The Equality and Humanity of Communal Showers

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gave his Thought for the Day yesterday on BBC Radio Four. His principal observation was the crucial sanctuary which places of worship provide from the demands of a success-obsessed modern world. It might matter what car you’re driving or what brand you’re wearing outside a church, mosque or synagogue, but once inside one it does not, all of us equal in the eyes of Jesus, Mohammed or Yahweh.

Sacks is right, and such places are, therefore, of immense value. As I’m neither a practicing Christian, Muslim nor Jew, I wondered where I could go to experience such equality and humanity.

I found it, later that day, in the most unlikely of places, in the communal showers of my local leisure centre. I’d gone for a workout – the need to get rid of a number of days’ accumulation of hard work and restlessness (yes, it is called a “workout” for this very reason) – and afterwards, standing sweaty, worn-out and naked as I hung my towel on a shower hook, I was confronted by an elderly man as hot, exhausted and exposed as me.

We smiled at one another, then turned simultaneously and took the few small steps to the showers, communal showers not divided by partitions, the kind of showers typical of old schools or sports’ pavillions, modesty not permitted. A line of four shower heads with corresponding taps, no more than this.

“Good workout?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I replied. “And you?”

“Well, it’s still working,” he said, putting his hand on his heart, “that’s the main thing,” and I smiled at this existential sentiment.

We walked to either end of the showers and pushed the taps, both of us, it seems, in spite of our amicable exchange, wanting separateness.

The water was cold, however, both from my shower and his. We flinched at the same time.

I took a step to my left and stood under the next shower head. He did the same, though in his case this required a step to his right.

Side by side now, both of us hoped that these two remaining shower heads would offer warm water.

“Here we go,” he said, smiling at me as he pressed the tap, and I did the same.

“It’s warm, thank goodness,” I exclaimed, humming with relief.

“Yes, mine too,” he answered contentedly.

And so there we stood, side by side, two men who knew nothing of one another but for our mutual aversion to cold water and the fact that we had both worked something out of ourselves, in his case old age perhaps.

As I showered, letting the water hit my face and run down my chest and back and legs, I suddenly found myself not separate from but together with this man, who, though a stranger, I felt very close to.

The reason for this was clear. Both naked, no more than flesh and bone, his hunched back as visible to me as my ample stomach was to him, we were unable to hide our imperfections from one another, the truth of ourselves beneath the material trappings of life outside these communal showers, the trappings of cars, clothes and houses which contain a multitude of lies. In this open and candid environment, which had a fondness for truth in all its beauty and ugliness, like a place of worship I had found great equality and humanity.

And I savoured this sense – it felt like a precious gift – and stood there longer than I normally would have. And neither of us spoke. We did not need to.

What Does it Mean to be a Man Today?

I’m due to become a father soon, and the following question is becoming increasingly pertinent in my mind: what does it mean to be a man today?

As a young boy, I imagined that I’d make myself into a man by being rational, analytical, controlled, steadfast and independent. I would exercise these uniquely male characteristics in my various roles as a father, husband and breadwinner. But in reality, though at times I might display these qualities to my wife and employer, I also display their opposite: I can be unreasonable, emotional, whimsical and needy.

It would seem that my childhood forecast of masculinity has not been fully realised, that I’m some way off its fulfilment. Can this solely be attributed to my own weaknesses and inadequacies, or is my failure representative of all men? My hunch is that I’m not alone, that there are other men out there feeling the very same, looking over their shoulders and crying out, “Look at these women!”

In intellectual development, social adjustment, professional achievement and personal happiness, women are surpassing men at an alarming rate. How have men responded to this challenge to their dominance, their loss of control? Well, by doing what us men do best … being destructive! In Britain, men perpetrate over 90% of convicted acts of violence. Around 90% of school children with behavioural problems are male. Men carry out most sexual abuse. Jails are crammed full of men. In  2010, three times as many young men killed themselves as young women. We’re not responding well to the challenge of the post-feminist world. Drink and drugs will not save us. We’re sick.

Feminists need not be so vociferous and vengeful anymore. Women are winning, and all the signs are that they are fast becoming the dominant species. Last year, some 25.5% of GCSE exams taken by girls was graded an A* or A compared with just 19.5% of qualifications sat by boys – a gap of 6%. In the European Union, there are now 20% more female graduates than male, and their prospects of employment far exceed men’s. And most significant of all, an increasing number of women are choosing to conceive and rear a child on their own. Man’s role is being reduced to a petri dish, God forbid! Even for the most deluded of men, in a state of perpetual denial, this picture of male decline in the new millenium is strikingly clear.

Radical feminist thinkers insist that women scare the man in me, threaten me, and make me defensive in female company. According to them, I look at women as impersonal objects to be impregnated, and nothing more. I feel that I must control them at all times, since they have a tendency to be hysterical, dependent, irrational, ambiguous and weak – all these uniquely feminine characteristics.

Now, different arguments have been put forward as to why men fear women. Freud thought it was the fear of castration. A man looks at a woman’s genitalia and sees with horror, and disgust, the absence of a penis – a woman is a kind of mutilated man, sick and inadequate. But is there not something exquisitely beautiful about the female genitalia, and is it not male genitalia which inspires horror, in Sylvia Plath’s words “a turkey neck and gizzards.” Then there are the attachment theorists who believe that a boy’s separation from his mother is a terribly painful experience, which he never fully recovers from. With this loss comes the realisation that he can no longer possess his mother orally, and that he will never control her genitally. Thus, he mustn’t allow himself ever again to completely trust a woman, be so dependent on one. He can never again feel so weak and helpless, out of his mother’s arms. And so he grows up into a man who hates all women as whores, and wants to be sadistic and cruel to them. It is no mere coincidence that men, when they are violent towards women, often rape them. For this is where they feel they can exercise most control. And last of all, there is the fact that the fulfilment of a heterosexual man’s desires is utterly dependent on a willing woman. All men have an ever-present itch that they need to scratch, perpetually driven by their incorrigible sex drive. They produce 25 times more testosterone per day than women. They fantasise about having a woman who is always sexually available to them. And when they can’t get what they want, well … then they want to destroy it. Modern man is in love with pornography. It relieves the itch – it’s quick relief, impersonal, controlled and contained in the realms of fantasy. He gets excited, masturbates, and then ejaculates. Steve Biddulph, the author of Manhood, remarked that “the sex-sell in this country is incredible. It’s amazing that young British men can think straight. They’re taught that they want one thing and they believe it.” Today, men define themselves by their genitals – the size of their prick and how hard it can get.

Men are violent. Yes we are. For men who have lost someone or something, who have failed to express themselves in other ways, and who are preoccupied with control, violence is their final desperate mark on the world. I have been an angry young man who thought the whole world was shit. Restless and aggressive, I had to put my rage and frustration somewhere. Those feelings could only go one of two ways, either inside or outside myself. A violent man is either reduced to a depressive state, curled up like a child in his bed, with no will to eat let alone get up, or he is locked up in a prison cell after harming someone else. But in both instances, the man commits violence, be it against himself or someone else. In his bed or in his cell, he feels the same – hopeless, ashamed, humiliated, angry and alienated. Suicidal and homicidal tendencies go hand in hand. When I was depressed, I fluctuated wildly between self-destruction and the destruction of others. Thankfully, I never hurt anyone. But I could have done. The point I am trying to make is that violence against oneself or someone else comes from the same place. This reality – for it is precisely that – does not justify or pardon the actions of a violent man, but crucially explains them as a complex web of interacting factors. Let’s forget John Major’s call after the murder of James Bulger for “less understanding and more condemnation.” And let’s not label a violent man a “monster” or “devil”. It is no longer appropriate to explain his actions as the product of the innate evil in his character. Such a populist or monistic religious view is untrue. A moral judgment must be made, but not so as we can suspend our horror at the painful truth of our own accountability and blame. For then how would man ever learn to tame his aggression, to learn the language of non-violence? He never would.

