VARIATION ON AN ALMOST ENDLESS THEME
Richard Livermore
This one was worked out on a computer, so don't blame me for it; after all, it is a bit algorithmic. It was meant to explain how, in the face of nature being 'red in tooth and claw' and all that, altruism could have emerged. "In the beginning there were two kinds of people. The nice people and the nasty people. The nice people were altruistic, the nasty people were selfish, so, of course, it was only a matter of time before the nasty people took over and began to take advantage of the nice people. However, they also mated with the nice people and that in the end was their undoing, because the offspring they produced were half-nice and half-nasty. And the reason why that was their undoing was that these half-nice and half-nasty offspring were nice to the nice people and nasty to the nasty people, and in time came to act as a buffer between the nice people and the nasty people, isolating the latter. Gradually, after a few generations, the nasty people declined in numbers and the nice - along with their nice-nasty protectors, of course - dominated the planet." Of course, I'm sure things were a bit more complicated than this, but, perhaps as some kind of foundational myth it may contain some element of the truth.
In fact, the film-genre known as the Western might be described is an exemplar of such myths working themselves out in 'reality'. The heroes of Westerns are not 100% nice people, nor are they 100% nasty people. Instead, they are usually half and half people, who are nice to the nice people and nasty to the nasty people. The hero of the typical Western is the decent man who stands his ground and knows how to be mean when he has to. But he is not basically mean, at least not to the nice people; he is only mean to those who are nasty. What the myth, repeated with variations through endless Westerns, tells us is that such people win in the end because they combine the attributes of both niceness and nastiness. In the process, the nice people lend them their support and nasty people find themselves isolated, even though they may rule the roost and have the law on their side.
The film, Open Range, is a film about a town which has come under the thumb of a ruthless rancher who has the marshal of the town on his payroll. The rancher's name is Denton Baxter ((Michael Gambon) and the marshal's name is Sheriff Poole (James Russo). These are the nasty guys and by nasty guys I mean nasty with no mixture of nice. The nice people, I suppose, you could say are the townspeople, unassuming mediocrities who up to now have let the nasty people have it all their own way. Among them are some who do fight back in the end, but only after a couple of nice/nasty outsiders have set them the right example. The nice/nasty outsiders are Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charlie Waite (Kevin Costner). These two free-grazing cowpokes resent being pushed around by the rancher and his henchmen and in their determination to stand their ground become catalysts of resistance for the rest of the town.
So far so Western. The film has been described as a nostalgic trip into a past where, in fact, things never turned out as they usually do in a movie, with our two victorious heroes riding off into the sunset, having settled their score with the villains. In the real historical past, it was the nasty ranchers who eventually won and drove the free-grazing cow-pokes off of the land. However, in this film - and in many another Western - we are in the realm of myth, rather than history, and such myths have a cyclical nature, which invariably sets them at odds with a linear account of history. This film was made in 2003, and has more relevance to our own era than it does to the past in which it is set. It is a film about how 'ordinary Joes', who say things like "It's a shame what this town has come to", but do nothing about it, rise up against ruthless usurpers once the seed of revolt has been sewn by outsiders. In other words it is a sort of morality-tale which has more contemporary than historical relevance, precisely because it is cast in the form of a myth rather than presented in a realistic way. It was directed by Kevin Costner, whose film, Dances with Wolves, seems to suggest that he's at the Howard Zinn end of the spectrum when it comes to interpreting American history. This film is set after the 'Indians' have been conquered—mention is made of that—but before the big ranchers and robber-barons have started to move in. Baxter is clearly a big rancher in the making.
The two characters around whom this film revolves are both as I've said, half and half types who are nice to nice people and nasty to nasty people. (No turning the cheek here; nor do either of them think much of God - that "son of a bitch" in the sky.) Of the two, Charlie Waite is the more morally ambiguous because he has a past as a ruthless killer which continues to haunt him. He has been a Civil War soldier and his behaviour while a soldier has been less than exemplary. In other words, he has done things which soldiers quite often do, though it is never admitted they do it. (Why do you think Bradley Manning is where he is right at the moment?) He is ashamed of his past and has a hard time living it down, but he is not able to do it without the help of Boss Spearman, who is, if you like, the moral heart of the film. Grizzled, gruff, yet easy-going and humorous, he can still be very stubborn and truculent when someone tries to push him around. He is outraged when one of his hands, Mose (Abraham Benrubi) is murdered by Baxter's henchmen and another, the 16 year old Button (Diego Luna) is shot and clubbed so badly he may not live. This sets the scene for a High Noon type showdown which will decide the fate of the participants in this drama and bring the film to its climax though unfortunately not to its close. They could have lopped off the last 15 or 20 minutes while Charlie Waite sorts out his feelings for the doc's sister, Sue Barlow (Annette Bening) and eventually decides that he loves her. Apart from this anticlimax, the film remains in the realm of myth in which the nasty guys get their come-uppance and the nice guys inherit the earth.
Perhaps the reason why the romantic episode is superfluous has something to do with the relationship between Boss Spearman and Charlie Waite, which the former jokes about in terms of their being like an old married couple. In many films the violently disposed man is saved by a woman and, if that had happened here, the romantic episode would have been necessary. But Charlie Waite, who still contains residues of his violent past, and on two occasions feels the impulse to enact it by killing defenceless people is saved from himself not by Sue Barlow, but by Boss Spearman, so that what happens after is more or less gilding the lily and contributes not one bit to the drama. Romantic episodes I feel are only justified if they contribute to whatever catharsis is brought about in the denouement. But this was a Hollywood movie, so one should not expect it to confine itself to a mythic format in such a bare and minimal way.
This defect aside, Open Range distils the mythic essence of every good Western, while at the same time making the myth relevant to ourselves in 2012. The 'ruthless ranchers' these days are called bankers and big corporations, while their 'marshals and deputies' are their bought and sold lawmen - and, of course, their smooth-talking politicians. This is how it all works, and why the western is such a good genre for certain kinds of myth to work themselves out in. A myth, to be truly cyclical, must have a strong element of abstraction about it such that it can be seen to be applicable to numerous historical contexts, including our own. This mythic current is what makes films like Open Range more relevant to the times they are made in than they could possibly be to those they are actually set in. And for that reason, they are more than just trips down Memory Lane.
A PARABLE OF POWER
Sometimes a film comes along which depicts a world which seems like a microcosm of the larger world beyond it that we all have to inhabit. Such a film, in my opinion, is Fernado Meirelles City of God. It is a roller-coaster of a film of great panache, often beautifully choreographed, about gangs engaged in the business of selling drugs in the slums of Rio de Janiero during the 1970s. The character who tells the story of the rise and eventual fall of the most ruthless of the crime-bosses, Li'l Zé (Zé Pequeño), is Rocket (Buscapé), a budding photographer whose situation as a slum-dweller gives him privileged access to subjects which no outsider could ever have had. He doesn't know the psychopathic Li'l Zé very well, as is illustrated by the fact that every time they meet, Li'l Zé has to ask him his name, but he's there, and, though being there involves certain risks, it is what gives him his opportunity to make a name for himself as a photographer and eventually emigrate out of the slums.
This then is Rocket, an attractive and personable young man whose one sortie into crime as more than just an observer ends up in failure because the people he and his friend, Stringy, choose to mug turn out to be 'too cool' for them to carry it out. Apart from hanging out with Stringy and a group of 'groovies' on the beach, smoking dope which he buys from a local drug-dealer called Carrot, his main interest during the film, aside, of course, from photography, is to lose his virginity. People like Rocket are made to record history, not to make it. History is made by much more psychopathic types like Li'l Zé, who have the ruthlessness required to pursue their agendas.
