By The Flickering Flames

This is all you have to do: lift the receiver and put it to your ear. Tap in a sequence of numbers on the dial. Wait for the ringing to begin and then stop, and for a little human voice to sound in your ear, asking what you want. Then speak.

 So why do I find it so damned hard?

I’ve never been able to make telephone calls. Even today, when it surely can’t be too long before dogs and cats have their own mobiles, conversing with somebody I can’t see seems unnatural. Unnatural, and plain wrong. I can’t help thinking that spoken conversation should come with a certain intimacy; a breathing of the same air, a matching of word and tone with facial gesture, the language of glints of the eye, of smiles and little shakes of the head.

 That’s all very well for candle-lit dinners for two, you might say, but what if you’re just trying to enquire about opening hours, or fix an appointment with the dentist? Not all human communication is a meaningful encounter between two souls, after all. You don’t have to gaze deep into your boss’s eyes to call in sick.

 I suppose I have a problem with that proposition, too, if it comes to it– I hate to think of any interaction between humans being purely functional– but really, I’m trying to rationalise something that’s irrational. After all, I don’t mind disembodied voices when it comes to the radio. In fact, I love the liberating limitations of radio, the freeing of the imagination that results when no picture if provided. Radio is the most intimate of all media, penetrating directly to the mind, without the go-between of images on a screen. And it has a funny way of seeming like a commentary on whatever visual scene is in front of you. I remember– when the much-lamented Dandelion Books was still open– how harmoniously its aural wallpaper of BBC 4 would blend with the second-hand volumes of Marxist theory and the snooker yearbooks that lined the walls. Sometimes a stricture can be a stimulant.

So there’s no point analysing it, really…I just can’t make telephone calls. I’m not too bothered by taking them, but the very thought giving someone a buzz gives me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.

 I’ll do anything to avoid it. I postpone telephone calls for as long as I possibly can, sometimes up to a week. And if I can avoid doing it, I will. If something can only be arranged over the telephone, I’ll have to really need it or really want it before I bring myself to dialling that number. And sometimes– often, in fact– I’ve been dialling a number and stopped before I reached the last digit, deciding that I’d leave it till later, or give up the whole idea.

The bit that really gets me is announcing myself. It feels so obtrusive. It’s not like walking up to a kiosk or a counter. In that situation, before a word has been spoken, there’s been a whole world of surmise and guesswork passing between the two people. But, when you phone up, the person at the end of the line has no idea who you are or what you want. She didn’t have the warning of an approaching figure, a nervous or happy-go-lucky or cross expression on a face.

So maybe she’s a secretary who answers the telephone every minute and has a pretty good idea what you’re going to ask before you ask it. Or who’s heard the same dozen questions a thousand times and answers them automatically. But it doesn’t feel that way to me. To me, it feels like I’m wandering into someone’s living room, unannounced. And naked.

 When I put the phone down, the horrible deed done at last, my heart is pounding and I’m sweating like I’ve been running on a treadmill for fifteen minutes. The relief is delicious. Suddenly, it feels like I’ve climbed through a horribly claustrophic tunnel and reached the great open spaces.

And yet…. I don’t know whether I envy people who say, “I’ll just give them a call”, pick up the receiver, tap out a number as casually as they’d do a sum on a calculator, and chirpily say: “Hello? I know this is a strange request, but would it be possible for my grandmother Jessica to borrow one of your mannequins overnight?”. There seems something almost sociopathic to me about such thick-skinnedness.

Everything seems more fraught to me than it does to most people, but everything also seems more charged with significance. Could I lose one without losing the other? When I was a boy, it seemed incredible to me that anyone could spend a night in a graveyard. Now I doubt it would bother me. But somehow that doesn’t feel like progress. Just the dimming of a vivid imagination.

Besides, I know it’s not just me. There’s plenty of people who dread making telephone calls, some to the extent of shunning the damned machine entirely. I think we should be accommodated, rather than having to painfully conform to majority behaviour. Surely every business has a computer by now; they should give an email address as well as a contact number. People shouldn’t blithely say, “Give me a ring”. Or, at least, one should be able to reply: “I don’t like using the telephone”, without getting a funny look.

After all, who’s the more misanthropic; someone who wants to see who he’s talking to, or someone who wants to deal with you long-distance?

