Which is where we really come to the crunch. A child who grows up not knowing the difference between swearing and ordinary language will not be employed by anyone who does know the difference, and there are still quite a lot of people like that, although their number might be declining. And a child who grows up listening to swearing adults, and who in turn becomes an habitually swearing adult, has been deprived of one of the most precious features of the English language.
The English language has many levels, stretching from the mundane, the everyday, to the divine, the level of love, worship and poetry. Used with point and a sense of pace, the profane can reinforce all of them, but it is not a language level in itself, and anyone confined to using nothing else has effectively been deprived of speech. Luckily nobody has to stay that way. Anyone with any brains at all will eventually notice that most people are getting more said with fewer expletives, and will try to copy them, if only to land a job.
It’s a counsel of despair to say that we can’t get back to decent speech. Almost everybody gets back to it for at least part of the day. I myself swear too much in private company, and swear far too much when I am alone and the last light bulb goes out. But when I watch my words, I realize that I have fallen back on a swear word for effect only because I ran out of ideas for saying the same thing better. No, I don’t mean that all comedians should clean up their act. I just want them to be something funnier.
I don’t think Frank Skinner would have made his historic statement on this subject if he hadn’t been aware that the tide is on the turn. I hope the puritans aren’t trying to regain their lost ground, and if they are, I hope I’m not one of them. But I do think the time might have come to listen to the laughs more carefully. Comedians always listen to the laughs. Quite often they count them. But a wise comedian listens to the quality of the laugh. Is it that thin laugh that he gets when people are determined to have a good time and will laugh at anything flagged as funny? Or is it the solid laugh that they grant to something really funny? There’s all the something difference in the something world.
Postscript
Perhaps I overdid my pitch. Now, listening to the broadcast, I sound peevishly out of date even to myself. Years before, I delivered a lecture to a television conference in which I contended that bad language would have a corrosive effect on comedy. Some of the executives present kindly looked concerned, as if I might have a point, but they went on doing nothing about it. Listening to the talent was their business, not listening to a critic, and the screen comedy writers went on writing it the way they wanted. The way got dirtier, but eventually it arrived at a masterpiece. I had to admit that The Thick of It made me laugh right along with my well-behaved family. We were creased. And the foul language was fundamental to the effect. But I noticed that in the episodes that worked best, the leading actor – the wonderful Peter Capaldi – had a monopoly of the putrescent talk. When another character was allowed a share of the scatology, the impact dropped away, sometimes to nothing.
The lesson was plain. Foul language needs a context in fair language. If foul language is all there is, the possibilities of expression are restricted rather than expanded. In private, if we are wise, we use dirty words only to add texture. Using them too often is a sign of self-assertion, which an astute interlocutor will quickly detect as weakness. The trouble with the foul-mouthed yob is that he’s asserting the only self he’s got. Sometimes I think I see that happening on screen. But had there been room, I would have admitted in the broadcast that there is such a thing as failing to keep up. It’s not the content that one fails to keep up with, so much as the style. I find Sara Silverman brilliantly funny, but I have listened for several hours on end to Russell Brand, watching his face carefully, and I have to say that I just don’t get it. Not that he swears a lot. But he does carry on as if uninterrupted insolence were the purpose of life.
If it were, it would be as boring as uninterrupted reverence. In the days when the mass media were censored, we could take comfort from the obvious signs that the censors were at least trying to throw us a bone. In my treasured early copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, the word ‘fugg’ occurred frequently. I was so young that I took a while to figure it out. Even today, the American TV networks still demand clean language. But in Battlestar Galactica the word ‘frak’ still gets through. I find it touching, as if something were being protected. The universe in which anything can be said is only a jump away from the universe in which nothing is worth hearing.
GLAMORIZING TERROR
Dates of show: 28 and 30 November 2008
In the growing category of German movies shining light on the murky past, The Baader Meinhof Complex, a movie about the core group of the Red Army Faction that was infamously active in Germany for almost thirty years, is currently making an international hit. Since I like to keep up even in my years of retirement, I suppose I’ll have to see it, but I’m not looking forward to it. Part of my trepidation comes from the possibility that the film will be full of exciting action, that I’ll get caught up with the characters, and that I’ll start to find them attractive. The producers of the movie say that they were intent on avoiding chic glamour, but there are people who say that Elvis is still alive.
At my age I can easily recall what was happening in the 1970s, and I can assure anyone too young to remember that the Baader Meinhof bunch weren’t attractive at all. Some of them were quite good-looking, and the actors playing them in the movie are even better looking, which is already a worry. Because even if the originals were easy on the eye, the attraction soon faded if you were getting the news of what they were up to, which mainly consisted of murdering law-abiding citizens to make a point.
The gangsters claimed to be rebelling against a repressive state. Too young to have had much direct experience of what a genuinely repressive Germany had been like, they thought that the Germany they were living in was authoritarian. There was some evidence for that, and the evidence grew as the authorities panicked under pressure. But when the gang’s founder members were finally arrested, the repressive state kept them alive to face trial. They were held in what was called maximum security, but anything they wanted was smuggled in, usually by their defence lawyers. When they wanted guns, those were smuggled in as well.
