Song choice: Amelia

I have set the following task for my students:

Choose a song that you like primarily for its LYRICS. Show a www.youtube.com clip and discuss the words with the class. Place your discussion on your BLOG.

So i thought that I would have a go at as well.

Amelia: Joni Mitchell

I was driving across the burning desert

When I spotted six jet planes

Leaving six white vapour trails across the bleak terrain

It was the hexagram of the heavens

it was the strings of my guitar

Amelia, it was just a false alarm

The drone of flying engines

Is a song so wild and blue

It scrambles time and seasons if it gets thru to you

Then your life becomes a travelogue

Of picture-post-card-charms

Amelia, it was just a false alarm

People will tell you where they've gone

They'll tell you where to go

But till you get there yourself you never really know

Where some have found their paradise

Other's just come to harm

Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm

I wish that he was here tonight

It's so hard to obey

His sad request of me to kindly stay away

So this is how I hide the hurt

As the road leads cursed and charmed

I tell Amelia, it was just a false alarm

A ghost of aviation

She was swallowed by the sky

Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly

Like Icarus ascending

On beautiful foolish arms

Amelia, it was just a false alarm


Maybe I've never really loved

I guess that is the truth

I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude

And looking down on everything

I crashed into his arms

Amelia, it was just a false alarm


I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel

To shower off the dust

And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust

I dreamed of 747s

Over geometric farms

Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms


This song is about the famous aviator, AND the writer- she seems to be trying to make connections between her experiences and those of Amelia Earhart. Therefore, the ‘six jet planes’ and the ‘six white vapour trails’ becomes connected to her experience- the guitar strings (being a musician). This is also apparent in the way the ‘drone’ of the engines becomes ‘a song so wild and blue’, and she really identifies with the aviator when she says ‘like me she had a dream to fly.’ The ‘clouds at icy altitude’ of Amelia Earhart (literal) becomes a metaphor for the singer- her difficulty in finding love or making proper connections. When she wrote this song, she was on the road driving across America, trying to forget her drummer, who she was in love with but who she had just broken off with. Finally, in her dreams she connects with Amelia Earhart as she dreams of ‘747’s over geometric farms.’



My favourite lines are:

I wish that he was here tonight

It's so hard to obey

His sad request of me to kindly stay away

So this is how I hide the hurt

As the road leads cursed and charmed

I tell Amelia, it was just a false alarm.



I can sense the pain of how difficult breaking up is for her- it doesn’t feel right for her, but she must do what he has told her. The pain is represented well by the sad, choking of the alliteration in ‘how I hide the hurt.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjxIIhHYRA 

A Tribute To Paul Cox

BESIDES being a great film director, Paul Cox is also a great, humanitarian man. The first time I met him was ten years ago at the premiere of his tribute to Norman Kaye: ‘The Remarkable Mr Kaye.’ He was dressed in his usual attire- casual, dark non-descript clothing (not one for worrying about fashion). I was standing five feet away and wanting to make contact, but nervous as anything. Then I see film reviewer David Stratton- also famous but not one to send chills down my spine- so I asked David to introduce me. I didn’t know what to say- so all I did was get his address (in Albert Park) and told him I wanted to write to him. Which I did. Two weeks later.


The next time was at another premiere- the much weaker, it has to be said, ‘Salvation’- about two years ago. Again, I shook his hand and didn’t know what to say. I thanked him for the tapes of his film ‘Vincent’ and ‘The Diaries Of Vaslav Nijinsky’ he so kindly posted me, and left it at that.


The third and quite recent time was at The Avenue Bookshop in Albert Park, at the launch of his new book, ‘Tales From The Cancer Ward.’ You guessed it- I didn’t know what to say- except ‘I’m glad you are still with us’ and ‘you deserve more than the paltry twenty or thirty people that are here to have their book signed. ‘


It’s possible this will be the last time I will see him. He is about seventy, and really lucky to be alive because he received a new liver at the eleventh hour when apparently all seemed pretty much lost.


Paul Cox has directed a multitude of films- over twenty. I haven’t seen all of them, but most of the ones I have seen are incredibly truthful and touching, and rich, and are about real people and about real things, and I think that’s all you can ask from a film, unless it’s ‘ET’ you want to see, or James Bond or ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’


Among the best are the ones about incredibly important and beautiful people like Van Gogh, Nijinsky and Father Damien of ‘Molokai.’ Or they are about simple people and they own -amazing stories- a blind man- Cactus’- an old lady slowly dying- ‘A Woman’s Tale’- a touching and pain-filled marriage- ‘My First Wife.’


Paul Cox must truly love his subjects, and his admiration and love for Vincent Van Gogh is all consuming. Vincent is mentioned innumerable times in the new book. Every moment of ‘Vincent’ is resonate of his love for the great painter. The paintings have been lovingly reproduced for the purposes of the film. There isn’t any pretentious, false Hollywood-style acting- instead, the camera is Vincent’s eyes as he travels across the plains of Holland and France.

The voice over is the magical letters- a truly beautiful, human document. Paul Cox it must have been who had the brilliant idea of having the letters spoken by a narrator as a voiceover- and the choice of person, with his raw and character-laden tone was John Hurt. The letters that were selected were inspired. Vincent’s battles with God, feeling forsaken before he found the path of his true vocation- the Christina Rossetti poem that Vincent loved about the difficult journey that begins ‘Does the road go uphill all the way? Yes to the very end.’ Nothing superficial or melodramatic, just the non-glamorised and unsentimental truth.


Paul Cox’s new book, then, is about enduring the time when you simply cannot say if you will make it. What are the chances of a transplant suddenly saving your life? How much longer do you actually have? What if you haven’t said all you need to say? In between times, Cox rails against Hollywood, capitalism and consumerism: ‘The celebration of the dollar makes people forget that they might just have other talents- apart from making money- that could be used creatively and help others less fortunate’- his deep gratitude and respect for the medical profession, his hatred of the Melbourne Grand Prix (such a short distance away), his appreciation of family and friends, more stark than ever at these times- his visits to his home country, the Netherlands- and all his weird and vivid dreams.


