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I know I haven’t been as active as of late, but that should change very soon. I’m going to be focusing much more seriously on my writing, and I would love for any of you to join me on this journey. Even if you can’t or don’t want to pledge anything, feel free to check out my recently released poem (and a bunch of other really cool queer poets!) at http://www.lavrev.net/2017/12/csilla-richmond.html! Plus, check out my super rough website (that will hopefully be better soon) at https://softbutchpoet.wordpress.com/.
Irrational for me / to believe in the longevity of staying with you, // but I believe in it. / We are on a walk. W...
A new poem of mine, out in Lavender Review (and nominated for a Pushcart Prize). The eponymous term comes from an anthropological context—I encountered it, I think, in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, whose authors reject the term and its implicit impulse towards “anthropological ‘explanation’ or ‘interpretation’” in favor of an alternative ontology, in which the concepts of things (re)make worlds. What is it in sexuality, in a relationship, or in a material experience that leads to any certainty around future experience? How is that different from, say, a superstition? And what form of sexuality, relationship, or material experience (of love or otherwise) can endure without that belief?
Lavender 2016 Not Rated Genre: Psychological Thriller On Netflix
The movie Lavender is a wonderfully compelling movie about a woman who can’t remember her childhood and who after a car accident is exposed to a farmhouse that possibly holds the secrets of her past. The movie focuses on a lot of real-life scenarios and manages to give you a feeling that the main character suffers from depression without outright saying such, a subject which is weighing heavily on her marriage. This movie is dark in just enough of a way to really feel the audience leaving satisfied with how the whole thing is carried out. So let’s break into it.
Our movie starts out with the words of a common child’s game, Hide and Seek. “Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Olly olly oxen free.” This line, and the Lavender song*, are huge parts of the movie as it is one of the only things that our protag remembers and often recites. In 1985, we are shown a farm where a man is tending to his chores before being approached by the police. On the other side of the farm, we are taken to his extended family’s home where some tragedy has occurred. Now a special part of this scene is how they carry it out. The frame is completely frozen while we are given the opportunity to explore the scene, finding a triple homicide that occurred and then shown a small girl in pajamas, covered in blood and sitting in the corner.
Back in current day, we are greeted with a woman, Jane, and her daughter, Alice, exploring the countryside and taking wonderful photography shots of old and abandoned houses. Throughout the beginning, the little girl seems terribly bored with her mother’s hobby and career. We are also immediately introduced to the strain that Jane and her husband, Alan, have, something that their daughter is very aware of and brings up to her father.
Jane explains why she loves these houses so much, they’re old and “Echoes of the people who once lived there” she tells an interviewer. But despite her passion, Alice is shown mocking her mother and referring to herself as stupid when she tries to repeat a conversation she had with Jane.
And then like she is momentarily possessed, Jane stops the car. She then travels to a farmhouse that we aren’t shown until she is already in the field with her daughter. Alice begins exploring, finding a jack in the field and talking to someone that we can’t see, getting into an argument with the unseen before she leaves. Done photographing the area, Jane calls for Alice and they leave. I feel that it’s important to note that Alice acts completely different around her two parents. Around her mother, Alice is quite stern and serious, often being the voice of reason when her mother wants to explore these houses. But around her father, Alice turns into more of a child, joking around and playing with him.
At home that evening, we are shown the first clue into the movie. Throughout, Jane receives multiple small gifts, all in a white box with a red ribbon around them and all of them pertain to her past in some way. Now often times in movies, we are given small hints and tidbits that are normally presented in conversations and background places but this movie presents us with a different way of doing this. It instead gives us up front clues to Jane’s past, creating a fun new way to give a creepy vibe to our movie. In this first box, Jane is given a jack, cleaner than the one her daughter found in the field, but we know they’re connected.
I feel as though Jane having some sort of depression is an obvious thing. She often times becomes obsessed with her own work in such a way that the rest of her life takes a backseat. Even when she is at home cooking or cleaning, she’ll give very short remarks to her husband and then retreat back into her own world. She also does this to her daughter, having a complete disconnect with Alice despite bringing her along to many of her photoshoots. One of the biggest examples of this is when she’s shown back at work and she is staring at a photograph of the farmhouse she just took photos of. Now we can say that this action is just her being drawn to it by paranormal means, but throughout the rest of the movie, Jane is drawn to physical things like the jack, the presents, actual objects in the home. So when I see this scene that she is staring at this photo for an undisclosed amount of time, I’m given the feeling of deep-seated depression, despite saying that she is fine.
Forgetting that she was supposed to go pick up Alice, Jane begins driving to get her. But she spaces out while driving, reciting the Hide and Seek line, and then sees a little girl in the middle of the road and swerves. In the hospital when she wakes up, it’s revealed that she actually has multiple fractures from a previous injury and the car accident aggravated them. She has mild amnesia and meets a man who introduces himself as the hospital’s psychiatrist named Liam.
While in the hospital, Jane receives another present, this one being a music box dancer and a photograph of the house she visited dated 1985. Alan visits her over the following days, showing her the records she requested from the county about this house, refusing that she did so and refusing that the house is hers that she inherited. But Liam suggests that maybe visiting the house and staying a few days will help her remember her past and help her mental health.
Over the next week or so, Jane, Alan, and Alice move into the house. Jane meets her uncle Patrick, the man we meet at the beginning, that some of the farmland was given to Jane begins having weird and disturbing dreams, especially after she receives a third gift while at a state fair after seeing Liam stalking her. It’s a photo of a little girl and a woman whose face is blurred. She starts having problems with hearing things, becoming frustrated when Alice wont tell her where she learned the Lavender song, and having odd occurrences where she hallucinates the barn that her uncle tore down where she finds a little girl and a razor.
