Background Blogging: I Sense a Theme

Checking my stats after the long absence reveals a certain trend in my search hits.

"incestuous rape Flowers in the Attic":  This blog discusses the rape scene in Flowers in the Attic: Part Six, which is the secondmost viewed entry on this blog by several hundred hits, surpassed only by the entry on the Andrews estate's court case with the IRS.

"flowers in the attic rape": Yes, same section.

"flowers in the attic chris and cathy make love": Cathy and Chris don't make love in that book.  They do in later books, but in the first one, it's straight-up rape.

"flowers in the attic nude": There is a lot of casual nudity scattered around Flowers in the Attic, particularly in the section covered in Part Five.  There is no nudity in this blog, unless you count that one picture of Burt Reynolds.

"flowers in the attic sex excerpt":  The whole scene?  It's not very graphic compared to some of the scenes in say, Petals on the Wind, and it's rather short, and it's, well, a rape scene.  There's an earlier scene where Chris and Cathy kiss and make out a little that's probably more satisfying on the sensuality front.

"flowers in the attic porn":  I'm sure it exists, although a quick search reveals that, if it's out there, it's surprisingly difficult to locate amid the tons of cheeky articles that describe the book as "softcore porn for preteens."  Andrews' own sex scenes tend to be soft focus.  You'll have to go to the fanfiction for anything more graphic than that. 

At any rate, there's no porn in this blog, and there's no porn in Flowers in the Attic, except for maybe scenery porn.  Andrews does love to describe her sets.

In a bit of mood whiplash, however, I'd like to talk about some other search results that really bothered me for a number of reasons.

"was vc andrews raped/was vc andrews molested/vc andrews was an incest victim"

Serious talk about incest and some analysis of Andrews' oeuvre under the cut.

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 . . .

Flowers in the Attic, Part Seven: Escape from Cellblock Six

In one of the best chapter titles in this series, if not in history, the first chapter we encounter in our final lap of the recapping is "Color All Days Blue, But Save One For Black." Also possibly a good title for the next Panic! At the Disco album.  But they have to include the italics.

The chapter begins "We were leaving. Any day." which my mental narrator read in a deeply sarcastic voice: Yep. Any day now. Aaaaaany day. Because so far it's taken them nine months to steal $500, and I'm sure that once that goal is reached, Chris will beg them to hold off another three days to watch Betty Jo's wedding on Petticoat Junction and then Cathy's period will start and of course you can't escape while you're on the rag because what if you attract sharks? But this time they have a plan: the next time they go downstairs, they're going to take everything, money, jewelry, valuables, a clean sweep. And then they're going to run away to Sarasota, Florida and become circus performers. No really. That's the plan.

Flowers in the Attic, Part Six: In Which Cathy Makes Passes at Men with Mustaches

A Note: Cathy spends the larger portion of this chapter running around in skimpy see-through baby-doll nighties. This is a trend that will feature heavily in the next book.

Cathy and Chris, by unspoken consent, decide not to speak of the "odd" moment on the bed, although they keep giving each other uncomfortable looks thereafter. Meanwhile, Andrews feels the need to inform us that puberty, once begun, is a river run wild: we are treated to descriptions of Cathy's willowy waist and broadening hips, and of Chris's manly chest and um, other manly things:

I caught him once in the attic staring down at that part of him he seemed so taken with--and measuring it too!

"Why?" I asked, quite astonished to learn that the length mattered. He turned away before he told me once he'd seen Daddy naked, and what he had seemed so inadequate in size. Even the back of his neck was red as he explained this. Oh, golly--just like I wondered what size bra Momma wore!

"Don't do it again," I whispered. Cory had such a small male organ, and what if he had seen and felt as Chris did, that his was inadequate?

Flowers in the Attic, Part Five: Starvation Heights

Hm. I could have sworn I already posted up Part Four, but Blogger thinks otherwise. Nevertheless we proceed apace, dear friends! We have reached the midpoint of the novel, and the first chapter of Part Two is called "Growing Up, Growing Wiser." I strongly challenge one of those two claims.

