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.

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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.

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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

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Ronald Colman & A Tale of Two Cities

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. — Last sentence of 1935 and Dickens’s ATOTC

Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in the closing moments of the 1935 MGM A Tale of Two Cities

Random Harvest — like Lost Horizon the film may be “read” as anti-war

Dear friends and readers,

When I was 12 or 13 my screen idol was Ronald Colman. I remember my love for him best in A Tale of Two Cities and Talk of the Town, which in the way Million Dollar Movie (Channel 9, local NYC metromedia station) operated in the 1950s I saw every night for 5 nights and all day Saturday and Sunday each time they were scheduled. At the time I used to tell anyone who would listen (not many, probably just my father) that were I to tell any of the girls in school my heart-throb was Ronald Colman, they’d stare and ask me, who’s he? Girls my age then loved Frankie Avalon, Frankie Valli (The Four Seasons). Looking back I guess I never told anyone lest I appall anyone.

Not that Colman was not — as well as self-contained, strongly ethical, seeking personal fulfillment, sad, wistful, noble, deeply disillusioned, looking away ironically, quizzically, averted eyes — beautiful in the 1920s in the way of matinee idols. This may still be seen in the 1935 film when he talks with Lucie in the garden in a scene which in the novel may correspond to Dickens’s idealization of his relationship with Ellen Ternan (for whom he had brutally ejected his wife just as he was writing A Tale of Two Cities):

Around that time I managed to watch the 1937 Prisoner of Zenda and just loved Colman’s gay and bitter ironies and thought him so alluring as a swashbuckler against Barrymore, Jr (I’ve not forgotten their thrilling sword fight down a turning stairway over a cliff uttering with many a bon mot at one another);; I saw a much mangled censured version of Lost Horizon which I also read (Hilton’s novel), and then decades (when I was in my later 50s) later replaced some years ago in my memory by reading buying a re-digitalized, newly restored (to an original version not seen in the theaters) DVD (complete with commentary and features) at the same time as I added to my repertoire Random Harvest (1942 MGM, also based on a Hilton novel); his very last performance of Othello in a 1948 Universal adaption of Othello, as actor and character, A Double Life. There is a worth while analysis of Random Harvest in Brian McFarland’s Novel into Film:

and of Under Two Flags (with Claudette Colbert and which I’ve never seen) by Victoria Szabo (“Love on the Algerian Sands: Reviving Cigarette”) in Women at the Movies, Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack:

Adapted from Ouida’s (Louise de la Ramee) novel

I’ve even managed a totally silent DVD of the 1925 Romola where Colman played a tenderly brother-type (not in the novel) to the heroine.

The trouble is I know these few films do not begin to cover those Colman acted in. While it’s true he sued Samuel Goldwyn for insinuating he was a depressive alcoholic and was neither (at all), I’ve learned that the suit helped his career. He was being given shallow silly parts, cliched roles, and he was quickly scooped up by MGM and Fox and went on to do some of his best work in the later 1930s. The books to read and peruse are the somewhat hagiographic R. Dixon Smith, RC: Gentleman of the Cinema, and the encyclopedic Ronald Colman: A Bio-bibliography by Sam Frank.

Still, after watching the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, and liking it better each time (though it is anti- the French revolution) I put this still from the film on the wall. It is Colman as Carton standing outside the Darnay home looking in (a sort of Stella Dallas):

I’ve now bought myself a re-digitalized 1938 Paramount The Light that Failed (Colman as Rupert Kipling’s failed painter) and await the DVD from Amazon eagerly).

with Ida Lupino, a dual Snake Pit

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I watched the 1935 MGM ATOTC as well as the 1958 Rank ATOTC — with Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton and the 1989 mini-series ATOTC, with James Wilbry as Carton, scripted by Arthur Hopcroft (who scripted the 1988 BBC Bleak House) because with a few people on Inimitable-Boz, I’d been reading & discussing Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

I had last read it in my senior year in high school so that’s 41 years ago, and yet as I read parts I remembered them. This time I’m finding it a seriously flawed book. Again and again there are long astonishingly insightful and indeed prophetic passages on endless unjust imprisonment; state-fomented paranoia; torture and humiliation of people then murdered by the state, and then psychotic madness of people do tortured (Dr Manette’s fits); an understandable crazed need for revenge after a life of ravaging injustice (the knit, knit, knit chapter) — but then these are not rooted in any sound analysis of the history of the era, or human nature as it is, but instead we get a melodramatic story. We see a man try to change his identity because he rightly cannot bear the one imposed on him (Darnay), but we are given no reason for, no understanding of Carton’s depression, alcoholism, despair. He is a character without a past, no context. How did Carton end up Striver’s jackal. We are not told.

We see this abysmally poor man’s child run over and grief jeered at — no wonder Gaspard seeks to murder the killer-blight on his life and all those around him.

But then a history of the time would emphasize these new principles and from what I’ve read of Carlyle he certainly does. Carlyle’s French Revolution (a possible source) is very hard reading — at least I find it opaque. The style is madness.

The question would be, how does a novelist dramatize these ideas? what plot-situation or dramatic scenes can convey them? Hugo resorts to outright chapters of idea- and history. I like these very much and think he carries it off splendidly, but now English translations of his Les Miserables actually put these in the back of the book, as if they were appendices and it’s hard to figure out where they came. One forgets they are there so forgets to read them.

Dickens’s story tends to criminalize the people making the revolution – as they are the perpetrators of the false trials of Darnay. They are presented as crazed and only a couple of anecdotes and stories produced to justify why they are seething with fear and rage. Darnay is Carton’s double and he figures a modern alienation: he does not want the identity imposed on him; he attempts in good faith to build a new life, but finds he cannot escape the past, his roots, his property even, and those around him will not let him escape what his uncle did before him.

As to the films: I watched the 1935 ATOTC twice and the 1958 ATOTC with Dirk Bogarde in the leading role, it shone. The 1958 film is a close imitation of the 1935, step-by-step influenced, but the changes were often deviations into something less believable and fudged (meaning the politics of the film). Especially the characters of Sydney Carton and Miss Manette. 1958: Dirk Bogarde was directed to play the part of an alcoholic who has given up on life without quite saying why; the typology really feel into a ne’er-do-well Skimpole (from Bleak House). Since I’ve seen Bogarde playing greatly (Night Porter, The Servant) I know he was directed into this. Elizabeth Allen believed in her role in 1935 and had an intense sort of femaleness; poor Dorothy Tutin (1958) was embarrassing as Lucie Manette; she didn’t believe the character for a moment and was told to make her voice high.

