Slow Dancing in a Darkened Room

'Slow dancing' may very well be may favourite term. It is almost certainly my favourite way to go about most things that I do. Even, and perhaps especially, when my mind is moving fast. It conjures up an image, a sensation, an ethos that is at once both deeply balletic and classical, and yet simultaneously lustful and anticipatory of anything going under the broad and oft-salacious heading of 'ACTION'. It implies grace and, with it, a longing to be yet more graceful still. It indicates a full and yet forever inconsecratable desire to turn to volume down on everything in life that doesn't move you, to dim the colours of the things in life that cause something deep inside of you to pulse and rage with bitter, aimless anger - to turn that volume down and dim those colours forever. It is a warmly isolated, tender state, un-intruded upon by shameful/shameless political machinations, by money-grabbing, money-hoarding, money-loving, by the (mostly metaphorical) whoring out of souls that are not yet well-rounded enough to be enjoyed by anyone, to be appreciated as having a worth that is above all that whoring, and so are instead mocked endlessly, jeered on and cheered on into their messy, celebrated end - hounded into that hallowed place that is the Z-list. It elicits in participants a utopian glee, seducing them with the notion that there is a calm situation, a completely chilled-out space, in which they may exist (alongside company of their own inscrutable choosing). That human nature has a zenith, a peak, and that 'slow dancing', in whatever form, may very well be it. The nadirs of that same nature just peel away like last-year's snakeskin, to crinkle in the dust.

But those nadirs do remain. They have to. There has to be a bleakness out there for the art of 'slow dancing' to become and remain what it is. It is only, some may very convincingly argue, possible to truly enjoy a moment of pure peace if you accept that peace with the knowledge that, at some point or another, it is going to slide down again into some kind of pit. You have to take the rough with the smooth, as they say, in order for either notion to have meaning.

And so I find myself thinking of slow motion tonight, late as it is and sober as I am, and, in particular, of the way that some directors use it as a means of coming to terms with that duality, with that price that must be paid for beauty. And by 'in particular' I mostly mean Sam Peckinpah.

Now, it cinematic terms, I mostly grew up avoiding anything that looked old - either in a black and white sense, or a 60's/70's faded-denim-type film colouring sense (bizarre to those who know, as those are the very things I love most often in films now). Peckinpah was unheard of and unsought after. I wanted action (though a different kind, in many senses, to that alluded to above), and plenty of it. Of course I did. I was a boy growing up into my teenage years at the arse-end of the 90's and action films were where it was at. Well, that or watching copies of 18-rated 'gross-out comedies' that some schoolfriend or other had acquired. But that wasn't really my bag. Not enough shit getting blown up. Not enough heavily-muscled Austrians looking for invisible aliens amongst the rainforest mist (I do not mean to suggest, however, at this point that my tastes in action were always so refined as Predator. No, sir. I would watch any old shit if the TV guide listed it as an 'action thriller' or, less frequently, and 'action comedy'. Even Steven Seagal films that weren't Under Siege or the somehow terribly entertaining one with Michael Caine in it (I watched Hard to Kill once, and could not believe how little actually happened in the first 45 mins, or how deftly and impressively the director managed to keep me watching the remainder of that steaming heap unfold (Still, that itself was a more impressive effort than the two Dolph Lundgren efforts I actually properly had a go at watching (Masters of the Universe doesn't count, because that was a He-Man film, and therefore not an original Lundgren property.) Silent Trigger, which, aside from including Gina Bellman who would later go out to be both hot and hilarious in Coupling, had little to recommend it; and Red Scorpion, which, to the best of my recollection, included a couple of gun battles lasting a sum total of 5 mins (in a film of about 2 hours), and lots of shots of Dolph running around in the desert pretending to be a Russian commando gone AWOL (or some such shit).). As well as many a film containing the vast repository of charisma that is Marc Dacascos (in fairness, Sanctuary was not half bad). So, please, feel free to assume the worst about my tastes at that time. Or now, for that matter, if you count Dolph and Seagal amongst your action-movie idols.). (I honestly have no idea if I have the correct number of brackets or full-stops in there, but I'm tired, so I'll skip the edit.)

I wanted action, and so the discovery of John Woo was a revelation. I distinctly recall that Hard Target, with none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme, was the first of his films that I saw, and I recall equally well being blown away by it. Sure, I know now that it's not as original as it seems, but that's one of the joys/drawbacks of growing up - the constant evolution of your knowledge as regards the limits of the known universe. When I was 14 (or so), Hard Target was the dog's bollocks (as they say, and I haven't said myself for years). Partly because I was still riding high on the buzz of seeing JCVD kick down a tree in Kickboxer, and I was willing to watch him in anything at the time, but also because John Woo just made everything look so cool! Everything that wasn't nailed down had a chance of being blown the fuck up, or crashed through by a speeding car or motorbike or motorboat or Belgian. And if something extra cool happened, you could be sure that some part of it was going to happen in slow-motion. Including, and particularly, a bad guy getting roundhouse-kicked in the face by the 'Muscles from Brussels'.

Action. Movie. Gold.

But both Kickboxer and Hard Target were showing on TV tonight, and I watched neither. I made no effort to watch either.

Perhaps that has to do with Face/Off. Probably the second John Woo film I watched. Oh, I loved it at the time, impractical science and glorious scenery-chewing and all. But the last time I watched it, I dunno... the bottom had kind of fallen out, and I couldn't quite say why. Maybe I was just too grown-up and cultured for that kind of thing (stop sniggering at the back!). Perhaps I'd simply seen it too many times to be surprised by it any more. Don't get me wrong, it still did what it was supposed to do, more or less, but that was no longer enough. Not even the slow-motion shoot-outs could save it.

Because I was starting to suspect that sometimes Woo was throwing them in just because he felt he had to. To appease the people in his audience like the teenaged me who'd demanded and expected that sort of thing from him. I can't say for sure this is how he felt, but that's not important. It's how I felt on recent reflection. I'd seen, a few years prior, The Killer, one of his early masterpieces, with Chow-Yun Fat, and the slow-motion seemed honest in that, and there was a sense that he was using it for a reason. The gulf between sensations emitted by the post-midnight watching of that film, and the whatever-time re-watching of Face-Off was nearly immeasurable. And it wasn't until I became more acquainted with Peckinpah, and with what slow-motion meant to him, that I was able to put my finger on what exactly was at the root of that gulf, was at the base of that chasm, chiselling it further apart.

The problem is, to me, that, whilst misery is the starting point for the action, it gets lost too often beneath an enjoyment of that action for action's sake. As a viewer, you are drawn to the madness of Travolta's performance in particular, and to the batshit sight of Cage trying to play straight opposite him but all the time waiting for his opportunity to get in on the fun. Slow-motion is there just because it can be. It looks cool, so it might as well be.

There just isn't a real reason for it, is all.

It was Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia that what made me understand just what was missing. What lesser directors than both Peckinpah and Woo cannibalised from both of their works and whirled through the machine until even Woo couldn't give it much meaning any more. In that film, Peckinpah winds everything up brilliantly for the first half. Real alarm clock tension stuff. And then in the second half, after a rather pivotal event which I will not divulge here, he lets that tension slide. And the slow-motion comes out, and he makes sure it captures not the zenith of human nature, but the nadir. He uses slow motion to invert the timeless idyll, and to show the horror of what happens when the seclusion of that slowed-down peace is invaded. To suggest a world that is so envious of such peace that it seeks to crush it out before it can be fully enjoyed for any proper length of time at all.

