Kitabı oxu: «A User’s Guide to the Millennium»

Praise

From the reviews of A User’s Guide to the Millennium:

‘Like Wilde, like Burroughs, Ballard has a great facility for paradox, inversion and subversion. He points a camera at a subject from a new and oblique angle, focuses, and invites us to look through the lens. The insights come flowing thick and fast. In an age when novels are going the way of poetry and becoming an increasingly minority interest, here is a writer who still really matters. There is enough meat here for the most ravenous of appetites.’

DES TRAYNOR, Irish Independent

‘A rich and varied collection of journalism from one of our major novelists. There is much to relish and wonder over. The pieces are short but supercharged, reminiscent of Orwell at his best. Ballard is the least provincial and inward-looking of writers. His autobiographical piece on his return to Shanghai is remarkable. Ballard is a very divergent and original writer and his mordant wit, evident in so much of his work here, comes as something of a surprise.’

City Life

‘Ballard is a highly imaginative essayist with a wide range of interests and a marvellous eye for a telling juxtaposition.’

NICHOLAS MOSLEY, Daily Telegraph

‘Ballard is never less than trenchant and accurate. Originality and provocativeness are the chief tools in Ballard’s literary kit.’

ROY HERBERT, New Scientist

‘He may live in suburban Shepperton, but he still has the cruel glare of Shanghai in his soul.’

NICCI GERRARD, Observer

‘A writer capable of the most amazing narrative feats. A canonical writer, and something of a loose cannon, J.G. Ballard can gut a book with the dexterity of a Billingsgate fishwife. He is a master of the pithy review.’

JOHN SUTHERLAND, Sunday Times

‘A fine aphorist, and one of the finest apologists for his troubled time.’

ALAN BOLD, Glasgow Herald

‘A brilliant anthology that includes fantastic pieces on Dali, Coca-Cola and Einstein. Totally essential.’

i-D

From the reviews of J.G. Ballard’s novels:

‘Is Ballard our best novelist? Perhaps. He’s certainly the most interesting, the one whose account of the last half of this century has the most to tell us.’

New Statesman & Society

‘Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer.’

WILLIAM BOYD, Daily Telegraph

‘Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene and a literary saboteur. No one else writes with such enchanted clarity or strange power.’

IAN THOMSON

‘One of the most brilliant and unnerving of writers … Ballard is a writer with talent to burn.’

The Times

‘Ballard has claims to be the most interesting living English writer at work. He offers a consistent and unmistakable view of the world, an alternative reality, strange yet coherent.’

Guardian

‘A writer of extraordinarily distinctive vision and power.’

Literary Review

‘One of the most sensitive and enigmatic novelists of the present day.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Present in everything Ballard writes is that sense of a unique and profoundly original mind.’

ANGELA CARTER

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

1 FILM

Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet …

2 LIVES

Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito …

3 THE VISUAL WORLD

Warhol, Hockney, Dali and the Surrealists …

4 WRITERS

Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs …

5 SCIENCE

Einstein, the Gene Pool, Freud and Richard Feynman …

6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

From Shanghai to Shepperton …

7 SCIENCE FICTION

Inner Space, Early Manifestos, and the Billion Year Spree …

8 IN GENERAL

Coca-Cola and Walt Disney, Mein Kampf and the Astronauts …

9 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Memories of the Rising Sun …

Keep Reading

Index

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1 FILM

Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet …

The Sweet Smell of Excess

Writers in Hollywood 1915-1951 Ian Hamilton

In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money. His plight is summed up in Sunset Boulevard, where Joe Gillis ends his unhappy career lying face down in the swimming pool he always wanted, rather than admit his failure and go back to the humble newspaper office in Dayton, Ohio.

Nowadays, of course, his successors lie face up in their Hollywood pools, with not a tragic shudder among them, and the huge fees they receive, often for scripts that are never filmed, could buy most provincial newspapers outright. But the problem of the screenwriter’s role still remains, especially when the director is once again taking almost all the credit for any success. What part is played by the film script, how much does the screenwriter contribute to a film, and does he merit the status which literary people generally assign him? The difficulty of answering these questions lies at the heart of the unsatisfactory Hollywood careers of Chandler, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Nathanael West, which fixed for ever the popular myth of the literary artist exploited and degraded by a philistine industry.

With some reservations, Ian Hamilton seems to accept this point of view, tracing the history of the screenwriter from the silent era, when regiments of ex-newspapermen were hired to rough out storylines and supply static captions, to the birth of sound and the recruitment in the 1930s of a far classier and more self-important literary set – the serious novelists, Broadway playwrights and Algonquin wits, who were patronizing about the crudities of popular film but had noticed that the green slopes of Beverly Hills were covered, not with leaves, but thousand-dollar bills. All of them, to varying degrees, made the mistake of assuming that the primary creative contribution to a film would come from themselves.

Much of Hamilton’s book is drawn from the standard defensive biographies of Chandler, Fitzgerald and co., and a stale air hangs over these anecdotes. He never asks why these pre-eminendy literary writers so failed to get to grips with Hollywood. Like most outsiders he underestimates the importance of the producer, in many ways the greatest creative force in film. He knows nothing about screenwriting or, for that matter, the writing of fiction, and misconceives the function of the scriptwriter, which lies closer to the original role of story-outliner and caption-supplier.

As far as the novel is concerned, the importance of the writer is still paramount, though all of us have learned to keep a close eye on the rear-view mirror. In the theatre the playwright is at least the equal partner of the performers, but in film the writer is shouldered aside by director, actor, producer and editor, who together transform the printed word into something far more glamorous and evocative.

Years ago I was offered the chance to do the novelization of a film then being made by a leading British director. The script outlined a hackneyed story about a malevolent stowaway, with dialogue that rarely rose above ‘Chow-time. Where’s Dallas?’ Topside.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ What amazed me was not that someone had decided to film this script, but that he had been able to form any idea of the finished movie from these empty lines. Yet the film was Alien, one of the most original horror-movies ever made, and the throwaway dialogue perfectly set off the terrifying vacuum that expanded around the characters.

By some unexplained alchemy, a film can effortlessly transform sentimental clichés into something emotionally compelling, as in Sunset Boulevard’s last lines: ‘Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her…’ No serious novelist would dare to end a book with these lines, and no middlebrow writer would have the talent to invent them. But Billy Wilder is the exception. He may have quarrelled with Raymond Chandler (over Double Indemnity), but they were really on the same side, both lovers of the word. Wilder’s films, dominated by their bitter-sweet dialogue and filled with theatrical characters who always seem aware of their audience, are untypical of anything in today’s cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock (whom, puzzlingly, Hamilton scarcely mentions) is a far better guide to the true relationship between screenwriter and film. Reading the script of Psycho, the ancestor of so much present-day cinema, one is struck by the off-kilter construction – Janet Leigh’s almost unmotivated crime, and the grotesque retribution carried out by the ‘innocent’ Norman Bates. The real villain, Mother, does not appear until the last moments, when she adroitly turns into her son. Despite all this, Psycho is one of the most powerful films ever made, a psychotic Little Red Riding Hood in which Granny disguises herself as the wolf. Chandler, Fitzgerald and Faulkner could never have written the script (by Joe Steffano) and would have ruined the film had they tried. The novelistic constraints of motive and characterization would never have allowed Hitchcock to achieve those states of extremity where his imagination thrived, though few screenwriters would accept this.

The most interesting films of today – Blue Velvet, The Hitcher and the 30-second ads for call-girls on New York’s Channel J (some of the most poignant mini-dramas ever made, filmed in a weird and glaucous blue, featuring a woman, a bed and an invitation to lust) – are a rush of pure sensation. Blue Velvet, like Psycho, follows the trajectory of the drug trip. Paranoia rules, and motiveless crimes and behaviour ring true in a way that leaves a traditionally constructed movie with its well-crafted plot, characters and story looking not merely old-fashioned but untrue.

As Hamilton points out, the disappointments of the 1930s and 1940s screenwriters were compounded by the Hays Office and its ludicrous moral code. However, cinema was then a public medium, watched by audiences made up of complete strangers, and the restrictions accorded with the conventions of ordinary social life – on those occasions when we stray into the bedroom of a strange woman we usually find, alas, a husband with one foot on the floor in the approved Hays manner. Now, though, cinema is becoming a private medium. We watch on video either alone or with one or two intimates, and the imaginative demands for greater sexual freedom are all the more urgent – needless to say, I think there should be more sex and violence on television, not less. Both are powerful catalysts of social change, at a time when change is desperately needed. And both might give the screenwriter a new lease of life in liberating him from the written word.

Independent on Sunday 1990

Magical Days at Rick’s

Round Up the Usual Suspects: the Making of Casablanca Aljean Harmetz

Nostalgia may not be all it used to be, but films really were better in the 1940s and 1950s, and this account of the making of Casablanca clearly shows why. Hollywood today seems set on returning to the simple and unsophisticated spectacle of the nickelodeon era, when my grandfather’s generation gazed in amazement at express trains speeding over viaducts. Fortunes are now spent on the kind of computerized special effects that appeal to the Super Nintendo mind-set of the present-day twelve-year-old, for whom adult relationships, political beliefs and the bitter-sweet ambiguities of love and loyalty – the magical stuff of Casablanca – are as remote and boring as the kabuki theatre.

Most critics consider Citizen Kane the best film ever made, but the best-liked must be Casablanca. Yet no one involved in making the film ever imagined that it would achieve its legendary status. As Aljean Harmetz records, when shooting ended in August 1942, everyone was glad that the production was over. There was fierce rivalry between Jack Warner, the studio boss, and the film’s producer, Hal Wallis. The director, Michael Curtiz, had constantly abused his crew and bit players, and with one or two exceptions, the actors had disliked each other. Paul Henreid was contemptuous of Humphrey Bogart’s acting skills, while Ingrid Bergman was baffled by her role and said of Bogart: ‘I kissed him but I never knew him’, a line worthy of a movie all its own. The film’s dramatic climax, when the hero renounces the woman he loves and nobly returns her to the husband, was decided upon only at the last moment, and the famous closing words – ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’ – were written and inserted weeks after shooting had ended.

One of the myths about Casablanca is that the director and screenwriters made up the story as shooting went along. In fact, almost every key character and scene were present in the original play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett, who had visited prewar Vienna and been appalled by Nazi behaviour. On his way back to America, he paused in a bar in the South of France and thought: ‘What a setting for a play!’

But the transformation of this unsuccessful play into a Hollywood legend required a huge range of talents, from the seven scriptwriters to the producer, director and the leading stars. As important was the strong cast of supporting actors who gave Casablanca a dramatic depth that no contemporary Hollywood film can match. Producers today rarely allow the camera to leave the face of the $10-million leading actor. By contrast, Casablanca is rich in supporting roles that give the film a telling authenticity – the cast-list is packed with Jewish refugees, some of them playing refugees, and the others playing the Nazis.

Round Up the Usual Suspects is filled with surprises, and a feast for movie buffs and late-night viewers of classic films. It had never occurred to me that the patrician Claude Rains was a born-and-bred cockney, or that he and Bogart, off the screen as on, could have struck up a close and lasting friendship. Some academic film critics have suggested that Casablanca is a thinly veiled parable of homosexual passion, to which one can only say: ‘Play it again, Sam’ – the film’s most famous line but one that never actually appears in it. Now that is the true measure of a legend.

Daily Telegraph 1993

Hollywood Sex Idols

Brando: A Life In Our Times Richard Schickel Mae West: Empress of Sex Maurice Leonard

Is Marlon Brando the Mae West of contemporary cinema? At first sight, no two Hollywood stars could seem less alike, but reading these biographies one begins to sense how much they resemble each other, especially in the way that they enjoyed immense fame as the avatars of a new kind of sexual frankness, and then fell victim to the celebrity they had helped to create.

Both Brando and Mae West rose to stardom by projecting a powerful and lazy carnality rarely seen before them, though Brando always had the advantage of the bigger breasts. Both completely overwhelmed the parts they played, and were great on-the-set re-writers of their scripts, adding a depth and bite for which they were rarely given credit. After their first runaway successes, both saw their careers collapse when Hollywood reset its sails in a changing social and commercial climate, and sank into a series of lacklustre films from which they briefly rescued themselves by sheer force of will. And, by the end, both became enduring camp icons, adored for the same mix of failure and combative pride that lovers of camp have always found irresistible, as in the case of Barrymore and Judy Garland, and the butt of the kind of cruel joke that Richard Schickel quotes. What do Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando have in common? Answer: many people believe both of them are still alive.

Schickel, the astute and generous film critic of Time, writes as an unabashed fan of Brando, and a member of the generation whose frustrated coming-of-age in the smug years of Eisenhower prosperity was galvanized by the appearance of the young Brando as the unforgettable Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Sly, illiterate and aggressive, and supremely confident of his sweating and animal body, Brando’s Kowalski became the idol of a rebellious generation, if not ready to rape their mothers, represented by the prim and self-deluding Blanche Du Bois, at least ready to rape their mothers’ values.

Schickel convincingly traces the bruised outsider of Brando’s early films – The Men, Streetcar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront – to his middle-class Illinois childhood, outwardly respectable but deeply marred by his alcoholic parents. He suggests that die children of alcoholics, trying to deflect attention from their shame, seek out those even more troubled than themselves, and that this explains Brando’s choice of the underdog roles in which he excelled. Whatever the accuracy of this, it’s certainly true that Brando’s characters have sustained more violent beatings over the years than those of any other Hollywood actor.

