Editorials
Protest: Does “Penny Dreadful” Really Belong to Eva Green?
When Showtime’s deliciously sensual and morbidly horrifying cult show “Penny Dreadful” returned for a second season in May, Entertainment Weekly made the statement, “’Penny Dreadful’ belongs to Eva Green.” It was a bold statement. So I’m here, a month later, to make an even bolder statement. “’Penny Dreadful’ belongs to Billie Piper.”
Don’t get me wrong, please don’t misunderstand: Eva Green is a rare gem, a magnificent sight to watch and not just because she’s basically the most beautiful woman on earth, but because she commands the screen and those sitting on the other side of it. But there’s someone else who lurked in the background of season one who’s pushed her way through to the foreground in season two as a major player and a driving force behind all that is emotional, beautiful, innocent, terrifying, and puzzling about “Penny Dreadful.”
Brona Croft.
Piper, who plays Brona/Lily Frankenstein, channels something on the show that no other character has channeled for me, a pure sense of heart and soul. The only other character that comes close to this is Caliban, but he also has his typical Frankenstein’s Monster anger issues. There was one character that also channeled what Piper brings to “Penny Dreadful” but he was killed in the second episode of season one: Proteus. It seems clear to me that the show wanted to make this correlation between Brona Croft’s pure soul and Proteus’ similar soul during the scene where they first met. At the time, it felt like nothing, looking back, now that Brona is Lily and has all of the attributes of Proteus, it feels very monumental.
Proteus: “Enjoy the fairy lights.”
Brona: “I always do.”
As Brona, Piper played a rough-around-the-edges, but intensely sweet and giving tortured soul. Still portraying one of the loveliest characters on the show. As Lily, she carries all the attributes of Mary Shelley’s famous Monster minus the “I’m going to murder everyone you love if you don’t do what I say” part. She exhibits trust, love, pureness, intelligence, loneliness, and a charming heart of gold. She is essentially everything that Vanessa Ives is not.
I’m not purporting that the show doesn’t belong to Eva Green because she isn’t pure at heart. But what I think is going to happen is that Lily is about to steal the show. She’s about to become one of the main reasons people watch it and a favorite character to boot. I think this fact is becoming increasingly clear to viewers, but what was not so clear is that she’s been stealing our hearts since the beginning of season one.
She was captivating when she so boldly came on to Ethan, her excitement and wonder at the theatre was absolutely child-like and delightful, her appreciation of the city on her first night out with Ethan could teach us all a lesson in gratitude, and when she tried to push Ethan away because of her own insecurities, she slayed us. These subtle scenes that didn’t seem to play too much of a part in the grand scheme of “Penny Dreadful’s” first season plot, were toying with our subconscious, preparing us for the second season and her return as Lily Frankenstein.
All this in addition to the fact that she channels a new take on Mary Shelley’s Monster. She is, as I’ve previously mentioned, a completely pure and charming version of the classic Monster. But she will also be (what I am completely assuming) a very feminist version, one that Shelley would be so proud of. Ives challenges the patriarchy all the time, it’s in her blood, she practically is the patriarchy. So it doesn’t make as much of an impact on the viewer. But Lily is learning things as a grown adult female that she wasn’t able to learn as she grew up, because she didn’t grow up, she popped into existence and now she has to figure out how to be a female in a dominant, patriarchal society. This is something viewers need right now, especially now. We look at Ives and think, “What a badass female! She is completely respected along with these men; they admire her, they need her. She’s such a great example for females!” And we’re not wrong… But with Lily, we will see the process. We will watch her transform and become the exact thing that we all want in modern day society. Watching that transformation, in my opinion, will be much more powerful than just seeing it already developed in Ives.
“Penny Dreadful” is a dark and dreary show without much to hope for (in the best way possible, it is horror after all). While the evil characters and the characters that sit somewhere between good and evil are absolutely necessary, there has to be a light. There has to be something to guide us through to the end. If not, we lose hope and the show starts to feel daunting. Brona was, and Lily is, that light.
Postscript: Not to mention, Lily is going to steal all of the men’s hearts and this is going to add such a sexy, lovely, and energizing element to the show!
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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