Film Break: WWI's Presence in "The Awakening," PART ONE

Remember when I mentioned that some films have a literary quality to them? Well, "The Awakening" is one of them, and I'm going to attempt to put my finger on why that is. (And it's not the cinematography and soundtrack, which are completely gorgeous, by the way.)

I'm not usually a fan of "scary" movies, but I am a sucker for a ghost story, which is what this is. Oh, is it a lovely, lovely ghost story. One that works on both literal and metaphorical levels, especially as regards WWI.

If you haven't watched it, you should. Behold, the lackluster Netflix summary (and Netflix has the film up on Instant Play, conveniently):

A haunted boarding school calls on Florence Cathcart, who disproves hoaxes for a living. But the strange place leads Cathcart to question rationality.

Because this post got insanely long, and is rife with screencaps and quotes, I am breaking it into two parts. This first part covers everyone and everything WWI-related except Robert and Florence.

THE REST OF THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS, CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Click to enlarge.

What absolutely blows me away about this film is that the real ghost in this story is World War I. It is 1921, and the war's shadow lingers not only over the entirety of England, but over the characters, themselves. Almost every single major character has been shaped majorly by the war in some way. The quote above, an excerpt from the protagonist's own works, opens the film, already allowing the ghost of WWI to make its presence known.

I watched the film again just now, taking screencaps and writing down the relevant dialogue. This is probably going to be a really long post, but I wanted to capture every instance I could think of. I'm going to start general, and then go into specific characters. 

Let's begin with the non-character-specific things that bring up WWI, and function as background for the film.

Florence: You don’t need me to tell you what happened to that generation of boys, Mr. Mallory, and yet you don’t see their ghosts stalking the halls of your school.

 The first picture is one of the photographs that Robert Mallory shows Florence while trying to convince her that the school at which he works is haunted. The photos show all of the boys at the school, and range from 1902 to 1906. If, for easy math's sake, the boys are around ten years old in the photograph, how old would they be at the start of WWI? Exactly. So when Florence makes that comment about "that generation," she means that the boys pictured would have ended up fighting, and dying,  in the war. The second picture is a plaque set on the wall of one of the local churches, which Florence notices.

Headmaster Purslow: Child dying before a parent. Dreadful thing. I lost three of them. //

Maud: But it’s a perfect hell on earth... to-to give a woman children to love... and to rob her of them.

One quote from the beginning of the film, one quote from near the end. I didn't even notice the WWI connections to either of these quotes until this time around. Purslow has lost three children, but most likely, they were sons killed in battle. In the second quote, Maud is talking about losing Tom and Florence, but the multilevel resonances of her statement echo the grief of all mothers who lost their children to the war. So we have these really wonderful, heartbreaking sentiments of parents affected by WWI almost bookending the film.

Headmaster: Parry! What would your father have thought?

This is a small one, but it's the reverse of the above: the effects of the war on the children left behind. In this scene, Victor Parry is a lonely boy who goes along with the other boys' schemes to get them to like him. Here, he gets in trouble for impersonating a ghost and scaring people. Notice the headmaster's phrasing when he reprimands Victor: "What would your father have thought?" As in, he can no longer think. As in, he was very likely a casualty of war, as well. The loneliest, saddest child in the school represents all of the children who were left fatherless by war.

McNair, reciting: I think that we / Shall never more, at any future time, / Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds...

I'm going to talk about McNair more later, but I just wanted to point out the poem he is having his students read. The passages are from Alfred Tennyson's "Morte D'Arthur." Here's a little more of the stanza for the line's context:

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: 

"The sequel of to-day unsolders all 

The goodliest fellowship of famous knights 

Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep 

They sleep – the men I loved. I think that we 

Shall never more, at any future time, 

Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, 

Walking about the gardens and the halls  

Of Camelot, as in the days that were.

