from The Blood
Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1999, by Jake Horsley
For the wise man, to
imagine is to see.
—Eliphas Levi, The
Key to the Mysteries
Don’t Look Now is an intellectual’s dream of a horror movie—it’s
like a piece of architecture, a flawless design, an ingenious puzzle. Like a
jewel it seems to reflect and refract light at a thousand angles; it changes
each time you look at it, yet it is hard and cold and uninviting to hold. The
English director, Nicholas Roeg, working from the script by Allan Scott and
Chris Bryant, adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier (author of The
Birds), has created his own authentic vision. Don’t
Look Now is a sustained work of anxiety, melancholy,
and dread, and probably the most heartfelt and elusive horror movie ever made.
The horror of the film is never quite in sight, it’s always just around
the corner; and when you finally see it (and recognize it as what was before
your eyes all along), it’s already far too late. Don’t Look Now is about time, and the ingenious, inexorable way in which it deceives
us, tricks us, sets us up, and snares us, like the most ruthlessly beautiful
and intricate mousetrap ever made. In Roeg’s film, the universe is a
mystery, and the film itself partakes of this mystery—it’s
ineffable, obscure, and deadly. We are enticed by its beauty, seduced by the
allure and the pathos of the characters, made to care for them despite all the
apparent detachment of the director, and despite our own better judgment. (And
Roeg plays fair here—his detachment serves us as a warning). Then, just
when it seems like all will come out all right, and we may escape
unscathed—snap—the trap is sprung.
Roeg’s method is so assured that we really never had a chance to begin
with. There are those who don’t respond to this movie at all however, who
find it cool and uninvolving, and dangerously close to pretention.[1]
The plot, although quite simple, is profoundly ingenious. John and
Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) are seen, at the
movie’s start, lounging about in their country home. John is looking over
some slides of churches (he’s a restorer) when he notices in one of them
a strange, red-hooded figure sitting in one of the pews; before he has time to
ponder this, he accidentally knocks over a glass of water and watches with
curiosity as the red stain, emerging from the small figure, spreads out like
blood across the slide. He is struck with a sudden intuition. The film cuts
back and forth between the Baxters and their two children playing outside by
the pond, and we see the little girl (wearing a red raincoat) sink into the
pond and drown. John is seized by an impulse and jumps up. Laura asks him what
is wrong; he replies “Nothing,” then rushes out to rescue his
daughter, but arrives too late. Without ado, the film cuts to “the
present”—Venice, where John is at work restoring a church. He meets
Laura in a restaurant; she’s writing a letter to their son Johnny. They
make small talk for a time and John jokes that it’s so cold in there that
even the waiters won’t come out to serve them. He gets up to close a
window, which causes another window to blow open and a gust of wind to pass
through the restaurant. Two middle-aged women sitting at a nearby table (who
have been watching Laura surreptitiously) are caught in the blast, and one of
them gets a piece of dust or grit in her eye. The two women make their way
clumsily to the toilet, but enter into the men’s room by mistake (one of
them we discover is blind, while the other, her sister, has been temporarily
blinded by the wind). Laura gets up to help them, and thus it is that the chain
of events that will lead to John’s destruction and Laura’s
widowhood is set in motion. Like Psycho, but
with even more clarity and precision (and power), we see how the tiniest of
acts—John closing the window—can start a chain reaction that will
lead finally to the most catastrophic of results; and all for a grain of dust.
This is not to say that if John had never closed the window none of the later
events would have happened—the sisters would certainly have imposed
themselves on the Baxters somehow, but the important thing is that John’s
death is traced back from the very beginning to his own conscious actions. He
is never a simple victim, he is (like the protagonist of Muriel Spark’s The
Driver’s Seat) an accomplice in his own
murder. While Laura is off with the sisters, John falls into thought, and we
cut gracefully back to a shot of the Baxters leaving their home in England
after the death of their daughter. The house is all closed up, and it is
raining. We see Laura look bleakly out through the car window as John is
locking the house and putting the last of the things in the trunk. As the
script has it, “she glances for a moment at the house as the car moves
off. Then she looks away into her private infinity” (Don’t Look
Now, by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, published by
BFI). It is impossible to convey the poignancy of this sequence in words,
however. Roeg accomplishes something mysterious, something miraculous, because
somehow he manages, with a few brief images, to convey the unspeakable grief
and the awful, black despair of the moment.
