“The Earth Hath Bubbles as the Water Has” – On ‘Don’t Look Now!’ (1973)

The ideas in this essay were developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea.  It is respectfully – perhaps presumptuously – dedicated to Frederic Jameson.

“And so, no more than the seasons to its unflowering inlets of the sea, do modern years bring any change to the gothic city… I wished to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings…” – Marcel Proust, The Captive

1. You Can Skip This Bit

Criticism is the art of reading in public. There is precious little value to such an activity if it is not itself creative.  Wilde called criticism “a creation within a creation”.  But, as with all creativity, it produces better results if it is kept within certain limits, if it is a game with a particular context, social objective, and self-imposed rules.  That – as Wittgenstein illuminated – is how language, and hence meaning, itself works.  Meaning cannot exist outside of such a game anymore than a mind can exist outside of a body.

The purpose of the game of criticism is to approach the text not only with oneself (as a reader) but also with itself.  It is to interrogate a text with its own textness, its own form and content, but also its own social embeddedness, its producedness, its own material and social history.  If a text ‘says’ certain things, it is the job of criticism to suggest why, to base such suggestions not only on the text’s material self but also upon the social selves that made it, and their social and historical positioning.

The solution to every riddle is that it is a riddle.  The solution of every puzzle is that it is a puzzle.  A jigsaw puzzle is not the picture which is formed when all the pieces are assembled in a certain ‘correct’ way; a jigsaw puzzle is the entropic mess in the box when you buy it.  Without its fragmentation, it is just a picture.  A maze is not the path which takes you to the centre; it is the obscuring of such a path.  The meaning of a maze is not that straight path; the meaning of a maze is that it is not just a straight path, and yet is nevertheless walked.  The meaning of a jigsaw puzzle is the game whereby assembling it in a certain way gives one the illusion of reversing entropy.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is not a small plastic box with a different primary colour covering each side; the meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is the process of integrating each and every flat plane of colour.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is also the history of consumer capitalism, nostalgia, youth, the semiotics of era, and so on.

We cannot solve a work of art such as the one under consideration here, the film Don’t Look Now! (1973), directed by Nicholas Roeg, based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier which was published in 1971. We cannot decrypt it or decipher it, as it shows us itself, with its own self-interrogations which lead nowhere.  If it is a puzzle, its meaning is its puzzleness.  If it is a mystery, its meaning is its mysteriousness.  And yet it is not enough to simply say, as many do about Don’t Look Now!, that it is all very meaningful, without saying what it means.  It is not simply enough to adapt the Terry Pratchett joke about some things being symbolic, not in the sense of being symbolic of anything in particular, but just Symbolic all by themselves.  Yes, obviously this is true.  But to settle for that is to simply notice the film rather than actually read it. And to be read is what it is there for, in the same way that a jigsaw puzzle is there to be reassembled and a maze is there to be traversed.

1. Death in Venice

There is a strange semiotic connection in English narrative art between Venice and death.  The connection has been noticed by outsiders.  In Death in Venice, a novel by Thomas Mann which became a film by Lucino Visconte, an Englishman dies – as the title promises – in Venice.

Two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays are set at least partly in Venice – The Merchant of Venice and Othello, the Moor of Venice – and both concern racial/cultural outsiders who, in their different ways, seem to bring with them chain reactions of deadly or near-deadly catastrophe.  In Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Lord Brideshead dies in Venice.  In Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, William Dorrit dies in Venice.  The connection is proved by the way it transcends levels of cultural capital.  Twentieth-century popular culture, as one would expect, ups the stakes.  In Moonraker (1979), Venice is where the evil billionaire Drax manufactures the toxin with which he intends to annihilate the population of the world.

And then, of course, there is Don’t Look Now!

2. What a Bloody Silly Way to Die

In both story and film, John Baxter, the protagonist (viewpoint character in the story), goes to Venice with his wife after the death of their young daughter Christine.  In the story, she died of meningitis.  In the film, in the shocking and traumatic prologue, she drowns in an accident.

The following summary describes both story and film:

While in Venice, the Baxters encounter two English sisters.  One is blind and, by her own account, psychic.  She tells the Baxters that she sees the spirit of their departed daughter standing near them, watching over them, and smiling.  A series of murders have been taking place in Venice.  One night, John hears a cry and sees a small figure running as if from danger.  The sisters tell Laura that Christine is trying to save her and John from some danger which stalks them in Venice.  Laura returns to England after an emergency call from the headmaster of their son Johnnie’s boarding school.  John then sees Laura and the two sisters dressed as if attending a funeral.  He tries to get the local authorities to investigate what he takes to be his wife’s strange behaviour and subsequent disappearance.  He then calls his son’s school and learns that Laura is in England after all.  Later, he sees the small figure again.  Intervening, he is murdered by the small figure, who reveals herself to be an elderly female ‘dwarf’.  She is clearly the serial killer.