By the mid-fifties Hollywood was desperate to defend itself against the rising power of television. Led by Darryl Zanuck, the studios began to invest in lavish cinemascope spectacles, and the first and greatest phase of Brando’s career was over. He found himself for the next two decades playing in a series of Technicolor schlockbusters such as the ludicrous Desirée (in which he appeared as a shy and spaced-out Napoleon, keenly looking forward to St Helena, one feels), Sayonara (slow death on Mount Fuji), and The Fugitive Kind (in which he became the first actor to be paid a million dollars for a single film).

By now, elevated to superstar status, he could no longer find the demeaning roles that satisfied his need to be humiliated, and as the years passed he seemed to grow ever more depressed, hiding behind a screen of weird accents and mannerisms. Schickel praises his fey and foppish Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, and in particular his ‘English’ accent – every bit as extraterrestrial as any of Meryl Streep’s – and it is sobering to reflect that, to Americans, most of us sound like this.

Then, at last, he broke free, first with The Godfather, and again in what I feel is his greatest role of all, Last Tango in Paris, in no sense a pornographic film but a stunning portrait of male middle-aged despair, in which he wrote a large part of his own dialogue. After this he made a few guest appearances in second-rate films and reserved his best performances for the world outside the film set, culminating in what many observers considered to be his brilliant impersonation of a father convinced of his son’s innocence at Christian Brando’s trial for murder.

Of Mae West it’s safe to say that for her the distinction between film set and reality was never worth more than a sidelong glance and a faint switch of the hips. Determined to make the most of her sexuality, whatever the location, she was only too happy if a crowd came in and stayed to watch. On stage from the age of seven, as a child vaudeville performer, she never left it until her death in 1980 at the probable age of eighty-seven.

Sex, the Broadway play she both wrote and starred in, put her on the map in 1927, and landed her in jail for ten days, guilty of ‘corrupting the morals of youth’, although I like to think that, far more valuably, it was the morals of the middle-aged that Mae managed so wonderfully to corrupt. A gangster’s bag-man named George Rauft, smooth as a gigolo, collected the box-office receipts, and later, as George Raft, starred with Mae in her first film, Night after Night. ‘She stole everything but the cameras,’ Raft observed. In a series of spectacular successes she single-handedly saved Paramount from bankruptcy, perfected her screen persona and polished to a gemlike brightness the string of one-liners that survive to this day, above all the immortal ‘Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?’ and, in reply to ‘Goodness, what lovely diamonds’ – ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it.’ Most were long-standing vaudeville gags, but no one ever delivered them like Mae West.

Above all, she brought humour into sex, then as now, sadly, a deadly serious business. Sex, for Mae West, as Maurice Leonard comments, was not only fun but went unpunished, a revolutionary notion whose hour had come in those Depression years. Even Benito Mussolini became a devoted fan – Mae West was an example of ‘Virile, healthy womanhood’, the Duce opined. But the puritanical Hays Office, and the code of restrictions that the film industry accepted, spelled the end of her career. Nervous of the moralistic Hearst press, producers were afraid to offer her roles.

Gutsy to the end, she reinvented herself as a camp icon, presiding over a Hollywood apartment decorated like a boudoir-scale Versailles, touring in Diamond Lil, and making guest appearances in over-the-top extravaganzas like Myra Breckinridge, when her memory had gone and her lines were relayed to her through an earphone. Over the years she drifted into eccentricity, urging enema kits on to her friends, obsessed with spiritualism, and surrounding herself with retinues of muscle-builders. The concept of an octogenarian nymphomaniac which she patented and so brilliantly sustained (amazingly, there had long been rumours that she was a man) showed that she had never lost her touch, and makes her a continuing inspiration to the rest of us.

Guardian 1991

Push-button Death

From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud

Was there a Gulf War? Already the question seems less absurd than it would have done a week ago, despite the destruction rained from the air and the huge number of casualties on the Iraqi side. After the arcade video-game of the bombing campaign, the ‘100 hours’ of ground fighting, filtered through the military and TV censors, were scarcely enough to root the reality of the war in our minds. Push-button death is a game with few risks, at least to the television viewer. The devastated Basra escape highway looked like a traffic jam left out to rust, or a discarded Mad Max film set, the ultimate autogeddon. The absence of combatants, let alone the dead and wounded, suppresses any reflexes of pity or outrage, and creates the barely conscious impression that the entire war was a vast demolition derby in which almost no one was hurt and which might even have been fun.

Will Hollywood cope more happily with the Gulf War than it did with Vietnam? Reportedly, several Desert Storm movies are in active preparation, and one can easily imagine Chuck Norris or Stallone rushing the berms and single-handedly strangling the Republican Guard in their own tank tracks.

Soon after the disastrous US intervention in Lebanon, President Reagan was heard to say: ‘Boy, I saw Rambo last night; now I know what to do next time.’ In retrospect, this seems a remarkably shrewd comment, and no doubt his military aides snapped their fingers as they recognized an astute career move. At first sight, the Gulf War and the invincibility of the American killing machine might seem the purest expression of the Rambo ethos. But as many of the contributors to From Hanoi to Hollywood point out, the hero of Rambo: First Blood Part II was the very opposite of a technological superhero – all he had going for him were his hate-driven will, his Indian hunting skills and, of course, immortality, qualities which General Schwarzkopf had no need to call upon.

The Vietnam War lasted at least ten years, and continued in the American mind long after its routed troops were airlifted from the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975, perhaps only ending with George Bush’s recent press conference pronouncement: The Vietnam syndrome is dead.’ Yet during the war Hollywood released only one Vietnam film, John Wayne’s preposterous Green Berets. Such was the war’s legacy of ‘lies, errors and impotence’, in the editors’ words, and so deep the crisis in the American imagination provoked by the war, that it was only in the late 1970s that the first large-scale Hollywood films began to appear.

Many of these films, from The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now to Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July, openly confront the tragedy of American failure in the war (the vastly greater tragedy that befell the Vietnamese is rarely touched on), and the unhappy position of the returning veterans who, for the first time in American history, found that being a veteran was not something of which to be proud. Despite their huge budgets and the self-conscious literary references to Heart of Darkness and Fenimore Cooper, Hollywood’s Vietnam films rarely match their lofty ambitions, and only succeed in presenting the war as a bloody Superbowl. They trivialize death not because they accord it no value, but because they treat it with the bogus respect of a poignant camera angle.

Nonetheless, two great lines survive the unending gunfire: from Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kilgore’s ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, worthy of some Armalite-toting Robert Lowell, and Rambo’s plaintive ‘Do we get to win this time?’ from First Blood Part II, in many ways the most interesting of the American war films, though universally detested by the essayists in this book. Platoon, which they grudgingly prefer, seems to me a tiresome buddy film, while First Blood Part II does contain an ambiguous and many-layered message – that all governments and military bureaucracies are corrupt, that the ordinary fighting man is an expendable victim, but that he alone loves his country and is prepared to die for it.

The essayists, almost all American academics, condemn virtually the entire output of Hollywood Vietnam films, faulting them for evading any serious consideration of what they see as America’s misguided and racist involvement in Vietnam and for failing to offer any insight into the long-term consequences of the war. But Hollywood, especially when it puts on its battle fatigues, is not a branch of the peace or civil rights movement, and it puzzles me that these well-meaning academics could expect the conventions of the entertainment movie to cope with the complexities of the war, and one moreover that America lost.

Though the undisputed genius of popular entertainment, Hollywood has rarely made a successful war film. The realities of war, which Americans have totally mastered while they are awake, run counter to everything they hold dear when they dream. The best war films ever made – Rossellini’s Open City, the Japanese Fires on the Plain and The Burmese Harp, and the greatest of them all, Klimov’s Come and See, about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, are visions of desolation, meaninglessness and despair, qualities that are true to war but do nothing for the box office.

As well, the conventions of the entertainment movie reduce war to the subjective experience of a single hero, for whom combat is the ultimate catharsis that allows him to find his true self. This rarely happens in war, as Leo Cawley, himself a Vietnam veteran, comments in the best essay in the collection:

There is almost no human activity that is as intensely social as modern warfare … When a military unit loses its internal cohesion and starts to fight as individuals there is such a radical and unfavourable change in the casualty ratio that it is almost always decisive … Every general staff in the world since 1914 has known that the bravery of individual soldiers in modern war is about as essential as whether they are handsome.

Guardian 1991

Hobbits in Space?

Can I offer a dissenting opinion? There seems to be a profound need everywhere to admire Star Wars, and a resentment of any response other than loving affection. Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, is engaging, brilliantly designed, acted with real charm, full of verve and visual ingenuity. It’s also totally unoriginal, feebly plotted, instantly forgettable, and an acoustic nightmare – the electronic sound-wall wrapped around the audience is so over-amplified that every footfall sounds like Krakatoa.

In that case, why all the fuss? And what does the amazing success of Star Wars indicate, for good or ill, about the future of s-f cinema? Although slightly biased, I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. S-f has been one of the few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change – social, technological and environmental – and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias. Why, then, has it translated so uneasily into the cinema? Unlike the western, which long ago took over the literary form and now exists in its own right, the s-f film has never really been more than an offshoot of its literary precursor, which to date has provided all the ideas, themes and inventiveness. S-f cinema has been notoriously prone to cycles of exploitation and neglect, unsatisfactory mergings with horror films, thrillers, environmental and disaster movies.

The most popular form of s-f – space fiction – has been the least successful of all cinematically, until 2001 and Star Wars, for the obvious reason that the special effects available were hopelessly inadequate. Surprisingly, s-f is one of the most literary forms of all fiction, and the best s-f films – Them!, Dr Cyclops, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Alphaville, Last Year in Marienbad (not a capricious choice, its themes are time, space and identity, s-f’s triple pillars), Dr Strangelove, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Barbarella and Solaris - and the brave failures such as The Thing, Seconds and The Man who Fell to Earth – have all made use of comparatively modest special effects and relied on strongly imaginative ideas, and on ingenuity, wit and fantasy.

With Star Wars the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way, towards huge but empty spectacles where the special effects – like the brilliantly designed space vehicles and their interiors in both Star Wars and 2001 - preside over derivative ideas and unoriginal plots, as in some massively financed stage musical where the sets and costumes are lavish but there are no tunes. I can’t help feeling that in both these films the spectacular sets are the real subject matter, and that original and imaginative ideas – until now science fiction’s chief claim to fame – are regarded by their makers as secondary, unimportant and even, possibly, distracting.

Star Wars in particular seems designed to appeal to that huge untapped audience of people who have never read or been particularly interested in s-f but have absorbed its superficial ideas – space ships, ray guns, blue corridors, the future as anything with a fin on it – from comic strips, TV shows like Star Trek and Thunderbirds, and the iconography of mass merchandising.

The visual ideas in Star Wars are ingenious and entertaining. Ironically it’s only now that the technology of the cinema is sufficiently advanced to represent an advanced technology in decline. I liked the super-technologies already beginning to rust around the edges, the pirate starship like an old tramp steamer, the dented robots with IQs higher than Einstein’s which resembled beat-up De Sotos in Athens or Havana with half a million miles on the clock. I liked the way large sections of the action were seen through computerized head-up displays which provided information about closing speeds and impact velocities that makes everyone in the audience feel like a Phantom pilot on a Hanoi bombing run.

In passing, the reference to Vietnam isn’t undeserved – the slaughter in Star Wars, quite apart from the destruction of an entire populated planet, is unrelieved for two hours, and at times stacks the corpses halfway up the screen. Losing track of this huge bodycount, I thought at first that the film might be some weird, unintentional parable of the US involvement in Vietnam, with the plucky hero from the backward planet and his scratch force of reject robots and gook-like extraterrestrials fighting bravely against the evil and all-destructive super-technology of the Galactic Empire. Whatever the truth, it’s strange that the film gets a U certificate – two hours of Star Wars must be one of the most efficient means of weaning your pre-teen child from any fear of, or sensitivity towards, the deaths of others.

All the same, as a technological pantomime Star Wars makes a certain amount of sense. There’s the good fairy, Alec Guinness, with his laser-wand and a smooth line in morally uplifting chat; the pantomime dame/ wicked witch, the Dark Lord Darth Vader, with black Nazi helmet, leather face-mask and computerized surgical truss; the principal boy, the apparently masculine robot Artoo-Detoo who in fact conceals a coded holographic image of the Princess Leia, which he now and then projects like a Palladium Dick Whittington flashing her thighs.

However, George Lucas has gone badly astray with his supporting cast – what looks like an attempted tour de force, the parade of extraterrestrials in the frontier-planet saloon, comes on hilariously like the Muppet Show, with shaggy monsters growling and rolling their eyeballs. I almost expected Kermit and Miss Piggy to swoop in and introduce Bruce Forsyth.

What is missing in all this is any hard imaginative core. Star Wars is the first totally unserious s-f film. Even a bad episode of Star Trek or Dr Who has the grain of an original idea, and the vast interplanetary and technological perspectives of 2001 were at least put to the service of a steadily expanding cosmic vision. The most one can hope, I think, is that the technical expertise now exists to make a really great s-f film. Star Wars, in a sense, is a huge test-card, a demonstration film of s-f movie possibilities.

