Favourite illustrations: a coach from hell

[Was originally going to write this for a publisher’s website as part of an “Illustrations I love” series I had been invited to contribute to – but I procrastinated with such fierce determination that the series winded up before the piece could be done]

Page 24 of chapter 5 of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s stunning From Hell ends with this wide panel, which holds me in thrall whenever I look at it – though there is also a tiny fear that I will be sucked into the scene it depicts.

As you can see, these are the main elements of the drawing: a woman walking along a dark, deserted road, a coach coming up behind her, the silhouettes of two men visible in the driver’s seat– the coachman holding his whip, sitting next to him a man wearing a top hat. Most of the light in this scratchy black-and-white image is behind the coach, giving the impression that it has emerged from some great mist. (Or through a magic portal. There are concentric circles in the portion of the drawing that frames the carriage – swirling fog, or a vortex to hell?) The woman’s features are indistinct but her face is lit up as if by the coach’s lamp, enough for the reader to register that she has only just noticed the vehicle and is looking up at it with childlike curiosity.

The scene could be from fairytale or myth, a version of the Wolf stalking Red Riding Hood, but it is a fictionalised depiction of an encounter that really did take place around 3 AM on August 31, 1888 near the Whitechapel Road in London’s squalid East End. Purely at the level of narrative, this is a crucial panel in From Hell: the first meeting between the serial killer widely known as “Jack the Ripper” and one of his victims (the prostitute Polly Nichols). A full 130 pages (and at least 800 drawings – I’m not counting) into a graphic novel that uses the Ripper murders as a sharp dissection of the Victorian Age, an unveiling of London’s architectural secrets and a foreshadowing of the 20th century, this is the first time we see killer and victim together in the same frame. (No spoiler alert needed – this book is not a whodunit.)

Thematic importance aside, I love the image on its own terms. There is something almost impressionistic about it – no real detailing, just light and shadow used so skilfully (see how the right side of Polly's dress is partly illuminated while the left remains in darkness) that one gets the gist of what is happening without being able to describe the specifics. Elsewhere in the story, including in the panels that neighbour this one, you can see Polly’s features clearly, but that isn’t necessary in this drawing, which has a symbolic function and is also a sort of punctuation mark – dramatically ending a page that has, over the previous six panels, shown us this poor woman staggering along the road, looking for a customer so she can earn the “doss money” she needs to sleep in a boarding house at night, singing a song to herself while the light of the coach slowly, slowly creeps up behind her...and then.

(“I want this to be dramatic, with the coach a large and dark engine of the apocalypse,” wrote Alan Moore in his panel description to Eddie Campbell; you can see the whole page and Moore’s script for it here.)

To really appreciate the drawing, you have to see it not just in the context of the rest of the page, but the rest of the chapter, and finally the whole book taken together. In the scenes that follow this image, the Ripper – cast here as the royal surgeon Sir William Gull – will invite Polly into his carriage, offer her opium-laced grapes and direct the coach to the nearby London Hospital, in the gardens of which a lonesome figure – the deformed “Elephant Man”, Joseph Merrick – can be seen from a distance. After asking Polly to say the words “Salutation to Ganesha”, Gull will strangle her, thus commencing – with the blessings of the elephant-headed God – what he sees as a sacred mission. Sir William’s delusion is that by killing these women according to Masonic ritual, he is performing the divinely mandate task of suppressing the “irrational”, feminine side of the human consciousness. In this view of things, the coming together of killer and victim is a moment with cosmic significance: as Gull puts it elsewhere, they are to be “wed in eternity”. (Note: this is true of the Jack the Ripper story even at a more mundane level, beyond the colourful conspiracies involving the Royal family and Freemasons: a never-identified assailant and his destitute victims are entwined for all time in the popular imagination.)

The coach image is also an arresting one given the overall visual language of chapter 5 (titled “The Nemesis of Neglect”). Early in the chapter, there have been a series of pages that have contrasted Gull’s privileged life with Polly’s hand-to-mouth existence. Thus, the doctor wakes and stretches languidly in his plush bedchamber, while the unfortunates of the East End sleep in the cold, sitting up against a wall, with a rope stretched out in front of them to prevent them from falling forward. And Campbell employs different drawing styles to emphasise the divide between the two settings: water-colour drawings make Gull’s world lush, while Polly and her friends are drawn in the gravelly black ink that is more typical of the book.

