I heard on the radio that we export more to Ireland than we do to Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. Is this true? And, if it is, how on earth can this country hope to survive other than by gambling on houses and half-witted bankers? Incidentally, Swift got bankers in one - ‘I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.’
State of the Nation
July 28th, 2010Ansel Adams
July 28th, 2010And, since this is rapidly turning into a photography blog, I ought to draw your attention to this – $200 million worth of Ansel Adams negatives found. I can never quite make up my mind about Adams. I like the fact that he shows a pristine world unaffected by humans and, plainly, he is a technician of genius. But is it enough? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
A Footnote to Susan Sontag
July 27th, 2010It took me a while to realise that this new site allows comments on all pages. I was approving comments and then wondering where they had gone. Finally, I found them in the Gallery or Selected Articles.
Over the last few days a lively and tetchy string has formed itself around my Film and Lomography article. (I’ll leave aside Bjorn’s comment that I am a fanatic. Is it difficult for people called Bjorn to appreciate prose tone?) The occasion for this debate was a picture that appeared in several papers by Antony Spencer of fields of lavender. Denis Waugh says it was photoshopped to death, Spencer says it wasn’t. The poles of the debate are the manipulation of images in Photoshop against the anthenticity of images taken direct from film. Spencer makes this crucial point:
‘For heavens sake even choosing a film such as Velvia (arguably the most common film type for serious landscape photographers) is instant manipulation. You get much stronger saturated colours and more contrast before you’ve even started. Seriously that is a very naive statement.‘
He is right of course. Both my primary films - Fuji Velvia and Kodak Tri-X – are chemically rigged to produce certain effects – lush and landscapey, grainy and newsy. On the other hand, it is an extraordinarily abstract argument to say that because they are both ways of rigging an image, film chemistry and Photoshop are essentially the same. This would be like saying getting a ticket for illegal parking was the same as being hung for the same offence. Degree is always more important than abstract category.
The question is: what is the important difference, the true difference of degree, between a photoshopped picture and one printed straight for a negative? This is, you will realise, not just about photography. Let’s call it a metaphor.
I have just reread Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which, being published in 1977, had nothing whatsoever to say about digital but did have a great deal to say about the effect of photographic reality on the world. It is a flawed book and, in style, somewhat too much of its time, but she makes the important point that the photographic image is autonomous, whereas we tend to see it as dependent on the world. It is a new reality – this is obvious but easily forgotten. This post is a footnote to that thought.
The important difference between the digitally rigged and filmically rigged picture is not one of quality. This is the terms in which people talk of this – notably in terms of the extent in which digital can or cannot match the resolution of film or its special quality. Let us say that, one way or another it can, and leave that aside.
What matters is the quality of commitment. There are several levels to this. First, exposing a film changes the world, as represented by the emulsion, irrevocably. With digital you can instantly delete. Second, the photographer must commit to the production process by buying film and having it developed and/or scanned and printed. Third, he must make an (effectively) irreversible decision when he puts the film in the camera. If he chooses Velvia 50 to shoot a cocktail party, he will fail as surely as if he chooses Tri-X to shoot a field of lavender (actually, that might just work). I probably could think of more forms of commitment but they would all make the same point.
Now you could argue that all that matters is the image and my commitment or otherwise does not affect the image. You would, obviously, be wrong. I know when I shoot film that I am behaving, thinking and imagining differently from when I shoot digital. I also know that I am in an argument with the machinery and chemicals in such a way that, sometimes, they will get the upper hand and produce an entirely unexpected image. I like this. The only way you could argue against my state of mind having an effect on the image would be to say that I am irrelevant, that the camera takes the picture. This is a possible extension of Sontag but not a credible one.
The point about commitment is you have to think in the moment, you cannot snap away – spray and pray, they call it – and look to the future to fix your image. Photography is about the moment above all else. It invented the moment as the great contemporary fiction, our new knowledge of reality. Doubtless digitalists can do this but, for me, film does it better and always will. Technology adds but it always subtracts.
Snaps, Progress and Carmen
July 19th, 2010in The Sunday Times yesterday I wrote about film photography (and lomography), I reviewed Daniel Ben-Ami’s book Ferrari’s For All: In Defence of Economic Progress and I wrote about the Royal Opera House’s project to film Carmen in 3D.
Film and Lomography
July 18th, 2010Satan was the worst photographer in Hell. It was an embarrassment so, one day, he told Beelzebub, his go-to guy, to see if he could come up with something to fix his holiday snaps. Beelzebub went to California and returned waving a small box.
‘This is it!’ he cried, “it’s destroyed the art of photography on earth. Now you can do what you like with your pictures!”
It worked. Satan’s snaps glowed. The box became known throughout Hell as Satan’s Snap Fixer. Back on earth they continued to call it Photoshop.
Digital photography for the consumer got going in the early nineties. It freed people from film buying, processing and printing. It let them see their pictures immediately. Digital also allows immediate deletion and the taking of hundreds if not thousands of shots and storing them on a memory card. All can then be downloaded on to a computer.
In the twenty-first century, for all but a few purists, nutters, diehards, freaks and me (I’ll explain later), film photography collapsed. Last year Kodak announced it was stopping production of Kodachrome, the only film celebrated by a great singer – Paul Simon – with a great song – Kodachrome. Kodak still make films, including Tri-X, the black and white film with which Henri Cartier-Bresson made some of the most sublime images of the twentieth century. If they ever stop making that – well, Hell will not be hot enough for the Eastman Kodak Company.
All of that was bad enough, but there was also the matter of Satan’s Snap Fixer. In 1990 Photoshop 1.0 was released for the Apple Mac computer. Over the years, with ever increasing sophistication and complication, Photoshop has allowed pros and amateurs to improve, enhance and fake their pictures. Now it is safest to assume that everything has been Photoshopped and nothing, therefore, is true either to reality or to the art of photography.
But happily, years before, the seeds of the backlash had been sown. In 1984 the Soviet camera industry was doing what it did best, ripping off foreign designs. In that year it produced the Lomo LC-A, a compact 35mm film camera copied from a Japanese Cosina. In 1991 some guys in Austria got hold of an LC-A and liked it so much they became the sole worldwide distrbutor of the Lomo company of St Petersburg. Lomography had been born.
Now if you go into certain groovy clothes or design shops you are likely to see a display of brilliantly coloured plastic cameras with names like the Diana Multi Pinhole, the Holga 120 Pinhole, the Lomo Lubitel, the Lomography Spinner and, still in plain black, the Lomo LC-A. These are all film cameras. You have to buy 35mm or 120 – medium format – film, load the camera, take pictures without seeing them and then get them processed and printed.
The further twist is that, in strict professional terms, most of these are not very good cameras. They often leak light causing random streaks on prints, some have plastic lenses which cause bizarre and unpredictable effects, they offer minimal exposure control.
Some crazy lomographers make matters worse by cross-processing. This means you buy a slide film and process it as a negative film. Strange, luminous colours leap out of the final print.
