From the Scripts and Voice-over commentary: Downton Abbey

Susannah Buxton, Costume designer for Downton Abbey

Caroline McCall, Assistant Costume Designer (from Feature on Season 1 DVD)

Dear friends and readers,

Last night I find myself again regretting that the older Poldark films have never been produced on DVDs with features with talk from the film-makers and actors; there has been no voiced-over commentaries with slowed-down parts, or any of the kind of commercial paraphernalia a sociological event best-seller of the Poldark type have begun to accumulate around them since the later 1990s. Here we do have some real use for the fandoms who might be said to serve as a tangible target for money-making on the Net. Beyond Graham’s Poldark’s Cornwall, only part of which was about the mini-series, the only book produced was Robin Ellis’s Making Poldark, now in a third reprinting, most of it the same text he originally produced (it has autobiographical additions and better stills).

From recent DVD feature on The Haunting (see review)

It may be much of the original cast is now dead (most of the principals are), but I’ve listened to and watched a DVD of the 1963 Robert Wise film of Shirley Jackson’s Haunting, where what was left of directors and writers and the cast produced intelligent insightful features and voice-over commentary — I took substantial notes on how the film was made. I suspect Poldark as a film still suffers from its original labeling as “swash-buckling soap opera,” and its not having had a widely-prestigious and single auteur type (instead many directors, writers, directors). By contrast, Downton Abbey now has had at least two books (The World of, The Chronicles of) and the first of three projected scripts produced.

Extras dressed right, intermingling make for fuller seeming reality (The World of discusses the making of such scenes)

Since I last wrote about Downton Abbey I’ve re-watched all the parts of the first season, read the playlets or scripts for all but the seventh part of the first season, and begun slowly to re-watch the parts again this time with voice-over commentary. Here is a little of what I’ve learnt about the power of these films (and by extension other costume dramas). I should say that I can stay up to all hours watching, absorbed, interested, enjoying them more; they take my mind off my recent intense anxiety. Reading the scripts reveals unexpected depths and parallels; cut scenes add much; Fellowes’s notes are ironically instructive. The voice-over commentary and especially watching the film move slowly gives you a chance to see how carefully each shot was cut, shaped, contextualized. We get the personal urges of Fellowes again and again — perhaps that’s the key to the strength of this and other films, this psychosocial projection drama.

************************
The scripts in general

The pathos of Molesley’s father so grateful is seen in several of the older lower class males (Matthew’s father)

Gwen the parallel figure who needs encouragement

Part 1 as I said was introduction, by Part 6 I saw that hours that seemed centrally silly (it ends on the flower show) when read silently and slowly as with a novel, come out touchingly suggestive. Much of what’s omitted hurt the programs: when in Part 4 Miss Obrien brings Daisy to confide what happened in Mary’s room (how soap opera this kind of sentence is) in the program the camera cuts away. We know what Daisy has to tell. In the script Edith is very kind to Daisy; we hear here how Daisy has been suffering under the harassment and insults of Mrs Patmore and how in need of some comfort she is (quite apart from seeing the dead corpse pulled along), and Edith does provide this. It’s double edged as Edith now (understandably I think) wants to get back at Mary for needling her over Strallan and Matthew but it is real and a parallel to Sybil helping Gwen.

Matthew comes out as ambiguous throughout, far more questionable at times, in his mockery of Edith and his sidling up to Mary; he is as complicit and collusive in this penultimate part (supposedly unimportant) flower show hour as his mother with her overt pressuring of Violet to give up the prize. The Chronology of DA emphasizes origins of characters and how Fellowes sees them. As Matthew moves away from his supposed love, Lavinia, he has a peculiar expression on his face:

Ever harboring guilt, Mary appeals to his less noble side

In several skeins of interweave it’s not too much to see that there is a Chekhovian rhythm to this hour as written up (like some of the earlier film adaptations, say 1983 MP) which is wholly lost in the actual realization’s quick pace.

Staring at and covering the corpse

Conspirators

Part 3 is hectic: This is the one where Lady Mary goes to bed with Pamuk and he drops dead while (presumably) trying to fuck her. It is also the one where Gwen’s desire to be a secretary is outed by Miss Obrien exposing the typewriter which Mrs Hughes says Gwen has no right to keep in Gwen’s room. The room is not Gwen’s, not even the bed she sleeps in is hers in private. We also have Mr Bates trying to escape the mean teasing and attempts to fire him by wearing a contraption that is torture.

In Fellowes’s notes he shows he realizes Mary is dense (he mentions her surprise anyone could not want her), but he is more concerned he says that viewers wrote in because they thought what was implied was (wait for this) Pamuk buggered Mary (!). Lines had been left out about her losing her virginity and what to do about it and so now he was sorry these were left out. My sense that people hardly ever say what they think and what is presented as mainstream thinking is utterly shallow was confirmed. I admit I had not thought of that – that he forced anal intercourse on her would have hurt and shocked her perhaps and she would not have so regretted the loss — but did think maybe we were to see Pamuk could go with men or women and that’s really why he was with Napier.

This time I’m confirmed in the idea that Mary is a real horror, cold and mean (she could care less about what Gwen is doing with her life) and Pamuk a cad. The irony is that Mary doesn’t see that Napier was a good candidate for her, showing really she doesn’t deserve him. I felt again for Edith, though she shows no compassion or concern for anyone but herself – as Sybil does trying to help Gwen who really despairs in her heart anyone will want her as a low person originally. In his notes to this scene Fellowes confirmed he was aware that the lower class person would not dream he or she could succeed and thus probably would not. It did seem to me the throwing away of the awful contraption is the equivalent of getting rid of the corpse of Pamuk and somehow connected to the typewriter — all sources of guilt, harassment.

Gwen after having been berated, told she had no right to have this in her room, ostracized, takes away her offending property

In the script to the fourth part, Fellowes thinks the film-makers omitted the whole of the scene below. But watching I find they hadn’t. I begin to wonder how much he worked on his notes — fact-checking is non-existent that I’ve seen. But at any rate I scanned it in because I found it touching. Maybe it was intended to omit it and the last minute put back. t was “not needed” — as part of the action. I reprint it to show that the plays as written in this book show 1) the show was not conceived by Fellowes as tongue-in-cheek at all, and 2) they all thus far make Grantham our hero of decency, fairness, even egalitarianism of a paternalist sort. It anticipates Lord Grantham believing Bates innocent later on, and when Bates returns from prison telling him to take some time off, rest, read books, go into the library:

Upon being invited to take books out and read them, Branson becomes animated and tells his favorites

3 INT. LIBRARY. DOWNTON. DAY.
Robert is working, with Pharaoh at his feet. Carson enters.
CARSON: You wanted to see the new chauffeur, m’lord.
ROBERT: Yes, indeed. Please bring him in.
Carson nods and a young man, in his thirties, appears. This
is Tom Branson. He is attractive and polite. Carson leaves.

ROBERT: Come in, come in. Good to see you again …
Branson, isn’t it?
BRANSON: That’s right, your lordship.
ROBERT: I hope they’ve shown you where everything is?
And we’ve delivered whatever we promised at the
interview?
BRANSON: Certainly, m’lord.
ROBERT: Good.
Robert nnds him rather an interesting character.
ROBERT: How did you first come to be a chauffeur?
BRANSON: My father was a tenant of Mrs Delderfield’s and
I was apprenticed to the chauffeur there. But he’d been
a coachman and he didn’t have much feeling for cars. In
the end, the mistress asked me to take over.
ROBERT: Won’t you miss Ireland?
BRANSON: Ireland, yes, but not the job. She was a nice
lady, but she only had one car and she wouldn’t let me
drive it over twenty miles an hour. So it was a bit …
well, boring, so to speak.
Which makes Robert laugh. Branson looks around.
BRANSON: You’ve got a wonderful library.
The remark does not offend Robert but it does surprise him.
ROBERT: Are you interested in books?
BRANSON: Not in books, as such, so much as what’s in
them.
A reading chauffeur? Unusual. Robert thinks for a moment.
ROBERT: You’re very welcome to borrow books, if you wish.
BRANSON: Really, m’lord?
He is astonished and delighted. Robert nods.
ROBERT: There’s a ledger
use, even my daughters.
room’s empty.
BRANSON: Do all the servants enjoy the same privilege?
ROBERT: I suppose they could, although I doubt they’d
avail themselves of it. Carson and Mrs Hughes sometimes
take a novel or two. What are your interests?
BRANSON: History and politics, mainlyROBERT: Heavens.* Well, when you come
back, you should
start looking in that section, there.t
Carson has reappeared at the door.
ROBERT: Branson’s going to borrow some books. He has my
permission.
CARSON: very good, m’lord.
Does Carson approve? Probably not. He looks at Branson.

*********
Typical notes by Fellowes:

The Irish troubles were a hot topic throughout this period, much more even than in the 1970s. We remember the Suffragettes and the emergence of the unions, but in fact if we’d been alive at that time the front page would have been dominated by Ireland, so here Branson is bringing those troubles to Downton. Because, by this stage, the show had developed its own method of dealing with these things. We don’t usually introduce famous characters like Lloyd George or Curzon or De Valera, but we allow our characters to refer to political events and scandals and things that were happening. To achieve this, to make the Crawleys and their servants aware of what was going on, I had the idea of bringing in an Irish chauffeur who was political and a republican. He is not active, in the sense of being a freedom fighter, but he is energetically pro-independence for Ireland. It seemed to me that such a chap would allow us to talk about the topic without its seeming contrived. I also thought – although only vaguely when I was writing this episode – that we might have a cross-class romance at some point and so it seemed a good idea that he should be young and handsome, whether or not we actually did anything with it. The actor who plays Branson (Allen Leech) had worked with me and our producer, Liz Trubridge, on a film I wrote and directed, called From Time to Time. He impressed us both and he had a kind of gritty, very real sort of good looks, as opposed to the face of a film star, which is more useful in this kind of drama.

I was sorry they cut this section, when Robert invites Branson to borrow books. It was taken from Below Stairs by Margaret Powell, whose memoirs of a life in service have just been reissued, for which I wrote the preface. She takes a fairly jaundiced view of the world but she was operating in smaller
households than Downton, where she was only one of two or three servants and they worked like dogs. But, once, she does go to a grander house on a temporary basis to replace a cook, and there all the servants were encouraged to borrow books from the library. When I read it, I thought it was rather a
nice touch and quite Robert’ish. Since I knew it was based on truth I was looking forward to being attacked but in the event it was cut. Naturally, Carson can’t bear the idea.

Carson as seen in the scene below

BRANSON: Is that all, m’lord?
ROBERT: It is. Off you go and good luck.
Branson goes, leaving master and butler alone.
ROBERT: Well. An Irishman with an interest in politics …
Are we mad?
CARSON: I could always bring in fire drill for the staff.
ROBERT: Thank you, Carson.
They share the moment.
ROBERT (CONT’D): He seems quite a bright spark after poor
old Taylor.
Carson is not prepared to volunteer an opinion. Yet.
ROBERT: I always thought he was happy. Why did he want
to leave?
CARSON: I believe it was Mrs Taylor, m’lord. She felt
cut off. She wanted to live in a town.
ROBERT: But running a tea shop? I cannot feel that’ll
make for a very restful retirement, can you?
CARSON: I would rather be put to death, m’lord.
ROBERT: Quite so. Thank you, Carson.
with a glance at the dog, he returns to his letter.

Lord Grantham amused

I liked the joke too, now this tea-shop part was omitted

One of the many things I like about serial storytelling is how a later part harks back to the earlier. In Part 4 we also get the slowly developing love of Anna for Bates; we saw her pity for him, her respect, her bringing him a tray when she and he thought he was fired, and she watched him cry; now in this episode he brings her a tray during her bad cold and in the script we can read the scene slowly.

