It comes as something of a shock to realise that Auntie's last attempt at The Turn of the Screw as over ten years ago. Clearly though it was decided that this time the moppets would be even blonder, the mad bint governess even more hysterical, the psycho-drama aspect even more intrusive... and the tits and bums (well, bums at any rate) would be right there on the screen for everyone to
Happily though, this was no straightforward ITV-style dumbing down exercise. Actually it was a surprisingly clever, psychological reading of James's story. Whereas James himself only ever meant his work to be a good old ghost story (for Christmas or otherwise), this latest version dealt with the story's darker themes of mental illness and the corruption of childhood innocence.
Of course James's contention that The Turn of the Screw was "only" a ghost story rather raises the question of what ghosts actually are. Are they suppressed memories residing in the unconscious, be it individual or collective? Or are they souls that have not "moved on" yet? And if they are the latter then that in turn raises philosophical questions as to what a soul actually is.
We know from revelation that our souls will be re-embodied by divine intervention at the end of Time. The unconscious, on the other hand, is the world of dreams – and to a certain extent also of death. Those souls that remain in prison in the Underworld are those that are never able to let go of this world of matter and enter into the clarity of pure thought that allows for intellection of the Divinity and what we call 'the Beatific Vision'.
On the subject of the unconscious, I was just reading about Pasolini's silly 1970s horror movie Salo, thanks to The Daily Telegraph's saying on its website that it was one of top ten most controversial films of all time. Obviously it wasn't really controversial. In reality, the most "controversial" thing about it was the ban that was put on it (for obscenity) by the authorities. Far from being controversial, in fact, and for all that it was really just another piece of run-off-the-mill, artsy-fartsy schlokum, the mainstream critics positively lapped it up. Most of the film's current mystique actually is probably due to its being Pasolini's last film. As if consumed by the demons he had himself courted, his bad karma caught up with him when he himself was murdered shortly after the film's release.
It's a depressing reflection on our own time that Pasolini himself couldn’t recognise that the book he based his film on was originally intended by its author to be not just a satire on libertinism in general but also an attack on people like him in particular. And unlike the film, the book in question, The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, remains genuinely controversial - not to mention altogether unfilmable - to this day because it features “paedophilia”. In fact it was itself inspired by the largely made-up fantasies that centuries before had done for the historically important figure Gilles de Rais. Even yet more to the point, it is likely to become still less filmable as time goes by as the double standard over children’s sexuality becomes more and more acute – with even depictions of children witnessing sexuality, as Miles does in this evening’s drama, becoming verboten. At the same time, of course, what can one make of a TV-show that positively revels in rumpy-pumpy and yet at the same time wants us to think that children will be deeply disturbed by it?
Nevertheless, it's a neat parallel to draw. Just as ghosts carry on in the collective subconscious, so children continue to bear the spiritual scars of sexual abuse. I recently finally got round to reading Alan Moore's magnificent pseudo-academic comic-book From Hell, about the Jack the Ripper murders. I couldn't help but reflect that real serial killers are actually much more interesting than imaginary ones with magical powers. The real Jack the Ripper, indeed, is a far more frightening historical villain than any ghost/alien/demon/comic-book villain imaginable. It's the same reason why the most disturbing episodes of The X-Files are the most realistic, with the "real world" monster of the week Donnie Pfaster being a good example. (At least he was until a couple of seasons later, when it was revealed that he was some sort of evil demon.)
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