Farewell

I have been writing The Invisible Province for the past three years and I have enjoyed doing so. The blog has provided me with an intellectual distraction. But I feel that it has run its course. It is time to hang up my mouse and consign The Invisible Province to blog history.

Thank you to my small band of “followers.” I hope there were things in The Invisible Province that you found stimulating, thought-provoking or entertaining.

Fr Martin Boland

Othello, our contemporary

At university, a set text when studying Shakespeare was Jan Kott’s influential, Shakespeare, our Contemporary. This scholarly work was lucid and highly provocative. Kott’s book was a Molotov cocktail of ideas. For example, in an essay on King Lear, Kott places Shakespeare in conversation with Samuel Beckett and philosophical existentialism. This kind of intellectual daring ignited my undergraduate imagination. Kott was blasting the brown varnish from a “heritage” view of Shakespeare’s work so that we could see anew the startling, colourful vulgarity and genius of the Bard. It was thrilling stuff. The theatre director, Peter Brook, wrote in The Preface to Kott’s study:

His writing is learned, it is informed, his study is serious and precise, it is scholarly without what we associate with scholarship. The existence of Kott makes one suddenly aware how rare it is for a pedant or a commentator to have any experience of what he is describing. It is a disquieting thought that the major part of the commentaries on Shakespeare’s passions and his politics are hatched far from life by sheltered figures behind ivy-covered walls.

Looking back at my dog-eared copy of the book, I have underlined this paragraph and written with adolescent enthusiasm in the margin: yes, yes, yes. Of course, I realise now that Brook was indulging in intellectual trash-talk and, as I sat through countless productions that contrived to “update” Shakespeare and make him relevant, I began to question and, then, to curse, Jan Kott. Shakespeare’s text, poetry and story-telling were often mutilated in order to conform with some half-baked, puerile conceit whose purpose was to make a name for the director. In such hands, Shakespeare became less relevant rather than more.

However, occasionally a production of a Shakespeare play comes along that makes me re-examine my sceptical stance. Nicholas Hytner’s modern dress, updated Othello is one such production. There is a clarity, urgency and cohesiveness of vision operating here that serves Shakespeare’s play. It doesn’t feel contrived to set the action in a Cypriot military compound because this environment rings true with the themes of the play and enhances, rather than smothers them. Hytner provides the audience with a fresh, imaginative route with which it might approach the play and make sense of character motivations. Jonathan Shaw, the military adviser on the production and a serving member of the British Army, writes with insight in his programme essay:

Othello’s external themes are set within the context of soldiers in an operational setting. The set designs accurately expose the bleak functionality of the environment within which modern soldiers live on operations. Environment affects behaviour; the joyless T-bar barriers and Corimec shelters shrivel the soul. In such a raw environment, and with the removal of the disciplining power of an impending war, the easy recourse to drunkeness and violence is understandable; and the play is astonishingly violent to modern eyes.

The testosterone-fuelled world of the army camp may produce the heroic values of bravery and loyalty, but it can also be a toxic breeding ground for rivalry, jealousy and violence. The dusty line between watching your comrade’s back and stabbing him in it is continually tested by the desert winds. Iago’s jealousy is founded on Cassio being favoured by Othello and raised through the ranks ahead of him. Cassio is acting above his station. Othello is the cause of this. The tapeworm of resentment twists in Iago’s gut.

This resentment begins to poison Iago and his schemes to exact revenge spiral out of control and become deadly. Rory Kinnear’s finely-tuned performance captures Iago’s psychological imprisonment by the “green-eyed monster” through subtle shifts of tone, emphasise and gesture. At the beginning of the play, he cadges a smoke and, with sleight of hand, slips the whole packet of cigarettes into his pocket. This act of petty theft hints at more serious moral defects in his character.

Kinnear’s Iago is a man who will manipulate and deceive with blokeish charm in order to get what he wants. He plays Othello, casually planting the pernicious seeds of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness in the Moor’s mind. The richness of detail and depth in Kinnear’s performance provokes in the audience laughter, pity and horror. It does so because we recognise in ourselves and others the trace elements of Iago’s vices.

Adrian Lester’s Othello first appears on stage with the sunniness of a man about to marry and the confidence of one who effortlessly commands respect from his soldiers. He is physically virile – a man’s man and a ladies man. His speech is smoothly orotund – he has the honey tongue of the evangelical preacher. He has “a free and open nature”. He is a natural born leader. All this is eroded by the corrosive acid of Iago’s spite.

As the supposed evidence against his wife accumulates, his trust in her disintegrates and he along with it. Everything he believed and loved is called into question. He is tormented by doubt and fear. He sniffs every word and action for the bed sheet odour of betrayal. Lester’s final scenes with Desdemona (Olivia Vinall) in a portakabin bedroom are hugely affecting. The mental desperation that finally leads Othello to kill his wife is unbearable to watch. And when Iago’s malicious lie is revealed, Othello’s suffering is heart breaking. The great man is reduced to a husk, a pitiful creature who must “die upon a kiss.” The emotional conviction animating Lester’s performance will fill his cabinet with awards.

Nicholas Hytner’s modern setting of the play does not overwhelm Shakespeare’s storytelling but gives it a pace and clarity. This is the best production of Othello I have seen and maybe the best that I will see in my lifetime. It is so good that it made me dig out my university copy of Jan Kott's study. This Othello reminded me that William Shakespeare is, indeed, our contemporary.

Othello at the National Theatre, London

Margaret Thatcher and British Protest Music

There has been a lot of interest in the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz following the death of Margaret Thatcher. Widespread debate has raged about Ding Dong, the witch is dead and BBC Radio 1’s decision to only play an excerpt of the song if it reaches number one. The reason I don’t want to hear this song is because it offends my sense of what makes for decent political music. It is an insult to the venerable tradition of the protest song. Ding dong, the witch is dead is politically vapid. It possesses no political traction or heightened feeling. This is a novelty exercise in viral tastelessness. It is instantly disposable and forgettable, rather than having anything daring, memorable or challenging to say.

For centuries, Britain has produced political protest songs. The 1381 Peasants Revolt produced the well-known rhyme, "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" The civil and religious wars of the 17th century produced such movements as the Levellers and Diggers with their hymnal of incendiary ballads. Founded by Gerrard Winstanley in 1649, the Diggers were inspired by the Acts of the Apostles vision of living in community and sharing everything in common. Diggers attempted to farm common land in small egalitarian communities. Suppressed by the local authorities who viewed them as a threat to the status quo, very few of their protest song lyrics survive. Those that do, give us a flavour of their radical boldness:

The lawyers they conjoin, stand up now,
to rescue they advise, such fury they devise,
the devil in them lies, and hath blinded both their eyes
stand up now, stand up now!

The clergy they come in, stand up now,
the clergy they come in and say it is a sin
that we should now begin our freedom for to win.

Stand up now diggers all
'Gainst lawyers and 'gainst priests.
Stand up now, for tyrants they are both,
even flat against their oath, to grant us they are loathe
free meat and drink and cloth.
Stand up now diggers all!

The industrial revolution was the catalyst for an increase in protest songs and ballads, such as The Triumph of General Ludd. Using a fictional persona, a Robin Hood character, the song expressed the concerns of the Luddite movement that had grown up in the cloth industry with the introduction of wide-framed automated looms. These could be easily operated by low-paid, unskilled workers and highly skilled weavers and textile workers found themselves unemployed:

No more chant your old rhymes about old Robin Hood
His feats I do little admire
I'll sing the achievements of General Ludd
Now the hero of Nottingham Shire
Those engines of mischief were sentenced to die
By unanimous vote of the trade
And Ludd who cannot a position defy
Was the grand executioner made
Whether guarded by soldiers along the highway
Or closely secured in a room
He shivers them up by night and by day
And nothing can soften their doom
Shall the whole team of humble no longer oppressed
And shall Ludd sheath his conquering sword
Be his grievance instantly met with redress
Than peace shall be quickly restored
Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice
Never ere their assistance withdraw
Till full-fashioned work at the old-fashioned prices
established by custom and law

In more recent times, the work of the folk singer, Ewan MacColl, articulated concerns about nuclear weapons and the cold war. Young people found the folk song was, MacColl believed, “tailor-made for expressing their thoughts and comments on contemporary topics, dreams, and worries.” Donovan’s 1965 folk song, Universal Soldier, and his anti- Vietnam song The War Drags On gave musical expression to anti-war protest, as did John Lennon’s 1969 naïve anthem Give Peace a Chance. British folk music in the 1960’s was socially engaged and had real political bite. Today, we have the insipid, Mumford and Sons.