I have painted a rather bleak picture of the sate of modern man. What about modern woman? Mustn’t she be held accountable for some of the trouble with us men? Can it really be our entire fault? Have we let ourselves be emasculated? Are there not violent and cruel women as well as men? We only have to look at the organisation of AMEN, an Irish group helping male victims of domestic violence, to testify to this fact. According to one recent study, half of spouse murder victims were found to be alcoholic or psychotic and had played a significant part in their own death. And then there is Erin Prizzey, founder of the first women’s refuge for battered women, who declared that battered women were themselves violent by nature, much to the dismay of certain feminists. However, men’s violence still far exceeds women’s. Far more men hurt women than women hurt men. This fact cannot be ignored.

The psychiatrist Anthony Clare, in his book, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis, states that “phallic man, authoritative, dominant, assertive … is starting to die.” But he believes that a new man can emerge in his place. This man will no longer be reticent about his emotional life and relentless in his desire to control women. Rather, he’ll harness his propensity to dominate and express himself through words and tears rather than threats and punches. It does seem that man must now reinvent himself in a new image. Guns and viagra are firing blanks, the final death throes of a dwindling phallus. Good luck to us all. We need it.

Miami, Miami!

Miami … what a place! And the people that live here … they are so affluent. This is the impression I get as I sit in a cafe on the opulent Ocean Drive sipping on a pina colada no less, and watching an impeccably dressed middle-aged man stroll towards me, the picture of material success in his Armani suit and Prada loafers, a big cigar hanging from his mouth that you can bet is not Cuban!  He carries a big smile across his face, the consummate look of self-satisfaction and personal success. And let us not forget the sassy lady on his arm, who, in spite of her relative youth, has still deemed it necessary to cosmetically and surgically enhance herself with peroxide hair, fake tan, silicone tits, liposucked arse, collagen lips – all those uniquely American characteristics of bought beauty. She looks at her man adoringly, as they stop beside me to admire the clothes hanging in the neighbouring shop window.

This man has made it in the land of the free. Through his acquisition of wealth and beauty – albeit artificial beauty – he has achieved status and respect in his country. Chasing the dollar remains, it seems, the most important human endeavour in America, more important than attaining knowledge or helping others. Obama’s socialism – this is how the Republicans perceive his social conscience – has had little impact, both on America’s love affair with money, and her conviction that the dollar, above all else, will bring ultimate happiness.

I look away from the man now, over towards another middle-aged man, this one rather different. He wears ripped blue jeans and a grubby T-shirt, and on his feet an old pair of sneakers, one of the soles hanging loose. It’s true that we tend to look down at people’s feet when trying to make an assessment of them and their life circumstances. It’s a rather crude and imperfect means of judgment, but one that I nevertheless make recourse to. He’s likely homeless, I conclude, and at this moment he paces manically across the street, heading straight for me. He looks at me wild-eyed, his intense demeanour heightened by his hair that stands on end like Einstein’s and his goatee that is coiffed into a Daliesque knife-edge of facial hair, albeit far more imperfectly than Salvador’s. In fact, this part of his appearance is the only bit of him that seems to possess any semblance of order, the rest utterly chaotic. “Hey, lemme show you something,” he demands, these words flying out of his mouth, fast end edgy.

He pulls a deck of cards from his back pocket. “Think of a card, remember it,” he goes on, as he begins to shuffle through the pack.

The Queen of Aces comes to me. This will be my card, I decide.

“You know, if there’s one card I like in this deck, it’s this one,” he says, stopping at a particular card, removing it from the pack and flicking it onto the street. It lands face down. “So tell me, which card d’you choose?” he asks.

He reveals the deck to me, thumbing through different cards. “No, I don’t think it’s that one. Nope, not that one either. You look like an Ace kind of guy,” he continues, clearly realising that flattery will get him everywhere. “You’d normally go for Jack, but this time, you’ve gone Queen. You must be in touch with your feminine side today,” he quips.

“And what’s really strange,” he goes on, “is that the card you’ve picked, the one in your head … well, it ain’t in the deck. It’s the one I got rid of at the start, the one that’s lying there in the middle of the street.”

He points to the stray card, then bounds over and picks it up. “Look, isn’t that the strangest thing?’” he announces, holding the card aloft, and there in his hand I see my card, the Queen of Aces.

I hand him a couple of dollars. “You’re a gentleman, a true gentleman. The last guy I had called me a fuckin’ bum and told me to leave him alone. How else am I gonna be able to maintain my luxurious wardrobe?” he gestures down his body with a wry, sarcastic smile.

As he makes to leave, he bumps into the other middle-aged man – let us call him ‘the cigar millionaire’ – and his big-bosomed companion. They continue to window shop.

“Why don’t you watch where you’re fucking going?” he barks at the homeless magician, raising his fat cigar in the air as if it were some kind of lethal weapon.

“You again…” the homeless magician stutters, it immediately clear that this is ‘the last guy’ he just referred to, the one who called him ‘a fuckin’ bum.’ “Look, it was an accident. I’m sorry, okay,” and he scurries nervously away, off down the sidewalk.

The cigar millionaire turns to me and says, “He been bugging you as well? Damn welfare case. All he should do is stop drinking, lazy bastard.”

I don’t bother to suggest that it’s care, rather than judgment, that he most needs.

The cigar millionaire swaggers off, his blonde in tow.

The disparity between rich and poor in America remains shocking, even under Obama’s watch. His health care reforms were seen by many as one step too far, a clear attempt to redistribute wealth. The poor are seen by the wealthy as the tough medicine that goes with democracy and individualism. For are there not always going to be some people who fail to meet the mark, who aren’t tough enough to meet the rigours of a capitalist system? We cannot help everyone, the Republicans maintain. There have to be some losers. And so there are two distinct groups: those who have made it – fulfilled the American dream of self-promotion and personal success, that is – and those who have not. The latter continue to wander the streets aimlessly, like lost souls. They are not in pursuit of the dollar but rather seem to be searching for something that their country does not offer them. Perhaps this something is another way of life? America might be the land of the free according to the ruling class and those that have made it, but it is a prison to others, and this reality must be acknowledged rather than glossed over with euphemism and rhetoric.

It is one of the great ironies that a country founded on immigrants, a melting pot – to use Walt Whitman’s famous analogy – of different peoples, creeds and cultures can at one and the same time be so insular, simplistic and conformist in its thinking. The Oath of Allegiance demands absolute loyalty and devotion to the American way. Every citizen is encouraged to strive for the fulfilment of the American dream. However, success is limited to a few in the American capitalist system. Many must be exploited so just a few can prosper. The innumerable valets in Miami are testament to this fact.