What Li'l Zé desires more than anything else in the world is power and, to get it, he is willing kill off all his competitors in the drug-business, so that he can take over their businesses and become the sole cock of the walk. If it wasn't for his side-kick, Benny, "The coolest hood in the City of God", he would have killed Carrot as well, and the fact that he doesn't is part of the cause of his eventual undoing.
Li'l Zé develops a taste for killing at a very young age. When he is only about 10 or 11, he massacres the guests and workers at a hotel which his older friends have just robbed and fled from in rather a hurry. He enjoys killing. What greater power-trip, after all, can there be than killing other human beings who are at your mercy? And it is power that Li'l Zé is after and is willing to do anything to acquire. He is not content to be one drug-dealer amongst many, each doing business in his own patch. No, he wants it all and is willing to do whatever it takes to become the top dog. What interests him above everything else is the power to strut his stuff in the City of God and always have his own way.
His 'nemesis' is a 'stand-up guy' called Knockout Ned, who, for some obscure reason seems to bring out something really malevolent in Li'l Zé. Every time he encounters Knockout, he tries to humiliate him in one way or other, even to the extent of forcing him to strip naked on the dance-floor in front of his girlfriend - who had earlier refused to dance with Li'l Zé. The problem is simple, as Rocket later explains, Li'l Zé is the ugly bad guy, while Knockout Ned is the handsome good guy who can get any girl. Li'l Zé has to pay for sex or use force, and the fact that Knockout is everything that he's not seems to rub him up the wrong way. Knockout Ned, by the way, is one of those Rocket and his friend, Stringy, contemplate robbing until they decide that they cannot go through with it because they find him too 'cool'.
The turning point in the film comes when, after Li'l Zé has raped his girlfriend in front of him and his gang has murdered his uncle and teenage brother, Knockout Ned joins Carrot's gang to get revenge on Li'l Zé. He has been an expert marksmen in the army, and his expertise is just what Carrot needs to defend himself against the expected onslaught from Li'l Zé and his "soldiers". On joining, however, he insists that no innocent people get killed and Carrot agrees. Nevertheless, as he gets drawn deeper and deeper into the activities of the gang, including its robberies to pay for the arms to fight Li'l Zé's gang, his scruples about killing innocent people go the way good intentions generally go. In short, he becomes as murderous as it takes and thinks nothing of killing an (albeit armed) guard whose young son is present at the time it occurs. This boy's name is Otto, and he later joins Carrot's gang in order to kill Knockout Ned in revenge.
But back to my original point that some films depict a world which is a microcosm of how the larger world functions. Before he gets himself killed by 'the runts' (But they are another story!), Li'l Zé's rise to prominence and its manner of accomplishment could be anyone's who has power as their main objective in life. Political power, economic power - the power of a Murdoch for instance - it makes little difference. To rise on that ladder requires certain psychological traits in a person, a certain ability to forget your humanity as soon as it gets in the way. Why does Li'l Zé keep forgetting Rocket's name when they meet? Because Rocket is just an ordinary person who serves no purpose in his scheme of things - until he wants his photograph taken so that he can become as famous as Knockout Ned when he is captured by the police and paraded in front of the media. Only when Rocket becomes useful to him, does he start to remember his name. That's how certain minds work and it's especially true of those who seek power.
There are, of course, people - Carrot seems to be one, Benny another - who just want to make a good living from drug-dealing. Benny even intends to retire to a farm with his girlfriend, smoke dope and listen to rock-music, because he's fed up with the life he is living. Carrot is willing to kill, because it's good for business at times. He kills Blacky, for instance, once he has heard how the latter has mistakenly killed Benny instead of Li'l Zé. Carrot knows that with Benny now dead, Li'l Zé will move in and kill him as well. Business is what interests him, selling drugs and making a living, not power. Carrot, though a criminal, is not a psychopath. Where his interests are not effected, he's an easy-going live and let live sort of person. Not so Li'l Zé, who enjoys killing because power over life and death gives him kicks which he wouldn't otherwise have.
One can imagine all the power-hungry tyrants and empire-builders in History being composed of basically the same material as Li'l Zé, and not only them. After all, does not the desire for power lie at the root of political ambition, whether or not it manifests itself in such extreme ways? It's largely kept in check in a 'democracy', except when it comes to finding excuses for war. Then the Thatchers, Bushes and Blairs of this world show what they're really made of. Li'l Zé at least doesn't have to conceal his psychopathic impulses behind a sanctimonious mask like political leaders in a 'democracy'. Even the 'good guys' who, in the spirit of Knockout Ned, might enter politics to right certain wrongs, find themselves conforming to its inhuman dictates. Li'l Zé rises because there is something missing in his psychology, something called empathy, which might allow him to see other people as people just like himself. Not so Knockout Ned, who nonetheless finds himself drawn into the spiral of killing because, well, that's what it takes to keep his head above water once he's committed. By the same token, no politician, no matter how good the cause he espouses, can claim to have completely clean hands. It is for this reason, in my opinion, that all politics is to be avoided, all attempts to acquire power over others through politics, whether 'democratic' or not, should be shunned and a different way has to be found. What this film shows is that in the end, there are no good guys and bad guys. Rocket for instance is neither a good guy nor bad guy, only someone getting on with his life. And his strength lies not in being good, like Knockout Ned, or bad, like Li'l Zé, but in the distance he keeps from the madness around him. It's not in itself enough, of course, but it's a beginning and we all have to start from somewhere.
THE SECRET OF GREEN STREET?
Richard Livermore
When you think of football hooliganism, you don’t normally think of people in well-paid middle-class jobs, such as teachers or City workers. The class-preconceptions of our society predispose us to thinking in terms of working-class or unemployed ‘yobbos’. One of the interesting things about the film, Green Street, is that it doesn’t trade in such myths. None of the hooligans depicted in this film fits the stereotype. In fact, when they are not being hooligans and slaking their thirst for violence, they are perfectly normal, sociable people, like ‘you, m and everyone else’. They even give up their seats to women on the tube.
So what is the fix? Why is the violence so necessary to them? According to the film-maker, Lexi Alexander, it has something to do with fathers who don’t spend quality-time with their sons. As good an explanation as any, I guess. Perhaps Achilles’ addiction to violence - both before and after the death of Patroclus - had similar roots, what with his dad, Peleus, gallivanting off all over the place while Achilles was still a wee laddie. So perhaps there is something in the explanation, after all. But isn’t this also the Freudian explanation for homosexuality. That would certainly explain Achilles’ huge grief at the death of Patroclus. Distant dads take the fall for a lot of things, it would seem, so why not football hooligans and queers as well? Blame it all on the breakdown of the nuclear family; single mothers have so much to answer for. What we need is a ‘back to basics’ approach.
But what are the basics? If there is one thing football hooliganism expresses, it’s a resurgence of tribalism. And how much more ‘back to basics’ can you get than that? And tribal family relations are somewhat different to nuclear family relations. Paternity, for example, was often unknown. Yet the sons seemed perfectly integrated into the tribe and as a result weren’t much given to hooliganistic excess. Warfare, perhaps, but hooliganism, no. Presumably there were other familial ‘support-structures’ which made dads - distant or not - an irrelevance.
Warfare. Now that’s a connection we could pursue. Tribal societies engaged in warfare, but it was non-alienated warfare, not the alienated kind that so-called civilised people engage in. They didn’t go to war because they were told to; they were not coerced into fighting, nor did they have a chain of command to transmit orders from above and maintain discipline in the ranks. Like just about everything else, warfare in our society is alienated and it is just possible that football hooligans wish to short-circuit some of this alienation and engage in warfare of a non-alienated kind, just like their tribal ancestors. So there’s another possible connection with tribalism - the hooligans’ revolt against civilisation - at least in the matter of warfare, and a ‘back to basics’ approach to the matter of fighting.
