The Art of the Double Bill

Originally published on Litro on 19/03/13

What is it about choosing cinema snacks? Deciding which combo of overpriced junk food to go for takes up as much time as picking the film you’re going to see. You have to have popcorn, of course, but will it be sweet or salted? Or what about nachos and a dip. But then will the dip be cheese, salsa or guacamole? How about an ice cream instead? Although it will be tricky to pick from all those flavours. Or some pic’n’mix ? Or a bag of chocolates? Perhaps a hot dog? And then what about something to drink? Maybe you like to swill the popcorn out of your teeth with that auditorium classic, watery coke, or kill the spice of your nachos with a beer, or augment the traces of the cigarette you puffed outside by having a coffee (see Jim Jarmusch). The choices go on, and the combinations will all work together in different ways.

The same could be said of putting together a double bill — an innovation that came about during the depression of the 1930s as of way of roping in a larger audience who would be more likely to part with their hard-earned if they were getting two films for the price of one. The art of the perfect double bill has always been about finding two films that bring out something in the other that might not be quite so piquant if they were shown on their lonesome, or alongside something else. It’s like choosing to put gin together with tonic or Angostura bitters, or to eat a hot dog with ketchup or mustard — a view shared by New Statesman film critic Ryan Gilbey:

“The only rule I can see for a double bill is finding two films with complementary flavours,” he says. “I guess there doesn’t even have to be a literal connection like the same director, star or even genre. One good example that I remember — actually it’s a triple bill, but one of the films is short — was at London’s old Scala cinema in the late 1980s, where I got most of my cinematic education. It was playing the first run of Alex Cox’s bizarre warmed-up spaghetti western Straight to Hell, which they showed with Bob Rafelson’s Monkees film, Head, and Luis Buñuel’s 40-minute religious comedy Simon of the Desert. It was genius, because each film opened up the other for the viewer.”

Ice cream, all the flavours (too much of a good thing)
It is exactly this sort of hotchpotch of filmic fare that appeals to online cinema Mubi.com’s content manager Duncan Gray, who says the only real rule for a double bill is that it be “an instructive but fun way to compare and contrast, to acknowledge the breadth of cinema and the joy of omnivorous consumption by bouncing two films off one another”.

By the same measure, a lot of the obvious connections for double bills — sequels; remakes; same leading actors — may leave one feeling rather surfeited; as if one’s eyes were bigger than one’s belly. Gray again: “One Saturday night in college, I joined a group of friends to watch all three Indiana Jones movies back-to-back-to-back. Though I’d already seen each film many times (and loved them all), placing them side by side gave me the belated realisation that Indiana Jones goes through the same damn character arc each time. In other words, taking them all at once diminished the impact of each individual film instead of growing them.”

Gilbey cites the pairing of Alan Parker’s Midnight Express and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver — two films about young, American, criminal outsiders that were commonly screened together in the 1970s and 1980s — as another example of double bill overkill. “It sounds like eating potatoes and rice to me: way too heavy. Likewise William Friedkin’s Cruising and Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill — how much sex and violence do you really want in one sitting?”

While a director double bill may be a more rewarding way to exploit obvious connections — “ask any card-carrying auteurist, and they’ll tell you that the best way to experience a great director is to look at their films as an entire body of work”, Gray says — it does seem to lack imagination, especially when there is a pretty much endless platter of movies to be picked at.

Sweet popcorn & Seven-Up (two takes on sugar-coated)
One of the best double bills I remember going to see — at London’s home of double bills, the Prince Charles Cinema on Leicester Square — is Chris Columbus’ Home Alone withFrank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life a couple of Christmases ago. The films look at a lot of the same themes (festivity; home; family; being trapped in a little town) but consider them through different eyes — the eyes of a little boy in 1990 and a middle-aged man in 1946 — although one gets the feeling that these eyes have elements of the same soul behind them: James Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life  George Bailey, even declares at one point “I wanna do what I wanna do” — a dream that Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister gets to fulfil — as if they are the same spirit in different bodies (see the newly released Cloud Atlas).

