"The Haunting of Bly Manor"
“The Haunting of Bly Manor”
Death: why are you uncomfortable?
Purge Announcement
Haunting
Spirits of the further
Possessions
Spirits, lost souls, and wanderers
Protective incantations
Wake
Pre-Roll
Our existence in this plane has a gravity to it. What are the transience of our lives and the traces of our existence left behind within our material surroundings? We either leave a swell of joy despite the melancholy that surfaces when we pass. Or, we might not pass so peacefully, not so quietly. Our spirit, consciousness, mass of existence might be so confused, so distraught in the thought of timelessness and the overlays of eternity. It is thought that restless energy acts as a black hole, a void for those around it. They lure life to the edge of their horizon before absorbing their essence.
The philosophy of death.
The experience we know to be inevitable yet seldom is recognized as a part of life.
Spiritualist visualize life and death as an infinite cycle; a ceremonious cleansing of the soul.
Nihilists claim death to be merely the end of the line for our microscopic and insignificant existence in reality.
Are there moments we can be tucked away into? Will we land in the limbo realm as we search for the key to unlock another eternity?
Perhaps we relive an experience over and over again until the universal lesson is learned and we purify our perception in the purgatory of our mind.
Do we project out of our bodies as we recount the moments leading up to our departure?
Would we live out the life of every individual we ever had a connection with so we can acknowledge our sphere of influence? Our very own gravity well? Recognizing our silent magnetism.
How will it end?
No.. rather.
How will it start?
Before we embark on this journey: Some terminology
The Void
The Void is the philosophical concept of nothingness manifested. The notion of the Void is relevant to several realms of metaphysics. The Void is also prevalent in numerous facets of psychology, notably logotherapy.
To some the philosophy of the void draws parallels to absurdism. This can lead to a lifestyle of existentialism and/or nihilism.
The manifestation of nothingness is closely associated with the contemplation of emptiness, and with human attempts to identify and personify it. As such, the concept of the Void, and ideas similar to it, have a significant and historically evolving presence in artistic and creative expression, as well as in academic, scientific and philosophical debate surrounding the nature of the human condition.
In this sense, knowledge or experience of the Void could be said to actually be unknowing, given its inherent ineffability. In Western mystical traditions, it was often argued that the transcendent 'Ground of Being' could therefore be approached through aphairesis, a form of negation.
Philosophy
Western philosophers have discussed the existence and nature of void since Parmenides suggested it did not exist and used this to argue for the non-existence of change, motion, differentiation, among other things. In response to Parmenides, Democritus described the universe as only being composed of atoms and void.
Stoic philosophers admitted the subsistence of four incorporeal among which they included void:
"Outside of the world is diffused the infinite void, which is incorporeal. By incorporeal is meant that which, though capable of being occupied by body, is not so occupied. The world has no empty space within it, but forms one united whole. This is a necessary result of the sympathy and tension which binds together things in heaven and earth.”
Chrysippus discusses the void in his work On Void and in the first book of his Physical Sciences; so too Apollophanes in his Physics , Apollodorus , and Posidonius in his Physical Discourse, book ii.
There were questions as to whether void was truly nothing or if it was in fact filled with other things, with theories of either being suggested in the 18th century to fill the void.
Mysticism
Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard (1978) described an experience of sitting on rocks in the Himalayas as leading to an awareness of a Void at the centre, or the source, of phenomenal existence: "These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp in the Heart Sutra, that 'form is emptiness and emptiness is form' – the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything."
For Ken Wilber in Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), the Void is not mere nothingness, and is therefore distinct from something that can be subsumed into the category of nihilism, and is instead "reality before we slice it up into conceptualism". Here he explores the idea of Śūnyatā (shoon-ya-ta) a Buddhist belief of ontological state of being, which cannot be "called void or not void; or both or neither" but can be referred to as 'the Void' with, again, the proviso that it exists beyond the limit of language.
Stanislav Grof's distinction between holotropic and hylotropic experience is important here, with the former encapsulating experiences which connect to the Void.
Religious and Spiritual Conceptions
Absolute (philosophy)
Ground of Being - Dzogchen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism
Ma
Nirvana
Śūnyatā
Unmanifest
Substance or Cartesian dualism
Substance dualism, or Cartesian dualism, most famously defended by René Descartes, argues that there are two kinds of foundation: mental and physical. This philosophy states that the mental can exist outside of the body, and the body cannot think. Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the famous mind–body problem.
Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent realm of existence distinct from that of the physical world. In contemporary discussions of substance dualism, philosophers propose dualist positions that are significantly less radical than Descartes's: for instance, a position defended by William Hasker called Emergent Dualism seems, to some philosophers, more intuitively attractive than the substance dualism of Descartes in virtue of its being in line with (inter alia) evolutionary biology.
