Tag: Christianity

Episode 291: Doctor Hoffman has fooled us all

Up to this point, Dark Shadows has been scrupulous about avoiding references to Christianity. Of course, that was necessary- you can more or less casually drop in an image from ancient Greek mythology, for example, because not many people put a lot of energy into wondering whether they ought to be worshiping Zeus. But Christianity is very much a live option nowadays, with the result that even a subtle allusion to it tends to take over the audience’s reaction to whatever story you’re telling and turn their reception of it into a theological debate.

It can be particularly hard to steer clear of Christian ideas when you draw elements from stories that were first told in cultures where Christianity was so heavily dominant that people simply took its major concepts for granted and used them without thinking. To take an obvious example, vampires are an inversion of Jesus. Where Jesus is the ultimate example of self-sacrifice, the vampire is a metaphor for selfishness. Where Jesus’ resurrection represents his final victory over death, the vampire’s resurrection leaves him under the power of death every dawn. Where Jesus invites us to drink his blood and eat his flesh and thereby join him in eternal life, the vampire drinks our blood and annihilates our flesh in order to subject us to his indefinitely prolonged dying. Where Jesus commands his followers to spread truth wherever they go, the vampire’s existence depends on lies and secrecy. It’s no wonder that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is all about people using crucifixes and communion wafers to contain and destroy the sinister Count.

The scene that closed Friday’s episode and that is reprised in today’s opening is, I think, the first to include a recognizable allusion to the Christian story. In the Gospels, the first human being to learn that Jesus has been resurrected is Mary Magdalene. She learns this when Jesus interrupts her attempt to mourn his death and calls her by name, and that act of naming creates a new kind of relationship between them and a new place for her in the history of the cosmos. In Dark Shadows, the first person to find out that Barnabas Collins is a vampire otherwise than by becoming his victim is Dr Julia Hoffman. Barnabas learns that Julia has caught on to him when she interrupts his attempt to kill her and calls him by name, and that act of naming creates a new kind of relationship between them and a new place for her in the narrative arc of Dark Shadows.

Furthermore, Jesus had, before his death and resurrection, freed Mary of seven demons who possessed her. The memory of that past liberation was the original basis of her devotion to him. In this scene, Julia, as the anti-Mary Magdalene, promises that she will free Barnabas of the force that has made him a vampire. Hope for that future liberation is what stops Barnabas from murdering Julia, and will become the basis of their initial collaboration. Julia’s promise is not based in any claim of divine power, but in a lot of pseudo-scientific gibberish derived from the 1945 film The House of Dracula, in which a mad scientist tries to cure Dracula of vampirism by an experimental treatment that involves the participation of several other characters from Universal Studios’ existing intellectual property. The echo of the Mary Magdalene story also evokes the “meddling in God’s realm” theme of that and the other monster movies Universal made in the 1930s and 1940s.

Julia is not the first scientist on Dark Shadows to offer to help an undead menace to rejoin the world of the living. That was Dr Peter Guthrie, parapsychologist, who in #184 told blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins that if she would stop trying to incinerate her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, he would help her. Laura laughed at Guthrie’s offer, and when he said that his research into conditions like hers “has been my life,” she remarked that she found his choice of words strangely apt.

As a humanoid Phoenix, periodically burning herself and her sons to death and then reappearing in a living form, Laura was not part of any mythology as familiar and well-articulated as are the vampire stories from Bram Stoker, Universal Studios, or Hammer Films. The only really well-known thing about Phoenixes, beyond their rebirth from ashes, is their elusiveness. That the Fire Bird can be seen alive or not at all is a recurring theme of medieval and early modern literature based on Celtic and Germanic folklore, and a reason why the Phoenix is so often associated with the mysterious realms that figure in the legends of the Holy Grail. It is essential to Laura that we cannot understand what she is thinking, or even be sure if she has an inner mental life at all. Not only can Laura not give up her plan to burn David alive and retain a sense of menace. If we so much as catch her thinking about Guthrie’s offer, she will cease to be any kind of monster. So it is no surprise that she responds to Guthrie by killing him the moment opportunity presents itself.

Vampires, by contrast, combine decades of prominence in popular culture with a deep resonance for those who identify with their individual compulsions and social isolation. That gives storytellers a whole warehouse of resources to use when shaping a vampire into an image in which the audience can recognize themselves. So when Julia tells Barnabas that she has spent her whole life looking for someone like him to use as an experimental subject, he doesn’t have to make a snappy remark like that Laura made to Guthrie. He takes it in, and spends the rest of the episode weighing whether to cooperate with Julia or kill her.

