In Glenn Gould’s experimental radio documentary The Idea of North (PBS, 1967), regular commuters on a long distance train journey to the far north of Canada talk about their relationship to the remote landscape. Conversations and voices overlap, fading in and out with the clattering of the train wheels and the sympathetic rattle of the catering trolley creating a dreamlike, almost hypnotic effect...
Generations ago, a journey to the frozen north would have been fraught with danger and difficulty and I wonder whether the ability to travel quickly in relative comfort can ever quite mask the collective memory of ancestral foreboding that must have once accompanied such a pilgrimage. The horror of the speeded-up carriage ride to the Transylvanian castle of the vampire appears fully formed in Murnau’s silent horror classic Nosferatu (1922), and we can feel its echoes, for example, in the long winding drive to the Overlook hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).
The place of foreboding in Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, 1947) is a former Indian palace high up in the Himalayas where a group of nuns are attempting to set up an Anglican community. The sound of distant drumming on the soundtrack hints at the dangers of ‘going native’ under the influence of so much secluded isolation, such that when the wild-eyed Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) wears lipstick for the first time and changes into a red dress, it’s already clear to us that the brooding sexual tension has peaked and the floodgates of unconscious trauma are about to be unleashed.
There’s something precarious and intellectually cold about the union of spirituality and isolated heights. Instinctively, we recognise that the far north in stories is a place where terrible events that chill the bones can happen. Sometimes even undiscovered bodies lie there, waiting for the spring to arrive. The mountain top monastery of the recent BBC1 miniseries adaptation of The Name of the Rose has drifts of unmelted snow lurking in the shades of its courtyards, in contrast to the sunlit forests where a young novice monk might chance to have his first innocent encounter with a real flesh-and-blood woman.
Inside the fortified walls, debate simmers about whether the Benedictine vow of poverty can be allowed to undermine the concentration of power-as-wealth in the Catholic Church and this context provides a theological backdrop to a series of mysterious murders. Such unprecedented horror prompts apocalyptic panic amongst the brotherhood and a frenzied backlash from the papal inquisitor, whose barely concealed contradictions are portrayed with skin-crawling precision by Rupert Everett. In parallel, the detective monk William of Baskerville (John Terturro) heroically highlights the need to maintain a cool and calm head when dealing with evil events, advocating that both self-discipline and psychology are necessary if one is to confront the uncanny with any kind of equanimity. The intuitive appeal of an integrative approach must surely also account for the popularity of the rationalist nun Sister Agatha in BBC1’s Dracula reboot over Christmas, exemplifying the old Buddhist proverb that ‘He who does not believe in demons would never be defeated by them’.
Time and again the dangers of corruption and betrayal are shown to be manifold in the cold places where many others have had their spirits broken, exerting a dark fascination on those characters who teach themselves to navigate there. Travelling to the arctic to learn the secret of why children are being separated from their souls, the young girl Lyra in His Dark Materials (BBC1/HBO) learns to rely on an intuitive mechanical device to plan her next move, recognising that even her own animal intuition can play her false in such tricky territory.
The place of foreboding in Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, 1947) is a former Indian palace high up in the Himalayas where a group of nuns are attempting to set up an Anglican community. The sound of distant drumming on the soundtrack hints at the dangers of ‘going native’ under the influence of so much secluded isolation, such that when the wild-eyed Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) wears lipstick for the first time and changes into a red dress, it’s already clear to us that the brooding sexual tension has peaked and the floodgates of unconscious trauma are about to be unleashed. There’s something precarious and intellectually cold about the union of spirituality and isolated heights. Instinctively, we recognise that the far north in stories is a place where terrible events that chill the bones can happen. Sometimes even undiscovered bodies lie there, waiting for the spring to arrive. The mountain top monastery of the recent BBC1 miniseries adaptation of The Name of the Rose has drifts of unmelted snow lurking in the shades of its courtyards, in contrast to the sunlit forests where a young novice monk might chance to have his first innocent encounter with a real flesh-and-blood woman.
Inside the fortified walls, debate simmers about whether the Benedictine vow of poverty can be allowed to undermine the concentration of power-as-wealth in the Catholic Church and this context provides a theological backdrop to a series of mysterious murders. Such unprecedented horror prompts apocalyptic panic amongst the brotherhood and a frenzied backlash from the papal inquisitor, whose barely concealed contradictions are portrayed with skin-crawling precision by Rupert Everett. In parallel, the detective monk William of Baskerville (John Terturro) heroically highlights the need to maintain a cool and calm head when dealing with evil events, advocating that both self-discipline and psychology are necessary if one is to confront the uncanny with any kind of equanimity. The intuitive appeal of an integrative approach must surely also account for the popularity of the rationalist nun Sister Agatha in BBC1’s Dracula reboot over Christmas, exemplifying the old Buddhist proverb that ‘He who does not believe in demons would never be defeated by them’.
Time and again the dangers of corruption and betrayal are shown to be manifold in the cold places where many others have had their spirits broken, exerting a dark fascination on those characters who teach themselves to navigate there. Travelling to the arctic to learn the secret of why children are being separated from their souls, the young girl Lyra in His Dark Materials (BBC1/HBO) learns to rely on an intuitive mechanical device to plan her next move, recognising that even her own animal intuition can play her false in such tricky territory.
-o-
In 2019’s Dr Sleep (dir. Mike Flanagan), the young boy Danny who witnessed an axe wielding Jack Nicholson lay his childhood innocence to waste in The Shining, is now an adult, battling alcohol addiction. When Danny returns to the icebound Overlook hotel to face his demons in more ways than one, a hallucinatory barman offers him an illusory whisky in the bar, arguing that what is not real cannot do him any harm. The moment in any story where the hero is tempted to turn to the dark side reminds us that the evil that is being battled is never entirely outside.
The power of the unexamined past to recreate trauma in the present is very graphically illustrated in Dr Sleep, which ends, almost inevitably, with the hotel in flames, in a metaphorical echo of the cleansing fire beloved of the medieval inquisitors. A similar inferno in the monastery library at the end of The Name of the Rose has darker overtones still, inviting symbolic comparisons with book burning as an act of censorship. When the one person with knowledge of the truth about the murders is tracked to a secret chamber amidst the labyrinthine bookshelves, it is apparent that they are not just willing to see monks die over theological disagreements but that their ideology threatens to destroy the medieval world’s accumulated knowledge too. The series title suggests that the truths that remain are those that we take inside us, and that they survive long after the things we love have been destroyed.
-o-
Such considerations are far from the minds of The Idea of North’s long distance commuters on their dream-like journey into the depths of Canada as they pontificate about the pace of modern life, the moral equivalent of war, and large scale engineering challenges.
The narrator Gould has already started to mentally tune out by this point, but his hyperactive poetic imagination draws him back like a magnet to a simple powerful revelation, which he amplifies with a glorious musical crescendo. Although the outward journey continues, his personal train of thought has already reached its destination.
For us, he says, the moral equivalent of war... the thing that forces us to confront ourselves and aspire to acts of great heroism... is going North.
-o-
This article was originally published in Radius Newsletter No.16, February 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment