A retreat from society where the troubles always follow you.
The human mind and body are designed to only take so much before they snap. There’s exertion coming from all directions, imposing themselves upon the emotions and will. Sometimes a holiday is just what is needed to delay the inevitable sinkage into hopeless insanity and despair. Even one solitary day off from the troubles of this foul busy life, just a few hours where you drive all thoughts of your usual routine out of your mind, can work wonders in steeling the determination for yet another attack on your life which you’re struggling through. Puts this whole wretched affair into stark perspective when you realise that you’re just fighting against a life you don’t want to live. Sleep is nice, death is better but it’s always easier if one didn’t exist to begin with.
Ah, I can feel the black slime oozing out of my soul and flowing out onto the surfaces which I’ve spent hours cleaning today. Splitting headaches and days off spent dreading the looming sentence back at work are turning me in a bitter depressive. Things are beginning to taste like coal and my throat is sore. I need a fucking holiday, or better yet I need to extricate myself from this devil snare of a job.
But enough about me, what about you? I watched this film many weeks ago but never found the time to actually sit down and write on it, mostly to do with the fact that my mind was forced to strike all recollection of my free time the moment I went back to work. Now that I have a few hours on my hands with nothing else that needs to be seen to on the agenda, I can finally write up this long awaiting ramble on Withnail and I (1987). I tried once to watch this film a very long time ago, deep into a night of heavy pot smoking that when I actually got round to playing the damn thing, my mind was in such an abstract mess that I just couldn’t handle whatever the film was throwing at me. I remember that opening saxophone number as sounding like the dying screams of a thousand angles as they orgasm simultaneously. And the DVD copy I had in my possession back then didn’t come with subtitles which made it a nigh impossible task for me to really understand the dialogue because the sound recording of this film is somewhere in between charming and broken. So yet on another day off like today, in a completely different mercury and with a lot more sanity, I sat down on a golden Monday afternoon and finally opened my eyes to this classic which I’ve wanted to watch for such a time.
This is one of those tales of when you try to run away from your troubles and they just take on a completely different form and follow you to your supposed sanctuary. A holiday so to speak, totally ruined, racked with stress and paranoia. One then begins to wonder whether life was just easier before. Two actors living – barely – in Camden Town realise how flat up against the wall they are in their lives and that their luck has totally run out. With no hope or other option in sight, they decide to embark on a little retreat to forget about their trials. But the universe runs according to certain conventions for guys like these because when they arrive at their cosy little cottage in the Lake District, it’s a goddamn mess. No water, no heating, no food and the locals give them the sort of welcome afforded to witches in an early English village. Things become even more complicated once Withnail’s uncle Monty arrives at the scene – the uncle who owns the cabin whom they conned to let them borrow it.
This has all the makings of an immortal cult film. Poverty and strife right at its centre and how two humans try to ease the pain of their existence, even if it’s only temporarily and they more than us are well aware of that transience. Their tragedy turns into our comedy and this gulf between the audience and the character is bridged so precariously hitched on the wild whims of these drunkards, but with such enjoyment to watch. Life has turned completely sour for these two individuals and every atom around them sickens them, which is why they decide that they must get away from it all at once, out into open country, a place so rural that the metropolitan troubles will stop dead in their tracks upon the city limits. But of course, being city boys, they are an affront to country life and are the subject of scorn and reproach from all the bats in the village. There’s a level of twisted excess to this film which I’ve witnessed in few others. Excessive indulgence in drink and or anything that will pry the senses off its axis. Withnail is especially bent upon this eternal frenzy, this mutant of a human who is operating on such high tension that he registers as a magnitude 7 quake on the Richter scale. Then you’ve got “I”, who’s actually just called Marwood, someone with a bit more prospects and reason than his contemporary which makes their pairing so perfect. Methods to madness.
Then there’s the excess to acknowledge in the filmic language. Dizziness is the effect that takes over the head in the wake of how much that camera is moved and whirled around like a drunkard careening a car at top speed down the M4. It rips forward into close ups and sometimes stays a bit too still for one’s ease. A currency of filth and disgust is what the cinematography is wealthy in, because there is absolutely nothing aesthetically appealing about this film. From those washed-out colour palettes like the skin of a junkie at the abyssal depths of their habit to scenes of old crones biting into egg sandwiches and sending sprays of yolk dripping onto their withered hands, this is a film which inspires nothing but revulsion in the viewer, and for that I bow in respect. Equally messy is the soundscape, the dialogue is so chopped up that it has a ghost of its echo looming over every utterance which gives it a weird distorted sort of an effect like a hurling a brick into a still pond and still hearing the sound of the splash ripple for a few seconds. All the music used in the film sounds like it’s playing out of a beat-up stereo that was thrown out of the sixth-floor window and is still somehow by some broken miracle producing sound. In my eyes, or rather ears, I like that. For a film that came out during the tail end of the 80’s it sounds primitive compared to some of the stuff that came out alongside it, but it fits the diegetic time of 1969 and also the impoverished state of the characters. It’s a sort of film which intentionally or not, takes its themes and aesthetic all the way down into its nuts and bolts.
A bright yellow full moon is rising from behind an ugly block of flats. It’s a view that makes you want to close the blinds and curl up in a blanket to distract yourself. I smell some portent in this sight so maybe it’s best if I wrap this up here before….
Whatever was supposed to go there is in the question marked vacuum of my headache shook imagination. Do yourself a favour and watch this film, try to find a copy with subtitles but if in any event you can’t, just struggle your way through it because that’s the painfully true ethos this film comes bundled up with.
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