Barnabas takes Julia back to his house. While she is in the basement picking out a room to use as a laboratory, Barnabas tells his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie that he has decided to kill her after all. Willie protests, and Barnabas goes back and forth on the question. When Julia comes back upstairs, Barnabas sends Willie away.

As Barnabas moves in to kill Julia, she tells him that her survival guarantees his. She explains that this is because his former victim, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is not dead as everyone has been told, but alive and well-hidden. Maggie is suffering from amnesia covering her time with Barnabas. Julia is Maggie’s psychiatrist, and if Barnabas cooperates with her experiment she will see to it that Maggie does not recover her memory.

Julia betrays Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

From our first glimpse of Julia in #265, she has been a mysterious, forbidding figure, harsh with Maggie and indifferent to the usual norms of medical ethics. But she is, after all, a doctor, and so we’ve been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Now that we’ve heard her tell the vampire that she will abet his crimes by using her professional skills to ensure that Maggie’s psychological injury will not heal, we realize that she is not a maverick, but a mad scientist.

Again, the echo of the story of Mary Magdalene in the opening adds to the shock of Julia’s willingness to betray Maggie at the end. Mary was Jesus’ most faithful disciple, accompanying him to the cross when the men he had called were all busy denying him and looking for places to hide. It is also traditional among Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Roman Catholics to name her in prayers for healing, because of old stories that she had healed people of blindness, mobility impairments, and leprosy, among other conditions. So Mary Magdalene is the most trustworthy of healers, and it is startlingly appropriate that Julia, as her exact opposite, is the least.

My usual themes: Supernaturalism

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times I made remarks about the concept of the supernatural that Dark Shadows develops with all its ghosts, witches, and other weird beings.

In this remark about Danny’s post on episode 659, I respond to a discussion in the comment thread in which several people dismissed the idea that it was the ghost of Sarah Collins who sent Vicki back in time in episode 364, precipitating the show’s first time travel storyline:

It makes sense to me that Sarah sent Vicki back. The whole thing with the supernatural is that what seems weakest is actually strongest. The dead are stronger than the living, children stronger than adults, etc. So it fits the conceit that a long-dead and not especially bright little girl is the greatest power. It fits the dramatic development as well- throughout her time as a ghost Sarah steadily reveals more and more powers, and by the time of the seance we’re wondering what she will show us next. Moreover, her whole approach throughout 1967 is an attempt to curb Barnabas’ murderousness and to shield him from accountability at the same time. Vicki’s return from 1795 storyline precipitates events that achieve precisely that goal, and it is the goal to which Julia (Sarah’s successor as a sister to Barnabas) devotes herself for the rest of Barnabas’ time on the show.

I enlarged on my thoughts about Sarah’s ghost in a response to a post about an episode in which she actually appears, number 294:

“I don’t really think the writers are sure who Sarah is, or what she wants.” I don’t think that either we or she are supposed to know what Sarah wants. Up to this point she’s been very mysterious- for the first few episodes it was unclear what she remembered from one appearance to the next. And of course she several times expresses puzzlement that she can’t find her parents in the Old House, and she doesn’t know why David and the others think her clothes are old-fashioned. So they leave open the possibility that she was just a projection from the past with no intentions and no ability to learn in the present.

By now it’s clear that she is a character interacting with other characters, but still unsettled as to whether she knows she’s a ghost, or what happened to any of the people from her corporeal days, or what century it is. It still could be that her presence is just a side-effect of Barnabas’ revival, that she represents some kind of energy that was released into the world when he came out of the box. In the Phoenix storyline, they played with that same kind of ambiguity- Laura’s presence in the house coincided with other disturbances, over which she had no control and of which she was not aware.

Later it will become clearer that Sarah knows a fair bit, but right up to the moment Vicki vanishes from the seance she is trying to figure out a way to curb Barnabas’ murderousness without betraying him. Indeed, the speech Sarah gives speaking through Vicki at that seance is the climax of that whole development- Sarah is deep in her own thoughts, trying to solve an impossible problem, and taking a gamble on something amazing of which the most she can say is that “maybe” it will work out.

