Cracow Gothic

Piotr Sobolczyk CRACOW GOTHIC Let me start with a market-based point of view: perhaps the success of the Witcher franchise (books, RPG, and series) encouraged the producers to create Cracow Monsters, the new Polish Netflix series directed by Kasia Adamik and Olga Chajdas. Sapkowski's prose makes use of or makes reference to Slavic mythology, many of the monsters that the Witcher has to fight against, are taken directly or with a trasformation of some kind from Slavic pre-christianity. Following this path, the eponymous monsters in the recent series are shown as Slavic mythology figures, although in fact oftentimes they are rather an adaptation. Another "bait" for the viewer is the city itself. More than fourteen million visitors came to Cracow in 2019, and even during the pandemic in 2021 the number exceeded eleven million: Cracow is an international brand. This "tourist" aspect of the series might explain why some of the scenes were filmed in Wieliczka saltmine, one of the most recommended tourist places. As a resident of Cracow for more than twenty years I can say that in most cases the city is filmed "accurately," and what I mean is that when a person walks one street and turns left, they do appear on the factual street as it is on the map; only once did I notice a scene where two characters were supposed to go to Kazimierz district, and in fact they were riding a car toward Podgórze, which is exactly the opposite way; also in some scenes the characters were driving cars on the streets where there is no car movement; last but not least, in some cases Jagiellonian University's Collegium Novum is depicted as the medicine faculty (which it is not), and then sometimes the factual Collegium Medicum is shown. Certainly this is of little relevance for non-insiders, and also from the city-promotion-via-series point of view. All in all, judging the series critically, Cracow is the best asset of the series, and also the visual aspects of some scenes are really impressive. There is another market-based bait or at least an affinity available only to Polish viewers: the two-season series Kruk (i.e. The Raven, although "Kruk" is a family name here), produced by the Polish branch of Canal+, but not sold anywhere else. The series was highly acclaimed by the critics and the audience. What I find similar in that series and Cracow Monsters is the linkage between "East" and mysticism and esoterism. This is a part of Polish mythology dating at least from romanticism with the figure of Wernyhora, a Ukrainian-Cossack seer. The action of Kruk is set in Białystok and its surroundings, a bigger city in North-Eastern Poland, near the Polish-Belarussian and Polish-Lithuanian borders, and the biggest aggregation of Eastern Orthodoxy votaries in Poland. Contrary to the rest of "realistic" Poland, the region of Białystok is depicted as a place of mysticism, apparitions, esotericism, and somewhat dated customs as if taken from XIXth century, or perhaps rather from a contemporary heritage-park. The key figure in this respect is a grandmother-seer called "szeptucha" (a kind of a good witch, healer, seer, white magician, shamaness). The construction of the Polish myth of "Eastern mysticism" refers in the first place to Ukraine (or Belaruss, or even Russia), however it can be narrowed also to the East of Poland, especially Podlasie (the region of Białystok). It is a local version of a colonial regard of East where the Orient was mythicised and "fanciful". The other examples of this myth are: an ironic approach to it in Małgorzata Szumowska's movie Never Gonna Snow Again (2020), and a quite serious treatment in Agnieszka Holland's movie Julie Walking Home (2002), to name only a few. In Cracow Monsters, this myth of "Eastern mysticism" is a bit more complicated though: we also have a grandmother figure (Małgorzata Rożniatowska, perhaps the best acting part in the series, by the way) who has some natural esoteric powers, because, apparently, that is what elderly women in Slavic cultures should possess. We also have a mastermind monster, an evil god from pre-christianity, called Chworz. This figure is indeed taken from Slavic mythology, where it is known also under the name Chors. He is mentioned e. g. in The Tale of Igor's Campaign, a XII century poem composed in Old Eeast Slavic language. There are two interpretations of what this god used to represent: a solar one (positive) and a lunar one (negative). Adamik and Chajdas chose the latter, Chworz is a god who preys during the period preceeding "the red moon". Although the cult of this god embraced many Slavic territories, contemporary Poland included, it is unclear why he chose Cracow to reappear. Just one of the inconsistencies of the script that ask the viewer to be neglected in order to have fun. Chworz kills a young boy and enters his body, from now on speaking sometimes in Polish, and sometimes in... well, that is a good question. The credits say that the language used was "starosłowiański" (Old Slavonic), which must mean "staro-cerkiewno-słowiański" (Old Church Slavonic in English), and the coach of that language was Danilo Jaryj. The story of Prince Igor, for that matter, was written in Old East Slavonic, quite different from Old Church Slavonic. Certainly this (in)accuracy makes not much difference to the viewer. As any of my fellow students of Polish philology, I had to study Old Church Slavonic for one semester and it was a nightmare (not because we had dreams about Chworz drinking blood during red moons however); at the same time I was in my 5th year of learning Russian, and even though the knowledge of the Russian alphabet helped, I clearly (and painfully) learned that these languages are very difeerent. I might be wrong here, yet in the series Cracow Monsters the suposedly Old Church Slavonic sounds to me quite... Ukrainian. Fortunatelly in this context such link between East (through language) and esoterism is at least not colonial. It is gothicised. As I have already stated above, there is plenty of inconsistencies and logic lacunae in the plot. The main character, pansexual Alex, has just been accepted as a student of medicine at Jagiellonian University. Out of the blue she writes a special exam for students who wish to join a study group of professor Zawadzki, a pathologist of world fame. She is accepted mostly because on her exam sheet she drew intuitively some kind of old Slavonic symbol... She then has to move to a building where Zawadzki and his study group actually live. With regard to the organisation of