Penny Dreadful: A Few Last Thoughts

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Eva Green, Ferdinand Lyle, Homosexuality, Joan Clayton, Josh Hartnett, Larry Talbot, Lycanthropy, Patti Lupone, Penny Dreadful, Polari, Simon Russell Beale, The Wolfman, Victorian England, Witchcraft

For the past couple of posts, I’ve been covering Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. There were a couple of other small points that I couldn’t really develop into full posts, so I thought I’d just put them together in one quick post.

1. Penny Dreadful riffs on Victorian science-fiction, occult, and horror stories. At least it does in theory. It’s got Frankenstein and his monster, Mina Harker from Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Josh Hartnett’s Wolfman. But as I’ve already pointed out, Frankenstein isn’t a Victorian character; he’s from the Regency period a full two decades prior to the Victorian era. And the Wolfman isn’t a particularly Victorian character either. Although there were a handful of short stories published about lycanthropes in the 19th century, the major Wolfman stories are 20th century. The earliest novel on this theme (that I know of, at least) is 1933’s The Werewolf of Paris. The character in this novel, set in the 1870s, is not a wolfman, but a classic werewolf (he turns totally into a wolf, rather than a wolf/human hybrid). But the novel helped inspire the 1935 horror film, The Werewolf of London, whose protagonist, played by Harry Hill, is the first Wolfman. Werewolf established two of the key tropes of such films, namely that lycanthropy is spread by bites and that transformation into a werewolf is governed by the moon. That in turn helped inspire 1941’s The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. as the unfortunate title character. Maybe if we average out the Regency era Frankenstein with the Depression era Wolf Man, we get the late Victorian era. (Incidentally, Josh Hartnett’s character is eventually revealed to be named Ethan Lawrence Talbot, Lawrence Talbot being Lon Chaney Jr’s character in The Wolf Man.)
2. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) watches her witch mentor Joan Clayton (Patti Lupone) burned to death sometime in the 1880s. In reality, the last person executed in the British Isles for witchcraft was the elderly Scottish woman Janet Horne, who was sentenced to detain Scotland, along with her daughter, in 1727. Her daughter managed to escape custody, but Janet was smeared with pitch, paraded through town, and burned alive. Laws decreeing the death penalty for witches were repealed a few years later, so the idea that a group of angry townspeople would burn Joan to death in the 1880s is pretty far-fetched.
3. Simon Russell Beale’s flamboyant homosexual Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle was one of the great charms of season 2. But he has a rather 20th century sense of self. In the last episode he refers to himself as a ‘queen’, using what so far as I know is a term that only emerged in the 1950s.He also describes himself as belonging to a ‘tribe’, but I’m not sure that a 19th century gay man would have thought of himself in those terms. If the show had been more interested in an historically accurate portrayal of homosexuality, it should have had Lyle using polari, a wide-spread British slang system used by homosexual men (among others) in the 19th and 20th century. Polari was a complex mixture of Italian, Romani, London English, rhyming slang, back slang, sailor slang, and thieves’ cant that was employed by gay men to covertly signal their homosexuality to other men and have discrete conversations about sexual activity. For example, “Vada the dolly dish, shame about her naff riah” means “Look at the attractive man, shame about his bad hair.” Although some words (like ‘naff’ in the above example) have become common British slang, polari sadly began to die out as homosexuality won a wider social acceptance in the late 20th century. If you’re interested in polari, check out this short film in which two men have a conversation in it.  (Ignore the number 4–I can’t get the auto-numbering to turn off)
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk

Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I incorrectly wrote that Claude Rains played the Wolf Man in the 1941 movie. While Rains was in the film, it was of course Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role. 

Penny Dreadul: The Grand Guignol

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, André de Lorde, Dr Frankenstein, Eva Green, Frankenstein's Monster, Henry Treadaway, Josh Hartnett, Max Maurey, Paula Maxa, Penny Dreadful, Rory Kinnear, Showtime, The Grand Guignol, Timothy Dalton, Victorian England

The Showtime series Penny Dreadful, set in London in the early 1890s focuses on the occult underworld of the late Victorian period, using a variety of characters inspired by and in some cases directly taken from 19^th century literature. Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), and Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) are searching for Mina Murray, who would under other circumstances be the Mina Harker lusted after by Dracula. Meanwhile, Victor Frankenstein (Henry Treadaway) pursues his quest to master the secrets of life and death, while his first creation, here called Caliban (Rory Kinnear), takes work as a stage hand at the Grand Guignol Theater in London, while Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) carries on his decadent life with prostitutes, libertines, and kinksters.