In a comment on episode 639, I said a bit more about the idea that Sarah herself is supposed to seem uncertain about her nature, her powers, and her goals, finding actress Sharon Smyth the perfect choice to play such a character:

When she first starts showing up, Sarah is a total mystery to us- it’s pretty clear she’s a ghost, but do ghosts form memories? That is, can she remember during one appearance what happened in her previous appearances, or does she know only what she learned in life? Does she have plans and intentions, or are her appearances simply the result of invisible forces? … young Sharon Smyth’s confused demeanor (nowadays she sums her performance up in “one word- clueless”) plays right into all those questions.

In a comment responding to the post about 730, I commented on how the original Phoenix storyline of episodes 126-192 (what I call the “Meet Laura” period of the show) set the stage for the supernatural tales that would come to dominate the show after the vampire shows up in episode 211:

Laura is the first paranormal being who sets a story in motion. Ghosts had been in the background from the beginning and had played important roles in ending Vicki’s first two imprisonments, but they hadn’t started any plotlines. The Phoenix story is bounded by the supernatural on all sides. At the end of it, virtually all the characters concede that they have just seen something that cannot be explained and tacitly agree never to speak of it again.

One of my less well-formed comments was a rambling half-essay about ways that particular kinds of Christians might be expected to respond to particular supernatural stories that I contributed to the thread responding to episode 1017. It was one of those internet moments where you click “Post” because it’s the only way you can imagine yourself letting go of something you’ve already wasted too much time on. Unsatisfactory as that comment wound up being, I can defend my motivation for writing it. Several contributors had made blanket assertions about what Christianity teaches concerning various matters, and someone really ought to have objected that different groups of Christians teach different things.

My usual themes: Denial and the demonic

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. I frequently refer to denial, the psychological defense mechanism, as a story point on Dark Shadows, and more than once I connect it with the show’s supernatural themes.

From the very beginning, the show focuses on the Collinses as a family addicted to denial. Elizabeth hasn’t left her house for 19 years because she’s guarding a secret; she’s summoned Vicki to live with the family for reasons she conceals so deeply that we never find out what they are; she almost loses the house, the business, and everything else as she gives in to the demands Jason McGuire makes in return for his silence. For his part, Roger is terrified that Burke will reveal the secret they share, and goes to extreme lengths to keep that secret hidden; he openly hates his son, but can tell no one why; his estranged wife is a profoundly mysterious figure, whose own secret is so powerful as to imply that the consensus view of reality prevailing in the community where the show is set is an elaborate lie. David sees ghosts; eventually the audience also sees them, and we know that some of the adult characters can see them, too. Yet all of the adult characters hotly deny that the ghosts exist until Vicki breaks the embargo after she sees the ghost of Bill Malloy in episode 126. Not until Carolyn tells David about her childhood friend Randy in episode 344 will another adult even allow David to suspect that she thinks ghosts might be real.

Here’s a concise statement about denial as a theme in the show, from a comment I made on one of Danny’s posts about the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” segment:

Of course it doesn’t make much difference that Gerard possesses Liz. Liz’ whole thing, from episode 1 on, is that she refuses to acknowledge painful realities. That’s what Gerard wants her to do, so all she needs is a little nudge to go back to her usual state. Even though she isn’t on the show much, I think of Liz as the main character in the sense she embodies denial, and the show is very largely an exploration of what can happen when people are deep enough in denial.

And here’s a somewhat more developed remark, this time from a post about the first “Haunting of Collinwood”:

Roger’s angry dismissal of Barnabas and Julia’s concerns this time, combined with Liz’s triumphant reaction to the sight of Mr Jughans at the end of last Monday’s episode, actually do make sense both of Barnabas and Julia’s refusal to tell her what they’re up to and of Liz’s own acquiescence in their absurd behavior. The Collinses may reside in the state of Maine, but the state in which they hold their true citizenship and to which they give their sole allegiance is the state of denial. If Barnabas and Julia tell Liz what’s going on, she will have to build some structure of lies to conceal it from herself and from everyone else, regardless of the cost. If they simply act like lunatics and impose on her with nonsensical demands, however, she can set about convincing herself that it is somehow all right to have Barnabas and Julia around her house.