academic life in Poland, this is completely mumbo-jumbo. A study group specialising in pathology would rather need - from the point of view of the university - access to laboratories, not a separate flat. Also in Poland we do not have that much of humanistic approach to our intellectual masters and mentors, it is true that sometimes archeology students spend a whole summer on field trips where they socialise with the academic staff, yet it is unheard of for a professor to actually live with his study group. Especially that it is not explained at all why he would live with them if he has a big house on the outskirts of Cracow where his family stays. Another lacuna begging for forgiveness on behalf of the viewer is the fact that once Alex joins the study group - all students of medicine - none of them actually ever go to class, because they are too busy running after monsters. In fact they are a sort of Cracow's "ghostbusters" rather than students. They all have some psychic powers (who knew that medicine students are so apt in esoterism?) and what they in fact study is not pathology nor any other branch of medicine, they study the history of old Slavic beliefs. Now a question arises: why did the screenwriters chose students of medicine to do the humanists job? Certainly studying old Slavic beliefs suits better historians, archeologists, ethnologists, anthropologists. What - according to the creators of the series - is the connection between pathology and the ethnography of old monsters? I did not find that link. If I wanted to be more indulgent I would suggest that the fact that they chose medicine here pays a tribute to classical Gothic conventions. In most Gothic novels, beginning with Frankenstein, if we have a figure of a scientist, they usually do medicine or biology, I cannot remember a single "scientist" in classic Gothic literature who would be a specialist in philology or history. Perhaps, however, we, the humanists, should be grateful for our invisibility and unimportance, because the Gothic convention traditionally presents those bio-med scientists as obsessed or evil. This is also the case here: Zawadzki abuses his students' psychic powers to help his dying boy; he even - as a kind of a bad copy of Faustus - makes a deal with the "devil", i.e. Chworz. Although Andrzej Chyra, an extraordinary Polish actor, was cast in the role of Zawadzki, he does not do much to lend credence to his character's choices and actions. That was some of the lacunae in the very basic script logic. The case is even more poignant when it comes to more intellectual content. I have already said that the series does good to the promotion of Cracow. Why, then, would it not have the adventage of spreading some knowledge of Slavic pre-Christianity? It could - but it does not. The knowledge of this period and its religion is superficial, presented in scraps, sometimes actually, the screenwriters mostly even reduced it to a god's name, and a one-phrase description of what qualities a deity had. At times the characters use some books and here the creators honour the genre's obligation - I mean, the pop-horror movie convention, not the classic Gothic novels, because books are treated more seriously in, ironically, books. The convention consists in pulling some book from the shelf, opening it on a random page, then the camera shows a page full of symbols and drawings, the less understandable, the better, and the characters shriek with a sound that expresses the ultimate revelation. This convention is older even than the movie adaptations of Dan Brown's novels. Perhaps this is how medicine students read books, no wonder that the only monsters that we, the humanists, who were trained to study scriptures slowly and in detail, can chase, are moths. I am afraid also that this depiction of studying sources is a meta-allegory of how the creators studied Slavic mythology... We do not learn if the Slavic deities and monsters have been always present for centuries of Christian domination or only now, and if the latter is the case, then what made them appear, what do they want from humans, etc. The most ambitious attempt would have been the topic of Wanda (I say "would have been", because this intention failed). Wanda is now regained by Polish feminists (e.g. Monika Rudaś-Grodzka) as a strong female character; such interpretation is based on, precisely, the pre-Christian reading of the legend or myth. According to this interpretation, Wanda is an aquatic godess. And this is how in scraps she is presented in our series, which implies that the creators read some recent feminist research. Alex is a modern incarnation of Wanda, when she is thrown to Vistula river in a scorching car, she does not die. OK, but so what?! She is aquatic, so what? She is a godess, so what? The topic of Wanda, and some others, offered various intellectual opportunities: to show pre-Christian Slavic mythology which is unknown in the world, or to recover the pre-Christian matriarchal aspects of Polish (resp. Slavic) culture(s), or to show the potential of today's going back to the roots, etc. etc. The superficiality and intellectual gibberish destroy these possibilities. Even a failed Gothic novel such as Jacek Dehnel's Ale z naszymi umarłymi ["But with our dead ones"] (2019), where zombies invade Cracow and then the whole Poland, offered hints of social criticism and philosophical allegories. (See my review of this novel Apokalipsa przyszła bez trąby…, "Opcje" 2019 nr 4). Now somebody could oppose that also in classic Gothic novels mythologies and religions were presented in a truncated manner. Take Richard Marsh's The Beetle for that matter and its representation of Egyptian religion and its mysteries: purely colonial and phantasmatic. That is true, however Marsh was writing in a period where the knowledge on Egypt was hardly accessible and actually "in the process of making", and, importantly, he wrote not about his own culture. My opponent could also ask: can't you just let go these pretensions to logic and intellect for the sake of pleasure? But: what pleasure...? I would reply also that even the "simplest", the most "libidinal" Gothic novels had their intellectual dimension, social criticisms, philosophical allegories - or at least we, the scholars in Gothic fiction, were taught to see them. I do not see anything of this kind here. The result is the "pleasure" of chasing the monsters for absurd and holey reasons, which is the pleasure of a teen drama that simulates some intellectual dimension behind the basic story.