20th Century-Fox’s advance publicity describes the modern motion picture as ‘the most magnificent toy ever invented for grown men to play with and express their fantasies’ – presumably with Lucas’s approval, and Star Wars may well be more prophetic than I give it credit for. In many ways it is the ultimate home movie, in which Lucas goes back into his toy cupboard and plays with all his boyhood fantasies, fitting together a collection of stuffed toys, video games and plastic spaceships into this ten-year-old’s extravaganza, back to the days, as he himself says, when he ‘dreamed about running away and having adventures that no one else has ever had’.

Time Out 1977

A User’s Guide to the Millennium

When it turns to science fiction, cinema closes its eyes and moves into a rich and uneasy sleep. The collective dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century have found their most vivid expression in this often disparaged but ever popular genre. A few great directors, from Fritz Lang to Steven Spielberg, have worked in science fiction, but until the sixties most s-f films were little more than B-movies. With limited special effects, minor actors and minuscule budgets, and usually ignored by the critics, the only things that these films had going for them were powerful stories, unrestrained imagination and, first and foremost, a hot line to the unconscious. In these often modest films, as almost nowhere else in the popular arts of our age, classical myth and scientific apocalypse collide and fuse.

Like most of my fellow s-f writers, American and British, I nurse ambivalent feelings towards the science-fiction movies. Despite our heroic efforts, it is not the printed word but the film that has defined the images of science fiction in the public mind and also, incidentally, exerted a huge influence on architecture, fashion and consumer design. Even now, the future is anything with a fin on it.

Far from being a medium of escapist entertainment, the science-fiction film has always been a sensitive barometer of the cultural and political climate of the day. Our deepest fears of an irrational superscience stalked its blue corridors long before latter-day environmentalists became concerned for our planet’s future. In the fifties, Cold War paranoia and the terrors of nuclear Armageddon prompted a cluster of remarkable science-fiction movies, among them Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, which were handicapped by their meagre – by present-day standards – special effects. Unlike the novelist, the film director cannot leave his locations to the reader’s imagination.

In the sixties, however, the special effects at last began to match the inspiration of the filmmakers. Indeed, within a decade the technology of film design became sufficiently advanced (as in Star Wars) to show an advanced technology in decline.

At its worst, the science-fiction film offers the sheer exhilaration of the roller coaster. At its best, and to its credit, it tries to deal with the largest issues facing us today, and attempts, however naively, to place some sort of philosophical frame around man’s place in the universe.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

This remarkably stylish colour film is a quantum leap forward in visual confidence and in the richness of its theme – an update of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Walter Pidgeon plays the Prospero figure, Dr Morbius, a brilliant but flawed scientist living alone with his daughter on an isolated planet. Robby the Robot is the ever obliging Ariel, and the crew members of a visiting spaceship are the stranded mariners.

The film’s real originality, however, lies in making the brutish Caliban figure an externalization of Morbius’s own libido. This gives an unsettling force to the final confrontation, as Morbius’s lustful id, never seen directly, throbs and oozes along in full Oedipal splendour, melting down steel doors on its way towards a quivering Anne Francis. The special effects were unequalled until 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Nearly twenty-five years after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s black satire has lost none of its impact. In this story of an insane US Air Force general who launches an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, Kubrick cunningly mixes documentary realism with the ultimate in graveyard humour – the death of mankind treated as scarcely more than the last sick joke.

Kubrick’s masterstroke is to tilt the dramatic action of the film so that the audience’s sympathies slide across the value scale and eventually lie with the targets being satirized. We come to admire the magnificent B-52S with their sleek A-bombs and brave if baffled crews; we despise the wimpish president for trying to do a deal with the Kremlin, and we almost welcome the nuclear Armageddon when it comes. By enlisting us on the side of our darkest fears, Kubrick exposes all the sinister glamour and unconscious logic of technological death.

Alphaville (1965)

This moody and powerful allegory is Jean-Luc Godard’s most accessible film, made for that consumerist and politically conscious sixties audience that he dubbed ‘the children of Marx and Coca-Cola’. Alphaville blends utopian satire, pop art and comic-book imagery to create the alienated landscape of the distant planet Alphaville, whose cowed population is tyrannized by an evil computer. However, Alphaville is in every way indistinguishable from contemporary Paris. The ‘spaceship’ of secret agent Lemmy Caution is his Ford Galaxy, and similar linguistic plays link the action together in a far more convincing way than might seem possible.

For the first time in the science-fiction film, Godard makes the point that in the media landscape of the present day the fantasies of science fiction are as ‘real’ as an office block, an airport or a presidential campaign. His original title was Tarzan versus IBM, but the film transcends its pop imagery to create a disturbing world that resembles a chromium-plated 1984. Sadly, after Alphaville Godard abandoned the genre.

Barbarella (1968)

Sex, which many enthusiasts thought they had invented in the sixties, here makes its appearance in the science-fiction film. The relationship between sex and science fiction or, more to the point, its virtual absence from the genre, has always been a puzzle – explained, I would guess, by the fact that science-fiction writers constitute an authentic community of naifs, generally nervous of change, politically ultraconservative, eager not to think about what adults do after dark.

At any rate, it is inconceivable that the masters of classic science fiction could have come up with this rich and saucy confection, in which the interplanetary sex adventures of the French comic-strip heroine are elegantly transferred to the screen. Roger Vadim, who in And God Created Woman created Brigitte Bardot, here turns his affectionate and ironic eye on another of his wives, Jane Fonda, who achieves immortality as she cavorts naked in a fur-lined spaceship.

Silent Running (1971)

Douglas Trumbull, who supervised the special effects in 2001, directed this moving ecological fable, and there are strong echoes of Kubrick’s epic in the scenes of giant starships sailing along the tideways of space. The premise – that one day in the future all the vegetation on Earth has died, and that the last remaining trees are stored in vast, orbiting space vehicles – may take some swallowing, but the theme is so well handled that the film taps into all our unease about the abuse of this planet and its environment.

Much of Silent Running’s success is due to Bruce Dern’s superb performance as a watchman and gardener in one of the forgotten greenhouses. His dogged, cantankerous manner exactly suits the character of this last conservationist alive, who refuses orders to dump the vegetation, kills the crew, and sets off into deep space with only the trees for company.

Dark Star (1974)

Dark Star is the Catch-22 of outer space. The anarchic spirit of Joseph Heller’s novel, with its inverted logic and padded-cell humour, presides over John Carpenter’s extraordinary low-budget feature. Reportedly made for $60,000, Dark Star was originally filmed in 16mm by a group of students at the University of Southern California, and later transferred to 35mm. Watching this brilliant extravaganza, one is forced yet again to accept that talent alone is always enough.

Like many ostensible satires – in this case, of the science-fiction movie itself – Dark Star soon transcends its own subject matter. The sealed world of the spaceship, with its exhausted, near psychotic crew, its ‘dead’ captain in his cryogenic capsule periodically revived to be asked for advice, and its intelligent bombs that have to be argued out of detonating prematurely, soon begins to resemble that other spaceship called Earth.

The Man who Fell to Earth (1976)

A brave failure, Nicolas Roeg’s excursion into science fiction reveals the excitements, and hazards, of illustrating a conventional genre theme – the visiting alien destroyed by an uncaring Earth – with images taken largely from outside that genre. Here the alien is played by rock star David Bowie, whose strange, hypersensitive presence instantly convinces us that he has come from another planet. His growing estrangement is seen not as a reaction to the brute incomprehension of others, but in terms of his own seduction by our television and communications landscape, with its unlimited tolerance of deviant behaviour.

Above all, the Bowie figure is seduced by the fragmentation and sheer ironic style of life on Earth, perfectly exemplified by Roeg’s film technique – a mix of elegant photography and fashionable dislocations. But with his alien dismantled and demoralized, Roeg has nowhere to go, since he cannot rely on the genre’s conventions to rescue his film. And without the genre’s conventions the behaviour of his hero becomes merely modishly psychotic.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Spielberg’s mastery of the science-fiction medium was already evident in Duel, his 1971 classic of highway paranoia. From autogeddon he moved on to two major themes of science fiction, monsters (Jaws) and interplanetary travel (Close Encounters and ET the Extra-Terrestrial). That these have become three of the most successful films in the history of the cinema underlines my long-held belief that science fiction defines the popular imagination of the twentieth century.

Close Encounters combines lavish special effects with the complex and poetic story of a power-company technician whose life is transformed by a series of UFO visitations. He becomes obsessed with a strangely shaped mountain in Wyoming, a model of which he constructs in his family living room. The film proceeds by a series of powerfully allusive images, which climax with the arrival of the alien spaceship, a visionary landing that resonates for years in the spectator’s mind.

Alien (1979)

Alien is a tour de force of pure horror, a barrage of brutal eruptions (some literally so) that obscure the existence, behind the blood and terror, of an extremely elegant s-f film. Returning to Earth, the crew of the Nostromo is diverted to a remote planet and there unknowingly picks up the alien organism, which then proceeds to metamorphose its way through the cast until defeated by the courage and wiles of Sigourney Weaver, the s-f film’s first feminist heroine.

While all this is going on one has barely a pause to notice a host of fine details: the claustrophobic world of the spaceship, with its fraying camaraderie; the entropy of long voyages, time slowing down so that a brief conversation seems to last all day; the stylish interior of the Nostromo, a cross between a computer terminal and a nightclub; the final appearance of the alien, an insane mesh of ravenous teeth straight from the paintings of Francis Bacon that materializes just after Weaver strips down to her underwear. Dinner, fortunately, is delayed, at least until the sequel.

Mad Max 2 (1981)

This second, and by the far the best, of George Miller’s Mad Max trio is a tribute to the power of the s-f film to break free of its conventions and renew itself in a creative burst of ideas and images. On one level the ultimate road movie, Max Max 2 is a compellingly reductive vision of post-industrial collapse. Here the end of the world is seen as a non-stop demolition derby, as gangs of motorized savages rove their desert wastes, bereft of speech, thought, hopes or dreams, dedicated only to the brutal realities of speed and violence.

Above all, Mad Max 2 is an example of how sheer virtuosity can triumph in the film medium. A host of images wrench the retina -garish vehicles, fearful road armour and weird punk hairstyles, the sense of a world discarded after Judgement Day. In its raw power and vast scenic effects, Mad Max 2 is punk’s Sistine Chapel.

American Film 1987

Courting the Cobra

Projections 2 edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue

The confidence of film directors, their zest and appetite for life, are nothing less than daunting, especially to the novelist, a gloomy soul sitting alone in the darkened auditorium of his own head and never certain that the lights will come on. Judged by the few grumbles in Projections 2, even a film director’s lowest moments sound remarkably like a novelist’s highs.

I once asked the veteran profile-writer Lynn Barber, who has interviewed hundreds of successful people in almost every profession, to name the happiest and most fulfilled of all. ‘Film directors,’ she promptly replied, a verdict amply confirmed here. Yet most filmmakers are unemployed at any moment, and reduced to peddling their latest projects from one unwelcoming office to the next. Film directors, as David Hare comments, are like deposed royalty, encountered in hotel lobbies as they wander the globe. They retain their tides, but lack a kingdom.

Launched last year by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, Projections is the best of the new series of film books, neither too popular nor too specialist, and free of the over-academic criticism that brings the entire paraphernalia of Marxism and psychoanalysis to the job of decoding John Ford westerns. Projections is packed with lively gossip and provocative ideas, underpinned by a shared passion for the medium of film. Directors, screenwriters and cinephotographers speak their minds with a frankness rarely seen in other professions.

In his introduction to Projections I, John Boorman wrote wittily and ruefully of the difficulties he met in financing his recent films. He described the ordeal of making the sales pitch in a producer’s office, a process that I have watched in Wardour Street over the years and which resembles the snake-charmer’s courtship of the cobra, with the same plaintive little tunes, frozen immobility and fear of those bored, deadly eyes, swaying slighdy from the effects of a large lunch. None the less, films are still made, and the most expensive dreams in the world are turned into light, and play against the silver wall of the planetary imagination. I hope that future numbers of Projections will look at the producer’s creative contribution, always underestimated. The Hollywood of fifty years ago, its greatest era, was a producer’s Hollywood where most directors were less important than the cameramen. Given the huge financial constraints, film may well be the least likely success story of the twentieth century.

One of the most interesting features in the new volume is a round-up of directors invited to predict the future of the cinema in the next millennium. Paul Schrader imagines the novelist and film director working in conjunction with the neuroscientist. ‘The next version of Ulysses may well come in pill form,’ he concludes, though many people already regard Joyce and Proust as the closest thing to a Valium. Even more apocalyptically, John Boorman guesses that not only the lens may become redundant, but also the eye and the camera, with electrical images fed directly into what I assume will be a kind of brain-bypass, something which we have already experienced in the form of television.

Other enjoyable features are long interviews with the maverick Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H and The Player, and Hollywood’s enduring one-man awkward squad, and with the British screenwriter Sydney Gilliat, who collaborated with Frank Launder on the script of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Gilliat offers his astute reflections on the curious and devious personality of Hitchcock, whom some have described as emotionally under-developed and little more than a grown-up schoolboy with a taste for lavatory humour. Gilliat knew him as a complex and scheming character, especially destructive of other people and determined to take all credit for himself.

