CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

JULIAN TEMPLE’S TEENAGE EXORCISM

Toby Goldstein

Julian Temple’s directorial credits include masses of music videos as well as the cult Sex Pistols movie, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, but in recent years, he’s been obsessed with using the music he Knew so welt to explore his longtime grand passion—Britain’s teenagers. The result, in eye-popping explosions of technicolor movement, is Absolute Beginners, a film most people either love or hate. It’s a grandiose portrait of an era—late ’50s England —that attempts to span all four decades of teenage history and celebrate the spirit of independence which unites them. In the process, Absolute Beginners tells a love story, and examines gentrification, consumerism, race riots and neo-Nazi revivalism for good measure.

The basis of the film, a littleknown novel by youth chronicler Colin Mclnnes, was Temple’s point of departure. However, explains the director, matching the music to the film’s ideas offered his biggest challenge. “When you do a music video, you’re being paid to sell records and flatter a pop star. And when I was doing this film, I was concerned with exploring a number of ideas with music and visual images. It was difficult, in many cases, to get the music to do what I wanted. But on the other hand, that was a wonderful thing, to be able to change it. When you’re doing a video, you’re given a seven inch piece of plastic and they say, film this. Unless you scratch it or melt it, you can’t really change it.

“The other thing was, I was keen to use people who spanned the whole period from the ’50s to the ’80s. I had Ray Davies from the ’60s; I had David Bowie who comes

from the late ’60s-early 70s; I used Paul Weller and Jerry Dammers—people from the punk period; I had Sade and other people from the ’80s.’’

Temple achieves his sought-after musical unity in a way few other directors have managed to pull off when making films which tie storyline to song. Absolute Beginners bears little resemblance to movies like Flashdance, in which a chunk of plot sudden ly erupts into three minutes of music, and then it’s back to the plot again. Instead, this film remains in constant, violent motion, where the music is an integral part of the storyline. The director admits that Absolute Beginners shares its teenage fixation, dark images and musical fluidity with West Side Story, but maintains strong differences.

“I wasn’t trying to remake West Side Story by any means, but I think there is a similarity, that we were making a musical which touched on social themes, that was organized around a love story set in a teenage milieu, and especially the fact that there’s a racial theme in West Side Story, and there’s a racial theme in our movie. But, on the other hand, ours is trying to be more analytical about the English teenage phenomenon as well as a love story.”

American moviegoers may find that dimension of Absolute Beginners their biggest problem, simply because U.S. and English teenage life have followed such different paths. Just as Americans, with no experience of mods vs. rockers, found Quadrophenia tough going, there may be similar difficulties at identifying with the cool jive cats who live in poor but integrated neighborhoods. As Temple explains, crossing English society barriers and making English racial problems understood here would be hurdles he knew he might

not be able to overcome.

“To rebel against being English is a bit like being Houdini. When you get out of the chains, it's quite a miraculous thing. And English teens have come up with these theories of escape which have to be unpredictable each time, or they won’t work. And I think the constrictions of what they’re rebelling against have made it more exotic than anywhere else.

“There certainly has been controversy about (the racial aspect). People have accused me of sensationalizing

race riots and turning them into spectacle. But you’ve got to understand that’s what they are in England. They’re black kids getting so pissed off at being beaten up by policemen that they take over an area, aid white kids are involved as well. And when they set fire to a car, it is a statement of anger, but in another sense, it’s a form of entertainment.

“England is a very funny country at the moment. A lot of people have no jobs and have the feeling they have no future. And I wanted to provoke some thought about that.”

TALKING BOOKS

BOOKS-ON-CASSETTE (Various Companies)

Richard C. Walls

Obviously, the empire’s about to fall. First there was rock ’n’ roil, then the Playboy Channel, then Chuck Norris movies, and now this, the latest landmark in American culture’s de-evolution from its Elysian heights of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, to

the post-Spielberg dungeon of mush-minded swill that threatens to engulf us all... yes, it’s the dreaded books-on-cassette.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But after investigating this latest phenomenon/fad/craze and/or new cultural fixture and actually sampling a variety of these here book/cassette things, I think this perception may be a wee bit extreme. For one thing, it seems that book cassettes will mainly appeal to the already literate—just because many of these b/c’s have been abridged doesn’t mean that they’ve been rendered into basic stoopio(; a surprising amount of whatever complexity of style, plot, and character was in the original usually remains (which is why, even as a pedestrian, I have reservations about book/ cassette listening while driving—if some clown is bearing down on an intersection at the usual 10 or 20 mph’s over the limit, I’d prefer that he or she not be trying to unravel all the piot threads of The Little Drummer Girl). As for the argument that abridgements screw up the author’s intentions, there’s something to that, though it has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Obviously, abridging a long serious work like Gore Vidal’s Lincoln so it can be read aloud in a few hours is going to reduce it to a sampler (but even then the listener can decide if he actually wants to read the book)—on the other hand, something like Stephen King’s Thinner can only be improved by abridgement since one reads King for the plot and the peaks, not for the philosophical asides. Of the literally hundreds (OK, dozens...well, about 15) abridged tapes I listened to, only two were noticeably impaired. One was a two-hour version of Orwell’s 1984, which seemed especially truncated during its climactic passages—the book loses much of its impact without every chilling nuance of Winston Smith’s torture and conversion. And Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer, squeezed into two-and-a-half hours and read by Martin Balsam (the only really bad reading in the lot I heard) was more than abridged; and a bowdlerized Tropic is more or less pointless.

But most of what I heard was pretty good and answered the question that those of us who neither jog nor spend that much time in cars may pose, which is why not just read the damn books? Two reasons: a) there’s a special quality to being read to, a pleasantly contemplative and not necessarily unintellectual activity that many of us have not engaged in since childhood and b) more often than not the tapes offer the added pleasure of a dramatic performance. Whether it’s Christopher Lee reciting Poe’s gloomy accretions with a tone of sensual menace, or Paul Sorvino bringing the proper pulpish exuberance to the aforementioned Thinner or the ever-hammy Isaac Asimov reveling in his own cleverness (though, just as British actors guarantee a flawless reading, authors reading their work is a gamble) or Brit actor Stephen Moore turning into an entire repertory theater to properly serve up Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide tetralogy... well, you get the point.

I’ve barely scratched the surface—many b/c services offer unabridged books, some rent rather than sell their products, and fiction’s just a part of what’s offered. There’s also self-help books (two actual titles: You Deserve To Be Rich and Change The Channel On Pain; make up your own jokes, I’m running out of space), history books, original romance novels (I actually acquired a complimentary cachet of these, though I couldn’t bring myself to listen—but my crack research assistant Elizabeth Finnegan, who endured the assignment with more joy than she’ll admit to, reports that they were “breezy, full of sexual cliche, and sex period. Pithy quote: ‘Jared’s kiss was hungry and branded her with the stamp of ownership and love.’ Good for a long convalescence...”), your basic classics, the whole gamut.

Best Bets: free catalogs can be had from the following reputable firms:

Listen For Pleasure Ltd.— 417 Center St. Levinston, N.Y. 14092 Recorded Books—

6306 Aaron Lane, Clinton, Md. 20735

Listening Library, IncOne Park Ave., Old Greenwich, Conn. 06870 Cassette Book Co.—

Box 7111, Pasadena, Calif. 91109