The idea that colour in itself attracts an audience is also open to doubt. Cinema attendance plummeted throughout the ’60s when the rival television was in black and white. Casablanca recently on television out-rated all its garish rivals. On any night the curiously loyal are seeing again for the fifth time the same old Marx Brothers comedies and the same stark Bergman tragedies in the unendurable tedium of black and white. Of the black-and-white, or partly black-and-white features released in the English language in the last twelve years – If, A Man and a Woman, The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, Lenny, Newsfront, Manhattan and Stardust Memories – only one, Lenny, has lost money. This is a record eight times as good as the colour movies brought out in the same period. In 1963 Twentieth Century Fox was saved by a black-and-white film, The Longest Day, from a financial disaster caused by a colour one, Cleopatra.
The loss forever of the special worlds of Smiles of a Summer Night and Last Year at Marienbad and La Strada and Bicycle Thieves is a tragic one. Its replacement has been a branch, not of narrative art, but of interior decoration, whose proper use is the television commercial. The time has come when we should get back to what we value, a means of expression that is more dramatic, more succinct, more fluid, more impelling and statistically more successful, a medium in which all our fondest memories are etched, the medium of the future, black and white.
Cinema Papers, June 1981
ON LOVE, MAY 1999
A plausible theory I read once – in Penelope Lively’s slim sweet novel According to Mark – is that love is a virus that passes like the flu. It infects, takes hold, brings night sweats, is treated, subsides and at last is gone. This seems to me to fit all aspects of the case, in youth and age. But so too does the theory that love never dies, but returns in a kind of glowing flashback every seven years or so, and can be enjoyed again for a night, a week, exactly as it was.
Love fits a lot of definitions. The best I know (from The Reader’s Digest 1955) is ‘fullness of response’. This allows it, as it must, to change, transform itself, in an hour or so, into hate, stalking, pursuit, a suicide pact, a murder. It evokes too that claustrophobic enclosedness, that hot obsessiveness, best seen in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or in Shakespeare’s poison sonnet on the troubling adjacent subject of lust.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad,
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof – and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream:
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
The sexual component of love seems mostly to presage its undoing: Hamlet spurns Ophelia, mocks her, bids her go to a nunnery once he has bedded her – ‘I did love you once.’ ‘Indeed, my Lord, you made me believe so.’ Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction satisfies himself, then is haunted and stalked by a kind of disease that will not go away. That most erotic of films, Betty Blue, starts with a vivid, limbs-clenched consummation, then goes on to chart a nightmare, as the hero finds the beloved is mad.
Love without sex as a rule is better, or seems so in retrospect. One girl I loved first when I was sixteen – if loved is the word – and took out, courted, proposed to, met again, courted again, for seven years, I found in Canada in 1968 and got at last to bed in Toronto. And because the relationship was built on a kind of hovering pleasured incompleteness – a kiss, a fumble, an intense long talk at night by Bondi Beach – once pushed to its logical end was soon, in another year, over. Love is best in youth because of all that incompleteness. The boy in Cinema Paradiso, who waits for ninety-nine nights beneath the window of his beloved to the music of Morricone, best reminds us of what it was like, and the heart soars and tingles.
Oh do not call it love though thousands praise
These primy thoughts of thee on edge of sleep
That fill with naked thees my hidden ways
And mock me like so many counted sheep.
O do not call it love though I do sing
Archangel-sweet of slumbering on thy breast
And half-convert the nations of the West
To worship at thine icon in the Spring.
Oh do not call it love and do not weep
Though I do plunge the world five fathoms deep
In adoration of thy bridal trove
For love requires a giving back to keep
The barren age at bay in one joint sleep;
And lacking that, oh do not call it love.
The above, surprisingly perhaps, was written by me in imitation, I suppose, of Shakespeare or Donne – ‘to an unhad beloved, still unhad’ – when I was young. I had long thought it burnt but it turned up, and there it is. It’s a measure of what fruitfulness comes with unconsummation, what sweet sorrow. It’s a measure, too, of what it was like for us who are old now when, in our youth, the custom was unconsummation, and yearning, and letters, and phone calls with long pauses, and lingering on the doorstep, or those comic half-measures in the front seat of the car that we saw with such glum recognition in The Last Picture Show, that best film of what it was like in the ’50s. Behave now. All that can wait till after we’re married. Oh, Emmy Lou …
Love is a word that covers too many meanings, too many, as the novelist might say, wild shores of the heart. The Inuit have, I think, twenty-eight different words for different kinds of snow, but no one word for snow as a generality, and it were best for us if we had more words for different loves, and none for the generality.
