midnight cowboy (d john schlesinger, w. waldo salt)

This is one of those iconic films of my youth, another one I will have seen on late night TV back in the eighties, lodged there as a reference point, the details all but forgotten. I revisited it as part of a new project which might be set in NY of that era. That Velvet NY, a rat infested Factory farm with a winsome charm that has supposedly been long since lost, is at the forefront of Midnight Cowboy. All the semiotic placeholders are present. The underpasses where the zombie world lives. The Italian families, speaking Italian. The outrageous sub-Velvet art party which is a haven for freaks, petty criminals and anyone who wants to get out of the cold. 

Schlesinger’s film cleverly frames its vision of NY through the dreams of the would-be cowboy gigolo, Joe Buck, played with a disarming naivety by Jon Voight. He comes from Texas to use his body and make something of himself, Candy Darling style. The film plays on the myth of NY as a city paved with gold which turns out to be strewn with rubbish and conmen. One of whom is Hoffman’s Rizzo, a presumably gay down-an-out who at first cons him and then befriends him. The fame of Midnight Cowboy was down to two things: one is Hoffman’s bravura performance, and  the other is its portrayal of love between men, even if it’s clear this love-hate relationship is never anything other than platonic. Hoffman, who had once been a struggling actor who knew this world like the back of his hand, succeeds in portraying Rizzo as a bona fide creature of the streets, someone who might have literally crawled out of the gutter. His off-key smile and unexpected gentleness lend Rizzo a pathos which that type of character is rarely offered on the big screen. He seems like a survivor, until it becomes obvious that the thing which bonds him to Joe Buck is that they are both inveterate losers. 

The film is also distinguished by its willingness to go off-piste. The neo-Roeg editing style was in danger of becoming slightly cliched, but in Midnight Cowboy it permitted Schlesinger to go beyond naturalism and seek out a more percussive register to convey its vision of a city which never sleeps, but also one that never gives a sucker an even break. 

capital (john lanchester)

The prologue of Lanchester’s novel promises much. The premise is set out: a street where every home is worth is a million pounds. The great London victors of the property wars, those blessed to have been in possession of a house in a desirable barrio of London in the late years of the twentieth century, early twenty first. Who, as the writer explains, just by sitting still in their homes day after day were racking up capital, getting rich. The street is called Pepys Road and would appear to be on one of the more salubrious streets of Clapham. The absurdity of the London housing boom is a subject that begs to be interrogated and there’s no better place for investigating it than in a novel.

However, the novel never really seems to follow through on this premise. It’s another in the current vogue of novels told from multiple perspectives (see Coe’s Middle England and Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other), a format that by and large feels more effective in theory than execution. In theory the potential for crossover, for one household to effect another, with great dramatic possibilities, is strong, but this never really happens in Capital. In addition, in the end at least half of the book’s key characters don’t actually live on the street. And if they do, the impact of their undeserved wealth on their psyche is never examined. Whist being an entertaining enough read, it feels as though Lanchester never nails any of his targets. Rather the novel drifts along towards what feels like a sort-of happy ending, except for the fact that one of the protagonists has ended up in a detention centre, under threat of being sent back to her native Zimbabwe and facing whatever kind of horrors she might have to face there. Whilst it is in some ways admirable to compose an overarching novel about London, its winners and losers, there’s always a danger that the presentation of the losers ends up seeming trite. 

Capital could have been a correlative to Who We Was, Krauze’s take on the criminal underclass. It could have shown the complex underside of the other world, that of the unwitting millionaires. There is a  hint of a darker storyline where the residents of the streets are sent the same menacing postcard, but this is never thread which feels undercooked. The man behind this menacing campaign, an angry frustrated artist, is at one point described as going through his Dostoyevski stage. And naming Dostoyevski makes one wonder what the Russian would have made of this story, as well as realise how much modern London needs and lacks its own Dostoyevski. 

la vie et rien d'autre (w&d bertrand tavernier, w jean cosmos)