In the story, as he succumbs, John thinks “What a bloody silly way to die!”

Apparently, it was this last line which made the filmmaker Nic Roeg want to direct a movie version of the story, though he knew instantly that cinema could not convey the same effect as this line of prose.  The way in which he tries to get across something of the same feeling is by intercutting the death of Baxter (Donald Sutherland) with a montage of quick clips of previous moments in the film.  It is as if Baxter is mentally searching for some reason why this is happening to him, some meaning for his death, some way in which he is responsible.  It is an admission of the – from his point of view – senseless absurdity of the death he has brought upon himself.

More broadly, it is as if the film is riffling through its own self, looking for something for this final ridiculous, horrible, tragic event to definitively mean.  The film, via Baxter, seems to be trying to make itself make sense.  But the effect, of course, is to emphasize the lack of any cogent and clear meaning.

3. Alternative Takes

‘Don’t Look Now!’ the short story is – like much of Du Maurier’s work – pregnant with possibilities.  It is telling that probably her best novel, Rebecca, was made into a good but not especially inspiring film by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the great directors of the 20th Century, whereas two of her lesser works were made into cinematic masterpieces, Hitchcock’s The Birds and Roeg’s Don’t Look Now!  Rebecca the novel could not be improved by cinematic adaptation, not even by Hitchcock, and certainly not by Hitchcock hemmed in by Selznick.  The book was already perfect in itself, in the sense of being the best possible version of itself.  Hitchcock expanded The Birds into something greater than its source material.  (It is, I believe, his best film.)  Similarly, Don’t Look Now! is Roeg’s best film. It mines its source material for possibilities, and imports many new concerns, making it a breathtaking work of art in its own right, and one of the greatest films of the 1970s.

When I chatted with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman about this film for a podcast, Elliot suggested that he saw it as a mosaic of alternative takes which all exist on the same plane.  The more you look at the film, the more you see this.  At different points, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) can and then cannot speak Italian.  Accidents both do and do not happen.  There is one sequence in which the supposedly psychic sisters are seen, in private, laughing uproariously, which is entirely at odds with their manner and behaviour throughout the entirety of the rest of the film.  We see bodies – the victims of the serial killer at large in Venice – fished from the canals.  One of the bodies is shot in such a way that we, the audience, receive the strong impression that it is Laura.  Yet she is alive at the end of the film.  The legendary sex scene shows noticeably different types of lovemaking intercut, and is also intercut with footage of the Baxters getting dressed in the bathroom.

The film is soaked in instances of events and images prefiguring and mirroring each other, and repeating in altered forms.  Sheets of glass mirror the reflective surfaces of bodies of water.  Characters unconnectedly mirror each other’s words and hand gestures.  The colour red keeps splashing across the picture, sometimes literally.  Famously, the figure which haunts John in Venice wears a red coat, reminiscent of the red coat Christine was wearing when she died.  The scene in which John pulls her drowned body from the river is mirrored by the shots of bodies pulled from Venice’s canals.  Christine died in a fall into water.  John nearly dies in a fall in Venice.  Indeed, he both escapes this death and does not escape it.  A priest he speaks to has just lost his own father to a fall.  The Baxters’ son Johnnie – his name a repetition of his father’s – is injured in a fall (a pointed alteration made by the film.)

Throughout the film, unconnected events seem to be causally connected in some occulted way.  Christine’s death seems to be caused by her brother breaking a sheet of glass by riding over it on his bike, and by a spilled drink inside the nearby house.

In a film which is a mosaic of little pieces which add up to an uncertain whole, it is surely significant that John’s work in Venice is overseeing the restoration of a mosaic, the sum of which we, the audience, never see.

Moreover, John sees events – or ‘future echoes’ of events – before they happen.  He has a premonition of disaster moments before Christine’s accident, to close to the events for him to do anything, and making it ambiguous whether his premonition is actually an unconscious spell which causes the accident to happen.  He sees the red-coated figure he eventually encounters in Venice in an architectural photograph just before Christine dies.  He sees the funereal vaporetto bearing Laura and the two English sisters in mourning, clearly a prevision of his own obsequies – and yet it is this vision which sets him on the path which leads to those obsequies.

John is implied to possess the gift of second sight.  In a film which features ‘weird sisters’ who bring him ‘supernatural soliciting’, it is he who has the gift of prophecy.

