Nobody puts baby in the corner. Variations on an art form where the dancing is always dirty

Pagan Russia, 2847 BC. The sky turns ox-blood red as dawn breaks over the parched grey scrubland, a conductor raising his baton for an ominous, funereal overture. The Chosen One is released into the nascent daylight, only to be sliced with fragmented melodies and walled off by huge, dissonant blocks of sound.

Her virginal body is primed; the seed of death that must be sown to reap good harvest. The tribe’s men surround her, shuffling and prowling in concert. They encroach in heavy, menacing orchestration, their sexual aggression compounded by the dizzying syncopation and surges in polyrhythmic tension.  

Last rites: The Sacrificial Dance, performed by the Metropolitan Opera (Beth Bergman, 2003) 

The sacrificial dance begins. The prima ballerina’s body twists and convulses to the savage fortissimo, E-flat major with added minor seventh tearing against F-flat major to create a fierce cacophony. Double basses, strings and clarinets coalesce violently, externalised in the frantic, explosive gestures of the corps de ballet. In the last bar the girl falls dead, the final flicker in a sonic and physiognomic conflagration that scorches the sensibilities of the Parisian cognoscenti.

When Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in May 1913, its shockingly visceral content provoked a near-riot; composer Giacomo Puccini called it ‘the creation of a madman’. The Russian composer and his choreographer Vatslav Nijinksy had violated every balletic convention in their tale of prehistoric pagan ritual; releasing a wild, primitive and very modern energy that rippled through the rest of 20^th century performance art.

Yet for all its revolutionary dynamics, there must have been something unsettlingly familiar to the Parisian audience about watching a girl dance herself to death. For this was ballet in the City of Light, where the control, exploitation and destruction of young women was an ever darkening force; a web of sexual brutality weaved throughout the delicate gossamer of sophisticated high art.

Wealthy, top-hatted males groomed aspiring ballerinas for sex in Paris’s opera houses; haute couture brothels that subjugated young girls desperate to escape from the city’s poorest suburbs. ‘Little rats’ was their collective slave-name, imprisoned as they were in the sewers of a self-serving elite as tightly as the finely-woven bodices squeezed their underdeveloped waists.

Every move you make: The Star by Edgar Degas (1876-77)

Nineteenth century Parisian impressionist Edgar Degas devoted over half of his paintings to the theme of sexual and aesthetic control within ballet. "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement," he once said, and you feel this sensuous obsession with power and poise in his work, just as you sense the sinister, erotic gaze of the darkly-suited men leering from the sidelines of the foyer de la danse.

This is feminine grace framed in a man’s world, beautifully backlit by a wash of impressionist sleaze. And the ballerinas are high class artisan hookers, procured, consumed and broken with all the allegro efficiency of the elders in Stravinsky’s ballet, demolishing their virgin to sate the base appetites of the earth. 

Germaine Greer called ballet a cultural cancer, because it’s a version of the female body idealised by men, stretched and emaciated in the pursuit of artistic and carnal satisfaction. For all the pretensions of ballet as a way for young ladies to develop self-esteem, it is for Greer a seductive con trick: women lured into a male-dominated world in search of an identity that was never theirs to begin with.

“Why do you want to dance?” asks Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) of ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, that technicolour tapestry about the art of ballet. “Why do you want to live?” comes the reply, as if the only way she can find meaningful existence is by conforming to some preordained pattern. She is slowly destroyed by this warring male possessiveness, the red shoes on her feet become metaphors for a macabre artistic control that eventually drives her to a sacrificial death tombé, The Rite of Spring reborn on the glitzy shores of the French Riviera. 

Martyr to movement: Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948)

Sixty years later, the tragedy is echoed in Darron Aronofsky’s psychodrama Black Swan, in which Natalie Portman’s ballerina succumbs to schizophrenia. Her desire to be both black swan and white swan – and achieve that exquisite artistic moment which narcissistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) calls ‘transcendence’ –  ultimately tears her asunder, another sad chapter in how women’s pursuit of male-oriented perfection irreparably splinters their sense of self.   

Transcendence is a male force, argued Simone de Beauvoir in her famous feminine tract TheSecond Sex. It is creative, productive and powerful, extending outward to impose itself on the universe. Opposing this is what she called immanence, the closed-off static realm of women, where they remain passive, immersed in themselves and a circumscribed repetition, in much the same way a ballerina is trapped in the relentless practice and pursuit of another’s vision.

Dancer in the dark: Natalie Portman in Black Swan (2010)

The only way for women to escape this, argued de Beauvoir, was for woman to create their own vision, 'not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself'. There is no greater example than Martha Graham, who did more than anyone in the 20^th century to overturn the patriarchy of dance. “I’m going to the top. Nothing is going to stop me. And I shall do it alone,” she once said, before going on  to use her supple body and singularity of mind to conceive a lifetime of radical danceworks that were irregular, abstract and completely revolutionary.

