NETFLIX AND THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

FILM AND LITERATURE are two very different mediums, and it is pointless to expect a smooth translation from one to the other.  There are reasons why Arwen was at the Ford of Bruinen rather than Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings; reasons why Mat Hooper doesn't hook up with Ellen Brody in the film adaptation of Jaws; and yes, even reasons why Ozymandias's sinister plan in the cinematic Watchmen doesn't include tentacles.  It's pointless to rail against such things.  Very few films are scene-by-scene faithful to the books that inspired them.

There are a few.  Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is essentially just the novel put up on the big screen.  Robert Mulligan didn't stray far from Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird.  And in 1963, legendary director Robert Wise did an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House under the title, The Haunting.  There have been two subsequent film versions, one in 1999 and now a ten-hour television adaptation for Netflix.  Wise's faithful version is widely considered one of the finest haunted house films ever made.  The two subsequent versions missed the entire point.

Now, I did not object to the complete overhauling of the novel's plot; Jackson's legendary novel is far too short and to the point for a ten-hour binge-worthy Netflix adaptation.  Making the protagonists a family, rather than a collection of strangers brought together to investigate a haunted house, was not on the face of it a bad idea.  Nor was it a bad decision to flash backwards and forwards between the characters as children--when they lived in Hill House and it destroyed their mother--and adults still dealing with the echoes and the fallout of that tragedy.  But when fate has handed you one of the scariest pieces of fiction ever written to work with, you might wish to pay attention to the engine that makes it work. That engine is Hill House itself.

What distinguished Jackson's novel is that we are never really certain if Hill House--despite a reputation for being the "Mount Everest of haunted houses"--is really haunted at all.  Are there ghosts in Hill House?  We never see any.  To borrow a line from H. P. Lovecraft, "What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers."  That is the essence of Hill House.  People have terrible accidents there.  People kill themselves there.  But the implication is not that specters walk the halls, it is that the house itself is bad. Stephen King understood this, referencing Hill House directly in his 'salem's Lot.  His own Marsten House--like Hill House--holds evil in its "moldering bones."  King, like Jackson, is asking us to consider the possibility that a house, like a human being, can be wrong.

In the novel, and the superb Wise adaptation, there are poundings on the doors, there is writing on the walls.  But not all of the characters hear the poundings, and we are never really sure if it was a ghostly hand or--far worse--one of the characters wrote the words themselves.  To sum the Jackson novel up in the colloquial, Hill House is fucking with their heads.  People died there, but did they actually leave any ghosts?  Not according to Jackson;

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Hill House, "not sane," stands "by itself."  Whatever walks there, "walks alone."  The problem with the 1999 adaptation, and now Netflix's, is that the house is not alone.  It is filled to the rafters with ghosts.

Don't get me wrong, the Netflix The Haunting of Hill House is a bit more subtle about it than the 1999 version, and is superior to that one in nearly every way.  Right up until the tenth and final episode you can't be certain the ghosts are real or just hallucinations.  But it is in that final installment that the writers and producers demonstrate they either never fully understood the point of the novel or they simply did not care.  Hill House is bad, yes, but the ghosts are real and some of them are "good."  A husband is reunited with his wife there and they two of them live happily ever after as ghosts forever.  The Dudley's die there so they can live eternally with their child.  And in a rewritten line that is essentially a giant middle finger at Shirley Jackson, "whatever walks there, walks together."

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to rewrite books for films.  The film version of Goldfinger, for example, turns Ian Fleming's daft idea of the ultimate bank robbery into a far more chilling act of terrorism.  Yet despite this change, Goldfinger remains fairly true to the core of the novel.  This Hill House doesn't give a damn about Jackson.  It just wants to cash in on the title.

If you like well-written family drama, if you like uplifting tales of familial love overcoming obstacles, this is a good series for you.  It has genuinely scary moments, and the final revelation of the secret of the "Red Room" is brilliantly done.

But if you were looking for The Haunting of Hill House, go rewatch Robert Wise.    

STAR TREK DISCOVERY: SOME THOUGHTS ON ESPISODES 1 AND 2

BEWARE, AHEAD IT IS DARK AND SPOILERY UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THE FIRST TWO EPISODES

Star Trek returns to the small screen by becoming something it hasn't been in a long time...relevant.

