CRIMSON PEAK (2015)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, sociological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


Though CRIMSON PEAK only performed adequately at the box office in 2015, I consider it the best work from director/co-scripter Guillermo del Toro, easily edging out my previous favorite PAN'S LABYRINTH. On the other hand, it's  hard to say a lot about it, given that in the DVD del Toro provides copious information on all of his influences from Gothic novel, Hitchcock films, Henry James novels, and other items to craft CRIMSON. One might say that he provides his own Cook's Tour of the literary myths (my term) underlying this sumptuous visual fest.

Because del Toro discussed his themes and content in such depth, I don't want to reiterate too many of his own observations, though I can hardly doubt the sincerity of his creative imperatives. However, had I never listened to the commentary, I would still have deemed the film high in its mythic realizations of cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, and sociological tropes.

The primary myth of CRIMSON is that of "good woman and bad woman fighting over a somewhat-good man," but with a conclusion that does not entirely validate the romantic angle. It may be that the lack of a romantic sense of closure-- even that of a sacrificed love such as one sees in TITANIC-- may have kept mass audiences from investing in the experience. CRIMSON also seems at odds with the current grotesquerie of the horror-film genre, for del Toro is clearly trying to find an artistic middle ground in which beauty and repulsion are fused. In all likelihood the current horror-audience didn't know what to make of this attempt to revive the tropes of the Gothic.

The movie's secondary myth involves the uncovering of some shocking secret, which isn't universal in all Gothics-- the founding novel CASTLE OF OTRANTO being a significant exception-- but many film-watchers have come to expect such revelations from classic films like REBECCA. The motif of incest has appeared so often in Gothics that no one will be very surprised to find that this trope is a big part of del Toro's conception. That said, del Toro does attempt to work out the psychological underpinnings more thoroughly than I've seen since Robert Bloch gave birth to Norman Bates.

A short summation of CRIMSON might be boiled down to "REBECCA meets THE HOUSE OF USHER." American heiress Edith Cushing (Mia Wasilkowska)-- who matches up loosely with DuMaurier's nameless heroine-- marries a Man With a Past, allegedly wealthy British baronet Thomas (Tom Hiddleston). Despite opposition from Edith's father, and some weird vibes from Thomas's sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), Edith marries Thomas and moves to the baronet's ancestral home in England. But whereas the DuMaurier heroine has a beautiful home to inhabit while wondering about her new husband's past and her mysterious housekeeper's hostility, Edith ends up in a decaying mansion out of Poe. In place of the sludgy tarn that consumes Poe's most famous edifice, ancestral Allerdale Hall is built atop a mountain of red clay, the "crimson peak" of the title. In fact, Thomas is even attempting to mine the clay with new technology. But what crimes have he and his sister committed, in their attempt to perfect the technology and to rescue the decaying mansion from total ruin? And what crime do they intend to commit upon the new mistress of the estate?

The aforementioned lack of romance may spring from del Toro's concept of feminism. He wants the women to fight over the man in their lives, but he wants the battle to be all about the heroine's recovery of her sense of self, not simply winning the prize, even though "rescuing the guy" would seem to fit with del Toro's remarks about subverting the "damsel in distress" trope. It's arguable that, even though Thomas has his own character-arc, the movie is far more about contrasting Edith, a positive image of femininity, with the negative nature of Lucille. Del Toro even assigns each of them a sort of "symbolic animal," with Edith compared to the beautiful butterfly and Lucille to a dark and predatory moth.

The one myth-aspect of CRIMSON that del Toro does not discuss in the commentary is the idea of the peak itself. When I read that the mountain was made of red clay, I assumed that the director was playing with the Biblical association of the first man in Genesis, whose name is sometimes translated as-- "red clay." However, del Toro does not choose to speak of any religious influences upon his modern Gothic, sticking only to the literary and cinematic indebtedness. Though del Toro wants a conclusion in which his heroine escapes the horrors of the past, it may be significant that his Gothic is, like the best works in the genre, far more invested in those horrors than in any dull, alternate reality.

NOTE: the only "marvelous" aspect of the film is that a handful of "ghosts" that appear in the story, but exist purely to utter oracular statements that further del Toro's storyline. The ghosts are also the film's main "cosmological trope," since Thomas theorizes that ghosts are not spirits, but simply memory-remnants that "haunt" selected locations.