A Dream Within a Dream

Picnic at Hanging Rock
M'House
DVD
2/24/08

My friend Joe gave me a copy of the Criterion DVD of Picnic at Hanging Rock for Christmas a few years ago. I've just now gotten around to watching it.

It's based on a novel by Joan Lindsay about a group of Australian schoolgirls who go on a class outing to Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day, 1900. Three of them and a teacher vanish. Hanging Rock is a real place and, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a lot of effort has been put into making you believe that the events in the film really happened.

And, like the events in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, they didn't.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a fiction. It's lyrical and mesmerizing and it's central mystery is maddeningly unresolved. It's a good thing, too. As Lovecraft wrote, "In all things mysterious, never explain." Lindsay actually wrote a chapter that explained the mystery that was excised from the book and went unpublished until after her death. And when you find out what it is... well, it's kind of ridiculous. I haven't read the book and I don't know how well it fits in with the tone of the book and while the explanation fits in with aboriginal mythology, it still has kind of a "That's It?" vibe to it.

And I'm not going to say what it is.

Still, this is one creepy movie. It's a horror film that takes place mostly during the day and where very few horrifying things are seen. There is a monster, in the form of the girls school headmistress, but the unnerving thing about the film is Hanging Rock itself. Its given a presence and there is a deep, low thrum on the soundtrack that accompanies most of the scenes set there. And as the vanished girls ascend the the rock, there is the feeling that something is calling them to the peak, something almost sexual. With the exception of one (the one who runs screaming down the mountain as the others disappear) they remove their shoes and stockings, and the one who later reappears is missing her corset. And I doubt it's a coincidence that the pan flute is the primary instrument in the score.

Which raises the question, if the girls were abducted by faeries, is the one who was sent back even the same person who was taken? Or a changeling, or something else? As I mentioned, it's maddeningly unresolved and open to interpretation and even if there is an author penned solution to what's going on, who's to say she was right?

Apparently, they screen Picnic at Hanging Rock at Hanging Rock every Valentines Day. I think if anywhere, that would be the place to see it.