How I Imagine Ridley Scott Pitched Robin Hood

Ridley Scott : Ok, picture this: Russell Crowe...as Robin Hood!

Movie Producing Guy: That’s your idea?

RS: That’s it! The rest will write itself. I might add Cate Blanchett to give it a bit of gravitas, but I think Russell’s voice gives it plenty. You know that deep, gravelly voice he uses when he’s doing an English accent? They ate it up in Gladiator.

MPG: Ok, so Robin Hood. It’s a historical piece?

RS: Sort of. I’m gonna set it in the 12^th century, and since nobody really knows what the 12^th century was like, so we can pretty much just make it up.

MPG: We can?

RS: Sure! We just make all the props out of wood, throw in a few frolicsome dance sequences and call the alcohol ‘mead’, and nobody will know it isn’t the 1200s.

MPG: Hang on – isn’t the 12^th century the 1100s?

RS: Is it? I always get those confused. Anyway nobody in the audience will know that.

MPG: What about the dialogue? Didn’t people speak different back then?

RS: Probably – nobody really knows how they spoke, so we can assume it was pretty much like we do.  Anyway, historical dialogue’s easy. All you have to do is expand all the contractions – like ‘isn’t’ becomes ‘is not’, ‘don’t’ becomes ‘do not’ etc. Hey presto – it’s ye olde! Anyway with a film like this we won’t need much dialogue – just a few wisecracks to punctuate the fight scenes.

MPG: Well, Ridley, you certainly seem to know your stuff. What’s your time frame?

RS: Well filming will take a few months, but I could have the script to you by...COB today?

MPG: Deal!

Such have I dreamed

Friday poetry this week is inspired by a strange dream I had last night.  I dreamed I was sitting an exam about Thomas Hardy. I had to write an essay about him, and for some reason (in the dream it seemed like a stroke of genius), I’d called the essay “Too Big to Fail.” The pressure of the ticking clock and the muscles in my hand cramping around my ballpoint pen were vivid, but I was enthused about my subject, and preposterous analogies came thick and fast. When my alarm went off at 6:15am, I was just in the middle of a cunning allusion to Hopkins’ “Windhover”; somehow the gold gash in that poem was linked to the financial crisis and the fall of the dollar, which was in turn somehow linked to Thomas Hardy. I’ll never know whether my essay was as brilliant as it seemed in the dream (very unlikely), and as I never finished it I don’t know what the marker (whoever they might have been) would have given me. Nor do I know what a dream like this says about my state of mind (probably nothing complimentary), but I thought a Thomas Hardy poem about a dream would be apt today. I like this one because of the very odd meter.

A Dream or No

Why go to Saint-Juliot? What's Juliot to me?
I was but made fancy
By some necromancy
That much of my life claims the spot as its key.

Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West,
And a maiden abiding
Thereat as in hiding;
Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.

And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago,
There lonely I found her,
The sea-birds around her,
And other than nigh things uncaring to know.

So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed)
That quickly she drew me
To take her unto me,
And lodge her long years with me.  Such have I dreamed.

But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see;
Can she ever have been here,
And shed her life's sheen here,
The woman I thought a long housemate with me?

Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?
Or a Vallency Valley
With stream and leafed alley,
Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

February 1913.

Nothing now can ever come to any good

I love the funeral scene in IT Crowd where Reynholm Industries’ 2IC prefaces his eulogy by saying with great solemnity: “I’d like to begin by reading a poem that I saw in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.” The surface joke here (I think) is the incongruity of elevated oratory and pop culture, but the underlying point is that pop culture topples elevation (indeed it’s supposed to). What starts as a touching scene about love and death, in which a forgotten and somewhat ironic poem is dusted off, becomes a cliché of unreconstructed emotion, a kind of emoticon for feeling sad. When things are ‘popularised’ they lose their quality of exalted singularity, their holiness. The sheen of the coin is rubbed off in its wide circulation. The upside might be a democratic redistribution of wealth, but the flipside is that the gold is gone. What we love, we love to death.

So now I’d like to share with you a poem that I saw in the show IT Crowd.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Minister Describes Fall of Icarus as "Tragic"

Of course, the 24 hour news cycle has changed things somewhat: most of us pause for a moment or two to hear the announcement about the boy falling out of the sky before we turn quite leisurely away. And in that moment there is a breathless expectation that someone in a suit will capture for us the momentousness of what has happened. However banal and bleedingly obvious it might seem when a politician labels a disaster as ‘tragic,’ ‘shocking,’ ‘appalling,’ or any other of his list of synonyms, there is also I think a genuine satisfaction of a genuine need. Human suffering and natural catastrophe demand language. Words that both gauge and contain their depths, and words delivered in a voice of authority. In fact these labels, though they seem pointless, move beyond mere verbalising into the realm of religious incantation. The blessing of a priest; the elevation of the ordinary into the sacred. It is also an acknowledgement, the same one Breughel's painting so conspicuously lacks, that something amazing has happened.

Poetry Challenge

Though I think poetry is tremendously important, I am not myself a writer of poetry. I gave that up after some adolescent attempts that, though long since destroyed, still bring a blush of shame to my cheeks. However, there are some ideas best (or only) expressed in verse, and since in this case I can’t follow Philip Larkin’s advice and write what I want to read, I thought I’d throw out a challenge to any aspiring poets who happen by this post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about boat people, oil spills, whaling, and how these issues circle and plumb our collective soul, and particularly as a country ‘girt' by sea. The word ‘seaworthy’ continues to float atop these thoughts. I feel constitutionally incapable of producing the poem they seem to demand, so I thought I’d cast them adrift and see if any passing poet hauls them aboard.

Any takers?