Unlike football hooligans, however, many tribal peoples didn’t seem to have batted an eyelid at same-sex relations. No doubt all those absent fathers not spending ‘quality-time’ with their sons made it inevitable - if we are to take Freud as our yardstick. This is another interesting thing about Green Street. The background hum of homo-social relations. Don’t confuse this with homosexuality. At least, not yet. Same-sex relations are well off the gaydar screen in this film - at least at first glance. Achilles and Patroclus, perhaps, but let’s not forget that, in Homer at least, they slept with slave-girls rather than each other - which doesn’t mean, of course, that we have to turn Patroclus into Achilles’ cousin, as was done in the film, Troy, in which Brad Pitt played the part of Achilles.
It may only be in their predilection for non-alienated warfare that football hooligans resemble tribal people. And it is unlikely that tribal people had a predilection for warfare in any case. War was simply a necessity to them, a way of preserving their territory or hunting-grounds, a means of survival. In relation to other tribes they lived in a ‘state of nature’, which football hooligans do not. They fight for kicks; it’s an addiction with them, even taking punches brings on a ‘high’, according to Matt Buckner (Elijah Wood) in the film. Their values are by and large the values of the wider society. They are not generated by the tribe itself, or, rather, the “firm”, but by the society they live in. Listen to Pete Dunham (Charlie Hunnam of Queer as Folk fame) talking to Matt Buckner, not long after they have met for the first time. “I just don’t get it. What is it wiv you Americans? You start a fucking war, bottle it, then we ’av to come and save your arse again.” There is no question here of self-consciously challenging alienated war-fare. He clearly accepts it. If they are ‘rebels’, their rebellion is entirely unconscious. It’s the rebellion of an unknown primitive self against the alienation of civilised life. And we must assume that the wider society’s values are accepted not just in matters of warfare, but sexuality also.
As I have said, many tribal societies seem to have accepted same-sex relationships without batting an eyelid. They saw them as part of the fabric of life. If Green Street is anything to go by, this is certainly not the case with football hooligans. In that little matter, they mirror the wider society. Yet, if what we’ve said about absent or distant fathers applies to both hooligans and homosexuals, then football hooligans have more in common with homosexuals than either, perhaps, would like to admit. They have distant or absent fathers in common. What does this mean? First that the intense homo-social bonding required for football hooligan firms provides a source of temptation for homosexual expression which must be rigidly guarded against. The repression must be even more severe than it is in the wider society. I think this repression is very important in Green Street, in the world it depicts and the homo-social relationships it explores.
Green Street, is a film which, I must confess, I am not absolutely sure how to take. What I mean by this is that I don’t know if it is meant to be taken simply at face value as a work of entertainment which has only one level of meaning, namely that which is explicit in the narrative. Or are there other levels of meaning at work in it? I’ll give you an example. Matt and Pete are the two main protagonists. For most of the film they live together. They are both the younger brothers of Shannon and Steve respectively, who are married to each other. There is absolutely no indication on the narrative level that Matt and Pete are lovers, but do the parallels between Shannon & Steve and Matt & Pete have some kind of symbolic significance which works at a deeper level than that of the narrative? Again, when Pete first claps eyes on Matt, he gives him a long hard stare and then says, “Jesus Shannon, you look rough.”, to which Shannon, in another part of the room, replies, “You’re a funny guy, Pete.” Are we meant to see this just as an innocent quip or is something else being implied, an attraction Pete feels which he has turned into a joke in order to kick it into touch? Am I simply reading the latter into the former? Probably, but I must confess that it is questions like this which have me confused as to the intentions behind the film. Confused, but also intrigued. (Another possibility you might consider here is the casting of Charlie Hunnam for the role, who first came to attention as the 15 year old Nathan Maloney in Queer As Folk. Resonances there perhaps?)
Whether I think it is a film that works on more than one level or is something less interesting depends on what I believe to be its intentions. As I have said, I am not totally sure; but I am going to give it the benefit of the doubt. The Director/Co-writer, Lexi Alexander is, after all, a woman, and so I very much doubt that she takes the almost exclusively male world she depicts in the film completely at its own measure. She may have mixed with German hooligans when she was younger, been a world kickboxing champion twice in succession and been part of a firm, but she is still a woman, and the fact that she is must give her something of an outsider’s perspective. We can also assume that, as a woman, she is not over concerned with preserving a male self-image and is quite able to see through it in men. Could it just be that while making a film whose primary purpose is entertainment, she has tried to say other things through it, things which aren’t on the narrative surface? That is a possibility I’d like to explore.
Most reviewers gave Green Street two stars, though The Guardian did give it four, I believe. So you see, it is not a great film we are talking about. It’s interest for me lies in other directions, of which the director is perhaps even unconscious, though, giving her the benefit of the doubt, she probably wasn’t. The narrative begins with what seems like a rather blatant contrivance to appeal to the American market. There was no real need for Shannon and Matt to be Americans; however, Americans, it seems, can only relate to other Americans, and so, to appeal to the American market, you need an American star. Enter ex-hobbit, Elijah Wood, who, unlike Charlie Hunnam, especially in full skin-head mode, looks almost too cuddly to be at home in the role of a ‘thug’. He plays the part of Matt Buckner, a Harvard journalism student who, after taking the fall for his wealthy roommate, Jeremy Van Holden (Terence Jay) when drugs are found in their residence, is expelled and flies off to London to stay with his sister, Shannon (Claire Forlani). Shannon is married to an English ex-football hooligan by the name of Steve Dunham (Marc Warren). Within hours of landing in England, Matt meets Steve’s younger brother, Pete. Pete is the leader of a firm of West Ham football hooligans called the GSE (Green Street Elite). However, Pete is not your stereotypical thug, but an intelligent, engaging and somewhat charismatic young man with an aggressive edge and a certain addiction to violence. At first, the meeting is a little bit strained. Matt is a bit of a ‘wimp’, and is no doubt a little bemused by Pete’s underlying aggression, and also, by the looks of it, a little bit mesmerised - as a rabbit might be by a ferret. Pete has come to borrow money from Steve, which Steve offers only on condition that he takes Matt to a football match, since he has planned a ‘romantic evening’ with his wife, which, of course, excludes Matt. However, instead of giving the money to Pete, he gives it to Matt and tells him not to give any to Pete, but to buy all the drinks himself. Once Pete and Matt hit the street, Pete tries to extort half the money from Matt with threats which, if not exactly explicit are certainly very clearly implied. Matt responds by distracting Pete’s attention and trying to kick him in the crotch, a move which Pete easily counters. Matt soon finds himself lying on the pavement, with Pete standing over him saying, “Serves you right for fighting like a bleeding tart.” That is, if you like, the beginning of Matt and Pete’s real relationship. For no apparent reason, just when he should be pressing home his advantage, Pete relents in his threatening behaviour towards Matt and gives up the idea of trying to extort the money from him. Though still somewhat bossy, his attitude softens, and the two go off to the match together.
