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Video idiots
Alice Thomas Ellis
The dream sequence, in my view, is the last resort of the artist who can't think of what to say next. Crouched over his word processor devoid of inspiration, he slaps in a dream sequence. I blame Freud. We have all, I am sure, rustled our newspapers or made a trip to the Ladies as some person has recounted his dream of the night before, since there is nothing in the world more boring than other people's dreams. (This is probably why psychoanalysis is so expensive. If you have to spend your life plunged in ennui you are going to make it worth your while.) In the case of the artist the dreams usually take pornographic or blasphemous form so that he can indulge his fantasies and get paid for it. Blasphemy and pornography are also ultimately boring because they are the response of the inadequate to matters of importance.
Pornographers and blasphemers are terribly irritating people because they don't understand, and the normal, religious person soon gets very fed up with watching them rolling round in the midden shouting naughty words. What is the point? `Free- dom of speech', they will say, pausing in their wallowings to look up wearing a virtuous expression. To which I respond that freedom of speech can lead to a very great deal of bad feeling and should be used judiciously and in moderation. Art is not an excuse for licence, and when it is treated as such it usually ends up as tripe. So there.
The other day I was innocently watching telly when there appeared a clip of a new video featuring some stupid girl who has chosen to call herself Madonna — which is in itself frightful cheek, almost on a par with that of the man who libelled Our Lord in The Last Temptation by imputing to Him his own peculiar aspirations. This girl threw herself about a bit, crawled dreamily into what I took to be the confessional since there was a chap in it hung about with crucifixes and rosaries, and stroked his face, which seemed for some reason to be painted gold. I found it offensive largely because it was so hopelessly idiotic: so ignorant of what faith is about, so facile and so cheap. Life is too short for such rubbish. And, I would direly remind its perpetrators, eternity is very long. They'll probably be invited to watch their own video through aeons of purgatory till they think even Hell would make a pleasant change.
Wide was in Seville during the prepara- tions for Holy Week and tried to describe the atmosphere to me. She is perhaps the best describer I know and she showed me pictures too, but I've never been to Spain and I couldn't really imagine it — the devotion with which the people worked for hour after hour preparing the statues to be carried in procession, the application and the meticulous rehearsal, the air of sombre magnificence — of tragedy and glory. We seem to have largely forgotten the import- ance of religion — that it is as much about God as about His people and their freedom to go to blazes in their own way — and are diminishing and 'humanising' it out of recognition.
However, I must admit that our local church was crowded to the doors on Palm Sunday, and while it was not magnificent it was moving. Candles and flowers and incense did something to relieve the squalor of Camden Town, and an exotic touch was added by the tinker's child who flew up and down the aisle dressed in her best frock (satin in two shades of green) and wearing gold dangling earrings. Her little brothers followed her, and their big sister, trying to say her prayers or possibly intent on nicking the collection, pretended she'd never seen them before in her life. It was almost like a dream.
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