by Veronika | Filed Under Articles, Muse Lore
Part 3 of our essay on fantasical, mythological, and supernatural Muses
Nocturnal, Diurnal, and Seasonal Changelings
There is a specific class of changelings that appears in ancient Greek myths, folk tales from around the world, Shakespearean plays, Japanese ghost stories, fairy tales, and modern stories: those creatures that are compelled by spell or their own design to come alive, or be born anew, at the witching hour of midnight. For them, nighttime is their playground, and the nocturnal changes that occur for them are often beyond their control. If no changes occur, they are often creatures who find kinship and comfort with the night: they are most themselves within its velvet embrace. Alternatively, I will also explore a few instances of diurnal changelings, as well as the grandmother of all seasonal time-sharers: Persephone.
In Ovid, Persephone’s story is told by Calliope, one of the muses. Persephone became the queen of the underworld, but first she was just a spring-time goddess and the only daughter of Demeter, herself the great goddess of agriculture and grain, the basic staple by which man lived at that time, and leader of the predominant Mystery Cult, which promised those who followed its teachings a blessed afterlife.
It was as a young maiden out flower picking, her fresh dewy beauty as like the petals as a breathing being’s could be, that she caught the eye of Hades, her shadowy opposite: the king of the underworld. Deciding she was his, he kidnapped/raped her and brought her to his chthonian kingdom. In a desperate gambit that will be familiar to the millions of women who try to protect their children as single mothers, Demeter becomes their prototype as she goes after him, torch-bearing Hecate at her side, to get her daughter back. When she learns that Zeus had a part in the abduction, she threatens to throw the land into famine unless her daughter is restored to her, so he agrees to the girl’s return, but there is a hitch: Persephone has already eaten of Hades’ food. Just a handful of pomegranate seeds, but that was enough to doom her forever: thereafter she would be forced to split her time between the underworld and the literally “earthy” world just above it that was so full of life, pleasure, and the joys and pains of being human. She would spend a portion of each year in both realms (different sources disagree on the length of time in each), seeing the secrets of death and the mysteries of life’s renewal up close like no other creature on earth.
In a way, the seasons – and thus life, particularly that of the countryside – revolved around Persephone. Her annual return to the earth in spring was marked by the flowering of the meadows and the sudden growth of the new grain. Her return to the underworld in winter, conversely, signaled the dying of crops and plants — the stymieing of growth of the food that nourishes and the flora that delight. She became legendary as the woman whose body birthed the change of the seasons. (She also gave birth to children, with Hades: the Erinyes – the fearsome female avengers we will discuss in another essay.) Like Eve, she ate the forbidden fruit: not from the tree of knowledge, but from the realm of the dead. To those who knew her on earth, her ability to pass from the Queen of the dreaded underworld back into the world of the living, it must have been a little uncanny, no matter how happy they were to see her, for she underscored how close the two worlds coexisted, and how ever-present death truly is, just beneath our feet.
Persephone represents death, but also renewal, straddling the world of living, breathing mortals,
and that of the underworld of Hades, by dividing her time between the two and ruling the seasons. Other creatures, however, must make nightly vigils to fulfill their roles as part of the endlessly-threaded tapestry that makes up our fears, anticipation, and coping strategies for the mysteries and mythology that is Death. The wilis, familiar to us from Act II of “Giselle,” are one thread in this giant weaving. As we have seen with “Giselle,” wilis are the spirits of betrothed girls who die before their wedding night, and are now doomed to come alive after dark each night. According to some, wilis are unable to rest in their graves because they could not satisfy their passion for dancing (with their groom, presumably) when they were alive. They therefore gather on the highway (or at crossroads in some legends; at their own grave sites in others) at midnight to lure young men and dance them to their death.
As with Circe, who had a near-twin in Japan, it is becoming obvious that many of these myths have counterparts around the globe, with minor tweaks and changes to the details of the myth as it gets its passport stamped in each new port. In the case of wilis, in Serbia the closest approximation were maidens cursed by God who stalked the night; in Bulgaria they were known as samovily, girls who died before they were baptized; and in Poland they were beautiful young girls floating in the air atoning for frivolous past lives. Whether the nocturnal rule was as fast for these floating Polish girls is unclear.