During the 1970’s Punk became the voice of musical protest. Songs such as God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols and If the Kids are United by Sham 69 gave vent to anger about youth unemployment and poor opportunities. To my mind, the greatest protest songs of this period came from the pen of Joe Strummer and The Clash. Writing about class, political, economic and racial inequalities gave Strummer’s writing a tensile energy. The lyrics to the 1977 song, Career Opportunities, is an example of Strummer’s political concerns:

They offered me the office, offered me the shop
They said I'd better take anything they'd got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?
Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock
I hate the army an' I hate the RAF
I don't wanna go fighting in the tropical heat
I hate the civil service rules
I won't open letter bombs for you
Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock.

Bus driver
Ambulance man
Ticket inspector
I don't understand
They're gonna have to introduce conscription
They're gonna have to take away my prescription
If they wanna get me making toys
If they wanna get me, well I got no choice
Career opportunities are the ones that never knock,
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock.

I associate three great protest songs with Margaret Thatcher and her government. The first is Ghost Town by The Specials released the day after the first Handsworth riot in central Birmingham (10 July 1981) and two weeks before the wedding of Charles and Diana. The song made number one in the charts with its themes of social disaffection and decline. Blending melancholy and menace, the song captured an urban landscape eroded by dole queues, simmering violence and deep social divisions. It has lost nothing of its resonance today.



Elvis Costello’s Tramp the Dirt Down is full of naked rage and venom. This haunting protest song with its lyrical tautness is in the tradition of Shelley’s 1819 poem, The Mask of Anarchy, written following the Peterloo Massacre in that same year. Like that poem, Costello is less interested in political analysis and more in capturing the emotional anger that Margaret Thatcher provoked in some people. Morrissey’s Margaret on the Guillotine would be another example of this. Unlike Ghost Town which provided a description of the social effects of the Thatcher government’s policies, Costello’s song documents the feelings of frustration and impotence that many people felt during the Thatcher government. These feelings were not universal – “Basildon man”, for example, applauded Margaret Thatcher’s policies and non-consensual style of politics – but the feelings Costello captured were real for many people.

I saw a newspaper picture from the political
campaign,
A woman was kissing a child, who was obviously
in pain.
She spills with compassion, as that young child's
face in her hands she grips.
Can you imagine all that greed and avarice
coming down on that child's lips?
Well, I hope, I don't die too soon,
I pray the Lord my soul to save,
Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave,
because there's one thing I know, I'd like to live
long enough to savour
that's when they finally put you in the ground
I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.

When England was the whore of the world
Margaret was her madam
and the future looked as bright and as clear as
the black tarmacadam.
Well, I hope, that she sleeps well at night,
isn't haunted by every tiny detail,
'Cos when she held that lovely face in her hands
all she thought of was betrayal.

And now the cynical ones say that it all ends
the same in the long run,
try telling that to the desperate father who just
squeezed the life from his only son.
And how it's only voices in your head and
dreams you never dreamt,
try telling him the subtle difference between
justice and contempt.
Try telling me she isn't angry with this pitiful
discontent,
When they flaunt it in your face as you line up
for punishment.
And then expect you to say "Thank you"
straighten up, look proud and pleased,
because you've only got the symptoms,
you haven't got the whole disease.
Just like a schoolboy, whose head's like a tin-can
filled up with dreams then poured down
the drain,
try telling that to the boys on both sides,
being blown to bits or beaten and maimed,
Who takes all the glory and none of the shame.

Well, I hope you live long now, I pray the Lord
your soul to keep,
I think I'll be going before we fold our arms
and start to weep.
I never thought for a moment that human life
could be so cheap
'Cos when they finally put you in the ground
They'll stand there laughing and tramp the
dirt down

But for me, the leading protest singer in Britain during the 1980s was Billy Bragg, the Woody Guthrie of Barking. His most personal song, Between the Wars, was released in 1985 at the height of the miners’ strike. The proceeds from the record went to the miners’ strike fund. Beneath the politics, Bragg captures the profound disillusion experienced by individual lives and communities destroyed by poverty and unemployment. I kept the faith and I kept voting/ Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand./For theirs is a land with a wall around it/ And mine is a faith in my fellow man./ Theirs is a land of hope and glory/ Mine is the green field and the factory floor./ Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers/ And mine is the peace we knew/Between the wars.



Here is an example of British protest song writing at its very best. Angry, but full of human compassion. It is this song that should be number one this Sunday…and then, let us pray for Margaret Thatcher.

David Bowie is...

I am standing in a queue at Burger King in Liverpool Street Station, when I spot, loitering in the middle of the central concourse, two subversive figures. They’re dressed in identical, tweedy suits, brogues, matching shirts and ties. On one man, this bespoke, dandy look would be interesting, but worn by two men, it starts to feel creepy and threatening. They look like Saville Row clones who have escaped from the set of Dr Who.

People, catching trains and making their way to the tedium of the office, cast looks at the improbable pair. Some even stop in their tracks to get a better look. A young woman takes a photo of them on her mobile phone. It’s impossible not to take a sneaky look. Of course, that’s what they want you to do. After all, they believe they are works of art. They are Gilbert and George.

The art of Gilbert and George is not only to be found in contemporary art gallery collections, but exists wherever they are – whether it’s having a builder’s tea in an East End caff or schmoozing with the art crowd in a Venice Biennalle pavilion. “Art for all” became their democratising slogan. Their art is provocative and populist. Art is not something Gilbert and George do, it is something they are. Their work and who they are have fused into one.

The first room of the David Bowie is exhibition contains a “singing sculpture” by Gilbert and George dating from 1969. Captured on film, the artistic duo, with their faces painted silver, dance and sing the Flanagan and Allen vaudeville standard, “Underneath the Arches” – a song in which two tramps describe the pleasures of sleeping rough.



In the polite atmosphere of the Victoria and Albert museum, opening this exhibition with Gilbert and George is like being welcomed with a Glasgow kiss. It’s not what you are expecting. It floors you and gives you a nosebleed. It’s a statement of intent. This is not going to be some reverential homage to an ageing pop star or a marketing exercise for his new album. This exhibition is going to make outlandish claims about David Bowie that will raise blood pressures, make pupils dilate and cause people to dance and sing along to some of the greatest songs in popular music. The curators, Victoria Broackers and Geoffrey Marsh, write in breathless fashion:

David Bowie is one of the most important artists of the last fifty…who channelled the avant-garde into the populist mainstream without compromising its subversive, liberating power. Bowie forms a link that connects Andy Warhol, Bertolt Brecht, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali, Marlene Dietrich, Philip Glass, Nietzsche, Hollywood glamour, graphic design, platform shoes, film, music, Kurt Weill, Berlin, New York, London, Alexander McQueen, the 2012 London Olympics, Jim Henson, the moon landings, Kansai Yamamoto, Kate Moss and Marshall McLuhan.

If they'd included Obi wan Kenobi, we would have had a full house of cultural icons. With any other rock star, this overblown catalogue could be written off as the spliff-induced ravings of the beret wearing, pretentious squad. But with Bowie, it all rings true and it becomes even more convincing as you make your way round this incredibly vibrant exhibition.

The exhibition claims a place for David Bowie among the artistic and cultural radicals. This is David Bowie as a performance artist. We are being asked to see the music, the costumes, sets, design, photos, mime, video, theatre and cultural references as a piece and not to separate them out. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, in Aristotelian terms. In other words, we come to understand that what Bowie does and who he is have become indistinguishable in our imaginations. Bowie is living as a complete performance and that is why we can’t take our eyes off him. He is the art and his art is for all.

Raiding the extensive Bowie archive, the exhibition curators reveal the range of Bowie’s artistic enterprise and ambition. For example, there are the costumes which allowed Bowie to play out his artfully constructed character fantasies: Uncle Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, Clockwork Orange Droog, White Soul Boy, New Romantic Pierrot. Bowie sheds costumes like snakes shed skins. Some sixty dresses, suits, kimonos, jumpsuits, capes, frock coats and leotards are on display. They are evidence of how Bowie’s sartorial ambitions matched his musical ambitions.



Bowie’s clothes defy conventions. They break the rules of what men are supposed to wear. There is nothing grey, functional or Marks and Sparks about them. His clothes are all about androgynous glamour. They play with silhouettes, shape, form, texture and colour. Sexual ambivalence is stitched into their seams. Every pleat, vent and button hole is tailored to provoke a reaction. Bowie’s wardrobe belongs to him alone. No other man would be man enough to dress that way – Bowie’s way. Camille Paglia in her thoughtful exhibition catalogue essay, Theatre of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution, writes:

Like Wilde, who free-lanced as a fashion journalist, Bowie is a dandy for whom costume is an art form. But his lineage descends not direct from Beau Brummell but refracted through the English dandyism imported by French decadents such as the poet Charles Baudelaire, who portrayed the dandy as an arbiter of distinction, elegance and cold apartness – exactly like the Thin White Duke persona of Bowie’s 1975-6 tours. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire’s friend and ally, called dandies “the Androgynes of History”.

One can only imagine what the local denizens of Bridlington Town hall and Torquay made of Ziggy Stardust as he strode their stages in a Kansai Yamamoto red leotard. I suspect they found it both appalling and thrilling…and isn’t that the point? The greatest art and artists have always subverted our mundane, bland versions of the world. They shake us from our imaginative and intellectual torpor and wake us to some new way of imagining ourselves.

The exhibition’s designers use every trick in their creative arsenal to expose you to the full power of Bowie’s creative vision. There’s the music, of course, but there is also innovative use of video, stills and documentary footage (I particularly enjoyed a piece from BBC’s Nationwide with a pompous Bernard Falk barely disguising his disgust at teenage girls screaming for a “freak with makeup”). Biographical details are scattered throughout the exhibition, the books that influenced Bowie fly above your head, Bowie’s story is found between the vinyl records you flick through as if you were in a Carnaby Street record shop. You do not move from one room to the next, but from one set to the next – one moment you’re with Bowie on Top of the Pops and next you are in a Berlin recording studio beside the great man and Brian Eno.

There are the pages of song lyrics written on scraps of paper with scrappy schoolboy handwriting. It looks like nothing and, you get nearer, and you read (scrawled on copy book paper):

Ziggy played for time
Jiving us that we was voodoo
The kids was just crass
He was the Nazz
With God-given arse
He took it all too far
But boy could he play guitar

And, in your imagination, the music kicks in and the rock anti-god, Ziggy Stardust, claims the stage again. It sends shivers down your spine. There are Bowie’s paintings, excerpts from his films (for example, Bowie playing a camp hobgoblin King in Labyrinth – not one of his finest moments) and theatre work (for example, Bowie played to critical claim, Joseph Merrick, in Bernard Pomerance’s play, The Elephant Man), storyboards, set designs…and all this leading you to the centre piece of the show: roof high video screens with Bowie performing “Heroes” live. It is mesmerising.

This is not an exhibition. This is full immersion into a single man’s creativity. It will make you gasp with excitement. It will make you laugh and smile. It will make you want to applaud and cheer. There is nothing solemn or “anorak” about this exhibition. It’s just super cool, super intelligent and super exciting…like the man himself.

If you are a Bowie fan, this is a reminder of why you are – why, like me, you love the man and love the music. If you think you might be a Bowie fan, this will make you one. If you are not a Bowie fan, go see a doctor.

David Bowie Is... at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

On Facebook

Confession. I am a member of that billion member constituency made up of the emotionally retarded. I am on Facebook.

I will look at Facebook on an almost daily basis. I waste too much time chatting, posting and checking my status update and those of others. Yes, I want to look at photos of people’s sleeping cats. I want to be liked, poked and invited to events. I want to know who is single, in a relationship, straight, gay or any combination of the above. I want all the moral and political complexities of life to be summarised in ten words. Only when someone posts me that Tupac Shakur inspirational song lyric will I be able to get through a bad day in the Brentwood ghetto. I need to know the names of those people who think The Shawshank Redemption is the best film ever…I need to know so that I can keep away from them.

Andy Warhol was right when he said that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Facebook is exactly like that except that the people on it are not famous and the fifteen minutes goes on forever and ever and ever…

This year’s Lent seemed an opportune time to practise some Facebook self-control. It also gave me an opportunity to think a little more deeply and seriously about my uneasiness about this form of social networking and my relationship to it. Was there any ethical substance to my Facebook anxiety?

For the forty days of Lent, this is what has been on my mind:

(i) Facebook and Profile Identity Fraud Facebook is largely populated by people who are constructs - social media fabrications. These are incomplete or airbrushed representations of a person. They are online identities or to use the Facebook jargon, profiles. In other words, they exist in closer relationship to the avatars of Second Life than to human beings of real life.

Because of the sheer size of Facebook and the possibility that anyone can view your profile, identity construction and self-representation become extremely important. Profiles, pictures and posts are manipulated in order to make a person appear interesting, smart, witty or in-the-know. There is no place for modesty on Facebook. Keeping up appearances is everything.

In his seminal article, The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, the social scientist, Clive Thompson, uses the concept of “ambient awareness”, the idea of “being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does – body language, sighs, stray comments – out of the corner of your eye.” On Facebook, ambient awareness is heightened. Every movie or music preference allows people to feel like they can actually “see” you and “know” you. Every photo is chosen to influence how the viewer perceives you – is this person attractive, friendly, having a good time? There are not many photos on Facebook of people in distress or with tears in their eyes.

Unlike journals and diaries which were a personal and unedited view into a private world, Facebook is a public and manufactured view of an online image. The purpose of this image is to get oneself noticed. The Facebook user is advertising and selling a product to others and the product is a kind of fiction about who they are. And to be successful at this, knowing which details to reveal about yourself and which to edit and delete is essential if you are to become desirable in Facebook terms. Those who have not mastered this dark art become Facebook embarrassments.

The sophisticated Facebook user assembles cultural references and images to shape how others will see them. These may not be lies, but they are reductions and simplifications of who they are. Simplifications that they are then expected to conform to and those around them are expected to believe in. Only those who really know the person outside of Facebook are in a position to correct what has been altered and fill in what has been edited out.

The Facebook profile trivialises the true identity of a person. Online life consists of premeditated decisions that cosmetically determine the user’s identity. In the Facebook world, ambiguity, complexity and suffering are anathema. In the real world, these are the things that make us more than a profile and worth loving.

(ii) Facebook and Narcissism I came across a University of Georgia psychology study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin which suggests that there is a strong correlation between the numbers of “friends” you have on Facebook and the “toxic” traits of “socially disruptive” narcissism. It gave me pause for thought.

“Simply put, narcissists are people who think they’re pretty great…They think they’re more attractive, more intelligent, more unique and entitled to special treatment,” writes Lauren Buffardi, lead author of the study, “They’re well-liked upon initial meetings, but have more difficulty maintaining warm and intimate relationships.”

The researchers focussed on two particular elements of narcissism:

(a) The Grandiose Exhibitionism aspect which includes “self-absorption, vanity, superiority and exhibitionistic tendencies.” People with this personality aspect are constantly seeking to be the centre of attention. They expend significant energy promoting themselves and making sure they get noticed.

(b) The Entitlement/Exploitativeness aspect which includes “a sense of deserving respect and a willingness to manipulate and take advantage of others.”
People who exhibit such traits find in Facebook a readymade vehicle with which they can self-promote. The “friends” they acquire are, more likely to be, affiliates, fans or awestruck followers who hope that some of the narcissistic glitter will rub off on them. But that doesn’t matter. They are an audience.

“Narcissists use Facebook and other social networking sites because they believe others are interested in what they are doing, and they want others to know what they are doing,” claims Buffardi. However, the research goes further than considering how narcissism finds expression online, it also suggests that it can have a detrimental effect on healthy and mature relationships offline.

