In Which Downton Abbey Fought In A War

All Useless on the Western Front

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Downton Abbey
creator Julian Fellowes

War suits Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) intolerably well. The first three episodes of the British drama Downton Abbey’s long-awaited second season simply brim over with his bliss. The Western Front of the first World War seems to place a new resolve in him. The discomfort of unwittingly becoming heir to the huge estate of Downton and being shoved into matrimony is forgotten in favor of grander purpose. Not once do we see him weep over his fate. Not once does any blood smear his flesh. He spends approximately two days at the front before returning home on leave, some important duty always on the horizon, always beckoning, always putting him on a train in a wake of weeping women.

Wars and rumors of wars trim away the superfluous like leaves from a hedgerow. Still, the most important query — namely, what will happen to the manor of Downton Abbey if Matthew Crawley perishes in the Great War?! — goes unanswered. The forecasted nuptials between himself and Lady Mary Grantham dissolved into thin air with the possibility of a new heir, yet somehow international bloodshed ensures his inheritance. Nothing but the prospect of a sudden removal from earth will make people fall for you so entirely and forget your country bumpkin ways.

In the interim between Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination and the Battle of the Somme in 1916, Matthew’s eye has settled on a sweet blondish creature, Lavinia (Zoe Boyle) for some reason or another, much to the Granthams' chagrin. They will do everything to investigate the poor girl’s history, not because they feel she is particularly unworthy but because their desire to remain entombed in Downton is strong. As Matthew slips from their fingers into the spoils of military command, the promise of their continued legacy at the mansion begins to fade. Matthew, for his part, seems nonplussed by Lavinia except as a concept to move towards while halfway underground with hundreds of dying men.

Indeed, Gosford Park scribe Julian Fellowes wastes no time taking us to the trenches; they divide both France and portions of Downton’s halls as differences brew between servant and master, servant and servant, and master and master. As it is, the pandemonium of the front can only translate to the genteel English countryside as a prevalence of raised voices, as maids serving the supper instead of footmen, as nearby buildings transforming into hospitals for the wounded. The residents must adjust in their own ways to a rapidly changing environment: some making their sacrifices willingly others grudgingly letting go of what has always been. Reluctance strains on both sides, but it is surprisingly the servants of Downton who have more trouble accepting the change.

Power always remains in some form, but those who live on the penny of power quickly become obsolete.

Downton Abbey houses three types of servants: those who aspire to be more, those who are more, and those who don’t care. The new housemaid, Ethel (Amy Nuttall) entertains delusions of grandeur although she doesn’t have the presence of mind to know when she is being made fun of. Chauffeur Tom Branson (Allen Leech) believes in the socialist ideal and will do anything to be heard. Men like the valet John Bates and the butler Mr. Carson sacrifice their own health and happiness for the sake of the Granthams and their family honor. Of all the characters, culturally we are the least like them, and the most like Ethel, insisting that the best be set aside for her.

Many men have gone to war, but not all. The Earl of Grantham balks at being too old to join the ranks at the front while the eager young footman, William (Thomas Howes), does not understand why his father will not let him enlist. A white feather is enough to send a man blazing in injured pride to his death, but it will take a greater sacrifice to bring him home again.

When Downton footman Thomas deliberately gets himself shot in the hand, he incapacitates himself not only in his role as soldier but also in his former role as servant. Henry Lang, the Earl’s new valet, suffers from shell shock and commits a series of humiliating blunders before they finally let him go. We must imagine that some men returned home relatively sound of mind and body, but they are perhaps more useless to the stories of horrific war than are the millions of mute bones lying beneath Verdun.

And what of the women? The Countess Dowager (the elegant and familiar Maggie Smith) continues to fix flower arrangements, ones that ominously resemble funeral wreaths. Lady Grantham holds Downton Abbey in patient hands, obviously conflicted between a desire to serve the cause wholeheartedly and to hold on to remnants of a fading world.

Matthew's mother Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) continues to baffle and exasperate all with her bluntness and her attempts to control. When she encourages Sybil to become an auxiliary nurse, Lady Grantham and the Earl hesitate — but accept their daughter’s need to prove useful. Because she is the middle daughter, her whims are neither regulated nor overly indulged; while Mary must continue to uphold family honor and custom by searching for a suitable mate, and Edith suddenly and wildly volunteers to drive a tractor at neighboring farm, Sybil’s decision goes unquestioned. Without the familial duty to protect honor or the reckless impulse to gain recognition, she sails through uncharted free territory. She lives in no man’s land.

