The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”
Nora Helmer begins Act I as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald, and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act III by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts (representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers) makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the Nora of Act I, the charming toy of the men in her life who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband’s recent promotion is set to provide, and the Nora of Act III, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self-determination? Wes & Erin discuss Henrik Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House."
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Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Part 2)
What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”
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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.”
About Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films
Subtext is a book club podcast for readers interested in what the greatest works of the human imagination say about life’s big questions. Each episode, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O’Luanaigh conduct a close reading of a text or film and co-write an audio essay about it in real time. It’s literary analysis, but in the best sense: we try not overly stuffy and pedantic, but rather focus on unearthing what’s most compelling about great books and movies, and how it is they can touch our lives in such a significant way.
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