I finished watching this film with the impression that the Hanging Rock "victims" were actually freed and went on to a better place. Not in the "proper young ladies go to heaven" kind of way, but rather something a little more existential.
While their disappearance hurt those left behind, how were the missing cheated of anything? Let's look at their circumstances, allowing for some differing conditions between Miss McCraw and the girls:
They lived in a suffocating, repressive setting — even Mademoiselle de Poitiers was chided for using rouge — and the "skills" of their day included deportment and dance. One hopes Miss McCraw squeezed in some geometry lessons, but the function of the school essentially was a cloister where virgins were to stay put and intact until they were deemed suitable for a man.
They also were under the thumbs of staffers incapable of caring for them at an impressionable age — Mrs. Appleyard, who was sadistic, and Miss Lumley, brainless and hysterical, and Mlle. de Poitiers, kindly but frivolous, favoring children who wore pretty little diamond watches. Why the staff picked on Sara wasn't clear — her clear feelings for Miranda, her financial situation or otherwise — but this much is certain: Individuality must be stamped out.
They were dolls to the community — rows of virginial maidens dressed in white, passing by on the wagon, glove-clad under public scrutiny.
As we've discussed, their well-being was chiefly tied to the image of their virginity, and anybody in town was entitled to this information. They were subject to the most sordid speculation imaginable, including that unsettling conversation by the garden staff in the greenhouse.
And what would romance and sex be for them after schooling? Wouldn't it be sneaky and guilty, like Tom and the maid's trysts? Or would a lucky girl land a Michael, who values ... well, a swan? What about social expectations — visiting the wild, beautiful outback, as long as there were tents and music and light refreshments?
For whatever reason they were chosen, I think the gradual withdrawal from the others, from civilization, from inhibitions as they undressed, was supposed to be an emancipation. I think Weir's slow-mo pan at the end and uplifting music were supposed to underscore that good people were gone, but perhaps to a better place where female repression didn't exist.
In any case, wherever they were going, they didn't need corsets.
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14 comments:
What about the girl who was "saved?" Why did her emancipation fail?
That's a very thoughtful analysis, cl, and I agree with everything you said — I wish I had said it! — but I still don't think the film has a feminist sensibility. The director certainly acknowledges that it's no picnic being a woman in a culture like that, but his solution is what? Death? I think literature and Western art is full of these types of women — women who are worshipped for their ethereal beauty, who are not of this world, whose transcendent free spirits are doomed, and the doom is part of the aesthetic. The prime image to me is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty floating in a flower-strewn pond, like Millais' Ophelia.SHE IS MORE BEAUTIFUL DEAD seems to be the message. Her beauty is tragic.
A feminist sensibility — not that there's only one — would, I think, show sexuality as triumphant in some real here-and-now way.
And I'm not saying that the film HAS to have a feminist sensibility; I'm just disputing that it does. On the contrary, it seems to be catering to a rather well-worn, masculine ideal of female beauty (the fragile, too-good-for-this-world angel kind).
Has anyone else seen "The Virgin Suicides"? I think it has a very similar aesthetic.
I've seen it, and I agree.
I agree with you, too, cl. I was thinking something similar, and you articulated it quite well.
What you're saying makes a lot of sense, too, kc.
Aaaack! Love it. Response forthcoming.
That’s an interesting thesis, cl, but I don’t buy it. I agree with kc that the tragic beauty sensibility isn’t feminist.
You say that the “good people were gone”. But I consider Sara to be the best of them all, and she is just simply, incontrovertibly, dead. Likewise, Ben’s question is telling one. It would help the emancipation theory if the poor girl regretted coming back. Instead she doesn’t even seem to realize that she was gone. We are given no clear sense of how she is different from the ones who are gone forever. I hope to watch the movie again on DVD someday, and perhaps I notice something then that sets her apart.
I go back to the idea that the basic strategy of the movie is keep offering up sex while withholding it. In this way, disappearing is the ultimate tease: now you will never have me. But I don’t know how Miss McCraw fits into that.