On a lighter note, perhaps the most celebrated tale of the mayhem that can ensue when the night, love, and spells are mixed is Shakespeare’s comedy, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The story is of two sets of lovers, Hermia and Lysander, and Demetrius and Helena, who flee into the woods so that they can get married to their true love, rather than follow their parents’ dictates. The problem at the beginning of the play is this: both Lysander and Demetrius want Hermia, and Hermia and Helena are friends. What is needed is a little fairy dust to straighten things out, transform a few creatures and straighten out a few hearts under cover of darkness, and luckily, with the King and Queen of the Fairies nearby (Oberon and Titania), things look like they have a chance of working out.
However, the ne’er-do-well Puck, Oberon’s faun and go-to boy if you don’t want anything done as planned, has run amuck with the love potion. Oberon asked him to sprinkle it in Titania’s eyes, so she would fall in love with the very first thing she saw, but Puck got sidetracked with the silly mortals, so that soon both Lysander and Demetrius are suffering the potions’ effects and professing undying love for poor, confused Helena. Meanwhile, a band of lower-class labourers have arranged to perform a very low-brow, badly-acted play about Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus’ wedding, and to that end, have ventured into the forest, near Titania’s bower, for their rehearsal. Nick Bottom, a stage-struck weaver, is spotted by Puck, who transforms his head into that of an ass in a fit of inspiration. Titania is then awoken by Bottom’s singing, and she immediately falls in love with him. She treats him as if he is a nobleman and lavishes attention upon him, feeding him and fanning him. While in this state of devotion, she encounters Oberon, who decides she’s had enough humiliation. They resolve their quarrel, Oberon releases Titania from her enchantment, and he orders Puck to remove the ass’s head from Bottom. They also release the mortals from their spell, straighten out their mess, and eventually the right couples are married, chocking up the chaos and confusion of the night before to a dream “past the wit of men.”
This is a nocturnal realm not of screeching owls like Lilith’s or of betrayed women luring men to death (see below), but of laughter, happy accidents, and ridiculous transformations. It is, in short, the night we all experience when in love, captured so well by Shakespeare. The fairies are only hyperbolic representations of the giddiness and endless possible wonders the night holds for the young couple in love, for whom even arguments are a light matter, as with Oberon and Titania’s quarrel.
At the other end of the spectrum, those caught in the nightmare of unrequited love or obsessive jealousy may be tormented by sleepless nights or worse. In ancient Japan, it was thought unwise to be caught in a “lonely place” after dark, for one would automatically be vulnerable to roaming spirits or fox demons. But perhaps even more terrifying is the case of Lady Rokujo, one of the many lovers – but repeatedly praised as perhaps the most elegant, and uncommonly beautiful and tasteful – of Prince Genji in The Tale of Genji, written by court lady Murasaki around 1000 A.D., during what was Japan’s golden age of the arts. Arguably the world’s first psychological novel, The Tale of Genji, and its author Murasaki, showed astute insight into characters’ motivations and even created the first anti-hero in literature.
With so many playthings with talents to recommend them (ladies of the court with whom Genji cavorts), most readers have a favorite for whom they feel sorry, as Genji never spends enough time with any of his many lovers. For my part, I always favored the proud, cultivated, and impeccably cultured Lady Rokujo. Not only is she as beautiful as any of her rivals – many of whom are younger, for she was consort to a previous emperor, before Genji was of age – she has the deadliest weapon of all in her arsenal: she is an expert poet and calligrapher, and in the Japan of this era, when women hid behind screens, often a man would see a woman’s handwriting before he saw her face (unless he peeked behind her folding screen, which was bad manners but common). This was one reason that an artistically impressive calligraphic hand was all important; the other was simply that this was an age of peace in Japan, and the aristocrats celebrated the arts because in the absence of war, attention could be paid to such things. And Rokujo’s pen was as mighty as any other lady’s.
However, her fatal flaw was jealousy. Given her talents and her station, she resented being treated lightly by the young Genji. But even she did not know how intense her jealousy was. After being insulted in public by Genji’s wife at a parade, strange things, however, begin to happen. Aoi grows sick, and Rokujo herself begins to feel unwell.
