Philobiblon

The England of The Libertine has been a on 15-year-long binge – a binge of drinking, and fucking* and every other kind of debauchery that its brightest and best could dream up. Suddenly, however, the “hair of the dog” has become ineffective and through the lens of director, Laurence Dunmore, you see a society abruptly awakened.

It is opening its eyes to a grim, grey and desperate land; even the gaudy decorations of the theatre are fading, peeling, corroding. But John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (Johnny Depp), the man who has always shone above the rest, is not prepared to turn his path towards righteous, restrained endeavour that fits the new era – will not, and perhaps cannot.

I’ve always thought of Depp as a pretty-boy actor (when I’ve thought of him at all), but he turns in a stunning performance here, book-ending the film with wry, searingly honest monologues in which the twitch of the corner of an eye speaks volumes. And he manages to be both awful, and awfully attractive.

Yet he is almost eclipsed by Samantha Morton, playing his protege, the actress Elizabeth Barry, who, however much she might have to play the whore in the wings, is determined on stage to be her own woman, and secure her own fame. The final scene between her and Rochester is a wonderful portrait of a woman who has fought for and achieved power – for her the power over the fickle, dangerous, but passionately loving London theatre mob.

John Malkovitch is powerful too as the King – the man who’d led the party when he was restored to the throne as a fresh-faced youngster, but who’s now an ageing roue, seeking, like any leader on his way out, to secure his legacy. He, as much as a king can, loves his subject Rochester, and he wants him to deliver for himself, but like any father, knows deep down that the Earl will always go too far.

But the star above all here is the camera – the way it peers through the murk to focus on a greasy strand of hair, a goosebumped arm, a bottomless pool of mud. You can almost smell and taste this rough, barbarian world – yet it is a world that values culture, wit and learning, a world the dissects and analyses every catch in Ophelia’s voice, inspects every line of a new play to find the one that rings true.

And the language of the film – the words of the earthy, blunt 17th-century street, of the rapier-fast wit of the aristocratic fop, and the orutund flow of the formal stage – is brilliant. (It is based on the play by Stephen Jeffreys, and it shows in a classiness and complexity seen in few movie scripts.)

There was really only one scene I thought didn’t work – the orgy in St James’s Park, or at least the orgy that Rochester imagines. It is far too tame, too Vaseline-lensed an affair for the imagination of Rochester, but then again the director had to get at least an 18-certificate for it.

That’s a reminder that for all the claims of the moralists, ours is an age far more uptight and hung-up than later 17th-century England. And in fact overall The Libertine is by no means an explicit film. A great many sexual things are suggested, but it never – thankfully – gets anatomical; it doesn’t need to.

The only other negative is the handheld camera work – spinning around a character in a slow circle is rather overdone, and the first-time director should immediately put away the technique of moving two characters in and out of focus as each speaks – very year-one film school.

Nevertheless, as a portrait of an age, and of a brilliant man who’s bent on sticking his hand in ever fire so that the pain can tell him he is alive, this film would be hard to beat.

I seldom go to the cinema, but my recommendation would be that even if you only go to one film a year, go to this one.

*I use the basic Anglo-Saxon here because it seems appropriate in the context of this film. (If it offends you here, you really don’t want to see it.) The film itself has very few of today’s “obvious” taboo words, but it might well revive a few of the old ones.

“Condoms”, “anal sex”, all sorts of previously banned terms are regularly bandied about by the mainstream media with scarcely a wince to be seen. Yet how often do you see the word “menstruation”? Nothing (necessarily) to do with the sexual act, so, you’d think, less likely to be taboo, but somehow it is still seen as something not to be mentioned in polite company, or “family newspapers”.

I’ve been reflecting on this after reading Menstruation: A Cultural History, edited by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, which provides a historical framework for understanding the strength of the taboo. Also, it makes clear how much beliefs about women contributed to the framing of women as inferior.

It starts, as so often, with Aristotle. For him, there was only one sex, females being merely an inferior form of male. This conclusion arose because as the normal human shape was male, for a woman to be capable of producing a male, menstrual blood must be male, in effect a lesser form of sperm.