We tend to glorify ourselves when we imagine the past, taking for granted that we would be kings and queens, clean and fat and absolutely without disease. Most importantly, we would be on the right side. But history has no sides — only truth, untruth, and that vast shell-shocked territory in between. When Thomas lifts his lighter, trembling, over the lip of the trench, he’s not only gambling with gangrene and death but also his sense of identity. A man can put on a footman’s livery and still not be a footman, and he can put on fatigues and be a soldier for a while until he’s wounded. What is Thomas, when he returns to Downton? Nobody has tried on as many uniforms for size.

I am reluctant to call him the archenemy of Downton Abbey, but not as reluctant as I am to believe that the middle daughter, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) will set aside whatever petty competitiveness drives her and find a healthy niche in the world. One can hardly imagine a more fertile place for a young woman to bloom than on a farm in early twentieth-century England, but Edith foils her own attempts to be useful during the war by getting involved with the married farmer whose tractor she helpfully drives. The more she attempts to set herself apart from her sisters, the more she resembles Mary, whose own desperate attempt to forget Matthew leads her to court a man with a disturbing lack of eyebrows (Iain Glen). No other family in television has worked so disharmoniously on a common cause.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Roman Polanski’s Tess. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Bittersweet Melodies" - Feist (mp3)

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In Which Roman Polanski Gives Tess A Certain Romantic Weight

This week we look back at the films of Roman Polanski.

A Woman Revealed

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Tess
dir. Roman Polanski
186 minutes

Polanski filmed Tess in France, a fugitive. Wanted in the United States for sexual assault and fearing extradition if he remained in England, he fled to a rural slice of territory in Brittany. Where else could such a man have found refuge? What other story could he have brought to life? Shortly before her murder by the Manson family in 1969, Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate had sent him a copy of it along with a note: “This would make a great film.” She had no idea.

Tess Durbeyfield (Nastassja Kinski), the daughter of uneducated farmers, must go claim kinship with a wealthy distant cousin when a parson idly tells her father that he is not, in fact, simply John Durbeyfield but rather the last of a defunct noble family, the d’Urbervilles. The Durbeyfield’s horse has died and they face certain desperation, so Tess reluctantly accepts a position at the d’Urberville manor as a poultry maid, although it becomes clear soon enough that “cousins” Lady d’Urberville and her son Alec (Leigh Lawson) are not true relations, having bought the title. Alec’s immediate infatuation with her both fascinates and repulses her, but when he rapes her one foggy evening in the forest she can dream of nothing but escaping him. Pregnant and by all societal standards shamed, she returns home where she gives birth to a sickly infant that does not survive.

French posters for the film promised enticingly, “The film that revealed Nastassja Kinski!” While entire sequences revolve around her mouth — its innocent fullness, the way the lips tremble at the slightest emotion — the promise is almost entirely ironic. The sixteen-year-old German had already gained notoriety by appearing nude in a previous film (Sykes’ To The Devil…A Daughter, released in 1976), and in Tess barely reveals more than a demure breast to feed a squalling child.

Yet the memory alone of such startling young womanhood — an eager body — lends to the story a heroine that has not reappeared in any subsequent adaptations of Hardy’s novel. She is a woman of cunning naivete who is still no more than a girl, a woman one wants to blame for one’s sin, a “pure woman faithfully presented.” One can detect Kinski subtly blooming in this role, which would award her with worldwide recognition.

Similarly, one can sense Polanski’s fumbling attempts to discover his ingénue, a manic search that might have led to the sudden intimacy between himself and Kinski, despite the fact that he was almost three times her age and convicted of a similar offense across the puddle.

What is it in a man that longs to discover a woman? When Tess leaves home once again, some time later, she begins working for a kindly dairy farmer — and it is in these idyllic pastures that she meets Angel Clare (Peter Firth), an aspiring young farmer attracted to what he considers to be her singular purity and her natural, unspoiled femininity. Since Tess believes herself to be forever tainted, she struggles against her growing affection. Determined to begin anew she attempts to tell Angel what happened between her and Alec by shoving a note under his door, an almost passive-aggressive gesture begging for trouble.