It has been a pleasure to have met a great man like Paul Cox- three times- except I have never known what to say to him...

Recent observations in The Age

Some politics- just a change- early May 2011.




I met somebody new over the weekend and had a look at his blog which was fairly political- with Wikileaks, that sort of thing. It got me thinking that politics is something I don’t touch on much, but I find it fascinating and it does take up a lot of my thinking time. I felt some political urges emerge after reading the paper on the way home on the bus last night, and in bed later.

Obviously the main news of the day was the apparent killing of Osama Bin Laden. It is almost ten years that his name became a household word after September 11, 2001. I was teaching in a crappy school in Mansfield UK near Nottingham, last lesson, when the twin towers were smashed into. This time, teaching again, just before last lesson when one of the students strolled into the room and let me know.



I had a vague feeling about it all afterwards. Neither jubilant or sad, or moved in any way, just vague and uncertain. The only strong reaction I did experience shortly afterwards was when I saw footage of the excited crowds, huge grins on their faces, pumping their arms, celebrating like America had won the World Cup, or it was suddenly discovered that Elvis was alive after all. For some reason the excessive cheering made me feel sick. Was it because the crowd feels suddenly safer now? Or was it because they were sucking in a feeling of revenge? Or was it just mob delirium? We all know how horrible a mob of any kind is.

Next I read an article by Robert Manne that offered an overview of the way Federal politics is going, and how much things have become worse over the last decade and a half, after the election for the first time of John Howard. Worse, in the sense that as a nation we are less generous, more suspicious of ‘outsiders.’ Initially we rejected the notion of ‘White Australia’ and the 1970’s was full of hope with new arrivals coming to Australia and helpfully bringing with them their own exotic culture. Some excerpts from his article:



“In the quarter century between the election of Gough Whitlam and the fall of Paul Keating, Australia experienced a genuine cultural revolution where profound questions about the nation were asked and apparently solid values overturned.


In part, this revolution was general. Throughout the West, millennial certainties concerning race and gender, authority and sexuality, crumbled. But in part the revolution was particular, coloured by the histories of each country where its impact was felt.


In Australia, the revolution focused especially on questions of ethnicity and race. For the first time, at least in large numbers, Australians grasped the unspeakable tragedy visited upon the original inhabitants of the continent; the ugly racism implicit in the white Australia policy; and the arrogance that required postwar European immigrants to abandon their cultures if they wished to be regarded as truly Australian. As a consequence of this revolution, Australia became involved in a process of trying to reinvent itself.


In place of what W. E. H. Stanner had called ''the great Australian silence'' on the question of the Aboriginal tragedy, all Australian governments in that quarter century sought a future based on reconciliation and indigenous self-determination. In place of the white Australia policy, they committed themselves to a policy of racially non-discriminatory immigration. In place of the idea of the migrant assimilation to the Australian cultural norm, they sought to refashion the relation between ''Australians'' and those of ''ethnic'' origin according to the ideas of multiculturalism.


What was interesting was that the era of probing self-criticism was associated not with pessimism and paralysis but with optimism and creativity. During this quarter century a distinctive Australian style emerged in the popular arts - exuberant, quirky, vibrant, and self-consciously innocent and naive.”


Then when Howard was elected, the mood for some of us turned sour and culturally we spiralled backwards:

“From the mid-1990s, the period of reinvention and self-criticism began to falter.


The deep hope for reconciliation was gradually abandoned. The always utopian ideal of Aboriginal self-determination was replaced in the public mind by the all too obvious dystopian reality of dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities.


The critique of the racism implicit in the idea of white Australia was replaced by an increasing hysteria about the supposed threat to border security posed by the arrival of mainly Muslim refugees by boat from central Asia and the Middle East.


The belief that relations between the old Australian population and migrants should be governed by the ideal of multiculturalism was threatened by a growing conviction that one or other of the religious-ethnic groups - ''Asians'' first, then after Tampa and September 11, ''Muslims'' - posed a threat to national cohesion. Because of the influence of a crass new cohort of right-wing commentators - Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen - the cultural struggle against old patterns of racism was reinterpreted as the arrogant attempt of self-appointed thought police to impose their elitist values on the commonsense virtues of ordinary people.


The greatest enemy of Australian self-criticism and reinvention was the man elected PM in 1996. John Howard was disdainful of what he called the perpetual symposium on national identity. During his prime ministership, self-criticism gradually became confused with un-Australian self-hatred.


Howard sought to reduce the shame of the indigenous dispossession to a blemish on the otherwise glorious pages of Australian history. Under his influence, Australians were encouraged to take pride in the success of the post war migration program but to resist the divisive ideology of multiculturalism. Under his influence, the national imagination was militarised, with Gallipoli increasingly unchallengeable as Australia's sacred soil.


Yet the political and cultural complacency that gradually overtook the nation was more insidious than this. Having demonstrated their political and moral superiority in their defeat of the totalitarian Soviet state, the United States and some of its closest anglophone allies, including Australia, managed to convince themselves that they could do no serious political and moral wrong.


The most striking instance of this conviction came in the case of the invasion of Iraq. Although Iraq was invaded against the will of the UN Security Council; although the invasion was justified on the basis of fraudulent intelligence and immediately plunged Iraq into years of astonishing chaos in which more than 100,000 civilians were killed and millions more forced to flee their homes - the three leaders who had mounted the invasion were handsomely voted back to power in the following elections. Howard increased his 2001 majority in the election of 2004. For his role in the illegal and humanly catastrophic invasion of Iraq, there was no price to pay."

Then came great new hope with the election of the Rudd government, and it was soon discovered that he took on far too much, all at once, making wild promises, but at the same time encouraging us to cling to this hope that things will be better, that the image of Australia, and the will to be better will improve much to the relief of us all.

