Twixt (2011) closes the gap between Francis Ford Coppola’s Corman-produced horror debut, Dementia 13 (1963), and his 21st-century excursions into low-budget experimentation, Youth Without Youth (2007) and Tetro (2009). In many ways, Coppola’s late-career films form an aesthetic and thematic triptych, not least because director of photography Mihai Mălaimare Jr. shoots all three, his crisp digitalism boldly juxtaposing against Coppola’s sophisticated classicism. In all three films, “men of letters” fight to evade time’s inevitable forward momentum. The first, Youth Without Youth, depicts a suicidal linguistics professor rejuvenated by a supernatural lightning strike. In Tetro, Vincent Gallo plays a reclusive writer whose traumatic familial past anticipates Twixt’s more pointed Gothicism.
Twixt stars Val Kilmer as Hall Baltimore, an author of witch-centric horror novels whom Sheriff Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) insensitively describes as “the bargain basement Stephen King.” The film begins with Baltimore’s entrance into the fictional small town of Swann Valley for a book signing. Assailed with spookily vivid night visions featuring Poe’s spectral form (Ben Chaplin), Baltimore soon joins LaGrange in the investigation of a murdered girl named V (Elle Fanning).
Like its immediate predecessor (Tetro), Twixt invokes Coppola’s teen arthouse classic, Rumble Fish (1983). The connections between Tetro and Rumble Fish are obvious — Coppola originally intended to cast Rumble Fish star Matt Dillon in Tetro’s title role, and he shot both films in black-and-white interjected with bold pops of color. Further, both films depict young men yearning for validation from their enigmatically charismatic older brothers. So too does Rumble Fish serve as an early expression of Coppola’s more avant-garde formal impulses, a mode to which his 21st-century trifecta returns.
Twixt’s connections to Rumble Fish are subtler than Tetro’s, but no less significant. Twixt opens with voiceover narration from Tom Waits, echoing his growly soda jerk philosophizing in Rumble Fish that “time is a funny thing,” and that aging is a gradually accelerating process. As the omniscient non-diegetic narrator of Twixt, he invokes time again, opening the film with the phrase, “there was once upon a time a town not far from a big city.” He then introduces the film’s central thematic and narrative device: an old belfry in Swann Valley, whose clock tower is visible from anywhere in town. The tower’s seven separate clockfaces perpetually tell different times, a visual homage to Gothic fiction’s braiding of past, present, and future.
Clocks literally loom large in both Twixt and Rumble Fish, the latter featuring a visual refrain of prominently framed timepieces as well as ample time-lapse footage. But where Rumble Fish studies youthful restlessness, Twixt concerns itself with aging and regret. In many ways, Kilmer’s Baltimore echoes Dillon’s Rusty James — both are lost men mired in their own mediocrity.
Of course, Twixt’s preoccupation with time responds to a central tenet of the Gothic writ large — that of hauntings, unsettling future visions, and the past’s uncanny emergences in the present. This is not the first time Coppola has ventured into the shadowed halls of Gothic cinema. His filmography evidences a recurring interest in the tradition — in addition to Dementia 13, he directed a baroque adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Of all the Gothic’s varying regions and forms, though, Twixt owes most to the New England Gothic — if Poe’s literal presence in the film isn’t evidence enough, the director cites the influence of both Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in a 2010 New York Times interview.
Although Twixt never explicitly locates its fictional town of Swann Valley in New England, its dealings with witchcraft and Puritanical townsfolk unavoidably recall the Salem witch trials that haunted Hawthorne’s family. So too does Swann Valley recall the fictional locales peppering New England Gothic tales by H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King — its name most explicitly recalls King’s fictional municipality of Castle Rock (Cujo, Needful Things, etc.)
In New England’s Gothic Literature, Faye Ringel notes that “New England Gothic, whether expressed as nostalgia for the Puritans or, more often, horror at their excesses,” also often looks “further back for inspiration, toward the European Middle Ages”; she adds that New England Gothic generally imports “the horrors and not the whimsies or romance of that era.” Twixt adheres to this tradition in its depiction of Pastor Allan Floyd (Anthony Fusco), a vampiric child murderer hiding behind an affable religious façade. The English Gothic’s medievalism manifests differently in New England Gothic, as Ringel notes: “though castles reassembled from European stone dot the actual landscape, the function of the castle in European Gothic is given in New England Gothic to the isolated farmhouse, the Victorian Gothic mansion, or even the deserted factory.” In Twixt, the Gothic castle takes form as the Chickering Hotel where Floyd molested and murdered several children; the film’s fictional version of Poe once stayed there, further solidifying its Gothic associations.
Although it features moments of horror, Twixt concerns itself less with Gothic ghoulishness and excess than in the genre’s capacities to articulate grief. To that end, it’s worth noting that in Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, Jodey Castricano argues that “Gothic is not a genre at all, but a work of mourning.” Twixt subscribes to this notion — as Baltimore faces the death of his daughter in a tragic speedboating accident, one cannot avoid thinking about the real death of Coppola’s son Gian-Carlo in 1986 under identical circumstances. Twixt works, then, as a summative work of metafiction, and what is the Gothic — a literary tradition rife with found documents, epistolary devices, and haunted writers — if not innately metafictional?
Coppola articulates his metafictional mourning through an extended dialogue between Baltimore and Poe. Sharing his name with Poe’s place of death, Baltimore might represent to Poe what Poe represents to him: a walking emblem of mortality. This scene directly quotes from Poe’s classic essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” which proposes that death is most “poetical” when “it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Twixt takes this notion further by mirroring the deaths of two young girls (V and Baltimore’s daughter, whose specters permeate the narrative).
The film’s lush, otherworldly dreamscapes foreground the theme of time by contrasting contemporary film technology against the aesthetics of Gothic pasts. Coppola fills Baltimore’s nocturnal visions with Expressionist gestures: tilted crosses and jagged shadows summon the ghosts of Murnau, Wiene, and Lang. Foggy, moon-silvered forests recall the likes of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941), but paired with the irreal textures of digital day-for-night, the images achieve a uniquely hypnagogic, uncanny quality — out of place, out of time. These sequences are the film’s most gorgeous and indelible, high-definition depths of field creating immersive dioramas peppered with flashes of otherworldly color. Twixt unravels the impositions of linear time, imagining a world in which we might, if only in the moonlit hours, walk among ghosts in timeless misty woods. When we wake, we can honor their hauntological presences with the stories we tell.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
