It's Only a Movie

by Mark Kermode

  How’s that for a poster quote?

  So, ladies and gentlemen, it remains only for me to remind you to switch of your mobile phones, take your knees out of the back of my chair, stop eating any noisy food, and basically shut the Sam Hill up as we dim the lights for …

  ‘Our Feature Presentation’

  Chapter 1

  ‘COME AWAY, OH HUMAN CHILD …’

  In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been studiously ignoring ever since.

  ‘Learn to speak properly,’ he told me, ‘and stop watching all those films.’

  Having made a profession out of speaking improperly about films, I imagine that I must be a great disappointment to him. But hey, at least I didn’t become a transvestite pop star which I frequently (and, it transpired, hollowly) threatened to do, so there was some cause for paternal rejoicing after all.

  As early as I can remember, my life was defined by movies. I recall my childhood not as a succession of birthday parties, bruised knees and short-trousered playground scuffles but as a glorious parade of films – their posters, trailers and certificates; where I saw them; who I saw them with (usually no one); even which seat I was sitting in and how good the view was.

  This last point is particularly important. From childhood to dotage I have always needed to see every inch of the screen and cannot bear even the smallest obscuring of the picture by heads, curtains or inadequately maintained projection lenses. When I see a movie, now matter how rotten it may be, I want to see it the way it was meant to look without interruptions, visual or aural, and on this issue I know no moderation. So, for example, if you ask me about Silent Running, which is probably my favourite sci-fi movie of all time, I can tell you that I first saw it in June 1972 in London’s Baker Street with my school friend Mark Furst whose father (a famous conductor) took us for a treat on a Wednesday night. On arrival at the cinema, Mark and I surveyed the poster (of which I now own several signed copies) depicting Bruce Dern and a Drone robot planting a flower in an outer-space geodesic dome. We gawped at the poster, grinned at each other with glee, and did that early seventies playground hand-slap that was the forerunner of the now corporately institutionalised ‘high five’. Inside, we sat on the left-hand side of the auditorium, about ten rows from the front with me on the aisle seat (another early obsession – I don’t do ‘trapped’ seating) yet despite the vast Cinerama-style curved screen my view of the picture was troubled by the unreasonably big hair of the wide-lapelled gentleman in front of me. This would not do, and I had to lean right out into the aisle to remove the Mungo Jerry lookalike’s presence from my line of sight – a position I remember maintaining for the duration of the movie. Now, whenever I think about Silent Running (which is quite often), I get a tweaking sensation in the back of my neck, as if my body were physically remembering the circumstances of seeing the film for the first time.

  For the record, the supporting feature on the programme that night was a documentary about stuntmen which started with a ground-level shot of a man and woman running along some tarmac with fudgy greenery in the foreground which moved in and out of focus in that now nostalgic zoom lens fashion. I remember this exactly because it was during this shot that I did the physical maths to figure out just how far I had to lean in order to avoid Mr Jerry and his hair without falling out of the chair.

  Oh, and the movie was really great, and made me cry.

  Part of its tear-jerking charm was an unabashed and thoroughly unfashionable sentimentality, heightened by Peter Schickele’s glistening score and a couple of heartbreakingly hippy-dippy future-folk songs earnestly warbled by Joan Baez. Decades later, I had the bewildering experience of sharing a small BBC studio with Joan Baez, who popped up on Radio Four’s long-running arts programme Kaleidoscope in the mid-nineties to perform a couple of feather-throated acoustic numbers. I had arrived late to review some utterly forgettable film and, having no idea that Ms Baez would be there, was left in speechless palpitations by her radiant presence. As a teenager, I’d spent a vast amount of money ordering a Japanese import soundtrack album of Silent Running, the much-loved vinyl of which I had polished and treasured like a religious relic. And now here she was, in the flesh – the lungs, the lips, the larynx which had given birth to ‘Rejoice in the Sun’, the voice of God singing to me through the celluloid.

