Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock

If you're the type who likes reviews that "explain" the movie, you're out of luck this time around. Picnic at Hanging Rock is a mystery. Raymond Chandler described the ideal mystery as "one you would read even if the end was missing." In the bible a mystery is a religious truth revealed only to the elect, or a story with symbolic significance-a parable, a fable, a myth. Mr. Whitehead, the grizzled gardener in Picnic at Hanging Rock, merely states "Some questions got answers and some haven't." Each of these descriptions applies to Picnic at Hanging Rock, but the film isn't contained by any of them. The movie poses a plethora of questions and plenty of possible explanations for itself, but you'd be cheating yourself, and the film, to settle for any one-or two, or three-of them.

What happened at Hanging Rock becomes an obsession within the film. What happened on the factual level is this: the girls of Appleyard College went on a St. Valentine's Day outing in 1900 to Hanging Rock, a monolithic volcanic eruption in the Australian outback. Four of the girls went exploring on the Rock. Not all of them came back. it's as simple as that. But few works of art are able to capture the sense of awe at the mysteries of the universe, the sense of infinite possibility and wonder as does Picnic at Hanging Rock. Every explanation that is proposed for What Happened At Hanging Rock gives rise to more questions, until you'd give anything, anything, if someone would just gather all the characters in a room and say, "Okay, this is what really happened...That racing in your mind that takes places as you watch the movie is just what the movie is about: mankind's need to explain the world and its relationship to himself-whether through art, myth, philosophy, religion or science. Picnic At Hanging Rock strains against the limits of human knowledge in an attempt to touch the unknowable. "People don't just disappear like that-not without good reason," says one cozy character. but the fact is, they do. "They coulda fallen in a hole or somethin'," says Tom, the college handyman. Picnic at Hanging Rock reveals to us glimpses of those little tears in the fabric of the universe that people (and logical explanations) occasionally just slip through.

Gheorghe Zamphier's "Flute De Pan" conjures Hanging Rock up out of the mist of the film's opening shot, followed by the invocation:"What we see and what we seem is but a dream, a dream within a dream." The incantatory words are spoken by Miranda, whose namesake is the daughter of Prospero, the enchanter in Shakespear's The Tempest, and whose identity is variously associated with a swan, "a Botticelli angel," and Hanging Rock itself. (In one succession of images, the curve of Miranda's head, the neck of a swan, and the silhouette of Hanging Rock metamorphose into each other.) Miranda speaks in riddles and aphorisms and though her first lines may call to mind associations with A Midsummer Night's Dream, their source is actually Edgar Allen Poe-an appropriate epigraph for what is, after all, a horror film. Poe's poem is a farewell: "Take this kiss upon the brow!/And, I parting from you now/This much let me avow-/You are not wrong, who deem/That my days have been a dream/yet if hope has flown away/In a night, or in a day/In a vision, or in none/Is it therefore the less gone?/All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream." Miranda seems to be preparing to go somewhere. "You must learn to love someone else apart from me, Sara," she tells the girl who loves and worships here. "I won't be here much longer."

All of Peter Weir's films, and other Australian films as well, have explored the tension between the ancient tribal rites of the outback-chiefly those of the native Aborigines-and the modern forces of Western civilization. In one mildly startling shot in the opening sequence the girls, in their corsets and virginal dresses, hold aloft a jet-black figure of a naked St. Valentine. According to the Catholic "Lives of the Saints": "The custom of sending valentines on this day is the revival of ancient pagan practice, which consisted in boys drawing the names of girls in the honor of their goddess, Februata Juno, on February 15. To abolish this practice names of the saints were substituted on billets drawn upon this day." At Applyeyard, where there are no boys, the girls (in the early stages of sexual awakening) give valentines to each other and to their (female) teachers. They really seem to get into it, too. We see right away that the tortured Sara does not just love Miranda; she is in love with her. Appleyard College is a monument to repression-from the tight, turban-like hair-do of Mrs. Applyeard, to the discipline of the girls' daily regimen, to the corsets and gloves which keep their nubile young bodies covered and constrained. in a memorable early image, a blushing pink rosebud is flattened in a flower press. The only sex in the film is between Appleyard's least refined, and therefore least repressed, inhabitants, the servants Tom and Minnie.

