Discovering Japan: review of Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation arrived on Film Four laden with praise from intelligent critics. It was something of a surprise, therefore, to find it tedious, mean-spirited and unconvincing, but there you go. Bill Murray hasn't aged well. Whatever cheeky charm his face may have displayed in Ghostbusters had been replaced by a craggy careworn sack by the time of Ghostbusters 2 and Groundhog Day, and he now looks like a well-preserved mummy. His character's annoyance at being mistaken for a contemporary of Sinatra and the 'lat-pack' is therefore undeserved. Incidentally, it does seem unfunny and tactless to attempt to play for humour the fact that an entire nation has learned a foreign language and has some slight difficulty with some of the sounds. Reviews singled out the 'hilarious' scene where Bill has to decipher the photographer's valiant attempts to pronounce names of film stars as the comic highpoint, which might have been warning enough.

Not that it aspires to be a mere comedy: it is a study of character. Well, I don't mind studies of character if they are interesting. Bill's character is lightly drawn as an actor who is less successful than he used to be but still famous, with an unfulfilling home life as husband and father. He looks pained a lot, especially after sleeping with the (awful) cabaret singer, but articulates nothing more than a generic feeling of dissatisfaction.

Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, is also lost, finding that accompanying her new husband to a foreign country while he works is a bit boring, something that years of academic training had failed to prepare her for. She doesn't really 'get' Japan, or at least seems not to: she spends a long time wandering around sampling classical and popular culture with a bemused look on her face, but we don't find out exactly what she thinks. Her background is even vaguer than Bill's: she 'tried writing but hated what she wrote'. Try something else, then?

Everything in the film takes a long time. Sofia Coppola obviously learned from her father that you can't make a film too long. But films shouldn't try to represent boredom by making us share it. What I think Sofia has managed to do is to create an art-movie lite, something that looks and sounds like a serious film but which has no insight to offer. It's dated too: these days, Scarlett would stay in her room, blogging.

Another blogger gets dooced

Petite Anglaise is the latest victim of blogging at or about work. It's not entirely clear on what grounds her employer sacked her: general loss of trust seems to be the line. This is partly because they claim that her blog revealed that she had not given the full reasons for her absence on two occasions. The hysteria of their response is reflected in this: in any other circumstance, an employee would be asked to explain themselves, rather than sacked outright. After all, there is no reason they should be taking the blog as the truth. It is interesting that the fictional case in my radio play Dooced got it so right, down to the creepy sexism of the male managers (not that that requires the skills of Nostradamus). Of course, blogs do frighten people, not least because they know that whatever they say may be used and given in postings, with whatever spin their employee wishes to place upon it. That's also why company hate tribunals: usually they have very tight control on what emerges into the public domain, but you never know what sort of dirty linen or DNA-stained dresses might turn up in the course of public questioning.

Celebrity Titanic: Love Island and the death of ITV

Love Island isn't a very good programme. Even the deluded who convince themselves that BB7 is worth watching know this. Love Island has managed to deliver the lowest ratings in ITV's history, at a time when success was vital for the survival of the company. It may well be that Fearne 'Jonah' Cotton's latest victim will be an entire television channel.

On the otehr hand, it's good news. It goes to show that it is possible to go broke underestimating the taste of the audience. You can imagine the production meetings when they're planning the series:

"The audience love BB when it's drunken fights and sex: so let's give them that all the time. And we'll make sure she get rid of the wrinklies and fatties, cos who wants to see them up close and personal."

Where did they go wrong? Part of it lies in the premise. Although BB's sexual antics achieved some notoriety, what people remember best was not the quick fumbles beneath the sheets, but rather the developing relationships over time between Paul and Helen (Dumber and Dumberer) or Preston and Chantelle, in which sex hardly featured.

ITV has a difficult task, of course. The BBC can roll out its audience-pleasers, safe in the knowledge that its worthy-but-unwatched and edgy-experimental other product can be shown at other times, on other channels. ITV has to get it right all the time, delivering a stream of viewers who can be sold off to advertisers; if noone watches, no money is made. That is why their scheduling is usually completely ruthless: they literally cannot afford to keep showing underperforming series. And why they have risked so much (£20 million) on creating a programme to take on BB and win. Except it hasn't. Even when potentially moderately exciting things happen on Love Island, nobody knows it: the press have lost interest, the public were never interested to start with. I can only assume that the programme hasn't been shifted to 12.30, when they know nobody will be watching, because they realise 1. that any replacement will also come off worse; and 2. an admission of failure of the ITV's trump card will immediately lead to collapse of the share price and a renewed takeover bid.

The sooner they 'fess up and switch to showing Crocodile Dundees and Die Hards in constant rotation, the better.

