It is at an institutional level, when acting as the henchman of the establishment that the police become frightening. As individuals, as humans we find harmony. Ferguson, Orgreave, Hillsborough, and the many unexplained deaths in custody are all manifestations of the dehumanization that occurs when an institution that ought to serve the public glitches and becomes a tool for state oppression. The transference of $4.2 billion of U.S. military equipment to local police authorities across America is an indication of what the state regards the role of the police to be. Even Boris is buying up German water cannons to sluice down febrile Londoners. It’s as if they know a change is coming.
9
It’s Big But It’s Not Easy
THE LAST TIME I WAS ARRESTED WAS IN NEW ORLEANS AND wasn’t that long ago. I was clean. It is worse getting arrested in recovery and it is worse getting arrested in America. This arrest came during my beard-and-pajamas postmarital era.
I was making a film called Paradise (don’t worry, no one has) with Diablo Cody, the writer of Juno. It was her directorial debut. She is a talented, y’know, Oscar-winning writer and a lovely person. I suppose I just wasn’t up for making a film. The indicators were clear, with hindsight. For example, I was refusing to cut my hair for the part. Or my beard. Hair is prissy but understandable; beard is inter-dimensional unreasonableness.
Diablo and I fashioned my beard together in my trailer, together, as cautiously as you’d sculpt a peace treaty between two nations that prefer war to peace. The reality was that my identity outside of filmmaking had become more important to me. I was doing hours of yoga and meditation each day, I was going through a divorce, and the result was a kind of hirsute intransigence.
I looked like the cliché of a terrorist and I behaved like one. Except the beard wasn’t the symbol, it was the cause. I feel some guilt about my lack of enthusiasm for acting, like it’s a bit ungrateful. Like I’ve let my teenage self down. Mind you, he let himself down a fair bit, the dirty little pervert. The dreams of my adolescent self were entangled with silvery screens and limousines, and I still feel that I need to offer up superficial sacrifices to his misguided altar. The fact is, though, I find filmmaking a boring process and its ends dubious. This could, of course, be due to the quality of the stuff I’ve done so far, as opposed to an essential rejection of an art form.
Maybe if I’d been “R. P. McMurphy” or “The Elephant Man” or “Brian,” I’d feel different.
It just wasn’t what I thought it would be. It’s not just the entertainment industry that has seemed like a mirage on arrival. What about clubs and parties? When I’m there I think, “Is this it? Is this all there is? Is this what all the fuss is about?” This feeling of disillusionment perhaps climaxed around the time of my divorce and the making of this subsequent film. New Orleans, though, is not a city of lackluster superficiality but one of unique vibrancy. Mark Twain, the thinking man’s Colonel Sanders, reputedly said, “America is New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
The city is renowned for its spirit in every sense of the word, spirit, there is a Creole, voodoo ambience, spirit, the people are plucky, vivacious, and strong, spirit, everyone is drunk all the time. They are proud that there is an incessant festival, a rolling celebration. The architecture in the French Quarter—wrought-iron railings, low ceilings, narrow streets, and vines—is perkily romantic and gently decadent, like a wink and a hand on your thigh. It must come from the swamp, the land itself unsure if it’s a solid or a liquid that could slip right back into the Mississippi and roll on by, so you might as well party.
I got arrested there. My mood was strange. Party towns are strange if you don’t drink. If you’re there working. If you’re beginning to think that making films is not for you. If you’re starting to consign easy promiscuity in the Big Easy to the ever-growing pile of defunct distractions. I don’t let go without a struggle, though. I didn’t with booze or drugs and I won’t with sex or fame. The problem is that as access to spiritual data and practices of various kinds begin to make a difference it gets harder to go back to sleep. So I was in New Orleans with a girl, and from the outside my life looks like it’s supposed to look like. She’s a model, I’m in a movie, I rent a vintage sports car, of course there’s paparazzi, but in my teenage dream of me there were paparazzi too.
