Bedazzled 2000: The Devil and Koyaanisqatsi

The 2000 remake of Bedazzled is one of those movies that I would probably enjoy a whole lot more if not for the movie itself, if that makes sense.

A reworking of  Stanley Donen's classic 1967 Faustian comedy starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, our protagonist is Elliot (Brendan Fraser), a lonely office worker who's picked up at a bar by the Devil and presented with the offer of a lifetime - seven wishes in exchange for ownership rights to his soul. The unique hook here being that the big D appears in the form of the tantalising Elizabeth Hurley. She's zeroed in on Elliot in part due to his low ranking in the social food chain, but what makes him particularly vulnerable to the she-Devil's machinations is his love-sickness for his work colleague Alison (Frances O'Connor), and it's Lucy-fer's supposed ability to make their union possible that seals the deal. The Devil is nice enough to give Elliot an escape clause, whereby once he's had enough of a particular wish, he has the option of cancelling it and returning to his default reality (she could have gotten him to burn through his seven wishes a heck of a lot faster if she wasn't so generous).

The establishing act is, honestly, fine. The sequences where Elliot meets the Devil and is seduced to the dark side are where the film is at its most breezy and likeable. It's once we get into the "meat" of the story, where Elliot starts making his wishes and the Devil delights in corrupting them (and the obtuse Elliot does make it supremely easy for her), that the experience becomes a drag. We know that none of Elliot's wishes are going to work out as he wants, and the presence of a reset button means that we also know that whatever happens in each individual reality ultimately won't have any lasting consequences for the overarching narrative. With that in mind, it all comes down to how entertaining the wish fulfilment sequences are as their own self-contained set-pieces. The original 1967 film pulls it off. The remake not so much, part of the problem being that the sketches have a tendency to advertise their solution upfront. It's usually too transparent from the outset what went wrong with Elliot's wish for the playing out to be very much fun. Likewise, God shows up and intervenes in Elliot's journey, and it's supposed to be a twist which character he is, but you'll have figured it out the instant you lay eyes on them. There is seriously only one character that he could be (clue: it was 2000, and Hollywood was caught up in a passionate love affair with the Magical Negro). For a film about playing with fire, Bedazzled 2000 ultimately suffers from playing things just a little too safe; in the end, even the Devil's sultry temptress act seems more cute than artfully charismatic.

In spite of my complaints, I come away still somewhat liking Bedazzled 2000, but it's definitely a film that benefits from the presence of a fast forward button (in fact, I think there is a potentially promising edit to be had in implementing a visible fast forward through all of Elliot's wish sequences). The most intriguing aspect of Bedazzled is the sequence that accompanies the opening credits. Here, we supposedly see the Earth from the Devil's perspective, as she scans the population for susceptible clientele, momentarily freezing on a prospective target while a caption appears on screen, each giving us a little window in that individual's coveted soul. Subjects are defined as "honest", "optimist" and "talks during movies". Her unwitting quarry are overwhelmingly human, although she momentarily considers going after a dog bearing the "neurotic" label (I'd be curious to see how that scenario would play out, actually). What's intriguing about this opening is that the Devil's eye-perspective of Earth and its denizens seems deliberately reminiscent of Godfrey Reggio's seminal arthouse flick Koyaanisqatsi (1982). In particular, the credits are reminiscent of the film's most infamous sequence, "The Grid", in which we get to observe the denizens of modern urbanisation from a bombardment of different vantage points. Many of the same techniques are deployed - time-lapse photography featuring crowds of people rushing about their daily grind, perspective shots enabling us to hurtle along overpasses at gut-wrenching speed, sped-up clouds that offer an intermittent glimpse of the natural world existing on the sidelines.

The title of Reggio's film comes from the Hopi language, and translates to "life out of balance". The title being the biggest giveaway that the film is intended as an indictment of this way of life; the film itself eschews commentary in favour of a soundtrack from Philip Glass, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions from the imagery. Early sequences focus primarily on natural phenomenon - canyons, waterfalls and deserts in all their awe-inspiring splendour - but as the film progresses we see increasing evidence of human modification, as a new phenomenon lays claim to the landscape, the phenomenon being that of technology. The opening portions of the film are devoid of any actual first-hand signs of human life, the power lines that span the desert and the great imposing smokestacks that penetrate the skies initially doing all the talking for us. As we wade deeper into urbanisation, however, we discover where all the humans are at - playing Q*bert and getting daily slices of nutrition in shopping mall food courts. The sequence is masterfully shot and edited so as to inspire a tangle of contradictory responses; at once beautiful and nightmarish, the imagery speaking of both the potency and vulnerabilities of humankind, the might of species matched with the powerlessness of the individual. The rows and rows of supermarket shelves stocked with goods and the numerous venues competing for patrons' attentions in a shopping mall give off the appearance of choice in an overall arena of entrapment. Reggio himself has commented that the purpose of the film was to illustrate how: "The main event today is not seen by those of us who live in it...the transiting from old nature, or the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation, into a technological milieu, into mass technology as the environment of life...it's not that we use technology, it's that we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we're no longer conscious of its presence."

