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.

That dream was like a film I saw

(Caution: contains spoilers. Sort of.)

Inception is a great film for two key reasons. One: it attempts to investigate some of the deepest parts of the human subconscious, those relating to the nature of one’s dreams. Two: it fulfils this goal less during the film than during the audience’s period of reflection in the film’s aftermath. Indeed, it is of principle importance that it does not reach any definitive conclusions during its runtime, that it does not offer any concrete answers. That, even if you know how everything has happened within the narrative, you still don’t know how everything has happened.

Now, to say that it is great, really great, is not necessarily to say that Inception is as brilliant or nuanced in its understanding of human nature, or of the emotional connections people form and break and form again as some recent films have been, such as DiCaprio’s other big-budget effort this year, Shutter Island. Nor is it to suggest that it gets everything right. However, I would argue that, in a similar way to Citizen Kane, its chief faults, if one wishes to term them that, are in its flawlessness, are in its rigid adherence to an intricately mechanical sense of construction.

Kane, of course, is still regarded my many as the finest film ever made (not that I am claiming that of Inception, but bear with me), and yet it is, for most of its running time, emotionally distant. Or perhaps a better way to say it is that it is not a particularly warm film. The ending should leave a smile on one’s face, I think, but one stemming more from understanding rather than from happiness (perhaps in the same way as Inception’s should). Welles’ film is, however, incredibly knowledgeable about emotions, and interrogates and analyses them in a manner almost without equal in any film I’ve seen. It is expertly composed in order to fully convey its findings, and to ask its questions on human nature, without ruining or drawing away from the narrative arc. It is perfect in a supremely clinical way, and yet the viewer does not become fully aware of how completely well-fitted its parts are until it is over, because its characterisation is, both despite and because of the aforementioned distance, so evocative and compelling as to render proper thinking-time within the film near-impossible.

Both films are, then, atomic-clockwork masterpieces, long-in-the-planning overtures rather than perfect pop songs played out in 3 minutes flat and written in not much longer. If they were paintings or prints they would be by M.C. Escher rather than by Van Gogh.

Indeed, the mention of Escher in relation to Inception is, by anyone familiar with his works, inevitable. The mathematical theorems and impossible figures so vividly present in that work are echoed and re-presented within Nolan’s film, from the two not-fully-there staircases, to the vast spectacle of Paris folding in upon itself and running rightways-up on several different intersecting plains at once. Moreover, however, the Escher comparison is fitting when relating to the entirety of the dreamspaces within the film – many of Escher’s greatest pictures seem otherworldly somehow, and yet all are, upon consideration, mathematically precise. These are not Dali’s surreal visions, at once realistic and yet also wild and untrammelled by the harsh constraints of worldly reality. Escher’s are visions which are always grounded within that reality and yet exploit it, calculatingly, almost academically. Much as, it could be argued, Nolan’s are within Inception.

This does not, in the long run, mean that those visions are any less impressive, or less effective, but it does mean that the audience is constantly aware, albeit unobtrusively, that what they are watching has been shaped specifically for them to watch. Escher, at possibly his most ambitious, created two pieces entitled ‘Metamorphosis I’ and 'Metamorphosis II', and the latter of these consists of a progression from one highly detailed tessellation into another into another, etc – the links between these objects, and the thoughts and feelings they stimulate, are not mathematical, but the construction of them is, (c)overtly so. With the exception of one segment – that dealing with a lighthouse (his own addition) on a coastline in Italy, which (in an odd parallel to Dali’s love of his childhood views) he fell in love with when he lived and worked there for a time in his youth. The startling break from the expected progression is present only briefly before returning to the tightly-planned order by way of fusing that lighthouse into a chessboard replete with similar-sized pieces, but it is present.