The ‘Picasso of Dance’ stayed in almost constant creative flux, teaching, training and theorising until her death at 95. Yet despite all her groundbreaking bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, a sense of entrapment stalked Graham’s life, and found its visual correlation in her haunting performance of Lamentation. Enrobed in stretched fabric with only her hands feet and face visible, Graham’s body writhed and twisted mummy-like, seemingly in agony, as if grasping for some elusive, inner peace that can only be achieved through the perpetual motion of creativity.

"Dancing is permitting life to use you in a very intense way,” she admitted, the malevolent tip-toes of Hans Christian Andersen’s demonic shoemaker pattering within these tortured words. “Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable." The black dog of depression pursued her throughout her career, which she would later characterise as “a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that has kept me marching... I live and work out of necessity, as deeply and as committed as an animal.”

Freedom in captivity: Martha Graham performs Lamentation (1930)

Dance as survival against the forces of darkness, whether psychic or physical, finds its apotheosis in the work of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. In her feminist interpretation of The Rite of Spring, she covered the stage in peat as the setting for a performance, which in the words of critic Judith Mackrell, saw men and women dancers ‘unite in great wheeling circles then scatter into a collective frenzy of coupling... galvanised by some savage, biological imperative’. Smeared in thick earth and glistening with adrenalized sweat, this is dirty dancing in extremis – a struggle for life at the end of the world – and it captures acutely the panicked strangeness of Stravinsky’s score.

“Dance, dance or we are lost” was Bausch’s motto. And it is this battle to belong, to find themselves and to live at any cost, which unites all the dancers above, whether it’s Stravinsky’s pagans praying for a bountiful harvest, Degas’s little rats looking to escape destitution, Vicky Page striving for unattainable happiness, or Martha Graham confronting her blessed unrest. Much like Nikos Kazantzakis’s ZorbaThe Greek, they are characters who choose to dance in the face of life’s full catastrophe, every intimate, rhythmic gesture and spatial configuration representing a brave, existentialist stare into the void.

Empty space takes centre stage at the finale of The Red Shoes, when the ballet is performed after Vicky’s death with no one in the lead role. The spotlight tracks the vacuum left by the dead ballerina, as if her demise has burned a hole in the fabric of the performance. It is ostensibly dead space, but one that’s pregnant with possibility, symbolising as it does the eternal cycle of conflict between creation and destruction, male and female, sex and violence, control and submission. 

“You always seem to be battling yourself, to be wracked by some inner drama,” said my wife to me in the coffee area of my daughter’s ballet school, as we waited for her class to finish. My life partner’s wisdom and grace was once again choreographing me through the world’s vicissitudes, and I yielded to her instruction like a pliant novice. “Look outwards more. Don’t keep turning inwards.”  

I look up and outwards; my eyes rest on the pictures of young ballerinas displayed on the white-washed walls. Their fine ivory limbs stretch out adagio, sculpting their own personal space and pushing outwards into the implacable hostility of the universe. Calm self-assurance pervades these scenes; vignettes of deep, personal courage which achieve a kind of fleeting serenity, meditative harmony emanating from their carefully rehearsed forms.

They seem trapped but exhilarated. Subjugated but forever in blissful rebellion. Doomed yet defiant. Their purpose is clear: to live, to survive and to dance – to find their place in the world amid all its wretched beauty, and be at home on a stage which humankind has bravely traversed since the outermost recesses of history. 

It is a rhapsody that carries them forward triumphantly, through time and through space, soaring upwards and downwards on life's turbulent, emotional currents, strengthened by a ceaseless human spirit that's forever broken but never ultimately defeated. 

I believe in the church of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. So let me put any heathens in the picture...

There’s no other image so dark, yet so divine.

Dejected and downtrodden, I’ve been buried in this dim, dirty enclosure for what feels like an eternity now. Daylight has long since faded away, displaced by a muddy, dishwater-brown haze that’s entombing us all in its dense, soil-like darkness.

Outside, in the thick, dry Mediterranean air, the droning apathy of Rome’s underbelly drifts through the shutters, deadening everything in the room except for the deepening wound of greed and ignorance coagulating around the table.

A vulture-eyed tax collector, wiry and officious, joins a stupefied, rum-swilled young man in obsessively counting the denari before them. There are two others: a knowing boy with a face like a ripe peach, and another, all belligerent and braggadocio, only too ready to carve me from ear to groin and watch my gutted carcass roast in the blistering Italian heat. 