As the show depicts it, the Grand Guignol Theater stages plays of graphic violence that attract a London crowd eager for horror. While many viewers probably think the theater is just a fabrication of the show, it was actually a real place.

Trigger Warning: This post describes some fairly graphic violence and has a photo some may find disturbing.

 

Le Théatre de Grand Guignol

The Grand Guignol Theater (literally ‘the Theater of the Big Puppet’) was founded in Paris in 1897. Its original aim was to be a home to naturalistic theater that explored the lives of men and women who were not thought to be appropriate subjects for theater, namely the criminals, prostitutes, orphans, and similar figures who resided at the bottom of the lower class. It originally served as a forum to critique the social inequities of its day; it takes its name from Guignol, a traditional French puppet character who is sort of a combination of Punch and Judy and Jon Stewart.

However, in 1898, the Theater acquired a new director, Max Maurey, who remained in charge until 1914. Working with the playwright André de Lorde, he pioneered an entirely new style of theater, naturalistic horror, which the Theater explored until its eventual closure in 1962. Whereas most 19^th century horror was supernatural tales of vampires and ghosts, de Lorde’s plays were stories of human madness. He wrote around 150 plays, many of them co-authored with psychologist Alfred Binet, the inventor of IQ testing. Their characters commit appalling acts of violence and degeneracy against each other.

In “A Man of the Night”, a necrophiliac breaks into tombs to violate the corpses. The nanny in “The Horrible Passion” strangles the young children entrusted to her. “The Laboratory of Hallucinations” depicts a doctor who finds his wife’s lover in his operating room and he revenges himself by performing a graphic brain surgery until the now-deranged lover drives a chisel into his brain. “The System of Dr. Tar and Professor Feather”, based on a short story by Poe, deals with a madhouse in which the inmates believe themselves to all sorts of objects and creatures, while the staff treat them as if they actually are those things until the patients revolt and turn the tables on the staff. “The Torture Garden”, set in China, focuses on a European woman who loves watching people being tortured until some revolutionaries decide to punish her by inflicting the same on her. Some plays explored the effects of diseases such as leprosy, rabies, and syphilis on their victims. Hypnosis, panic, and other altered states of consciousness were another popular subject. (A few of de Lorde’s plays have been translated into English. His “At the Telephone” is quite tame by Grand Guignol standards, but it gives a sense of his style.)

“The Torture Garden”

The Theater’s most famous actress, Paula Maxa, was called the Most Assassinated Woman in the World, because over the course of her career she was shot with rifles and revolvers, scalped, hanged, disemboweled, strangled, guillotined, crushed by a steamroller, dismembered, burned alive, poisoned, operated on, doused in acid, and more; she performed in an estimated 3,000 rape scenes. Despite this, the plays were not generally misogynistic so much as misanthropic; both men and women behaved abominably and both men and women were victims and killers.

“The Woman who Loved Heads”

The plays also addressed a wide range of social prejudices, such as hostility to immigrants and strangers, fear of infection and uncleanliness, class prejudices, fear of technology, and so on. True crime stories were another inspiration.

As the preceding description demonstrates, the Theater specialized in gore and graphic violence on stage. They created a wide range of special effects involving blood squibs, fake knives that spurted blood, animal intestines and eyeballs, blood pumps, fake body parts, and similar tricks. Gouging out eyeballs was a particularly favored effect. It also employed sound rather than music to heighten the psychological impact of the violence. Another trick involved the schedule. The plays were short enough that 5-6 plays were performed in a single night. The tales of violence alternated with bawdy sex comedies, producing a sort of whipsaw between ribaldry and horror that the Theater called la douche ecossaise, “the hot and cold shower”.

