Picnic at Hanging Rock: a principle of uncertainty

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time...”

“Each electron, therefore, must be passing through both slits at the same time!” Stephen Hawking- A Brief History of Time

A principle of uncertainty underscores Peter Weir’s 1975 film version of Joan Lindsey’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film that is on the one hand about institutions and the physical and psychological constraints of life in an Australia that is still politically under the stranglehold of a monarch residing on the other side of the world but which is also about the uncertainty of a landscape that is at once profoundly new and yet primitive and preternatural. The narrative tells the story of four Australian school girls and their Maths teacher who disappear on a trip to Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day 1900. After several days of full scale searching by the authorities, teachers and other members of the school, a heroic (or is it guilt-ridden?) mission by two young men who might have had some sort of encounter with the girls results in the finding of one of the missing pupils, Irma. Note the multiple conditional clauses in the previous sentence: this is a film that refuses, like the eponymous rock itself, to yield its meaning to rational investigation.  The other girls are never discovered and one of their friends, Sara, distraught at the prospect of returning to an orphanage because of non-payment of her fees by her guardians, throws herself from an upstairs window into a greenhouse and kills herself.

The theme of imprisonment pervades almost every scene; the girls and their mistresses struggle with their own sense of institutionalisation in Appleyard College, a school administered by a seemingly ruthless and ultimately corrupt matriarch and which is itself struggling within the financial constraints placed upon it by a combination of failing creditors and the need to dress itself in the affluence to be expected by a fee paying school at the end of the Victorian era. The girls themselves are caged in what Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird calls the ‘starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary’, their burgeoning sexuality kept narratively and visually under wraps in an opening scene in which the girls form a daisy chain in order to tighten each others’ bodices with maximum efficiency.

This scene, with its nascent homoerotic undercurrent, points to Michel Foucault’s notion of a Victorian sexuality that is both incited to discourse (the girls breathlessly recite Poe’s A Dream within a Dream) and yet is also buried beneath an opposing discourse of restraint. The spectator is caught in voyeuristic pleasure (and I am reminded of Leopold Bloom gazing on at the girls in the Nausicaa passage in Ulysses) and the result is an eroticism that succeeds because of the covering up of bodies rather than the revelation of them. Characters are imprisoned by the heat into shaded enclaves. Perhaps one of the most explicit victims of imprisonment is Sara, who is forced to remain behind (presumably for her guardian’s non-payment of fees) and who is cruelly castigated by Mrs Appleyard for not being able to memorise verbatim The Wreck of the Hesperus as well as ridiculing the girl’s own attempts at verse. Longfellow’s poem, in which a the daughter of a ship’s captain is lashed to the mast to prevent her from being thrown overboard by the storm, prefigures perhaps the most startling of images in the film:  that of Sara physically restrained to a wall in order to correct her posture by Miss Lumley whilst the other girls enjoy their daily bout of callisthenics.

But against this background of restraint and imprisonment, the girls’ disappearance can be read as a form of escape. Throughout the film, soft focus photography places the girls themselves firmly within the gaze of a camera which emphasises their youth and their aesthetic beauty in a series of filmic equivalents of Pre-Raphaelite shots. As Miranda begins her ascent onto the rock, her French mistress Mme de Poitiers comments on the classical beauty of Miranda, one of the girls who disappears, referring to her as ‘a Botticelli angel’. This erotic speculation of bodies is also reinforced later on when the two young men who will eventually lead the search for the missing girls watch Miranda, Irma and Marion make their tentative way across the terrain, considering what the girls might look like beneath the layers of cotton which serve to conceal bodies rather than reveal. In the film’s most erotically charged moment, when the girls reach the top of the rock, the girls remove their stockings in slow motion close ups  which fragments their bodies in true Mulveyan fashion and these shots intercut with low angles of the girls dancing in Pagan abandon beneath the midday sun signify both a metaphorical and a physical release. Their barefoot ascent through the dark recesses of the rock are met with indignant horror and revulsion by Edith who later reports that she saw Miss McGraw  running up the rock in her bloomers, another display of release and escape from the confines placed upon their gender and their sexuality.

