Harry's Place Arts

I watched a TV adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, heard the word “parenting” and winced.  “Parenting” has become a common word since about the 1990s, but it wasn’t round much in the 1890s and it doesn’t occur in the text of The Turn of the Screw. It is a gender-neutral term that we need as our ideas of what constitutes a family have changed.   I started doubting the scriptwriter’s historical knowledge and her ear for language, and in fact the programme was a crude and sexed-up version of a famously ambiguous story. 

All right, you can end up being one of those bores who complains that a film about the Battle of Waterloo had the Kent Greys rather than the Suffolk Blues on the left flank, and the piping on their uniforms was white when it should have been yellow but there are only so many anomalies, impossibilities and anachronisms that a film or book can carry without collapsing.   Frederick Forsythe’s review of The English Patient is a classic summing up of a film getting so much so very wrong:-

We start (according to a flash-up on the screen) in October 1942 with a young man taking off somewhere in a howling wilderness of desert. Amazingly, he is flying an uncamouflaged, silver-painted Tiger Moth trainer with the registration number of a British flying club. (A minor skirmish called the Battle of El Alamein was in full flow that month in that place.)

A glamorous blonde seems to be asleep in the front seat. Within minutes he flies over the world’s most isolated German machine-gun nest, a small foxhole without any life-support system, stuck in a sea of sand miles from anywhere. But these Krauts are real aces; though they can never have seen a Tiger Moth (there weren’t any at Alamein), they recognise it at once and open up with heavy machineguns. In mid-air the bullets turn into cannon shells, leaving clusters of black flak over the blue sky. Disdaining to take evasive action, our hero is shot down.

(It’s an entertaining piece.  It may be unfair on The English Patient but I can’t say because every time I’ve tried watching it on the telly I’ve fallen asleep after 10 minutes).

The Matrix had me wondering that if you are making this elaborate scam against humanity so as to use their bodies’ heat as a power source, why choose humans out of all the mammals?  They take nine months to gestate and they grow up very slowly.  Why not use rats, which, can have five litters a year and grow to maturity in eleven weeks?  However, the film really seemed about having people jump from building to building looking cool in long black coats.

So when I caught The Road the other night, I was distracted by a statement at the beginning that some disaster – evidently natural as there are earthquakes – has killed every animal except for human beings.  Not a rat or a mouse is left.   Cockroaches would die in such cold weather, but what about the parents of the maggots that ate all the corpses that leave the skeletons that the two main characters stumble over? But they don’t come across any flies, nor mosquitoes in the pools.  Nor do they have fleas or lice in the rags they wear.  Presumably the bacteria in their digestive tracts and the mites that eat our dead cells haven’t been wiped out otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted the nine years that they have so far.  They come across one beetle, and that is meant to be a little ray of hope in an otherwise bleak world.

Anyway, The Road is Samuel Beckett meets horror films.   The Father and the Son walk from place to place scavenging, visiting the kind of houses that you know from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would be best avoided and poking round cellars which every slasher movie warns you that you should give a wide berth.  (Those bits did have me on the edge of my seat, as the Hallowe’en films do, when you know something horrible is going to happen).  Other people represent an extreme form of stranger danger, since they are likely to be rapists, murderers or cannibals.  Everyone’s clothes and skin are filthy.

Now, it’s reasonable that the Father and the Son should be filthy, as they are vagabonds.  When they get a chance they heat up water and have a wash and hair cut.  But the cannibal groups they find, who lead more settled lives, are also filthy.  These are Americans, whose culture worships the bathroom and who despise foreign countries’ showers and plumbing.  There is no shortage of fuel – the whole terrain is covered with dead trees and felled forests.  There is no shortage of water – it’s always raining when it isn’t snowing.  They have time on their hands except when they’re hunting and torturing other human beings so why can’t they heat up some water and have a wash?  It’s not true that just because people are cannibals they don’t have standards.  There have been cannibal societies that produced fine art and oratory.

Well, on they trudge through the wasteland scavenging away, and it’s reasonably compelling, waiting for their next brief and nasty encounter with other people. There are dramatic landscapes of deserted flyovers, drunken power poles and beached ships, in every shade of grey. It’s watchable, has some effective moments of real scariness and doesn’t go on too long. Viggo Mortensen ( the Father) is good at being serious and noble, as he was as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is fine as well.  But all the while you know that the makers want you to think that they are dealing with elemental questions about humanity, morality, survival, fatherhood and so on.  It’s the cheap portentuousness that you get in stories set in concentration camps (eg Sophie’s Choice).

I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s book that the film was based on, so can’t compare the two.  Steven Poole has fun with its attempts at not sounding horror-cheesy here. The world as presented on the film is a rubbish-dump without seagulls shrieking or the smallest weed growing, or any glimpse of regenerating nature that has happened after the worst catastrophes in the history of our planet.  I did think that maybe McCarthy didn’t want to make the kind of post-apocalypse world where nature burgeons and the few remaining human beings live the simple grow-your-own life in small groups which can look attractive to the Green in many of us. The gang of kids in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome who live in an oasis and have evolved their own religion and language are having a great time, much more enjoyable than being an office drone paying the mortgage.  The destroyed world in The Road is a place where you live in fear and misery, chased by thugs and haunted by memories of happier times.  It looks like he wanted a place of hopelessness and despair but that’s a hard thing to create without falling into easy nihilism.  The film ends on a slight note of upbeat – the Boy goes with strangers and they turn out to be friends after all.  They also have a dog, the only one left in the solar system.  How it survived when there aren’t packs of cross-breeds roaming the stricken land, we are not told.