Tag: daphne du maurier

Episode 432: Cousin Abigail’s religion

In the deserted Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, repressed spinster Abigail Collins has stumbled upon the coffin in which her nephew Barnabas spends his days. She arrives just as he is rising for the evening. Abigail knows that Barnabas is dead, but she has never heard of vampires, so she has no idea what to make of what she sees.

Barnabas taunts Abigail. When she cries that the Devil is trying to touch her, he cynically asks why she thinks that the Devil always wants to touch her. The broadcast date is 1968, when Freudianism was riding high in the circles frequented by the sort of people who wrote and produced Dark Shadows. The dramatic date is 1796, when that school of thought was undreamed of. Still, there were various strands of folk wisdom about the adverse psychological effects of celibacy, so Barnabas’ smirking comment undoubtedly means exactly what the original audience would have taken it to mean.

From the moment Barnabas saw Abigail at the end of yesterday’s episode, we’ve wondered how he would go about killing her. She is his aunt, after all; the vampire’s bite is so widely recognized a metaphor for the sexual act that we could hardly expect the ABC censors to have allowed him to make a meal of her. In the end, he simply bares his fangs and she dies of fright.

Barnabas scares Abigail to death. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Abigail has been a villain; even the opening voiceover refers to her as “a woman who has been responsible for much grief.” During their confrontation, Barnabas tells Abigail many truths that, had she known them earlier, would have kept her from causing that grief. If she accepts them now, she will be remorseful. To the extent that we want Abigail to know what she has done, we identify with Barnabas during this scene. That might lead us to think that her death by fright is a way of letting us see Barnabas as the good guy, since he does not kill her by physical contact. But throughout the confrontation he has been telling her that she is about to die. Before he bares his teeth, he makes a dramatic announcement that clearly tells us that he is bringing matters to their climax, and when he sees her die he does not look the least bit unhappy. He seems to have known that the sight of his teeth had the power to kill his aunt, and to have deliberately used that power.

Abigail is the sister of Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins. Before he even became a vampire, Barnabas killed Joshua’s brother Jeremiah in a duel. By his clumsiness, Barnabas inadvertently caused the death of his own sister, little Sarah Collins. Things are getting rather lonesome for Joshua.

In the great house on the same estate, young Daniel Collins is trying to slip out into the night. Yesterday, he arranged to meet secretly with much put-upon servant Ben so Ben could give him pointers on how to run away from this depressing house. The lady of the house, Joshua’s wife Naomi, intercepts Daniel. She asks if he plays whist, and he complains that he isn’t allowed to play cards because that is “against cousin Abigail’s religion.” Naomi says that so long as it isn’t against his religion, it’s no problem for her.

This isn’t the first indication that Abigail’s religion is different from that of the rest of the family. As rich New England landowners in the eighteenth century, we can assume they are all Congregationalists, but the loose polity of Congregationalism left room for a lot of variation from one congregation to another. She may well have attended a stricter meeting than did the other members of the family, though she seems to have taken her greatest satisfaction in imposing her austere ways on the other members of the household.

Naomi suggests that Daniel and his older sister Millicent might stay at Collinwood with her and Joshua indefinitely. Daniel is clearly not a fan of this idea, and struggles to find a polite way to say that he is desperate to go back home to New York City. He is still struggling when a knock comes at the door. It is the Rev’d Mr Trask, whom Abigail called in from out of town to find witches. Trask is currently prosecuting Victoria Winters, former governess to Daniel and the late Sarah. Abigail asked Trask to meet her because she thought she would find evidence against Vicki in the Old House. Since she found Barnabas instead, she will not be keeping the appointment.

While Naomi goes to look for Abigail, Trask takes the opportunity to work on Daniel. At first Trask seems to be far more agreeable than we have ever seen him before. So when Daniel apologizes for telling him that he looks like the Devil and that he sees no reason they should exchange any words, Trask smiles and calmly says that he appreciates his honesty. Trask holds Abigail up as an exemplar of Christian virtue; Daniel says that he cannot bring himself to want to emulate Abigail, since she “is always so, so unhappy, as if whatever she has eaten doesn’t agree with her.” Trask takes this remark in good turn.

