Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”

It’s Valentine’s Day in the state of Victoria, Australia in the year 1900. A group from a local girls’ school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot but only the first act of Peter Weir’s 1975 film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters’ struggle to make sense of what happened on the rock. Yet, sense is not what the film intends to deliver. Rather, it’s an anti-mystery that dismantles the nature of the mystery story itself—its love of solutions, its neat settling of the uncertainties that crime or menace introduce. What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin discuss “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”; Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. It's Valentine's Day in the state of Victoria, Australia, in the year 1900. A group from a local girls school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot, but only the first act of Peter Weir's 1975 film based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters struggle to make sense of what happened on the rock. Yet sense is not what the film intends to deliver. Rather, it's an anti mystery that dismantles the nature of the mystery story itself, its love of solutions, its neat settling of the uncertainties that crime or menace introduce. What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language. Today we're discussing Picnic at Hanging Rock. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I heard that when this film came out, it did pretty well on college campuses. But when I was a master's student at the University of Florida, I discovered that not all college students were enamored by the film. And there was a story that one of my professors told that the students at a screening of this famously rioted and threw furniture at the screen and it was covered in the campus newspaper that they were so upset, I guess, that the film had no resolution. Spoiler alert. That it had no resolution and they were so hoodwinked and maybe possibly drunk, I don't know. So I wondered if you had seen the film before. I think you were unsure if you had, and whether or not you ended up throwing any furniture or what your reaction was. 2:27 Wes: Yeah, no, it turns out I haven't seen the film. I knew of the film, of course, but I had not, it turns out, seen it. I didn't do a lot of research, but I knew going in that it was going to be. I knew the plot and I knew it was going to be unresolved. It would be interesting to have just gone into it completely fresh and to see if it would have Been disappointing under those circumstances, but no. Yeah, it didn't occur to me to be disappointed with the lack of resolution in the ending. And overall, I suppose the film has a kind of dreamy, surreal quality that I guess there's a few hints that there might be some sort of explanation as to what happened. So, for instance, the fact that Michael follows the girls, that there is a bit of suspicion cast upon him, but it's quite subtle and passing and not much is made of that. So I don't think the film builds up a lot of suspense, actually, about the mystery. 3:28 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. I have the Criterion set, and a while ago I watched the documentary in which Peter Weir said that he was trying to prepare the viewers for the fact that there would be no resolution to the mystery through the tone and other clues. So, yeah, so it is. It is surprising. But this is a film that I. I saw when I was probably a little bit younger than the age of the girls in the film. So when I heard that, I was so shocked, that story. Because by that time, this had long been one of my favorite films. So I was surprised that anybody would go looking for meaning from this particular story or that kind of meaning. 4:06 Wes: How old were you when you first saw it? 4:08 Erin: I was probably 14 or 15. 4:10 Wes: Okay. 4:11 Erin: Yeah. This is one of my mom's favorite films. So she introduced it to me at the right time. Age that I was. It was like the perfect age, you know, the perfect girls, boarding school kind of age, to see this film for the first time and be really affected by it. But, yeah, to this day, it's one of my favorites. And I think it's possibly the best Australian film. I haven't seen every Australian film, but I think there's something here actually to do with the nature of Australia itself, which we might talk about. 4:36 Wes: All those poisonous snakes, all the things 4:38 Erin: that want to kill you. Yeah. But did you enjoy it? I'm just, you know, I'm curious about your reaction in a more general. 4:45 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I enjoyed it. I did watch it twice. So I guess the routine now is to watch it twice so that I'm not trying to take notes during the first viewing, which can interfere with the enjoyment. But I guess because I'm thinking about recording on it, I'm not as attuned to how much I like it or don't like it. I mean, I can't say it's no Mission Impossible. It's not like Tom Cruise is doing amazing stunts and there's things exploding. 5:14 Erin: Well, it's Very. It's a very. 5:15 Wes: Yes, it's an artsy movie. So. So in other words. Yeah. I'm not equipped to the kind of an. Maybe. Maybe this way to put it. I'm so. I've been so bludgeoned by popcorn movies that I'm not as sensitive to what's going on when I'm. 5:34 Erin: That's funny. 