Stylized Denial: The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man

The final paper for Writing About Film. Take one of the films we viewed for class (or clip thereof—which threw Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys in as a qualified sources material—and compare it with another film.

This one didn't go where I wanted it to, but it arrived somewhere nonetheless.


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ENG 317
December 8, 2009
Final Essay

Stylized Denial:
The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man


If I go first, I'll wait for you there,
on the other side of those dark waters.
―James Jones

The world of departed souls is said to be to the west—towards the setting sun. The path leads through a dim world of twilight. Another trail intersects this first; used by shamans as a shortcut to encounter the souls in journey to that other world. At some point along its westward travel, the path encounters water—a running stream, a lake, the great black ocean when the soul crosses to the sunless lands. At the brink, before this point is reached, the soul comes upon a lodge or passageway, where the guardians wait. When the soul reaches the lodge, it comes face-to-face with these guardians. Sometimes the guardians welcome the soul with laughter and drumming, and they carry the soul on to where it will ultimately pass alone. Often times the soul is not greeted warmly, fear and denial dominating what transpired in leading the soul to this point on its journey.

In Mary Henry's voyage from the river where the car she rode in plunged—killing all its occupants—she travels westward to Salt Lake City. Once there, she is drawn to a ruined structure on the outskirts of town that to her is hauntingly familiar. This is the Saltair Pavilion, and in Herk Henry's bleak supernatural tale Carnival of Souls (1962), it acts as Mary Henry's ghost lodge, through which she must pass en route to her ultimate destination.

Similarly—and more directly linked to our analogy of the journey of the soul—Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, shows us William Blake's westward movement from Cleveland to the Pacific Northwest and beyond the reaches of the living. Unlike Mary, Blake is lead by a guide rather than making the trek on his own.

The two films share many semblances. Both are shot in black-and-white, and both have distinctive soundtracks which use only a single instrument performed in a minimalist capacity and employed with deliberate effect to push its constraints. In Carnival of Souls, Gene Moore uses the pipe organ to create the eerie soundtrack which keeps the audience as unsettled as the protagonist, who, incidentally, is an organ player herself. This brings the sense of music into being part of the narrative created by the film and is a vehicle for Mary sense of place within the liminal space of her journey. For Dead Man, the weapon of choice is Neil Young's electric guitar, which fades and rises like a waning heartbeat behind William Blake's travel towards some unknown westward land.

Another trait both films share is their lack of adherence to a single genre. Like their main characters, the films exist in an over-lapping, in-between space of convenient labeling. Carnival of Souls is at once a B-grade horror film, a supernatural thriller, has grown to be seen as an art film, transcending the trappings of its genre. Dead Man is, on its surface, a Western, yet William Blake is no Shane, and the almost surreal Old West town of Mechanic is not a place we're likely to find Clint Eastwood; its theme is far closer to the religious ecstasies displayed in the paintings of the other William Blake—18th century visionary writer and painter who is the namesake of the protagonist.

In Carnival of Souls, the culmination for Mary Henry comes when she walks through the angular curvature of deep shadow at the Saltair, in a north-western direction, passing beneath a framed Arabesque arch. She looks across a barren salt beach, where the jutting piles of decayed docks rise like tombstones, markers of the afterworld. In a reprise of an earlier scene—where Mary played the church organ and fancifully imagined this one—white-faced ghouls rise from the dark water the lake that could as easily be her subconscious. A dozen ghouls amble to the pavilion and, amidst the framework of the decrepit ballroom, they begin to waltz. Circling back and forth, they leer, dancing to the organ music of a malicious merry-go-round.

Mary stands at the periphery, terrified of this totentanz. She has chosen to come to this place, but upon her arriving, denies her own part of this world. Having "seen" this waltz before—while playing the organ at church—she has called this world to her. The organ could be her heart, and she plays it hoping for more life, while all around her evidence of her death dances. When the music stops, the ghouls cease their waltz and turn towards her in sudden pursuit.

They chase Mary out of the pavilion, onto the white salty shoreline of the afterworld. Mary runs beneath the pavilion, among the pylons of the foundation—into the base foundation of her own consciousness—but everywhere she turns she finds a white-faced ghoul waiting. She's returned to her primordial mind and death courts her from every shadow.

