Madeleine Olnek | Wild Nights with Emily / 2018

the vixen poet waiting in her den

by Douglas Messerli

 

Madeleine Olnek (screenwriter and director) Wild Nights with Emily / 2018

 

Let me begin by weighing in on the endless controversy about the importance of poet Emily Dickinson: I believe she is one of the central figures of US literature, her poetry speaking radically of love and death in a manner that few male American poets of her time were able to express. But her subjects—to call them “themes” robs them of their radical sense of exploration—are multitude, and as Susan Howe has brilliantly demonstrated in her My Emily Dickinson, her influences and responses to literature, culture, and history throughout time is immense as they are varying and always original.

    I have much more to say, but this is not an essay on Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and indeed it may not truly be an essay that very much concerns the poet or her life. I just feel it important to establish that I do not come to films about the great American poet lightly—although screenwriter and director Madeleine Olnek most certainly does, which was one of first things that somewhat rubbed me wrong about this film.

     We begin in the film with a slapstick scene, as Emily (Molly Shannon) greets her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler) in her room and gently kisses her on the lips before the two of them suddenly dive behind the couch in a fit of lesbian passion. It’s not necessarily that Olnek incorrectly deals with Dickinson’s probable lesbianism that so irritated me but how even that was pruriently presented to the viewer as if homosexual behavior between two women of the 19th century consisted primarily of endless kisses with just such an occasional leap into and behind a bed or couch.

      Young girls of the 19th century, moreover, spoke only in full sentences according to this movie, without any contractions, communing with one another in voices that appeared at all times to be speaking the kind of poetry that one imagines needs to be flatly intoned so as not to reveal to the reader/audience its full emotional richness.

      Males in the Dickinson house were clearly all idiots, including those who regularly visited the poet, who as we know from the long myths concocted by those—male and female—who were terrified of the true improprieties of such a female poet who dared to challenge years of patriarchal thought. Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman), for example, is represented as an utter Polonius-like fool, even though in her own writings Dickinson often speaks kindly of his discussions with her; and she chose to meet with him, despite her reclusiveness, twice. Certainly, he is no favorite of mine given how he and Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz) almost destroyed Dickinson’s poetry through their editorial disruptions of her texts and their erasure of continued poetic and personal correspondences with Susan in her writings.

     But surely there might be some middle-ground in which to explain why Emily (I resist calling her by her first name since critics often do that to women simply to diminish their shadow, but I will do so here in order to distinguish her from the several other Dickinsons who appear throughout) sought him out other than her desire to be published in The Atlantic Monthly.

     I am certain that he was literally made “dizzy” by her conversations with him, and his attempts at editorial surgery would anger any poet who knows what she’s doing. Moreover, his constant suggestions that because of its unconventional forms and styles that she resist publishing her poetry until readers had grown more daring is like asking someone like Guillaume Apollinaire or Louis Zukofsky to wait for a few decades before letting their work be read by the masses. One cannot imagine saying the same words to any male writer. Yet she still responded to him at one point upon his praising one of her works: "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue." Was Emily too being merely hypocritical. According to this film she would have had to be.

       Apparently Judge Otis Phillips Lords (Al Sutton), with whom some surmise—with very little evidence since most of their correspondence has been destroyed—that she had a late-life romance, is easily dismissed by Olnek by portraying him as a doddering old man who sits in one of their weekly meetings dozing off and describing Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as “Wuthering Jane,” as well as, at one point, even forgetting the name of the woman to whom he speaking. But once again, despite the myth of Emily’s reclusiveness, she apparently enjoyed the man she called “My lovely Salem” for his discussions of Shakespeare’s plays, to which he brought her as gift Cowden Clarke’s Complete Concordance and with whom she evidently found delight in their regular literary discussions. The rumor that Susan Dickinson once entered the room to find Emily in his arms is explained by this film as simply being a moment where the old fool had lost his footing in getting up, she rushing to help him.

       At one point when Ralph Waldo Emerson (Robert McCaskill) attends one of Susan Dickinson’s many social events, the recluse Emily comes racing out of her next-door convent only do discover a softly mumbling gentlemen pontificating only to himself, so inaudible are his remarks.

