Mark of the Healer

An interview with the creator of Netflix’s surprise hit

Unless you were a fan of the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport public safety and personnel training videos, until recently you were probably not familiar with the work of C. C. Cheltenham. By now you may be familiar, however, with the controversy and buzz surrounding their new Netflix movie Mark of the Healer. The movie, which debuted on the subscription streaming service January 19, quickly became the subject of wildly varying reviews; a rapidly growing global cult following; and even a series of protest campaigns in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.

[Author’s note: the following will be heavily laden with spoilers!]

Mark of the Healer is a speculative historical fantasy that follows 18th-Century English governess Persephone Eastbrook, who upon the death of her employer assumes authority of the last European outpost in what we today call North America. Eastbrook, played by Octavia Spencer, must hold together her late duchess’s retinue while attempting to acclimate the duchess’s son Lazarus [Jesse Williams] to his hereditary responsibility as lord of the manor.

The central conceit of the movie – and that which has apparently inspired the love and the hate – is that it takes place several decades after the height of a global pandemic that has, for all intents and purposes, nearly eliminated white people from the face of the earth. Though thoroughly English in culture and manner, Eastbrook is the daughter of West Africans who had been brought to England in the hope of preserving the country as white Britons rapidly began to die off. The late duchess was also African, and her son Lazarus was fathered by an anonymous, plague-stricken European sailor. It is revealed that all surviving offspring of such unions – between plague victims and those immune to the disease – are gifted with an ability to heal illness and injury in themselves and in other living things.

There is a host of other idiosyncrasies built into Mark of the Healer, and recently I got a chance to discuss it with C. C. Cheltenham. We also talked about what inspired them to make the film, their thoughts about the responses to it, and what, if anything, lies ahead in the film’s universe.

[Author’s note: this interview was conducted live via Skype. The transcript has been edited for clarity.]

Sam Holloway: I’d like to jump right into the film, if I may.

C. C. Cheltenham: Of course.

SH: So much about the film seems so alive and authentic, the world-building you accomplished is astounding. Your budget was reportedly under $2 million, too, is that about right?

CCC: It worked out to be a bit more than that, actually, about three or so. To be quite frank, it all seemed rather extravagant to me. I’m used to working on a shoestring at Transport. But I had excellent producers to guide me in that respect.

SH: Well, first off, the location. Why Nova Scotia?

CCC: You should really chat with my co-screenwriter, Betty Barlow. She’s a Bear River Mi’kmaq with an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the island, the adjacent coast, the peoples therein, and so forth. Back in early 2016, what would become the film was just beginning to run through my head as a very general story idea, a novel perhaps, and I just happened to meet Betty when I was on holiday in the States. See, I was spending a week as an observer down in North Dakota, watching the indigenous Standing Rock people try to nonviolently defend their water sources from an ill-advised and unnecessary oil pipeline that was to be laid through their land. I watched them being brutalized daily by heavily armed police, while the lame-duck liberal Obama lifted not a finger to help them. I was enraged and heartbroken, but spending so much of that time with Betty also left me inspired. We chatted quite a bit.

SH: Is that your normal idea of a holiday?

CCC: [laughter] Both my parents were ardent communists. You might say they had an overdeveloped sense of justice. I think in some ways I was a disappointment to them both, seeing that I took the education they procured for me and applied it to the most uncontroversial public service one might imagine. So I suppose when I have a rare urge to get away, it’s always to reacquaint myself with my political roots. To recharge my red soul, as it were.

SH: You said you had a very general story idea before you met Betty Barlow. Could you elaborate on that?

CCC: Of course. In lieu of gluttonous travel and pub surfing, I do an awful lot of reading. Novels, nonfiction, newspapers, magazines, the entire spectrum. And of course I’m often on Twitter. It’s my primary newsfeed, in a sense. So I’d just finally got around to finishing Federici –

SH: Caliban and the Witch?

CCC: Yes. But what really set me on was a tweet I’d read from a lovely and talented Afro-Dominican woman named Zahira who I’d started following on Twitter. She said, if I may paraphrase, that she had little use for dystopian fiction, because she – like all indigenous and colonized peoples – had been living in an apocalypse since before she was born. This put the key light on something that had been bothering me, namely how the capitalist mode of living is catastrophically unsustainable.

SH: And that there were alternatives?

CCC: Indeed, my dear! Indeed! There have always been alternatives! The Anglo-American-dominated Western project is built and sustained on wholesale violence. Like many empires before, it seeks to crush all competition. But there are always people who take a stand, despite the odds, because for them voluntary assimilation is worse than death.

