From Adventure to Austerity and Back Again: On ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’

I have lately been reminded of something.

A film, and its importance.

I was feeling down earlier this evening, caught up in one of my far-too-frequent recent melancholy moods. Musing on fiscal matters, as it happens. Which, when one is a writer, is never the smartest of plays.  

Anyhow, I got it into my head that what was needed to rectify this joy-rot was a good, solid, movie-going experience. I felt certain that, should I be able to find the right film, I’d be lifted clear of the doldrums.

Only, an actual movie-going experience was, by the time I hit on this idea, not going to be feasible. Not only was it too late, too cold, and too wet to be travelling anywhere to see one; but going out to see one would only have compounded my aforementioned monetary woes.

So, instead, I plumped for watching something on demand. I wheeled through the action/adventure selection, considering everything from Blood Simple to Snatch to The Hurt Locker to The Outlaw Josey Wales. I spent a good few minutes mulling each option over, but, in the end, I didn’t quite fancy any of them.

In fact, I was beginning to go off the idea altogether. It seemed as though bedtime was approaching, a good couple of hours faster than usual.

Until, that is, I noticed – shunted in and amongst a bunch of wholly dissimilar titles – the 1938 classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood. The kind of film about which it is often said: ‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’ – which seemed as fitting a recipe as any other for a late evening’s reality-break. Indeed, though I hadn’t seen it for a long while, I recalled how I always used to enjoy it when I was younger, and decided to give it a go. At the very least, I was sure it couldn’t make me feel any worse.

After only a handful of minutes, I noted down the following thought: There are few films so excellently and effortlessly entertaining as this early Technicolor marvel.

And then added: There are few films as effortlessly rebellious either.

Already, it was beginning to do what I wanted it to. Furthermore, it was also helping me recall the way I felt when watching such films as a kid.

At the age of six or seven, I felt a kinship with The Adventures of Robin Hood because it seemed to mirror the medieval mischief I got up to with my elder brother and our friends out in our garden or in the neighbouring field. Running around with plastic bows and arrows, or with ones that we’d fashion from sycamore branches and tightly-tied string.

As an adult, I found I was revelling not only in the memories of such times, but also in the newly-noticed anarchic angle, the rebel tone, which I didn’t have to think to understand when I was young. The outlaw aspects of the story and of Flynn’s performance were much clearer. The socio-political underpinnings of that standpoint, I mean.

Indeed, as a child, there is a sense in which outlawry is one’s natural state. Only you don’t notice it so much, because few people bother to clamp down on you so hard with the rules. They do not really apply, as the assumption has long since been made by grown-ups that you’re too young to understand most of the mistakes you might be making. There was a healthy degree of discipline in my upbringing, I should admit, but I was still are free, by and large, to indulge my playfulness, my imagination; I was free to give full heed to my (then) innate sense of adventure.

Such actions do not represent a side, a political/philosophical ethos you have chosen. They are simply actions, tied to goals at once far smaller and far larger than any you’ll encounter in your adult life. You give yourself quests to fulfil in your makebelieve, and then forget them, and so are free and able to repeat them at your leisure. The questing itself is the joy, and it hardly matters, at that age, against whom or what, or for whom or what, you are doing it.

At the age of about six or seven, I understood, I think, The Adventures of Robin Hood on those terms. That is to say, as an extension of my own early adventuring. I knew some of the episodes contained within it from picture books, and probably from the Disney version also, but at the same time they felt fresh; I couldn’t help but take them on their own terms. There was none of this lengthy, rambling analysis. I knew Robin Hood was an outlaw simply because people called him an outlaw. Because he called himself an outlaw. I knew he was a good guy because he was the focus of the film and played by Errol Flynn. I knew he was the good guy because he wins at the end.

Watching it as an adult, such simplicity is, largely, stripped. And yet it remains tremendously escapist and entertaining, despite, or possibly even because, I can now detect layers of discourse I previously was unaware of having overlooked.

Perhaps I have even retained a kinship with it because I, and my social situation, has changed so much. I am no longer free to do exactly as I wish. I am expected, as a full-grown man, to be obedient to the rules and dictums of the society within which I find myself surrounded. To be upstanding, as best I can. To be sensible. And, when the government says something, passes some new law, rolls out some new policy, even though this is a democracy, I am not really expected to say anything in response, to answer back.

Furthermore, I am, difficult and shameful as it can be at times to admit, not in the finest position financially. Which is to say I’m on the dole. And have been for some time. Not for want of trying to find work, nor for want of trying to make money off my writing; but that is, regardless, the way things have gone. There’s a line in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which a character propounds: ‘Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.’ And, being in the position I felt locked in last night, I could fully see where that sentiment came from. It seemed, as I thought on it, to have grown out, spread across the Atlantic, taken hold here. And elsewhere, judging by the global nature of the Occupy protests against that quasi-mythological entity, the ‘One Percent’.

However, as I watched the opening scenes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, I began to reflect instead on the tendency of each generation to assume they’ve experienced the first instance of everything.

It having been so long since I last watched the film, coupled with my fuzziness over what exactly the Hays censorship code prohibited, meant I was unprepared for the way in which it actually begins. Within those first couple of minutes, we see the harsh actions of Prince John’s knights towards the ‘Saxon’ villagers and peasants in Nottingham. They are denied extra food, leniency, comfort. As I watched this, I understood these scenes as austerity measures. Austerity Britain: The Middle Ages Edition.

Rather than Robin Hood, who I always was (even if my brother was Robin Hood as well), I found myself feeling closer, identifying more, at this stage, with them. In particular with a figure in pale blue robes who, after being denied a fairly basic demand by a soldier, waits for the soldier to leave the frame before looking him daggers and spitting into the mud. I watched that and clicked with the sense of curiously impotent anger that figure projected, the vague notion of their being a wrongness he could do nothing to right.

But then, moments later, Robin Hood himself bounds into view, jumping a low-hanging tree branch on his horse, looking every inch the ultimate badass. A feat made all the more impressive given that at least a third of his inches are taken up by bright green tights. And it is the introduction of Robin, in such a way, which ensures that the film stays entertaining. Which lets you know that things will be alright. That the preceding injustices will be addressed, rectified.

As soon as I see him, I can’t help but grin. I grin wildly and my breath is taken a little, because not only does this image return me to the aforementioned simpler, less rule-stricken times. But, having associated myself with the downtrodden, I understand and feel his presence as more heroic also. I understand that heroes are not only heroes because they tend, in films like this, to win, but because they represent a moral/ideological position that people suddenly, desperately need to witness being upheld.

There’s a long line of similar folk-heroic figures peppered like buckshot through the arse cheeks of history. Rebels, poachers, bank robbers, ne’er-do-wells who nevertheless are felt to have done well by a great many people, all in the name of sticking it to The Man. Most of these, however, do seem fairly stuck in their own historical context. Their heroism is defined by the era they were in. As Sam Elliott intones in his introductory monologue in The Big Lebowski, ‘Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place.’ This seems to be a fit description of such folk-heroes as Bonnie and Clyde, the kind of bank robbers most often linked to ideas of Robin Hood-like aspirations.

