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Vera, a distorted picture for our shallow society
Popular taste is a good guide to the temper of the times, much more so than highbrow high culture. You can tell much more about how most people felt and what their assumptions were from John Buchan or Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming than from reading what were seen then and since as the best novels of the time.
It is precisely because popular works seem so dated later on that they have something to reveal of their time. Other greater works which have a more universal, timeless quality tell us less about the date in question.
Big box office movies of the past unselfconsciously reveal sociological volumes about the status of women through the anachronistic make-up of the female stars alone. What sells in the mass market is revealing.
So what, I have been asking myself glumly, is revealed about the temper of our times by the outstanding popular success of Mike Leigh’s new film, Vera Drake? I can hardly remember a more dazzling reception for a film or a more impassioned mass outburst of respect and affection, with important industry awards and nominations and rave reviews everywhere. I myself was eager to see it since, like millions of other people, I think Leigh at his best is something of a national treasure.
This film is a mass popular triumph but it is also a succès d’estime — perhaps the French phrase will point up its more critical, arty cineaste success. Although there have been a few voices of dissent it has wowed both the critics and the glitterati. But how depressing it all is.
For if the triumph of Vera Drake is any guide to feeling and taste today, then we are living in a time of mass sentimentality, mental laziness and class hatred. I simply cannot understand why people have not recoiled at the film’s obvious dishonesty.
Most obvious of all perhaps is the class stereotyping. All the heart-warmingly good and decent people in the film, like Vera Drake herself, are working-class and unfailingly salt-of-the-earth. The audience is allowed no other response to these powerful performances. The single exceptions (apart from the wicked spiv who finds the girls) are the only two working-class characters who show any signs of aspiration or youth.
The young aspirational wife, Vera’s sister-in-law who wants to better herself, is a selfish monster. The only other person who turns away from poor Vera at her time of trial is her own young, faintly aspirational son who works in gents’ outfitting. Fortunately in his case (as he is decent Vera’s decent enough boy), the constant cup of tea soon brings him back down to his place amid the stoical, inarticulate, loveable working-class sorts who know their unaspirational place and have the right values.
By contrast to these working-class heroes and heroines, the upper-middle-class characters are all stereotypically heartless and repellent with mean spirits, locked jaws and nothing whatsoever to recommend them or to arouse any response in the viewer apart from contempt. The only exception (apart perhaps from a kindly society doctor) is a posh girl who is ignored and patronised by her chilly mother and date-raped by a Hooray Henry monster. She is therefore a victim and thereby relieved of much of her class guilt and no longer hateful, although still contemptibly repressed like all the other toffs.
One could say that there is nothing wrong with stereotypes in a work of art. Bourgeois realism is not compulsory in creative fiction. Think of fairy tales, morality tales, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. However, Leigh does not claim that excuse. In a recent interview he said: “Actually the last thing my characters are is stereotypes because they are far too idiosyncratic, like we all are, to be able to qualify in a million years as stereotypes.” Well, he said it.
If Leigh himself and his many admirers and his huge audience cannot see that his characters in Vera Drake are the most hog-whimperingly two-dimensional stereotypes, then there is something wrong with him and them and popular culture generally.
Alternatively (leaving aside Leigh’s personal baggage) it must be that the great British public, along with its supposed intellectual leaders, prefers easy, lazy, feelgood stereotypes to an artistic and intellectual challenge.
In many ways this film was wonderful. The direction is irresistibly lush and many of the images and sequences are unforgettable. There is something unmistakably authentic about all the period detail and the performances are quite impeccable.
For years we have been spoilt in this country with an astonishingly high standard of acting and every performance in this film is truly excellent. The many awards coming the way of this dazzling cast are thoroughly well deserved. However, intellectually speaking, the film reaches a depressing low in the lowest common denominator of contemporary British feelgood mindlessness.
