The Clocks of The House with a Clock in its Walls

Clocks are seemingly mundane objects, and always seem to seamlessly blend into the background of every setting. But what happens when we start paying attention? The endless variations of brands, structures, and histories of clocks can be very telling. In The House With a Clock in its Walls, John Bellairs starts the book off with a distinct description of a gold pocket watch with a paper clip chain dangling out of Uncle Jonathan’s pocket. This seemingly trivial detail is actually a significant clue to Uncle Jonathan’s quaint character. His personality is an important catalyst for many events that will take place, and therefore characterizing him in this way so early on in the book is very important. He is a combination of refined and yet sloppy, with amazing taste and also a haphazard mysteriousness. He has a radical unpredictability, which is later also reflected in his home. Located atop a bell tower and glowing bright over the Main Street of New Zebedee, the next clock puts Uncle Jonathan in a trance.

“The arches of the belfry made a howling mouth and two gaping eyes; below the mouth was a large, glowing clock face with iron numerals.” This clock, presiding over the town square with a mysterious grandeur, brings with it a reaction from Uncle Jonathan that launches the beginning of a series of curious events. Following this clock comes the first clock Lewis sees upon entering the mansion, which “cleared its throat with a whirr and started to chime midnight”. This is the first of a series of clock sounds rooting Lewis’s realization of Uncle Jonathan’s obsession with clocks. Both are also portrayed in a way that makes them seem less like objects and more like houses themselves. This adds to their value and importance within the book.

Two mantle clocks and a grandfather clock later, and after a description of a cherrywood clock with columns of mercury as weights, Bellairs moves on to describe another one of Lewis’s personal clocks, “a new Westclox bedside clock.” Lewis watched as its “luminous hands […] crept toward midnight”. This is a subtle contribution to his sheltered and timid personality. This is Bellairs’s indirect way of showing the readers just who Lewis Barnavelt is, and this is somehow caught when we learn that his little clock is brand new. He has recently lost both of his parents in a car accident, has moved to Michigan from Wisconsin, and we can imagine the small comforts that he so needs. After a mundane description of “an electric clock” on the kitchen wall belonging to Mrs. Izard, in her temporary home, the audience is finally introduced to the infamous Clock in the Walls. The endless buildup and anticipation of this unveiling comes to an anticlimactic end as Bellairs finally reveals a “plain, old, Waterbury eight-day clock” hidden deep in the House’s cellars, behind a false coal chute door. Lewis heroically smashes it to pieces on the ground.

So, who was the genius who created this whimsical hero? John Bellairs was a college professor at Jesuit and Augustian colleges, matriculated at University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. It was as a professor that he further nurtured his skill and passion for writing, and where he developed endearing characters such as Lewis and Jonathan Barnavelt in The House With a Clock in Its Walls. Even though Bellairs was the author of this captivating novel, this book would not have been complete without a collection of wonderful drawings completed by none other than Edward Gorey. Known for his heavy-handed yet refined illustrations drawn in dark ink, Gorey rose to the top starting with an impressive education at Harvard University. He was a well-rounded artist, designing Broadway sets such as Dracula, illustrating for PBS’s Mystery, and working for art publisher Doubleday. Starting with this novel, Gorey and Bellairs both broke the bonds of what young adult horror traditionally was.

The vibrant illustrations of Gorey and the eloquent writing of Bellairs fit hand in hand, each cultivating the other in a multitude of ways. The mystery and horror aspects of the mansion and of the supernatural translate flawlessly into Gorey’s illustrations, emphasized with a dark sheen over the drawings that stems from his unique technique. Bellairs’s descriptions of the house’s gothic and Victorian decorum and structure are perfectly depicted by Gorey’s drawings, his art style fitting right in with the action images he portrays.

This September, the long-anticipated film adaptation to John Bellairs’s classic novel, The House With a Clock in its Walls was released by Amblin Entertainment. The story follows a young and virtuous boy called Lewis Barnavelt in his journey in exploring magic with his Uncle, Jonathan. There were many lovers of the book who couldn’t wait to see their favorite characters depicted on screen, establishing tremendous buildup and excitement about what is known as Bellairsia. However, many defining elements of the book were found missing in the movie, including not only the house itself, but many of the endearing characters that the fanbase had grown to love.

In the movie, the house is a large, multi-story mansion with high ceilings and stained-glass windows. Although it was large, the movie-set house seemed cramped. The house was full not in the sense that it was decorated, but that it was cluttered with an endless supply of Uncle Jonathan’s furniture and belongings. The wallpaper and furnishings appear old fashioned, appropriate for the supposed time period. The house as well as its clutter were generally unsystematic, almost as if the production designer’s budget was too large. Overall, other than its tremendous clutter, size, and the rooms (unmentioned in the book) containing masses of mannequins, freak show paraphernalia and doodads, the house was depicted fairly in structure, architecture, and layout.

Seeing this display of detailed clutter makes me wonder how much time its production designer, Jon Hutman, spent reading the book. It seems to me that he picked up only on the surface disarray of the house, missing the methodical significance of each item, carefully devised by Bellairs. Did Hutman recognize the value of the house as created by Bellairs, and every component of it? Did Hutman use the book to discover what he was capable of reproducing, or did he follow his own ideas? Did he draw any inspiration from the beautiful gothic and Victorian influences in the house within Bellairs’s descriptions and Gorey’s illustrations? Hutman’s haphazard design of the house missed the mark: the house in the film is hardly accurate.

The house itself is not the only unrecognizable component of the movie. Our beloved Lewis Barnavelt, sweet and vulnerable, was replaced in the movie by an arrogant, showy knockoff. This transformation can be attributed to one thing: casting. The actor, Owen Vaccaro, was simply miscast. Not overweight in the least, and having a bland emotional palette, the actor seemed like Harry Potter’s American cousin. One of the biggest changes made in the movie was that Lewis is able to perform magic, even pranking his nemesis at school, causing the water fountain to splash him. This type of school-for-wizard’s trope is nonexistent in the book. This gave Lewis a shallow character that makes him seem less of the worried, belittled character that so defined him in the book. This unnecessary change is overcompensated with an overly-exaggerated nerdy persona also accentuated in the movie, which made him seem still more arrogantly intelligent than timid and run down. The movie also fails to build up to Lewis’s big hero moment in the end, by giving him more power throughout the rising action. Giving Lewis this power, getting back at bullies and completing menial tasks (he snaps his fingers in the morning and his bed makes itself?), makes it far less impressive to the viewer when he finally becomes the world’s savior in the end. Giving Lewis the power of magic ended up not only taking away the wonderful aspects of Lewis Barnavelt, but also the individual aspects of Bellairs’s storyline, smothering it in an overused, unoriginal way. To say that the movie was inaccurate in its portrayal of Lewis Barnavelt would be an understatement.

One of the major things setting John Bellairs’s books apart from any other are his distinct illustrations by illustrator Edward Gorey. In fact, Gorey is almost considered an essential part to Bellairs’s impact as a writer, and while one might have hoped to see some influences of these drawings in the movie, they were vividly absent. This, again, turned Bellairs’s interesting, one-of-a-kind story into just another mass-produced, unoriginal movie with no individuality.