And, finally, to make sure you really screw up your pictures, there are ten golden rules of Lomography which include ‘be fast’, ‘don’t think’ and ‘try the shot from the hip’. The whole point of lomography is to escape the curse of digital perfection.
“I’m falling in love with film again!” cries Natalie Wells, a professional photographer who admits digital made her feel guilty, “Every one of these cameras gives you a completely different picture.”
She is, she says, in pursuit of “something more extreme and chaotic” than digital.
We are sitting downstairs in the very groovy lomography shop in the unbelievably groovy Newburgh Street in London’s Soho. Upstairs, It is packed with people – mainly young but quite a few old – handling with wonder and delight the huge range of plastic cameras on display and the enticing little boxes of film.
The Lubitel is an amiable pastiche of that great camera the Rolleiflex and the Holgas look like the cheap, point and shoot cameras of the fifties. But there are also weirdos like the Oktomat which takes eight pictures at once and the Spinner which takes 360 degree panoramas.
The shop is run by Adam Scott, a psychology and sociology graduate turned professional photographer. It opened last year and business seems to be booming. The British are natural lomographers, we are, per head of population, the biggest market for these cameras.
“There seems to be some innate interest in photography in the UK,” muses Scott, “people are just really interested and curious.”
He’s right. The night before I had watched in wonder an episode of the TV show Midsomer Murders in which a war between digital and film photographers leads to violent deaths. It was just so English. The only flaw in the show was that the digital freaks were young and hip and the film nuts were old and fusty. Now all that is being reversed.
Back in 2004, Scott had an expensive digital Canon and started to notice that people were asking him to make his pictures look like film. This could be done with Satan’s Snap Fixer, but it did raise the awkward question, why bother? Why not just shoot film in the first place?
Having discovered a Holga and mastered – or, rather submitted to – its eccentricies, Scott produced a book of Holga images and started the store. The shop’s walls are lined with lomographs, hundreds of little pictures of people and things. The point is to show that no picture is more important than another.
None, of course, have been subjected to Satan’s Snap Fixer.
“I don’t have to use Photoshop and invest all my time in something that is essentially fake,” says Russell Darling, an American who admits with some shame that he worked for George Lucas and thus helped take cinema to the Dark Side of the Digital. Now he shoots lomographs to expiate his guilt.
Arat Komsawadichai, a Thai photography student and possessor of almost every lomography camera ever made, quietly makes the single most profound observation of all.
“People in the street,” he says, “don’t feel threatened by these cameras.”
In the golden age of photography, great artists like Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank would simply walk up to people and take their picture. You cannot do that now. Either people are aware of the legal rights attached to their image or they are paranoid – who you are why you want their picture and so on.
Fighting against these restrictions, the Pennsylvania photographer Mark Cohen has taken to just rushing up to people with a Leica – the preferred camera of the greats – and a handheld flash, taking a picture and running. His technique is, he admits, “intrusive”, but the results are startling and have been exhibited at the Whitney and the Met in New York. Like lomography, his pictures are a gesture of dissent from the digital empire.
Once again digital is the accused. Digital replicates and disseminates. Once your picture is taken on the street, it can be on the web and round the world in seconds. No wonder people are paranoid.
What Cohen and the lomographers are doing is attempting to renormalise photography, to take it back to where it came from, the street. Of course, film negatives can be scanned digitally and also replicated and disseminated. But, somehow, film is different, especially when the camera looks like a toy. Perhaps it is simply that these guys are just photographing everything. The subjects are not being singled out, they are being included.
Lomography remains a small movement but things are happening. The new window display in Herems in Bond Street consists of old film cameras and strips of 35mm film. Polaroid film is being made again and Fuji has produced Instax, a film that, like Polaroid, produces instant pictures and which can, with the aid of special camera backs, be used with lomographic equipment. Meanwhile, film makers like Ilford, Fuji and Kodak are seeing their first upturn in sales since the appearance of digital.
At one level, this is a familiar marketing phenomenon. Authenticity is the salesman’s Holy Grail – you convince people that this is not just a product, it is the Real Thing. This has lately been taken to new levels of refinement. You can buy Levis jeans cheaply anywhere, but you have to seek out their Vintage range which offers – at a big premium – new jeans cut in any style all the way back to the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Lloyds bank and John Lewis both advertise not what they sell, but what they ‘truly’ are, authentic friends, companions through life. Similarly lomography is ‘real’ photography.
But there is more to this than marketing. Some years ago I bought a superb digital camera, a Nikon D200. I found it enervating. I never felt committed to any one picture and I always felt there was something more I should be doing to each frame I kept. Eventually, I stopped taking pictures.
Then, a few months ago when I knew nothing about lomography, I bought a Nikon FE2, a superb film camera from the eighties. I then discovered I already had an earlier FE which I had completely forgotten. I had, unwittingly, started collecting. Now I have about thirty cameras, most picked up at car boot sales for £1, some from ebay, a couple from dealers, all, except the Leica M6, absurdly cheap and some, especially the Leica, very beautiful indeed.
I take pictures obsessively, getting my films developed by RP Photographic in Wandsworth and clutching the boxes when they come back with dumbstruck joy. These strips of celluloid are alive with the moment they were taken. Soon I shall pluck up the nerve to send them to RP for printing.
At Aperture, the secondhand dealer in Bloomsbury where I bought my FE2 and the Leica, they told me they could not get enough film cameras to satisfy demand. One photographer in Norfolk told me, “Lomography is just the beginning. We haven’t even begun to explore the photographic image properly. Digital stalled the whole thing.”
“The future,” say the lomographers, “is analogue.”
I say: God shoots film with a Leica.
Growth Defended
July 18th, 2010Ferraris for All: In Defence of Economic Progress
by Daniel Ben-Ami
Policy Press Pp 282
People who are sceptical about the virtues of economic growth are, writes Daniel Ben-Ami, “inhumane, elitist, conservative, misanthropic and more preoccupied with consumption than anything else.” This is not true but it’s a good start to an extremely bitter and important debate.
Economic growth is a recent phenomenon. For 200 years the developed world has grown at 2 per cent per year. Industrial civilisation has brought a level of wealth to the workers that would have glazed over the eyes of the Emperor Nero.
This is unprecedented. Some, like Ben-Ami, assume that it represents a fundamental change in the human world and that growth has become a law of nature and a more or less unconditional good. Others point out that all civilisations come to an end and this one is no different. How it will end is up for discussion, that it will end is not.
The primary reason for thinking the Ben-Amists are right is science. This, for the first time, introduces an objective form of cumulative wisdom into human affairs. So, if this civilisation does collapse, someone, somewhere, will still know that the earth revolves around the sun and how to make a car. Growth is conceptually and actually tied to the progress of science.
The primary reason for thinking the Ben-Amists are wrong is also science. Humans, being human, use science to extend their capacities for good but also for evil and excess. Science has given us weapons capable of destroying civilisations and mechanisms of consumption that could deplete the planet or render it uninhabitable by humans. Growth, therefore, is necessarily limited by human wickedness and planetary capacity.
This book is a pro-growth polemic. Ben-Ami lines up his ducks – tree-huggers, over-population obsessives, liberal wets, happiness theorists, hyper-egalitarians – and blasts away at them. Mostly he misses but that does not make this book any less important.
