On Friendship

I have just had an article published in The Irish Post on Friendship. It is a reworked version of an earlier blog post inspired by the film, The King’s Speech, but now with a Christian emphasis and consideration of how the dominance of erotic love has “done dirt on friendship”. I have even included a Toy Story video as an act of reparation! I think it is an improved piece of work.

With five star reviews and predictions of Oscars, The King’s Speech is the film of the moment. Interestingly, it has been described by some critics as the first “bromance” of 2011. “Bromance” is street patois for the friendship between two men. In cultural terms this is a recognition of the value and importance of men having male friends. These friendships give men the permission to reveal or articulate things about themselves in a way that is different to how they would do so with their wife, girlfriend, work colleagues or gang of mates down the pub. Unfortunately, the term “bromance” brings with it associations of juvenile puerility. Yet, the central relationship between Bertie, the future King George VI and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has no trace of such associations. Their friendship was a not trivial affair and part of the film’s success, is that it is treated in a sincere and profound manner.

Friendships can be based on interests, experiences and personality traits shared in common. However, The King’s Speech is a reminder that deep friendships can occur between seemingly mismatched characters. In this case, royalty and a commoner, an English monarch and an Australian speech therapist, a man straight-jacketed by convention and a man who explodes conventional practices, one trapped by the wounds of the past and one uncertain about the possibilities of the future. Yet, these combinations work because each man sees in the other healing and life-affirming qualities. Through their friendship both men discover a masculine idiom with which to communicate their fears and longings.

The Greek philosopher, Aristotle devoted two chapters of his Ethics to friendship and all future reflections on friendship have, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by his thought. Aristotle believed that friendship

is almost necessary for living. Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things. Indeed those who hold wealth and office and power are thought to stand in special need of friends; for what is the use of prosperity to them if they are denied the opportunity for beneficence. In poverty too and all the other misfortunes of life people regard their friends as their only refuge. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life. What is more, people think that good men and friends are the same.

So, for Aristotle, friendship is a kind of virtue, not only because it can potentially bind together the divisions of class, age and social rank, but because deep within the noblest friendships incubates the germ of goodness. “It is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake that are most truly friends,” wrote Aristotle, “because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.”

Christian thinkers took such ideas and married them to the fact that human beings are created in the image of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A God of relationships of love. They believed it was possible to glimpse (albeit through a glass darkly) in the highest forms of human experience something of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity.

It was in the twelfth century Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire that Abbot Aelred synthesised these ideas and wrote On Spiritual Friendship. Aelred saw in friendship the possibility of human beings concretising their faith. The Christian life could not just be an abstract assent to the love of God but rather love of others, for example, through friendship, made real in some manner God’s love for us.

For Aelred, friendship is a vehicle by which we can approach the Divine and, at the same time, a conduit through which Divine love can pass. Friendship, according to Aelred, should never be a convenient alliance of interests. For him there was a clear separation between superficial, fair-weather friends and a profoundly spiritual friendship. He writes: “Is it not a foretaste of blessedness thus to love and thus to be loved; thus to help and be helped; and in this way from the sweetness of fraternal charity to wing one’s flight aloft to that more sublime splendour of divine love..?”

In recent times, the idea of friendship has been vandalised by the ubiquitous belief that all relationships are, at base, erotic and sexual. This insidious notion has done dirt on friendship and, sadly, deep friendships between people of the same sex are often viewed with suspicion. The King’s Speech refutes this modern idea and unashamedly places friendship centre stage. Friendship, it suggests, give people the space to breathe, to be themselves, to not be narrowly defined in a sexual way. Good, healthy friendships provide us with intimacy as well as the security and freedom of distance. They are to be celebrated.



Aristotle believed that without friendship our lives would be incomplete and we would remain partially lost to ourselves. Tempering his natural idealism he candidly admits that “such friendships are rare...because men of this kind are few...The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not” or as the poet, Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “they (friendships) are not claimed but courted, honoured, considered.”

The friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue appears to have possessed these qualities. After a slow, stammering gestation period, their lifelong friendship was courted, honoured, considered. They were able to penetrate their character differences, idiosyncrasies and failings and see within each other the treasure of goodness. “Easy at first,” writes W.H.Auden, “the language of friendship/Is, as we soon discover,/Very difficult to speak well...” In The King’s Speech we meet two men who found their respective voices and did learn to speak that essential language very well.

