Stevie: The Movie

I'm strongly affected by the way Jackson recites "Thoughts About the Doctrine of Eternal Hell." While the camera closes in on her face illuminated in the dark room, she says it with great conviction, pressing home her argument with ferocious intensity, fiercely biting down the final lines:

Who makes a God? Who shows him thus?

It is the Christian religion does.

Oh, oh, have none of it,

Blow it away, have done with it.

This god the Christians show

Out with him, out with him, let him go.

In the written text, the emphatic change from a capital G to a small gin the Lord's name (from God to god) enacts the brave renunciation.

Stevie felt that we should accept loneliness, not make a theology of it by inventing an all-powerful deity. She said memorably: "If I had been the Virgin Mary, I'd have said: No, no, I'll have no part in it, no savior, no world to come, nothing."

For me, the most poignant scene in the film is the death of the Lion Aunt. (Washbourne looks as if she's somewhere in her eighties, though Margaret Annie Spears was in fact 96 years old when she died in 1968). Leaning back against her pillow, half propped up, calling out weakly to Peggy for a drink of water. The touching way that Aunt reaches over with effort and Stevie takes her hand. Stevie says--talking partly to herself, partly to us: "People think because I never married I know nothing about the emotions. They are wrong." She looks intently into her aunt's face. "I loved my aunt."

There's a chill, a small shock, in the fact that she is already using the past tense. A close-up of Stevie's two hands covering her aunt's hand. The camera moves up along the body to focus on Aunt's face on the pillow. Slowly, almost uncannily, with her eyes still closed, Washbourne turns her head in our direction. There's a look of great repose on her face, which is partly in shadow, partly in light. The slightest trace of an inner smile. Death as an end and remedy. And then the traditional cinematic signal from the outside: a curtain closing across the darkening upstairs window.

I myself had grown so attached to the spirit of the Lion Aunt incarnated through Washbourne that the first time I saw the film I began to cry at her death and couldn't quite stop myself. I think I was in tears about it, on and off, for much of the rest of the movie. I knew even at the time that there is a deep reverberation for me with the death of my own practical-minded grandmother, whose name was Anna. I still get an icy shiver every time I come across the first stanza of Stevie's memorial poem to her aunt, "Grave by a Holm-Oak":

You lie there, Anna,

In your grave now,

Under a snow-sky,

You lie there now.

Worlds pass away with these tender, tough-minded women who gave us so much of their ferocious loyalty, their strength.

11. "Do Take Muriel Out"

Stevie would be next. The film makes it seem as if Stevie's death and her aunt's were widely separated by a span of years, but in fact Stevie followed her aunt into the ground just three years later. So we enter the final movement of the film, its last act.