Sleepy Hollow

The global problems of today may be imputed to many ills – industrialism, usury, ignorance, inter alia – but among those countries of Christian heritage, the problem is one: the acceptance or denial of the Bible's literality. You will not have to look far to find the deniers, who seem to believe the most scientific arguments are the ones yelled most loudly and most frequently (for people who worship dark and endless silence, they are conspicuously noisy). Their primary mistake, of course, is thinking that the non-occurrence of a Biblical event argues the non-occurrence of all Biblical events and an invalidation of the religion itself, which is a little like not finding a particular glossy leaf and denouncing an entire forest. Those who take the Bible as the infallible word of God, however, deem the practical impossibility of some Biblical events a mere avocation from their task of gospel-spreading and brimstone-throwing. As such, both sides are far off the mark. The Book of God for the Christian is a tome of moral principles, illustrated in many cases by what we suspect are fables, and in many others by what we believe are the greatest events in the history of mankind. It would be too easy to accept all this literally, and, indeed, literal truth is best found in the concrete jangle of numbers, formulas, and measurements. Figurative truth is a much more elusive quarry; a fine way to approach the nightmarish happenings of this film.  

We begin with a scene which I cannot spoil since it will be repeated with varying effect more than a half-dozen times. What we can reveal is the date: July 15, 1799, a decade and a day after the French decided that neither cake nor bread could console them. Since our film does not seem to be overtly political, we do not immediately understand the implication of this detail, but its importance will manifest itself in due course. Six months shy of its first century (never mind those who would correctly begin count in 1801) as a free nation (never mind that truly free were only Christian white men of Northern European stock), America's United States still have a very European marrow, the region of our concern being the Dutch settlements of upstate New York. It is then of little surprise that the main signatory to the last will and testament that captions our opening sequence is a certain Peter van Garrett. What is a surprise, however, is what soon befalls this hitherto omnipotent landlord, whose last glimpse of earth involves a scarecrow that could not possibly have been designed for birds alone. We next meet Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), an idealistic forensic mortician who reviles the iniquitous interrogation methods of the New York City police – where he just so happens to be employed. Crane's squeaky defiance is nothing new, yet he manages to rile a Burgomaster (Christopher Lee) to such a degree that the latter opts to dispatch him to a "mostly Dutch" community, "two days' journey to the north," where "three people have been murdered in the last fortnight, their heads lopped off as clean as dandelion heads." The old functionary punctuates his harangue with a long finger and the warning, "Remember it is you, Ichabod Crane, who is now put to the test." (Crane is a proponent of post mortems and other such ghoulish scientific work, which the Burgomaster labels "experimentations.") Crane accepts this unusual assignment as an indication that science can triumph anywhere over any obstacle; we are later provided, in the film's worst parts, psychobabble-inspired nightmares that should have been excised, with a reason for his blind faith in science (which will also account for the curious puncture marks on his hands; the less said about this plot detail, the better). Yet for what he is about to witness, we and the steadily dwindling population of Sleepy Hollow sense that Ichabod Crane's library might not have a ready diagram.  

The three victims, we read in Crane's journal, are Peter van Garrett ("a prominent land owner"), Dirk van Garrett ("his son"), and Emily Winship (merely "a widow," a woman not even defined by herself or anyone living, although the same could be said of Dirk van Garrett). Crane arrives at Sleepy Hollow and notices what one is supposed to notice in films of immense foreboding: namely, that everyone ogles the newcomer then shuts her windows before he can ogle back; that extreme measures are being taken (an odd makeshift fortification suggests a turret) against the evil; and that amidst the approach of death, people seem to be more amenable to indulging in some last-minute vices, such as the lusty couple straddling the darkened doorstep that opens onto a very civilized ball at the house of Baltus van Tassel (Michael Gambon). Van Tassel is van Garrett's proprietary successor and, as the de facto lord in this fiefdom, will head the cabal of village elders, none of whom would be mistaken for a paragon of righteousness. There is the Magistrate Philipse (the late Richard Griffiths), who enjoys idle gossip as much as any stereotypical chambermaid; Doctor Lancaster (Ian McDiarmid), who has a bad habit of looking over his shoulder; Reverend Steenwyck (Jeffrey Jones), as upstanding a citizen as most priests are in thrillers; and the dead-eyed, grizzled notary Hardenbrook (Michael Gough), who must be the luckiest man in Sleepy Hollow to have lived to such a ripe old age considering his perfect firetrap of a hut. At the ball Crane also makes the acquaintance of van Tassel's young daughter Katrina (Christina Ricci), who comes complete with jealous beau, a proclivity for spells and other occult appurtenances, and a recently acquired stepmother (Miranda Richardson). The unanimous elders expound their theory on the murders to Crane, even going so far as to thump a Bible in his vicinity, but the coroner remains convinced that the perpetrator is "a man of flesh and blood" (he is, as it turns out, only half-right). It should be noted that a crucial detail in the narrative of the Hessian mercenary who would go on, local legend insists, to become the ghostly killer that haunts these parts, is seen but not discussed. This information is so vital to the plot that one cannot fault the first-time viewer who either does not register the detail or only recurs to it hazily once its significance becomes obvious. The slayings of course continue, including the film's one really objectionable scene implying the death of a child, and Crane has a lot more dots on his hands to connect. 