He misses because he does not have an argument as such. It is not, as he seems to think, proof that somebody is wrong simply because the same argument was put before. The greens are not wrong, for example, because they dislike industrialisation like those silly old romantics. And, secondly, it is no refutation of an idea to say that all these scientists say one thing but this other guy, whom Ben-Am happens to think is much smarter, says another. So global warming sceptic Bjorn Lomborg is not right just because he disagrees with deep green James Lovelock.
Furthermore, the author has a habit of saying things in such a way that one instantly thinks of the obvious refutation. So to prove how well we are doing he says, “A visit to an ordinary supermarket would amaze our ancestors with its huge range and high quality of food.” Well, yes, but a visit to Auschwitz or Hiroshima in 1945 would also have amazed our ancestors, just not in a nice way.
Also Ben-Ami’s intellectual history seems a bit dodgy. He quotes a perfectly sane remark by the sociologist Daniel Bell about human limits and then says, “It would be hard to think of a statement more directly contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment.” Ben-Ami believes the thinkers of the eighteenth century thought human capacities were limitless. The two greatest Enlightenment philosophers, Kant and Hume, would be startled, though the half-witted French thinker Auguste Comte would perhaps have agreed. Thomas Jefferson would also have been uneasy. America was not founded in the belief that humans were omnicompetent but in the conviction that they were fallible.
Stripping all that out, however, all Ben-Ami is saying is that economic growth is a good thing. It relieves poverty, extends life, alleviates suffering and generally improves the quality of human life. Furthermore, only through growth can we hope to cure the problems of growth – global warming being the obvious example. Resource depletion, meanwhile, has repeatedly been offset by increased ingenuity and efficiency.
We thus have no choice but to jog frantically on the growth treadmill. Not to do so will harm others but not, if we live in the rich, developed world, ourselves.
What should make you uneasy about this is its hectoring, utopian tone. What should make you uneasier is the fact that Ben-Ami believes in the conquest of nature. He is a hard human exceptionalist who think it is our particular destiny to remould the natural world in our image.
The problem with this is it cannot ever work. Our so-called conquest of nature would be news to rubble-dwelling Haitian earthquake victims or Aids sufferers. We are not remoulding nature, we are just pathetic tinkerers. And, anyway, why should we? Nature is just another word for our home.
Growth is, indeed, one of the great issues of our time. Its benefits are manifest and anybody arguing against it will have to take on Ben-Ami’s core opinions. They are, in certain circles, commonplace – all the more reason to think they are probably wrong.
Carmen in 3D
July 18th, 2010The donkey is called Pollyanne and the horse Louis. The chickens are called Katie, Francesca and Carmhen. But there is an issue with the chickens. They are orange and the blend in with the set. So, next week, they are trying out a blue one. She’s called Blue.
They have to take the horse and donkey up from Floral Street in a lift. But they must remember to close the doors, otherwise Pollyanne and Louis get vertigo. They also need to have pocketfuls of polo mints. Pollyanne once started braying on stage, but she doesn’t if you feed her Polo mints.
Funny business, opera.
Louis likes Polos too. But he is pretty calm anyway. Backstage during a performance, I didn’t see him in the darkness – he is very black – and I banged my head on his chin. He didn’t even flinch. He was probably listening for his cue. Louis goes on stage the minute he hears the right music.
The chickens are even calmer than Louis. They are so calm they lay eggs.
“I had a Royal Opera House-laid omelette only last week,” says the stage manager Emily Gottlieb, “it was excellent.”
“Years ago,” explains handler Kay Weston, when I ask her how she got into this animal handling game, “I was asked if I could handle a vulture and that’s where it all began.”
And so here she is in Floral Street delivering this little menagerie to the Royal Opera House. The thing is, today, Pollyanne, Lous, Katie, Francesca and Carmhen have to look and be their best. There are to be no unscripted toilet malfunctions and no staring into the cameras, two on long cranes, one whizzing about in front of the stage and one held by a man in black who wanders about onstage. Today the ROH production of Carmen (Carmhen, geddit?) is to be filmed in 3D.
Because of the cameras getting in the way, tonight’s audience has got cheap tickets, about two thirds off. This and one show the week before had been sold not as full-fat opera but as a chance to see opera being filmed in 3D.
The animals were okay with this, but the audience was confused,. Some of them ask where the special 3D-viewing glasses are, you know, the ones they needed to see Avatar.
“There are no glasses,” it is explained to them, “you are seeing a real show being filmed in 3D.”
“Oh!”
This raises the nightmarish sci-fi thought that people will, in the future, want 3D glasses to see the real world. But I digress.
“At the moment,” says Tony Hall, ROH chief executive, “it is really just film that is being done 3D. I want to put ourselves up there with film. The experience you get through watching opera is so complete, so immersive, and this is the medium that gives you almost all of that.”
The plan is that this autumn you will be able to go to your local cinema, put on those glasses and see Carmen in full glowing 3D, swooping in among the singers and animals. You can already do this with performances shot statically in high definition from the ROH and the Met in New York. The ROH sells these shows as giving you “the best seat in the house”. Hall says 3D is more. It is all the best seats in the house plus a few on the stage.
The problem is that nobody has done this before. Smaller productions have been filmed statically, but a full-scale show with moving cameras. This is a first. And I can’t tell you how difficult it is.
Round the corner from the ROH passers-by are peering into two big cameras planted on giant tripods next to a huge truck. They are peering not just because they are cameras but because they are weird cameras. These machines are wider than usual with a sloping mirror inside and, on closer examination, each is not one camera but two placed at right angles to each. “Mirror rigs,” they are called.
The truck cost £6 million. It was the world’s first 3D truck. It is owned by a company called Telegenic and it is called, boringly, Telegenic T18. Under pressure from me, a guy from Telegenic agrees that it could be called Dave. Or the Tardis.
“Welcome to the Tardis,” says Julian Napier, director of 3D Carmen, as we climb aboard.
It is like being inside a space station except that it is all done out in a fetching shade of black. Screens run down one wall and huge banks of computer stuff run down the middle. Humans fill what little space remains. A feed from those two cameras outside runs to some of the biggest screens. I pick up a pair of those glasses and watch passing workmen in yellow jackets gurning and grinning in 3D. I could do this all day.
Now, as Jennifer Anniston used to say in that shampoo ad, here comes the science.
Back in the fifties 3D movies were made by placing two film cameras side by side to mimic the position of your two eyes. The results, as anything other than novelty shows, were awful and 3D died. There was a brief revival in the sixties and seventies, but the use of film still limited the possibilites. Then came digital movies and, finally, in 2005 Chicken Little – there are a lot of chickens in this story – an animated film in digital 3D.
That was the point at which the new 3D went mainstream and, since Avatar in last year, everybody has been scrambling aboard. Cinamas have been kitting up for 3D, 3D TVs have gone on sale, over 30 3D films are in production in Hollywood, 3D laptops are coming out and so on. Everybody says this is a revolution comparable to the arrival of talkies and of colour.
