Yes, there are some drawbacks to being God: You would know how all the movies end; it’s hard to go for a quiet evening out without being recognised; people are forever doing awful things and saying it was your idea.
Mostly, though, I would get depressed by the kinds of people I would have to deal with every day. Heaven seemed like a good enough idea in the beginning – you get to hang out with your buddies and no one ever has to get up early to go to work – but heaven must increasingly be resembling Cape Town: it’s an attractive enough place, but all the interesting people are somewhere else.
Imagine, for instance, having to spend eternity in the company of Neleh and Vicepiah. Neleh and Vicepiah are not the names of twin towns on a Biblical plain earmarked for destruction, although they should be. Neleh and Vicepiah are the names of the last two contestants in Survivor: Marquesas (SABC3, Tuesdays), which ended this week. Throughout the series the two gals ran their respective campaigns on a two-pronged platform of evangelism and deceit. Neleh was a Mormon, and Vicepiah belonged to some other denomination that allows you to do whatever you want as long as you ask forgiveness afterwards.
“We pray to the same God,” Neleh solemnly informed Vicepiah, in a moment of what passed for multiculturalism in America. It might have been a meaningful gesture if Neleh had been Palestinian and Vicepiah an Israeli soldier, but between two Christian denominations it was hardly an epiphanic moment.
They may pray to the same God, but they had different ideas about what God’s best course of action should be. Neleh prayed that God would make Neleh win. Vicepiah prayed that God would make Vicepiah win. “I am proud of my spirituality,” they both informed the camera. It was infuriating to watch two such smug individuals so utterly persuaded of their own virtue. Their faith had not made them behave any better than anyone else – it had just allowed them to feel good about it.
Perhaps I am just envious. It must be a pretty sweet deal to be able to act the way we are going to act anyway, and still have no doubt that it’s all going to turn out well for us in the end. I have no beef with religion. I had a beef with Neleh and Vicepiah.
“I could never believe in a God that did not know how to dance,” Nietzsche once said. I suppose I could never believe in a God that watched Reality TV. The good news was that one of them was going to lose. The bad news was that one of them was going to win. Vicepiah won. She hooted. She hollered. “God is good!” she hooted and hollered. Neleh did not hoot and holler that God was good. Vicepiah thought God had made the right call. Neleh wasn’t so sure. Neleh, you had the impression, was beginning to wonder if they really did pray to the same God. What if, she seemed to be thinking, my God was watching Big Brother instead?
The long reach of television
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 21 OCTOBER 2002
TELEVISION HAS A long reach, and it makes bonds where you would scarcely imagine bonds might be. I have just today returned from Namibia, and more precisely from the Skeleton Coast. The Skeleton Coast is the most extraordinary place I have visited. It is far, far from here, a place of dreams and fears, where the sky and the sea and the sand meet and make an agreement that does not take human beings into account. You cannot live on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia; you can only visit it, and each moment that you are there, you know you are there only on the sufferance of the sky and the sea and the sand.
On the Skeleton Coast the nearest telephone is 300 km away. The nearest television is further. It is a wild place. It is wilderness. On the shore I saw the bleached masts of 19th-century whaling ships, and jackals that roam the dunes and pick over the scrubbed bones of baleen whales. I saw hawks and gulls and lions that walk the sand, feeding on the slowest seals. There are elephants and dead men and a wind that never stops blowing from the sea. The foam mounts on the sand until the shore is like the trembling crest of some infernal beer.
The Skeleton Coast is a lonely place, but I was not lonely. I had good company. Among the company was a German man named Wolfgang. Wolfgang and I did not warm to each other. I am not proud of it, but I have an in-built prejudice against Germans. I don’t seriously believe that the Maginot Line is in serious danger any more, but old habits die hard. (I mean my habit of mistrusting Germans, not necessarily the 20th-century German habit of wearing grey and invading their neighbours.)
