Once upon a time there was a poet who was a bottomless well of ideas about what it means to be passionately alive in a world that will never understand itself.
A
medium
of impeccable and forever avant-garde work - nothing remains, in poetry, more complex and furiously groundbreaking than what he left written, by the light of countless candles, burning before anything - halfway between what happens inside each one of us and what surrounds us for the past three centuries.
That poet is, of course, Emily Dickinson, and the one who thinks all that is Alena Smith,
showrunner
of the bizarrely brilliant, cathartic and extremely intelligent
Dickinson
(Apple TV +), whose second season dismantles the present of unnecessary convulsive egos from its bizarre and delicious anachronism.
Because that, says Smith, who was tanned, by the way, in the writers' room of the muscular treatise on television journalism that Aaron Sorkin commanded a decade ago,
The Newsroom
,
first, and the literary criminal erotic puzzle
The Affair
later, is the intention of his hallucinogenic portrait of the poet.
Poet who 1) was always an unstoppable force of nature even though she never left Amherst (Massachusetts) and seemed to take care of her parents - there is no rarer and fiercer animal than the female poet - and 2) if she does not he met in life it was not because he did not consider that what he did had no value, but quite the opposite.
Here is the premise that explores, with profusion although not with the passion of the first round, the second installment of this vaudeville that has more of a postmodern literary study than anything else.
Well, it is the poet's verses, and not life so much, that direct the Martian
sitcom
, in which, for example, when you want to make a momentous decision, you make a
Ouija board
and ask the spirits if we would do well or wrong to take it.
As when reading a poem, what happened, and what was thought, is adjusted to the present in which the reader lives.
There are echoes of discussions on Twitter in the fleeting and frivolous, and more or less polarized, exchanges of opinions at the
timeline-
like parties
organized by Sue - the poet's sister-in-law, lover and muse - and her brother next door .
They are the closest thing, Smith says, to a World Out There that Dickinson experienced in his time, and today, to a cyberspace in which everything and nothing seems to matter too much.
And is it preferable to be someone to be nobody?
This second season is built on that fundamental question in the life of Dickinson, who takes up the fearful story not so much of what was thought of it as of ceasing to be, as he says, and his poems say, "the sun" to be content with to be "the daisy" that the sun "lets grow".
That is, to give up all their power, the power that their work grants, to the one who publishes it - a hot topic, if we play to exchange work for practically
soul
, or what do social networks do, our editors? life, with what are we?
Have we not stopped being the sun, to let another be it and believe that we grow because it illuminates us? -.
The description will sound slightly more hollow than it should to those who haven't taken a look at the first one.
Because, before that one, and with the poet in an incomprehensible background - Dickinson is no longer the center of everything that happens - he loses something.
Yes, the uncomplexed and hilarious ax blow to the patriarchy is still there - and the poet is no longer the only one who never behaves as she was supposed to in the old 50s of the XIX - and the nod to the absurdity of the present as well - like the moment when that the maid lists her infinite other jobs, ranging from medium to seamstress and lady dedicated to making flower arrangements, and then says: “What did you expect?
I am
freelance
”-.
But the power of Hailee Steinfield's performance, of a deeply magnetic intensity, extremely attractive, is sadly tempered, and not because of her, but because of a script that is moving away from its wild inner abyss.
As those around her grow - even her sister Lavinia, now obsessed with being a
bad
girl
, and also the arrogant Jane Krakowski, in the role of her increasingly free mother -
grows, she grows
smaller.
As her world expands, the poet contracts.
But it is not a game of form and substance that tries to relegate her to anonymity in which she always felt freer - "fame is a fickle delicacy, on a changing plate", he concluded - but the consequence of a slight change of point of view that impoverishes the genius of such a necessary artifact, the one that better - better than any rehearsal, better than anything - has understood and explained no longer what it was to be the, in many ways, we already said it,
punk
, Emily Dickinson - the best poet, without distinction man and woman, in history–, but what it is to be a poet without more, to dedicate oneself to that magical and instinctive art that turns hunger for everything possible into words. There is a third season scheduled, which will dive right into the American Civil War, and which Smith has been writing about during the assault on the Capitol. We will see.