Ident (aka Maybe I'm A-mazed...)

There can be few talents at Aardman more under-championed than Richard Starzak.The Bristol-based studio is so synonymous in popular consciousness with the work of Nick Park that it would be quite accurate to describe just about any of its non-Park talent as under-championed - not least studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton - but Starzak has always struck me as a particularly fascinating example, in part because he can be readily posited as a freakier, more sour-tasting counterpart to Park, epitomising the weirder body of work taking place at Aardman as Wallace and Gromit were winning the public's hearts. Back in 1989, when Park was preparing his breakout short Creature Comforts, Starzak (or Goleszowski as he was known at the time) was another rising claymation whiz getting the chance to flex his idiosyncratic muscles. Both had earned their stripes by working as animators on Aardman's most ambitious project to date, the apocalyptic Babylon, and each was given the opportunity to create their own five minute piece for the upcoming Channel 4 series Lip Synch, an anthology of five shorts designed to showcase the studio's individual talent. From the start, Starzak established himself as a darker, more surreal voice than any of his peers - his contribution, Ident, was by far the strangest of the five, an absurdist fantasy charting a day in the life of a beleaguered everyman as he navigates the walls of a maze and the dystopian society housed within, modifying his identity in an effort to blend in with the various social pockets he encounters, before his dog finally shows him that there may be a better way (maybe...).

Naturally, Ident didn't receive half the attention that Creature Comforts did, which is not say that it made no impact whatsoever. Like Creature Comforts, it did eventually lead to its own spin-off series...of sorts. Ident boasts the very first appearance of Rex the Runt, the two-dimensional plasticine hound who would go onto become Starzak's signature character throughout the 1990s, here featured as the pet of our chameleonic protagonist. It was followed by a trilogy of shorts exploring the further adventures of Rex, once he'd slipped the maze and learned to talk and walk upright - How Dinosaurs Became Extinct (1991), Dreams (1991) and North By North Pole (1996). Rex finally received his own full-fledged TV series in 1998, which the BBC bizarrely attempted to market as a kind of fill-in Wallace & Gromit, airing it in various lunchtime and early evening slots across the Xmas/New Year period. Brilliant though it was, Rex was never destined for the same kind of mass appeal as Wallace & Gromit - again, I fear that Starzak's humor was always too random, unsettling and off-the-wall compared to the altogether warmer eccentricities of Park's creation. This was 3 AM student insomniac television, awkwardly shoehorned into the niche of festive family entertainment; I'm not sure what stuffing-addled viewers made of it in the dying embers of 1998, but whenever Rex was repeated the BBC typically tended to squirrel it away in the late late hours.

Before he teamed up with Wendy, Bob and Vince, Rex led a humbler but stranger existence as the loyal companion of a phallic plasticine being living inside a labyrinthine dystopia. Compared to subsequent incarnations, this Rex is less anthropomorphic and largely behaves like an ordinary dog. He does not possess the gift of the gab, although in that regard he's at no more of a disadvantage than any of the maze's "human" inhabitants. Lord has stated that Aardman never settled on a unifying theme for Lip Synch, although the title suggests that dialogue and communication are of significance to all five shorts, and Ident is unique among them for containing no discernable dialogue (Barry Purves' contribution, Next, is an almost completely dialogue-free experience, but not quite). The characters all speak gibberish, although the nature of the gibberish changes according to the speaker. One character, who may be the protagonist's girlfriend, communicates by reciting letters of the alphabet in sequential order (although she skips the letter "g" for some reason). Another, presumably his boss, haughtily regurgitates the word "blah" over and over. The climax of the short has the protagonist head to the nearest watering hole, where he engages in drunken blather with its patrons (albeit before he's even touched a drop himself). Clearly, nothing of substance is communicated in their garbled murmurings, but the characters engage in rituals designed to give off the appearance of interchange, all the while revealing the fundamental disconnect between the participants. The failure of the protagonist and his girlfriend to see eye to eye results in both parties coming out worse for wear (and the possible breakdown of their relationship). The protagonist's display of over familiarity with his boss results in reproach. Masks are a recurring feature of interaction in the maze; the protagonist both annoys his girlfriend and appeases his boss by donning a mask and obscuring his true face. The backdrop his work environment consists of an assembly line of identical masks, suggesting that the protagonist is either involved in their manufacture, or (more likely) signifying the erosion of individual identity amid the capitalist grind.

In creating Ident, I strongly suspect that Starzak was influenced by Jan Švankmajer's 1983 film Dimensions of Dialogue, a collection of grotesque visual metaphors on the damages dealt by the inadequacies of human communication, particularly the manner in which the speakers aggressively distort one another's appearances as part of their pseudo-conversations. In Švankmajer's film, a succession of humanoid figures constructed from various household objects (vegetables, cooking utensils, office stationary) devour and regurgitate one another, grinding each other's basic components down until all differences are completely eradicated. The characters in Starzak's film endure a more comical but no less devastating evisceration, the emotional toll of all this assimilation being reflected the various scars accumulated by the protagonist throughout the course of the day. The discord with his girlfriend causes his face to be smeared with clown make-up (literally making a fool of him), while the mask he puts on for his boss appears to be altering the basic shape of his face, as his identity becomes conflated with the outward guise he is forced to assume for his daily survival. The characters do not literally consume one another, as in Švankmajer's film, but there is nevertheless a sense of them preying on one another's vulnerabilities in order to assert their own supremacy, with characters physically shrinking after enduring a particularly withering personal blow. Our protagonist is not an innocent in this process - in addition to the damage he unintentionally inflicts on his girlfriend by failing to understand her, he takes out his anger on a maze denizen significantly smaller than he; a denizen who approaches him to ask a question (he holds up a card with a question mark, which seems an appropriate reaction to the general situation), bringing an opportunity for connection and the sharing of knowledge, but whom the protagonist would sooner antagonise than attempt to understand. The inhabitants are a motley collection of figurative Minotaurs, brutally goring one another at evert turning, the grey, oppressive walls of the labyrinth signifying that they are all prisoners of their own conformity (entrapment and isolation are also central themes to at least three of the five shorts in Lip Synch).

