by Clive James
Dates of show: 14 and 16 November 2008
Britain’s most successful director of Hollywood films, Ridley Scott, has plans to give us a new version of Robin Hood. In earlier news about this project, it was suggested that Robin Hood would be the bad guy and the Sheriff of Nottingham would be a fair-minded administrator whose central role would be reflected in the revised title, Nottingham. This prospect was greeted with derision in some quarters. But I, for one, welcomed the news. In these broadcasts I have been stressing the importance of lawful institutions and here was a sign that the message was sinking in. At the very least, I had caught a mood. People are learning to distrust the image of the rebel and have begun to favour the ideal of the responsible official.
Later news from Hollywood, alas, reveals that Ridley Scott might already be starting to equivocate. The wobbling Ridley is now outlining a scenario in which the Sheriff is indeed a responsible official who invents the first equitable tax system, but Robin may not be a mere hoodlum, Robin the Hood, out to wreck a good man’s plans. Robin will be a social democrat who contributes a critical overview in a responsible manner. But he will still do so in a raised voice. The antagonism of old will still apply, even if Russell Crowe, as has been rumoured, plays both roles. For Ridley’s latest blockbuster, Body of Lies, now in the cinemas, Russell Crowe put on a lot of weight in a hurry. I myself possess the same talent but I’ve always admired how quickly Russell can do it. He should certainly be in shape not only to play both Robin and the Sheriff, but both of them on screen together when the scene requires.
I just hope he doesn’t have to resort to violence against himself just because a few armchair critics have been attacking the new concept. What we want up there on the screen is reasoned discussion. We want Maid Marian to make a rational choice. Stay with an adventurer of no fixed income and have a baby on the floor of the forest, or bring up a family in a secure castle with a sheriff who does his share of the washing-up? Let all this be laid out in the form of dialogue uninterrupted by action. If we have to retain the scene where Robin is almost defeated by the Sheriff’s champion whose arrow hits the bull’s-eye, let Robin’s arrow not split the champion’s arrow, but end up where it belongs, in the chest of a spectator, thus to illustrate the danger of lethal weapons in private hands. I’ve also got ideas for a Friar Tuck who eats sensibly and a Little John of average height.
Having laid out these ideas in script form under the provisional title of Conflict Resolution in the Nottingham Area, I’ve already sent a message to Ridley Scott that I’m willing to help with the project, and I got an e-mail straight back. It was labelled Out of Office Reply but I have high hopes that he’ll be in touch. Meanwhile I continue to work on the tricky scene where Robin and his band of reasonably merry men confront Guy of Gisborne in the forest and persuade him by force of argument that there should be no relief on capital gains tax without a concomitant lowering of the basic rate. Guy of Gisborne, I think, should be played by Hugh Grant in his terribly nice chap mode. ‘Well, Robin, I, and I say this advisedly, I think that, that there’s something to be said for your views, judging by that sword you’re holding, and I’ll tell Nottingham, or Nottie as we call him, that you . . .’ But you know the sort of thing.
A previous collaboration between Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, Gladiator, was a worldwide hit. Russell was of normal size for that occasion. It was fitting, because there was very little fast food in ancient Rome that you didn’t have to hunt on foot first. Though born in New Zealand, where he first learned to throw telephones at a moving target, Russell, like Nicole Kidman, is one of those Australian citizens who look good in a skirt. But think how much more inspiring Gladiator would have been if Maximus Musculis could have subdued the wild animals with his powers of logic and reached an accommodation with the Emperor on an intellectual level. Instead, the action got in the way.