Tavernier’s film is set in the aftermath of the first world war. Philippe Noiret is Major Delaplane, in charge of recovering the bodies of dead soldiers whose remains have not yet been identified. In the course of his job he meets the aristocratic Irène de Courtil (Sabine Azéma) who is searching for her lost husband, even though it becomes clear that they were estranged and that he was the lover of another woman, whose path she crosses, looking for the same man. The premise (reminiscent of Guzman’s Nostalgia por la Luz) is fascinating, allowing the film to meditate on the hypocrisy of the veneration of the dead soldiers by those who continue to use their sacrifice for their own advantage. The relationship that evolves between Noiret and Azéma is well constructed, with Noiret a man who suffers no nonsense, and both characters overcoming an initial antipathy to discover that the things they have in common bind them far more than they realise. The budget was clearly expansive, and there are several set piece scenes whose artistry is impeccably executed. Unfortunately the script feels baggy and lends the film a discursive tone. Some of the strongest moments come towards the end, when the film foregoes dialogue in a moving sequence where both soldiers and those searching for their lost ones find a moment of consolation at an impromptu cabaret night. The atmosphere and music of this moment invoke a pathos which the film at other points seems to strain to achieve. 

prater violet (christopher isherwood)

Who says there’s anything new under the sun? The notion of auto-ficcion is sometimes bandied around as a post-modern concept, but here’s a resolutely modernist Isherwood constructing a novel wherein the central character is one Christopher Isherwood and reads for all the world like a piece of non-fiction. The conceit helps to lend authenticity to a minor text, which describes the author’s experiences as a screenwriter working for a Viennese film director, Friedrich Bergmann, (modelled on the real life director Berthold Viertel), contracted by a British studio to make the powder puff movie. The details of movie making in the thirties are enjoyable and suggest a world that hasn’t changed all that much. In the first decade of this century I spent a fair amount of time drifting around the edges of the old film world in Soho and the characters who crop up in Prater Violet are dead ringers for the down-to-earth figures one would meet there. The novel’s twist occurs with the Austrian Anschluss when the director’s family is threatened by the Nazi takeover, which in turn puts the film in jeopardy. Isherwood’s novel is too discursive to really engage with the implications, but even so, the way the people working on the film react to an event in a distant country which will eventually have unimagined consequences in Britain feels disconcerting, the insularity contributing to a blasé lack of concern, something Isherwood is aware of. The novel was published in 1945 and one can imagine Isherwood working on it during the war, mindful of the way in which the events that lead up to the catastrophe were ignored; in the words of Auden: “How everyone turns away, quite leisurely from the disaster.”

twelve monkeys (d terry gilliam, w janet peoples & david webb peoples)

Back to the future in so many ways. Back to the future in so far as we were finally back in a cinema, after four months of enforced abstinence. Back to the future in so far as there can have been few more apposite films to have watched on the  occasion of returning to the cinema in these plague ridden times. 

I am sure I’ve seen 12 Monkeys before, but then again, perhaps I never did. It’s a film that has entered the consciousness, alongside the lighter Brazil, as a definitive high concept extravaganza. The kind of filmmaking that can only be done with big budgets and the flair stroke megalomania of an auteur director. I was never a great fan of Monty Python, and the Pythons’ shtick. Gilliam took the very British surrealism and coated it with North American excess. The Pythons on the whole flirted on the safe side of madness: Gilliam, with his fascination with Quixote, pushed the madness towards a more dangerous, unhinged edge. The effects in 12 Monkeys are startling. Not least because the film opens with the announcement of a virus that will wipe out most of the human population. Knowing how plausible this scenario is only adds grist to the mill. Can Bruce save the world or is he mad? Will any of us emerge from our Covid dreaming sane on the other side? 

