Crimson Peak questions

[igenlode]

Does Thomas really come to Boston with the original intent of pursuing Eunice McMichael rather than Edith, or is she (as I assumed ) simply deluding herself as to his interest? She seems an entirely unsuitable target for the Sharpes' schemes, since she has a living mother and brother who are both highly likely to interfere.
(And apparently the Sharpes are able to afford to spend time in fashionable London, despite the state of their finances, since that is where the McMichael family made their acquaintance...)

Why does Lucille object that Edith is an unsuitable target because she is too young? Surely that would make her more naive and malleable?

If Thomas chooses to fix his interest with Edith rather than one of the other girls because he is genuinely attracted to her, despite Lucille's warnings and her father's disapproval (which risks him intervening to prevent the wedding, or else cutting her off without any money in the event of a runaway match), then what on earth does he suppose the outcome of a marriage between them is likely to be? Is he simply shutting his eyes to the uncomfortable fact that his sister is busy killing off every woman she sets him to seduce?

Comments

[calliopes_pen]

In that original script, Thomas was also definitely much more of an active participant in helping Lucille kill his wives. And I think there was a mention he had killed the baby himself, since it was ill. However, with the rewrite I’d say he’s more on the side of thinking that everything they do is just so they can survive, and that it’s not really him doing anything bad if Lucille is just taking care of him just as she has always done.

Or so he thinks. Again, closing his eyes to the horror, just as he has managed all his life. You have it exactly right, with his not wanting to experience any discomfort by fighting. He’s been in denial for his entire life, and thinks what he has with Lucille is normal. In his mind, as you mention with the harem, he could make it work and everyone might be fine—deluding himself.

With the original script, I think the ways the ladies were killed were different, and at least one person had a name and city of origin change.

When it comes to their father, I do remember it’s definitely mentioned in the novelization. Lucille poisoned him with the tea over a period of time, until it weakened him enough for some sort of accident to occur when he was out of the house. First, he was killed. Then, later, Lucille killed Beatrice.

Yes, those deleted scenes were included on the DVD. For some reason, a lot of the time I haven’t seen that one included in uploads on Youtube, but I managed to find it;; skip ahead to 3:26, Lucille At The Piano.

[igenlode]

When it comes to their father, I do remember it’s definitely mentioned in the novelization. Lucille poisoned him with the tea over a period of time, until it weakened him enough for some sort of accident to occur when he was out of the house. First, he was killed. Then, later, Lucille killed Beatrice.

Yes, I found it. (That section with 'Sir Michael' and the comedy peasants isn't one of the book's greatest moments, though the subtle manipulation Lucille uses on her brother in the following scene to convince him that it had been his idea all along to look for dirty books in the library is nicely done.)

It doesn't actually say that Lucille weakened their father with the tea, but it does say that she drugged him on the morning he was riding out to hunt, and sabotaged his tack to ensure there would be an accident. And that their mother helped...

Lady Beatrice is one of the other inconsistencies; when Lucille first shows Edith her portrait -- and she looks about sixty in that painting; just how old was she when Thomas was born? -- she implies that their mother spent a lot of time not only out of the house but out of the country, but later passages describe her as bed-bound for much of their lives. Presumably she originally travelled with their father, until he somehow or other broke her leg.
(Quite difficult to do just by beating someone up in the ordinary way; I think she must have been on the floor at the time, and he must have deliberately trodden on it, going by the description.)

The passage about Eunice immediately follows, as well: it says she was so bedazzled by Thomas's title that she asked silly questions about his visits to the royal family, and whether he owned a crown. (I'm not sure that's very credible in a girl who spent time in London society, visited the British Museum, etc.; she must have acquired a sensible knowledge of etiquette and precedence, and just how minor a rank that of baronet actually is.)
What the book *doesn't* attempt to explain is why Lucille would consider Eunice with her voluble and meddling family to be a suitable target for a 'mercy killing', other than finding her so annoying that it would be doing the world a service to get rid of her :-p

[calliopes_pen]

There was a group called Crimson Peak Secrets that was on Tumblr around the time of the movie that I looked in on from time to time, and people kept wondering about Lady Beatrice's age due to that portrait.

