Sensual reading shapes and steers the self as much as it informs it. The signs we take in and interpret define our state of mind, the contours of our body, and their place in the world around it. Reading special texts (collections of signs) brings experience and pleasures disjoined from the body–the sublime jouissance (“bliss”) of touching new thought, new language, and new dimension. This jouissance is limited, however, by the spacetime of its living reader; it cannot transcend its dying mind and body or its fading pasts and accelerating future. External texts collapsing into the reader’s internal ones, the reader’s only liberation to greater eternal interpretation is Death, its finalizing end, or its limitless expanse

For the inhabitants of that expanse, that liberation can bring paradoxical restraint. Their time freed from linearity, their corporeal past can still pull them back to its thrall, its vital phenomena exciting their minds as they jar–and hopefully realign–their “bodies.” Lily, the uncanny narrator of Oz Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House embodies and asserts this, noting how haunting ghosts will:

…go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again, worrying over the floors in confused circles, tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens…there is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen. They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking. For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing, and left all alone, this is how they rot.

She is not being impersonal. Going back and forth between times and bodies herself, her interpretation is direly internal…as is her dread of the rotting she fears encroaches upon her. Trapped in a physical house, between carnal and spectral bodies, and earthly and deathly Time, Lily must complete two separate but enjoined interpretations, un-maskings of two primal mysteries for saving self-knowledge and freedom from “rot.” She must move from the stasis of impotent looking to the existential freedom of spiritually seeing

This involves a double mode of interpretation–and subsequent double mode of being–similar to a third person dream where dreamer is both acting object and viewing subject, both hero and watcher of the dream’s “film.” As Lily herself notes, this process isn’t automatic. The temporal/bodily separation of the two “selves” brings a strangeness as potentially potent as the natural recognition, particularly that moment initially separating them–the sublime moment of death:

They have stayed to look back for a glimpse in the very last moment of their lives, but the memories of their own death are faces on the wrong side of a wet window, smeared by rain, impossible to properly see.

To realign with that point of revelation, and that face in the “wet window,” Lily must watch her living self–a nurse caring for the Horror author Iris Blum–solve the temporal mysteries of her last days as her own reading of their revelations brings the jouissance and self-awareness eluding her

In her living present, and spectral past, Lily arrives at Blum’s house (itself dying of rot) sneering at the author’s output (“the kind of thick and frightening books that people buy at airports and supermarkets”), marking herself a facile, surface reader. She is also a considerably faint-hearted one. When the estate manager suggests she read Blum’s most famous novel, The Lady in the Walls, she recoils, asserting, “I scare too easily!” Later, she comments on herself, “Some people, they just get spooked.” Each of these “flaws” draws living Lily to both the mystery of the dying, oddly-sounding house and that of Blum’s novel incorporating its story…her banal self-assurance spurs her investigation as her potent fear gives it tantalizing allure. Her spectral future, meanwhile, watches in wait, her past self and interpretation her own mysterious text to decipher

Both “Lily’s” will be engaged in two types of reading semiotician Roland Barthes referred to as the texte lisible (“readerly”) and the texte scriptible (“writerly”). The readerly text is that collection of signs whose interpretation demands no changing of consciousness, or rearrangement of self; its reading brings no real revelation, no sublimity. The writerly text is that sublimely alien, uncanny collection of signs reshaping the reader’s consciousness as they interpret their strange arrangement…the text bringing its reader jouissance. For living Lily, her readerly texts are the physical house surrounding her, and The Lady in the Walls and its literary history of Polly Parsons, the 19th century occupant of the house who mentally (and possibly literally) haunted Blum and may now be haunting Lily. For her future ghost, and “current” observer, she herself is both readerly and writerly text, both her mundane observations she has already experienced and the sublime discoveries and sublime death she has yet to fully interpret or absorb.

