Star Wars: If they'd given me the 'Episode 7' gig...

Probably the main emotions I associate with the Star Wars movies – such a hot thing back when I was 6 years old, not to say ever since, and fervently so again now the resumption of the series has been announced – are vague disappointment and anti-climax of the childish kind, a bit like the taste of flat Coca-Cola? Even by today’s standards few motion pictures have ever been so aggressively and unremittingly marketed; a process that’s not always compatible with innocent ideas of escapist fun.

I think that’s why, when I was kindly escorted to see Star Wars (‘Episode 4’, as we never knew it) at the age of 6 – I was quite puzzled to find that what was on the screen hardly lived up to what had been going on in my head, having already seen tie-in comic books, picture books, kiddie-novelisations and breathless reports on the whole phenom by John Craven’s Newsround and Frank Bough’s Nationwide. I suppose one learned something there, before one could give it words, about how the excitement of the human imagination lives on its own and seeks objects to attach itself to. The main point is, I’m certain I enjoyed playing with Star War toys (i.e. a great deal) vastly more than watching Star Wars.

Those, then, are the big twinned disappointments of the Star Wars thing: its vanguard role in the modern-day science of Selling to Kids, together with the variable quality of the movies lurking in back. Again, memory is vulnerable (I was 12 when I saw it) but I find it hard to believe viewers of any age weren’t groaning through Return of the Jedi (‘Episode 6’), with its pat resolutions and endless talk and insufferable fur-ball cuteness . With the second trilogy of movies that came out between 1999 and 2005, pictures I admit I’ve only glimpsed on small screens, even the diehard fans seemed to break out in revolts of distress, despondency, rage.

My one clear thought about Star Wars around that time came when me and a small film crew were scuttling around Denmark making a Channel 4 documentary on the Danish Dogme 95 film movement, during the production of which I was constantly being told by sneering US and UK film journalists that this vaunted avant-garde was just a shallow marketing ploy to sell a slate of low-budget Danish movies. That critique never looked more kneejerk-insular to me than when our crew stopped for supper at a motorway McDonalds outside Copenhagen, and with our Happy Meals we were served, quite irrespective of our wishes, a little set of plastic tat promoting Star Wars Phantom Menace (‘Episode 1’). There’s marketing and there’s Marketing, see.

But of course I’m not here to bury Star Wars. I suspect for many viewers, and not just apostates like me, it’s the indisputable excellence of The Empire Strikes Back (‘Episode 5’) that provides most of the abiding images of the series. I do recall going to see that one (aged 9 this time) as the first occasion 'going to the movies' felt both giddily exciting and also a bit painful in the heart vicinity – rather like how falling in love would shortly come to feel. And one needn’t summon critical respectability to this, but Pauline Kael’s championing of Empire as the best American movie of its year (a year that included Raging Bull) was quite telling. What’s good about the picture, as with most good pictures, is its writing (by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, veteran of the Hawksian western and film noir) and directing (by Irvin Kershner, who began his career making smaller ‘personal’ films, and nearly turned this one down), and its production design, in the fullest sense. 

Pauline Kael was also very big on the movie’s visual-aural texture – Darth Vader’s armour lit for maximum gleam and menace, the venerable green-fuzz aura around Yoda, the affecting sounds of Chewbacca’s deep mournful howl and Luke’s grim whimpers after his sword-hand is lopped off. Empire was shot by Peter Suschitzy, whose son I knew slightly at university, and who went on to become David Cronenberg’s preferred DP. The film is properly dark, hard-edged, a really satisfying pop version of all that mythological stuff George Lucas professed to love in the creative anthropology of Joseph Campbell.

And now the Star Wars series is cranking up again, three more movies resuming the storyline after the events (!?) of Return of the Jedi. They’ve gone and hired Michael Arndt to write it and, professionally, I accept that – I wouldn’t have been the man for the job, my screenwriting CV hasn’t got quite the same lustre as his, I doubt I would have aced the pitch meeting... However I’m happy to offer Mr Arndt these tips on ‘which way to take it’:

1. Stay dark. Whoever the hero is this time, undermine him, menace him, keep in mind the limits of heroism, make everything come at a cost, such that triumph feels like perplexing failure. After all, the seeming point of the series has been that there are continual reversals of fortune in this war between The Force and the Dark Side. You need to preserve a sliver of ambiguity there about which is which.

2. Remember Hitchcock’s maxim: the better the villain, the stronger the picture. No Darth Vader this time out. But you need someone interestingly threatening, not called Darth.

3. Keep it mythological. Go Greek, go Shakespeare, go Wagner, go folktale. But avoid attempts at contemporary resonance (e.g. about the corruption of great republics and whatnot, when what your story proposes is an ‘evil empire’ of cosmic proportions.)

4. By all means ‘feed the theme-parks’ with white-knuckle-ride set piece sequences (which even partially redeemed Return of the Jedi.) But please think less about feeding the toy stores with opportunities for marketing soft gonks to pre-schoolers.

5. Kill Han Solo and kill him well, as Harrison Ford has long seemed to wish – the mere threat of which did so much to distinguish Empire Strikes Back. Clearly there is potential in ‘Episode 7’ for an Ibsen-like plotline of the aged warrior summoned out of brooding retirement by the woman from his past who urges him to take a final but fatal stand.

6. Try and cast older actors with proper voices, who can cope with the kind of fanciful dialogue these pictures seem to require. Star Wars got so much mileage from Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing. Episode 3, conversely, took the mystery of how Anakin Skywalker came to be imprisoned in Darth Vader’s armour then voided it of interest by casting Hayden Christiansen. (A proportion of these proper actors should be British/Irish but don’t have to be the biggest British/Irish movie stars of the moment...)

7. These stories require characters, not stereotypes, however much the audience likes to give the impression they prefer the latter. A big trick of them, it seems to me, is how to pace a character’s slide from good to evil, or their ascent in the other direction. Even Billy Dee Williams was briskly effective in Empire as the unreformed scoundrel who betrays Harrison Ford. (He got turned round very swiftly in Jedi, but I suspect that had a bit to do with saving Williams from a lot of abuse at fan conventions.)

8. Nothing is written, everything is permitted: didn’t Lucas invent quite late on the whole wheeze of Darth Vader being Luke’s father? And thank god for that. Anything twisting of previously given information is forgivable in the cause of making things less boring.

9. Really you need a family at the centre of things, with tensions therein, and... but, what am I saying? Over to you, Michael Arndt. Disney, I am available for Episode 8, probably.

Political dilemmas: even harder than you may think

One reason this blog fell into disuse in the autumn of 2010 was that I had formerly employed it to pontificate quite a bit about politics. But it’s not been a good last few years for politics... and I’ve lost a bit of fight for the subject (for which, inter alia, I like to blame Ed Miliband.) That said, in the autumn of 2010 I also got onto Twitter, and became accustomed every morning to reading political opinions, long and short, with which I agreed, and found to be more robustly and eloquently expressed than my own. (And I didn't even have to pay for them - talk about a guilty pleasure.)

The stuff I don’t agree with, meanwhile, I find I mostly haven’t the will to tackle. I was a bit nettled last week, though, by this New Statesman piece from Rafael Behr – and not, you understand, solely on account of the gruesome photo that tops it off.

It gets underway well enough, seeming to be a piece on Labour ‘recoiling from the whole spectacle of government on a shoestring’ – a problem on which Hopi Sen has been doing some hard thinking for a while. Behr further ventures that the British public ‘do seem grimly reconciled to the idea that politics, which used to be about favours bestowed from the Exchequer, is now about pain selectively inflicted’ – a debatable point, but one that Janan Ganesh also makes quite a lot.

However this is what Behr’s piece winds round to (with my emphases):

"There is a caricature of Labour’s public-sector debate that pits the frugal, reforming idolators of Tony Blair against spendthrift, reactionary disciples of Brown. The distinction is increasingly meaningless. Orthodox Blairites are a rare and neutered breed and even they accept that Balls, for all that the Tories paint him as Brownism incarnate, is wedded to budget discipline. The real tension is both subtler and more profound. It is between the need to defend Labour’s legacy of investment in public services and the impulse to imagine different ways of effecting social change. It is the dilemma of how to rehabilitate the abstract principle that government can be the citizen’s friend while also attacking the current government as a menace to society. It is the battle between Brown and Blue shades of Labour which remains unresolved, because Ed Miliband is personally steeped in both."

You could nearly imagine Miliband a brooding colossus, astride two great clashing ideas... In fact what Behr describes at the end there is not a ‘dilemma’, not by any definition. A dilemma is a choice between two more or less equally undesirable options: it’s what politics is mostly made out of. But for Labour it is a perfectly pleasant and natural thing – the usual day’s work – to offer itself as the citizen’s good angel, while pointing out that the other lot all have horns on their heads.

I suppose if you accept Ed Ball’s conversion to fiscal toughness, and also feel that his 5-point plan for growth is what the Coalition really should have been doing since 2010, then you could also take a view that Labour has progressed from its recent and rather backward stint in government (and from its nominal leader in that ‘moment’) and is now in ‘profound’ contemplation, even if only about new ways to keep on saying the things it's always liked to say. But if the unfinished Thoughts of Chairman Brown and the pamphlets of Blue Labour are really all that Ed Miliband has to mull over for inspiration then I can't see that this current version of The Party is engaged in any kind of dialectical process at all.

Say what you like about Hitchens...

The posthumous intellectual reputation of Christopher Hitchens still comes under regular assault: sometimes ‘more in sorrow than anger’ blah blah, sometimes with the avowed intention of nailing some lasting badge of shame onto his collected writings. No-one can be surprised by this, since he was consistently repudiated by aggrieved ex-co-thinkers of the left while he was alive – a little bit at first because of his loathing for Clinton, then a lot on account of his advocacy for the ousting of Saddam.

Unlike some admirers of Hitchens’ writing I don’t find any of the attacks made on either side of his death to be outrageous, indecent etc. Hitchens could certainly dish it out, and didn’t tarry much if the target of his wrath was recently deceased or clearly en route to the terminus. He seemed to feel these things needed saying regardless, and that it was ‘important to have the right enemies’, which will tend to keep you speaking freely. (Also - does it need saying? - he wasn't right about every last thing, and not everything he wrote was end-to-end brilliant; and if you wrote as much as Hitchens did then there will, and must, be blood.)

Evidently his skin stayed thick and his wit keen during the cancer. Recently I watched an interview he gave to Laurie Taylor for Sky Arts in 2011, in which Taylor put the familiar question of whether Hitchens was bothered about the kind of intellectual company he kept post-Iraq (also, unspoken but clear, whether he missed the warm exchange of fraternal regards with Chomsky, Tariq Ali et al.) ‘It takes a lot to make me cry’, Hitchens shot back, confidently if a tad wearily, before Taylor could complete the thought.

A while back I was given and enjoyed reading Hitchens’ Mortality, the short book of thoughts and notes made as he neared the end. All of it is expressed so candidly, searchingly, elegantly that I would hope to read nothing else of cancer until the great history to come of how its cure was found... (That said, I do wish I could take a razorblade and chop out Mortality’s slack preface by Graydon Carter, who – perhaps imagining himself as generous as was Time to Paul Claudel – describes Hitchens’ opinions on Iraq as ‘curious’, twice in the space of a few pages.)

With Mortality I must also regretfully accept this is the final Hitchens. I have come to terms, too, with a longstanding feeling that after September 11 2001 it just wasn’t – couldn’t be – as much fun to read him as it had been Before. (One more reason to wish Osama Bin Laden a hot place in a dream Hades.) The retooling of Hitchens’ regular Slate column under the banner of 'Fighting Words' only confirmed that he now felt there was only one political issue worth writing (and voting) on. It was needful, and he did it well, though the fierceness of the disagreements on that single issue seemed always to be lagging behind actual conditions ‘on the ground’. After 2001 Hitchens did begin to write more about literature than before, which made for diversity, and was all highly erudite, but not really the thing that had made him a must-read in the journals where I first discovered his stuff...

That’s it, see. When I now sit and conjure up the pleasure of reading Hitchens it’s all from the 1990s: his Nation 'Minority Reports' warning and urging over Bosnia (‘for the last time...’), or even (lest we forget) welcoming a Labour leader he first thought ‘unbearably Lite.’ Or his long LRB essays, bashing Isaiah Berlin over Vietnam or hailing Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. His interviewing Mailer, for that matter, in the New Left Review, and stressing the great man’s adherence to ‘an idea of the Left’ – an effort that now feels like less of the absolute essence.

I suppose what I hate most is starting to sound the slightest bit like George Galloway, who, in one of his attempts to debate Hitchens over Iraq, came out with a notably pathetic sorrow-over-anger spiel lamenting whatever befell the Hitchens he once loved - the guy who had such a store of snappy, quotable, unimprovably moralistic one-liners about (mostly American) political creeps, phonies and psychopaths?

It’s a mawkish tendency in myself, I know. You have to wipe your nose and move on (though not MoveOn.) There needs to be ‘a nuanced goodbye to all that.’

Politics as Fiction: Making the Best of a Bad Thing

Since I have a bit of previous when it comes to ‘top tens’ I was happy to answer a request from the Nudge book-lovers website for a list of my ten favourite fictional politicians in literature: that rundown is online here, and I daresay it jams in most of what are considered the classics in this field, alongside one or two curios and/or amusements.

I must admit I don’t think I could have made it up to a top fifteen – there’s not an embarrassment of riches in the literary rendering of politics and politicians, unless you’re really keen on varieties of stage villainy writ large across a page. The challenge, as I see it, is how to render accurately both the politician’s trade in all its impossible complexity, and the politician as a realistic human being rather than a straw man ‘leaking sawdust at every pore.’

I don’t believe Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men can be bettered as a poetic vision of politics, how it works, and what it does to us – but I do really love Mishima’s After the Banquet, inter alia for a special insight it shares with Tolstoy’s great novella The False Note, in which the Tsar, wrestling alone with an ethical problem, is shown to realise that:

'he could not give himself up to the demands of the human being because of all the demands that are made on a Tsar from every side; as for admitting that the demands of the human being might be more binding than the demands made on him as a Tsar - he did not have the strength to do that.' 

This, I think, is one of the great dilemmas facing the senior politician, whatever his/her ideological stripe.

My interest in this topic has been sharpened of late since, as mentioned at the head of the top ten, the novel I’m now working is about a senior politician of my invention. As is my wont I’ve been researching the world of the novel as actively as if it were to be a piece of non-fiction, and all of that legwork has been fascinating. Where I am not bound by the Chatham House Rule I hope to share a few odds and sods of that research here as I go along.

"Radical, uh, diabolical means..."

I realise belatedly this clip has been knocking around online without my noticing: some bits from a discussion I had with George Miller of the Podularity site about The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, recorded at some point in the late spring of 2011, and quite possibly on the morning after a Night Before...

Richard T. Kelly on The Possessions of Doctor Forrest from George Miller on Vimeo.

This I loved in 2012

Lucian Freud, 'Pregnant Girl' (1961)

Faber now makes a habit of asking its author to select some end-of-year cultural highlights for posting at the Thought Fox blog, and mine were included in this tranche a week before Christmas. I think I said all that needed saying: to be honest, my list includes just about everything that I found time to take in over the last twelve months - certainly the one exhibition I got to, which was Lucian Freud, need you ask. But if I had spread my categories a little to mention memoirs read then I would have wanted to extol Pete Townshend's Who I Am and Jack Straw's Last Man Standing, each of which seems to me exceptionally insightful of its author and in its field. And then if I hadn't been making such a fuss of Bob Dylan and Mozart I would have saluted the wondrous Catherine A.D. and her album of cover versions, Reprise, which followed 2011's superb mini-album Communion, and includes the Crystals cover below. I was stunned to learn that back in July of last year Ms AD also managed to publish this.

Scarfiotti, master builder

Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist (1969)

A couple of years back I mentioned the MFA thesis I submitted to the BFI in 1995, an interview-based study of the life and work of the late production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. It was, I hoped then and think now, a decent and useful piece of work, and I was especially grateful to Paul Schrader and Bernardo Bertolucci for their contributions, very evidently made out of the deepest regard for their friend and collaborator.

Anyhow, a few chunks from the thesis have ended up online, here and here, accompanied by some attractive frame-stills. Fine by me, as I'm correctly cited, and otherwise the thesis would have no meaningful afterlife other than for visitors to the BFI Library. Please do look for yourself, and remember one of the most quietly influential figures in twentieth century film style.