We heart zombies

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This is the full text of a short paper given as part of Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas, on Thursday 25 Oct 2012

LIVING THE DREAM: LOVING THE NIGHTMARE

While I teach Film Theory and related matters here at Anglia Ruskin, I'm largely here tonight in my capacity as an author [here I wave the Viking Dead book]

First, a confession. I have never read a zombie novel. That's bad, I know, considering I've written one. My points of reference, in terms of writing, are from elsewhere – and my inspirations zombiewise are almost all cinematic. I think that's important to note: the zombie – by which I mean the modern, Romero-style zombie with which we are all familiar, as distinct from its voodoo ancestor – is primarily a cinematic phenomenon.

The strong similarities between cinema and world of the dream – the literal, nocturnal dream – have long been noted. We are in a dark place. We see images whose significance we do not at first properly understand – there are characters, situations, interactions, scares, thrills, tensions. A dream is like reality, but it is a heightened version of reality. In both dreams and film we witness things we cannot in life. Real reality is bound by the weight of matter, in our cinematic dreamworlds, worlds of pure image, we experience a kind of boundless potential. Anything is possible. When dreaming, of course, we believe it to be real. In the cinema, too, we allow ourselves to believe in its reality – until finally awakened by the roll of the credits.

Being shown possibilities, and believing they could be real, is really what speculative fiction of any kind is about. Given this, it is not hard to see the value of dreams – or, at the very least, their ability to be wierdly entertaining.

But what about nightmares?

Film theorist Robin Wood refers to horror movies as "our collective nightmares". A devotee of psychoanalysis, he means this quite literally – that they provide us with a means of safely exorcising our primal demons. This doesn't mean they're not also genuinely terrifying, of course, just as literal nightmares are. So the question is, why do we want them at all? Even if we believe that nightmares serve some important psychological purpose, few of us ever actually want to have them. So why do we return to cinematic nightmares over and over again?

Well, let's take a tough case – the ultimate nightmare: the zombie apocalypse...

The western world loves zombies. But what, exactly, is there to love? It's such an obvious question that we hardly ever stop to ask it. But we should. Most of us would probably regard someone who yearns for apocalypse as completely crazy. Then we sit down to enjoy a good zombie film. An individual who expressed a sincere desire to be a zombie we would consider strange indeed. But then we take part in zombie walks and eagerly prepare our zombie costumes for Halloween. Subliminally, as in a dream, we seem to desire it, too. Dreams are about desires as well as fears.

Dreams also operate symbolically, by having something represent something else. So, let's take a moment to consider what zombies may represent.

Zombies are dead, and the dead belong in the earth. So, the zombie evokes a primal fear – fear of death, the looming presence that relentlessly stalks us, and from which we can run, but cannot hide.

Taking another cue from Robin Wood, we might think of them in terms of "the return of the repressed", in which the earth represents our unconscious and the dead the repressed material that won't stay put, rising up to threaten rationality and social order. The threat to social order, in this case, is total. The zombie has role, no ambition, no gender. It has no family and no nationality. It recognises no boundaries.

With apologies to Dr Seuss, the zombie isn't here or there, the zombie's with us everywhere.

The zombie represents the end. 'Z'. Omega. The end of us and the end of days. It brings not merely breakdown or war, but apocalypse.

The zombie is anonymous. There are no individuals, no zombie celebrities – no Dracula, no Frankenstein's monster, no Wolf Man and no Mr Hyde. They are legion. A faceless mass.

The zombie represents the destruction of identity. The eradication of humanity – in all senses of that phrase. The zombie is without thought or care. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.

These zombies are not the servants of any voodoo master, nor the result of any occult curse. They are a contagion. Something that can infect us if we do not take precautions.

The zombie eats. That is its one purpose. We might say it is the ultimate consumer. It confronts us with a dual fear, that of becoming both the consumer and of being consumed. Of becoming walking meat. There is an insistent emphasis on the physical in these films – on gore, and flesh.

So much for the nightmare.

David Mamet says "Every fear hides a wish". But what is there in this comprehensive catalogue of disasters that any of us could possibly desire?

