Visiting Mrs Nabokov

by Amis, Martin

  There instantly follows a scene of startling butchery, partly cut by the censors, in which ED 209 applies physical force — with twin machine-guns. 'We always knew that sequence was going to be excessive,' Jon Davison has said. 'I sent somebody down to the local 7-11 to get the biggest ziplock baggies they had; and then we filled them with blood.' In the footage submitted to the MPAA, the executive's corpse received an additional 200 rounds. 'I thought it was funny and the preview audience thought it was funny. The censors didn't think it was funny. The result was that they took something that was basically funny and turned it into something horrifying.' Actually, the comic element survives. Where there is no affect, there is no horror. And we laugh because there's nothing else to do.

  But our laughter isn't entirely wanton. I finally met up with ED 209, in one of the unit's prop shops. It looks smaller than it does on screen, and slightly bedraggled: one of its gun-arms was ripped off while it was making a PR appearance at a Los Angeles theatre. But it still inspires real menace and amusement, because of the integral brilliance of its design. This is ED's creator, Craig Davies:

  I did include things that were my own digs at what I see as a really lame current corporate design policy. For instance, there are four huge hydraulic rams on the legs, even though a creature like ED wouldn't need nearly that many. So it's like complete redundancy - a true corporate product.

  The violence of RoboCop isn't the 'poetic' violence of, say, Peckinpah. It is 'sweet' violence: violence as technological fix. When we laugh at ED 209, we laugh at corporate overkill, corporate literalism. Here is a death-dealer with a heart made by Yamaha: thoroughly sophisticated, thoroughly murderous, and thoroughly moronic. When we laugh at ED 209, we laugh at something that already exists in the present and eagerly awaits us in the future. The future won't just happen: it will be our creation, our machine.

  The time had come to do the star interview — a nervous interlude. Peter Weller was chosen for RoboCop because he was the only actor who would do it. For the sequel, naturally, he is the only actor who would do. This is a period of what Hollywood calls 'dignity' for Peter. Already, the night before, Paul Sammon and I had tiptoed to the Star trailer. Covertly we watched Peter limbering up in his cycling shorts, his face already 'gone' in Robo's numb glaze. We tiptoed away again. For RoboCop, also, must come close to affectlessness incarnate. Not quite incarnate, because he is part machine. And not quite affectless, because he is still a man.

  There are three distinct phases in the evolution of a movie star. Stage 1 represents the swirling, gaseous years of ambition, fever, hard work. In Stage 2 (the briefest stage: you might call it 'Denial'), the star solidifies and heats up, all the time pretending that nothing irreversible is happening to him. Stage 3 brings the nuclear burning of full deity; hereafter, no mortal can ever really look his way. Peter Weller is halfway through Stage 2, still struggling somehow to combine stardom with his original identity. It can't be done. Such laws are universal. The old Peter will be lost for ever in the cosmic fire. And then the star awaits its final destiny: white dwarf, red giant, black hole.

  Wonderfully opaque and stylised on the screen as RoboCop, Peter Weller, in real life, is all affect: it's like being in a room, or a trailer, with about fifty different people. Simon Schama's new study of the French Revolution is cracked open on the table; so is Teach Yourself French; so is Teach Yourself Italian. He puts down his trumpet, looks up from the stack of inspirational videos (Ivan the Terrible) and shouts out of the window for more classical CDs. His feeling-tone is intense; but so is his muscle-tone. He hums with vigour. I would too, I suppose, if I got up at three and ran 16 miles every morning, which Peter does, before settling down to his two-hour make-up session. What with one thing and another, he's neglecting his yoga and karate and aido - or was it his ashinto, or akimbo? 'He's a maniac,' says Moni, Peter's mime coach, admiringly. 'Very systematic.'

  'The patience factor on number one was nuts,' says Weller, in his hybrid style. 'It took ten hours just to get into the suit. Then five. Then four. Now it's one-and-a-half. Robo II is easier because we're over the hump of making this shit work. There's a Harvard professor who teaches RoboCop in a course on the Hellenistic hero. But I tell you, it's heroic just to be in that suit. The real preparation went much deeper. Moni and I worked our ass off, man.'

