Withnail and I (film group essay)

"They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over."
Danny, the drugdealer in　Withnail and I

"We live in a kingdom of rain...where royalty comes in gangs. Come on, lads. Let’s get home. The sky is beginning to bruise."

Uncle Monty in Withnail and I


　
Bruce Robinson’s 1987 Withnail and I is a cult film in Great Britain. Fans of the film demand that the National Trust acquire properties where scenes in the movie were shot. (The National Trust attempted to purchase the cottage featured in the movie in 2009 as a place of historical significance – the price was too high and the place is now a Bed and Breakfast catering to Withnail fans.) Admirers memorize the dialogue and can recite much of the movie by heart. In the UK, the film is used as the media "platform" for a drinking game. Every time, Withnail consumes an alcoholic beverage, the participants in the game are supposed to drink down a similar decoction. When Withnail drinks lighter fluid, players substitute overproof Rum. Participation in the game is not advisable. In the film, Withnail swallows:

9 and ½ glasses red wine

½ pint cider

1 shot of lighter fluid

2 and ½ shots of gin

6 glasses of sherry

13 glasses of whiskey

½ pint of ale






Bruce Robinson


Bruce Robinson is an Englishman born in 1946. Blessed with stunning good looks as a young man, he performed in several important films. He had a role (Benvolio) in Franco Zeffrelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), worked with Francois Truffaut in The Story of Adele H. (1975) and performed in Ken Russell’s lurid The Music Lovers (1968).

In 1984, Robinson wrote the script for Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. At that time, he was working primarily as a screenwriter and novelist. Withnail and I was his first film and is largely autobiographical. Although the film was a failure at the box-office, Withnail and I was well-reviewed and Robinson went on to make another picture with George Harrison’s Handmade Films, How to get ahead in Advertising (1989). This film is a surreal black comedy that also confused audiences but impressed many critics. (How to get ahead in Advertising is about a advertising executive who suffers a psychotic breakdown; a boil on his shoulder turns into a talking head –" a head" – that advises as to how he should advance his career). Invited to Hollywood, Robinson directed a crime film in 1992 Jennifer 8. The movie was a complete failure and, in fact, was not released in the UK – it went straight to video. Robinson was so disturbed by the experience that he left Los Angeles and vowed that he would never work there again.

In the latter part of the nineties, Robinson returned to fiction and screenwriting. He wrote Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) with Roland Joffe, a dramatic film starring Paul Newman about the Manhattan Project and Neil Jordan’s In Dreams (1999). By the first decade of the 21^st century, Robinson’s Withnail and I had attained legendary status as a cult film in the British Isles and, for years, had been one of the bestselling movies on home video. A new generation of fans were impressed by the film and one of them was Johnny Depp. Depp agreed to produce a film version of The Rum Diary, an account of spectacular alcoholism in Puerto Rico based on the writing of Hunter S. Thompson. Robinson had lost years of productivity to booze – he acknowledges that he is a "chronic alcoholic" – but had been sober for six and a half years when Depp’s production company hired him to direct the film. Depp was hoping that lightning would strike twice and that The Rum Diary would be an indelible cult film similar to Withnail and I. Robinson who was then in his early sixties suffered from a writer’s block and couldn’t mold Thompson’s chaotic prose into a meaningful form. He began drinking heavily again and, in fact, many of the alcohol sequences in the movie are not staged – Robinson and Depp got drunk together and, then, the camera would record the actor’s antics. After the film was released, to tepid reviews, Robinson quit drinking again and has remained sober since that time.

Robinson continues to write novels, short stories, and children’s books. He is a sad figure in the history of film, a promising director who made one great movie and whose career has been blighted by alcoholism.




Production

In the late sixties, Bruce Robinson was often unemployed, living in squalor, with his friend, an actor named Vivian Mackerrel. Robinson finished a novel about this existence in 1969. Publishers weren’t interested in the book but it circulated among Robinson’s friends and associates in manuscript form. Another actor friend gave a copy of the book to a wealthy young man, the heir to an oil fortune. This young man subsidized Robinson’s work rewriting the autobiographical novel into the screenplay from which Withnail and I was produced. Robinson took about five years of desultory work revising his book into the screenplay. Someone associated with George Harrison’s HandMade Films, a production group most well-known for Terry Gilliam’s early movies, read the screenplay and approved the picture for production. (HandMade Films was founded by Harrison and Denis O’Brien to fund the Monty Python picture The Life of Brian).

HandMade Films conceived of the movie as a rowdy comedy, a sort of British Animal House and was distressed by the first few weeks of shooting. The production supervisor observed that the movie was "underlit" and that there was very little comedy in evidence – "where are the gags?" the production supervisor asked. Robinson’s conception of the film was always somewhat dark; the movie was to be a farce-tragedy. Indeed, at the end of the original screenplay, Withnail fills a gun-barrel with wine, Uncle Monty’s Margaux 53, and drinks from the weapon while pulling the trigger.