Meanwhile, Laura, while helping the sighted sister Wendy to remove the
dust from her eye, has discovered that the other sister, Heather, is blind, but
that she possesses “second sight.” Unprompted, Heather begins to
talk of Laura’s dead daughter, claiming to have seen her, sitting between
the Baxters in the restaurant, happy and laughing in her red raincoat. Laura is
at once “sold” on this optimistic vision and returns to John with
newfound joy. John of course thinks she is crazy, and is immediately
mistrustful of the sisters. This suspicion and wariness will constitute his
attitude to them throughout the film, and play a major part in his own death.
We discover, through the sisters, that John is also “psychic,” that “he has the gift but is
resisting it,” and that, “It’s a curse as well as a
gift.”[2]
The sisters repeatedly warn Laura that
John’s life is in danger, and she passes this warning on to him, though
he of course ignores it. Since Laura is so obviously happier and stronger than
before, however, John is temporarily reconciled to her “madness.”
The couple make love, apparently for the first time in a long while (perhaps
since their daughter’s death). Roeg, in a justifiably celebrated sequence,
intercuts between the couple’s foreplay (leading on to full-blown
lovemaking) and their languidly and contentedly dressing for dinner afterwards.
Even as a concept, the scene is a humdinger; but Roeg, working with Sutherland
and Christie (who show a rare kind of intimacy together throughout the
film—they feel like a married couple)
transcends the mere cleverness of the concept and transforms it into something
more affecting. This scene is the centerpiece of the film, the moment when we
actually come to know the characters, by seeing them at their most naked and
most vulnerable, and yet also their strongest and most pure. And by coming to
know them, we come to love them, also. Without this intimacy, this closeness, the
final catastrophe would have no force, no meaning, it would be just one more
grisly murder in a long series of grisly murders that constitute—for the
most part—the history of the horror film. As it is, we are caught between
our affection and our despair, and the horror and the grief we feel may be a
shade too real for us
to assimilate. When John’s blood begins to flow, we feel the life force
ebbing from him, and the
blood, the life, is real—we are bleeding with him.
The Baxters receive a call in the middle of the night—their son
Johnny has been in an accident. It’s not serious but Laura is
sufficiently upset (and yet also vindicated—she thinks it fulfills
Heather’s prophecy somehow) to return to the U.K., having secured
John’s promise to follow her as soon as he can. (Laura had tried in vain
to persuade him to leave Venice, and he had finally relented on the condition
that she return to her medication.) John says goodbye to her on the pier and
watches as the barge moves away (we stay with Laura however, and watch
John’s figure shrink to obscurity—this is the last time
she’ll ever see him alive). John returns to work, and later on that same
day (following a brush with death that forces him to re-evaluate his judgment
of the sisters), he sees, or believes he sees, Laura, dressed in black, on a
barge with the two sisters. He calls out but she does not respond. Puzzled and
bewildered, he returns to the hotel (which is closing up for winter) to see if
Laura has returned there. He then goes to the police and tells his story to the
inspector (a marvelously placid and rather eerie performance by Renato
Scarper), who is puzzled by it (and by Baxter himself, apparently) but agrees
to look into the matter. He has Baxter followed, having asked him to try and
find the sisters’ hotel; this Baxter does, only to find that the sisters
are gone, having changed hotels that very morning.[3] The sisters are picked up later by the police, but by this time
Baxter has received a call from Laura in England, saying that everything is all
right, and that their son’s injury was minor. Baxter is speechless, and
when he splutters out incoherently to Laura that he saw her in Venice, she
simply ignores him, and insists that she’ll be back soon (she seems to
have forgotten all about her desire to get him out of Venice). That night,
Baxter goes to the police station to pick up the sisters, apologizes profusely
for all the trouble he’s caused them, and takes them back to their hotel.
