For decades, the children of Austin and Susan Huntington Dickinson spent their days running back and forth, envelopes in hand, between their home and that of their aunt Emily. Friends from childhood, Susan and Emily constantly corresponded in letters filled with sisterly affections like, “I love you as dearly, Susie, as when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.” Sisters, schmisters. These guys were clearly lesbians, right?
So say many modern scholars, and so says Madeleine Olnek, director of Wild Nights with Emily (2018). Known for experimental works such as The Foxy Merkins and Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, Olnek was the first filmmaker to tell the story of Emily Dickinson as queer. Rather than a documentary or historical drama, she chose to create a spoofy rom-com. And it really, really works.
The film’s frame is a lecture given to the Ladies Rotary Club Auxiliary by Mabel Loomis Todd, the editor of Emily Dickinson’s posthumously-published poems—and Austin Dickinson’s lover. Referring to Emily as a “dear, sweet, spinster-recluse-poet,” Todd represents historical misinterpretation of Dickinson’s life and work. Olnek uses irony to assert the ridiculousness of scholars labeling Dickinson as a hermit: while Todd laments that Emily would not come out of her room, the audience sees clips of her stepping into the hallway, only to turn back around at the hilariously loud sounds of her brother and his lover having sex.
Olnek’s Emily Dickinson, played by comedian Molly Shannon, is anything but a timid, depressive spinster. She lowers baskets of bread from her window to clamoring neighborhood children. She trips over her skirts as she runs across the grass to avoid being caught in bed with her sister-in-law by her brother. Best of all, she is in on the jokes: as the senile Judge Lord remarks on his fondness for the Brontës’ Wuthering Jane, her furrowed brow and half-open mouth let the audience know that, like us, she finds this man ridiculous.
Susan Ziegler plays Susan Dickinson with a dryness that balances Shannon’s passion. When Emily has an affair with Kate, an out-of-town widow, Susan sits at her window and watches with narrowed eyes as the two women draw their curtains closed. She delivers curt replies to Emily’s later questions about Kate’s sudden departure with a haughty expression, chin turned up and lips turned down, as if Emily’s infidelity has left a sour taste in her mouth.
In one of the film’s final scenes, Ziegler turns serious as she bathes Emily’s corpse. The room dark and her face gaunt, Susan smiles slightly as she tenderly washes Emily’s legs, her feet, her fingertips. The juxtaposition between Emily, head in the clouds, and Susan, feet on the ground, is now literal as the pair says goodbye for the last time. Having spent the last hour laughing, I half-expected Shannon to sit up with a “boo!” The film’s comedic approach, although effective in its argument for Dickinson’s queerness, leaves audiences unprepared to meet her death with solemnity.
Similarly, Olnek follows a montage of Todd and Austin Dickinson’s sexcapades around the Homestead with a depiction of several unidentified characters shin-deep in a pond, sobbing melodramatically as Shannon’s voice recites “I can wade Grief.” Susan, laughing and clad in a green that matches the surrounding trees, sits on a rock with a bottle of liquor in hand. While visually compelling and potentially effective as a standalone interpretation of the “Grief” poem, this scene feels confusing sandwiched between the farcical antics of the rest of the film.
Perhaps, through the tension between rom-com and historical revision, linear narrative and cinematic experiment, Olnek challenges audiences to hold complex truths about Dickinson. True, she wrote like someone intimately familiar with depression and tortured by love. But she also had a wicked sense of humor and a lifelong love for her best friend. Dickinson’s story, weighed down by centuries of misinterpretation, cannot be untangled in a single film. But Wild Nights, light and funny and a delightful watch, is a wonderful start.