Likewise, Inception is at its most complex and intriguing, for me, when the memories of its chief protagonist, Cobb (DiCaprio), seem to bleed into the meticulously constructed dreamscapes, perturbing the logic of those constructions, challenging their true role and purpose. Now, at this point, I could well delve into a deep analysis of just what exactly each such rising memory indicates and tells the audience about the story and the characters on the whole – I have after all, been bouncing ideas related to that about my head and off the thoughts and words of others ever since I saw the film – but I do not wish to do that here. This is because what concerns me primarily at this juncture are more the mechanisms by which such memories are set in motion.

As I said earlier, during the film, there is not so much time for complicated analysis of what is occurring – that comes afterwards – and yet there is ample time for complex and multi-faceted reactions to the events and practical demonstrations of ideas unfolding upon the screen. Of course, this is how the human mind works, on a basic level, with regards to present happenings (what follows is not a detailed scientific explanation, but a simple description of how the process seems to me - if any more learned person than I could outfit this piece with more accurate, less guess-worky explanation, please feel free to suggest one). It is fed a picture of what is happening and it reads that for signs of what the picture means, picking up even the vaguest association stimulated by certain facets of the image, in the midst of concrete facts that it can ascertain from the surroundings (i.e. the road is wet here; there is a wall over there; Marion Cotillard looks amazing). It performs basic practical analysis of the given situation, reacts to impulses regarding what may happen next, based on what has happened previously – a fixed physical memory of the world is key to this process. If something in that image is replicated from something it has encountered before, or reminiscent of something, it will recognise it, and certain ideas associated with the prior encounter will be, potentially, brought to the surface, and interact with fresh ideas about what this new encounter means.

Within the film, we see this in action most fully upon Cobb’s face any time an irregularity occurs (his wife’s reappearances, the intrusion of a freight train into a traffic-packed street, etc.) – these are things he and his team must react to even as he considers their direct relevance to him. However, the film throws a remarkably ingenious complication into this process, by having these irregularities occur within a dream. When he sees his wife, it is not as though he is seeing a vague doppelganger of her walk into the same restaurant where he happens to be taking his evening meal. In the dreamscapes, the only way in which she can enter is as, it is explained, a projection from his subconscious. Ditto for the curiously off-the-rails train. Therefore, his mind is forced into running in circles when it reacts to these irregularities. He reacts to the reappearance of his wife in the present, but then, when his brain delves into the mass of associations related with her appearance in that present, it reaches the reason why she has reappeared. And yet, within the dream, she is arguably as real as any other person or object. Following this, there arises a very problematic question – is he seeing only what he’s thinking about seeing, or is he seeing what is actually there? Is his view dictated by his responses to it, or are his responses dictated by the view?

Now, obviously, I am getting more into the territory of (over-)analysis that comes when the film has finished, when I am no longer viewing it as it unfolds, within my own present. That being the case, I’m going to pull back slightly and jump out into looking at that question from the point of view of myself as a member of the audience, in relation to one section of the film in particular.

That the chosen section concerns Cobb demonstrating the construction of dreams/dream labyrinths to Ariadne, is fitting, I think, because this really seems to me to be at the heart of the film’s most challenging (and potentially maddening) ideas. This is the sequence in which Ariadne bends Paris into the Escher-referencing dimension-breaching shape mentioned-above, but it is two things she does to her reconstruction of the city after that which interested (and drew a reaction from) me the most, at least up to that point in the film. Firstly, the two of them jump from one market-lined street to a passage underneath a bridge, and this bridge was, like the Escher imagery, something visually in the film that really sparked a deep-set connection within me. Before I venture further into that, however, it is interesting to note that, within the film again, this is the point where the issue of a(n enforced) division between memory and dreams is first properly raised – it is even more interesting to note that it is Cobb giving the lecture on the issue to Ariadne on how including architecture from memory can trigger further subconscious projections which may compromise the integrity of the dream, as she has brought the bridge into play due to the fact that she walks under it each day in order to get to college.