Narcissism is often based on a fear of failure or weakness, a focus on one’s own self, an unhealthy drive to be seen as the best, and a deep-seated insecurity and underlying feeling of inadequacy. Wendy Behary, author of Disarming the Narcissist believes that Facebook allows narcissists to remain disconnected from true intimacy and accountability for their behaviour. She writes:

At the core of most people who are narcissistic, underneath they often feel inadequate, lonely and a sense of shame because they haven’t learned the skills to connect with someone in a real way. Facebook allows them to stay in hiding.

(iii) Facebook and Alone Together At Christmas, a friend gave me Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. It lay beside my bed. I decided to make it part of my Lenten reading. It is provocative and convincing because Turkle has no desire to romanticise an analogue age, but thinks we must rein in our digital excesses before they do us permanent emotional damage.

Her thesis is simple. Turkle argues that, more and more, we live our emotional lives through the technology at our fingertips. Technology has become the medium by which we shape our intimacies. So, for example, how often do you pick up the landline phone and have a conversation with someone? We will text, tweet, Facebook, but for most of us the phone exists to provide an internet connection for our digital technologies. Phoning another person has come to feel like an act of intrusion. We are less likely to communicate with each other in real time and face to face. Facebook allows us to process a response in our time and at a remove from the person we are communicating with. This is a form of communication but one achieved without intimacy and the vulnerability of revealing yourself to another in their presence. “Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing,” writes Turkle, “Now it is exotic, the jewel in the crown.”

Perhaps, Facebook has made us less attentive to each other. I find myself asking some of my friends to turn off their mobiles when they are with me because I know, if I don’t, I will never have their attention. The opportunity to be present to each other, to talk to each other is eroded by the constant digital percussion tempting them to engage with their virtual relationships. I want them to talk to me, a real flesh and blood person, rather than to connect with me from the safe haven of the internet.

“Connectivity offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship,” Turkle claims. In other words, we think we can have companionship through the likes of Facebook but without any of the demands of intimacy. We conduct our “risk free” relationships as avatars on Second Life and confuse the skewed, scattershot postings on Facebook as authentic communication. In the desperate attempts to connect with others, whoever they are, the new technologies risk becoming a crucible for a new solitude. The engine that drives Facebook is an abysmal existential loneliness. Turkle writes:

The networked culture is very young. Attendant at its birth, we threw ourselves into its adventure. This is human. But these days, our problems with the Net are becoming too distracting to ignore. At the extreme, we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other…we expect more from technology and less from each other…We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, and yet we have allowed them to diminish us. The prospect of loving, or being loved by, a machine changes what love can be. We know that the young are tempted. They have been brought up to be. Those who have known lifetimes of love can surely offer them more.

Will I ever go back to Facebook? Probably. Doubt it. Though, I miss the sleeping cats and Michael's posts. Who knows? But maybe I need to relearn how to use the telephone, write a letter...be more human.


Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other, Sherry Turkle, Basic Books, New York, 2011

Harold Pinter's Old Times

.

Last night, I had the privilege of watching two actresses at the height of their powers. Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams mesmerise the audience in Ian Rickson’s pellucid production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. They play the roles of a wife and stranger with such technical purity and emotional sincerity that their performances acquire a balletic quality. This is acting in its most concentrated and distilled form – these actresses are not play acting imaginary characters, rather, they are embracing the opaque quality of what it is to be alive and to love.

The play is based around a ménage a trois, a triangular relationship that shape shifts when the balance of power tips one way or another. Deeley (Rufus Sewell), a successful film director, is the man in the middle. He and his wife, Kate (Lia Williams) are staying in a converted farmhouse when, Anna (Kristin Scott Thomas), one of Kate’s old friend comes to stay. Deeley and Anna both want to claim the introverted Kate as their possession. They vye for her affections. They each claim a special closeness to her. They out manoeuvre and trump each other as they attempt to win the trophy of Kate’s exclusive commitment. But behind their efforts is something creepy and relationally rancid.

Pinter’s play is interested in how our memory of past events shapes and informs the way we live in the present. We always approach the people we know with a store of memories of who they were at different times in the past. Yet, these memories are plastic and unreliable. We manipulate and edit our memories to suit our psychological needs. We never experience memory in a neutral way. “I remember things that may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place,” writes Pinter. The forty-year old characters in the play look back to the bars, clubs and art galleries of their youth as a way of making sense of their present environment. The memories of youthful flirtation and desire are manipulated to excuse the silent terrors of ageing. In the end, Deeley is defeated by his past. He becomes a sobbing wreck before the knowledge of who he was and what he has become. Old Times exposes how memory and power act as an invisible web to so many of our adult relationships

Kristin Scott Thomas is the perfect Pinter temptress. She captures the potent sensuality that some middle aged women possess. They are charged with an eroticism that comes from experience and an unshakeable self-confidence. Kristin Scott Thomas slinks and smooths and stretches like something feline. Yet, we know she also can also flash her claws. Lia Williams, on the other hand, is a master class in buttoned up, corseted rage. She has all the power in this triangular relationship and knows it. But the power is contained, nuclear, and only leaks as she finally turns on Anna and coldly admits, “I remember you. I remember you dead.”

Two great actresses. One actor, admirably holding his own. 80 minutes of gripping, thought provoking theatre. A mysterious Pinter play. Oh and I’ll be back to see if it was as good as I remember it to be.

Old Times by Harold Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London

Obama, Tarantino and slavery

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech 2013

It seemed kind of appropriate that I saw Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, on the day that Barack Obama, the first black President of the United States, gave his inauguration address. There was much to enjoy in Obama’s speech and much to enjoy in Django Unchained. Let me mention a few of those things:

1. Samuel L. Jackson gives the performance of his career. Jackson plays an old slave, Stephen, who is fiercely loyal to his plantation owning master, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Stephen is repaid for his loyalty by having the ear of his master and access to the contents of his drinks cabinet. Jackson plays this attendant as a stereotype Uncle Tom figure, a kind of benign grandpa figure that you might find singing zipeedeedooda in another film genre. However, there is nothing benign about Stephen. He is a malevolent racist - spewing racial hatred and dehumanising his fellow slaves. He has styled himself as a black spokesman for white supremacy and the guardian of a vicious system of oppression. Jackson’s characterisation captures all the self-loathing and moral contradictions within this racist collaborator. It is a performance of psychological daring - one that is bristling with danger and menace. It leaves you open mouthed and deeply uncomfortable.

2. A superb musical soundtrack which exercises more than a background function. The meticulously chosen music provides a referential depth to the screen action. Tarantino has a magpie ear. He lifts music from other films and mixes musical genres with little regard for the historical context of the film - country, rap, soul, love ballads, classical are all to be found in Django Unchained. It’s a kind of postmodern game, mixing high and low culture in musical mash ups, but it works because you believe Tarantino loves the music he chooses. There is nothing philosophically arch about his choices. Tarantino layers musical references in order to arouse an audience’s aural imagination and complement the visual, storytelling experience. So, for example, the opening titles of Django Unchained are accompanied by the Luis Bacalov’s romantic theme song from the 1965 film melodrama, Django. In lyrical and musical terms it positions Tarantino’s contemporary take on the western revenge saga somewhere between the cinematic history of the western and a philosophical reflection on slavery.



3. Tarantino’s dialogue fizzes with energy and irreverence. Westerns usually have very little dialogue. Traditionally, the heroes of these movies are the big, strong, silent types. Characters in westerns talk with their Smith and Wessons. In Django Unchained the characters are wordy and lippy. There is a wonderful scene where a lynch mob on horseback argue about a design failure in the bags they are using to cover their faces – the eyes have been cut in such a way that it makes it impossible for them to see where they are going. Their comical exchange of views unmasks the horrific absurdity of their racist actions and their own moral blindness. Such sharpness and precision of writing is a thing of pleasure.