To get at this, I think we need to consider the landscapes of modern zombie mythology.

In the recent wave of zombie films, from 28 Days Later to Zombieland and beyond, one message is clear: get out of the city. It becomes a repeated motif. By the time The Walking Dead hits the screens, it is a given that the city is the heart of the corruption, and that only by starting again out in the country do survivors stand a chance.

Max Brook's ingenious distillation of American zombie mythology – The Zombie Survival Guide – states the case succinctly: Rule 12: 'Avoid urban areas'.

The city belongs to the living dead.

In the real world, the city pampers us, makes us comfortable, gives us a limitless choice of things to consume. In a sense, it connects us. But it disconnects us too – from the land, from nature, from the basic survival skills of our ancestors. The heroes of zombie films are those who can recover those skills. As Romero's Dawn of the Dead shows us, they also have to draw a line under capitalist, consumerist society, to let go the now useless consumer goods of the shopping mall. If they fail, they will themselves be consumed.

The city also disconnects us from our own nature. It alienates us from others, makes us too busy to bother with our neighbours. It makes us less human. The globalised city goes further still. Like a zombie horde it recognises no boundaries, it wanders without restriction and reproduces itself wherever people gather – wherever the meat is. It even threatens the category of 'city' itself. The city now comes to us – through our screens, our clothes, our purchases – and makes us citizens not of a locale, but of a concept – replacing physical places with what anthropologist Marc Augé calls "non-places".

Even my own novel, which took zombies as far from the cities of the modern world as I thought it was possible to go, the theme that repeatedly, insistently emerged was that of connection to, or disconnection from, the land.

The deep fear evoked by the American zombie mythology, then, is not the outlandish possibility of being pursued or killed, but the far more disturbing anxiety of a breakdown of all categories – of the collapse not just of society, but of the distinction between one and the other, us and them. A breakdown of all context, and therefore of meaning. A terror, in fact, of globalisation and modernity, which renders even geography irrelevant, disconnecting landscape from the specifics of the land, making it generic – a place that is no place. It is a fear of becoming nothing. Signifying nothing. It is fear that the globalised city has already fatally infected us, already rendered us meaningless – flesh, and no more, belonging nowhere. That we are already the walking dead.

When George Romero was asked what zombies represented, he had a one word answer: "Us."

And yet... Within this fear is hidden a wish – a wish to see the city fall. To sweep away all that confines and makes demands upon us. To be unfettered by modernity, to no longer be oppressed by the stuff of capitalism or culture. To be simple – a creature of instinct like the babe in the crib, without thought, without care, without responsibilities. To be a zombie. This is why the end of the world as we know it gives us a curious thrill – why the base existence of the undead holds a certain allure. It may be impossible, irrational, destructive, but we can still dream it. We can still forget ourselves from time to time. We should. That, it seems to me, is one of the great possibilities offered by cinema. And if in doing so, we can also acknowledge our inner zombie, and even love it, well, maybe there's hope for humanity after all.

Mel Gibson goes into a bar #2

Mel Gibson goes into a bar. He turns to the customer next to him, looks him up and down and says 'Hey fella - what's your name?'

'Ira Goldberg,' says the customer. 'Why?'

Gibson smacks him on the nose and shouts 'You people killed our Lord!'

The customer straightens himself up and says: 'Actually, that was the Romans. However, the fact that the Christian church had its power base in Rome when the New Testament was being established both necessitated, and provided the opportunity for, the obfuscation or distancing of Roman involvement in the crucifixion. Pilate's 'washing of the hands' cleverly abdicated apparent responsibility – despite the fact that Rome had absolute administrative power in Judea in AD 33, that the Herodian family were mere client kings, and that Roman prefects personally appointed the high priests of Herod's Temple anyway – and scriptural repetition of this notion finally succeeded in shifting historical blame onto Christ's Judaic contemporaries, even though the execution is carried out by Roman soldiers acting under Roman law against a man who threatens Roman authority. The entire episode, from beginning to end, was really about protecting and continuing the dominance of that authority.' He pauses. 'Which is kind of funny when you think about it.'

