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  As it happens, there’s more to Hrundi’s idiocy than pure idiocy. He seems like someone who could never be integrated anywhere. And his gentle foolishness and naivety become a powerful weapon. If you’ve been humiliated and excluded, you could become a Black Panther or, later, join Isis, taking revenge on everyone who has suppressed and humiliated you.

  Or you could give up on the idea of retaliation altogether. You could perplex the paradigm with your indecipherability and live in the gaps. After all, who are you really? Not even you can know. When it comes to colonialism, the man of colour is always pretending for the white man: pretending not to hate him and pretending not to want to kill him. In a way, Sellers’s baffling brownface is perfect, for in some sense we are all pretending – if only that we are men or women.

  Eventually Sellers’s useful imp escapes the colonial power and leads a rebellion. Or, rather, an invasion in the home of the white master, involving an elephant, a small army of young neighbours and the whole of the frivolous sixties. The swimming pool fills with foamy bubbles into which people disappear, until no one knows who is who. In a carnivalistic chaos they all swim in the same water.

  At the end of the movie, Hrundi and the French girl leave in his absurd little car. In both films, the Sellers character knows he has to be saved by a woman. And he is. Significantly, it is a white woman.

  * * *

  Walk out tonight into the London portrayed in The Millionairess and you will see the great energy of multiracialism and mixing; an open, experimental city, with most living here having some loyalty to the idea that something unique, free and tolerant has been created, despite Thatcherism. Out of the two films, The Millionairess looks the less dated, since its divides have returned. It has been said that Muslims were fools for adhering to an extreme irrational creed, when the mad and revolutionary creed, all along, was that of Sophia Loren’s family: extreme, neo-liberal capitalism and wealth accumulation, creating the Dickensian division in which we still live.

  Equality does not exist here. This city’s prosperity is more unevenly distributed than at any period in my lifetime, and the poor are dispersed and disenfranchised. Not only does our city burst with millionaires, many given to patronising urchins and the underprivileged, but a doctor committed to serving the financially excluded would be busy. London has reverted to a pre-1960s binary: a city of ghosts simultaneously alive and dead, of almost unnoticed refugees, asylum seekers, servants and those who need to be hidden, while many rightists have reverted to the idea that white cultural superiority is integral to European identity.

  Since those two films with their brownfaced hero, we have a new racism, located around religion. And today the stranger will still be a stranger, one who disturbs and worries. Those who have come for work or freedom can find themselves blamed for all manner of absurd ills. As under colonialism, they are still expected to adapt to the ruling values – now called ‘British’ – and they, as expected, will always fail.

  However, if the Peter Sellers character begins by mimicking whiteness, he does, by the end of both films, find an excellent way of forging a bond with his rulers, and of outwitting them. If the West began to exoticise the East in a new way in the sixties, the Sellers character can benefit from this. For the one thing the women played by Sophia Loren and Claudine Longet lack and desire is a touch of the exotic and mysterious. It becomes Sellers’s mission to provide this touch.

  For Kabir and Hrundi, the entry into love is the door into the ruling white world of status and privilege. To exist in the West the man of colour must become, as the psychiatrist-philosopher Frantz Fanon would put it, worthy of a white woman’s love. A woman of colour has little social value, but a white woman is a prize who can become the man’s ticket to ride. By way of her, being loved like a white man, he can slip into the West, where, alongside her, he will be regarded differently. Perhaps he will disappear; but maybe he will alter things, or even subvert them, a little, and their children will either be reviled or, out of anger, change the world.

  A Hollywood ending tells us love must be our final destination. Yet there is more complexity to these lovely finalities than either film can quite see or acknowledge. Birdy num-num indeed.