But, it turns out, nobody has fully worked out how it should be done. The mirror rigs are one answer. The line between 2D and 3D is not clear. Too much 3D is distorted, too little is pointless. So the mirror rig allows for constant adjustment of the effect. It means the cameras can be as close together or as far apart as you like. But that means you have to get everything right between the two cameras – perfectly matched lenses, identical zoom rates and so on. This is impossible but it must be done.
And, when it comes to the man in black walking about the stage, the problems multiply. He is using a Steadicam, a rig that makes movements smooth and free. It makes him look like a cyborg but for the baggy shorts. Normally it takes an hour to set up a Steadicam. It takes nine hours to fix up a 3D rig and it weighs much more than the 70 pounds of a normal rig.
Dom Jackson, the Carmen Steadicam man, says he is afraid to stand on the scales and find out how much more.
“For years they told us the rigs were going to get lighter, but now they’re getting heavier. It’s like going back twenty years.”
Carmen, he says, is not the most complicated show he has done but it does mean he has to be rigged up for three hours and it does involved crowds – of children, chorus and singers.
“It’s not a particularly complicated show from my perspective but it’s busy and a lot of things need to be done at the right place and at the right time and there’s fire and knives and animals…..”
Always the animals.
Also, after 17 years using Steadicams, he has had to relearn his trade. Some shots that would be standard in 2D don’t work in 3D. Close-ups of faces just look “weird” and an arm projecting into the side of the frame looks like a disembodied limb. As a result, Napier is filming Carmen with are no close-ups, only wide and medium shots.
This is a relief for Claudia Stolze, the beautifully made-up and coiffed woman in charge of wigs and make-up at the ROH. To say that Stolze is enthusiastic about her art is to say the Great Pyramid is a pretty nifty tomb. She is crazy for it. Put together her personality and her job and she is a novel waiting to be written.
She shows me samples of hair – “Feel the Asian, it is so thick!” – severed heads and masses of wigs. I idly pick up a bluish severed head. The expression is distinctly irate and it is heavy and weirdly large.
“We have to make them slightly bigger than the real thing,” she explains, “because, for some reason, when you cut off a head on stage it suddenly looks tiny.” Who knew?
Stolze has got used to dealing with high definition 2D. This allows extreme close-ups. Few faces are in a condition to take this. Stolze has to do nostril and ear checks on the singers to get rid of hair and, ahem, other stuff and she has to gouge out ‘sleep’ from the corners of eyes.
She also has to trim the lace which holds the wig on to the forehead. Normally, this is just pressed into the make-up and is invisible to the live-audience. But it can be seen in HD and she assumed there would be the same problem in 3D. In fact, Napier’s decision to drop close-ups means the normal laces still cannot be seen. Make-up has to be toned down. Normal stage make-up would look clownish on film.
Anyway, this is all very well but there is an opera – people loving and dying and singing about it – in the middle of all this. How on earth will it survive the filming?
My first sight of the auditorium fully rigged for 3D is not promising. At sides of the front stall are the two enormous cranes stretching alarmingly over the orchestra pit and poking their mirror rigs right on to the stage. Across the front of the stage another rig whizzes back and forth on the Furio Dolly – this, believe it or not, is the name of the wheeled machine on rails. Still to come is mighty Dom Jackson with his Steadicam. How can even the lust, blood and big tunes of Bizet’s opera get through all this?
None of this is what the ROH originally had in mind. They wanted a 3D version filmed as usual – with cameras at the back of the stalls, This would mean no intrusion on to the stage and, above all, no “seat-kill”.
Seat kill is a very sensitive business in an opera house. It means making some seats unuseable. In a full season any one show may only be put on perhaps 8 times which means there are only about 18,000 seats available. Killing any of these means taking out a signifiant percentage of revenue and irritating regulars.
But when the ROH told Real D, the Hollywood 3D cinema company that is co-financing this, they want no seat kill and cameras at the back of the stalls, talks, well, stalled. Real D rejected the idea and the ROH relented. Seats would die, Steadicams would walk and a Furio Dolly would whizz.
Anyway, to my amazement, none of this seems to bother the singers. Watching a run-through, I see them acting their hearts our around Dom as if he isn’t there and being gypsies and soldiers in nineteenth century Spain in spite of the fact that two huge mirror rigs are glaring at them like alien robots. In fact, Christine Rice, who sings Carmen, seems to be able to ignore all this to the point of becoming delusional.
“They got rid of that camera on the front of the stage, didn’t they?” she says in her dressing room.
She means the Furio Dolly and they haven’t got rid of it.
“Er,” I begin, “n….”
An ROH PR gives me a look and I do not complete the sentence.
“Always tell the stars want they want to hear,” he whispers to me.
She also asks, “Have they cut the chickens? I haven’t seen one for a while.”
Chickens, why must it always be chickens?
But, of course, this is not delusion, this is extreme professionalism. Rice is a pro in a way that only opera stars can be. Once she starts for the next three hours she is Carmen the free-loving gypsy whatever high tech kit is zooming in on her.
“You’re not aware of them filming you… You don’t notice the Steadicam guy. I do these duets with Don Jose and you just don’t notice this guy creeping around you.”
A wonderful mezzo-soprano, she gave up a physics PhD and gave herself a year to see if she could make it as a singer, she finally heard the words that are as good as it gets as far as a singing student is concerned.
“He said to me, ‘If you stick with this, you will be a working singer.’ Nobody pledges anything more than that.”
The core of Carmen the character, she says, is the word ‘freedom’. She always want to be free to take and drop lovers. On this, she never compromise, finally to the point of death. She corrupts her killer, Don Jose, by making him love her.
“She has her way of living and she can’t change that for him.”
The opera is one of the most popular in the repertoire. Even if you have never seen it before, you will think you have. The story is epic and familiar and everybody knows the Toreador Song and L’Amour.
“It is just one tune after another. Even people who have never been to the opera before – there is stuff in it they would know.”
This production began in 2006. It is directed by the formidable and slightly (okay, very) frightening Francesca Zambello. She is an American who grew up in Europe. She speaks French, Italian, German and Russian which is useful when dealing with the polyglot casts of international opera.
I watch her giving notes to the cast. First she love-bombs them and then she takes their performances apart with terrifying precision. Everybody in the room, me included, would rather gnaw off their own right arm than argue.
(She later gives me one of her notes. I am to mention in my article, she says, the Glimmerglass opera festival in Cooperstown, New York. So there it is. I like my right arm.)
She is less frightening in a tiny glass interview room almost entirely filled with two sofas in the depths of the labyrinthine ROH. After some questions designed to get the measure of me, she launches into praise of Avatar and, therefore, 3D.
“I thought it was brilliant, not only because of its use of technology, but also because it had so much heart. It seemed to coem from the world of opera, it is very Wagnerian. We can identify with the characters even though they aren’t human, it draws heavily on the world of fantastical myth. Of course, Carmen is the complete opposite of that.”
And 3D?
“I am a strong believer in any way that technology can get our work out there… Nothing can replace the live performance and nor should we be trying to replace the live performance, but this adds another dimension, in a different way.”
