The Boy Behind the Curtain, Page 2

  Apart from kitchen knives, my children never saw any kind of killing tool in the home. When they were little my wife and I refused to buy them toy weapons of any sort. Not that they escaped the romance of the gun, for despite our best efforts to monitor their screen time, firearms were everywhere they looked. If they picked up sticks at play and made guns of them, then that was their right, we weren’t about to tell them what they could and could not imagine, but we had no intention of collaborating with the purveyors of the cult. Our kids were strangers to violence, but perhaps, like children everywhere, they play at war to ward it off.

  My kids were still small in the autumn of 1996 when a disturbed young man with a very low IQ murdered thirty-five people at Port Arthur in Tasmania. Twenty-three others were injured that day. It was a rare and traumatic event in the recent life of this nation. It prompted a review of national gun laws and many Australians were surprised to see how stridently the locally emergent gun lobby resisted all talk of reform, which mainly focused on restricting access to semiautomatic weapons. So violent was their discourse that while addressing a hostile pro-gun rally in Sale that winter the prime minister, John Howard, resorted to wearing a Kevlar vest. These were scenes once unimaginable in modern Australia. I was never a fan of John Howard. I despised his retrograde social policies and was dismayed by his nostalgia for the unchallenged whiteness and patriarchy of the 1950s, but at a pivotal moment in our history he literally stuck his neck out and did something vital and brave. By following through on gun reform he made this country a little safer. Fronting angry rednecks from the dais that day, he looked pale and stiff, like a man unwell, but that sick look was the face of courage. That was the spectacle of a man exceeding himself.

  In the days immediately after the slaughter in Tasmania a woman bailed me up at the gate of my kids’ primary school. She’d taken offence at something in one of my books and thought I could do with a little consciousness-raising. As she rehearsed her many opinions about men in general and me in particular, her three-year-old son waved a plastic machine-gun at me. The little fellow’s eyes were like slits and beneath them were shadows dark as bruises. His toy gun was the colour of bubblegum but for some reason it reminded me of rendered flesh. Making all the sounds of televised murder, the kid ‘shot’ me about twenty times. Deprived of a response, he began to shove the barrel into my hip again and again, wheezing and squinting, stamping his feet, raging. I kept expecting his mother to make some token effort at curbing his assault, but she hadn’t taken a breath since she collared me. So it was a war on two fronts. He was only an infant, but the kid’s aggression was startling and demoralizing. Perhaps, I told myself, he’s just picked up on her mood and is trying to please her, but if that explained things his efforts were in vain because she appeared not to notice. In fact she paid this little man in the making no mind at all. It seemed she had bigger fish to grill. Maybe it was the proximity of the massacre and the images of that dead-eyed murderer in Tasmania, or perhaps I’m just thin-skinned, but this encounter with the Rumpelstiltskins rattled me. By the time my daughter skipped up to rescue me from the righteously jabbing hippie finger and the porn-pink Tommy gun, I was shaking.

  The only time my kids heard a firearm discharged they were more scandalized than awed. When my brother-in-law set up a skeet trap in his home paddock they were wild with excitement, but when they heard what a shotgun really sounded like their enthusiasm waned. They stuck their fingers in their ears and retreated, pale and big-eyed, to the nominal shelter of the clothes hoist. After I’d watched their uncle for fifteen minutes and resisted all his entreaties for me to have a go, I relented. I don’t know what shocked the children more, seeing me fire a gun or realizing I was good at it. For half an hour, with a curious and rising exultation, I blasted away, blowing clay discs to dust, and nothing died, no one was in danger. I was out in the open, a threat to nobody. Everyone, including my own kids, could see it. And not even the mood of umbrage and inner-city disapproval radiating from the rear seat on the long drive home could make me regret it.

