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.’

POLANSKI BEAT

At the conclusion of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic story, ‘The Red Headed League’, Sherlock Holmes responds to Watson’s effusive praise of his efforts with a shrug, saying:

‘“L'homme c'est rien – l'oeuvre c'est tout,” as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand.’

Why do I mention this? Because of Roman. Poor Roman.

You have to hand it to the US authorities; whatever they lack in immediacy, they certainly make up for in dogged persistence. Over 30 years it’s taken them to catch up with European arthouse cinema’s most wanted – the Ronnie Biggs of film.

The response to Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland has been one of near universal outrage – partly because of the sheer unexpectedness of it (though one has to concede that unexpectedness may play a fairly crucial part in its successful completion). France's culture minister, Frederic Mitterand (Polanski is French by birth) declared himself ‘dumbfounded’. British author Robert Harris – with whom Polanksi had been working – was ‘taken aback’. President Sarkozy said he was following the case closely, and hoped it could ‘soon be resolved’. Harvey Weinstein called it a ‘miscarriage of justice’, and said he was going to call Arnold Schwarzeneggar (presumably to have him flex his metaphorical muscles as Governer of California, rather than spring the accused from jail with a massive truck and lots of guns).

Meanwhile, organisers of the Zurich Film Festival, where Polanksi was to have received a lifetime achievement award before being collared by Swiss police, were in ‘shock and dismay’, and immediately arranged a special ceremony ‘to allow everyone to express their solidarity for Roman Polanski and their admiration for his work’. Now, a petition has appeared – signed by over 100 leading names in cinema, including Woody Allen, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Harmony Korine, Stephen Frears, Michael Mann, Wim Wenders, Tilda Swinton, Julian Schnabel, Whoopi Goldberg, Monica Bellucci and Pedro Almodovar – stating: ‘We demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski’. They add: ‘Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renowned and international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom’.

Like Woody, Martin, Whoopi et al, I appreciate many of Polanski’s films (though, clearly, Bitter Moon was a mistake). I hope he continues making them. I also think there are many questions to be asked about the way this absurdly long investigation has been conducted, and perhaps also its current outcome. Nevertheless, there’s something in this outpouring of support, these demands, that niggles. No, that screams.

Suppose, for a moment, that this wasn’t Mr Polanski, but Mr Zadenski. And suppose that he wasn’t a film director, but a pipe fitter. Would there be a similar outcry? Of course not. In all likelihood, we wouldn’t even hear about it. Even if we did, would the cultural and intellectual heavyweights of the world be leaping to his defence? Would anyone? Unlikely. Isn’t it more probable that the prevailing view be: ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime’?

Let’s just consider the original ‘crime’ for a moment. According to the testimony given to a grand jury by 13-year-old victim Samantha Gailey, the then 44-year-old director had plied her with alcohol and drugs, and taken nude pictures of her in a hot tub during a fashion shoot. He then had sexual intercourse with her despite her resistance and requests to be taken home. Polanski originally faced charges including rape and sodomy, but following plea bargaining these were dismissed in exchange for him admitting unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. However, rather than stand trial he skipped bail in 1978 and never set foot in the US again. So, not an incident to be particularly proud of, nor one that, under ordinary circumstances, we would dismiss lightly. Had the hypothetical Mr Zadenski been the perpetrator, it seems unlikely he would have elicited much sympathy.

Polanski, however, has widespread support. Why? Because he’s a great film director. This fact is not only the spur that has kicked people into action, it has become the main thrust of their argument. He is talented. Successful. Renowned.

So, should murder now be taken less seriously if committed by someone with artistic talent? Should we treat the wealthy more leniently than others if they break the law? Should the severity of punishment by the criminal justice system be inversely proportional to ones fame? Of course not. Even a child knows that such a view of justice is absurd.

And yet, French director Luc Besson – who refused to sign the petition – was practically a lone voice of sanity when he said: ‘I have a lot of affection for him. He is a man that I like very much, but nobody should be above the law.’

Some have pointed out that the victim has herself called for the charges to be dropped, having previously reached an out-of-court financial settlement with the director. But is this really a satisfactory conclusion? Was it satisfactory in the case of Michael Jackson? Is it justice, or is it really just another example of the rich being able to buy their way out – a situation that only invites further abuse by alleged victims and alleged perpetrators alike?

There are many complex issues raised by this case, but what has emerged most forcefully – eclipsing all else – is that we seem suddenly incapable of making the simple distinction between a man and his work (or, as Holmes puts it, in the tongue of Polanski’s native land, between l’homme and l’oeuvre). It’s a failure of our powers of perception at the most fundamental level – and one that, bafflingly, has afflicted not just ordinary folk, but many of the most perceptive minds in cinema.

Perhaps, for them, it’s all a little too close to home. And perhaps there’s one key question that should be uppermost in their minds: How good do your films have to be to save you? Because if the shit hits the fan and your freedom comes down to critical appreciation of a body of work, you’d better hope you’re a Polanski rather than a Glitter.

