Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Ruins of the Free State Hotel

Carnival of Souls (1962)
directed by Herk Harvey
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library

"Coffee never keeps me awake" might be new favorite line in a horror film. Candace Hilligoss's delivery is so close to the listless, dreamy exchange between Fred and Renee in Lost Highway* and, like that conversation, funny in a quiet way. The camera cuts to Mary with her head on the pillow and her open eyes--angled slightly apart--are not tired like an insomniac's but far away like a somnambulist's.

Mary is never any closer than far away. Harvey once said he didn't always plan to include the final reveal, and the moment when the men who were in love with Mary trail her footprints from the pavilion to the lone hand print in the sand--the last indication she was anywhere at all--is a better conclusion, anyway. As in Laura, everyone is in love with a dead girl.

But Mary isn't missing, but in some intermediate state. The parameters of her purgatory are never made clear: is her soul unconvinced of its fate? Why is death frightening and not merely insistent? Mary is an independent woman, not afraid to be unlikable or to set off on her own. She takes no obvious pleasure from day-to-day existence but notices when the birds stop singing around her. The absence of birdsong scares her; she does not need human contact to still be a part of the world.

Loneliness, as the basic human condition, is too brutal to face head-on, so Carnival of Souls is a romance. Not in the conventional sense--the only man with any obvious sexual interest in Mary is the other tenant in her boarding house, and he courts her at an aggressive, lascivious lurch--but because the space that Mary moves through is elevated by what Harvey sees around her. She's sunlight, in a way.

Whether watching a film directed by a dead man exacerbates one's sense of isolation or assuages it is a question I can never quite answer. It comes and goes with my moods. In the daylight, loneliness is a little morose (and sometimes overwhelming). At night it can be worse. But nighttime is a movie's best shot to convince you that a distraction can be something more than simple disengagement from too much thought or too much feeling.

So the interior of Mary's car becomes a way to light her face as she drives through the desert at twilight. The currents in the river where she drowns draw out the grain in the film. Carnival of Souls looks as lovely as Laura, but on a different scale. All Mary can say as she stumbles out of the water is "I don't remember"--what she lost, or who she was, or why she crawled from the car at all. She didn't, but she did. She can't find her way on her own.

* "What are you going to do?"

"Stay home, read."

"Read? Read? Read what?"