I've been experiencing a crisis of GhostFaith recently.
Not that many of you will be especially interested in my personal issues; quite rightly, you want to read pop-cultural ramblings, sarcastic asides, and me getting all sentimental about secret agents from forty years ago. But you might have to bear with me on this one, just for a little while anyway.
Thing is, I keep seeing things that distract me. There was a line on the BBC site about Occupy camps 'being shut down last year' and, whilst I know the whole story well, I suddenly found myself thinking, who the bloody hell has the right to shut down protest like that? Who has the right to shut ME down, should I decide to protest against a system that increasingly seems horribly wrong from a purely moral point of view?
I took part in a protest last week, as some of you may be aware; this isn't the place to discuss that, save to say that I was angry about the actions of a political/religious group and went to point this out to them. Everyone else there was much more vocal than me, I just stood at the back and made the numbers up, but I increasingly feel as though I've been neglecting this part of me for a very long time. The protests last year, especially the N30 strike, made me realise a few things about myself, about lazy thinking, about the power I have, the responsibility. You know, like Spider-Man and that.
So, as my dear old friend Molesworth once said, a grate thort occur to me. Is this a valid use of my time?
It was a difficult one. Old TV shows and random acts of situationist culture-jacking are pretty much all I've ever talked about. OK, I can explain the impact on me personally, I can dissect the Freudian bits of The Owl Service and I can imply that Are You Being Served? has a Lovecraftian subtext (it totally does, but that's one that got away). I can talk about how Number 6 was a role model to a battered and confused teenager twenty years away, but what point does this serve, really? Not to go all dramatic on you, but it occurs to me that I'm now older than my grandfather was when he died, what have I done with this time?
I thought about turning all the lights off, locking the door, and walking away, leaving the key under the mat and the chairs on the tables. But then I didn't.
Why? Well, first of all, a couple of conversations out in the real world. Thanks for being magnificent people, people.
Secondly: it's a fucking blog, loser. No-one cares anyway. Just have fun with it.
Thirdly: Harpo.
Born Adolph Marx in New York, I believe. Him and his brothers were quite famous, as it goes. The FBI reported on him. Went to Stalinist Russia for no readily apparent reason. Never got into grief with Hoover, never got called before THAT committee, even though he was on record as being a unionist and a 'Red sympathiser', (which sounds like a really amazing electronica act to me). I loved his brother Julius for his fast talking style and the way that his character never, ever lost, no matter how down and out he seemed in his movies. I found his brother Leo funny and possessed of immaculate comic timing, though that accent really grates eventually. But it was Harpo that really did it for me.
He never speaks. Never on film, not once. The whole thing is done with expressions and body language. He runs through the movies like the wrath of some demented god, grinning like a madman, trashing the set and stealing things. He's a archetype, an ancient trickster incarnate, with a pair of scissors (for cutting the ends off rich mens' cigars). When the HQ is under military bombardment in Duck Soup, he runs out into the line of fire...and sticks a "Help Wanted" sign on the front gate. Salvador Dali (still famous) and Alec Woolcott (no longer famous, sadly) both adored him. Dali wrote him a script, Horseback Salad, tragically never made. Well, perhaps not tragically.
Throughout the movies he made (the good ones, anyway) he is the enemy of pointless officialdom. He traps a cruel policeman in a cage, infuriates endless immigration officers, glues documents to the backside of an ambassador and steals the Presidential motorbike. He's chaos, basically.
Woody Allen once said that these films kept him going. That, in his darkest moments, these movies brought him back to reality. Which is odd, because the clip he used to illustrate this is the 'war' sequence from Duck Soup, where a huge ensemble cast go into an elaborate, frighteningly joyous and decidedly cynical song and dance routine about the joy of starting wars ("every mother's son will grab a gun and run away to war"). It's an wonderfully dark and mature moment of intense silliness.
And that got me thinking again about stopping. If people can be silly and say so much at the same time, surely I can carry on talking bollocks on the internet for thirty odd readers?
Like all my recent Transmissions, Harpo helped me; I was depressed, 14, and hating things as usual when I watched Horse Feathers for the first time. It's set in a university, but it's treated like a school, and the brothers' simple exercise of holding administration up to the light and shaking it a bit (or 'satire' as those of you who like one word at a time call it) made me feel a lot better about the world and a lot less fearful of idiots in offices who had files with my name on the front.
But back to my starting point, and one link; it's a symbolic one. There's this bit where Harpo saunters happily down the street. This guy dressed half in rags stops him: "Can you help me out? I'd like to get a cup of coffee."
It was the height of the Depression. The same scene was in movies everywhere and everywhere in real life too.
Harpo nods, smiling.
Produces a hot cup of coffee from his pocket and hands it over.
It's just a joke, but it still means something, somehow. Do the impossible. Change things.