Let’s get this straight first: I don’t have a cat called Strider, or a tattoo written in Elvish runes. If I owned a house, I wouldn’t call it Rivendell. I didn’t pay in to some awful film just to see the teaser trailer for Fellowship of the Ring. I’ve read Lord of the Rings twice in my life, with about fifteen years between readings, and the second time I was less than impressed. Tolkien can sometimes reach lyrical heights reminiscent of Old English poetry, but at other times, he writes more like Enid Blyton. Nine Trek Through the Wilderness? Something like that.

And I was disappointed with the films. Too many belching dwarves, too many wildly gesticulating CGI creatures, too many identikit scenes of Frodo and Sam wandering through barren wastes, too much nose on Gandalf. (Where did the novels say he had a grotesquely swollen conk? Where?) It was a one-off chance to film a fantastic story, and I felt it had been mucked up. I took Peter Jackson off my Christmas card list.

Now I can see I was too hard. I still want to strangle Gimli when he comes on screen, and I still wince when Sam makes his “inspiring” speech at the end of the Two Towers, but I can see now that the films are monumental achievements, for all their failures. Never was such visual splendour married to such poetic grandeur. At least not since the Eurovision of 1974.

 And the words coming out of the characters’ mouths! Fair enough, when they issue from Gollum or Sam or Gimli’s lips, I want to smash the DVD player into tiny little pieces. But some lines were so poetic they make goose-bumps appear on my flesh, and fill me with a desire to grab a broadsword and massacre some Orcs. Death! Death! Death!

Here are my top twenty, in reverse order. I’m sorry if I’ve misquoted anywhere. But not THAT sorry. (I hate pedants.)

20. You did not really think a hobbit could contend with the will of Sauron, did you? There are none who can. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron.

You know it’s time to get scared when somebody that GANDALF looked up to decides to play for the other team. Nice to see Chrissie Lee still showing the young ‘uns how it’s done in his eighties.

19. The women of this country learned long ago, those without swords can still die upon them. I fear neither death nor pain.

The blondie Saxon chick can turn a phrase, as well as Wormtongue’s head.

18. There is only one lord of the Ring…only one who can bend it to his will. And he does not share power.

I was disappointed to have so few quotations from the Gandalf/Sauruman face-offs, since their scenes are such dramatic gold, but the bare words don’t seem that impressive taken from their context. But this one nicely sums up what might be the story’s central theme, that true heroism is resisting power, not wielding it.

17. Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many. 

This feels like the poetic centre of the entire trilogy, even if it occurs in the first film. If I was Frodo I’d rather put Sting through Sam’s plenteous guts. Bootlicking creep.

16. Look for your friends. But do not trust to hope. It has abandoned these lands.

The actor playing Eomer pulls off the most impressive frowning in the entire trilogy, possibly in all cinema.

15. I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the flame of Arnor. The dark fire shall not avail you, flame of Udun. You shall not pass!

Gandalf is no drama queen but he knows when a bit of theatricality is called for.

14. Toss me.

OK, Gimli said one funny thing.

13. Oh, but you are alone. Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in? So fair, so cold… like a morning of pale Spring still clinging to Winter’s chill.

Never has lechery been so lyrical. Wormtongue should probably work on his approach to girls. And wash his hair.

12. I do not fear them.

It may not be poetry, but I’m always moved by the serene courage with which Arwen says these words.

11. Your coming to us is as as the footsteps of Doom.

But you’re welcome anyway. Galadriel lays down the red carpet for Frodo.

10. The Grey Pilgrim. Three hundred lives of men I’ve walked this Earth and now I have no time.

The fascination of Gandalf is how his history is only ever hinted at, tantalisingly. But there’s more to him than anyone knows, that’s for damned sure. Also, if someone who’s walked the Earth for so long sees current events as being a big deal, they must be. And that gets us all excited.

9. Our people…our people…I would have followed you, my brother…my captain…my King!

They’re holding hands but it’s not gay! Anyone who could listen to Boromir’s dying speech and not feel a lump in his or her truth is not to be trusted. Also, for a monarchist like me, it’s a good example to quote when anti-monarchists claim there’s something ignoble or servile about loyalty to a sovereign.

8. Then it is forfeit.

Faramir, like his brother, is one of the most moving characters because he truly struggles with temptation and evil, unlike the angelic Aragorn and the godly Gandalf. Here he waves away a minion’s warnings that letting Frodo go with the Ring will mean his neck and his head parting company when he gets back to Daddy.

7. The board is set. The pieces are moving. We come to it at last; the great battle of our time.

Sometimes you suspect that Gandalf is secretly enjoying it all.