Gibson stares at him for a moment and finally says. 'Fair point. Well argued. It appears we only have ourselves to blame. Can I buy you a drink?'

Mel Gibson goes into a bar #1

Mel Gibson goes into a bar. He turns to the customer next to him, looks him up and down and says 'Hey fella - what's your name?'

'Ira Goldberg,' says the customer. 'Why?'

Gibson smacks him on the nose and shouts 'You people sank the Titanic!'

Reeling, the customer protests. 'The Jews did not sink the Titanic! It was an iceberg!'

Gibson shrugs. 'Iceberg. Goldberg. What's the difference?'

Sherlock Series 3 Exclusive

Thanks to sources close to the production, we can exclusively reveal some of the plot secrets of the eagerly anticipated third series of BBC crime drama Sherlock. And believe me, there are some surprises in store – not least of which is what happened to our hero after 'that' fall...

At the end of the last episode of Series 3, we witnessed what seemed, incontrovertibly, to be the death of Sherlock as he fell from the roof of St Bart's. Then, bafflingly (though, perhaps, not surprisingly) he is seen alive and well watching John Watson visit his grave. There have been many theories about what happened in between - all of them wrong. Here's the truth...

Episode 1 of the third series opens with a brief recap of the 'death scene'. We then see Sherlock awaken outside St Bart's, his head bloodied. It's night, the streets are unusually dark. He staggers off, disorientated, his faculties blurred - but even in this state he feels something is terribly wrong. The streets are familiar, and yet not. There are no cars, no neon, no sounds of engines or piped music. Instead, horses. Carriages. Broughams and hansoms. The cries of street sellers. Reeling, he spies a sign indicating a police station and staggers in, barging past an anachronistically-dressed duty sergeant into its inner sanctum. He recognises this building now - but everything is wrong. As many more, similarly-attired officers of the law look on in complete bemusement, he rails at them, demanding - for the sake of his own sanity - that they tell him what year it is. A large, bluff, red-faced man with mutton-chop whiskers downs his gin, steps forward and grabs him by the lapels. Sherlock protests, almost apologetically, informing the man he has recently suffered a severe injury.

"I don't give a bangtail's old felt hat if your swede's falling in two," seethes the man. "You do NOT come waltzing into my manor giving it all that like the Lord Mayor of bleedin' London!'

"Who the hell are you?" replies Sherlock. The man slams him against a roll-top desk.

"Jeremiah Hunt. Detective Inspector. And it's 1887. Around supper time. I'm 'avin' pie'n'mash..."

We segue into new opening titles, over which Sherlock's voice is heard:

"My name is Sherlock Holmes. I had an 'accident', and I woke up in 1887. Am I mad, in a coma, or suffering from the affects of secretly administered hallucinogens? Whatever's happened, it's like I've landed on a different planet. Now, maybe if I can deduce the cause, I can get home..."

Can't wait, can you?

Real 3-D – comin' atcha

As dear old Uncle George embarks on the 3-D-ification of the Star Wars movies, providing us all with the opportunity to buy the entire saga all over again (how many times is that now?), debate nonetheless continues to rage about the validity of 3-D.

In cinemas across the UK, the multi-million investment in 3-D projection equipment has, of course, already been made, and even as I write, production lines in the Far East are gathering momentum, churning out – whether we like it or not – a new generation of 3-D Blu-Ray players and TVs. Yet amongst critics, it's hard to find a single voice raised in support. Roger Ebert dismissed 3-D as 'a waste of a perfectly good dimension', while on the other side of the Atlantic, Mark Kermode's rants on the subject have reached epic proportions. On his 'Kermode Uncut' blog at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/ he even offered instructions on how to make special '3-D correcting glasses' which convert a 3-D cinematic projection back into a nice, user-friendly 2-D format. For bemused audiences, still seemingly split on the subject, the issue is just a bit of a headache – and not only because it forces you to go cross-eyed.

But for all this, 3-D does, perhaps, have a natural place in cinema – and, somewhat controversially, it's not where anyone expects it to be.

Let me explain.