That bridge was not only from her memory, however. It was from mine, as a filmgoer, and perhaps from those of other filmgoers as well (and obviously those of people who actually do walk under it each day, but that would complicate the point). Because it seemed to me to be the same stretch of rail-bridge that Marlon Brando walks under at the start of Last Tango in Paris. Even if I’m wrong about that, it is a similar bridge, and, regardless, the ideas related to my feelings on that film and its characters were already rushing back into me head – my subconscious was bringing its own projections into play with everything occurring on the screen. Indeed, as soon as Cobb’s wife, Mal, reappears briefly later in that scene, I began to link and look for parallels in their relationship and the relationship(s) at the centre of Bertolucci’s film, particularly in their evocations of grief. I started to see these links everywhere, even as I was taking in the film’s happenings on a separate, clearer level. Most tellingly, perhaps, I noted the way that Cobb tried to keep Mal locked within a sort of prison of memories within his mind, in the same way that first, Brando’s Paul tells Jeanne, the younger woman with whom he has embarked upon an affair, that they are only to see each other within the sparse apartment where they first meet; and second that Paul’s dead wife is confined, within the timeline of the narrative, to lying surrounded by flowers on her old bed, and presented so viciously with Paul’s memories of her and their time together.

Backing up a little to that scene beneath the bridge again, however, I was presented with a reminder of another film, a few moments after the first, when Ariadne begins to push mirrors she has installed between the stanchions of the bridge into a position that allows them both to stand and see themselves reflected at either side into infinity. This is an optical illusion which will have had its genesis, and many other uses, I’m sure, in various stage shows and other films with which I am unfamiliar, but the one that it brought to my mind was, fittingly enough, Citizen Kane. In that film, the illusion occurs when Kane is shambling along the halls of his deserted mansion, Xanadu, and is only onscreen for a couple of seconds, but it was clearly, for me, an indelible sight. Feeding this back into Nolan’s film, I began to see this scene in terms of loneliness, and now, enhanced by retrospective distance, in terms of how the ability to control and dictate the happenings of much of one’s own environs cannot necessarily breach or solve or even cure those problems that cause such loneliness to fall upon a person.

Here, of course, one might reasonably ask a similar question to the one I asked earlier of Cobb, i.e. whether I was putting ideas into the film or the film was putting ideas into me. Whether I was seeing what I wanted to see in order to make the film more than it is.

But, in many ways, that is a moot point. After all, that is what our minds are always doing, isn’t it? Filtering given information through the backlog of what we already know about the world, the accumulated mass of what we’ve already experienced, and thenceforth trying to find some sense and/or beauty to it. Indeed, one of the peculiar triumphs of Inception, I think, is that it actively encourages such a thing, rather than encouraging an escape and avoidance of oneself as many films do (not that I am by any means against escapism). It accepts all feelings and responses as valid, (particularly regarding the ending) in a way that stands out from a lot of the things I've seen recently. So, when a reviewer says that certain scenes remind him of Bond films, or, in the same article, says that it lacks ‘genuine heart’ such criticisms perhaps come from the unexpected nature of this acceptance – perhaps the reviewer sees them as faults because he has not expected his reactions and input, and yes, even ‘heart’ to be as integral as Nolan allows it to be. Whether one smiles with joy or understanding upon the film’s closing is, arguably, down to what each viewer has chosen to personally invest in the tale, and in the character of Cobb – whether they have seen him as a kind of everyman, or just as an isolated, unlinked projection from someone else’s mind.

