1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 104: Haunted

A ghost movie doesn’t need good performances or a compelling story. It needn’t even be frightening. What it does require are recognizable tropes, careful pacing, a distinctive location, and off-kilter photography.

Haunted (1995) has those things.

The Sussex estate where most of it takes place is the gorgeous, seldom-filmed Parham Park, here called “Edbrook.” Its Elizabethan manor has dozens of rooms – some grand, some quirky.

Outside the manor are green hills and a pond.

Edbrook is populated by a trio of aristocratic siblings …

… and by their catatonic old servant, Nanny Tess, played by that strange crone, Anna Massey. (Even when she was a not-unattractive starlet in Frenzy and Peeping Tom, she was, well, rather odd-looking.) The family’s doctor – Sir John Gielgud, in an engaging but gratuitous role – lives nearby.

The plot owes much to Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” We witness the Edbrook household’s downfall through the eyes of a “parapsychologist,” Professor Ash (Aidan Quinn). He has his own troubles. Many years ago, his kid-sister accidentally drowned. He occasionally glimpses her – or seems to. Is she a ghost? Is she a different little girl? Is she a trick of the mind? Professor Ash takes a skeptical attitude. He’s no supernaturalist; his “fieldwork” consists of infiltrating and debunking séances.

At one séance, the word “Edbrook” is murmered, and not long afterward, a letter arrives from that address. It’s a plea for help, for the disturbed Nanny Tess. Intrigued, the Professor packs up his ghost-detecting equipment and rides a train to the countryside. He is met, at the station, by Christina (Kate Beckinsale), the chatty middle sibling at Edbrook. She drives him to the estate and tells him about her family. Her friendliness takes an unexpected turn when she removes her clothing and jumps into the pond. She is promptly joined by Simon (Alex Lowe), her frivolous younger brother – the “spare.”

Arriving at the manor, Professor Ash notes various nudes of Christina painted by the lordly older brother, Robert (Anthony Andrews, of The Scarlet Pimpernel and Brideshead Revisted, very much in his element).

The siblings’ life at Edbrook would be an uninhibited frolic but for the ceaseless brooding of Nanny Tess. Alas, the old woman’s meeting with Professor Ash is an abject failure. She continues to “see ghosts.”

Rather than admit defeat and return to his university, the Professor whiles away more days with the lovely Christina.

Her brothers are less welcoming. Simon is always playing obnoxious jokes. Robert is downright unfriendly. He tells the Professor to leave. The Professor stays put. When he isn’t with Christina, he tinkers with his equipment or strolls the grounds. The scenery is pleasant. The light is soft … and yet, somehow, there is a glare. Really, the lighting is extraordinary. Things look lavender without actually being that color, as if persistently touched with a flash-bulb’s after-effect. Everything is perfectly, nightmarishly illumined.

The Professor sees curious things. Then, one stormy night, he falls into the pond. …

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This is a ghost story, yes, but the ghosts are clever window-dressing. Haunted’s objective is to satirize the degenerate rich – or, more precisely, viewers’ lurid obsession with the degenerate rich. The older movie that Haunted channels has nothing to do with ghosts. I’m referring to Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956): “a perverse and wickedly funny melodrama,” Roger Ebert tells us,

in which you can find the seeds of Dallas, Dynasty, and all the other prime-time soaps. Sirk is the one who established their tone, in which shocking behavior is treated with passionate solemnity, while parody burbles beneath.

He goes on:

All the reviews of [Written on the Wind] seem to involve lists: It’s about wealth, alcoholism, nymphomania, impotence, suicide, and veiled elements of incest and homosexuality.

A similar list could be made of Haunted’s themes.

To appreciate a film like Written on the Wind probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message. His interiors are wildly over the top, and his exteriors are phony – he wants you to notice the artifice, to see that he’s not using realism but an exaggerated Hollywood studio style. …

The actors are as artificial as the settings. They look like Photoplay covers, and speak in the clichés of pulp romance. …

The … skyline in an early scene is obviously a painted backdrop. The rear-projected traffic uses cars that are 10 years too old. The swimming hole at the river, where the characters make youthful promises they later regret, is obviously a tank on a sound stage with fake scenery behind it.

Haunted plays the same game but with a twist. The setting is obviously real and beautiful – too beautiful, in fact. The exaggerated style is up-to-date Masterpiece Theatre, not Old Hollywood. But thematically, things are the same. And where it can get away with it, Haunted duplicates Sirkan imagery, particulary of windblown leaves.

