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I want to be mesmerizing too
LJ appears to be slightly borked: it wouldn't let me log in for hours and now that it has, the formatting refuses to look right. If this is some attempted style upgrade, I shall be very displeased. [edit: fixed it, either by clearing every cookie in my browser or Livejournal got its act together at the same time. Whatever. Now if only I could get rid of that featurebug that tells you what commenters' icons are called. Who wants that?]
All I'd wanted to do was post my last night's dreams about discovering Peter Cushing in a famous television adaptation of a horror story that doesn't exist. It had aired originally in the mid-to-late-'70's as part of something like A Ghost Story for Christmas, although the modern setting of the episode made it an outlier within the series; I have the vague idea I ran into it as a short between features at the Harvard Film Archive or something and then tracked down the original story in a secondhand anthology from Vintage UK, along with other unfairly neglected tales of the supernatural. The author was Danish, writing in English. The television version had transplanted the story from somewhere in Denmark with heaths and granite crags to northern industrial England, although inside my head both landscapes had the same dry bleak light. Cushing plays a teacher at a public school who falls for one of his students, a girl with very long, very straight hair that matte paintbrush-brown that is almost black. He's a widower; I knew in the dream that this detail was Cushing's own—because Helen was dead by then—and I appreciated that there was no implication in the story that the girl reminded him of his dead wife. He's tutoring her and she never looks straight at him, her head bent sulkily to one side, staring out the window or down at her papers. She cuts classes and one day he follows her, all the way out onto the moors with her hair flying all ways in the wind and her shoulders shrugged as usual, heading nowhere he can make out at no particular pace, never glancing back, never looking around; he has to leave her when he realizes he'll be late for some administrative meeting and the last he sees of her, she's still walking, a straight line between two gorse-girt tors. He's obsessed and he knows it. He doesn't know why. It is almost a silent part, Cushing always watching, whatever he says to his students or his colleagues autopilot by the time we're nearing end-of-term and all the lines of his face drawn so tightly back against his skull, he seems to be disappearing into his eyes, the silver rims of the glasses he takes off more and more exhaustedly now, handkerchief-polishing them in a kind of nervous frustration as if he could just get a better view on what it is about this girl that draws him, but he can't. I don't remember if there's gossip, what anyone else has noticed or knows. Maybe the other teachers talk about him. He wouldn't notice if they did. And then one day she can't be found; nobody's seen her. She's not in any of her usual haunts and it's not like she was ever gregarious. And all it takes is for Cushing to hear something about sending for the police to set him flinging off into the moorland like Van Helsing after an innocent in peril, scrambling through the bitter late cold with no coat and no hat, hours and hours, the last way he saw her walking. She's lying under one of the tors, the sun very bright on her unreflecting hair. He kneels to see if she's alive; he has no idea how to tell, he's too keyed-up and in a hurry to find a pulse that isn't his own heart hammering. He pulls the long, long fall of her hair out of her face, back from her eyes. It's the first time he's been able to look into them, even see them properly, she's gazed past him so often or seemed not even to register he was there. In each of her eyes, in between her lashes—kohl-dark, very heavily shadowed—a hard black shining is moving, the light sliding off it like an eye glancing back and forth, and then her eyes open wider and it is a pair of deathwatch beetles, clicking. That's not the end. The end is Cushing, as windblown and hatless as though he walked the same cold miles straight back to school, seated at his desk with his glasses in one hand, resting forgotten on the blotter while above his head one of his colleagues is saying the same thing urgently and he doesn't seem to hear, doesn't once look straight at them, his head bent absently to one side, staring out the window or down at his papers.
SERIOUSLY BRAIN I ASSUME YOU DO THIS JUST TO FUCK WITH ME?
I have no idea.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
handful_ofdust has been sending me a lot of Cushing photography and fanart lately, which I cannot complain about; atmospherically I'd like to blame ashlyme and the never-written stories meme, but I gave him the only premise that in any way resembled the dream (I really want him to write the rest of it, though). And now that I'm awake, I find it fascinating that it was Peter Cushing cast in this dream rather than some other actor I like who might plausibly have starred in a British anthology series in the 1970's. Maybe it's that keen expression of concern. His characters do tend toward the obsessive: just manifesting in different ways. And usually the results are a little less reminiscent of Dennis Potter out of Junji Ito.