Yet she is the first person I spoke to who raised a doubt about all this operatic outreach. She knows that the new demands on opeare are in danger of distorting the art.
“I sometimes don’t want to look down a singer’s tonsils. Opera is now exposed in a way that the art form was mever intended for.”
Then thetre is the possibility that filmed opera will damage the real thing. Live opera ticket sales in Anerica are falling and some smaller, local companies are threatened.
“With these simulcasts [live opera productions from the big companies in cinemas] audiences are saying they can pay for this or go to local companies and some are closing because of this.”
This is the heart of the matter. Full fat opera is costly and immobile. In America it is paid for by private donation, here it is largely financed by government subsidy. In both cases, there is the assumption that it is a public good, however small the audience, to keep this extravagant art alive.
These days that assumption is not enough. The masses must be given access. This is partly simply justice but also because the opera business needs to build future audiences. Almost everybody I spoke to at the ROH, whatever they did, told me that, when young, they had been stricken by the emotional power and truth of a great opera.
Emily Gottlieb is typical. She is rendered almost inarticulate by the attempt to express her feelings for the art – “I always loved opera… I love it and that’s how it happened really.”
The good and slightly suprising new is that the economics of the cinema business might becoming to the rescue.
I meet the guys from Real D in a cafe inside the ROH. Amidst the crowds of actors and crew, they look, well, different. Four Americans – all Hollywood based – and one Englishman, they exude the logic of business. Josh Greer, president, is in California casuals, but the others are suited and booted. Earlier I had seen them walk, nervous and self-conscious, into Zambello’s note-giving session with the case. Then they looked tongue-tied, but now they are on home territory, selling stuff.
Real D’s business is putting 3D systems in cinemas around the world. They started in 2003. They launched their first sytem in 100 screens in 2005, now they are at 6000 screens in 50 countries. The growth has been driven by the cinema’s realisation that this stuff works. Prevously they could see no reason even to invest in digital. But, with 3D, they could charge premium prices and the movies were evidently popular. Currently a 3D movie sells three times as many seats as one in 2D.
But here’s a weird thing. In an average week an average cinema will sell only 15-20 per cent of its seats. I sort of knew this because I see weird films at strange times and I am often almost alone. In addition, there are only ever a few big money films around. So multiplexes – 12 screens here, 16 or more in the States – just run the same films at different times or fill the other screens with poor performers. There is, in short, a gigantic problem of over-capacity in the cinema business.
That, combined with the ease of handling digital compared with film, opens the door for what the Hollywood guys keep calling “alternative content.” This would mean live sport, big rock concerts and…. opera!
“Cinemas are moving from a place you see movies, “says Michael Lewis, chairman and CEO, “to a place of entertainment – feature films, sports, concerts art. We look at our Real D platform and we see you can programme it like you would programme a TV network. And A fifty foot screen is better than a fifty inch screen.”
As a result, Real D has become interested not just installing the system but also in providing the content. Carmen is the toe they have stuck into these stormy and competitive waters. 3D is their life jacket.
Grand opera may seem an odd choice in this context. But the point is that its audience not match Avatar’s, but it is passionate. There are crazed opera nuts everywhere and most of them cannot afford or cannot reach the big shows. They can, however, get to a show at their local cinema and the hope is that, in 3D, they will do so in ever increasing numbers.
And so the ROH went looking for a 3D partner and they met Real D, which brought in the production company, Principal Large Format, which brought in the truck company Telegenic which hired Mighty Dom the Steadicam Man and the rest is or will be history.
Tony Hall, ROH chief executive, has, to be honest, gone a but nuts about the whole thing. He first checked out 3D by going to see the animated movie Bolt with his daughter.
“We bought packets of crisps, punt on the glasses and loved it. It actually was 3D and it felt creatively good. And then came Avatar…”
He also gate access to the latest gizmos by dropping in on Sony periodically. He now loves 3D video games – “Car racing in 3D is amazing!” They don’t make opera bosses like they used to, probably wisely.
Hall is good at getting opera to the masses. He developed the big screens in public spaces idea. For Carmen he had 14 big screens around the country and he got 7000 people – three full houses – in Trafalgar Square on a rainy night. He reckons that with big screemns and 2D cinema fees, he adds 100,000 to a show’s audience – about 45 full houses. 3D is an experiment that could multiply the effect even further.
So – I fix him with my gimlet, Paxman eye – will revenues from this compensate for the cuts in overnment funding soon to come?
“I don’t know,” he says (nobody ever says that to Paxman), “all these things are gradual. One hopes that whatever happens in terms of grants give us time to work through whatever is necessary.”
In the end all of this is about survival, the survival of the mad, extravagant live art form known as opera. I used to have a problem with this, agreeing, for time, with Samuel Beckett that opera was the “utlimate abomination” because it literalised music or with Soren Kierkegaard who loved Mozart’s Don Giovanni but could not bear to watch it. He attended repeated performances but listened from a corridor outside the auditorium. My view has mellowed and Stolze with her wigs, Weston with her animals, Zambello with her notes, Rice with her terrifying concentration and Hall with his 3D car races have mellowed me even further. These people believe.
But it is show time. For the first half I am planted in a narrow space just behind Adam Lawney, the deputy stage manager. He sits on a perch, barely offstage and does cool things like audience announcements and timing everything.
My position is weird and precarious. It is weird because I am sitting next to a machine thta generates “Atmospheric Haze”, basically water vapour with stuf fin it to make the stage look sultry and Mediterranean. I spend the entire time looking as if I am sitting in a cloud.
It is prcarious because, if I stretch a leg, I could cause a load of children or the chorus to stumble like dominos as they storm on to the stage or bring down a principal or, horror, cause Pollyanne to bray – she is standing by me, doing nothing in a state of trance, as donkeys do.
Emily Gottlieb is in command, marshalling me and the entire cast and crew. Mighty Dom the Steadicam Man is working on his rig. This is his big night. The previous filmed show, a week before, had been done in wide shots. Tonight is Dom’s only chance to get it right. He looks nervous and, at one point, shouts angrily at his assistant.
Suddenly, there is a problem. The film people had lost a shot from the previous week. They had to do it again before the curtain rose. It is 6.57, the auditorim is secure, the audience is seated. The show starts at 7. The film guys ask for a five minute hold. Adam Lawney looks at them in dismay.
“We don’t do that at the Opera House.”
Gottlieb sorts it out. They will do the shot during the overture. It works. I want to hire Gottleib to tidy my desk and then run my life.
Then we’re off. I watch in wonder as the cast move on and off, in and out, like clockwork. One minute the children are asking Lawney about his screens and buttons, the next they are peasant kids in nineteenth century Spain. I watch the scene change – crashing into phlegmatic Lous in the process – and marvel at the vast industrial process which, a few feet in front of me, becomes a sultry Mediterranean scene.
I spend the second half in a box high above and to the right of the stage. I have to stand to see the action and, at first, I am oppressively aware of the cameras. But, slowly, it all falls away until, finally, as Don Jose stabs Carmen, I am utterly lost in the romantic, terrible truth at the centre of this whole mad enterprise.
