Bryan Appleyard

Daldry’s 9/11

admin — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:45:36 +0000

At the Soho Hotel, Stephen Daldry is in a state. He can’t smoke in here, he has a bad cold and he’s edgy about his new film. His conversation is, er, hesitant. “No, er, I don’t think so, no,” he says, and “But I, yeah, no.” “I don’t know” comes up a lot, as do baffled silences. One silence ends with the mysterious words “paid in eggs, you know, chickens”. After a while, I realise he is talking about what will happen if the euro collapses. But there are also sudden flashes of insight — “I think grief has always been my subject, one way or another” — although even they seem hedged and uncertain.

The problem is, I think, that his new film, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, is a bit of a poser and has already divided the critics. “Kitsch,” says Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, “an impossible movie that has no reason for being other than as another pop-culture palliative for a trauma it can’t bear to face”. “A classy, well-ordered production,” says Brent Simon in Screen Daily, though the review is largely negative.

“People will feel passionately about the film,” Daldry says. “Some will really like it, some will really hate it. I doubt there will be a middle ground… That’s the nature of the beast, you’ve just got to take it.” Given that Daldry’s three previous films — Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader — each won him a best director Oscar nomination, this is nervy stuff. But this was pre-Oscar nominations. He could have relaxed: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was duly nominated in the best picture category.

The film is based on a Jonathan Safran Foer novel about 9/11. A boy’s beloved father dies in one of the Twin Towers. The boy, Oskar Schell, is difficult and obsessive. He may have some form of autism. “Inevitably, we went through our own diagnosis,” Daldry says. “We put him on a spectrum. Let’s assume it is some kind of Asperger’s — that would fit this.”

After the “worst day”, as he keeps calling 9/11, Oskar sets out across New York with a backpack and a tambourine in pursuit of a clue he is convinced his father left him. He has a key and he wants to find the right lock. To tell you anything more would be a spoiler, because the plot has so many twists, it makes Tony Blair look like a pretty straight kind of guy. The first big thing you have to say about this film is that the performance of Thomas Horn as Oskar is extraordinary, not least because he was plucked out of show-business nowhere; he comes from a family of San Francisco doctors, not actors, and his one previous claim to fame is that he won the kids’ version of the American television gameshow Jeopardy!

“I do think it is one of the more astonishing performances by a young actor in the canon of cinema,” says Daldry, evidently relieved to have got away from the subject of critical voices. “He has this ability to access his emotional life — how, I have no idea.”

To tell you anything more would be a spoiler, because the plot has so many twists, it makes Tony Blair look like a pretty straight kind of guy.

It was also a relief not to be directing a professional American actor in the lead part. “Sometimes it’s much harder to have a conversation with American adult actors. They have this thing called the method, so, in their tradition, the director is not involved in the creation of the character. But Thomas came without any baggage. It means you don’t have to undo anything or relearn the language.”

It took a year to find Thomas, and the deal with Warner Bros was that if they couldn’t cast the boy, they wouldn’t make the film. Scott Rudin, the producer, finally spotted him on Jeopardy! He was 12 when he won and is 14 now, although Oskar is played as an 11-year-old.

“It was hard to explain to the family, who don’t really go to the cinema, that I would be taking over. That’s what happened. One of the parents was there the whole time — he should go back to school and go to Yale. I kept saying to the parents, ‘Let’s try not getting him any offers.’ ”

Horn leads a spectacular cast: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman. Even Max von Sydow appears to play, well, Max von Sydow, although this time he is mute. (It was enough, apparently, to persuade the Academy to give him a best supporting actor nomination.)

“Isn’t Max great?” Daldry says. “He always delivers. He’s spent a long time getting away from priests of one kind or another.”

Over it all, however, looms the spectre of the Twin Towers, a tricky subject for any director and a sacred one for New Yorkers. I tell him something Steven Spielberg said to me — that it would be years before the great 9/11 movie came out. “I always knew I wanted to make this film to come out after the 10th anniversary, but, whether it is too soon or too late, everybody will have to make their own personal choice,” he replies. “Some people will still feel very close to 9/11. Some do not. But there are thousands of stories to be told and many films to be made about it.”

When the planes hit, Daldry was in a Soho editing suite, finishing The Hours with Rudin. “We both went down and watched the TV. The strange thing was, we could get through to people in New York on the phone, but nobody in New York could. I remember feeling it was an out-of-control situation, that the world had changed into a dangerous and strange place. Suddenly, this was chaos.”

What is striking to anybody over the age of, say, 15, however, is how quickly it has all been normalised, if not forgotten. We live in a post-9/11 world, but, for some, the event is all but ignored. Daldry lives in New York and his two daughters go to school there. “You know 9/11 is not taught in American schools? My kids only know about it properly because of this movie. Loads of kids in New York don’t really know what happened, and why and what the consequences were. I was shocked, and other people agree with me — there’s a campaign to have it taught.”

Perhaps the point is that nobody would yet know how to teach it. In some ways — in Afghanistan, most obviously — it is still happening, and the story has no ending. The film is about the beginnings of this feeling of incomprehension that the event engenders. Oskar idolises his father, almost cutting his mother out of the family and, therefore, turning himself into an orphan in the process. The father’s death is beyond anything the boy can imagine. He creates his search project to give meaning where there is none. This isolates him even further.