Whilst the directorial chutzpah is on full display, alongside an enjoyably over-the-top performance from a callow Brad Pitt, the star of the show is the screenplay. Janet Peoples and David Webb Peoples) weave a virtuoso script, which creates the space for the film’s excesses and indulgences, without making them appear as excesses and indulgences, as they are knotted into the logic of the film’s premise. So 12 Monkeys jumps from the first world war to a dystopian future and somehow it all makes sense. Without this immaculate screenplay, the house of cards would have collapsed, but as it is the film holds up and retains tension right to the telegraphed finale. 

the keep (jennifer egan)

The Keep is a sly novel. It creeps up on you. You read it thinking this is so Austeresque, and it is, but then a crack emerges in the narrative, a chink, and you go through the crack, which is like one of the arrow slits in the castle the protagonist, who isn’t really the protagonist, Danny, visits. Once you go through the crack you start to think that the novel is more Calvino than Auster, it’s got this strange depth to it which feels shallow but isn’t. Bit by bit the puzzle of The Keep starts to fall into place, the story within the story, which is then another story, and as this realisation breaks on you, the reader, it’s like being caught on the crest of a wave, which is going to break very soon, because the crest of a wave is the most ephemeral of creations, it barely even exists, and even as you ascend onto the crest, the wave is already breaking and you can see the shore which is the end of the novel, the silence that awaits once the last page has been read, but you, as a reader, are grateful for this moment that caught you by surprise, after you’d been paddling around, not going anywhere, to suddenly be lifted up, and the power and the glory of the ocean of narrative is fleetingly revealed, and it was all worth it, the writing, the surfing, the reading. 

america (baudrillard)

At one point in Geoff Dyer’s excellent introduction, he suggests that in the era of Obama, Baudrillard’s vision, rooted in the Reagan era, might come across as dated. It’s the only vaguely negative thing Dyer has to say about America. He extols the way it seems to transcend its intellectual silo to emerge as a classic text in its own right. However, this comment is one thing Dyer got wrong. Because reading it in the age of Trump, (albeit an age on pause, but Trump will surely define this era in a way that Biden never will), Baudrillard’s acerbic take on the dynamics and show of US power and politics feels more relevant than ever. 

America is a book riddled with observations of the utmost ingenuity and brilliance. Reading Baudrillard’s prose is not a straightforward process. The prose is frequently dense, contrived, at times seemingly overcooked, but then, as one comes across sequences of intolerable brilliance, one wonders if the density of the text means that the reader cannot process all the glory that it contains, and that it merits being reread until every ounce of meaning and non-meaning  can be extracted. I found myself rereading paragraphs multiple times, and sometimes it was only on the 235th reading that I finally got what the author was trying to say. People might say that this is a flaw in the writing, but it is also testament to its depth, one has to mine the text rigorously to extract its riches. 

Perhaps because his focus is so much on the juxtaposition between the desert and the city, the author’s vision feels in no way dated. The meditations on the comparative role of culture in European and American society are just as on point. Likewise his observation on societal structures: “Entire social groups are being laid waste from the inside (individuals too). Society has forgotten them and now they are forgetting themselves. They fall out of all reckoning, zombies condemned to obliteration, consigned to statistical graphs of endangered species. This is the Fourth World.”

The quotable passages are limitless, it’s like plucking pearls from the seafloor, but I leave the reader with one more which again leapt out for the way it demarcated the limit between a European consciousness and an American one: 

“We fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavour and seduction, we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who are unfailingly attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence find it a mental shock and a unique release to discover the fascination of nonsense and of this vertiginous disconnection, as sovereign in the cities as in the deserts. To discover that one can exult in the liquidation of all culture and rejoice in the consecration of indifference.”

who they was (gabriel krauze)

Krauze’s roman a clef is a plaintive celebration of masculinity and the fearsome dreams of youth. It’s an account of a white, second generation Polish man’s integration into a West London criminal scene. Gabriel, the protagonist, spends his days either smoking weed, plotting robberies, or carrying out robberies. Sometimes he gets involved in stabbings, sometimes he witnesses shootings. Some days he’s in prison and on other days he goes to uni and talks about Nietzsche. The book’s take on crime, as one might expect from the Nietzsche reference, is anti-judgemental. Crime is a phenomenon that exists, with society’s moral boundaries being something imposed by an elite seeking to protect its status and wealth against the ferocious power of youth. One of the longest non-criminal sections in the book involves a uni discussion about the victim’s rights to murder and even torture a pedophile, an argument Gabriel puts forward to the nodding approval of some of his fellow students. The law exists as a means to control base tensions and the collateral damage of lawlessness is a price worth paying to exist in a society that feels more alive. 