I do not even notice Mighty Don the Steadicam Man, pacing backwards to get that final killer shot. For a moment, I am down there with Christine Rice, stretched out on the stage and deluded into the truth.
Secularism and Vietnam
July 15th, 2010In The New Statesmen I write about secular Britain and, in the last Sunday Times, I interviewed Karl Marlantes about his Vietnam War novel
Secular Britain
July 15th, 2010The same thing happens in both the first and second episodes of BBC 2’s new comedy series Rev. St Saviours, a rundown inner-city church with, usually, a tiny congregation, is suddenly filled with newcomers.
In the first episode, Reverend Adam Smallbone is baffled by an invasion of rich, middle class families. In the second, he lends his Sunday service to a fashionable evangelist who fills his church with partying kids and a smoothie bar.
In each case Smallbone drives out the invaders. He will not be corrupted by the money of the aspiring middle class, who, it turns out, are only there because they want to get their kids into the local C of E school. Nor will he tolerate the cold bigotry that lies not far beneath the surface of the evangelical smiles. Instead he will return to his almost empty services and to the maddening eccentricities and demands of his poor parishioners.
The BBC’s last comedy take on the Church of England was the unfunny Vicar of Dibley. This was not about faith at all, but about soppy niceness, local ‘characters’ and the mild novelty of a woman vicar (Dawn French). Neither is faith involved in the character of The Simpsons’ Rev Lovejoy nor in Channels 4’s Father Ted. Belief has been an encumbrance for comedy priests. But Smallbone is different, he is passionate. He prays intently. His relationship with God is the heart of the matter and we are intended to approve this relationship.
James Wood, the writer, plainly know where he stands. In the first episode, builders moon and abuse the vicar, jeering and calling him the Vicar of Dibley. Finally, Smallbone loses his temper, rips of his dog collar and tells them to ‘Fuck off’. Dibley is dead and, it seems, religion is not quite as far down the BBC’s agenda as we thought it was or, perhaps, as the BBC thinks it is.
So is the bienpensant attitude to the established church – condescension, baffled disinterest, outright contempt – being revised upward? Not if you are a footballer.
During the World Cup, some of the England team sang the National Anthem and some – notably Wayne Rooney – did not. What did they mean by this? That they would not wish the Queen, the head of the established church, well or they would not bow the knee to God or their country? Or, either way, that they did not belong anywhere? Meanwhile, players from the Catholic countries crossed themselves as they ran on to the pitch and offered thanks to God for every goal. The English showed no signs of praying other than to their agents or, in Rooney’s case, Alex Ferguson
Britain, it is commonly said, a secular society. In strict constitutional terms, this is completely wrong. We have an established church that embodies, in theory, the nation’s faith. Legally, we are not just a Christian country, we are a Church of England country and Adam Smallbone is an agent of the state.
But this may reasonably be seen as a relic from another age, an antique eccentricity like Countdown or Bruce Forsyth. The reality is that, except for the odd blip caused by evangelicals and middle class school grabbers, fewer attend church each year. About 15 per cent of the adult population go to church. One million churchgoers fell away in the nineties alone. The fall has slowed thanks to the enthusiasm of some ethnic minorities – nearly half of London congregations are black – but the trend is clear. At some point in this century most churches will be empty.
Furthermore, we have become a much more diverse society. What sense can contemporary British Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs or even Catholics make of the idea of one local sect being elevated to the highest ranks of the state? Or, perhaps more importantly, what sense can any tolerant, liberal-minded atheist make of it? Religion, thinks the liberal, must be a matter of individual conscience, not of state approval.
This discontinuity produces friction and the occasionally flare-up, usually reported with outrage in the Telegraph or Mail. Councils have been the focus of recent cases. The new Mayor of Leicester, Colin Hall, dropped prayers at council meetings, announcing his decision in the journal of the local Secular Society.
“I personally consider that religion,” he wrote, “in whatever shape or form, has no role to play at all in the conduct of council business. This particularly applies in Leicester where the majority of council members, myself included, do not regularly attend any particular faith service.”
Enfield Council, meanwhile, swapped prayers for poems. Anybody still wanting to do so could pray in the Mayor’s chambers. In Bideford, as is so often the case in Devon, the situation is somewhat different. There the National Secular Society sought a judicial review of council prayers, arguing they were a breach of human rights legislation.
Eric Pickles, communities and local government secretary, has responded by saying Christians should not be ‘sidelined’ for their faith and attacked the habit of renaming Christian festivals as culturally neutral celebrations. The Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, became the lead spokesman against the prayer spoilsports. He said the prayers were “a public act which reflects the self-understanding of the English nation, and of its governance as being by ‘the Queen in Parliament under God’.” Others can simply say ‘Amen’ if they feel so inclined.
Either Christianity is transcendentally true or it is culturally true as the moral and historical basis of this nation. Either way, prayers are valid. Or religion as a whole is false and this locally elevated sect is an abomination, therefore its rites should be relegated to the private places of the superstitious.
The issues are large, but, let’s be honest, their expression in contemporary Britain is comic. This is all more Dibley than Smallbone, squalls in a teacups. On the surface the source of this comedy is obvious. There is simply nothing here to be taken seriously. The Church does not exist in the lives of the overwhelming majority so both a passionate advocacy of prayers or an equally passionate rejection are absurd.
But to dismiss the conflict in those terms is to miss the point entirely. Intelligent, sensitive people on both sides do care about these things. This is an argument about something. But what?
The National Secular Society campaigns for the total withdrawal of the state from any religious commitment, connection or sanction. It does so for, it says, democratic reasons and also because the NSS “asserts that supernaturalism is based upon ignorance and assails it as the historic enemy of progress.” This is, of course, nonsense. Christianity was deeply involved in the European invention and cultivation of science and in the continuous economic growth of the last 200 years.
This is not to say that it should be so implicated that in the next 200 years. Perhaps something else should take its place. This brings us back to the question – but what? The NSS can only offer arm-waving generalities. They feel false because they are unrooted and, therefore, impractical and unpersuasive. Soldiers don’t die for democracy or freedom, happiness or well-being, they die for the guys next to them. They die, in other words, for something much more intimately intangible than anything imagined by the NSS. They die for a friendship and, by extension, a culture, a society. Ask any soldier.
The problem with the NSS as well as with the current wave of militant atheists is that they are defined by negation. They clearly know what they don’t want but what they do want are just the nice, happy things that everybody wants. Furthermore, they always make the patently false assumption that it is primarily religion that makes people do bad things. Think of your own examples of non-religious evil and then consider that at least the church nurtured Dante and Titian.
The problem in all these rows is nobody ever says what they mean by ‘secular’. France is a secular state. It was specifically established to thwart the political ambitions of the Catholic Church. The Revolution was anti-religious. America is also a secular state. The First Amendment specifically prohibits an established religion. But this was done to protect religion. America remains ‘one nation under God’ and the most religious developed nation on earth. In other words, secularity is not one thing and it is certianly not a simple case of ditching religion.