"Despite the early hopes the arrival of the Rudd government excited and its one transcendental moment - the apology to the stolen generations - what was most instructive about its 2½ years of office was how little it was able to transform the spirit of the political culture of conservative populism it inherited. By early 2010 the Rudd government lost its way in hopeless policy confusion, in particular on issues that had assumed symbolic resonance during the Howard years, such as asylum seeker policy and climate change.


The knife-edge election of 2010 may eventually be seen to be one of Australia's more important. What it revealed was that in the immediate future at least there is simply no prospect of Labor returning to power without an overwhelming proportion of Greens preferences. What it also revealed was that as long as the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate there is no prospect of Labor governing effectively without a legislative program making concessions on issues of greatest significance to the Greens.


This is an inherently unstable political situation. A battle for the future of Australia - on one side Labor and the Greens, the partners of a tense, forced marriage; on the other an increasingly strident populist conservative Coalition under the leadership of Tony Abbott - will be fought out over the next two years.


The issues of the battle will most likely include not only the management of the economy but also Muslims and multiculturalism, asylum seeker policy, the referendum to acknowledge indigenous Australians in the constitution and, above all else, climate change and the carbon tax."


His article concludes with the grimmest thought of all:

"Unless the mood of national complacency is successfully challenged, the victor in this battle seems certain to be Tony Abbott."

After reading Manne’s article and feeling somewhat cheered that I haven’t been alone with these thoughts, I found another article in the same edition that gladdened my heart further. Sally Tonkin writes about an organisation called St Kilda Gatehouse that we can all be thankful for. It recognises, unlike many people in society, that street sex workers are real people, with real needs and emotions, too.

"Think, if you will, of the simple joys. Holding someone you love. Being held. A safe place to call home. Space to think, to just exist calmly. A feeling that you matter, that you somehow count for something. Confidence that tomorrow will probably be a pleasure, too. Security.


So many of us have this. For most, it's the result of hard work and, maybe, some good luck. We're aware it is impermanent and under constant threat from malevolent fortune. So we protect it with a primal passion. We don't take it for granted.


Now, imagine a life bereft of such universal, precious things. Imagine a life of pain, of struggle, of abuse in all its forms, and where the smile of a stranger is as rare as an angel. And imagine having arrived at such a destination without having bought a ticket.


Some of the most marginalised people in our community are also some of our most misunderstood. Street sex workers are not standing on those corners because they want to be there. They are not weak - on the contrary. Yes, some have made mistakes. Many of us do. Many teeter on the edge, but have the support to pull back, to be given that second go.


The vast majority of women working on the street are there through misfortune, mongrel circumstance. They are people deserving some sympathy and much help. Yet so often they receive malice and worse.


''A lot of people maybe don't ask the questions behind why they are there on the street corner. But going by how we can see how some of them are treated, we can assume that they are viewed as, I guess, scum - that would be the word that comes to mind - of very low worth, on a low rung in our society. They are abused by both the people who buy their services and also by general society.


''People don't understand that they are wives and sisters and someone's friend. I guess people aren't seeing the human side of who these women are. They see the issue. Some people just see the outcome of street sex work - the nuisance, the noise, and the issues that go along with it.''


The St Kilda Gatehouse, then, is a safe haven for these women to go to when they need support and services. And the support needed is widespread and confronting as you can imagine- childhood sexual abuse, poverty, homelessness, a lack of care and support throughout childhood, addicted parents, shattered homes, the awful scourge of heroin:

''Addiction plays a huge role. Many of the women we see have some common paths that they follow into street sex work. Many came from abusive homes, didn't have the traditional social supports that a lot of us have - family, friends - and things just unravelled in their lives.


Gatehouse has volunteers and donors. ''The way that we build a relationship with the women is through being there for them in their needs, whether it's crisis care or just everyday things. So, food, clothes, jewellery, cosmetics. Being able to have those things means that they come in and they get to know us and we build up a relationship with them. All those items are donated. So, [if you are] cleaning out your wardrobe, half-used lipstick, whatever, we'll take it.''


There's a barbecue every Monday night, with food provided by SecondBite and FareShare. It often becomes a bit of a brainstorming session. One Monday night, the idea of a netball team emerged. A melange of sex workers and volunteers and friends and Gatehouse staff, the team is set for its third season in the local league.


''No one's introduced as a volunteer or a sex worker, we're just all one; you're a wing attack or a goal shooter. We're not this special netball team. We are actually playing in a legit competition. It was pretty scary to put it out there for all of us. We had no idea how this was going to go. But it's been wonderful.''

Isn’t it great that places like this exist? And I’m glad I came across in the back pages of The Age travelling home last week.

Banville and Schlink: key novels

THE SEA, THE READER: unfulfilling holiday fodder.

RECENTLY I have read the necessary books for school, and amidst the usual to and fro of events at home have squeezed in two well known novels whilst listening to the wild cockatoos screeching in trees in Torquay at night.

I enjoyed the first half of THE SEA (JOHN BANVILLE).  I became involved in the mysteries surrounding the past lives of artist Max Morden, and his shifting erotic affections for his friend Chloe’s mother Connie, and later the family’s nursemaid, Rose. And he, remembering momentous events of the past, and helping to revive those memories, driving back in middle age, to the place these events occurred. The first half of the novel is mostly driven by Max’s interest in Connie and his developing awareness of her family. The second half, and less successful for me, was about Chloe who Max develops an interest for, and her mute brother, Myles. Meanwhile Max’s wife Anna dies (she is discussed obviously as part of Max’s adulthood), and Banville takes us back to Max’s childhood again in which Chloe and Myles both drown.

