3.15am. I’ve just finished viewing The
Legend of Lizzie Borden, and my mind is still
half-immersed in the twilight zone of tele-movies from
1975. This film is based on actual events circa 1892 and
stars Elizabeth Montgomery as the woman accused of murdering
her father and step-mother with an axe. The case was never
solved and has entered into, and still commands, the popular
imagination. A well-known piece of doggerel sung by children
of the day went: “ Lizzie Borden took an axe and
gave her mother forty whacks, when she saw what she had
done she gave her father forty-one.” (The rhyme errs
on the side of exaggeration: in actual fact, the number
of axe-blows her step-mother received was 19, her father
10.) Nevertheless, the rhyme encapsulates something of
the public’s
macabre fascination with the crime, and society’s
need to ascribe guilt. The Legend of Lizzie Borden is
reminiscent of the rhyme in two ways: in its assumption
of her undeniable guilt and in its portrayal of her enjoyment
in carrying out the murders. From the moment that a curious
neighbour comes to the Borden’s door and Lizzie says
with a matter-of-fact blandness, “Do come in, someone’s
killed father”, the movie weaves both these threads
together by moving back and forth between her court case
and her actions leading up to crime.
While watching Lizzie Borden I was surprised
to see how similar it was in terms of its formal style
and overall look to today’s tele-movies. The tele-movie,
it would seem, is a static object – something which
has found a perfect form of expression. Clearly, each and
every tele-movie has its own separate artistic aims, (usually
found in the narrative and thematic domains), but this
doesn’t stop them from sharing certain generic qualities.
And one thing which most tele-movies seem to share, regardless
of their differences, can be loosely summed-up in the word “familiarity”.
These films are designed to be watched in a far more intimate
and comfortable environment than a theatrical release.
Instead of visiting a 500 seat cinema, we watch them from
our living room sofas. With this venue in mind, most tele-movies
are constructed with a desire to create a sense of warm
familiarity that sometimes has quite peculiar results:
thus the story of an axe murderess who doesn’t feel
the slightest remorse for her crime and who is acquitted
by a jury in court, is not meant to leave us wondering
in horror at the holes that exist in the American, and
by implication other Western, legal systems. In fact, it’s
not meant to repel as much as to fascinate, and to fascinate
in the same slightly-sensationalized slightly-lurid slightly-melodramatic
slightly-soap-operaish slightly-superficial way that media
headlines fascinate. In modern society, it seems, we can
digest our horror between mouthfuls.
There
are several ways in which tele-movies such as The
Legend of Lizzie Borden create their atmosphere
of warm familiarity. One of the most noticeable and oft-mentioned
differences between tele-movies and theatrical releases
is the importance of size and the way that directors
make use of it. Theatrically released films exploit the
scale opened up by the Big Screen and their visuals are
often designed with an eye for grand spectacle. This
is what makes the marshalling of the Roman army in Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960)
so successful: it’s what makes an audience experience
the almost foolhardy courage and idealism of Spartacus’ rebel
gladiators as they prepare to engage the precisely-tuned
machine-like colossus of the Roman army. It’s also
what connects Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epics
with their ‘casts of thousands’ to films
like George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith (2005).
The opening scene of Sith, for example,
has a vertiginous shot that provides our point of entry
into a massive star-battle that simply lacks the same
kinetic impact when viewed on the Little Screen, (and
which on the laptop becomes a frenzied movement of strangely
ant-like activity). There’s no doubt about it:
size matters, but largeness of scale brings with it certain
difficulties as well as advantages.
One of the most noticeable
difficulties in the context of discussing the properties
of the Big Screen versus those of the Little Screen can
be seen in the use of the close-up. In theatrical releases
the close-up rarely presents itself as simply ‘close’ and
intimate, but tends to acquire abstract qualities by
virtue of its sheer bigness. Sergio Leone used such qualities
in his Westerns much as Lichtenstein did in art: to render
the familiar fresh and therefore, expressively energized.