Indeed, though films have been made about them, and figures like them, decades after their era, these, especially Arthur Penn’s masterful Bonnie and Clyde, come laden with an elegiac tone. The audience is aware of most of the actual facts (not ‘stories’, mind you) about such figures, and so these facts undercut the escapist mythologizing such films might otherwise aim for. The audience knows the era of these characters has passed, and so they will be able to embrace them only fleetingly before their inevitable end. And, when it comes, that end will come with the implicit moral that crime doesn’t pay, and it’ll be back to reality for everyone.

This is not so much the case with The Adventures of Robin Hood. For a few reasons. First off, though, within the film, he is clearly presented as ‘the man for his time and place’, the historical sketchiness, of both film-makers, audience, and, let’s face it, historians themselves, as regards that time and place means that Errol Flynn’s characterisation much more readily transcends such boundaries. Indeed, rather than being an elegiac evocation of a bygone age, and focusing its attentions on mourning the demise of such values as chivalry, etc., the film concentrates on creating a platform through which modern-day grievances can be simultaneously considered, and, through Robin’s eventual triumph, escaped from.

I’ve talked about how I found myself drawing parallels with the ‘Saxon’ situation as laid out in the film and my own, and associating myself with the downtrodden, as it were. But mention should also be made of the actual release date of the film, 1938, which is right at/just after the tail-end of the Great Depression. It is possible that, aside from it being a darn good entertainment and starring Flynn, this timing played a part in its initial success.

Because there is so much more distance between now and the era in which the (hi)story of Robin Hood is set, than there is between now and the 1930’s, say, the former era (at least as it has become enshrined in Western myth and folklore) has become timeless. And, as a result, can return to being timely, well, whenever it pleases.  

Which may go some way towards explaining why it affected me the way it did on latest watching.

The fact that I’d not previously considered the film verdant grounds for criticism may go some way towards explaining why that impact surprised me.

I chose to watch it on a whim, because I fancied a complete diversion from my current personal climate. I had not considered that, in Flynn’s performance, I would find evoked on screen my poorness-pressured person’s patron saint.

And yet, the more I watched, the more I came to think of him as exactly that. He is defiant, courageous in all the ways I want to be but currently aren’t. He carries on as though the rules that are so stringently and virulently enforced are not really there, and, in so doing, overcomes them. He is a slave only to his ideals.

Indeed, he feel like the right man for this moment – for the moment I was having last night, anyhow – precisely because he has been able to not only hang onto those ideals, but act on them, flying in the face of austerity and the tyranny of being told what to do. At one point, he speaks to Maid Marian of being able to offer his men ‘silks for rags, kindness instead of riches, limitless food instead of hunger’, and, whilst in the real world I may be willing to dismiss such promises as empty rhetoric, in the world of this film, it is clear that they are not lies. So I succumb to the sentiment, allow it to lift me.

I was buoyed as well, watching the film, by the fact that Robin has retained an important aspect of one’s childhood makeup. He has hung onto outlawry as a natural state.

As the character progresses on his eponymous adventures, he therefore graduates from peer to inspiration. The trade-off is that I accept my own downgrading, the prohibition of my own adventuring; that I acknowledge the areas in which I lack. But I would still be lacking, even without Flynn’s Robin Hood there to make that jump. Which is why the fact that he is at least there to entertain me makes my position more tolerable.

Performances such as that, and films such as this, facilitate, for ninety-odd minutes, a return to the freedom one used to take for granted. As you grow older, they cease (unless you yourself have taken to wearing bright green tights) to act as a mirror, but become instead a looking glass, a window into the possibility of a better world.

Of course, there is a level on which such films are purely frivolous – the historical content is, as afore-alluded-to, damn-near utterly bunk – designed and intended as nothing more than eye-catching entertainment. But there is another level, both beneath and above that, in which that entertainment serves a deep and gratifying purpose. A purpose made clear when, at the end, you watch the court and the merry men cheer in unison, and feel something inside of you cheer along too.

It is a shame, therefore, that The Adventures of Robin Hood is, indeed, the type of film about which it is often said: ‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’

Because films like this feel important. Not least because they make the watcher, whatever their age, feel important as well.   

'Arbitrage' and Iconoclasm. Or 'How to read (too much into) a movie poster.'

At first, this poster for the upcoming film Arbitrage is quite striking, if standard. It’s Richard Gere, and he isn’t grinning or sharing poster-space with a brunette, so we can safely assume this isn’t a rom-com. He’s playing it serious.

This top image is separated from the lower half of the poster (depicting the aftermath of a car-crash, which, we can presume, is both actual and metaphorical) by what seems to be a whited-out silhouette of a cityscape. That most famous and iconic (at least in the Western World) of cityscapes – New York.

Even without having heard about the film, or seeing a handy summary or trailer, we can guess that this is either going to involve lawyers or stockbrokers/bankers. That is, shady dealings. Gere is in a tux in the top half, and the car he’s totalled in the lower half looks as though it was pretty expensive. He is certainly not of the 99%.  

So far, so topical.

Decent, but still pretty standard-looking.

Then, we notice something else about that dividing section. It triggers a memory of something. Well, two things.

The first is a Simpsons episode, ‘Lisa the Iconoclast’, involving the fraudulent past of Jebediah Springfield, founder of the town in which the show is set.

The second is one of the cultural artefacts that inspired that. The unfinished portrait of one of America’s ‘Founding Fathers’, George Washington. One of the first, and still most notable, of America’s ‘elite’.

Suddenly, this poster begins to ask questions, rather than simply doling out answers and telling us how we should see this film because it’s totally awesome and there’s probably some cool stuff in it and also Richard Gere doesn’t do any smiling. It makes us wonder why it has chosen to make this reference.

Is Gere’s character powerful enough to hold near-Presidential levels of influence?

Is he unfinished?

Is he coming apart?

Is his city?

Or, in repurposing the unfinished original into this very clearly structured, polished reproduction/homage, is the suggestion that this is how, in the time since the country’s official post-revolution formation, that blank space has been filled in?

Leaving a rich [white] man – practically a Marley-esque spectre – carefully, though precariously, removed from the wreckage he surveys?

Notice how the dividing line appears to be retreating upwards.

Notice how much more you can get out of a thoughtfully-constructed poster than you can from a trailer that seeks to condense ninety minutes into just two and a half.

 

Somebody has to steady that ladder you're climbing: On 'Brave' and 'La Luna'

I’ve long been of the opinion that a good film, much like a good story or a good song, should keep its audience hooked right until the very end. I once, for instance, became pretty pissed with my two brothers when they started joking around near the close of Gladiator. If anything, this attitude has only strengthened since I began to take my own writing seriously, as a potential livelihood. The feeling being, in that case, that I would very much like for a given reader to pay full attention to my work throughout its entire course, and to feel rewarded in some way at the end of that experience. Therefore, it would be hypocritical, not to mention a little rude, for me not to pay full attention to the work of other artists.

