JACK CLAYTON –
THE INNOCENTS – 1961
The film is a marvelous black and
white film. It Has the magic of black and white; It has the depth of buildings,
inside and outside, only seen in shades of grey, particularly dark grey. It has
the perspective of shade and shadow and the menacing, awesome, fearful, fathomless
profundity that implies some gravity in the drama. Cast in this partly old
Tudor and partly old Georgian mansion this black and white “coloring” or
absence of “coloring” is frightening, disquieting, perfect for the atmosphere
that is expected from the story. We are entering a horror story.
The film chooses to emphasize one
aspect of Henry James’s story. The absolute paranoia and even maybe worse,
something like psychosis, of the main character who is given a name she never
had in the novella, Miss Giddens, giddy indeed from even before the very start.
This naming the unnamable makes it more normal whereas the whole film is going
to show she is absolutely berserk, from the very first instant we see her. I
will regret the age of the actress. This governess is supposed to be hardly 20
or over by one or two years maximum. The actress does not fit that assumption.
She cannot be in her first job just out of her family. She is too old and she
behaves and acts too old, and her immature psychosis in front of some fear that
is her own and she turns into a fright, a panic, or even worse, does not fit
with this too obvious age.
Apart from that, right from the
beginning she seems immature and emotional, like for example having the coachman
stop at the gate for her to proceed on foot is absurd when you know everyone is
waiting for her at the door of the mansion, servants and children (even if only
one child at that moment). The fact that she finds the girl in the park around
the mansion though she should have been at the door waiting for the arrival of
the new governess is unacceptable even for a house where there is no master,
except a housekeeper. The governess is at least surprisingly unaware of what
she does not do right, but there is something wrong in the general picture.
And sure enough the film insists
on her becoming more and more deranged by all kinds of noises and fears she
develops in an old mansion she is convinced is haunted in a way or another. The
two dead members of the personnel become her fixation: the previous governess
who killed herself in the lake, which is not the original version, and the
valet turned house manager whose death is not made explicit in the way it
happened. But the innuendo about an unacceptable pregnancy is pushed aside. It
is even hinted that the previous governess was old and not so beautiful.
The insistence on the relation
between the children and these tow people is excessive and at the same time
meaningless because the cause of the two kids coming under the guardianship of
their uncle is not clarified enough and the two kids are not shown as they
should: traumatized by the death of their parents, traumatized by their uncle
sending them to this country mansion in some sort of exile, and traumatized by
the death of the two people they had built a transference relation with. All
that counts for nothing because it is not used except to build the phantasm of
some haunting ghosts in the mind of Miss Giddens. And anyway what is wrong with
a man teaching a boy how to ride a pony? You have to be particularly perverse
to see some evil in that kind of action.
As for the children being
possessed by the ghosts, the film does not show it really. They are close and
that is normal since they have survived together at least three traumatizing
losses, and they feel Miss Giddens is not entirely sane from their very first
encounter. Miles will even say so and Flora in her final temper tantrum says
about the same thing. In fact the children are just at first testing the woman
and then playing with her when they find out she is haunted by some fright of
some ghosts she imagines around her. They may be cruel but they are not
haunted. Miles is depicted as cruel as cruel can be when he pushes the woman
into her most vulnerable unacknowledged mysterious psychological layers by
kissing her on the lips. Note this game is maybe a little bit too strong for a
ten year old boy, and it is not what the original novella says: Henry James
showed in details how the nameless governess was emotionally attracted and that
this attraction was sexually haunted by the belief that anything physical was
wrong, especially for children, and yet at the same time this nameless
governess was physically attracted by the boy she kisses and hugs at least
profusely.
Then the final death of Miles,
rejecting Miss Giddens who is insisting on the presence of Quint’s ghost,
remains unexplained really. It appears as if it were a way to protect himself against
Miss Giddens but that is overreacting really and the final scene of Miss Giddens
kissing the dead boy on the lips is just absurd. She likes her children dead so
that they run no risk to be perverted . . . by her, and yet she desecrates Miles
with a necrophiliac kiss.
The psychology of these two
traumatized children is overlooked and the perverse desires of Miss Giddens are
underrated, so that the film seems to have no real explanation: we are dealing
with some unexplainable events, though these events can be entirely explained
with a little of help from the first psychiatrist we can come across in the
underground. The film is of course from the very early 1960s and that was a
time when we considered psychiatry as a science of psychological diseases and
we refused to consider non-clinical psychiatry explaining the behavior of
people in a more meaningful way than behaviorism. And unluckily that’s the
final explanation that floats on top: the mansion is haunted and it took
possession of its inhabitants, the children and the new weak and very obtuse
governess.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 4:42 AM