One scene in particular, which has been copied, consciously or not, in a great many films since (and is, to some degree a copy of a shot from an earlier Peckinpah film, The Wild Bunch), conveys this inversion, and indeed perversion, of an ideal better than most others in the film. It involves a shoot-out between two parties, one on either side of a dusty Mexican road, and the kernel of that sequence is simply a long-held slow-motion shot (interrupted a couple of times by cuts to what's happening across that road) of a man firing a sub-machine gun. In now-clichéd fashion, cartridge cases tumble down into the dirt, clinking, bouncing, scattering asunder; muzzle flare sits at the end of the gun like a kind of tropical flower, twirling, blowing in the wind. And then that man is killed, his trigger-finger remaining squeezed upon the trigger and he keeps firing. All in slow-motion, as hideous as it is mesmeric. The peaceful moment ruined and pockmarked with holes. (It would also be useful to make reference at this point to the late Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde here as well, which uses slow-motion for a similar effect.)

In what I was going to try and make my first book (but am saving for a later date, when I can make it slightly more better and whatnot), I have the main character making this observation:

Slow things are what people secretly want to be. What I want to be. When they found slow motion and put it in films it was like watching a second stretched out to a minute’s length. Some people say that movie stars will live forever once they’ve been up on the screen, that once their name has been in lights then they’ll be in lights forever, but if someone is on the big screen in slow motion then surely they’ll live even longer. Death scenes happen in slow motion because it is postponement, and if the rest of the time were like that, death would just be pushed further away. Love scenes happen in slow motion because love should be outside of time, because love should be made a new eternity with each breath, because sometimes slow motion makes the people look good.

And I thought that was appropriate to this discussion/ramble, and so went right ahead and jammed it in. Whilst the part about 'death scenes' in this passage seems to be making a slightly different point about their usage, it isn't really. It isn't as full of a consideration of all facets of the deployment of slow-motion in such cases, of course, but it does touch on the fact that directors such as Peckinpah used the form to suggest the trauma of violence and its ruinous effects on mankind, as well as reflecting on the strange and worrying (though perhaps not always unexpected) similarities between the experience of joy (in the above passage given as 'love') and pain, and the way that such similarity allows for the potential of one to corrupt the other.

As with all these things, however, the original intention becomes mislaid and diluted through overuse, to the point where it is perfectly acceptable for one of the most haunting and effective uses of slow-motion (in Oliver Stone's Platoon) to be parodied quite mercilessly in Tropic Thunder. Now, whilst I am far from against the spoofing of such things (as long as it is done, as it largely is in Tropic Thunder, with some measure of intelligence and wit), it can easily be seen that such parodies can, retroactively, render the initial scenes devoid of their original intention, so as modern viewers can watch older films and assume, quite reasonably, that slow-motion is being used simply because it's cool, and for no other reason. It renders whatever serious comment the directors may have been aiming to make largely ineffective, turning the volume down on the wrong things. Draining away the colours with which they were trying to communicate. Leaving only the snakeskin up on the screen.

Yet, a lot of people keep watching, and they don't seem to mind. They'll happily shell out the money to see things explode in slow-motion and high-definition and 3(unsatisfactory)Dimensions. And so I sometimes feel, when it comes to cinema at least, that I am not so much 'slow dancing' with those always of my choosing, but simply with those who are left behind when the rush to see 'new' things has started, still searching for a beating heart and a working mind, and finely-honed technique being used for a definite reason. For works of art that aren't just made to make money, but to make a point too.

Bodywork

I recently watched My Left Foot for the first time. And it has caused me to start seriously thinking, in odd ways, about the titular appendage on my own body. About the things I do with it, day in and day out.

After much contemplation, I have concluded that the activities it carries out can be broken down into three main groupings (including estimates of the time dedicated to each activity, which, my maths being awfully shaky, have mostly just been plucked out of the ether):

1) Tapping idly on the ground whilst I sit behind a desk (roughly 60% of the time I'm awake).

2) Walking from room to room, including up stairs (roughly 5% of the time).

3) Tapping idly on the ground whilst I sit on the sofa (roughly 35% of the time).

I don’t, however, use it to take vinyl records from their sleeves and drop them into place on the player, as Daniel Day-Lewis (as Christy Brown) does in the film. Neither do I use it to write, either simple messages or poetry. Or to paint. Or to turn the pages of a book whilst I am reading. Or even really to play football, these days – I am indeed struggling to recall the last time I kicked a ball in anger, or in wonder, or simply out of a passionate need to be part of that game, that sport.

Of course, they do say that necessity is the mother of invention, and perhaps the chief reason I don’t do any of those things with my own left foot is because I don’t have to. Unlike the late Christy Brown, I do not have a condition which renders it most practical to employ my left foot as the chief instrument of my physical work.

And, yet, I haven’t really been doing any of those things with other parts of my body either of late. The record player in my house does not currently work – a fact I could use as a handy excuse to get around this act of laziness – although I doubt I would have used it recently even if it did. Maybe this is down to the fact that the vast majority of my music collection is now located on my computer, available to me at a few clicks of a mouse button. But I don’t think that excuses me either. In fact, I think it makes the situation worse, because I find myself these days constantly choosing the options in life which involve the least movement (well, in most cases…). I find it easier to e-mail a message than to write out a letter and walk to the nearest mailbox with it swinging in my hand. I find it easier to move a couple of analogue joysticks and push a few buttons to shift players around a not-really-there field than to go outside and have a kickabout with an actual football. Granted, again there are probably other reasons I could give for that, such as the fact that it seems unimportant to do so now because a fair percentage of people playing actual football at my age are getting paid metric shitloads of money to do so.

But that isn’t a good enough reason. That is, in fact, the problem.

It just doesn’t seem enough to want to do things, even little things, purely because of the enjoyment you get out of it anymore. It’s not enough to want to use a record player because your dad has an awesome selection of vinyls and because lifting then dropping the needle feels kinda like opening a door at a concert hall, making the music-listening experience feel just that little bit more immediate and visceral and real. Or because you love those first few scratchy sounds before The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night album starts playing. Perhaps it’s part of being an ‘adult’, especially one so financially challenged as I, but I am beginning to find it increasingly difficult to look beyond those factors, that not-enough-anymore business, when I’m considering what I’ll actually get out of an action. Perhaps the bottom line of such thinking is: if I’m not going to get any reward for this, monetary or otherwise, then why bother?

Why not go the easy route instead?

Why not find everything I need outside of food and drink on the Internet, the great Information Superhighway?

After all – I feel like I’m always telling myself on some strange kind of tape loop – that’s what most other people out there are doing. Because it’s easy.

To be sure, the world of Christy Brown was a very different one in a lot of ways, his life starting in the 30’s in and amongst the backstreets of Dublin, and the reason he felt, and continued to feel, like such an outsider due to his cerebral palsy was perhaps because that world was primarily a physical one. No Internet. Not nearly as many phones. No video games. Just the walls of a house and then the cumulated housewalls of a street. Real fresh air and real raining sky looking down. Real mud. Real bruises from a punch or a bad tackle. Real kisses and real hugs whenever there were kisses and hugs to be had. None of this xoxoxo bullshit. No instant messaging being pulled off the bench as a substitute for proper conversation, that with face to face and eye to eye. Mouth to mouth.

Maybe that’s why Christy Brown felt so compelled to try as hard as he did to find his voice, to undergo seemingly endless hours of speech therapy; to agree to go in goal when his brothers were playing football and use his head to stop any shots that came his way. It could well be that, born today, he would simply have resorted to using computers and the Internet as a means of communication, might never have painted out of frustration or of anger or of love. Might never have written all those poems.

The way that Day-Lewis plays him, though, and the way that he himself comes across from the things that I’ve read, I don’t think that would have been the case. I’d very much like to think it wouldn’t have. Because My Left Foot is one of those rare films that, for me, achieved the glorious feat or being properly inspirational, just through the unvarnished way in which it seeks to tell of one man’s life, in which it educates the viewer as to the complexities of Brown’s existence. It is not simply a standard triumph-over-adversity tale. It is a case of a triumph over normality, of a man wanting at first to be accepted and to fit in, despite his condition, but then finding that his talent allowed him to transcend the norm, allowed him to communicate in more powerful ways ( I haven’t yet checked out too many of his paintings, but his poetry is extraordinary). And, most importantly, despite dark periods, he didn’t let those talents go to waste.