So, I didn’t exactly anticipate spending the last ten minutes of Brave only part-watching. Part looking up from my nearly front-row seat [got there late], and part looking down at my notepad, sketching out ideas for what has turned out to be this article.

It isn’t that I was bored, though, or that I was so disappointed in the film that I felt the need to jot down my negative responses before it had even ground to a halt. On the contrary, I was entertained throughout. And I did follow the ending, even whilst I was writing. I still wanted to see how it all tied together. It was good, charming, and put a smile on my face.

But it is the fact that I could be so sure of exactly what was going on even when I wasn’t looking up that leads me into the point of this piece.

I don’t intend that to sound like too harsh a criticism. After all, if I were to take that tone, to lambast Brave for being ‘too predictable’, then I would be met with an all-too-obvious and all-too-deserved reposte – that being that it is principally a kids’ film. It’s not attempting to be Inception. It is a film with a clear point – a moral, even – that it wants to convey, and it would have scuppered that point entirely had the ending been different.

It is no sin for a film to seek simply to tell its tale and entertain, forsaking any major surprises. It is certainly far better to do that, and do it as well as Brave does, than it is to shoehorn ridiculous and implausible twists into a storyline and bugger it up.

On the other hand, if a film sets out to communicate a message, then, once that message is clear, it doesn’t perhaps require the viewer’s full attention. Brave laid its cards on the table well before the end, and, as such, the first half of the film was more entertaining, and arguably more essential watching. Its joys lie in its sharp, fairly fresh takes on old character types, and in the animation, art design, and soundtrack. Which combine to give the film a sense of both spectacle and intimacy. The balance between the showier scenes and the more introspective moments is well-struck. In addition, there are good laughs to be had throughout.

The second half, surprises more or less revealed, is more obviously formulaic, and, whilst entertaining, never really leaves its conclusion in doubt (unlike the far more daring and exceptional Toy Story 3).

But that’s OK.

Because Pixar made up for that before the main feature even started.

La Luna, another in their growing line of justly-celebrated short films, is a genuine gem. Delightful, on both a visual and thematic level, it is perhaps only retrospectively that its true brilliance – and the way in which that brilliance is augmented through its pairing with Brave – can be understood. [Which explains, hopefully, why it took me nearly the full length of the longer film to write anything down about the shorter one.]

When it becomes clear that the two films share the same basic intent/moral, the difference between the two forms (short and feature films), and the relative merits of each, are thrown into bright and rather wonderful relief.

That moral is, simply, that the younger generation should first pay attention to, respect, and learn from the previous generation, before they can successfully strike out on their own. It is a timeless, and perhaps rather obvious, even trite message. But it is one that both films seem convinced of.

However, whereas Brave makes this clear well before the credits, La Luna – constructed, as is common for Pixar’s standalone shorts, almost in the form of a single-reel silent movie, only with gestures and grunts instead of title cards serving as stand-ins for speech – manages to keep its theme subtly present throughout, and then still enchant and surprise with its conclusive, summative shot. The notion that the best results are only achieved through working together and learning from others certainly sounds trite when worded like that, but is conveyed in La Luna with a cinematic eloquence that circumvents the cynicism some viewers might otherwise feel.

Indeed, just as there are many writers who believe that the short story is the best and most direct form of prose fiction, there is certainly an argument to be made for short films doing the same thing within the context of cinematic fiction. In such shorts, there is no need, nor any room, for the tiresome exposition/statements by protagonists about the things they’ve learnt, which, understandably, grate with some viewers. Neither is there space for nonsensical subplots, which plague so many longer films (though not, it should be noted, Brave) and come across simply as filler.

Following this, there is a further argument to be made for more studios to throw money at short films and release them not simply for free on YouTube, but as valued works in their own right (albeit probably not at the cinema). This would be, in some ways, similar to the shift the music industry saw, as regards the focus being placed more on the downloading of individual songs rather than the purchasing of whole albums, with the corollary being that many albums ceased to display concern with functioning as cohesive entities, content instead to exist as collections of singles.

There are, of course, film-makers doing this already, and there are also kinks in this approach which probably mean it is not ‘commercially viable’ on any grand scale, at least not on its own. There’s no need for it to be, though. The argument is simply for more credence and consideration to be given to short films, not for them to supplant full-length feautures. There are things short fiction is better equipped to handle than longer variants, is all. Things it can tackle more immediately, and more effectively. Moral tales are a great example of this, as suggested by the longevity of Aesop’s Fables, amongst other works. Moreover, short forms that don't rely upon dialogue often allow the viewer to reach the story's moral/revelation in their own way, in their own words. It becomes something for the audience to discover, rather than something they must be told/have lectured to them.

On the other hand, longer-form fiction can deliver such lectures. It allows for a much more in-depth, and therefore theoretically more roundly satisfying, consideration of its chosen themes. It can also give the audience more of a good thing. If all that existed of, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark was the opening scene, it would make for a fantastic short film, and would still give a good sense of the character. However, at full length, it becomes a masterclass in adventure storytelling, and cinematic entertainment in general.

Yet, there is no need for film-makers to choose one form at the expense and exclusion of the other, as Pixar continue to prove. Indeed, perhaps it is even better if a way can be found, as the studio has with La Luna and Brave to link the forms together in some way. A great single can, after all, be improved even further through inclusion on an album of other, likeminded songs.

A more useful way, beyond this music-selling metaphor, to consider what Pixar have done here might be to look at both the short film and the main feature as being parts of an essay on the same ideas, the same central theme. The short film is the abstract – it introduces the issue, in an attention-grabbing fashion, and at least hints at what the essay’s overall conclusion will be. It’s not strictly necessary to read on to guess with some accuracy what the rest of the essay will argue, but if the abstract has done its job right, you will.

The main feature is the essay’s body – it provides examples which interrogate and demonstrate the underlying argument. These examples should, where possible, be original, entertaining, and above all else interesting. If that part of the essay has done its job right (as Brave did), then you’ll probably have reached the full conclusion before you actually read it.

As I did, enabling me to start off on this ramble in the first place.

Only, there’s one more crucial detail that I might have missed, had I still been writing at the time, and not heading for the door. A dedication to Steve Jobs. Something which was, I guess, to be expected at the end of the first original Pixar film to be made after his death, but which also suggests that Brave had to be that film. And that it had to be coupled with La Luna.

Whatever your opinion of Jobs on either a personal or professional level (or of Apple and its assorted products), it is inarguable that Pixar would not be where they are today without his early input. These two films serve as an acknowledgment and show of thanks for that, even as they demonstrate just how far the company aspires to move forwards without that input.