Change and decay: work in progress 4

I opened the door and breathed in slowly. This was the bit of my job I loved. Archivists have the reputation of being fussy or authoritarian, protecting their collections from users. But this is just a product of their role – they are responsible for the safety of the archives. If somebody damages a document, then to them it is an accident; to the archivist it is a failure. Not surprisingly, archivists end up being cautious: everything is done according to the rules, documented, carefully; this makes it hard to go wrong. Except now. Before anything had been listed, counted, described – here I could devalue the collection in minutes by rearranging things. As it stood now, the records room’s organisation reflected the process of managing the estate: documents were field together because they were used together. So, before moving any of the bundles, piles, boxes, and (in the corner) heaps of paper that filled very flat or near-flat surface in the room, I walked along, mentally classifying them into types: legal documents, business letters, accounts, and, most common of all, general miscellaneous. All administrators seem to grasp the first principle of record management: keep all the papers you might need. The second, keeping them organised, was usually beyond them.

The revenger's comedy: interpreting The Information by Martin Amis (1995)

I

The plot of The Information is essentially simple; Richard, unsuccessful novelist and book reviewer, attempts to wreak revenge on his friend Gwyn, unaccountably successful novelist. Richard enlists the aid of Scozzy, a self-styled wild boy and drug dealer, to deliver physical punishments escalating in seriousness; after a tour of America in which Richard’s unsellable unreadable novel literally threatens the life of Gwyn and himself by causing a near-crash in a light plane, their relationship changes, and Gwyn loses the inhibitions resulting from his previous envy of Richard. Scozzy’s assaults prove counter-productive: only Richard suffers.

Even in this bald summary, it is clear that the book is much more than the story of two men, although you wouldn’t know this from the reviews it received at the time. This may have been because those reviewing it in Little Magazines were being cautious, since the book is scathing about the quality of British reviewing and questions the entire edifice of modern literary journalism.

II

The rivalry between Richard and Gwyn had a real-life equivalent in the friendship and sporting contests between Julian Barnes and MA which had run from their student days into adult life. Although MA has argued often that it is the job of writers to invent their fictions, he has often used real life as a source, in The Rachel Papers (teenager attending crammer school to get into Oxford), Success (art gallery assistant), Dead Babies (weekend of disasters with various friends and couples), and Money (screenplay writing in America). Since in The Information almost all description adopts the viewpoint of Richard, it is easy to assume that he represents MA (there are short passages where the narrator shifts to cover Scozzy and Gwyn, and MA appears speaking for himself briefly). This lazy equivalence is perhaps justified by MA’s ascription to Richard of his own experiences, including being given a set of bound volumes of the little magazine when he left, and seeing someone reading his book on an Underground train.

The book proved prophetic in its treatment of the other characters: the Julian Barnes friendship ended in the gap between Amis finishing the draft text and its being published, as a result of MA’s decision to drop Pat Kavanagh, Julian’s wife, as his agent. Agents too, particularly lazy agents, have a hard time in the book, particularly Gal Aplanap. MA does not reveal how much he drew on this event in finalising his text, but the rivalry, and its revelation as being not friendly but unfriendly, is structural. So much so that it seems legitimate to wonder whether the strength of Barnes’ reaction was partly in response to what must have read like a barely-veiled critique of his person and work (although it is doubtful that anyone would call his novels unliterary, Flaubert’s Parrot was nominated for a Booker prize, after all).

So rivalry is a theme, but not the main one. Richard himself says so: “Gwyn didn’t do it. The world did it.” (p. 140). It takes him a long time to realise that his campaign against fate is therefore aimed at the wrong target.


III
The novel ends with a paragraph which has been criticised as being meaningless or pretentious; but it provides, through back-references to previous events, an abstracted argument, a summary of ‘what the novel is trying to say’ (although Richard gives such questions short shrift: ‘It’s not trying to say anything. It’s saying it. […] It’s saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn’t put it any other way’. (p. 340).

The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. [1] Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. [2] Every morning, we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. [3] Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. [4] Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. [5] Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. [6] The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. [7] And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night. [8]

1 The Man in the Moon appears on p. 476 The Man in the Moon dates back to the time when humanity thought itself the centre of the universe; as we get older, we move towards knowing that we are temporary and unimportant; and we know we get older because policeman, doctors, professors even, look young.

2. Tempus fugit. Who has ever needed a skull as a memento mori? Who could forget?

3 This sentence appears on p. 197. We live with decay and dissolution; time’s arrow only points one way.

4 The critic is mentioned on pp. 432 and 476; he has lost his place in the world, his purpose, sidetracked by excess, and no longer matters to anyone.

5 The nun appears on pp. 213, 221 and 413. Why should anyone beware a nun? Partly because they act as a warning: they leave noone behind; but mostly I think because they know something. They already know the information, and accepted it: they are stronger than you.

6 The man at the callbox has cropped up on pp. 46 and 447-8. He is the man without home or family, desperately phoning around to find someone so that he doesn’t have to face death alone.

7 The planesaw whines on p. 172, as one of the urban sounds (although there is no such thing as a planesaw), reflecting the absence of community, the lack of fellow-feeling characteristic of modern life.

