![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The colored folks and Ti-Misery
I was asked to write about something spooky for Halloween. Luckily for me, the Criterion Channel left all this Val Lewton just lying around.
It's so difficult to remember that the face of Carre-Four belongs to a human actor. True to his name, he is met at a crossroads among the spiky rows of sugarcane where a horse skull, a hanged goat, a hollow gourd, and a human skull jaw-fallen in a circle of stones have already pointed the way; a flashlight catches him like a spotlight, first his bare feet, then his stock-still tall silhouette, and finally his lean-muscled face, just as motionless in the cane-whistle of wind. He would be handsome with animation. Maybe he was, once. Now his flesh looks as harsh and sculpted as resinous wood; his eyes have the dry tissue-glitter of parched scales and they do not change their further-than-thousand-yard stare for light or dark. More than anything else, really, he resembles the figurehead of the long-ago ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to this fictional yet not at all far-fetched island in the West Indies, a weathered and arresting effigy which can still be seen as an ornament in the garden of the wealthy white planters for whom generations toiled and died, "an old man . . . with arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face." Still white, still wealthy, still sugar planters even in these supposedly post-colonial days, the Hollands of Fort Holland recognize him as Saint Sebastian, the eponym of the island and its patron saint. The free descendants of their slaves know him as Ti-Misery, patron of the sugar-burdened island in quite a different way. Like the loas and orishas of Vodou and santería, he is a prayer card with one Euro-Christian face and one Afro-Caribbean one and he presides over all that transpires on Saint Sebastian just as the silent, liminal character played by Darby Jones presides over the film of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), even if he isn't the title character after all. That one's white, and she's scarier.
To render a Black face so iconic that it is not immediately decipherable as human sounds, of course, fantastically racist, and in another film it might simply be so, especially if it were the sole face of Blackness in the narrative. Scripted by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, directed by three-time Lewton collaborator Jacques Tourneur, and photographed with both haunting and pragmatic shadows by J. Roy Hunt, I Walked with a Zombie avoids this trap by a clever, curious sleight of hand: the longer the film runs, the more its white characters come to feel like the least important thing in it. We begin with them, as we expect to. The dreamy, slightly self-deprecating young woman's voice that restates the title as her personal experience belongs to Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a Canadian nurse looking back on the events of the year she left snow-covered Ottawa for the hothouse of Fort Holland and found herself at the center of a vortex of love and death that had, after all, very little to do with her. She is dark-haired, crisply dressed, with more determination than prettiness in her face; she is so naïve that it is impossible for the audience to take her point of view without salt. Hearing the story of Ti-Misery from the coachman (Clinton Rosemond) who drives her up the winding, oleander-laden roads of Saint Sebastian, she leans sympathetically forward as he describes the "enormous boat" that "brought the long-ago fathers and the long-ago mothers of us all—chained to the bottom of the boat" and then relaxes back into the tropical prospect with breathtaking superficiality: "They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?" The possibility of ambiguity in the coachman's mild last word, "If you say, miss. If you say," is lost on her just as surely as the warning signs of her first conversation with her new employer, the saturnine sugar planter Paul Holland (Tom Conway) who dismissed the luminous sea-swell she was admiring as "the glitter of putrescence" and adduced the streak of a meteor across the star-swarmed sky as proof that "everything good dies here—even the stars." In return for this spoilsport cynicism, she reinterprets him as a romantic figure, the Gothic hero who appeals because he's "clean and honest, but hurt—badly hurt," and first takes against his equally acid-tongued half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison) because he mocks her rose-tinted impression of Paul as "quite the Byronic character." Handsome at first as a rival hero, he turns out to be a missionary's faithless son who drinks too much while the drums beat down at the sugar mill, like all the Conradian sins rolled into one, but there might be something in his whiskey-soured insistence that Paul drove his wife into the brain fever that left her a beautiful wraith (Christine Gordon), lying against her pillows like a doll of herself unless she's wandering the old stone tower like a bride of Dracula gone south for the winter, so blank in blocks of moonlight that her whiteness takes on a terrible cold solidity, the lividity of death. "She makes a beautiful zombie, doesn't she?" Hence the inspiration that she might be cured by the "better doctors" of the houmfort, that Betsy might be able to present Paul with the love-gift of his restored wife—or at least the firm self-persuasion that she wants to, though the viewer watching her make this pledge to herself in the shimmeringly Gothic-romantic setting of a night sea breaking in white flowers on the rocks of the cliff where she stands may not be so sure. Nothing is sure about these people, who talk so accusingly or guiltily of their treatment of one another and yet hardly seem to understand their own motivations or responsibilities. They have a peculiar celluloid flimsiness to them, no matter how sincerely tormented or daring or flawed they are. Shouldn't they register more three-dimensionally, these normative nice white people with their troubled romances and family skeletons in an environment so classically torrid, it confers the authentic stamp of exotica on problems that in more suburban surroundings might just be poshlost? Why should they? They're not the only people in this world.
