Crimson Peak questions
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hidden_passagesDoes Thomas really come to Boston with the original intent of pursuing Eunice McMichael rather than Edith, or is she (as I assumed ) simply deluding herself as to his interest? She seems an entirely unsuitable target for the Sharpes' schemes, since she has a living mother and brother who are both highly likely to interfere.
(And apparently the Sharpes are able to afford to spend time in fashionable London, despite the state of their finances, since that is where the McMichael family made their acquaintance...)
Why does Lucille object that Edith is an unsuitable target because she is too young? Surely that would make her more naive and malleable?
If Thomas chooses to fix his interest with Edith rather than one of the other girls because he is genuinely attracted to her, despite Lucille's warnings and her father's disapproval (which risks him intervening to prevent the wedding, or else cutting her off without any money in the event of a runaway match), then what on earth does he suppose the outcome of a marriage between them is likely to be? Is he simply shutting his eyes to the uncomfortable fact that his sister is busy killing off every woman she sets him to seduce?
(And apparently the Sharpes are able to afford to spend time in fashionable London, despite the state of their finances, since that is where the McMichael family made their acquaintance...)
Why does Lucille object that Edith is an unsuitable target because she is too young? Surely that would make her more naive and malleable?
If Thomas chooses to fix his interest with Edith rather than one of the other girls because he is genuinely attracted to her, despite Lucille's warnings and her father's disapproval (which risks him intervening to prevent the wedding, or else cutting her off without any money in the event of a runaway match), then what on earth does he suppose the outcome of a marriage between them is likely to be? Is he simply shutting his eyes to the uncomfortable fact that his sister is busy killing off every woman she sets him to seduce?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-01 05:33 pm (UTC)You'll also get more of Lucille and Thomas' childhood, and (from what I recall--I need to read it again) more of Thomas' POV about Eunice.
Why does Lucille object that Edith is an unsuitable target because she is too young? Surely that would make her more naive and malleable?
She tended to prefer it when the target of their greed was older, so that Thomas wouldn't end up falling for the woman in the way that he did with Edith. Edith might be young, naive and malleable, but she also still had people that would notice if she just up and disappeared, too.
Such as Alan. Or her father until he was done away with by Lucille.
The other women were isolated in their lives.
With the last question, yeah. He's closing his eyes again against any untoward thing getting in the way. He just wants to pretend nothing bad is happening all around him.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-01 09:43 pm (UTC)It's just possible it might still be there, though the lifespan of movietie-in paperbacks on the shelves tends to be short...
Elements from early versions of scripts that were never actually used always occupy a rather questionable position in continuity for me (for example, the various deleted scenes used to pad out the DVD are mildly interesting, but the director definitely made the right call in excising them; they wouldn't have improved the finished film). There turns out to be a long and absolutely fascinating 'deleted scene' in the original newspaper serialisation of Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera", for instance, which settles some major fan controversies... but it didn't make it into the final edit of the novel (mainly, I suspect, because it really does make things too clear too early in the plot), so if I'm writing "Phantom" fan-fiction, from the perspective of my characters those revelations were never made!
I think it depends if it's unseen backstory that is compatible with what was eventually shown -- I've heard that del Toro apparently did distribute more detailed biographies of Thomas and Lucille -- or if it's a matter of elements that were superseded by something else during development (like the SF show where the telepath is described in the novelisation as having red-coloured irises, but where they subsequently dropped the idea from the script because it wasn't practical to film).
A interesting idea that Lucille actively picked unattractive women because she was worried about losing Thomas (although again, Eunice doesn't seem to fit that template any more than the 'isolated' one; I definitely got the impression she was pursuing Thomas rather than vice versa, and that before I knew there was anything questionable about the Sharpes at all!)
A couple more questions: if Carter Cushing is successful enough not to have done any manual labour for years (he's now a self-made businessman taking investment decisions rather than a common steel worker), how can his hands still be rough? A spell of a few months in hospital is normally enough to soften the horniest palms into vulnerability, never mind years of comfortable wealth -- has Cushing been moonlighting from the office on his construction sites for old times' sake? ;-)
(And conversely, given that Thomas and Lucille apparently have no servants to do the labour of the house and that Thomas has a workshop full of manual tools and has been helping construct his inventions himself, it seems unlikely that they would have perfect aristocratic hands...)
