John Osborne Plays 1: Look Back in Anger, Epitaph for Geroge Dillon, The World of Paul Slickey and Déjàvu

According to Wiki and academic reviews, Look Back in Anger changed British theater. That's a statement I can't qualify. The only think I can say is that Look Back in Anger is probably the first literary work about the British lumpen, a class that would become the majority in the last 50 years. Irvine Welsh and Hooligan, just to mention two examples, cannot be explained without John Osborne's work.

Casino Royale - Martin Campbell

Casino Royale is the first Bond movie to present Daniel Craig as the famous British agent. At the time, Craig was widely criticized, just like every other actor who has portrayed Bond. With hindsight, it is clear that, as an actor, Craig is closer to Stallone's Rambo than to Pierce Brosnan or Sean Connery, though the producers said that, since Casino Royale portrays a young Bond, a little bit more of violence was in order.

Only time will tell if Craig was a good pick. Since Casino Royale, he has done more two Bond films and has signed for five more...

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

"What makes things break up like they do?"

-Ralph

Lost is nothing else than the most recent reincarnation of a mental exercise present in Western civilization since Voltaire's Candide: what would a group of people in an uninhabited island look like? The objective of this question is to speculate on the true nature of men: optimists think that man is inherently good, so the group would eventually build up an utopia; pessimists, predictably, argue that the members of this hypothetical society would kill each other. 

The Cold War version of this mental exercise is Lord of the Flies, a book written by William Golding in the mid 50s, which earned him the Nobel Prize later on. Being a citizen of the second half the 20th century, Golding added an innovative twist to the Voltairean question: instead of grown ups, the inhabitants of the solitary island would be boys (there are no female characters in this novel).

Like other books written by Nobel Prize winners such as Herman Hesse's Demian, Lord of the Flies is a required reading in most middle school programs. Six out of the first 10 entries in Google for this book are synopsis and ready-to-turn-in essays which is, I guess, a testimony of the validity of  this book as a school text (1 of the remaining entries is the link to Amazon, and the other 3 are links to the movie, in case you were wondering). 

School kids obviously have to read something, but I think that framing Lord of the Flies as a book for teenagers is a mistake. Considering that kids are a product of the education provided by adults, it is the latter who benefit the most from seeing what the former might become if left on their own in an non supervised environment. Let me put it this way: if you are an adult and think that your child might end up acting like one of the characters of Lord of the Flies, you are doing something very wrong.

The Nobel Prize Foundation has this interactive game on Lord of the Flies to help children to prepare their exams.

And you can hear Golding motivation to write this book (and why he didn't include any girls in it) in this video:

PS. ("chased from hell to breakfast"; great expression)

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

I just completed Harper Perennial's edition of the complete works of Oscar Wilde. The book contains an introduction by Vyvyan Holland, Wilde's son.

A number of critics have dissected and studied Wilde's works. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a masterpiece, and so are The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde's short stories. The rest of his theater and his poems are OK, but nothing extraordinary. His essays on art and aesthetics require a very high knowledge on the topic; they are not designed for the general public. His essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism is partly right when it says that Socialism deserves a chance if it makes individualism the core of its action plan -it didn't, in case you were wondering.

This edition also contains De Profundis, the poem that Wilde wrote during his time in prison his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (as usual, Wikipedia contains an excellent summary of the Wilde-Douglas love affair). De Profundis is one of the most intimate and touching texts I've ever read. If I had to recommend this book based on a hidden pearl few people know about, De Profundis would be it.

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble - Simon Schama

Simon Schama is a British historian at Columbia University. He writes regularly for The Guardian, The New York Times, The FT, Vogue, The New Yorker, and a bunch of other newspapers. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble is a collection of his essays written since the late nineties.

This book contains a lot of definitions are descriptions about a lot of places and persons. Here are some of them:

About Washington DC:

• Are there any city avenues more inhumanly broad than those of Washington DC¿
• (...) most of the young people who make up the clientele and who come to love the place aren't there because of the romance in the city, but because they need to live in an idea made architecturally visible: the idea of democratic government.
• (...) when the cherry blossom is doing its shameless thing, and the streets of Adams Morgan are warming to the kids on the block, it 's entirely possible to see Washington as not just DC, not just ideology made visible, but as an American community; and a good one at that.

