ABSTRACT
Ryan Murphy is no stranger to “historical” narratives. With productions like Feud (2017), American Crime Story (2016/2018), or Pose (2018–), he already showed his keen and personal understanding of America’s cultural and political past, as well as his ability to approach any story from a camp and/or queer perspective. In his work, Murphy has always pushed inclusiveness and queerness, and his latest effort, Hollywood, does not stray away from his usual ethos. Set in post–World War II Hollywood, the diegesis centers around a small group of aspiring filmmakers and actors in their quest for success. However, using the what-if trope typical of uchronian narratives, Murphy concocts a universe where gender, racial, and sexual inclusiveness in Hollywood in the late 1940s is more than a dream. Yet, unlike Philip K. Dick’s or Philip Roth’s classically dystopian uchronias, what most reviewers have called Murphy’s alternate history, or alternate reality, is actually a rather uncommon form of utopia: the departure from our universe is caused not by one singular colossal event (the Nazis have won the war, Columbus did not arrive in the Americas), but rather a constellation of micro decisions which uncannily blur the lines between fiction and reality throughout the show, increasingly promoting antisexist, antiracist, and antihomophobic values. Referred to as “faction” by Murphy himself, this new universe offers an original terrain for intersectional analysis. His agenda is not mere pink-washing, nor the erasure of decades of feminist, civil rights and LGBTQ+ struggles; what he is doing, instead, is queering the past, and creating a special space where he and the viewers can reflect upon all kinds of what-ifs, while looking at the history of Hollywoodian representations of minorities from the 1940s to today, thus helping us, perhaps, to (re)imagine the future while (re)imagining the past.
