This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers
Steven Sees a Ghost
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."
So begins Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel, and so begins Mike Flanagan's 2018 miniseries adaptation. It's a sublime passage, one that struck me immediately upon opening the book. The words "absolute reality" evoke existential angst; the interjection "not sane" is too eager to isolate the sentence subject; what is not said about the house takes on a sinister bearing. Flanagan-- longtime horror film director, first time television showrunner-- is wise to replicate the paragraph in voiceover, despite the show having very little at all to do with the book.
In fact, the context of the passage is uprooted quite violently. What was once the musing of an omniscient narrator becomes a quotable line from a book of schlocky nonfiction written by the nominal protagonist of episode 1. Steven Crane, one of five children to experience a terrifying childhood in Hill House, has grown up to exploit that violence by channeling it into the aforementioned best-selling book (itself called The Haunting of Hill House). This, predictably, drives a wedge between him and the rest of his folks. "I need to help my family," he opines, gesturing towards his wife. "We are your family," his sister responds.
Steve has spun the success of his first novel into a middling career. Now he trudges from lead to lead, researching ghost stories to share with the world, all the while remaining privately skeptical. Superior, even. He refuses to engage with the notion of the 'supernatural,' instead preferring the term 'preternatural,' which he insists upon in a didactic and equivocating monologue. He is an agent of logic and reason. Like many such people, he fails to see how determined his life is by forces compared to which logic and reason are like spitting in the wind. His career choice was clearly intended to distance himself from the trauma of his youth, but he has instead trapped himself in a cycle of wallowing. His entire livelihood is, unbeknownst to him, a trauma response.
The pilot episode of "Hill House" deftly moves us from sibling to sibling to demonstrate how each of their lives have been shaped around this yet-to-be-seen family rupture. Second oldest Shirley (a nod to the novel's legendary author, whom you might know from the short story "The Lottery") runs a funeral home. She immerses herself in death to help others work through baggage she hasn't worked through herself. Theo is doing her best to both achieve and avoid intimacy, seducing women back to her apartment then cutting ties more effectively than even the D.E.N.N.I.S. system. Her queerness also invokes the original novel, which is in large part about the terror of women loving women in the '50s. We don't see much of Luke beyond references to his perpetual drug addiction. And then there's the youngest, Nelly, the hinge upon which the show pivots.
It's remarkable the ease with which the show introduces these characters. Nelly is the web that unites them; she cross-pollinates phone calls throughout the episode. Steven and Shirley don't answer, they call back, she doesn't answer, she's maybe talked to Luke but nobody can reach him, Theo tries her best to stay out of it all, etc. Phone tag is a great conceit to offer windows into their daily lives, but the real meat of characterization happens in flashbacks.
Nobody likes a flashback. They're often expository, unnecessary sojourns that take you out of the action. Flanagan deconstructs the flashback with his approach, shifting us between "Then" and "Now" with memory-associative edits. He deploys trigger points to move us through time, often associated with the senses-- the sound of hammering, a drip of water, a snippet of a familiar phrase. It's crucial to both the structure and meaning of the show that neither timeline is given precedence. This editing technique insists that linear time is not a boundary that holds when processing human experience. These are not flashbacks, nor flashforwards: simply flashes.
Dreams spill. These are the words of Then Dad to Then Nelly, a child suffering from lucid night terrors. We see what she sees in a shot of a prone Nelly that coolly pulls back and rotates 90० to reveal The Bent-Neck Lady. This is a signature Flanagan flourish. The perpendicularity of Flanagan's cinematography flares up in moments of encounter with the superpreternatural. But her Dad can't see what she sees, so he repeats a well-worn mantra: dreams spill. Steve mouths this along with him. Two words meant to provide comfort and protection simply because they've been reinforced so many times.
The German word Nachträglichkeit can be translated a few different ways: retroactivity, deferred action, afterwardsness. It's a Freudian idea that describes a mode of belated understanding as it relates to traumatic events. Freud posited that trauma is not a singular event that exists at a point in time, nor is it simply a recurring cycle. Oftentimes a seemingly benign event triggers a trauma response that hearkens back to a formerly buried incident, as if the benign event is the trauma itself and the buried memory is a reference to it. Another way to think of it is that each new inflammation of the traumatic event reprints the original. Meaning is set by perpetual reprise.
"Remember the Bent-neck Lady? She's back," Nelly says to her father over the phone. She is dead soon after. All of her siblings awake, frightened, separate but simultaneous. This inciting incident is tragic in a way that will force the family to reckon with the closeness of their history. Nelly's "suicide" mirrors her mother's "suicide." The death of the sister printed back upon the death of the mother. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," as Steven himself lets slip to Shirley.
At the end of the episode we see Steve find Nelly in his apartment, speechless. He lectures her a bit, then turns away to take a call from his father, who tells him the bad news. Only upon receiving this news does Steve turn to confront the specter of his dead sister, complete with an alarming jump scare in which Ghost Nelly blips from dozens of feet away to a few inches. All of Steven's skepticism disintegrates with immediacy, in a moment of retroactivity that opens realms of possibility surrounding his late mother that cannot be reboxed.
The boundaries between past and present cannot hold. Every barrier is compromised. The opening recitation may claim that "the doors were sensibly shut," but these kids/adults are about to discover that that isn't always the case. Shut doors open.
8.5 / 10
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