About the Korean War:

• The Korean question is both relic and omen.

About 9/11:

• (...) if the script of Bloody Tuesday had been offered to a studio, it would have been turned down not for the scale of the horror, but for its failure to supply identifiable villains.

About Democracy:

• The first and greatest weapon a democracy has for its own defence is the assumption of common equity; of shared sacrifice.

About George W. Bush:

• Prayers (like vacations) are the default mode for this president, who knows how to chuckle and bow the head in the midst of disaster but not, when it counts, how to govern or to command.

About Isaiah Berlin:

• Though he genuinely admired American energy and forthrightness, the mistaken conviction that exhaustive iteration was the same thing as understanding depressed him.
• [he was] that unlikely thing: a seriously happy Jew.

About Winston Churchill:

• No leader who made jokes against himself was in much danger of turning dictator.
• Thrice he was the impassioned advocate of reduced arms expenditure, as Tory, Liberal and Tory again, and thrice again (in the naval arms race immediately before the First World War, in the 1930s and in the Cold War) he was gung-ho for rearmament.
• [it was] Churchill's fundamental decency, the quality that made Orwell forgive him his anti-socialism and and his sentimental imperialism. Though limited in education and social experience, Churchill nonetheless had no difficulty translating his own romantic feeling for nationality to the aspirations of other cultures. It was natural, then, for him to end up the friend of Michael Collins as well as F. E. Smith, Chaim Weizmann as well as Emir (later King) Abdullah, and to see that a two-state solution in both Ireland and Palestine was the only way to satisfy equally legitimate longings for homeland.

About Gérard Depardieu:

• Gérard Depardieu (...) must have worn the clothes of every generation after the Black Death.

About Pablo Picasso:

• Picasso regcognised in Rembrandt an ancestor of his own dangerous visual intelligence, which could move freely between the aesthetic convenience of the nude and the messier, sexier reality of the naked model: etched images of half-dressed women warming themselves by the stove. Nothing like that stripping truth would happen again until Manet and Degas.

About Bolognese sauce:

• Bolognese sauce isn't fast food.

About small children:

• Small children are nature's little conservatives. They are warmed by fulfilled expectations. They have favourites in the kitchen - and why deny them¿

About stews:

• Stews are bringers of contentment to a discontented world. I don't know of any other kind of food, except perhaps freshly baked bread and cakes, guaranteed to fill a kitchen with such a sense of abundance. They violate all the cool modern conventions, for they demand fat and time and copious carbs - mashed potatoes or parsnips, pasta or bread  to soak up the juicy mess.

But in general, this book is mostly aimed to the the Oxbridge / Ivy League Humanities crowd. For the rest of the World population, this book is a coin-toss: some bits are interesting, but most of it contains praises to artists and historians mostly unknown, at least to me (for instance: J. H. Plumb, Charlotte Rampling, Anselm Kiefer, John Virtue, Ruskin).

The book is also extremely verbose -or "eloquent", if you are British. British verbosity is something Americans love, which why they forgave Christopher Hitchens' atheism. But for the rest of the World, especially non-native English speakers, this book is a painful read.

The Iron Lady - Phyllida Lloyd

The first half of The Iron Lady is a depiction of a senile Margaret Thatcher that understandably annoys her family and members of the British Conservative Party.

The second half is a collection of sketches showing several passages of Mrs. Thatcher political career, masterfully performed by Meryl Streep. You need some basic knowledge of British History and politics to get a good grasp of this part of the movie.

The Iron Lady is just one more average movie, but it is likely to get several Oscars given the well-known American fascination with British accents.

The Queen - Stephen Frears

It is hard to write a negative review about a movie that received more than 25 major awards around the World, appeared in several Top 10 lists the year it was issued, and has a 97% approval rate in Rotten Tomatoes. And yet, I still think that The Queen is not the masterpiece everyone thinks it is. The acting of Michael Sheen as Tony Blair and Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II are remarkable, and Stephen Frears claims in The Making of that he had several sources close to both Blair and the Royal Family standing for the accuracy of the facts he portrays.

I think The Queen would be an excellent movie, worth of its 99.9% of approval rate, had the speech given by Elizabeth not been the focal point of the entire movie. Here is the original speech given by Elizabeth:



It would be excellent to compare the two speeches, but I was not able to find Helen Mirrens personification, so the trailer will have to do the trick.



