Poe’s “Origin Story”? Reflections on <i>The Pale Blue Eye</i>

The Pale Blue Eye was released in select cinemas on December 23, 2022, and arrived on Netflix on January 6, 2023. It is incumbent upon me to provide the usual “spoiler alert” to those readers who have not yet viewed the film but might want to; be warned, especially, that the identity of the movie’s murderer is revealed herein. I shall not take up space with a plot summary but would, instead, direct the reader’s attention to the solid Wikipedia entry on the movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_Blue_Eye). The entry also provides a list of characters and the actors playing them.In an online interview, director and screenwriter Scott Cooper provided his thoughts on the creative function of The Pale Blue Eye: “Essentially what I’m saying is that this film is an Edgar Allan Poe origin story—that the events that take place in this narrative forced him to become the writer that we love” (https://www.goldderby.com/feature/scott-cooper-the-pale-blue-eye-writer-director-video-interview-1205221080/; 1:48–1:58). Likewise, in interviews, Christian Bale (who plays police detective Augustus Landor) and Harry Melling (who plays Cadet Poe) echo Cooper’s point: the film might be seen as an origin story of the Edgar Allan Poe the world knows now, the “iconic Poe” (Melling’s phrase), as opposed to the very young man, the West Point Poe, who up to that time (1830) thought of himself exclusively as a poet. If I understand them, Cooper and his two main stars like to see this film as presenting the sort of incidents that might have / could have inspired the young poet to become the Gothic heavyweight and inventor of detective fiction known to twenty-first-century fans and scholars. They therefore present to readers and moviegoers a narrative that, quite rightly, participates in both genres. But given that nothing remotely like the outré events of the film ever occurred in Poe’s life, the conceit that macabre murders, dismemberments, and occult rituals enacted to prolong a sick woman’s life form the etiology of Poe the Gothicist and inventor of detective fiction seems a bit silly and a tad presumptuous. Does it make sense to suggest that fictitious events could have influenced the career path of a historical figure? Or do Cooper et al. really mean to say that the macabre fictitious events of the movie constitute a fictitious origin story?Either way, the “origin story” conceit is thought-provoking, intriguing, and playful, but the challenge is this: How can the creative minds behind the film “pull this off” in satisfying not only casual fans of the historical Edgar Allan Poe but also those of us who are specialists in the field of Poe studies and presumably more exacting and discriminating? One way is to follow Poe’s own compositional practices: even while asking readers to follow the Coleridgean dictum of willingly suspending our disbelief when faced with the outré in a work of fiction, the text must still have some grounding in the recognizable. Poe, for instance, gives readers bizarre tales such as “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” but his readings in abnormal psychology gave him the ability to anchor those narratives in the truths of human behavior, especially the psychopathological. The Pale Blue Eye as an origin story of the iconic Poe asks us willingly to suspend our critical skepticism regarding the outré plot involving satanic rituals and talk of witchcraft, but if Cooper insists on the “origin story” claim, we may rightly enquire as to what extent he ties the movie’s events and characters to the Zeitgeist and even more importantly to the actualities of Poe’s life, literary career, and accomplishments—not only concerning the conventions of detective fiction invented by Poe, as well as his sleuth’s philosophy of detection, but also concerning the author’s grooming in the magazine industry, awash as it was in Gothic fiction. He honed his craft within that environment. I shall consider the extent to which The Pale Blue Eye succeeds as a credible origin story by making some quick, miscellaneous observations concerning what we know about Poe’s character and biography before moving on to a much more substantial examination of the “detective motif” in the film, followed by some brief observations concerning the movie’s Gothic elements.First, a brief disclaimer is in order. The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Louis Bayard. Various online sources give the publication date as either 2003 or 2006 (I prefer to settle for Wikipedia’s 2003). Not having read the novel (yet), I cannot say if Bayard considered it a kind of origin story for the iconic Poe; I shall therefore simply confine my remarks, for the most part, to the film (and extend apologies to Bayard if my reflections herein fail to do him justice).Nevertheless, Cooper’s screenplay must surely be based on much of what can be found in Bayard’s novel. At any