SILENCE AND DARK SHADOWS

For the benefit of one of the characters in this story, I'm waiting until after the sun has gone down before posting it during this year's "Who's On First?" blogAthon.....

One thing I never liked in my tenure as the Toobworld Caretaker has been cast photos.  The actors  are all sitting or standing about and staring directly into the camera.  I could only accept those into the Toobworld Dynamic as photographs of the characters, never as frame grabs of never-seen moments within the show.  

For the most part, that works.  Eventually everybody assembles for group photos - family members, co-workers, classmates, vacationers....  But if they were caught looking at the camera while all of them were supposed to be in the middle of their "real" lives?  I don't think a splainin of "candid - you know, CANDID - photography" is going to cut it.  It's more like all of them were looking at something else.  And yet if we incorporated that into their actual world, it's almost as if they had forgotten that they were all fixated on something at one time.

I think you might see where I'm going with this.....?

Here's a cast photo of the cast of 'Dark Shadows':

The residents of Collinsport, Maine, are all arranged as though they were at a cocktail party held in the Collinwood mansion.  However, this photograph had to be taken at some point between June 27, 1966 to April 2, 1971, when all of the actors pictured were still involved with the show.  But if that's the case, we can't accept it as being a picture of the characters.....

From Wikipedia:

A vampire's image cannot be captured with analogue cameras containing silver emulsion in the film; digital cameras are able to capture an image because they do not use silver emulsion. [Wikipedia]

Although the concept of digital cameras had been around since 1961, and got a boost from Texas Instruments in 1972, the technology was never there to make it viable for the consumer market.  And so unless the cameraman in this case had come from the Future via the Para-Terra timeline, there was no way Barnabas could show up in the picture.  It would not be until the new millennium when digital cameras replaced those which depended on film stock.

But what if we're not meant to consider this as a photo of the characters?  Instead, why not think of the camera as being the point of view perspective for somebody else, and all of the assembled characters are staring at him... at her....

Or staring at it?

From Wikipedia:

In the case of the Silence, their existence is a secret because anyone who sees them immediately forgets about them after looking away, but retains suggestions made to them by the Silence. This allows them to have a pervasive influence across human history while being difficult to locate or resist.

What if everybody was staring at one of the Silence, who had inveigled its way into the mansion in order to keep tabs on the vampire Barnabas?  

But as you can see, all of them are smiling.  None of them are in the least bit afraid of the alien observer.  That's because members of the Collins family are made of sterner stuff, after everything which they've gone through in their daily lives.  And it's likely that Barnabas was calling the shots; keeping them all calm as he drew upon the alien's own powers to cast a "spell" of suggestion over them to show their lack of fear in its presence.

So this isn't a splainin which could work for every "natural" pose cast photo, but in this case, I think it works, mate!

BCnU!