5:34 Wes: Looking at arts here movies. And I. I can appreciate them aesthetically, but. So I appreciate it. And in fact, I think the second watching, when I was taking notes, trying to look very carefully at what was going on, in a way, strangely enough, that was more gratifying that I watched them days apart and I didn't expect to have the second time be more pleasurable because then I knew it was gonna happen. I done. 6:01 Erin: Well, for me, it's. I had never really thought so deeply about the film before until preparing for this recording. Just kind of thinking through it because for me there's nothing to do but enjoy the movie. I mean, it's so beautiful. You know, there's not. It's just. It just sort of washes over you. I can't think of a more beautiful film off the top of my head. Maybe some Merchant Ivory films or something, but I'd say they're on par. 6:25 Wes: I have a complicated relationship to beauty, I think, but so does everybody. 6:31 Erin: Don't we all? Yes. Yeah. It's so gorgeous. And I think the film. I think I watched it at such an impressionable age and it made such a huge impact on me. It's like, embedded in my psyche in some strange way. So lots of images from the film, the birds collaged with Miranda's face and various other things are extremely. Or even just the opening credits with the rock rising from the mist. Like, that's like one of the main images from that. That time in my life, maybe. 7:01 Wes: And it is. What. It's 1975, so it's right there in my. My wheelhouse. 7:06 Erin: I know, I know. 7:07 Wes: 60s and 70s. 7:08 Erin: Yeah. I thought. I thought this would have. Be a crossover hit for us, but alas. Well, maybe we'll still have some. An interesting conversation here. But anyway, it's also sort of. I'm not sure if it's propaganda for or against poetry, but certainly poetry plays a big. Plays a big part in this film as well. You know, we have the character of Sarah. Well, you know, before I even get into that, I'm also curious to know because I was sort of polling people. Who do you think the main character is? 7:35 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking about that. A little bit, because we really were getting a few different stories. In some ways, Sarah seems to be the protagonist. In some ways. Michael Albert, of course, has his own arc. In a way, the strongest arc belongs to Mrs. Appleyard herself. So maybe it's an ensemble movie. Maybe we have multiple characters or I'm sure someone has said in an essay somewhere, ooh, it's the rock, it's hanging Rock is the main character. There's a lot of fading shots in this movie where you get one image overlapping another. Right. Maybe that's the main character. Just that transition, the collage itself. 8:21 Erin: Well, there's something to that. I think the film is really interesting. Interested in photography, oddly, and also in reproductions and images and mirror images. Something about the nature of the film itself seems. Seems to be thematic. But I was thinking about that maybe lack of a main character as somehow, I don't know, somehow an expression of this idea that the genre seems to me to be an anti mystery, for lack of a better term. So we have, you know, we have a movie that's acting as though it's going to be some kind of procedural crime drama and it just routinely dismantles those expectations. And I think we discover very soon that they aren't going to be solved or settled. But then we do get some, you know, one of the girls does come back and we do have this repeated effort on the part of the characters to solve the mystery. It becomes kind of a low key media sensation in the film. And I wonder if the fact that there is no locatable main thread or maybe the main character is Miranda who then just disappears. So then you're sort of dealing with a film in which the protagonist is simply gone and the film is trying to reckon where the story is trying to reckon with working itself out in a vacuum. Because this girl seemed to have been such a pivotal. She has a kind of cult of personality around her at the school. And so the film seems. 9:45 Wes: She might be the antagonist. 9:47 Erin: She might be. She might be. That's right, yeah. And you know, we think that maybe the police officer is gonna, you know, come in and have a disappointment arc, at least if he's not going to solve it. But you know, I was thinking about the mystery's association with a single protagonist or with the figure of a detective or someone who comes in and solves it all and figures out who the antagonist is. You know, like part of the mystery story seems to be about figuring out actually who the. Who the characters are and how to classify them. Right. So the Fact that it is an anti. Anti mystery, as I'm. As I'm suggesting. And the fact that the characters are all. All important and unimportant. Is this sort of an egalitarian film, in a way, is, I think, indicative of the fact that the Rock doesn't have a narrative that we can attach to it. It doesn't have the story, doesn't have something we could pull out and say this is the explanation. In the same way that we can't look among these people and say that's the most important person because that's the person that, you know, everything hinges on. 10:48 Wes: Yeah. Maybe it's worth just describing a few of the different arcs and broad brush, you know, what is Sarah's story? Sarah is an orphan and she's been separated from her brother Bertie, who turns out to be Albert. And some unknown benefactor far away is financing her attendance at this boarding school where she is quite out of place socioeconomically. Although we get an idea that there are probably other girls like her there as well. But she's certainly in the minority compared to all the posh, privileged girls she goes to school with. And she's got a defiant streak. She's not doing her work. She wants to compose poetry rather than simply read it from memory. It gets her held back from going to Hanging Rock to getting involved in that adventure where she could well have been one of the ones who never came back. Right. She would have followed Miranda to the very end, all the way up to, you know, sex Heaven or wherever they ended up going. Oh, boy. Floated up on a red cloud into. But 12:04 Erin: into the spaceship. 