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Gothic
The nightmarish lunacy director Ken Russell showcases here plays like a private joke for aficionados of gothic literature. I am such a person—when Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) lists off a number of obscure gothic titles, I nod familiarly and giggle at the sly reference. I’ll admit that all non-fans else will be lost, confused, and probably plain bored; then again, I’m not sure that anyone else except folks who immediately recognize the DVD cover art as a replication of Henri Fuseli's "Nightmare" would even bother to watch this film. If you’ve never heard of Henry Fuseli, this write-up isn’t for you. Go read one of my other reviews. If you have, then you will likely find Gothic as big a riot as I did. It is an acid reinterpretation of the most important night in all of horror literature—the stormy evening in Lord Byron’s summer estate outside of Geneva, when he, Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), his new wife Mary (Natasha Richardson), Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), and Dr. John Polidori (Timothy Spall) all agreed to write ghost stories. If you’re still reading, you already know what happened as a result of that evening: Mary went on to write Frankenstein, and Polidori wrote “The Vampyr,” the first story to romanticize the bloodsucking nosferatu and a key influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If the story was as simple as that, we wouldn’t have a movie. That Dracula and Frankenstein were both invented on the same night is one of the great coincidences in literature, but not enough to sustain a feature film. No, the alleged scandals surrounding that night are what really fascinate people about that haunted summer—the illicit love affair between Percy and Mary that caused his first wife to commit suicide, the often violent animosity between Bryon and his personal physician (and arguably gay) Polidori, and the supposed nightly orgies that had the townsfolk across the lake ready to storm the house with torches and pitchforks. It is impossible to know what exactly went on under that roof, but if we are to believe the myths, it was a free-love free-for-all that occurred about one hundred and fifty years too early to be anything short of demonically indecent. With the scandals foremost in mind, the most important (though far from the most interesting) moment in the film comes at the very beginning, as nosey tourists with binoculars sit on the other side of the lake and try to get an eyeful of some of the terrible sins that are going on in the house. “Byron’s bedroom is top right,” a guide informs them, and they all ooh and aah and shift their lens appropriately. Ken Russell, a director of overwhelming excess, finds the perfect, subversive note for this moment, and it informs the rest of the film: Gothic is not about the truth of this house, but is rather an intentionally exaggerated account in the spirit of the morbid fantasies of the outsiders looking in. It’s the quietest moment in the film, and the last quiet moment; we immediately jump to Bryon, who is quickly visited by the increasingly disturbed Percy, Mary, Claire, and Polidori. As soon as they’re all together in the house, Russell’s oblique fever kicks in and starts its mixture of a little fact with heaps of fantasy. He provides, in a scene lifted directly from Mary’s accounts, the infamous moment when they all read ghost stories together and decide to write their own. This is followed by a moment of pure, Russell fancy that feels recycled from leftover Altered States storyboards: High on opium, they conduct a midnight séance in which they all place their hands on a skull and bid their greatest fears to pay them a visit. These visitations make up the rest of the film; they instantly push the proceedings into a full-throttled series of nonsensical vignettes where everyone overacts and runs about the mansion in drug-induced frenzies. The escapades are made up primarily of collective, suicidal nightmares featuring demons, living puppets, furious electrical storms, and Death riding a horse. That’s when the group is not busy with passionate orgies on the floor, of which they never seem to tire. We don’t believe a minute of any of this, which is about as subtle as Young Frankenstein and nearly as loony. I suppose that on one hand, Gothic is neither scary nor coherent. The hallucinatory images are obviously inspired by Frankenstein and vampire mythologies, and because we know that they are all fantasies, they do not disturb us. And the central story is predictable to a fault: Since we already know that the two greatest literary demons found life that night, we easily predict the outcome of this group head-trip. Nor are we particularly convinced by the dilemmas of the characters: They are so busy tripping and screaming at one another at the top of their lungs that they never generate any sincere sympathy. Watching them is like going to a party and laughing at the biggest pothead; we don’t laugh because he is funny, but because he does not realize that his jokes are only funny to him. So the film is admittedly an exaggerated, plotless experiment in dramatic and visual overkill, and we clearly recognize every minute of its