The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  A Dark Room, a Big Screen

  Something many decadent films share is a fascination with cinema itself. Yet as we move towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, cinema has become something relatively marginal and displaced, as increasingly we watch films on dvds and mobile phones. This only serves to confirm cinema as the one truly decadent mode of movie viewing – with all the delicious and dangerous ambivalence the word decadence contains,flicking as it does between toxic decline and life-affirming hedonism. On the one hand multiplexes surround their ever-shrinking screens with multiple layers of franchised and packaged consumerism, while town centre cinemas are transformed into bingo halls and sex clubs. On the other hand, the cinema theatre still persists, albeit often derelict and struggling, poised perilously on the edge of contemporary corporate-dominated experience. As we lurch between wild selfishness and spending sprees and puritanical self-abnegation, cinemas remain the finest place to indulge – and share – in the magnificently dubious spectacle of decadence.

  The Child

  Nicholas Royle

  The light was just beginning to fade when I found the shop.

  I’d been wandering around the ‘Northern Quarter’ for much of the afternoon. When I last lived in Manchester, in the 1970s, the Northern Quarter didn’t exist. It was a grey area between Shude Hill and Ancoats then. A post-industrial hinterland of broken windows and empty warehouses. Tib Street was full of pet shops; it smelled like a hamster’s cage. There was the odd record shop, perhaps, but nothing much going on. I left for London in 1982 and didn’t start coming back until the 90s. I had no reason to visit Oldham Street or anywhere else in the Northern Quarter, as the area started to become known towards the end of that decade. Businesses opened in refurbished buildings, the odd café or bar. Crafts places, wholefood. By the middle of the so-called noughties, when I moved back, the area had changed a fair bit.

  I was trying to reconnect, find places I recognised. It was either that or get on with decorating the spare room, as I had friends coming at the weekend.

  The smells of straw and pet food had drifted away from Tib Street. The new boutiques that had sprung up were filled either with urban streetwear that didn’t seem quite me, or with stuff I’d owned in the 1970s: sheepskin-lined denim jackets, plastic Adidas kit bags, parkas with fake-fur trim. The bookshops on Shude Hill didn’t have the allure they’d once possessed. The guys behind the counter were probably the same blokes from twenty-five years earlier. They were certainly wearing the same clothes, and didn’t look like they’d washed them.

  I was about to head back to my flat in Whalley Range when I spotted a window deep in shade on the wrong side of Lever Street. A line of videos, couple of DVDs. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Hitchcock’s Frenzy. Emmanuelle. A naked bulb could be seen burning inside. Low wattage. I tried the door, descended a flight of steps. My nostrils flared at the damp and something else, an animal smell. Out of the gloom came a flash of white teeth, a glistening tongue. I leapt backwards.

  ‘Baz, sit!’ said a voice from somewhere.

  The Alsatian sat back on its haunches, meek as anything.

  Dogs scare the crap out of me.

  ‘Sorry, mate.’

  The speaker was a tall dark-haired man in his early twenties. He unfolded his insectile body from the stool where he’d been sitting behind an antediluvian cash register and stood, albeit with a pronounced stoop on account of the low ceiling.

  ‘Stay, Baz,’ he said to the dog, then looked at me. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’

  His polite manner was a surprise. I stared blankly at a shelf of exploitation films, only half familiar with the titles.

  ‘Just browsing,’ I said.

  ‘Let me know if I can help,’ he offered, returning to his stool and picking up a smouldering cigarette.

  I looked around. He had an interesting if limited selection. There was an attempt at categorisation but it was no more rigid than his shelving system and certain titles had ended up in the wrong place. Different formats – VHS, DVD – were mixed in together. Apart from a torn Pink Flamingos poster, the walls were bare and cracked. Even with my enthusiasm for some of the stock, I found the place depressing.

  ‘There’s more stuff through there,’ the young man said behind me.

  I turned. He was pointing to a plastic-strip curtain hanging in a doorway.