For one moment, let's put all those well-worn, overly-familiar arguments about the process to one side. Let's pretend that it doesn't cause severe spectacle build-up among those who already wear glasses, that it doesn't cost significantly more to get in to a 3-D movie – effectively meaning we are paying for the installation of projection equipment that we didn't ask for and perhaps never wanted – that the retro-fitting of existing films into 3-D isn't an industry-wide horror that makes colorization seem like a mere amateur jape, and that the lenses don't mean a 30% colour loss when we're watching the film. Let's pretend, too, that it doesn't render larger objects woefully unimpressive, making them look more like a tiny model than they would have back when those effects were actually done with a tiny model. Let's pretend, in fact, that it just works.

OK, fine. But there's still a problem - and it's one that is rarely, if ever, addressed.

Here's the thing. I don't know about you, but I see in 3-D all the time. I open my eyes in the morning. 3-D. I make a cup of tea and look out of the window. 3-D. I cross the kitchen – using my depth perception to skilfully avoid collision with a chair. 3-D. To many, right now, 3-D appears to be a new and exciting phenomenon. Other, more, cautious souls refer back to 3-D movies of the 1950s, or to Edwardian stereoscopic photographs. But really, they're missing the point. The fact is, 3-D is old news. Really old. Like, millions of years. Considering this, it goes without saying that seeing things in 3-D is actually, well... a bit boring. It's humdrum. Everyday. Just... normal.

So why, when we go to the cinema to experience a distinctly different kind of world – one that, for the most part, we hope is neither boring nor everyday – is 3-D thought to be an exciting addition to the mix? And why is this belief apparently even more fervent when the films in question are big, fantasy extravaganzas, whose raison d'être is escape, and whose attraction is therefore their very difference from the ordinary world that surrounds us? Surely, adding 3-D to these astonishing, wonderfully unreal worlds is rather like gazing upon the painstakingly created, magical realm of L Frank Baum's Oz in all its vibrant, gaudy glory, then gleefully announcing 'Hey, let's make it look even more real! Let's furnish it from Laura Ashley paint it magnolia!'?

But wait... Not all of cinema is about escape. There are films, after all, that aim not to take us away from the world, but to hold a mirror up to life – to bring it closer (even that phrase 'bring it closer' is suggestive). For some filmmakers, the everyday – the humdrum, the 'real' – is their preferred territory; their quest, to make film as 'real' as possible. Following the logic, it soon becomes clear where 3-D truly belongs; not in Wonderland or among clashing Titans, in the hands of woolly-headed fantasists and expressionists, but with the realists, the kitchen-sinkers, the purveyors of true-life grit.

I imagine Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are merely biding their time before making their move. And Michael Winterbottom and Shane Meadows are doubtless waiting for the hype to die away before laying claim to what is rightfully theirs. After all, how can they reasonably resist what the 3-D revolution offers – the chance to make their cinematic worlds more real than they have ever been before?

Then, and only then, will 3-D cinema finally make sense.

Ray Harryhausen

Another from the archives, in which I get to chat with the original king of the clashing Titans, Ray Harryhausen, during his visit to Cambridge Film Festival. First published in 2001.

What do you think about CGI?
Oh I think CGI does some wonderful things, but I don’t see why you should throw everything else out just because CGI is good. I see no reason why it can’t be combined, after all what is the end product? It’s to entertain...

CGI involves hordes of people, but all your work you did on your own. Were you also directing the live action sequences to which your effects would be added?
Oh absolutely, yes. I always directed my own scenes. I worked on the script. I don’t just wear the hat of a special effects person. There are a lot of people that would call me an animator of special effects, which would suggest you’re handed a script and you’re supposed to try and put it on the screen. But I worked with the writers very closely, I’d make pre-production drawings, and those stimulate the actors, as well as the writers, and a lot of these things are put into the script.

And many of the films were built around ideas that you brought to your producer Charles Schneer?
Yes. I brought in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, I had a whole idea which we got a professional scriptwriter to devise a script for it, which I worked with him on, and I brought in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad and The Eye Of The Tiger, as well as 20 Million Miles To Earth.