What has happened? On the one hand, it could be that Pete’s change of demeanour is due to the fact that he has suddenly come to respect Matt for ‘standing his ground’. It would certainly fit in with the ethos he lives by. But there is no respect in his voice when he barks at Matt “...and for fuck’s sake stop saying soccer.” or shouts back at him over his shoulder: “Come on, ’urry up.” After all, respect usually implies treating the person you have come to respect with respect, and there is little sign of that in Pete’s behaviour towards Matt. On the other hand, it could be that Matt’s having fought “...like a bleeding tart!” has brought something out in Pete, something possibly ‘sexual’ in nature. I say ‘sexual’, though it is deflected and channelled along non-sexual pathways. What seems to have happened is that Pete has suddenly become the dominant partner in a relationship in which Matt has, equally suddenly, become the submissive one. His threatening behaviour has given way to one that is domineering instead, to which Matt seems to respond quite willingly. A new dynamic is set up between them, and it is, I believe, a disguised sexual dynamic?
On the tube a conversation takes place as to the relative merits of baseball or football. It is only necessary here to say that it turns on whether baseball is a girl’s game or not. Pete says it is and Matt says it isn’t. This is not the first indication, of course, that male self-image is an issue in Green Street.
After getting off the train, Pete takes Matt to the pub where the GSE usually meet before going to matches and introduces him to his friends. However, just before they enter the pub, Pete warns Matt not to tell anyone that his father is a journalist. Once they are in the pub, everyone behaves in a friendly manner towards Matt except Bovver (Leo Gregory), who is, as Matt later describes him in his journal, “Pete’s thuggish right-hand man.” Bovver resents Matt from the outset. Matt is an outsider; and perhaps the fact that he is also likeable and attractive, while Bovver is neither, has something to do with it. Bovver, clearly has some kind of special relationship with Pete - even if it is only as his “thuggish right-hand man”. He makes his hostility to Matt known at every available opportunity - first in the pub’s toilet and then just about everywhere else. At one point, this conversation occurs between Bovver and Pete. “Jesus, you two joined at the fucking hip, or what?” Pete: “Leave it out Bov; it’s starting to get old.” Bovver: “No, I’m starting to wonder about you two; if I didn’t know you any better, I’d say you were a couple of gay boys.” Pete responds in a quiet but menacing way. (Hunnam’s delivery here is superb.) The situation is diffused by their friends. They are all ‘hetero’ of course. After all, this is a very improbable culture to be gay in.
During Matt’s first full-scale ‘rumble’, after being rescued and looked after by a rather solicitous Pete, while his friends hammered the Birmingham supporters who had ‘jumped’ him on the way back from the match, Matt’s first concern is to look around to see where Pete is and go to his rescue. What seems obvious is that, just as Pete has developed protective feelings towards Matt, Matt in turn has begun to develop protective feelings towards Pete, who, to echo his sister later, has begun to enter his system. When the fight is over, Pete and the others rib him a little. “That first punch you threw. A little bit on the feminine side.” one says “A bit gay.” Pete follows, “Larry Grayson,” another quips, mimicking Matt’s over-arm punches, while Bovver looks on in annoyance? The following morning, after Matt had spent the night on Pete’s couch, and then returned with Pete to his sister’s, an altercation occurs between Matt & Pete on the one hand and brother Steve on the other, a violent altercation in which Matt comes to Pete’s rescue and then Pete comes to Matt’s against Steve. All that needs to be said about this is that it is curious how Steve’s heterosexual marriage to Shannon hasn’t completely cured him of violence! As a result of this altercation, Matt and Pete start living together, although, as I‘ve said, there is no suggestion that they are sleeping together as well.
This is the whole point. You must not see these characters as in any way gay. “Gay” & “Straight” are determinate identities - and, I believe, very confining ones. What we have here are repressed and disguised homosexual feelings which have no way of expressing themselves except in terms of the ethos of the firm and the homo-social bonding it requires. Gays have not really liberated themselves; they have simply settled for a social space in which they might be more easily exploited. To liberate themselves they would have to liberate ‘straights’, like Matt, Pete and Bovver, and this they have singularly failed to do. Hence the contempt Bovver is able to take for granted without even emphasising it in “a couple of gay boys”. (Although the slightly camp voice in which he says it speaks volumes about him, I think.) Gays are no longer “queers” as they used to be, but “gay boys”. That’s the extent to which gays have been ‘liberated’. The ‘Gay Revolution’ is a revolution that has stopped half-way in the name a gay identity. A gay identity, after all, is easily catered for by both politicians and businessmen. Gays have become both a ‘constituency’ and a market. I suppose this is inevitable in a ‘democratic’ capitalist society like ours. Nevertheless, the repressed homosexuality which I think I see in this film has nothing to do with a gay identity and that is what makes it so much more interesting.
Two other episodes in the film are worth mentioning before we move on. First is that in which Tommy Hatcher (Geoff Bell) - the leader of the GSE’s main rival firm, Millwall - uses the term “she” of Pete when Bovver makes his first visit to Millwall. He says: “Where is your other little girl? ... Petey. She at home is she?” And also later, when Bovver is about to betray the GSE to Hatcher and Hatcher asks him if he’s had a lover’s tiff - presumably with Pete. Remarks like this make me think that the film-maker was more aware of what she was doing than may be immediately apparent, because, on one level, that’s just what Pete and Bovver have had. Moreover, it is just possible that Hatcher has seen something in Pete and Bovver which those too close to them have been unable to see - including Pete and Bovver themselves. Of course, it could just be an innocent remark, but then there are rather a lot of such ‘innocent’ remarks connected to homosexuality in this film. Too many, I think, to ignore.
The second is the episode in the pub in which Matt is accused of being an undercover journalist. (He has told Pete that he studied history not journalism at Harvard, because he knows how much Pete and the others hate ‘fucking journos’.) Pete’s feeling of anger at being ‘betrayed’ by Matt is entirely understandable. It explains his initial violence towards Matt. However, when Steve intervenes on Matt’s behalf, asking Pete if he’s sure of his facts, and Matt explains himself, doubts begin enter his mind. A conflict with Bovver emerges when Matt says to Pete, a propos his having been seen at The Times with a couple of ‘journos’: “That was my dad. He’s the journalist. You knew that.” Such a revelation can only enflame Bovver, who turns it into an issue of Pete’s leadership of the firm. And then, when Pete intervenes violently against him as he tries to kick Matt on the floor, Bovver finally flips. He first appeals to Steve as the ex-leader of the GSE, accusing Pete of being “too much of a bottlejob to lead us”, but Steve sides with Pete. That is when the thought of betrayal enters his mind, I believe. He finally realises the truth just at the time when he was hoping to finally ‘nail’ Matt, that Pete has put Matt before himself in this confrontation, and he reacts like a jilted lover. Not that he is in any literal sense a jilted lover, but his behaviour follows the same contours as that of a jilted lover and that, I think, is what is important. It is as if all these repressed feelings existed in some parallel universe influencing the course of what goes on in this one without in any way making their presence directly felt. After all, what is uppermost in all of their minds is Pete’s status as the leader of the GSE. Nothing more. Nothing less. Finally, after Bovver has gone off to betray the GSE to Tommy Hatcher, and thus set in motion a chain of events which will lead to Pete’s death, the dominance-submission element in Pete and Matt’s relationship resurfaces as Pete barks angrily at the bloodied Matt “Get yourself cleaned up”, which Matt dutifully does.