”Since the quarrel over the carriage, the Rokujo lady spent the time restlessly. Rumors spread that her spirit or that of her father clung to Aoi. That was the malign spirit. She herself dreamed that her soul had indeed gone to Aoi and tortured her. She believed that your soul left your body when you hated someone strongly. The odor of poppy seeds never vanished.”
Poppy seeds were used by the priests during exorcisms in that era to try to oust possessing spirits. Therefore, if their scent was clinging to her robes, it was incontrovertible proof: somehow, without her willing it consciously, Lady Rokujo was leaving her body at night and possessing Aoi, Genji’s wife, and the priests’ poppy seed incense was hot on her trail. No matter how fashionable she was, nor how exquisite a sensibility she had, she could not control her body and save herself from this disgrace of being an evil spirit. And indeed, it was not long before Genji learned the truth, when Aoi spoke with Rokujo’s voice. Soon thereafter, Aoi died, and Lady Rokujo decided to try to atone for some of her sins by accompanying her daughter, chosen to be a young shrine maiden, to her new temple.
Genji, meanwhile, winced at the hypocrisy of Rokujo’s condolence note over Aoi’s death when he received it; but then he took another look at it, and felt his heart melting once again, under the spell of that bewitching handwriting. She may be mad, she may be an uncontrollable fury of a woman, and she may have possessed and inadvertently killed his wife, but in an age when the women who inspired men were determined not by the shape of their breasts or the fullness of their lips, but by the stately grace of their calligraphy and their taste in choosing writing paper, Lady Rokujo had no match. Because of this, no matter what her terrible misdeeds, Genji could never completely break it off with her, this muse of finely dyed paper and flowing penmanship, no matter how dangerous she was. Besides, her crimes were committed only at night.
In the realm of fairy tales, the clock striking twelve can have dire consequences, or lead to ultimately happy endings. “Cinderella” is the poster child for the latter, for those who obey the rules of the witching hour. While the tale as we have come to know it first gained widespread popularity when published by Charles Perrault in 1697, others argue that the story dates back to ancient Greco-Egyptian times. Another (slightly disturbing) earlier version of the story, Ye Xian, appeared in Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang, by Tuan Ch’eng-Shih, around A.D. 860. (China’s brutal practice of footbinding was starting just around this time as well, during the Tang Dynasty; even though some say it didn’t officially come into practice until about fifty years later, obviously small feet were already fetishized by the culture if the Chinese would devise such a drastic and sadistic practice in a few decades. Hence, we can probably attribute to the Chinese version the stress on the all-important slipper: Cinderella’s losing it, and above all, the importance of it fitting the foot of the one who will marry the prince, as well as the fact that Cinderella’s foot – and slipper — is apparently small, at least compared to her sisters’.)
But before Cinderella gets to try on that glass (or was it meant to be fur?) slipper, she has to get dirty by sleeping in the cinders and doing all the housework. Then she has to rely on her fairy godmother to, as Eva Peron would say, “adore her and Christian Dior her”, or whatever the approximate expression would be at that time and in that kingdom. The fairy godmother magically transforms a pumpkin into a coach fit for a princess, a mice into a team of gleaming horses, lizards into first-class footmen, and a rat into a driver, before topping it all off by wrapping the ingénue in a gown of glorious material and star-bright jewels, and topping it all off (or bottoming it off) with slippers of fantastically glamorous color and material.
All the different versions of the tale have slight variations – specifically in the number of balls Cinderella must attend to nab the prince; some say one, some three – but all seem to involve the help of animals, particularly birds, in getting sweet Cinderella ready for the ball. In one version, doves roosting in the tree at her mother’s grave shake down the clothing she will need to wear; in another, she must ask her father to help her with the Dove of Fairies, and she sends Cinderella a tree that will provide her with all the clothing she needs to catch the Prince’s eye and live happily ever after.