While critics concur that, fifteen years after its release, Sleepy Hollow persists as one of the most visually pleasing films you will ever experience (I have seen it four times and it remains sensational), some have lambasted Burton's "infidelity" to the original story. But this is all hogwash. Irving's seminal tale implies something rather unfortunate about more than one of the characters, a scarcely-concealed reality that would play poorly on screen (although one brief scene offers a taste). No, Burton's vision has it right: the best tales do not undermine, but overmine, overreach, and overdo their passion. The trick to tempering those sentiments is to have superbly drawn characters, a tight plot, and, most importantly, a moral bearing, and what Sleepy Hollow does very well is allow Crane initially to exist in a parallel dimension. He does not believe, or does not want to believe, a word the locals tell him about the killer despite what we may justly term overwhelming physical evidence. When, at the film's midpoint, Crane comes to lend credence to the legend, he deduces the pertinent minutia – before the killer actually appears – with the same cold logic he sought to impose on the villagers. This is the script's finest touch: a skeptic contemning the people for believing what he deems a myth, yet once the myth seems true, expressing even greater contempt for their not combating it more vigorously. And what about that cardinal in a cage? Perhaps Crane's notion of truth and appearance might be better than we first thought. 

P.'s Correspondence

Were it only possible to find out who are alive, and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of my life, somebody comes and stares me in the face, whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted never more to be pestered with the sight and sound of him. 

The unreliable narrator has become a staple of postmodern writing, as unreliable a "movement" as you'll find in any human epoch, precisely because the "art" of the postmodern sits like a row house within the artfulness of the con. We have had interesting liars throughout literature; but the vast majority have lied for something noble, or something so dear that, for but a fleeting moment or two, they have even gained our pity. But how is one to pity a crook? What empathy resides in our hearts for those who wish to deceive simply for the sake of deception? Why should we care about those whose business is to hide their true feelings – if, of course, they had any true feelings to begin with? No, the best symbol of the postmodern is the labyrinth with no minotaur or treasure at the center, not even a path that leads back on its own pebbles. The reader has navigated the zags and zigs and come to the clearing. Here he finds a card, a simple paper card, blank and ornate, yet to the discerning eye very cheap, and he stops to pick it up. And it is then that he looks around the topiary trim and espies not shrubs, but large green cut-outs in plainest carton, all of which begin to collapse simultaneously like the house of cards the postmodern has always been. True art resides in the eternal genius of men, in their moral mettle, and in their sincere striving towards spine-tingling bliss – nothing more and nothing less. A fine introduction to this odd and seminal work.

Our narrator will pass the baton rather quickly to his beleaguered friend, the eponymous P., who "has lost the thread of his life," a wonderfully sad way to soften the report of creeping senility. If we were, that is, dealing with senility:

All this is not so much a delusion, as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon a stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence.

These characters will turn out to be the major figures of English Romanticism, but let us take our cue from the date of P.'s letter, included integrally in the text, of February 29th, 1845. The date, as we know, is impossible; yet its impossibility prepares the reader to receive the text as the fantastic "moonshine" of someone who may not be able to separate our reality from the courtyard of his private dreams. P.'s own description of his environment does nothing to dispel this impression:

Sitting as I do, at this moment, in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of Queen Victoria – listening to the muffled roar of the world's metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London – with all this positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why – would you believe it? – that, all this time, I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber with its one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars – that same little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought you to visit me.

