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.