  These days I’m back living in the bush. And the awkward fact is I could really do with a rifle. The local success of the government’s fox-eradication program has meant the whole peninsula we live on is overrun with rabbits and feral cats. The bunnies ravage the vegetation and the cats are killing everything from birds and small marsupials to baby turtles. Now and then a friend comes out with his .22 and we shoot as humanely as we can with low-velocity ammo and telescopic sights, but even the subsonic report makes the dog anxious, and my wife, despite acknowledging the need, hates having a gun in the house. So I’ll never buy one. Because however much I still like to let off a round or two, I’d prefer not to have a weapon at home. There are no longer any small kids to fret over, little chance one of my own will stand at the window and point the thing at passing roadtrains, but even secured in a safe somewhere discreet, a firearm would be a dark presence I can do without under my own roof. Too much sinister potential. Too much unearnt power.

  Some of my friends and neighbours have no such qualms, though there are times when I wish they did. A few have veritable arsenals at home and one or two are genuine enthusiasts. Not in any rabid gun-nut way, they’re more like trainspotters or collectors. But I worry about them, sometimes, worry for them. The sanest and safest people go through low patches, awful things happen out of the blue. Not many people have access to such ultimate and instantaneous temptation. Whether a gun owner acknowledges this or not, that’s what a proximate gun presents, and no one is immune.

  A child is a strange creature, and a boy perhaps strangest of them all. He befuddles his parents and confounds his friends; most of the time he’s a mystery to himself. As a kid there are times when you brim with things that need saying but lack the words or suspect there’s no one willing to listen. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong about this apprehension you’re hostage to; you’re stuck, you feel you’re cornered. I guess that was my experience. Lurking there behind my parents’ curtain I put a gun between myself and the world. I reduced my neighbours to objects, made targets of them. Anything could have happened, none of it good. And just in time, it would seem, before anything irreparable could come of this impulse, I found words. God knows I was a happier, safer boy once I did.

  A Space Odyssey at Eight

  On a winter’s day in 1969 our teacher wheeled a television into the classroom. The Grade Fours, she said, were about to witness a moment of history, though for us the mere presence of the telly at school was landmark enough. She was an intense young woman from the English Midlands who wore Dr. Scholl’s clogs and seemed to suffer a permanent case of the sniffles. That day she seemed particularly agitated. The set hummed and flickered as she struggled to get a signal. Some wag asked if we could watch Marine Boy or The Flintstones. Eventually she found the broadcast channel and we settled and fell silent as Neil Armstrong tipped himself back off the ladder to walk upon the moon.

  The black-and-white transmission was woolly, the commentary terse, and there was no grand music to accompany the events before us. Without the misty look in the teacher’s eye we might have missed the momentousness of the occasion. But in the street that evening there was no mistaking the importance of what had occurred. The adults of the neighbourhood were fizzing with pride and excitement and on TV the pundits suggested that humans had finally broken free of earthly restraint; the future lay close and undefended before us. We were on our way to the stars.

  I was caught in the optimistic uplift of that day, though I didn’t feel it the way the grown-ups all around me did. For them the moon landing was the realization of a dream, an achievement they hardly dared to think possible in their own lifetime. But for me, a child of the sixties and of the Cold War space race, the prospect of Americans on the moon was inevitable, and in a sense the lunar landing had already been rendered ordinary by constant expectation. And there was another reason for feeling slightly underwhelmed by the events of July 20: I’d been to the stars alre
ady.

  The year before, as a treat to celebrate his eighth birthday, the mother of one of my mates from school had taken a group of us into the city to see the big new space film that was in the news at the time. I still have a photo of us at the birthday boy’s house before we set off. I’m skylarking about, going cross-eyed for the camera. All of us are in high spirits. It was probably a good thing we got the happy snaps in before the outing, because afterwards the mood wasn’t so bubbly.

  Having bravely ferried six restless kids into central Perth, the boy’s mother wrangled us all into a row of seats at the Piccadilly just as the lights began to dim. The curtains drew back momentously, the way they did in those days, but the screen remained dark. Some very strange music began to fill the cinema, a kind of muttering and welling of voices that grew more eerie and insistent as we sat there in the gloom. The sound made me uneasy. And it didn’t let up. Soon I was truly spooked and I wasn’t the only one. A wave of sidelong glances swept along the row. Normally at such a moment I’d have blurted out something ‘witty’. Even a fart might have broken the tension. But at the critical juncture I had nothing. My mouth was dry, my throat tight, and I just didn’t want to be at the pictures anymore. I was sitting at the end of our row, separated from the aisle by a single empty seat, and I was seconds from legging it to the lobby when somebody sat down and blocked me in.