4. Tarantino's courage. Hollywood’s treatment of slavery can be rather worthy and tentative. For example, think of Stephen Spielberg’s The Color Purple and Amistad. To my mind, only Lars von Trier’s Manderley has succeeded in challenging the stock cinematic responses to slavery. The Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw, remarks that “Slavery is a subject on which modern Hollywood is traditionally nervous, a reticence amounting almost to a conspiracy of silence – except, of course, in the explicit context of abolition. As far as Hollywood is concerned, the day-to-day existence of unabolished slavery has been what welfare reformists call the live rail: don’t touch it.” Tarantino’s Django Unchained is not an historical account of American slavery. Django Unchained is a provocative, cinematic essay on the concept of slavery and how human flesh becomes currency. I admired Tarantino’s courage in tackling the issue.

After the duff, over blown, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is Tarantino striding back into town and shooting from the hip. The geek director offers us a slave trade spaghetti western interbred with a Jacobean revenge drama. There are longeurs, contrived plot moments (including one with the director doing an Alfred Hitchcock – don’t give up the day job, Mr Tarantino) and moments when ideas aren’t pulled off. Yet, Django Unchained remains bravura film making. It’s not for those with weak constitutions, but it is for those who want to see an important film director back on form and with fire in his belly.

The Smiths and Catholicism

In A Light that Never Goes Out, the author Tony Fletcher places the phenomenon of The Smiths in the socio-political history of 1980’s Britain, paying particular attention to the city of Manchester, the birthplace of the pop group. The sifting of contextual details provides Fletcher with new methods with which to evaluate the music of The Smiths and their continuing influence.

Fletcher contends that the unique creative energies that shaped the songs of The Smiths are inextricably bound up with, for example, local geography: Whalley Range, the moors, Rusholme. Figures such as Myra Hindley, Alan Sillitoe and Margaret Thatcher inform the content and textural feel of these songs. Fletcher sets out to show that Morrissey’s magpie appropriation of ideas were as much cultural as they were musical - beside the vinyl of The New York Dolls you would find a copy of A Taste of Honey.

One of these cultural influences was the Irish, working class Catholicism that both Morrissey and Marr were weaned on as “cradle Catholics”. Catholic parish churches and schools had been created in the nineteenth century as the loci of community cohesion and identity. This remained the case into the twentieth century and, indeed, up until the present time. The famous Loreto College, founded by the sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1854, was very much a defining presence in Manchester and could be seen from the Morrissey’s terraced house on Queen’s Square.

It is hard to determine the veracity of Morrissey’s version of his childhood Catholicism and that is, in part, because Tony Fletcher’s own antipathy to Catholicism colours his judgement. It suits Fletcher to accept Morrissey’s sour version of events. Morrissey never lets the truth get in the way of a good turn of phrase - his self portrait of the artist as a young man feels too contrived to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. An example of this is the following account of his disenchantment with the Catholic Faith. It sounds “quite absurdly” partial:

I came from a monstrously large family who were quite absurdly Catholic...when I was six there were two serious tragedies (the death of two grandparents) within the family which caused everybody to turn away from the church, and quite rightly so, and from that period onwards there was just a total disregard for something that was really quite sacrosanct previous to the tragedies.

But, in fact, there was not a total disregard for Catholicism in the Morrissey household - far from it. Morrissey would go on to make his First Holy Communion, Confession and Confirmation. He would attend St Mary’s secondary school, becoming a member of Margaret Clitherow House. His childhood and teenage years were immersed in Catholicism which would later feed his lyrical imagination. The affectionate, music hall song, Vicar in a Tutu, with its monkish monsignor advising, "My man, get your vile soul dry-cleaned" is one of the few compositions which references religion explicitly. Yet, there is a Catholic sensibility that informs these songs of death, martyrdom and immortality.

“Those Catholics, they really nab you when you’re young,” Morrissey admitted to Douglas Coupland in a 2006 interview, “They sear you. They sear you, they do.” This contradicts the simplistic view that Morrissey abandoned his Catholic faith to become the prodigal son of popular music. Far from being a cosmetic addition to his being, Morrissey senses that his Catholic Faith has transformed him ontologically, in ways so profound that he cannot rationalise them away. Morrissey’s relationship to his faith is more complex and subtle than Fletcher would have us believe.

One of Morrissey’s heroes, Oscar Wilde, famously said that “Catholicism is the only religion to die in.” Wilde, of course, did die a Catholic. Given his family background, Catholicism was the only religion that Morrissey could have been born into. At his death, will Morrissey meet Wilde at the cemetery gates? I wouldn't bet against it.

And my favourite film of 2012 is...

2012 began with a great film and ended with a great film.

In January, Steve McQueen's Shame was released in the UK. I can't begin to describe the impact this film has had on me, months later and it still haunts my imagination. The story of a sex addicted drone (Michael Fassbender) and his mentally unstable sister (Carey Mulligan) was treated with such sensitivity and compassion that it became almost unbearable to watch. For me, one of the greatest pieces of pure cinema occurs in this film: an extended tracking shot of Fassbender jogging through a nocturnal city, desperately trying to sweat out of his system his distorted, contradictory passions. Technically, the most amazing tracking shot since Touch of Evil and Raging Bull. Existentially, the most poetic summary of the contemporary predicament.

In December, I saw Amour - Michael Haneke's penetrating examination of old age, sickness and death. There's not an ounce of sentimental fat on this film. The story of an elderly husband who cares for his wife is told with a fierce tenderness and humanity. Every frame of this film has a painterly quality. Every emotion on the screen is delivered with gamma knife precision. Cinema for adults only.

And so, there is no favourite film this year. For me, Shame and Amour both take the top spot. They share the laurel crown.

And my other favourites:

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master - Anderson is the new Kubrick. Joaquin Pheonix gave a performace of such feral rawness and strangeness that it tore up the screen.

Leos Carax's Holy Motors - it is demented, punk, exotic and completely mesmerising. People use the word "surreal" about things that are merely strange. But this film is surreal. Holy Motors takes its place alongside Dali and Bunuel as a surrealist work of art.

Sam Mendes' Skyfall - this Bond movie looked a million dollars and that was thanks to the remarkable cinematographer, Roger Deakins. It was tense and exciting, until the anti-climactic final scenes (big Scottish pile in the Highlands blows up...yawn). It also had the campest villain in any multiplex film I can recall. Javier Bardem channelling Kenneth Williams and Augusto Pinochet.

Gareth Evans' The Raid - kickass entertaiment.

Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill - the gangsta movie reinvented.

So what were your top five films of 2012?

Bee keeping, Quantum mechanics and love

Constellations is seventy minutes long. No interval. Most “scenes” are brief. Blink and you’ll miss some of them. The stage is bare apart from white helium balloons, heavenly spheres or molecular models, that float above the action. Two actors (Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall) are on stage throughout.

Constellations is a boy meets girl love story – a metaphysical romcom with dark metastases. A love story about the infinite, shifting possibilities of love. This is a theatrical chamber piece written with intellectual dexterity and played with inventive commitment.

Marianne, a vivacious quantum physicist at Sussex University, and Roland, a blokeish beekeeper, meet at barbeque. There’s a bit of awkward flirting. She makes a joke that bombs and any possibility of romance ends there. But then the meeting is played out again in a parallel universe. Slight variations in the original meeting – the turn of a phrase, the language of their bodies – result in new outcomes. Another universe. Another meeting. Exponential results. And so on, until we see their love for each other take shape.

The defining moments of their relationship are played out in these parallel universes. The theoretical existence of a multiverse, that our lives and deaths can be played out in any number of ways, is what excites motor mouthed Marianne. For Roland, struggling to keep up with his girlfriend’s lessons in quantum mechanics, the three different kinds of bees, each with their specific purpose in the hive, provide him with a key to understanding the purpose of life. “If only we could understand why it is that we’re here and what it is that we’re meant to spend our lives doing.” The word “God” punctuates the play as a challenge to positivistic ways of thinking.

Constellations is thought provoking and stylish, but it's not as clever as it would like us to believe it is. The playwright, Nick Payne, can’t quite make up his mind whether he wants to engage our hearts or our minds. In the end, he does neither.

What this production does have are the two perfectly pitched, charismatic performances of Hawkins and Spall. Their relationship fizzes on stage with authenticity and tenderness. They remind us that love, in all its complex variations, is the atomic matter that makes us who we are. Love is the driving force of the universe.



Constellations by Nick Payne is currently playing at the Duke of Yorks Theatre, London.

What was my favourite album of 2012?