Here in Miami, I’m not far from Castro’s Cuba (it remains his, just about), which in ideological and theoretical terms at least is the antithesis of the American way. There, everyone is supposed to be equal. No one is greedy, proud and self-important like the cigar millionaire I just encountered. No one is weak, belittled and helpless like the homeless magician.  The state is there to serve the nation, to look after the welfare of its citizens. And all its inhabitants are meant to happily work for one another, for the sake of the common good, the socialist goal.

And yet it is not like this in reality. Like people in the rest of the world, Cubans have different ideas, wishes, beliefs and personalities. They do not all share the same ones. Many of them disagree with one another, and object to the state telling them what they should want and expect from life. It is indeed very difficult to impose a new value system on a certain person, group, country or race that already has its own set of beliefs. Castro and Bin Laden would find the cigar millionaire’s opulence, materialism and greed unacceptable, and would seek to change him, by force if necessary. Though I also found the cigar millionaire to be rather smug, unpleasant and ostentatious, my opinion of him was a product of my own subjective value system. Ultimately, I had no right to tell him how objectionable I found him, and no right to force him to relinquish his current lifestyle, adopt my beliefs and immediately commence living like me.

America, on the other hand, no longer even attempts to provide for the welfare of all its citizens. The state’s public services do make some provision, but it is desperately lacking. America remains driven by market forces, this its government’s guiding principle. The power of the state is used to secure “the scope for as many individuals as possible (though inevitably not all) to make use of the opportunities the market has to offer.”[1] This policy is unwilling to accommodate human frailty and weakness. It leaves little room for doubt and indecision. If you don’t possess the skills to use the opportunities available, then you become one of the have-nots. And this rather ruthless governing system is all-too-ready to dismiss any kind of criticism levelled at it as socialist froth or poor man’s envy. The poor man might believe in a different way of life, money might not be as important to him and he might want to promote a viable alternative, but he’ll be written off as a dissenter and a failure. If a particular citizen cannot maximise the opportunities given to him by the state, well… then fuck him.

The cigar millionaire has been strong, effective and decisive, hence has been rewarded. The homeless magician, it would seem, has been weak and indecisive, so has been punished. Perhaps he had his own ideas about life and these were not compatible with the state’s. It is possible – though unlikely – that the homeless magician has consciously chosen to live his life on the fringes of society. Maybe he refuses to buy into a society in which “self-interest [is] hailed as the highest value, reinforced by vast industries that are devoted to implanting and reinforcing [this ethos].”[2] I can only speculate. The only thing that is clear is that one man has significantly more wealth and happiness than the other.

To those people in power and those who are prosperous, the suggestion of a different economic system, an alternative form of government or another cultural value system is considered preposterous, even dangerous. God forbid they lose some of their power and some of that enormous fortune they’ve amassed. And so the system as it is must be maintained at all costs. Change is bad. New ideas are dangerous. In America, there are huge systems of private power – the big multinational companies – and they remain unaccountable. For them, “Capital has priority – people are incidental.”[3] Sadly, they only become partly accountable when they collapse, as some did a few years ago. And so the democratic motto goes, ‘Let the people speak feely, but if they don’t agree with you, then don’t give any consideration to what they are saying.’

As I continue to sit in Miami’s South Beach, my pina colada finished now, I can understand why much of the world remains angry with America, why some people find it hard to accept her way of life, why some even wish her harm. And these people are not solely confined to Islamic fundamentalist groups. They can also be found among liberal-minded European politicians in Brussels, student bodies in China, women’s groups in Pakistan, the American intellectual elite, the poor sections of American society and anti-globalisation protesters not only in the poor southern hemisphere but also in the major sectors of rich industrial countries in the north.

Just as the separation between rich and poor increases in America, so it does in the rest of the world as well. The poor and desperate now fight to get into the rich enclaves of North America and Western Europe, who respond by fortifying their barriers and toughening their laws to keep them out. An elite group of less than one billion, 15% of the world’s population, currently takes more than 80% of the world’s wealth. When will we accept that western capitalism – the free market and free trade – does have negative consequences. It is an aggressive economic system. Its practitioners must compete against one another for dominance. They push to acquire more capital by any means necessary and use it for more production, which in turn produces more capital. America has been extraordinarily effective in her practice of it. She has exploited resources, created markets, increased production and gained capital all over the world. But she has done so at the expense of other peoples and nations, at the expense of the poor.

And so it is now that under Obama growing sections of American society are starting to wake up, to confront this truth. These people are starting to look deep into their own hearts, and the heart of their nation, in an attempt to understand why such violence was committed against them ten years ago. These people are starting to feel guilty for all the wealth their country has, and have begun to wonder whether there could be a viable alternative to the American way, which still only serves the interests of a powerful minority. They are in search of a new system of sustainable development that cares for the welfare not only of poor Americans, but poor people throughout the world.

[1] Runciman, David. The Garden, the Park and the Meadow, in London Review of Books, vol. 24, no.11, (2002), p.7.

[2] Chomsky, Noam. September 11th and Its Aftermath: Where is the World Heading?”, an excerpt from a public lecture he gave in Chennai, India on 10 November 2001, presented by Frontline magazine and the Media Development Foundation.

[3] Moore, Michael. White Frights (ed. Extracts from Stupid White Men) in The Guardian Weekend on 30 March 2002, p.22

The Tabloids Bay for Blood

There was something deeply troubling in the recent tabloid coverage around the murder of Joanna Yeates when police called in her landlord. One red top argued that because he, Chris Jefferies, had a penchant for the avant garde – for literature and cinema which was deliberately obscure, challenging and unorthodox – this pointed to his guilt. Tabloids typically have contempt for that which is unconventional, a little different, none more so than the Daily Mail, which professes journalistic objectivity and credibility, partly on the grounds that it does not have a red top, but in truth does little more than appease and enforce the prejudices of its Middle England readers, this majority of decent, proper, upright folk who believe in self- and home- improvement, low taxation, and of course ordinariness. The argument made, that Chris Jefferies was guilty because he is rather eccentric and has unusual cultural tastes, was absurd. It pandered to the narrow-minded and ignorant. The Daily Mail might bemoan the presence of unusual, difficult and provocative ideas, thoughts and tastes – which are contrary to its own ‘ordinariness’ that it is so proud of and will defend so resolutely – yet without them our culture would be stale and barren. I’d rather be consigned to hell than live in the Daily Mail’s ordinary world!

