In separate emails to me and to my partner the other week, an old friend strongly recommended a new movie she had seen. My heart sank and I think I may not misrepresent David if I venture that his did a little too. Does this reaction seem as inappropriate as it does ungracious? Permit me to explain.
I haven’t set foot in a cinema for many months, David for many years. I certainly used to do so. When we lived in London, I went into town at least twice a week and caught two or even three movies during the daytime and then a piece of theatre in the evening. I considered myself au fait with developments in film. But those days are gone. My visits to London have dwindled to one per year and movie-going plays no part in them. There is no cinema in our nearest town and further afield is ruled out for me because I do not drive. David certainly wouldn’t come too and anyway we don’t like to leave the dogs so long unattended. Buses in our area, as is typical of rural services, do not run late enough to get home from an evening trip. And seeing a movie in daylight now seems an unattractive proposition, as if you might be served weak tea and stale biscuits at the intermission.
I gave up my subscription to Time Out after noticing that it went unopened week after week. Then I realised that I no longer read the movie reviews in the papers. So now I have no purchase on a film world that, whenever I bump into it, appears to be largely peopled by directors and actors whose names mean nothing to me.
It doesn’t feel like a savage loss. The latest releases turn up on Sky Movies so quickly – usually within eighteen months – and I was never the sort of person who felt obscurely naked if he hadn’t read the latest novel before it was reviewed or hadn’t already seen an exhibition in Paris ahead of its London visit. It’s partly a function of age – patience is a mature virtue – but perhaps more that my range of interests is broad, so there is always plenty of all manner of subjects with which to catch up and/or to keep up. In any case, I dutifully videotape (yes, videotape) promising movies off the telly and then never get around to watching them.
The realisation that one cannot possibly live long enough to encompass it all is curiously liberating. Jonathan Franzen – whose The Connections I have read but whose Freedom I will certainly not acquire before it is in reasonably-priced paperback (due September 1st in the UK) and then will not hurry to devour – once said that he had calculated both his life expectancy and the number of books he read in a year and that he discovered that (then in his 40s) he could never read all the books he already owned. I intuited this in my 30s but it never stopped me buying more. It still doesn’t.
So I suppose that was the primary element in the reaction to our pal’s recommendation, that it was rather wasted on us; and also that … um … she might be expected to know as much, having been our houseguest several times. Not that I grumble at that. Clearly her instinct was wholly generous and kind. But I think there is a subtext, a more subtle resistance to anybody’s recommendations.
With whom does one share one’s taste? You can stand next to someone at a gig and be equally crazed with excitement at seeing (oh, it might be) Arctic Monkeys, and then go to your respective homes, where one settles down with a Clive Barker and the other with an Iris Murdoch; and neither of you would ever dream of entertaining the other’s notion of pleasing fiction.
My partner and I have a vast amount of overlapping taste, much of it shaped by decades of influencing each other. Each of us could write the book about what the other will like – though of course there are always surprising lacunæ – but there are also distinct no-go areas for one of us but not the other. I think our taste in contemporary cinema is an area where there are divergences, dramatised from the outset when our first date-movie (at my instigation) was Apocalypse Now. Not only was David irrevocably seared by the movie but he had to endure it from the middle of the front row where he sweetly indulged my self-important movie-buffery by agreeing (with unexpressed misgivings) to sit and, in the same interest, staying through forty-or-so minutes of end credits.
I no longer recall whether he at any level appreciated – or affected to appreciate – the Coppola. We were still in the first flush back then. Now, he would assuredly stomp out after twenty minutes. No, rather, he would never have gone with me to see it in the first place.
Recommendations can be the devil. Some years ago, another old chum presented us with a CD of a new band. Now this friend has a fine track record in spotting music that will break big. He was even ahead of the curve on Bob Dylan and, while many claim as much, he genuinely did turn up with the first LP when none of our circle had even heard of this new young razorwire-voiced genius.
The CD in question was by Antony and the Johnsons. I own at once that here is someone whose stock has risen very high among discriminating listeners. What can I say but that David and I both cordially disliked the CD? But we certainly said thank you.
Some time later, I made an ill-considered jibe about young Antony in an email to our pal. He had made some disobliging comment about art-school pop stars in general and I suggested – jovially, as I thought – that Antony might be of their number. Back came a quite ferocious ticking off. He had introduced us to this new music out of the kindness of his heart and I had flung it back in his face. I’m paraphrasing. I don’t mind saying that I was quite mortified.
Is there actually a moral obligation not only to act upon but to profess to concur with someone else’s taste? It seems so. I have on never-forgotten occasion been fiercely upbraided by friends both for responding positively to and for expressing indifference to some cultural artefact about which the friend in question entertained contrary sentiments. I was made mysteriously to feel that I had in some crass and hostile manner questioned the whole basis for the friendship. Not so: I just disagree. Is that not allowed?
All of us have long-term and deep friendships that have triumphantly survived the friend’s unfathomable commitment to a partner whose acquaintance we would never otherwise have chosen. We may privately think – even ask of our own partner – “what ever did she see in her?” or “can’t she tell that he is an absolute no-good?” or “can that really be the sort of guy that turns him on?” But we would never, even under the pressure of close questioning, tell the friend. No one wants to hear, after the break-up of a significant relationship, all one’s old friends say “well, of course, I always disliked her, but I could never tell you that”.