Daniel keeps insisting that Vicki is not a witch, but is very nice. Trask takes everything he says as evidence against Vicki. For example, when he tells Trask that Vicki extolled the virtues of curiosity, Trask exclaims that “Curiosity is the Devil’s money! What you buy with it is disbelief in everything it is right to believe in!” Even in this portion of their encounter, Trask seems far smoother than the screaming fanatic we’ve seen up to now. Daniel complains that Trask keeps talking about the Devil when “I want nothing to do with him.” At that, Trask leans in and says that if Daniel feels that way, he can still be saved. When Daniel asks how he can be saved, we can see how Trask might have managed to win a new follower, if he hadn’t gone straight to a demand that Daniel testify against his friend Vicki.

Trask and Daniel have a man-to-man talk. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Trask finally loses his temper. Naomi returns and is appalled when she hears Trask telling Daniel that he bears the mark of the Devil. Daniel runs out into the night, and Naomi tells Trask he is to blame for that.

Daniel wanders about in the woods, looking for Ben. He quickly concludes that he must have missed Ben, and he thinks of going back to the house. Remembering that Trask is there, he chooses to stay outside.

Naomi is in the woods looking for Daniel; Trask joins her, much to her displeasure. Daniel sees Abigail’s corpse propped against a tree. He shouts for Naomi. She and Trask come, and he points the corpse out to them.

Daniel shares his gruesome discovery. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Abigail is the second character Clarice Blackburn has played on Dark Shadows. She joined the cast in #67 as housekeeper Mrs Johnson. In her first months on the show, Mrs Johnson was out to get revenge on the Collins family for their treatment of her former employer and the object of her unrequited love, the late Bill Malloy. Blackburn was told to think of the character as if she were Mrs Danvers, the terrifying housekeeper in Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca. After the Death of Bill Malloy storyline ended, Mrs Johnson transformed into a warm-hearted old biddy whose wildly indiscreet chatter gave the other characters just the information they could use to advance the plot.

Mrs Johnson was always fun to watch, and one of the reasons to look forward to the show’s return to a contemporary setting is that she is waiting for us in 1968. But after her first few weeks, her appearances were rare and usually brief. Abigail gave Blackburn her first chance to show viewers of Dark Shadows what she could do when she had the chance to work on a big canvas. In later storylines, she will have more such opportunities, but we will always miss Abigail.

Episode 209: The darkest and strangest secret of them all

Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis stares at the portrait of Barnabas Collins hanging in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. The portrait’s eyes glow and the sound of a heartbeat fills the space. Willie’s fellow unwelcome house-guest, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, comes into the room. Willie is surprised Jason can’t hear the heartbeat.

After consulting the Collins family histories, Willie goes to an old cemetery where legend has it a woman was interred with many fine jewels. The Caretaker of the cemetery stops Willie before he can break into her tomb. Willie hears the heartbeat coming from the tomb, but, again to his amazement, the Caretaker cannot hear it.

Yesterday, strange and troubled boy David Collins had told Willie that in some previous century, a pirate fell in love with Abigail Collins, gave her jewels, and that Abigail took those jewels to her grave. Today, Willie repeats this story to wildly indiscreet housekeeper Mrs Johnson, only he identifies the woman as Naomi Collins. Fandom likes to seize on this kind of thing, presenting it either as an error or as a sign of retcons in progress, but I suspect that it is just a clumsy way of suggesting that the characters are hazy on the details of the legend.

The legend itself is very much the sort of thing that inspired Dark Shadows in its first months. ABC executive Leonard Goldberg explained that he greenlighted production of the show when he saw that Gothic romance novels were prominently featured everywhere books were sold. The idea of a grand lady in a manor house somehow meeting and having a secret romance with a pirate is a perfect Gothic romance plot, as for example in Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek. Willie’s fascination with the tale might reflect an accurate assessment of the situation if Dark Shadows were still a Gothic romance, but the show left that genre behind as the Laura Collins storyline developed from #126 to #193. If Willie had been watching the show, he would know that the story David told him is not the one that is going to shape his future as a character on it.

