December Talking Meme: Sir Malcolm Murray
In a show with a premise that's essentially a fanfiction multicrossover and gleeful celebration of tropes and archetypes, both Victorian and current day, (Sir) Malcolm Murray (the show never says, but I'm assuming he got knighted for his explorations, as opposed to being born a baronet) owes his existence to several sources. For starters, he's Mina Murray's of Dracula fame OC father - I think both of Mina's parents are mentioned as dead in the novel, but it's been a while since I've read it so could be wrong. In any event, they don't show up. Like the most frowned upon OCs, Malcolm partially ursurps a canon character's role (gathering the vampire-fighting gang together is canonically Van Helsing's job), but for all that his family connection is with Dracula, the character himself is actually far more connected to another type of late Victorian sensational novel and reality. Think Allan Quatermain and Henry Rider Haggard. Malcolm is, among other things, a deconstruction/variation of the White Explorer, hero in Victorian times and mostly cast as villain in current day eyes.
Now, there's one more precedent which show creator John Logan evidently has to be familiar with. I have no idea whether he's said as much or denies it, but he has to have read Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the first two volumes at least because afterwards the series goes down the drain. Not just because the multicrossover premise is very similar to Penny Dreadful, but also because Moore's comic series already stars a deconstructed Allan Quatermain in his old age (opium addicted, out of shape and at odds with the present), and the prickly dynamic between him and Mina Murray (divorced Mina Harker, post Dracula, and one of the very few Minas who have the determination, drive and cleverness of the Stoker character as opposed to the damsels who bear her name in movies and tv incarnations elsewhere) is one of the key relationships in the story. (Sidenote: there is also a film version which I haven't seen. They lost me before even a trailer was out there when I read an interview with the director where he said that they changed the story from Mina as the leader of the League to Quatermain as the leader because Sean Connery was cast as AQ and "can you imagine Sean Connery taking orders from a woman?" Okay then. I never watched that movie.)
Penny Dreadful's Mina is (mostly) of the damsely variation, but she's only a minor character, if of tremendous importance to two of the main characters. Instead, it's variation of the Deconstructed Exporer/Young Sharp Woman combination offers as the woman in question another OC, Vanessa Ives. Vanessa - who is something of a combination of a Wilkie Collins antiheroine with a 1970s horror movie, archetype wise - is in many ways the center of the show, and as opposed to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Mina/Allan Quatermain combination, which turns romantic in the second volume, her relationship with Malcolm refuses definition because it's messed up to a degree even Alan Moore might envy.
They start out as a mystery both to the first pov character the show offers, Ethan Chandler (American Abroad, werewolf and increasingly the Guy With Ethics in the developing team) and the watchers, and after hints and fragmentary revelations, it's not until episode 5 that we get the backstory for Vanessa, which includes the explanation of just how she and Malcolm are connected. In the best Victorian sensational novel tradition, it starts as a tale of two families. We never learn much about Malcolm's wife other than that she grew opium addicted in her later days or about Vanessa's father other than that he's Catholic (like the rest of his family): the families seem to have been dominated by Malcolm and Claire (Vanessa's mother), who had a long term affair. (This begs the question as to whether Vanessa could be Malcolm's biological daughter, but I'm tending towards "no" because if she were, it would take away from the emotional power of the season ending.) It's interesting that when Malcolm later tells Vanessa that he always expected/feared his family would be destroyed by himself, he names his absences and neglect, not the affair, at what he thought would be the cause. (Did he and Claire think it would simply never be discovered, or did they count on their spouses' silent toleration?)
