05. Heavenly Creatures
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Heavenly Creatures SAPIENTIA ET VERITAS This essay is the devotional act of an ardent admirer without portfolio on whom a long- lasting impression was made (manet alta mente repostum) and who now momentarily abandons impersonal, scholarly passivity for something more lyric but hopefully no less pardonable. For me, this was a landmark film. Not since Barton Fink had I felt myself to be such a proper narratee. No other film has so impressed itself upon me nor so consistently claimed, sustained and rewarded my attention. It is my most profitably studied film and it grows ever more satisfying with reflection. I always return to it with a sense of pilgrimage, rejoicing in nearly every detail and dwelling on it with undiminished enthusiasm, appreciation, affection, delectation and awe. Even the film’s dedication presents an opportunity for personal emotional connection. It was my privilege to view this film in the company of members of various Hollywood cinematic guilds, including those writers responsible for the film’s Academy Award nomination. I managed to get through graduate school and to write my master’s thesis without buying a computer. But Heavenly Creatures proved to be the last straw and I could hold out no longer. My discovery of the websites dedicated to this film was a major reason for the purchase of my second computer. It is to these online resources that completists seeking paralipomena are directed. A prerequisite for my purchase of a DVD player was the release of this film on that format, though the version released in 2002 is not the one treated here. It is important to note that this essay is based on and is proper to the 99-minute version of this film that was exhibited in the U.S. beginning in late 1994 and later distributed on laserdisc. The version available for streaming on Netflix as of the winter of 2013 is this short version with several frames that were missing from the original U.S. release restored at an elapsed time of 37:50. Though not the full original aspect ratio, this edition resolves the felonious formatting errors noted below. Improvident adulation is sometimes expressed with absurdity, as when an evaluation of 12 is made on a scale of 1 to 10. A quantitative maximum cannot be exceeded, but significance can transcend the dimension of objective quality, as when one is asked to judge one’s own children. As a passionately engaged and emotionally invested partisan acolyte, I consider it proper to recuse myself rather than offer my humble advocacy and proselytize on behalf of this film. For those who attend to critical opinion, this film has been dignified by having its excellencies sung by several important critics. It was ranked the #3 film of the year by Richard Corliss, #2 by Andrew Sarris, and #1 by Molly Haskell. Joseph Campbell writes of the Icelandic tradition of land-nam or “land-claiming,” in which local landmarks are opportunistically commandeered and sanctified to serve as symbolic holy places. It is in that spirit of irredentism that I lay claim to this film and bow before it in an act of acknowledgment, affirmation, homage and celebration via admittedly unbridled (vasta mole superbus) but hopefully forgivable prolixity. 1 of 145 STA VIATOR, HEROEM CALCAS MIRABILE VISU, MIRABILE DICTU TRANSEAT IN EXEMPLUM Those poor wretches who have not seen this film exhibited at its original theatrical aspect ratio should be aware that several rewarding bits of business and information have been denied them. The initial VHS release does not deserve to be flattered with the label “pan-and-scan” because of various residual formatting errors, to be noted in due course, that could have been easily and adequately corrected by panning and scanning, but were not. (“Écoute bien ceci: nous allons voir, docteur, la bestialité dans toute sa candeur.”) The DVD contains a relatively spoiler-rich trailer that at least rescues the film’s musical score from overexposure by substituting Antonin Dvorak’s symphony “From the New World.” The DVD’s subtitles appear over the image rather than in lower margin, and they translate even those foreign phrases that are to be diegetically translated seconds later. — Even before the first image appears, the narrow audio bandwidth of the soundtrack music establishes a nostalgic, once-upon-a-time atmosphere as the screen remains black. In Eastern thinking, all things emerge from and recede into the void (sunya). This prologue is bracketed by blackness, as is the film as a whole. The very first syllable heard is “Christ,” immediately heralding divinity. The first two syllables are “Christ” and “church,” suggestive of sacred marriage and mystical union. The city of Christchurch is presented as “New Zealand’s city of the plains.” The spelling of “plains” is inferred as geographical. However, the first onscreen image shows not only plains but also a plane. This homophonic ambiguity permits the expectation of punning as an intrinsic norm