The journey we undertake in Koyaanisqatsi is effectively that out of Eden and into the Tower of Babel (an image evoked more explicitly in the second of its spiritual sequels, Naqoyqatsi), a Babel that seems to be simultaneously ascending into ever more dizzying heights while erupting into a borderline apocalyptic chaos. There is a universal language being spoken around this tower - one that urges its denizens onto a course of constant consumption - yet it comes from such a multitude of ceaselessly jabbering voices as to amount to an all-out sensory overload, an idea most effectively communicated in one shot where we see a woman and her two children in an electronics store, surrounded by walls of television screens all transmitting the exact same image. This is followed by a channel-surfing sequence in which we surge through multiple television images with the same kind of feverish frenzy as those aforementioned overpass shot, digesting brief extracts from news broadcasts and commercials; too brief to have much individual meaning, but which all ad up to convey a single, entirely comprehensible message that seems to arise from a state of total delirium. Possibly my favourite shot in The Grid is that in which we pan down through the various levels of a shopping mall, a massive complex of criss-crossing escalators, artificial lighting and the occasional desperately out of place greenery; throughout this shot I find myself caught between marvelling at the architecture and the claustrophobic sensation that I'm navigating my way through some kind of maze that's leading me further and further away from the prospect of ever seeing daylight again. In fact, that's my overall impression of life in The Grid - the denizens all appear to be navigating through a giant maze comprised of endless, snake-like passages, all racing toward some kind of objective that none of them seem to be achieving. It is a maze in which all the inhabitants seem to be perpetually lost. Throughout much the footage, the humans are too numerous and too indistinct for any particular one to stand out, but every now and then you get some sense of the individual lives adrift in the system, and micro-narratives start to suggest themselves - I'm quite fond of one shot that seems to function as a split-screen, showing a lone office worker through the window of a skyscraper while crowds and traffic whizz by on the streets below. Likewise, a moment in which we follow an individual woman through an unusually deserted subway seems almost startling when juxtaposed with so much congestion.

The opening of Bedazzled thrives on similar shots depicting masses of humans racing through a plethora of streets and subways. In lieu of Glass's haunting score these shots are unaccompanied by Johnnie Taylor's "Just The One (I've Been Looking For)", cluing us in that we're in for a more comical look at the notion of urban indifference. Here, the Devil has the ability to freeze and identify individuals among the non-stop sprawl by a range of defining characteristics - she can pick out a "sinner" from a "saint", and a "peeping tom", "fake" and "optimist" who all happen to cross paths on their daily commute. There are a few obvious jokes, such as the so-called environmentalist who negligently disposes of a paper cup, the bridge and groom who are tying the knot "for money" and "for green card" respectively, and the "ex-yuppie" who seems to regard a passing "ex-hippie" with an instinctual antipathy. For many of the subjects, however, the labels seem merely absurd in their arbitrariness. The "virgin" seems indistinguishable from the "horny", while our aforementioned fake, peeping tom and optimist barely register as distinct figures. Ostensibly, these are labels which evoke the kind of micro-narratives intermittently suggested in The Grid sequence of Koyaanisqatsi, and the contradictions and general human messiness underpinning this seemingly formidable surge of global conquest. They take on a more sinister edge, however, when we consider that the particular perspective from which we are seeing the world is that of the Devil's own personal shopping channel. The labels which supposedly define each individual therein basically amount to advertising hooks designed to talk up each unwitting soul to a consumer hell-bent on bending them to her own ends.

On one level, the Koyaanisqatsi nods in Bedazzled function as an elaborate set-up to a visual punchline that occurs at the very end of the opening sequence, when Elliot gets stuck holding the door at the Synedyne building (or Syn for short - get it?) for a seemingly endless succession of visitors. The image is indicative of the disconnect between Elliot and his environs, the idea that he's a lost soul struggling to navigate the particular grid he inhabits - he is left standing out in the cold (literally and figuratively) while the rest of the world rushes him by, apparently knowing exactly where it needs to be (unbeknownst to Elliot, this disconnect is universal across Babel, where nobody speaks exactly the same tongue, although everyone is ultimately pushing toward more-or-less the same ends). It also confirms that he has the all-important quality the Devil desires in her next victim - he is a "doormat". Other characteristics that make Elliot an appealing target for Faustian trade include "lovesick", "desperate", "oblivious" and "loser". The one characteristic that is not cited, but is implicit amid the rest is "hungry". The Devil hones in on Elliot because he is especially deficient on the satiation front. Elliot is in a constant state of hungering for the life he feels he's missing out on. He hungers for success, and he hungers for acceptance among his peers. Primarily he hungers for Alison, who represents the peak of Elliot's desires, and what ultimately convinces him to make his pact with the Devil. On another, more visceral level he hungers for something as deceptively basic as a Happy Meal, and even that yearning turns against him.

