Tag: roger collins

Episode 18: Strange sounds and lonely echoes

Only three characters in this one- Roger, Vicki, and David. In the previous episode, Roger learned that his crash was no accident, that someone tampered with his brakes. Now he wants Vicki to tell him what she can that will help him prove that Burke Devlin was the one responsible. Which is a great deal- she saw him in the garage, with a wrench, next to Roger’s car. She had gone into the garage after hearing what she thought was a car door slam. She admits that the slam could have been the hood over the engine compartment, and since the car door next to Devlin was open, this seems likely. Since the reason Roger was on the road was that Devlin had invited him to town to discuss “business,” and the two of them do not seem to have any business together at all, the case against Devlin seems quite strong.

David will place rather a substantial difficulty in the way of Roger’s hope of sending Devlin back to prison. As the audience knows, it was he, not Devlin, who removed the valve from the braking system on his father’s car. We even see him handling the valve in this episode. In episode 17, he nearly confessed to his Aunt Elizabeth, and this time he makes an incriminating statement to Vicki. Both women had assumed he was merely expressing guilt for his hostility to his father, and tried to reassure him that his feelings and thoughts didn’t mean that he was to blame for what happened on the road. David even tries to talk to his father in this one, and Roger icily dismisses him. But we’ve seen enough mystery stories, including inverted mysteries where the audience knows who done it before the detective does, to be sure that Roger will learn the truth when he least expects it.

Roger not only has reason to suspect that Burke is responsible for his crash; he also has deep, complex, ungovernable feelings where Burke is concerned. Some of those feelings have to do with the testimony he gave at the trial ten years before which sent Burke to prison. Some go back before that, and have to do with the friendship that existed between them before that trial. All of them are deeply secret.

This show was being made in 1966, when Freudianism reigned supreme in much of American intellectual life, and the most respected of respectable novels was Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. All of the cast and much of the production staff comes from Broadway, where at that time Tennessee Williams was the undisputed king of serious playwrights. And the part of Roger was played by Louis Edmonds, who came out of the closet as a gay man as soon as it was possible to do so, and who was never in the closet as far as his friends and colleagues were concerned. So it seems likely that the secrets Roger is so desperate to conceal include some kind of homoerotic connection with Burke. This episode lampshades some standard soap opera craziness in order to call our attention to the irrational nature of Roger’s attitude towards Burke, and I think a mid-1960s audience would be likely to suspect that a repressed sexuality is driving that irrationality.

Here’s how I put it in a comment on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

When Vicki tells Roger what she saw Devlin doing in the garage, Roger asks her to come with him to confront Devlin at the hotel. That’s a typical soap opera character idea. What isn’t so typical is Vicki’s response, that it would be better to go to the police. She sticks with that rational idea until Roger tells her of his urgent need to see Devlin’s face. That picks up on Roger’s frantic behavior in Week One and sets him up for the whole saga of Where Burke Devlin’s Pen Is, in which we see that Roger’s attitude towards Burke is rooted in some deep and complicated emotions.

Episode 17: Such a strange question

Another of the diptych episodes in which Art Wallace excels. This time we have two pair of contrasting scenes.

David, thinking he has succeeded in his attempt to murder his father by tampering with the brakes on his car, awakes from a nightmare and walk out through a feature no nine-year-old boy’s bedroom should be without, a full window that opens on a ledge above a two hundred foot drop to the sea. Elizabeth stops him before he can jump. David is hysterical, Elizabeth frantic to console him.

Juxtaposed with the wrenching scene between David and Elizabeth is a very light scene between Roger and his doctor. Roger is in the doctor’s office, pitying himself for his minor injuries. The doctor is overly friendly and relentlessly makes little jokes at which he himself seems to be quite amused. Roger is annoyed with the doctor’s manner and impatient with his work. The self-contained, self-satisfied, ultimately trivial Roger seems to live in a different world than the one where his son is suffering so grievously.

Then we have two scenes of teacher and student. Bill Malloy explains hydraulic braking systems to Roger and a scene in the drawing room where Elizabeth tells stories from family history to David. Since Malloy’s explanation advances the mystery story that is the main thread of the show at the moment, it is fascinating, and since the early history of the family is not (yet!) relevant, Elizabeth’s stories are intentionally presented as tedious. Here’s how I put it in the comments on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

Bill Malloy was a talented guy. His explanation of a hydraulic braking system, supplemented by that admirably drawn schematic, was not only crystal clear, but genuinely interesting.