A scene from one of the plays

These plays had no moral or deeper meaning. The whole point was simply to trigger intense emotions of fear, disgust, and horror, although some plays also employed eroticism. Maurey felt that a play was a bust if it didn’t cause at least two faintings a night. The theater employed a physician to tend any theater-goers who required assistance. The intensity of the plays, the sensational subject matter, the clever publicity, and the violation of 19^th century social mores made the Theater successful for 5 decades. It was attended by everyone from factory workers to European royalty. Anais Nin was a fan, as was the future revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who was working in Paris as a pastry chef. The boxes in the balcony were known for sexual goings-on, as horrified theater-goers sought release from the intensity of their feelings.

Unfortunately for the Theater, after World War II, it went into decline, because the war had dulled the appetite for such bloody spectacle. Its last director, Charles Nonon, once said, “We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things–and worse–are possible.”

But by the late 1970s, as memories of the war had faded a little and a new generation grown up, interest in the Theater’s genre began to re-awaken, in the form of the American slasher film. Films like The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Friday the 13^th are arguably cinematic descendants of “The Laboratory of Hallucinations.” Other horror films, such as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, rejected naturalistic horror in favor of more supernatural stories but still fed the appetite for graphic violence that Le Grand Guignol pioneered. It was the inspiration for Anne Rice’s Théatre des Vampires in Interview with the Vampire, and it has lent its name to any work of over-the-top gore. Some of de Lorde’s works are still periodically performed today, often around Halloween and a few theater troupes specialize in Grand Guignol theatrics today.

 

Penny Dreadful

The version of the Grand Guignol in the show is not an exact copy. It’s located on the wrong side of the English Channel, and it’s open a half-decade too soon. Nor are its plays all naturalistic; the second play we see is a story about a werewolf who kills a young woman, while the third play seems to involve a male victim who goes up to Heaven. Nor does the theater seem to employ the Hot and Cold Shower. Its shows are apparently all gore. Caliban runs the below-stairs equipment, attaching hidden hoses to pumps that spurt fake blood. From the few snippets we see, the plays were also not scripted in a naturalistic style, but rather emphasized a more artificial style of acting; the second play involves rhyming couplets.

(There was a short-lived London Grand Guignol, but much later, opening in 1920.  The London Grand Guignol, as it was simply called, copied the French theater’s approach, performing 4 to 6 short plays in a night’s entertainment that emphasized madness, revenge, and gore. Many of the scripts were direct translations of the French originals, while others were original plays, include several bawdy satires by Noel Coward. But the London stage was subject to censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, limiting what they could do. As a result, it closed after only two years.)

Penny Dreadful’s Grand Guignol

The show uses the Grand Guignol as a tool to reveal the brutality of its London society. One of the major themes of the show is the moral corruption and violence that lurks just underneath the fancy clothing and sophisticated society of London. The poor prostitutes of the city are repeatedly murdered by a serial killer and Dorian presides over decadent sex parties. Later Dorian takes Ethan to an underground club where people place bets on how many rats a dog can kill.

And just as the London Grand Guignol’s plays are supernatural rather than natural, so too do the human sins of its characters have supernatural effects. Vanessa’s sexual sins serve as a catalyst for her mediumistic abilities, make her vulnerable to possession, and set Mina on the path toward becoming a vampire.

Despite all this, the show plays the same game Ridley Scott’s Gladiator does. It wants to leave us appalled by the cruelties of the Victorian era: the casual violence of the rat-killing scene and the blood-lust of the men and women watching it, the cruel medical treatments of the asylum Vanessa is committed to, the way Caliban is subjected to unprovoked assault simply because his face is scarred. It tells us that we are superior to our Victorian forebears because we can recognize these things for the horrors they truly are.

Frankenstein and his monster having a reunion

Yet at the same time, the show is itself a Grand Guignol of sex and violence because we  watch it for those same horrors it condemns. It offers us a spectacle of graphically dismembered women and their children, of tubercular prostitutes who spit blood during sex, of Caliban literally ripping another of Frankenstein’s revenants in half with his bare hands. The show hypocritically draws us in with the same violence and sexual displays that it invites us to look down on and feel superior to. This technique demonstrates that despite the passage of time, we’re not so far removed from our ancestors after all.