The further problem is that merely becoming secular in any form does not actually solve any problems. In France, for example, they felt justified in banning the hijab in state schools because it offended against the established principle of laicite, the removal of all states institions from religious signs and practices. Britain did not do so because the act would offend against freedom. Freedom and the state’s laicite are both secular ideals, but they conflict. Deciding which comes first is not possible within the terms of the system.
It is obvious that, as with mathematics, as with anything, to make the secular system work, you have to stand outside the system. But where and on what do you stand? Asking that question defines the predicament of contemporary Britain in a nutshell.
In answering the question, it is as well to remember what the word ‘secular’ actually means. It means, literally, ‘of the age’ and refers to earthly time. God is outside time and, therefore, secular came to mean the things of this world rather than the next.
In a climate of belief, this duality is, in the words of the philosopher and the greatest contemporary thinker on secularity Charles Taylor, an “internal dyad”. You cannot have one without the other, each defines the other. In the climate of unbelief that started in Europe in the sixteenth century and is now so dominant in Britain, it becomes an “external dyad”. You must have one – secularity – without the other because the other is deemed not to exist.
But the internal dyad, in my terms, serves an obvious and vital purpose. It provides the ground on which you stand outside the system. Effectively, it provides the opportunity of criticism of all secular systems.
This can be done without resorting to the specifics of a faith. So, for example, rather than banning the hijab in schools by appealing to the authority of specifically secular institutions, the French could have asked themselves what was different about the world today as opposed to the one in which those institutions were founded. They could have stood outside the system but without standing at the altar.
The big difference about today, argues Taylor, is diversity. An institution founding to oppose the dominance of one church is not necessarily the right one to balance the competing demands of many churches and a multitude of private convictions. You don’t need to be religious to hold an absolute moral point of view that is essential to your identity. Ask any real vegetarian or green. Such convictions – and there are ever more – also make demands of any secular system.
In Britain we dodge and weave, perhaps because we are, as we have been since the Industrial Revolution, the most modern country. We cannot convincingly appeal either to old secular or ancient religious institutions. We are in the no-man’s land that will one day, if the prophets of secular progress are right, engulf the world.
So where will the British run with this ball that is neither French nor American? Much depends on the extent to which we can see the problem.
Britain’s leading atheist intellectual, Richard Dawkins, to his credit, does, though, perhaps, indirectly. In his book Unweaving the Rainbow he argues against the powerful romantic idea that scientific explanation disenchants the world. He says the wonders revealed by science are as wonderful and as poetic as anything in the pre-scientific world view. In other words, he accepts the necessity of wonder itself, a concept that is, in my terms, non-secular. He is, of course, plainly wrong if he thinks science can claim a monopoly of wonder, as his later attacks on religion seem to suggest.
But the average Brit appears to be unmoved. In the public sphere which he inhabits religion appears as a marginal or absurd intrusion. Alastair Campbell famously said “We don’t do God” on behalf of his boss Tony Blair. His boss patently did and does, but, in electoral terms, Campbell was fully aware of the fact that doing God would be a vote loser, a sign of, well, weirdness. He was acknowledging demographic reality.
Yet, though I do not wish to hang too much on either the Rev. Smallbone or football, I suspect that there is a growing awareness of what we might be in danger of losing. The England World Cup team all too obviously lacked ethos, meaning and community when contrasted with the solemn crosses and prayers (not to mention the much better football) of those other, usually Latin, nations. And we are definitely supposed to be on Smallbone’s side when he rejects the self-seeking cynicism of the babyboomer middle class or the savage exclusions of the evangelicals – they want to have one of the regulars banned because he pinches an evangelical bum.
Rev is spot on with the education issue. As the babyboomers, a generation that never even thought it would grow old, finally face death themselves, they are starting to ask themselves what, if anything, there is to pass on through the education of their children in the ‘best’ schools. If any of that involves our great cathedrals or even our history, then the account of Britain as a nation made by Christianity must be included.
Of course, Britain is certainly very secular as the word is conventionally understood. Our native church is marginal and unattended and appeals to anything larger than ourselves tend to be greeted with howls of individualistic outrage. But, in my sense of the word, Britain cannot be secular because the secular society is at least dysfunctional and probably incoherent.
All systems function by reference to things that are not subject to the rules of the system. Secular time but be tempereed by some sense of the timeless. This can be put in the contemporary terms of network theory. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler write in their book Connected, “One way to make social networks stable is to arrange them so that everyone is connected to a node that can never be removed… If God were seen as a node on a network, large groups of people could be bound together not just by a common idea but also by a specific social relationship to every other believer.”
God the node will not, in the foreseeable future, rebuild C of E congregations. But He may rebuild something and define the intangible space in which we begin to make sense to each other. It is either that or bad football, fake faith, shopping and The X-Factor and I think I’d be with Smallbone on that one.
Karl Marlantes Interview
July 11th, 2010It is 1968 in the Vietnamese jungle. The bullet had gone through the kid’s breast pocket and entered his heart. There was a notebook in the pocket. Lt Karl Marlantes, US Marines, pulled it out. There was a picture of the kid’s high school girlfriend. The bullet had gone through her face.
“Then the artillery was coming in,” recalls Marlantes, “ and I snapped back. You don’t have time to mourn. But if I wasn’t in a restaurant right now, I’d start crying. That was the first loss and his girlfriend’s face had been obliterated. Relationships are broken, there is no going back, it’s final.”
We are in the cafe of the Imperial War Museum. He is sipping a decaf latte. There are tears in his eyes and his hands are shaking.
Another kid in the North Vietnamese Army was rolling grenades down a hill, pinning down Marlantes’ platoon. He crept round the back of the bunker. The NVA kid (as you will see later, it is important we keep calling them kids) stood up, a grenade in his hand. He was a couple of metres way. Marlantes told him if he threw the grenade he would kill him. The kid threw the grenade and he shot him between the eyes. It was his first.
“He was very young – so was everybody – I could see his eyes and I realised he was just like me, a kid.”
All for a pointless war.
“We did it to ourselves. Vietnam is going capitalist, the domino theory was wrong… the outcome would have been the same without 60,000 dead Americans and God knows how many dead Vietnamese. It was an error.”
When he left the Marines, he was determined to write a book. Over a summer in Oxford – he was a Rhodes Scholar – he wrote hundreds of thousands of words and then junked them all.
“I told myself I was going to write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War. I wrote manically for three or four months, seventeen hundred A4 pages. I went away for a week and read it again. It was terrible. It was bad writing but good psychotherapy.”
He spent the next 30 years trying to write a good book about Vietnam. His family thought he was crazy. Relatives rolled their eyes when the subject of Karl’s book came up.
But, finally, he produced Matterhorn. It is 600 pages long and I came close to reading it in one sitting, though I did eat and sleep. I was living and dying in Vietnam with Bravo Company.
Matterhorn is the code name for a fire support base – an artillery platform – in the deep and mountainous jungle near the North Vietnamese border. It is taken by the Marines, fortified, then abandoned and then taken again.
