It’s easy to forget about Edgar Allan Poe’s “lost months” at West Point. For any cursory knowledge of the author would never lead one to guess he was much of a military man (which he, of course, really wasn’t). And yet, so much of that brief time at the Academy was certain to solidify his confirmed identity as a “thinking man.” More specifically, a morbid thinking man. While Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is entirely fictional (and based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel of the same name, which itself won an Edgar Allan Poe Award), the one fact it’s grounded in is Poe’s attendance at West Point circa 1830. Prior to that, it was in 1827 that Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army after struggling to pay for his education. So yes, it was a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures, and it didn’t take long for Poe to rally for being discharged and sent to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York instead. It is perhaps this snowy, bleak setting (read: Upstate New York) that gives The Pale Blue Eye its Sleepy Hollow-esque quality. Except with far more seriousness than Tim Burton is usually wont to offer in his movies.
Indeed, by commencing with a Poe quote from “The Premature Burial,” (“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”), followed by the stark image of a man hanging from a tree, Cooper delves right into the macabre and doesn’t relent. For, going beyond just the one-trick pony note of “macabre” (as Burton also showed again in the softcore gloom of Wednesday), Cooper weaves the insidiousness of the murders of cadets that begin with that hanged man into a larger, more profound message about oppressive patriarchal institutions that churn out “Men” with The System’s seal of approval.
But The Pale Blue Eye is hardly any kind of “stylized biopic” about Poe, for his character is but an auxiliary one to the lead: retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale). Summoned to the Academy after Cadet Leroy Fry’s (Steven Maier) body is discovered at that tree, Landor is plucked out of said retirement by Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) and Superintendent Thayer (the perpetually sour-faced Timothy Spall). The latter being known as the real-life “Father of West Point.” Detective Landor was a father once, too—though his daughter, Mathilde a.k.a. “Mattie” (Hadley Robinson), has been gone for some time, described as having “run off” somewhere. This would be lonely and heartbreaking for a father under any circumstances, but Detective Landor’s sentiments are made all the more pronounced by the fact that he has been a widower for the past two years. Granted, that hasn’t meant his bed has been cold, with a local barmaid named Patsy (Charlotte Gainsbourg, too underused in this role) often spending her nights in his cottage. It’s at the bar she works where Detective Landor makes further acquaintance with Poe (Harry Melling, in the part he was born to play), who previously advised him that the murderer he’s looking for is surely a poet.
At the bar, Poe elaborates that because of the nature of the crime (a man’s heart being ripped out after his death), the man Landor is looking for simply has to be a poet for, “The heart is a symbol or it is nothing. Now take away the symbol and what do you have? It’s a fistful of muscle of no more aesthetic interest than a bladder. Now to remove a man’s heart is to traffic in symbol. And who better equipped for such labor than a poet?” Landor briefly indulges him before moving on in his search for a culprit, eventually deciding that Poe could be very useful to assisting in the case. For his soft-spoken, unimposing demeanor makes him ideal for hiding among the shadows and gathering intel about potential suspects. It is in this way that Cooper’s underlying theme about such institutions as the U.S. Military Academy gradually comes into the spotlight. For, soon enough, when Poe becomes a suspect himself, he laments to Landor, “If I were to kill every cadet who had abused me during my tenure here, I’m afraid you would find the Corps of Cadets reduced to less than a dozen. Now, if you must know, I’ve been a figure of fun from my very first day here. My manner, my age, my person. My…aesthetics. If I had a thousand lifetimes, I could not begin to address all the injuries that have been done to me.”
Thus, we have a prime example of a “fraternalistic” institution established in the United States’ early history serving as one of the most germinal paragons of how patriarchy deliberately seeks to quash men like Poe. Those gentle, delicate spirits that the “desirable” meathead archetype can’t understand, therefore must mock and subdue. Fittingly enough, a review for the novel version of this tale from The New York Times commented of this oppressive landscape marking Poe’s earlier years, “The regimented, gloomy world of West Point, with all its staring eyes and missing hearts, forms a perfectly plausible back story to the real-life Poe’s penchant for tintinnabulation, morbidity and pale young women, first initial L.” That woman, in this instance, being Lea Marquis (Lucy Boynton, the Anya Taylor-Joy to Melling’s erstwhile Harry Beltik role in The Queen’s Gambit). A pale girl, to be sure, for she is afflicted with some mysterious illness that makes her cough a lot and go into arbitrary seizures that make her look decidedly “possessed by the devil.” Her brother, Cadet Artemus Marquis (Harry Lawtey), is of the meathead variety at the Academy. A real ringleader, of sorts—as Poe finds out after being invited to a secret society-type meeting by Artemus after curfew.
The boys (posing as men) at this little gathering consist of people like Cadet Randy Ballinger (Fred Hechinger), parading an antagonistic air toward anyone perceived as weak, such as Poe. It is in moments like these that Landor’s contempt for an institution of West Point’s nature proves what he says to Captain Hitchcock when the latter demands, “Mr. Landor, do you harbor a latent hostility toward this Academy?” Landor replies, “I am risking my life on behalf of your precious institution. But yes. I do believe that the Academy takes away a young man’s will. It fences him with regulations and rules. Deprives him of reason. It makes him less human.” Hitchcock, offended, asks, “Are you implying the Academy is to blame for these deaths?” Landor assents, “Someone connected to the Academy, yes. Hence, the Academy itself.” Hitchcock decries, “Well that’s absurd. By your standard, every crime committed by a Christian will be a stain on Christ.” Landor confirms solemnly, “And so it is.”
As we learn more about why Landor is so disgusted with how such an institution as the Academy does stamp out the will (and heart) of many a young man, turning them cold and unfeeling, we see Poe’s own heart growing fonder of Lea. But even she has her special machinations when it comes to stringing Poe along, never knowing that, in this alternate account of his history, she will be the true inspiration for “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Landor, in his own way, as well. In point of fact, this entire cutthroat milieu is what Cooper wants to reiterate helped to form Poe as an author. As Cooper himself remarked, “…it’s these events that occur in our film that shaped his worldview and helped him become the writer that he became—with the recurring themes that deal with the questions of death and the effects of decomposition and reanimation of the dead and mourning; all those are considered part of his dark romanticism.”
His worldview was also undeniably shaped by having been subjected to the “frat boy fuckery” of both the U.S. Military and its West Point Academy, where, like Landor, Poe no doubt learned something about the cruelty of most men, ready to take their repressed urges and latent rage on someone else more powerless—in this case, an innocent girl.
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