The film’s tendentiousness, although perhaps not cynical, simply serves that uncritical feely-touchiness. Vera Drake is a back-street abortionist in 1950 whose only motive is to help girls in trouble and who is horribly shamed and punished for her kindness.
There is nothing wrong with that as a plausible plot. Of course there were greedy and heartless people who performed dangerous abortions only for money, but it is also true that some kind women wanted to protect pregnant girls from disgrace and misery and took terrible personal risks to do so.
Leigh claims to be interested in lies. Here he has effectively promoted several. The truth is that abortions like the ones so gently done by the saintly Vera would have been extremely painful and dangerous. It is unthinkable that there would have been no screams at the time and no horrible deaths and infections during her 20-year mission of mercy or that she would not have known.
The truth is that nobody taking such awful risks could have preserved Vera Drake’s relentless good cheer and confident respectability. The truth is that a hard-pressed, hard-up working-class family like hers could not have been so relentlessly saintly — no family could. The truth is that the interest of such a story lies in its complexity, of which this film almost entirely robs it.
A great artist would have risen above all this extreme oversimplification to tell wider, interesting truths. What Leigh offers is a combination of superficial nicey nicey, with a nasty underlying confirmation of outdated class prejudice. Shallow thinking and shallow feeling — that is popular culture in our time, it seems.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 23, 2005 | Comments (0)
Something rotten in the state of Harry’s education
"A bad day for Eton” was the title of an unforgettable essay that I read many years ago, in a long defunct magazine, about the disappearance of Lord Lucan after he murdered his children’s nanny by mistake instead of his inconvenient wife.
The article described very eloquently the unpleasant world that Lucan inhabited, solemnly eating lamb cutlets daily in the Clermont club, giving upper-class countenance to flash gamblers and surrounded by a clique of rich Etonians and hangers-on, outstanding more than anything else for their philistinism, recklessness, ruthlessness and eye-stretchingly unfeeling sense of entitlement.
Like the writer of that article, I have often been tempted to think that this strange subculture might have something to do with Eton, rather as Harrow is distinguished by some particularly appalling chancers of a different stamp among its old boys.
Of course there are lots of old Etonians, young and old, who are entirely different and impressively well educated. I can even say that some of my best friends are old Etonians.
All the same, I have my doubts about Eton’s secluded oddities and I was reminded of that essay last week in the midst of the scandal surrounding Prince Harry. I feel as strongly as anybody else that what he did was almost unforgivably stupid and insensitive, particularly for someone in his position.
To most people the swastika that he chose to wear on his arm for fun stands for unspeakable atrocity and he should have known that. He should have felt that. The question is, why didn’t he? Why has nobody succeeded in teaching him what Jane Austen would have called proper feeling or, failing that, at least some political nous? It is obvious why his family has not done so. With the exception of his grandmother, his close relations are notoriously dysfunctional and tactless, if not actually unhinged, and live a life of unusual social exclusion and ineptitude, surrounded by disloyal servants demented by red carpet fever. It is also obvious — although extremely odd, considering how many films and documentaries there are about Nazism, the second world war and the Holocaust — that popular culture succeeds in teaching very little history.
According to a recent poll, about 60% of all women and of people under 35 know absolutely nothing about Auschwitz; the word is meaningless to them.
If ignorance is any excuse, perhaps a very young man could be forgiven for dressing up in Nazi costume. Most bog-standard comprehensives have for years been entirely unable to give their pupils any sense of history whatsoever.
Princes Harry and William, however, did not go to a bog-standard comprehensive. They went to Eton, one of the best schools in the country. It is awash with brilliant and attentive teachers — called by some other name, of course, because exclusive language is part of exclusivity. All those teachers must have been aware that in the princes they were taking on two troubled boys much in need of guidance — both real moral guidance and the more worldly sort to ease them comfortably into the Establishment and give them the acceptable face of privilege. This is the sort of guidance that schools such as Eton pride themselves on providing. I think Eton failed the princes, by any standards.