Colman really played the part of a depressed man, disillusioned by all he’s seen. gayly, poignantly ironic — he was typed this way in other films (Lost Horizon) and as I wrote at one point in his career sued the studio for insinuating this was his real character in life and broke his contract (he had some courage and integrity). The actors in 1935 were closer to Dickens’s world and were better at the grotesques, especially I admit Edna May Oliver and the woman enacting Madame Defarge as well as Basil Rathbone as her evil nemesis who destroyed her family.

From the totally wild self-abjecton and tender chapter of Sydney declaring his love, a chapter undermining masculinity, i 1935 they carried it off, especially since in the 1935 movie it was followed up by slight montages and vignettes suggesting in fact their relationship deepened and was part of their mutual lives for a few years to come. The dialogue reappears even in 1989. Hopcraft just didn’t drop it.

Not that there were no moments in 1958: Leo McKern was the lawyer attacking Darnay, and Donald Pleasance a young Barsad, the spy. Both films are hurt by the excess of sentiment and filming at studio lots. The 1958 could have been more political; it was eschewed, but the individual portraits hit home: the 1958 Mr Manette put me in mind of the prisoners now starving to death in Gitmo, there for more than 11 years, many innocent of any crime but being in Pakistan and poor and known to be leftist in sympathy during the time the bribing scheme was on. The prisons too — they brought to mind our own huge prison industry and people put away in solitary confinement for years and years.

1989: Although the film with James Wilby as Carton and Serena Gordon as Lucie was probably more effective for a modern audience, it was inferior to the 1935. Again it hinges on Carton: John Wilby actually played it as something like a gothic wanderer: he was filmed as a Byronic type. Unlike both Colman and Bogarde, the alcoholism was marginalized.

Wilby plays the role as the outsider, the man who does not belong, a man apart, alone

The real problem with this character seems to be is he’s absolutely socially unacceptable to a wide audience and only the 1935 group had the nerve and only Colman the ability to play it.

It’s as if with each new version the film-makers departed more from the first try by getting rid of every good touch in the ’35 movie: one of my favorites is when (1935 movie) the people are jeering at Colman and others in the cart, and laughing at him especially, the actor says, “don’t laugh, and some words about the nature of the person or what’s happening there the man doesn’t understand.” Coming from Barsad that’s one of the finest moments in all 3 films.

Hopcraft was the writer and he wrote the 1988 Bleak House and that was excellent yet here he falls into the trap of having the actors do these fake semi-Frenchified voices and behaving in this stilted manner to indicate their Frenchness. It reminds me of the way Arab people are often represented on TV, as “different.” (A rare one not to do this was Prime Suspect). The harm to the movie was incessant. Hopcraft had moderned Esther Summerson by giving her some real characteristics of anger and resentment, and also pro-activity; nothing like that here, though unlike either previous Lucie at the film’s end Serena Gordon seems to realize she has done Carton in and at least looks some regret and memory of him.

This is actually the last close-up shot of the 1989 film: Lucie in the carriage

I expect the movie-producers were afraid of offending as this is a book that’s well known. I feel the book itself got in the way. OTOH, no more of this stigmatizing of the “mob” as in 1935 and 1958, more incidents were invented to make us understand the rage and fear of the people in charge of the terror, not a lot but something.

The 1958 and 1989 film were afraid of imitating the 1935 and this too got in the way. Bogarde did have a consistent fulfilling final moment: in accordance with his character, he is not eager to go, rather passively letting things happen than (as with Colman) reaching out (to the seamstress).

Bogarde as an apprehensive Carton

In 1989 we don’t see Wilby mount the scaffold, and the film ends with the carriage trundling away and the over-voice is the Christian “I am the Resurrection and the Light.” While that’s in the novel, it’s not the ending, and to put it last is to make Christian what is a part suicide scene: Carton seeking oblivion, peace, not redemption.

No one is redeemed in Dickens’s novel; it’s deeply pessimistic and as Colman mounts the scaffold (see the still prefacing this blog) we know the reason we do not hear catcalls is Miss Pross has murdered Madame Defarge. Jerry Cruncher, like Dickens’s Flintwich, beats his wife mercilessly, is the Resurrectionist of the book and bleakly parodies all the deaths. He conducts parody of the corpses of the ancien regime, and the corpses of the reign of (more intense because more crowded) few years to come. What is it Jay Gatsby says to Nick Carraway at the close of The Great Gatsby? “Tell me, old sport — what are we going to do with all these corpses on our hands?”

The ancien regime mutilated them. Jerry digs them up and sells them. Resurrectionist — a dark parody of I am the resurrection and the life, no? The US throws them out to sea.

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

I know I’ve not written much since May 2nd (Disability Studies). I’ve been both busy and have lacked the heart to write much since My busyness has included finishing two powerful long novels by Trollope (He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now read alternatively) and then carrying on reading three more remarkable novels by Anthony Trollope, the last very long (Framley Parsonage, The American Senator, Phineas Redux). I’m doing some fascinating reading about the use of maps, about the presentation of the city through plot-designs and action which emerge from how space is mapped in these books and hope to write about this soon.

I return to Colman to say to equate him with the “old-fashioned silver-screen gentleman” is to underestimate him. He had gone to a boarding school and started a good education, but was forced to leave school at 16 when his father died suddenly; while working at an office job, he turned to dramatics as an amateur by the time he was 22. For 18th century lovers, he is said to have been able to trace his family tree directly back to George Colman. He fought in World War One, a Ypres, and was very badly wounded. He limped all his life afterward and part of his acting was to disguise this.

As the reporter waiting for his plan in Lost Horizon (this too is on one of my workroom walls)

Ellen

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Recent Popular Fiction & Film: more & openly disabled characters; the effect of fandoms

Society is no comfort/To one not sociable — Shakespeare, Imogen, Cymbeline, IV:2, 12-13

The Walking Stick: Deborah (Samantha Eggar) badly lamed leaning on Leigh (David Hemmings) (1970, Eric Till, Winston Graham, George Bluestone)

Dear friends and readers,

Disabled characters have increased in numbers in popular fiction & film in the last quarter century. Has there been a genuine increase in sympathetic empathy and understanding, any real help offered such people or acceptance as a result. It would seem not. I link these two phenomena to the growth of fandoms in cyberspace and elsewhere and how they effect the development of programs and series of fictions. Why there are there. I exemplify briefly with the way disabled characters from Sondheim’s Passion to Winston Graham’s mystery and Poldark novels are treated, and more at length in Downton Abbey, from Fellowes’s himself to the indifferent to hostile commentary on him & Anna, the head housemaid who loves him.