  I believed it. There is nothing accidental about the strange beauty of RoboCop in motion; the effect is fully thought out, and fully achieved. Like many others on the team, Weller is more than a perfectionist. He is an absolutist. For him, it is a kind of liberation, and not a hindrance, to do all his acting with his neck. 'Did you have any doubts about doing the sequel?' I routinely asked. 'Now that you're a major - '

  'Now that I'm a major shit, you mean?' He smiled brightly. 'No. I didn't worry about the dangers of all that career shit. I thought: Do I want to judge up all that jazz?'

  'What's the key to the part? For you.'

  'Aside from executing the physicality of the robot - I think of him as like a guy with amnesia. That's the only plane on which I address this character.'

  Later, Weller arrives on the set in a caddycart; he stands there, holding the rail — a modern Steve Reeves, on a modern chariot. An entire truck-sized cooling unit is trained on him as his dressers do the final clip-on and polish. Additional helpers attend to his itches and aches and stiffnesses. He looks charged. He is the man. Like the creation he plays, though, Weller is only partly human now; to some extent, inevitably, he is product. The lost-self theme works so powerfully on us — perhaps we all feel it. Perhaps, as we speed into the future, we all feel that something has been left behind.

  RoboCop II was being made by a kind of brotherhood - a brotherhood of know-how and can-do — and on the set there was an attempt at a kind of moose secrecy. One of Paul Sammon's duties was to thwart paparazzi ('They want shots of The Monster. Or Peter without his suit on'). Similar interdictions apply to the script, I'm not allowed to quote from it. But presumably I'm allowed to praise it.

  The author is another boy-genius, Frank Miller, who wrote the cult comic book Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. He is perfectly placed to expand and deepen the RoboCop idea; he understands how 'this unique creation' vibrates with myth, everything from Frankenstein to Captain Marvel. RoboCop II will feature the same underlit corporate boardrooms, the 'mediated' reality of ads and newscasts, the same reflexive corruption and passionless violence. The script also offers us a more pained and plangent hero, and two resonant new villains: a murderous twelve-year-old drug baron, and RoboCop II itself - the heir, not of RoboCop, but of ED 209, the latest concept in machine literalism, machine justice. Frank Miller has seen the future. And it sucks.

  On the last night I patrolled the set with Paul Sammon. We quizzed and banished a lady 'onlooker' with a four-foot lens on her camera. The street audience had already gathered for the night's viewing ('They're going to blow that one'). All around, monitoring the set, was the city's superstructure and its real personnel: real firemen, real cops.

  And beyond them, meanwhile, on the higher ramps, the young rollerskaters loop and glide, remote and self-possessed. Ironically, these incurious youths are themselves much talked about and widely celebrated; magazine articles have been written about them. They exude calm and indifference and silent esprit de corps: immaculately affectless. They are the audience of the future. They will watch the RoboCop double bill with no response at all — without a tremor, without a smile, without a flinch of recognition.

  Premiere, 1990

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  Salman Rushdie, the author of a much-discussed novel called The Satanic Verses, is still with us. One feels the need to emphasise this fact: that he is still around. He is caught up in a trap or a travesty; he is condemned to enact his own fictional themes of exile, ostracism, disjuncture, personal reinvention; he occupies a kind of shadowland; but he is formidably alive. The Rushdie Debate has reached a chokepoint where no one seems to be able to speak naturally. In that sense the fo
rces of humourlessness have already triumphed. Rushdie's life has been permanently distorted. I hereby assert, then, that his humanity is unimpaired and entire.

  Direct encounters with the man remain infrequent, and tortuous. If you want to meet up with the Minotaur, you have to enter the labyrinth of his security arrangements. Yet various glimpses and sightings are always current among his friends: Rushdie, at midnight, proposing to recite the Complete Works of Bob Dylan; or watching the World Cup on television last summer (with his remorseless parodies of the sportscasters); or falling over while demonstrating an ambitiously low-slung version of the Twist; or eating pizza and listening to Jimi Hendrix. Rushdie's situation is truly Manichaean, but he is neither a god nor a devil; he is just a writer - comical and protean, ironical and ardent.

