July 12 2019, 17:12
On writing ‘The Complex’
The first shoots of the ideas that would combine to become The Complex appeared way back in November 2012, when I was fascinated by Lars von Trier’s film, Antichrist. I hadn’t watched it, I was too scared of it, but I was reading interviews with Charlotte Gainsbourg about what it was like to work on the film, and I became fascinated with the idea of going into the woods, with actors, as a director, and getting them to do whatever I wanted. I was suffering with writer’s block at the time. To be able to write freely, without censure, in a cabin in the woods on my own internal film set, was an exciting idea. I was crushing the life out of myself with old feelings of shame and inadequacy. Gainsbourg in the interviews made film-making with extreme material feel playful. I wanted some of that.
I didn’t write the first words of the first draft of The Complex for another three years. By this point, in December 2015, I was in the middle of the second year of an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. I had been flailing around creatively, with two aborted attempts at a novel on my desktop, but now things were getting serious. For the first time, I had workshops in which I had to present work from my final dissertation, a novel, to a group of my peers and my tutor. I remember reading back through years of notebooks, pulling together strands of thoughts and little sketches, about a cabin in the woods. I also found notes I had made about the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, taken after my mother died in 2014. In working through my grief, I had written about his concept of a complex, in which a person is taken over by patterns of thoughts and feelings so that they act irrationally, with great energy.
I had even written in my notebook that The Complex was a perfect title for a novel. I had forgotten all this, even when starting to write two other novels, but now, when I needed it, the title reappeared. I think I fell into a complex to write the first half of the first draft of the book — after years of not being able to write a longer story, under the pressure of a workshop, with a tutor who I wanted to impress, the words started to come. Three voices — Stefan, Gabrielle and Leo.
It became clear that I needed to find a narrative mechanism that would let me write more fantastical, dream-like sequences, but staying grounded in the emerging location of the story. They appeared organically, as I wrote the draft. Stefan has the Virtual Reality headset. Gabrielle has Art’s drugs. And Leo has whatever is in the place itself.
And I wanted to explore relationships. These characters were parts of myself, and I could bounce them off each other, let them rip. A lot of the fun of writing The Complex came from imagining the scenes as if I were shooting a film. My father introduced me to genre stories very young. He loved mysteries, thrillers, fantasy, science-fiction and horror, in books, television and films. Growing up, our house was totally liberal in what I could read, mostly liberal in what I could watch on TV, but totalitarian in terms of having and expressing feelings. No wonder I had writer’s block. But that’s an entirely different blog post.
When the writing was going well, it felt like I was making a film for myself, perhaps for my father too. Dreams, fantasies and the imagination are all real in their affects. Through Gabrielle I could write about my grief at my mother dying, Stefan about optimism and hope, and Leo about desperation, longing and despair. It felt like important work to be doing — even if it might never be published.
Because the book took almost four years to write, by the end of it I was a different person, and I could look more clearly at the themes. There was grief, yes, but also the problems of intimacy, technology, sanity and reality, family, falling in love, betrayal, addiction, competitiveness, manipulative relationships, affairs, and memory. I’d covered a lot of ground, but organically, without a conscious agenda. The story is driven by the characters. In writing, the themes seemed to follow the characters interests, but if I am the characters, and they are aspects of myself, then I guess these were all my concerns and obsessions.
Anyway, my tutor on the MA was Nicholas Royle, who was also a commissioning editor at Salt. I feel lucky and grateful that it will be published and read. Now I have to write some new characters, in new locations, and find out how my obsessions have changed. It’s like writing myself into existence.
Since I’ve put it like that, I’d better crack on.
February 03 2019, 18:12
Anomalisa (2015)
Everyone looks the same to Michael Stone. He is in Cincinnati to give a talk at a conference and is staying at the Hotel Fregoli. After failing to make a connection with an ex-lover, he becomes fascinated by an antique Japanese sex toy. He seems unable to make a connection with anyone.
