strange and random happenstance

The Birds
Based on the short story by Daphne Du Maurier
Starring: Tippie Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Cartwright, Suzanne Pleshette
Release Date: March 28th, 1963
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Melanie Daniels is picking up a mynah bird for her aunt when she meets Mitch Brenner. As is the nature of this young socialite who is inclined to play practical jokes, the mynah bird having been chosen to repeat certain four letter words, she pretends to be a sales associate willing to help Mitch in his search for two love birds for his little sister's birthday. Of course, it's really Mitch who's playing the joke on Melanie, knowing full well about this girl who likes to play in Italian fountains naked. Melanie, chagrined, decides to one-up Mr. Brenner and shows up later at his home with the love birds only to find he's headed to Bodega Bay to spend the weekend with his family. Never one to be deterred Melanie heads up there to deliver the birds in the most convoluted and confounding manner. Instead of simply driving up to his house she rents a boat to sneak up on his dock and therefore leave the birds as a surprise.

Melanie gets the result she was hoping for, Mitch races back to town to meet her... too bad she's attacked by a bird on the way back, marring her triumphant approach and perfect hairdo. That night she is invited to dinner at the Brenners, where she gets to meet Cathy, the birthday girl, and Mitch's mother, Lydia. After a persistent Cathy insists that Melanie stay for her party the next day Melanie stays with an ex of Mitch's and Cathy's teacher, Annie. That night after dinner with Mitch and his family a bird kills itself against Annie's door. The next day at Cathy's party birds come out of nowhere to harm the children. The attacks become more and more fierce, the death toll rising. The Brenners and Melanie eventually take refuge in a house boarded shut mourning the death of Annie and countless others. As night falls there is no end in sight of these ever vicious, ever increasing attacks that come in waves. As dawn breaks we are left with a minor victory, they survived the night. But how much longer will they live?

The irony of The Birds is that you can see that Daphne Du Maurier would have loved the movie if it hadn't been her own story twisted out of shape and stripped of all subtext. She loved the conventional being destroyed by the unexpected, be it a midget mistaken for a child or a lovely usherette killing RAF officers as a calling. Therefore a meet cute that goes apocalyptic starting with an unexpected braining by a bird in Bodega Bay, yes, this is right up her alley. Only it's not what she had written. The Birds is perhaps the movie by Hitchcock, more than any other, that could be labeled a summer blockbuster, even if this was before JAWS set the standard. That is the problem. Hitchcock wanted to make an apocalyptic blockbuster out of a story of subtlety and nuance. Of course by this third outing with Hitchcock Du Maurier should have known what she was in for. A story about one family's attempt at survival against the onslaught of birds was turned into a romantic comedy with a chance meeting that soon spirals into death, death, and more death, with a side of a man on fire. A world of feathers and blood. Where what you see is what you get.

I can't help but feel sorry for Du Maurier. Sitting, watching this film, you can see how Hitchcock's mind was working when he read and then cannibalized her story. There's the lone telephone booth taken off a Cornish Moor and the school bus that brings our hero's daughter home for school, which lead to Hitchcock thinking; how about an attack IN the telephone booth, and what good is a school bus full of children when you can put a whole school in jeopardy with no bus to protect them? Yes, you can see the genius of Hitchcock at work because these are images forever shared in our zeitgeist. But how must Du Maurier have felt? Betrayed? Again? No wonder people think her story "The Birds" is just about the apocalypse without any deeper meanings, because her story was eclipsed by the iconic images of Hitchcock. Yet it's a DAMN fine and original take on the end of days. Sure it's stripped down and went for shock value, but can you think of a Hitchcock film this memorable and bleak? This is just pure horror. Hitchcock had wanted to end this movie with a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds... interesting thought, birds bringing about the end of days, no matter who's the storyteller.