The Readers

My wife, an artist, took me to a performance of The Readers in Hackney the other night, an avant-garde performance art group led by two contemporary artists Ramon Salgado-Touzon and Jones Tensini. “What do they do?” I asked her dismissively, on the way to the venue. “Well, it’s hard to explain,” she replied. “They’re specialists in keynote, foreground and electro-acoustic sounds, which in English means they play and perform music quite like you’ve never heard and seen before.” I judged this to be a euphemism for “obscure, abstract, nonsensical arty bullshit!” But hell, I was wrong. What I heard and saw that night was wonderful, extraordinary. Think the minimalism of Phillip Glass but rife with even more sounds – a cornet, a harp, a bell, a glockenspiel, a vocoder, a human scream, a musical saw, the list of instruments does not end here. Think the melancholic, haunting voice of Billie Holiday but from a contra tenor dressed in a striking dress and corset, and wearing high heels. I lost myself in the performance and music, the group’s mantra ringing in my ears: “The Readers want to free you from your need to consume.” Why was I so moved, entranced? Well, my work as a film producer and novelist is predominantly hard-nosed and commercial: I want people to consume what I create. The end product might inspire artistic feeling in the viewing and reading public, yet the making and selling of it rarely does. Today, a producer, even a novelist if truth be told (writers have to get out there now like everyone else does and flog their work), hustles and pushes all the way, money driving the process, creativity typically way down the list of priorities. And here, in The Readers, was art for art’s sake, crucial and precious in a world which commodifies everything. Go see them, lose yourself in them, and learn to value real art once more.

Go to The Readers

It’s Us Against Them

Fan the Flames, No. 6, Dec 2001

Wednesday 12th September 2001
I’m in my car on my way to work. I won’t forget this day. Why? Because the day before was one of the worst days in American history. I switch on the radio and listen to the Today programme on BBC Radio Four. John Humphrys says, “President George W. Bush vows retribution against the terrorists responsible for thousands of deaths after hijacked airliners were used to destroy New York’s World Trade Center and seriously damage the Pentagon. The finger of suspicion is being pointed at the Islamic fundamentalist, Osama Bin Laden.”

It’s painful to listen to any more news after a day and night of constant, relentless media coverage. As I turn off the radio I spot a Muslim woman walking down the road with her two children. She wears a kaftan and headscarf. She looks pensive and anxious, while her toddler boy and girl smile and giggle. A burly middle-aged white man in a suit scowls at her as he barges past her and the children. He seems angry with the Arab woman and suspicious of her.

I get to the office. I’m compelled to turn on the television. The media frenzy feeds my morbid fascination. I switch to CNN and listen to Tony Blair’s speech. Like his American counterpart, he refers to the “enemy in our midst” and a “battle that we (the civilized, democratic and free world) will win.” It is us against them. Good versus evil. Now I’m listening to the black and white rhetoric of war. Ambiguity is unacceptable. I’m part of Bush’s and Blair’s privileged and civilized ranks. They demand my allegiance. All of a sudden I feel confused. I don’t know which world is the bad one, the terrorists’ or my own.

Thursday 13th September
A man writes in to the BBC and rails against its left wing bias. He states, “I’ve had enough of your liberal, indecent crap. You’re not showing these dead Americans the respect they deserve.” Before him, the BBC had given voice to a woman who considered the assault on America to have been a tragic but “majestic” metaphor in its brutally effective strategic assault on the heart of Western capitalism and its chief exponents. Her chosen adjective is harsh, and perhaps inappropriate, so soon after the event. However it does point to a truth: the misdeeds of America’s foreign and economic policy had finally come home to haunt her citizens. The woman hoped that “our political masters in the West will now be more tolerant of different ideological, political, economic and religious systems.” America loves those nations and people who strive for her freedoms and her conception and practice of democracy, but hates those that don’t. Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Chile, the list of countries is long.

I walk into a newsagent and have difficulty deciding which newspaper to buy. The Times headline reads, “Good will prevail over evil.” I read the statement of US Senator Gary Hart: “Let’s give these terrorists a fair trial… and then hang them!” I pick up The Guardian. It carries an article on the training methods employed by Bin Laden. The report’s contents shock me. Volunteers to his extremist group, al-Qaeda, are shown hundreds of hours of video footage showing the persecution of Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya amongst other countries. It’s indoctrination – a calculated exercise in breeding hatred. They’re told that their commitment to jihad is an imperative religious duty, and that their violence is justifiable in light of American violence in Iraq, Israel, Nicaragua and elsewhere. Having received this piece of information perhaps now I can make a choice and commit to my country, my people, the whole civilized and democratic world? The actions of Bin Laden now seem to me more reproachable.

Monday 17th September
President Bush states, “We will find these evil doers, these barbaric people… They slit the throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective that is beyond comprehension… This is a fight to say that [we] the freedom-loving people of the world will not allow ourselves to be terrorised by someone who thinks they can hit and hide in some cave somewhere. I want justice. There used to be an old poster out west that I recall and it said, ‘Wanted – dead or alive’.” I despair at this aggressive and simplistic rhetoric. President Bush, leader of the ‘free world”, sounds fundamentalist, his language not far removed from the fanatic, whether he be a Muslim extremist or a Christian fundamentalist. Listening to these words has left me feeling confused. I don’t know whom to believe any more after one week of obsessive and manipulative rhetoric on both sides, by leaders and broadcasters alike. Must I choose sides? Can’t I be a conscientious objector? I keep on recalling Lord Longford’s conviction, “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.” I hate what happened in America last week, when over 5,000 innocent people were killed, and yet I must try and understand what drove these suicide bombers to do what they did. How could they have hated America so much?

An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust in London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf War. Since the USA and Britain imposed the trade embargo over 1 million civilians have died, half of them children. The CIA trained the Mujahedin in their fight against Soviet rule in Afghanistan, and provided them with $2.17 billion of missiles, guns and ammunitions. Between 1965 and 1966, 1 million Indonesians were killed with the complicity of the US and British governments. During Vietnam, the CIA under Operation Phoenix arranged the murder of approximately 50,000 people. The state of Israel would not have survived were it not for American support. The United States now insists that it abhors all terrorism, yet it has permitted Ariel Sharon’s policy of assassinations in Palestinian territory. It paid, trained and armed a terrorist group in Nicaragua in the 1980s that killed over 30,000 civilians, and it has supported the IRA. President Bush declared on Thursday 13th September, “Americans do not yet have the distance of history but our responsibility to history is already clear – to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” In light of the above, perhaps Bush is proposing self-destruction as well as the destruction of the evil others.

The Arab world finds it very difficult to accept the destructive, inconsistent and culturally imperialistic nature of American foreign policy. On Wednesday 12th September, the Jordan Times commented, “US decision makers should evaluate whether they have steered the world’s only super power to dominate under the insignia of justice and international legitimacy, or succumbed to short-term interests, short-sighted considerations and the power of arrogance.” The majority of Arabs did not condone the mass murder in New York and Washington. The American and British media need not further repeat footage captured in Palestine and the Lebanon of small numbers of men, women and children celebrating the murder of American civilians. However, even these few revelers cannot be dismissed as mad or evil, the bad products of rogue nations. On Thursday 13th September, The Guardian quoted one Cairo resident as saying, “Now it is time for Americans to understand how other nations felt when they were bombed and shelled by the most advanced US weapons.” This is the common voice in the Middle East, and the sentiment it expresses is extremely important. America now shares in other nations’ suffering. Before the terrorist attack, a culture of complacency and a politics of isolationism were dominant. Americans were safe, prosperous and free in their own country (less than 10% of the population have travelled outside the United States). The rest of the world did not matter. It is this brutal exposure to the rest of the world that has so shocked American citizens. Now they cannot ignore the desperate cries of the impoverished anymore. A fanatical and hate-fuelled minority might have carried out the attack. These extremists might seek absolute power for themselves. Yet their actions have spoken, whether intended or not, for the poor. An elite group of less than one billion people now takes more than 80% of the world’s wealth. The bomb is a call for us in the west, this elite group, to consider redistribution. We must accept that Western capitalism – the free market and free trade – does have necessary consequences. The American oasis of civilization has been torn open. And never did any of us dream that such a thing could happen on this formerly impenetrable soil.