  To bear this out, Rushdie has now produced a defiantly high-spirited and chivalrous novel, a children's book for adults called Haroun and the Sea of Stories. There are times when Rushdie's predicament feels like a meaningless divagation, a chaotic accident; there are other times when it feels rivetingly central and exemplary. Rushdie's friends, I imagine, think about him every day. But his writer friends, I suspect, think about him every half hour. He is still with us. And we are with him.

  'When I first heard the news, I thought: I'm a dead man. You know: that's it. One day. Two days.' This interview took place in September, at a Mystery Location. We had joined up via something that Haroun would call a P2C2E: a Process Too Complicated To Explain. 'At such moments you think all the corny things. You think about not being able to watch your children growing up. Not being able to do the work you want to do. Oddly it's those things that hurt more than the physical idea of being dead. In a way you can't grasp that reality.'

  Reality seemed to be generally elusive on that day, 14 February 1989 — the day of Khomeini's fatwa. Even the sky, I remember, was preternaturally radiant. Rushdie first heard the news when a radio station rang him up — to ask for his response. 'How do you feel about being sentenced to death by the Ayatollah? What about a quote?' He managed the quote ('God knows what I said'), and then ran around the house drawing the curtains and shutting the shutters. Next, he sleepwalked through an interview for the CBS morning show, and proceeded to what would be his last public appearance: the church service for his close friend Bruce Chatwin.

  The church was Greek Orthodox, sombre, dusty, big-domed, and full of writers. Rushdie entered promptly with his then wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. 'I was in shock,' he now says. He looked excitable. We were all excitable. Saul Bellow calls it 'event glamor'. 'Salman,' I said, as we hugged (he likes to hug his friends, and never routinely, always meaningly), 'we're worried about you.' And he said, 'I'm worried about me.' The Rushdies sat down beside me and my wife. I had a shameful impulse to recommend all those nice empty pews at the far end of the church. Rushdie kept glancing over his shoulder: representatives of the press were being kept at bay by his agent, Gillon Aitken. 'Salman!' called out Paul Theroux, boyishly. 'Next week we'll be back here for you!'

  Appropriately, the service was a torment, a torment in its own right, with much incomprehensible yodelling and entreating. I found that my thoughts were all mildly but stubbornly blasphemous. The robed clerics waved their fuming caskets in the air, like Greek waiters removing incendiary ashtrays. This, I concluded, was Bruce Chatwin's last joke on his friends and loved ones: his heterodox theism had finally homed in on a religion that no one he knew could understand or respond to. We sat down and stood up, stood up and sat down, trying not to subvert with sigh or yawn the dull theatre of an alien faith. When it was over, Salman and Marianne ducked past the waiting journalists and were driven off in a friend's limousine. Rushdie would spend the day searching for his son Zafar — searching too, I suppose, for a way to say goodbye to him, as he prepared to take up his new life.

  I briefly attended the post-service reception. In normal circumstances we would have taken the chance to air our preoccupation with the mourned friend. But no one was thinking and talking about Bruce. Everyone was thinking and talking about Salman: his danger, his drastic elevation. As I went home I did about half-a-dozen things that Salman Rushdie was no longer free to do. I visited a bookshop, a toyshop, a snack bar; I went home. On the way I bought an evening paper. Its banner headline read: EXECUTE RUSHDIE ORDERS THE AYATOLLAH, Salman had disappeared into the world of block caps. He had vanished into the front page.

  *

  His case is of course unique. It is an embarrassment of uniquenesses. The terms of the fatwa (it is, at once, a death sentence and a life sentence); the size of the bounty (three times the reputed fee for the Lockerbie crash); the nature of the exile, which removes the novelist both from his subject (society) and from his object (sober literary consideration): in his own phrase, Rushdie is firmly 'handcuffed to history'. His uniqueness is the measure of his isolation. Perhaps, too, it is the measure of his stoicism. Because no one else - certainly no other writer — could have survived so well.

  I often tell him this. I often tell him that if the Rushdie Affair were, for instance, the Amis Affair, then I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquillised 300-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs, and covered in blotches and burns from various misadventures with the syringe and the crackpipe. He has gained a little weight ('no exercise') and has resumed a very moderate cigarette habit; for a while he developed a kind of stress asthma. But Rushdie is unchanged: the rosy complexion, the lateral crinkle in his upper lip when he smiles (which gives an impression of babyishly short incisors), the eyes so exotically hooded that he has long foreseen minor surgery to prevent the lids from engulfing the irises. His urgently humorous presence is undiminished, undiluted. Sometimes, when you call him, his 'Oh I'm fine' lacks total conviction. Otherwise, he is a miracle of equanimity.