And, when one considers that the comment about Bond films, specifically in relation to the snowbound ‘action sequence’, is by no-means an lone example of such a response, then a further consideration rises to the fore, in relation to both the characters within the film, and the perception of them as they relate to our society now. After all, one of the film’s main conceits is that the dreamscapes within it are ones that have been consciously created in order for subconscious ideas and issues to be stolen/implanted/explored. Ergo, does it not follow that the creators of the dreams could well have been influenced by ideas and scenic considerations placed in their heads by films they have seen, by images presumed present in their world that they have come into contact with, and which have been brought more fully into play by some stimuli elsewhere in their environment as they have been at work on the design? Outside of the film, I guess, the main point that such reviewers are trying to make is that these images have clearly been placed in Nolan’s head, and he is acting upon them, either consciously or subconsciously. But to accuse him of unoriginality, or of directing like Michael Bay(!), is to miss the essential truth that we are all composites, to admittedly varying degrees, of our experiences and influences – if we deny the impact of the things that influence us then there is no point to them, or to our ability to receive and react to them as influences (and, correspondingly, no point to reviewing anything, and even less to mentioning those influences ourselves in reviews).

Just as there exists the potential of a back-and-forth in the interplay between film and dream within Inception, therefore, there also exists that same potential outside of it. As mentioned earlier, it is clear that certain parts of my subconscious are somehow fused to things I have encountered in films and then linked, often by way of actual, physical experiences, to emotions and ideas. I imagine, and know in some instances, that a great many people feel the same. This may stretch from simply remembering how Saturday mornings used to feel when you were seven at the mention of some now practically-archaic cartoon, to the way in which you actually find yourself framing the world as you look upon it, tilting your head to a certain angle to experience a sight in a very particular and more personally-appealing way. Furthermore, in relation to the actual construction and compilation of films, Inception provided me with several interesting thoughts on just how the composition of dreams, at least in memories of them, have influenced that, and, potentially, the other way round. For example, when Cobb mentions to Ariadne something about the odd way that, in dreams, it is possible to go from one setting to another with absolutely no idea of how you travelled the distance in between, I was instantly jolted to think how often such a question may arise to the film-viewer, when confronted with an apparently unexplained scene-change (a thought I may have had before, but which is, for the time being, tied intrinsically to my reading of Inception). This then, probably not-unintentionally, serves to complicate the viewer’s perceptions of just which parts of Nolan’s film are intended as dream and which parts intended as reality.

However, some have pointed out that, whether due to the fact that they are intended as pre-planned dreams or not, because of their clarity, and, at-times, hard-to-differentiate-from-reality nature, they do not come across as particularly accurate evocations of a dreamlike state. They do not come across as being naturalistic. Perhaps this is because of the limits placed on the role of memory within them, perhaps simply because that did not fit with the aesthetic direction in which Nolan wanted to take the film. Perhaps not. It does not matter particularly why they aren’t naturalistic, only that they aren’t. But there are numerous other films that could be suggested to fit that demanding criteria, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Brazil, and to fit it well. Yet, even those cannot, by their nature as planned and edited pieces of film truly and completely evoke the dreamscapes we each encounter in our heads. They can, however, influence the way in which we remember our dreams and respond to those memories. We can more easily relate those filmic dreams to our own grand illusions. Indeed, if I were to have a dream tonight that includes flying, I do not think my first port of call in the afterthought period would be to Freudian analysis, but to those first fantastical dreams in Brazil.

Still, further to that, I know I have not only had dreams that included locations from films, but have also semi-consciously kickstarted such dreams, often in some attempt to remember or, perhaps, relive the film in question, only to find that other issues and images intersect and disrupt that process. Or, maybe more bizarrely, I have, whilst not fully awake, attempted to envision films in full having only seen their trailers, or posters, or heard of their premise and which actors they include, and the cuts and scenic jumps within those visions have come about from me, fitted in on subconscious impulses of just where it feels right that they should go... But, then, are these impulses not based on ideas that films have placed inside my head and made me believe are coming from my own mind?

Well, films and other sources.

And, indeed, Inception is a great film because it takes those other sources into account, in relation to its characters, its creators, and especially its audience. Like Citizen Kane, it consists of an impeccably-structured labyrinth, and yet leaves a different route through that labyrinth for each individual viewer – they are each likely, and entitled, to reach their own conclusion, whether positive or negative, with regards to the film’s happenings. You don't have to like it, but you should appreciate it, I think, because it’s one of those too-rare films which knows, and accepts, that ‘inception’ is never just a one-way street.

