the hills of california (w. butterworth, d. mendes)

My brother said, do you want to go to the theatre, and I said why not. When in London, sometimes it feels like there’s no time to go to theatre: it takes up a whole evening and there are people to see and places to haunt. But as a night out with el hermano, it seemed ideal. And what better than that doyen of British theatre, Jez Butterworth’s latest.

I read nothing about the play beforehand. My expectations, as ever, were not high. The set had a polished, conservative feel. A meticulously rendered front room of a rundown Blackpool hotel. Emblematic, perhaps, but doggedly naturalistic. It declared: “You have arrived in a British theatre, do not expect to witness anything radical.” The audience didn’t look as though they had any desire to witness anything radical, so they were not going to be disappointed. We were up in the gods. I had actually checked out these tickets on-line earlier, and they cost around £70. My bother, as is his wont, had an app, so we got them for £15. The theatre was full. The show is a success.

What unfolded over the course of the next three hours was indeed an exemplary rendition of British theatre. The play is beautifully written, directed and acted. It has humour and pathos, The Andrews Sisters and the Rolling Stones. It is seemingly written for Butterworth’s wife, Laura Donnelly, who gives a grandstanding performance in a female-lead play. There’s a sniff of Chekhov, a faint hint of Pinter in the set-up, a dollop of Osbourne and a whole backlog of British (and Irish) playwriting. It’s one of those things that people in the arts, both here and abroad, will note that we ‘do well’. There’s next to no politics, nothing formally challenging, not even all that much emotion. But it all works like a cuckoo clock. 

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Nb - To be present in the Harold Pinter theatre, formerly known as the Comedy Theatre, is an event in itself. The Victorians had money and they had a grand, claustrophobic vision for how to spend it. The theatre is as intimate a cave, a cave with ledges and crannies and a religious focus on the event of the stage. The social complexity of the Victorian world is still functioning here, with the gods and the stalls, the balcony and the boxes. Even if your seat is half way to Piccadilly Circus, you will still get enough of an immersive view to feel like you are part of this great theatre machine, which is part of this splendiferous empire, a place of plush velvet and ornate ceilings. Just to be there is to belong to the victors. The quality of the show is entirely incidental. 

1917 (w&d mendes; w krysty wilson-cairns)

OK chaps. This is what we need. We inhabit a country that’s becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea that fundamentally we won two world wars single handed. Vanquished the monstrous Hun, saved a lot of fetching French women and basically acted with a degree of heroism and British sang-froid which marks us apart as clinically superior to our European neighbours. We don’t want anything too meaty, let’s have some straight-off emotional plot points, photos of loved ones back in Blighty, brother saving brother, a good death scene, (which is also a narrative twist, catchy?),some communal male singing, because that’s what they all did, and plenty of doomed bonhomie. And for fuck’s sake, let’s not make it too deathly serious. Let’s have lots of swearing and lets reel in the youts by giving it a real video game aesthetic. You know, like you’re there living this and the Hun is coming after you and it’s kill or be killed, and you’ve got a fixed target which gives you a big (emotional) pay-off. Let’s package it up with a shedload of extras and some nifty explosions and maybe just maybe we can do it like in one take?

You’re an intern in the production company at an early planning meeting (concept; target audience; reference) with the esteemed Cambridge graduate director. After keeping quiet for a long time you summon up some courage and say - ‘Has anyone seen Son of Saul?’ Some people in the room nod approvingly, others look slightly confuesed. Then you add: ‘Let’s make the Apocalypse Now of the first world war’. The team look at you and say: this chap or chapess knows her shit. What you don’t say is: ‘Do you realise that this is just going to reinforce national stereotypes and play up to the increasingly ultra-right agenda of modern British politics?’ (You definitely wouldn’t mention the B word.) Or, let’s hypothesise that if you did say that, you would have been quietly lead away to the room reserved for people with a modicum of political awareness and farmed out to Loach or someone of their ilk. 