SH: People like the Standing Rock water protectors, and the indigenous tribes in the Amazon, and I guess on a larger scale maybe the Cuban Revolution and the DPRK.

CCC: Right. Listening to Betty, talking with her at length, I realized that we had a very specific story to tell, a story that turned on an historical moment that set us on the apocalyptic trajectory in which we now find ourselves.

SH: So, back to Nova Scotia.

CCC: (laughing) Oh, I do go on when given the chance.

SH: Not at all. This is all good.

CCC: Very well. So, you’ve seen the film, and the idea we settled on was to entertain the question, What would the world look like if those globally rapacious Europeans were to more or less suddenly disappear before the height of their power? And instead of a sweeping epic, we settled on a very specific place, one with which Betty was intimately familiar, and on a few people through whose eyes we could envision that different world, a world built on cooperation and mutual aid instead of heedless, brutal exploitation. Or at least the beginnings of it.

SH: The vision certainly looks gorgeous on screen. The lush greens of forest and the brilliant blues of the sea. It all seems so alive, it’s a place I wouldn’t mind being in. When Persephone is standing on the shore at the end, letting the ocean breeze wash over her, I swear I can feel it on my own skin.

CCC: You can thank Jerzy for that. He’s a miracle worker with the digital camera.

SH: You’re speaking of your cinematographer, Jerzy Powalyczek, son of the late, great Polish filmmaker Weronika Powalyczek.

CCC: Yes. Jerzy’s Polish crew were his mum’s favorite in her last years, and at the time they were rather eager to get in a bit of work before we all expected Brexit to crash down on us.

SH: Now, can you say something about the animated sequence of the pandemic origin story? I’ve never seen anything like it. The tale of the slave ship captain, and the kidnapped African priestess who cursed him, it was a little shocking, I must admit. Why include that, and why animate it?

CCC: I like to think we established that the origin tale was mythical, not to be taken literally, not even by those retelling it. But we also wanted to tie the plague directly to slavery and to the Middle Passage, to demonstrate that such horrible deeds should reap horrible consequences. So the scene had to be raw and merciless. We animated it because that couldn’t be produced and filmed on our budget. We got lucky that our animator, Tess Bailey, is a genius willing to work on a shoestring. Colin Salmon’s brilliant voiceover gave it the last bit of oomph that it needed.

SH: Speaking more about the performances in the film, I have to confess that when I saw Jesse Williams’s name in the credits before watching, I was suspicious. As an activist I always respected him, but I never thought much of him as an actor. He really sold me on Lazarus.

CCC: Oh, yes. What a delightful person to work with. You know, he came to us. Word got out about our project, and he practically insisted on playing any part we could find for him, even as an extra. He offered to help raise money for our budget, too. Such a beautiful man, inside and out, a true delight.

SH: And Octavia Spencer? Wow. First of all, the accent.

CCC: My gods, yes. We wanted her to be posh, to the point of fault in fact, but when we first met online to do the first reading, it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her not to worry too much about the accent, and then she just started and I was astonished. [Laughs] That was my object lesson to never underestimate an Academy Award-winning actor.

SH: And the whole sexual awakening arc? I wasn’t expecting that. She really sold it. She sold the whole thing. I’m pretty sure my TV screen was steaming up during the tent scene.

CCC: We wanted Persephone to represent the vestiges of a dying patriarchal culture. In a sense, she was inspired by my Federici readings. We needed her to understand that the sclerotic old mores to which she was clinging were both unnecessary and harmful. They’d been put in place centuries before for nefarious purposes, and she was due to be rid of them. Hence her ‘awakening arc,’ as you put it.

SH: This is what so many people find irresistible about Mark of the Healer, I think. Sure, there’s the fantastic bit about the supernatural powers –

CCC: Forgive me for interrupting you here, dear, but I must gently protest. I highly recommend you and everyone else watch a documentary, it’s available on YouTube, called Surviving Progress. There’s an idea expressed near the beginning, if memory serves, that we humans are running continuously updated software on 500,000 year old hardware. I take that to mean that the evolution of our physical form has been stagnated by our propensity to alter our environment instead of adapting to it. So I prefer to think that we used the plague as a shortcut to unleashing, or rather rekindling, an evolutionary potential.

SH: I hadn’t thought of it that way.

CCC: And I also want to point out that Lazarus isn’t a superhero. He isn’t fighting off armies and lifting boulders. He’s quite powerful given the right conditions, but his abilities are almost passive, really. He’s redirecting energy that’s already there. And it’s clear that exercising his abilities can exact a severe toll on him if the balance of nature isn’t fully accommodated.