rate, somebody did their homework vis-à-vis what we know about Poe and his environment—and is mostly successful in this regard. For example, screenwriter Cooper draws accurately upon biography when Cadet Poe refers to his English boarding school Stoke Newington and the Reverend John Bransby. Elsewhere we have an allusion to another figure who was important in Poe’s life: when the cadet mentions “my very own benefactor,” he is referring to his foster father John Allan. Additionally, Captain Ethan Allen Hitchcock and Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer are both historical figures who did indeed command at West Point when Poe was a cadet there, as attested to by history professor Jared Frederick (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeaMuFx6quM).The film is also accurate regarding what it shows us about the iconic Poe as author, critic, and literary theorist, as we see in the scene where he examines Landor’s library and comes across what he refers to as the “lamentable Fenimore Cooper.” The historical Poe would write several hostile reviews of Cooper’s works. We learn more about Poe the man of letters when he tells Lea Marquis, “I do consider death to be poetry’s most exalted theme.” As well, Poe’s late sketch “Landor’s Cottage” (1849) must surely have been the inspiration for Augustus Landor’s surname; Artemus Marquis even asks the detective, “You have a cottage, don’t you?” Indeed he does—in the same vicinity as the cottage of Poe’s sketch: Hudson Valley, New York. It is the setting of the film’s most important scene, as Cadet Poe confronts Landor there with accusations during their final meeting. Screenwriter Cooper, presumably following novelist Bayard’s lead, even reflects certain stylistic aspects of the iconic Poe’s prose both fiction and nonfiction—such as his notorious overdependence upon hyperbole. Cadet Poe has been the object of ridicule at West Point. He complains to Landor, “I’ve been a figure of fun from my very first day here. My manner, my age, my person . . . my aesthetics [pointing vaguely to his famous forehead]. If I had a thousand lifetimes [emphasis added], I could not begin to address all the injuries that have been done to me.” That sounds exactly like the whiny woe-is-me private correspondent; it also recalls several of his narrators (Pym, for one, with his throats of a thousand demons, and ten thousand times the agonies of death). Elsewhere, occult expert Jean Pépé employs the term idée fixe, which means a fixed idea, obsession. It was a medical term as early as 1812 and, in its connection to the concept of monomania, came to be seen as a pathology of the intellect. The expression and the concept it names are found throughout nineteenth-century prose, both medical and literary—recall Melville’s Ahab, Hawthorne’s Chillingworth, and the pathologies of Egæus in “Berenice” and the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for instance. In short, the use of the term grounds The Pale Blue Eye firmly within Poe’s Zeitgeist.So does an object I missed upon my first viewing of the movie. Figure 1 shows a scene in Pépé’s library. On the table to the right of Landor, while Poe in his Military Academy uniform looks on, we spot a phrenology bust (lower left corner of the frame)—a rather grotesque bust in keeping with the grotesqueries of the film’s Gothic events but not at all like the smooth and attractive little statue popularized by the famous Fowler Brothers (a replica of which I possess). Poe’s use of phrenology is well known to specialists in Poe studies, and the appearance of a bust in this scene is a very nice touch indeed. In this, and the other ways enumerated above, The Pale Blue Eye can begin to build a claim to be a credible origin story of the iconic Poe within his time and place.Let us turn now to the question of genres. Like “Rue Morgue,” the film illustrates two popular genres, detective fiction and Gothic fiction. What have the creative minds behind the movie done to suggest how Cadet Poe’s traumatic experiences were (may have been? could have been?) instrumental in the creation of the iconic Poe?One significant way to gauge Cooper’s success in presenting the plot of The Pale Blue Eye as an etiology of the iconic Poe might be to consider which of the author’s contributions to detective fiction are featured in the movie. These can be divided into two categories: (1) the character of the sleuth and his methods; (2) other conventions of the genre both pertaining to and functioning independently of the sleuth. Interestingly, The Pale Blue Eye complicates this evaluative approach to the movie because it presents two detective figures—the ostensible investigator, Augustus Landor (whose first name is doubtless a nod to C. Auguste Dupin), and the young Cadet Poe, who becomes something like a protégé to Landor and who ultimately solves the case in spite of the network of red herrings that Landor has been constructing since the discovery of