After this scene it is largely downhill. The film’s ending is a huge disappointment. Neither Matt nor Pete come to any recognition of what has been driving their relationship and also destroying the firm, but then, perhaps we shouldn’t have expected that. Pete is killed, sacrificing himself so that Matt and Shannon can get away from a fight that has taken a dangerous turn, and all that Matt seems to have learnt from his death is that he can now kick butt with the best of them and therefore no longer has to play the wimp with Jeremy Van Holden. It is his way of ‘honouring’ Pete. It is a huge anti-climax and a sop to conventional values. But it was a commercial film and commercial films very rarely confront their audiences explicitly with issues that they might not be comfortable with. To have confronted these issues head on would have required a different film entirely, I suspect. Nevertheless, it is a film which - in my own mind at least - raises important questions concerning the male culture of violence and repressed homosexuality, and this makes it somehow a lot more intriguing than many films which are very much better.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WILLIAM BURROUGHS
by
EDDIE WOODS
Clearly I'm a Johnny-come-lately where the 1993 film The Junky's Christmas is concerned. As I'd already surmised before sending the YouTube links for it out to my literary mailing list, most (but not all, mind you) avid William Burroughs fans were long since familiar with this Francis Ford Coppola claymation production, even if many had not seen it in a while. Just as quite a few knew the original short story (from the 1989 Interzone collection) or had heard it on the CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (released the same year as the film). But it was those others on my list (easily the majority) to whom I was mainly wanting to give this touching Yuletide present. And touch it certainly does, even if not pleasantly till towards the very end.
"How can you say that?" the Dutch writer Simon Vinkenoog screamed at me onstage, after I had publicly thanked William for participating in the reading event I'd been emceeing, and additionally for "the countless hours of reading pleasure" he'd afforded me over the years. "Pleasure?! He wants to stick a knife in your heart!"
Yes, well, we all get our kicks in different ways. And I seriously doubt I'm the only person in the world who 'enjoys' reading Bill Burroughs. Or, judging by the responses to my mailing, came away from watching The Junky's Christmas feeling spiritually uplifted. One lady actually wrote back saying, "That lovely film you sent brought tears to my eyes." Sweet of her, but it's not a 'lovely' film. (Unless you want to count the closing sequence, showing William and friends tucking in to a holiday feast, which is quaintly cozy but somewhat peripheral.) It's a mini cinematic masterpiece, brilliantly scripted and engagingly presented. Same as the story is a fictional portrayal of the core messages contained in the Sermon on the Mount. The Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus are likewise ultimately beatific, but still far from being in any way nice.
Here we have a necessarily twisted tale (narrated throughout by the classically gravel-voiced author) of a mild-mannered junky, Danny the Car Wiper, in search of a Christmas fix. The clay animation characters suit the desperate situation on a cold and bleak urban winter's day perfectly, occasionally with an aura of tenderness but for the most part horrific: huge bulging eyes, excruciatingly painful shivers, near-demonic grimaces. The two severed legs Danny finds in an abandoned suitcase merely accentuate the overall sense of despair.
"Holy Jesus!" he exclaimed. "The routines people put down these days. Legs! Well I got a case anyway."
Especially exquisite for us, is that there is nary a hint of what we are leading up to. When Danny does eventually cop (gratis, courtesy of an inebriated but nonetheless sharp-witted doctor) a quarter-grain tablet which he later prepares spoon and needle fashion for injecting, the form his badly-needed Christmas present will take seems a forgone conclusion. Until on the verge of shooting up, he hears a series of annoying groans emanating from the room next door. Oh hell, go have a look. It's a young man in the unbearable throes of a kidney stones attack. Without really thinking about it, and hesitating but momentarily, Danny forgoes alleviating his tortuous junk sickness and shoots the kid up rather than himself. Then, the sacrifice made, he returns to his own room resigned to suffer the bitter reward for his charitable act. Instead a warm flood suddenly pulses through his veins and breaks in his head "like a thousand golden speedballs."
"For Christ's sake," Danny thought. "I must have scored the immaculate fix!"
The vegetable serenity of junk settled in his tissues. His face went slack and peaceful, and his head fell forward.
Danny the Car Wiper was on the nod.
The short story was apparently penned around 1954. And is therefore representative of relatively early Burroughs. Yet it is also hauntingly reminiscent of that famous final entry in the Last Words journal of more than four decades hence, describing love as "the most natural painkiller what there is." Notwithstanding everything else at once complicated and straightforward that William S. Burroughs was about, both as a man and a writer, he was never a stranger to the essential ingredients of love, compassion, karma and mystical reality. If you are in any doubt of that and haven't yet done so, do yourself a favor and see The Junky's Christmas. I bet Charles Dickens would dig it, too!
The Junky's Christmas
Directors: Nick Donkin, Melodie McDaniel
Writers: William S. Burroughs (story), James Grauerholz (script)
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola
Running time: 21 minutes
Color: Black & White
DVD release: Koch Visions (2006)
Available at Amazon and elsewhere
This review first appeared in Beat Scene 64 (Coventry, England). http://www.beatscene.net/
WHEN WE’D NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD
There are two narratives running concurrently through the film, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner - first that of Colin Smith, the undeniably lonely long-distance runner of the title and secondly that of the the middle-class institutions he finds himself at odds with. For Colin Smith, the point is exclusion. He doesn’t want to belong. For the middle-class institutions he finds himself at odds with, the point is inclusion. We’re one big happy family together and if you play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you, and we can’t be fairer than that now, can we? Of course, there is one thing these middle-class institutions have overlooked and that is the very real fissure of class. This fissure runs all the way through the film and it seems that the only one who is aware of it is Colin himself. He really would like to put all those smug middle-class bastards up against a wall and shoot them, because he knows that, when push comes to shove, that’s what they’d do to people like him. However, for the time being, he’ll play the game by their rules and make them think they’ve got him house-trained.
Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was always my favourite of those British New Wave social-realist films of the early 60s. I have often wondered why. I’m no great fan of social-realism, after all, and films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey just did not have the same impact on me. But it does transcend the genre on two counts at least. First, the running scenes are beautifully filmed and poetic, especially the early morning one. Secondly, the film had what we would now call attitude. It was a slap in the face of the bourgeois establishment of the time, which I suspect is one of the reasons it was panned by the critics. The British Board of Film Censors, as I believe it was called, even said it was communist propaganda.
Tom Courteney is perfect, I believe, as the alienated working-class boy who sees through the system and prefers a life of petty crime and borstal to working for bosses in the dump of his industrial town. He knows he’s fighting a one-man war against his ‘betters’, but he’s still not going to let them grind him down. I suppose he could have done something more ‘constructive’, like join a left-wing political party and get stuck into the bosses that way, but I suspect he wanted more immediate gratification than that. If Colin is some kind of working-class hero, he’s not a Marxist, but an existentialist one. In the end, he’ll spit in their bourgeois faces, but he’ll do so his way and nobody else’s. Existentialism is premised on the belief that it is better to be a star in your own movie than an extra in somebody else’s. It was never going to produce a revolution, but it wasn’t a time for revolution anyway. (The early 60s were very much a continuation of the 50s from that point of view.)
The chief metaphor running through the film is, I think, the sports-field where we can all be equals together, engaging in the healthy competition - and may the best man win, and all that. This was a metaphor of life in Britain at the time where everybody stuck to the rules and, the working-class no less than the middle, played the game as they should. Those who dissented were thought to have no real cause for complaint. I remember it well. “You won’t get very far with an attitude like that, lad.” was an expression even older working-class people would use against younger ones who they thought had a chip on their shoulder. In the film, however, it is the political classes - as exemplified by the man on TV - or those who control things and make sure they run smoothly - like the borstal-governor (played by Michael Redgrave) - who say things like this. But as I remember it, the working-class were happy to play the game by the rules as long as their standard of living was rising and they were able to buy washing-machines and television-sets to watch the programmes their ‘betters’ were making available to them. It was only later on in the 60s that the consensus began to break up and middle-class hegemony was called into question. However, at the time, it seemed that only people like Colin ‘with a chip on their shoulder’ were calling it all into question and recognising that under the middle-class hype of “You’ve never had it so good” things were pretty much as they’d always been - at least for people like him and his family, living their prefab. second-class lives. Colin’s attitude might have been ‘existentialist’, but, given the supine state of the working-class at the time, this was hardly surprising.