Here’s a response to another post about the original haunting of Collinwood, this time dissenting from the view of several others in the thread that the writers had simply lost track of which characters knew what and ended up presenting Liz and Roger as memory-free, “goldfish” characters:

I don’t think Roger and Liz are goldfish in the way that so many characters were in earlier episodes. They’re people in deep denial about the nature of the world in which they find themselves. That’s what makes their scenes powerful in the two or three weeks leading up to this installment. They refuse to believe in ghosts, and so they think they are protecting the children from Maggie, Mrs Johnson, Julia, and Barnabas when those characters talk about what’s going on. In fact, they are enabling Quentin’s abuse of the children. When Liz and Roger break down and face facts, they relieve us from involvement in that terrible situation. They also stun us, especially if we’ve been watching from Episode 1, because we’ve seen the immense price each of them has paid to avoid dealing with unhappy realities.

Both the original haunting of Collinwood by the ghost of Quentin and its re-haunting by the ghost of mini-Quentin Gerard mainly take the form of child abuse. The Collinses respond to that child abuse with a solid wall of denial:

Of course, it is abuse to coerce children into harming their loved ones, so it isn’t just allegorical. It’s realistic to show this form of child abuse working in the same ways as do other forms.

The Collinses are such a wretched bunch that the children of the family must have been the objects of a great deal of abuse over the centuries, yet the show wimps out of exploring that topic at the climax of the Phoenix story, when Roger and Carolyn stop openly proclaiming their hatred for David. For the next 500 or so episodes, the only abuse inflicted on the few Collins children we see is the occasional attempt to murder one of them. In this fictional universe, being the target of a murder plot is a so routine an experience for so wide a variety of people that it seem odd to describe it specifically as “child abuse.”

We don’t really have to think about Collins children being abused until the Haunting of Collinwood story. Then we go to 1897, when the show finally takes child abuse seriously and connects it to the Collinses’ addiction to secrecy and their desperate unhappiness.

In a thread about the 1897 storyline, I go into some depth connecting the show’s theme of denial with its depiction of dark supernatural forces. I compare those depictions with understandings of the supernatural found in some familiar traditions and end with fanfic:

I think of the climax of the Iliad. As Achilles moves in to kill Hector, Athena takes hold of his spear and drives it in, delivering the fatal wound herself.

For modern readers, this may ruin the story. The whole poem has been leading up to this moment; we’ve spent a lot of time with Achilles, listening to him try to figure out what it would mean for him to kill Hector. So why have the goddess take over at the last minute? Isn’t it an evasion of Achilles’ responsibility for his actions, and a cheat for us as we’ve been observing his psychological development?

For the original audience, it was not. They actually believed in their gods. Athena really existed, as far as they were concerned. When an event was important enough, they took a interest. If it was really huge, they would get involved. Moreover, the gods worked closely with each other. So much so that you didn’t pray to one at a time, but always to groups of them. When Athena joins Achilles in his fight, it isn’t her pushing him aside- it’s him doing something so important it blurs the boundary between human and divine.

Something like that is at work in the traditional, pre-modern, conception of demonic possession. To say that a person is possessed is a way of looking at behavior that is reducible neither to moralistic judgment nor to psychological analysis. It isn’t individualistic in the way that those modes of discourse are. Rather, it suggests that the boundaries between the person and the spiritual forces of darkness have broken down. Perhaps the person is partly to blame for that breakdown, but the whole point is that s/he is no longer a distinct being, but is merging into those supernatural forces.

So, imagine a version of Dark Shadows where Elizabeth Collins Stoddard really was the main character. Her whole approach to life is denial. So, you could have had a story with a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, we see the lengths she has gone to in her quest to keep from ever having to have an embarrassing conversation. In the middle, we see various horrors take place around her, each worse than the one before, each more obvious than the one before, and each time she finds a way to convince herself it doesn’t exist. At the end, a couple of innocent characters go to her in the drawing room of Collinwood to rescue her from the monsters who are running rampant there. She looks at them placidly and tells them she sees nothing wrong. Why ever do they think she would want to leave her home? All the while leathery-winged demons are fluttering about her head. She doesn’t see them, and they have no choice but to flee.

Made as it was to be shown on the ABC television network from 1966-1971, it is unsurprising that Dark Shadows is, off and on, vaguely Christian in its worldview. At one point they even imply that the Collinses are affiliated with a specific Christian denomination, The Episcopal Church. Of course, the view of the world they present is not exactly orthodox, but the idea of an individual human personality as something that can gradually become less distinct from various spiritual forces is a familiar one, not only to Christians, but to others who are invested in the idea of a supernatural realm.