It is a bit like reminding about gravity to note that there is no shortage of Hollywood films which simultaneously foreground non-white actors and are racist af. Sometimes the most neutral representation that can be hoped for is scenery. We are even introduced to the Black population of I Walked with a Zombie in exactly this anonymous fashion, first as sailors sharing a slow communal melody aboard the schooner from Antigua to Saint Sebastian, then as stevedores toting sisal and sugar on the docks of the island—musical, laboring bodies, literally local color. Almost immediately, however, this familiar panorama of Otherness begins to break up into individuals and the communities they belong to, very few of them observing the servile, stereotypical functions of Black bit parts in a white story. The coachman gives us the background of the island just as local color should, but he puts the first cracks in our identification with the white narrator-protagonist in the process. The maid Alma (the immortal Theresa Harris) makes a point of pampering Betsy in bed on her first morning at Fort Holland, just as she used to do for her mistress Jessica, but she's neither an autopilot mammy nor a dark-skinned Mrs. Danvers. Reproved the first night for frightening Betsy with the traditional ritual of weeping for a birth, she turns the criticism back on Betsy's fragility with the tart deflection, "Well, she didn't soothe me any, hollering around in the tower!" Later, seeing the real warmth with which the nurse enters into the island custom of the newborn child choosing his own friends, she suggests the recourse of the houmfort as matter-of-factly as if she's offering an opinion on diet or exercise, not a flagrant defiance of the rational Christianity of Fort Holland: "The houngan will speak to the Rada drums and the drums will speak to Legba and Damballah. Better doctors." With one dark finger, she draws the map through the canefields in a sifted white circle of sugar, such a casual repurposing of the staple crop of slavery that it too may read as a subversion. Taking racial insubordination even further as the neat and sweet-voiced calypsonian who gives away the scandal behind the antagonism of the half-brothers and the woman who now lies like a meaningless prize between them, Sir Lancelot must have been dynamite in the theaters of 1943. With great dignity and irony, he apologizes for performing the insult of the "Fort Holland Song" within earshot of Wesley and Betsy, but after the wastrel sugar planter has drunk himself out cold and the rest of the café's clientele dispersed into the dusk, he returns to finish the story for its most necessary audience. Her eyes are empty and she cannot talk and the nurse has come to make her walk. The brothers are lonely and the nurse is young and now you must see that my song is sung. It's a brilliant piece of double-speaking on the part of the movie. Betsy is a newcomer to the island, a white woman alone at night with a Black man who approaches her as though he has a right to while her assumed protector lies insensible among sticky, empty glasses of rum and the barman Ti-Joseph (Arthur Walker) watches with folded arms. She is not the object of a sexual threat—nothing so crude. She's facing the exposure of a situation that embarrasses the Holland-Rands and implicates her in the "shame and sorrow for the family" and while the singer exits the scene without even a bow at the unexpected arrival of the reassuringly practical Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), the damage is done. He has laid truth bare to power. Power can either reckon with the facts or repress them, but it can't pretend it didn't know. And once again, though Betsy reacts to him with fear and mistrust, we cannot uncritically share her perspective and the gap between audience and protagonist widens. Paul with his bitter talent for crushing others' joy may have overstated the ugliness of the Caribbean, but the sugar trade and its perpetuation of what Le Guin called "sweetness pressed from human pain" is not a prettily neutral backdrop for a part-retelling of Jane Eyre. I don't want to overreach for a reference not actually present in the text of the film, but as ghostly and inimical as the close-grown cane-rows look during the night-walk of Betsy and Jessica, the Lewton unit never allows us to forget there's blood at the roots and they know who spilled it there.