Of course, the irony of it all is that towards the end of the film, Colin himself has begun to succumb to temptation, taken in by the blandishments of the borstal-governor who has been telling him that he might have a great future ahead of him as an athlete if he sticks to it. He may even represent Britain in the Olympics and in the process make a career for himself. He is not just making them think they’ve got him house-trained, perhaps he is actually becoming house-trained, as his best-friend, Mick, suggests when he asks “Whose bloody side are you on all of a sudden?” - which in this (existentialist) context means “Are you being true to yourself? Are you being authentic?” And it gives pause to think. While he is running his final race - the one he throws - he has flashbacks to his mother and, her ‘fancy-man’, his dying and dead father, his girlfriend, the coppers, the politician on the box, the bosses, the borstal-governor, the boy who was beaten up by the screws and so on and so forth - in fact the whole tenor of his working-class life, as well as the middle-class institutions he is at odds with, and during these flashbacks, he is reminded whose bloody side he is on all of a sudden. It’s a great moment - at least, I thought so when I first saw it - a moment when he puts two fingers up to all the middle-class people who have him under their thumb and refuses to play the game by their rules.
Of course, things are no longer what they were in the early 60s, when “we’d never had it so good”. In fact, they started to go awry not so long after. Now things are a lot more desperate and no-one is taken in by this idea of continuous capitalist progress any more. Colin’s ‘existentialist’ rebellion was probably the only one available at a time when the consensus was all for the status-quo and middle-class hegemony prevailed. Now that that hegemony no longer exists, it’s become a lot more difficult to believe in Colin’s individual rebellion than it was in the 50s and 60s, when alienation had not reached the collective pitch it presently has. Nowadays, it might seem a little bit pointless. But it did have a certain resonance then, and perhaps even now we could do with more of his negative attitude towards the people in power.
THE BLACK VALET
I don’t normally like what I call secondary films, that is to say films based on novels, plays, operas or biographies. I prefer the film to be a product of the film-maker’s own imagination, a film in which the conception and execution of the film have emerged together and not as an adaptation from some other medium. However, I do make exceptions - for instance, Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, which I think is cinematically wonderful, and Joseph Losey’s film of Mozart’s Don Giovanni which, now that it has been digitally remastered and remixed, is really quite extraordinary. Like Death In Venice, one could almost call it “total film” in the way one might speak of “total theatre”. This is not only due to the music by Mozart, the libretto by Da Ponte, the quality of production, singing and acting, the Palladio settings, the emphasis on style and ritual as opposed to realism in the performance, but also somehow the almost eerie impression created by the Black Valet whose role, although he doesn’t utter a word, is clearly crucial to what Losey wants to say in this film. The Black Valet is like a sardonically silent master of ceremonies hovering in the background at all the film’s crucial moments. He doesn’t sing; he doesn’t speak. He is just there as a kind of beautiful and stylish androgynous comment on what’s going on. Ruggero Raimondi, as Don Giovanni, creates an almost vampiric impression at times, and his Dracula-like presence seems to be reinforced whenever his emotionless, black-clad valet (played by Eric Adjani) appears on screen to assist him.
Mozart’s opera is one of those rare works of art which seem to appear at turning points in the history of a civilisation. It was written just before the French Revolution. I do not see it in the simple moralistic terms of an aristocratic libertine receiving his come-uppance and being dragged down to Hell for his crimes. It is also an allegory of the fate of a class that seemed to have no future left and was therefore going to make the best of the rest of its time while it could. Losey’s interpretation of this aspect of Don Giovanni is a Marxist one. Indeed, before the the Overture begins, the film is prefaced by a quote from Gramsci: “The old dies and the new cannot manage to see day. In the interim, a large diversity of morbid symptoms surges forth.” This was a mistake, I believe. Gramsci may well be right, but in relation to Don Giovanni himself, the quote is a touch moralistic. The production is also Marxist in the way it foregrounds the peasantry in a threatening way in some of the scenes, the same peasantry who, with the sans-culottes in the towns, would be the leading force in the revolution to come. It’s as if Losey was saying, “These are the people who will eventually bring you and your class down, Don Giovanni.” And, of course, in this he was right.
One must also not forget the Freudian interpretation of the Son’s Oedipal rebellion against the Father - Il Commendatore - and the ensuing guilt-complex which culminates in Don Giovanni’s being dragged down to Hell. From a Freudian point of view, revolutions are fuelled by such complexes. However, it is hard to see Don Giovanni as a revolutionary. More like a reactionary who recalls his class to its true nature, which it seems to have abandoned to accommodate itself to the bourgeois mores of the age. I disagree with those who say that Don Giovanni was rebelling against the mores of his own class. Superficially, that may appear to be so. But from a metahistorical perspective, that is far from what’s going on. Indeed, what Don Giovanni really seems to be rebelling against are the mores of a class which had sold out and adopted alien mores. His own class was a fundamentally predatory, not to say misogynistic, one, and Don Giovanni himself was an atavistic throwback to the true barbarous nature of that class, as opposed to its more decadent contemporary variant, represented by Don Attavio. You hear a lot of talk about the bourgeoisification of the proletariat these days, but the aristocracy got there first. They became bourgeois the moment they opted to become respectable in their behaviour and choose accomodation with their bourgeois rivals, who were now in the ascendancy.
Don Giovanni is a predator, just like his remotest ancestors, and what he preys upon is women. And he doesn’t seem to want them for themselves so much as the fact that each one of them adds to the tally of his conquests, which, according to the list enumerated by his servant Leporello to one of his victims, Donna Elvira, seems to run into the thousands. In Spain alone, there are “mil e tre”. He seems to collect these ‘conquests’ in the way ‘Injuns’ in a wild west movie collect scalps as proof of their prowess as warriors. He undoubtedly takes pride in this list. It doesn’t matter if the conquest is beautiful or ugly, fat or slender, old or young, plebian or aristocratic. The important thing is that they are his conquests and therefore redound to his glory.
To understand this aspect of his behaviour, we need to go back a few millenia, to the misty ‘dawn of Civilisation’, that is to say the first wave of barbarian invasions. Imagine yourself at this time as a peasant, someone who lives and works in the country. You work your land communally with other peasants; you live with them in a village and are probably related to them, though you also might trade and be on good terms with other villages. You have no government, no state to regulate your life, but you do have elders or chiefs who meet regularly in council and keep your collective life ticking over. Women play a central and honoured part in your lives and you probably worship the Great Mother Goddess as a symbol of the fertility of the land. You may very well have a militia to protect you from thieves and marauders bent on stealing some of the products of your labour, but you don’t have standing armies and militarism is not a way of life with you. You are peaceful, mind your own business and want others to leave you alone so that you can provide for yourself and those who depend on you. This is your life. Not very exciting but you know how to live it up during your many bacchanalian festivals and rites. You are not living in the mythical Golden Age, but you are perhaps living in the Silver Age, and I think you are largely content with your lot.
