by Amis, Martin
We used to play for money, he and I, twenty years ago. Pounds sterling changed hands, in note form - and they really mattered. A win or a loss could affect how well you lived for a day or two. I nearly always won, as I remember; and as we left the club or the hall I would make quite a show of hailing a taxi, offering to drop Julian off at the nearest tube. When, years later, he bought his own table (and a house big enough to put it in), and we started playing regularly, almost weekly, we wondered whether we should go on playing for money. Because the money didn't matter now, and our games were more evenly and bitterly fought, and we agreed that the rivalry shouldn't - and indeed couldn't - get any tenser. It's all a nightmare anyway.
Unlike the Barometer, who is largely faithful and wholly site-tenacious, the Earthquake puts out all over town. My casual opponents include a biographer, an entrepreneur, a political analyst, a tennis pro, a handyman, a philosopher and a hustler (who casually obliterates the fifty-point leads he gives me in a torrent of pinks and blacks). All these players can make me flinch and squirm: but it's nothing compared to the torment meted out bv the Barometer. With him. even when I'm an inch away from clear victory, I sometimes wonder if I have ever suffered so. Why is this? Because we have 'contrasting styles', and go back a long way, and are both novelists? No. It's because there's nothing in it. We're equal. Each frame is decided by the tiniest psychological edge, by sniggering fate — by the sneer of the snooker gods who determine the rub of the green.
I prepared for the match with an early night, a breakfast rich in carbohydrates, and, later that morning, a secret visit to a local club, where, with a pensive pint of low-ale lager, I practised alone: to get the spasms out of my cueing arm, to neutralise the excitement (i.e. panic) of one's induction into the verdant six-bagged oblong. With epic nonchalance I motored north. We've each had our hot streaks, I won't deny: the whammy has changed hands many times. For a while, as Julian once accurately and hauntingly said to me, 'You now come here with fear in your heart.' But in recent weeks the whammy has been mine: just. Barometer Barnes received me calmly. He was pretending to take an interest in the Edberg-McEnroe fourth-rounder at Wimbledon, further claiming to see an encouraging paradigm in Edberg, the expressionless icicle, versus McEnroe, the scowling has-been. Of course, we hardly needed to say, as we made our way upstairs, that we were both nervous wrecks.
Our cues bespeak us — both, coincidentally, presents from our wives (pious admirers, naturally, of their husbands' baizecraft). The Barometer's cue is a one-piece broadsword, the Earthquake's a two-piece rapier, which, moreover, comes in a yob-heaven black leatherette case with twin combination locks. His tip is ponderously large, half the size of the cue-ball; mine is as slender as a sting — excellent for spins and miscues. The blinds were lowered. The gentlemen ruminatively chalked. I felt confident and self-possessed, and recovered quickly from the catastrophe of losing the toss.
The pattern of our recent frames has been as follows. I go into the end-game (the colours) with a lead of about 30 — and then win on the black. The equivalent in tennis would be a 6-0 lead in the tie-break, and eventual victory at 19-17. This was, at least, an improvement on an earlier pattern, where I went into the end-game with a lead of about 30 - and then lost on the black. That's the Barometer for you: never more dangerous than when in the portals of the slaughterhouse. The man's an animal. My brain is encrusted with scar tissue from all the frames he has pinched and nicked. I can so easily fall apart ... In frame one I went into the colours, feeling completely hysterical, with a lead of about 30 — and won on the brown! 61-32. No sweat. Rack 'em.
Frame two, I say with tears of pride in my eyes, was a near duplicate, 51-14, my opponent disgustedly resigning with blue, pink and black still on the table. I was impressed. I was astounded. I hadn't relaxed or over-reached or crumbled or collapsed. I saved all that for frame three. All wobble and tremor, the Quake just wasn't making it on to the Richter Scale. His eyes now lit by a weak leer of hope, Barometer Barnes closed me out on the pink: 35-43.
