Penny Dreadful – Bitch Flicks

‘Penny Dreadful’: Departure from Heroine

We do not see the warrior that we have come to know and love, for her ability to not just fight battles, but to align others to fight against their darkest selves and moments for a better world. … Her death becomes a part of their story and creates an allegory of her character; she is not a woman anymore, but a figure to them, something they now own.

This guest post is written by Cassandra A. Clarke. | Spoilers ahead.

In battles, there’s an importance not just on the victor but on the amount of effort given by both sides. Perhaps this is why it’s the longest boxing matches that we remember, not for the score, but for the sake of the perseverance in those who step into the ring; that’s what we remember. It is no wonder that Penny Dreadful’s season three finale (and unexpected series finale) left viewers with a bitter aftertaste in their mouth.

“The Blessed Dark” episode was framed as the show’s last battle (including an epic slow motion shot of the team assembling on their way to face Dracula in his Gothic hideout in the dregs of the city), one that viewers had been waiting for since the series’ introduction of Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), as the doomed to be cleverest person in the room, facing an eternal battle against the Devil and Dracula, both vying for her soul and flesh. Yet, we received a forfeit: a bequest to finish with all of the battle, with all of the effort, in exchange for calm; or, in more literal terms, she asks Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) to kill her in order for her to find redemption in heaven and leave this earth. Vanessa, the same woman who punched the Devil in the face, who fought for her soul back, relinquishes her life.

In an interview with Variety, Penny Dreadful creator/showrunner John Logan and Showtime president David Nevins, claimed that this ending for Vanessa was actually a message of empowerment for the audience. In Logan’s words, he said Vanessa Ives “owns her death.” While it’s true that Vanessa did ask for her death, the two are missing a bigger point about the show’s view of agency. The series does a marvelous job at toying with the idea of possession to make us question the view of agency for the characters: Are they acting like themselves or another? Are we imagining them to be better than they are? In Vanessa’s last moment, it’s unclear whether or not her agency is fully there or not as moments before she is shot, she tells Ethan, “Vanessa is long gone.” This begs the audience to wonder whether or not her death was something she truly wanted or the desire of her darker parts inside herself and we received no answer. The moment is too brief to provide more clues to her state of mind and wishes; it ends with someone taking her life in their hands and ending it in order to prevent her from having to be hurt (or have others hurt) to survive.

Even if Penny Dreadful is saying that this death, this kind of redemption from her life, is what she sought after, there is still another question that goes unanswered: Why did Vanessa’s death come so easily? In the finale, we see no battle with Vanessa, no decision to harm the creatures that have harmed her. Although she has leveled up to be the Queen of Darkness, we do not see her actually wield her power nor use it to take advantage of Dracula. We are led to believe that she is seduced by him and not of herself, and yet, we see her escape the clutches of this darkness to ask Ethan for help? All of her battle happens under the surface and off-screen, so that we as a audience cannot actually see any of Vanessa’s planning or will or desire, and that is where her death failed us. We do not see the warrior that we have come to know and love, for her ability to not just fight battles, but to align others to fight against their darkest selves and moments for a better world. She has no team to lead, no mission to complete.

The team exists, but we do not see Vanessa lead them like she has in the past to help defeat witches, demons, and toxic people. Her team is almost completely destroyed by the hands of the creatures of the night and they have no real power in which to defeat Dracula without her assistance. Instead of her power, we see a docile, white-dressed maiden, asking to be sent back to her creator. This feels so wrong because the series tended to show us how sometimes the darkest parts of ourselves can be aligned with good intentions and used for something more. We see that motif exercised plentifully through Ethan, who is able to kill an entire bar of people and yet is still shown to struggle emotionally, returning to London for the good fight. Yet, we do not get a chance to really see Vanessa struggle in and through her darkness. And this also begs another uncomfortable question to ask that the show avoids of her darkness: Did she do enough to win back her God’s faith? Because we don’t see her fight and do see Dracula flee back into the night, we’re left wondering if she earned her redemption. Did she do enough good?

The series carefully avoids answering that question by putting us into a hazy London where we can only imagine the thousands of deaths that Vanessa caused. We do not see her confront that. We see her choose to join Dracula and then hear of her casualties but we do not see Vanessa reconcile these consequences. We do not see her team assemble to do everything they can for her. Instead, we are left with an ending of her friends gathering at her grave, talking about what they learned from her. They are all given a second life to live, post-Vanessa, and she has taught them how to be more wicked than good. Her death becomes a part of their story and creates an allegory of her character; she is not a woman anymore, but a figure to them, something they now own.

Although Logan says this is a “shocking” ending for a show in 2016, as it shows a woman dying for what she believes in, it is not at all shocking to me. Plenty of women characters have been used as a prop to tell other men’s stories, to be their emblem of hope and fear. Penny Dreadful perpetuates the idea that in order to be strong and overcome the life that you were born into, even if it’s unfair, even if it’s theoretically doomed to cause you pain over and over again, it’s more worthy and noble to sacrifice yourself for others as opposed to learning how to channel your efforts into creating a stronger world. Each of the male characters who create monsters literally and kill innocents (including their children and siblings) are able to gain a chance at a new life, but Vanessa was never granted this option.

Logan argues that the only two choices that Vanessa had were eternal Hell on earth or Heaven. I think that is where the show ultimately failed Vanessa and us, because there was no thought to a third alternative for her, to a last battle, or, dare I say, the vanquishing of both evil male-oriented forces in her life. Could we imagine in 2016 a woman who was able to defeat the evils and traumas that plagued her and while changed, becomes stronger? Could we even further imagine a world in which she is not quite all innocent and certainly not eternally good, but a force to be reckoned with and one that could be called upon for future battles of good and evil, thereby earning redemption?

I imagine the Penny Dreadful showrunners heckling, “But you can’t defeat evil!” Yes, Vanessa living through her darkness would be hard. And the forces that seek to control her will always be there, but that’s where her will gets to come in and thrive. Vanessa is the kind of woman who believes that while fighting is harder than succumbing to temptation, it is the more interesting choice to court the impossible for the sake of friendship. If Penny Dreadful aims to thematically tackle oppressive forces, why use her freedom of choice to leave the story? If the show is willing to reanimate a corpse to fight the patriarchy, it could have let Vanessa live to rebuild herself. Yes, oppression will always persist, but that is why her life’s work as an ally to and against evil would offer more power for her and others.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sex and the Penny Dreadful

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

Cassandra A. Clarke’s work’s been previously published in Electric Literature, Word Riot, Entropy, and other speculative places. She has an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College and is the Editor in Chief of the new-weird literary magazine, Spectator & Spooks.

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

Small screen torture porn, at least in the cases of ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Penny Dreadful,’ seems to be serving rather to take our fear of sex and women out of the dark and into the light, giving us an opportunity to vicariously take women apart and show them as disgusting as a substantial portion of our society fears we might be.

This guest post written by Holly Derr is an edited version that originally appeared at her site. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead for Penny Dreadful.

When what film critic David Edelstein called “torture porn” became a trend in 2004 and 2005, its relationship to the growing awareness that the U.S. had become a country that tortures was clear. On-screen representations of people being tortured by evil but human monsters served as a means of taking what had been kept secret about Abu Ghraib and putting it in full view in all its gore. Even films like Hostel and Turistas, that deliberately built their stories around Americans in foreign locations, served as a kind of collective catharsis upon accepting that our country also engaged in such horrific practices.

Twelve years later, with the Saw franchise eight movies in, torture porn has made its way into television. Between American Horror Story and The Walking Dead still going and Penny Dreadful having recently ended, it occupies a fairly important space in the supernatural television landscape.

For this year’s Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, I had the ridiculous idea that I would watch all three of these television series from beginning to end, determining, if not which show is most feminist, at least which is least sexist. I couldn’t do it. I made it through only one show all the way – Penny Dreadful – and in the course of just three seasons I watched women tortured by demons from the inside out, tarred and burned alive, branded, poisoned, smothered and brought back to life, a woman was driven to cut her own throat, and multiple women were shot by their father, creator, and closest friend.

Bringing together characters from Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a werewolf thrown in for good measure, Penny Dreadful’s main theme is that we are all possessed by demons; we all have a monster lurking inside. Creator, writer, and showrunner John Logan uses the Victorian backdrop to great effect. In season one, the Grand Guignol delights audiences with its onstage violence and spurts of blood. Season two features a subplot about a wax museum of gory crime scenes with ambitions of becoming a full-on freak show. Season three features the trusty horror trope of the mental institution in which people are experimented upon. All three elements anchor the show firmly in its gaslight era and constantly remind us that, despite a lot of talk about faith and sin, Victorians were really obsessed with bodies and their physical limits.

The potential for feminism is high. The focus of the show on a woman, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), as its protagonist gives the audience a chance to identify with and follow the story through a woman’s perspective. Patti LuPone’s second-season cut-wife character Joan Clayton – unnecessarily violent depiction of abortion aside – is a strong, single mentor and good witch/doctor. Her third-season psychiatrist, a gender-flipped Dr. Seward from Dracula, is a smart woman succeeding in a man’s world who can handle herself in a fight to boot.

But the show’s feminism falters by treating the female characters differently from the male ones. Though minor male characters in Penny Dreadful are the victims of some pretty horrifying violence, too, the women really get the worst of it, and there are fewer of them to start with. Furthermore, for the male characters, the connection between what haunts them and their sexuality remains the subverted metaphor that it is in the Gothic horror novels in which they were created, with greed, ambition, and failure to be a good father/son mixed into an all-encompassing idea of their sins/demons.

For Vanessa Ives, however, acting upon her sexual feelings literally brings out the demon in her, creating a one-to-one relationship between her sexuality and her dark side. Though her suffering is centered, her character is actually less complex and therefore less fully human than the male ones. Other than one early sexual misstep, she has no flaws at all. To make matters worse, the female character who fully owns her sexuality, Brona/Lily (Billie Piper), one of Dr. Frankenstein’s creatures, is also a fully evil murderer, even when she connects to the early feminist movement and becomes a leader of disenfranchised women.

Finally, the presence of the same female body (Patty LuPone’s) in two different characters (something that is not a recurring aspect of the show, as it is with American Horror Story, but rather only happens with this one actor) keeps female heroism in the realm of archetype. In fact, the most interesting character in the series is not Vanessa Ives but the werewolf, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), whose relationships with three different father figures and his past as a soldier and an adopted Apache give him far more to grapple with than his sexuality (which is interesting as he is a queer character), which, despite the Victorian setting, doesn’t seem to be a problem for him at all.

No possible alternative to her fate is ever implied for Vanessa Ives, for whom acting on her sexual desires is to bring about the end of the world, and the audience is given little opportunity for hope. Accordingly, Penny Dreadful lacks a key component of horror: the moments of relief, whether in the form of humor or love, that are essential to keeping audiences vulnerable to the coming terrors – nothing is so rewarding when watching horror as a laugh that turns into a scream. Torture porn as a genre has very few of those moments, creating a rhythm that is not about suspense and jump-scares but merely about the ongoing horror of watching, head on, what terrible things people will do to people.

Penny Dreadful comes close to performing feminist work by showing how hard it is for women to live in a society that thinks of their sexuality as dangerous and their bodies as “nasty” and “disgusting,” with blood coming out of their wherevers. In the end, however, it doesn’t just depict the oppression of women, it reifies it, concretizing the idea in audience’s minds by making the women’s suffering disgusting.

I couldn’t get further than one and a half seasons into American Horror Story, which puts even more torture on screen than Penny Dreadful. Though some bad things happen to the men in that show too, the rape, mutilation, deliberate transmission of the bubonic plague, and unnecessary amputations in the episodes I’ve seen are reserved for female bodies. The buzz around this year’s season premiere of The Walking Dead indicates that it has gone from being a means of examining the variety of ways that people form societies and families to a means of examining the variety of ways people kill one another. Some scenes in the premiere were too graphic to be shown during prime time in the U.K.

At this point, our culture is no longer using torture porn to work out our guilt about our conduct abroad. Small screen torture porn, at least in the cases of American Horror Story and Penny Dreadful, seems to be serving rather to take our fear of sex and women out of the dark and into the light, giving us an opportunity to vicariously take women apart and show them as disgusting as a substantial portion of our society fears we might be.

Perhaps these depictions of torture are a necessary step to take before we finally accept that sexual women are not demonic, the women’s movement is not led by a superhuman killer with a vagenda of manocide, and our bodies don’t need to be tortured to be made pure. If anything good can be said about recent public discussions of sexual harassment, abuse, and oppression, it’s that they are public. Women all over the country are sharing their stories of being grabbed in the pussy and kissed against their will, women are owning the descriptor of “nasty” as a badge of pride, and women are refusing to be seen as anything less than fully human, inside and out.

Unfortunately, Penny Dreadful doesn’t ultimately reject the notion that women need to be tortured to be sure that they’re not evil. I can’t tell you where American Horror Story and The Walking Dead are going because, even though I am a hardened, life-long horror fan, I can’t take any more torture, and I don’t want to keep seeing bodies, and women’s bodies in particular, used to create disgust.

I watch horror because identifying what we are afraid of tells us a lot about ourselves, but also because it’s fun to be scared. As my Halloween binge-watching experiment draws to a close, I’m a lot more scared by what it means that torture porn TV is so popular than I am by torture porn itself.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sex and the Penny Dreadful

Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her Tumblr, Feminist Fandom.

Sex and The ‘Penny Dreadful’

The control of sex and sexuality was a fascination of the 19th century. In a reaction to the thought to be morally bankrupt licentiousness of the regency period, Victorian sexual values were characterized by repression, control and purity. Fitting as a common theme of the era was man’s victory over nature. It was a time when the medical establishment was obsessed with classifying and categorizing and “disorders” such as homosexuality and hysteria were invented

Penny Dreadful is a dark gothic horror television show; its main appeal is its excellent cast, which includes Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, and Josh Hartnett, and the fact that it features popular horror characters that are now in the public domain, including both doctor and creature Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Mina Harker, and Van Helsing. The London it portrays is dark and brooding and slides with ease between the unfettered opulence of the rich to degradation of the poor. The show manages to capture the atmospheric blend of strife and ambition that seems to characterize the period of industrialization.

The control of sex and sexuality was a fascination of the 19^th century. In a reaction to the thought-to-be morally bankrupt licentiousness of the regency period, Victorian sexual values were characterized by repression, control and purity. Fitting as a common theme of the era was man’s victory over nature. It was a time when the medical establishment was obsessed with classifying and categorizing and “disorders” such as homosexuality and hysteria were invented. The latter led to the invention of the vibrator as women were treated for the condition by being stimulated to orgasm by doctors. Ironically, masturbation in men (women were not really thought to be capable) was heavily pathologised and blamed for a vast array of ills. However the obsession with strict sexual morality and the regulation of sexual impulses meant society was obsessed with talking about and policing it, hence the prevalence of sexuality as a theme in both medicine and art during the period. Parallel to the puritanical public standards existed a large private world of sex work and pornography.

The character of Brona Croft, played by Billie Piper, a northern Irish sex worker plagued with consumption, represents the particular paradox of the sex worker in the 19^th century. Her life is difficult, she is poor, and there is the ever-present threat of violence which is made apparent on the show by the reports of sex workers being torn apart by what might be the re-emergence of Jack the Ripper. However, Brona also on a certain level exists outside of the highly patriarchal social structures of the day. She makes her own money, she decides how to spend it and chooses her own relationships, freedoms most other women do not have. Brona is a fully realized character in a way that sex workers normally are not on television. We learn that she came to the trade because she was replaced by a machine in her factory job, but she prefers it anyway because the money is better and she doesn’t have to spend her days cooped up inside never seeing the sun. She speaks eloquently about the grim poverty of her childhood and her escape from an abusive relationship. Her sex work is not viewed as a barrier to her having meaningful romantic relationships. Her profession is an aspect of her but it is not who she is. I can’t believe just how refreshing it is to have a sex worker on television that is fully human in her own right and not just a plot device to be thrown away at the writers whims. Brona certainly does not fit into the “happy hooker” trope. There are many issues that she has to contend with that the show addresses; some are due to her work and some are not. What matters though is that Brona’s life is not tragic simply because she is a sex worker, nor is it perfect because she is. For example, she is dying of consumption, but this is portrayed to be more a symptom of her poverty rather than a punishment for her work.

Vanessa Ives (played by Eva Green), on the other hand, is a Victorian lady of leisure. She lives with Sir Malcolm Murray, a famed explorer of the African continent, and their relationship is not explained until mid-season but seems vaguely paternal. What we do know is that Vanessa is in the possession of some super natural abilities and is helping Sir Malcolm to locate his daughter who is currently under the power of a vampire. Vanessa’s sexuality is constantly and consistently pathologised. She ruminates on whether viewing a sexual act for the first time awoken a wickedness inside of her. Her very first sexual experience ended up breaking up two families who had been very close and triggering her first episode, of what is referred to by two different doctors over the course of the season, a “psycho-sexual” illness. The treatments that she is subjected for this illness amount very literally to torture and Vanessa’s mother ends up dying of shock when witnessing a display of her daughter’s sexuality. For Vanessa, her sexuality is not the source of her freedom from restrictive patriarchal norms of the day; it is a curse that she must control with utmost care otherwise the consequences could be devastating. Vanessa’s sexuality is dangerous–not just to her but to the people around her.

Having the two characters on the same show makes for a really interesting dynamic. It seems to capture the sheer obsession Victorian society had with the policing of sexuality and channelling it into the proper avenues while at the same time there existed many women who manage to carve out lives outside the structures of society despite the extreme social disapproval. Overall, the show manages to capture the two sides of the society quite nicely and explores both characters in a way that does justice to their humanity.

Gaayathri Nair is currently living and writing in Auckland, New Zealand. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri