Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues: Twenty Years of Writing About Film, Music and Books

by Nick Hornby

  It’s a Wonderful Life is different, partly because there is no climactic snogging in Capra’s soppy masterpiece. Of course, films with a Christmas setting have an unfair advantage over the opposition, and the tears I shed during the final scene are as much about my lunchtime refreshment as about Jimmy Stewart’s warm-hearted neighbours. Even so, what differentiates It’s a Wonderful Life from the drippy opposition is that it is one of the very few weepies with no real female involvement; the key players in the melodrama – Stewart, his brother, the grief stricken pharmacist, Clarence the angel – are all men. It is interesting that Field of Dreams, the nearest we have to a contemporary equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life, is similarly male-dominated. Amy Madigan, Kevin Costner’s wife in the film, is just there, watching lovingly while he turns their farm into a baseball field for ghosts. How does such an ostensibly butch film manage to turn every man I know into mush?

  Field of Dreams pays due respect to the emotion inherent in sport, for a start, and thus has an advantage over any film which is merely about kissing and stuff. But both Field of Dreams and It’s a Wonderful Life tap into male feelings about wasted potential. The Costner character worries that at the age of thirty-six he has turned into his father, and has let all his ambition slip away somewhere; the Stewart character abandons his dreams of seeing the world, and stays at home to save the family business. Most of us have settled for less than we ever thought we would, and the way that these two films turn compromise into a form of heroism strikes some kind of self-aggrandizing chord.

  The father/son relationship in Field of Dreams is also crucial: our problems with our dads are rarely explored with any sympathy or depth, unless one cares to argue a case for Rebel Without a Cause or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There’s almost nothing that makes any sense in Field of Dreams, either – a ghostly dad younger than his son and dressed in a baseball uniform? – but Costner is given a chance to put things right, and that seems to be enough to make a great many men weep.

  ‘Crying is a highly overrated activity, and let me tell you one thing: beware of men who cry.’ Who said that? Nora Ephron, that’s who, back in 1989. Hopefully the woman who wrote and directed Sleepless in Seattle, the agent of my most recent disgrace, is another Nora Ephron, one more tolerant of the sensitive and empathetic modern male. Perhaps Sleepless in Seattle was merely conceived as an elaborate exercise to flush us out, humiliate us in public.

  Crying at films doesn’t worry me in the slightest; it’s just a meaningless and ungovernable knack, like double-jointedness. What bothers me more is my inability to weep at certain films. How come I sat dry-eyed through Au Revoir les Enfants, for example, which is about children being rounded up by the Gestapo, rather than offerings of mermaids or baseball? Reviews of Louis Malle’s film refer to its ‘unindulgent generosity’, its ‘avoidance of heroic cliché’, its ‘quiet integrity’. Maybe Nora Ephron is right, and men like me are to be mistrusted; maybe I’m just some kind of lachrymose vulgarian after all, and I wouldn’t recognize a really moving film if it rolled over and drew its last breath with me cradling it in my arms. Hey, but how about that bit in Cocoon when the old guy takes his grandson fishing before disappearing off with the aliens for ever? Everyone cried then, right? Oh, well …

  Marah

  May 1998

  I’m on a book tour in the US, and after a reading in Philadelphia, I go out for a drink with a music journalist from the Inquirer whom I’ve met a couple of times before. At the end of the evening he gives me a tape. A tape! 1998 seems a long time ago now. It’s so long ago, in fact, that I was even travelling around with something to play it on. It’s a copy of the forthcoming first album by a local band called Marah, which rhymes with Hurrah! ‘Marah?’ I say. ‘What kind of name is that?’ Dan tells me that it’s from the Old Testament, and it means ‘tree of bitterness’. For some reason, this in itself is enough to convince me that the album will be great. This band has had the good sense to incorporate into their very being all the forthcoming disappointments and betrayals attendant upon a career in music.