Blue Valentine

Dean: I feel like men are more romantic than women. When we get married we marry, like, one girl, 'cause we're resistant the whole way until we meet one girl and we think I'd be an idiot if I didn't marry this girl she's so great. But it seems like girls get to a place where they just kinda pick the best option... 'Oh he's got a good job.' I mean they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is gonna stick around.

Marriage break-up films traditionally revolve around some infidelity or tragic event that shakes the foundations of a previously secure marriage. Blue Valentine avoids these obvious dramatic episodes and enters the more interesting territory of what happens when hairline cracks and fissures appear in a marriage and the centre cannot hold. The film dissects the cliché that people “fall out of love” with a poetic intelligence that reveals the blessing and the pain of love as something elemental to our human experience.

From the outset we sense some bleeding toxicity in Dean and Cindy’s marriage and yet, we cannot locate where the bleed is coming from. They communicate in staccato, accusatory outbursts or silences, thick with loathing and blame. While they live in close proximity to each other, they are emotionally strangers. Husband and wife relate to each other as tenants who cannot remember what brought them together in the first place. They look like two people worn down and defeated by their increasingly futile attempts to keep the fragility of love from shattering in their hands.

Yet, the director, Derek Cianfrance, intercuts historical flashbacks to remind the audience of the times in Dean and Cindy’s relationship when love seemed possible. Dean wooing Cindy by singing you always hurt the one you love in a “goofy voice” as she tap dances in front of a wedding outfitters. The choice of a doo-wop, soul classic that becomes “their song”, the musical glue of their affections. The hushed intimacies, the physical tenderness, the belief that in each other they have found something protecting and ennobling. These glimpses into Dean and Cindy’s past are not just romantic excursions but evidence that, in the words of the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, “love means to learn to look at yourself/The way one looks at distant things/For you are only one thing among many./And whoever sees that way heals his heart...”



Ryan Gosling’s Dean is all bloke-ish charm but with a sense of the real responsibilities that come with trying to be a husband that loves. He is not the stereotypical man who abandons the girl when things get tough. He is not the commitment phobe but is determined to stand by his woman. It is Dean who tries to claw back the relationship from the precipice of destruction and is not frightened to say “I love you” repeatedly in order to do so. Gosling’s blistering performance has a physical rawness that manages to combine coiled-up ferocity and masculine tenderness.

Michelle Williams played one of the wives in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. In that film, the slow realisation that her husband was living a double life and the grief that came with this knowledge was handled with a pitch-perfect sensitivity and honesty. I doubted that I would see another performance of this quality from Michelle Williams. I was wrong. In Blue Valentine, she manages to convey the sunny passion of love and the desperate hurt when that superficial love begins to burn away leaving the cinders of a failed marriage. Her every look is an autopsy on a dying relationship.

In narrative terms, Cianfrance’s film looks slight but its ability to consider the death of love from within the lives of the characters themselves is powerful and convincing. Who or what is to blame for the failure of this marriage remains a mystery and it this mystery that makes Blue Valentine so believable. This remarkable film lays bare the secret movements of love and shows how falling out of love can, for many of us, be as heart-achingly bewildering as falling in love.

Bromance, friendship and The King's Speech

Some critics have described The King’s Speech as the first “bromance” of 2011. They are right and they are wrong in equal measures. The hybrid term “bromance” indicates the friendship between two men. In cultural terms it is a street recognition of the value and importance of men having male friends. This is the secure environment where a man can reveal or articulate things about himself in a way that is different to the way he would do so to his wife, girlfriend, work colleagues or gang of mates down the pub. Unfortunately, the term “bromance” brings with it associations of juvenile puerility. The central relationship in The King’s Speech between Bertie, the future King George VI, and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has no trace of such associations and thus makes for a more profound and moving depiction of their friendship.

Friendships can be based on interests, experiences and personality traits shared in common. However, The King’s Speech is a reminder that deep friendships can occur between seemingly mismatched characters. In this case, royalty and a commoner, an English monarch and an Australian speech therapist, a man straight-jacketed by convention and a man who explodes conventional practices, one trapped by the wounds of the past and one uncertain about the possibilities of the future. Yet, these combinations work because each man sees in the other something that has a healing quality and is life-affirming. In this friendship both men discover a masculine idiom with which to communicate their fears and longings.



