Occupied Territories

A Twitter Conversation on Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

By request, here is a transcript from last Friday of a Twitter conversation between myself, Phil Coldiron, and later Dan Sallitt (with the scene-stealing insights) on Terence Davies’ newest film The Deep Blue Sea.

@loosejoints: The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies): did anyone else find this critique of convention a little too compact and coy?  

@loosejoints: Some moments of overwhelming intensity, with lulls that seemingly undermine everything the film is trying to convey. Why so much restraint?  

@loosejoints: Cute satire of the British “stiff upper lip” shtick was annoying pat when many moments in the film seemed to embody precisely this bearing.  

@loosejoints: Which was maddening because of the great passion virtually radiating off the screen in the film’s best moments. Rachel Weisz is totemic.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints Is “convention” = Rattigan or England (or both)?

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron Specifically, I mean the whole idea of when Weisz’s character says you can’t live on a flat plane your whole life.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints Davies obviously has a whole lotta affection for Rattigan, but I never got the feeling he was cosigning on all his ideas.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron Agreed, but that seems unavoidably the theme of the film. And if not, why not? I think it’s right, albeit perhaps a truism.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints I think that’s the big theme of Rattigan’s play, but Davies seemed more interested to me in, duh, time and memory and culture.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints It’s basically a mobius strip of a movie that modulates via culture in the process of its showing (i.e. vs. Rattigan’s telling)

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron It’s pretty hard (for me) to ignore that the best parts of the film have to do with the welling up of intense emotions in the

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron present, which I feel its formalism doesn’t sit easily alongside. However, I did like how it treated the way change how we

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron view relationships after time has passed. I don’t know, I felt a distance I interpreted as reserve. It was distracting.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron I mean, how do we interpret (formally) the final scene between Hester and Freddie? How do you hook the viewer in with so much

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron intensity and emotion, only to leave us with that cool, cruel final scene? It’s like Davies is saying, “Well, so long folks!”

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints That tension b/w overblown emotion and Davies’ graceful-cool direction makes it for me; if we’re takin sides, I’m w/ the latter

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron But I don’t feel the emotions were overblown at all. Thought they were pitch-perfect and totally relatable. If the movie is

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron just a “graceful-cool” formalist exercise in culture, memory, etc., why begin by showing us the suicide attempt of a woman I

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron come to care about. How are those abstract themes more important than her survival? Plus, she’s right, so why subvert that?

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron And if Hester/Rattigan wrong according to Davies, then I just flat-out refuse to listen to the rest of what he has to say.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron (Not to be difficult but rather because I identify so much with Hester that I cannot minimize my allegiance to her.)

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints I said tension (which is productive), not that Davies is asserting wrongness or superiority or whatever.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints So nothing’s “more important than her survival”; it’s about the filtering of a theatrical approach to emotion through cinema.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron Can you give me a concrete example of what you mean by “theatrical approach to emotion”?

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints I don’t see anything with her being subverted, more like abstracted into something that’s synecdochal for post-war culture.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints Something like, say, the big museum fight. More thinking of it as an overarching idea that colors all of Rattigan’s approach.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron I definitely see the presence of Davies in a scene like that, but not sure the overall point. I like the direction you’re

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron heading, though, but it reminds me of an essay I’m writing on melodrama. For me, abstracting virtually = subverting.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints I think the big constant for TD is his mix of affection and abstraction; he treats TR’s work the same way he does his own past.

@sallitt: @loosejoints @PhilColdiron Davies always stages drama as a ceremonial recreation of a dead past; he surely doesn’t see that as subversion.

@PhilColdiron: @sallitt @loosejoints Yeah, even the elements that seem like they’re screaming for subversion (i.e., Postlethwaite in DV,SL) aren’t.

@loosejoints: @sallitt @philcoldiron This makes sense, but “ceremonial” is the complete opposite of abstraction, to me (and not subversion).

@loosejoints: @sallitt @philcoldiron And ceremonial helps me understand the film as a whole a lot better. Works with how I called Weisz “totemic” in TDBS.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints I think we just had wires crossed on how I was thinking about abstraction; ceremonial is a more accurate way to put it, yeah.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron I can def see an “abstract” dimensional to ritual, but yeah, as a former religious studies major, for me it’s the opposite.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron But I must say, I loved the way Davies used focus. The scene where she walks away from Freddie outside the bar is amazing.

@PhilColdiron: @loosejoints Here’s a stab at refinement: abstraction as a precipitant in the process of transforming the personal into the ceremonial.

@loosejoints: @PhilColdiron I like it and am suddenly very interested in “ceremonial melodramas.” Should be a word for abstraction that’s not “abstract.”

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