Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration by MESjournal

The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

II About MSJ

IV Letter from the Editor

Greg Chan

VII 10 Years of MSJ Covers

VIII Our Contributors

ARTICLES

01 Dead Doesn't Mean Gone: The Haunting of Bly Manor as a Neo-Victorian Text

Jelena Trajković and Stefan Čizmar

Vol.07 No.02

13 Hollywood's Portraits of Artists as Kept Man

Joakim Nilsson

Vol.09 No.01

24 Symmetry and Centrality as Power: The Use of Mise-en-scène to Create Power in Sir Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile

Sahar Hamzah Vol.08 No.01

33 The Big Bad Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Kubrick’s ‘Shining’ on Domestic Abuse in The Dark and the Wicked

Lucie Patronnat Vol.07 No.02

46 Organizing the ZOO: Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts

Michael Johnston Vol.03 No.01

FEATURETTES

53 Food as Story and Spectacle in Big Night

Laura Beadling Vol.08 No.01

57 Chekhov’s Gun that Never Goes Off: Femininity and Castration in Jackie Brown (1997)

Clinton Barney Vol.08 No.02

62 Cinematic Isolation and Entrapment in The Lobster

Mazyar Mahan

Vol.07 No.01

66 Enter the Neighbour: An Inland Empire Mise-en-scène Metonymy

Andrew Hageman

Vol.05 No.02

UNDERGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

73 The Empty Vessel: Chronicles of the 'Unfed' Womb — Examining Symbolic Female Bodies and the absence of Bodily Autonomy in Alien 3

Jordan Redekop-Jones Vol.08 No.02

78 David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the Los Angeles Uncanny

Lydia Fraser Vol.09 No.02

84 From Innocence to Experience: On the Significance of Sansa Stark's Costumes in HBO's Game of Thrones Chantele Franz & Yasmeen Kumar Vol.04 No.01

VISUAL ESSAY

96 Unthethered: Engaging the Senses in Post-2013 Space-Travel Films

Melaine Robson Vol.05 No.01

INTERVIEWS

98 Tears Instead of Laughter: An Interview with Stop-Motion Animator Adam Elliot

Paul Risker Vol.10 No.01

ANNOUNCEMENTS

103 Open Call for Papers

The staff at Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2014.

About MSJ

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Greg Chan, Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Canada

ADVISORY BOARD

Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada

Richard L. Edwards, Ball State University, USA

Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago, USA

David A. Gerstner, City University of New York, USA

Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, USA

Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Janice Morris, KPU, Canada

Miguel Mota, UBC, Canada

Paul Risker, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

Asma Sayed, KPU, Canada

Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India

Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

REVIEWERS

David A. Gerstner, City University of New York, USA

Nilakshi Goswami, Girijananda Chowdhury University, India

Andrea Hoff, UBC, Canada

Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, USA

Robert Pasquini, KPU, Canada

COPYEDITORS

Robert Pasquini, KPU, Canada

Joakim Nilsson, KPU, Canada

LAYOUT EDITOR

Patrick Tambogon, Wilson School of Design at KPU, Canada

GRAPHIC DESIGN CONSULTANT

Kirsten Alm, KPU, Canada

WEBMASTER

Janik Andreas, UBC, Canada

OJS CONSULTANT

Karen Meijer-Kline, KPU, Canada

The views and opinions of all signed texts, including editorials and regular columns, are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect those of the editors, the editorial board, or the advisory board.

Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration is published by Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada

WEBSITE journals.kpu.ca/index.php/msq/index

FRONT COVER IMAGE

Alamy Stock Photo, 2025/Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2014

BACK COVER IMAGE

Jake Hills on Unsplash

Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader:

The issue before you represents a landmark in our journal’s storied history. I am proud to announce that with the release of its Summer 2025 edition, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration marks its 10th anniversary of scholarly publication.

A decade of Mise-en-scène has seen it evolve from a grassroots, in-house journal to an internationally recognized forum for film and television studies. The universality of film as a storytelling medium is reflected in our editorial team, advisory board, contributing authors, and readers like you. Across its eighteen issues, MSJ has become a transnational community of film studies academics, film students, independent scholars, filmmakers, and cinéastes. Our 122 contributing authors alone represent film studies research in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Portugal, India, Japan, Ghana, and Brazil. Much like the Grand Budapest Hotel featured on Issue 10.1’s cover, the journal has held space for the colourful guests who arrived, shared their stories, and left behind a legacy that continues to reveal itself “one frame at a time.” They are at the heart of this retrospective edition celebrating MSJ’s history–and its future.

Looking back, it seems fitting that Mise-en-scène had its beginnings in an English classroom back in 2014 when I was teaching a fourth-year film studies course at KPU. The students in that class wrote research essays that were undeniable: they deserved a second life beyond the classroom. An extracurricular project I proposed to guest edit a KPU-edition of Film Matters became that opportunity, with a cohort of my film studies students signing on as the editorial team. Together, we wrote the call for papers, reviewed the submissions, copyedited the accepted articles, proofread the galleys, and shepherded the issue to publication with oversight from Film Matters’ Editor-in-Chief Liza Palmer. Following the pivotal experience of publishing Issue 7.2 of Film Matters with my students, I began to wonder whether editing a film studies publication could be more than a one-off: What if my university could publish a film studies journal that was open-access, peer-reviewed, and quarterly in its release?

The Film Matters guest editorship inspired me to undertake a one-year research sabbatical from KPU during which I laid the groundwork to launch in 2015 what was set to be called Mise-en-scène Quarterly (I had convinced myself that MSQ sounded like a cinematic journal). The sabbatical had me earning my certification in OJS (Online Journal Systems) editorship and journal management at SFU’s Public Knowledge Project School. Learning how to manage and edit an

Film Matters 7.2 and its editorial team: Rachael Ransom, Mathew Fabick, Melissa Houghton, Neil Bassan, Fraser Readman, Irene Halliday, and Ann (Kim) de Kleer, 2016.

OJS publication under Kevin Stranack’s expert instruction gave me the skills and confidence to program the journal site. Other than publishing quarterly—MSQ morphed into the biannual MSJ—everything else in my blue-sky vision was falling into place. Once OJS-certified as an editor-in-chief, I assembled an advisory board and recruited editorial team members to serve as reviewers, copyeditors, layout editors, and proofreaders. A cohort of my film studies students eventually rounded out the team as interns. Amongst the founding board and editorial team, a number have been with the journal for its entire ten-year run: Paul Tyndall (KPU), Kelly Doyle (KPU), Janice Morris (KDocsFF/KPU), Heather Cyr (KPU), Joakim Nilsson (KPU), Duncan Greenlaw (KPU), Michael Howarth (MSSU), Gary McCarron (SFU), David Gerstner (CUNY), Paul Risker (Independent Scholar), and Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi). Irene Halliday (KPU) served as MSJ’s initial layout editor, while Janik Andreas (UBC) joined the editorial team as its webmaster. KPU’s Faculty of Arts and the KDocs Social Justice Documentary Film Festival came on board as our first supporters, later becoming our founding sponsors who were joined by the KPU Library and KPU’s English Department in subsequent years. Within a year of building its infrastructure, MSJ launched its premier issue headlined by Taylor Boulware’s “‘Who Killed the World?’: Building a Feminist Utopia from the Ashes of Toxic Masculinity in Mad Max: Fury Road” and Paul Risker’s interview with director Agnieszka Holland.

Along the way, MSJ travelled to various conferences (Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Pop Culture Association, SWPACA, Congress of the Humanities and Social Science, and Film Studies in Japan) and film festivals (KDocsFF, Sundar Prize Film Festival, Dawson City International Short Film Festival) either as an exhibitor, a presenter, or a correspondent. Many of our contributing authors were discovered at these film and media studies conferences. Internationally, MSJ’s print editions have found homes in Canada (in the KPU Library’s collection) and in Portugal (where they are on display in Lisbon’s Cinemateca Portuguesa Cinema Museum). Always evolving, the journal added key members to the editorial team, most notably Asma Sayed as an Advisory Board Member; Robert Pasquini as our Chief Copyeditor; Andrea Hoff as a Reviewer; and Patrick Tambogon as our Layout Editor, whose graphic designs relaunched the journal in 2018. The submission categories of video essays, visual essays, and undergraduate scholarship were successfully integrated into the journal as it grew into its mission and mandate. We began to publish special themed editions (such as “Narratives in Motion,” “1980s Redux,” “Film Noir”) as well as guest-edited dossiers (like Issue 7.2: Horror, edited by Michael Howarth). To revisit Mise-en-scène’s development over a decade, Issue 10.1 is a compilation of articles, featurettes, interviews, visual essays, and undergraduate scholarship making their return appearances.

Issue 10.1 marks another passage: It is my last as Mise-en-scène’s Editor-inChief. Ten years of the journal coincides with my retirement from KPU after 30 years. As I look back on a decade of Mise-en-scène , I can say that creating community in film studies research and publication has been a highlight of my career. What a privilege it has been to explore the artistry of filmmaking with those in the field. While I will stay on as the Founding Editor and an advisory board member, two incredibly talented members of our editorial team are stepping forward as MSJ’s new editors: Kelly Doyle (KPU) and Michael Howarth (MSSU). Both Kelly and Michael have been with the journal since its inception, serving in multiple roles as advisory board members, reviewers, copyeditors, and contributing authors. By way of introduction:

Kelly Doyle holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC; she currently teaches film and literature at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her research and teaching interests focus on the subversiveness of gender and post-humanism in horror film. Her work on zombies in popular culture was feature on CBC Radio, Shaw TV, and in local newspapers, while her recent publications explore anthropocentrism, humanism, and cannibalism in zombie

MSJ Issue 1.1(Winter 2016) and early promotion.

Greg Chan

films, as well as the representation of gender and ‘the human’ in zombie transmedia. Kelly also serves as a judge/horror expert on the Vancouver Horror Show’s annual Table Read Series, during which she helps select a winner for its horror screenwriting competition.

Michael Howarth holds a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in such publications as The Tulsa Review, Mud Luscious , Cave Region Review, Concho River Review, and Farmhouse Magazine. He is the author of two critical texts: Under the Bed, Creeping: Psychoanalyzing the Gothic in Children’s Literature and Movies to See before You Graduate from High School. He is also the author of the young adult novel Fair Weather Ninjas and the gothic historical novel A Still and Awful Red. He currently teaches children’s literature, film studies, and young adult literature at Missouri Southern State University where he also serves as Director of the Honors Program.

I extend my congratulations to Kelly and Michael, whose tenure as Mise-enscène’s editors begins with Issue 10.2 (Winter 2025). I know they will usher in a new era of the journal and am excited for its future direction and success.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone, past and present, who has contributed to Mise-en-scène: contributing authors, editorial team members, advisory board members, sponsors, student interns, and subscribers. Your engagement and generosity has been the lifeblood of our journal.

With gratitude,

Greg Chan Editor-in-Chief

Introducing MSJ’s incoming editors, Dr. Kelly Doyle and Dr. Michael Howarth

Team MSJ at the Film Studies in Japan Conference, 2025.

10 Years of MSJ Covers

Our Contributors

Clinton Barney is a graduate from the film and media studies program at Washington University in St. Louis, and the editor-in-chief of The Cinematograph film journal. With a background in history, his research primarily engages film as a means of preserving and reshaping American historical memory. He is also interested in the cinematic representation of “otherized” groups, ideology in early silent films, and narrative construction in professional wrestling. Currently pursuing a Master's program in Library Science, Clinton aims to make accessible photographic and cinematic archival collections through the creation of exhibitions and other educational resources.

Dr. Laura L. Beadling earned her doctorate in American Studies in 2007 from Purdue University. She currently teaches film and screenwriting at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. She has recently published on Cherokee filmmaker Randy Redroad’s film The Doe Boy and Alexander Payne’s screenplay and film Downsizing. Her research interests include contemporary American independent film, voiceover narration, genre, and issues of gender in filmmaking. She is currently at work on a book about Alexander Payne.

CLINTON BARNEY

LAURA BEADLING

STEFAN ČIZMAR

Stefan Čizmar is a PhD student at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad. His current research focuses on masculinity in literature, and he is working on a doctoral thesis on masculinity in transgressive literature. He is also interested in the Gothic, neo-Victorian literature, and postmodernism, and he has written several papers on these topics. Additionally, he is interested in examining the relationship between literature and other media such as film.

CHANTELE FRANZ

Chantele Franz is a Kwantlen Polytechnic University graduate with a Bachelors of Arts in English. Through her studies, not only has she been able to explore her love of literature and film, but was also able to co-develop a guest lecture with Dr. Paul Tyndall and fellow classmate Yasmeen Kumar for KPU's Art History department. The lecture was subsequently presented at the Far West Popular Culture Association's 2018 Las Vegas conference and created a foundation for her co-authored article, included in this journal.

Lydia Fraser is a recent graduate of Harvard University, where she received a BA in Film and Visual Studies and Government and a language citation in French. Her honors thesis explored spatiotemporal disjunctions in Los Angeles through horror films, employing gothic studies, urban history, and postcolonial theory. Her scholarly work can also be found in Film Matters and Bright Lights Film Journal

LYDIA FRASER

SAHAR HAMZAH

ANDREW HAGEMAN

Andy Hageman is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Ethics and Public Engagement at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, USA. His research focuses on Ecocinema, Horror Film, the works of David Lynch, and a current project on Stephen King's The Dark Tower series of novels. Andy teaches courses on film, literature, and a study away term in Norway that combines Design, Architecture, and Narrative.

Dr. Sahar R. Hamzah is an Assistant Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at the Arabian Gulf University in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Dr. Hamzah was previously as Assistant Professor of film production at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas. She is a Blackmagic Design Ambassador and Certified DaVinci Resolve Trainer. Dr. Hamzah received her PhD in Media and Communication in 2017 from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, Scotland, specializing in film adaptation. Her feature-length documentary Digital Kenya , created by herself and a colleague as part of a study-abroad program, was published in The Journal of African Media Studies, and screened at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) in Nairobi, Kenya, July 2021.

Michael Johnston is a Professor at Kutztown University in the Department of Cinema, Television and Media Production where he served as Department Chair from 2020-2024. His short films and screenplays have screened at and won awards at top internation film festivals such as the LA Shorts International Film Festival, Cinequest, and the Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition. His research focuses on architecture and film.

MICHAEL JOHNSTON

YASMEEN KUMAR

Yasmeen Kumar is a KPU graduate of English and history. During her time at KPU, Yasmeen explored her interest in historical textiles and costumes in film. In her free time, Yasmeen enjoys designing, and creating costumes based on films, TV, and celebrity fashion. Since graduating from KPU in 2019, she has pursued a career working with children with special needs in schools in the UK and Canada. She currently lives with her husband who she met while at KPU.

JOAKIM NILSSON

MAZYAR MAHAN

Mazyar Mahan is a Teaching Associate and PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he teaches courses on transnational cinema, understanding film, and global art cinema. Mazyar’s dissertation focuses on the films made by Iranian expatriate filmmakers over the past decade. He is one of the editors of the forthcoming volume ReFocus: The Films of Shirin Neshat, to be published by Edinburgh University Press. His films—Return of the Repressed (2023), Exile Echoes (2024), and A Drop at a Time (2025)—have been screened at and received awards from national and international festivals.

Joakim Nilsson completed my PhD at the University of Alberta, focusing on masculinities in 20th Century American literature and film, and in medieval literature. He has taught at Pierce College in Puyallup, WA, and at Simon Fraser University, and since 2011, he has taught at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. His teaching and research interests focus on gender, race, and sexuality, and he is particularly interested in American literature and film 19451960. Joakim has published articles on nostalgia and hegemonic masculinity in the film Field of Dreams (1989) and homophobia in Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1961), and is currently working on an article exploring gender and sexuality in the film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961).

LUCIE PATRONNAT

Lucie Patronnat is a long-time horror enthusiast and a PhD candidate in Film Studies at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she also started teaching recently. Her research revolves around the spatial expression of familial relationships—often analyzed through the lens of gender dynamics—in a comparative corpus of modern and contemporary horror films, mostly from the US. She has written soon-to-be published essays on Ari Aster’s Hereditary uncanny filmic language (“L’horreur d’Hérédité : une mise en scène de l’inquiétant ‘familial’”) and the cinematic vectors of destruction in the pagan cult/family unit dialectics of Ari Aster’s Midsommar and Robert Eggers’s The Witch (“Sur les décombres de la famille, la secte: recompositions horrifiques contemporaines”).

JORDAN REDEKOP-JONES

Jordan Redekop-Jones is a graduate of Kwantlen Polytechnic University where she received her BA in English. She also holds a creative writing certificate from Simon Fraser University’s the Writer’s Studio. In the Fall, she will be starting her graduate studies as a MA English Literature student. Her research interests include Indigenous Futurisms, South Asian Diasporic Literature, Feminist film theory and Critical Mixed Race theory among others. Her scholarly work is published in Alight and her creative work appears in magazines including Prism International, Arc, The Ex-Puritan, The IHRAM Press, and Sad Mag, among others. She is the recipient of a 2024 Indigenous Voices Award in the unpublished poetry category and the 2024 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for Poetry.

Paul Risker is an independent scholar, freelance film and literary critic, and interviewer. Outside of editing MSJ ’s interview and film festival sections, he mainly contributes to PopMatters, although his criticism and interviews have been published by both academic and non-academic publications that include Cineaste, Film International , The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Little White Lies. He remains steadfast in his belief of the need to counter contemporary cultures emphasis on the momentary, by writing for posterity, adding to an ongoing discussion that is essentially us belonging to something that is bigger than ourselves.

PAUL RISKER

MELANIE ROBSON

Dr. Melanie Robson is a film scholar and tutor at School of the Arts & Media at UNSW Sydney, and she teaches screen studies at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. She is co-founder and President of the Sydney Screen Studies Network. Her current research investigates the aesthetic, political and ethical role of the long take in contemporary European cinema. She has broad research interests in film style, temporality and staging in Europe and Asia.

Jelena Trajković is a PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade. Given her background in English studies, the current focus of her research is contemporary anglophone theater, with special interest in the American musical. However, despite her primary focus on theater, she has an interest in horror media, particularly the work of Mike Flanagan. She holds the position of junior researcher at the Institute for Theater, Film, Radio and Television in Belgrade.

JELENA TRAJKOVIĆ

Dead Doesn’t Mean Gone

The Haunting of Bly Manor as a Neo-Victorian Text

BY JELENA TRAJKOVIĆ AND STEFAN ČIZMAR University of Novi Sad

ABSTRACT

This essay places Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) within the theoretical framework of the neo-Victorian genre. Based on the work of Henry James, The Haunting of Bly Manor figures as the second instalment in Flanagan’s Haunting horror anthology series, exploring the themes of memory and trauma through the Gothic tropes of spectrality and haunting. The essay assesses whether Flanagan’s adaptive decisions constructively engage in a dialogue with the nineteenth-century socio-political structures and their haunting effect on the present. Placing emphasis on the issues of sexuality and class, he relies on the neo-Victorian practice of rendering visible the historically invisible, as well as the genre’s central metaphor of the mirror as a window to the past. The essay, therefore, considers the extent to which the narrative possibilities Flanagan creates for contemporary re-imaginings of James’s characters utilize the neo-Victorian genre’s subversive potential.

Henry James’s 1898 horror novella The Turn of the Screw continues to inspire both literary and transmedial adaptations, appropriations, and rewritings, many of which are subject to interpretations through the neo-Victorian lens. Joyce Carol Oates’s Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly, Sarah Waters’s Affinity, and A. N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost, as well as films like Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), and, more recently, Floria Sigismondi’s The Turning (2020), are only a handful of works which borrow characters, motifs, and plot elements from the classic novella and deploy them to different ends, attesting to the persisting appeal of the source material to the contemporary (re)imagination of the nineteenth century.

The most recent adaptation, and the one that concerns this essay, is the second instalment in Mike Flanagan’s Haunting horror anthology streaming series titled The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020). Although the plot most distinctly echoes The Turn of the Screw, the series interweaves several of Henry James’s ghost stories into a contemporary gothic romance set

in England and the United States in the late 1980s. The frame narrative, however, is set in 2007, with an enigmatic greyhaired woman (Carla Gugino) attending a rehearsal dinner in California, where she offers to tell the guests a ghost story she insists is not hers, though “it belongs to somebody [she] knew” (“The Great Good Place”). Once she begins her narration, the story rewinds to 1987 London, introducing Danielle “Dani” Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), an American expatriate hired as an au pair for the orphaned Wingrave children (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Amelie Bea Smith) living on a remote family property in Bly under the legal care of their absent uncle, Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas). While the storyteller’s identity remains unknown to the guests, Flanagan offers the viewers clues throughout her narrative, with the show’s closing scene confirming that the woman is indeed Jamie, the former gardener at the manor who remained Dani’s lover until her death seven years prior.

Whereas James dilutes the governess’s story by filtering it through a male perspective, Flanagan’s gender-swapping

of the frame narrator, as well as the introduction of a lesbian protagonist, suggests the potential for destabilizing the patriarchal and heterosexist structures upheld during the Victorian period, the ramifications of which persist well into the late twentieth century with Thatcher’s reinforcement of “Victorian values,” despite Great Britain’s seemingly promising redirection toward more progressive politics in the 1970s. Resulting from a contemporary fascination with the nineteenth century, the neo-Victorian genre has opened up spaces for historical, cultural, and aesthetic exploration of the Victorian era and its unyielding effect on the present. In literature and media, this effect is often metaphorically conveyed through the master trope of spectrality and haunting (Arias and Pulham xi), as ghosts are traditionally taken to represent projections of cultural fears and unresolved trauma.

In The Haunting of Bly Manor, Flanagan’s reimagining of a classic Victorian ghost story suggests the possibility for conveying anxieties about social and political uncertainties pervading Great Britain and the United States at the time both nations were under extremely conservative leadership. Such updating of Henry James, particularly his thematic preoccupation with the nature of storytelling and its inherent mirroring of the nineteenth-century social structures, blatantly points toward the Victorian past as a spectral presence that continues to haunt

engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re) vision concerning the Victorians” (4, original emphasis). Based on this definition, there appear to have emerged two distinct categories of texts that engage with the nineteenth century. The first are the texts in the vein of Sarah Waters’s Affinity and A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which operate within the boundaries of historiographic metafiction, revisiting and often rewriting historical events, and problematizing the relationship between history and fiction. Put another way, these texts challenge the cultural memory of the Victorians, seeking to right the wrongs of the past from the vantage point of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and often doing so by playing upon the contemporary stereotypes about the period or by giving a voice to the historically ostracized. As a result, they often adopt an ironic stance and are characterized by political undertones. Positioned at the intersection of the neo-Victorian genre and postmodernism, these texts rely on dismantling the official version, offering instead a pluralist view of history, that of which Hutcheon is the foremost proponent. By drawing attention to their own fictional nature, they suggest that the desire for the knowledge of history is continually undermined by the postmodernist notion of the impossibility of attaining such knowledge, thus consciously denying the historical plausibility even of the alternate histories that they

contemporary society. Moreover, it offers a metafictional exploration of the ghost story genre itself and the implications of the genre’s conventions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Placing the series within the neo-Victorian theoretical framework, this essay aims to determine its attitude toward the Victorian past; it considers the changes made to the source material as well as the extent to which the series realizes its subversive potential as opposed to appropriating the Victorian era for aesthetic and commercial appeal.

Although she never uses the term “neo-Victorian” to describe contemporary returns to the Victorian past, Cora Kaplan ponders the motivation behind these returns, highlighting the importance of “asking whether the proliferation of Victoriana is more than nostalgia—and more, too, than a symptom of the now familiar, if much debated, view that the passage from modernity to postmodernity has been marked by the profound loss of a sense of history” (3), thus hinting at the ongoing discussion about historical fiction’s critical versus nostalgic engagement with the past as dichotomized by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism (45).

In the frequently cited definition of neo-Victorianism, Heilmann and Llewellyn contend that to be considered neo-Victorian, a text “must in some respect be self-consciously

construct. In that respect, these texts reveal the unreliability of cultural memory, highlighting the fact that it is underpinned by inherited ideas and stereotypes about the past rather than historical facts, and is, therefore, ultimately dependent on the accumulated sense of history.

In the other group are the texts which are not concerned with critically engaging the Victorian past, but rather with adopting a celebratory and often sentimental approach to it, which tends to further perpetuate cultural clichés about the period. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009), for instance, prioritizes aesthetic reproduction of Victorian London over engaging in a critical dialogue with the social structures of the period. These texts emphasize nostalgia with no aspiration to subvert dominant historical discourses. Because they lack both a metahistoric aspect and “a self-analytic drive,” Heilmann and Llewellyn are wary of labelling these texts neo-Victorian, referring to them broadly as “historical fiction set in the nineteenth century” (5-6). Elaborating on the example of nostalgic cinema, Fredric Jameson is highly critical of purely stylistic engagements of the past, of “conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (19), having famously described such endeavours as “cannibalization” due to their negligence of “genuine historicity” in favour of nostalgia.

Nonetheless, because literature and media which employ a Victorian setting, character archetypes, and/or other conventions of the time have proven incredibly versatile, the neo-Victorian genre continues to evade a stable definition despite scholarly attempts to narrow it down to only the texts that exhibit a conscious effort to enter into a dialogue with the Victorian past, often with the objective of resolving present-day social and political tensions that stem from the nineteenth century.

If Henry James’s ghost stories are a cultural product of his time, the question that arises is whether Flanagan’s setting update is a deliberate attempt at establishing an analogy between the two social climates—the Victorian era and Thatcherism, as well as its American counterpart, Reaganism. The Haunting of Bly Manor’s most chilling and memorable line may well be Flora’s assertion that “dead doesn’t mean gone” (“The Way It Came”), which figures as the motif throughout the series. When considered within the neo-Victorian framework, the line reads as a metafictional affirmation that the Victorian era, although long behind us, continues to exert its influence on the present.

Flanagan’s iteration of James’s haunted countryside estate is populated with marginalized characters, including two black women, two lesbians, and an Indian immigrant, all of whom are employees of Lord Wingrave; the foundation is therefore laid for a narrative that will abound in political implications. Another significant change to the source material lies in Flanagan’s decision to rid the story of its signature ambiguity surrounding the supernatural presence at the manor. In The Turn of the Screw, upon her arrival to Bly, the governess begins to see two mysterious figures on the premises. None of the other residents appear aware of the figures, which leads the governess to suspect that the manor is haunted. She soon learns that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, was having an affair with the manor’s valet, Peter Quint, and that both of them are dead. The novella’s eerie atmosphere is deftly built through the governess’s point of view as she becomes convinced that the ghosts of Jessel and Quint intend to harm the children. The governess’s narrative ends with Miles dying in the governess’s arms after she tries to protect him from Quint’s ghost. The ambiguity which permeates James’s story has sparked various interpretations; however, the one which appears to have enjoyed the most popularity in critical discussions about The Turn of the Screw centres on the governess’s presumed insanity.

The Haunting of Bly Manor, on the other hand, confirms early on that the ghosts of Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and the former governess, reimagined by Flanagan as Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), are not figments of Dani’s imagination. Flanagan rejects the readings of James’s text as a case study for female madness, foregrounding instead social and romantic relationships at the manor as they are embedded within the dominant social institutions that all trace back not just to the Victorian era, but, as the eighth episode, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” suggests, all the way back to the seventeenth century.

LIBERATING JAMES’S GOVERNESS

Seeing that “subversion is only possible in the presence of a norm against which that subversion is directed” (Booker 188), Dani and Jamie’s lesbian relationship is continually contrasted to Peter and Rebecca's, its hetero-patriarchal and ultimately doomed counterpart. The contrasting nature of the two relationships is introduced in “The Two Faces, Part One” when Dani, having learned of Peter’s controlling behaviour, concludes that “People do that, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really. Love and ownership.” Thus, Dani not only alludes to her failed engagement to Edmund (Roby Attal), but also foreshadows a happy and healthy relationship with Jamie. Additionally, unbeknownst to Dani, the dichotomy also takes on a literal meaning as Peter’s ghost possesses Rebecca’s body before he compels her to drown herself in order to reunite with him in death.

Flanagan furthers the disparity between the two relationships by means of flower symbolism. Although he does rely on flowers as a traditional symbol of romance and sexuality, Flanagan expands their connotations to convey political metaphors. The prematurely cut roses which Peter gives to Rebecca thus become emblematic of their relationship. When Peter is surprised that someone of Rebecca’s intelligence is content working as a nanny, “scrubbing up some rich kid’s puke while his guardian drinks himself into a coma,” she admits to having applied for the job knowing that Henry Wingrave works for a prominent London law firm, telling Peter that she had always wanted to be a barrister—the ambition he ultimately cuts short when he compels her to drown herself (“The Two Faces, Part One”). Appropriately, the bouquet he gives her consists of both red and white roses, while the scene in which Peter is driving Rebecca to Bly for the first time momentarily freezes on the garden, focusing on a single white rose struggling to bloom, with the thorns from the surrounding roses looming over it (Fig. 1).

Dani and Jamie’s relationship, on the other hand, is symbolized by a moonflower. In “The Jolly Corner,” Jamie reveals that she took up gardening in prison out of boredom, but has grown to love it as she believes it has given her life purpose: “people aren’t worth it, but plants… you pour your love, and your effort, and your nourishment into them, and you see where it goes […] you watch them grow and it all makes sense.” She then compares Dani to a moonflower (Fig. 2)—a flower which, like marginalized identities, blooms only at night and is “bloody hard to grow in England.” Jamie contends that, although “everyone is exhaustive, even the best ones […], sometimes, once in a blue goddamned moon, I guess, someone, like this moonflower, just might be worth the effort.”

By using a nocturnal plant to illustrate a lesbian relationship in the 1980s, The Haunting of Bly Manor alludes to the contemporary attitude surrounding non-reproductive families. This proves particularly resonant in light of the Section 28 of the Local Government Act introduced in 1988 by

Fig. 1 | A foreshadowing of Peter’s intentions, 00:09:47. “The Two Faces, Part One” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

Fig. 2 | Jamie’s moonflower blooms against a prison-like trellis, 00:34-39. “The Jolly Corner” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

Thatcher’s government, prohibiting “the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities” on the basis that it clashed with traditional family values which stem from the hypocritical notions of sexual morality fostered in the Victorian era: “Thatcher’s invocation of the Victorian era centred upon her particular re-creation of the Victorian family with the heterosexual marriage as the permissible locus for sexual activity” (Mitchell 48). In that respect, Thatcher’s idea of the Victorian mirrors the exact image of the period that the neo-Victorian genre strives to expose and ultimately reconstruct. When Dani and Jamie kiss next to the blooming moonflower, the shot is initially framed through the trellis, indicating Dani’s

Jelena Trajković and Stefan Čizmar

entrapment, while in the next shot the trellis is removed, as Dani has embraced the previously repressed transgressive desire (Figs. 3 and 4).

Given contemporary curiosity surrounding the cultural stereotype about the Victorians’s rigid attitude toward sex, it is no surprise that sexual liberation is a frequent subject in neo-Victorian fiction. Antonija Primorac infers that the neo-Victorian re-imaginings of Victorian sexuality represent “a foil to contemporary notions of the sexually liberated and sexually knowledgeable individual” (“The Naked Truth” 92). But is Flanagan’s apparent favouring of Dani and Jamie’s relationship over Peter and Rebecca’s actually subversive? To what

Fig. 3 and 4 | A symbolic representation of Dani’s liberation, 00:34:49; 00:34:53. “The Jolly Corner” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

extent, if at all, are dominant Victorian structures de-centred? To ensure the safe distance from which we engage with the Victorian, the neo-Victorian genre relies heavily on the mirror metaphor, which is closely connected to the previously mentioned master trope of spectrality and haunting. In the first four episodes, Dani is quite literally haunted by the ghost of heteronormativity. From the moment she is introduced, she is continually startled by the figure of a man with glowing eyes that appears behind her in reflective surfaces (Fig. 5). In “The Way It Came,” it is revealed that the spectre that haunts her is her childhood best friend-turned fiancé Edmund, who was killed in a traffic accident, his eyes reflecting the headlights of the truck that hit him.

The episode delves into Dani’s past, outlining the trajectory of her coming to terms with her sexuality since early childhood up to the moment at Bly when she confides in Jamie. Six months before her arrival in England, Dani obliquely comes out to Edmund, saying that she thought “[she] could just stick it out and eventually [she] would feel like [she] was supposed to,” ultimately breaking off the engagement and causing Edmund to angrily exit the car and walk into traffic. After Edmund’s death, traumatized and overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and shame, Dani develops a habit of covering mirrors to avoid facing him, and essentially herself, as she is illuminated by his glowing eyes, thus symbolically conveying her repressed lesbianism. However, the most eerie and spatially significant of Dani’s encounters with Edmund’s gaze occurs in “The Great Good Place” when Miles and Flora lock Dani in a closet; Edmund’s appearance in the closet mirror causes Dani to have a panic attack, screaming to be let out, as the fear of sexuality is projected onto the fear of spectrality (Figs. 6 and 7). Moreover, Flora and Miles are eventually revealed to have trapped Dani in order to protect her from the murderous ghost of Viola Lloyd (Kate Siegel) who roams the manor nightly, therefore reinforcing the idea of the closet as the only safe space for perceived deviance.

By intertwining sexuality with guilt and trauma, Flanagan evokes the standard Gothic trope in which the return to the repressed is conveyed by means of spectrality. Dani’s being haunted by her past thus metatextually reflects the neo-Victorian genre’s preoccupation with the Victorian past and its influence on the present. However, to invoke Simon Joyce’s idea about the act of looking back, there is “the inevitable distortion that accompanies any mirror image, whether we see it as resulting from the effects of political ideology, deliberate misreading, exaggeration, or the understandable simplification of a complex past” (4). The mirror image therefore reveals our own misconstrued (although culturally accepted) ideas about the nineteenth century. As Heilmann and Llewellyn note, “neo-Victorian spectrality can be seen as a reflection of our inability to recapture the Victorians, and the impossibility of see(k)ing the ‘truth’ of the period through either fiction or fact” (144). In that respect, Dani does not remember Edmund as he was; rather, the image of him that haunts her is the one shaped by the trauma and guilt

By using a nocturnal plant to illustrate a lesbian relationship in the 1980s, The Haunting of Bly Manor alludes to the contemporary attitude surrounding nonreproductive families.

she associates with it. Dani affirms her transgressive desire by burning Edmund’s broken glasses, thus freeing herself from his constant surveillance and rendering herself a threat to the hetero-patriarchal system (Fig. 8).

Therefore, having established Dani and Jamie’s relationship as a viable threat to the social order embodied by Edmund’s now dissipated spectre, Flanagan is able to subvert the mirror metaphor: years after Dani’s death, as Jamie is narrating the story to the guests, she reveals that “for the rest of her days, the

Fig. 5 | Dani is haunted by Edmund’s illuminating gaze, 00:36:09. "The Way It Came” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

Fig. 6 and 7 | The fear of sexuality is projected onto the fear of spectrality, 00:48:48; 00:49:01. “The Great Good Place” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

gardener would gaze into reflections, hoping to see [Dani’s] face,” as the spectre is now a desired presence rather than a source of terror (authors’ emphasis, “The Beast in the Jungle,” Figs. 9 and 10).

Focusing on neo-Victorian heroines on screen, Primorac has observed a persisting trend in the neo-Victorian genre’s sexing up of female characters, contending that the genre’s overemphasis on exposing Victorian sexual hypocrisy ultimately compromises its subversive potential (93). Because these texts are often insistent on sexually liberating the Victorians, “the spectacle of the nude or scantily-clad female body draws viewers’ attention away from diminished rather than enhanced female agency in these contemporary renditions of female characters” (93). Notably, Flanagan’s screen text steers clear of a sensationalist depiction of its heroine and therefore does not weaken its critical stance on the historically dominant institutions. As a contemporary afterlife of James’s repressed governess, Dani’s liberation is achieved on her own terms; in other words, her liberation from Edmund’s gaze and her subsequent relationship with Jamie effects a change in the historical discourse, destabilizing the hetero-patriarchal system without weaponizing the female body or otherwise compromising Dani’s agency informed by her marginalized identity.

Unlike Rebecca, whose relationship with Peter does not pose a political disturbance, Dani is granted full agency over her life and ultimately her death. Both Rebecca and Dani commit suicide by drowning in the lake at Bly, and while Rebecca’s is orchestrated by Peter’s ghost possessing her body, Dani’s suicide marks an ultimate act of service for Jamie, protecting her from the malevolent ghost of Viola Lloyd. Whereas Rebecca’s death proves futile and a hallmark of Peter’s betrayal, Dani’s sacrifice offers a cathartic conclusion to her and Jamie’s relationship. Bound by the conventions of the Gothic genre, Dani and Jamie’s decade-long domestic idyll, eventually fortified by a civil union in 2000, does end in death. However, Dani’s suicide is not painted as a tragedy; rather it is framed through the Wordsworthian philosophy about the renewal of life, tying it up to Jamie’s own, inherently romanticist worldview expressed in “The Jolly Corner” and centred around the idea that the beauty of a moonflower lies in its mortality: “life refreshes and recycles, and on and on it goes, and that is so much better than that life getting crushed, deep down in the dirt, into a rock that will burn if it’s old enough.” Jamie’s rejection of the finality of death is ultimately embodied in the final shot of the series, which reveals that Dani’s ghost never left Jamie’s side, despite Jamie’s being unaware of her presence (Fig. 11).

PETER QUINT AND NARRATIVE (IM)POSSIBILITY

As Kate Mitchell points out, “Thatcher used the term ‘Victorian values’ as a measure against which to identify the social ills of her milieu” (48), particularly in relation to ever-growing class tension. In Thatcher’s England, therefore, to reinforce Victorian values meant to strengthen the boundaries of the clear-cut social categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality,

as well as the way in which these categories overlap. In the Haunting of Bly Manor, the tension between these categories is explored through the characters of Peter Quint, who is immediately established as the main antagonist, and Jamie, who is one of the romantic leads.

While The Turn of the Screw deliberately refrains from providing Peter Quint with motivation for tormenting the governess, sparking a debate on whether his ghost really is there, as opposed to being a reflection of the governess’s deteriorating mental state, The Haunting of Bly Manor gives Peter strong motivation which is revealed in "The Two Faces, Part Two." The episode endeavours to explain the roots of Peter’s behaviour, ultimately sourcing it to his frustration about Britain’s class division. Read in light of the neo-Victorian genre, the exploration of Peter’s past opens up a possibility for Flanagan to construct a working-class revenge narrative in the vein of Waters’s Affinity, which allows its unscrupulous

Jelena Trajković

Fig. 8 | In “The Way It Came” (The Haunting of Bly Manor), Dani renders herself a threat to the hetero-patriarchal system embodied by Edmund’s gaze, 00:49:36. Netflix, 2020.

Fig. 9 and 10 | Dani’s fear of a spectral presence is contrasted with Jamie’s grief over its absence, 00:35:33; 00:39:46. “The Way It Came”; “The Beast in the Jungle” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

working-class deuteragonist to deal a severe blow to the rigid Victorian social structures. Namely, Waters’s Selina Dawes and her working-class lover, Ruth Vigers, successfully trick the bourgeois protagonist Margaret Prior into helping Selina escape from Millbank prison, ultimately embezzling her, before fleeing the country. The working-class characters are therefore allowed a happy ending in terms of both cheating the class system and cultivating a lesbian relationship despite the confines of Victorian norms.