As a counterpoint to the gloomy conventions of life within the labyrinth is the character of Rex, who does not exactly accompany the protagonist on his journey throughout the day, but the two of them have a tendency to keep running into one another. Rex is a faithful friend (although there are limits to his loyalty, as we see at the very end of the film), constantly seeking out his master and appearing to speak to some kind of latent urge that is contrary to the will of the maze. It could be because Rex is a dog, and therefore entirely lacking in human pretension. I suspect, though, that Rex is a largely symbolic character, a manifestation of the independent self our protagonist is repeatedly required to suppress in order to blend in inside the labyrinth. Rex signifies the protagonist at his purest and most honest toward himself. Significantly, the dog's appearances are usually heralded by the protagonist taking the time to examine himself in the mirror, reinforcing the idea that Rex "speaks" on behalf of his master's reflection. At the start of the short, Rex objects to the protagonist's (relatively low-key) efforts to smoothen out his wrinkles; he later barks aggressively when his master returns from his dispute with his girlfriend in full clown make-up, signifying the disparity between his inner and outward identities - he has become unrecognisable to himself. Although the dog and protagonist frequently appear to be at odds with one another, there is a surprising display of tenderness between the two when the latter is inebriated. He induces inebriation as purely a defence mechanism, to emulate the rituals of his peers, but just for a moment he lets his guard down and shows a smidgen of affinity for his overlooked friend.

It is ultimately through a mirror, and the guidance of Rex, that our protagonist is able to exit the labyrinth altogether. Rex demonstrates to him that the mirror is actually a portal to another world, if he can muster the gumption to cross through it. There is a strange duality to the very concept of a mirror providing the means of escape - the function of a mirror, after all, is to reinforce the concreteness of whatever environment is juxtaposed with it, the ubiquitousness of mirrors around the maze suggesting that they, like the masks, are tools of oppression, reflecting only the greyness of the walls and the inhabitants' inevitable slide into debasement. Rex's demonstration of what lies beyond the mirror is naturally a call to look past surface appearance, but also evokes the importance of self-empowerment and of taking charge of one's own destiny. Earlier in the film, we saw the protagonist pass a window revealing only the unending passages inside the maze, and obscure it with a picture of an altogether different world, a sunlit one with greenery and open spaces; a perfunctory and seemingly futile gesture of escapism, yet in the end he discovers that such a world was lying in wait for him the entire time. All that was keeping him boxed in were the limitations of his own mind. His earlier action constitutes a rejection of the maze, but in the most superficial way possible; the potential for ingenuity is in him, but at first fulfils no greater function than the masks, as a defensive means of covering up what is undesirable while leaving it fundamentally unaltered. At the end of the film, he finds a way out by acknowledging and fully embracing his potential as an individual, not simply as a means of escapism, but of empowerment to go against convention and change his circumstances.

Unfortunately, the basic limitations that have dogged him all the while are not so easily overcome. For all the beauty of that final revelation, Ident reaches a humorously - and disturbingly - pessimistic conclusion. The protagonist leaves the maze behind him and sets out in a new direction, only for the same cycle of hectoring and alienation to continue beyond its walls. He meets another figure who his double in almost every way, an encounter that at first appears to bring both parties joy, before they suddenly turn on one another. Given that the protagonist has seemingly escaped into his own psyche, this lashing out against his own doppelganger can be interpreted as an expression of self-loathing, a sign that he will never be contented with any reflection that he sees, and effectively always banging his head against the walls of a maze, whether literal or metaphorical. In the background we see the silhouette of Rex watching the entire sorry exchange play out, before he finally decides that his master is a hopeless case and goes his own way. Unlike Park's signature canine, Rex doesn't have the infinite amount of patience required to play guardian angel to an obtuse human (or whatever our protagonist is) and would sooner go and seek out his own pack.

As an endnote, when Creature Comforts received a spin-off television series in 2003, it was ironically Starzak, and not Park, who was the main driving force behind the project. While for the most part Starzak was able to keep his more acidic sensibilities to the sidelines, it seems that he had been interested in taking the concept in a darker direction; apparently, he wanted to do an episode based around animals in a vivisectionist lab, but the higher-ups talked him out of it.

Logo Case Study: Aardman, Meet Pandaman (aka Mommy, What's Wrong With That Man's Face?)

Aardman aren't typically renowned for being the kind of animation studio to propagate childhood nightmares (whether rightly or wrongly), but they made a solid (if largely unsung) contribution to the pantheon of disturbing production logos just around the point that their time in the sun was getting underway. This is what served as the company's logo during its breakout era, between the smashing success of Creature Comforts in 1989 and their initial efforts to ride the shoulders of the Hollywood giants at the dawn of the new millennium. This was the era that gave us the early Wallace & Gromit shorts, Adam, the Creature Comforts electricity campaign and a variety of strange and demented animated pieces from the increasing multitude of individual talent at the studio, and Aardman certainly weren't averse to scaring the wits out of their ever-expanding legions of fans. If you stuck around to the very end of The Wrong Trousers (as I made the mistake of doing), your reward was to be greeted with a smirking claymation face, about which there was something distinctly, unsettling, immediately wrong. I call this one "unsung" because I rarely see it featured in lists of scary production logos, but it passed the test as far as I was concerned.

