From this point of view — that of drift and dream; of looking out for interest, of following this or that because it seems alive — Ritalin and other forms of enforcement and psychological policing are the contemporary equivalent of the old practice of tying up children’s hands in bed so they wouldn’t touch their genitals. The parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good. There is more to this than keeping out the interesting: there is the fantasy and terror that someone here will become pleasure’s victim, disappearing into a spiral of enjoyment from which they will not return.
It is true, however, that many people, often called obsessives, have spent their lives being distracted, keeping away, often unknowingly, from that which they most want, thus brewing in themselves a poison of disappointment, bitterness and despair. But there are still, as the Ritalin boy seemed to know, forms of distraction which can be far more harmful. We can attack ourselves unknowingly: we might call this corrupted desire, as if we are possessed by a demon whose whispers are cruel diminutions of the self, destroying creativity and valuable connections, until enervation and self-hatred make a living death.
It is said that distractions are too easy to come by now that most writers use computers, though it’s just as convenient to flee through the mind’s window into fantasy. In the end, a person requires a method. I mean that he or she must be able to distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave, whether they feel depleting or fulfilling. And this can only work if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself — if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life.
As we become desperate financially, and more regulated and conformist, our ideals of competence become more misleading and cruel, making people feel like losers. There might be more to our distractions than we realised we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not completing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you to. This may be why most art is either collaborative — the cinema, pop, theatre, opera — or is made by individual artists supporting one another in various forms of loose arrangement, where people might find the solidarity and backing they need.
Weekends and Forevers
Marriage as a problem, and as a solution, has always been the central subject for drama, the novel and the cinema. Most of us come from a marriage, and, probably, a divorce, of some sort, and both bring together the most serious things: sex, love, children, betrayal, boredom, frustration, and property. The kind of questions which surround lengthy relationships — What is it like to live with another person for a long time? What do we expect? What do we need? What do we want? What is the relation between safety and excitement, for each of us? — are the most important we can ask.
Set in contemporary Paris, Le Week-End is a film I developed with the director Roger Michell, with whom I’ve worked on a TV series, The Buddha of Suburbia, and two films, The Mother and Venus. The films were mostly concerned with a subject we believed was neglected in the cinema: the lives and passions of older people, whose anxieties and desires, we found, were as intense, if not more significant, than those of the young.
Le Week-End concerns a late-middle-aged couple, Nick and Meg, who are both teachers, one in a school, the other in a university, and who go away to Paris to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. While there they discuss the meaning and direction of their marriage now their children have left home. Time and health are running out for them, as they consider their impending old age, and wonder what sort of future they might want, either together or apart. They think about how they might die, but this couple also need to talk about how they have lived: the way in which they have brought up their children, and how the family has worked, where it failed, and where there is regret, bitterness and even fury.
The film shows the depredations of time, but also the lability of the past, its different meaning and value for each of the couple, and how, now they are talking, it can seem as unstable as the future. They are looking in the same direction, but cannot see the same thing. There is no narrative they can agree on.
Their short sojourn, whatever else it is, will be a time of difficult conversations. What if it occurs to one or other of them that their relationship was a mistake, that it didn’t resemble their original hopes at all, and they could have had a far better life elsewhere? Meanwhile, what have they done to one another? Was there harm? What did they use one another for?
The couple are from a suburb of Birmingham, where they have taught for decades. But ‘Paris was where the twentieth century was,’ says Gertrude Stein in Paris France. And Paris, in their provincial English imaginations, represents several desirable things: the fresh ideas and radicalism of the sixties and the barricades of 1968, along with the intellectual revolutions of their youth as exemplified by Derrida, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault. There are also personal revolutions: the idea of the equal, committed, but ‘open relationship’, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, for whom ‘the game of love’ — the rondo of seduction, rejection and change — never had to end. As Stendhal writes in Love, ‘The pleasures of private life ought to be augmented to an infinite degree by recurrent exposure to danger.’ But was it true that love could easily be turned into a form of sport or frivolous distraction? Surely love was no closer to sport than sex was to exercise?
As well as these essential questions, Paris, for our couple, represents continuity, and an ideal of civilisation. It means a certain quality of living when it comes to clothes, sex, transgression, tolerance, conversation, bohemianism. This pair like to eat well; it is in French restaurants that they find sensuous enjoyment together, perhaps the one place now where there is real collaboration and exchange between them.
In the London suburbs of the 50s and 60s, where I grew up in relative safety after the turbulence of the war, all, apparently, was set forever. Conventional marriage was the paradigm. My father, an exile from colonial India’s religious strife and partition, was a commuter, and my mother was happy to call herself a housewife. The relation between work, marriage and play was perfectly arranged. Nothing was missing; it was all there already. All you had to do was fit in. That, at least, was the idea.
As Nick and Meg are aware, marriage frees a certain sort of companionate love, if you’re lucky. But it domesticates sex. The couple are over-intimate. They know too much about one another. Without obstacles, there can be no fascination. How can you desire what you already have? That’s not alclass="underline" the arrangements which marriage requires to survive — security, duration, reliability, repetition — can seem liberating in their continuity, or stifling, according to your nature. The suburbs suited my father, since he’d come from a more dangerous place, and wanted contentment. But there was something about living there that could make you want to scream. For some, it would never be sufficient. You might learn, as Nick does in Paris with his wife — whom he still wants and needs — that the problem with desire is not that you cannot get rid of it, but that there is too much of it. It is ever-present, and ever-pressing, however much you want to discount it. You cannot wish it away, and it cannot be replaced by a substitute.