In contrast, Peter Quint’s plan to embezzle the Wingraves and flee to America is cut short by his being killed by the ghost of Viola Lloyd, and The Haunting of Bly Manor’s critical attitude toward the issue at hand is immediately brought into question. Although Peter’s preoccupation with class immobility

one rigid class system to another that appears less rigid in his eyes. He describes how in Britain, class is the only thing that matters, while in America, it is only money that is important, and he hopes that with the money embezzled from the Wingraves, he will be able to start a new life on top of the hierarchy. Thus, his story is not one of rebellion, but rather one of upholding the capitalist class system and simply climbing its ladder. His description of the differences between the class systems of Great Britain and America only shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem, since his statement only uncovers that in both places, class is the only important thing. The only difference is, most of the wealth in Britain is held by families of aristocratic origins, while in America, it is held by capitalists who do not descend from noblemen. However, both

By intertwining sexuality with guilt and trauma, Flanagan evokes the standard Gothic trope in which the return to the repressed is conveyed by means of spectrality.

does create narrative anxiety, his being denied a chance to free himself from the shackles of the rigid class system suggests that Peter is ultimately punished precisely for his marginalized status as a working-class man. Jamie serves as Peter’s foil but despite her marginal status as a working class woman being furthered by her being a lesbian, she is rewarded with a comfortable life in America with her lover, even though she remains relatively passive in effecting a change in the class discourse.

Moreover, Peter’s thoughts on the class system in Britain are not a product of inspection and analysis, but of personal anger and naïve idealism. His thoughts are not focused on dismantling the class system; he simply seeks to move from

countries are ruled by capital and are defined by the same capitalist–proletarian class division present in all capitalist countries. Therefore, Peter remains within the confines of the class system that he seems to detest, and he inadvertently upholds its primary value: the acquisition of capital.

Peter’s naivety is essentially a blind belief in the American dream, the belief that any person may achieve a prosperous life and attain wealth in America regardless of their background, race, creed, or nationality. In Peter’s eyes, unlike Britain, America is a place of progress. This belief on Peter’s part is quite problematic, both narratively and politically, as the series falls short in critically engaging with American ideology and

Fig. 11 | The final shot of the series reaffirms Jamie’s romanticist rejection of the finality of death, 00:49:01. “The Beast in the Jungle” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

history. While The Haunting of Bly Manor does engage critically with British past in a manner that is typical of neo-Victorian fiction, it does so from a markedly American perspective and with an uncritical representation of Reaganite America. Peter’s idealist idea of America positions the country as a place of progress, whereas rural Britain is shown to still retain a similar social structure that it had in the 17th century when Bly was owned by Lord Willoughby. The place is still owned by a lord, albeit one who evades it due to trauma, and much like in the early modern period, there is a clear distinction between him and his inferiors. This rigid distinction is well exemplified when Peter tells Hannah (T’Nia Miller) that “there’s them and then there’s us” (“The Altar of the Dead,” authors’ emphasis).

Such representation of the British-American relationship appears to strengthen and uphold the position of America as the new global superpower, which looks at Britain as a waning imperialist power that is stuck in the past and cannot step into the contemporary era. The Haunting of Bly Manor’s framing of the British-American relationship in this way is what distinguishes the series from the neo-Victorian narratives that engage critically both with the British past but also with the rise of America as a new dominant power. A.S. Byatt’s Possession, for instance, also criticizes the American drive for acquisition of capital through the heavily stereotypical characterisation of the prestigious literary scholar Mortimer Cropper, who obsessively collects memorabilia despite having no passion for the subject of his study.

Neo-Victorian fiction is deeply marked with an engagement with Thatcherism, whose American counterpart was Reaganism. Much like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan was a conservative leader whose economic goals sought to decrease government spending and liberalize the market as much as possible. This would allow The Haunting of Bly Manor to encompass both systems and create a holistic neo-Victorian critique of both Britain and America; however, the only engagement with America is filtered through Peter’s subjective, overwhelmingly positive view of the country. Therefore, the only narrative possibility for Peter is a rags-to-riches story, as is often the case with working-class characters who either seek to climb the social ladder, are represented as antagonists, or in Peter’s case, both. The same narrative possibility is given to Dani and Jamie, who rise from working-class to petite-bourgeoisie. However, unlike Peter’s narrative, theirs is completed in this manner since their stories are motivated mainly by sexuality and not class. Class struggle cannot be incorporated into capitalist ideology, which is probably the reason why Peter is given no chance at redemption, while Dani and Jamie’s struggle, especially when it is stripped of all its revolutionary potential, can. As a result, Dani and Jamie are allowed to enjoy a somewhat happy ending as long as they stay within the confines of the capitalist class system and ideology.

Upon relocating to Vermont, Dani and Jamie start a successful flower arranging business and are shown to be living blissfully as the sequence eerily recalls Peter’s musings about his and Rebecca’s carefree future in America only moments before

he is killed: “We’re getting out of here. The things we’re gonna be, you and I, in America… A lord and his lady. No. A queen and her stable boy” (“The Altar of the Dead,” Figs. 12 and 13).

Although Peter and Jamie come from virtually the same background—the characters are strongly implied to have endured child abuse, and both have juvenile records, with the criminal behaviour overtly linked to their traumatic childhoods—Jamie’s antagonism toward the class system is only touched upon and, as previously mentioned, she remains passive in effecting change but is nonetheless allowed sympathy. Conversely, Peter is vilified for being a product of the same corrupt system that ultimately kills him in his attempts to prosper within it.

As the titles of the two episodes centred on him and his relationship with Rebecca suggest, Peter is extremely cunning despite his outwardly charming persona. Accordingly, upon his introduction, his face is first seen in the reflection of a tailor’s shop window in Kensington as he pictures himself in an expensive suit, before he is seen shopping for luxurious whiskey and driving away in a Rolls (Fig. 14).

The sequence is framed as Peter’s fantasy and his self-deception translates onto the viewers as they are led to believe that Peter is indeed a rich man. However, both Peter and the viewers are soon disillusioned as it is revealed he was only running errands for his boss, Lord Wingrave. Metaphorically, class immobility in Thatcher’s England is conveyed by means of the gravity well which surrounds the manor. After Viola’s ghost has drowned him, Peter, too, returns as a ghost but soon learns that he is confined to the grounds of Bly. Once “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” reveals that Viola’s spite for her husband and sister is responsible for the gravity well which

Fig. 12 and 13 | Peter muses about his and Rebecca’s carefree future in America, revealing his blind faith in the American Dream, 00:35:41."The Altar of the Dead” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

traps the ghosts of all who die on the premises, it becomes evident that Peter’s chance at crossing the class boundary is denied him by those at the very top of the hierarchy. When even the murderous Viola, the former lady of the manor, is given a lengthy backstory with the intention of painting her as a tragic figure, Peter remains the only character whose personal tragedy is insufficient to redeem his actions in the eyes of the viewers, despite the narrative’s insistence that Peter’s antagonism is a product of the British class system rather than his being inherently evil.

Peter is notably absent from the story after the events at Bly. Once the curse of Bly has been broken and the ghosts released, Peter’s fate is deliberately left unknown as the narrative focus shifts entirely to Dani and Jamie’s life in America. Such conclusion, or lack thereof, to Peter’s narrative allows Flanagan to expose, and ultimately reaffirm, the historical injustices of the Victorian era that continue to plague Britain in the late twentieth century. However, given The Haunting of Bly Manor’s mishandling of Peter’s motivation for his villainy, especially in relation to the other marginalized characters, Peter’s defiance of the class system is essentially reduced to his being the collateral damage of a wealthy woman’s ghost.

CONCLUSION

The central question that permeates the majority of discussions within the field of neo-Victorian studies has been succinctly articulated by Kate Mitchell: “can [the neo-Victorian novels] recreate the past in a meaningful way or are they playing nineteenth century dress-ups?” (3). Undoubtedly so, Mitchell’s claim extends to neo-Victorian screen texts as well, despite the fact that neo-Victorianism on screen occupies a marginal position within the field (Primorac, Neo-Victorianism

While The Haunting of Bly Manor does engage critically with British past in a manner that is typical of neo-Victorian fiction, it does so from a markedly American perspective and with an uncritical representation of Reaganite America.

on Screen 2). Given the dual approach to the past within the neo-Victorian genre, this essay has explored the ways in which Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor revises the work of Henry James. Flanagan transposes James’s narrative into the 1980s, assigning the characters ex-centric identities. As a result, the series expounds political themes, raising questions about class, gender, and sexuality in both Victorian and Thatcher’s England, as well as in Reagan’s America.

Ultimately, Flanagan heavily relies on the neo-Victorian practice of rendering visible those whose histories are elided by the official version; he writes against the Victorian tradition by allowing Dani and Jamie’s lesbian relationship to take up the central position of the narrative, therefore utilizing the subversive properties of the genre. Upon her introduction, Dani is a closeted lesbian whose guilt and fear manifest in the form of her fiancé’s ghost. Edmund appears behind her in reflective surfaces, invoking Simon Joyce’s idea about looking forward in order to make sense of the past. The story thus acquires metafictional properties as it points toward the haunting presence of the Victorian past in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In an attempt at renegotiating the official history, Flanagan allows Dani and Jamie’s relationship to prevail over its heteronormative counterpart, with Dani’s

Fig. 14 | Peter ‘tries on’ an expensive suit in “The Two Faces, Part One” (The Haunting of Bly Manor), 00:01:27. Netflix, 2020.

reaffirming of her transgressive desire by burning Edmund’s glasses and therefore freeing herself from the socio-political constraints his gaze represents.

The narrative thread focusing on Peter Quint and class conflict, however, proves problematic, consequently blunting the criticism of the state of the nation. Although it acknowledges the rigidity of the British class system by employing the metaphor of the gravity well, The Haunting of Bly Manor fails to engage in a constructive dialogue with class discourse; if anything it further complicates the matter by its portrayal of the character who is most deeply rooted in being working-class as a murderer and whose antagonism is also fuelled by his blind faith in the American Dream. Peter Quint is demonised, marginalised, and eventually omitted from the narrative, which goes to show that The Haunting of Bly Manor operates within the confines of bourgeois fiction and ideology, preventing it from fully realizing the potential of the neo-Victorian tropes it employs. On the other hand, Viola Lloyd, whose vengeful ghost ruthlessly drowns everybody who crosses her path during her nightly roaming of the manor, but whose actions are ostensibly rooted in a tragic family history, is a wealthy landlady. Unlike Dani and Jamie, whose relationship withstands and successfully undermines the dominant order, Peter’s ambition to climb the social ladder is eroded by his being killed by Viola, his ghost remaining trapped within her gravity well.

Therefore, as a neo-Victorian screen text, The Haunting of Bly Manor readily employs the genre’s central metaphor of the mirror as a window to the (distorted) past, while the conventions of the ghost story genre prove as useful a tool in delineating the social mores of contemporary society as they were in the Victorian era. Flanagan’s adaptive decision to sexually liberate James’s governess demonstrates an overt intention of destabilizing the hetero-patriarchal order, as Dani and Jamie’s relationship ultimately subverts the mirror metaphor by having an aging Jamie seek Dani’s ghost in the reflection of her bathtub in a scene that bookends the series (Figs. 15-18).

Conversely, Flanagan’s meditation on the British class system, although given a significant amount of attention, does little beyond merely acknowledging the issue as he steers clear of making bold decisions when it comes to the conclusion of Peter’s story 

Fig. 15 and 16 | Aging Jamie seeks Dani’s face in the water in The Haunting of Bly Manor’s opening scene…, 00:02:01; 00:02:03. “The Great Good Place” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

Fig. 17 and 18 | …and again in the closing scene of the series, however, this time with her identity known to the viewers, 00:47:31; 00:47:37. “The Beast in the Jungle” (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Netflix, 2020.

Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham, editors. Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Booker, Keith M. Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque. University Press of Florida, 1991.

Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-Frist Century, 1999-2009 Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.

Joyce, Simon. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror . Ohio UP, 2007.

Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism Edinburgh UP, 2007.

Mitchell, Kate. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Primorac, Antonija. Neo-Victorianism on Screen: Postfeminist and Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women . Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

---. “The Naked Truth: The Postfeminist Afterlives of Irene Adler.” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies , vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 89-113.

“The Altar of the Dead.” The Haunting of Bly Manor, directed by Liam Gavin, season 1, episode 5, Netflix, 2020.

“The Beast of the Jungle.” The Haunting of Bly Manor, directed by E. L. Katz, season 1, episode 9, Netflix, 2020.

“The Great Good Place.” The Haunting of Bly Manor, directed by Mike Flanagan, season 1, episode 1, Netflix, 2020.

“The Jolly Corner.” The Haunting of Bly Manor, directed by Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling, season 1, episode 6, Netflix, 2020.

“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” The Haunting of Bly Manor, directed by Axelle Carolyn, season 1, episode 8, Netflix, 2020.

“The Two Faces, Part One.” The Haunting of Bly Manor , directed by Ciarán Foy, season 1, episode 3, Netflix, 2020.

“The Two Faces, Part Two.” The Haunting of Bly Manor , directed by Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling, season 1, episode 7, Netflix, 2020.

“The Way It Came.” The Haunting of Bly Manor, directed by Liam Gavin, season 1, episode 4, Netflix, 2020.

Hollywood’s Portraits of the Artist as a Kept Man

BY JOAKIM NILSSON Kwantlen Polytechnic University

ABSTRACT

Since the early 19th Century, the male artist has been both celebrated as a heroic figure who represents self-expression and freedom from traditional work and a figure whose financial dependence of a patron undermines his masculinity. In the USA after World War Two, men faced increasing suburbanization and consumerism, and often longed for the rebellious freedom represented by artists like Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac. But in the post-war Cold War culture, those who rebelled were threatened with the label of communist or homosexual. Focusing on three films made after World War Two--Humoresque (1946), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and An American in Paris (1951)--the article explores the portrayal of the male artist as a "kept man," and discusses visual and narrative elements in each film that work to reinscribe traditional gender roles. Specifically, each film uses a love triangle between the artist, an older, wealthy, female patron who threatens the artist's masculinity and artistic integrity, and a younger, more traditionally feminine woman who, by the end of the film, will help the male artist reassert his traditional masculine role.

For at least two centuries, the image of the male artist has created conflicting perceptions in regard to heteronormative models of masculinity. Romantic writers, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, promoted an image of the male artist as tortured hero and rebel. Discussing the “heroic artist,” Wanghui Gan explains how, “according to this trope, the artist is an inspired visionary, a prophet-like figure marked by potency, legitimacy, and creativity. Often a solitary genius and tortured outsider following the inclinations of his desires in self-imposed exile, he is romanticized as a countercultural rebel who is more authentic and honest than the masses because he is more attuned to beauty and truth” (1). To men who follow the model of traditional masculinity—husband, father, breadwinner who sacrifices his personal needs to satisfy the material needs of his family—the male artist may represent freedom and escape from social and labour conformity.

But this lack of conformity, and the desire to express oneself honestly through one’s art, often come with economic instability—the trope of the “starving artist.” As Amelia Yeates explains, “The figure of the male artist in the nineteenth century was a locus for various concerns surrounding the construction of masculinity, such as the issue of labour and production, the

role of the patron and the marketplace and the gendering of aesthetics” (“Introduction” 133). Katarzyna Kosmala captures two aspects of the artist’s relationship to work:

The career in the arts’ sectors is often referred to as having a protean form, that is, a form of a boundary-free organization of creative practice and linked to an occupation whereby the motivation and a drive for a success are internally infused and self-driven (Baruch, 2004; Hall, 2004). A notion of creative career is also closely linked to the idea of non-career, which is reflected in a pattern of working that is nonlinear, not easily approximated with the monetary value or with a form of financial recognition (Hearn, 1977), until it enters the art market through either patronage, networks or recognition. (17)

To achieve “recognition,” artists usually relied on a patron, a relationship that undermines the connection between masculinity and financial independence. In 19th Century England, according to Yeates, some people felt that “the emasculation of artists through their subservience to patrons automatically rendered them prostitutes,” as “within nineteenth-century

discourses …, women were frequently linked with exchange and transaction, a connection that rendered problematic artists’ activity in the marketplace” (“Slave” 175).

During the period on which I focus this article—the decade after World War Two—the conflicting feelings about the artist as rebel were further complicated by the Cold War, an increasingly materialistic American culture, the growing corporatization of white collar male labour, and male anxiety about the perceived influence of women: “In the 1950s American men strained against two negative poles—the overconformist, a faceless, self-less nonentity, and the unpredictable, unreliable nonconformist” (Kimmel 236). While, as Michael Kimmel suggests, overconformity was questioned—conformity was associated with communism—”mid-century therapeutic culture pathologized the man who sought a lifestyle outside of the conventions of the time. Moreover, the increased awareness of the (invisible) male homosexual in every walk of American life added to the sense that a man was compelled to fulfill the life trajectory that experts deemed ‘normal’ and ‘mature,’ lest he be tainted by the stigma of homosexuality” (Cuordileone 138). Whether men feared homosexuality or suburban drudgery, it was women who usually took the blame for society’s social ills:

In the mid-twentieth century, the enemy for many male critics was less the female reformer proper (the ominous image of Eleanor Roosevelt notwithstanding) but rather self assertive, “civilizing” women in the private sphere, and a looming matriarchy radiating outward from the home. The claims made by mid-century male critics that women maintained a matriarchal grip on the family and society were absurd, yet they reflect new and unresolved tensions about women’s mid-century roles. (Cuordileone 139)

In the films I discuss, these related anxieties about male financial dependence and growing female agency come together in the character of a wealthy, middle-aged female patron who offers the male artist monetary support, but at the cost of his sense of masculinity.

To

written about Gene Kelly’s “athletic” dance style: “Not only did Kelly’s American style democratize dance through his embodiment of the ‘working man,’ dispelling the myth of aristocratic ownership of dance, but his consistent portrayal of ‘military man’ roles offered a previously unseen, more universally recognizable male identity in onscreen musicals that continued to dispel the other American myth of dance as female” (Guernier 17-18). So, while a rebel against some aspects of society, male artists

often reassert their manhood through an emphasis on sexual power relations and reconfirmation of their artistry. Thus, the correlation between the performance of machismo and of authentic artistic genius indicates that despite shunning society and being shunned by society, the [artists] still identify themselves within the boundaries of cultural ideologies that serve to assert and maintain male hegemonic power. They often display homosexual panic in grappling with long-standing cultural assumptions that associate artistry and male homosexuality, working to re-masculinize art and aesthetics. (Gan 4)

The popular post-World War Two artists I mentioned all maintained an image of masculinity that seemed to balance virility and heterosexuality with a challenge to the materialism and suburban drudgery that threatened to undermine traditional American manhood.

The three films I discuss—Jean Negulesco's Humoresque (1946), Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951)—do not explicitly address homosexuality; instead, each portrays a relationship between a young, male artist and an older, wealthy, upperclass woman who at first acts as his patron but soon becomes demanding in a way that undermines both his art and his masculinity. Whether buying him nice clothes, providing a place to live and work, or helping him connect with other wealthy patrons of the arts, the older woman places the artist in the position of a “kept man”—a position he reluctantly accepts in trade for the success and stability that his art alone does not

men who follow the model of traditional masculinity—husband, father, breadwinner who sacrifices his personal needs to satisfy the material needs of his family—the male artist may represent freedom and escape from social and labour conformity.

In the decade after World War Two, the most prominent artists in America worked hard to maintain an image of the artist as approachable and heterosexual, thus challenging the stereotype of the artist as elitist and unmasculine. Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock1—and Gene Kelly (whom I will discuss more later)—all portrayed a traditionally masculine, working-class image. Pollock was hard drinking and wore a tee shirt, jeans, even cowboy boots (Jones 23), and much has been

provide. Using the narrative device of the love triangle, each film juxtaposes this older woman with a younger woman who, based on age, social class, and potential for love, marriage, and family—the hallmarks of heteronormative gender roles of the time—is portrayed as a more appropriate choice to restore the artist’s manhood. And if these normative gender roles are not clear enough, each film relies on other characters to articulate the expectations that the male artist is transgressing. While the

mood and genre of these films range from melodrama to film noir to musical, each film resolves the narrative by restoring the main character’s masculinity.

HUMORESQUE (1946)

The film opens near the end of the story, with Paul Boray (John Garfield)—a successful classical violinist—facing a crisis. Through his words to himself, we learn that success has not brought the happiness and satisfaction Paul has always longed for; he still feels “outside, always looking in” and “far away from home,” and longs to “get back to the happy, simple kid I used to be” (0:03:55-0:04:22). Flashing back, we see that as a boy, Paul already showed signs of the “heroic artist”: despite his father’s protests (Rudy played by J. Carrol Naish), Paul wants a violin for his birthday, rather than the baseball bat or fire engine suggested by his father. While his working class, immigrant father seems concerned about the cost of a violin, he also seems to want Paul to choose a more traditionally masculine occupation. Upon returning home, Paul’s mother (Esther played by Ruth Nelson) goes to buy the violin, starting a pattern of support for Paul’s musical dreams. Is she overindulging Paul, like his father (and many social critics anxious about the impact of “momism”2 on young men) fears, setting him up for a life of financial dependence? As Rudy tells Esther about successful artists, “Statistics show there’s one of them in a million. … Paul Boray: the genius who lives over a grocery store?” (0:18:480:19:02). But Paul seems to possess the mix of talent and determination needed to be that one, despite his father’s and brother’s (Tom D’Andrea) criticisms, which focus on Paul’s lack of financial contribution to the family, a situation his mother continues to defend. Now a young man attending a music academy, Paul tells his fellow (somewhat successful) musician Sid (Oscar Levant), his older friend and character foil, “I’m not going to be a parasite from now on. I’m going to pay my way” (0:19:410:19:45). Expressing his desire for social mobility, Paul states “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life living in a hot box over a grocery store” worrying about unpaid bills (0:20:43-0:20:55). Ironically, it is at this point that Sid explains to Paul the realities of being a successful concert musician: nice clothes, an expensive violin, a manager—all of which rely on an upper-class patron like Helen Wright (Joan Crawford), and thus another form of financial dependence.

Before I discuss Helen Wright, the older, rich, married woman who provides Paul the money and connections he needs to succeed, I want to discuss Gina (Joan Chandler), the young woman who loves Paul, and of whom Esther approves. Early in the film, Paul is walking with Gina, a cellist from the neighborhood who also attends the music academy, telling her about his artistic dreams which, as a musician herself, she can understand and support. Paul then tells Gina, “I never open up like this to most people. Not even mom; it’s only you. I don’t have to pose with you. I don’t have to fight or argue. I can be just what I am: no different, no better, no worse, just me....” Before going inside, she kisses Paul and says, “If I told you I loved you, would you laugh?” Once alone, Paul seems surprised and somewhat

pleased, but he does not respond with similarly strong feelings (0:15:39-0:16:38). Maybe Gina is too familiar—they have grown up together—or maybe she symbolizes that “hot box over a grocery store” that he wishes to escape. Esther often speaks of Gina, and later makes clear that she can give Paul what he really wants: “I know you. Inside, Paul, you want a wife, home, children” (1:07:54-1:07:59). However, Gina cannot give Paul the financial support and social connections he needs to fulfill his artistic dreams, which he will not compromise. Unlike Sid, who is full of self-mockery and will acquiesce to the wishes of conductors or producers, and is happy to make any money from his art, Paul is proud and egotistical, regularly clashing with those who do not meet his artistic standards. As Sid says to Paul, “You have all the characteristics of a successful virtuoso: you’re self-indulgent, self-dedicated, and the hero of all your dreams” (0:30:32-0:30:39). We see this pride and pugnaciousness on full display when he first meets Helen Wright, a meeting arranged by Sid as a first step toward the patronage that Paul needs and wants. What Paul soon learns is that there are strings that come with the support he will receive.

Our initial perception of Helen Wright as a strong, demanding woman is created by the portrayal of the men who surround her. Before Paul meets Helen, he sees her surrounded by obsequious young men who laugh at her quips (Fig. 1), and he also meets her husband (Paul Cavanagh), who describes himself as “weak” (0:33:27)—likely for putting up with Helen’s flirtations. While these other men do as they are told—‘“get my glasses for me like a good boy, Teddy”’(0:35:51-0:35:53)— Paul challenges Helen from the beginning—not surprising, given the choice of John Garfield to play Paul. As Stuart Hands discusses, Garfield often played tough characters who combined “dynamic expressions of pent-up anger, vulnerability, cold disillusionment and brimming sexuality” (2). And if the audience misses the associations, a drunken woman at the party makes them clear, insisting to Paul, “You look just like a prize fighter” (0:33:41-0:33:43). But then Paul plays, piquing Helen’s interest (Fig. 2). Though she hides it behind insults,

Fig. 1 | Our first impression of Helen: surrounded by men eager to please her, 0:33:08. Warner Bros., 1946.

Helen seems to enjoy the challenge, likely having tired of the “weak” men around her, and the next day sends Paul a gift of a gold cigarette case. Mama seems concerned about Helen’s interest, a scene followed by Helen buying Paul a suit (0:54:250:55:36). Again asserting his independence, Paul will let her buy him a suit, but he insists on disregarding her opinion and choosing the material himself (Fig. 3).

Paul clearly has conflicting feelings about Helen’s help. At the next meeting, he refuses to light her cigarette, and then says to Helen, “The patroness of the arts. What am I? A substitute for this year’s trip to Sun Valley? Or the discovery of a new painter? You think it’s pleasant to be patronized by a woman?” He fears she has “just added a violin player to your collection, that’s all” (0:57:40-0:59:22). Hands argues that “In their initial scenes together, Paul’s hostility toward Helen is well-rooted in her social status and the upper-class world she represents. But at times, this anger becomes indistinguishable from his resistance to the emasculation he feels as this strong woman helps and guides his musical career” (57). Paul clearly expresses

his conflicting feelings between desiring success and relying on Helen to achieve that success. But his anxiety about being “patronized by a woman” no doubt, if only on a subconscious level, also reflects his ambivalence about his relationship with his mother. Paul may recognize that he has moved from relying on his mother, who has always supported Paul’s musical ambitions, even in the face of his father’s and brother’s criticisms, to relying on Helen, whom he feels more comfortable criticizing. Paul seeks financial independence and artistic success away from his family; nevertheless, he still seeks approval, not from his father but from his mother who will continue to question his relationship with Helen.

While Helen willingly takes on the role of “patroness,” she initially defines their relationship as strictly professional: Paul suggests a possible romantic relationship, but she is interested in him “only as an artist” (0:45:00-0:45:06). As Helen describes her past marriages, we learn her reasons for this reluctance, and for her drinking: she has been unlucky with men, and seeks to keep them emotionally at arm’s length. She was married at sixteen to “a cry baby” and at twenty-one to “a cave man” (0:44:18-0:44:25), and as we know, is again married to a “weak” man presently. So when Paul comes on to her, she quickly asserts her need for independence: “I don’t know how you men get that way, but every time you meet an attractive woman, you begin to plan how and where you’re going to club her wings down” (0:44:35-0:44:41)). When Helen does eventually profess her love for Paul—“I love you. I can’t fight you any longer, Paul” (1:05:57-1:06:06)—she begins to be a more sympathetic character because despite Paul’s claims that he loves her, she quickly learns that she is less important to Paul than his music.

While Esther still distrusts Helen and her interest in Paul— unlike Rudy, Esther is not impressed by the nice apartment Helen has helped Paul move into, and still believes “There’s something wrong with a woman like that” (1:26:36-1:26:39)— we begin to see the dark side of Paul the “heroic artist”: “the myth of the artist-genius often goes together with artists exhibiting harmful behaviour, notably narcissism, machismo, and misogyny, as the myth provides the justification and impetus for problematic behaviour as natural moral and intellectual superiority, especially when these artists feel a lack of understanding and acknowledgement from those around them” (Gan 2). Helen’s husband grants her the divorce she wants, so she can marry Paul, but echoing Sid’s statement about Paul’s artistic ego, he warns her that Paul is “not soft” and that “nothing means anything to him but his music” (1:29:351:29:39). A male friend of Helen’s reinforces this criticism of the male artist after he sees the negative emotional impact Paul is having on Helen: “A French philosopher once listed three hundred ways to commit suicide. Only he left one out: falling in love with an artist” (1:39:46-1:39:50).

More than the other two films I will discuss, Humoresque portrays the “patroness” as a complex and sympathetic character, and questions the drive and “narcissism” of the male artist. When Helen’s friend speaks of “suicide,” he foreshadows

Fig. 2 | A shot through Helen’s wine glass—is Paul simply Helen’s latest addiction? 0:40:59. Warner Bros., 1946.. Warner Bros., 1946.

Fig. 3 | Dressing the artist, but with some resistance, 0:55:03. Warner Bros., 1946.

To achieve “recognition,” artists usually relied on a patron, a relationship that undermines the connection between masculinity and financial independence.

Helen’s fate; Helen soon realizes that despite his claims of love, Paul is not a rebel against gender norms: “You want the homemaker type. Outside of your music, you cherish all the standard virtues,” but more than anything, he is “married to [his] music” (1:43:00-1:43:36). Helen shows courage when she confronts Esther and professes her love for Paul, to which Esther replies, “You only make demands. Leave him! Leave him alone!” (1:46:32-1:46:39). Esther has always defended her son, and does not know what the audience knows about Paul’s treatment of Helen. Increasingly despondent over her feelings for Paul, and not wanting to interfere with his musical success, Helen’s last words echo those of Paul at the beginning of the film: “Here’s to love. And here’s to a time when we were little girls and no one asked us to marry” (1:51:44-1:51:54). Her suicide by drowning in the ocean—made melodramatic

by Paul’s concert music playing in the background, as if haunting Helen—suggests that she sacrifices herself for his music. Her death leads to Paul’s emotional crisis that begins the film, but also the resolution he seeks: leaving his penthouse apartment, he returns to ground level and to what looks like the old neighbourhood. His final words, to Sid—“I’m not running away” (2:03:30-2:03:31)—suggest Paul has recognized that he can find happiness in returning to the place he so desperately wanted to escape, and while it is not clearly shown, the ending implies that Paul might return to Gina (she was at his concert, and looked happy), and to the heteronormative values that his mom defined as his true desire: “a wife, home, children.”

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Like Humoresque, Sunset Boulevard begins near the end of the story but not with a question to be answered by the main character. As Joe Gillis (William Holden)—“just a movie writer with a couple of ‘B’ pictures to his credit” (0:02:28-0:02:30)—floats face down in a swimming pool (Fig. 4), we quickly realize that his fate is sealed. We know that he dies, so our attention immediately shifts to “How did this happen?”—a question our dead narrator,

Fig. 4 | Joe Gillis finally gets some notoriety in Hollywood, 0:02:33. Paramount, 1950.

through voiceover (and some Hollywood magic), answers by describing “the facts, the whole truth” (0:02:11-0:02:12) about the events that lead to his death. His story thus becomes a warning, and his first theme Joe focuses on the high price of seeking material success in Hollywood: “Poor dope--he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end he got himself a pool. Only the price turned out to be a little high” (0:02:35-0:02:42). As Joe will outline, his desire for success will cost him not only his life, but also his artistic integrity, an “appropriate” romantic relationship, and his sense of masculinity.

Continuing to recount his story through voiceover narration, Joe describes a life of financial desperation and artistic failure. Having left a comfortable job as a reporter in Dayton, Ohio, Joe clearly had artistic aspirations, but unlike Paul Boray, whose artistic integrity was always supported by his mother, Joe feels increasingly isolated and desperate. Unable to sell a story or even borrow money to avoid losing his car, Joe quickly gives up his artistic ideals, and even considers admitting failure and returning to his job in Ohio. His cynicism is highlighted when he meets the first corner of his future love triangle—Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), a young, idealistic script reader—while he is pitching his story “Bases Loaded.” Not knowing Joe is present, she insightfully criticizes the story as written “from hunger” (0:06:26) and thus without merit, and then tells Joe that she thinks he does have talent he should nurture (Fig. 5). His response—“That was last year. This year I am trying to earn a living” (0:07:15-0:07:17)— reveals his vulnerability; Trowbridge argues that Betty’s criticisms “insinuate that Joe Gillis has prostituted his writing ability” and that Betty “shows foresight, as the opportunistic writer indentures himself to Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) soon thereafter….” Joe soon “does triple duty as the silent star’s ghostwriter, gigolo and audience, in return for lavish gifts that overindulge his acquisitive appetite” (296).

Unlike Paul Boray, who maintains his emotional control as he pursues a relationship with a reluctant Helen, Joe does not recognize the artistic and personal cost of his relationship with Norma. Hiding his car in what he believes is an abandoned mansion, Joe believes Norma’s house is a safe place where he can hide and regroup. Initially, Joe thinks that he controls the relationship with Norma—“I was pleased with the way I had handled the situation. I dropped the hook, and she snapped at it” (0:24:01-0:24:08)— and sees it as preferable to a humiliating return to Ohio. He does not recognize how, with Max’s (Erich von Stroheim) help, Norma will manipulate him into a sexual relationship that will undermine a more legitimate relationship with Betty (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7). As Joan F. Dean argues, “Joe makes the same erroneous assumption about his profession as does his colleague played by Richard Gere in Paul Schraeder’s American Gigolo. Both mistakenly believe that they control their situation, that they have the freedom to walk away from their trade when they choose, that they can reclaim their integrity” (95).

As Joe is moved from his apartment to the room over Norma’s garage to a room in her house to Norma’s bed, he feels increasingly conflicted about the relationship: “I wanted the job, and I wanted the dough, and I wanted to get out of

Fig. 5 | Nancy’s disappointment in Joe’s lack of artistic integrity, and Joe’s defensiveness, 0:07:17. Paramount, 1950.

Fig. 6 | Joe as controlling gigolo…, 0:57:29. Paramount, 1950.

Fig. 7 | … or self-deluding object of desire? 0:57:57. Paramount, 1950.

there as quickly as I could” (0:29:10-0:29:15). His inner voice recognizes the peril he is in, but unlike Paul Boray, who has Mama reminding him of his heteronormative aspirations, Joe remains isolated and self-deluding. In a scene that parallels Helen buying Paul a suit, Norma criticizes Joe’s clothes and offers to buy him new ones. Joe is initially reluctant— Joe: “I don’t need any clothes, and I certainly don’t want you buying them for—.” Norma: “Why begrudge me a little fun? I just want you to look nice” (0:36:34-0:36:39)—but acquiesces. Through words of support, rather than criticism, the salesman (Peter Drynan) articulates Joe’s role as a kept man by quietly suggesting to Joe that he take advantage of Norma’s money: “Well, as long as the lady’s paying for it, why not take the Vicunan?” (0:37:28-0:37:31). The salesman has no doubt seen this older, rich woman/younger man dynamic before, but as shown by Joe’s reaction to his words, having his secret relationship made public does not sit well with his sense of manhood (Fig. 8 and Fig. 9).

Like Gina with Paul, Betty is presented as a more socially acceptable choice for Joe, as she is younger, of the same social

class, and a writer who wishes to support Joe’s artistic aspirations: “[Janey] Place insightfully points out that in Sunset Boulevard, Norma ‘insists [Joe] participate in her life rather than being interested in his’ (57), and that Joe’s ideal partner Betty dreams of his career rather than her own, that she is content to be behind the camera rather than in front of it” (Mazur). Joe begins to live a double life, meeting with Betty to write, but carefully keeping each relationship secret from the other woman. Some critics have argued that Joe is thus an unsympathetic character. While describing Norma as a vampire “feeding on the life-blood of the young,” Cooke criticizes Joe for “feeding off Norma’s wealth” and sees the film as doing “little to endear either Joe or Norma to the spectator looking for some kind of positive identification” (92). I would argue that unlike Paul Boray, Joe lacks the male artist’s arrogance and self-centeredness, and he also lacks the focus on money needed to be an effective gigolo. Out to get cigarettes for Norma, Joe runs into Betty again at a New Year’s Eve party, and there is a clear attraction. But Joe calls to check in with Norma, and Max informs her that Norma has tried to commit suicide. Rather than seeing this as an easy escape from his “kept man” relationship, Joe feels guilty and leaves Betty, so he can console Norma. And while not as sympathetic as Helen, Norma is also presented as a complex character, a victim of the Hollywood system. As Cecil DeMille tells a younger colleague after Norma drops off her script at the studio, “A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit” (1:07:14-1:07:19)).

Driven by guilt, Max—her current servant, former husband, and the director who discovered her—continues to maintain her illusions of continued stardom and hopes of return, denying her the opportunity to face reality.

We know from the beginning of the film that Joe will die, but before this happens, he does recapture his sense of masculine agency with the help of Betty. Joe has been writing secretly with Betty, and while he fights his attraction to her—Betty is engaged to Joe’s friend, Artie (Jack Webb)—Betty eventually visits Joe at Norma’s house to solve the mystery of his private life. Joe admits out loud the taboo relationship he has worked so hard to keep secret: “Older woman who is well-to-do, younger man who is not doing too well. Can you figure it out yourself?” (1:36:07-1:36:18). His secret revealed, Joe demonstrates some humility and integrity when he chooses to return to Ohio, without Betty, believing that she will be happier with Artie: “Maybe it’s [Joe’s relationship with Norma] not very admirable, but you and Artie can be admirable” (1:37:08-1:37:15). Joe also tries to be honest with Norma, an attempt undermined by Max, but

Fig. 8 | The salesman’s words of advice and encouragement, 0:37:29. Paramount, 1950.

Fig. 9 | Joe does not react well, 0:37:31. Paramount, 1950.

Norma shoots Joe in the back as he tries to leave. So, while Joe does not survive, and also chooses to give up his artistic aspirations, he does finally show male agency and the willingness to choose the hard reality of artistic failure over the illusions he maintains during his relationship with Norma.

Jerry home. Sitting in the backseat of her large car, Jerry is cheered by the children in his neighbourhood, a scene echoing the cheers he might have experienced as a soldier liberating Paris during the war (Fig. 10). Through most of the film, Jerry will claim that there is no romantic interest between Milo and him,

Whether buying him nice clothes, providing a place to live and work, or helping him connect with other wealthy patrons of the arts, the older woman places the artist in the position of a “kept man”—a position he reluctantly accepts in trade for the success and stability that his art alone does not provide.

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951)

Unlike the other two films I discuss, which are set in the USA, An America in Paris is set in a society that more willingly accepts the male artist and places less focus on material success as a measure of happiness. James Baldwin, an African America writer who lived most of his life in Europe, describes this different attitude in a 1959 essay:

The American writer, in Europe, is released, first of all, from the necessity of apologizing for himself. It is not until he is released from flexing his muscles and proving that he is just a “regular guy” that he realizes how crippling this habit has been. It is not necessary for him, there, to pretend to be something he is not, for the artist does not encounter in Europe the same suspicion he encounters here. (6)

Through his opening voiceover, Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) does establish himself as a “regular guy”—a veteran who decided, after the war, to stay in Paris to paint—but also as a man who has chosen the freedom to paint over trappings of material and financial success. Angela Dalle-Vache argues that “While Jerry Mulligan is a tame, good-hearted all-American guy, his geographical dislocation and eagerness for psychological fulfillment through artistic creativity suggest that he also might be out of touch with the conservative America of the fifties” (72). Jerry contrasts his choice to live and paint in Paris with those men who have given up on their art and chosen the comfort of middle-class conformity: “Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you better give up and marry the boss’s daughter” (0:02:21-0:02:25). Here, Jerry introduces another version of the “kept man”: gaining wealth through marriage. And while Jerry is poor and lives in a tiny apartment, he does not have Joe Gillis’ precarious financial and social situation, thanks to the GI Bill, which pays him a small monthly sum; Jerry also has “many dear friends in Paris” (0:04:44-0:04:46), giving him a social network for artistic and financial support.