Now, as I’ve said, it’s possible that his physical drive and ambition to communicate more fully with the world was, in some ways, down to the conditions of the society in which he lived. Was because outside is where most of the action was. After all, we humans are, to admittedly varying degrees, products of our environments. That being said, it seems that, these days (a term I am perhaps overusing in this piece, possibly suggesting an oldness, and a grumpiness, that is not entirely mine), too many things take place online, that too much of ‘socialising’ is conducted through social networks, that sites like Facebook, for example, are becoming the hang-out point of choice for a great many people of an evening. Don’t get me wrong, there are advantages to such social networking – the ability to ‘poke’ your friends whilst you chat to them is certainly one. As is the ability to click endlessly through pictures of old nights out with good friends, instead of doing your damnedest to arrange another one. Of course, it is far cheaper than actually doing anything for real, and, if you accidentally say the wrong thing during a ‘conversation’, you can always blame it on your little brother getting on your computer whilst you were elsewhere, using your left foot (and your right one) to walk to another room and fix up a drink. And did I mention ‘poking’?

I’m a hypocrite, though, and I’m sadly, painfully aware of it. I’ve spent a lot of time lately bitching (to myself, mostly) about the Internet, and Facebook in particular, and yet here I am, posting on my blog and no-doubt soon linking to this page on FB. Because the Internet is what is was established to be, more or less. An easy, convenient means of communication. And FB is the main way in which I can (hopefully) keep in touch with a lot of people I might otherwise lose contact with. So, in spite of my ranting and frustration at the system, I will most likely persist with my current level of usage. I will most likely continue to send e-mails, rather than writing out letters, because it is more simple, and allows for messages to reach the intended recipient almost instantly, as opposed to a time-delay dictated by the actions of the postal service, exactly as it was designed to do.

I do want to strive, however, to do more things out in the world, to actually achieve some things physically for a change. Even if, at first, it’s only handwriting more articles before typing them up. Handwriting more of my own poems, so I can get to work compiling another collection following the planned release of my first at the end of this month. Even if it’s just walking outside in the autumn rain more often, coming back cold, wet, miserable and happy that I’ve still got a body to get soaked to the bone.

Because that’s what this is all about, really. I need the actual flesh of my body to feel necessary again. I need to make it work, and then work harder. I need to know and remember my left foot and my right foot and my right shin and my left shin and my knees and thighs and dick and hips and my stomach and chest and left shoulder and right shoulder and my arms and hands and fingers and mouth and tongue and eyes. And I need to make them work.

Is it long enough?

That is the question that has been hounding me of late.

Is there enough substance there?

You see, I have recently been readying myself for something, to send my first novella off to a literary agent with the aim of getting one such person suitably invested in hawking my wares to a publisher, and thenceforth onwards to the great wide world.

But there are a few problems that have lingered within the manuscript since the first draft was completed, nearly two years ago, which have thus far led to me delaying this grand send-off, postponing the day when I will stand at the dock's edge and smash an overpriced champagne bottle upon my story's hull, standing there until it has long fled my view and tripped across the blue arc of the horizon. Not least of which problems is that I'm now hideously worried that such an unwieldy metaphor as that may have somehow escaped my roving, pernickety, editorial eye.

More pressing, however, is the worry that it simply does not contain enough. Enough joy. Enough fear. Enough questioning. Enough answers. Enough characters. Enough passion. Enough prudish control. Enough reason. Enough sensations.

Fair enough, it is, and has been from the start, only a relatively short story (I am attempting, failingly at times, to resist the urge to refer to it as a book until it actually has been granted a wraparound cover and a spine), only about 34, 000 words as of the last draft. And, whilst it is perhaps not as common as it might be, there are numerous works of fiction I have read that have been about that length and thrilled me, connected with me, and challenged me immensely. Perhaps not much happens in some of them either. Like Of Mice and Men, for example. And yet, in some way, it seems to happen more deeply, more fully. Maybe that I do not see this entirely in my own works, whether I sought to weave it in completely or whether I was simply aiming for something lighter, is down to both an over-familiarity with the text and also to a lack of confidence or, rather, of having too much when I'm criticising and not enough when I'm creating.

Whatever it is, I cannot shake it.

It has recently been suggested, however, by one test-reader, that it would work better as a play, or, more properly, as a film. That the problems I am having with it are problems brought about by the fact that I have written it as a very visual, sensual experience (or have, at least, attempted to), and that, these days, people may be more willing to engage with it if it were to find such a form, rather than becoming a short, and possibly overpriced, book.

I have been thinking on this possibility for the best part of a week now, and, whilst it had crossed my mind how I might like to see it directed and framed and structured on a cinema screen in the past, I had always considered it in terms of being an adaptation, never really a straight-up, first-hand film. I cannot say I am not intrigued by this new turn, to the same degree as I cannot say I am not becoming bored with constantly re-editing it as a book and trying to maintain the restrained, though intimate and full-felt, style of it. It pains me to think that two years of work on it, constantly refining and re-defining my purpose with it, to get each sentence just so, to convey the missing parts of the main character just as surely as the faulty workings that remain, will be, essentially, left behind or otherwise transmogrified in this transition. That I would have to trade in words, descriptions, for pictures, sounds.

Because, as much as I love films, I have never truly made one yet, and yet I have written stories. I can write them whenever I want. I can even try and make them great. Whether that is a goal I meet, it is a goal I am free to try for. I have control when the tips of my fingers grip a pen, or press and hammer and simply touch words out on this keyboard of mine. Words are my chief medium at present, and so I am worried, perhaps, that if I were to leave them in some way behind for this project, I would be giving something of myself up.

At the same time, however, I am more than well aware that such not-much-happening stories can be made into films without ever seeming too short or too shallow, if done right. If one abides by the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, then one can easily understand why this might be the case. After all, though it can take a writer a great many sentences to fully convey a sense of one character's emptiness, or fear, or self-doubt and self-loathing, or self-love, sometimes independently of the machinations of what people may term plot, a film-maker can do it simply with one well-framed and well-timed shot of the character's eyes, controlling the lighting, controlling the sound - without having to evoke such things in a manner that may be taken in as many different ways as there are readers, some of which may miss the point entirely, and therefore end up not connecting with the character, not appreciating or enjoying the tale that is currently in the telling.

Of the two Wong Kar-Wai films I have seen, the latest was Days of Being Wild, and it illustrates this point brilliantly. In essence, the story is thin, vague, not, in a synopsis, packed with too many major occurences. A young man makes a habit of seducing women and then leaving them, living a raw yet curiously unfulfilling life. That is the meat of the story, and yet telling you that does not really give anything away, because the films chief revelations and delights are visual ones, aural ones. It is not as fascinating, electric and sorrowful as his In the Mood for Love, but it is absorbing nonetheless, and ascribes a depth to these characters' lives in a way that does not seem underdeveloped, as it may in a short book.

It is indeed, the sort of film I may well like to make.

However, this first novella is, likewise, the sort of novella I wanted to write, I am forced to conclude, or else I wouldn't have written it. If I have given off the impression that I am not proud of it, then I did not mean to, because I am. Rather, I think the problem is that I am just not sure other people would want to be involved in the story in that way - I do not think it would sell too well, if at all, as a book. And that, unfortunately, is what it comes down to, when you are trying to get published, it seems, when you are trying to get your work out into that great wide world. It is alright producing things the way you want to produce them if you do not intend to depend on them for your livelihood at some point in the future. But, if you do, then there has to be a point at which you give the audience more for their money... doesn't there?

And, if forced to choose a means of making a living, I can think of none I would choose above this - storytelling, whether with words or pictures. So, with that in mind, I suppose I must come to a conclusion soon about exactly which fashion I want the first voyage of this first big(ger) story to take.

