Cinema

The odd couple

Peter Ackroyd

Return Engagement

(15', Screen on the Green, Islington) This is something of an oddity: a film about an American pantomime horse, hi which the front half is occupied by G. 29Tdc'n Liddy and the back half by I imothy Leary. Previously they would only have been seen together in the Los Angeles lelePhone directory, or perhaps once in Ter- minal Island prison, but they have now Ter- teamed uP to perform on the American lec- ;are 'circuit' — a strange mechanism used hY celebrities

si who have appeared on televi- " so often that their faces have become

11,ratilihar, or by writers who have some -"ficulty in communicating their thoughts hn the page. This Film records eight days of what was billed as 'the Liddy-Leary circus'. They are ,strange couple. Timothy Leary was the !larvard academic who, in the Sixties, believed that drugs could save us. G. Cor- i:117,7h Liddy was the architect of the Nix burglary, who believed that only on

um

w At the beginning of the film tie find Liddy singing 'The Battle Hymn of , le RePublic' while Leary accompanies him loosely on the piano. Liddy is the TPartner in 'butch'this affair. He is wearing a shirt and has a moustache that could rerce a beer

ha can. Leary, on the other hand, s taken so

e11a , i many drugs that not even a ,,.Tg. ng rhinoceros would shake him out "Is Placidity; pudding faced, wearing a :..egalation cashmere sweater and plimsolls, i!e resembles a Unitarian preacher, The h,hi ee.ision of the British government to pro- bit Plieable:

hIS entry into this country is inex-

Ill one might as well bar a toy bear on egrounds that the real thing is dangerons. Lid 9esPite the Fact that they last met when " ,,,dY attempted to arrest Leary on drug arges, Prethey seem to like each other — or, ,ThaPs, they just admire each other's act, it ne secret of their success is, as Liddy put rl' 1.1111°thY Leary and I disagree about 'Tactically everything it is possible to dis- 4, gree about.' Liddy is an authoritarian, who l°,elievese in discipline, absolute loyalty, and i !li coercive power of the state: a Hobbes in biker's uniform. Leary is much more believes the American populist tradition; and eves in 'space', 'the future', and video ;aTites, He is in the business of selling 0P- :211, ism, as a kind of Alka-seltzer of the !fl,1111c1. The ideological differences between iiiift ent are no longer particularly important, nlever, since they have both learned the important rubric of shov. business, unn the stage in front of a large American a8' theY attack each other with all the fer- vour of men who have nothing left to say. theY have reached the point, in other

words, where they have made so much money that they need only pretend to be serious. This is perhaps just as well since, in the days when they were taken seriously, they were an overt public menace. Liddy admitted that he was willing to kill people 'for prudential reasons' although he em- phasised that he would never do anything whch was Maild177 in se' — somehow Latin is never reassuring under such cir- cumstances. And Leary's espousal of LSD, in turn, must have been responsible for more fatalities then he cares to contemplate now.

There are some who no doubt take com- fort from the fact that the American 'way of life' allows such men to become public performers, and that it is so 'open' or democratic' that the two men can speak on the same platform. This ignores the fact that only in America could such men be taken seriously enough to appear on a plat- form in the first place. They are amateur philosophers, springing from a culture which offers nothing but an occasional Latin tag. They are autodidacts who, in a country of largely uneducated people, become authorities.

The director of this film, Alan Rudolph, has previously worked with Robert Altman and he shares his ability to bring together a number of apparently random scenes and conversations to suggest exactly the kind of society he is dealing with. This was the America of middle-class blandness — very relaxed, very intimate, very 'mellow'. It is essentially a culture of images in which even the most dangerous nonsense is acceptable if it is properly marketed, and where criminally irresponsible people can become 'celebrities'. Return Engagement is, in that sense, a most sinister film.

'Comedian!'