And Cinderella is well aware of the rules and limitations of all this magic: it wears off at midnight, so she must leave the ball by then. This leads, of course, to the Prince’s chase after her, the slipper that falls off one tiny foot as she flees, the great search by the Prince for his bride (whoever fits the shoe), Cinderella’s step-sisters’ futile mutilation of their large feet, and finally, the light touch to the toes, the disbelief, the perfect fit, and Prince Charming already at her feet to propose to a dream-girl shod in one dream-shoe. Cinderella, while she almost left the party too late, was one to play by the rules, and she was grateful for all the help she received from her bewitched friends. She was happy to be home by midnight, if it would help her get the prince (and looking like an angel one minute, and a scullery maid the next certainly won’t help that). However, we are not all Cinderellas. In another famous, bittersweet fairy tale, twelve sisters preferred no curfew to princes and marriage and happily ever after, night after night, and bedtime at a reasonable hour. And in the end they were trapped. All for desiring dance and freedom instead of a wedding ring.
“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” can’t help but seem modern to us today. A group of girls who just want to dance til dawn, and don’t want to settle down – in a way, it’s amazing to think how little young people have changed. Who among us hasn’t snuck out of the house to go to a party or a dance club? We can all relate to them, which is why the last line of the story in some of the versions, “But the princesses never went dancing again,” is like a stab through the heart that some feminist writers, such as Anne Sexton and Jeanette Winterson, have tried to soothe through their own retellings and rewritings.
Also known as “The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes” or “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces,” the tale was first circulated widely by those two guys who really knew how to dance the night away: the
Brothers Grimm. There are some minor variations in different versions, but the basic tale is this: every night a king locked his twelve daughters in a room to which only he had the key, and which could not be unlocked from within. Yet every morning, the princesses’ dancing slippers would be worn straight through. Utterly at a loss as to a plausible explanation, and with the princesses keeping quiet, the king finally announced that whoever discovered the princesses’ secret would be able to choose whichever of the twelve he liked best as his bride, and because he had no son, would become his heir. However, if a man should try for three nights and still come up with no answer, he would pay for it with his life.
The prospective suitor-sleuths lined up around the block, but they kept falling asleep (with a little help from the dozen club-kids), and so one after another, their lives were forfeited, and the girls remained free to do as they pleased in their dancing shoes.
One wonders where their father thought they went. For surely the price of their liberated nights, for as long as they had them, was prim and proper princessly behavior during the day? Surely he thought they were good girls?
do good princesses dance in underground castles with spellbound princes? I suppose the king thought not, given that he preferred they marry strangers rather than continue such shenanigans. Good girls are not wild; they are not rebels; they are not muses. That is why we love them, and why fathers despair over them.
Around this time, a poor soldier passed through the kingdom and ran into an old wisewoman. He confided that he’d like to try his luck at uncovering the princesses’ secret. She told him it would be no problem at all if he wore the cloak she would give him, which would make him invisible, and if he avoided drinking any wine the princesses offered him, because it contained a sleeping potion. So he introduced himself to the king, set himself up outside the princesses’ bedroom doorway, and followed her advice.
For the next three nights he basically repeated the same actions. In order not to lose their trail, he trod on the gown of the youngest princess (whose protest of alarm was scorned and quieted by the eldest). After descending through a trap door in their bedroom floor, they passed through three groves of trees: the first made of silver, the second of gold, the third of diamonds. The soldier broke off a branch from each one as a token of proof, again alarming the youngest, who, as the closest to him, was the only one who heard any noises, so her sisters ignored her worries.
After passing through the fairy-tale groves they arrived at a great lake, where twelve boats were waiting, an enchanted prince in each. One princess got in each boat, except that the soldier got in with the youngest. She complained that the prince was not rowing fast enough, but of course neither she nor the prince were aware of their invisible load that night. But at last they reached the other side, where a castle welcomed them, ablaze with lights. This was where, on each of those three nights, the twelve princesses gaily danced the night away, only leaving when their dancing slippers were completely worn through.
On the third night the soldier took a golden cup from the underground castle as further proof, and in the morning went to the girls’ father and explained their secret. They knew they had been found out, and did not try to deny it. In the Grimms’ version, the soldier has no kin, apparently, and asks for the hand of the eldest daughter, since he is no longer young himself; in some other versions, the man who narks on the dancing princesses conveniently has eleven brothers, so they all get to spend the rest of their lives with someone connected to the man who forever ended their nights of happiness for his own profit.