I’ll admit, though, that it did take the onscreen dedication to actually make me reflect upon that, and thereby to deepen a little further my appreciation of both films. Which shows that it really does pay to watch a good film all the way through to the finish. And, in Pixar’s case, that it pays to make people want to do so, whether they end up writing in notepads at the same time or not.     

The Rum Diary: Shooting the hangover, selling the binge

(Caution: Contains mild spoilers.)

It has a rickety, sweet kind of jazz, this film. Sometimes the timing’s off. Sometimes it’s on. At all times, though, it has some kind of beat running through it. Whether it’s provided by cars or cockerels or clattering keys, it always has some kind of beat.

Now, straight away, it’s important to acknowledge that this isn’t always the kind of beat you can dance to. But it’s equally important to accept that this is a film where it’s not always meant to be. It is a film swayed by the rhythms of the lifestyles and living standards of the characters on screen, not one that tries at all times to impose a contradictory melody over the top of all that. As such, it is grubby in places, and dull. And frustrating. There is the sense on occasion that people are grasping too fervently for the right word, and from there to give their chosen words meaning.

Yet, when they succeed in that, which happens far more frequently than not, the film finds a tenderness and, yes, a truth that marks it out from others you may have seen about similar situations.

A few of these truths are ones that might be considered universal – the comments on the spread of big business, on the doings of bastards worldwide, both then (1960) and now.

Some, however, are more specific, and arguably targeted at a slimmer portion of the audience. The portion that are primarily wanting to see the type of film that some advance rumours have promised them, a film about the evolution of a writer, and about the finding of one’s own voice. Now, there are some – many perhaps – who might mock that notion for being simplistic, or otherwise just daft and out of touch with how the adult world works. After all, it’s the sort of notion that turns up in kids’ films isn’t it, like in The Little Mermaid or Shrek, this idea of finding and embracing your true identity?

It’s that kind of argument, though, which suggests that the biggest problem for emerging artists in any field is not that everyone’s a critic, but that everyone’s a cynic. Ideas like ‘truth’, in the romantic, Bohemian sense, have, in some circles, come to seem so pat, so banal, that it appears a large portion of the audience for any fiction, written or filmed, no longer expects or demands it. I grant you that the counter-argument about more and more film-goers being interested purely in big-budget special effects, big breasts, and big bastard robots instead of feel and mood and character has long since become trite itself, and yet it daily requires more and more effort to see beyond that argument. Once word has gotten around about The Rum Diary being slow and moody, and about the way that people talk and want to write about their anger instead of just smashing stuff up – as it has begun to – it won’t do as well at the box office as other films that are not the same way. Which means it will not be seen by as many people.

Which is a hellish shame.

Not because The Rum Diary is the funniest film since Withnail & I, or even the best film based on a Hunter S. Thompson book, because it isn’t, on either count (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas still retains that honour). Rather, this is because it knows a feeling – a clutch of feelings – and it runs with them and gets inside them and, if you’re willing to give it your attention, makes those feelings come alive. It contains a lot of talk about ideas, and is more incisive and original in its judgements on some than on others, but, in this way, it displays an understanding of the way in which sometimes talk and words are what comprise a given person’s way of passing through the world.

To this end, it doesn’t shy away from scenes of sitting at a typewriter, or from lengthy conversations, but then, neither does it shy away from voiceless things, and from putting on clear display those times when words are inadequate or even just plain bloody useless. At all times, however, this film gives those words, and that way of expressing and receiving ideas a deep and full respect.

And perhaps the importance of that kind of thing is overlooked in the current cinematic climate, is dismissed as being naïve, or ‘idealistic’. But here is a film that is unafraid to step up and say that it needs to be looked into again, and which has the capacity, one would hope, to make certain viewers remember how to try to be that way themselves. Indeed, at its heart is a bravely existential quest, which, if considered in a different way, may well seem utterly ludicrous, but which when looked at through the eyes of the protagonists (especially Depp’s character, Paul Kemp), has real meaning. This is a film that follows its characters in pursuit of something that actually, utterly matters to them, and wants to make it matter to its audience in turn.

This is, however, not something that comes across very well in the advertising for the film, displaying very clearly (if inadvertently) the duality and conflict at the film’s core. The trailer and the posters suggest that it is much more concerned with the greasy glamour of this early part of the Hunter S. Thompson myth. That it is a shiny, wasted-looking roadtrip through the main streets of some exotic clime (Puerto Rico, in this case), with occasional stop-offs indoors to drink. That The Rum Diary is a jumped-up fantasy of the Gonzo lifestyle, in the same way that Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing is. Those that go into the film expecting that will probably be disappointed, and may well have overlooked the deeper themes running through both films, failing to understood that Fear and Loathing… could only have turned out how it did after Hunter had been through the 60’s, and that, at the end of the 50’s, he was in a very different situation. As was America.

Bearing that in mind, Bruce Robinson makes the right decision early on in the film to get on board with that early Hunter, and the preoccupations of that time, rather than trying to shoehorn more mayhem into places it doesn’t necessarily fit. And it is when he makes that decision that the film truly becomes interesting, and sets itself apart from the pack, as it were.

It is, in light of the earlier discussion of cynicism as regards Kemp’s desire to find his voice as a writer, perhaps entirely fitting that this moment should involve a mermaid. Or, at least what seems to be a mermaid at first. In fact, the seeming-apparition that emerges from the water next to the pedello Kemp has taken out for an evening drift is a young woman named Chenault; a beautiful young woman who immediately captivates the writer, and seems to symbolise all the glamour of the new American rich swarming into Puerto Rico. At this point, it appears that expectations of this film becoming a gloriously diverting romantic adventure are about to be realised, with Depp doing one of his sublime double-takes as the lady swims away, hinting that more such shenanigans are to come. And yet, the line he utters at that point is a far more accurate, and surprisingly subtle, indication of things to come: ‘Oh God, why did she have to happen? Just when I was doing so well without her.’

This is a film that, rather than being constructed à la the trailer purely to fulfil some tropical caper quotient, is very much of the opinion that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Plotwise, it could almost be accused of being composed solely of red herrings, and of having a cop-out ending – if, that is, it weren’t so defiantly focused more on the life and less so on the plans. This teased romantic subplot does indeed lead somewhere, but not perhaps the somewhere one might expect, and it doesn’t come to dominate the film in the way that other events do. And this is simply because these other events/personages just get in the way. Indeed, Depp’s question is one that his character could well ask about most events in the film. Particularly the arrival and insistent reappearances of Moberg.

Ah, Moberg… The closest link this film has to Robinson’s masterpiece Withnail & I, and also, arguably, its closest link to Fear and Loathing…, Moberg is a riot in man’s (unwashed) clothing. A booze junkie who regularly consumes ‘470 proof’ alcohol and has a collection of old Hitler speeches on record. As well as an SS hat, lurking about somewhere amongst his belongings. He is also, on that evidence, another piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit in with the holiday hi-jinks vibe suggested by the trailers (which probably explains why he doesn’t really turn up in them too much), though he is crucial to Robinson’s take on the issues and events involved. Rather than attempting at all times to glory in the brilliance of Kemp (and, therein, the brilliance of Hunter S.), he approaches the figure in much the same way that Thompson did himself, from time to time; with an iconoclastic, unsympathetic, but still drearily affectionate eye (the ending of Thompson’s essay, ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’ comes to mind).

