Black Narcissus is not the name of a goth band; it's a 1947 film about rival concupiscent nuns, a bizarre love triangle in the thin air of the Himalayas, directed by Michael Powell. Sister Clodaugh(Deborah Kerr) and Sister Ruth(Kathleen Byron) both have their vows put to the test by Mr. Dean(David Farrar), the roguish go-between for General Toda Rai(Esmond Knight), the Raijut ruler, who wants to build a nunnery over a former house of ill repute. Clodaugh and Ruth are sisters of passion, the secularized kind; one latent, the other made manifest through facial gesture and body language, but both are more interested in him than hymns. Sisters of Mercy, a Brooklyn convent, is the home of a novitiate nun, Colleen Lundson(Addison Timlin), and also the name of an English musical group fronted by Andrew Eldritch, a noted goth practitioner, in Zach Clark's "Little Sister", a film with layers and multitudes because of its allusions to Mopu Palace, God's Nepalese provisional house. Who called Colleen? God works in mysterious ways, but not this mysterious. God didn't call Colleen. Colleen called God. This former Satanist/performance artist's reasons for joining a convent are clearly secularist in nature. The unnamed abbess(Barbara Crampton), known only as Sister Mother, doubts Colleen's devotion to Jesus Christ, suspecting correctly that the young woman is running away from the actuality of being. Atonement, born out of self-hatred, can cause a person to do extreme things. Being a nun, the audience suspects, is a preventive measure against a truth that Colleen doesn't want to face about herself. The vow of celibacy every prospective nun has to undertake gives the young woman an excuse not to explore her sexual orientation. What Colleen chooses to do in her free time gives her tenuous connection to incorporeality away from the beginning. Not a man in sight, the bar Colleen walks into, but with her future all mapped out, she can pretend to be on a mission, a tourist, there to support Debbie(Amber Williams), a friend, and bad experimental theater; an agitprop production about 9/11 and the Iraqi War. Outside the venue, Colleen lectures Debbie, who reacts incredulously at her friend's approach to her, sounding more like a life coach than a pal, even though they're contemporaries. As a nun, letting this crush object know that she should pursue a professional singing career is the only way for her latent romanticism to breathe.
The runaway daughter returns home. Not so much a calling, but an escape, three years ago when Colleen chose God over family; her dysfunctional family. The GWAR fan didn't hear voices like Joan of Arc; she was probably an atheist, if the upside-down cross in her childhood bedroom is any indication. The voice she heard was internal, a voice of her own beckoning; a whisper, a scream, or otherwise, granting herself permission to abdicate the rudimentary duties of a daughter and sister, like offer solace to dad(Peter Hedges) when mom(Ally Sheedy), a recovering junkie, attempts suicide, while Jake(Keith Poulson), her older brother, was fighting a war in Iraq. Sister Clodaugh, in "Black Narcissus", leaves Ireland in a haste after Con(Shaun Noble), the man she had set her heart on marrying, chose America over a provincial Irish life by boarding a plane to bountiful without her. In flashbacks, it's hard to reconcile the red-blooded gal who once loved to fish for trout in pristine lakes, join the men on rabbit hunts with impeccable horsemanship, and model grandma's heirlooms; green emerald earrings that matched her green necklace, in a full-length body mirror, with the person she would become, a Sister Superior, donning the habit, inhabiting the comportment of a post-woman, giving up on life. Rather than blame the wild and impulsive girl she was for making a rash decision to love god and recognize god's silence as the sacrifice every nun makes in a loveless ecclesiastical marriage, she casts animadversions on her exotic surroundings, attributing the thin air as an addling aphrodisiac, a natural drug that undoes the act of forgetting. God is designated to be the sole listener to the petitions of a nun in crisis, but Sister Clodaugh shares her innermost secrets to an impious set of ears, telling Mr. Dean, a hairy-chested agnostic in short pants, about the woman she was before her calling; a calling about as unconvincing as Colleen's consequential life choice. In "Little Sister", Colleen, too, betrays God, but the catalyst of change when she returns home isn't an improper love interest(like an old flame from high school; she never had one), but Jake, a sibling, home again, never the same again, after being scarred bodily whole by fire from a bomb that detonated during his tour of duty. Cosplaying a goth, that's what Colleen did as a teenager, but now, Jake, the ex-soldier, has more goth cred than his younger sister ever accrued, passing his days and nights indoors as if the sun and moon were rumors. The upside down cross she turned right side up, remains right side up, but for old times sake, Colleen returns to her death metal roots, dyeing her hair pink, and locating her makeup kit containing the usual suspects of goth chic: white pancake makeup, black eyeshadow, and blood red lipstick, and turns herself into the undead; a zombie, not Lazarus. Both Sister Clodaugh and Sister Ruth are both the protagonist in their respective filmic universes, so we're privy to their backstories, but it's not Clodaugh that the filmmaker modeled Colleen after; it's Sister Ruth, who in "Black Narcissus" isn't cosplaying goth; she is religious mythology incarnate. The novitiate nun must be running away from somebody, but who?