It’s through this syntagmatic (is the word) development that these series gets their depth. Of course it contrasts to Mrs Hughes giving up her love, Daisy making an error in falling for the lesser man, Thomas. All brought together in the moment of ferocity when Bates threatens Thomas for needling and mocking William, that foreshadowing the reality of his pent-up violence … he is the one real justfiably angry man of the series.

The script to Part 6 is a deepening of the seriousness and suggestivity of the Scripts 1-5. You really feel for example how the relationship between Branson and Sybil has a genuine basis in their natures, their predilections, his reading (John Stuart Mill you now see), her ideals. Talking seriously:

The show does not have enough time and is in a way — however paradoxical this is — too effectively presented dramatically. You lose the hidden novel in the quick-paced creamy-pop appeal that all the filmic techniques project.

******************
Downton Abbey 1:1: from the voice-over commentary

Crowborough frantically rifling Thomas’s drawers in search of their love-letters; POV the naive Lady Mary

Bates coming upon them, ironically offers to let them investigate his room, upon which Lady Mary apologizes out of her habit for doing so when she’s in the wrong

As I wrote, it was not until I watched very slowly, this time having read the script, clicking and snapping on the stills and then studying them (the way the film is put together) that I realized the real motive for the Duke of Crowborough’s visit was to go up to that attic and snatch back his love letters to Thomas Barrow.

In the case of this series, part of my absorption is a kind of fascinated horror at what the whole thing reveals about what audiences like, what they think when they are watching — for in the scripts Fellowes includes many notes telling of what viewers have written to the film-makers. The commentary has
Fellowes and his partners (the producer for season 1 and director of this part) continually upholding this fantasy world as good and wonderful and real (so from the point of view of understanding the film dead wood), a kind of bland hypocrisy, their “job” whatever hype is expected they’ll utter.

Fellowes is the best of the three because he really believes in what he is presenting and is unashamed. Amid or sometimes after his fatuous kinds of naive statements he will suddenly say what he intended to do in a scene, comment on how he sees the actors, what they are doing, why this one is dressed this or that way (costume so important in costume drama). Two examples, when near the close Anna visits Bates with the
tray of food all three suddenly say these are their ‘favorite pair’ and there is suddenly a discussion of the lighting, the words (which insist he’s going to be fired), the depth of feeling in the scene, the lighting. As important in these
over-voice commentaries, the scene moves much slower.

The paired scenes sandwiching this are of Crowborough getting the naive Mary to take him to the servants’ quarters so he can find and get back his letters to Thomas and Thomas’s visit as a footman to Crowborough’s room. The latter is the first place in the whole hour all formality is dropped and we get two human
beings confronting one anther for real.

Plain talking, natural gestures (Crowborough)

I don’t believe it was the two males’ ideas to kiss so lovingly, but at any rare they do it so touchingly and yet we know how no humane feeling lies beneath it (so a contrast to the Bates/Anna scene in the attic which just precedes it — see first two stills) and again light, words, gestures and it’s the real climax of all the scenes in the part — and it undermines all the fatuity about how the show supports the order in front of us.

Fellowes also confirmed for me that Miss Obrien is really meant to be the person who had no belief in this system and hates it. He does not like her for this at all, and thinks it condemns her. But we may think differently even if we don’t
like her personally. He described Maggie Smith as a kind of crow in this part: also exposing the humbug but from her self-interested perspective. He kept pointing out how often she is in black with black hats.

Fellowes saw in this hat an allusion to a hawk

He personally finds Elizabeth McGovern very pretty as an older woman and remarked on this as they watched the last bedroom scene.

While she is often in black (they are all supposed partly in mourning), not always, and I could see he liked her as a simulacrum of an older wife he could quite imagine himslf “having” …

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downon Abbey: First number, first season re-watched

Among the very first shots

Dear friends and readers,

I began a re-watching of Downton Abbey last night; how often I’ll do this re-watching I don’t know since I have several projects which are intended to produce papers for conferences, published reviews or published papers and there will be deadlines. But I know I’d like to do this — as well as The Forsyte Saga, 1967 and 2002 and the two Poldark mini-series and 1996 film, as it turned out abortive). The Forsyte Saga has to wait until I finished reading the novels. I’ve been bitterly disappointed at the reaction to the blogs I’ve written on the Poldark series from their prime or fan audience: aggressive absymal ignorance determined to squash intelligent interest, and in re-watching that series (I’ve only started a little) I see a certain high romance conception of picturesqueness strongly influencing the films which I had not begun to think about. The equivalent for DA is the pomp.

I have to make up my mind if I can and want to blog weekly or bi-monthly on this series to start as I have the materials easy to hand. It certainly would provide matter for this blog whose purview is become centrally film studies and film adaptations — after all that’s what I do when I’m writing about HD-opera. No matter if it’s live while filmed, it’s a film.

I was newly impressed by the exquisitely well done art this first series and first number of Downton Abbey represents — rather like a Dickens first number. Paradoxically the discipline adds to its enforcement of hierarchy.

The characters are all wonderfully seen and brilliantly played. This time I felt that the author and actors really cared about their characters and made us care. I feel in love again with Anna, found Bates just so appealing, with his slight menace a s sign of dignity and self-esteem. These first episodes emphasize his lameness is emphasized; some of the staff attempt to get him fired, so this is an hour about what happens to disabled people in a community. The seething behavior of Miss Obrien and Thomas might well be real: such a repressive environment with its skewed values would produce that. And they were matched by the low-life out of a lord, Crowborough: all the high white male types in the first series are low-life amoral sleazes and it struck me if these aren’t very like many of Trollope’s, including some of his so-called heroes (in Ayala’s Angel I can think of a horror of a Frank, Harry Clavering &c&c) only seen with a modern critical eye. The hero of the piece is Robert, Lord Grantham who has the right feelings and does the right thing, backed by Edith who however hasn’t his power to enforce her feelings so it comes out as helpless sarcasm. Lady Mary is a chip of the Dowager and her mother, but all are real and they do have some decency in them too — Mary a complex character with better impulses which win out during the attic tour. But not enough not to marry a low-life lout, not to participate in the attempted firing of Bates. I see that Sybil is presented as sweet.

Poor Daisy, the stress on how she’s the lowest of the low and made to feel it. There are astonishing revelations in Fellowes’s notes: how luxurious it was to wake in the morning and have a silent nearly invisible servant make up your fire. He takes utterly seriously this world he is presenting.

There is nothing innovative in the filmic techniques but they are all done to perfection.

Since I’m off to a conference this will be my only message today unless it should be someone else posts something that wants a reply.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey: beautiful script books

From the first season script: the three sisters

Dear friends and readers,

Julian Fellowes is a smart man; he knows how to keep up sustained interest in his imaginative world. What better way than produce these finely-produced generous books which enable the reader to re-imagine the series, to re-watch the DVDs with book in hand? These are forms of novels. The first script for the first season is now available for a reasonable price at Amazon; indeed the price is low considering the object and what you can pay for books say from Ashgate. The book consists of 7 plays, each of them subdivided into three acts. Whether this is a hindsight division or one Fellowes has come to see, to apprehend the parts this way elevates them into historical plays. The second season’s scripts, including the Christmas special will be out next October, just before the fourth season begins.

Fellowes shows his ability to think for himself too when he decides to bring out his scripts for Downton Abbey. It seems most script-writers obey (whether they agree or not) the private-property obsessed notion that you must not share the script lest someone use your ideas and make money off of them. As someone fascinated by film study, whenever I seriously study a film or set of films (say the Pallisers or Jane Austen films), I had usually had to go to the trouble of taking down in stenography the script as I watch a DVD, clicking pause as I go. Arduous and time-consuming. The script is the basis of the film; the shots or stills are its embodied utterances. Whenever I’ve come across a published or on-line script, I’ve rejoiced and bought it, used it. But it’s rare to find them. In the 1960s there was an attempt made to publish these in large anthologies for the newly burgeoning discipline of film studies, but apparently this went nowhere — or not enough people ordered them, so I have but two of the several then published, and more recently scripts only for those films which became part of a cult, and then not always. It maybe the real reason it’s hard to get these scripts is the average person watching movies will not buy them so there’s not enough profit to warrant producing readable ones.

Yes I know all the flaws of DA, but one is not a lack of books. Fellowes’s daughter has published two genuinely informative, helpful — and beautiful — books thus far: The World of Downton Abbey, which is a standard “The Making Of,” very interesting about the sets, costumes, ideas about the era, and genuine historical information about the lives of servants in great houses (very hard); The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, which is made up of chapter giving analyses of individual characters as Fellowes conceives or understands them, with rationales and justifications. Both are splendidly rich, the paper heavy art paper which supports color reproductions.

And others have come out with some history of the family which owned Highclere Castle in the later 19th century. Here is a small list of such books, including the original memoir for the 1970s Upstairs Downstairs.

It was taking a chance. And then arrived on my stoop today (whence this blog) not a slender script book — which is often what I’ve found, but a fat book of nearly 400 pages, good quality letterpress paper. sewn even. The scripts are beautifully set out: lots of space between lines and not just dialogue, but directions for gestures, brief descriptions of planned sets or places, and occasionally long footnotes by Fellowes telling his thinking behind a scene or some history of his impulse for writing this or that. In the center is fold of art paper with stills that go with several scenes, of which I’ve put one at the top of this blog (these show the tongue-in-cheek archetypal quality originally intended):

Fellowes is well aware of the political exposure his series has been subjected to and also how badly the decamping of Deborah Findley-Brown, Dan Stevens, and now Siobhan Finneran might hurt the coming season. It’s hard also to keep up interest and make each season filled with new suspense. Of course he could move to the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War, but how would it do for him to produce a pro-Franco series. I understand Season 4 will move ahead just 6 months.

What this has done is re-tempt me to begin to make blogs of the many postings I’ve done over the two years and not put onto the World Wide Web, but just left at Yahoo. I hesitated partly because it would take hard work as each one this season required my taking notes as well as capturing stills. The script will make it much easier, and as long as I don’t fuss too much with too many stills I could try it.

So what I’ve done in the meantime is the easier thing: simply linked my handy list into my website: I didn’t make a separate page in the manner of the Pallisers or my Austen Miscellanies as I simply haven’t done enough to warrant that, but eventually I’ll replace the links mostly from this blog, with a page in the website domaine itself. Its mascot or gravatar picture for now is Thomas (Rob James-Collier) dancing with the Dowager Duchess (Maggie Smith):

I’ve tried again and again to explain why I love costume drama enough to even take deep pleasure in this (for me) ambivalent series. Well I just do. Had I lived in the 18th century I’m sure I would have been one of those readers who bought plays bound together in books and read them slowly: in the 18th century people read plays; they were bound up in make-shift books and could be bought or found in circulating libraries. The closet dramas of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron had an audience. The novel put paid to that by the Victorian period, especially with Mudie’s distribution services and then after Pickwick installment publication in magazines.

My goal would be to follow a schedule whereby I do one every one or two weeks. On the weekends read the scripts. The scripts would make it so much easier, indeed a pleasure; then in October when Season 2 comes out (in time for the TV airing of Season 4) I could do likewise for Season 2.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey Goes to Scotland: “dreaming of a better life” & Mrs Hughes’s POV

Edith to Mary:’ Why must you sound so heartless? … ‘Gregson to Matthew: ‘So the laws of society should be preserved no matter what. Edith gave me the impression you were a freer soul than that.’ Matthew: ‘I find that hard to believe … [but] say a proper goodbye, you owe her that …

Mrs Hughes to Mr Carson: ‘You don’t want to come?’ Mr Carson: ‘I would rather chew broken glass.’ Cora to Robert: ‘Aren’t you enjoying your Victorian idyl any longer?’