The face in question had a large dotted bow-tie, a toothy, lopsided smile, and no discernable eyeballs, features that combined to make it look unspeakably uncanny. My initial assumption was that this mysterious figure was intended to be the "Aard Man" referenced in the studio's moniker (in actuality, the eponymous Aardman was an accident-prone superhero created by studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton for a skit they made for Vision On). For a while, I was in the habit of calling him "Pandaman", simply because the dark patches on either side of his nose reminded me of the eye patches on a giant panda, and from a distance I presumed that those curious features were supposed to be his eyes. All the same, I never really settled on how to make sense of this face, and it perturbed me so. Something about the smile struck me as downright unwholesome; the apparent lack of eyes gave the form a distinctly inhuman edge, as if some monstrous being had attempted to mimic human form and not quite managed to master the eyes. Instinctively, I always knew that Pandaman wanted to devour me whole; that an encounter with him would invariably result in winding up on the wrong side of those horrifying gnashers. In other words, he was right at home among the studio's output for the era, which was all about giving a beating heart to the weird and the eerie - check out the 2000 VHS/DVD release Aardman Classics to see what a diabolical little chocolate box it was.

Emphasis upon that beating heart, because as with many of Aardman's freakier pieces, its freakiness goes a long way in bolstering its charm. The fact remains that this is a deeply charming logo, although its charms are more apparent in the full animated version than in the still version that tended to bite the ankles of most productions. In the animated logo, we see the landscape from which Pandaman emerges coming together, and it's a green and vibrant land, brimming with all of the hand-crafted warmth one would expect from the claymation legends. As we encircle the plasticine grass, various cranes and pillars in the backdrop end up forming the frame around Pandaman and the Aardman lettering, when viewed from the pivotal angle, while Pandaman's uncanny mug and various two-dimensional clouds on wires drop down from above to complete the image. In a particularly endearing touch, that garish bow-tie transpires to be a butterfly that flutters gracefully toward his shirt. The accompanying music is a tad ominous, but also stirring, as if something wondrous is taking place. A particularly neat variant is featured at the beginning of the 1991 VHS release Aardman Animations Vol 1, which includes time-lapse photography of an animator putting the numerous components into place, before we zoom in and Pandaman gets to work his typically unearthly magic.

So far as I can tell, the Pandaman logo originated from the titles used for Aardman's series Lip Synch, a collection of five short pieces commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989 (in addition to Nick Park's Creature Comforts, by far the most famous and influential of the five, there was also Ident by Richard Starzak, Going Equipped and War Story, a couple of animated monologues by Peter Lord, and Next by Barry Purves, who at the time was working as a freelance animator on various Aardman projects). Each short was preceded by the unnerving image of a mouth appearing in a small beige frame and growling the words "Lip Synch", while one of the red spots from his conspicuous polka dot bow-tie rolled out and created the corresponding lettering. Many of Pandaman's characteristics were carried over from this face, including the bow-tie and the shadowy blotches around the jaws. Given the title of the series, the focus on the mouth makes total sense, although here the frame is so tightly boxed around the feature in question that his uncanny lack of eyes goes unrevealed. Which is not to say that the Lip Synch titles are any less unnerving than the Pandaman logo; the snarling, disembodied mouth is still pretty freaking monstrous, its enormous teeth no less carnivorous, the guttural manner in which it spits out the title appropriately inhuman.

By the late 1990s, Aardman were seeking a new look, and what's interesting is that they did initially appear interested in retaining Pandaman as a long-term emblem and incorporating his terrible form into future branding. The closing titles for the 1998 series Rex The Runt feature a different, two-dimensional logo, in which Pandaman is depicted shouting through a megaphone (although the logo is rendered in such a way as to downplay his monstrous features, so that he just looks like any regular human with a bow-tie). This was not to be, however. Pandaman disappeared shortly after and was long out of the picture by the time Chicken Run, Aardman's first theatrical feature film, debuted in 2000. Aardman presumably wanted their signature image to herald the bold new era they were currently entering, and subjecting mainstream family audiences to the delights of Pandaman in a theatrical setting was possibly deemed a step too far. Instead, he was replaced by a completely new concoction, in which various two-dimensional figures are shown rotating around the gears in a great machine, only to come to an immediate halt when a hand reached in and presses the central figure, a small black box with limbs and a head, and on its torso, a bright red star which was to serve as the company's new trademark going forward. There are few forms less objectionable than that of a star, but also few more generic, and the demented character of Pandaman is very much missed. Not that the gears logo (which itself appears to have fallen by the wayside) doesn't have a likeable ingenuity all of its own - it is, after all, more benign than Pandaman only so long as you don't focus on the tortured faces of the various forms trapped within those rotating cogs. There's a childhood nightmare to be derived from that, I'm sure.

Lily Takes A Walk Into The Urban Abyss (A Spooky Surprise Book)

One of the creepiest books I remember reading as a young child was Lily Takes A Walk by Satoshi Kitamura. So creepy, in fact, that it inevitably became an obsession of mine. The book tells the story of a girl named Lily who takes regular walks into the heathlands outside her town, accompanied by Nicky, her faithful Jack Russell terrier. We follow them on the return journey of one such walk, as they navigate their way through the assortment of streets and back to Lily's house in the fading evening light. Early on, Kitamura establishes the central irony that haunts the story: "Even if it begins to get dark on the way home, Lily is never scared because Nicky is there with her." Unfortunately, the sentiment isn't mutual, for Nicky encounters a great deal on their seemingly ordinary journey that scares the jittery terrier to his wits' end, and having Lily there is blatantly of little consolation to him.