Gilbey suggests teaming up It’s a Wonderful Life with Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona — “the sweetness and tradition of the Capra satisfied one part of you, and the breakneck mania of the Coens another” — and Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Daywith Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel — “very different treatments of the subject of stasis from different traditions, Hollywood and arthouse, but there is enough crossover to make the pairing spark”.

Galaxy Counters & salted popcorn (anarchy and incongruity)
Gray adds something new to the recipe, saying a favourite double bill of his is the classic Looney Tunes short Duck Amuck (which is easily worth six-and-a-half minutes of anybody’s time) and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. “They not only share similar themes in genres as disparate as children’s cartoons and arthouse films, Duck Amuck provides the ideal gateway and context for the Carax film, as its anarchy makes no more or less sense than that of Holy Motors, so you get to loosen your expectations and see what happens to anarchy when it grows up.”

Gilbey’s fondness for watching films while munching on “Galaxy Counters sprinkled into a tub of salted popcorn, shaken well,” may well be the cinema snack equivalent of that anarchy grown up, with “the combination of salt and chocolate, hard counters and spongy popcorn, offering the same odd combo of incongruous flavours as an unusual double bill”.

Nachos & coke (a spot of heat with a splash of sugar)
For me, the cinema diet of choice has to be nachos — something a little bit sharp, that will stick in your teeth (and your throat) — washed down with diet coke — something a bit easier to take. Cinematically, this could translate into Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine followed by Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. They have a lot in common — both French, black and white films, about criminals and outsiders, and are both about 90 minutes long — but come at similar material 40 years apart. And while Pickpocket is not a simple watch, Bresson’s style gives it almost a fairytale touch that makes it a much easier watch than La Haine, at least aesthetically, allowing it to wash away the nasty taste Kassovitz’s film might leave behind.

So what are your perfect cinema pairings — from the box office and the refreshments stand?

How a novel should be?

Review: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

This book is definitely not going to be to everyone's taste, but then Sheila Heti would be the first person to acknowledge that. For, as Heti says on page one, "you can admire anyone for being themselves", and that is really what this book is about; although more importantly it is the way that this book is concerned with this topic that makes it so monumental and has resulted in it receiving so much praise (although apparently not on Amazon).

"How Should a Person Be?" is not concerned with living up to traditional expectations of what a novel should be, it is concerned only with saying what it wants to say, and saying it in the best way the author can find to say it. It is a memoir-cum-novel-cum play about a female writer (also called Sheila) trying to write a play and failing, trying to hold together a friendship and partially failing, and trying to understand how a person should be, and finally understanding it (sort of) through her failings. By stripping away many of the pretences of traditional fiction, Heti finds a way of drawing the reader into her world, taking the reader along with her, through her failings and her despair and her sufferings and out the other side. And it is this highly personal, self-flagellating method of story-telling that helps to get across the book's message: "A life without failure, suffering or doubt [is] empty of those things that make a human life meaningful." A person should be someone who is happy to fail, who is prepared to keep on failing, to face up to their failings (as Heti is doing with this book, which is not the play she set out to write), and to learn from their failings; rather than someone who keeps running away from their failings in the hope of finding a place where they never fail, suffer or doubt themselves, because that place doesn’t exist.

The book is about more than this, although this is its key message. But as I said above, a lot of what the book is about is connected to the way the book is constructed, in fragmentary chunks, in acts like a play (Sheila's failure to write a play is her success; because she has a five act book here, so isn't that a play, even if it isn't the kind of play she set out to write, or the kind of thing normally called 'a play'?), with events and its protagonist sprawling itinerantly across North America in the same way as Sheila's mind sprawls itinerantly across the plains of life.