  ‘Your adult section?’ I guessed.

  ‘Kind of.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up again. Close to, he really was remarkably tall. I wanted to tell him to stay sitting: it would be kinder to his back. But he was already pushing aside the rainbow-coloured plastic strips. I followed him through. The smell back here was more pungent. The damp was eating away at the plaster, which was crumbling behind flaking paintwork. The decay felt like it might be contagious.

  The back room did contain adult material, but not of the usual kind. Instead of videos labelled Playboy or Electric Blue, this guy had stacks of Russ Meyer films and quasi-innocent 70s softcore of the type once screened constantly on Channel 5. Lesbian vampire flicks. Confessions movies. Dropped in among the dross were mainstream films with notable erotic content: Bad Timing, Daughters of Darkness, The Draughtsman’s Contract. I flicked through the Russ Meyer titles. These were the kind of films I’d had to leave Manchester to find. Sex scenes I’d seen on TV as a boy had been witnessed in arse-clenching embarrassment as my mother fiddled with the pleats of her skirt and my father tutted loudly enough to be heard over the soundtrack. I rarely got to see films on my own, but when I did, by sneaking downstairs after my mother had gone to bed and my father was on a night shift, and I was lucky enough to catch something worthwhile, it meant all the more. I stored up fleeting glimpses of nudity. The naked rear view of the headmaster’s wife disappearing down a long corridor in If … the white globes of her bottom ghostly in the moonlight. Cybil Shepherd’s shy disrobing, watched by awestruck admirers, in The Last Picture Show. Neither scene had actually aroused me, so much as awakened in me a sense of wonder coupled with an equally potent sense of guilt. After staying up late to watch The Vampire Lovers, I checked the hamster’s cage as part of my routine before sneaking back up to bed. The hamster was lying very still in the wrong part of the cage. I took it out and it felt different in my hand, cold and heavy. I put it back and the following day had to pretend that I hadn’t known. Overcompensating, I insisted on burying the remains in the garden. At the back of one of the flower beds, past the remains of my father’s latest bonfire, I knelt down and dug a little hole with the trowel, then pressed the body of the hamster as deep into the soil as it would go. For some time I felt uncomfortably guilty about having knowingly left the hamster lying dead in its cage overnight.

  My illicit late-night screenings were undoubtedly what led to my becoming a film journalist. I went to London to go to university, then narrowly avoided getting thrown off the course for never showing up. When I wasn’t in a Wardour Street preview theatre or catching up on lost sleep after an allnighter at the Scala in King’s Cross, I was ensconced in the college newspaper office in the union building writing up film reviews on a golfball typewriter.

  ‘Some of this stuff’s pretty rare,’ the young guy said. He had taken a few videos off a shelf and was blowing the dust off them. The title of one of them caught my eye and it was like spotting the twinkle of gold in a prospector’s pan.

  Thundercrack!

  I’d seen it only once, at the Scala, as part of a double bill. The other half of the programme had been wiped from my memory. That was the effect of Thundercrack!, the most outrageous and depraved film I’d ever seen. It was also funny, weird and breathtakingly erotic. It turned me on like no other film I’d ever seen. I knew people who swore by the love scene in Don’t Look Now. Others who got off on Ai No Corrida. I even had a friend who said he sat through Cronenberg’s Crash with a 90-minute boner. The only film that did it for me was Thundercrack!

  ‘I didn’t know this was available
,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not,’ said the tall guy, with a little smile. ‘Have you ever seen it?’

  I told him about the Scala. ‘You’re too young probably even to have heard about it,’ I added.

  ‘My dad used to screen Thundercrack! in Manchester in the 80s,’ he said. ‘My name’s Joe, by the way. Joe Hoffman.’

  We shook hands. I told him my name.

  ‘Your dad wasn’t …’ I began.

  ‘Anthony Hoffman, yeah.’

