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Conclusion: This is a time for ghosts
The Awakening (2011) is exactly the sort of movie ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
handful_ofdust would have written if she hadn't been the person who recommended it to me in the first place. It is a classic ghost story; it has a mystery and a revelation and any number of tense, ambiguous moments in between. It is also a poignant and very fine exploration of what it means to be haunted in the more figurative, Henry Jamesian sense. If there are no ghosts, Rebecca Hall's Florence Cathcart remains as haunted by the loss of her lover in World War I as Dominic West's Robert Malory by his survival of those same trenches: his slight stammer and shuddering fits, the grief that cores through her with every phenomenon debunked; the skin-hunger that flashes between them in a mix of trust and trauma, as if they can prove on one another's bodies that they still have a right to the living world. (It is not at all the romance expected of their initial pairing, the shell-shocked Latin master and the professional skeptic called to investigate at his school; there are ways in which it is barely a romance, meaning I approve. Florence's sexuality is not the repressed force behind the hauntings, not a symbol of her mental unraveling, not the consequence of her Cambridge-educated, sharply compartmentalized life as a woman who lives by cool, efficient intellect when the loss of a cigarette case is enough to open an abyss of suicidal grief beneath her. Her work at the school is raking up private terrors faster than she can lay them with tripwire cameras and dusting for prints. Gazing covertly at Malory in his bath, touching herself as she lies pensively in the same tub, kissing him for the first time as the impossibly screaming face of a child blurs up from a tray of developer, she is trying to use her body to drown out her brain. I have rarely seen movies with contemporary settings, let alone a softly speaking ghost story set in 1921, acknowledge that this is a thing women also do.) At times the story plays almost like a remix of The Turn of the Screw, housekeeper, groundskeeper, and eerily self-possessed boy all present, Florence in danger of falling into the governess' role. There are eches of The Waste Land: a famous clairvoyant, a line from the Morte d'Arthur, Malory's unhealing wound like the Fisher King's in his thigh. Mostly there is Florence, sharp-edged and wounded, striding in her soldier's greatcoat and her restless intelligence, refusing to live in fear even if the exorcizing of it destroys her. Yes, it is probably unnecessary to have her threatened with rape at any point in the story (although I would note that Malory is explicitly not her rescuer: a painting the camera keeps returning to is Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes), but I spent so much of the film wondering when it would toss aside her agency in favor of the aesthetic potential of a frightened woman, it was a pleasure to find the denouement her decision, too. Online research suggests that some viewers find the ending ambiguous, but I don't see it. The confusion of living and dead is almost inescapable. Florence walks like a revenant through her own memories, wryly admitting that "a life haunted . . . isn't a life at all." When Malory says he can always see his ghosts, it doesn't matter whether he is speaking literally or metaphorically: their weight on his shoulders is the same.
That was a textbrick. I'm going to bed. I meant to three hours ago, but I was writing this.
handful_ofdust would have written if she hadn't been the person who recommended it to me in the first place. It is a classic ghost story; it has a mystery and a revelation and any number of tense, ambiguous moments in between. It is also a poignant and very fine exploration of what it means to be haunted in the more figurative, Henry Jamesian sense. If there are no ghosts, Rebecca Hall's Florence Cathcart remains as haunted by the loss of her lover in World War I as Dominic West's Robert Malory by his survival of those same trenches: his slight stammer and shuddering fits, the grief that cores through her with every phenomenon debunked; the skin-hunger that flashes between them in a mix of trust and trauma, as if they can prove on one another's bodies that they still have a right to the living world. (It is not at all the romance expected of their initial pairing, the shell-shocked Latin master and the professional skeptic called to investigate at his school; there are ways in which it is barely a romance, meaning I approve. Florence's sexuality is not the repressed force behind the hauntings, not a symbol of her mental unraveling, not the consequence of her Cambridge-educated, sharply compartmentalized life as a woman who lives by cool, efficient intellect when the loss of a cigarette case is enough to open an abyss of suicidal grief beneath her. Her work at the school is raking up private terrors faster than she can lay them with tripwire cameras and dusting for prints. Gazing covertly at Malory in his bath, touching herself as she lies pensively in the same tub, kissing him for the first time as the impossibly screaming face of a child blurs up from a tray of developer, she is trying to use her body to drown out her brain. I have rarely seen movies with contemporary settings, let alone a softly speaking ghost story set in 1921, acknowledge that this is a thing women also do.) At times the story plays almost like a remix of The Turn of the Screw, housekeeper, groundskeeper, and eerily self-possessed boy all present, Florence in danger of falling into the governess' role. There are eches of The Waste Land: a famous clairvoyant, a line from the Morte d'Arthur, Malory's unhealing wound like the Fisher King's in his thigh. Mostly there is Florence, sharp-edged and wounded, striding in her soldier's greatcoat and her restless intelligence, refusing to live in fear even if the exorcizing of it destroys her. Yes, it is probably unnecessary to have her threatened with rape at any point in the story (although I would note that Malory is explicitly not her rescuer: a painting the camera keeps returning to is Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes), but I spent so much of the film wondering when it would toss aside her agency in favor of the aesthetic potential of a frightened woman, it was a pleasure to find the denouement her decision, too. Online research suggests that some viewers find the ending ambiguous, but I don't see it. The confusion of living and dead is almost inescapable. Florence walks like a revenant through her own memories, wryly admitting that "a life haunted . . . isn't a life at all." When Malory says he can always see his ghosts, it doesn't matter whether he is speaking literally or metaphorically: their weight on his shoulders is the same.That was a textbrick. I'm going to bed. I meant to three hours ago, but I was writing this.