Richard Falk, Professor of International Relations at Princeton, believes that “Western foreign policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestrained political violence.” The majority of the American public wants bloody revenge. President Bush knows this. Like his enemy, Bin Laden, he girds his people’s democratic, nationalistic and primordial instincts. I can imagine every American at this time recalling the Oath of Allegiance to their county: “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty… that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws against all enemies, foreign and domestic… that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law… so help me God.” The Oath demands absolute loyalty and devotion to the American way. This inflexibility and cohesion of mind troubles me. For alongside these qualities must be an earnest attempt to voice caution, to question, to analyse and to reflect. These voices – perhaps full of doubt, ambiguity, confusion even despair – must be heard. Otherwise, a hateful situation of us and them is created. America must find the courage for self-reflection.

Last week, a dear friend of mine compared the attack on America with the murder of a man by his wife in a public place. It was a very powerful analogy and helped me better understand the events of Tuesday 11th September. He said, “Passers-by watch with horror as a woman shoots a man. The man falls to the ground. The woman runs off. People gather round as the man on the floor draws out his final breath. They are horrified by the woman’s actions. The woman is arrested later that day. On the evening news, local people gather round their television sets and watch video footage captured by an amateur of the murder. It appears to be unprovoked, and the woman appears unemotional even callous. They are thankful that this evil woman has been arrested and will be brought to justice for her heinous crime. These people wait with eager anticipation for the commencement of the trial. When it begins, new evidence emerges, though. It is revealed that the woman suffered systematic emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her husband for many years. He was terribly cruel to her. Yes … she intended to murder him in cold blood, but this was an action born out of desperation, nothing less: she could think of no other way to end her suffering, to express her right to be loved and not hated, her right to be defended and not neglected. By the end of the trial, the local people’s position has changed. They still hate what she did, and yet now they are able to understand her actions. Some of them are even able to feel love towards her.”

The Limitations of Lying on the Couch

Human Givens, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 2002

I want to recount my experience of psychoanalysis in the hope that I can determine exactly how effective and therapeutic it was for me. Did it alleviate my mental distress? Did it make me feel less miserable? Did it make me happier? I do not conduct this inquiry solely in the spirit of a former patient’s rebellion against his analyst. I am not just writing to make trouble with him and the psychoanalytic institution. Rather I make this examination because I believe that this psychological process, like any other, ought to be scrutinized and contemplated. It should be able to withstand the critic’s eye, and even the contrarian’s challenge.

If I conclude that psychoanalysis did not help me, then I would hope that its practitioners – some of who might be reading this – would ask the crucial question: does psychoanalysis, as a psychological approach and method, contain flaws both in its understanding of mental functioning and its treatment of mental disturbance?

In this article, I propose that psychoanalysis is intellectually aloof, that it demands a near-religious dogmatism from its practitioners, that it is too concerned with the self rather than the rest of the world. Personal knowledge and insight are not everything. The world goes on around us irrespective of our mastery of our unconscious selves.

The powerful establishment of psychoanalysis, with all its intellectual pomposity – if only it were as clever as it considered itself to be – must be held to account if it provides ineffective treatment for its patients (as opposed to ‘clients’), and even worse, if it actually increases the suffering of these individuals.

Entering analysis
I was in psychoanalysis for three years. I entered analysis (or ‘psychoanalytical psychotherapy’, as some refer to it in its less intense incarnation) when I was 26. After the break-up of a relationship both my anxiety and my depression became more and more unmanageable. They started to interfere with my day-to-day life, my ability to work and to socialize. Then they began to affect my personal relationships.

It became increasingly painful and difficult to spend time with the people I care for, the people I love. I went on to lose my appetite for food and my ability to sleep. I started to wake early, at half past four in the morning, and lay there tossing and turning, full of dread at the prospect of getting up and going out. Before long I was permanently confined to my bed, in a desperate state.

I saw my GP and was prescribed anti-depressant and anxiolytic medication. To compliment the drug treatment she referred me to a counsellor who worked for the practice. The NHS provided a weekly one-hour session for ten weeks, after which time I could decide whether I wanted to continue treatment with another practitioner. The counsellor introduced me to the various different psychotherapies, offering me a brief outline of how each one worked, and finally referred me to a psychoanalyst. After consultation with my GP, I stopped taking medication and entered analysis.

The psychoanalytic process
Freud offered, for the study of the mind, a concatenated model – id, ego, superego – which facilitated systematic study of causes and symptoms, symptoms and causes. Through this psychological process I hoped to rid myself of the anxiety and depression, which caused me so much pain and distress. I would enter into an intense relationship with the analyst, and become very dependent on him. He would guide me as I penetrated my unconscious and dug deep inside it. He would help me remember and identify specific earlier traumas, which had been repressed. He would encourage me to re-live them and he would interpret them. And through this painful and rigorous process, of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I would gain a new understanding and insight, which would put an end to my ‘neurotic symptoms’, as Freud would have me call them. In short, this method of digging up and unraveling my past experiences would make me better.

So where was I after the first nine months of therapy? Was I less depressed and less anxious? Well, not exactly. In fact, not at all. Far from making a recovery, I had another mental collapse: I was in a state of crisis again. My then relationship suffered terribly during this time. My GP referred me to a psychiatrist, who was not so concerned with my symptoms’ aetiology, but rather with their prognosis and containment. He diagnosed depression and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), and prescribed a combination of medication (paroxetine, commonly known as Seroxat) and CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). I only had three sessions of CBT, and now wish that I’d had more.

Throughout this period of crisis I continued to see my analyst. Unfortunately, it is only with the benefit of hindsight that I can appreciate how ill-equipped psychoanalysis is when it comes to dealing with serious emotional distress. Freud always maintained that his would-be science responded best to neurosis, the less serious forms of emotional suffering. Well, he was right about this. ‘Some neurotics have remained so infantile that in analysis… they can only be treated as children,’ he’d remarked. Perhaps I was such an infantile patient? God only knows what criteria he applied to make the value judgement of ‘infantile’. His definition seems nothing more than an act of pedagogic discipline. According to him, it would seem that anyone is weak and puerile if they do not respond, as they should, to the therapeutic powers of his method, and sicker still, if they challenge his will and his method.

The purity of analysis
I was reluctant to come off the medication again until I felt ready. I recently read an article in The Observer newspaper in which Lewis Wolpert, the Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College, London and author of Malignant Sadness: the Anatomy of Depression said, ‘People say to me, “Is the Seroxat helping you now?” But how the hell can I know? I stick with it because I’m too nervous to stop.’ Like him, I was terrified of the return of another depressive episode. My analyst agreed to continue seeing me, but we would work towards me coming off anti-depressants.