Here's a little confession. Julian and I are not terribly good at snooker. But we can be terribly bad at it. The longest, if not the highest, break of the day was my five-bailer, which scored 8 (green, yellow, three reds). There was also a 15 (me), a 13 (him) and a 12 (me). My opponent secured his third-frame win, for example, by rifling in breaks of 4, 7, 6, 5 and 3. The fourth frame, though, was an all-howler affair, a series of abject calamities. The builders on the scaffolding outside must have thought that the house contained a pack of feral beasts, groaning at their captivity, their ill-treatment, their lousy food. At one point the score stood at 13—18, without a colour potted. The only ball that seemed to find the pocket was the white, in a bad dream of in-offs and in-withs — plus, from Julian, a world-class in-instead, the cue-ball struck with such a prodigious unintentional side-spin that after a deadened impact it ambled on grimly into the corner bag. Altogether appropriately and ingloriously, the frame ended with the Barometer's in-off the black, the ball lasering in on the middle pocket at a preposterous angle. 58—46. The taste of victory is sweet.
Actually I felt strangely subdued as I drove home. Gutted for the Barometer, no doubt. He took it like a man, which is better than I would have taken it. I would have taken it like a boy. Later, though, I felt tremendously happy and high-souled. I felt as if I had singlehandedly wrecked San Francisco. It occurred to me that all the pleasure of snooker comes either in anticipation or retrospect. On the table, everything is a falling-short, hamfisted, cross-purposed — a mortified groping. Come to think of it, the same goes for tennis, chess, poker, darts and pinball. Asked about his writing, the great Jimmy White once admitted that he wasn't much good at it, adding: 'Not much good at the reading neither. Either.' I can read and write, and to a high standard. As for the snooker, well, to approach the televisual ideal, by which we all measure ourselves, I'd have to do nothing else for the rest of my life. Then snooker might work out and measure up, with everything going where you want it to go, at the right weight and angle. Then snooker might feel like writing.
1991
ROBOCOP II
ROBOCOP: PRIME DIRECTIVES
1 Serve the Public Trust
2 Protect the Innocent
3 Uphold the Law
RoboCop II - and I mean the robot, not the movie - looks like a wasp-waisted three-ton Swiss Army penknife with all its blades outturned: cutters, skewers, pincers, gougers. Called 'The Monster' in the script and on the set, this sizzling cyborg is not RoboCop's successor but his adversary. 'The concept of two robots duking it out', says one of his creators, 'was a given.' Part Man, Part Machine, All Psychopath, RoboCop II is also, for good measure, a drug-addict, a vigorous abuser of a substance called Nuke. He is programmed to Break the Law, Protect the Guilty, and Trash the Public Trust. 'We're very pleased with him,' says his chief designer. 'The face is great. Those twin panels shoot back revealing a digitalised screen, with receding lines giving a weird to-infinity effect.' For now, the curved diagonal panels remain closed, impeccably hostile and severe, like the sharp prow — the leading edge — of the future.
Last fall, downtown Houston was also giving a good imitation of the henceforward. The main precincts are deserted after 6 pm - for this is a modern city, and no one is seriously expected to live in it. You work in it. Elegantly alienated youths rollerskate through the empty malls. They aren't sullen or simmering or smashed; they are just not interested. Later, the night sky will contain the faint reports of gunfire: the crack wars of the crack gangs. Driving through the more depressed areas the next day, you will find the streets littered with beercans, hookers ('Hey, white boy!'), undergarments, human wigs - and the nomadic poor, clustered in the steel and concrete crevices of the city; soon, the police will come and briskly pressure-hose them out of there, and they will be obliged to regroup somewhere else. But not downtown, where the future is contentedly going about its business. Look into the magenta glass of the looming skyscraper, and what do you see? The reflection of
another skyscraper — and then another, and then another.
This month there is street theatre in Houston: the making of RoboCop II. Onlookers gather early behind the police lines. The crowd (mostly black) has come to see what the imported natives (mostly white) will get up to this evening, what explosions and firestorms they will stage, what miracles of wreckage they will achieve: what strafings, what stompings, what splatterings. The ahs and ows of this first preview audience are strictly calibrated to the size of the bang, the height of the flamespout. All week the night action takes place amid the fortress architecture of Houston's cultural centre: between the theatre and the opera house. The filmmakers are obliged by the city to get through their most thunderous scenes before 8 pm, when the curtain goes up on the other performance (tonight, a rock opera of Measure for Measure). But they never make it.
'HOLD THE SMOKE!' says the Assistant Director into his bullhorn. 'I'LL NEED SOME BEEF.' Beef means muscle, means sceneshifters - for the upended cars, the shattered stanchions. 'I SAID HOLD THE SMOKE,,, MORE BEEF!'