Elliott's first wish is his most mundane - he wishes for a Big Mac and a Coke, and this the Devil fulfils by taking him on a bus ride to the nearest McDonald's and ordering the requested items, which she forces him to pay for out of his own pocket. This is an underhanded tactic on the part of the Devil, who seeks to create ambiguity as to whether or not she has officially fulfilled a wish for Elliot, thus misleading him into thinking he has more wishes remaining than he does. But there is nevertheless an implicit teaching in this episode that the Devil even goes so far as to spell out for Elliot, when he complains about being expected to pay for his Big Mac: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Only marginally more subtle is the implicit message when Elliot holds up his ill-gotten (or not) meal and declares (albeit sarcastically): "This is really the work of the Devil". Indeed, there is a connection to be made between the culture of mass consumption embodied in that mundane Big Mac and the kind of life tipped way out of balance in which the Devil is clearly most her element. The Devil reminds Elliot that there is a hidden cost to convenience, a message likewise nestled not far below the surface of Koyaanisqatsi. Reggio's film conveys the stark warning that as we immure ourselves in a self-made maze constructed from wall-to-wall television sets, overpasses and shopping malls, we risk losing touch with the bigger picture, and with the world that flounders beneath the weight of our technological addictions. Juxtaposed with all the imagery of consumption within The Grid are odes to the industrial processes that go largely hidden to the average consumer, but which make our diets of confectionery and auto-mobiles possible; these too are marvels in their adroitness, co-ordination and efficiency, and yet there is something unnerving, even unappetising about these mass production sequences. They are reminders of how much of the journey from raw resource to recognisable product happens out of sight, the momentary glimpses we get here barely scratching the surface, to say nothing of the deeper scratches extending far across the landscapes beyond the city as a result of our gargantuan appetites. The fast food ordered by Elliot is the perfect symbol for the kind of on-demand gratification most of us are accustomed to seeing materialise out of nowhere, divorced from the bigger picture, but to which a multitude of visible strings are firmly attached. The cycle of craving and consumption that defines life in The Grid is echoed in the business model by the Devil operates, for both thrive on keeping their subjects mired in a state of constant desperate yearning for on-demand gratification, all while mounting toward increasingly apocalyptic consequences. Elliot risks losing his soul, not merely in the Faustian sense, but to the perpetual feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction on which both corporations and the Princess of Darkness depend.

As I say, the wishes themselves are the least interesting aspect of the film. Only the first wish (for a Big Mac) and the seventh wish have any real impact on the overarching narrative, and in between we get to see him expend his five wishes on living out cliched and easily corruptible scenarios that represent conventional models of success - Elliot wishes for various incarnations of wealth, power and fame, only to discover that each comes with an unpleasant sting in the tail. So, let's skip directly to the ending, and it's somewhat of an odd one. It's an ending that effectively looks to have it both ways, in that Elliot both does and doesn't get what he wants. During his final encounter with the Devil, she advises him that Heaven is a place on Earth, as is Hell, and whichever one he inhabits ultimately comes down to his own perspective on life. Elliot discovers that what anchors him to the latter is personal desire; when he uses his final wish exclusively for Alison's benefit and not his own, he finds that his Faustian contract is voided, an outcome that makes the Devil curiously happy, as if she has been privately rooting for Elliot all along. Elliot accepts that Alison is unattainable - once he actually gets close enough to strike up a conversation with the woman, he discovers that she's already in a relationship. He does, however, end up with a mirror version of Alison, one who seems custom-designed to be his perfect partner; after his adventure, Elliot returns to his house to discover a new neighbour moving in the form of Nicole (also O'Connor), and the two of them hit it off. The best sense I can make of this ending is that Nicole's uncanny appearance is intended to clue us in that Elliot has finally made it to Heaven, having transcended his previously hellish existence, with Nicole representing the angelic counterpart to the corruptive Alison. Not that there was anything particularly sordid about Alison in herself. We spend nearly all of the picture viewing her through Elliot's distorted lens and barely get to know her as a character. And that's because she barely is a character. Rather, she represents the worst of Elliot's desires, the personification of the life that was forever out of his reach, and without which he'd convinced himself his existence was inherently debased. Nicole, on the other hand, is the embodiment of self-acceptance - she looks like Alison, but her personality more closely echoes Elliot's own, thus affirming that there was validity in the person he has been all along.

In the film's closing sequence, we slip back into Koyaanisqatsi mode, in a manner that deliberately echoes the opening moment in which Elliot was stuck holding the door for a stream of passers-by. Once again, time-lapse photography shows a succession of figures zipping across the local terrain while Elliot, along with Nicole, stays comparatively still. This time, though, there's not so much a sense of Elliot being lost and passed over in the daily grind as him having figured out exactly where he wants to be - which is to say, right there in the present moment - while the rest of the world races ever onward in the expectation of some vaguely defined better. Elliot and Nicole are not the only figures left out of the general scramble - we also see a Buddhist monk sitting upon a park bench, two more couples and a family - a minority of figures who appear to have stepped out of Babel and achieved something resembling clarity. We see that Elliot is still being observed by both God and the Devil, who are playing a game of chess together in the park; the ancient battle between virtue and vice continues, but in a much more amicable fashion than traditionally assumed. For the final frame, we close in on our two heavenly souls and get a glimpse of what life is like on the side of the angels - Nicole "hogs the covers" while Elliot "drinks from the carton." Heaven, much like Hell/Babel, is signified by the uncouth habits and all-round messiness that make up each individual therein, and here that's embraced as as good as it gets.

Bungle Boy Jeans (And That Has Made All The Difference!)

I admit that I haven't revisited enough of the series in my adult years to test this supposition, but is it fair to say that Tiny Toon Adventures was a freakier series than Animaniacs? It's certainly my recollection that Tiny Toon Adventures had a penchant for darker, more grotesque humor than its successor. Then again, I was a slightly younger child during Tiny Toon's run, so it could just be that it hit me at a more suggestible time. Not to mention that, the younger I was, the higher the likelihood that the numerous pop culture references would go right over my head. There were many, many episodes that confounded me, but none more confounding than "Acme Cable TV" (original air date November 11 1991), an episode built around the premise that Babs and Buster Bunny are unable to perform their usual schtick after coming down with the Taiwan flu (so called because it makes you sneeze with a Taiwanese accent), so instead we get to spend twenty-odd minutes hanging out on their couch as they flick through the delights of cable television, or in the words of Babs, "685 channels of viewer-pleasing mind-rot". Mind-rot starring themselves and their classmates, no less. Can we say VANITY?