  Anthony Hoffman had been a face on the Manchester scene in the 80s. He’d known people at Granada TV and Factory Records and Savoy Books and so on, and was often seen at the same parties as Tony Wilson or David Britton.

  ‘How’s he doing these days?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so good.’

  Unsure what to say, I looked at the photocopied notes on the back of the video box.

  ‘So he used to screen this?’ I said, eventually.

  ‘Yeah, he’d hire a 16mm print and book a little back room somewhere. Word would get out and the place would be rammed. He even rented the Apollo once or twice.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ I said.

  The Apollo had been where I’d gone to gigs. I tried to imagine this guy’s father hiring it for a film screening. Thundercrack! was directed in 1975 by Curt McDowell and written by McDowell in collaboration with underground filmmaker George Kuchar. A group of characters are forced to spend the night in a big old house where they have sex with each other in a variety of different ways and permutations. Copulation, masturbation, ejaculation – it’s all in there and pretty much non-stop. As Kim Newman writes in Nightmare Movies, ‘The film is too doom haunted to appeal to a gay or straight porno audience, and yet its two hours plus of penetrations, perversions and come-shots make it all but unbearable for anybody else.’

  Obviously, I disagree with him.

  ‘The number of times his screenings were raided by the police,’ Joe said. ‘Ironic, really.’

  ‘Why ironic?’ I asked, a bit too quickly.

  His only response was to light another cigarette.

  ‘The 80s were James Anderton’s heyday,’ I remarked.

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know how many prints of Thundercrack! his lot must have ended up with. My dad told me he never got them back.’

  ‘Maybe they burned them?’ I suggested, remembering the frequent bonfires my father lit in our back garden.

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ Joe prodded a patch of loose plaster on the wall with one of his Converse baseball boots. It fell off and a large spider scuttled away. ‘I think he was deliberately trying to wind the police up – and succeeding.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been difficult,’ I said. Not with the chief constable being a self-declared born-again Christian. Although I’d been living in London at the time, I’d been aware of Anderton’s increasingly bizarre pronouncements. It was hard not to be, given what my father did for a living. The mid-80s were strange times. On the one hand you had Nicolas Roeg, co-director of the splendidly amoral Performance, making TV ads warning of the danger of AIDS, and on the other there was James Anderton, God’s copper, suggesting that people with AIDS were ‘swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making’.

  ‘I gather he lives in Sale with his wife now,’ Joe said. ‘Does a lot of charity work. I imagine he’s doing better than my dad anyway, who lives in a nursing home in Old Trafford. Sits there staring out of the window. On one side of the building you’ve got a park full of dogshit, pissheads and other assorted miserable cunts, and on the other you’ve got Old Trafford. Pretty much the same view, considering my dad’s a lifelong Blue.’

  He stared at me with anger in his eyes. I held his gaze for a moment, thinking of my own father.

  ‘How much is this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ten quid, mate.’

  As we left the back room I noticed another open doorway on the other side of the shop.

  ‘This place goes on for ever,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got more space than I can fill, and more than I can afford, more to the point. I’m looking to sublet that side. Dead cheap. Fifty quid a week. Sixty tops. If you know anyone…’

  ‘It’s tempting,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

  ‘Really? What would you sell?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m thinking of starting up a little magazine. A film magazine. Something small, subsidised.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll do it,’ I said, waving my hands as if I could waft the idea away. ‘I wrote some pieces for 8020, which promptly folded. I approached City Life, about doing some film stuff for them, the week before the Guardian closed them down.’

  ‘Do you write for anyone else?’

  ‘I write for the nationals and Sight & Sound, but I wanted to do something locally. I grew up here and now I’ve moved back. I want to fit in. I want to belong again. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he nodded, reaching for another fag.

  I handed him a tenner for the video and he started hunting around for a bag.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  As he passed me the video he said, ‘Think about the space. I could let you have it for fifty.’