  And the album is great, too. It was recorded for no money, and it’s about to be released on a tiny indie label based in Mississippi, and it labours under the title Let’s Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later On Tonight. And yet the opening bars of the first song, where a horn section plays over an ice-cream van serendipitously parked outside the studio, tell you everything you need to know about Marah – they have pluck, ambition, tunes and talent to burn. Let’s Cut the Crap … turns out to contain what will become three or four of my favourite songs ever. It sounds as though the band has taken what they need from the Stones, Steve Earle, the E Street Band, the Faces and the Pogues, shaken it all up and drunk it down; the thing is, though, that they really didn’t need that much, because they had plenty of other things of their own already. I can’t quite believe how good it is, so I buy a couple of copies of the CD and give one to my friend Lee, who runs a music shop in Islington, and hears everything. He is immediately besotted. We could both be wrong, of course, but at least I have company. Since then we have been to see them play live whenever we can.

  25 March 2006

  I’m on a book tour in the US again. This week I’ve been to campuses in Indianapolis, Memphis and North Carolina, but today I’m sitting in a van with Marah, and we’re driving from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. If you’re someone who loves both rock ’n’ roll and books, then this is a pretty rich journey. We have just been to Sun Studios, and had our photographs taken in the room where Elvis sang ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ and ‘That’s All Right’; tomorrow, in Oxford, some of us will stand in the room where William Faulkner wrote most of his novels. One of them is plotted out in pencil on his study wall.

  Since that first album, the band have been picked up and put down by a major label. They have made four more albums, lost about as many drummers, played for beer money in London pubs and appeared onstage with Bruce Springsteen, a fan and champion, in a football stadium. They certainly haven’t seen the need to change their name to something more upbeat, but on the other hand, they’re still around. Last year’s terrific album If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry got great reviews, and Stephen King, of all people, picked it as his album of the year in Entertainment Weekly. He described Marah as ‘probably the best rock band in America nobody knows’. If the band is dispirited by the apparent fruitlessness of their eight-year journey, they never show it. Their live shows are invariably a joy, ferocious, funny and utterly committed, regardless of how many people show up. On a good night, when Serge Bielanko is lying on the floor in the middle of the audience blowing on his harmonica, and his brother Dave is standing on the bar playing his guitar, it’s hard to think of a better way to spend an evening.

  We’ve become friends over the last few years, and a couple of years ago we invented a show that we could do together whenever our touring paths crossed, a show in which I read and they play. It’s a break in routine for all concerned. I like doing readings, but on a book tour you tend to read the same extracts in similar-looking venues, and you spend an awful lot of time on your own. When I do the events with the band, I read five unpublished essays about music I wrote specially for the show, and I read them in bars or clubs, and I have colleagues – I’m part of a team. Before tonight’s show I end up unloading equipment from the van. (To be honest, this is almost entirely because I know I’ll be writing a newspaper piece about being part of a team. I don’t usually bother.)

  As any writer will tell you, what you usually get at the end of a reading is some polite applause followed by a resounding silence – a silence broken only by an audience member plucking up the courage to ask a tentative and dutiful question about one’s working process. But the first essay I read in these shows ends with the words, ‘OK, Marah, make some noise,’ and they do – they play loud, which is one of the things I love about them, and I run as fast as I can to the side of the stage. (I live in fear of being trapped onstage by equipment while the ba
nd rampage around me. It has happened once, and I was thrown a tambourine. I would like to claim that I enhanced both the look and the sound of the band, but I fear this might not have been the case.) Anyway, every writer should experience the thrill of having their words punctuated by Marah’s three-guitar attack. I know what you’re thinking, Sir Vidia, but you’d be wrong: a quick burst of ‘It’s Only Money, Tyrone’ or ‘Point Breeze’ would perk up any literary soirée.

  Believe it or not, a Mississippi bar on a Saturday night turns out to be a tough gig, and quite unlike, say, Cheltenham or Hay. At a table off to the side, there’s a rowdy group which isn’t interested in listening to any of us, and though the band can drown them out, I can’t. At one point during my reading, Dave Bielanko jumps down and suggests that they might like to take their custom elsewhere, a suggestion that is rejected with some vehemence. Dave decides that, on this occasion, discretion is the better part of valour, and returns to the relative safety of the stage. We get through, and those who had come to hear us seem to enjoy it. And though I’m very much looking forward to reading on my own at the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent in a couple of weeks, it really won’t be the same.