Some would assume that time has so retrenched P.'s mind that he does not even realize the place of his own incarceration, likely an institution (he will recur to that "row of iron bars" towards the story's end) for those from whom reason has departed forever or in whom it never bothered to take root. We suspect, however, that neither condition truly befits our narrator. Not that this indeterminate state could stop him from strolling through an imaginary London peppered with more than a few imaginary literary acquaintances: Byron, now obese and, his newfound religion in mind, a violent bowdlerizer of the works of his juvenilia (the real Byron, as we know, enjoys eternal youth); Burns, senile and sentimental; Scott, nearly paraplegic, and empty of everything except what distinguished his particular adventures from everyone else's ("whether in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in infinite variety"); Shelley, now a preacher; Coleridge, once of unlimited potential, now a mediocrity bereft of all traces of his mad genius; and Keats, the sole member of this unwilled fraternity who has survived both corporally and in reputation. Lesser lights also twinkle in P.'s dark evenings, but that is likely owing to his wish to incorporate all those past who influenced his own rapturous sighs. And despite the fact that most of the spectres are British, our text ends with two questions for this American diplomat who, like the rest of P.'s pantheon, has long since quit our green earth. 

Some believe that elements of our strange little story would furnish, a couple of generations past Hawthorne's own lifetime, that most nebulous and anti-intellectual of genres, science fiction, with a niche of beastly boringness known as alternate history. The chief difference being, of course, that P. is simply revisiting his heroes (both he and the addressee of his letter allude to P.'s failed literary aspirations), not transforming them into zombies, aliens, or rogue planets. What the space-and-race pundits omit to mention is that every literary man worth his salt will daydream in terms not unlike those P. so boldly lays out for his public. That said, the actual reimaginings of deceased writers now alive, if well past their literary primes, is not the usual manifestation; more common is a dialogue in which the dreamer revels in meeting his masters only to discover (if the dreamer is himself a first-rate genius) that the man whose work he has worshipped is a bore, and possibly also an unkempt and lumbering oaf. There is also the small matter of the moral pendulum of these same esteemed letters, an accusation he launches at a decrepit Scott ("the world, nowadays, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth, than he was qualified to supply"). It is therefore appropriate, one supposes, that Shelley, the most virulent opponent to society's mores, is accorded the keenest change of heart, and that his early works are explained thus:

They are like the successive steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential to the support of the whole, as the highest and final one, resting upon the threshold of the heavens.

Shelley is still read in English survey classes, although he remains one of those authors one embraces when young and barely tolerates when older. Alas, not even such fame will ever be the lot of P.; although he will never stoop to the lows of anarchism and other such inanity, he will also never rise to the sublime perfection of this poem. "The reality – that which I know to be such," writes our resigned narrator, "hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably prominent illusion." Which is why some people never find themselves able to choose between the two.

Esenin, "Душа грустит о небесах"

A work ("The soul beholds the clouds and grieves") by this Russian poet. You can read the original here.

The soul beholds the clouds and grieves,
The residence of fields not here.
My love burns when upon the leaves
Hot greenish fire draws my gaze near.

Like candles warm in secret shape,
These boughs of gilded trunks will glow,
And stars of words illuminate
Primordial leaves of long ago.

I know what ‘earth’ may well entail,
Yet I cannot its torture shake,
Like waters’ deep reflecting dale
Of passing comets’ fiery wake.

So no good horse would shake its tress,
Its spine reflects a drinking moon.
If only eyes like mine would crest,
As leaves like these in endless swoon.

Number 13

Admirers of Germanic Scandinavia – I am fortunate enough to count myself among their numbers – will all concur that what distinguishes this miraculous swath of civilization from the rest of our globe is something we may term secularity, but what is better understood as modernity. Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and my beloved Denmark have all endured enormous changes when one considers at what juncture of development these countries lay just a century ago (as depicted, for example, in this film). Yet peace and prosperity, both of which have been showered on Scandinavia for almost seventy years, have that funny tendency of making the beneficiaries forget about basic values. Scandinavians have dammed that slippery slope by the sanest hybrid of capitalism and social welfare the world has ever seen, and while a few are frightfully rich, far fewer can be deemed frightfully poor. Such is the point of government: help the weak, allow the strong to flourish only when they simultaneously aid society, and allow everyone the same opportunities. The results, of course, will necessarily not be the same. There will be still be arrogant peeves over materialism, individual freedoms, and the separation of Church and state, and there is little we can do for people so devoid of imagination that they need their neuroses ballasted in law. Which brings us to this old tale.