While he is there, Heather falls into one of her epileptic trances, and Wendy
insists that John leave. Baxter does not object, being obviously glad to get
away. Heather, in a state of wild despair, cries “Don’t let him
leave—fetch him back!” Wendy finally relents and chases after
Baxter. She is too late to catch him, however, but runs into Laura, who has
just been brought to the hotel from the police station. Wendy tells her that
John has just left, but takes Laura up to the room, where Heather tells her to
find her husband at once, repeating hopelessly—“She told you, leave
Venice!” (she’s referring to their daughter Christine, from whom
the warnings supposedly came). Baxter, meanwhile, is wandering around the
darkened alleys of Venice again (the film makes full, glorious use of the
natural settings to create a sinister, palpable, and almost suffocating sense
of menace and foreboding). He hears a scream, sees a small, red figure, and
rashly, unthinking, follows after. It appears to be fleeing from a man, and
Baxter pursues it into an abandoned building, closing an iron gate behind him,
in order to keep the man out, presumably, though in fact this act serves to
further ensure his death by preventing Laura from following after him. (This is
the moment where his id takes over.) Baxter confronts the figure, offering
soothing words of comfort, approaching steadily nearer; the figure
turns—we see its face, the moment of truth, it draws a knife. Baxter says
one word: “Wait,” as if by this puny utterance he could stop the
tidal wave of events started by a single gust of wind (a wave that now comes to
engulf him entirely, and reduce him to nothing). As his blood flows, and Laura
reaches helplessly out to him through the bars of the gate (she calls out
“darlings”), the many, myriad, fractured events of Baxter’s
life pass through his mind, with new meaning, now as clear to him as his death.
And so the facets of the jewel come together, for one brief moment, before it
is shattered into a million fragments.
Cut to Laura on the barge—the exact same shot we have seen
before, of her dressed in black between the two sisters, only now there is no
Baxter to witness it. Of course, there’s no need for him
to—he’s seen it already.
*
First, kill all your darlings
—Nicholas Roeg, quoting W.B. Yeats, Don’t Look Now
&
nbsp;
Don’t Look Now is a work of
devastating emotional power and cinematic brilliance, and in the horror genre
it stands alone. Much of this power derives from the original source, but the
du Maurier story serves as a mere blueprint, or rough sketch, over which Roeg
and the scriptwriters weave their tapestry. The story itself has neither the depth
nor the ingenuity of the movie, but it does suggest it, as latent potential, and the central idea which makes Don’t
Look Now such a rich and rewarding puzzle is to be
found there, in the title itself no less.[4]
Pauline Kael wrote of Don’t Look Now (in one of her very few
obtuse reviews) “I imagine people will cook up the usual elaborate
deep meanings for this film,”[5]
she thereby merely demonstrated her own failure to discover these meanings for
herself, while simultaneously protecting herself in case anyone else did. There is really no need to “cook up” what is already
prepared and ready for consumption, though one may at times be forgiven for
lending a hand with the serving (and if Kael missed the deeper meanings of the
film, it’s safe to say that others have also).[6]
“Don’t look,” first of all, lets us—or John
Baxter—know that appearances are deceiving (“nothing is what it
seems,” as Baxter says at the beginning of the film), and that the only
way to reach the truth is not by looking but, in the true “psychic”
sense of the word, by seeing. (A “seer”
is, of course, a prophet). The “Now” of the title refers to the
present, and the fact that Baxter’s fatal error is in interpreting a
future event as a present one (or in terms of the present): by seeing an event
that has not happened as something that is already happening (what-will-be as
what-is) he fatally confuses the signals—or signs—and makes the
future the past, i.e., irrevocable, or otherwise inescapable. Thus, he turns a
warning into a blind. The story is about the futility of prophecy, and how by
seeing the future we only play into its hands—or those of
time—because we thereby help to create it. It
is by looking at his vision, and perceiving
it as here and now, that Baxter consolidates his fate. If he had understood the
true meaning of the vision, he would of course have gotten the hell out of
Venice at once, and so have avoided it. For anyone who knows even the slightest
thing about the nature of prophecy—or anyone with the slightest gift of imagination
(in other words any artist, who is by vocation a fledgling seer)—the message of Don’t Look Now is astoundingly, and uncannily, astute. It is a cautionary tale of
the highest order, and in the deepest imaginable sense.
To illustrate this point (which many may find fanciful) I reproduce a
story, not a fable but an actual, recorded historic event (reported in Rev.
Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth): A “seer” is sitting in a
pub drinking his wine. A man enters and orders himself a drink, and the seer,
seeing this, gets up to leave. Asked the reason for his haste, the seer
explains that the man who has just entered will be dead in two days time. The
man takes offense at the suggestion, becomes angry and assaults and kills the
seer. Two days later, the man is executed for his crime.[7] (This story might be titled “Don’t Speak
Out.”) It is a wonder to
observe the parallels between this story and Roeg’s movie. What strikes
one above all is—how a supposed “seer” could be so bloody
stupid! In the case of the above history, we lack the necessary data to answer
that question. In the case of John Baxter, however, the answer is plain; too
plain perhaps, as plain as the knife in his throat. Baxter denies his gift, and
so it turns against him. The marauding figure in red, I would wager, is his
angry id become a murderous demon at large.[8] Mark Sanderson, in his study of the film Don’t Look Now (to be distinguised from the script, also published by BFI modern
classics), comments how “the network of sulci—the serpentine
grooves on the surface of the brain” resemble the labyrinthine structure
of the film, and remarks, “in one sense the whole film takes place inside
John’s head.” His analysis of the film draws a seemingly endless
pattern of relations and synchronicities both within the film itself and outside it.[9] Sanderson is astute in observing: “The film creates such an
atmosphere of the paranormal and the paranoid that there seems no room for
harmless coincidence.” In his shot-by-shot breakdown of the opening
sequence, he writes:
The red
forms a foetal shape on the slide. A terrible evil is born. . . An eye has developed in the foetus as
it continues to grow. It forms exactly the same shape as the drowned Christine
(and Wendy’s mermaid broach) . . . Water kills (Christine) and gives
birth to the evil embryo on the slide. . . The inversion shows that the woman
in red is the opposite of the child whose name means a follower of Christ: a
withered limb of Satan.[10]
It is apparently irresistible (for myself as much as for Sanderson) to
seize the opportunity to make such highly fanciful readings of the
“real,” occult meaning of Don’t
Look Now, for this film is an occult work if ever
there was one, a nightmare of metaphysics from start to finish. And perhaps
this is all for our own entertainment, but the point I am getting to is one
that Roeg himself seems to have been fully aware of during the making of the
film. In Don’t Look Now, Roeg tells
Sanderson, “I believe film
has a life of its own but releasing yourself to it is by no means easy. Movies,
like life, are full of compromise and the fight is to have as little compromise
as possible . . . the point is not
to interfere with the movement of all kinds of forces” (p. 71). Don’t
Look Now is the only film I know of that seems not
only to deal intelligently with occult forces but to conspire with them, and ultimately, perhaps, to have been formed by them. I realize how untenable such a conclusion will be to those
(like John Baxter) who refuse to even acknowledge the existence of occult forces
to begin with; but, at the same time, I rest assured that, legion as such
skeptics may be amidst film critics, they are presumably scarce indeed amidst
artists. After all, is there any force more “occult” than that of
artistic inspiration?
Don’t Look Now is the only mainstream
horror movie that I know of which makes a serious, “adult” (that
is, both thoughtful and thought-provoking) case for the workings of the
supernatural. The reason it manages to do full justice to the subject is, above
all, that its whole premise rests on an essential complicity existing between ourselves and these forces: thus, they are seen not
as acting on us, but as acting through us. According to this interpretation, then, it is not until the very
last moment, when the hooded figure turns around and faces its pursuer (and its
“maker”), that the mysterious, amorphous tulpa takes on its solid form as an actual adversary, or “withered
limb of Satan.” Until that moment, it is wholly dependent upon Baxter
himself whether he is to be confronted with his resurrected daughter, or a
helpless child, or a foul and malevolent dwarf wielding a butcher’s
knife.[11] When the “malicious munchkin”[12] shakes its head pitilessly at Baxter it seems to be acknowledging
this, to be reprimanding Baxter for his own obtusenesss and folly, and to be
announcing the fatal necessity of its actions, all of which add up to one
thing: Baxter’s death. And so when Laura calls out
“darlings,” as if to
both her husband and her daughter, she is not necessarily mistaken: that
malevolent “dwarf” may as well be their dead daughter, in spirit at
least, seeing as it has emerged from the very same “realm,” or
dimension: it represents the same Id that was warning Baxter, and is now making
good on its warning (hence it fulfills its own prophecy). By this time, it is
all over for Baxter, in any case, so the only message an emissary from the
beyond can have for him is: “Time’s up.”[13]
The faint, mysterious and wholly ineffable smile that lingers on
Laura’s lips as she attends her husband’s funeral seems to
acknowledge this in the most quixotic way imaginable. The smile is unsettling,
vaguely sinister, because it seems so unaccountable; and yet, at the same time,
it is a relief, after all we have been through, to witness such apparent emotional
detachment. Roeg himself (whom many critics accused of just such detachment)
comments on the smile:
Laura is in a state of grace,
that’s why she smiles. It is beyond their knowledge. I think it is secret
and chilling, but beautiful. Emotionally the terrible events have given her a
dreadful strength. Laura is smiling at some secret memory. . . Laura and John have had the best: it
may be over now but it can never be taken away from them. Laura knows this. She
is locked deep in some other place where superficial things like tears cannot
reach her. . . As she smiles I
chill. Grief takes many forms. . .
