I Feel Love

The film’s central conceit might be the film set as a model for the unconscious. When you open a door in a film set and walk through it, you might walk into a room in a different building altogether, a different city, a different country, a different reality (etc). And in turn, when you see a scene in a film that appears to be taking place in a single geographic location, that scene will frequently have been pieced together from footage shot in different “actual” locations. Apply the same logic to time as well as space and you have one possible entry point into Inland Empire.

That’s what I think Hollywood is to Lynch: a source of metaphors. Whatever Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive are, they aren’t cautionary tales about the price of fame (or of dreams of fame) or jeremiads about the decadence of “the industry”.

Potentially interesting contrast between two of my favourite directors: Lynch’s films are warm, extremely subjective, often sentimental and (as far as I can tell) devoid of any conventionally “ethical” content whatsoever. Michael Haneke’s films on the other hand are cold, distant, rigorously unsentimental, and completely and unabashedly moralistic. Two kinds of formalism?

Anyway, here’s Tom Ewing on another fractured masterpiece.

The largest city in the province of New Brunswick is called Saint John.

The largest city in the nearby province of Newfoundland and Labrador is St. John’s.

Don’t Canadians find this a bit confusing?

In the second season of Extras, the character played by Ricky Gervais, having successfully pitched to the BBC a subtle character-based comedy series that presumably would have turned out to be not unlike The Office, finds himself instead fronting a stone-age broad farce that revolves around a cartoonishly oafish protagonist with antediluvian social attitudes whose comedic value resides in the single catchphrase “are you ‘avin a laff?” (It’s a measure of my at times simple tastes that I found some scenes from this show within the show funnier than the show itself, but there you go.) In one particularly biting scene, a crestfallen Gervais looks out into the studio audience (this being the sort of comedy that is filmed in front of an audience) and sees that every single person is wearing a t-shirt with a catchphrase from some other comedy series–”Computer Says No”, “Am I Bothered?”, etc.–the implication being that this is what we have been reduced to.

All of which should make us grateful that the comedy gods at the ABC are apparently less interventionist than their BBC counterparts. If their commitment to free will means they are not inclined to prevent a bad comedy from becoming completely unwatchable, this is a small price to be for giving Chris Lilley’s genius free rein. After the brilliant final episode of Summer Heights High, it’s pretty clear how the ABC’s comedy budget should henceforward be allocated: give Lilley as much money as he needs to do whatever he wants, and do what you like with whatever is left over (spend the lot on the Paul McDermott, Sandman and Flacco pension fund, aka The Sideshow, for all I care).

It’s a bit strange though, isn’t it, how SHH’s instant cultural ubiquity has become filtered through “quotes”, almost as if it was Little Britain. It’s hard to have a conversation at the moment without someone throwing “Puck off miss” or “I love your bins, they’re so random” or “Two words: get over it” into the mix. And yes, there are of course t-shirts (I have one). Obviously this is just how we relate to things nowadays. But let’s be clear: Summer Heights high is not a “catchphrase-based comedy”! None of the famous “quotes” was uttered more than once; Ja’mie even stopped saying “random” after about Episode 4! So while it’s nice to see the series being hailed as “Another Antipodean Comedy Classic”, we are talking about a whole different level from Kath and Kim here. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Kath and Kim, at least the first couple of seasons, but it could hardly be accused of subtlety in any form.) This is especially the case with the Jonah Takalua storyline, surely one of the most sophisticated treatments of race we’ve ever seen, let alone Lilley’s admirable decision to take Jonah’s “behavioural problems” to their logical, tragic conclusion instead of inventing some deus ex machina, and the overarching tribute to friendship (how brilliant was Leon by the way?).

In fact if Lilley’s work deserves comparison to anyone else’s, it’s that of Ricky Gervais. I kind of hope Lilley’s career doesn’t take the trajectory that Gervais’s has, but if you’ve ever seen him interviewed (he’s almost painfully shy in person) it’s difficult to imagine him doing lazy stand-up gigs in the Royal Albert Hall, so I suspect we’re safe on that score.