Whilst that decision is being made, however, I intend to send another work off, a work that really cannot be anything other than a book, not right now anyway, because I have written into it a celebration of words and of personal honesty in art, in life. Curiously, it is not only about this, but about giving up, about moving on, about learning how to do both well. I should perhaps point out that it too is technically a novella, with around the same number of words as the first, although it is a couple of thousand words longer.

And, as they say, every little helps.

A Kind of Magic

I put most of my faith, whatever there is, into film. Even though film is not real and I know it is not real, it moves me, when it is used well, and so I believe in it.

Yet, that faith is being tested.

More and more films seem, to borrow Chuck Palahniuk's potent and prescient phrase, like 'a copy of a copy of a copy'. News of them (pictures, trailers, adverts, reviews...) gives me the feeling that I am trapped inside some insomniac daze, tripping round through half-formed dreams, unable to connect with the visions that I see before me. Fills me with an inexplicable rage that some people, somewhere, are killing one of the things I love, one of the things that helps me get by, trying to take it away from me. They pile old story upon old story upon old story and they do not even try to make it fresh or vital, these nameless, faceless persecutors of my peace and quiet content.

As ridiculous as this may or may not sound, such a line of thought often sends me on small downward spirals, renders me inconsolable on odd evenings, left staring at my own work on a screen and not being sure there is a space for it in this cowardly new world, typing occasional words, untyping them straight after. Because, you see, my faith in film is tied up with my faith in fiction full stop. And, well, that faith is tied up with everything I find myself doing and thinking and dreaming about. It almost goes without saying that to lose belief in one's own dreams is a terrible thing.

And so that is why I am immensely grateful that, alongside the triumphs of Inception and Toy Story 3, I have recently seen another new film that went counter to that spiral, even as it seemed to feel the same as me. Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist is an animated film, hand-drawn, which deals, in essence, with the death and closing down of the Vaudeville era. Its hero is an old stage magician, the kind who pulls a rabbit out of a hat and whips bouquets of flowers from out of nowhere, from out of his sleeve. Watching his act in the opening scenes, one does not find it hard to explain his ever-diminishing audience. His rabbit is a mad one, near-impossible for him to control, and there seems little passion left on his old face to suggest that he cares much that he is one stage anymore. He travels to a few theatres, showing off the poster he carries round with him, so that he might get some money. That is all. He wants to entertain, of course, but only now, one gets the uneasy feeling, because he won't get paid if he does not.

So far, this itself may well sound like a copy. Maybe even a copy of a copy. It is not the most startling and fresh premise, I'll admit. But then, it is based on an old script by the late French comic Jacques Tati, and so to expect something bang up to date, on Inception’s level, for example, would be perhaps expecting too much.

Perhaps you could say that I went in, then, on the basis of these first scenes, expecting too much. And yet I was enraptured, captivated by every detail up there on the screen. Even though most of the scenes and scenarios were closed-in, small-scale affairs, there was always something kicking at the walls in them, opening the windows and reaching outside. The film was beginning to seem itself like the magician’s mad rabbit trapped inside his old hat…

Which, of course, is exactly how it is meant to feel.

Because this film seems to be not just a story but a mission statement. Where did the magic in the movies go? Chomet seems, at least in part, to be asking. And he seems also to be asking, more deeply, more furiously: Was there ever any to start with? This is the work of a director frustrated with how things are, angered that the things most filmmakers seem to have chosen to copy are not the best aspects of the truly great films that have come before, but are instead the cheapest, easiest tricks from films that have simply sold well, without challenging anyone. Films that don’t finally awe the audience with whatever they’ve been hiding up their sleeve because, quite simply, they have nothing there.

Unlike Chomet’s first film, Belleville Rendez-Vous, a wild and brilliant film about human endurance and about making the best of bad situations. Unlike this one, which pulls off the greatest trick of all, which shows it hand, and all its sorrow, and yet still somehow gives you hope, just through its very being.

There are several unshakeable images in the film, of such incredible power and suggestion that it is impossible to think that they are not copies. Or rather, that they do not feel like copies, to the point that you do not wish to question if they are. One of these in particular, involving the moving of a book's pages means so much, both within the film and outside of it, that I will not say more about it, except that it is worth watching the film for that moment alone.

Indeed, that there are other, even more enchanting moments is all that I will add. Because, well, this is a film that should be seen rather than heard about. It is, after all, bad form to talk too much about magic tricks, especially ones that have you believing them, in spite of yourself.

Beer and Flip-Flops in West Yorkshire

It starts as it ends, with The Wire…

But first, first we need to be in Leeds. In an art gallery.

Now, the ‘we’ I am using at this point is not the editorial, not some half-baked device to make you the reader, feel more involved. No, this ‘we’ simply involves myself and a fellow who will (in order to protect his identity, and to stop anyone with medical knowledge who may happen to know him from worrying constantly about his health) be referred to henceforth as the Brumlord. Or B, for short.

At this early juncture, I feel I should make a small digression from the stated path and explain more about his character. He is, as his nom de guerre, suggests, from Birmingham, and doesn’t often camouflage this fact well. Indeed, upon his arrival in my sunny county the evening prior to our being inside the aforementioned art gallery in Leeds, he had been picked out as one of those folks ‘not from around here’ when he asked for directions to one of the local supermarkets, a great wide building staring at him from just a little down the road. Because of such moments, he is also not renowned for his sharpness. However, to misjudge him on this front would be a mistake. He is a fine, cultured gentleman given to surprising insights and expressions of refined taste too seldom seen these days.

Indeed, why else would we have been in an art gallery at half past two in the afternoon with the sun coming down so brilliantly and with such uncommon warmth outside? We passed first through a few rooms holding sculptures, possibly constructed by a German, or a Dutchman, or some other such European-man of genuine talent and invention. Most of the pieces were white, and stick out in my memory as though they were hemmed in by black walls, although it is entirely possible that they weren’t. One piece, I recall, reminded me of the sort of conical shells one might find, puckered and in early decay like a week-fallen autumn leaf, strewn on a cold Welsh beach. It lacked a hollow, however, some place to which it would be possible to place one’s ear and listen entranced to the rolling out and inwards of the sea. The Brumlord seemed impressed with the display, face set in gentle wonder.

Crossing the covered bridge suspended between that section of the gallery and the main building, we noticed something to which we would return later.

We came to a large annex, a kind of centrepiece of the place, holding vast canvases as big as walls in small houses, and trundled around, occasionally taking a seat to gaze upwards into certain pieces, noting the way the lights played across the oil-paint glaze. It seemed to dance as poets write of it dancing across the giant fjord in a picture by a Norwegian who had at one time been favoured by Kaiser Wilhelm. We were impressed, and I, having seen this picture before, took great pains to point out aspects of its perspective I enjoyed.

On the floor above we took strange pleasure from disliking the absurd abstract pieces, especially the one that screamed across its enlarged canvas like a man’s testes exploding, rather unfortunately, in a sickly purple shade.

We had coffee in the largely empty café and discussed the exhibits, voices quiet and reserved. Opinions muted, un-vulgar.

Passing down onto the lowest floor, we spent a scarce few minutes in the crafts gallery, leafing through a selection of posters with increasing speed, and attempting to be unsubtle in our watching of the ladies behind the desk. When they started watching us back we came to the mutual conclusion that we should take our leave. That this jaunt was in danger of going sour.

Through the open exit door we stepped out into sunlight that seemed, at least to my eyes, to swim a little, or to stand still whilst objects swam inside it. Even to my recently more light-sensitive eyes, it seemed to border on being oppressively bright. As we turned to look at the thing we had noticed from the bridge earlier, there seemed no point in hiding it further. We were quite drunk. And soon to get drunker.

That thing was a pub.