 

Want to Know More?

Penny Dreadful is available on Amazon.

There are a number of books about Le Grand Guignol. Mel Gordon’s Theater of Fear and Horror and Richard Hand and Michael Wilson’s Grand Guignol are two worth looking at; the latter includes a number of complete scripts of the theater’s plays.

300 2: Let’s Talk about Artemisia

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300 2, Ancient Greece, Artemisia, Bad Clothing, Eva Green, Sullivan Stapleton, Themistokles

A couple weeks ago, I took a look at 300 2: Rise of an Empire (2014, dir. Noam Murro). That post was mainly focused on the overall plot and the military details of the film, so I didn’t get much chance to talk about the main bad guy, Artemisia (Eva Green). So today, I’m going to look at this intriguing historical figure and consider how the film portrays her.

Spoiler Alert and Trigger Warning: If you plan on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to do so before you read this post, since I talk about major plot points, including the film’s conclusion. Also, this post discusses rape.

Oh, and let me get one issue out of the way right at the start. The cinematic Artemisia gets to wear lots of awesome sexy clothes that cling to her body and look absolutely nothing like anything any ancient Greek woman ever wore. During the Greek Archaic period, Greek women, even queens, were expected to cover most of their body in a tubular dress known as a peplos. It rose up from the ankles, was pinned at the shoulders, and then folded back down to just past the waist, where it was usually belted. It was a loose dress that covered the body but left the face and the arms bare. Alternately, she could wear a chiton, a dress that was sewn more than pinned. This usually had half-sleeves. Over this garment was often worn a type of cloak called a himation.

Women, or at least elite women, generally wore their hair up in a hairnet. Braids, pins, tiaras, and veils or other wraps were also common. Lacking straight-irons, they rarely just let their hair hang down.

So in public, Artemisia probably looked like this:

Greek women in chitons; the two on the right are wearing himations as well

and not like this:

In fact, when a relative died, Greek women enacted mourning by pulling the decorations out of their hair and ripping their clothes. So, to the extent that the outfit in the above shot of Artemisia would have signified anything to the ancient Greeks, they probably would have read it as mourning garb. So maybe Artemisia is an early version of a Goth chick.

As a rule of thumb, remember that Hollywood generally dresses women in clothing and hairstyles that reflect contemporary fashions rather than historical ones. In movies that are more interested in historical accuracy, the clothing might make an attempt at accuracy, but the hairstyles almost never do (although The Advocate is something of an exception to this principle.)

The Historical Artemisia

Artemisia ruled Caria, in the southwestern corner of modern Turkey, from its capital of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum). In 545, a couple generations before, Caria was incorporated into the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, as one of its satrapies (essentially a province with semi-independent government). So in keeping with Achaemenid practices, Caria was a kingdom administered by a monarch on behalf of the Persian shahanshan (literally, ‘the king of kings’, or emperor).

Halicarnassus

As is often the case with ancient history, a lot of Artemesia’s life is lost to us. Her father was king of Caria, and so she seems to have inherited the office for him, although her husband was the actual ruler down until his death. When he died, he left behind a young son, so Artemisia acted as the regent for her son. We don’t have clear dates for these events; we only know that she was ruling by 480 BC.

When Xerxes went to war against the Greek city-states, Artemisia contributed five ships and acted as their commander. Most of what we know about her participation in this war derives from the pages of Herodotus, who is known for including a lot of wild stories in his History. Thus, we have to take what he tells us with a grain of salt.

According to Herodotus, before the battle of Salamis, Xerxes gathered all his generals, including Artemisia, and asked if he should commit to a naval battle (since his navy’s main purpose was to provide supplies for his massive army, which was too large to live off the land). All his generals, apparently being yes-men, agreed that he should, but Artemisia pointed out that the Greeks were better seamen than the Persians. She also argued that Xerxes had already conquered Athens and that the other city-states could not hold out very long individually. In other words, Xerxes was already winning on land and didn’t need a naval victory. Xerxes reportedly praised her advice, but then ignored it and decided to engage the Athenian navy at what became the battle of Salamis.