1917 is a technically well-executed movie which uses an off-the-peg Blake Snyder template. Sadly it’s an exemplar of where we are now, a culture that cooks up effective but vapid, bellicose content targeted at the world’s conservative heartlands. No idea what a ‘European’ watching this film would make of it; in particular the quite absurd necessity to turn the German pilot into the villain of the piece, a scene that could have been scripted by a Mail-Murdoch hack. Personally I can’t say I found it depressing or moving or challenging. It’s blandness and predictability washed over me like a stolen vote that you’ve got no option but to learn to live with. 

skyfall (d. mendes, w. neal purvis, john logan, robert wade)

Roland Barthes liked Bond narratives. He wrote a long and engaging essay about their structural form. He also liked Carry On movies, so we shouldn’t get carried away, but Barthes’ appreciation is a pointer to the fact that Bond could be seen as the closest thing to an existential hero (or anti-hero) British popular culture has ever produced. Bond inhabits his own moral universe, where society’s rules do not apply. In part this is because he works for the British secret service, with its dubious ethics, but it also has to do with his perception of the world. A perception that might be said to originate in a jaundiced perspective engendered by having to be oneself in spite of the British class system, something that drives him towards his default loner condition. (It might be worth noting that Fleming’s background has plenty in common with those of Philby, Maclean and Le Carre.) In order to escape the torpid Whitehall world, he effectively goes rogue, even if that’s something which the system seeks to integrate to its advantage. Bond’s tragic flaw is not that he is a defender of the British faith (ie that he is a servant to the notion of ‘duty’ even if that proves to be to his detriment); but that no matter how much he indulges and exerts his individuality (in the role of the outsider) his talents and his soul, what remains of it, will always be appropriated by the state he works for.

All of which explains why Bond is such a fascinating fictional creation: a brilliant expression of the tension between individuality and the demands of society/ the state. Bond cannot escape his Britishness, but he will go as far as he can in order not to be tied down by the rules decreed by his nationality. Hence his pervasive and engaging cynicism.

Skyfall’s lachrymose denial of all of the above is an indicator of how conservative British society (and filmmaking) has become over recent decades. It’s a far cry from the character Connery once made his own. Skyfall seems to do everything to locate Bond within a narrative of renascent colonial glory. The depiction of Dench-as-M-as-quasi-Queen (reinforced by the now-famous Olympics stunt) to whom Bond is devoted, and who has become a maternal figure in his life, distorts his whole relationship with the state. The new Bond is a loyal and devoted soldier whose acquiescence to authority negates his anarchistic streak. (Shown to be destructive and narcissistic as he downs scorpion-laced shots in the tropics.) M herself is viewed in a turgid shot, reminiscent of the most depressing Hollywood cinema-as-propaganda, in front of coffins draped in Union Jacks. M is then given the job of defending her agency’s role in modern global politics, embellishing the notion of the importance of Britain retaining a telling military presence in the new global game. This argument and these images reflect Britain’s recent and continued role as military adventures, something much of the new world finds hard to swallow, as though we still lived in the post-war global matrix that Fleming himself inhabited, when European wars determined the planet’s fate.

Does any of this matter? If Mendes and co want to turn Bond into an apologist for British foreign policy, where’s the aesthetic problem? The trouble is, in terms of creating an effective Bond movie, it matters a lot. This is an emasculated Bond, whose beauty is purloined along with his cynicism. Rather than defining himself in existential struggle against a ferocious opponent, the yin to his yan, he’s defined by his patriotism and servility. This is not what we want need or want from Bond and ultimately leads to an increasingly dull and over-extrapolated narrative. After the impressive opening sequence, the movie flatlines, when it is not rescued by Deakins’ cinematographic flair. We are presented with an asexual, ascetic Bond who finds no real pleasure in life. The closest we get is a muted homoerotic hint in a relationship with Bardem which is more flirtatious than threatening. Where the villain should be Bond’s alter-ego, the evidence of anarchic power untrammelled, here his relationship with Bardem is muted and fraternal. They are two sons of Empire, only the one with the Spanish accent really didn’t fit in. The portrayal of Bardem’s character feels desperately contrived and the assault on Whitehall so mundanely implausible, and cheap, that it makes us realise the worth of real implausibility in the Bond narratives, where villains have powers beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Both Bardem and Bond have been betrayed by Empire, and whereas one is happy to take his medicine, the other  has become slightly peeved and even more Oedipal. This converts M into the central character, as though someone handed the scriptwriters the section from the bible marked “jeopardy” and they have valiantly tried to crowbar it into a narrative that doesn’t require it. With the effect of turning Skyfall into cheap melodrama, when M’s maternal role is emphasised by the decision to return to his parents’ home for one of the least spectacular dénouements in the Bond franchise. This is the froth that comes from trying to devise a narrative with an emasculated hero (in much the same way as happened in Quantam of Solace). The close-cropped Craig is a shorn Samson: in a conservative society, there’s no room for mavericks. The Bonds of this dull world have to learn to fill in their forms, curtsey to their superiors, tug their forelocks and iron out their anarchic muscles.

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Appendix:

Here are some of the things we don’t need to know about Bond:

We don’t need to know about his parents or his upbringing.