Anna (Joanne Froggart) beginning to dance, looks back at Mr Bates

His deep smile (Brendon Coyle), the ball at Duneagle

Dear friends and readers,

So Downton Abbey came to an end for another season, and it was as fitting an ending as the 2 hour Christmas time Part that ended the second season. We had a parallel plot: Lord and Lady Grantham, Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley, Violet, the Dowager, the two ladies’ maids, Lord Grantham’s valet (Bates) and Matthew’s (Molesley), all traveled to Duneagle, Scotland, to visit Lord Grantham’s cousin, Marquess of Flintshire (aka Shrimpy), Marchioness (I must register my chagrin to see Cordelia from Brideshead [Phoebe Nicholls] now grown old, wrinkled, tempus fugit), their daughter, Lady Rose and of course their staff was there, including a lady’s maid, May Bird, seeming replica of Miss Obrien. Here they are sewing their ladies’ hats:

Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran) talking of her ladyship’s ways

May Bird (Christine Lohr) begins to become upset; in the next still controlling near-crying

To them came the man now in love with Edith, a Rochester-type [wife in aslyum], Mr Gregson who has also provided Edith with her first paying job (which I must say she does not seem to appreciate as she does not seem to value the money or the liberty it could give her — as yet).

Duneagle, some trundling up from the train, the others waiting on the steps

Left behind are the rest of the staff of Downton and Tom Bransom and little Sybil (Sibby) who says he was not invited, as well as (of course) Mrs Crawley, Dr Clarkson, and the townspeople, among whom a tradesman, Jos Tufton, will figure in our story. All but Bransom and Mr Carson go to a day-long fair:

Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) in the lead, just out of the camera Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol)

As will be seen, very discreetly, Mrs Hughes is in the lead, and the attentive observer will notice that throughout the day Mrs Hughes is glimpsed repeatedly: what distinguishes the story at Downton for this part is our POV is Mrs Hughes: her voice and her perspective prevails repeatedly. Since she is given that passive humanity Keats talked of, i.e., entering into others’ views genuinely (though alas she keeps her reactionary disapproval in view too when any “law” of society is threatened), the mood of this half of the part was to me gratifying. She feels for everyone and she is patient, even with the new maid, Edna, who does not see why there should be artificial hierarchy, and takes advantage of Bransom’s continuing grief: what I liked about Edna’s dismissal (with a decent reference) is that to Mrs Hughes’s expected reiteration: “there are rules to this way of life Edna and if you are not prepared to live by them then it’s not the right life for you,” Edna’s face grows hard, and she turns and walks away.

Hardly a likeable character, Edna (MyAnna Buring) holds her own against Mrs Hughes. There’s no abjection of the kind Ethel was driven to as she has done nothing to be shamed of, which Mrs Hughes acknowledges. OTOH, she’s fired. The man and now upper class person counts, the female and servant not.

Mrs Hughes is given the best line of the hour which I here take as its good keynote. When Mrs Patmore says of her brief romantic delusion over Mr Henshawe (who wanted to marry her to get himself an obedient cook and nurse while he carried on flirting and more with young women), “I don’t know what I could have been thinking of,” “O I don’t know, dreaming of a better life.”

This tone, of reconciliation graced with behaving with dignity and kindness, to what is pervades and shapes the action in the Scottish scenes too. Trollope said if a Christmas story is not meretricious (which he allowed most are)

Nothing can be more distasteful to me than to have to give a relish of Christmas to what I write. I feel the humbug implied by the nature of the order. A Christmas story, in the proper sense, should be the ebullition of some mind anxious to instil others with … Christmas charity.

So the snitcher Jimmy Kent (who Alfred has learnt to distrust and now is careful to tell Mr Barrow there can be no physical love between them) thanks Mr Barrow for saving him from a savage beating by a mob,

Dr Clarkson (David Robb) come to help Thomas after Thomas fended off thugs from Jimmy is startled because Thomas is not one to get into physical fights,

and they become friends

with Mr Barrow (Rob James-Collier) telling Jimmy (Ed Speleers) to make himself useful by reading a newspaper aloud to them both.

There is the usual abrasive insistence on the rightness of status quo at every turn. Mrs Crawley refuses Dr Clarkson’s offer of romance (and marriage) on the grounds she’s got a life that she likes and why she should risk any change. (This is Mr Woodhouse’s reply to Emma when Emma declares she will marry Mr Knightley.) But Tom’s plight, his feeling he belongs to no world now is plangent and the spectacle of Mr Carson’s ability to unbend before a baby touching.

Mr Carson (Jim Carter) picking the baby up and talking to her

Overall the mood of this year’s Christmas spectacle was that of last’s.

Like last year too it devolves into separates threads of stories more than usual. To me the most pleasurable was that of Anna and Bates: their story thread begins in 3:7 when he comes out of prison, and in brief epitomizing scenes they are glimpsed, he with Lord Grantham, walking (they do a lot of this), fixing their house: Scotland is a holiday for them too: again, the walking, a picnic, her resolution to dance, the practicing with Lady Rose (who seems to be taking a role like that of Lady Sybil with long-gone to secretarial work Gwen):

Lady Rose (Lily James) directing

and then the entry to the ball, the moving to dance … Return to Downton, she is back at work, serving our princess bride, Lady Mary, but she has had her holiday and Bates too.

The back story of Duneagle become the front story for this half of the part is the unhappy marriage of the Flintshires: they dislike one another, and all he does irritates her.

Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), Flintshire (Peter Egan), Lady Rose (Lily James): Flintshire tells Grantham they do not get along and Lady Rose’s sarcasm confirms it

The anti-feminism so often on display in Downton Abbey comes out in the way what’s dramatized is the Marchioness getting back at Lady Rose. Like Lady Mary, she is directly asked “why is she so miserable to everyone?” only since it’s a male who asks her (the husband), and we never see him making anyone unhappy, it’s implied she’s in the wrong. We’re left to surmise she does not respect him (“Shrimpy”) nor like her life. Dreaming of another life in Scotland becomes kicking against the pricks. What Lord Grantham thought a Victorian idyl is a dying world just loaded with writhing helpless angers. (Of course Fellowes does not make the inference, that this pair should divorce.)

Oddly, for once the Dowager is on the side of underdog, her grand-niece Rose, against whom she says she cannot cast a stone. And Rose emerges not as the salacious Barbie doll of 3:8 but the unhappy daughter of an unhappy mother who Cora, Lady Grantham will taken when her parents go to India. (Flintshire has lost his estate, having no coaxing ex-lawyer-son-in-law, Matthew, and steward-farmer son-in-law, Bransom, to guide him.) Cora says she understands the Marchioness’s position — too bad she doesn’t explain more about this understanding.

Marchioness (Phoebe Nicholls) coming into Cora’s room to appeal to her to take Lady Rose

Who else (beyond the Marchioness at moments) comes off badly in Scotland? well, May Bird, like Lady Rose, twisted by the Marchioness’s tactlessness (in asking May to imitate the hairstyles Miss Obrien concocts for Lady Grantham), spikes a drink that the bumbling Molesley takes in one gulp. Lady Mary with her soul-withering remarks to Edith and yes Matthew Crawley seemingly reinforcing these, ever doing Lady Mary’s bidding with his priggish lecturing of Michael Gregson.

Matthew (Dan Stevens) between the sisters, Edith wincing with hurt (Laura Carmichael)

Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), drawing herself up defensively; she has every right to her sarcasms

And as usual Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), looks rueful but says nothing so implicitly endorses Mary

I say seemingly because if you study the stills you see that Matthew is very uncomfortable. He does not like this kind of destructiveness. He preaches to Gregson, he does not insult him. Fellowes and the other film-makers have said they thought one way to write Dan Stevens out was to make him estrange himself from Lady Mary for good (the worm turns? finally he can’t take it anymore?) and go off to America and not return. Such a scene is preparation for what they feared would devastate the more pious of the fans (who don’t seem to observe how naive the presentation of sex is throughout)

To mention this — the problem of Stevens’s wanting to leave the mini-series and what to do about in inside the stories — compels me to speak of what I know so many have complained of this week and I must go outside the fiction to explain it.

**************
Anibundel puts it that the sudden death of Matthew has a strongly tacked-on last minute feel. Structurally it’s a coda, an ironic aftermath of the birth of the baby. Fellowes gives less than 2 minutes at most to it; compare the long preparation, death, and aftermath of the going of Lady Sybil.
See the opening of this essay on the dispatch of Stevens: Sonia Saraiya, The AV Club.

I’ve this hunch: spite. Fellowes has been irritated at the way Dan Stevens has from the first summer after the spectacular success of season one been talking is determination to jump ship to get better and more interesting roles. You can discern their positions from these articles in the Guardian and New York Times.

Stevens’s portrait photo: how he would like to be seen, and that’s not a gentle upholder of aristocrats

These are clearly diplomatic presentations of what was probably a simmering resentful: Stevens is guarded throughout. He does not want to be typed into an emasculated male; he wants modern psychologically sexually sophisticated roles. Firth had bad trouble throwing off Darcy, partly because he too gave into money and being a star when he took the Bridget Jones’s Darcy part on. But no one bites the hand that feeds it especially since the show has now made Stevens a star. He is irritated at Cumberbatch for saying the show is “f..king atrocious” because there is a code among actors nowadays not to diss one another’s jobs; actors who turn down a part (as asinine or embarrassing) find they are not asked for good parts too.

The last still: brutal, emphasizing the fleshy nature of his face:

Fellowes asked Stevens to come back next year for an episode or two to die then, and he would have worked up the character with a death that was meaningful somehow. Stevens said no. So Fellowes got back, did Steven’s character in short and brutal and abrupt with no meaning. He prefaced it with one of Lady Mary’s more unpleasant references to Edith and herself, showed her complacent-bossy at the last:

Matthew: You are horrid when you want to be
Mary; I know you love me anyway
Matthew: Madly

and just after Matthew dies, we are treated to her telling Anna that Matthew must not come up until after the family as after all he’s had his turn already. So there was little there to allow us to grieve with Lady mary. Fellowes didn’t want us to. He wasn’t … grieving over this loss. Good riddance … I picked up on the ironic close of Matthew’s advice to Gregson to leave forthwith: of course give her a proper goodbye. Well Dan didn’t get to do that with Michelle.

*****************

I know I am not admitting to the unreality of the grating re-iterated premises of the mini-series, but then I’ve gone over these and thought I’d end rather on what is the series’s great strength: the characters of Downton Abbey are the driving emotional force of the series, and we love to love at least some of them. They are presented with sufficient ambivalence in complicated stories well-dramatized so that we can endow them with complexities and the intense emotionalisms and clever dialogues hits us in sore areas. Fellowes has a real gift for this. So we get involved with all of them.

Gregson (Charles Edwards): I wanted us to have a last evening together … Edith: This is not our last evening …’

Other people with this gift on the BBC who write mini-series include Andrew Davies's (a genuine genius of TV drama), Sandy Welch (another), Gwyneth Hughes. Individual mini-series are powerful — where a writer seems not to carry on with another mini-series: so the 1999 Aristocrats, and whole teams pull this off: Prime Suspect comes to mind.

I love to live with these characters; they keep me company; they are, unlike real people, anything but cool; they care intensely about much more than themselves and yet repeat many of our thoughts and articulate our troubles and dreams.

Ivy (Clara Theobold) and Daisy (Sophie McShera) at the fair too: they are seen to be friends at home, at the fair they play a ball game and for once Daisy wins something — she says she never wins …

So I’ll watch on next year and have a candidate to replace Dan Stevens. I’m hoping for Matthew MacFayden because I know he plays these kind generous grave males (Little Dorrit), but he might also bring to the part (if Fellowes would like him) a subversive irony such as he did as Felix Carbury in The Way We Live Now or more recently, Oblonsky in Anna Karenina. I know he’s too chubby just now (but Stevens is not thin), and no heart-throb for young teenage girls as he is somewhat older, but if Fellowes does not want to infantilize his central heroine, she ought to have a mature adult male as a partner.

Tom Bransom (Allen Leech), the only upstairs (defined so) young male left standing, or should I say left sitting, POV Mrs Hughes’s.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:7: to give way to them is to conform to rules set down by the evil-minded; or, Orphans of the Storm?

Alfred: ‘It’s about a wronged women who survives in a wilderness through her own wits and courage’
Miss Obrien: ‘Blimey they’ve stolen my story …’
Mrs Hughes smiles quietly at her.

Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran), Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) smiles

Thomas (Rob James-Collier), tense, endangering himself

Thomas: ‘As for a defense what can I say? I was very drawn to him and I got the impression that he felt the same way … I was wrong Mr Carson: It seems an odd mistake to make Thomas.’
Thomas: ‘When you’re like me, Mr Carson, you have to read the signs as best you can and because no one dares speak out …
Mr Carson: I do not wish to take a tour of your revolting world
Thomas: ‘… No …’

Dear friends and readers,

This blog is not on the two hour mix that was shown on PBS Sunday night; I rather watched 3:7 as shown on BBC this past fall so I could experience the theme, patterns and tones, the climax and ending intended. Later this week I’ll watch 3:8 and write about that in its own right. I enjoyed 3:7 as I have a number of this season’s parts because there was something valuable unexpectedly brought forward climactically that undermined accepted ugly norms (as when the cruel trick played on Tom Bransom in 3:1 was exposed) and overdone rituals (weddings). Fellowes really exposed childbirth’s dangers and then paid attention to a character type often overlooked: paradoxically the mother figure who you would think in a women-centered soap opera form would get a lot of respect (they don’t).

After the drama of Sybil’s death and the Duchess (Cora)’s grief Fellowes wrote a quiet part, no high drama climactic scene; instead threaded through were continual identifications with characters, a couple of whom we have been led to feel alienated from whose full basis remained deliberately withheld or unstated. The movie whose title we are not told (I suspect Fellowes had a particular one in mind), with Lilian Gish (Orphans of the Storm) is the allusion that gives us the part’s perspective.

Anna (Joanne Froggart) and John Bates (Brendan Coyle) smile at Miss Obrien’s allusion

So, to begin with the 1st thread: cheer replacing plangency when Mr Bates returns, his lifted spirits to see Anna given the family car to pick him up:

He sees Anna there waiting for him

Then the kind welcome by the other servants, the reassurance of Lord Grantham who tells him to take “a rest,” “stay in bed,” “read books” (you see what I mean about unexpected). But Mr Bates is worried how he will support himself now; and Anna a little anxiously takes him for a walk to anticipate a plain brick attached cottage on the estate (someone else has to move out) for them.

Their future home

Next the continued risk of being thrown out in the streets (=the wilderness) that Ethel endures. The Duchess thinks to argue Mrs Crawley out of keeping Ethel as a servant on the basis of narrow minded (evil I called them in my header) scorn which might just reflect badly on the Granthams, but when the Dowager sees that is not going anywhere with Mrs Crawley switches tactics to assert how unhappy Ethel is in her present place (and picks up Mrs Hughes’s support), about which Mrs Crawley shows she is not fooled:

Mrs Crawley: ‘Oh nonsense she couldn’t give tuppence about Ethel or anyone like her.
Duchess: ‘You’ve been reading those communist newspapers again …

No she’s not, nor is Bransom a “Marxist” as Lord Grantham asserts when he hears Bransom’s plans for equity for the tenants.

Ethel is unhappy even if she’s learning to cook well — we are allowed to hear this spiteful slur by the Duchess upon Ethel defending her new skill:

Ethel: Nowadays one must have a skill …
Duchess: but you seem to have so many …

We know she enjoys her quips

Ethel suffers in the streets:

Ethel (Amy Nuttall) puts her basket down: cooking well is after all not enough

But it’s more than the nasty cuts she receives; when Mrs Crawley comes home from Downton, she finds Ethel sitting brooding. She needs more than minimal safety. We need to break these chains of shame that imprison and ostracize and isolate us. That’s what Ethel is put through: shame, imprisonment, isolation, risk of the streets too.

The strongest moment is the sudden revelation of the fear, anxiety, and need the homosexual Mr Barrow (he cannot get people to call him that) feels when he’s tried to reach someone and found himself rejected in a kind of hard-faced anger and flees in the night back to his own bed.

I can’t prove this but have a feeling we are intended to think Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) protested too much. He has a way of asserting he wants to go out with Daisy (Sophie McShears), but doing nothing about it; of saying he wants to dance with her, when it’s Alfred who turns out to be actually willing. He was eager to tell Mr Carson he was someone his aging mistress went after; when we first see him in this season, he’s washing a half-naked body and presented as intensely boyishly attractive. And the parallels between himself and Thomas are suggestive: neither it seems has parents, siblings, any family. Thomas reacts to this information by suggesting they share a loneliness, but their shared family-less state is the quiet point.

Upstairs shows displacements — they are more protected from the storm. The estate agent, Jarvis (Terence Harvey) is pushed out (we do not say sacked of middle class positions). Carrying on the feminization of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), with Mary (Michelle Dockery) even laying on top, being the aggressor when we see them in bed (not infrequently in this and the last couple of parts), we see he blames himself for Mary not yet being pregnant. For a man who is the heir and has supplied tons of money to Lord Grantham he takes an oddly subaltern position. Mary will not promise to support him against her father. It does give him some complexity (as well as his five o’clock shadow). Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) carries on with some quiet needling of her obtuse Lord and Master (Hugh Bonneville) with a worn smile.

The two of them

The ending was gratifying — and believable. Tom’s brother is brought in to show how much Tom has begun to identify with the haves and powerful. It could be that a young man is married into a family from a low station and his real talents recognized becomes a central help. It’s an old story in fact. And that he managed to baptize his daughter Catholic another. Sometimes the Duchess’s interventions work — it’s her idea that they take Tom on this way; he’ll go back to being Bransom as steward too.

The community re-forms itself

For me the weak moments was the one easy success. It’s just not probable that an editor of a newspaper would eagerly wine and dine (as far as journalism is concerned), a nobody like Edith (Laura Carmichael); her piety towards her father (all the three daughters are Daddy’s girls) does not suggest exactly fiery columns to come. I grant Edith-Laura is now dressed as prettily as Lady Mary-Michelle has been throughout the seasons:

I counted 3 tasteful alluring hats: a wide black straw hat, a cloche with a beaded gold band, the above number, and 1 scene of her looking at her image in the mirror in a most gratified way.

Apart from anything else, the easy success didn’t fit the mood of the piece which was (as I say) otherwise ambiguous. I’ll capture it in a visual image — as film should convey itself through aural and visual image: Ivy (Cara Theobold) and Alfred (Matt Milne) walking home in the dark:

My header is a line not from Downton Abbey as it’s too generous-minded and brave to come out of Fellowes’s conservative wary mindset. It’s a statement the hero of another popular mini-series (the Poldarks) makes to a young woman who is about to deprive herself of companionship. Fellowes is however perceptive, he is writing in this form, and the man who wrote Gosford Park could be found in 3:7, for the kind of content I’ve discerned her is typical soap opera or on-going multi-plot narrative forms. To quote Robert Allen on this: The journey forward is not only deferred, but also halting rather than continuous. There are continual gaps in the narratives, and alterations in horizons. The consequences of an action are more important than the action itself (especially as it ripples out to affect others), and small particular things matter. It’s an elusive form of art and fitting that a movie we hear of gives us our clue.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:6, the fallout: “Don’t flirt with me, Robert”

Dowager: ‘Now that it’s over try to get some rest …’
Cora: ‘Is it over? when one loses a child is it ever really over?’

Cora to Robert: ‘You’re always flabbergasted by the unconventional’

Cora at Robert: ‘Not everyone chooses their religion to satisfy Debret’s’

and then there was:

Lord Grantham: ‘We’re going right now …’
Cora: ‘What are you talking about …’ [emphasis hers]

After the salmon mousse (Going round in clock-order, Penelope Wilton, Elizabeth McGovern, Amy Nuttal, Laura Carmichael, Michelle Dockery and Maggie Smith, POV: Hugh Bonneville)

Cora, Lady Grantham turning to look at Lord Grantham

Dear friends and readers,

I don’t say that Elizabeth McGovern in this episode came up to when I first saw her, as Beatrice-Joanna in Middleton’s Changeling (with Hugh Grant and Bob Hoskins), but, alas, you can only see that if you’ve a working VHS player and buy this cassette; the old PBS (Channel 13, Play of the Week) performance is not even listed on IMDB. Go look. Nor when I saw her in Shelley Duval’s Faery Tale Theater; (where I’ll swear she was in a tale with David Hemmings, and held her own as Snow White against an evil queen — though she’s not listed there either). The material in Downton Abbey is not up to Middleton at any rate; but then Maggie Smith has not shown us what she can do either.

But she was great and (as middle-aged women who demand to be taken seriously) again overlooked, and if half-crazed pathos was her end note last week, steely- or suppressed rage was at moments this. I wished she could have given some of it to Ethel who also had a child now dead to her and given her subaltern position can only manage: “But you know how it is when you bury someone young …When you lose your child there’s nothing worse under the sun.” By contrast, Cora says: “I am here [still].” (Not as good as “I am Duchess of Malfi still” but going in that direction.)

Early shot in 3:6

The major thread of this hour was coping with Sybil’s death: the fallout. In context, the usual suffering of Bates and Anna functions in place of the comic relief, but such little time is given over to it, that it’s hard to say just why Bates’s use of a pointed instrument (nail file?) and menacing threat of his cellmate’s throat, and the spiteful oppressive guard terrorized them into successfully urging Mrs Barnett to tell how Vera probably poisoned herself with a pie.

See I told you it was what we had as comic relief. Mary, ever the sage, while taking her jewels off her fingers, tells Anna standing by with hairbrush more than once “we need this, it’s good news.”

Anna (Joanne Froggart) and Lady Mary

Though I fear not for Thomas who is also being set up for a rejection by Jimmy (who complains of Thomas’s gingerly gestures towards Jimmy’s shoulder).

One cannot say the other thread which contrasted to the major story was comic, as it partly reinforced the realities Lord Grantham is having to face. When Daisy (Sophie McShera) visits her loving father-in-law, he tells her he would like her to learn to take over his farm, to become its manager.

Daisy: But I always thought I’d spend my life in service
Mr Mason (Paul Copley) ‘You have forty years of work ahead of ya do you think these great houses like Downton Abbey are going to go on just as they are for 40 years, because I don’t …

Lord Grantham is not going to lose just the battle over whether his new grandchild will be Catholic Mary: “You’re going to lose this one.”

We saw Daisy trying to teach an ungrateful Alfred (Matt Milne) to foxtrot

But he hankers after Ivy (actress’s name?), of whose rouge Mrs Patmore (Leslie Nicol) does not approve, mostly because she’s been irritated out of all patience by the obdurate cruelty of Mr Carson (Jim Carter) against Ethel. Mr Carson scolds her and she is not allowed to answer back. Nor does Mrs Hughes. In fact no one (not even Cora) tells any of the men they have no right to judge Ethel’s life — not when they are men (with all the gender’s advantages).

In Fellowes’s world, the women can identify and sympathize with Ethel, most of the men (Dan Stevens I assume would take on his role as noble exception) scorn.

Otherwise, we are coping with something impossible to cope with. The death of a young woman. Mrs Crawley in her usual anxiety to help (“Is there something I can do, anything, anything at all?”)

Well, no, now that you mention it.

But she persists, and Mary supports her in the invitation to luncheon for “the girls” (“Does that include me,” asks the Dowager unseen on the couch), which leads to what I think is Mrs Crawley’s first ungenerous moment in 3 years: when Ethel voices her intense desire to do something too — in the form of a delicious luncheon: “I’d like to make a bit of an effort to show our sympathies,” Mrs Crawley in effect threatens her with loss of job: “I’ll hold you responsible.”

For those paying attention to the art and structure of these parts, the luncheon occurs at precisely the same place as the humiliation at the wedding. When Cora refuses to leave, defying Robert and supporting Ethel, that was climax. Maybe that’s why most blogs sees to quote the Dowager’s unusually semi-feeble (all the funnier) support of Cora by way of apology to her son: “It seems a pity to miss such a good pudding.”