John Banville has an extraordinary vocabulary, and many interesting words are littered throughout his novel. This is just an example of the ‘c’ words:

caducous: adj. falling off easily or before the usual time
catafalque: n. an ornamental structure sometimes used in funerals for the lying in state of the body
cerement: n. a shroud for the dead
cinereal: adj. resembling or consisting of ashes
congeries: n.pl. aggregation, collection
costive: adj. affected by constipation; slow in action or expression
crapulent: adj. relating to the drinking of alcohol or drunkennesscraquelure: n. network of fine cracks found on the surface of some oil paintings

crepitant: adj. having or making a crackling sound

 

I have a similar experience when I read books by Zoe Heller. She also chooses her words thoughtfully and imaginatively. However with Zoe Heller there seems to be a lovely flow to her unusual words. Banville’s words I found off putting, like he seemed to be showing off. Perhaps there were too many clever words and it came across to me as self conscious.

 

The main bit in the denouement involves the drowning of the children. By this point I had become a bit tired of the novel. The current occupants of the lodging house called the ‘Cedars’ that Max has returned to are an ex-army Colonel and a house maid, linked to the catastrophic events many years before, but uninteresting. The slow death of Max‘s wife is also drawn out.

The Sea is beautifully written, however the narrative chopped and changed too much for me and I found the new characters in the second half of the book less compelling . An interesting concept though- to revisit the place of your youth in which momentous events occurred.  Something terribly sad about the idea as well.

THE READER (BERNARD SCHLINK) brought to me even less satisfaction. A few big jumps in time but no flashbacks. Like The Sea, it is written in first person by a male narrator, Michael Berg. This novel, too, deals with the erotic thoughts of a young man (he is 15 at the start)  and a considerably older woman. These erotic fantasies are much more fulfilled. The love interest is the enigmatic Hanna, who suddenly disappears at one point and re-emerges as a defendant in a Nazi war crime trial, for which she is found guilty. Hanna was a very blurry character for me, and dissatisfying. She liked to use the expression ‘kid’ in reference to the narrator a lot, and said little else, and I found her unconvincing. She was a tram conductress before the trial, and spent the rest of her life in prison thereafter. The epiphany she experiences whilst inside was interesting but I found myself not caring in any particular way for her.

A key question imposed by the novel is in regards to the level of culpability we should inflict on those who followed the orders of the SS in Germany during the Second World War. Hanna and the other German officers allowed a large group of Jewish prisoners to burn to death in a church that has been bombed. They should have opened the doors and let them out. Hanna’s involvement is complex because she harbours a secret that implicates her in crimes  she may have otherwise been not guilty of. Her extended time in prison therefore is a tragedy, however Michael unfailingly tries to keep her spirit alive by sending tapes to her.

We see the preparedness of the SS guards to let the 300 Jewish women burn as heinous and insufferable. For me there are many Holocaust stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that are far more compelling. Hanna was not an evil character, and I found myself wondering if Bernard Schlink wanted us to empathise with Hanna.  At the end of the story, perhaps, but perhaps not in the course of the events that took place in the war. The ability to forgive is always important and powerful, not to mention healthy. The film ‘Dead Man Walking’ deals with this concept powerfully. And the Australian film called The Father, with an elderly and brilliant Max Von Sydow, deals with similar themes to those that appear in The Reader.

'Never a warm leaf to unfold': Lawrence and the impact of the Great War

NOW  I have read a few little novellas, first published in 1923 together in one volume: The Fox/ The Captain’s Doll/ The Ladybird- D H Lawrence. World War One had a profound effect on Lawrence’s writing, as it did many other writers. We can see it clearly in the themes embedded in these stories. It is not surprising when we consider that Lawrence was forced into exile at this point by British authorities, who were uncomfortable with Lawrence for a few reasons: he was living, in 1915, in Cornwall, a place in which it could be argued that you could collude with the German navy. He was by this time fairly newly married to one Frieda von Richthofen, cousin to the ‘Red Baron.’ He and Frieda went for late night walks with their torches and sat inside their cottage singing German folk songs. And above all, Lawrence was a writer, and excused from war time services after a humiliating episode that occurred at Bodmin barracks (described in the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo.)  He referred to the episode in a letter as a ‘spiritual disaster.’ The key idea, I think, that the three novellas deal with is the idea of the impact on the individual of war, and his or her dehumanisation as a result. War has created damaged people and damaged societies, and this theme was an obsession with Lawrence from his early story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ in1914 onwards.

The least interesting, for me, was The Ladybird. Its major characters have all suffered loss, and know people who have suffered imprisonment and serious wounds. On his return from war, Basil is a much changed man. Lady Daphne (based on Lawrence’s real friendship with Lady Cynthia Asquith), yearns deeply for the return of her husband from war as the Armistice approaches. Waiting for him she thinks of his body, ‘beautiful, white-fleshed , with the fine sprinkling of warm-brown hair like tiny flames.’ She remembers their ‘loved-days’ and their shared ‘lovely, simple intimacy.’ The Ladybird reminds us, on Basil’s return, of how much the war altered people, and destroyed relationships. The first thing that Lady Daphne notices is the scar. For Basil, seeing his wife again is a miracle. She is no longer a girl, but a woman now. His eyes quickly scan her face, her throat, her breast. She has trouble reconnecting and doesn’t want to touch him. He has become ‘like risen death’ to her. She secretly holds in her hand a thimble which contains the ‘ladybird’ crest, given to her by Count Dionys. The Count, a German prisoner at Voynich Hall, has usurped her husband’s place in her affections, and she has visited the Count several times whilst her husband has been at war. In Dionys, Lawrence presents us with a sympathetic psychological portrait of the enemy. It was the dehumanization of the enemy that was one of the things about wartime that appalled him. War time alters things between people for ever.

