[day 16 of a summer of substack!]
CW for death, grief and memory loss. also, spoilers for just about every Mike Flanagan project ever.
the rest is confetti
Episode 5 of The Haunting Of Bly Manor is quite possibly my favourite episode of any piece of TV, ever, and it’s taught me more about writing and grief than I could ever explain. But I will sure as hell try.
I am a relatively big Mike Flanagan fan, and an avid consumer of horror, and I maintain that episode 5 of every show he’s put out is the best of the series1. Something significant always happens within the fifth episode, and it’s often the mystery at the heart of the series, the thing that starts to draw together everything we’ve learnt so far. It changes the way we think about what we’ve seen. This is particularly the case in Midnight Mass, where we find that the main character we have been following for the entirety of the season so far is actually very disposable. He dies, burns up in front of us, and the perspective of the viewer slowly shifts towards that of Erin, his love interest.
Actually, the ‘something significant’ is always character death, without fail2. But for the characters in Bly Manor, death doesn’t really mean dying.
in paris I was a sous chef
Owen and Hannah are the heart of the episode. It isn’t important for us to know who they are, not really, not now. I’m sure I’ll reveal it gradually. We take Hannah’s point of view from the off, the episode opening with a conversation between the two by a fire. Owen’s mother has just died, after a long period of having Alzheimer’s, during which Owen cared for her and worked as a chef at the house. Now, without her, he is, as he says, “untethered”. He wants to leave, to have a space for himself. He asks Hannah to come with him back to Paris, where he originally worked as a sous chef. “Live, Hannah, live!”.
Then, we are in the kitchen. Owen introduces himself to Hannah, a client in an interview. It’s a flashback. But Hannah seems confused as to how she got here.
Then, we are in the kitchen. Owen introduces himself to Hannah, a client in an interview. It’s a flashback. But Hannah seems confused as to how she got here. And so are we. We’ve been here before. And the characters know this too. “Haven’t we done this before?”.
Every time we are back in the kitchen, we know that the Owen we are seeing isn’t really Owen. It’s all a construction of Hannah’s mind. It gets darker, and more intense. He shouts at her, she runs out of the room, they snap in and out of character to each other, both lost in the facade of her memory. And then we stumble across this line. “We’ve been doing this since it happened.”
Through these disjointed scenes (which I hope I’ve reflected above), memory is introduced as a processing mechanism. It isn’t important for us to know what Hannah is processing, not really, not now. But Flanagan, through the characters of Hannah and Owen constantly reliving the same scenario, introduces memory not only as a way for us to cope with events in our lives, but to learn more about ourselves and the people around us. And when they’re gone, or they’re dead (the distinction must be made), life is less lived in the present. We seem to live through snapshots of the past, things that we did, in the capital-B Before.
It can be comforting to think about the recent events you have had with a person when they die. But the truth is, more memories just keep falling around you. You don’t expect it. You’ll be out shopping one day and see something they mentioned in conversation once. You won’t have recalled it before, and look at you now: you’ve been knocked breathless in the fridge aisle. They just keep falling around you. Like confetti.
poor, sweet, drunk man
Hannah is the groundskeeper of the titular Bly Manor. She is, whether as a function of her job or her personality, constantly caring for other people. Hannah and Owen talk by the fire, over and over again. He is drunk, and she watches him talk about his mother, and life, and Paris, with a mixture of love and something else. Sadness? Regret? She looks as if she’s thinking about a missed opportunity, and this only intensifies the more we revisit the fire. She tries to change things, but the conversation never shifts in her favour. Owen, once and only once, turns around and says to her, “You spend a lot of time caring for other people”. She brushes this off as a part of her job, as I also did above. But he is right. Compared to his drunken grief she is wise, she knows how her poor, sweet, drunk man feels, and she can do nothing but watch him.
It’s not only Owen she cares for. She looks over both children of the Wingrave household, and their new au-pair, Rebecca. She speaks to the latter in the chapel, wise in her knowledge of relationships and how they can break down. But Rebecca ignores her warning. Of course she does. This is Hannah’s memory, after all. She can’t change anything, really. Rebecca leaves, slamming the door shut, but as Hannah goes to open it she finds instead the bricks of a well, blocking her path outside. She freezes, comes to terms with something she doesn’t yet understand, and moves on to another memory.
This is the sad thing about Bly Manor. No one ever listens to Hannah. When they do, it isn’t real. It’s Owen in Hannah’s memory, not really him. No one listens, and then it is too late for anyone to try. The character that dies in episode five is Hannah. Actually, that’s a lie. Hannah has been dead since she first appeared on screen, in episode one. She haunts the house, still stuck in her role, still taking care of other people. She distracts herself from her own rotting body, down the well in the garden. We see that Hannah’s lack of care for herself over other people leads her to be lost in her memory, even after she is dead. What’s sadder, maybe, is that Owen confides in her about grief, not knowing he is talking to a ghost. She can’t go to Paris, but maybe she doesn’t quite understand why yet. It’s just a missed opportunity, one she can never take.
you’ll break your bloody skulls!
A small aside to talk about how perfect I think the TV format is to tell this story. The partnership of LaManna (the writer for this episode) and Gavin (the director) works seamlessly. Hannah’s memory is flowing and relentless, mirrored in J-cuts3 and match cuts and snatches of sound. We hear the dripping of the water in the well long before that we know her body is there. The camera work is also impeccable. It builds intensity, intimacy, characters lean in and out, there is tension and resolve. It makes us uncomfortable, in a way that’s difficult to analyse.
