Peaky Blinded.

“You'll see him in your nightmares
You'll see him in your dreams
He'll appear out of nowhere but
He ain't what he seems
You'll see him in your head
On the TV screen
Hey buddy, I'm warning
You to turn it off
He's a ghost, he's a god
He's a man, he's a guru.”

— Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Red Right Hand”

Thomas Shelby is a god. Not just of mine, but of many. They might not know him by that name, might even resist the implication that their adoration comes from a religious place, but doubt it not – the man is a god. 

"Past the square, past the bridge, past the mills, past the stacks."

Like all gods, Tommy Shelby never existed – in that he was never a flesh and bone person with a home address and farts that smell and shits that stink. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t real. He is real, alright; in the minds, imaginations, subconscious and even hearts of countless people.

Do not mistake this dynamic for one of ordinary fandom. For sures, they share outward aspects; an affinity translated to coffee mugs and t-shirts, a feverish exchange of photographs, a community of hashtags and fan fiction. But this isn’t some shallow celebrity culture applied to a fictional character; this is not simply the admiration of beauty or the cult of escapism with a nostalgic twist.

Nick Cave explains, in the theme song that opens every episode of Peaky Blinders: “He’ll reach deep in a hole/Heal your shrinking soul/But there won’t be a single thing that you can do.” The song was written in 1994, nearly 20 years before Season 1 aired. But you would never know it from the lyrics, which map onto to the character Steve Knight created and Cillian Murphy crafted so perfectly that they read like prophecy. And so it is fitting, that a figure that haunts millions of imaginations like a ghost or a guru should have been, somehow, foreseen.

So allow me to be more specific in what sense, exactly, Tommy Shelby is a god. As John Halstead writes in “The Death of God and the Rebirth of the Gods,” Carl Jung articulated a psychoanalytical view of gods that understood them as elements of human experience which are unchosen — whatever combination of cultural and biological predilections we are handed upon birth, they are not deliberately chosen extensions of identity (although they can, of course, be embraced as such) but rather urges and experiences — spirits, if you will — that we exercise no more control over than we do the color of our eyes. In other words, as Halstead writes, “We do not have desires, habits, prejudices, etc…they have us. These ‘gods’ have the power to quite literally possess us.” (1)

Thomas Shelby, in this sense, is a god of his times. As an embodiment of repressed desires, Tommy represents something — some things — that are particularly seductive at this historical moment. As Western inequality returns to turn-of-the century levels, he’s a working class man from an ugly place who uses ugly methods — methods that our bourgeois liberal democracies have deemed illegitimate, and systematically denied to anyone unwilling to place themselves within reach of the carceral state. And yet Tommy is not ugly — on the contrary, his beauty borders on the unbearable, forged in the fire of despair and death and cooling to a cold, powerful stoicism that only occasionally cracks. And when it does crack — when Tommy cries or breaks down — the intensity of it is all the more considerable for being rare, and one is simply drowned in the inexpressible loneliness and suffering that being human can bring.

Yet this loneliness is not eternal or decontextualized — Thomas Shelby is a man who lost faith: in nations, in ideology, in humankind itself. It was taken from him on the fields of France, just as it is being taken from countless men and women who now find themselves denied hope, home, and human dignity. So he defies the norms of his society because he knows them to be lies: the hypocrisy of the ruling order is such a key idea behind Peaky Blinders that anyone unsympathetic to it couldn’t possibly become seduced by the show. As Tommy said at the end of Season 3, in one of the most heartbreaking moments of the series, “Those bastards — those bastards! — are worse than us! Politicians, fucking judges, lords and ladies, they’re worse than us — and they will never admit us to their palaces, no matter how legitimate we become. Because of who we are. Because of who we fucking are, because of where we’re fucking from.” This is an antihero for anyone who ever bore the brunt of this hypocrisy: and at this point, who but the fuckheads in Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington D.C. haven’t?

Hence the explosive popularity of the show — hence the monumental tattoos that an be found in the hundreds online, of entire arms, backs, and legs being turned into tributes to the Peaky Blinders. Hence a festival held in Birmingham — a typical postindustrial wasteland that remains stubbornly unredeemed by hipsters or the so-called "creative class" — dedicated entirely to the musical aesthetic and style of the show. Hence how I dream on a regular basis of Tommy — hence how I personally know him as a god. 

Always over my shoulder.

So let me close on that level of the self — of myself, and how the accidents of my birth and life intersected with the idea of Thomas Shelby. Who is Tommy to me? Righteous violence. Desire that flirts with self-destruction. A darkness driven by contempt. A loneliness birthed from disillusionment. A beauty everyone can see and even envy but no one understands. Stillness in the thick of that loneliness; drunkenness as a way to banish all the unresponsive external world from even the periphery of your vision. Tommy does not deny the man he’s become — “No one came back” — but neither does he try to make it into a story of triumph or positivity. Tommy is “already broken” — but powerful, smart, and just all the same. He is defiance of the categories that restrain my life and reign in my passions.

Which is why it is only with the idea of a god that I can fully capture how he’s always there, lurking around in my subconscious regardless of whether I care to cultivate him or not. As Jung wrote: “Called or not called, the god will be there.” Discovering Peaky Blinders has been a blessing I cannot describe in conventional terms of bringing “happiness.” Brushing up against the gods doesn’t bring a simple happiness as commonly understood; it caresses the same place that is touched when you pray, when you cry, when your heart is crushed with either pain or pleasure. Thomas Shelby is an ambiguous god. But a god, for sure, he is.

(1) John Halstead, "The Death of God and the Rebirth of the Gods," in Godless Paganism, edited by John Halstead (2016).