Wolfgang was in his sixties, and although rationally I knew that means that he was too young ever to have piloted the Stuka that dive-bombed my grandfather’s tank in 1944, still I looked at him askance. I began to feel like John Cleese. There were South African history buffs in the camp, and whenever anyone mentioned war, I found myself, as though possessed, turning to Wolfgang and saying, “They are talking about the Anglo-Boer War, you know. Oh, yes, the Anglo-Boer War. Gee, what a war, eh? Never mind, we’re all friends now.”
It was, you might imagine, awkward. My companion – an individual of immense diplomacy and good sense – took me aside and said, “Will you shut up about the war already? Who do you think you are, Winston Churchill?” But could I stop? I could not.
And then the peculiar thing happened. Around the campfire one night, someone mentioned Bing Crosby. I forget how Bing Crosby was mentioned in the distant sandy hollows of the world’s most desolate coast, but he was, and what’s more, he was not popular. Popular opinion on the Skeleton Coast, I am compelled to report, was not in favour of Bing Crosby. Good words were spoken of Jim Reeves, of all people, and Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, with which I can scarcely argue, but Bing Crosby received short shrift. For want of anything else to say, I offered: “Oh, Bing’s not all bad. His daughter shot JR, for one thing.”
That received the silence it deserved, but then Wolfgang turned to me. “You are right,” he said. “Mary Crosby played Sue-Ellen’s sister, Kristin Sheperd, and she shot JR.”
I was astonished. “You know Dallas ?” I said. Wolfgang leaned forward, and his khaki safari-vest rustled slightly under the intensity of his gaze. “I love Dallas,” he said.
Wolfgang is a Dallas ophile. I too am a Dallas ophile. It is currently being repeated on the Series Channel (DStv), but my Dallas memories are vivid from the days I used to tiptoe out of bed at 9 pm on a Tuesday and peer around the corner of the living room to watch the doings of the Ewings over my parents’ shoulders.
Occasionally I was caught and my mouth was washed out with soap (my father would have preferred to have washed out my eyes with soap, but my mother was a gentle soul), but still each Tuesday I returned. Sometimes I snuck outside and stood in the garden, watching Dallas reflected on an open window in the Durban summer night. I am still obscurely touched to think that my parents sought to shelter me from the horrors of the adult world by forbidding me to watch Dallas. If only they had just forbidden me to grow up, I am sure I would have been much happier.
I love remembering Dallas. It awakens in me the memory of the days when being an adult still seemed exciting. For the rest of the trip, Wolfgang and I tested each other on Dallas trivia. “Who was JR’s lawyer?” Wolfgang asked. “Harv Smithfield,” I replied with a smirk.
“What was the name of the corrupt Dallas sheriff?” I asked. “Fenton,” said Wolfgang, shrugging.
On the whole, I blush to confess, Wolfgang had the edge with Dallas trivia. For one thing, he remembered the name of the nightclub where Audrey Landers as Afton Cooper sang when she was still Cliff Barnes’ girlfriend. I had to concede.
From our Dallas connection, conversation grew. We spoke about being children and seeing things we were not allowed to see. We spoke about the small sorrows of growing older. We spoke about our fathers, and dying. We never mentioned the war.
Now Wolfgang is back in his small village outside Bremen, and I am on this page, fielding queries from friends about when I am going to update my photograph. It wasn’t quite like the Christmas Day the soldiers called truce to play football in no-man’s-land, but still it felt good. Now I have a place to stay, the next time I find myself in a small village outside Bremen. And we have Dallas to than
k.
My kind of serial killer
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 3 NOVEMBER 2002
NOW WHERE IS Hannibal Lecter when you really need him? I have of late been thinking about Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter, I am compelled to admit, is my kind of guy.
I have always liked Hannibal Lecter, I suppose, in a distant sort of way. He had a fine nose for perfume and a way with women that impressed me. Like John Malkovich chatting up Michelle Pheiffer in Dangerous Liasons, Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs touched a nerve deep in every young man’s heart. “Say, I don’t need a flashy car or an expensive haircut in order to interest the ladies,” every young man realised, on some deep and perhaps inarticulate level. “All I need is to learn how to speak to them. Maybe not precisely like Hannibal Lecter speaks to Jodie Foster – in some circles that may be regarded as a little creepy, and not all women respond well to the rumbling threat of being eaten on the first date – but he does seem to know a thing or two about holding up his end of the conversation.”
