The Blackbird and the Fireflies
THE BLAZING WORLD – a film by Carlson Young – SPOILERS
Josie and Lillie Fink as the young Margaret and Elizabeth Winter
Two decades ago, on a summer’s day in the deep south, Young Margaret Winter endures complementary traumas. She and her identical twin sister Elizabeth are near the pool and are busy being fascinated by a jar of captured fireflies. Margaret is distracted by a noise which turns out to be a blackbird flying into the side of the house. The bird is beyond repair, but while there, Margaret peeks through the window and witnesses a violent altercation between her parents. By the time she returns to her spot by the pool, her sister has drowned.
Lained (Udo Kier) stands in the corner while Margaret immerses herself in the bath
The story jumps ahead to the present. Margaret gets a phone call from her mother, and finds out that her parents are selling the house and moving away. Her mother asks Margaret to bring her some more ambien the next time she visits. Margaret checks the medicine cabinet, discovers she’s out of ambien, and finds a razor blade. Then she draws a bath and sits in the water.
THE BLAZING WORLD is a single character story. Sure, we get to meet a bunch of other characters some of whom are real, but all are shown as aspects of Margaret Winter. The most interesting of these is Lained (Udo Kier), whose name literally means “hidden”, and whose identity remains that for most of the film. Lained defines himself as “the darkest dream in the forest of light”, and occasionally offers insights into the story and other characters. He says of Margaret’s parents: “Your father drank to forget. Your mother cried to remember.”
Soko as Margo the Fortune Teller. Soko performs the song “Oh, To Be A Rainbow” from her 2020 album “Feel Feelings“
Then there’s Dr. Cruz (Liz Mikel), a TV personality with new-age tendencies. Dr. Cruz (in Margaret’s mind at least) is cynical about her audience and skeptical of the value of her own work. Citing Rosicrucian and Aurobindonian thought as reference, Cruz offers this thought: “Thoughts of consciousness are not a byproduct of brain functioning, but have their own objective reality independent of the physical.”
Margaret contacts Blake (John Karna), an old acquaintance who (she hears from her mother) has sought treatment for his “problems”. His problems were possibly alcohol related and might persist, because he and Margaret get together at a bar called “The Woods” which has almost no patrons and one very un-busy bartender. Several old friends turn up including Margot (Soko) who gives Margaret a Tarot reading and tells her “You’ve had a huge emotional loss and everything that comes after that is just a chain reaction of that early trauma. Be careful, ok? If you spend too much time in the spiritual realm, you might not be able to come back.” (The name Margot is a French variation of Margaret.)
Margaret’s mother Alice blocking the view of one of the figures in the painting behind.
When Margaret returns to her parents’ house, she has an awkward conversation with her mother (Alice, played by Vinessa Shaw) at the dinner table. Behind Alice is a large (and fairly well-known) painting of the French Royal Family in 1782. The painting is seen in mirror image, and only one of the people in it is blocked from view by Alice. The one we cannot see is Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, the oldest child of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
The house the elder Winters are selling has two sets of three spherical lights in the front yard, each resembling three golden spheres of a pawnshop.
In her childhood bedroom, Margaret has a copy of Tolkien’s “The Sillmarillion“. In that book, the Silmarils were gems made from the essence of the Two Trees of Valinor, and are an excellent parallel with the fireflies collected by the twins (near an impressively large tree) just before the death of Elizabeth. The three jewels are like the four keys Margaret must locate in the quest she undertakes. A drawing on the fridge in the Winter’s kitchen seems to depict the spot in the desert where Margaret will find one of those keys.
Periodic height measurements of the twins (through 1999) show that Elizabeth is consistently slightly taller than Margaret. It might not be relevant, but Queen Elizabeth was 5’4″ tall and her sister Princess Margaret was 5’1″.
Margaret (Carlson Young) after a desert flower’s bloom opened when she tried to pick it.
The combination to Tom Winter’s safe is 10-29-99, which is also Carlson Young’s birthday. (Tom, played by Dermot Mulroney, is Margaret’s at-times-violent father, and she finds these numbers on a picture of birthday candles.)
In an interview with Sarah Musnicky of Nightmarish Conjurings, director Young was asked about working with composer Isom Innis: “Something that really inspires us both in film scores is this balance between electronic and sort of synthetic and orchestral. And so, we really tried to toe that line and find the balance of those two things. I very much wrote the script to these two pieces of Tchaikovsky, and then the Panda Bear song that comes in at the end…And then, everything in between, the whole thing feels very theatrical and very balletic, and I wanted it to feel like a ballet. Every emotion is conveyed in the score. We were looking at the score like a character in the film. It wasn’t an accent. It was a character.”