A mist of stardom shrouds the trailer of Peter Weller, who has yet to appear. Everyone waits. A rejuvenated, reglamorised Nancy Allen sits chatting on a director's chair (her handsome new boyfriend is near by, the silent custodian of her second blooming). Nancy plays Lewis, RoboCop's sidekick. It is a pivotal role, and she understands its centrality. She is the only 'real' presence in both movies: everyone else is either a hood, a corporation ogre, a scientist, or a robot. Nancy is happy to kill time; indeed, she is an expert time-killer, like all movie stars, for there is much time to kill. Everyone waits. Weapons expert Randy Moore trundles on to the set to deal with 'a blanks problem'. Randy's outrageous handguns and bazookas look at home in Houston: they wouldn't seem out of place, you feel, in the average Texan kitchen. At length, Randy resolves the blanks problem, and everyone goes back to what they were doing before: waiting.
Unbelievably, about five hours later, two whole shots are in the can. Nancy has scaled an armed-personnel carrier and successfully back-kicked a security guard in the face. And Peter has scaled a media truck and readied himself to pounce on The Monster. But the street audience is unconvinced, and gives a collective shrug before it disperses, as if to say, 'Is that it?' And you sympathise. You want to explain to the Houston crowd that what they are getting is, as yet, only half-formed, only half-made. As yet, the illusion is embarrassingly - but necessarily — incomplete. Peter hasn't got his RoboCop pants on, for instance (the shot is only waist-up). And Nancy's back-kick looks dainty and innocuous. And the battleground is littered with scene-coordinators with their walkie-talkies. And the corporation HQ seems punily small-scale. And The Monster is still in the prop shop . . .
This is the thing with RoboCop: it all comes later — the sheen, the finish. What you see here in Houston is just raw material, the chaos of the merely contemporary. Only in the lab will it take on the hard edge of the future. RoboCop is itself a sign of things to come; the new depth of illusion, the widening gulf between set and screen. On screen, the corporation HQ will have a matte painting on it and will loom eighty storeys high. The scene-coordinators will be blacked out of shot. The Monster will be on duty. Peter will appear to have his pants on. And Nancy's back-kick will be crunchy.
The RoboCop II team has a boy-genius or crazy-professor feel to it. On the set the atmosphere reminds you of the exotic unsalubriousness of Washington Square Park in New York, where all the skateboarders are chess prodigies, the bums are International Grand Masters, and the lounging brothers have four-figure IQs. Director Irvin Kershner (Never Say Never Again, The Empire Strikes Back) looks like a radical Sixties academic. Producer Jon Davison (Piranha, Airplane!, RoboCop) has the droll, wheedling delivery of a Greenwich Village intellectual. All around there is a reassuring sense of strength-in-depth. Unit publicists are usually cyborgs themselves, but RoboCop IPs Paul Sammon is an omnicompetent film-maker, writer, computer ace. And here's cold proof of how hip and classy this outfit is: nearly everyone had read my stuff. Even the continuity girl turns around and quotes me, word perfect . . . And shabbily lurking by the coke-machine and the chow-trailer are Oscar-winning designers, make-up artists, stop-motion animators, stunt illusionists — tricksters, wizards, futurists.
RoboCop made money (£50 million in the US alone), and everybody hopes that RoboCop II will do at least as well. But they are in it for love — obsessive love. Between rehearsals they crouch down among the cables, the webbing, the gizmo wagons and gadget trolleys and gimmick barrows, the cans of engine enamel, the bottles of Havoline. They talk about the film — 'the show' — with almost parental earnestness and cautious pride, as if they were preparing an enormous machine, or an enormous robot, for smooth functioning, fully tuned and 'tweaked'. Someone is going around with a box of Noisebuster earplugs. We help ourselves. One of the redetailed Ford Taurus turbocruisers is about to blow. 'Not the "beauty car" — the one nearest camera - but the oldest car,' Paul Sammon tells me. 'They might not get it done in time, but if they don't they'll want to do something else noisy.' The atrocious detonation comes and goes, and the team gets ready to do it all again.