“Grief is messy and difficult,” Daldry says. “It’s one of the more complicated and distressing of emotions, so it didn’t feel like it was a useful exercise or truthful to make this into anything other than what it was — a mother locked in her grief, a kid locked in his. Yes, they fight, and actually they’re having a really hard time together.”

He creates his search project to give meaning where there is none. This isolates him even further.

There is a tension here between this “small” private grief and the larger public grief surrounding the event itself. It echoes the tension in Daldry’s previous film, The Reader, in which one man’s search for meaning in the Holocaust comes up against the big, public, brute fact of the thing itself. The seeker, played by Ralph Fiennes, is eventually told to seek his therapy in art and literature, because nothing comes out of the concentration camps. I won’t tell you how Oskar finds peace, but keep your eyes on the answering machine.

I can tell you that it involves something Oskar did not do, and that brings out two rare autobiographical asides from Daldry. He was 14, and his father was dying of cancer. One day, his mother said they really had to go to the hospital: “I decided I didn’t want to go, I wanted to watch TV, and he died. That stays with you, that mistake.”

Then there was the matter of the empty coffin. There is no body in Oskar’s father’s coffin — it had not been found — so, to the boy, the funeral service seems meaningless. Again, there is a parallel. “I remember my father having a massive autopsy. Somebody said at the funeral that there was only a bit of my dad in there, the rest was sandbags. So the empty coffin thing chimed with me.”

The film, you will gather, is played at a high emotional level. It has as many tear-jerking moments as plot twists. “I find the film quite upsetting. It sort of gets to its level, and it stays there in terms of its intensity. It has a long start, then it settles into its level. Perhaps there’s too much emotion, so some people will respond to that and some people won’t. That’s all you know.”

Both the emotion and Oskar’s way of seeing the world are further intensified by the way it is filmed. Daldry plays around with depth of field and extreme focus on certain things. Also, it is shot using a system Daldry calls “Alexa raw”. He says it is the first time this has been used in a movie. The result is very high definition and very sharp colours. When the film started, I thought the visual quality was an attempt to suggest a dream, but it is actually intended to capture something of Oskar’s autistic understanding of things. If Daldry has his way, it will also drive yet another nail into the coffin of 3-D.

“It’s a raw digital format that gives you a level of saturation that is so much more vibrant. I love it — it pulls me closer to the people. There was an ability to access the human face that felt new to me. It is so much more interesting than 3-D — that gives me a headache.”

Daldry, like the film, is a strange package. He always gives the impression of not quite knowing what he is doing or what he has done. At the same time, his appearance (tautly smart) and his voice (Jeremy Irons-ish) contradict the mental dishevelment he expresses. I felt the same discontinuity when I spoke to him about The Reader. This time, I guess it’s worse, because he really doesn’t know what he’s done with EL&IC.

It missed out at the Golden Globes, and the signs for the Oscars are not good. The problem is, as everybody says, the number of plot twists. If you know there is a twist round every corner — and there is — then you stop caring and, more to the point, your tears aren’t jerked. The moment we wrap, Daldry rushes outside to have a fag, still talking about the way some people will like it and some will hate it. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”

Richard Sennett’s Togetherness

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:30:51 +0000

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

By Richard Sennett

(Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 324pp £25)

Human interactions are not necessarily well served by human inventions. Take the ‘call tree’, the telephone answering device that makes you choose a series of options so that the company ‘may better direct your calls’. People hate these because they detect the exploitation inherent in the transference of a company’s inefficiency to its customers. But there it is, almost daily, making us all miserable. What the machine is doing is simplifying you into a series of attributes which it has been programmed to understand; it is making you ‘machine readable’. Ideally, it would like you to be a machine. Humans are just too infuriatingly complex.

That is my example, but, in its own mundane, consumerist way, it illustrates the thesis of Richard Sennett’s book: that ‘our emotional and cognitive capacities are erratically realized in modern society’. Building on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, he argues that ‘people’s capacities for cooperation are far greater and more complex than institutions allow them to be’.

The starting point for any such argument is a refutation of the highly individualistic or atomised view of human nature that dominated economic and social thinking until, approximately, the Eighties and still persists among a few economic fundamentalists. In this, the individual was considered as a snooker ball-like unit simply bouncing off other balls. This was always implausible and, for Sennett, was replaced by the much more coherent view advanced by, among others, the psychologist Erik Erikson, that it is only through interactions with others that individuality emerges. We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.

Thus cooperation is the only way we can be human at all, and the suppression of cooperation – which is what the call tree does so ruthlessly – is the suppression of humanity. Together is a grand tour around the historical and cultural implications of this idea. Sennett starts at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900 and takes us, via evolutionary theory, religion, inequality, the quandaries of the Left and little oddities like his musical adventures with the editor of The Guardian, to his conclusion that ‘we are capable of cooperating more deeply than the existing social order envisions’.

This is, you will gather, a somewhat rambling book and Sennett’s prose is far from focused. His conclusion is effectively the same as his introduction, though I don’t condemn him for this because the problem he is addressing is too fundamental to be solved by argument, advice or policy. It involves a reversal of the ‘age of brutal simplifiers’, as Jacob Burckhardt characterised the modern era.

We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.