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A spin-off from both the APA/ACA and ASECS conferences: in both there were roundtable panels on “disability studies: I feared not enough would be said in the more casual talks these roundtables offer to take up enough time and the audience would be called upon to talk, and then feared I’d reveal myself too much or get too involved. I have seen academic people present themselves as interested in isabilities and found that they were not, except as an abstract topic; worse, if I probed I discovered the people were just as strong for enforcing “normalcy” (on behalf of “success”), just as prejudiced (not taking a whole personality into account, not being willing to critique their definitions of success), fearful and/or nervous in their reactions. I worried I’d feel angry or know intense dismay.

So I didn’t go, and now regret this because what I did do was take down names of journals, books and periodicals with disability studies for today. First off I learned that in the last quarter century there’s been a huge increase in the number of disabled characters in popular fiction. It might be the disabled characters were always there in mystery-crime fiction, though not acknowledged, as villains or victims, but not being acknowledged, presented as freaks, or evil, or reprehensible in some way. But this is a big change to presenting people with disabilities in a sympathetic or seeming sympathetic way. Nowadays disability is also popular in historical fiction and romance. So that I noticed so many disabled characters in Winston Graham does not show originality on his part, but rather a following of a zeitgeist.

I won’t cite the names of the articles or journals separately unless someone asks for these (in the comments) which is most unlikely, just describe generally. Most were studies of texts or art in the close reading humanities way today (looking sociologically, how they function in society). Basically there were two schools of thought: one argues that the new wave of appearances of disabled characters is not increasing any real understanding or sympathy for people with disabilities because 1) at the end the disabled person is forcibly or seemingly willingly co-opted into the “normal” world, made to seem “normal” and the point is to defuse the person as a threat, on the way the emphasis in portrayal is the disability itself with full utterly varied richness of people ignored; it’s voyeurism; and 2) we see very little progress in the outer world for funding, real acceptance, or even understanding in wider circles of people. The other argues that the spread of such depictions does help; little by little the stories make people no longer ignore the disabled, no longer erase them altogether, and does gradually work up sympathy and we may hope for change.

When Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) wants to visit the crippled Mrs Smith (Helen Schlesinger), her father rages at her with open disgust for her “queer” tastes (from the 1995 BBC Persuasion, Roger Michell, Nick Dear)

Then there are essays on particular works or authors or sub-genres: how disabled people are presented in romance; how presented in mystery-crime stories (where they’ve long been an unacknowledged central type, either as villain or victim); in later Victorian gothic. The way they are discussed in non-fiction case histories, which sometimes turn out to be obtuse fictions which promulgate single-minded freakish stereotyped views, e.g., Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night which invites voyeurism. Once in a while a particular writer or work is found which increases understanding and sympathy. The value of these is if you want to do such studies they show you how to do and what’s said, and give you insights.

Two good books are worth noting: Women with Disabilities, ed. Michelle Fine (and others). Fine’s the one who’s done intelligent candid studies of how women who have been raped are treated, women’s studies. The kind of character includes is Fosca in Tarchetti’s book (now called Passion from Sondheim): I’ve noticed again and again women who are presented as disabled are eroticized, made beautiful but for the disability which then adds to their alluringness (and the kick of having sex with them in the imagination apparently). Another is more historical and crosses gender, class, ethnicity: Rosemarie Garland Thomson: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring disability in American literature. The truth is many people still believe in disabilities only if they are physical.

Fosca from Passion, made plain not crippled (yet this came from a website mocking the addictive love affair)

From what I’ve read thus far I think the those who say this increase in visibility has not led to a gain in empathy or understanding are right. Even when the novel does not enforce normalcy, readerships insist on misreading the fiction to emphasize a happy ending at the close — happy being equivalent to assimilation and erasure. From what I’ve seen in real life — the cutting off of funding, the cutting out of Aspergers from the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Physicians Manuel), and the increase in coercive techniques & drugs among psychologists again those who say more visibility has not helped are right. No one really has a mechanism for helping such people gain self-sustaining employment for or proposes helping older adults socially for real at all.

Misreading in terms of the readers’ own identity needs, to throw off a threat of anything unknown or new leads me to the other related topic I heard discussed at the conference and want to consider again. Next time (if there is one for me at either conference), and if I have a chance to go on panels about fandoms, fanzines, I will. The book here is Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins.

Fandoms are one aspect of different ways of life in the Net that are reactions the increasing anonymity and loss of community in US life, the impoverishment of individuals and high unemployment rate so that people come onto the Net to find community, meaning when there is nothing where they live. These groups replace religious communities too, can be a religious community, and they are real. It’s another instance where the idea that what happens on the Net is not real is false. In the 1950s Richard Hoggart wrote a book called The Uses of Literacy where he argued that TV was being used to create “imagined communities” which through propaganda and loyalty to shows inculcated in people Tory reactionary values; again people at a loss, people left out, communities devastated by global capitalism; the book was re-issued during the 1980s Thatcher years.

But it’s not true that these are imagined and unreal communities. These groups of people active and aggressive; authors ignore them at their peril. They meet outside the Net when they can and influence where they can. They will punish, ostracize, exclude the person who takes a different view and attack that. I have found it very painful to deal with such people; actually I can’t, don’t know how to. They can be group bloggers. They can be seen whirling to some extent around mini-series programs, Games of Thrones say or Downton Abbey.

How do you recognize a fandom. It’ll be a message board where anonymity is enforced, and thus no one held accountable. No personal relationships can develop easily. In the case of films or TV, the re-doing of bits of films in YouTube videos to change the original meanings of scenes to fit what the fans want and posting of these. They can be embarrassing. Fierce conversations which a given aggressive individual will not give up. I’d say worse than some of what happens on Austen-l only it’s moderated so the two or three people moderating immediately shut up whoever has said what they don’t agree with (they were particularly fierce over sex), “community” activities centered on the actors and stars of the films and a whole range of sociological or psychological phenomena having to do with inventing a fictional identity. They do meet outside the Net when they can. A pre-screening of the new Sherlock in a New York movie-house brought fans from around the country to meet in the movie-house, see their movie, eat and talk together afterward.

A deeply sexual shot: Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees about to go to bed together as Ross and Demelza Poldark (1975 Part 7)

Examples include Harry Potter, Batman, Dr Who, Star Wars, long-running TV programs. My experience has been with the Winston Graham Society webpage, really a message board dedicated to discussing two of the famous stars from the first mini-series: Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees (although she’s dead now). I had read in Graham’s autobiography this group succeeded in damning a 1996 film and making it impossible to go on; a paper I heard at ACA showed that the group influenced the second season of the films. I was told by one woman my discussion of disability, violence and sex in Graham’s fiction “deeply upset” her so how dare I? No one should write about this series what could upset her, no details allowed. I had notice how many disabled (often autistic) characters Graham has in his Poldark and mystery novels; how he studies alienation (Marni) and individual loss sympathetically and wanted to discuss this. The shattering of one of the heroines from continual marital rape; the reality the hero rapes one of the chief heroines and the son they have, neglected and over-indulged (anything but taken care of) after her death grows up disturbed and lonely enough to reach out for an orangutan as a companion. Forget it.