  While we were on-air I struggled to contain my excitement, but the minute the show was finished and microphones were closed I virtually threw myself at her feet, to her astonishment and alarm.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Ms Baez,’ I blurted pathetically, ‘but I just have to tell you that I absolutely love love love love love … Silent Running.’

  She looked at me, blankly.

  ‘Silent what?’

  ‘Silent Running. You know … Silent Running.The seventies sci-fi film. Bruce Dern and the walking dustbins. Geodesic domes. Eco-warriors in space.’

  A hint of recognition flitted briefly across her face.

  ‘And you,’ I continued.’You doing the theme song. You know, “Fields of children running wild, in the sun, tra la la la”. Obviously it sounds stupid when I do it, but when you did it, it was wonderful …’

  She screwed up her face a bit, and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, uncertainly.‘Yeah. I remember it. I think. Silent Running? Yeah, I got it …’

  ‘Oh thank heavens … I was starting to think I was going mad.’

  She paused.

  ‘I remember the song,’ she mused.’Never saw the film.’ She gave me a breezy smile.’Any good?’

  Such is the nature of songs and cinema; it’s the ones you forget that everyone else remembers – and vice versa. And, like Linda Blair in Exorcist II: The Heretic, I remember everything – or at least, I think I remember it …

  Let me explain.

  It has often been argued that cinema has such a profound effect upon the viewer because it substantially mirrors the function of memory. When we look at the world we allegedly observe a linear narrative assembled with invisible old-fashioned Hollywood continuity editing rather than nouvelle vague European fast-forwards, flashbacks and jump cuts from one scene to the next. We are literally stuck in the moment, watching the uncut rushes, as it were, with life unspooling before us in real/reel time.

  If this is indeed the case (and Buddhists who aspire to ‘living in the now’ would insist that it most definitely is not) we should be surprised that the montage of moving images which cinema has been serving up for over a century is not more baffling – a time-and-space-travelling mosaic in which our POV flits from one place and time to the next in an instant. Why does edited film, with its increasingly kinetic barrage of cubist visual information, seem so natural, so ordinary, so familiar? Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5, may have become famously ‘unstuck in time’ but the rest of us have no such luck. In our day jobs we are neither Time Lords nor gods blessed with omniscient all-seeing eyes. So how come we ‘get’ cinema at all?

  One answer is that the Buddhists were right all along, and ‘living in the now’ actually takes several lifetimes of practice. Another (related) explanation may be that the act of watching movies somehow replicates the peculiar card-shuffling experience of memory – that we remember events in a manner strikingly similar to the way a movie constructs a story on celluloid. It’s as if our memory was some kind of Freudian auteur, and each of us has their own jodhpur-clad Erich von Stroheim striding around in their frontal lobes, conjuring widescreen epics from the raw footage of our day-to-day experience. When we remember things, or when we dream about them, we are in effect sitting in our own private screening room, watching an egotistical director’s cut of life as only we have known and lived it. As David Lynch tells us in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, ‘We live inside a dream’. And we dream inside a movie.

  This may sound like hooey to you (go talk to the Buddhists and see if they can do any better) but it makes perfect sense t
o me and since I am to all intents and purposes the auteur of this book and the director of this ‘real life’ Movie of the Week, you’d better get used to it. There’ll be no test screenings nor audience feedback cards from here on in, OK? This is my movie and I get final cut – like Michael Cimino on Heaven’s Gate, only with more jokes and less roller-skating. And in my film, memories and movies are all but indistinguishable. So when I say that something actually happened, it may well be that it only happened in the rancid, popcorn-filled drive-in cinema that is my head. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t ‘real’ – merely that, to me, it is all ‘only a movie’.

  The problem, as I have discovered, is that movies, like memories, are malleable and frequently exist in several different cuts. Just as Francis Ford Coppola can’t stop fiddling with Apocalypse Now or Oliver Stone can always find another few hours of footage to jam into JFK we all seem to treat our personal back catalogue as a work in progress, to be restructured willy-nilly for each new performance. In my case, the situation is worsened by the fact that I appear to have a rogue editor running wild in my subconscious, randomly splicing scenes from one film into another with peculiarly anarchic results.

