And what becomes of you my love?

My brother told me about The Office on the same day as the attacks on the World Trade Centers in 2001. Of course, like everyone else I spent the 11^th September 2001 watching the planes endlessly crash and crash again into the skyscrapers, watching the towers fall, the dust, the death. I didn’t watch The Office until much later. But the two events – the best comedy show of all time and the most spectacular terrorist attack - are forever linked and not just because of their coincidence in time for me. They are both masterpieces of the spectacle of agony. If anything the excruciating, intimacy of the slow, torturous, social deaths of David Brent are more painful to watch. 9/11 was, to my eyes, a movie.  The Office was real life.

So I experienced 9/11 – a real event – as a fiction too outlandish, too horrific, to categorise in familiar terms. (Indeed when my brother told me what was happening in New York  my only frame of reference was the mid 1970s remake of King Kong where the monster climbed the World Trade Centres. The Office was different. Sure, he was a figment of Ricky Gervais’ imagination but as a reminder of personal failings shared by everyone to some extent – vanity, stupidity, arrogance, delusions of adequacy –  David Brent was usually too close to the bone for comfort. The Office, even after multiple viewings is painfully funny to watch.

Last year’s reprise of the main character David Brent Life on the Road got ‘mixed reviews’. For me, though it is a dark masterpiece. Particularly in the way that Gervais breaks the fourth wall. At one point in the film we see, on screen, Brent paying members of his band to go for a drink with him. This is a really pathetic example of how little respect they have for him. Brent is in his fifties now, a forlorn, lost soul whose pursuit of the depressingly hackneyed dream of making it as a rock star drives the plot of the film.

He endures insult upon insult, and seems only occasionally aware of how the rest of the world holds him in contempt. The disturbing, almost suicide inducing rupture of the fourth wall comes late in the film. Some of the characters actually start to stick up for Brent. One character spends £2000 of his own money on fake snow that he’d persuaded Brent not to buy so as to save his money and then admits on camera that he actually likes him as a person. The other band members willingly go for a drink with him. A female character, who’d shown a soft spot for Brent all through the film reaches out to touch his hand in the very last shot of the film.

But what I couldn’t shake off was this thought  - What if Brent had paid them all to say these nice things about him on camera? What if he’d been paying the ‘love interest’ all along to take his part? Gervais is inviting us to take consolation from the conclusion of the film but because of the bleakness of what has gone before, it seems to me that this is a ruse - the equivalent of a version of 11th September 2001 where Tom Cruise, Will Smith, and Brad Pitt manage to stop the planes at the last minute.  No one believes in that.

Living in Oblivion

You can never watch the same film twice. I have just watched Living in Oblivion again; twenty years after I first saw it. This is a film about how you can never shoot the same scene twice. There’s something in this about how children love to have the same stories read to them, something about how perceptions of sameness are really reflections of an attitude of defeat. Why is it that boredom is an invention of adulthood? What could be more definitive of the loss of childhood than the statement “I’m bored!”?

Living in Oblivion is a film about acting, about the difficulties of making a film; the opening twenty five minutes of the film shows repeated attempts to shoot the same thirty second  scene over and over again to no avail. Each time something goes wrong – a light bulb blows, a microphone drops into shot, the actors forget their lines, the actors perform incredibly, movingly well but the cameraman has slipped away to vomit and the magic is lost. You can never step into the same river twice; I guess now that when I saw this film first I saw in it echoes of a novel I loved  - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman  - in which the narrator fails to ever start the plot.

A film that can’t be shot, a novel that can’t get going and yet I really love both of them.  If something can’t be said to have begun then its end is perpetually deferred. The attitude that you can’t step into the same river twice is both fatalistic and hopeful, in short, it is an admission and denial of death. Especially when you are in a river of shit. Everything repeats and so, the rest is up to you. I like Yeats' decision to celebrate the futility of life given the inevitability of death:

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. 

What matter if the ditches are impure? 

What matter if I live it all once more? 

Endure that toil of growing up; 

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress 

Of boyhood changing into man; 

The unfinished man and his pain 

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; 

The finished man among his enemies?— 

How in the name of Heaven can he escape 

That defiling and disfigured shape 

The mirror of malicious eyes 

Casts upon his eyes until at last 

He thinks that shape must be his shape? 

And what's the good of an escape 

If honour find him in the wintry blast? 

I am content to live it all again 

And yet again, if it be life to pitch 

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, 

A blind man battering blind men; 

The sentiments expressed in that poem are a bit too cranky for my tastes. Still I like how it rhymes. Actually I can easily imagine Steve Buscemi, the main actor in Living in Oblivion reading the lines. In particular the whiney ones about getting dumped that follow "A blind man battering blind men..." that I have not posted because they're just too maudlin.