I know that lots of us are writing about Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs. And while it wasn’t perfect (I would like less dialogue and more weird, fragmented flashbacks of Ethel Cain frontier family doing Suspiria shit) it has lingered in my mind. In Anna Bogutskaya’s wonderful post, she reveals that in an interview Perkins tells her, “Satan is a colour”. I had read Bogutskaya’s piece prior to seeing the film, and I held this idea in my mind, as I drank red wine watching the scarlet title cards. The film opens with an image of a white house in the snow, surrounded by woods. Framed in a 4:3 aspect ratio, I was immediately reminded of photographs from my childhood. I sometimes get a feeling when I see Canada on screen, especially when it is not explicitly the named location. When I see the place I was born represented in this way, I feel as if Canada is doubly haunted; by being made to stand in so often for the United States, and by its status as stolen land.
Over at The Forbidden Room, Scott Clark describes Longlegs as “ a mood board of mistrust and decaying nostalgia.” Although I read this piece the morning after I saw Longlegs, I unwittingly gave myself a deeply weird and nostalgic viewing experience by eating fuzzy peach candy while I watched it. I had bought a handful of these candies from one of those now ubiquitous American Candy Stores that have sprung up in dead mall and high street space all over the UK. I was there with some young relations, and I found myself pulled in by the lure of nostalgic artificial flavours. Does Satan have a flavour? If so, for me it may well be the combination of red wine and the granulated sugar of those chewy peach candies.
Bogutskaya and Clark both remark on Longlegs’ debt to Silence of the Lambs, particularly the way Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is an echo of Clarice Starling. I also noted this, but the other character that came to mind was Mina Harker, the dutiful correspondent, fiancé, and almost-bride of Dracula. This too fits with the way Lee is positioned as investigator, and bait. Mina likes order, much like Lee, but she is also open to sensation. Throughout the film, Lee is keenly sensitive to atmosphere, noises, the fine details. She lays out crime scene photographs as if they are a tarot card spread, ready to notice patterns that no one else has bothered to look for. If Clarice Starling sometimes wears L’ Air du Temps, then Lee Harker smells of the woods, of her Twin Peaks-style cabin, of campfire smoke, and the cereal she eats for dinner. Cereal milk and white birthday cake with sprinkles are flavours associated with childhood, but their power and popularity persist into adulthood, which perhaps accounts for the success of Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar and its birthday cake truffles, and the fact that Milk Bar offers a recipe for cereal milk to be used as a base for ice cream, or other desserts. These are powerfully evocative flavours, and the fact that Lee eats cereal as a meal late at night suggests efficiency as well as nostalgia, particularly when it is coupled with a sinister card from Longlegs.
The more I think about this film, the more I feel it is about girlhood, the weird echoes of it, and when we see Carrie Anne (Kiernan Shipke), a young woman with a more brutal version of Mia Farrow’s Vidal Sasoon haircut, call Lee a “flirtsy dirtsy angel bitch” we know we are in some kind of fucked up territory. This phrase itself is chilling, as chilling as the idea that the Devil is a colour. This feels like an echo of the first time someone calls you a bitch, before you even know what that word really means. And angel bitch, well, that feels like “ain’t none of ‘em nice girls” and if Longlegs is about anything, it’s about that.