Lucid and entertaining, Gilliat reminisces about the 1940s, the golden years of British film, and though now in his mid-eighties seems brimming with new ideas and as keen as ever to get behind a camera. His last words are typical of filmmakers as a whole, those hustlers, poets, bullies and mountebanks, every one a Cortez glimpsing an imaginary Pacific – ‘Any offers?’

Daily Telegraph 1993

The Samurai of the Epic

The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa Stephen Prince

In 1971 Japan’s greatest filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, director of Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, slashed his wrists with a razor, apparently in despair over the collapse of his career and failure to find commercial backing for his future films. Kurosawa’s attempt to kill himself – a way out of his problems, incidentally, that he never allowed his samurai heroes – lies at the centre of The Warrior’s Camera, an extended inquest into this would-be suicide and Kurosawa’s motives. Suicide may well be an act perfected by the Japanese, but it is hard to imagine Billy Wilder walking stoically into the surf off Malibu after the failure of Fedora. Movies, even those as witty and brilliant as Wilder’s, are not worth wetting one’s toes for.

But Kurosawa was never a maker of movies. Film was his medium at a time – the forties and fifties – when the film was at least the equal partner of the movie, and the cinema had yet to separate into the art film, a species that may soon be extinct, and the entertainment movie that now swamps our imaginations. Some movies, like Point Blank and Double Indemnity, are intense and ruthless enough to count as films, but this was never a doorway open to Kurosawa.

Truffaut, in his published conversations with Alfred Hitchcock, compliments him on his good sense in going to Hollywood, and comments that there is something about England that is inherently uncinematic. Truffaut refers to the anti-dramatic nature of English life; our stolid routines and subdued manners, and even our weather, Truffaut claims, are anti-cinematic. At first sight, how much more these strictures would seem to apply to the notion of a Japanese cinema – especially the rain, which certainly drenches many of Kurosawa’s films. Given the glacierlike rigidities of pre-war Japanese life, the total deference to authority and social consensus, and the suppression of the smallest gleam of individuality, it’s plainly a miracle that a Japanese cinema ever emerged at all, let alone a maverick talent like Kurosawa’s.

Stephen Prince suggests that Kurosawa only found the freedom to make his immensely personal films thanks to Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. The shattered population, gazing at their fire-bombed, moonscape cities, realized where consensus and obedience had led and were prepared for a few years to visualize some kind of alternative. From the start of his career, making wartime propaganda films, Kurosawa believed in the power of cinema to bring about a national regeneration, and was convinced that the Japanese would find their salvation by thinking about themselves above all as individuals.

In 1950 he produced Rashomon, a masterpiece of subjectivity in which the murder of a warrior and the rape of his wife are seen from four conflicting viewpoints. As Stephen Prince points out, what is so tantalizing about Rashoman is its refusal to validate any of the witnesses’ stories as the true account. In a world of absolute relativity, there is no way of knowing who is telling the truth. These same ambiguities prevail in Kurosawa’s films with contemporary settings -Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, among others – bleak visions of post-war criminality that draw on the same sources as the Italian neo-realist cinema, and convey the unmistakable impression that the Japanese, more than any other people, enjoy being depressed.

His samurai epics, above all The Seven Samurai, show Kurosawa again subverting traditional views of Japan’s historical past. The originality of the film, and an aspect that failed to translate into its Hollywood remake, The Magnificent Seven, was the unprecedented decision by the warriors, whose loyalty was to their feudal lord, to espouse the cause of the peasants – as strange as we would find the decision by a group of Grenadier Guards officers to set off for Yorkshire in the 1984 coal-strike and defend a village of striking miners.

Despite a long series of distinguished films, Kurosawa’s career was already threatened by the sixties. With the triumph of television, Japanese cinema audiences stayed at home to watch formulaic samurai epics produced at a fraction of Kurosawa’s lavish budgets. As well, a new kind of consensual thinking and corporate obedience had emerged with the rise of Japan Inc. The global victory won by Sony, Datsun and Matsushita Electric left no room for tortured self-doubt or moral relativities. The Japanese cinema fragmented into soft-porn and mass-entertainment industries, leaving behind a small group of art-film directors who loathed Kurosawa’s sweeping epics and what they saw as his ‘Hollywood’ narratives.

Today Japanese cinema manages to produce an occasional oddball like Tampopo. But its great days seem to lie in the past, along with the great days of American and European film, a vanishing world that survives in cinematheques and the TV graveyard hours and, one step from oblivion, in the nearest that the consumer society comes to cultural nirvana, the video-rental classics shelf.

Guardian 1991

La Jetée

This strange and poetic film, directed by Chris Marker, is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence – a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream – the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.

The jetty of the title is the main observation platform at Orly Airport. The long pier reaches out across the concrete no-man’s-land, the departure point for other worlds. Giant jets rest on the apron beside the pier, metallic ciphers whose streamlining is a code for their passage through time. The light is powdery. The spectators on the observation platform have the appearance of mannequins. The hero is a small boy, visiting the airport with his parents. Suddenly there is a fragmented glimpse of a man falling. An accident has occurred, but while everyone is running to the dead man the small boy is looking instead at the face of a young woman by the rail. Something about this face, its expression of anxiety, regret and relief, and above all the obvious but unstated involvement of the young woman with the dead man, creates an image of extraordinary power in the boy’s mind.

Years later, World War III breaks out. Paris is almost obliterated by an immense holocaust. A few survivors live on in the circular galleries below the Palais de Chaillot, like rats in some sort of abandoned test-maze warped out of its normal time. The victors, distinguished by the strange eye-pieces they wear, begin to conduct a series of experiments on the survivors, among them the hero, now a man of about thirty. Faced with a destroyed world, the experimenters are hoping to send a man through time. They select the young man because of the powerful memory he carries of the pier at Orly. With luck he will home on to this. Other volunteers have gone insane, but the extraordinary strength of his memory carries him back to pre-war Paris. The sequence of images here is the most remarkable in the film, the subject lying in a hammock in the underground corridor as if waiting for some inward sun to rise, a bizarre surgical mask over his eyes – in my experience, the only convincing act of time travel in the whole of science fiction.

Arriving in Paris, he wanders among the strange crowds, unable to make contact with anyone until he meets the young woman he had seen as a child at Orly Airport. They fall in love, but their relationship is marred by his sense of isolation in time, his awareness that he has committed some kind of psychological crime in pursuing this memory. As if trying to place himself in time, he takes the young woman to museums of palaeontology, and they spend days among the fossil plants and animals. They visit Orly Airport, where he decides that he will not go back to the experimenters at Chaillot. At this moment three strange figures appear. Agents from an even more distant future, they are policing the time-ways, and have come to force him back. Rather than leave the young woman, he throws himself from the pier. The falling body is the one he glimpsed as a child.

This familiar theme is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honoured conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

New Worlds 1966

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet is, for me, the best film of the 1980s – surreal, voyeuristic, subversive and even a little corrupt in its manipulation of the audience. In short, the perfect dish for the jaded palates of the 1990s. But a thicket of puzzles remains. First, why do the sensible young couple, played by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, scheme to break into the apartment of the brutalized nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) and risk involving themselves with the psychopathic gangster – Dennis Hopper in his most terrifying screen performance?

A curious feature of Blue Velvet is the virtual absence of the youngsters’ parents, shadowy figures who take almost no part in the action. I assume the film is a full-blown Oedipal drama, and that the gangster and the nightclub singer are the young couple’s ‘real’ parents. Like children hiding in their parents’ bedroom, they see more than they bargained for. Playing his sadistic games with the singer, the gangster rants ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy’; a useful pointer to David Lynch’s real intentions. The young man longs to take the gangster’s place in the singer’s bed and, when he does, soon finds himself playing the same shocking games, a crisis that can only be resolved by killing his ‘father’ in the approved Oedipal fashion.

The second puzzle is the role of the severed ear found by the young man after he visits his father in hospital, and which sets off the entire drama. Why an ear rather than a hand or a set of fingerprints? I take it that the ear is really his own, tuned to the inner voice that informs him of his imminent quest for his true mother and father. Like the ear, the white picket fence and the mechanical bird that heralds a return to morality, Blue Velvet is a sustained and brutal tease, The Wizard of Oz re-shot with a script by Kafka and decor by Francis Bacon. More, more…

Time Out 1993

2 LIVES

Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito …

The Chain-saw Biographer

Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography Kitty Kelley

But why didn’t the astrologers see this coming? The sunsets above Mulholland Drive must be an even more electric pink these days as the whole of Bel Air blushes for Nancy. By now everyone knows about her White House affair with Frank Sinatra, her legendary meanness as she recycled unwanted presents, her reckless spending of the taxpayer’s money and Imelda Marcos-sized extravagance on designer clothes, her chilling relationships with her own children during the ruthless climb to success and, most damning of all, the astrologers who decided the dates of international conferences and determined those ‘bad’ days when Ronnie was not allowed to leave the White House at all.

Kitty Kelley is an exponent of the chain-saw school of biography, and through the blizzard of sawdust it is hard to make out the real woman within this devastating portrait. But the real was always a doubtful commodity in the case of the Reagans – so much of the President’s image was manufactured, and so self-deluding his own notions of the world as he confused reality with the half-remembered movies of his youth, that it scarcely matters if the facts in this biography are true or not.

Observers of the Reagans often commented on ‘the gaze’, the look of rapt attention that Nancy turned upon the President whenever he spoke in public, but masks of various kinds had long been used by Nancy to screen her from anything she preferred to forget. Huge sections of her past had been freeze-dried and hidden away in a dark locker of her mind, never to be opened again. The daughter of an ambitious repertory actress and a failed car salesman – whom Nancy claimed to have been a Princeton graduate – she was brought up during her early childhood by her aunt and uncle when her parents divorced, a period of forced separation that seems to have numbed her for ever. In later life Nancy never contacted her natural father, transferring all her affection to Dr

Loyal Davis, a taciturn Chicago neurosurgeon whom her mother married when her career had ebbed.

This ultra-right wing and viciously racist man – he could never bring himself even to utter the word Jew – was later credited with shaping Ronald Reagan’s political world-view and transforming him from a Democrat into a deep-blue Republican. Dr Davis had treated Spencer Tracy’s crippled son, and after graduating from college the aspiring actress Nancy Davis (she had forced through her legal adoption against the wishes of her reluctant step-father while still a teenager) set off for Hollywood and an MGM screen test arranged by Tracy. Always rather old-fashioned, Nancy chose a traditional route to launch her career, opting for the casting couch when she began a long affair with Benny Thau, the MGM executive in charge of casting. A number of undistinguished films followed, in which she tended to play plucky housewives in maternity smocks, while off the set she enjoyed affairs with a succession of Hollywood’s leading men, among them Robert Walker and Peter Lawford, who particularly prized her talents for oral sex.

But destiny finally dialled in the shape of another fading B-actor with an unhappy childhood, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. Soon Hollywood was behind them, as the Reagans set their eyes on the governorship of California and, beyond that, the leading roles in the ultimate movie of them all, the presidency of the United States, in which he would star and she would direct, with a supporting cast of European monarchs, Russian statesmen and California millionaires.

Reading this wonderfully sleazy account of the Reagans’ rise to power, of their relentless ambition and ruthless social climbing, one is still surprised by the confidence with which American politicians set about exploiting the fruits of office. Dissatisfied with the Sacramento governor’s mansion, Nancy ordered another, a $1.4 million monstrosity that later stood empty for ten years. Once in the White House she began to amass a vast wardrobe of couture gowns and furs, all on indefinite ‘loan’ until the Internal Revenue Service panicked her into returning them. Tactlessly, she announced the purchase of a $200,000 china set on the same day that the President cut school lunches and declared that ketchup would be counted as a vegetable in the federally subsidized programme. She recycled inferior presents, and accidentally sent a gift-wrapped birthday present to her grandson of the teddy bear he had left in the White House. At the same time, Nancy’s ruthlessness extended to herself. On hearing that she had a cancerous breast nodule, she demanded a total mastectomy against the advice of her doctors. But as one of the surgeons commented, the Reagans were not afraid of the knife. ‘Both have had numerous facelifts. From the scars behind his ears, I’d say the President has had two lifts, and she’s probably had three or four.’

Reagan’s presidency was a mystery to Europeans, though Americans were happy to see this amiable if goofy former sportscaster on their TV screens rather than the moralizing Carter, and took him much more easily in their stride. But how could a man so intellectually third-rate, an empty stage-set of a personality across which moved cartoon figures, dragon ladies and demons of the evil empire, ever have become President of the world’s most powerful nation? Was the image everything now, and who would be next – Colonel Sanders, Jimmy Osmond, Donald Duck? Is the USA so strong and so soundly constituted, so effectively ruled by its great bureaucracies, that politics and the presidency are an entertaining irrelevancy?

But the dream buckled with the Irangate-Contra affair and the revelation that summit meetings with Gorbachev were scheduled by Nancy and her $3,000-a-month astrologer. Since then the grey men have moved in again, led by George Bush (‘Whiney’ to Mrs Reagan). But perhaps the real lesson of the Reagan presidency is the sinister example he offers to future film actors and media manipulators with presidential ambitions and all too clearly defined ideas, and every intention of producing a thousand-year movie out of them.

