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That's at the end. You'll be there soon
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ashlyme: The Cicerones (2002). I have not read the original story by Robert Aickman, but it reminds me once again that I should know more of his work than "The Stains," much as I love it. This one is an even more indirect narrative, barely more than a suggestive sketch of encounters, but it chills.
Mark Gatiss looks terrible in a pencil moustache, but it suits his English traveler1 with his Brylcreemed hair and his spotted scarf, his Baedeker and his insistence on getting into the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in time to see its famous painting of Lazarus. The time is unspecified, as is the setting—perhaps mid-century, as perhaps somewhere in Central Europe. (The sign on the cathedral door appears to be written in Czech.) Patrick Leigh Fermor might have walked through this country on his way to Constantinople, but he would have known at least a few words of the language and he wouldn't have treated an ancient sacred place as just one more box to tick on his tourist's progress. He would have said a prayer for the young couple on the train (her so heavily pregnant, fingers running a constant rosary). Gatiss' traveler doesn't know what to do with people. His small talk is evasive and unconvincing, his smile an embarrassed grimace. We're not so sure he knows what to do with art, either.
In fact, we're not sure about much in this story, which is why it works. In a conventional tale of the supernatural, each of the cicerones of Saint Bavon's would reflect or challenge something about the man they purport to guide, but nothing here is direct, only unsettling. A slim young gentleman with dove-colored gloves and the local accent discomfits the traveler by referring to the cathedral as "holy, holy, holy," an expression of the numinous that echoes like a threat. A brash American youth in a T-shirt as tight as Stanley Kowalski's whisks the dropcloth off a painting he didn't want to see—the bloody martyrdom of a saint—but his provocative assessment of the traveler is even worse. A silent altar boy with the red mouth and dark brows of a fairy tale points him toward a clock, which is made of stone. And at last an English boy dressed in the same oddly bright, rich garments as the altar boy and the heavy, faceless figure the traveler saw or thought he saw slumped in the pulpit like an optical illusion or a late delivery from the Cadaver Synod emerges from behind a catacomb door carved caveat intra muros tacet desine fata deum flecti and offers at last to show the traveler some of the treasures of the cathedral he came to see: "Would you like to see one of the other bishops? There might not be another chance." The traveler, who lives by his timetable, who was so impatient with the cathedral's inconvenient hours, cannot refuse. Turning back would acknowledge a wasted day, even when every instinct of the horror genre screams at him to get out before God knows what. And so deeper he goes into the crypt, led by his insistent, insouciant, unexplained countryman. We are encouraged to expect a nasty shock: some whiplash turn, some appropriate punishment for an unimaginative art-seeker. High in the hollow-lit stained glass of the chapel, we saw a blood-red devil with wasp wings, seizing a pale human figure by the arms and neck. But the sudden stop of his story is even more unsettling. The more you try to make the different pieces of strangeness fit together, the more it diffuses. I have my theories about some of what the traveler walked into, but I cannot make all of it cohere and I don't want to. It's a mood, not a moral. It's thirteen minutes of your time. Surely you can spare that. The cathedral is not yet closed.
1. The character is credited as "John Trant," but I do not believe he is ever addressed by name onscreen. I assume it's a holdover from the original story.
ashlyme: The Cicerones (2002). I have not read the original story by Robert Aickman, but it reminds me once again that I should know more of his work than "The Stains," much as I love it. This one is an even more indirect narrative, barely more than a suggestive sketch of encounters, but it chills.Mark Gatiss looks terrible in a pencil moustache, but it suits his English traveler1 with his Brylcreemed hair and his spotted scarf, his Baedeker and his insistence on getting into the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in time to see its famous painting of Lazarus. The time is unspecified, as is the setting—perhaps mid-century, as perhaps somewhere in Central Europe. (The sign on the cathedral door appears to be written in Czech.) Patrick Leigh Fermor might have walked through this country on his way to Constantinople, but he would have known at least a few words of the language and he wouldn't have treated an ancient sacred place as just one more box to tick on his tourist's progress. He would have said a prayer for the young couple on the train (her so heavily pregnant, fingers running a constant rosary). Gatiss' traveler doesn't know what to do with people. His small talk is evasive and unconvincing, his smile an embarrassed grimace. We're not so sure he knows what to do with art, either.