We were already three drinks (of varying and ever-rising alcohol %) in and that number would double comfortably before we progressed from this somewhat-hidden booze-manor to some other joint. Sitting on a slanting bench in the courtyard, however, it was in our conversation that the day’s (and, indeed, the long weekend’s) intent began to see clarity.

We discussed, B and I, our usual range of topics – best film actors of their respective generations; best films including those actors; how incredibly fine Sigourney Weaver looks in Alien – but then we reached, after maybe a couple of beers, the point at which we suddenly became taken with the idea of making a film of our own. Now, this is an idea that has been floated about between us in the past, of course, sometimes even when sober, but somehow it has never felt as real and urgent as it did at that point right then. There was sincere conviction as we agreed to this intention. The sort of sincere conviction that only seems to come about these days when alcohol is involved and restrictive urges are peeled back, fear of embarrassment ditched like an old mattress at the side of an obscure country road.

However, this pact comes with one proviso: that whatever film we make must be unlike any other film ever made. That it must speak of and to something original and unique within our beings.

Unfortunately, it turns out that originality is one tricky fucking business – a conclusion we came to quickly in what followed of that strand of talk.

This was not just an observation on the state of new cinema releases (or, indeed, new fiction releases of any kind), but also an observation on the difficulty of maintaining a sense of true individuality within this society, and of leading a life that passes down paths un-trodden. And the ramifications, the negative vibes, generated by that observation, deepen, arguably unavoidably, the more one thinks about it. For instance, we were far from the only people talking and drinking in that bar, and maybe not even the only ones talking about film, name-checking titans like Scorsese and Sergio Leone. Neither were we the only ones to end up in a karaoke bar that evening and make total arses of ourselves – but more on that later.

The question arose in my mind, or, rather, has been arising there for some time, of what precisely constitutes an original? What defines a specific singular human being? Obviously, the clear scientific answer is DNA, is all the little quirks of genometry (don’t think that’s going to catch on…) that determine a person’s appearance, scent, susceptibility to various impulses and stimuli, sensitivity to various tastes. But is this enough? If it was, then surely each person would be a species unto themselves.

Perhaps, following that, the pursuit of originality beyond that is symptomatic of a wider misanthropic streak within me, a desire to distance myself from others in the herd, not just because they are a herd, but because they are a herd of the same animal. They are, as beasts, essentially alike. I know I would not be the only one to feel that way, certainly, but I don’t think that is entirely the case. Like most humans, I have periods where I crave company, where I hunger for the crush of the crowd. I am a social animal, and suffer when I am out of society for too long.

The issue is, I think, that I just don’t want to stay in the crowd so long that it defines me, that it subsumes me, and everything I could be outside of its grasp.

Perhaps the Brumlord feels this too, although I don’t ask. I suppose he does, from time to time. In fact, I guess that was why we were there, in that art gallery and that pub courtyard and then in that Italian restaurant spending far too much on two (admittedly tasty) fillet steaks. To quit that feeling, and reassert our individual selfness and togetherness. We feel original, the Brumlord and I. We move through Leeds differently to how the other people seem to move.

Perhaps the Scottish fellow noticed that about us. Detected it in our aura. Maybe that was why he came up to us and began to show us his litany of medication and describe the methods by which he fleeced various ‘stupid’ English doctors – whom he reassured us he loved – out of such pills. Maybe that was why he proceeded to inform us the reason why he had those pills was because he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Fair enough, we thought. This man is a one-of-a-kind as well. Mad as a hunter waving his honey-dipped dick at a bear, but certainly one-of-a-kind.

But then the Scostman broke a cardinal rule of this order of ours, of unspokenly-self-conscious originality – he tried to further ingratiate himself into our small group of two, by trying to offer his wine around, and then trying to follow us to dinner.

This was not on. It was our party and not to be crashed. Nothing personal, you understand, but once you let one in then you have let them all in, and our table just didn’t have room. No way was I jostling for elbow room whilst cutting my steak. No fucking way. Neither, in fairness, was I about to listen to further tales of how one of the kinds of pills he had was so strong he used to cut heroin with it in prison and deal it around, especially not whilst sipping calmly on my cool Italian beer. B, also, was unlikely to continue getting drunk in the easy manner that had thus far characterised the day with that chap sitting there and constantly referring to him as ‘Big Man’, on account of his unexpected height (he is not tall, especially, certainly no taller than I, and so I am forced towards the conclusion that the Scotsman assumed I was hanging out with someone of the vertically-challenged nature – a Brummie midget if you will. Now, whilst I have nothing against either Brummies or [insert politically correct term here], the chances of finding me with a person who combines both attributes is slim – not only because I do not currently know anyone matching that description, but also because they would doubtless throw my perception of my own individuality clean into the gutter. My ego, such as it is, is particularly fragile at the moment, and could not take such a beating.)

Anyway, to return to whatever point I was making, B and I were getting utterly whammed. To (re)assert our separate and combined personas, or somesuch. The bar we hit up after the Italian place (from which we considered walking off without paying, although somehow couldn’t get off our posteriors quickly enough) was good, served relatively cheap drinks and had a fairly comely wench (do people still use that term? Fuck it…) for a barmaid, but it was the guest appearance by three people hawking a new vanilla liquor that made the place for us. Firstly, this was because the two lasses in the group were the kind of girls usually chosen to hawk new products to drunk, horny men, and, secondly, it was because they were giving out free flip-flops as well as free shots of the stuff. Now, these flip-flops were, unfortunately, bright orange, which is why I left my pair on the table when we abandoned that place for pastures new, but the Brumlord was not so picky. As far as he was concerned, these were free, fair-quality footwear, and be-damned if he was missing out on such a bargain.

So we set off for our next destination, B with the flip-flops, in their plastic sheeting, stuffed inside his back pocket. We had three cigars left between us and smoked two as we walked. To a cash point. Natch. It was there, however, as we debated the options for our next port of call, that the Brumlord had to part with his beloved new footwear. There was nowhere decent, I reasoned, that was going to allow him to enter their premises looking either as though he’d curb-stomped Mr Tickle, or sat on him, depending on where he was storing the offending toe-garb at the time. Reluctantly, he laid them, with a solemnity usually reserved for long-treasured family pets, upon the half-wet ground and we reached another bar, our fractured conversation there to continue.

Before entering, we stood across the street, sharing the last cigar, breath travelling out like mystic whispers of the revelation we, unknowingly, found ourselves caught within.

For a moment, allow me to suggest that you picture that scene as it might happen on a movie screen. How the smoke might cloud out across and through the celluloid grain. Given only that fragment of film, we could come across to different viewers as criminals, detectives, lovers, or just great mates out on the town. But, with just that fragment to work with, there are other options too. For instance, it is possible that, for the two minutes, perhaps, that the shot is held, we are just two beings in existence, and that is our story. Before and after and context and surrounding earth and civilisation are currently unavailable contraptions, unnecessary tools of understanding. In that fragment, we are beyond understanding, and we belong and speak only to ourselves. We are a daydream, and it is not for anyone else to know our minds, just as it is not for me to know his, nor he to know mine, not fully. Picture that, and conclude only that it constitutes something you haven’t seen before, if only because it is something you still cannot see. The suggestion of the vision’s presence is often more important than the vision itself – the essential truth of the quest narrative. The realisation of the vision is the end point, but that end point does not exist without the germination, the slow and tantalising expansion, of the notion that the vision is out there somewhere to be seen.

The problems begin, however, when you stop merely picturing this scene and start seeing it. That is when the rot of unoriginality sets in.