Somehow, its hard for me to reconcile the iron lady image presented by Mirren with the fluffy lady who originally delivered the speech. I sometimes get the impression that Mirren got her inspiration for Elizabeth from the image presented in the pounds: a petrified character without the possibility to have any feelings whatsoever (to be fair, Mirren kind of cries in two or three moments of the movie).

I'm not saying that Elizabeth II is actually a nice old grandmother who felt any sympathy for Diana. It's no secret that they hated each other and the Queen is probably the iron person presented by Frears in private. I give him and his sources the benefit of the doubt. However,  Mirren was not able to represent the role of a nation's grandmother which Elizabeth was during the speech. She was not able to understand that she was not playing the role of the Queen playing the role of a fluffy venerable old lady.

I can only think of an actor who understood that she was not playing a character, but a character playing another character: Christopher Reeves. His performance as Superman trying to be a Clark Kent who hides Superman is simply superb.

The Italian Job - Peter Collinson

The original version of The Italian Job (1969) is about a bunch of English guys who go to Europe to steal some gold using three Minis. The main song of the movie, "Getta Bloomin Move on," has become a football anthem for English fans. In addition to offering one of the best open ends in the History of movies, this is a movie about British (English) pride at a time when the European Common Market was creeping on British Sovereignty.


Another movie called The Italian Job was made in 2003, loosely inspired by the movie directed by Collinson. Mini was no longer a British brand, the public stopped liking open ends, and there is no connection whatsoever to the United Kingdom. But the British were still afraid of the Europeans taking over their sovereignty...

The original movie is just excellent.

Live Forever. The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop - John Dower

Brit Pop was my first window to popular culture. I liked it so much that I grew up believing that the United Kingdom was a sunny place where everyone was happy, optimistic, and full of enthusiasm. Time would teach me better. Let’s be under no illusion: the United Kingdom is a gray, rainy, and cold place with little social mobility. I eventually realized that songs like “Live Forever” are in fact aspirational anthems against a boring life with no future.

Live Forever. The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop is a 2002 BBC documentary that describes the years between 1990 and 1997, which is, according to the director, the year when Brit Pop died. In that year, Oasis issued Be Here Now and Princess Diana died. Throughout the movie, Brit Pop is presented as a spontaneous reaction against the Thatcher years which was co-opted by Tony Blair. From that perspective, Noel Gallagher is the betrayer who compromised the movement's ideals. The movie requires the viewer to be aware of some glorious moments of British culture, like when Liam Gallagher appeared on Vanity Fair’s cover. The documentary is hard to follow sometimes, since it does not have a narrator: the viewer only gets to see fragments of interviews with people without any introduction or anything.

But the biggest problem of this documentary is that it was filmed too early. If we believe in the idea that New Labour and Brit Pop were linked, then the latter died when either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown left Downing Street, not before. Granted, with the death of Diana the world re-discover that monarchies are ruthless and ossified. And Be Here Now might have been a bad album (I personally do not think so, but let’s assume it is for the argument’s sake), but other bands pretended to sound like Oasis after that, and even Oasis eventually sounded like What’s the Story again. The Crown’s reaction to the death of Diana was only the first deception of a generation that believed in the promise that we could ignore how our friends’ gardens grow. After Diana, came the support to the War in Iraq and the saving of the big banks. And Blair passed from being Bambi to Bliar.

In retrospective, it is now evident that the legitimacy of New Labour rested upon the following bargain: in the first place, the government closed one eye to the excesses of the City bankers as long as they paid enough taxes to keep the social programs running. The other side of the agreement was that the social programs would not create human capital or enhance productivity. Like in the rest of Europe, the British state has decided to maintain an underclass of people who make more money by being unemployed and receiving their unemployment benefits than working. In Cool Britannia, it is easier to sell the idea that any guys’ band can become rock ‘n’ roll stars and make money than telling them that their life will not be better than their parents’.

Labour left office a couple of months after Oasis announced its split. The sound-like-the-Beatles formula is exhausted, just like the idea that big taxes and generous social programs compensate for the lack of regulation. The United Kingdom is broke and its prospects are dim: the dullness and frustration of the Thatcher year will stay here for a long time after 15 years of partying. Things like Britain’s Got Talent just make the landscape even more depressing. 

Sorry for the kids.

We had a good time.