Living Lily actually begins this investigation with a simple written text, or as it seems at first. Overcoming her fear of the frightening, she begins Blum’s novel, seeking the mystery of the house, of Blum, and of the enigmatic Polly with whom Blum has confused her. Opening Lady in the Walls immediately opens the parameters of the novel, as Lily discovers a pressed flower in the inner back cover, a physical memento carnalizing the connection between author and subject…and possibly reader and subject. Her entrée made to the intimacy of the text, Lily reads and Polly speaks:

I’m not more than a few minutes old. I was tied to my mother’s body by a terrible rope. But now I am dead, and yes I left the world just as I came into it; I am wearing nothing but blood…I am as white as a sail. I tell this often to myself. I tell myself that nothing gets on me, but it does me little good. The words pour right through; I am too full of holes.

Lily recoils in both faint-hearted dread of the horrific and uncanny recognition of the eerily familiar, the image of blood-soaked Polly stirring her fears as Polly’s existential disease echoes her state…both moving her into sublimity–and sublime knowledge–within and outside herself.

Lily’s sublime reading in turns expands the readerly limits of the novel, at least for her, extending its signs to the house and mysteries it documented and releasing its hero from its printed words to the spiritual unbound. The house begins to reveal silhouettes and upturned carpet corners suggesting an uncanny occupant not entirely unknown. Polly’s transcribed words of her life, marriage, and matrimonial murder became literal whispers in Lily’s ear, hushed ominous warnings of “This is how you rot.” And these warnings become suggestions, and possible prophecies, as Lily begins seeing herself rotting like the moldy house slowly making her its own. Now heightened reader, and imperiled subject, of a ghost story expanded beyond its pages, she must work to avoid its promised ending even as its allure beckons her to it.

Spectral Lily watches all this with the intrigue and the dread of her doppleganger subject. A spirit who has left her body and bodily past behind, she is still dependent on them for her own self-knowledge. She is aware of both her post-mortem state and her removal from living space and time:

From where I am now, I can be sure of only a very few things: the pretty thing you are looking at is me. My name is Lily Saylor; I am a hospice nurse. Three days ago, I turned 28 years old…I will never be 29 years old.

Lily’s awareness of her ghostly state is remarkably incomplete; she is aware of her death and her aging’s end, but she remains nescient of what she is and what sublimity made her; still locked in looking, Death’s true jouissance still eludes her. Even worse, as Iris had warned her, she has not escaped the dying (the rot) that plagued her living body and encasing house:

You poor pretty things whose prettiness holds only one guarantee–learn to see your self as the rest of the world does and you’ll keep…but left alone with only your own eyes looking back at you, and even the prettiest things rot; you fall apart like flowers

To free herself from this spectral narcissism (and rot), she continues it to its climax, her bodily ending Polly found so opaque. At that sublime moment, living and spectral Lily become one, just as both “readers” move from readerly observation to writerly participation. As white silhouette becomes dreadful revelation, they converge into shared death, one shedding their body as the other finds real form. True jouissance closer at reach; Lily is ready for new readers, the house’s new occupants in sublimity’s grasp

Art is more than communication; it is a presentation of the self and the world in one’s own style. There is content, but throughout the artwork, not within it.  So, successful perception of Art is not just the reception of information; it is opening oneself to the other, greatly at the artist’s terms.  For artists, however, particularly intimate ones, the exchange of Art remains communication, just one of a higher form.  More communion than communique, the intimate artistic exchange between artists carries heightened expectations, rewards, and perils.  Failure to adequately receive & understand the art and artist cannot be excused as error.  The receiver is no longer an uninformed other, but an enlightened familiar, one whose intimacy demands perception, comprehension, and sympathy.

This is the dynamic dwindling in (and driving) Tom Ford’s brilliant Postmodern Noir, Nocturnal Animals.  Its protagonist, Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), is a successful high-end gallery owner discontented with her work and marriage. A former art student, she now deals in what she condemns “junk,” while married to her pretty, hollow, and wayward husband, Hutton. Seemingly serendipitously, she receives a book copy from her first husband she had divorced 19 years ago, alleviating her present dejection. Her assistant reading the accompanying letter, she brightens as she hears the book is to be published, it is different than what he wrote when they were together, and she gave him the inspiration for this soon-to-be-published novel, entitled “Nocturnal Animals.” No longer just a book for Susan, this is her unsettled past possibly bringing a brighter future, a new escape from an old one poorly chosen.