Lily Takes A Walk is a particularly witty example of how the illustrations of a picture book can be used to create additional layers of meaning for the narrative therein. The text and illustrations appear to be playfully at odds with one another, for they are not quite telling the same story. If you were to listen to a reading of the book without looking at the pictures, then you would get an entirely genial account of a fairly nondescript journey from Point A to Point B, with the aforementioned reference to the dark providing the only hint of any potential peril. Lily does some shopping for her mother, greets a neighbour, admires the bats and the evening star, pauses briefly to watch the ducks on the canal, and finally reaches home, where she is welcomed by the reassuring smell of a hot supper cooking. The text offers a very straightforward representation of how Lily perceives the walk. All very pleasant, you might think, but what was the point? The visuals, however, convey what the experience is like for her companion Nicky, and it's a markedly different one. Nicky sees dangers that Lily does not, with every step of the journey revealing another menace, another terrible set of eyes trailed upon them. To begin with these spectres have a degree of subtlety about them, which makes Lily's obliviousness more understandable - there are aptly camouflaged monsters masquerading as commonplace objects like trees and letterboxes. Sometimes multiple objects appear to come together to create a single entity - on one page, for example, Nicky sees how the moon, a clock tower and a street light, when viewed from a particular angle, combine to create a buck-toothed, beady-eyed face in the sky, an absurd image that is nevertheless unsettling with its suggestion of clandestine surveillance. As we get closer to home, the monsters get bolder and more prominent, and Lily's obtuseness to the matter seems increasingly ridiculous. Sights toward the end of their journey include a giant tomato-drinking vampire (he lacks the trademark fangs, but he has a pale complexion, appears around the bats and bears a marginal resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so vampire seems a safe bet), the Loch Ness Monster's canal-dwelling cousin and a pack of monsters raiding the trash cans outside of her house (in one of the book's quirkiest visual gags, one of these creatures is recognisably a hippopotamus).

Lily Takes A Walk was published by Picture Corgi Books in 1987 as part of a series known as "Spooky Surprise Books".  So far as I can tell there were three other titles in this series - The Hairy Toe and Teeny Tiny by Amelia Rosato, both re-tellings of traditional horror yarns, and another title by Kitamura, Captain Toby. What they all have in common, besides a generally macabre theme (although Captain Toby is probably the least macabre of the lot) is a final, extended page folded over into a flap which the viewer is required to lift to reveal the story's closing visual punchline. In the case of Lily Takes A Walk, it's a befittingly odd punchline that utterly baffled me as a child and, even today, I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of it. But perhaps we can take a crack at it here.

There is an entire chapter dedicated to Lily Takes A Walk in the book Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts by Evelyn Azripe and Morag Styles, in which they document the reactions of young readers to the book. Some of their observations sync up with my own, others are much more divergent. Among the most interesting was the following: "...most readers were more concerned about the feelings of the over-imaginative dog than with the child, while at the same time laughing - not unkindly - at him. This also allows quite young readers to enjoy the experience of feeling a little more grown up and mature than the characters in the book." (p. 58). Interesting, because when I read this book as a small child I was very firmly on Nicky's side and the last thing I'd have done would be to laugh at him. It honestly never occurred to me that the demonic figures lurking on every street corner might only be figments of a paranoid mind - possibly pathologically so - whose facial recognition was working overtime. I guess back then I was very receptive to the idea that there might be hidden horrors lurking in the most mundane of places, monsters who were every bit as at home in modern cities as in secluded caves and marshes. I took it as a given that the dog was the smart and perceptive one, attuned to the terrifying reality of the world around him that passed his inattentive owner by, and that is the interpretation I still prefer. Throughout the former half of the journey, it seems reasonable enough to ascribe ambiguity to Nicky's perspective, when the monsters take the form of ostensibly commonplace objects, although it becomes harder to say what Nicky might otherwise be seeing when menaced by something as unambiguous as the canal monster. Moreover, if you read the illustrations as reflections of Nicky's dementia, then the story, while visually inventive, the story seems kind of funny and kind of sad but overall much less juicy. I am instead inclined to liken Lily's obliviousness throughout her walk to that of the hedgehog at the start of the 1975 film Hedgehog In The Fog, who is so accustomed to walking a particular route each evening to go stargazing with a friend that he fails to notice the owl that stalks him and gets frighteningly close on this particular journey. So too is Lily so comfortable with what has become a familiar routine to her that she repeatedly fails to pick up on the monstrosities lurking in plain sight - monstrosities that, perhaps disturbingly, only seem to get more and more conspicuous the closer she gets to the definitive comfort of home. Azripe and Styles observe that some readers see Lily's obliviousness to Nicky's fears as comparable to that of an insensitive parent, but contend that this "does not correspond to the representation of Lily as a child who enjoys the sunset and the stars and likes animals (even bats!)" This, though, strikes me as one of the story's great ironies - Lily does have a deep appreciation for the world around her and takes time to enjoy the various sights she encounters along the way, be it the evening star (or Dog Star), the swooping bats or Mrs Hall at her window. But her gaze is always averted away from the really critical event happening in every picture. There is another side to Lily's town that Lily herself lives in blissful ignorance of. She sees what she wants to see, or at least what she expects to see. The fact that this is all stated to be part of a regular routine raises questions as to what the walk typically looks like for Nicky. Is this the first time he's seen these monsters, or is he accustomed to the need to keep his guard up while walking? Is the implication that our heroes will go out again and Nicky will be subjected to the same nightmare visions on subsequent walks?