Of course, there is still a bit of stop motion animation being done today…
But they’re in the form of puppet films, whereas the type of films which Willis O’Brien started with King Kong and The Lost World are films where your animated character is a character in the story that you’re telling, rather than a puppet. Chicken Run is a wonderful example of a beautifully made puppet film, but everybody knows it’s a stylised puppet. In Mighty Joe Young and King Kong you had the character as an actor, as a part of the intricate storytelling process.

I believe you thought about being an actor, but had stagefright...
Yes I did. I studied acting at Los Angeles City College, and the two ladies that were just ahead of me in the class made it in the big time in Hollywood. But I remember when I was in my senior play, I hated the opening night, where you have all this tension around – remember your lines, is your fly open, you know all these horrible things that go on in one’s mind when you’re before the public. So I preferred to be behind the curtain! But I’m grateful for that period where I wanted to study acting, because our animated characters intrinsically act with the live actors, rather than just being there for shock value. Mighty Joe Young you would see a lot of acting with.

How much of that was from watching Willis O’Brien, the animator for King Kong?
Oh a lot of it, because Willis O’Brien was my mentor. When I saw King Kong, I was just awestruck, I couldn’t believe it, that anything like that could be done. I had the great pleasure of working with him on Mighty Joe, but I was just his assistant. I created a little bit, a few things, but nine tenths of it was his. His style of film concept rubbed off on me, of course, because of King Kong. All those little intricacies… I tried to put that in Mighty Joe Young – O’Brien left most of the actual animation to me – by having him pound the ground with his fist every time he was angry. That seemed to be a good characterisation, giving him a little more than just being a mad monster.

Your last film was Clash of the Titans. What was it made you decide to stop at that point?
Well I thought I’d had enough of it; the rest of the crew would go out and make three or four pictures while I was still on one film. That was one reason, there were personal reasons too, and then the other reason was the type of story that seemed to be popular in the eighties and nineties – it wasn’t my cup of tea. I like Greek mythology and you can’t tell a story like that with an explosion every five minutes. But now people just want special effects for the sake of special effects. Or at least that’s what Hollywood thinks. There’s no story.

Were you glad to stop?
Well I was at the time, but I miss it a lot, because I found it very creative, from developing the screenplay rather than actually doing it. As Hitchcock once said, ‘Your work is really done when you’ve written the script with all the details in it.’ The next step of course is hoping that you can get that on the screen… I used to make about four hundred little sketches that were published in the script, for the scenes that are all my work, so that when I would direct that sequence, sometimes the director would resent that. There were clashes of personality occasionally. You tried to keep that at a minimum.

I was interested to discover quite recently that you are a lifelong friend of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury.
Oh yes. I first met him in ’38 or ’37, when he was a struggling writer a group of us, used to meet at Clifton’s Cafeteria. We used to talk on the telephone, when for five cents you could talk for an hour. He lived in Venice, quite a distance from where I lived, and we used to talk about making films together on the telephone for I don’t know how long. If you did that today it would have cost you a fortune! We ended up making The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms together, from his story.

I also recall you saying that you got itchy feet and wanted to leave Hollywood and go to Europe.
Yes, I did, so I wrote this story, which became 20 Million Miles To Earth… I just called it The Giant Aemir at the time. I wanted to go to Europe, and I had this outline for a story where a rocketship crashes in Lake Michigan in Chicago. But I changed it to Italy because I wanted a trip to Italy! And, by George, I got it.

What made you decide to settle in London?
Well we came over for two pictures actually in the 60s. We filmed a lot in Spain, and the locations were closer. To take a crew from Hollywood to Europe is very costly. Here in England it’s only two hours to Spain, and two hours to Italy, and we used a British crew. Our first cameraman here was Wilkie Cooper, and he took a skeleton crew to Spain.