Conceptually, "Acme Cable TV" bears a resemblance to the 1987 movie Amazon Women on The Moon, which follows a similar channel-hopping format - and, in both cases, the format is largely an excuse for unleashing a slew of micro parodies and skits that require little to no context or development (although Amazon Women has an ongoing narrative thread that it intermittently returns to, in the form of the titular film-within-a-film). Catching this episode back in the early 90s, I was not yet culturally savvy enough to appreciate the bulk of what was being referenced, and with no solid narrative grounding to focus my engagement, watching it swiftly became an exercise in all-out discombobulation, wherein I found myself at the mercy of Babs and Buster Bunny's (mercifully?) fickle attention spans. I remember being particularly frustrated when they cut away from one story just as it appeared to be getting started - I won't say which one for now, although the fact that I became invested in the scenario in question as a narrative probably speaks volumes of my naivety as a child.

One of the early skits was a faux commercial for the fictitious breakfast product "Foot Loops" - a blatant play on the cereal Fruit Loops, although that brand and its avian mascot meant nothing to me at the time. Nevertheless, even back then I was already well-versed enough in the language of television commercials to appreciate what was being lampooned - that is, the efforts of advertisers to make the banal, and sometimes just plain atrocious, look desirable, even the most ghastly kind of sugar-laden cereals (in fairness, I've never eaten Fruit Loops, but it looks absolutely revolting to me, and I can only assume the writer of this particular skit shared my sentiments). It gave me something I could latch onto, amid the chaos. I was hoping to see further spoof commercials littered throughout, but alas, there was only one other (I don't remember there being too many spoof commercials in Amazon Women on The Moon either, and one of the scant few was for a way more vile product than Foot Loops). But that second ad was so bizarre that it wound up being the episode highlight for me. Here, a dressed up Babs catches a taxi, but not without giving a sideways glance to the nonchalant Buster lingering beside the curb, who gets a mouthful of exhaust fumes when her taxi departs. Babs makes it all the way to the airport and up into the skies before a thought suddenly occurs to her, whereupon she backtracks all the way to Buster, to ask him the question that her mind cannot let be: "Are those Bungle Boy jeans you're wearing?" An impassive Buster confirms that he's not wearing anything beneath the waist at all, to which Babs responds, "That's what I thought," and her cab drives away, forcing Buster to once again chow on its exhaust.

It was another reference that was completely lost on me at the time, but the ad was spoofing a popular spot for the now-defunct brand Bugle Boy jeans (in the Tiny Toons skit, the brand has been modified to "Bungle", which means to screw something up, but is also a play on "bunny", referring to the leporine nature of the characters). Airing in the cusp between the 1980s and the 1990s (around the time that Levi's countered with the image of a young Brad Pitt being turned loose from prison in just his boxers), the scenario is actually pretty similar to that of the Tiny Toons skit, but that it takes place in an arid desert where our two participants may well be the only figments of human life within miles. A male hitch-hiker, clad in the denim of the hour, is passed by a female motorist, but she hastily backs up her vehicle to ask him the burning question: "Excuse me, are those Bugle Boy jeans that you're wearing?" He confirms that they are, whereupon she thanks him and drives away, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere. In a more sinister variant from the same campaign, a man received a telephone from his ultramodern apartment in what looked to be a dystopian near-future, to be greeted by the voice of a female voyeur wanting to know if those were Bugle Boy jeans he had on, whereupon she promptly hung up on him. In his case he possibly dodged a bullet.

The former ad is iconic enough to have been spoofed in a variety of venues, including an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head (no prizes for guessing what variant on the pivotal line they had to offer) and the music video to the 1991 Genesis single "I Can't Dance", which was a broad piss-take on the superficial quirkiness of contemporary jeans advertising in general (more on that later). Oddly enough, though, I feel that the Tiny Toons variation actually makes better use of its strange scenario than the original. Watching those Bugle Boy jeans ads, I really am scratching my head trying to crack the underlying narrative - obviously, the implication is that his choice of pants is the only fascinating thing about him, and the sole reason he's given a second look, but she just drives off and leaves him in the dust anyway. His jeans momentarily get him attention, but he doesn't get the ride. Compare it to Brad Pitt's triumphant turnabout at the end of the aforementioned Levi's ad, and this campaign seems curiously punishing of its product's in-universe patron.

With Babs and Buster Bunny, however...well, there is slightly more of a story going on there. I've no doubt that many of the added touches are there simply to play into the cartoon absurdity of their universe, such as Babs getting her plane to turn around in-flight on her own personal whim. Nevertheless, their looser reality cuts a little deeper into the underlying humanity (as it were) of the situation. The feeling I get is that Babs' ability to reverse her trajectory so readily is not a matter of idle curiosity, but a desperate, potent defiance in wanting to move backwards to a critical moment in time when things could potentially have gone differently. Babs is already far down what should logically be passed the point of no return when she manages, by sheer force of will, to turn around and take her story back to square one, driven by an overpowering sense of regret as to what she left behind. 

