“The Favourite” Diary

November 15, 2020November 16, 2020 ~ Piece, of the Sky

We begin with Queen Anne, who is arguably the main protagonist of this story. She relaxes her neck, as the crown, which in real life is quite heavy, is removed from her head. In the final scene, she will bear down on Abigail’s head. When the two of them danced together, in happier times, Queen Anne repeated jokingly, “off with her head,” several times, as a part of a ritualized 1700s dance. This will not be the last of the film’s allusions to Alice in Wonderland.

Queen Anne gives Duchess Sarah a palace. Her glee at being able to surprise Sarah is infectious and is cute to see. Sadly, this is the healthiest we will see of Queen Anne in the entire film. It is difficult to imagine the character of Anne without her ailments, but I do wonder what the film would have been like, if most things had been the same, and Anne had been more physically strong.

The focus on health is further explored in the first real complex scene. It is a sequence that explores pain and agony. Abigail’s chemical burn, from being tricked into putting her whole hand into a bucket of lye, is overlaid onto a serious attack of the Queen’s gout. It is the first real time the two are going to be emotionally linked.

Here the audience first sees Abigail as a woman of action. As Queen Anne retells how she met Duchess Sarah, we see Abigail on a mission to get some herbs, first to soothe her hand and later to sooth the Queen.

As the Queen says Sarah’s pink shoes “disappeared,” Abigail rides off gallantly into the dark, of the early morning. As the Queen says the Cheever boy was removed, with a “crack,” Abigail looks up, startled, in the woods, since technically she should not be out here and has stolen a horse.

Abigail’s initiative earns her an initial reprieve, from her hitherto brutal existence. When the Queen passes by, in her wheelchair, Abigail’s cough seems legitimate, but in a world where her predicament is exceedingly precarious, Abigail is quick to claim credit for the herb, to which the Queen wonders, “That was you?”

Thus, Abigail begins to see into the world of Queen Anne. She becomes figuratively caught in a tug of war, between the Queen and Duchess Sarah, over a cup of hot chocolate, being forced, like a robot, to announce “I do not know what to do.” Little did they all know, this would not be the last of Queen Anne and Duchess Sarah’s tug-of-wars, over Abigail – only the least harmful.

Sarah finally relents and lets Queen Anne have her cup of hot chocolate, but doesn’t fail to embarrass Queen Anne, in the same sentence. Contrast this to a therapeutic mud bath Abigail takes Queen Anne to later, where Abigail comforts the Queen, telling her to imagine she is bathing in a tub of hot chocolate.

Irritated at been humiliated by Duchess Sarah, over breakfast – and in front of Abigail, no less – Queen Anne powerfully kicks out the chair holding up her hurt foot and demands to be taken back to her chambers. They begin the long, winding walk, down the dark hallway, to the Queen’s room, which will continue to symbolize Sarah and Anne’s relationship (Sarah will make this trip alone, shaken, twice). At the end of this specific journey, Anne, always looking regal, even in repose, is left alone in her stately quarters, still visibly upset, and hurt. It is truly lonely at the top.

The second major time, Queen Anne will be embarrassed and riled, by Duchess Sarah scolding her, in front of Abigail, will occur over a cup of tea, not hot chocolate. This cup of tea once again brings out Abigail’s knowledge of herbs, but this time for vastly different ends.

Duchess Sarah is sent off on a literal and psychosomatic trip, of Alice in Wonderland proportions, as “evil” music plays, and a naked man, who looks like the Devil, with a ‘horned’ wig, joyfully dodges a barrage of fruit, that leaves splatters that are meant to look like blood. It is the film’s best complex scene and does indeed deposit Sarah in the 1700s’ version of hell.

When Duchess Sarah returns, still looking dashing, in her now soiled, but once-white, spectacular riding and shooting coat, Queen Anne cannot bear to look at her, even going as far as to push Sarah out of bed. Obviously, Queen Anne has no knowledge of what Abigail did, but she feels guilt in benefiting and growing stronger, in Duchess Sarah’s absence.

Sarah demands that Queen Anne look at her, and her hideous scar, and Queen Anne cannot, an inversion of Queen Anne ordering the beleaguered servant boy to look at her, when she looked like a badger. The tables have turned; the one shouting to be seen is always the weaker person. From there Sarah’s falling out of favor, in the balance of power, only becomes more readily apparent.

Before, a clothed Sarah was able to mount a clothed Queen Anne, in bed, and was eagerly invited there. Post-scar, Sarah literally walks on to Queen Anne’s bed, in her riding boots no less, only to be bodily thrown overboard, in a bit of physical comedy, as Queen Anne hastily says goodnight. Indeed, it is Sarah who has now “fallen far.”