On the outside, Red Army Faction members still at large tried to spring their friends. The most prominent businessman they took hostage undoubtedly had a Nazi background. But in order to kidnap him they shot his driver, his bodyguard and two cops. No doubt they thought the cops had it coming, being uniformed representatives of a repressive state, and as for the bodyguard, stopping a bullet was his job, was it not? But the driver was just driving the car. Perhaps he was driving it in a repressive manner. Anyway, all rescue attempts having failed, the prisoners committed suicide, two of them using the smuggled guns.
Once again, they had their pictures in the papers, and now, what with the movie coming out, they’ve got their pictures in the papers all over again, along with the pictures of the actors playing them. The actor playing the driver is only an extra, so I haven’t seen that actor’s picture in the papers yet. Come to think of it, the original driver’s picture wasn’t very often featured in the papers either, even in Germany. He was only a driver. Let’s forget him while we talk about more important people: Hitler, for example.
One of the previous German movies shining light on the murky past had the same director. It was Downfall, concerned with the last moments of Hitler’s life. That one I did see as soon as it came out, and I admired it very much while hating every minute of it. How, you might ask, were two such contrary reactions possible? Well, it was easy. On the one hand, the movie was wonderfully well made. On the other hand, it had a thumping lie right in the centre of it. When Hitler violently expressed his anti-Semitism, the good-looking personal secretary was stunned, as if she had no idea.
The original girl was good-looking but she couldn’t have been stunned. The one thing that everybody in Germany cou
ld be sure of was that Hitler was a violent anti-Semite. He told them often enough. But he hadn’t told them often enough for this girl to hear about it. When I first saw her beautiful eyes widening with shock I asked myself, are we meant to believe this? And then it struck me: we were meant to be her.
We were meant to believe that we, too, could have total horror going on all around us and not spot it until the roof fell in. To that extent, and it’s almost the whole extent, Downfall is a dream world. It’s a story without a context. It’s been glamorized. That might seem a paradoxical thing to say about a story which dares to feature Himmler’s horrible haircut and people blowing their brains out all over the place, but it’s true. When you take the historical context out of a story, what you are left with is glamour.
When we move to Hollywood movies shining light on the murky past, we get the glamour principle operating at full steam. Steven Spielberg’s Munich was a case in point. Spielberg had done his best with Schindler’s List, but his best left some of us wondering just how useful a contribution it was, to make a movie about how some of the Jews had survived, when the real story was about all the Jews who hadn’t. Spielberg tried to cover that aspect with his brilliant device of the little girl in the red dress. She was doomed, and we felt for her. But what we were mainly left with was a story about how one kind man could make a difference. And the real story was about how it took whole armies to make a difference. But to tell that story, you have to give a history lesson, and in a movie there is never time.
Munich was so short of time that there was almost nothing left in the plot except secret agent derring-do and John Woo-style gunfight face-offs. The tip-off scene was the conference in which the Israeli leaders planned their retaliation against the terrorists who had killed the athletes in Munich. That conference should have been the key scene, as it was in real life. There were pluses and minuses to be debated, dilemmas that took in the whole of modern history. The scene went for nothing, to make room for more action.
I was only kidding a couple of weeks ago when I said that the action in action movies should be replaced by reasoned discussion, but in Munich the movie would actually have been more exciting if the underlying issues had been explained. They weren’t, because movies have their own logic: the logic of glamour.
Glamour nearly always shapes the movies and it took over completely when Carlos got famous. His real name was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez but he called himself Carlos as a code-name. It was already a bad sign when the press agreed to call him Carlos too, and an even worse sign when they started calling him Carlos the Jackal, apparently on the grounds that a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Jackal had been found among his kit: but perhaps it would have been less catchy to call him Carlos the Casually Lethal Reader of Second-rate Fiction.
The original Carlos was a psychopath whose idea of a political gesture was to roll a grenade into a crowded Paris cafe. But he believed himself to be a glamorous figure. The press went along with it and the movies went mad with it. Movies with a charmingly ruthless central figure based on Carlos proliferated. There might have been something to the idea that he was charming, if you can be charmed by a puff adder with a nice smile. One of his French defence lawyers was, and she married him while he was in jail.
He’s still in jail but I prefer to speak of him in the past tense. I hope he never gets out. Why do I hope that? Because I could have been in the cafe, and so could you. No, of course we weren’t. But we should be able to imagine it. We should be able to imagine being the unglamorous figure, the one that gets blown away. But the movies will always try to make us imagine we’re the glamorous figure, the one in the close-up.
Defending themselves with passion in the middle of a shouting match that has split German opinion in a big way, the makers of the Baader Meinhof epic are keen to point out that they have shot their action sequences from the viewpoint of the victims. They probably have. I’m sure it’s an accomplished movie, and I’ll be sure to see it before I judge it. The trailer looks to me like a cross-section through a pile of tripe, but judging things unseen is a habit that needs to be resisted.