I’ll give Lord Grantham this: although he’d see Ethel starve, he’s not into marital rape (Cora has relegated him to his dressing room), and so the Dowager engineers a scene of catharsis, to bring Cora back to face what she cannot:

Dr Clarkson (David Robb) realizing the Dowager wants him to lie: in this part we see someone coming between a woman and her doctor

The core of the final scene is that it was probably in the cards for Sybil to die. Eclampsia is still a major cause of “complications” (as things going fatally wrong are euphemistically called), and in 1920 although there had been sufficient advances in understanding sepsis as well as how to stem the horrific bleeding that comes with the major surgery of Cesarean section (through increased knowledge of the flesh walls of the uterus), still it was a highly risky procedure.

I take Cora’s shudder and hysterical crying as the final scene shuts after Clarkson’s shading of the truth (we could also call it) to be this realization because I want to be charitable to Downton Abbey. I know there is another interpretation: we are encouraged to believe that under pressure from the Dowager, Dr Clarkson lied.

As we all recall, in the previous episode, Dr Clarkson said there was “a chance” Lady Sybil could survive if she was rushed to the hospital for a Cesarean. And we recall that Dr Tapsell pooh-poohed this, and said he saw nothing to demand such strong measures and Lord Grantham went with Dr Tapsell and Cora acquiesced. (Some commentators have said this complicity of hers was the result of instilled obedience to her husband, and we might say her rage at her husband is rage at herself but I think that’s giving psychological depth to these characters that’s not there (It’s not a George Eliot novel but more like a staged play.) The Dowager persuades Dr Clarkson to move from “small chance” to an “infinitesimal chance.” And in the event, facing the pair, he actually says she would have died anyway. Upon which Cora collapses into Lord Grantham’s arms.

Why? was it that she really blamed her husband and now that she believes it was not his fault, she is not angry. That turns her into a mechanical doll, a stupid woman whose emotions can be turned through words. I take it (as I say) she finally faced that Lady Sybil was going to die and there was nothing to be done.

But there is a problem here ethically: Fellowes encourages us to feel that she was led to this realization by a lie. The moment may be seen as a not simply a justification of lying as sometimes needed, called for, but even a kind of validation. The hour at that point recalled Ann Patchett’s Patron St of Liars, which novel rather boomerangs on her as a thoroughly disingenuous novelist. It also validates a doctor imposing a false truth on a woman.

As it happens last night I watched another movie, this one based on an under-rated fine novel, The Walking Stick, where the heroine finds her sense of reality so undermined by the lying of her partner, that to keep her sanity and trust, and stability she has to give up the relationship. We can only base ourselves on the stability of truth. This is of course not the only time I’ve seen Fellowes urge a distorted coarse understanding of life’s experiences, but it did grate, possibly because I took the character Cora too seriously. I have known several women now whose children pre-deceased them. One of them told me it’s like having a knife put in your heart ever after.

But if you don’t take this mini-series or its character seriously (and it’s not great art and Fellowes’s vision is often falsifying), you are invited to find it amusing that Ethel had to plead with Mrs Patmore to get Mrs Patmore to help her and accept such dismissively wry statement when Ethel finds herself remembering how often she has failed as a cook, that “Anyone who has the use of their limbs can make a salmon mousse:”

Can they now? I can’t.

Mrs Patmore, like Mrs Hughes, quietly defies Mr Carson (patriarchy is having a hard time in this episode) and the two help Ethel, but they do not do so graciously, bringing to mind the Latin saying: “To give quickly is to give twice.” Mrs Hughes has ever been grudging, and now Patmore has to be argued into helping Ethel on the grounds her Ladyship will be there:

.

That’s not good enough. The first scene between Ethel and Mrs Patmore was for me the most painful because (as I said when I started) Cora stands up for herself. I wish she had held out longer against Lord Grantham, but it was inevitable that she let things go back to whatever they were and live with Sybil’s death.

There was a rare touching scene between Matthew and Mary in bed together. It too related to Sybil’s death, but for those who watch the mini-series as a mini-series, you know this is ominous foreshadowing:

He: When Sybil was talking about the baby being a Catholic do you get the sense that she knew?
She: I’m not sure, not at the time but of course I’ve asked myself since.
He: You’d think we’d be used to young death after four years of war.
She: That’s why we must never take anything for granted.
He: That’s what I’m trying to get Robert to see. He wasn’t given Downton by God’s decree. We have to work if we want to keep it.
She: And not only Downton, us. We must never take us for granted. Who knows what’s coming.
He: I have to take one thing for granted. That I will love you until the last breath leaves my body.
She: Oh my darling, me too. Me too,
She lays on him and he kisses her hair

To sum up: It’s about the fallout after a hard death and Elizabeth McGovern comes into her own in this role. I wished Amy Nuttal had been able (but her position precluded it so we must make do with Cora) to react as frankly and truly. I like that it may be in the cards Sophie McShera may yet end up in charge.

The important history in these two episodes is the way women are treated in childbirth as a mirror of the way they are still sidelined today.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:5: childbirth as risk, trauma; or how to get rid of a character

Sir Philip Tapsell (Tim Piggot-Smith): Never fear, Duchess, I’ll get a baby out of her one way or the other

Ethel: But I think it’s going to be a lot more complicated than you allow. Mrs Crawley: Then we shall have to face those complications together, shan’t we?

Tom (Allen Leech) trying to help Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) feel comfortable and not managing

Then taking inopportune moment to confide he’s found a job as a mechanic (she hates the idea of him returning to laboring work)

Dear friends and readers,

People keep asking me why are so many people watching and talking about Downton Abbey? Well, by this time (the third season) it’s become what Truffaut called “a sociological event.” Many don’t want to feel left out as others passionately discuss what they wouldn’t have seen; so they watch.

Of course this just avoids the question, what hooked viewers originally? I’ve been showing precisely because DA exploits the features of the soap opera form, one peculiarly fitted to TV watching. Like the clocks Mr Barrow teaches Jim are living things: “Never wind them in the early morning before a room is warmed up nor too late when the night air cools them down.” And I’ve tried to show Fellowes uncanny intuition for dramatizing paradigms of intensely sore areas — like when in the 1st episode of this season a mean bully-trick is exposed. Many suffering from bullying and underhanded tricks today know in fact such behavior is tolerated, still treated as a joke.

This power of this week’s episode derives from the way historical novels and films present usable pasts (or create them) in order to speak to us today. It is no coincidence that another female died in childbirth in a paradigm just like Lady Sybil’s in a mini-series that has sold more copies than any other (until perhaps Downton Abbey) but the 1995 A&E/WBGH/BBC Pride and Prejudice (scripted Andrew Davies, with Colin Firth as Darcy): the 1970s 2nd mini-series of Poldark ends in the death of Elizabeth Chynoweth Poldark Warleggan in childbirth. We see Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) during parturition suffering badly:

Dr Enys (Michael Cadman) helping her give birth

Like Sybil, Elizabeth gives birth and everyone rejoices, and then a few hours later we hear her screams. We’ve gone on from 1977: we hear but do not see Elizabeth die in an agony. But it is the same sudden turn about. In the earlier case (by which I mean 1977-78) the woman does not die from eclampsia but from having taken a dangerous herb-drug to induce early parturition (see court cases), and whatever Dr Enys did probably would have been as useless as the doctors in this week’s Downton Abbey (2013). (More on Elizabeth’s story.) Neo-Victorian novels are said to be feminist and it would be interesting to compare how many deaths in childbirth are directly dramatized in these novels and the specific treatment, and how these are treated in mini-series on TV but this would take research and is beyond the purview of my weekly recaps).

The point is the scenes of intense anxiety with which the episode opens, the later terrors and pains, the intense fear, the sudden relief, the turn around, and then the sudden death are about what women experience today. And also the moving half-crazed reactions of several of the characters to childbirth, here to a death. Elizabeth McGovern came into her own again (she has not had such a meaty series of scenes since she almost died of flu in Season 2) when we come upon her talking to the corpse of her daughter — with no preparations that this is what we are seeing.

Along with Tom, the husband, Cora, her mother (Elizabeth McGovern) is the person closest to Sybil during her death convulsions

Cora’s apparent calmness and smile and quiet talk fool us for the couple of seconds it takes to grasp she is talking to the dead

For once the Dowager Duchess is not funny. Maggie Smith uses her aging body in a long walk across the hall to emphasize the feeling of gross injustice at the death of the young woman.

Maggie Smith as the old woman with the distorted body, staggering slightly, leaning on her cane walking to the family now she’s heard of the death

We then see her earnestly talking about how it was nobody’s fault. For once Lord Grantham does take part of the blame, which concession may be seen as ironic from a distance as obviously he did not cause her eclampsia, though it is true at the opening of the episode he becomes irritated when Dr Clarkson tries to tell the family about the details of symptoms that are worrying him. But then is not Cora as much to blame when she tells Clarkson he is giving too much information and all they need to know is can they go back to bed?

Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) looking away as Cora tells Clarkson (David Robb) he is offering TMI

One aspect of childbirth today that seems to bother women that this week’s episode made visible is how men as physicians are often in charge. Blog after blog, comments, postings all “interpreted” the death of Sybil as the result of men in charge. In the particular instance the fatuous Tapsell was wrong, and Dr Clarkson was not able to get Lord Grantham to follow his advice and take Sybil to the hospital and try to induce labor early (a bit of anachronism there), but we could put that down to class bias. Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) blames Lord Grantham, but she is complicit, does not herself act on her impulse to ask Tom (someone calls him the “chaffeur” still), who doesn’t know what to do. And it’s by no means clear that had they gone to the hospital the outcome would have been better. It is though true that the last quarter century women have been trying to free themselves of male control, instinctively sensing the male is not sufficiently on their side as women but rather supporting the medical establishment.

For my part, while watching this week’s episode I kept remembering how during the very first time I was pregnant my husband and I had this little plan we got from the sessions on childbirth we attended together. We were going to have this book of short poems with us and he read them as we followed all our instructions on distraction. What laugh when it began to happen. Totally unreal. Or just before I went in when my grandmother suddenly turned round to me and said, oh so seriously to me, “Good Luck.” I would need was the dire feel. Looking back from another childbirth more than 6 years after the first my grandmother was the only person who produced an appropriate tone, who had not been cut off from the reality of history as well as experience. (Full disclosure: I’ve had two live births, both C-sections; before that, two miscarriages, one of which ended in an abortion to save my life.)

In Anibundel’s blog on DA this week, she links in Ta Nehisi-Coates’s great shock when he discovered childbirth is still dangerous, and a general column validating the insight that science is not magic: nature is still there and evolution has made childbirth risky for mother and baby. Atul Gawande has tried to remind women what childbirth is and was not just before the 20th century technological breakthroughs but recently.

Most after the first experience even when everything does not go badly and ends well (live healthy mother and baby) know the truth. Labor is not discomfort, it’s pain, bad pain, and the experience physically traumatic. Why is this not discussed? the same reason that the details of childbirth were not discussed in earlier times, were taboo in the Victorian novel. It seems all cultures do what they can to erase the hardship of having babies in order to pressure women into becoming mothers. I queried Victoria (a list-serv about Victorian books) two days ago for citations of scenes where we have a direct dramatization of death or agonies in childbirth. Very uncommon. We are presented with orphans, the experience of a woman is reported, but a direct scene? and when it is detailed the reviewers protested. See my list of typical childbirth deaths in Victorian to Edwardian novels.

Cora’s failure of nerve: Clarkson is speaking firmly against Tapsell and Lord Grantham (who have objected to “public” hospitals) but we see in Cora’s face a fatal hesitation (tellingly it’s Edith who stands behind her mother in such scenes)

***********************

Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier) teaching Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) how to wind a clock

To some watchers it may seem remarkable that this is not the only thread in this week’s multi-plot pattern. Put it down to the ability of Fellowes to convey meaning through epitomizing dialogues and gestures and the sophistication of viewers who have seen this sort of thing before. The thread with the most scenes is that of Isobel Crawley’s attempt to hire of Ethel Parks as a servant to enable her to climb out of the pariah status she is now in even though Ethel finds she need no longer be a prostitute to make ends meet. (No boy to clothe, feed, send to school.) Ethel is deeply grateful but warns Mrs Crawley that there will be complications (the use of the word links this substory with that of Lady Sybil).

