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Leigh is not interested
in mocking someone else, but showing us things about ourselves.
As he has often insisted, there is no "them" in his work. Everywhere
we look, we are meant to see ourselves. His hell is never reserved
for other people. That is what makes his films so unsettling. We
are supposed to take them personally. If we don't, we're not really
paying attention.
 Keith
and Candice-Marie's dietary and behavioral eccentricities are symptoms
of a state of imaginative derangement that, in Leigh's view, runs throughout
society. They have become cut off from their own experience by culturally-received ideas and emotions. For this relisher of sensory, physical, and
behavioral particularities, there could be no greater heresy than basing
your identity and emotions on abstractions. To do so is to lose touch
with reality and, in effect, make yourself unreal. Characters like Keith
and Candice-Marie have gone insane in a far more insidious and dangerous
way than any of Hitchcock's or John Carpenter's protagonists.
The ultimate fictions that enthrall Keith
and Candice-Marie are not ideas about the world but about themselves. Their
intellectual relationship to nature is evidence of an even more disturbing
intellectual relationship to their own lives and experiences (a subject which
Leigh will explore further in Abigail's Party and Who's Who). In
their resistance to processed food, Keith and Candice-Marie have unconsciously
swallowed all manner of processed thinking, canned feeling, and shrink-wrapped
selfhood. Their identities are as received, their emotions as dictated by
fashion, and their "views" (in both the perceptual and intellectual senses) as
second-hand as the opinions in the travel-guides they slavishly follow. In
their quest for culturally-certified "naturalness," they have become completely
artificial. Leigh wants us to see that if there is even a shade of
"naturalness" in his movie, it resides in figures like Honkey and Finger, not
Keith and Candice-Marie or the well-trod paths they hike. In this orgy of
intellectual recycling and imaginative role-playing, there is nothing real
left.
All of Leigh's work explores problems of
selfhood and identity, and the major problem with taking your feelings and
opinions from outside of yourself, in Leigh's view, is that you lose track of
who you really are. Keith thinks he is a paragon of reasonableness, when he is
actually an imaginative terrorist. Candice-Marie thinks she is a flower-child
devotee of peace and love, even as she unceasingly nags and bullies Keith about
not being loving enough.
The way we can detect the falseness of
Keith and Candice-Marie's conception of themselves is not only through the
contradiction between what they say and do, and in the ironic discrepancy
between what they say they see and what Leigh shows us (as on the pig farm),
but through the unimaginativeness, inflexibility, and unresponsiveness of their
performances. In Leigh's view, when you play a part that is emotionally and
intellectually inauthentic, the result will always be a mechanical performance.
A false role can never be truly spontaneous, free, or responsive.
 In
the implicit dramatic metaphor that informs most of Leigh's work, Keith is a
bad actor or director who mechanically adheres to a pre-established script and
is terrified of any departure from it. That is the significance of his reliance
on texts of various sorts for virtually everything he says and does
(instructions on putting up his tent, notebooks, maps, tour itineraries and
schedules, a numbered guidebook, and the campground regulations he quotes).
Keith is unable to go "off-book," to creatively improvise on the margins of a
text or allow the least bit of creative independence or departure from the
"script." Keith tyrannizes over everyone around him, insisting on adherence to
(and punishing departures from) his pre-determined "scripts" for experience.
That is the point of a climactic scene late in the film, when Keith and
Candice-Marie invite Ray to their campsite to have tea. Keith functions as a
bad director who attempts to dictate the most minute details of Ray's and
Candice-Marie's blocking (where they should stand for the photograph), line
readings (in the song), and feelings about and interpretation of their roles
(in the talk about nutrition).
For a filmmaker so clearly committed to
the value of expressive individuality and spontaneity, the result of attempting
to pre-script and over-direct human interaction is not only expressive boredom
but the erasure of fundamental individual differences. While Leigh's cinematic
style is an effort to respect individual structures of feeling and points of
view, Keith's personal style denies the existence of any point of view other
than his own. He cuts everyone and every interaction to fit the Procrustean bed
of his own interests, stage-managing all conversations and directing all
interactions to conform to his own interests. He is a kind of bad artist who
makes life too purposeful, too meaningful, too orderly–and in doing so takes
the spontaneity, surprise, and fun out of experience. He takes the play out of
play....
–Excerpted from Ray Carney, The Films of
Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (London and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
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Ray Carney's The Films of Mike
Leigh is quite simply the best book of film criticism I have ever read.
Now I have to say that I have never read
any of Carney's other books (he has also written books on Cassavetes, Frank
Capra, and Carl Dreyer), which, for all I know, might be even better. But as a
friend of mine put it, 'His writing blows everything else out there away, even
to the point of many times seeming like simply in a class of his
own...different in kind more than degree.' And although I admit to not having
read 'everything else out there,' I feel the exact same way. Ray Carney's new
book has undeniably rocked my world.
Ray Carney's book is to what usually
passes for film criticism what Mike Leigh's movies are to what, in Hollywood,
usually passes for filmmaking: a truly radical critique, a whole different
animal, and a solitary voice of sanity that has somehow miraculously managed to
make itself heard over the noise and hullabaloo of this culture's present-day
insanity.
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–Caveh Zahedi, creator of A
Little Stiff and I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore,
in a review in Filmmaker Magazine
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| To learn
how to obtain this book,
click here |
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