running time as the manipulation of an overambitious director who seems to go a little madder with every film he gives us. Fortunately, we’re not alone in recognizing these handicaps. So does Ken Russell, who uses these illogical eccentricities to draw attention to subtler ideas which, if you squint enough throughout the carnage, are actually pretty compelling. First of all, the house itself is a fantastic collage of gothic motifs and designs; Russell knows this genre, and every frame contains homage to great literature and art from the gothic and romantic eras. I could provide some examples, but it would just be a list of elements instantly detectable for those familiar with gothic literature and otherwise insignificant to the layman. These visual references are invaluable for the way that they saturate us and constantly provide context to the proceedings. Byron and the others were creatures of their era; here we see them not suggesting gothic visions but embodying them. “It is not enough that we create ghost stories. We must create ghosts themselves,” Bryon declares, and this is an insightful commentary on their own reclusive and mysterious lifestyles. Their ghosts were mirrors for their own tragic lives, which is partly why Frankenstein remains so compelling (for example: William, Frankenstein’s murdered brother, was also the name of Mary and Percy’s stillborn child; such knowledge lends weight to the fictional tragedy). Russell also wisely allows these bizarre images to filter in primarily through the eyes of Mary and Polidori, who were ironically the least prolific among these literary giants. You can purchase the complete works of Lord Byron, but can you name another novel by Mary or a story by Polidori? That these two lived in the shadows of Percy and Byron respectively lends weight to the power of their gothic works—they had a lot to live up to, and they rose to the occasion—and Russell allows us to react to the group’s fantasies by viewing them as Mary and Polidori see them. Russell is a bit heavy-handed in the way he surrounds vampiric and Frankensteinian images respectively around Byron and Percy, but he cushions these images by allowing us to see such images as critiques of these two men from the point of view of their companions. It has been speculated that Polidori indeed based his vampire directly on Bryon and Mary clearly drew inspiration from Percy for Victor Frankenstein; to watch Gothic is to believe that Dracula and Frankenstein themselves were in Bryon’s house together, engaged in séances that called their demonic spirits into existence. Russell therefore argues that Polidori and Mary didn’t so much create these characters as they recorded them and renamed them. Such speculations allows clever literary analysis to filter in, under the film’s extended mayhem. I especially admired how Polidori so often follows Byron around like a cackling Renfield, which if true suggests even more strongly that Bram Stoker was very aware of “The Vampyr” and its origins as he wrote Dracula. But these observations are really my way of dodging the confession that I wholeheartedly embraced the madcap nature of this weird film. Gothic is a macabre celebration of its namesake’s images and ideas; most only know of Frankenstein, but to additionally read gothic classics like Byron’s Manfred, Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, or William Beckford’s Vathek is to embrace surreal, audacious images strung together with effectively campy fury. To know these books is to recognize that Gothic, in celebrating such absurd horrors, is only doing its best to keep up with its literary counterparts. Any other cinematic version of such tales would have to be muted to have any effect at all: Read Jane Loudon’s great gothic chiller The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (is this the greatest title ever?) and observe the aerial battles between mad scientists and undead mummies in helium balloons; when you’re finished, let your mouth fall open when large statue heads fall from the tops of towers and crush ghostly villains in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. Now try to convince me that Russell goes too far with his inevitable and deliciously over-the-top images and unforgivable overacting. Well, fine: He does go too far, but for those of us who understand his images and their inspirations, we wouldn’t have it any other way. You don’t call a film Gothic and then fail to live up to the genre that inspired it. I’ll conclude with a random bit of trivia: When Polidori eventually committed suicide, he did so by drinking a deadly elixir invented by one Johann Dippel. Dippel, you may or may not know, was Mary’s real life inspiration for Victor Frankenstein. There’s an irony here that is perhaps too subtle for Russell’s antics; then again, real life is never quite as fun as its fantasy counterparts. Which is Gothic’s point anyway. Cast: Vestron Pictures presents a Virgin Visions film. Directed by Ken Russell. Written by Stephen Volk. Rated R for drug use, strong sexuality, and disturbing violence/images. Running time: 87 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: April 10, 1987. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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