What was captivating about Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs was that he was himself captured. His power was the power of a low voice in the darkness, like a brooding fallen Lucifer plotting one day to get back up there where the air is rarefied. It was comforting to a young man. When you are a young man without money, a vehicle or much by way of desirable social resources, life can feel very similar to a solitary cell in a maximum-security prison: you can’t go anywhere and you have to wear unattractive clothing and your only companions are other men in a similar social position with unattractive personal habits. Ah, but with a voice and a mind, Hannibal Lecter could transcend all that! And win an Oscar too! Hannibal Lecter was a quiet inspiration.
But last week, tucked up on the sofa with a barrel of fried chicken, a full heart and Hannibal (M-Net, Sunday, 8pm), it occurred to me that Hannibal Lecter on the loose is altogether a different proposition. I had not seen the sequel before, although I had nearly watched it one night in wintry Amsterdam when I was on my own and at a loose end. (Traditionally single men at night in Amsterdam find other entertainment than an Anthony Hopkins movie, but I was not much tempted by such ruddy delights. The human body is capable of many splendours and wonders, but I would like to keep some of them as a surprise for my middle age. Besides, even alone and in Amsterdam, there are some loose ends at which you do not want to be.)
I had chosen not to watch Hannibal that night, even though there was an English-language print showing in a theatre somewhere off the Kaizersgracht, because I was already lonely and cold and in a foreign city, with the canals stirring slow and dark and menacing. The last thing I needed was to feel lonely and cold in a foreign city with the pressing suspicion that I am being followed down the side alleys by a cannibal in a Panama hat. But last Sunday I was not lonely and I was not cold, and all of a sudden I found myself wishing that I had Hannibal Lecter on personal retainer.
In Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter is on the loose. Outside of prison, much of his personal power is dissipated. His voice and his personality are not as important – he can buy things and wear disguises and even become involved in tussles with the forces of evil. Well, the other forces of evil. It is, I suppose, a little like being a young man grown older. Life is a little easier and much more fun but not necessarily as dramatic. I identified far less with Hannibal Lecter in the second movie, but I approved of him even more.
Hannibal Lecter kills and eats people. Big deal, you might say. There are plenty of people who kill and eat people. But Hannibal Lecter’s gimmick is that he prefers to kill and eat people who deserve it, not because they are immoral or unethical, but because they are without grace or taste. Oh, what a thought! The problem with serial killers is that they are so random. Worse: they are often fairly uncouth individuals themselves. What could be a more dismal fate than being randomly killed and eaten by some unshaven yob scratching his belly and listening to The Best of Queen in his pick-up truck? But if serial killers were calm and rational and dedicated to making the world a better place by removing, not the sinners and the harlots, but the bad mannered and the poorly dressed, I would be all in favour of them. Ah, would that there were a squadron of Hannibal Lecters.
Different serial killers resemble different understandings of God. I would love to believe in a God like Hannibal Lecter – an individual of taste and breeding, punishing those who jump queues or who have facial piercings or who bring babies to restaurants or who insist on telling you jokes. Sadly, in my limited experience, if God is a serial killer, he more closely resembles the Washington sniper. It is a random harvest.
Such at any rate were my thoughts, late of a Sunday evening, having watched Hannibal Lecter eat part of the living brain of Ray Liotta with a knife and fork. At such moments my mind turns frequently to improving the world. If only we could identify the part of the brain that enjoys Big Brother, and that makes people stand reading their transaction slip at the ATM instead of stepping aside already, and that invented the mullet hairstyle. If only we could, I might just turn Hannibal myself. Pass the salt.
Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 24 NOVEMBER 2002
I HAVE TO CONFESS, and I suppose this is as good a place as any to do my confessing. My confession is this: I have of late, I know not why, been troubled by curious dreams. I say “curious”, but I am being discreet. These dreams are more than curious – they cause me to wake in the night, trembling and mopping myself and reaching for a glass of water. There is pleasure involved in these dreams, but they are guilty pleasures. They are not the sorts of pleasures you would want to tell your mother.