I'm not even sure it would go too far to say that ultimately the Black characters of I Walked with a Zombie are more real than the white ones. I don't mean the condescending vitality so often assigned to characters labeled "primitive," so much closer to the simplicities of the natural world than us civilized folk all cluttered up with neuroses and literacy. The film views its white characters from an increasingly interrogative distance, but it looks at its non-white ones simply like people. The scenes at the houmfort are a legitimate high-water mark of ethnography, but they are also shot with unshowy empathy, neither gawking nor taxonomized. "I'm afraid it's not very frightening," Paul said earlier with his air of apologetic deflation. "They sing, dance, and carry on, and then, as I understand it, one of the gods comes down and speaks through one of the people." He's right that it's not some fearful Satanic savagery; he's wrong to dismiss it as "cheap mummery." Under the open-air, flag-hung rafters of the houmfort where the three drums of the Rada batterie hold a steady polyrhythm and the objects on the candlelit altar cannot quite be seen by the camera, the congregation is singing call-and-response. They are calling the opener of ways, the crossroads talker with his saint's keys and his trickster's hat: O Legba, O Legba, marche donc. Marche donc, Papa Legba, marche donc. Dressed all in white except for the lithe, black-clad figure of the Sabreur (Jieno Moxzer), they have serious, ordinary faces of all ages; even hampered by the technical difficulties of lighting and photographing brown skin on the film stock of the '40's, they have beautiful faces. There are no rolling eyes, no flashing teeth. We see a white chicken carried firmly in the direction of the altar, but we are not shown the sacrifice. When the possession comes, it is signaled by the collapse of a dancer (Jeni LeGon) as the drums quicken and the rhythms intensify; she whirls in tandem with another girl (Rita Christiani), the two of them finally forehead to forehead above the heart-hammer of the smallest drum until all falls suddenly silent and a new song led by a new rhythm begins. It's not a documentary, despite the conscientious research by Lewton and Wray and the technical assistance of LeRoy Antoine, the Haitian musician and folklorist who supplied the traditional songs "O Legba," "Wallee Nan Guinan," and "O Marie Congo." Like the later scenes of the Sabreur's work with doll and drumming and dance in order to draw the will-less shell of Jessica back to the houmfort, it's staged for purposes of story. But whether it's authentic or not, it's never a cheap scare or even perhaps a scare at all. It's as sacred as any other aspect of daily life. The revelation that one white character has appropriated the language and rituals of Vodou for their own benevolent but patronizing ends seems to undercut the dignity of the true believers, but when it's chased by the twist that the same character was at least once, fatefully, really possessed, then it looks more like a cautionary lesson in the illusions of colonial control: don't call the rider if you're not willing to be the horse. By the mythic finale when the actions of the white characters interlace like a dream with the rituals of the houmfort, it's as impossible to parse the supernatural from the psychological as it would be to separate Saint Barbara from Shangó. It is hard, however, not to notice that the film's authority has gone conclusively over to Ti-Misery. Following the tremendous image of Carre-Four with the night surf crashing about him as though he really is the old slave-ship figurehead breasting the waves, the scene shifts to white faces in black water, Black fishermen with tridents and torches discovering the dead whom the sea has given up, and to a Black voice speaking a prayer that invokes at once Vodou and Christian traditions of transgression and understanding: "The woman was a wicked woman and she was dead in her own life . . . Yea, Lord, pity them who are dead and give peace and happiness to the living." Our last shot of Betsy is a silent one, her "clean, decent," limited narration having fallen away in the second half of the film as if in recognition that she is no longer its center. Our last sight onscreen is not the white lovers comforting one another but the piercing black memory that is Ti-Misery.