Salamis, of course, turned out to be a trap, and Themistokles crushed Xerxes’ navy. When Artemisia realized that the Persians were losing, she tried to retreat, but was unable to do so because there were other Persian ships in the way, and a Greek trireme was bearing down on her. To fool the Greek ship, she ordered her ship to ram another Persian ship. This made an opening for her, and it tricked the Greek trireme into assuming she was on their side. As a result, she was able to get away in good order. This story of Artemisia ramming the Persian ship was rather famous; it’s reported in several other sources. Two sources claim that when Xerxes saw the ramming, without realize that she was hitting a Persian ship, he remarked that his men had become women and his women had become men.

After the defeat at Salamis, Herodotus tells us that Xerxes again asked her for advice. He wanted to know if he should lead his army into the Peloponnesus personally, or withdraw to Persia and allow his general Mardonus to handle the campaign. She advised him to withdraw, because if Mardonus won, the glory would still go to Xerxes, while if he lost, Xerxes would not be at risk. Xerxes listened to her and withdrew to Persia.

Herodotus bookends his description of Salamis with these two scenes of Xerxes getting advice from Artemisia. The first time Xerxes ignores the advice and regrets it, while the second time he listens and benefits (since Mardonus was disastrously defeated later in the campaign). This symmetry makes Herodotus’ story a little suspect, and that calls attention to some of the inconsistencies in the account. If Xerxes liked Artemisia’s advice well enough to praise it, why did he ignore it? If he really didn’t know his navy well enough to know that Artemisia had attacked his ship, how did he know it well enough to know that she was commanding the ship? Also, since Greeks generally considered women inferior to men, this story has the unstated point that Xerxes is a fool, because he needs a woman to tell him how to make good choices. So this story, while famous, is a little suspect.

These stories all emphasize that Artemisia survived the battle of Salamis, but that’s pretty much the last solid information we have about her. Presumably she returned home at some point, but we do not know what became of her, how long she ruled, or when she died. Her grandson was king of Halicarnassus when Herodotus spent time there, so perhaps his stories are essentially family legends about Artemisia.

The Cinematic Artemisia

The movie’s version of Artemisia is quite a different creature than the historical Artemisia; in fact, about the only similarities are her name and the fact that she’s associated with ships. She’s not a queen; rather she’s the daughter of an average family whose city is sacked. Her family is killed and she is enslaved and raped repeatedly before being discarded as a teenager (a rather odd point, since teenagers were ideal slaves in many regards, with years of service ahead of them and breeding potential if the master wanted it). One of Xerxes’ men (Peter Mensah) finds her and trains her to become a ruthless warrior who murders her way to the top of the Persian political and military hierarchy; she becomes the most trusted general of first Darius and then Xerxes. In fact, in contrast to Xerxes’ depiction in the first film, in this film, Artemisia is virtually his puppet-master, pulling his strings and at one point flat-out insulting him and defying him.

There are a couple of notable things about this version of her story. First, it falls into a trend in contemporary film of having strong female characters. In contrast, for example, to most female leads of, say, 80s or 90s action films, Artemisia is not a defenseless maiden who needs rescuing by the hero, nor is she a femme fatale who needs to manipulate men to get her way. She has a great deal of agency, is a forceful personality, and is fully capable of both leading troops and fighting in person. In that sense, she’s fun to watch, even if the idea of female warriors in ancient Greece is complete fiction.

However, she’s also an example of another trend in recent film and television, the trend to equate strong women with women who have been raped. In the past year or two, the ‘raped strong woman’ trope has become so common in film and tv that it’s attracted a fair amount of commentary, and may be in danger of becoming just another cliché. Rape is certainly an important issue, and it can be argued that it is healthy for entertainment to expose viewers to this ugly problem. But it’s unfortunate that Hollywood seems to have become fixated on the idea that rape can somehow explain why a woman is strong, as if a woman cannot be strong without having been raped. Putting a rape in a woman’s back story can serve to make her a more complex character, but it can also become a lazy and brutal crutch for scriptwriters who can’t imagine more nuanced ways to develop a female character; surely there are more stories to tell about women than just this one. There’s a fine line between acknowledging an all-too-common problem for women (especially for women who are victims of war) and using rape as a cheap way to add some ‘grittiness’ to a story while suggesting that rape is simply a universal fact of life and therefore nothing to be shocked by.