The Fox is a much better story. And the weight of the war is everywhere in this story as well. It is because of the war that two women- March and Banford- are running a farm together, when ordinarily these women might have married. Their potential husbands are at war and are possibly being killed. They have a young male visitor who becomes like the fox that kills the women’s chickens. He is like a predator as he sets his sights on March. And there is a none- too- subtle fire within Banford as she, jealously, worries she will lose her friend. Henry Grenfell is insistent on March marrying him. The mere touch of Grenfell troubles and confuses  March as he delves deeper into her psyche: ‘..he drew her gently towards him and kissed her neck, softly. She winced and trembled and hung away. But his strong young arm held her, and he kissed her softly again.’

 Grenfell is sly like the fox, and equally dangerous. Much later he literally gets rid of his opposition in the guise of a falling tree that kills Banford. I remember travelling through the Berkshire countryside in 2002, not far from where Lawrence was living in Chapel Farm Cottage where he wrote a good portion of The Fox. There was a pub that we passed called The Fox, and it looked 17^th or 18^th Century, so it made me wonder. The woman who now lives at the cottage found a fork with the initials DHL printed on it in her back garden. I wrote to one of Lawrence’s chief biographers about this via email, and he was unable to verify whether or not the Lawrence’s made imprints on their cutlery.

                                                                                                              

The third of the trilogy of novellas is The Captain’s Doll which is a lighter and more fanciful story, beautifully written, but containing its dark passages too. The germ of the story came to Lawrence when he and Frieda visited Frieda’s wealthy sister, Nusch, and her family, at Zell-am-See for a month in Austria from July 1921.  Lawrence found it impossible to write here, but it was restorative and before he left he was able to set foot for the first time on a glacier.

In The Captain’s Doll, we are given a fascinating snapshot into life in the defeated territories after the war. Inflation is rampant and poverty and corruption abounds. The most significant section of the novella takes place at one of the afore-mentioned glaciers, as we are witness to an excursion to the glacier by Hannele (the Frieda character) and Captain Hepburn (the Lawrence character.) The pair have climbed the sheer rock face and find themselves at a great height overlooking the valley and a multitude of streams and rivers rushing downwards in waterfalls and cascades. Both are exhilarated, yet they are ‘not in good company together.’ Hannele exclaims ‘wonderful! wonderful!’whilst Hepburn’s response is ‘Yes- and horrible. Detestable.’ He says he is no ‘mountain-topper’ which places him at odds with the healthy young locals, bare arms and bare chest, with all the trendy mountain gear- the knapsack and alpenstock, the ‘ghastly fanged boots’, all of which Hepburn finds ‘repulsive.’ He admits to hating people who are ‘prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted’, hating the mountains for their ‘affectation’, whilst she describes them in awe-struck terms as ‘god’s mountains.’

They finally arrive at the main glacier, the unhappy couple, so at odds with each other! Hepburn it seems is reluctantly fascinated by the whole thing, and is determined to climb all over it. Hannele wisely keeps her distance. Then he peers over the edge and sees a world of ice: ‘a terrible place of hills and valleys and slopes, all motionless, all of ice.’ And he is frightened of it. Once he descends, safely, he is full of emotion, but can only comment, bitterly :’I’ve been far enough. I prefer the world where cabbages will grow on the soil. Nothing grows on glaciers.’

So why does Hepburn have such a repugnant view of the glacier? For me the clue lies in the fascinating and telling response he has to what he has witnessed:’ Never a warm leaf to unfold, never a gesture of life to give off. A world sufficient unto itself in lifelessness, all this ice.’

Hepburn experiences the glacier as a place of death. With his focus on war and the atmosphere around him, the natural world has turned sour and left him with bitter feelings. Everything is sterile. Especially at this time, with the war machine in full swing, life is especially precious to Lawrence, and real feeling, real emotion, real human contact is everything. The war tainted his thoughts and his subject matter and the characters in his books as he wrote them for the rest of his life.

The Accidental Traveller

THIS morning I went to the city market with my wife and two kids. She shopped for fruit and vegetables, and I took off with the kids to Readings in Carlton and bought the youngest one a picture story book about a little girl called Lulu. We drove back to the market where we were all reunited, close by the American doughnut van. The plan was for the wife and kids to go somewhere for the day and listen to popular local singer and actor, Justine Clark, while I caught a tram home with all the market shopping.

In fact, as it turned out, I caught a lot of public transport today, and decided at the end of it that it is much more interesting than driving. When the tram arrived, I had no idea how I was going to get the heavy trolley onto it. You see, I had a dozen eggs, two kilos of large potatoes, and lots of carrots on the bottom rung of the trolley alone. On the top rung I had a multitude of different types of fruit: apples, peaches, nectarines, kiwi fruit, bananas, and so on, and so it all adds up!

Well as it turns out, there was a tall, stocky man already on the tram, willing to lend a hand. From the bottom step I sort of coerced the trolley in his path on the top step, and he hauled it in for me. He had an American accent and spoke softly , almost in a feminine way, which belied the strength that was apparent in his arms and his body. He got off a couple of stops later when we were still in the city, and he caught my eye. He seemed to long for some kind of gratitude or reassurance, which I gave him. His face seemed to have a strange sense of sadness or longing.

The journey became a bit uninteresting then- or at least, I stopped looking about me- as I became immersed in Anne Tyler’s ‘The Accidental Tourist.’ I only started it last night.

At the end of the journey, which was also the tram terminus, I was once again stuck with the slightly disconcerting idea that I would have to lug the heavy trolley down this time. I thought I might have to bounce it down onto the second rung, then the bottom rung, then a bit jolt onto the ground, and I was worried the metal wheels might snap. And lo and behold, out of nowhere came a voice- two in fact- and I was rescued again by some civilian decency. This time it was two big Asian girls, very good natured, who held the bottom end of the trolley each so I could manoeuvre it down without incident. It ended up being quite a good journey home. I became immersed in my book and had some much needed help along the way.