Some music is so exquisitely beautiful that it acts as a healing balm to all that is bruised and hurting within us. Some music embracing the this-ness of life, a never ending happening, swells the chambers of the heart. And then there is music with a radiant clarity, a transfiguring power, that forces you to your knees before the mystery of creation. Bill Fay’s remarkable album, Life is People, possesses all of the above.

In the early 1970’s Fay released two critically acclaimed albums that made little impression on the listening public. He was a voice crying in the wilderness of the music business. Having fallen out of favour with the accountants at Decca, Fay became a lapsed singer-songwriter. He made ends meet by working in parks, shops and by cleaning factories.

However, some of his followers remained faithful to his memory and treasured their vinyl copy of his 1971 masterpiece Time of the Last Persecution. His fans, including Nick Cave, Marc Almond and Julian Cope, never lost faith and waited for his return from exile. This finally happened in 2007 when the US indie band, Wilco (who performed a cover of Fay’s Be not so Fearful), persuaded Fay to step on stage with them.

Now, forty years after his last studio album, Fay has returned from the wilderness of his personal Lent. In his cupped hands he carries a music that is fragile and poetic, birdsong with a broken wing. This music has a prophetic pitch. It sings of the soul of man. It draws tears.



Strings, Gospel choirs, piano, electric guitars combine with Fay’s rich, bass voice to produce an album of musical conviction and integrity. Dense, lush arrangements (Cosmic Concerto) are balanced with a spare, compelling intimacy (Jesus, Etc.). Fay’s unpretentious lyrics have a Blakean quality – adult experience expressed with a childlike innocence and purity.

These songs chart Fay’s search for the voice of the Holy One, a voice that is so often drowned out by the ferocious chatter within us and the white noise of a technologically oversaturated culture where oases of repose are hard to find. Life is People has the feel of a contemporary psalter, a collection of deeply-felt songs recording exile, redemption and thanksgiving: Thank you, Lord, for the love you’ve shown me/ your Son on the Cross is ever before me.

There are miracles in the strangest of places, Fay declares, there are miracles everywhere you go. A couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Bill Fay. Danny Watson, a father who has a son in the choir at Brentwood Cathedral, recommended this album to me. I know Danny has a great love and knowledge of popular music so I thought it was worth taking his recommendation seriously. I’m glad I did and I’m indebted to him for introducing me to Bill Fay.

Listening to Life is People for the first time was a kind of miraculous cure. It was as if some unexpected, buffeting power caught me unawares and knocked me sideways. I had been deaf for so long, without realising it, and now could hear again. I could hear “the still, sad music of humanity” and had been given a note with which to sing new songs to the Lord. Yes, there are miracles in the strangest places, even in Brentwood Cathedral Clergy House.

Life is People is a masterpiece. Listen all you that have ears!

And my other favourites of 2012:

Channel Orange by Frank Ocean
Blunderbuss by Jack White
Devotion by Jessie Ware
Is your Love Big Enough? by Lianne la Havas
An Awesome Wave by Alt-J

Amour

Michael Haneke makes films for adults who want to be treated as intelligent. The commercial function of mainstream cinema to feed docile audiences with pureed cliché and sentiment in the name of entertainment are anathema to him. His films are unashamedly cerebral and severe. They are tough experiences - film making in the “High Morbid Manner”. They press one’s face (at times, with sadistic force) against some aspect of reality, pinning the viewer to the glorious and basest features of his nature, until, tapping the canvas, he is forced to submit to the reality.

Haneke’s interest is the fragility of the human enterprise and an individual’s vulnerability before the demands of living. In the face of violence (Funny Games) or an obsessive relationship (The Piano Teacher), when living under the surveillance camera (Hidden) or the brutality of provincial totalitarianism (The White Ribbon), what moral response is appropriate? His cinematic answers are tenebrous.

Like previous films, Amour is concerned with the vulnerability of the human situation – in this case, the ageing process and the degradations that some of the elderly will face as their bodies and minds begin to fail them. In such circumstances, what does love look like? What does it cost? What, if anything, remains of love?

Haneke places our mortal natures on the dissection table and, using the sharpest visual imaging, picks them clean until the whites of our bones are laid bare. The process of sickness, deterioration and death are recorded with mimetic detail. It is designed to make your skin crawl. “Death subtends life, or underlies life,” the pathologist F Gonzales-Crussi writes, “and the action of time consists in peeling away successive layers so as to render death ever more visible.” The relentless erosion caused by suffering and death appals our Western liberal sensitivities. Our attempts to preserve ourselves from suffering are shown to be futile - no one escapes death. We would prefer decay and corruption to be hidden from public view, behind a hospital ward curtain. But our familiarity with suffering and death also provide us with a brutal clarity about what it is to be alive.



Amour is about an elderly married couple, Georges and Anne (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva). They are classical musicians who live in a chic Parisian apartment, designed around their cultural interests: books, paintings and a grand piano. The passage of time has matured and softened their love for each other. This is expressed in small acts of physical tenderness and a stability found in shared experiences. When Anne has a stroke, leaving her paralysed, George chooses to care for her at home. The film follows the decline of her mental and physical faculties over the weeks and months and George’s response to her deterioration.

In Haneke’s film, Funny Games, two delinquent, violent youths invade the home of a family and torture them with “games” that are anything but funny. The theme of invasion of a home occurs again in Amour, where George and Anne’s home is invaded by sickness and death. It is chilling to watch the mechanical bed being fitted in the bedroom, every bedside table top being annexed by boxes of medication and other medical detritus. Their home is violated by these objects and slowly transformed into a mausoleum. Mortality plays funny games with them.

In all of this, Haneke finds moments of tenderness – the calming experience of a caress, the care with which a lovingly prepared meal is spoon fed, the intimacy of sharing childhood memories that cement their love. Old age and a long marriage are portrayed as beautiful things. But Haneke articulates this without sacrificing the psychological complexity of his characters. We see how generosity of intention and violent energies can coexist in the same nature; the fact that individuals can live lonely, even desperate lives, within otherwise mutually sustaining relationships. “You are a monster sometimes. You are also kind” Anne says to George.

Trintignant and Riva perfectly capture the fundamental splits, dualities and twinnings at the heart of George and Anne’s marriage. Both in their eighties, these actors produce performances that are perfectly pitched. By making themselves completely vulnerable before the camera, they make emotional and physical disintegration, sublime. It is deeply moving to see acting of such depth and honesty.

Amour makes so much other film-making look crass and adolescent. It does what all great art does - it tells us something about the ineffable business of being alive. That may not always be something we want to consider, but when we do, we grow and mature in ways that are beyond our imagining. We leave behind consoling deceptions and illusions – we become adults.

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master

It feels as if the film ends mid sentence. The words The Master appear as they did at the beginning of the film. The credits roll. It’s an ending but not as an audience normally experiences it. In a packed Leicester Square cinema, the audience sat momentarily frozen, unsure how to respond. There was a communal sense of bewilderment at the beauty and strangeness of what we had just seen.



The friend I went with admitted to getting bored three quarters of the way through and wanted there to be more “ordinary” characters. He described it as “a mood piece...think, late Kandinsky.” I don’t disagree with his reflex review (and the need to find analogies with other artists and artistic forms) but, twenty four hours later and having allowed my initial responses to settle, I think there might be more to say:

1. You are not going to see a better performance on screen this year than Joaquin Pheonix’s war-damaged ex-sailor, Freddie Quell. This is acting of such feral ferocity and rawness that it shreds the “method acting” handbook and takes film performance into another territory. This is not acting, this is possession. In his portrayal of Quell, Pheonix exposes the terrible damage to the soul caused by the lacerating shrapnel of life – a failed romance, the horrors of war, existential rootlessness, Godlessness. Quell is a man in spiritual and psychological tatters.

Pheonix's Quell is a portrait of an outsider – a man to whom life has become something alien and he an alien to it – but without any existential romanticism. Though terribly damaged, Quell clings to a scintilla of hope: that he is loveable, that someone might love him. Your cinema ticket is worth every penny just to see how Pheonix conveys longing and hurt in his wounded-animal eyes.