(The rest of this post short-circuited by my suddenly needing to get an ice pack, but I shall be all right. I hit my head into something stupid. Talk about Peter Cushing instead.)
All I'd wanted to do was post my last night's dreams about discovering Peter Cushing in a famous television adaptation of a horror story that doesn't exist. It had aired originally in the mid-to-late-'70's as part of something like A Ghost Story for Christmas, although the modern setting of the episode made it an outlier within the series; I have the vague idea I ran into it as a short between features at the Harvard Film Archive or something and then tracked down the original story in a secondhand anthology from Vintage UK, along with other unfairly neglected tales of the supernatural. The author was Danish, writing in English. The television version had transplanted the story from somewhere in Denmark with heaths and granite crags to northern industrial England, although inside my head both landscapes had the same dry bleak light. Cushing plays a teacher at a public school who falls for one of his students, a girl with very long, very straight hair that matte paintbrush-brown that is almost black. He's a widower; I knew in the dream that this detail was Cushing's own—because Helen was dead by then—and I appreciated that there was no implication in the story that the girl reminded him of his dead wife. He's tutoring her and she never looks straight at him, her head bent sulkily to one side, staring out the window or down at her papers. She cuts classes and one day he follows her, all the way out onto the moors with her hair flying all ways in the wind and her shoulders shrugged as usual, heading nowhere he can make out at no particular pace, never glancing back, never looking around; he has to leave her when he realizes he'll be late for some administrative meeting and the last he sees of her, she's still walking, a straight line between two gorse-girt tors. He's obsessed and he knows it. He doesn't know why. It is almost a silent part, Cushing always watching, whatever he says to his students or his colleagues autopilot by the time we're nearing end-of-term and all the lines of his face drawn so tightly back against his skull, he seems to be disappearing into his eyes, the silver rims of the glasses he takes off more and more exhaustedly now, handkerchief-polishing them in a kind of nervous frustration as if he could just get a better view on what it is about this girl that draws him, but he can't. I don't remember if there's gossip, what anyone else has noticed or knows. Maybe the other teachers talk about him. He wouldn't notice if they did. And then one day she can't be found; nobody's seen her. She's not in any of her usual haunts and it's not like she was ever gregarious. And all it takes is for Cushing to hear something about sending for the police to set him flinging off into the moorland like Van Helsing after an innocent in peril, scrambling through the bitter late cold with no coat and no hat, hours and hours, the last way he saw her walking. She's lying under one of the tors, the sun very bright on her unreflecting hair. He kneels to see if she's alive; he has no idea how to tell, he's too keyed-up and in a hurry to find a pulse that isn't his own heart hammering. He pulls the long, long fall of her hair out of her face, back from her eyes. It's the first time he's been able to look into them, even see them properly, she's gazed past him so often or seemed not even to register he was there. In each of her eyes, in between her lashes—kohl-dark, very heavily shadowed—a hard black shining is moving, the light sliding off it like an eye glancing back and forth, and then her eyes open wider and it is a pair of deathwatch beetles, clicking. That's not the end. The end is Cushing, as windblown and hatless as though he walked the same cold miles straight back to school, seated at his desk with his glasses in one hand, resting forgotten on the blotter while above his head one of his colleagues is saying the same thing urgently and he doesn't seem to hear, doesn't once look straight at them, his head bent absently to one side, staring out the window or down at his papers.
SERIOUSLY BRAIN I ASSUME YOU DO THIS JUST TO FUCK WITH ME?
I have no idea.
handful_ofdust has been sending me a lot of Cushing photography and fanart lately, which I cannot complain about; atmospherically I'd like to blame ashlyme and the never-written stories meme, but I gave him the only premise that in any way resembled the dream (I really want him to write the rest of it, though). And now that I'm awake, I find it fascinating that it was Peter Cushing cast in this dream rather than some other actor I like who might plausibly have starred in a British anthology series in the 1970's. Maybe it's that keen expression of concern. His characters do tend toward the obsessive: just manifesting in different ways. And usually the results are a little less reminiscent of Dennis Potter out of Junji Ito.(The rest of this post short-circuited by my suddenly needing to get an ice pack, but I shall be all right. I hit my head into something stupid. Talk about Peter Cushing instead.)
