Trouble with People: The Mystery of Jennifer
Detours, episode 14
Trouble with People: The Mystery of Jennifer
Stephen Broomer, November 22, 2024
In the harsh and glorious sunlight of southern California, consider the romance and terror of the shadow in film noir: shadows, plural, cloak a scene in mystery, but true menace lies in the faintest of movements, the animation of a lone shadow, breaking the atmosphere with a hint of voyeurism or violence, an agitated movement on the periphery of strained vision. In film noir, the night has a thousand eyes, but the night is not a syndicate: each probing stare that emerges out of that blackness is individual, creatures of torment and desire. Like many noir films, Jennifer is about the failure of social connection; it is also a romantic mystery, told through characters—sirens, spinsters, and satyrs—trapped in a web of miscommunication. This mystery is signalled at the start, with the movement of a lone shadow stalking the threshold of an empty gothic Californian estate. To this solitary shadow the film will inevitably return.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses Joel Newton's 1953 film Jennifer, a bridge between the Gothic melodrama and the Old Dark House film. Broomer addresses the film's themes of madness and loneliness, as well as its portrayal of male predation.
SCRIPT:
In the harsh and glorious sunlight of southern California, consider the romance and terror of the shadow in film noir: shadows, plural, cloak a scene in mystery, but true menace lies in the faintest of movements, the animation of a lone shadow, breaking the atmosphere with a hint of voyeurism or violence, an agitated movement on the periphery of strained vision. In film noir, the night has a thousand eyes, but the night is not a syndicate: each probing stare that emerges out of that blackness is individual, creatures of torment and desire. Like many noir films, Jennifer is about the failure of social connection; it is also a romantic mystery, told through characters—sirens, spinsters, and satyrs—trapped in a web of miscommunication. This mystery is signalled at the start, with the movement of a lone shadow stalking the threshold of an empty gothic Californian estate. To this solitary shadow the film will inevitably return.
Driving through the secluded, sun-soaked beauty of Montecito, California, Agnes Langley is a single woman on her way to assume a lonely job, as caretaker of the Gale family estate. She will reside in the Gale family’s empty Spanish-style mansion, their palatial home cloaked in shadows and dynamic chiaroscuro, a forsaken setting made lonelier by the echoing reflections of its many vanities. The position was previously held by Jennifer, a cousin of the Gales who has disappeared mysteriously, leaving behind all of her possessions. Langley has cause to be suspicious: the local is full of gossip about Jennifer and the Gales. The haunting, spare atmosphere of the house furthers her suspicions, its darkened hallways and dusty furniture pierced by beams of light. When Agnes discovers an enigmatic diary belonging to the missing woman, she is compelled to investigate. In unravelling the mystery of Jennifer, Agnes Langley will transform, shedding her manicured, stoic, self-assured persona. Between the romance and terror of the house’s shadows, she will become the hysterical, compromised, wilting woman of machismo fantasy.
When Agnes Langley first appears, she is framed from behind: the camera assumes the perspective of an omniscient passenger. Through this perspective, the film immediately aligns the viewer with Langley, and that sympathy remains even as the apparently sensible Langley implies that she is a compromised and unreliable protagonist, admitting to her employer, Lorna Gale, that the gaps in her resume are due to an illness, eagerly admitting her own desperate need for the position. Despite glimpses of fragility, it is her apparent independence that becomes an obstacle for everyone she encounters: from local gossips who regard her as stubborn for not heeding their warnings about the house, to opportunistic estate manager Jim Hollis, who targets her with aggressive attempts at seduction. Langley admits to having been unwell: but it is her status as an unmarried woman that raises the eyebrows of the townspeople. This circuit of suspicion, glimpsed only in her rare encounters with others, hangs over the film’s quieter moments when, left alone in the Gale house, Langley is terrified, it would seem, by the treacherous corners of her own imagination. Her imagination is helped along by paranoid and suspicious clues left by the missing woman, for example, financial records that lead Langley to speculate that embezzlement was involved, and, late in the film, an ominous note that suggests Jennifer hid from her attackers in the house’s furnace room.