There are some analysts who refuse to see patients who are either on medication or receiving behavioural therapy. According to them drug treatment and behavioural therapy act as a smoke screen. They dampen down the emotions of the patient, and hence hinder him or her getting to the root of the problem. According to analytic theory neuroses need to be uprooted at the core. Painful experiences must be remembered, reflected upon and interpreted. Only then is significant characterological change possible. Implicit in this ‘hypothesis’ – let us give it its proper status as an assumption or proposition rather than a scientific truth – is the idea that the patient’s symptoms such as depression, severe anxiety or obsessional behaviour are the ‘expressions of highly charged conflicting impulses and fears’. Man is viewed in rather bleak terms as a cesspit of seething affect and sexual drives. If these are confronted and understood – revealed and ‘confessed’ to the analyst – then the patient shall ‘thereby [gain] relief and enrichment in [his or her] personal and intellectual life’. The patient must give himself over to the process. The patient must work hard and be rigorous with him or her self. Only then shall the patient gain relief, and become the true master of his unconscious. These are the rather dogmatic and educative rules of the psychoanalytic game: to make the unconscious conscious. All emotional conflict is interpersonal or person-centred, to use modern terminology. The rest of the world is not so important. Hence, genetic, biological, gender, environmental, economic, cultural, religious and racial concerns do not figure at the roots of mental distress. One need look no further than oneself and one’s own mother and father.

In search of a non-deterministic view
I must question this theoretical assertion and practice, particularly in light of recent advances in neuroscience. Depression and anxiety disorders have recently been attributed to low serotonin (one of several neurotransmitter chemicals that nerve cells in the brain use in communicating with one another). Anti-depressant medication works by slowing the reuptake of serotonin by the transmitting cell, thus making it more available to the receiving cell and prolonging its effect on the brain. Hence, if someone is biologically predisposed to depression and/or anxiety, rooting about in their past will not reverse this chemical imbalance, their inherent brain chemistry. Likewise, if someone is subjected to serious racial abuse and discrimination in the area in which they live, what will help this person is not a lengthy process of self-reflection and analysis but rather a change of environment or an appeal to the police. Only the abuser can change his or her own behaviour. That is unless he or she is forced to by the rule of law. No amount of personal knowledge and insight by the victim will halt the perpetrator’s abuse. These biological, hereditary, racial and environmental explanations of the causes of mental distress demonstrate the narrow scope and limited perspective of psychoanalytic theory. Trouble also comes from the real world, not just from within.

I spent the next year and a half in analysis building up to the point where I felt confident about coming off the medication. I hoped that the psychoanalytic process of rooting about in my unconscious would provide me with the inner resources to handle another depressive episode if, God forbid, another one crept up on me. My increased insight would give me the necessary strength. But it did not.

Biological madness
When I came off the medication I felt myself spiraling out of control. Self-knowledge didn’t seem enough. However, my analyst assured me that courage was required to avoid medication again, and that my current mental distress could be worked through. But I felt the chemistry going, that I was crossing the line into madness. My anxiety and depression had their own force and momentum, and I could not halt their relentless course. I yearned for practical coping strategies and tools to manage the anxiety. I desperately tried to recall what I had learnt in my few sessions of CBT. These practical behavioural approaches ran contrary to the ideas of psychoanalysis. My analyst perceived these methods as just ‘bloody management’, which fail to get to the root of the problem. They are temporary, shallow and artificial devices that do not set out to ‘cure’ and ‘heal’, but rather to ‘dampen down’ and to ‘manage’. Eventually I returned to my psychiatrist, who prescribed medication again.

Andrew Solomon, in his book The Noonday Demon, refers to his depressive breakdown as the point where ‘once you cross over, the rules all change. Everything that had been written in English is now in Chinese’. After nearly three years of lying on the couch, I might have possessed a greater intellectual understanding of the aetiology of my mental distress, but my symptoms still persisted, and with the same vigour and menace. I lay on the couch, in the midst of a panic attack and feeling suicidal, and sadly, all my analyst could offer me in terms of support was yet another interpretation. ‘You must examine again your early relationship with your mother.’ He said this with conviction, as if it provided the answer to all my distress, as if this insight would relieve me of my suffering. And at that moment I knew that analysis could not offer me anything else.

The impossibility of closure
When I announced that I wanted to terminate my therapy I was accused of being unwilling to fully commit myself to the process. My failure to completely let go, to fully trust in the analyst and his methodology, to open up, to expose all of myself, to relinquish my ego – I could go on – meant that my distressing symptoms would persist. My analyst cited that when I was particularly anxious, I used to charge straight into the toilet as soon as I entered the building and empty my bowels. Quite literally, I couldn’t contain myself. Now frustrated and angry, he declared that I unconsciously wished I could shit on him – according to his interpretation, this was my ultimate fantasy. If my anger were not repressed, if I were bolder, then I could speak instead of shit, I could confront him with words rather than faeces. According to this hypothesis, my depression was a kind of internalized violence. When my legitimate anger against others could not express itself, well … then it turned inwards, to self-contempt and self-destruction. This was his interpretation of my distress, which he assumed to be the root cause of my anxiety and depression, and he applied it rigorously. He knew what my shit really meant, and he told me so.

There was indeed some truth in my analyst’s explanation. I did feel angry. But I also felt very sad and confused. And these two feelings prevailed as my anger subsided. I asked myself, ‘How would this challenge to his dominance help me? Would it lift me out of my despair, just to enter into a conflict with him, to feel powerful?’ According to the rather brutal, pessimistic dog-eat-dog worldview of psychoanalytic theory, it would. This reminds me of the school bully, who having spent years being bullied himself, finally gets to the position where he can dominate others, where he can become the bully. And he takes up this role with relish. The analysand becomes the analyst. Now it’s his turn to be tough with his patients.

But when I did challenge his interpretation and deny the therapeutic value of his interpretation, my objection was not taken as a statement of truth but rather as a projection of my fantasy, an act of denial. The analyst alone, sitting aloof in his chair and looking down at his patient, can see the truth. He can be counted on to tell the patient what he or she really means. He is the best judge of what the patient is really thinking and feeling.

But how can this be? For what qualifies him to suddenly be in the position of authority. The psychoanalytic institution would respond, ‘Because he has been vigorously analyzed himself.’ But how can analysis be measured? Perhaps by the number of hours, or by the level of intellectual content, or by the number of tears shed? No, the process is too unique, too subjective. Every analysand’s experience is so different. Suffering cannot be universalized.

I was unsure what else I could do in analysis, what else I could gain from the process. I had entered therapy to relieve the burden of my memories and to be happy again. I had carefully reflected on my past experience as the process required. I had listened to the analyst’s interpretations, considered and incorporated them into my present life. I had made a systematic, concerted effort to make my unconscious conscious. According to psychoanalysis, if I took all these steps and pursued them with vigour and commitment, my suffering would be alleviated. And yet after my long and passionate commitment to a process, an ideology, an institution and a practice that I hoped could help me and lift me out of the dark, I was still deeply unhappy. I had put my faith in a psychological process that had failed to help me – though it would probably still maintain, even now, that this was my failure rather than its own.

I left analysis still suffering from bouts of crippling anxiety and depression. I left analysis still feeling emotions that often seemed completely senseless and unmanageable. It was a valuable intellectual exercise in self-awareness, but beyond this internal exploration of my unconscious it did not offer any practical solutions to my mental distress, it did not alleviate my suffering. It was not as therapeutic as it believed itself to be.

Believing in a more compassionate and humble approach
And now, a few months since I ended my analysis, I feel better, a whole lot better. Psychoanalysis insisted it could understand my experience in the format of theory alone. But to its great detriment, it did not meet my basic emotional needs and it did not nurture my built-in resources to help myself. It was unbending about the ultimate truth of its own approach. It was sure that it alone – as opposed to any other therapeutic method, faith, belief system or ideology – possessed the key to unlock the secrets of men’s and women’s hearts. It was blind to any other way of seeing the world. Human experience has shown itself to be too unique, varied, enigmatic and ambiguous. Life, at every corner, seems to resist definition and categorization. Different people need different things. Likewise, different theories and methods work for different people.

Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1964
Griffin, Joseph and Tyrrell, Ivan. Psychotherapy and the Human Givens. Human Givens Publishing, 1999
Hayman, Ronald. A Life of Jung. London: Bloomsbury, 1999
Masson, Jeffrey. Against Therapy. London: Harper Collins, 1989
Solomon, Andrew. The Noonday Demon. London: Chatto & Windus, 2001
Wolpert, Lewis. Malignant Sadness: the Anatomy of Depression. New York: Free Press, 1999

Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun”

Slovo, Vol. 9, No.1, 1996

Mikhalkov’s tale of life in the Russian countryside in the mid-1930s is an apparently idyllic one. A man and a woman deeply in love, a child they adore, and a family they cherish. The characters sing and dance in a beautiful and harmonious setting. But the destructive glare of Stalin gleams over them. The tensions of bravery and cowardice, honour and betrayal, freedom and constraint are played out. The film ends tragically, the protagonists scorched and burnt by ‘the sun of the revolution’. Burnt by the Sun is dedicated to all those who suffered in this way.

Mikhalkov’s portrayal of life in Stalinist Russia is rich in pathos and humour, chaos and harmony. The film is characterized by sharp contrasts in action and viewpoints. It opens with two conflicting scenes which reflect this directorial trait. Dmitrii, played by Oleg Menchikov, sits in a chair in his Moscow apartment, loads a pistol, puts it to his head, and pulls the trigger. The atmosphere, reminiscent of Chekhov, is dark and gloomy. The photography enforces this impression, light deliberately kept out of the cinematic frame. Set against this darkness is a scene of family bliss in a wooden hut in the countryside. Colonel Sergei Petrovich Kotov, played by Mikhalkov himself, bathes with his daughter, Nadia. The two of them play ‘the platypus’ together while Marussia looks on adoringly. These two carefully drawn scenes demonstrate the filmmaker’s ability to create atmosphere and delineate character. The method – casting simple and concise insights on the protagonists’ situations and their psychological responses to them – is characteristic of Chekhov. Atmosphere is elevated above plot and becomes vital to the film’s dramatic development.

Burnt by the Sun‘s treatment of the ills of Stalinist Russia is rich in subtleties, with instances of oppression and injustice touched by moments of parody and comedy. The Colonel’s steam bath is interrupted by ‘our tanks’, in the words of a distraught villager, which have come to ‘ruin the wheat’. Kotov mounts a horse bareback and gallops off to intercept them. The audience watches with delight as the courageous Colonel, to dramatic musical accompaniment, approaches Brigadier Commander Lapine, reveals himself as the Old Bolshevik hero, mocks the insolent soldier, and orders the tanks to turn back. The actions of the Soviet forces are potentially tragic for this small, fragile, rural community. But Mikhalkov injects sunlight and humour into them.

The main action takes place around a dacha situated in a State Home for Artists and Musicians (SHAM) outside Moscow. The period piece is Mikhalkov’s forte, and his detailed cinematic eye paints Renoiresque tableaux of the dreamy dacha, the beautiful river and woodland, and the characters which inhabit this environment. Dmitrii returns to his home disguised as a bearded blind man, a ‘wizard from Maghreb’. He makes a theatrical entrance into the dacha, goading and taunting individual family members, and then strips off his costume to everyone’s delight. Mikhalkov establishes immediately an awkward tension between the characters of Mitia and Marussia. He avoids dialogue and concentrates on the nervous actions of the young woman gulping down water and tapping her fingernails repetitively on the side of a glass. The camera lingers on the small detail of her wrists which are heavily scarred, her attempt to ‘obliterate’ Dmitrii from her consciousness ten years before. The emotionally charged encounter down by the river between Mitia and Marussia is disrupted by the comic nuisance of Civilian Defence Workers seeking out volunteers for gas training. Mitia has lured his lost love into the water, and forces her to remember their passionate night together in the boatman’s barn where he had read Hamlet to her and she had wept. While volunteers struggle to carry a fat, big-busted woman on a stretcher, Dmitrii demands, ‘I’m dead.’ A defence volunteer reports, ‘We leave the dead.’

The disorder and rowdiness of the river bank is juxtaposed with the calm and beauty embodied in the rowing boat between Sergei and his daughter. The hero of the revolution, with his name and a brash image of the sun tattooed on his arm, reveals himself as a tender and loving father, caressing Nadia’s soft feet. His daughter asks him, ‘Can we drift like this for all our lives?’ The screenplay is poetic and succinct. Mikhalkov demonstrates that he is an exquisite craftsman, achieving a perfect balance here between dialogue and the visual spectacle of the film format.

The dramatic tension of Burnt by the Sun is built up through intimation and ambiguity. The Russian filmmaker, in a Felliniesque vein, portrays the shooting of a near silent melodrama at particular points in his work. Sergei is sure that he can hear the faint creaking and grinding of bedsprings coming from one of the bedrooms in his dacha. Their pitch and volume grow in his mind’s eye – yes, Mitia and his wife are making love? And Dmitrii, through his sinister gas mask, stares at his sexual rival, the Colonel, who responds with his characteristic dazzling smile – yes, is Mitia intent on reclaiming what was his, Marussia’s deep love and his sweet home? The audience is unsure. Mikhalkov controls the viewer’s emotional and rational response. The audience is at once settled and unsettled, reassured then confused. The director and his crew achieve this in the delicate interplay of light and shadow. Mitia’s laughter ends in a groan and Sergei’s smile on the verge of tears. These undercurrents of emotion distinguish Burnt by the Sun as an exceptional piece of filmmaking.

Mikhalkov’s tale builds into something scary and ominous. When will the filmmaker reveal his anti-hero’s enigmatic purpose? Dmitrii, suffering neurotic alienation as direct consequence of his estrangement from his loving family and home, and his gradual identification with a brutal machine, cannot penetrate the intense love of Sergei and Marussia. The audience witnesses something akin to an explosion: an explosion of truth, despair, bitterness and resentment. ‘A car is coming in two hours’ to take the Old Bolshevik away. During the football match, a good proletarian game unlike ‘bourgeois’ and ‘middle class’ croquet and tennis, the viewer learns that Mitia, the pseudo ‘pianist’ and ‘musician’, works for the NKVD. During the Civil War he ‘fingered eight Generals from the White Army’, who were shot without trial. He was bought by the Colonel and his Bolsheviks like a ‘whore’. Then the full horrors of Stalin’s paranoid purges are forced on the audience. Dmitrii threatens Sergei with ‘five or six days crawling in his own shit’. Then he ‘will admit in writing that since 1920 he has worked for the Germans, since 1923 for the Japanese, and that he was a terrorist who wanted to murder Stalin’. ‘Confession is the source of justice’ in this cruel and twisted world. In his study for the last time, Kotov sits in his Red uniform and stares desperately at the framed photographs of Stalin and himself on the bureau. Mikhalkov depicts Sergei’s impending execution as the ultimate betrayal. He is Stalin’s brother-in-arms, he has his direct phone line, and yet these things mean nothing. As the assassins beat him to death in the car and dispose of the lost truck driver looking for ‘Zagorianka’, Stalin’s great balloon lifts off. The leader’s influence and power is absolute and universal. Everyone is burnt by the rays of his cruelty.

