William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, c.1819-20
Haunted by a bloody episode during a mental breakdown at her previous post, Maud arrives at the isolated house of once famous dancer Amanda to act as her live-in carer. Subverting the image of the devoted nurse, debut director Rose Glass gives us a fragile protagonist enraptured by devotion itself. A gripping and disturbing examination of faith, madness and salvation in the modern world, Saint Maud is sure to stay with you beyond its mesmerising final shot.
Array‘DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YA’
From its trailer’s mutated rendition of Billie Eilish’s ‘all the good girls go to hell’ to the Edwardian hilltop house above Scarborough’s clamouring arcades, Saint Maud announces its appropriation of the Gothic at every turn and in the largest sense of the word.
When our fanatical nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark) is given a book of William Blake texts and visual art, it catalyses her Gothicised imagination: the haunting return of a recent trauma (a corpse on a hospital stretcher, Maud in her scrubs covered in blood, and a large beetle crawling across the ceiling glimpsed at the film’s opening) and the disjunction of narrative order, as Maud unravels, hears voices, and has visions.
After Blake, and through its depiction of embodied and eroticised care work, an anti-authoritarian strain runs through Saint Maud. As well as being — in my book — one of the best and most enjoyable films of the year, Rose Glass’ debut subverts the enduring stereotype of the subservient, angelic nurse.
William Blake, Christ in the Sepulchre Guarded by Angels
CORINTHIANS 9:7. ‘WHO EVER GOES TO WAR AT HIS OWN EXPENSE? WHO PLANTS A VINEYARD AND DOES NOT EAT OF ITS FRUIT? OR WHO TENDS A FLOCK AND DOES NOT DRINK OF THE MILK OF THE FLOCK?’
All good questions, Paul. Should we give up our rights for the benefits of others? Troubled and reclusive Maud has backwards-engineered a ‘Yes.’
By recently converting to Roman Catholicism, she has found a way to make sense of her bare, run-down flat, her lack of company, and her thankless work as a live-in carer. All the sacrifices she has made in her life amount to nothing. But, rather than confront this, she believes, like Paul, that God will provide the reward.
She experiences spiritual seizures equal parts pleasure and pain
While yearning for some moment of revelation, some answer to her prayers, she is assigned work with retired dancer Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), who is suffering through the late stages of cancer. The pair get off to a turbulent start: Amanda drinks until she throws up, chain smokes, hosts parties, and pays a younger woman to have sex with her — all of which invites us to ask ourselves what a ‘good death’ might look like.
From where I’m sitting, Amanda’s end-of-life model is admirable, all things considered. However, Maud doesn’t share my sentiments. She’s affronted by these hedonistic pursuits, as she administers medication, cleans, helps Amanda to bathe and guides her through basic physiotherapy from a cold distance (despite their claustrophobic physical proximity). Finally, God’s plan for obsessive, pious Maud slides into view: she must steer Amanda onto the righteous path. Anyone can administer palliative care, she says, but ‘to save a soul, that’s something.’
Not only does God give Maud her life’s purpose, he is always with her. She experiences spiritual seizures equal parts pleasure and pain, recalling the ecstasy of St. Teresa of Ávila. One day, Maud is caught in one such episode of writhing jouissance when Amanda appears to feel God’s presence, too — though it’s unclear whether her gasps conceal a mocking contempt, a sense of wonder, or are merely a way to flirt with her young nurse.
This episode marks a turning point in their relationship. Amanda starts referring to Maud as her ‘saviour’ and gifts her a book of William Blake’s poems and illustrations. Blake makes an impression on fragile, God-fearing Maud; but then, as a prophet and a heretic rolled into one, the apparent simplicity of Blake’s work has always made him pliable.
ArrayBLAKE’S UNLIKELY GOTHIC LEGACY
As early as 1973, critic David Bindman referred to Blake’s ‘Gothicised Imagination’. He suggests Blake was attracted to the Gothic’s ‘simplicity and purity of style’. Yet Blake is more often than not characterised as a proto-Romantic – or even simply ‘a visionary’. Certainly, the Gothic label doesn’t sit comfortably with him.
Still, Blake has lived a curious Gothic afterlife: he crops up in horror fiction, such as Red Dragon and Hannibal; in the macabre, antiauthoritarian graphic novels of Alan Moore; and in film, from Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus to Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. A recent McSweeneys article titled ‘Death Metal Lyric or William Blake Quote?’ seems to sum up the way Blake has become weirdly entwined with Goth culture.
