From Adventure to Austerity and Back Again: On ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’

I have lately been reminded of something.

A film, and its importance.

I was feeling down earlier this evening, caught up in one of my far-too-frequent recent melancholy moods. Musing on fiscal matters, as it happens. Which, when one is a writer, is never the smartest of plays.  

Anyhow, I got it into my head that what was needed to rectify this joy-rot was a good, solid, movie-going experience. I felt certain that, should I be able to find the right film, I’d be lifted clear of the doldrums.

Only, an actual movie-going experience was, by the time I hit on this idea, not going to be feasible. Not only was it too late, too cold, and too wet to be travelling anywhere to see one; but going out to see one would only have compounded my aforementioned monetary woes.

So, instead, I plumped for watching something on demand. I wheeled through the action/adventure selection, considering everything from Blood Simple to Snatch to The Hurt Locker to The Outlaw Josey Wales. I spent a good few minutes mulling each option over, but, in the end, I didn’t quite fancy any of them.

In fact, I was beginning to go off the idea altogether. It seemed as though bedtime was approaching, a good couple of hours faster than usual.

Until, that is, I noticed – shunted in and amongst a bunch of wholly dissimilar titles – the 1938 classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood. The kind of film about which it is often said: ‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’ – which seemed as fitting a recipe as any other for a late evening’s reality-break. Indeed, though I hadn’t seen it for a long while, I recalled how I always used to enjoy it when I was younger, and decided to give it a go. At the very least, I was sure it couldn’t make me feel any worse.

After only a handful of minutes, I noted down the following thought: There are few films so excellently and effortlessly entertaining as this early Technicolor marvel.

And then added: There are few films as effortlessly rebellious either.

Already, it was beginning to do what I wanted it to. Furthermore, it was also helping me recall the way I felt when watching such films as a kid.

At the age of six or seven, I felt a kinship with The Adventures of Robin Hood because it seemed to mirror the medieval mischief I got up to with my elder brother and our friends out in our garden or in the neighbouring field. Running around with plastic bows and arrows, or with ones that we’d fashion from sycamore branches and tightly-tied string.

As an adult, I found I was revelling not only in the memories of such times, but also in the newly-noticed anarchic angle, the rebel tone, which I didn’t have to think to understand when I was young. The outlaw aspects of the story and of Flynn’s performance were much clearer. The socio-political underpinnings of that standpoint, I mean.

Indeed, as a child, there is a sense in which outlawry is one’s natural state. Only you don’t notice it so much, because few people bother to clamp down on you so hard with the rules. They do not really apply, as the assumption has long since been made by grown-ups that you’re too young to understand most of the mistakes you might be making. There was a healthy degree of discipline in my upbringing, I should admit, but I was still are free, by and large, to indulge my playfulness, my imagination; I was free to give full heed to my (then) innate sense of adventure.

Such actions do not represent a side, a political/philosophical ethos you have chosen. They are simply actions, tied to goals at once far smaller and far larger than any you’ll encounter in your adult life. You give yourself quests to fulfil in your makebelieve, and then forget them, and so are free and able to repeat them at your leisure. The questing itself is the joy, and it hardly matters, at that age, against whom or what, or for whom or what, you are doing it.

At the age of about six or seven, I understood, I think, The Adventures of Robin Hood on those terms. That is to say, as an extension of my own early adventuring. I knew some of the episodes contained within it from picture books, and probably from the Disney version also, but at the same time they felt fresh; I couldn’t help but take them on their own terms. There was none of this lengthy, rambling analysis. I knew Robin Hood was an outlaw simply because people called him an outlaw. Because he called himself an outlaw. I knew he was a good guy because he was the focus of the film and played by Errol Flynn. I knew he was the good guy because he wins at the end.

Watching it as an adult, such simplicity is, largely, stripped. And yet it remains tremendously escapist and entertaining, despite, or possibly even because, I can now detect layers of discourse I previously was unaware of having overlooked.