One day, however, something cataclysmic happens. You find yourself overpowered by another who leaves you standing when it comes to cultivating the warrior-virtues. You have no answer to his aggressive, dominating behaviour towards you; you just have to submit to his ferocity and prowess. He has been schooled in completely different conditions to yourself and this shows in his tough, aggressive demeanour towards you. He despises you for your ‘feminine’ relationship with the soil, as he also despises manual work, which he believes should only be done by women and slaves. He has been a nomadic herder and warrior who has developed his militarily capabilities on the hoof, as it were, probably by raiding the cattle and horses of other tribes just like his own and having to defend his own lifestock from similar attacks. He is male in the extreme, because that is what his warrior-culture has made him and his women are 100% under his thumb, his property to dispose of just as he chooses. He practices female circumcision, infibulation and suttee just to keep them in line and he worships male sky-gods with warrior-profiles. He is the polar opposite of yourself and vastly superior from a military point of view. And he will not only conquer you and make you work the land for him, he will do what he wants with your women. Like you, he has no government or state, but his society is nevertheless very hierarchical; and he tends to make slaves of those he has conquered.
However, he is not going to make you his slave. He knows he’s on to a good thing by letting you work the land for yourself and providing him with part of what you produce for ‘protection’ against predators just like himself. He will live off the fat of the land, while you will sweat and groan under his ‘protective’ yoke. If you do not comply, he’ll just plunder and loot what he can, rape your women and move on, so you don’t have much of a choice. In time, he will become a member of a warrior-aristocracy and you will provide him with the means of doing so. He will lord it over ‘his’ peasants while assuming seignorial rights over their daughters and wives. Don Giovanni is a throwback to this ‘gentleman’ and therefore the only true aristocrat in the whole of the opera, that is to say, the only barbarian.
The point I am trying to make here is that the aristocracy is not in essence the class of effete snobs it is often portrayed as. It is rather a class of macho conquerers who take pride in their warrior-status and prowess. Where it has degenerated from this, it is only due to the fact that it has become decadent over the millenia. It it has either become soft from easy living or has assimilated some of the values of those it once conquered which, once the dust of conquest has settled, will begin to reassert themselves. During Don Giovanni’s time this will include the values of the rising bourgeoisie, especially the values of respectability and sexual restraint. In both cases, a loss of vitality has been the result. In both cases also there has been a certain feminisation. In Don Giovanni, it is the rather sappy Don Ottavio who represents the respectable feminised aristocrat, ruled by the wishes of his female other half, Donna Anna, who herself undoubtedly finds the sexual vitality of Don Giovanni - despite all her protestations to the contrary - much more arousing than the love and respect offered by her ‘legitimate’ spouse. Don Giovanni is much more possessed by the true spirit of his class, which, as I have said, is a macho and predatory one, and this is what makes him attractive to women. As for Donna Elvira, her situation is genuinely poignant, because she is truly in love with Don Giovanni and as a consequence, pities him and wants to save him from himself and the fate she seems to intuit. Her love, however, is tragically doomed to remain unrequited because Don Giovanni will always disdain genuine love. As a throwback to the time when his class could take women completely for granted, he is not into women as they are, only into what they represent for his masculine ego. He is too one-sidedly male to allow himself to submit in that way.
Yet this one-sided macho development is achieved and maintained at the price of a great deal of repressed femininity and homosexuality. And this is where the androgynous Black Valet comes into the picture. The second to last scene in which Don Giovanni is shown eating and drinking and generally living it up before he is dragged down into Hell, is presented by Losey as a ‘gay’ orgy, with men - one of whom is in drag - lounging around together, erotically disposed towards one another. (Look closely and you will see that the 'lady' sports a 5 o'clock shadow!) Don Giovanni himself doesn’t engage in the activities of the orgiasts - though one is free to imagine what he does with the Black Valet behind closed doors. At one point during the revel a female version of the Black Valet appears and stands the opposite side of Don Giovanni while he is eating. But she very soon departs from the scene. The ambiguous silent presence of the Black Valet lends the scene a disturbing homoerotic interest which is never brought out and therefore remains just the under the surface as a suggestion, the merest hint of what Don Giovanni’s fixation on womanising and conquests is really about. Losey, of course, will not be the first to make this connection between the Don Juan type and repressed homosexuality, but the way he makes it is something only an artist of the highest calibre could so successfully accomplish.
In Losey’s film, The Servant, the relationship between master and servant has definite homoerotic undertones, but on the surface heterosexuality rules as part of the power-play between the two male characters. Heterosexuality is the rule in Don Giovanni as well. But Losey has his own agenda and the way that agenda is established clearly shows him to be an absolute master of cinematic innuendo. The scene which leads up to Don Giovanni’s descent into Hell is one of the most intense and ambiguous scenes I think I have ever seen on film.
What I’m doing, of course, is reading between the lines and looking at the film as a ‘metahistorical document’. The narrative itself is fairly banal. And its message is a moral one in which Don Giovanni gets his ‘just desserts’ as a fornicating libertine. The very last scene makes this quite obvious. I don’t know to what extent either Da Ponte or Mozart subscribed to such a message. Somehow, I don’t think that, as serious artists, they could have. They were just writing within the conventions of a certain genre. But that hardly matters. What matters is what is simmering under the surface. And in terms of this particular production, what also matters is Losey’s masterful display of cinematic innuendo, using the Black Valet to add his own perspective to the original in a way that is completely transcendent.
EXPULSION FROM PARADISE
What is it to be a 14 year old boy in a small farming community in Vermont, in touch with your feelings, that is to say, with the ‘feminine’ side of yourself, sensitive towards animals, a bit of a loner— your best friend is a chicken— with a need to be accepted by others your age or not so much older, who, in reward for your efforts, call you “chicken boy”, treat you with joking contempt and only tolerate you because you pay for the beers. You’re a square peg in a round hole and, to make matters worse, you are unable to suppress you’re burgeoning feelings for a bigger boy who appears to protect you. You are going to get hurt and to ward off the pain, you are going to violate everything that you are. Furthermore, your mother has just died and you were closer to her than anyone else in the world, and your taciturn, stoical father does not know how to deal with your weirdness. On top of all this your name is Duncan Mudge and you are played in a movie by a young Emile Hirsch, who, despite all the awful 'teen-flicks' he's done, happens to be a very good actor.
The film in question is called The Mudge Boy (2003), directed by Michael Burke - a low budget ‘indie’ film, made in a matter of weeks. In fact, so brief was the schedule for making the film that the actors didn't even have time to learn a proper Vermont accent before filming began. Hirsch's Californian accent stands out perhaps a little too much, though in every other way he’s just about perfect. In fact, the three main performances are all very convincing. Hirsch, as the Mudge Boy, gets into every corner of his character’s eccentricity, vulnerability, anguish and eventual distress, while Thomas Guiry as Perry, has all the unpredictability that his character requires - at one moment protective towards the weaker Duncan, the very next moment macho, aggressive, with a very short fuse. (My experience of repressed homos suggests that they open up to the possibility of desire one moment, then panic and slam the doors shut the next as Perry does when Duncan is kissing him.) Richard Jenkins plays the father’s perplexity at the odd behaviour of his son superbly. Obviously, they are both trying to deal with the mother’s recent death in their own different ways, but what, if you were a stoical farmer, would you make of a boy who deals with his loss by wearing his mother’s clothes and impersonating her at the dinner table? He means well by his son and is doing his best, but he just doesn't seem to be able get his head round Duncan's eccentric behaviour. The way the relationship between father and son is treated is one of the many strengths of the film. (Emile Hirsch's body-language in the scene where Duncan's father confronts Duncan over the fact that he "can't even get into trouble like a normal boy" is extraordinary; there is at the same time both submission and a rebellious truculence about it - a brilliant piece of acting on Hirsch's part, I believe, where he gets right inside his character's head and subconscious mind.)
