/ 9 May 2005

True to self

There is an episode of The Sopranos in which the wives decide they need some culture, and a film club is established. The gilt chandeliers are dimmed, the ladies settle on pink couches and kick off puce pumps into pastel shag-pile carpet, the hijacked wide-screen television is turned on, and the bootleg DVD inserted.

That evening’s offering is Citizen Kane, and it is clear that Orson Welles’s classic has left them floundering like a snitch in concrete slippers. They just don’t get it. They try, as we all try to appear engaged by art we’ve been told is great, but they’re not sophisticated enough to persevere with the pretence.

If only we could all be like mafia wives. Perhaps then we might be able to admit that the tribal favourites, the films we doff our caps to without even having seen them, have left us cold and bored. Perhaps then we might have a chance of groping towards like minds, to find fellow refugees from popular, unanimous acclaim.

Back at Chez Soprano, one of the molls suggests they watch The Godfather, and is silenced by wickedly self-referential glares. This is perhaps the only instance in all of modern popular culture of a group of people being suspicious of Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster soapie. For the rest, the movie-watching public, from breathily theorising film students to indiscriminate video-hirers, continues to fling themselves prostrate before Marlon Brando’s speech impediment, to beatify Al Pacino’s pomade. Suggest that the trilogy is a well-made, watchable homage to everything repulsive in American culture, that it becomes boring and self-indulgent halfway through the second installment, and that long silences do not a classic make, and you end up twitching in a slow-motion hail of condescension, like Sonny ambushed at a tollgate by pseuds.

It’s not an unkind generalisation to say that those adults who enjoyed The Lord of the Rings trilogy were probably fragile, sickly children, regularly bullied, who took comfort in their mothers telling them that sticks and stones might break their bones, but words could never harm them. As a result, they know that verbal taunts are useless and tend to come at one with sticks and stones when one suggests that the second and third installments of the Lord of the rings were excruciatingly dull, horribly directed, woodenly acted, and by and large a complete waste of time. Purists made a fuss about the deletion of the final ‘Scouring of the Shire” chapter of the book but, alas, my proposal of a ‘Scouring of Part 3” and a ‘Scouring of Aragorn with wire wool, Dettol and a toothbrush” fell on deaf ears.

So how does this tiny band of beleaguered critics make itself heard? How does one suggest to humanity that it strip away its sentimental attachment to Star Wars and see the film for what it is: a B-grade, back-lot melodrama cursed with arthritic dialogue and costumes salvaged from the wreckage of a foam party at Studio 54?

How can one stand silently by as Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are hailed as triumphs of wit, when one recognises in Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays the smart-ass undergraduate smugness that comes with being talented enough to play with conventions but not intuitive enough to know that he’s irritating the grown-ups?

But all these frustrations are overshadowed by the cultural albatross that has draped itself around cinema’s neck, disguised as a wreath of sickly-sweet blossoms: Bollywood. Perhaps political correctness has discouraged Western audiences from pointing out that Indian zoom lenses seem to be operated by spastics. Perhaps they’re afraid of being labeled elitist racists and so shy away from proposing that Indian features are bogged down in the narrative, intellectual and aesthetic swamp that Hollywood grew out of in the 1930s.

Yes, Bollywood schlock is ‘visually stunning”, a ‘noisy, vibrant kaleidoscope”; but if you want a noisy, vibrant kaleidoscope, why not just put an alarm clock in said kaleidoscope and escape two hours of saccharine hoopla? And as for visually stunning, I’d rather by hit in the eye with a wet sock.

Now I’m going to go out and buy the DVDs of Clueless, Caddyshack and The Naked Gun trilogy.