When this got picked up by medieval cleric scholars who, theoretically at least, had no contact with women, it only got worse. Menstruation was a cleansing process – uniquely required by the female body – (so emmenagogues – preparations for bring on menstruation – could be seen as pro-natal, rather than abortifacients). Although I wonder how many women really understood what was going on. As a consequence of this belief, menstrual blood and women who were menstruating, could be seen as impure, and dangerous. (The process of churching women after birth certainly had something to do with this – although not according to official theology.)

And it meant that menstruating women would stain mirrors. “If a woman has this flow and looks into a mirror during this time, this mirror becomes like a bloody cloud. And if the mirror is new, one can hardly remove the red staining from the mirror, but if it is old, one can easily remove it,” said the Secreta Mullierum [Secrets of Women, written circa 1300.

Then such a lovely image: “Therefore Avicenna says that the uterus of women is like a toilet that stands in the middle of town and to which people go to defecate, just like all residues of the blood from all over the woman’s body go to the uterus and are cleaned there.” (p. 66)

And a menstruating woman can pollute in all sorts of ways – speaking to one makes a man’s voice hoarse; a baby conceived when a woman is menstruating would become leprous, it could give children the evil eye, and sex with a menstruating woman could give men all manner of diseases.

It is not until the 20th century that you start to get to heroes in this story – usually female doctors and researchers, the “most definitive expression of the approach” was in The Hygiene of Menstruation: AN Authoritative Statement by the Medical Women’s Federation in 1925, which said: “Menstruation is a natural function; it is not an illness, and girls should therefore continue their normal work and play during the period. It should not be and is not normally accompanied by pain or malaise.” (p. 112)

Yet there were still social hangovers. In 1926 Johnson & Johnson printed a “silent purchase coupon” for Modess sanitary napkins, so it “may be obtained in a crowded store without embarrassment or discussion”. But still women complained that the shape of the box was easily identifiable. (p. 250)

(Tampons, by the way, for the historical record, were patented in 1931 and put on sale in 1934.)

What strikes me is that growing up in the early Seventies in Australia I was still affected by many of these attitudes. Mum told me carefully that I had to make sure Dad didn’t see my sanitary pads. (I don’t recall any explanation being given, there was just an air of this being something shameful and dirty.) And this wasn’t surprising when I read the sex education books that she’d had at my age, which still referred to “clearing out impurities” in the body and similar.

I wonder what messages young teens get today. Are they any better?

* An interesting side-point: a 14th-century London cleric wrote that some girls started menstruating “in the eleventh or in the tenth year. And at that point they are capable of conception.” Which certainly doesn’t seem to square with our ideas about medieval nutrition and health. (p. 55)

The technical definition of “drought” is of prolonged, abnormally dry weather. Yet somehow, whenever I check in on the Australian rural world, most of Australia is “in” drought, or “just coming out of” drought, or “facing” a drought. There’s a simple failure here to face the reality of the continent’s climate. It is dry, normally dry, and Australian agriculture is often trying to do things that the climatic conditions cannot support.

I thought of this when I read a piece in the Guardian suggesting that one in ten pre-school children might be suffering from mental illness. Now I assume that most people would agree that mental illness is by definition an abnormality. But if one in 10 in a population is suffering from something, isn’t that just a variation of normal, and something that should be catered to and allowed for, rather than “treated”?

“What do women WANT?” It is a classic question asked by an anti-feminist bloke, usually with a stagey layer of overlaid sarcasm, implying that half of the human race is unreasonable and impossible to satisfy. And if they are unhappy, it is neither this man’s fault, nor any other man’s.

The Women’s Library has the perfect answer, in its exhibition titled simply What Do Women Want?” Drawn entirely from its collections, covering a span of around 150 years, it comes to the conclusion that women over that time have wanted broadly the same things – access to decisionmaking in public and private spheres, safety, opportunity, respect …. and they’ve had to keep fighting for them, because they have often not been delivered until decades of campaigning, and even when delivered, they’ve been continually under threat.

