"But I Digress ..." (12 page)

Bogie and Bacall look off-colour

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 11 AUGUST 2002

A
ND SO THAT
'
S
how
Ally McBeal
ended – not with a bang, but with a whimper. Come to think of it, that's also how
Ally McBeal
started – and carried on. Still, we have now seen the last episode, and a good thing too. No more pouting, no more hair-twiddling as a substitute for acting, no more of Vonda Shepard's theme song for the 1990s, “I've been searching my soul tonight”.

Searching your soul is unseemly. You never find anything useful there – the car keys are generally between the couch cushions, and your parking ticket will not be found, no matter where you look. When you do put in a thorough search, standing at the parking payment machine with a small sea of plastic shopping bags around your feet, and you finally emerge with a parking ticket, like a happy gannet bobbing up with a pilchard in its beak, it is always the parking ticket you lost the last time you were at the mall. Where was it three days ago when you needed it? Where has it been in the interim? Ah, my friends, these are life's ineffable mysteries. You may as well ask why the caged bird sings, or how many roads a man must walk down before you can call him a cab.

Humphrey Bogart never searched his soul, or if he did, he had more class than to do it in public. That is one of the many reasons I am so fond of him. Bogart is a reminder of a better time; a cleaner, stronger, nobler time, when male movie stars were men, not pretty boys with expensive haircuts and bellies rippling like traffic calming zones. When life dealt Bogart the blows it deals us all – true loves arriving in our gin-joint with a new man on their arm; strange hoodlums socking us on the jaw when we least expect it – he responded as men should respond: with bourbon and a cigarette and a quiet determination not to let it happen again.

Bogart was not simple. He was not emotionless as Stallone or Steven Seagal or other modern so-called tough guys are emotionless. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Rick in
Casablanca
were troubled, sensitive beasts, prone to brooding and hurting and – in the scenes off-camera, solitary tears. The difference is that they didn't expect applause for being sensitive. They decided what had to be done, and they did it and bore the consequences like – if the Women's Day activists will forgive me – like men.

The Humphrey Bogart festival started on e.tv this week, and I settled in front of the
The Big Sleep
(e.tv, Monday, 10.15pm) as excited as a kitten.
The Big Sleep
was co-written by William Faulkner. The plot line is more prolix than Faulkner's novels, but fortunately the sentences are shorter. Bogart carried a gun, but his most effective weapon is the snub-nosed sentence, delivered like a poker dealer delivers a card: “Have you met Miss Sternwood?” asks the butler. Bogart's face is impassive.

“Yes,” he says, “she tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up.”

Later the supernaturally lovely Lauren Bacall loses her temper and flies at Bogart. He catches her wrist. “Careful,” he says, without any inflection. “I don't slap around so good, this time of evening.”

Bogart was so hard-boiled he hardly spoke the way other men speak. He seemed to hold his lower jaw immobile and move his upper jaw up and down. He specialised in playing lonely men toughing it out in a world of shadow and deceit, a world of pasteboard masks and moving scenery that conceal corruption and betrayal and death. And down these mean streets he stays true to his code of honour and tortured sense of duty. But scarcely had I started watching
The Big Sleep
when I realised that Bogart was up against a whole new threat.

The Big Sleep
had been colourised. Some poor schlub in Ted Turner's diabolical workshop sat with digital paintbrush and pen and coloured in the black-and-white print, so that Bogart floated across the screen in lurid shades of newly peeled pink, like a hard-boiled lobster. It was awful. The point of film noir is that the hero wanders a world of black and white, in which nothing is black or white but washed with shades of moral ambiguity. The only thing ambiguous about the colourised print was the actual colour of Bogart's trench coat.

In the original it is an appropriate shade of slate; colourised, it suddenly took on precisely the mustard shade of Inspector Clouseau's coat. It was disconcerting to be half-expecting Philip Marlowe to ask people if they had a minkey. Fortunately, halfway through a scene the colourisers had a change of heart, or perhaps they ran out of mustard crayons, and the trench coat subtly metamorphosed to a queasy shade of green.

Precisely how aesthetically destitute would you have to be to prefer the colourised version? Ted Turner defended the process by claiming that the renovated prints would attract new generations to the films. This is something like painting bigger breasts on the Mona Lisa in order to bring her in line with contemporary tastes and draw a younger crowd to the Louvre.

I don't think I can bring myself to watch the other films in the Bogart festival. I love them too much to see them painted and peddled like tuppenny tarts. I will certainly not be watching a colourised
Casablanca
. There are few things that are sacred to me, but Ingrid Bergman's white dress is one of them. If I see her on that runway in shades of lilac or bottle green, I'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon; and for the rest of my life. Here's not looking at you, kid.