‘Just someone who’s lost’: From Out of Sight to Up in the Air

(Caution: contains spoilers. I.e. it’s probably not a good idea to read this if you haven’t seen either of the two films referenced in the title. Or Solaris. Or Rocky III.)

I have been trying to imagine George Clooney in a boxing movie. Something like Rocky or Cinderella Man. Or Raging Bull. To imagine him breaking his hands upon a jail cell wall.

I have been trying to fit him into those bar basement scenes in Fight Club. To see him with his face bruised and bloodied against the concrete in the same way that Edward Norton’s gets. In the same way that Brad Pitt’s gets.

I can’t.

Perhaps it’s because my imagination doesn’t really have much to work with. After all (and please correct me if I’m wrong), Clooney just doesn’t seem to get too physically messed up in films. Stallone, Crowe, De Niro, Norton, they all get messed up plenty. In their harder films, they all seem to affect a stance that demonstrates allegiance to the maxim Stallone himself professes as Rocky Balboa in the 6^th and final film in that series: ‘It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.’ With Clooney, it has always seemed as though it’s more about avoiding being hit (observe, for instance, the scene in Ocean’s Eleven where he and a tough-guy acquaintance fake his beating/interrogation). This is not to suggest that he plays cowardly types, more that he generally plays characters who rely on their cunning, on their charm. His casting as Mr. Fox in the recent Roald Dahl adaptation fits this persona perfectly.

That the role finds him as a voice actor is also oddly fitting. The more I consider that fact, the notion of Clooney as voice, the more it becomes apparent why I’m struggling to put him into the great big black and white boxing ring inside my head. He is a talker, not a fighter. Even when he takes roles in action movies, it always seems like other people take larger parts in the action than him. Consider Three Kings, and the Mexican standoff that develops in the small Iraqi town which Clooney’s Archie Gates and fellow soldiers believe to hold a bunker full of gold bullion (‘No, not the little cubes you put in soup’). Instead of attempting to instigate a gunfight, he tries to explain to his men exactly what happens to the body as a result of gunshot wounds. He is a negotiator. He is the referee, the man in the middle, not one of the men in the corner. He is always looking to make sure that it’s a good, clean fight.

Nowhere is this tendency more evident in one of his characters than it is in Up in the Air’s Ryan Bingham. Even though his job is essentially to inform others that they have lost theirs, he has honed the craft of doing this with minimum damage to a very fine art. We are both shown this and told about it every time he talks about his work. He knows people don’t like what he does, but he feels it is necessary, and so justifies his position by demonstrating just how good he is at it. Talking, that is. Because, of course, the other facet of Bingham’s (professional) life is that he is a motivational speaker. One of those people who goes around trying to convince other people to improve themselves and their lifestyles. One of those people who goes around trying to help people keep on moving forward without getting hit. Again, he has this down to a fine art. He rolls out the same speech at each conference event he gets invited to, and gets the same response from his audience – muted hope tinged with subdued despair. The longer the film continues, the more the audience realises that this is pretty much how he feels too. He gets back from these speaking engagements exactly what he puts in. They are not made to seem like the important part of the endeavour. They are not, in themselves, the ultimate goal.

It is the same with actual heist in Ocean’s Eleven. It is not the taking of the money that really matters, or that’s even really the difficult part – it’s the getting away with it that counts. The heist may be the showy part, the aesthetic triumph, for all parties concerned: director, actors, characters, story, but it means almost nothing without the big payoff.

And yet, at the heart of a lot of Clooney’s films is the implicit acceptance that such a payoff will be short-lived. In Ocean’s Eleven there are only about 10 minutes of film after the completion of the heist, compared to about 100 minutes before. The way the shot of the fountain jutters and fades just before the final scene suggests an odd kind of emptiness, an impermanence to everything that’s gone before and which is coming after. It says, simply, that all good things come to an end.