4. Gender Trouble

Let’s start with the sex scene.  On one level, this montage is about the complexity of marriage, of heterosexual love.  As many have pointed out, most sex in cinema is first-time sex, often between near strangers, whereas this is sex between people who have been married for years, who have had children.  It is implied to be a resumption of their sex life after a pause following their bereavement.  Aside from the extreme beauty of the two participants, it is recognisable sex, with some of that awkwardness and ever-present potential for violence and injury that lurks within all real-world sex on some level.  It is undoubtedly loving sex, yet it is intercut with formal dressing.  And the intercutting brings home the different ways in which sex – perhaps particularly married sex within the bourgeois, patriarchal, heterosexual nuclear family – can be both communication and failure of communication, both intimate and empty ritual, both tender and aggressive, both affectionate and selfish, both equal and hierarchical, both active and passive.

On another (related) level, we might be seeing present, past, and future intermingled.  We might be seeing different possible versions of the same hours.  Thus we might be seeing different possible versions of the same relationship, the same lives, the same history, the same world, all of which might coexist or contradict each other.  We are seeing life as a mass of contingencies, possibilities, and agencies.  We are seeing freedom of action, nested inside a web of determinations.

The two different ways of interpreting the montage of the sex scene – and thus the entire film of which the sex scene is a cameo – actually dovetail.

The film is intensely about gender and marriage.  It is intensely concerned with the power relationship between John and Laura, and by extension between men and women generally.  The picture it paints is not a simple one.

One would not expect a simple picture from Du Maurier, whose own gender identity and romantic/sexual orientation were decidedly complex.  And indeed, Du Maurier’s original story – like so much of her work, whether she knew it or not – is concerned with the relations between the sexes, and ponders the possibilities of romantic, sexual, and gender experimentation within the implicitly perverse and abusive confines of bourgeois heteronormativity.  Rebecca, for instance, portrays cycles of abuse between men and women who both try to conform to, and radically transgress, the established identities and relations of the genders in bourgeois society.  Rebecca is partly about how such identities and relations often violate the natures of the people to whom they are assigned, and about the catastrophes that can ensue when they are enforced, or when someone tries to enforce them but lacks the ability to do so.

The story ‘Don’t Look Now!’ contains the essential seeds of the film’s complexity in its schema of a ‘rational’ man who disbelieves in the supernatural, despite his ‘emotional’ wife’s attraction to it.  In both story and film, John Baxter is – at least superficially – rational, whereas his wife Laura is – at least superficially – emotional and intuitive.  In the film, in a Venetian church, she is drawn to candles, he to an electric lighting rig.  They are both attracted to illumination, but he to the modern and technological source, she to the ancient and spiritual.  It is his alignment with bourgeois rationality and modernity which leads him to fatally misunderstand – or rather act upon without understanding – a series of warnings and portents to which he, not she, is privy because it is he, not she, who possesses the ‘gift’ of second sight or premonition.  It is itself a violation of patriarchal gender traits that the man should be possessed of the gift of prophecy – not in itself, of course; after all the role of prophet has been assigned to males since antiquity and before, and is an essential part of the structure of patriarchy in many of its religious iterations – but in the specific context of mid-20th century bourgeois gender and sex relations, and particularly in the context of matters pertaining to the deepest emotions and the family.

The deadly confusion or subversion of gender traits carries on into the identity of the killer in Venice.  The story also provides the underlying ironies of subverted mythic and literary tradition, in its employment of uncanny female figures, particularly two interrelated iterations of the witch: the equivocating harbinger or prophetess who triggers the tragic fall of the male protagonist through his own misprisions, and the vengeful crone.

Here we must glance at the complexities of Du Maurier’s own sexual and gender identity.  She was in many respects raised as a boy by a father who wanted a son and who treated her like a little brother rather than a child.  His own nickname was ‘Boy’, and he was bisexual and promiscuously unfaithful.  Daphne explicitly conceptualised the part of herself that wrote fiction as male.  She had intense crushes – reciprocated and otherwise – on women, and love affairs with women that may or may not have been sexual.  Yet she professed to despise lesbians and lesbianism.  She would angrily say that if anyone referred to her relationship with other women by “that disgusting L-word” she would kill them.

In the context of coding and the performance of gender, it is worth remarking that Du Maurier was one of those people who cultivated and employed a private vocabulary.  ‘Venice’ was her word for gay.  ‘Venetian’ was her word for lesbian relationships.

This all meshes with the misogyny seen in much of her work and with her adaptation of the Shakespearean ‘weird sister’ figure when, in the story, John Baxter wonders if the two English sisters might be “men in drag”.  Not only would Macbeth’s ‘weird sisters’ have been played by male actors but their ambiguous gender identity is referred to in the play “you should be women but…”, emphasizing the way in which they transcend and destabilise every category with which they come into contact.