Then he hears a voice through his hotel door. Anonymous Lisa. Anomaly Lisa. Lisa’s voice and face are different, so Michael becomes enraptured by her. His interactions with Lisa in his hotel room are sweet, if a little manipulative. He is desperate for something real in his life, an authentic person who is not like everyone else, something that he hasn’t fucked up. The scene where they make love is beautiful. Animated intimacy surprised me, perhaps because it was more intimate and real than most sex scenes I’ve seen with real actors.
The nightmare he has that night reveals the horror of his situation. In the basement he meets the hotel manager who says he is in love with Michael, and that he can fuck anyone at the hotel but Lisa. Michael is falling in love with her and his unconscious is telling him he has to protect her, because he is going to ruin it, ruin her. He has brought her out of herself and her vulnerability terrifies him. The next morning her voice begins to change and she starts to become like all the others.
Michael has a breakdown on stage as he gives his talk — he is trapped in his own self-absorption, or perhaps a medical condition, we can’t know. He returns home and is faced with the same face wherever he goes. His family is no comfort. He doesn’t know how to connect with his wife or son. But Lisa is transformed by the experience and heads off into her life renewed. It’s a smart reversal in a film full of doubles. Multiples, in fact.
The hotel is a metaphor for Michael’s psyche, twisted and pulsing with his emotional experience. The story is told in three thirty-minute acts: arriving at the hotel, his night with Lisa, and the consequences. The dialogue is awkward and authentic, and it took me a while to realise all the faces and voices of periphery characters were the same. That was unnerving. It made me wonder if I had the same problem as Michael Stone. And the lines on the characters faces were freaky too. I didn’t know they were puppets, so it added to Michael’s paranoid, nightmarish view of the world. You only realise how ill he is at the very end.
It’s a terribly sad story for him, but an uplifting one for Anomalisa. Brilliant.
August 20 2018, 11:15
Point Break
It’s tricky to find films that my fifteen-year-old son will want to watch with his forty-something parents, but this seemed to sit in the sweet spot — surfing, armed robbers, a cocky young hero, skydiving, a love interest and lots of banter. I wanted to see how the film stood up twenty-five years after the only time I saw it, on it’s release. I remembered Patrick Swayze’s charisma and the adrenaline rush of the action sequences, but beyond that it was pretty vague. Intriguingly, it also had the highest rating on iTunes I had ever seen, 4.9/5 with 74 reviews. That impressed me.
Johnny Utah wants to make his mark at the FBI and take down a crew of surfer armed robbers. He is attracted to the crew's leader, Bhodi, who lets him in to his surfer gang and shows him the spiritual side of being a surfer. But Bhodi’s greed and Utah’s ambition put everyone in danger.
Utah becomes Bhodi, absorbing him, integrating his own shadow, in Jungian terms. We project what we unconsciously desire or fear and, if we do the work, we can claim those things in ourselves consciously, and take back our projections from the other person.
The film is fast-paced, the dialogue cheesily involving, and the main characters substantial enough. Bigelow's camera loves the ocean, making the surf and surfers seem as mystical as the characters believe they are. It’s all very light. My son was impressed. Now I have to convince him to watch Robocop.
August 19 2018, 09:15
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Siblings Sally and Franklin come to a remote part of Texas to make sure their relatives remains haven’t been dug up from a local cemetery in a bizarre, gruesome local crime. But Franklin’s curiosity takes them to the slaughterhouse their grandfather used to own. They are warned not to go there, but in time-honoured tradition, they go anyway. That transgression sets the film in motion.
This is a film about meat. The young people are slaughtered like cattle in a world where meat is life and livelihood. Bones are plentiful in the rural setting, made into art works, mashed together into new creatures. There is beauty and horror in the lives of these people, who are like bacteria, or maggots, stripping life to the bone because it’s all they have. It’s a type of hell.
The film makes meat-eating seem like a transgression, a breaking of natural laws, with the characters hung on hooks, frozen, and butchered like animals. The film seems to say that it is none of our business what people do in their own homes, and if we are too nosy, it’s at our own risk. And all sentient life should be treated with respect. It's a pro-vegetarianism film.
