(Please feel free to point out mistakes, though I doubt this can have anywhere near as many typos as it did in print.)
The Beckoning Strangeness
Notes Towards a Gay Critique of Dark Shadows
by S. R. Shutt
The past, it has been said, is another country. So often do we visit those foreign shores in memory that the pathways thither ought by rights to be familiar rather than strange. Nevertheless, when the destination is a place called Dark Shadows, it is precisely the strangeness, the sinister, the secret, that delights and increases and inevitably lures one back.
For a child growing up “different” in the late 1960s—or, to be more exact, a ten-year-old budding queer in 1968—Dark Shadows beckoned as a garden of respite and refuge, a deliciously Gothic refuge from an otherwise dreary and hostile world. Though assuredly not without its terrors, Collinwood brought comfort in the companionship of Barnabas and Julia, spectacle in the occult triumphs and defeats of Angelique, dark villainy in the designs of Count Petofi (a personal favorite) and Reverend Trask, pathos and passion in the struggles of Victoria and Maggie, Quentin and Chris, each in their own way seeking a better life. There was Elizabeth’s tragic dignity, Roger’s acid wit, Carolyn’s pert curiosity, the brave wisdom of Professor Stokes in the face of every supernatural menace known to man. There was that extraordinary music, unlike anything ever heard before or since. Like Grayson Hall’s exquisitely Gothic, expressive face, the visible grandeur of Collinwood and Barnabas’ mesmerizing, sonorous voice, the music was one of the magical things that elevated one into another world when watching Dark Shadows.
“Watch” is far too passive a word, though, to describe how we experienced Dark Shadows. Jonathan Frid has said, jestingly, that we (the viewers) were the ones doing the acting. Though that was hardly true, it is true that the audience involved themselves in the show so completely that an entire imaginary universe worthy of Borges himself, came into fantastic life within the cramped confines of that now-legendary studio at 24 West 53rd Street. Despite all the flubs and confusion people laugh at today, to a child’s eye this was a darkly enthralling world of utterly convincing reality. To call the series’ cancellation in April 1971 traumatic would be something of an understatement. It was the eve of my 13th birthday; the door in the wall that led to the secret garden had been locked forever. Adulthood loomed, perilously, and with decidedly few blandishments, on the horizon.
Watching Dark Shadows again in the Nineties as an adult has proven a much different, though no less enthralling experience.
“A Stranger who is not a stranger, with a soul shaped by the far place from which” I have come, as a gay man (and an academic, to boot) passionately interested in questions of what in the Seventies was called the “gay sensibility”—now more commonly spoken of as “queer culture”—I find myself astonished, beguiled, and enraptured all over again by the unique vitality of the Dark Shadows aesthetic. The delirious (yet often carefully crafted) mannerism that infuses the whole series, though it certainly has roots in everything from Gothic literary conventions (from Poe to Lovecraft) to the penumbral photography of 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s horror movies (from Val Lewton to Mario Bava), maintains, above all the eclectic reconfigurations of style, a verve and an elan that transcend the iconic conventions of 1960s camp theater. Because it was made with complete seriousness and solemn dedication to presenting something completely new in the constricted medium of television, DS transcends “camp” even as it embodies what Susan Sontag declared to be the fundamental truth of Camp—Camp as a theatre of pure style.
…Camp rests on innocence. …In naïve, or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve. …The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. (Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp,” In the Susan Sontag Reader (NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982, pp. 111-112))
She postulated further that ‘pure’ Camp—the theater of the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve—represents the triumph of style over content. “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style.” (ibid., p. 108) According to her, Camp mirrors gay sensibility to the extent that it “is a solvent of morality.” These ideas seem to me to be very suggestive pointers toward a way of analyzing the style of Dark Shadows. Dark Shadows, in its kaleidoscopic transmutations, is by turns both serious and playful, extravagant and naïve, passionate and yet morally ambiguous (especially in the development of Barnabas). The stories often represent the triumphs of characterizations over plot, a twist in the narrative that seems absurd in a summary acquires depth and logic in light of the personalities with which the actors infuse their characters. These are all elements which locate Dark Shadows firmly within the theater of gay sensibility—call it Camp if you will—and which assure its incorporation into the pantheon of queer culture.