and sanctions the interpretive use of puns later on. Puns are one of the symptoms via which psychoanalysis seeks to understand repression. Obsessional personalities often produce many bad puns by free association. Literary and dramatic puns may be assumed to be asteisms, rich in implication rather than accidental. At this point, it is not yet known if this image of a DC-3 should suggest the flight of Icarus, which would foreshadow presumptuous misjudgment leading to catastrophe. Only later will this story be recognized as the failure of a flight into artistic freedom on wings of art. The film begins with a brief travelogue. As Joseph Campbell would say, the tour on which we are embarking will be psychological rather than topographical. Acting as psychocartographer, director Peter Jackson will conduct the audience on a psychological pilgrimage into the geography of the unconscious mind. “Canterbury” brings to mind storytelling by way of association with Chaucer’s Tales. It also accords with the approaching mention of Cranmer Square. Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), archbishop of Canterbury, is relevant here for his association with divorce, contumacy and disputed royal legitimacy. The old Academy aspect ratio adds to the nostalgia already established by the narrow audio bandwidth. Taken together, they may also represent narrow-minded parochial Puritanism. These physical factors, plus the puerile music and the narrator’s retrospectively ironic statements, establish the background against which the crime will seem so shocking to this society. As with such films as Howards End, The Crying Game and Like Water for Chocolate, this film could be regarded as including the portrait of a society, as in a Gesellschaftsroman. In 2 of 145 spite of the pretty flowers and the Chamber-of-Commerce hype of this georgic meant to evoke and extol endearing local eccentricities (vedi Napoli e poi muori), this is the wasteland, at least from the subjective point of view of the principal characters. Such a wasteland may be symbolized by physical analogy without recourse to anything as drastic as the parched desert of The English Patient. James Joyce’s archetypal view of Dublin may be applied to Christchurch, with New Zealand assuming Ireland’s role, as Stephen Dedalus puts it, of “the old sow that eats her farrow.” Christchurch is presented as a fusty backwater of frustration, captivity, paralysis, and stultifying provincialism, with the Cathedral, symbol of cold petrified authority, at its heart. (A similar view of Cathedral Square can be seen in the 1957 film Until They Sail, which coincidentally features a Christchurch woman speaking of going to California, as well as the murder of a Christchurch woman. The film ends with indecision about whether understanding constitutes forgiveness.) The significance of the phrase “gay and golden” is discussed on the Fourth World website (www.adamabrams.com/hc/), a locus classicus and the online resource of first call. Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) was born in Nelson. He established the existence of the atomic nucleus and of radioactive transformation, which is a metaphorical analog of the shape- shifting trickster archetype that our heroines will exemplify. Pauline is to be a pioneer of innermost psychological space as Rutherford was a pioneer of innermost physical space. Delving below the surface to the quantum uncertainty underlying deterministic Newtonian space-bound exactitude also implies the release from spatiotemporal limitations afforded by imagination and aesthetic arrest. This reference and a functionally similar one to Sir Edmund Hillary near the end form a conjugate pair that bookend the film. As if New Zealanders would rather not recall the dirty little secret hiding in a dark alley of Memory Lane, spring, summer, and autumn are acknowledged, but not the season on the first day of which the film culminates in murder. This prologue is seemingly preparing the palate for a quaint, easy to swallow rhozzum, a humorous shaggy dog story about some colorful local character, perhaps in the same vein as Like Water for Chocolate. But time to acclimatize to the rhythm of this cultural setting has hardly been given when a reality check occurs, revealing the horrors this little curtain raiser belies. Such disturbance of the status quo leads to disorientation and suggestibility in the audience. Staking out the conceptual territory by firing this opening volley across the bow of an unsuspecting audience, Peter Jackson wrenches his viewers from the protatic, nostalgia-inducing narrator (laudator temporis acti) and cuts to the emotional chase. The dissolution of distancing mechanisms is a dislocation and disorientation tactic that tempers and taints the preceding rose-tinted, cockeyed optimism. Contemporary cultural circumstances can often serve to establish a dramatic substratum. The correct historical detail in Wagner’s Lohengrin throws into the highest relief the mystical aspect of the story.