The beginning is birth, the ending is death and all the rest is just
anecdote. Life does not have a happy ending—everyone ends up
dead—but movies can end happily. Laura has survived,
triumphant—death shall have no dominion over her—their happiness
may be in the past but it was real and will always remain so. That is what you
have to remember in your grief.
(Sanderson,
Don’t Look Now)
I have gone this far with my interpretation because, as I say, even on
the surface—without any in-depth analysis but simply through a direct
reading of the film—Don’t Look Now is an
astonishingly esoteric work. The fact is, Don’t Look Now, like any work of genius, seems to have a life of its own. It may be
pointless to attempt an analysis of the film. It may even be foolish. To take
this puzzle apart may be never to put it back together again, and unravelling
its mystery is like picking at the insides of a golf ball—unloosen one
single thread, and the whole thing unwinds. Analysing this movie is like
staring into a crystal ball by candlelight—one might reasonably expect to
see anything at all, and certainly not only what
one expects to see. The depths of the unconscious are endless, beyond the
depths of any ocean: and the best advice, finally, when faced with such a
vision, might well simply be—Don’t look!
It seems only fair, in any case, and certainly appropriate, to leave
the last words to Roeg himself (whom I trust is presiding over our discussion
in spirit, as well as letter):
The
truth has many faces, and your truths about Don’t Look Now, which spring from your experience, are just as valid as mine, which
spring from my experience. In knowledge all things are connected and we each
bring different things to it. The important thing in making movies is to ensure
that the knowledge is there to be shared.[14]
;
[1]. For some the film is neither fish
nor fowl—the art house crowd is disconcerted to find itself at a mere
horror movie, while the horror crowd may despair at being subjected to all this
art. I
don’t think the film is trashy, at any level, even though the one central
device on which the whole film hinges—the marauding dwarf in a red
raincoat with a butcher’s knife—is a trash device (and one that becomes
arbitrary and rather absurd if we think about it for too long).
[2]. This
line, along with the title, is the key to the movie. John of course is in
denial, and his inability to accept this side of himself
forces him to deny, however irrationally, everything else that relates to or
reminds him of it. And so his gift becomes a curse. He poo-poos the
“mumbo jumbo” of the sisters and dismisses them along with it;
everything Laura tells him he insists (to himself above all) to be pure
nonsense. And yet, for all his desperate clinging to reason, it is he who acts
like a madman and a gullible fool, finally, by chasing after the hooded figure
as if it were really his daughter (who he insists to Laura is “dead,
dead, dead, dead, DEAD!”), and thereby ensuring his own death. The
complexity and depth of this film can make one reel to think about it, and yet
it’s all there, not under but on the surface, for all
to see. Roeg made a film with superficial depths—it’s about how
mystery is always right before our eyes, plain as day, but how we insist upon
mystifying ourselves, by never looking at what is there. We
are like Plato’s cave dwellers, transfixed by shadows.
[3]. Heather
complained about prowlers; the prowler of course was none other than John, who
was snooping about earlier looking for Laura, and fled from the irate neighbors
when his Italian mysteriously failed him.
[4]. This is
a perhaps unique example of a title giving not only the essence of the work,
but also an invaluable—though entirely useless (because ignored)—tip, or word
of warning, to the characters within the story.
5.
“Labyrinths,” Reeling, p. 235.
