John Walsh - Are you talking to me? - A Life Through the Movies

I’d been stunned by Kubrick’s masterpiece when I saw it on a huge screen in 1968. Now, thirty-three years later, lying on a bed fretting about mortality in the dark watches of the night, I had conjured the film’s ambiguously alarming monolith to come and loom over me and take me somewhere (‘Where are we going now?’) more interesting.

I sat up and looked, as though for the first time, at the bed in which I was lying, an antique divan I’d picked up in the Eighties. It was, I realised, not a million miles from the one in the film. I looked around the room. An antique gentleman’s wardrobe that I’d bought in 1995 gaped open, self-consciously mimicking the one in the movie. I thought of the armchairs in yellow-gold brocade that I’d bought (I couldn’t have told you why) years ago for the sitting-room downstairs. And the threadbare Ottoman sofa. And the spindly-legged occasional tables that Carolyn had often tried to throw out because she couldn’t see any beauty in their false antiquity. And those heavy old hotel curtains I’d insisted on …

Could it be true? I went downstairs, switched on the light in the living-room and stared. Yes, it bloody well could. For years, I had unconsciously been furnishing my home to look like a simulacrum of the room in 2001: A Space Odyssey where an astronaut had fetched up thirty-odd years before, the room in which he was re-born into something infinitely grander than a mere Earthling. For years, it appeared, I had been patiently, unconsciously, nagging away at an image of transcendence in my head, one that had steered my taste in something as banal as furniture, and all to create a scene – actually in 2001 – where, at the end of your long journey, you don’t die after all.

It was such a shock that I began to wonder what other movies had sowed a corresponding seed, or how they had altered the course of my life when young. And gradually I began to isolate the films that had had a specifically moral, physical or psychological effect on me or had made me behave in peculiarly uncharacteristic ways.

Only a fool would admit that he or she has become a better person through their exposure to the cinema. It’s never been the natural home of great moralists. Sentimental film buffs still go to see D.W. Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation and emerge stunned by its casual racism, its black baddies and Ku Klux Klan heroes. But the cinema screen works an insidious magic on the emergent consciousness, and leaves us charged with feeling in ways that we only dimly understand. Unlike books or plays or TV programmes, the movies make you do weird stuff. And it’s this egregiously personal response to the key movies in your life that I try to explore in the ensuing chapters. I’ve included nothing I saw after I was twenty-one because it’s before that age that films imprint themselves on you most deeply; after twenty-one, your life is too hijacked by work, drink, sex, family demands and all the compromises you make with the Real World to be awestruck to the same degree by the plush curtains and the massive screen.

Perhaps my youth was mis-spent in darkened cinemas, when I might have been better employed reading Hegel or Gibbon or Proust, climbing Snowdon or Helvellyn with the Venture Scouts, travelling in the Sudan or the South China Seas, helping the sick with Mother Teresa. But the movies changed my life in the Sixties and early Seventies, and this is a celebration of that heady metamorphosis. And I cordially invite the reader to raid his or her own filmic image-bank and consider what flickering presences, what seductive scenes and passionate epiphanies, made them into the people they’ve become.

*J.G. Ballard, speculating about Hollywood’s influence on American attitudes to war, came up with a startling theory about movie-worship. ‘Any dream that so endures,’ he wrote, ‘must draw its strength from the deepest survival instincts. The potent spectacle of bright light playing against a high wall taps into something hardwired in our brains – memories, perhaps, of the first dawn.’

*Which goes, in its entirety: Yeah. Huh? (Pulls out gun.) Huh? Huh? Faster ’n you. Go fuck yourself. (Puts gun back in holster.) I saw you comin’, you fuck, shitheel. I’m standing here. You make the move. You make the move. It’s your move. (Pulls out gun again.) Huh. Try it, you … (Puts the gun away.) You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Well who the hell else are you talkin’ …? You talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here …

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