The guilty party in The Innocents

'The Innocents' is a 1961 British gothic psychological horror film starring Deborah Kerr, based on the 125-year-old novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, with a screenplay smeared with the buttery fingerprints of Truman Capote and, to a lesser extent, John Mortimer. The psychological underpinnings of the film's screenplay have made it the subject of numerous critical and scholarly essays, particularly in the area of film theory and it was selected by The Guardian as one of the 25 best horror films ever made.

Quite a pedigree. Which makes you wonder who the hell am I to wade in with my pennyworth.

And it's quite a simple criticism really, having rewatched it a few days ago. And it has nothing to do with 'psychological underpinnings' (can you tell I culled much of that from Wikipedia'?) but from a writerly perspective. I've mulled on why it simply does not work for me as a film (and, I seem to dimly remember, as a book). 

There's somebody missing.

Let's just precis the first act. Miss Giddens (Kerr) becomes governess to two orphans on a large country estate, the previous incumbent having died. Whilst her charges are generally angelic, she grows disturbed by their occasional odd, and oddly adult, behaviour. She is also disturbed by disembodied voices and apparitions she—and only she—witnesses. She concludes that these are the ghosts of her predecessor and her lover and are in possession of the children so they can physically continue their relationship. She determines to rescue them from this possession.

And therein lies my problem. What on earth would make Debs come to such a bonkers conclusion as a first guess? The kids are playing up and there are ghosts around. There's nothing, nada, zilch, zip that links the two. Not a smidgen of a suggestion unless you cook it up in your own mind.

The only way that I would buy this line of reasoning in any way, shape or form is if either she had exhausted all other possibilities, or somebody put the idea in Miss Giddens' head. It is too great a leap for somebody to make, at least in one step, and I'm not sure what the 'other possibilities' are here as I'm inclined to tick the 'unrelated' box and deal with each issue separately. Which makes me think we need somebody whispering this concept into Giddens' shell-like.

Okay, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces was published decades after James wrote his story, and wasn't the go-to in Hollywood when the film was made as it was when, say, Star Wars was being story-boarded, but even so... it describes established story elements rather than inventing them afresh. The mentor has existed for ever.

Without a mentor, possibly an unreliable mentor, to plant the idea of possession in the governess's mind I'm just left unempathetic and unengaged as she goes off on a bonkers one. Maybe that's the idea: horror movie as clinical observation of somebody's cheese sliding off their cracker. But I always regard the main character as being my proxy in the storyworld, as the eyes I see that world through. Their going mad means my going mad. That makes it my cheese sliding off my cracker. No dice.

When I first learnt story structure under an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (okay, a writer of an Oscar-nominated short), one of the many things that stuck in my mind (far less red wine had flowed under the bridge) was that protagonists' thought processes must be clear and reasoned, even if, say, driven by gut instinct, whereas antagonists can display leaps of logic worthy of a wuxia hero. Bond must show his workings, whereas only Blofeld's allowed to act like a loose cannon.

How much better, then, to have a mentor figure whispering in Miss Giddens' ear: when the children act like that, they're not the children, they're possessed by the spirits of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, and for Miss Giddens to come to think, slowly, over the course of the second act: that's ridiculous, but wait, that does accord with what's happening, and there it is again, that's the only conclusion, it can't be anything else, the children... they're possessed, I have to help them...

Truman! Truman!! We're gonna need a rewrite...

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.