Well when I got home I had to do some washing and putting clothes out in the dry February heat. Then I started putting the food away as well, ensuring that the cold meat went in the fridge quickly. At the back of my mind I knew that I had an eye appointment soon at a large retail shopping centre, so I didn’t have a lot of time. And yes, more public transport, but no excess luggage this time, just my new book. The tidying and putting away took ages, and I wanted to clean my teeth properly because I knew I was going to have my mouth quite close to the face of an optometrist in half an hour, which is what happens when they look deep into your eyes with machines.

So I left home quickly and had to wait an inordinate amount of time for the bus around the corner that would take me to the shopping centre and my appointment. The bus finally came- waiting ages meant I would be late- and I chose a seat quite close to the front. Within two stops a woman who looked like she might be from Thailand sat right next to me, even though there were plenty of vacant seats about. I didn’t mind because she was kind of pretty, but as it turns out very fidgety. She drank lots of water and her phone rang twice. She had short conversations in a language I didn’t understand, and gesticulated quite a lot. She was also very conscious of people about her. As the bus became quite full, she seemed obsessed with ensuring that frail and elderly people had a seat, which was kind of her.

At the shopping centre at last, I became lost briefly- I saw a phrase in ‘The Accidental Tourist’ on the way that sums me up perfectly: ‘geographic dyslexia.’ I was half an hour late. The reading of the novel along the way meant that my demeanour and my language changed when I spoke to the optometrist. This always happens when I see a film I enjoy, or read a book I like a lot. I get very easily influenced. It happened dramatically when I first read ‘Catcher In The Rye’ all those years ago, and it happened now with Anne Tyler. It also happened, somewhat dangerously, when I left the cinema when I first saw the remake of  ‘Cape Fear.’ I walked and felt like the deranged character played by Robert De Niro.

Somewhat typically, I got lost again when I started looking for the bus stop when I left the optometrist. I read intermittently on the way home, but the people scenery was too interesting. Firstly at the bus stop I noticed the teenage girls- who all looked the same- flirting with the teenage boys thirty or forty feet away. One of the girls yelled out ‘you look hot!’, which was a ‘come on’ gesture if ever I’ve heard one.

On the bus, there was a bald retarded man sitting next to another sullen man with a scraggly beard and dishevelled clothing. They were looking at their DVD copy of a Tom Cruise film called ‘Knight and Day’ as if it was a first edition of ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Ulysses.’

At the first stop a youngish black man got on, wearing high boots and a black shirt unbuttoned all the way down exposing an unremarkable chest. He was very unhappy and restless and definitely ‘had issues’ to use a colloquial phrase. His feet jutted out of the aisle too much, and a nice woman brushed past them as she walked to the back of the bus. He grimaced when she said sorry as if she had trodden on his toes wearing screw in football boots. A bit later another woman, with a pram this time, also touched his feet as she sauntered past, also saying sorry. Very decent these women! His petulant retort was ‘no you’re not!’ which took her aback. He had some papers in his hand which he scrutinized carefully all the way. They didn’t look like a big deal to me, but he held them as if they were some precious, mysterious letters. When he got off the bus, the bus driver waved and said ‘thanks very much!’, and the black man ignored him completely! He limped as he got off which reminded me a lot of Crooks from ‘Of Mice and Men’, so suddenly I felt sorry for him.

Not long before my journey’s end, with not much more of ‘The Accidental Tourist’ read, a young Asian couple got and sat opposite me. She wore tracksuit pants and had a gaping hole up her sleeve so you could see her whole black bra if you wanted to. She looked about eighteen. Her boyfriend? also looked eighteen, and he had the languid look of irresponsibility about him. His pants were loose and his underwear showed and he grinned a lot as if he was incredibly carefree. Except he wasn’t. The two of them had a toddler still in a pram, a sad, sullen looking boy, with the sort of expression you would have on your face if you had young parents who were really not very ready for you to come along. I felt sorry for her. She looked like she cared deeply, and was doing her best to be a responsible parent. The partner, on the other hand, was very distracted and didn’t take a lot of notice of his child. There were, however, two telling incidents. The first was when he lunged, suddenly, for his boy and ran his big brown hand over his kid’s hair in an aggressive and over the top fashion which hurt the little boy. A few minutes later he casually grabbed one of his cheeks and pulled it vigorously and caused the poor little boy to grimace and well up in tears. The mother laughed, it seemed, out of not wanting to clash with her partner, but it probably pained her. The boy was stoic though. His face became resolute and determined and he shrugged this off as just another incident in a bewildering day out with mum and dad.

Mike Leigh: A New Film, New Controversy

MIKE LEIGH IN THE PAPER



MIKE Leigh has come under the reviewer’s scrutiny in The Age on both days this weekend (Jan 28-29). His latest film, ‘Another Year’ has just opened in Melbourne. In both cases, it isn’t just a discussion about the film that unfolds. It is also an examination of Leigh as a director. In terms of critical appraisal he is a bit hit and miss. You will find many reviewers across the globe who admire Leigh’s work, and just as many who will find plenty of fault.


Tom Ryan makes his focus immediately clear by using the words ‘rough ride’ at the beginning. For him, Leigh can be a bit depressing, and ‘Another Year’ is a case in point. He also uses the word ‘caricature’ to describe Lesley Manville’s character, a key role. Ryan thinks the actors aren’t given room in the script to move. That they start off a certain way and fail to change, or grow: ‘There are moments when the characters seemed poised to break out of the straitjackets they’ve been forced to wear, but Leigh won’t cut them loose.’ This seems like a sensible review to me. He finds fault with the way the characters fail to emerge, and that’s fine, even if I don’t share his point of view. A good feature of Ryan’s review is that it is objective. He offers, as he sees it, an excellent example of a character in a recent Leigh film that did change, and did emerge, and therefore he gives it a glowing assessment. The film is ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’, and the actress was Sally Hawkins, playing Poppy: ‘..that film led us to see that there was much more to its protagonist than initially met the eye.’ Perhaps Tom Ryan wanted Mary to eventually find some peace of mind? I am personally glad she didn’t.


