Out James-ing Henry

 Over the last week or so, my wife and I watched the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manner. Or rather, we watched 7ish of the 9 episodes.

This show started off well as an adaptation of Henry James' excellent novella The Turn of the Screw, but it goes off the rails and undoes a lot of what makes James' story spooky and interesting.

From the very opening, the source material is obvious for anyone familiar with James' novella as a group of people sit around a fire telling ghost stories. One participant opens the story exactly the way that James does, even invoking James' phrase, “turn of the screw.” So far so good.

Once the frame narrative is out of the way and the main narrative begins, we see that it is a period piece, set in the 1980s. This is fine and it doesn't end up being as much of a big deal as it seems at first. The set up is good and works well for a tv format. All is good until the story really starts to get rolling. I have four main complaints about the whole show that eventually led to us deciding to throw in the towel and give up on finishing it.

First, (oh yeah, I am gonna spoil the fuck outta this dumb show) everything is supernatural. All of the careful ambiguity that James builds into his novella, all of the psychological tension and unreliability that he slowly reveals over the course of the story is gone. At the end of the novella, the reader is not really sure what happened. It is possible that the governess made everything up or went mad or maybe there is a ghost. There is sufficient evidence to support each of these readings of the novella. This is actually James' gift. He makes the interpretation of the story track back onto the reader's personality and predilections. Here, not so much. There are ghosts.

Second, the characters talk so goddam much. The precious, precocious Flora utters the sickly phrase “perfectly splendid” to no end throughout the series. Yes, this is meant to be a character tic for a child repeating a phrase she had heard an adult she admires speak. Well enough for what it is, but it keeps coming back. The gardener Jamie is a tough-as-nails misanthrope who promises Dani (the governess in the novella) that people aren't worth knowing because they always let you down. And she repeats this again and again. She makes the longest speeches to others around her trying to demonstrate how much she doesn't need them when not talking to them at all would be a much more efficient and effective way of doing the same. The other characters make similarly long-winded speeches. I like talky movies and shows, but this seemed to me to be directorial distrust of the viewer. It seemed to me that someone decided that I was too dumb to get what was going on and needed to have the whole thing spoon-fed to me. Thus:

Third, subtext is made text. Did Quint and Miss Jessel have an affair in The Turn of the Screw? Did Quint abuse Miles? Did the governess actually see any of this? Are the kids making shit up? No solid answers are provided for any of these by James. Again, my position is that this is what makes the ghost story great and this is a staple of Gothic literature. We don't know. And not knowing is better because it is scarier. The Haunting of Bly Manor not only answers all of these questions, it provides even more backstory and answers even more questions than the reader/viewer ever really had.

And finally, the whole thing is too damn long. This would have been a fantastic 4 or 5-part show if it had continued in the same vein as the first few episodes. Too much unneeded backstory, too much re-narration (several plot segments are replayed multiple times with slight variations), too much talking. This could have been so much tighter and it would have generated so much tension.

To conclude, this show had a lot of promise from the first few episodes and I really was hoping for an adaptation that would do justice to the source material. But this just can't deliver. I could perhaps see past some of the above points if it weren't for the fact that the explanation at the end just doesn't hold together. There is a whole plot in which dead Quint kills Miss Jessel and then ropes the kids into becoming vessels for the dead souls of these lovers and it just couldn't keep me. The explanation just felt needlessly convoluted and tacked on. So watch the first few episodes and keep it up until you can't take it anymore. That's what I did. Or you can watch and enjoy the whole thing like it seems a lot of other folks did.