The Haunting of Blah Manor
Diversity! Muddled themes! Anachronistic costumes!
Spoiler alerts for the entire dumb show, obviously.
If you’ve been friends with me for long enough, it’s very possible — even likely — that I’ve made you listen to me talk at length about Gothic fiction. I’ve never been particularly interested in the old stuff; I prefer reading/watching/discussing things from the 1950s onward. But even though I don’t have much desire to reread Wieland or The Castle of Otranto, I know enough about how their respective cultural contexts shaped their ideas of horror and how those conventions translate into modern Gothic works like The Shining, Relic, or Annihilation to issue a ruling on Netflix’s new series The Haunting of Bly Manor and that ruling is: it sucks.
Not all the critics agree with me. A lot of them said it’s a moving portrait of loss and forgetting or whatever. I mean…maybe? I don’t think it was, but I’d be open to hearing a persuasive argument. What I can tell you is that as a piece of ostensibly Gothic fiction, it failed completely.
Let’s start with the setting: England. Rural England, in fact, which will be important later. British Gothic and American Gothic typically have different root sources of horror because the original sins, such as it were, of each country are very different. British Gothic is all about the tyranny of the ruling class and the monarchy — that’s why the old, crumbling castle is such a prevalent trope. It represents the ways in which previous generations consolidated power and wealth at the expense of the lower classes and how the current inhabitants typically cling to those things in some way, which ends up being their undoing.
To say that this factor is ignored in Bly Manor is a grievous understatement. Skipping ahead to the interminable eighth episode in which we learn the identity of the Lady in the Lake, we find out that Viola was an heiress in the 17th century (wearing 19th-century clothes and whose husband was dressed as an 18th-century lord) who caught tuberculosis (diagnosed by a 14th-century Italian plague doctor) and made her husband promise to give all of her fine jewels and fabrics to their daughter when she came of age.
Here is where the story could have been Gothic: if the husband or daughter, faced with financial ruin, had refused to sell the jewels, instead clinging to the last vestiges of their nobility and pride, and the jewels had subsequently become haunted, that would have made some sense. Instead, Viola’s sister mercy-kills her after having consumption for SIX YEARS (because she’s “stubborn”) and marries her husband. We’re supposed to think that this is very conniving and evil of the sister, but honestly it seems shittier of Viola to expect everyone to live in the house with a very contagious person for that long. Then, after the husband drives the estate into the ground, the sister wants to sell the jewels to keep their family (and Viola’s daughter!) afloat. This is Very Bad and Selfish, according to the show, and Viola’s ghost strangles her sister, and then the husband and daughter throw the trunk (with Viola inside? It’s never really explained why her ghost would be stuck in a trunk) into the lake and flit off to America.
If you thought that trunk, its physical contents or the husband and daughter were coming back at any point as a representation of generational trauma or the danger of holding onto past glories, you were very much mistaken. Instead, we’re supposed to think it was…good? that Viola consolidated her family’s wealth? And that her murdering a bunch of people is a reasonable response to the situation that she caused?
WE HAVEN’T EVEN GOTTEN TO THE PLOT.
Okay. So. Dani, an American closeted lesbian who is being briefly haunted by the specter of her dead fiancé, takes the job of au pair to two precocious British children whose previous au pair died by suicide and whose parents were killed in a tragic accident and whose uncle refuses to visit them for Mysterious Reasons. She arrives at Bly to find that everyone else who works there is a very attractive 30-something and also there is a ghost! Who is also very attractive!
You will notice that the cast is very diverse. This is objectively great! It is narratively nonsense, because they do not address this at all nor does it factor into the subsequent horror of the piece.
American Gothic is more traditionally rooted in racial trauma, since the country was literally founded on genocide. However, that doesn’t mean that England gets to skate past on its history of colonialism and violence. Owen, the chef, is played by British-Indian actor Rahul Kohli. India, as you might know, was forcefully occupied by the British for roughly two centuries, so you would think that the presence of an Indian family in rural England had potential for some good haunting. Nope.
Nor is the presence of two Black women noted. While England does not have the same relationship to slavery that the US does, it was absolutely involved in the slave trade and if the complicit past of an aristocratic family came back decades later to haunt the inhabitants of its manor, that would be fascinating!
That’s not what happens here.
Instead, we quickly learn that the ghost Dani is seeing is, in fact, a ghost. (There goes that source of narrative tension, as well as any resemblance to The Turn of the Screw, the show’s loosely-hewn-to source material.) The children are creepy, the sexual tension is thick, blah blah blah.
Finally, Dani makes out with the gardener (who makes a terrible speech about moonflowers and why she prefers plants to people) and suddenly she’s not haunted by her fiancé anymore! Again, all narrative tension gone.
Some stuff happens (over and over and over again, because the central conceit is that people can become trapped in their own trauma and must return to it endlessly) and then the ghosts try to possess the children and then Dani is taken by the Lady of the Lake, who has been murdering people for decades and trapping their ghosts at Bly because she misses her daughter! But she escapes and the Lady takes the little girl instead! But then Dani says a dumb incantation and the Lady disappears but we know she’s inside Dani because one of her eyes changes color!
The curse is lifted! All the ghosts are free! The children can go live with their uncle/father in America!
But poor Dani. She knows that, against all narrative and thematic reason, she is still haunted. Even when she and the gardener move to Vermont and open up a plant shop, she knows that it’s only a matter of time before the Lady resurfaces. (Literally. In a sink full of dishes.) So Dani has to…go back to Bly and drown herself?
WHY.
Dani’s story has absolutely no connection to that of the Lady. Dani’s trauma, her repressed sexuality and guilt over her fiancé’s death, completely disappeared from the narrative as soon as she kissed the gardener. Not only that, but thematically, it has nothing to do with Viola’s trauma of being kind-of murdered and “forgotten” (which was really her own fault since she strangled her sister and made her husband and daughter think that the trunk was haunted. Because it was.)
Again, if they’d tied in Dani’s rejection by her family because of her sexuality (this is complete projection on my part, since the show never addresses this) or if she and the gardener had had to hide their relationship because of small-town prejudices or something, there might have been a way to tie the stories together. But nope. She’s just another lesbian casualty.
There’s so much more to talk about: how the show glossed over the fact that Peter ghost-murdered two people and was emotionally and physically abusive to his girlfriend when he was alive but we’re supposed to think it was some sort of love story; the ridiculous framing device of the narrator/gardener telling this story to a bunch of people the night before a wedding; what the dollhouse had to do with anything; the almost-but-not-parallel-enough-to-make-a-thematic-point storylines of people coveting their siblings spouses; the mind-numbing repetition of “Sleep, wake, walk” and the saccharine “perfectly splendid.”
But I’ve been talking about this for long enough, so I will leave you with a question from my friend Jill (who also designed my header and logo and is available for all of your freelance design needs!):
Until next time, don’t get haunted and wear your goddamn mask!