It may be, as people say, that Harry isn’t very bright (and would not have got into Eton had he not been the Queen’s grandson). But surely any responsible bill or pecker or beak at Eton ought to have been able to convey even to poor Harry just a little bit of history, the embarrassments of his family’s past and the painful ambiguities of his own role, not to mention some manners. It’s not molecular biology.
The privately educated boys to whom I’ve spoken (and they are not academic either) are powerfully aware of what a swastika means. They are contemptuous of Harry and also of William for not stopping his younger brother there and then in Cotswold Costumes in Nailsworth when he chose his Nazi outfit. Perhaps William was equally unenlightened.
It seems that the part of upper-class culture in which they find themselves is generally rather insensitive. It takes a distinct lack of proper feeling to hold a big party with a “native and colonial” theme (where a truly vicious guest took the notorious photograph of Harry). It seems that the princes are surrounded by young things, many of them Etonians, who just do not understand how distasteful their pranks appear to others.
I am not anti-elitist or invertedly snobbish or disapproving of titles or remotely politically correct, yet these sort of people have mildly offended me all my life with their insensitivity and their unconscious sense of entitlement. They bring to mind the rumbling of the tumbrils.
The Queen would have been absolutely incapable of such a disastrous mistake. She was strictly brought up to understand her role and to discipline herself to it. But her grandsons have not been properly prepared.
It may no longer be possible to prepare anyone for royal highness in a supposedly meritocratic world, where self-discipline is increasingly seen as pathological and there is only one elderly royal role model for it. Majesty is crumbling everywhere, from Holland to Japan, battered by neurotic brides and delinquent sons.
But without such preparation the House of Windsor is doomed to play out the next act of its lengthy Götterdämmerung at a rather more rapid rate, no matter how handsome William is.
The hysterical international feeding frenzy, from tabloids to television, upon this poor boy’s gaffe was inexcusable. Millions of words and thousands of hours of air time, driven largely by greed and sanctimoniousness from left and right, were spent cynically teasing up profitable frissons of righteous indignation.
It’s well known, sadly, that swastikas sell stories and a combination of royalty and swastikas is commercial dynamite. It has been shameful and extremely unfeeling.
Poor Harry has been punished excessively. For a boy of 20 this international fury must have been deeply shocking. I believe that he meant no harm and I am sure that he understands now that he ought to be extremely sorry. He may apologise more.
However, a really grovelling apology is owed to the public, and even perhaps to Harry, from the entire population of the Street of Shame.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 16, 2005 | Comments (0)
Moralists merely wail, but science gives us answers
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the philosopher Wittgenstein famously said. That was my response to the tsunami in Asia and its terrible aftermath.
To me it was and is a meaningless horror about which there is almost nothing one can say except, perhaps, to ask what can be done. Perhaps the most picturesque was the belief of Alun Anderson, editor-in-chief of New Scientist, that cockroaches are conscious. That is to say cockroaches and other quite simple animals are conscious of the world around them, though quite differently from humans, and not merely driven by hard-wired, instinctive, scuttling reactions.
I am not complaining about all the reporters and scientists who have been trying to discover useful information about how the tsunami might have been anticipated, its effects mitigated, what can be done now or how relief work is being co-ordinated.
What has depressed me has been the excessive moral and theological posturing. Media atheists have been unfeelingly triumphalist, as if this disaster proved them — yet again — right in their disbelief.
And media men and women of the cloth have, not surprisingly, been reduced to incoherence about their enduring belief. The Archbishop of Canterbury became, and not for the first time in his episcopate, almost incomprehensible.
“The extraordinary fact,” he wrote, “is that belief has survived such tests again and again — not because it comforts or explains but because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given to them. They have learnt to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift.
“They have learnt to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God’s mercy for themselves and make it real for others and they have learnt that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence.