In Hollywood, it always has, until now. And there tended to be too much action even in the Tudor theatre. Shakespeare tried to break away from all that when he made Hamlet think things through instead of just going mad with the muscle, but sure enough, Act Five was ruined with poison, sword fights, poisoned sword fights, and all the standard high-concept mayhem, the early sixteenth-century equivalent of Go! Go! Go!, 5 4 3 2 1, the car chase in the tunnel and the hero somersaulting towards you propelled by the flames of the exploding building. If Shakespeare were alive now, he would follow Ridley Scott’s example and make the whole thing more nuanced. Hamlet and Claudius, after taking counselling together, would sign a peace treaty drafted by Polonius. Prime Minister Laertes would solve the economic crisis by raising the bank rate, or lowering the bank rate, or whatever it is you do with the bank rate, and Ophelia would take over as the new presenter of Countdown. Parties of foreign tourists being conducted around Elsinore, instead of stepping over bodies in the corridor, would hardly know that the royal family was in residence except when Hamlet’s voice came over the public address system. ‘Oh what a rogue and peasant slave I was, before I got in touch with my inner child.’
What we’re talking about here is the duty of mass entertainment to transmit constructive values. One evening last week I accidentally sat on the remote control, tuned in to cable channel 67 and was face to face with a re-run of Mr and Mrs Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie respectively. You may not have seen this movie. If you are a clinically sane person, you will almost certainly not have seen this movie. But a lot of susceptible people have seen this movie, and you fear for what they might do under its influence. Brad and Angelina play a married couple neither of whom is aware that the other is a professional assassin. Each of them keeps an arsenal in the house unknown to the other. It’s true that most wives could keep the complete equipment of a panzer division in the house without the husband ever finding out, but husbands who can keep even a pop gun in the house without being rumbled by their wives are surely very few. Brad, however, works the trick, and needs every gun in his collection when it turns out that each of the married assassins has been assigned to assassinate the other.
As Mr and Mrs Smith exchange bursts of machine-gun fire with underlying affection, the plot expands instantly into a whirlwind of Go! Go! Go!, 5 4 3 2 1, cars through the window and body-surfing on a wave of flame. Never once are younger viewers warned: Don’t try this at home. The accumulating two-way spouse abuse adds up to a story boring beyond belief. Think how much better it would have been if the two assassins could have just sat down and discussed the matter, or, even better, taken counselling together. The counsellor, Billy Crystal, could have told them that they would get even greater job satisfaction out of just behaving like a normal Hollywood married couple, the husband a standard leading man with his head on upside down pursuing a big career while his wife, a lush beauty with a mouth the size of a paddling pool who adopts every stray child in the world, pursues an even bigger career. The real excitement is in realism, not fantasy.
Sometimes the unrelenting action of a blockbuster movie makes sense. By now I have seen Armageddon five times. I find it hard to explain why. It isn’t just for Bruce Willis, although the way he can maintain a wry smirk while being blown backwards through plate glass is an inspiration to any man who spends his life doing nothing more challenging than face a computer screen that says: ‘There has been an error. Do you wish to report it?’ What makes the level of violence in Armageddon legitimate, I think, is that there really is no other way of dealing with an asteroid approaching Earth except to send Bruce Willis to drill a hole in it and blow it up with a nuke. His crew have to be tough characters of frightening aspect. But why do Bruce and his band of unreasonably merry men have to hit each other all the time? Couldn’t they save all the aggression for the asteroid? Nevertheless, you can see how things might get rough when the Earth has been left behind yet nothing else but a concerted effort by a group of dysfunctional half-wits can save it from destruction.
Back on our planet, however, the age of mindless action is surely over, and Hollywood knows it. There is a whole n
ew climate. Reason has prevailed even in America, which has just elected a President who gives evidence of mental activity in everything he says, whereas his predecessor spoke as if he had just rammed his head through a wall for the third time shouting 5 4 2 3 1. There is no going back now to when Robin Hood could be played by Errol Flynn. Let’s leave Kevin Costner out of this, because we know that Kevin Costner was born to play a postman. But Errol Flynn was born to play Robin Hood in the old style. In an earlier programme I drew mockery for suggesting that the Australian George Lazenby was the only James Bond who looked the part, but surely the Australian Errol Flynn was the Robin Hood best fitted to wear tights. He just couldn’t understand that the Sheriff of Nottingham had a point of view meriting respect. Peace.