The most spectacular moment in the film captures Tess as she finds the note, unread, untouched, on their wedding day; the brilliant sun obscures her from our vision as she descends the barn ladder, her face one moment the picture of ecstasy and the next, unbearable pain. Her next chance comes at supper, and she tells Angel, trembling, of the night she was victimized. The fire burns low as she stares into it. Blurred in the background, you can almost feel the cold radiating off of Angel.

Turn Tess into a tale of sentimentality and a certain romantic weight must be given to the male leads, a mistake Polanski gracefully avoids. Neither Leigh Lawson nor Peter Firth makes any lasting impression opposite Kinski. It’s easy to hate Alec, but it is not as simple to fall in love with Angel. What was initially intended to be jarring — the moment when Angel turns his face from Tess and tells her that he can no longer love her — becomes almost irrelevant; we cannot wait to see Kinski’s lips take the news. We might have done worse just to see this woman react.

Disillusioned, Angel insists that she return home to her parents while he goes on an exploration of South America alone. Thus abandoned, Tess searches for work so as to support her ailing father and hungry family, and somehow manages to run into Alec. England was never so small as when it rested in the lens of Polanski’s camera.

Alec’s manipulative attempts to win her back disgust Tess, but when her father’s death pushes the Durbeyfields into abject poverty, she desperately secures Alec’s financial help by becoming his mistress — just when Angel returns to beg her forgiveness. Strangely enough, their reunion is anticlimactic; I might blame the unconvincing passion between them on botched chemistry.

Even when they have finally escaped Alec and roll around like feral children on the floor of an unoccupied house, we cannot believe in them. Neither does Tess, apparently, since she allows herself to be captured by the police roughly 48 hours after murdering Alec.

In Polanski’s vision, key conflicts take place outdoors, their outcome as foggy as the landscape; tents, however, represent a stalemate, a meeting of two equally determined forces. Thus Tess meets Alec for the first time in his pleasure pavilion on the lawn of Lady d’Urberville’s manor, while later on the impoverished Durbeyfields take shelter in a churchyard behind the fluttering curtains of Mrs. Durbeyfield’s four-post bed. In this world a group of young women frolicking in the fields to celebrate May Day with flowers and dancing is as solemn as a funeral procession, and a dank crypt offers comfort.

Here, the odds are equal for destruction and restoration, and often one will not take precedence without inciting the other. Safety is rarely found indoors. Violence, but also an uneasy sort of love, originates in forests and on plains. Tess observes a noble hunting party chasing through the mist, an illusion nowhere near as haunting as her own experiences.

There is nothing more difficult than making an old story new, because there is nothing as untrue as the assumption that good stories remain relevant forever. You must find a fresh face to play ancient vices and virtues as if they have never been played before. Most of the time, though, all it takes is the experience of stigma to understand a classic. That Polanski saw himself in the heroine, shunned by society and struggling to regain her virtue, is certain. Could it have been any other way? Could it have been any other woman?

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Abi Morgan’s drama The Hour. You can find her website here.

"To Be Continued" - Evidence (mp3)

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The second studio album from Evidence, entitled Cats & Dogs, was released on September 27th.

In Which We Interrupt To Bring You A Special Broadcast

Sixty Minutes

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The Hour
creator Abi Morgan
Wednesdays at 10 on BBC America

Imagine for a moment that Ben Whishaw last appeared on screen as John Keats. We might feel a little impatience towards his character, Freddie Lyon, in Abi Morgan’s summer drama The Hour. How can a man whose latest accomplishments involved stroking small woodland creatures, kissing Abbie Cornish and dying of consumption convince us that he is anything other than the tender romantic? We knew nothing of Whishaw before he was the perishing poet, yet Freddie is as far from Keats as a puppy is from a man.

The eager curls have been greased back. His lips harden around a cigarette. Any residual softness hides in the huggable tweed suits, in the circumference of fingers around a steaming cup of tea. In a show that is half the actual life story of Peter Jennings and half an Agatha Christie mystery, Whishaw’s character balances precariously between the romantic and the cynic. He carries the show as gently as he carries the raincoat of a man he killed. The image has not been altered in any way, but it has been tailored to fit all of your secret fears.

Clocks appear in almost every scene of The Hour, yet for the entirety of the first two episodes almost nothing progresses. A watch on Freddie's wrist moves in and out of focus. He and Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) work for the BBC, which in 1956 primarily aired newsreels of society's upper echelon getting engaged and winning croquet tournaments. He is idealistic, she ambitious.