The youngest version of Malcolm - the tanned charismatic explorer returning - we see in the show actually isn't a terrible father, though, absences not withstanding. (That comes later.) He's greeted enthusiastically by all three children, his own two, Mina and her brother Peter, and Vanessa, and it's worth noting he hugs and talks to MIna and Vanessa with equal affection. The Murray/Ives dinner where everyone is listening enthralled to his stories furthers the impression that not one but two households are revolving around Malcolm as the star, their emotions shaped by his comings and goings. This is the Victorian pater familias as hero, though very soon shown standing on a questionable pedestal when young Vanessa accidentally finds him and her mother having sex, something she imprints on and can never forget. When the children are teenagers, the view on Malcolm as a father darkens, because his son Peter increasingly feels inadequate to parental expectations, with both Peter and Vanessa aware that the younger generation person who actually would be suitable to join Malcolm in his adventuring, the one who wants to, isn't Peter but Vanessa, something that Victorian gender expectations prevent being acknowledged by Malcolm. The break between both families is triggered by Vanessa's seduction of Mina's fiancee, but it's Malcolm who seals it, in closing the symbolic and actual door between the two households. It's the end of Vanessa's childhood paradise (as perceived by her; Peter might have seen it somewhat differently) and the rejection through Malcolm is a casting out that at the same time is an acknowledgment of the similarities between; he thought he would destroy his family, he tells her, but it was her.
The Malcolm the show offers in its present day, otoh, is aware that he accomplished that destruction quite independently from Vanessa's one youthful tryst. This is the Victorian father as villain. His son is dead, and as the season goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the reason why Malcolm feels guilty of this is that in fact he is guilty; dragging Peter to Africa, leaving him behind in a camp when he got sick, you name it, Malcolm did it. Whether he ever did anything more directly harmful to Mina than not being there, the show doesn't say. But the impression it gives me is that one major reason for Malcolm's obsession with saving Mina is that he never was there when she needed him, and of course doomed her brother, and that is harm enough.
Malcolm's explorer status is also relentlessy deconstructed. What he wanted to find - the source of the Nile - he didn't, and the mountain he named after himself instead of his son is a monument to his ego. Vanessa - accurately - predicts that no matter what plans he spins, he won't return to Africa. One of the entities possessing Vanessa accuses him of having raped and killed natives galore. Though it's worth noting that if this had been Malcolm's standard mode of behavior, it's hardly believable Sembene would choose to stay with him. Sembene is an underwritten character, but anything but servile, on a first name basis with Malcolm, who doesn't take it for granted that Sembene will do as he says but asks him as well as the main characters whether or not he'll join when Team Fighting Vampires is assembled. When Sembene talks to him about whether Mina might not be irretrievable, Malcolm doesn't agree but also hears him out first, at no point behaving as if Sembene giving his opinion on a key matter is in any way unusual.. The first time we hear them talk to each other, they speak Kishuaeli, i.e. Sembene's language, not Malcolm's which at the very least also shows Malcolm wasn't the type of White Man Abroad who thought everyone should just speak English or that relying on translators would be enough. All of which leaves me with the impression that Malcolm's behavior in Africa must have been something better than a non stop rampage, and must have included some genuine curiosity and appreciation of other countries, but otoh I'm also sure those accusations of the demon didn't come out of thin air, and that there were at least some killings, and probably also rapes. And let's not forget - Victor Frankenstein (plus Creatures) and Ethan (as a Werewolf) and Vanessa (possession) all embody horror tropes. Malcolm is the Victorian explorer as a horror trope.
He's still not a villain, because this show actually believes in redemption. Not of the self justifying kind, which probably would have happened had Malcolm been able to save Mina the way he imagined he would. He's aware of his own sins (half the information about Malcolm's misdeeds comes directly from Malcolm - "so you see, doctor, I have not a shred of decency" - is how he puts it), but that ego is still there, and I don't think he could have resisted rewriting his past in his own eyes in such a case. But instead, the relationships with people he's not related to biologically turn out to give him another shot at being something other than terrible. There is some mutual self punishment in his allegiance with Vanessa - they've seen each other at their worst, and have no hesitation to bring that up when arguing -, but also an instinctive understanding, and even before the finale very rarely an odd tenderness (when he comes home after the seance and finds her sleeping, or when she is about to go on a date with Dorian and twirls joyfully for an openly admiring Malcolm) in the midst of the ruthlessness. There's the quiet comrardery with Sembene, for which we really need the backstory and not just a hint of same. And there are the two young men, Ethan and Victor, far better equipped than poor Peter to call Malcolm on his bullshit if he spouts same but in Victor's case responding to him as a father figure nonetheless. Ethan's a bit more complicated because his allegiance is to Vanessa, and while he has daddy issues about his own father he doesn't cast Malcolm as a second one. So Ethan is more of an emotional son-in-law, from Malcolm's pov. But all of them: damaged members of a new created family. One Malcolm didn't set out to create - he simply needed backup in his attempt to redeem the past/save his daughter - but one which formed, nonetheless.