  Let me give you an example.

  When I was eleven, I saw a trailer for Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the last in the ongoing simian saga which would come to play an unhealthily large part in my psychological development. Indeed, I would argue that the seeds of the adolescent Marxist/Leninist leanings which I displayed in the mid-eighties were actually sown in the early seventies during a double bill of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at the ABC Turnpike Lane. To the casual viewer, these films may seem to be dopey anthropomorphic fantasies with men in monkey-masks doing a sort of grown-up version of those PG Tips tea commercials in which chimpanzees in bowler hats attempt to move a piano up a flight of stairs (‘Dad, do you know the piano’s on my foot?’ ‘You hum it, son, I’ll play it. Ha ha ha ha!’). Yet to the cognoscenti they are astutely sketched political parables, with Beneath offering a stern lecture upon the nuclear madness of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (mutant humans worshipping the ‘Father, Son and Holy Bomb’) and Conquest littering its city-burning Spartacist rebellion with Black Power salutes and bold proto-leftie rights-for-all rhetoric.

  Nowadays, I could pretty much recite the plots of all five Apes movies (plus the flawed 2001 Tim Burton ‘update’) and most of the spin-off TV show episodes at a moment’s notice (don’t push me, because I will ). But back in 1974 I had never seen an Apes film, and I was utterly transfixed and baffled by the trailer for Battle. Two things I remember very clearly – the first was imploring my mum to take me to the Hendon Odeon to see Battle on a scorching hot summer’s afternoon which she insisted would be much better spent at the lido in East Finchley. Regrettably, the film’s A certificate required the accompaniment of a parent so there was no chance of her dropping me off at the cinema while taking my sister and brother for a refreshing dip. If I was going to the cinema, we were all going to the cinema – which (it was ‘unanimously’ decided) we weren’t.

  The second thing I remember with crystal clarity is a scene from that trailer in which a female ape, played by Kim Hunter under a mountain of prosthetic appliances, stared sadly into the middle distance and said with great poignancy, ‘The poor man … he tries to love me.’ This scene, with its strange transgenic longing, made a particularly strong impression on my prepubescent psyche, and even today I can hear that line delivered with a conviction which would shame Meryl Streep.

  Imagine my disappointment therefore when, in the full flush of teenage independence, I finally got to see Battle for the Planet of the Apes on a rerun double bill at the Barnet Odeon and discovered that that scene wasn’t in it. For a while I assumed that (as so often happens) it was an early out-take which had been used for publicity purposes but had hit the floor during the final editing of the film. A shame, but there you go. Yet I struggled to imagine where such a scene could have fitted into the film which I saw, and which contained precious little trace of the charged romantic entanglements implied in that trailer which I remembered so well.

  Several years later, I found myself watching Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and was shocked to hear Liza Minnelli deliver the line ‘The poor man … he tries to love me’ in exactly the same manner as Kim Hunter, only with far less facial hair, obviously. I was utterly befuddled; what the hell was an out-take line from Battle for the Planet of the Apes doing being quoted in an Oscar-winning musical about naughty Nazis in the thirties?

  The answer, of course, was that had I seen trailers for Cabaret and Battle back to back and my over-fried imagination had somehow spliced them together to create its very own mental movie mash-up in which a talkative ape spoke with the voice of Sally Bowles. The scene never existed in the ‘real’ world, but in the movie house of my memory it was playing five times a day to a packed house of me.

