Cool Runnings
Disclaimer: This is not an article about Jamaican bob-sledding. It has nothing to do with the Olympics, winter sports, heartwarming human interest stories or early 90s cinema.
Maybe you didn't click on the title because you thought it did. In fact, maybe I am one of the only sentient beings who recalls, with some affection, the 1994 film of that title. Although I mainly recall it with affection because I went to Paris for the first time that year and saw posters for an awesome-sounding film called Rasta Rocket, which (sadly) turned out to be the aforementioned Jamaican bob-sledding classic.
Rasta Rocket: it's infinitely cooler as a title. Infinite cool is one of the many things that Paris makes me think about (ah, the bliss of Eurostar!), along with why French bread is so addictive, whether Parisian dogs have got bigger in the last 15 years, and why people film Notre Dame. Paris, to my fifteen year old turtleneck-wearing, de Beauvoir-reading, hipster self was the arbiter of cool. On that first trip, I made the pilgrimage to Père Lachaise to pay my respects to Jim Morrison; I went to Shakespeare and Co.; I sortied through the Marché aux Puces. Très cool.
But also très teen. I went back a few years later armed with more clichés: reading Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast: A Diary of a Film, walking the streets mentioned by Baudelaire and Apollinaire, looking for traces of Existentialist café culture. All the socially and culturally arbitrated markers of cool accompanied this trip: Gauloises, espresso, a Moleskine notebook. Probably the same bloody turtleneck. I felt it return like a clamp around my neck when I went to Patti Smith's exhibition this weekend.
I love Patti Smith: she's an icon for me as an artist and an activist and a human. The exhibition was like being inside her brain, which you'd think would be cool. But it wasn't. It was the brain of a fifteen year old, still romanticising the Symbolists and their diseased lives and deaths (check out Angela Carter's story "Black Venus" for a take on Baudelaire's syphilitically infectious cool), still climbing moodily through graveyards, still aestheticising the grubby mattress in a narrow room which seemed more reminiscent to me of a refugee detention centre than an artist's garret.
What was missing from her love affair with Paris was the world I discovered after I got my head out of the turtleneck: Gertrude Stein (a Jewish lesbian living in occupied France), Jean Rhys (working poor, alcoholic), Cora Sandel, HD, Josephine Baker (dancing at revues because she found Paris less racist than the US), and the different meaning that the artist's garret had for the lives led by many unknown women in hipster Paris (broke, nude modelling, procuring illegal abortions, caring for alcoholic artists).
But who cares about that when there's potential Rimbauds to romance and Morrisons to dance with in the moonlight? Ah, la vie bohème and all its anti-bourgeois charms. Unless, of course, you're not middle-class, not male, not white... a point that has been made before by Sally Potter in her brilliant take on La bohème, Thriller (1979), in which Mimi (Sabine in Baz Luhrmann's lurid version, Moulin Rouge) gets up from the white chalk line and investigates her own death.
Conclusion? It was cool what done it. Or the aura of cool attached to the notion of being an artist starving in a garret for art's sake, with its concomitant lack of concern for money, the future, work, other people (as individuals or en masse). Cool has little time for politics - and when it does - well, let's take a look at the programs of films being shown right now in London to mark the 40th anniversary of May 1968, when France faced its biggest revolution since the Revolution.
Qui etes vous, Polly Magoo, anyone? I could give a dozen other examples of New Wave films which, sure, they're radical when it comes to certain Marxist dogmas but - questions of race and sex? Of European supremacy? Of France as a colonial power? A single film by a woman? Not so much. None of the mini-fests are including films from the Third Cinema and African cinema that were influenced by the political currents leading up to 1968. Or even French films that dealt with these issues. Because what's cool is the canon, led by the cult of filmmakers and of design.
Cool rules, in other words. And there are cool rules that dog my heels, some like the former kind of Parisian dog (small, yippy, bity, whiny) - like, if I refer to a feminist classic in a poem, I feel the need to footnote it, but if it were James Joyce or Godard or someone 'cult', I wouldn't. Others are like the new Parisian canine force (large, lumbering - but dangerous), like the loss of important films and books, including books that were massively popular and critically acclaimed, because the arbiters of cool still tend to glom onto what reflects them (mainly white, mainly male, mainly middle-class, mainly straight, mainly able-bodied, etc). And there's an extension of the meaning of cool to mean 'radical,' so that only radical things that are cool (JG Ballard) get highlighted while radical things that are uncool (Bette Gordon) don't.
The thing about the small puppies is they turn into the big hounds sooner or later. What seems like a stylistic choice now becomes erasure and homogenisation all too quickly. Cool lauds the (apparent) rebels and revolutionaries, turning them into a canon in the process (Che Guevara T-shirt anyone?). It enforces rigid rules while portraying itself as breaking all the rules. Reference Agnès Varda or Ousmane Sembene rather than Jean-Luc Godard, or Tori Amos rather than Patti Smith (in fairness, Smith invited Amos to play as part of the season she programmed in London three years ago), and feel the wrath of cool. I know I sound like a small whiny-type dog, but it matters. Culture doesn't run itself - there are people making the cool runnings. They make the possibility that many of the things that we love as Shebytches be declared cool about as likely as a Jamaican Olympic bob-sledding team winning gold.
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