[6]. In fact
Kael’s chief weakness as a critic is her lack of affinity or understanding
for the more “spiritual” dimensions of movies (we’ll leave
life out of it), a common enough failing for the “intellectual.” In
her review of Don’t Look Now (from Reeling) Kael
displays a lack of judgment almost unique in her career as film critic. She acknowledges
Roeg as a “genius of chic” (p. 235) who “has an edgy style
that speaks to us of the broken universe and our broken connections, of modern
man’s inability to order his experience and to find meaning and coherence
in it” (p. 233). All well
and good so far, but when she goes on to say that the film “never arouses
any feeling for its characters” (p. 235) she seems to lose her judgment
irrevocably. It’s true that Roeg detaches himself from the characters,
but only, as I say, as a means of warning us as to their fate. It is then up to
us to conjure feelings within ourselves, at our own risk, and I think if we go
with Sutherland and Christie’s performances, the Baxters become more real
to us than most film characters ever do. Kael claims that the film’s
“meanings are very simple, very much on a Hitchcock level, and are often
organized with that same mechanical precision. . . The non-believer hero destroyed by his refusal to trust his
second sight (that old, old shtick—the agnostic punished because he refuses
to believe in the supernatural) gives one such a strong whiff of
Hollywood” (p. 236). Her interpretation is woefully inadequate here; she
seems to let Roeg’s technique blind her to his artistry, and the obvious
superficial meanings of the film convince her that there are no depths beyond
them. But just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean
it’s not true or profound. In fact, clichés are generally truth
dressed up to look shallow, which is exactly what Don’t Look Now is, but
Kael never sees beyond appearances, either. She’s as far out of touch
with her own “second sight” as Baxter, though her only
“punishment” may be that she missed out on one of the greatest
films of the period.
[7]. The
precise history goes like this: “It is notoriously known what in Killina
within Perthshyr fell tragically out with a Yeoman, that liv’d hard by,
who coming to a companie within an aile-hous, where a Seer sat at a table, that
at the sight of the intrant neighbor, The Seer starting, rose to go out of the
hous, and being asked the reason for his hast, told, that the intrant man
should die within two days, at which news the named intrant stabb’d the
seer and was himselfe executed two dayes after for the fact.”
[8]. I have
neglected to make any mention of a significant plot device in the
film—Venice is plagued by a random series of killings, which “leave
the authorities baffled.” Various mentions of these serial murders are
made, and of a “killer at large” and so forth, and we even get a
glimpse of one of “his” victims. The murders are not linked to the
plot other than incidentally, and as a means to heighten the sinister
atmosphere of the film, but we are led to believe that the red dwarf is in fact
the killer—hence was running away at the climax, after committing another
of her crimes. None of this is explicit in the film,
and it by no means undoes my hypothesis. Either we can say that the crimes have
nothing at all to do with the dwarf, or, more audaciously perhaps, we can say
that Baxter’s id was already out of control long before it turned against
him, and was actually responsible for these other murders as well. This would
help explain why Baxter was such a willing—albeit an
unwitting—accomplice in his own death. This idea is referred to by
Eastern mystics as a tulpa—a projection of
consciousness (or of the unconscious) that takes on an actual, independent life
of its own. Baxter unconsciously projected
the figure as a warning, as a way of calling out to himself; a message from his
irrational subconscious psyche (or soul) to h
is rational conscious mind. The
latter denied all knowledge of the former, however, despite its repeated
appearances (first of all in small, subtle ways, such as the image on the
slide, finally in full, manifest form). The longer he denied the existence of
this “demon,” the more insistent did the demon become, until
finally, through a combination of its own growing frustration and
Baxter’s dread, denial and doubt, it turned against him. (The fact that
the red dwarf is female supports this “shadow-side”
hypothesis.)
[9]. Of its
making, for instance, Donald Sutherland, reports: “We shot the climax
last and I knew I was going to die in it and I became literally convinced that
I would die, and dying began to feel almost like a sexual rite.” Don’t
Look Now, p. 31.
10. Ibid,
p. 42-3.
[11]. What
form his id took depended entirely on how he himself chose to see (or receive)
its manifestation.
[12].
Sanderson, p. 30.
[13]. There is
a terrible symmetry to the tragic outcome and the way in which the Baxter
family is, during the course of the film, cut precisely down the center: the
adult male and the female child being sacrificed, leaving their shadows or
complementary halves, the mother and male child, in their wake.
[14].Don’t
Look Now, p. 80.