Then someone else emerges, a phantom from the abyss. I notice His light first: a ray of elegant purity lancing towards me through the void. Then I see His finger, summoning my gaze upwards to meet His beautiful, black magnetic eyes, which seem to contain the entire cosmos.

I lose and find myself in His look: two infinite pools of dark luminosity drawing me in with all the force of gravity. Reflected back in the deep space of these pupils is everything my heart has ever yearned for, a new image of myself in glorious ascension. I keep looking at this picture of perfect bliss, and after a while, it feels like every star in the universe is shining for me and for nobody else.

“Life is full of dark moments,” said the gentle, calming voice to me four hundred years later, in a quiet, softly-lit room, a fragile bubble of insulation from the rain-lashed winter streets outside. “And images can be a very powerful way of throwing light on them.

“The thing to do is to paint a new picture of yourself and how you want your world to be. Create this image in your mind and summon it in your time of need. Do that, and you’ll find something within yourself that you never knew existed.” 

In times of loneliness and adversity, images are sometimes all we have. When I’m under pressure, hobbled with self-doubt, faced with a situation I don’t think I’ll be able to deal with, or when life’s complexities cloud my thoughts in a sea of foggy confusion, pictures can generate the soothing clarity I need: metaphorical lighthouses guiding me to steadier, more self-assured terrain.

Sometimes it’s my three-year-old daughter running towards me, arms outstretched in innocent wonder. Or the glowing, therapeutic warmth of my wife’s homecoming smile. Or an Olympic athlete’s elation when they cross the line first, a lifetime of gruelling dedication culminating in one singularly ecstatic moment.

And sometimes, it’s an image from another time and another place, a picture forged in the hot irons of an eternal Italian city, where the ruined and the resurrected co-exist exquisitely under the classical, Christian sun.

On the Via Santa Giovanna D’Arco near Rome’s Piazza Navona is the San Luigi dei Francesci, the national church of France in Rome. Beyond its grand, stately facade lies the Contarelli Chapel, built in the sixteenth century in honour of French cardinal Matteu Contreil.

Holy trinity: The altar of the Contarelli Chapel in Rome

Enter the chapel and to the left-hand side, on the wall near the altar, is a four-centuries-old oil painting by chiaroscuro master Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Composed in 1600, The Calling of St Matthew visually dramatises the scene in the Gospels when Christ and Peter first see the disciple in a tax collector’s office, and spirit him away from his world of narrow, financial malfeasance to follow the righteous path of Christian salvation.

It was ostensibly created as a coded reference to French residents of Rome to remind them that, in the words of Pope Clement VIII, their Protestant-leaning motherland was “not yet sufficiently cleansed from the thorns and weeds of heresy and corruption".

I’m not a religious person. I’ve always distrusted mankind’s organisation of divinity and believe that to have a single answer or version of the truth in a universe so vast, complex and unknowable is an affront to reason.

Yet when I see reproductions of The Calling of St Matthew, and lose myself in its gorgeous use of light and colour and space, reason succumbs to sensation, the cobwebbed corners of my mind become a little less fusty, and my future turns into a landscape of plenitude and opportunity rather than a self-constructed brick wall.



Cometh the hour, cometh the man: The Calling of St Matthew (1600)

Because optimism, awakening dormant potential and believing in your own personal vision are what this painting is ultimately all about. As an artist, Caravaggio’s calling card was to take scenes from the Gospels and set them in modern-day Rome, so they resonated more acutely with disillusioned members of the flock.

In The Calling of St Matthew, first century Galilee is replaced with downtown Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century, and the tax collector’s abode where Matthew’s life suddenly changes forever is a dreary, non-descript setting whose only decorative polish comes from the latest Italian fineries garbed around the room’s myopic, money-grubbing inhabitants. 

The execution is simple, sparse, the antithesis of the ornate, religious pictorials so common at the time. It depicts two men entering a darkened room and disturbing a group of four other men, a shaft of sunshine the solitary light source in these closed, claustrophobic environs.

This radiant beam is the first thing you notice when you see the painting, a surge of energy bisecting the visual field from the top right of the image down and to the left, underscored by the shutter on the back wall, which is blown back on its hinges. The aesthetic effect is a sudden influx of momentum, rippling through the air and oxygenating the room, resuscitating this miserable collection of petty drifters from their moral coma.

Heaven sent: Christ and Peter make their entrance

Time itself becomes distorted too. On the far right, Christ and Peter stand tall, strong and magisterial, clothed in New Testament robes so they appear like supernatural forces emerging from the shadows of the past. Christ resembles some chiselled, Matinee idol carved out of marble, while Peter leans into the picture zealously, consumed by the intoxicating vitality of His Master’s will.

