Thread by @megelison

I have had Some Cocktails and I’m about to live tweet the new #Rebecca #RebeccaNetflix.

I am intimately familiar with the text, and the Hitchcock version.

Sing along if you know the words.

Alright, they had the good sense to keep the best first line in all of literature. And we open on the menace of the sea. Not bad.

Ann Dowd is better than we deserve as Mrs. Van Hopper.

Maxim DeWinter is in a Dick Tracy yellow horror of a suit. Not mustard. It’s a nightmare.

The painful difference in class between the MC and the people she’s with is the real star of the first act, and I’m here for it. They won’t seat her in the dining room. She wears cheap perfume. They talk about her like she can’t hear.

Listen, any woman who orders a dozen oysters for breakfast can have the keys to my famous country estate. 🦪

Unfff DeWinter’s Bentley. Ok this might be wealth porn.

It’s gold ffs. And we have our first brush with danger on the road. And she gets to drive it! But Hammer is dull and completely without sexual magnetism. Tall is not a personality, folks.

A book of Love Poetry inscribed from Rebecca, first time we see her name outside of the titles. Murderous penmanship.

The MC’s clothes are poorly chosen and shorty looking, which serves the story. But I’m hoping to see a BIG SHIFT when she marries.

He’s building a sandsomething on her bare back. Is this meant to be sensual? Broody dudes are supposed to be hot. Trust me; I’ve run down a few in my time. Hammer can’t do it. He’s dull as rich dishwater.

More like Minimum DeWinter. #RebeccaNetflix

Yeah they’re having a painfully awkward sexytime on the beach and even the cinematographer isn’t buying. This is bloodless. But I guess he’s despoiled her and now they must marry. Fait accompli me down the aisle 🤷🏻‍♀️

Ann Dowd turns cruel like nobody else. Shaming the luckless girl for her striving to escape her poverty. Like a striking serpent.

He proposes and she hears a job offer. Honey, you’re not wrong.

Her panic at being left alone with her boss is so subtle, so infantilizing. And here again we have a mention of Rebecca. As a ghost. 👻

Ooh minor key folk song take my pagan ass AWAY. And finally we see Manderley. And she tries to shake hands with the help. It wrings my heart.

Here’s the star of the show: Mrs. Danvers. Dour and dry as a ghoul. Our heroine is humbled before her at once.

The yellow suit is back. Christ.

The scale of Manderley is immense. She’s dwarfed in every frame, her floral prints tiny and girlish against the dark armored everything.

Danvers’ mentions of The Late Mrs. DeWinter are taut and strained. There is a specter haunting Manderley...

The dread that settles over our MC is suffocating. She dreams of Rebecca, never having seen her. A little psychic real estate deal; both DuMaurier and Jackson pull that trick. And the Brontës, but let’s not spoil my greyhound here.

Sleepwalking leads us into the forbidden west wing. The Second Mrs. DeWinter is still wearing the scholarship to the good boarding school fall collection. Perhap an enterprising governess will knife up the drapes for her.

How do these litle dogs seem so sinister? Why are they watching these two cold cream cheese popsicles bone in an armchair? Why do they growl at nothing? Can they smell poverty?

First blood: the MC smashed a porcelain knickknack and hid the pieces like a naughty child. I guess that’s one way to symbolize the loss of virginity. Or maybe Manderley likes blood as a sauce.

Bitch if I marry you and you expect me to use your late wife’s monogrammed brushes, perhaps they could be cleaned first?

Whyyyy does she want to fuck him all the time? Has she never seen a man before? Can someone get a ouija board and bring me Sir Laurence Olivier?

At last we return to the erotic yet treacherous sea. Perfect opportunity for DeWinter to yell at his young wife for no reason. Fear not: this only increases her ardor.

We stan a sinister mumuration of swallows, though. Excellent use of the natural spooks of the rocky coast.

Nobody. Would want. To marry. This rude. Dismissive. Sexless. Secretive. Dickbagel. Idgaf what his net worth is. What a grating bore.

Rebecca haunts our MC. Our MC, overwhelmed, has a stompy fit about it. That’s... A Choice.

Rebecca has a pic of a hot mustachioed sidepiece in her seaside cottage and I cannot blame her.

Finally finally we’re in Rebecca’s rooms. Vanity, good taste, monogrammed everything. And here comes the film’s best, gayest moment.