'Wetdown,' says Irvin Kershner — Kersh — to his assistant. 'WETDOWN,' says his assistant. There ensues, of all things, a long delay, as every inch of the set is hosed with water. The set is regularly wetdowned to give it a glossy, slinky, noiry look — also to preserve continuity, in case it rains. 'BEEF . . . MORE BEEF.' On conies the beef: unsmiling figures who all seem to be called things like Tug and Tiff and Heft. The beef on RoboCop H, you feel, will be better beef than usual, real thinking man's beef, the most skilled and dedicated beef you can buy.
That night's shoot spluttered on until 4 am, but Jon Davison is at his desk early the next morning. Like all on-the-job moviemen he has an air of exalted exhaustion, of priestly fatigue. 'The whole thing was awful the first time around,' Davison croaks. 'Robo himself just didn't work visually. You know: his ass moved in a funny way, he looked smaller than the women. But now . . . it's all going along.' Nobody knows exactly how much the first movie's frisson owed to its director, Paul Verhoeven, and his 'neurotic elan', in the phrase of one team-member (here are some other phrases: 'He's a wildman.' 'A sick genius.' 'A real extremist.' 'Bananas.' 'Nuts'). 'Kersh', says Davison, with some concern, 'is, of course, much less violent than Paul .. .' Kersh is also sixty-seven; and at present he is too busy to sleep, let alone be interviewed. There is a feeling that Kersh will have to be kept an eye on. He may have a weakness for the light. Others, then (the deep talent), will have to make sure it's heavy.
The floors of the production offices are heaped with Fed Ex envelopes and copies of Variety, but the walls are papered with fanatically exact 'storyboards' of the scenes to come, frame by frame. The drawings remind you of RoboCop's imaginative origins: comic books. Comic books, given flesh, and metal - given hard life. 'What made you choose Peter Weller?' I asked. I wondered if it had anything to do with his mouth (his only visible feature for much of the film) and what my wife described as the 'unerotic perfection' of its cupid's-bow lips. 'His mouth? No! Peter was chosen because no other actor would do it.' Like all surprise successes, RoboCop was something of a lucky accident. It gathered the right people at the right place at the right time. Davison put them there. He is the puppet-master - or rather the master of the puppeteers: Verhoeven, Weller, the designers and animators, right the way down to all the unsung eggheads at Dream Quest, Praxis, Intervideo, Screaming Lizard and Visual Concept Engineering.
RoboCop was a genuine original. All its admirers know this, and even its detractors partly sense it. RoboCop was doubly futuristic. As a movie, and as a vision, it wasn't just state-of-the-art. It was also state-of-the-science: when you see its twirling rivets and burnished heat-exchangers, when you hear its venomous shunts and succulent fizzes, you suspect that the future really might feel like this — that it will act this way on your very nerve-ends. Technology is god in RoboCop, but it is also the villain, with its triumphant humou
rlessness, its puerile ingenuity, its dumb glamour. And that ambivalence explains why RoboCop's special effects had a special effect.
Also a special affect. To define: affect means 'feeling tone'; and affectlessness means 'no feeling tone' - no heart. And the heartlessness of our response to the RoboCop future is most noticeable, of course, when we confront the movie's extreme violence. American children laugh at Rambo because they don't yet know what violence means, because they shouldn't be watching Rambo (what, you wonder, will their children be laughing at?). The hoods in RoboCop — and in most American thrillers of the past twenty years — laugh as they kill and rape and devastate because this is the expression of their anti-ethics, their sociopathology. But we laugh at the violence in RoboCop, even though we really should know better. We laugh because we have no response to it. We laugh to fill the silence, to fill the vacuum, like embarrassed Japanese.
Take the celebrated and show-stealing scene in the corporation boardroom, when the grinning VP introduces the executives to his latest concept in 'urban pacification', Enforcement Droid 209. An android is supposedly 'a robot with human form', but there is nothing humanoid, or even organic-looking, about ED 209, whose otherness is in fact emphasised by its weird borrowings from the animal kingdom: the shape of the 'face' (killer whale), its warning growl (angry black leopard), its squeal of distress (dying pig). By way of demonstration, the VP asks a young executive to raise a gun at ED 209 'in a threatening manner'. The robot jerks into its attack mode, and says, in its warped baritone (the voice is actually Jon Davison's, slowed and distorted), Please put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply. The executive complies, but the machine advances, citing the appropriate penal violation before announcing, with robotic probity, I am now authorised to use physical force.