I also feel the need to highlight the use of the horror format to tell this tale which is, fundamentally (as is said in the first episode) “a love story”. Horror builds tension. It makes us anticipate the unknown, simulates a racing heart in its music. We see our emotions reflected in the characters on screen, and feel every breath, every swallow, every step they take into the unknown. Horror is perfect to tell a story about grief. Grief is, after all, the process of accepting something which was once unknown. The aching hole of something which was full before. It haunts you, it does. There’s no other word for it.
Grief has made me understand why ghosts have prevailed in folklore. The feeling of always having someone around, watching over you, caring for you even in death as they once did in life. Dead, but not gone. The idea helps us to face the horror of a life without them, softens the blow a little.
Bly Manor takes both the horror of grief and the comfort of eternal presence, and juggles them deftly. This episode in particular is illogically formatted, cyclical in structure, tension is built through silence and repetition and repetition (I love that joke and will never stop making it). Nothing makes sense. Characters aren’t who they appear, they talk to each other when they shouldn’t. They even talk to us.
There’s a moment where Owen looks directly in to camera and it genuinely scares me to my core4. We, as viewers, are able to float straight through the fourth wall: characters speak to us and break character constantly, in this show of Hannah’s memory. The concept of characters being aware that they’re playing along frightens me immensely. A glimmer of the old Truman Show paranoia, maybe, or a Body Snatchers type fear. The part in that Starkid show where they begin to see the audience, or the part in that other Starkid show where they begin to see the audience. Yes it’s funny, but it’s frightening. Hannah’s memory plays tricks on her, just as the show plays tricks on us, and nothing is quite as it seems.
Grief is a horror story, it’s illogical and guttural and confusing. We can try to make sense of it all we like, but there’s only really one way we can. Rereading the book, retracing your steps. Living in memory.
stay here as long as you like
I said before that death doesn’t mean dying in Bly Manor, and that there should be a distinction made between dead and gone. Bly Manor defines these words apart from one another, and it might be for that reason that episode five stays with me, even now.
The ghosts are embraced as part of the house very quickly. I mean, the show is called The Haunting Of Bly Manor, for crying out loud. The ghosts in the manor aren’t the imposing forces of Hill House — they are not a representation of relentless loss and grief, but a symbol of enduring love and care. Even the Lady in the Lake, the most violent ghost of the house, is motivated by love. Hannah, though, is the epitome of this thought. Hannah is always watching over the people in the house, the people she loves. She commits to this further in her memory, flicking back over moments she may wish to have said something different, or been there to change something. This is especially observable in her conversations with Rebecca — we get the impression of a woman drowning, but not wanting to be saved. And try as she might, Hannah’s hands cannot help Rebecca out of the water.
The dead/gone difference comes up in a scene between Hannah and Mrs Wingrave, in the chapel. Hannah’s husband has been cheating on her with another woman, and Mrs Wingrave has lit a candle for him, a traditional act of remembrance.
“I didn’t think you lit remembrance candles for the living.”
“Oh you don’t, not normally. But for him, a special case.”
"…Sam is gone.”
It’s the good old “dead, but not gone”, inverted. The truth is, in Bly, the dead are never gone, but the living have the ability to leave. And leave they do. Hannah watches Owen leave their conversation at the fire again and again. Owen passes the boundary and Hannah cannot move any further, it is just darkness and fog. She repeats her name to herself, to remember who she is, to escape back to the memory of Owen, not to live in this moment with all that she has learnt about herself. But she is dead. And she can’t leave.
Hannah is doomed to relive her whole life, for the rest of… well, eternity. It’s the only comfort she has. She is the dead one, but she is the one grieving her whole life. The life she never got to live, the chances she never got to take. For herself. Why didn’t she listen to herself more? Why didn’t she say a different word, or stay silent? She can’t change anything. She just keeps turning the pages.
turning the pages
Flicking back through memories. That’s all this substack is, I suppose. I find myself telling events in slightly different ways. The nature of reconstructive memory is that every story we tell changes us slightly. Why do I put myself through that, the writing, an endless cycle of remaking events? Remembering lies I have told myself. Conversations with hypothetical dialogue that overlap with reality, things I didn’t say that appear miraculously on the page, or things I did say that are left out. Memory is fiction, memory is interpretation. Memory is a story we tell ourselves before we go to sleep at night.
I’ve often wondered if the dying brain is like that, too. People say your life flashes before you, but is it chronological? Time doesn’t matter, not really, not then. The one point in life where time doesn’t matter. Is it a flurry of J-cuts and head turns and confusion? Do we retake conversations but find ourselves unable to change them?
Writing, then, is my way of remembering, of grieving the past and the future. It helps me to remember the people that I’ve lost, but most importantly it helps me to look forward to the people that I haven’t had the chance to lose yet. Writing helps me to grieve, and makes me hopeful. It’s my way of taking care of myself, pruning the garden of my mind. Was that metaphor too on the nose? Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, not really, not now. Maybe it’s useless to try and collect all of these events together, to catch these butterflies in my net. I should just let them be, let them fall around me. I’ll leave this here for now, then. There’s so much more I have to say. The rest? The rest is…
I haven’t finished The Fall Of The House Of Usher, so take this with a pinch of salt, though I have it on good authority that my theory holds.
Okay, one fail if you count The Midnight Club, but someone is brought back from death in that episode so that counts, right?
A type of cut where the audio of the next scene overlaps with the previous scene’s imagery.
Major props to Rahul Kohli for this whole episode, he can get scary. Also, Hannah herself, T’Nia Miller. Icon.