This juxtaposition continues for a few pages. And it is apt that the drawing which finally unites ("weds") the two characters has an abstract quality: it definitely isn’t the smooth water-colour style employed for the earlier Gull scenes, but it is dreamier, more poetic than the deliberately coarse style that Campbell uses elsewhere.

Choosing this image to discuss here doesn’t mean it is my favourite drawing in From Hell – there are dozens of others I could just as easily have cited. When I first read this book years ago, I concentrated on the story – on the brilliant wealth and depth of detail Moore brings to his central conceit, and how he fits the facts of the Ripper case to his own speculative fiction. But as I revisit it these days I find myself looking ever more closely at the images and discovering new things in them. (This is even more rewarding if you have the book on DVD and can look at large versions of the pictures – though that is a time-consuming process since there are thousands of them.)

P.S. As a From Hell obsessive, I can't believe I didn't know about this new companion volume. Put together by Campbell, it includes (among other things) many of the detailed scripts Moore wrote for each of the 500 pages - a fascinating insight into the writer's incredible mind, as well as into the process of creative collaboration.

Child in time: thoughts on Richard Linklater’s Boyhood

“I don’t want to live my life through a screen,” says 17-year-old Mason Jr in a late scene in Richard Linklater’s exquisite new film Boyhood. Within the narrative, Mason – a sensitive young man with an artistic temperament – is fretting about the pressures of staying visible on Facebook and other social media; that these things now seem to validate your existence, and he wants to switch off from them. But at an extra-narrative level too, the line is resonant – because young Ellar Coltrane, who plays the role, has lived so much of his life on the screen created by this remarkable project.*** Though a scripted fiction film, Boyhood was made in installments over 12 years, capturing Coltrane’s own growth from age seven to age 18. In the finished work, when Mason speaks about how futures can seem pre-ordained, how it can feel like the path ahead has been mapped out, one hears an echo of the actor who, as a child barely comprehending the scale of what he was getting into, became part of Linklater’s grand vision.

Time, and what it does to people and their relationships, is one of the big themes of Linklater’s cinema – most famously demonstrated in the three “Before” films made over 18 years with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy – but even by his standards Boyhood was a risky experiment that could easily have crumbled in the execution, or worse, have come off as one giant gimmick. An important difference between watching Hawke and Delpy age over the course of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight and watching Coltrane grow up in Boyhood is that the latter was so young and vulnerable when this project began. In this interview he says he doesn’t even remember his first meeting with his director, and barely has any memory of the first 2-3 years of shooting. One might say that the concept of “performance” (which implies self-awareness to begin with) doesn’t apply in the normal sense to his early scenes.

To a degree, that is true for all child actors, and there is a danger of making the story of Boyhood’s filming sound more dramatic than it was. From what I know, though scenes were shot every year, each schedule took only a few days or weeks; Coltrane wasn’t like a willing version of Jim Carrey’s Truman in The Truman Show, under a camera’s scrutiny for every minute of his growing-up years. He continued to live his own life, as the other cast members did. Still, it couldn’t have been a quite normal childhood (whatever the ideal of “normal childhood” is). And though Boyhood is a lovely, absorbing film on its own terms, while watching it I kept thinking about the effect it must have had on the young actor.

What is it like to be the subject of such an experiment from an early age? How does your own (nascent) self get shaped by and subsumed in the character you are playing, and how does the role affect your own future real-life decisions? In his “young adult” scenes, Coltrane projects such a calm, mature personality it is hard to imagine that in real life he might be a different, more boisterous person. In his interviews too, he sounds like Mason, and some of his own interests – in photography, for instance – were absorbed into the film’s script. When Linklater picked the six-year-old all those years ago, he must have seen the seeds of the qualities he wanted for his protagonist. But could the very process of being filmed every year also have contributed to making Coltrane more inward-looking, more understanding of creative processes? And is it significant that though Coltrane cooperated with his director unfailingly, year after year, Linklater’s extroverted daughter Lorelei (who plays Mason’s sister Samantha) told her dad at some point that she didn’t want to participate anymore; couldn’t he kill her character off?