Facebook pages dedicated to famous stars or authors identified as conservative and classic, or with some ethnicity or doctrine. The audience for Austen’s books is leavened because it includes different types of people, academics and heritage industry and there’s a lot of money to be made on sequels and conferences and tourism so the fandom cannot invent this world of its own and control the material. Austen has prestige, her texts are not considered trivial and worthless in the way of say Star Trek and other texts around which fandoms whirl. These groups dislike any criticism of their author; they will justify or excuse or explain away the smallest unfavorable remark. Their identities have become involved, their egos, their self-image. They build whole worlds around their texts & shows.

Tellingly, for people interested to see if popular fiction that has a wide enthusiastic audience can function to increase the sympathetic imagination, the fiercest hostile responses come from any assertion that the fetishized material explores sexuality or gender in unconventional ways, has an ambiguous or sad ending, shows the hero to be less than admirable (violent for example, politically radical).

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I’ll end on the treatment of disability in Downton Abbey, the first season. Since I think I do not misread, I cannot tell what the misreading would be precisely, probably in the direction of scorn or dismissal or somehow turning the disability into what’s normal if “unwanted,” as Sir Anthony Strallon was treated in the third season, or silence, as the man with the heinously disfigured face was in the second — both given over to the program-scapegoat, Edith.

In the first part of Downton Abbey, the lamed Mr Bates is almost fired because few will accept his disability: most take it as a blemish on community, insist he will not be able to do his job, a few ridicule him, a couple (that’s enough) tell false tales; Lord Grantham almost fires him but his decency and better self seeing the cruelty and injustice of the act, keeps him on at the close of the hour.

In the third part, Mr Bates still driven by fear he’ll be fired, tormented by cruel jeering or physical gestures (as when Miss Obrien trips and humiliates him) buys an instrument of torture to make himself walk more straight. As the hour wears on we see Bates in pain, leaning over in agony, having a sour expression, indeed not be able to do his job. (In the context of the hour’s juxtaposition, the parallel is the ejection of Pamuk’s corpse from Lady Mary’s room after he half-rapes her; both are trash which ruin the body and probably spirit of the character.) Finally Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper insists on seeing what is wrong with Mr Bates, and he shows her his leg, now covered with blood and sores from the contraption on it.

As ever Fellowes is on the side of the mainstream: we next see the pair by the side of a river on the property. Mr Bates has agreed to throw the thing away. The lesson Mrs Hughes instructs Mr Bates to remember is: “I promise I will never again try to cure myself, I will spend my life happily as the butt of others’ jokes and I will never mind them.” Mrs Hughes: “We all carry scars Mr Bates, inside or out, you’re no different than the rest of us, remember that.” Mr Bates: “I will try to that I do promise.” And then he hurls it off, and she cries “good riddance.’

The part about not trying to cure oneself is good — autism month should be called autism acceptance month. The group of articles I have include two arguing the higher ends of autism include people who are in many ways more gifted than the average and would not have to consider themselves disabled if others didn’t ostracize and punish them. And Mr Bates is doing his job fine. But the second part half-blaming Mr Bates and saying it was he who considered himself different is the narrow cold-shouldering mind of the establishment speaking, demanding in effect (were he autistic) that he be neurotypical and leads to people purchasing such contraptions or having painful useful dangerous operations. Stiff upper lip. Never admit to anything.

Mr Bates and Anna (Joanna Froggart) end of Part 5: he getting into cart

As far as I could tell from reading the fan’s responses to the hour, they were sympathetic to the obtuse and mean Lady Mary; in his notes to the script Fellowes exclaimed against letters to him decrying a supposed buggery — the people couldn’t endure that Lady Mary should lose her virginity (hymen) so they jumped to the conclusion buggery had occurred and this was why the man had a heart-attack (!). (How revealing of silent suppositions this is.) And on-line people quickly tired of Mr Bates — by the second season as homely and a “sob-story” (“passive-aggressive” was a favorite phrase)and felt excruciated when (they felt) asked to identify with Anna, for they would not have fallen in love with Mr Bates as she slowly does for his intelligence, integrity, good nature, refusal to kowtow or forsake his dignity, good heart (of which we see instances).

A friend wrote:

Mrs. Hughes’s comment that ‘we all carry scars’ nags me, however. Who is the “we?” On the first glance, I’d take it to be a universal statement–the series shows that everyone, upstairs or downstairs, has their problems, but I’m not convinced it is a universal “we.” (I’m sure Fellowes meant it to be.) Is the “we” the servants? However, whether or not Mrs. Hughes “we” is universal, this leads me to think that disability plays out differently between servants and masters — Matthew’s Hemingwayesque war wound, leaving him “crippled” and impotent, is a parallel to Mr. Bates’ disability — both
are physical and both call into the question each man’s ability to do his primary “job” — in Matthew’s case of course, to “make the heir,” but one has a miraculous cure and the other not …

Yes. Who is the we? In the case of the servants, they have no buffer or support to help them if they are rejected, so they must conform and if they cannot, must not complain.

I was told again and again how my blogs on Downton Abbey took “a different view,” and at times (especially around the character of Edith whose scapegoating I exposed) attacked. Twenty years from now attitudes will have frozen and it will be hard to talk freely to those still remembering (many will no longer but move on). I never did discuss disability in Downton Abbey. I should have. So have made up for that now.

Ellen

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PCA/ACA conference: TV soap opera and serial story-telling; or, The Way We Watch TV Now

Shoverdose: @lizzieskurnick’s word for binge-watching a TV series.

Humpty Dumpty: ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word … [Lewis Carroll] For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious”. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “‘frumious’.

‘Nowadays people curate their experience of TV and cinema films’

Mr Bates (Brendon Coyle) quietly crying — fired because a disabled man (Downton Abbey, Season 1:1)

Anna Smith (Joanne Froggart) come to comfort the just fired Mr Bates — saying “Tell us how you are getting on …. ” Downton Abbey 1:1) — it is true that we remember this subliminally in the 3rd season whey she & Bates are happy in Scotland

Dear friends and readers,

Among the many unusual subjects treated seriously at the recent American Popular Culture and American Culture Association country-wide conference in DC, was that of soap opera and serial story-telling. This phenomena on TV and in film was treated in sessions on it; in British Popular Culture (which includes mini-series); in Gender Studies on TV ( made up of programs with a serial arch, e.g., Girls, West Wing); and some of the many sessions on film adaptations.

