The Hunger

As a teenager in the late eighties I watched my share of American TV series. Then as now, television was largely the monopoly of American culture with the exception of a few locally produced and worthy adaptations of Spanish literary classics and the occasional release of highly theatrical BBC dramas. As a result, thanks to the excellent Hill Street Blues I had to, among other lessons that are only useful to feed the pop culture idiot savant in me, learn to decipher the unknown code underlying the snappy repartee of cops and lawyers battling their respective corners of law enforcement in New York City.

Be careful out there and have a sandwich or something

Watching LA Law I also learnt a few lessons regarding the combination of feathery hair, shoulder pads, tan tights, and clip-on earrings (mainly not to wear them all at the same time) that have served me sartorially for a couple of decades now. Although I must confess that, as a child, I used to consider the un-clipping of the said earrings to take a phone-call the height of sophistication. Again, to my surprise, the judiciary world in LA revolved around a heady palette of pastel colours, far removed from the moral black and whites that one would expect in the presence of justice. I confess I still have not figured out, however, how one plain clothes detective in Miami, namely Sony Crockett in Miami Vice, could own a Ferrari Testarossa without being flagrantly corrupt, nor, more urgently, how he could be in pursuit of criminals, wearing loafers with no socks, without tripping at every move.

Eating dinner in Miami Vice: a risky business wearing an all-white suit

The quality of TV series has exponentially improved since and I will spare you yet another article about the HBO-led renaissance of the last decade. The series I am currently watching, The Good Wife, a thought-provoking crime and legal drama, has dispensed with the inoffensive pastels of LA Law, to emphasise the moral greys that sully the conduct of those involved in the legal and political systems in Chicago. One thing has not changed, though, and that is the alarmingly poor dietary choices of characters in crime and legal dramas. As a teenager, my parents and I mined the “walking and talking” scenes of American series for laughs. Could these people ever stop on their tracks for a minute to have a conversation? And what was that strange tick they had of lifting things (a folder from a desk, a ringing phone from its hook, a jacket from a chair) as they moved along firing one-liners at their equally kinetic adversaries? Most hilarious was the tendency not to eat at all or, when compelled by what must have been pangs of near starvation, to wash a stand-bought hot dog with a coffee as they marched down some skyscraper-lined avenue in pursuit of a greater truth or a bigger lie.

Will and Alicia: will they, won’t they ever have something to eat?

I admire American culture in many ways: its greatest writers, filmmakers, and now TV writers, have produced work that is simultaneously compelling, complex and often a direct challenge to its citizens’ self-perception. There is, however, an aspect of American culture that I instinctively link with the sterility of corporations and the heartlessness of capitalism that manifests itself in the perennial lack of food outlined above. I don’t think this is a conscious motif in American TV writing but when I watch the characters in The Good Wife go hungry from one episode to the next, I realise how poorly I would fit in their milieu: the hunger for power, money, and status that oils the capitalist machine leaves me cold. I am afraid I would always insist on getting lunch and being home for dinner.

The revolution will not be televised

There are three things that I enjoy above all else in my spare time: having a meal, going to the movies, and a drink in a pub. The first two I can do by myself, although I would rather in company, the third one is unthinkable on my own. All three require a degree of concentration and ceremony. I’d rather watch a film in the cinema than at home: I like the darkness and quiet of the theatre, and I like the community of voyeurs. I like to plunge into the darkness so that I can enjoy watching films like I enjoy dreaming. I strongly disapprove of chatter of any kind in the cinema and disdain crunching and cracking noises, although not the consumption of food per se if done with a modicum of discretion. Again, I think of film like I think of slumbering: I do not mind the smell of coffee and toast drifting into my dream world, but hate to be rudely awaken by careless clatter in the kitchen. Today I went to the IFI and they dutifully warned patrons not to make noises during the film. A perfect silence reigned throughout the projection of Like Father, Like Son: you could hear the sizzling of Japanese dumplings on-screen above your neighbour’s breathing.

When it comes to eating, Ireland still has enough reverence for the rituals of restaurant dining and I have not come across any public dining ruined by the blare and glare of TV screens.  The most frequent acoustic offender tends to be Muzak and this is quickly gobbled up by the growing din of conversation. Low lighting and convivial chatter are as essential to a good restaurant outing as good bread and wine.  I wish the same could be said about pubs. Why is it so many publicans have decided to ruin their otherwise atmospheric pubs with television sets turned to an infernal blast? Is there a conspiracy out there to turn every bar in this country into the back room of a spin-doctor at the White House? Or perhaps they are aiming to recreate the sitting room of the  hardest of hearing most cantankerous and socially inept grand-uncle in the land?

