SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS: SAD AND FLEETING BEAUTY
“The attack on pederasty is at root an attack on maleness itself.”
Christianity did wage a war on the male violence in the European Dark Ages that we are all the beneficiaries of. There are gains to be made through culturally reinforced self-restraint and we undoubtedly made them. But any good trait is capable of becoming pathological. Honesty’s good. Pursued to an abstract extreme, it can be cruel and murderous. Moderating pederasty is good. Pursued to the pathological extreme Freeman describes well it becomes gangrenous. The protection of boys today is reminiscent of the way Ottoman heirs apparent were kept safe. Protected from every conceivable danger--along with quite a few inconceivable--they grew up sickly and decadent and myopically self-obsessed, not much use to anyone. Which isn't a bad description of western civilisation right now.
The film Is Anybody There? is rendered safe by Michael Caine’s old old age. He was 75 at the making of, and they worked hard to add at least ten years. Physically he’s finished and spiritually he’s half way to the cutting room floor. Good performance by Bill Milner as plucky 11yo Edward saves this soggy old bowl of tapioca from being a complete waste of bran.
There was one message worth the gleaning. A bright, curious boy lives with his mum and dad in an old folks home. He spends his time trying to find evidence of ghosts. In this ageing, dreary, senile world, maybe the afterlife, the boy thinks, can offer a cure for his terminal boredom and isolation. Hats off to the metaphor, anyway. Used to be the boy himself was the surest way to heaven—now the lad has to jerry-build his own stairway.
The corpse of Caine past has enough crusty, coughing old echoes to offer the boy some hints of a friendship, and there is an occasional murmur of warmth amidst all the catarrhs and cold custard.
(Memo to film-makers: twinkly old-geezer humor--eg the nonagenarian's dirty jokes that scandalize a young priest--is more shopworn than Caine's slippers.)
But the moment the boy makes a big gesture, makes a sterling effort to bring light into the old codger’s life, with an important trip to a graveyard (where else?)--the old codger starts weeping about old regrets and suddenly looks at Edward and says balefully, “Who are you?” In the graveyard of Western culture, a boy has to know his place – which is roughly nowhere. Caine dies shortly afterwards. And the boy’s sad but wiser, apparently. Is anybody there, indeed.
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