This is a blog about who and how people watch soap operas and serial dramas nowadays; how people participate as fans on the Internet: very differently since we have all these new technologies which put us in control. We curate our experience of TV. Passionate fans influence and shape what they watch if it becomes popular. I offer a new word: shoverdose (show-overdose). I summarize a few papers on specific serials, including those on the CW channel, Days of Our Lives, an older Police Procedural, Downton Abbey, and Poldark and in these you will find summarized characteristics found in soap operas and serial story-telling.

I admit I don’t have any summaries on Jane Austen mini-series — that’s because I didn’t hear any papers on Austen mini-series. I admit to shoverdosing: on the 1995 Ang Lee & Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility; Andrew Davies‘s Little Dorrit and Sense and Sensibility; the 1981 Brideshead Revisited; lots of people have shoverdosed on Davies’s 1995 P&P and Fay Weldon’s 1979 P&P, Simon Raven’s The Pallisers.

So on soap opera and serial story-telling, how we watch these nowadays and a few of them: Two sessions on specific soap operas, one on the Poldark novels versus the two mini-series and Downton Abbey and a paper from a Film session on war films. First I’ll cover how people experience soap opera or serial story-telling on TV today and then specific serial dramas.

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On Saturday, 9:45, Soap Opera II (4201) featured two papers, Marion Wren’s “Short Attention Span Theater: The Cultural Status of TV serial narratives in a Post-network era” and MJ Robinson’s “Curatorial Culture and the Future of Serialized TV.”

Wren asked, How do we watch TV? Jessica Helfand has argued that the Internet media has turned people into skimmers, people who multi-task, and skim an article while doing many other things on-line. The result is “narrative deprivation:” people have ceased to deep read.

Pessimism and anxiety lies behind such formulations. For example, Helfand does not take into account the phenomenon of binge watching (sometimes referred to as shoverdose — show overdose) which the availability of DVDs and all sorts of ways of controlling and time-shifting our watching has enabled us to do. Someone sits down and watches a whole season of whatever program he or she wants over several extended hours. This is diametrically diferent frmo the way audiences once watched serials and TV.

She suggested that advertisers have only the crudest methods and points of view on the audiences for such soap operas and serial TV and films. They regard viewers as so many eyeballs and when they can try to count them. So Downton Abbey drew 7.9 million for the 1st instalment of the 3rd season. One element in its success is its framing as “legacy,” as “heritage,” as elite and upper class. Therefore that it becomes the object of obsessive viewing is legimitized. Its upper class content and status as quality drama makes it a form of aspiration. This is what the branding did in this case. In previous sociological events of this type it was Jane Austen (the 1995 P&P), elite books and quality drama (Brideshead), historical heritage and regional cults (Upstairs, Downstairs, Cornwall for Poldark whom Graham said was first likened to GWTW).

Ms Wren then turned to examine what we know of the behavior of fandoms that surround such experiences. Henry Jenkins has written about them in Textual Poachers. Jenkins wrote that these fans are not assive; they are a participating culture; they are creative and extend the universe of the show to fit their preconceptions. They work at this, once upon a time by forming clubs, traveling to sites, writing fan letters, now by blogging, tweeting, again traveling to meet one another, by illegal downloading, by using web 2.0 media (I saw that in Poldark where fake videos misrepresenting the mini-series were made). They influenced the author and later seasons by their aggressive demands and insistent views. Both the makers and the viewers may be said to conspire together to often emphasize surprise to mystify the experience, to guard outsiders and one another from showing their what is the real motivation and need served. Viewers invent legitimizing narratives. The audience are communities to be exploited.

I was reminded of Richard Hoggart’s older book on The Uses of Literacy. He argued way back in the 1950s that TV was used politically; to persuade people they were part of imagined (= unreal) communities who espoused a group of values, values which were in this way proselytized for.

The real problem is to turn this into a business model to make as much money from it as possible. Ms Wren mentioned that AMC did not like when fans came onto twitter as faux characters; they felt this was plagiarism and maybe the fans would make money themselves. Twitter was told to pull such tweets and it did. The fans got very mad and AMC let them go back online as a form of on-line advertising because they did see the unlikelihood most fans would make any money.

Ms Wren seemed to want to suggest that binge watching, tweeting creatively about such a serial is depth viewing. But is it? What do the fans write? They write narratives and stay on the surface and miss much of the nuance of what itself is not subtle. OTOH, shoverdose is such a denigrating word and I know that immersion in a script, close study of parts of a mini-series (the juxtaposed shots) and its course texts and intertextuality yields as much depth of knowledge and understanding as any George Eliot novel.

By “Curatorial Culture” Ms MJ Robinson meant how viewers today can organize, select, arrange their own programming: “nowadays people curate their own experience of TV and cinema film.” In the past 5 years what has happened to TV watching resembles what happened in the 15 years to music listening and the last decade to journalism. TV watching used to be top down: the executives chose when you would watch, and you had to stay within the patterns of airing set forth by the channel. TV now can be consumed at any time, any where on a variety of machines. TVs come with “apps”. On YouTube viewers make their own movies. There is such a behavior as “churning:” people join briefly to watch whatever is the promotional offering and then unsubscribe.

Thus the Nielson family viewer ratings which the TV larger channels still cling to (partly they don’t want to know how few people might watch a program or who they are or even what is preferred for real) are hopelessly outdated. The “televisual has become an undifferentiated landscape.” What happens is programmers are fighting for audience shares that they do not know how to translate into direct revenue. Or they are trying to monetize the serial watching in new ways. For example, Netflix did a deal with a Norwegian company to release 8 episodes of a very popular serial, but it was set up in a way that forced the viewer to watch them sequentially.

The aim is to find out when content is used and attach an advertisement to the use. There was always a problem predicting popularity which often increases slowly. So Seinfeld had ratings in the basement in the first season and in the second, soared. The Poldark mini-series was at first ridiculed. Now the difficulty is much greater. On the Internet you find an increasing number of “apps” where to watch a program you have to click on “facebook” first (or twitter or some other social media place) and that way you are counted.

Companies keep their data to themselves. Netflix does not release its the ratings it has from its rentals publicly. There are laws against cable companies mining their data; your privacy is protected unless you are thought to be part of Al Quaeda. They’ve never been able to predict with any ease what the public will make a cult about next.

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Helen Mirren as Concerned Cop (Prime Suspect, Season 6)

Soap Opera II at 9:45 also had a paper on a channel dedicated to soap operas for teenage girls, and Soap Opera III at 11:30 (4301) papers on what made a commercial success, a specific mainstream program breaking taboos and types of programs not seen as soaps but have the same characteristics.

