Netflix’s ‘The Pale Blue Eye’ Makes Fatherhood a Gothic Mood

Netflix backed a film about Edgar Allan Poe at West Point in the pseudo-historical vein of The Terror – a good elevator pitch – and Scott Cooper made it film about fathers. Christian Bale’s character is looking for vengeance and this makes the plot happen. We don’t know know this, though, until the film’s last act, so the convoluted plot feels like atmosphere. This is where Poe, who becomes Bale’s protégé, comes in. The audience experiences events as a son might or someone who might have wanted to have been born someone else’s son. The film diffuses the will of the father throughout all the experiences and textures of its world as pure climate.

The Pale Blue Eye’s landscape is not true Hudson in winter, but rather a sterile, impressionistic Hudson painted on nineteenth-century export china. It is as pale and brittle as the plate that Gillian Anderson’s mad matron, Mrs. Marquis, smashes during a pivotal dinner scene. The Hudson is shard, pure edge to a Monet blueness of pure surface, its single stroke brushed across period military greatcoats and forest mists and the eyes of Mrs. Marquis.

‘Costumes help inform a character,’ Anderson remarks. ‘But Scott [Cooper] imposed a vision on the landscape with an almost painterly brush.’ The sentence loses track of the line between costuming and landscape, character and setting, just as it should in this case. In a Gothic piece like Cooper’s film, Mrs. Marquis is a figure of ‘flirtations’ and ‘situations,’ another formal human parlour to unlock, because everyone is. The source material – Louis Bayard’s Edgar-nominated novel – calls her ‘rabbity.’ All the characters in this film are rabbity, though. All are bloodied and hunted, even the hunters, and make no sense apart from the landscape. They slice their paws on the Hudson lost in its pale, blue haze.

The film’s central conceit – a young Edgar Allan Poe solves a real-life Gothic mystery at West Point – is part of that haze. The camera flirts with Poe’s brief career as a cadet. He salutes in his pigeon-blue uniform and blends with a granite wall. This gives us a precise date range for the tale – sometime between the fall of 1830 and February 8, 1831, when Poe intentionally got himself expelled. Make no mistake, though. Poe was a strong student and a good soldier. Prior to entering West Point, he had risen to the rank of sergeant-major after two years as an artillerist. None of this is particularly important in The Pale Blue Eye, however, because the historical and biographical elements of the tale are just more of Anderson’s ‘situations,’ occasions for stepping into other shoes, other places and times, and trying out what different fears, fascinations, and desires feel like.

What better landscape for this than the Early Republic? The Hudson as Rorschach test. West Point as Rorschach. Tell me what you see in the pale, blue fog. Poe’s America had a paranoid streak and Cooper’s film mines it. Echoing the Jackson Era’s populist distrust of West Point, The Pale Blue Eye’s cadets are often violent, arrogant popinjays, some with decidedly aristocratic names like ‘Artemus Marquis.’ In fact, the whole Satan-worshiping, human-sacrificing Marquis family, with its Old World pedigree and patrician manners, seems borrowed from a George Lippard novel. There is Dr. Marquis, the West Point surgeon, a man of reason and science with a secret penchant for black magic. His adult children, both of whom make much mischief, are uniformly beautiful and nondescript, atmospheric as the Hudson. When the fog clears around them – for Poe, the fog of young love, of poetry, of emulation – the plot exposes Artemus and his sister as violent, neurotic occultists.

Like the biographical Poe or historical West Point, though, none of this is really central to the film. Even the human sacrifice business is a feint. The Marquis scheme and the overt detective plot about a murdered cadet come together through sheer coincidence, much to the consternation of the The Pale Blue Eye’s reviewers. ‘The film keeps circling its plot,’ Peter Travers remarks, ‘without finding a satisfying place to land.’ In Poe’s time, a popular gothic novel might have tied the two together through the mere disclosure of so many Catholics at West Point. His was the era of lurid hoaxes like the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and all manner of nativist, anti-Catholic propaganda. Characters in The Pale Blue Eye are always opening bureau drawers and exposing copies of the Rituale Romanum or devotional pictures, so much so that supernature is decidedly Roman Catholic in the film if it exists at all. This is a big ‘if’ – and the question remains oddly untested, unexplored, and unresolved for a gothic tale – because Christian Bale’s brooding detective, Augustus Landor, had his faith shaken after three cadets raped his daughter and drove her to suicide. Whatever he says goes in The Pale Blue Eye. He generates the pale, blue haze on the Hudson sitting in his cabin on the Hudson and brooding. It seeps from his ear as though from a smoke machine.

The link between Landor and the plot’s circular indecisions highlights what is really at stake in the film. The Pale Blue Eye is paternal gothic. As a genre, the gothic generates allure and unease through the idea that the past and its values exert pressure on the audience’s present. The past makes uncomfortable demands. In The Pale Blue Eye, this suggests a peculiar crisis for contemporary audiences in imagining fatherhood – not so much how to be a ‘traditional’ father but what do to about wanting one.

The film’s mothers are all dead or else ghosts or voices in sons’ heads or domestic prisoners like Mrs. Marquis. This draws the paternal gothic into clearer focus as landscape feature. The Hudson, it seems, is littered with failed surrogate fathers. There is General Sylvanus Thayer, the “Father of West Point,” with his unmarried, monkish devotion to the institution. In Cooper’s film, he is perfect pale blue, a man worried about public impressions, unaware of what is happening in his own house, unconcerned with the human dimension of cadets, his metaphorical children why keep dying or vanishing. There is the ineffectual Dr. Marquis, a prisoner of his own brood, the ‘rabbity’ public face for their cabal. There is the looming, oil-painted portrait of his ancestor, Henri le Clerc – ‘Henri the Priest’ – the diabolical template of a failed ‘father.’

Landor-as-father, on the other hand, simply is the plot. He has been devising its course the whole time, murdering one of the cadets who raped his daughter, then ‘investigating’ the murder alongside poor, poetical Poe, then leading Poe through a series of clues to full knowledge of his guilt. The ‘film keeps circling its plot’ because The Pale Blue Eye’s plot is a process of coming into a father’s confidences. After all has been confessed, Landor tells Poe that he wishes his protégé had taken his daughter to the West Point ball on the night she was raped. ‘Who knows?’ Landor muses. ‘We might have become a family indeed.’

This line is the crux of The Pale Blue Eye. Augustus Landor is tragic because the film supposes that his fatherhood is both true and generative. That only Landor can kill in the film – truly upend the generative principle – is testament to the gothic scope and distinctness of his role as father. Unthwarted, the film suggests, it might have remade ‘a family indeed.’ All the other rituals involving human hearts or mutilated animals or black magic are parodies of it. It is no surprise, then, that he piques the interest of Mrs. Marquis. Her formal parlour parodies his hearth. Outside, the Hudson’s pale, blue cast is the color palette of Revolutionary Road or The Ice Storm. Inside the Marquis house, everyone is rabbity in a John Updike sort of way when Mrs. Marquis smashes her china. Mrs. Marquis has had it with Rabbit. Nor is it surprising that Poe decides to keep the secret of Landor’s guilt in the end. As Christian Bale remarks, the film thematizes ‘the ethics of revenge.’ True enough, but this ethic is unchallenged by the film because this is Augustus Landor’s plot. The Pale Blue Eye is about wanting a father who would kill for you. It is about wanting to be wanted by such a one.