If the locations are utterly genuine – and they must be, to follow the Masterpiece Theatre template – then how does the movie tip its hand? How does it declare its fakery? Rather brazenly. By using body doubles. And by showing their faces. Not just once; I dunno, at least three times. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, … you get the idea.

Critics don’t. Every critic I’ve read has suggested that the filmmaking is sloppy. But that just isn’t true. The rest of the movie looks great – even the ludicrous climactic special effects are spectacular in their way. And everything moves along at just the right clip. But the crucial detail is that the body-double “mistake” occurs too many times. It must be deliberate. The director, Lewis Gilbert, made James Bond movies, for goodness’s sake. Those movies aren’t shy about heaping on the cheese, and they’re the opposite of profound; but no one, as far as I know, accuses them of technical incompetency.

See Haunted, then; and, more importantly, see the great, decadent Written on the Wind.

Happy Halloween.

Boo, y’all.

Harassment; catfight; gatekeeping

Received, via text message:

VOTE EARLY THIS WEEK!

Our records show that you previously voted early OR absentee, but have yet to cast your ballot for this election!

Do NOT be the reason our county becomes SOCIALIST! It is happening just across our border in Michigan.

Early voting is open this week and this weekend! Don’t wait until it is too late. Vote REPUBLICAN today.

Paid for by the St. Joseph County Republican Party

Reply STOP to STOP

I get stuff like this all the time. Probably everyone does. The election can’t come too soon.

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Ziva and Dory have been fighting to the death again.

I put Abel on the bed for his nap. A minute or two after he went to sleep, Ziva jumped on the bed and appeared to attack Abel. It was a blur of hissing, yowling, flailing, and shedding – the works.

I chased Ziva away and then saw that Dory had been snuggling up against Abel, under a blanket.

Which is kind of sweet.

Abel slept through the fracas.

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Dory, whom we rescued and adopted, pines for the outdoors. The neighborhood’s other cats pine to be inside our house. Half a dozen regularly congretate on our porch or in our yard.

One of them – the friendliest – followed Samuel and me down to the bus stop this morning. Then she followed me back home. I hated to shut her out, but it was necessary for maintaining the peace.

A curious apology

Nigel Biggar (theologian), in In Defence of War:

Why write yet another book on the justification of war? Why not a book on the arts of peacemaking instead? Surely peace, not war, should have first claim on our attention and reflection and creative intelligence.

I cannot deny the truth of this statement, nor the force of the questions preceding it. I cannot deny them, since I know that war is horrendous and that working to prevent its outbreak – even if in the end that should prove justified – is our first and most urgent duty. A fortiori as a Christian I cannot deny these things.

Nevertheless, I confess that I do not have it in me to write a book about peace. Maybe in due course I shall have; but I do not have it now. Now, as for most of my life, it is war that captures my imagination. I read nothing so voraciously as military history. Wherever I go, if there is a battlefield or a war cemetary, I will make a point of visiting it: Waterloo, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Gallipoli, Ypres, the Somme, Jerusalem, Gibraltar, Maleme and Souda Bay in Crete, Leningrad, Malta, El Alamein, Assisi, Rome, Normandy.

Whence the fascination? I grew up in a country haunted by the two world wars. As a child I played in my grandmother’s air-raid shelter, and I heard about the German bomber that had crash-landed in the adjacent field only twenty years before. I attended a school and a university college where the names of the war dead cascade down whole walls. A brother of my father’s father left Scotland for France one September day in 1915 and was killed three weeks later at the battle of Loos. He was twenty-one years old. My mother’s youngest brother flew out over the Burmese jungle on another September day in 1944 and never was heard of again. He was twenty-two years old. My father himself volunteered in 1943, aged thirty, and spent the next two-and-a-half years in Italy first manning an anti-aircraft gun and then, when there were no more enemy planes left to shoot at, carrying a stretcher. …

War therefore exercises my imagination in a way that peace does not. I do not claim this as a virtue. I merely state it as a fact from which I cannot escape, but which therefore defines (for now) my vocation. The arts of peacemaking certainly deserve attention, and others who are differently located and called should reflect on them. In the meantime, however, it is my task to think and write out of the place – historical, cultural, emotional, imaginative – that has, with all its many limitations, been given me. I have inherited a certain fate, and I must honour it.

So here is another book on the moral justification of war. …

There are obvious rejoinders, but the apology rings true at least in this respect: many people really do believe in the link between heritage and justification. Some people refrain from condemning the Confederate cause or the Zionist cause (or whatever) just because the heritage that has fashioned their mental furniture – and that claims them as heirs – is Southern or Jewish (or whatever). Until the link between heritage and justification is undone, anti-war argumentation is beside the point.