The plot of Lily Takes A Walk bears more than a passing resemblance to the classic 1948 Looney Tunes short Scaredy Cat, in which Porky Pig and Sylvester take up residence in a shadowy old manor where the previous occupants have apparently been dispatched by a cult of murderous murids, and Sylvester alone cottons onto the terrible danger they are in. In fact, I am half-inclined to interpret the puzzling ending of Kitamura's story as a tribute to Scaredy Cat - both involve nasty surprises from rodents with a flagrantly sick sense of humor. A major difference, however, is that Lily and Nicky's disparate perspectives never bring them into direct conflict as with Porky and Sylvester, with Lily remaining cheerfully oblivious not only to the nightmares on her street, but also to Nicky's corresponding behaviours. That, I suppose, is the poignancy nestled at the heart of Lily Takes A Walk - Nicky's total inability to open up and communicate his troubled perspective to Lily, in part because he lacks a voice to begin with, but also because Lily doesn't seem terribly interested in him. It would be unfair to suggest that Lily ignores Nicky altogether, for she talks to him regularly throughout their journey. The early pages make it clear that she values the dog's companionship, yet she pays him very little in the way of close attention. The one thing Lily consistently fails to do throughout the story is to look at Nicky, except on the title page, which Arizpe and Styles correctly identify as the only instance in the book in which Nicky displays any kind of positive energy: "The title page belies the cover in that the dog is actually looking quite happy to be going for a walk. Perhaps this is because they are just starting out or because Lily is actually looking at him for once." They're incorrect about that first point, as the illustration shows Lily and Nicky not starting out on their journey, but actually on the heath, the location in which we are told they will sometimes walk for hours and hours, but which is represented only briefly in the story proper.

The opening page is notable for being the only illustration in the entire book to conceal no discreet (or otherwise) menace (besides the aforementioned title page, and even that's up for debate - see below). We see Lily and Nicky on their way out to the heath, walking along a pavement and past an apparently ordinary tree. What's interesting about this page is that both characters are breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at the reader (it isn't the only time that Lily does this). On the next page, we jump to them already out on the heath, at the furthest point from home we'll find our heroes throughout the course of the story. It is, perhaps not coincidentally, the most serene and picturesque illustration in Kitamura's book - there is an atmospheric calm amid the lush greenery and open space of the heathland not replicated in any of the sights of the town, represented here by a small collection of buildings stretching off into the distance, beckoning our heroes with the reminder that they must ultimately return to its hold. Even here, there is a hidden disturbance, for as Nicky cocks his leg against a clump of grass he becomes aware of a snake gazing back at him from an adjacent tree. Compared to the menagerie of surreal delights awaiting our heroes on the route back home, the snake on the heath seems like a positively humdrum detail, a harmless (in all odds) and not entirely unexpected sight to encounter while out in the wilds (unlike that trash-hungry hippo at the end of the journey). Yet there is something undeniably sinister about the snake; it stares at Nicky with an intensity, and a crooked smile that suggest a conspiratorial nature to its appearance, as if it knows and enjoys the fact that only Nicky can see it. This page establishes the prevailing dynamic of the story - Lily is staring, apparently deep in contemplation, at the world around her, her back turned to both Nicky and the snake, and by extension the reader. This clues us in that though Lily may be the title character, it is Nicky with whom our sympathies are to be aligned.

The text, coupled with the slightly shadowy ambience of the illustration, indicate that Lily and Nicky have reached the end of their most recent session on the heath and will soon be preparing to make the dreaded (for Nicky, anyway) trek home. In this regard, the snake functions as a kind of omen of the terrors that lie ahead. The buildings in the distance too seem more like a threat of what is to come than a reassuring reminder that home is within walking distance. We might relate this illustration back to that on the title page, which presumably shows an earlier, more carefree point from their adventure, suggesting that, snakes aside, Nicky does actually enjoy the heath portion of their excursions. That is the other great irony of Kitamura's story - the implication that Nicky feels his safest when he is at his furthest from home. The necessity of having to return there is what poisons his particular Eden. The title page seems to represent the purest state for both Lily and Nicky, when the two are at their most mutually happy and untroubled, but even then we see a slight spot of trouble on the horizon in the form of a single building nestled off in the distance, its out of place appearance and multitude of dark windows making it seem like it is the hidden menace of this particular illustration.

I am very conscious that I recently wrote a little piece on the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, which also follows a trajectory from nature into urbanisation, with an implicit message that expansion of the latter is gradually eroding the former. Although I don't detect an overtly environmentalist theme to Kitamura's story, it too conveys a distrust of urbanisation, which stands in contrast to the relative serenity of the natural world. I suspect that, largely, Kitamura is having fun with the irony that the dangers get more egregious the closer Lily and Nicky get to home, but there is something distinctly haunting about the entire character of the urban landscape they traverse, even without Nicky's monsters there to personify its covertly unpleasant nature. It is notable, for instance, that the town does not appear to be particularly well-populated; early in her journey, Nicky interacts with a market vendor, who ends up being the only other form of human life we see stirring in the outside world. We are informed in the text that Lily waves to a neighbour, Mrs Hall, as she passes her window, but Mrs Hall is not represented in the illustrations. Instead, Lily appears to wave directly at the reader, in her second instance of fourth wall breaking, leading to a curious paradox where the reader temporarily assumes the role of Mrs Hall and is complicit in Lily's facade of a warm and cozy community, whilst getting a window-side view of Nicky and his buck-toothed sky monster. The only other resident glimpsed throughout the journey, for the eagle-eyed reader, is a figure staring out of a distant window in the vampire illustration. The lack of residents out on the streets might not strike us as overly unusual, given that most of the journey takes place at night, but even then only a minority of houses have lit windows. Most of the buildings stand in eerie darkness, raising the possibility that they aren't occupied at all. Kitamura depicts the town as a dead, artificial space filled with unnatural lifeforms. Conversely, in some cases these lifeforms take on natural guises, such as the monstrous tree Lily and Nicky pass, suggesting a nature that has been corrupted by the imposition of the town. In the case of the sky monster, we have the natural and the unnatural literally combining to create a great uncanny entity. Others, such as the snarling letterbox that devours and regurgitates letters, suggest a corruption of industry and technology, it having turned against its original purpose to facilitate communication. The enormous vampire emerging from an advertising billboard promoting a brand of tomato juice, meanwhile, puts a comically monstrous face on the kind of consumer culture examined in Koyaanisqatsi. While I am not fond of the interpretation that the monsters are merely figments of Nicky's imagination, I am prepared to accept them as symbolism for a darker, more distasteful side to this town and its absent community, of which Lily remains entirely innocent. It is a grunginess only vaguely hinted at in the town's darkened alleys and the various items of litter seen strewn across the streets.