Unlike the aforementioned Foot Loops skit, this one doesn't advertise upfront its nature as a faux commercial, so a reasonable assumption would be that Babs is going backwards because she regrets not seizing the opportunity to strike up a conversation with the attractive young bunny who momentarily caught her eye before heading down a different direction and discarding the possibilities he potentially opened in a cloud of exhaust fumes. In actuality, she goes back to confirm that Buster isn't wearing the brand supposedly being advertised - when Buster points out that he isn't wearing pants at all, Babs states that she suspected as such and drives off, reinforcing her disregard for Buster with a second blast of exhaust. Again, an absurd outcome, but one that makes sense if viewed from the perspective of Babs' need to explore The Road Not Taken. Babs goes back, basically, to affirm that the path she had chosen was indeed the correct one, in eliminating the possibility that Buster was wearing the coveted jeans that would have marked him out as desirable company. The alternate path was indeed not worth pursuing, and Babs goes on her merry way. And that's what makes this unassuming skit so compelling to me. It plays like the perfect metaphor for very our human desire to know how things might otherwise have gone had we done things just a little differently, weighed against our intuition that we'd likely be no better off either way. That's the case for Babs, at least. Perhaps if Buster had possessed slightly better fashion prowess then he'd have avoided that mouthful of pollution the second time around.

The Lover (aka Ernie, I'll Be Happy If It Comes Up To My Chest)

Last time, I made some nebulous comparisons between a TV ad for a brand of soap that spooked me as a child and Harold Pinter's 1963 creation The Lover, which debuted as a television film, directed by Joan Kemp-Welch and starring Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant (who at the time was married to Pinter), before being transferred to the stage. This seems like a good enough opportunity to segue into talking about The Lover itself. Not only does it happen to be my favourite work of Pinter's, but the original 1963 film ranks as one of my all-time favourite pieces of television, period. The dialogue is tremendously witty, and the script boasts no shortage of beautifully constructed jokes, yet the film as a whole makes for such an incredibly intense and uncomfortable watch - a dry domestic drama charged by interludes of eroticism and a surprisingly sinister undercurrent. And it's poignant. There's an extent to which I find its ending scene almost unspeakably sad.

The Lover starts out with a perfectly nondescript scenario. Richard (Badel), the husband, is preparing to leave the house for a day at the office, and goes to bid Sarah (Merchant), the wife, farewell. But with the first words out of his mouth, the mundaneness is completely shattered, as he wastes no time in dropping their relationship's big bombshell: "Is your lover coming today?" "Mmm" replies an appreciative Sarah. After establishing that Sarah and her lover intend to occupy the house until about 6pm, Richard wishes her a pleasant afternoon, and departs.

So yes. While Richard is out at the office all day (or so he claims...), Sarah's favoured method of passing the hours is to entertain an extramarital lover, an arrangement that Richard not only tolerates but openly discusses with Sarah on return. Sarah's shamelessness initially seems to stem from the understanding that Richard takes no more than he dishes out - early in the film, Sarah coaxes Richard into admitting that he is not, in fact, at the office during the afternoon but out having an affair of his own, a revelation that bothers her only because Richard does not speak of his extramarital partner with the same degree of warmth and affection that she does her own:

 

Richard: You can't sensibly enquire whether a whore is witty. It's of no significance whether she is or she isn't. She's simply a whore, a functionary who either pleases or displeases.

Sarah: And she pleases you?

Richard: Today she's pleasing, tomorrow one can't say.

Sarah: I must say I find your attitude to women rather alarming.

Richard: Why? I wasn't looking for your double, was I? I wasn't looking for a woman whom I could respect as you, whom I could admire and love as I do you, was I? All I wanted was, how should I put it, someone who could express and engender lust with all lust's cunning. Nothing more.

This is not your traditional love triangle, however. There is a dramatic twist, midway through the proceedings, which massively alters our understanding of the situation, and it's here that I give notice to anyone unfamiliar with either the television film or the play to turn back now, lest you miss out on the opportunity to experience this wonderful story fresh.

On the second day, we finally get a decent look at Sarah's lover, and he turns out to be...none other than Richard himself, under the assumed moniker of "Max". That's right, all this talk of their respective affairs transpires to have been nothing more than a bit of kinky role-playing on the part of a bored couple desperately seeking refuge from the stagnant state of their relations. All innocent fun and games then? Not exactly. Once we have this vital knowledge, we can see that the interactions between Richard and Sarah during the first half of the film are loaded with uncomfortable double meanings. Both players, in their commitment to maintaining the fantasy, are never permitted to break character, from either side of the equation (Sarah, to Richard's chagrin, commits a taboo early on, in neglecting to change her shoes between Max's departure and Richard's return). As such, whatever commentary each has to offer on the content of their role-playing can be made only indirectly (the absence of direct communication was a favourite recurring theme of Pinter's). Having returned on the first evening, Richard takes the opportunity to complain about the intense sunlight he experienced earlier in the sitting room as Max: "Very sunny on the road. Of course by the time I got onto it the sun was beginning to sink, but I imagine it was quite warm here this afternoon." This also gives added significance to the portions of dialogue where they speak of their respective lovers, for they are, in practice, giving critiques of one another's performances and their overall impressions of what this reveals of the person underneath. Hence, Sarah's indignation at being described as a "common or garden slut", when the worst observation she has to offer about Richard/Max in return is that he "has his moods, of course." The interplay between Sarah and Richard, and the clear disparity between what the fictitious affair means to each of them, is indicative of the tensions brewing beneath their (admittedly unconventional) display of domestic harmony. Sarah, who asserts that "Things are beautifully balanced", is ostensibly happy with the arrangement, but we can trace Richard's expression of dissatisfaction right back to his initial description of his (equally fictitious) day at work: "Long meeting. Rather inconclusive." Compare this to his summary of the subsequent day's work, which follows on from his motion, as Max, to bring about an end to the role-playing - "What a dreary conference, went on all day. Still good work done, I think. Something achieved" - and it becomes apparent that Richard's daily synopses of life in the office are actually pithy summaries of his latest tenure as Max - in essence, his job - expressed in the driest and least emotional terms possible.