  If Their Lips Weren’t Sealed by Fear

  Antigone is a particularly modern heroine. She is a rebel, a refusenik, a feminist, an anti-capitalist (principles are more important than money), a suicide perhaps, certainly a martyr and without doubt a difficult, insistent person, not unlike some of Ibsen’s women. More decisive, less irritating, talky and circular than Hamlet – but, you might say, equally teenage – she has blazed through the centuries to remain one of the great characters of all literature. Is she a saint, a criminal of extraordinary integrity, a masochist or just stubborn and insolent? Or even ‘mad’, in the sense of impossible to understand?

  Although psychoanalysis is not a determinism, with the parents Antigone had – the self-blinding Oedipus and the suicider Jocasta – you’d have to say she didn’t have much of a chance. Nonetheless, she is a splendid, fabulous creature, with all the romance of the outsider, vibrant in her hardness, even as she is wildly frustrating in her intransigence.

  She is also a wonderful part to play for an actress. We must never forget, after all, that Antigone is most famously a play of Sophocles, in which a young woman defies a king and the law in order to follow her own conscience. It is the story of an individual against the state.

  The text, described by Hegel as ‘one of the most sublime, and in every respect, most consummate works of human effort ever brought forth’, is a contribution to showbiz and not a thesis, although as a character Antigone is infinitely interpretable and has been repeatedly written about by philosophers, psychoanalysts, feminists, literary critics and revolutionaries.

  The ‘anti’ in the name Antigone should be emphasised. What she wants, the strong desire from which Antigone never wavers, is to bury her beloved so-called traitor brother Polyneices – lying dead and neglected outside the palace walls – with ceremony and dignity. This is essential to her; she is absolutely clear: her brother will not be carrion for dogs and vultures. She will have the rituals of mourning, despite the fact his body has been dumped outside as a punishment for fighting against his native city. Sophocles is not talking about oppression as we would understand it. The society he describes is composed of the privileged, and of artisans and slaves. Antigone does not want to overturn this, but she insists on rebelling, on having things her way, on transgressing.

  Since this is a father–daughter drama, Creon, her adversary and uncle, the man who could become her father-in-law, and who is a kind of daddy substitute, is a tough guy. Creon is a leader, a clever politician with a Mafia don side, a primal father to whom all the women must belong. He is not the sort of man to be mocked or out-thought by a young woman, one who is determined from the start not to admire him, and who is set on undermining him. As he insists, ‘The laws of the city speak through me.’

  Creon, then, like her own father, for whom she cared for many years, is self-blinded. There is much he cannot afford to see or acknowledge. Antigone, on the other hand, with no children to protect, can enter ‘the domain of men’ and attempt to persuade Creon to understand her, to recognise the absurdity of the law. She is his perfect foil and necessary nuisance, ideally placed to see on his behalf, to tease out his weaknesses and torment him.

  Though Antigone is betrothed to her cousin, Creon’s son Haemon, Creon insists, not unreasonably, that the law, which replaces the agency of individuals, has to be obeyed. There cannot be exceptions. That is the point of the law: it is absolute. But for her the law is pathological and sadistic, and ethics are ideology. She is uninterested in happiness – she is accused by her sister Ismene of ‘loving Polyneices being dead’ – but the play is certainly concerned with enjoyment. If the law enjoys itself at our expense, she will also enjoy herself, perhaps too much, taking her sacrifice to its limit – death, and even beyond, into ‘myth’, ensuring that she w
ill never disappear.

  Antigone is certainly a feminist, a girl defying patriarchy, a lone woman standing up to a cruel man. But she ain’t no sister; there’s no solidarity or community in her actions. She doesn’t want to remove Creon and replace his dictatorship with a more democratic system. In fact, Sophocles is showing us here how the law and dissent create and generate one another, illustrating the necessary tension between the state and the people, the family and the individual, man and woman.

  Antigone is, in some terrible way, bound to Creon in love, as we are inevitably bound to our enemies. She is no more free than he. This couple are fascinated by one another. What is terrible about Antigone is not so much her belief, but the way she assumes it. She is entirely certain. She is no paragon; and rather than being an example of someone who sticks to their desire, she is a person who cannot think, lacking intellectual flexibility.