8 This sentence appears on p. 452.

It is clear from this analysis that the paragraph is carefully written, and, since it runs through the book, it follows that the novel as a whole is, too. Its style is a little flashy, but that is compensated by sentences, whole pages, of such beauty and clarity that the reader pauses in astonishment. This does some violence to credible characterisation, unfortunately: it is hard to believe that someone who thinks and speaks as eloquently as Richard does should write novels whose highest praise was that ‘nobody was sure they weren’t shit’, and it is notable that dim bland Gwyn and mad Scozzer share a common interior language with Richard, and MA.


IV
So what is the information? The more astute of the reviewers says that it is death, but they are wrong. If the novel were about death, it would treat it more seriously: Anstice and Richard’s doctor are despatched quickly, simply, as jokes. Demi’s father, whose gradual decline in a rotting mansion is described, parodying Catholic Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, is also killed in a sentence. It is not death as such; the information is the knowledge of one’s own mortality. The world is telling you to start saying goodbye, to prepare in the face of inevitable, increasing humiliation.

Without blunting the force of this message, MA does suggest what can help in this task: love, children, and humour; throughout the book, these are quietly advanced as moral markers, good in themselves, and signifiers of goodness. Gwyn’s novels are shown to be bad partly by being humourless; Gwyn’s refusal to have children defines him as bad; Gwyn’s turning away from love is his badness. Because of this, MA is able to end his novel with Richard in what by any objective standard is a worse place than where he started, but being credibly happier all the same.

BB goes off the boil

As T S Eliot says, human kind cannot bear very much reality (Burnt Norton) , and he was of course thinking of BB 7 and Love Island (not Celebrity Love Island, as we shall see).

Big Brother, despite the media hysteria it has engendered, has singularly failed so far to drum up any great enthusiasm in its audience. Watercooler television it is not. You can imagine the producers find this hard to believe: have they not provided madness, surgery-enhanced breasts, screaming fits, and various near-couplings? Well, yes, and more than enough. But BB has also overpacked the house with too many too similar people, and by the tedious and unoriginal second house concept has meant that we still have almost as many inmates as we started with. The main interest as the series develops is usually the interplay between tensions within the house leading to nominations, and then the judgement of the public on those chosen. BB has ridden roughshod over both elements, and there is much less interest in watching the arbitrary acts of an absolute tyrant. Nevertheless, BB has proved a ratings juggernaut, presumably because its target audience, the young, are too lazy, drunk, drugged or stupid to consider doing anything other than watching.

It remains to be seen whether Love Island urges them to turn over. I hope not, but that’s probably because I find the prurience of promoting on-screen sex as the sole purpose for a show distasteful. It is by now established that any discussion of Celebrity programmes must include a joke about Z listers, but I shall break that rule and instead provide a catalogue raisonee of my classification of celebrities:

A superstars whose fame and influence is so great that they can use it to succeed in fields far divorced from their initial area of success (ie Arnie moves from bodybuilding through barely coherent acting to running the world’s fifth biggest economy)
B stars who rule their chosen realm but fail when they move outside it (Neil Young filmmaker, Bob Dylan actor)
C stars who have had a varied career but are mainly associated with one key role (most of the cast of The Bill who started off in soaps)
D stars whose fame is based solely on their one major role (one-hit-wonders)
E other actors (etc) who wouldn’t be famous at all if were not for their extracurricular activities (I’m sure no-one would remember Daniella Westbrook at all if she hadn’t dissolved her nose in cocaine)
F other actors who never made it to fame
G people associated peripherally with F-listers (glamour models, promotion models)
H lovers and children of stars, who achieve fame due to media notoriety
I lovers and children of near stars who achieve fame due to media notoriety
J lovers and children who never achieve fame
K relatives of J listers


This makes some sort of sense to me. So, let’s look at the Love Island line-up. By my count, the highest anyone can get is D (ex-reality), with most in G-H. In some ways this hardly matters, if the series is seen as reality. There is however something much more interesting about Celebrity reality, because it gives an unusual view of people who have an established public persona already. People may well have suspected previously that George Galloway was a pompous bully, or Michael Barrymore was a needy paranoid, or Faria Alam was a manipulative self-publicist, but now they could test this perception, and find out, well, that they were right.

ITV are desperate to turn Love Island into the hit of the summer, having seen their audience, and advertising revenue falling for years. In the absence of positive press (you might say that since the filming is so remote, there was no prospect of bargaining by granting better access), they have persuaded a producer to blog for the Guardian.

The live reality plays directly into my office and I watch as the celebrity stand-ins getting ready for bed. Two snuggle up and I try to imagine how much more interesting it will be when the real celebs are in there in less than a week's time.

Not more interesting at all. And what do you mean, ‘real celebs’? My basic definition of a celebrity is someone you recognize without being told who they area. These you don’t recognise even after you’ve been told.