The Spirit of the Beehive

A couple of years ago, my clinical supervisor recommended The Spirit of the Beehive. True to form, only two years and three clinical supervisors later, I finally took the recommendation.

In fact, I might have forgotten about the film altogether were it not for the fact that bees have been a recurring theme in my reading lately. It started when I re-read that wonderful little book Chabon wrote in which he imagined Sherlock Holmes as an old man who has retired to keep bees. Chabon wrote eloquently of bees and made a life spent as a beekeeper sound idyllic. It reminded me of a short story I read, a very long time ago (I was 10, so 23 years), about an old man who kept bees and who was also, secretly, a bee himself.* Then, finally, I was reading some short stories a friend wrote in which he alluded to the old legend that as an infant Pindar was fed honey in his crib by bees, foreshadowing his skill at spinning honeyed words into sweet, languid passages. This concatenation of apian allusions finally jogged my memory and I remembered that I'd always meant to watch this old Spanish movie in which bees and Frankenstein's monster (or his ghost, or the idea of his ghost) were important characters.

Incidentally: By the time the clinical who recommended it had left, he and I were very much at odds, so if the film turned out to be terrible I wouldn't have been awfully disappointed.

Fifteen minutes into The Spirit of the Beehive, I was already fascianted. From its palette of autumnal yellows and oranges to its exquisitely decaying architecture (Spain, 1940something, immediately after the civil war, in the first days of Franco's ascendancy), the film is visually arresting. Set against laconic imagery (fallow fields, crumbling wells, winding roads, a lazy cat with brilliant green eyes) the only lively things in Spain after the war seem to be the children and the bees. The kids live in a world of their own, largely disconnected from the complacency and ennui of their parents and teachers.

One of the children, Ana, a playful but sad little girl, becomes enraptured by James Whale's adaptation of Frankenstein and comes to believe that a deserter from the routed Republican army is the spirit of the monster from the film. Her sister has told her a ghost story about the monster's ghost living on abandoned property near their home, and Ana takes the tale to heart. Disconnected from both her parents and the other children, Ana forms a bond with the soldier, who is soon discovered and executed by the government police. In the end the strange little girl is again alone in her parents' house, invoking the spirit of the monster which she believes must still be out there, even if the soldier himself has been executed, since spirits do not have bodies and can never really be harmed.

The film is pretty short (about 90 minutes). There is very little action onscreen and nobody says too much. Two little girls live in a big, crumbling house with their parents, who don't really talk to each other. The mother writes letters to a distant lover, while the father tends to his bees. Ana watches movies and plays with her sister. Her sister isn't evil but can be cruel--she squeezes the cat until, despite its lazy good nature it claws her just to get away, and she plays mean jokes on Ana--mostly because she wants desperately to shock someone or something into lifelikeness. Ana fixates on the ghost of a movie monster because, like her parents and her sister and everyone around her, she's locked in her own private world that she wants desperately to superimpose upon the dying, decaying, outer world.

F.H. Bradley said once (I can't remember exactly how he put it) that everyone is in their own prison and that everyone, in looking for the key to their cell, only manages to confirm that they're in prison. Spirit of the Beehive is both somber and beautiful. It shows lost, isolated people who try to cope with their own private prisons. It's sad and beautiful to watch the way they try to touch each other. Despite the despondency, the film ends by holding out a slender, pale prospect of redemption. Ana has not transcended nor escaped--she remains locked in the same patterns and delusions as ever. But she still wants to connect to something outside herself, more affirming than the solemnity and cruelty and apathy that surround her, and she's still undefeated only because she keeps trying.

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* The Bee Man of Orn, a children's story by Frank Stockton