There’s a structural justification for it- Liz’s lecture to David about Isaac Collins in front of Isaac’s portrait is deliberately presented as boring. So including another lecture supported by a single illustration and making it urgently interesting shows that what’s boring isn’t the format, but the relevance of the content to the story.

That venture into educational programming is a fine example of the freewheeling experimentation the series was doing in these early weeks. Some of those experiments come up again. The final 2 seconds of the episode is the first time a character looks directly into the camera, a trick they will use to advantage many times down the line.

Also, the date 1690 is interesting, not only because the portrait is ludicrously anachronistic- the man is wearing clothes from and is painted in a style that date from 200 years after that date- but also because we will hear about that period again, near the end of the series. Most likely that’s a coincidence, but I suppose it’s possible someone connected to the show in its final months remembered that the 1690s were supposed to be important in the history of the family.

Episode 15: I think he’s beginning to trust me

I left two comments about this episode on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die. A long one about its place in the overall development of the show’s stories:

This is a vitally important episode. The scene in David’s room is the first of many in which David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles act their way out of weak writing to establish a relationship between two characters who can always make a connection with each other. Their body language, tones of voice, etc, triumph over some remarkably tedious dialogue to show us what people look like when they’re starting to trust each other. The growth of that relationship is really the only story that works in the first 42 weeks of the show. The big events involving characters we’ve only heard about or who will soon be recast matter insofar as they represent developments in that story, and other events don’t matter at all.

The scene that Liz and Roger play out in the drawing room while Vicki and David are talking upstairs is important in its own way. That these conversations are going on simultaneously is an example of the mirroring of Vicki and Liz that is such a strong motif in the first 42. Vicki is open and uncomplicated as she tries to talk David down from his superheated hostility to his father; Liz is guarded and double-minded as she tries to talk Roger back up to fear of Devlin. In the contrast between the two women, we see the difference between the innocent one with no past, and the frightened one with nothing but a past.

The contrast between father and son plays out in those scenes, and also in the two brief scenes between them. Roger’s narcissism renders him utterly childish, making no effort to take his son’s feelings into account or to understand Devlin’s motives. David’s fear and pain drive him to mimic adult behavior with absurd and indeed horrifying results. Liz tries to make Roger grow up, as Vicki tries to free David to be a child, but Roger’s inability to take anyone’s feelings but his own seriously dooms both efforts.

The moments between Liz and Vicki call for comment. Later on in the series, these characters will be stuck in many frustrating scenes where they inexplicably fail to pass on information that would resolve story points. At first glance, Vicki’s failure to tell Roger about Burke’s presence in the garage and Liz’s failure to pass the word of it on to him after Vicki tells her may seem to be the first of those failures. But Vicki has no reason to trust Roger, and very little to suspect Burke of wrongdoing. On what she’s seen of Roger so far, she can only assume that if she tells him what she saw he will jump to the most sinister possible conclusion and enlist her in his mad campaign against Burke. Liz seems relatively reasonable, at least on the topic of Burke Devlin, so by telling her Vicki is both satisfying an obligation and reducing the likelihood that she will be a party to slander. Indeed, Liz and Vicki tell each other quite a bit about themselves, much more than they will later on.

And a short one about a point that bothers many viewers:

Oh, and Liz’s failure to repeat Vicki’s news to Roger isn’t a problem. Liz is deeply preoccupied, and Vicki’s report wouldn’t be particularly interesting to anyone who hadn’t been watching the show.

Episode 12: You can still hear the widows

Roger and Vicki encounter each other on the peak of Widow’s Hill. Roger remarks it is the highest point in the area. At the end of their conversation, Vicki will call to Carolyn, inviting her to join them “down here.” This may seem to be a blooper, but since we hear “down” used to mean “up” in a later episode, I speculate that it’s a peculiarity of Collinsport English.

