Cinema
Talking dirty
Peter Ackroyd
It begins with the notion that history 'is not a moral subject' — the phrase issuing from the plump lips of a French-Canadian academic. And when music 'based on' Handel intervenes, it is clear that this is going to be something of an intellectual treat, one of those allusive and sardonic films which the French used to manufac- ture by the dozen. And then off again — `. . . it is my theory that the concept of personal happiness . . . normative para- meters . . . marriage is a mode of econo- mic exchange'. It does not take long, however, to realise that the narrative is exclusively concerned with the sexual re- miniscences of a group of French-Canadian academics — or 'intellectuals', as they seem to prefer to call themselves. If to mention Milan Kundera, Wittgenstein and Susan Sontag is to be considered 'intellec- tual', so be it. Of course it may not be everyone's idea of fun to watch them doing so.
At least in such company we may be allowed to talk of theories, and on this occasion the film-maker seems to be addressing (another popular word in the university system) the thesis that 'the drive towards personal happiness' is in some way connected with 'the decline of the Amer- ican empire'. Of course the fact that everyone concerned at first talks like a word processor does not necessarily mean that this effusive level of abstract articula- tion is necessarily to be taken seriously. So we wait, with increasing impatience, for something to happen. And in a sense something does: they all begin to, as they say in Hollywood movies, 'talk dirty'. It made this reviewer shiver, at least, and this reviewer is not necessarily a prude.
And yet as explicit detail follows hard on the heels of some more than particularly repellent innuendo, these lascivious dia- logues begin increasingly to seem unreal. Like the stumbling demotic of those academics who want to seem 'one of the boys', the concrete and specific talk seemed more artificial than the abstract and the generalised. And since much of the sexual description was clearly designed to bolster the theory about 'personal happi- ness' and American imperialism, these little vignettes of intellectual copulation had all the interest of line drawings in a scientific manual.
There are some horrible moments, however; it was not nice to see one of the partners in the sexual Festschrift passing blood and filling the lavatory bowl in the process. And the long list of possible venereal infections, like some parody of a Latin litany, was not calculated to raise the spirits — or anything else, for that matter. But there may be a suitably theoretical excuse for this exercise in bland guignol: as the title suggests, this is a film with so pronounced an historical consciousness that every phrase and image is 'placed' in its right socio-cultural context. In that sense the passing of the blood and the recital of diseases did capture one appropriate moment in our particular span of history — the moment of sexual anxiety, when the connection between eroticism and illness has seemed increasingly to reassert itself.
The news is not all bad, however. There are some comic passages, and even the pervading mood of bleakness and vacuity will appeal to those with apocalyptic im- aginations: when faced with such people, it is hard not to believe that the end of civilisation, if not necessarily of empire, is drawing near. In fact we need look no further than this affluent society itself, this comfortable space which acts as an echo- chamber for their elongated conversations. One of the great contemporary horrors is of a world which has been transformed into a gigantic service industry, a world stocked with goods which no one ever seems to have made and luxuries which no one seems to have earned. The old-fashioned metaphor would be that of the world as a stage-set but, paradoxically, this is precise- ly the metaphor which the cinema is most adept at suggesting.
Whether this rarefied sense of period will be enough to send you into the cinema for this particular film is a moot point: probably not. But, even if it does nothing else, The Decline of the American Empire will confirm the suspicion that the only thing less interesting than sex on the screen is talking about sex on the screen. This may purport to be an attempt at diagnosing the cultural dynamics of sexuality, but on the whole it is an exercise in verbal voyeurism, a kind of logoprurience, as if the graffiti on a lavatory wall had come suddenly but quite undramatically to life. The proceed- ings are literally farcical because, like farce, they are based upon the highly suspect principle that sex is 'behind' every other human activity. And, like most farces, it was only intermittently funny.
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