We learn that Sarah and Richard have been married for ten years, and it is implied that things between them were (perhaps not unexpectedly) a lot more fervid in the beginning - Sarah states that "I didn't take my lover ten years ago. Not quite. Not on the honeymoon," in response to Richard's charge that she has forced him to endure a "humiliating ignominy" for the past decade. Their relationship now is almost comically sterile - Pinter makes a point of illustrating their non-existent sexual relations by showing that they sleep in separate beds. Sarah's lack of passion for Richard is signified in her repeated offer of a cold supper every evening - she reserves all of her fire and intensity for Max, a fact that makes Richard absurdly jealous. The "ignominy" of which he speaks is rooted in the frustration of being unable to experience sexual relations with Sarah without pretending to be someone else - previously, he conveyed disbelief at Sarah's profession that it is Richard, and not Max, whom she really loves. Sarah's reference to their honeymoon, meanwhile, alludes to a time when she and Richard were able to enjoy more conventional intimacy, with her "not quite" in particular suggesting that Max is a lot closer to the suitor Richard was back in the day. During one of their earlier sparring matches, Sarah challenged Richard's assertation that she was the first to "look elsewhere", suggesting that it was changes to Richard's interests and disposition that proved the snake in their marital Eden - which in itself prompts the question as to which identity is assumed and which represents the "true" character. Sarah, meanwhile, might claim that the status quo is beautifully balanced, but we sense that this merely a compromise on her part and that, given the choice, she would sooner have Max full time. When Richard comments that Max has never seen the night from the house, Sarah gives the pointed response, "He's obliged to leave before the sunset, unfortunately." We can only speculate as to whether her faux pas involving the shoes was genuinely a mistake, as she claims, or an act of rebellion (conscious or unconscious) designed to coax Max out of Richard out of hours. This also accounts for why Sarah takes Richard's "common or garden slut" remarks as sorely as she does; more than simply a light-hearted jab at her contributions to the role-playing, Richard is deliberately downplaying the possibility that these games constitute anything more to him than, as he so delicately puts it, "a quick cup of cocoa while they're checking the oil and water".

The notion that these afternoon visits from Max represent a return to a kind of marital purity for the couple is tempered by the nature of their erotic exchange, which thrives on a heavy air of threat and danger. While Max and Sarah are together, they delve into deeper role-playing games still, in which both characters flit between a range of identities. Sarah, who is alternately addressed by Max as "Dolores" and "Mary" throughout this sequence, assumes the role of a vulnerable woman pursued by a potential rapist while awaiting her husband in a park, and rescued by a man claiming to be the park keeper; both assailant and benefactor are fulfilled by Max. The precariousness continues as the self-proclaimed park keeper lures Sarah/Dolores/Mary into the park keeper's hut and apparently traps her there, intermittently shrinking away to acknowledge the wife he insists is still waiting for him. We see extracts from another game in which the two dance their fingers across a bongo drum (an image that appears in both the opening and closing titles) as part of a ritualised interaction; the tentative manner with which Sarah's fingers approach and stroke Max's, followed by the predatory manner with which he grabs and pins down her hand, also conveys an element of threat. As is aptly observed in the BFI's entry on the film, their hands look like a pair of mating spiders, giving a precarious, potentially deadly air to the proceedings.

The Lover is predominantly a two-hander, with Badel and Merchant being the only on-screen figures to feature for most of the film, although a third character does appear, briefly, at around the midway mark. While waiting for her lover to arrive, Sarah is startled by an unexpected (and undesired) call from the local milkman, played by Welsh actor Michael Forrest. As per the play's Wikipedia entry, the appearance of the milkman is a simple diversionary tactic on Pinter's part: "Pinter leads the audience to believe that there are three characters in the play: the wife, the husband and the lover." This may well be true for the stage productions, and the impression you might indeed be inclined to form if you noticed three names on the playbill. It is noteworthy, however, that the original television film does not attempt to practice this deception on the viewer, with Forrest receiving no credit until the end. To the contrary, I would suggest that Forrest's very presence, however fleeting, is a disturbance; when Sarah opens the door to reveal him standing there in the place of her lover, he registers immediately as a stranger to this scenario. The viewer knows, from the outset, that he is not Sarah's lover (although his being a milkman constitutes an entire gag in itself) - earlier in the film, we get a small glimpse of her lover from behind, and the two visibly do not match. More critically, the first half of the film has been so tightly restricted to Sarah and Richard, and to what goes on within the confines of their property, that the appearance of a third person catches us off of guard, to an extent that exposes how much we have subconsciously anticipated the story's twist all along. One of the key themes of the film is isolation, with the milkman's minor but by no means superfluous role conveying something of the couple's ambivalent relationship with the outside world. Part of what makes his appearance so impinging is that he catches sight of the unwary Sarah in the seductive gear she dons exclusively for Max's visits; he represents the prying eyes and judgement that Sarah, who had previously remarked how lucky she and Richard were to live in such seclusion, spends the entirety of the film shielding herself from. He also embodies both the temptations and the perils of the world beyond, as signified in his repeated effort to peddle "cream" to the unwilling Sarah; what makes this staggeringly unsubtle bit of innuendo so hilarious is his attempt to add incentive by inferring a rivalry with a neighbouring housewife Mrs Owens (she just had three jars...clotted). Being such a cliched vessel of illicit sexual gratification, he does, in his own perverse way, represent the threat of conventionality, an offer that Sarah is particularly adverse to. His thinly-veiled crudeness make him a refreshing interlude to the deliberately stilted and reserved exchanges that have occurred between Sarah and Richard, but his predatory intentions also make him a sinister figure, in a manner that seems to prefigure Sarah's mock-vulnerability at the hands of the various pursuers played by Max. It's a dangerous, dangerous world out there, and it parks itself right on Sarah's doorstep.