New Zealand “gothic”

From Kate De Goldi’s 2010 introduction to the Text Classics edition of David Ballantyne’s novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968):

New Zealand literature began in 1882 with the introduction of refrigerated shipping. This was the inimitable opening line of the New Zealand Lit course offered at Canterbury University in 1981. It was delivered by Dr Patrick Evans whose undergrad fame preceded him: his jokes were so good people actually wrote them down in lectures. Evans’ thesis, as it unfolded, was mesmerising – and deeply unsettling … something like this:

Refrigerated shipping – the vehicle for the frozen meat trade – entrenched the basis of the nascent New Zealand economy: the farming and slaughter of animals. The consequent despoliation and industrialisation of the landscape, and the transformation of the New Zealand colonist into a “systematic and calculating” butcher, described the progress of the “New Zealand Dream” from an imagined South Pacific eden (a “better Britain”) to a fallen society with, literally, blood on its collective hands. New Zealand became, not the pastoral paradise envisioned by British utopians, but a society in which industrialised violence was merely the sanctioned version of other widespread malignancies.

New Zealand literature, Evans argued, oscillated between work that danced around the “truth” of this national mythology, and work that confronted it in various compelling ways. Using short fiction and novels from the mid nineteenth century to the late 1960s he laid out the evidence for a “slaughterhouse” fiction …

Then, a list. I don’t know a lot of New Zealand authors, but most of those I’m aware of, down to the present day, are on Evans’s/​De Goldi’s list or should be. Even Katherine Mansfield. (Ngaio Marsh, for all her murder-writing, would barely qualify – she’s one who “dances around” the slaughterhouse theme, preferring to write about theatre-killings and such – but I presume she’d make the cut, for Died in the Wool.)

(I don’t mean the philosophers – certainly not A. N. Prior. But Jonathan Bennett isn’t so far off, thematically.)

Think of moviemakers, too. “Systematic and calculating butcher” describes Peter Jackson rather well. And Jane Campion has her moments (In the Cut; the fascinating, disturbing Top of the Lake). Think, also, of the documentarian David Farrier (Tickled; Dark Tourist; Mister Organ).

Anyway, Sydney Bridge Upside Down is a piece of work.

People are always saying how civilized New Zealanders are, how exemplarily democratic, and maybe so, but New Zealanders do appear to relish churning out stories of brutality. As do the Swedes.

Body-text fonts, pt. 56: Guardian Egyptian

Guardian readers will be familiar with the house font.

Matthew Butterick:

It’s counterintuitive, but a well-designed font can have a lot of subtle variation between letters and still look consistent on the page. The converse of this principle is that a font with too much consistency can be numbing to read. Cambria is an example of this problem. It works well on screen, but on the printed page, it’s a skull-clutcher. Guardian Egyptian … [is] similar to Cambria but [avoids] monotony.

An example of Guardian Egyptian:

This is hardly the best type specimen. The quote marks are “straight” rather than “curly,” and the dash in the second line appears to be a mere hyphen.

But I exhibit it because it’s an outstanding passage from one of my all-time favorite reviews: a pan of the great Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. It gets at what’s so elegant and so disconcerting – so craftily, poignantly removed – about Ishiguro’s prose.

(I’ve been reading Ishiguro’s books in order. Their formality is endlessly fascinating.)

The Guardian passage explains certain tendencies in my own writing.

I, too, am a kind of foreigner.

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Another insight along similar lines, due to Nancy Mitford (Don’t Tell Alfred):

You must remember, with Americans, that they are fighting to express themselves in a language they’ve never properly learnt. They need the dissertation; the kind of shorthand that we talk would be useless to them.

Recall, also, C. S. Lewis’s remark in Studies in Words:

It was better to have the older English distinction between “I haven’t got indigestion” (I am not suffering from it at the moment) and “I don’t have indigestion” (I am not a dyspeptic) than to level both, as Americans have taught most Englishmen to do, under “I don’t have.”

If you introduce many non-natives into an English-speaking country, then – naturally enough – phrasal verbs will get phased out: got will be dropped from I haven’t got.

Suppose that, over time, that country’s influence is inflated. Eventually, the blood will be siphoned out even from the Mother Country’s speech.

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See, also, David Lodge’s chapter, in The Art of Fiction, on Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day:

Stevens [the narrator] speaks, or writes, in a fussily precise, stiffly formal style – butlerspeak, in a word. Viewed objectively, the style has no literary merit whatsoever. It is completely lacking in wit, sensuousness and originality. Its effectiveness as a medium for this novel resides precisely in our growing perception of its inadequacy for what it describes.