The Birds also broke with convention. Movies have scores, it's a fact of life, they give out an Oscar for it. Heck even all television you watch is scored, some more professionally and competently than others, but we expect melody to underscore our acting. Hence when this doesn't happen, like in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where Buffy's mom dies it stands out as original and is lauded. Now I don't know if Hitchcock was the first to do this stunt, but it still packs a wallop to this day. Seriously, it was gutsy to make this movie with no soundtrack other than practical sounds. Yes, it goes in the exact opposite direction that Du Maurier had pictured with the ominous silent attacks. But having the attacks drown out the very voices of the actors leads to another kind of horror. A cacophonous nature versus a silent one. Aside from the shower scene in Psycho, the scene where Melanie waits outside the school for young Cathy while the birds slowly multiple on the jungle gym is one of the most ominous and scary in film history. The reason why it works so well is the counterbalance of the quietly massing birds with the children's innocent singing. This signing is the only music you'll get. This adds to the realism and also shows that birds turning against us is scary enough with their piercing cries that they don't need a Bernard Herrmann orchestral backing to get the blood pumping.

But a flaw in this film is that we are obviously supposed to be rooting for the humans to win. Or at least I assume we are. The problem is, aside from Annie, I don't like any of the characters. The Brenner family is a dysfunctional family worthy of comparison to the family in Du Maurier's The Scapegoat. While Melanie fits right in with her mommy issues that the distant Lydia can hopefully fix. So while I enjoy this film it's not really my favorite Hitchcock film. I take glee in the death and destruction. Melanie is a spoiled rich girl, Mitch is a magnetic man whom women flock too, which I can not see for the life of me, Cathy is a spoiled and clueless little girl, and Lydia is emotionally remote and almost a cold hearted bitch. This cast of unlikable characters being slowly tortured makes me laugh. I know it's some perverse, dark sense of humor that resides in me, I blame my grandparents, but I take joy in these characters's pain. Because if this is a cross-section of humanity? Let the birds loose. And that is why the ending is dissatisfying. No one wins. It's open ended. The humans are beaten but not destroyed. Yet what chance do they have against the number of birds in the world?

And that's what I really don't get about this film. The ending is inconclusive and the heroine is beaten. Hitchcock was known for subverting expectations with his films, especially with regard to his female leads. Psycho was sold as a new Janet Lee vehicle, and yet she is killed very quickly and the film falls on the shoulders of Anthony Perkins. But there's subverting expectations and then there's this. This feels like something different. I've always felt the ending was a little off. The bubbly socialite turned into a near comatose zombie never sat right with me, and then I watch The Girl, a TV movie about Hitchcock and his relationship with Tippi Hedren. Now I kind of get why the ending of The Birds never sat right with me and also why I hate Marnie, Hitchcock's followup with Tippi, so much. These movies were really about breaking Tippi's will. Subjugating her to Hitchcock's every whim. I think without ever knowing this I felt it in her performance, I felt unease. I felt creeped out. With the recent revelations about Last Tango in Paris you can draw a quick parallel to Melanie's attack in the bedroom. It feels like a rape scene, because it is one. That is the true horror of The Birds. Man's nature, not bird or beast's.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Apocalypse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Daphne Du Maurier, Du Maurier December Deux, Hitchcock, Horror, JAWS, Last Tango in Paris, Marnie, Psycho, Rape, Subtext, The Birds, The Girl, The Scapegoat, Tippi Hedren

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: October 28th, 2008
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

On December the 3rd life changed forever for Nat Hocken and his family. The day before was like any other, he worked at the farm and ate his lunch on the cliffs overlooking the channel. But the birds seemed agitated. That night, the wind came in from the East and turned fall into winter in Cornwall. While he slept soundly next to his wife he was awoken by a tapping on the glass. Upon opening the window a bird attacked him and flew off. This happened once more, though his wife insisted in her groggy state that it was a dream. But once the children were attacked in the room across the hall his wife became scared as well. Nat spent the night fighting the birds off to find fifty little corpses on the floor of his children's bedroom by morning. The day after the night attack they tried to resume life as normal. After walking his daughter Jill to the school bus stop he decided to stop in at the farm to see if this was a unique occurrence to his family. Up at the farm they had heard nothing, but on his way back to his family the home service announced that birds were massing all over the country. Nat went home and prepared his house for the coming attack which he could feel coming deep in his bones. They survived that second night, those at the farm weren't so lucky. But how long can his family survive with their supplies ever dwindling and the birds become ever more fierce and silent?