Relationships are a minefield, and friendships and indeed family bonds are routinely fractured when disapproval of partnership choice is not withheld. The even-worse stage in a parental relationship than one’s precious child settling on a partner who, the parent knows, will only bring that child grief is the child feeling obliged to choose between the parent and the partner.
But it surely needn’t come to this over a television programme or a pop song. It ought to be readily acceptable that other people – even those with whom one feels in close accord on almost everything else – will be mystified by the enthusiasms with which one fills one’s days and the blind spots to which one happily admits. I would be bored to tears by cricket or line-dancing or Celebrity Big Brother or the novels of Howard Jacobson or the singing of Katherine Jenkins, but I do not rule out a trusting friendship with someone who gladly embraces any – all? let’s not go too far – of these things.
Of course, I cannot avoid a certain irritation when my own finely discriminating recommendations go unheeded by others. A few years ago, I spent an evening in New York with what struck me as one of the most thrilling and unexpected pieces of theatre I had ever seen. It was a one-man show, something I usually cross the road to avoid, being evidently enough of my father’s son to want full value for my buck. But what I had read intrigued me and I could not get a ticket for anything else on my list that night.
The monologue was called I Am My Own Wife, it was written by Doug Wright (whose play Quills that was subsequently filmed is perhaps his most widely known piece) and acted by a man I had not encountered before and have not since, Jefferson Mays. It and he enthralled me for the duration. The play went on to be awarded a hatful of awards, crowned by the Pulitzer Prize, though that never influences my opinion. It merely confirms that I was not alone.
Later, it came to London with the same actor. I urgently alerted every friend to whom I thought it might have any appeal. Not a single one of them acted on my advice. Initially vexed, I modulated my view to “well, sod ’em, then. It’s their loss”. If memory serves, the London critics were surprisingly lukewarm and the run was brief.
Maybe it just didn’t travel well. Theatre, after all, is the most fugitive and ticklish of the arts, inspired in one performance, lame the next. I once had a play put on at the late lamented Soho Poly Theatre. The two previews went like a rocket and the director then told everyone that, as an inevitable consequence of this happy experience, the press night would be a damp squib. This madness became a self-fulfilling prophesy – the only inevitability that I could discern – and so the reviews were indifferent, save for that of John Peter in The Sunday Times who attended a subsequent performance. In my more paranoid moments, I muse that said director killed my budding career as a dramatist.
Rather a large proportion of my friends never attended the play or, if they did, they kept shtum about it. But that’s a whole other issue, not one of simple taste. I suppose the aspect of recommendation that causes the most trouble is the presumption – the arrogance of which is cheerfully overlooked – that the finely-honed instrument of one’s taste will lead others to dance to its tune. This presumption can induce quite staggering levels of misplaced self-confidence.
One of the more tiresome aspects of following people on Twitter is that so many of them make daily recommendations. It might be merely an illustration that they want you to look at – readily accessible via a link given in the tweet – or an article they agree with or a pop song they love – similarly linked – or, more long-term, a ballet/movie/comedian/book-reading/play/gig/opera they think you should attend. I wonder if they give a thought to how big a commitment of time and indeed sometimes cash they are casually proposing that unknown readers should invest. As a tweeter, I do it myself a little but not, I think, more challengingly than to suggest nipping to a clip on YouTube or sampling a Guardian column.
Some – and they are apt to be the compulsive tweeters who never seem to be off the damned thing – practically hit you over the head with their insistence that you (whoever you are) must experience this latest thing that the tweeter loved. The humorist and actor Chris Addison is one such member of what I think of as the I-Guarantee-You-Will-Love-This school. Well, Mr Addison doesn’t know me and hence he doesn’t know my taste. I am not even sure that something I’ve yet to encounter by Alan Bennett or Mozart could be absolutely guaranteed to please me, and Mr Addison has not, I fancy, included these artists among his tips. He seems only very recently to have discovered Victoria Wood’s blithe sitcom Dinnerladies, despite that it has been playing on one satellite channel or another every day at any time of the day or night for at least the past ten years. So how reliable can he be?
The film director Joe Wright, interviewed in today’s Guardian, laments a comment that he read about his own work on the internet and parrots the age-old plaint “everyone’s a fucking critic these days”. No indeed, criticism is something else entirely, or it should be. Joe Soap’s arbitrary taste is his own affair and doesn’t need to be defended against anybody, even if his taste seems arbitrary and unfair to Joe Wright or even to Joe Always-Right.
But proper critics – career critics – have an historic role to play, that of building a consensus about the works in their field, a consensus that aspires to (even if never truly achieving) a state of objectivity. That at any rate was the proper function of classical critics, and everyone from Walter Pater to Frank Kermode recognised it. Reviewing – that is to say, the run-of-the-mill instant responses in the newspapers – only ever contributed to the grave task of building a consensus in the hands of particularly gifted, erudite, experienced and thoughtful critics, of which there are now precious few examples (Philip French, Robert Hughes, Michael Billington, John Fordham).
I expect a serious critic to place a new work in the grand order of things and to inform me accurately that I ought to seek out and recognise its significance, if indeed it bears significance, whether the critic personally cares for the work or not. Twitter recommendations – and indeed those of civilian friends – are about those works in face of which this particular consumer (and not necessarily any other) rolls on her back and purrs with delight. A critical assessment of the time-honoured kind is about enduring achievement (or, of course, the lack of it).
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