Ethel (Amy Nuttall) wants this good place but is understandably fearful; Mrs Crawley (Penelope Wilton) listening

I for one was not surprised to see Mrs Bird refuse to work with Ethel. My favorite moment in this week’s episode was where the narrow Mrs Bird thinking that if she says she’ll leave, Mrs Crawley will not hire Ethel, tells Mrs Crawley she’s going and Mrs Crawley thanks her and wishes her well.

Mrs Bird (Christine Lohr) realizing her risky ploy has failed, and she is being “sacked”

Normally I loathe scenes which show the power of the employer; not this time. This being Fellowes he gives the sarky conservative who disdains good acts ammunition by making Ethel a bad cook, awkward, stumbling. But Mrs Crawley is not ridiculed for once. (Several unusual moments this week.) My hope (looking ahead) is that when Mrs Crawley loses her son (hush hush I know) she may find her reward for her beautiful act was to find she has this loving giving person with her as a substitute.

Daisy (Sophie McShera) hearing of the young mistress’s death

Daisy too is made to realize she is not as powerful as she dreamed she would be by her promotion. We see her struck by the powerful Lady Sybil’s death. Later she realizes too she is making herself disliked by Alfred by bullying the new scullery maid, Ivy, who shows competence. One might say realization is the theme of this episode. Thomas surprises himself by grieving over Lady Sybil’s death. He realizes how much she meant to him as a caring employer. We have, done with remarkable celerity, Anna and John Bates realizing how Bates’s ex-wife poisoned herself and framed him for murder, Anna’s meeting with Lord Grantham and then the lawyer (both of which are literally skipped — we are to understand what was said).

This is not the first time Mary (Michelle Dockery) had stood accusing Matthew (Dan Stevens) and he back away

There are also realizations to come. Matthew has realized that Lord Grantham is badly mismanaging Downton Abbey but when he twice in this episode tries to do something about it, he is thwarted by Lady Mary. The first time it’s in a mild talk they have as they pass a ruined barn but the second she comes near to putting him “in his place” when he attempts to tell the lawyer (who himself knows something needs to be don). How dare Matthew try to talk to her father when he is so grieved? We are getting hints that all is not well in their sex life (that’s why no pregnancy has emerged). Miss Obrien is (alas) shown as up to her usual spite as she encourages Jimmy to turn to Thomas for help, and Jimmy begins to realize that because Thomas is homosexual (however closeted) this may cause difficulties for him (who is apparently not bisexual at all).

But all these feel like very much tertiary threads in the tapestry of this week’s central drama. There is perhaps too much idealization of Sybil now she’s dead: Mrs Patmore: “She was the kindest person in the house.” But rather than cavil I’d like to close where I opened: the soap opera nature of these programs and another way of looking at Sybil Bransom’s death.

**************

Sybil and Mary discuss Tom’s desire to take a job and the baby’s religion: Mary is evasive, reluctant to agree

It was reported at the end of the 1st season that Jessica Brown Findlay and Dan Stevens had said they did not want to return for a second season. That could be interpreted as wanting more money. Then between the 2nd and 3rd the same two were said to want out. This past fall it was said Maggie Smith would not do a fourth year, but now she has agreed to. Her departure would have been such a great loss to the series as almost to deal it a death-blow.

It can kill a show to lose a favored actor or actress. They are part of the mix that attracts, part of the dream life of the viewer’s on-going time the form caters to. Let’s say were Downton Abbey a day-time program, and the producers were confronted with the problem of an actor who wants out, would they kill her off? I suggest perhaps not. The structuring of soap operas is based on the idea of an ongoing community of characters only some of whom we see in an particular episodes or series of episodes. Characters drift in and out, disappear, reappear, leave legacies. It’s the large community that we see, and someone can vanish and then at a later time return. They can be brought back. This is very much the way of cyclical series of novels: Trollope has vanishing and recurring characters; so too Oliphant, Balzac, in our own time Anthony Powell. It would be easy for Fellowes to bring Sir Richard Carlisle back if the original actor or an actor who looked sufficiently like him were willing. We have a new footman, a new scullery maid. Mrs Bird is going to vanish at least for a while after this episode.

But DA is not quite ongoing in the same way as daytime TV. It’s not daily, and it doesn’t go on all year. We have only so many parts, so we really do concentrate on about 14 or so characters, with some central stars. Of course they could have written it that Sybil went off to Ireland with Tom and that’s that. Fellowes wants a family that sticks together (part of his piety). Findlay Brown’s determination to find another role and not be typecast enabled him to see his way to strong scenes by using her departure this way.

We have been similarly told that Dan Stevens is leaving after this year. He had been acting in the US on Broadway (among other roles). The character has certainly been made to feel useless for the last two episodes or so. He alone encourages Sybil in her budding career as a journalist but except for her (and she doesn’t count for much in the family prestige) if he brings forth any of his modern or progressive ideas (like his mother’s), they are not much appreciated.

Another epitomizing scene in this episode was between Mary and Sybil (as sisters they were close). Sybil asked Mary to help her stop Tom from taking a job a a lower rank and told her that she intended to make the baby Catholic to please Tom. Mary’s reply: “you don’t have to.” Now that Sybil is dead, the way is open for the family (we know of Lord Grantham’s bigotry towards Catholics) to protest this baptism (on all sorts of grounds including future career). If a struggle ensues over the baby’s religion, and Matthew sticks up for Tom’s rights as he has before), do you think that will count for much?

The closing still: Tom nursing his child

Again I have been discussing how soap opera works in order to defend the form.

P.S. For fun and semiotics: the Hats of Downton Abbey, Season 3

The hats a character wears tell a lot about her. This year the costume designer had a smaller costumer budget.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:4: “We all live in a harsh world, but at least I know I do”

Ethel: “Mrs Hughes said we all have lives to lead but that isn’t true I’ve got no life I exist but barely … No I don’t, I don’t have a life … “

Opening still of Anna (Joanna Froggart) understanding there’s again no letter from Bates

2nd sequence of shots: Bates (Brendon Coyle) made to understand there’s again no letter from Anna

From last stills of episode: juxtaposed superimposed montage moments of both with their cherished letters

Dear friends and readers,

This was a another powerful episode. Framed by interwoven sequence of the unprovoked abysmal misery of our its first shots, Anna again not receiving any letters from her husband in prison (“it’s been weeks”) and (the 2nd sequence) Bates in line made to understand there is nothing for him, and its last shots, first Bates, then Anna, and then both superimposed as they read their letters and feel the presence of the other through the power of letters, it presents four direct attacks on vulnerable in effect powerless people, the attack orchestrated as much by the person the attacked person finds him or herself turning to as the people who mounted it — because they could.

While (as with many novels seeking a wide readership), enough is given the viewer to take the establishment point of view in each of the crisis confrontations and side with the person disdaining, scorning, excoriating, depriving the vulnerable down-and-out person, the way each is presented and the ceaseless reinforcement (one of Downton Abbey‘s strength is its lack of subtlety) of the super-comfortable (supposed at least identifying with) privileged rich type, the whole emotional trajectory of the circumstances we are given (Ethel gives up her beloved child, Tom sick with worry yet frantic to avoid the prison the episode makes clear will be a horror, even if it doesn’t end in torture or execution) makes us side with the wounded, those the very structure of the society as such, its norms turns into a victim.

Occupying (what a wonderfully resonant word this has become) the climax-into-denouement position (just the place where Edith was humiliated in the previous part), we have the powerful encounter of Ethel again with her son’s grandfather who seems to regard her as subhuman. Like Edith’s, we could say the moment has been building for at least a season. In this episode after yet more shots of Anna’s desolation, Mrs Crawley approaches Mrs Hughes to tell her that Ethel wants to see them; phase 2 gives us the scene between Mrs Hughes and Mrs Cralwey’s at Mrs Crawley’s house where Mrs Bird, the housekeeper treats Ethel like someone contaminated and the two older women concede that Ethel has been driven to where she has no future (nothing can be a goal) and agree to ask the Bryants to see her and her son again; culminating in phase 4 Ethel’s walk to the house with the child, the scene where she gives him up rather than take the meagerest of stipends all the while watched, and the close of her walking away and both women now to help her cope say she did the right thing. Here Mrs Crawley’s face is enough to show it ought not to be:

Ethel (Amy Nuttal) in the blurry distance Mrs Crawley (Penelope Wilton), Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) just out of view

“There’s no turning back now for Ethel” says Mrs Hughes. And she’s partly right. It’s not that Ethel has no life, but that she has a lousy one. Because there was no decent job for her outside service.

In the same phase 4, we finally learn that the reason Anna and Bates are suffering is simply that the warden had taken a dislike to Bates. Perhaps he seemed too unhurt, too steely, well, as a mate tells him, the warden now dislikes Bates’s mate, and so means to plant evidence in a cell against Anson. Bates asks the man why he is helping Bates; the man says he detests Anson too. Certainly breaks any providential patterning, no?

Less centered, but given far more and lengthy scenes is the flight of Tom and then Sybil Bransom from Ireland during the early days of the troubles (it’s 1921 now). There is a problem here. Film is a surface art and makes it effects rapidly but we are 1) not given enough to experience with Tom why for him such places as Downton Abbey

are different for me. I don’t see charm and gracious living. I see something horrible …

There perhaps needed half an episode or at least a montage of the hovels the Catholics live in, some sense of the lack of any right or power for Catholics to change the law and situation. Probably Fellowes despite demurs and self-defenses (in the second book produced by his daughter, The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, he responds to critics trying to show he is not the reactionary neanderthal they have been describing) cannot accept that if not direct violence the threat of it, felt, is what makes entrenched orders compromise, give up some of their luxuries and in Lord Grantham’s shocked tones about “private property” attacked (!) there is an incisiveness even the Dowager fails to inflict.

Fellowes nonetheless shows us how Grantham not shows a complete lack of imagination except when it comes to the wealthy’s suffering (as does his daughter, Mary). It’s very irritating the way Grantham lights into Tom — no understanding of what the Anglo-Irish did at all, no memory it seems and excoriates him as a coward for his leaving Sybil behind but then we discover Grantham is seriously undermining the family by not facing up to his real income. During the course of the episode Matthew discovers the huge sums he has given into Downton will be lost because of Grantham’s mismanagement (too big a staff is part of it). We have seen seen how unscrupulous both Mary and the Dowager were to get their hands on yet more of Mrs Leveson’s “late husband’s money” as she puts it. If Grantham does not know he is “in a harsh world,” it’s because he’s laid his hands on money he never earned. Matthew does not dare it seems bother him and uselessly goes to the Dowager; Julian Fellowes says in The Chronicles he has made Lord Grantham a dullard.

