The Company of Wolves

So, the lupine doll with his peasant dress and his crystal ball reminded me so strongly of The Company of Wolves that I had to see the film again.

It’s a film that could not be made today because its strange claustrophobic set design, so perfect for Angela Carter’s re-rendering of Little Red Riding Hood as a fairytale agenda that indoctrinates young girls into passive acceptance of their societal roles, would almost certainly be done as CGI.

CGI looks real. But The Company of Wolves does not look real: It looks like a village a child made from old toys and dusty furniture in somebody’s attic; its boundaries expand and contract as a child’s imagination expands and contracts. And that’s its strength.

I mean – you could certainly remake The Company of Wolves with more persuasive CGI. But then it would be immersive. You would lose that strange duality of watching something that is not quite real but at the same time is terrifyingly real. You would submit entirely to Rosaleen’s dream life, and lose the tantalizing sense of being simultaneously within it and without it.

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The film’s other strength is its storytelling.

The Company of Wolves is a collection of narratives that are contained within one another like Chinese boxes. I read the collection the film is based upon – Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber – long before I saw the film, and I do remember that Carter does write stories within stories in the print version of The Company of Wolves, but I think Jordan takes this narrative device several steps further: There are no fewer than seven stories being told both simultaneously and sequentially in this film!

The underlying framing device is the dream within a dream… Nested narratives are the defining characteristics of dreams, far more than surreal imagery – which is why most films get dreaming sequences all wrong. It’s never the distortions of visual imagery that are disturbing in dreams; as a dreamer, you buy into that almost passively. No, what’s disturbing is the way that time becomes unraveled from its chronological sequencing.

The 1965 Polish film The Saragossa Manuscript is the only other film I know of that uses this framing device with any degree of success. Poring through various interviews with Neil Jordan posted on the Internet (which is what I do whenever I find a book or a film that moves me in some deep way), I found that yes, indeedy – Jordan cites The Saragossa Manuscript as an influence on The Company of Wolves. Good catch, go me, etcetera. So I guess I’ll be rewatching The Saragossa Manuscript again some time soon, too – although since it’s a black and white movie with subtitles and I am basically lazy, it will be heavy lifting.




As the set design for The Company of Wolves fascinated me, I did some research on the set designer. A man named Anton Furst. Did Kubrick’s set design for Full Metal Jacket, too, and Tim Burton’s set design for the first neo-noir Batman. In 1991, on the verge of rilly, rilly, rilly huge success in Hollywood, he leapt from the 8th story of a parking garage in LA.

I kinda would like to know more about this.

Like where was the parking garage exactly?

Eventually, I did go to that Country Inn and Suites in Long Island City from whose third story balcony JR leapt back in January. I had a little bunch of sage; I lit it with a BIC lighter bought specially for that purpose. A few people even looked up from their cell phones, wondering what the hell that nutty old lady was doing with that burning thing in her hand.

Fly away, Jayson, I whispered. There’s nothing for you here.