Like Paul Boray, Jerry has a strong sense of artistic integrity, and of masculine independence, which is only mildly threatened by Milo (Nina Foch), a rich, American, female patron. Jerry’s first temptation toward the role of kept man occurs after his first meeting with Milo, who offers to have her driver take

but the song he sings after returning home in her car suggests something else. The chorus includes these lines—“I got my gal/ Who could ask for anything more?” (0:26:38-0:26:44)—which may be coincidence, or may suggest that Jerry’s interest in Milo may not be so innocent. However, to assert his independence, when Jerry returns to her place that evening for a party, and discovers it is just her, he protests, but she tells him, “I’m not trying to rob you of your precious male initiative” (0:32:420:32:46). Like Helen, Milo assures Jerry that she is only interested in him as an artist—a claim quickly contradicted when we learn that Milo has a pattern of relationships with male artists. Jerry seems to take Milo at her word because he quickly and aggressively hits on Lise (Leslie Caron), a young woman sitting at the next table—even commenting on her attractiveness to Milo and her friend, Tommy (Hayden Rorke) (Fig. 11). Later, while driving home with Milo in her car, Jerry gets angry when Milo claims he treated her badly; the relationship is repaired only when she apologizes for her outburst. Milo is right when she tells Tommy that Jerry “is just not … housebroken yet” (0:36:22-0:36:24), clearly showing her plans to domesticate Jerry. In his disrespectful treatment of Milo, and his aggressive pursuit of Lise, Jerry epitomizes the same qualities as Paul Boray: the “narcissism, machismo, and misogyny” described by Gan as a common defense mechanism used by the struggling, unappreciated artist.

Lise is initially turned off by Jerry’s aggressiveness, but eventually relents. On their first date, we quickly discover that Lise better fits the feminine ideal of the 1950s: unlike Milo, who is middle-aged, rich, assertive, and at times, demanding, Lise is nineteen, works in a perfume store, is modest, and tells Jerry, “I don’t like to talk about myself. I prefer to listen to you” (0:54:39-0:54:43). While she dates Jerry, and they fall in love, we learn that Lise is also loyal: she eventually reveals to Jerry that she is engaged to Henri, a successful middle-aged singer who cared for Lisa while her parents fought, and died, for the French Resistance during the war. In reality, Milo is not much older than Jerry, but compared to Lise’s youth, and given her pattern of failed relationships, Milo comes across as older. And as with Helen and Norma, Milo’s money, and Jerry’s poverty, put them in positions of power that undermine Jerry’s sense of masculinity. Without telling him, Milo rents Jerry a studio,

and arranges a show of his work. Initially resistant, Jerry eventually agrees but insists that he will pay her back. When Milo asks Jerry, “Why do you always make such an issue of money?” he replies, “Because I ain’t got any. And when you ain’t got any, it takes on a curious significance” (1:11:17-1:11:25). Angela Dalle-Vache claims that Jerry’s “heterosexual identity is further threatened by the traditionally ‘male’ initiative Milo appropriates. … By virtue of his artistic vocation and his dependency on Milo’s money, Jerry himself risks turning into that ‘extra girl’” she used to lure him to their meeting date (67).

More than the other two films I discuss, An American in Paris overtly reinscribes normative gender roles. Though he is not married, Jerry has a strong sense of heteronormative values: during their first “date,” Jerry tells Milo, who was married for two years before her husband left her for another woman, “You know, you should get married again. You need it.” “Why?” she replies. “Everybody does. Everybody needs somebody to account to” (0:33:42-0:33:50). When Jerry does become more financially dependent on Milo—but remains in denial of her feelings for him—he has his friend and fellow musician, Adam (Oscar Levant, who also plays Sid in Humoresque), to remind him of the risk to his masculinity:

Adam: “This, eh, sponsor of yours. What does she want in return? Don’t tell me. I shock easily.”

Jerry: “You’re crazy. She’s not interested in me. She’s just a good-hearted kid who likes the way I paint.”

Adam: “Huh. That’s real dreamy of her. Tell me, eh, when you get married, will you keep your maiden name?” (1:04:25-1:04:44)

Later, Adam tells Jerry, “I told you this sponsoring business was complicated. You see what happens today? Women act like men and want to be treated like women” (1:16:531:16:59). And even Milo says she desires to fulfill the traditional female gender role, telling Jerry when he finally acknowledges her feelings for him and kisses her: “I feel like a woman for a change.” “You are,” Jerry replies (1:26:08-1:26:11) (Fig. 12). Jerry insists on arranging their plans for the evening, and she gladly agrees.

Despite her seeming acceptance of her traditional gender role, as a rich, middle-aged woman, Milo cannot prevail against social, and genre, conventions: “What is at stake in this love triangle is whether art should be aligned with the docile femininity of Lisa [sic], with the creative masculinity of Jerry, or with the entrepreneurial aggressiveness of Milo. These alternatives narrow themselves down to form the happy ending, which suggests that an American male can be a painter in Paris as long as he marries a French girl” (Dalle-Vacche 71). While Humoresque ends melodramatically with Helen’s suicide and Paul’s self-awareness, and film noir Sunset Boulevard ends with Joe’s death and Norma’s complete detachment from reality, An American in Paris is a musical, and thus the audience expects the reuniting of socially-appropriate lovers. And this is what they get. Ironically, what briefly pushes Jerry into Milo’s arms is learning that Lise is engaged to a man she admires and feels

Fig. 11 | Jerry spots the other part of his love triangle—unconcerned about Milo’s feelings, 0:35:22. Warner Bros., 1951.

Fig. 12 | Jerry takes charge, and Milo “feel[s] like a woman,” 1:25:55. Warner Bros., 1951.

Fig. 10 | Jerry gets a taste of the good life in Milo’s car, 0:24:47. Warner Bros., 1951.

The artist represents freedom from suburbanization and soul-numbing work and consumerism, but as a “kept man,” he reflects the fear of poverty and loss of traditional masculinity through financial dependence.

indebted to, but does not really love. We know that Henri has overheard the lovers, but we do not know his reaction to their revelation. But after Jerry’s lengthy dance number, we find that Henri has freed Lise from their engagement. Lise returns and she and Jerry kiss—the happy ending we want, but an ending with little practical resolution: “the happy ending with the French girl distracts us from the difficulty of being an American male and a painter in Paris at the same time. From the plot alone it is hard to tell whether Jerry will continue to paint after marrying Lisa [sic].” Furthermore, the ending “does not completely resolve the rivalry between Art and Love, unbound male creativity, and the routine to which marriage leads” (Dalle-Vacche 65). Will Milo continue to help Jerry? Will Jerry and Lise have children, and how will being a husband and father impact Jerry’s artistic aspirations? These practicalities remain unaddressed as the two lovers embrace.

CONCLUSION

Writing about the post-World War Two era, Michael Kimmel describes how men faced a dilemma regarding their definition of masculinity: “Men had to achieve identities that weren’t too conforming to the march of the gray flannel suit lest they lose their souls; but they couldn’t be too nonconforming lest they leave family and workplace responsibilities behind in a frantic restless search for some elusive moment of ecstasy” (236). The three films I have discussed each portray the male artist as reflecting that dilemma: the artist represents freedom from suburbanization and soul-numbing work and consumerism, but as a “kept man,” he reflects the fear of poverty and loss of traditional masculinity through financial dependence. The films also use the upper class, middle-aged “patroness” to portray anxieties about the perceived growth in the social and financial influence of women in this time period. Juxtaposing this empowered woman with a younger, more traditionally feminine love interest allows each film to reinscribe traditional gender roles by showing and telling the dangers of assertive women and weak men.

But the films differ in degree of dependence each artist faces, and of sympathy we feel for the “patroness” character. Humoresque is the most critical of the artist, as Paul Boray best represents the “heroic artist”: driven to escape his working-class roots, Paul is “married to his music,” and has the arrogance and selfishness to succeed. Helen is the most sympathetic “patroness,” and it is only after her suicide that Paul begins to question his singular focus on music and to value the family and

community he has worked so hard to escape. Joe Gillis faces the greatest financial and social vulnerability of the artists I discuss, and unlike Paul and Jerry, he lacks both arrogance and people close to him who can remind him of the dangers of transgressing against traditional gender roles. Through Joe’s voiceover, we follow his ambivalence and self-delusion regarding his role as an artist and a “kept man.” Although he dies, Joe achieves self-awareness and masculine agency: his decision to leave Norma, and give up his dreams of being a Hollywood writer, and return to his job in Ohio, show that he no longer wants to live the sort of illusion that has defined most of Norma’s adult life. Living on the GI Bill, Jerry Mulligan never really faces Joe’s financial desperation, and Jerry’s artistic arrogance, combined with constant reminders from Adam about gender roles, means that Milo never really had a chance to make Jerry a “kept man.” And while the film gives the audience the happy (gender role affirming) ending it wants, the film sidesteps any serious questions about how Jerry will balance the roles of male artist, husband, and father. Thus, while not every love triangle resolves to a happy Hollywood ending, each film does show the male artist eventually finding his traditional masculine identity. 

NOTES

1. While Jackson Pollock maintained the image of working-class, independent masculinity, in reality, he was the epitome of the artist as “kept man.” According to the documentary film Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015), Guggenheim discovered Pollock and “rescued” him from a job as a carpenter by giving him a large commission and arranging his first show. She also gave him a monthly allowance and a loan to buy a place to work, and continued to give him money after he married. Guggenheim also claims they had only one sexual encounter, which she described as “unsuccessful” (0:53:50-0:58:18).

2. See Kimmel, chapter 7, and Cuordileone, chapter 3, for a discussion of post-World War Two critics blaming women for male anxiety, as well as juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, and many other social ills.

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Guernier, Matt. Shattering Stereotypes through Song & Dance: How Gene Kelly Democratized Dance and Paved the Way for the American Male Dancer. n.d. U of Florida. Honors Thesis. https://original-ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu/AA00085572/00001

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Symmetry and Centrality as Power

The Use of Mise-en-scène to Create Power in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile

BY SAHAR HAMZAH Arabian Gulf University

ABSTRACT

Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile director Sir Kenneth Branagh employs elements of mise-en-scène to convey his characters’ sense of power or powerlessness and their control or lack thereof in a given situation. This article explores the various means by which Branagh achieves these conveyances through the use of blocking, set design, symmetry of images, camera angles, and costuming. In both of these films, the character Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) is the main seat of power and is often placed at the centre of a shot. When Poirot is not in authority he is placed off-centre, indicating that he has lost control of the situation and other characters move to the centre. Camera angles, the use of colour, and set designs consisting of repeated parallel lines in architectural features all contribute to defining the power structure that exists between the characters.

In his film adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022), director Sir Kenneth Branagh uses symmetry and centrality to illustrate who wields power and control. Branagh conveys this power, or the illusion of power, and the desire for control in a variety of ways using elements of mise-en-scène, including set design, blocking, camera placement, and costuming. In addition, the compulsive need for balance in aspects of his life is a further motivation for the actions of the lead character, Hercule Poirot (Sir Kenneth Branagh). The theme of balance is also evidenced in Branagh’s frequent use of symmetry in his frame composition. Thus, this article explores the means by which Branagh conveys the sense of power or powerlessness of his characters, their control or lack thereof, and Poirot’s desire for balance.

Poirot’s need for balance is demonstrated in an early scene from Murder on the Orient Express when Poirot walks through the street and accidentally steps with his right

foot into a pile of manure. Unnerved by the imbalance of having manure on only one shoe, he steps into the manure with his left foot. As Branagh states, “It’s not so much with this new Poirot that he is prissy and precious about getting his hands, or indeed, feet dirty, it’s something else, which is balance” (“Commentary” 00:03:35). Poirot feels compelled to step into the manure a second time so that there is balance and both feet are the same.

This compulsion for balance is also highlighted in Death on the Nile when Poirot moves the right foot of the corpse of Linnet (Gal Gadot) so that it is neatly aligned and parallel with the left foot (Fig. 1). In the scene, Poirot is in the centre of the screen with a light hanging directly over his head, purposefully illuminating his quirks and eccentricities.

Like Poirot, Branagh creates a world of balance in Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile where this balance frequently equates with strength, power, control, authority, and stability, and it is translated on film as a world full of symmetry.

The use of symmetry has been a constant in many of the directorial films of Branagh, as it is in life itself. The existence of symmetry has been shown to be essential in nature to create stability. Even at the molecular levels of such building blocks as proteins, it “confers stability on the molecular system” and is “associated with cooperativity,” yet “mild perturbation from perfect symmetry may be essential…for dynamic functions” (Blundell and Srinivasan 14243). The properties of symmetry in architecture and art mirror those seen in nature.

In his book Symmetry, which deals with his classic study of the principle of symmetry in nature and in the arts, Hermann Weyl states, “Symmetric means something like well-proportioned, well- balanced, and symmetry denotes that sort of concordance of several parts by which they integrate into a whole. Beauty is bound up with symmetry” (3), particularly in the case of “bilateral symmetry, the symmetry of left and right, which is so conspicuous in the structure of the higher animals, especially the human body” (4). Bilateral symmetry, where “the halves of a composition mirror each other…is by far the most common form of symmetry in architecture, and is found in all cultures and in all epochs” (Williams 271). For example, the Parthenon in Greece, the Taj Mahal in India, and the Alamo in the United States are each representative of bilateral symmetry. Kim Williams, in her study of Symmetry in Architecture, argues that this popularity of bilateral symmetry in architecture may be “an expression of our experience of nature, and in particular with our experience of our own bodies. As many cultures believe that God created man in His own image, architecture has in turn probably been created in the image of man” (271).

Weyl points out that artists as far back as the ancient Sumerians, circa 2700 BC, regularly used bilateral symmetry in their works, as have other artists throughout history (8-15). Bilateral symmetry can refer to mirror images of each other along a vertical axis or to examples of “broken symmetry…

where the precise geometric notion of bilateral symmetry begins to dissolve into the vague notion of Ausgewogenheit, balanced design” (15-16). In these instances, elements on the left side of the vertical axis may be different than those on the right, but may still present a balanced Fig. that gives the appearance of being symmetrical. I.C. McManus, in his study of symmetry in Italian Renaissance art, concludes that “Asymmetry, when it is used in the arts, is used to season symmetry…some asymmetry is added to that symmetry to generate interest and excitement, for a little asymmetry, correctly used, makes objects optimally satisfying” (176).

McManus provides a “summary of the psychological and aesthetic properties of symmetry and asymmetry, according to art historians and philosophers” (160). According to McManus’s findings, symmetry represents law and order, binding and constraint, fixity, and stasis. Following in the tradition of millennia of such artists, Branagh is a strong proponent of the aesthetically- pleasing aspect of symmetry in cinema and its ability to convey the notions of strength, stability, authority, and control. However, Branagh also employs the use of broken symmetry, or balanced design, as well as asymmetry to generate interest and excitement in the set design and the camera framing in his films.

As a filmmaker, Branagh is a proponent of formalism, which “tempts one to set highly visible” styles above more naturalistic ones but does not…demand this hierarchy” (Dudley 84), for, as questioned by Béla Belázs, “Who could find the atmosphere of Claude Monet’s paintings in actual nature?” (176). In filmmaking, the aesthetically pleasing is more important than realism, and actors, as well as props, are used to create symmetrical frames.

The production designer for both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile was Jim Clay, who also worked with Branagh on the production designs of Artemis Fowl (2020) and Belfast (2021). Also working on both films was director

Fig. 1 | Parallel feet of Linnet, Death on the Nile, 1:12:59. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Symmetry and Centrality as Power: The Use of Mise-en-scène to Create Power in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile

of photography Haris Zambarloukos, who served in the same capacity for Branagh’s films Sleuth (2007), Thor (2011), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), Cinderella (2015), Artemis Fowl, and Belfast. The production designer, director of photography, and director all worked together to bring to life Branagh’s vision of lateral symmetry and broken symmetry to symbolize both beauty and power in Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile

In Death on the Nile, the characters take a cruise down the Nile River on a ship called the Karnak. For the design of the ship, Jim Clay states, “We researched the Thomas Cook fleet…and then designed our own. [Branagh] had specific requirements about how the boat should look. He wanted it to feel rather threatening and sleek and shark-like, because these waters of the Nile were dangerous, especially in our particular case. So we adapted the shape of the hull” (“Design” 2:32:27). The ship is filled with repeating symmetrical vertical lines that are mirror images along a vertical central line to convey the power, strength, and stability of the ship (Fig. 2).

The same can be said of the design for the Cataract Hotel. In describing his design for this hotel, Clay states:

There is a real place called the Cataract Hotel, and in fact, it existed in the 1930s. Agatha Christie stayed there and was reputed to have begun writing Death on the Nile in the Cataract Hotel…we didn’t copy it. We used the name, and I used an amalgamation, of various styles of architecture from Egypt in the 1930s, and we built our own composite set specifically for the requirements of the script. (“Design” 2:29:09)

Like the Karnak, the hotel is composed of numerous examples of symmetrical architectural features that highlight its strength and stability.

These examples provide a sharp contrast to the opening scene of the film, which begins with a flashback to Poirot’s time on the battlefields in World War I. The opening shot of the Yser Bridge in Belgium on October 31, 1914 (00:00:49) depicts a broken symmetrical image, or balanced design, of burnt-out trees on either side of the ruined road littered with craters created by artillery shells. Smoke clouds rise and dissipate on either side of the desolate landscape. Near the end of the bridge stand similar carts on either side, further adding to the balanced design of the image. The parallel vertical lines of the tree trunks lining the path lead towards the vanishing point on the far side of the bridge and appear shattered and weak, the opposite of stability. This opening image, with its broken symmetrical design, evokes strength and power, while emphasizing the all-encompassing, domineering, and destructive power of war.

In numerous instances for Branagh, the symbolism of symmetry as strength goes hand-in- hand with the significance of centrality in the framing of his characters, the definition of centrality implying not only taking position in the middle of the screen but taking and commanding authority and control of the action. Centrality of the characters represents a break

Branagh is a strong proponent of the aesthetically-pleasing aspect of symmetry in cinema.

from the usual rules in cinematography, wherein the rule of thirds is the more common feature. This departure from the rule is employed when a specific reason or purpose is evident or intended.

In his 1797 book Remarks on Rural Scenery, English writer, painter, and engraver John Thomas Smith is the first to coin the phrase, “the rule of thirds.” In examining paintings created by the master painters, especially those of Rembrandt, Smith noticed that

the principal light is most frequently placed near the middle of the scene; and that above two-thirds of the picture are in shadow. Analogous to this Rule of thirds (if I may be allowed so to call it) …I have found the ratio of about two thirds to one third, or of one to two, a much better and more harmonizing proportion, than the precise formal half…and, in short, than any other proportion whatever. (Smith 15)

This rule of thirds proposes that, in composition for painting, photography, and cinematography, the frame be divided into thirds and “major points of interest in the scene [be placed] on any of the four intersections of the interior lines” (Blain 26).

The rule of thirds has been used by artists for centuries to create what is commonly believed to be the most aesthetically pleasing image as it tends to draw the eye of the viewer deeper into the image instead of simply focusing on the centre. However, “Filmmakers often use a deliberate violation of these principles for a particular effect” (26). In these two films, Branagh’s often breaks this rule by using centrality to showcase power, control, and authority. As he states in the commentary of Murder on the Orient Express , “I feel when I watch the movie, I hope that those of you watching at home [feel]…the sense that everything probably means something” (“Commentary” 00:34:29).

From Poirot’s first appearance in Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh quickly establishes him as the seat of power. As Poirot is being served his breakfast, two eggs of equal size, the shot depicts Poirot seated in the middle of the room, in

Fig. 2 | The Karnak, Death on the Nile, 00:34:22. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

the middle of the table, and in the centre of the doorway (Fig. 3). On either side of Poirot, the image is a study in bilateral symmetry with black and gold pillars on either side of the doorway. Next to them are windows with latticework that are mirror images, and another black and gold pillar on the other side of each window. This symmetry of the set puts emphasis on the centre of the screen and the focus of power, and even while focusing on the centre, it helps to highlight the symmetry.

Two additional characters grace the scene: the policeman standing slightly off-centre to the right in the doorway and the waiter slightly off-centre to the left at the table. However, it is Poirot who commands attention, even though his back is to the camera, as he sits in the exact centre of the frame. Much like in the films of Wes Anderson, the blocking and symmetry “seem not just meticulously designed in their interiors but very carefully arranged in their presentations- and arranged specifically to be viewed from one particular angle at which the camera obligingly positions us” (Kornhaber 30). In the composition of this frame, using blocking of the additional characters and the symmetry of the set design, Branagh demonstrates from the beginning of the film that Poirot is a man of power and authority.

Branagh uses this technique again in Death on the Nile in the scene in which Poirot reunites with Bouc (Tom Bateman), his friend from Murder on the Orient Express As the scene begins, the overhead establishing shots of the Pyramids of Giza follow the rule of thirds, with the two largest pyramids occupying the two dividing lines (00:16:21). The pyramids are not symmetrically aligned because the purpose of these shots is to establish the location and there is no need to break the rule. The pyramids are shown to be of different sizes with the Great Pyramid, the largest, situated between the other two.

However, these establishing shots are followed by a symmetrical shot that shows the largest pyramid in the centre of the screen and the two smaller pyramids on either side (Fig. 4). The two pyramids on either side are depicted in the previous scenes as being of different sizes, yet in the following figure they appear to be of equal size. This is done in order to create the symmetry needed to aid in demonstrating Poirot’s authority.

In the centre of the largest pyramid is the imposing figure of the Sphinx. In the exact centre of the Sphinx is Poirot, shown from the back as he faces the Sphinx head-on, as though he is facing off with it. This demonstrates Poirot’s authority and power as the eye is drawn to Poirot in spite of the commanding presence of the Sphinx and the might of the pyramids facing him. His centrality establishes him as the one in control, heightened by this juxtaposition of the might, reverence, and longevity of these great Wonders of the Ancient World. His costuming, the white suit and hat, adds to the emphasis on Poirot as he stands out against the browns and tans of the rest of the scene. This emphasis is further enhanced by the broken symmetry of the stonework and the two tables on either side, creating a balanced image. The two eggs of similar size on the left table reference the above-mentioned scene from Murder on the Orient Express. The centrality of Poirot in the following reverse shot reinforces his dominance in his surroundings (00:16:44). The symmetry of the buttons on his suit, the way he sits with legs slightly spread and knees bent at a ninety-degree angle, and his hands placed firmly on his thighs indicate that he is a confident man who is in control.

In Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile , centrality is also used to help in the storytelling process for other characters. For example, in a scene from Murder on the Orient Express , it is not Poirot who is in control as Dr. Arbuthnot (Leslie Odom Jr.) holds a gun on Poirot and threatens to shoot him. Arbuthnot has power and control, standing in the centre of the broken symmetrical interior of the train, the vertical lines of the door, the windows, and the shelves framing Arbuthnot, adding a feeling of strength (1:25:22).

Similarly, when Linnet (Gal Gadot) is first introduced in Death on the Nile, both symmetry and blocking are used for her entrance into the club, designed to announce her as a powerful woman (Fig. 5). Linnet is spotlighted in the centre of the screen as she comes down the stairs with the crowd parting to make way for her advance, giving her significance in the centre of the frame. Couples dance on either side of the pathway that is created to showcase Linnet’s power.

Linnet is in control of the situation, dressed in a glimmering silver gown that makes her appear almost angelic, foreshadowing her role as an innocent victim. Linnet is a pale contrast to the striking red that Jackie (Emma Mackey) wears in the same scene, foreshadowing her role in the film. Studies have shown that “the color red is known to influence psychological functioning, having both negative (e.g., blood, fire, danger), and positive (eg., sex, food) connotations”

Fig. 3 | Poirot as the Seat of Power, Murder on the Orient Express, 00:02:21. 20th Century Fox, 2017.

Fig. 4 | Poirot in Control, Death on the Nile, 00:16:39. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Symmetry and Centrality as Power: The Use of Mise-en-scène to Create Power in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile

(Kuniecki et al). This makes red a fitting colour for the character of Jackie because she is deliberately trying to manipulate the feelings of those around her, leaving them feeling upset, anxious, and unsettled. In this way, costuming is used to give insight into these two characters, one as victim and the other as master manipulator.

This scene in the bar provides foreshadowing of the rivalry that is to come in the film between Jackie and Linnet over the affections of Jackie’s fiancé Simon (Armie Hammer), whom Linnet soon marries. Initially, Linnet appears to be in control. However, appearances are deceptive as Jackie has hidden advantages about which the audience does not yet know. Therefore, they appear to begin as equals (Fig. 6). The symmetry of the two profiles indicates that they are supposedly both equal components competing for power, rivals for control, and counterbalanced. Although these two characters appear here to be on equal footing, there will be clues provided as the film progresses that indicate Linnet’s declining power and Jackie’s emergence in this battle for the centre, for control and dominance.

This use of side-by-side depiction of the characters is duplicated in a later scene when Bouc confesses his love for Rosalie (Letitia Wright) to Poirot as the Karnak continues its journey down the Nile. Bilateral symmetry is demonstrated in the architecture along the central pole as axis, as well as in the rattan chairs on either side. Both Bouc and Poirot have their hands in similar positions atop the rail and they are in mirror positions in the middle of the chairs behind them.

No longer taking the central position, Poirot allows Bouc his moment in the sun as Bouc reveals his true feelings, giving Bouc equal footing as his friend. This is not a case of a younger man going to his elder friend for guidance, but an example of equality in friendship with Poirot allowing Bouc to share in the spotlight for that moment and again when they take a seat in the chairs behind them. The closeup that follows of Bouc, seen through the latticework of the chair, is reminiscent of a confessional as Bouc bares his soul before Poirot, confessing his love but worried about gaining the approval-and financial backing-of his mother, Euphemia (Annette Benning). Much like the usage of symmetry in Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), the symmetry in these shots “draws our attention to the relationship between the actors and the sets, encouraging us to read the scene intellectually” (Lawrence 77).

In the battle for control between Linnet and Jackie, the first indication of Jackie’s rising control is her walk up the steps to enter the Cataract Hotel (Fig. 7).

As Jackie ascends the steps, she is also ascending in power. She appears once more bedecked in vibrant red in sharp contrast to the pale pinks, whites, and beiges of the other guests at the wedding party. She encompasses the colour red and everything the colour represents. She is full of danger, passion, love, aggression, dominance, and power, with the train of her dress flying behind her like a red flag signifying the presence of impending trouble and danger.

As Jackie ascends the steps, she is also ascending in power.

Jackie is defined as a powerhouse with the symmetry of the image as she takes the centre of the screen, walking up the bridge with mirroring stone railings on either side amid the rocks that form the edge of the water. In the shot that follows, Jackie rises in the centre of the screen at the top of the stairs, flanked by symmetrical stone columns, palms trees, large pots, and rattan chairs (00:26:18). This is a power play and Jackie is making her move to gain control and power over the situation.

This scene, along with the first entrance of Linnet, bookends the battle between Linnet and Jackie. The outcome has already been decided, although the audience does not realize this yet. Linnet, as she enters, descends the staircase, symbolizing and foreshadowing her loss. Jackie, as she enters, ascends the staircase, symbolizing and foreshadowing her victory. Although in a later scene Jackie appears to be out of control

Fig. 5 | Linnet as Power, Death on the Nile, 00:11:47. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Fig. 6 | Rivals for Power, Death on the Nile, 00:13:37. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Fig. 7 | Jackie’s Ascension, Death on the Nile, 00:26:06. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

He is, again, centralized within a symmetrical set design above and around him.

and tells Poirot she cannot control herself, the foreshadowing in this scene reveals the truth, that she is a woman fully in control of the situation and her own actions and is capable of manipulating the emotions and actions of others.

The emotionally distressed Linnet turns to Poirot for help and protection. She and her new husband, Simon, ask for Poirot’s guidance and suggestions for what should be done about Jackie’s constant stalking of the newlyweds (Fig. 8).

In this scene, Poirot is central with multiple arches above and behind him. The architecture of the set boasts bilateral symmetrical lights, windows, and pillars, indicating strength and stability. The wine glasses on the central dining table, the placement of the chairs on either side, and the smaller table lights that appear behind the table, are all symmetrical, with the two waiters on either side providing a balanced design.

Linnet and Simon are on either side of Poirot, and are seated at the table and looking up at him. All elements combine to demonstrate the perceived power of Poirot over the newlyweds as they acknowledge his authority and control of the situation, and seek his guidance.

However, this scene is designed to demonstrate the idea of perceived rather than actual power. Poirot appears to be in control, yet actually is ultimately powerless in preventing the impending murder of Linnet. It is Simon, in his continuing efforts to deceive, who has taken control of the narrative and herein allows Poirot, and the audience, the perception of Poirot’s being in control while Simon is secretly intending to murder his wife. To this end, the newlyweds choose to ignore Poirot’s advice at this point. Instead, the passengers all board the Karnak and begin a cruise down the Nile.

When the passengers disembark at Abu Simbel, Bouc’s mother Euphemia proves to be more of a problem than he had anticipated in his desire to marry Rosalie. In the scene at Abu Simbel, Euphemia commands the attention, centrally located between the colossal statues with mirror images on the bases of the statues. With the camera angle shot from below, she is almost at an equal height with the massive statues (Fig. 9).

This low-angle shot indicates Euphemia’s dominance, power, authority, and control over her son, Bouc. She controls his actions because she controls his finances, limiting his choices and thereby, unbeknownst to her, contributing to the terrible actions that follow for Bouc and his decision to steal Linnet’s extravagant Tiffany & Co. yellow and white diamond necklace. The shot that displays the necklace has it positioned in the centre, thus foreshadowing its importance in the action of the film. It is displayed atop a wood and mother-of-pearl table, placed in the centre so that the two ends of the table also create a balanced design within the shot (00:32:22).

As the larger-than-life Euphemia walks towards Bouc in the scene, she is still shot from below and centrally located as opposed to Bouc who is very small next to these huge statues (00:47:15). The image demonstrates his powerlessness before her and sets the stage for what is to come when Linnet is subsequently murdered and Bouc steals her necklace.

When the passengers of the Karnak return to the ship, they all learn that Jackie has joined the cruise at Abu Simbel. Jackie and Linnet are given centre position and are again battling for control. Jackie is now winning. Linnet had tried to escape Jackie, but she has returned. Jackie appears confident and full of power, surrounded by wide open space (00:53:32). In contrast, Linnet is frazzled and upset (00:53:24).

While this article argues that Branagh often uses centrality to demonstrate power, this is an example of how his use of centrality is not limited to exclusively showcasing strength and power. In this case, the shot of Linnet is significantly more symmetrical than that of Jackie. Linnet faces the camera directly while Jackie stands at a quarter turn from the camera, which enhances the sense of symmetry of Linnet’s

Fig. 8 | Poirot as Perceived Protector, Death on the Nile, 00:32:01. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Fig. 9 | Euphemia in Control, Death on the Nile, 00:47:08. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Fig. 10 | Rosalie, Simon, Jackie, and Bouc, Death on the Nile, 1:00:37. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Symmetry and Centrality as Power: The Use of Mise-en-scène to Create Power in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile

shot in comparison to Jackie’s. However, the vertical lines that frame Linnet in the windows make it appear as though they are closing in on her and she is losing the battle. Thus, centrality in this case does not demonstrate her power but rather her feeling of being trapped in a bad situation that she cannot escape.

As this action takes place, Poirot watches from above, indicating his watchful eye and omniscient presence that sees everything. He is, again, centralized within a symmetrical set design above and around him. This also occurs in Murder on the Orient Express as Poirot observes everything from the outside, “watching, and he sees everything. No one can hide the truth from him” (Hamzah 67).

Onboard the Karnak, blocking becomes an element of symmetry in setting the stage for the confrontation that is to come between Jackie and Simon (Fig. 10). The symmetry of the set is emphasized by the multiple vertical lines of the boat windows and by the doors at the centre of the screen. The blocking further underscores the symmetry as Rosalie and Bouc move to either side with Jackie and Simon, coming together in the centre of the screen as the scene sets up the impending murder of Linnet. As Branagh describes it, “This edginess, this danger, this sense that lust will turn into something darker, means that hatred and murder are never far from the center of things” (“Design” 2:30:38). With Rosalie and Bouc, again like in Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts, “the actors are absorbed into the set design, there to provide symmetry for the compositions and nothing more” as “Symmetry is all” (Lawrence 74).

Tensions run high as Poirot begins his investigation into the murder of Linnet, and the additional murders of Linnet’s maid Louise (Rose Leslie) and Poirot’s friend Bouc. Poirot’s questioning leads to a confrontation with numerous characters accusing each other of the murders. This scene is filmed through the beveled glass on the doors, causing each character’s image to be doubled, indicating the deception that these characters are all perpetrating as they try to cover up their guilt, not of the murder, but of their possible motives for it (Fig. 11). As Branagh states, “Sometimes, to play with the audience’s sense in a thriller of what may or may not be the truth, it’s useful to sometimes consider distorting the point of view” (“Commentary” 00:57:44).

Branagh also uses this method of showcasing the duplicity of the characters in Murder on the Orient Express. In the scene in which Hardman (Willem Dafoe) confesses that he has been lying about his identity and comes clean about his real reasons for being on the train, his confession is itself another lie. His character is not only two-faced, but is actually three-faced, covering a lie with another lie, and never revealing his true face until Poirot uncovers the truth (Fig. 12).

In the scene leading up to the confrontation between Poirot and the killers, whom he will now name, Poirot is again a man in control (1:44:20). He is again in the centre of the screen, the vertical lines of the doors and windows symmetrical, as are the ropes and boat railings on either side

Poirot is along the dividing line for the rule of thirds because he is vulnerable and no longer the master in control of himself.

Fig. 12 | Three Faces of Hardman, Murder on the Orient Express, 1:19:38. 20th Century Fox, 2017.

Fig. 11 | Duplicity of the Characters, Death on the Nile, 1:33:37. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Fig. 13 | The Two Faces of Poirot, Death on the Nile, 1:53:29. 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Fig. 14 | A New Poirot, Murder on the Orient Express, 1:21:45. 20th Century Fox, 2017.

Branagh consistently uses elements of mise-en-scène to convey who wields power and control in a scene.

of him. Even Poirot is standing flat-footed, almost aggressively, with his weight evenly distributed on both legs. He is the authority and confident that he knows the truth about everything.

When Jackie pulls her gun and points it at him, Poirot is ready and does the same. Here, seen through the beveled glass, is a humanized Poirot, the two faces of the man, one the clever detective, cold and ruthless, and the other, the man in pain over the useless death of his dear friend Bouc (Fig. 13). No longer in the centre position, the shot follows the rule of thirds, with the two Poirots along the dividing lines, indicating his torn feelings as he battles with his pain.

This is similar to the image of Poirot, this “Poirot for a new generation” (“Art of Murder” 00:01:52), as he examines his photo of his lost love Katherine in Murder on the Orient Express. Here is a sensitive Poirot who cares deeply for others. He feels himself completely out of control of the case. No longer positioned in the centre of the screen, Poirot is split, one figure on the right and his reflection on the left (Fig. 14). He is uncertain and of two minds, unsure where to go next in his attempt to uncover the murderer. This is a condition that he is not accustomed to feeling.

The train itself is also used to reinforce how the situation is out of control, derailed and leaning to the side (00:48:48). This “beached whale that is the train” (“Commentary” 00:49:49), as Branagh describes it, is centralized in the frame, pulling focus to the train within the broken symmetry of the tunnel and the equal number of workers on either side of the track. Much like in the opening scene of Death on the Nile, this shot is designed not to emphasize the

stability of the tunnel, but rather to demonstrate the power and destruction of nature.

When Poirot uncovers the truth behind the murder of Ratchett (Johnny Depp), he assembles all the passengers outside in the tunnel along a table reminiscent of Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper. Like in the painting, there are thirteen suspects assembled here, arrayed down its length like the disciples of Jesus in the painting, implying that here, too, a traitor may be sitting among them (1:28:02). As Branagh says, “The idea was that somehow he’d seen it before in these Biblical terms. So now, here was the Last Supper. Judas was there somewhere” (“Commentary” 1:28:11).

Poirot has now solved the crime and he moves towards the culprits as they sit quietly, under his spell (Fig. 15). He is in control and he walks like a predator about to pounce upon his prey. As screenwriter Michael Green points out, “It is adversarial. It’s us versus them. It’s me versus this group of potential killers,” to which Branagh adds, “Well, me and the train versus this group” (“Commentary” 1:29:05). Branagh is at the centre of the screen, in the middle of the tracks, with the train behind him as support, backing up his conclusions because the train carries all the clues. This centrality makes Poirot appear aggressive and intimidating as he comes forward to unveil the killers.

In the final moments of the film, Poirot wanders alone down the interior length of the train. He contemplates the matter of justice and his own conscience. The interior of the train is an example of symmetry and Poirot is again centred in the middle, aware that he has power and control over all the lives of the passengers (1:43:02). As he moves down the train, he comes to the decision to lie to the authorities and to let the murderers go free.

In the beginning of the film, Poirot, as Branagh states, has the “idea that there’s right, there’s wrong, there’s nothing in between [which] gives him some sort of absolute

Fig. 15 | Poirot as Predator, Murder on the Orient Express, 1:27:58. 20th Century Fox, 2017.

Symmetry and Centrality as Power: The Use of Mise-en-scène to Create Power in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile

position, he thinks, but it’s what sets up what’s going to be the challenge to that position through the rest of the story” (“Commentary” 00:08:11). Poirot has been forced to come to a new revelation of his character, that there is not always absolute right and wrong. Poirot’s desire for human beings to be better than the beasts is tested when he has to “confront the evidence that often they are not, including, in this case, where twelve beasts attacked a defenseless human being in a compartment on a train” (“Commentary” 1:29:05).

In the scene in which Poirot reveals to the passengers the decision that he has made concerning the murder on the train and those responsible for it, he is a changed man (1:44:00). As such, he is feeling a bit lost. Here there is no symmetry in the image. The windows on either side

of Poirot are not the same. Poirot is along the dividing line for the rule of thirds because he is vulnerable and no longer the master in control of himself. He is a changed man and, as Michael Green states, “He must learn to live with the imbalance” (“Commentary” 1:29:06).

This article thus demonstrates that Branagh consistently uses elements of mise-en-sc è ne to convey who wields power and control in a scene through his choices of camera angles, framing, blocking, and costuming. In doing so, Branagh often chooses to break the rule of thirds and centralize his characters to showcase their actual or perceived dominance and authority for reasons that aid the storytelling process 

“Art of Murder.” Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Kenneth Branagh, 20th Century Fox, 2017. Blu-ray.

Belázs, Béla. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art Form. Dover Publications, 1970.

Blundell, Tom L. and N. Srinivasan. “Symmetry, stability, and dynamics of multidomain and multicomponent protein systems.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 93, December 1996, pp. 14243-14248. Colloquium Paper. https://www. researchgate.net/publication/14245798_Symmetry_stability_and_dynami cs_of_multidomain_and_multicomponent_protein_systems

Brown, Blain. Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Fig. Making for Cinematographers and Directors . Routledge. 3 rd ed. 2016.

“Commentary.” Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Kenneth Branagh, 20th Century Fox, 2017. Blu-ray. Death on the Nile. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, performances by Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, and Kenneth Branagh, 20th Century Studios, 2022.

“Design on the Nile.” Death on the Nile, directed by Kenneth Branagh, 20th Century Studios, 2022.

Dudley, Andrew J. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. Oxford UP, 976.