Blake has long been recognised as a ‘Prophet Against Empire’; meanwhile, Sean Silver argues that ‘The Gothic first emerged as a political category during the long and ruinous Civil War (1642-49)’. Republicans turned to England’s tribal heritage for a national origin that predated monarchy. Ever since then, the Gothic has had a countercultural strain – antiestablishment, harking back to a time before one existed at all.
SOONER MURDER AN INFANT IN ITS CRADLE THAN NURSE UNACTED DESIRES
In the above quote — one of Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — all the stress falls on ‘nurse’. While this call to do-as-you-will might be Blake at his most rhetorically provocative, throughout his work he launches an assault on the powers of repression – particularly institutional religion, which subdues desire in the name of reason and holiness.
‘Active Evil is better than Passive Good’, Blake said. It’s one of the ways that we might understand The Good and Evil Angels, one of the paintings that Maud becomes infatuated with; the flames that surround the ‘evil’ angel become bound up with Maud’s own auburn hair. A troubling mirror, especially for a Saint such as she.
All the painting’s propulsive energy is with the ‘evil’ angel, his limbs outstretched like an ice skater. He’s rendered heroically with a strong physique. Rather than trying to snatch the infant in the ‘good’ angel’s arms, there’s a sense in which he might be attempting to free it from the church’s strict and sterile grip. Restrained, this villain has a chain around his ankle – perhaps representing misguided rational thought as chains do elsewhere in Blake’s oeuvre (‘What the hammer? What the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?’)
ArrayTHE LADY WITH THE LAMP
Ever since the 19th century, the image of the nurse has been all but synonymous with ‘Passive Good’. Think Florence Nightingale approaching with a halo of light around her lamp. (This chaste and abstemious image was widely promoted to override the widely popular image of the nurse as a dissolute drunk, as exemplified by Charles Dickens’ Sarah Gamp.)
The devoted nurse, passive to the point of self-erasure, is a trope which horror films have long delighted inverting — see Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Annie Wilkes (Misery), Charlotte Diesel (High Anxiety), The Babadook’s Amelia, and Fragile’s Amy. The trend is for these nurses to emasculate their male patients or otherwise ‘bust their balls’; here, horror derives from a kind of one-dimensional joke, whereby something you thought was inactive, like a doll, suddenly becomes animated. The trope reaches its logical conclusion with Silent Hill’s twitching ‘Puppet Nurses’, rendered faceless but with push-up bras and several buttons undone on their low-cut blouses.
Maud might be many things, but she isn’t passive. The film as a whole presents notions of devotion and care in all their complexity: to what or to whom should we devote our lives? Who, or which system, would look after one of us if we happened to slip through the safety nets?
William Blake, The Good and Evil Angels
Notably, around the film’s midpoint, Maud drinks and hooks up with strangers in a self-destructive spiral. Our image of her Catholicism is thrown into stark relief: it’s far more idiosyncratic, less puritanical, flimsier and more desperate than we might have expected.
Throughout the film, care — which includes care of the home / cleaning — is embodied: an ambiguous queer tension plays out with each touch of the leg in a physiotherapy session, with each bath, and when Maud tucks Amanda in at night and leans in close to whisper to her the words of the Lord. One scene sees Maud burning the back of her hand on the agar; her subservience throughout seems to be a kind of self-imposed punishment. She’s actively her own jailkeeper; at least part of the film’s psychological horror derives from the fact that we all recognise what it’s like to confuse our sense of pleasure with notions of self-control.
Through voiceover, Glass gives us a too-close proximity to a mindset where devotion equals downfall. As we occupy this troubled headspace, Saint Maud becomes an exquisitely executed character study, rather than a rehearsal of tropes. Allowing us access to the subjectivity of a nurse as a means to critique the society she practices in might just be the most Blakean thing about this film.
Array‘ALL THE GOOD GIRLS GO TO HELL’
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisprings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
- Nurse’s Song, William Blake
In Blake’s Nurse’s Song, as in Glass’ film, we occupy the repressive mindset of a quasi-parental authority; here, the ‘green and pale’ (read: sick) internal machinations of a nurse. Certainly, those ‘whisprings’ sound ominous, especially combined with ‘disguise’.
Both express the idea of concealment, perhaps of the nurse’s true self in order to fit in socially. As Saint Maud continues, it becomes clearer and clearer that our protagonist’s religious mythology is a cloak to hide something far darker within herself; self-immolation giving rise to self-hatred. Like an epiphany in reverse, Saint Maud asks how much of ourselves we disguise and conceal in the pursuit of self-effacing acclaim — an enduring paradox, illuminating a hunger-to-be-good inverting before our eyes.