  I am not alone in this kind of confusion. As recently as 2008 I managed to persuade Bill Forsyth (director of Local Hero, my second- or third-favourite movie of all time) to accompany me to Pennan, the tiny Scottish village where he had shot much of his magical, melancholy masterpiece. Forsyth is famously reticent about watching his own movies (Woody Allen described the experience as being like a chef eating one of his own meals and tasting only ‘too much basil’) and generally spurns any opportunity to be nostalgic about his back catalogue. But after much cajoling he agreed to come to Pennan to film an item for BBC2’s The Culture Show about the reopening of the village hall which had been destroyed by a mudslide during particularly harsh rainfall. The idea was that we would gather together people who remembered the production of Local Hero¸ and we’d put on a gala screening of the movie with Forsyth in attendance. The ceilidh band who appeared in the movie, the Acetones, also agreed to play a few tunes, and I insisted on being allowed to murder Mark Knopfler’s haunting ‘Theme from Local Hero’ on bagpipes on the beach as the sun went down – an idea which was initially resisted for reasons which I never fully understood …

  Anyway, somehow the whole event came together and culminated in a dream-come-true evening in which I sat at the back of a packed hall in Pennan and watched the strange wonderment of Local Hero unfold with an increasingly emotional Forsyth by my side. Despite having watched it fifty or sixty times the movie never fails to move me, and as it played out on that starry autumn night I was once again enraptured by its dark and timeless spell. Some people think of it as charming, heart-warming fare but there’s something much more moody and subversive which causes it to break my heart – a quality which Forsyth perfectly encapsulated when he described Local Hero as ‘a cross between Brigadoon and Apocalypse Now’.

  But as we sat there, with me wondering whether life could actually get any better than this, Bill suddenly leaned across and whispered in a not very sotto voce: ‘This isn’t the movie.’

  ‘What?’ I replied, baffled.

  ‘This isn’t the movie,’ he said again.’This is some TV version of the movie.’

  I didn’t understand what he meant. I looked up at the screen, wondering whether it was being projected in the wrong ratio (square, rather than oblong) but no; there was Local Hero in all its rectangular cinematic glory.

  ‘What do you mean it’s “some TV version”?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, there’s loads of stuff missing,’ said Bill.

  ‘Stuff missing? What stuff?’

  ‘Well like just then, when they stopped the car because it was too foggy to drive. There’s a whole conversation that’s been cut out – an entire scene.’

  I thought about this for a moment. I’d been watching the movie very closely and I was pretty damn sure we hadn’t skipped even a single word. Yet Bill was flustered, sure that something was wrong.

  ‘Which scene do you mean?’ I asked, adding gently that, ‘I haven’t noticed any cuts.’

  Bill took a deep breath, as if readying himself to enact the missing scene right there and
then.

  Then he stopped. Deflated. Wrong-footed. Unsure.

  ‘I think,’ he said, as much to himself as to me, ‘that I’m remembering the script rather than the film.’

  He turned and smiled at me.

  ‘I think,’ he went on, ‘that I cut the scene out myself. In the editing. I can’t quite remember. I thought I’d left it in. But it was so long ago, and now I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well I’ve seen this film loads of times,’ I assured him, ‘and honestly, what’s up there on the screen is the film that’s been out there in the world for the past twenty-five years.’

  ‘Ahh yes,’ said Bill sagely.’“The film that’s been out there in the world.” I’m not so familiar with that. I just know the film that’s been inside my head.’

  Exactly!

  I wanted to hug him.

  But I resisted, and sat quietly in my seat, dreaming of the film inside Bill Forsyth’s head …

  The film that has been playing inside my head for the last forty years is Krakatoa: East of Java, an old-fashioned action spectacular from 1969 which boasted Thunderbirds-style special effects, later enhanced by the stomach-rumbling power of ‘Feelarama’. Today the film is perhaps best known for its geographically challenged title, for (as any fule kno) Krakatoa is actually due west of Java – duh! But for me, Krakatoa: East of Java retains a special place in my heart for containing the first scene I can actually remember seeing in a movie house – the Crescent, Douglas, Isle of Man. Oh, I know there was lots of stuff with ships and air balloons and exploding volcanoes – largely because most of those crowd-pleasing highlights were depicted on the poster, and very probably in the trailers. But I can’t remember watching them – only being aware that I had seen them after the fact, and in the abstract.