‘Bly Manor’ Review: I don’t care what straight people think of this show.
Negative reviews concerning The Haunting of Bly Manor reiterate the importance of where those reviews are coming from: Straight people miss the mark on the resonance of LGBT stories.
[WARNINGS: THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR SPOILERS]
‘Bly Manor’ is a story within a story; at the end of the narrator’s tale, a listener exclaims, “I liked your story, but I think you set it up wrong. You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t. It’s a love story.”
That right there is a whole summary of Bly Manor in once sentence. It is a love story, powerful and poignant that resonated with me — a queer woman — so deeply that the ending of the show inspired my partner and me to promise each other that if one of us ever dies first, we will always put a hand on the other’s shoulder. (Which is especially impressive to me given my partner’s insistence that ghosts are not real. )
While reviews for the show have been resoundingly positive, it’s the negative opinions that have given me the greatest pause. While those reviews don’t take away from my connection with Bly Manor’s narrative, they do remind me of a point that Brie Larson raised and was lambasted for. When The Wrinkle in Time opened to mixed reviews, Larson pointed to the fact that the majority of reviewers were middle-aged white men. She said: “I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”
At the time, I whole-heartedly agreed with Larson, and I still do. Building on her point, how unforgivably reviewers missed the queerness of Bly Manor illustrates a similar problem: I don’t care what heterosexual people think of Bly Manor.
For example, Mashable’s reviewer whines about Dani’s ‘tragic widow’ backstory seeming far too similar to Hill House. But this is a bland heteronormative spin on the actual narrative.
[REMINDER: Spoilers Follow] Victoria Pedretti’s Dani, a lesbian, grew up friends with the boy next door who fell in love with her. She kept clinging to her compulsory heterosexuality up until the eve of the wedding when she finally admitted her sexuality to her would-be husband. The night ends in his accidental death, and Dani is left with complex feelings of guilt which are rooted not in the grief of her nearly-husband’s death, but in the fact she blames herself and her sexuality for ending his life and destroying the lives of his family whom she so dearly loves. As a queer woman with my own past battle with compulsory heterosexuality, Dani’s narrative was one that I felt in my bones; the bitter incongruency between the desire to make others happy and be true to myself.
Similarly, Variety complains that Dani’s backstory was so ‘ showily, cryptically teased’ that by the time it’s given to the audience it’s a disappointment. In my opinion, this reviewer completely missed how important building the romantic tension between Dani and Amelia Eve’s Jamie was to the depth of that reveal. Never during Dani’s flashback does she admit her sexuality, she never says the words, but we know because the narrative told us. To me, the subtle and organic introduction of Dani’s queerness is the opposite of showy: it feels far more reflective of queer experience than any blunt force “I’m a lesbian” early reveal would have.
Similarly, RogerEbert.Com complains of Dani’s ‘anticlimactic [backstory] reveal’ and also seems to utterly miss the importance, originality, and soul-wrenching reliability of Dani’s queer experiences.
The climax of the story involves Dani inviting the tortured ghost of Kate Siegel’s Lady Viola Willoughby to possess her. However, I am yet to read a review of that lays out in crisp detail why Lady Willoughby accepted, so I’ll tell you.
Viola Willoughby’s ghostly half-life consists of her waking, walking through the land of the living in an unfelt, unfulfilling haze, and returning to sleep to forget it all until the cycle repeats. Throughout Dani’s flashback relationship with her would-be husband, we see much the same story: Dani wakes, she walks further into her own unhappiness, searching for a feeling that is never there, so she tries to forget who she is to keep going. It is that recognition that brings Viola to Dani, and while the pull of Viola’s anger and depression eventually proves too strong for Dani’s will, Dani gets to live, and love, and find enough peace to let both of their souls' rest.
The beauty in Bly Manor is that connection between death, regret, and the closet. It doesn’t take a degree in Film Studies to know that throughout most of the horror film genre’s history, the LGBT community hasn’t been cast in a warm romantic glow. We’re typically the mentally-ill murderers or the degenerate monsters — not the heroes or the saviours.
This series purposefully dismantles those painful tropes, equates compulsive heteronormativity and queer guilt with struggling through monotony and mud, and ends on a bitter-sweet note that promises me that love like mine is just as eternal and everlasting as anybody else’s.