Tom is outnumbered. Like Ethel, all around him reject him, including Sybil who he had to lie to about going to his political meetings. She cannot understand his desire to return to Ireland and help. “Our child” she cries in these solemn tones. Unlike Grantham, Tom expresses some remorse, gratitude (but then he needs these people). This thread opens in medias res with Sybil phoning Edith from a public phone and Edith not beginning to comprehend, but unlike Mary and her mother has a vexed fretting face

Sybil (Deborah Findley Brown) phoning

Edith (Laura Carmichael) offered “reasonable” explanations by Cora, her mother and Lady Mary

The man we have just seen fleeing a policeman on a bike in the dark

Tom in flight

interrupts the fine dinner the family is offering the bishop (with nearly full staff, two men, Alfred supposed to be head footman ends up competing with the new lower footman, James, who will serve meat and who the vegetables). The counterpart to Mary’s imperturbable savoir faire and quick lies to the bishop (a “silly” man at the door) grated; this kind of hypocrisy, the covering up is in the kitchen given over to Mrs Hughes. Thomas observes Tom had no money (“he hadn’t got it for a cab”)

Mrs Hughes: ‘Maybe he [Tom Bransom] fancied a walk?’
Miss Obrien: ‘Yes that’s it I should think he loves a night’s walk in the pouring rain without a coat’

Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran) with Mrs Hughes again just out of sight, Daisy (Sophia McShera) in blurred position

It’s insufficiently appreciated how Mrs Obrien plays a similar role to the Dowager (Maggie Smith), maybe because the lady’s maid’s riposte have a bite or gravitas the Dowager’s lack. In The Chronicles Fellowes insists he loves Miss Obrien at the same time as he insists he’s got the type of woman who became a lady’s maid right. Not having his background I can’t say. We was offered by an intelligent member of one of my listservs this insightful analysis:

The older woman is Lady Grantham’s personal maid, and apparently wishes the lady were dead, for when the lady is on the point of death, this servant is so seized with guilt and remorse over
wishing her dead that she tends her tirelessly night and day (at least that is how I remember it). This servant really is the prostitute with the heart of gold. She really does buy into a social order, in her heart of hearts, in which the the lord and lady mimic the role of kind and queen–mystical creatures that is sinful to wish dead.

On first viewing I thought the low point came in the fourth thread: Edith goes to her grandmother (will she never learn?) for empathy, to be told “quit whining” (a favorite word for Charles Krautheimer, among the most odious of the “intellectual” republicans); this from the woman whose mockery made Strallan crumble and reinforced that humiliation scene. In the book Fellowes makes his parallel of Anna with Edith explicit. He begins with how Mr Bates is a much older man, also lame. Fellowes does not go on to say that Anna is not driven away because she is not regarded as equally valuable, equally able to “get something better” in the marketplace, but that’s a central difference between them.

I don’t mean to be too solemn about the Duchess or offer an analysis appropriate to a Victorian novel. She is a comic type. I concede the Dowager cannot do much harm while everyone is so rich, but were anyone to follow her advice they’d lose any hope of an authentic existence. Her candid honesty about her motives and behavior is that of the jester. It’s to be noted we told nothing about her earlier life — compare Trollope’s Aunt Stanbury (He Knew He Was Right) whose earlier life is thoroughly gone into

Fellowes understands that we are not intended to take the Duchess like a character in a novel; Downton Abbey is closer to a filmed play. In the scene where Tom is called upon to explain how he could have sided against the people in the great house (Mary says she came out with the daughter!), the Countess persists in her witty idea that the Irish were quite right to burn such a hideous house down.

The dowager saying no one ever liked that house (Maggie Smith)

Lord Grantham: ‘This is not helpful, mama.’

Edith does come up trumps by writing to a newspaper against the disapproval of everyone around her (like Tom and Ethel). “Thank you for the vote of confidence” says Lady Edith to her father who settles the question of her attempt to be a writer to newspapers with “she’ll never be published.” Unexpectedly her article is published,even with a comment. Chance? it hit the right spot that moment.

Matthew congratulates Edith, but like his mother his willingness to buck the powerful and stand up for what he perceives is good is limited. In the scene with Mary in the nursery she wants to turn into their sitting room, his gestures, intonation, facial blenching reminded me of Robert Bathurst playing Strallan.

Matthew (Dan Stevens) losing out against the oblivious Mary (Michelle Dockery)

**************

So what does it all add up to? Am I arguing that after all Downton Abbey is subsersive art. No. I am showing how it works and why it grips those of us who watch on.

Very few shots of the abbey in this part and always in the shade, looking dank at the bottom

The way to understand a film is to capture the shots one by one. The shot is the word of the film, and the sequence of stills the sentence. Meaning arises from a Barthes-like response to mise-en-scene, which is worked on arduously from teams of people in production and costume design, the director, the actors, each nuance studied. Fellowes has no text he is adapting, and reminding me very much of another politically conservative adapter who did books apparently close to Fellowes’s heart, Trollope’s Pallisers, Fellowes has little filmic intertextuality. We can’t find out what is the ethical perspective as we can from some films by looking t other films comparatively and it is not sophisticated filmically. Few flashbacks, hardly any voice-over. The montage which ends Part 4 is unusual. Historical accuracy in it is used to provide enough verisimilitude but the way we are brought into the world of films is through readily available archetypes which cut through its veneer of a past into the present of the viewer.

Here and there in The Chronicles (as Fellowes did in the first book, The world of Downton Abbey) Fellowes does cite a book or an actual case or story in a newspaper at the time. Bates and Anna’s story is partly founded on a real life trial of a man named Harold Greenwood accused of poisoning his wife to death with arsenic who as gotten off by a brilliant lawyer — and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (pp. 237-38).
But these only give local direction.

What it does not do is deliver simplistic cant on how to live or how to take our lives. And much that is there can be extrapolated this way and that.

In this part new threads and new characters move into the community. A handsome new footman, Jimmy Kent, whom Thomas is clearly attracted to, and who has been used to having women (it seems) “beg” him to stay with them

“You know what women are” Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) is saying to Mr Carson who replies he expects he does not the way James does

Daisy wanted a servant “underneath” her to do the hard work, but Alfred who Daisy fancied is attracted by her — maybe the way women are is more complicated than Jimmy surmises

They fit the themes of 3:4 as a whole. When you have little of what many people want or admire, you can be sideswiped by the very event you longed for. Jimmy for nothing he ever deserved is taken on. Told by Carson one of the candidates is handsome, sight unseen, without a second thought, Lady Mary says oh do take him on, such fun for the maids. But not much for Alfred who finds himself displaced. Thomas looks charmed too (so no snake-like attacks from his corner). When the two are serving at table and Edith says we must not let Alfred be overshadowed by the new butler, Carson sententiously replies:
“Hard work and diligence weigh more than beauty in the real world, my lady.”

We’ll let the Dowager have the last word here:

“If only that were true.” Amen.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:3: cruelty so raw it took my breath away

Edith (Laura Carmichael) having a hard time breathing as she realizes the humiliation in store right then

Letting go

Exhaustion defeat

Dear friends and readers,

So what was it? What had this character done wrong to have unleashed at her such a level of spite, of raw humiliation that I’ve never seen equaled in kind before — and I’ve been watching mini-series for some 40 years? Before the whole community, people she must live with, a fever pitch of rejection. The question to ask is, Why is this character scapegoated so?

Jane Eyre’s horror when Rochester’s brother-in-law interrupts her wedding to Rochester to say there is an impediment, Rochester had a wife now living, pales before this. Nothing to it.

I’ve long been puzzled at the way Lady Edith Grantham is sneered at, mocked, by Downton Abbey audience members. Fellowes, again knowing writer that he is (remember he wrote Gosford Park, one of the most intelligent of the great house movies I’ve seen, to expose the hypocrisies of professed motives), has been feeding this maw for three seasons. For three seasons I’ve seen it emerge again and again. In little things: Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Lady Grantham is directed to roll her eyes when Edith speaks; Maggie Smith as the dowager and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Princess grimace knowingly. In the first Edith gave away that her sister, Mary, had been in bed with one of the show’s several lout-lords who died at the abbey; in the second Edith drawn to, fooled by a man masquerading as a hideous cripple. I thought perhaps Fellows had decided he’d whip-lashed Edith enough when in 3:1 he had Robert Bathurst as Strallan courageously break the taboo which allows mean tricks and expose one played on Allen Leech as Tom Branson by another lout-lord.

I mistook. I should have realized that the intrusive domineering demand that Edith not consider this man by the Dowager was an important sign. I’ve never liked Lady Bracknell (Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest), a witty bully, upon whom (Edith Evans) Maggie Smith may intuitively have modeled herself. Amusing cynic yes, like one of the old women Anthony Trollope is ever defending. She has the crass nerve to get up and insist what is happening is right and thus disable Strallan further (he crumbled because he overheard her making fun of his prowess to the chaplain):

She’s one of many in the DA world who thinks she has intimate rights over other people subject to her authority (some behave as if many others have intimate rights over them). The dowager couldn’t stand Strallan so Edith is thrown away with him. So what is wrong with him? Aristocrat, monied, kind, perceptive, offering “quite enough happiness” for Edith to be going on with (Lord Grantham’s words).

This gives us our first hint: what is wrong? he’s said to be too old and he’s got a crippled arm, masks, masks for not saying for he’s not manly enough, not macho enough, weak.

He fails to perform masculinity adequately. There you have it. And Edith, why is she a butt? She fails to perform femininity adequately. Jim was telling me tonight that he reads a blog which argues that the real electric power of DA (for those who are addicted) is it’s camp, and tonight he read there the offhand comment that some ludicrous star, inexplicably wrong in her garments, was dressed in the Edith Grantham style. Not Lady Mary Grantham. Not Lady Sybil, now Mrs Bransom (Deborah Findley Brown). Though they all dress alike.

Tom all awkwardness, Sybil turned dowdiness itself

So this hint is not sufficiently explanatory. This is not the first time I’ve asked myself what fuels the need to ridicule this young woman?

As I have before I hunted in three very good books on women’s films I have: Tania Modleski’s mongraph Loving with a Vengeange; and edited collections of essays by Marcia Landy (Imitations of Life) and Christine Gledhill (Home is Where the Heart Is). This time I wouldn’t give up. In previous hints I’ve found Miss Sarah Obrien (Siobhan Finneran): the villainess, spiteful domineering old maid; in 3:1 and 3:2 I tried to ignore her reversion to this role but in 3:3 she is not only wearing the ugliest of thick-cloth witch-like dresses, her face made up to look like pancake, her hair terrible. She is all menace. Daisy (Sophie McShera) tells Moseley she wouldn’t want Miss Obrien to be angry at her. In this episode Miss Obrien was outwitted by Thomas (he has also returned to smirking bad gay guy, narrow envious gay man Rob James-Cellier) who foolishly thought he could make her lose her job by telling (the now trembling) Molseley (Kevin Doyle) she meant to leave and directly Molseley to offer a relative as new lady’s maid to Lady Grantham.

I found Anna — long suffering, self-sacrificing nurse type. Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan), everyone’s well-meaning mother.

Trawl, trawl, trawl and then I saw it. Tania Modleski had it: no heroine is allowed to admit openly she longs to marry.

Is not this Edith’s flaw? in the first episode she became a Lawrentian-style farm girl to allure a man (whose wife put a stop to that). She wanted to love the crippled man. And what does she say when lying in her bed afterwards: not that she has missed a dreamed-of precious life, but that both sisters are married, one is pregnant and probably the other is. We have enough to see she does like him, but that’s not the emphasis here.

She wore her heart on her sleeve. She was open. She is indiscreet. Worse: she is inept at manipulation. She breaks code & for that and her exposure of the game she cannot be forgiven. Loneliness is a laugh among Judith Butler-style performers. Did anyone in her family, anyone downstairs feel for her? Anna Smith Bates (Joanne Froggart), in some ways an alter ego; it’s no coincidence Anna is Edith’s shadow in the last we see of Edith in this episode:

She tells Anna she wishes she had another life (something Anna ought to wish for if she had any real value for herself and her time)

Score high for Fellowes. I put it to my reader this scene will be remembered and imitated. It’ll be spoken of. You thought Downton Abbey was running out of dazzle, did you?

*******************

Mrs Hughes and Lesley Nichol as Mrs Patmore hestitate before going into doctor’s office

I had meant to show how each separate episode in a good mini-series will have its own structure and set of themes. I showed patterns in 3:2. Here, then we are looking at themes. As it’s a hidden dialogue (overheard) that defeats Strallan so this is an episode rife with hidden information and lies which have power to hurt, often enough known by people who do not realize their power. Thomas lies to Molseley and inconsistently Cora, Lady Grantham does not give Miss Obrien a chance to explain herself (“I am very hurt by your behavior”) while being all fairy-godmother goodness to Phyllis Logan as Mrs Hughes (“we will keep you” if you should become too ill to work). Daisy alone knows that Lavinia Swine (Zoe Boyle) sent a letter to her lawyer on the day she was dying and blurts it out, thus enabling Lady Mary to pressure Matthew to accept a legacy the family needs. Mrs Bartlett (Claire Higgins) may know the truth of Bates’s wife’s last hours. In the prison a friend warns Bates (Brendan Coyle) that a weapon has been planted in his bed and the police told; he is able to wrest it out of his bedding and hide it before the police rush in to search.