“These convictions are terribly assaulted by all those other facts of human experience that seem to point to a completely arbitrary world, but people still feel bound to them, not for comfort or ease but because they have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart.”
If that contorted prose means anything at all, it would take a very great leap of faith, of a most mystical sort, to believe so.
It is sad that the Church of England, which produced the strong-minded, eloquent lucidity of Cranmer’s liturgy, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of the English language, should now be reduced to impenetrable waffle.
However, in my case it would have made no difference if the archbishop had spoken with the tongues of men and of angels; I am an unbeliever. Yet the constant images of the disaster in Asia, like the less constant images of broken people and broken lives in Iraq, do naggingly demand some sort of answer to the question of what, if anything, one does believe in.
Confronted with senseless violence, viciousness, corruption high and low, and human weakness generally, it is hard to have faith in anything much, especially if one is not religious. But even so I do believe in the importance of faith — not of religious faith but of faith in a different sense, such as keeping faith or living in good faith.
This is not something I can particularly defend, although some evolutionary biologists have tried. It just seems good to me: I do, like religious people and most irreligious people (whatever they might think), have faith, which is to say I hold an irrational belief in some things that I can’t support with argument or evidence. As a believer in the supremacy of scientific thought (if only through a glass and rather darkly), I’ve always found this awkward.
However, it seems it doesn’t necessarily trouble real scientists. Great scientists have sometimes guessed the truth before they had either the evidence or arguments for it; Diderot called this the “esprit de divination”. And the online magazine Edge began the new year by asking 120 scientists “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” It received 60,000 words of fascinating reply.
Even more startling is the belief of Kenneth Ford, the distinguished American physicist, that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.
Scientists don’t normally tend to be quite so astonishingly upbeat as that, but all the same, what distinguishes scientists is their ambitious, open-minded optimism.
Humanity may not make progress, but science certainly does, at a breathtaking rate in many fields, and this sense of increasing discovery and power makes scientists feel hopeful.
By contrast, non-scientific people who have studied and worked in the humanities tend to feel just the opposite — pessimistic, jaded and powerless. Perhaps that is because the human condition hasn’t changed much for the past couple of thousand years and there isn’t a great deal left to say about it.
This first struck me when I worked long ago in the BBC on two science programmes made by a brilliant young producer, one on gerontology and the other on the Big Bang. The producer had an extraordinarily positive quality about him that I had never come across before.
The reason, I began to realise as I listened to him and struggled to understand scientific journals and eminent scientists, was that in science things keep getting bigger, newer, better.
Science is where the intellectual story is. C P Snow wrote famously about a division between the two cultures of literary intellectuals and scientists and suggested a “third culture”, which might unite them.
That never quite emerged. What has happened in the past couple of decades has been that scientists have increasingly bypassed the rather supercilious arts intellectuals and seized the intellectual initiative and the intellectual high ground for themselves.
Many of them have written eloquent and readable books for the general reader, appearing in the mass media or contributing to intellectual online magazines such as Edge.
Scientists, increasingly, have become our public intellectuals, to whom we look for explanations and solutions. These may be partial and imperfect, but they are more satisfactory than the alternatives.
So here is what I believe, without being able to prove it. If there are any answers to life’s greatest questions, or if there are other questions that we should be asking instead, it is science that will provide them.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 09, 2005 | Comments (1)
All right, you lot, here are the resolutions you need to keep
Making new year resolutions for myself is something that I gave up long ago; breaking them was depressing. However, I still make them for other people; it is so much easier to tell others what to do, and if they break my resolutions that is hardly my fault. I have tried to keep them simple.
Tony Blair: As a devout Christian you should read the Bible more, particularly that bit where it is written “Thou shalt not bear false witness”.
Cherie Blair: Spend more time with your family. A devoted mother would not take on so many extra engagements and an unelected spouse should stay out of public affairs.