Also this weekend, a much longer discussion, primarily focused on the director, as well as his recent film, by Stephanie Bunbury: ‘True Leigh Low On Sympathy.’ (which follows at the end).


The discussion starts with a well known Leigh quote about each film being essentially the same, and the object being to create people ‘with all our faults and virtues- vulnerable, good and bad.’ And again, ‘all my films, first and foremost, are about that sympathy for people.’ The problem for Stephanie Bunbury is, she can’t find the sympathetic note that Leigh searches for in his films. She refers to what Leigh calls ‘complexities and issues’ as ‘misery.’ She then goes through a list of his back catalogue, creating divisive and usually derisive adjectives to describe his characters, from 1977’s ‘Abigail’s Party’, ‘which satirised the petty ambitions of its suburban characters with a steely contempt’, all the way through to ‘Another Year ‘, and Lesley Manville’s character Mary, representative of a string of ‘generally appalling women’, many of which are even ‘ridiculous and despicable.’


Bunbury’s biggest beef is with the women in Leigh’s film, and her discussion is from a strong feminist standpoint. She is entitled, obviously, to this point of view. I have seen most of the films that Bunbury is uncomfortable with. The fact that my opinion differs so strongly can only be in the interpretation of these films. Why we interpret the films differently is anybody’s guess. A big reason must be that she is female and I am male. But of course it must be more than that. To counteract, therefore, some of Bunbury’s arguments:


First and foremost I have a lot of sympathy for many of the characters that Bunbury struggles to enjoy. I can’t see the ‘steely contempt’ drawn in the people in ‘Abigail’s Party’ for example. Even the husbands in the film, that are either sullen or dull, or trampled upon and hopeless, are ordinary people. They have their faults and virtues in bucket loads. They are a certain type, but seem to me to be authentic, and this is what I am seeking.


I am yet to see what Bunbury refers to as Leigh’s ‘nastiest film, ‘High Hopes.’ She admits that ‘Life Is Sweet’ is ‘comparatively benign’ but still refers to the way in which Leigh ‘wrings maximum snark from lower middle-class Wendy’s embarrassment about the shabby state of her front porch.’ Again, our focus is very different. I don’t remember this scene. For me this film is memorable for its treatment of teenage ennui in the character played by Jane Horrocks, which has nothing to do with treatment of class, or a ‘vicious portrait of suburban aspiration’ as Bunbury refers to it.


Then we get to Bunbury’s description of some of Leigh’s women. She uses the words pretentious, neurasthenic, appalling, resentful, infuriating, dried-up, screeching, amongst others to define them.






So it occurs to me, more than ever, that a reviewer writes for a certain audience, and sometimes it isn’t very broad. Stephanie Bunbury looks at the film from a certain angle- a very personal, feminist one. Mostly because I am male, my concerns are different to hers. Therefore my reading of the film is different. Therefore I cannot read too much into a Bunbury review of a film of this type because I know she will come from a completely different angle, with a completely different focus, and this will cause a wide variation in our levels of appreciation.

I saw ‘Another Year’ and loved it. Just like I have loved most of Leigh’s work, particular ‘Nuts In May’, ‘Vera Drake’, ‘Secrets and Lies’ and ‘All Or Nothing.’ The film centred particularly on Lesley Manville, in her role as a struggling woman called Mary. There were a number of Bergman like shots of Mary’s beautiful but lined and tired face in close-up. Leigh burrowed his way into her soul. Mary’s face reflected her pain and longing beautifully. The film ends, quietly, as it stays with Mary who is sitting around a dinner table with her friends. She is almost sobbing and is completely lost. She simply doesn’t know what to do. As with Timothy Spall’s tear-stained face when he realises his wife doesn’t love him anymore; as with Jane Horrocks, crying when Alison Steadman forces her to face her predicament; Vera Drake shell-shocked when the police gate-crash her party: my experience is that these are some of the most moving scenes in cinema.


For me, none of Bunbury’s adjectives fit Mary. And I certainly don’t see her as ‘generally appalling’, ‘ridiculous and despicable.’ Mary moved me. I felt sorry for her. I am full of sympathy. I thought she was sad and helpless, but not pathetic. There are many women and men like Mary in society. Life has passed them by somehow. She is getting older and she is desperate for some good company. Touching somebody or comfort in some way initially, intimacy even better, later. A good car that is reliable. Her own house. Is this all too much to ask? It seems it is, and Mary hides behind her insecurities by pretending things are ok, and by drinking too much, and by visiting her generous friends too often. And therefore she is very real. And Mike Leigh is giving people like Mary a voice. To remind us that fragile and dependant and troubled people like Mary exist.

And it’s not just the women in life who struggle. Again, a very honest and a very real character is Ronnie, who is in his sixties, and suddenly finds himself alone after the death of his wife. Ronnie is shell shocked, bewildered by this turn of events, and Leigh provides a long scene in which Mary and Ronnie are by themselves in Tom and Gerie’s house, communicating and reaching out to each other and providing succour in a world in which they desperately crave affection.


I reject outright Bunbury’s notion of a lack of sympathy, a type of sneering, and the negativity she associates with these characters. But perhaps we come from completely different worlds with different experiences.

 







True Leigh low on sympathy


Stephanie Bunbury


January 29, 2011






"Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity," says Mike Leigh.


Intensely scrutinised and true to type, Mike Leigh's miserable middle and lower-class characters have little room to grow.


'THE truth is that each film is different," says Mike Leigh, "but as Jean Renoir said, we all go on making the same film. What all these films are about is saying to people 'look, this is how we are with all our faults and virtues — vulnerable, good and bad'. All my films, first and foremost, are about that sympathy for people." How elusive, then, sympathy can be.


At 67, Leigh is often described as Britain's greatest filmmaker. With five Oscar nominations behind him, an OBE, the top awards from Cannes and Venice film festivals (for Secrets and Lies in 1996 and Vera Drake in 2004) among dozens of other prizes, he sometimes seems almost beyond criticism.