Watching the transitions in Mason’s (or Ellar’s) features over the film’s three hours – dreaminess and reticence shifting into something like confidence, a sense of a young person becoming comfortable in his skin (without losing his vulnerability) – I began free-associating, thinking of other films and books. The Antoine Doinel films made by Francois Truffaut, for example, in which Jean-Pierre Leaud played the central character from age 12 on, beginning with The 400 Blows and ending with Love on the Run 20 years later. Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table, in which a boy’s three-week ship journey between Sri Lanka and England becomes a symbol for “the floating dream of childhood”, the vast ocean unmarked by milestones. (In Boyhood, Mason Jr’s pre-teen life seems to go by like a dream, with people and houses flitting in and out of sight, and around half the film deals with his life between age 16 and 18.) Or even the strange career of child actors like Mayur, who played the young version of Amitabh Bachchan so often that by the time he did it in Laawaris – as a gangly 16-year-old – he had all the expressions and movements down pat, even in the little jig he does while listening to “Mere Angne Mein” on the radio; he was performing in a pre-constructed mould.

These thoughts, though, were secondary to the experience to watching Boyhood unfold at its leisurely pace. Like much of Linklater’s other work, it is driven by naturalistic conversation and by a disavowal of clearly set-up dramatic situations for the characters to respond to in familiar ways. There are a few such situations here (which life doesn’t have them?) – a drunk stepfather terrifying his wife and kids at a dining table, a sweet old geezer from the Bible belt (Mason’s dad’s new father-in-law) gifting the boy a shotgun and assuming that everyone will be happy to go to Sunday church together – but they aren’t underlined. The obvious awkwardness felt by Mason, Samantha and their dad about the overt religiosity of the stepmother’s family doesn't lead to a “confrontation” or even a brief teenage outburst; instead the tension is diffused in a charming little moment when the siblings and their father whisper to each other about this “God thing” and the stepmom calls out jovially from a distance “I can hear you!”

Such is the “verite” nature of the film in any case that the dramatic moments aren’t presented in terms of a clear beginning, middle and end. Exhibit: a scene where Mason and Samantha and their step-siblings cycle up to their house and see Mason’s mother lying awkwardly on the ground while her husband yells at her. We don’t see the start of the fight or see him hitting her, we arrive right in the middle of a messy situation, disoriented, slowly piecing together what must have happened. This is slice-of-life storytelling at its sparest. And at the end here is Mason/Ellar, on the verge of being free from the screen at last, liberated and unsure in equal measure, looking ahead to a future that is no longer pre-ordained.

--------------------------------------

*** As David Thomson noted in another context, here are two opposing – but also complementary – meanings of “screen”: one involves concealment, the other exhibition.

Gabbar the fat lazy lout - Sholay, reassessed

I have written before about film-reviewing (and to an extent book-reviewing) not being taken seriously in this country; about how the culture of 300/400-word reviews in mainstream publications (and the all-important star rating) creates a circle where potentially good writers fall into bad habits, editors blithely delegate review-writing to almost anyone, not thinking of it as a discipline that needs experience or a particular skill-set, and standards fall so low that it becomes easy for filmmakers, scriptwriters and authors (the “creative people”) to say foolish things like “Critics are eunuchs in a harem.”

Every now and again, though, comes a reminder that overall things are probably better than they were a few decades ago (if only because we have more publications now with space for extended culture writing). This usually happens when I go through the archives of old magazines from the 1950s, 60s and 70s and note that “reviewers” and “critics” of the time had such a flip, disdainful attitude to what they were doing that they couldn’t even bother to use the characters’ names when discussing a film’s plot; instead they would use the actor’s real name, or even his nickname, and generally write the piece in the style of drawing-room gossip about a distant family member.

Here is an entertaining review I read recently, from a 1975 issue of Star and Style. The subject of the piece is a just-released little thing called Sholay, and I herewith attach the full document for your scrutiny (click to enlarge, or right-click and select "View image"):

In fairness, this is not by a long way among the most poorly written reviews I have read in these old magazines. But the casualness of the piece (after a first paragraph that makes at least a perfunctory attempt at saying something – that the skin of the film is impressive but not the main body, etc) is striking. Plot details are carelessly given away with no spoiler alerts (and this is very much a first-Friday review, not an extended analysis meant to be read after watching the film). No character names are supplied, even in one instance where it could lead to reader confusion. (“Hema using her own name in every sentence…”) Intriguingly the actor playing Jai is not mentioned even by his own name – instead there are only references to “Dharam’s friend” and even “Dharam and his co-killer”! And no, this is not because Amitabh Bachchan wasn’t yet a star – Deewaar had been released a few months earlier, and Zanjeer a full two years before.