Perhaps I have even retained a kinship with it because I, and my social situation, has changed so much. I am no longer free to do exactly as I wish. I am expected, as a full-grown man, to be obedient to the rules and dictums of the society within which I find myself surrounded. To be upstanding, as best I can. To be sensible. And, when the government says something, passes some new law, rolls out some new policy, even though this is a democracy, I am not really expected to say anything in response, to answer back.

Furthermore, I am, difficult and shameful as it can be at times to admit, not in the finest position financially. Which is to say I’m on the dole. And have been for some time. Not for want of trying to find work, nor for want of trying to make money off my writing; but that is, regardless, the way things have gone. There’s a line in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which a character propounds: ‘Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.’ And, being in the position I felt locked in last night, I could fully see where that sentiment came from. It seemed, as I thought on it, to have grown out, spread across the Atlantic, taken hold here. And elsewhere, judging by the global nature of the Occupy protests against that quasi-mythological entity, the ‘One Percent’.

However, as I watched the opening scenes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, I began to reflect instead on the tendency of each generation to assume they’ve experienced the first instance of everything.

It having been so long since I last watched the film, coupled with my fuzziness over what exactly the Hays censorship code prohibited, meant I was unprepared for the way in which it actually begins. Within those first couple of minutes, we see the harsh actions of Prince John’s knights towards the ‘Saxon’ villagers and peasants in Nottingham. They are denied extra food, leniency, comfort. As I watched this, I understood these scenes as austerity measures. Austerity Britain: The Middle Ages Edition.

Rather than Robin Hood, who I always was (even if my brother was Robin Hood as well), I found myself feeling closer, identifying more, at this stage, with them. In particular with a figure in pale blue robes who, after being denied a fairly basic demand by a soldier, waits for the soldier to leave the frame before looking him daggers and spitting into the mud. I watched that and clicked with the sense of curiously impotent anger that figure projected, the vague notion of their being a wrongness he could do nothing to right.

But then, moments later, Robin Hood himself bounds into view, jumping a low-hanging tree branch on his horse, looking every inch the ultimate badass. A feat made all the more impressive given that at least a third of his inches are taken up by bright green tights. And it is the introduction of Robin, in such a way, which ensures that the film stays entertaining. Which lets you know that things will be alright. That the preceding injustices will be addressed, rectified.

As soon as I see him, I can’t help but grin. I grin wildly and my breath is taken a little, because not only does this image return me to the aforementioned simpler, less rule-stricken times. But, having associated myself with the downtrodden, I understand and feel his presence as more heroic also. I understand that heroes are not only heroes because they tend, in films like this, to win, but because they represent a moral/ideological position that people suddenly, desperately need to witness being upheld.

There’s a long line of similar folk-heroic figures peppered like buckshot through the arse cheeks of history. Rebels, poachers, bank robbers, ne’er-do-wells who nevertheless are felt to have done well by a great many people, all in the name of sticking it to The Man. Most of these, however, do seem fairly stuck in their own historical context. Their heroism is defined by the era they were in. As Sam Elliott intones in his introductory monologue in The Big Lebowski, ‘Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place.’ This seems to be a fit description of such folk-heroes as Bonnie and Clyde, the kind of bank robbers most often linked to ideas of Robin Hood-like aspirations.

Indeed, though films have been made about them, and figures like them, decades after their era, these, especially Arthur Penn’s masterful Bonnie and Clyde, come laden with an elegiac tone. The audience is aware of most of the actual facts (not ‘stories’, mind you) about such figures, and so these facts undercut the escapist mythologizing such films might otherwise aim for. The audience knows the era of these characters has passed, and so they will be able to embrace them only fleetingly before their inevitable end. And, when it comes, that end will come with the implicit moral that crime doesn’t pay, and it’ll be back to reality for everyone.

This is not so much the case with The Adventures of Robin Hood. For a few reasons. First off, though, within the film, he is clearly presented as ‘the man for his time and place’, the historical sketchiness, of both film-makers, audience, and, let’s face it, historians themselves, as regards that time and place means that Errol Flynn’s characterisation much more readily transcends such boundaries. Indeed, rather than being an elegiac evocation of a bygone age, and focusing its attentions on mourning the demise of such values as chivalry, etc., the film concentrates on creating a platform through which modern-day grievances can be simultaneously considered, and, through Robin’s eventual triumph, escaped from.