YOUR IDEAS ON STAR TREK probably depend on where you started.  Take, "continuity," for example.  If you began with The Next Generation, or any of the shows in that era like Deep Space Nine or Voyager, continuity is probably something you expect.  These were shows, after all, that adhered to a strict writer's bible.  If you began with the original series, however, continuity is not a big deal.  Star Trek was a show that made everything up as it went along. Klingons changing appearance?  Been there, done that.  Somewhere between The Animated Series and The Motion Picture they sprouted their bony brow ridges and somehow fans managed to survive.  Compare this with the Internet lamentations about the new Klingon appearance in Discovery.  

Continuity is one thing, but maybe the biggest difference between old school fans and those who started with the spin offs is what you think Trek is "about."  If the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Trek is a program about a bright, utopian future, where mankind has left savagery behind, you probably started with TNG.  The original series was a lot messier, often darker, with a Federation that struggled towards high ideals but was still plagued by very relatable problems.  Indeed, if you started with this Star Trek, your impression of the show is probably not so much a rosy vision of the future, but rather a social commentary on the difficulties of the present.  This is territory where The Next Generation was far more reluctant to go.

The first Star Trek was on TV in the middle of the civil rights era, and it did not shy away from tackling the hot button social issues of its era.  Racism, sexism, the Cold War, it's all addressed right there in the composition of the bridge crew. Female officers worked right alongside the men, from the first "Number One" to Lt. Uhura.  There was an Asian pilot and a black officer.  There was a Russian on board that no one was trying to kill.  Of the issues of that day, racism was perhaps the most commonly addressed, in multiple ways.  Sarek and Amanda had a mixed marriage and biracial child; "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was a blatant tale of skin color and prejudice; the first interracial kiss on television between Kirk and Uhura was not shown in many southern states.  We could go on and on, but the point is original Star Trek was social commentary in the form of stories about the future.  It was a mirror turned back on its audience.  

Which brings me to Discovery.

That there was actual Internet outrage over the diversity of the new cast shows us how necessary it is for Discovery to turn that same mirror on the modern Star Trek audience.  We are not, as a society, as evolved as we thought.  Fortunately, Discovery doesn't shy away from this, and stands right up alongside Star Trek in confronting our most pressing social issues.  It is right in your face with it.

Of course there is diversity; the two senior officers are women, one Asian and one Black, and we will have the first openly gay couple on Trek played by gay actors.  But frankly we expect by now Star Trek to beat the drum for diversity.  Diversity is just assumed to be part of the genre package, and we know Trek will always champion it, despite the noise made by Internet trolls.  Fortunately Discovery goes much further and is more specific in wrestling our present demons.  Nor does it waste any time.  Right there in the first two minutes it jumps right in.     

Would-be Klingon messiah T'Kuvma opens the series with a  speech that could easily have been made by any of the "very fine people" who brought their tiki torches to Charlottesville over the summer.  It's a monologue that would roll off the tongues of any of Europe's far right.  It could easily show up on Trump's teleprompter.  What it amounts to is a call to arms, a struggle between "nationalism" and "globalism."  T'Kuvma is arguing that traditional values of the Klingon Empire are under threat by a cosmopolitan coalition of diverse cultures (the Federation), that his people should reject diversity and "remain Klingon."  Embracing what the Federation represents would be "losing purity" awash in the "muck" of mixed races and cultures.  The Klingons must protect their uniqueness and their "heritage." 

This new Star Trek ain't playing around.  

And in First Officer Michael Burnham, we are thrown the second major curve ball to deal with.  "Where is the line," her story demands of us, "between mutiny/treason and doing the right thing?"  When does conscience and best intentions trump the letter of the law?

We can argue with her decision to run around Captain Georgiou and seize control of the ship, but in the wake of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, of whistleblowers and the near constant leaks of information from the White House, this is an issue that the original Star Trek would have taken on too.  Sometimes, if you believe in a course of action powerfully enough, right or wrong you break the chain of command.  "I thought saving your lives was more important than the principles of the Federation," Burnham tells us.  No, this is probably not something Will Riker would have done, but need I remind fans out there it is exactly something that Spock did.  To Kirk.  To bring his previous captain to Talos IV.  Maybe it all has something to do with the way Sarek is raising his kids?

It is too soon to tell where all this is going, but I found "The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle at the Binary Stars" a welcome return to classic Trek, not just in the old school swoosh sound effect of the doors or the beeps and whoops on the bridge, but in the challenging spirit of it.  Yes, this is a very modern Trek, with Abram's Kelvin Timeline effects, dizzying shots, and lots of movement--the entire thing looks like a big budget film--but it doesn't feel anything like the cinematic reboots.  It doesn't feel much like The Next Generation either.  It feels like a Trek ready to get its hands dirty again, a Trek ready to make us uncomfortable and to make us think.  Will it follow through on these difficult issues?  We have to wait and see.  