the murdered Fry’s missing heart.Cadet Poe, the nascent inventor of detective fiction, has opportunities to witness firsthand the world of sleuthing in conversing with Landor and in meeting with him at various locations significant to the commission of various crimes. Any detective visiting the scene of a crime will engage in hound-dog methods, close examination of the location, as Landor does when he meets Poe at what the former refers to as “the scene of the crime. The second . . . crime. Where Fry’s heart was brought.” Here, in the icehouse of the Academy, Landor, with an eye perhaps as sharp as Dupin’s, has detected blood and candles placed on the ground in a circle and a triangle. This discovery of occult symbols sends Landor and Poe to Jean Pépé, an expert in the occult. Ultimately, this trail leads not to the murderers of Cadets Fry and Ballinger but to the Marquis family, who have been engaged in occult rituals to prolong the life of Lea Marquis, rituals involving the hearts of murdered men.Earlier in the movie, however, we are introduced to certain intellectual gifts belonging not only to Landor but particularly to Cadet Poe, which will prove indispensable to the creation of his Dupin. The historical Poe employed the term “ratiocination” to refer to logical inductions and deductions. Deductions, especially, are the lifeblood of detective fiction, especially the “soft-boiled” variety, and we find them not only in the Dupin trilogy but also in the Poe tales that scholars have identified as precursors to the fully developed genre as we know it: “Thou Art the Man,” “The Man of the Crowd,” and “The Gold-Bug.” (We have a nod to this latter tale when Superintendent Thayer acknowledges Landor’s famous talent for “code-breaking” and then when Landor deciphers Fry’s diary). Landor requests the assistance of Poe to determine the full message of a torn note found in the hand of the murdered Fry. We know that the historical Poe was keenly interested in autography, deducing personality from signatures, but this scene involves something different. Cadet Poe returns later, having determined that the note was written in such a way (with “primitive black capitals”) as to disguise the identity of the sender, and that it was meant to function as “a trap.” Then he exults in his full powers of ratiocination:The young cadet explains his reasoning with the cocky self-confidence and the condescension of a Dupin. Then he and Landor team up to complete the puzzle by deducing where the meeting was to occur and that it was an would he a cadet at the when can him not a but a by the of the movie do we that Landor had Poe on the Landor was the of the This in The Pale Blue In a Fry’s with Marquis, for example, Landor to his in that the to have Fry up and his he was . . . if would, at his from the But this is Landor’s are not based upon from his as an what a Landor was the who had to Landor’s has been we the extent to which he has with the Poe, who shall I how the of us as But I was Landor’s in to another of detective fiction invented by the of red herrings to and the at the Art the illustrates this rather use of red herrings is Landor’s of in which the by the West Point that a satanic is for the and of in the that Landor’s in this is by the however, it that the of the and is what iconic Poe would have “a of more is sleuthing invented by Poe not is to the Dupin especially “The first meeting Landor, Poe is incumbent upon me and the of this to some of the which I have having the scene of the Cadet Poe has been as to the iconic “The of having his to the Fry “The man for is a Landor do that the man who Fry’s heart was a Poe’s us in of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is this: a heart is to in who for such a a is the “I a poet to as We might in “The that the is both a poet and a and that to the of where had the Dupin must like a poet and a the the man of that Cadet Poe is about a poet Fry’s the film is upon how of illustrates of his philosophy of crime an must be to the Dupin the police in this especially in “The the of to the of the because he is of like a of up a creative to the of had to with the he would have been his to the his of to those not of an but to a The Dupin succeeds where the the of the film, Poe has determined that Landor murdered both Fry and he that to the crime he has the of this time not with some poet but with Landor what did I do what would have done [emphasis Dupin trilogy us with aspects of that philosophy of crime detection, his must not at a case the police for this must that the of a case is in direct to its outré the a case the more it will be to of the more bizarre a case the it will be to when all are must upon the as the to the I are in The Pale Blue but I to be it would have been to them and the creative minds behind the movie were not to to detective fiction to the iconic Poe in to make the case for the film an origin conventions invented by Poe are to list and most of them are not