  Her intransigence mimics that of Creon. Indeed, the two of them have similar characters, neither having any self-doubt, scepticism or ability to compromise. Both are afflicted by excessive certainty, so that the two of them will always be on a collision course. Both are shown to be monsters, and both will have to die.

  Sophocles’ play, then, is perfectly balanced in the way it engages the audience, as it moves from argument to argument. It is a play of voices and an exercise in democracy itself, proposing no solution, but clearly displaying the most fundamental questions. There is no agreed-upon good. The good is that which can be argued about, but there is no possibility of a final position without imposing it, a form of utopia which can only lead to fascism.

  Every act renders us guilty in some way. It is as if we’d like to believe we can live without hurting others. But this beautiful story of ‘demonic excess’ can only end badly on both sides, with Antigone killing herself and Creon having lost his son, consumed with guilt and eventually murdered by the mob, his palace burned down.

  Antigone could be described as a dialectical teaching play, a ‘what-if’, showing human action from numerous points of view, just as the point of psychoanalysis is not to eliminate conflicts but to expose them. The play doesn’t tell us what to think, for it is not a guide to thought. It is another thing altogether: a guide to the necessity of perplexity. It illustrates a necessary conflict, showing that useful rather than deadly conflicts make democracy possible.

  Love Is Always an Innovation

  She was in the hotel waiting for him, a cheap place with a bad view. They were going to separate, that was the idea, after one last time together. It would be wild; the wildest.

  She was in the hotel waiting for him and she had got there early to clear her head. She needed to keep her phone on for him, but the kids and Peter kept texting. She was with a friend who was ill, on his deathbed. She giggled as she lied, but they never let her alone, the only people she had. Her family were like family, she liked to say. And he, Mr Goodbye, was on his way.

  She was in the hotel waiting for him. After practising, she had come to appreciate aggression in the bedroom. Nor had she been an exhibitionist before. She’d never been far beyond the decent. What a difference that made to her life, with everything else having to be reorganised to recognise her, the new person.

  Until this, she had been with five or six men and had kept her eyes closed. Nervous, anxious enough to float the world on her worry, she had run from what she needed. She believed that this was how most people were. She was ashamed. She had been unwilling to accept the wound. She had been too good for her own good. Sometimes you have to let people hate you.

  Mr Goodbye was the only one who liked to talk. He asked for her wishes; he explained what he wanted to do. ‘Open your mouth for my fingers, bend over, open yourself. Show me. I must see.’ He made her use words too. She used them back now. You see, they were the thing.

  A fat, hairy and busy man, a pig, a salesman, a liar and show-off, his voice more phallic than his cock. Every time with Mr Goodbye was an assault on everything she knew. He made her so avant-garde she wanted to bite his face off, carry it away and make everyone she knew wear it.

  She was in the hotel waiting for him, staring out, her hands flat against the window, and there were jets crossing the sky. People were moving about more than you’d think. She took off her clothes, threw them down and paced in her shoes, a nude in a cube, feeling freer like this.

  We are perverts in our imagination, and she was what they call beside herself. This is when you know you can’t master yourself. Eros shoved her beyond, and sex is not justice, she’d decided. Desire and disgust were ever-loving twins: she wanted to be violent and loathsome. She wrote lists of wishes to remind herself which sort of loathsome she had in mind. She still couldn’t understand where in herself all this alteration originated, or who you could ask about it.

  She was in the hotel room waiting for him. At twenty years old someone said she wouldn’t understand passion until she was forty, or be able to bear it until she was forty-five. Even then it wouldn’t be too late. Nevertheless: what a warning. But it was true, she had had no idea what a body could do. You had to thank anyone who made you so irrational.

  She was waiting for him and knew that even now her lust was too tempered by something like love. When she saw his face she was more tender than she’d intended, kissing him too much. He had stripped her to her bones. People say you should learn to live without leaning on others. But what if they are so good for you that you forget everything else?