The ghosts that appear in Allerdale Hall appear to be dripping red because their bodies have been dumped in the clay vats. (Edith's mother died of the 'black cholera' -- I don't know what we deduce about Lucille, unless that her body lies unburied and gradually withers to black...)
But Lady Sharpe is the odd one out; her body can't have been taken down to hide in the clay, because its discovery in the bath is reported (with illustration!) in the newspapers. Unless it's a case of red water from the plumbing again.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-02 02:23 pm (UTC)One or two elements of those biographies that he privately provided the actors are sprinkled in the novel. For instance, the manner in which their father died. Otherwise, I don’t know if anything was ever really revealed to anyone else.
I’m going to check, but I might have the pdf of the novelization, too, still, if you like. I gathered everything for a Yuletide 2015 story, and kept it handy.
A couple more questions: if Carter Cushing is successful enough not to have done any manual labour for years (he's now a self-made businessman taking investment decisions rather than a common steel worker), how can his hands still be rough?
A spell of a few months in hospital is normally enough to soften the horniest palms into vulnerability, never mind years of comfortable wealth -- has Cushing been moonlighting from the office on his construction sites for old times' sake? ;-)
A question I never thought of, actually! He’s definitely doing something on the side, in some manner for Edith’s benefit. But yes, there’s bound to be more than a single callous on Thomas’ hands, with the equipment he uses.
I always felt that Lady Sharpe must have been buried on the surrounding grounds. There’s clay everywhere in the area, so it’s not just in the vats, it's the soil itself. No matter where you go on the grounds, it’s there. If there is some graveyard near them, it's bound to taint things—as you see with it seeping through the snow around them.
I can say the ending could have been worse, since it was originally meant to include all the people that Lucille killed coming back as ghosts and dragging her away. Her at the piano is a nice callback to the only place she felt at ease, in a way.
Oh, and did you ever see the deleted scenes? One of them is Lucille. She sits at the piano, slowly going mad while Edith and Thomas are at the post office. Playing one note over and over again, as she stares upward at her mother's portrait.
Edited to add: And over the scene, you hear Thomas reading Edith's book. "A house as old as this one becomes, in time, a living thing." It continues on a bit from there. It's the passage you hear in the trailers, but never in the film itself.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-03 03:34 am (UTC)That's interesting, because it very probably explains just why I've been having so much trouble writing a scene from Thomas's point of view towards the start of the film -- it turns out to be very difficult to write him in a way that's consistent with later events without its coming across as a complete whitewash. Basically, he kills people (or at the very least gets people killed for his own advantage)... and if he isn't a calculating monster, then how on earth does he justify it to himself?
The scenario only works with the character's motives left obscure and the reveal delayed; once you try to look at it from his point of view you have to start asking yourself what he thought was going on. He doesn't appear to have been going through enormous angst; in his private exchanges with Lucille at this point he seems to have been a full partner in the plan.
In the end I've gone for the option that he doesn't *let* himself think about what is going on, based on his comments about trying to avoid uncomfortable experiences; he knows it on some level, but in order to stay reasonably sane and functional he just shuts all these things away in a box marked 'unfortunate but too disturbing to face up to right now'. I notice that even at the end of the film, he clearly has no intention of breaking with Lucille, even after she has tried to murder both Alan and Edith in front of him and he tries to save them -- as far as we can tell, he appears to be cherishing the illusion that from now on he can just run a sort of harem with his sister *and* his wife, on the assumption that both women will cooperate! I rather like that touch, actually; it shows that he *is* pretty messed up and not thinking straight, which makes his other behaviour more comprehensible... and it's less of an obvious moral message than having him conveniently change sides to repudiate his sister after deciding that she is Evil (whereas she wasn't before?)
I have a lot of time for Thomas (he is a much more compelling character than poor token Alan). But he is mentally very confused!
I'm not sure the death of their father is mentioned at all in the film -- I think Thomas just says that he went abroad and dissipated a lot of money. He doesn't seem to have been a significant presence in their childhood; presumably he predeceased his wife (although a scenario in which he arrives back in the country and finds Beatrice gruesomely murdered, the house shut up and his children packed away might be interesting!)
Yes, it makes sense that Lady Sharpe was buried locally and hence in a red clay grave...
