This Saturday afternoon, we hosted a viewing party of Apple TV’s brand new coming-of-age series, Dickinson. One of the stars just happens to be an old friend of mine, Adrian Blake Enscoe, and when I saw him posting about his role (as Emily Dickinson’s older brother, Austin Dickinson) I knew we had to celebrate the film together. Luckily, my co-working office, Class & Co, was willing to host our bohemian menagerie.

perfectly fitting
when the 19th century
unites in 2019

Years ago, at the beginning of my performance poetry career, when I had very little self esteem about my art, I was asked to impersonate Emily Dickinson for a birthday party being held in her honor (her birthday is December 10th by the way, if you want to start preparing) and got to choose and recite a few of her poems live on stage; She’s held a special place in my heart ever since.

Earlier this year, my interest deepened when I got to see Madeleine Olnek’s Wild Nights With Emily, where Molly Shannon plays an irreverent and delightful Emily Dickinson. The film revolves around an exploration of the modern revelation that Dickinson’s writings and work were heavily edited and redacted by her surviving relatives after her death. In fact, it is almost certain that she was not a pathetic lonely spinster, but had a loving lesbian relationship with her brother’s wife throughout her entire life.

Anyway, enough with the background info, let’s talk about Dickinson.

Honestly, I was skeptical upon seeing the trailer with Hailee Steinfeld portraying Emily. I didn’t know much about the star, and thought she was just a frivolous pop star type. Good thing I love being wrong, because WOW, was I wrong. She is so pure, and an absolute delight. It took a few minutes for the show to find its stride, but once it did, it positively galloped. There are 10 episodes, and at 30 minutes each, you can devour the whole season in an afternoon, taking breaks only for more spiked cider and slices of Emily’s famous black Christmas cake. We of course took too many cider breaks so I had to finish the season at home, crying alone over all the things that happened that I won’t spoil for you in the review.

i would not stop for
death and so he paused for me —
immortality

Speaking of Emily Dickinson’s famous references to death throughout her work and writings, Dickinson provides us with a perfectly trippy and truth-talking representation of Death throughout the show, and he is perfectly, decadently embodied by Wiz Khalifa. Khalifa as a psychedelic blinged out Death vision is one of many ongoing commitments the show makes to being irreverent, anachronistic, and stunning in its originality and ability to surprise us into feeling something. We get to watch Emily and her siblings and friends contemplate issues of the time, and just live their daily lives, in a way that shines a light on how very little has changed from then to today, and how universal human suffering is.

One of the themes that struck me as particularly relevant to today (and feels so current I don’t think this would have been portrayed so clearly even last year) is privilege. Emily is trapped in a family where she could be punished or possibly even disowned for seeking recognition of her writing, and we feel her pain. But, the show doesn’t shy away from pointing out to her time and again that she is truly privileged in her own right, and that there are many characters struggling with more mortal, and moral plights. We walk a delicate line as the viewer, getting to see every character’s individual sorrows and concerns, feel them as our own, and respect them in their own rights.

The show also leans waaaay in to making the dialog accessible to Gen Z, while being choc-a-bloc with fun historic and literary references for the less… contemporary among us. If you know anything about Henry David Thoreau, for instance, you will probably be in tears during the episode where Emily and her friend go looking for him at Walden Pond, and he eventually deadpans the line “Never meet your heroes.”

all good things are wild
and never do their laundry—
simplification

Abolition was a hugely controversial topic of the time, and I can’t wait to see what Dickinson does on the verge of Civil War with the next season. It’s a tricky issue to tackle now, not to be flippantly addressed with modern language and sensibilities, and it’s a shame for the historic Emily because there is almost no proof that she actually was an abolitionist; She might not truly have been that woke, or not brave enough to ever go on record even in private writings about any specific support of abolition. Not so in our show - Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily is decidedly progressive, as are most of her friends, and we get to experience a few scenes where the youths call each other out and debate the issues, which is fascinating to say the least.

When Zosia Mamet appeared at Christmas dinner as Louisa May Alcott and said to Emily,

“Hawthorne called us “a damned mob of scribbling women” but he can eat a dick am I right?”

I… well, I died. It was a pristine, hilarious, and completely ludicrous moment, and it suddenly made me reflect that the whole series was brimming with pure moments of delight, and that every actor had done their equal part to bring stuffy Puritanical characters into living, full, 21st century technicolor.

For most of the show, my friend Adrian’s portrayal of Austin Dickinson was charming, humorous, dashing, and just downright adorable. But in this world, as he grows into the “man of the house” and moves toward marriage with Emily’s best friend and secret soulmate Sue (Ella Hunt) we start to see what Puritanical, patriarchal society can do to squash a tender spirit. At the end of the season, Austin insults Emily in a truly heartbreaking way, and one of the last quotes of the final episode is Emily shouting,

“Just because you’re a man, it doesn’t mean you have to become a monster.”

It’s a resounding message, and meaningful way to leave us eager to see what Alena Smith and the entire team will give us to chew on, or spin our heads with, next season.