Today
I did something I almost never do, making a fool of myself
in the process (something I do a lot, so I’m, like,
so over it). I went up to someone I recognised from a movie
and said how much I’d enjoyed her film. This is trés
pas moi. I’ve from London, home of famous people,
where we think nothing of seeing Jude and Sienna out walking
the dogs/kids in silly hats (Jude favours a large Rasta
thingie). I used to have my hair dyed by Tori Amos’
hairdresser. I went to school with Ridley Scott’s daughter.
I once gave Eddie Izzard a cigarette. It’s all water
off an extremely cynical duck’s back (although this
cliché has been given a certain frisson by one of
the frontrunners for the Ig Nobel prize, who studies homosexual
necrophilia in ducks, but anyway). I even passed up the
chance to touch Björk when I saw her in a bar in Reykjavik.
Yeah, I sooooooooo cool. It’s a sense of priorities,
I tell myself: famous people are just people, they do groceries,
have hangovers, eat lunch, whatever.
And
they have a right to privacy and peace. I’ve been on
TV three times in the last three years, and there’s
a weird place I enter between thrilled and miffed when people
I know tell me that they’ve seen me on TV. And that’s
just people I know. There’s also a weird sense of having
been caught doing something intensely embarrassing (which,
when a prof says that they’ve seen you on cable TV
dressing in sparkly wings talking about Buffy, is
probably justified). As the James Spader vamp says to Buffy
in "Conversations with Dead People," it’s
an inferiority complex about having a superiority complex.
It’s especially strange when people seem excited about
this, as if knowing someone who has been on TV is a moment
of transcendence in an otherwise humdrum existence. Talking
about Buffy while wearing sparkly wings is no sort
of challenge. It’s fun, but I don’t feel like
I deserve praise for it. Mild derision, sure, but praise?
Talking about superheroes does not a hero make.
Making
a low-budget film about First Nations women in the Canadian
prison system, and getting distribution and great reviews
sure does though. Hence much tripping over of feet and of
words this afternoon when I recognised Gail Maurice at Maggie’s
on College. I see about sixty films a year, and most of
them have familiar faces in them, even the indie films.
I speak fluent marginal celebrity (like recognising the
girl who works in Jet Fuel as a member of the Stars) but
it’s rare that a face will stick in my mind from a
single viewing, with no network of NOW reviews, gossip,
theatre appearances, posters, websites… the million
and one brand reinforcements that attend even the most obscure
and pointless celebrity these days. Johnny Greyeyes
is branded on my mind, though. No-one had to sell it to
me — I sought it out, watched it in awe. Every cliché
of prison movies is reworked, every cliché of the
indigenous story in Canada is examined, sifted for hard
political and social truth, given life, a body, identity.
And Gail, who wrote the film as well as playing Johnny,
stands at the centre.
So
I had to go and say something, in my uncertainty and weirdness.
Not because I am arrogant enough to think that my speaking
up about having seen/remembered/loved the film is going
to affect her life (although I hope it touched her), but
because how often do I get to meet a real hero? A proud,
talented queer woman who is making her own art on her own
terms (more details in an interview here <http://www.canadiancontent.ca/interviews/110502maurice.html>)
without the grinding of the media machine. I admire Björk,
more distantly, in the same way — especially now she’s
changed her mind and decided that she’s a feminist
in this cool interview that put The Guardian back
in my good books <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1436296,00.html>.
There’s part of me that finds it hard to believe that
the quiet woman I met today dreams of being a knight in
armour, but that’s the part that also doubts my power
to inhabit my dreams. There’s a larger part that’s
hugely inspired and enlivened by it — and another part,
the movie slut who believes that pop culture can be the
first place that social politics change for the better,
that can’t fucking wait to see it: Angelina Jolie and
Gail Maurice riding out side by side to fight off the white
man. Because without heroes, we start to think we real cool,
forget that there’s more we can strive for and achieve.
Without heroes, there’s nothing to talk about.
he