Hi, honey, I'm ho-
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is an 1890 short story by Ambrose Bierce.
It’s set in northern Alabama in 1862 and is told in three chapters. Peyton Farquhar is a "planter" — that is, a slave-owner and plantation owner — and an enthusiastic supporter of the Southern Confederate cause in The American Civil War. As the story opens he’s on the Owl Creek railroad bridge, about to be hanged by Union soldiers. At the end of Chapter I, he’s dropped off the bridge. Chapter II fills in How We Got Here: Farquhar, who never got around to joining the army but likes to play at being a rebel, attempted to sabotage the bridge, but was caught, the Confederate who told him about the bridge actually being a Union scout.
Chapter III is the most famous part of the story. Farquhar’s dropped off the bridge but the rope snaps, plunging him into the water below. He manages to free his hands from the ropes binding them and swim away downstream as Union bullets pepper the river. Eventually he scrambles onto shore and, after many hours traipsing through the woods, arrives home at his plantation and greets his wife... or does he?
Bierce's most famous work and one of the most famous works of 19th century American literature, and a topic in high school English classes since forever.
Adapted by French filmmaker Robert Enrico into the 1962 short film, An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge (original French title La Riviere du hibou, "The Owl River"). The movie won a Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for short film, and was later edited and broadcast for American television as an episode of The Twilight Zone, with the audio track completely replaced and Rod Serling's opening and closing narration added. The story had previously been adapted as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1959.
An Occurrence at Trope Creek Bridge:
- Agent Provocateur: The gray-clad soldier who stops at the Farquhar mansion turns out to be a Union scout, obviously sent to flush out any civilians with sabotage on their minds.
- Asshole Victim: The reader is not meant to feel any sympathy for Farquhar, as the narration reminds us that he's a slaveowner who fully supports the Confederacy.Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician, [Farquhar] was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause.
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: While Farquhar is in the river and being shot at after freeing himself from the noose, he looks at the forest on the riverbank and sees the individual leaves on the trees and the insects on them: flies, spiders, and locusts. It serves as another hint that he's hallucinating the whole thing (he wouldn't be able to see the tiny bugs on the trees while in the middle of a river).
- Color-Coded Eyes: Farquhar notes the gray eyes of a man taking aim at him with a rifle and thinks about how people with gray eyes are the best sharpshooters. (This is another bit of foreshadowing that Chapter III is unreality. How could Farquhar make out the eye color of the man sniping at him from far away?)
- Daydream Surprise: Farquhar's escape and flight home is an extended daydream.
- Dead All Along: Turns out Farquhar died at the end of the first chapter of the story.
- Downer Ending: Chapter III was an extended dying dream; Farquhar is hanging from the bridge, dead.
- Dying Dream: The Ur-Example and still one of the most famous instances in fiction. All of Chapter III turns out to be the dying dream Farquhar had in the short time between being dropped and getting his neck broken by the noose.
- The Ending Changes Everything: The very last sentence reveals that Farquhar never escaped at all; Chapter III is a long Dying Dream.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Farquhar genuinely loves his wife, and his only goal after "escaping" is to get home to her.
- Flashback: Chapter II gives some more detail about Farquhar and includes the scene where he encounters the supposed Confederate scout and hears about Union troops reaching Owl Creek and the bridge.
- Foreshadowing:
- There's actually a fair amount of hints towards the end that something is not right. The road is described as unnaturally straight, like an "illustration of perspective", and completely empty. Farquhar sees "golden stars...grouped in strange constellations" and hears "whispers from an unknown tongue." His neck feels swollen, he can't close his eyes, he relieves a feverish feeling on his tongue by sticking it out of his mouth, and he can't feel the road beneath his feet. And at the end he just sort of appears at the front of his mansion, as if he'd "recovered from a delirium."
- And apart from that, there is one gigantic hint. Chapter III opens with the following sentence: "As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead."
- Gothic Horror: Ranks right up there with Edgar Allan Poe as one of the most iconic examples in literature.
- Hanging Around: The story revolves around a Confederate sympathizer being led to hang by a group of Union soldiers. In the third section the rope breaks and he manages to escape, which would make this a subversion. HOWEVER, the infamous Twist Ending reveals that the rope didn't break and he's been Dead All Along since the end of the first part of the story.
- The Man They Couldn't Hang: Well, he thought he was this.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: All of Chapter III is a dying dream. And for that matter he never even had a chance to burn the bridge, as the "Confederate soldier" who told him about it was actually a Union scout.
- Terrible Ticking: As Farquhar is being prepared for execution, he starts to hear a series of metallic striking sounds that slowly grow sharper and farther apart, driving him to the point of wanting to scream. It's actually just the ticking of his watch.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: A Dying Dream variant. Farquhar has a dream that seems to last hours, when actually it all takes place in one or two seconds at most.
Tropes found in the 1962 short film:
- Adapted Out: As the film excises Chapter II, the supposed Confederate soldier who turned out to be a Union scout and lured Farquhar to the bridge is omitted.note
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: Right after Farquhar surfaces from the river, there are some extreme close ups of stuff like dew dripping from leaves, a caterpillar crawling across a leaf, and a spider wrapping up his lunch. This is a nod to the literary Blade Of Grass Cut in the story, in which Peyton takes acute notice of the minute details of his surroundings.
- Foreshadowing: The film mostly lacks the cues found in the story and listed under Foreshadowing above, but it does have one major clue of its own: the gates of Farquhar's mansion open by themselves.
- Imagine Spot: Before he takes the drop, there is a brief shot of Farquhar imagining his wife and children in the front of his mansion.
- Narrator: In the original theatrical version only, there are bits of narration taken from the Bierce story, like the part where Farquhar muses about how he could escape if only he could free his hands. All of this was taken out of the Twilight Zone television version.
- Oddball in the Series: The only episode of The Twilight Zone that was not originally made as a Twilight Zone episode. Serling's introduction notes how strange the situation is.Rod Serling: Tonight, a presentation so special and unique that for the first time in the five years we've been presenting The Twilight Zone, we're offering a film shot in France by others. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival of 1962, as well as other international awards, here is a haunting study of the incredible from the past master of the incredible, Ambrose Bierce. Here is the French production of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
- Ominous Fog: The scene at the bridge is fog-bound with mist rising from the river, a detail which sets the mood but is absent from the Bierce story.
- Ominous Owl: A hooting owl sets the ominous mood at the start of the story, appropriately enough for Owl Creek.
- Overcrank: In the Twilight Zone version, the audio track of the commanding officer's orders to open fire on Farquhar (from "He must be hung!" to "...like a rat in a trap!") is played in slow motion.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: Excises the Part II flashback, dramatizing only Farquhar's hanging and escape. Instead, the necessary info is imparted with a single shot of a poster announcing that the penalty for sabotage by civilians is death.
- Re-Cut: The Twilight Zone version was re-edited for television. Several shots received minor edits to make the film a little bit shorter to fit in the time allotted. More significantly, all of the original soundtrack—Farquhar's Inner Monologue, the chatter of the soldiers at the bridge, the music, and even a song—was removed.
- Silence Is Golden: In the Twilight Zone version, the only spoken words consist of the commands given during Farquhar's hanging and subsequent escape, and his internal repeating of his wife's name.
- Translation Convention: Inconsistently applied in the original French theatrical version. The chatter of the Union soldiers is in English, but Farquhar's internal monologue is in French.
- Whip Pan: The camera spins around as Farquhar struggles in the river, a duplication of a scene from the story in which he's caught in a vortex and spun around.
- An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, in two forms: as it was dreamed ... and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination ... the ingredients of the Twilight Zone.