The ghouls act as shepherds, herding Mary towards the lake. She runs from beneath the pavilion and out on the featureless salted shore, she stumbles, and the ghouls are upon her. Mary's fall is not so much to the salt and sand of the beach beneath her, but back through a liminal world to the place of her long-procrastinated death.

The denouement is two-fold. Three men, the policeman, the doctor, and the minister—male representation of the Three Fates—follow Mary's path along the beach to where she fell and discover no tracks beyond that point. Following their observations, there is a cut to back east, where the car Mary had been in—and plunged off a bridge into a river—is towed up from the water. Mary's body is, of course, inside.

When it comes to William Blake's moment of passage, he is delirious from his long trek through the dark woods of his own fear and dark night of the soul. Unlike Mary Henry, Blake's journey has had a guide, a psychopomp named Xebeche, a Wakashan who calls himself Nobody. Numerous times along the way, Blake has insisted that he's not dead, but in reaching the gate—both a literal as well as figurative—of a Makah village, he cannot walk through of his own power, his own body allied with his vocal denial of death. Blake leans awkwardly against a section of fallen tree, the rings—its lifespan and evidence of its death—visible around him. Nobody, having lead Blake here, continues his own role as spirit guide, and brokers a deal for Blake to pass through the gate. The solo guitar of the soundtrack pulses in a desultory staccato, as Blake stares up at a carved raven totem and his consciousness fades.

When Blake comes to, more than a dozen Makah stare at him like the faces of ancestral spirits. They appear concerned, confused, menacing. Blake has little choice now, and they seemingly witness his death finally catch up with him. His consciousness fades again.

Blake lays on a shale beach, birds can be heard overhead, the ocean crashing at his head. He is wrapped in funerary cloaks and attempts one last look around, bewildered and uncertain. As his perspective is our own perspective, we are left in this ambiguous state of understanding, having left one world—one film story—but have not yet arrived entirely in another. When he next opens his eyes, Blake is on a canoe laden with, Nobody says, cedar boughs. "It is time for you to leave now, William Blake," Nobody tells him, "Time for you to go back where you came from ... The place where all the spirits come from and to where all the spirits return."

Nobody pushes the canoe into the vast dark waters to the west, but Blake looks back, to the east. He watches helpless as Cole, a bounty hunter who has pursued him, approaches Nobody from behind. In a choreographic death, Cole and Nobody shoot each other—manifestations of Blake's higher and lower ideals; that which wisely guides and that which gives feral chase. William Blake's burial canoe is pulled out to sea by the tides as the staccato guitar pulses and then dies.

Carnival of Souls and Dead Man are cyclic stories which don't so much end where they begin but meander a pre-destined path before finally settling at the conclusion. Upon first-glance Carnival of Souls has a straight-forward understanding at its finish—that Mary died in the car wreck which began the tale, and her spirit continued on a path much the same as if she had lived—Dead Man's ending is left far more metaphysical and ambiguous: At what point did William Blake die? Shot in Thel's room in the town of Machine? In the forest where he fled? On the canoe drifting out to the open ocean?

In both instances the protagonists of these films have made stylized westward journeys through the twilight at the edge of the world to reach acknowledgment of their deaths.

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Bibliography

Carnival of Souls. Dir. Herk Harvey.

Perf. Candace Hilligoss.

Criterion Collection 63, 1962. DVD.

"Carnival of Souls." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

14 Nov 2009, 12:31 UTC. 1 Dec 2009.

Curnutte, Rick. "Mad Poets: William Blake,

Jim Jarmusch and Dead Man."
The Film Journal 1 (2002).
The Film Journal.
May 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jarmusch.

Perf. Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer.

Miramax, 1995. DVD.

Kawin, Bruce. "Carnival of Souls."

Carnival of Souls
Criterion Collection 63 (2000). Print.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "A gun up your ass:

An interview with Jim Jarmusch."
Cineaste 22.2 (1996). Print.

Taubin, Amy. "Dead Man Talking."

The Village Voice 14 May 1996, 41.20. Print.

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