The milkman and his mention of bored housewife Mrs Owens are our only objective insights into the wider community that exists beyond Richard and Sarah's self-contained soap opera. The strongly claustrophobic atmosphere of the film is sustained not only by the fact that we never see anything more of it, but also that we can never be certain just how many of Richard and Sarah's alleged activities therein are genuine or products of fantasy. Does Richard even go to an office at all, or is this simply part of the act? If so, then how is he whiling the hours until Max's visits at three o'clock? We get some indication that he does not travel far - Sarah objects to his description of his mistress as "handy between trains" on the grounds that he does not travel by train, but by car, suggesting that he has inadvertently strayed from the rules of their established narrative in mixing up his designated transport method. And what of Sarah's mention of her having had lunch in the village? Did she actually go, or are she and Richard simply going through the motions in churning out meaningless detail before they can get to the juicy part in digesting their latest bout of role-playing? If Sarah did go to the village, then she got little from it - as per her account, she saw no one and her lunch was merely fair. Sarah later professes to be thankful for their seclusion, and to live so far away from the main road, a statement that somewhat undermines Richard's preceding caution against laughing too loud at Max's jokes, lest it encourages the neighbours to gossip. We have no idea if there actually are any neighbours within hearing distance, although the threat of gossip from external forces is certainly present in the milkman's indiscretion about his own success in peddling cream to Mrs Owen.

The couple do not seem to have much affinity with the outside world, although their reclusive lifestyle does not, conversely, offer much of a refuge. To the contrary, they thrive on the danger in their seclusion, in the knowledge that they are alone and that no one can hear them. "Richard" and "Sarah" are merely the front they put on, possibly to the external eyes but mainly to themselves - it is the time when things are at their most formal and clearly defined, and when there are strict parameters that cannot be crossed. Richard's departure and return under the guise of Max, and Sarah's similar shedding of her austere garments into more alluring apparel, signify a loosening of these social/personal restrictions, until finally both characters are ready to delve into a tortuous wilderness in which they each possess no fixed identity at all. The prosaic sitting room becomes a menacing no-man's-land, in which offender and defender, husband and lover, wife and mistress are all merely different sides of the same coin. Here, the roles of husband and wife are specifically cited as roles to which they are intermittently obliged to return, but for the moment find great exhilaration in wandering from.

There is a liberation in their games, but it also entails entrapment, something that becomes apparent when Richard, ever jealous of his alter ego and his wife's blatant preferences for whom, elects to disrupt the entire routine. His resentment culminates in a tirade on both sides, as he attempts to end the fictitious affair, first as Max and then as Richard. Here's where Richard decides to rewrite the rules of the game completely, leading Sarah down a cruel and confusing path. Some of his statements, such as his comments about Sarah being too bony, are deliberately contradictory and designed to discombobulate her. Other times, he violates the established narrative by supplementing it with earth-shattering creations of his own - most explosively, he gives the couple imaginary children (the only such reference in the entire script) whom he claims are away at boarding school - leading the game into hitherto unknown, and therefore dangerous territory. Sarah is eventually provoked into playing Richard at his own game, and starts fashioning fantasies of her own out of thin air, whereupon we get a callback to the episode with the milkman: "I have other afternoons, all the time, and neither of you know...I give them strawberries in season, with cream. Strangers, total strangers! But not to me, not while they're here."  For as intense as their climactic stand-off becomes, both characters remain committed to the most cardinal rule of their fantasy - that is, neither will explicitly acknowledge that Richard and Max are one and the same - for its duration, almost to an unsettling degree. In particular, it is unclear whether Richard's ludicrous declaration that, should he ever happen across Max on the premises, "I'll kick his teeth out", constitutes a further indulgence of the fantasy, a deliberate expression of self-loathing, or the very peak of absurdity with regards to his jealousy toward Max. He pushes Sarah within a whisker of crossing this forbidden line when he suggest that, should she continue the affair, then she do so outside of the house: "Take him into the field...find a ditch, a slag heap, find a rubbish dump...buy a canoe and find a stagnant pond. Anything anywhere, but not in my living room!" Sarah protests that this is not possible, but is unable to elaborate further when challenged by Richard. Naturally, Sarah is unable to continue without Richard's mutual participation, but we also see shades here of her antipathy to the outside world, and a means of interpreting the symbolism behind her house-bound existence. Earlier, during their sexual role-playing, Max had taunted Sarah by insisting that she was trapped, something that Richard later repeats while fingering the bongo drum previously reserved only for Max and Sarah (much to Sarah's alarm). What, exactly, is the nature of Sarah's entrapment?