(I don't actually think the snow *would* have been stained red all round the house, as shown in the film, unless there was raw earth underneath *and* a whole load of people/animals trampled over it. What we actually see is tussocky grassland, and snow that fell there would simply rest on top of the grass and melt slowly into isolated patches -- even snow that falls on mud doesn't dissolve into muddy slush unless it gets walked on, in my experience. But practical physics/geography are not a strong point of this film -- its version of Cumbria bears a strong resemblance to Gold Rush movies, down to the clapboard 'depot' that hires out horses!)
I thought I had seen the deleted scenes, but I don't recall that one. (I never saw the trailers.) I remember a scene with Alan and the butterflies in the park, and I think an extended version of the boardroom demonstration scene... and a scene with Thomas downstairs in the hall, I think, but that's only a shadowy memory.
I've checked the online library catalogue, though I can't see the branch availability info from here; the "Crimson Peak" novelization still shows up as present in the library stock, although it also shows as only ever having been borrowed once, which is not the best of indications! I'll try to remember to call in tomorrow afternoon.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-03 02:57 pm (UTC)Or so he thinks. Again, closing his eyes to the horror, just as he has managed all his life. You have it exactly right, with his not wanting to experience any discomfort by fighting. He’s been in denial for his entire life, and thinks what he has with Lucille is normal. In his mind, as you mention with the harem, he could make it work and everyone might be fine—deluding himself.
With the original script, I think the ways the ladies were killed were different, and at least one person had a name and city of origin change.
When it comes to their father, I do remember it’s definitely mentioned in the novelization. Lucille poisoned him with the tea over a period of time, until it weakened him enough for some sort of accident to occur when he was out of the house. First, he was killed. Then, later, Lucille killed Beatrice.
Yes, those deleted scenes were included on the DVD. For some reason, a lot of the time I haven’t seen that one included in uploads on Youtube, but I managed to find it;; skip ahead to 3:26, Lucille At The Piano.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-07 02:33 am (UTC)Yes, I found it. (That section with 'Sir Michael' and the comedy peasants isn't one of the book's greatest moments, though the subtle manipulation Lucille uses on her brother in the following scene to convince him that it had been his idea all along to look for dirty books in the library is nicely done.)
It doesn't actually say that Lucille weakened their father with the tea, but it does say that she drugged him on the morning he was riding out to hunt, and sabotaged his tack to ensure there would be an accident. And that their mother helped...
Lady Beatrice is one of the other inconsistencies; when Lucille first shows Edith her portrait -- and she looks about sixty in that painting; just how old was she when Thomas was born? -- she implies that their mother spent a lot of time not only out of the house but out of the country, but later passages describe her as bed-bound for much of their lives. Presumably she originally travelled with their father, until he somehow or other broke her leg.
(Quite difficult to do just by beating someone up in the ordinary way; I think she must have been on the floor at the time, and he must have deliberately trodden on it, going by the description.)
The passage about Eunice immediately follows, as well: it says she was so bedazzled by Thomas's title that she asked silly questions about his visits to the royal family, and whether he owned a crown. (I'm not sure that's very credible in a girl who spent time in London society, visited the British Museum, etc.; she must have acquired a sensible knowledge of etiquette and precedence, and just how minor a rank that of baronet actually is.)
What the book *doesn't* attempt to explain is why Lucille would consider Eunice with her voluble and meddling family to be a suitable target for a 'mercy killing', other than finding her so annoying that it would be doing the world a service to get rid of her :-p
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-07 09:14 pm (UTC)From the commentary track, Del Toro once said that he made it resemble his own grandmother. There was never a real answer for Beatrice's age, though I'd think that the spousal abuse caused bed rest and the harshness of her personality made her look beyond her years.
Yeah, with Eunice there are more people to wonder what happened to her. Hence why she's a bad idea, and Lucille is off the mark when it came to her in the novelization.
I think Thomas had other less kind things to say about Eunice in the original script, when he was a different person entirely. One of them might have actually been that last--making the world better without her. Heh.
