The Turn of the Turn of the Screw

[smokingboot]

Watched the first 4 episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor with my niece. Hmm.

Well, it has its moments of homage to The Innocents, but 9 episodes of this? Flashback land and lots and lots of relationships.

The clever creeping thing about this story is not the ghosts. It's the narrative voice one learns to distrust, little by little until faced with the possibility that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, dead or alive, are not the problem; that these children are in danger from a very real predator. Henry James is inevitably focused on what we know and how we know it, the master of fish eye lens story telling. The revelation is not about a great ta dah at the end, though the end is a brutal thing gently expressed. It's about the gradual understanding of what is going on, what all those delicate petal words are really telling.

But to understand, it's helpful to look at the yearnings of people involved, not the internecine sufferings caused by their relationships. Assuming any relation between this and TTOTS, what happens is not going to be explained away by guilt and suppressed lesbian tendencies. That's so easy. The story is far more horrible than that. People's real lives are not the landscapes traversed. We are in a David Inshaw painting, it's not about interconnectedness/The Fam.

Strange though, how so much is, how the 21st century so far seems all about finding a tribe and sticking with it. That has its own horror potential obviously (see any zombie movie) but it's not what turns the screw.