  She was in the hotel room waiting for him, and thought she might roll under the bed so when he came in he’d get a shock. He would stand there with his baffled look on and begin to understand what it would be like to be without her, that beyond here there was no bliss. He might sit down. He could ruminate.

  She was in the hotel room waiting for him. She didn’t want to scare him. She wanted to smoke but the windows wouldn’t open. She wondered if he liked her because she’d had breakdowns and been locked up for having a runaway mind. Maybe he thought people like her would do just anything.

  She was in the hotel room waiting for him, and soon that, as they say, would be that. They had done everything people could do together; she still wanted him, she could do it again, but she had a family. He wanted a girlfriend to share a croissant with, not a berserker to look around a room for.

  She was in the hotel room waiting to see the grey soles of his feet. Soon she would be giving up the thing she enjoyed most to rejoin the tribe of the Unfucked. He made her laugh but she was beginning to bore him. The mad were those who put others off. She feared loving him more than she feared death. Passion made ordinary life impossible and interfered with the ground zero of reality, thank God.

  She was in the hotel room waiting for him. She enjoyed her children; her duty was to take care of her ill husband. With him it was like trying to make love to your mother. Morality was where you gave up what you loved in order to satisfy someone you disliked. Now she’d discovered that this ugly man was the best thing of all. But how did these ideas touch one another?

  She was waiting for him and there was much she didn’t want to know. After this she would fanatically try to forget the things that mattered most to her.

  She was in the hotel room waiting for him in the hours and minutes and seconds before he became a ghost and she would return to her senses. She was in the hotel room waiting for him, and anyone anywhere waiting for anything is waiting for love.

  Excessive, Explosive Enjoyment

  When we were teenagers in the late sixties drugs were new. Not only for us, but for our parents and for the culture. We stranded suburban kids out in Kent knew that something strange had been going on in London because even the world’s most popular group, the Beatles – who had been respectable and decent but had now got weird with their colourful clothes and unusual hair – had talked about it. The music they made in their great middle period was concerned with tripping and smoking and swallowing stuff that appeared to take your mind into a free, uncontrolled zone where the usual r
ules didn’t apply, where you might see that which was ordinarily hidden.

  This music was about freedom and leaving home, and, particularly at that age, freedom meant a lot to us. The boredom and violence of school, and the drudgery which had been planted ahead of us – work, mortgage, debt, child care – was already heavy. Our future and what was expected of us had been laid down early. It wasn’t thrilling and we weren’t ready for it.

  The London suburbs were not as affluent as the American ones. Our area, Bromley, was still wrecked from the war. The food was repulsive, the men wore bowler hats and education was an endless sadism. But The Graduate spoke to us pretty things. As Benjamin Braddock realises in Charles Webb’s funny novel and Mike Nichols’s film, when he returns home from university his parents’ world looks false. From the kids’ point of view, the way the adults lived seemed crazy. Who would want to fit in with that uncomfortable, John Cheever world where everyone should be content and yet was not? Their unhappiness and discomfort was plain, and their pleasures – of alcohol and promiscuity – were half-hidden and guilty. Their pleasures weren’t even a pleasure.

  In those days people still talked about alienation, and David Bowie knew what that meant with his talk of spacemen. We were the wrong people in the wrong place. Some people said that art could change the way you saw things. But somnolent Mozart, or Hollywood movies, or Renoir paintings couldn’t make the revolution we craved.

  Then we heard Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Occasionally we could see the Rolling Stones or the Who on TV. Suddenly we became aware of a dirty, obscene noise which violated all decency and which represented a heightened pleasure we hadn’t encountered before. It led to the fatal association: pleasure was insane. Too much of it could make you mad. Like sex, it was excessive. You couldn’t grasp or understand it, but you wanted it, and it could make you dance and want to be creative. Music – not the cinema, television or the novel – was the most significant cultural form of the day, and it changed everything for everyone.