  A Stranger in a Strange Land

  To me it wasn’t an aftershock. To me it was a straightforward, no-prefix shock. I was halfway through a ‘tuna melt’ when I felt the comforting, familiar rumble of a Piccadilly Line train underneath my feet; only when everyone else leaped to their feet and ran away from the restaurant did I remember that Santa Monica beach wasn’t on the Piccadilly Line, that it was off the tube map altogether, in fact. It’s hard enough having to deal with the rest of LA – the blinding light, the psychotic politeness of the shop assistants, the herbs you always seem to get on your chips – without having to handle earthquakes as well (5.3 on the Richter Scale – not a stonker, but certainly big enough to grab your attention); all I needed to complete the LA experience was to see some film stars and to be shot dead in a gang war, and I was going to see some film stars the next day. (Note to Ed: Please remove gang-war reference if I am shot dead in a gang war. Thanks – N. H.) Nobody else seemed to care, though. They all knew that if God intended for us to die in a quake, He’d have enough decency and, more importantly, enough curiosity to wait until after the Oscar ceremony, and there were still twenty-nine hours to go. Everyone else wanted to know whether Spielberg was finally going to do it; surely He was no different?

  Imagine that Wembley, the suburb in north-west London, had its own multi-section daily newspaper, and a Sunday newspaper that made our Sunday Times look anorexic. Imagine that it had sixty or seventy television channels, and a couple of hundred radio stations, and that everyone who lived and worked in the area had lost every last trace of self-irony as a result of too much time spent looking up their own bottoms. Imagine all that, and then imagine the kind of mind-numbing gibberish you would hear and see and read on FA Cup Final day. Well, Los Angeles does have sixty or seventy TV channels, and its newspapers do contain more words daily than Proust could manage in a lifetime; the annual Academy Awards ceremony is LA’s cup final, and the gibberish you can see and hear and read at any given minute of a twenty-four-hour day is truly, dizzyingly awesome.

  In this year’s build-up there was an Oscar Oprah (I was hoping for some tearful previous winners grabbing Oprah’s microphone and accusing the squirming, ashen-faced statuette of messing up their lives, but it turned out to be just a bunch of nobodies arguing about the merits of The Piano). There was an interview with a psychic (an impressive, if promotionally disastrous, death-or-glory performance this – she got ‘nothing coming through’ for Spielberg or his movies – whoops!). There was Whoopi Goldberg vowing in a newspaper interview that her performance as host would prove she was ‘not some fluff pig’. (The British never thought you were a fluff pig, Whoopi! We have no idea what a fluff pig is!) There was ex-Academy president Robert Wise helping us to understand Spielberg’s use of black and white and colour in Schindler’s List: ‘If he’d been actually shooting during the period, he’d have been shooting in black and white. What he was saying at the end there was, “This is the modern day.”’ Thanks, Robert! There was a nominated make-up artist explaining the difference between her work on Hook (‘That was a fairytale’) and on Schindler’s List (‘That was reality’). Thanks, make-up artist! There was the Oscar weather (‘I wouldn’t be shocked if there was some drizzle’) and Oscar fashion (pretty dull, by general consent, apart from the lady who bravely chose to wear what appeared to be a suit of armour) and there was …

  The bizarre thing is that you begin to care. I cannot recall ever having cared much about the Oscars before – how thrilled were you when Driving Miss Daisy won Best Film? – but once you get to LA there isn’t much else to care about, give or take the odd earthquake. Listen to enough people telling you that something is important, and after a while it begins to rub off on you. Oscars in Hollywood, you start to feel, are like ceasefires in Sarajevo, or food supplies in Mogadishu: context is all.

  And yet, this year, Hollywood’s self-importance is set on a collision course with things that really do matter: injustice, AIDS, the Holocaust. I’m a new father, and I hadn’t been to the cinema in nearly six months before Empire asked me to do this piece; night after night for a week I came home puffy-eyed and traumatized. I’d seen Tom Hanks die in the arms of his lover and Daniel Day-Lewis get fitted up and jailed for fifteen years and Pete Postlethwaite die in prison and Ralph Fiennes shoot kids in the back; in this sort of company, Sam Neill chopping off Holly Hunter’s finger with an axe has to serve as light relief. All tragedy has to have a catharsis, though, and for movie folk the catharsis comes when they slip on their Armani tuxedos (‘The maestro, Giorgio,’ replies Liam Neeson when someone asks him ‘who’ he is wearing, a reply which somehow dents my admiration of his performance as Oskar Schindler) and head off down to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the world’s biggest legal display of mutual adoration.