Hamzah, Sahar Riyad. “Confinement and Duplicity: Mise-enscène in Branagh Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express.” Mise-en- scène: The Journal of Film and Visual Narration, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 66-69.

Kornhaber, Donna. Wes Anderson. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Kuniecki, Joanna Pilarczyk, and Szymon Wichary. “The color red attracts attention in an emotional context: An ERP Study.” Front. Hum. Neurosci., 29 April 2015. https:// www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015. 00212/full

Lawrence, Amy. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge UP, 1997.

McManus, I.C. “Symmetry and asymmetry in aesthetics and the arts.” European Review , vol. 14, no. 2, 2005, pp. 157-180. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/sites/ medicaleducation/files/2005-EuropeanReview-Symmetry_ Asymmetry.pdf

Murder on the Orient Express. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, performances by Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley, and Kenneth Branagh, 20th Century Fox, 2017. Blu-ray.

Smith, John Thomas. Remarks on Rural Scenery: With Twenty Etchings of Cottages, From Nature: And Some Observations and Precepts Relative to the Pictoresque. 1797. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/remarksonruralsc00smit/ page/16/mode/2up

Weyl, Hermann. Symmetry. Princeton UP, 1952. https://people. math.harvard.edu/~knill/teaching/mathe320_2017/blog17/ Hermann_W eyl_Symmetry.pdf

Williams, Kim. “Symmetry in Architecture.” Symmetry: Culture and Science , Vol. 10, Number 23, 209-400, 1999, pp. 269-281. https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/266445292_Symmetry_in_architecture

The Big Bad Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Kubrick’s ‘Shining’ on Domestic Abuse in The Dark and the Wicked

BY LUCIE PATRONNAT University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

ABSTRACT

The thorough scholarly dissection of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has yielded many results, among which is a reflection, led by Jack Torrance’s “Big Bad Wolf” impersonation, that centres on the implicit theme of domestic abuse. This wolf metaphor stands as the starting point of an examination of Bryan Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked (2020) through the lens of The Shining’s domestic violence narrative. Both films, although widely different status-wise, and directed forty years apart, seem to tackle this thematic idea through common cinematic elements: prowling shots, hints of fairy-tales, and cannibalistic patterns, together depicting the home as the hunting ground of a patriarchal predator. The domestic abuse theme, subdued in The Shining, remains textually absent from The Dark and the Wicked, but their synoptic analysis shines a new light on the missing genesis of the characters’ devouring trauma, as diverted through its visual narration.

INTRODUCTION

In terms of the tantalizing amount of interpretative content it spawned over the years, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is arguably one of the most prolific examples of modern horror cinema. It has been examined through numerous lenses, ranging from the socio-historic perspectives of the Indigenous and Jewish genocides to that of the economic landscape of its period and the volatile territory of worldwide conspiracies. This ever-growing subtextual web encompassing The Shining has found (or re-discovered) its way into contemporary horror cinema, with some resurgences echoing louder than others. During the promotion of his debut The Witch (2014), director Robert Eggers straightforwardly admitted it “reeks of The Shining” (“Cinematic Exorcism”). Indeed, the two notably share a dark fairy-tale atmosphere that culminates in The Witch’s own

“Room 237” sequence, mirroring the content and composition of the original (Fig. 1). The editing of this sequence entangles the perspectives of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his son Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd), but almost entirely eludes the traumatic experience of the latter, which leaves him with a contused neck. In The Witch, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) coalesces Jack and Danny’s characters in his prepubescent impulses: his confrontation with the hag as a treacherously seductive woman is equally motivated by childlike curiosity and lustful fascination. The boy’s fateful embrace of the witch even entails consequences that are reminiscent, if far more tragic, of Danny’s bruised neck.1

Another example would be Ari Aster’s opening of Hereditary (2018), which uses the same continuity trick used

1 In a feverish bout, Caleb seems to be choking before he regurgitates a rotten apple.

by Kubrick in one of his seminal sequences: the camera frames Jack studying the garden maze model displayed in the lobby before deceitfully assuming his “overlooking” point of view (00:39:40). A slow, vertical track on the maze ensues and, as distant voices can be heard, tiny figures appear to be moving within it. Hereditary reinvests and exacerbates this point of view, placing its protagonists inside the miniature replica of the family’s home, itself located inside the actual house (00:01:55). The motif’s wide thematic scope notably extends in the artificiality of the (real) home, which, just like the Overlook, was entirely built on set and rendered geographically impossible by the mise-en-scène.2

The Dark and the Wicked (Bryan Bertino, 2020) and The Shining first appear to share common elements, but their relationship proves more profound when investigated further. The former proposes a relentlessly bleak and violent variation on the familial disintegration a theme very dear to horror cinema— that plagues the Torrances. Brought back to their estranged parents’ goat farm to bid farewell to their comatose father (Michael Zagst), siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael Straker (Michael Abbott Jr.) soon come to realize the home is now ridden with a dark influence, seemingly linked to the halfdead patriarch and to which they will eventually fall prey. But beyond the small family unit that both films focus on, they also share a similar generic spin. A look at Bertino’s first feature, The Strangers (2008), informs the lineage of its successor: an ailing couple is confronted with three masked killers, a scenario that fits it neatly into the slasher subgenre. Though the home invasion in The Dark and the Wicked is more ethereal, the merciless annihilation of its protagonists and the predatory vantage of the camera betray a similar kinship to the slasher. As for The Shining, Kubrick’s notorious gliding shots prey on the Torrances as they wander down the Overlook’s corridors, conveying a strong sense

of predation culminating in the final chase—Jack’s wailing as he flails his axe in the maze evokes the last scene of Tobe Hooper’s seminal slasher, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). As has been noted by Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck in “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining,” the film’s initial straightforward Gothic horror later indulges a generic spin that is tied to Jack’s pivotal character. His arc, representation, and interpretation “parody the Gothic horror genre and slasher films and even children’s fairy tales in what is, at its core, a story about domestic violence” (689).

Hornbeck then places Jack’s emphatic rendition of the “Three Little Pigs” tale (02:03:15) at the centre of her reading, making this Big Bad Wolf the emblematic figure of the domestic abuse narrative in The Shining. Furthermore, the association of “the nightmarish, predatory beast of fairy tales” (689) with domestic violence, along with the perspective it provides, shed new light on The Dark and the Wicked’s own “wolf” metaphor. Heavily embedded in the film’s aesthetic and narrative text, the figure of the wolf is similarly pivotal to this Southern Gothic tale of supernatural grief that veers into a deadly hunt. Moreover, it serves as the starting point for an interpretation of the film as a ruthless battle against the trauma of domestic abuse perpetrated by the predatory father.

In an attempt to track down the different steps of this theory’s formation, I first explore the cinematics of grief, the immediate central theme of The Dark and the Wicked . A closer observation of these motifs, however, reveals that their subversive application feeds interestingly into the aesthetics of trauma. Both films lay out the common foundation of their domestic violence narratives through their portrayal of a deeply ambivalent home coalesced with the patriarch as a site of danger. What elements support this subtext in The Shining, and how are they echoed in The Dark and the Wicked? How do

2 Explored, among other elements, in “L’horreur d’Hérédité: une mise en scène de l’inquiétant ‘familial,’” a soon-to-be published essay I wrote for the 17th issue of Mise au Point

Fig. 1 | Jack’s encounter in room 237 in The Shining, 01:12:49–01:15:24. Warner Bros., 1980. Caleb’s encounter with the hag in The Witch, 00:40:29–00:42:00. Parts and Labor, 2015.

these works reflect on each other when considered through the lens of a paternal violence—past or present—intrinsic to the home? A constellation of narrative and visual elements akin to predation, devouring, and digestion is deployed around the emblematic figure of the wolf. I will thus explore how, primarily in The Shining, the articulation of these elements could be seen as feeding into the theory of chronic childhood trauma resulting from domestic violence. Finally, I will interrogate the intertwining of those tropes in the re-definition of The Dark and the Wicked’s threat as the abusive patriarch and the return of the devouring trauma suffered at his hands in the wake of his passing.

Both The Shining and The Dark and the Wicked lay out the common foundation of their domestic violence narratives through their portrayal of a deeply ambivalent home coalesced with the patriarch as a site of danger.

SUBVERTING THE CINEMATICS OF GRIEF IN THE DARK AND THE WICKED

In The Forms of the Affects, Eugenie Brinkema states that

There is a habeas corpus drive in the cinema, and when a body fails to appear … the loss can be framed by the environment, delimiting the missing being by marking out the space of or in relation to objects that that body should properly inhabit—hence, the clichéd images of unoccupied beds and chairs in narratives of loss. (95)

From its opening sequence (00:00:58–00:05:50), The Dark and the Wicked highlights the subversive nature of its central loss: not altogether there, nor completely absent, the unconscious father occupies a liminal space between life and death. In lieu of an empty bed, we are thus presented with an occupied one. As his soon-to-be widow, Virginia Straker (Julia

Oliver-Touchstone), chops vegetables, the camera slowly pans in on her back—the sound of a chair scraping against the floor, and settling under an unknown weight, can then be heard. She turns around to find the ominously empty chair has been placed right behind her. The use of these tropes establishes a clear link between the dying father, David Straker, and this menacing presence, but their diversion foreshadows the deceitfulness of this anticipated grief: “It’s not what you think,” the mother will later tell her son (00:15:23), a warning that could just as well be addressed to the viewers. While the marital bed is still occupied by the vacant body of the undead father, a polarizing disembodied presence sits in the empty patriarchal chair (Fig. 2).

The traditionally empty spaces of grief are therefore subverted in The Dark and the Wicked, and this play on vacancy is further exemplified by the second sighting (00:13:10) of the elusive, vampire-like creature that embodies the malevolent force invading the home. As Louise stands at the sink, the front door creaks open, tearing a dark crack into the safety of the house; in a shot-reverse shot dynamic, the camera assumes an eye-level perspective of the character, from the visually-vacant, dark exterior. A panning shot follows her as she crosses the room to the door and catches a backlit silhouette standing on the threshold of the marital bedroom (Fig. 3). The dark, but deceitfully empty, tearing in the protective house is transposed into this solid black shadow that is already inside the lit home. The apparition feeds into the vacant/occupied polarity introduced by the bed and chair and complements it with a play on light and shadow. Moreover, the equation of the menace with the (eponymous) dark recurs: as Louise, alone in the goat pen, scrutinizes the nocturnal space outside, what we first mistake for her own shadow elongates, ominously, against the back wall (00:48:35).

From empty spaces we thus move to shadowed ones, a prominent feature in The Dark and the Wicked that is used to convey the estrangement of the Straker family members.3 Writer Virginia Woolf, here quoted by Gaston Bachelard in his work on space, compares the illuminated room to “an island of light in the sea of darkness . . . [wherein] [t]he people gathered under the lamp are aware they form a human group,

3 This estrangement is rendered apparent by the dialogues between siblings Louise and Michael (00:11:03–00:12:17).

Fig. 2 | The ambiguously occupied bed and chair in The Dark and the Wicked, 00:03:47 / 00:05:47. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

From its opening sequence, The Dark and the Wicked highlights the subversive nature of its central loss: not altogether there, nor completely absent, the unconscious father occupies a liminal space between life and death.

united in a depression, on an island” (Bachelard 128).4 This poetic imagery highlights the dismantled state of the family unit: instead of being “gathered” under the light, the Strakers are isolated from one another in it, and, accordingly, they are separated by the dark voids creeping around it (Fig. 3). In Mourning Films: A Critical Study of Loss and Grieving in Cinema, Richard Armstrong invokes an eerily similar metaphor: “death means that our things have separated from us like objects in space no longer governed by gravity. They float indiscriminately, but inexorably, away” (94). These characters seem to have floated away from one another long ago. But what do these shadowed spaces, devouring the home as they expand throughout the film, stand for?

The Dark and the Wicked’s subversion of the empty spaces of grief—ambiguously occupied or invested by shadows— ultimately consists of a manipulation of the absence/presence dialectic which has been investigated, notably, by Tarja Laine

in regards to the representation of trauma onscreen. In an article titled “Traumatic Horror Beyond the Edge, It Follows and Get Out,” the author notes that traumatic events are defined by absences, in both visual and narrative forms. Drawing from that observation, she argues that these two films create and maintain an atmosphere of trauma via a displacement of the threat offscreen, thus conveying “the eternal presence of an absent dread” (284). The ever-present threat of this compounded offscreen presence/onscreen absence, she states, adequately stands for the missing narrative of the characters’ trauma, as a suggested event lying just outside the borders of the film’s narrative.5 Moreover, Laine mentions the work of Miriam Haughton, who speaks of trauma as a “shadowed space.” With this metaphor, Haughton points to the fact that the kind of trauma suffered in the plays studied—which, interestingly, are focused on domestic violence towards women and children—is figuratively “shadowed” from public discourse and representation (5).

4 “Un îlot de lumière dans la mer des ténèbres... Les êtres réunis sous la lampe ont conscience de former un groupe humain réuni dans un creux de terrain, sur une île.”

5 Very little, if anything, is indeed said or shown about the initial trauma of the characters, such as the death of Jay’s father in It Follows (Robert Mitchell, 2014) or that of Chris’s mother in Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017).

Fig. 3 | The first appearance of the “dark” transposed inside the home; Michael and Virginia in their islands of light in The Dark and the Wicked, 00:13:16–00:14:41. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

I therefore posit that the ambiguously occupied, and the literally shadowed empty spaces of the Strakers’ home, participate in an expression of trauma. These figures convey the persistent threat of an event that is, in itself, glaringly absent from the narrative. The source of this trauma is domestic abuse, as I will try to justify further in light of Kubrick’s The Shining.

DOMESTIC ABUSE AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF HOME

Drawing from the work of Judith Herman and her observations on violence within the domestic sphere, Haughton notes, “one may conclude that the most dangerous place for women and children is the home” (27). Indeed, the home is depicted as a highly ambivalent milieu in both of our films, and in ways that seem to respond to one another. Greg Keeler approaches films like The Shining through a synoptic analysis articulated around the duplicity of the home. The Torrances's problems, he writes, “are no sooner confronted than they go whipping into the void of the huge ‘home’ which isolated the three of them” (3). This “void of the home” also adequately portrays the ambiguous space within (or from) which The Dark and the Wicked’s invisible guests and infiltrating shadows emerge.

In the climactic sequence of The Shining, Jack uses an axe to take down not one, but two doors during his rampage into the heart of the family quarters (Fig. 4). “Wendy, I’m home!” he emphatically exclaims as he hacks through the first one (02:01:56), and just before hacking into the second one, he recites the words of the fairy tale antagonist, the Big Bad Wolf: “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in…” (02:03:15). This anticlimactic doubling of the intrusion, along with Nicholson’s lines, serves a single purpose in two ways. First, the formulation

of this clichéd greeting of the bread-winning patriarch to his household, in its very linguistic structure, collapses the abuser and the environment into the ambivalent concept of the “home,” effectively associating it with danger: Jack is the home. Second, in the repetitiveness and rapid succession of the two scenes, a slippage occurs between his consecrated role as protector and provider, and the “beast within” transpiring in the “Three Little Pigs” re-enactment. Moreover, the reference to this precise tale—“then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”—insists on the illusory protection provided by the “home” that the abusive patriarch is conflated with.6

When questioned by their desperate victims about the reason they were chosen, the intruders of Bertino’s The Strangers coldly respond, “because you were home” (Fig. 4). This emblematic line offers a deformed reflection of Jack’s ambivalent phrase, and thereby discloses similar concerns. As Kimberly Jackson underlined in her discussion of the film, these antagonists comprise a masked, stereotypical family unit of their own (53-54), and the fact that they are attacking a failed attempt at one adds another layer of irony to their statement.7 Stripping down the home-invasion genre to its minimalist core, this nihilistic posture further posits the household as a site of impending danger: “ … the punishment the strangers mete out happens specifically to those who are ‘home’; it is a form of terrorism reserved for the domestic space and those who occupy it” (57) In the same way, the Straker siblings’ demise is precipitated by their return to the farm, although this “home” has not been their own for quite some time.

During The Shining’s crucial scene in the red bathroom, Jack and Charles Grady (Philip Stone) get into a confusing debate: who is the caretaker here? This ambivalence is

6 Jack’s last line—“Here’s Johnny”—has been said to replicate the introduction of The Tonight Show’s host Johnny Carson, circling back to popular culture. But in the perspective of it marking the completion of Jack’s transformation from the stereotypical patriarch, through the beast, and to a full-blown “pater familicide,” I suggest that it alludes to the infamous John E. List, who executed the five members of his household in 1971. The main motive of his crime, compounding the shame of imminent economic ruin—he was pretending to go to work everyday though he had lost his position years past—and subsequent social demotion are not far removed from Jack Torrance’s preoccupations.

7 In The Strangers, Kristen (Liv Tyler) just rejected her boyfriend’s proposal.

Fig. 4 | Jack’s “home” twisted cliché in The Shining, 02:01:57. Warner Bros., 1980. The ambiguous “home” declaration as motive for the masked family in The Strangers, 01:10:40. Vertigo Entertainments, 2008.

primarily embedded in the narrative through Jack’s complete negligence of the facility’s maintenance, as Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is shown fulfilling those daily duties. Grady then encourages Jack’s legitimate reclaiming of the title: he is, and has always been, the caretaker. Here, it seems relevant to highlight the pivotal role of the figure in the etiology of trauma akin to domestic violence. As Herman states in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, “chronic childhood abuse takes place in a familial climate of pervasive terror, in which ordinary caretaking relationships have been profoundly disrupted” (98). Thus, in the midst of a scene concerned with patriarchal violence, the heavy emphasis on the polysemous term betrays its subversiveness—meanwhile, the ball band’s “home” filters through the walls, bringing this ambivalent caretaker back to the ambivalent home he personifies.8 Indeed, when confronted with Wendy’s suggestion of an abandonment of post (01:43:50), Jack’s aggressive reaction makes it clear that the responsibilities he feels so strongly about are not those stated in his initial contract. He must now take care of his family, in the treacherous sense implied by Grady as he comes to rescue him from the pantry (01:54:33): “I see you can hardly have taken care of the business we discussed.” Grady then adds, “We have come to believe … that you haven’t the belly for it,” and the phrase, stripped of its figurative meaning, rings particularly true in advance of the following segment.

THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF PREDATION: HUNTING, DEVOURING, AND DIGESTING

The crucial figure of the wolf in the domestic abuse narrative of The Shining was the starting point of this essay, and now that the ambivalence of the home coalesced with the patriarch as a site of danger has been established, I will explore

the cinematic forms that this danger assumes. The Dark and the Wicked composes imagery of predation from its opening sequence: after Virginia, the mother, hears wolves howling outside, the prowling camera catches a glimpse of a vampiric creature crouched among the agitated goats (00:04:40). It will then hunt the characters through the lighting—or, more accurately, the shadows—as well as the camera work and sound, using deceitful human disguises. The darkness that devours the home as the film progresses evokes the predatory traits that Mary Webb, quoted by Bachelard, attributes to the night: “to those who don’t have a home, the night is a wild beast … an immense beast, that’s everywhere, like a universal threat” (130) 9 Very low and partially concealed camera angles give off the persistent impression of a creeping predator hidden in dark corners of the room to spy on his prey (Fig. 5). As Jeremy Kibler aptly writes in his review, “long-time character actor Xander Berkeley, a priest who claims to be a friend to Louise and Michael’s mother, also makes a lingering impression as a possible wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The deceiving figure first engages in a cryptic dialogue with the siblings, comparing the evil plaguing them to a wolf.10 His next visit offers an interesting counterpart to Jack’s impersonation, as it is composed and shot like a Big Bad Wolf encounter: in a growling drawl, the hunched-over imposter enjoins Michael and Louise, who are huddled on the threshold of their house like the scared children of fairy tales, to “come outside” (Fig. 6).

The threat of being devoured already implied by this miseen-scène of predation is intricately woven into The Shining. The overt allusion to cannibalism during the family’s journey to the Overlook and the repeated reference to the Roadrunner’s chase by a ravenous Wile E. Coyote are further elaborated by precise visual and narrative elements. Fairly early in the movie, a dolly shot precedes then tracks Wendy as she wheels a catering cart down from the kitchen to the family quarters. A hard cut switches to a stalking shot of Danny’s compulsive tricycle ride around the

8 In the “Soundtracks” section of The Shining’s IMDb page, the song is credited as “Home (When Shadows Fall)” and performed by Henry Hall and the Gleneagles Hotel Band. The lyrics read, “When shadows fall, trees whisper day is ending. My thoughts are ever-wending home.”

9 “Pour ceux qui n’ont pas de maison, la nuit est une vraie bête sauvage… une bête immense, qui est partout, comme une universelle menace” (Bachelard 130).

10 Berkeley states, “ You think she’s crazy cause she saw a wolf, saw it coming? He’s not out there. He’s already here” (00:46:00). As he says this last line, he is silhouetted against the front door as a solid, black shadow.

Fig. 5 | A hidden shot of Louise; the priest silhouetted as a solid black shadow in The Dark and the Wicked, 00:14:37 / 00:45:50. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

The Shining therefore seems to display a “to eat or be eaten” logic to the characters’ confrontation with their traumas: by regurgitating Tony, Danny manages not to be devoured by his father who, conversely, failed to assimilate his own experience of childhood abuse, and instead revisited it upon his son and wife.

hotel’s ground floor, before going back to Wendy as she wheels the cart to the door of the apartment and brings the tray into the bedroom, waking Jack up with a breakfast in bed. These alternating cuts and the continuous tracking shot connecting them equate Danny to Jack’s meal (Fig. 7). In “My Dinner with Stanley: Kubrick, Food, and the Logic of Images,” Mervyn Nicholson highlights that “the motif of eating people is subtextually present throughout the movie, where dismemberment and death suggest food preparation for a demonic banquet” (285)

This image is first brought up by Jack and directly relates to the figure of the predator: when awoken from his grunting nightmare by Wendy, he tells her he “cut [her and Danny] up into little pieces” (00:58:52).

The “little pieces” motif will recur not only to extend this devouring theme with the subsequent organic process— digestion—but also to articulate those aesthetic elements inside The Shining’s narrative of domestic abuse. The image is summoned back during Jack and Grady’s encounter: “You

Fig.6 | The Big Bad Wolf encounter with the priest (left to right) in The Dark and the Wicked, 00:51:05–00:52:40. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

Fig.7 | Danny getting served as Jack’s breakfast (left from right) in The Shining, 00:34:21–00:35:50. Warner Bros., 1980.

chopped your wife and daughters into little bits” (01:27:28). Keeler describes it in a curiously fitting sarcastic tone:

Also the little fellow dreams about a strange word spelled redrum, which could easily be mistaken for red room except that it actually spells murder backwards. The most noticeable red room in the huge lodge is a symmetrically designed Stanley Kubrick style public bathroom, a bathroom where the little girls’ daddy tells his daddy how he made his kids take their medicine, and his daddy takes this as good advice. (4)

As written by Amy Nolan in an essay titled “Seeing Is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” this room “embodies an interior, claustrophobic atmosphere, evoking the womb, or heart, or stomach” (101). As domestic abuse is calmly discussed in the Overlook’s stomach, Wendy is anxiously rehearsing her escape plan when Danny’s Tony starts chanting “redrum” like a broken alarm clock (01:31:41). Thus, decor and sequential continuity are used here to further link the mise-en-scène of predation to its peripheral themes of devouring and digesting, thereby inscribing it inside the domestic abuse narrative.

THE EXPRESSION OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA IN THE SHINING

The motifs observed so far in The Shining are consistently linked to Jack’s character and feed into the domestic violence narrative, providing solid ground for a shift of perspective: I now propose to examine the film through the lens of trauma— that of Danny and of Jack—or under the light shone back on this violence by its consequences. Although Kubrick’s adaptation eludes it entirely, Hornbeck notes that the paternal violence

The Dark and the Wicked’s “wolf in sheep’s clothing” eventually visits Louise as a young woman wearing a red cloak, a piece of clothing that hints at the “Little Red RidingHood” tale as a counterpart to The Shining’s “Three Little Pigs.”

suffered by Jack as a child is a crucial backdrop to Stephen King’s novel (702-03). This intergenerational trauma narrative is absent from the film, but Jack and Danny appear to be linked through the motif of play, which is “obsessively repeated” posttrauma (Herman 39). The previously approached breakfast sequence includes an inserted tracking shot of Danny’s tricycle loop around the hotel’s ground floor and ends with Jack’s retelling of his first encounter with the Overlook (00:37:04): “It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner,” he states, projecting the repetitive play of his son. An offscreen rhythmic sound accompanies the following slow dissolve into a shot of his typewriter, and the camera pans out to reveal Jack’s own repetitive play—the throwing of a ball against the lobby’s wall—as the origin of the sound. This traumatic bond is symbolically reinvested and further articulated in a later sequence. In this sequence, Danny plays in an upstairs corridor when a pink tennis ball rolls into the panning-out shot towards the boy, then a reverse shot reveals the eerily empty corridor from which it emerged. It is as though the ball travelled from Jack’s playing session, through the permeable twin spaces of the maze and the Overlook to resurface, days later, in the labyrinthine upstairs corridors (Fig. 8).11 The travelling

11 This porosity is established in the following succession of sequences and concludes in the seamless transfer from the maze’s model to the real one (00:38:02–00:39:45).

Fig.8 | The play theme of Jack and Danny’s traumatic bond conveyed through the porous spaces of the Overlook and the maze in The Shining, 00:37:37–00:40:12 / 00:57:10. Warner Bros., 1980.

ball then lured Danny to room 237, where he suffered abuse that would be immediately blamed on Jack. Something akin to an inheritance from father to son is therefore symbolically conveyed here: a “traumatic play” legacy. The later revelation of Jack’s neurotic mantra—“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (01:42:17)—further confirms this intuition.

Hornbeck aptly suggests that an “interpretation of Danny’s psychic ability is as a display of a split personality, known today as dissociative identity disorder” (705), a disorder that has been correlated to “situations of massive childhood trauma” (Herman 102-03). This fragmentation of the personality mirrors that of the body, the one dreamed up and then attempted by Jack: could Tony be one of Danny’s “little pieces”? This traumatic personality fragment as the little boy that “lives in [his] mouth” and “hides in [his] stomach” (00:12:10) also harbours a strong connection to the ingestion and digestion pattern. Moreover, when needed, Tony is “regurgitated” by Danny in a motion reverting the devouring or ingesting dynamic of the predatory patriarch. Grady incites Jack to “correct” his wife and son in the red room (01:31:41) when “Tony takes over completely… In psychological terms, the alternate personality performs the function for which it was created, to protect the abused child from a dangerous parent” (Hornbeck 706)

In Trauma and Recovery , Herman states that reliving a traumatic experience represents an attempt “to ‘assimilate’ and ‘liquidate’ traumatic experience” (41), thus invoking a biological process that further extends the digestion metaphor. Relying on the same intertwining of the Overlook and its garden maze that allowed the transfer of Jack’s ball, Hannah Mowat writes that “[Jack’s] death in the maze has resulted in his complete absorption into the hotel’s history—through the hedge-lined exterior and onto the plastered walls of the interior.” Additionally, she invests the biological term mobilized by Herman within the context of trauma: “the final dissolve to an extreme close-up of Jack’s face offers further confirmation of this ultimate assimilation” (Mowat) The Shining therefore seems to display a “to eat or be eaten” logic to the characters’ confrontation with their traumas: by regurgitating Tony, Danny manages not to

be devoured by his father who, conversely, failed to assimilate his own experience of childhood abuse, and instead revisited it upon his son and wife. Having unfolded the different threads weaving the domestic violence theme into Kubrick’s cinematic text, I would now like to superimpose this canvas onto The Dark and the Wicked.

TO EAT OR BE EATEN (BY TRAUMA): ECHOES OF THESE TROPES IN THE DARK AND THE WICKED

The opening sequence of The Dark and the Wicked (00:00:58–00:05:50) along with the one preceding the mother’s suicide (00:16:11–00:17:28) display elements that establish a connection between the patriarch, the figure of the wolf, and the threat of being devoured. Similar to the one observed in The Shining, this pattern hints at an absent narrative of domestic abuse and childhood trauma. The ambiguously empty chair of the opening sequence is not only associated with the father as the “underbelly” of the occupied bed, but is also charged with a threat of a patriarchal nature: its unseen occupant seems to ensure that the mother’s domestic duty— she is chopping vegetables—is fulfilled with due diligence. Virginia’s defeated attitude is eerily devoid of surprise, indicating that this is, or was, a regular occurrence. The second sequence (00:16:11–00:17:28) repeats this oppressive ritual: Virginia is once more chopping vegetables when she is made distraught by the chair’s scraping noise, followed by the sound of its seat settling under an unknown weight. Suffice to say that this domestic throne is established fairly quickly as the token of the dying, abusive patriarch’s persisting dominion over his household. The Shining’s patriarch has been associated with kingship as well. While being berated by Wendy for abusing Danny (01:02:04), Jack sits “stupefied in his thronelike, Napoleonic chair” (Nolan 189), and the dissolve into the next scene then puts a chandelier very much resembling a crown onto his head (Fig. 9).

Finally, this versatile symbol of the chair is depicted as an instrument of harm. Its scrapping sound causes such distress in Virginia that her domestic task seemingly turns against her, and

Fig. 9 | Jack’s patriarchal throne in The Shining, 01:02:41. Warner Bros., 1980.

Thus, The Dark and the Wicked’s Big Bad Wolf hunts down the members of this fractured family unit while the menacing patriarchal throne stands for the persisting, destructive influence of the domestic abuser.

she proceeds to mince her own fingers along with the carrots.12 This gruesome occurrence recalls The Shining’s “little pieces,” suggesting cannibalistic consumption and the traumatic fragmentation of the psyche in victims of chronic abuse. The next morning, as the siblings frantically search for Virginia, the creeping camera slowly retracts in the shadows of the goat pen, soon to include in the frame her hanged, backlit silhouette. The ensuing shot of the patriarchal chair placed around the dinner table implies that it was the instrument of the suicide, therefore imputing the mother’s fateful gesture to the absent narrative of domestic violence (Fig. 10).

In the closing segment of this essay, I would like to recompose the absent narrative of domestic violence through each member of the Straker family, as all of them seem to display symptoms that endorse this hypothesis. The cinematic portrayal of their battle against dark forces lured to the home by the patriarch’s liminal state is lined with another, more grounded tale: the struggle to “assimilate” their resurgent trauma or be devoured by it. In a diegetic lifespan encapsulated between the two “vegetable sequences,” Virginia exhibits ambivalent behaviour ranging from meekly disapproving of her

children’s visit to aggressively enjoining them to leave. The oddly resigned attitude she otherwise displays rings true to the frozen state adopted by captive victims of chronic abuse. Herman contends in a metaphor particularly fitting here that “these are the responses of captured prey to predator” (42). Virginia’s attitude betrays an obscure knowledge of what is coming while embracing a somewhat passive, sacrificial posture that could be interpreted as the expression of a guilt-inducing complicity in her children’s past abuse. This equivocal stance is moreover reminiscent of Kubrick’s portrayal of Wendy’s character, which, as Hornbeck highlights, sparked ambivalent commentaries (706).

As for the avoidant attitude of the brother, Michael, it could be seen as re-enacting a past, precipitated departure from the home, one that left his mother and sister to fight for themselves. After he fled in the middle of the night, Louise’s harrowing and infantile reproach —“You left me!”— rings like an echo of their history (01:18:38); this point resonates all the more so when her huddled figure is framed in a “dirty shot” with the empty chair previously placed around the table now facing her (Fig. 11).

12 Dawn Keetley took notice of the obsessive wood-cutting associated with male characters to “express their sublimated hostility toward [their] family”; this motif, she states, is notoriously used in Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979) and has been recently reclaimed in Eggers’s The Witch (Keetley). The Shining followed The Amityville Horror closely, and Kubrick’s trading of the mallet for the axe as the instrument of Jack and Grady’s familicides could be speculated to reference this anger-fuelled, stereotypically masculine wood-cutting. In the scope of gender representations, a case can be made of the neurotic vegetable-slicing motif typically attributed to female characters: the fanatic mother of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and the traumatized one of The Dark and the Wicked seem to mirror this wood-cutting in horror cinema.

Fig. 10 | The menacing patriarchal chair and Virginia’s fragmentation in The Dark and the Wicked, 00:16:10–00:19:30. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

Michael is then driven to suicide by a hallucination of his decimated daughters and wife around the dinner table, a brutal vision that plays on the illusion that he brought the “trauma” home and visited it upon his own family. The sequence illustrates a divisive point between The Dark and the Wicked and The Shining, as it feeds into the fact that “contrary to the popular notion of a ‘generational cycle of abuse,’ the great majority of survivors neither abuse nor neglect their children” and are “terribly afraid that [they] will suffer a fate similar to their own” (Herman 114). Michael catches a glimpse of the table surrounded with empty chairs as he dies: this last occurrence of the fateful symbol conveys his deceptive fear of perpetuating the cycle of patriarchal violence.

But as the last surviving member of the household and primary victim of abuse, Louise represents the most telling case. During a sequence reminiscent—if reversed—of Danny and/or Jack’s venture into Room 237, she is confronted with an intrusion of her dying father while in the shower. Shot from her low-angle perspective as she is reduced to a scared child or

animal cowering in the bathtub, the apparition sternly stares down Louise (Fig. 12).

She yells for Michael, telling him that “Dad’s in here!” and when the siblings later stand around the still bedridden father, she insists, “He was there.” This line relocates the incident in the character’s past, reframing it as a re-enacted recollection. A string of similar occurrences then befalls her. First, she awakes to discover her face smeared with red lipstick in the mirror—two elements echoing The Shining’s “Redrum” episode—and finds the tube in the marital bed she now shares with her dying father. She will later lay in that bed, an unseen, grunting beast grinding the springs under its weight while an ominous shadow spreads over her; through the cracked open door of the bedroom, the patriarchal chair fleetingly appears (Fig. 13).

The Dark and the Wicked’s “wolf in sheep’s clothing” eventually visits Louise as a young woman wearing a red cloak, a piece of clothing that hints at the “Little Red Riding-Hood” tale as a counterpart to The Shining’s “Three Little Pigs.”13 Their encounter, in composition, mirrors the nocturnal appearance

13 Other elements seem to refer to this tale: Louise is seen wearing a red coat several times, and just as she shared her dying father’s bed, Little Red Riding-Hood slips into bed with the wolf posing as her previously devoured grandmother (Perrault 82).

Fig. 12 | The shower sequence in The Dark and the Wicked, 00:26:17. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

Fig. 13 | Louise’s face smeared with red lipstick and the briefly visible chair right before her assault in the bedroom in The Dark and the Wicked, 00:40:16 / 1:09:50. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

Fig. 11 | Louise reliving her brother’s desertion in The Dark and the Wicked, 01:18:38. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

of the priest as the Big Bad Wolf with a shot-reverse shot dynamic revolving around the threshold and a wide framing of the house (Fig. 14). This time, though, Louise explicitly subverts the priest’s malicious invitation of “You should come outside” by enjoining the female intruder to come in (Fig. 6). Once inside the home, the creature’s metamorphosis unravels, ever-faithful to the tale: her voice distorts to a masculine growl as she chants, “All alone…,” and she calls Louise “little girl” while displaying wide black eyes and eerily elongated teeth.14 This last infantilizing torment reconvenes the wolf and ties the sexually-charged previous occurrences—the shower, lipstick, and bedroom scenes—back to the character’s childhood, therefore reinforcing the intuition that we are dealing with the return of repressed (and possibly sexual) abuse from the predatory patriarch.

CONCLUSION

The Shining builds its narrative of domestic violence upon cinematics of predation that are themselves composed of motifs embodying the hunting, devouring, and digesting gestures proper to the predatory animal, namely the Big Bad Wolf from fairy tales that Jack impersonates in the last segment of the film. The wolf figure takes centre stage in Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked, too, and this shared antagonist has motivated a cross-examination that not only provided a deeper insight on the domestic violence narrative of The Shining, but brought The Dark and the Wicked’s implicit one to the forefront. Although formally absent in the film, Jack’s own history of abuse is still

an ongoing narrative perpetuated in his relationships with his son and wife. Centred around the empty space left by the dying father, The Dark and the Wicked tracks its own absent narrative of domestic violence backwards, piecing it together through the belated and far more fatalistic reckoning of the characters’ past trauma. About the catalyst of such devastating aftermath, Herman writes,

Eventually, often in the third or fourth decade of life, the defensive structure may begin to break down. Often the precipitant is a change in the equilibrium of close relationships: the failure of a marriage, the birth of a child, the illness or death of a parent. The facade can hold no longer, and the underlying fragmentation becomes manifest. (114)

Thus, The Dark and the Wicked’s Big Bad Wolf hunts down the members of this fractured family unit while the menacing patriarchal throne stands for the persisting, destructive influence of the domestic abuser. Sucked back into the dark voids of this wicked home, the Strakers get caught up in the “repetitive reliving of the traumatic experience” (Herman 41) that they are unable to assimilate: reduced to the “little bits” of Jack’s nightmare, they “may well provide dinner for a wolf” (Perrault 84). In the last minutes of the film, Louise refuses to leave her father’s bedside. As darkness engulfs them both, he awakes to devour her. This final image, in mimicking the tragic ending of the “Little Red Riding-Hood” tale, seals The Dark and the Wicked and The Shining’s iconographic bond and thematic kinship. 

14 In Charles Perrault’s version, the unsuspecting little girl comments on the wolf’s big voice, eyes, and teeth (Perrault 84).

Fig. 14 | The last Big Bad Wolf’s encounter and intrusion in the house in The Dark and the Wicked, 01:13:29–01:17:28. Travelling Picture Show Company, 2020.

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Organizing the ZOO

Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts

BY MICHAEL JOHNSTON Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Peter Greenaway’s film, A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), examines the process of death and decay and how the cinematographic process can document the human experience. The film centres on Oswald and Oliver Deuce, grieving twin-brother zoologists, and their affair with Alba Bewick, a beautiful woman whose body is decomposing as a result of a series of amputations. She is also the woman responsible for the death of the twins’ wives. In order to process their wives’ deaths, Oliver and Oswald undertake a series of pre-cinema-esque studies: photographing the decomposition of the zoo animals in their care. Like all Greenaway films, Z&OO subverts traditional narrative filmmaking. Greenaway’s films employ a visual organizing principle as cinematic structure rather than traditional movies motivated by story and plot. A Zed and Two Noughts derives its organization from Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century locomotion studies, Animals in Motion. Muybridge’s pre-cinema photographic studies of human and animal figures in the 1880s were meticulously organized, meticulously edited, and near pornographic. Greenaway has explained that his fascination with Muybridge’s work lies not only in the visual organization, but more in the peculiarity and perversion of the human activities documented in the studies. It can be argued that Muybridge’s work bridges the gap between art and science. It can also be argued that Muybridge’s work existed solely for the amusement of its maker. Greenaway’s use of Muybridge suggests both – art and science and the amusement of the maker. This article examines Muybridge’s organizing principles for his motion studies and how those same peculiar principles serve as the process for Oliver and Oswald Deuce to grapple with death in Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts

Peter greenaway’s 1985 film, A Zed and Two Noughts (Z&OO), tells the story of Oliver and Oswald Deuce, Siamese- twin zoologists separated (cut into individual bodies) at birth. The twin brothers lose their wives in a freak car accident when a swan crashes into the windshield of the wives’ car, killing the brothers’ wives and injuring their driver, Alba Bewick, who as a result has one leg amputated. The brothers mourn their wives and seek to understand their unexplainable deaths. That is the clearest narrative this author can provide for the film; a clear narrative is neither Greenaway’s intention nor is it part of the film’s structure. Since his first short films in the late 60s to his most recent “bio-pics” about Rembrandt, Hendrick Goltzius, and Sergei Eisenstien, Greenaway’s films evidence the filmmaker’s desire to organize things and his attempt to find order in chaos (Pally

108). Greenaway’s films subvert traditional narratives and are structured by what Greenaway refers to as an organizing principle (109). A Zed and Two Noughts is no exception.