When Willie is wandering around the old cemetery, he twice shines a flashlight directly into the camera and creates a halo effect. The first time might have been an accident on the actor’s part, but the second time the halo frames the Caretaker in a way that is obviously intentional. Patrick McCray’s entry on this episode in his Dark Shadows Daybook describes the Caretaker as “a refugee from the EC universe.” Indeed, Willie’s crouching posture and angry facial expression, the halo filling so much of the screen, the tombstones in the background, and the Caretaker’s silhouetted figure carrying a lantern add up to a composition so much like a panel from an EC comic book that it may well be a conscious homage:

Beware the Vault of Horror!

This is our first look at the Tomb of the Collinses.

Introducing the Tomb of the Collinses
Willie sneaks up to the Tomb

It’s also the first time we are told the name of the cemetery five miles north of Collinsport in which the Tomb is situated. Mrs Johnson calls it “Eagle’s Hill Cemetery,” though later it will be called “Eagle Hill.” Mrs Johnson also mentions the Collinsport cemetery two miles south of town, and the Collins’ family’s private cemetery located in some other place. They won’t stick with any of this geography for long, though it all fits very neatly with everything we heard about burial grounds in the Collinsport area during the Laura story.

My usual themes: Gay subtext

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 picked up on one of Danny’s favorite topics, gay subtext in Dark Shadows. Usually I claimed that there was even more of this in the show than he identified.

Danny writes intricate, deeply considered analyses of episodes 210 through 1245 of Dark Shadows. He does not cover episodes 1-209, and frequently claims that there are many episodes among them he has never seen. He does refer several times to a plot point that stretched across many episodes in those 42 weeks, the story of Roger Collins and his obsessive interest in where Burke Devlin’s pen is. Burke has sworn to expose the nature of his former relationship with Roger, exposure which Roger fears will lead to his disgrace and imprisonment.

Driven by that fear, Roger alternately takes and loses Burke’s pen. He keeps returning to where the pen is, and his obsessive attention to the pen, moving it from one hiding place to another, holding it in his hands, staring at it, shifting it between his coat pocket and his pants pocket, dropping it out of his clothes to a place where people can see it, putting it in darkened corners of his house, burying it in the soil of the grounds of his home, digging it up again to put it in yet another place, leads directly to his arrest. Danny does not appear to find any gay subtext in this, even in the post in which he gives synopses of 21 episodes where Burke’s pen is the main theme. Instead, Burke’s pen is, for him, a symbol of the dangerous boring-ness of the first 42 weeks of the show. For an audience in 1966, watching what was at that point a rather ambitiously literate show and living in a country where Freudianism was enormously influential, I suspect a man obsessed with where another man’s pen is would have seemed likely to be dealing with psychological issues concerning male genitalia, even if he weren’t played by Louis Edmonds.

Though there may not be any posts about the first 209 episodes, the comment threads range over the whole series and over topics far beyond it. So, the Burke/ Roger relationship came up in a thread responding to Danny’s post on episode 1008. In response to that discussion, I wrote the following:

There is a dispute among the characters as to whether Burke or Roger was driving when the car hit Hanson. This hardly matters. It was Burke’s car, and even if he gave the keys to Roger, he would have done so knowing that Roger was as drunk and as unfit to drive as he was. A fact like that wouldn’t necessarily have kept Burke out of jail even if it were known at the time, and ten years later, after witnesses’ memories had faded, physical evidence had been lost, and statutes of limitations had expired, the whole basis of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline is sheer nonsense.

But let’s look at another question about the identities of the people in that car. The public story is that the three people in it were a pair of lovers and their friend, and that after the collision the lovers broke up and one of them ended up married to the friend. Maybe that’s true- but maybe the lovers were Roger and Burke, and Laura was the friend who was along for the ride. That’s the secret Roger is so desperate to cover up when Burke comes back to town.

It also explains why Burke “investigates” the matter personally, rather than handing it over to the high-priced private investigating firms the show goes out of its way to tell us he is in the habit of retaining. He isn’t trying to uncover established facts about the past- he’s trying to fabricate a new past, in which will stand a different sort of relationship than the one he and Roger actually shared. Perhaps, as a deeply closeted 1960s guy, Devlin has it in mind to remake the past so that he and Roger did not have a sexual relationship at all; by rewriting his history with Roger, he may hope to free himself of his same-sex desires and the threat they pose to his macho identity. Perhaps, at another level of his mind, he wants to free himself, not of his desires, but of that macho identity, and of the social norms and personal inhibitions that keep him from living openly as a gay man. In that way, Burke is the first of Dark Shadows’ would-be time travelers, embarking on a quest to erase a past he cannot tolerate and to replace it with one that will enable him to have a sustainable set of intimate relationships.