Robinson was paid 80,000 pounds to direct the film. He quarreled with HandMade over the budget, demanding to shoot the scenes at Uncle Monty’s cottage on location in Penrith, Cumbria in the Lake District. HandMade wouldn’t authorize location work, fearing that this would force the film overbudget and so Robinson invested 30,000 pounds of his salary in the film in order to finance production in the Penrith area.

The actor playing Withnail, Richard Grant, who became a star as a result of this film, was a strict teetotaler. Nonetheless, Robinson found ways to sneak alcohol onto the set and, in fact, there was much drinking in the course of the film’s production. (In the scene in which Withnail drinks lighter fluid, Robinson substituted vinegar for water without telling his actor, this accounts for the grimace and pained reaction by Grant when he swallows the fluid.) Before shooting the film, Robinson required Grant to binge-drink until he passed-out so that he could better play the part of the frequently hungover inebriate, Withnail. Grant recalled the production of the film as "deeply unpleasant."

The movie failed at the box office and Robinson was not reimbursed his investment.

　




Autobiographical Elements



Bruce Robinson lived with the actor Vivian Mackerrel for about five years, on and off. (The two men met in their first year of drama school; Robinson has written that Mackerrel looked "like Marlon Brando" at that time.) Mackerrel was a Scottish actor, a "splenetic fop," and an alcoholic. He was born in 1945, educated extensively and at great expense, and, at first, thought to show great promise as a thespian. Soon, however, alcoholism and drug abuse ruined him.

After completing his training as an actor, Mackerrel lived with Robinson and another roommate in a flat in Camden. Mackerrel was immensely attractive to women and, apparently, had no difficulty seducing them. But he had no use for sex – his romance was with booze – and his roommates were always astounded that Mackerrel did nothing to prosecute these affairs. (Mackerrel was bisexual in college and may have been primarily homosexual although his various addictions rendered the question of his sexual proclivities purely abstract.) Mackerrel had an acid tongue and was renowned as a great wit. Those who saw him act thought that he had the capacity to be the best of his generation. Photographs show a handsome man with a lean face and piercing eyes wearing a Sherlock Holmes style "deerstalker" hat. His nicknames were "Spine" and "Crime" – no one knew what the first meant; the second referred to his habit of cadging drinks in bars: "Crime doesn’t pay."

Mackerrel appeared in a few TV shows and a couple of short films. He starred with Marianne Faithful in a ghost story aired by the BBC. He couldn’t work live theater because of his alcohol and drug addictions and, after 1974, was unable act for the camera. Prior to that time, Mackerrel had reached a nadir in his addiction when he spent an afternoon guzzling lighter fluid. For many months at a time, Robinson and Mackerrel were so poor that they relied upon a single light bulb for both heat and light – they both recalled moving the light bulb from room to room in their desolate apartment. This poverty led Mackerrel to indulge in the lighter fluid – they had run out of money for boozing – and this concoction caused blindness so that he spent several weeks in a stupor unable to see. Gradually, Mackerrel recovered. One afternoon, a year later, Mackerrel came back from Scotland with a crate of bottles of 100% alcohol, some sort of byproduct of the whisky distilling process. He drank one of those bottles, went on a rampage, and using an artificial leg that he had somehow acquired, smashed out two walls in the Camden flat that he and Robinson were renting. A couple months later, Mackerrel and Robinson, who was alarmed at his roommate’s drinking and violent rages, parted. The flat was so badly damaged that it had to be bulldozed.

Mackerrel sometimes worked as a salesman in an expensive tailor shop. On many occasions, he ordered bespoke suits, wore them one or two times, and, then, deposited the puke-ravaged garments in his closet. After his death, Mackerrel’s family found a dozen expensive, hand-tailored suits rotted out by vomit in the closets of his flat. Mackerrel was sick during the last twenty years of his life. He suffered from esophageal cancer, something that he attributed to his escapade with the lighter fluid. His voice-box was excised and Mackerrel’s famous speaking voice was silenced. A couple years before his death in 1996, Mackerrel went fishing with his father on the loch where his family owned an estate. He apologized to his father writing a note saying: "I never intended to become an alcoholic." But when his father died, Mackerrel was too drunk to attend the funeral.

Vivian Mackerrel died in 1996 at the age of 51. The esophageal cancer returned and killed him. During the last six months of his life, he lived on sherry injected into his stomach through a feeding tube. Robinson wrote in 1985 that as he was dying, Mackerrel changed "from being the biggest coward I ever met...into the bravest bastard I’d ever known. It’s got to be hard to laugh when you’re dying..."

When they got good and drunk, Robinson and Mackerrel wandered into Regent’s Park and looked at the wolves in their pens.

Another aspect of Withnail and I that is autobiographical is the character of Uncle Monty. As a youth, Robinson was cast as Benvolio in Franco Zeffrelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet. Zeffrelli was openly and flamboyantly homosexual and he exhausted himself attempting to seduce Robinson. Robinson resisted the Italian’s overtures and was mercilessly harassed during the production of the film. Robinson claims to have based the part of Uncle Monty on Zeffrelli.