The others are sitting down, their body language insular and preoccupied. The man on the extreme left cuts a despairing figure, someone lost in the black wilderness of his own thoughts, a misery shadowed by the hunched, bespectacled taxman, a vampire feasting on fiscal suffering. Contrasting this is the person on the far right of the table, whose body is in the early stages of contortion, as if he’s being sucked into the gravitational force field created by the Son of God’s entrance.

This is just one opposite in a painting that echoes with counterpoints. The most subtle and dramatic of all is the two opposing finger gestures – one from Christ and one from Matthew – as if Caravaggio had seen the Sistine Chapel’s Creation of Adam and decided to go one better.

Finger of fate: The Sistine Chapel's Creation of Adam



Christ’s gesture is authoritative and unflinching: Matthew’s is diffident and fearful, his finger cowers back into his chest. Trapped in the headlights of the holy, Matthew can scarcely believe why anyone would be interested in him, let alone who he is or what he can become.

“You come upon scenes midway and you're immersed in them,” is how Martin Scorsese once described Caravaggio’s work. The Calling of St Matthew is a breathtaking example of this, capturing an instant when something has just happened (Christ’s entrance) and something is about to happen (Matthew’s conversion). The drama is tantalisingly poised at this spiritual crossroads, at that decision point between action and reaction which makes the scene so brilliantly provocative.

If he was more timid and conventional, Caravaggio might have painted the scene to show Matthew leaving with Christ, shrouded in holy light and galvanised by the power and glory of the Lord. The moribund pit of the tax collector’s office would be brought out more sharply and grimly in this respect, the contrast between heaven and hell more self-evident and polemic. 

But instead, he chose the moment when the gauntlet is being thrown down: that high noon point when Matthew has, quite literally, to stand up and be counted. So just as Christ is asking the question of Matthew, Caravaggio and his painting are, by extension, asking the same, powerful question of all those French Catholics who viewed the painting for the first time. When your time comes, when the spotlight falls on you, will you awaken from your slumber and discover the latent spiritual strength within you?  

Reinvention of the self: Matthew on the brink of conversion

“It is the spectator, not life, that art really mirrors,” said Oscar Wilde in the prelude to The Picture of Dorian Gray, another masterpiece about the all-consuming power of the image. Wilde was referencing and reinterpreting that famous line in Hamlet, a play written in the same year The Calling of St Matthew was painted. His point was that art communicates different things to different people at different times, regardless of their creed, colour or century of their birth.

 

Today, in an increasingly secular world and to a jaded agnostic like myself, the meaning of the painting is as clear and as direct as the beam of light which first draws you in – and which is as full of energy and youthful promise as the boy who sits casually at its vanishing point.

The future beckons: The young boy at the painting's centre

The real subject of Caravaggio’s artwork isn’t one man’s spiritual renewal two thousand years ago. The real subject is whoever’s looking at the painting, and the personal journey awaiting them in their own lives. We’re all Matthews, the painter says, and we all have the chance to escape from those suffocating situations which tax our soul, simply by letting the world’s natural light illuminate a new version of ourselves.

Put simply, The Calling of St Matthew isn’t about believing in God. It’s about believing in yourself. And the enlightenment heralding Christ’s entrance is not simply holy – it’s a metaphor for all those transcendent moments in life when the light is thrown on your world and you see things in a new, revelatory way. Like when you’re absorbed by a beautiful work of art. When you witness a heroic sporting achievement. Or when you just see someone for the first time and they completely take your breath away.


A dance to the music of life: Caravaggio's The Musicians

“Life is full of dark moments,” said the soft voice again. “And images can be a powerful way of throwing light on them. So paint a new picture of yourself and how you want your world to be. Create this image in your mind and summon it in your time of need.” 

I leave the tax collector’s office and step out into the ruined splendour of Rome feeling lighter, freer, unburdened. Images emerge in my mind with thrilling lucidity, intense spotlights leading me back out of the many dead-end turns I seem to think my life has taken.

Colour is everywhere and every surface seems iridescent, a supreme visual elixir. Nearby, there’s a blossoming young Boy with a Basket of Fruit, laden with luscious green. Every vivid tableaux I see is like the Supper at Emmaus, the meat and drink of life spilling out of the frame with abundant vitality.

Above, The Musicians gather in an ensemble of red and white, gently rocking to the blissful lilt of their own melodic purity. And around me, every beggar, priest, maiden, merchant and charlatan seems innately capable of delivering their own personal Seven Acts of Mercy.  

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)

The world is turning faster and more dangerously than ever before. But I’m not daunted. I let it spin and spin and spin, its centrifugal force uniting all shades and subtleties in a divine, kaleidoscopic rhythm. Eventually the pigments fuse into one, and the future before me turns into a single hue of purest white, a blank canvas waiting to be explored and expressed.