There are many ways to interpret "The Birds." You can read that the East wind is the tide of Communism, a threat that could arrive at any moment, which was what Du Maurier intended seeing as this was written at the height of the Cold War. I, like Patrick McGrath who selected the stories for this book, found "The Birds" post apocalyptic setting more compelling. Yes, the story IS more Russian scare than world destroying plague, but this 1952 story could be seen as a prototype for what was to come in literature and television. Walking Dead anyone? Yet this is a far more languid way to tell a story that is about "the end." It's peaceful and quiet. The Hocken family trying to withstand an unknown force on limited rations in a desolate landscape sounds just like the best in horror films, but this would be of far more artistic fare, where the lighting of Nat's cigarette signals giving in to the inevitable.

The scope of this story is what I find most compelling. Knowing that this was the impetus for an Alfred Hitchcock classic I had assumptions as to what this story would be. Assumptions that I should have second guessed knowing Du Maurier's dislike of the adaptation. This shows horror on a very intimate and knowable scale with a single family facing off against the mundane omnipresent birds. Could we die because of something we took for granted as being peaceful turning against us? Could the known become unknown? You can see why this story still appeals to readers today, fear of the unknown, and attack by the previously known will always be a real threat, be it the reanimated corpses of loved ones as zombies or birds. Yet here it boils down to the fatalism in that last ambiguously bleak cigarette.

If you've only read Daphne Du Maurier's novels you truly haven't experienced her range as an author. Yes, her novels are some of the best and most beautifully written and suspenseful books you'll ever read from Rebecca to Jamaica Inn to The Scapegoat, but they often cover the same ground and don't even touch on the supernatural and strange that her short stories, such as "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" delve into. It's like Du Maurier felt a freedom in this shorter format that let her handle the outre, the other, and the persecuted that will surprise you in their range and occasional depravity. Each story is easily worthy of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone with a supernatural agency at work in the everyday lives of our heroes and heroines that is never quite fully explained. In "Blue Lenses" Mrs. Marda West has ocular surgery with special lenses inserted to regain her sight only to open her eyes and see that everyone has an animal's head. At first she thinks it's a joke being perpetrated on her but soon comes to realize that these visions are giving her insight into the true nature of people. People whom she trusted are animals of dubious nature and ill repute.

"The Blue Lenses," besides showing this "otherness," showcases an ongoing theme in these shorter works. Du Maurier's protagonists often think that they are the object of a joke being played at their expense. They are the victim of a con and the proper authorities are often viewed as conspiring against them. From "Split Second" to "La Sainte-Vierge" to "Don't Look Now" to the aforementioned "Blue Lenses" delusion and trickery are what everything hinges on. But this paranoia that has these people confused by what they see, hoping they are mistaken, actually shines a light on Du Maurier's true interest, plumbing the depths of humanity. The fact that these characters are so willing to believe that someone would go to the trouble of conning them shows a fear of the "other," a fear of what people are capable of. Because looking deeper, past the supernatural trappings, at the root these stories show that people are capable of murder.

In fact sometimes Du Maurier forgoes the supernatural entirely and tells a tale that is, in the end, just about murder. In fact my favorite story, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," is about a troubled girl who kills RAF men she meets. Of course it wouldn't be a true Du Maurier story if you weren't bamboozled into thinking it was a love story until the very last page, but again and again that is why these stories work, she is continually subverting your expectations. Yes you could boil this all down to man versus nature, be it's man's inner nature or actual nature or something against nature, but trying to condense it down does an injustice to the writing. Du Maurier through stories about killer birds, "The Birds," and killer usherettes, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," and women joining mountain cults that may be leper colonies, "Monte Verità," touches on so many truths and so many weighty topics that you can see why she was always miffed that people called her a "romance" author. She is so much more. If you don't believe, just pick up this book. I think it will change your mind.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Cold War, Communist, Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now, Du Maurier December Deux, Hitchcock, Jamaica Inn, Kiss Me Again Stranger, Post-Apocalyptic, Rebecca, Rod Serling, The Birds, The Scapegoat, The Twilight Zone