In all the cities in all the worlds, at the same moment at which B and I were standing there, trying to gauge whether our show of old-school manliness and camaraderie was going to be enough to convince the burly bald bouncer at the next destination to admit us (an issue that needed to be resolved hastily, both of us having ‘broken the seal’ some time previously…), many others would be doing the same thing…or at least looking like they were doing the same thing, visual perceptions of actions being pretty much as important as actions themselves…

The questioning comes again, a scabrous and unnerving presence in some sector of the think-war zone behind my eyes. Out in the ‘real world’, just how exactly does one maintain one’s self? How does one maintain the hope of not only boldly going where no man has gone before, but boldly going there how no man has gone before? How does one remain individual without becoming too self-obsessed to interact with others and lead a ‘normal’ human life?

Perhaps one can’t.

Perhaps I can’t.

Perhaps B can’t.

Or, perhaps, the trick lies in just freewheeling, and facing up to the world as it comes. In letting your circumstances help define you. After all, the story of a life is inseparable from the story of all the roads that life has travelled. Just cling on to the fact that, whether you look the same and end up doing the same things as countless others, there are quirks in your actions that separate you, and there are vast gulfs of difference between some of your thoughts and many of theirs.

For instance, for all the doubtless many people undergoing similar mental crises (an overstatement of the case, perhaps) at this moment in time, and all of those writing blogs about the experience, I can guarantee that I am thinking and writing about two things in two completely induplicatable ways to everyone else. I am thinking and writing about myself and about the Brumlord and the spaces we occupied at times that nobody else could possibly have occupied them.

Suddenly, I know that I don’t have to try so hard to constantly assert this fact, when it is just that, a fact.

However, I also know that this knowledge, this confidence will somehow become eroded, and that I will feel pressed, more and more, to issue forth proofs of this life being mine. I will growingly feel compelled to leave my mark. That is at the base of why I write, isn’t it? Because I not only feel I have something to say, but because I hope it is something nobody else would say, not quite. I have taken cues from many (occasionally obvious) sources, even in the writing of this piece, and yet I hope it will end up being mine when I roll the final full-stop out. Furthermore, I have recently completed the first draft of a novella that deals with this very same problem, the struggle to so strongly become oneself that oneself becomes little more than that struggle, and often the weaker for it.

But I was onstage then, in a karaoke bar, and belting out ‘Smooth’ by Santana Ft. Rob Thomas, and I was utterly wankered. B, well, he was out in front of the stage, dancing as though rhythm and style were foreign concepts, even more wankered than I. And this was the zenith of our day/night. This was us being us, and, in recollection, I can see the point at which we hit this final stretch – it was in the discarding of those hideous orange flip-flops. That was the snakeskin-shedding moment, the acknowledgement that things must sometimes be abandoned in order for the great wheel of living to keep on turning, joyous and clean. Carrying them around any further would have been weighing us down, and when we were constantly redefining our own potential during our racing about the city and the city’s bars, that was simply no good.

And it is that notion of the wheel that is crucial here, that is key, that brings us back full-circle to The Wire.

We spent the Saturday recovering (with another few boxes of beer and a few cocktails) and embarking upon the completion of our 3-year quest through the entirety of the aforementioned TV show. We sat there hungover, drunk, entranced. It felt quietly monumental, as though we were at last catching up with the avant garde of our generation, skipping the queue at last after lingering, hellishly bored, in the line for too long. And then the series-closing montage happened, and a curious awareness began to wash over me. We saw characters and ideals depart, just as we witnessed others step up to take their respective places. And so, without wishing to go all Lion King–soundtrack, I think it became clear then that, even if there truly are no new stories to tell, there are renewed and renewable ones. There are stories that can be revisited and made fresh just through their coming from a fresh time – it all comes down to a multitude of factors coming together in some semblance of harmony, to the stars all being aligned.

And yet, as the screen fades to the credits, then to black, and then crackles back around to that glorious, glorious song, I have a conflicted sensation. I am satisfied, deeply content, and yet concurrently aware that something is missing. That something, some small mystery, has vanished. It is how I always feel at the close of something I have completely enjoyed. It is how I feel the morning after, watching the train depart back to Birmingham, standing halfway up the steps that lead from the platform and back to the street. In my head as well, however, is some new knowing that three years can indeed be fitted, at a push, into four long days.

So, there really is no need to sit around and mourn for too long the ending of something truly original, because the originality of that piece does not disappear as soon as it has been encountered. Classics remain classics because they were good enough, and different enough, in the first place to have staying power. That is why B and I have sat around many a time discussing our cinematic heroes, our treasured films. That is why we keep sitting around together. We help define each other, just as our other friends help define us and we them. It’s a needlessly complicated business, thinking all this through, the mathematics of self and identity, but what it comes down to, I suppose, is being sure of all the things that make you feel good, or affect you unavoidably in some other way, and clinging on to them as the wheel turns, just trying not to fall off as you wait for the opportunity to give those things a fresh spin.

Indeed, as the ever-sage Brumlord remarked in summation upon reaching the aforementioned final credits: ‘Shit. We’ll just have to start it again now...’

This Is A Happy Ending

(Caution: contains spoilers for Toy Story 3, and The Shawshank Redemption.)

What can you say?

You know, right at this moment, that if you open your mouth it’ll break out into a sob. You can feel your lip going, trembling. You reach up to each eye, maybe a minute apart, to discreetly wipe ‘something’ from the corner.

You’d heard that there was a sad ending to this film, a very sad ending, from other people, from the Internet, but you didn’t think it would be quite like this. Not in a kids’ film. Not even in this kids’ film. And yet, you find yourself strangely-accepting, understanding that all things come to an end, even things as good as this. It is easier to accept this because the characters accept this. Still, if you weren’t in a packed cinema, you know you wouldn’t have held your mouth closed for so long, wouldn’t have wiped at your eyes. You have every reason to cry.

Because this film has been about a prison break, has been about that thing that most people dream about at some point or another – escape. A getaway from one bad situation back into a good one, or even just into one they hope will be better than the hole they’re in. About making it to some place that those in control assure them it is impossible to reach.

Furthermore, this film has been an escape in itself, from the very start and up to this current point right here – it is not set in reality as we inhabit it, and, so we think, its main protagonists are not human but toys, moulded plastic and machine-shaped wood, these materials themselves rendered in CGI. This has been the most fun you’ve had at the cinema in ages – in fact, you can barely remember when you laughed so hard in front of a big screen. Sure, there’ve been bits of danger, threats to that fun, but nothing quite like this.

Reality is intruding now and, just because you’re accepting it, understanding it, doesn’t quite mean you’re liking it. At all.

And so you think of another prison film, The Shawshank Redemption, more recognisably set in reality than that, even if that reality begins about 70 years in the past, and you think of a scene in that film, a scene holding an old man in a dim-lit room, about to step up onto a chair. That man is called Brooks, and he has, after around 50 years in jail, finally been released on parole. He has, however, been released into a world in which he no longer fits, in which he no longer seems to have a purpose or a place. Motor cars that were, before he went inside, rarities on the roads, are now everywhere, and the only job he can get is in a small supermarket, packing bags, something he finds increasingly difficult with his arthritic hands. In prison, he was in charge of the library, he was respected, had friends, and he also had a bird that he took care of, which he released shortly before he was let out. Not so out here. Back in the room, he steps up onto the chair, scratches his name into the wooden beam running across the centre of the ceiling. Watching, you know what is coming, and, as hard to accept as it may be, you nevertheless find yourself accepting, knowing that this is not how things should be, but seeing, like Brooks himself, no other way out.

Likewise, in Toy Story 3, what has led the toys to such a point is the feeling that they were no longer needed by their owner, Andy – that, even if he did still care, with his leaving for college, they will be obsolete regardless, at least in terms of what they hoped to remain and hoped to be beyond that in the future. And yet, in Toy Story 3, something else is at play too. Brooks’ tragic end almost feels inevitable because he seems to have lost all hope, whereas the toys’ inevitable end feels tragic because they still had hope, they still have, even at that point, each other.