I’ve talked about how I found myself drawing parallels with the ‘Saxon’ situation as laid out in the film and my own, and associating myself with the downtrodden, as it were. But mention should also be made of the actual release date of the film, 1938, which is right at/just after the tail-end of the Great Depression. It is possible that, aside from it being a darn good entertainment and starring Flynn, this timing played a part in its initial success.

Because there is so much more distance between now and the era in which the (hi)story of Robin Hood is set, than there is between now and the 1930’s, say, the former era (at least as it has become enshrined in Western myth and folklore) has become timeless. And, as a result, can return to being timely, well, whenever it pleases.  

Which may go some way towards explaining why it affected me the way it did on latest watching.

The fact that I’d not previously considered the film verdant grounds for criticism may go some way towards explaining why that impact surprised me.

I chose to watch it on a whim, because I fancied a complete diversion from my current personal climate. I had not considered that, in Flynn’s performance, I would find evoked on screen my poorness-pressured person’s patron saint.

And yet, the more I watched, the more I came to think of him as exactly that. He is defiant, courageous in all the ways I want to be but currently aren’t. He carries on as though the rules that are so stringently and virulently enforced are not really there, and, in so doing, overcomes them. He is a slave only to his ideals.

Indeed, he feel like the right man for this moment – for the moment I was having last night, anyhow – precisely because he has been able to not only hang onto those ideals, but act on them, flying in the face of austerity and the tyranny of being told what to do. At one point, he speaks to Maid Marian of being able to offer his men ‘silks for rags, kindness instead of riches, limitless food instead of hunger’, and, whilst in the real world I may be willing to dismiss such promises as empty rhetoric, in the world of this film, it is clear that they are not lies. So I succumb to the sentiment, allow it to lift me.

I was buoyed as well, watching the film, by the fact that Robin has retained an important aspect of one’s childhood makeup. He has hung onto outlawry as a natural state.

As the character progresses on his eponymous adventures, he therefore graduates from peer to inspiration. The trade-off is that I accept my own downgrading, the prohibition of my own adventuring; that I acknowledge the areas in which I lack. But I would still be lacking, even without Flynn’s Robin Hood there to make that jump. Which is why the fact that he is at least there to entertain me makes my position more tolerable.

Performances such as that, and films such as this, facilitate, for ninety-odd minutes, a return to the freedom one used to take for granted. As you grow older, they cease (unless you yourself have taken to wearing bright green tights) to act as a mirror, but become instead a looking glass, a window into the possibility of a better world.

Of course, there is a level on which such films are purely frivolous – the historical content is, as afore-alluded-to, damn-near utterly bunk – designed and intended as nothing more than eye-catching entertainment. But there is another level, both beneath and above that, in which that entertainment serves a deep and gratifying purpose. A purpose made clear when, at the end, you watch the court and the merry men cheer in unison, and feel something inside of you cheer along too.

It is a shame, therefore, that The Adventures of Robin Hood is, indeed, the type of film about which it is often said: ‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’

Because films like this feel important. Not least because they make the watcher, whatever their age, feel important as well.   

Somebody has to steady that ladder you're climbing: On 'Brave' and 'La Luna'

I’ve long been of the opinion that a good film, much like a good story or a good song, should keep its audience hooked right until the very end. I once, for instance, became pretty pissed with my two brothers when they started joking around near the close of Gladiator. If anything, this attitude has only strengthened since I began to take my own writing seriously, as a potential livelihood. The feeling being, in that case, that I would very much like for a given reader to pay full attention to my work throughout its entire course, and to feel rewarded in some way at the end of that experience. Therefore, it would be hypocritical, not to mention a little rude, for me not to pay full attention to the work of other artists.

So, I didn’t exactly anticipate spending the last ten minutes of Brave only part-watching. Part looking up from my nearly front-row seat [got there late], and part looking down at my notepad, sketching out ideas for what has turned out to be this article.