We don’t need to know he has an Oedipal relationship with M.

We don’t need to know that he’s capable of emotion.

We don’t need to know that he has a matey relationship with his parents’ former gillie.

We don’t need to know about his politics or those of the organisation he works for.

We don’t need to know that he’s capable of nostalgia.

We definitely don’t need to know that he’s a patriot.

Here are some of the things we require from a Bond film:

A charismatic villain with an outrageous if potentially convincing motivation for their villainy.

Exotic locations.

Cynicism.

Sex.

Imaginative use of dramatic action sequences.

An ahistorical perspective (history being the playground within which Bond frolicks).

A clearly demonstrated lack of respect for authority, towards both his superiors and his enemies.

revolutionary road (d. mendes, w.justin haythe)

Article 1. Wo sind die kinder?

Towards the end of the film, the last time the Wheelers will see one another, after their long night of the soul, April decides to pretend for the benefit of Frank, and makes him breakfast. She says something along the lines of - 'I sent the kids away, as I thought you'd like to have a quiet breakfast before your big day'. At which point one is tempted to scream: What kids! Admittedly their two children have been glimpsed, upon occasion. But miraculously, every time the Wheelers have one of their bust-ups (frequently) or invite the all-seeing mad man round for lunch (twice) or need to go out - the kids vanish. Who looks after them? Where do they go? Why are they so conveniently absent? The reason this seems important is that this is a film seeking to capture a raw emotional honesty - it could be argued its the whole premise and raison d'etre for the making of the movie - but right there you have this massive child shaped gap, suggesting a void at the heart of all this truth, a lack of emotional honesty. There's one very good dramatic reason for absenting the children so much: the movie strives to ensure that the audience retains sympathy for the Wheelers, in particular April, in spite of the nasty way they act towards one another. If the audience were to glimpse the suffering their actions imparted to their children, their sympathy quotient would plummet.

Article 2. Paradise Lost involves losing a paradise.

The film opens with a roadside argument. It feels as though this will be a pivotal moment. The rot has set in and the slide towards marital disintegration has begun. This is fair enough. Except that, within the context of the film, it's not a pivotal moment. Because the audience is never shown what has been lost. We're asked to buy into the notion that the Wheelers possessed some unique, Fitzgeraldian glow, without being given any evidence for it. (If there is any template for Revolutionary Road the movie, not the book which I haven't read, it's surely  Tender is The Night, which endows the Divers with a similar, although articulated mystique.) A few fragmentary flashbacks aside, the narrative dwells exclusively in the section of the arc that has crossed the yardarm. In effect, what this means is that an audience's real reason for accepting the (vital) premise that these characters have something magical about them (which they lose) is the fact they're played by very famous and beautiful people. Which is a bit of a trick, when all's said and done - the conceit being that because these very famous and beautiful people are so special, then the Wheelers must be too. 

Article 3: The Meta-narrative. 

This is a bit more discursive. Mendes has been the key overseer over recent decades in the evolution of a kind of boutique theatre, initiated at the Donmar, his highly successful London HQ, a product of its late-Thatcher, Blairite era. This has seen the creation of a meticulously cast and packaged brand of theatre, which takes calculated risks to create an expensive cultural product, consumed avariciously by its affluent consumers. A couple of years ago Mendes quit the Donmar, in part to exercise his ambitions to make movies, in part, one likes to think, because he recognised that what he was doing there was, in a way, creatively bankrupt. An exercise in capitalism as much as theatre. In this sense, Mendes was, within the meta-narrative of the film, Frank Wheeler. Around the time he quit he also hooked up with Winslet, who is April within the meta-narrative as well as the film. Winslet, a partner whose filmic cultural framework offers Mendes the opportunity for redemption. It comes as no surprise that much of the film becomes an exercise in Mendes capturing Winslet, luminescent, tragic, striving towards a broader personal frontier, striving to get to Paris. The raw emotional honesty Revolutionary Road seeks to capture is testament to their brave new creative world. However, just as it's harder for a rich man to get to heaven than not enjoy the sight of Kidman taking her clothes off on the Donmar stage, the last place to go in search of raw emotional truth-telling is Hollywood. Where the very budgets themselves conspire to wrap your truths in a tasteful package of well-framed shots with excessive amounts of extras. No matter how desperately hand-held it all gets towards the conclusion. Hollywood cannot offer the Wheelers cinematic redemption. There's only one place to go for that, but you have to be able to speak the language. And that's Paris.

My friend told me in the pub after watching the film that if you're on facebook you can poke Godard. Maybe Sam should give him a nudge and see if that spawns the missing children.