Now, the reason this is on my mind is that I am approximately halfway through the first and only season of NBC's cancelled 2009 series 'Kings': a kinda sorta modern-day-but-not-actually-the-world-as-we-know-it retelling of the King David story. (David's not king yet though, he's just hanging around being inconveniently Chosen by God while Ian McShane - who is king - Ian McShanes his way through some speeches about butterflies.) It's set in a fictional kingdom (Gilboa) with a fictional monarch (Silas, who in the Bible is Saul-no-not-the-Damascus-one-a-different-one) but all the clothes and technology and what have you are contemporary. It's pretty neatly done, the problems of the shows (and there are problems) aren't really with the world-building element of it. In fact, it's the kind of conceptual approach that you could easily see being theatrical: it's what you might do with a Shakespeare play or a Greek tragedy to keep it, y'know, not dull as fuck.
(Quick sidebar: Why don't we do more Bible plays? Western theatre tradition practically evolved out of them, what with the Medieval idea that the only thing better than a play was a play on a cart.* And yet Bible stories are pretty much screen adventures only these days - in fact, it's one of the first things Hollywood did once they figured out they could do picture and sound and colour at the same time. The new technology came in and Cecil B. DeMille said, "Charlton, go up on that rock, talk to God, and make it sexy."** And I guess that got into our heads somewhere along the way because, with the exception of nativity plays, I'm far more familiar with the idea of the cinematic Bible epic than the theatrical one. (Of course, now I've written that I can think of at least three examples of Bible stories being done onstage but screw you brain, you came up with this lame idea for a blog, have the courage of your convictions dammit.))
ANYWAY. The problem with 'Kings', I think, is that it starts the story in the wrong place. It's ok. Lots of people do it. It happens to the best of us, George Lucas, with our insistence that we meet Anakin at the age of ten and... and that is a different blog. Basically, 'Kings' would be much, much better with the same world-building, some of the same actors, and a totally different plot. This is the biggest trick that 'Kings' misses: making David a pre-kingship blond-haired big-eyed innocent Luke Skywalker type. Biblical David? HUGE DOUCHEBAG. The second biggest trick is not only the de-gaying of the David/Jonathan relationship, but the turning of Jonathan into a standard jealous, scheming villain.
A lot has been made out of the Biblical are-they-boning relationship between David and Jonathan, son of Saul, the king that David is nominally serving - Oscar Wilde cited them alongside Achilles and Patroclus as an example of "the love that dare not speak its name", and there was an awful lot of Medieval "THIS IS WHAT A HOMOSOCIAL RELATIONSHIP LOOKS LIKE AND THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO BE SEEN HERE" wrangling. My personal position is that you can explain away David and J-Dog kissing and telling each other that they love each other so much more than they love women as an extreme product of a patriarchal society that prized bonds between men above heterosexual relationships but why would you? It's not like there hasn't been enough queer erasure over the centuries, and no-one's going to prove it definitely one way or another, so yes, I am all for it: David and Jonathan, Bible Boyfs.
EXCEPT. Except for David's aforementioned douchebaggery. Really, the story of David and Jonathan resembles less Achilles and Patroclus, and more 'The Giving Tree'. David turns up post-Goliath slaying, and Jonathan is so overwhelmed that he, on the spot, strips off and gives David his armour which, as well as being a real example of a Biblical striptease, symbolically gives David his position as heir to the kingdom. That is how much he loves him. David's response is something along the lines of "Oh thanks bro, yeah, did I ever tell you about how I killed a giant just now?" This continues, with David falling out of favour with Saul and running away, at which Jonathan immediately ups sticks, abandoning his father and people, to follow David into exile. David's response, again, is, "oh hey, um... Jason? Jonathan. Yeah, no, I knew that." The rest of the time it's Jonathan professing his love and David going, "Well, I am better than you and everyone else, Jonathan." In the end, there's a big battle and both Jonathan and Daddy Saul are killed. Then David expresses some affection, composing one of his trademark psalms on the lyre - but then again, maybe he was just the world's first douchebag to pick up a lyre at a party and say, "This is an original composition."
And through all of this, by the way, David is married to Jonathan's sister, Michal. Whom he bought for two hundred Philistine foreskins. (The asking price was a mere one hundred, but David knows you get what you pay for.)
So this should be a TV series in its own right, shouldn't it? It deserves at least a few seasons to let the tragic inequality of the relationship hit home before Jonathan dies in David's manly arms, plus you can set it during the time D&J are in exile together - throw in some kind of Biblical supernatural demon-fighting alongside the overarching plot and you've got a monster-of-the-week set up fuelled by potential slash. Jonathan is in love with David, while David makes it his mission to bone any man, woman or celestial being that looks at him sideways, along with the occasional implication that David's just scared of his feelings for Jonathan. Then the series is cancelled before we get anything more than an obligatory drunken kiss episode. There's nothing a network loves more than some good old queer-baiting, after all.
But it could be a fascinating study of unequal relationships: an opportunity to both loathe David and yet understand why Jonathan is so drawn to him, to empathise with Jonathan, to want him to break free of this toxic, unrewarding state of affairs, and yet still, with a tiny, terrible part of your soul, want him to hang in there because David might - might - one day love him as fully as he deserves.*** But while fighting monsters.**** As in 'Kings', Jonathan will be played by Sebastian Stan because he deserves a chance to do the character in a way that isn't horrible, and David will be played by Idris Elba, because we need to believe that we too would follow him to the ends of the earth on the off chance that we might get a snog.
