Nowhere is that more clear than in one of the scenes between the adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) and the ghost of Dick Hallorann, played by the great Carl Lumbly here. Riffing off the metaphor of hunger that the bitter Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) applied to his own family, Dick talks about the world as “a hungry place.” But instead of speaking out of resentment, Dick uses the world’s hunger to encourage Danny to help others, to use his gift to make the world a little less ravenous.
We Can’t Count on the Past (The Haunting of Bly Manor, 2020)
An adaptation of the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Bly Manor veers away from the horror of Flanagan’s other works and fully embraces openhearted drama. It’s fitting then that the best monologue in the series is really two monologues that become something of a dialogue, focusing on Bly Manor’s prim and proper housekeeper Mrs. Grose (T’Nia Miller) and the affable cook Owen Sharma (Rahul Kohli). Owen makes his attraction to Mrs. Grose known from the beginning, but the housekeeper is slow to reciprocate, paused by the memory of her abusive late husband and too practical to fully accept the dreamy Owen’s plan to go to Paris.
In the incredible fifth episode “The Altar of the Dead,” directed by Liam Gavin and written by Laurie Penny, we see what appear to be a series of flashbacks in Mrs. Grose’s life, including her first meeting to interview Owen. It’s there that Owen shares his experiences of caring for his dementia-stricken mother, which taught him that “we can’t count on the past.” Owen’s hopeful speech about unreliable memories and Mrs. Grose’s monologue about vulnerability intermingle into a tragic reveal about the latter’s heartbreaking fate.
My. Self. (Midnight Mass, 2021)
The story of a charismatic priest who confuses a vampire for an angel and returns to his island hometown with a renewed sense of mission, Midnight Mass is about both the beauty of faith and its ability to turn us into something monstrous. As the town’s most outspoken skeptic, Erin Green (Kate Siegel) seems like the person with the least to say on the subject of belief. But when she’s asked by her guilt-ridden friend Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) about what happens after death, Erin gives a monologue that includes, yes, scientific fact, but also a moving bit of wonder.
“Myself. My. Self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing, that word, ‘self,’” Erin begins. In place of selfhood, Erin focuses on the material, describing her body as “mostly just empty space … and solid matter,” just “energy vibrating very slowly and there is no me. There never was.”
Erin gives this speech in the final episode, part of a flashback she experiences as she lays dying outside her home, while the rest of the town reels in anguish. They now realize that they’ve been mislead by the charismatic priest Father Hill (Hamish Linklater), who himself mistook a vampire for an angel, and infected his whole town. Erin’s doubt protected her from the fervor that overtook so many, but that doubt made her a pariah.