When you say a ‘skeleton crew’…
No I don’t mean skeletons with bare bones! But I mean what they could term a skeleton crew, and then we used mostly the Spaniards – they had wonderful art directors there. We shot quite a few – six films – over in Spain. Another advantage of living in England was its closeness to new locations. In America, of course, television eats up all the locations. And you can’t use Malibu Beach for The Lost Island… In Spain, when we shot a lot of close-ups for The Lost Island, we used some live edible crabs, six of them, I think, and we had a nice dinner of them. Eat your actors when you’ve finished with them! Hitchcock would have been pleased.

Is Jason And The Argonauts your favourite film?
Jason I think is the most complete. The whole picture was shot in Italy. We used the temples which are four thousand years old – Greek temples. We had wonderful locations. But there are bits and pieces of other films I admire more. I wish I could shoot some of them over again!

The fighting skeletons in Jason probably are what stick most in people’s minds, but the other is Medusa from Clash of the Titans...
I always wanted to animate a Medusa, because I saw the Hammer film they called Medusa, and it was just a woman with rubber snakes in her hair, and every time she walked they would bounce! And I thought, oh God, you can’t call that Medusa! So I designed her so that she wouldn’t have to wear clothing by giving her a snake’s body, which fit perfectly with the story, and we gave her a bow and arrow and a rattlesnake’s tail, so that the sound effects that we used could be quite creepy, and she could destroy people from a distance. We gave it very spooky lighting...

Did you have a larger model for when you showed just the head?
No, we shot all the close-ups on that one model, and they were detailed enough so that you could photograph them close up.

Why not make them larger?
Well, the skeleton’s only eight inches, and the reason for that is because of your projection, the basic principle of animation is miniature rear projection. You project on the screen and have your stop motion models in front. The larger you project, the more grain, and then you have to re-photograph the grain of the projected image, so I try to keep the picture as small as possible. That’s why the models are small.

Tim Burton used your spaceships from Earth Versus The Flying Saucers for Mars Attacks, of course. But I believe there’s a curious story about their sound…
Oh, the sound effects were recorded at the Redondo sewage disposal plant. We filmed there for the inside of the rocketship to save building the set, because they had all levers and things. And then Charles heard this goo going through the sewage plant, and he said ‘Ah that makes a good sound for the saucer.’ So we recorded everybody’s residue going through the pipes and we incorporated it as the flying saucer sound, to make it sound extraterrestrial!

I think Earth Versus The Flying Saucers was one of the first films to really show a flying saucer.
Well, usually they avoided it or just showed a hubcap on a wire. Otherwise it was just a big prop. We tried to make it as though you were actually there, and you could see it coming up behind the car. Even in Close Encounters they used a similar thing with the lights, only the lights came up behind the car.

Did you enjoy Jurassic Park?
Oh yes, very much. I thought the dinosaurs were superb. I also liked Walking with Dinosaurs, the BBC programme. That was remarkable.

It seems in some respects things are coming full circle. In Tomb Raider there is a scene in which a stone statue of a many-armed goddess with swords comes to life...
I wonder where they got that idea? [Chuckles]

Chuck Palahniuk

From the archives: my interview with the author of Fight Club, first published in RealCity magazine in 2002

72 hours. That’s how long Chuck Palahniuk’s been awake. When he was a kid he’d wonder at British writers arriving in Portland looking like skeletons, at the outermost edge of their signing tour. Now here he is, at the outermost edge, 72 hours from Portland. A skeleton. A skeleton dipped in yellow wax. Chuck writes a lot about sleep, about crawling through life in a dream, about being neither asleep nor awake. His latest book is called Lullaby.

Outside, Chuck fans and die-hard anarchists are crammed into the Business section of Borders bookstore, which some accident or Mischief Committee has seen fit to place directly above Starbucks. It’s one of only two Lullaby signing sessions in the UK, and he was due on five minutes ago. But he won’t leave the building until he’s talked to everyone who wants to talk to him, which, right now, means me. Chuck is a gentleman.

