The second season of Alena Smith’s “Dickinson” begins with a warning and provocation. “The records of Emily Dickinson’s life, up to and including Sue and Austin’s marriage, are full and factual compared with what lies ahead,” says narrator, star, and executive producer Hailee Steinfeld, an admission that yes, the first season took liberties with history, but this one will make those liberties look factual by contrast. Neither Smith, Steinfeld, nor the writers’ room have a choice if the story of Dickinson’s arc from no one of note to one of America’s most celebrated and enduring poets is to continue. Buckle up.
Historical flights of fancy, where man-sized bees hang around the lead character in her hallucinatory waking life and Death is personified by Wiz Khalifa, may be anathema to purists, folks who hold dear the truth and can’t stomach creative efforts at reading history on the creators’ terms. “Dickinson” wasn’t for them a year ago. It’s less for them now, though Smith takes the series into realms of supposition and conjecture that may cushion literary nerds against her buoyant unreality. If not, then this season won’t be for them, though frankly, any insistence that popular culture represents with accuracy the fuzzy details of Dickinson’s extraordinary career and curious persona misses the point of popular culture. Even Terence Davies’ “A Quiet Passion” and Madeleine Olnek’s “Wild Nights with Emily” play loose with matters of record.
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“Dickinson” deliberately plays looser, adding the language of today to the atmosphere of the 1850s, a screwball rendition of a Sofia Coppola movie set at the birth of influencer culture and in the midst of Dickinson’s struggles with the shades of declining health, her desire for publication, and discomfort with publication’s fruits. Season 2 is about fame, notoriety, and the hunger for success conflicting with the pressures of the public eye, as well as the uniquely American desire for more: More wealth, more possessions, and mercifully more meaning. Legacy is key here, not only Dickinson’s but father Edward’s (Toby Huss), brother Austin’s (Adrian Enscoe), and sister Lavinia’s (Anna Katerina Baryshnikov), while Sue (Ella Hunt) seeks material possessions and new horsies to fill the void left in her heart by another unthinkable loss notched on her belt.
Everyone’s welcome to hard times, and in “Dickinson,” everyone’s fallen on them. Emily starts out this round of exploits in a doctor’s office, where an optometrist, played by James Urbaniak with unctuous ambivalence, feeds her an equally ambivalent diagnosis about her recent eye troubles. She isn’t going blind, he says, but her vision is damaged, or it might be, or maybe not. Who knows? Not science! “Hush Emily!” roars Edward when she tries soothing his wrath over the physician’s careless waffling. “Can’t you see I’m in the middle of shouting at this man?” Smith has necessarily departed from the historical footpath but she’s kept her sense of humor as her walking stick, injecting rapid-fire joke selection, referential winking, class satire, and occasional bawdiness into Emily’s battles against existential doubt.
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What’s a poet in waiting to do when she’s so painfully aware of what it would mean to have her work run in the papers? In “Fame Is A Fickle Food,” the season’s second episode, that exact opportunity drops at Emily’s feet when she wins the baking contest at the Amherst Cattle Show; coming in first means praise, which means the spotlight, which means media attention, which means an interview in the Springfield Republican running alongside the recipe for Emily’s winning (and absolutely colossal) Caribbean black cake. How can she say yes? It’s her ambition to be printed as a poet. And yet how can she say no when the Republican’s dashing editor, Samuel Bowles (Finn Jones), whose interest in Emily stems first and foremost from her unpublished poems?
Samuel courts her as much for her work as for her, or at least that’s one possible take on the way Steinfeld and Jones play off one another in their scenes together. But “Dickinson” isn’t using him as a replacement for Season 1’s departed Brian (Matt Lauria); the show wants the audience to think of Bowles as a means to an end, which for Emily is a mixed blessing. How badly does she want to be the greatest poet to ever live? What would it mean for her, in a totally holistic sense, to be recognized for her poetic talent? Is she okay being known instead for her Herculean baking? (Seriously, Paul Hollywood would give her a handshake without thinking twice about it.) The last question, at least, is easily answered when Sue approaches Emily in full mean girl mode at a post-contest party. “I just think it’s a little absurd, don’t you?” she says with a deceptively sweet smile. “That you’ll be remembered as a baker, and not a poet?”
Steinfeld reacts with an expression suggesting that Emily’s just had the life snatched out of her, so the answer to Sue’s question is technically yes. But “Dickinson” and Steinfeld ensure the depth of Emily’s character goes further than simple binaries: She’s haunted, figuratively by her future and literally by the nameless ghost (Will Pullen) who first appears on her train ride back from her hospital visit. The young wraith turns up a few times over the course of each episode, culminating in the unsettling climax of “The Only Ghost I Ever Saw,” kicked off by a séance gone wrong, or maybe “right,” though floating tables, spectral visitations, minor possessions, and self-playing instruments are freaky enough that the distinction doesn’t matter to the characters involved. Poltergeist hijinks are still hijinks, even if they’re self-inflicted.
“Dickinson” relishes the full step forward into supernatural spookiness as surely as Steinfeld embraces the challenge of playing her part sans the buttressing corroborating detail of primary documents. Her performance, perhaps to the surprise of none, is quite good, and partial credit for that goes to how much more liberated Steinfeld is now that the series has wandered beyond what’s known about Dickinson as a person, poet, and genius; she’s better able now to make the role fully hers, vulnerable, sharp, self-assured yet utterly uncertain of herself at the same time, and of course absolutely side-splitting. “I am gonna give this town a moist, sticky, generously spiced ass-kicking!” she declares to her family on the morning of the baking competition. It’s a contemporarily styled one-liner that outlines “Dickinson”s full circumference while paying respects to Dickinson in its own fashion. If the latter was driven by her poetry, then the former is driven by her. The show could have tried hewing closer to history. Turning instead to imagination and artistic license, however, feels more honest, and better honors Emily’s spirit than sticking to the books ever would have. [B+]