THE SCIENCE
Modern science has allowed researchers to observe brain waves pre and post mortem with the use of electroencephalography.
EEG Recordings of Patients Undergoing Life-Support Withdrawal
A study by Norton et al (published in 2017) recorded EEG activity in 4 terminal patients having their life-support turned off. One of the four patients displayed brain activity well into 10 minutes after they were declared clinically dead (i.e. absence of pulse or pupillary action). This patient experienced similar brain waves as to what is typically seen in deep sleep. This was in contrast to the slow death wave seen in the previous study that is seen in some people leading up to their moment of death.
Eliminating any technical issues that could have confounded the reading, as well as providing any neurological basis for the EEG recording this late after death, the researchers were unable to provide a reason why this patient displayed brain activity after death.
Typically, brain activity begins to fade a few minutes before death, and this was evident in three of the four patients. But for one of the four patients, persistent electrical activity could be seen and was not attributable to any technical malfunction. This was also independent of the slow ‘wave of death’ seen in rats after decapitation, or some patients leading to the moment of death. What was causing this is still unknown, but provides an insight into perception of the world even after death. Did this patient have awareness during this time, and is it possible that they had awareness after being pronounced dead? All four patients experienced unique EEG signatures in the frontal cortex before and after death suggesting death could be a unique experience for each person.
This concept was explored, I’d say rather poorly, in the film Flatliners
The Haunting of Bly Manor dir. Mike Flanagan (2020)
An adaptation to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Although the show was set in the fictitious English countryside of Bly, the filming of the Gothic mansion was done in Canada at Sheffield Park in East Sussex and Brympton d'Evercy, a manor house near Yeovil, Somerset. The building of an operatic narrative with backstories to every character with the persistent dread that was present in the series predecessor Hill House. This supernatural romance with overtones of Greek Tragedy explores the emotional melodrama on love, jealousy, selflessness, desire, responsibility and trauma. These concepts, of intermingled fates and repeated motifs that repeat over the course of generations, have become something of a signature of the stories told by Flanagan on both the large and small screens. The 2013 horror film Oculus now feels like a trial run for such concepts when looking back on it, and both Hill House and Bly Manor have now indulged themselves with deeper explorations of the same themes. Flanagan has little interest in telling straightforward horror stories—ironic, considering that he’s really quite good at it. Instead, his favorite narrative device seems to be the Möbius strip effect, in which constant asides and flashbacks slowly drop crumbs and morsels of a greater mystery for the audience to piece together. Bly Manor in particular catches the writer-director at his most Christopher Nolan-esque, and you simultaneously have to acknowledge the complexity of the series’ structure while also feeling that it may be a bit too impressed with itself.
But this isn’t a show/movie review or plot analysis. Let’s talk about the most common theme in Haunting which is: d e a t h
The episodic lament constructed within the Manor is built upon emotional memories, confusing hallucinations, and general ghostly visions. The labyrinth drains the will, identity, and what little humanity is encapsulated within the confused victims as they lose their will to reach the exit.
Episode 5, “The Altar of the Dead,” begins with the cook, Owen, talking about having just lost his mother to dementia. “We can’t rely on the past,” he says, referring to the crippling fear that one day, everything that makes you who you are, your memories and identity, will fade away into oblivion. Indeed, if trauma and grief were the major themes of Hill House, then Bly Manor is all about memories. The show often relies on flashbacks to tell its story, going back in time to explore the backstory of several of its characters, and we often see the same characters drifting away mid-conversation, as they get trapped in their own memories.
The show draws a direct parallel between this reliance on memories, for comfort and identity, and the ghosts that haunt the grounds. Unlike the ghosts that wander the grounds of Hill House decades after their loved ones died, those who die at Bly Manor slowly see themselves fade away as they are forgotten by everyone, until they lose every piece of their former selves. It shares thematic space with the Pixar film Coco, which is grounded in Mexican tradition and argues that a person dies three times: once when their body stops working, once when they are buried and a final time when there is no one left alive to remember them.
This is not entirely unlike Owen’s mom dying of dementia. The Haunting of Bly Manor portrays memories as the carrier of our very essence, our identities and the loss of that is what truly kills a person. In horror genre, Natalie Erika James’s film Relic, from earlier the year, draws a similar balance between the frights and emotional payoffs. Like Bly Manor, Relic uses the haunted house genre to tell a terrifying story that also touches on dementia. In that film, a woman goes home to take care of her elderly mother, but slowly starts to realize the house — just like her mother’s mind — is fading away. What makes Relic bloodcurdling is the realization that this isn’t some outlandish piece of fiction, but something you’ll likely experience yourself. It wasn’t enough to see the characters go through the horrors of the film, I left the theater with the crippling sense of dread that comes with knowing I’ll probably go through the same struggles with my own mother one day. In Bly Manor, the characters most afraid of the ghosts are those who understand this and know that they will become ghosts themselves over time, as their memories are forgotten.
