I saw The Innocents, the film version of Henry James’s classic novel The Turn of the Screw, again recently, and it’s a great movie. Some people (mostly snooty movie reviewers and authors) criticize the film for not having the wonderfully ambiguous quality of the novel, since, as they say, in a movie a ghost is either there or it isn’t there*, so you can’t be all coy and cagey about it; and being a tease like that is what makes a great ghost story great, according to jerks like these guys. Yes, it’s always the vagueness of something that makes it great. (When it comes to blurry, seen-out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye ghosts vs. crappy, lame, overdone CGI “ghosts” that are in perfect focus, screaming theatrically for our undivided attention, then I must agree.) In fact, for years, movie reviewers have mercilessly panned and derided ghost stories that have ghosts in them, as if a less-is-more approach is so much better, and that the less there is the better, so much so that if there’s nothing at all it’s the absolute bestest thing ever! So then I suppose a ghost story should just be whatever drama, and no ghosts or even any suggestion of one, and then at the end you say: “Um, they said it was a ghost story. What the fuck?” Surely this would the greatest ghost movie of them all! Right? No? But according to the critics of yesteryear, that’s how it ought to be done. That’s why it’s so strange that critics didn’t fall all over themselves in praise of the recent ghost movie The Skeptic (which everybody panned, but I thought was quite good). If you like that kind of vague, out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye stuff, then that’s the movie for you!
* BTW: You can absolutely be ambiguous in a movie about such things, and in The Innocents, the scenes with the ghosts are from Miss Giddens’s perspective, and she's the only "living" character in the scenes also, suggesting that only she sees them, and calling into question her reliability. (Plus, the whole movie is really presented as her memory of what happened, since the film is “framed” by her dialog at the beginning reacting to the tragic events of the end of the film, which are revealed to us at the end, as well as the context of her opening narration.) That’s what the book does, but it layers in more elements of unreliability from the fact that it’s being read from an old diary as an account of someone else’s experiences related to the narrator by yet another someone else. Ugh. But if he really wanted us to question the reliability of the story, James could have put in even more and yet again more layers of unreliability, just to make it more fun. He could have had the story be read from a diary kept by a known pathological liar of their memory of a diary they once had read to them by someone who loved embellishing everything they read out of boredom, and then have it be the case that the governess had Alzheimers when she wrote down her account of what happened, and that a dog chewed up her story, so that the person editing it had to recreate half of the missing text to fill it out and just hope that they were correct about what they guessed was missing. Then it turns out that every step of the way, each person had to translate it from another language that they didn’t know very well (like, for example, that the governess was really an Indian who wrote in Hindi, and that it was found and translated by an expatriate Russian living in England, who then took it with him to Paris, and when he died a French guy translated the Russian into French, and then during the Crimean War, it was found amongst his papers when he was killed in the war, and it was returned to his English half-brother who then translated it into English, etc. You get the idea.), and so there’s then that whole extra level of “lost-in-translation”-iness in every step of the way. Now surely that would have made the reviewers come in their pants if ambiguously vague obscurity and narrator unreliability is what they liked so much about the story! Right?
