Beautiful Darkness

A Story for Children (Perhaps)

Little creatures with big eyes are cute. Puppies, kittens, bush babies, sugar gliders – they elicit our protective instincts towards the vulnerable and child-like. Insects and arachnids on the other hand, despite being little and often having big eyes, are not considered cute by most people. There is a reason why in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) the squirming, chittering insect world is used as a symbol for the dark recesses of the unconscious mind.

Fabien Vehlmann, Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset’s 2018 Eisner Award nominated graphic novel picture book Beautiful Darkness (Jolies Ténèbres in its original French) operates at the precise intersection between the adorable and the repulsive. The fact that it stages such a stark juxtaposition between the whimsical and macabre has made the comic prime material for YouTube ‘Explainer’ videos like ‘This Adorable Comic Has a DARK Secret’ and ‘This Adorable Comic Made Me Sick to My Stomach’. Such videos are redundant, however, since Pommepuy and Cosset (credited together under the pen name Kerascoët) provide a full-page spread depicting the grey, rain-lashed corpse of a small girl even before the title drop. In a more reflective video essay, Ghost Hoarder posits that much of the existential horror of the book drives from the contrast between the human-sized world of the mysterious corpse and the teeny-tiny size of the comic’s characters. For you see, out of the girl’s eyes, mouth and nostrils tumbles a parade of miniature humanoid figures...

Some of these look like elegant fairies from a Victorian children’s book; others look more like the spriggedly sprites from a Hayao Miyazaki or Tove Jansson forest scene. Some have wiggly noodle arms; others have doughy, squishy heads and stumpy features. They all look immediately distinctive and loveable, though faintly amoeba-like or protoplasmic, as if newly formed.

The book never defines who or what these characters are in any literal sense. They might be fantastical woodland creatures; they might be anthropomorphised grubs feeding on the corpse of the little girl; they could be characters she dreamed up when she was alive; perhaps they are facets of her personality or psyche. They are simultaneously of-a-piece with the recognisable creatures and minibeasts of the countryside – mice, ants, ladybirds, wasps, flies, sparrows, robins – which are painted by Kerascoët in gorgeous, delicate watercolours – and distinctive from them.

Three characters that stand out all look like avatars for – or variants upon – the central blonde-haired dead little girl. Aurora, who we meet first, is a doe-eyed princess in a blue polka-dot dress who seems keen to rally together the crew of lil’ misfits into some kind of functional civilisation. Zelie, larger than most of the other characters, has long golden tresses and somewhat resembles Titania in Jiří Trnka’s 1959 stop-motion adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské). At first she is a needy, self-pitying character who begs Aurora for help against the perceived threat of a beetle; later, she is revealed as merciless and tyrannical, exploiting others as she is able. Gizmo, the third character, looks like a wild-eyed Kewpie doll, hulking and feral. She only speaks in snatches and seems terrified to leave the cavernous comforts of the girl’s corpse, hunkering down in her skull when the others have long since left to explore the woods (or, at least, the grass surrounding the little girl’s body).

Broadly speaking, Gizmo might be taken to be the girl’s ID, since she seems driven by simple “primitive” desires; Zelie would be the calculating ego, constantly weighing up her options and playing social games; while Aurora would be the superego, engaged in the project of civilisation. It is hard to know for certain whether that was Vehlmann’s (or Pommepuy’s) intention in writing the characters, but MoFace in her video highlights the clue that Aurora’s name is seemingly the same as that of the little girl, judging by the cover of her school notebook. Indeed, if Beautiful Darkness can be said to have a central protagonist, it is Princess Aurora, who is the figure the comic returns to most consistently. The comic largely traces Aurora’s growing disillusionment as she is exposed to the amorality of her fellow creatures. Similarly gentle and sympathetic figures like the lithe, one-eyed Timothy, are treated ruthlessly by the likes of Zelie. Other mild-manner characters like Sally (a personal favourite, whose slowly-escalating allergic reaction to a plant is used as a source of mordantly humorous body horror) are either too naïve or too weak-willed to resist the evil machinations of the likes of the slippery, sycophantic Plim, who switches his allegiance from Aurora to Zelie midway through the book.