6. If Aragorn survives this war, you will still be parted. If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true you will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality. Whether by the sword or the slow decay of time, Aragorn will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of his passing. He will come to death, an image of the splendor of the kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world. But you, my daughter, you will linger on in darkness and in doubt as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell bound to your grief under the fading trees until all the world is changed and the long years of your life are utterly spent.

And some fathers would just say, “He’s a bum with no future”.

5. One does not simply walk into Mordor. It’s black gates are guarded by more than just orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.

Boromir has more depth than any other character in the films, apart from King Theodien. You can’t help thinking that he has a point when he makes this speech, and you can’t help being moved by the weight of duty under which he is visibly struggling, along with the seduction of the Ring. Who said Sean Bean was a bad actor?

4. Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day!An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the Age of Men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight!

Yes, it’s a corny trailer moment. But it’s pretty damned effective.

3. Arise! Arise, Riders of Theoden! Spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered! A sword day… a red day… ere the sun rises! Ride now!… Ride now!… Ride! Ride to ruin and the world’s ending! Death! Death! Death!

But that’s how it’s really done, pretty boy.

2. Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills, into shadow…how did it come to this?

It may be plagiarised from a Middle English poem, but it’s still one of those most eloquent moments in any film I’ve seen.  A very close contender for the top spot.

But it had to be:

1. The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that was taken is now lost, for none now live that remember it.

The very first moments of the trilogy were the best. I can remember sitting in the cinema, hearing those brilliant words spoken against a black screen, and thinking: this is going to be the greatest film ever. No voice-over has ever evoked such an atmosphere of world-shaking events, of a story on the grandest scale. Then the belching dwarfs and the Scottish hobbits came along.

Almost everybody I know is a liberal. Some are lefty liberals; they take a dim view of corporations and advertising, and tend to believe that everyone would rub along just fine if there was a good deal less greed and a bit more tolerance in the world. Then there are more hard-headed liberals, not necessarily without compassion or a social conscience, who see the current state of affairs as pretty much the best that can be expected. A third group , not much represented amongst ordinary Irish people, think that the world would be a better place if people were left to their own devices, and subjected to the least amount of interference and censure from society.

The irony is that it’s the last group who are most likely to describe themselves as “conservative”; and if you call yourself a conservative, the first assumption people will make is that you want to slash taxes. As a matter of fact, the third group I have described is the one I agree with least; the ones that are furthest from my notion of conservatism. The tree-hugger, the anti-pornography feminist and the retired headmaster who wants to introduce a curfew for teenagers are all closer to my brand of conservatism than the pot-smoking, share-holding anarchist.

Most people I know are liberals; and yet most liberals consider themselves subversives. They regard the majority as hopelessly hidebound and reactionary, but they are always surprised when I tell them that I’m a conservative. Anyone under the age of fifty who gives the impression of having Read Books, they seem to think, can safely be counted as a liberal; and when I tell them that I’m not, their reaction is often one of embarrassment as well as surprise. We were rubbing along quite well, I can almost hear them thinking; he seemed nice.

Conservatives are the Blue Meanies of the liberal world-view; because of God knows what frustration or repression or animus, they want to drag other, more free-spirited people into their doldrums. There is a certain amount of censure and intolerance involved in being a conservative; but, as you might guess, ultimately I see myself on the side of the angels. I’m a conservative because I care, because I want people to live happy and meaningful lives.

Let me confess right away; I know little about the nitty-gritty of politics, and even less about economics. I never read the newspapers, and my grasp of history is rudimentary. My conservatism is more social than political. I think we pay far too much attention to the political, to the mechanics of government and the letter of laws, and far too little attention to social attitudes. Because that’s where the action really happens, after all. A society does not change because laws are enacted; laws are enacted because society changes. A new world comes into being at dinner tables and pub debates, in schoolyards and house parties, not in parliamentary debates. Let me make the ballads of a country, somebody said, and I care not who makes the laws. We don’t have ballads anymore, but the principle holds true.

It’s possible to categorise most arguments and debates into two kinds; those regarding means, and those regarding ends. Two economists arguing over government spending are usually debating about means; they both want to create more wealth, but they both have different ideas of how to do it. Most of my disagreements with liberals are disagreements over ends, not means. I don’t want a more free, more equal, more prosperous society. I don’t especially care about freedom or equality, and I think most of us already have more prosperity than is good for us.