As is usual with Women’s Library exhibitions there is a strong interactive component, developed here through an innovative design. It looks a bit odd at first glance, but it grows on you. Each section of the exhibition has its own “tower”, from which accompanying artworks – created for it – are strung, while it also forms a desk where visitors are invited to write their comments. These contributions take up one whole wall of the exhibition, and as usual make likely reading.

Housework, and why it is still seen as a woman’s job, is the scene of one of the hottest debates. Comments range from a joyous “hurray, don’t do it”, to a despairing “because it is crap work”, to the sarcastic “because men don’t do it ‘properly’ … clever boys”. Read more

I was questioning earlier today the claims that self-harm is a modern phenomenon, and a small piece of admittedly anecdotal evidence can be found in H.V. Morton’s The Spell of London, first published in 1926. At this time there was a special river police station under Westminister Bridge. Morton, after reporting that nine out of ten suicide attempts on the Thames in London were made from this bridge, asks:

“How many Londoners know that day and night a police boat waits in the shadow of the bridge?
It is tied to its morrings by a loose knot. One pull and it is free. It is a curious boat. At the stern is a roller.
‘Have you ever tried to pull anyone out of water into a small boat>’ asked a policeman. ‘If so, you’ll understand why that roller is there.'”

Then Morton visits a nearby room for the reception of would-be suicides, including a hot bath and neat bundles of dry clothing, for men and women.

“Does a suicide repent and welcome rescue as soon as he touches the water?’ I asked.
‘Not often,’ they replied.
‘Mostly they fight and try to get back into the water,’ said the patrol sergeant.
The three of us say in the Suicide Room, and the two policemen swapped memories of rescues. I wish I could tell some of the stories, but they were not quite — You understand?” (pp. 42-43)

With such elaborate arrangements, you get the feeling there must have been an awful lot of suicides.

And of course the other “great” suicide spot of the era was what is now the Hornsey Lane Bridge over the start of the A1 in Archway. (I used to live just down the hill from it.) It was the higest public point in London for many years, so I’ve read, and it still has a Samaritans phone on it.

Watch out if you are cycling in central London. This afternoon at about 3pm at Holborn Circus there were eight – count ’em eight – police standing around (well two of them were on bicycles). Terrorist scare? armed robbery? you are probably thinking.

No, they are cracking down on cyclists’ behaviour on the road. Not other road-users, just cyclists.

Now there are undoubtedly some cyclists who do need to be penalised – one tore past me when I was stopped at lights in Whitechapel a little later, scattering pedestrians. If he was booked, I wouldn’t complain at all, except that I doubt the cops could catch him.

But what did a police officer have cause to take me to task for at Holborn Circus? I drew up at a red light, and since a taxi was occupying all of the marked bicycle space on the road, at the front of the queue, I went forward of the bicycle stop line, although still back from the pedestrian crossing space. I took back about a third of the space to which I am entitled, to make sure the taxi couldn’t suddenly decide to turn left across the front of me.

So a middle-aged policeman came bustling over and started to lecture me. I pointed out that he should have been lecturing the taxi-driver, he claimed I’d been there before the taxi, I suggested that I’d be happy to look at the CCTV, since I knew I hadn’t. He started to bluster, then the lights changed and that was that. (Well the bike courier bloke said “good on you” to me as he left.)

As I’ve posted previously, my encounters with London police have given me a general view of incompetence, laziness and bullying – now that feeling has only been multiplied.

Oddly enough, the policeman didn’t pick on the cyclist beside me – a large, young, male courier, and he didn’t pick on the taxi driver, who’d broken the law first, forcing me to do likewise if I had concern for my own skin (perhaps because the taxi-driver was a middle-aged bloke like him with whom he identified). I, however, was the helmeted, well-dressed, middle-class cyclist – perfect target, he thought, for a bit of hectoring.

I should be, by class and social position, a natural supporter of the police, but I’ve now decided there is nothing about the London force that is worth supporting. (And that’s without mentioning the crazy way they drive – I consider a speeding police car one of the greatest threats to cyclists in London. Yes ambulance drivers go fast too, but they seem to do so with a great deal more sense – and usually, I suspect, more reason.)