“Paint a new picture of yourself and how you want your world to be,” calls the voice again, echoes of tranquillity filling the destitute chambers of my mind, daubing its walls with glorious splashes of life. Imagine yourself, it says. Then choose your canvas. Pick up your brush.

And start painting.

Dedicated to my daughter Sofia Grace and my godson Eli John James, whose palettes and canvases have no limits. 

Wish you weren’t here, from Prisoner Cell Block Hollywood

Last night I dreamt I went to Los Angeles again.

Bastardising Daphne du Maurier’s magnificent opening line to her novel Rebecca is the only way to introduce my feelings towards a metropolis so intertwined with visions of fantasy and nightmare.

Note the line’s syntax and the obsession implied. ‘Again’ comes at the end of the sentence, so the meaning of the fiction is slippery, ambivalent, the very quality of dreams. Have I already visited LA and returned there habitually in my sleep? Or is my visit a purely imagined one, the recurrent projection of my subconscious desires?

Such is the nature of LA, or how I perceive it to be at least. After all, how do we know what’s real and what isn’t? What’s genuine and what’s fake? What constitutes an authentic experience, or what is simply a hollow, Hollywood-style simulation?

Califiornia dreaming: Los Angeles at night, as seen
from the Hollywood Hills

I’ve been a movie fan since a very tender age. Now that I’m an adult in a society hurtling through the advanced stages of postmodernity – with its digital avatars, ‘reality’ TV, omnipresent advertising, theatrically-managed news and the worship of confected celebrity – it’s a question that’s become ever more profound. But it's one that so often seems impenetrable too, like  entering a labyrinth which has no centre, or trying to find yourself in a Californian city that lives and breathes on illusions.  

Let’s set the record straight. The real one that is. I have never been to Los Angeles. But I can also say that no other city on earth – or no idea of a city at least – has captured my imagination so vibrantly and insidiously.

Postcards from the edge: Selling the most fictitious of cities

Captured feels like the right verb, too. On the surface, LA has always seemed like a fountain of possibility, an epicentre of flamboyant self-belief that’s always ready to erupt. Space, power, glamour and opportunity sunbathe seductively on the sun-kissed horizon, sweltering next to the cool, calm, confident waters of the Pacific (the first Hollywood cliché you will read in this supposedly ‘original’ piece of writing).

Yet it’s a mirage that would rapidly dry up, I feel, if I made the 6,000 mile journey west; vanishing like the speediest of cinematic dissolves and suffocating me in hot, Californian quicksand. Lurking amidst this quagmire is the alternative, darker mythology beneath the spacious boulevards, neon lights and gaudy lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Behold the noxious afterburn of a conurbation smothered by freeway upon freeway of dense, distorting petrol fumes, and veiled in a treacherous cloak of hollow, ersatz lunches, riddled with fake, supercilious chatter and masking greed of Erich von Stroheim proportions.

Game on: Robert Altman's Hollywood satire The Player (1992)

The only thing I imagine which unifies this disconnected, sprawling metropolis is its very lack of moral cohesion, a vacuity that systematically chokes off the hopes of many a star-crossed young man and woman, just as it beckons them with the sweet promise of opportunity. This is a place where the young, gifted and talented go to act, love, transgress and die (Hollywood cliché number 2), sacrificing themselves before the high priests of showbusiness on the altar of ‘entertainment’.

More than any other city in the world, LA embodies this kind of myth-making – that very human escapist urge to imagine, to quite literally project yourself into a richer, more exotic realm. Step inside, says the whispering usher through her glossy, rosebud, ruby-red lips. Sit in the dark for a couple of hours. Forget who you are. Look up at the light show and believe the hype.

Light and dark are the prime movers in my own personal projection of Tinseltown. When I close my eyes I see it more clearly than ever – a constellation of thwarted egos, scattered by the Gods across a haphazard urban grid on the blackest of nights, each twinkling light a siren luring the ambitious into their own private Greek tragedy.

Indeed, much of the art that influenced my youth embodies this visual and moral aesthetic – the shallow focus, metallic sheen of Michael Mann’s Heat, the slippery, insubstantial netherworld of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the grim, noirish fantasias of Raymond Chandler’s pulp thrillers.

Feeling blue: Robert DeNiro as the doomed LA anti-hero in Heat (1995)

So what happens after the curtain rises on this grandiose panorama of the San Fernando Valley? Cut to a gorgeous tracking shot that transports me across the movie screen of my mind to a time before career, before responsibility, before family – at that brief tipping point when I had the chance to do something very different with my life.

