#31 - Secrets From The Dark Hours
This week started badly in that the week preceding it was reluctant to end. A vicious bout on insomnia meant I didn't sleep at all for one night and little the night after. This used to happen to me all the time but it's not done for a good long while, many months at least. I think I've done better by making myself more active and getting to bed (or trying very hard to) before 12 every night, which was quite easy to do over the summer. Though now look here - along comes the Autumn. Bodies slow down, the light drops out of the world and we learn to live in the dark. I can see myself becoming familiar with the early hours again, as I'm doing while typing this newsletter way past my bed time.
I do miss that feeling of late night/early morning being a special time, like it did when you're a kid. Being from an Indian family, there'd be plenty of long haul flights to the Old Country, the cheapest of which would take-off in the morning, so you'd find yourself awake at 4 and sometimes 3 AM, hours you had no capacity to live within at that point in life which made it the height of novelty. It's funny - those mornings in suburban London passed for exotic to six year old me, whereas India itself felt kind of miserable. A drab place of scooters, diesel fumes and wiping your arse with a bucket of water.*
I've already talked about how late nights work in a writing context way back in newsletter number 6 so I won't go on about it too much but there are unexpected benefits also to being unintentionally sleepless. I find that I'm too tired to be clamped by the anxiety that holds you during the day and you just get stuck in. On that Monday morning, I did about five things I'd be constantly putting off - most of it menial, but some of it deeply creative. So many pools of clarity emerging from within the fog. Appropriately, while trying to force myself back into bed, I found this Hilary Mantel quotation that rang very true. The below is from a screenshot from someone off Instagram that I can't remember. Thanks to you, whoever you are. My penance for the lack of accreditation is typing it up from the picture:
Hilary Mantel: Many kinds of writing can be done in the unabashed light of day and by a precise intellectual process, but I think fiction that has layers and depths - the kind that you can read twice - has to come from an inner location that is in some way fogged, a place that is a continuing mystery to the author. When you begin a project you don't want to see your whole purpose in one clear glance. You need shadows in the landscape, to keep you alert and expectant. If you know too much about a story, the work is already done, and writing it down becomes a chore. You want a story to form up secretly in the dark hours, and to surprise you at dawn by being bigger than you thought and a different shape, and perhaps of a different nature entirely.
Darkness - both metaphorical and literal - also dominates Ad Astra, the Brad Pitt fronted existential space movie I saw this week. The first trailer for it didn't fill me with confidence but I was seduced by the reviews and also the need to fill myself up with stories like these before I sit down to tackle Brown Chekhov in Space properly. On paper, I am exactly the target demographic for this movie and for the first forty five minutes or so I was really with it. It's beautifully put together, I was digging the Apocalypse Now riffs that play out of the set up for the film, and though I don't quite think Brad Pitt is good enough to carry a movie in Serious Actor Mode without at least a cursory dip into his bags of charisma, I was willing to go along with it because I just appreciated him making a movie like this happen.
HERE BE SPOILERS. I WARNED YOU.
Ultimately though, it slid straight out of my mind and I don't think it's ever coming back. To give it the Apocalypse Now comparison it clearly wants, Ad Astra mimics the increasingly surreal nature of the narrative in the older movie but I think it fails to grasp the political motivations behind it. Or to give it a bit more credit, it's trying to do something else, but that something else doesn't accumulate the weight that Apocalypse Now carries with it. Bluntly put - coming to a full understanding of the absurdity and brutality of Vietnam is a greater mission than coming to understand your Dad and, with him, yourself.
I'm told that if you've lost a parent (I assume more like in adulthood as opposed to when you were a child like in my case) the movie is more affecting but to me that doesn't make up for the fact that Pitt's father's great mission - the one that he kills for, ultimately comes down to: "I got some good data, lads". Which feels so anaemic next to something like "I've figured out how to win this war, but you aren't going to like it".
There are also a whole host of other slightly dicier political readings to be taken away from the film, which I'm not sure it's entirely conscious of but I'll leave you to watch it and decide for yourself. I sound more down on it than I was in the watching, but I'm always like that. The stories that are so close to being good are the ones I find myself griping about more than the ones that entirely miss the mark.
Probably need to start wrapping up. I realise that I forgot to give you a LucasFact TM last time around so I'll give it to you here. It's actually better suited to this week as it involves India. The set up: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, newly embittered by their divorces are working on Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom. Married, hippyish screenwriting duo Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz who helped George with Star Wars are hired to work on the Indiana script and...well...I'll let Willard tell you...
At one point when we were writing it we told George "We know a lot of Indians. We've been there...I don't think they're going to think this is really so cool. Do you think you're going to have trouble shooting there?" He said, "Are you kidding? It's me and Steve." Months later they called and said, "We can't shoot in India. They're really upset." So they shot in Sri Lanka and London, mostly.
Magic.
I want to try and make this newsletter more useful to people so if you've got anything in particular you'd like me to talk about, please do write in.
* Forget arguments about hygiene, you really need to check out the video at the bottom of that article. There's so much to unpack. A lunch time activity for you and your favourite office pals, perhaps...
If you're new to Patelograms and like what you've read, you can subscribe by clicking here.
If you're an old hand, thanks as ever for taking the time.