The Queen: Stay out of politics. Taking a line — any line — on multiculturalism, as you did in your Christmas Day speech, was highly political, especially when a Birmingham theatre had been closed by an ethnic minority riot, and when the government was proposing to give tax breaks to second wives of ethnic minority husbands. For decades you have managed to stay out of politics; don’t follow the unwise example of your son, who has not.
Prince of Wales: Start trying to stay out of politics. That’s the deal — and it is an increasingly fragile deal.
Barclay brothers (owners of the Telegraph group): Install a condom machine in the offices of The Spectator.
Charles Clarke, the new home secretary: Every time you look in the mirror ask yourself what you are doing for children in so-called care. Astonishingly high numbers of these children find themselves illiterate, unemployed and in jail. Yet social services departments divert huge amounts of time and money from real need into wasteful obsessions with race, gender and sexuality.
Public-spirited servants everywhere — teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, hospital administrators, probation officers, prison officers: Follow the example of Mahatma Gandhi and respond to Whitehall oppression with passive resistance. Say no to paperwork. Refuse to fill in the forms and refuse to read the guidelines. Bin all the bumf. Only something extreme will convince Whitehall that public servants must be relieved of the crushing burden of bureaucracy.
It’s quite easy. A former primary school head teacher told me that she used to train her excellent teachers how to deal with pages and pages of ridiculous forms to fill in. First, ignore them. When the powers that be ring to ask why they have not been returned, say they didn’t arrive or must have been lost. If they are sent again, ignore them. If someone calls again, say you can’t understand them and need “support”. Blame the post, blame maternity leave, but don’t return them.
A consultant oncologist told me he fills in only the most essential forms. “Look at it this way,” he said. “How many consultant oncologists have they got?” Public servants of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your paper chains.
Local education authorities: Stop selling school playing fields immediately. Stop closing special schools that parents and children want to stay open.
Conservative voters in marginal seats: Grit your teeth and vote Labour. Blair, undesirable though he may be, is all that stands between us and the imprudent Gordon Brown and his wild socialist dreams. Do not vote Liberal Democrat: a poor majority for Blair will give comfort to Brown and the forces of socialist conservatism.
George Bush: (This is one I’ve made for him before, but he has persistently broken it.) Keep God out of your speeches. Everyone knows you believe you have a hotline to a higher father, but going on about it makes millions of people across the world angry and suspicious, even when they are not mindless America haters.
United Nations: Clean up the UN commission on human rights, which has for years been one of those intolerable scandals that people have somehow tolerated. Don’t think about expanding it: reduce it to exclude all countries that have committed human rights abuses. That would make it very small indeed, but there is no point in having a commission on human rights that includes kleptocrats and mass murderers.
European Union commission: Get your accounts audited.
Europhiles: (This is one I’ve often made before.) Explain in clear, foolproof English the advantages of the ever-closer harmonisation with Europe and of the European constitution. Europhiles always address Eurosceptics rather grandly de haut en bas, as if we are too stupid to understand the great European project. They may be right but it is not the way to win a case. The Eurosceptic arguments have been clearly put to great effect. If the Europhile sophisticates cannot come up with an equally plain and powerful case we shall be forced to think they have not got one.
Media folk everywhere: Stop using the expression “community leaders”. This is a piece of lazy sentimentality and can be counterproductive because these so-called community leaders do not necessarily speak for their so-called communities, yet the rest of the public imagines that they do. To lump all British Sikhs or Muslims or Ukrainians or Jews into one “community” is self-evidently a mistake. Who is to decide who represents them? The Archbishop of Canterbury certainly does not represent me, even though I am ethnically English and Anglican. These self-styled community leaders are often self- appointed and are accepted uncritically by reporters and commentators because they are vociferous or easy to get to appear on a programme.
Conservative party: Don’t make any resolutions. There is no point. This will be a good election to lose. Wait for Labour’s inevitable nemesis. Try not to give away any good ideas before then.
Happy new year.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 02, 2005 | Comments (1)