'The genesis of Lullaby was a short story about a reporter – and about doing something that would make words really, really powerful again,’ he says. ‘There was a time when people really shaped their lives by what they said; they took vows or they took pledges, and that was the rest of their life changed with a word. Now it seems the proliferation of language has destroyed that power. So I wanted to do this short story about language having this ability to kill people – what we see as the ultimate change. A friend of mine had pointed out how the icons of the religious deities in different cultures had became the decorating element of our culture. Whatever some culture held as sacred, our culture was using as a wallpaper border. So I started thinking about doing that with language, and what would happen if the wrong thing got quoted. It became a short story, which became three chapters, and then I made Lullaby out of it. That's good rule of thumb: if you can't get your concept down to a short story – like chapter six in Fight Club – then maybe you really need to focus on what your concept is. If I can't get it into a short story, I don't have it clear enough yet.’

Chuck likes short stories. He says:

‘A short story has to make a transformation, to complete a dynamic in, like, seven pages. And I read so many novels where nothing happens for 200 pages. So my goal is to make every chapter like a short story – something is completed, but something also generated in a very small space.’

And then:

‘Every time I think I'm writing a book of short stories I realise that everyone in the short stories is doing the same thing, and that what I'm really doing is writing another novel.’

It wasn't until 1992, at the age of 31, that Chuck Palahniuk decided he was going to write. But it began with a kid who’d grown up in a trailer opposite the Burbank Tavern, East Washington.
‘In fifth grade my sister was getting a lot of attention from her teacher because she was writing, so I thought it was a good way to get attention. Up to that point I could barely read. I was a really slow reader, because I just couldn't make head nor tail out of diagramming sentences. I used to just weep over my homework, because it was gibberish. When it finally made sense it was such an emotional moment for me that I was just married to words after that. I never got over it, the joy I felt when I finally realised why a verb was a verb, why a subject was a subject, why a noun was a noun...’

‘So what led to you actually becoming a writer?’

‘I had wanted it all my growing up, but I always told myself that I had to wait until I retired. Because I couldn't do it and work. And then I did a motivational course which basically convinced me that if I wanted to do something, I should start doing it immediately, even if it was just a few minutes a day. I had to do it in some capacity, I had to fit it in to my life.’

‘So was that awakening the way it is in Fight Club? With a gun held to your head..?’

‘It sort of was a metaphorical gun to the head. It was very much about existentialism and nihilism, but leading up to Kierkegaard's leap of faith – the idea that if you could stand for everything meaning nothing, then you could determine what means something. I finally had the freedom to choose the thing I wanted to choose my entire life, but was afraid to.’

Someone once said to me of Chuck: ‘He likes to experience everything he writes about...’ If that were literally true, he’d be dead by now. But then there were all those fights he used to get into.

‘Yeah... It was a real frustrating part of my life, when I wasn't writing. I was just working and seeing my life amount to nothing more than paying the bills until I died. And I was not brave enough to do the thing I wanted to do. So there was a lot of frustration. I was in a lot of fights during that time.’

‘And that frustration was where Fight Club came from?’

‘And the exhaustion that came from it, because at least it left me tired and vented – you know, my rage was vented – and I had to acknowledge that there were aspects of fighting that I really liked, that were really beneficial to my life as a coping mechanism. But writing works a little better as a coping mechanism.’

Another time around then, he was off hiking in the mountains with friends.

‘Some people came and they camped right next to us. And they brought out a big stereo and were playing disco music in the middle of the night, in the mountains. They were stoned, and I was pissed off, and I went over and we got into a big fight and I ended up getting the shit beat out of me. My face looked so bad. The kind of bruises that just change colour like a mood ring. So bad that anyone who cared about me wouldn't even acknowledge it. And I realised no one wanted to acknowledge what was so obvious because they were afraid I would tell them what my secret, private life was like. They didn't want to know what I did in my free time, because obviously it was something terrible. And I thought, if you look bad enough you could get away with anything and people wouldn't call you on it, because they’d be terrified you'd tell them the truth. So I thought, what about somebody who wears his private life on his face in that way, in such a way no one will have the guts to acknowledge it?’

The first novel to actually get written was Invisible Monsters. The story goes that when it was rejected, Chuck wrote Fight Club to get back at the publishers. But instead of getting pissed off, they published it.