Another problem with the film is that it completely ignores the one probably genuine story we have about Artemisia. Her escape from Salamis demonstrates that Artemisia was a cunning and ruthless woman, and it would have fit perfectly well into her character as the film presented it. But instead, the screenwriters dropped the real story and just made up nonsense about an iron oil-tanker and guards sent on suicide missions with exploding backpacks (which is how this film got its obligatory Stuff Blows Up scene). It demonstrates that the screenwriters weren’t in the least bit interested in the actual history, and really just wanted to make up cool stuff for the fan-boys, even when that cool stuff makes no sense whatsoever. At least the first 300 tried to get the basic narrative facts right even as it was getting everything else wrong.

Nothing says ‘strong’ like some spine ridges

A third problem with her character is the way her sexuality is handled. This mostly gets explored in the two encounters Artemisia has with Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton). The first real meeting happens about half way through the film, when Themistokles is taken by boat to meet with Artemisia. Historically, Themistokles sent Xerxes’s fleet a message that he wished to defect, and this was how he lured the Persians into the trap at Salamis. When Themistokles went to meet Artemisia, I initially thought that this would be the film’s way of handling this detail; certainly replacing a message with a face-to-face meeting would be a reasonable bit of dramatic liberty.

We hate each other, but let’s have sex!

Unfortunately, the scene’s actual purpose is just to give our two main characters a chance to have some sexytime. We get to see the actors mostly naked having rough sex. The whole scene is essentially pointless, except from the standpoint of satisfying the audience’s voyeuristic urges. (And, as an aside, why doesn’t Artemisia try to kill Themistokles in this scene? Why does she let him sail back to his fleet? She’s evil, and not even remotely honorable, so logically she wouldn’t scruple to not kill him if she has the chance. Crappy plotting, if you ask me.) The scene doesn’t advance the plot at all, nor is Themistokles’ offer to betray the Greek fleet even mentioned in the film. The scene does mean that when the two of them meet up again at the end of the film, the whole scene feels very Freudian, so that when Themistokles stabs her with his sword, he’s essentially killing her with his penis.

If we put all of these made-up details together, the whole narrative arc takes on a rather ugly overtone. Artemisia’s ‘strength’ is basically driven by the fact of her rape, which provides literally the only motive she seems to have in the film, namely to punish all men for what has happened to her. Her murders of various Persian leaders and her manipulation and defiance of Xerxes demonstrate that she is a destructive force that turns the world upside-down, overturning male authority and destabilizing her society (she’s actually the one who kills Darius). Her enjoyment of rough sex becomes a symptom of her rape. And her death at the end of Themistokles’ penis-sword becomes a symbolic re-assertion of the proper order of society, an order grounded on male sexual domination of women. While Artemisia has agency, she has no clear motives or desires; her villainy is not due to personal ambition or some twisted moral cause, but simply a clichéd hatred of men, and her defeat at the end is not due to a specific mistake or character flaw, but rather to the fact that she is incapable of dominating Themistokles for the simple reason that he refuses to live as a slave.

If the first 300 is a story about how straight white men overcome the ugly, sexually deviant non-whites of the world, 300 2 is a story about how straight men overcome the threat posed by an uncontrollable woman. In both cases the enemy represents servitude and the heterosexual male hero represents liberty.

While rape can, in the right hands, be a powerful device for telling a story about women’s experiences, in this case, the rape is just cheap, lazy storytelling that serves to demonize its female character. This script victimizes Artemisia twice, once when it makes her the victim of rape, and once when it replaces what was apparently a strong, clever real historical women with a cheap male fantasy of a dangerous woman who needs to be defeated to preserve male sexual authority.

Want to Know More?

300: Rise of an Empireis available on Amazon.

Our best source for the Persian Wars and for Artemisia is Herodotus’ The Histories, Revised (Penguin Classics).There’s also a version, Herodotus: The Persian War (Translations from Greek and Roman Authors), that’s only the sections about the Persian Wars with scholarly explanations added.