Liberals assume that, with the exception of children and the insane, people know what is good for them, and society should not hinder them from pursuing it, unless it harms others. True, sometimes liberals deviate from this policy. The more intellectual are likely to favour government sponsorship of art-works that the man in the street considers to be rubbish. (I’m inclined to agree with the man in the street.) The more ecological are likely to favour pedestrianisation of city streets, even in the face of public disapproval. (I agree with the liberal here.) Most liberals would favour public service broadcast of documentaries of documentaries rather than reality TV, even when they secretly prefer the reality TV themselves. (I agree with the liberal again).

But on the whole, the liberal thinks that adults should be treated as adults. We should not impede their actions; we should not even criticise them, unless we believe they are hurting others in some way. I can see the logic of this argument; I’m used to the indignant cries of, “Who are you to tell other people how to behave”? Because– and I find myself delaying the admission– I do not agree. I think I have both a right and an obligation to censure; I do think I know better, in many ways. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But I think everyone has the same right. I find it too depressing to accept that a modus vivendi, a way of living together without irritating each other too much, is the best that society can hope for. A nation, in this view, is like a hotel; as long as you don’t make too noise and upset the other guests, and you pay your charges (not forgetting a reasonable tip to the porter), then you’ve done all you ought. You might do more; you might spend each night in the hotel bar, chatting to the other guests and bringing some sunlight into their day. But this is entirely up to you; and you always have to be careful not to overstep the mark and become a nosey parker or a bore.

I prefer not to see society as a hotel. I prefer a society held together by bonds of affection and emotion, to one held together by bonds of convenience. Might I even say that we should aspire to– bonds of love? And we have a right and a duty to rebuke the ones we love.

I don’t think the debate should be how we can all get along without stepping on each others’ toes. I don’t even think the debate should be how we should pick up those who fall, and how we should put them safely on their way again. I think the debate should be how we can make social life a rich, joyous thing; and I don’t mean this in any silly utopian sense. How can we preserve the traditions and culture of our society? How can we strengthen them? How can we make our public places (and our private places) not only pleasant but beautiful? How can we best honour our past, and glory in it? What nuances of social life and custom are to be celebrated, or decried? What makes us unique, as every society should be unique in its own way?

The conservative, ultimately, is a romantic. A liberal can be a romantic, too; a liberal can have a Rousseau-like vision of uncorrupted humanity, freed from the shackles of social forms, restored to his natural innocence. A liberal can have a dreamy vision of mingling races and cultures, everybody at last allowed to step out of the chains of gender roles and national stereotypes, allowed to finally be individuals.

Of course the romantic vision of conservatives, my sort of conservative, is quite different. We may be romantics, and we may believe no less than the liberal in humankind’s essential goodness and nobility. But we are rather more pessimistic about goodness being his raw state. We are more likely to think that he needs custom and tradition to attain to it; that he will likely go to the dogs without social bonds, without discipline, without being guided by the wisdom of those who have lived before him.

This wisdom, though, doesn’t just prevent him from falling; it raises him up. The conservative believes that the soul is not cramped or weighed down by tradition and custom, but made all the richer. The scope for individual character is still infinite– there is always room for personality– but now there is a sense of belonging, a life-giving link with past centuries, a context. Deep roots don’t stop a tree from flourishing, or growing upwards and outwards.

The precise nature of my conservatism will be described in future posts.

Revolver (2005)

4/5

What do you do if your debut film, a brisk and breezy gangster comedy, has won universal acclaim from critics, your second feature (in much the same vein) has kept them generally happy, but your latest flick has swept the board at the Razzie bad film awards and had critics queueing up to give it a good going over with their Doc Martins?

Well, any sensible director would make another brisk and breezy gangster comedy, tied with a big red bow and a polite little Apologies card. So I love the fact that Guy Ritchie did just the opposite with Revolver; instead of striving to get back into the critic’s good books, he put a bomb underneath their free seats.

The film is about a conman (Jason Statham) who gets released from prison, where the two cells on either side of his own have been occupied by criminal geniuses. These supermen, communicating through notes in library books, have worked out the ultimate con, and have promised to take Jason Statham’s character with them when they escape. They don’t. But when our hero is released, and gets himself into trouble with a crime-boss, he realises that they’re still watching over him., even if their help has a bitter taste. The plot of the film– pretty conventional stuff until now– begins to bend into all sorts of strange shapes, not resembling any crime film we’ve ever seen before, as the story shifts from a feud between gangsters to an allegory of spiritual release. It’s the most audacious shift I’ve ever seen on film, almost as if Hamlet turned into music-hall farce in the last act.