In a modern retelling of the story by Jeanette Winterson, all of the girls are scheduled to be married off like this, although the youngest escapes to continue her life of dancing. We hear the stories of the rest of the girls, sad stories all, many of which involve themes familiar from the classic tales in The Metamorphosis, but with a modern twist. For instance, the husband of one of the princesses, reasoning that his wife’s passion for dancing might lead her astray again, keeps her chained to him, even while sleeping or using the toilet. He tells his wife that she is his falcon, and that she will tear him to pieces if he deals lightly with her. Finally, she can stand being captive – she who was once free – no longer, and the princess is magically turned into that falcon, who then rips out the heart of her husband, a thing she would never before have done, and afterwards flies away from him, finally finding the permanent escape she had longed for, if only in the body of a bird.
But in a world where dancing princesses are hunted down, the gift of flight, of ready escape, can come in handy.
Then there are those who would never dream of letting some penniless soldier drag them from their rightful place: their place deep within the night, under the moon, beneath the stars, amidst the hours of dreams. This is the situation of “The Queen of the Night,” from Mozart’s beloved opera, “The Magic Flute.” Although she is more or less defeated narratologically, and while it is said that Mozart’s opera is a hidden allegory of freemasonry and the Queen of the Night lacks the necessary balance to be a positive aspect in that system, one can’t deny that she gets to sing the most memorable aria in the opera, with that impossible, twittering coloratura (she turns into a bird before your very eyes, with the help of nothing but some twists and turns of her astounding voice). And whenever she appears, you can’t take your eyes off her, flowing through the space in her black veils and starry skirts, let alone allow your ears to be distracted.
In one scene toward the end of Act I, the scenery suddenly changes: it becomes dark, and the Queen of the Night appears as if she can materialize out of the shadows anytime she pleases, so at one with the night is she. Seated on a silver throne, radiant with countless silver stars, she is the Moon and the Dark Goddess. Up until this point in Act I we’ve encountered the Queen of the Night’s three henchmen; that is, we encountered her in her Triple form, but now she reveals herself singularly, yet paradoxically, all the more powerfully, as she fully claims the throne and the legacy of Star-Crowned Isis of the Moon. After her slow, emotional aria, in which she promises Tamino that if he saves Pamina from the evil magician, Sarastro, he will then be free to marry her, she disappears, and the scenery turns back to normal as quickly as if the Queen of the Night’s presence had all been a dream. But what else should the presence of the Queen of the Night be like but a fluid dream, sometimes beautiful, sometimes full of trickster sorcery, and sometimes, stars dimmed, just pure malevolence, but a dream nonetheless?
The Queen sets Tamino up to think that her daughter needs saving from Sarastro, when she really needs saving from the Queen’s underworld. Buy why? Does the Queen of the Night want to get rid of her, realizing that her daughter is a creature of light and ease, not fit for the penumbras of her world, the nightmares and screeching owls, the vigilance of a thousand burning stars? Does she think her daughter too bland for the vespertine thrills and trills of this coloratura’s world of lunar madness? What is her motive for putting Tamino into play?
While we may not be able to discern her motive easily (and that is part of the lure; besides, at least we get to hear her sing), other nocturnal beings and their chosen crepuscular existence are easier to parse. The tragic story of “The Phantom of the Opera,” before it was all but ruined by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical industry, had already been told and retold countless times, to great dramatic effect — in books (beginning in 1910, with the serialized French novel by Gaston Leroux), film (both talkies and silent), plays and yes, musicals. It is yet another variation of the Beauty and the Beast myth, except that the beast here, Erik the phantom, is too repugnant, in the traditional version – although to some extent, it is he who sets himself up to be received that way, in truly tragic fashion – to win the maiden’s heart, even after giving her the greatest gift he can offer: he teaches his favorite singer at the Opera Garnier in Paris (where the action takes place in Leroux’s novel) to sing. His pupil, muse, and hopeless love, Christine Daae, receives these clandestine lessons through the wall of her dressing room, and she believes that they are being conducted by a heavenly spirit – “an angel of music” — sent to her from her dead father.