Guardian 1991

Survival Instincts

Wild Swans Jung Chang

The women of China must be among the most oppressed and, paradoxically, the most strong-willed in the world, as this harrowing account of three desperate lives proves on every extraordinary page. I can remember the bad-tempered amahs of my childhood, ruthless and hard-fisted little women darting about on their bound feet. At the other end of the social scale were the dragon ladies – tycoons’ wives or successful businesswomen – in their long fur coats and immaculate make-up, who could petrify a small boy at fifty paces with their baleful stares.

Returning to China last summer, I was startled to find an advance guard of dragon ladies apparently waiting for me in the Cathay Pacific lounge at Heathrow. But there were none on the streets of Shanghai, and, fortunately, their places were taken by thousands of relaxed and cheerful young women in pretty frocks, strolling arm-in-arm with their husbands and friends. The sight would have warmed the hearts of Jung Chang’s mother and grandmother, the two women whose tragically abused lives occupy the centre of this heart-rending book. Together they tell the story of China during the twentieth century, an epic of privation, cruelty and dashed hopes that makes one despair of politics as the answer to anything. China’s greatest political leader and ideologue, Mao Zedong, brought an end to decades of devastation and civil war under the corrupt rule of Chiang Kai-shek, but in turn Mao, his wife and henchmen brought equally appalling cruelties to the Chinese people.

Jung Chang begins her memoir with Yu-fang, her grandmother, who at the age of fifteen, in 1924, became the concubine of an elderly Man-churian warlord. She herself was the daughter of a woman so unvalued, like all female children, that she had never been given a name and was known simply as ‘number two girl’ – like the servants of my own childhood whom I addressed for years as ‘number two boy’ and ‘number two coolie’. Despite her bound feet, with their broken arches and crushed toes, Jung’s grandmother was considered a beauty by her war-lord general. Virtually a prisoner in a large harem, she bore a child, Jung’s mother De-hong. After the general’s death, when his wife might have sold her off to a brothel, she married a 65-year-old doctor, and enjoyed a brief happiness. However, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and began to ransack the cities and countryside. Years of destitution followed, but somehow mother and daughter survived the deliberate brutalization of an entire people. At last, in 1944, American B-29S appeared in the sky, followed by a Russian occupation force who presided over yet another regime of terror and repression.

But the first Chinese communists also arrived. Ragged and ill-equipped, they looked poorer and scruffier than beggars. None the less, they soon restored order, restarted the economy and improved the food supply. When civil war broke out between Mao’s forces and Chiang’s Kuomintang armies, the teenage daughter threw in her lot with the communists, the only political group that promised an end to the barbarous treatment of women.

The late 1940s were a time of runaway inflation, when emaciated women pinned signs on their children: ‘Daughter for sale for 10 kilos of rice.’ Jung’s mother became active in the underground, but was arrested by the Kuomintang. Miraculously, she survived a firing squad when the prisoner next to her was shot dead. Soon after, she fell in love with a romantic communist guerrilla who gave her Russian novels to read and – a point very much in his favour – knew the difference between Flaubert and Maupassant.

With Mao’s conquest of the country, and the flight of Chiang to Formosa, a new and fairer China seemed waiting to be born. But the conservative peasant women, survivors of the Long March, resented the young and strong-willed students such as Jung’s mother who attracted the communist menfolk. Mind-numbing sessions of public ‘self-criticism’ began to occupy much of the revolution’s time. Everything was now politicized, as the regime suppressed the last vestiges of spirit and independence that had drawn Jung’s mother to the communist cause in the first place. Suspected of bourgeois leanings, she and her husband were transferred to the remote western province of Sichuan, where they began to work their way up the party’s administrative ladder. Even now their idealism still prevailed over the Orwellian logic of Maoist ‘thought reform’. Cleanliness was regarded as unproletarian, ignorance was celebrated as freedom from bourgeois thinking, and constant meetings left no time for inward reflection, virtually eliminating the private sphere.

Jung was born in 1952, but she saw little of her mother, who was struggling to survive the successive purges of ‘hidden counter-revolutionists, rightists and capitalist-roaders’. In this nonsense-world, grass, flowers and pets were deemed to be bourgeois. Red traffic-lights now signalled go, but the ensuing traffic chaos was merely a comical prelude to the sinister cruelties of the cultural revolution. Estranged from her husband, who feared that emotional support for her would be anti-party, Jung’s mother, by now a senior education administrator, was forced to kneel on broken glass and parade with a dunce’s cap on her head. The daughter was banished to the Himalayas to work as a barefoot doctor. At last, with the death of Mao, rehabilitation followed, but Jung’s father died soon after, hounded to his grave by petty spite and envy.

As his daughter remarks, the hallmark of Maoism was the reign of ignorance and hatred, and I suspect that Mao’s real achievement was to allow the Chinese, a supremely stoic and unemotional people, to express emotion fully for the first time. When Jung escapes to the West, a century-long nightmare seems to end. Immensely moving and unsettling, Wild Swans is an unforgettable portrait of the brain-death of a nation, and a tribute to the superhuman endurance of Chinese women. Sanity seems to have returned to China, but, as Jung reminds us, Mao’s portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square.

Sunday Times 1992

Fallen Idol

Elvis Albert Goldman

The Hollywood cynic who commented, on hearing of Elvis Presley’s death in 1977, ‘Good career move,’ might well have second thoughts after reading this ruthless exposé. Everyone watching Presley on television in his last years, as he swayed across the stage of the Las Vegas Hilton in his Prince Valiant suit, a bloated parody of himself who now and then treated his blue-rinsed audience to a canny leer, knew that something was wrong. But the memory of the young Presley remained, an electric charge that still pulls all the current out of the mains.

According to Albert Goldman, for at least the last decade of his life Presley was a hopeless drug addict, a walking pharmacopoeia of powerful stimulants and opiates that a coterie of compliant doctors injected into him at all hours of the day and night. Although the autopsy results were never published, it was probably a huge overdose that killed him during the long night of 17 August 1977, as he sat alone in his bathroom at Graceland, his stoned entourage asleep in their nearby bedrooms.

But by then, according to Goldman, the real Presley had been moribund for years, in effect since the death of his mother Gladys in 1958. Goldman clearly relishes his tale of Presley’s slow and lurid decline, elaborating a long catalogue of those sins that seem particularly heinous to Americans. Mama’s boy and bed-wetter, prude and glutton, voyeur and obsessive gun-fancier, Presley alienates his biographer’s sympathies at every turn. In fact, almost everything about Presley is present in this biography except his enormous talent, and an influence on popular culture greater than that of any other musical performer this century.

Goldman makes much of the close relationship between Presley and his mother, lingering over their extreme physical intimacy – they slept in the same bed until his puberty. But despite her own well-developed taste for drugs and alcohol, Gladys seems to have offered Presley rock-like support throughout her short life. Again, Goldman reveals that Presley was a natural blond, and based his legendary black hairstyle on that worn by the young Tony Curtis in the 1949 film City Across the River. Does this diminish Presley, or show his astuteness in the way he assembled his potent stage image as that archetypal 1950s figure, the juvenile delinquent?

Goldman’s attempt to demolish the Presley myth seems an attack on the whole popular culture of the period (he is now working on a book about John Lennon – watch out). Curiously Goldman seems obsessed with Presley’s sexuality. In his first view of Presley, he describes him in his bedroom at Graceland towards the end, ‘propped up like a big fat woman recovering from some operation on her reproductive organs’. He harps endlessly on Presley’s voyeurism, his liking for two-way mirrors and closed-circuit TV through which he watched the Guys (the Tennessee buddies who formed his entourage) making it with their girls.

Still, not as wild or as sad as the end. By the age of forty, Presley had earned $100 million. He gave away Cadillacs to passing strangers, threw expensive jewellery to his audiences, once flew from Memphis to Denver in his private jet to buy a peanut butter sandwich. In a trance of drugs and terminal boredom, he fell asleep with his face in a bowl of chicken soup. He was constantly watched by his guards in case he choked on a piece of food, became incontinent and had to be carried to the lavatory and tied into diapers. At the end he was so obese that he used a golf cart to carry him from the elevator to the stage of the Hilton.

For some reason, though, I find myself admiring Presley all the more. That knowing smile, those savvy eyes and that talent transcend everything, even this book.

Guardian 1981

The Killing Time

The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer

Ours is a season for assassins. How far does our fascination with Oswald and Charles Manson, Gary Gilmore and James Earl Ray play on the edgy dreams of other lonely psychopaths, encourage them to gamble their trigger fingers on a very special kind of late twentieth century celebrity? Will everyone in the future, to adapt Warhol, be infamous for fifteen minutes? Given the immense glare of publicity, a virtual deification by the world’s press and television, and the remarkable talents these rootless and half-educated men can show for manipulating the mass media, their actual crimes soon seem to sink to a lower, merely human realm.

Lee Harvey Oswald, had he not been shot by Jack Ruby, would presumably now be up for parole, ready to play his part – as TV anchorman, or special assignment writer for Guns and Ammo? – in the election of yet another Kennedy. With luck any would-be assassins in the future will give themselves away haggling with their agents for the biggest film advance and the right prime-time TV coverage.

The Executioner’s Song is Norman Mailer’s account of the crimes, trial and execution in 1977 of Gary Gilmore, the first convicted murderer to be put to death in the United States after a ten-year moratorium. Dedicated to Mailer’s agent, at first sight the book is off-putting, perhaps the last chapter in the very system of exploitation that Mailer criticizes. Mailer never met Gilmore, and the 1,000-page text is based on a mass of extended interviews by Lawrence Schiller, an ex-Life photographer turned Hollywood entrepreneur. The result is a vast cast of largely minor characters and an excess of parallel narration never properly fused together, which makes nonsense of Mailer’s attempt to call it a novel.

But in fact the repetitions and the flat documentary style allow Mailer to build up a masterly portrait of the murderer – Gilmore might well have been one of the morose GIs in The Naked and the Dead. By the time of his release from an Illinois penitentiary at the age of thirty-five, Gilmore had spent eighteen of the previous twenty-two years in prison and reform school. The illegitimate son of a sometime convict and a mother who resented him from earliest childhood, Gilmore had already tasted celebrity. During a prison riot in Illinois the local TV crew ‘selected’ him as one of the leaders and put him on television to say a few words. His looks and the way he spoke attracted attention and the first fan mail from women admirers.

Returning to Provo, Utah, and a life of drugs, beer-drinking and petty theft, he cold-bloodedly murdered a gas station attendant and a motel clerk for little more than the equivalent of £50, and was arrested almost immediately by the police. Sustained by his girl-friend, Nicole, a remarkable young woman who would stand outside the jail, bellowing ‘Gary Gilmore, I love you!’ he accepted his death penalty and settled down to await his execution. The police psychiatrists diagnosed Gilmore as a psychopathic personality, and he seems to have felt no anger or hostility towards the men he murdered, regarding them with the same total blankness that he felt for himself. Already in the death cell he was planning both Nicole’s suicide and his own execution – he wanted to be shot in the dark with tracer bullets, so that he could watch them coming towards him. Even the horrendous conditions on Death Row, a long way from Cagney and George Raft, hardly affected him. Mailer vividly describes this depraved zoo, a bedlam of cries and rage, the condemned men exposing their genitalia through the bars, hurling cups of urine into the faces of any intruders.

Gilmore’s refusal to appeal against his death penalty soon made him a local celebrity. The first curious journalists interviewed him, the advance guard of an army of hustlers and agents, veteran wheeler-dealers from the Manson and Ruby cases, film and TV executives who swarmed in from all over the world. Gilmore’s own lawyer, who doubled as his literary agent, defended his right to die, claiming: ‘I think executions should be on prime-time TV.’ The first hard cash, $500, was paid by the Daily Express (‘When the British are here en masse,’ said one excited newsman, ‘the stamp is on the meat’).

In a strange but impressive way, Gilmore expanded to fill the roles assigned him. One journalist noted that there was racist Gary, Country and Western Gary, artist manque Gary, self-destructive Gary, Karma Gary and Gary the movie star. He quoted Shelley and Hermann Hesse, and would ask visitors ‘Are you familiar with Nietzsche?’

The end came as he wanted it. The climax, and greatest set-piece in the book, is Mailer’s account of the last night before the execution, a virtuoso description of the deranged prison party held around the drugged Gilmore, wearing a comical Robin Hood hat and brandishing pornographic photos of his girl-friend, while a huge TV and press encampment waited outside the prison.

Soon after dawn the party ended. To the tune of ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, Gilmore was taken to the execution yard in the prison cannery. As a TV commentator bawled: ‘You’ll be able to hear the shots, I promise!’ Gilmore was tied to a chair in front of the concealed firing squad. After the shots, in the first silence since Gilmore’s arrest, the only sound was the blood dripping on to his tennis shoes below the seat. Perhaps not surprisingly, only one witness managed to be sick.

Guardian 1979

Mob Psychology

Little Man: Mayer Lansky and the Gangster Life Robert Lacey

Americans cherish their gangsters, Robert Lacey remarks in this entertaining biography of Meyer Lansky, one of the most mysterious criminal figures of the past fifty years. At times that fascination seems to extend to the entire world of crime, itself an inverted image of the American Dream, with its violence, energy and pursuit of the fast buck. Only serial killers, presidential assassins and out-and-out psychos – none of whom are interested in money – are excluded from the gallery of glamorized rogues.