It's a god's life

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 18 AUGUST 2002

I
T
'
S A DOG
'
S LIFE
, being God. Hang on, I've just realised that I'm not sure whether the expression “It's a dog's life” means it's a hard life or an easy life. Do dogs have a hard life? In Korea, yes, and it can't be much fun in Greenland with a sled tied to your back and a man in a furry parka yelling “Mush!” at you all day, but besides that dogs seem to have a soft enough time of it.

There must have been a couple of Buddhists over the generations who have been tempted to rack up a couple of bad-karma points so that they could come back as a dog and spend some good years being fussed over and scratched behind the ears and regularly fed a tasty dish of something nutritionally balanced and tail-thumpingly good. Of course, the risk is that you might collect too many bad-karma points and come back as a tapeworm, or a pimento, or something.

That's why I have never converted to Buddhism: too imprecise. There should be a schedule of benefits and punishments, as with frequent-flier miles: “Thirty acts of adultery earns 1700 bad-karma points, which equals reincarnation as a moose,” for instance. Then you would be able to plan for the future.

But I digress. When I say: “It's a dog's life, being God,” I mean that it can't be much fun. Oh, there must be plenty of fringe benefits. Good seats at all the big games, for instance, and you wouldn't have to worry about medical aid or retirement schemes. Plus, there are any number of tax-free corporate gifts, although after a while you might be looking for a little variety. “Enough with the burnt offerings already!” you might say. “What's with the thousands of years of burnt offerings? What's wrong with medium-rare every now and then? And would it kill you to throw in a nice blue-cheese sauce?”

Yes, there are some drawbacks to being God: You would know how all the movies end; it's hard to go for a quiet evening out without being recognised; people are forever doing awful things and saying it was your idea.

Mostly, though, I would get depressed by the kinds of people I would have to deal with every day. Heaven seemed like a good enough idea in the beginning – you get to hang out with your buddies and no one ever has to get up early to go to work – but heaven must increasingly be resembling Cape Town: it's an attractive enough place, but all the interesting people are somewhere else.

Imagine, for instance, having to spend eternity in the company of Neleh and Vicepiah. Neleh and Vicepiah are not the names of twin towns on a Biblical plain earmarked for destruction, although they should be. Neleh and Vicepiah are the names of the last two contestants in
Survivor: Marquesas
(SABC3, Tuesdays), which ended this week. Throughout the series the two gals ran their respective campaigns on a two-pronged platform of evangelism and deceit. Neleh was a Mormon, and Vicepiah belonged to some other denomination that allows you to do whatever you want as long as you ask forgiveness afterwards.

“We pray to the same God,” Neleh solemnly informed Vicepiah, in a moment of what passed for multiculturalism in America. It might have been a meaningful gesture if Neleh had been Palestinian and Vicepiah an Israeli soldier, but between two Christian denominations it was hardly an epiphanic moment.

They may pray to the same God, but they had different ideas about what God's best course of action should be. Neleh prayed that God would make Neleh win. Vicepiah prayed that God would make Vicepiah win. “I am proud of my spirituality,” they both informed the camera. It was infuriating to watch two such smug individuals so utterly persuaded of their own virtue. Their faith had not made them behave any better than anyone else – it had just allowed them to feel good about it.

Perhaps I am just envious. It must be a pretty sweet deal to be able to act the way we are going to act anyway, and still have no doubt that it's all going to turn out well for us in the end. I have no beef with religion. I had a beef with Neleh and Vicepiah.

“I could never believe in a God that did not know how to dance,” Nietzsche once said. I suppose I could never believe in a God that watched Reality TV. The good news was that one of them was going to lose. The bad news was that one of them was going to win. Vicepiah won. She hooted. She hollered. “God is good!” she hooted and hollered. Neleh did not hoot and holler that God was good. Vicepiah thought God had made the right call. Neleh wasn't so sure. Neleh, you had the impression, was beginning to wonder if they really did pray to the same God. What if, she seemed to be thinking, my God was watching
Big Brother
instead?

The long reach of television

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 21 OCTOBER 2002

T
ELEVISION HAS A
long reach, and it makes bonds where you would scarcely imagine bonds might be. I have just today returned from Namibia, and more precisely from the Skeleton Coast. The Skeleton Coast is the most extraordinary place I have visited. It is far, far from here, a place of dreams and fears, where the sky and the sea and the sand meet and make an agreement that does not take human beings into account. You cannot live on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia; you can only visit it, and each moment that you are there, you know you are there only on the sufferance of the sky and the sea and the sand.