Because of complications during the construction of the Opera house, underground water had to be pumped from the building’s foundation pit, creating a large subterranean lake beneath the Opera Garnier – and along with it, the perfect lair for a musically-inclined phantom. And sure enough, rumors soon haunt the opera house, including that Box Five must be left empty at every performance – for a ghost. Things remain in a state of equilibrium for years, until a collision of events brings about disaster in a hurry: new managers take over the theater and refuse to acquiesce to the demands of a ghost; Christine outsings the house prima donna, Carlotta, at her debut, gaining a rival but also regaining the attentions of Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny and her childhood love, who happened to be in the audience for her performance; the phantom becomes jealous of Raoul; and Christine learns who her “angel of music” is when he appears before her masked and takes her to his macabre subterranean chambers.
She feels betrayed that he is not the pure medium of her father’s love for her, and demands to be let go, but she seems to waver when they begin to sing a duet from “Othello” together. They both share a passion for music, after all, and for a moment it almost seems like this could be another reprisal of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale: especially because of their shared musical gifts, and their ability to find a muse in each other for their art, why shouldn’t Christine be able to look past Erik’s hideous face? But she can’t; when she rips off his mask during the duet to see his face – which in itself is a gesture of love’s curiosity, to know all about the other — she recoils in mortal terror and disgust.
One could analyze the differences between Christine and Belle and perhaps find clues as to why Belle sees past the exterior of her beast, while in her situation, Christine cannot. One seemingly very important difference between the two girls is that Belle has a strong father figure, and so she is probably not innately afraid of male creatures in general, whether fair or ugly, while Christine has fetishized her dead father and is most comfortable with the incorporeal “angel of music” who teaches her to sing (although she does have a real-life suitor, and that is a second difference between the two girls; but this is a recent and new development, a continuation of a childhood, playful love). Christine’s most important male figure has long turned to dust: even the angel of music, in helping her fulfill her dreams of becoming an opera star, was most likely, in her mind, helping her to fulfill a fantasy of making her long-dead father proud from beyond the grave.
Eventually, after releasing her on the condition that she return to his catacomb-like lair, the Phantom ends up kidnapping Christine while she is performing on stage, and at the height of an aria from the opera, Faust, just as she is imploring the angels to lift her soul up to heaven. With the help of his one friend, a mysterious Persian, the Phantom puts Raoul in a torture chamber and swears he will blow up the opera house if Christine does not marry him. In the end, though, he lets both her and her lover go, because although what she offers him is far less than matrimony, she offers it to him freely, and with true compassion: a kiss on the forehead. That is her minor beauty and the beast climax, as is her promise to come back and bury him after he dies.
Once upon a time, Erik was safe in his nocturnal world, coaching his muse on the other side of the wall. Her dead father was Christine’s muse, and she was the Phantom’s. The Phantom learned an important lesson when he broke the barriers that both he and Christine needed intact to maintain their fantasies, and left the safety of the underground and its dark disguise, but he paid for it with his life:
Sometimes it is best to keep one’s muse at arm’s length. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, the muse can be deadly up close for a number of reasons, many of them unintentional.
Not all transformative creatures who live by a stark day-or-night-only schedule carry out their hijinks at night. Here I want to consider a rare case: the diurnal changeling embodied by Catherine Deneuve’s character, Severine, in Bunuel’s 1967 film “Belle du Jour”. Not only does daytime witness a disturbing, shocking, and (were it not for our century’s advances in psychiatry) inexplicable transformation in this Chanel-clad trophy wife, it is only a very specific window of daytime hours during which the passive, submissive Severine performs her radical change from frigid bourgeois “good” girl to classy belle of an exclusive brothel. To keep her husband, a doctor, from finding out, she can only work from 2 to 5pm:
”No exceptions!” she asserts to the madam, with uncharacteristic force. Because of her temporal restrictions — which the madam finds kind of intriguing, as they beg the question of who is waiting for her at home – Madam Anais gives her the working name, Belle du Jour.