The limousine is black, menacing, opulent. The expensive suit is svelte, sculpted, a razor-sharp second skin. The weather is dull, sparky, as unpredictable as a damp firecracker. The company is the finest, my own. I cruise along Ventura Boulevard in the heart of Studio City, relishing the control, the command, the caché of my own potential, a delusional prospector advancing greedily upon a rich, abundant diamond mine.

But the stellar mirage is true to nothing but its own emptiness. I drive and drive and drive, the surrounding buildings giving way to vista after vista of dry, arid emptiness, not dissimilar to the sepia-toned, depression era-desert evoked by Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, that mesmerising vision of a metropolis starved of water (and another of my adolescent favourites).

The Waste Land: LA as physical and moral desert
in  Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974)

Eventually I reach the Pacific coast (I must have been through LA and not noticed it. Or did it just disappear in the midst of a breathless, Godardian jump cut?). Before me is a sweet low-angle shot of a woman lying semi-naked on the beach, gazing out to the horizon, her slender bikini thong draped over her curvaceous, casting-couch hip. The body is soaked in classically-composed light, accentuating the scented ripeness of the flesh and bathing it in the very softest of focuses.

The skin seems translucent, ghostly, unattainable. Through it I see each gentle undulation and tender lapping of the sea. The hourglass figure seems to pulse and ripple with each mysterious shift of the water. I caress the beautifully manicured shoulder, stroke the tanned, airbrushed skin and imagine the lustful suggestiveness of the billboard face, the rich soft moistness of the kiss (Hollywood cliché number 3).

Then I peer over the shoulder. Gouged-out eyes lead to empty, unfathomable caverns into the skull. Emaciated cheeks, yellow-grey skin and a cesspit mouth pulse and throb with twisted, corroded enamel. Lips are stretched wire-thin into jagged pieces of pale, abrasive tissue.

Beauty turns beast: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980)

In the blink of my (sleeping) mind’s eye, the American dream becomes the American nightmare. The objectified, decaying enchantress before me reflects back the shallowness of my ambition and the bankruptcy of my imagination. Just another malevolent she-devil in the City of Angels, who’s led an impressionable, stereotypical man to his own tawdry downfall (Hollywood cliché number 4).

Sometimes the dream ends differently, of course. Either I’m smashed to pieces in some grisly, narcotic-fuelled tabloidesque car wreck. Or more comically, I drop dead face first on my keyboard, while tapping out woeful screenplays in some dilapidated apartment block in Venice, like an embittered, 27th rate F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or I simply wash up, empty and isolated in a cold, soulless bar, one of the lonely folks in that most dreamy and metropolitan of paintings, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (Hollywood clichés number 5, 6 and 7).

Calling all lost souls: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942)

Metaphorically, romantically and rather pathetically, I expire in the gutter while pining for the stars, squinting bleary-eyed as these pockets of hopeful light finally fade to black. And it’s in that moment between dreaming and waking that I feel the hollow feeling I always get at the very end of watching a movie, when the credits have finished and you’re plunged into total blackness, waiting for fantasy to be extinguished and reality to begin again.

It’s only a movie, this hard blackness says. A collection of artificial images sewn together. A ribbon of dreams, said Orson Welles, one of my favourite of all Hollywood outcasts. Or did he mean a ribbon of delusions?

In one of Welles’ films, The Lady from Shanghai, the naive, narcissistic hero (played by the director himself) confronts the devious femme fatale (Welles’ ex-wife Rita Hayworth, her hair dyed and cropped so she’s the quintessence of artifice) and the film’s villain (Everett Sloane, holder of the purse strings, the movie’s chief puppeteer – a metaphorical studio boss?) into a surreal Maze of Mirrors at an amusement park.

It’s a preposterous climax to a ludicrous story. But through bravura presentation and his innate love of the magician’s trickery, Welles conjures up a weird and wonderful, tragic-comic vision of fatalistic imprisonment. The slicing, linear treatments of the mirrors, which beautifully fragment the action and warp our idea of what’s real and what’s replicated, become like the bars of a cell, splintering the protagonists’ hopes and locking them icily into their doom.  

Image obsessed: Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in
The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

At the scene’s climax, the anti-heroes pump bullets into representations of each other, bringing the whole house of cards – and a hollow ménage a trois based on deceit and vanity – shattering down into fragmented shards. Ego meets temptation meets delusion meets betrayal meets self-absorption meets imprisonment meets death. Hollywood cliché number 8 then – and the perfect metaphor for LA, a city where idealised representation and self-destruction are almost badges of honour.

Whenever I think (or dream) of Los Angeles, I end up asking myself: which is more powerful, reality or fantasy? And which one is really nurturing or damaging the other? In his book America, French post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard illuminated this idea after his own visit to California. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” he wrote. “Whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyper-real and to the order of simulation.”

