Picnic at Hanging Rock (redux)

I'm teaching Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is always a dicey proposition: students find it either utterly absorbing or utterly boring.    (In some ways, I'd actually prefer to have students read the novel--if anything, it's darker than the film--but it's not in print in the USA.)  Watching it again, I noted that Weir slightly undercuts the novel's double-edged critique of the Appleyard establishment.  The film preserves the novel's opposition between the unruly, dangerous Australian landscape and the overstuffed, overdecorated  "Victorian" interiors at the college; the latter is dominated by Mrs. Appleyard's ominously ticking clock, which in part represents the school's rigid social structure.  As Miranda implies when she explains why she no longer wears her watch, though, the ticking clock also hints at mortality and decay.  If Mrs. Appleyard embodies English propriety, then that propriety itself obviously decays over the course of the film, as her alcoholism reveals itself under pressure.   The novel's Mrs. Appleyard, however, is not just an alcoholic: she's a con artist.   She sells not Victorian Englishness (which is what the gullible parents want to purchase) but "Victorian Englishness," making Mrs. Appleyard and her establishment  neo-Victorian--and quite cynically so.  In the film, the only real sign of Mrs. Appleyard's identity as confidence-woman lies in her famous error (intentional on Lindsay's part? accidental?), also in the novel, about Felicia Hemans: she mistakenly ascribes H. W. Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus" to Hemans, when she really means "Casabianca."*  (One of the wealthy students, Irma, recites a couple of lines from "Casabianca" while on the rock.)  It's a splendidly ironic error, because Mrs. Appleyard holds Hemans up as a model of "English" poetry, even as she confuses Hemans with an American poet.   Given the film's obsession with surface-level conformity, often undermined from within (as in the secret love affair between the two servants), it's not surprising that Mrs. Appleyard's supposedly authentic Englishness turns out to be interchangeable with Americanness...

*  In the film, Sara, the orphan and would-be poet, keeps an engraving of Byron on her bureau--not only a very different model for poetry, but also a cosmopolitan, exotic figure. 

Comments

[Nathaniel]

Count me as someone who found it both utterly boring and utterly absorbing, but for different reasons, when it was assigned in high school. I think that I loaded more into the novel's most obvious hook - the strange disappearances (coupled with the film's whole soft-focus ooziness) - and thus found the actual novel and the boring "real explanation" appended subordinate to my wild speculations.

Also, it was presented to us as "faction" or whatever the horrible neologism was, which was something an Internet search unfortunately set that additional appeal to rest quickly (young enough to have had that option).

I really should read it again, since I feel I encountered it (and the film) in an entirely superficial manner.

[undine]

This movie haunts me. (I haven't read the novel.) Even Mrs. Appleyard's ridiculously overdone pouf of a hairdo, which deflates as her alcoholism increases, contributes to the film's sense of a hollow facade collapsing slowly in on itself, as your post suggests.