So many horror tropes seem to constellate here. Young people are picked off one by one. A killer has a phallic, mechanical weapon. Rural communities are dangerous to outsiders who don't respect the old ways. There is a final girl.
But the thing that struck me most was the beautiful, dread-filled cinematography, the art design, and the overarching intelligence of the script and direction. Almost forty-five years after its release, when of course it was vilified and banned, it’s now clear it’s a masterpiece.
August 15 2018, 19:35
Exhibition (2013)
This one lingers in my mind. The married couple, D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) have created their own emotional ecosystem, balancing intimacy and distance, in a big modernist house somewhere in Central London. She is an artist, and he is an architect — both work at home, but in their own offices on different floors, talking to each other sporadically through an internal phone system. It’s an unusual setup that has worked for them for years, but comes under strain when they decide to move home.
Neither actor has acted before, which is remarkable to me, and makes sense given the naturalistic rendering of their relationship. They are completely believable as an averagely neurotic middle-aged couple. The house itself is the third character, representing the life they have created together. There are lots of beautifully framed shots of interiors and exteriors, the cinematographer making the most of the glass, concrete and minimalist shapes.
D hates going out and is afraid H will be hurt every time he steps outside. At the same time she lives a separate life in her office studio, performing for herself, using her reflection in the big glass windows, aware that she can also be partially seen through the carefully arranged blinds — if anyone was looking.
March 03 2018, 21:09
High Rise
I read several Ballard books in the late nineties — my mid-twenties — starting with short stories, before being entranced by the shiny silver paperback cover of Super-Cannes. I thought I’d read High Rise, but I quickly realised on starting it that I hadn’t. There was the usual Ballardian sense of society being on the edge of primal chaos, but I’d read so many blurbs on the backs of his books they were blurring together.
Robert Laing is a newly divorced medical academic moving in to high-rise block in London. He’s hoping for a life of comfortable anonymity. We also meet Richard Wilder, a television documentary-maker on the second floor, and Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, in the penthouse. The high-rise is portrayed as a mixture of designed technology and living organism—a social experiment designed by Royal and embraced by the residents.
Laing is a social chameleon who wants to make a safe place for himself in the building, whereas Wilder wants to conquer it and confront its maker. Each man tries to make the building serve them in their own ways, but it’s the women who ultimately make the place their own.
If the high-rise is a living thing, Ballard is its ultimate creator, and I like the idea of Laing, Wilder and Royal being different aspects of Ballard’s creative personality. The prose mixes an omniscient point-of-view with that of each character as Ballard moves between them. The omniscience could also be that of the building itself. It’s a little irritating how characters reveal chunks of backstory in their thoughts, but the descriptions are brilliant and unnerving, and Ballard finds endless ways to show the collapse and degradation of the initially modern and comfortable environment.
I was nervous about watching the film—I didn’t want to subject myself to two hours of disgust and misery. The film is quite different though. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley and adapted by his long-term screenwriting and editing partner Amy Jump who makes the main protagonist Laing. Wilder and Royal are still important, Laing is given far more agency. The film honours the book in how it portrays the dying building, but differnt chaacters come to the fore. It’s an impressive feat.
December 08 2017, 21:14
It Follows (2014)
I avoided watching It Follows because the idea was unsettling. It’s a genius concept embedded in a homage to John Carpenter and Halloween. The characters are all on the cusp of adulthood with their parents barely around. Jay has sex with her new boyfriend and finds out he has passed on to her a curse that she can only get rid of by having sex with someone else. The cursed person is chased by slow shape-shifting dead people, visible only to them, moving methodically at walking pace. They are all ages, shapes and sizes, but always dead and gross.
The cinematography is wonderful—slow tracking shots, wide-angle views of suburban Detroit, open spaces drawing the eye of the viewer to look for the next zombie. Even the soundtrack is touched by John Carpenter, with the synth score serving the mood perfectly.
Who knew a single slow zombie could be so scary?
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