We find ourselves in this town, somewhere between the Great Wars, but definitely far out of the reach of current events. Our protagonist is a certain Mr. Anderson, a Church scholar and linguist particularly enamored with the migration of faiths through these Northern lands. His current journey is justified by the news that "in the Rigsarkiv [National Archive] of Viborg there were papers, saved from the fire [of 1726], relating to the last days of Roman Catholicism in the country." Of course, there is no such thing as the "last days of Roman Catholicism," simply the first days of another, closely related system of beliefs – but let us be more precise. What should be understood here is that the original formations of faith are never swept away by novelty, however long novelty has been around; they invariably persist in some form or another. Hence the omission of room 13 from circulation at our destination, the Viborg lodge the Golden Lion, something "which Anderson had already noticed half a dozen times in his experience of Danish hotels." Anderson wishes himself a larger room, and gets it: room twelve, "fairly high and unusually long" with three windows on its side. Very satisfied with this arrangement, he plans his long workdays with that mirth unique to scholars. And since he first entered his quarters during daytime, it is only at night that he remarks the anomalies:

It was not difficult for him to find his way back to his own door. So, at least, he thought; but when he arrived there, and turned the handle, the door entirely refused to open, and he caught the sound of a hasty movement towards it from within. He had tried the wrong door, of course. Was his own room to the right or to the left? He glanced at the number: it was 13 .... [Later] it occur[red] to him that, whereas on the blackboard of the hotel there had been no Number 13, there was undoubtedly a room numbered 13 in the hotel. He felt rather sorry he had not chosen it for his own. Perhaps he might have done the landlord a little service by occupying it, and given him the chance of saying that a well-born English gentleman had lived in it for three weeks and liked it very much. But probably it was used as a servant's room or something of the kind. After all, it was most likely not so large or good a room as his own. And he looked drowsily about the room, which was fairly perceptible in the half-light from the street-lamp. It was a curious effect, he thought. Rooms usually look larger in a dim light than a full one, but this seemed to have contracted in length and grown proportionately higher.

Nowadays, of course, Danes couldn't care less whether an Englishman – well-born or otherwise – stayed in a hotel or, for that matter, did anything at all. Our scholar betakes himself to the National Archive the next day and represses this oddity.

What happens subsequently is, for the most part, what one can expect to happen in a story by James, that is, fantastic eloquence striped with utter dread. As is also common in his work, the tale is related by someone who did not experience it – the very hallmark of ghost stories who nourish themselves on the amplifications of word-of-mouth. In this case, the narrator is Anderson's cousin who later reveals that he possesses a tome whose frontispiece ("representing a number of sages seated around a table") was made by this infamous engraver. Strange things begin to occur in their habitual fashion and yet the anxious reader may become puzzled that Anderson, as someone clearly with a sideways interest in the occult, would not detect the hints. One in particular that perhaps should remain undetected:

The light was behind him, and he could see his own shadow clearly cast on the wall opposite .... Also the shadow of the occupant of Number 13 on the right ... Number 13 was, like himself, leaning on his elbows on the window-sill looking out into the street. He seemed to be a tall thin man – or was it by any chance a woman? – at least, it was someone who covered his or her head with some kind of drapery before going to bed, and, he thought, must be possessed of a red lamp-shade – and the lamp must be flickering much. There was a distinct playing up and down of a dull red light on the opposite wall. He craned out a little to see if he could make out any more of the figure, but beyond a fold of some light, perhaps white, material on the window-sill he could see nothing.

Should we add that the Golden Lion is "one of the very few houses that were not destroyed in the great fire of 1726"? It was right around that time that a hideous pact was completed between a future scholar at this university and, well, the being you would normally associate with hideous pacts. But we – and Anderson – still cannot account for that one night when he hears a song.  

Blue Car

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

                                                                                                                   Yeats, "The Stolen Child"

Were there ever a French version of this film, the first change imposed, I would imagine, would be the elimination of its non-diegetic music (unless a soundtrack features Bach or something of comparable solemnity, it is best to let the viewer contemplate only nature's din). Thankfully, these treacly insertions will compose the work's only flaw. The acting is absolutely first-rate – at times breathtaking – the vignettes maintain impeccable pacing, and the one truly preposterous event is rendered somewhat plausible by its occurrence early enough in the film so as not to serve as a distraction. That Blue Car is also a directorial debut filmed for a pittance makes it all the more impressive.