The small-town bank-robbers of the 1930s were rapidly mythologized into a band of punk Robin Hoods, from Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd to Baby-Face Nelson and Ma Barker, a proto-feminist heroine if I saw one, who died beside son Fred, firing her Thompson in a final gun-battle with the G-men. But none of them could match the sinister charm of the big city crime-bosses who emerged from the Prohibition years. As the American economy boomed during the Second World War, the public imagination seemed to insist that crime too be conducted on a corporate basis, matching the giant scale of the steel, oil and automobile industries.

With the invention of the Mafia, whose existence many US law enforcement officers deny to this day, the endemic corruptions and venalities of American life were explained away at a stroke. Capone had died in prison of syphilis after being convicted of tax evasion, and he was followed by a financially more savvy group of New York criminals, above all Lucky Luciano, who broke away from traditional Sicilian practices into more expansive and profitable underworld activities.

Although associated with these mobsters, who were deeply involved in drugs, extortion and labour racketeering, Meyer Lansky was a very different figure, as Robert Lacey points out, and his elevation to the pantheon of criminal fame is in many ways surprising. But if the American public demanded that crime be put on a corporate basis, someone had to be found with the brains and administrative skills to run the corporation, and Lansky seemed to play the part to perfection. The American press called him the Chairman of the Board, and the brains behind the Mafia. He was claimed to have a personal fortune of $300 million, to have financed Bugsy Siegel in the creation of Las Vegas and to have teamed up with Batista to run the great Havana casinos. ‘We’re bigger than US Steel’ was his most quoted remark, and he achieved the ultimate in popular fame by being portrayed by Lee Strasberg as the Mafia chief Hyman Roth in The Godfather II.

A few years ago I drove along Miami Beach where Lansky had retired, past the luxury condos with their washed gravel drives that looked as if they were delivered fresh from the quarry each morning, past the stretch limos guarded by large-shouldered men in black suits and shades. I imagined Lansky in a duplex apartment under the sky, manipulating the Mafia’s vast cash reserves on a terminal linked to Wall Street as he gazed at his fleet of cocaine-running speedboats. But I couldn’t have been more wrong, and the luxury condos, if not the cocaine boats, were almost certainly owned by Miami dentists and heart surgeons. As Robert Lacey reveals, the image of Lansky created by American newspapers and television was a complete myth, partly sustained by the failure of the US Justice Department to convict him of any serious crime, a failure that only reinforced the belief in Lansky’s all-embracing power.

In fact, before his death he was living in a poorly furnished one-bedroom apartment, and left so little money to his heirs that his crippled son was soon reduced to existing on welfare. After the overthrow of Batista, and the loss of the Riviera hotel-casino in Havana that Lansky had built, he lived for years in a modest bungalow north of Miami, whose only expensive equipment was the elaborate bugging device which the FBI secretly installed. Unlike the New York crime bosses, Lansky was never involved in drugs, prostitution or labour racketeering, despite his childhood friendship with a real crime-tsar, Luciano. Born in eastern Poland in 1902, Lansky arrived in America with his parents at the age of four. A clever child with a flair for mathematics, he was small but aggressive, and as a teenager became a lookout and strong-arm man for the Jewish and Italian gamblers on New York’s lower east side. His quick mind and organizational skills were invaluable to Luciano during the bootlegging years, and with the repeal of Prohibition Lansky turned his skills towards that other great American pastime, illicit gambling.

Robert Lacey makes the point that, far from being one of the architects of modern organized crime, Lansky in the post-war years was primarily a casino operator, inside and outside the law. He helped to devise the concept of the big Las Vegas resort hotel, which offered glitz along with first-class service and is now the dominant style of the international hotel. The illegal skimming of the take which he organized for the gangster owners of the Vegas hotels is the main charge against him, but like many a corrupt book-keeper he led a frugal private life, subscribing to the Book of the Month Club and worrying about his unhappy children, who were clearly unable to cope with the manufactured image that the US media had foisted upon their father.

By the time he died at the age of eighty he seems to have wearied of his reputation as the mastermind of American crime. As the nurses struggled to resuscitate him he thrashed away at them, crying out his last words: ‘Let me go!’ The Las Vegas hotels he helped to run have long since been sold to legitimate international corporations, and one wonders where the American imagination will turn to next in its search for a criminal superhero.

Guardian 1991

Closed Doors

The Hughes Papers Elaine Davenport, Paul Eddy and Mark Hurwitz

A strongly punitive note sounds through this investigation into Howard Hughes’s final years, as through so many recent books and news magazine exposés, particularly those of American origin. Clearly Hughes’s sometimes bizarre though often merely eccentric behaviour during the last twenty years of his life still profoundly irritates his fellow-citizens, destroying far too many cherished fantasies. Great-grandson of a Confederate general, son of the millionaire inventor of the world’s most efficient oil-drilling bit, aviation pioneer and Hollywood man-about-town who ‘escorted’ its greatest leading ladies, Howard Hughes bought and sold airlines and film studios, personally designed a brassiere for Jane Russell and helped to introduce that unique cultural institution, the in-flight movie.

How galling, then, that this embodiment of so many potent national myths should slam the door on it all at the age of fifty and opt for exile, silence and cunning, and even more so that his quest for absolute privacy should be conducted in such a tantalizingly public way. If Hughes had retired to some impregnable mock-Xanadu or an exclusive Long Island sanatorium, no one would have minded; but he doubled the offence by sealing himself into the penthouse of the Desert Inn Hotel above the one national fantasy he had so far left alone – Las Vegas.

Unlike The Hughes Papers, a compilation of Hughes’s confused financial shenanigans, mild political bribery and muddled efforts to take over the whole of Nevada, the one book about Hughes which might have refurbished the myths has not yet been published – Clifford Irving’s fake biography. This imaginary account of Hughes’s secret life during his purported exile – the big-game hunting expeditions, meetings with Hemingway, conversations with Schweitzer, etc. – would have safely restored the hero to his pedestal. Had Hughes, who was seventy-one when he died, in fact died two or three years earlier, before he could have issued his denial, Irving’s biography would not only have been published but its authenticity, for powerful psychological reasons, could never have been seriously challenged.

The Hughes Papers exhaustively analyses the possible involvement of the Hughes empire in political and financial corruption. But the present state of the art as revealed by Watergate and the Lockheed scandals suggests that Hughes’s activities in the fifties and sixties amounted to little more than discreet tinkering, and would barely be of interest except for his increasingly eccentric behaviour. I admire Hughes, above all for the casual way in which he closed the door on the world. Lying back on a couch with the blinds drawn, popping pills and worrying about fad diets while watching the 170th re-run of Ice Station Zebra, reminds me in many ways of life today in the Thames Valley. Hughes may well have been more in touch with reality than one assumes.

New Statesman 1977

Last of the Great Royals

Hirohito Edward Behr

Asked in 1986 for his thoughts on Halley’s Comet, which had visited our skies after an interval of seventy-five years, the Emperor Hirohito remarked: ‘It’s nice to see it again.’ The reply accords in every way with the popular image of this remote and unworldly sovereign, dedicated to marine biology, that most endearing of sciences, who knew little or nothing of Japan’s preparations for the Second World War and bore no responsibility for the appalling atrocities his armed forces committed. Hirohito’s finest hour, by this reckoning, was his surrender speech on 14 August 1945, a few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, calling on his forces to lay down their arms and reminding them, in a felicitous phrase that has its own dotty charm, ‘that the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’.

General MacArthur, an almost preposterously imperial figure, was one of the first to accept the now traditional view of Hirohito. At their meeting in September 1945 the trembling Hirohito expected to be arrested on the spot – already there had been calls for his indictment as a war criminal. But MacArthur was affability itself, offering the Living God a Lucky Strike and putting him at his ease. Their meeting was in private, though Mrs MacArthur was listening to every word behind a curtain, and it is hard to know what convinced MacArthur that Hirohito was ‘a sincere man and a genuine liberal’. At any event Hirohito, after publicly renouncing his godliness, then embarked on the rest of his immensely long and undisturbed reign. He resumed his state visits to foreign countries and was courteously received by Queen Elizabeth and President Ford. By the time of his death Japan had become one of the world’s economic superpowers, and the Japanese monarchy was almost alone in having retained its dignity intact – by comparison our own scrambling royals might be auditioning for EastEnders. Hirohito’s funeral was attended by the President of the United States and a host of kings, heads of state and prime ministers. The hunger-strike mounted in protest by a British ex-serviceman seemed little more than a quaint anachronism.

Edward Behr’s biography is a cool and convincing attempt to dismantle the myths that constitute one of the most successful public relations exercises of our century. Above all, he sets out to expose Hirohito’s true role in the 1930s and 1940s – a formidable undertaking, given the maze-like complexity of Japanese imperial and political life, and the uniquely strange upbringing of Hirohito himself. Behr portrays the wartime Hirohito as a cunning prevaricator and opportunist, who exploited his own wavering diffidence in dealing with his military chiefs. However, spontaneity and personal choice were qualities the future Emperor had never been allowed to cultivate. At the age of ten weeks he was taken away from his seventeen-year-old mother, the Empress Sadako, and brought up by a retired admiral. He was provided with no childhood friends or games, and had to submit to grim routines to improve his posture and eyesight. One of the few respites came at the age of fifteen, when his father, the Emperor Taisho, sent one of his concubines to Hirohito’s quarters. She reported back that the Crown Prince ‘had displayed a certain scientific curiosity in sex, leading in time to a perfectly normal conclusion’. So was born, perhaps, the future marine biologist.

This apart, Hirohito’s only real pleasure in his entire life was his visit to Britain in 1921. He was captivated by the Royal Family’s friendliness and informality, and returned to Japan with a set of bagpipes, a lifelong dedication to English breakfasts and plus-fours, and a determination to be the first monogamous Emperor. By all accounts he made a happy marriage, though his bride received from the Empress Sadako what must be the ultimate mother-in-law’s wedding gift – an illustrated pillow book of advice on sex techniques and ways of ensuring a male heir.

On ascending the throne Hirohito reduced the size of the court and put an end to the custom of being presented, on important occasions, with gifts of dead fish. But his meals were first sampled by food-tasters, and there was a daily examination of the royal faeces. More importantly, he had earlier established a privately subsidized think-tank, the University Lodging House. This was a select and secretive club where bright young bureaucrats mingled with up-and-coming military men, and became a sounding-board for various right-wing and ultra-nationalist ideas.

Edward Behr points out that Hirohito was exceptionally methodical and industrious, read everything to which he put his seal, and was aware of whatever took place within the Supreme War Command and the cabinet. Despite certain vague reservations, he supported the invasions of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937, promoted those responsible and was well aware of the preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Behr believes that he envisaged a short, sharp war with the United States and Britain, which would be followed by a peace treaty guaranteeing Japan’s future dominance over East Asia. All too soon the American counter-attacks in the Pacific and a series of devastating naval defeats cooled his ardour. His aides noticed that he spoke increasingly of his friendship with the British Royal Family, harping on his blessed days at Balmoral.

Meanwhile, of course, British prisoners were being worked to death on the Burma railway. By the time the B-29 raids had begun to lay waste entire Japanese cities, a growing air of unreality had settled over court life. Between visits to the palace air-raid shelter there were lectures on calligraphy and Chinese culture. At last, after the dropping of the A-bombs, Hirohito decided to save what was left of Japan, and made his famous broadcast ending the war. But as General MacArthur remarked, it is hard to understand how someone powerful enough to end the war could not have prevented it in the first place.

After defeat he entered the last phase of his rule. He attended poetry competitions and became a keen TV fan and addict of sumo wrestling. Forever shy, he was said to be at ease only with marine biologists of his own height. However, his role in the war was not completely forgotten. In 1972 one of his former soldiers, Corporal Yokoi, returned to Japan after holding out for twenty-eight years in the jungles of Guam. Japanese TV audiences were baffled by the corporal’s insistence on carrying out his military duties to the last, determined to return his rifle, still in working order, to his Imperial Majesty. Hirohito commented: ‘I hope he gets a good rest.’

But as Edward Behr asks in his epilogue, had there ever been, in the Japanese eye, the notion of surrender? Nowhere in Hirohito’s speech is surrender, or defeat, specifically mentioned, and many Japanese are now convinced that Japan was the war’s prime victim. Whatever else, this total inversion of the truth may be the greatest achievement of this astute, devious and mysterious man.

Observer 1989

Sinister Spider

Dragon Lady: the Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China Sterling Seagrave

Of all the maligned women in history – a richly stocked sisterhood that stretches from Eve to Mrs T – the most unfairly treated may well have been the last Empress of China, Tzu Hsi, who ruled from 1861 to her death in 1908. Sterling Seagrave’s scrupulously researched exposé of the insults to her reputation makes one wonder how false our images of the great and famous probably are. Were Cleopatra and Catherine the Great anything like the figures that historians have described? Even in the era of the telephoto lens and the satellite interview our impressions of Nancy Reagan and Imelda Marcos may reflect our needs rather than their reality.

