If You Say, Miss: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE

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BETSY [voice over]:
It seemed only a few days before I met Mr. Holland in Antigua. We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian. It was all just as I'd imagined it. I looked at those great, glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek. I breathed deep and every bit of me inside myself said, "How beautiful!"

PAUL HOLLAND [aloud]:
It's not beautiful.

BETSY:
You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland.

PAUL:
It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer. Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish -- they're not leaping for joy. They're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water -- it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here. Only death and decay.

BETSY:
You can't really believe that.

[Cut to the shot of a falling star.]

PAUL:
Everything good dies here -- even the stars.

Of all the Lewton films, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE might be the most dreamlike and mysterious. It owes much of this mood to the shadowy, often iridescent images of Jacques Tourneur, to long moments without dialogue punctuated by the skittering of wind in the leaves and dry sugarcane, to the sparse and elegiac music of Roy Webb, to the broken family relations on this island with a long history of suffering:

COACHMAN:
Times gone, Fort Holland was a fort, and now, no longer. Holland's was the most old family, miss. They brought the colored folks to the island. The colored folks and Ti-Misery.

BETSY:
Ti-Misery? What's that?

COACHMAN:
A man, miss. An old man who lives in the garden at Fort Holland. With arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face.

BETSY (alarmed):
Alive?

COACHMAN:
No, miss. He's just the same as he was in the beginning. On the front side of an enormous boat.

BETSY:
You mean a figurehead.

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. And the enormous boat brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.

BETSY (gazing around):
They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. If you say.

The other source is a narrative strategy that offers an event long-completed before the film begins, one that is interpreted with conflicting views by the people involved, but never shown to the audience. In films, we believe what we can see, but when we are denied this authoritative perspective on what happened, we can only hear about it from second-hand accounts.

A few of the characters explain this event in the framework of modern medicine, others, in the framework of religious belief. At the end of the film, we are shown magical intentions to manipulate events, but we have also been shown, earlier, that identical results have been caused by ordinary means: one character is known to wander aimlessly; another does exactly what he had asked someone else to do before the climax. Just because magic is being used does not imply that magic is a cause; all too often, instead, people can mess up their lives through typical sorrows, obsessions, and addictions.

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In a similar way, the film denies itself narrative clarity by refusing any firm opposition between cultures. The Houngan, the Voudou priest, uses religious rites to apply practical psychological therapy to ordinary human suffering, while the Western doctors use religious terms for medical advice. Two of the Western characters believe in magic, while others do not, but in the end, neither science nor magic are given authority. We can see the result, but we cannot specify the cause.

Even during the final moments, the one character who might be given authority, the Houngan, offers no explanation, no clarification, but only a prayer in hope that the sorrows of the island will be healed. In the face of the island's long history, in the face of ordinary human suffering, such a hope seems impossible:

"Everything good dies here -- even the stars."