But I can't wait to see where it goes next.

  

  

        

SHERLOCK SQUARED

Sherlock Holmes belongs to a fairly exclusive club, one occupied by other august (and Victorian) personages like Tarzan and Count Dracula. He is, simply, one of the most played, most adapted, most revised, most re-invented figures in fiction. According to Guinness, he's been portrayed by 75 actors in 211 films. This doesn't take into account stage or television.

These days we have at least three major incarnations of Holmes in play; well, two-and-a-half at least. We have Guy Ritchie's absurd over-the-top action Holmes, played by Robert Downey Jr. We have Hugh Laurie's House, who qualifies as the "half Holmes." This tale of a drug-addicted, interpersonal-relationship challenged mystery-solving genius was clearly inspired by Conan Doyle's detective, even in name ("Holmes" becomes "House," "Watson" becomes "Wilson"). But clearly the best of the bunch is the BBC's wunderkind, which despite consisting of only a handful of 90-minute episodes stretched over two seasons (or "series," to be British about it) is the best Holmes you've seen since Jeremy Brett.

Sherlock is a modern retelling of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Think Holmes and Watson in the 21st century and you've got it. We've seen adaptations of this kind before--the whackiest by far being 1987's dreadful The Return of Sherlock Holmes, where the great detective is thawed out after a century in cryogenic sleep (an idea so stupid it was recycled again in 1994 in Sherlock Holmes Returns). Sherlock is different. It doesn't bring Holmes and Watson into the present, it portrays them as belonging here.

Watson, played to perfection by The Office alumnus and soon-to-be-Bilbo-Baggins Martin Freeman, is an Afghan war veteran suffering PTSD. Encouraged to blog about the war and his recovery by his therapist, he ends up encountering the eccentric Holmes and blogging all about him instead, turning him into a kind of pop culture icon. This is a smart update of the tradition John Watson, an Army doctor who turned Holmes into a celebrity by writing about him. Freeman's portrayal manages to remain very faithful to Conan Doyle while at the same time giving Watson modern context and issues. He has precisely the right blend of exasperation, hero-worship, and protectiveness of Holmes that made the character the original Samwise Gamgee (couldn't resist another hobbit reference).

But the show is called Sherlock, and what sinks or swims any adaptation is the actor who takes on Holmes. This time it is the improbably named Benedict Cumberbatch, whose take on this played-to-death character is so freaking good you can't take your eyes off of it.

Cumberbatch's Holmes is a faithful incarnation; he is a genius whose racing mind never slows down, and unless has an impossible puzzle to work on starts tearing itself apart. The more negative aspects of the character are accentuated. Always a bit aloof and arrogant, this Holmes is so inside his own head he barely acknowledges the existence of other people. Like Hugh Laurie's House he is so charm-free that he's charming. Somehow.

The stories themselves are loose adaptations of Conan Doyle, again, brilliantly done. Series creator and writer Steven Moffat--who knows all about brilliant reinventions of characters after his smashing version of Doctor Who--excellently keeps the mysteries fresh with enough winks and nods to the Holmes tradition to keep devoted fans tickled. Case in point, his handling of the famous deerstalker cap, a piece of headgear we all associate with Holmes that he never actually wore. In Moffat's hands Holmes grabs the cap to quickly disguise himself, but is photographed in it and made such a celebrity in Watson's blog that the public (to his fury) immediately identifies him with it. This is just one of many touches that make the series excellent.

It is this triple blow of two wonderful lead actors and superb writing that make Sherlock must-see television, whether you're a Conan Doyle fan or not. In a world where Holmes has been played to death by a long line of leading actors, turned into Japanese anime, and even been portrayed by Kermit the Frog, the BBC's current revision is shockingly fresh.

THE DOCTOR

Doctor Who is often—and quite erroneously—explained to Americans as “the British Star Trek.” The problem with such a comparison is that, for all the fervor of its enthusiasts, Star Trek has always been peripheral to the mainstream American experience. Due perhaps to that stubborn old streak of American anti-intellectualism, Star Trek is generally watched by “geeks” and not spoken of in polite company. Doctor Who, however, has always been a family program, and the percentage of the British population glued to the screens to watch it is far greater than the percentage of American Star Trek fans. Who is, according to Guinness, the most successful science fiction series in history, both in terms of longevity and profitability. It is also, one could argue, only very nominally “science fiction.”