The men of the local village present themselves as easy suspects in Jennifer’s disappearance. Jim Hollis, introduced as a domineering and unwelcome presence who comes and goes at will to and from the house, is either a selfish, dangerous ally, or a conspirator in Jennifer’s disappearance. He pursues Langley while dismissing her suspicions. It is Hollis who articulates the film’s underlying critique of Langley, when he remarks that she has a problem with people; he’s right, but he is also a man who makes himself a problem for her, ignoring her rebuffs, provoking her disdain, only winning her over after a campaign of belittlement and condescension. Langley is ill-at-ease with others from the very start of Jennifer. People habitually feed her paranoia and distrust, attempt to domineer her, and cast doubt on her decisions. Hollis’s pursuit of Langley reinforces the ultimate cost of her ‘problem with people’: she is unable to connect romantically with others. Hollis finally draws out her underlying trauma, but even as she tells him of her experience of being left at the altar by a married man, he is opportunistic, twisting her words, drawing attention back to his desire for her, and coercing her into a date. At the other end of the spectrum is Orin, a boyishly creepy local handyman, who feeds Langley’s suspicions and wants desperately to collaborate with her on solving Jennifer’s disappearance. He is leering, unnaturally curious, and morbid in his fascination with the missing woman. Orin and Hollis agitate Langley, but in different ways: Orin wants to be her partner in this paranoid search, while Hollis who wants her to drop it, dismissing her fears. These characters offer reasons for Langley’s solitude: they turn love and partnership into a repulsive game of conquest.
In Jennifer, form offers a glimpse into the anxiety of its protagonist, in both conventional and unconventional ways. James Wong Howe’s cinematography offers the Gale mansion as an emblematic example of the gothic interior, plagued with metaphoric details, dark corners and mirrors. The audience is invited into Langley’s confidence not only by her reasonable temperament, but by the inhospitable atmosphere she has been thrown into: far from a romantic expression of her paranoia, it is an objectively spooky setting. The film also finds unconventional means to express Langley’s social discomfort, notably, a scene in a listening booth where she and Hollis encounter one another by chance, communicating in mime on either side of the glass, an exchange that emphasizes his impetuousness and her impatience, but also, a vivid demonstration of her solitude under attack: even as the characters communicate in mime, on the soundtrack, their records collide, the austere mood music she has selected punctuated by the up-tempo piano of his jazz record, tension ratcheting up through the disparate tone and counterpoint of the resulting sound. Imogen Sara Smith describes the pathology of the gothic melodrama as one of captivity, isolation and growing madness. She writes, “In Gothic melodramas, women are not only physically menaced and held captive, but psychologically isolated and harassed. Just as they rarely leave their houses, they are forced further and further into their own troubled minds, incapable of communicating freely or getting accurate information.” Agnes Langley’s problem of communication is a matter of habit. Her stoicism is not loneliness, it is a refusal of connection. She is uncommonly strong among the rare female protagonists of film noir. In the climax, she is reduced to hysterics after encountering what she believes is a corpse, but more than this, she seems most fearful of the possibility that she is, like the missing Jennifer, truly alone.
In the climax, the truth comes out that Jennifer died in a sanatarium, that the thread Agnes Langley has been following was itself written by an unreliable source, a solitary woman, like herself, whose isolation and paranoia drove her to madness. The clues that Langley had believed outright were in fact inventions of a troubled mind, one too close to her own for comfort. As the song goes, “the fact’s uncommonly clear.” Langley imagined a conspiracy, and in doing so, worsened her own frail grasp on reality. When the menacing romance of the shadows of the Gale estate bend back on her, as when she hallucinates Jennifer’s drowned corpse in her own reflection, it has been no more than that, a troubled mind feeding back on itself, finding death in the mirror while searching for shadows on the periphery of vision. Jim Hollis comforts her, absolving her, telling her and us that Agnes Langley is not like Jennifer, for Jennifer “was sick and alone, [while Agnes isn’t,] anymore.” Even as hero to her damsel-in-distress, Jim Hollis is opportunistic. Their love story, if one can call it that, is the tale of a woman wrestling with trauma and personal demons, tormented by the social expectation of settling into adulthood, caught between two suitors, Orin, a mischievous child, Hollis, a man of ambiguous temper and motive. As they depart, a shadow remains on the ground where they stood. With a moment’s hesitation, it stalks away, back towards the house, to suggest what: that the tidiness of this explanation is insufficient to settle the agitated shadows of the film itself? The shadow may or may not be a supernatural expression of the missing woman’s lingering, restless spirit; or it may be Langley’s own ‘shadow-self', that solitary, independent woman, freed into bondage by Hollis’s courtship. This shadow lives on in the repressed, remote ambience of the Gale home. Excuse her while she disappears.