A traditional novel shows us a rounded image of a "traditional" person (a 19th century image of a person, living a sort of "monotrack" life), embedded in one place, living an apparently linear life. Heti understands that real people and real life are not like that anymore. With the internet, with the ease of moving around from place to place, with our atomised society, few of us really live lives that fan out into a kind of linear narrative. Rather we live, as David Shields puts it in his book "How Literature Saved My Life", a sort of collage life, taking all these myriad things that happen to us and trying to fit them together in the best way that we can.

If "How Should a Person Be?" doesn't sound like the kind of book for you, that's ok. And if it sounds like the kind of thing you might hate, that is perhaps even better. For as Heti says towards the end of this book: "The only way to go somewhere new is to do the thing I most fear." So go on, give this book a try. It might scare you, and you might despise it, but it is guaranteed to take you somewhere new.

The picture for this review, which may appear to make little sense, is a reference to the final chapter of the book

Humankind's happy misery: Review (The Silence of Animals, by John Gray)

This book develops the ideas from John Gray's 2002 book Straw Dogs, although there is no need to have read the earlier book in order to understand or appreciate this book.

In Straw Dogs, Gray set out the notion that human beings differ only from other animals in that they convince themselves that they are superior beings destined to conquer the earth and rule over all other life forms. In The Silence of Animals, he delves behind this conviction, looking at the myth of human progress that supports our false hopes for ourselves - the hope of reaching some kind of utopian salvation. A key thread in the book is the religious nature of all movements and philosophies, with humanists coming in for a particularly heavy going over - "humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith" - and atheists being asked to ask a much bigger question of themselves than those they ask of belivers: if God does not exist, why do so many people feel a need to have a faith in one? It is this idea of faith that Gray is really interested in, and he brands humanism and atheism as "secular faiths" that take humankind as their God, with the myths of progress as their testament.

The idea that we need a faith to soothe us through the thorny discomforts of life is nothing new - Marx said in 1843 that religion is the opium of the people - but what elevates this book to another plane is that Gray dissects why human beings are so reliant on myths in order to give their lives meaning - effectively reaching a conclusion that "a life without myths is itself the stuff of myth" - and why we feel the need to give our lives meaning at all. He quotes a plethora of poets, memoirists and thinkers along the way (most commonly Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche - although strangely Albert Camus does not get a mention, despite his The Myth of Sisyphus treading ground very close to that which Gray passes over here), as he pushes toward the idea that people "find meaning in the suffering that the struggle for happiness brings", that we are "attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery". 

From this idea he picks up Freud, asking why we need to pursue an idea of happiness - fundamentally reaching the conclusion that we do so in order to distract ourselves from our lives ("from the internal monologue that is the dubious privilege of human self-awareness") - and then asking why we cannot simply be happy to exist and experience life.

The book then moves into its final part, where Gray joins hands with Samuel Beckett to question the use of language (how it gets in the way of our simply existing and experiencing life) and J.A. Baker, whose book The Peregrine saw him attempt to understand the silent existence of a peregrine falcon. While animals appear content simply to exist, the human's problem is the constant quest to give meaning to existence - a meaning universally underpinned by the myth of progress.

Gray asks us to essentially take a step back from existence, to stop interfering with the world, to stop building false constructs within it and our minds, to "look with eyes that are not covered with a film of thought". It is thought, the one thing we think we have that makes us superior to animals, that is in fact our undoing - we think ourselves to death, or at least out of life.

Gray comes close to reaching the same conclusion in this book ("Contemplation can be understood as an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it, but simply to let it be") as he did in Straw Dogs ("Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"), but he adds a final kicker in this book: "There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed."

In the context of the book, this rings an optimistic note - that humans can reach this point of not feeling the need for redemption - but the more realistic conclusion seems to be reached 10 pages before the end: “Man, much more than baboon or wolf, is an animal formed for conflict; his life seems meaningless to him without it.” After all, we attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery.

