Catch it early

Timesinks from Amazon arrived this afternoon, bringing CDs of instrumental music (which in theory I should be able to play while studying, so as not to distract me with lyrics), and a few DVDs for the weekend. Of the music, standouts are the soundtrack from Miss Potter, with Renee Zellwegger looking rather rabbity herself on the cover, which is light, airy, and evokes wonderfully the English countryside of imagination (as opposed to the English countryside as seen from the window of a First Great Western train); Pan's Labyrinth is also a beautiful plunge into a fairytale world, the only problem being that the soundtrack was conceived as an extended lullaby, which of course meant that I promptly fell fast asleep.

The DVDs I bought were a lucky choice. I had meant to get another season of 24, but the political bias was beginning to show itself to a distasteful degree, like having a conversation with a man with an increasingly tumescent erection. I decided to take a chance on Criminal Minds, and found it refresingly intelligent. It isn't so tightly written to the point of being fatiguing, like the hour-long BBC dramas; it's predictable enough to be fodder for a Saturday night off. It falls into one of the sub-categories of crime dramas about the different investigation procedures, in this case the profilers. Mandy Patinkin, oddly convincing as a paternal/avuncular veteran of the field, heads a team who, in the episodes I've watched so far, gallop through the various criminal psychoses.

Perhaps I've been wondering since my nightmares of the other night whether I'm of a criminal disposition, but with each profile I found myself nervously examining myself for signs of criminal behaviour. Loner disposition and antisocial qualities? Check. Obsessive compulsive disorder? Yes, until my mid-teens. Interest in Criminology? Yes, I just finished the exams. Paranoid personality? Check. Does paranoia that one is of a criminal disposition count for or against likelihood of criminal behaviour? Okay, now I'm going around in circles. A sign of self-obsession...

Dream Sequence

It's only been my second night without downers, but I've spent the last two nights in the throes of a dream which I wish I could say was recurrent, but has been actually rather like a television serial. Perhaps I've been exalting the format of the television novel a little too much, but my dreaming has taken on the likeness of an art-house version of 24. Night 1. Interior. Night. I hang out with some new friends, popping a few pills and smoking up. At the end of it all, I feel a flirtatious camaraderie with one of the boys, R. As the sun comes up, they all stumble out of my house, sobering up in the cold dawn. I'm suddenly conscious of the maid standing shivering in the doorway; she informs me that my terrier, who was pregnant with four puppies, is dead. R had come upon her and for no apparent reason kicked her across the lawn. She had spent last few hours haemorrhaging to death at the vet's. I wake up and attend my Sociology of Ethnicity class.

Second night. I have a presentation to prepare, so I took out my notes, my handouts, and my readings, and soon fall asleep with pencil in hand. Interior. Night. I have found my father's .38 in a desk drawer, and am trying to remember how to use it, and the few shooting lessons we had had together before I grew up and into libertarian politics. My dog's corpse is brought home in a cardboard box, and I thank the maid who had fetched it for me. As soon as the door closed, I found the reason why I had been unable to work the gun. I unlatched the safety, braced my arm, and fired. The recoil was more manageable than it had been for a nine year old, and I managed to leave a nick in the door three feet left of the peephole I had been aiming at. Armed, literally, with this new confidence, I mustered the courage to open the box, and stroked the stone cold body. The next shot went into the wall somewhere. I wiped away the tears and kept firing until the gun was empty.

At this point I had to wake up to go to the bathroom. I knew that if I went back to sleep I would soon head out to see if I could actually find R and pull the trigger. Did I want to find that out? It wasn't even six in the morning yet, but I decided instead to check my email and see if any friends across the globe were awake and logged onto their instant messaging service. Tonight I'm cranky and antisocial, and have decided I'm going to pop a Valium. I also called my maid and was reassured by the sound of barking in the background. I told her to take her to the vet's; she's overdue for her shots anyway.

Notes on a Few Recent Films on Sex

After the phenomenal worldwide success of 'The History Boys', you might be led to thinking that the British take a somewhat relaxed moral attitude about things like middle-aged schoolteachers sexually harassing young boys. This is far from the truth. In Venus, about a decrepit actor's relationship with a young girl, and Notes On A Scandal, about a female schoolteacher's relationship with a young boy, and that of an older schoolteacher's sapphic lust for her in turn, yet more permutations of inappropriate desire are explored, sometimes more throughly than one would like to really see.

Of the two new films, Notes On A Scandal is the 'bigger' release, featuring as it does Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett; Patrick Marber (Closer) wrote the screenplay, and Philip Glass (The Hours, among other depressing hits) the music. All the ingredients are in place for a throughly gut-wrenching movie, and anyone with any sense would wait for the DVD and watch it with either a very large tub of ice-cream or a warm body into whose clothing one can sink one's tears. I am not a sensible person, so I watched it at the Phoenix Picturehouse, where I had, incidentally, recently seen The Queen. I only mention this because Notes on a Scandal features two former Queen Elizabeths, and I felt that Helen Mirren should have at least been given a bit role in this movie, if only because she has more Elizabeths under her belt than either of them. The movie was indeed bursting at the seams with emotion and high drama, and Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett turned in excellent performances: full marks. But even while Elizabeth I and Elizabeth I were thrashing it out, there was a part of me that was tapping my foot: 'And then?'

Perhaps it was because I had not quite recovered from the sparse, insidious realism of the previous night's Venus, directed by Roger Michell, of Notting Hill fame, but in a style far removed from the gloss, as well as romanticism, of that film. The lighting in Venus is harsh and unforgiving, especially when the most of the cast is carunculated and tousled. Even Jessie (aka Venus) isn't fantastically pretty; she's young and has the attractiveness of youth, but that's about it. Now when you have a situation in which there is an old (i.e., not merely elderly, or older, but old) man and a teenager (presumably of consensual age), one expects certain cliched storylines to emerge: the intellectualized desire of Nabokov's Lolita, a heartwarming tale of breathing life into a dying man's last days; a tale of sexual frustration, perhaps. Hanef Kureshi, who did the screenplay, and Michell did nothing so prosaic. Or rather, they took all these for granted (the scene in which she insouciantly swabs her twat and offers her finger to Peter O' Toole as a 'reward' is unforgettable) and went far beyond any such conventionalities, ironically by making it a film, quite simply, about a relationship. The film is as insouciant in its portrayal of this unfolding relationship as Jessie is in it, and this lack of deliberate intensity makes it hit all the harder.

I highly recommend watching these films back to back with The History Boys; perhaps they should offer them as a box setof some sort, with a warning that any thoughts of sex after watching all three in a row will, for a while at least, be accompanied by a shudder.