The spooky, confessional title, drawn from the credited nonfiction article by Inez Wallace, comes up over a scene that never appears in the narrative: a man and a woman walking side by side at the curling tide-line of a long, dawn-lit beach. By their silhouettes, the woman must be Betsy; the man, Carre-Four. Is it an acknowledgement of coexistence, even syncretism, a concession to the liminality of Vodou over the anxious dichotomies of whiteness? What's really frightening in this movie? The legacy of colonialism, the unknowingness of people who are accustomed not to think about the world; it is not like The Leopard Man (1943) an exploration of the impossibility of self-knowledge so much as an indictment of the willful self-obtuseness of people who assume they are always the reason a story happens. It can get away with Carre-Four because it is filled with finely drawn even walk-on Black people, whose living faces the camera appreciates so that we can recognize the inhumanity of the zombie as a function of his condition, not his race. Is it the apex of Black representation on film in the 1940's? I'm sure some race film has the pants beat off it. But it is a lyrical and atypical treatment of a religion still used more for jump scares than real numinous and I noticed some time ago that it is much more difficult for me to write about movies originally seen before I started paying attention to movies, so it feels like something of a victory to write about this one which I may last have seen as much as twenty-five years ago. I think it's even better now. This walk brought to you by my living backers at Patreon.
It's so difficult to remember that the face of Carre-Four belongs to a human actor. True to his name, he is met at a crossroads among the spiky rows of sugarcane where a horse skull, a hanged goat, a hollow gourd, and a human skull jaw-fallen in a circle of stones have already pointed the way; a flashlight catches him like a spotlight, first his bare feet, then his stock-still tall silhouette, and finally his lean-muscled face, just as motionless in the cane-whistle of wind. He would be handsome with animation. Maybe he was, once. Now his flesh looks as harsh and sculpted as resinous wood; his eyes have the dry tissue-glitter of parched scales and they do not change their further-than-thousand-yard stare for light or dark. More than anything else, really, he resembles the figurehead of the long-ago ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to this fictional yet not at all far-fetched island in the West Indies, a weathered and arresting effigy which can still be seen as an ornament in the garden of the wealthy white planters for whom generations toiled and died, "an old man . . . with arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face." Still white, still wealthy, still sugar planters even in these supposedly post-colonial days, the Hollands of Fort Holland recognize him as Saint Sebastian, the eponym of the island and its patron saint. The free descendants of their slaves know him as Ti-Misery, patron of the sugar-burdened island in quite a different way. Like the loas and orishas of Vodou and santería, he is a prayer card with one Euro-Christian face and one Afro-Caribbean one and he presides over all that transpires on Saint Sebastian just as the silent, liminal character played by Darby Jones presides over the film of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), even if he isn't the title character after all. That one's white, and she's scarier.