The climax of this maelstrom of events is the juxtaposition of the now insulted Duchess Sarah confronting Queen Anne, once again, in bed, now with a black sash around her face, but also a handful of blackmail letters – with Abigail handing Queen Anne, the box, with her ring, and both Queen Anne and Abigail catching each other’s glance and smiling, sharing a secret happiness between them. Sarah’s last desperate act had no chance of succeeding, and she is duly expelled.

However, Abigail isn’t going to escape unscathed. Abigail had a genuine care for the Queen, encouraging her to stop wallowing in self-pity, and take responsibility for the throne. Abigail and Queen Anne danced together. They trade off both saying the other is “not nothing” and calling the other beautiful. Queen Anne takes Abigail’s suggestion, involving a metaphor about a party, and becomes more competent, the face of her organization, not Duchess Sarah. Yet somehow Abigail still becomes complacent.

Abigail, now a Baroness, becomes the archetype of the decadent 1700s aristocrat. Her sham legal marriage is apparent, as she sits on some random guy’s lap, an echo, to when Duchess Sarah lovingly sat in the Queen’s lap, when they kissed, after a ball. When called to her actual “marriage,” with the Queen, she is rendered inadequate by alcohol.

Queen Anne is still understanding, even though now she can barely read, after being rendered even more ill, by a stroke. This was foreshadowed the last time the audience saw Queen Anne standing, when she initially has trouble making out, with her good eye, the bill to end the war. Abigail, who is almost always seen, in her free time, with a book, could have easily read to her “wife,” but instead throws up in a vase, ending the trinity of all three major characters throwing up, at least once, on screen.

Thus, the stage is set for the final scene. Everything, however vile, rude, or crass, has been played for laughs, until now, in which the true tragedy of the situation is painfully laid bare. When the curtain is drawn back, the audience sees Abigail, reading, as usual, like when she discovered Queen Anne and Duchess Sarah making love. She smirks as she steps on a rabbit’s spine, and Queen Anne understandably snaps.

Queen Anne who once, garbed in flowing royal winter robes, told Duchess Sarah powerfully, that she wasn’t making a point and kissed her, has been now rendered almost invalid, laid flat out by her ailments. Yet Abigail’s careless betrayal fills her with a kind of fury and energy we haven’t seen in Queen Anne before, for the entire film: a palpable spirit of malice. Even after Queen Anne crawls toward the door, once she stands up – blocking the door – it is clear that Abigail is going to be punished.

In the beginning, when they first met, Queen Anne is not interested in then-maid Abigail’s story and is about to dismiss her from the room – until Abigail notices the rabbits and genuinely calls them “gorgeous.” Their connection, over the animals, humanizes the both of them. By the end, the rabbits multiply over the screen nauseatingly and symbolize their mutual distress, as they are now locked in this loveless “marriage” forever, “til death do us part.”

A Serious Earth

February 25, 2018February 25, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

childhood2

Roger was out with the dogs.

Eddies of dusty snow embraced him like the sun-touched fog of a dream. He might as well have been in a horse-pulled carriage, riding under trees with black branches that had cracked the fuzzy, yellow light on some country road long ago.

The alpha dog, Mondi, was the color of fine silver. His eyes shone like cyan blue crystals on anything he trained them on. As the lead dog he was the most anxious, a coiled ball of wiry fur. When Roger untied him, he was always careful to remain Mondi’s “alpha dog,” always walking with Mondi at his side or with Mondi behind him, not in front of him. If Mondi began to think he was Roger’s “alpha dog,” the stress would destroy him, and he would begin to exhibit poor behavior.

The dogs carried Roger over the snow, each of them bounding, arching in the air like flashing jets of liquid metal. They pranced like reindeer, light and springy, not like heavy moose, horned blocks of cold, hard meat. Moose were not happy animals; they were always angry when Roger ran into them on hunting trips.

The white valley flowed through a ribcage of mountains. The clouds roiled overhead, shifting in their formations as they inched down the slopes.

Roger’s feet rattled in place as the sled clattered over half-submerged rocks. He didn’t like the vertigo of constant movement. Whenever he skied, he was always relieved when he stopped, and the rest of the world caught up with him. But on the sled Roger enjoyed the sheets of freezing air shattering against his face. If he had a beard, the frost would have curled its fingers into his tangled hair and held on like fish hooks.

The dogs were good dogs. Sometimes, after sled rides he would stare into Mondi’s whirlpool eyes and see his own blue eyes staring back at him.

Roger had a face carved out of stone, with very little fat and navy-blue eyes, almost black, pushed in under a sharp square brow. If someone drew him from a far, he or she would start with a rectangle and then fill it in with parallelograms and rhombi. His dark hair felt like hairbrush bristles.