There is a lot of misery here, and confusion, and even a touch of self-loathing. Perhaps too much for the film to be fully uplifting at the end. It is, after all, scathingly cynical in its own way. Hunter’s brand of cynicism, however, (and, clearly, Robinson’s) is one born from anger and frequently channelled into an attempt to rectify a situation, or at least to confront a problem head-on, even if this is only through some kind of art. The downer periods are necessary, are essential for this approach to be fully understood – it is hope in spite of, and because of, hopelessness. Pissing in the wind, perhaps, but always keeping focused on where you want to aim.

A tricky business, we can all agree.

Certainly, it is a tough ask to persist with that approach, both in life and art. To wear at all times not rose-tinted spectacles, but dark glasses so as the daytime world outside doesn’t hurt your eyes/your head too much, even as you refuse to stop looking at it. As such, the film is prone to maudlin moments, to periods of quiet, unsettling reflection. All of which are in keeping with the situation Kemp is in, and which are important to the story’s progression. Moreover, for those who may be/have been in similar situations, this is (as it ever is, when you discover one of your idols was once in a similar pedello to that in which you’re currently adrift) curiously cathartic. The few scenes in which mention is made of his former (more romantic) aspirations of being a straight up novelist are handled with a kindness and an understanding that is refreshing and all too rare – even within the world of the film, writing like that is viewed either as a waste of time (by Kemp’s boss, Lotterman), or as a means to exploit and manipulate others out of their cash (by the property magnate, Sanderson).

But then, the whole film is a dialogue between ‘artistic integrity’ and ‘commercialism’. At the edges of the narrative, at all times there is the notion that whatever scraps of paradise Puerto Rico at that time may have held, they are crumbling, in as much a state of disrepair as the American-run newspaper that Kemp finds himself producing shonky horoscopes for. Furthermore, it is increasingly evident that those spaces are being taken over by banks, by business interests, about to be filled up with hotels like a Monopoly board; indeed, that, as with a monopoly board, those hotels are going to dominate income, and result in those that don’t have them going very swiftly skint. Here again, the film could be accused of naivety, of a kind of simplicity in its outlook and its politics, and, worse still, of being hypocritical – it is, after all a big business venture itself, to a degree; a Hollywood product, with arguably the biggest male star in the world as its marquee name – and yet in its freewheeling attitude to narrative, and in the way in which it is frequently more attentive to the hangover than the binge (from the opening scene of a particularly ruinous morning after onwards), it remains stridently faithful to its low-down, grubby, truth-seeking ideals. It plays the game just enough to give itself chance to have its core ideas heard.

Indeed, when the time comes to choose between the potentially-limitless glamour of the nouveau riche island life, and the potentially-limitless (judging by Moberg, at least) squalor of a life of investigative journalism/writing, Robinson makes the same choice as Kemp does. His film demonstrates a familiarity and fascination with both sides of the coin, but is only ever really hoping for it to land on tails when it finally falls. And this is the right choice for the material. As Withnail & I demonstrated, Robinson has an affinity for those who may not always meet their own high expectations, moral or otherwise, and, moreover, refuses to abandon them unacknowledged to their plight. As a director (and writer), he seems fully willing to follow such characters doggedly, wherever they might be headed, and, in that respect as well as others, the ending that the film reaches is entirely fitting. It is not ambiguous in the sense of it being a cliffhanger, but, rather, it presents a picture of a man figuratively at the bottom of a cliff, intent on beginning another long climb.

Still, it isn’t a particularly glorious, celebratory ending, and certainly not in keeping with the way in which most other recent films or TV series (such as State of Play or The Wire) have tackled the subject of investigative journalism. In failing to deliver a showdown between the two conflicting parties, it does somewhat go against accepted cinematic conventions on such matters. It would be more than understandable to find that a large portion of the audience consider it a cop-out. After all, final reel showdowns can still be phenomenally entertaining occurrences (most recently, those in Drive and The Ides of March have thrilled me immensely), and so the absence of one here (between the human players, at least) can be seen as another reason for any potential commercial failure on the film’s part.

And that is, as I mentioned earlier, a problem, in so far as it will probably stop as many people as should see it from seeing it – at least until it is released for home viewing. But, from an ideological standpoint, it is an honest move. To have the business dealings and the intimations of corruption overcome by something as seemingly trifling as petty jealousy is a left turn, but one that, amidst the feel and sensibilities of The Rum Diary, feels right. That it gives far more time to the little foibles and shenanigans of the underdogs than to those of the ‘bastards’ is admirable, and, in the manner in which it does it, rare. There is genuine and surprising warmth to the minute-long scene in which Kemp breaks free from watching a cockfight and stumbles across a beautifully bedraggled little alleyway, taking pictures of people and the burnt-out carcasses of cars. It is a note thrown in but not dwelled on, an improvisational tweak that adds to the film’s developing mood rather than detracting from it. That warmth, again unexpected, is there at the end of one car racing scene (teased in the trailer as being something a little different to how it actually is). Whilst the film comes to seem, in terms of most environs selected in the latter half of the film, almost anti the standardised escapist drama it could have been, it does hold an escapist sensibility all its own.

If things are going to go wrong, and if the bastards are always going to find a way to grind you down, then, this film suggests, you must always try and make the most of the moments before they do. A wonderful example of this, and a rare point at which standard cinematic escapist tropes and The Rum Diary’s escapism overlap, occurs in the final third of the film, and serves as the culmination of the romantic arc. Sitting in the scummy apartment that Kemp shares with his photographer Sala, Kemp and Chenault share a moment of clarity, staring deep into each other’s eyes, as gentle piano music rises. Cut to Kemp behind a shower curtain, and Chenault’s hand reaching out to pull that curtain back, stepping, still-clothed, into the spray. Sharing a kiss. Cut to the bed, and the beginnings of a tender, soft-focus love scene –

Cut to one of Moberg’s Hitler recordings blaring out from the other room. Cut to Kemp, cock-blocked and flustered, walking into the other room to discover Moberg sitting in a chair by the window, wearing his SS hat.

Harsh. But it is precisely Moberg’s classless act of cockblocking that provides a perfect summation of Robinson’s approach. There are several moments throughout the film when he presents the viewer with the tantalising hint that this may become another glossy travelogue romance, bathed in sun and soaked in ocean breakers. But, each time, he undercuts these moments, or, rather, just cuts into them, going for some below-the-surface thing. Or, quite often, has some bastard (either a purposeful one, or an accidental one, such as Moberg) enter from stage left and undercut them from within. Indeed, by the time that the latter turns up in his SS hat, it is firmly assured that nobody will be mistaking anyone else for a mermaid anymore.