Aristotle devoted two chapters of his Ethics to friendship and all future reflections on friendship have, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by his thought. Aristotle believed that friendship

is almost necessary for living. Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things. Indeed those who hold wealth and office and power are thought to stand in special need of friends; for what is the use of prosperity to them if they are denied the opportunity for beneficence. In poverty too and all the other misfortunes of life people regard their friends as their only refuge. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life. What is more, people think that good men and friends are the same.

So, for Aristotle, friendship is a kind of virtue, not only because it can potentially bind together the divisions of class, age and social rank, but because deep within it incubates the germ of goodness. The highest form of friendship will involve the reciprocal recognition of goodness, its nurture and unhindered growth.
Aristotle hewed three broad categories of friendship. The first two he considered inferior to the third; nonetheless all had some claim to be properly described as “friendship”. The categories were:

(i) Friendship based on utility. This would include the friends we intermittently call upon to fill vacant evenings and help keep at bay the bruised clouds of loneliness – friends who will amuse us, flatter us and distract us from ourselves.

(ii) Friendship based on pleasure. This type of friendship often comes as a powerful twister of looks, feelings and passion which eventually blows itself out, leaving varying degrees of emotional destruction. Once the feelings have been stripped bare and the passion exhausted, so this friendship lacking real foundations, subsides and eventually collapses.

(iii) Friendship based on goodness. These friendships are stable, possess athletic stamina and can weather the fickleness of human emotions and motives because they are based on goodness. Aristotle writes that

Only the friendship of those who are good, and similar in their goodness, is perfect. For these people each alike wish good for the other qua good, and they are good in themselves. And it is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.

Aristotle suggests that without this pure form of friendship our lives would be incomplete and we would remain partially lost to ourselves. Tempering his natural idealism he candidly admits that “such friendships are rare...because men of this kind are few...The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not” or as the poet, Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “they (friendships) are not claimed but courted, honoured, considered.”

The friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue appears to have possessed these qualities. After a slow, stammering gestation period, their lifelong friendship was courted, honoured, considered. They were able to penetrate their character differences, idiosyncrasies and failings and see within each other the treasure of goodness. “Easy at first,” writes W.H.Auden, “the language of friendship/Is, as we soon discover,/Very difficult to speak well...” In The King’s Speech we meet two men who found their voices and learnt to speak the language of friendship well.

Football, Religion and the Sacking of Football Managers

Followers of The Invisible Province will know that I greatly admire The Times newspaper’s chief sports journalist, Simon Barnes. The oceanic breadth of his sporting knowledge is married to incisive, intelligent analysis and expressed with prose of crystalline clarity. Today, Simon Barnes, considers the sacrifice of the Liverpool manager, Roy Hodgson, and the resurrection of Kenny Dalglish (although a weekend loss to Manchester United makes this resurrection look precarious). There are not many sports writers who can reference The Golden Bough (a text that is more often associated with T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land) with such ease and lack of pretentiousness. Simon Barnes can:

Football is always making comparisons between itself and religion, with messiahs coming to save football clubs – I have just read that Kenny Dalglish is regarded as a “saint” on Merseyside – and every ground, especially Anfield, is a cathedral. But football is not to be compared with the organised religions of the present day.

No. Football goes straight to the atavistic roots of religion. To understand the cult of the football manager, don’t linger by the sports shelves, go across to anthropology and read The Golden Bough, the great work by Sir James George Frazer.

Frazer told us all about the temporary king, the person who has total command, along with everything – and everyone – he could possibly want. But his real function is not to rule. His function is to die. When the crops fail, the king must be killed and a new king found. Only that way can a new start be made, only that way will the future glitter and flow with promise, only that way will the followers have their faith reignited.

This ancient cycle of despair and hope is repeated in football clubs across the country and the world: appointment, success, decline, failure and then the immolation of the leader. So bring in the new leader and everything will be all right, the cycle can continue. It is an absurd way to run a football club...but running a football club is not the real purpose of this ritual.

The real purpose is to satisfy our souls, to reconcile us to life’s unfairness, an unfairness brutally exaggerated in the distorting mirror of football. Long live the new king. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The 2011 Census

I was at Westminster Cathedral today and browsing through their newsletter (no, not during the homily!) I spotted a notice for volunteers to help with the forthcoming national census that will take place on March 27th. This reminded me of an article I’d read in The Economist just before Christmas by its British editor, Andrew Miller, predicting the findings of this census and what it might tell us about how we are presently living in Britain:

The census will reveal a sharp rise in the number of adults in their 20s who still live with their parents, tethered to the family nest by a combination of limited economic opportunities and still-high property prices. Yet it will also suggest that, among affluent young people, more are opting to live alone (because they are settling down with partners later, and eschewing the option of sharing with friends in favour of getting a foot on the property ladder). And it isn’t only yuppies who will be shown to be living by themselves. So will several other kinds of Britons.