Scorsese, surely, is bullet proof. Woody would probably be OK (though he might want to buck his ideas up a bit). Lynch we expect to be weird anyway. Yeah, those guys are safe.

But what of Michael Bay? A commercial success, sure – but can he hack it artistically? Which side of the line would Joel Schumacher fall? Or Brett Ratner? Would Renny Harlin be damned or saved by his oeuvre? And do we judge on content? Has Cronenberg always looked like a dodgy character? Would Lars Von Trier be judged more harshly because Cannes audiences booed?

If ever there were an incentive for directors to make decent films, surely this is it.

ANTICHRISSED

Antichrist Lars von Trier (2009) Denmark/Germany/France/Sweden/Italy/Poland

In a recent piece for the Daily Mail, critic Christopher Hart slammed maverick Danish director Lars von Trier’s controversial new work Antichrist – but also succeeded in creating a controversy all his own. Under the heading ‘What DOES it take to get a film banned these days?’ he went straight for the soft underparts, with the opening words: ‘A film which plumbs new depths of sexual explicitness, excruciating violence and degradation has just been passed as fit for general consumption by the British Board of Film Classification.’

Having a go at von Trier is nothing new, of course. At Cannes, it’s practically compulsory. The part that really ruffled readers’ feathers, however, came in the fourth paragraph. ‘I haven't seen it myself,’ said Hart, ‘nor shall I – and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency. But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment.’

This was greeted with hoots of derision from readers and commentators of every hue – including fellow critic Mark Kermode – all of whom seemed to struggle with the concept of judging a film you haven’t actually seen. When Hart talked of the film containing ‘horrors the likes of which I have never witnessed’ you could almost sense the half-stifled guffaws of disbelief, and the cry from the bequiffed gentleman at the back of ‘That’s because you haven’t seen them...’

When he went on to harangue ‘the anonymous moral guardians of British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), who in their infinite wisdom, have passed this foul film for general consumption’ you could almost hear the unrestrained cascades of cruel laughter, and the pantomimesque heckles of ‘Their wisdom may not be infinite, but at least those moral guardians bothered to watch it!’

And when he continued by stating: ‘It doesn't surprise me that Antichrist was heavily subsidised by the Danish Film Institute to the tune of 1.5 million euros,’ you could almost feel the furrowing of the eyebrows and lengthy pause for thought across vast swathes of southern Scandinavia, as the entire population of Denmark mused on whether they had just been roundly insulted.

All of these reactions, of course, are grossly unfair. I may not agree with Christopher Hart’s assessment of von Trier’s film, but I defend to the hilt his right to pass judgement on it in a state of complete ignorance. In fact, let me add my own voice to his.

I haven’t seen Antichrist either, but based on blind assumption, hearsay and rumour I judge it to be possibly the best film I have never seen. The opening sequence, in which the couple make love while their child falls out of a window, is both beautiful and heartrending, while the Sleepy Hollow bit with the arms coming out of the tree looks absolutely marvellous.

As far as the much-debated genital mutilation goes, well, I’m all for it. Just another one to add to the collection, from my point of view. And who cares if it hasn’t got a happy ending or a moral? That’s why we have Disney and Dreamworks, for goodness sake. As for the idea that these shocking images corrupt us, I’m with Wes Craven on that one – such cinematic shocks and traumas are small rehearsals for the shocks and traumas of real life, and so are life-enriching, not corrupting.

The bits in between – though largely imagined – are by turns absurd, tragic, funny, sickening, heartwarming, thrilling, stomach-churning, poetic, offensive, bold, terrifying, sentimental, misogynistoc, ironic, meaningless and life-changing, and the sequence in which Willem Dafoe does tricks on a bicycle in an apple orchard to the strains of Burt Bacharach and crashes into the mic boom is sheer movie magic.

Some – bandwagon jumpers, BBFC officials, people who have actually seen the film – may take issue with this unfashionable point of view. But it’s people such as Chris and myself who have the purest possible experience of it, unsullied by the distraction of any kind of objective reality. Certainly, our versions are a hundred times better and/or worse than yours. Born out of sheer bloody ignorance, these are pure and unfettered experiences – untouchable, incorruptible, beyond criticism; something those who have actually seen Antichrist will never know, and have absolutely no right to comment on.

In short, a fabulous film, that everyone, young and old, should see. Or not.

DESPERATE ANTICS

Desperate Romantics BBC 2, Tuesday 9.00pm

"In the mid-19th century, a group of young men challenged the art establishment of the day. The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were inspired by the real world, yet took imaginative licence in their art. This story, based on their lives and loves, follows in that inventive spirit."

It’s witty. It’s entertaining. It looks great. But what’s it all about?

Well, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, apparently. There’s the young, fresh-faced one whose talent the others envy (John Millais), the bohemian, brooding one who’s always tapping the others for cash (Dante Gabriel Rosetti) and the stripped-to-the-waist boxing one known as ‘maniac’ (William Holman Hunt) who is, well... a bit of a maniac.