The moral questions the book poses are perhaps the least interesting element of a fascinating book. I am slowly working my way through Quixote, a book riddled with a cartoonish violence, and Krause’s use of violence or crime seems almost as much a literary device as a declaration of (Im)moral purpose. Violence has always been a cornerstone of the literary experience and Who They Was just adopts this to give the novel fuel. In a similar way, the use of street slang, in which the book is written, feels like a carefully crafted wallpaper which lends the text authenticity and acts as a distancing device. Gabriel inhabits a world with its own codes and languages, one which the reader can access but will always feel estranged from, because on the whole readers won’t talk like this. (Good luck to the translators.) The spine of the book is not the violence or the language, it’s the elliptical journey of the protagonist, who will in the end exile himself from this Threepenny Opera world, using the writing of the novel as a way of exorcising his earlier life. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension lies in this: when will the narrator switch, when will he leave this world behind? Krause holds on until the very end, when we come to realise that the novel is essentially a lament. A lament for the lost world of (his) youth, where you don’t yet have to play by the rules, where your guile and strength should protect you, where you will bounce back from a beating or a stabbing, ready for more. It’s the world of Mercutio and Tybalt, and it retains a dark lawless beauty, fuelled by adrenaline, which Krause’s prose captures with surgical efficiency. 

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Aside. I lived for a decade in a block of flats on an estate which gets a passing mention as one of the less troubled West London estates. Gabriel’s family lived on the other side of the railway tracks. At one point he scoots across the footbridge and the narrow passageway which connects my former block to Westbourne Grove. Hyde Park is just a ten minute walk away. London is a city where worlds rub up against one another. My flat was sandwiched between Notting Hill and Maida Vale, two of the wealthiest barrios in the city. I too lived there in part because I wanted to cross over from the middle class divide, find out what it meant to live on an estate. If I had read Who They Was beforehand I might have been scared off, but the truth its that Polesworth House was never a threatening place to live. It always felt safe. The underworld  that Krause describes kept itself to itself. At the same time, there are other prisms through which the culture Krause celebrates can be seen. The Curry and I investigated this with Nicholas La Barrie in Tempest. I also thought of the elusive and enigmatic figure, The Text God (T.T.G.), whose pithy graffiti on the footbridge over the railway lines Gabriel would have seen just as I did. The graffiti contained both an anger and an energy, but suggested other methods of channeling that energy, methods which are just as anarchic, but perhaps less destructive, both to the subject and the object of the subject’s ire. 

the great gatsby (f scott fitzgerald)

Did I appreciate the quality of the writing when I first read Gatsby? When did I first read Gatsby? Who knows. A readily digestible classic, no doubt it is read by many who are, as I was, too young and gauche to really appreciate what the writer is up to. We sense that authorial brilliance, without in any way processing it, caught up as we are in images of shirts, parties and an apparently neo-romantic narrative which isn’t actually very romantic at all. 

The danger of creating myths is that the myths out-run the authorial intention. Of course, storytellers are in the business of creating myths. Myths convey immortality, on the characters and their parent, the author. Some writers write for money, but others write in order to join the pantheon of myth makers, their eye on the aftermath, rather than today’s battle. It’s the curious nature of the art of writing that it’s greatest rewards are to be found in a post-materialist state, also known as death. Perhaps the same might be said of saints and terrorists, but posthumous vocations are few and far between, and the exhaustive, passive process of writing has none of the temporal heroism enjoyed by the saint or the terrorist. 