The only figure whose inclusion might be seen to temper the cynicism of the narrative is a fourth character who could be the symbolic embodiment of the woman that the real Aurora, the dead little girl, never had the chance to grow up to be. Jane somewhat resembles Merida in Pixar’s Brave (2012) and unlike the other characters, looks like a full-grown woman rather than a child or adolescent. She wears a long red dress and appears almost entirely self-sufficient, only enlisting Aurora’s help to assist her in cutting the wings of a robin in order to tame it. Jane’s fate in the comic is somewhat uncertain, but she seems to stand as an inspirational figure for Aurora, able to survive in a world that is painted as truly red in tooth and claw.

Several reviews of Beautiful Darkness – those by Matthew Meylikhov, Vida Cruz-Borja and John Seven – explicitly compare the graphic novel to William Golding’s 1954 novella Lord of the Flies due to the fact that both depict an isolated group’s quick descent into savagery (rather than ascent into civilisation). However, I appreciate that Seven notes in his review for The Comics Journal that the comic is “like the Borrowers found themselves stranded in Lord of the Flies, without either canceling (sic.) out the essence of the other”. Likewise, Meylikhov praises the book for maintaining a delicate balance throughout between darkness and whimsy. There is a risk when reimagining fairytales – or children’s stories more broadly – for adults that they become edgily, even smugly, grimdark. The makers of Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Red Riding Hood (2011) or Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) – or, indeed, American McGee of American McGee’s Alice (2000) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011) fame – often don’t seem to appreciate that the darkness of the original texts is already apparent to most readers and that their allegorical cloaking is a strength not a weakness. Admittedly, the parts of Beautiful Darkness that don’t focus upon the disillusionment and eventual hardening of Aurora are basically a cavalcade of prettily illustrated horrors – deaths, cruelties and callous betrayals. Vignettes include a tiny ballerina having her throat pecked out while trying to be fed by a bird; children pulling the legs off a ladybird; a prince swallowed by a toad before being regurgitated in semi-liquid form; a girl buried alive in a pencil case; a baby being left to starve to death.

The latter moment is chilling, but like with Scarlett Johansson’s alien doing the same to a baby in Under The Skin (2013), you have the impression that the characters committing the crime don’t have any particular sense that they are engaged in a terrible evil. The child-like, even infantile, amorality of many of the characters in Beautiful Darkness helps to give proceedings a curious weightlessness, which the resemblance of the comic to a children’s picture book helps reinforce. I am reminded again of Blue Velvet, but this time the ending image of the robin with the bug in its mouth. It has been much debated whether this robin symbolises innocence or the corruption of innocence, but I think it is important that the bird belongs to a realm of nature where such categorisations do not apply. The bird eats the bug because of course it does. The pretty bird and the squirming bug belong to the same order and cannot be extricated from one another. To quote some lyrics from The Residents’ album God in Three Persons (1988):

Pain and pleasure are the twins
That, slightly out of focus, spin
Around us till we finally realise
That everything that gives us pleasure
Also gives us pain to measure it by.

In a pairing that at first seems counter-intuitive, Chris Randle compares Beautiful Darkness to the first season of True Detective (2014), ultimately concluding that the comic provides the more comprehensively nihilistic vision. He asserts – Werner Herzog like – that “Nature isn’t a conspiracy of the otherworldly and sinister, nor is it a playground for sprites to frolic underfoot. It simply does not care about us”. However, the lush, almost enchanted visual style of the comic simultaneously belies this apparent emptiness. If Vehlmann and Pommepuy’s writing depicts nature as evil, then Kerascoët’s art present it as a verdant evil that attracts even as it repulses.

Indeed, if the humanoid figures of the graphic novel can be afforded any grace is it due to their enmeshment within nature. Their civilisation is such a grotesquely hypocritical sham, that moments of pure survivalism are rendered surprisingly pure and unsullied by comparison. Nature is brutal, but it does not dissemble.

The reader is presented with two starkly contrasting visions of Aurora near the comic’s end. In the first, Aurora chides a mouse for following its natural instincts – crossly criticising it using the euphemistic language of civilisation – before angrily poking out its eyes. This is the superego revealed as a prissily sadistic agent of control.

Later, having turned her back on civilisation, Aurora stares directly at the reader – feral – clad in the fur of the skinned mouse, ready to burn her enemies to dust without dissemblance or apology.

It is clear which version of Aurora the artists feel little girls need to grow up to be to survive in this harsh, amoral universe. With civilisational and environmental collapse escalating yearly, Beautiful Darkness looks increasingly like the instructional manual for children that fairytales were originally intended as.