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Sorry about the head. The way you describe this reminds me a tiny way of Cushing's role in Tales from the Crypt, in which he ends up as a walking corpse/vengeful revenant: Sweet, lonely guy whose wife is dead and who gets suspected of something he hasn't done (child molestation, in that case), which literally destroys his life and brings him back from the grave, having turned him into a genuine monster. Your idea is subtler, obviously...
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I wish I could send you a copy!
Sorry about the head.
Thanks. I have a lump on my forehead. I've managed to reassure myself I don't have either a concussion or brain damage. It will get better and in the meantime I may have to refrain from my usual habit of cat-bumping my head against people I like, or at least not leading with my frontal bone.
(That is not what happened. It was the corner of a chair-back. I said it was stupid.)
Cushing's role in Tales from the Crypt, in which he ends up as a walking corpse/vengeful revenant: Sweet, lonely guy whose wife is dead and who gets suspected of something he hasn't done (child molestation, in that case), which literally destroys his life and brings him back from the grave, having turned him into a genuine monster. Your idea is subtler, obviously...
Heh. I should still see if I can find that episode on YouTube . . .
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqjFr3sCoaQ&feature=relmfu
I'm watching this episode right now. Don't be alarmed that it begins with the end of an unrelated tale: it's part of an anthology episode and the thread with Cushing's character picks up a few minutes in. The next excerpt rounds off the story, I believe.
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I would give much for the story and show actually to be real. Someone on one of those graymarket video duping sites probably has a copy, complete with godawful seventies wine commercials. Peter Cushing, by that point in his life, looked so worn and unhappy that I feel bad for saying this, but it really works well for the part. Big eyes; vampire eyes, I would say if I didn't like him as an actor.
Given a non-weird fiction writer, he could be the guy in a thousand works of literary fiction who draws new life from a deeply inappropriate affair with his student/the next-door neighbor's sexpot daughter/a manic pixie dream girl. Only there are no answers here and no fulfillment of any kind.
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I really need to read him. Every time
Someone on one of those graymarket video duping sites probably has a copy, complete with godawful seventies wine commercials.
We could hope for a Region 2 DVD, but we'd probably have to settle for a washed-out video transfer in three parts on YouTube. It would be the sidebar link between the 1954 Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Signalman.
Big eyes; vampire eyes, I would say if I didn't like him as an actor.
Heh. He didn't look that bad in the dream, but then again it was my dream.
Only there are no answers here and no fulfillment of any kind.
And there is one of the reasons I prefer weird fiction, I believe.
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(And I'm sorry you hit your head.)
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This happens with art and my dreams. I still resent the nonexistence of Britten's Kipling.
(And I'm sorry you hit your head.)
(Thank you. I am recovering.)
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You are so getting that story, by the way. Give me a week or two and I'll have at it.
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I was about to type that I wish I could make it come into being that easily (if enough of us remember seeing it . . .), but that way lies a very contagious haunting. Maybe this is
Teenybuffalo beat me to the Aickman comparison.
You are so getting that story, by the way. Give me a week or two and I'll have at it.
You rock.
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I do! If you meant the thing where you hover your mouse over someone's icon and it tells you the keywords. I'm always fascinated to see what other people associate with icons, and how they frame their keywords -- one word, tidy categorization, allusion, little symbols that make sense only to them? It's like a window into someone's mental organization system for pictures.
Now, this dreamed film, by the way, sounds glorious. Gloriously terrifying, perhaps, but nonetheless.
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That I'm fine with! I just don't understand why, when I view comments in my style (as in this journal), down the side of the icon is a little list: user, date, subject, icon name. It's unnecessary and occasionally spoils jokes.
Gloriously terrifying, perhaps, but nonetheless.
Thank you. My brain does this.
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Oh, I see! How odd. I'd never noticed that, but I do see it now that you mention it. But just for some comments; others have just user, date, and subject. (Perhaps that's just a default icon, though.) I don't think I've seen it on anyone else's journal style, although that could very well be that I just haven't noticed, since apparently my eye skims right past.
Weird, LJ.
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Also, be kind to your head. Not that you banged it on purpose, but still.
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I think that is a wonderful response.
Not that you banged it on purpose, but still.
Thanks. It's getting better.