This would also explain Burke’s attitude towards other major characters. Carolyn and Laura are nothing to him but weapons to use against Roger and instruments to use in inscribing a new past. His relationship with Vicki doesn’t really get started until there’s no reason for either of them to be on the show anymore; it’s boring for that reason, but if we think of Burke using Vicki as a beard we can find an interest in its very lifelessness.

Moreover, we can connect Burke’s closeted homosexuality to his weirdly feckless efforts against Barnabas. He never figures out what Barnabas is, but he immediately sees what Barnabas is not- that is, he is not trying to be a perfect example of Heterosexual Male, 1960s edition. He responds to Barnabas with undisguised loathing, but not with any real jealousy about his attentions to Vicki. It’s Barnabas’ freedom from convention that he envies. Once we postulate a B/R sexual relationship before the crash that killed Hanson, we can draw a direct line from Burke’s return to town in episode 1 to the night he spent hiding behind a tree near the Old House waiting to see Barnabas come and go in episode 304.

I suppose there might be a reason they chose the name “Burke Devlin” for the character- not only was the actor who played “Burke Devlin” in the film “The Tarnished Angels” Rock Hudson, but that Burke Devlin is involved in a love triangle in which his strongest feelings seem to be for the husband of the woman with whom he is ostensibly involved. That Devlin is at first fascinated by the husband, has a falling-out with him, then turns his attentions to the wife.

Strong as the gay subtext in the whole development of Burke Devlin’s character is, there are other times when it is even closer to the surface. I wrote this about the beginning of the “Leviathans” storyline:

So far, this has been the gayest storyline the show has taken on yet.

In 899, the sailor offers to buy Paul a drink, and Paul shouts “I buy my own drinks!” This isn’t subtext- any man getting that reaction in a bar will know that the other fellow has interpreted his offer as including more than the drink. Paul apologizes and becomes friendly, indicating that he is willing to abandon that interpretation and set aside the hostility that accompanied it.

In this episode, we’re back in the same bar. Barnabas beckons Paul to his table with his index finger. I invite any man who doesn’t think we are intended to read this as a reference to a sexual come-on to try that move on a homophobic tough guy in a bar.

Paul’s face shows his inner struggle as he tries to resist Barnabas’ advances, but he can’t. Barnabas coaxes him into reminiscing about yet another night in the same bar, when a casual encounter with yet another guy led to something that seemed at the time like a little harmless tomfoolery, but that has now grown into a threat to his relationship with his family, his standing in the community, his physical well-being, and everything else.

Indeed, there are moments in the Leviathans story when the gay men in the cast seem to be having a bit of fun with the barely-coded gay themes:

Every time Barnabas addresses Philip as “Philip,” I see a little twinkle in Jonathan Frid’s eyes. By 1969, female impersonators had been imitating Bette Davis’ commands to Leslie Howard in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, where his character’s name is “Philip,” for thirty years. I knew gay men who were still making each other laugh as late as the 1980s by quoting lines beginning “Philip!” If Bernau hadn’t stayed so perfectly in character, I doubt Frid would have been able to keep from a giggling fit that would have brought the house down.

Christopher Bernau’s decision to play an antique dealer using a voice and mannerisms derived from a Jack Benny imitation led many of Danny’s commenters to bring up Bernau’s own sexuality and wonder whether he was simply incapable of staying in the closet. As it sometimes does in discussions of obviously gay actors playing men partnered with women on American TV in this period, The Paul Lynde Show (1972-1973) came up. I had altogether too much to say about this:

The reference to Paul Lynde in the original post reminds me of THE PAUL LYNDE SHOW, a sitcom which aired on ABC in the 1972-1973 season. It’s a fascinating artifact. Lynde’s character has a wife and two daughters. The opening sequence sets the tone- it flashes through several readily identifiable scenario (falling off a bicycle, etc) which end with Lynde falling into one or another kind of trap. Lynde plays each of those little vignettes with the same series of expressions on his face, the first a grim look of deep-seated misery, the last an explosion of panic. Each episode focuses on Lynde’s character stumbling into some kind of excruciatingly awkward situation, suffering through a rapidly escalating series of embarrassments, and finally escaping from it with his dignity annihilated but his wife and daughters feeling sorry for him.