Maybe I need to watch “The Virgin Suicides” again. I remember liking it at the time, but it seems to have left a thin impression on me. I suspect that I’ll remember “Picnic at Hanging Rock” better because I like the cinematography. That’s the main reason I want to see it on DVD.
I like your take, kc, but am mixed on the idea that a director who made a film that so heavily criticized Victorian mores would let his heroines wilt and disappear in the wild. First, I need to backtrack on a word choice I made.
Quite accidentally, I said the rock "chose" the missing women, when clues suggest that they went missing at random. In the scenes during the climb, Marion, Miranda and Irma continue to look up at the landscape and increasingly fall under a trance that compels them to continue their ascension. In each of those scenes, Edith is either slow to look up, or is resting, and in one case isn't near them. Thus I think Edith is left behind more at random than for lacking any special qualities.
Likewise, Miss McCraw is compelled to climb the rock after gazing upward to see whatever the missing girls saw. I think it was a deliberate choice by Weir to have the rest of the school party asleep, not merely inattentive, when McCraw has that experience. It's suggestive that the missing went missing by chance in that moment of (stopped?) time, no more.
While I identify with that idea of the doomed Ophelia (why are the drab women always left behind to deal with their shit?), it isn't consisent with the makeup of the rock victims. Maybe I, too, thought the story would take that path (after all, I thought the French teacher would be the one to disappear.) But it's Miss McCraw who keeps screwing things up.
I think Weir's casting of Lambert has distracted us from what kind of story he wanted to tell. Miranda, Miss McCraw and the other victims are too disparate (Irma, flaky; Marion, rather ordinary-looking and sensible) to reach a conclusion about their disappearance.
I like the "Virgin Suicides" parallel, too, but those characters chose death as a way out, or to give up, and the Hanging Rock women seemed set out on some kind of discovery.
DW, just read your comment. I still think everybody is focused on Miranda and who played her, and I think Weir's portrayal of her has introduced a sexual motive in this film that wasn't intended. Miss McCraw doesn't fit; Marion doesn't really fit; and Irma comes back.
What does this movie do for everyone without the "really blonde" and "fey" Lambert? Did she screw it up?
Oh, I don't think she screwed it up. I think the screeplay writer screwed up in not giving her more depth. It was probably a delicate balance between making her too airy and too real, though. Do you think if she were fleshed out a bit, she would lose her faeryland aura and tread too heavily on the film's Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic?
It just occurred to me that the Pre-Raphaelites were active in Victorian times, so maybe Weir is deliberately playing on the tension between those outlooks. I mean, very specifically on those two outlooks.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood really liked Botticelli and played a big role in putting his work back in the public imagination. I think the heavy-handed identifying of Miranda with a Botticelli was obviously more significant than the French teacher's passing fancy. Thoughts?
I can't remember where I read it, but the picture Mademoiselle looks at is of Botticelli's Venus, which is suggestive. And ... goddamnit ... sexual.
Yes, Erin pointed that out too. It was Venus, not an angel, she was looking at. Actually, it's the Birth of Venus, which may tie into the vagina-rock metaphor and Miranda's rebirth (like DW was talking about). The venus floats on a half shell and covers her nakedness (sort of half-heartedly) with her long blonde locks. She does look a lot like Miranda.
Kc, instead of better script writing to flesh out the story, a different direction would have been to toss over several of the side stories and develop our understanding of the remaining core characters slowly and in a more non-narrative way. (Ok, I’ve been reading the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon for the last month.) The very strongest feature of this movie was its cinematography. That could have been used in conjunction with the music—pan flutes and the like—to develop a different sort of depth that was more in keeping with the unanswered mysteries mood of the movie. And, of course, they had some great landscape to work with.
We keep talking about Victorian culture, but Queen Victoria died in January 1901 which is less than a year after the time of our movie. Thus we see the very end of Victorian times with the Empire at its peak and seemingly robust but posed for decades of ever accelerating decline. Is this an important backdrop to our story?
That's a good point. The Edwardian age would have eased the restrictions on the young women (maybe mademoiselle's rouge was the start of that) in the next decade. I don't know whether that would develop more slowly in an English outpost.
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