They pursue the car through saxophone streets, and I, like a patient stirring mid-procedure as the anesthetic fades, think more than ever, “This just won’t do.” When you stop or move, they splat you with hostile chumminess: “Hey, Russ, who’s the girl?” They drive like jackals too, scavenging in your tracks, at your heels. This looks how it’s supposed to look, but it doesn’t feel like it’s supposed to feel, and then, several thwarted tricks in, the idea kicks in, that I am a man and that I can do whatever I want.
That I didn’t sign a contract to be preyed upon or spied upon or lied about, then sighed about, “Oh, I wonder why’d, it’s no-surprised” about. The car is bloody hard to drive. The lights turn red and so do I. This brain I have sometimes just says to me stuff like, “Russell, this is bullshit; these people have got no right to chase you and harass you. Fuck ’em. Get out of the car now and confront them.” Then another part of my brain, apparently distinct from the first bit, goes, “Y’know what? You’re right. I’m in charge of the body; I’ll take care of it.” Then whatever’s left of me that’s not encompassed by those two, or three, gets up and goes along with it.
The girl says something—the girl always says something. I’m up and out the door. I’m in character—I think I’ve even got a hat on. I’m committed to this now, whoever I am, this guy in a hat, in a street by a car in New Orleans, this hirsute projection of a teenager’s dreams. A languid mosaic of years of refusal, and years of abuse all, and years of confusion.
At their car door now, iPhone hyenas. Window down, corners of mouth up. He says something from the capsule of his car that collides with how I see the world in that moment, that implies that me snatching his brandished phone out of his hand and throwing it is not a possibility. For me, though, it is, so I do. That smashes the pane of conviviality to smithereens. It also smashes the window of the building across the street. It sails through the air, his liberated phone, like a funereal dove, a symbol of my emancipation from press intrusion, and crashes presumptuously through the window of a law firm. The occupants will know their rights, I quickly deduce. The pap gets out of the car, all confounded and flustered, like I’d tipped over the Monopoly board when he’d just secured Park Lane. There’s the bit where we both pretend we’re willing to have a fight, then the girl or his friend descend and it’s broken up. Back in the car, I’m buzzing, which doesn’t help my driving. Pap car A and another pap-mobile are still following; I check them in my rearview mirror, like a movie. In the end they chase us to a hotel; I didn’t want to lead them back to where I was actually staying.
I didn’t hear about it for a few days, then plainclothes police come and arrest me at the casino where we are filming. Luckily, the stereotype of bad-boy actor already exists, so as I’m led off in cuffs there is an available reference. Such overt dramatic displays make me, in a compensatory demonstration, act all polite and genteel, like Alan Bennett getting pulled, or Prince Edward at Glastonbury.
I don’t go in for a snarling, Wild-man performance in this instance but virtually escort the arresting officers through the casino like Jeeves, bowing and tipping my hat.
In America when you’re arrested, they cuff your hands behind your back; usually in the UK, they leave your hands in front. This makes me yearn for the comparative kindness of a British bobby as I’m helped into the back of the squad car, which has barely any leg-room.
With my American arrests, both of which followed paparazzi altercations—the first in LAX Airport, where a spat with an intrusive pap who’d tried for a shot of my then-wife’s pants was humorously titled by my mate Matt as “Liam Gallagher: The Musical”—there was a jarring record scratch from pre-arrest
conviviality to the cuffing. It felt like I was famous right up to the moment my rights were read.
The mind is a machine that registers difference. I suppose we become inured to anything if subjected to it for long enough—poverty, or extreme privilege. Fame after a while seems ordinary. The accumulation of a million easy treats, a license to speak your mind or sulk. It is possible to retreat into a cell of comfort, ceramic stillness. I am grateful for the disruptions that come and remind me of the shallow impermanence of fame as a condition. This is how I feel in retrospect when I reflect on my few hours in the New Orleans Police Department holding pen. It’s not how I felt at the time though. I was freaked out.
That place was fucking scary; the process of industrialization has given their justice system an inhuman hum. The strip lights and the strip searches, the efficiency suffocates humanity.