Malcolm's choice of Vanessa in the finale isn't simply one to save Vanessa's life over who Mina has become. He could have done that silently. It's also an open acknowledgment of what Ethan told him in the previous episode, and a continuation of something he once said to Vanessa in anger, with a new emphasis. When he told Vanessa during an argument "you're the daughter I deserve" , he said it to hurt her, and to express self loathing. When Ethan told him "you want to save your daughter - well, here she is, not some things with fangs", it's a reproach of Malcolm's willingness to sacrifice Vanessa for Mina. (Also some self loathing, if you like, because Ethan himself is of course a thing with fangs, once a month.) But when Malcolm says "I have a daughter" before shooting Mina to save Vanessa, he's not using Vanessa as a personification of his own sins (something he did from the moment he closed the door on her and between the families in her youth): he's admitting to his feelings for her while choosing the reality of her, neither an idealized Victorian saint (which is what he made the Mina of his imagination into) nor a demonized curse. When Dorian in an incidentally very funny scene tried to find out whether he should treat Malcolm as Vanessa's father figure or lover, Malcolm sidestepped the implicit question by saying Vanessa owned herself. Which is true, but it's also an avoidance of what Dorian wanted to know. Now I don't think "daughter" is all Malcolm sees in Vanessa (and "father" is certainly not all she sees in him, hence the devil coming to her in Malcolm's shape and Vanessa seeing through the trickery and having sex with him anyway), but it's one important element in their complex relationship, and one that he's finally been able to give voice to.
In the last scene showing him in the season, he's taken the maps of Africa down - another acknowledgment of a truth - and he and Vanessa are able to finally mourn together, instead of against each other. But it's not just about the past. Vanessa, only half kidding, brings up Christmas and inviting "the boys", and Malcolm doesn't say no. They're neither of them the son he doomed, Ethan and Victor. They're themselves. And that might be why this new family has a shot at survival. Not with Malcolm as the patriarchal head, the way he was for his first family/families; with him as one of the messed up members who try, nonetheless.
December Talking Meme: The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1037435.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Now, there's one more precedent which show creator John Logan evidently has to be familiar with. I have no idea whether he's said as much or denies it, but he has to have read Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the first two volumes at least because afterwards the series goes down the drain. Not just because the multicrossover premise is very similar to Penny Dreadful, but also because Moore's comic series already stars a deconstructed Allan Quatermain in his old age (opium addicted, out of shape and at odds with the present), and the prickly dynamic between him and Mina Murray (divorced Mina Harker, post Dracula, and one of the very few Minas who have the determination, drive and cleverness of the Stoker character as opposed to the damsels who bear her name in movies and tv incarnations elsewhere) is one of the key relationships in the story. (Sidenote: there is also a film version which I haven't seen. They lost me before even a trailer was out there when I read an interview with the director where he said that they changed the story from Mina as the leader of the League to Quatermain as the leader because Sean Connery was cast as AQ and "can you imagine Sean Connery taking orders from a woman?" Okay then. I never watched that movie.)
Penny Dreadful's Mina is (mostly) of the damsely variation, but she's only a minor character, if of tremendous importance to two of the main characters. Instead, it's variation of the Deconstructed Exporer/Young Sharp Woman combination offers as the woman in question another OC, Vanessa Ives. Vanessa - who is something of a combination of a Wilkie Collins antiheroine with a 1970s horror movie, archetype wise - is in many ways the center of the show, and as opposed to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Mina/Allan Quatermain combination, which turns romantic in the second volume, her relationship with Malcolm refuses definition because it's messed up to a degree even Alan Moore might envy.
