Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
When a group of schoolgirls spends a day in the wild, under the magical Hanging Rock, four of them are called into its depths, and are never seen again.
Jade and Alex attempt to integrate Hanging Rock with a Witches Circle under the full moon...
ALEX
Us four men have left the women now alone in the forest as it swiftly descends into darkness, as it swiftly recedes in the rear-view mirror, on our way to a warm house and beers. The ritualistic flavor of escorting them to Bidwell Park’s Council Ring, to hold a Witches Circle under the full moon, made the silence in the car heavy with implication. Would we see our loved ones ever again? If they do return, will they be the people we remembered? By its very definition, the women-only full moon gathering creates an experience which the male cannot perceive, cannot penetrate. By Jade’s own decision, something inarticulable will be made, and planted in the unconscious only.
Miranda and her three ill-fated friends hear the call of Inarticulable Nature whistling through the towers of Hanging Rock, and it’s clear that though they are doomed, they are also special, chosen, enlightened. They know that, for them, to refuse the call of Hanging Rock would doom them to a fate even worse than the mystery which later swallowed them whole.
A different kind of invitation emerges tonight for the four men. What is it, by contrast to a Witches Circle, that will more firmly place us in the world as men?
The tragedy at Hanging Rock is the pandemic and lockdown of 2020. On that year, inexplicable nature and the unknown future reared their Hydraic heads, ‘Disruption’ and ‘Dissolution’ the names written on every reptilian brow. The small town and girl’s college in Hanging Rock both try to go back to normal, but new ripples of the same tragedy keep upsetting their attempts to restore order. The world and society in 2021 is putting on a brave face, but many of the men (do the women feel this too?) in our circles are yet holding a profound and unsettling darkness inside.
Within this disruption-portal that exudes from Hanging Rock to lure the four school-girls, the interior rises to meet the exterior (expressed visually in the way the spell-bound girls kept removing more of their clothes), and a successful journey is determined by an ability to remember, and articulate, and bring something back from that inner merging. When our interior arose during quarantine, what was it we confronted? How are we going to remember and articulate it?
These men of our community are aimlessly circling the siren call of nihilism; they cannot move on from the cataclysm because they have not declared, for themselves, what really happened in 2020, and what it’s going to mean for their growth from now on. It's an illusion to chalk it up to a virus from China. This was the unknown as such, this was the Hydra, and everything is different now.
We must follow the women’s example, do as both Jade and Miranda do and walk resolutely into the new reality of Future-Unknowns-becoming-Present-Reality, yet we must also model those things associated primarily with the masculine. Jade’s Witches Circle called forth some of those traits: commitment, physical prowess, specificity, clarity.
JADE
In the dark woods we are swallowed almost completely within ourselves. We ignore the darkness surrounding us and gather close together around the fire. Fifteen women fit perfectly around the brick wall of the pit. Safely gathered together in this uncertain territory, I invite these women to return momentarily to the deep interior place within them. We illuminated that interior space and saw how that light poured out of us, and out of the eyes of our sisters. We have lit a fire in the dark forest and illuminated that interior space at once.
When the clock approaches 7, the agreed hour of closing, I am only aware of it because someone is asking me to play a song. My phone says 6:50. The fire is meant to be out by 7. I look around at the Happening, and don’t want to let it go, would like to tell the men to nevermind and we will find our own way home, unless we don’t. Lydia’s dressed in nothing but a wisp of white: if we stay just a little longer, I know we’ll begin to float. I am drunk on our Happening, I am trying to remember the plot. Yes, yes–the men. They are expecting us. I imagine what we look like through the trees. I observe us. Now I can remember the water in the bucket, which I brought to put out the fire. Right–how to end things. I’ve planned this. I step from one self into another, from a dancing elf to the speaking self. As the four men approach the agreed hour of closing, my own masculinity rises up, speaks. I change the music, and announce the close. And even though I try to speak tender and firm as a mother declaring bedtime, I want to apologize; I feel as if I am Edith in Hanging Rock, screaming, to shatter the spell before she is taken somewhere intensely Elsewhere. The other women are willing, and together we undertake the task of putting out the fire, of gathering our scattered coats, pants, and shoes. Candles in every hand, walking in procession, we are not all spirit as before, we appear as a human force in the dark night, a re-civilizing march back into a more stable territory.
ALEX
Once the two male protagonists rescue Irma from Hanging Rock, she is presented one last time to the other girls of the college before moving away. Her costly and beautiful red velvets are striking in contrast to the white dresses of the young and uninitiated. When the girls surge forward, crying, screaming, demanding answers, demanding an articulation of just what the hell happened within the Inarticulable, it is not just their need for resolution that colors their cries with panic. This is also fear of adulthood, fear of their sex arising from within: felt, and unknown, and now it has clothed Irma in scarlet allure. What is it like, Irma? What is coming for us? It is a failure of the masculine force of the college that’s responsible for Irma’s infuriating silence. She cannot remember, because she was not aptly prepared for the Unknown by the scion of Order in the college: Mrs. Appleyard.
JADE
Perhaps Mrs. Appleyard has too much of the masculine in the beginning and not enough of a nurturing and motherly spirit. She can direct and create order, but she is unable to respond in the best possible way to new, life shattering events as they rise around her. Such an ability for improvisation and response is a more feminine sort of skill which would have served her character’s needs much better.