Unfortunately for Nicky, the story does not stop once he and Lily reach the ostensible safety of home. After all, what makes us think he's going to be any safer indoors in the company of Lily and her parents? The following illustration shows a continuation of Nicky's plight, with Lily and her parents at the dinner table, as Lily, as per the text, describes everything she has seen on her walk, while Nicky, alone (or so he thinks) with his own food bowl at the corner of the room, makes a futile attempt to communicate his side of the story. His frantic expression, coupled with the barrage of speech bubbles containing images of the assortment of monsters he has seen on route (the snake is absent, suggesting that we should discount it as part of the pattern), convey his eagerness to be heard, but he is predictably paid no attention. The display of family unity in this illustration is tempered by Nicky's evident exclusion. It is also one of only two points in the story in which Lily is shown within the presence of adult supervision, the other being the market vendor who sells her a bunch of flowers. A question that never crossed my mind as a child but bothers me a lot as an adult is that of just how old is Lily intended to be. The assortment of toys in her bedroom suggest that she probably isn't older than 12, but that begs the question as to why her parents would allow her to go on these long, unsupervised treks through the darkness at all. I appreciate that some suspension of disbelief is often required with these books, but nowadays I can't help but see a slight subtext here about parental negligence, with Lily's obliviousness to Nicky's upset suggesting that she is inheriting, whether by nature of nurture, her parents' own casual attitude toward her. Crucially, in her parents' single appearance, her father's eyes are closed and her mother has her back to the reader, much like Lily in the early illustration upon the heath, suggesting that both maintain their own wilful blindness to the situation.

The disturbance in the dining room is the most low-key of the story, and you might not even notice it on your first read. There is a fifth presence in the room, not far from Nicky and his bowl, and apparently taking an interest in the dog. This time, Nicky himself doesn't even see it.

We're now onto the final page of the story, and here's where we finally get into the source of so much childhood confusion for me. I mentioned that a key characteristic of the Spooky Surprise was that the final page was always extended, the extended portion being folded over into a flap you had to lift to reveal the story's ultimate spooky surprise. In the case of Lily Takes A Walk, we find ourselves in Lily's bedroom, as she retires to bed following what has been (from her perspective) an entirely agreeable day. The folded portion of the page shows a rather miserable-looking Nicky in his dog basket; here, he doesn't look afraid so much as physically and emotionally weary. The final words of text take the form of the fondest of wishes from Lily to her dog: "Goodnight. Sleep well." We suspect there is little chance of that, however, even before we lift the flap, which reveals Nicky being startled yet again, this time by a swarm of mice who have crawled out from the skirting board, complete with their own miniature ladder so that they can access the top of his basket. As I say, there are definite shades of Scaredy Cat here.

What always puzzled me about this ending, as a child, had less to do with the intentions of the mice (it is unclear whether their actions are carried out in a misguided attempt to befriend the nervous dog or if they purposely enjoy unsettling him further) as the implications of that fold-out page. It was unclear to me which of the two illustrations I should take as the final one. After all, if you turned over the extended page the top of the flap, showing the exhausted Nicky, forms part of another illustration, in which the mice and their ladder are just visible from the skirting board. I was never entirely sure if this image was intended to be an extension of the original scene in Lily's bedroom, before we lift the flap to reveal the mice around Nicky's basket, or if it represents the aftermath, with the mice retreating back into the hole with their ladder, and Nicky resuming his previous expression, yet again weary of it all, not least that he allowed some mice to get the better of him. If the former, then the problem is that it is impossible to view the complete scene at once. If the latter, then it suggests a slightly more positive outcome for Nicky, who is at least shown being left in peace by one of his aggravators at the end of the story. And that makes all the difference, particularly when you're a young reader - at what point in the story do we leave poor Nicky? I own two other books from the Spooky Surprise series - Teeny Tiny and Captain Toby (currently, every single price tag I've seen on The Hairy Toe has been way too high) - and unfortunately they don't add any clarity to the situation, as in both their cases, the other side of the extended page is blank, other than what's on the flap.

