Essential escapism
“barbarism will not be eradicated by culture.” So says a character in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which just ended its Covid-interrupted but otherwise triumphant first run in London. The man speaking, with typically Stoppardian erudition, is a member of a thriving, assimilated, uppermiddle-class Jewish family in early 20th-century Vienna. He is arguing with a relative who believes that so central is the Jewish contribution to the cultural life of that most cultivated society, that nothing could possibly derail the progress of successful integration. It doesn’t take long for the prophecy of barbarism to be fulfilled.
A piece of music, or a painting, or a book — Schoenberg, Klimt and Freud are presiding spirits hovering over Leopoldstadt, not forgetting Theodor Herzl, and Hitler, of course — can have power, but it can’t save us. The parallels with our own moment are stark: the rise of nationalism; the demonising of minorities, including but not limited to Jews; the shirking of our responsibilities to the persecuted; the deadly antipathy towards intellectuals and the arts... These echoes can be clearly heard today, and not only in Mitteleuropa. A discussion in Leopoldstadt of America’s failure to meet even its modest quota of Jews seeking asylum from Nazi Austria might have been pointed directly at our own failure to rescue all but a handful of the people of Afghanistan from their tormentors. Except Stoppard finished his meisterwerk long before our sudden flight from that country. This kind of venality never goes out of style.
So, no, barbarism has not and will not be eradicated by culture. But neither has culture been eradicated by barbarism, and Stoppard’s play is proof of that. As ever, though, we Brits are having a jolly good go at it.
The night I saw Leopoldstadt happened to be the same one that Boris Johnson announced his autumn cabinet reshuffle. The appointment of a new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was confirmed: Nadine Dorries, a woman previously — and surely one day, posthumously — best known for her appearance on ITV’s long-running reality show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. (Is that barbarism or culture, or barbarism as culture, or vice versa?)
Some might suggest that this earlier experience of Dorries’ is an excellent primer for her new life as a minister in the Johnson administration, given that eating shit on TV is the central requirement of both roles. But her suitability for the job doesn’t stop there. The MP for Mid Bedfordshire has further previous in the moronic inferno, as a BBC-baiting, Islamophobic, gayrights-bashing culture warrior. And, as her weary defenders have reminded us, as a bestselling author of soft focus, landfilling historical dramas that run the full gamut of emotions from lachrymose to maudlin. (I mention only in passing that Germany’s culture secretary is an art historian, while France’s wrote a book on Verdi.)
What is the point of culture, Stoppard’s integrationist Jew might wonder, if it can’t protect us from doom? Or, in our case, from Dorries. But is that what culture is for?
Paolo Sorrentino is the writer-director of a series of dazzling films and TV shows, most
famously his Oscar-winning satire of Roman high society, The Great Beauty. In December, he returns with an extraordinary new movie, The Hand of God, about fate, family, football and the consolations of cinema.
In September, I went to the Venice Film Festival, where The Hand of God was in competition, to talk to Sorrentino about, among other things, the power of art to provide refuge from reality. Sorrentino doesn’t think culture can save us, necessarily, but cinema arrived at a moment in his own life when he needed it badly, and it gave him a reason to carry on. That is one of the themes of The Hand of God.
Sorrentino believes in the legitimacy of escapism. He says that he began to create alternative realities because it was the only way he could cope with events in his own life. But art can be a confrontation with reality, as much as an escape from it. Leopoldstadt offers that confrontation. It is Stoppard’s reckoning with his own family history: all four of his grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. It is an act of bearing witness. It is a reminder of what happens when we allow tyranny to take root. The Hand of God is a reckoning, too, with an appalling family tragedy. It may prove cathartic for Sorrentino — he doesn’t know yet — but for the rest of us it offers a sobering reminder of the fragility, but not the futility, of human life.
The Hand of God won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice. But it was by no means the only exciting, challenging new film playing at the festival. This issue of Esquire, as culture gets back to business after its long lay-off, we spotlight a number of the most hotly anticipated movies on the way.
Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is a psychological thriller set in Swinging London, influenced by the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s, as well as by Polanski’s Repulsion. Olivia Ovenden interviewed one of its stars, the young New Zealander Thomasin McKenzie, and we took her photo outside Bar Italia on Frith Street. (Cultured Londoners will know that it was in that same building, in 1926, as a plaque on the wall reminds ristretto drinkers, that John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of his newfangled invention, television.)
In a separate piece, Olivia talked to Adam McKay, who made his name as the director of the broadest of broad Hollywood comedies (the deathless Anchorman is one of his) and then switched to effervescent, star-packed, but also pointed political satires including The Big Short, about the subprime-mortgage crisis; Vice, about the war on terror; and his new one, Don’t Look Up, with Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, about, well, the end of the world. (Timely!) In addition to his accomplishments, McKay makes for a charming interviewee.
More movie-talk from Miranda Collinge, who caught up with the fast-moving Justin Peck, choreographer of the New York City Ballet and the man stepping into Jerome Robbins’ giant dancing shoes for Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. And David Thomson, doyen of film writers, wonders what happened to the happy ending? (007 preservationists, take note.)
And then there’s Benedict Cumberbatch, the man of the hour (again) with four high-profile new films ready for release, including the latest outings for his Marvel character, Doctor Strange. While I was sunning myself on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel, waiting for Sorrentino to arrive, I watched Kirsten Dunst and Jane Campion, at the next table over, preparing for their promotional duties for The Power of the Dog, a new Western — also featuring Campion’s compatriot, Thomasin McKenzie — that Cumberbatch, its star turn, discusses with Johnny Davis for his excellent profile on page 136.
Culture, as even John Logie Baird would agree, isn’t only moving pictures. Also in this issue, an admission of guilt, from yours truly: I enjoy the novels of Jonathan Franzen, even the new one, and I don’t care who knows it. That may not sound like a shocking opinion to hold to you (and understandably so), but in certain literary circles, especially online, it’s fighting talk. Elsewhere, Charlie Teasdale talks to British womenswear darling Erdem Moralioglu about his first collection for men; Andrew O’Hagan hymns the joys of fragrance pour homme; and Simon Mills stubs out the fashion set’s favourite snout. We celebrate the best watches on the market; classic trainers; nu pub grub; trendy detergent (really); Japanese gardening tools (double really) and the very best from the winter men’s collections.
Finally, I am delighted to welcome Dylan Jones to Esquire, for his long overdue debut in these pages. (Dylan, where have you been hiding all these years?) Dylan is not only the best and most successful British magazine editor of his or any other generation, he is also the author of too many books to count, including a series of hit oral biographies about pop stars and pop movements (David Bowie; the New Romantics). For our Journal section, he offers a characteristically waspish account of how he puts those books together, introducing the terrifying concept of the “one anecdote” interviewee. As someone who has been interviewed by Dylan for his books, and never managed to produce more than a single publishable story each time, I read this column with a shudder and a wince. No doubt the slight was fully intended, as well as richly deserved.
Barbarism? That’s as close as we get here. ○