This, perhaps more than any other point in the film, explains why its commercial prospects, despite Depp’s star power, are less-than-rosy. It is one of those brave (even if not entirely successful) films that attempts to mobilise the audience’s mind to considering concepts that might otherwise go overlooked in such a movie, to wake the audience up from the dream, as it were – the one thing that the film’s arch-capitalist advises Kemp that one should never do. In that way, it is a truly, if subtly, subversive piece of entertainment. It praises Hunter S. Thompson, but it praises the reasons and approach that underpins the mythology of the man, rather than relying solely upon the surface tenets of that mythology. It doesn’t give the people what they might think they want – boozy wreckage everywhere – and, therefore, doesn’t really give them what they may have been tempted to pay for. What it does provide, however, is (to paraphrase and re-appropriate the Oscar Wilde adage that Kemp quotes about midway through) a sense of the value of things, rather than simply the price. Of the value of thinking hard about your dreams before chasing them, rather than simply buying into somebody else’s just because you saw it advertised somewhere. Of the value of carefully chosen thoughts and words over indiscriminate action. Of not simply being passively cynical and allowing various heinous exploitations to continue, but of at least trying to channel that cynicism into rage and from there into some degree of change.

This is, of course, a very grandiose aim, and, at times, it is an idea above the film’s station, but the ebullient contrarianism of the piece has an undeniable charm and zing. It is a film in which things that you want to happen don’t, things that you don’t want to happen do (often, but not always, because of bastards), and which suggests that the best you can usually manage in the aftermath is to write something honest about the way you feel, hoping that the right people get to read it.

The big screen of cinema, with its still-inherent promise of fantasy and escapism, is a tricky medium for such a message, told in such an at-times spare and moody tone as this; as some commentators have suggested, it may well be better suited for the smaller screen, and for repeated watching at home. However, if a viewer is willing to accept that with The Rum Diary, as with life, sometimes the timing is going to be on and at other times off, and is willing to sit still through the parts that aren’t made to be danced to, then it’s likely they’ll not only enjoy it, but truly appreciate what it is trying to do.

Because, after all, it really does have a rickety, sweet kind of jazz.

Slow Dancing in a Darkened Room

'Slow dancing' may very well be may favourite term. It is almost certainly my favourite way to go about most things that I do. Even, and perhaps especially, when my mind is moving fast. It conjures up an image, a sensation, an ethos that is at once both deeply balletic and classical, and yet simultaneously lustful and anticipatory of anything going under the broad and oft-salacious heading of 'ACTION'. It implies grace and, with it, a longing to be yet more graceful still. It indicates a full and yet forever inconsecratable desire to turn to volume down on everything in life that doesn't move you, to dim the colours of the things in life that cause something deep inside of you to pulse and rage with bitter, aimless anger - to turn that volume down and dim those colours forever. It is a warmly isolated, tender state, un-intruded upon by shameful/shameless political machinations, by money-grabbing, money-hoarding, money-loving, by the (mostly metaphorical) whoring out of souls that are not yet well-rounded enough to be enjoyed by anyone, to be appreciated as having a worth that is above all that whoring, and so are instead mocked endlessly, jeered on and cheered on into their messy, celebrated end - hounded into that hallowed place that is the Z-list. It elicits in participants a utopian glee, seducing them with the notion that there is a calm situation, a completely chilled-out space, in which they may exist (alongside company of their own inscrutable choosing). That human nature has a zenith, a peak, and that 'slow dancing', in whatever form, may very well be it. The nadirs of that same nature just peel away like last-year's snakeskin, to crinkle in the dust.

But those nadirs do remain. They have to. There has to be a bleakness out there for the art of 'slow dancing' to become and remain what it is. It is only, some may very convincingly argue, possible to truly enjoy a moment of pure peace if you accept that peace with the knowledge that, at some point or another, it is going to slide down again into some kind of pit. You have to take the rough with the smooth, as they say, in order for either notion to have meaning.

And so I find myself thinking of slow motion tonight, late as it is and sober as I am, and, in particular, of the way that some directors use it as a means of coming to terms with that duality, with that price that must be paid for beauty. And by 'in particular' I mostly mean Sam Peckinpah.

Now, it cinematic terms, I mostly grew up avoiding anything that looked old - either in a black and white sense, or a 60's/70's faded-denim-type film colouring sense (bizarre to those who know, as those are the very things I love most often in films now). Peckinpah was unheard of and unsought after. I wanted action (though a different kind, in many senses, to that alluded to above), and plenty of it. Of course I did. I was a boy growing up into my teenage years at the arse-end of the 90's and action films were where it was at. Well, that or watching copies of 18-rated 'gross-out comedies' that some schoolfriend or other had acquired. But that wasn't really my bag. Not enough shit getting blown up. Not enough heavily-muscled Austrians looking for invisible aliens amongst the rainforest mist (I do not mean to suggest, however, at this point that my tastes in action were always so refined as Predator. No, sir. I would watch any old shit if the TV guide listed it as an 'action thriller' or, less frequently, and 'action comedy'. Even Steven Seagal films that weren't Under Siege or the somehow terribly entertaining one with Michael Caine in it (I watched Hard to Kill once, and could not believe how little actually happened in the first 45 mins, or how deftly and impressively the director managed to keep me watching the remainder of that steaming heap unfold (Still, that itself was a more impressive effort than the two Dolph Lundgren efforts I actually properly had a go at watching (Masters of the Universe doesn't count, because that was a He-Man film, and therefore not an original Lundgren property.) Silent Trigger, which, aside from including Gina Bellman who would later go out to be both hot and hilarious in Coupling, had little to recommend it; and Red Scorpion, which, to the best of my recollection, included a couple of gun battles lasting a sum total of 5 mins (in a film of about 2 hours), and lots of shots of Dolph running around in the desert pretending to be a Russian commando gone AWOL (or some such shit).). As well as many a film containing the vast repository of charisma that is Marc Dacascos (in fairness, Sanctuary was not half bad). So, please, feel free to assume the worst about my tastes at that time. Or now, for that matter, if you count Dolph and Seagal amongst your action-movie idols.). (I honestly have no idea if I have the correct number of brackets or full-stops in there, but I'm tired, so I'll skip the edit.)

I wanted action, and so the discovery of John Woo was a revelation. I distinctly recall that Hard Target, with none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme, was the first of his films that I saw, and I recall equally well being blown away by it. Sure, I know now that it's not as original as it seems, but that's one of the joys/drawbacks of growing up - the constant evolution of your knowledge as regards the limits of the known universe. When I was 14 (or so), Hard Target was the dog's bollocks (as they say, and I haven't said myself for years). Partly because I was still riding high on the buzz of seeing JCVD kick down a tree in Kickboxer, and I was willing to watch him in anything at the time, but also because John Woo just made everything look so cool! Everything that wasn't nailed down had a chance of being blown the fuck up, or crashed through by a speeding car or motorbike or motorboat or Belgian. And if something extra cool happened, you could be sure that some part of it was going to happen in slow-motion. Including, and particularly, a bad guy getting roundhouse-kicked in the face by the 'Muscles from Brussels'.

