SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve somehow managed to avoid spoilers for A Series of Unfortunate Events and care about having it spoiled for you, you should probably avoid this article at all costs.
As a child, I was an avid reader of A Series of Unfortunate Events. I eagerly devoured all thirteen books. Though they’re labeled as children’s literature, the series is a treasure trove of black and absurdist humor as well as a cornucopia of literary references and meta jokes.
As I’ve watched the Netflix adaptation of the series over the past week, I realized that A Series of Unfortunate Events is particularly timely at the dawn of the Trump presidency.
The first several books of the series follow a pretty standard formula. In The Bad Beginning, the Baudelaires are orphaned when their parents perish (a word which here means die) in a fire. They are then sent to live with their closest relative (by physical proximity, not bloodline), Count Olaf, who turns out to be after the fortune left to them by their parents. He hatches some scheme to obtain the fortune, the children ask the adults in their lives for help. No one ever believes them. When I was a child, I interpreted the utter uselessness of the adults in the series as them being fooled by Olaf. Now, my far less generous interpretation is that the adults are simply too wrapped up in their own lives and selfish desires to think critically about what’s in front of them and aid those less fortunate. Eventually, Olaf’s villainy is brought to light, but he escapes the law.
Briefly victorious, the children are shuffled off to a new guardian, where they stay until Olaf inevitably shows up in an incredibly thin disguise. The children recognize him right away, but the adults, even the well-meaning ones, fail to do so and refuse to believe the children, once again caught up in their own little worlds. Olaf enacts his latest plot, which is ultimately foiled by the Baudelaires through their skillful utilization of inventions, research, and teeth. Caught red-handed, Olaf flees the law again. And the cycle repeats.
In our unfortunate American reality, Trump is Count Olaf. He’s an incompetent, bumbling villain who always manages to get away with what he’s done because the cards are always stacked for him. He’s a greedy man, who wants nothing more than money and power for their own sake.
Congress is an analog for the adults of the Baudelaires’ world. Some of them are Trump’s hench-people, still some of them are well-intentioned. But most of them simply refuse or fail to see Trump for what he is, taken in by his shoddy disguise of a semblance of a decent human being. Whether this is because they’re actually taken in by him or because they simply can’t pull themselves away from their own selfish motives for long enough to care about all the American people – a phrase here which means including oppressed groups – is a different story.
We, the American people, but particularly those who will be most adversely affected by Trump, are the Baudelaire orphans. We see through his sham of a disguise, but no matter how often or how loudly we point out his duplicity, his cruelty, his loathsomeness, no one believes us. We’re told that we’re being ridiculous, Trump doesn’t actually think all those things about women and racial minorities. Trump won’t actually do further harm to those already abandoned by the system. They dismiss us as if we’re particularly unintelligent children and try to cut us out from conversations about our own futures. Even those in positions of power who are well-intentioned are either unwilling or unable to help us, hamstrung by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that is American politics.
Just like Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, no one is coming to rescue us. No one and nothing is going to stop Trump from becoming president, and Congress certainly is not going to stop him from infringing upon the rights of everyone who isn’t a straight, cis-gendered, rich, Christian white man. Once Trump has filled the late Antonin Scalia’s seat, the Supreme Court won’t help us either.
No one is coming to rescue us. That’s just not how the story goes.
But we do have each other. The Baudelaires did not survive thirteen books of misfortune alone; they relied upon one another. Every time they thwart one of Olaf’s dastardly plans, each sibling contributes.
It’s not as though the series ends happily. Instead, it ends on a rather ambiguous note. But Violet, Klaus, and Sunny survive. Their wit and their skills and their teeth and their teamwork are enough to keep the rising tide of horror at bay just enough for them to keep their heads above water.
That is what this presidency is going to be. It will an unrelenting barrage of attacks on our civil rights, on our personhood. If we work together, if we put our skills and our knowledge and our teeth to good use, if we keep each other afloat, we can keep Trump and his henchpeople at bay just enough for us to survive.
I know it’s daunting. I know it’s scary.
But I’m afraid we don’t really have a choice.
Lean on each other, literally and figuratively. Support each other. If you have privilege, use your voice to make those less privileged be heard.
But most importantly: don’t stop fighting.