I have never read this poem before, but it appears that Arthur is telling one of his knights that battle isn't as glorious as he thought it would be, because he suffered such hard losses. Sound familiar? This reminds me of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, where the young men learn the hard way that battle is messy and horrible, not glorious. Like the Wilfred Owen poem states, "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory / The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori [It is sweet and right to die for your country]."

Anyway, notice how McNair, a former soldier, can recite the Tennyson lines perfectly? The war was hard – an understatement. But its shadow even touches the students' curriculum, changing the way their old school texts can be read. This is such a lovely, subtle moment, which would have been ruined by any mention of "dulce et decorum est..." (Owen's poem was written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920, so even though the poem would have been around, it would have been a stretch for it to have been in a textbook.)

And all of these things are just in the background. Now I'm going to go into the characters. I'll try to go in reverse order re: the number of relevant quotes. 

TOM HILL

Tom, of course, is Maud's son, and Florence's half-brother, who was accidentally shot to death by his father – who was trying to kill Florence after shooting her mother. It's complicated. Essentially, Tom is the ghost that haunts the school. That's him, on the far right; he appears in all of the 1902-1906 school photographs that Robert shows Florence. 

Tom and his mother, Maud, are perhaps the only two major characters who have not been directly, or importantly, affected by WWI. However, remember that these are photographs of future WWI soldiers. If Tom had not been killed as a child, he would likely have grown up to fight in the war, as well. Because Tom and Maud have already lost so much, they represent WWI with its absence. Tom would never grow up to fight in WWI, and Maud could never grieve his loss with the other mothers; her loss and grief are just the same, but separate. 

What I appreciate most about Tom's appearance in these photographs is that, even though he's the only true ghost at the time, for all we know, all the children in that photograph grew up and became ghosts. It's as if he's a portent. How convenient it is that the only years of photographs Robert shows are the ones that are now (or were) soldier-aged.

MALCOLM McNAIR

McNair, as mentioned briefly above, is a teacher at the boys' school. He is a harsh man, prone to yelling at his students, and caning them for misbehaving, or even getting a reading wrong. He also has a terrible cough. A bit of research tells me that McNair might be suffering from a pulmonary contusion, as a result of being near explosions in the trenches. Since 1921 is so soon after the end of the war, he might also be suffering from the aftereffects of poison gas, which could manifest as a form of bronchitis. Whatever the case, I think it's a fair bet that McNair has this cough as a direct effect of the war.

In McNair's key scene, quoted partly below, it is revealed that he is the cause of the schoolboy's death a few weeks prior:

Florence, as Victor is about to be caned by McNair: Wait, stop! For God’s sakes. You’ve done quite enough damage. You will not do this.

McNair: What did you say?

Florence: You use a balsam for your chest. I just smelled it on you. I also found it smeared on the glass of the French doors and on the handles, and on Walter’s bear. You were – You were there the night he died.

McNair: I protest. This is –

Florence: And did he protest, when you found him downstairs, ripped the bear from him, and left him out in the dark? I came here to protect children from fear, and you – you are hell-bent on making them live in it.

McNair: You can’t die of fear!

Florence: No. But you can die of an asthma attack brought on by it.

McNair, after a long, guilty pause: He was alive when I left him.

Purslow: Malcolm!

McNair: He was crying, insisting he’d seen a ghost. I thought – I thought I’d toughen him up. It’s not enough to be mollycoddled, Robert. These boys must be strong... Stronger than us.

Notice, firstly, the line, "You can't die of fear!" This is obviously coming straight from personal experience in the trenches. Then, notice the part that gives me chills. He looks at Robert, who was also a soldier, and says, "These boys must be strong... Stronger than us." Wow. By being so cruel, McNair was actually, misguidedly, trying to make the boys tougher than he ever could be, so that the next generation does not have to experience the same terror as he did in the trenches. Everything about this man is an aftereffect of WWI. It has destroyed him, and now, it has gotten him fired. He may have gone to war a normal man, but he came back with nothing.