In the midst of all this, there is the predictably reverential nod to the “understated” performances of Jaya and Sanjeev. But THIS *beat of drums* is far and away the best part of the review, the one that will bring a silly grin to Posterity's face:

Amjad, looking a short fat lout, is a far cry from the much-feared dacoit. The man cannot even run or fight and only keeps ordering or grimacing.

I wonder what the reviewer would have thought of Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag.

[More from old magazines here: Nirupa Roy's varicose veins, Dilip Kumar's tasty tongue]

How iPhone met my mother (and turned her into Darth Vader)

[Did this piece for the Daily O website]

A few years ago I bought my mom a computer and made her say hello to the internet. This was long-overdue and I had been feeling guilty about putting it off for so long. Naturally, there were teething troubles: I had to keep an eye on things, tell her not to get hysterical each time a notification appeared on the screen, or when a new window popped up and hid an earlier one. Being in a position to provide reassurances, to supervise these baby steps, made me feel smug and in control – which is not something I often experience when it comes to technology. (Even today, after switching on my laptop, I sometimes reflexively look for the little “VSNL dial-up” icon that made getting online – via a medley of shrieking bell sounds – such an adventure back in 1998.)

My new role as improbable tech-guru didn’t last long though. While I stayed safely atop my Luddite plateau – using my computer mainly for writing and for basic net use, congratulating myself if I managed to pull off something as complicated as taking a screen grab – my mother was scaling new peaks just because they were there. And because she had now been gifted an iPhone by a cousin, following which the laptop was relegated to its bag. Later, an iPad or some similar tablet-like thing arrived and conversations in the house began to pivot around the word “Apps”. The realisation that Skype could be accessed on a small device, easily carried about the house, came with a roar of triumph akin to that of the primitive ape-man in 2001: A Space Odyssey discovering that a large bone could be used to smash in enemies’ heads and thence lay the road to civilisation.

Watching a parent learn to stand on her feet – to probe the marvels of the world for herself without constantly pointing at things and asking questions (“What is a Cloud?”) – was poignant in its way, though I felt I could do without this bratty business of having a phone thrust at my face (“Look look, Jai has just come in – isn’t that an ugly beard?”) so my maasi could glare at me all the way from Chandigarh.

As this sort of thing continued, I became increasingly self-conscious about the bulkiness of my own laptop. Feeling like the Jedi masters must have felt on learning that their precocious student Anakin had not only surpassed their skills but was now also a bad-ass in a shiny black suit, dispensing storm-troopers across the galaxies, I tried suggesting to mum that she use her computer once in a while because, well, all those Engelbert Humperdinck and Pat Boone music videos look better on a big screen. But she had moved well out of my ether. Worse, having grown up much too fast, she was becoming faintly parent-like again. “Jai, you aren’t on WhatsApp?” was no longer said hesitantly (as if wondering if I were using something more sophisticated that she didn’t know about) – instead it had the sharp, accusatory timbre of those cold 1982 pre-school mornings: “You haven’t finished your milk?”

Much of this could still be shrugged off, but when I began eavesdropping on her video conversations I was mystified. Smart-phone and tablet technology is so empowering for people of a certain age – people who spent decades being in touch with loved ones only via snail mail and expensive long-distance phone calls – you’d think it would lead to actual talk: gossip about the good old days, the childhood and college years in Ludhiana and Bombay, the problematic parents and spouses.

Instead, all the conversation now is about the very gizmos they are using.

It began simply enough (“Neelu, the Wi-fi doesn’t seem to be working, let me use the phone connection instead” and “Yes I can hear you fine, but I can’t see anything... why have you kept your phone facing down?!”), but then progressed to:

“What? Viber? V-I-B-E-R? Okay, wait, I’ll just download it. I heard Tango was better?”

“It says downloading.”

“It still says downloading. Now it is asking if I want to upgrade the App. Should I upgrade the App?”

“Of course I sent you a photo of the new iPad. I sent it through MMS. Should I email it too? Where’s the attachment?”

“I don’t have FaceTime on my phone – this is an old phone – so I’ll move to the tablet, give me a minute, okay?”

Few of these conversations are decipherable to me, stuck as I am with my old machine. But why be surprised? In a post-modernist age where literature is mainly about literature and cinema is mainly about cinema – and where the done thing is to ruminate constantly about the medium one is operating in rather than supply fresh content – perhaps it's natural for new technology to facilitate the sort of communication where all you’re doing is talking about the new technology.

Or maybe she needs a little more time to outgrow the teen-slang.