Looking down the well - A study of Hannah Grose
The passing of the soul has been depicted as a state of limbo for some characters, while others are forced to come to terms as they evaluate their flaws defined in their character.
Like The Haunting of Hill House before it, The Haunting of Bly Manor hinges on a fifth episode that casts everything we’ve seen in a different light and frames the series for its second half. Unlike how Hill Houses “The Bent-Neck lady” reveled that one of the story’s core characters had effectively been haunting herself, traveling through time in a futile attempt to warn herself of her impending death, Bly Manor’s “The Altar of the Dead” reveals that the Gothic mansion’s housekeeper, Hannah Grose (T’Nia Miller), is already dead when the story starts. She has been a ghost all along.
Despite the reveal is later on in the season, the groundwork for the twist is laid from Hannah’s first appearance as Dani is introduced to Hannah and Miles. She’s staring into that well when we first see her, her shoulders unevenly hunched, and the first thing she does when she straightens up is place a hand to her neck, which has been snapped by the fall. Throughout the next four episodes, we’ll see Hannah refuse food and drink, supposedly due to a lack of appetite, and explain that she’s out of sorts because she hasn’t been sleeping well—her mind not yet having come to grips with the fact that she doesn’t need to sleep because she’s no longer alive.
The bravura is in the editing of the episode; rather than smoothing over the transitions, the episode, which was directed by Liam Gavin, highlights them. Hannah might open a door in 1982 and walk through into 1984, her movements fluid but everything else jarringly abrupt. It’s nighttime in one shot and daytime in the next, as Hannah jumps from one side of the screen to the other, her orientation flip-flopping so that she’s almost face to face with herself. (Ken Blackwell and Jason Hellman’s editing is spectacular.) Eventually Hannah finds herself back in the kitchen, in the middle of interviewing Owen, and at that point she starts to catch on. “Haven’t we already done this?” she says in that English way that suggests she regrets even having to bring up the subject, and Owen takes a beat before looking at her sympathetically: “Yes. But we have to do it again.”
Unwillingness to To Let Go
The Haunting of Hill House was at heart a story about childhood trauma, and at its core Bly Manor is about regret. Hannah is haunted by the time she gave to a man who didn’t love her, and the time she never had with one who might have. Dani is haunted by the ghost of her fiancé, a childhood sweetheart to whom she ended up engaged before she had the courage to tell him she was gay. It’s also about people who’ve lost their families, whether through tragedy or other means, building new ones. Dani, whose father died when she was young and whose mother abandoned her after that, tells the Wingrave children that being an orphan is special, because you get to choose the adults who will be in your life. Bly Manor’s residents make those choices, sometimes wisely and sometimes with fatal miscalculation, but the key to moving forward is not letting their past hem in their future. Although the series quickly departs from the premise laid out by Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw—the show is officially based on “the work of Henry James,” since it incorporates elements from his other ghost stories—it shares with that novella that it’s a story about the English authored by an American, premised on the idea that letting tradition stop you from reinventing yourself is a good way to end up in an early grave.
In episode 8 “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” we see the beginnings of Bly Manor through a black and white filter used to further implicate the century piece we’ve now entered.
Centuries ago, the owner of Bly Manor, Willoughby, passes away, orphaning his two daughters, Viola and Perdita. Viola arranges a marriage to their cousin, Arthur Lloyd, to Perdita's chagrin, who has developed feelings for Lloyd as well. After birthing a daughter Isabel, Viola falls ill with a lung disease. During a priest's visit, Viola refuses her last rites, insisting that she "will not leave". She becomes increasingly bitter and angry as her disease worsens, and she is isolated from the family, frequently emerging from her bedroom to search for her daughter. Perdita, no longer able to tolerate her sister's worsening condition, smothers Viola to death and marries Arthur herself shortly afterward. Having refused to leave Earth after death, Viola's spirit is trapped in a large chest in the manor, filled with dresses and jewelry she bequeathed to Isabel. Arthur's finances dwindle and, at risk of losing the house, Perdita opens the chest, hoping to sell Isabel's inheritance to keep them afloat. Viola's spirit emerges from the chest and kills Perdita. Finding Perdita's corpse, Arthur fears the chest is cursed and sinks it into the lake on the property before leaving with Isabel. Viola becomes the Lady in the Lake, emerging from the water at night to search the manor for her daughter and killing anyone else in her path, her memory fading altogether along with her face over the centuries.