In the pod, you suggested one lesson of the story is that men should have been there, that the women under Hanging Rock should have had guards with them. I know you were sort of joking, but I feel a strong need to push back against that point. Yes, sometimes protection is useful and stabilizing. Masculine energy is an important force and should exist in partnership with feminine energy to achieve harmony. But for a story like Hanging Rock, I think it would be far less satisfying for men to accompany the women into the scary place. A proper hero, man or woman, knows when to access the masculine and feminine energies that exist in all of us. In the myth of Cupid and Psyche (a myth I will literally never stop talking about!), Psyche goes on her own hero's journey, and through each of her trials must use whichever force is proper for the given challenge; sometimes she uses a more feminine principle to her advantage, like when she waits for the harsh light of the sun to change position in the sky so she will not be burned by the golden fleece, while at other times she will wield a masculine principle, like using the orderly force of nature in ants to help her sort out an enormous chaotic mass of grains.
Thus did I conceive a Witches Circle held in the woods, at night, with no men in sight. Yet there arose a request from the delicate feminine within, saying “we are fragile!” The amazon within pushed back, declaring “we are strong!” The mother within awakened, stretched out her arms, searching for a balance, an integration, and her searching hands found the masculine, who said with four men’s voices, “I can hold this.” Hark! The angry feminist within emerges! She shouts, “Alone, alone, alone!” And when he took her up and held her, she was revealed to be a frightened child, whose scream was not a scream but a deep cry, the sob of abandonment, or fear of it. She could not say which, but in being held there, she was transformed. The Delicate and the Amazonian took hands then, saying, “I am brave enough to be fragile, I am strong enough to be held, I am enough to need you.”
To my own great surprise, I chose to invite guards. The masculine replied with four men’s voices: “I will be there.”
The men leave; the circle closes. Within the circle is all presence. As the night falls, we are illuminated by our fire. We become more here, more real. We cannot see beyond the place which the light illuminates. In the light of the fire, we are all love, all sisterhood, all joy and dancing, all interior light. My spell has been cast, we are now Being, without exposition; even our talking is not talking but a different kind of dancing. We are passing around tobacco and wine and adorning each other, we are singing and spinning and holding each other. We are total togetherness, total interior. We are all Happening, all spirit, all animating force.
I notice the lack of men in the unbrokenness of this current. The particular women who have joined us, but generally prefer to sit and watch, those who feel greater comfort in the role of the observer, find no men’s ears to voice their observations to. Good and bad, we find ourselves in another kind of confrontation there at the fire. It is not with the unknown and the darkness, which is looming so large that we can ignore it. It is a confrontation with the all illuminated life within the circle, full of a holding, which is also a possible rejection. This is an experience of the self, not the other, all that it offers, and all that it threatens us with: the possibility of being held so completely, and the possibility of a deeper exclusion. This doubt is real in our local sisterhood, deeply felt. An anxiety that at times keeps us quiet and cold and apart.
JADE
I asked about the significance of stabbing the St. Valentine cake, and the fact that the story takes place on Valentine’s Day, and in our pod we decided it was meaningless. But as I think about it more, I can apply some significance to it: St. Valentine represents devotion as such. Devotion between romantic partners is just one version of the more eternal and all-encompassing devotion attributed to a Christian God. Forms of devotion, and the stability that devotion creates, are broken through the course of Hanging Rock piece by piece.
ALEX
That shot, of Miranda stabbing the Valentine’s cake into halves, is the film’s first invocation of the Spell of Disruption. Our post-modern tribe unwittingly calls up storms of instability by running away from all forms of Devotion. Our men have each been destroyed, in ways small and large, visible and invisible, by the apparently senseless abandonment of their romantic relationships. We men have both created the abandonment and been its victims. The Beloved Other, that shapely mirror of our own deepest self, disappears into the unknown future as abruptly as Miranda left Sara, as catastrophically as civilization disappeared in 2020.
What we children seek in our abandonment of commitment is freedom: we seek an open vista of the timeless that is free from calendars, and days of the week, and appointments, and dependable sameness, yet the four men showing up as promised to begin the Witches Circle, and to close it exactly two hours later, created a container within which time and physicality itself were drawn up into a dancing fire of the timeless. A more real Happening that expanded far beyond “two hours” was one result of four men holding to their commitment.
JADE
I understood that it was a good idea to give voice to our need for men, because I felt a deep symbolic resonance when I imagined returning to them after the fire. I imagined looking into Ade’s face, and felt that desire to be witnessed by him, to have that symbol of return and that experience of reunion. Showing up to the park that day, I was amazed to see that the men were there before the women. On this night, the four men showed up with more organization, stability, and devotion for the feminine than the women did.
The masculine had responded to the need of the feminine. The four men were present, awaiting direction, ready to follow the feminine lead. As they accompanied me to the Council Ring carrying all the logs and water I had brought in my truck bed, I felt carried by them even as I led them: the anima and the animus, interdependent and complimentary. When we reached the Council Ring, they put down the supplies and nodded. Then the masculine departed, just as was asked, and the feminine was left to ignite its own fire.