Britain’s divorce rate has stabilised. But that trend disguises a rise in the overall separation rate. The number of couples who choose to cohabit rather to marry has risen; and their relationships tend to be more fragile than modern marriages. So the overall separation rate is higher than the (marriage-only) divorce rate. As the census will enumerate, this means a steadily rising number of people who are living by themselves. More, too, will be found to be living alone at the end of their lives, after a partner dies. (The ageing population will be another of the census’s headline themes. It will record that there are almost 1.5m people in Britain aged 85 and over – and that the country is home to more pensioners than children.)

People will be found to be working alone – at home – more than ever. In the sphere of work, Britain will emerge as a radically bifurcating country: increasingly divided between the workaholic and the work-shy. There will be a large number of households in which both the resident adults work worryingly long hours – and, even more worryingly, a large number in which no one works at all.

If Miller’s predictions are correct, then the Britain of 2011 is one in which people of every age are living more atomised, disconnected lives. The traditional bonds that held relationships, families and communities together are being rejected in favour of looser, less stable bonds. This is a worrying trend if we are to maintain some recognisable form of social cohesion and individuals are to hope for something more than a life alone.

Our relationships, particularly with people whom we love – husband or wife, parents, children, dearest friend – embody something of our meaning and who we are. If such relationships start to deteriorate, then we risk being degraded as well. At the same time, this picture is also an opportunity for existing communities (the family, religious and social groups of all colours and persuasions) to show what has been possible in the past and present robust and attractive models of community living for the future.

127 Hours

Danny Boyle’s latest film, 127 Hours, reimmagines the true story of a swaggering adrenalin junkie, Aron Ralston, who heads out into the lunar landscape of Moab, Utah on his mountain bike. Canyoneering (a mixture of cycling, hiking and climbing) provides him with his endorphin release of highs that makes him feel invincible. But, when his arm is trapped by a boulder in a deep ravine, this sports badass is soon reduced to a scared little boy. The film captures Ralston’s increasingly desperate attempts to roll the stone away and the tormenting realisation, captured on his Blair-witch style video diary, that he could be crushed by a trillion year old landscape.

It has been widely reported that Ralston escapes by hacking off his arm. Boyle’s depiction becomes one of those moments when a cinema audience both squirms with empathetic dread and relishes the butchery. At this point, there is a real nerve-shredding connection between audience, character and visuals. But such connections are hard to come by in the rest of the film.

Boyle becomes so committed to trying to capture Ralston’s reckless energy and will-to-live that the film loses any real emotional connection with the central character. In a film so closely focussed on one character this is a failure. Ralston's experience is lost in a whirlwind of showy cinematic tricks and techniques: split screen images, kinetic editing, flashbacks and an obtrusive soundtrack (Dido, Sigur Ros, A.R.Rahman, Bill Withers). This one-man agony opera is played with conviction by James Franco but the performance is overwhelmed by what begins to feel like an end-of-year film school project. Boyle's penchant for technical exhibitionism reduces this Romantic battle between man and nature into a comic hero caper.



The single man trapped in a claustrophobic space (see Ryan Reynolds in 2010's Buried) is a challenging ask for any director. One suspects that Boyle was attracted to such subject matter, in part, as a reaction to the narrative expansiveness of Slumdog Millionaire. But rather than trusting in the finely observed details of this human story, the acting and an audience’s ability to engage with both, Boyle bottles it and resorts to a cinematic box of tricks. Flashbacks to friends, lovers, family and two female hikers Ralston met before the accident have no emotional weight and feel like idle intrusions into the editing suite.

127 Hours is a disappointment and only saved from being an indulgence by the breathtaking landscapes conjured by cinematographers Antony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak. In these images the audience are given a glimpse of the real vistas, physical and psychological, this film might have explored if it had dared to channel some of Aron Ralston's spirit of adventure.