Our protagonist is fifteen-year-old Meg Denning (an astonishing Agnes Bruckner), who opens our story by reading a wretched poem of which the less said the better. Wretched not only because of its unavoidable puerility ("I am the disease that rots the bark of trees/ I am rust and gravity"), but also because, well, Meg is truly miserable. Her single mother (Margaret Colin) divides her futurelessness between an unwanted job and a time-heavy night school curriculum, her younger sister Lily has resorted to self-mutilation and a hunger strike, and Meg's father departed many years ago in the titular vehicle, never to return. Her one escape is the Advanced Placement English class of a dashing fellow by the name of Tony Auster (David Strathairn). Auster seems very much the educated gentleman, except for a noticeably crooked smile, and if we know anything about smiles, we know that good people do not bare their teeth like wolves. In fact, we may not realize it at the time, but with his first spoken words Auster provides us everything we need to know about his character. When Meg has concluded her reading of "Blue Car" – a poem that will go through several variants in the course of the film – a classmate breaks out in fake sobs, to which Auster replies: "Mr. Clark, this is AP English. If you can't extend a modicum of respect to your classmates, you are free to go right on down to auto shop." Comic effect aside, since when has auto shop been less admirable a course than AP English? Are both skills not necessary for the advancement, literally and figuratively, of humankind? Therein lies the problem with dear Mr. Auster, who possesses all the snobbery of a literary genius without any of the talent. That is to say, a literary genius will tell you, and firmly believe, that auto shop or cooking or dance class while charming in their way all invariably detract from a poet's lifelong quest for inner perfection. He will be right, because he can contribute to the world by means of a much rarer gift – but let us return to Mr. Auster and, as he calls her with simpering deference, Ms. Denning.  

One melancholy afternoon after Ms. Denning has missed a bus home (Ms. Denning's afternoons are consumed by the surveillance of Lily, who cannot be left alone for more than a few seconds), Mr. Auster finds her walking by the side of the road and pulls over. We are pleased to report that Mr. Auster's car is a grey not a blue Saab. But Mr. Auster, who affects a pleasing Midwestern accent occasionally reserved for serial killers, is far too interested in the life of his young student. There is a poetry contest whose state finals Mr. Auster presides over and whose national finals will take place in Florida (we are, importantly, beneath the linden trees of Dayton, Ohio). Wouldn't Ms. Denning like to participate in the statewide contest? We stand corrected: wouldn't Ms. Denning like to win the contest and go to Florida with, among other people, that dashing Mr. Auster? What eventually takes place between these two characters is so inevitable and yet drawn with such attention to detail that it feels at once perfectly awkward and perfectly correct, and a few scattered thoughts occur to us. How many times before has Mr. Auster taken on a pretty prodigy and lured her – I mean, encouraged her to go – to a much-ballyhooed competition far outside her parents' purview? Why does Mr. Auster so enjoy quoting this famous work? Maybe for the same reason that he also quotes Yeats and Wallace Stevens, because that is what a decorous student of twentieth-century literature is supposed to do. He won, it is said, a writing competition nine years ago, which explains his large house; there is also the matter of what he carries around in that leather bag of his, but that revelation awaits the viewer alone.

A few other characters add some color and, more importantly, delay our main event. A drug-dealing brother of one of Meg's friends shows her how kids don't need parents to destroy families, since they can do it all by themselves (Meg's criminal exploits exhibit, alas, the ease of habit). Having evinced a pathological disregard for her own well-being from her first words on-screen about a Mexican self-mutilator, Lily charts and completes her own Calvary. She starves herself into hospital care, raves about angels, collapses on a church altar, ends up in the psychiatric ward, and then mysteriously falls out an open window. This whole sideshow, which culminates before the film's halfway point, allows the script to erase the blue car's basic premise: Lily, after all, was the spitting image of her father, and with her death he is no longer allowed to see his surviving daughter. Interestingly, Auster also endured a family tragedy, although we don't believe it when he first casually broaches the subject because we know he is capable of saying anything that a magic moment requires. When we later meet his wife Delia (a scene-stealing Frances Fisher), however, we know that something awful has indeed happened to his family. Delia's happy-go-lucky act, including one of movie history's most tantalizing sips of a gin and tonic, cloaks her obvious pain, although she is not numb to Auster's lusty looks at his prize pupil. Her appraisal and tacit acceptance of Meg, one that she seems to reconsider in a later scene, is stunning in how clearly yet subtly all the information is conveyed, a much more common conceit in a French film that relies far more heavily on gestures and silence than Hollywood's tirade-laced melodramas.

Why do I keep thinking of a French version of Blue Car? Perhaps because it so intentionally differs from this infamous novel, which at times is nothing more than a very French romance gone very wrong. The romance in our film resides in what we may loosely term poetic development and more properly term the growth of the human soul. Meg has some artistic qualities, surely; but her willingness to lie, cheat, and steal suggests that her most dominant trait must remain her callow age (term papers can be written about the film's motif of the necktie). Her path is marred by her ambition, an obstacle for all poets, but not in the sense that she encounters. If she really believes Tony Auster to be an artist trapped in the guise of a high school English teacher – he lacks only the pipe and plaid-patched blazer – then she may also believe many other things that will ultimately betray her. But betrayal is the first step to cognizance and redemption, and teenagers scarcely know the devastating range of life's wicked twists. Even if they will always remember that first, eviscerating dagger.