Review: The Middlesteins, by Jami Attenberg

As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

In Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins, every member of the eponymous unhappy family is unhappy in his or her own way. The book revolves around Edie, the chronically obese grandmother who simply can't stop eating. Orbiting around her are Richard, her ex-husband hunting down new love in his 60s, her son Benny, who hides from the world through his nightly spliff (much as his mother finds solace in food), her daughter-in-law Rachelle, whose life is controlled by the need to appear the perfect Jewish mother and to stay as slim as possible, and her daughter Robin, drifting between places, drifting between childhood and adulthood, unsure of who she is and where she belongs.

The book declares towards its end that life is "full of layers and nuances, coloured all shades of gray", but unfortunately for this novel those shades of gray weren't quite nuanced enough. While there is some grayness about Edie - her family might want her to lose weight, but she doesn't seem particularly interested in doing so, and shouldn't she be left free to eat herself into the grave if she wishes? - the rest of the characters and plot feel very one-dimensional. Rachelle is almost a parody of the good Jewish wife, and even Richard (probably the second main character) doesn't feel like he has much depth to him, other than half a chapter on his arrival from Ukraine and establishment of his pharmacy store (seemingly pulled from the pages of a book - The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Theethnic history of Chicago) - read for research and mentioned in the acknowledgements).

I enjoyed reading The Middlesteins, although I felt that I came away from it with very little, other than the "morals" that family is the most important thing in life, at the centre of everything, a source of sometimes unlikely bonds between two individuals with little else in common; and that people find solace from life in all sorts of things - food, drink, drugs, organising b'nai mitzvahs - and just because one person's way of dealing with life is more socially acceptable than another's, it doesn't make them a better person.

The book is a very easy and very quick read, which might make it nice to flick thorough on a commute, but the reader's eyes glide across the words in the same way that the author glides across the surface of a lot of big issues - at no point does she let you fall into the gaps between the words and the characters' actions and find the difficult meanings, the nuanced grays, hidden in between.

Short-listed for Stork Press Mini Short Story competition

Fiction rather than journalism, but I was recently short-listed for the Stork Press Mini Short Story competition. The full story — for which the theme was "Abstract Christmas" (think Tarantino, rather than Dickens) — is published below.

More blessed to give than to receive                                                                  

I did it because of the John Lewis Christmas advert; that’s what I’m going to tell the court. After I saw that snowman risking life and melting limb to get his snowwoman wrapped up nice and warm in some winter woollies — which he may as well have presented in Trojan horse wrapping paper — I finally understood: Christmas is the perfect time to do it; it’s practically invented for this sort of thing; I mean, look at what wound up happening to Jesus.

So, to my chronically lactose-intolerant teenage daughter, who wears a WWJD bracelet that I wish stood for something illicit, the butter baste on the Turkey and the mashed potatoes are just for you. Jesus would forgive me.

To my son, the 20-year-old adrenaline junkie. I did some research on the internet, which you constantly accuse me of being unable to use properly, and I found a really disreputable firm that arranges bungee jumps. I’ve booked you a 300ft drop. I know you’ll do it topless to show off your abs, but you might want to consider getting charity sponsorship and wearing a T-shirt. Is there a charity for victims of their own egos? I’ll let you look that one up online, if you can break through the firewall I’ve set up.

To my dad, the borderline alcoholic, enjoy this bottle of whiskey and VIP brewery tour. You can drink as much as you want.

To Mark. We used to work together. I know you’ve got no other friends, but I really don’t know why we still meet up once a month for a drink. I’m just writing to let you know that I’ve changed my email address and phone number, and am in all likelihood moving out of my house after Christmas. Further details not enclosed, although I hope you make good use of this knife sharpener.

And to my wife, who said she wanted nothing more than a picture-perfect family Christmas featuring festive jumpers, a perfectly clean front room and plenty of good lighting for the photos she will post on Facebook to make all her equally superficial friends jealous, your first present is inside this shoebox, which is empty apart from the Christmas list you gave me in early September. The little drawings on it are all my own work. Your second present is in the driveway. It’s the next model up from the one the neighbours bought last month, and the brakes have already been cut.