And so it goes. Lies, secrecy, silence — central themes in women’s books ever since Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

Preposterous scenes of virtue — central to women’s romance since heroic 17th century romance and rife in opera. So Matthew cannot bear to accept his legacy and when persuaded to, Lord Grantham will not take the money but share the abbey with his son-in-law who admits he likes living there. Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) teaching sleazy sarky prostitutes to use sewing machines while they jeer at her. Fellowes’s disdain and hostile depiction of the lowest vulnerable members of society is not compensated for by Ethel Parks’s shame when she comes in for help (naturally not for herself) and again flees rather than tell her secret.

What are men and women allowed to do is presented as a genuine question. Not reveal their appetite, as Anna tells Daisy that makes men flee:

The lobster is a part of the mise-en-scene — perhaps a joke version of vagina dentata?

Not take it upon yourself to criticize the arrangements of those above you Mr Carson tells Miss Obrien’s naive nephew, Alfred (Matt Milne).

Of course this is drivel as a serious investigation of how to live your life. It is really what you want that shapes your choices. Edith did want to marry Strallan and be mistress of his estate, have his children. Now she wants another life but cannot see her way to any other. Lady Mary wants to stay princess of Downton and Mr Carson her butler. Lord Grantham does not want to lose face or status. Matthew no longer seems to want the independence he once did, and Tom Bransom has begun to wear dinner jackets — they both appear to want to please their wives.

IN Downton Abbey we can measure the characters by what they want at this point. Miss Obrien wants to get back at Thomas for insulting her as someone who was never asked to be married (how does he know she ever wanted to?) and threatening her job.

As usual I warm most to Mrs Hughes who appears to want to live on, quietly, with dignity, as self-supporting as her world will let her be. I would warm to Isobel Crawley if (like Edith but for very different reasons) her work were not the subject of such ridicule.

What kind of life do you want to live is a serious debate found in Victorian novels. When Jane fled Rochester, she was forced “to build a life.” When Mrs Crawley is trying to reach Ethel, she wants also to be frank (like Edith is intuitively) and uses the word “prostitute” of how Ethel is surviving, and says “you should know this is true of every woman who has come here to rebuild their lives and I’m helping them, and is re-echoed mockingly:

(A camp picture?)

That’s right. Why not come in and help us rebuild our lives?

I understand the sarcastic laughter. People act in terms of particulars, of their own landscape, and if they don’t have access to a milieu that allows for fulfillment on middle class terms, they don’t get it. So Ethel says, “That’s not why I’m here Mrs Crawley. That is I am … what you said but I don’t want help, not for myself but … ” and unable to face whatever it is, she runs off again. It’s not so bad with Edith as say Mrs Bartlett (a laundress) or these unskilled women or Ethel. Isobel says over dinner what Edith needs is something useful to do.

But it has been a viscerally searing day for her, and my goal in this blog has been to investigate why Edith is the episode scapegoat.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:2: Is the Abbey a Bourdieu habitus?

Siobhan Finneran as Sarah Obrien looking at her nephew & realizing what she’s up against if she wants her nephew to succeed

Dear friends and readers,

I had meant to write but one blog a week on Downton Abbey, but discovered that the American PBS stations are not following the divisions of the British series and this past week presented two parts back-to-back. As when PBS cuts out parts of these films, so when they run them together, they obscure their patterns, themes and emphases. Part One was re-introduction where the viewer was remarkably quickly re-informed about who the characters were, and watched the season’s new premise

1) fuel the crisis scenes where characters have failed to cope (Lord Grantham [Hugh Bonneville] loses his wife’s money) or refuse to be co-opted (Matthew Crawley [Dan Stevens] is still struggling against his role as kept man, this time yet more distastefully because the source of the money is a dead deluded girl); and

2) fuel conflicts as some of the characters’ whole being is bound up with keeping what they can of the left-over ancien regime order of the pre WW! world (e.g., Lady Mary [Michelle Dockery], Carson [Jim Carter], Lord Grantham, Violet, the dowager [Maggie Smith]), while others want out (Matthew, Lady Sybil now Mrs Bransom [Deborah Findlay-Brown]), see it as punishing, excluding, cheating, pressuring them (Daisy Robinson [Sophia McShera], Tom Bransom [Allen Leech], Sarah Obrien), see what’s happening and don’t care as long as they can get what they want out of what’s to be (Lady Edith [Laura Carmichael], Mrs Hughes [Phyllis Logan], Anna Bates [Joanne Froggart]) or just knuckle under (Cora, Lady Grantham [Elizabeth McGovern]; Anthony Strallan [Robert Bathurst]).

This quite apart from how we are to view them ethically.

The richness of the series — what makes it compelling is the way these complexities are made to play out in the dramatic scenes and manifest in witty dialogue.

The first part ended not only in the wedding, but the immediate prologue to it: Daisy seeing that going on strike is useless, counterproductive and just plain silly (Thomas’s bad advice) and yielding to seeing Lesley Nicholl as Mrs Patmore was doing her best and all she could — she got her a raise of 12 shillings. We see them working together on the food and at the last moment rushing out to see the wedding too from afar (the reactionary lessons of the series never ceases):

****************************

Part Two shows the need of a third season to be fresh while keeping the community going. The world of Downton lost characters in the previous years to war (which itself provided much of the narrative thrust and events of the second year) or life’s attrition (Gwen Dawson got an office job, Sir Richard Carlisle [Iain Glenn] couldn’t integrate). So you need new characters or you bring a strong character back. In the aesthetics of soap opera characters may drift out of range and then drift back again.

Penelope Wilton as Isobel Crawley is still half-thwarted in her function as the program’s proofs that liberal solutions will not work. (Again Fellows’ politics is ceaselessly in evidence.) Mrs Crawley has now opened a clinic and employment agency for young women who have become outcasts. This allows Fellows to bring back Ethel whose rebellious spirits and burning desires will no doubt overcome her shame and unwillingness to kow-tow (compromise) to authority and conventional norms. Those of us who did watch last season know she had a small son and he needs to be accounted for.

Amy Nuttal as Ethel Parks lets Penelope Wilton as Isobel Crawley pass her by taking on a blank look (so as not to be recognized)

And thus we are hooked into next week.

This need to make the material compelling again may also be seen in Part Two where the idea seems to be to throw wrenches into our assessments and expectations. There is a real attempt to make us suspect that after all maybe Bates did murder his wife. Brendan Coyle is presented as a seethingly dangerous, menacing John Bates when Anna Bates is not around. The partnership of Thomas and Miss Obrien breaks down. Uncertainty replaces or is added to unease as part of the dominating mood. The Bransoms have gone home to a difficult life in Ireland. Will Lady Mary and Matthew really make it as a couple? Until near the end of the part, will Shirley Maclaine as Mrs Leveson again supply an enormous amount of money to keep this luxurious hierarchical life going for this privileged group of people?

A central thread with more episodes than any other: Mrs Hughes appears to have cancer; she and Mrs Patmore see the lump, feel it, consult the doctor repeatedly. Will she survive? In the touching close of the second part we see her and Lesley Nicoll who as Mrs Patmore has been her support and companionship walking off into the darkness:

Mrs Hughes: You just missed an admirer. Mr Carson said you did very well.
Mrs Patmore: Did you tell him?
Mrs Hughes. No. And what is there to tell? One day I will die and so will he and you and everyone of us under this roof. You must put these things in proportion Mrs Patmore, and I think I can do that now.
Mrs Patmore puts out her hand and touches Mrs Hughes’s arms and walks off the stage.
Mrs Hughes turns round, faces the camera steadily and then turns out the light

Ironically what is certain in this series so far has been death. For my part in Part One for me the most moving character was Mrs Patmore: it was when Anna left her alone to have her eye operation and she looked so anxious that I burst into tears. In Part Two I bonded with Mrs Hughes’s moral strength and loyalty when she helped Ethel and her Scots sceptical stoicism. When the character who I originally hated as a misogynistic fantasy and has now emerged as one of my favorites (I’ve grown to love her), Miss Obrien, tries to pressure Mrs Hughes into conforming with the rest of the kitchen and at least pretending to believe in an afterlife, ghosts, spirits,” Mrs Hughes replies: “Yes but I do not believe they play boardgames.” I now see Miss Obrien as a stand-in for the old deprived-governess character (always in sober clothes, not made up), single, perhaps unaware of her lesbian impulses (especially towards her lady as we saw when Cora became mortally ill).

As there is a resort to switching or casting doubt on our expectations, so the primal generic feature of soap opera is allowed to emerge: female desire. It’s powerful. What are these two episodes about, but women getting married? We have the iconic scene of the bride, the outfit, the walk down the aisle. The high point (or low depending on who you concentrate on) of the previous part when Anthony Stallan exposed the lout-lord (it’s curious how young high lords in this series have often been louts) Larry Grey [Charlie Anson], but now in this episode we think we are having a repeat of the thwarted romance that happened to Edith (with a crippled man who was an imposter) in the second season. Lord Grantham tries to break up Edith’s romance; he refuses to reward Stallon, and implicitly it’s his not being a macho male (the bad arm is the sign of this). AT the center we have this poignant moment when Edith begs her father to let her have what she really wants and is backed strongly by Mrs Leveson (one of her best moments).

The sentiment is undercut because we realize Lord Grantham is also motivated by a desire to please his mother-in-law in the hope of getting her money

Women are the operative force in this second part. From Mrs Leveson’s American maid, Reed (Lucille Sharp) who has an alerter eye than Obrien’s nephew Alfred (Matt Milne) and courts him:

to Miss Obrien goinng about trying to help Alfred when she gives Thomas a strong comeuppance by having the nerve to steal all his Lordship’s fancy shirts and putting them in a trash burner: Thomas’s fooling Alfred into burning a small spot on Matthew’s dinner jacket is petty stuff to this. Her intense desire to help her nephew shows her mother instinct. And she has all along existed on the other end of a spectrum to where the Dowager looks at the world, her sceptical wit is as good as Maggie Smith’s and she delivers her lines equally deadpan.

The palette of this part is dark, dark colors, a lack of light, downstairs and the prison are more frequently seen than upstairs which is itself often night-time.

The mini-series costume drama is easy and even natural to respond to as it imitates life’s rhythms through its exploitation of time and character bonding, but it is not easy to explain its complicated art: the weaving patterns and juxtapositions of the multiplot-structure with their climaxes in ritual group scenes (it need be no more or less than a dinner or shooting party or picnic)
become tedious when outlined. Its aesthetics and tropes are that of women’s art, which is often mocked. The gnomic advice of Mrs Leveson to Lord Grantham in the part’s penultimate scene is meant as much for women as it is for (a small class of people after all, Lords losing their money):

Mrs Leveson: You know the way to deal with the world today is not to ignore it. If you do, you’ll just get hurt.
Lord Grantham: Sometimes I feel like a creature in the wild whose natural habitat is gradually being destroyed.
Mrs Leveson: Some animals adapt to new surroundings. It seems a better choice than extinction.
Lord Grantham: I don’t think it is a choice. I think it’s what’s in you.
Mrs Leveson: Well, let’s hope what’s in you will carry you through these times to a safer shore.

And they drink to it.

Is it too much to see Downton Abbey as a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense: where we see dramatized from a woman’s perspective and art (the soap opera) “the lifestyle, the values, the dispositions and expectation of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life.” As long as we read against the grain Fellows’s persistent reactionary lessons, which the dramatic form and characters provide much undermining of, I think it is.

Ellen

Read Full Post »