The entrapment Sarah faces is the same as that faced by Richard, which is to say that they are trapped with one another. Ultimately, The Lover plays like a commentary on the depths of the codependency between these characters. For Richard and Sarah are a couple well-accustomed to one another, and who effectively have nothing but each other. From that perspective, we might question which need the role-playing better fulfils - is an attempt to rekindle the sex life that has inevitably waned now that their honeymoon days are long behind them, or a means of coping with the reality of their mutual dependence? They are bored with one another, but emotionally reliant on one another for normality, to the extent that, rather than look to the outside world as a means of escaping the monotony of their marriage, they are obliged to create that escapism among themselves. The paradox being that the game ceases to function as escapism, once it has become part of the established normality. While the visits from Max - a throwback to Richard's younger days, when he was a passionate and spontaneous suitor - still mean the world to Sarah, for Richard the constant alternation from one alter ego to the next has become a burden. His resentment appears to stem, in part, from the awareness that he is, by now, assuming the role of Max more for Sarah's gratification than his own (it is probably not a coincidence that Richard launches his aggressive rebellion on the day that Sarah actively requests an afternoon with Max). His main grievance, though, is hinted in his early complaints about the sitting room, his references to "these damn afternoons, this eternal tea time", and his observation that "to have as the constant image of your lust, a milk jug and a tea pot must be terribly dampening." As jealous as Richard is of Max, and the affections and privileges Sarah keeps exclusively for Max, he's also aware that Max has grown weary of his own lot.

The film ends on an ambivalent note, with Richard and Sarah once again lapsing into their sexual role-playing, and the lover and the whore resurfacing. Richard's rebellion has not, in practice, brought an end to their fantasy, but merely shifted the rules of the narrative, so that Max now lays claim to the house in the evening and can finally remain after the sunset with Sarah. Max has assumed the territory previously designated to Richard, and as such it might be tempting to read the ending as a sign that the barriers have been broken and that Max (aka the younger, more passionate Richard) has returned full-time. Of note is that Sarah does not address Richard as "Max" at the end, but purports instead to recognise her lover underneath Richard's guise - "I've never seen you like this before...why are you wearing this strange suit, and this shirt? Usually you wear something else". Their sensual interactions do, nevertheless, continue to be framed within the realm of fiction, with Sarah indicating that the man standing before her is not her husband, and accounting for his absence by stating that he is at a late-night conference. There is also a slight disturbance in the film's closing line, when her lover addresses her as "You lovely whore" - "whore" being a term that Richard, and not Max, had ascribed to Sarah. This follows on from Sarah's offer to change her clothes (presumably into the alluring gear restricted only to Max's visits), to which Richard agrees: "Yes...change...change...change your clothes." The repeated emphasis on "change" calls to mind the extent to which this alternation between identities is mutual; Richard sheds his aloof shell and becomes Sarah's sensitive lover, via the very same process through which she strips away her own outer layer of decorum and becomes Richard's lovely whore. The play thus ends with both a truce and a compromise. The couple's bond will continue to endure, but they remain reliant on the crutch of fiction to keep them afloat. Is this simply the price of having lived with a significant other for over a decade, and knowing them inside out, to the extent that fantasy is needed in order to inject some degree of improvisation? Or perhaps this lover and whore would quite happily be so 24/7, only the husband and wife play too indispensable a role in providing the pillars from which they delight in deviating as part of their danger-fuelled erotism.

I first experienced The Lover as the television film, when the BBC aired it as part of a Pinter retrospective in 2002 (unfortunately the film was initially produced for ITV, so it was not featured on the Pinter At The BBC DVD collection released by BFI in 2019). I did, however, see a stage production of it some years later, paired in a double bill with another Pinter two hander, The Dumb Waiter. The two key points that stood out were:

a) The appearance of the milkman immediately got a huge laugh from the audience. The milkman in the production I saw was also a lot less threatening than that portrayed by Forrest in the film.

b) On that note, the production in general tended to put greater emphasis on the campiness of the scenario. Elements of threat and claustrophobia were still retained, but this production went for a somewhat more overtly comic vibe than the film; let's just say that this Max made for a slightly more awkward suitor than Badel's. Of course, I'd say that much of the threat in the film version comes from the intense close-ups, particularly wherever Badel's steely gaze is involved, which the stage version naturally has to make do without.

Interestingly, I saw the play with a friend who went in totally ignorant to the plot, and his initial reaction to the big reveal had been to assume that Richard and Max were indeed different characters in context, just played by the same actor (a technique that admittedly works more convincingly on stage than on film), but he got wise when Richard professed to having dumped his mistress for being "too bony". Obviously, if you study their language throughout the first act it becomes apparent that Richard and Max are one and the same, but only with the benefit of hindsight, so I wonder how common my friend's misconception is among audiences who first experience the story through the stage version. It's my theory that we do subconsciously anticipate the twist, but perhaps that only strictly applies to the television film - there at least, we're so tightly immersed in Badel and Merchant's tense and secluded world that any permeation from outside forces seems borderline impossible.