       And her brother, the handsome lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College Austin (Kevin Seal) is presented as an utter bore who attempts to escape his wife Susan’s social salons by retreating to a back room with like-minded males or attempting to charm attending women such as the wife of an Amherst faculty member, Mabel Loomis Todd. According to Olnek, he has promised in marrying Susan not to sexually “touch her,” but given the three children the couple had, as Emily later declares, “I guess he didn’t keep his promise.” Most obviously, he was a complete dolt if for no other reason that he was unable to perceive, with the daily letters being delivered by his own children as go-betweens for his wife and his sister, that something more than recipes and gossip might be going on between the two of them.

       Finally, this film often settles to the lowest depths in its recitation of Emily Dickinson’s poems, at one point near her death presenting “I died for Beauty – but was scarce / Adjusted to the tomb” as an absurd face-off with the dead poet reading her lines as moss crawls up her face in tandem with a dead black soldier. Fortunately, this comes late in the movie or I surely would have turned it off and ceased further watching.

 

     Given the endless epistles and notes Emily addressed to Susan each day and, far more importantly, the number of poems and poetic letters dedicated to her—most of them rubbed away by Mabel Todd out of what she might have described as judicious censoring for those who might not understand such a close “friendship,” but in reality perhaps just as much erased out of envy for Emily’s deep love for the wife of Austin with whom she was having an open affair—make it evident that the two were involved in some sort of intense romantic relationship. How sexual that was or how even how much it involved their bodies can never be known, although certainly one likes to imagine a lesbian affair.

     But in the end, when I almost gave up on Olnek’s film for any attempt to present an honest historical account of Emily Dickinson’s—even though the writer/director wraps herself around the permissions of the quoted letters from Harvard University and other sources, as if that were to verify her obvious historical aberrations—the film began to grow on me as a much needed tonic for all the sophomoric mutterings about the belle of Amherst and the tragic ululations of filmmakers such as Terence Davies who clearly prefers to see her as a suffering woman in utter loneliness instead of the figure Olnek presents of a lusty young intellect perfectly happy to jump into any corner with her childhood friend and brother’s lusty sister.

       Surely, it’s better to imagine this Emily, faced with the downstairs boisterous fucking of Mabel—who’d been hired to play the piano for the spinster upstairs—as refusing to meet Mabel simply because the moaning strumpet wouldn’t shut up long enough that she might intervene in order to tell them to quiet down.

       Perhaps a nearly always poker-faced comedian like Molly Shannon is the perfect one to play an intelligent woman of the 1870s who was so fed up with the local nabobs and the religious hypocrisy of the community in which she lived, that she could no longer have any desire to communicate with anyone but those she dearly loved and with whom she could express her deep sentiments and humor. Even Susan had been one of those who discovered their “salvation” in the Calvinist meaning of that word through the local church, and some of their arguments were surely about the “unsaved” Emily’s disinterest in organized religion.

      Olnek, herself, at moments, represents Emily’s beloved Sue as a kind of martinet, demanding that Emily produce new poems every day until her sister-in-law digs her new work out of the back pocket of her simple white dress, and uncurls them from within lockets and even hairpieces as if being demanded evidence of her hard work. No one, however, understood her poetry evidently as Susan did. And that bond alone made her hold her childhood friend close, desperate for some support in a world of true intellectual complacency and stasis.

       That the two also enjoyed a private world that might have shocked the late 19th century less that the coming 20th century is great fun to imagine. And, if nothing else, Olnek’s work makes clear just how Higginson and Todd—the latter presented as the real villain of the piece—among the rows of later Dickinson scholars, struggled to bury the radicalness of her texts. The most disturbing montage in the entire film is the last split screen where on one side Susan sits carefully sponging off Emily’s corpse, while on the other side sits Mabel in the Dickinson living room busily erasing Sue’s name from the top of numerous of Emily’s letters and poems.       

     To tie the poet up with an LGBTQ rainbow flag and pretend to “out” her is far better than winding coils of lilacs around her neck, locking her away in her Amherst room like a madwoman in the attic, and whispering to those who dare to mention her name just how lovely her flower poems were, being as she was, obviously, a student of botany.

       In Olek’s vision, we see none of Emily Dickinson’s renowned gardens, instead watching her mostly dig up holes into which buries flowers instead of planting them. According to her sister Livina (Jackie Monahan) when she found a hatch of new-born kittens without a mother, she took them in to drown them and place their bodies in a bottle of formaldehyde, suggesting this Emily was more like a member of the Addams Family that the renowned Dickinsons.

       Even if she has little to do perhaps with the real poet, I think I like this Emily better than the vision most people have kept of her to protect them from her wild imagination or from accidentally revealing through her poetry her wild visions of love, life, and dying.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).