In fact, we're not sure about much in this story, which is why it works. In a conventional tale of the supernatural, each of the cicerones of Saint Bavon's would reflect or challenge something about the man they purport to guide, but nothing here is direct, only unsettling. A slim young gentleman with dove-colored gloves and the local accent discomfits the traveler by referring to the cathedral as "holy, holy, holy," an expression of the numinous that echoes like a threat. A brash American youth in a T-shirt as tight as Stanley Kowalski's whisks the dropcloth off a painting he didn't want to see—the bloody martyrdom of a saint—but his provocative assessment of the traveler is even worse. A silent altar boy with the red mouth and dark brows of a fairy tale points him toward a clock, which is made of stone. And at last an English boy dressed in the same oddly bright, rich garments as the altar boy and the heavy, faceless figure the traveler saw or thought he saw slumped in the pulpit like an optical illusion or a late delivery from the Cadaver Synod emerges from behind a catacomb door carved caveat intra muros tacet desine fata deum flecti and offers at last to show the traveler some of the treasures of the cathedral he came to see: "Would you like to see one of the other bishops? There might not be another chance." The traveler, who lives by his timetable, who was so impatient with the cathedral's inconvenient hours, cannot refuse. Turning back would acknowledge a wasted day, even when every instinct of the horror genre screams at him to get out before God knows what. And so deeper he goes into the crypt, led by his insistent, insouciant, unexplained countryman. We are encouraged to expect a nasty shock: some whiplash turn, some appropriate punishment for an unimaginative art-seeker. High in the hollow-lit stained glass of the chapel, we saw a blood-red devil with wasp wings, seizing a pale human figure by the arms and neck. But the sudden stop of his story is even more unsettling. The more you try to make the different pieces of strangeness fit together, the more it diffuses. I have my theories about some of what the traveler walked into, but I cannot make all of it cohere and I don't want to. It's a mood, not a moral. It's thirteen minutes of your time. Surely you can spare that. The cathedral is not yet closed.
1. The character is credited as "John Trant," but I do not believe he is ever addressed by name onscreen. I assume it's a holdover from the original story.
no subject
Once the question 'Did you notice the hair?' is asked, nothing can be said that would help. Both 'no' and 'yes' feel equally damning, because the correct answer, whatever it is, must be as irrelevantly relevant as the question itself. The thing I can think of that seems closest to right would be 'Hallelujah', but even that is based on having seen later things and feels as though it would be sucking up to whatever is going on. In order to give the right answer one would have to know, and we don't and we can't, and the genius of Aickman is that this gives us that sinking feeling of the dream-test one hasn't prepared for, and the stakes are clearly more than life.
Sometimes an Aickman protagonist does come out of this sort of thing okay, but it's just as clearly blind luck, a case in which the natural responses the person makes happen to fit into the unknown and unknowable and probably unnatural system, which is just as creepy or even creepier than the other way around. The classic example of this for me is 'Bind Your Hair', in which everything the protagonist does is just as mysteriously right as everything the traveler in 'The Cicerones' is wrong, and I do not feel any better at all about the upshot, even though it is almost certainly objectively better.
... apparently I have Feelings about Robert Aickman. This is confusing, as prior to your making this post I would have said that I did not have any feelings as I do not understand his work at all. BECAUSE I DON'T. ONE CANNOT. THAT IS A GREAT DEAL OF THE POINT.
no subject
Yes. That was fascinating to me because it was precisely the kind of image and implication that would have rendered this movie unwatchable for me any time before about age thirteen: it doesn't matter that it's apparently debunked a moment later, is instantly awful, the suspicion of a scarecrow with a slumped corpse inside, and seeing it as an adult doesn't stop it from being disturbing on this nearly unconscious level, it just means I didn't have to close YouTube before it burned me and read something completely different for hours. And it is not even the worst thing, objectively. I would love to know what frightened Robert Aickman, because from limited exposure to his work I actually cannot tell.
it's that there is a sense that the system is navigable, that there are expectations and things that one should do and not do, but it's impossible to find out what they are (except that I am fairly sure that if the traveler had either prayed for the young couple or waited till the cathedral opened he would have been just fine, and I am also sure, as things are, that he wasn't).
I agree with both of these readings. And of course the traveler is not the sort of person to think of either of those things. (He's on holiday, not in a fairy tale.) I believe also that the offer to introduce him to another bishop is a genuine choice, refusable—the boy doesn't press when he declines going behind that Latin-carved door—but that by the time he notices the reliquary flashing it's too late. Possibly the fact that he can see it is a bad sign. But you don't know.
in which the natural responses the person makes happen to fit into the unknown and unknowable and probably unnatural system, which is just as creepy or even creepier than the other way around.
Yeah, I can see how that would not actually make anyone feel better.
... apparently I have Feelings about Robert Aickman. This is confusing, as prior to your making this post I would have said that I did not have any feelings as I do not understand his work at all. BECAUSE I DON'T. ONE CANNOT. THAT IS A GREAT DEAL OF THE POINT.
You are allowed to have feelings about things you don't understand! I think a great deal of human engagement with the universe is predicated on this phenomenon!
no subject
If Robert Aickman said, as mentioned in another comment to this entry, that the events of this story literally happened to him, then he's talking about his own wedding, I think: previous self torn willing/unwilling into shards and something new coming after. Marrying doesn't take everyone that way, but he was married in the days when there was a sharper division between single and husband as states. It's still a sharper division than one expects, as you know, when everyone has spent a lot of time making sure we can all have sex and cohabitate beforehand; it must to earlier generations have been, on occasion, like the end of the world.