12:06 Wes: And so what happens to her? Well, she loves, you know, her and Miranda have this very loving relationship. And it's a bit asymmetrical, of course. Miranda has a superior position and it looks kind of pities and condescends in a way to Sarah. And Sarah seems to look up to and idealize Miranda. But then in a way, she's abandoned. Miranda tells her, look, find someone else to love because I won't be here much longer. And explicitly, she's returning to the fact that alluding to the fact that she's going to be moving on from the school, although one and read it as a prophecy. And this is the way Sarah later on reads it, is that Miranda knows she's not going to be coming back. This is after Miranda says, you'll have to come meet my quirky, funny family. I forget how she puts it, but one day you'll have to come visit my sweet, funny family for Yourself, which is a rather nonchalant way to put that to someone who themselves doesn't have a family. But she goes from that to the very abandoning idea. But you also have to find someone else to love. I won't be here much longer. And then Miranda does complete that abandonment. You know, if you want to read it on some level, as Miranda purposefully, like the Pied Piper meeting everyone except Edith, who's sensibly hysteric about sex, runs screaming down the mountain, she leaves Sarah behind and Sarah is once again abandoned. And not only that, Miranda's. Again, if we read Miranda's having done all this, it leads to the school being in big financial trouble and trouble otherwise, which means Appleyard has to crack down and kick Sarah out, which leads to Sarah's suicide. So you can see why I would want to frame this dynamic in terms of. So that's just one arc. I'm not going to go do them all. Maybe you can do the next one. We could do Appleyards or something next. But you see, the. That's one story, but it's not even the story. You couldn't say that that story, that Sarah's story. Right. Takes up a huge part of the film, or is the main thing in the film, because it's so evenly balanced between these other stories, But. 14:18 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I did some thinking yesterday about Sarah as a representative of the Romantic. The capital R romantic sensibility versus the Victorian sensibilities of the school. You know, we could think of Sarah as the antagonist to Mrs. Appleyard, or Vice versa, but we have these twin portraits that are featured semi prominently in the film, where Mrs. Appleyard has that prominent portrait of Queen Victoria in her office. I think it is. It looks like everything is so heavily upholstered in every room that Mrs. Appleyard is in, it's difficult to tell what the purpose of the room is. She has a portrait of Queen Victoria and it, of course, takes place in the state of Victoria in Australia. Newly named, I would imagine. Not quite so newly named, but maybe. And then in Sarah's bedroom, she has the portrait of Byron. And of course, as a lover of Byron, she's obsessed with her brother, so she has this. This desire to, as you, as you've already mentioned, to write poetry herself. She writes. Is it an ode to Saint Valentine? It's not an ode to. For some reason, I thought it was Cupid for a second, but I second guessed myself. Ode to Saint Valentine. I think it is. 15:27 Wes: Yeah. It's an ode to St. Valentine, yeah. 15:30 Erin: She writes herself, which one could imagine is a kind of Keatsian or Byronic composition, but is instead being forced to read, well, Heman's Casabianca or Longfellow's the Wreck of the Hesperus. Mrs. Appleyard is not really up on her English lit the way that she imagines that her. That she is. So she misnames or misidentifies the author of the Wreck of the Hesperus as Felicia Hemans. Both of these poems that she refers to, the Wreck of the Hesperus and Casabianca, are about young children, either in the Wreck of the Hesperus, sacrificed because of the flaws of the parent, or in Casabianca, sacrifice to duty that they perform at the behest of a parent. So both of them are about children who end up dead. And both of them, I think, are representative of a kind of Victorian sensibility towards what we might call typical Victorian middle class values. So we have familial duty, duty to one's parents, honor, staying at one's post, doing one's job. In the Wreck of the Hesperus, this is literally she's staying at her post. Her father goes out to sea in the middle of a hurricane. He's warned against doing this, but he's too prideful. And as it's clear that the ship is going to potentially be wrecked, he ties his daughter to the mast to try and save her. She's later found by a fisherman, dead, still tied to the mast. The ship was wrecked at Norman's Woe in Gloucester, Massachusetts. So anyway, the conflict between these two sets of