I’ll see it, though, because I want to find out what the movies are doing, not because I need the history lesson. If you already know something about the history behind its nominal subject, you can judge a movie against its context. But the thought that people might be learning about history from the movies is enough to drain the brain. It’s already bad enough when it takes the release of a new movie for the press to get interested again in the events it purports to treat. But at least the press has the resources to recall the events in some measure of their complexity. For the moviegoers, unless they are reading all the newspapers and magazines at once, the movie might replace the event.
Almost always it will replace the event with a glamorous fiction, because there just isn’t room in the frame for the people who don’t matter. I’m sure that when the businessman gets kidnapped I’ll see the driver getting shot, but I doubt if we’ll hear anything else about him. Yet he’s the one we should think about as us. The one who doesn’t matter. I know it would be a different movie if it was all about him. In fact it wouldn’t be a movie at all, because it would just be the story of an ordinary life, which finished at that moment. I’ll be keen to look at the cast list at the end, and see if he’s been given a name, or just called Driver. His name, incidentally, was Heinz Marcicz. I think that’s how it’s pronounced. I’ve never heard it said. And now, let’s talk about Mumbai.
Postscript
A few days later I saw the movie and it was even worse than I had expected. The driver vanished from the screen as soon as he was killed, but that was no surprise. All the terrorists were beautiful young people but that was no surprise either. What was truly astonishing was the poverty of the film’s historical imagination. It made Downfall look profound. The special squad of policemen assigned to track down the terrorists featured an extra-special grand old man (played by none other than Bruno Ganz, fresh from his role as Hitler) to provide gravitas, guidance and wisdom. The wisdom was apparently designed to sound wise to anyone who knew nothing at all about modern history. The penalty for knowing anything was to sit there open-mouthed as the grand old man opined that the terrorists would be less active if the Middle East crisis could be solved. Such a view, already wrong now even though widely accepted, is simply incongruous when projected decades into the past, when scarcely anyone proposed it. To hear it turning up as a piece of received wisdom in the movie was to fear that the world had been taken over by high-school students, and not very bright ones at that. Thus the essential point – that the Red Army Faction, like the Brigati Rossi in Italy, needed nothing more to drive them crazy than to have been brought up in a free country – was allowed to vanish by default. Whether it was the director who had no sense of history, or whether, possessing that sense, he had prudently decided that his audience didn’t, was a nice question. Keen to put him in the best light, I prefer to believe that he is a confident ignoramus of the type that currently sets the tone for the progressive intelligentsia throughout the West. To say that he perpetrates his distortions knowingly would be to accuse him of iniquity.
Still, it was an exciting movie. Whether exciting movies about politics do much good for those who have no other source of political knowledge is a larger question. One tries to be optimistic and believe that seeing a movie might count as making a start, no matter how empty the movie is. I knew very little about post-war politics in Poland when I first saw Ashes and Diamonds, or about Algeria when I first saw The Battle of Algiers. But subsequently, when I read up on their subjects, I found that both movies had been reasonably true to the complex facts. No young person who reads up on the background of The Baader Meinhof Complex is going to reach a similar conclusion. In that regard, there has been a precipitous decline over the last half-century, with the movies becoming more brainless as their resources increase. The best we can hope for is that the low point has already been reached. It’s hard t
o think of anything emptier than the way the Albert Speer character, in Downfall, just stood around in his leather overcoat looking deeply concerned. Nowhere to go but up. Or so I thought, until, in late 2010, an epic movie about Carlos was announced, with a running time longer than Parsifal. I saw the short version, took due note of the hero’s infinite supply of cigarettes and beautiful young women, and briefly wondered why I had never gone in for terrorism myself. One trusts that this was not the desired effect.
WRITER’S ROOM
Dates of show: 5 and 7 December 2008
The great thing about speaking in this slot is that I can pontificate. But a wise pontificator should always remember that he won’t solve a global problem in ten minutes, or even do much more than usefully touch on it in ten hours. There are two main reasons for that. One reason is that the global problems are, by their nature, devilishly complicated. But everyone knows, or should know, that.
The other reason is less obvious, because it lies within the nature of the pontificator. He, or she – in my case he – speaks with a special pontificating voice: integrated, judicious even in its doubts, purporting to contain the distilled wisdom of a lifetime’s experience. Almost always, I suspect, this voice is at odds with the personality from which it emerges, and in my case the discrepancy is so glaring that even I can spot it.
As I prepare this script, tapping away at the keyboard as Socrates might have done if he had owned a PC, it seems to me that my brain is at my fingertips, with all its scope and knowledge. But then, after looking up at the screen and noticing that the last two sentences are all in capitals and include various chemical formulae for substances unknown to science, I bounce my forehead off the desk and make the supreme mistake of looking around my room.