The Last Post

"Please take these words and do with them what you would like. It's a dream I had, it drove me mad. It's just your time, it's just my fucking life."

Before we begin...either those kids got assaulted or they got dragged through a media circus to make some more cash for the whores posing as their parents. Either way they got raped and they're forever damaged. The only innocence that meant anything in this whole sorry spectacle is long since lost, and any voyeurs are indicted by implication. That means you, me, and everyone else that has an opinion on the subject. So spare me. We're all sitting in the same boat, it's just that some of us can admit we're hypocrites while the others still believe they're somehow above it all. Newsflash: Your shit stinks, too, and never more so than right now.

Which scandalous, egocentric rambling brings us right back home to the decidedly scandal-free, ego-driven scribbler who turned twenty-six today. It's an odd situation for the destructive romantic in me. A year ago, I'd have thought being stopped mid-masterpiece by the fates, the conspiracies, or the combined might of Mr. Jack and Mr. Marlboro a fitting way to end this project. After all, I wasn't looking for much in the way of a happy ending, and I certainly wasn't looking for what I found. No, this little collection of thoughts and feelings got turned around on me. One day I was staring at the bottom of a bottle, the next I was staring at the sky.

Seriously, I thought this journey would end with my coming to terms with my demons through words. I thought I'd take all the frustration I was easing with bottle and cigarette and make it into something that could make people understand the way I feel. It was and is an ego-trip. Never let any writer tell you any different. This was all about me, and about the issues I had with you. I wanted you to know me well enough that when I commented on something meaningful, you'd take it personally. I wanted you to empathise, though not necessarily sympathise. I wanted...I wanted you to get it, you know? I wanted to build you up with my story and then tear you down with what it gave me. I wanted you to see the world I see, and then the worlds I build to escape it. Notes From A Darkened Room was a series of postcards sent to random addresses in the vain hope that someone somewhere would write back, even if only to say 'fuck you'. I'd gotten trapped between these four walls, and I needed to know that the thoughts in my head could still fly beyond them. A stupid and arrogant idea, yes, but an honest one. And if anything struck a chord, I think it was that confessional aspect. I was unable to avoid sharing my finest moments, and I couldn't resist the chance to fictionalise some of the more mundane. At the same time, though, I think I managed to reveal and then face down at least some of my worst fears and humiliations. If nothing else, it's certainly been a therapeutic experience.

Yes, that title is literal. Yes, I am talking about the Notes in the past tense. Yes, this is the end. There was a point when it was all evolution, when it all still came under this header, when it was just the one story. That point has passed. I'm not the same guy that wrote a little piece entitled Mr. Whippy's Lament a year ago, and to pretend otherwise is to watch its original meaning become increasingly diluted by time and circumstance. I am both closer to and more distant from those words, and they no longer mean what they used to. Sometimes a year passes in the blink of an eye, and sometimes you look back and can't believe you were that person in that place. That's life, They say, and - every once in a while - They're right.

So it's time I stopped looking over my shoulder at the ghosts of my father and the boy I was, stopped trying to define emotions I can neither relive nor ever really understand, and way past time I stopped seeing the world as this room and then everything else. I'm no longer the child stood terrified in front of a world that seemed to be all about compromise, about giving up my dreams and settling for second best. I've found a way to walk without staring at my feet.

So I'm giving the demons one last night to dance. It is, after all, my birthday. I've killed the lights and I'm letting this screen throw its luminescent ghosts to the breeze that slips in through the open window, bringing with it the faint scent of another summer night in suburban nowhere. In the distance, raised voices struggle to make themselves heard over the bland and endlessly repeating moans of the cars that pass through this small town, forever on the way to somewhere better. A kiss would taste of bourbon and cigarettes, my poisons since I was old enough to know better. A touch from the right hands would find replies I thought myself incapable of. And a three-letter question could only ever have one answer...

Because I hurled myself at the ground...and I missed.

Where Fallen Hearts Still Flicker

"I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad. These dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had..."

It was Lenny Bruce who said that tragedy plus time equals satire. While that kind of cynicism is always appealing, this boy has to believe that he isn't always ruled by such a dark mistress. Time dodges all cliches, even those that seem to stop it in its tracks with piercing and painful insight. Satire isn't such a great marksman at the best of times, and tragedy has it beaten by sheer weight of numbers.