That belated escape unexpectedly connects her to that desired future, as it entails a primal scene uniting them in embedded memory, if possibly hindering a true reunion.  The scene was a brutal one. Frustrated with her husband Edward’s (Jake Gyllenhaal’s) insistence on pursuing his writing career, she chose to abort their unborn child, finding subsequent solace in the arms of her lover and soon-to-be husband, Hutton…solace witnessed by a devastated Edward.  However, the scene was no isolated phenomenon. It was a shattering climax to Susan’s cruel crescendo of belittlement, her incessant undermining of Edward’s artistic confidence in hopes of his embracing a more lucrative career.  Instead of that movement, he disappears from her for 19 years, only to return in the form of his art she had derided.  Ironically, if she is to have her desired communion, she must embrace Edward and his work as the artist and art she had dismissed in their past.  She also can no longer receive them as the cynical art dealer she had become, but as the artist of her past who received Edward as he was, not whom she wanted him to be. A true artist, Edward is communicating his art, himself, and the state her damage has left him in. Only a true artist can receive them.

As the communicating artist, Edward’s work cannot fade into incoherent abstraction; beauty and sublimity are not its only goals.  As artist presenting himself as such, he also cannot become the polemicist, the writer privileging argument over the artist’s aesthetics.  He must find narratives, characters, and mood conveying him and his experience without recognizably becoming them.  This will complete his intentions and free him from her past belittlement–her damaging claim true writers (unlike Edward) didn’t write about themselves, an insistence he could dispute but never fully repel.

The narrative of “Nocturnal Animals” approaches but nimbly avoids that of a Roman a Clef.  The protagonist is a successful writer with a lovely red-haired (like Susan) wife and a spirited red-haired teen daughter. Packed for a road trip, they leave their lovely Texas home in their nice Mercedes.  There are clear similarities here to Edward’s–and Edward and Susan’s–story.  Like young Edward, “Tony” is a writer from Texas who “left” his Texas home and was moving into the future with his wife and “child.”  However, unlike Edward, Tony is an accomplished writer, and his daughter is an almost grown child, not an unborn one.  An artistic reader could and should navigate these differences: recognizing similarities without ascribing sameness, seeing separation without discarding parallels.  This acuity becomes more vital when the reader encounters Edward’s family’s horrid fate.  Soon after leaving their home, two cars full of dangerous-looking young men begin terrorizing the family in the night, eventually forcing them off the road.  After ten minutes of physical and psychological torment, the leader of the young men-and a few of the others–drive off with the mother and daughter and complete the novel’s horrific tragedy. Again, the narrative provides striking similarities and (greater) differences between Edward’s and Tony’s ones.  There is no parallel–and the novel makes none–between the rape and murder of two women and a woman having an abortion, inadvertently destroying her husband in the process.  There are, however, parallels in the two men’s helpless states and degrees of loss.  Both Edward and Tony see their shameful weaknesses/fragilities affirmed as everything they had and hoped for is erased by outside forces.

Edward keeps Tony and himself separate, but close, throughout this tragedy through his symbolic use of character: in particular, his use there of metonymy.  Artistic writers avoid vulgar representation–which is banal replication, not artistic expression. So, as opposed to metaphor, where a character represents and/or replicates an extra-textual signified, they use metonymy.  There that signified is represented by different characters (and sometimes objects), and/or a character signifies different people and/or objects.  The artistic reader knows this. They do not need the metonymic theories of Freud, Lacan, and/or Jakobson to know these dynamics are vital to artistic representation.  They know without metonymy, Art degrades into argument free from vital sublimity.  So, while that reader does look for inter-textual signification, they look for it in fractal connections dictated by the artwork, not in simplistic analogues suggested by myopic rationality.