values, I think, are interestingly indicative of the nature of this school, of the nature of Victorian society itself, of Australian history. All kinds of things are kind of coming together in this clash between Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard. Sarah also, you know, the name and the fact that she's an orphan at this wealthy school reminds me of Sarah Crewe and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, if familiar with that Victorian novel for children. But essentially we have this, what do we want to call it? An aristocrat of the soul, you know, a princess in rags who represents a kind of earlier sensibility versus these, the middle class values of Mrs. Appleyard trying to run a school in which she has all of these little princesses in her charge. And it's like she's an administrator in a place where there's all this plutonium that might go off at any moment and she's the one responsible for, like, keeping the lights on and, you know, making sure. That. That everything runs according to plan. 18:06 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. 18:08 Erin: I just want to say that I think that, you know, this romantic sensibility is very much a teenage girl sensibilities. The idea of Victorian society is to take all of these things and all of these feelings and repress them according to a kind of middle class value system which ended up being imposed from the very top. 18:30 Wes: Right. 18:30 Erin: Victoria herself is a sort of like, you know, angel of. Of middle class values. Very different from the kinds of aristocratic values which were previously ascendant in the English empire and representative of people like Lord Byron. And. And so the clash between these things is like the clash between nature and repression, between the Australian continent and the English colonizers. All of these things, I think, are represented in this clash of wills between Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard, in which Sarah is fatally outmatched ultimately, but Then so is Mrs. Appleyard in a way. 19:14 Wes: Yeah. So I like. There's a lot of different parallel conflicts here that you're pointing to. One is between parent and child when it comes to the process of civilizing children, and likewise to like a, you know, between a Victorian colonialist project and the people who are supposed to be civilized by it. Right. There's also a picture of a tiger on Mrs. Appleyard's wall. Not just Queen Victoria. So you get right. The project of the boarding school is in parallel to this, you know, colonials project. And. And then, of course, there's more broadly civilization versus nature, which comes out right in the film. In a way, they're going up against the natural world and they're not equipped for that. And then, as I've said on the podcast before, I think femininity codes is more civilized and also more upper class. So there's a class dynamic, upper versus lower class. But then there's the whole question of what represents the very essence of civilization or moral stricture, which is in some sense the feminine. And then whatever that comes into clash with, which is not easily put right, because nature is not coded as masculine. Nature is also a raw feminine force. But given Appleyard's project with all these dreamy, semi psychotic young girls, you know, burgeoning adolescent sexuality and writing poetic valentines to each other and reading them at the beginning of the movie, you know, to each other, there's one thing you don't want to do, which is hire a French teacher. What's her name? Is it de Poitiers? 20:59 Erin: Yes, it is. Diane de Poitiers. Which is. Which must be Mademoiselle, a reference to the famous Famous royal mistress. 21:08 Wes: She's just DP in my notes. I didn't want to write it out every time. D.P. so, mademoiselle. Now, I don't want to try to say that on the podcast each time either, but we'll just call her Diane maybe. 21:18 Erin: Yeah, sure. 21:19 Wes: Mademoiselle is the French teacher. Well, she. In a school where you have a lot of grim, tight assed women like Appleyard or Ms. Lumley, other than the lower class staff like Minnie, for instance, the French teacher stands out as she's young, she's beautiful. In a way, she's one of them. Or, you know, partly one of them. She's the one who gives them permission to go up on the rock even though Appleyard warned them before they even left. Don't do that. You're not allowed to do that. I forbid it. In a way, the French teacher participates or colludes in the whole. This whole project by giving in to them and saying they're allowed to go up by themselves. Even to the point where when Miranda is leaving and turns back and gives that very potent goodbye, as if it's going to be her last goodbye. And what does de Poitiers say? She says, now I know she's one of. You know what I think? Is it Ms. McCraw who asked her? You know what she is? A Botticelli angel. She's been looking at Botticelli in her art book. Right? 22:35 Erin: Yes. 22:36 Wes: Yeah. Don't let these French libertines into your school if you want to keep things. 22:41 Erin: I know. Shouldn't the English know better? 