Up in smoke: The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte (1929)

To Baudrillard, our postmodern world is essentially built on this hyper-reality: a series of intensified, simulated representations of the real which makes our experiences inherently artificial. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about this concept in 1946 called On Exactitude in Science, in which cartographers make a map so detailed that it becomes the actual size of the kingdom it’s meant to survey. When the map deteriorates, inhabitants are left to piece together what is real and what is fake among the debris, like unfamiliar mourners at a wake, struggling to grasp surprising and contradictory stories about the deceased. 

Sign of the times: Actress Peg Entwistle committed suicide by
jumping off the 'H' in 1932. It was the only thing she became famous for

Which brings me to the title (and overall point) of this blog. Bury Me in Celluloid. I used to think this denoted the confessional space of a movie buff who loves to be smothered in the fictitious fancies of film. Now I realise there’s a darker implication at work. And that the title alludes to the masochistic yearnings of someone who’s spent far too long in a cinematic shadow, at too young an age, and who has too often drawn on movies as a window through which to frame his view of reality.

If Gustave Flaubert was right when he said the art of writing is to discover what you believe, then this bittersweet 2,000 word paean to a city I’ve never even visited serves as yet another vindication of that maxim. Structured like a dream, preoccupied with surface and fantasy, melded together through cinematic language and repeatedly using movies as a roadmap to delineate my relationship to the world, this blog is surely the natural, logical output of a shy, introverted youngster who has enjoyed the passivity and anonymity of cinema too much when he was at his most impressionable. 




Like Welles’ flawed hero, I’ve wandered into my own Maze of Mirrors, a tarnished vagabond who’s marked for life, and who is now slowly cutting my way through the jungle of Baudrillard’s apocalypse now. And when it comes to my writing – that means of self-expression which comes most naturally to me – my default creative mode is to use cinema as a kind of calming narcotic, a drug which numbs confusion and anaesthetises my voyage through life.   

At the end of The Truman Show, a classic movie about hyper-reality and imprisonment by simulation, the hero sails across the sea to the edge of the monumental, biospherical sound stage which he has inhabited all his life. He is ready to take his first glimpse at the brave, new world of ‘reality’.

Brave new world: Jim Carrey at the climax
of The Truman Show (1998)

I’m on that boat too. But mine is somewhere just off the Californian coast. And the door which offers Jim Carrey freedom has long since drifted away from me, like an enchanted city on the horizon that’s faded evanescently from view.

Not that I mind. I lie back and remember what Baudrillard said about the future: “In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban, like Los Angeles. After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no longer have names. Everything will become infrastructure, bathed in artificial light and energy.”

The synthetic sky above me is vast and endless – they could project a million movies up there. The stage-managed sea expands majestically and uniformly in all directions – imagine what it would be like to see land for the very first time. And then to relive this moment again and again and again in all formats and reproductions, each one a slightly different repackaged version of the next.

The breeze is disarming, soothing, manufactured – and it never, ever whispers ‘cut’. My only company is the thick, white, cotton wool clouds floating on the tallest of crane shots thousands of feet above. They keep a benign watch over my anonymity; elemental power brokers moulding me into submission with the gentle pressure of a fragrant, seductive wind.

Breathlessly and beautifully, they take me beyond the horizon and far, far away. To some quiet, still spot I’ve always dreamed of discovering, a resplendent island of pure cinematic solitude, deep in the heart of nowhere.

What becomes of the broken-hearted? They go time-travelling with Estee Lauder…

A famous Victorian author described it best when he imagined Christmas as a time when the ghosts of your past, present and future converge. As the flab and frivolity of each festive season goes by, Christmas does feels more and more like a time machine: an annual ritual that compresses the past and invites you to compare your younger and older selves.

Memories are evoked more readily, I feel: moments of clarity amid the boozy hedonism. Images, stories, pleasures and pains whirl before your mind’s eye like a zoetrope, flickering, only partially defined. Put them together and you have your very own dream-like movie, plus a real temptation to draw the loose narrative threads of your life into a neat, yuletide gift bow.  

Such a moment happened to me the other week, as I wandered through that temple to festive celebration, the department store. My personal movie started rolling when I walked past the Estee Lauder counter, and smelled the Ghost of Christmas Past wafting through the air like an exotic scent. Three Christmases earlier, I’d stood at the same spot looking at a poster for the label’s latest fragrance. The face staring back at me became like a portal to the past, its features leading me back to a time, place and heartbreak eight years previously.

The polished ivory face. Broad, glacial cheekbones. Thick eyebrows, arched somewhere between disappointment and cool irony. Big eyes glazed over with indifference. And a satisfied, knowing smile that bore into you with amused pity, bracing you gently for your downfall.