Little happens to advance the plot in this episode, but between Roger’s announcement that he and Vicki are standing on the highest point in the area and Vicki’s invitation to come “down here,” we hear a lot about the ghostly legends of the place. After the scene in episode 11 where the ghosts are troubling Elizabeth while David is doing something mysterious involving motor grease and little pieces of metal, it seems that the show is using the ghosts as a sign that something big is happening. Certainly the “Widow’s Wail” is a striking sound effect, and Louis Edmonds does a good job of selling the idea that Roger really does believe in all the legends about the house that his social position might require him and Elizabeth to ridicule publicly.

It’s a bit jarring that Carolyn drifts into the scene asking what Vicki and Roger are doing- “planning a suicide pact?” She had just told Vicki about the legend that a third governess would die by jumping off the cliff, and the series story bible still calls for Roger to throw himself to his death from it. So you might think it would be in questionable taste to bring that particular topic up just now.

There’s also a scene in the Evans cottage where Maggie (Kathryn Leigh Scott) tries to get Sam (Mark Allen) to tell her what’s been bothering him. In episode 11, Conrad Bain had triumphed over a weak script and Mark Allen’s relentless whine to turn what might have been a lot of tedious recapping into a compulsively watchable scene. At the beginning of this scene, Kathryn Leigh Scott is mustering such powerful emotions that it looks like she might be about to accomplish the same feat, but Allen has switched from whining all his lines to bellowing them. So the scene is a dead loss.

Episode 10: To the death of the monster

Carolyn is in Burke’s hotel room, where he charms her and tricks her into believing that he’s planning to leave town soon. I suppose the definition of “dashing” would be a charming fellow who makes things happen, things you wouldn’t have predicted and of which you aren’t sure you can approve. Burke is at his most dashing in scenes where he’s trying to enlist the women and children of Collinwood to his side. With Carolyn here, with Vicki back in episode 7, most of all with David in episode 30, we wonder what exactly he’s trying to do. He’s not so good with the men- when he tries to recruit Joe Haskell to his intelligence-gathering operation in episode 3, he ends up baldly offering him a bribe.

Liz and Roger are in the drawing room, where she demands he be less openly hostile to his son David. Unknown to them, David and his toy robot (a Horikawa “Attacking Martian,” which sold for $4.22 in 1966, not including two D batteries) are hiding behind a chair listening to Roger’s brutal denunciations of the boy. Unknown, that is, until Roger goes to the brandy bottle for his second drink, when the Attacking Martian starts attacking Roger.

Roger all but assaults David in response. David flees his father’s rage. He runs out of the house, telling Roger he hopes Burke Devlin gets even with him. Roger is as bleak and maladroit in these interactions as Burke is glittering and skillful in his handling of Carolyn. Again we see Art Wallace’s use of intercut scenes to bring out a comparison between characters.

After the second part of the scene in Burke’s room, David slips back into the house to find his Aunt Elizabeth asleep in a chair, muttering about ghosts. After all the talk about ghosts in the first two weeks, Elizabeth’s muttering about them seems significant- perhaps we are to think that her dream is a message from the ghosts who linger about the house, a sign that something is happening that will stir them up. Elizabeth awakes, and sees that David is in front of her, smeared with grease and holding a small object. He won’t answer any questions or let her see what he has in his hand. Before she can pursue the matter, Carolyn appears in the foyer, bringing an unexpected guest- Burke Devlin. Confronted with this shocking sight, she forgets all about David.

Episode 4: Frightening a new friend

Here’s the comment I left on the Scoleris’ Dark Shadows Before I Die blog entry about this episode:

Interesting how the early episodes tiptoe towards the supernatural. Burke, Roger, and Carolyn all use the word “ghost” metaphorically, to refer to unresolved conflicts from the past that are still causing problems in the present. Liz and Vicki, each in her turn, responds by saying there are no such things as literal ghosts, only to hear the first person assert that there absolutely are. Giving this same little conversation to both Liz and Vicki is one of the ways the show tries to establish Liz and Vicki as mirrors of each other, of presenting Liz’s current life as a possible future for Vicki and of Vicki as a revenant of Liz’s past.

The sobbing sounds Vicki hears in this one are the first occurrences that would have to be explained as the act either of a ghost or of someone trying to make Vicki believe there are ghosts. The next such moment will come in episode 14, and there will be several more in the weeks and months ahead. This tiptoeing is what the Dark Shadows wiki on fandom tracks as “Ghostwatch.”