At her wit’s end, she and Alan get into and argument where she demands they leave, but someone has slashed their tire. Alice begins having an asthma attack, Jane commenting that her little sister did too. Trying to save Alice, they attempt to leave but the house refuses to allow Jane to go with them, so she stays while Alan drives their daughter to safety.
In the house, Jane begins hallucinating again, crawling under the bed with the little girl that she has been seeing as the girl tells her that the monster is coming. The monster drags the child out from under the bed and Jane runs out into the hallway, encountering Liam. He tells her not to be afraid of him, that he isn’t the monster. Looking back into the room, we see Jane’s uncle on the bed and we begin the memory of the night they all died.
That night, Jane was babysitting her little sister Suzie when Patrick came into the house to molest Suzie. Liam, her father, and Jennifer, her mother and the woman in the photo, come home. Liam is drunk and falls asleep quickly on the couch, but Jennifer hears someone upstairs and goes to investigate, catching Patrick who she confronts. Patrick attacks her while Suzie begins having an asthma attack and Jane witnesses the death of her mother, blood running under the bed and covering a jack. Jane runs out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. Patrick follows her and when he tries to calm her down, she cuts him with a razor and runs out into the hallway. Liam, hearing the commotion, is coming up the stairs when Jane runs into them and sends the two of them tumbling down. We see both Liam and Jane unconscious on the floor while Patrick attempts to stage it to look like Liam is the one who killed his family and then he leaves. Jane wakes up in her father’s blood and she scrambles to where we see her in the beginning of the movie.
In present day, Jane is still sitting in that spot and Liam is beside her, telling her that everything is okay and that they have been trapped in this house ever since. Alan comes home to save Jane but Jane tells him that everything will be okay now. Alan explains that Alice calm down when they got to the road so he took her over to Patrick’s but Jane panics.
Patrick is giving Alice cookies and talking to her, saying roughly the same things that he said to Suzie the night she died. Alice tells him that they told her not to trust him causing him to ask who. He tells her that he knows who told her and that talk too much before seeing Jane and Alan driving through the field to his house. He drags Alice out to the barn and shoots a rifle at Alan when he tries to confront him. Coming from behind, Jane smacks him in the head with a shovel.
When Patrick wakes up, he is in Suzie’s bedroom with Jane. She simply closes the door and locks it, leaving a terrified Patrick trapped in the house with the spirits of his dead family.
To me, this movie hits almost all of my personal boxes. We show a good representation of depression, we have ghosts that actively blend in to the world, we have the creepy little ghost girl that the daughter can see and hear, and we have the torture of a rapist. The movie also connects everything together in a very cohesive way. The way all of her gifts or trinkets fall into place in her memory of that night is a very compelling tie to complete the ending of the movie.
The first gift, the jack, was tied in as one of the last things she saw with her mother, her mother’s blood slowly seeping to run against the jack. The music box dancer being something that their mother said kept fairies in the music box. The music box playing the Lavender song that Alice learned and Jane recognized. The razor being the one that she tried to stop her uncle with. Even her and Suzie playing Hide and Seek before the monster came. All of it came full circle and completed itself.
I really don’t have many complaints at all. I think that maybe the mother, Jennifer, could have been a little more active like Suzie or Liam, but maybe Jane was just closer to her dad and sister. That’s something that we just don’t really know.
Also can we mention the landscaping in this movie? Every shot was just a gorgeous example of how peaceful but unsettlingly lonely farmland can be. And the shots in the house were cohesive enough that I could draw a layout of that house and know where everything went. Nothing drives me crazy like a movie with a house that makes no damn sense.
So all in all, I loved this movie. 9 out of 10, I would definitely give it a shot. This movie isn’t really scary in the traditional horror way, but gives just enough of a fright to keep you interested. Please watch this movie if you have the time.
NO FEE Submission call (LGBTQ) + editor interview - Lavender Review, DEADLINE: Always open
NO FEE Submission call (LGBTQ) + editor interview – Lavender Review, DEADLINE: Always open
Lavender Review is an international, biannual (June & December) e-zine dedicated to poetry and art by, about, and for lesbians, including whatever LGBTQ might appeal to a lesbian readership. It is a publication of Headmistress Press, which publishes books of poetry by lesbian poets. They have an excellent quote on their Submission page by Eloise Stonborough:
On Getting Your Poems Noticed: The Essential Need for Community - guest blog post by Risa Denenberg
On Getting Your Poems Noticed: The Essential Need for Community – guest blog post by Risa Denenberg
As a lover and reader of poetry, and as a poet and editor, I’m always thinking about how to connect poems (my favorites, my own, poets I publish) with readers. This is no easy task; it’s not as if poems sell by their own weight in worthiness. It saddens me to think how much excellent poetry never gets read at all; even sadder to consider poems that only get noticed after the poet dies. The world…
NO FEE Submission call (LGBTQ) + editor interview - Lavender Review, DEADLINE: Always open
NO FEE Submission call (LGBTQ) + editor interview – Lavender Review, DEADLINE: Always open
Lavender Review is an international, biannual (June & December) e-zine dedicated to poetry and art by, about, and for lesbians, including whatever LGBTQ might appeal to a lesbian readership. It is a publication of Headmistress Press, which publishes books of poetry by lesbian poets. They have an excellent quote on their Submission page by Eloise Stonborough:
