Film Recaps: Flowers In the Attic (1987)

Happy New Year, readers!

Considering what a cult phenomenon the original Andrews books were at their peak, it amazes me that they only ever had one major media tie-in.  Oh, the idea gets shuffled around now and then--there was a plan to film the Landry Saga as a television series, and the Rain thing happened--but nothing ever seemed to come of it until recently, when, out of nowhere, Lifetime announced the forthcoming remake.

There's a lot of potential factors for this long delay.  Andrews was notoriously reclusive.  Marketing might have forced her to deal more with the public than she cared to.  She also seems to have been as protective of her intellectual properties as she was of her privacy; it's known she demanded script approval and that she went through five scripts before selecting the one that eventually got produced She did not, however, reject the treatment by Wes Craven; that was someone else's bad decision.  You can read the Craven script here, where it is available courtesy of the amazingly vast Complete V.C. Andrews site.   It has incest!*
 
Finally, the immediate aftermath of Andrews' death was fraught with so much red tape that perhaps no one wanted to touch the mess.

In the end, someone did film an Andrews novel.  Just one.  And it was panned so solidly that no one dared mention its name again.

Warning: this review is very long and very gif-heavy, because give me an avi of FITA and a copy of Photoshop and I just can't stop.

The Suspense!

Watch this space on New Year's Day for a surprise!

A big surprise.

::side-eyes the ever-growing Word file::

A big, big, twenty-seven-pages-and-counting surprise . . .

At this point I wouldn't trust me either.

I have tried very hard to keep my personal life experience off this blog (because, you know, we're so professional here), but from its inception, this blog has been plagued with setbacks, such as the time my town was leveled by a tornado, the time I nearly died of pneumonia*, and my father's death last year, in addition to my intensive school schedule.

But good news!  As of December, I will be an honest-to-god graduate of English, meaning that I will have no realistic job prospects AND my investigations into the world of V.C. Andrews will instantly have an air of authority!  In addition to this, on January 18th 2014, Lifetime will present its new made-for-TV version of Flowers in the Attic, and they have promised us actual incest this time.  Mmm, incest.

Therefore, barring any more life-threatening ailments, natural disasters, or my becoming a complete orphan, this blog will officially recommence January 2014, in time to review the new movie and in anticipation of a resurgence of interest in All Things Andrews.




*Could've been arsenic poisoning.  I have it on good authority that the symptoms are identical.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being an Andrews Character

I'm not really expecting a lot of diversity from my V.C. Andrews.  She was a lily-white lady writing pretty, sexy novels to appeal to other lily-white ladies at a time, albeit a relatively recent time (within the past thirty years), when the very idea of racial diversity in media was a concept tossed about by high-minded academics in the company of other high-minded academics, most of them white and all of them very probably drunk.  Moreover, the very book that made V.C. Andrews famous took place in a locked room and featured a grand total of six major characters.  There's not a lot of wiggle-room for representation within those perimeters.

But she tried, God love her, she tried.  The very few people of color in Andrewsland are by and large kind, cheerful, generous people who do their best to ease the lives of the (invariably young, white, and clueless) heroines.  When both Heaven and her mother feel out of place in the rambling halls of Farthinggate, they are welcomed into the kitchen by the jovial Rye Whiskey, who dispenses home-cooking and advice.  The Dollangangers are led to safety by the mute housekeeper, Henny Beech. 

Taken all together, it points to a kind of genteel racism, the logic of which goes something like this: I am a white writer, and as such have no experience with persons of color as individuals.  It's not that I don't like them--heavens no!  It is just that I fear that I, ensconced in my whiteness, can never do justice to their inner nobility, and also because I am secretly terrified of being called a racist.  Therefore I will go out of my way to include them in my work, and furthermore, I will make them dear and kind and decent and well-nigh saintly, prescribing to no negative stereotypes.  How can that possibly be racist?  It's a Scarlett O'Hara attitude, pointing out that the slaves at Tara get a ham every Christmas while never addressing the moral question that there are slaves at Tara.  The trouble with genteel racism is that in the end, it feels as if the author expects a pat on the head for acknowledging the very existence of anyone who isn't white.

"Dance, Ballerina, Dance . . . "

I'm still working on the next section of recap, so to fill some time, please welcome Mr. Nat "King" Cole, singing the song Chris quoted to Cathy during their incredibly awkward semi-nude pool-party in Flowers in the Attic!

Fun Fact!  This song topped out at #18 on the charts in 1957, the year Flowers in the Attic begins.  Now you can imagine twelve-year-old ballet-obsessed Cathy playing this single over and over on her plastic portable record player and driving everyone in the family nuts.

A Possible Influence? The Works of Margery Lawrence

While working on the next entry for this blog, I came across this quote: "he forced upon me what should only be given in love."  This line regards Julian raping Cathy in the upcoming section and is--I thought--a classic example of Andrews' strangely coy descriptions of all things sexual.

Except I took a closer look, and it isn't.    

In fact, this line is a direct quote from a 1930 novel,  The Madonna of Seven Moons, by Margery Lawrence.  The only difference between Madonna and Petals is that the Madonna quote is in third person, while Petals is of course in first person.  Criterion describes the film adaptation of Madonna of Seven Moons as a "lurid tale of sex and psychosis" about a woman who was raped by gypsies.

The little I found on a quick research of Margery Lawrence is that she was a writer of occult mysteries in the 1940s.  She was very much into spiritualism and published a couple of books on the subject; she prefaced some of her (obviously fictional) Gothic works with a disclaimer stating that they were true stories with the names changed for privacy.  Cambridge University's Orlando index, which catalogs the works of female British authors, describes her work thusly:  Female sexuality looms large in her work and she often places female characters in impossible predicaments, often involving social convention, money, or class.

It's too little info to make a connection to Andrews, but I did find it interesting that the most outstanding conventions of this woman's work sound like things that could be said of Our Gal Ginny.  It sounds as if Lawrence could have very well be an influence on Andrews, and the direct quote strongly implies that Andrews read The Madonna of Seven Moons. 

I feel it necessary to point out that I do not imply Andrews may have plagiarized this other author.  One lifted line does not a plagiarist make.  Writers brains are like flypaper for unique phrases, which tend to get regurgitated without our realizing it.  Recently in my own fiction, I had to go back and edit the opening of a scene when I realized it too closely resembled the opening of a similar scene in a published novel.  I'm sure that if I had to bear down to catch a whole three paragraphs, a line or two here and there has probably slipped under my radar.  That's how we writers roll.

Margery Lawrence's works are sadly out-of-print, and the few copies available are antiques far out of my price range.  She seems to be well-known enough to have a Wikipedia article, but obscure enough that I can't find any scholarly papers on her work--and believe me, us desperate English majors will dig up writers you've never heard of in order to stand out in our field.  I do not have quite enough time to do any in-depth research investigating other potential links between the two authors. But if there's a thesis anywhere in this, I call dibs.

I Chase the Wild, Elusive Butterfly of Andrews: a short essay with no immediate application

There is an astonishingly tiny universe of biographical information about V.C. Andrews.  A significant proportion seems to be obfuscation disseminated by Andrews herself.  For example, she liked to understate her real age even after her biographical information became widely available.  As Andrews remained a very youthful-looking woman right up to the end of her life, she could get away with the ruse.  There are two apparent origins for this small vanity: one, as told by E.D. Huntley in V.C. Andrews: a Critical Companion* states that young Andrews may have lost some friends when they discovered she was nineteen, rather than sixteen, and that thereafter she always knocked a few years off her age.  The other is the notorious People interview that essentially ended all interviews with Andrews.  People reported Andrews' age accurately as fifty-six.  Andrews, furious, fired off a letter to a fan where she claimed to be "twenty years younger."

I don't call this lying. I call it a small, understandable vanity.  God knows she's not the only woman in the world who ever misrepresented her own age.  But even with limited insight into Andrews' psyche, one knows that she never did anything for just one reason.  Perhaps, feeling that she had lost out on her young adulthood through illness and immobility, she decided to celebrate a second youth once she had the money and power to do so.  Perhaps she wanted to be as young and glamorous as the women in her writings, either for emotional reasons or to sell her image to the public.  Perhaps she had been understating her age for so long that she really believed she was thirty-six.  Whatever her reasons, I personally find this a sweet, sympathetic fib, a deception that harmed no one. 

Knowing that the mutability of age that is a prominent theme in Andrews' work, it is hard not to read a direct parallel with the author's life.  Cathy sets twenty-six candles into Paul's birthday cake because that is the age she wishes him to be.  Vera in My Sweet Audrina changes her age to reflect however she's feeling that day, from sixteen to twenty to thirteen; Audrina herself has no ability to determine the ages of others and must rely on what they choose to tell her, with each individual choosing to remain the age they like best.  In Heaven, Kitty, a glamorous thirty-five, is obsessed with looking twenty.  And in arguably the most famous example, Heaven's grandmother Jillian literally suffers a complete mental breakdown when confronted with her true age, accompanied with the gripping image of her youth peeling from her face like the layers of an onion.  These examples are simply the ones that come to mind immediately; I can think of half a dozen others.

For all the ribbing I give to Andrews' stylistic quirks, the truth as I see it is that that she was a woman who wrote close to her own bones.  Because there is such an obvious personal component in her novels, coupled by the lack of concrete information with the woman herself, it is hard not to read too much into the text, if only to satisfy one's curiosity for a woman who deliberately made herself elusive.  In this way, Andrews begins to remind me of the shadowy, long-dead mother figures in both the Dollanganger and the Casteel series.  (The first) Corrine Foxworth and Leigh Van Voreen hover over both these sagas without physically manifesting**, influencing from beyond the grave the course of the heroines' lives.  Both families are haunted by the legacies of these beautiful, dead woman.  Somehow, I don't think this interpretation would have displeased Andrews herself.         










*Yes, there are critical guides to Andrews' work written by people who are not me.  

**Well, Leigh does but we'll get to that later.

Petals on the Wind, Part Six: In Which We are Going to Carry On as if Nothing Happen

After confronting Julian with her upcoming nuptials, Cathy goes back home for--oh look, another Christmas.  Considering that this book culminates in a dramatic Christmas Eve face-off, I'd like to say that making Christmas a constant touch-point is Andrews's way of foreshadowing, but I think she just really really enjoys gift-porn. 

"Thank God I had Paul to escape to," Cathy gushes.  "And I wasn't going to let Julian take the joy from this Christmas.  For this was the time Paul and I had agreed to announce our engagement, and the only person who could ruin my happiness now was Chris."  AND HE WILL.