My latest outing to a pub would suggest this is the case. Last Tuesday I went out for a drink and found my straightforward plan to have a private conversation in a public place thwarted at every turn by televisions blasting the budget debate in the Dáil. Every sip of excellent stout, every line of riveting conversation was punctuated by the offensive banality and obdurate shamelessness of Noonan and company. A good conversation in a pub is the grease of a well-oiled relationship, and the Minister for Finance and his adversaries were hell-bent on making mine screech. The bummest note was struck when Noonan and one of his opponents quoted lines by W.B. Yeats in an effort to give complexity and gravitas to their shopkeepers’ rhetoric. I felt like the beast had quit slouching towards Bethlehem and was sprinting towards me to take a dump on my head. The evening turned into an unplanned pub-crawl as we chased the pipe dream of a TV-less pub. We sat in two and put our heads in four before finding one with a screen-less area. Some evenings the best course of action is to go home and read some Yeats in peace. We need some warnings to stop publicans from switching on their televisions at every turn. Even better, we need a campaign to ban screens from pubs. As with the smoking ban, it will be hard at first, but we will soon grow to appreciate the clean air(waves).

Is Romantic Ireland dead and gone? It  bloody will be if they insist on installing a TV set in every pub

Eating him up inside: James Gandolfini, The Sopranos and the psychodrama of food (Part 1)

I was shocked and saddened at the news of James Gandolfini’s passing last week: he was a superb actor and, as Tony Soprano, arguably gave the finest performance to ever grace a television screen. In The Sopranos he displayed that combination of intense physicality and gestural nuance that has been the mark of great modern acting since Brando. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee has claimed that Tony Soprano is a more complex character than Hamlet: full of contradictions and, thus, impossible to reduce to a set of traits.

Gandolfini managed to convey and sustain that complexity throughout six seasons without exhausting the depth of his character’s psychodrama. Permanently on the brink of ruin yet masterfully in control, Gandolfini’s performance is anchored in the paradox engendered by the tension between, on the one hand, Tony’s formidable physique and steely resolve as a gifted strategist and, on the other, his bearish torpor and fragile psyche. We were never sure whether the body or the mind would herald the arrival of his tragic collapse, and I suspect that viewers’ were frustrated by the series ending because it gave us neither.

The complexity of the character, of course, is also in the writing, and Tony Soprano, as well as a fearsome Family man, is a flawed family man. The double-sided nature of the character gave The Sopranos almost instant critical recognition as a television classic. I have watched the series in full twice and can attest that it stands repeated viewing. It compels because of the alien criminal setting and the familiar domestic environment Tony negotiates from episode to episode.

The Sopranos understood and played with the potential for novelistic expansion of TV series. It gave us hair rising spikes of dysfunction and aggression but it also ambled through the mundane rituals of everyday life to create the multifaceted portrait of an individual at battle with his social, professional, and family environment, which is the stomping ground of the novel. An aspect of the excellence of its portrayal of setting is the repeated use of food to emphasise elements as varied and important to the series as: family and its attending emotional resonance, Italian-American culture and rituals, violence and aggression; maternal manipulation, neglect, and rejection, amongst others.

I sometimes feel that food is underutilised in prose fiction, I suspect this is because it is terribly difficult to write about the sensory experience of eating (hence the shortcomings of food reviewing). In this sense, eating may be like sex, an experience that is universal yet resonates uniquely with each individual; hard to describe it without reducing it to the trite or commonplace.  In drama, food has a lot to offer: it is strongly tied to setting; it is shorthand for culture, time, and place. It speaks volumes about character without recourse for exposition. In other words, it is Godsend for a dramatist, but particularly for a screenwriter, who can avail of the close up, and thus of the actor’s face, to convey the inner world of food, as well as its outer social function. I cannot think of any other work of drama that does this as thoroughly and profoundly as The Sopranos. Gandolfini’s face was, more often than not, the canvas on which the inner and outer worlds of food were reflected, which is to say the canvas on which body and soul fleetingly become one.