One desperate, bloody action succeeds another. As their training kicks in and the Marines face each appalling task and more weeks of suffering and death, they always say the same three words, a prayer of acceptance- “There it is.” They are who they are, where they are, when they are and they must do what they must do. There it is.
Everything that happens happened to Marlantes. The hero, Waino Mellas, is, like the author, an Ivy League graduate. But there the resemblance ends.
“I am not like Mellas. I don’t have his political skills or ambition. He is based on a couple of people. One is my elder brother who is very good at corporate politics.”
This leaves an incredible autobiography waiting to be written. Marlantes’ life before and after Vietnam is a story as dramatic as any novel. It centres on four huge crises over a period of 30 years – in Morocco, Vietnam, Oxford and Santa Barbara. Each one represents a breakdown, a collapse. There was, of course, a fourth in Vietnam but that is in the book and you will be reading that anyway.
He was born in Oregon 65 years ago to a school teacher father, who had seen action in Normany and at the Battle of the Bulge but never spoke about it, and a waitress mother. He was an athletic boy and he was drawn to the glamour of the military.
“Back in those days we had this thing called the service, we owed the military a couple of years. So, if you were going to get drafted, it seemed best to join the marines. Boys came back from the marines four inches broader in the shoulders. There were no wars and I was told marines guarded embassies, which was true at the time.”
He trained but he also went to Yale to study economics where he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He still owed the marines three years service, but they said they would let him do his degree in England. By the time he got there, the Vietnam War had escalated and his contemporaries were dying. His own small high school lost five boys. The contrast between his privileged life in Oxford and these jungle deaths became, by the end of his first term, intolerable.
“I knew what was going on and it felt bad. The war was looking dodgy. There were arguments. I remember saying at Oxford, ‘An American presdent wouldn’t like to Americans” and I believed it. They laughed at me. But I had sworn an oath and my friends were dying…”
He had to make up his mind to desert, as his Oxford friends urged him to do, or to abandon his course and sign on for combat. Confused he fled to Morocco, effectively stealing his next term’s money from the Rhodes fund. He smoked a lot of dope. Finally he cracked. With hair down to his shoulders and wearing a djellaba and yellow slippers, he walked into a US naval base, announced he was a marine lieutenant and he wanted to fight. Soon afterwards he was in Vietnam. There it is.
He was ‘in country’ as they used to say even before he landed. His helicopter came under fire. He was told, in the first weeks, to obey his much more experienced corporal, a kid of nineteen, and he did. His training suddenly seemed beside the point.
“But I don’t think you can prepare anybody for combat. You can’t simulate the terror and the confusion.”
He killed, he reckons twenty men. Read the book if you want to know the rest. But there is one bitter, poignant point to be made here. For all the horrific losses of his platoon and his company, their fighting never made the papers, it was barely noticed. Losses, you see, were rounded up to division level. From this perspective, these were skirmishes. The carnage endured by Mellas, and, therefore, Marlantes, came under the heading ‘light casualties’.
After a thirteen month tour, he went home a captain. he had been a formidable soldier and was laden with medals. Six weeks later he was at a desk job in Washington. He was in full uniform delivering papers to the White House. He saw anti-war demonstrators. They abused him, calling him a babykiller.
“They had Vietcong and North Vietnamese flags and I remember the thought going through my head that, six weeks earlier, I would have shot them all. I felt I just couldn’t talk to them, I couldn’t reach them. A big motivation of the novel is to say we are just ordinary people. We abstract people by saying they are marines or troops or gooks [slang for the Vietnamese] but you can’t kill people as easily as you can an abstraction.”
Out of the Marines, he sunk into “sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” until, one day a letter arrived from Oxford. It was from Sir Edgar Williams, once chief of intelligence to Montgomery and now Warden of Rhodes House.
“You know I had stolen the money from the scholarship when I went to Morocco. He just said he was glad I got out alive and, if I cared to go to Barclays Bank in Oxford, I would find the original amount deposited in my name. I just burst into tears, I was in a bad way.”
When he got to Oxford, Williams brushed aside Marlantes’ apologes – “I don’t want to hear about it. I know how crazy it can get.” Williams was, he says, his head bowed, “a wonderful man.”
He finished MA and went on to become a successful businessmen while, all the time, picking at his novel. But hidden tensions were mounting.
One day in the nineties he walked into a boardroom in Singapore and saw a pile of corpses on the table. He became terrified in lifts, the noise their doors made was like the sound of a helicopter tailgate opening. In bed one night he heard a sound, he rushed out naked in the street, ready to fight and kill. In his car he heard a man honk his horn, he leapt out, flung himself on th man’s bonnet and started kicking in his windscreen – “I wanted to kill him”. In Vietnam after the first few weeks you knew that any sound or movement in the jungle was the enemy and you fired at once. Marlantes was reverting to a more primitive state, to the “monkey madness” of the soldier in the lethal jungle.
He described these symptoms to a man in the course of a mental health week in Santa Barbara. The man suddenly asked, “Have you been in a war?”
“I broke down, bawling, snot pouring out of my nose, it went on for fifteen or twenty minutes, my ribs were sore for tree days. The whole room was looking at this guy falling apart. He told me I had post traumatic stress disorder and he made walk straight out of the building and walk eight blocks to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs… That’s when I started to get healed.”
He had been living on the brink for over twenty years, only the book keeping him sane.
“Writing the book kept me from doing stupid things. I didn’t get hooked on drugs or alcohol or have five marriages. I would visit the book instead of the bar.”
Therapy and medication now control his symptoms. But he is evidently a man still swept by powerful emotions. His hands shake and his eyes moisten at certain moments. We have left the cafe and are in the museum lobby surrounded by tanks guns and aircraft. I ask him how he feels about this weaponry.
“I get fluttery, these are war machines and…”
He is a religious man. He was baptised Greek Orthodox and is now a Catholic. At one point he startles me by explaining the experience of war in religious terms.
“The awareness of death, being in the moment, the commitment to commmunity – all those things are present in combat and in religion.”
Fighting connects us to the dark side of the spiritual experience. He quotes Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, thinkers who saw the horrific pains and struggle of real religion. This is the reason he fears the new remote way of war, using drones controlled by men at computer screens thousands of miles away. They will not look into their victims’ eyes.
“I don’t know what the effect on someone’s psyche is going to be of being in Arizona operating a drone from eight thousand miles away and then killing people and going home to dinner with his kids. ‘What did you do today, Dad?’ ‘I killed seven Taleban, got them right though the eyes’. There’s something weird about that, there’s something wrong about it.”
The point is that we are in danger of losing touch with violent death. This will make war too easy and humans will always want war.
“We are not on the top of the food chain because we are a nice polite species.”
The trick is to know what we are doing. That’s why he insists on calling soldiers ‘kids’. Adults should know exactly what they are doing when they send their kids to war.
“I am not a pacifist. To be a warrior is a noble calling which is why we should not waste them. But I do not ever wish to think of a politician not realising what what he is asking to be done. It had better be goddam serious. And, if it’s that serious, okay.”
If it’s that serious…. well, there it is.
*Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes is published on August 1st by Corvus at £16.99.
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