It isn’t that I was bored, though, or that I was so disappointed in the film that I felt the need to jot down my negative responses before it had even ground to a halt. On the contrary, I was entertained throughout. And I did follow the ending, even whilst I was writing. I still wanted to see how it all tied together. It was good, charming, and put a smile on my face.

But it is the fact that I could be so sure of exactly what was going on even when I wasn’t looking up that leads me into the point of this piece.

I don’t intend that to sound like too harsh a criticism. After all, if I were to take that tone, to lambast Brave for being ‘too predictable’, then I would be met with an all-too-obvious and all-too-deserved reposte – that being that it is principally a kids’ film. It’s not attempting to be Inception. It is a film with a clear point – a moral, even – that it wants to convey, and it would have scuppered that point entirely had the ending been different.

It is no sin for a film to seek simply to tell its tale and entertain, forsaking any major surprises. It is certainly far better to do that, and do it as well as Brave does, than it is to shoehorn ridiculous and implausible twists into a storyline and bugger it up.

On the other hand, if a film sets out to communicate a message, then, once that message is clear, it doesn’t perhaps require the viewer’s full attention. Brave laid its cards on the table well before the end, and, as such, the first half of the film was more entertaining, and arguably more essential watching. Its joys lie in its sharp, fairly fresh takes on old character types, and in the animation, art design, and soundtrack. Which combine to give the film a sense of both spectacle and intimacy. The balance between the showier scenes and the more introspective moments is well-struck. In addition, there are good laughs to be had throughout.

The second half, surprises more or less revealed, is more obviously formulaic, and, whilst entertaining, never really leaves its conclusion in doubt (unlike the far more daring and exceptional Toy Story 3).

But that’s OK.

Because Pixar made up for that before the main feature even started.

La Luna, another in their growing line of justly-celebrated short films, is a genuine gem. Delightful, on both a visual and thematic level, it is perhaps only retrospectively that its true brilliance – and the way in which that brilliance is augmented through its pairing with Brave – can be understood. [Which explains, hopefully, why it took me nearly the full length of the longer film to write anything down about the shorter one.]

When it becomes clear that the two films share the same basic intent/moral, the difference between the two forms (short and feature films), and the relative merits of each, are thrown into bright and rather wonderful relief.

That moral is, simply, that the younger generation should first pay attention to, respect, and learn from the previous generation, before they can successfully strike out on their own. It is a timeless, and perhaps rather obvious, even trite message. But it is one that both films seem convinced of.

However, whereas Brave makes this clear well before the credits, La Luna – constructed, as is common for Pixar’s standalone shorts, almost in the form of a single-reel silent movie, only with gestures and grunts instead of title cards serving as stand-ins for speech – manages to keep its theme subtly present throughout, and then still enchant and surprise with its conclusive, summative shot. The notion that the best results are only achieved through working together and learning from others certainly sounds trite when worded like that, but is conveyed in La Luna with a cinematic eloquence that circumvents the cynicism some viewers might otherwise feel.

Indeed, just as there are many writers who believe that the short story is the best and most direct form of prose fiction, there is certainly an argument to be made for short films doing the same thing within the context of cinematic fiction. In such shorts, there is no need, nor any room, for the tiresome exposition/statements by protagonists about the things they’ve learnt, which, understandably, grate with some viewers. Neither is there space for nonsensical subplots, which plague so many longer films (though not, it should be noted, Brave) and come across simply as filler.

Following this, there is a further argument to be made for more studios to throw money at short films and release them not simply for free on YouTube, but as valued works in their own right (albeit probably not at the cinema). This would be, in some ways, similar to the shift the music industry saw, as regards the focus being placed more on the downloading of individual songs rather than the purchasing of whole albums, with the corollary being that many albums ceased to display concern with functioning as cohesive entities, content instead to exist as collections of singles.

There are, of course, film-makers doing this already, and there are also kinks in this approach which probably mean it is not ‘commercially viable’ on any grand scale, at least not on its own. There’s no need for it to be, though. The argument is simply for more credence and consideration to be given to short films, not for them to supplant full-length feautures. There are things short fiction is better equipped to handle than longer variants, is all. Things it can tackle more immediately, and more effectively. Moral tales are a great example of this, as suggested by the longevity of Aesop’s Fables, amongst other works. Moreover, short forms that don't rely upon dialogue often allow the viewer to reach the story's moral/revelation in their own way, in their own words. It becomes something for the audience to discover, rather than something they must be told/have lectured to them.

