by Douglas Messerli
Curtis Harrington (screenwriter and director) Night
Tide / 1961
But
obviously that didn’t prevent me from viewing it, even if at first given its
subject of a woman who believes she was formerly a mermaid, Mora (Linda Lawson)
who falls in love with a sailor, Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper in his first major
role), seemed to suggest this was an entirely heteronormative work.
In Night Tide it is rumored by the
merry-go-round operators, Ellen Sands (Luana Anders) and her grandfather (Tom
Dillon), that Mora has been involved with the death two of her previous lovers, and
they quickly warn Johnny of the fact after he meets Mora at a jazz club and
almost immediately falls in love.
Why, I
wondered, had Harrington chosen this strange myth in which to weave his story
about the beautiful and utterly innocent sailor played by Hopper, just the kind
of figure with whom you might imagine the filmmaker to have fallen in love?
Even more strangely, although the couple are obviously attracted to one another,
they seem to never engage is sex. Johnny’s visits to her apartment result with him
even curling up on her couch to sleep, but he never moves into her bed.
Almost
as in the Andersen story, however, there is a kind seemingly tacked-on ending
where after that event, Johnny discovers her body back in the tank
of the carney show, Captain Murdock later admitting to police that he had
killed the other men who had grown too close to Mora. When he found and adopted
the young orphan, he implanted the idea of her being a mermaid in order to keep
her close, and later made her feel responsible for the deaths of her previous would-be
lovers. Yet he denies knowing anything about the dark “Water Witch” (Marjorie
Cameron) who also seems to haunt Mora’s life, and who Johnny has noticed
several times.
What was Harrington in his story turned into a filmscript trying to tell us? Was Mora secretly in a lesbian relationship? And what did she mean by loving the ocean but also being terrified of it, particularly with the strange almost coded message that rings out from her words: “I guess we’re all afraid of what we love,” reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s line from The Ballad of Reading Goal, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” Like Val Lewton’s 1942 film Cat People there are some women who are inherently dangerous, despite Johnny’s intense skepticism of Mora being able to hurt him or anyone else.
Upon
further rumination I suddenly realized that the mermaid is the perfect metaphor
for a transsexual, a woman who cannot provide her man vaginal sex (or as Bette
Midler performing as the mermaid Dolores Del Lago boldly belts out: “The
question before us is where’s her clitoris”), having her lower half covered over
with fish scales. If Mora is not literally transsexual, she is metaphorically
so, kept away by the man who controls her life and is willing to kill all others
who come too close and might dare to undress her and discover her secret.
The film made in 1961, in order to properly distributed (and even then it was held from general release until 1963) had also to offer a possible heteronormative ending, as at the close Johnny promises to come back and visit the true woman who pines for him, Ellen, who operates this merry-go-round of this movie.
Harrington’s movie is not at all a horror film, but seems like one,
layered with images that hint of darker meanings, accompanied by the
wonderfully moody jazz score by David Raksin. Instead, it’s a love story that
cannot openly speak its subject.
*Coincidentally, I am told that my friend Paul Sand actually lived above
the Santa Monica Pier’s carousel.
Los Angeles, November 19, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).