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[Poetry]

SOMEONE LIKE MORELLA
by Michael du Plessis

Roger Corman, directed, Morella. In Tales of Terror, directed by Corman. USA: AIP, 1962.

       What happens after death to someone who does not choose to stay dead--someone like Morella?
                 —Vincent Price in voiceover as the general narrator of Tales of Terror 

      Itself by Itself, ONE everlastingly, and single. 
                —Plato's Symposium, quoted and translated by Poe as the epigraph to "Morella"

I
This ghost of flesh, sighs Vincent Price (as though
we could tell which flesh from which ghost),
about himself, it seems, or rather, the role
he’s playing, that of Locke, boozy widower
and child abandoner, in a lilac dressing gown
on which large paisleys chase one another
like sportive fetuses in an aquarium
of the unborn, and the collar of which (ah,
occult ministrations of production
design!) seems of the same fabric as the hat and dress,
of velvet electrically blue, that his daughter,
Lenora, the child abandoned, appears in,
to tell Locke he’s been an awful father
and that she’s dying at twenty-six, but
there’s more than a hint of reconciliation,
or so says the close-up that closes the scene,
with electric blue velvet and lilac
dressing gown embracing with lingering
focus on the glossy tangerine that is Lenora’s
(or rather Maggie Pierce’s) lipstick,
this ghost of flesh, this ghost of flesh,
this flesh of ghost.

II
                                     This flesh of ghost
gets a look in, too, because what I haven’t
mentioned yet: the reason why Price
is boozy and Pierce abandoned
(and fails with men, as she tells Daddy Locke,
since she cannot give) is because of
Morella, the mother who died four months
after Lenora’s birth and whose portrait
in movie oils (painted flesh) dominates
the father’s room, and who blamed Lenora
for killing her and seems to have vowed
revenge, and who now says in voiceover
(a ghost of flesh), I’ll be revenged, and
who then shows up as a black-and-white
superimposition (a device almost
Méliès-like in its simplicity,
as though we were travelling back to
the birth of cinema as silent
black-and-white special effect,
ghost of a ghost, flesh of the ghost
of that ghost, re-birth of a now-dead
cinema, slain by Technicolor
and synchronous sound, everywhere
on display here, not least in Morella’s
VO and Les Baxter’s soundtrack ) tracking
its way to Lenora’s room, re-tracking
along its way, the trajectory
Lenora follows at the beginning
in her electric blue velvet with a
tippet of movie--one hopes--ermine,
through what at first appears an artfully
all-beige interior but which turns
out to be gilt covered in cobwebs
(Price is bad housekeeper to boot,
who keeps one room a Miss Havisham-
like wedding feast replete with more cobwebs,
spiders, and rotting wedding cake), a cobweb
-beige setting that nicely offsets the
electric blues, lime greens, tangerines
and lilacs (one of these colors
we are still about to see), where she
precipitates Lenora’s death and who then,
for Morella is sultry brunette
(Leona Gage) as we know from the portrait,
and Lenora (presumably by way
of binary opposition), is a blonde,
once Price has covered dead Lenora with a
sheet, performs the hair trick:
the flesh of ghosts.

III
              The ghost of flesh:
it’s only a matter of time, we
know, before blonde Lenora turns
into brunette Morella, with
the hair trick, the one Poe does in
“Ligeia,” which means Richard
Matheson, the screen- writer,
is thinking of Ligeia, a
screenplay he’ll write for Roger Corman
four years later (but I digress); in addition
to being a bad father and sloppy drunk,
Daddy Locke has kept Morella’s
body in her bedroom (he couldn’t
put that beauty in a box, he explains),
surrounded by cobwebby beige bed
curtains, and that she (Morella) is partly
decayed, but mainly electric blue
and lilac, which means that she does
the body switch in addition to
the hair trick: as Daddy Locke gingerly
peels back the sheet, we see luscious
brunette hair instead of Lenora’s
bland blonde--frantic, he checks Morella’s
bedroom-tomb, and finds Lenora
decaying blue and lilac in her
(Morella’s, mother’s) bed (which really means
the bed is a tomb), which makes Locke then
yank back the whole sheet to reveal, fleshiest
ghost of all! not just a living Morella in dead
Lenora’s place but a Lenora
or Morella with a makeover moreover
(the ghosts keep getting fleshier, the flesh ghostlier):
while Lenora died in her nightdress
(white of course), Morella makes
her postmortem comeback, a lamia
in lime green lamé (in a  regency
cut) with very spangly earrings
and a bouffant rococo hairdo
(even Lenora had some demure bouffants),
so she now laughs mockingly, green glittering
siren, femme fatale, as it seems Morella
was wont to do, because Daddy Locke
had earlier explained to Lenora that
Morella had vowed revenge because
the baby had interrupted her party
life and had died only because she
had disobeyed her doctor’s orders
(dressed up and laughed and danced and sang:
is she simply a frustrated performer?),
and all of this laughing and partying
puts her in the movie tradition of
Evil Party People (inevitably
women) like Rebecca, the first
Mrs. De Winter, who laughed at Max
as she laid out her party plans—which made him
kill her (and made it okay for the jury
and viewers that he did), only Morella
unlike Rebecca, is a mother,
a Totmom after the fact and before the letter,
and at her mocking laughter Locke drops
a candle that makes the bed curtains catch fire
(a common movie Gothic dénouement)
and Morella strangles him gleefully
as burning beams collapse around them,
for strangulation during conflagration
is a theme we have seen not only in
House of Usher but will see, too,
in Tomb of Ligeia, and the section
ends as all the sections of Tales of Terror
do with a citation from Poe
(to show it’s really POE): the winds
of the firmament breathed but one sound
within my ears and the ripples upon
the sea murmured evermore—Morella,
which oddly points up the very difference
between the film and the story, since in
the story everything hinges on
the name—which of course encodes death, MOR),
and the nameless father’s inability
to name his daughter until she’s ten or so,
when he finds himself irresistibly
tempted to give in to the only proper personal
name in the text and he calls the daughter
MORELLA at which point she dies, thus
the story is in some way about naming
and death or naming as death or naming
of death, which is what Giorgio Agamben
says when he writes that the message
the angel we struggle with all our lives
brings us is but one message, that we are
dead, and that this struggle is nothing
other than language, that it takes
us all our lives to read that we are;
the film is not about words, so we have
the hairdo trick, the swapped bodies:
Lenora is back on top of dead Locke
while a gleefully smiling Morella,
blue and purple, is back in the burning
bed-tomb in the final shots: the ghost
of flesh, the flesh of ghosts, cinema.

IV

Morella Locke Lenora Leona Maggie

Lo, cameraman, a line, look. Glee, ogler,
onlooker, erelong a camellia gleam,
a maniac green eel, lo, a gem. Look, roll,--
glee, camera, a man. I look, loge, enroll,
gone roll, a megalomaniac role.

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