  There is a crowd of maybe a couple of thousand outside the Pavilion; some of them have slept out overnight, all for a glimpse of a Cruise bow tie or a Kidman strap. They are, frankly, desperate, and consequently cheer anybody the rabble-rousing MC tells them to cheer: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, one of the first ladies of Hollywood, MISS DEBBIE REYNOLDS! Ladies and gentlemen, the Olympic medallist MISS NANCY KERRIGAN!’ At one point he is reduced to reciting the list of films nominated for Best Picture, and they get a cheer, too. Overhead – and if you saw this in a film you’d groan at the obviousness of the Hollywood wannabe image – an aeroplane flies past bearing a banner: ‘WORLD’S FUNNIEST MOVIE SCRIPT NEEDS A PRODUCER. CALL RUSKIN 714 538 5046.’ I don’t spot anyone jotting down the number. As far as these guys are concerned, nothing goes on above their heads.

  The ceremony starts at six, and between five and five thirty I see more people I cannot recognize than I have ever seen in my life. They are all dressed for recognition, and when they have walked through the massed ranks of photographers they manage to give the impression that they are relieved that the ordeal is over, but nobody knows who they are. There’s a man with a beard, and a fat person, and another fat person and someone who looks like Daryl Hannah but isn’t, and someone else who looks like Meg Ryan’s podgy elder sister but isn’t, and a little boy who looks like the boy in Jurassic Park but isn’t, and a sign of the Hollywood times – some Japanese people; but at five thirty Anthony Hopkins walks up the red carpet and he starts something of a celebrity flood. Ken and Emma, Gabriel and Ellen, Steven and his mum and Kate, Liam and Natasha, Jeremy and Sinead … even so, the important nobodies outnumber the important somebodies by about five to one. And do the somebodies look different in Real Life? Only because they’re wearing sunglasses, although the men look more like themselves than the women: Gene Hackman in a dinner suit looks much like Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, but Holly Hunter looks a lot healthier tonight than she did in The Piano and she’s got rid of that bun, too …

  The ceremony is OK. Whoopi is no
t as embarrassing, nor as political, as she has threatened to be, and there is no sign of fluffy piggery, or none that I am aware of. She makes a couple of self-aggrandizing jokes – ‘There haven’t been this many studio executives so nervous since the Heidi Fleiss trial!’ – but for the most part she contents herself with the usual Oscar-night gush: ‘I’m glad we do what we do,’ she declares after Tom Hanks’s emotional acceptance speech. ‘We’re amazing!’

  But it isn’t her night: it’s Spielberg’s. Schindler’s List hovers over the event like an enormous, brooding cloud; I want it to win everything, not only because I thought it was a great film, but because – and I know this is dull – I really do believe that it’s worth more in the greater scheme of things than any number of flashy, enjoyable movies like The Fugitive. So when Tommy Lee Jones beats Ralph Fiennes to the night’s first big prize my heart sinks; just like the Basildon result in the ’92 General Election, it seems like a horrible harbinger of things to come. And when Jones comes to see us in the Press Room, my heart sinks even further. This is the first time I have ever been in the same room as a movie star, and it is not a pleasant experience: fifteen minutes after receiving an Oscar, Jones manages to be both graceless and surly – no mean feat.

  ‘You ever interviewed this guy?’ one old-hand writer asks another. ‘It’s horrendous.’

  Tom Hanks, however, is a sweetie. He stops the press conference because he wants to hear Spielberg’s acceptance speech, and urges us to do the same; he manages to be dignified and funny at once.

  ‘Hey, was I really wearing a blue tux? Just kidding,’ he says to the Kodak executive who has just presented him with a commemorative photo.

  The Schindler people could be forgiven for a show of surliness, or at least of impatience. You and I might have spotted that Schindler’s List has a slightly different moral tone from, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but it is a distinction that seems to have escaped a number of people in the room; the collision between reality and Hollywood is happening, and reality isn’t looking too good.