Lyme Regis/The Cobb Research

 Lyme Regis and The Cobb have been iconically throughout history in literature and film. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Cobb was used to show power, danger and the drama between the two characters in the film, as the film is about two actors in a film within the film, but they then become intimate in their present life. This shows a disjointed reality and conflicting characters and situations, much like our music video which is why the location fits so perfectly to our idea.

 

The iconic shots of Meryl Streep on The Cobb were definitely something we wanted to recreate and reference in our video. The flowing skirt was also an intentional intertextual reference in our video to this film as Meryl's costume is a long, flowing black coat which was filmed billowing in the wind at the end of The Cobb, a shot in which we attempted to recreate.

The Cobb and Lyme was also used as a location in the TV version of Jane Austen's Persuasion (1995) where it also references the Victorian ideology of the area and Lyme itself. The Lyme Regis museum describes The Cobb as, 'The 16th century Cobb was a miracle of engineering for its time, and described by the Elizabethan chronicler Holinshed as "a great and costly jetty". It required constant maintenance, and in the 1620s Thomas Gerard described how stones to reinforce the Cobb were carried there buoyed up by empty wooden casks.' Therefore, showing that The Cobb is a marvel in British engineering and has many connotations with the literature that was written at these times, such as Thomas Hardy's classic literature.

A drawing of the 16th century Lyme Regis and Cobb





Jane Eyre's book, Persuation, was also influenced by Lyme Regis. She was very fond of the area and in her novel she depicts a girl, Louisa Musgrave, who after a dramatic turn of events, jumps off the Cobb. This perfectly fits to our idea of using the Cobb and it also made the idea of Ava, our female character, jumping off the Cobb a more viable idea due to it being more than about the relationship because it is symbolic and intertexual.