Postscript
Luckily Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood project was postponed and revised, so that in the end Russell Crowe played only the title role, instead of climbing into drag and playing Maid Marian as well. Persuading a bankable male film star to throttle back on his power is never an easy matter, but somehow it was managed. Right up to the point where they get too capricious to be employable, however, it is common for the male film stars to hog the screen even when they are playing only one role at a time. The most common way of hogging the screen is to look about a lot while talking and indeed while anybody else is talking. Run a DVD of Body of Lies and watch what Crowe does with his head. It’s everywhere, like a hungry pigeon’s. Almost all male film actors will do this unless stopped. Ben Kingsley is practically the world champion. (See him in Species. Who needs an alien?) For a director like Ridley Scott, the downside of recognition in the industry, and in all the media, as the man in total control of his latest picture, is that he must bear the responsibility when it tanks, even if the damage has been done by a lacklustre central performance. Kingdom of Heaven might have been as exciting as Eva Green’s eyes or Jeremy Irons’s voice if only Orlando Bloom could command the screen like . . . well, like Russell Crowe. But Ridley Scott chose his cast, so he must take the rap. The matter concerns me because my gratitude is eternal for what he did with Blade Runner, a supreme example of how a director fully equipped with a producer’s powers and responsibilities can bring disparate and even antagonistic elements together in a poetic unity. Just because Blade Runner was no fun to make, and a comparative dud at the box office, Harrison Ford still doesn’t mention it among his triumphs. Yes, the leading actor was as dumb as that.
A career of directing movies on the scale Ridley Scott likes to make them requires such powers of generalship that megalomania is only ever a step away, but he seems always to have avoided it, except when, very occasionally, he falls prey to the illusion that he can make a comedy. But soon he is safely back into space, the future, ancient Rome or Sherwood Forest, where the concept is high, the budget huge, the technical demands are infinite, the dialogue doesn’t matter very much, and the leading male actor, though bonkers enough to suck on his own cell phone like a lollipop in order to strengthen his facial muscles, has the wherewithal to command the central space around which, with prodigies of organizational prowess, the director knows just how to arrange everything. Only a few people can do it, and if they weren’t doing it they’d be invading Russia, so we should count ourselves lucky. Nobody I subsequently met or heard from, incidentally, admitted to having been gulled even for a moment by my concept of an action-free action movie: but they all knew someone who had.
BAD LANGUAGE
Dates of show: 21 and 23 November 2008
Early this week I was in a supermarket stocking up on light bulbs, which I seldom replace until they all fail and I have to find my way out of my office by feeling the furniture, swearing all the way. But I wouldn’t swear if children were present. Perhaps I should. Swear words are only words, and a case can be made for children hearing as early as possible the language of the world they will grow up in. I wonder, though, if that case is very good. The young mother who was checking out in the next aisle to mine seemed to have no doubts on the matter.
She was no harridan. In fact she looked like a fashion model. But she had a trolley piled high with stuff, her two attendant children were behaving like children, and she told them off in roughly the following terms. ‘Stop something about or I’ll something leave you at home next time.’ The word ‘something’ was delivered several times with tremendous force, so that the light bulbs rattled in my trolley. I use the word ‘something’ instead of the word she used. The BBC has rules about using that word and I wouldn’t want to use it anyway if I didn’t know who was listening.
In private, when I do know who’s listening, I use it frequently, possibly too frequently: a question I’ll get to. But I can’t imagine myself using it in the presence of children. The young mother with the trolley couldn’t imagine anything else. It was clear that she used it all the time because the children didn’t bat an eye. You would think their lack of response might have tipped her off to a salient fact. The word can’t have any shock effect if you use it all the time. It is indeed only a word, but it isn’t even that if it’s done to death. Bad language can energize normal language, but bad language used all the time is no language at all. The only signal that it sends is that the user is in the grip of anger, or is nervous, or is a member of the male television cooking profession, or perhaps all three.