6. Weird Sisters

To adapt a phrase: Shakespeare is good to think with.

The weird sisters in Macbeth are a sexless, genderfluid, sorority.  Their spells destroy family units by bereaving wives.  As witches, they are inherently a threat to children and infants, and speak of using parts of newly murdered babies in their spells.  They attach themselves to Macbeth and his wife, who are the most complex married couple in all Shakespeare.  There is the unspoken suggestion – at least in the version of the play that has come down to us – that the Macbeths have lost whatever children they ever had.  Lady Macbeth offers to give up her gender identity many times during the play, not least in her offer to “you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts”, asking them to “unsex” her.  She uses her own possession of patriarchally constructed masculine traits, and also assigns similarly constructed feminine traits to her husband, to taunt and manipulate him.  The project which she and her husband embark upon sunders multiple families and leads to the murder of several children.  And MacDuff’s great cry of frustration when contemplating revenge for his own murdered “pretty chickens and their dam” is to cry “he has no children.”

Thus the weird sisters are a direct assault upon the integrity of the male dominated patriarchal systems of power which reproduce themselves through the family.  They represent not only the destabilisation of the social order as a whole but also a threat to the reproduction of the social order at the level of the family.

Whether one thinks this is a good or bad thing depends very much upon your perspective.  To the hegemonic Jacobean mindset, it is inherently bad, and the very femininity of the threat – with all its instability a paradoxical amplifier – is an essential part of it.

The figure of the villain is usually constructed of threats to the social order, and to the ordered social; even if the villain has the identity of a powerful social group, the message is inherently conservative.  If the villain has the identity of a marginalised social group, the picture becomes paradoxically more complex and less inherently reactionary.  The association of the villain with the subaltern is superficially a straightforward identification of the marginalised or stigmatised or oppressed identity with villainy, and the rebellion of such identities is thus inherently a moral and social evil.  And yet, the villain so constructed opens a space for a reading in which the subaltern, the marginalised, the oppressed, the stigmatised, can achieve a position of radical challenge.  It is possible to see such possible radical readings as time bombs, buried in texts, with the passage of time itself a factor likely to increase the likelihood of detonation.  The weird sisters seem inherently like figures of radical challenge to us, separated as we are from the original context in which they fit far more seamlessly into a far more hegemonic ideological consensus around the proper constitution of gender relations and power relations more generally.

One of Shakespeare’s claims to greatness is that he seems to have been conscious of such things.  Terry Eagleton wrote that, to unbiased outside observers (of which Shakespeare seems to have been one), the witches are plainly the heroines of the play.  From the margins, they exact revenge upon the Scottish state that has oppressed and marginalised them by exploiting its contradictions to make it feed upon itself.  They achieve this through the medium of prophecy.

It is well known the prophecies of the weird sisters are self-fulfilling in that they trigger the very events they claim to disinterestedly presage.  This is an expression of the fact that, in Early Modern England, there had long been prohibitions on necromancy, witchcraft, etc, with special emphasis on the evils of prophecy and prognostication, precisely because – aside from the clear potential of prophecy to be politically incendiary – telling the future was seen as potentially influencing it.  Foretelling how long a monarch would live might just affect their lifespan in reality.  Elizabeth I was only able to avail herself of the politically-useful services of Dr. John Dee when she made it clear that his magic was white magic.  Elizabeth knew this because he’d prophesied Mary I’s fall and her own accession.  Presumably she felt that, if he was influencing events with his maths – sums were seen by many as hardly different from spells – then he was at least influencing them in the right way.  This sort of paranoia about prophecy – from scrying to horoscopes – was directly connected to a wider paranoia about speculation of any kind.  Pamphleteers frequently found themselves persecuted and mutilated by the forces of law and order for thinking out-loud and in print about the ongoing national game of thrones.

But Shakespeare’s dramatization of such social energies is far from simply fitting in harmoniously with the hegemonic ideology of his time.  It is this ability to dramatize the ambiguous and ambivalent entirety of his culture’s attitudes to certain key flashpoints of culture and ideology that makes Shakespeare so pregnant with critical possibility.

The ‘weird sisters’ bring on an apocalypse which is not defeated or ended, but institutionalised.  And a lot of how they destabilise the feudal state is through the provocation of bourgeois behaviour such as the self-seeking competitive accumulation of the Macbeths, a marketizing and competitive force within the feudal system.  And a lot of the bourgeois behaviour they align with is also attacked and destabilised by them.  The sisters themselves are not bourgeois or feudal.  They are History in its paradoxically transitional state.  They are one of Shakespeare’s spectral manifestations of History cracked by its own processes, irrational hauntings which seep out of the split in time, expressing the fact that he – Shakespeare – wrote in the era of ‘primitive accumulation’, living through the overlapping past of feudalism and the oncoming future of capitalist modernity.  And it is also true that the Macbeths themselves are as feudal as they are proto-bourgeois.  Indeed, that is just what ‘proto-bourgeois’ is: the condition of being as feudal as bourgeois.  Their tortured ideology of ruthless competition is at least as much an attempt to adopt a spurious bourgeois self-characterisation as an expression of an actual bourgeois trait.  Indeed, that is just what bourgeois is: the condition of ideological false consciousness about ones of class nature.  And therein lies the tragedy, of course.

As Fintan O’Toole pointed out when writing about Othello, Shakespeare’s audience would have understood what was being communicated to them when a play – like Othello, or The Merchant of Venice – was set in Venice.  Venice represented the European financial hub of the rising mercantile capitalism of the late-medieval / Early Modern era.  It would not have been unlike a novel or film today being set on Wall Street.  Indeed, this comparison is particularly apt since the form of capitalism represented by Venice was very specifically mercantile capitalism, that is to say: international trade.  The power of the figure of Venice to the Early Modern British imagination was probably the relation between international trade and the domestic beginnings of capital formation, i.e. primitive accumulation.

It is worth noting in passing that, inescapably, the Venice we see in Don’t Look Now! is not the Venice of Shakespeare’s time.  It is the Venice which lingers after its greatest influence.  It is autumnal historically, as well as climatically.  It is Venice dying, sinking (as it always is), killing itself with – among other things – a roaming murderer who uses the iconic canals as a dump for bodies.

This is not the place to go into a discussion of the various theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Britain.  Suffice it to say, I subscribe to a version of the Marxist view which sees capitalism growing slowly and gradually within feudalism in Britain, taking the form of a centuries-long period of transition in which the two economic forms co-existed and conflicted, as a result of competing attempts to increase and/or control labour productivity, i.e. class struggles.  These struggles were a response to the growing pressures and opportunities of trade, both domestic and foreign.  And these pressures stem, at least partly, from the emergence of mercantile capitalism elsewhere in Europe, itself a product of embryonic European imperialism.  This condition has been called ‘market feudalism’, and it is the same tragically paradoxical social condition which is characterised within the Macbeths, as mentioned above, along with Shakespeare’s other great tragic heroes and villains.  Indeed, that is just what a Shakespearean tragic figure is: a dramatic expression of the tensions within market feudalism.

Taking, as I do, a view of semiotics more from Voloshinov than from de Saussure, I see such semiotic connections as the one mentioned at the opening of this essay as deriving ultimately from history and ideology.  The signifier ‘Venice’ (and cognates) refers to a host of things in English culture, and one of them is that strange connection with death – especially a public kind of death for an English or English-coded figure – via Tragedy, machination, historical processes, or some combination of all three.

We can therefore fruitfully identify Venice, for Shakespeare, as a representation of an alien force having a powerful and ambiguous distal effect on the world in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries lived.  The depiction of Venice as cosmopolitan places where different ethnicities and religions can mingle, where subaltern peoples can avail themselves of opportunities, is decidedly ambivalent in the plays.  This reflects the profound ambivalence that people in Early Modern society felt on multiple levels as they – in accordance with the view of the rise of capitalism in Britain put forward above – traversed and navigated the contradictions of a society in deep conflict and transition.  That one of the Venice plays is a comedy and the other tragedy is expression of the ambivalence, before we even get into the fact that the comedy contains deep elements of tragedy and the tragedy is structured like a farce.

In Othello, famously, time is out of joint.  Othello and Desdemona seem to have simultaneously been married a few days and several weeks.  They seem to be both an established married couple and newlyweds who hardly have had any time or chance to get to know each other, at least as intimate partners.  Both these temporal and dramatic states need to be true in order to make the action of the play plausible.  But there is more to it than that.  The simultaneous existence of two time schemes in the play is another way of saying that we are simultaneously watching two versions of the same events.  We cannot be sure if the conclusion we see is the conclusion to one version or both?  Is it necessarily the inevitable conclusion to every version?  In a play so manifestly hinging on minute contingencies, surely not.  And yet the conclusion we see is always inescapable and inevitable.  The play – once again overlaying two clashing worlds, and thus two clashing historical epochs, upon each other – is both expressing the essence of its moment in both the radical doom of being caught in the historical mechanism and the radical openness of the possibilities that historical change can bring.  Yes, much of the action of Othello is not actually laid in Venice, and yet Othello is the original tragic story of shattered time and shattered marriage, and death in Venice, made of alternative takes.