Greenaway’s first feature film, The Falls (1980), is composed of 92 biographies in which each character’s last name begins with the letters F-A-L-L. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) is centred around 12 drawings on a country estate. Drowning By Numbers (1988) is a film simply numbered 1-100. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) employs colour-coded rooms and daily restaurant menus. The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003/4), is a trilogy centreed on the contents of 92 suitcases. Greenaway’s last three feature films are organized around an artist’s specific biographical episode and their defining artistic technique: Rembrandt and Nightwatching (2007), Hendrick Goltzius and

Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), and Sergei Eisenstein and Eisenstein in Gaunajuato (2015). Greenaway is continuing these hybrid biographical-fictional-essay films with Eisenstein in Hollywood (2018) and Walking to Paris (2018), his film about Constantin Brancusi. Greenaway’s cinematic experiments with numerical systems, alphabetical sequencing, and colour-coding have all been attempts to dislodge the apparently unquestioned presumption that narrative is necessary and essential for cinema (Pascoe 10). Greenaway states:

If a numerical, alphabetical or colour-coding system is employed it is done deliberately as a device, a construct, to counteract, dilute, augment or complement the all-pervading obsessive cinema interest in plot, in narrative, in the ‘I’m now going to tell you a story’ school of film-making, which nine times out of ten begins life as literature, an origin with very different concerns, ambitions and characteristics from those of the cinema (9-10).

Exactly one hundred years before Z&OO, at the pre-dawn of cinema, Eadweard Muybridge captured, organized, and catalogued chaos – the chaos of the sensation of movement – that until that time had never been photographed successfully. From 1884-1887, Muybridge photographed human movement at the University of Pennsylvania and animal movement at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden. The work, Animal Locomotion, consists of 781 photographs containing nearly 20,000 individual images (Braun 7). The opening images of Z&OO offer the viewer Greenaway’s cinematic version of Muybridge’s locomotion work and Greenaway’s vision of Muybridge at work (Figures 1 & 2). Greenaway begins his film with a reference to the beginning of cinema.

Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies have influenced generations of artists and filmmakers. His work has been referenced and recreated in live sports broadcasts and television commercials, music videos like U2’s Lemon, in the artworks of Francis Bacon and Sol LeWitt, and in the films of Hollis Frampton, Ken McMullen, and the Wachowski Brothers. Nowhere do Muybridge’s studies surface more repeatedly than in the film and media work of Peter Greenaway. Reproductions and recreations of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion are evident in A TV Dante: The Inferno – Cantos 1-8 (1989), Prospero’s Books (1991), The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy (2003/4) and Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway (2008). Greenaway views Muybridge’s locomotion studies as “a project that mocks human effort…It’s as an unfinished and unfinishable catalogue of anecdotal ephemera that I like it best” (Pascoe 111). Perhaps Greenaway’s most compelling use of Muybridge’s locomotion studies is A Zed & Two Noughts (Z&OO), which uses Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies as its organizing principle.

Muybridge’s locomotion studies are “organized,” if nothing else, from conception to presentation. Each motion study consisted of a sequence of still images (photographic plates) of a movement, often shot from 3 different angles, which

In the Zoo human life interferes with animal life: at L’Escargot animal life interferes with human life.

sought to isolate individual human and animal movements and freeze time. Muybridge’s system operated via a series of still cameras stationed side-by-side that captured the movement of the figure as it passed his camera bank. The result of such a photographic sequence is the sensation of successive, continuous movement.

Greenaway’s later film and television work employs multi-layered and simultaneous imagery on the twodimensional screen, The Tulse Luper Suitcases being the most excessive. Those images are often presented in a Muybridgianfashion, providing the viewer with multiple angles of the same exact moment. The technology necessary for Greenaway’s Tulse Luper style was not available at the time of Z&OO’s making. Rather than attempt a cheap triptych in Z&OO , Greenaway edits together shots from a scene that would suggest Muybridge’s simultaneous mulit-camera perspective (Figures 3 & 4). Greenaway does what Muybridge could not; he turns Muybridge’s still-motion photographs into moving images.

Scientist Etienne-Jules Marey was working on similar motion studies in France slightly before and during Muybridge’s time. What set the two photographers apart, aside from their

Figs. 1 & 2 | A Zed and Two Noughts begins with twin brothers Oliver and Oswald Deuce photographing animals in motion, like pseudo-Muybridges, moments before their wives’ deaths.

photographic subject matter, was their photographic technique/ system. Marey captured each stage of human movement by using a single camera with a single lens that remained open while a rotating slotted-disk shutter alternately exposed and masked the plate behind it (Braun 185). The result was a blurred, overlapping sensation of movement within a single frame. It is believed that Muybridge made some pictures with Marey’s system, but those photos do not exist (185). Marey’s method was preferred by Philadelphia painter, Thomas Eakins, who worked with Muybridge at the University of Pennsylvania. Muybridge and Eakins parted ways due to a disagreement over technique; Muybridge had no interest in adapting Marey’s wheel-system. Instead of stages of movement on a single plate, Muybridge preferred one isolated movement per photographic plate. By separating each movement by plate, Muybridge, unlike Marey, afforded himself the opportunity to edit and re-arrange his motion sequences.

Viewing Muybridge’s work outside the printed page gives the viewer the impression that Muybridge’s photographs were projected, thereby qualifying his work as the earliest form of moving pictures or cinema. However, Muybridge’s work was not projected; it was printed in a book. Each page contained one complete locomotion study in which all the movements and photographs (including varying angles) were presented to the viewer at once, each effacing the other (Rohdie 5). As many as 36 photographs could appear on a single page. An explanation of his process reads:

Muybridge used up to 36 lenses with 12 to 24 cameras, placed at 30-, 60-, and 90-degree angles to his subjects. The two cameras placed at 30- and 60-degrees were able to hold up to 12 lenses each. The 90-degree angle was known as the lateral, or parallel, view, while the others Muybridge referred to as the front and rear foreshortenings. With this set-up, a successful session could result in as many as 36 negatives (From Proof to Print par. 3).

As a result, Muybridge’s images could be ordered and read vertically and diagonally, in addition to being read horizontally. Reading the images vertically does not offer a linear unfolding of time sensation, but rather a rapid front-to-back visual pattern. If one photograph suffered from a mechanical or aesthetic malfunction, Muybridge removed the defective photograph and simply repeated an earlier photographic plate in the sequence. Further examination leads the viewer to notice repetitions in a single photographic sequence. Here the viewer witnesses Muybridge editing his work. “Muybridge would sometimes cheat accuracy to ensure the integrity of the naturalness (of the series) to overcome the inherent discontinuity of his images” (Rohdie 5). In essence, Muybridge was editing movies before editing movies was possible. For this reason, Sam Rohdie considers Muybridge the earliest pioneer of montage editing. I contend, however, that Muybridge was creating the illusion of movement via a “database” approach rather than a rational or linear approach.

Greenaway’s use of nudity is not intended as eroticism but to inform the viewer that this is the actor/model without costume and therefore without context.

Writing about the database logic in new media artwork, Lev Manovich discusses “Database Cinema” and identifies Dziga Vertov and Peter Greenaway as two major database filmmakers. Manovich states:

For cinema already exists right in the intersection between database and narrative. We can think of all the material accumulated during shooting forming a database, especially since the shooting schedule usually does not follow the narrative of the film but is determined by production logistics. During editing the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed. From this perspective, every filmmaker engages with the database-narrative problem in every film, although only a few have done this self-consciously (208).

If Muybridge’s work was intended to give the illusion of sequential, continuous movement, why did he insist

Figs. 3 & 4 | A Muybridgian perspective of the Deuce brothers. The shots appear to be the same time from different angles. A Zed and Two Noughts.

on photographing a single movement per photographic plate as opposed to Thomas Eakins and E.J. Marey’s system of capturing one entire motion at various stages on a single plate? Muybridge insisted on using his own organizing system: an organizing system that resulted in obvious gaps in the recording of motion and time; a system where each photograph was numbered and ordered (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…), even though specific photographs depicting one stage of motion were not chronologically edited or systematized.

Muybridge’s studies are not continuous; they include gaps between movements that provoke the viewer to ask what happened in between those two opposing photographs. Studying Muybridge’s edited motion studies on the printed page as database, the observer can apply Lev Manovich’s words, “[s]o the only way to create a pure database is to spatialise it, distributing the elements in space” (209), which is exactly what Muybridge did. As is the case with all instantaneous photography, Muybridge did not know what he was going to get when he photographed his models. Yet, he took his results and made them into a coherent whole (Prodger 220). It was a coherent whole that was created artificially, not naturally. Muybridge’s system permitted fictions within non-fictions; Marey’s and Eakins system did not. Muybridge was not necessarily photographing movement, but photographing, editing, and presenting the process of the illusion of movement. Peter Greenaway’s statement that Muybridge is a precineaste appears apt.

In A Zed and Two Noughts, following their wives’ deaths, Oliver and Oswald Deuce begin studying death and decay through a series of time-lapse motion studies of decomposing animals (Figure 5). The brothers also screen David Attenborough’s Life on Earth documentary series, free animals from the zoo where they work, and begin a three-way sexual relationship with Alba, who eventually has her other leg amputated. At the end of the film Alba gives birth to twins; it is uncertain which brother fathered the babies. In their final attempt to document decay and understand death, the twin brothers lie naked on a gridded, Muybridgian slab at L’Escargot (Alba’s country home), inject themselves with poison, and commit suicide, all the while recording time-lapse footage of their demise and decay (Figure 6).

Just seconds after their deaths, instantaneous like Muybridge’s photographs, their photographic-system fails when thousands of snails overrun their film equipment and create an electrical outage. The twins’ photographic timelapse studies go unfinished, and Greenaway’s snails spinning round and round on the record player and 16mm camera lenses are presented as nothing more than a mockery of the Deuce brothers’ efforts.

For all their logic, their planning, their knowledge, and their experimentation, they are reduced to nothing; not by suicide, but by a “primitive form of life,” to quote Oswald Deuce. In the zoo, human life interferes with animal life: at L’Escargot animal life interferes with human life (Figure 7). This final mockery of the Deuce brothers’ efforts enables Greenaway to end on yet

Peter Greenaway’s films are nothing more than the filmmaker’s desire to organize things and his attempt to find some sense of order in chaos.

Fig. 5 | Greenaway ironically using the Muybridge grid, Animals “Not” in Motion, in A Zed and Two Noughts

Fig. 6 | The Deuce brothers’ final photographic series in A Zed and Two Noughts

Fig. 7 | The Deuce brothers’ experiment ends in a mockery of human effort in Z&OO

Z&OO is not a film constructed with a narrative. The narrative emerges through Greenaway’s systematized arrangement of visual data recorded by the camera.

another Muybridgian note. Z&OO opens with visual referents to Muybridge, and the film ends with Greenaway’s personal Muybridgian insight and aesthetic reasoning: a project mocking human effort (Pascoe 111).

Z&OO’s narrative, while accessible, is not necessarily reliable. It is convoluted at best. Z&OO is among Greenaway’s most challenging works, placing before its viewers a lush, often puzzling assortment of allusions, puns, visual clues, bizarre images, taxonomies, and self-referential musings. “The film’s encyclopedic sprawl and interpretive ‘red herrings’ threaten a precocious hermeticism, yet its overt self-consciousness and insistent references to seventeenth-century allegorical painter Jan Vermeer constantly invite us to read it” (Petrolle 160). The glue that holds the film’s structure together is the filmmaker’s attempt to organize and catalogue the bizarre and useless actions of the film’s characters. Here, Greenaway is working on the problem of reconciling database and narrative forms. He is working to undermine a linear narrative by using a different system to order his film. No longer having to conform to the linear medium of film, the elements of a database are spatialized within a museum, in this case a zoo: Muybridge’s zoo. This move can be read as the desire to create a database at its most pure form: the set of elements not ordered in any way. If the elements exist in one dimension (time of a film, list on a page), they will be inevitably ordered (Manovich 208-209).

Z&OO opens with a cross-cutting of double Muybridgian imagery. Oliver Deuce records the number of times a tiger paces back and forth in its cage at the zoo. Similarly, Muybridge analyzed the movements of animals and used his photographs to demonstrate that quadrupeds employ, on the surface of the ground, eight different regular systems of progressive motion: walk, amble, trot, rack (or pace), canter, transverse-gallop, rotatory-gallop, and ricochet (Muybridge 26). In a separate shot, Oswald sits outside a gorilla’s cage (the gorilla is missing one leg) photographing the animal’s movement. The number of photographs slowly wind on the camera – the final number Greenaway leaves us with is 12. Many of Muybridge’s animal sequences were composed of twelve photographs – twelve from two different angles. Muybridge never published a photograph of a one-legged gorilla, but he did publish a series of photographs of human figures with physical abnormalities; some missing one or both legs. In this opening sequence, Greenaway recreates Muybridge’s studies and re-imagines the Muybridgian studies as pure cinema; Muybridge is no longer relegated to pre-cinema, hence the 12 still frames captured by twenty-four moving frames per second.

Not only is the zoo a direct visual reference to Muybridge’s photographic studies, but the zoo is the architectural representation of the “organization of chaos.” A barred and gridded,

created system, in essence a database, of wild animal life spatialized with the intent to communicate the narrative of animalia – which is nothing more than “an unfinished and unfinishable catalogue” (Pascoe 111) as new species are discovered and others become extinct. The zoo is non-linear – it is organized by space. Greenaway emphasizes this zoo-database idea with a riddle in Z&OO: do you think a zebra is a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes? Greenaway, with his tongue-in-cheek humor, chooses to mock human effort, like the efforts of the Deuce brothers, to study and understand animalia in a simple, linear storytelling fashion. The riddle is never answered.

Z&OO’s zoo serves a third purpose: it performs multilaterally like Muybridge’s photographs. Z&OO moves forwards and backwards simultaneously. The film’s narrative moves forward in time – from start to finish. However, in order for the Deuce brothers to understand their wives’ random deaths, they work backwards – gathering clues and pieces of information (and broken glass from the crash) in order to reconstruct the car accident and change its cause from random to logical. The Deuce brothers’ physical and intellectual quest moves backward in time. This leads the once Siamese twins to reconnect themselves physically as they were at birth. At the start of the film, Greenaway introduces each brother in his own film frame and in his own space conducting his own animal experiment. At the end of the film, the brothers don a Siamese suit (two suits stitched together as one) and eventually strip naked, connect the scars of their bodies that indicate where they were originally attached at birth, and die simultaneously while conducting a shared experiment.

Greenaway also spells this frontwards/backwards out simply and clearly with the word ZOO. The opening image of the film depicts two children dragging a Dalmatian toward the big, blue letters: ZOO. The end of the film shows Venus de Milo opening the zebra cage and walking toward the big, blue letters: OOZ. Greenaway has inverted the reading of space and the use of the space just as he inverted Muybridge’s photography of life in motion to a photography of death/decay in motion. Just after Greenaway presents the viewer with OOZ, the Deuce brothers fail in their final experiment as they are overrun and covered by the ooz(e) of the snails.

Neither Muybridge nor Greenaway views wild animals as the only example of chaos in need of structure and superficial ordering. Human chaos (that of actors and models) also requires organization. In Z&OO, action is a matter of going through the motions. In their grief Oliver and Oswald represent Muybridgian characters for Greenaway’s camera. “There are no purposes, only functions. Every step of a movement is made to look as significant or insignificant as every other step” (Pascoe 110-111), and every step is photographed by Muybridge and filmed by Greenaway along one of three axes.

Muybridge’s three camera banks enabled him to photograph his subjects from three distinct angles: 30-, 60-, and 90-degrees. Every camera was stationary and recorded the model’s full body in motion and the distance between model and camera was never

altered. The distance was standardized. Muybridge did not use or attempt to create film vocabulary: no medium shots or close-ups. In Z&OO, Greenaway only moves the camera in 3 distinct directions: side to side, front to back, or on a forty-five degree angle. The actors, for the majority of the film, are filmed in wide-angle long shots. The camera is never hand-held or on a Steadicam and never operates in a purely physical manner, in that a camera operator never moves the camera around the actor in a subjective or physical way. Greenaway presents his actors full-bodied from an objective distance so that all aspects of their movement are visible. It is not until the end of the film that Greenaway breaks with Muybridge’s visual motif and moves the camera off his previously designated pattern. As the brothers inject themselves with poison on the angled grid, the camera, via a crane, moves in an arc pattern up, over, and around the dying brothers. This change in camera suggests that Greenaway is moving beyond Muybridge and beyond pre-cinema.

In Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, models appear in five different stages of undress, revealing the particularities of sex, race, disabilities, and body type. There is an erotic aspect to the work but it is never prurient; the mechanical facts of Muybridge’s models are visible. Within the confines of the artificial space Muybridge creates, a certain pathos manifests itself. The figures appear lonely. Their behaviours are disjointed. Their actions are ineffective. We are shown the unglamorous side of existence. The simple facts of behaviour are made plain, stripped of motivation, and emotion and context (Prodger 218-220). Nudity is a recurring theme here and in Z&OO; Greenaway chooses not to depict any sexual acts, yet he chooses to display his models naked a great number of times. Greenaway’s use of nudity is not intended as eroticism, but to inform the viewer that this is the actor/model without costume and therefore without context. Greenaway shows his nude actors cry, sit on the floor spread-eagled, descend a staircase while singing, cover their naked bodies with snails, and dress and undress.

Mourning their wives and contemplating the value of zoo-structures, zoologist-widows Oliver and Oswald are also stripped of motivation, emotion, and context; their “simple facts of behaviour” are made evident. They are not glamorous. Oliver stops bathing and in an early attempt to kill himself, sits nude on his bathroom floor drinking a glass of red wine spiked with pieces of broken glass from his wife’s car crash. Oswald takes to walking against the wall of his apartment until the wallpaper shreds and deteriorates (Figure 8). The wallpaper slowly peels away like flesh of the decaying apples and prawns in the films he projects in his apartment (Figure 9). Both brothers sleep with the same prostitute and the same double-amputee.

Greenaway depicts the brothers as emotional in the start of the film; however, that quickly changes, and their emotions and their actions lose context as they walk and jog in Muybridgian fashion toward their suicide. Their actions do not appear linear but scattered and can be read by the viewer horizontally, vertically, and diagonally as they perform nude and semi-nude in the film frame. Greenaway’s Deuce brothers only function is to procreate and die; all their actions in between those two

No

longer having to conform to the linear medium of film, the elements of a database are spatialised within a museum, in this case a zoo – Muybridge’s zoo.

Fig. 8 | Oswald’s repetitive Muybridgian x-axis walk rots his wallpaper and leaves a trail of ooze in A Zed and Two Noughts.

Fig. 9 | A rotting apple projected beyond rotting wallpaper and the recreation of a Muybridgian semi-nude model in A Zed in Two Noughts

Fig. 10 | Siamese-twins, Oliver and Oswald, suggest cinematic Siamese-twins Peter Greenaway and Eadweard Muybridge, watching a blank movie screen: the purpose of not serving a purpose in A Zed in Two Noughts

functions are arbitrary and peculiar. In one scene Oswald is forced to look at a woman’s underwear in a public restroom upon her request. Immediately after flashing her underwear, she slaps Oswald in the face and he falls to the floor. Oswald’s action and reaction serve no functional purpose to the film’s narrative line or Oswald’s character arc. It is not erotic. It is not purposeful. It is peculiar. As Greenaway states, “It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one” (Morgan 17).

Animal Locomotion and Z&OO organize the chaos of Muybridge and Greenaway. The sexual undertones of the images, the masters’ hands altering successive motion for the sake of aesthetic pleasure, and both Muybridge’s unfinished catalogue

that ends on the arbitrary number 781 and Greenaway’s unfinished time-lapse film of the Deuce brothers’ suicide, provide the viewer with a narrative beyond “I am going to tell you a story.” Each motion study contains its own unique narrative – all 781 motion studies compiled in a book creates a different narrative of disjointed and unreliable imagery. Greenaway stands twin brothers before us and films them at a distance so that the viewer must study their movement, dress, nude bodies, and actions in order to properly identify them. Z&OO is not a film constructed with a narrative. Rather, the narrative emerges through Greenaway’s systematized arrangement of visual data recorded by the camera 

WORKS CITED

A TV Dante: The Inferno – Cantos 1-8. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by John Gielgud and Bob Peck. KGP Production, 1989.

A Zed & Two Noughts . Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Andrea Ferreol, Brian Deacon, Eric Deacon. British Film Institute, 1985. Braun, Marta. Eadweard Muybridge. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.

Drowning by Numbers . Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Bernard Hill and Joan Plowright. Film Four International, 1988.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato . Directed by Peter Greenaway, Per-formances by Elmer Back and Luis Alberti. Submarine, 2015.

“From Proof to Print.” Freeze Frame: Eadweard Muybridge’s Photography of Motion. National Museum of American History, 2001. americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/htm/ htm_sec3/sec3.htm

Goltzius and the Pelican Company. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by F. Murray Abraham and Lars Eidinger. Head Gear Films, 2012.

Greenaway, Peter. Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway. 2008, video installation, Park Avenue Armory, New York.

Life on Earth. Directed by Sir David Attenborough, BBC, 1979. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2002. Morgan, Stuart. “Breaking the Contract: A Conversation with Peter Greenaway.” Peter Greenaway Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Muybridge, Eadweard. Animals in Motion. Dover Publications, Inc, 1957.

Nightwatching. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Martin Freeman and Emily Holmes. Kasander Film Company, 2007.

Pascoe, David. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images Reaktion Books, 1997.

Pally, Marcia. “Cinema as the Total Art Form: An Interview with Peter Greenaway.” Peter Greenaway Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Petrolle, Jean. “Z is for Zebra, Zoo, Zed, and Zygote, or is it Possible to Live with Ambivalence?”Peter Greeaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema. Ed. Alemany-Galway, Mary & Williquet-Maricondi, Paula. Lanham, MD, The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2008. pp. 159-176.

Prodger, Phillip. Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Prospero’s Books. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by John Gielgud, Michael Clark, and Isabelle Pasco. Allarts, Cinea, Camera One, Penta Film, 1991.

Rohdie, Sam. Montage. Manchester University Press, 2006.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon. Allarts Enterprises, Erato Films, 1989.

The Draughtsman’s Contract. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Anthony Higgins and Janet Suzman. British Film Institute, 1982.

The Falls. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Colin Cantlie and Hilarie Thompson. British Film Institute, 1980.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases Trilogy. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by JJ Field, Raymond J. Berry, and Valentina Cervi. ABS Production, Delux Productions, Focus Film Kft., Gam Films, Intuit Pictures, Kasander Film Company, NET Entertainment, Studio 12-A, 2003-2004.

Food as Story and Spectacle in Big Night (1996)

BY LAURA BEADLING Youngstown State University

ABSTRACT

Big Night (1996), one of the earliest American examples of a food film, is comprised of two distinct but intertwined aesthetics. One involves immigrant restaurateur brothers, Primo (Tony Shaloub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci), and another involves a competing establishment run by conniving Pascal (Ian Holm). Tucci and Scott use mise en scéne and camera work to portray the spectacle of food as a corollary to authenticity. Primo and Secondo’s restaurant focuses on offering genuine Italian food from their childhoods while Pascal’s restaurant is all about showmanship, not food. Tucci and Scott film each restaurant in starkly different ways to link the identity to the spectacle of food. Unlike much of the dialogue which concerns business and uneasy personal relationships, spectacle in Big Night focuses on food. While the main narrative strand explores character tensions, much of the running time and screen space showcases Italian food being prepared, eaten, and enjoyed.

Big Night (Campbell Scott, Stanley Tucci, 1996), one of the earliest American examples of a food film, showcases the distinct but intertwined aesthetics of two spaces. One involves the restaurant of immigrant restaurateur brothers, Primo (Tony Shaloub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci), and another involves a competing establishment. The brothers’ restaurant, Paradise, is a place of simple authenticity in which Primo serves as chef while Secondo runs the business. Secondo must somehow make money despite his brother’s uncompromising culinary ethic that constrains the restaurant’s menu and budget. Nearby is the highly successful Pascal’s, run by another Italian immigrant, Pascal (Ian Holm), who duplicitously treats Secondo as a brother yet he plots to ruin Paradise so as to acquire the talents of Primo. Directors Scott and Tucci use mise en scène and camera work to portray the spectacle of food as a corollary to authenticity, which is significant because the brotherly feud shows the ease with which identity can be lost following a bid for assimilation after immigration.

Although spectacle is a “fundamental cinematic concept,” it has proven difficult to define (Brown 157). Critics Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale note, “As an aesthetic phenomenon, spectacle has proven easier to exemplify than to define” (5). Critic Simon Lewis highlights that spectacle “seems to be fairly straightforward,” but understanding how it functions is complicated (214). Lewis also argues that while spectacle can be the antithesis of narrative, the two are closer than previously acknowledged: each “transmits information to the spectator” (216). Likewise, Patrick Keating outlines a “cooperative model” of diegetic elements, including spectacle, that “work together to produce an intensified emotional response” (4). Big Night exemplifies this definition; scenes that push the narrative line and those that focus on the food itself (its preparation, cooking, serving, and consuming) work together to create the movie’s emotive tableaus.

Unlike much of the dialogue which concerns business and uneasy personal relationships, spectacle in Big Night focuses

on food. While the main narrative strand explores character tensions, much of the running time and screen space showcases Italian food being prepared, eaten, and enjoyed, crucially, as a spectacle.1 However, spectacle can also be any moment that is meant to be appreciated in terms other than as a means to advance the narrative. In a later book, King defines spectacle as “the production of images at which we might wish to stop and stare,” which describes the food in Big Night (4).

The competing settings of the individual restaurants are showcased early in the film by Secondo walking through each restaurant. To establish the uncompromising nature of Paradise, Scott and Tucci predominantly use long shots, deep focus, minimal camera movements, and sparse editing. The restaurant is portrayed as it seems, with no pretense or pretension, only excellence. In the first scene, the three primary characters associated with Paradise—Primo, Secondo, and the taciturn waiter Cristiano (Marc Anthony)—prep for the evening as the camera remains in a long shot of the kitchen and the three characters (Fig. 1). The opening sequence is just over two and a half minutes long with only one cut, when Secondo leaves the kitchen and enters the front of the house. Secondo walks through the dining room, sets up the bar, and opens the front door. Within the first few minutes of the film, the whole space of Paradise has been clearly laid out.

By opening with two lengthy shots, Big Night viscerally demonstrates Paradise’s authentic but constrained personality. In The Way Hollywood Tells It, critic David Bordwell notes that average shot length in American films shortened from 8-11 seconds before 1960 to 3-6 seconds by 1996. Thus, these opening shots set a specific pace and feeling of continuity (121-22). The two brothers are always proximate; not even editing gives them escape. The success of one is absolutely dependent on the success of the other, but the brothers do not see eye-to-eye. There is little clutter or colour in the kitchen or dining room, emphasizing that food, not atmosphere, is primary in Paradise (Fig. 2).

Conversely, Pascal’s emphasizes pizzazz as made clear when Secondo walks through the space early in the film. The first time we meet him, Pascal reinforces that he is a businessman who gives customers what they want; Primo, the food artist, repeats that customers must learn to appreciate authentic food. While Pascal’s has the trappings of a stereotypical Italian restaurant that includes plates of antipasto, comically classic songs like “O Sole Mio,” and numerous trays of pasta, the real attractions are live singers and the omnipresent showman Pascal, who lights desserts on fire and dramatically uncorks bottles tableside (Fig. 3).

In stark contrast to Paradise, Pascal’s symbolizes how easy it is to lose one’s identity after immigration and assimilation. Pascal is who Secondo hopes to be—a successful businessman with a busy restaurant—yet the spectacle of his restaurant makes it clear

that Pascal has sold out his heritage. While Primo believes that great food is about communion with God, Pascal exploits facile Italian stereotypes to be a successful American businessman. In the final confrontation between Secondo and Pascal, the latter claims, “I am a businessman. I’m anything I need to be at any time.” To claim the identity of a businessman, though, Pascal admits that everything else is exploitable.

1 Critic Geoff King notes that spectacle in Hollywood action films can be summed up as “Dinosaurs. Sinking ships. Fantastic cities. Spaceships. Alien landscapes. Explosions (lots of explosions). War. Disasters,” and, generally, the “scale and impact” of special effects (178).

Fig. 1 | Primo, Secondo, and Cristiano work in Paradise’s kitchen in Big Night, 00:02:56. Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

Fig. 2 | Secondo readies the dining room for the night’s service in Big Night, 00:03:25. Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

Fig. 3 | Pascal’s restaurant with live singers, Pascal’s wife and dog, and loud décor in Big Night, 00:24:29. Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

Pascal’s does everything possible to obscure the food, which, although popular, is inauthentic. Like Pascal himself, the food served at his restaurant is empty of any real connection to culture or heritage. The diners who eat there are being served their own reductive ideas of what Italian food is rather than experiencing a different cuisine.

Even more damning than the décor is the fact that Pascal does not subscribe to Primo’s scrupulous respect for the traditional food of his homeland, as demonstrated by the lingering shot of spaghetti and meatballs, which connotes the Americanization of Italian food. Primo will never compromise because he understands that assimilation comes at a cost. While Pascal is rich, he cannot claim any identity other than one as businessman; while he appreciates Primo’s food, he is unwilling to do the work to present traditional food to his American diners. Selling out his culture has made him rich, but it has not made him happy or fulfilled. He appears to know that his wife is sleeping with Secondo but does nothing about it. He chases his own chef out of his restaurant after setting his apron afire. He ruins the man he claims to share brotherhood with. Pascal will do anything for money and his inauthentic food is linked to his inauthentic self.

The spectacle of food truly begins once Pascal fools Secondo into thinking that a famous jazz musician will visit Paradise, thereby offering hope for the restaurant’s salvation. Primo and Secondo go all out, investing their last resources into the “big night.” Much of the second act features this event. Despite familiar tension, the spectacle of cooking emphasizes brotherly harmony; their food (and the heritage it represents) is more important than their individual differences. Shots of food preparation focus not on the characters—and in fact it is often difficult to distinguish the brothers—but on cooking techniques (Fig. 5), often through bird’s eye angles (Fig. 6).

Alternatively, the camera is constantly in motion around Pascal in the dining room, never lingering on diners or cooks. Meanwhile, in Paradise, particularly during the big night itself, the camera deemphasizes story and lingers on the enjoyment of food. These moments of bliss are in shallow focus to emphasize the bodily sensation over narrative drive. While most of the diners at the celebration are nameless (Fig. 7) and without significant narrative presence (Fig. 8), the camera nevertheless lingers on facial expressions and epicurean appreciation. The spectacle comes from the overwhelming pleasure of Primo’s food while there is almost no such pleasure in Pascal’s restaurant.

Accordingly, Pascal’s restaurant illustrates how he has rejected authentic Italian culture. Instead of static camera work, scenes at Pascal’s are dominated by oneiric Dutch angles and spinning tracking shots that confuse the eye. Although the camera portrays the same spaces in both restaurants—the kitchen, the front door, the dining room, and the bar—there is no clear spatial logic or connection. In Paradise, the kitchen is paramount, but at Pascal’s the camera does not even enter it. Unlike Paradise, Pascal’s is dark, cluttered, and infused with a lurid red light (Fig. 4). While the simple, bright, uncluttered space of Paradise allows the food to shine, the ambience of

After the financially ruinous big night, the film ends with an almost five-minute-long shot of Secondo cooking an omelet, part of which he serves to his brother, implying that the two are united even in defeat. This scene is both cooking spectacle but it also, in Keating’s words, cooperates with narrative to close the film with an emotional catharsis. The final lengthy shot returns to the minimally edited, deep-focus style of the beginning to show that integrity and authenticity are still important. The big night ends with Primo and Secondo arguing. Secondo screams that he has done “everything” to try to make the restaurant a success while Primo has done “nothing” Primo responds by

Fig. 4 | Unlike Primo, Pascal has no problem serving big portions of spaghetti with meatballs in Big Night, 00:24:06. Rysher Entertainent, 1996.

Fig. 5 | The two brothers make pasta in Big Night, 00:41:05. Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

Fig. 6 | The labor-intensive preparation of authentic Italian food by hand in Big Night, 00:41:25. Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

saying that he has tried to teach Secondo but he has “learned nothing.” The final confrontation of the night involves Secondo and Pascal. Secondo tells him that what Primo has is rare and that Pascal will “never have him.” Secondo has finally learned what Primo has been trying to teach him: inauthenticity kills. The last scene in which Secondo cooks the omelet is filmed in the same style of minimal camera movement and editing as the beginning, demonstrating that the lesson has been learned as now Secondo’s cooking is filmed in the same way that Primo’s cooking had always been filmed. Without words, the two brothers are reconciled as Primo accepts and eats the food his brother has prepared. Big Night helped launch the food film trend that continues to accelerate today, but its attention to the craft and labor of preparing traditional food remains unmatched 

WORKS CITED

Big Night . Directed by Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, performances by Stanley Tucci, Tony Shaloub, Isabella Rosselini, Minnie Driver, Ian Holm, Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. California UP, 2006.

Brown, Tom. “Spectacle/Gender/History: The Case of Gone with the Wind.” Screen, vol. 49, no.2, 2008, pp. 157-78.

Hall, Sheldon, and Steve Neale. Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History. Wayne State UP, 2010. Keating, Patrick. “Emotional Curves and Linear Narratives.” Velvet Light Trap, vol. 58, pp. 4-15.

King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction . Columbia UP, 2002.

Lewis, Simon. “What is Spectacle?” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 42, no. 4, 2014, pp. 214-221.

Fig. 7 | The camera lingers on this nameless character in Big Night, 01:19:20. Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

Fig. 8 | The camera lingers on another nameless character in Big Night, 01:19:15. Rysher Entertainment, 1996.

Chekhov’s Gun that Never Goes Off

Femininity and Castration in Jackie Brown (1997)

BY CLINTON BARNEY Washington University in St. Louis

ABSTRACT

A feminist readings of Quentin Tarantino’s films generally investigate the placement of women within his hypermasculine storyworlds. Deriving from Heidi Schlipphacke’s reading of feminine revenge in Inglorious Basterds (2009), this essay evaluates the gendered power dynamics in Jackie Brown (1997). While feminine revenge is obtained by Tarantino’s protagonist, Jackie Brown becomes a victim of her own desires, creating a vacuum of power in which the patriarchical structure underpinning the politics of Tarantino's films unknowingly reinforces its own influence. Examining the visual pattern created by Tarantino during the quickdraw sequence in Jackie Brown (1997) as a framework, this essay investigates the lack of true feminine power within Tarantino’s storyworld.

Seeking to dissect the political and gender undertones of Quentin Tarantino’s films, film scholars have long evaluated the extent of feminine agency in Tarantino’s hypermasculine storyworlds. This agency has rooted itself in oppositional terms, namely the feminine’s desire for revenge against her male counterparts. In her analysis of Shoshana (Mélanie Laurent) from Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009), film scholar Heidi Schlipphacke determines feminine revenge to be “mythic and self-destructive” (Schlipphacke 114). In order to obtain revenge against the patriarchy, she must, as a result, destroy herself, and by extension, her feminine influence. The political ramifications of this are clear in Inglorious Basterds. The power and politics of revenge are stripped from the feminine figure of Shoshana, who seeks to infiltrate and destroy the patriarchal power of the Nazis, and are instead extended to the male crew of the Basterds, who successfully eliminate the Nazis and their patriarchal control. The woman becomes a victim of her own desires, unable to destroy the patriarchy on her own accords. It is, instead, the men who enjoy the benefits of revenge. As

iterated by Willis, “Tarantino’s films display a masculinity whose worst enemy” is not femininity, but rather “itself” (Willis 290). In their appropriation of the feminine’s revengeful desire to destroy the patriarchy, the men (unknowingly) reinforce their own patriarchal influence.

This same reading can be applied to Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), primarily as seen in Jackie’s (Pam Grier) tumultuous relationship with Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), and her desire to kill him in the film’s climax (02:22:05–02:24:28). While much scholarship and debate surrounding the film has sought to answer the ambiguous actions of Jackie in said climactic moment, I believe Schlipphacke’s notion of feminine, self-destructive revenge can serve as a proper lens to evaluate Jackie’s actions and underlying motivations.

Prior to the climax of Jackie Brown , Jackie prepares for conflict against Ordell, the masculine antagonist who seeks to harm Jackie, by practicing her quickdraw in Max Cherry’s (Robert Forster) office. This sequence of Jackie’s preparation is constructed in a visual pattern that is

embedded with suggestions about gender/power dynamics and the politics of revenge. This essay examines the visual pattern created by Tarantino during the quickdraw sequence

in Jackie Brown, and how the eventual delineation from said pattern demarcates the lack of true feminine power within Tarantino’s storyworld.

The power dynamics within Jackie Brown must be adequately contextualized prior to a visual analysis of the sequence. Like Shoshana, Jackie seeks revenge over Ordell and, by extension, seeks to topple his patriarchal oversight. The root of Jackie’s power lies in what theorist Sigmund Freud labels castration, which he defines as the lack of a possession of a penis (or the destruction of phallic power), which the woman embodies (Freud 152-157). Within Jackie Brown (like Inglorious Basterds), castration results from the ability of the feminine to infiltrate said overarching patriarchal structures, either threatening to destroy it outright, or rendering it incompatible by promoting feminine power. Thus, in her desire to kill (and thus symbolically castrate) Ordell, Jackie’s revenge serves as a means to liberate herself from his patriarchal oversight.

Fig. 1 | A revolver residing in the drawer of Max Cherry’s desk in Jackie Brown, 02:18:28. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 2b | Jackie stoically gauges her hypothetical target in Jackie Brown, 02:18:39. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 2a | Jackie examines and loads the revolver in Jackie Brown, 02:18:31. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 2c | Jackie draws the revolver from the drawer in Jackie Brown, 02:18:40. Miramax, 1997.

As Ordell and Max drive back to Max’s office for the film’s climactic moment, Jackie draws a gun three times in a sequence that establishes a pattern embedded with notions of revenge and power (2:18:27–2:19:04). The sequence begins with a close-up of the gun as it is pulled out of a drawer by Jackie (Fig. 1).

The next shot shows Jackie in a medium close-up checking the barrel before placing the gun back in the drawer and practicing her quickdraw (Figs. 2a-2c).

As Jackie points the gun off-screen, the film cuts to a reverse shot of what she is aiming at: the door she expects Ordell to walk through (Fig. 3).

Regarding the notion of liberation, the foundational three shots can be thus differentiated as such: the object of liberation (gun), the perpetrator or agent of liberation (Jackie), and the expected victim of liberative violence (Ordell).

Jackie practices her quickdraw routine again, and she adheres to the same pattern as before: close-up of the gun as

she places it back in the drawer (Fig. 4), then the medium shot of Jackie practicing her aim (Fig. 5), then a reverse shot of the door Ordell is expected to enter (Fig. 6).