2. There is not a frame in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film that is not beautiful. It has a numinous quality. Shot in 70mm format and designed with meticulous attention to period detail, The Master definitively answers the question of whether a film can be a work of art with a resolute, “Yes, of course, it can and this is such a work of art.” The Master is an aesthetic treasure that will be looked at, studied and commented on in decades to come.

3. Contrary to internet reports The Master has very little to say about Scientology or the dubious motives of those who found religious movements. The Master is a bromance but not of the comforting sort we have become accustomed to. This is a bromance with barbs and thorns that cut and nick. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, the founder of a religious movement called The Cause, uses Quell as a guinea pig for his experiments in spiritual “processing.” He claims to be able to heal Quell. For the damaged Quell, this promise is attractive. He sees Lancaster Dodd’s new religion as the way to restore some sort of psychic stability in his life. This is not a friendship based on affection but one based on the different needs of the two men. The need of the charlatan to believe his own lies and to have his lies believed. The need of the outsider to find a way inside the city walls. The Master is an oblique study in neediness.

4. There are no simple narrative arcs or easily comprehensible character motivations. The film is a frustrating watch and for this reason comes close to reality as we experience it, where so much is hidden from our immediate understanding and slips our conceptual grasp. So much of who we are remains a mystery, at once, fascinating and terrifying. If people find The Master boring and frustrating, it is because, in one sense, it is exactly that. Anderson refuses to pander to the audience’s need for the security of conventional story-telling. Instead, he delivers something that is closer to a parable or tone poem where depths of meaning are released with every viewing.

5. Why should you go and see The Master? Joaquin Pheonix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and the uncompromising originality of the writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the Olympic gods

Few people who were watching the BBC coverage of the 1988 Olympics will forget the evening of Tuesday 27 September. The suave sports presenter, Des Lynam, was given, on air, a bulletin from the Agence France-Presse, an international news agency. He read it with the solemnity of someone broadcasting a declaration of war to the nation: “I’ve just been handed a piece of paper here that, if it’s right, it’ll be the most dramatic story of these Olympics, or perhaps any others.”

The story was that Ben Johnson, who had three days earlier won the 100 m final with a world record time of 9.79 seconds and defeated his nemesis, Carl Lewis, had tested positive for the anabolic steroid, Stanozolol. The image of the pumped hulk, Johnson, crossing the finishing line, his finger pointing to the Olympian gods, was overnight replaced by that of a man destroyed by his own hubris. The Furies, “those who beneath the earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath” according to Homer, gathered around Ben Johnson. This athlete had sworn to the Olympian ideals of honesty and fair play while injecting steroids in locker rooms. For this, he would be punished. He would be stripped of every medal, title and world record. He would be cast out into the dark. He would become a thing of shame.



Richard Moore revisits the events of the Seoul Olympic 100m final in his book The Dirtiest Race in History with a forensic, impartial eye. Moore avoids lazy portrayals of Johnson as the panto villain of the piece and Carl Lewis as the handsome prince with wings on his ankles. A simple, moralistic reading of these men would not do justice to the complexity of their stories, characters and bitter rivalry.

Ben Johnson was all muscular aggression, ripping up the blocks on the “B” of the “BANG!” of the starting gun. Carl Lewis, on the other hand, was grace and beauty, a human gazelle. Johnson, the poor Jamaican immigrant, was embraced by the people of Canada as a national hero. In America, the middle-class Lewis was admired rather loved for his athletic ability. He was unable to woo the romantic heart of the American people. Johnson was the stutterer, Lewis the honey tongued one. Johnson, the lothario. Lewis, the suspected homosexual. And what brought these two very different men together was a 100m strip of racing track.

Moore humanises these athletic titans, unpicking their complexities and dissecting the hatred at the heart of their relationship. It is this which makes The Dirtiest Race in History read like a psychological thriller. You know the ending but that doesn't stop this book from being a page-turner. Actually, the ending of Moore's account is where the author finally encounters the elusive Carl Lewis at the opening of a London Nike store. It is a brilliant conclusion to the book.

Moore also successfully brings to life the shady managers and ambitious coaches who will stop at nothing to give their athlete the edge on their competitors. There are the unethical doctors and dubious friends, the megalomaniac sports executives and greedy hangers on. Moore exposes a mafia cesspool of greed, double-dealing and syringes.

But there are also the good guys, such as Don Catlin, “the father of drug-testing in sports” according to the New York Times and Manfred Donike, the German chemist, who patiently found more reliable ways to detect steroid use and create an “endrocine profile,” the science which strives to keep sport “clean”. They prove to be the heroes of the story and those who carried the torch for the nobility of sporting endeavour. It is thanks to men such as these that the London Olympic Games 2012 remained relatively drug free and the world could marvel at the speed, strength and stamina of its participants.

The Dirtiest Race in History, Richard Moore, Bloomsbury 2012

Joey Barton, Morrissey and the teenage me

Back in the day, Eric Cantona was the philosopher king with his gnomic musings on sardines and seagulls. In recent years philosopher footballers have been thin on the ground. Until now that is. There is a new pretender, an unlikely heir to the cod-philosophy throne: a tattooed boy from Birkenhead (actually Huyton, Merseyside) called Joey Barton, presently on loan from Queens Park Rangers to Olympique de Marseille.

Depending on your point of view, Barton is a sweet and tender hooligan who can’t control his fists or a refreshing voice on the football scene who eschews Neanderthal soundbites in favour of speaking his mind and mixing it up with a quotation from Virgil or Nietzsche. His musings range from Gary Lineker to Lucian Freud via Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There’s nothing David Beckham about Joey Barton – nothing photo-shopped, manicured or groomed. Barton is old style, George Orwell working class: the lad from the council estate who got hold of a library card and got clever and lippy. Joey Barton has over 1.6 million Twitter followers hanging on his every unpredictable word.

I’ve taken an interest in Barton because he is interested in The Smiths and their lead singer, Morrissey. Barton’s Twitter biography reads Yes, we may be hidden by rags but we have something they’ll never have... These are lyrics from The Smiths song Hand in Glove, that soaring anthem to working class nobility. The song was all rage and vitality, romanticism and self-loathing. It was the clarion call the doomed youth of Thatcher’s Britain had been waiting for or that was how it felt at the time.

I still remember the first time I heard John Peel play Hand in Glove and how pop music suddenly seemed important – important in the way that Shakespeare and Rembrandt are important. Culturally important. The idea that Culture and pop music might cohabit was a kind of revelation to my teenage mind.

I remember climbing on to the shoulders of a friend as Hand in Glove was played at a gig in The Venue, Leicester Square and having to take the following day off school because I’d lost my voice and my ears were still ringing. I still have the twelve inch, Rough Trade vinyl (and the wonderful B-side Jeane) with the cover photo of some handsome devil mooning at the world. Hand in glove, the sun shines out of our behinds...It was 1983. I was 17. Hand in Glove was a thing of beauty and youthful joy.

From that moment on, I went to every gig The Smiths played in London. I bought every single, every album, learnt every lyric off by heart – I can still spot a Smiths lyric from a hundred miles. I watched A Taste of Honey and read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning because I read in the NME that these were Morrissey’s inspiration. I bought gladioli and hair gel and made compilation tapes of favourite Smiths songs which I took with me to university. It was great to be a Smiths fan in the 1980’s. I am proud to admit that the music of The Smiths became the romantic soundtrack to a chunk of my reckless teenage years.

For me, Hand in Glove has become the equivalent of Marcel Proust’s madeleine. Every time I hear the mouth accordion opening, every time I stumble across words from the song, my involuntary memory ignites and, to paraphrase Proust, the vicissitudes of life become indifferent to me and life’s disasters innocuous. I wonder if Joey Barton enjoys the same experience?

Loneliness and Jumpy

The trouble with young people is that they have no sense of the past. The trouble with old people is that they have no sense of the present. Discuss. The question April de Angelis unpicks in her bitingly funny new play, Jumpy, is whether these positions, if true, can ever be bridged and if so, how and by what.

In a brilliantly nuanced performance, Tamsin Grieg, plays a fifty year old mother called Hilary. Her middle class life is beginning to come apart at the seams: her job with a literacy support group is about to be axed, she’s experiencing panic attacks on the tube and she’s taking comfort in a glass or three of Chardonnay. On top of this, she is married to an emotionally inarticulate husband and has a sullen, teenage daughter, Tilly, who would not be out of place on The Jeremy Kyle Show.