On the other hand, longer-form fiction can deliver such lectures. It allows for a much more in-depth, and therefore theoretically more roundly satisfying, consideration of its chosen themes. It can also give the audience more of a good thing. If all that existed of, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark was the opening scene, it would make for a fantastic short film, and would still give a good sense of the character. However, at full length, it becomes a masterclass in adventure storytelling, and cinematic entertainment in general.

Yet, there is no need for film-makers to choose one form at the expense and exclusion of the other, as Pixar continue to prove. Indeed, perhaps it is even better if a way can be found, as the studio has with La Luna and Brave to link the forms together in some way. A great single can, after all, be improved even further through inclusion on an album of other, likeminded songs.

A more useful way, beyond this music-selling metaphor, to consider what Pixar have done here might be to look at both the short film and the main feature as being parts of an essay on the same ideas, the same central theme. The short film is the abstract – it introduces the issue, in an attention-grabbing fashion, and at least hints at what the essay’s overall conclusion will be. It’s not strictly necessary to read on to guess with some accuracy what the rest of the essay will argue, but if the abstract has done its job right, you will.

The main feature is the essay’s body – it provides examples which interrogate and demonstrate the underlying argument. These examples should, where possible, be original, entertaining, and above all else interesting. If that part of the essay has done its job right (as Brave did), then you’ll probably have reached the full conclusion before you actually read it.

As I did, enabling me to start off on this ramble in the first place.

Only, there’s one more crucial detail that I might have missed, had I still been writing at the time, and not heading for the door. A dedication to Steve Jobs. Something which was, I guess, to be expected at the end of the first original Pixar film to be made after his death, but which also suggests that Brave had to be that film. And that it had to be coupled with La Luna.

Whatever your opinion of Jobs on either a personal or professional level (or of Apple and its assorted products), it is inarguable that Pixar would not be where they are today without his early input. These two films serve as an acknowledgment and show of thanks for that, even as they demonstrate just how far the company aspires to move forwards without that input.

I’ll admit, though, that it did take the onscreen dedication to actually make me reflect upon that, and thereby to deepen a little further my appreciation of both films. Which shows that it really does pay to watch a good film all the way through to the finish. And, in Pixar’s case, that it pays to make people want to do so, whether they end up writing in notepads at the same time or not.     

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.

Watching Gilbert Grape

I find myself laughing a lot at good films lately; at films which are reputed to be good and which I find to be so. Not all of these films are funny. In fact, most of them aren’t, at least not for much of their length.

But I laugh. Or maybe I don’t. Rather, I think that more often than not it’s just a smile I can’t stop. Which, on paper (or screen) might read ridiculously. Say it aloud and it probably sounds ridiculous too. Yet I don’t think there’s a better way I can say it. I suppose that it’s similar to how I feel when I’m falling for someone, but I really don’t want to digress.

Having said that, however, it seems that love is probably the most appropriate word for how I feel about film, about what film can achieve. It’s certainly how I feel about film when I see movies that don’t amaze me simply because of what I want to believe about them, but instead because of what they make me believe. Indeed, having somehow avoided watching Citizen Kane for the first 23 years of my life, I wasn’t sure what I expected from it, upon finally sitting down to watch a copy I was bought for my last birthday. Perhaps some part of me actually wanted to be disappointed by it, to achieve some special and peculiar sense of gratification from being one of the few people I’d heard talk about it who didn’t hold it in such high reverence. I don’t know quite why this should have been (to witness Orson Welles’ face upon his entrance in The Third Man is to know that what it projected wasn’t just acting – it was the face of a man in complete control of his every intention), and, sure enough, upon Kane’s ending, I had no clearer idea as to why I’d entertained thoughts of disapproval. There is no target at which that film aims that it even comes close to missing. It is as perfectly realised exploration of an idea as I’ve ever seen. Judging by such rampant hyperbole, stirred within me by this viewing, I was once again sure that film and the cinema was clearly the object of my deepest artistic affections.