The problem is that we are being ‘de-skilled’ when it comes to cooperation. Such skills are embedded in rituals and forms of discourse. The standard radio or TV debate on a topical issue involves representatives of the two opposing points of view arguing with each other in terms that cannot possibly be resolved. The format pushes them to extremes. Radio phone-ins are worse as their sole purpose seems to be to push each new caller to say something more stupid than the last. This is all entertaining but it is predicated on the idea that cooperation is impossible and, as far as the broadcaster is concerned, undesirable.

For Sennett the way out of this impasse is ‘dialogic cooperation’ which ‘entails a special kind of openness, one which enlists empathy rather than sympathy in its service’. In this form of conversation, listening is as important as speaking, because only by listening can you understand and empathise with the opposing point of view and thereby gain perspective on your own position.

Sennett says ‘dialogic cooperation’ is the ‘Holy Grail’, implying that it is out of reach. This is understandable. Individualism within the context of the free market has, since the Seventies, been the prevailing orthodoxy, an orthodoxy with which the Left had to come to terms because, until the crash of 2008, it seemed to be making us richer and to have defeated competing systems. But the Left has failed to respond coherently to the crash and the Right has quietly arranged for the bankers to go back to business as usual, so even that cataclysm has failed to lead us back to the dialogic Grail.

The answer is, as Sennett rightly says, to relocate the concept of the competitive free market within the cooperative human world. Much neo-liberal rhetoric seemed to treat the market as some kind of natural system with which we tamper at our peril. This attitude seems to have been supported by some dubious Darwinian rhetoric about the survival of the fittest. In fact, all markets are very intricate human creations, products of cooperation rather than competition. It is this kind of insight that may inspire new thinking on the Left – though perhaps not in Ed Miliband.

On the Right, anxieties about the impact of unbridled capitalism have tended to circle around the concept of community, an idea which seems to have sprung from Robert Nisbet’s book of 1953, The Quest for Community, and to have filtered all the way down to David Cameron’s Big Society and, in a rather different way, to the Tea Party in America. These are rather specialised and fragile responses to the problems of urbanised and polyglot societies. Of course, we want communities – they are nice things – but, in a big city, a degree of what Erving Goffman called ‘civil inattention’ towards others may be safer.

It is hard to summarise the scope and erudition in these pages, or fully capture the seriousness of Sennett’s intent, which is, essentially, to find a way out of the quandaries – particularly for the Left – of the post-Cold War world. He does not in the end find a way but he does find an image, that of Montaigne’s cat. When the great thinker played with his pet, he wondered if it was not, in reality, playing with him. Others are opaque, cooperation is difficult. But the cat and the man do play because both of them want to and that, in the end, ought to be the benign order of things.

4Chan and Anonymous

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:21:53 +0000

Epic Win for Anonymous by Cole Stryker

On July 5, 1993, The New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner showing a black dog sitting at a computer screen talking to a white dog with black spots sitting on the floor. “On the internet,” says the black dog, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Anonymity is a defining feature of the internet; people routinely hide behind pseudonyms. Many find this alarming, even dangerous. Cole Stryker seems to disagree. “I wrote this book,” he states, “because I wanted to set the record straight. Namelessness matters. Freedom matters.”

The subject of Epic Win for Anonymous, the website 4Chan.org, is certainly nameless and, in one sense, free. Basically it is an image-upload site with comment threads. It has numerous categories ranging from Japanese manga to toys and fashion. It was founded in 2003 by Christopher Poole, a 15-year-old student hiding behind the pseudonym “moot”. His real identity was exposed by The Wall Street Journal in 2008; he has now gone on to launch a new website called Canvas.

Originally, 4Chan was all about Japanese anime. Now it is about everything and it has about 10.2m visitors a month and hundreds of thousands of new posts a day. It changes all the time but a quick check on the category known as “random” — usually the most hair-raising — reveals a boy asking for advice about what to do when his sister offers him cannabis, a lot of teenage girls in states of undress moaning about being dumped, speculation about why Stephen Hawking is confined to a wheelchair if he is so smart, assorted gay shots featuring freakish penises and…well, this is a family newspaper.

Anonymity is a defining feature of the internet; people routinely hide behind pseudonyms.

These things come and go because nothing is saved, the median life of a comment thread being just under four minutes. If you have a desperately short attention span, 4Chan is for you.

Why should this matter? In part, because it has become one of the most effective generators of internet “memes”, ideas that spread rapidly. The word was coined by Richard Dawkins, who speculated that memes could be cultural units that behaved somewhat like genes, sustaining and replicating themselves, using human minds as their medium. A typical internet meme has been “lolcats”, cute pictures of cats with speech bubbles that make them speak in a curious pidgin English.

Stryker’s first contact with the site was in 2006 when he was sent a link to an anime character “doing something unspeakable involving at least three bodily fluids”. Further study led him to conclude that this was “the most fascinating place on the internet”.

Actually, the most fascinating place on the internet is the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, but I can see what Stryker means, in the sense that 4Chan is the most direct expression of what is utterly novel about the internet. Never before have we been able to hide behind a mask of anonymity and expose our lowest, our most intimate concerns before an audience that may include the entire world.

Stylistically, this generates a kind of vast in-joke. Regulars on 4Chan seem to despise newcomers and anybody who is not in on the specialised language — “newfags”, they call them, as opposed to “oldfags”. “Fags” is a frequently used suffix which seems to have become detached from its American role as an offensive term for gays. Similarly “nigger” seems to be okay on the site. Indeed, the only thing that seems to be positively discouraged — and suppressed — is child pornography.