Gregory Woods declared in his pathbreaking study Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry (Yale University Press, 1987) that any work of art may be given a gay reading (or a gay interpretation) regardless of the sexual orientation of its author. In the culture being created by the gay community that has formed since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, there is an unquestionably and unfolding sensibility that will respond to—and cherish—Dark Shadows with a sensitivity and a passion that will be distinct from the conventional viewer’s response to the series.
For many gay viewers, the character of Barnabas provides a kind of touchstone, even an Everyman, through whose eyes they view the action of the entire series. As an outsider, Barnabas acts out in his own life the sense of displacement, unease, and exile that many gay youths felt growing up in the late Sixties and Seventies, and the kind of “difference” that many gay people still feel in Nineties America. The rawness, alternating with exquisite poise, that we see in Jonathan Frid’s portrayal of Barnabas, gives the character a kind of wounded, vulnerable openness that still seems unique in the television universe. Regardless of the sexuality assigned by the plot to Barnabas, his profound loneliness, and poignant struggle to recover his humanity in the midst of a dark and hostile cosmos, make him truly a gay Everyman.
As a child, I never found Quentin to be nearly as intriguing as Barnabas, and as an adult I would locate the lack of sympathy in Quentin's very different response to his curse. In 1897, Quentin cried out, “I want to be normal again. I want to be decent again.” In 19769-70, his amnesia showed just how desperate he was to return to “normal” life. Though he ultimately struggled to redeem himself, his character displayed a certain ruthlessness that the writers rapidly wrote out of Barnabas, in favor of a more ambivalent (and compassionate) moral stance. As a Lothario—and, ironically, a champion of the value of “decency”—Quentin is bound to seem less attractive to the gay viewer. (Gay fans of Quentin—I’m waiting to hear form you!)
A character with whom I found an extraordinary resonance as a child was Dr. Julia Hoffman, and still today Grayson Hall’s theatrical brilliance, her energy, wit, and verve, are essential facets of Dark Shadows’ continuing appeal. As Julia, she made a mark because her strength and loyalty in the face of daily frustration with Barnabas’ waywardness, proved to be prophetic of the experience of unrequited love in adulthood.
Lara Parker was another actress whose mere presence onscreen was enough to charge the atmosphere with a very exciting energy. In her memoir, “Out of Angelique’s Shadow,” she advances her own thought in retrospect that the characters and situations in DS proved so compelling to viewers because they responded to Jungian archetypes, such as those said to be reflected in mythology and classical drama. Though this idea of archetypes is a fascinating one, it seems to me to deprecate the very particular qualities each actor and actress on Dark Shadows brought to their portrayals of the people in the stories. We cared—and continue to care—so much about Barnabas, Julia, Angelique and the others not because they are iconic figures in some primeval mythic drama, but because they are complex individuals whose characters are fleshed out with unusual thoroughness in the leisurely narrative flow of the program. As a soap opera, DS was uniquely able to achieve that haunting sensation of gradually building menace so characteristic of the late Victorian ghost story—a brooding atmosphere in which the characters grew and gradually became real to us in all their extravagance, passion, and innocence.
In this essay, I have ventured from a recollection of my childhood love of Dark Shadows toward a more mature appreciation of the world created by the program. My fundamental contention remains that gay cultural/critical perspective offers an unusually effective way of explaining why Dark Shadows has remained so compelling a part of all our lives. I’m not simply trying to defend or analyze Dark Shadows; I’m determined to celebrate it as an extraordinarily forward-looking event in the history of American television, and a legacy that will grow in richness and inspiration over the years. If, as Jonathan Frid has said, the show has entered the stream of American folklore, it has certainly become an integral part of the gay community’s cultural memory as well; as of this writing, a live soap opera performed in a gay bar in New York City reportedly includes among its situations “Barnabas Collins walking into a gay bar in Twin Peaks.” Let us hope that the Secret Room provides a much-needed space for gay viewers to express, at long last, the very personal meaning Dark Shadows has had for us, in all its complex and varied dimensions.