EDWARD JUDD

Edward Judd is what appears to be the groundskeeper at the boys' school. He is affected by WWI just as greatly as McNair, but not for the same reasons.

 

Florence: You don’t like [Judd].

Mallory: I have my reasons. It would be indiscreet.... Where are his glasses? He used to keep up the pretense. Used to have a limp, too. Kept him out of the trenches

So essentially,when the war arrived, Judd didn't go off bravely to the trenches like the other boys did. He stayed home, feigning the physical handicaps that would prevent him from being drafted. Obviously, by Robert's tone, you can tell that Judd experiences contempt from many people about being "cowardly," especially as Judd's afflictions were faked. Somewhat ironically, Judd is criticized for being one of the only people to see that war for what it was before most of the others did.

Judd: You going home? Found your ghost? Another case to write up while McNair’s thrown to the dogs. After all he’s been through. 

Florence: You know, I wonder whether any of us really know what he went through, Mr. Judd. 

Judd: You shouldn’t talk to me like that. 

Florence: Excuse me? S – I’m sorry. I didn’t – I didn’t mean to – 

Judd: You think I don’t know? Staying at home was wrong? Come down here and tell me that? Let me tell you something, ghost lady. It’s living you wanna watch out for. Not the dead.

Judd calls Florence out on her assistance in getting McNair fired. McNair, who was a soldier. You start to get an idea here about how Judd feels about his own act of cowardice. He realizes the soldiers suffered. Here, he sticks up for a soldier, when soldiers openly criticize him for not fighting in the war. He is defending his tormenters. And then he says it, after Florence essentially calls him a coward. He tells her how guilty he is. How he wishes he were dead, with his peers. He feels wrong about lying and staying home, and now there is nothing to be done about it. But it strains him, and strains him, shaping him into a more and more miserable person, until the pressure finally grows too great, and he snaps.

Judd: I saw you. I saw you with [Robert], the war hero... I’ve seen plenty through these windows making my rounds, but never that. Women. Just lap up the sob stories, don’t you? They were sent, you know. They didn’t sign up. Suddenly they’re heroes.

Florence: How dare you? You did nothing, and you think you can mock men like him.

Judd: You take care of what you’re saying.

Florence: You did – You did nothing when men gave every –

Seeing Florence with Robert, the "war hero," finally sends Judd over the edge. Judd will never be a war hero – he is the exact opposite. And even while the war is over, Judd is still suffering for his decision. While he sometimes respects the pain of the soldiers, he cannot help but resent them. He doesn't have any heroic stories to tell women; many women, like Florence, obviously lost their men, and would feel nothing but contempt for a man who was never in harm's way during the war. Thus, Judd likely does not get a lot of positive female attention. All the while, in his mind, he tries to convince himself that the soldiers were not heroes. "They were sent," he says. He tries to devalue his own choice by devaluing their agency.

Unfortunately, all of this resentment has built to such a degree that, right after this exchange, Judd hits Florence, knocking her unconscious, and then drags her into the forest, where he attempts to rape and murder her. I am not excusing his behavior, nor denying the fact that he may have had some psychological issues before the war began; however, I do think that at least in part, even though Judd did not fight in the war, he still feels a psychological trauma from it.

Interestingly, Judd almost does get his wish, to have fought and died in the war. While Florence is still unconscious, Tom's ghost goes into the woods and frightens Judd out of raping Florence. Notice how he is in the woods, almost entirely alone, in the middle of committing a violent act. Then, out of nowhere, an unknown enemy force appears. He is confused, disoriented. He doesn't know what to do. Then, Florence comes to, and surprises him by hitting him from behind with the barrel of his gun, killing him. Judd gets killed by a gun, after all. Of course, this doesn't exactly replicate the experience of the trenches, but it definitely feels like a battle scene, to me. So almost every action of Judd's in this film is motivated by WWI, from beginning to end.



Click here for the next part, where I conclude by talking about Robert and Florence, and where it's all getting at.