In these early months of Dark Shadows, we hear that all the money made in the town of Collinsport finds its way to the old dark house on the top of the hill, where it does nobody any good.
The house itself is full of examples of wealth going to waste. Each of the last few episodes have involved long treks through abandoned corridors and visits to forgotten rooms. Everywhere you turn in these dank spaces, years of accumulated dust bury vases, paintings, antique furniture, oriental rugs, and other apparently valuable objects.
The Collins family is headed by a woman who hasn’t left the house in eighteen years. Reclusive matriarch Liz shares her home with her brother Roger, a spectacularly irresponsible man who squandered his entire inheritance and now holds a position in the family business which seems to involve little or no work. It is difficult to imagine that they run a dynamic enterprise that is taking advantage of the economic boom of the 1960s.
At the same time, Liz seems to have a vigilant concern for the security of her employees. Her only household servant, gruff caretaker Matthew, often brings up the fact that she gave him a cottage on the grounds of the great estate and assured him he would have it for the rest of his life. When plant manager Bill Malloy comes to the house to ask Liz to approve the acquisition of some new machinery for the cannery, her first question is how many men will lose their jobs as a result of it. Only when he assures her that the answer is zero does she agree to the purchase. So we might imagine that the attitude of local wage-earners towards the Collinses will be two-fold- on the one hand, gratitude that they go out of their way to ensure that the people working for them keep what they have, but on the other frustration with their failure to create opportunities for them to move ahead at a time when working people everywhere else in the USA were experiencing the fastest rise in real incomes in the nation’s history.
The relationship between hardworking young fisherman Joe and flighty heiress Carolyn occasionally seems like it will dramatize this situation. Joe is a local boy, and like everyone else in town, he works for the Collinses. Liz has taken a liking to him, and wants him to marry her daughter and have a career as an executive with the firm. He would be glad to marry Carolyn, but is not interested in that career- he wants to buy his own fishing boat and build his own business around it. Liz keeps trying to pull him deeper into her family’s firm, but he keeps insisting on his plan to go his own way. Joe mentions a friend with whom he wants to go into partnership. We never see this friend or anyone else who is working with Joe, and Carolyn doesn’t show the slightest interest in Joe’s plans. Since he doesn’t have anyone to talk to about his ideas, beyond a couple of scenes when he shakes his head at Liz and says “I’m sorry, Mrs Stoddard, but my mind’s made up,” the story of his attempt to diversify Collinsport’s economy doesn’t go anywhere. Earlier this week, the Joe/ Carolyn relationship met its long-awaited demise.
Joe has moved on to a relationship with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The daughter of drunken artist Sam Evans, Maggie runs the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. She and Joe are representatives of Collinsport’s working class. During their first date, Maggie demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of sail-rigging, which may not be the most useful thing for a commercial fisherman in the age of diesel, but her interest in the sea raises our hopes that she might be a partner to Joe in his ambitions. Together, they might show us what it has meant for the town that the Collinses control so much wealth and do so little with it.
In a comment on Danny Horn’s blog Dark Shadows Every Day, I mentioned another way the show could have done more with this theme. I imagined that they might have expanded the part played by the only African American actor to deliver lines on Dark Shadows, Beverly Hope Atkinson.
The opportunities they missed came into view in episode 563, when Beverly Hope Atkinson appears as the unnamed nurse who keeps Nicholas Blair out of Joe’s hospital room but lets Maggie in. Unnamed Nurse lights up when she sees Maggie and greets her by name; they seem to be old friends.
In the first 42 weeks of the show, when the supernatural was in the background and the stories were slow, it would have been easy to have a couple of tea party scenes at the Evans cottage where Maggie and her lifelong friend, Unnamed Nurse, recap whatever is going on. Those scenes could have led to a whole exploration of the tension between the working-class people in the village and the jerks in the big house on the hill. That in turn could have led to the introduction of Unnamed Nurse’s family, headed by Unnamed’s parents, Mr and Mrs Nurse, including her brothers, Young Mr Nurse and Master Nurse, and her sister, Miss Nurse. We could then have seen the ancestors of the Nurse family in each of the flashback segments and analogues of them in Parallel Time.
I try to keep my contributions to Dark Shadows fanfic modest, so I didn’t try to think up a new name for Unnamed Nurse. My point is that the makers of the show did not need any more sets or many more characters to create a much more spacious world in the imaginations of the audience. The Evans cottage by itself, as an instance of a working-class home in Collinsport, is almost enough to make us think of a whole town of people teeming with ambitions, resentments, plans, and frustrations. Just a few small scenes there shedding light on some underused themes could have got us the rest of the way.