This mid-life crisis comedy plays for big laughs, but laughs that are never cheap. It achieves this with a compassionate awareness of the generational gaps and psychological fissures that stop us relating to each other as we should. This is writing with real emotional truth and psychological accuracy. When Hilary tries to speak to Tilly in an adult manner, she is constantly interrupted by the ping of another text message on her daughter’s mobile. The mother tries to find some way to connect with her daughter only to be trumped by the teenager’s desire to connect with her “friends” by txt lol omg XXxx. In her marriage, Hilary tries to connect with her passionless husband by reading him Great Expectations as a bedtime story. This fails and Hilary then tries to connect with one of her daughter’s buff boyfriends. This also fails because Hilary cannot play the cougar and the toy boy jock has an emotional range that runs from A to B. Hilary wants to talk about feminism and her time at Greenham Common. The jock, if he talks at all, probably wants to talk about Gran Turismo 5 and his latest milf conquest.

In Paradise Lost, John Milton observed that “Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named, not good.” Part of our fallen natures is that we now live with the existential knowledge of loneliness: we’re born alone, we live alone and we die alone. Only love and friendship provide us with those invisible paths, aboriginal songlines, by which we make our way back to Paradise. We retrieve from our ancient, collective memory the remembrance of a time when our relationships were harmonious, when we did connect and love. The ache in our beings is the ache for Paradise. For the believer, this is the ache for God.

The characters in Jumpy live with the poverty of loneliness and the feeling of being unloved. Their sad, fumbling, comic attempts to combat their loneliness are deeply moving because they resonate with what we know to be true about ourselves. We know that loneliness and vulnerability in our beings, but we also know the truth that love and being loved are essential to any understanding of what it is to be a person. This truth does not take away the knowledge of loneliness, but it puts it in its proper place and fills it with meaning.

Jumpy has neither a Pollyanna or pessimistic view of what it means to be human. In the play, the teenage mother who loves her baby instead of aborting it, the wife who returns to the marital bed and finds consolation in the affections of her husband, the teenage daughter who cannot imagine living without her mum, the soft toy that connects us to our more innocent, less cynical selves provide the ways, De Angelis suggests, that we regain some foothold in Paradise. The final message of Jumpy is that love alone has the power to bridge the gaps. In the tragicomedy of life, we can love and be loved. Paradise is not competely lost to us.

Untouchable and the bromance

In cinema terms, we’ve been here before. This is the bromance genre that is usually based around a true story: two men from very different backgrounds are thrown together by circumstances and develop a deep friendship.

In the 2010 Oscar winning, The King's Speech, it was the friendship between the Aussie speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), and King George VI (Colin Firth). What brings these men together is George VI's stammer and his attempt to find a cure. It is Lionel Logue’s unconventional methods that helps the King master his disability. George VI finds his voice and in the process, he gains a friend who is prepared to see beyond the royal state and relates to “B-B-B-Bertie”as a human being.

In the 2012 French film, Untouchable (which I would predict has a good chance of winning an Oscar), it is the friendship between an ex-con black immigrant from the benlieues, Driss (Omar Sy), and a cultured Parisian, Philippe (Francois Cluzet). What brings these men together is Philippe’s hang gliding accident which has left him paralysed from the neck down. The paraplegic millionaire has grown weary of live-in carers who either pity him or behave like oily sycophants. The irreverent Driss does neither of these things. Philippe does not find his feet but, thanks to Driss, he regains his love of life and finds love through this friendship and that of an understanding woman.



I’ve written in a previous post about bromance and The King’s Speech, but that film was too earnest for my taste. This was bromance by numbers. Buttoned up King meets eccentric speech therapist and has his tongue loosened. And the moral of the tale is that men can have friendships as deep as the friendships women are perceived to enjoy. That didn’t seem to me to be a great insight (back in 44 BC, Cicero had sussed that fact and wrote about it in his treatise, De Amicitia). The friendship depicted in The King’s Speech felt too staged and theatrical to ring true.

The bromance in Untouchable did ring true and that’s partly because the film is corny, sentimental and playful just like the friendships between men. The directors, Oliver Nakache and Eric Toledano, capture these aspects of male friendship perfectly, but they also recognise that the authentic bromance also contains subterranean emotional and spiritual depths that distinguish it from the “friendships” of pub mates or golf course buddies. Along with its broad stroke charm and crowd-pleasing humour, Untouchable has a real intelligence and eye for the matter and form of male friendship. It is this which makes it moving. Untouchable is a bromance with its heart and its head in the right place.

Holy Motors

At the Cannes Film Festival Holy Motors polarised the audience. From one camp, cries of “Sacre...merde!” sounded. They believed that they had seen through the Emperor’s new clothes and that this was a self-indulgent exercise in pretentiousness. From the other camp, there were hollers of excitement and the conviction that they had witnessed a contemporary classic. However, all agreed that this was iconoclastic filmmaking – you may love it, you may hate it, but you will never have seen its like before and once seen, Holy Motors leaves a compelling impression on the viewer.

The friend I went with hated it. By the time we got to the chimps (you have got to stay for “appointment nine”) and the talking limousines (a sly reference to Pixar’s Cars), he was begging for mercy and was found clawing his way to the nearest illuminated EXIT sign.

Holy Motors is a form of cinematic terrorism – a volatile mix of gags, pseudo-philosophy, musical numbers, cinephile film allusions, Kylie Minogue, longeurs and general French nuttiness. The film’s director, Leos Carax, has strapped these ideas to his torso and confronts his audience with detonator in hand. Conventional narrative structures are blown apart and the familiar story-telling building blocks of a beginning, a middle and an end come crashing down around the audience. You just have no idea where Carax is taking you or why. No scene exists in the arena of tidy categories or predictable conclusions. Just when you think you have a handle on something intelligible, the film wrong foots you and slips the bounds of normality. Images are so imaginatively fluid and eccentric that they cannot be processed by trusted mental actions. Everything that we might normally recognise as a film is subverted as we are tipped into an hallucinogenic state which is both recognisably familiar and disturbingly alien. In a word, Holy Motors is bonkers. Good bonkers? Bad bonkers? Judging this kind of movie with such blunt critical notions is a futile enterprise.



The opening scene acts as a philosophical prologue. Carax, playing himself, wakes from sleep and activates a concealed door in the wall of his bedroom that has been wallpapered with a forest background. This first scene lays down the director’s main interests. The film will inhabit that peninsula of the imagination that exists between dream and waking reality, between the known and the secret, the visible and invisible, reason and the absurd. The only thing we are certain of is that we will not be able to see the wood for the trees. Carax has admitted that the forest is a reference to the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself/ In dark woods, the right road lost.”

Monsieur Oscar, played by Denis Levant, takes to the roads of Paris in his stretch limo as he moves from one appointment to the next, from one parallel life to the next. Like some tormented soul in the Inferno, he is trapped in a daily round of role playing. The back of his limousine doubles as an actor’s dressing room where he transforms himself with latex, wigs and costumes into a series of characters. For one appointment he is an old woman, for the next, a gangster, the next, a deranged, dead-eyed man and so on. The words from T.S.Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, “There will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” could be Monsieur Oscar’s mission statement.

These transformations are so complete that Monsieur Oscar’s sense of himself is eroded. With time, it becomes difficult to distinguish the man from the personas he is called to play. The job, the habitual demand of acting out these roles, has taken over the man and consumed his personal identity. When asked why he does it, he replies, “For the beauty of the gesture.”

With a magpie voracity, Holy Motors references everything from Bunuel to Disney’s Tron, Godard to an Ingmar Bergman death bed scene. Carax ticks off film genres with reckless ambition: the balletic eroticism of a motion capture shoot, the gangster film, the psychological drama, etc. The film oscillates wildly from profundity to inanity, from visual lyricism to crassness. This is achieved with such anarchic enthusiasm and uncompromising inventiveness that I totally succumbed to the film’s energy and magic. Holy Motors is fun, infuriating and loopy. 115 minutes of cinema at its enchanting and provocative best.