In view of the near-sexlessness of the later years of the show, it’s striking how frank this one is. Roger’s aggressiveness towards Victoria is plainly sexual. Liz catches him trying to sneak into Victoria’s bedroom, he derides her attempt to regulate his “morals.” He offers Victoria a drink, they talk about pleasure and pain in words that so clearly about sex that they barely qualify as sens double. Indeed, that is the only moment in the whole series when Victoria seems like what she’s supposed to be, a street kid from NYC. And the flirtation between Uncle Roger and his niece Carolyn is so blatant that it’s a wonder how Louis Edmonds and Nancy Barrett keep the scene from making the audience either laugh or feel ill.

Episode 3: Open your door!

Episode 3 of Dark Shadows is remembered chiefly for two things. It’s the one where Carolyn and Vicki first meet, and Carolyn introduces herself by going on at alarming length about her crush on her Uncle Roger. Vicki’s quiet reaction is just what you’d expect from a new member of the household staff discovering that a member of the family is a raving loon.

It’s also the one that opens with Roger pounding on the door to the Evans cottage and shouting “Open yer doah, ya drunken bum!”:

There is more to it. At the Blue Whale, Burke tries to enlist Joe in his intelligence-gathering operation, an attempt Joe virtuously rebuffs. Bill Malloy confronts Burke, showing that he, like Joe, is devoted to protecting the Collinses.

Art Wallace, the author of the show’s story bible and sole credited writer for its first eight weeks, specializes in a diptych structure, building an episode by interweaving two parallel scenes. That structure leads us to compare and contrast characters with each other in a wider variety of ways than we might if the scenes followed each other in succession. In this one, we see Joe and Bill faithfully standing up to Collins family foe Burke, while newcomer Victoria tries to assume the persona of a loyal retainer in her response to Carolyn’s bizarre talk.

My usual themes: Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother

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 it occurred to me that a Dark Shadows features a number of older sisters who clean up messes that their misbehaving younger brothers make, and that a variety of male-female relationships on the show take on the dynamic of a bossy big sister and her bratty little brother. Danny doesn’t cover the first 209 episodes of the show, when we learn that Roger Collins has managed to squander his entire inheritance, half of the family fortune, and that his older sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard has gone deeply into debt to contain the damage that his irresponsibility has done to the family business. Elizabeth takes Roger into her house, and alternates between demanding that he reform his ways and enabling his ongoing bad conduct. She takes charge of the raising of Roger’s son David and puts Roger to work in the family business, setting bounds to Roger’s crapulence but also insulating him from its consequences.

My first remarks about this theme were in a comment on episode 565:

Watching this episode, I just realized the main relationship in DARK SHADOWS- Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother. Liz and Roger are literally that, and each one’s struggle to safeguard their relationship by keeping the other in the dark about their shameful secrets is the background of every storyline in the first 209 episodes. Carolyn and David become the functional equivalent of a Bossy Big Sister and a Bratty Little Brother, and that’s the development that makes Carolyn a relatable character.

In Julia and Barnabas, we have the supreme example of such a relationship. They fall into it naturally; Julia is used to giving orders, and Barnabas is used to disobeying them. From the moment Julia lit her cigarette on the candles in the old house, she’s been Barnabas’ Bossy Big Sister, pursuing one plan after another meant for his own good. He’s been alternately pouting at her, raging against her, and clinging to her, at once resenting her demands on him and craving her validation for his narcissism. The climax of the episode, when they both know that a he-vampire is roaming about in search of a victim but it occurs to neither Julia nor Barnabas that Julia might be in danger, shows how deeply they have embedded themselves in these roles. Barnabas won’t even let Vicki walk to her car alone, and Julia, hearing the dognoise, understands why. But when Julia tells Barnabas that she will close up the lab and leave shortly after he goes out to join Willie, implying that she’s going to walk all the way back to the Great House by herself, he just leaves. Of course nothing will happen to Big Sis, she’ll always be OK.