Part of one fractal connection appears in the novel in the form of Detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), a cranky rustic lawman assigned to Tony’s case.  In many ways, Andes joins the assailants in representing the stereotypical Texas masculinity Edward shirked.  As Susan’s mother tells Susan in a flashback, Edward has always been sensitive and fragile. As he shows Susan in another one, that sensitivity extends to his feeling guilt, not unease, at finding his best friend, Cooper (Susan’s brother), had had a crush on him.  Andes, however, serves a more important metonymic purpose in representing a significant part of Edward, himself.  Andes is Edward’s drive to accomplish what his weak, flagging self cannot. Andes’ separate connectedness shows the artistic reader Edward’s capability for such resolve while separating Edward from Andes’ banal virility & (more particularly) ambition he’d disdained.  When Bobby asks Tony, “If we pick you up at the house, you think we could backtrack from there (to the crime scene)?” and he tepidly answers, “I could try,” Andes looks at him in incredulous condemnation. When Tony half-heartedly scans a line-up of suspects, pathetically claiming he recognizes none, Andes angrily responds, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you want to put these guys away?”  Andes has become the dwindling, nerveless Tony’s dedication & strength needed for his revenge, as he embodies Edward’s once-untapped diligence & ambition needed to write and complete his expressive novel.  This metonymy is finalized by the fact Andes is literally dying, Tony is effectively doing so, and Edward has seemingly spent 19 years fading into a dark place with a darker end.

Edward greatly symbolizes this dark place–and its cause–through his metonymy of Susan.  Like Edward, she is partly represented by her obvious signifier, Tony’s wife, Laura. Played by Isla Fisher in the film, their physical resemblance is uncanny and she is the warm, loving wife Edward hoped Susan would be.  But the wife is not enough.  Edward had always seen Susan as an artist, despite her giving up her literal artistic career, not just a wife. We see that passion, strength and daring he saw in her in the daughter, India, who also looks strikingly like Susan, likely even more like the teen Susan and Edward knew.  India is sharp-witted and confident–more than even the growingly cynical Susan–and shows creative/artistic potential before Tony’s failure helps end her life.  The tie between the two women and the girl is further cemented by the way Laura & India are found–two intermingled, almost indistinguishable bodies pointing to shared existence as well as experience.

Ironically, Susan’s metonymy also connects her to Laura and India’s assailants, particularly their leader, the lethal peacock Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson.)  As noted earlier, Susan’s strategic undermining of Edward had been catastrophic. As seen in an earlier scene, Susan’s mother had predicted this, “In a few years all these bourgeois things as you so like to call them will be very important to you and Edward will not be able to give them to you.” “Don’t do this,” she later adds, “you’ll regret it and only hurt Edward.”  Once Susan and Edward are married, her words prove brutally prescient. Hoping to steer Edward into a more lucrative career, Susan attacks his work in a stream of sweetened invectives also attacking/gaslighting Edward himself:

    You’re going to take this the wrong way.

I think you should write about things other than yourself

It’s just my mind started to wander while I was reading it and that’s not good, right?

Are you going to work at a book store and write your novel? Is that what you want to do with your life?

I mean that’s really Romantic, but (points to their shoddy furniture) this is it?

This is exactly why I don’t want to read your work because you always get so fucking defensive!

Edward makes passionate and articulate rebuttals, but they are defensive and unsure, convincing neither of them and continuing his decline.

Ray exacts similar–but more explicitly severe and horrid–gaslighting upon Tony throughout the novel. During their initial horrific encounter, Ray, picking up on Tony’s weakness in inaction, taunts, “Have you got a vagina? Have you got a vagina there, vagina boy?” Exasperated at his impotence called out, Tony can only muster an ineffectual howl.  Ray continues this semi-familiar torment when Andes and Tony take him for a drive, hoping to exact a confession. Bemused, Ray focuses only on the weaker Tony, sneering, “He’s crazy…you’re fucking crazy.”  And he finalizes his gaslighting and personal attacks, as well as confirming they’re connection to Susan’s, with his last words before Tony kills him: “You’re too weak, too fucking weak. You’re too weak to do anything about it.” By the end of Susan’s gaslighting, and during her planned escape, this is what Edward (partially correctly) heard in her words:

     (Susan) You’re so …you really are so wonderful. You’re so sensitive and Romantic and…”

(Edward)…Weak!..That’s fine.

(Susan) What? No, I did not say that!