Fitzgerald succeeded in joining this pantheon, above all with his creation of Gatsby, a riddle enshrined in an enigma discovered on the sole of Nick Carraway’s shoe. Gatsby is a bootlegger, a fake, a loser. He is also, briefly, incredibly wealthy, and a man whose dubious taste is redeemed by his indifference, and the fact his bad taste is, in the true American style, a bigger, brasher bad taste than anyone else’s. Under the cloak of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose, the dubious taste of his character morphs into a kind of apogee of everything the world ever aspired to, even though the author himself makes it abundantly clear that Gatsby’s aspiration is the only thing of any real value. The achievement of fame, fortune and a truckload of monogrammed shirts proves meaningless and empty. He even has Gatsby himself recognise this, with the unwitting playboy turning his back on his riches, which were only a means to woo the woman he fell for, a means to keep an unsustainable dream alive. 

All of which means that in the end, Gatsby is a paradoxical novel, famous for celebrating the things it is questioning. Those things being the cult of the individual, the rampant march of capital, the joys of conspicuous consumption. The cult of Gatsby is the cult of a myth, a man whose funeral no-one attends, a man whose reputation is trashed even as his coffin is being lowered into the grave. A soul who is trashed in the contemporary world of the novel, only to be redeemed, posthumously, by the sublime craft of his creator.  

the parable of the sower (octavia butler)

I read Butler’s book not realising, in my ignorance, its original publication date. Perhaps this is of less relevance that I am making it out to be, but the fact that the  novel was written in the mid-nineties marks Butler out as an uncannily prophetic voice. Had this been a novel published this year, one might have accused her of jumping on a bandwagon, but given the publication date it would be fair to say that in fact, Parable of the Sower is the bandwagon. It predates that other influential US dystopian novel, The Road, and subsequently apocalypse has become more and more fashionable. I came to the novel via Amitav Ghosh, who recommended it as one of the very few pioneering climate change texts. 

As an aside it would be fascinating to trace the history of apocalyptic literature. Apocalypse lends itself to cinema, and there have been plenty of Apocalyptic movies, from Stalker to The Omega Man via Will Smith’s I Am Legend. Images of devastation give good cinema. In literature, so rooted in the mores of its culture, it’s perhaps less common. Ghosh talks about the marginalisation of SF as a literary genre, which is the more natural home for an apocalyptic literature, a genre he argues is essential if we are to begin to address the dominant issue of the day, which is climate change.

Butler was there ahead of her time. The book’s heroine, Lauren Oya Olamina, lives on the edge of a Los Angeles which has been brought to the brink of societal collapse, in large part due to the scarcity of water. As her world becomes more and more feral, she is forced to flee, setting out on the road and gathering a bunch of followers to her slightly trippy vision of humanity’s future, encapsulated in her poetic writings. The novel is dynamic, fast-moving, and, in its way, terrifying. Survival is everything in the apocalyptic world and values such as empathy have to be carefully rationed, like water, if you want to live. 

The vision of Los Angeles being overrun by drug-crazed gangs made me question the writing at first. It made me thinking of the writings of Mariana Enriquez, whose stories broach the issue of an inner city which has been hollowed out by the use of crack derivatives (‘pasta base’ in Rioplatense terms). Where I live now, the Ciudad Vieja, there are most nights pasta base users squatting in the porch in front of my house. They are the shadowy figures of bourgeois nightmares, theoretically the emerging zombies who end up overrunning LA in Butler’s novel. Only, the social balance doesn’t quite work that way. In practice, they keep themselves to themselves, huddle in the corner of the barrio they have appropriated, and, as Enriquez describes, are not threatening. All of which made me question Butler’s Yankee perspective. However, the fact the novel is 25 years old gives it another dimension. Perhaps what is happening in our ‘third world’ barrios is just the start of something that terminates as Butler describes it. One hopes that her deeply pessimistic vision does not come to pass, but events seem ever more determined to prove this hope wrong.