To render a Black face so iconic that it is not immediately decipherable as human sounds, of course, fantastically racist, and in another film it might simply be so, especially if it were the sole face of Blackness in the narrative. Scripted by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, directed by three-time Lewton collaborator Jacques Tourneur, and photographed with both haunting and pragmatic shadows by J. Roy Hunt, I Walked with a Zombie avoids this trap by a clever, curious sleight of hand: the longer the film runs, the more its white characters come to feel like the least important thing in it. We begin with them, as we expect to. The dreamy, slightly self-deprecating young woman's voice that restates the title as her personal experience belongs to Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a Canadian nurse looking back on the events of the year she left snow-covered Ottawa for the hothouse of Fort Holland and found herself at the center of a vortex of love and death that had, after all, very little to do with her. She is dark-haired, crisply dressed, with more determination than prettiness in her face; she is so naïve that it is impossible for the audience to take her point of view without salt. Hearing the story of Ti-Misery from the coachman (Clinton Rosemond) who drives her up the winding, oleander-laden roads of Saint Sebastian, she leans sympathetically forward as he describes the "enormous boat" that "brought the long-ago fathers and the long-ago mothers of us all—chained to the bottom of the boat" and then relaxes back into the tropical prospect with breathtaking superficiality: "They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?" The possibility of ambiguity in the coachman's mild last word, "If you say, miss. If you say," is lost on her just as surely as the warning signs of her first conversation with her new employer, the saturnine sugar planter Paul Holland (Tom Conway) who dismissed the luminous sea-swell she was admiring as "the glitter of putrescence" and adduced the streak of a meteor across the star-swarmed sky as proof that "everything good dies here—even the stars." In return for this spoilsport cynicism, she reinterprets him as a romantic figure, the Gothic hero who appeals because he's "clean and honest, but hurt—badly hurt," and first takes against his equally acid-tongued half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison) because he mocks her rose-tinted impression of Paul as "quite the Byronic character." Handsome at first as a rival hero, he turns out to be a missionary's faithless son who drinks too much while the drums beat down at the sugar mill, like all the Conradian sins rolled into one, but there might be something in his whiskey-soured insistence that Paul drove his wife into the brain fever that left her a beautiful wraith (Christine Gordon), lying against her pillows like a doll of herself unless she's wandering the old stone tower like a bride of Dracula gone south for the winter, so blank in blocks of moonlight that her whiteness takes on a terrible cold solidity, the lividity of death. "She makes a beautiful zombie, doesn't she?" Hence the inspiration that she might be cured by the "better doctors" of the houmfort, that Betsy might be able to present Paul with the love-gift of his restored wife—or at least the firm self-persuasion that she wants to, though the viewer watching her make this pledge to herself in the shimmeringly Gothic-romantic setting of a night sea breaking in white flowers on the rocks of the cliff where she stands may not be so sure. Nothing is sure about these people, who talk so accusingly or guiltily of their treatment of one another and yet hardly seem to understand their own motivations or responsibilities. They have a peculiar celluloid flimsiness to them, no matter how sincerely tormented or daring or flawed they are. Shouldn't they register more three-dimensionally, these normative nice white people with their troubled romances and family skeletons in an environment so classically torrid, it confers the authentic stamp of exotica on problems that in more suburban surroundings might just be poshlost? Why should they? They're not the only people in this world.
It is a bit like reminding about gravity to note that there is no shortage of Hollywood films which simultaneously foreground non-white actors and are racist af. Sometimes the most neutral representation that can be hoped for is scenery. We are even introduced to the Black population of I Walked with a Zombie in exactly this anonymous fashion, first as sailors sharing a slow communal melody aboard the schooner from Antigua to Saint Sebastian, then as stevedores toting sisal and sugar on the docks of the island—musical, laboring bodies, literally local color. Almost immediately, however, this familiar panorama of Otherness begins to break up into individuals and the communities they belong to, very few of them observing the servile, stereotypical functions of Black bit parts in a white story. The coachman gives us the background of the island just as local color should, but he puts the first cracks in our identification with the white narrator-protagonist in the process. The maid Alma (the immortal Theresa Harris) makes a point of pampering Betsy in bed on her first