Breeze & Norman
There are two types of people in the world and they’re living in your head. They vary depending on the person they’re inside. If you’re trying to stay healthy, then one person will definitely being trying to convince you to keep on the diet, whilst the other one is saying surely you’ve been good for long enough to earn at least one treat.
My two people seem to have an opinion about everything. If I decide how I’m going to spend a Saturday, then one of them is going to keep giving me other options, all day long. If I’m trying to save money, the other person always has a shopping list. Thanks to them, trying to pick a film has become a minefield. I can spend ages trying to find what I’m in the mood for, only to spend the whole movie glancing at my DVDs or mentally skimming through Netflix. It’s no way to live.
The two people in my head have one definite topic of heated conversation: artistic intent. I’ve had to listen to them rage on the subject over and over again. Back when I was debating about trying comedy, one of those people decided I had to be like Bill Hicks, putting the world to rights. They said I needed a pulpit, a soapbox. A mountain for my sermons. The other person kept pointing at the likes Dave Gorman or Andy Kaufman. People who clearly had a love for their work and who wanted to involve their audiences in that same feeling.
It won’t surprise any poor soul who’s tried to read the Chris Long back catalogue to learn I am constantly drowning in this debate when it comes to novels. Every time I start to focus on a longer story, I find myself wanting to write something straight to begin with. Something that fits neatly into one place and gives the reader a reason to turn the page. Most of my first drafts read like that. Then I have to keep re-reading it through each proceeding draft and that’s when the story starts to feel boring. Pedestrian, even. That’s when the other voice pipes up. Normally after I’ve watched some meta movie or TV show or I’ve started reading some strange, genre shifting book.
If you’ve been foolhardy enough to read all of my blogs you’ll probably remember the names David Lynch, Alan Moore and David Foster Wallace. And maybe Robert Aickman. Anyway, it’s never long before I find myself tinkering, with the voices bickering in my ears. I start adding some extra level of strangeness or distance. It’s not so bad with short stories. I can keep the people in my head on the leash for around three thousand to five thousand words.
Blogs can make them argue. You better believe there’s been plenty of debate about me trying to put this one online and we haven’t even gotten to what finally prompted me to write it. The short answer is cinema.
(INTERMISSION - GO GET YOURSELF A SNACK OR A DRINK. WE’VE GOT A WAY TO GO.)
(NOT THAT IT’S COSTING YOU ANYTHING.)
In the past seven days I finally took the plunge and went to see Tenet. The cinema experience itself wasn’t too bad. It was quiet and well run. No one was screaming about masks or coughing like an extra in Contagion. The lobby wasn’t busy. The showing wasn’t crowded. I wore a mask for 3 hours plus and, when I got home, I washed my hands to the point where I think my fingers shrunk.
Coming out of that cinema, I found myself loaded with a lot of questions. Not about pandemics or the girl in front of me, who kept checking her phone. It was more to do with the movie. I think it’s fair to say I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan. I’ve loved everything I’ve seen of his. I’ve felt sorry for him when the awards haven’t pulled his name out of an envelope and I’m always intrigued to see what he’ll do next. He’s a fascinating, mainstream boundary breaker. It’s hard not to like that when a lot of cinema is learning to spend its money on the safe tables, in the middle of the road.
Tenet, though, might be about as far as he can push some of those boundaries. Especially on a first watch. It’s one of the few movies that I’ve finished knowing that I have to watch it again. Not want to. Have to. Because I know I missed things. Because I think it’s a movie that’ll improve with time. It’s the closest a summer blockbuster has come to movies like Primer, The Endless or even Time Crimes. Only, particularly in the case of The Endless, I felt a stronger connection to the people in that movie. Tenet isn’t there to hold you close or keep you warm. Tenet is there to work.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great piece of pure cinema. It’s an experience as much as a spy movie. There’s just something human missing from the heart of it. I don’t think I’ll find more character depth when I watch it again. I’ll simply find more answers or motivations. It’s a lot like 2001 in that way. Probably more so than Nolan’s own space epic, Interstellar.
His steadfast adherence to the spy fi template is only there as a foundation for his time twisting set pieces. It feels he made the decision early on to keep some of the more human moments of interaction either offscreen or turned down to low volume. A lot of the dialogue functions solely as plot cypher. One character, very early on, says ‘no small talk’. She wasn’t kidding.
Not that the cast weren’t brilliant. Not that the movie wasn’t breath taking. It just ran a very different race to something like Inception or The Prestige. Which is fine. I just don’t see me going to Tenet to relax or unwind. It’s a puzzle; whereas Nolan’s Batman movies or Dunkirk or his early crime thrillers are hiding some blood pumping subtext under their surface, ready for future rewatches.
A few days after watching Nolan’s experiment in blockbuster cinema inversion, I switched on Netflix and tried out the new Charlie Kaufman movie. Kaufman is another genre breaker, only he has stepped away from the mainstream. Or it has stepped away from him. Since Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Kaufman’s work has become singular, focused, a bit too strange for most cinema goers. Particularly now he’s also directing his movies. He’s removed the artifice and explanations from what he’s doing, along with the more classically expected endings. His character based meta explorations are now embedded in dream space. Which means houses can be on fire for an entire movie or people will hear the entire world speaking with one voice and he doesn’t have to offer you a reason; he leaves that up to you.
I also read his first novel this year, Antkind. Just like his recent movies, the book doesn’t make allowances for the strangeness you encounter. To be honest, I still can’t work out if I enjoyed it. Like most of Charlie’s work, it’s an experience that’s designed to stay with you, but it’s not necessarily one you can decipher or completely empathise with. I couldn’t figure out whether he was mocking the real life people he used as characters or the evolving world of 21st century sexual culture. I really hope he wasn’t. His main character definitely took a few pot shots at Christopher Nolan. Which is why it felt so strange to watch their latest movies so close together.
Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a shape shifting deep dive into relationships, memory and loneliness. Or I think it is. It also features character quoting entire movie reviews, interpretative dance, animation and the bleakest ice cream shop you’ve ever seen. In a way, it’s a movie that could almost be about anything we find inside ourselves on a bad day. The captivating and heart breaking performances by the cast keep you focused as the low fi reality around them shifts, ages, crumbles, reweaves and occasionally animates. It’s an intriguing if not wholly engaging trip into the cold, deep end of experimental cinema. A slice of pragmatism, dressed as a cringe wrought break up movie that might be about why you should never go back to high school.
Now, you better believe these two movies have got the two people in my head squabbling. They’ve been talking about genre and creative decisions, about who exactly am I writing this new book for. It’s not been a fun five days, although the answer to all this might be pretty simple on the surface. Never mind the voices, never mind the indecision. From our own beginnings, we each build ourselves from the ground up. We decide who we want to be and we also decide who we’re going to be on the journey to that person. It’s a decision that we can change or our lives can change for us, but we set that path.
I’m also starting to understand that the many fantastic creative people and passionate genre fans I have the pleasure of knowing can keep a stronger grip on their two people. They’re able to live their lives by pursuing what interests them. Never mind what sells. Never mind what works for other people. They don’t appear to be distracted by it. I would argue the same can be said for both Nolan and Kaufman. They are both creators pursing what holds their interest in the moment, following it to a conclusion that works for them. Whether that outcome is a ground breaking spectacle circled by loud question marks or quiet, empty rooms lined with important, heartfelt, derelict keepsakes.
My niece and nephew went on holiday this summer to a farm. There were two horses there, who they fed carrots and petted and loved just for being horses who liked children. One of those horses was called Breeze. The other was called Norman. There are two people in the world: I think we have names for them now.