They start out as a mystery both to the first pov character the show offers, Ethan Chandler (American Abroad, werewolf and increasingly the Guy With Ethics in the developing team) and the watchers, and after hints and fragmentary revelations, it's not until episode 5 that we get the backstory for Vanessa, which includes the explanation of just how she and Malcolm are connected. In the best Victorian sensational novel tradition, it starts as a tale of two families. We never learn much about Malcolm's wife other than that she grew opium addicted in her later days or about Vanessa's father other than that he's Catholic (like the rest of his family): the families seem to have been dominated by Malcolm and Claire (Vanessa's mother), who had a long term affair. (This begs the question as to whether Vanessa could be Malcolm's biological daughter, but I'm tending towards "no" because if she were, it would take away from the emotional power of the season ending.) It's interesting that when Malcolm later tells Vanessa that he always expected/feared his family would be destroyed by himself, he names his absences and neglect, not the affair, at what he thought would be the cause. (Did he and Claire think it would simply never be discovered, or did they count on their spouses' silent toleration?)
The youngest version of Malcolm - the tanned charismatic explorer returning - we see in the show actually isn't a terrible father, though, absences not withstanding. (That comes later.) He's greeted enthusiastically by all three children, his own two, Mina and her brother Peter, and Vanessa, and it's worth noting he hugs and talks to MIna and Vanessa with equal affection. The Murray/Ives dinner where everyone is listening enthralled to his stories furthers the impression that not one but two households are revolving around Malcolm as the star, their emotions shaped by his comings and goings. This is the Victorian pater familias as hero, though very soon shown standing on a questionable pedestal when young Vanessa accidentally finds him and her mother having sex, something she imprints on and can never forget. When the children are teenagers, the view on Malcolm as a father darkens, because his son Peter increasingly feels inadequate to parental expectations, with both Peter and Vanessa aware that the younger generation person who actually would be suitable to join Malcolm in his adventuring, the one who wants to, isn't Peter but Vanessa, something that Victorian gender expectations prevent being acknowledged by Malcolm. The break between both families is triggered by Vanessa's seduction of Mina's fiancee, but it's Malcolm who seals it, in closing the symbolic and actual door between the two households. It's the end of Vanessa's childhood paradise (as perceived by her; Peter might have seen it somewhat differently) and the rejection through Malcolm is a casting out that at the same time is an acknowledgment of the similarities between; he thought he would destroy his family, he tells her, but it was her.
The Malcolm the show offers in its present day, otoh, is aware that he accomplished that destruction quite independently from Vanessa's one youthful tryst. This is the Victorian father as villain. His son is dead, and as the season goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the reason why Malcolm feels guilty of this is that in fact he is guilty; dragging Peter to Africa, leaving him behind in a camp when he got sick, you name it, Malcolm did it. Whether he ever did anything more directly harmful to Mina than not being there, the show doesn't say. But the impression it gives me is that one major reason for Malcolm's obsession with saving Mina is that he never was there when she needed him, and of course doomed her brother, and that is harm enough.
Malcolm's explorer status is also relentlessy deconstructed. What he wanted to find - the source of the Nile - he didn't, and the mountain he named after himself instead of his son is a monument to his ego. Vanessa - accurately - predicts that no matter what plans he spins, he won't return to Africa. One of the entities possessing Vanessa accuses him of having raped and killed natives galore. Though it's worth noting that if this had been Malcolm's standard mode of behavior, it's hardly believable Sembene would choose to stay with him. Sembene is an underwritten character, but anything but servile, on a first name basis with Malcolm, who doesn't take it for granted that Sembene will do as he says but asks him as well as the main characters whether or not he'll join when Team Fighting Vampires is assembled. When Sembene talks to him about whether Mina might not be irretrievable, Malcolm doesn't agree but also hears him out first, at no point behaving as if Sembene giving his opinion on a key matter is in any way unusual.. The first time we hear them talk to each other, they speak Kishuaeli, i.e. Sembene's language, not Malcolm's which at the very least also shows Malcolm wasn't the type of White Man Abroad who thought everyone should just speak English or that relying on translators would be enough. All of which leaves me with the impression that Malcolm's behavior in Africa must have been something better than a non stop rampage, and must have included some genuine curiosity and appreciation of other countries, but otoh I'm also sure those accusations of the demon didn't come out of thin air, and that there were at least some killings, and probably also rapes. And let's not forget - Victor Frankenstein (plus Creatures) and Ethan (as a Werewolf) and Vanessa (possession) all embody horror tropes. Malcolm is the Victorian explorer as a horror trope.