A brief survey of the serials discussed. Kayti Lausch discussed the CW channel and its teen serials, i.e., Gossip Girls, Vampire Diaries (any title with the word “diary” in it is aimed at girls), Secret Circle, Melrose Place, The Beautiful Life. Voice-over also identifies a show as for women. In type they are very like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The characters are often mean to one another and there is a lot of conventionalized sex. The characters are rarely at work or school, and when they are there, their interest is not in their work; there is little for the young women to do, and every week there’s some sort of party.

Melissa Ames suggested that when the content really reflects the mood and of a given era the serial is a success. The problem with this is you end up offering a tautology as an explanation, e.g., since this show demonized the rich was a success its era was one where the rich were propagandized against. She described repeating typical stories: revenge is popular, melodramatic deaths, mistaken identities, the fragility of loyal love, tawdry trials, and of course the family is central. She suggested the programs she studied shows any sense of shared sacrifice has faded, people blame victims, escapist content preferred. She had in mind programs like Dallas, the Sopranos, Games of Thrones, Mad Men and Downton Abbey.

Kimberly Smith discussed the introduction of gay characters into The Days of Our Lives. Gay characters had been seen in soap operas from 1991 on, but Days of Our Lives made Sonny Kiriakis, a character central to the series, a member of one of the primary families, and Will Horton, a son of another family fall in love. Ms Smith screened a powerful scene where Horton’s father comes in to object and is clearly intensely hostile, and another where the two lovers behave sentimentally and emotionally the way heterosexual couples are often filmed. Some of the fans protested hysterically but enough accepted to make this pair of characters a staple of the show.

Roberta Brody described a specific serial called Law and Order, which has since had a number of imitations: it did not tell the personal lives of the police; the story was tightly organized, a new case or set of characters brought in for each episode; little back story even for the central case; it’s an ensemble cast (so costs less as there is no star salary); heavily event-driven, with abrupt closings. These share elements with soap operas: melodrama (provocation, pangs, and penalties); themes include heinous rimes, victims who are victims but if they have committed a crime are punished; a conflict of duty and personal feeling; hidden babies, rejected children, rebellious teenagers at risk; poor choice of partners (husbands, wives); substance abuse, mental illness, and loneliness for central characters. She went over a typical story. Her thesis was that the soap opera elements are rarely acknowledged and part of the reason for the series’ success.

I asked if these had evolved in Police Procedural like Prime Suspect and Five Full Days where we do learn about the detectives’ lives, and have feminist themes. She insisted that these “new” kinds of Police Procedurals did not belong to “proper” Law and Order programs; had been influenced by PBS or BBD mystery series. I asked if the Law and Order programs had been aimed at men, and instead of answering this, she said that when it was discovered men watched more than women, women were added to the permanent cast.

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Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley, officer, saving one of his men, another man waiting to help (Downton Abbey 2:1)

I heard three papers on Downton Abbey. The first, by Joanna Abtahi, was one of three on depictions of WW1 in Film and History (Thursday 9:45 am, 2244). She said DA was the first season presented as frivolous escapist fare which climaxed suddenly in the Earl of Grantham declaring the nation is at war. The second season saw a dramatic transformation. This character-driven drama now presented itself as accurate. She presented the view of the great war as a useless waste of millions of life, futile, with the ordinary man seen as indispensable as simply the “conventional usual view;” and argued that DA was countering this with the idea that the war created meaningful experiences, showed that the patriarchy was concerned for the social order, with the community pulling together in the face of “great peril.” Matthew’s behavior shows he deserves his authority; The snobbish selfish Mary becomes care-worn, Sybil a nurse who runs off with Branson, Thomas hitherto a villain, an understandable man, who destroys his hand to escape death on the battlefield, and cries over a suicidal patient. She suggested that the program suggested today the UK is more trustful of its government (! — ignoring the huge strikes against the destructive Tory elite gov’t).

John Greenfield and Janice Blandford gave papers on Downton Abbey in “British Popular Culture 4 (Thurs, 1:15 pm, 2420) which startled me: they took the program at its surface value and did not critique its values; Ms Blandford seemed to think the portrait of Robert Grantham (she called him Robert) was realistic. Ms Blandford bought into Edith as vicious, Daisy as dutiful and therefore gaining an obliged new father who helps her “assert herself.” Robert feels the “way elite people then felt about their estates” (high idealism); upholding the social order right and good. Mr Greenfield claimed in the 3rd season Robert (he also did not call the character Lord Grantham) is humiliated and defeated in the 3rd season (victim of new technology and world); Mrs Hughes is strong in the way she befriends Ethel and defies Mr Carson; Edith has become a feminist; a gay plot came to the forefront (! — it has been there all along); Tom transcends his old role; it all ends on “the exhilarating [?] birth of the child.” The death of Matthew he thought must’ve prompted shouts of “swerve” “swerve” across “the nation.” He conceded the woman servants were oppressed.

The reality is Lord Grantham remains in charge throughout and only he has the power to make the police go away and not arrest Matthew. He says he values Matthew for his cricket-playing.

Mr Greenfield discussed serial story-telling in a Freudian way. He suggested its serial production allowed for twists and turns and multiple plots and death, and that Fellowes has mastered the form and uses it captivatingly. He quoted Linda Hughes and Michael Lund on the serial novel in Victorian magazines: pleasure may be discharged again and again as female sexuality is supposed enjoyed (as opposed to male which does not practice sustained arousal).

I raised my hand and said, “lets imagine Anthony Trollope seeing this series. He’d laugh raucously. Great houses are political linch-pins where wheeling and dealing and patronage goes on. As to all these abstractions, he’d see through it as unreal.” I described Trollope’s fiction which Fellowes has been influenced by but where Fellowes’ mind is fuzzy and narrowly aimed; Trollope is precise with wide and thorough knowledge of his era.

Robin Ellis as Ross Poldark returning from the rape of Elizabeth (Poldark, 1975-76, Part 15)

Julie Taddeo’s paper (in the same Thursday session on British Popular Culture) was on the treatment of women in the Poldark worlds’ she compared the way Ross’s rape of Elizabeth was treated in TV mini-series as opposed to the Poldark novels. For a summary, see continuation in comments section.

Ellen

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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

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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

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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

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Downton Abbey 3:8: The ending charity itself? or simply cricket

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past — George Orwell

The past is a competitive business — Peter Borsay

The women, Tom and Matthew (final shot of watchers)

Thomas, Lord Grantham and Dr Clark (near final shot of players)

Buvan, great-souled (Aamir Khan), at bat (nowhere near final shot)

Dear friends and readers,

But wait, you are saying, whence that third still? who can they be? the hero is not white, not even in white. Buvan! How did Aamir Khan get into the grounds? Patience, gentle reader.

