To Be (Real) or Not To Be (Real), That Is The Question.
The Reality Motif in The Haunting of Hill House
Type “The Haunting of Hill House Motifs” into the Google search bar and you will get thousands of hits on all the circular, non-linear patterns Mike Flanagan used in this series.
The house is an obvious motif representing shelter and protection (or lack thereof). The Bent-Neck Lady is a motif for how the future can haunt you. I’m sure Floating-Dude-with-hat-and-walking-stick represented something similar. There is a thoughtful video essay I found on YouTube that presents the many intertwining threads of the Trauma Motif that run through this show.
However, my favorite motif is one that seems pretty obvious on the surface, but I find it complex in a way that warms my heart. I call it the Reality Motif or the Mental Illness–Ghost Triangle. (There must be a technical term for this, in which case, I am sorry for butchering it.)
This motif usually appears in movies involving “ghosts” and has to do with our perception of reality and unreality. In these movies, there are two types of people with two different realities: the so-called over-sensitive, hallucinating person who believes in ghosts, and the stoic one — practical and realistic — who does not believe in ghosts.
In more recent cinema, this latter group believes in mental illness instead while heroically categorizing themselves as “sane”. Mental illness is contrasted as scientific from ghosts, which are unscientific.
This pattern annoys me beyond belief in other movies since they try to force down our throats a singular answer to this puzzle — either ghosts exist or they don’t. But The Haunting of Hill House works with it in a nuanced, subtle, elegant way: it merges these two lines to a point where they are almost inseparable. There is no singular answer. Insanity and sanity, the belief and the disbelief in ghosts are all in one universe.
I have made here a handy-dandy illustration of the characters from The Haunting of Hill House and have shown how they fall into my Mental Illness–Ghost Triangle.
Very early on Steven and Shirley set themselves apart as the practical ones: the ones who don’t believe in ghosts; the ones who believe their mom was (and now Nell is) just mentally disturbed. They, Steven and Shirley, are the sane ones, or so they tell themselves.
We never find out if Shirley believes in ghosts, but it appears clear from her feud with Steven that she believes the family has gone through much-unexplained trauma — in the psychological sense of the term. This trauma keeps reappearing in her life: as an affair, as sleep talking, as issues with control and anger. She isn’t exactly understanding of what Nell or Luke is going through; she doesn’t pick up Nell’s calls and convinces Luke to skip Nell’s wedding.
But Steven is the more interesting character to me. Being the first child, he rationalizes what happened at Hill House. He was old enough to have internalized the concepts of reason, and he tries to explain everything in mortal, realistic terms. He could separate himself from what he saw that night long enough to write many a famed horror story, without once buying into the ghost narrative.
To Steven and Shirley, the ghosts are trauma.
“A ghost can be a lot of things: a memory, a daydream, a secret, grief, anger, guilt. In my experience, most times they are just what we want to see.”
On the other side of the triangle, the ghosts are real. Each time things shifted to Nell’s perspective, I was convinced of the existence of the Bent-Neck Lady. I desperately wanted the others to pick up her calls, to believe her, to see things her way. It is the same with Luke. I never suspected that the Floating-Dude didn’t exist or that Luke imagined he saw Olivia at Nell’s funeral.
It took me very few scenes to realize that they were juxtaposed as the insane ones whose reality was in direct contrast to Shirley’s or Steven’s.
As a person who has been in and out of mental health treatment most of her life, I always support mental-illness representation in media. But in this show, for the first time, framing Nell’s and Luke’s experience as “mental illness” felt like a dismissal of what they had gone through. It felt like desperation to define them — define them in socially explainable shapes.
Steven’s line — most times ghosts are just what we want to see — suddenly sounded like textbook CBT talk: your thoughts are faulty, so they need to be challenged and changed to live a more functional life.
Perhaps, there was nothing faulty with their thinking. Maybe the ghosts were real and no amount of challenging their thoughts would change the fact that these ghosts live with them.
It looks like the same thing over and over again, but that’s not insanity…that’s what recovery is, you know. It is the same thing over and over again, in spite of the results.
Hugh is the quintessential dad: the handyman trying to fix a house while providing for his family. His is a kind of masculinity that believes in doing the next right thing. This is perhaps why he decided that Olivia was beyond help and the next best thing to do was to save his children. Practical.
Olivia’s reality, on the other hand, is Nell’s reality — just larger. Do you think Olivia “seeing” the dead tenants of Hill House was a psychic ability that she hadn’t learned to control? Maybe her daughter Theo inherited it and learned how to better keep a rein on it.
So, here are two self-contained realities, but they are not succinct and separate at all times. That’s how it becomes a triangle. Hugh keeps seeing Olivia even after she dies. When I first watched this, I assumed that it was symbolic of the maternal voice in Hugh’s head that stays concerned for his now-adult children. The voice had likely taken Olivia’s form because he knew how much she loved her children: enough to kill them even.
Five years down, I wonder if it was the real spirit of Olivia that visited Hugh. Could it be that the practical, worldly, mortal Hugh was contacted by his psychic, otherworldly wife?
I had to touch Nell because I had to know. You know what happens when I touch people; a part of you knows, it always has. I touched her, and I felt nothing…And I wondered if that’s what she felt, that’s what mom feels, and it’s just numb and nothing and alone. What if that’s what it is for all of us when the time comes?
Theodora is my favorite character in this show. She has her mother’s psychic abilities that tether her to Nell’s ghost world. She has her father’s reason that connects her to Steven’s scientific world. All the realities merge in her: She is a psychologist and uses science. She also uses her supernormal sense of touch to help the children she is working with.
True, she struggles with this for a long time. The scene where Theo weeps in front of Shirley is so dear to me. No scientific, “normal” explanation exists for the nothingness she felt when she touched Nell. I see it as the moment she finally accepts that there are some things, like her own ability of touch, that just can’t be explained using human vocabulary.
Theo stands at the precipice of sanity and insanity, and she asks an important question. Are we willing to admit that an insane person’s reality is just as real to them as a sane person’s reality is? Are we ready to stop trying to “fix” disabled people and people with mental illness, and start accommodating for more than one reality?