He is certainly the only director in the world who can regularly muster sufficient funding for projects that begin with no script, no star cast and no guiding idea — at least, none that Leigh is prepared to share with anybody.


The scripts are worked up through improvisations, typically over a period of six months. "To be honest, the fact that I'm allowed to do what I do in the way that I do it never ceases to amaze me," Leigh said once. "I think I've been remarkably lucky. Nobody has ever interfered, ever."


Leigh's latest film, Another Year, features several of his regular collaborators — Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as Tom and Gerri, a devoted couple in late middle age, Lesley Manville as their neurotically needy younger friend — whose comings and goings are observed over the span of four seasons marked out in their garden allotment, an oasis of satisfaction.


Outside, misery — or, as Leigh puts it, "the many complexities and issues about how we live our lives" — lies drably in wait. Gerri, a counsellor by day, must cope on more evenings than she might want with Mary, who is perpetually agitated and endlessly unlucky with men, cars and drinking choices. Tom, salt-of-the-earth that he is, has his own millstone: Peter Wight's Ken, a widower whose gloom has settled on him like cloud on a mountain top. Some people, Leigh agrees, have no talent for happiness.


Another Year is Leigh's 13th feature-length film. His first was Bleak Moments (1972), but it was his plays made for the BBC in the '70s that established his credentials. Perhaps the most enduring and important was Abigail's Party (1977), which satirised the petty ambitions of its suburban characters with a steely contempt.


But Meantime (1983) was even more savage, the lives of a family on a London housing estate in an endless dreary round of broken washing machines and the ritual humiliation of the dole office. It was thus that Leigh became the anointed chronicler of Thatcher's Britain.


Five years later, his first film made for the cinema in 17 years, High Hopes, took on the ascendant new Tories with their shoulder pads and renovations in what remains Leigh's nastiest film: he wasted little sympathy on them. Even in his next film, the comparatively benign Life is Sweet (1990), Leigh wrings maximum snark from lower middle-class Wendy's embarrassment about the shabby state of her front porch.


Not everyone is persuaded that these vicious portraits of suburban aspiration are the greatest films Britain has made. Some have ventured that, particularly in these early films, the upper-crust characters — and, even more despicably, those who aspire to be like them — are no more than caricatures, crudely drawn ones at that. He has also been accused of misogyny, although his affectionate portraits of women in Vera Drake (2004) and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) have gone some way to redressing the damage done to his reputation by Naked (1993). It was this film, unquestionably his grimmest, that was his most controversial.


Naked opens with a shambling street philosopher, David Thewlis's Johnny, raping a woman in a Manchester back alley. We then follow him through his meanderings to London, ostensibly in an attempt to escape a beating from his victim's family, where all the women he meets are similarly suffering, sad and generally supine. It was their collective failure to provide any resistance to Johnny's malevolent charisma that raised some feminists' ire.


None of this criticism seemed to touch Leigh; he is a practised curmudgeon and, moreover, has a capacity to hit the ball back so hard that he ends up winning every point. "Obviously, the assertions that it was a misogynist film are ridiculous and not even worth talking about," he said dismissively at the time. "I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important," he said on another occasion. "Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity." There is no arguing, it seems, with "everyone".


More telling to me than the rapist as dubious hero, however, is the string of risibly pretentious, neurasthenic and generally appalling women, usually childless and sliding into a resentful middle age, who pin down the loser's end of so many of Leigh's ensemble casts. The infuriating Mary in Another Year is one in a long line that starts with Beverly in Abigail's Party and includes the dried-up Barbara in Mean-time, the screeching lower middle-class Valerie, craving parity with her posh neighbour, in High Hopes and Monica in Secrets and Lies, all of whom are drawn as simultaneously ridiculous and despicable.


Leigh does not see them this way; Mary, like her predecessors, is both victim of circumstance and author of her own fate as, indeed, we all are. "I refuse to allow anybody to draw me into reducing (her) in such a way that misses the point of the film," he snaps, "which is the complexity of how we are."


Leigh has compared the complex reality he sets out to depict in his films to that in a documentary. The worlds he shows are so detailed they seem to exist independently of the camera. This is the purpose of months of rehearsal. "We really know who these people are. We know everything there is to know about them socially, economically and in every detail of their lives".


And it is this, really, that seems to me the real trouble with Mike Leigh. Nobody knows everything about anyone. If his characters seem exaggerated, it is because they are over-examined types, each with a set of characteristics and preferences that add up to someone we feel, often with a painful sort of amusement, we recognise.


And if their habitual tics, such as Imelda Staunton's constant invitations to all and sundry to have a cup of tea in Vera Drake, rapidly become tiresome, it is because they are repeated with so much significance. Every time Vera delivers the tea line, we tick off her chief perceived trait of homely kindness. Almost everything said illustrates some aspect of the character saying it. If they are types, they are assiduously true to those types.


This means that it is well nigh impossible for them to change. Leigh maintains that while some people see Another Year as optimistic and others as pessimistic, it is actually neither, its much-vaunted complexity meaning that it contains many possibilities for the future. Certainly, we may each read these situations differently but the characters are too firmly fixed to alter those situations. There are Leigh films — All or Nothing (2002) is a moving example — that end with catharsis, but it is through confrontation between selves that remain immutable in themselves.


Perhaps this doesn't matter. Leigh says he likes his films and is pleased they are out in the world and, with the exception of High Hopes, so am I. His admirable commitment, however, shouldn't mean his films are beyond argument. And however much actors enjoy those long rehearsal times and getting to the bottom of their characters' histories — and however great some of the performances — the fact remains that others emerge as cheap parody, less convincing than those drummed up on unrehearsed first takes on the Hollywood films Leigh so despises. As for the sympathy he feels for them — well, that remains as elusive as ever.