He's still not a villain, because this show actually believes in redemption. Not of the self justifying kind, which probably would have happened had Malcolm been able to save Mina the way he imagined he would. He's aware of his own sins (half the information about Malcolm's misdeeds comes directly from Malcolm - "so you see, doctor, I have not a shred of decency" - is how he puts it), but that ego is still there, and I don't think he could have resisted rewriting his past in his own eyes in such a case. But instead, the relationships with people he's not related to biologically turn out to give him another shot at being something other than terrible. There is some mutual self punishment in his allegiance with Vanessa - they've seen each other at their worst, and have no hesitation to bring that up when arguing -, but also an instinctive understanding, and even before the finale very rarely an odd tenderness (when he comes home after the seance and finds her sleeping, or when she is about to go on a date with Dorian and twirls joyfully for an openly admiring Malcolm) in the midst of the ruthlessness. There's the quiet comrardery with Sembene, for which we really need the backstory and not just a hint of same. And there are the two young men, Ethan and Victor, far better equipped than poor Peter to call Malcolm on his bullshit if he spouts same but in Victor's case responding to him as a father figure nonetheless. Ethan's a bit more complicated because his allegiance is to Vanessa, and while he has daddy issues about his own father he doesn't cast Malcolm as a second one. So Ethan is more of an emotional son-in-law, from Malcolm's pov. But all of them: damaged members of a new created family. One Malcolm didn't set out to create - he simply needed backup in his attempt to redeem the past/save his daughter - but one which formed, nonetheless.
Malcolm's choice of Vanessa in the finale isn't simply one to save Vanessa's life over who Mina has become. He could have done that silently. It's also an open acknowledgment of what Ethan told him in the previous episode, and a continuation of something he once said to Vanessa in anger, with a new emphasis. When he told Vanessa during an argument "you're the daughter I deserve" , he said it to hurt her, and to express self loathing. When Ethan told him "you want to save your daughter - well, here she is, not some things with fangs", it's a reproach of Malcolm's willingness to sacrifice Vanessa for Mina. (Also some self loathing, if you like, because Ethan himself is of course a thing with fangs, once a month.) But when Malcolm says "I have a daughter" before shooting Mina to save Vanessa, he's not using Vanessa as a personification of his own sins (something he did from the moment he closed the door on her and between the families in her youth): he's admitting to his feelings for her while choosing the reality of her, neither an idealized Victorian saint (which is what he made the Mina of his imagination into) nor a demonized curse. When Dorian in an incidentally very funny scene tried to find out whether he should treat Malcolm as Vanessa's father figure or lover, Malcolm sidestepped the implicit question by saying Vanessa owned herself. Which is true, but it's also an avoidance of what Dorian wanted to know. Now I don't think "daughter" is all Malcolm sees in Vanessa (and "father" is certainly not all she sees in him, hence the devil coming to her in Malcolm's shape and Vanessa seeing through the trickery and having sex with him anyway), but it's one important element in their complex relationship, and one that he's finally been able to give voice to.
In the last scene showing him in the season, he's taken the maps of Africa down - another acknowledgment of a truth - and he and Vanessa are able to finally mourn together, instead of against each other. But it's not just about the past. Vanessa, only half kidding, brings up Christmas and inviting "the boys", and Malcolm doesn't say no. They're neither of them the son he doomed, Ethan and Victor. They're themselves. And that might be why this new family has a shot at survival. Not with Malcolm as the patriarchal head, the way he was for his first family/families; with him as one of the messed up members who try, nonetheless.
December Talking Meme: The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1037435.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.