Either way, the final message is clear - there can be no place of genuine safety for the beleaguered Nicky. Even Lily's ostensible shrine to childhood warmth and innocence offers little comfort. In some respects this is the venue that most evokes a wilderness, ironically so since it is at the heart of our urban labyrinth. Lily's room is populated by a variety of plush animals, she has a calendar depicting a scene not unlike the heath she has returned from, and on the wall, close to Nicky's basket, is a poster of a tiger wading through long grasses. But these too are unnerving images. The tiger in particular seems to have been deliberately positioned so as to appear to be looking at Nicky, giving us an uneasy sense of a predator stalking its prey. Most of the plush animals, meanwhile, have wide, frantic eyes, suggesting an unsettled environment in a state of constant vigilance. It seems to evoke the more brutal side of nature, as a place in which animals are obligated to watch their backs at all times for fear of predation - somewhat conversely, as it is positioned within the context of a child's optimum place of comfort. Among the flesh and blood animals within the room, we get a playful subversion of traditional predator/prey dynamics, with Nicky, a terrier, being terrorised by a pack of rodents. The mice, naturally, represent a breakdown of the barriers between wilderness and domesticity, with the irony that the wilderness recreated inside Lily's bedroom is not the same one lurking right outside her doorstep. The images in Lily's room suggest a nature that has been broken in and defanged, in spite of their uncanny aura. The plush toys and tiger poster constitute a domestic remodelling of a wilderness that either no longer exists or is slowly vanishing, and being replaced by a wilderness of a different kind, one far more twisted and perverse but so mundane and familiar to its inhabitants that they do not feel the same need for vigilance as our jungle friends, and its numerous horrors go unnoticed. Indeed, the real hidden menace in the bedroom illustration is not the mice, but rather the building we can just make out through the gap in Lily's window where the curtains have not been fully drawn. It is as if the building, with its characteristically darkened windows, is peering on our heroes as they settle down to sleep, a threatening reminder that they must eventually venture out and repeat the nightmarish cycle all over again.

The one truly heart-warming detail in the final illustration is the picture Lily has been drawing on her desk, a picture of Nicky. The dog really is number one in Lily's world. All the more poignant, then, that she never seems to pick up on his.

I Can't Dance (Genesis)

There exists a powerful symbiosis between advertising and popular music. Advertising has a well-established history of capitalising on the public's nostalgia and goodwill toward much-loved tunes in order to transfer some of that pre-existing emotional investment onto the products being hawked, while exposure in such a campaign can do wonders to make get any song, familiar or brand new, embedded into contemporary zeitgeist. Occasionally, you'll find a scenario that gets the process backwards, with a pop song that only exists at all by starting life as an advertising jingle. So much of the creative energy in advertising is fuelled by music, but how often do we find the boot on the other foot? Are there many pop songs out there that take advertising as the main source of their inspiration? I've already covered a couple of tracks by Negativland that satirise the tactics of soft drink commercials, but if we look for more mainstream examples then the first tune that comes to mind is the Genesis single "I Can't Dance". Released in 1991, the song offered a light-hearted potshot at trends in contemporary denim advertising, which was still riding a fashionable high that started when Nick Kamen walked into a 1950s laundrette in 1985 and stripped his Levi's 501 jeans (and everything else he was wearing, save his underpants) to the sounds of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (naturally, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" was re-released and became a UK chart hit soon after).

In the early 1980s, the Levi's brand had lost much of its lustre with younger consumers, who'd tagged them as the kind of unhip clothing their parents wore, and the Kamen ad was conceived as a means of reinventing their image (come to think of it, Levi's was facing much the same problem in the late 1990s, only their response that time around involved a terminally depressed hamster; I still cannot fathom how anybody thought that was a good idea). The strategy paid off and sales of Levi's jeans increased by 800%. It was followed by a series of ads heavily emphasising the soundtrack of yesteryear and the sex appeal of their male protagonists. One of them, memorably, featured a young Brad Pitt greeting the desert highway in his boxers, which seemed to be recurring motif for the series.

The music video for "I Can't Dance" is best remembered for that knowingly awkward swagger that band members Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks deploy whenever the chorus kicks in (thus accounting for the title), but the really fascinating element is of course when they take on the then-established conventions of designer jeans advertising. The lyrics of each individual verse and the corresponding visuals all lampoon a different contemporary jeans commercial, starting with that iconic spot for Bugle Boy jeans in which a female motorist briefly stops to ask a male hitch-hiker if he's wearing the brand in question before leaving him permanently in the dust. Also under the spotlight are a couple of ads for Levi's 501, one featuring a beach hunk who has his dog keep watch over his coveted jeans while he catches some waves, another following a 501 patron who slays the competition at a bar pool table and demonstrates his authority by getting his opponent to reveal (what else?) his underpants. Collins plays the denim-sporting protagonist in all three scenarios; things don't work out half as well for him as they did the heroes of the aforementioned Levi's ads, although he gets much the same treatment as that unfortunate Bugle wearer.

 Let's dig in a little deeper.

Hot sun beating down,
Burning my feet just walking around.
Hot sun makin' me sweat,
Gator's getting close, hasn't got me yet.

 

Of the triad of ads being sent up in this song, this one is represented the most tenuously in the lyrics. In fact, if not for the music video I doubt I would have connected it with the infamous Bugle Boy hitch-hiker ad. I think what particularly throws me off is the reference to this mysterious alligator that's apparently stalking our hero, something that occurs in neither the original commercial or the Genesis music video. As such, I draw a blank as to how it fits in here (I've heard it suggested by at least one person that the "gator" is a reference to the French clothing brand Lacoste, but I doubt that - for one thing, their mascot is a crocodile). In the video, the scenario plays out in a very similar fashion to the original ad, except here the motorist doubles back not to question Collins about his taste in denim, but to offer a ride to his reptilian cohort (an iguana, not an alligator). There's also a lot more emphasis on Collins getting showered with dust on both occasions that she passes him by; a running gag throughout this video involves Collins winding up on the receiving end of some form of slapstick/humiliation, subverting the cool and confident rebel archetype that was pivotal to the Levi's 501 campaign in particular. 

Next up... 