I laughed at the hearts. I hated them. They were trapped inside a wedding card from my parents, and I freed them only because I tore open that fat envelope with careless greed. I wanted the money more than I wanted the wishes scrawled within. Transatlantic love is romantic enough to inspire the sighs of voyeurs, but it's nothing without funding.

We were on Interstate 15, Destiny Road, cutting through the heat-haze in our rented car, gazing at the mountains and never daring to look back. In our wake, the demons danced on sun-sick tarmac, snarling regrets as their claws tapped out angry rhythms on the asphalt. She kept us between white line and yellow, glancing across at me with a smile in her eyes as I ripped the paper and parted the card and a shower of tiny golden hearts exploded upwards and outwards, catching the light like so much glitter as they fluttered down into my lap. We laughed. We spared them no real thought. They were a minor inconvenience next to the message my mother had insisted I not read until we were together, next to the money that would pay for rings and words. When our initial euphoria subsided, I rescued as many as I could and threw them into my bag. We forgot them.

Lenny would have appreciated the smirking irony of those little hearts. Later, back in California, they leapt out onto the floor of her bedroom every time I reached for clothes. They stuck to our feet and got dragged all over her apartment, mocked us by lamplight as we sat watching television and the clock. The day I left, I looked down through a spray of warm water and watched one drown in the bath, struggling in the current before being dragged mercilessly to its death in the tiny whirlpool between my feet.

They were there on the plane, winking in the darkness beneath my bathroom bag as I reached for a book. They were there when I got home, jumping out to explore the fresh terrain of my bed while I organised my presents. When it was easy, when distance and time had yet to conspire against us, they were there, reminding me of sunlit roads and moonlit hotel rooms, of friendly bars and intimate conversations held against a backdrop of yelping slot machines, of the cheers and groans of the sin city chancers. They mingled with the flotsam of my bedroom, drifted happily on the tide of blandness I'm so rarely inspired enough to swim in. As the days and weeks went by, they disappeared beneath the waves.

Tragedy plus time equals satire. I appreciate that more than I used to. Sometimes, on the last leg of my journey home from a job I never wanted to a place I could never call home, I look up at the sky with a perspective born of frustrated dreams and a heavy heart. I see the stars not as pretty and easily dismissed pinpricks of light catching the stare of an unseen sun, but as worlds far bigger than my own made insignificant by distance. Looking up at the night sky is like looking into history. By the time that silvery luminescence reaches the eyes, years have passed. I'm staring at giants that have lumbered on, wondering at lights that have long since been extinguished. The distance across an ocean and a continent is a tiny and irrelevant thing in comparison. Still, it hurts; a swift, sharp knife between the ribs mocking a sword barely raised.

I do what I have to do. I get by. I return to a bedroom stale in more ways than one. Every night, I undress and climb into bed, reaching down for my phone, thumb dancing over the keys to set my alarm for the following morning. And in those long, empty seconds where I lay on my side waiting for the tiny screen to go dark, my eyes flit over the magazines, the CD and DVD and game cases, the clothes and the towels, the crumpled sheets of paper bearing the untidy graffiti of my dreams. The shrapnel of a life litters the floor, and here and there amongst it, those fallen hearts flicker like broken promises. I remember Lenny and I try to smile, try to remember that - for this boy at least - dreams plus time equal reality.

Movie Review/Rebuttal: Closer

"You can have my isolation. You can have the hate that it brings. You can have my absence of faith. You can have my everything."

Three scenes leap into my writer's mind: The first is of Patrick Marber sitting before his first final version of Closer feeling fulfilled, clever, and not a little bit proud. The second is of Clive Owen reading the screenplay and hitting a point somewhere amongst the many words where he realises that the role of Larry is, in fact, the cynical heart of the movie and a part he can really grab by the balls. The third is...well...it's this...

You see, they almost had me. I like Nichols as a director, and I enjoy Law, Owen, and Portman as actors. Julia Roberts I can take or leave. As for Marber's screenplay, it gives a romantic intro and then promises a cynical and REAL take on love, sex, and relationships, an antidote to all those Hollywood dreams of fairytale endings. Promises, but never delivers. Because this is a film as fake as those it seeks argument with.