22:43 Wes: Appleyard sows her own destruction with all that. So, I mean, just looking at her arc. Right. Yeah. She's tasked with this project. Her husband is dead. She's hitting the sauce on the side because of the stress. She's not without heart. She's not without a conscience. She has a little bit of a breakdown. Has to give Sarah the bad news about leaving. What is so funny about that? 23:10 Erin: You're just so funny. That is so funny. Sorry. You should do just like, you know, like. Like two minute summaries of art films. Appleyard, what's her deal? She's hitting the sauce on the side. 23:29 Wes: But it's a very tragic arc for her, of course, which is that in the end she's willing to lie. Who is it who lies in the movie? She lies. Who else lies? 23:40 Erin: Michael. 23:41 Wes: What does Michael lie about? 23:42 Erin: He says that all he did was watch them cross the creek. 23:46 Wes: Yeah, right. 23:46 Erin: But then he's. Then he mentions that the dumpy one film is so cruel to Edith, that the dumpy one was following behind after them. So we know from that that he actually. And then he later admits. And we could see why he does this, because he's a suspect. 24:01 Wes: Yeah. 24:01 Erin: But he then admits that he did follow them a little ways and he saw that Edith was trailing behind when they crossed the creek. Miranda was the last to cross. 24:08 Wes: So he kind of leaves that out until he's brought it. But, yeah. Yeah, let's just see what he says here. Yeah. Then there was a little dumpy one. And then Albert's like, crikey, wait, what is his name? What is the Australian slang? Not lassies, but. 24:29 Erin: Oh, Sheila's. 24:31 Wes: Sheila's. Crikey. Oh, Sheila's. 24:35 Erin: I wonder if anyone thought maybe the dingo ate the girls. 24:38 Wes: Anyway, so Edith is the third. And then he pauses and then said the last one was slim and fair. And then the sergeant says, that's four. So he had said three. And what the sergeant notices is that he's listed four girls. And of course, the. Miranda is the one who's the fourth, is the afterthought, in a way. And she's the one who figures so prominently in Michael's fantasies. And then Michael's explanation is that. Well, that's because the dumpy one was back a little, which doesn't quite make sense to me now, because Edith is the third one. Where does he admit to following, though? Maybe I'm. Maybe this is the wrong. 25:16 Erin: A later scene. I think he admits to it. 25:19 Wes: That's right. Sorry, Yeah, I pulled us into the wrong scene. So, yeah, a little bit later, the sergeant says this is when he's at tea with Michael. And I guess it's to the side of this party, this posh, fancy party. Sergeant says, why didn't you tell us you followed the four girls? And Michael says, I didn't exactly follow them. I just jumped across the creek and walked towards the rock for a little way. I was curious. In England, young ladies like that wouldn't be allowed to go walking in the forest. Not alone, anyway. But what if they had a French governess? Anyway, but they'd gone by the time I'd come out of the trees, so I turned back. And we'll never know, of course, if there's more to this story. Michael, of course, seems so sympathetic with the girls. He's gonna search for them and find one of them. And, you know, it would be interesting to know if he was just a madman murderer, maybe forgot he had murdered them and left one alive. But anyway, we'll never know. But that's. Yeah, I guess we don't really know how the sergeant finds out that he followed them. Maybe Albert outed him, who knows? But he's confronted about that fact, so at the very least, he's omitted that. But I can't think of any other direct lies. But just coming back to Appleyard, the one that she tells is unfortunate. I don't know, what's the word? It's quite a transgression because the lie is that Sarah has been picked up by her benefactor. Right. Sarah has been picked up. Picked up by her guardian and she's telling that to de Poitiers, the French teacher. Why is she doing that? Because at this point, the French teacher has become very concerned about Sarah and Appleyard doesn't want to seem like a cruel. You know, the cruel one who's kicking Sarah out of the school. Is that right? 27:06 Erin: I think so. 27:07 Wes: I think I was just bringing that up because that's a critical mistake. That is part of why she, in the end, is done right. Once Sarah kills herself. 27:18 Erin: Yes. 27:18 Wes: And by the time they even find Appleyard, she's already dressed in what looks like a morning outfit and has everything packed. She knows she has to go. I'm not sure if she had been honest about that situation that she would necessarily have to go, but that is kind of the nail on her coffin, or am I right about that? So I'm just looking at the kind of tragic element of what's going on with her, where her need for to be overly controlling backfires in these important ways. 27:47 Erin: Yes. But at the same time, she too, is permissive. Why does she let them go to Hanging Rock? You know, this is. This. This is the big one of the big questions here. Certainly not the main big question, but 27:59 Wes: I think McCraw is wondering that in the beginning. 