Roger liked Mondi the best, but the dogs were not Roger’s. Ben lived in a cabin at the foot of the mountains and always lent him the five huskies: Mondi, Rufus, Kimball, Roy and Bobby. Blond, apple-cheeked Ben would always say “Go. Have. Fun!” His coarse beard was a warm color reminiscent of waffles.

Roger had been coming to this corner of the Yukon for at least three years now. He worked in the Caruthers Bank’s Cayman Islands branch. Sometimes he would also vacation on the other side of the border, in Alaska.

His co-worker Freddy had clutched his mug of black coffee drawn straight from the new pot, the furious tendrils of steam curling up into his nostrils and beading up his moustache. “What’s going to happen to us?” he said one day, around the time of the merger, “It’s never going to be as good as it is now and now isn’t even as good as it was back then.” But that had been two years ago.

The snow encrusted Roger’s jacket as if he were a corroded barge laden with barnacles. He was only thirty – but Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, Shah of Persia, Pharaoh of Egypt and Lord of Asia, had already conquered the known world by that age.

The mountains loomed above him like a ghost town, not there, and yet still filling up all the sky in front of him, running east to west through the Eagle Plain Basin.

“Keep away from evil and no evil will come to you,” his white-bearded dad would say when he was a teenager. He always seemed to say it while wiping his hands on a dish towel and turning away from an empty sink – at least that’s how Roger remembered it.

“And that’s that,” Freddy had said, making a brushing motion with his hands, when they all got their new letterheads and stationery with the post-merger company name on it. The name sat there at the top of the page looking clumsy and apologetic and hackneyed with a dash in the middle of the two older names. And then someone had chimed in about annual reports from over at the water cooler under the small window, with the fake potted plant, a geranium.

Snowflakes began to fall like tiny spectral will-o’-the-wisps dropping out of the clouds on top of him. Clouds that were once roiled were now flat sheets of beaten metal, repainted in brushstrokes of pewter and teal.

There was nothing but great width; the land was a great concavity reaching up towards the sky, a never-ending slope. Take a tangent to it; this was just one slice of life on the crust. The atmosphere and the land were only a thin layer on the face of the earth, a width so fragile.

A hare darted out in front of the sled. Roger barely saw the twitch of motion against the snow. It must have popped out of a hole. There were no woods around that it could have run out of. All the dogs except Mondi reacted like spooked horses. Rufus, Mondi’s beta, pulled away in the other direction causing Mondi to yip in pain or annoyance. The sled swerved in the disarray and Roger fell out and slipped down a hole, quick as a wink. Poof.

Roger had gone in to great depth. He imagined that his yell had the sound of something dropped down a well: receding with its echoes trickling over damp stones and the Doppler shift of an ambulance going from AAAAA to OOOOO.

He had been on the soft surface but now gravity had placed its hands on his shoulders and sat him down hard on a boulder. He stood up and felt a spiral of pain wind its way up his right leg and tighten around it, there to stay. Roger looked up at the manhole cover of the sky and saw it vibrate with every ache, in tune with his pain.

Roger stopped looking up. The glistening, snow-covered rocks rose up all around him like the tapering pipes of a church organ. The glittering cave stones competed with the vaulted gray ceiling of St. Peter’s Basilica

The cavern was shallow. He hadn’t fallen as far as he thought. He could see a path of footholds that he could climb even while dragging his leg. It would have to be left to dangle out in the space beneath him.

But the air was still vibrating; it quivered with fumes. All around him smelled of burnt plastic. He was knee-deep in the blackest gunk, a liquid with dirty snow spiraling on its eddies. Roger could barely breathe.

The sweet, sweaty smell of the black pond seemed to shout at him. The smell was incessant like a thin electronic whine you could only hear in silence. It screamed all around him; it groaned and roared like someone had just leaned on as many piano keys as they could.

Roger shifted on his good leg and moved towards the path upward, light streaming from the sky above. The pain subsided somewhat, like a sniveling child after the tantrum was done. The sharp rocks jutted in planes he could fit himself into. Smoother stones would have been too slippery with little clearance to wedge his feet.

No, he wouldn’t die down there. Oil companies wouldn’t find his lonely skeleton abandoned and tucked away in a corner – a rusty and wry “Oops” moment.

He inched up the rock wall out of the earthen birth canal, the oil on his legs dribbling off like the afterbirth of a dura mater, a hard mother. He pulled himself back on to the surface, his boots shedding black tears on white snow.

Where were the dogs? Ah, there they were. The sled had been pulled like a toy behind them and was turned over where it had come to a stop. The dogs looked around bemused and bewildered, panting, continuously turning their wedge-shaped heads in every direction.

Roger limped toward them, his injured leg drawing a straight furrow in the snow. A sullied trail of footprints lengthened between him and the hole. The ghostly snow rose up like mist; it seemed to clasp at him. The dogs noticed Roger and began wagging their tails.

Roger began to whistle.