morning at Fort Holland, just as she used to do for her mistress Jessica, but she's neither an autopilot mammy nor a dark-skinned Mrs. Danvers. Reproved the first night for frightening Betsy with the traditional ritual of weeping for a birth, she turns the criticism back on Betsy's fragility with the tart deflection, "Well, she didn't soothe me any, hollering around in the tower!" Later, seeing the real warmth with which the nurse enters into the island custom of the newborn child choosing his own friends, she suggests the recourse of the houmfort as matter-of-factly as if she's offering an opinion on diet or exercise, not a flagrant defiance of the rational Christianity of Fort Holland: "The houngan will speak to the Rada drums and the drums will speak to Legba and Damballah. Better doctors." With one dark finger, she draws the map through the canefields in a sifted white circle of sugar, such a casual repurposing of the staple crop of slavery that it too may read as a subversion. Taking racial insubordination even further as the neat and sweet-voiced calypsonian who gives away the scandal behind the antagonism of the half-brothers and the woman who now lies like a meaningless prize between them, Sir Lancelot must have been dynamite in the theaters of 1943. With great dignity and irony, he apologizes for performing the insult of the "Fort Holland Song" within earshot of Wesley and Betsy, but after the wastrel sugar planter has drunk himself out cold and the rest of the café's clientele dispersed into the dusk, he returns to finish the story for its most necessary audience. Her eyes are empty and she cannot talk and the nurse has come to make her walk. The brothers are lonely and the nurse is young and now you must see that my song is sung. It's a brilliant piece of double-speaking on the part of the movie. Betsy is a newcomer to the island, a white woman alone at night with a Black man who approaches her as though he has a right to while her assumed protector lies insensible among sticky, empty glasses of rum and the barman Ti-Joseph (Arthur Walker) watches with folded arms. She is not the object of a sexual threat—nothing so crude. She's facing the exposure of a situation that embarrasses the Holland-Rands and implicates her in the "shame and sorrow for the family" and while the singer exits the scene without even a bow at the unexpected arrival of the reassuringly practical Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), the damage is done. He has laid truth bare to power. Power can either reckon with the facts or repress them, but it can't pretend it didn't know. And once again, though Betsy reacts to him with fear and mistrust, we cannot uncritically share her perspective and the gap between audience and protagonist widens. Paul with his bitter talent for crushing others' joy may have overstated the ugliness of the Caribbean, but the sugar trade and its perpetuation of what Le Guin called "sweetness pressed from human pain" is not a prettily neutral backdrop for a part-retelling of Jane Eyre. I don't want to overreach for a reference not actually present in the text of the film, but as ghostly and inimical as the close-grown cane-rows look during the night-walk of Betsy and Jessica, the Lewton unit never allows us to forget there's blood at the roots and they know who spilled it there.
I'm not even sure it would go too far to say that ultimately the Black characters of I Walked with a Zombie are more real than the white ones. I don't mean the condescending vitality so often assigned to characters labeled "primitive," so much closer to the simplicities of the natural world than us civilized folk all cluttered up with neuroses and literacy. The film views its white characters from an increasingly interrogative distance, but it looks at its non-white ones simply like people. The scenes at the houmfort are a legitimate high-water mark of ethnography, but they are also shot with unshowy empathy, neither gawking nor taxonomized. "I'm afraid it's not very frightening," Paul said earlier with his air of apologetic deflation. "They sing, dance, and carry on, and then, as I understand it, one of the gods comes down and speaks through one of the people." He's right that it's not some fearful Satanic savagery; he's wrong to dismiss it as "cheap mummery." Under the open-air, flag-hung rafters of the houmfort where the three drums of the Rada batterie hold a steady polyrhythm and the objects on the candlelit altar cannot quite be seen by the camera, the congregation is singing call-and-response. They are calling the opener of ways, the crossroads talker with his saint's keys and his trickster's hat: O Legba, O Legba, marche donc. Marche donc, Papa Legba, marche donc. Dressed all in white except for the lithe, black-clad figure of the Sabreur (Jieno Moxzer), they have serious, ordinary faces of all ages; even hampered by the technical difficulties of lighting and photographing brown skin on the film stock of the '40's, they have beautiful faces. There are no rolling eyes, no flashing teeth. We see a white chicken carried firmly in the direction of the altar, but we are not shown the sacrifice. When the possession comes, it is signaled by the collapse of a dancer (Jeni LeGon) as the drums quicken and the rhythms intensify; she