The sum and essence of my problem – the nub, you might say – is Anne Robinson. Oh go on, you know Anne Robinson. Anne Robinson is the Torquemada of Trivia, the Grand Inquisitor of the Intellect. Anne Robinson is a torturer, a tyrant, a short, female, bespectacled, red-headed Idi Amin of the airwaves. God, I love that woman.
Anne Robinson presents The Weakest Link (BBC Prime, DStv, weekdays, 7.05pm) in much the same way that Daisy de Melker presented her husband with his morning coffee. But unlike Daisy de Melker, Anne Robinson doesn’t smile. It would be fair to say that Anne Robinson is sarcastic, but only if you agree that it would be fair to say that Ronnie Biggs had no respect for the law, or that the shark in Jaws had pointy teeth and he showed them pearly white. In Anne Robinson’s hands, sarcasm is an artistic medium. It is expressive, it is aesthetic and it causes you to question your assumptions about the world, which is apparently what contemporary artists understand to be the principal purpose of art. Anne Robinson’s sarcasm, indeed, could win the Turner Prize. Come to think of it, that would be a bright day for contemporary art, when you consider the sort of threadbare balderdash that does win the Turner Prize.
The Weakest Link is an English question-and-answer game show in which a procession of spotty Brits take turns to quail and crumble beneath the gimlet gaze of Anne Robinson. (“Do you even know what a gimlet is?” Anne Robinson asked me in my dream last night. “Er … uh … it is a small tool that bores things, isn’t it?” I stammered. “And does that description fit anyone else in this room, would you say?” said Anne Robinson. I blushed and lowered my head in a kind of furious ecstasy of abasement.)
Anne Robinson’s greatest asset, besides the ability to convince you she is wearing leather thighboots and a riding crop beneath her black ankle-length coat, is a talent for making you believe she knows all the answers to all the questions. Anne Robinson, you would swear, is omniscient and omnipotent, and she knows when you’ve been naughty, and she knows when you’ve been nice. When you answer incorrectly, she looks at you with such mingled disappointment and contempt that you feel – yea, verily, you feel – that your coming chastisement is proper and deserved and you only wish she would find it in herself to punish you a little longer.
“Roy, what do you do for a living?” Anne Robinson asked a portly fellow on the show this week.
“I’m a comedian, Anne,” he replied bravely.
“Really?” said Anne, with a voice that could be used to perform keyhole surgery. “Are you a professional comedian, Roy, or do you mean your friends think that you are a bit of a card down at the pub?”
Roy swallowed heavily. “No, no, I’m a professional,” he said gamely.
“So people pay you to be funny, do they, Roy? You must be very funny indeed. Tell us a joke.”
Roy did not want to tell a joke. Roy would rather have performed an emergency appendectomy on himself using his own teeth than tell a joke at that moment. But when Anne Robinson speaks, strong men bend the knee. Roy told a joke. I could scarcely hear the joke, I was in such agonies of masculine sympathy. Anne Robinson listened to Roy’s joke. Her face was as the face of Pharaoh Akhenaten on a mural in the Luxor necropolis. The Pharaoh Akhenaten was not remembered by antiquity for his sense of humour, particularly in necropolises.
“Roy,” said Anne Robinson.
Roy shuffled his feet and dropped his eyes. “Yes, Anne,” said Roy.
“Do you know any funny jokes, Roy?” said Anne Robinson.
Oh, how she haunts my dreams. Night after night she returns, her stiletto heels clacking on my floor and across my chest, mouth pursed with the inward pleasure of kindness withheld, asking me questions, always questions, questions that torment and mock, questions with no answers. “If it’s called Business Class,” she demands, “why do they allow babies in?” and “Where is the reflexology pressure point for feet?” and “Do hot cakes really sell better than other sorts of cakes?”
But I Digress ... Page 11