Another character who brings the Collinses’ deficiencies as commercial leaders of Collinsport into view is dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Himself born into Collinsport’s poorest class, Burke has gone away and somehow made himself very rich. The whole time he was in Collinsport he was penniless. He left town when he was sent to prison. Only five years after his release from prison, he is a millionaire many times over, in a position to buy up the Collinses’ debts and claim all of their assets. The show has dwelt on this timeline often enough that they have started making awkward attempts to explain how he got so rich so quickly. But it seems that we are supposed to feel that it was simply getting clear of Collinsport that opened the doors to wealth for him. He went to South America, he went to New York, he went to an oil field, he went someplace, but all that really matters is that he went far from the stifling influence of the Collinses and their gloomy house.
Now, Burke is moving to destroy the Collinses and supplant them at the head of local industry. Today, he and his lawyer meet with some of the key men from the Collins cannery and fishing fleet. He wants to recruit them to work for a competing firm he is buying. When the lawyer tells him the men may be too loyal to Liz to take his offer, Burke recites a list of the tired cliches that wealthy villains spout when boasting to their henchmen of the power their money gives them: “Money talks. Money buys loyalty. Everyone has their price. Name it and you can buy them. Some just come a little higher than others, that’s all, but everyone is for sale.” Too bad Cabaret didn’t get to Broadway until three weeks after this episode was broadcast, or he might have closed with a few bars of “Money Makes the World Go Around.”
The men are offended when Burke says he wants them to leave the Collinses and come to work for him. They pride themselves on their loyalty to the Collinses. If they feel that way, it’s a mystery why they agreed to come to a meeting with Burke in the first place- everyone in town knows about his vendetta against the Collinses. They start to leave, but stay long enough to hear Burke offer them higher wages than the Collinses can pay, and a profit-sharing plan.
The most senior of the men present, Amos Fitch, stops by the house to tell Liz and Roger about the meeting. Apparently the other men are more rational economic actors than Amos, and they are considering Burke’s offer.
After the meeting has broken up, Burke spends a few more minutes expounding to his lawyer on his theme that anyone will do anything if you dangle enough money in front of them. He interrupts himself before he can literally say that all people are whores and gives the lawyer a check, telling him that it’s always good to have some extra loyalty around. Apparently he decided that leaving a two-dollar bill on the night-stand might be too subtle. The lawyer reacts with distaste to Burke’s crassness, but takes the check.
Burke’s first attempt to buy someone’s loyalty took place all the way back in episode 3. He met Joe in the local tavern and offered him enough money to buy a fishing boat in return for information on the Collinses. When Joe refused, Burke told him that he himself got his start when a strange man approached him in a sleazy bar and offered him a lot of money to do something he wasn’t very specific about. He accepted, and that led him directly to great riches. That’s wonderful career advice, “A guy in a bar flashes some dough, you don’t ask no questions, honey, just leave with him.” Sounds like a guaranteed path to success. Anyway, it’s obvious in that one that Burke is trying to lure Joe into something dishonorable. We already care about Joe, so if he were to be tempted we would be in suspense until he proved his uprightness.
Contrast Burke’s attempt to buy Joe’s services back then with today’s attempt to hire this group. We’ve never seen or even heard of any of the men whom Burke is trying to lure. So if the conflict over control of the sardine-packing business is a test of their moral rectitude, it’s none of our concern. On the other hand, if it were a choice between a prosperous future for the town that does not include the Collins family or a stagnant future that does, there might be real suspense.
The Collinses are our point of view characters and the story cannot continue if they are thoroughly defeated, so if we enjoy watching the show we will root for them no matter how strong a case their antagonist may make for his position. On the other hand, we do care about Maggie and Joe, and are ready to care about characters who are friends of theirs. Therefore, if we see that a plan will be good for the working people in town, it won’t be easy for us to hope Liz and Roger will foil it. If the show can put us in that situation, we will feel suspense as we watch the events of the story and look for a way to resolve the tension that our mixed feelings have created. That’s how every thriller works- we may want the good guy to beat the bad guy eventually, but not until we’re done enjoying the contest between them.
Think again about Burke’s temptation of Joe in episode 3. Joe earns a few points with the audience by rejecting Burke’s offer out of hand. If he’d considered it, we would have paid attention to him until he made his decision, but only to him- a temptation story works only if the person or people being tempted find themselves isolated from everyone else. If he ultimately rejected the offer, the story ends and leads nowhere. If he’d accepted it, we would be disappointed in him and lose interest in his subsequent doings. He wouldn’t become interesting again until he either went through a redemption story, which would again tend to isolate him from the rest of the cast, or became a villain, which isn’t what they want the character for right now. But if, instead of a moral test, he had been presented with a plausible business decision, we could have had a story that would have given us a virtual tour of Collinsport and given us a feeling that we know the place, even if we didn’t actually see any new sets.
So that’s why I wish Dark Shadows had done more with the relationship between the Collinses and the rest of Collinsport. Not that I suppose the writers had deep political and sociological insights that I long to have heard, but that putting your characters in a bigger world allows you to tell bigger stories.
Dark Shadows Commentary 