Queer Love and the Escape Velocity of Grief at Bly Manor
*Spoilers below for both The Haunting of Hill House
and The Haunting of Bly Manor*
I recently had my heart ripped out of my chest and I liked it. Let me tell you, I've been hearing “The Haunting of Bly Manor” was going to ruin me and it absolutely delivered. So many tears, so much love. I'm going to talk to you about my new favorite romance story.
Some folks prefer not to tip their hand at the start of a piece, but I'm going to be up front with you. This series, and its predecessor, “The Haunting of Hill House”, have taken the top spot in my heart for supernatural horror shows.
Here's a tidbit about me. I've spent a number of years avoiding sad content, whether on the page or the screen. I've noped out. It wasn't until recently, until I was watching both of the series in Mike Flanagan's “The Haunting” anthology, that I began to piece together why. Most of the time when I'm watching or reading something that involves losing loved ones, it feels...inauthentic. It's not just that the stories make me sad, it's that they don't feel genuine.
I want to see these stories but I want them to be given the respect they deserve. If a creator is going to kill a character, tear relationships apart, break their hearts...they should earn it first. Just making you care about the people in the story is only half the task. You have to understand the value of life and the bonds we create with those we care for and love. We invest our own experiences and values in characters as we watch them move through a story, and that means something.
This is very much taken into consideration in The Haunting series. Throughout both Hill House and Bly Manor I'm thoroughly convinced by the relationships between characters. Each aspect of what makes a story come to life on the screen is executed with style and grace, and it's that grace in particular that sets these stories apart. Such care has gone into presenting these stories with a kindness of heart. It's the respect for the process of loss and grief, I think, that sets them apart. It's a gentleness that we rarely see in horror of any kind. Not gentle in the sense of pulling punches, but in the recognition of the value of the things and people we lose to death and time.
I could say a great deal about the entirety of these shows in that respect, but right now I'm here to talk about the relationship between Dani and Jamie in Bly Manor. As I watched it for the first time and noted their first meaningful glance, I said out loud: “YESS MAKE IT GAY”. My wife had already seen it and gave me a knowing side eye. I wasn't actually expecting to get what I hoped would be the case because so often creators kill their gays but OH THEN THEY SMOOCH, LIKE, AN EPISODE LATER. NO IMMEDITATE DEATHS.
These two characters are just a delight. Flanagan's writing and direction combined with exquisite performances by Victoria Pedretti and Amelia Eve allows for the blossoming of one of the most beautiful, charming romances I've seen on a screen. Side note: between Hill House and Bly Manor, Victoria Pedretti has become one of my favorite actors. She's a gem.
Over the first few episodes we're given insight into Dani's backstory, her tragic experience in losing her fiancé and her accompanying guilt. This comes to a head as she first tries to kiss Jamie and is greeted once more by the specter of her fiancé, who has been haunting her in reflective surfaces since the first scene of the show. Jamie has her own ghosts of past neglect and trauma that hover over her life, there's a moment in one scene where we hold for a moment on a shot of burn scars on her shoulder that is particularly poignant.
We're given a sweet, gentle connection between these two that isn't the grasping, desperate love that queer characters are so often put through in fiction. Neither of them is the life preserver thrown in by the writer to save the other. They are both people with their own loves, fears, guilt and dreams. They're both running from something, and choose to confront these things in order to be present for each other. With tenderness and honesty they're able to come together as they move through their past pain. I don't know that I've seen that in TV before, so feel free, reader, to reach out on socials to suggest comparable emotional depth to me.
The events of the story would, in any other show, kill off this gentle romance. Dani's decision to invite Viola's worn, angry spirit into herself is a death sentence just as surely as cancer, or any other terminal condition. This becomes a metaphor for being in a romantic relationship in which one person is terminally ill. Once more I'm struck by the care taken to present a joining of people that is truly loving, the gentleness of it.
Each moment of the last half of that final episode is brimming with heart. When Dani brings Jamie a plant but SURPRISE THERE'S A CLADDAGH IN THE ROOTS. I cried. I cried some more. Even as we see Dani slipping and we know that Viola will inevitably take hold...that gentle love is there to tell you that however this goes, the love will remain.
Then we reach the inevitable conclusion and it hurts...but in the context of the story it makes sense. I cry. The desperation as Jamie returns to Bly, knowing what she's going to find in the lake. It hurts so much to see her try so hard to reach Dani, now resting forever beneath the water. I feel that it subverts the “kill your gays” trope, however. Dani isn't discarded the way that trope implies. Both of these shows flip the comment perspective that death has in fiction. She isn't sacrificing as much as she is making the choice that keeps Viola from sweeping up Jamie in her wake. All the same, I cry again.
I'd already figured out that the storyteller character was Jamie because of the accent (which I actually think was done better than some folks think, kudos for the effort to Carla Gugino), but I wasn't expecting such a neat, beautiful tying off at the end. I think Carla Gugino was the ideal choice to play the older Jamie. Her face carries a sense of emotional wisdom, (which worked just as well when she played Olivia Crain) and it shows as she talks to adult Flora, when the story is done.
I understand that some folks aren't sold on the dancing scene, but I appreciate it. I'm a soft bean and I love it. It shows us each character as they look now and in the past, and it ends with a flash of Jamie, then her present self. I'm getting teary just writing about it. It's going to be a matter of personal taste, and it was very much to mine.
In the last shot we see Jamie going through her nightly ritual, hoping that Dani might walk in if she leaves the door open a little, and I discover that yes indeed I do have plenty more tears to cry and as we back up to see Dani's hand on her shoulder, there they are. Such a perfect expression of the quality of their love. She's by her side, and maybe it's just a visual representation of Jamie's hope, or perhaps Dani's really there and she knows the price of the dead intruding on the realm of the living and so keeps silent. Whatever the case, it's the best way I can imagine for us to see this couple through to the credits. Flow on, tears. This show earned it.
By Dan Sexton-Riley