SH: One final note about the film, about another thing I think strikes a chord with so many fans of the film. The sex isn’t gratuitous, I mean, there’s very little nudity, but the sexual dynamics are quite open and very fluid. When we first meet Lazarus, he gives a tearful embrace and kiss to his Mi’kmaq traveling partner, Benjamin [Glen Gould]. It’s very clearly a romantic relationship in part, at least, and no one’s bothered by it except Persephone. Then there’s David [Alfred Enoch], the young bard who’s being trained to take over for the Elder [Colin Salmon]. He’s openly gay. These things aren’t discussed openly in the film, with the exception of Persephone’s initial expressions of discomfort, and even she feels guilty and out of place about that. Keeping in mind that this story takes place what, maybe fifty or so years after the collapse of organized Christianity as we would have known it?

CCC: As you know, dear, I’m nonbinary. When I was an adolescent, I don’t think I understood it conceptually. I wasn’t aware of an adequate term for what I felt about myself. The closest popular model I had was David Bowie from around the time I was born, and needless to say I’ve always been a huge fan of his. His ability to build a very successful career marketing an image of aggressive gender fluidity was remarkable. It spoke to an urgent need in Western society, I think.

SH: Well, this is also one of the big criticisms of the film. There’s the suggestion that in addition to what the reactionaries are calling the ‘white genocide’ back story –

CCC: [laughing] Oh, my, those protests. They’re such bloody gits. The racism is so thick it’s satirical. I can’t even take their death threats seriously. But please, please, continue. You were saying?

SH: How much of the sexual politics of the film is wishful thinking, which isn’t by any stretch a bad thing, mind you, and how much do you think is realistic given the conditions you set up in the world you built?

CCC: That’s a fair question. Best I can say is that it was inspired calculation. As we were discussing earlier, I think, you have to remember that the processes of imperialism and colonialism have left so many cultures badly disfigured if not outright destroyed. Who’s to say what would have happened if that genocidal juggernaut had been removed at any earlier point? There’s an infinite spectrum of possibility. It makes sense to me that things we have special names for or even make taboo would just be taken in stride under different cultural conditions.

SH: Thank you, that’s just what I was looking for. It didn’t dawn on me until maybe my third or fourth viewing how many little details were seamlessly woven into the film to help demonstrate some of those possibilities. For example, it’s mentioned in passing that the Queen of England is a transplanted Persian princess, and it’s implied that’s because she was the best available person who could be drafted for the job. And part of Lazarus’s experiences across the continent involved witnessing the tail ends of wars that were fought among and between recovering indigenous tribes and nations and the remains of European colonial projects. And at no point do I feel like I’m being burdened with gift-wrapped exposition. It all fits; it all flows.

CCC: Thank you. I don’t know if you are as big a fan of the old Twilight Zone as I am. Television that Rod Serling created a lifetime ago on a minimal budget and with no sophisticated visual effects remains eminently watchable today. It was the simple, powerful, ancient art of storytelling. We tried to keep to that.

SH: Well, obviously you were very successful. In its third week, Mark of the Healer topped two billion minutes by Nielsen’s SVOD content ratings. That’s phenomenal for a low-budget movie under two hours, one that initially didn’t benefit from aggressive marketing, and it has yet to drop below 1.5 billion for any week since.

CCC: I confess, despite my communist pedigree, that I’m glad to have made Netflix a lot of money. They took a chance and invested in our project when we weren’t sure anyone would touch it. Before they gave us the call, I was honestly excited to convince Tess to help Betty and me make it into a graphic novel. As we English like to say, though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

SH: So, finally, now that you’ve gone and built this phenomenal world, will you be returning us to it?

CCC: No, I’m afraid not. I could probably convince Betty to work with me, but quite frankly she’s very busy. The challenges indigenous folk are facing haven’t gone away. And it may be selfish of me, but I think the story is best left open-ended. So I’m content to let this be a unique cultural artifact. I will say that Betty and I own the screenplay, but we can’t and wouldn’t try to stop Netflix from hiring someone else to continue the story. If they want to pick my brain for ideas, I’ll do it for a cup of tea. Just as long as it’s someone capable in charge. But I’m happy at Transport, where I still get to work with Jerzy and a lot of really talented, wonderful people every day. Besides, I’m still not caught up on my reading. I just started following a political analyst yesterday, a brilliant American living in Canada by the name of Nina Illingworth. I stayed up all night reading her analysis from the last few years, and she predicted just about everything that’s happened in your country politically. You should read her.

SH: I already do, C.C. Thank you for your time.

CCC: You’re quite welcome. It’s been a pleasure.