Or the constant user might be a comedian. Almost all stage comedians of the present day use swear words constantly. The comedian Frank Skinner, however, has just told us that for purposes of experiment, for a single night on his latest tour, he tried doing his stand-up act without any of his usual swear words, and that the act went surprisingly well. He didn’t say how much shorter it was, but apparently nobody complained. Nobody came up to him afterwards and said, ‘Your something act was twenty something minutes shorter than something usual and I’m really something disappointed.’ Everybody thought he was just as funny as ever.
Having made this discovery, Frank Skinner has transmitted it to us via the press, with the proviso that he still thought some parts of his act really needed the swear words, so he put them back in the next night. On the whole, though, he was amazed by the results of his bold venture. He had left most of the swear words out, and the audience had still laughed. He didn’t draw the conclusion that all the other comedians should follow his example and leave most of the swear words out, but he seemed to be asking for someone else to draw it for him, so let me be the one to try.
At this point I should hasten to say I made a big mistake last week when I conjured a fantasy of Hollywood action movies that left all the violence out in favour of reasoned discussion, and a version of Hamlet in which everyone took counselling instead of fighting with swords. I was joking, but some of the people who wrote in to the BBC website didn’t realize it. Perhaps I didn’t swear enough. Swearing has become the mark of comedy, but I really do think that comedians who swear a lot are hardly ever funny, and this time I’m not joking. People with a talent for comedy should watch their language, and people who can’t watch their language should cook food. There, I’ve something said it.
Stage comedy was already filthy well before the time of Shakespeare, and the Puritans who tried to clean it up were always more frightening than the poor clowns dishing out the verbal offal. When it comes to the stage, where nobody is exposed to the spectacle except people who buy a ticket, better the most depraved comedian than any censor. But on stage, the filth that works the trick has always depended more on the dirty idea than the dirty words. Max Miller, who dominated the music halls from the 1930s to the 1950s, dealt in a line of innuendo scurrilous beyond belief, but he never swore, he just conveyed insalubrious ideas. In fact he sometimes never even completed the idea. He let the audience complete it in their minds, and then accused them of being filthy.
Delighted, they agreed. They were all adults and they were on a night out away from the kids. The BBC banned him for a good reason: some of the kids might still be awake. In modern times, Lenny Bruce pushed comedy into forb
idden areas, and those who thought that he was shining a necessary light on darkness were right to praise him. Later on Richard Pryor took it further, and people were right to praise him too. But always these liberating advances into a less squeamish awareness – a true and necessary breaking down of barriers – depended more on the picture conjured up than on the words employed, and trouble began to arrive when there were suddenly thousands of comedians who had no pictures to conjure up, but only bad language to distract the listener from their paucity of invention.
For a long while, television would not do what the stage did, but finally the argument began to win out that comedy has to have ‘edge’. Victoria Wood was the first comedian I ever heard who was brave enough to wonder aloud if ‘edge’ was a good thing in itself, but by now, I think, most comedians who actually know how to raise a genuine laugh are wondering seriously if their profession hasn’t been invaded by people who either aren’t working hard enough or have very little to work with. With no boundaries left to push, with no edge left unexposed, those comedians devoid of any real ideas will have no resort except to join all the swear words together, putting in nothing except what Frank Skinner left out.
Suppose they did so, would any grown-up get hurt? Well, probably not, even if they did it on television. Only words, swear words are barely words at all without an idea behind them. Mainly they’re just punctuation, and when we get a message that’s all punctuation we either wait for a real message, or, more likely, shut down the computer. The test is, can you say something interesting without the swear words? If you can, then you can always bung a few in to make what you say more effective in the right company. You might be trying to entertain your friends. If you’re a man you might be trying to impress a woman – very dangerous, that: she might be well brought up. Or you might just be telling someone to go away. But in that case, the person you are telling to something off had better be smaller than you are. Not so small, however, as to be a child.