Open: the autobiography of Andre Agassi

Andre Agassi was castigated for taking part in an ad campaign with the tag line, Image is Everything. In his autobiography (ghost written by the Pulitzer prize winning, J.R. Moehringer), Open, Agassi goes behind his own image and that of tennis to provide a candid account of his life on the circuit. This is a confessional account that gives as much space to his lost childhood and his bullying, unloving father as it does to cataloguing the victories and losses of the tennis matches he played.

All this is recounted with an emotional honesty that at times is almost too painful to read. This is partly because tennis has such a “clean” image and the reality for this tennis player, at any rate, was less then clean. In this book it is as if Agassi is unpicking the scabs of old psychic wounds. He reveals with remarkable candour and humour all that was retarded and dishonest in himself as he struggles to establish an authentic identity that is more than just a public or sponsorship image. Such self-analysis is not uncommon in the modern biography, but for a major sportsman to do this makes for a landmark sporting text.

The leitmotif that runs throughout this book is I hate tennis. Agassi is not bluffing. He means it. He hated tennis but like an abusive lover, he kept going back to it and could not give it up. The hatred began at an early age. As a child, he was forced to spend hours every day hitting balls being fired from a customised machine, the dragon, while his father barked, harder, harder. Mike Agassi is the destructive influence that disfigures his son’s whole life. This father turned a little boy with talent into someone so psychologically damaged that Agassi would spend the majority of his life loathing himself or making failed attempts to piece together, like one of his mother's jigsaw puzzles, some sense of who he was. At a turning point in his failing professional career, Agassi reflects with a raw honesty:

I hate tennis more than ever – but I hate myself more. I tell myself, so what if you hate tennis? Who cares? All those people out there, all those millions who hate what they do for a living, they do it anyway. Maybe doing what you hate, doing it well and cheerfully, is the point. So you hate tennis. Hate it all you want. You still need to respect it – and yourself.

This search for some sort of self respect could have turned this autobiography into another Oprah book of the week. In a famous 1994 article written by Martin Amis for the New Yorker, Amis derides the idea of the need for “personalities” in tennis, such as Nastase and Connors. He acerbically comments that “personality” is “an exact synonym of a seven letter duosyllable starting with “a”, ending with “e” (and also featuring, in order of appearance, an “ss”, an “h”, an “o” and “l”)”. But it is the anguish and hard-won self understanding that makes Agassi’s search for selfhood so compelling. His peers may have considered Agassi an “asshole”, but Agassi was simply a damaged mutant trying to find a true reflection of himself in a world he didn't understand. At the heart of this search is Agassi’s primitive instinct that love is a central element in the composition of any being. Love is the illuminating feature that distinguishes someone from being a self-preoccupied egomaniac and being a person.

She (the actress, Brooke Shields) laughs. You don’t actually hate tennis.
Yes.
But you don’t hate hate it.
I do. I hate it.
We talk about our travels, our favourite foods, music, movies. We bond over one recent movie, Shadowlands, the story of the British writer C.S.Lewis. I tell Brooke that the movie struck a chord with me. There was Lewis’s close relationship with his brother. There was his sheltered life, walled off from the world. There was his fear of risk and the pain of love. But then one singularly brave woman makes him see that pain is the price of being human, and well worth it. In the end Lewis tells his students: Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He tells them: We are like blocks of stone...The blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what makes us perfect.

The war of attrition that the ATP tour became for Agassi was also the place where he played some great, physically bruising tennis. Open captures these matches with an economical vividness and shows how a match could turn on a point or be lost due to poor split-second decision-making. We feel the sweaty rivalry between Agassi and his nemesis, “pistol” Pete Sampras – a rivalry that also had a deep seam of mutual respect. However, Agassi’s deepest, bitterest rivalry was with Boris Becker, who in Agassi’s view “tries to come off as an intellectual, when he’s just an overgrown farmboy.” There is a brilliant recreation of the 1995 grudge match at the US Open semi where Becker starts blowing kisses to Brooke Shields in Agassi’s box. But Agassi has spotted Becker’s tell-tale serving weakness: “Just before he tosses the ball, Becker sticks out his tongue and it points like a tiny red arrow to where he’s aiming.” Insider details such as these provide the reader with enormous pleasure and provide Agassi’s account of his career with a unique, multi-layered texture.

Much has been made about the lurid drug revelations in Open, but the real revelation is that a sportsman like Agassi admits to being profoundly messed-up by his past and by the sport that continually threatened to destroy him. Neither his past or his tennis did destroy Agassi and the man who emerges victorious from this book is much more than just an image.