Last night, we finally watch Stephen Fry's film version Of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, Bright Young Things. I spend most of the film thinking that Emily Mortimer must be the finest and most versatile actress of her generation - she looks *nothing* at *all* like she did when playing Myra Hindley in Longford. Then I realise I'm confusing Emily Mortimer with Samantha Morton and that slightly takes the sheen off things.
I haven't read the novel - can't even remember which two early Waugh novels I *have* read, so can't really comment on it as adaptation, but it's certainly not a bad film. The comedy in the writing is, understandably, consistently teased out by Fry's direction and the excellent cast, who all *look* just right for the period. Michael Sheen, getting a well-deserved break from playing Tony Blair (one wonders what awful things *he* got up to in former lives) minces to particularly good effect, and Julia McKenzie, not normally my cup of char, is exceptional as the dotty landlady, Lottie Crump. The denouement - Adam at last hooking up with the mad Colonel (now a mad General) on the battlefields of WWII who finally possesses him of the £34,005 he's won on the gee-gees and that will; enable him to 'buy' back his share in his beloved, Nina (Mortimer/Morton) - is the only moment when the general ambience of what-hoing and high larks gives way a little to deeper feelings. But the spirit of decadence, if not quite the degree of nihilism I'd expected, is captured well and it's a refreshing reminder to people of my generation that the 60s was not the only Dionysian decade of the last century.
My expectations had been raised by a couple of lectures -one on the novel, the other on the effects of WWI on the psyches of those who survived it - that I recalled from my degree course. The English lecture quoted a scathing passage from the text in which Waugh is evidently directing his ire at those of his generation who, shellshocked by the horrors of The Great War, had thrown themselves into the pursuit of the hedonistic pleasures of the Jazz Age with such abandon, and it changed my perceptions of Waugh as a writer - I'd only picked up on the Wodehousian comic bits before, and not the social critique. The horrors of attritional trench warfare - millions turned into cannon-fodder to advance a few feet - cast their shadow on British Foreign policy right up to Chamberlain's declaration of a second war with Germany. Until a few months before, Appeasement was pretty much bipartite, the argument for rearmament (and possible use of those armaments) was about as easy to make then as it would be for a prospective government to stand on a ticket of negative equity and 15% interest rates...
Little of which is foregrounded in the film and, to get to the nubbin of what I really wanted to say here, the sense of dislocation and warped depravity I imagine haunting the npost WW1 years is perhaps caught better in the Bowie song Aladdin Sane, which was inspired by his reading Vile Bodies and making the connection between Waugh's and his own period. Mike "Greer" Garson's manic, Ellington-meets-what-Hendrix-would've-sounded-like-if-he'd-played-the-piano solo, is particularly powerful. I must read the Waugh book now, if only to see if the same heady mix of elegy, numbness and impending dread is evoked as beautifully there as it is in that song.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
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I guess WW1 must have seemed apocalyptic for all involved. WW2 ended on a pretty scary note too.
ReplyDeleteWar to end all wars my arse.
Yes Dickster, I don't think I did justice to the effect it had, but I'm pleased you got the gist.
ReplyDeleteI can't remember who, but one of the political big shots of the time who survived the trenches recoiunted a story of someone walking for about a mile across no-man's land and there being corpses covering the whole journey, like a carpet.
What does stuff that do to people who live through it?
Oh yeah - Mike Yarwood - he was another good one...
L.U.V. on ya,
Bob
I suppose the Regeneration trilogy tried to capture that 'when we return' feeling.
ReplyDeleteI'm always a bit wary of those that write about war that have never been through it, aren't you?Perhaps I'm being harsh. Also, people who wear medals who have never been on the front-line.
That story about walking through the corpses is shocking isn't it? We forget the total horror of it. It's frightening and depressing. And it's still going on now.
I'm trying to think of anything that has adequately captured the sense of horror of it all. Can you think of anything? Film is similar in a way. It's so hard to capture it without being patronising or 'worthy' or (gulp) Tenkoesqueplatoony.
ReplyDeleteIt's my favourite novel, but not my favourite film, and the two facts are almost certainly linked.
ReplyDeleteWhile he was writing VB, Waugh discovered that his wife was intercoursing another man. (He later dealt with this betrayal in A Handful of Dust.) This clearly exacerbated his loathing for the shallow society he saw around him, and I reckon he declared war on it - within the realms of his creation - as a means of wiping the moral slate clean. He was a member of the generation that had been just a bit too young to serve in WWI, and nursed a massive sense of survivor's guilt as a result...
And "Tenkoesqueplatoony" is my word of the week.
Assimilating this thread with a more up to date comparison - there is a shocking documentary film made 'by accident' by a multi-national news-gathering team of three or four who unwittingly got caught up in the battle for Muzzar El Sharif Afghanistan. The situation was dire and an absolute disaster with the majority of the casualties caused by the Americans going crazy nuke'em style - at the Northern Alliance - the allies! Furthermore, on this particular occasion the Northern Alliance and then the British were so under attack that all they could do to shore up their trenches for extra protection was to use their fellow-soldiers newly dead and decomposing bodies. They even had to scramble over them. It beggars belief. What can this do to people? We must not forget Yugoslavia either - one of the highest levels of post-traumatic stress disorder recorded after service in that country. Appalling.
ReplyDeletePS: on a lighter note - I originally came along to say wonderful podcast Bob - really fab. Luv on ya x
ReplyDeleteI have to plead ignorance here I'm afriad I have neither read the book or watched the film, maybe I should
ReplyDeletexx BB
I'm not familiar with either film or book, either, but do recall reading All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, which is excellent. If any piece of literature can come close to converying the horror and mundanity of war, this is it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm pleading ignorance to both film and book.
ReplyDeleteGood Bobcast, even though I had to fast forward through the Radiohead song - I'll get back to that one whenever I feel like slashing my wrists.
Lennon's "Gibraltar Song" was luverlee.
It's my favourite book too so I have been avoiding the film.
ReplyDeleteYou can actually tell in the text exactly when the scales fell from his eyes.
Scoop's not a bad read either..
E. Waugh was a lot funnier than D. Bowie, particularly in Decline and Fall, the finest comic novel in the English language. Waugh also wrote all his own stuff, whereas I have a terribly irrational difficulty believing Bowie actually ever wrote anything. He just seems like such a dullard. I don't know where I got this impression from, though, and would be happy to be disabused of it.
ReplyDelete"He [Bowie] just seems like such a dullard. I don't know where I got this impression from, though, and would be happy to be disabused of it."
ReplyDeleteOh I can disabuse you of it, P.
How long have you got?
Am just about to finish Vile Bodies and, although it's a long time since I read D & F, I have to say V.B. is a lot funnier. Or maybe I've acquired more of a GSoH as I've got older?
Spinny & Tim are better equipped to argue the toss on Waugh, but I will put you straight on Bowie in the near future.
L.U.V. on ya,
Bob