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: October 28th, 2008
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

John and Laura have gone to Venice in the hopes of putting the past behind them by revisiting places they loved when they were whole. They haven't been whole for awhile. They have been drifting apart, trapped in depression since the death of their daughter Christine due to meningitis. Venice is supposed to reinvigorate them. Instead what starts as a pleasant trip soon turns incomprehensible. One day they see elderly twin sisters in a restaurant. Laura runs into them in the restroom and discovers that one of the sisters is blind and claims to be a psychic. She tells Laura that she sees Christine there with her and her husband and that she is happy. When Laura tells John this story he claims they are nothing more than charlatans and goes out of his way to avoid them. Yet fate has other plans. That night after getting lost in the labyrinth of Venice they again meet the sisters in a restaurant and the sisters are very enthusiastic to meet Laura again.

John, in his cynicism, thinks it's the sisters sinking their claws into Laura, while Laura insists it's because the sisters have a message for John from Christine; he is to leave Venice at once because he is in danger. John scoffs at this but when they get back to their hotel there's a message that their son Johnnie, who is away at boarding school, is sick with appendicitis and Laura thinks this is the reason that Christine wanted them to leave. Laura is able to get an early flight out but John has to wait. When the plane was supposed to be in the air he sees his wife and the sisters on the grand canal. Thinking there must have been a mix up or the sisters are up to something he spends the day trying to find his wife and the sisters. But perhaps he should have paid more attention to Christine's warning and the sister's insight that John himself has the power of psychic understanding.

"Don't Look Now" is an odd little story, perhaps best remembered by the movie with the same name. The problem I faced with this story is that we are given this glimpse into the marriage of John and Laura but it's as if we are looking through glass from the famous Murano workshops. There's this weird distance that stops us from forming any real connection with the couple. This entire story is written in such a way that the reader always feels like an outsider. It's not just the lack of connection with John and Laura but "Don't Look Now" was written with an insider's knowledge of Venice. Of course during the time period Du Maurier wrote this story her readers would have been more familiar with Venice as it was a common tourist destination but that doesn't help me. I've sadly never been to Venice so the way John rattles off locales makes me think he's smug and is just another way I am excluded from becoming a part of the story. But then again, John is kind of an idiot. His ham-handed approach to finding his wife to his complete unwillingness to actually listen to the sisters means he gets what's coming to him. As for the supernatural of it all? Du Maurier has done better, but that ending. It is a shocker. Mostly because it was so vaguely foreshadowed.

But if you've only read Daphne Du Maurier's novels you truly haven't experienced her range as an author. Yes, her novels are some of the best and most beautifully written and suspenseful books you'll ever read from Rebecca to Jamaica Inn to The Scapegoat, but they often cover the same ground and don't even touch on the supernatural and strange that her short stories, such as "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" delve into. It's like Du Maurier felt a freedom in this shorter format that let her handle the outre, the other, and the persecuted that will surprise you in their range and occasional depravity. Each story is easily worthy of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone with a supernatural agency at work in the everyday lives of our heroes and heroines that is never quite fully explained. In "Blue Lenses" Mrs. Marda West has ocular surgery with special lenses inserted to regain her sight only to open her eyes and see that everyone has an animal's head. At first she thinks it's a joke being perpetrated on her but soon comes to realize that these visions are giving her insight into the true nature of people. People whom she trusted are animals of dubious nature and ill repute.