Contemporary reports, apparently so reliable, can lead to enormous injustice, and around Tzu Hsi the most scurrilous gossip solidified into instant history. During my Shanghai childhood in the 1930s I listened spellbound to strange tales about the Dowager Empress told by old China hands who had lived in Peking during the last years of her reign. Virtually entombed within the Forbidden City for fifty years, she had presided like a sinister spider over the Manchu empire. Only her closest courtiers had ever set eyes on her, and even her doctors were never allowed to see or touch her. Whenever she was ill, so the story went, silken cords were tied to her wrists and unwound to a curtained anteroom, where the royal physician would make his diagnosis from the faintest tremblings. I was deeply impressed, though years later in England I learned of fashionable Harley Street doctors who diagnosed the maladies of their rich women patients, and prescribed the desired stimulants and tranquillizers, entirely over the telephone – a not too dissimilar kind of silken line.

What I was not told as a child was that Tzu Hsi was widely believed to be a monster of depravity, a vicious oriental Messalina who presided over orgies of sexual perversion, poisoned her own son and was responsible for China’s humiliation during the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. This wholly false picture was only revised in 1975 when Hugh Trevor-Roper exposed its principal creator in his Hermit of Peking: the Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse. An Oxford graduate who spoke fluent Chinese, Backhouse arrived in Peking in 1899 and became unofficial editor and adviser to Dr George Morrison, local correspondent of The Times, who spoke no Chinese at all.

Prompted by the poisonous republican propaganda of Chinese revolutionaries campaigning against the Manchu dynasty, Backhouse concocted a stream of fabricated despatches about the Empress and the Imperial Court that satisfied the western appetite for tales of eastern corruption, and fixed the image of China as a haunt of dragon ladies, cruel and inscrutable mandarins and generally devilish behaviour (how I searched for it, in vain) that has lasted in large part to the present day.

As Trevor-Roper revealed, Backhouse supported himself by forging the court papers and court diaries that confirmed his malicious portrait of Tzu Hsi. Shortly before his death in Peking in 1943, during the Japanese occupation, he compiled the last of his fictions, an account of his long love affair with the lewd and elderly Empress and the weird orgies that she organized for her entertainment.

Sterling Seagrave sets the record straight. He draws on long-suppressed reports (which Backhouse denounced as forgeries) by western visitors who had met the Empress and found her to be a genial and kindly woman of quirky disposition but great strength of character. A former concubine of the Emperor Hsien Feng, she became the Dowager Empress when she was still in her mid-twenties and a complete novice in matters of state. Despite the immense handicaps of being a woman and almost never leaving the Forbidden City for the next fifty years, she did her best to steer China through the dangerous decades of confrontation with the west.

But fiction, though not as strange as truth, can be far more potent and self-justifying, and the Dowager Empress’s supposed depravity seemed retrospectively to vindicate the gunboats and raiding parties of the European powers as they set about their ruthless exploitation of her nation.

Daily Telegraph 1992

Lipstick and High Heels

Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China Richard Evans

Deng Xiaoping is widely rumoured to be dying, but it would be a mistake to write off this feisty little man before the grave is cold, as Sir Richard Evans, Our Man in Peking from 1984 to 1988, makes clear in his shrewd biography of the most important Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. It could be said of China that for forty centuries nothing happened and, then, in a single century, everything happened. The feudal agricultural society that had moved through the millennia at an almost geological pace burst into the modern age with the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1912. A new China soon emerged – urban, industrializing and, in due course, fiercely Marxist – and with it arrived a new kind of Chinese man and woman, as many Westerners found to their cost.

In 1949 my father was trapped in Shanghai after the communist takeover and, like all old China hands, confidently expected the ideological purity of the invading armies to last as long as it took them to climb down from their tanks and stroll into the bars and brothels of downtown Shanghai. In fact, their puritan zeal only intensified, and my father found himself on trial, accused of various anti-communist misdeeds. Fortunately he was able to quote enough Marx and Engels to convince the magistrates that he had seen the error of his ways. He was acquitted and a year later escaped to Hong Kong, aware that the old China of ‘squeeze’ and corruption had gone for good, a transformation that I still find hard to grasp and which was due in large part to men such as Deng Xiaoping.

Deng was born in 1904, the son of a prosperous landowner in Sichuan province, and at the age of sixteen travelled to France as a worker-student, where he laboured at a series of menial jobs, developed a life long taste for croissants and met Zhou Enlai, who introduced him to Marxism. After five years he returned to China a committed communist. He survived the Long March in 1934–5, served as a political commissar during the war against Japan, and after the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek helped to drive through the programme of land reform, when hundreds of thousands of landowners and rich peasants were killed in what Sir Richard calls the greatest social revolution in the history of the world. These numberless deaths, like those in Tiananmen Square in 1989, cast a shadow over this apparently likeable man, whose talent for friendship frequently saved his life.

As Sir Richard points out, Deng’s years in France inoculated him against the sinocentrism that marred the vision of Mao Zedong, who never went abroad except to visit Russia. Early in his career Deng realized that China could develop into a modern state only if it was willing to learn from the outside world. In 1958 he spoke publicly of the day when Chinese women would be able to afford lipstick and high-heeled shoes, a more revolutionary notion, given the extreme poverty of the peasant population, than anything dreamed of in the Communist manifesto. Inevitably he became a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and was persecuted by Mao’s vicious wife, Jiang Qing, and the Red Guards, who accused Deng of being a ‘capitalist-roader’ and humiliated him by forcing him to kneel in the ‘airplane’ position with his arms outstretched behind his back. After years of exile in a remote province Deng was restored to office upon Mao’s death in 1976. As China’s leader during the 1980s he launched the immense programme of economic and political reform that opened the country to foreign investment and transformed its landscape in a way that must have dismayed the old guard.

In 1991, during a visit to Shanghai, I had dinner in the restaurant on the top floor of the television tower with the affable director of the TV foreign news service. He asked me what I thought of the new Shanghai. Looking out at the forest of skyscrapers that reared from the crumbling streets of the old International Settlement, I tactlessly said that it reminded me of New York. He stared at me in a deeply depressed way, slowly exhaling the cigarette smoke from his lungs, as if the same thought had crossed his own mind more than once.

Summarizing Deng’s achievements, Sir Richard speculates about the future facing China after his departure. He predicts that the present collective leadership will give way to the rule of one dominant figure, in accord with Chinese tradition, and that China’s educated class, despite its appetite for social and cultural freedom, will doubt the wisdom of abandoning one-party rule. This combination, it seems to me, of a paramount leader, one-party rule and phenomenal economic and industrial growth (a yearly average of 10 per cent, a potential for mischief-making on a global scale that thankfully was denied to Mao) will make China’s future a matter of vital concern to all of us, and we can only hope that the country is led by someone with the hard-headed pragmatism displayed by Deng Xiaoping.

Daily Telegraph 1993

3 THE VISUAL WORLD

Warhol, Hockney, Dali and the Surrealists …

The Spectre at the Feast

The Andy Warhol Diaries edited by Pat Hackett

Said hello to lots of people, who said hello to me … This entry in November 1976 virtually sums up the entire contents of the diaries which Warhol kept for the last ten years of his life. The endless parties and gallery openings drift by in a dream of Manhattan, touched by movie stars and pop celebrities. Mick and Bianca, Jack Nicholson and Jackie O, Madonna and Yoko flare briefly through a prose as soft and depthless as his screen prints of car crashes and electric chairs. As he moves through the New York dusk with his white wig and ashen pallor, Warhol resembles a spectre at the feast, a role in which he seems literally to have cast himself. In June 1968 he had been shot and critically wounded by Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, who had played a small part in his film Bike Boy. Semi-conscious, Warhol heard his doctors say that he had died, and from then on considered himself ‘officially back from the dead’.

Sadly, Warhol’s creative imagination failed to join him on the return journey, and the gun-shots in the Factory sounded the effective end of his remarkable career. Was Warhol the last important artist to emerge since the Second World War? The works of his fellow pop-artists, the comic-strip blow-ups of Roy Lichtenstein and the billboard murals of James Rosenquist, seem as dated as half-forgotten advertisements. By contrast, Warhol’s silk-screened soup-cans and celebrities, criminals and race riots are now even more vivid than their original sources, exposing the eerie banality of the world that modern communications have created. The multiple images mimic the mass-produced news photographs that swamp our retinas, and make an unsettling judgment on our notions of fame and success.

What sets Warhol apart is his effortlessly assumed naivety, a wide-eyed innocence that recalls an earlier filmmaker. In many ways Warhol is the Walt Disney of the amphetamine age. In his silk-screen images there is the same childlike retelling of the great fairy-tales of our time, the mythic lives of Elvis and Marilyn, Liz and Jackie. Presented in cartoon form, the replicated frames resemble film strips, their colours hand-painted by a studio of assistants.

Like Disney, he then moved on to wildlife documentary films, Flesh, Trash and Bad, his camera lens observing the mating rituals and reproductive cycles of the canyon-life of Manhattan. And Warhol, of course, was for ever his own greatest creation, a Valium-numbed Mickey Mouse in a white fright-wig. His dead-pan comments on his own work show a teasing astuteness. ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings. There’s nothing behind it … I want to be a machine … Everybody’s plastic. I want to be plastic …’

Inevitably, his dream came true. Why did this brilliant and gifted man – after Warhol, remember, came Schnabel with his wall-loads of broken crockery and the lurid twilight of Gilbert & George – lose his inspiration and devote himself for his last twenty years to commercial portraits and the cocktail party circuit described in his diaries?

As a child Warhol was a keen reader of movie magazines, and all his life remained star-struck by the rich and famous. Together, his paintings and films constitute the ultimate fan-magazine devoted to celebrity. The multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while the Day-Glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book. The same banalization of celebrity seems to have affected Warhol himself, ensnaring him in the reductive process he had once observed in the glitterati around him. He records in July 1983: ‘There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already.’

So the diaries unroll, recording the endless parties (nine, I counted, in one evening alone) and not a single interesting conversation. He notes the impossible arrogance of Jane Fonda and reflects without envy on the astronomical prices paid to his fellow-artists Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns – he himself was having to get by on $25,000 portraits of bankers and their wives. Neutral to the last, he confirms his Valium addiction and lists the deaths of his friends from Aids, a fear of which may have led to the slight social ostracism he seems to have suffered. People avoid him, fail to invite him to parties, seat him at remote tables. One assumes that his unexpected death in 1987 after gall-bladder surgery would not have unduly surprised him. By then he was almost as celebrated as the stars he so thrillingly admired, his imagination fixed for ever in those carefree days in New York ten years earlier, when ‘it was wall-to-wall everybody rich and famous, and you couldn’t understand how they were all in town because it was August, and then you know it is a great city’.

Guardian 1989

Escape into the Seraglio

Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce

Affable and engaging, his Yorkshire savvy filtered through the warmest shades of California sunshine, David Hockney wears his celebrity more casually than any post-war artist. Neither Warhol, with his eerie, death’s-head stare, nor Dali, too often coming on like a hallucinating speak-your-weight machine, ever achieved the comfortable rapport with his audience that Hockney has been able to take for granted since the 1960s.

Together, Hockney’s life and work sum up exactly what the public today asks of its artists. Cannily, Hockney has saved his real waywardness for his life-style – the gold lamé jacket and dyed blond hair, once so outrageous, and the pool-boys high in the Hollywood Hills – while his paintings have remained wholly acceptable to his Sunday supplement admirers. The playgroup palette reminds them of the kindergarten paintboxes with which they dabbled as toddlers, while the images of Los Angeles offer a romanticized vision of that latter-day Samarkand among the freeways. In many respects, Hockney performs the role today which Alma-Tadema played for his Victorian audience. Both artists have satisfied the public’s need for exotic, far-away lands filled with graceful houris and sybaritic dreams. Both specialized in swimming-pools, but where Alma-Tadema, depicting the seraglios of a wholly mythical east, surrounded his marble grottos with pretty girls, Hockney furnishes the pools of his equally mythical west with a parade of pretty boys.

Anyone who has spent even five minutes in Los Angeles can see that this city of dreadful night is nothing like the sanitized realm invented by Hockney in his paintings of the 1960s. Hockney’s Los Angeles resembles the real terrain of dingbats and painted glue, stretching as far as forever under a tangle of overhead wires, only in the sense that Rick’s Cafe resembles the real Casablanca. Needless to say, Hockney’s vision is all the better for that, and I for one wish that he had stayed with his houris in the Hollywood Hills, painting ever bigger and bigger splashes. But the great period of the swimming-pools had passed with the end of the 1970s, at about the time when the first British visitors arrived en masse and discovered the reality of his imaginary city.

By then Hockney had himself begun to discover reality in the form of photography, a long-standing enthusiasm which seems to have seized the centre stage of his imagination during the 1980s. Hockney on Photography is a lavishly illustrated guide to the series of photo-collages he has made in the last six years. These, he believes, pose a fundamental challenge to the ‘one-eyed’ tradition that has always dominated photography since its birth.

In his interviews with the filmmaker Paul Joyce, Hockney describes his first experiments with the Polaroid camera and the significance for the future of photography of what he calls his ‘joiners’. He ranges widely over the history of western painting, contrasting its single-point perspective with the generalized perspective of eastern art, and discusses his attempts in the photo-collages to enlarge the dimension of time and infuse a greater degree of realism. Hockney speaks with all his customary wit and intelligence, though he is frequently pushed over the top by an immensely subservient interviewer. ‘I wonder whether you are going almost beyond art itself,’ he gushes. ‘Photography is no longer the same after this work of yours …’

‘Picasso and others then took off from Cezanne, and now I’m trying to take off from Picasso in an even more radical way,’ Hockney rejoins. He disdains the ignorant viewpoint of ‘people who think they know about art, or write for the Guardian’.