Rest assured, there will be many such shots of Sebastian Stan crying.
Starting later in the story also allows us to visit the whole final-season Bathsheba debacle. This is where even the Bible has to start acknowledging David's douchebaggery. Now king, replete with many wives (many wives), he goes for a stroll on the palace roof and sees naked babe (Bathsheba) having a bath - I've never been quite clear whether the aptly named Bathsheba was also bathing on the roof, as Leonard Cohen would have us believe, or whether David was a massive creeper on top of everything else, and once he realised he could see into some girl's bathroom window, did not think the decent thing would be to look away. Either way, David's reaction is something along the lines of, "Damn, girl, let's get you impregnated." To this, Bathsheba says: WE DON'T KNOW BECAUSE THE BIBLE LITERALLY DOES NOT HAVE A SINGLE WORD ABOUT HER CONSENT IN THIS MATTER. NONE. IT JUST SAYS DAVID "WENT IN TO HER". LIKE, WOW. WOW, BIBLE. EVEN FOR YOU.
So anyway, Bathsheba gets all good and impregnated, the only fly in the adulterous ointment being her husband, Uriah the Hittite, who is off fighting for David in a war that he should be in too but, y'know, roof-bath-chicks to nail. So David calls him back home and does something along the lines of that Monty Python sketch, "Your wife, bit of a goer is she? Nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean maybeyoushouldgoandhavesexwithhersonobodywillknowthechildismine" until poor Uriah has to say, "Look bro, it's not that I don't appreciate the respite from the horrors of war and all, but don't we have this, like, incredibly sacred and ancient rule that soldiers on active duty don't sleep with their wives?" And David says, "Ugh, you are not making this easier for me. I mean, really you are bringing this on yourself." And he sends him to the worst bit of the fighting where he'll definitely be killed. And he is. And then David marries Bathsheba because hey, it's good to be the king.
The coda to all of this is that, as aforementioned, even God has to admit he might have not been totally on point when he decided that David was going to be his Super Special Bro on Earth, so - in the manner of people who hate being wrong - he totally overreacts. The prophet Nathan pops along and tells David that a) his child with Bathsheba will die, b) someone he loves will "take all his wives" and c) everyone is done playing happy families. Sure enough, the child dies (David, in one final defiant act of gold-medal douchebaggery, mourns while the child is alive and refuses to mourn after the child has died because he knew it was coming), and years later David's son Absolom starts a coup against him that is kicked off by Absolom having sex with all of David's concubines in public. (I feel like Game of Thrones could step up a little.) Bathsheba kind of does get hers in the end, as she makes the dying David promise that her son Solomon and not his actual heir can be king next, and I like to think she did it through pinching the tube on his morphine drip until he said yes.
So, obviously, this is the final season of, I would say, about five. Four seasons of David and Jonathan hunting demons and almost making out, then Jonathan dies, a lot of the original cast departs, and you get one of those slightly weird situations where the show limps on for another twenty episodes before a kindly network exec shoots it in the head. But what a glorious mess it would be.
Or, even better, a PLAY. A big non-naturalistic Greek tragedy style play, in which the first half leads up to David marrying Bathsheba, then there's a time jump, and the second half is Absolom's coup and a big fuck-off civil war, ending with Solomon becoming king. That's gold dust. That's the lost Shakespeare play right there. And someone clever and angry like Howard Barker should write it, it'll be staged in the Olivier, and the critics will say things like "powerful but overreaching" or "impressive in scale and ambition if ultimately unfocused". But I'll be happy. And that's what counts.
Bonus Bible: The Book of Revelation as arthouse film
Like any rational person, I love (the first season of) Sleepy Hollow. The Tim Burton film also, but specifically the current series starring my eyeliner idol Nicole Beharie, and the excellently-nosed Tom Mison. If you don't know what I'm talking about - you poor thing - the current Sleepy Hollow series takes the Washington Irving story of the Headless Horseman and says, "Yes but what if it was actually about the Biblical apocalypse?" It's great, trust me.
But as much as I love Sleepy Hollow and its attention to detail when it comes to translating the most whacked-out book of the Bible onto the screen, I cannot help but feel there is a better way of going about dramatising the Book of Revelation. Which is, essentially, not to bother with plot.
Revelation is the stoner's favourite for a reason. Most of the Bible is written like an over-excited child taking twenty minutes to describe going to the bathroom - "And then...and then...and then..." - but Revelation doesn't even bother with these attempts at incident. It just describes John of Patmos's big weekend on a vision quest (at one point a coyote voiced by Johnny Cash turns up). The easy joke here (that I just made a couple of sentences ago) is to say "stoner diaries" and be done with it. But it has too much structure and weird, terrifying logic for that. No, I am talking getting the heads behind Fantasia and A Field in England together and letting them have at it. It will feature only Tilda Swinton playing all the parts (probably), and will be so terrifying that the world will literally end.
Go in peace.
*Medieval Mystery plays: actually pretty interesting and often gross.
** Accurate.
***Just describing Sherlock now.
****Or Supernatural.
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