They’re funny creatures, critics. More than anything else they remind me of Sunday morning Christians; they genuflect at the altar of imagination and ambition (say, when they’re reviewing an Italian art-house film), but if they’re confronted by such values outside the hallowed ground, they go positively puce in the face. A British director, who had cut his teeth on music videos and enjoyed a couple of commercial hits, asking them to accept a crime flick that morphs half-way into spiritual allegory, that includes quotations from Julius Caesar and the Art of War, that offer viewers a black screen and classical music where the end-credits should be? No wonder the ink so quickly turned to cyanide.

Ritchie was offering us “pub philosophy”; his head was full of Kabbalah nonsense; the film was incoherent; and, if there was a point, it wasn’t worth the effort of looking for it.

I saw Revolver twice, and though it utterly bewildered me the first time round, I was intrigued enough to pay in a second time. The film is a roundabout journey, all right, but not a wild goose chase. Ritchie’s script tackles problems of personal identity, the ego, the will and the self, problems so fundamental to the human condition that I found myself thinking of Plato’s Republic and the theories of Schopenhauer. Did Schopenhauer spend much time in the pub? I don’t think so. But I suspect the critics who lashed Revolver for being “pub philosophy” have spent more time sinking beers than reading Nietzsche.

Nor is the film incoherent; in fact, the elegance of the allegory is one of the most striking things about it. And, although the influence of Kabbalah can be clearly seen, the ideas behind the film don’t depend on any mystical or religious assumptions, any more than the principle that you should love your neighbour as you love yourself requires a belief in the Trinity or an acceptance of the Immaculate Conception.

The film is flawed; critics rightly complained of an anime sequence that seems as redundant as male nipples, and Ray Liotta’s performance would make Punch and Judy look understated. But why should we care? The cinema is so surfeited with lookalike movies, thrillers and horrors and gangster flicks that never stray from the comfort zone of their genres, that almost any amount of blemishes can be forgiven in a film that really succeeds in being different. Do yourself a favour; get Revolver on DVD, and allow yourself the heretical thought that maybe all of the critics were wrong.

A young person has recently alerted me to the existence of the “internet”. It’s quite an interesting phenomenon. It was invented by the US Department of Defence as a form of communication that would endure through World War Three. This was to facilitate the cockroaches, who– as everybody knows– are the only form of life that could survive a nuclear assault. Once they had evolved into bipeds, they would come across our underground computer consoles, our internet pages last updated two million years ago. They would learn all about mankind’s dark and lamentable history. And they would resolve NEVER to let New Romanticism or Barney the Dinosaur happen again.

I’ve looked around on this “internet”, and found it a curious vista. A staggering amount of pro-naturist sites, for a start. That movement is REALLY swelling, in more senses than one. Thousands upon thousands of ”blogs”, (which word sounds like some nasty public school practice, but isn’t). About 995 out of every thousand of these blogs seem devoted to discussions of what was on television the night before, reflections on the news headlines, and the odd poem about the meaningless of life and the hypocrisy of one’s parents. The other five in a thousand are mostly divided between UFO aductees, S/M devotees, white supremacists, black supremacists, Bourne Supremacists, born again Christians, dead again Satanists, and the occasional loony.

Something clearly had to be done.

So, with a heavy heart, and animated by a sense of noblesse oblige, I present: By the Flickering Flames. Taking the internet by the scruff of the neck and putting manners on it. Please imagine yourself in my splendid old-world drawing room, the roaring fire lighting up my hunting trophies on the far wall, the old portraits of Queen Victoria and Lord Nelson looking down upon us with twinkling eyes. Hear the tinkle of brandy as I fill your glass from my ornate decanter. Ignore my wandering hand on your knee. Together we can set this “internet” back at least 150 years. Jolly good stuff!

Expect no-holds-barred indictments of the present state of cinema, literature, television, pole-vaulting, civilisation and lady’s fashions. Expect the most merciless flights of introspection since Sigmund Freud said, “I wonder why I dreamt I was sucking a lollipop last night?”. Expect philosophy, theology, phrenology, cosmology and codology. Expect the unexpected, but always beware in case the expected comes along and catches you with your pants down while you’re not expecting it. Expect dancing girls, performing bears, seven-minute long guitar solos and dream sequences involving dwarves and whistling baboons. Expectorate.  But don’t expect the internet to ever be the same again.