On the Skeleton Coast the nearest telephone is 300 km away. The nearest television is further. It is a wild place. It is wilderness. On the shore I saw the bleached masts of 19th-century whaling ships, and jackals that roam the dunes and pick over the scrubbed bones of baleen whales. I saw hawks and gulls and lions that walk the sand, feeding on the slowest seals. There are elephants and dead men and a wind that never stops blowing from the sea. The foam mounts on the sand until the shore is like the trembling crest of some infernal beer.

The Skeleton Coast is a lonely place, but I was not lonely. I had good company. Among the company was a German man named Wolfgang. Wolfgang and I did not warm to each other. I am not proud of it, but I have an in-built prejudice against Germans. I don't seriously believe that the Maginot Line is in serious danger any more, but old habits die hard. (I mean my habit of mistrusting Germans, not necessarily the 20th-century German habit of wearing grey and invading their neighbours.)

Wolfgang was in his sixties, and although rationally I knew that means that he was too young ever to have piloted the Stuka that dive-bombed my grandfather's tank in 1944, still I looked at him askance. I began to feel like John Cleese. There were South African history buffs in the camp, and whenever anyone mentioned war, I found myself, as though possessed, turning to Wolfgang and saying, “They are talking about the Anglo-Boer War, you know. Oh, yes, the Anglo-Boer War. Gee, what a war, eh? Never mind, we're all friends now.”

It was, you might imagine, awkward. My companion – an individual of immense diplomacy and good sense – took me aside and said, “Will you shut up about the war already? Who do you think you are, Winston Churchill?” But could I stop? I could not.

And then the peculiar thing happened. Around the campfire one night, someone mentioned Bing Crosby. I forget how Bing Crosby was mentioned in the distant sandy hollows of the world's most desolate coast, but he was, and what's more, he was not popular. Popular opinion on the Skeleton Coast, I am compelled to report, was not in favour of Bing Crosby. Good words were spoken of Jim Reeves, of all people, and Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, with which I can scarcely argue, but Bing Crosby received short shrift. For want of anything else to say, I offered: “Oh, Bing's not all bad. His daughter shot JR, for one thing.”

That received the silence it deserved, but then Wolfgang turned to me. “You are right,” he said. “Mary Crosby played Sue-Ellen's sister, Kristin Sheperd, and she shot JR.”

I was astonished. “You know
Dallas
?” I said. Wolfgang leaned forward, and his khaki safari-vest rustled slightly under the intensity of his gaze. “I love
Dallas
,” he said.

Wolfgang is a
Dallas
ophile. I too am a
Dallas
ophile. It is currently being repeated on the Series Channel (DStv), but my
Dallas
memories are vivid from the days I used to tiptoe out of bed at 9 pm on a Tuesday and peer around the corner of the living room to watch the doings of the Ewings over my parents' shoulders.

Occasionally I was caught and my mouth was washed out with soap (my father would have preferred to have washed out my eyes with soap, but my mother was a gentle soul), but still each Tuesday I returned. Sometimes I snuck outside and stood in the garden, watching
Dallas
reflected on an open window in the Durban summer night. I am still obscurely touched to think that my parents sought to shelter me from the horrors of the adult world by forbidding me to watch
Dallas
. If only they had just forbidden me to grow up, I am sure I would have been much happier.

I love remembering
Dallas
. It awakens in me the memory of the days when being an adult still seemed exciting. For the rest of the trip, Wolfgang and I tested each other on
Dallas
trivia. “Who was JR's lawyer?” Wolfgang asked. “Harv Smithfield,” I replied with a smirk.

“What was the name of the corrupt
Dallas
sheriff?” I asked. “Fenton,” said Wolfgang, shrugging.

On the whole, I blush to confess, Wolfgang had the edge with
Dallas
trivia. For one thing, he remembered the name of the nightclub where Audrey Landers as Afton Cooper sang when she was still Cliff Barnes' girlfriend. I had to concede.

From our
Dallas
connection, conversation grew. We spoke about being children and seeing things we were not allowed to see. We spoke about the small sorrows of growing older. We spoke about our fathers, and dying. We never mentioned the war.

Now Wolfgang is back in his small village outside Bremen, and I am on this page, fielding queries from friends about when I am going to update my photograph. It wasn't quite like the Christmas Day the soldiers called truce to play football in no-man's-land, but still it felt good. Now I have a place to stay, the next time I find myself in a small village outside Bremen. And we have
Dallas
to thank.