7. Third Act Reveal

We can now draw our threads together.

From Death in Venice, we get Shakespearean tragedy.  From Shakespearean tragedy we get the idea of Venice as a trading hub whose tentacles of influence reached out across the world and triggered historical change.  The historical change in question – the great rupture down history that is the transition to capitalism and modernity, the great scar of violence that is primitive accumulation – has implanted into English literature and culture a lingering feeling of connection between Venice and doom or death, leading us to the idea of the fated, public deaths of English people.  In these tragedies, as we know from Shakespeare, there are relationships between men and women and – particularly in Venice – outsiders, relationships which entangle people in social contradictions and lead toward disaster.

Shakespearean tragedy is not ancient or classical tragedy.  It is modern tragedy.  It is not the tragedy of people doomed or destined to destruction because of the inexorable machinations of fate, or the whims of the gods.  It is the tragedy of people caught in social contradictions because they are living in a world (whatever era the plays are notionally set in, they all effectively taking place in Elizabethan or Jacobean England) that is actually two historical epochs overlaid upon each other and struggling for supremacy.  These tragic heroes are brought to doom because they try to straddle the eras, obey the codes of both, and inevitably fail.

In the Venice of Don’t Look Now! with have more than two eras overlaid, we have two – or more – realities overlaid.  This is why the film is a mosaic of Alternative Takes.  It is a place where the various possibilities of history intermesh, or coexist.  This is why the John Baxter experiences the gift/curse of prophecy there.  He has the curse/gift before he gets there; it is what draws him there.  He has it before he is there because he has it there.  In line with the ideas of prophecy as political action outlined above, John Baxter’s knowledge of the future is not knowledge of inescapable destiny.  It is a series of glimpses of possible futures and presents.  He is not even as trapped as Macbeth, who is undoubtedly manipulated by outside forces.  There is no agency equivocating as it offers him advice – unless we take the laughter of the weird sisters as evidence of malice and mendacity.  Even the things which make the openness of the text make sense are themselves open.  For the most part, however, the sisters are not agents in this story, but lookers.  It is possible that their looking is what sets the ultimately decided-upon version of events into motion – don’t look now – and yet it seems like even their role in events is more down to how they are seen than to what they see.  It is Baxter’s own freedom to accept or reject the visions he sees, to accept his own foreknowledge of events and places (“I know this place…”) which decides his fate.  And yet every take, every version of the film, every version of the reality in which the Baxter lives, and every decision he makes or fails to make, leads to doom.  This is the case precisely because he is a prophet in a totally open timeline, a prophet granted foreknowledge only of possibilities, of variations upon a theme, of alternate takes.  Given enough knowledge of determination, we have freedom.  Given enough freedom, we always, eventually, have doom. To quote an enemy: in the long run we are all dead.

Even so, this wider truth obscures closer ones.  Why does Baxter’s freedom lead him to doom?  Why does Othello’s, for that matter?  It is because of that fatal mix of freedom and mental slavery.  Othello has the freedom and opportunity afforded by modernity to advance in Venetian society and yet he is still enslaved by his racial otherness, which leads him to misunderstand – and be misunderstood by – the fundamental basis of their society, which the commodification of human beings implicit in the Venetian conception of marriage.  He, once property, now free, possessed by the idea of himself created by white society, cannot fully conceptualise the idea of Venetian marriages as property relationships, or Venetian women as both property and market agents.  He is given all the choices in the world but freely chooses inescapable doom.  Something similar is true of Shylock with respect to his new opportunities and lingering oppressions, which come to a head around the issues of commodification (he is a money lender to a gentile merchant who hates him) and family (he is the father of a daughter he understands as property, and loses her to a society which also commodifies relationships but which also offers opportunities to her).

Something similar again is true of John Baxter, and we see why when we look at the meanings of the Weird Sisters and the Gender Trouble in his family relationships.

When John and Laura get lost in the maze that is Venice, John is the one who experiences the premonition (“I know this place”) and the one who has the responsibility of finding both of them a way back out, away from the uncanny places of occulted foreknowledge to the places of commercial nightlife, the apparently rational spaces of consumerism and tourism, the place he describes as “the real world”.

Baxter kills himself because he denies his own premonitions.  He resists the warnings he is shown, the guides and maps all around him.  An implicit semiotician (the mosaic restoration) he refuses to see the signs.  He insists upon interpreting every omen and portent as without meaning, or at least without its obvious meaning.  His is a rationality conditioned by masculinity as constructed by bourgeois ideas and patriarchy.  His authority in the marriage is emphasized in key scenes in which he reacts to Laura’s clutches at the straw of hope offered by the sisters.