The drama follows them on their quest for fame and fortune in the art world, set against a lively backdrop of saucy London lowlifes and the stuffy, Academy-dominated art world. They dash about bustling, Dickensian streets, questing here, questing there, pursuing the perfect model, ordering gins on the slate in whore-infested taverns and wondering when they’ll break into the big time. Seen through the eyes of a (fictional) hanger-on imaginatively named ‘Fred’, the action plays out like a sophisticated and very expensive soap, built around the shifting relationships between the key characters and the wacky/funny/embarrassing/dangerous situations they periodically find themselves in as they vie for success.

Those seeking historical accuracy are likely to be disappointed – as are those expecting to encounter Romantics (as opposed to romantics). It’s all good fun, nonetheless – and the handy disclaimer invoking ‘inventive spirit’ at the start of each episode neatly sidesteps the need to stick to the facts. But while most of us can happily accept the flouting of a few facts for the sake of a juicy narrative (facts, as Dickens points out, are greatly overrated) there’s a far more fundamental issue at the heart of it all. A gaping hole, in fact. What are ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, and why have these men chosen to become them?

Since this is ostensibly what motivates the action of the entire drama, it would seem a fair question – and a necessary bit of information, whether we’re interested in the facts or not. But it remains unanswered. OK, so they ‘challenged the art establishment’. But as to how, the drama gives us no clue. We’re simply told in the opening preamble that they ‘were inspired by the real world, yet took imaginative licence in their art’. And that’s that. The fact that this vague generalisation could apply to any artist at any time doesn’t seem to bother the makers; stereotypical character background has been established. Passionate. Bohemian. Rebellious. Just artists, OK?

The real Pre-Raphaelites were indeed ‘inspired by the real world’ – they felt artists should ‘study Nature attentively’ so they would be better equipped to express their ideas. Certainly they were also passionate, as well as determined to overturn the prevailing trends in art by consciously rejecting ‘what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote’. In this, they might be seen to have a great deal in common with the (genuine) Romantic William Blake, who – contrarian that he was – was one of the few to speak out against the establishment of a free National Gallery, on the grounds that it would corrupt young artists and encourage them to copy other art, rather than follow their own pure visions.

But the Pre-Raphaelites were no less contrary. They were radical, yes – but, in many respects, radically conservative, pledged to ‘sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art’. The fact that they felt the art of their day to be stiflingly mannered and lacking meaning doesn’t mean they had a secret yen to invent Cubism or were planning to set up the Bauhuas. In fact, the art they held up as the ideal to aspire to was, quite literally, medieval. The clue, as they say, is in the name; ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ is a term that evokes what came before – that looks back, not forward.

It is their primary pledge, however, that is the one most noticeably absent from the drama: ‘to have genuine ideas to express’. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic revolution. Art, they felt, had become a depressing parade of empty gestures, and they sought to re-establish painting that had a moral point, based on Christian ideals. Certainly they were hungry for success, but central to their art – and central to understanding both it and them – is a moral crusade.

Yet of all this, there is no hint. True, Hunt seems to agonise – at least for a couple of seconds – before giving in to the charms of his former prostitute model, but this is presented not so much as a moral dilemma as just him being a bit uptight. Most of the time, the rogering and roistering and purposeful striding about streets in long coats seems to go on without too much of a care for anything – apart from how their generic, proto-X Factor quest for fame is progressing.

Why should this be? Does the BBC really believe that an audience who – let’s face it – are prepared to give a drama about a group of 19th century British painters a punt are nonetheless too stupid to understand what motivated them, or too lazy to care? Even if one assumes the most jaded audience possible, raised on a tooth-rotting diet of pure summer blockbusters, the desire to have some vague explanation of character behaviour is still very much in evidence. In fact, whole genres are built on it. Think of all those superhero origins stories – Superman, Spider-Man, Batman Begins, X-Men, Hulk, Blade, Daredevil, Elektra, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, another Hulk (Incredible), and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, not to mention the forthcoming Thor and Captain America. If these don’t demonstrate that the vast majority of us have more than a passing interest in what makes a character tick – even a comic-strip character – then what does?

But no. Like a household appliance-wielding psychopath in a bad, straight to video ‘80s slasher movie, no explanation is deemed necessary. Instead, we’re just given a kind of shorthand. He’s mental. They’re rebellious artistic types. What more do you need?

The queer thing is that on this point even the writer, Pete Bowker (who also wrote the recent Occupation) seems conflicted. In the midst of it all, the character of John Ruskin – beautifully played by Tom Hollander – shines out like a beacon. This is no bawdy caricature, but a complex, rounded character, whose past and tangled motivations seem utterly convincing (which, ultimately, is more important than whether they are true). Troubled – haunted, almost – and carefully balancing wit with poignancy, the part is often funny, but never played for laughs. The effect of this is to make any scene in which Ruskin appears immediately stand out, whilst simultaneously demonstrating what Desperate Romantics could so easily have been – a great drama, rather than a merely entertaining, unneccessarily dumbed-down romp.