28:01 Erin: That's a great speech. Yeah. And, you know, and with a name like Appleyard, there are a lot of. We can make a lot of biblical connections here. She's permissive enough to let them go. And I could go in a lot of directions here. There's the nature of the picnic. There's this idea that perhaps Appleyard is so disconnected from reality, she's not actually aware of the extent to which she is playing with fire. So, you know, this is a sort of replica of a traditional English boarding school transplanted to Australia. There's this Georgian mansion surrounded by palm trees. There are all of these traditions that seem to be kept alive here. You know, they're not allowed to Remove their gloves until they've gone through the town. It's clear that there's a townie school kind of antagonism going on here, or at least a fascination by the townspeople for the girls. And then we have a picnic itself, which is about. I mean, to the extent that I understand the origins of the practice, I think it's about mimicking the kind of al fresco lunch that the field workers would normally have. But it's an upper class tradition in which, you know, let's go outside and have a meal. Like these people who we are, who are so far below us on the social strata. You know, let's mimic that idea because it seems like so fun to sit outside and, you know, get baked in the sun the way that these poor people are. So there's a play acting, right, involved in all of it, just like there's a play acting involved in Victorian society and maybe a willful ignorance or just an ignorance of what's really going on here. You know, so much emphasis seems to be placed on their, you know, near seclusion from the society of the town. And it seems that the homosocial aspect of this school is designed to sort of like keep anything from. Keep any hanky panky from going on, you know, and that's the kind of ignorance, perhaps that, that we're dealing with here. And so on the one hand, we can just say it's ignorance that she doesn't understand the forces at play. She doesn't understand that, you know, nature will find a way or whatever, whatever expression we want to use there. 30:16 Wes: Say that in the voice of 30:19 Erin: Richard Attenborough. Right. 30:22 Wes: No, no, it's Jurassic Park. 30:25 Erin: That's what I was thinking of. Yeah, I thought it was Jeff Goldblum. 30:29 Wes: Yes, there you go. 30:30 Erin: Yeah, I thought, I thought it was the old man who said it, Richard Attenborough. But anyway, regardless, then there's the aspect of voyeurism that might be an explanation. You know, they're supposed to go up to the rock, they're supposed to sit at the base of the rock, but they're not supposed to touch the rock. Voyeurism seems to be a big theme in the film as well. Obviously Michael looks at the girls, the girls look at the rock, the rock looks at them. Sometimes in certain shots it looks literal. 30:56 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting because McCraw will early on point to the foolishness of going out for a picnic in a dangerous environment. So she'll say, this we do for pleasure, so that we may shortly be at the mercy of Venomous snakes and poisonous ants. How foolish can human creatures be? We could say this about any kind of excursion or anything we do for pleasure. We're increasing the risk to ourselves. We could just stay at home. You know, if we hadn't gone the walk, we wouldn't have been hit by the car and so on and so forth. It's a bit more extreme in this case. Right. Because this is Australia and this is, I guess, the. Technically the bush or something. 31:37 Erin: Yes. 31:37 Wes: And untamed nature. And they do have a lot of poisonous snakes. It's not just. I was gonna say, like, going out in Georgia, but actually, Georgia has a lot of poisonous snakes, too. 31:47 Erin: But not. But not even that. 31:48 Wes: I dealt with my share of snakes in Georgia. Yeah, go ahead. 31:52 Erin: There's an even more obvious principle at work here, which is when you're a teenager and you go to a big barbecue or something, there's always the party separate from the party. Right. The teenagers always break away. They find a way. They go up on the roof, they go behind the shed, they go, you know, whatever. Right. Like I've. Every single party I ever went to at a teenager where there were adults, you always break away and you have your own little whatever. You find a pool house. You find some room that nobody else is in, and you all hang out. And usually there's some, you know, funny business that goes on with something. I mean, even. You know. I don't mean that. 32:33 Wes: If this were an 80s movie, you know. Yeah. Someone would be topless. There'd be pool scene. 32:40 Erin: Right, Right. 32:41 Wes: It'd be a party. There'd be a. Yeah. 32:42 Erin: I mean, there wouldn't even be any parents around at all because they're just, you know, latchkey kids. But somehow the parents are always gone. 32:51 Wes: Hanging Rock would be the name of a. Name of a mall now. 32:54 Erin: Right? Exactly. Yeah. No, but you know what I mean, like, there's always. There's always something and something always happens. You know, somehow they've, you know, somebody finds liquor or something and someone either gets hurt because they're jumping off of something or, you know. 33:10 Wes: Yeah. So there's the danger represented by nature, and then there's the dame. Danger represented by their. Their impulses. 33:16 Erin: Yeah. 33:16 Wes: Which are, of course, of a piece with nature in a way, and they're the way in which we're closest to nature. 33:21 Erin: Yeah. 33:22 Wes: But instead of the external force of what might come from the outside, like a venomous snake, which is obvious, of course, it could be read as having something to do with sexuality and the dangers of sexuality yeah. What's at stake are also impulses. One of the impulses, as you said, is to. Is maybe voyeuristic, but there's also just more. Ordinarily, there's the impulse just to go outside and have fun, and then there's. There's sexual impulses, there's aggressive impulses, there's all sorts of things that maybe have more play or more range in the natural environment. 33:57 Erin: Yeah. And I suppose, you know, Appleyard, by not going, by staying at home, I mean, you know, I want to maybe interrogate why Sarah is also made to stay. I guess there's the suggestion, because of what Appleyard says later about Ms. McCraw, that Ms. McCraw was supposed to be sort of her deputy and that. 34:14 Wes: That fabulous masculine intellect of her. 34:17 Erin: That masculine intellect of hers. Yeah. Is there any other kind? 34:20 Wes: The. 34:21 Erin: The idea is that she. That they were going to be safe, that there was going to be supervision not from a French teacher, but from. But from Ms. McCraw. And yet she was the one. You know, it's like. It's like when the. It's always the most extreme people that are taken in the opposite. The opposite direction. Right. Because to me, you know, many jokes, of course, can be made about the permissive French teacher, but to me, of course, she's most normal person in the film. I think that's clear. The French teacher seems to be the most well balanced, considering that they're. That the school environment is so repressive, bizarre. Any school environment is repressive and bizarre for reasons we could also talk about. But the fact of the matter is she seems the most normal and she has the most human feeling of anyone. And so therefore, sort of, by definition, she's not going to be susceptible to conversion in the same way that Ms. McCraw is. Of course, the movie leaves it open that McCraw might have been just following them to try to get them back. But we have the detail of her having taken off her dress. Of course, that, too may be evidence that she was trying to get them back. It was an extremely hot day. She might have been just being practical and once she realized that the girls were gone, was trying to make an earnest effort at summiting this rock as quickly as possible to get to them. And she, too, fell, or whatever explanation we wanted to. Same might have happened here. But on the other end of the spectrum, there's the argument that McCraw, because she's so repressed, was therefore ripe to be taken in by the forces of capital, nature and capital S. Sexuality and whatever else might be going on. 35:58 Wes: Yeah, well, her first, I guess, misstep, if you want to read it as that is to kind of not say anything when the French teacher says, yeah, you can go up on the. 36:08 Erin: Yes. 36:08 Wes: She gives a look, I think as they leave, she looks a little bit alarmed or nonplussed by the French teacher saying, now I know, now I know. And you know what, you know that Miranda's a Botticelli angel. But she doesn't intervene. And she said some very. I don't know, she comes across almost as a soothsayer earlier on, right? So after that remark about what we do for pleasure, you know, not long after they've taken their gloves off and Hussie says, there she is, ladies, Hanging Rock and crosses. The mountain comes to Muhammad. A hanging rock comes to Mr. Hussey. And I had to look up this whole idea, right? If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must come to the mountain. Which I take to be the idea is that we can't just get what we want through fantasy. We either have to work for it or we have to come to terms with reality and give up on it. But in this case she seems to be suggesting that Mr. Hussey's kind of lower class and therefore meager ambitions, right, are being somehow rewarded. And I don't know, maybe they're being rewarded in like manner with this weird monstrosity instead of a mountain, right? Something in a way deformed or maybe something's coming to too easily to him, I'm not sure. But she goes on to give us the science behind Hanging Rock. It's volcanic and it's. Or actually Hussy says that. And McCraw will correct him and say it's not just thousands of years old, but it's millions of years old and 37:44 Erin: it's actually just 1 million years old. Relatively young, she says, compared to the rocks around it. 37:49 Wes: Oh, right, it's Hussy, right? She says a million, then Hussey says thousands. Millions. Devil of a long time away in a manner of speaking. Okay, Samwise. And then she corrects him again. One million years ago. And she'll say, quite a recent eruption, really. The rocks all around Mount Macedon itself must be all of 350 million years old. Siliceous lava forced up from deep down below. Soda trachytes extruded in a highly viscous state, building the steep sided mamelons we see in Hanging Rock. And quite young geologically speaking. Barely a million years. 38:25 Erin: Please, Wes, this is supposed to be a podcast for kids. Stop reading. 38:31 Wes: Right. So what she's describing there, it sounds like the hanging rock is kind of like it's a congealed ejaculate, right? 38:41 Erin: Yes. 38:41 Wes: Highly viscous. Or it's something almost. It's been frozen. It's a snapshot of ejaculation that's frozen in time. And now you can go climb on it if you want. 38:51 Erin: Right. 38:52 Wes: So pretty gross. 