Kristin Scott Thomas has it just right. She takes on the voice of the lost beloved. Reenacting the moments she can’t stop reliving. Refusing to let the woman go, keeping the house haunted with every breath in her body.

Ah, but they cut it too short! What of her gait? Her shoe size? Her taste. Her elegance. What of taking the Second Mrs. DeWinter’s hand and forcing her to touch the furs and gowns? Why cram the heart of the thing into such a small box?

Jack isn’t smarmy enough. There’s meant to be a venal threat here; he’s behind her in the saddle, telling her to squeeze with her thighs. No heat, no charge. How are so many pretty people so utterly without a hint of horn?

Oh goody now Maxim is yelling at her like an angry father. Cheap string toy depicting a caged bird. Did they teach you all this symbolism in film school? It’s about a subtle as a pastry tube to the mouth.

Danvers is enlisting the sympathy of the MC and attempting to teambuild. The scene is clunky and I assume setting us up for betrayal/reversal later? It doesn’t deepen the relationship; we get no new information. Blanvers.

Ok yes now they’re a team so that Danvers can do a villainy more efficiently. If they’d written itsi that their shared vulnerability was more real and not a layer of icing, it would have worked better. More starlings. More wooden sexual tension.

Who is out here making these obvi af soundtrack choices? Driving thunderstorm before a party = Pennies from Heaven. Did you just google “rain songs” and click on the first one?

Big reveal of her in the haunted costume. Tight focus on Minimum’s face and he can’t sell it. At all. Is he horrified, or did he just overhear a slightly off-color joke?

“His face!” She sobs, trying to recover.

What face? It’s Ike pareidolia in plywood.

Her replacement dress is a pajama flavored nightmare about social exclusion you had in seventh grade. The housekeeper is better dressed.

Folk music is back! Just in time to rescue a poorly managed revelry-turns-sinister sequence. This version reaches for stylism in places where it makes no sense. It’s all realism until we run out of ideas!

Ok the denouement after the party makes clear that the setup scene between MC and Danvers was a late addition. Possibly added in reshoots. The arc is deteriorating. The novel hands this to you on a silver bloodstained platter, folks. The author trusted us. Why can’t you?

Armie’s big moment! Minimum’s confession! He’s done a murder. He’s suicidal. He’s full of loathing. This means he is performing with .2 mm more brow furrowing than before, and breathing harder. Imagine if he’d broken through all this sterility. Imagine if he’d shown a true face.

In the book, this goes off like a bomb. In this adaptation the big reveal goes off like a fish farting through seawater.

Mark Lewis Jones, I’ll watch you in anything.

Our MC is coaching DeWinter on how to testify. That makes sense since she’s afraid to speak to the staff in her own home and can’t cope with pressure of any kind and folds like a babychild before any and all pressures.

Also makes sense that she’s prepared to deal with blackmail and bribery, since she’s never had any money or power and is accustomed to none of this.

There’s a version of this story that focuses on the turbulent emotional labors performed by the household staff of the very rich, and their revenge on their masters. Danvers could be heel turned working class hero, avenging a lover killed by her husband. I’d watch that.

Ugh the whole foundation of this house shudders under the misapplied pressure to become a procedural in the third act. Gothic horror cannot be tamed by cops and lawyers. Don’t bring a gun to the ghostfight.

This has been managed to give our heroine some last minute agency and a chance to save the day. Or to try. The day doesn’t really need saving. DuMaurier is no sap. We were doomed from the start.

The Second Mrs. DeWinter has grown and changed and matured and gained impossible skills in the last 20 minutes. And the man who wanted to marry a giddy child hates her for it. Ah, the breeding pair reunited!

But Danvers has other plans. She strikes at them in the most vulnerable place for the rich: their real estate. 🔥

Her parting words are the closest we’ve come to the Big Gay Confession we’ve been hoping for. A true lesbian death, that plunging defiant into the sea.

The final scene is inexplicable. Turgid. Saccharine. Corrosive to the tone. Belonging to another film. Grafted on from some other tree entirely. Mystifying. Unsatisfying in the extreme, as if a bird shit in your mouth as you laughed. #RebeccaNetflix

This has been my live tweet. Roll credits and get me Hitchcock on the timephone.