In one scene, he savagely shouts at her that Christine is “dead dead dead dead dead”.  This is an echo of Lear’s “Never never never never never” over his own dead daughter’s body.  We can leave in abeyance the question of whether this is conscious homage or a byproduct of the fact that iambic pentameter is a poetic form which owes its power to the natural rhythms of human speech (because of how we breathe, because of the tempos of our hearts).

In another scene he bullies Laura into taking pills in order to shut her up.

In one of the most telling scenes of the film, Laura attempts to get John to let her see the sisters by blaming him for Christine’s death.  She reminds him that he said it would be safe to let the children play outside unsupervised.  The move is a savagely passive aggressive attack but it shows us two things: Laura implicitly feels that she must have John’s permission to do what she wants to do, and her only weapons are the weapons of the powerless, the emotional terrorism of the emotionally subjugated.

One of the brilliant aspects of Robert Eggars’ The VVitch (2015) is the way it dissects patriarchy by showing us a couple in which the naturally dominant partner must submit because she is a woman while the naturally submissive partner must lead and rule because he is a man.  Both forced into social and familial roles for which they are unsuited, and which they hate, they turn upon each other, and upon themselves.  And they hate what they become as a result.  Kate detests the “shrew” she has had to play in order to express her smothered sense of self, and her disappointment with the failures of her husband to enact his role in a way that would make her role make sense.

Don’t Look Now! shows us something similar in the way it depicts the responsibility of the husband within the patriarchal bourgeois nuclear family as double edged.  Even in the marriage of a young, educated couple in 1973, it is still a position of authority, control, leadership, rulership.  When things go wrong, it is a position of culpability, failure, guilt, shame.  Baxter – like Hamlet, who is both Renaissance man and feudal prince, and is this trapped – is both modern man and patriarch, precisely because he is in a world in transition.  It is John Baxter’s sense of responsibility – as he understands it within the confines of bourgeois rationality – which causes him to act in a deeply emotionally irrational way, to ignore the clear warnings he is blessed/cursed to be privy to, to thumb his nose at the possibilities he is offered in the schrodinger’s universe of alternate takes he lives in.

It is worth dwelling on the fact that John stays in Venice to keeping doing his job even as Laura leaves in order to see their injured son back in England.  Here again, we see bourgeois patriarchal responsibility in all its sickness.  The boy – almost certainly still grieving and blaming himself, needing his parents – has been left behind, left at boarding school.  He is expected to do ‘his duty’ within this worldview.  John too is expected – or expects, or expects others to expect – that he will do his duty.  His duty is his job, his profession.  It is conceptualised implicitly as the neglect of his emotional life.  The duty to the family is fulfilled by the payment of the school fees, the preparation of the boy for the bourgeois world of jobs and manhood, and by the dispatch of the wife to do the emotional duty, inherently implied to be lesser, easier.  It is no accident that the John and Laura’s son is ‘Johnnie’.  He is John in miniature, a picture of John’s origin.  He is an illustration of how John came to where he is.  Like his father, he dies/does not die in a fall.  Like his father, there is an occult way in which Christine’s death is his fault, caused by some unwitting spell, a disconnected event – the breaking of the glass – which nevertheless looks like a causal trigger.

Here we are also forced to face the recurring concept of the fall.  The Fall is, of course, the ultimate expression of the patriarchal notion of responsibility.  The Father is the judge and punisher.  The son is the judged and punished.  He must take responsibility, and thus labour.  The crime was his.  But this all makes him the subject.  The woman is the object, beneath blame.  She ate of the apple but that hardly matters.  It is the fact that she successfully tempted the man to also eat which dooms humanity to expulsion from Eden.  Sin cannot have been alien to humanity before the first bite of the apple, because the bite itself was a sin.  The sin being disobedience to the rule of the Father, naturally.  And yet it was the sin of a mere woman, and therefore was fundamentally not the sin of a human but of some lesser thing.  It is only when the lesser thing brings Adam down to her level that the Father, and the universe, and time and History, take notice.  Of course, despite her being so unimportant that her first sin is of no cosmic significance, it is always there as a stick with which to beat Eve and her daughters.  It is her weakness which led to the more complex and conscious evil of Adam.  She did the same thing but it matters less because she is less sentient.  She is not, ultimately, allowed as much blame as him, and therefore as much status as him.  It was her weakness.  It was his responsibility.

John is doomed not by fate but by his own actions.  His foreknowledge is not what traps him.  It is his refusal to understand that his foreknowledge is knowledge of possibility rather than destiny.  This comes from the very paradox of responsibility outlined above.  Patriarchy becomes destiny because it is designed to be snare.  The bourgeois outlook is doom because it limits the ability of those within it to see that there is no such thing as doom.  The subjectivity of the male in this structure of power is what entraps him.