(Oh, and on Ao3, you mentioned the devotion of Alan. He was briefly described as the golden retriever of the fandom, for how devoted he was to Edith. Poor thing.)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-11 01:43 am (UTC)You see, Raoul de Chagny has also been characterised as "the golden retriever of the [Phantom of the Opera] fandom" -- fair-haired, sunny in temperament, devoted to the point of self-sacrifice... and uniformly ignored as canon love-interest in favour of rewriting the plot to ship the heroine with the brooding mysterious stranger who reduces her to hysterical terror and kills people :-p
I could never understand the attraction in that, because I was seeing things from Raoul's point of view, where he is confused, horror-stricken at his own failure to save the woman he tries to rescue, and determined never to let them be parted again. (And it did occur to me that that first scene I wrote for Alan is scarily close to the first story I wrote for Raoul, where he is in the Phantom's power and trying to bargain with his own life to attain a moment's distraction).
But now I come across this fandom, and for the first time I get it. Because Alan does absolutely nothing wrong: he's unselfish, he's resourceful and intelligent, he's brave and loyal and devoted and clean of heart (and if he ends up having to be rescued by the lady, why so does Raoul...) And yet compared to the elusive, damaged, doomed Thomas, he's far too perfect to be interesting: he just comes across as a none too subtle embodiment of all-American virtue in the face of those wicked English aristocrats. I found him tedious and slightly irritating, exactly as people describe Raoul... up until the moment when Thomas stuck a knife into him, anyway ;-)
(The answer, of course, is as always to consider the characters as people from their own points of view, and not as symbols of anything. Alan is chivalrous but deeply uneasy about Edith -- has the best man really won? And the more he learns, the more desperately angry and afraid he gets: desperate enough to believe or hope that simply being right is its own armour. And of course he has his own background and history -- intersecting with Edith's, but from his point of view, like everyone else's, the world is centered on him ;-)
But I still find Thomas more instinctively compelling (partly, I think,because he represents the intellectual where Alan represents the solidly physical) and want him to justify Edith's belief in him, even though objectively he really doesn't deserve our partisanship any more than the Phantom does. There is at least the justification for it that Edith does love him in canon, and that their relationship offers him a chance at redemption, as opposed to the Phantom's unwanted and unrequited love which is the cause itself of monstrous things... but if she loves him, it is because he quite cynically seduces her, and because she doesn't yet know the truth.
Tortured bad-boy allure strikes again... and this time I'm no more immune to it than the rest.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-11 02:07 am (UTC)A proper gentleman of the era ought to have his back hair much shorter behind the ears than that and better shaped, and the front swept back and up rather than just around... the whole thing is just shapeless and floppy. Apparently Alan has never heard of macassar oil :-p
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-03 04:00 am (UTC)What I don't have is any plot ideas, other than Lucille's general reactions to the whole situation!
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-04 10:43 pm (UTC)"Her mind cast back to how it was that..." as a lead-in to the plot was pretty clunky as well, as is much of that introductory chapter. Which is a pity, because it's got some quite good writing later on (or perhaps I was just getting caught up in the story) -- it's the beginning that is reminiscent of bad fanfic, but of course it's the beginning that has to catch the reader in.
(Maybe not such a problem with novelizations, as the target market is people who just saw the film -- but I hadn't!)
I'm not entirely sure that it was a good idea to write sections from the point of view of the house itself(?), but presumably that was an attempt by the author to cover the scenes in the film where Edith as narrator isn't present or isn't aware of what's going on.
The book actually seems to be much closer to the finished picture than a lot of novelizations I've come across; I think I spotted some additional lines of dialogue that may well have simply been cut from the script, but there isn't a lot of inserted backstory/additional sub-plot, or conversations and descriptions that add a lot of new material to what was seen on screen, or are simply inconsistent with it. It pretty much is a reproduction of the film.
[Edit: actually, I've just this minute encountered one -- Holly refusing to divulge the information Cushing paid for, and Alan threatening to punch him until he does! And another: Edith drops Enola's key into the clay vat.]
I just thought of another 'question': all that melodrama about Thomas going to great lengths to stab Alan non-fatally could have been avoided if he had been thinking a little more rationally :-p
He is holding a knife in his hand that's stained with Alan's fresh blood; Alan is already bleeding heavily and in a state of collapse. He may not have trusted Alan's acting ability, but Lucille isn't going to know the difference if he just fakes the blow with the bloody blade and leaves the intruder collapsed and unconscious on the floor (which is pretty much how he does leave him, in the end -- he's already taking the risk that the wound is going to leave the supposed victim writhing in vocal agonies on the floor, instead of causing him to appear conveniently dead!)