Perhaps this is why I still can’t place him in a boxing ring. I get the sense that he, or, rather, the characters he plays, simply don’t see the point in fighting just to win, because they have already thought about it too much and they know that victory won’t last so it doesn’t seem worth working for. It is not necessarily a defeatist attitude, but it is a defensive one, a self-protecting one. And his characters generally stick to it, unless, of course, there is another incentive, another source of happiness to get him through even if the other things he’s working for go sour.

Usually, these other incentives are women.

In Ocean’s Eleven, Clooney’s Danny Ocean is ostensibly going after the money, but really just wants his ex-wife back. Similarly, in Up in the Air, as soon as he begins to feel the inevitability of his career completely changing shape, he invests more effort and time in trying to make things work with Alex, a female fellow traveller he has met with occasionally on the road. He even invites her to accompany him to a family wedding. Throughout both films he is absolutely on top of his game when it comes to charm. This is due in no small part to the excellent scripts with which he’s provided, especially in the latter, but it is also very much due to his undeniable natural talent for negotiation. He gives the impression that what he’s saying is exactly what he’d say even if it hadn’t been scripted. He sells it completely. He understands that the audience has to believe him in order for us to believe that the woman in question would believe him, or at least be willing to go along with him even if they didn’t. For instance, the dialogue in the scene where Ryan Bingham first meets Alex sounds so spot-on that it’s entirely plausible that their evening should end up the way it does.

In the wider body of Clooney’s work, however, it’s also entirely plausible that their relationship should end up how it does as well.

In Out of Sight he plays a bank robber, Jack Foley, pursued by Jennifer Lopez’s Karen Sisco, a US Marshall following his escape from the Glades Correctional Facility. Their first meeting occurs immediately upon the event of this escape, when he bundles her into the boot of her car and jumps in beside her, whilst his partner Buddy drives them away. About 3 minutes after this is the moment when it becomes apparent that they are attracted to each other, or rather, that she is attracted to him. He is attracted to her from the get-go. They are talking, and he quotes a film, Network, with such childlike glee that she can’t help but smile. He has his hand on her hip and she doesn’t move it off. This is not because she is scared to do so. After all, unbeknownst to him, she keeps a gun in the boot. When the car stops, she has a chance to shoot him and Buddy, but she doesn’t. Not then.

But later, near the end, she shoots him. In the leg, but she still shoots him. She has to take him back to the correctional facility. Both of them knew it was coming. Especially Foley.

Something did happen in between that first meeting and that (almost) last, however. Something key to explaining how Clooney’s characters get by, even if they think the odds are ultimately against them. Foley tracks down Sisco to her hotel in Detroit, and approaches her as she sits alone at a table near the bar. Earlier, in the car boot, he’d mused about how things might be different between them if they were two different people, if they were strangers who had no idea about what the other did for a living, and so it is that he proceeds to act this theory out. He gives his name as Gary. She gives hers as Celeste. He asks what she does for a living, starts the small-talk, gives compliments as though this is the first time he’s seen her and thought those things. Then she asks him what he does, and he immediately punctures the fantasy, explaining that ‘I don’t think it works if we’re somebody else.’ And he’s right, because this has to be their escape, their personal getaway, not Gary’s, not Celeste’s. All they have to do is put their ‘professional’ lives aside, and focus on that sense of the personal. Nothing exists outside of them and the rooms in which they find themselves. It is a mutual arrangement, and it suits them fine, until morning.

At that point, their professional lifestyle choices bleed back in, and they both debate whether they actually did what they did because of the thrill of breaking the rules dictated by their position, or because of some genuine feeling. It is Foley who concludes the discussion in favour of the latter point, because it is perhaps him who needs to believe that the most. It is absolutely crucial to his survival that he was not just a bank robber when he was with her, but that he was himself.