Of course, this being a Bunuel film, and Bunuel being one of the foremost of the surrealists, Severine’s life is confined not so much by temporal boundaries – the hours of the day or night – but by her fantasies. Sitting in the Bois de Boulogne, in what may be a fantasy or not, Severine replies to the gentleman who asks if she comes there often, “Everyday, in my dreams.” The film alternates between Severine’s stints at the brothel, her scenes of near silence and perfect devout wifeliness with her husband (with whom she has never consummated her marriage; she loses her virginity to a fat, self-satisfied boar at the brothel), and mise en scene daydreams involving Marquis de Sade-style degradation. Bunuel always claimed he didn’t know which parts of the film were “real,” and which weren’t, but Severine, at least, seems the most real at madam Anais’ brothel – the most awake and animated, especially when she falls in love with one of her clients, although Deneuve always retains that aristocratic languor. From 2 to 5pm, she is as different from her home self as night is from day. And she is, as Anais says in explaining her unrivalled popularity, “a pearl.”
A more recent story than that of “Belle du jour”’s, but one which shares the theme of its heroine’s double life and its surreality, comes from the early 1990’s cult television series “Twin Peaks,” in which the death of schoolgirl and femme fatale Laura Palmer sets the series in motion. Playing on film noir classics such as “Laura” and “Vertigo” (from which Laura’s identical cousin, Madeleine Ferguson, takes her name), “Twin Peaks” presented the modern girl with the secret life, albeit in Lynch’s patented out-of-time film setting, one which invites nostalgia for the past while refusing to sacrifice present conventions (virgin vamp Audrey Horne still wears saddle shoes, there’s a 1950’s type diner everyone frequents, yet we know it’s the present day from a thousand minor details). On the outside, seventeen-year-old Laura reigns over this small town in the Pacific Northwest as effortlessly as a fairy tale queen, but far more distractedly, for she, like the place of Twin Peaks itself, has terrible things going on at night.
By day Laura is the prom queen and an excellent student, and she is busy with such meritorious extracurricular activities as delivering meals to elderly shut-ins and tutoring Audrey’s mentally impaired older brother, but by night she becomes a completely different person. Nocturnal Laura works at the brothel just over the U.S.-Canadian border, named One-Eyed-Jack’s, to support her cocaine habit. She engages in orgies in the sinister woods surrounding Twin Peaks. But above all, she does anything she can, the wilder the better, to try to survive the unspeakable secret she harbors: that her father, possessed by a demon, has been raping her for years. She copes with this trauma by literally dividing herself in half, though only few people around her realize that has done this – and what’s more, that she has confined herself with, rather than liberated herself by, what her psychiatrist (who is only one of about half the men – and women — in town who’d fallen for her) terms this “double life.”
Laura is the ultimate small-town muse (although her small town is more surreal and complicated than many big cities), even if it is unlikely she would have ever heard the term. For one thing, the blonde, beautiful, and sexy young girl has an instinct for men’s pleasure (and allegedly, some killer dance moves) that any Parisian courtesan would respect (as she says on a tape to her psychiatrist, “Why is it so easy to make men like me?”), and to prove it, she has ensorcelled a bevy of Twin Peaks’ citizens of both genders, including the high school football captain, the town’s wealthiest business magnate (and owner of One Eyed Jack’s), the gorgeous Chinese widow she is tutoring in English, a very overweight French-Canadian bartender and drug-runner, and an agoraphobic horticulturalist to whom she delivers meals. But this is not what elevates her tragic story to musedom: it is the fact that we are first introduced to her as a stilled body wrapped in plastic, and we are forced, like the sheriff and F.B.I. Agent Cooper, to trace her story back to discover how she got there. And like her body, that story is wrapped up in layer upon layer of chilling and cryptic veils that hide the “real” Laura from both the light of day and the night’s dangers.
At first, we are given to learn, the “daytime” Laura was so convincing in her performance that when Cooper suggests she was using cocaine, the Sheriff answers firmly, “You didn’t know Laura Palmer.” He believes there is no depth to her story, but that belief does not last long. Once all of those illusions of the one-sided Laura are shattered, and the mystery leads us deeper and deeper into the activities of the “nocturnal” Laura, we get closer to a firsthand demonstration of her true power. That this girl who was already loved so much, exploited and abused too much, has so many more secrets to tell: this makes you want to seduce her as much as you want to console her, and that makes you as a viewer just as complicit as everyone else who used her underage, once-innocent beauty. You see, once you know her, you can’t forget her. Either of her.
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