Blue jeans sittin' on the beach
Her dog's talking to me, but she's out of reach.
Ooh, she's got a body under that shirt
But all she wants to do is rub my face in the dirt.

 

This verse homages "Beach", a 1990 ad for Levi's 501 in which a dog is tasked with keeping watch over a pair of jeans while their mutual owner, a surfer, is off chasing waves. The dog performs its duties diligently, but falters when approached by a girl in a bikini who figures that the jeans are up for grabs. She gets as far as donning the jeans and turning to make her exit before the dog's protective urges are reignited, and it makes a sudden lunge at her ankles. At this point the dog's owner, a typically glamorous 501 hero, returns and diffuses the situation. He gives the dog the okay signal, and the three of them strut off together, one big happy beach family. The adventure is set to the sounds of "Can't Get Enough" by Bad Company.

 

The Genesis video tweaks the scenario marginally, so that the dog now belongs to the bikini wearer, who seems peeved to even acknowledge Collins' existence. The dog takes it upon itself to tussle with Collins for ownership of the jeans, with the result that Collins exits the beach with a bite-sized hole in one of the cheeks, a far cry from the triumphant adieu of our 501 surfer boy.

And finally...

 

Young punk spillin' beer on my shoes.
Fat guy's talkin' to me tryin' to steal my blues.
Thick smoke, see her smiling through.
I never thought so much could happen just shootin' pool.

 

The most recent addition to the 501 campaign at the time that "I Can't Dance" was conceived was "Pool Hall", in which a characteristic 501 protagonist runs afoul of a cue-wielding bar goon who cajoles him into gambling his precious jeans on a game of pool. Naturally, our young and glamorous hero turns out to be an absolute wizard at the pool table, much to the delight of an attractive bar maid who silently roots for him from across the room. To the victor the spoils; not only does he retain ownership of his jeans, but he gets the satisfaction of refusing a cash prize payment from his bewildered opponent and forces him to drop his (non-denim) trousers instead, confirming to the bar patrons that he wears boxers and not briefs. Characters shedding their pants to reveal the garments underneath was a recurring image in the 501 campaign, and could be empowering or degrading, depending on the context. Whatever a man wears around the lower half of his body is clearly posited as the height of his personal expression and autonomy. Kamen's willingness to voluntarily parade his near-naked form around a laundrette was the ultimate mark of confidence and poise, but elsewhere in the campaign we have multiple examples of one character depriving another of their dignity by denying them the privilege of a well-clad waist. Both the hero and villain of "Pool Hall" know how to hit each other where it hurts, hence why the sight of their opponent in their undergarments is worth so much more to them than money. In Brad Pitt's entry to the campaign, we see him turn the tables on a sadistic prison guard who gets a short-lived kick out of turning Pitt loose in just his boxers, symbolic impotency that's swiftly obliterated when rescue arrives in the form of Pitt's waiting girlfriend, who brought a spare pair of Levi's, and with it Pitt's restored prowess. Command a man's pants, according to the campaign, and you command the man. In the Genesis video the pool hall scenario goes in the other direction entirely, with the bar goon absolutely slaughtering Collins and forcing him to surrender his jeans, which frankly seems more realistic than the improbable David vs Goliath outcome in the original ad. Anyway, it's thanks to "Pool Hall" that "I Can't Dance" exists at all; apparently the song started life as a riff inspired by "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash, which was used as the soundtrack to this particular ad.

 

One thing you might notice about the trilogy of spots being lampooned here is that none of the protagonists therein had actually attempted to dance or sing. The Bugle Boy jeans ad doesn't quite fit the mold, as the hero does get to open his mouth, albeit briefly, but the 501 ads avoided dialogue altogether and let the classic rock track of the hour do the talking. So what exactly are Genesis getting at in mocking these well-dressed rebels for supposed deficiencies in abilities we never even see them take a crack at? Circle back to where this all began, with Nick Kamen in that laundrette. After selling an entire generation on the delights of Levi's 501, Kamen attempted to capitalise on his newfound acclaim by making the transition from model to pop musician, but the response was much more tepid than when he had Marvin Gaye do the heavy lifting. He found early success with the Madonna-penned "Each Time You Break My Heart", which reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1986, but the law of diminishing returns set in quickly for Kamen, and while he continued to net appreciative enough audiences in several European countries throughout the latter half of the decade, as far as his native Blighty was concerned all Kamen's flavour had already been licked dry. In the book 100 Greatest TV Ads, written by Mark Robinson to tie in with a popular Channel 4 program in 2000 (Channel 4 did a lot of these "100 Greatest" things when they had a couple of hours to fill in the 2000s, and they by and large made for very poor viewing, but this one at least appealed to the budding ad buff in me), TV presenter Kate Thornton is quoted surmising what went wrong for Kamen: "He broke the rule - he talked. We just liked looking at him. It was as simple as that...fundamentally he was to be looked at and lusted over - and never to be taken seriously." (p.121) That, in a tidy little nutshell, is the message of "I Can't Dance". The rebel in shrink-to-fit denim was a mythical figure that existed only in the most facile of surface detail. A fantasy world in which all ambient noise was conveniently filtered out by your favourite retro radio station, not merely for the purposes of exploiting nostalgia, but because any first-hand vocalisation from our well-dressed maverick would have ruptured the mystique and brought us crashing back down to reality. "I Can't Dance" was about taking a humorous look at the absurdities nestled beneath the artifice.

 

Robinson offers the following epilogue to Kamen's career: "He turned a new Levi's ad into a much-hyped media event and ended up eventually being replaced in 1999 by a fluffy yellow puppet called Flat Eric." Somewhere in between there was also that hiccup involving a hamster, but Robinson was tactful not to mention that.

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 campness 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.