 

Weir’s film possesses the ambience of something akin to folk horror, only here the thing that is unearthed and awakened is not some relic of a pagan past or a forgotten ritual that will free the inhibitions of its protagonists; instead it is the mystical and eerie presence of a landscape with which a Colonial European settler has not yet (nor will ever) be able to fathom and which will ultimately absorb whose who engage with its mystical being. The rock itself looms over the narrative, shifting position and shape under the transformative light of the unforgiving sun. Languorous shots of the girls seen through apertures and orifices reinforce the sense of voyeurism in the film but in these point of view shots, there is a sense that the landscape itself is the voyeur, watching the human actors as they attempt to penetrate its mysteries.

In a lecture posted on the web, Paul Atkinson and Marcia Pope comment on the use of sound within the film at the point when the girls encounter the rock:

“it crosses an interesting boundary between intra-diegetic sound — sound that is explicable within the framed onscreen narrative, and extra-diegetic sound — sound that comes from outside the frame, such as soundtrack music or a voiceover. The sound is actually identified in the script as the sound of cicadas, but it is much more ominous, and we’re never sure if it is a sound that the characters hear” (see http://velorum.ballarat.edu.au/~patkinson/hx513/cinelec10.htm)

Whether the characters hear the sound is irrelevant: for me, the sound here suggests a heightened Eno-esque ambience reminiscent of Ligeti’s soundscapes from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the suggestion that, like Kubrick’s monolith, the earth itself has a greater consciousness, one that can manipulate the warp and woof of time and space. In an essay in this month’s Sight and Sound (March 2013), Mark Fisher discusses his own audio-essay On Vanishing Land, and talks of how landscapes ‘[demand] to be engaged with on [their] own terms’. For Fisher, we can discover in the landscape a sense of the eerie which, he states:

‘usually concerns agency ...it suggests an intentionality or an intelligence ... [it] is about the encounter with the unknown.”

By this criterion, Picnic at Hanging Rock moves from beyond the uncanny (that which should remain hidden has resurfaced) to the eerie (for Fisher ‘the traces of a departed agent whose purposes cannot fully be known’), and it is in the rock itself that we must look for traces of the eerie. It is apposite that the school mistress that disappears is a Mathematician; even as the girls ascend the rock, she is contemplating dimension and space. In fact, the uncertainty principle at work in the geological formations under which she shelters offer a more [im]precise mathematical dilemma: that the observer can know where something is or where it is going but not both simultaneously. In its depiction of the eerie, it might be argued that Picnic at Hanging Rock is that most Lynchian of films and in its soundtrack especially, one is reminded of many of Lynch’s most nightmarish scenes:  the red room of Twin Peaks, the opening scene of Eraserhead, the seething mass of insect life in Blue Velvet, or the atmosphere of evil that accompanies Fire Walk with Me.

 

In many ways, Picnic at Hanging Rock displays many of the characteristics of folk horror. Is it nature that is disturbed? Or is it the linearity of time and space? Just as quantum mechanics permits the existence of parallel narratives so we must allow for such an event here. The girls’ removal of the trappings and accoutrements of Victorian sensibility suggests a passing into a different age. Time has ceased to be: all time has stopped and they are, quite literally out of time. Their entry into the fissure of the eponymous rock is a re-entry into the earth, a Venus in reverse perhaps.  In arguably Lynch’s greatest narrative of uncertainty, Mulholland Drive, Betty/Camilla disappear into another story, one that might or might not be a dream, beautiful arrangements of electron particles which bounce off into a singularity beyond the narrative into which they were born, only this time instead of the blue box there is only the rock, the rock which has waited like a celestial guardian for a million years for this moment.