whirls in tandem with another girl (Rita Christiani), the two of them finally forehead to forehead above the heart-hammer of the smallest drum until all falls suddenly silent and a new song led by a new rhythm begins. It's not a documentary, despite the conscientious research by Lewton and Wray and the technical assistance of LeRoy Antoine, the Haitian musician and folklorist who supplied the traditional songs "O Legba," "Wallee Nan Guinan," and "O Marie Congo." Like the later scenes of the Sabreur's work with doll and drumming and dance in order to draw the will-less shell of Jessica back to the houmfort, it's staged for purposes of story. But whether it's authentic or not, it's never a cheap scare or even perhaps a scare at all. It's as sacred as any other aspect of daily life. The revelation that one white character has appropriated the language and rituals of Vodou for their own benevolent but patronizing ends seems to undercut the dignity of the true believers, but when it's chased by the twist that the same character was at least once, fatefully, really possessed, then it looks more like a cautionary lesson in the illusions of colonial control: don't call the rider if you're not willing to be the horse. By the mythic finale when the actions of the white characters interlace like a dream with the rituals of the houmfort, it's as impossible to parse the supernatural from the psychological as it would be to separate Saint Barbara from Shangó. It is hard, however, not to notice that the film's authority has gone conclusively over to Ti-Misery. Following the tremendous image of Carre-Four with the night surf crashing about him as though he really is the old slave-ship figurehead breasting the waves, the scene shifts to white faces in black water, Black fishermen with tridents and torches discovering the dead whom the sea has given up, and to a Black voice speaking a prayer that invokes at once Vodou and Christian traditions of transgression and understanding: "The woman was a wicked woman and she was dead in her own life . . . Yea, Lord, pity them who are dead and give peace and happiness to the living." Our last shot of Betsy is a silent one, her "clean, decent," limited narration having fallen away in the second half of the film as if in recognition that she is no longer its center. Our last sight onscreen is not the white lovers comforting one another but the piercing black memory that is Ti-Misery.
The spooky, confessional title, drawn from the credited nonfiction article by Inez Wallace, comes up over a scene that never appears in the narrative: a man and a woman walking side by side at the curling tide-line of a long, dawn-lit beach. By their silhouettes, the woman must be Betsy; the man, Carre-Four. Is it an acknowledgement of coexistence, even syncretism, a concession to the liminality of Vodou over the anxious dichotomies of whiteness? What's really frightening in this movie? The legacy of colonialism, the unknowingness of people who are accustomed not to think about the world; it is not like The Leopard Man (1943) an exploration of the impossibility of self-knowledge so much as an indictment of the willful self-obtuseness of people who assume they are always the reason a story happens. It can get away with Carre-Four because it is filled with finely drawn even walk-on Black people, whose living faces the camera appreciates so that we can recognize the inhumanity of the zombie as a function of his condition, not his race. Is it the apex of Black representation on film in the 1940's? I'm sure some race film has the pants beat off it. But it is a lyrical and atypical treatment of a religion still used more for jump scares than real numinous and I noticed some time ago that it is much more difficult for me to write about movies originally seen before I started paying attention to movies, so it feels like something of a victory to write about this one which I may last have seen as much as twenty-five years ago. I think it's even better now. This walk brought to you by my living backers at Patreon.
no subject
no subject
Thank you! It wasn't vampires, but I am glad it sufficed.
I forgot this film referenced Jane Eyre (I think I saw it when I was a kid, about half of it, on a late night TV station) -- I've seen references to it in litcrit even.
I would need to re-read Jane Eyre in order to tease out the way the film transposes or rearranges the novel, but it's definitely there in the DNA. The premise-configuration of characters is recognizable, as are a couple of points of the plot. I'm sure someone has written straight-up Jane Eyre and Zombies, of course, but I'd be surprised if it were as weird as I Walked with a Zombie.
no subject
no subject
Oh, neat! I have never read the novel. Did you watch (at least a few scenes from) all the movies referenced in it?
no subject
no subject
I always support watching Cat People.
no subject
I was happy to hear the caller singing in the same register as Pops Staples in True Stories, yes indeed.
no subject
Yes!
no subject
no subject
I saw it in high school when I saw very few movies, so I had no idea that it could have been cringeworthy and just took all the disturbing humanity as normal! Now I'm wondering if it was my first zombie movie. It may well have been.
no subject
no subject
Thank you!
I was rewatching the film last night on TCM, and that Sir Lancelot scene is just priceless.
I bounced very badly off The Curse of the Cat People in high school, but James Agee says such good things about his performance in that movie, I'm starting to think I might have to re-try it.
Theresa Harris is always wonderful.
She is. I can't quite honestly say that I have rewatched Baby Face just for her, but only because of Barbara Stanwyck.
no subject
no subject
no subject
I didn't have so much trouble with the idea that it wasn't a direct sequel—although I was disappointed that no one turned into a cat or even thought about it—but I hated the last line, because I did not think that Oliver should lie to his daughter even by way of repairing his relationship with her; I thought there were better ways of indicating his acceptance of her imagination. It really burnt the finale for me.
no subject
To me, the movie epitomizes one of Kestrell's favorite sayings: "Grownups lie." Oliver's last line just reinforces that.
no subject
But if that's the intended reading, then there is no way to take the ending except as brutally bitter and cynical where everything else I remember about the scene suggests it was meant to be taken as delicately touching and tentatively redemptive. It is obvious that Oliver believes he's being supportive of Amy by telling her that he can see Irena, especially since he punished her at least once for stating truthfully that she could still see her friend standing in the snowy yard, which was empty to him. But the film seemed to agree that it counted as a supportive statement and that was what I hated and to read the film otherwise seems to leave the problem stated above, which feels out of key with the other Lewton films I've seen. Some of them close with irony, but mostly with poetry, and they are never corrosive.
no subject
I don't find it a corrosive ending, though certainly a sad one in some respects. Those who embrace imagination and those who don't can never agree on what constitutes reality, whichever side of the parent-child divide they find themselves on. But those who embrace imagination have at least moments of utter joy that the others can never share.
On the other hand, maybe I have just been conditioned to accept that an otherwise-great movie will often have an ending which completely undercuts it, and thus have become used to not letting another such occurrence ruin my enjoyment :-)
no subject
no subject
Thank you!
I'd recently been thinking about watching one of the old voodoo-style zombie movies, simply because I've never seen any of them, and I was interested in the history of the modern trope of undead-braineating-style-zombies. But you make this sound so much more fascinating than simply a history lesson.
It really holds up on its own merits. I would also recommend checking out White Zombie (1932) if you're interested in zombie trope history, but it's not the same kind of movie at all.
no subject
... okay, I will come back when I've read the entry properly.
no subject
I think so. And it seems to confer in this case a kind of folkloric property, like the name of Ti-Malice, the trickster (who, unless there really is a character in Haitian/Caribbean folklore named "Ti-Misery," I would assume the figurehead was named by analogy with).
... okay, I will come back when I've read the entry properly.
Okay!
no subject
no subject
You should! And report back!
(I wonder if I Walked with a Zombie is considered to be an influence on Wide Sargasso Sea. The one predates the other by more than twenty years, which is certainly enough time to make it plausible; I suppose the question is whether Rhys would have had the opportunity to see the film, or at least hear about it.)
no subject
What's really frightening in this movie? The legacy of colonialism, the unknowingness of people who are accustomed not to think about the world ... [It is] an indictment of the willful self-obtuseness of people who assume they are always the reason a story happens. --And how! That line at the start about bringing the people to such a beautiful place. AaaaaaaAAAAaaaahhh!
And I really like this: Yea, Lord, pity them who are dead and give peace and happiness to the living. Amen.
no subject
You're welcome! It is really worth seeing.
--And how! That line at the start about bringing the people to such a beautiful place. AaaaaaaAAAAaaaahhh!
So, so, so much scarier than zombies.