To the judge and jury, I tell you that this Christmas, I truly felt more blessed to give than to receive, and you can never take that away from me.

Click here to see the advert

Ticket to Nowhere: The Problem with Travel Writing

Originally published on Litro on 12/12/12

I’ve long harboured a deep-seated aversion to travel writing, despite being something of a seasoned traveller.

It’s not like I haven’t been open to the genre. I’ve tried numerous authors, from the populist Bill Bryson, whose Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europeenthralled me as much as a flick through the Argos catalogue, to the more erudite Colin Thubron’s In Siberia. I read the latter during a nine-month stint when I was living and teaching English in Siberia, hoping that the geographical relevance of the book would lend it a searing power that travel writing had never previously held for me.

But Thubron’s book failed to excite me, even as I read it in situ. In fact, it more sickened me with its romanticising of snatches of life in Russia. But then Thubron isn’t the only one guilty of this, and I actually owe him a debt of gratitude for helping me to remember why I find travel writing so abhorrent.

Why is everything made out to be so poignant, so achingly significant? And why is everyone the writer meets either at a crossroads in life or taken to represent a country’s entire population? It just feels so contrived, so overly-theatrical, and consequently, I can’t believe that any of it is real. As any genuine traveller knows, most of your time is spent sitting—on trains, buses, in poor excuses for restaurants, train stations or airports—doing nothing or trying to wake up while thinking about how much money you’ve got left.

Then there's the other kind of travel writing: the outrageously comic. These travel stories always seem somewhat mocking. Read this story! it yells, about some chap travelling through the Sahara on a three-legged camel while juggling an antique collection of razorblades—or some other “wacky” concept—while you sit in your drab excuse for a home somewhere far from exotic, or stand on a rush-hour bus next to an abnormally sweaty man, and think about how unlikely it is that you’ll ever be able to amass the means to go on such a trip.

Of the many journeys I have been on, there are only three instances that I can think of that would fit into the pages of a “wacky” travel book, and two of those involve food or drink. The one that doesn’t was in Severobaikalsk in Siberia, and it involved me stripping to my underpants in my flat following a trek through the taiga, flicking a notoriously deadly tick off my leg and then trying to capture it with a glass before killing it with a razorblade, although not an antique one. In between finding the tick and killing it, I phoned my Russian host to ask what to do with the insect, about whose lethal capabilities he had earlier lectured us, only to hear him chuckle as if he were my archnemesis who had finally caused my downfall.

Another incident in Siberia saw an off-duty Russian train driver, with whom I was sharing a sleeper carriage, playing the inebriated comic foil to my reluctant foreigner as he forced home brew down my neck, signed his epaulettes and gave them to me in return for my timid agreement to house his children when he shipped them to England to get an education. He then woke me up at 4am to demand the epaulettes back as his employers refused to give him free food unless he had them on. His kids still haven’t shown up at my front door.

And finally, around two years ago, traipsing my starving carcass around Warsaw’s freezing streets at 10pm, I found myself in the increasingly farcical situation of being turned away from restaurant after restaurant claiming to be closed despite the “OPEN” signs displayed on their unlocked doors. Close to an hour after I began my search, I found my way into the U Szwejka restaurant—named after the bumbling hero of Jaroslav Hašek’s First World War novel The Good Soldier Švejk, and decorated with Josef Lada’s darkly mirthful illustrations for that book—where I sat alone and, as if the spirit of Švejk had come to dwell in me, devoured half a roast chicken, a stack of chips and dollops of sauerkraut with a gaumless grin smeared across my face as drunken businessmen ignited an atmosphere of carnivalesque debauchery around me.

Real travelling is not what we find in travel books. It’s not concocted, planned meticulously or enacted in a series of comical set-pieces, it’s just real life in a different place—and just as in real life, occasionally something unusual happens.