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maninahat Grand Poobah Since: Apr, 2009
Grand Poobah
02/26/2021 15:45:51 •••

How to Ruin Gothic Fiction

The first two episodes of Behind Her Eyes are some of the most engrossing television I've seen in a while. Exciting, dark, mysterious, sexy, stylish, creepy... so how does a show manage to go from brilliant to hot garbage in the span of only six episodes?

Without going into spoilers, Behind Her Eyes follows a young single mum, Louise, who starts a sexual relationship with her handsome new boss, David, whilst also forming a tight friendship with David's unknowing wife, Adele. Beyond this precarious threeway, there are a lot of mysteries of the Gothic and spooky kind. We immediately sense something is strange about David and Adele, and we invited to start forming our own theories right away. There is a Jane Eyre comparison is explicitly made within the show itself; we're treated to a broody man with a troubled past, but also fires in gloomy mansions, madness, secrecy, flirtation, intrigue, jealousy and nightmares. So far, so great!

But then comes episode three, and whatever theory you might have come up with you might as well throw in the trash. And that is because this show suddenly has magic in it. You heard. Magic. The show introduces a supernatural element from nowhere, having never suggested it prior. Imagine if the original Jane Eyre figured out she could teleport, half way through the novel, and that would give you a sense at how incongruous this new element feels compared to the rest of the story so far. There's nothing inherently wrong with magical elements and Gothic horror is full of it, but you really needed to introduce this stuff as early as possible, otherwise the rest of the plot becomes a bit of a joke.

So now you are forewarned, you might be thinking you can now enjoy the show a bit more than I did. Maybe you think I'm making too much of a deal out of this one plot element. Maybe that's true, but I still can't recommend Behind Her Eyes, and that's because the magical elements lead to a spiteful final twist that harbours a lot of unfortunate implications; an ending that somehow manages to be homophobic and transphobic in one move.

There is room written into this story for a second season, and if such a thing does get made, it's going to have to do a lot of justifying and back peddling to fix a mystery plot. One that ultimately isn't worth the trouble.

Reymma Since: Feb, 2015
02/25/2021 00:00:00

Funny thing is, Gothic horror novels would sometimes pull this. The novel considered the codifier for the genre, The Monk, starts off quite grounded (for the time at least), then halfway through introduces ghosts, then piles on more and more of the supernatural until at the end it is revealed much of what happened was a Batman Gambit by the Devil himself. So it\'s in a literary tradition, however much a bad one.

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
marcellX Since: Feb, 2011
02/26/2021 00:00:00

an ending that somehow manages to be homophobic and transphobic in one move.

Isn\'t a lot of transphobia rooted in homophobia anyway.

maninahat Since: Apr, 2009
02/26/2021 00:00:00

Often, yes. The twist is a bit of a special case, which I\'m not going to talk about for spoiler reasons.

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