"The Blue Lenses," besides showing this "otherness," showcases an ongoing theme in these shorter works. Du Maurier's protagonists often think that they are the object of a joke being played at their expense. They are the victim of a con and the proper authorities are often viewed as conspiring against them. From "Split Second" to "La Sainte-Vierge" to "Don't Look Now" to the aforementioned "Blue Lenses" delusion and trickery are what everything hinges on. But this paranoia that has these people confused by what they see, hoping they are mistaken, actually shines a light on Du Maurier's true interest, plumbing the depths of humanity. The fact that these characters are so willing to believe that someone would go to the trouble of conning them shows a fear of the "other," a fear of what people are capable of. Because looking deeper, past the supernatural trappings, at the root these stories show that people are capable of murder.

In fact sometimes Du Maurier forgoes the supernatural entirely and tells a tale that is, in the end, just about murder. In fact my favorite story, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," is about a troubled girl who kills RAF men she meets. Of course it wouldn't be a true Du Maurier story if you weren't bamboozled into thinking it was a love story until the very last page, but again and again that is why these stories work, she is continually subverting your expectations. Yes you could boil this all down to man versus nature, be it's man's inner nature or actual nature or something against nature, but trying to condense it down does an injustice to the writing. Du Maurier through stories about killer birds, "The Birds," and killer usherettes, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," and women joining mountain cults that may be leper colonies, "Monte Verità," touches on so many truths and so many weighty topics that you can see why she was always miffed that people called her a "romance" author. She is so much more. If you don't believe, just pick up this book. I think it will change your mind.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now, Du Maurier December Deux, Jamaica Inn, Kiss Me Again Stranger, Monte Verita, Psychic, Rebecca, Rod Serling, Short Story, The Birds, The Scapegoat, The Twilight Zone, Venice

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: Virago Press
Publication Date: 1951
Format: Paperback, 335 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Philip Ashley is raised in the all male environs of his cousin Ambrose Ashley's estate. He grows up the consummate bachelor, the two of them reveling in the fact that they have no women to answer to or scold their slovenly ways. For his health Ambrose reluctantly leaves his Cornish home and Philip and goes to the continent to winter. On his second winter abroad he goes to Italy and meets a distant cousin of theirs, Rachel. Philip is shocked when he gets a letter that the two have married. He cannot believe that Ambrose has given up his bachelor lifestyle to chain himself to a woman, who while having similar interests, is still a weight around his neck. Philip and Ambrose's correspondence suffers and Philip starts to worry for his cousin. The most recent missive hinting at Rachel poisoning him arrives too late, as Philip arrives in Florence to find Ambrose dead and Rachel gone. Returning home Philip finds that Rachel has arrived in Cornwall. He begrudgingly allows his enemy shelter. But will his vow to avenge Ambrose be thwarted by his own heart?

One day I'm going to write a companion book for My Cousin Rachel and it's going to be called Just Rachel. Because if I read one more time "my cousin" before Rachel's name I'm going to scream. I know Du Maurier is showing the possessiveness of Philip in regards to Rachel, but there's making a point and belaboring a point. This is belaboring. By these two simple words Du Maurier is able to repeatedly bring home the fact that culturally, and very specifically in Philip's case, women are not worth anything, they are at best possessions, at worst objects of hate and derision. These two words are what is wrong with this book. It's not that Du Maurier does a bad job showing human frailties and prejudices, it's that Philip is so unlikable that I couldn't stand to read his thoughts.

Philip is problematic in many ways. He's an unreliable narrator, a trope that can be fun, but in this instance just leads to a few omissions that make him an even bigger douche. The main issue though is that he is an unlikable narrator. He was raised by Ambrose to be the consummate bachelor, able to cuss his way through the alphabet but unable to treat a lady right. But it's not just that Philip doesn't know how to treat a woman, I think he has an underlying fear of them. Women are a foreign concept to him, and a foreign woman, well, he has know idea what to do with this. So he mistrusts anything he doesn't understand. He is xenophobic in the extreme, besides being misogynistic. This rears it's head when he decides that Rachel must have poisoned Ambrose and is now poisoning himself, through her tisanes. Any reader of Agatha Christie knows the continental love of tisanes. But to Philip this must be viewed as the vehicle through which she promotes death because it is foreign to him.