(Edward) You’ve said it so many times before; you might as well say it again.

As this exchange and her earlier undermining showed, explicitly calling Edward “weak” was not Susan’s mode of attack. But it’s what Edward often heard, affirming his inner fragility haunting him, the inner fragility he mostly blamed for his great loss. So, Ray allows Susan to be represented as cause of loss and crucial part of it, a complex metonymy of the resented, the cherished, and the lost.

This paradox shows in Edward’s sending the novel –an artistic work of stark revelation and potent demonstration–to Susan he believes can artistically receive it. He had always believed in her having those gifts. When she responds to one of his parries with, “No, I don’t because I’m not creative,” he returns with both assurance and plea that “that’s because you choose not to be.”  She does choose this, likely galvanizing that in her rejection of Edward. Not only does she host ghastly exploitative exhibitions bereft of Art, she can no longer remember why her younger, more artistic self saw beauty in works she bought.  And this shows in her reading of the novel.  Not unexpectedly, she is moved by the family’s tragedy and Tony’s subsequent trials and torments.  As a skilled non-artistic reader, she is able to recognize the skill and work in “Nocturnal Animals.” After reading through the night scene, she e-mails Edward:

     Dear Edward,

I am reading your book. It’s devastating. I am deeply moved. It is beautifully written. I    would love to meet on Tuesday evening. Let me know if you are still free. Much to say.

Love,

Susan

She is deeply moved and devastated, but by the fictional experience of Tony and his family.  She cannot see Edward in the novel, nor even conceive he could express himself and his experience in it. If she had, she would not anticipate the “much to say.”  And her memory fails her as much as her faded artistry, as Edward had earlier told her, “nobody writes about anything other than themselves.” So a reader-writer connection is made, and a vital artistic communion is not…and Susan moves hopefully forward, blissfully unaware of the ramifications.

So, she waits at the restaurant oblivious to the reality and reason why he is not coming…or is no longer going anywhere at all.  There is Noirish exacting of revenge here–the victim of cruel devastation bringing poetic justice to his trusted victimizer and betrayer.  But Edward’s book was not a hateful device he could have so more easily constructed.  It was a final artistic communication of extended desolation coming to its close as much as it was an expression of resilient rage at the one who caused it.  As an artistic one, it needed an artistic receiver capable of receiving and grasping it more than a receptor of wrath and pathos.  Edward wanted realization and recognition, not reciprocal suffering. Had she met this expectation, painful knowledge and grievous catharsis could have reopened once-closed artistic escape of her own.  Her reading a failure, and her artist now gone, she lingers in the crushed hope and cynicism she chose over her now faded art.

(Spoiler alert: This is an analysis of the film, including the ending.)

Horror cherishes its endings. They let it expose audiences to sublime dread, semi-reveal to them its cruel secrets,  and unnerve them with devastating crescendo. Burnt Offerings’ apocalyptic ending–Horror’s greatest–does all three. The mid-70s Gothic Horror film introduces its viewers to its malignant Mrs. Allardyce, paralyzes them with her horrific “truth,” and wipes out its guest family in a paroxysm of broken windows and broken bodies. A Gothic apocalypse, the family and their memory are consumed by their baleful house, their “era” ended to be replaced by another.

The finale reflects another ending: the tense post-Vietnam/Watergate fever dream ending in a president’s resignation and a country left leery of its leaders and traditions. This angst extended to the family. Mothers, fathers and families sold these myths, so they and their value became profoundly suspect. Few genres captured this better than Horror and its disdain for comforting traditions and bonds.  The Omen preyed on the period’s familial distrust and confirmed paranoia of a wicked establishment. The Exorcist horrifically carnalized epochal fears of Evil infecting our youth.  Burnt Offerings, however, did much more.  While decimating its family and its bonds, it horrifically reflected its period’s erosion of its sacred traditions of marriage, family, and progress, relegating them to the detritus of its Past.  In doing so, Burnt Offerings moves its family and audience to an uncertain nexus: the family subsumed by the house’s sinister anti-history, the audience left horrified and tainted by the period’s troubling uncertainty.

