The pie-crust head of Craig Brown looks damp between the lights of Aldeburgh cinema. He is interviewing Louis Theroux and he has just assured us, the audience that Theroux (junior) has
” a basic faith in human nature and a belief that we are all good”
Is this why he seems so excited by the sinister? Hoping to expose the naiveties of Max Clifford, Jimmy Saville & American neo-Nazis. People driven by their need tyo control;ridiculed by their lack of it.
I ask Louis a question assuming, naturally that we are a love-match, that he’ll feel a sense of relief when I ask it-yes, that girl understands me
Me: “Have you ever met anyone who was so funny that you felt sobered and could not find the humour in the situation, perhaps until later?”
Louis: “So the question is um…have I ever met anyone so poisonous and evil that I didn’t want to interview them?”
I repeated the question but to no avail. I think he thought I believed that people could be categorised as evil. This has never appealed to me as it explains nothing.
Maybe Louis had a fundamentally happy childhood. His father may write lascivious memoirs from his condo in Hawaii, but maybe there was little darkness in the Theroux household. Louis continues to try and answer me by telling an anecdote about someone who initially comes across as very unpleasant but who later revealed his vulnerability through a love of Are you Being Served.
I know of the photographs of Mussolini that were banned and that guests had to continue the conversations Hitler had stopped when he had fallen asleep half an hour previously.
I watched Marnie the other night and was interested how Marnie’s behaviour was explained and excused as part of a Freudian equation. I suppose my very unpleasant childhood may account for my vertiginous fear of darkness-of the literal and the modern ‘murky and unpleasant sort. Vertiginous in the sense that I want to jump from high places. I feel I am from and part of something with such Exxon Valdese darkness that I must avoid it at all costs and yet it is somehting I often find myself overwhelmed by.
So to owls: the most collected of all figurines in Britain and America. Traditionally birds of the dark and often thought to be ghosts.
I have two owl stories, one light-filled and one a sort of twilight…
Ctd on next post
Adapted from a text published in Dark Arty