The main theme of the film, I believe, is that there’s a price to pay if you’re different, a price which makes you want to conform or belong. Towards the end of the film, just before the climax, Duncan denies being “a faggot”. What would you do, if you were in his shoes, taunted by other boys who you’d tried to become friends with? Hold your head up high and say you were glad to be gay? He’s only 14 remember and desperately wants to belong. Life is not always so simple. And that’s also one of the strengths of the film. The problem with a lot of ‘gay films’ is their desire to bury the complexity of a character in order to make a political statement. Neither Duncan nor Perry - or indeed Duncan’s father - are simple. Take Perry for example. When Duncan is finally driven over the edge, Perry, who had been such a key figure in provoking his crisis, is suddenly disturbed and sobered by what Duncan does. Perry's feelings towards Duncan are much more complex than those of the other boys, who just want to sport with him, but how can he let them out in the open? In one scene, he plays the macho-man and rapes Duncan after persuading him to wear his mother’s wedding-dress, but in another when Duncan just wants a kiss, he brutally rejects him and calls him a faggot.
The supporting actors are Pablo Schrieber, Zachary Knighton and Ryan Donowho who play Brent, Travis and Scotty, the three boys Perry hangs out with. Beckie King and Meredith Hannerham play the two girls, April and Tonya, who hang out with the boys. April has little time for Duncan and thinks he’s a weirdo, but the more homely Tonya takes a liking to him, responds to his vulnerability and tries to protect him. Unfortunately, neither are on hand to moderate his four tormentors during the climax in which Duncan’s big secret, which he’d confided to Perry and which Perry has betrayed to the other boys, is finally out. His mother had taught him that you could calm a chicken by putting its head in your mouth. No doubt his other secret is common knowledge as well, namely, his feelings for Perry, so that when Perry taunts “Suck it like your mother showed you.” everyone knows that he’s not just referring to the chicken. In response to being baited in this way, a traumatised Duncan puts the chicken's head in his mouth and then bites it off. Why does he do it? Why does he bite the head off ‘his best friend’ in response to being taunted for being a faggot? Difficult to say. Is it a final bid to grow up by severing his links with his mother? One Christian website opined that now that he’d severed his links with his mother and especially after his father had embraced him at the end of the film, he would grow up normal like everyone else and put his homosexual feelings behind him.
Of course, this begs a very big question. Was his sexual attraction towards Perry, simply the result of his identification with his dead mother, like his penchant for wearing her clothes and impersonating her at the dinner table? Is it all just a question of ‘gender confusion’, as a result of her death, which, after his father embraces him in his distress, he will grow out of to live a normal, healthy, heterosexual life - as intended by God, of course? It seems a little reductive and pat. But then, what do you expect where people reduce the complex reality of the world to the Procrustean bed of their own religious concerns?
My own personal take on Duncan’s behaviour, for what it is worth, is this. The connection between biting the head off his chicken, symbolising his own repudiation of his sexual nature and his desire to belong, to be accepted by the other boys, is clear. It is a temporary rejection of himself whereby he violates everything that he is because it has got him into this mess. He’s in flight from himself, from ‘the faggot’ within. He is suffering from what people might call “cognitive dissonance”. Two sides of himself have suddenly come into head-on collision and turned him momentarily psychotic. After being embraced by his father, hopefully, he’ll put the pieces of himself back together, and he’ll grow up gay, because that’s what he is. He is too much in touch with his feelings for that not to happen, whatever crisis he’s going through now.
There is another aspect of Duncan which I believe should be taken into account and that is his guilelessness and complete sexual innocence. He has not only never had sex with a girl, as he admits to Perry, but when his feelings for Perry emerge, he doesn’t seem to dissociate them from any other aspect of his life. They seem as natural to him as breathing might be and it is only Perry’s reaction to them which makes him think there is anything wrong. The chicken, as well as being a connection back to his mother, is somehow symbolic of this innocence, particularly in relation to his feelings for Perry. So that, after he has tried to kiss Perry and been called a faggot for his pains, he starts to take it out on the chicken. In the bath the following day he unceremoniously pushes the chicken away from him. It’s as if the chicken had now come to represent that part of himself which he had come to reject - namely his own feelings, which he’d come to see as monstrous because of Perry’s reaction. He was now at war with himself and the first casualty of that war would be the poor chicken.
As for Perry, well, unlike Duncan, there is nothing temporary about his rejection of himself. In fact, he has all the makings of a life-long self-hating homophobe. He’ll go on fucking women to prove to himself that he isn’t a faggot. He’ll get married and probably physically abuse his wife as he himself is abused by his father. He’ll pop out as many kids as it takes and at the end of it all he’ll wonder what his life was about. When he gets older, he’ll be miserable and bitter. He already knows that it’s all fucked up. He says so to Duncan. In compensation, he sees Christianity as some kind of consolation, responding to Duncan's doubt in an afterlife by saying, “there’s definitely a heaven; there has to be.”. How else make sense of his fucked up existence and give it some kind of meaning? And it is precisely that belief that will reinforce his repressions and homophobic responses to people like Duncan probably for the rest of his life. (This judgement could be very wrong, of course. Perry could wise up to himself in the end. His reaction to Duncan's act of biting the head off the chicken suggests this possibility, in fact.)
One other aspect of the film which might produce ground for speculation is the paucity of material in it with any real connection to contemporary everyday life. There’s the truck Perry, Brent, Travis and Scott drive around in with its ominous throb, which you usually hear before its visual appearance, there’s the tractor and the small truck belonging to Duncan’s father, there’s the truck belonging to Perry’s father, there’s Duncan's old bike which he inherited from his mother, but beyond these props there is very little to remind you of life in 20th. Century, let alone 21st. Century America. Duncan, for example, does not seem to go to school. There are no signs of computers. TVs and radios are conspicuous in his father's house only by their absence. The rooms inside of the house look like stage-sets. And there is something almost arcadian about the greenery of the surrounding countryside. It seems that the only concessions the film makes to contemporary life are those which are absolutely essential to the story itself or to work on the farm. In this sense, it is refreshingly ‘minimalist’ and uncluttered, suggesting an archetypal rather than realist background to the action which takes place in the film. This, I think, is important as it situates the innocent Duncan in his own ‘Garden of Eden’ from the very beginning. A city wouldn’t have served this drama at all. In a city, Duncan would have grown up much more streetwise about his feelings for Perry. He would have known they were ‘queer’ right from the start and therefore would have been much less likely to let them take him by surprise and undo him. If there is a cinematic equivalent of the Et In Arcadia Ego genre in painting, this film belongs there. Such a coming of age drama could not have taken place in any other environment.
Finally, the $64,000 question after seeing this film is what will happen to Duncan after the credits have rolled. My bet is that he will suppress his homosexuality for a while - at least until he’s more sure of himself. At the same time, he will, I hope, avoid his former ‘friends’, although, under the circumstances of living in a small farming community, that won’t be easy. I think it’s unlikely that he’ll follow in his father’s footsteps and become a farmer. Physically, he’s just not cut out for it. Perhaps, he will migrate to a city where he will probably find more opportunities to be who he is. And he’ll eventually grow old and die, like everyone else. But I suspect that, meanwhile, he’ll be much happier than Perry, much more in tune with himself. The first half of that Gnostic dictum - “If you bring out what is within you, what is within you will save you.” will apply to him, while the second half, “If you do not bring out what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” will apply to Perry. So all in all, the winner will be Duncan, while the losers will be those who refused to accept him and singled him out because he was different.
Start blogging by creating a new post. You can edit or delete me by clicking under the comments. You can also customize your sidebar by dragging in elements from the top bar.
|
RSS Feed