This uncertainty was considerable and deeply felt.  After a nightmarish, unpopular war ended–leaving thousands of Americans dead and even more disillusioned–and a president resigning after being revealed a criminal, Americans lost faith in their societal institutions and endured and/or embraced cultural breakdown and experimentation. The institution of Marriage suffered as divorce rates rose, promiscuity became pastime, and discos and singles bars became playgrounds for erstwhile and present husbands and wives.  And films inevitably arose manifesting this aimless, sybaritic ideology. Saturday Night Fever chronicled Romantic and romantic thrills of nocturnal single life, while Looking for Mr. Goodbar preached of and presented its horrific possibilities.  Film also expressed the anxieties and cultural breakdown of American marriage.  Kramer vs. Kramer explored divorce’s threat to traditional gender roles while lesser films like A Change of Seasons vulgarly visualized the carnal opportunities divorce offered.  Those films, however, weren’t Horror films. Restricted to the quotidian, no matter how hedonistic, they had little access to the period’s Sublime.  They couldn’t adequately portray or reflect the spiritual disintegration of the mid-70s and the nightmares it produced. They also couldn’t portray or reflect our horror at seeing our 30 years of post-war stable domesticity coming to a shattering close. Burnt Offerings did, shattering its family and audience alike.

As with most Gothics, the center of Burnt Offerings is its house. A neo-classical mansion sitting white and clean in a 1970s remote California countryside. its uncanny atemporality and alienness jar the viewer before it does its incoming guests.  The house’s own nature and “actions” in the film bears out this recoil.  A literal predator, it consumes its inhabitants to resist the entropy of Time and continually revert back to its nascent state. With each occupant devoured, the houses dead foliage re-blooms, old shingles give way to new, and/or its pool and surroundings are completely rejuvenated. The remains of its victims are stolid pictures framed in atemporal frames, arranged as grim trophies in unsettling asynchrony.

Its new guests, the Rolfs, arrive in synchrony with each other and their world’s culture and history.   As philosopher Martin Heidegger famously noted, that synchrony is vital to authentic existence in the world instead of alienation from it. Such alienation leaves one disconnected from the past, in a spiritless present, fumbling towards irrelevance and death. Bound in a tri-generational loving nuclear family in 1976, the Rolfs have avoided that malaise plaguing many of their contemporaries.  The father and mother–Ben (an atypically milquetoast Oliver Reed) and Marilyn (an atypically normal Karen Black)–are a young attractive couple who, after 13 years, still enjoy a healthy sex/romantic life. Their 12-year-old son, Davy, is ebullient and well-adjusted and enjoys a playful verbal-sparring relationship with his father. Completing their loving clan is Aunt Elizabeth (a typically spry Bette Davis), who fortifies Ben’s position as paterfamilias, a steward securing his line’s future and its past.

The house–and it’s two “children”/attendants/familiars, Arnold and Roz Allardyce–begin erasing this synchrony immediately upon the Rolfs’ arrival.  Roz’s quarry is Marilyn. She aggressively, but unctuously, enlists her to care for her “mother.” Manipulating Marilyn’s palpable motherly instinct, Roz draws her into mothering hers: the mysterious Mrs. Allardyce living upstairs in her locked attic room, surrounded by her asynchronous “collection” of eerie photos.  And to be sure the house itself is included in the deal, she assertively asks, “Will you love the house as brother and I do”?  The wheelchair-bound Arnold–a creepy Burgess Meredith–disturbingly sets his sights on other prey–rambunctious Davy.  Upon hearing Roz note “there’s a boy, too,” Arnold wheels hungrily to the window, looks lasciviously at Davy, and purrs, “Oh God, what a charming little boy.”  His rapture finalizes after watching Davy fall from a tree and bleed, as a once dead plant in the house sprouts three vibrant green leaves.