  How is this? Unquestionably Rushdie has a great deal of natural ballast. He knows about exile, its deracinations, its surprising opportunities for expansion, how it can make you feel both naked and invisible, as in a dream. There has always been something Olympian about Salman Rushdie. His belief in his own powers, however (unlike other kinds of belief), is not monolithic and therefore precarious. It is agile, capricious and droll. The first time I met him, seven years ago, he mentioned to me that he had recently played football for a Writers' Eleven in a historic fixture in Finland.

  'Really?' I said. 'How did you do?' I expected the usual kind of comedy (sprained ankle, heart attack, incompetence, disgrace). But I was given another kind of comedy, out of left field.

  He said, 'I, uh, scored a hat-trick, actually.'

  'You're kidding. I suppose you just stuck your leg out. You scrambled them home.'

  'Goal number one was a first-time hip-high volley from twenty yards out. For the second, I beat two men at the edge of the box and curled the ball into the top corner with the outside of my left foot.'

  'And the third goal, Salman? A tap-in. A fluke.'

  'No. The third goal was a power header.'

  Even if you don't know the game, you'll probably get the idea. This is Rushdie's style. He is always daring you to decide whether or not to take him literally.

  Well, certain contemporary forces have made their decision, and they have duly arrived at a literalist's verdict: eternal remainderdom. Rushdie can take the weight of the anathema, and the vastly generalised animus, I think, because he has long been in training for it. He has skirmished with world leaders before, after all: in Shame with General Zia (the book was of course banned in Pakistan), and in Midnight's Children with Mrs Gandhi (who sued him for libel). But then came the intensive training, which began on 26 September 1988, the day The Satanic Verses was published. Bannings and burnings, petitions and demonstrations, rioting in Islamabad (six killed), rioting in Kashmir (one killed, 100 injured). Rushdie maintained at the time that these deaths were 'not on [his] conscience'; but by this stage he was feeling, he says, 'completely horrible. It was the most shocking thing - until the other most shocking thing.' The riots too
k place on consecutive days. On the third day the fatwa was announced. Rushdie knew by then that his book had raised mortal questions. He had no choice; he was obliged to become world-historical.

  *

  'At first, I found it more or less impossible to switch off, to turn away. Before the Ayatollah made his move, I saw myself as being part of a debate. Now the debate went on, but I was excluded from it.'

  Another dreamlike state: Rushdie was a ghostly spectator at his own trial. And he found it was a full-time job keeping abreast of developments. His day began with Breakfast News at 6:30 and ended with Newsnight at 10:45. At that point the Rushdie story was at least three pages deep in every national newspaper; and for odd moments in between there was always the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, the South African Weekly Mail, the Osservatore Romano, the Salzburg Kronen Zeitung, Al Ahram, Al-Noor, the Muslim Voice and India Today. Everywhere he looked he saw torched hardbacks and writhing moustaches.

  Question: What's got long blonde hair, big tits, and lives in an igloo in Iceland? Answer: Salman Rushdie . . . Such jokes, current in every pub and at every bus-stop, were relayed to Rushdie by his Special Branch bodyguards; he also became a staple for TV comedians, as a type for the hunted, the marked, the evanescent. Rushdie found some Rushdie jokes funnier than others. But what disturbed him was the sudden promiscuity of his fame. 'I kept thinking, What the hell am I doing here? What the hell am I doing in a TV sitcom? What the hell am I doing in the Jasper Carrot show?' In a sense, though, the fatwa itself is a Rushdie joke. The blasphemy issue is at least debatable (and Rushdie wants to continue that debate); but what can you make of Khomeini's ravings, which portrayed Rushdie as a literary dog of war, hired by world Jewry to soften up Islam for a neocolonialist blitzkrieg? Now that really is funny. When you write, when you try to instruct and entertain, you want the world to sit up and take notice. But not literally. And here on the evening news are the pulsing flashpoints on the colour-coded worldmap, Bombay, Los Angeles, Brussels, riot, fire and murder. What's the story?