I’ve no doubt we were to take the ending of Season 3 as charity itself (as in “the adieu” of Darcy). Thomas (Rob James-Collier) not excluded, not handed over to the police after all; far from sacked, he’s to be under-butler. No silly soup of emotional sentimentalism either. There’s the Duchess (Maggie Smith), holding out, determined as ever. She has gotten rid of the (gratifyingly grateful) Ethel (Amy Nuttall) who was continuing to cause all that dreadful “talk:”

Ethel and Mrs Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) standing by, outflanked

I mean what’s a friend to do? Ethel had a plan (it seems). She will tell her beloved child, Charlie, brought up by his grandparents in a great house nearby where she is to be cook (Mrs Patmore’s ex-pupil now) that she was his nanny when he was baby. What more could she want? Her life is rebuilt (we may remember the mocking laughter of the prostitutes taught to sew earlier this season). As Mrs Crawley admits, no one will know. “The slate wiped clean.” Did you not feel that you had an instance of Mrs Wood’s East Lynne before you, fully explained, nay justified?

But Thomas, now, suffering crying Thomas

has been allowed to stay.

In case you missed this part (or fell asleep by the second hour on PBS), this last part has shown us that Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) is the kind of homosexual who when they make public office cover up their own activity by ceaselessly persecuting other homosexuals. He’s after Thomas’s body fluids in another way. If Mr Carson (Jim Carter) gives Thomas the good reference (all heart is Mr Carson even though Thomas is “revolting,” lives in a “revolting world”), he, Jimmy, will go to the police. Who saved the day? Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) again (she did it for Ethel) to the rescue. It seems Mrs H knows of such men (!) and believes Jimmy led Thomas on. Mr Carson bows to her authority (ironically) and she goes to Mr Bates. She is not missing from the cricket game, although naturally not to be seen under the tent nor in all white

Naturally all discretion, behind her we get to glimpse Daisy (Sophie McSheara), Ivy (Cara Theobold) and Mrs Patmore (Leslie Nicol) as befits their rank

Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran), that insidious spying witch, has also poured effective poison into the ears of her nephew, Alfred (Matt Milne) but is defeated by a mere two words uttered in her ears by a gallant Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle) who has returned all Thomas’s treachery and mockery of him with an act of supreme generosity: “her ladyship’s soap.” (So Mrs Hughes said were the magic words.)

This also nicely rounds out Season 3 by bringing us back to Season 1 where (we are to recall) Miss Obrien caused her ladyship’s miscarriage and near death by putting a cake of soap near her bath and leaving her ladyship to slip and fall, thus keeping Matthew the unexpected heir.

The camera on the puzzled Anna Bates (Joanne Froggart) so as to spare us the shattered woman

Miss Obrien I say nowhere to be seen at last. Nor Jimmy just now.

Alfred is not let off so easily. Peculiarly slow in the brain-pan, once an idea is put into his head, it’s hard to dislodge it, so he has gone to the police about Thomas; said police turn up to take Thomas away, but Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) now to the rescue. There has been some misunderstanding he tells the police, and by a mere word and look gets Alfred to apologize and confess he was “squiffy.” For those not in the know of 1920s upper-class slang, that means drunk, and Alfred mistook some “rough-housing” between male servants. We see in the policemen’s looks they don’t believe a word of it,

but Lord Grantham’s word overrides all and the victim they nearly had their claws on is saved — at the cost of Alfred’s humiliation.

We are supposed to find it ironically amusing that part of his Lordship’s motivation is Thomas’s supreme ability at cricket. Grantham would not want to lose such a valuable player. As long as we assume all homosexuals would be treated horrifically by everyone they meet in this era (not true), these grudging good faeries (Mr Carson, Mrs Hughes, Mr Bates, his Lordship) seem noble and we have learnt our warning lesson about how hard it is in life to be a gay man.

Of course not that his Lordship really cares who wins. At the closing moments when Molesley (Bernard Gallagher) has (no surprise there) flubbed it, he not being any more manly than Sir Anthony Strallon (Robert Bathurst) was — I mean just imagine Strallon trying to play cricket –, Lord Grantham, I say, shows he does not care who won after all. The thing is to play the game. And why? it’s an assertion of a vision, that of the sporting British empire, all-inclusive, all powerful, endlessly pastoral green, unproblematically hierarchical enacted before us.

Which brings me to Buvan — look up, gentle reader — that dark-skinned man in black playing cricket too. The scene comes from an intensely anti-imperialist, anti-British powerful Indian Hindi movie, Lagaan, which also ends in a cricket game. Only there it mattered who won, and it mattered big. The situation:

It hasn’t rained for two years in Champaner, a village in sweltering central India, but Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne, who is a Billy Zane doppelgänger), the commander of the local British regiment, isn’t about to give the parched villagers a break. He makes a bet with Bhuvan (Aamir Khan), the most spirited of the villagers (and of course, the handsomest), but only because he believes it’s a sure thing: If the villagers can beat the British regiment in a cricket match, he’ll cancel the land tax for two years; if the British win, the villagers will have to pay three times the normal, unreasonable amount.

Jim, my husband, focused on how at Downton who won does not ultimately matter at all, what matters is the assertion of the abbey, the team spirits carrying on. And this final part lets us know it will, at least for a little while. I remember reading Tariq Ali’s sense of intense irony in recounting how this movie which shows the Indians beating cruel injust British is all about a cricket game. Simon Raven has a cricket game at the close of his adaptation of Trollope’s Pallisers, and some people who don’t remember the books very well think there is one there. Not so. Trollope was not an imperialist; anyway his sport was hunting.

Important political lessons learned too: like his mother, Isobel Crawley (above) Matthew (Dan Stevens) has compromised, held his tongue, played along; his reward is our princess bride, Mary (Michelle Dockery), and his Lordship’s acquiescence in all his schemes for turning the estate into a business, with the tenants having to pay much more and, with the help of the new steward, Tom Bransom (Allen Leech, who of course turns out to be good at cricket) make much more money for higher rents. You win by giving in to these powerful people. We see where again Mary is in charge in their bedroom trysts when she puts off love-making; he acquiesces and turns out she has been to the physician, had an operation (not a problem) and in this final scene speaks of their “little prince” on the way.

Here she’s all hat

If we were seared for Edith (Laura Carmichael) over her humiliated wedding dream, now we need not worry. Hers is indeed a Jane Eyre story, but it’s one robbed of all rebellion, all radical feeling & thought. She has kissed the whip several times by now in her piety before her father and grandmother (who responded we recall to Edith’s mild complaint with “don’t whine”) and gotten a job as a journalist. Congratulated by the editor, Charles Edwards (Michael Gregson) for not writing just about women (whew! she’s not going to be one of these militant feminists, a one note Sally), she was nonetheless put off by his seeming to flirt with her. Horrors. She checks him out and discovers he’s married. A true daughter of this house, she’s learnt her lesson not to want a man beyond all, and she does not hesitate to say she quits, only to be told he has a mad wife in an asylum and simply in such dire need of hope, a good woman’s affection, that she apparently agrees to stay.

