6. The memory of that night in south London...
The sixth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero pays a visit to the cinema.
The memory of that night in south London reminds me of the first time I saw Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a fashionable party goes awry in an unexpected and utterly surreal manner...
I was introduced to Buñuel by the Travelling Companion, back when we were at university together in Norwich. Amongst other things, his best work casts a caustic eye over middle-class values, inverting social norms and skewing the bourgeois world with absurdist disruptions, dream logic and the revenant dead.
Politically, his films reveal ideas like ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ to be little more than seductive illusions, rather than the absolute concepts we often mistake them for. As the paucity of democracies throughout history shows, such things are only ever partially realised after curbing the excesses of the ruling class, making the fight for them a perennial one.
I think it was Hegel who once said something about history being the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself. In the political sense, there’s an element of truth to that, I guess; but in the ethical sense, the idea seems far less secure, especially if you align ‘freedom’ with unconscious forces, as I’ve always been prone to do.
It’s an idea touched upon in Buñuel’s penultimate film, The Phantom of Liberty, which makes strange connections across time, space and the imagination, just as it stresses the role of contingency in governing human affairs, making us merely actors – bound by the arbitrary nature of social ritual, law and morality – in a sort of shadow-play that has no definitive teleology.
Doesn’t this lack of purpose, and the inevitable ennui that accompanies it, suit those who govern? Feeling out of place and politically impotent, was, I think, an integral part of my problem. In my brain, the political and the personal had, over time, become painfully entwined. Every time I looked around, I saw a world in which democracy had been eroded and the economy rigged in favour of the elite. I’d realised I wasn’t on the winning team.
And this knowledge made my personal situation and precarious state of mind even more difficult to manage. In a rather unsubtle fashion, I decided that everything – my circumstances, my emotional misfortunes, my psychological frailty, my relative penury, even my lack of artistic talent – was unfair. I even concluded that concluding it was all unfair was somehow unfair. All of which added to my desire to excuse myself from the whole sorry show, to obliterate absolutely everything through spectacle and intoxication.
As it happened, the day after the Burns Night party I found myself at the Odeon on Tottenham Court Road, hungover and sitting down to watch the latest instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise (I can’t remember which one). I certainly wasn’t thinking about Buñuel or politics or any of this during that moment and was in fact coveting exactly the kind of distraction Nietzsche had condemned. It was only while sat there, monotonously munching on a bag of peanut M&Ms, that the memory of my third or fourth date with the Travelling Companion returned to me.
We’d gone to see the first film in the series – the one that climaxes on the train between London and Paris, beneath the Channel, with the helicopter and the explosive chewing gum. I’m not sure why we chose this movie, but I remembered how much we both enjoyed it, and I remembered drinking in the pub with her afterwards, and how she looked at me with those bottomless eyes of hers, and how it felt like being caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, which I knew, even then, would one day run me down.
In the darkness of the cinema, my mind suddenly unspooled an entirely different roll of film, as Tom Cruise faded into the background and the fugitive images of those early days with the Travelling Companion took his place. I couldn’t stop thinking about the letters she sent me during the holidays; letters to which I never replied but which were full of such solicitude and passion. Composed in her small, finely crafted handwriting, full of whimsical descriptions about where she’d been and what she’d been doing, they were marked by a fidelity to the future I couldn’t share.
Even if I had responded, my juvenile scrawl and maladroit sentences would have only revealed my failings as a boyfriend (which is perhaps why I didn’t). These differences in graphology stood as the perfect metaphor for that first phase of our relationship. I was thoughtless, feckless, foolish; she was conciliatory, caring, wise. The problem was that as a young man I had no idea how to respond to genuine affection, and where she saw possibility, I saw proscription. All this came back to me that day, and when I left the cinema, I was full of the kind of longing and regret that has been the staple of much of my life since, all too aware of the countless wrong turns I’d taken along the way.
Exactly how long had it been? How many times had her face flashed before me like that, so familiar and yet by now so utterly strange? A flickering trace of what had once existed so forcefully in my life, a ghostly reflex randomly coursing through the canyons of my brain. I could never bring myself to attach a precise number of years, months or days to the length of her absence, to undertake the simple calculations required, preferring instead to let the time and pain pass unmeasured.
And yet, walking in the rain along Tottenham Court Road, I made such an attempt, perhaps stunned into action, because, for the briefest moment back there in the cinema, I’d felt certain she was sat there next to me in the dark, as she had been all those years before; and this, in turn, prompted a curious but fleeting sense of wholeness in me, as if a missing thread of knowledge had temporarily been stitched back in place. Would reading Proust, I wondered, entail an encounter with her too?