Along with Viola’s spirit also emerges the philosophy of interactionism. Interactionism is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states. This is a position which is very appealing to common-sense intuitions, notwithstanding the fact that it is very difficult to establish its validity or correctness by way of logical argumentation or empirical proof. It seems to appeal to common-sense because we are surrounded by such everyday occurrences as a child's touching a hot stove (physical event) which causes him to feel pain (mental event) and then yell and scream (physical event) which causes his parents to experience a sensation of fear and protectiveness (mental event) and so on. We can see the chest and all of Viola’s treasures, along with the oath her and her husband promised their daughter to inherit, as a direct affect of interactionism.
Shame and Self-Forgiveness
Each of the characters in Bly Manor and The Haunting series in general, are battling the ghosts of their past; whether those battle be with childhood trauma, addiction, shame, guilt, or wrongdoings.
The reoccurring emotion in The Haunting of Bly Manor seems to revolve around shame. We see Peter projecting his stagnant career and underachieving present unto Rebecca, who he then pursues romantically and manipulates into possession, metaphorically and literally. Each character is surrounded by an atmosphere of shame from decisions they’ve made in their life. This collimation of clouds over the characters creates a thick haze, similar to the fog that sweeps the grounds of the manor during Viola’s wake from her lake and the walk towards her shameful grave. The grave not being the lake nor the chest in which the oath was set, but rather the bed where she lost herself. The bed where her identity and very nature contorted beyond recognition.
Viola
Before Viola slipped into the void, into her purgatory, she faced the stages of purgatory herself:
1. Stubbornness
2. Repentant
3. Pride
4. Envy
5. Wrath
6. Sloth
7. Avarice
8. Gluttony
9. Lust
Owen
feels the shame of not staying in France, even though he was more concerned with the duty of taking care of his mother. After his mother’s unfortunate passing he seems to live with the guilt of not doing enough for his own life. He recollects the empty remembrances given at his mother’s wake and how they were fractured frames holding the image of his mother. She became a husk of identity and the her inevitable passing could of had been handled by a patient, studied practitioner. Though Owen’s heart was in the right place to stay in Bly for his mother, his ambition for his future has lost meaning as it molds into the routine and monotony of his day.
Dani
Dani is introduced to have a childlike curiosity as she’s seen navigating the streets of the city with an adorable foldable map, love that for her. Within the first five minutes of the episode we’re introduced to the echoes of Dani’s late fiancé, Edmund, who we later find out was the victim of a horrific accident immediately after Dani broke his heart, sad innit. The guilt weighs her down as she feels responsible for his demise and for abandoning him and her life in the states after his tragic passing.
Jamie
The coolest queer to live out her cottage core fantasy on the grounds of the manor and with her partner during a time when gay marriage wasn’t yet legal in the states. When watching the show I was curious as to why Jamie didn’t have her own flashback episode to dive into her past. Without that introduction I was confused by what drives her to stay at Bly (other than a literal paycheck). Was she a ghost? Was she tied to the grounds out of guilt? Shame? In fact, it was none of the above. Jamie lived to the capacity of her means. She had a private yet intimate connection to her passions, including her adoration for Dani. The Haunting of Bly Manor and the narration that unveils the tragic story is, literally, Jamie. We are living in her process of forgiving herself for what she couldn’t stop. The inevitable journey towards death, towards losing a partner. The conversations between her and Dani were more than predicting a timeline for when Viola would fully possess Dani’s soul, but rather, the timeline towards separation. Dani anxiously anticipated the day Viola would digest her essence. As for Jamie, she would trim past Dani’s hysteria by comforting her and reminding her to live in the moment and to enjoy the time they have together and have experienced together. The thought of living for the moment can terrify some of those who prefer to strategize their approach to situations or to life in general. However, planning for the unknown, the inevitable, can inhibit us from enjoying the pleasures or even simplicities of life. We won’t recognize the moments we’re surrounded by, we’ll lose sight of those around us, the passions we enjoyed, and the fabrication that defined our identity. This is how Jamie needed to forgive herself. She needed to acknowledge her own advice to Dani and apply it to her own life. Years past as Jamie is married to the same daily routine, the haunting trope for the characters in Bly Manor find themselves in, hoping to conjure the spirit of her deceased Dani. Jamie fills the tub and sink with water and leaves the door cracked open. Although she knows Dani needs no key to be allowed in, Jamie finds comfort in the possibility that one day she’ll wake to see her love standing there, worry free.
Outro
The dead can only retrace their steps, hoping they’ve lived enough good moments to linger in. The Haunting of Bly Manor has a humane and bittersweet approach by directly addressing the nature, and the purpose, of grief.
Citations
van Rijn et al, 2011. Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’. PLoS One. 6(1): e16514. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3029360/
Norton et al, 2017. Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death. Can J Neurol Sci. 44(2):139-145. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28231862
Vrselja et al, 2019. Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem. Nature. 568, 336–343 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1099-1