True, it is about an alien. When we first met the titular character in the November 23rd, 1963 episode “An Unearthly Child,” he was hiding in a junkyard, his remarkable alien ship disgused as an ordinary London police box. That first episode is dark, weird, and quite eerie, the story revolving around two teachers who cannot make sense of the mysterious new girl at school. A genius in mathematics, science, and history, the girl is befuddled and ignorant when it comes to the most basic things (in flashback, she mistakenly refers to British currency as a decimal system, and when the teacher corrects her, the girl responds that she had forgotten the British hadn’t moved to a decimal system yet). The teachers feel compelled to investigate, and follow her to her home address (the junkyard) where she apprently lives in a police box with her grandfather. Forcing their way in, they discover the truth; the girl and her grandfather are aliens, not only from another world but another time. We are told nothing else about them; not the name of their planet, their people, or why they are on the run from them. We are not even told their own names (the girl’s, “Susan Foreman,” is clearly an alias and her grandfather is called simply “the Doctor,” begging the question that gives the show its title).

Which is of course the crux of Doctor Who’s charm. There is no techno-babble here. Where similar science fiction programs struggle to explain the mechanics of things, Doctor Who veils everything in mystery. The show embraces Clarke’s assertion that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Thus, while Star Trek tech is from just a few centuries in the future and therefore expected to be somewhat comprehensible to us, the Doctor points out, his people had mastered all time and space when humanity was struggling with the wheel. Even if he tried to explain the workings of his science we wouldn’t be equipped to understand. His mysterious ship can therefore be physically larger on the inside than the outside, can change its appearance at whim, travel througout all of time and space simply by vanishing and re-appearing, and to some degree sentient, without us needing to know “how.” And the Doctor himself conveniently “regenerates” when seriously injured or an actor gets tired of playing him, changing both his physical features and to some extent his personality. Thus, eleven actors have played the Doctor in the series, but unlike the various James Bonds, they are all understood to be the same character in sequence. As the show unfolds it becomes clear that even the Doctor and his people have forgotten how everything “works.” They are so old they cannot even recall how their ancestors came up with the technology, and everything is veiled in ritual and evocative names (the black hole that somehow powers the whole time-travel thing is charmingly called “the Eye of Harmony”).

What this does is make room for stories, and oh...what great stories they have been. Doctor Who careens wildly between horror, historical drama, fantasy, action, comedy, and sci fi. And yet remarkably—impossibly—it follows a loose sort of story arc. When we first met the Doctor he was callous, self-absorbed, and utterly contemptuous of humanity. He abducts the two teachers who learn his secret and seems to spare them only at the urging of his grand daughter. He demonstrates over and over again cowardice and a lack of sympathy for the suffering of others. But it is through his travels, and his interactions with these human companions and others that follow, that the Doctor begins to evolve. He begins to care. In one of my favorite episodes of the program, The War Games (broadcast back in 1969), he even runs into a situation he realizes he cannot handle on his own and is forced to call his people. We learn a bit more about him here—he is a renegade being hunted by his own race, his ship stolen. But he risks capture and punishment to save other lives. It is a character-defining moment, splendidly acted, and the Doctor pays the ultimate price. His people help the human out and then punish the Doctor by exiling him to Earth, his vessel disabled, and in a weird form of capital punishment “kill” his current incarnation, forcing him to regenerate into a new actor (this matters only because we learn that the Doctor’s people ultimately only have 13 such lives in them).

From here the Doctor softens, working with the United Nations to defend Earth against alien attacks, doing his best to help the primitive humans learn and grow. When his ship is restored to him, he continues to act as a sort of crusader, righting wrongs whenever he can. As the series progresses, his schemes become grander, and darker elements of his past re-emerge. He becomes more ruthless in fighting for what he thinks is right, until finally destroying both his own home planet and its mortal enemies when the war they are fighting threatens the rest of the universe. After its 26-year run ended in 1989, the series returned in 2005 with the Doctor as the last of his race, a mythic figure so ancient and so far ahead of anyone else that he sees himself as the custodian of all creation. Despite his altruism, the Doctor’s old arrogance, his sense of absolute suoperiority, frequently rears its head, making him a very complex sort of hero. In what is arguably the single best episode of the revived series, the Doctor takes it upon himself to change history, saving the life of a woman whose death will actually inspire others to future greatness. Being the last of his kind, he boasts he no longer has to follow the rules. He is the “Time Lord Victorious” and can change history if he pleases. In the end, knowing what her destiny was supposed to be, the woman he saves commits suicide to restore the balance. It is brutal, deeply emotional, and highly philosophical all at once (not to mention a very clever inversion of the most praised Star Trek episode of all time, “City on the Edge of Forever”). It reminds us of what a previous human companion once said to him; he needed humans to travel with him because sometimes “you need someone to stop you.”