Burnt by the Sun ends where it began, in Dmitrii’s gloomy flat in Moscow. He lies in a bathtub, drowning in his own blood. He does not have the courage and strength to stay alive. His battle with life has come to an end. The powerful filmic metaphor of a burning sun hovers over him. Mikhalkov’s visual symbol of the malign forces of revolution stamps itself on the audience’s psyche. The pathos is complete. The directorial tone and method enforce this sentiment. In 1995 Burnt by the Sun was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture. It richly deserved both prizes.

“The Distinguished Assassin”, Second Extract

29th December ‘52

At Kirovskaya, Natasha stands on the escalator as it descends into the bowels of Moscow. She recalls how just over a week ago, on 21st December, she and a few other work colleagues had to celebrate Comrade Stalin’s birthday, there something obscene about this. For though the majority of people know that he is a tyrant, still they celebrate him, some out of coercion, others freedom. They were made to stand in front of the Institution and were instructed to sing happy birthday. “Enough of Koba!” Natasha remonstrates, and returns her attention to where she is, looking down the escalator and admiring the tall lanterns which illuminate this underworld. She gazes down, letting her eyes follow the parade of lights all the way to the bottom, their end marked by a small metal cabin in which sits, no doubt, a surly station attendant. She looks across at the other escalator, which ascends this great burrow and sees one other passenger, a lone man, some way off. The way he stands, hands in pockets, head cocked thoughtfully to one side, reminds her of Aleksei. She waits for him to come closer, and, as he does, as he nears her, Natasha looks at him intently. He doesn’t have Aleksei’s well-built frame and his face is obscured by a thick beard, yet it could still be him, she thinks. Natasha leans over, almost losing her footing, and as he comes up parallel with her she stares right at him, hoping to look into his eyes, but he doesn’t reciprocate her gaze, rather looks away awkwardly. Are his eyes green? She’s sure they are, yes. But not gentle, no, but then, how could they be, if it is indeed him, after what he’s been through. She’s instantly sure that it is him and so calls after him, “Aleksei, Aleksei!” But he doesn’t turn round, no, just looks straight ahead like he hasn’t heard her. “It’s you, isn’t it? Aleksei? Aleksei!” she screams.

The attendant … yes, there is one installed in the cabin at the bottom of the escalator, and as expected, she is surly too … is roused from her stupor of ennui, of civic duty, by Natasha’s frantic cries, and calls out, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” over and over.

At first, Natasha ignores her and continues to shout after the man. Only when he reaches the top of the escalator does he finally turn round, and though he’s too far away now, he seems to look at Natasha as if he does know her after all, is her lost husband, is Katya’s father, is Aleksei her true love … Aleksei Nikolayevich Klebnikov. But then he disappears out of sight.

“Have you gone mad?” the attendant bellows into her ear.

“It’s nothing to do with you, okay,” Natasha shouts back, stepping off the escalator.

“Yes it is, when you’re making a show of yourself and disturbing other comrades.”

“Look around you! There are no other comrades!”

“What am I then?”

“Oh, just get back in your bloody box, will you?” Natasha quips, and walking away, onto the platform, she worries that the attendant might follow her, report her, but she doesn’t, she leaves her be. Perhaps, for her, sisterhood precedes Soviethood.

Was it him? Natasha asks herself again. No, it can’t have been, he’s in a labour camp. Had he escaped, Vladimir would’ve told her. If it were him, he would have acknowledged her sooner, would’ve come to her. No, it wasn’t him, she concludes.

And yet she feels him here in her heart, and she touches her chest at this moment, senses he’s close by, that he is here in Moscow. Yes, she has always been able to feel him, to know when he’s near.

A train is coming; Natasha hears its murmur growing louder. God, she is talking of Aleksei like she’s with him again, like he never left her. But he didn’t leave her, he was taken from her. Why does she feel him again? There must be a reason. Yes, perhaps this intuition is right and she must accept that Vladimir is still lying to her and always will, that he isn’t a reformed character, hasn’t had a great change of heart.

The train pulls up alongside the platform. She gets on. However, is she not deluding herself with this feeling? Perhaps her heart has concocted it, and it represents one last desperate bid to bring Aleksei back even though he’s never coming back!

Natasha rubs her forehead with the tips of her fingers, vainly hoping that this physical gesture might relieve some of the pressure of her thoughts, lessen their power, their effect. The woman sitting opposite gazes at her with a worried look, as if observing someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and maybe she is near to mental collapse, Natasha wonders.

View the book The Distinguished Assassin

“Don Don”, Chapter 2

I opened my eyes at three o’clock in the morning as the temple bell tower sounded: I always woke at the same time. I no longer required the gong to wake me; rather I simply used it as a prompt to bring me from sleep back into awareness, into the present moment. I sat up, arched my back and rotated my neck; then slowly ran my right hand over my shaved head, feeling its texture and shape.

Next I put my hands to the floor, lifted my knees to the ground and leant forward on the hard mat I slept on, stretching my spine like a cat that has just woken from a deep sleep. I noted the silence, then pulled back the blind of the umbrella-tent and looked out onto the forest, still dark, a black canopy of tropical evergreen.

I reached for the lantern, lit it and watched the flame burn, its orange dance different every morning. Next I carefully extended my right leg, feeling it straighten and tense, until it was outside the tent, then leant forward and ducked my head underneath the blind, allowing my whole body to curve and follow like the passage of a swan’s neck after it has finished grooming and lengthens itself once more, this movement so smooth and graceful, my whole body aligning itself as I brought my left leg parallel with my right.

Standing upright I felt the dirt and leaves underfoot, their texture and dampness. I held the lantern aloft and made my way down to the lake, noting every step, feeling the movement of my long arms and legs and the brush of wild orchids against my ankles and shins, and when I reached the water’s edge I crouched down, sitting on my heels, and set the lantern beside me, which illuminated a small cluster of lotus flowers that added color to the dark murky green of the lake.

I placed my hands on the water’s surface, skimmed the tips of my fingers across it, then moved them in a circular motion – my fingers seeming to dance on water like a water strider – the water swirling then rippling. When I submerged my hands I heard the water swish and as I cupped my hands together and threw water in my face I heard it splash.

This moment always gave me pleasure, the commencement of morning ablutions; the first touch of cool water on my skin like morning dew on a blade of grass. I felt it on my forehead, my eyelids, my cheeks, my jaw – the steady trickle of water down my face; this face of mine which was uncommon amongst my people, long and narrow rather than round and flat, and that was typified by my nose which according to Sunnato appeared almost Roman at a certain angle rather than Thai…

View the book Don Don