Tele-movies, by contrast, have a preference for facial
close-ups just as they do for small-scale interior locations
such as kitchens, living rooms, studies, corner stores,
etc – and outdoor
shots are primarily used as an establishing shot at the
start of the scene, or as a means of transiting from one
scene to another. Whilst these preferences have historical
roots in the original soap-operas that were designed for
women and worked their stories around more-or-less ordinary
people caught up in everyday situations and relationships,
nevertheless, their expressive effect is to generate a
sense of emotional closeness. In addition to the way in
which directors make use of screen size, images in a tele-movie
rarely contain the sheer amount of detail which
is seen in many theatrical releases. Though Lizzie
Borden is a period film, we are not steeped knee-deep
in the customs, clothes and paraphernalia of the times,
such as Kubrick did in Barry Lyndon (1975),
or Visconti did in any number of films. The interiors of
the Borden house, the courtroom, and the jail, are all
fairly bare of enriching details, containing only those
props required to establish each scene and to authenticate
the historical epoch. One reason is that the size of the
television screen makes it unsuited to highly-detailed
and intricate images. But there is also the fact that many
tele-movie directors seem to be motivated by a wish to
avoid making their viewers feel that their mise-en-scène
is too alienating. Although the sets in Lizzie
Borden are meant to represent New England in the
last decade of the 19 th century, they still mostly contain
the same sorts of objects that would be found in any suburban
home today – what we are looking at, despite the
period dressing, is an environment designed to be so worn
and so known that it allows us to settle us into the lives
of the characters as easily as we would settle back into
a comfortable armchair. It is interesting to note just
how ordinary Lizzie’s house is, if only because many
comparable films construct the living quarters of psychopathic
killers as dark and bizarre, as places whose unknowability
is consciously made to reflect the mind of the person who
inhabits it.
One result of this lack of detail is that
we are able to focus almost solely on the events of the
narrative at hand. Most tele-movies are event-driven and Lizzie
Borden is no exception. It moves forward in a
constantly progressing and escalating series of events
which function to continually change the way we interpret
the characters. For example, at first Lizzie appears innocent,
then guilty, then a victim of a cruel father and step-mother,
then innocent again, and so on. And as the film is restricted
to a fairly small number of sets and locations, (as most
tele-movies are), this interpretive instability helps stave
off monotony. One such instance of our shifting perception
from Lizzie Borden is a repeated scene
of Lizzie standing at the top of a central staircase in
the Borden house and looking down at the maid who is struggling
to unbolt the front door to let in Lizzie’s father,
while Lizzie laughs from her position at the top of the
stairs. The first time we see this scene, early in the
film, the scriptwriter and director have been focusing
on the tension that exists between the maid and the Borden’s,
and Lizzie’s laughter seems merely to be an expression
of her contempt for the maid, of her sense of superiority
over a servant. Lizzie might come across as a little cold
in the scene, but we still don’t quite believe that
this coldness incriminates her as an axe murderer. The
second time we view this scene on the staircase is towards
the end of the movie, and we are shown the moment that
directly precedes it: Lizzie’s calculated murder
of her stepmother. And when we return to the moment of
her laugh, we connect Lizzie’s laughter to two new
sources: firstly, the sight of her step-mother’s
butchered body which is lying on the bedroom floor, (something
which Lizzie catches a glimpse of from her position on
the landing), and secondly, the knowledge that her father,
who is about to enter the house, is walking towards a similar
fate. This time around we are not only convinced of Lizzie’s
guilt, but are also convinced of her derangement. This
repeated scene works, in part, because of Montgomery’s
facial expressions. She achieves a look which can equally
be read as cold indifference or psychotic brutality. In
fact, Montgomery’s ability to act in a manner which
allows for different interpretations of what she is thinking
and feeling is a large part of the reason why such scenes
are successful.
