This is the working title for a novel. The idea is simple. It's set in the London of the not-too-distant future. Barring a handful of rebels and an increasingly dwindling pool of veil-wearing Somalian immigrants, *everybody* is a celebrity. Even the servants and hangers on of the fairly-well known have acquired a renown that would put today's reality TV stalwarts to shame. Anyone who is not a celebrity is such a novelty that they are treated with the same jaw-dropping, flash-bulb popping adoration as would previously only have been merited by huge stars of the silent era; Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, perhaps. Invariably, with the help of modern technology, they don't remain unknown for long; there is, for instance, a separate youtube chart for 'Big Issue' sellers who can command huge performance fees for personal performances, some of the biggest stars of street corner begging having been replaced by 'virtual' spots outside Marks & Spencer and so on where people can watch looped performances of them shouting "'Gisshew" and then make online credit card payments to have the magazine downloaded onto their mobile phones. In such a world, anonymity becomes the most powerful condition it is possible to aspire to; hence the naming of the novel's eponymous heroine: Anon.
Anon. goes to great lengths to disguise her true obscurity - wearing expensive cast-offs; Jimmy Choos and designer snakeskin trousers purchased from the new breed of charity shops - Help the Wanted; War on Ageing; Sexfam etc. She flees the city where she joins a small band of rebels who make night raids on the city, smashing the ubiquitous flat screen TVs that show the sex-lives of the fairly well-known in all major public places, spraying out the names and slogans on advertising hoardings and so on. Anon. and her fellow rebels are eventually captured and after being tortured and villified by the Head of the State (a thinly veiled Simon Cowell - no, I didn't know he was a Muslim either...) they are publicly crucified. Ironically, in death the rebels achieve only the worst kind of martyrdom and become the most celebrated of all celebrities as their lives are revered and worshipped down through the centuries in a wicked travesty of the obscurantism for which they gave their lives.
I'm thinking Blanchett or Paltrow in the lead role. Bill Nighy as the O'Brien character, perhaps? Maybe Mel Gibson as Barabas. Kind of thing.
So, whaddaya reckon?
L.U.V. on ya,
Bob
Showing posts with label Novels-fillum adaptations of. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Novels-fillum adaptations of. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Monday, 26 March 2007
"...Passionate Bright Young Things, Takes Him Away To Waugh"...
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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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
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
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
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