The connective tissue here is the line drawn, via Shakespearean tragedy – Venice, marriages, primitive accumulation, the rise of bourgeois modernity and the nuclear family, the occult, prophecy – to the social contradictions of the 1970s.  The general and underlying social contradictions pave the way to the specific social contradictions in which Baxter is caught: the post-war, post-60s, post-feminism patriarchy of 1973.  The patriarchy in which the refusal of patriarchy is part of the patriarchal role.  The bourgeois ideology in which the rejection of bourgeois ideology is a key component.

The Baxter’s marriage is another alternative take.  It is liberated and equal, and is it still a bourgeois, patriarchal, nuclear family.  It is the great denial which underlies all the little denials which go into John’s refusal to see where everything points.

John Baxter is destroyed by following the figure that reminds him of the daughter he lost.  He is destroyed by the figure of the witch/crone, the quintessential figure of anxiety about female power and agency in the Early Modern period from which the film draws so much of its semiotic parlance.  The crone or witch – the version of the wise woman after stigmatisation by rising modernity – also takes the place of the male serial killer who stalks 70s cinema, not least in the giallo genre, which features endless black-gloved killers-of-women strangling and stabbing their war around Italy.  (In fact, the best giallo – Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, for instance – self-interrogates and self-inverts somewhat on questions of gender.)  And so his doom comes at the hands of a female-captured inversion of male aggression towards women, a female appropriation of a misogynistic/patriarchal stereotype, a female reappropriation of the gift of prophecy.  It is also by no means certain that he has not been chasing his daughter after all.  Remember Laura’s cry when she sees John and the murderous ‘dwarf’: “Darlings!”  What does she see?  Does she see a crone/witch/’dwarf’?  Is that, in fact, only how John sees the figure?  Is it, in some sense, Christine returned?  Reincarnated?  Has Christine come back for revenge?  Ultimately unknowable, the real point is this: John’s choices in the radically open universe of the film – a mosaic of alternate takes and thus infinite possibilities – have led him to the point where he pays with his blood, not for his own actions but for his understanding of those actions, for his social role as an actor in bourgeois patriarchy, for his sense of responsibility.  If the killer at the end ‘is’ Christine taking revenge, it is because John understands himself as requiring to pay blood atonement, it is because he understands the female as a deadly responsibility, and his own maleness as a trap of guilt.  He conjures the crone/witch/daughter as a vengeful spectre, assigning the role of evil avenger to a misogynistic fantasy of evil femininity, so that he will be punished with the fate that he thinks he deserves for failing as husband and father as he is fated to understand such roles and, far more crucially, as he is fated to believe that others understand such roles.

The original story expresses the author perhaps pondering her own alternate possible identity by placing herself in the male position and constructing that male self via how he is seen, or how she imagines he is seen, or how she imagines he imagines he is seen, by the women around him.  (The title comes from a remark made about the fact that a man notices that women are looking at him.)  Thus what we get is a hypothesis of male selfhood made from the author’s perceptions of how women see men, or rather from her perceptions of how women see her.  The male viewpoint character is thus not really an expression of experienced maleness, or the imagination of experienced maleness.  It is, rather, an attempt to understand identity via ones own perception of how one is perceived.  In the gender dynamic of the story, it is less that the author is making herself male than using a male identity to understand female social relations to each other, including to her, and hers to other women.  By being centred, the male is actually excised from the picture.  At the end of the story he is in fact excised from the story by a woman.  His character is literally cut out.

The original text is an investigation of female identities and relationships, partly via the female appropriation of a male identity.  The character of John Baxter represents, at least in part, a speculation as to how men see women, and how men think they are seen by women.  Like Agatha Christie and Jane Austen, Du Maurier is a writer intensely conscious of the contours, intricacies, and paradoxes of both patriarchy and bourgeois society without being particularly conscious of the existence of either, at least as anything other than an existing state of affairs.  In the cases of all these writers, adaptations of the work have been able to take this intense but divided consciousness and expand the source material.  The film of Don’t Look Now! broadens out from the original story into a consideration of the tragic condition of human beings in bourgeois patriarchy, most particularly the tragic misunderstanding of the self and relationships while plague the male within the confines of his patriarchal role.

Don’t Look Now! is about how men in patriarchy think women see them.  It is about the construction and consciousness of male identity within patriarchal norms, especially with reference to the power dynamics and emotional energies between the male and the female partner within a patriarchal relationship.  It is particularly about how male identity and power forms as a fragile relation via the male experience of female looking.

Ultimately, what is the bourgeois, patriarchal nuclear family but a bloody silly way to die?