They have tired of the mundane, and it seems like they are about to get a break when an acquaintance, Clarence Fendley (Anton Lesser), organizes a team for a new current affairs program called "The Hour" and nominates Bel as its producer. Tempers flare when Freddie’s attempts to become the face of the show are thwarted by the charming Hector Madden (The Wire's Dominic West), a disaster barely appeased by Bel’s promise that Freddie can work with her to make the show everything they have always dreamed a news program should be.

Ruth Elms

When his childhood friend Ruth Elms (Vanessa Kirby) asks Freddie to investigate a hastily dismissed murder, he finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy that eventually leads to her death, rumors of Soviet espionage and the involvement of the British secret service, MI6. To make matters worse, the BBC refuses to endorse or help Freddie in his investigation.

Everything stagnates until the crisis in Suez, when Bel and the team step up to the plate and deliver the story from an angle nobody else in England is brave enough to explore. Their insistence to bring an unbiased presentation of facts to the British people gives the show popularity while dealing out obstacles that they will have to fight to overcome.

People nowadays watch the news for entertainment, a concept that had just begun to expand in the late 50s. Word of the Suez crisis has the office assistant Sissy Cooper (Lisa Greenwood) panicking — but with excited eyes — about the outbreak of a third World War.

Outside of the television studio characters grapple for copies of old newspapers, search dusty archives, protect sensitive film reels from the elements. News still took time to travel, arrived by precious mediums, and the consumption of it hinted at privilege. Freddie brings home hot chips wrapped in old newspapers to his father, who devours them eagerly. This is decidedly British but it is also decidedly symbolic. Freddie only picks up a pen to decode the printed word, to turn it into "real" information — that which is seen, that which comes to pass. A viewer of "The Hour" confides that watching the program makes the world seem unbearably real. What did people do before live footage, before blog posts with pictures?

Bel jokes that "The Hour" is "a news show, not vaudeville" but it is farce that drives the story: the farce of British democracy, the farce of an illicit love affair, and the farce of Soviet spies in the BBC.

The ability to make somebody afraid of something constitutes true power, one that Bel and her colleagues attempt to dispel by showing the story behind the rumors. Hector Madden’s wife discovers that Bel has been sleeping with her husband under the pretense of "work" and reduces her to tears over a cup of tea. Freddie discovers that it is his father — not secret agents — who has been sacking the apartment looking for artifacts of the past. Truth is beauty. If it is not beautiful, make it so ugly that the spectator will be unable to tear his eyes away.

Chemistry between the characters gradually loosens into a sort of comfortable tension. Freddie loves Bel, which she either does not realize or pointedly ignores. Bel’s feelings for Freddie range between maternal protectiveness and intimate friendship; Hector, weirdly inarticulate and married, fails her again and again yet still manages to get in her pants.

Antagonists rise and fall like playing cards, each less threatening than the last. Morgan would have us believe that people slept together in narrow twin beds and survived solely on a diet of buttered white bread, chips, and whiskey. The Hour's six episodes have been helmed by three different directors, each defining the relationships between characters with dramatic lighting straight out of a film noir, faces blurring in and out of focus. Stark, almost industrial interiors contrast sharply with the modernity of Bel and Freddie’s project.

The Hour is particularly unkind to the elders, depicting them as senile or desperate for another bout of youth. Bel’s mother paints her face garishly and stuffs a middle-aged body into a slinky dress for a night on the town. Freddie's father spends his evenings moving chips from the paper to his mouth in front of the television, refusing to answer his son’s questions. Head of News Clarence Fendley cannot be trusted in a moving vehicle.

We might arrogantly suggest that the rapidly modernizing world — a world of nukes, of strange overturned revolutions and faces in front of a camera — belongs only to the young. In a tender, more wistful way The Hour tips its hat to a generation of people who gave up their best years to survival, to evenings in the basement with the blackout curtains drawn. We tried to make the world better for them, and succeeded in making it complicated.

Mad Men forever defines anything pre-1970; walking in the footsteps of this giant,  Morgan tries hard not to drown in its shadow. The script aspires to something like His Girl Friday and fails, while misogynistic jabs thrown in Bel’s general direction sound like they have been included just for the sake of it. Romola Garai consistently seems as if she is about to say something, but then she never does. The era undoubtedly sells well, but requires more than a few nice costumes, people enjoying smoking and clever parallels between their political situation and ours before we'll buy.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about how to become an Anthropologie girl. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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