This is creepily carnivorous. The house and its environs are beginning to feed on the Rolfs and their bodies.  However, it is also temporal.  If a zeitgeist is the spirit of a time, the house is a nichtzeitgeist, a spirt of non-time. Its graveyard of Allardyces ending in 1890 suggests it had survived historically along with its family by consuming them or through uncanny symbiosis. The end of the Allardyce line, outside the sub-human vestigial Roz and Arnold, demanded the house live outside of time, disrupting its occupants historical time to do so. If the house is to ingest the Rolfs into its non-Time, it must break their  bonds with Time and their normative familial positions galvanizing it.

Its easiest prey is Aunt Elizabeth.  A familial addendum to the nuclear Rolfs, an aunt to Ben, and a relative removed to Marilyn and Davy, she does not share the close bonds of the other three. Also, as the oldest, her connection to the current zeitgeist is the weakest, her own “time” the closest to fading into the past. This makes her the one closest to death, the easiest to draw towards it…and the house does so voraciously.  Like the dying foliage around the house, Elizabeth begins to decay. Her hair grows increasingly pale white. Her bawdy liveliness and painting flora in the yard gives way to late morning rises quickly followed by mid-afternoon naps.  Even worse, she becomes increasingly addled, unsure whether or not she closed Davy’s window, leading to his near death from a house-initiated gas leak. A pariah to Marilyn and a pity to Ben, she retreats to her bedroom, suffers an inexplicable broken back, and a horrific death next to a cowering Ben.

Ben could do nothing; he was undergoing his own consumption and decay.  The head of the family with historical support for his authority, he immediately became the house’s biggest target. Before it could devour him and the rest of the family, it had to break him, rending him from his temporal position, and reducing him from potent patriarch to whimpering whelp.  It uses the increasingly swayable Marilyn to sexually humiliate him, undermining his patriarchal confidence. It also partially does this by drawing him out of his time and into it’s non-one.  Leaving a pair of 19th c. glasses from one of its earlier victims, it physically draws Ben in, reducing his temporal stability and bearings.  With Ben now open to its sway, the house can reduce him to the child of his past by reproducing his once-vanquished nightmares of it. He had been traumatized at his mother’s funeral as a child by a leering chauffeur seeming to take pleasure from his grief. Haunted by nightmares of that encounter in childhood, adulthood and manhood had purged those reveries. The house whispers them back while carnalizing them into Ben’s present reality. Sitting on the lawn, drinking a beer, Ben is horrified to see the chauffeur’s car driving up the driveway, and paralyzed with terror to see the chauffeur in the window leering at him once again. Traumatized, Ben becomes that terrified boy again, an impotent “man” who cannot save Davy from nearly drowning or his aunt from the chauffeur when he appears in her room, “crushing” her with her future coffin.

This leaves the house and household in the care of Marilyn, the house’s most important, most intimate victim.  Marilyn isn’t just caretaker, puppet or prey; she’s the site of the house’s new triumph over time, and its avatar fully ensuring its success.  Like Elizabeth, Marilyn begins to age, accelerating the house’s rejuvenation. Her hair becomes slowly grayer and she begins preferring older clothes styles, hair styles, and accessories.  But unlike deteriorating Elizabeth, Marilyn’s change invigorates her, making her more assertive and vibrant. It also, however, makes her more detached from–and oblivious to–her family. As noted above, she moves from resisting her husband’s affections–making him bemoan their time between “visits”–to outright repelling them, leaving him to pathetically wail “have I become so repulsive?” Even her care for Davy wanes, as she also almost lets him drown as she tends to her new “child,” the house. Moving further from her family and the family traditions of her time, she drifts into the house’s non-time, her body’s movement into her elderly future driving the house back into its “past”…..once again.  She becomes the house’s potent, uncanny avatar, Mrs. Allardyce, as the house readies for apocalyptic rebirth and its guests’ apocalyptic end.

That end is savage, symbolic and swift. With the house manifest in Marilyn’s body, and her body rent from its own time, the Rolf’s stabilizing history collapses around them.  Unable to function without that, or their own matriarch, Ben and Davy–the contested future–confront her and the house occupying her…with annihilating results.  Like many of their time, the Rolf’s traditions and family bonds failed them.  Unlike their contemporaries, they are in no “place” to recuperate them.  Absconded out of Time, they are now a-temporal refuse, plastic memories of a timeless spirit.