The sequential placement of the close-ups of the gun (Figs. 1 & 4) and Jackie (Figs. 2a-2c and 5a) suggests an intrinsic bond between Jackie and the gun. The gun serves as the means of her liberation, and it is by her pull of the trigger that she achieves liberation and by extension, castrative power over Ordell. As she practices her quickdraw, she maintains a sense of collectiveness and bravado. She appears at this moment “bold…and methodical” (Wager 144). Jackie stoically looks off-camera towards the door, her jawline accentuated, which is culturally associated with masculine power and dominance. Jackie is also dressed in a black suit, a traditionally masculine outfit and symbol of masculine strength and confidence. Her performance and dress are coded in masculine projections of control, thus painting her entire character in

Fig. 5 | Jackie redraws the revolver in Jackie Brown, 02:18:50. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 4 | Jackie places the revolver back into the drawer, restarting the visual pattern in Jackie Brown, 02:18:44. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 3 | A POV reverse shot from Jackie’s perspective, showing the area where her target is expected to enter in Jackie Brown, 02:18:41. Miramax, 1997.

masculinity. As a result, this notion of liberation is intertwined with masculine forms.

However, as quickly as Tarantino creates the pattern, he deviates from it as Jackie draws the gun for a third time. The close-up of the revolver is omitted, and the third pattern begins with a medium shot of Jackie preparing and pulling the gun (Fig. 7). The object of liberation is no longer visually associated with or connected to Jackie in terms of the cinematography.

Jackie attempts to maintain the same degree of bravado as she points the gun for a third time, but she starts to crack. She struggles to grasp the gun from the drawer, and forcefully sets it back down, visibly uncomfortable and even “fearful” (144). Rather than returning to the reverse shot of the door, the film cuts to a shot of Ordell in the car with Max (Fig. 8), reinforcing his placement as the source of Jackie’s discomfort.

The same degree of masculinity that Jackie employs in the first two segments of her quickdraw practice is slowly stripped during the third attempt. Not only is the revolver omitted, thus disrupting the intrinsic link between the gun and Jackie (as well as the politics of liberation that the gun signifies), but so, too, are the layers of her masculine bravado as exemplified by her discomfort.

As Ordell enters Max’s office (Fig. 9), Tarantino frames him in a way that emulates the reverse shot of the door from the quickdraw sequence (Figs. 3 and 6).

Ordell also notes the darkness of the space, which calls back to his first encounter with Jackie in her apartment,

when Ordell kept turning the lights off in preparation to kill Jackie. Thus, all signs in the climactic moment, from the cinematography to the mise-en-scène, suggest that Jackie will be the one to pull the trigger and free herself from Ordell’s patriarchal control.

However, as soon as the audience expects Jackie to shoot, federal agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) steps out of a back room (Fig. 10). Immediately, Jackie yells, “Ray, he’s got a gun,” calling for help (which is culturally perceived as a feminine trait), to which Ray responds by killing Ordell. Jackie is framed in a dimly-lit close-up, which obscures most of her face and masculine-coded suit. The only definable characteristic of Jackie’s head is her long brown hair highlighted via backlight (Fig. 11). Thus, Jackie is visually defined solely by markers of her femininity, opposed to the masculine-coded bravado of the quickdraw sequence.

The climactic sequence also reverses the pattern of the quickdraw sequence. Ordell enters Max’s office (Fig. 9) in a similar medium long-shot to the reverse shot of the door. As Ray emerges from the other room (Fig. 10), he is framed in a medium shot similarly to Jackie at the desk. As Jackie calls for Ray’s help, she is shot in a close-up akin to the revolver (Fig. 11). Given the similarities in framing, Tarantino depicts Ray as the agent of liberation and Jackie as the means/object. The gun that she practiced with, the expected object of liberation, never appears. It is the Chekhov’s gun that never goes off. She does not reach for the gun, much less pull the trigger. Jackie

Fig. 9 | Ordell enters the darkened office through the door, shown over Jackie’s shoulder, 02:22:56. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 8 | Ordell, the source of Jackie’s woes, driving with Max in Jackie Brown, 02:19:05. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 6 | Returning to Jackie’s POV of the door in Jackie Brown, 02:18:53. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 7 | Jackie’s masculine bravado starts to crack in Jackie Brown, 02:19:03. Miramax, 1997.

denies herself the climactic, liberative moment of killing Ordell, instead transferring the castrative abilities to the masculine figure of Ray, who performs the liberative act. Wager understands this moment to be a result of her manipulation of Ray (52), and thus an extension of her feminine power. However, given her eventual discomfort during the quickdraw sequence noted previously, her willingness to give Ray the agency to pull the trigger against Ordell seems to be less out of a state of power. The reason for Jackie’s transference of her castrative power is notably left ambiguous, but given Schlipphacke’s notion of feminine self-destruction, I suggest that Jackie did so as a means to save herself from harm. Whereas Shoshana dies because she is unwilling to diverge from her revengeful desires, Jackie survives primarily in that she is willing to expel them. She does not fall to her own self-destructive tendencies, and seemingly acknowledges the self-destructive nature of feminine revenge by granting Ray the climactic castration of Ordell, and thus, maintenance of patriarchal control. Yet, like Shoshana, in transferring her castrative power and granting agency to Ray, she reduces her own feminine influence. The threat of castration no longer resides with the woman, but comes from within the patriarchy itself. In diluting the power and influence of the feminine, the patriarchy continues to “reign unchecked,” (154) all the while it “reinvent[s]”/reinforces itself (hooks 50). The feminine is thus reduced to a state of inferiority. The visual pattern created during the quickdraw sequence visualizes a moment where femininity can and does have liberative power, but the fact that the castrative climax of Brown’s revenge arc ultimately does not occur by her own hands suggests the lack of resonant and lasting feminine power within Tarantino’s hypermasculine storyworld. 

WORKS CITED

Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (19271931). Edited by Anna Freud et al. Translated by James Strachey. Vintage, 2001, pp. 152–157. hooks, bell. “Cool Cynicism: Pulp Fiction.” Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies, Routledge, 1996, pp. 47–51. Schlipphacke, Heidi. “Inglorious Basterds and the Gender of Revenge.” Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema . Edited by Robert Von Dassanowsky. Continuum, 2012, pp. 113–133.

Wager, Jans B. “Jackie Brown (1997): Gender, Race, Class, and Genre.” Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Rereading Film Noir Texas UP, 2005, pp. 143–54.

Willis, Sharon. “‘Style,’ Posture, and Idiom: Quentin Tarantino’s Figures of Masculinity.” Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill. Arnold, 2000, pp. 279–295.

Fig. 10 | Ray enters the office through a back room in Jackie Brown, 02:23:03. Miramax, 1997.

Fig. 11 | Jackie, cast in shadow, calls Ray for help in Jackie Brown, 02:23:04. Miramax, 1997.

Cinematic Isolation and Entrapment in The Lobster

BY MAZYAR MAHAN University of Texas at Dallas

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the final scene of The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015), focusing on its use of mise-en-scène and cinematography to construct a visual language of isolation and entrapment. It argues that these formal elements reflect the oppressive mechanisms of a fictional society that enforces rigid norms and punishes deviation. Through allegory, The Lobster critiques real-world systems that marginalize individuals based on constructed ideals of normality and exposes how difference, whether in sexuality, ability, or identity, becomes a basis for exclusion and dehumanization.

Society creates rules to define “natural” citizens. No matter how logical the rules are, those who do not follow will be considered misfits and punished in one way or another. In different temporal and spatial contexts, misfits become marginalized by their society. In the world of The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015), having a partner is the defining characteristic of being natural. Single people are marginalized, isolated, incarcerated, and even punished by losing their right to live as human beings. Despite being a science fiction film, The Lobster, in many ways, resembles our world. This essay examines specific elements of film form in the final scene of The Lobster to illustrate how they contribute to the film’s meaning. As I will demonstrate, through mise-en-scène and cinematography, the scene enforces the sense of isolation, loneliness, and entrapment that marginalized individuals experience in a society that does not recognize their fundamental human right to live as ordinary civilians. In a dystopian future, everyone is mandated by law to have a partner. Single adults are sent to a place called Hotel, in which they have only 45 days to find a partner among other guests. Those who cannot find someone with similar “defining characteristics” will be transformed into an animal of their choice. Those animals are released into a forest near the Hotel.

David (performed by Colin Farrell) loses his wife to another man, resulting in his being transferred to the Hotel. There, he observes other guests who seek out superficial similarities such as frequent nose bleeding, limping, heartlessness, and lisping, if only to generate the façade of partnership under the law and to continue living as humans, not animals.

After a while, David is almost ready to be transformed. He even chooses what animal he wants to be: a lobster. However, one day, he manages to escape the Hotel and joins Loners, a group of single people who live outside society in the woods. To resist the mainstream society’s peculiar laws, Loners have established their own rules. No one among them can have a partner or love relationship. Those who do not submit to the law will be punished by mutilation. At first, this seems like an ideal society for David because he is single. However, the situation changes when he falls in love with a group member known as Shortsighted Woman (performed by Rachel Weisz). Hiding the relationship is a challenging task. That is why, when they realize they both have myopia, David and Shortsighted Woman plan to return to the city because now they have a so-called defining characteristic that makes them a socially suitable couple. The leaders of Loners find out about their plan

and, as a punishment, make Shortsighted Woman blind. Now, she and David must keep living in the woods or find another common characteristic. David chooses the latter. He decides to blind himself to live with his love.

The scene under analysis comes from the film’s final sequence. By this point in the film, David and Shortsighted Woman have tried to be accepted by society or the members of a community, with their efforts having failed each time. First, they lost their “eligibility” to live in the city as soon as they became single. Then, they tried to join the Loners community. However, when the group finds out about their relationship, they are ousted and escape from the forest where Loners live. They subsequently enter a restaurant on the city’s outskirts, where David intends to execute his plan. In the dining room (Fig. 1), only the foreground, where the two characters sit, is in focus, a selective focus indicative of their isolation and detachment from their surroundings. They do not belong to this place because their relationship does not follow society’s rules. They are technically Loners, an “illegal” couple that has sneaked into the world of ordinary people. On the other hand, they do not actually belong to the world of Loners, who live in the forest shown in the far background of the scene.

The blurred background, created by long lenses, enforces the film’s claustrophobic atmosphere. Natural light—the soft diffused sunlight coming through the windows—is the only light source. This choice creates a low-key lighting effect, resulting in a somber, hopeless mood. The blue and green colour palette implies a sense of gloom and sadness. The colours are

desaturated. Such a choice produces a washed out look that suggests alienation and a bleak, unfortunate circumstance. The characters speak monotonously, which is indicative of the lack of emotion and passion in the world of the film.

The scene begins with a lateral medium shot of Shortsighted Woman. A piece of dramatic music, which ends after a few seconds, signals the transition from the previous scene. There is no establishing shot, but from the previous scene, we already know that they were going to a restaurant called Joel’s, located on the city’s outskirts. In the foreground, which is in focus, the woman is positioned in the centre of the frame, looking offscreen and to the left. She is sitting in a green curved-shaped booth, with a table of the same shape. Her position between the two curved-shaped objects evokes a sense of entrapment. The use of offscreen space is equally significant. Instead of positioning the two characters in a single frame or offering overthe-shoulder shots, the camera captures only one character in a single frame at a time. This technique adds to the sense of each character’s loneliness. In addition, the blurred background shows trees (likely the same forest from which the two characters have escaped) and some metal columns, and cars pass through the highway.

The scene cuts to a medium shot of David (Fig. 2). He is sitting on the other side of the table, looking at the woman’s fingers. Two other individuals in the restaurant are seated at the farthest point from David and the woman. In the foreground, his in-focused body occupies only one-third of the frame, on the right-hand side. The remainder of the frame is filled with the rows of booths in the restaurant, all blurred. David’s placement in the frame, the blurred background, the vertical lines on the booths, and the oblique lines formed by the restaurant’s windows create a sense of separation and isolation.

In contrast to the traditional approach to such scenes, in this scene, the camera does not offer over-the-shoulder shots of the two characters talking to each other. It is located beside one character, offering a lateral view of the other one. The side of the face angled towards the viewer is in the dark. Here, the camera offers a slightly low-angle shot of David looking at the woman’s fingers. The part of her hands that shows up in the foreground’s lower-right section of the frame is out of focus. David remains in focus, staring at the hands. The blurred hands can be interpreted as signifying David’s subjective view of them. He is not looking at them. Rather, he is thinking of what awaits him.

The scene cuts to the next shot where, for the first time, we see a medium two shot of the two characters in a single frame, sitting on the opposite sides of the couch, both smiling (Fig. 3). A slight high angle shot emphasizes their vulnerability. The direction of the light makes the foreground dark, forming a dark space between the two characters, implying their distance and evoking a sense of hopelessness. This dark space is symmetrical and parallel to the mass of trees that stands in the background. Since the two characters come from the forest, where Loners reside, the frame’s composition associates loneliness with the darkness. While the two characters smile at each other, a family

Fig. 1 | The restaurant's dining room, 01:45:48. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

Fig. 2 | A medium shot of David, 01:46:08. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

passes by the window. The characters’ smiles, captured in a single shot, and the presence of a family within the same frame, work together to suggest a hopeful future for them, a future in which they can be together. For a brief moment, the balanced, symmetrical composition in the scene evokes the promise of hope that maybe they will be able to unite after all. In this shot, the emphasis on the vertical lines formed by water glasses, the salt and pepper shakers, the characters’ bodies, the lines on the couch, the table lamps, the trees on the two sides of the frame, the metal columns, and even the road hazard cones creates a sense of unification between the two characters. This feeling is heightened by the depiction of most of the objects mentioned above in pairs: the pepper and salt shakers, water glasses, and table lamps, for example. After a short dialogue about getting used to blindness, David takes the knife and stands up to go to the restroom.

The scene cuts to a corridor that leads to the restroom (Fig. 4). The light coming through the exit door and the ceiling lamps at the end of the hall are the only light sources. Such lighting creates a dark space in the foreground and a small bright one in the background. The camera is static, but David’s move provides a transition from a medium shot to a long shot.

In contrast to the end of the hall, which is in focus, the foreground is out of focus, suggesting that David is moving from ambiguity and uncertainty to decisiveness. Granted, he is supposed to blind himself, but maybe blindness is the only way to unite with someone he loves very much. In addition, in the centre midground and background, a red sign (pointing to the toilets) and a green sign (pointing to the exit door) are emphasized. David can choose the toilets or take the exit door and run. If he follows the red sign, there will be blood waiting for him in the restroom. Alternatively, if he decides to run, like the lonely icon on the green sign, he will be alone and, consequently, need to go back to the forest and live as a Loner. Further still, the two circular bright windows on the exit door metaphorize human eyes. If he takes the door, he will still have his eyes, and if not, he must turn right into an unknown destiny. The tight framing also emphasizes David’s entrapment and isolation. When he reaches the end of the hall, he turns to the right, making clear that he has chosen blindness.

The scene cuts to the bathroom (Fig. 5). The camera offers a full lateral shot of David with a knife in his right hand, pointing it at his eyes. A wall divides the frame into two parts, with a window on the left side the only light source. Such lighting, in addition to the composition, put David in a white vertical frame. It also mirrors a much darker version of the room on the right, foreshadowing what is to come.

The camera cuts to a medium shot of David with the knife in his hand (Fig. 6). He picks up some tissues and puts them in his mouth. The natural backlighting renders his face dark and undetectable. His face is seen in the mirror as well. When he raises his hand to put the knife in his eye, his hand is masked by the tissue holder. We only see the tip of the knife pointing at his eyes, as if someone else—perhaps society, culture, the law, or the

Fig. 5 | David is trying to blind himself in the bathroom, 01:48:16. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

Fig. 3 | A medium two shot of David and Shortsighted Woman, 01:46:45. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

Fig. 4 | The corridor, 01:48:03. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

Fig. 6 | A medium shot of David with the knife in his hand, 01:48:50. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

government— is doing it to him. He wants to be with someone he loves, but he cannot unless he blinds himself.

While David struggles with executing, the scene cuts back to the restaurant’s dining room, where Shortsighted Woman, sitting in the same booth, waits for David (Fig. 7). The camera replicates the scene’s earlier two shot of David and Shortsighted Woman, except this time, the woman sits alone, her blind eyes looking at where David had sat before. Her glass is empty, suggesting the passage of time. She moves her head to the window as if she is looking outside, at the forest. Maybe it has been enough time for her to realize that she must go back to the woods because David will not be coming back. A couple passes by the window. The family life the woman and David had planned is passing in equal measure, becoming unreachable. The

scene then cuts to darkness and focusses there for a few seconds before the film’s credit reel begins. Does it mean David has blinded himself, or does this dark interlude allude to the tragic fate of these two characters?

Whatever the case may be, The Lobster is a portrayal of human society, a society that defines “normal” and “natural” through the lenses of various criteria, including race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language, religion, ability, etc., and punishes and excludes those who do not fit those criteria. These rules may change from time to time and from one place to another. They might even seem ridiculous in the eyes of outsiders and observers. However, as The Lobster shows, any form of exclusion is dangerous and absurd and can potentially hurt all members of a society regardless of their status and qualifications. 

WORKS

CITED

The Lobster. Yorgos Lanthimos. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

Fig. 7 | The final shot, 01:49:00. Film4, Screen Ireland, 2015.

Enter the Neighbour

An Inland Empire Mise-en-scène Metonymy

BY ANDREW HAGEMAN Luther College

ABSTRACT

Inspired by teaching films that challenge narrative conventions and comprehension, this featurette demonstrates the power of sustained mise-en-scène analysis as a tool for interpreting challenging texts like Inland Empire. The featurette brings granular attention to various formal elements at work in a vital scene early in the film when a neighbour arrives for an unannounced visit that unsettles the protagonist with a message that feels as urgent as it is cryptic. David Lynch uses camera angles and proximity to frame and shape spaces, faces, and objects in ways that align with the film's motifs and meanings. In this sequence, a mesh comes into view of wealth, light, passageways, hospitality, and marriage. Though the mesh retains gaps, it holds together as a unit that also works as a metonymy for connecting, though not containing, the disparate pieces of the film.

The 2006 film Inland Empire is widely considered David Lynch’s most enigmatic feature to date. The film is brilliant and baffling, entrancing and evasive, and it effectively resists totalizing gestures of interpretive containment. For those unfamiliar with Inland Empire, the film features Laura Dern playing Nikki Grace, an actress who takes on the role of Susan Blue in a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows. Nikki’s and Susan’s subjectivities blend and blur, so it’s difficult for her, them, and us to tell who the person embodied by Laura Dern on screen is. What’s more, this narrative line on acting is juxtaposed with A Lost Girl in Poland, a surreal sitcom that stars human-size anthropomorphized rabbits, interrogations, hypnosis, and one of the weirdest backyard barbecue scenes in cinema. While it appears impossible to map the interconnectedness of these disparate pieces of the

film, a close mise-en-scène investigation of a vital sequence is a powerful way to ground interpretive work that may reach across the narrative as a whole.

One of the most vital sequences in Inland Empire unfolds early in the film when a self-proclaimed “new neighbour” (Grace Zabriskie) drops by Nikki’s house to “say hello.” This is the first appearance on screen of the protagonist, Nikki, in one of her oft-shifting subjectivities. As the narrative proceeds, Nikki’s subjectivity grows increasingly permeable and promethean to a degree immeasurably beyond the Betty/Diane/Camilla/Rita identity flux in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). This sequence centres around a parable the new neighbour abruptly shares with Nikki. Actually, the parable is more than one—but not quite two—since the neighbour tells the story and then retells it “with

a variation.” By including a parable, the sequence conjures a story meant to produce meaning through the work of interpretation, and the variation further complicates the interpretative work. The parable itself emphasizes places, particularly thresholds. As this film contains many spatial transitions, the sequence promises to be a key metonymy, and this essay investigates its miseen-scène in four distinct parts.

INTO THE FOYER

After the camera follows the as-yet-unidentified new neighbour’s approach to the door of Nikki’s expansive palazzo, the doorbell rings and there’s a cut to the interior foyer (Fig. 1). Notably weird is the distortion of this space that an extremely wide-angle shot creates. Seen from Nikki’s position at the far end of foyer, this elongated area is lavishly decorated in a style that signals an antiquated European bourgeois taste. Turkish style rugs, wooden furniture, and paintings on the wall adorn the scene, while the compressed framing generates a cacophony of patterns and atmosphere of claustrophobia despite the preceding exterior shots establishing this house as massive.

As a further index of Nikki’s wealth, her butler, Henry, is positioned at the far end of the shot where he answers the door. He inhabits the scene as an additional safeguard to the space between the wealthy homeowners inside and the world and people outside. Henry physically keeps the visitor outside of the home’s threshold until Nikki signals her approval to invite this mysterious person inside. As soon as the new neighbour has crossed into the house, the shot is reframed. While Lynch continues to deploy the space-distorting wide angle, Nikki moves toward the door and becomes visible in the same shot as Henry

In the case of Inland Empire (2006), widely considered Lynch’s most enigmatic feature, close mise-en-scène investigation can provide an anchoring node that enables interpretive work to reach across the narrative as a whole.

and the unexpected guest. The sense of a safely distanced remove collapses. Enhancing this spatial and tonal shift is the neighbour’s movement and dialogue. She says, in that spooky way that Grace Zabriskie commands, here with a Slavic accent, “I don’t mean to intrude. I’m your new neighbour. I [pauses for a long beat] hope this isn’t inconvenient for you.” At the same time, this visiting neighbour steps further into the house and stops when she occupies a position between Nikki and Henry, the three of them forming a diagonal line (Fig. 2). The scene syncs the dialogue of intrusion and hospitality with the person formally welcomed in cutting off access to both the servant and the door as potential way out.

Connected with the neighbour asserting an intimate proximity that broaches Nikki’s wealth-enabled private space, the margins of the shot are oddly framed. On the far left and right are unconventionally partial views into adjacent rooms, somewhere between slivers of distinct light that could frame the shot and glimpses of complete furniture or decor that could allow a sense of plenitude. Instead, both rooms include windows, and the daytime sunlight streaming through is intense, overexposed. The partially visible rooms appear as potential paths to avoid this

Fig. 1 | The luxury and distance of Nikki’s foyer as the neighbour arrives, 09:54. Absurda, 2006.

neighbour, and the windows are portals of egress, but ones typically associated with looking rather than passing through. All of these mise-en-scène elements initiate the neighbour’s visit as a sequence of wealth, remove, hospitality, intimacy, danger, and a proliferation of egress and ingress points.

SENDING OUT AN S-R-S

The potential danger that comes bundled with acts of hospitality, such as inviting a stranger into one’s home, formally suffuses the mise-en-scène of the shot-reverse-shot (s-r-s) exchange that follows the neighbour’s entry. Lynch has previously demonstrated his acumen for building nuanced terror through formally unsettling s-r-s exchanges, such as the in the “Breakfast at Winkie’s” scene in Mulholland Drive. The s-r-s element of this Inland Empire neighbour sequence is every bit as ominous.

The shots of Nikki throughout the exchange are consistent (Fig. 3). Her face is framed near the centre of the shot. To her right and just above her face is the lower opening of a lampshade; it presents an ellipsis of over-bright illumination at the periphery with a design on the lamppost resembling candle wax melting downward. To her left is the corner of an oil painting, the texture and cracks in the paint visibly in focus, as well as a green glass bauble like a plant bud ready to blossom upward. Nikki resides between electric light and a duo of original art and mass-produced manufacture. As such, Nikki is in the middle of a world where art and kitsch coexist on one side, while on the other side is a lamp, which Lynch famously loves and builds, powered by electricity, which he repeatedly codes as

a conduit for bad things. It’s a dynamic world. Yet, Nikki’s face is shot in clear focus and with a camera proximity and angle that capture her naturally, realistically. She is, for now at least, at ease in this place and life.

In the alternate shots that feature the neighbour, the framing is inconsistent. Her face dominates each shot, claiming a range of screen space from half to nearly two-thirds. When the intensity of her dialogue amplifies, the neighbour fills more of the screen via closer camera proximity and the unsettling intimacy it signifies. Enhancing these proximity shifts are subtle shifts in camera angle. As a result, the neighbour’s forehead looks exaggeratedly large so that Grace Zabriskie’s already dramatic eyebrow movements become supercharged (Fig. 4). The impact of these framing elements is escalated by the fact that the neighbour’s face is shot out of focus. She is close enough to feel dangerous, but despite, or perhaps because of, this spatial intimacy, who she is and what she’s trying to communicate are blurred. Furthermore, as this part of the sequence progresses, the framing and proximity changes make the neighbour’s head physically blot out the one window in the room. This leaves the stairway as the only visible egress from the room. As a composite, the mise-en-scène underscores Nikki’s increasingly urgent desire to comprehend just what she has so casually invited into her home.

The parable the neighbour shares is itself a powerful conjuring of mise-en-scène as well. She begins with the following version: “A little boy went out to play. When he opened his door, he saw the world. As he passed through the doorway, he caused a reflection. Evil was born. Evil was born, and followed the boy.” Nikki, perplexed, asks what this is, and then the neighbour

Fig. 2 | Invited in hospitably, the neighbour positions herself between Nikki and Henry, the butler, and the doorway, contracting space and dilating intimacy, 10:30. Absurda, 2006.

This supposed neighbour is close enough to feel dangerous, but despite, or perhaps because of, this spatial intimacy, who she is and what she’s trying to communicate are blurred.

Fig. 3 | Nikki is centred between lamp, painting, and glass, her face in focus, 12:56. Absurda, 2006.

Fig. 4 | The neighbour’s face is blurred and distorted through proximity, 17:48. Absurda, 2006.

adds, “An old tale, and a variation. A little girl went out to play. Lost in the marketplace, as if half-born. Then, not through the marketplace, you see that, don’t you, but through the alley behind the marketplace. This is the way to the palace.” Martha P. Nochimson has pointed out in David Lynch Swerves that the discourse of the palace references Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and she reads the sequence and film as a whole by connecting Lynch’s deep engagement with Transcendental Meditation to the aesthetics of uncertainty and paradox (134). For this sequence analysis, though, the focus is on the inclusion of a threshold, an alley to bypass, a shadow, a way. The parable’s spatial portrait maps onto the very elements strangely at play in the room where the neighbour and Nikki sit. The boy may be the husband, and the girl may be Nikki. As to “lost” though, is Nikki disoriented, isolated from goodness, or both? This sequence—and its metonymic resonance across the film—is a process of working out how to answer that question through the egresses that proliferate but which Nikki perceives as prohibited to her. This parable, which is more than one but not quite two, is a letter from the dark—from the unconscious and, therefore, from no one— yet, it contains the power to bring its receivers into the light, to borrow what Lynch has said is one of his favorite images to commit to film (Catching 129).

TIME TRAVEL IN THE LIVING ROOM

The transition to the next part of this sequence comes through a conflation of perspectives. The neighbour’s contribution to their conversation reaches a peak of intensity when she loudly and abruptly proclaims, “Brutal Fucking Murder.” She then dials it down and speaks of temporalities. The neighbour says, “Me,

But the visit, like the sequence within the film, is unforgettable, so it continues to speak even if it elides standard subjective perceptions of temporality and causality.

I can’t seem to remember if it’s today, two days from now, or yesterday. I suppose if it was 9:45, I’d think it was after midnight. For instance, if today was tomorrow, you wouldn’t even remember that you owed on an unpaid bill . . . . If it was tomorrow, you would be sitting, over there.” Just then, the film cuts to an unsteadily floating shot of the neighbour’s hand, index finger indicating a direction (Fig. 5). The point of view is the neighbour’s subjective one. But in the shot that follows, Nikki’s face is for the first time distorted through camera angle, proximity, and focus. In addition to these formal alignments with the neighbour’s face, when Nikki is shown turning to look where the finger points, she’s framed from her other side, as the camera is no longer switching back and forth from a place between Nikki and the neighbour. She’s shot from the same side as the neighbour has been. Through these mise-en-scène elements, one experiences a paradoxical toggling, as if both women are focalizing through the same eyes, sharing a subject position and point of view. These formal moves complicate Nikki’s multiple subjectivities across the film as the neighbour here oozes between being a separate person and a part of Nikki’s self speaking to itself. This turn in the sequence points at the unconscious. I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s remark about Mulholland Drive in The Weird and The Eerie, that with the unconscious there is dreaming but

Fig. 5 | The indicating finger conjures a weird conflation of subjectivities, 18:05. Absurda, 2006.

no dreamer (58). In this instance, Fisher’s claim nudges our attention towards the neighbour as one among many of Nikki’s subjectivities rather than as a letter addressed from one monadic subject to another.

The next shot looks where the finger had pointed, to the far end of the living room. The lighting, which in this room is chiefly natural via the windows, is precisely the same, as if it is the same time on the same day. Only, that cannot be, because where Nikki and the neighbour are looking, Nikki is sitting snugly between two friends on a sofa. Is this a vision or premonition? A subsequent shot reinforces the question, since the Nikki on the sofa looks across the room when hailed by her butler with a phone call from her agent, and the two chairs she and the neighbour occupy are now empty. This Nikki on the sofa seems blissfully unaware of the neighbour’s unsettling visit and cautionary nearly-double parable. She thrills to the news on the phone that she’s been offered a coveted role. But, to answer the question in the negative presumes a stable, monadic subject. In a vital way, some aspect of Nikki is also watching as the telephone call creates a crossroads where she will either enter the marketplace or the alley behind it. Her exuberant reaction to the call implies the neighbour’s visit may have been too early or too late. But the visit, like the sequence within the film, is unforgettable, so it continues to speak even if it elides conventional subjective perceptions of temporality and causality.

A TILTED EGRESS

The sequence closes on an ominous note with Nikki having walked, big smile on her face, into the trap of the marketplace. The final shots show her husband approaching the top of the

Inland Empire builds our capacity to engage fully and ethically because living is uncertainty.

stairway to a position where he can see Nikki and her friends without being seen. Across Lynch’s works, stairways are powerful passageways, diagonal corridors that lead up and down but at angles and with each step requiring intentional ascent or descent. Indeed, the ceiling fan connected with BOB in Twin Peaks resides atop the stairway of the Palmer house, and in The Return, Mr. C and Agent Cooper must ascend a stairway to meet with Phillip Jefferies in his metallic non-human form. In this shot of Inland Empire, the last remaining egress from the sitting room appears closed off by the spectral menace of the husband. From the neighbour’s visit, it’s implied that he used his influence to ensure Nikki got the role, so his gaze suggests he’s observing the first result in what is ultimately his sadomasochistic test of her commitment to their marital bond.

One subtle piece of the mise-en-scène manages, however, paradoxically to maintain an opening within the overwhelming sense of closure. As the husband observes Nikki’s joy, he places a hand on a newel, a key support post of the stairway (Fig. 6). The emphasized hand gesture rhymes with the weird framing of the neighbour’s pointing hand. In this latter case, the husband’s hands grip the post with deliberate and furious control. Yet, the stairway is porous, comprised of many holes between posts on the bannister side. The corridor still includes a way out, and the alley remains an alternative to the marketplace, albeit a narrow and temporary way. The sequence ends with a cut to an exterior

Fig. 6 | The husband’s hand projects his overconfident sense of control, 19:15. Absurda, 2006.

view of the Hollywood sign. Yes, the iconic sign implies that Nikki is now lost in the marketplace. Yet, I agree with Alanna Thain that there is something else besides a condemnation of Hollywood as an evil marketplace at work (92). The neighbour’s visit sequence has, after all, established the persistence of egress points if one can imagine and seek them out.

METONYMY IN THE MESH

The neighbour’s visit is a productive node in the network of Inland Empire. It connects with the many living rooms that span the film, from the set of the Rabbits television show and the shots on set when Nikki and Susan bubble into each other, including the unforgettable “Locomotion” dance sequence, to the finale musical dance sequence of liberation that reclaims

and reinvents the domestic hearth place. The visit connects with the ethical moments of hospitality, from the interviews with the hypnotized victim to the spontaneous picnic with the circus personnel. And it connects with Nikki’s visions (whether literal or figurative, past or present or future) of the alleyway and the door marked “AXXONN.” By paying close attention to the mise-en-scène of the neighbour’s visit, one identifies objects and ideas to analyze discretely across the film, ultimately assembling them into an interpretive mesh. Yes, there will still be gaps. But didn’t the neighbour’s visit instruct us that the gaps are the way to the palace? Inland Empire builds our capacity to engage fully and ethically because living is uncertainty 

WORKS CITED

Fisher, Mark. The Weird and The Eerie. Repeater Books, 2017. Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.

---. Inland Empire. Absurda, 2006.

---. Mulholland Drive. Les Films Alain Sarde, 2001.

---. Twin Peaks. Lynch/Frost Productions, 1990-1991.

---. Twin Peaks: The Return. Rancho Rosa Partnership, 2017. Nochimson, Martha P. David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire. U of Texas P, 2013. Thain, Alanna. “Rabbit Ears: Locomotion in Lynch’s Inland Empire.” David Lynch in Theory. Edited by Francois-Xavier Gleyzon. Literraria Pragensia Books, 2010, pp. 86-100.

The Empty Vessel

Chronicles of the ‘Unfed’ Womb — Examining Symbolic Female Bodies and the Absence of Bodily Autonomy in Alien 3

BY JORDAN REDEKOP-JONES Kwantlen Polytechnic University

ABSTRACT

Alien 3 (1992) explores what it means to be a woman in horror as defined solely by motherhood and womanhood. Following the devastating loss of maternal relationship between Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn) during a crash landing, the protagonist Ripley must navigate the prisoner planet Fiorina 161 as the sole survivor and woman amongst violent convicts placed in isolation from society for their heinous acts against women. Director David Fincher uses a dark, isolated setting to explore the patriarchy’s definition of bodily autonomy through the abjection of an unwanted alien pregnancy, the void-like environment of the prison, and the uncontrolled, fast paced violence of the prisoners and ‘rogue’ alien. This essay seeks to examine the concept of Barbara Creed’s ‘Monstrous Feminine’ as seen through the patriarchy’s fear of the parthenogenetic alien queen and the abject womb of Fiorina 161.

Rosemary Betterton argues that “Barbara Creed identified the birthing monster in the Alien series as the ‘archaic mother’ whose alien materiality threatens to engulf human subjects” (81). The alien mother incites great fear in the fictional world of the Alien series because of her threat to devastate and destroy humankind through numerous unfertilized pregnancies. Likewise, women who choose to reproduce in American society are treated with similar animosity. Their ability to carry children and the looming fear of parthenogenetic pregnancies, defined as “reproduction from an ovum without fertilization” (Oxford Languages), make the patriarchy feel virtually obsolete in childbearing. Thus, their insecurities have driven scholars such as Creed to coin and study the term ‘the monstrous feminine’ or what refers to “what it is about women that is terrifying, horrific, abject” (27). Under the male gaze, women are feared because of the abject, which Kristeva terms [as] that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’; that

which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’” (Kristeva qtd. in Creed 8). Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the womb, and monstrous motherhood defy ‘the system’ because the female body/uterus is something which cannot be controlled even by women themselves. David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) reveals the patriarchy’s anxiety surrounding women’s power, and men’s inability to achieve reproduction in the same way. In this film, Ripley’s unwanted pregnancy leads her to her own death and destruction not only as a mother figure, but as a woman as well. By looking at the way the female body is appropriated in horror, we can see how bodily autonomy is a source of power for women, and in turn, a source of fear for those who cannot control it. Most importantly, this film depicts patriarchal vexation and disgust as illustrated through the symbolic womb of the prisoner planet and symbolic bodies in general.

The symbolic womb first appears in the destruction and entrapment of the pod’s occupants including Newt (Carrie

Henn) in Ripley’s ship. After Ripley’s attempt to save herself and Newt in the previous film Aliens (1986), their pod/ship crash lands on the prison planet Fiorina 161. The first of many painful realities of Ripley’s motherhood is Newt’s death, even whilst Ripley attempts to keep her safe both in the womb of the pod and during autopsy. Throughout the film, Ripley must face the grief of losing her ‘adopted’ daughter, as well as the loss of her own bodily autonomy. In Figure 1, one of the pods is shattered, which suggests trauma to the pod as symbolic womb as well as foreshadowing Ripley’s own lost ‘pregnancy’. The low key lighting presents an interruption to the sacred space of Newt’s enclosed pod, which Ripley drapes herself over as if it were a pregnant belly outside of herself, forever stuck in time. Here, the pod is a symbolic womb that was supposed to keep Newt safe from the aliens, even though it ultimately causes her to drown.

Besides the symbolic womb, attention is drawn to Newt’s death through an autopsy table’s drain, which is symbolic of Newt’s rib cage (Fig. 2). Figures 2, 3, and 4 reveal how early on women’s bodily autonomy is removed and controlled. Significantly, Newt’s autopsy is conducted by a man, Clemens (Charles Dance) though it is closely supervised by Ripley. Newt is being autopsied to check for traces of an alien, though because she is a child, the director does not rely on graphic shots of her bare body and open rib cage to demonstrate the pain of being witness to such a loss. Instead, the drain runs clear one moment in Figure 1, then the camera pans to a knife and returns to a drain that runs red with her blood in Figure 2. It is through this removal of visual horror that viewers are subjected to the auditory cracking of Newt’s bones. In Figure 4, Ripley is highlighted in low key lighting with half her face bruised and shadowed in between life and death, as she watches over her adopted daughter, still working to protect her body even in the afterlife. She is evidently in pain at having to remove Newt’s bodily autonomy in order to ensure that her corpse has not and will not be used as a vessel for alien life, which is seen later when Ripley demands Newt’s cremation in the void. Furthermore, “Alien 3 opens upon a scene that displays a new possibility for horror, that of the complete failure of essential motherhood” (Waldrop 37). Arguably, this could be translated to the failure of womanhood itself, as even though Ripley does not give birth to Newt, she cannot save her from the patriarchy as her dead body is surrounded by what Andrews (Brian

the

Glover) defines as “thieves, rapists, murderers, child molesters” (00:21:04/1:54:00) in an all-male prison. Thus, she demands Newt be cremated so that her corpse is safe from the alien as well as the violent offenders. Figures 2, 3 and 4 are suggestive of menstruation or abortion where a life is symbolically washed down the drain. Even if Newt were alive, she would become a target of the patriarchy as a young girl with reproductive promise in the same way Ripley has reproductive promise for the alien. Later in the film when viewers are reminded that the alien births happen from the chest cavity, it brings attention to the risk pregnancy puts on the female body and the chest as a figurative womb. Symbolically, the cryo tube that Newt is stored in represents the containers where fetuses are stored in science labs, which suggests that Newt was just a fetus herself; her potential lost. In the womb of the cryo tube, Newt was doomed to die due to complications that were beyond her control. Newts are “small slender-bodied [amphibians]” that “typically [spend] [their] adult [lives] on land and [return] to water to breed” (Oxford Languages). Her death by drowning (00:16:46/1:54:00) and isolation within her pod represents the

Fig. 1 | One of the pods is shattered and Ripley drapes herself over Newt’s Pod in Fincher’s Alien 3, 00:13:00 and 00:13:17. Brandywine Productions, 20th Century Studios, 1992.

Fig. 2 | Water runs down the drain during Newt’s Autopsy in Fincher’s Alien 3, 00:16:33. Brandywine Productions/ 20th Century Studios, 1992.

Fig. 3 | Blood enters

drain during Newt’s Autopsy in Fincher’s Alien 3, 00:16:45. Brandywine Productions/ 20th Century Studios, 1992.

control the patriarchy has over young female life. As well, the helplessness that Ripley feels demonstrates this symbolic loss of her child as well as her own bodily autonomy as she later realizes her own role in carrying an alien child. Moreover, it is a reflection on how the ‘man-made’ synthetic womb will always pale in comparison to a real one.