Edith has ever been a sympathetic listener

(Come back next year, gentle reader)

In all this Edith shows her distance from a character newly introduced, the foolish great-niece, Lady Rose McClare (Lily James), with sly salacious smile (joyfully compliant anyone?, a kind of Barbie doll made real) who just lends herself out to be seduced by a man lying about his wife and is rescued by a trio of Matthew, Edith, and Lady Rosamund Painswick (the aunt, Samantha Bond). The scene reminded me of the trio at the close of Don Giovanni who rescue the silly Zerlina. Perhaps this sweeping dismissal of teenage girls in the invention of this character provided the worst because so priggish moment in the hour.

There is at least something redeeming about all but Miss Obrien forgiving Mr Barrow, even if the terms upon which it’s done bring us to “don’t ask, don’t tell” of your great shame. Ethel does not end up in the streets, with her new skill (pace the Dowager’s sneer) she may hold out until the whirligig of time is in her favor. The woman who should have been her mother-in-law, Mrs Byrant (Christine Mackie) is another of these compromiser’s with viciousness: Ethel should leave the scornful Mr Byrant, the boy’s grandfather to his wife. The depiction of Lady Rose has no such compensations. The character as conceived reminded me of Sheridan’s conservative depiction of young women as Lydia Languishes, eager to jump out windows. So much for rebellion. The dowager tells Lady Rose she will be kept on a tight leash (like a puppy?) until she’s of age. For her own good of course.

Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) back to loyal sweet do-nothing: thus she enacts a woman satisfied with a rich woman’s life

Tom Bransom is now prepared to live at Downton (as Matthew has learned to) and allow his daughter to be brought up there. His reward is no longer to be an exile. He is taken into the great home place and this not-exact parallel to the end of another rebellion (Sybil’s marriage) fits the Lady Rose story. In the end you will be assimilated.

If not visible, Miss Obrien is protected by her ladyship and Mrs Hughes’s silence: one night before the cricket game Cora must hurry off to “Obrien’s” care (it’s evening) lest she be “scolded.”

How inclusive it all is! Anyone left out that you can think of, gentle reader?

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

Despite Miss Obrien’s telling Ivy to “stay out of it,” Ivy carries on disapproving of Jimmy’s intransigence, forcing him to leave the table

So, in this mini-series and hour we see charity enacted — within the limits of stereotypes controlled by conventions which insist on a heterosexual nuclear family as the way of life that is safe.

This final part of season three ends in the big ritual scene Part 1 did. The whole self-preserving system is enacted before us: the community is self-perpetuating; who a character is, is as much a function of his or her place in this paradigmatic system as what he or she does over the course of the sequence. There is an appetite for real community that Downton Abbey feeds, and for those who can respond to what there is in it of kindness (a good deal) and mutual support, watch it as it were against the grain, aware of the ambivalence in the portraits of the hard authority figures.

Those who are fans for such series ignore the reality that the fakery and bogus nature of much that is represented in shows like Downton Abbey is not one that is widely popular; many turn away to commercial channels, to “pop” programs because upon looking at the dress, accents, house, they know they do not belong to this myth. Football instead of cricket; macho-male violent action-adeventure films would be the opposite pole. There are some fine programs on these channels (HBO) and the mini-series and police procedurals, screwball comedies can offer other kinds of ambivalent lessons. But it is rare to find alternative visions of meaningful complex real identities. Probably they are found most often in local theater art, localism.

Right now as individuals the politics of space and place as presented to us in our media seems controlled by corporations backed by military machines. Unemployment remains high, salaries low, much harshly and competitively enacted. That’s why the prospect outside the Abbey seems so bleak. It’s what’s experienced outside it in the 21st century streets & buildings that makes it so alluring.

Ellen

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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

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Downton Abbey: a note on Grantham & Grantchester

Ford Madox Brown (1821-95), Hampstead from my Window (1857)

Dear friends and readers,

A brief note for Americans like myself who are not aware of the birthdays or birthplaces of British politicians who have become symbolic figures after they exercised power in an ostentatiously as well as felt way politically.

I did not know that Grantham was the name of the place Margaret Thatcher came from (as it’s put). Her father was “a local worthy” who ran a small business. That it’s a compliment to Mrs Thatcher and at the same time an allusion meant explicitly to alert us to the political allegiance of its author.

Jim not only said, oh yes, but immediately went on to suggest that the mood and atmosphere of the mini-series as described to him (he does not watch TV) brought to mind some lines from Rupert Brooke‘s 1912 poem “The Old Vicarage, Granchester,” which ends with these lines:

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies and truth and pain? …. oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

The whole poem is online.

If the whole poem were like that, it’d indeed capture a central motif of Fellowes’s Downton Abbey, only Brooke’s poem is a kind of pastoral as satire on male muscular Christianity with some misogynistic lines thrown in here and there (“And Ditton girls are mean and dirty”) with scorn for lower class people so egregious (“folks in Shelford and those parts/Have twisted lips and twisted hearts”), that I’m tempted to say it’s ironic with the poet keeping his distance from his narrator, but I think the escape into a deep meadow and landscape world before industrialization, pre-Capitalist is at times serious, and then again mocking: “And when they get to feeling old,/They up and and shoot themselves I’m told) …

John Betjeman, Brooke is not (to be explained on my Sylvia blog this Sunday).

I don’t know if I’ve emphasized how surprising it is that there is so little filmic intertextuality in Downton Abbey. It does not imitate, borrow, allude to other mini-series; this is unusual nowadays as well as it’s rare use of montage and almost complete lack of flashbacks, voice-overs, filmic epistolarity (letters ready by characters using voice-over). What intertextuality there is (confirmed in the second volume on the series, The Chronicles of DA) is textual: Bates’s story was suggested to Fellowes by a news article and an Agatha Christie story.

So I suggest he may also have remembered or had in Brooke’s Grantchester in mind when he chose the name Grantham. I’ve chosen a couple of mid-Victorian idealizing watercolors for this blog whose typology is behind what we see of landscape (not a lot, again surprisingly for a mini-series of this type) in DA.

Perhaps the reader will recall the shot of Lady Sybil plotting Gwen Dawson, the maid who escaped to an office job in the first season, where they are in an old-fashioned wagon riding together and pass under a half-ruined arch in a vast green landscape:

Alfred Wm Hunt (1830-96), Finchale Priory (exhibited 1862)

Ellen

P.S. I’m not really surprised by the lack of filmic intertextuality, filmic sophistication and/or dream landscapes. These are part of the ways in which Fellowes has carefully kept this mini-series broad and popular in its approach & therefore appeal.

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