It is the same in Up in the Air, and the way Ryan interacts with Alex. He needs their time together more and more to be something that exists outside of his professional life, and his career choice, because, quite simply, that professional life seems to be coming apart. He embraces a fantasy that states that the two states of being can exist outside of each other’s sphere of influence. As such, he decides to go to his sister’s wedding, and to take Alex there with him, not because it is a more personal thing to him, at first, but because it feels like it should be, and because there is no group that has been more isolated from him by his work practices and his constant travelling than his family. Everything goes surprisingly well. He feels good, even though he’s soon going to relinquish a big part of the lifestyle he has come to love, and to depend on. He doesn’t mind that one good thing is ending, because another is beginning.

And this is, in view of the philosophy by which his characters often seem to live, that which suggests that the best anyone can hope for are small victories here and there to lessen the pain, where his character makes a mistake that ends up costing him dearly. If it was a boxing movie, this would be the ringing of the bell to signal the start of the last round before he gets KO’d. He has started to believe that not only is winning possible, but that he is bound to do it.

Or perhaps he has just given in to the fantasy, given up on anything else. After all, when the moment finally comes that he achieves his target amount of air-miles, it feels, to both him and the audience, like an anti-climax. Even if it does involve Sam Elliot, longtime owner of cinema’s greatest moustache. He has, to quote an old proverb, put all his eggs in one basket, and he will have nothing left if that basket gets dropped. He is starting to depend upon the fantasy as much as it depends on him to keep it going.

There is one clear parallel with this in Clooney’s career, though it is one which takes the notion of such a fantasy even further by involving it in science fiction. This is Solaris. Again directed by Soderbergh, this is a remarkable departure in terms of tone, composition and conversation from both Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight, and yet the essential outsider/underdog aspect of Clooney’s character remains. The plot, on a basic level, concerns Clooney, as a psychologist, Chris Kelvin, being taken to a research station orbiting the titular planet, following a distress call from an old friend. Upon arriving there, he discovers that this friend is dead and the other crew members are living in fear of physical manifestations of people from their memories – unwanted avatars of their repressed subconscious, as it were. These, apparently, are being caused by the planet, the magnetic fields of which are steadily expanding. The apparition (I term it this, though it seems far more bodily than the average cinematic ghost) which appears to Kelvin takes the form of a woman we first discover he fell in love with, then later find out he married. Before flashbacks confirm this, we infer, from his shock upon realising her being there is not just a dream, that it is no longer possible (or shouldn’t be) for her to be anywhere outside of his head. She is dead.

However, as is often the case with such things, she is recurring now, in this faraway place, because of some unfinished business, because of some lingering problem within Kelvin’s mind that goes beyond the simple, harsh fact of his losing her. It was the manner in which this loss took place that disturbs him, that will not allow her to quit his conscious mind. It is here, in this film perhaps most of all, that we see Clooney’s charm and conversational talent failing, that we see the wires in his head beginning to short from being stripped back just a little too much. And it is very much his failure to talk his wife into submission during an argument that leads to the tragedy by which all else in his life comes to be measured – she has been distant for a while before this argument, and yet he has not taken the time to find out why, he has not listened, he has not asked, and, when this explodes into an argument, he leaves without hearing the last words that she says. He cannot know, at that moment, that she is going to kill herself. But he should.

And so, more than the other remaining crew members, he, after the initial panic has died down, is eager to understand this new manifestation of her. He is intent on knowing more about her than he does. He wants to make amends, to salvage something before she throws in the towel once again. And yet he cannot. Not really.