‘When they first saw Invisible Monsters it was really weak, and I'm so glad in retrospect that nobody published it, because it would have been a really poor first novel. When Fight Club was published, Gerry Howard was the only editor who wanted it. He was one of their top editors, and they didn't want to alienate him, so they offered what they call “kiss-off money” – they offer you an incredibly low advance, knowing that any intelligent author will be offended and turn it down. That way they keep peace with their editor, but they're able to not acquire the book. So they offered $6,000. But for me that was like "Wow!" I took the kiss-off money, and that's how Fight Club got published.’

Chuck’s now heading for the 73rd hour without sleep. I ask him about Tyler Durden. Everybody always wants to know about Tyler Durden.

‘Tyler Durden is married and raising two kids in Bent, Oregon, building houses for very rich people. Tyler Durden is my friend Geoff. Really all my characters are just friends of mine.’

Chuck says how the things he writes are just stuff people tell him, how every time he thinks he’s seen it all, another person on a plane next to him tells him a story. ‘The world is always another book,’ he says.

‘I was doing a book event in London and a young man took me aside and said "I really loved what you wrote about doing things to celebrities' food in restaurants, because I work in a five star restaurant and we do things to celebrities' food all the time." I said "Who? Tell me one person." He said, "I can't." So I said, "Well, I'm not signing your book..." And he got really quiet, and then goes: "Margaret Thatcher has eaten my sperm. At least five times..."

‘Do you think Osama Bin Laden read Fight Club?’

‘No, but I think maybe he saw the movie. I don't think we've been translated into that many languages yet. Don't blame it on me…’

‘Were you happy with the movie of Fight Club?’

‘When they made the movie I wasn't very invested in it, because I had sort of processed all those issues, so emotionally it didn't catch me any more. But I thought it was a terrific piece. They told the story so much better than the book did. They pulled all the needless extras out, and pared the story down to what mattered. It embarrassed me how much stuff should not have been in there. Parts of the book now I just think are needless. And it was just dream casting – people who were really invested and did a great job. What was so funny was taking the actual people who were characters there, walking through this giant, beautifully lit version of their lives. The house that they built was so much like Geoff's horrible house. It just cracked me up that they spent $1,600 having a hand-made Ikea table made instead of buying the $16 plastic Ikea table. Everything was like this enormous, big budget version of our cheap, scuzzy lives. And they were saying things my friends had said three years before when they were drunk.’

I look at my watch. He was due on 20 minutes ago. But now I’m on about how so many modern novelists are cinematic in their writing. ‘Do you think that applies to you?’ I say.

‘I think it does, because in minimalism, the style I was trained to write in, you're really trained to break down every moment, every physical activity. You can't say “Someone walked into the room angrily”. You have to describe them in such a way that “angrily” occurs in the reader's mind. You have to break down every physical aspect about them in a cinematic way. It keeps your scenes really short, too.’

Chuck's publicist is giving me the wind-up signal. ‘I've heard you’re running a raffle for characters in your next book to be named after real people. Is that still in progress?’

‘The new book is almost done. In October they'll be pulling the six names.’

I’m trying to imagine that. Writing a novel and not knowing the characters’ names.

‘Really the theme of the book is how people need to make their mark and leave their name in some way, so it seems just perfect to use real people's names and give them that mass immortality in an instant. And in a way it's a jibe at these writers who are taking kickbacks from corporations for mentioning stores or products.’

‘Does the book itself have a name yet?’

‘Period Revival.’

‘And after that?’
‘My goal is always to try to eclipse the thing that people fixate on, to raise something better. Eclipsing Fight Club is always really the challenge. But I'd like to put out at least a book a year for the next ten years and then just teach after that. I really wanted to spend my 40s writing and then spend my 50s teaching.’

And then the question everyone asks – about a follow up to Fight Club.

‘I have no interest in going back there. If you see a sequel to Fight Club it's because I desperately need the money, and I sold the rights to someone else and they're writing it... Harry Potter And The Fight Club Of Fire.’

Outside, the space monkeys are getting restless. Soon they’re going to know it’s me holding things up.

‘I think we should stop now,’ I say, ‘or something's going to happen out there.’