Up a Backlit Staircase, Casting a Long Shadow
71
catatonic state, so in surrendering Jessica to her final fate—again, another more
final death by voodoo—she is merely allowing a kind of nature to take its
course. In the eyes of the narrative, Betsy is not facilitating Jessica’s death.
Betsy is merely standing by while larger forces work their way through. The
problem, as always, is that present or not Jessica is as mute as her fellow
madwomen. She can say nothing. Her story belongs to Betsy.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Juan Martinez
Notes
1 This is a very clumsy way of saying that any figure placed on the extreme foreground
immediately makes the viewer—or me at least—very uncomfortable, particularly when
we can only see the back of his or her head. It creates tension, partly because the figure is
resisting our impulse to look: we are not to look at him or at her. We’re not watching him
or her. We’re watching through that figure at what that figure is interested in. But there’s
a certain creepiness—a definite sense of the uncanny—in doing so. Campbell brings up
the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich as an example, but an even better one—or a
better one at explaining why this tension works so well—might lie in two fairly common
film tropes: there’s always a moment in a David Lynch movie where a character will lean
in and whisper something at another character, but the audience is not allowed access to
the information imparted; there is also, in nearly every Japanese and Korean horror movie
ever made, a moment where a spooky, blurred figure will approach but not actually
engage the protagonist—will often not even look at him or her, will have his or her back
turned—and the mise en scene here will also mirror Welles’s, Stevenson’s, and others:
the viewer sees the back of the protagonist’s head, and the protagonist will also be
approaching a disengaged figure, one whose back is often also turned.
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