  I smiled. ‘Nice talking to you,’ I said, and moved towards the steps up to the door.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, rummaging around in a drawer.

  He came over to me with a DVD in an unmarked case.

  ‘Have a look at that,’ he said, pressing it into my hands.

  I asked him what it was.

  ‘Something my dad shot. I think you’ll find it interesting.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘How much do you want for it?’

  ‘Nothing. Borrow it. Watch it and bob back with it at some point. There’s no hurry.’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘Keep it to yourself, though.’

  I promised that I would, then turned my back on him and climbed the stairs to the street. I looked back through the window and saw him bending down to give the dog a stroke or a pat or whatever it is you do with dogs if you don’t want them to bite your face off.

  I headed back to the multistorey where I’d parked the car. Leave the ground in Manchester and you can see the hills. I unlocked the car, but instead of getting in I wandered over to the concrete balustrade and looked out over east Manchester at the mountains in the distance, only ten or fifteen miles away. The snow that had fallen a week earlier glowed in the twilight.

  My father had often taken me walking in the Peaks at weekends, when he wasn’t working.

  He did shift work.

  He was a copper, my dad. His time on the Greater Manchester force coincided with Anderton’s reign as Chief Constable.

  When I got back to the flat, I had a bite to eat, then installed myself in front of the TV with a beer, and slipped Thundercrack! into the VCR. I was only ten minutes into it when the phone went.

  The machine answered and as soon as I heard Simone’s voice, I hurriedly picked up the remote and switched off the TV. Simone was history, but the sound of her voice still managed to make me feel guilty about watching something like Thundercrack! Without even being in the room. Without even being in the same city. Simone was one of the reasons why I left London. And why I would probably never go back. Not until I knew she was either safely attached to someone else or living in another country.

  There was nothing much to her message. Could I call her when I got a chance? But I knew that if I picked up the phone I’d get an earful. The same old questions. The same distortion of the truth.

  I stopped the tape. I couldn’t watch it now, not with Simone’s voice in my head. I picked up the unmarked DVD-R that Joe Hoffman had lent me. I put it in the machine but it wouldn’t play. Nothing doing, no menu screen or anything. I tried it in my laptop with the same result. Frustrated, I went to bed, thinking that I would take it back the next day. The fact that it wouldn’t play naturally made me even more interested in finding out what was meant to be on it.

  In the morning, howe
ver, I realised that finishing the spare bedroom had to take priority. Otherwise my guests wouldn’t be able to move for wet paint. While I worked I daydreamed about the magazine I wanted to start up. As the hours went by and the walls got whiter, my plans acquired more depth and detail, but at the same time departed further and further from practical reality until I reached a point at which I acknowledged it simply wasn’t going to happen. There would be no magazine and I wouldn’t be renting Joe Hoffman’s spare office space. But I still needed to go back to his shop to query the DVD. When I finished painting, however, it was too late and the next day my friends arrived from London. We had a good weekend; a lot of food and drink was consumed. These were my closest friends and it was good to see them again. I was gratified that they had come up so soon to see me in Manchester. It was the next week before I could get back to the shop on Lever Street, and when I did, I found the window bare and the door locked.

  I pushed and pulled at the handle and knocked on the glass. I even got down on my hands and knees and called Joe’s name through the letter box, but the shop was empty. No stock, no dog, no Joe. As I stepped back into the road and craned my neck to look at the upper storeys of the building, a police car cruised by. The driver slowed down; he and his colleague stared at me until I turned and walked away.

  When the cop car had gone I turned back. The shop had never had a name or a board outside and there weren’t any other signs of life in the immediate vicinity. I walked round the block and tried in a couple of CD shops, but neither Joe’s name nor my description of his shop rang any bells. I asked in Vinyl Exchange, where they sold videos and DVDs in the basement. Nice folk but no joy. I couldn’t think where else to try. Shops like Joe’s came and went and these days the trend was definitely towards closing down rather than opening up, even in the Northern Quarter.