That’s also why I don’t see how slashfic positing a sexual relationship between Barnabas and Julia can work. They are so much Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother that no matter how much time they spent telling themselves that they aren’t actually related, it would still be impossibly weird to try to be something else to each other.

I returned to the theme in a remark about episode 572, where Jonathan Frid gives a line-reading so pouty that I wonder if he was consciously trying to depict Barnabas as a bratty little brother to Julia:

I love the way Jonathan Frid pouts the line “I was afraid your visit would be pointless.” He’s every inch the bratty little brother upset that his big sister went out when he didn’t want her to go.

By episode 648, the idea has moved me to fanfic:

Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.

Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”

I revisited these points a few times- Danny’s blog consists of over a thousand posts, one each for episodes 210-1245, plus a few dozen about properties related to Dark Shadows, and each post has its own discussion thread. So it isn’t bad netiquette to repeat yourself a bit from one thread to another- there is always a chance someone who didn’t see a comment previously posted elsewhere will take an interest when you post a similar one. But I did try to keep from making a bore of myself to those who read everything.

I could have mentioned some other bossy big sister/ bratty little brother combos. In a comment on the 1897 storyline, I alluded to the relationship between Judith Collins Trask and her feckless younger brothers. Judith’s arc doesn’t really allow her to be a bossy big sister to any of her three bratty little brothers. But each of them does find himself attached to at least one woman who is stronger than he is, and who might well treat him as Elizabeth does Roger and as Julia does Barnabas.

It’s a shame Terry Crawford wasn’t a more accomplished actress in the 1960s- in the scripts Beth fluctuates between indulging Quentin in his every vice and insisting that he clean up his act. That’s the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic we’ve seen so many times, but unlike any previous pair who have enacted it Beth and Quentin are lovers and are not social equals. It would be interesting to explore the dynamic in that context, but Ms Crawford’s performance is so wooden that you sometimes have to think about her scenes after it is over and call to memory the dialogue and the visual composition before it strikes you what the point was.

Pansy Faye isn’t on the show very long, unfortunately but she’s clearly in the driver’s seat in her relationship with her thoroughly clownish husband Carl Collins. And Edward Collins is much the weaker personality in his connections with both his estranged wife Laura and with Kitty Soames. So each of those men was looking for a woman who was forceful enough to take charge of him, but indulgent enough to allow him to continue in all his established habits.

I also made only one brief reference to the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic in the discussions of the 1840 storyline. That’s rather odd- after all, in that one Julia actually presents herself to the family as Barnabas’ sister, and he is forced to go along with the pretense.

I did not refer to the theme in my comments on posts about “The Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of Quentin, and I made only a single reference to it in my comments on posts about the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of mini-Quentin Gerard. Indeed, that single reference is to Julia’s failure to focus her bossiness on Barnabas. I dropped the ball there, I think- the relationship between David and Amy in the original “Haunting of Collinwood” is at its most interesting when it mixes elements of the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic with other types of interaction, while the bland, lifeless relationships between David and Hallie on the one hand and between Tad and Carrie on the other in the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” could benefit from some kind of structure.

I also left the theme unmentioned in my comments regarding the show’s dying days, the 1841 Parallel Time storyline of episodes 1199-1245. That’s understandable- the show did not develop any bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationships in that period. But there was an implicit one- Miss Julia Collins was the sister of Justin Collins, and she had functioned as head of the household during his years of madness. Justin dies a few episodes into the story, without sharing a scene with Julia, and she is left as a bossy big sister with no bratty brother to whom she can attach herself. Meanwhile, Bramwell is a thoroughly bratty man with no big sister. It’s rather sad for the loyal audience, having enjoyed so many scenes in which Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid had enormous fun with the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern, seeing them drift separately through these dreary episodes.

The closest we get to a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother scene in the dying days of the show is also the one genuinely irresistible moment of that segment. In episode 1215, Flora Collins (Joan Bennett) and her son Morgan (Keith Prentice) are walking through the woods on their way to Biddleford’s Creek. He whines about the pointlessness of the trip, she scolds him, and we get a brilliant little glimpse of what their relationship must have been like since he first learned to talk. That authoritative mother/ whiny son moment left me, not only wanting more such scenes between them, but also wishing it had been presented in contrast with a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationship elsewhere in the show.

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.