Indeed, it is, outside of the prison connection, the struggle to maintain hope, that eternal intangible, which most directly links these two films, and, moreover, the way in which both films take the notion of hope seriously, without ironically undercutting it, without belittling or downplaying its importance to the way a great many people try to live. For most of its first half, Toy Story 3 plays the conflict between those who keep and those who lose hope for gentle comedy, making references to mistakes made in the past by certain characters. Shawshank, in expected contrast, deals with this in a far more visceral fashion, through the steady disintegration of the prisoners at the titular jailhouse as they pass their years there – in particular, the disintegration of Andy Dufresne. Ostensibly the film’s main character, we see him most through the eyes of Red, largely from a distance, physical and emotional, at first, and then as a close friend by the time Andy is planning his own escape. Through Red’s eyes we see remarkable changes within Andy, in the way he acts, the way he talks, the way the lines look on his face.

But there is a strange and unexpected mischief in that face too, at times, and you get the feeling that those times are what makes Red accept this ‘new fish’, what makes him become his friend. After all, most of these moments come when Andy reaches out to Red and asks for something (Red being the prison’s fixer, and all). And it is those things that hold the key to understanding the way that hope works, and how it can motivate people to extraordinary things, at least in these two films.

Particularly, it is the pin-up posters he wants for his wall that are of primary importance. Indeed, one of the film’s most playful scenes comes when Andy walks into a screening of Gilda, notes all the prisoners enjoying the film even though they’ve seen it several times this month, and then taps Red on the shoulder and asks if he can get him the film’s star, Rita Hayworth. He is smiling as he asks this, and Red knows what he means, even as he feigns incredulity at being expected to bring this real-life movie star to Shawshank prison. Shortly afterwards, a large poster arrives, and Andy places it on his cell wall, across from his bed. He sits and stares at Gilda, Rita Hayworth in her prime, and, we get the feeling, he has already begun to dream.

This is not necessarily a salacious dream, however, more just another form of escape. You see, Rita represents not just the prime of A-list womanhood at the time, but also the good life in general. And, in more ways than one, she comes to represent his aspirations to travel once again beyond these prison walls. Of course, the dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is a key factor of many prison narratives, but it's rare to find it explored with such nuance and tenderness as it is at times within both of these films, particularly Shawshank.

In Toy Story 3, in a neatly quirky spot of invention, Mrs Potato Head discovers that she can still see Andy’s room from within the confines the daycare centre where they find themselves trapped, because her lost eye is still there – through that, they can monitor the progression of his packing as he gets closer and closer to leaving to college, and they can also discover that their ending up in this daycare centre was a mistake. On a more usual level, the toys can see the streets, or at least the roofs of other houses, from within the walls of the centre, and that view gives them further hope and incentive to escape. Likewise, in Shawshank, some of the prisoners, Andy and Red included, are allowed out to do (supervised) work on community projects, allowing them to (re-)experience important glimmers of life beyond bars, and, in one of the film’s most indelible moments, to sit on a rooftop which they have been tarring and drink beer as the sun is on its way to setting, each and every one of them feeling like free men.

However, there is one piece of information from the outside that reaches Red and Andy Dufresne that changes both men’s views and hopes for life when they leave Shawshank penitentiary, and that is the last letter from Brooks, his suicide note. From that point onwards, Red notices Andy growing both more reckless in his sly disregard for prison authority, and more distant again, more withdrawn, and, upon hearing from a competitor that Andy asked for a length of rope, he fears the worst. When Andy doesn’t step outside his cell the following morning, those fears seem to have been confirmed. Because, you recall, just about the last time they spoke properly, Andy told Red that what it seemed to come down to on the ‘inside’ was that one either had to ‘get busy living, or get busy dying’, and Red, given Andy’s recent behaviour, has assumed that he has opted for the latter option. As the guards move in to check Andy’s cell, he thinks, much as you were thinking at that moment in Toy Story 3, that his good friend’s fate is sealed.

But, once inside the cell, the guards find it empty. Andy has, despite the odds, escaped. In doing so he becomes the ultimate pin-up for the inmates, the perfect image to keep them hoping through all their long days and longer nights. Indeed, when Red is finally released on parole, and ends up working at the same store as Brooks did before ending his life, and living in the same apartment, it is only the thought of Andy that keeps him going, that keeps him from stepping up onto the same old chair. And it is only the thought of Andy that makes him remember something else his friend once said to him, which leads to him breaking parole and setting out for a town in Mexico, where Andy should be waiting to take him on as a partner in his charter fishing business. That makes him take a chance on his finding happiness again, and believe in his personal right to do so. All in all, it is entirely wonderful, and fitting, that the last two words of Red's voiceover should be ‘I’ and ‘hope’.

The only way, then, that it would seem a more definite sense of escape than Andy’s and, perhaps more crucially, Red’s can be achieved is with characters who don’t seem to inhabit or be subject to the harsh laws that sometimes intrude unbidden upon human life, with characters like toys. Because toys, well, they’re what you put all your hopes in when you’re younger, achieving anything you make believe they possibly can, always helping good win through, giving you comfort and maybe letting you dream, even for the slightest of moments, that real life will one day be this exciting, this important, this fantastic and this fun. Of course, within the grand scheme of things, that is why they have to reach that terrifying point, why those harsh laws have to intrude in here as well.

It could be suggested that this peril they come to face resembles a final loss of innocence in the life of the owner, Andy, before he steps up into the ‘adult’ world, but, more than that, it seems to signal an impending loss of imagination as well, of fealty to one’s dreams. An abandonment of one’s hitherto deepest convictions and desires for self-improvement, in the face of external pressures, such as the encroaching ‘prison’ of social expectation and forced responsibility.

Watching that scene, it becomes clear that you are crying, or almost crying, because you once reached a similar point in life, whether you took the time to notice then or not, and you, quite possibly, ceded something to those pressures. You’re on the verge of weeping because you didn’t see any way around that loss at the time and you felt forced into accepting it, whether you wanted to or not. Perhaps you couldn’t sleep some nights in the past because you couldn’t find the escape you wanted, so desperately, to find, even given all your hope. Perhaps you still can’t sleep some nights now for that same reason, whether you’d ever admit that to anyone or not. And you want to cry now because that same thing is happening to someone else – real or fictional, it doesn’t matter here, because the travesty being represented is the same.

And that’s why, when it comes down it, these toys were here in the first place, the reason Pixar brought them to life. To act, firstly, as avatars for our best-planned adventures, and then to remind us that we really do care about our deepest hopes and aspirations, however childlike the society around us may conspire to tell us that they are. That we have to do so, in order to fully care about and do right by ourselves.

When their inevitable doom is, brilliantly, avoided, therefore, it doesn’t feel like a cop-out, like Pixar have pulled their punches right at the moment they most needed to hold their nerve. It feels good. It feels bloody amazing. You can feel your lips stop trembling and break out into a grin. You still don’t know what to say, but it doesn’t matter, because, somehow, a kids’ film about toys being trapped in a daycare centre has restored a little bit of your hope, has let you know that maybe it’s alright for you to just go right ahead and restore more on your own.

But what really makes this experience exceptional is that is doesn’t stop there, that it can't, because there is the acceptance that, now ‘reality’ has intruded once, it can’t magically go away, not fully. Something is still coming to an end. Andy is still going to college, and he still can’t take his toys with him. So, following a slyly beautiful communication from Woody to his precious owner, the toys end up being taken over to the house of a family friend, and given over to her young daughter, Bonnie. And, thusly, does the film, and the series, achieve its peak, emotionally and ideologically. We see, as we watch that closing scene of Andy introducing all his toys to Bonnie, those toys (especially Woody) having their Pinocchio-moment, finally becoming a real boy. We see, as Andy plays with them one last time, that it has always been about him and his dreams, really. In the way that maybe your own toys were always more about your dreams than they ever were about whatever TV series they came from, whatever factory they were made in, whatever they looked like to anybody else when you were playing with them. And, whilst he does give the toys away in order to help someone else dream a little more truly, the finest moment comes as he waves goodbye before driving off towards college, and he lets out a short breath, one of those that might just make it out when you’re trying not to cry. He realises, as do we, that, just because the physical embodiments of those dreams are moving on, it doesn’t mean that the things he’s learnt from them have to go away, doesn’t mean that he has to give up on the way he really wants to be within himself. And, if he gets stuck, he’s always got the photograph of his younger self with them all, just as a sign of something well-worth hoping for.