I have no doubt that the Doctor will make it to fifty. The revived series is going strong, and the Doctor Who brand sells better than ever. The premise is inexhaustible—stories anywhere in time, anywhere in space—and there are built in excuses to change lead actors and key sets. It continues to attract creative minds; Douglas Addams has written for Who,and last year the man behind Notting Hill and Love, Actually did a touching story about Vincent Van Gough. Now, Michael Moorcock—probably England’s greatest living fantasist—has written a Doctor Who novel and there is talk of him doing a script. Where the Time Lord will go from here is uncertain, but I will definitely be along for the ride.

AND NOW A WORD ON "BEWITCHED"

The year was 1964, and marriage equality was a hot topic across the United States. In more than half of those states, it was illegal for an individual to marry outside his or her own “race.” Some states, like Oklahoma, were specific in defining race (people of “African descent” were not allowed to marry people of “non-African descent”). Others were vague. Social conservatives, once again citing the Bible as grounds to prohibit such marriages, fought tooth and nail against more progressive elements trying to redefine what marriage was, and even periodically brought up ammending the Constitution. Interracial marriage would, they argued, destroy the American family. The Supreme Court finally ruled on the issue in 1967, ending this form or marriage inquality in Loving vs Virgina, but in ’64 it was a very contentious issue. And that was where a popular television program took a highly subversive stand.

I’m talking about Bewitched.

Don’t let Elizabeth Montgomery’s blonde tresses and girl-next-door looks fool you. The witches and warlocks in Bewitched were very intentionally presented as another race, rather than just a class or profression. You were either born one or you weren’t, and they came with their own exotic culture and customs. Sure, Samatha could “pass” as a normal suburban housewife, but then again lots of Americans could. Even in 1970, when my parents were married, my father was cautioned by his Catholic priest that my mother’s name, “Judith,” meant “Jew woman.” It wasn’t always about African Americans.

The issue of stereotypes and prejudices came up in the show time and time again, all cleverly concealed behind a thin layer of slapstick and special effects. When Samantha became pregnant, there was even some concern “what the baby would be,” and they didn’t mean a boy or a girl. Bewitched was taking aim at civil rights opponents and advocates of anti-miscegenation laws with its tongue firm in its cheek, and people were tuning it for eight years for reasons other than just seeing Durwood-Dumdum-What’s-His-Name being tormented by his mother-in-law.

And it wasn’t just racial discrimination. The key distinction between Samantha Stevens and many other television wives at the time was that she was no one’s subordinate. There was never any question that Samantha held all the real power in the relationship. She would consistently “yes dear” Darren and then do as she pleased the moment he went off to work. The Nickelodeon network years later would ask its voters who was more “powerful,” Samantha or Jeannie. One of the best answers came from a viewer who said it was obvious; Samantha never called her male partner “Master.” She definitely did not, and got her own way as often as he did. There was a feminist streak in Bewitched a mile wide.

And let us not forget Uncle Arthur, for whom Samantha was always asking people’s tolerance and understanding. In the late 60s, if you want the message loud and clear that the “eccentric bachelor uncle” may be light in the loafers you cast the spectacularly camp Paul Lynde in the role. Lynde’s sexuality was a well-known “open secret” in Hollywood, and he seemed to hall a ball with it in the show.

The message of acceptance even went to class distinctions. Watch the first few seasons, and Agnes Moorehead’s splendid Endora. Later in the show she was just whacky, in a moo moo and beads, but early on she was elegant, like an aged movie star. She was always jetting off to exotic locations in her life of leisure, and disappointed her daughter had “married down” into a life of domestic servitude.Bewitched’s live and let live extended to economics as well.

All in the Family and The Jeffersons would cover much the same ground, but Bewitched beat them to it. It would drive its point across with a smile, mock the prejudiced with laughter, and speak out for those discriminated against with a wink. It was spectacular sleight-of-hand.

And that was the most magical thing about it.