There is puppy love, and carnal love, and shipboard, passing love, and old love returning (Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado), the love of pets, the love of brothers, the love of grandchildren, and these need no explaining. There is love unconsummate in old age between a widow and a widower, finding and looking after one another in their last extremity. There is enduring love between those who dwell together, and have children together, and go through buffetings and trials together, bonding – as the dull word is – into that super-loyalty that is wedlock, married life. There is the love of a mother for a baby at the breast. That is fullness of response. That is greater love than all. She will turn her back to the bullet to shield her baby. She will do it instinctively.
A great unspoken fact of love, I think, is its situationality – its proneness and vulnerability to geography. As a student you shared digs or a tutorial group with someone, and you see them often, and soon you are in love. An arranged marriage of the Greek or Jewish kind grows eventually, ineluctably, in a shared house with children, into something like love. To spend time with someone – to go, for instance, on a camping trip with them, or a sailing trip, or even a train journey – is to begin, somehow, to love them. To know a person is to love them. You cannot stay forever bonded to the girl who left for England eight years ago and writes a letter now and then. She has to be here, or you have to be there, in the room. You have to engage.
Is love replaceable then? I think so. I have seen too many pleasured widowhoods – in my aunties, in my mother, whose great love, Wal, died on Monday night – to think that anything else is true. When asked the difficult question of who out of a widow’s three dead husbands will be her husband in heaven, Jesus of Nazareth, giving it up, said there would be no marriage in heaven. It improved the religion’s popularity immensely, I imagine – beyond the pearly gates, the orgy. But what else could there be. Each new love was true, and it passed into death, and was replaced.
Since the publication of the first Lancelot–Guinevere stories
in the thirteenth century, we have been obsessed with stories of adulterous love, and this leads me to believe – and I have no proof – that at least as a yearning it is an almost universal fact in married lives. For David and Bathsheba, for Antony and Cleopatra, for even Henry VIII’s long seven-year quest for the enjoyment of Ann Boleyn, there is a sympathy in women readers that suggests at least a knowledge, a participative dreaming of the dangerous chase that shows what we loosely give the name of love to be more promiscuous, more adventurous, more game than some in pulpits and courts would have it. And there is a lot of it about (prove that I lie), and much enjoyed and contemplated, and much in old age remembered, and as Yeats put it, in ‘When You Are Old’:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
So It Goes
MAY DAY, A SPEECH, 1999
It is May Day again, and there is not much to celebrate. Rights hard won by centuries of struggle have, it seems, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, vanished into air, into thin air, or are vanishing fast. The right to strike. The right to collectively bargain. The right to be paid for working back at night, or on weekends. The right to the kind of education for our children that may lift them out of the certain expectation of continued poverty and stress. The right to the reasonable probability for those children of a career that fulfils and is decades long, with security and marriage and home and children and community and safety as part of it. The right when one has worked hard to be paid a bonus from the greater profits of the company. The right to expect to know where we will be nine months from now, where we will be next week, at what home address, in what line of work, with what future prospects, or in what safety net that is guaranteed by our democracy, to citizens, to voters, with ordinary human rights.
All these in a moment, in a twinkling, are suddenly gone, or going, or on the list, as if by the wave of some malign magician’s wand, and the too familiar world of the 1890s – a shamed and punished working class, an idle, dandifying squattocracy, a grimy fearful subculture of crime and alcohol and prostitution and slum despair, the far-off faint hope for some of jobs as waiters and uniformed servants who open doors in flash hotels, or girls from the chorus line who marry up into the ranks of their betters – and the overwhelming waste of talent and potential and human generosity and communal decency that always accompanies the arrival of selfish new money, the crushing of craft and art and small business and the awareness of history, the ending of apprenticeship, the downsizing of the brains of teachers, the weevilling of the integrity of the universities, and the selling off of schools.
How has all this happened? How has it happened so quickly? How is it that the world we knew, and for at least one lifetime trusted in, has become overnight the world of the bruised and baffled young men of Brassed Off and The Full Monty, where one must become a prancing, bollocky buffoon to pay the rent, for just that week, and give up neighbourhood, and love, and music, and fellow feeling to survive? And has it happened before? And must it happen again? These are worthwhile questions, I think.
I last month spent ten days with John Ralston Saul, the great Canadian thinker, whose two books Voltaire’s Bastards and The Unconscious Civilisation tell us, I believe, what it is that has happened in our time, and of the world depression that no-one admits that we have been in since 1973 …
As Ralston Saul sees it, our wealthy betters, and their technocratic hitmen, and their grovelling academic servitors, and their rented politicians, never actually admit defeat. We win the basic wage, the eight-hour day, the old-age pension, the right to compensation for injury at work, the right to maternity leave and child care and wages that grow in proportion to the cost of being alive, and the battle is won and the story is over.