Notably, references to flowering in the film also contend with motherhood, womanhood and even death. In Figure 5, Ripley’s nose bleeds as she watches the bodies of Newt and Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) fall into the incinerator. Her nosebleed illustrates a symbolic miscarriage and the isolation of her face in this frame emphasizes how lonely this instance can be. Dillon’s (Charles S. Dutton) birth related monologue in this scene incites a contrasting and harrowing image of motherhood. At (00:24:43-00:24:58/1:54:00) when he says “For within each seed, there is a promise of a flower. And within each death, no matter how small, there’s always a new life,” he foreshadows her pregnancy as Ripley’s nose bleeds This signals first blood: it runs down as menstrual blood might, or a rejected egg implantation, or the painful birth of a newborn baby.

The setting of the film on the planet Fiorina 161 is the first foreshadowing of Ripley’s doomed pregnancy. “Fior” means flower in Italian, and by nature refers to springtime: a time of reproduction and blooming of the earth in all forms. Dillon’s positioning of women’s reproductivity (seeds) as probable mothers (flowers) assumes that birth and motherhood is

natural, expected and beautiful which is divorced from the often painful and abject embodiment of the experience. Thus, suggesting that even Ripley’s forced pregnancy and symbolic miscarriage of Newt are acceptable because the patriarchy deems these circumstances as an expected result of womanhood. In the Hebrew dictionary, the number 161 means “to be united” (2023). This is another example of curious foreshadowing in the film considering the clear divide of the prisoners and Ripley at the beginning and their inevitable though fragmented union by the end of the film. The flowering references contrast the image of the prison and the prisoners, in the same way the prisoners’ reformed Christianity contrasts the prisoners’ heinous acts against women. Dillon as the ‘religious’ leader of the cult talks of the balance of life in such a way that places him in a godlike position as the ultimate patriarch, watching as the bodies are thrown into “the void.” Ripley’s presence on the edge of the incinerator as the bodies are dropped into the void as well as Newt’s autopsy draw attention to Ripley’s role as guardian and supervisor of her adopted child. Even though she is outnumbered by the prisoner occupants of Fiorina 161, she claims her place among them early on in the film in her safekeeping of Newt’s body: the one she could save from the aliens but not from death itself.

In this film, the all-male prison serves as a void or dark womb; “a form of “abjection”” (Kristeva qtd. Silver 409). As Kristeva says, the womb is abject because it is uncontrollable, defying societal ‘rules’ and ‘systems’ which is mirrored by the violent offenders. The prison hosts Ripley (a woman) and an alien, which are two things the patriarchy is incapable of controlling. In this light, both the alien and Ripley bear witness to each other’s isolation, especially when Ripley becomes pregnant with the alien child and is shockingly preserved. As a symbolic womb, the prison serves as a place of development in terms of Ripley’s alien pregnancy and in the rehabilitation of its prisoners. Despite their practise of reformed ‘Christianity’, the fear and hatred of the womb becomes directed towards the only woman present: Ripley. Even “[Miles] points out that in Christian art, hell was often represented as a womb, ‘a lurid and rotting uterus’ where sinners were perpetually tortured for their crimes (qtd. in Creed 43).

As first incited by the alien queen and exacerbated by Ripley, their fear of women is present “in the film’s images of blood, darkness and death,” as well as “in the images of birth, the representations of the primal scene, [and] the womb-like imagery” (Creed 19). In Figure 6, the wind tunnel and worker are highlighted in soft, low key lighting symbolizing their “stasis” in the symbolic womb, yet they are attacked by an alien moments later. The fast-paced mutilation of the worker demonstrates the juxtaposition of the “abject” womb as giver of life and even in some cases the cause of death. Therefore, it displays the inherent lack of ostensible safety.

In the symbolic womb of the prison, the high-risk prisoners are held as a result of molesting and killing women. The womb “in Christianity [was] a place of sin where evil was located” (Douglas qtd. in Silver 410). Additionally, it “[is]

Fig. 4 | Ripley supervises Newt’s autopsy in Fincher’s Alien 3, 00:17:31. Brandywine Productions/ 20th Century Studios, 1992.

Fig. 5 | Ripley’s nose bleeding in Fincher’s Alien 3, 00:24:32. Brandywine Productions/ 20th Century Studios, 1992.

a menace to the social order” (Mitchell qtd. in Silver 411), because it departs from Freud’s idea of a “melancholic attachment to an idealized wholeness and well-being (stasis)” (Silver 415). This lingering dread persists because of “[the] archaic mother,” otherwise known “[as] the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end” (Creed 17). Ripley’s existence in the prison is mirrored by the alien who is simultaneously feared and incites violence and pain in the lives of the prisoners. Abstaining in her ‘tempting’ presence symbolizes their first imprisonment through pregnancy (in the womb) and their current imprisonment on a planet that starves them of all their desires, including assaulting her. Because they are violent offenders who have almost exclusively preyed on women, viewers can imagine how Ripley’s presence on the planet greatly endangers her bodily autonomy. The prisoners’ experienced rejection on a desolate planet is paralleled by Ripley’s own experienced rejection as a woman and as a symbolic mother to Newt. Ripley and the prisoners are alike in their ‘alien’ states and the latter are ‘rejected ‘by the alien itself, which leads to their demise.

Ripley’s introduction to Fiorina 161 reveals the true nature of the prisoners and in conjunction with the alien, wreaks havoc on a dysfunctional system long enforced and ignored because of its benefit for men. In other words, “Ripley, herself, threatens the sanctity of the cloister on the planet where her ship crash-lands” (Waldrop 37). Furthermore, as Laura Mulvey elaborates, “[the] presence of women is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (Mulvey 809). Ripley, while not traditionally framed for the erotic gaze, is still considered a spectacle as a woman because of the abject. She is fetishized by the prisoners, even while “[she] attempts to blend in by shaving her head and donning baggy, masculine clothes similar to those worn by the cloistered men” (Waldrop 38). In her final act of self-destruction, “Ripley turns her back on the corrupt [alien] child within her and potential future children by jumping to her death, arms first out in a horrible, upside-down parody of crucifixion, and then gently and maternally wrapped around

the “child” that bursts from her chest” (39). As seen in Figure 7, Ripley’s decision to jump into the incinerator is a way to escape her life both as a woman and a mother. As the flames engulf her body, she is no longer a vessel for the patriarchy. Her journey into the void marks her acceptance that as a woman, she will always be “simultaneously looked at and displayed” (Mulvey 272) for the male gaze as well as constantly criticized for not doing enough in her ‘role’ as a woman. The loss of Newt and her ‘abandonment’ of her ‘duties’ as a woman carrying an alien child paint her as “no longer the good mother” but “a monster” (Waldrop 37). Even though it was not her choice to survive the crash that killed Newt and Corporal Hicks, she defies the odds by being a woman in a prison surrounded by men “who can’t keep themselves from wanting to [assault] her” (39) and being motherless by choice until that choice is taken away from her. Because of her agency, “Ripley’s femininity is both unshakable and dangerous for her and the men around her” (38), which frightens the company men and prisoners who wish to control her bodily autonomy.

Moreover, the pregnant female body and Fiorina 161 are both othered by the company men; the existence of both the female body and the planet displays “the illegibility of the materiality of a pregnant body within a visual economy that everywhere marks the boundary between the self and other” (Phelan 171). Just like the company men desire to occupy and control territory (the planet itself, Ripley, and the alien), “[the] hidden quality of the womb supports men’s blindness and denial that in turn encourage their sexualized phantasies of capturing and controlling the womb” (Silver 413). Despite the tension between the occupants of Fiorina 161, the relationship between the alien and Ripley is one of understanding, not only because she is carrying an alien baby inside of her, but also because pregnancy in all forms is considerably dangerous and grotesque under the male gaze in its relation to bodily function and the maternal versus paternal symbolic. As Linda Williams elucidates, there is “[a] surprising affinity (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman, the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing” (62). Alien 3 remains pivotal to the idea of monstrous motherhood as a sci fi/ horror film.

Fig. 6 | A worker gets attacked by an alien and explodes in the fan in Fincher’s Alien 3, 00:30:24 and 00:31:34. Brandywine Productions/ 20th Century Studios, 1992.

Furthermore, as a female character in horror film who fully undergoes the throes of womanhood and motherhood, Ripley’s complexity and resilience cannot be underestimated. 

Fig. 7 | Ripley falling into the incinerator in Fincher’s Alien 3, 01:47:32. Brandywine Productions/ 20th Century Studios, 1992.

WORKS CITED

Alien 3. Directed by David Fincher, performances by Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, and Charles Dance. Brandywine Productions, 20th Century Studios, 1992.

Betterton, Rosemary. “Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination.” Hypatia, vol. 21, no. 1, 2006, pp. 80-100.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1993.

“Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, edited by Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay, Routledge, 1999.

“Newt, n.” Oxford Languages, 2023, /languages.oup.com/ google-dictionary-en/

“Parthenogenetic, n.” Oxford Languages, 2023, /languages.oup. com/google-dictionary-en/

Silver, Catherine B. “Womb Envy: Loss and Grief of the Maternal Body.” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 94, no. 3, 2007, pp. 409-30 ProQuest,ezproxy.kpu.ca:2443/login?url=www.proquest.com/ scholarly-journals/womb-envy-loss-grief-maternal-body/ docview/195088823/se-2

Waldrop, Kelly. “Bellies that Go Bump in the Night: The Gothic Curriculum of Essential Motherhood in the Alien Movie Franchise.” JCT (Online), Suppl.Special Issue: Curriculum of the Monstrous, vol. 34, no. 5, 2019, pp. 32-43. ProQuest, ezproxy. kpu.ca:2443/login?url=www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/bellies-that-go-bump-night-gothic-curriculum/ docview/2355328012/se-2

Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas Press, 2015, pp. 17–35.

David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the Los Angeles Uncanny

LYDIA FRASER Harvard University

ABSTRACT

Unlike other American metropolises, Los Angeles’ identity is inextricably intertwined with moving images and postmodernism, thereby ascribing the city with an ahistorical character and evoking a sense of the uncanny—a subject rooted in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. An interdisciplinary study of various theories of the uncanny synthesizes a new Los Angeles Uncanny that acknowledges the complexities of urban experiences that are unique to the City of Angels. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) is a film that fundamentally relies on its setting in Los Angeles for its metaexploration of the implications of the media and entertainment industry. Placing the synthesized theory in conversation with Lynch’s film unveils the hidden histories and identities of Los Angeles—the suppression of which, this essay argues, is ultimately responsible for the uncanniness and horror experienced in Mulholland Drive.

The uncanny—a concept that intertwines the strange and familiar—has long fascinated scholars, evolving from its origins in German psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalysis to a rich field of study that permeates modern humanities, revealing the eerie intersections between our known world and its hidden depths. The term first originated from psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in On the Psychology of the Uncanny and was then reanalyzed by Sigmund Freud in his essay The Uncanny. While the “uncanny” was often translated to mean “unhomely,” the German word for it—unheimlich—deconstructed more literally translates to “unconcealed” or “un-secret.” Under this repositioning, Freud describes the uncanny to mean something which “ought to have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light” (224). It is a paradoxical compound of the strange and the familiar–“that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Vidler 7). As a Freudian concept, the uncanny has been a source for much theory and analysis, the continued augmentation of which now includes many studies within the humanities including architecture, queer studies, film studies, urban studies, etc. These “uncanny studies” have only expanded as experiences of the modern continue to defamiliarize a world once thought to

be understood and “prepare the way for its inevitable return in disturbing, unrecognised form” (Collins and Jervis 4).

Urbanization, perhaps one of the most widely felt phenomena of modernism, continues to shift our construction of cities as they rapidly grow to accommodate increasing populations. This urbanization, despite maximizing the proximity between citizens, has also raised questions about feelings of anxieties, estrangement, and dissociation–experiences and sentiments often attributed explicitly to urban cities (Huskinson 1). The city allows the co-existence of millions of people but produces minimal interpersonal interactions. The urban uncanny, then, might “denote the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city, as the organised and familiar setting for citizens…and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it can evoke” (1). These uncanny experiences signal to something dormant and hidden, waiting to expose itself.

My intent with this contextualization of the urban uncanny is its application to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a film about an amnesiac woman who later names herself Rita after suffering a car crash in Los Angeles. In this initial scene, we are introduced to Rita (Laura Harring) in the context of the cityscape,

which captures the sprawling urban expanse of the city at night. The shot, taken from the site of Rita’s car crash, sets the stage for the film’s exploration of the uncanny within an urban context (Fig. 1). The vast, illuminated grid of the city appears both mesmerizing and disorienting, highlighting the dual nature of Los Angeles as a beacon of dreams and a labyrinth of hidden truths. The framing of the shot through the foliage adds an element of voyeurism and concealment. It implies that we are peering into a world where much remains hidden beneath the surface, aligning with Freud’s notion of the uncanny as something that should have stayed hidden but has come to light—one of the most conspicuous being the mystery of Rita’s true identity which triggers her friendship with Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress who has just moved to the city to pursue her goals. Mulholland Drive follows the two women as they attempt to figure out who Rita is. An unconventional movie that toys with the viewer’s perception of time, reality, identity, and narrative, Mulholland Drive has been subject to much academic analyses. With elements of the mystery, horror, and thriller genres (in addition to the David Lynch branding), it can also be opened up to studies of the uncanny–specifically, in this case, the urban uncanny. Particularly, Mulholland Drive’s setting in Los Angeles unlocks a reading of Lynch’s movie as an essay film dissecting the role of Los Angeles in the aforementioned urban uncanny. Through this essentialization of the city in Mulholland Drive emerges a concept of the uncanny that is especially unique to Los Angeles—interacting with the hidden, unsettling realities beneath the city’s historicism, glamorous surface, and architecture.

To first break down why Los Angeles is distinct from other major urban cities like New York, the romanticization of Los Angeles is largely dominated by perceptions of Hollywood and

the city’s relationship with the movie camera and filmmaking. This puts Los Angeles in a rather unique position relative to modernism, enforcing a “distinctively post-industrial and postmodern character”–“an exceptional urban paradigm in whose image more and more of the world’s urban landscapes are being reshaped every day” (Shiel 16). Upon the shift from the modern to postmodern, Los Angeles displaced Chicago as the epitome of twentieth century urbanism and the “forerunner to postmodern urbanism” (Maher 15).

But despite there being plenty of writing on the connections between the uncanny and modernism and urbanism–with Jo Collins and and John Jervis even going as far as to describe the uncanny as a “distinctively modern experience” in their book Uncanny Modernity–there appears to be little literature on the city of Los Angeles and the uncanny. In Lucy Huskinson’s collection of essays entitled The Urban Uncanny, there are writings on various urban cities from Budapest to New York, but little to no reference to Los Angeles, which was considered to be an “urban anomaly” for much of its development (15). This paper attempts to remedy that gap. By placing Mulholland Drive in dialogue with the earlier-established theory of the urban uncanny, we can analyze how the uncanny of Lynch’s film can be traced back to Los Angeles’s repressed or overlooked identities and histories in favour of a modernized and romanticized self-image.

Placed in conversation with Anthony Vidler’s writings on The Architectural Uncanny, we can centre the urban uncanny on the development of urban spaces. The architectural uncanny of urbanism would, according to Vidler, derive from the empty spaces “appropriated” by urbanism and “given over to architecture, which is forced, in the absence of a lived past, to search for posthistorical grounds on which to base an ‘authentic’ home for

Fig. 1 | Cityscape view from the site of Rita’s crash in Mulholland Drive, 00:07:16. Universal Pictures, 2001.

society” (Vidler 13). This ultimately culminates into uncanny experiences reminding us of “possibilities that are latent within, and other perspectives and orientations to life” (Huskinson 3).

This uncanny navigation between one’s expectations of the city as a place of organization and its unsettling experiences is most potent in the initial scene at the Winkie’s diner. The first clip of this scene unmistakably orients the viewer to its location: Sunset Boulevard, but nothing else really situates the viewer in this particular diner. Any following shot of its interior is relative to the two men we are immediately introduced to seated at a booth, Dan (Patrick Fischler) and Herb (Michael Cooke). Dan initiates the conversation by saying, “I just wanted to come here.” Herb, the second man, responds, “To Winkie’s?” to which Dan clarifies, “This Winkie’s,” which, as we already know, is the Winkie’s on Sunset Boulevard. Dan, evidently petrified for some reason unknown to us at the moment, then begins a spiel about a recurring dream about a frightening man in the back of the same Winkie’s they are dining at, emphasizing his desire to settle his paranoia. Their conversation further emphasizes the centrality of the location to this clip but solely from the perspective of Dan’s imagination and his perceived reality.

Through his nightmare, Dan has caught a glimpse of the very mismatch between city and person referenced by the urban uncanny. As the film has already established, Dan and Herb are on Sunset Boulevard, which is one of the most well-known streets in Hollywood and a popular tourist destination. Here, the city has much at stake in upholding its romanticized character. To expose the hidden here would be to remove the city’s rose-tinted filter. After Dan recounts his dream and reveals he has come to Winkie’s to rid himself of “this god-awful feeling,” Herb stands up from his seat at the booth assertively. Once he leaves the shot, the camera

cuts back to Dan’s face, filled with apprehension. He pauses before turning his head back over his shoulder to see Herb standing by the cash register, exactly like he had just previously described in his dream. When he turns his head back around to look forward, the dread settles in his face as he closes his eyes in fear. Dan’s experience of the uncanny is not just a dream obstructed from reality. It is a “mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming” (Vidler 11). This manifestation of this elision compels both Dan and the viewer to question the boundaries of the real and the unreal in Hollywood’s carefully curated narrative (Fig. 2).

While general trends can be determined within the urbanization of most major American cities on the east, they are usually not applicable to Los Angeles. As aforementioned, Los Angeles has been historically considered to be an exception to the metropolitanization of the twentieth century and has been known more for straying from the traditional urban characteristics of cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, Boston, and Philadelphia (Maher 13). Los Angeles’ antithesis to other urban American cities contextualized by the centralization of estrangement and defamiliarization to the uncanny already sets it up in a peculiar situation relative to the urban uncanny. Its location in southern California and the dominance of Hollywood on its identity not only place it in a position of estrangement physically but also culturally, which ensued in a contentious process over putting Los Angeles on the map in the early to mid-twentieth century (Shiel 69).

To delve deeper into the earlier mentioned observation of Los Angeles and modernism, because Los Angeles is so heavily associated with filmmaking, and cinema has been a “key social and historical phenomena…symptomatic of modernity,” through

Fig. 2 | Dan and Herb inside of Winkie’s Diner in Mulholland Drive, 00:12:23. Universal Pictures, 2001.

transitive property, Los Angeles, then, is the American city most synonymous with modernism and its various stages throughout the twentieth century–an association that has only strengthened as Hollywood has continued to monopolize the film industry even in the twenty-first century (Maher 23). This attachment of the “modern” to Los Angeles has resulted in general critiques and prejudices about its “monotonous placelessness,” “contemporary condition,” “transience and lack of history” (Shiel 15, 16). While Shiel acknowledges the film history in Los Angeles in which early motion pictures are able to conjure memories that no longer exist and that most of us have never experienced, he also points to the city’s history of the reinforcement of middle-class white AngloSaxon Protestant hegemony in films, which has been contingent on the appropriation and erasure of pre-modern histories of Native, Spanish, and Mexican Californians and an ignorance to residents living under the poverty line (8).

Back at Winkie’s, as Dan and Herb head toward the back of the diner, they pass by a sign labeled “Entrance” with “Use the front door” written above it and an arrow pointing in the opposite way of which they are walking. There are two signs here indicating to Dan and Herb that they are going in a direction they are not supposed to–warning them of the back. The back is intended for things that are not meant to be seen. The two men proceed to go behind Winkie’s anyway. The camera, filmed from Dan’s perspective, gives the audience an overview: garbage cans with overflowing trash–no cityscape, no Hollywood sign (Fig. 3). This perverts the reputation Los Angeles has meticulously attempted to build for itself and foreshadows the impending horror the two men are about to confront. The overflowing trash points to the accumulation of the city’s discarded and repressed elements, both literally and metaphorically. As Dan and Herb move closer to this

concealed area, the mundane and neglected surroundings enhance the uncanny feeling—transforming an ordinary space into one filled with dread and suspense. Simultaneously, upon this collapse between dream and reality, the audience is forced to confront their own assumptions about the city. This is not the Hollywood people like Betty dream of living in. By leading the characters (and the viewers) into this grim setting, Lynch effectively sets the stage for the revelation of the terror lurking in the shadows.

When Dan and Herb reach the very back past the garbage cans, the man from Dan’s dream appears, coinciding with an abrupt muffled sound, before Dan collapses to his death. If this abrupt sound is meant to be associated with the startling presence of the man behind Winkie’s, then we can reasonably conclude it to also delineate the moment we realize the world of dream, intended to be kept separate from reality, is no longer separate from reality. Furthermore, in another conditional statement, if, according to Freud, dreams are channels for unconscious and repressed sentiments, then their physical rupture into reality in Mulholland Drive might mean the materialization or exposure of the hidden or suppressed (44). In Dan’s case, placed in the context of the urban uncanny, the man from his dream–who we can deduce by the end of the film to be an unhoused person living behind Winkie’s–represents the sudden rupture from a purposefully fabricated to an unfiltered, unconcealed Los Angeles that threatens the artificial harmony between city and citizen. This figure, much like the trash-strewn alleyway, represents the unwanted and the unseen—elements of the city that defy its cultivated image. The scene’s layout, therefore, is not just a backdrop but an integral part of the narrative that deepens the sense of unease and anticipation, foreshadowing the nightmare that is about to become reality.

Fig. 3 | The back of Winkie’s Diner in Mulholland Drive, 00:16:15. Universal Pictures, 2001.

From this perspective, Los Angeles’ seeming “absence of a lived past” would manifest in the form of an attempted “ contemporary memory theater” without a past (Vidler 183, 201). But the urban uncanny’s mismatch between the city and its citizens’ habitation, predicated upon a “return of the repressed” that forces the ego to confront that past betrays itself via Los Angeles’ suppressed histories and identities (Huskinson 2). In short, in order to build its current image of modernity, as the Los Angeles metropolis was being formed, its prior indigenous and cultural histories were forced to go into hiding to institute the “essential complicity of the architect’s project and the collective memory from which it derives” (Vidler 204). In place of this repressed history was a modern film history that established Los Angeles as the “narcissistic…self-referential and self-promoting” city that we know today, “driven by the production and consumption of images” (Shiel 15). Not unsurprisingly, this carefully constructed reputation developed alongside the city’s just-as-carefully constructed urban space and grid plans that are infamously exclusionary to unhoused residents (Nally). These methodically compartmentalized areas offer suggestions for where citizens can travel to but are often negotiated by those same citizens, once again exposing an uncanny slippage between the city and its inhabitants’ lived experiences. In their subjective negotiations of Los Angeles spaces and grids, citizens open themselves to the urban uncanny of the very suppressed identities the city has attempted to keep concealed.

This manufactured perception of Los Angeles, dependent on its relationship to Hollywood and film, is most obvious when Betty first arrives at the Los Angeles International Airport. Her entrance in Mulholland Drive is emblematic of an idealized Los Angeles (Fig. 4a). She is literally radiant–a sharp contrast to Rita’s introduction, shrouded in darkness and mystery (Fig. 4b). This spotlight on Betty is constant until she visits Club Silencio with Rita. The film’s emphasis on light through Betty’s experience of Los Angeles is evocative of the historical zoning of filmmaking studios as “light industrial” areas in Los Angeles, which is also, not accidentally, what the city was and still is most associated with. These zones have allowed the filmmaking process to exploit light in both its natural and artificial forms (Martin 52). Here, Betty is the aspiring star still unknowingly subject to the romanticization of Los Angeles and the city’s architecture. Thus, the light here highlights, quite literally, its own cruciality in both architecture and cinema. What is meant to mimic a natural spotlight on Betty in this scene then simultaneously evokes a sense of cinematic commodification as she arrives to the city to live a life behind the camera and under the lights.

To clarify, the totality of this characterization of Los Angeles does not make an argument about Lynch’s knowledge of Los Angeles history and cultural landscape or his filmic intentions–which would be a disservice to his deliberate ambiguity with his filmography–but rather to advance the essentiality of Los Angeles in Mulholland Drive via its unique relation to the urban uncanny.

In one of the final sequences before Betty becomes Diane and Rita becomes Camilla, Betty and Rita go to Club Silencio, located in downtown Los Angeles. In this club, illusions are unmasked and

deceptions are revealed–the perfect foundations for the “return of the repressed.” As Betty and Rita approach the club, the camera catches an incomplete shot of the US Bank Tower, the tallest building in the area (Fig. 5), seemingly emphasizing the rigid grid these towers are built on, “highlighting a tension between downtown’s intensely controlled spaces and the fluidity of Mulholland Drive” (Martin 56). The grid entails the most precise yet repetitive compartmentalization of space. “Los Angeles’ grid…in Lynch’s spatial pantheon” is a “form of repetition that seduces, circulates, and subverts reality” (56). This subversion of reality is what Betty falls victim to, what Dan’s dream exposes, and what the urban uncanny is grounded upon.

To further dissect the relevance of Club Silencio within the context of “the repressed,” the club’s exposé on illusions might serve as a parallel to the imminent exposure of Betty’s presumed fantasmatic life, but it can also serve as a parallel to the urban uncanny that threatens to unveil the city’s “repressed” and estrange one from their conceptions and understandings of Los Angeles. As previously mentioned, the urbanization of Los Angeles was built on the suppression of Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican Californian history–the disclosure of which triggers the urban uncanny and a recollection of “the old city, its old monuments, its traditional significance, which were all seen as being too implicated with the economic, social, political, and medical problems of the old world to justify retention” (Vidler 179). Before Betty and Rita go to Club Silencio, Rita mutters Spanish phrases in her sleep that prompt their journey into downtown Los Angeles in the middle of the night. We can conclude from the announcements made and the singer’s rendition of “Crying” that Club Silencio is a Spanish club. Rita’s connection to this club can be reasoned

Figs. 4a & 4b | Betty's and RIta's character introduction in Mulholland Drive, respectively, 00:18:37, 00:05:13. Universal Pictures, 2001.

from her discovered heritage, which, up until this point, has been suppressed by her amnesiac state in Betty’s presumed fantasy. She finally realizes her “true voice, and it is a Spanish one” (Martin 60). Here, Rita’s forcible repression of her identity by Betty is analogous to the forced suppression of Los Angeles’ pre-metropolis histories by Hollywood.

The modernization and urbanization of Los Angeles have synonymized it with Hollywood and the film industry. However, a closer inspection of the city and its situation within society and history reveals additional layers beneath the domination of

modern, white bourgeois Hollywood. By using the urban uncanny to read Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, we can better comprehend urban experiences unique to Los Angeles and thus unconceal what has been hidden through the development of the metropolis. These uncanny ruptures in the city’s construction that are initially unsettling and destabilizing to the relationship between city and citizen, however, can also lead to better insights and understandings that open up opportunities for new and more authentic experiences of the city. 

Collins, Jo, and John Jervis. Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Franz Deutliche, Leipzig & Vienna, 1899.

---. The Uncanny. Historical Books, 1919. Huskinson, Lucy. “ Introduction.” The Urban Uncanny: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies , Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, 2016, pp. 1–17.

Lynch, David, director. Mulholland Drive. Universal Pictures, 2001.

Maher, Sean W. Film Noir and Los Angeles: Urban History and the Dark Imaginary. Routledge, 2020.

Martin, Richard. The Architecture of David Lynch. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Nally, Leland. “ This Map Shows Where Unhoused People Aren’t Allowed to Exist in Los Angeles.” VICE, 23 Aug. 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbaez/this-mapshows-where-unhoused-people-arent-allowed-to-existin-los-angeles.

Shiel, Mark. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles Reaktion Books, 2012.

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT Press, 1999. WORKS CITED

Fig. 5 | During Betty and Rita’s drive to Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive, 01:44:46. Universal Pictures, 2001.

From Innocence to Experience:

On the Significance of Sansa Stark's Costumes in HBO's Game of Thrones

BY CHANTELE FRANZ & YASMEEN KUMAR Kwantlen Polytechnic University

ABSTRACT

HBO’s Game of Thrones is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious and sophisticated series in the history of television. Based upon the enormously popular historical/fantasy novels of George R.R. Martin, the series is admired for its epic scale and for its elaborate world-building. HBO’s Game of Thrones is praised for its spectacular set designs and its skilful blending of CGI and location shots to create an instantly recognizable visual style. From the opening credit sequence to the richly textured and nuanced representations of the fictional worlds of Essos, Pentos, and Westeros, the mise-en-scène in Game of Thrones has played a significant role in winning the support of die-hard fans and scholars alike. To date, there have been more than a half-dozen monographs and/or collections of critical essays published on the landmark television series. Our essay aims to add to this commentary by exploring the significance of costume design in Game of Thrones. Inherently, costume design serves multiple functions. On one level, costumes help lend a degree of realism and historical accuracy to the characters and settings. They also help to define specific characters both as individuals and as members of specific social classes or groups. However, costume can also visually foreground narrative arcs and themes. This is the case for Sansa Stark. Through a dramatic transformation in costuming, the series showcases her character’s growth from innocence to experience.

“When costumes and make-up act as narrative markers, their change or lack of change becomes a crucial way to understand a character and the development of the story” (Corrigan and White 57).

As the cheif costume designer for HBO's Game of Thrones, Michele Clapton has contributed to the unique visual style of the series. From the distinctive costumes of the Wildlings, the White Walkers, the Dothraki, and the Unsullied, to the sigils, costumes, and armour of the Starks, the Lannisters and the other noble houses of Westeros and Essos, Clapton’s costume designs are rooted in careful research into the clothing worn by men and women from all social classes during the Middle Ages. The costumes used in the series serve several functions. At one level, they help lend a degree of realism and historical accuracy to the characters and settings portrayed in the series. They also help to define specific characters both as individuals and as members of specific social classes or groups. The costumes frequently

foreground narrative arcs, and along with them, important developments in characters that occur over the course of individual seasons. Finally, the costumes serve at times to draw our attention to important themes in the series.

One theme of note in Game of Thrones is the fall from innocence to experience. The Oxford English Dictionary defines innocence as “freedom from sin, guilt or moral wrong in general” (OED). Miriam Ticktin expands on this definition by noting that the emphasis falls on absence of experience, thus making innocence “a state of moral and epistemic purity” (578). To be exposed to any opposing and potentially depraved state, such as knowledge, guilt, or sexuality, would tarnish the pure space that defines innocence and thus signifies an irreversible entrance into understanding and consequently, experience. This theme is closely related to another in the series: namely, that of the decline of the chivalric code of honour. The qualities associated with this code include “courage, honour, justice, and a readiness to help the weak” (OED). For George R. R. Martin, the author

of the Game of Thrones novels, the Wars of the Roses symbolize a breakdown of the chivalric code of honour that had unified both political and literary culture during the High Middle Ages. As Martin writes,

Chivalry in the Middle Ages was among the most idealistic codes of conduct the human race has ever come up with for a warrior. These are men who were sworn to defend the weak. And then you look at the reality, and their brutality was extreme. (qtd. in Johnston 142)

More than any other character in the series, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) embodies both of these central themes: the fall from innocence to experience and the gap between the idealism and reality associated with the chivalric code of honour. In the case of Sansa, costumes are used to draw our attention to significant transformations in her character that occur over the course of the series. More importantly, Sansa’s changing costumes are used to make visible her character development and her embodiment of these themes. Sansa’s appearance in the first four seasons of Game of Thrones is relatively stable, reflecting both her innocence and her continued attachment to chivalric and romantic ideals. It is not until season five that we begin to see costuming used to foreground a more dramatic development in her character. The roles of innocence and experience in the character arc of Sansa are not only clearly outlined, but they also have extremely profound effects on the character’s growth into adulthood.

As Sophie Turner, the actress who plays Sansa Stark, observes, “Sansa is naive and quite vulnerable at the start. She’s a complete romantic and lives in a fantasy world” (Nguyen). This is

It is clear that Sansa has learned from her experiences in King’s Landing that the chivalric ideals that had meant so much to her as a girl are far from the brutal realities of life as a young noblewoman.

evident from the moment we first see Sansa in the scene in which the Starks and Lannisters meet for the first time (Season One, Episode One 00:25:44). In contrast to her younger sister, Arya (Maisie Williams), she is clearly enamored with the pomp and ceremony of the meeting of the two noble families, and with the trappings of power and status. More to the point, she is already infatuated with young Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) and imagines one day becoming his queen. Moreover, she remains infatuated with Joffrey long after she has witnessed his pettiness and cruelty. Joffrey’s confrontation with the butcher’s boy, Arya, and Arya’s direwolf in “The Kingsroad” (00:44:40) serves as the first indication of his cruelty and maliciousness. Intruding on the children’s play sword fight, Joffrey punishes the butcher’s boy for disarming Arya with a wooden sword by inflicting a gash on the boy’s cheek with a real sword. Yet, when Arya’s direwolf reacts in defense to Joffrey’s aggression by biting his arm, Joffrey cowers behind noble pretense and demands a trial to punish those responsible for his injury. In this way, Sansa witnesses Joffrey’s maliciousness firsthand. In the trial that follows, she sees even more evidence of his failings as a prince (00:48:20). When he demands retribution for his injured pride and Sansa is pressed for her account of the incident, she sputters “I don’t

Fig. 1 | Still from "Winter is Coming," 00:26:03. the Stark family awaits the arrival of King Robert Baratheon and the Lannisters. HBO, 2011.

know. I don’t remember. It all happened so fast.” In this short scene, she betrays her sister and re-affirms her support for Joffrey despite his cowardice. Ironically, Sansa’s silence leads to the death of her own direwolf, aptly named “Lady”, despite her wolf not being responsible for Joffrey’s injury. She is willfully blind to reality, preferring instead to cling to her fantasies of honour, decorum, and chivalry.

Sansa’s innocence is reflected in her clothing and her general appearance. During the first few episodes of the first season, she is dressed in long flowing gowns that are more elaborate than typical Winterfell dresses. As opposed to the dark, earth tone garments worn by other women in her family, Sansa usually wears a lighter pastel blue. In a sea of black, grey, and navy fabric, the lighter, airy colour immediately stands out, drawing attention to the juxtaposition of Sansa’s idealism with the pragmatism of the other Starks (Fig. 1). By comparison, Sansa’s dresses also seem to radiate a metallic, silver sheen. The pairing of pastel blue and metallic undertones not only creates a more feminine aesthetic, but it also bears more resemblance to the jewel tone palette of the dresses worn by the ladies of the court in King’s Landing. As a result, the contrast makes her garment seem more ornate than the ones worn by other Northerners, particularly her family. In keeping with an ornate, feminine look, Sansa’s hair is impeccably styled, often in complex braids such as waterfall braids, fishtail braids, and French braids (Fig. 2).

The time and effort Sansa spends on achieving a pristine, feminine look is indicative of her vanity, which is evident in the frequent shots of her scrutinizing her image in mirrors. As Valerie Estelle Frankel notes, such shots suggest “that she is considering herself as an object. Will her new gown please the men in her

life? Does she look pretty enough?” (Frankel 100). Such statements reinforce the idea of her vanity. Frankel quotes archetype scholar Wind Hughes on the figure of the Maiden: “She may be the dutiful daughter, her self-worth linked to pleasing others in order to receive their approval, [but] she has not developed a strong sense of self” (qtd. in Frankel 100). In this regard, Sansa completely embodies the maiden archetype, completely, especially in her insecurities regarding her appearance and her need for approval. In fact, in “The Kingsroad,” Sansa admires the visiting ladies of King’s Landing as they braid their hair (00:42:39). The scene emphasizes Sansa’s vanity and her fixation on outward appearances. Because Sansa lacks a sense of self, she is able to quickly shed her Northern identity and adopt a new one through clothing: a visual representation of her shifting loyalties and ambitions. This idea is reinforced in “Lord Snow” as the eagerto-please Sansa is quick to alter her appearance once she reaches King’s Landing. Slowly, she begins to abandon her Northern roots to conform to what she believes will make her more desirable for Joffrey. At first, she remains in her heavy knit Winterfell blue gowns, but changes her hair style to conform to the styles of the ladies of King’s Landing. In “A Golden Crown,” Sansa’s Septa comments on Sansa’s shifting appearance, remarking, “you wear

Sansa’s journey from illusion to disillusion spans the entire seven seasons, ending with her transformation into a strong woman with agency, capable of reconciling the real and the ideal.

Fig. 2 | Still from "Winter is Coming," 00:45:10, in which Sansa speaks to Queen Cersei Lannister for the first time. HBO, 2011.

your hair like a real Southern Lady now,” to which Sansa replies, “Well why shouldn’t I? We’re in the South.” Septa responds by advising Sansa of the importance of remembering where she comes from (00:39:58). However, Sansa doesn’t consider this advice; instead she continues her needlepoint, a historically domestic task which highlights the traditional elements of her femininity. Conformity is not a question in Sansa’s eyes, but a duty or obligation that is necessary in order to fulfill her childlike romantic fantasies.

Sansa’s weak sense of self, coupled with her lack of agency, render her unable to comprehend the gap between her own idealistic view of life in King’s Landing and the brutal realities of Westeros. For instance, when she attends her first jousting tournament in “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things” (00:45:46), what she witnesses should strip away any illusions she holds about the chivalric code of honour. Still, she remains infatuated with the Baratheons and with the idea of one day becoming queen. In fact, the scene depicting the tournament is shot in such a way as to foreground the gap between the ideal and the real. In medieval literature and history, such tournaments were largely symbolic displays of martial skill for the amusement of the king and his retinue. Yet Gregor Clegane’s brutal murder of his opponent, Sir Hugh of the Vale, clearly violates the symbolic nature of the ceremony. The camera lingers on the gruesome scene, foregrounding the unsheathed lance that “the Mountain” has thrust through Sir Hugh’s throat, while the editing serves to highlight that we are meant to see this horrific scene largely from Sansa’s perspective. Like the others in the stands, Sansa is clearly shocked and traumatized by what she has witnessed, but the camerawork and editing also simultaneously allude to her disconnect with the events unfolding around her. Specifically, this is evidenced by the oscillation between the close up of her reaction and the shot of Sir Hugh’s body (00:47:12). The knight, who embodies ideal, romantic notions of chivalry that Sansa holds in high esteem, lays slain on the ground, with his shining silver armour covered in blood as he gasps for air. Interspersed are the shocked reactions of both Sansa and the tournament attendees, as indicated by wide eyes and slack jaws. Yet the sole focus on her in tandem with the blurred background infers a disassociation from the event, as though Sansa is not really aware of her surroundings. In addition, the two characters are never shown in the same shot, inferring Sansa’s inability to comprehend the brutality she has just witnessed. As an accompanying wake up call, “the tale of brotherly love1” (00:48:20) that Petyr Baelish recounts to his young charge is another sign that King’s Landing is not the idyllic world that Sansa imagines. Ultimately, Sansa’s belief in the chivalric code distorts her perception of reality to such an extent that it takes abhorrent treatment from several

characters to force her to understand the brutal actualities of the Westerosi society.