Such a pattern occurs in numerous other Clooney films as well. In fact, it is surprising, given his stature and reputation, just how seldom his characters actually end up with the girl when the final credits roll. Unlike in Solaris, this is usually because of circumstances slightly beyond his control – in Out of Sight, Karen Sisco is on the other side of the law, and so there isn’t much hope and both know it; in Up in the Air, Alex turns out to have a husband and kids. However, just like in Solaris, in both of those films things go downhill and end how they do because he starts wanting to know more, to break himself and the women out of the limited roles of which it seems to have been pre-dictated that their relationships should comprise. In the former, that effort does lead to Jack Foley and Karen Sisco spending the night together, but it also leads to Jack doing what he knows, having come that far, he must – returning to the gun he stole from her, which she later shoots him with, and accepting that, whether they want them to or not, their professions define them much more than their personal desires do. In the latter, this involves Ryan Bingham using some of his air-miles to go to Alex’s home, with the intention of surprising her with some romantic notion, of bringing her into the life of ‘freedom’ he has created and subsisted on for so long, and yet it is there, at her front door, that he is himself surprised by a rather definitive denial, and turned away.

In both cases, the problem is caused by the difference between what his character wants to believe and what it actually the case, especially regarding Alex. He wants, perhaps needs, to think that she is a female version of him, his direct and perfectly-tailored counterpart, possibly even the elusive ‘soul mate’ – indeed, she fuels this fantasy by telling him at one point that ‘I’m just like you, but with a vagina’. Of course, she isn’t, and he knows this, in retrospect, piecing events and conversations together in his head. We can tell this, even though it is only implicit in the film. We can tell this because we know how this plays out, from retrospective analyses of our own.

And this is where Solaris comes in, dancing nimbly and unsettlingly on that line between fantasy and memory. Kelvin wants this (re)incarnation of the woman he loved to be more open and readable to him, to be more fully understandable in both her words and her actions. This is why, after the first time such an apparition enters his room, he is reluctant to destroy it or banish it into space. But, because she is a composite from his memories and his memories alone, she winds up acting and being exactly as distant as before – he still cannot know her. He still cannot know anyone beyond what he thinks he knows about them. Furthermore, he is less and less sure that he knows himself. Standard existential crisis fare then. If only it were standard.

By the end, as the planet grows to the point where it threatens the ship, complicated scientific and/or psychological explanations are unnecessary. What it comes down to is a simple choice between survival in a reality where he is forever aware that he did not really know his wife, where he forever feels guilt for not being able to help her, and submersion into the world that produced this (limited) remodelling of her. It seems, upon closing, that he has taken the latter, that he will exist there in a kind of shallow, undemanding happiness, but it is not certain. It is perhaps the closest equivalent in Clooney’s oeuvre to the Rocky III freeze-frame ending.

If this were a boxing movie, one might ask, would you put money on him to win?

Or has he, in giving up his torment, already lost sight of a vital piece of his humanity, of the ragged essence that clings on, inevitably, at the centre of a person’s being?

Maybe Solaris, then, is the main reason I cannot place him in a boxing movie. Because it, arguably, ends in him quitting, throwing in the towel, and no good boxer, no really good boxer, ever quits in the movies. They can lose, and lose badly, but they shouldn’t quit.

But maybe Solaris’ anomalous nature within his filmography means that I’ve got things slightly wrong. Maybe Solaris is the exception that proves the rule. The rule being, in this instance, that just because Clooney doesn’t box doesn’t mean that he doesn’t fight. Maybe it just usually means that he doesn’t fight too well.

Because the fact is that, onscreen, George Clooney is a loser. In fact, he may just be the ultimate loser for our time, for now. History and society simply appears to have made him too aware of the inevitability of failure, of the bastards grinding him down, of being beaten and left out cold on the canvas. It is there in way he throws his tie down after being refused a better job than security guard at an old-acquaintance’s firm in Out of Sight. It is there in the way he talks to Julia Roberts the first time we see them together in Ocean’s Eleven. It is even there when he tries to give advice to his onscreen daughter in One Fine Day about how to behave towards men when she’s older. And yet, with every new film, he still gets back in the ring, trying to find the perfect way to dodge all the punches, even if he knows deep down that that perfect way does not exist. He still ends up taking the hits, one way or another, but the main thing is that he keeps moving forward. Because, well, as his Ryan Bingham says, ‘moving is living’. Make no mistake.