Like Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Closer believes that in blowing the horn of compromise, lust, and apathy, it can somehow approach the realities of everyday relationships in a way that will arouse the viewer's sympathies. This, apparently, gives us real people in real situations with real emotions. It isn't a Hollywood daydream and it isn't some idealistic version of fairytale lives. It's gritty and rude and human.

It's bullshit.

The world of Closer gives us four protagonists - two male and two female - with little in common save for chance meetings and intense feelings. It is, in the simplest possible terms, a lingering look at the power of physical and emotional memory. On those terms, it is an effective and even powerful piece of work. As an examination of people and love, though, it is no more valid or human than, say, A Cinderella Story. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that such apparently superficial films have more in common with reality than Closer does. Shallow, fake, and idealistic they may well be, but at least they make some kind of attempt to confront human emotion where Marber and Nichols give us only weak cop-outs in the guise of serious commentary.

I don't know Patrick Marber, but I do know that his alter-ego in the screenplay isn't Jude Law's weak and underwritten Dan, rather Clive Owen's flawed and striking Larry. While Owen's performance in the film is undoubtedly deserving of the praise he has received, it isn't unfair to say that he had far more to grapple with in terms of characterisation than his three co-stars. As his male opponent, Dan is weak, neurotic, and false. As for the two females, Portman as Alice is given the role of Needy, Manipulative Cocktease while Roberts as Anna gets Worshipped (But REAL) Goddess. Portman makes the most of what she has - which is little in comparison to the men - while Roberts makes no impression other than as a foil for the angst of Owen and Law. By the time this farce is played out, the viewer is left with plenty of sympathy for Larry, but very little in the way of feeling for anyone else. Marber spends his entire screenplay making Dan look like a witless, insecure fool before attempting to make him a sympathetic character in the last twenty minutes through the less-than-engaging plot device of having everyone shit on him while he runs around in the rain and stares meaningfully at himself in various mirrors. Alice, meanwhile, is portrayed as being by far the most sincere character before she is revealed as the most dishonest of them all with a closing sequence that tells us it's okay that everything we've come to believe about her is wrong because she's beautiful and free. As for Anna, well, her story is never really closed out. She never fell out of love with Larry and ended up back in his arms. Which makes sense, really, as we never understood how she could possibly prefer Dan in the first place, apart from the brick-in-the-face subtle subtext that both girls prefer him in bed.

In the end, then, Larry wins the heart of the Goddess because he is honest and true and real, even if this occasionally makes him look like a bastard, Dan ends up broken and alone because he loves Anna but then pretends to love Alice even though she's second-best, Anna...just fucks both of them and then sticks with Larry for the reasons stated above, and Alice - the supposed heart of the movie - ends up alone but empowered ('empowered' in this case being walking in slo-mo down a busy street with long hair and funky earrings) because - hey - she never really gave herself to those predatory, neanderthal males.

My God, it's so REAL.

Fuck off. Marber clearly sees himself as Larry with just a hint of Dan to reveal his insecurities. His worldview - as evidenced by his weak, stereotypical female characters - is shallow and misogynistic. He's clearly confused as to whether women are something to be fucked and forgotten or placed on a pedestal, and believes by mingling tired cliches he has come up with something original and exciting and - lest we forget - REAL.

No. The only REAL thing about this story is the character of Larry, who clearly represents the working class dreams of the middle class Marber. While Patrick writes exceptional dialogue and obviously has some idea of what he wants to say, the message is lost in the translation from the philosophies of his obvious heroes to the high-cheekboned, back-slapping grins of the Hollywood set trying to be sincere.

Nichols, on his record to date, can do far better as regards both film-making and sexual politics. Law is clearly talented and could do with an agent that doesn't send him every second-rate piece of mainstream crap that comes in the mail. Portman is seemingly doomed to be young and talented but cursed with being beautiful. Roberts is...Julia Roberts. Clive Owen could and should have the world at his feet right now. He isn't the best actor on the face of the planet, but he's coming up trumps on the roles he chooses and making the most of what he has. As for Patrick Marber, the critical focus of this review, my feeling is that if he ignored all the people telling him he's a great writer and focussed on penning something genuine rather than stories that are REAL to people so far removed from reality that they have to go out and buy it, he may find he has something to say that won't make a whole lot of money but will cure what ails him.

Sadly, and despite all the hype, Closer is not that something. Cynicism, in this case, is just as easily faked as sincerity.