Oh, Philip. You know nothing Philip Ashley. Why would Rachel try to kill you when if you die she looses everything? It's Philip's motives, not Rachel's, that should be what is in question here. While it seems he's being nice to his cousin, look closer, he's just trying to possess her. Never once does he see how precarious her situation is or how their relationship might be viewed by outsiders. He is oblivious to everything but his own needs and desires. With so many books being written exploring Du Maurier's other mysterious woman, Rebecca, I wonder why more hasn't been written about Rachel. She's far more sympathetic, and as for her ambiguous pastime of perhaps poisoning people with her tisanes... well, Philip could use a good dose of poison.

Yet beyond the narrative issues, so much of My Cousin Rachel just feels as if it's a retread of something Du Maurier has written before. The review pull quote on the back of my edition says "From the first page... the reader is back in the moody, brooding atmosphere of Rebecca." Well duh. Du Maurier had an obsession with Cornwall, and in particular a house there called Menabilly. This house, which she was lucky enough to life in for a few years, became Manderley in Rebecca. But it also became the Ashley estate, and was also used in her book The King's General. By using this place so much you just start comparing it to the other times she's used it. It's Menabilly in all it's forms. I know she loved this place, but seriously, another book set here? It looses the magic of the place by being able to be the home of so many stories. She immortalized it with Rebecca, and then she overstayed her welcome.

But we must never discount the timelessness Du Maurier was able to evoke with Rebecca and some of her other novels, they are today as fresh as the day they were written. Now I don't know if Du Maurier was aiming for the timelessness with My Cousin Rachel as the introduction by Sally Beauman attests, but if so, I feel it really failed in this instance. Timelessness to me means that a book taps into something universally human and can reach across time and still be relevant. So while some of Du Maurier's books, like Jamaica Inn and The Scapegoat, have a time period, they still have a timelessness. But not here. Not My Cousin Rachel. It doesn't work here.

By trying to be ambiguous it makes the time period somehow more relevant. Sure, Du Maurier doesn't come flat out and tell us when this was set, but from what happens in the book it's obviously early Victorian, when Albert helped bring in Germanic Christmas traditions and moved festivities away from Twelfth Night, but prior to his death because the mourning customs weren't as strict. So yes, this was just another mystery that Du Maurier threw in, and in fact was the only one that could be solved to some extent. She does like her ambiguity... but perhaps with everything in this book she took it a little too far?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Agatha Christie, Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier, Du Maurier December, Florence, Jamaica Inn, Manderley, Menabilly, My Cousin Rachel, Philip Ashley, Rachel, Rebecca, The King's General, The Scapegoat, Tisane

The Scapegoat
Based on the book by Daphne Du Maurier
Starring: Matthew Rhys, Eileen Atkins, Anton Lesser, Jodhi May, Phoebe Nicholls, Andrew Scott, Sheridan Smith, Pip Torrens, and Julian Wadham
Release Date: 2012
Rating: ★★★
Unavailable

John Standing has lost his teaching job, Greek being thought archaic when conversational French is far more useful. That night in a bar he is mistaken for another man, a man that looks just like him. They spend the night talking, or as Johnny Spence views it, having a conversation with himself. Come morning Johnny Spence has fled with John Standing's belongings and Johnny's life is thrust on John. He never thought that he could slip so easily into a life of wealth and luxury, yet he seems to be doing just that. John slowly tries to repair the damage that Johnny has wrought to his own family and soon he realizes that he loves them all and wants to stay. But Johnny has other ideas as how to best use this unexpected boon that having a doppelganger gives him.

Now, as you probably know, I am an Anglophile in the extreme. I  long to live in "this scepter'd isle... this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England!" During the Jubilee Year I sat on my couch at ungodly hours to watch flotillas and parades. Yet never once did I think, you know what would make a great paring? Daphne Du Maurier and the Queen's coronation. Because they exist in different worlds and never the twain shall meet until someone at itv went, hey, here's a wacky idea, why don't we take Daphne Du Maurier's The Scapegoat and make it for the jubilee! We'll strip out all the nuance of the story and totally ignore the fact that it's set in France and make it about "those who have greatness thrust upon them" therefore drawing a parallel between Queen Elizabeth and John Standing, who both have responsibilities they weren't prepared for foisted on them. Um no. This makes an interesting movie, one that can stand on it's own fine and works better that way because as an adaptation it leaves so much to be desired.

The Britishness that was thrust upon the story changes everything. The setting of the story in France was deliberate on Du Maurier's part. She not only wanted to explore her family's history of glass making in France but she wanted to deal with the issues of what scars are left behind within a country that collaborated with the enemy. The past and the present and the future of her characters all hinges on what was sacrificed because of war. John, living in a world without attachments, doesn't understand that everything in life is about compromises. The compromises we make with our friends, our families, and even our enemies. He stumbles about trying to find this balance between daughter, wife, mother, lover. His struggle and final acceptance is the driving force of the narrative, whereas the film version of John thrives after one or two missteps.

No secrets, just happiness. WTF! Has Charles Sturridge, the writer of this adaptation, ever actually read and understood any Du Maurier? It's ambiguity in the end all the way! What are we to learn about someone who takes up the offered mantle of responsibility and doesn't stumble? Nothing is to be learned! Sure, we can compare him to George VI and how he stepped into the vacuum left by his Nazis loving brother, but that's not what this book is about! There's nothing that gets my goat more then taking a book, and instead of exploring or expanding on one or another theme, they cram the book into what they want it to be instead of what it is. You can see why Du Maurier was always hesitant about anyone adapting her work; they just don't get it.

In fact if you look at the new setup of the plot, it doesn't work. John Standing is fired at the beginning of the movie and therefore has no life to go back to. Whereas the book's John has a life that his duplicate is currently living and destroying. Without a life to go back to why would he even care about leaving? Why would he want to go back to nothing? It doesn't make sense? Though none of the changes make sense because each change so drastically alters the story that it is truly an unstable house of cards. As for the wife's pregnancy... well, without it I just saw that house of cards starting to fall...

Yet what I missed most was that unease that Du Maurier's writing always captures. The oddities of humanity and the inability to define the grey areas of the human psyche. The most obvious example of character shift is in the young daughter, the very French Marie-Noel, being turned into the very benign Mary Lou. Marie-Noel was religiously devote and had visions and mortified her flesh, here we have a girl who has a funeral for a dead fish, a stuffed rabbit that says goodnight, and wants nothing more then to read Charlotte's Web, versus some saintly tract. Ugh, please. This isn't Du Maurier, this is Enid Blyton.

Each character is slowly stripped of what made them unique and interesting till we have these stock characters that could work in any story. The grey areas are gone. Neither John is a saint or a sinner in Du Maurier's eyes, yet this adaptation clearly wants to view the true John Spence the devil of imagination. He has nothing redeeming about himself, nothing worthwhile, he is pure evil. He beats his mistress, he tries to murder his wife, he takes his doppelganger out to the wood shed... he is a stock villain. In Du Maurier's world nothing is this simple, nothing is black and white. Nothing in this adaptation rings true the deeper you dig. Life isn't this simple and that's why Du Maurier's work endures, because it shows us all aspects of humanity, whereas this adaptation is less then a two hour diversion you will soon forget.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: British, Charlotte's Web, Daphne Du Maurier, Diamond Jubilee, Doppleganger, Du Maurier December, England, Enid Blyton, France, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, The Scapegoat

The Scapegoat by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: Virago Press
Publication Date: 1957
Format: Paperback, 384 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

John has spent yet another holiday in France walking the history that is his passion and his reason for living. As he gets ready to return to England to teach yet another term at school he looks at all the people and wonders how apart he is from them and if his life of no connections is really a failed life. In the crowd he sees one face he didn't expect to see. His own. The two men, John and Jean, strike up a conversation based on their eerie similarities. They are true doppelgangers. The night is spent drinking and talking and come morning Jean is gone with John's identity, leaving the lonely Englishman an encumbered life filled with family and a failing business. Without really knowing what drives him to it John takes on Jean's life. The bachelor now has a pregnant wife, a daughter, a mother, mistresses, and a complicated life. But soon John doesn't want to leave this new life and if Jean were to decide to return, what would happen?