From the commentary track, Del Toro once said that he made it resemble his own grandmother. There was never a real answer for Beatrice's age, though I'd think that the spousal abuse caused bed rest and the harshness of her personality made her look beyond her years.

Yeah, with Eunice there are more people to wonder what happened to her. Hence why she's a bad idea, and Lucille is off the mark when it came to her in the novelization.

I think Thomas had other less kind things to say about Eunice in the original script, when he was a different person entirely. One of them might have actually been that last--making the world better without her. Heh.

(Oh, and on Ao3, you mentioned the devotion of Alan. He was briefly described as the golden retriever of the fandom, for how devoted he was to Edith. Poor thing.)

[igenlode]

I have to admit that my conscious reaction to Alan was 'now I understand why everyone claims Raoul is so boring' ;-p

You see, Raoul de Chagny has also been characterised as "the golden retriever of the [Phantom of the Opera] fandom" -- fair-haired, sunny in temperament, devoted to the point of self-sacrifice... and uniformly ignored as canon love-interest in favour of rewriting the plot to ship the heroine with the brooding mysterious stranger who reduces her to hysterical terror and kills people :-p
I could never understand the attraction in that, because I was seeing things from Raoul's point of view, where he is confused, horror-stricken at his own failure to save the woman he tries to rescue, and determined never to let them be parted again. (And it did occur to me that that first scene I wrote for Alan is scarily close to the first story I wrote for Raoul, where he is in the Phantom's power and trying to bargain with his own life to attain a moment's distraction).

But now I come across this fandom, and for the first time I get it. Because Alan does absolutely nothing wrong: he's unselfish, he's resourceful and intelligent, he's brave and loyal and devoted and clean of heart (and if he ends up having to be rescued by the lady, why so does Raoul...) And yet compared to the elusive, damaged, doomed Thomas, he's far too perfect to be interesting: he just comes across as a none too subtle embodiment of all-American virtue in the face of those wicked English aristocrats. I found him tedious and slightly irritating, exactly as people describe Raoul... up until the moment when Thomas stuck a knife into him, anyway ;-)

(The answer, of course, is as always to consider the characters as people from their own points of view, and not as symbols of anything. Alan is chivalrous but deeply uneasy about Edith -- has the best man really won? And the more he learns, the more desperately angry and afraid he gets: desperate enough to believe or hope that simply being right is its own armour. And of course he has his own background and history -- intersecting with Edith's, but from his point of view, like everyone else's, the world is centered on him ;-)

But I still find Thomas more instinctively compelling (partly, I think,because he represents the intellectual where Alan represents the solidly physical) and want him to justify Edith's belief in him, even though objectively he really doesn't deserve our partisanship any more than the Phantom does. There is at least the justification for it that Edith does love him in canon, and that their relationship offers him a chance at redemption, as opposed to the Phantom's unwanted and unrequited love which is the cause itself of monstrous things... but if she loves him, it is because he quite cynically seduces her, and because she doesn't yet know the truth.

Tortured bad-boy allure strikes again... and this time I'm no more immune to it than the rest.

[igenlode]

Oh, and like movie-Raoul, Alan also suffers from Inappropriate Period Hair -- I'm not sure where the 'wing of hair cut square behind the ear' look comes from (looks like something Leonardo di Caprio might model for a magazine shoot), but it's certainly not dapper fashion of the 1900s or any period I can call to mind, however generically 'oldfashioned' it may look :-p


A proper gentleman of the era ought to have his back hair much shorter behind the ears than that and better shaped, and the front swept back and up rather than just around... the whole thing is just shapeless and floppy. Apparently Alan has never heard of macassar oil :-p