I was marched in by the cops, formerly known as chatty, and routinely dropped on to the conveyer belt of the NOLA Police Department. There are a series of airlock doors, like in a spaceship, a fella behind a thick pane takes your name, someone else takes your belt and shoelaces or anything you could hang yourself with—I’m a man who likes to accessorize, so it took a while. Splayed across the wall, you’re patted down, more aggressively than in an airport and with less room for innuendo.
Across several airlocks in what I deemed to be the main area, I could see a vast purgatory of inmates, divided by gender but in uniform, ubiquitous Guantanamo orange suits. “I’m going to look awful in that,” I thought. As a celebrity—how I loathe the word but must be grateful for its perks here—I was placed on the other side of the wall-to-wall desk that divided the room, on the side of the police.
Whilst my “man of the people” tag is one I cherish, I must confess to feeling somewhat relieved to be on the carpeted quarter of that room, not the linoleum ghetto, where here and there murmurs were exchanged regarding my arrival.
Arrests are like STD tests: You can never be 100 percent confident of the outcome. Even though I knew I’d only been nicked for a trivial offense, the possibility of a damning conclusion seemed plausible given the awful situation I now found myself in.
Even though I knew that beyond the sedated orange riot on one side and the podgy baton-wielding authority on the other there were an invisible army of lawyers, agents, and producers making phone calls and pulling favors, I was a bit scared that due to a tantrum and a clerical error I was about to begin a life sentence among Louisiana’s most dangerous and least fortunate.
Movies get made these days in cities that offer favorable economic conditions to filmmakers, so at a governmental level there are relationships between studios and politicians which at this point were extremely convenient to me.
The other people there, being processed across the physical line of the long, chest-high barricade and the imperceptible but more imposing line of poverty, had none of my circumstantial advantages.
Most of them were black; all of them were poor, any material wealth necessarily had been accrued through illegal means, as that is the only means available. I ended up sat next to the facility’s overworked psychiatrist. He told me that everyone he saw had either addiction issues or mental health issues or both.
Sitting quietly in this place you can feel the energy. There is a weary lack of hope. On either side of the bureau, people are weighed down by conditions. A pre-plowed and unrewarding habitualized rut, like a destructive circuit in a broken brain. Neither side free. The captors as trapped and knackered as the people they’re processing in this bloodless abattoir.
The poor enslaved by desperation, the rich imprisoned by luxury.
I’m not suggesting the New Orleans police are rich, I bet their salaries are shit, only that any system that requires such extremity to be maintained is detrimental to us all.
With my coterie of well-placed benefactors, I was soon strolling out of jail and back on to set with a John Wayne walk and Lil Wayne grin, but for all my bravado and slapdash renditions of a new anecdote, that couple of hours had widened the crack. I’m lucky in that I’ve been able to be so gently awoken and reminded, a slap round the face rather than a five-year stretch.
10
Ich Bin Ein Monarch
WHEN TRAVELING IN IMPOVERISHED REGIONS IN GALLING LUXURY, as I have done, you have to undergo some high-wire ethical arithmetic to legitimize your position. If you can’t separate yourself from poverty geographically, then you have to do it ideologically. You have to believe inequality is okay. You have to accept the ideas that segregate us from one another and nullify your human instinct for fairness.
Another thing Slingerland, the professor of Asian Studies, mentioned was humankind’s innate expectation of fairness. We have an instinct for it, and instinctively we reject unfairness. He demonstrated this to me with the use of hazelnuts. As we spoke, there were a bowl of them on the table. “Russell,” he said, scooping up a handful, “we humans have an in-built tendency towards fairness. If offered an unfair deal, we will want to reject it. If I have a huge bowl of nuts and offer you just one or two, how do you feel?” The answer was actually quite complex. Firstly, I dislike hazelnuts, considering them to be the verminous tidbits of squirrels. Unless in a whole-nut chocolate bar—then I like them. Secondly, they were my fucking hazelnuts anyway; we were in my house. Most pertinently though, I imagine, to the point that Slingerland was trying to make, I felt that it was an unfair offering when he had so many nuts. I told him so and he seemed pleased. Like when at school you see a teacher think, “I’m really getting my point across here. I’m like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.”