Emily(Molly Plunk), an animal rights activist, was Colleen's best friend in high school, albeit by default. The student body didn't like them. Their accidental reunion convenes at a health food store where Emily works as a stock person. To catch up on old times, she invites Colleen back to her parents' house, the scene of their goth heyday. Fully-clothed, lounging around in an empty bathtub, Emily, also a recovering goth, asks the nun if she still has her "v-card". Colleen does, which is the main difference, or rather, the only difference that matters between the novitiate sister and Clodaugh; the Sister Superior lost hers. Why the bathroom, of all places, for these full-grown women to take a nostalgia trip? It's a tell; it's inevitable, this cusp of being. Why the tub and not a table with chairs, or the plush couch in the living room? As a teenager, Colleen had an inkling of who she was, but didn't stick around to find out for sure. Emily, likewise, quashes the truth about herself by dedicating her life to animals, love surrogates; she's like a militant version of Lottie Schwartz in "Being John Malkovich", who ends up with Maxine, and not needing the animals anymore to feel loved. The second time Colleen stops by for a visit, Jake tags along. When she catches Emily making out with her older brother, the filmmaker denies the audience a reaction shot. Is Colleen jealous? And what about Emily? She must know that Colleen will spot them. It's transference, perhaps; kissing Jake is six degrees of kissing somebody whose life choice made her unkissable. In her spare times, Emily constructs bombs, filling a need that the animal liberator can't quite put a finger on, until her best friend returns home. Since "Little Sister", quite pointedly, is set in 2007, Colleen can't marry Emily, so she marries God instead. Sister Clodaugh marries God on the rebound, after Con forsakes her. Sister Ruth, on the other hand, doesn't know a whole lot about love, and becomes a nun before she tested the real world. That seems to be Colleen's story, too.
Sister Ruth, the original goth, knows how to make a splashy entrance. All over her apron, in Technicolor, is blood, the gore of a hemorrhaging local woman, which upsets the Sister Superior, who feels that medicine should be left to the doctors and nurses, whereas Mr. Dean tells Ruth: "I'm very obliged to you," for her assistance in the saving of a worker he values. Blood can symbolize humanity, or life itself, but the context in this case relates to Sister Ruth's fledgling worldliness, a second puberty; the blood is menstrual. In the presence of Mr. Dean, who never fully buttons his shirts, Ruth experiences the flush of love for the first time. She misconstrues Mr. Dean's nicety, reserved for any man or woman who did him a favor, as a declaration of love. Unlike Sister Clodaugh, both she and Colleen allowed the church instead of the outside world to form them. Colleen's avant-garde theater piece, shock art as therapy for Jake, unmistakably references "Black Narcissus"; the all-white habit, smeared with "blood"(gelatin), recalls the aftermath of Sister Ruth's misadventure in the infirmary. A person can change, undergo a transformation from unholy to holy, but what Colleen does with her props, accompanied by the GWAR song "Have You Seen Me", acts as an origin story, an accidental commentary on the controversies that films such as Peter Mullan's "The Magdalene Sisters" and the Amy Berg documentary "Deliver Us From Evil" addresses, especially the former, which tells the story of The Magdalene Laundries. These so-called bad girls, these "fallen women", were imprisoned at what, for all intents and purposes, were asylums, in which they were subjected to cruelties by a type of woman Colleen role-plays as shock art. Literally(the nun doesn't renew her vows) and metaphorically(the nun falls over the side of a mountain cliff), Ruth is a fallen woman. When Mr. Dean rejects the former sister's advances, sensing correctly that he loves her rival, Ruth sneaks up behind Sister Clodaugh at the bell tower, and ends up killing herself instead. In "Little Sister", Colleen, ironically, asks a stripper: "Does your parents know what you do for a living?" Colleen dances, too.
Does her parents know what she does?
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