But they know better than we do. They know that governments will change, and new naive young ministers – like, say, Paul Keating – will yield in a while to a little duchessing, a little linguistic manipulation, a little technocratic hieroglyphic and mumbo-jumbo, a little flattery, a little elegant propaganda, a little numerical sleight of hand. The world is different now, they will say, it’s a global marketplace, and unless we learn to compete with slaves by becoming slaves ourselves, unless we do those things that Moody’s want, or Standard and Poors want, like abolishing social democracy and the tattered remains of the welfare state, and the reasonable security of the average individual from cradle to grave, no respectable world bank will lend us money anymore, and no multinational corporation will want to exploit us anymore, and then where will we be? It is not our preferred option either, but heck, gee willikers, gosh, it’s inevitable. It’s the way the world is unchangeably going. There is no alternative.
They know too that the attention span of the average working person is limited, and they do not have the time between work and children and dinner and conjugal exertion and sleep to address those code words, those deft Orwellian euphemisms – a more efficient workplace, a level playing field, a competitive environment for small business, a trickledown effect, a Third Way – by which they will see their lives destroyed.
And it is this attack on the meaning of language itself that I as a writer find most frightening, I think. Free trade, which means, in the end, the slave trade. Downsizing efficiency, which means in the end that the phone is never answered, or never fixed, and the counter never served, and the queues lengthen. Or a light plane crashes in Berowra, or an ambulance arrives three hours too late, when the corpse that might have lived is already stiff and cold. Affordable safety, which of course means danger. A level playing field, which means if Coca-Cola sets up a great factory on a hundred acres of land with government concessions, you can set up a small soft drink company on one acre of land beside it without government concessions. And if Coca-Cola spends a hundred thousand dollars each night on advertising, you can spend your life savings in one night trying to out-advertise them, and you can then go bankrupt.
The third way, which means, in the end, a kind of blustering and protesting surrender to Murdoch and Packer and Dupont Chemicals and W.D. & H.O. Wills and Coca-Cola, and the farm lobby of the United States, along with a surrounding miasma of academic jargon that, in England, cleverly redefined unemployment twenty-two times in ten years – a surrender that rewards the rich, in the usual way, for the dumb luck they had in their parentage and the broken bodies of workers on whom their fortune stands.
I grow more radical as I grow older, the way you are supposed not to do. My father, a Maitland coalminer who escaped into mere commercial travelling, taught me a good deal of what I know still to be the shape of the world. He would rail some nights in his cups of home-brew beer – the greatest legacy, he said, of the Whitlam era – against the sustaining fantasy of the Afterlife, and how the ruling classes invented it to keep you content in your lifelong servitude, or at least politically inactive. Invented the glowing promise that after your three score years and ten – and your pauper’s funeral, and your children’s ruin – there would be riches unimaginable for you, and delectable fruits, and choir practice among the seraphim on the other side. He would rail too against the State Lottery, which was their way of tempting you, he said, with the thought that you might be an exception to the tyranny, and you alone might escape your slum, and the enslavement you were in, and might ascend on the roulette wheel of a number to Sylvania Waters and a motor yacht of your own and leisure time unlimited, and a first-class seat on
Qantas any day of the week to the known world. He taught me in sum that there are con men everywhere – in politics, in banks, in unions, in churches, in the Labor Party factions – and you should mind how you go.
So I wrote a book in the end on the current doctrine of economic rationalism that is washing all our human civility from the planet, and from our memories. This doctrine argues – and even seems to argue plausibly – that if we sack just a few hundred thousand more people, there will then be jobs for everyone, and prosperity for everyone, and cheap and lovely consumers goods, and big competitive international corporations specialising here in only those things that Australia does best whatever they are – akubra hats, flip-top cans, all made cheaply enough to compete, and compete on a level playing field, with hundreds of millions of Chinese now prepared to work fourteen hours a day, twenty-nine days a month, for a dollar fifty an hour – to compete against them and win, the way every nation will win, all one hundred and ninety-two of them. The level playing field is just another flat-earth theory, discuss.
The book was called First Abolish the Customer, and in it I worked through a few ideas – like economic anorexia, or less and less flesh on bones till only dead bones are left; and that people who work for a company lifelong are now as expendable as kleenex; and that, for every person sacked, there are four people who cannot afford to buy things anymore, or things other than the price of a roof and mincemeat for dinner and a bus fare to the next job interview. And when, as happened in Canberra, twenty-five thousand public servants are sacked, there are suddenly one hundred thousand people not spending money on inessential goods in Canberra, whose small businesses are then put under pressure to sack more people, who, like the public servants before them, in anguish put on the market houses whose prices go down and down because of all the other houses being sold in anguish. They then migrate to the outskirts of Sydney as a new wife-beating, drunken, divorce-prone, undereducated and desolate underclass, whose battered children, being rational and desperate, take up crime – of course – and prostitution and the drug trade as the only profitable options in a universe gone mad.
Bob Ellis Page 17