If, then, there’s one thing that all characters learn by the end of Toy Story 3, it’s that (slightly contrary to conventional wisdom) most of the time you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s nearly gone - at which point, of course, you can still try and do something about it. Correspondingly, there is the suggestion that if you still don’t know by that time then you probably didn’t deserve whatever it was to start with. The beauty of Toy Story 3, just as with The Shawshank Redemption, is that the heroes know. They know the value of their friends, they know the value of themselves, and of their dreams and of the things that move them; and they also know that, even if you have to let go of something, you should always try and let go well. Indeed, that’s precisely why they’re heroes.

Betting On Wild Horses

I am wearing my alone beard. By which I mean that, to crueller, less wine-tired eyes than mine, it may well look as though a dried-out husk of roadkill has been pasted to my chin. As though my face has been the subject of some cosmic practical joke to which I have not yet wised-up.

I have, however, wised-up. It’s just that this morning I didn’t care enough to shave.

Hence, perhaps, my aloneness.

But Henry Chinaski! I mean, that Henry Chinaski…geez, what a guy! He has a likeshaped beard – at times scruffier, at times neater than mine – and yet he winds up with Laura! And Laura, well, let me tell you about Laura…

No, perhaps I should come back to her later – if I start off on that topic now, I’m liable to get distracted and not make the point I’m trying to make. Best to stick with Henry for the time being. He’s sometimes called Hank – one of those not-certain-how-it-came-about name-shortenings – but I think I’ll stick to Henry Chinaski here.

Anyway, the first time I met him, probably, he was drinking rotgut wine, or talking about drinking rotgut wine. Or thinking about it. Or on the verge of a fight out the back of a bar, smelling of it, breathing its flavour back up.

Yeah, that was it. I think.

Well, a bar was involved, somewhere, somehow. You see, bars are integral to Henry. He’s practically been built of them, by them. In return - the decent thing to do - he props up any he can find. He’s not picky, this Henry, not in the usual way. At least not when it comes to a drink. Or a fight.

But he is picky, very picky, when it comes to words. Oh, he can fool you into thinking that he isn’t, of course, because he really doesn’t seem to be. And it’s not as if he goes around all the time worshipping those words just for the sake of them being words either. No, what Henry does is respect what words can mean – he’s really very particular about meanings, very understanding of them and their importance to the human world. This is why he’s always eager and proud to announce to people that he’s a writer, that his greatest aspiration is to be one professionally. Words, he tells me, are ‘necessary things’ and he simply wants to make the most of their being necessary. He wants to ‘work’ them because they are there and they have to be worked and he is good at that. Oh, he might be able to fool some people into thinking that he isn’t, but he is. They have, out of their necessity, become natural to him. He was, as a documentary (which I still haven’t seen) suggested in it’s title, born into them.

Yeah, they made a documentary about Henry! Of course, there they call him something else. They call him Charles Bukowski. But Henry’s what he’s called in other films, and in books – yeah, in books too! – so let’s stick with Henry for now.

Having said all that, though, I may as well carry on and tell you that one of the times I met Henry, earlier tonight, it was in a film based on one of those books, Factotum. As always with Henry, it was a great way to pass through midnight into that part of morning just before that other part of morning when I’m getting ready to go to sleep. That latter time, naturally, being now.

Now, on this meeting, this specific but slightly booze-haze vague meeting, I sat by (yet was always included) as he drank rotgut (yes, that was this time not the first!), as he talked about how a poem is a city, as he won at the races, as he punched out a man at those selfsame races. As he met Jan – oh, yeah, I forgot to mention Jan. I went slightly less green over her, but each to their own – and went to bars with her, moved in and brought rotgut home to her. And I was sitting by too when he met Laura…

But wait – I should probably tell you about the first time I met Henry before getting into all that. Tell you about it properly.

You see, I met him semi-accidentally one night, one morning, in a film called Barfly (now, don’t get me wrong, I’d known Charles for some time – not long enough, but certainly enough to know I’d be better off if I knew him for longer. But that night was the first time I met Henry). He looked different then, younger and older at the same time, or in different light – in daylight and nightlight and twilight and barlight – but he sounded and acted pretty much the same as he did this evening. He gave off the same scent in my mind. Tripped the selfsame wires. But he didn’t quite look angry when he was swinging for the barman, and he didn’t quite look peaceful when the barman laid him flat out cold.

He just looked thirsty. Permanently thirsty, permanently getting thirstier, like a man stranded out at sea and disobeying all the rules about the water, water everywhere. Only not quite like that at all. More just thirsty for more experience about which it will be necessary to write, for more life that he can try to understand or just make more beautiful when he lays it out cold on the page. It doesn’t look peaceful, of course, but it does look beautiful.

So does he, in his way, despite the trimmed-roadkill mess of his beard, despite the way he’s half-blurred-out by alcohol most of the time. Despite the way he walks, arms wide away from his torso as though they’re always on standby to heft his bags and belongings for place to place, from old room to new old room, back slightly hunched from working on his writing over desks and over bottles. Flat-footed – never been much of an athlete, Henry – pounding the pavement and tiles of the barroom bathroom floors like his fingers pound typewriter keys, like they always mean to be going somewhere, even if they’ve got no fixed place in mind. Mainly, though, the first time I met him he just looked like he knew himself. He sounded that way too.

It was the same tonight. His look, his sound. As near as dammit, anyway. I could understand why he had women fighting over him, bareknuckle, in Barfly, and I could see how he wound up with Laura, for a time, in Factotum. And Laura…

Well, Laura’s one of a kind, one in a million… but the thing is, well, sometimes you get the feeling that it’s the millions that truly concern Henry Chinaski. That he can’t help thinking of them in all their multitudes and pondering their daily grinds, even as he goes about and talks about and writes about his own. What he had with Laura, well, even she had to know it wouldn’t hang about too long, because how you keep someone like Henry from looking out the window of tall office blocks that he’s cleaning and seeing the city and thinking about how that city is a poem and vice versa, how ‘a poem is a city asking a clock why,

a poem is a city burning,

a poem is a city under guns

its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,

a poem is a city where God rides naked

through the streets like Lady Godiva,

where dogs bark at night, and chase away

the flag; a poem is a city of poets,

most of them quite similar

and envious and bitter…

a poem is this city now, 50 miles from nowhere,

9:09 in the morning,

the taste of liquor and cigarettes,

no police, no lovers, walking the streets’ and perhaps it sounds mean, but perhaps it isn’t, to say that Laura might not have been the point here, that maybe it’s really more about the things she made him write.

Because Henry, Henry knows very much that you have to live, that you have to go out and be there and live, but that you have to react to your life as well, that you only really know yourself when you do that, when you say what you most want to say and let out the thoughts that you most want to think. And, also, that if you somehow do what you most want to do, and live how you most want to live, then perhaps you should write about it sometimes, just so you remember than you have and that you can.

And Henry, or Hank, or Charles, whatever you want to call him, he does something to me, he makes me want to look at things more, and look for things, and find the rhythm in the way the world goes by, in the sound of the hooves of the days as they run away like wild horses over the hills. He makes me want to look at myself sometimes and not hide from what I see, and not lie about it either, and instead, if I'm dissatisfied, ask myself what I can find that will change that, that will make the satisfaction come.

He makes me think that maybe I’ll shave in the morning. Makes me think that maybe I’ll find me a poem.