If you were to create a Venn Diagram with the overlapping circles “19th century period pieces,” “queer femininity,” and “homages to Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola” “Rachel’s interests” would be directly at the center of it. As such, Alena Smith’s “Dickinson,” the slightly absurdist, stylish, and emotional-sucker-punch-replete show about American poet Emily Dickinson is profoundly my shit. In fact, the only way it could have been more tailored to my predilections is if it had been focused on the Brontë sisters instead. When the Mitski music cue hit, I swooned. By the time I reached the spate of Bleak House jokes I thought, “I am being flagrantly pandered to, AND I LOVE IT.” I’m annoyed by Apple TV+, but I’m mostly likely going to keep my subscription because it’s impossible that I won’t binge on this show several more times in the coming months.
Despite loving 19th century novels and poetry, I’m rather selective about the adaptations and period pieces I watch. There’s a swath of BBC Dickens adaptations that I haven’t yet seen, even though a number of them are wonderfully cast, the most famous of them probably being Bleak House. Adaptations, to my mind, are always interpretations, so I don’t expect absolute textual fidelity, but I will be aggravated if the emotional tone is all wrong or incoherent or if whatever I’m watching doesn’t make a case for its own existence. Just because I love reading something doesn’t mean that I’ll also love watching it; the mediums are distinct, and it’s annoying to me when an adaptation or biopic leans heavily on its source material without telling me anything new or interesting.
That said, I am always thrilled by success stories. I’m sorry that Alfonso Cuarón regrets his present day setting Great Expectations because, as readers know, I love it. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet is a masterpiece, too (not Victorian, I know, but the Victorians loved Shakespeare). Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is exquisite, as is Thomas Vinterberg’s Far From the Madding Crowd (when I was in the movie theater watching the latter I responded to one particularly romantic scene by rapturously sighing and smacking my chest so hard that everyone around me giggled; once I had recovered from the emotional transport I was a bit embarrassed). The BBC North and South is also particularly well cast, and it beautifully honors the spirit of the novel.
And now we come to Dickinson, which is not an adaptation, of course, but it does draw heavily from the poet’s work, and the whole enterprise could have gone terribly wrong if the hands involved were not so deft. For one thing, we could talk at length about the show’s music, which is always just right. My favorite track, apart from the Mitski, of course, it probably this remix of Alice Boman’s “Be Mine.”
I remember seeing Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in the theater. Surprise of surprises, I love this film too, and I also recall thinking to myself that as brilliant as I found the contemporary accents, the effect could have been distracting and ham-fisted, rather than emotionally and thematically illuminating. My thoughts followed a similar path as I watched Dickinson, which is even more of an assemblage, and which strikes an even trickier balance. The key, I think, is that the humor never relies too heavily on the contemporary dialogue—not without telling us something about a character/historical figure (Louisa May Alcott remarking that “Hawthorne can eat a dick, amirite”) or emphasizing an affective moment within a relationship or laying bare a key emotional development. It makes sense, after all, that the young adult characters would speak to each other in a way that’s distinct. Sure, in the nineteenth century, nobody really answered the question, “Are you reading Bleak House?” with “I’m mainlining that shit,” but it was probable that you would express yourself with more enthusiasm and contemporary idiom if a friend asked versus your tradition-braced father. Also, as someone who believes that everybody should mainline Bleak House, I feel profoundly justified by this line. (Charles Dickens was a terrible person, but he managed to write some great books.)
And while I am not as intimate with Dickinson’s poetry as I am her British contemporaries, I know enough to understand the voltage of her formal and conceptual innovations. It makes a certain sense to explore her life and sensibilities by imagining the way she might have spoken and behaved if time and conventions were not so pinned together, if there were more of a temporal fluidity to discourse. When I taught her work in a women’s literature course—I call it this because that was the name of the course, but there’s a great deal to say about identifying literature in this binaristic way—I insisted upon spending a chunk of class on one line from the poem that begins “Title divine—is mine!”
Here’s the full text:
We dug into line 10, “Born — Bridalled — Shrouded—,” and I’m sure my students wanted to throttle me by the end of the discussion, but it mostly seemed as if they were compelled. The poem is brilliant through and through, but it’s this line that lays bare so much of how Dickinson perceived a woman’s life: you’re born, then harnessed by marriage (“bridalled” does such magnificent work here), and then you die. The possibility resides in the emdash after “Shrouded,” a full-bodied pause suggesting that what comes after death is unknown and, for that reason, a site of opportunity, of freedom. Men might have organized and controlled the details of a woman’s life on earth, but they cannot master whatever comes next.
Dickinson doesn’t explicitly engage this poem, at least it doesn’t in its first season, but this sentiment is everywhere present: in Emily’s refusal to be married, in her obsession with death, in her devastation over Sue’s engagement. “Is this — the way?” indeed.
And if women are “bridalled” they are also easily branded, particularly for unruliness. When the circus comes to town, Emily imagines announcing herself as poet and, as a result, becoming a tattooed carnival woman.
It’s a splendid scene, and Hailee Steinfeld, perfectly cast in any case, offers a performance that is bewildered and ambivalent—the expression she wears on her face! There is, she realizes, no perfect freedom available to her, and getting what she thinks she wants—literary fame—could be as alienating and violently exposing as it is exhilarating. She is not Louisa May Alcott: she does not need to write to support herself, which is a privilege. It also means that she can consider the sort of writer she wants to be, and whether defying her father and seeking publication will somehow render her more authentic.
The above shot is a near neighbor of the tableau, a bonkers nineteenth-century pastime of which we’re offered a glimpse in the Othello episode. There was no real narrative purpose to the following shots, but they shock the pleasure center, and I think Dickinson would consider that reason enough for their inclusion.
This, I believe, is meant to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
And clearly this is Macbeth (lol):
I’m overjoyed that the show has been renewed for a second season, although I suspect it will be a difficult watch in certain ways. We know what Dickinson’s life was. We know that the person she loved most was “bridalled” by a conventional marriage—to Dickinson’s brother, no less. We know that she never saw a real volcano, or travelled to Europe: instead, she created worlds inside of her bedroom. But we also don’t know what pleasures and joys were possible inside of that confining life, and I am glad that this show gives us space to imagine them—for Dickinson’s sake, and for the sake of those who love her.
P.S. If you have not already heard, John Mulaney plays Henry David Thoreau. I repeat, John Mulaney plays Henry David Thoreau. He is as hilariously petulant and self-aggrandizing as you would hope. And Wiz Khalifa is the sexiest, spookiest, most elegant Death.
P.P.S. The show is very gay, and that is IMPORTANT. This scene, which calls to mind the lush green shots in Jane Campion’s Bright Star, is just so lovely.