It’s routine for people to cite that show as an example of how clueless the entertainment industry and the public who consumed its products were about gay people in the old days, but it is so plausible a version of what it might have been like for Paul Lynde to have married a woman that can’t imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. You can read it as an exploration of a gay man and a woman who’ve ended up married to each other for whatever reason, and who have resolved to do what they can to make a marriage work. After all, they like each other, they want their daughters to know where home is, and they have a position to maintain within the community. They show the result as something that’s pretty nearly tolerable for all concerned, but at no point does it look like something great. Lynde’s daily frustrations, confusions, and humiliations are the basis of the comedy, but they could just as easily have been explored in a drama that makes their source explicit. It certainly gives academics interested in Queer Theory a lot to write about.

If the public wasn’t in fact as oblivious to gayness as is sometimes suggested, it would have been even more daring- or more clueless- to cast Christopher Bernau as a married man than you suggest. Especially so considering that he’s supposed to be an antique dealer, an occupation often stereotyped as a province of gay men. His performance in this episode is not as obviously gay as was his performance in episode 890- even if you were in an all-male porn video, it would be a challenge to be as obviously gay as Bernau is in episode 890- but it’s pretty darned flamboyant.

Maybe they had seen so many other gay actors play heterosexual characters convincingly enough that it didn’t occur to them that he would have a problem. Joel Crothers has been mentioned several times, but I would also bring up Louis Edmonds. As Edward Collins, he is perfectly credible in his scenes with Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Kitty Soames. And as Roger in 1966, he was credible both as a slimy guy coming on to Vicki and as the estranged husband of Laura.

The reference at the beginning of the last paragraph above to the late Mr Bernau having “a problem” is rather silly, and I regret it. It hadn’t struck me yet that he was doing a Jack Benny imitation, or that he would have expected a Jack Benny imitation to read in something like the way Jack Benny’s own performances did in his heyday. That the Jack Benny type shifted from an image of a rich, ineffectual man to an image of a gay man, and that Bernau was not thinking in terms of that shift at the end of the 1960s, is itself an interesting topic, far more so than my crude underestimate of Bernau’s acting ability (ability with which I was quite familiar!)

The Leviathans storyline was followed by the 1970 Parallel Time storyline, to which I usually refer as “Meet Another Angelique.” The A-story throughout that segment is an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. I engaged in a bit of imaginary recasting concerning that story:

Daphne du Maurier was bisexual, and a lot of people have written a lot of criticism of REBECCA based on the idea that what drove de Winter to kill his wife was that she was sleeping with women as well as with other men.

I’m skeptical about that interpretation. Maybe du Maurier had planned to put that in the book, but once the story turned out to be about the second Mrs de Winter’s struggle with feelings of inadequacy, the events that actually took place between Rebecca and Maxim during their marriage are relegated to a secondary importance. As for Mrs Danvers, the most important thing about her in the novel is her ambiguity. The second Mrs de Winter is terrified of her, but she would be terrified of anyone. Since she is the narrator, we have no way of knowing what Mrs Danvers is actually thinking or doing.

Of course, Hitchcock and Judith Anderson made Mrs Danvers’ erotic attachment to Rebecca the central theme of the movie. The second Mrs de Winter finds that Maxim has become unavailable to her as soon as they arrived at Manderley. The only powerful emotion she encounters anywhere in her new environment is Mrs Danvers’ passionate attachment to Rebecca. That passion is just one more thing she can’t understand.

Grayson Hall is good as Hoffman, but I wish Clarice Blackburn had played the housekeeper. First, because she joined the cast thinking that Mrs Johnson would be based on Mrs Danvers, so that she had spent a few years preparing for the role. Second, she was in real life partnered with a woman, so it would have been good to see an actual lesbian play a homoerotic-inflected role.