Action. Movie. Gold.

But both Kickboxer and Hard Target were showing on TV tonight, and I watched neither. I made no effort to watch either.

Perhaps that has to do with Face/Off. Probably the second John Woo film I watched. Oh, I loved it at the time, impractical science and glorious scenery-chewing and all. But the last time I watched it, I dunno... the bottom had kind of fallen out, and I couldn't quite say why. Maybe I was just too grown-up and cultured for that kind of thing (stop sniggering at the back!). Perhaps I'd simply seen it too many times to be surprised by it any more. Don't get me wrong, it still did what it was supposed to do, more or less, but that was no longer enough. Not even the slow-motion shoot-outs could save it.

Because I was starting to suspect that sometimes Woo was throwing them in just because he felt he had to. To appease the people in his audience like the teenaged me who'd demanded and expected that sort of thing from him. I can't say for sure this is how he felt, but that's not important. It's how I felt on recent reflection. I'd seen, a few years prior, The Killer, one of his early masterpieces, with Chow-Yun Fat, and the slow-motion seemed honest in that, and there was a sense that he was using it for a reason. The gulf between sensations emitted by the post-midnight watching of that film, and the whatever-time re-watching of Face-Off was nearly immeasurable. And it wasn't until I became more acquainted with Peckinpah, and with what slow-motion meant to him, that I was able to put my finger on what exactly was at the root of that gulf, was at the base of that chasm, chiselling it further apart.

The problem is, to me, that, whilst misery is the starting point for the action, it gets lost too often beneath an enjoyment of that action for action's sake. As a viewer, you are drawn to the madness of Travolta's performance in particular, and to the batshit sight of Cage trying to play straight opposite him but all the time waiting for his opportunity to get in on the fun. Slow-motion is there just because it can be. It looks cool, so it might as well be.

There just isn't a real reason for it, is all.

It was Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia that what made me understand just what was missing. What lesser directors than both Peckinpah and Woo cannibalised from both of their works and whirled through the machine until even Woo couldn't give it much meaning any more. In that film, Peckinpah winds everything up brilliantly for the first half. Real alarm clock tension stuff. And then in the second half, after a rather pivotal event which I will not divulge here, he lets that tension slide. And the slow-motion comes out, and he makes sure it captures not the zenith of human nature, but the nadir. He uses slow motion to invert the timeless idyll, and to show the horror of what happens when the seclusion of that slowed-down peace is invaded. To suggest a world that is so envious of such peace that it seeks to crush it out before it can be fully enjoyed for any proper length of time at all.

One scene in particular, which has been copied, consciously or not, in a great many films since (and is, to some degree a copy of a shot from an earlier Peckinpah film, The Wild Bunch), conveys this inversion, and indeed perversion, of an ideal better than most others in the film. It involves a shoot-out between two parties, one on either side of a dusty Mexican road, and the kernel of that sequence is simply a long-held slow-motion shot (interrupted a couple of times by cuts to what's happening across that road) of a man firing a sub-machine gun. In now-clichéd fashion, cartridge cases tumble down into the dirt, clinking, bouncing, scattering asunder; muzzle flare sits at the end of the gun like a kind of tropical flower, twirling, blowing in the wind. And then that man is killed, his trigger-finger remaining squeezed upon the trigger and he keeps firing. All in slow-motion, as hideous as it is mesmeric. The peaceful moment ruined and pockmarked with holes. (It would also be useful to make reference at this point to the late Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde here as well, which uses slow-motion for a similar effect.)

In what I was going to try and make my first book (but am saving for a later date, when I can make it slightly more better and whatnot), I have the main character making this observation:

Slow things are what people secretly want to be. What I want to be. When they found slow motion and put it in films it was like watching a second stretched out to a minute’s length. Some people say that movie stars will live forever once they’ve been up on the screen, that once their name has been in lights then they’ll be in lights forever, but if someone is on the big screen in slow motion then surely they’ll live even longer. Death scenes happen in slow motion because it is postponement, and if the rest of the time were like that, death would just be pushed further away. Love scenes happen in slow motion because love should be outside of time, because love should be made a new eternity with each breath, because sometimes slow motion makes the people look good.

And I thought that was appropriate to this discussion/ramble, and so went right ahead and jammed it in. Whilst the part about 'death scenes' in this passage seems to be making a slightly different point about their usage, it isn't really. It isn't as full of a consideration of all facets of the deployment of slow-motion in such cases, of course, but it does touch on the fact that directors such as Peckinpah used the form to suggest the trauma of violence and its ruinous effects on mankind, as well as reflecting on the strange and worrying (though perhaps not always unexpected) similarities between the experience of joy (in the above passage given as 'love') and pain, and the way that such similarity allows for the potential of one to corrupt the other.

As with all these things, however, the original intention becomes mislaid and diluted through overuse, to the point where it is perfectly acceptable for one of the most haunting and effective uses of slow-motion (in Oliver Stone's Platoon) to be parodied quite mercilessly in Tropic Thunder. Now, whilst I am far from against the spoofing of such things (as long as it is done, as it largely is in Tropic Thunder, with some measure of intelligence and wit), it can easily be seen that such parodies can, retroactively, render the initial scenes devoid of their original intention, so as modern viewers can watch older films and assume, quite reasonably, that slow-motion is being used simply because it's cool, and for no other reason. It renders whatever serious comment the directors may have been aiming to make largely ineffective, turning the volume down on the wrong things. Draining away the colours with which they were trying to communicate. Leaving only the snakeskin up on the screen.

Yet, a lot of people keep watching, and they don't seem to mind. They'll happily shell out the money to see things explode in slow-motion and high-definition and 3(unsatisfactory)Dimensions. And so I sometimes feel, when it comes to cinema at least, that I am not so much 'slow dancing' with those always of my choosing, but simply with those who are left behind when the rush to see 'new' things has started, still searching for a beating heart and a working mind, and finely-honed technique being used for a definite reason. For works of art that aren't just made to make money, but to make a point too.

Bodywork

I recently watched My Left Foot for the first time. And it has caused me to start seriously thinking, in odd ways, about the titular appendage on my own body. About the things I do with it, day in and day out.

After much contemplation, I have concluded that the activities it carries out can be broken down into three main groupings (including estimates of the time dedicated to each activity, which, my maths being awfully shaky, have mostly just been plucked out of the ether):

1) Tapping idly on the ground whilst I sit behind a desk (roughly 60% of the time I'm awake).

2) Walking from room to room, including up stairs (roughly 5% of the time).