The first and most impactful factor in her gradual loss of innocence is her relationship with Joffrey and the Lannisters. As mentioned earlier, she comes to know of Joffrey’s maliciousness and pettiness from her introduction to him in Winterfell, but her belief in chivalric notions distorts her perceptions of his cruelty. In fact, when faced with blatant danger due to the actions of Joffrey and the Lannisters, Sansa continuously reverts to an idyllic perception that the royal family will not harm her or her family because of her future position as queen. This tendency is first demonstrated when Ned Stark tells his daughters that their family needs to leave King’s Landing for their own safety. Though both Sansa and Arya strongly oppose Ned, Arya is aware of the threat the Lannisters pose and is intent on staying to learn how to fight. Sansa, on the other hand, complains to Ned that they can’t leave because she “is meant to marry Prince Joffrey. [She] love[s] him and [she is] meant to be his queen and have his babies” (“A Golden Crown” 00:44:45). The contrast illustrates that Sansa’s naivety is so deeply ingrained and aids her fantasy to such an extent that she cannot perceive harsh realities that even her younger sister is able to respond to.

The catalyst for Sansa’s awareness of these harsh realities is her father’s public execution, as ordered by Joffrey. This scene in “Baelor” serves as the climax of Season One. Preceding the scene, Sansa is confident that Joffrey will save her father’s life; he states, “your sweet words have moved me” (00:56:30). Due to Sansa’s naivety, she is unable to recognize that she has been enlisted into a piece of political theatre. Joffrey has convinced her that by persuading her father to confess to treason, she is saving Ned Stark’s life. In reality, Joffrey has scripted the confession to help legitimize his rule as king. Although he had originally refused to confess, valuing his honour over his life, Ned relents because he believes that by confessing he will be protecting his children. At the beginning of the episode, Sansa appears satisfied with her role in what she thinks will result in mercy for her father. However, during this scene there is an abrupt shift in Sansa’s facial expressions at the moment of realization that her father’s life will not be spared. To add to the horror of the scene, Cersei appears to be just as shocked by Joffrey’s sentencing as Sansa. This is worth noting as the series has portrayed Queen Cersei as a Machiavellian character thus far. Therein, Cersei’s reaction highlights Joffrey’s sentencing of Sansa’s father as capricious and malicious.

Witnessing her father’s execution is clearly a traumatic experience for Sansa and one that contributes to her loss of identity in the first seasons of the series. As Jenna Busch and Janina Scarlett observe, “Individuals whose identities are changed as a result of

1 Petyr Baelish to Sansa: “Has anyone ever told you the story of the Mountain and the Hound? Lovely little tale of brotherly love. The Hound was just a pup, six years old maybe, Gregor, a few years older, already a big lad already getting a bit of a reputation. Some lucky boys are just born with a talent for violence. One evening, Gregor found his little brother playing with a toy by the fire. Gregor’s toy. A wooden knight. Gregor never said a word. He just grabbed his brother by the scruff of his neck and shoved his face into the burning coals, held him there while the boy screamed, while his face melted.” (“Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things” 00:48:20)

trauma are more likely to experience physical and psychological effects of the trauma than individuals who are able to maintain their own identity” (52). We can observe the effects of Ned’s traumatic death through the way that Sansa isolates herself. Of course, Sansa’s circumstances are unique in that she is forced to live with the people responsible for her father’s execution, including Joffrey, to whom she pledged her love and loyalty only to be publicly betrayed and humiliated. As a consequence of the trauma Sansa faces, she also exhibits some of the symptoms of disassociation as she attempts to separate herself from her identity as a Stark. As Busch and Scarlett note, after her father’s execution, “Sansa continues to call her late father and her brothers traitors to keep herself safe from Joffrey and Cersei” (53). For example, on Joffrey’s name day, Tyrion offers his condolences to Sansa for her loss. “My father was a traitor,” she says. “My mother and brother are traitors too. I am loyal to my beloved Joffrey” (“The North Remembers” 00:05:50). It is clear that Sansa is not being entirely genuine with these comments: rather, she is emotionless and calculated in her claims. While she may not identify entirely with being a Lannister, it is the only identity now available to her, which she clings to not out of genuine love for Joffrey but as a means of survival.

This loss of identity and need to conform as a means of survival are reflected in Sansa’s costume. This is specifically illustrated in Sansa’s mimicking of Cersei Lannister’s appearance. This mimicking is a likely consequence of her fragile sense of self, coupled with her longing for the acceptance of others. Because she holds no firm identity of her own, she adopts the personae of others. Up until her father’s execution, Sansa’s changes in appearance had been limited to the mimicked hairstyles of the ladies in King’s Landing. Now, Sansa mirrors Cersei in both in the way she styles her hair and the fit of her clothing. In fact, in “Baelor,” Sansa wears her hair in a regal and elaborate style almost identical to Cersei Lannister. Her clothing too conforms to the jewel tone palette of the South, and mimics the fit and cut which Cersei wears throughout the first season. The dress is tapered to her body, with a cinched, thick belted waist, hanging sleeves and a deep ‘V’ shaped neckline. Even the necklace which Sansa wears, gifted to her by Joffrey, resembles the necklace which Cersei Lannister wears (Fig. 3).

Although she is clearly one of the most important characters in Game of Thrones, compared with other characters, Sansa Stark remains curiously static. For instance, Daenerys Targaryen, Arya Stark, and Jon Snow all exhibit more dramatic character growth than Sansa during the early seasons. To illustrate the static nature of her character, consider her relationship with Sir Loras Tyrell. Viewers will recall that Sansa had first seen Sir Loras in Season One, Episode Five, where he appeared, in her mind at least, as the quintessential knight in shining armour (00:06:40). Sansa was oblivious to the fact that his attentions were actually directed at his lover, Renly Baratheon, but chose instead to idealize him as the emblem of chivalry. In “And Now His Watch Has Ended,” Sansa is once again enamoured with Loras when Margaery suggests to her that she consider becoming his wife (00:34:24). At the mere mention of this idea, Sansa becomes

giddy and excited, like she once was with Joffrey, which causes her to become fixated on her appearance: looking in mirrors and fussing over the garments she wears. At one point, referring to a gown for King Joffrey’s wedding to Margaery, she asks her handmaid, “do you think people will like it?” (“And Now His Watch Has Ended”, 00:44:34). “Loras likes green and gold brocade,” she adds. It is surely no coincidence that Sansa utters this line as she stands in front of a mirror. Even more significant is the fact that in one shot in particular the mirror presents her as the subject of a stylized and perfectly centred portrait (Fig. 4). This scene in particular demonstrates that despite the lessons Sansa has learned about the realities of the Westerosi world, she still views herself as an object of desire for men.

Even after the promise of a relationship with Sir Loras never materializes, Sansa continues to hold on to the hope of a saviour, which leaves her to be taken advantage of again, this time by Petyr Baelish. In part, her trust in him is due to the fact that Baelish has been a close friend of her mother, Catelyn Stark, for decades. After her father’s execution, Baelish is anxious to serve as a surrogate father to Sansa. Moreover, Little Finger, as Baelish is known, always behaves in a courtly and ingratiating manner when dealing with Sansa or the Starks in general. Given her own investment in the idealized world of the court, she is especially susceptible to this type of behaviour. For instance, in season 4’s “Breaker of Chains,” Sansa instinctively trusts Baelish to take care of her after fleeing the scene of Joffrey’s murder. As he is the one to devise an escape plan to help Sansa flee King’s Landing, she is quick to suspend all skepticism and is seduced by the false sense of security he provides. Though Sansa has clearly gained a sense of awareness from her experiences in King’s Landing, her desperation in the moment, coupled with her naivety, make her unable to fully comprehend the dangers that await her once she leaves King’s Landing. She remains oblivious to the true intentions of others, which demonstrates that she has not yet shed her naivety.

Ironically, Sansa’s escape from King’s Landing to the assumed safety of Baelish’s guardianship coincides with a time in her life where she, at least superficially, is in possession of the noble life she fantasizes about. She seemingly has everything she ever desired, such as a position at court, the beautiful and elaborate garments of King’s Landing, and a noble husband. Her costume reflects this irony. While fleeing King’s Landing after Joffrey’s murder, she is still dressed in her ornate purple gown that she wore during Joffrey and Margaery’s wedding ceremony (Fig. 5). The color purple is, of course, indicative of royalty, thus illustrating Sansa’s inclusion in the noble class. Her garment is also made up of luxurious materials, such as silk, alluding to her wealth and noble status. Even while fleeing King’s Landing, Sansa’s costume reflects her unwavering attachment to the romanticism of the chivalric code, despite experiencing the failures of such ideals first-hand.

The first sign of Sansa’s transformation comes in “High Sparrow.” Once again, we see her in the company of Petyr Baelish. The two have returned to the North so that she can reclaim her inheritance. Baelish tries to convince her of the

Unlike her father, she has developed the ability to ‘play the game.’ After being a pawn in this ‘game of thrones’ for so long, she is finally a player.

Fig. 4 | Still from “And Now His Watch Has Ended,” 00:44:36. Sansa appears in the mirror as a perfectly centred portrait. HBO 2011.

Fig. 3 | Still from “Baelor,” 00:53:36. Sansa and the Lannisters await the public sentencing of Ned Stark. HBO, 2011.

strategic value of marrying into the House of Bolton, an idea which Sansa clearly finds revolting. “Roose Bolton murdered my brother. He betrayed my family” (“High Sparrow” 00:16:01) she says, referring to the Bolton family’s role in orchestrating the Red Wedding. Although she is unsuccessful in preventing the marriage, Sansa is now willing to challenge Baelish and his authority. However, she still remains naive to the fact that Baelish is more concerned with fulfilling his own self-interests than he is with her well-being. Nonetheless, we see Sansa slowly becoming less susceptible to Baelish’s violations of her good faith, which will foreshadow her eventual shattering of her trust in him.

Not only has Sansa become noticeably more assertive by this point in the series, but her appearance has shifted drastically. Her hair is darker now and she wears darker, more subdued costumes than those worn in earlier seasons (Fig. 6). The change in her hair colour and her clothing is motivated by Sansa’s desire to disguise herself so that she is not recognized in the North. However, it may also be interpreted as a defense mechanism she has adopted as a result of the suffering she has experienced since leaving Winterfell for King’s Landing. In fact, one could argue that Sansa’s change in appearance at this point in the series is a sign or symptom of dissociation. She is attempting to adopt a new identity to shield herself from the post-traumatic feelings she is experiencing as a result of her time in King’s Landing, yet her attempt to conceal and disassociate seems to be in vain. Even Little Finger himself comments, “You’re a Stark. Dyeing your hair doesn’t change that” (00:16:14). Interestingly, on the night before Sansa’s wedding to Ramsay Bolton, his mistress Miranda bathes her and rinses the dye from her hair, stripping her of the disguise and the protective shield she has attempted to build for

herself. Sansa does stand up to Miranda, informing her that she is Sansa Stark of Winterfell and not someone who will be intimidated or prevented from reclaiming her inheritance (Season Five, Episode Six 00:42:09). However, it is worth pointing out that this is just one of many scenes in which Sansa is represented in contradictory terms. On the one hand, we see her attempting to stand up for herself. On the other, she is being bathed, dressed or otherwise tended to by a female character, illustrative of her malleability at the hands of others.

Sansa’s transformation is by no means complete at this point in the series. On the day of her wedding to Ramsay Bolton, she reverts to the style of clothing she had worn in King’s Landing. In contrast to the plain, dark and heavy cape-coat that she wears in the scene with Petyr Baelish at her wedding to Ramsay, she is wearing an off-white wedding gown that draws attention to her figure. Her hairstyle is also reminiscent of the way that she had worn her hair prior to her return to the North (Fig. 7). Rather than being pulled back from her face, it has been carefully coiffed for the occasion. This jarring shift in appearance is suggestive of her regression from a woman in the process of developing her own autonomy, to essentially becoming Ramsay’s property. This is further illustrated through her rigid posture and hunched shoulders. The stance is indicative of defeat and resignation. With Petyr Baelish, Sansa is dependent, but she is able to voice her concerns regarding his plans for her. She is able to question his authority without fear of a violent reprisal. Once she marries Ramsay, however, Sansa knows that she will become a mere prop or plaything for him like she once was for Joffrey. Despite this apparent regression, it is clear that Sansa has learned from her experiences in

Fig. 5 | Still from “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” 00:46:55. Theon/Reek walks Sansa down the aisle as she marries Ramsay Bolton. HBO, 2015.

King’s Landing that the chivalric ideals that had meant so much to her as a girl are far from the brutal realities of life as a young noblewoman. She appears to recognize that she is a mere pawn in this “game of thrones.”

The nadir in the series’ representation of Sansa appears in the rape scene in “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” (00:48:26). The scene itself is one of the most important and most traumatic in the series, but it is also unlike other scenes depicting psycho-sexual violence. Rather than sensationalizing the violence or reveling in its graphic impact, the writers and director of this particular episode have chosen an uncharacteristically restrained approach. There is very little in the way of explicit sexuality or violence. Instead, what make the scene so disturbing is not simply Ramsay’s cruel and malicious abuse of Sansa but the fact that he insists that Theon/Reek remain in the room to witness the abuse. The ramifications of his presence are monumental as up until this point, Sansa holds naively in the faith that someone will rescue her. However, in this scene she realizes that despite the presence of Theon/ Reek--who Sansa looks at in a lastditch effort for help-- is not able to rescue her as a consequence of how crippled he has become as a result of Ramsay’s torment and emasculation. The absence of a male saviour, coupled with this horrifying abuse, leads Sansa to quickly shed her naive ideals and expectations of the world. Her physical trauma is compounded by the degradation and humiliation of having her “brother” witness the act, thereby making him both an accomplice and a victim. Through the lengthy shot on Theon/Reek, the viewer also takes part in the victimization as we too are unable to protect and preserve Sansa’s innocence. As Theodore Gioia notes, “we — the spectator — like Theon are an unwilling audience to this horrible

Her character growth over the course of the series is reflected not only in change of costume, but also in change in values as she makes the transition from innocence to experience.

event, yet watch, powerless to stop it” (Gioia). Ramsay’s haunting words, “watch her become a woman,” prove accurate, though not in the way he intends. As a consequence of trauma, Sansa finally recognizes the brutal reality of life in Westeros. This horrific event becomes the last straw for Sansa, causing her to shed her naive expectations of the world.

The trauma that Sansa suffers on her wedding night proves not only to be the breaking point of her naive ideal, but also the exacerbation of her PTSD as she exhibits the dissociative behaviour of the condition. She may not display the classic symptoms of PTSD-- hypervigilance, involuntary memories, or the contradictory need to both repress and confront the traumatic experience -- but she does show the signs of a young woman who has witnessed and experienced horrific violence. Like many PTSD victims, Sansa is isolated due to her inability to form connections with others. She is unlike her younger sister Arya, for instance, who seems to find camaraderie with many around her (Busch and Scarlett). Aside from her handmaid and Margaery Tyrell, the only relationships Sansa is able to form are with men whom she uses for her personal protection, reinforcing the notion of her as a “damsel in distress.” Even Sansa’s passivity can be attributed to her experiences of trauma. Although this

Fig. 6 | Still from “High Sparrow” 00:15:46. Petyr Baelish and Sansa discuss her proposed marriage to Ramsay Bolton. HBO, 2015.

From Innocence to Experience: On the Significance of Sansa Stark's Costumes in HBO's Game of Thrones

Fig. 7 | Still from “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” 00:46:55. Theon/Reek walks Sansa down the aisle as she marries Ramsay Bolton. HBO, 2015.

Fig. 8 | Still from “The Dragon and the Wolf” 00:55:17. Sansa presides over the trial of Petyr Baelish. HBO, 2017.

trait has been a constant in her personality, prior to her trauma, it seemed to stem from the desire to appease rather than from her helplessness. For instance, in the example of the direwolf confrontation mentioned previously, Sansa’s lack of action was due to her belief that the Lannisters represented a courtly ideal. As the series progresses, however, and Sansa suffers one traumatic experience after another, she becomes even more passive, withdrawing further into herself.

Sansa’s journey from illusion to disillusion spans the entire eight seasons, culminating with her transformation into a strong woman with agency, capable of reconciling the real and the ideal.

figure, but now she has independence. Although she had once looked to Baelish for protection, she now asserts, “I don’t believe you anymore. I don’t need you anymore. You can’t protect me” (00:04:55).

Sansa’s initial confrontation with Baelish foreshadows the Season Seven finale, “The Dragon and the Wolf,” in which she finally emerges as a strong character in her own right. We see her presiding over the trial of Petyr Baelish, levelling charges against him, and reasserting her recognition of the political machinations that he has orchestrated. It is significant that she conducts this trial not because she wants to but because, as she puts it,

The layered fabrics piled on top of one another reflect traumatic experiences that have unrelentingly weighed her down, accumulating in a grave and burdensome understanding of the world.

We see signs of this transformation in “The Door” when Sansa confronts Petyr Baelish after she is freed with Brienne’s help from the tower where Ramsay has held her captive. Sansa’s demeanor in this scene is strikingly different than in previous scenes. She is sure of herself and more clearly in control of the situation. This is evident not only in the assertive way in which she interrogates Baelish, but also in her body language and her overall demeanour. She insists upon making eye contact with him throughout this scene even when he tries to avert her gaze. “Did you know about Ramsay?” she asks, beginning a flurry of rhetorical questions which ultimately act as an affront designed to not only to force Petyr to take responsibility for his actions, but to convey Sansa’s true feelings about Baelish: “If you didn’t know, you were an idiot and if you did, you are my enemy” (00:03:05). The sentiment illustrates both Sansa’s awareness of Baelish’s duplicitous nature and her newfound immunity to his manipulation. After questioning and goading Baelish, Sansa alters her tactics and confronts him with the brutal truth of the pain she has experienced because of him. “I can still feel it,” she says, “I don’t mean in my tender heart it still pains me so. I can still feel what he did in my body standing here right now” (00:04:35). Sansa’s tone here is clearly ironic. In fact, it drips with sarcasm. By using the particular language she does, she is distancing herself from the romantic, idealistic views that she had subscribed to throughout the first five seasons of the series. But she is also performing one of the most important steps in post-traumatic growth: namely, taking ownership of her traumatic experience.

She acknowledges the trauma she has suffered at Ramsay’s hands, but interestingly, she is no longer merely a victim. At this point she is clearly moving toward a greater degree of independence and agency than she has displayed earlier in the narrative. In fact, this is the first time we see Sansa dominate the scene and control the conversation. In other words, we see a clear shift in the power dynamic; once subservient, Sansa is now in control. Previously, she was unable to make decisions or assert herself on her own. She needed the guidance of an older, usually male,

“it’s what honour demands” (0:55:46). In this regard, Sansa is clearly her father’s daughter. She then proceeds to deliver a litany of charges against Baelish, refuting each of his feeble attempts at self-defence. When he claims, for instance, that he killed Sansa’s aunt, Lysa Arryn, to protect Sansa, she is quick to reply, “You did it to take power in the vale” (00:57:02). The authority in her statement is striking, showcasing that she has finally become impervious to Baelish’s charms. But perhaps the most important line in the scene comes when Sansa offers the following assessment of herself and her slow, painful development as an individual. “I’m a slow learner...” she says, “But I learn” (00:59:04).

It is worth noting that Sansa’s wardrobe has taken a drastic shift from the ladylike attire she wore in earlier episodes. Her attire now has an element of weight, both literally and symbolically. Sansa is dressed in thick, dark layers, reminiscent of Ned’s costume in Season One (Fig. 8). The materials used to fashion her coats--primarily furs and leathers--are not only thick and heavy on their own, but are layered on top of one another, creating a monumental weight. All of these materials are also black and grey, compounding the notion of heaviness through a dark, monochromatic, layered look. Of course, this change in aesthetic is, in part, adopted for practical reasons as the garments protect Sansa from winter in the North. However, the physical weight, as indicated by material and colour, also reflects Sansa’s multitude of traumatic experiences. As Michele Clapton notes during a 2016 interview with IGN (Imagine Games Network), “the story is now getting darker, and more oppressive” (IGN); the costumes are intended to illustrate this. Thus, the layered fabrics piled on top of one another reflect traumatic experiences that have unrelentingly weighed her down, accumulating in a grave and burdensome understanding of the world. Reinforcing the notion of gravity and severity is the cut of her costume. Most prominent are the broadened shoulders of her garments. Prior to her dark, heavy attire, her gowns included delicate sleeves that draped off her

shoulders. The effect is both light and ethereal, connoting a ‘damsel in distress’ stereotype. In contrast, the sharp, defined shoulders of her new attire highlight her power without sacrificing or obscuring her femininity. This change in costume makes visible the change in character that has occurred as Sansa’s idyllic view of the world is replaced by a darker, but more mature understanding of life in Westeros.

By the end of season seven, Sansa has finally shed the naive and idealistic world view that had defined her character for so much of the first Six Seasons. She has also emerged as the heir to her late father, significantly becoming Lady of Winterfell not through marriage, but by being one of the only surviving heirs of Ned Stark. Therefore, it is no coincidence that her change in costume highlights her physical resemblance to her late father, who had once served as an emblem of the chivalric code (Fig. 9 and Fig. 10). This resemblance in costume is only fortified though her adoption of the values her father once held, these

being leadership, justice, and family. Rather than simply becoming her father, however, Sansa is learning from his legacy. Her character growth over the course of the series is reflected not only in change of costume, but also in change in values as she makes the transition from innocence to experience. Sansa hasn’t abandoned all faith in the chivalric code. However, she has shifted her expectations on how this code of life will play out for her. She does this by abandoning her fairy-tale-like visions of the world which paint her as a damsel waiting for a strong and powerful male figure to save her. Instead, she is able to embody the characteristics which she holds in such high regard: strength, loyalty, resilience, and family. She is able to grow as a woman, while still maintaining a sense of self. However, her experience makes her able to do this within the brutal realities of the world of Westeros. Unlike her father, she has developed the ability to “play the game.” After being a pawn in this “game of thrones” for so long, she is finally a player. 

WORKS CITED

“A Golden Crown.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2011.

“Baelor.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2011.

“Breaker of Chains.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2014.

Busch, Jenna and Jenina Scarlet. “The Stark Sisters: On Trauma and Posttraumatic Growth” Game of Thrones and Psychology: The Mind is Dark and Full if Terrors. Edited by Travis Langley, Sterling, 2016. pp. 49-59.

Corrigan, Timothy, and Patricia White. The Film Experience: An Introduction. Bedford St. Martin’s, 2018.

“Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2011.

“The Door.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss, HBO, 2016. “The Dragon and the Wolf.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2017.

Frankel, Valerie Estelle. “Maidens: The Innocent, the Orphan, and the Femme Fatale.” Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity and Resistance, McFarland, 2014.

Gioia, Theodore. “Changing the Game: How ‘Game of Thrones’ Rewrites the Rules of Modern TV.” Los Angeles Review of Books , 20 Apr. 2016. lareviewofbooks.org/ article/changing-game-game-thrones-rewrites-rulesmodern-tv/# !

Johnston, Susan. “Grief Poignant as Joy: Dyscatastrophe and Eucatastrophe in A Song of Ice and Fire.” Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 135-156. dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol31/iss1/9

“Lord Snow.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2011.

“The Kingsroad.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2011.

“The Lion and the Rose.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2014.

Nguyen, Hanh. “Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner: Sansa Has Been Manipulated by Joffrey | TV Guide.” TVGuide. com , TV Guide, 10 June 2011. www.tvguide.com/news/ game-thrones-sophie-turner-1034079/.

“And Now His Watch Has Ended.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss, HBO, 2013.

“Stormborn.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2017.

Ticktin, Miriam. A World Without Innocence . American Ethnologist, 2017, pp. 577–590.

“Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2015.

“Why Game of Thrones’ Leading Ladies All Wore Black in the Season 6 Finale - Comic Con 2016.” IGN YouTube , YouTube, July, 2016. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dccmXw0YpJU&t=152s.

“Winter is Coming.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and D.B Weiss. HBO, 2011.

Fig. 9 | Still from “Stormborn” 00:46:09. Sansa watches John leave on a recruitment mission. HBO, 2017.

Fig. 10 | Still from “Winter is Coming” 00:13:00. Ned Stark's costume in the North. HBO, 2011.

Untethered Engaging the Senses in Post-2013 Space-Travel Films1

BY MELANIE ROBSON University of New South Wales

The release of Gravity (2013) launched a cycle of American films and television series concerned with space travel: Interstellar (2014), Lost in Space (2018-), The Martian (2015), and Passengers (2016). These films evidence an increased turn in American cinema towards addressing the viewer’s sensory experience of film. Laura U. Marks calls this sensual address haptic visuality, in which “… the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (Touch 2-3).

Space-travel films draw on haptic visuality in a manner distinct from films set in Earth’s terrestrial space. Rather than accentuating the sense of touch, space films show the characters deprived of tactile connection to replicate their detachment from Earth. The characters’ skin is no longer their outer protective shell, and the skin as a liminal barrier between the inside ‘human’ world and the outside ‘alien’ world is an ever-present reminder of their vulnerability. Thus, the characters’ use of other objects as protective exteriors—a space suit, or a hibernation pod—is crucial to these films’ negotiation of haptic visuality.

Once inside their protective outer shells, the characters’ capacity for tactile engagement is removed. Close ups of characters shielded behind glass helmets highlight their fundamental

disconnection from the world, and crucially, these close ups allow us to participate in this disconnection too.The deprivation of touch, marked by the donning of the space suit, makes apparent the inextricable relationship between touch, emotion and memory. For Marks, the sense of touch is “… capable of storing powerful memories that are lost to the visual” ( The Skin of the Film 130). The space suit itself engages the viewer’s memory and reminds us what it is like, not just to touch, but to have touch removed.

The removal of tactile connection is emphasised when characters reach out with their spacesuit-covered hands to grasp objects or fellow spacemen in peril. These are some of the few moments of touch, but the characters’ loss of tactility and dexterity is made palpable through them almost always being just out of reach. “More than any other sensory deprivation,” Marks observes, “the loss of the sense of touch creates a feeling of being an orphan in the world” ( The Skin of the Film 149). Thus, space-travel films engage the senses by offering the viewer an experience of disconnection and vulnerability using haptic visuality. This approach offers the image of characters at the mercy of the limitless expanse of outer space, increasingly untethered.  Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Warner Bros., 2013. Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan. Paramount Pictures, 2014. Lost in Space, created by Irwin Allen, Matt Sazama, and Burk Sharpless. Legendary Television. Netflix, 2018-. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke UP, 2000.

---. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. U of Minnesota P, 2002. Passengers, directed by Morten Tyldum. Columbia Pictures, 2016. The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott. Twentieth Century Fox, 2015. WORKS CITED

1 A video essay companion to this feature can be found in the the online edition of Issue 5.1 and on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/u_rlcSfC8Bs.

Image from Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Warner Bros., 2013.

Tears Instead of Laughter

An Interview with Stop-Motion Animator Adam Elliot

BY PAUL RISKER Independent Film Scholar

Memoir of a Snail (2024) is Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot’s seventh film, importantly bringing him nearer to the conclusion of his 9-part Trilogy of Trilogies (three short shorts, three long shorts, and three features). The story revolves around lonely social misfit Grace Puddle, voiced by Sarah Snook, an ardent collector of ornamental snails, like her mother who died during childbirth. When their paraplegic and alcoholic father Percy (Dominique Pinon) dies, Grace is separated from her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee and Mason Litsos), who likes to impress with his fire-breathing skills. From a young age, Grace’s life is filled with painful and traumatic experiences. As a teenager, Grace strikes up an important friendship with the idiosyncratic and elderly Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who, despite her age, has lost none of the zest for life. Neither friendship nor marriage spares Grace from life’s difficult twists and turns, but amid the tragedy are an abundance of comedic and witty moments that shape a singular life.

Elliot’s previous films include the three short shorts, Uncle (1996), Cousin (1998), Brother (1999), the two longer shorts, Harvie Krumpet (2003) and Ernie Biscuit (2015), and his first feature, Mary and Max (2009). From Uncle through to Memoir of a Snail, Elliot has established himself as an idiosyncratic

world-builder. Grace Puddle is the latest addition of a cast of lonely and eccentric characters, blighted by bad luck, or dark and quirky experiences that place them in Elliot’s unique and singular universe

Memoir of a Snail premiered at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Connecting over Zoom for a virtual interview, Elliot explained that the film was only completed three weeks prior, and he was still in the process of trying to either learn or remember why he’d made it. He semi-jokes, “It was so long ago when we started, and now it’s finished, I’ve got to articulate why I did it and what it means.”

During his conversation with MSJ , Elliot discussed intertwining reality and fiction, the role the audience play in filling in the gaps, and preferring to make his audience cry instead of laugh.

PR: What compelled you to believe in this film and decide to tell this story at this particular point in time?

AE: When I was in film school, I had this pretentious plan of making a trilogy of trilogies because I loved the number three, and I love the number nine for all sorts of stupid reasons. So, I wanted to make three short shorts, three long shorts, and

three features. I thought that’s a nice little neat package. It was a bit of a joke, but it has become true because I’m up to number seven now.[….] So, I’ve only got two to go and then I can die.

Stop-motion is a slow and therefore expensive art form, and the truth is, I’ve probably only got two left in me. This one took eight years, and I hope the next one doesn’t take that long.

I never had a strong idea of what the film was going to be. Instead, I tend to start with the details and work backwards. So, I don’t start with a three-act structure or a strong idea of what the conclusion or inciting incident will be. I just start creating characters and attach quirks and add idiosyncrasies to them. Then, by the fourth or fifth draft, the three-act structure, themes, and messages start to magically appear.

My father died eight years ago, and he was certainly a collector/hoarder. He didn’t see himself as a hoarder and, similarly, with my mother, they both had a lot of stuff, like a lot of people’s parents do at that age. I started to think about why human beings collect things. Why do we collect things that are unnecessary, and why do we attach sentimental value to certain objects? So, I started to read a lot of books on hoarding and dug deeper into the psychology. I discovered many extreme hoarders have suffered a lot of loss, and more often than not, the loss of a child or a sibling, and collecting is a coping mechanism and form of self-preservation.

At the same time, I always wanted to make a film about a friend of mine who was born with a severe cleft palette and had eleven operations as a child. She was horribly teased and

bullied and yet, as an adult, became this flamboyant extravert. I was fascinated by how she transformed and learned to cope and turn disfiguration into a positive. So, the two ideas slowly started to come together and evolve, and I’d always had a fascination with twins and when they’re separated, how devastating that can be. This then became intertwined, and then I’ve some elderly friends that are eccentric, and they became the inspiration for Pinky. […] But it all came together slowly.

PR: One of the striking things about Memoir of a Snail is that Grace’s life is defined by sorrow, pain, and struggle, and yet, there’s the presence of humour and joy. It reminds me of the gallows humour people will adopt as a type of coping mechanism.

AE: I always love the quote, “Without the dark, the light has no meaning.” In some ways, the gags in the film are more about that relief and the release of tension from all the darkness. But even for people whose lives are extremely bleak, there’s always something that can bring a smile or a bit of joy, and vice versa, because even the happiest people are not always happy—there are times when they feel lonely and melancholic.

Ultimately, I’m trying to create characters that are empathetic and people can identify with. It is tough doing that with plasticine—getting people to suspend their disbelief and believe these blobs of clay are real people. That’s a real challenge, but in some ways, stop-motion is the perfect medium for that, because you have to suspend your disbelief right from the get-go. You have to trust and believe that they’re real.

I often say we’re more like magicians than we are filmmakers. It’s all trickery, smoke and mirrors, and illusion. Sometimes

Fig. 1 | Director Adam Elliot. IFC Films, 2024.

I can’t even watch my films because I can only see the plasticine, and so, I can’t be objective. As long as there’s a reaction of some sort, even if the audience [members] are just laughing, then that’s fine, but if I can get them to cry, I feel like I’ve achieved something. It’s a sick ambition to have [laughs] but I prefer tears to laughter.

PR: When you say you prefer tears to laughter, are you attentive to specific themes or are you focused on crafting a story driven by emotion?

AE: By the second or third draft, the theme of cages started to arise. I thought that had been done to death in the cinema but then I kept thinking about the symbolism of Grace as a snail—she was almost retracting into her shell and her bedroom becomes a self-imposed prison. She learns that the worst cages are the ones that we create for ourselves. Then there’s Gilbert, who is constantly breaking out of his cage, metaphorically, and he’s setting the animals free—the birds from their cages, the pigs from the pen, and the budgies from the aviary. So, I was trying to develop that contrast between the siblings.

There was a deliberate theme, but I don’t know whether it resonates much with the audience or is obvious. It is the emotion that people seem to be responding to, particularly Pinky’s death and then the relief and reward for Grace, who has been dragged through the mud. Originally, I didn’t have Gilbert coming back, but I thought, ‘No, Grace needs a reward for the trauma and perpetual bad luck.’

[….] Someone in the audience gasped when Gilbert came back. You could hear them breathing a sigh of relief because it’s pretty punishing what I did to Grace. I push the envelope too

far, but I think it balances out by the end. Only a few people have guessed that Gilbert would come back. Instead, most people are surprised, which surprises me because we put in little clues here and there that he was coming back.

My own father was an acrobatic clown and entertainer who made people laugh and cry, and if you just try to do those two things, then you’re halfway there.

PR: Thematically, Memoir of a Snail is an exploration of loneliness, resilience, and self-preservation. Grace, like the other characters, is an aspirational figure that leads me to consider how you take themes and imbue them with a strong emotional core.

AE: Sure, and the other thing, too, is I was very conscious of Grace’s character arc. Film school and all the scriptwriting books talk about having a strong transformation for your protagonist. I feel Grace certainly shows bravery towards the end, but she is quite a passive person. She’s bombarded with bad luck, and she’s like a sponge for all this trauma. I think she does transform, but it’s not a massive transformation. The de-hoarding, the de-cluttering is certainly helpful and cleansing, but really, the true hero of the film is probably Sylvia the Snail if you think about it, because she’s the one that directs Grace to the potatoes, although, whether Sylvia is a sentient being who knows where the potatoes are or it’s just a happy accident. And Pinky is sort of the sage who helps Grace.

Hoarding is Grace’s subconscious way of coping, and the film is also about loss. Grace loses her brother, her mother, her father, and she loses Pinky. It’s unrelenting, and yet she manages to survive and by going to film school she is putting herself first finally and, to some degree, being proactive.

Fig. 1 | Director Adam Elliot poses with Grace Pudel. IFC Films, 2024.

PR: On the subject of transformation, the audience’s response is influenced by the emotional baggage they bring to a film. Memoir of a Snail is an example of how a film is influenced by the audience’s changing life experiences, which creates the contradiction of cinema being permanent and impermanent.

AE: Oh absolutely, and all of my characters don’t have legs—it’s like The Muppets. If only the camera could pull back, and you could see all the chaos around the sets. There are lights, pencils, and rigs, and so on. I find the audience fills in the gaps, and this is the beauty of animation ‘full stop.’ We’re not putting in every single detail of the characters or their environments. The audience fill in the gaps and create those details that don’t exist, and I think they see themselves in the characters and project extra emotions onto the characters.

We showed the film to some fifteen-year-old kids a few days ago here in Annecy and by the end I could see the young girls were emotional wrecks. So, I felt like I’d done my job [laughs]. But the boys were very stoic. There were no tears or signs of tears on their faces, yet the more senior audience are much more open. It’s going to be interesting to see, not just how it resonates with ages and gender, but with different nationalities. I’m keen to see how Americans respond—not just because we burnt down a church [laughs]. I hope it’s universal and I always try to create universal characters.

[F]or some of the people that have come up to me after screenings, you can see that it has been a visceral experience, and that it has shaken them in some way. I met somebody who has gone through gay conversion therapy, and they found it very triggering. When you’re dealing with adult subject matter and challenging subject matter, you have to remind yourself that it can be triggering for people and not always push buttons in a positive way.

I love the word verisimilitude. A film can be a moment of deep truth or deep understanding, and I think all filmmakers aspire to that. That’s what I want when I go to the cinema. I want to come out not just feeling nourished and entertained but somehow transformed. I always joke that we’re not saving people’s lives, but the thing about filmmaking is, unlike painting and sculpting, we can reach so many more people so quickly, and you can have an impact. You have to remember that, and you have a degree of responsibility to show content and tell stories that are ultimately uplifting and nourishing.

I’m often told that my films are bleak, depressing, or dark. That’s not my intention. My intention is to end the film with an uplifting moment. Yes, people die, but people die in real life, and so why shouldn’t they die in animation? I had this question the other day, “Why do you have sex in your films?” I just said, “Well, why not?” Just because there are no sex scenes in Wallace and Gromit (1989-2024, Creator, Nick Park).

PR: Isabelle Huppert, head juror at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, has expressed concerns about the future of cinema, owing to its current “very weak” condition. In the past year, there have been discussions about how cinema is no longer the dominant art form. Is it as bleak as some suggest?

AE: I struggle with all of this because I love the format and the feature length. I love it as an hour and a half of your life. So, you don’t want to waste the audience’s time, and we have a lot of screen time competition now with series, video games, and all these other stimulating forms of entertainment.

We went to this Netflix party last night, and I was talking to someone about how I find Netflix completely dull. Every now and again you come across something interesting, but it’s just this massive pool of content. We’re all drowning in content, and we’re all looking for something that connects and gives us meaning. I feel starved, and maybe that’s because I’ve watched too many films. I’m fifty-two now, and I’m also a member of the Academy, and so every year I watch hundreds of films—maybe you become desensitised. But every now and again, there’s something that really hits you. For me, Triangle of Sadness (2022, Dir. Ruben Östlund) was a wonderful film. It was so strange, but all Ruben Östlund’s films are wonderful. So, that struck me, and then I was in tears by the end of Close (2022, Dir. Lukas Dhont).

It feels like it’s one in a hundred films, and why is that with all the tools at our disposal? We have access to any film we want as reference and guidance. We can look at any [Martin] Scorsese film we want, and analyze what he did right, and what did wrong, and yet there are so few films that have an impact. I find that curious, and so, all I’m trying to do with my films is have an impact and push people’s buttons, and not just because I want a reaction. I want them to think about what they’re seeing. I certainly want them to laugh and be entertained, but I want them to experience something deeper than that. I want some resonance, and it’s nice when you see people come out of the cinema disturbed and not just bored, but you can’t please everybody.

We’re drowning in content, and I wonder where we will be in ten years’ time. Then, of course, we have AI on the horizon and there’s a discussion here at the festival about it. I think I’m okay as a stop-motion animator because it’s clear what I do is handmade. Maybe as a scriptwriter, I should be more worried, but it’s a peculiar time. Here at Annecy there are 16,000 fanatics and when I first started coming here thirty years ago there were only 4,000. So, animation is alive and well, but I’m not quite sure whether storytelling is, because I find a lot of animation is just colour and movement. 

Open Call For Papers

For its upcoming issue, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (MSJ) currently seeks submissions that encompass the latest research in film and media studies. Submission categories include feature articles (6,000-7,000 words); mise-en-scène featurettes (1,000-1,500 words); reviews of films, DVDs, Blu-rays, or conferences (1,500-2,500 words); M.A. or PhD abstracts (250-300 words); interviews (4,000-5,000 words); undergraduate scholarship (2,000-2,500 words) or video essays (8-10 minute range). All submissions must include a selection of supporting images from the film(s) under analysis and be formatted according to MLA guidelines, 9th edition. Topic areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:

◦ Mise-en-scène across the disciplines

◦ Cinematic aestheticism

◦ Transmedia

◦ Film spectatorship

◦ Auteur theory

◦ Adaptation studies

◦ Pedagogical approaches to film & media studies

◦ Frame narratology

◦ Genre studies

◦ Documentary studies

◦ Fandom studies

◦ Seriality

◦ Television studies

◦ Film/Video as a branch of digital humanities research

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS: JANUARY 6, 2025

Please sign up as an author through the registration portal to begin the 5-step submission process: https://journals.kpu.ca/index.php/msq/about/submissions

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash