I’m just now getting to Longlegs, well, because the rental is $6 now and I got movie money. Also my movie watching is governed by the whims of spirits unknown to me. Also my ex said I’d like it, which obviously still feels sour occasionally. She was rarely wrong about a movie, though, and she certainly wasn’t wrong about this.
I want to describe the plot first, so everybody knows what we’re working off of: after correctly identifying the house a serial killer was hiding in on vibes alone, FBI agent Lee Harker passes what appears to be a test on psychic abilities and is put on a very strange case. For decades, a father kills his entire family on or around his daughter’s 9th or 10th birthday. The birthdays themselves are always the 14th. A strange, coded letter signed ‘Longlegs’ is found at every scene.
I tell you this, because I don’t want you to think, when I say, “Longlegs has some thoughts about familial violence’ for you, dear readers, to think ‘well, Marlowe thinks that about everything.’ Because it is here. It is here in the psychic test, where Lee assigns the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ to amorphous shapes. It is here when Longlegs drives in his car and shrieks ‘Daddy! Mommy! Unmake me! Save me from the hell of living!’
It is here when Lee sits in the backseat of a car, her mentor, Carter, and Browning, a female superior who always questions if Lee is capable, in the drivers and passenger seat. It is here when Carter’s daughter says, ‘Dad says he doesn’t want me to grow up too fast. But even veals grow a little, and they live in a box with their legs all tied up and everything.’ and Lee answers ‘It’s a hard life for veals.’
It is here with Lee’s mother. When she says “You are are child because you were allowed to grow up…It’s a cruel world. Especially for the little things. Not all of them are allowed to live. ” It is here in all the discussion of mothers. When the last living victim, played by a truly spooky Kerinan Shipka, says her mother hated her because she was ‘born wrong and made her bleed’, when Lee’s mother says, about her birthday, “I bled and bled and bled.”
It is here in the absence of Lee’s father.
Because Lee has no father. None is mentioned. None shows up. But. But we are led to believe by Lee’s psychic investigating that the murders work because a force compels the fathers to kill their families. It needs a father to Fear his daughter and kill her. And so there must have been a father. In archeology this is called ‘evidence from absence’, when the conspicuous absence of a thing that would normally be there implies it’s existence somewhere else. Lee was supposed to die. The fathers kill the daughters. And so, Lee forgot the father like she forgot Longlegs.
Because Lee did forget Longlegs. Lee’s amnesia around her 9th birthday is a pretty significant driver of the plot. And it is eventually revealed that: way back when, Longlegs was, in fact, in her childhood home. She remembers her mother with a shotgun. She remembers her mother bound and gagged, pinned to the floor and begging for her daughters life. She remembers watching this, from a doorway. She remembers all this when her mother shoots a life sized doll of her 9 year old self with a shotgun, releasing the memories that were locked away inside the hollow metal ball of its brain, saying ‘The doll told you where to look. And where not to look.’ This gifted Lee her insight, but also clearly left her emotionally repressed and deeply strained. A veal allowed to grow up, its legs still tied beneath it.
And then. And then she catches Longlegs and he sings her happy birthday. Talks to her like she is a loved one. Like he had a hand in raising her. Talks about her mother like she’s his partner. Because…..because she is. She’s his accomplice. That’s the price she had to pay, to let Lee grow up. Therefore elevating Longlegs, as a Symbol Of Evil, to the place of Lee’s father.
Because Browning and Carter? The surrogate parents gifted to her by the FBI? Lee’s mother shoots Browning in the head. And takes the last of the evil dolls to Carters family. By the time Lee gets there, consumed by memories that have burdened her with a horrible truth, the Carter family is already under the doll’s spell. Carter’s wife jokes back a sob when she speaks to her husband, for reasons she can’t comprehend. As he leads her into the kitchen to stab her Lee’s mother says ‘The woman is already dead.’
Lee has to kill Carter, in the end. Her mother, too. And we leave her, staring down a doll filled with evil with an empty gun, and go back to Longlegs, blowing kisses and hailing Satan. Which is where this all falls apart, for me.
Because the Satan stuff feels tacked on. We have the Hail Satans, and the ‘Mr. Downstairs’, and the ‘He certainly worships Satan, but this is the United States of America and that’s allowed’, and Lee’s mom asking if she says her prayers and and killing people in a nun costume, but it the religious fear pales in comparison to the family violence theming that it all just….falls short.
I am allowing that this is a personal beef I’ve had with satan themed stuff for literal years, and I cannot tell if the satan stuff does not work, or if I dislike a literalization of evil. Either way, if you just cut every instance of the word ‘satan’ or ‘the devil’ it would preserve the ambiguity that lends to so much of the movie’s tension, imo. And I usually like Perkins’s Satan stuff! Blackcoat’s Daughter is to this day the only movie that ever scared me so bad I had to stay up til sunrise. But something didn’t click with the satan stuff, for me, this time.
There is, of course, so much else going on here. There’s the fact that it’s a period piece, only indicated by the presidential portrait in Carter’s office, the math between the murder years, and the clunkiness of the cell phones. There’s the colors. The movie is a war between cold grey light over start white backgrounds and sickly yellow light over deep orange-brown backgrounds. Lee’s mother’s house is the former. Longleg’s basement room in her house, and Lee’s own house, is the latter. There is the fact that everything is happening through windows and doorways and at the end of long, dark hallways. There is a voyeuristic cast to every move. There is the dialogue, which I know a lot of Twitterites hated but I like Perkins’s odd, stilted dialogue, especially here. It adds to the uncanniness of the atmosphere and succeeds in unsettling the viewer.
All in all I think this earned its comparisons to Se7en and Silence of the Lambs, but the movie it made me think of most was Cure, if only because it is a film washed in cold, grey light that is about a serial killer who compels others to kill. And I do think I liked it, satanism bitching aside. And I certainly don’t think the family violence reading is the only reading, but for Others I will need to rewatch it a few months down the line. Which I probably will! I throughly enjoyed it! Wanna figure out what I think the significance of the butterfly life cycle poster in Lee’s childhood bedroom is, in the very least.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 