found in The Pale Blue One that is however, is “the of which we see in “Rue and “Thou Art the the even Cadet Poe comes Superintendent Thayer is with Landor’s of is my He then there any that this could have been the work of he was his table with an of his with that he fully to him ever make Poe’s case even more Thayer Landor that Poe had about not his Fry. Landor confronts Poe, who that, he has had with Fry. Landor is a very who up on the of a with rather important from their the of the film, however, Poe’s is as Landor and Lea Marquis to them engaged in an occult involving Fry’s heart and the of a and Landor this as an to of the Marquis of the very of which he himself is he recalls the murdered and do for even a man Artemus of Landor then in the early and of was It was who Fry with a The Marquis are are of Fry’s heart and are about to Poe, but are not of either Fry or that the very man to determine who has been and the of West Point Academy is himself the murderer illustrates another of detective fiction invented by that the most is the one, which in this case is by the of the person the This is found most in “Thou Art the Man,” as a character and by the of to be the this to in novel The of the of a as well as discovery that himself was the to in the of the to that the detective, or some other investigator, be the He this it can be that was not in with yet The Pale Blue Eye the same in a more Edgar Allan screenwriter Cooper fail in any in his of Poe as inventor of detective fiction and the first private The by Cadet Poe as he explains how he determined Landor’s in this is rather in to the of C. Auguste Dupin. upon yet another of detective and on the of the sleuth the is film shows the Landor and Cadet Poe, who explains to the detective that the on the two given to him by Landor, of which was from the hand of the murdered is But even a could have that the writer of both was the same came to me while I Poe we or saying give to the is to the of and in Cadet Poe is not given the to make a connection Landor, his and Poe the by a as he with who him the story of how the It would that Cooper, perhaps the of novelist Louis had on have that The Pale Blue Eye participates in two genres, detective fiction and Gothic fiction. This is given that the first detective “Rue Morgue,” participates in both in it that in literary history at which detective fiction shows to be an of fiction, as the from the of I find an examination of the Gothic in the film much what we have I shall say little about The and on the of the murdered are bit as as in Poe’s tales of crime and to the Gothic of The Pale Blue Eye are the setting and in to the and the The film’s scene looks to that Gothic “The of the of the of the Artemus and Lea could have given Cadet Poe the inspiration for the of the as their upon As for the occult rituals and Pépé’s talk about we might consider that of Poe’s literary In this I had that the movie as an origin tale of the iconic of Poe as But “The Black Cat,” and The narrator of “The Black his is and his him of the conceit that black are in the of we have but to the occult rituals that the narrator of has into to his who to him in that occult and who had from it for Like (and the Marquis to occult to prolong life Lea a form of and therefore a nod to that Poe’s as a The Pale Blue Eye could have done even As a of literary we must the extent to which Poe his tales of with full of what was in the for instance, the that the in Poe’s as a that in the and of who find in This of fiction was popular in like and influenced Poe “The and the and “The of / an to tales would have to anchor the movie in Poe’s Zeitgeist and the case for the film as the iconic Poe’s origin would a of popular magazine fiction, however, to become perhaps most literary at first by the and grounding his tales of and in by and Poe gave the world of not only early nineteenth-century but also twenty-first-century and Scott Cooper is of Poe’s as an of the and of the human In the same above, Cooper on his for The Pale Blue saying he was interested in to How much has to build before in What and to in Landor as a case however, to with the characters of Poe’s Landor like a but the found in the narrators of “The Black Cat,” or even in “Thou Art the What and This and is perhaps I find “The of my tale of in the Poe have been some conventions of the two literary that figure in The Pale Blue The successful of by screenwriter Scott Cooper the by Cooper, Christian and Harry that the of the West Point the sleuthing by Landor, and Cadet Poe’s own in the to the gave the young inspiration not only for his Gothic tales but also for the genre he would to the literary world a or his time in the Military Academy to The Pale Blue Eye be thought of as a to the film The as the former a origin an of the iconic Poe, the latter provides the as it does a of how and Poe in other The Pale Blue Eye and The the and the of iconic Poe’s

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