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Absolutely this. I think it's why the first act doesn't feel like a fakeout, even though I've now seen multiple reviewers complain about the way the focus shifts from the school environment to Florence herself. Her job at Rookwood is done when she solves the death of Walter Portman. It is a terrible answer, because it is made of human sadness and stupidity, but it is a better one for the headmaster than some predatory kind of phantom running loose among the boys. It settles nothing for her. She could leave that afternoon and go back to her strange, penitential life in its staggered downward spiral, disproving case after case and losing a little more of herself each time; it's what she's done every time before. It's only because she stays on, past her apparent part in the story, that she has the chance—however perilous—of anything more.
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I meant to three hours ago, but I was writing this.
I know the feeling. I hope you've found some restorative sleep.
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Weirdly, I got about five hours max, but I woke up fine.
I liked the film.
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I'm glad for the waking up fine part.
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I can't tell if it was even in theaters here: if so, it came and went in a week. It's currently on Netflix, so take advantage while it lasts. I am only a little sorry I didn't see it in a theater, because the cinematography is luminous.
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I . . . don't know. There are things about it you will undoubtedly enjoy, including Dominic West. (I don't know your mileage on Rebecca Hall. She was almost unknown to me and I'd watch a lot of her now. I said to
[edited for hell of a parenthesis, sorry about that]
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I haven't seen either, but if you pull out the silverware drawer one day and it is unexpectedly full, I would love to read whatever you have to say.
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The Gift is a pretty straightforward "local psychic investigates murder mystery" plot, including the standard twist of said plot. It is also quite violent. It is set in a very small town on the bayou, though, and it's that atmosphere that I think sets it apart. Also, the soundtrack is amazing.
As for The Awakening, I liked how the standard ghost story of the piece is almost incidental. It's a movie about hauntings and ghosts, oh yes, but not of the supernatural kind. Every character in it seems to be traumatized one way or another. There's grief and PTSD and loneliness and pain and survivor's guilt, all weighing heavily in those long white halls and nearly empty rooms. And there's Florence, debunking frauds as a form of exorcism that never works.
I don't know why anyone would think that ending ambiguous. It seemed pretty clear to me.
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Interesting. It looked like humorous zombies and the kind of Tim Burton-esque I don't like. I will reconsider.
Also, the soundtrack is amazing.
Cool! I'd never even heard of it!
There's grief and PTSD and loneliness and pain and survivor's guilt, all weighing heavily in those long white halls and nearly empty rooms. And there's Florence, debunking frauds as a form of exorcism that never works.
Yes. The teacher with the ruined lungs, hacking into his handkerchief as he quotes Tennyson's dying Arthur (never more, at any future time, delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds), already imagining the spectre of another war: "These boys must be strong . . . Stronger than we were." The boys with their wary circles of alliance, their isolation; Malory is not tugging heartstrings when he calls them "as good as orphans." (I like how they flock around the car like wild little animals, staring in at Florence.) Maud, who I love the film for because it does not demonize her. And Malory himself—I wrote to
(Ellipses because of trying to avoid honking spoilers, seeing as this is a film that actually benefits from not knowing everywhere it ends up. I suppose I can put back in the examples I took out if you don't care and no one's likely to read this far down.)
Everyone is haunted; everyone is hurt. You could remove the supernatural element and it would be a different story, but it might not feel all that much different to the characters.
[edited for failing italics]
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This is a piece from the soundtrack of The Gift, just to give you an idea.
I loved that The Awakening drove home the point that all of England was haunted in that period. You can read about "a whole generation of young men lost" in history books, but this is the kind of story that makes that visceral. And the four men featured in the narrative illustrate the impact of the war: one dead and commemorated with a cigarette case, two wounded and haunted by their own survival, one essential "draft dodger," despised and despising and outcast.
And then there's Tom (I don't mind spoilers if you don't), whose blurry, twisted, screaming face brings to mind photographs of the dead in the trenches, felled by mustard gas and grenades and all the terrible machinery of war. Once you realize who Tom is, and what happened to him when, you also realize he was always destined to haunt Florence, one way or another.
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Yes. Florence even says it casually, turning over an old class photograph: "You don't need me to tell you what happened to this generation of boys." Malory doesn't even flinch; it's something they both know. I found myself hoping McNair wouldn't live to see the next war, the fear of which you can see haunting him as badly as his memories of the last.
(In the early 1930's, the poet H.D. was referred to Freud as a patient because of her paralyzing fear of a second and worse war coming, which was then seen as a kind of paranoia—just because she had lost her husband in the first war, because her husband's shell-shock had contributed to the breakdown of their marriage (although H.D. being bisexual, polyamorous, not closeted about either, and in the most committed relationship of her life with a genderqueer woman, it is not surprising that monogamous marriage to a man did not work out for her; still, it did not have to hurt either of them so badly), because she always believed she had miscarried their child because of the stress. I did not associate Florence with her, but I thought of that mindset occasionally throughout the film.)
Once you realize who Tom is, and what happened to him when, you also realize he was always destined to haunt Florence, one way or another.
He has been haunting her for years. She just didn't know it was him.
(I love that he looks like a photograph.)
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I understand very well the sense of being a revenant in one's own memories. We're our own ghosts, in our memories. Future ghosts, witnessing our past.
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I agree in the sense that Florence means it, when she finishes the sentence, "We may as well be ghosts ourselves." From personal experience, living as though you are a ghost—the leftovers of a life, the image of a person rather than their substance, clinging to something you have no right to anymore, knowing you should just let go—is a very bad thing for a person who isn't actually, clinically dead.
Future ghosts, witnessing our past.
I like that.
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ugghhh, yes, okay, I can see how that is no life at all, yes -_-
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I think you may really like it.
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That's cool!