The in-joke is, of course, increasingly an out-joke because virtually everybody now gets the references. But things become much more serious when we consider one of 4Chan’s offspring — the hacker group Anonymous, which shares with WikiLeaks the determination to subvert and sabotage in the name of absolute freedom of information. It was born on 4Chan in 2003 as an attempt to become a global, anarchic network.

Anonymous has been spectacularly successful, notably in defending Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, by bringing down Mastercard and Visa when they refused to process payments to his site. Most recently they have hacked into the Nigerian government’s computers in support of the fuel-price protesters and this month they attacked the US Department of Justice in retaliation for the shutting down of the file-sharing site Megaupload.

A fabulously vain control freak, he seems to see himself as a lone hero whose privacies are uniquely excluded from the free flow of information

In this form, internet anonymity becomes a global, political and economic force. You may sympathise with some of Anonymous’s goals, but do not forget they are entirely unaccountable. They subscribe to an extreme anarchic ideology, not to anything resembling democracy. They are cyber-utopians, a creed whose shortcomings became most vividly apparent in the character of Assange. A fabulously vain control freak, he seems to see himself as a lone hero whose privacies are uniquely excluded from the free flow of information. He can steal your privacy but you can’t steal his. As ever, utopianism crashes into the brick wall of human personality and ambition.

And that is the point. For all Stryker’s strained justifications, 4Chan is a prison that is only called free. Real freedom is a way of restraining the worst excesses of human nature so that we may, indeed, be free to live, love and die in as much peace as we can manage.

But, abominably written though it is, Epic Win for Anonymous has, nonetheless, a certain anthropological interest, which is a smart way of saying if you really want to know about this stuff, it’s all pretty much here. But be warned, there’s nothing pretty about unfettered human nature.

The Crowds at Abbey Road

admin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:53:07 +0000

Every time I pass Abbey Road I see a crowd of tourists sitting around or posing like the Fab Four on this crossing. This very understated photograph has made the place sacred. It was shot on 8th August 1969 by Iain Macmillan standing on a ladder. He used a Hasselblad with a 50mm lens – ie wide in medium format – and he had time to take six shots, all based on sketches by Paul McCartney. The crossing is now Grade II listed. But for the four figures marching away from the recording studio, the scene is banal and the photography unremarkable yet it is globally recognisable, even The Simpsons have appeared in this pose – Homer being John and Bart Paul, which is odd, surely he should be Ringo. I suppose its success lies in the questions it poses – What are they doing? What does it mean? – combined with the obviously real and reachable locality. Perhaps the tourists think by going there they will meet the Beatles or are somehow touching them. It could only be done once and, though it has nothing of the quality of Fox Talbot’s masterpiece, it is almost equally important as a comment on what photography can do. The crowds look as though they will be there forever.

Fox Talbot’s Dream Square

admin — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:51:09 +0000

This is William Henry Fox Talbot’s Nelson’s Column under Construction, Trafalgar Square, April 1844. It is a photograph that has haunted me for some time. The Met’s commentary says it ‘marks the beginning of a new, photographic way of seeing’ which, I think, is right. The composition is strange and unbalanced, containing St Martin-in-the-Fields, the raffish Morley’s Hotel and the column itself, startlingly cropped, in an uneasy spatial relationship. This is not just about getting everything in because, if that had been the intention, then the top of the column would have been included. Perhaps, as the Met people say, it’s about ‘a fascinating intersection of the religious and secular, the historic and present-day’. But that sounds just too curatorish and falls far short of the eerie feeling I get from the picture. This, I now think, springs from the fact that the square is deserted, a fact made more poignant by the billboards which nobody is reading. This could be a post-apocalyptic vision in which the scaffolding signals not work but abandonment. And that, combined with the soft, misty effects produced by Fox Talbot’s camera and paper, turns the whole thing into a troubling dream, if not a full blooded nightmare. Or, I suppose, it is just very early in the morning and the city is still sleeping. It remains a dream, but a more benign one. Either way, it’s a great photograph, a moment of discovery, beyond which, almost 170 years later, few snappers have progressed.

Geoff Dyer: The Hatchet Man

admin — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:38:03 +0000

In his occasional column in The New York Times, Geoff Dyer trashed Julian Barnes’s Man Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending. Having annihilated all the book’s claims on our attention, he concluded: “It isn’t terrible, it is just so… average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well written: excellent in its averageness!”

Calling the work of one of our grandees of letters “average” is, of course, much more likely to get under the skin than calling him, for example, “crap”; it suggests the trashing is considered, rather than intemperate. And Dyer does seem to have thought about Barnes before. “It is not,” he admits, “the first time I have dissed him.”

Perhaps detecting a real spat, the judges of the new Hatchet Job of the Year award have shortlisted Dyer for the prize. So how does he feel about it now? He first emits a soft “Hmmmm…”. (He does that a lot.) “Well, since that thing came out, I’ve had so many emails from people saying, ‘God, I felt exactly the same.’ But I suspect Barnes is getting emails from people saying, ‘What an ignorant tosser that Dyer is.’”

Ignorant? No. Tosser? No. One of our most unusual and gifted writers? Yes. Dyer cannot be categorised, but here he is, sitting across from me in his immaculate flat off Ladbroke Grove, in west London, so I must try. Let’s start with that word “immaculate”.

“Nice socks,” he says to me as I enter his kitchen. They are nice — Richard James, last Christmas but one — but they are not often remarked on, because I am usually wearing shoes. Shoes are banned in the Dyer flat, which is, as a result, immaculate: flawless wooden floors, the right modern furniture, a book-lined study with just enough mess to suggest hard work. The only real mess is just by the front door, where there is a pile of shoes.

Dyer does seem to have thought about Barnes before. “It is not,” he admits, “the first time I have dissed him.”

Then there is the man himself, a walking rebuke to every man over 50. He is 53, tall, lean, fit and, as the writer Will Self has remarked, “elegant”. He could be cast in a television ad for Polo Ralph Lauren. The voice is warm and actorish, so the ad could also be on radio, and he even gives me camomile tea, as if I look in need of a detox, which, next to him, I do. That he is one of our finest essayists and funniest novelists is just the last straw.

Anyway, he plays tennis — wouldn’t you know it? — and started having a few games with Jamie Byng, the long-haired, excitable boss of his new publisher, Canongate. Dyer said he would like to write a book on tennis, and Byng became excited. “He said, ‘Oh, great, publisher’s dream, Andy Murray’s going to win Wimbledon’, and so on. Then I realised I didn’t want to do it. It was just awful, terrible.” Instead, unknown to the publisher, he wrote a book on the 1979 Russian film Stalker. “I happened to see Stalker again, and I wrote a tiny thing about it for The Guardian — and, frustratingly, realised I had a lot more to say. I started bunking off from the tennis book to summarise the film. Then I found a tone I really liked. It’s all about tone for me — having a tone, finding a tone. No tone, misery. After I get the tone, fun.”

At some point, he had to break this huge change of direction to Canongate. “They kept calling me to ask how it was going, and I kept saying it was going well. Then came the moment I had to say it was on Stalker, and they said, ‘Didn’t we say tennis? Well, we weren’t aware that our winter 2012 list was crying out for a book on this film that nobody will have seen, but now it seems there is a little space for it.’ ”

Stalker is by Andrei Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 — the Shakespeare of cinema, maker of three of the greatest films ever created, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror and Stalker. To describe these films as influential would be a wild understatement. Directors as different as Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick are soaked in Tarkovsky, and, since Malick’s most Tarkovskian film, The Tree of Life, more or less determined the style of a current television ad, you could say that Tarkovsky influenced Thomson Holidays. He invented a new way of seeing things — as a psychologically and spiritually intense meditation on time, every shot demanding the closest possible attention. Attending closely to the movie is exactly what Dyer does in Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.

Stalker is a religious film — Tarkovsky was a full-on Russian Orthodox believer — based on a sci-fi story about an enchanted zone where aliens may once have landed. But the movie strips out the sci-fi trappings to leave a tense, agonised and doubt-laden voyage through a wrecked industrial landscape to the Zone, a place of possible salvation, though it may only be the seeing eye of the camera that is saved. The Zone is in colour; the rest of the film is in black-and-white. But this is not ordinary monochrome. Tarkovsky shot the film in colour, then processed the film as black-and-white, giving it a hard, contrasty, dramatic look.

Dyer does not share the movie’s religiosity, but, as he says, “even Richard Dawkins” would be moved by the sensational and explicitly religious conclusion. His book is simply a record of watching the film; almost every shot is covered. It is not a critique or analysis so much as a reaction.

“I’d seen it so many times, and its power never seemed to diminish, so there is obviously something major going on in there. And it lent itself so well to summary, really, partly because I liked the absurdity of summarising a film you could summarise so simply. But also, the literal journey lends itself to these semimetaphysical digressions that I have a fondness for. I’m weak at plots — I can’t think of plots at all as a novelist. That’s always hampered me. I’ve always felt quite happy doing the little essayist things, and with this film, I could do both simultaneously because I had the plot.”

Dyer does not share the movie’s religiosity, but, as he says, “even Richard Dawkins” would be moved by the sensational and explicitly religious conclusion.

The book is also startlingly autobiographical. The Room in the movie is supposedly where you attain your deepest desire, which is, Dyer says, sort of the same as one’s greatest regret. “If so,” he writes, “then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged heterosexual men: that I’ve never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once.”One of my great desires has been not to have children. There’s just no aspect of the package that appeals to me

If this seems an almost blasphemous reaction to one of the great works of art of our time, then that is the point. It is Dyer’s honest reaction, and that, in a way, becomes Everyman’s reaction. “Paradoxically, the contingencies of my experience and the vagaries of my own nature give that book a universal quality.”

He doesn’t treat Tarkovsky as a kind of “Tolstoyevskian” god, as many did, but he does regard the book as a fan letter: one, he admits, that the great man may not have liked.

This may sound odd, but then everything Dyer writes is a bit odd. He is a genre-jumper, primarily because he doesn’t believe in genres. He says, for example, that his ostensibly nonfiction book on photography, The Ongoing Moment (superb), “was much more of a novel than many of the books eligible for tthe Booker prize that year”. And he dislikes the typical nonfiction book that publishers love.

“The most successful nonfiction books tend to be those that can be reduced to a review-style summary or, ideally, just to the title — Blink or The Tipping Point. I like nonfiction books that are non-reducible to an argument, that can be experienced as some kind of work of art.”

This maverick was the only child of a sheet-metal worker and a dinner lady in Cheltenham. He acquired the knack of passing exams and won a scholarship to Oxford to read English. After that, his big ambition was to go on the dole. This was the late 1970s, a time when the dole financed bohemia.

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I left university — I wanted to sign on the dole. The dole supported a generation of writers, artists, dancers, whatever. If you had some sort of vague desire to be a writer, it wasn’t like now — now, if you want to be an artist, then it’s Tracey Emin, I want the money now and I’ve got my hustle. Then, if you had any artistic ambition, it tended to overlap with the idea of dropping out.”

His influences at the time were very much those of the dropout, rather than the bestseller. He mentions Raymond Williams, a rather fusty old leftie, and the French philosopher Michel Foucault, both men who, for me, had a talent for being wrong about everything — but then, Dyer had a Marxist phase, and I didn’t. More promisingly, his real hero, his true mentor, was the art critic and thinker John Berger: “What a great man! Easily the greatest person I have ever met.” The old theorists have dropped away, but Berger has stayed with him. Zona is, in fact, a Bergeresque exercise in the close study of a work of art.

Apart from the dole, Dyer has only ever made a living out of writing — fiction and nonfiction, as well as a steady stream of essays. He wins prizes, he is fêted — although not as much as he deserves — and he has left bohemia for this immaculate flat. He is married to Rebecca Wilson, director of the Saatchi Gallery. They have no children. Dyer is very much against the idea, but he can’t fully explain why. He emits one of his “hmmm”s.

“One of my great desires has been not to have children. There’s just no aspect of the package that appeals to me — perhaps it’s because I was an only child, but I don’t know exactly why. It’s as if you asked me why I have never had sex with a man. Well, I’ve never wanted to.”

Now he’s writing a short book about the two weeks he spent on an American aircraft carrier, but he is eager to get onto the next thing, a project he won’t reveal. Personally, I hope it’s a book on Where Eagles Dare, the daft second world war shoot-’em-up starring Richard Burton, and, weirdly, the only film Dyer says he would do in the way he did Stalker, again bringing the contingencies of his experience and the vagaries of his nature to bear on the world. But it’s time to go. My feet are freezing — he should provide slippers if he’s making people take off their shoes.

Fred the Shred’s Head is not the Answer

admin — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:15:16 +0000

David Cameron was three, almost four, when a Milton Friedman essay appeared in the New York Times headlined ‘The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’. George Osborne was not yet born. That, in a nutshell, is why they still don’t get it and probably never will. They have spent their entire lives basking in and profiting from an economy defined by the legacy of that essay. Friedman was not wrong to say what he did. Like many others, he saw the competitive threats to the United States and he wished to free companies from the burdens placed on them by the social concerns of the postwar world. He argued that, socially, companies were, in effect, amoral; their job was to make profits, create wealth and obey the law. All other concerns were left to the private consciences of individuals. So, from 1970 onwards, one form of capitalism was replaced by another.

If you don’t understand this, you will talk, as Cameron did, of people losing their faith in free market capitalism. The implication is that free market capitalism is a stable and well-defined entity. But postwar-capitalism was utterly different from post-Friedman capitalism. And they, in turn, were quite different from eighteenth century capitalism. Certainly, they all shared a belief in private enterprise, but they all had entirely different view of the way it should function an what part it should play. This is not about a crass distinction between right and left or Hayek and Keynes, it is about the fundamental truth that capitalism engenders change and instability. Invariably it will go wrong because of free riders, cheats and monopolists and will have to be corrected. Which is where we are now.

Neither Cameron nor Osborne sees this because they think the system they have know actually IS capitalism. So, they just come up with little political games, like this week’s scapegoating of Fred Goodwin. Well, he’s obviously a premiership prat who didn’t understand finance and probably should be in prison, but he’s a symptom not a cause. It is a disgrace to use him as a distraction because you want to divert attention from the fact that the City is already busy incubating the next crash with its bonuses and its dud maths. If it works, the middle and working classes are in for another decade of economic stagnation, while the oligarchs steal or lose their money.

Smart Yeast Points to the Apocalypse

admin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:48:58 +0000

Tyler Cowen leads me to this. Apparently it is not so hard for multicellular life forms to get started. It took only sixty days for single yeast cells ‘to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.’ Cowen correctly observes that, exciting as this may sound, it is bad news for humans. The reason is the Fermi Paradox - basically if there are lots of alien civilisations, why is there no evidence in the form of, for example, von Neumann probes? One response was that there are not lots of aliens because it is an uphill struggle to get complex life started. In other words, as Cowen puts it, the filter is in the past. We made it past the choke point – single-celled creatures – where life tends to stall. But, if this is not the choke point, as this paper seems to show, then the filter must be in the future. Something about technologically advanced civilisations leads to self-destruction which is the real reason why there are no alien probes around. Here’s another observation about Fermi which probably doesn’t add much.

Anyway, if yeast can make it past the choke point…. well, it’s a pretty big story but don’t make any long term plans.

Borgen: The Snowstorm Paperweight

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:46:40 +0000

Yesterday Stephen Pollard tweeted ‘Five more sleeps until #Borgen’ and Christine Burns confidently predicted ‘that, within five years, all British TV will be in Danish, with subtitles.’ The Killing seems to have started this Danemania and now we have Borgen, a political drama about Denmark’s first (fictional) woman Prime Minister, the character being, I discover, ‘inspired by Tony Blair’. (This must make her the first person, factual or fictional, ever to have been ‘inspired’ by the old corkscrew; impressed maybe, inspired no.) Anyway, okay, The Killing was very good, Borgen is good and much much better than the West Wing. I am the only person in the country who couldn’t get on with The West Wing – all that super-smart dialogue, those horrible ‘staffers’, that saintly president with his soppy wife and the political emptiness that lay behind it all. It also did terrible damage, Westminster is now infested by young SpAds and wonks who think they are in the show. Borgen – the name refers to the palace housing the three houses of parliament – is better because it feels real and the characters are much less boring and much more sympathetic. Nevertheless, it will make people think twice about going into politics, partly because it seems pointlessly hard work and partly because you seem to get much less sex.

But what’s really interesting is Denmark. The two series of The Killing established the place as poorly lit and suicidally depressed, both positive attributes in my book. Borgen is brighter, but it still seems to suggest that there’s something wrong with Denmark and it’s not just Danish Blue, a horrible, horrible cheese. One thing that is wrong is that, uniquely in the world, the Danish have problems with Greenland – this was a superbly educational episode – but the big thing is that it is a very small country with only 5.5 million people. Smallness is everywhere in Borgen from the City Hall politics to the casual way the Prime Minister strolls around in public, unmobbed and protected only by two very offhand security guards. There is also smallness in the issues discussed, even when it’s terrorism and Afghanistan. The perverse effect of this smallness is that is makes the place seem autonomous and the story important on its own terms. You can’t do this with big or medium-sized countries because either the stories become global or they hover uncertainly in some ill-defined space between the global and the local. But, in Borgen, Denmark becomes a political doll’s house where everything has its own internal logic. This is exciting but also consoling, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

Scandinavia, as Euan Ferguson notes, has always attracted the British middle class, either on stylistic or sexual grounds. But we seem to have discovered a new charm – not the clean-lined, sexually liberated society of the past, but, rather, a cold and difficult place neatly contained within a harmless and rather loveable bubble, a snowstorm paperweight.

The Prince and the Canaletto

admin — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:11:50 +0000

Having fled the unpleasantness known as the war of the Austrian succession, Ferdinand Philip, 6th Prince Lobkowicz, found himself in London in 1748. He was supposedly buying horses, but, being handsome, 24 years old and a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, he also pursued various women, one of whom, the wife of the Venetian ambassador, happened to know a rather gifted painter. Impressed by a couple of giant views of the Thames, the prince bought both and shipped them from the painter’s studio back home to Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), where, bar a couple of brief interruptions, they have remained ever since. The artist’s name was Canaletto, and they are two of the greatest paintings of London ever made.

To mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee, one of those paintings is to be seen in the capital for the first time, as the star of a show called Royal River, at the National Maritime Museum, in Greenwich. You had better get used to this painting — you are going to see a lot of it in 2012.

We are looking eastward from the South Bank. St Paul’s floats serenely over the huddled red-brown roofscape that slopes down to the muddy banks of the river. Beyond, a sweep of church spires leads down to London Bridge. Beneath a benign sky, the river is packed with the barges of the lord mayor and the Livery Companies heading upstream towards Westminster. Celebratory guns are being fired and hundreds of small boats have joined the pageant. It is a party, a special day, but it is also timeless, one of the most perfect representations of both grand ceremonial and ordinary life in the mid-18th century.

For the moment, the painting hangs in a room in the Lobkowicz Palace, in Prague. On the opposing wall is the other London painting by Canaletto, a view of the Thames looking eastward from Lambeth Palace, showing the first Westminster Bridge. This has been to London as part of an exhibition in the 1990s, at the Royal Academy, but its partner has only ever been as far as a salt mine in Austria. Stolen by the Nazis, it was rediscovered by American soldiers and returned to Prague.

Then, in 1948, it being the 20th century, it was stolen by the communists, then, finally, returned to the hands of an unassuming American real-estate agent called William Lobkowicz. This is the man who now sits before me, beneath a stern portrait of his great-grandfather Ferdinand Zdenko, the ancient family’s 10th and last prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

“He was,” says Lobkowicz, gesturing at the dark and gory pictures that fill the rest of the room, “very fond of hunting.”

Lobkowicz is 50, tall, charming, beautifully dressed and elegantly balding: everything a central European prince should be, except that his accent is American, and his manner, as well as a certain nervousness in the eyes, betrays his modest upbringing in Massachusetts. His wife, Alexandra, is with us. She was expecting to be a teacher, but finds herself in charge of the art collection of one of the great families of Europe.

Lobkowicz, meanwhile, dreamt of the past, the paintings and the vast Bohemian estates, but never expected to reclaim them. “We were brought up on the fundamental principle,” he says, “that three things cannot be taken away from you — your family, your religion and your education. It was drilled into us that nobody could ever take those, so we didn’t have big ideas about restitution. It wasn’t the driving force.”

The Lobkowicz family line emerged in the 14th century, but did not come into its own until 1620, during the Thirty Years War. At the battle of White Mountain, just outside Prague, the Catholics defeated the Protestants and the family reaped the rewards in land and property. For the next three centuries, they remained one of the rich ruling families of central Europe.

Then, after the first world war, their aristocratic titles were abolished and the almost absurdly romantic figure of Max Lobkowicz, William’s grandfather, appeared on the scene. He was a politician, a diplomat and a believer in Czech democracy, to the point where he almost failed to see the threat from the Nazis. In the event, an overheard conversation among German soldiers on a train in March 1939 warned the family of the imminent invasion, and they fled Prague the night before the Panzer divisions rolled in. They were all on Hitler’s blacklist, and they left behind 13 castles, assorted palaces, several businesses — and their priceless archive and art collection.

In 1948, the communists took charge and, in that offhand way they had, executed the senior figures looking after the collection: two were tossed from a high building, something of a tradition in this city. Max was back in Prague, and found he could not get out. The apparatchiks may have let him live, but they didn’t want him making trouble abroad. In London, his wife, Gillian Somerville, feigned terminal illness and was visited by communist diplomats, who confirmed she was dying. Max was allowed out for a weekend to visit her. In a moment precisely reminiscent of the final scene in Casablanca, an order to stop him at the airport was deliberately ignored and, once again, romantic Max was free.

William Lobkowicz was born in 1961 and brought up modestly among the fragments of grand European families in Massachusetts. They received charitable assistance, but his father, Martin, also sold paintbrushes and knives door to door. He went to Harvard, feverishly studying European history and learning German, then into real estate, while nursing dreams of becoming an opera singer. Then, one day in 1989, he watched the television in wonder as East German refugees, suddenly freed, occupied the West German embassy in Prague, a former Lobkowicz palace.

“There were thousands of them there, and I thought, ‘This is it. The whole world’s watching this.’ My whole life had been a preparation for this, but I didn’t know what. It was one of those moments. I had no idea, no business plan, no clue. I was single, but I knew my way around.”

Communism had crumbled; the Bohemians in exile scented freedom and home. Lobkowicz was the youngest child, but he was the freest of family and work commitments, and the most enthusiastic about family history. So he became the returning “prince”, the face of the Lobkowicz restoration. He moved to Prague, engaged a lawyer, learnt Czech, married Alexandra in 1992 and embarked on a complicated and financially hair-raising scheme. He would, for example, buy one castle, mortgage it, then buy the next.

“We got 10 castles back out of 13. Three were basically ruins, with just two walls standing. The main castles were intact, in various states of disrepair — there was tens of millions of dollars of damage. There was the brewery, the winery, mineral water, some forests, land and tens of thousands of objects. The castles were filled with stuff.”

The process inspired death threats, hate mail and even a large image of a decomposing body, from people who felt he had no right, but Lobkowicz ploughed on. He financed the project by selling off 85% of what he reclaimed, leaving the family with three castles and the collection. The palace where we are sitting was returned in 2003 after 12 years of legal battles. Lobkowicz, Alexandra and their children live in a rented flat in Prague. “It’s not good to bring up children in a castle,” Alexandra says.

‘We got 10 castles back out of 13. Three were basically ruins, with just two walls standing.’

Also, cash is hard to find, the government gives almost nothing and, as a result, the Lobkowiczs are constantly fundraising to support the collections. One reason for this is that they cannot sell works of art. Though the collection includes the Canalettos, a superb Bruegel, a Cranach, a Rubens and so on, it is, in cash terms, valueless. The Czechs, having suffered one too many expropriations, will not allow works of art to be sold abroad, and there is no Czech market in old masters. They are even sticky about loans such as the current one to the National Maritime Museum. It was only through the bullish interventions of Lord Sterling, chairman of the museum, and the glamour of the diamond jubilee that the authorities were persuaded.

In anything other than cash terms, the collection’s value is literally inestimable, and not just because of the paintings. The family were great patrons of music and own original scores by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven — the ones on show provide the museum’s most shiver-inducing moments. But there is also 1.5km of shelving housing the unexplored archives. Lobkowicz has found unknown letters of Beethoven; nobody knows what else might be in there.

For us now, however, the whole story — a tale of coming home — is symbolised by the return of the Canaletto to London, 264 years after it was bought as a souvenir by the rakish Ferdinand Philip. The historian David Starkey, who is a guest curator of the Royal River exhibition, points out that this return is not just of the painting, but also of the artist, because, in painting London, he was painting his home city, Venice.

“Before the Victorians built the Embankment, the Thames was a working river. The reason the Canaletto is so wonderful is that London worked in exactly the same way that Venice does. The Thames was our Grand Canal.”

Starkey also points out that royal river processions in London have been associated with queens since 1487, when Henry VII decided to give his wife, Elizabeth of York, a river pageant. Henry VIII continued this tradition, notably with Anne Boleyn, and the Catholic wives of the Stuarts would not accept Protestant rites on land, so were awarded grand parades on water.

The real story, though, is that of Bohemia, of the fatal geography that placed it, in the 20th century, between the two bloodiest ideologies ever dreamt up by humans. Millions died in the “bloodlands” that lay west of Moscow and east of Berlin. Ancient families were expropriated and torn apart, but one is now reconstituting itself around the unlikely form of a diffident real-estate agent from Massachusetts.

“How many families,” Lobkowicz asks, “have made it through a couple of world wars and the communists, and are still alive and kicking, and are trying to tell a story?