Suitably chastened, I none the less feel that Hockney’s ambitious claims suffer severely when placed against the actual photo-collages. The overlapping rectangular prints form a mosaic of sharp angles and unintegrated detail that soon irritates the eye. Hockney maintains that the joiners are ‘much closer to the way that we actually look at things’ but the human eye is not faceted, and the only people who see like this are suffering from brain damage. Gazing at these jittery panoramas one sees the world through the eyes of a concussed bumblebee rather than, as Hockney hopes, through the visionary lens of some future Rembrandt of the Rolleiflex. There is no sense of when the separate photographs were taken, and the collages could equally have been shuffled together from cut-up copies of the same snapshot. A masterpiece of still photography such as Cartier-Bresson’s ‘The Informer’, reproduced in the book, showing the revenge of concentration camp inmates, resonates with a richness of meanings that transcends the single image and the moment of time it records.

These resonances are missing from the photo-collages, which work, if at all, only as still lives or landscapes. Hockney himself gives the game away when he admits that his technique would be unsuitable for a serious subject like the tragic image of a napalmed child on a Vietnam highway, also reproduced. I hope Hockney returns to his swimming-pool near Mulholland Drive, shuts his eyes to the city below and once again brings us the candied dreams of his mythic west.

Guardian 1988

In the Voyeur’s Gaze

This August, 300 yards from our apartment in Juan-les-Pins, the pleasant park of eucalyptus and fir trees between the RN7 and the sea had unexpectedly vanished, along with the old post office and the tabac selling the Marseille edition of the Guardian. In their place was an immense bare-earth site, exposed soil raked by bulldozers, for the moment occupied by an air-conditioned pavilion fit for some latter-day caliph resting en route from Nice Airport to his summer palace in Super-Cannes.

Cautiously entering the pavilion, we found ourselves in a property developer’s showroom, filled with promotional displays and a huge model of the new Côte d’Azur, ‘truly the French California’. An attractive guide took us on a tour of this visionary realm, a multilingual Scheherazade who swiftly spun her 1,001 tales of the world in waiting. Here, at the newly named Antibes-les-Pins, will arise the first ‘intelligent city’ of the Riviera. Outwardly, the pitched roofs supported by dainty classical columns, the pedestrian piazzas and thematic gardens suggest something to calm the fears of our uneasy heir to the throne, but behind the elegant façades everything moves with the speed of an electron.

The 10,000 inhabitants in their high-tech apartments and offices will serve as an ‘ideas laboratory’ for the cities of the future, where ‘technology will be placed at the service of conviviality’. Fibre-optic cables and telemetric networks will transmit data banks and information services to each apartment, along with the most advanced fire, safety and security measures. To cap it all, in case the physical and mental strain of actually living in this electronic paradise proves too much, there will be individual medical tele-surveillance in direct contact with the nearest hospital.

I’ve no doubt that Antibes-les-Pins, to be completed by 1999, will be a comfortable, pleasant and efficient place in which to live and work. Claire, my girl-friend, couldn’t wait to move in. While I dozed on the balcony with Humphrey Carpenter’s Geniuses Together, an enjoyable memoir of the 1920s Paris of Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Hemingway, Claire had discovered a piece of the twenty-first century under my nose.

The next day, as we drove to Marseille to see the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Musée Cantini, police helicopters raced overhead along the high-speed auto-route, while Canadair flying boats water-bombed the blazing hillsides a few miles from the city. The endless marinas and highways of the Côte d’Azur, and the fibre-optic vision of Antibes-les-Pins, reminded me of how technologically obsessed the French have always been. The future, which in Britain has been dead for decades, still thrives in the French imagination and gives its people their strong sense of get up and go. Prince Charles may be doing his best to propel the British into a nostalgic past where, in due course, he will feel more comfortable under an ill-fitting crown, but the French are still living in the future, far more fascinated by high-tech office blocks, electronic gadgets and Minitels than they are by Escoffier and Saint-Laurent.

Walking around the Edward Hopper paintings in the quiet gallery near the Old Port, we had entered yet another uniquely special world, that silent country of marooned American cities under a toneless, depression-era sky, of entropic hotel rooms and offices where all clocks have stopped, where isolated men and women stare out of one nothingness into the larger nothingness beyond. It was ironic to see the French visitors to the exhibition, residents one day, perhaps, of the California of the new Côte d’Azur, enthusing over Hopper’s images of a stranded US. They seemed to show the same appreciation for these pictures of a vanished American past that an earlier generation of Americans had felt for the Impressionist painters and their evocation of the Paris of the belle époque. Presumably, too, they saw Hopper’s close links with Degas and Monet, and recognized that in a sense this American painter was the last of the French impressionists.

Surprisingly, for a painter who seems so completely of his own country, Hopper’s ties to France are strong. To British eyes Hopper’s melancholy bars and hotel rooms sum up the America of the 1930s and 1940s, the antithesis of the folksy and sentimental Saturday Evening Post covers of Norman Rockwell. Hopper depicts that hidden and harder world glimpsed in the original Postman Always Rings Twice, and many of his paintings could be stills from some dark-edged James M. Cain thriller.

Yet Hopper’s imagination was formed across the Atlantic, above all by the three visits to France which he made before the First World War. Born in Nyack, New York State, in 1882, Hopper was a life-long francophile. In the catalogue of the Marseille exhibition Gail Levin, curator of the Hopper collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, points out that Hopper’s passion for all things French extended far beyond painting to take in poetry and the novel, theatre and cinema. During their long marriage he and his American wife, Josephine Nevison Hopper, frequently wrote to each other in French, although they were never to visit France together.

At the New York School of Arts his teachers lectured Hopper enthusiastically on Courbet, Degas, Renoir and Van Gogh, and Hopper later spoke of the ‘Vital importance of the French art of the nineteenth century for American painting’. In 1906, when he arrived on his first visit to France, he was consummating an already intense love affair. After the money-driven tumult of New York he found Paris elegant and unhurried. He particularly liked the way the Parisians seemed to live their entire lives in the street, and spent his time sketching them in the boulevards and cafés.

Among these drawings a figure appeared who would dominate the paintings of Hopper’s maturity – a nude woman standing by an open window, hand to her face in a meditative pose. In spite of Hopper’s strict Baptist upbringing, or perhaps because of it, as Gail Levin comments, Hopper was especially fascinated by the prostitutes who plied their trade in the streets of Paris, and the sight of these women seems to have unlocked the door of his sexual imagination. In his sketches, the prostitutes sit in their cafes, indifferent to the stares of the passers-by, marking out for the first time the voyeuristic space that separates Hopper from the mysterious and impassive women who dominate his paintings.

Nearly forty years later, in ‘Morning in a City’ (1944), we see the same woman by her open window, standing naked by an unmade bed as she stares into the street below. She appears again and again, in ‘Night Windows’ of 1928 and ‘Hotel Room’ of 1931, as if glimpsed from a passing elevated train or through an open hotel-room door. This voyeur’s eye bereft of emotion, in which all action is suspended, all drama subordinated to the endless moment of the stare, seems to be the key to Hopper’s paintings. Even the isolated houses and office buildings that form a large part of his subject matter are depicted as if they too are the object of a voyeur’s gaze.

In 1909 and 1910 Hopper made two further journeys to France. On his return he married Josephine Nevison, and when she asked him why she attracted him he replied: ‘You have curly hair, you know a little French, and you are an orphan.’ Curiously, Josephine Hopper, to whom he remained happily married for the rest of his life, served as his model for almost all the solitary women whom Hopper poses in their tired hotel rooms.

He never again crossed the Atlantic. He and Josephine bought a car and embarked on a series of long drives across the United States, to Colorado, Utah and California. Hopper’s paintings depict an archetypal America of small cities and provincial towns, late-night bars embalmed in the empty night, airless offices and filling stations left behind by the new highway, but seen through an unfailingly European eye. The mysterious railway lines that cross many of his paintings are reminiscent of Chirico’s, and his steam locomotives might pull the carriages that Delvaux left stranded in their sidings, while his strange nudes sleep-walk in the evening streets.

Out of sympathy with the art of his American contemporaries, he protested publicly in 1960 against what he felt was the excessive attention given to the abstract expressionists. In a sense he had bypassed the American art of the twentieth century, and his own roots went back to the Paris he had known before the First World War. Still at work after the deaths of Bonnard, Leger and Matisse, Hopper may arguably be not only the last impressionist, but the last great French painter. Hopper’s ‘New York Movie’ of 1939 might easily have been painted by Degas had the latter lived on into the age of the great picture palaces. In a gloomy side-chapel the usherette stares into the carpeted darkness, lost in her own dreams while a larger dream fills the distant screen. Degas remarked that he painted his women subjects as if he was seeing them through a keyhole, catching them in their most intimate and unselfcon-scious moments. Degas’ women are precursors of Hopper’s, but in painting the depression America of the 1930s Hopper brings his eye to bear on the alienation of the twentieth-century city.

His women expose themselves to a far more public gaze than a keyhole. They stand by their open windows as if no one can see them, as if the anonymity of the modern city renders them invisible to the passengers of a passing train. They expose everything but reveal nothing. In a late-night bar, in the ‘Nighthawks’ of 1942, a couple sit like characters on a theatre stage, but no drama is communicated to the audience. Hopper’s gaze is far removed from that of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He is uninterested in whatever banal mystery surrounds his solitary men and women, or in whatever pointless business is transacted in their provincial offices.

Leaving this powerful but unsettling exhibition, we set off for the Old Port and a necessary drink at a quayside cafe. Beyond the white picket fence which I had last seen in The French Connection was moored the life-size replica of a square-rigged sailing ship from Polanski’s ill-fated Pirates, a masterpiece of fibre-glass that towers above the fishing-boats in the harbour. Two years ago it was moored at Cannes, as if taking its revenge on the film festival where it came unstuck, but has now moved down the coast to Marseille, and it was ironic to see the natives of the great seaport paying their 30 francs to inspect this cathedral of floating kitsch.

But for once kitsch was reassuring. As the Côte d’Azur of Matisse and Picasso gives way for the last time to the fibre-optic, telemetric California of Antibes-les-Pins, to English language radio stations and the science park of Sophia-Antipolis, Hopper’s marooned hotel rooms appear positively inviting, as his French admirers may have realized. In the context of the future unwrapping itself on our doorsteps Hopper’s voyeurism and undisguised loneliness seem almost like intimacy. Penned in their high-security apartments, constant medical tele-surveillance linking them to the nearest hospital, a generation of even more isolated women will soon stare across their bedrooms. But this time there will be no keyholes through which others can observe them, no half-open doorways or windows on to the watching night.

Guardian 1989

A Humming-bird for Salvador Dali

Edward James John Lowe

Poeted: The Final Quest of Edward James Philip Purser

Scurrying from continent to continent in his surrealist search for a quarry he never identified, Edward James led his life as if he had forever mislaid his invitation to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. The highest compliment one can pay this spoilt and eccentric man, who must have been one of the most tiresome people imaginable, is to say that no one else so deserved to sit beside Alice and the March Hare at that magical table.

During the dark days of the late 1940s, when I was first discovering surrealism for myself, the name of Edward James began to appear in catalogues and reference books. Who was this mysterious collector, all the more strangely an Englishman, for years the patron of a group of artists regarded as little more than charlatans? A tantalizing clue appeared in Magritte’s ‘Not to Be Reproduced’, a double portrait of the back of James’s head as he stood beside a mirror with Lautréamont’s Song of Maldoror, the black bible of surrealism, and gradually a few facts about James began to emerge. He had been active in surrealist circles in the 1930s, and had financed a ballet season for George Balanchine. Dali described him as ‘my little humming-bird’ and, on the family estate near Chichester, James had furnished a house with Dali’s sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips, and a stair carpet into which were stitched the bath-time footprints of his wife, the dancer Tilly Losch.

Apart from these details, there was little more to go on, and James himself seemed to vanish until Philip Purser’s Where Is He Now? – The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James, published in 1978, and now revised and enlarged as Poeted: The Final Quest of Edward James. In his lively detective story, Purser describes how he tracked James down to a remote hillside in Mexico, where he was building a jungle Xanadu among the snakes and parrots. Unhappily for his long-time admirers, James turned out to be a shrill and eccentric old man pottering about in an Old Etonian blazer, who talked and twittered but had nothing interesting to say. Yet this was the man who had opened his purse so generously to the surrealists, and whose judgements had been tested by time, in a way that those of the Saatchis, and the New York bankers at present buying warehouses of Manhattan kitsch, are never likely to be.

Fashions in biography change, as they do in the novel. Ruthless documentation of frailty is now the vogue, a fashion set off in the 1970s by American academic biographers who funded teams of PhD students eager to scan ancient hotel receipts and discover exactly how many whiskey sours Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald drank on a dull afternoon in Atlanta in 1928. Richard Ellmann’s much praised biography of Oscar Wilde took frankness a stage further. Scarcely any sense of Wilde appears in this massive account – he comes across as flawed but vaguely presidential, rather like Goering – but the book is filled with details of sheet stains at the Savoy, Wilde’s symptoms and pus-filled diseases, the exact daily distance he was forced to climb on the prison treadmill and, above all, the money he made, details which fascinate us but may strike future readers as prurient or irrelevant.