Netflix's first big movie of 2023, The Pale Blue Eye, features Christian Bale as detective Augustus "Gus" Landor, who is brought in to West Point to investigate a series of murders. Landor teams up with Edgar Allen Poe (played by Harry Melling), a young cadet at the institution.
Did it really happen? Was Edgar Allen Poe an amateur detective? No, but Poe did attend West Point, and some credit him with creating the detective story. Here's what's true—and what's not—in The Pale Blue Eye.
The film is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Louis Bayard.
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Bayard writes in an afterword, "There have been a fair number of books with Poe as a character. I chose to catch him at an early stage in his development—when he's a cadet at West Point. He's only twenty. He's published a couple volumes of poetry, but he's largely unknown to the reading public, still struggling to find his voice, still trying to consolidate this very troubled relationship with his foster father, John Allan."
As the New York Times Book Review wrote at the time of its publication, "The regimented, gloomy world of West Point, with all its staring eyes and missing hearts, forms a perfectly plausible back story to the real-life Poe's penchant for tintinnabulation, morbidity and pale young women, first initial L."
Edgar Allen Poe did attend the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1827, claiming he was 22 years old but he was just 18. He matriculated at West Point in March 1830, but quit the following January. Poe was officially dismissed in March 1831.
"Of course this is a work of fiction, although Poe was at West Point," writer-director Scott Cooper told Tudum. "What I’m saying is that it’s these events that occur in our film that shaped his worldview and helped him become the writer that he became—with the recurring themes that deal with the questions of death and the effects of decomposition and reanimation of the dead and mourning; all those are considered part of his dark romanticism."
The Pale Blue Eye is a homage to Poe.
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Poe is widely credited with creating the detective story—his character, C. Auguste Dupin, who appears in the short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," is thought to be the first fictional detective. Therefore, the fictional Detective Landor is following in the footsteps of the genre Poe created.
Watch the Pale Blue Eye on Netflix.
Emily Burack (she/her) is the news writer for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
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