And yet, that I had to be reminded of such a thing is indicative of the fact that I had taken some time off from fully indulging certain of my mind’s passions, that I had taken the very things that I had turned to so often, for help and entertainment, for granted, without giving anything back. In all those shadowy conversations with cinema screens and TV sets and computer monitors, I had been a silent partner. It might have seemed like I was just being a good listener, but the only way you can be sure of that is if the listener talks back to you about the things you’ve said. I didn’t. It is the same with books, and music, and paintings, and sculpture. Good or bad, they are designed not merely to entertain, but to engage the reader/listener/viewer. They are a part of the artist that they have chosen to shout out into the world, and if all that comes back is an echo, than it has furthered neither them nor the world any for them to do so.

One of the aftershocks that has persisted as a consequence/reward for finally viewing Welles’ first masterpiece, is that I have been thinking a lot more about the ways in which film moves me, and why. I have been trying to further understand myself, to comprehend the mechanisms by which I am most deeply touched and entertained by art; not to disprove or question them, but to embrace them, and to marvel. This may sounds like too romantic a viewpoint to take on such issues, and perhaps it is, but it suits the way I am right now.

Indeed, after watching a film the other night (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), I got to thinking about the first time I was sure I was enamoured so completely with cinema and everything that came with it. Perhaps it was a subconscious rendering of my attempts to patch the distance between that time and now, to fix the wounds and the spaces left inside my head from disregarding it. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that occasionally slides into my mind when I’m content.

That first time, though…that moment has been preserved with rare and mythic clarity. It is an oddly pristine specimen in those dust-gathering museum halls behind my eyes. It happened during the last time I watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, about 3 years ago. Aside from the pratfall that leads into the last section of the film, that scene is not outwardly too comedic (although, admittedly, there are healthy doses of Leone’s mordant wit throughout), but I felt the laughter building in my body as I watched. The shot that begins that scene, leading from Eli Wallach’s clown-like tumble away from a cannonball’s impact, is, again, perfect. Indeed, whilst I wouldn’t wholly agree with Tarantino’s assertion that the film is the best directed in history (in fact, I’d suggest that Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is more consistent…), I do not think I have seen anything more astounding on any screen, small or big, that fully compares with the wonder of that shot, the way the camera spins and tracks Wallach through the avenues of that dusty graveyard with a manic, poetic intensity matched only by Ennio Morricone’s accompanying score. It encapsulates the view that the true fullness of life is to be found in the quests and journeys that we take on our way through it, and, dizzying as some may find it, that shot is a joy to me. That everything preceding it is nearly as good and most things that follow are better is testament to the genius of the work and those who made it. I have seen Brando toying with the shadows in Apocalypse Now, Walken playing with a revolver in The Deer Hunter, and De Niro throwing punches at the air in the flawless black and white of Raging Bull, and yet I still don’t think I’ve seen anything to quite match the way that seemed to me that day.

But, even if nothing ever beats that moment when I first started falling, I know this feeling is going to last, because, as I said, I’m laughing and smiling at films more than ever of late. I recently caught Up in the Air, and, for a good half hour section of that film, couldn’t contain my grin. Last weekend, I watched Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and a simple camera movement nearly made me laugh and cry at once, just because of the colours and the sly curve of the line along which the lens shifted. Everything that follows the conversation that forms the centrepiece of Godard’s Breathless felt like the lead-up to a gut-punch, even as it drew a smile across my face.

And that’s what this love of film is to me. It is topsy-turvy and upside down and direct and straight-shooting. I laugh sometimes at lines that are more touching than funny, and I cannot stop weeping as I watch certain scenes in certain films - whether it is with joy or distress doesn’t matter so much some nights, it only matters that the film has reached me, seen who and how I am, and shown me something glorious in return. The smiles and the tears and the laughter are simply my part of the conversation that these films and I hold in the dark, and some of this writing is what happens when the credits roll and I don’t want to stop talking back.