38:55 Erin: It is. 38:56 Wes: And then right after McCraw says that, a girl says, waiting a million years just for us. So why am I bringing that up? You mentioned. Okay. Her susceptibility to being converted, which had me thinking, I think for the first time of the mine ads. I don't know why I didn't think of this before, because there's a lot of dancing and frenzy and the girls are taking their. There's a shot where I think it's Miranda's taking a stocking off. They're just trying to take their shoes off, but in a very sexually suggestive kind of way. And as we know. Right. The Maenads were followers of Dionysus, so the God of pleasure and ecstasy. Their whole shtick was to get into that state of ecstatic frenzy that we all know and love, that in the 80s movie would just be accomplished with alcohol. But. So I wonder now, I wonder if St. Valentine has actually become Dionysus. But that's another question. I wanted to point to this role for McCraw that you've pointed to as sort of the surrogate for Appleyard and an authority figure who is. She's another failure point. Right. Not just the French teacher. She's a failure point in the sense that her. What seems like a scientific fascination is covertly, as her little speech seems to suggest, a quasi sexual fascination. 40:18 Erin: Yeah. In her book she's reading about, there's a triangle and it has a point P and point Q. So there's P's and Q's in there. I was trying to make more. I was trying to think of, you know, a dirty way to read what she was reading, but I couldn't think of one. But yes, I had the same. The same thought. I can't quite remember at this point, but in the novel it is noted that Ms. McCraw is too intelligent to be working at this school. That she's actually a first rate mathematician, like a real genius mathematician, and that it's odd that she should be working at the school. 40:51 Wes: Well, it's funny because when McCraw is coming out of the school with her parasol and the French teacher and the girls kind of close their circle. You can see McCraw is a bit of an outsider to this. And. And the French teacher speaks in French to Irma, saying, be quiet, Irma. Ms. McCraw's arriving like she's part of their little. This is part of what's inappropriate about her behavior. But anyway, yes, she's full of human feeling, but she's a little bit. She doesn't have proper boundary here. Yeah. But she says. Someone says. And I forget who it is. I don't know. I think it's one of the girls says she wants algebra today. And then I think it's the French teacher or someone says, today. Right. And this is part of her masculine intellect, right? This interest in things like algebra or geometry and science. And, you know, today of all days, the day that's supposed to be about love. That's what she's on about. But it turns out to be not the music of the relevant interest, as you're pointing out, with the P's and the Q's and the triangles, you know, and the. 41:52 Erin: Yeah, right. The erotic is always in the triangle. The one thing I wanted to say about your point about Dionysus is that, of course, when the French teacher notes that Miranda looks like a Botticelli angel, she's looking at Venus. She's looking at an image of Venus. So not a. Not a Christian image. Right. And then we have the idea, of course, embedded in that of Venus and Cupid, of the. Of the cherub versus the. Versus the God, you know, the Christian and laminated onto the pagan. So it's just an interesting. It's not a mistake per se, but it's just an interesting thing to say, to look at Venus and say it's an angel. 42:29 Wes: Since we were talking about Saint Valentine and Dionysus, I was just thinking about what's the relationship between love or Eros and then the Dionysian. And. Right. They both, of course, involve the ecstatic. And a little bit of Dionysus is good if you want to try and get yourself to the point of Aphrodite and love. Right. Wine is conducive to sex, for instance. But in a way, the Dionysian, I think might reflect the darker side of Eros. So irrational frenzy and potentially violence. Right. The maenads actually ripped people apart, including Pentheus, people who piss off Dionysus. And I think Plato, he wants to point to something. What's constructive about love in the Symposium and the way in which it. That can be Sublimated and lead us to higher unities and to an interest in truth or the good. I think he also indirectly is evoking this idea of the Dionysian via Diotima and his own daimon, such that there's a kind of ecstatic or manic element to higher interests, including the sorts of interests. Right. Which like the ones that McCraw have in the mathematical and the scientific. So we are always, you know, you can get a little worked up by a little too much doing too much algebra or philosophy for that matter. It can lead you into ecstatic places and into erotic places, which then threaten a kind of regression. 44:05 Erin: That's what's convenient about being obsessed with poetry. It's just being ecstatic about the ecstatic. It's so clear. 44:14 Wes: Yeah. You're closer to the real thing. So you don't need to go kill yourself on a. On a rock. 44:23 Erin: Well, no. Instead you throw yourself through the roof of a garden shed. 44:27 Wes: But only if things go right so much. 44:29 Erin: Yes, that's right. 44:30 Wes: That's right. 44:31 Erin: My things might work out, which they always do anyway. All right. Yeah. So I think that what maybe we should start talking about in part two is a little bit about Australia itself, perhaps, and maybe some speculation as to at least talk of the backstory of Mrs. Appleyard, perhaps. And maybe the ways in which the school environment and the sort of odd culture that schools create and the colonial environment aren't so different. And maybe what. What we can glean through that about the teachers, more about the teachers themselves. Okay, so we'll continue our conversation in part two. Thank you. 45:16 Wes: Thank you. 45:20 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. 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