Don't Get Mad, Get Murderous

I don’t know about you, but I tend to judge revolutionary groups by just how much mayhem they cause. I’m not condoning it, but, if you really feel strongly about something, and you can’t settle it by democratic means, you should almost certainly leave a trail of blown up cars, robbed banks, assassinated politicians and burned out embassies in your wake.

Britain’s own The Angry Brigade took a gentler approach, trying to avoid hurting anyone if possible but, ultimately, they proved to be utterly ineffectual and got caught and imprisoned, so it was not a massively successful policy. I’m glad that they didn’t kill anybody, of course, but they might have got further if they had.

So what were they so angry about? Well,  is was all about that bloody System that people often rail about, the capitalist world that, in their eyes, grinds people down and reduces them as human beings. They hoped that by sending a few letter bombs and machine gunning some empty embassies they would incite the working man to rise up and violently revolt against their oppressors. Typical middle class radicals, really: banging on about freeing the proletariat but expecting them to do all the dirty work and the killing and dying while the instigators talk about who’ll be in charge of what in the new order.

Hilary and Anna. Hilary is on the far left , Anna is too.  

In 1972, ‘World In Action’ interviewed two out on bail Brigade members, Hilary Crick and Anna Mendelson. They don’t have much to say for themselves (Hilary is particularly, almost smugly, uncommunicative), and refuse (or are unable to) present a coherent view of events, or even something approaching a defence. Anna tries, but generally drifts off the point very quickly. That said, it must be remembered that these are two people in their early twenties who are under enormous strain and are each facing up to 15 years in prison, so their reluctance to incriminate themselves, and their inability to think straight can be forgiven, especially it is not thought that they were major players in the group.

Perhaps the final word should go to Jim Prescott, the only working class member of the group, a man who was prepared to kill and maim for his cause, but wasn’t allowed to and spent 10 years of his life in maximum security prisons anyway: ‘I realised that I was the one who was angry and the others were more like the Slightly Cross Brigade’.

What a very British revolution.

A Cell Of One

B.S Johnson was a fiercely innovative writer and film maker who produced a series of experimental works throughout the sixties and early seventies. Despite his brilliance, he was unable to find his rightful place in the arts world and, overcome by despondency, he killed himself in 1973.

His last published work (in his lifetime) was perhaps his most accessible, the short novel ‘Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry’. In it, a callow but ambitious young man after money and sex applies the principles of double entry book-keeping to his everyday life: for every debit, there must be a corresponding credit. At first, this results in some minor vandalism and some lightly comical mischief. Ultimately, however, Christie’s rapier becomes a bludgeon and he becomes a terrorist, ‘a cell of one’, who poisons 20,000 people and tries to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

A film adaptation was made in 2000 and, although it’s no masterpiece, it has been unjustly overlooked, perhaps because of its very limited release (in 2002), its obvious budgetary limitations and the fact that it seems unable to work out whether it wants to be arty and oblique, surreal and subversive or ‘Trainspotting’.

Star Nick Moran is as bland as tapioca (Christie is basically a blank on the page, but there is a strong authorial voice behind him that is missing on screen), but overall it’s a decent, energetic approximation of the source material, and the tricky part of showing how Christie’s petty grievances (getting told off at work, his girlfriend’s rubbish job, tax) are ‘credited’ by increasingly disproportionate actions of revenge is done well and, just like the book, keeps just on the right side of ludicrous.

I’m going to stop there because I keep thinking about how incisive B.S Johnson would be if he was doing the review. He was a writer; I am a typist. We shall come back to his work at a later date. We'll come back to mine tomorrow.

Christie Malry's Own Double Entry