3) Tapping idly on the ground whilst I sit on the sofa (roughly 35% of the time).

I don’t, however, use it to take vinyl records from their sleeves and drop them into place on the player, as Daniel Day-Lewis (as Christy Brown) does in the film. Neither do I use it to write, either simple messages or poetry. Or to paint. Or to turn the pages of a book whilst I am reading. Or even really to play football, these days – I am indeed struggling to recall the last time I kicked a ball in anger, or in wonder, or simply out of a passionate need to be part of that game, that sport.

Of course, they do say that necessity is the mother of invention, and perhaps the chief reason I don’t do any of those things with my own left foot is because I don’t have to. Unlike the late Christy Brown, I do not have a condition which renders it most practical to employ my left foot as the chief instrument of my physical work.

And, yet, I haven’t really been doing any of those things with other parts of my body either of late. The record player in my house does not currently work – a fact I could use as a handy excuse to get around this act of laziness – although I doubt I would have used it recently even if it did. Maybe this is down to the fact that the vast majority of my music collection is now located on my computer, available to me at a few clicks of a mouse button. But I don’t think that excuses me either. In fact, I think it makes the situation worse, because I find myself these days constantly choosing the options in life which involve the least movement (well, in most cases…). I find it easier to e-mail a message than to write out a letter and walk to the nearest mailbox with it swinging in my hand. I find it easier to move a couple of analogue joysticks and push a few buttons to shift players around a not-really-there field than to go outside and have a kickabout with an actual football. Granted, again there are probably other reasons I could give for that, such as the fact that it seems unimportant to do so now because a fair percentage of people playing actual football at my age are getting paid metric shitloads of money to do so.

But that isn’t a good enough reason. That is, in fact, the problem.

It just doesn’t seem enough to want to do things, even little things, purely because of the enjoyment you get out of it anymore. It’s not enough to want to use a record player because your dad has an awesome selection of vinyls and because lifting then dropping the needle feels kinda like opening a door at a concert hall, making the music-listening experience feel just that little bit more immediate and visceral and real. Or because you love those first few scratchy sounds before The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night album starts playing. Perhaps it’s part of being an ‘adult’, especially one so financially challenged as I, but I am beginning to find it increasingly difficult to look beyond those factors, that not-enough-anymore business, when I’m considering what I’ll actually get out of an action. Perhaps the bottom line of such thinking is: if I’m not going to get any reward for this, monetary or otherwise, then why bother?

Why not go the easy route instead?

Why not find everything I need outside of food and drink on the Internet, the great Information Superhighway?

After all – I feel like I’m always telling myself on some strange kind of tape loop – that’s what most other people out there are doing. Because it’s easy.

To be sure, the world of Christy Brown was a very different one in a lot of ways, his life starting in the 30’s in and amongst the backstreets of Dublin, and the reason he felt, and continued to feel, like such an outsider due to his cerebral palsy was perhaps because that world was primarily a physical one. No Internet. Not nearly as many phones. No video games. Just the walls of a house and then the cumulated housewalls of a street. Real fresh air and real raining sky looking down. Real mud. Real bruises from a punch or a bad tackle. Real kisses and real hugs whenever there were kisses and hugs to be had. None of this xoxoxo bullshit. No instant messaging being pulled off the bench as a substitute for proper conversation, that with face to face and eye to eye. Mouth to mouth.

Maybe that’s why Christy Brown felt so compelled to try as hard as he did to find his voice, to undergo seemingly endless hours of speech therapy; to agree to go in goal when his brothers were playing football and use his head to stop any shots that came his way. It could well be that, born today, he would simply have resorted to using computers and the Internet as a means of communication, might never have painted out of frustration or of anger or of love. Might never have written all those poems.

The way that Day-Lewis plays him, though, and the way that he himself comes across from the things that I’ve read, I don’t think that would have been the case. I’d very much like to think it wouldn’t have. Because My Left Foot is one of those rare films that, for me, achieved the glorious feat or being properly inspirational, just through the unvarnished way in which it seeks to tell of one man’s life, in which it educates the viewer as to the complexities of Brown’s existence. It is not simply a standard triumph-over-adversity tale. It is a case of a triumph over normality, of a man wanting at first to be accepted and to fit in, despite his condition, but then finding that his talent allowed him to transcend the norm, allowed him to communicate in more powerful ways ( I haven’t yet checked out too many of his paintings, but his poetry is extraordinary). And, most importantly, despite dark periods, he didn’t let those talents go to waste.

Now, as I’ve said, it’s possible that his physical drive and ambition to communicate more fully with the world was, in some ways, down to the conditions of the society in which he lived. Was because outside is where most of the action was. After all, we humans are, to admittedly varying degrees, products of our environments. That being said, it seems that, these days (a term I am perhaps overusing in this piece, possibly suggesting an oldness, and a grumpiness, that is not entirely mine), too many things take place online, that too much of ‘socialising’ is conducted through social networks, that sites like Facebook, for example, are becoming the hang-out point of choice for a great many people of an evening. Don’t get me wrong, there are advantages to such social networking – the ability to ‘poke’ your friends whilst you chat to them is certainly one. As is the ability to click endlessly through pictures of old nights out with good friends, instead of doing your damnedest to arrange another one. Of course, it is far cheaper than actually doing anything for real, and, if you accidentally say the wrong thing during a ‘conversation’, you can always blame it on your little brother getting on your computer whilst you were elsewhere, using your left foot (and your right one) to walk to another room and fix up a drink. And did I mention ‘poking’?

I’m a hypocrite, though, and I’m sadly, painfully aware of it. I’ve spent a lot of time lately bitching (to myself, mostly) about the Internet, and Facebook in particular, and yet here I am, posting on my blog and no-doubt soon linking to this page on FB. Because the Internet is what is was established to be, more or less. An easy, convenient means of communication. And FB is the main way in which I can (hopefully) keep in touch with a lot of people I might otherwise lose contact with. So, in spite of my ranting and frustration at the system, I will most likely persist with my current level of usage. I will most likely continue to send e-mails, rather than writing out letters, because it is more simple, and allows for messages to reach the intended recipient almost instantly, as opposed to a time-delay dictated by the actions of the postal service, exactly as it was designed to do.

I do want to strive, however, to do more things out in the world, to actually achieve some things physically for a change. Even if, at first, it’s only handwriting more articles before typing them up. Handwriting more of my own poems, so I can get to work compiling another collection following the planned release of my first at the end of this month. Even if it’s just walking outside in the autumn rain more often, coming back cold, wet, miserable and happy that I’ve still got a body to get soaked to the bone.

Because that’s what this is all about, really. I need the actual flesh of my body to feel necessary again. I need to make it work, and then work harder. I need to know and remember my left foot and my right foot and my right shin and my left shin and my knees and thighs and dick and hips and my stomach and chest and left shoulder and right shoulder and my arms and hands and fingers and mouth and tongue and eyes. And I need to make them work.