We resume the narrative learning that "another year passed, much like the first." Mommy Dearest's visits have become less regular, and the grandfather remains perpetually two weeks from death. Cathy and Chris have developed the habit of sunbathing nude on the roof, too high up to be seen from the ground, and despite all the warnings have a stunningly casual attitude about nudity these days. "We were not always modest in the bedroom," Cathy says, "nor were we always fully dressed. It was difficult to live, day in, day out, and always keep the intimate places of our bodies secret from the other sex." No four people living in such close quarters can reasonably be expected to match the grandmother's standards of "modesty," which involve not even looking at members of the opposite sex, but so far these kids seem thoroughly obsessed with nudity, bathroom functions, genitalia, and their mom's sex life. They could use a few inhibitions.

Flowers in the Attic, Part Four: The Part Where the Book Becomes Unbearably Creepy

Mommy Dearest returns after the twins' bedtime. She is wearing an allegedly gorgeous green velvet-and-chiffon gown that shows off all the curves, as well as a healthy helping of cleavage. Chris is gobsmacked and openly ogles her; Cathy is envious of her brother's attention and hopes that one day she will have a figure like her mother's. I mean, it's one thing for a girl think Mommy is the most beautiful woman in the world and want to grow up to look just like her, but when you want to look just like Mommy because you notice that your brother gives her his undivided attention . . . I just don't know, y'all. This book is taking me to places in my own psyche where I do not wish to linger.

Flowers in the Attic, Part Three: Merry Christmas from the Family

With the Trunchbull gone, the kids gather around their mother--gently--as she explains what's going on here. What's going on here is that lady, you have one hell of a lawsuit open to you and you could probably sue these sadistic sumbitches for millions. You need to go to the cops and get photo documentation of this. Go on. I'll wait.

Nah, that's not how we roll here in Andrewsland, where money = absolute godlike power. Instead she explains that both her mother and father are religious zealots. Even in her father's condition, he attends church every Sunday, sometimes in a hospital bed, because he is trying to buy his way into Heaven (silly Malcolm Foxworth! You can buy your way into Heaven for $500! Just ask Cal Dennison in a couple of books!). As a child, she says, they were forbidden to go to dances, to date, and were required at all times to control their thoughts and keep them "pure," which explains why she keeps strolling around in her negligee in front of her teenage son, but whatever. But then she fell madly in love with her handsome half-uncle. They eloped, and finally it dawns on the kids that this half-uncle that has been mentioned at least five times now is, in fact, their father. NOTE TO THE ACADEMY: NOT MENSA MATERIAL.

Flowers in the Attic, Part Two: In Which the Metaphorical Flowers are in the Literal Attic

So the kids wake up and are apparently surprised to find they are still in the same room. Like I said: these kids ain't particularly bright. We get a recap of the room specs, as if we might have forgotten them since the last chapter: sixteen-by-sixteen (what twelve-year-old automatically estimates the square footage of her bedroom?), two double beds, highboy, dresser, dining table and chairs, faded Oriental rug, two overstuffed armchairs. So far, this room is better-appointed than my apartment.


And at this point we need to have a serious discussion about Cathy's continued use of the phrase "golly lolly." Some of the things V.C. Andrews puts in the mouths of her characters just fucking baffle me. No one has ever used the phrase "Good golly lolly!" in real life. Even twelve-year-old girls in the 50s didn't talk like this.

The majority of Andrews's dialogue is like this. She appears to have never heard two human beings engaged in casual conversation. It's not so much that her child-characters don't talk like children--which is a really common problem in fiction in general--as that they do not talk like human beings at all.

Flowers in the Attic, Part One: Lockdown!

The problem with V.C. Andrews is that, if you simply tell someone the premise of her books, they actually sound pretty good. The premise for Flowers in the Attic, for example, might be "Four young children are hidden in a single locked room while their mother attempts to win back her inheritance from her dying father. Gradually the children realize they are in danger, and that they must escape."
You can tell the story, you can hit the high points, but nothing ever quite manages to convey the wonky craptastic magic that is the V.C. Andrews Experience.