Mrs. Applyeard informs the girls that they are to write an essay on their outing when they return, but what they encounter at Hanging Rock is completely beyond geological analysis. Applyleard's curriculum of mathematics, drawing, dance, French and poetry-by-rote has not equipped their young minds to comprehend anything as ancient and primal as Hanging Rock. ("A thousand million years old," says Miss McCraw. "A devil of a long time, anyway," says the coachman.) Miss McCraw, a rather frigid personality who feasts on a banana, who wears the color of old blood while everyone else wears white or black, and whom Mrs. Appleyard admires for her "masculine" qualities, coldly described the birth of Hanging Rock in rather sensational language. She speaks of the molten lava being "forced up from down below...extruded in a highly viscous state." She may as well be speaking of the hormones slowly awakening in the pubescent girls, or an orgasm, or her own repressed id, or even the hysteria which eventually erupts when the girls can stand the mystery of Hanging Rock no longer. Hanging Rock itself is a Freudian Wonderland of phallic rock towers and dark, vaginal crevasses. Like the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, or the parasites in David Croneberg's They Come From Within. what happens at Hanging Rock can be seen, but doesn't insist on being seen, as a manifestation of the character's psyches.

As Miranda turns to Mlle. De Portiers for a last wave before she beings her ascent, the teacher has an incantatory call-and-response exchange with Miss McCraw (Mlle. P." "Now I know," Miss M: "What do you know?" Mlle P: "I know that Miranda is a Botticelli angel.") The Botticelli that Mlle. De Portiers refers to is "The Birth of Venus" which, according to art historian H.W. Janson, is "the first monumental image since Roman times of the nude goddess in a pose derived from classical statues of Venus." In other words, Botticelli's Venus is a fusion of ancient philosophy and Christian beliefs. The 'celestial Venus,' born of the sea as in Botticelli's picture, was invoked interchangeably with the Virgin Mary as the source of divine love and divine beauty. The celestial Venus dwells purely in "the sphere of Mind," according to Neo-Platonist philosophy, while her twin, the ordinary Venus, engenders human love. Perhaps Miranda has to choose between "human love" and "divine love." Her flesh remains unsullied, and after her "rebirth" (if that's what it is) at Hanging Rock, she dwells in the sphere of Mind.

She dwells in Michael Fitzhubert's mind a lot, too. Michael, just entering puberty himself, becomes captivated with Miranda as he watches the girls climb the Rock. Later he becomes obsessed with Miranda and her disappearance and even has visions of Miranda-on-the-half-shell. Michael's is truly a dream-within-a-dream since, rationally speaking, he couldn't have witnessed Mlle. De Portiers' association of Miranda and the Botticelli. Michael, too, represses his awakening sexual urges. He chides Bertie, the stable boy, for being rude when Bertie talks about one of the girls having "decent legs that run all the way up to her bum." The difference between Michael and Bertie, according to the latter, is that Bertie says "rude" things, while Michael only thinks them.

Weir imbues Hanging Rock with almost religious significance. There does seem to be some force of Fate (or "Doom," as one of the girls suggests) at work here. A close-up of ants swarming over a piece of cake is a microcosm of the girls on the rock. From high on the Rock, Marion looks down at the picnickers and compares them to ants." A surprising number of human beings," she says, "are without purpose, though it is probably that they are performing some function unknown to themselves." Just outside her awareness seems to lie the knowledge that she is about to fulfill her own "purpose". Miranda proclaims that "Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place." Juxtaposed with these intimations of higher levels of being are the rather earthbound imaginations of the adults and the rest of the girls. While the other three are exploring, Edith complains that she's tired and asks why they can't just sit and look at the rock from where they are. She is the one who becomes frightened and hysterical in the face of Knowledge she can't understand. (The Rock seems to know who to spirit away and who to leave behind.) Mrs. Appleyard interrogating Edith, asks "What happened on the Rock?" And then, with significant emphasis, "Was there a man?" Doc McKenzie, in a speech which reminds me of the psychiatrist's ludicrous "explanation" of Norman Bates in Psycho, mulls over a number of possibilities and then pauses to reassure everyone that one of the Rock's surviving victims has a hymen which is "quite intact."

So, great mystery that it is, Picnic at Hanging Rock provides the viewer with innumerable clues to its "meaning." Weir and Cliff Green load us up with allusions to literature, art, myth, and religion and provide us with plenty of circumstantial evidence as well. Sometimes the rock towers look like faces. The clearing in which the girls nap resembles Stonehenge. The girls sing "Rock of Ages" at the memorial service. What was the red cloud that Edith says she saw? Miss McCraw's skirt? And what do you make of the identical cuts on Michael's and Irma's foreheads, which no one in the film ever seems to notice? Were the girls raped, murdered, kidnapped, or any combination of the above? By whom? Miss McCraw? Michael? Bertie? Crazed Aborigines or extraterrestrial outlaws? Did they experience some kind of biblical rapture or did they, as Tom posits, just fall in a hole or somethin'?