January 15, 2023

The counterintuitive queer representation of Sandman

Posted in Uncategorized tagged Books, Culture, LGBTQIA, Media, Sandman, Television at 11:49 pm by chavisory

I had an initial, and not very charitable, reaction to this review of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman on Netflix from Autostraddle, but ultimately wound up grateful for the ways in which it made me articulate certain things, and found that I had a lot more to say on the topic.

I find it easy, in particular, to be frustrated with statements like “A lot of queer characters die, though I’d argue at least as many straight ones do, too,” because while I don’t even think that simply tallying up the number of certain kinds of characters or what happens to them can’t be a useful and informative element of analysis, I think body counts have sometimes, lately, become used to misinterpret a work. And in the case of Sandman in particular, are unlikely on their own to yield a reliable interpretation of what the work is trying to say.

I agree very much that on the whole, the subject matter of the graphic novels translates well to the screen, and that it’s a welcoming and accessible adaptation even for someone who hasn’t read the comics, and I’m thankful for the writing and casting decisions that helped make that the case. I think it also doesn’t hurt that a lot of Sandman’s newer fans have come of age in a media landscape so deeply and intrinsically shaped by…Sandman. That so much fantasy literature and media of the past 25 years or so has been, in one way or another, emulating Sandman. That Neil Gaiman and Sandman wrote a great deal of the language of fantasy that Millennials have grown up speaking, and so a lot of this story already feels like a native idiom. And yet I do think that newer fans would probably benefit in their appreciation of the show from some deeper context.

Beginning with the fact that Sandman was not a comic deeply beloved by people who felt secure and socially valued by the dominant political and cultural order of the late 1980’s to mid-1990’s.

In the comics, fewer characters are explicitly queer, and more of them are white and male, too. And when I was 15 to 19 or so and first reading Sandman, and Neil Gaiman stories more generally, especially Stardust and Neverwhere, I did not know I was queer. I did not know I was autistic. I did know that things were really not the same for me as they were for my peers, including even the ones who did know they were queer, and that no one wanted to admit that was true.

What I found in Sandman and in Stardust and Neverwhere and later in The Ocean at the End of the Lane wasn’t “queer representation” in anything like the way we talk about it now. It wasn’t about whether a character looked like me, shared my label, or shared my “identity.”

That stuff was just useless as far as identifying characters or stories that actually said anything worth saying to me. To a huge extent, it still is.

It was about people facing things, or finding out they were things, that weren’t supposed to be part of the “real” world. That weren’t, shall we say, admissible into evidence.

Neil Gaiman stories have always been on the side of people who tend to fall through the fabric of the world. Including people who that kind of stuff isn’t supposed to happen to. Farmers’ sons and guys with office jobs. People from nice, normal-looking, middle class families in pretty neighborhoods.

Sandman is a whole lot about acknowledging experiences that the waking world or the human-constructed world doesn’t want or know how to. People who have things happen to them that no one wants to explain or acknowledge.

And this is some of what you see in how grounded the visuals are in World War I and the AIDS crisis. (The show drastically toned down the state that Rachel is in when Morpheus and Constantine find her on the brink of death in “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” for instance.) Because some of the story under the story is about what war does to your body. What AIDS does to your body. How having to be a superhero can turn you into a monster or make you unrecognizable to yourself. How isolation and desperation can.

What humanity is dealing with in both the comics and the show is not just the consequences of lack of access to the Dreaming for a century–it’s war trauma, and the subsequent rise of the military industrial complex, and PTSD, and rampant addiction. When the comics were coming out, WWI was not so much in the immediate rearview mirror anymore, at least for most Americans, but the Vietnam War and the disillusionment it inflicted on people’s view of humanity and what humanity was capable of, very much was. More American Vietnam veterans died of suicide in the decades after the war than died in it. They’d seen and done things that there was no readily available way to cope with.

Seeing more explicitly queer and characters of color in the show feels like an acknowledgement that these are the people these things happened to. These are the victims of the rich and socially privileged playing with power that they do not understand.

Ironically, that means you see more bad things happen to more queer characters, but it’s not rooted in unconcern for bad things happening to queer people. I also don’t think it’s the case that “There just happened to be a lot of queer characters in this show where danger is around every corner.” It’s not coincidental. What you’re seeing is the victimization of queer people, Black people, poor people, strange and vulnerable people who have no words for why, by those who exploit cruelty and injustice for their own profit, brought into the light.

It says that these are not things that ~just happen~ to us because of who we are, but are the result of things people did, decisions that people made, that have deprived us of dreams, of an unlimited sense of possibility of what can be true. Whether proactively, evilly, carelessly, selfishly, occasionally with misplaced good intent, or simply in ignorance of the broader consequences of their actions. As with The Shape of Water, as with Brokeback Mountain and what I feel are the similar misinterpretations that many people have made of those films, the message is not “This is just what happens to you because of who you are. This is all that can ever be true for people like you.” It’s to pay attention to who is doing those things.

The bigots, the authoritarians, and the warmongers.

*

Yes, Sandman was always ahead of its time in terms of representing queer people, and people who defied binaries and boundaries in other ways. A lot of people who loved it then were already identified as queer. A lot of us weren’t. We were just people who fell through the cracks, or who there was no explanation for. And no one would admit what was happening to us.

It isn’t and wasn’t seeing bad things happen to queer people that was affirming, it was someone telling the truth, if even in highly figurative ways, about the fact that it was happening, even if we didn’t understand why it was.

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