And now we’ve arrived at the most
characteristic property of tele-movies as a genre: the
actor. The use of a known actor in tele-movies is quite
different from the use of a known actor in theatrical films.
Theatrical releases focus on the ‘star’, that
glittering glamorous unreachable celestial object. And
when a film uses such a ‘star’ it tends to
focus on the body of this earthly god or goddess, on their
personal spellbinding magnetic sexuality and desirability.
The audience sees and adores them from afar. But in tele-movies
it is the face of the actor that is of primary importance,
and facial close-ups constitute a considerable part of
the tele-movie’s shots. Moreover, it is not, (as
it is with screen idols), the divinity, the beauty, the
fetishistic celebrity of the face that counts, but rather
its familiarity, its quality of being like the face of
an old friend, a quality that comes from having seen this
face countless times before in the intimacy of our own
home. The face that is seen at the cinema is part of our
dreams. The face that is seen in our living rooms is a
part of our everyday lives.
(Television news often works in a similar way: the same
news reader seen night after night is trusted not only because
we know them, but because of where we have come
to know them.) Though the familiarity of a ‘television
face’ is something which fluctuates from decade to
decade as television programming changes, and as actors
come and go, the constant re-runs of Bewitched (1964-1972)
on afternoon television have ensured that Elizabeth Montgomery’s
face is still interpolated into the lives of many viewers
and, therefore, Lizzie Borden can function,
even today, in a way similar to when it was first released.
The fact that the New England axe murderess Lizzie Borden
is the familiar face of Montgomery is doubly important:
on the one side, we feel ‘at home’ with Lizzie
because we’ve seen Montgomery’s face so many
times in our own home before; on the other, we can find
it difficult to fear Lizzie Borden at first for
the simple reason that we don’t fear Elizabeth Montgomery.
This
reluctance to feel fear is not an irrelevant effect in
the production of a tele-movie such as The
Legend of Lizzie Borden. It may seem contradictory
to assert that the filmmakers want us to feel comfortable
around Lizzie the axe murderess but such a contradiction
is, I think, central to the way in which they build up
her character. If we look at how the script, to take one
example, presents Lizzie’s motives and guilt, it’s
hard not to suspect that the filmmakers are actually trying
to minimize the unease viewers might feel around such a
character. Although the historical Lizzie Borden was acquitted,
and although the murder of her father and step-mother has
remained unresolved to this day, the filmmakers step over
such ambiguities in order to present their Lizzie
as unequivocally guilty and then to let her off by proving
a set of motivating circumstances that tend to mitigate
her crime. Thus, just before the jury hand down their verdict
of innocent, the movie cuts to a flashback that shows how
Lizzie premeditated and methodically murdered her step-mother
and father. Such scenes should alienate us from
Lizzie, but they are counterbalanced by scenes aimed to
establish a degree of empathy with Lizzie: thus, they show
us a young girl spying on her father while he is fondling
a dead girl in the mortuary, and later we see him forcing
her to feel the cold skin of that same girl as his way
of explaining to her how “peaceful” death really
is. Somewhere along the way, the filmmakers seem to be
saying, Lizzie ‘cracked’ and was never again
quite normal, was ‘special’ as she is referred
to by her sister. (A comment which insinuates itself into
my mental files on Kubrick’s The Shining [1980]
where Hallorann tells Danny that terrible events leave
traces, like the smell of burnt toast, and that such traces
can make certain places ‘special’.) This is
fairly normal narrative construction, but the everyday
closeness of Montgomery’s face gives it a very peculiar
quality: it biases our responses very slightly, but significantly,
towards Montgomery-Borden. It makes us see with a kind
of ‘double-vision’ in which parallel, but separate
filmic universes are superimposed on each other, and it
generates a schizoid emotional response whose complexity
is quite independent of the film’s attempts at complexity
on a purely narrative level. In short, such tele-movies
can never be narratively pure – they will always
be contaminated by emotional input from other ‘TV-lands’.
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