The humbling had come in a student flat, just a few days before Christmas. The words of that night have long been forgotten but the look stays with me still:  the bored frustration of an artisan who’d finally run out of patience. With a final brush stroke I was finished: other landscapes and canvases awaited, ones that would stretch her more vigorously.

I’m not pretending that she was as beautiful as an Estee Lauder model. But the human face is a fascinating thing: small gestures and nuances can connect with you on a deep fundamental level, each tic telling a story that’s unique and intimate. And there was something in that face, alluring yet hurtful, which drew me back to my younger days. The sweet smell of recollection had come on powerfully, unexpectedly, lingering in the air before dissolving tantalisingly away, displaced by the sickly stench of failure and ageing.

As with Estee Lauder’s fragrances, concocted from chemicals and advertised within an inch of its life, I was in the middle of a truly synthetic experience. The commercialisation of Christmas had been the aroma luring me in: strategically placed, artful advertising in a department store (themselves monuments to fakery) seducing me into reliving my past.

But it was a recollection through eyes bloodshot with hindsight, photoshopped and airbrushed by time in the way the art directors must have refined Lady Lauder. And just like the poster, my view of the past was two-dimensional, paper thin and illusory. Step behind it and there’s nothing there, only the realisation that you’re actually striving for the unattainable and that the fragrance of your youth has long since been absorbed into air, its molecules dispersed into infinitesimal fragments.

Anyone who’s had their heart broken will know it feels like a kind of evaporation, a loss of self. In the months following that Christmas eleven years ago, my heart and soul hungered for something more solid and tangible: a sense of permanence and continuity that would hold me together, giving me something real amid the fragrant traps of maybes, half-promises and fakes.  

Eventually it came two years later, again at Christmas and again in a store. But there was no synthetic trickery this time, no evanescent perfume or cold, clinical salesmanship. Instead, there was a strong, perfect circle made from pristine metal: a line that seemed to continue forever, always replenishing itself and never fading away.

Unlike the frigidity of that earlier night, the engagement ring in the shop window felt like a warm, fiery hearth, thawing away disappointment and oxygenating my world. Clear, elegant and constant, it was crowned by a beautiful pink gemstone, a resplendent jewel as at ease with its power as a monarch sitting on her throne.

And she was, and still is, a kind of queen, lending me a decisive, guiding hand that combines authority with tenderness, tranquillity with fiery passion. I remember her face being reflected back in the jeweller’s window that night, framed by the security and solidity of the engagement ring: an image so warm and alive its magic transcended the shallow, artful accentuations of an advertising creative team. It’s a face that’s endlessly watchable still: dancing, flickering, full of energy and life, its flames and embers drawing you in and holding your gaze, as if you’re a cold and weary traveller seeking solace before a campfire.

The ring wasn’t bought for another two and a half years, but the deal had already been done that night and the scent of regret extinguished. The relationship was being forged, shaped and crafted, an unbreakable thread that would symphonise all my future Christmases together, a solid line as harmonious as poetry, as resilient as platinum and as nourishing and life-enhancing as an umbilical cord.

Only a few days after my Christmas encounter with the Estee Lauder poster, I found myself looking at this lifeline again. But the transparency of the shop window had been replaced by a grey, nondescript digital display. It was only about half the size of a postage stamp, sitting functionally at the top of a cheap white plastic stick.

But slicing it down the middle was a clear, bold, pink line signifying the test was positive. Like the ring, I imagined the line would continue on forever, forming a circle that would stay true and perfect long after I’d dissolved away. One Christmas later, I was cradling my infant daughter in a tight embrace, locking my hands together as if I was trying to stop the very sands of time from slipping away.

“Time was with most of us,” wrote Charles Dickens, “when Christmas Day, encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and everyone round the Christmas fire, and make the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.”

This year the little picture feels complete. The magic ring burns more brightly than ever. In it, I see the Ghosts of Christmas Future lighting my way – a series of spiritual beacons becoming smaller and smaller as they stretch out into the distance. They disappear eventually, but I know they’re following their natural course. In time they’ll loop back on themselves, igniting the here and now and making me see the world as if I’m looking at it for the very first time.

So as I dedicate this blog entry to my wife ahead of her birthday on Christmas Eve, I also raise a huge, bloated Dickensian glass of festive spirit to that brief moment in front of the Estee Lauder poster. It was a moment when the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future so perfectly and poetically collided. When I realised that everything in life does happen for a reason. And when I realised that through the fire and energy of my wife and daughter, life goes on, threading its wondrous path through the complex fabric of existence, reaching its end to find new beginnings.