  My new row-mate was older, an adolescent, no less, and despite the conniptions the music was visiting upon the rest of us, he’d taken his seat with a flourish. He gave an ostentatious sigh of pleasure and glanced down at me with an indulgent grin. I had time enough to take in his longish hair and the tassels of his suede jacket before the wretched soundtrack finally backed off. And there, at last, was something up on the screen besides brooding darkness: the African savannah. And a restive pack of apes.

  ‘God,’ said the newcomer. ‘Don’t you just love this?’

  I saw his shining face split in a grin. I could think of nothing to say in reply. Things were already weird enough without having an actual teenager engaging me in conversation.

  ‘Seen it seven times already,’ he said. ‘Man, what a trip.’

  I looked back at the apes in their desolation. A few picked lice from their fellows’ fur. A couple bared their teeth at interlopers. This went on for minutes but it seemed like an age, which may have been the point but it was lost on us entirely. Then, at last, a leopard appeared and leapt down upon an unsuspecting chimp. There was a skirmish, but nothing came of it. More rocks, more apes. The mood along the row grew mutinous. The poor woman who thought she’d taken a bunch of eight-year-olds to see a bit of newfangled Buck Rogers must have been wondering what she’d gotten herself into.

  Anyway, enter the Monolith. Or whatever that matt-black thing was. It didn’t exactly make an entrance: the sun came up on the primal plain and there it was, parked out the front of the monkey cave, a tall dark rectangle like a supersized version of one of those Cuisenaire rods they were using to teach us arithmetic at school. And when the primates woke, well, they went apeshit. The return of Ligeti’s Requiem can’t have helped. I think we were all as confused and appalled as the chimps. Pretty soon, though not soon enough for my taste, fur and bones began to fly. The older guy next to me snorted with glee. And then, suddenly, and rather beautifully, as the now-famous spinning bone became a spacecraft in the legendary match cut, we were out amongst the stars. I could almost feel my ears pop. It was peculiar. And fabulous. There was even proper music.

  For a short while it seemed as if this movie was finally about to straighten up and fly right, but there was plenty more weirdness ahead. For one thing, no one spoke for the best part of half an hour and when dialogue did arrive I garnered from it only the haziest appreciation of the problems at hand. Scientists on the moon had dug up a black slab like the one the apes had danced around, and once disturbed it emitted a noise worse than Romanian art music. It appeared to be linked to strange happenings further out in space, and in order to investigate things properly a craft shaped like a sinister tadpole was taking astronauts to Jupiter. Which was fine by me as far as a story goes, though this affair was like a science documentary whose budget hadn’t run to the provision of a voice-over. Still, the machines were ravishing and even the swoony, familiar music they floated upon was sublime. I didn’t know what a Strauss waltz was but I knew it made space travel less scary and marginally less boring.

  If there was any narrative tension in the film at all it came from the nagging sense that at any moment an alien would appear, as it surely must. I steeled myself, but against the greater anxiety that gripped me I was defenceless, because from the very beginning what was most frightening about 2001: A Space Odyssey was the experience of being led out into the cold darkness of space and left alone. Things kept happening – or not happening – without commentary, and with the conventional tropes of popular storytelling snatched from me at every turn, I had the child’s slowly mounting panic at having been abandoned. I was in several kinds of deep space and there was no one bothering to hold my hand. All I had for support and company was some kid in a suede jacket whose name I didn’t even know – and there was something off about him anyway. Still, I was lucky to have him; I was on an acid trip and he was my spirit guide.

  On and on the epic rolled, serenely refusing to explain itself as it went. It was hypnotic and opaque. It was eerie in a way that wasn’t much fun. And it continued for the best part of three hours. Needless to say, it took the shine off my friend’s birthday, and given the reviews bubbling up from the rear of the vehicle on the way home, it would have been a long drive for the boy’s poor mother. Of course I had my own withering criticisms to add to the chorus of schoolboy scorn, but in truth the movie had gotten to me in ways I wouldn’t understand for many years. Asleep or awake I couldn’t shake it off. There were images so singular and so vivid they resonated for decades. That first catastrophic viewing remains the most powerful cinema experience of my life.