Whilst I was thrilled to get a bit of tutorial approval, I was still reeling from the shoddy deal and told the glowing, nutty professor as much. He explained that human beings and even primates have an instinct for fairness even in situations where this instinct could be seen as detrimental. “You still have more nuts now than before,” he chirped, failing to acknowledge that all nuts and indeed everything in the entire house belonged to me. We then watched an amazing clip on YouTube where monkeys in adjacent cages in a university laboratory perform the same task for food. Monkey A does the task and gets a grape, delicious. Monkey B, who can see Monkey A, performs the same task and is given cucumber, yuck.
Monkey B looks pissed off but eats his cucumber anyway. The experiment is immediately repeated, and you can see that Monkey B is agitated when his uptown, up-alphabet neighbor is again given a grape. This time when he is presented with the cucumber, he is fucking furious; he throws it out the cage and rattles the bars. I got angry on his behalf and wanted to give the scientist a cucumber in a less amenable orifice. I also felt a bit pissed off with Monkey A, the grape-guzzling little bastard. I’ve not felt such antipathy toward a primate since the one in Indiana Jones that wore a little waistcoat betrayed Indy.
Professor Slingerland explained, between great frothing gob-fulls of munched hazelnut, that this inherent sense of fairness we have is found in humans everywhere, but studies show that it’s less pronounced in environments where people are exposed to a lot of marketing. “Capitalist consumer culture inures us to unfairness,” he said. That made me angry.
When I was in India, a country where wealth and poverty share a disturbing proximity, I felt a discomfort in spite of being in the exalted position of Monkey A. Exclusive hotels require extensive, in fact, military, security. Blokes with guns stand at the entrance. It has only just occurred to me that the word “exclusive” specifically refers to the excluded, the people who aren’t included, the majority, who cannot attend. Like the exclusivity is a good thing:
“Sir, if that canapé was not delicious enough, let me assure you that but a mile from here there is a family in a shack eating food they found on the floor.”
“That’s very reassuring, but could you provide a photograph?”
As we entered the five-star splendor, through the metal detectors, past the armed guard, I realized that if this was what was required in order to preserve this d
egree of privilege, it could not be indefinitely sustained. When you enter in to the opulence of these places you check out of your humanity as you check in. Of course India is a land subject to much sectarian violence, religiously motivated. My belief is that all conflicts, though, are about resources or territory and the theological rhetoric merely a garnish to make it more palatable.
These devices that maintain division are what my friend Matt Stoller focused on when I asked him what ideas he had that would change the world. I first met Matt in Zuccotti Park, Manhattan, in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011.
This corporate square in the middle of the financial district had become a lurid and buoyant shantytown of placards and canvas. I was magnetized down from my Tribeca apartment by a curiosity that will not yield, that will not be sedated by my ego’s ongoing acquisitive quest. Among the many stimulating encounters with cockeyed optimists and hard-core anarchists, my meeting with Matt stood out. Matt at that time worked for the government. He understands power: as a policy wonk for a Democratic congressman, his days were spent in the cogs of the lumbering Washington behemoth. He told me the establishment was afraid of Occupy. They were afraid because, typically, protests are backed by nonprofit organizations, themselves accountable to foundations who have boards, who have members who can be harassed and intimidated. Occupy doesn’t work like that. It is a spontaneous, leaderless co-operative, and that makes it harder to squash.
Any of you that saw Brand X, my U.S. chat show, will recognize Matt, because I kidnapped him from that square and forced him into my life. I did this because I instantly identified him as a peculiar radical: good old me. I saw that beneath his cherubic hay-colored curls and proper job, he detested the system he was trapped in. I suppose as a man who was in Manhattan making a movie and had trotted down to the protest site dressed in jogger’s Lycra, I identified with his quandary. Since then he has regularly prized apart the clenched and corrupt buttocks of American politics and allowed me to peer inside at its dirty workings. I asked Matt for ideas that would aid the Revolution; his response was, as usual, startling and almost proctologically insightful.
Revolution Page 10