Daphne Du Maurier has always employed doubling and duality in her writing, but never so obviously as in The Scapegoat. Here she openly embraces the trope of people who have switched places. Though in lighter fare it is done willingly or comedically, as in The Prince and the Pauper, The Parent Trap, and Moon Over Parador. Here it is a situation thrust on John, combining the switching with a case of mistaken identity. Though in any other case mistaken identity would be easier to prove if you weren't the doppelganger of the man they think you are. By combining these two plot devices into one Du Maurier is able to delve into the darker aspects of who we are and what would happen if we tried to escape our life by taking up the mantle of someone else's. 

By having the opportunity of becoming someone else, someone known, what would you do? Seeing as Jean is the one who thrust this situation on John, it's pretty clear that he does this just to amuse himself, a humorous what if. But John, John is more complicated. By going along with Jean he is made complicit in this scheme he doesn't want. Yet being put in a situation where the repercussions fall on another's head means that for the first time in his life John is free of responsibility and guilt and is allowed to make mistakes and be taciturn or angry or whomever he chooses to think Jean is.

John's first embracing of the situation is the fact that he can't be held accountable. Du Maurier here is bringing up the darker nature of humans. What would we do if we could get away with it? For some people it would be anything and everything, theft to murder. Putting someone in this situation is testing their mettle. Given a free pass what would you do? It shows the goodness of John that after the initially heady response of being able to say what he really feels that he tries to better the lives of Jean's family. His deepest desires aren't dark and perverted, his deepest desires are to have connections, to have people to care for and love. At the start of his journey he can't come to terms with his driftless life. He wonders what does he do with failure. After spending time in the shoes of Jean he wonders what do you do with love.

John's question has changed, but the search for an answer is still there. That is what it is to be human. To always be questioning and searching. While John spends his time as Jean picturing him as this evil man who viewed the demands of family as the demands of his "captors" life is never this black and white. People aren't just good or evil, they are filled with grey areas. We have spent so much time with John that we see the world through his eyes now but it isn't till the end, that slight shift in perspective that makes us realize, John's point of view isn't the only one. Life is complicated and messy and we are left with questions, but it is never just black and white.

Speaking of someone living in the grey areas, Du Maurier spent most of her life, and a significant amount of her writing, not just dealing with these weighty issues of the nature of man but as an extended therapy session for herself. She viewed herself as two energies, male and female, which understandably makes her obsession with duality make sense. But there is another force that ruled her life and her work, and that is her father, the actor Sir Gerald Du Maurier. The relationship between Jean and his daughter Marie-Noel is a loving, yet odd and at times downright disturbing relationship. The scene where Marie-Noel asks her father to whip her... I defy you to find a more disturbing image then a grown man being asked by a small ten year old to be whipped for her imagined sins.

The question one is left with is how much did Daphne put of herself in her books? Her father was a dynamic and possessive man. They had a love hate relationship and he often wished that Daphne had been a boy, perhaps starting her duality issues. Incest was often hinted at. It is even believed that perhaps they shared a lover, Gertrude Lawrence. Whatever is and isn't true, one thing is certain, the creepy dynamic that they had is shared with Jean and Marie-Noel, further fanning the flames of what was real in Du Maurier's world and what was play acting.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daphne Du Maurier, Doppleganger, Du Maurier December, France, Gerald Du Maurier, Incest, Moon Over Parador, The Parent Trap, The Prince and the Pauper, The Scapegoat