  Less than a year later, men actually walked on the moon, but the excitement of that historic event soon dissipated. For a few nights I gazed up at the full moon with new wonder, but like most of my peers I quickly assimilated the landing as a fact of life. The mythic, questing aspect that Kubrick’s film had helped lend it faded away. The years since have been marked by an increasing obsession with technology. Tools and toys are prized above all else. But every new marvel is on its way to being landfill the moment it arrives, so it’s a curious thing to see a work of the imagination endure the way 2001 has. Despite the anachronistic way the film was shot, using elaborate models rather than the computer-generated images filmgoers have become accustomed to, it still outdoes everything of a similar sort that came after it. Rooted in technology and confident speculation, undoubtedly a product of its moment, after nearly half a century it continues to resist obsolescence.

  I still return to it occasionally and when I do I can’t help but feel I’m watching it in the company of my boyhood self. Wherever I am, in the loungeroom or the revival house, there along the row in his suede jacket and Midnight Cowboy tassels sits the spectre of my slightly stoned guide, who endures as companion and intermediary.

  But for all that, the experience of seeing it again is never particularly nostalgic. For one thing, 2001 isn’t that kind of film. It still expects the viewer to be a voyager, not a popcorn-scarfing chucklehead. And if it has any consolations they are austere indeed. Don’t worry, it seems to say, intelligent life will go on, but your entire race will be subsumed: you’ll become star people – it’ll be great. Little wonder it made me anxious as a kid.

  To be honest, love this film though I do, I’m not a Kubrick tragic. Despite the director’s reputation, some of his work is just silly. Full Metal Jacket, for instance, is an anthology of clichés. During a screening of Eyes Wide Shut a friend and I were nearly thrown out of the cinema for inappropriate laughter. So it’s not as if each time I return to 2001 I’m dusting off a shrine to the great Stanley. Bu
t the impressions his masterwork left in me from that very first viewing have been confirmed and complicated with every subsequent look. I’m not ritualistic or even particularly enthusiastic about revisiting the film. If anything I go back diffidently, nervously, sometimes with many years between viewings, but I go out of curiosity, I suppose, knowing it’s likely to set things off in me that will take some time to absorb, wondering if all that strangeness still resonates. And I’m always startled. The film retains its visual power. Its capacity to disturb and inspire is undiminished.

  When I saw it again recently I was reminded of Kubrick’s brilliant deployment of sound. Not just his bravura use of music, but the way he treats the unbearable silence of space. Many sequences are beautifully, pitilessly quiet, and although we’re looking out at the endless possibility of the cosmos, we’re conscious, too, that all this volume and distance might suck us out into its maw – like astronaut Frank Poole – as if we’d never existed. In 1968 the sight of the murdered astronaut spinning slowly into oblivion gave me nightmares. Even now the sequence makes me clammy. Fatally unmoored, the helpless man reels out into the silent void. As an image of existential dread it’s tough to beat and harder to forget. Kubrick’s portrayal of the watchful computer is another masterstroke. HAL’s demonic red eye is never more foreboding than when the machine is silent.

  Whether dealing with outer space or the operating spaces within buildings and machines, Kubrick overlays many scenes with the fraught and claustrophobic noise of human respiration, like a mesh of consciousness lacing every apparent abyss, and as a result each mute action is threaded with contingencies so great as to be almost unbearable. Since the film’s release, this technique has been used so often in the hands of lesser filmmakers it’s become banal, but to hear it again in 2001 is to hear it as if for the first time. In his 2011 masterpiece The Tree of Life, one of the few films of recent years to rival Kubrick’s for ambition, Terrence Malick tries another tack to achieve something similar. He embroiders earthbound scenes and ethereal dreamscapes with mutterings and prayer-like whispers to give everything on screen, human or otherwise, a sacred yearning that builds toward some sort of collective sentience. Kubrick’s labouring astronauts, however, are most eloquent when they don’t speak. As they struggle to outwit the rogue computer, or as they hurtle through space in mind-warping clefts in time, their every breath says all we need to know about their situation.