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...’