Noteworthy movies about substance abuse
Drinking and drunkenness have been the central themes of a number of well-known films. Here are some examples: Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945) starring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman (the movie is about Wilder’s experiences working with the famously alcoholic Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity, Blake Edward’s Days of Wine and Roses (1962) with Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, Barfly directed by Barbet Schroeder in 1987 and based on the writing of Charles Bukowski (starring Micky Rourke and Faye Dunaway), Tales of Ordinary Madness also based on Bukowski and directed by the Italian Marco Ferreri in 1981, Once were Warriors, the New Zealand film about drunkenness among the Maori directed by Lee Tamahori in 1994, and Leaving Las Vegas with Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue (Mike Figgis, 1995). No doubt you can think of many other examples. A prominent early docu-fiction, that is staged documentary about alcoholism is On the Bowery shot on location in New York in 1956. Of course, the progenitor of this genre was Eugene O’Neill and his Long Days Journey into Night establishes the template for many dramatizations on this subject.

One of the greatest films about alcoholism is Ted Kotchef’s startling 1971 Australian film Wake in Fright. This was a film that I had hoped to show this summer, but it is currently unavailable.

　



Music


Perhaps because George Harrison’s HandMade Films produced the movie, Withnail and I has an extraordinary soundtrack. The picture contains one of the rarest of all rare birds, a brief clip from a Beatles song, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." (Beatles’ songs are so expensive that they are almost never licensed for performance in films.) Also noteworthy as well are the Jimi Hendrix songs "Voodoo Chile" and "All Along the Watchtower" heard in the picture. The version of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (Procol Harum) by King Curtis is from a legendary album King Curtis Live at the Fillmore East. One of the myths associated with the film is that this version of the Procol Harum song was recorded on the very night before Curtis’ death – he was stabbed to death in New York City in an altercation involving a TV set. The story is a good one but it’s untrue.



Genre
Withnail and I belongs to a specific and well-defined genre of films – the coming-of-age picture. The most noteworthy and, perhaps, greatest example of this kind of movie is Fellini’s I Vitelloni. (1953). Other excellent examples are Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993). These films involve "lads," a group of young men who have graduated from High School (or college) but are unmarried, drink heavily, and remain unemployed. The young men are reluctant to assume the responsibilities of adulthood and, generally, pampered by their mothers or older sisters – the boys stay up late partying or chasing women and sleep all day. Films of this kind are episodic, nostalgic, and, generally, conclude with one of the lads, usually a surrogate for the director, departing the milieu in which the other young men seem pointlessly becalmed. Some of Scorsese’s early films have this outline – there are elements of this plot in Mean Streets, for instance. These pictures celebrate the cameraderie of the young men, but the antics of the characters are viewed from an adult, or mature, perspective. Unavoidably, these films have a sort of "dying fall" – the hero’s assumption of adult responsibilities signifies the end of an era. Withnail and I marks the end of the sixties; Dazed and Confused celebrates the final years of the seventies. Diner is set in Baltimore in the last week of 1959. Invariably, these films have "killer" soundtracks since music inevitably signifies nostalgia for "the good old days."

The template for these films is the first part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One. Prince Hal conceals his nobility and engages in debauchery with Falstaff but, in the end, must assume the mantle of royalty.

　



Notes


Camberwell carrot – a joint of marijuana made with 12 rolling papers. Kevin Hanson points out that Camberwell refers to a "spike" – that is, a workhouse for the poor and destitute. Orwell mentions the Camberwell spike in Down and Out in Paris and London. Kevin also notes that the Camberwell spike is also referenced in Antonioni’s Blow Up.

Surmontil 50 – 50 mg dose of a tricyclic anti-depressant and sleeping medication made (trade name for Trimipramine).

A Rebours – this is a novel by Joris Huysmans, the French writer, published 1884. Robinson regards this book as the funniest novel ever written. In the film, it is shown with another book, Charles Dickins’ David Copperfield.

Tottenham Court Road where "I" is accused of "toilet trading" is a street three blocks from the British Museum in the Bloomsbury part of London. "Toilet trading" is homosexual solicitation in public restrooms.

Konstantin is the doomed young playwright in Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895) who is searching for a "new theatrical form." He kills himself at the end of the play.

Journey’s End is a celebrated 1928 play about World War I. The play is used to date Uncle Monty and his aborted theatrical career.

Uncle Monty recites lines from Baudelaire’s "A Hemisphere in your Hair" – "Laissez moi respirer longtemps longtemps ..." ("Allow me to inhale at length, at length...") The poem was published in Paris Spleen.

H. E. Bates was a British writer famous for bucolic novels about loveable farmers – Love for Lydia, for instance, and The Darling Buds of May, about a rural family in Kent.

QC is an abbreviation for Queen’s Counsel, a senior barrister authorized to wear silk and defend as well as prosecute felony crimes.

On August 20, 1969, the Beatles’ recorded together for a final time. The White Album which contains "While my guitar gently weeps", was released in 1968. George Harrison wrote the song (although Eric Clapton plays lead guitar). The song is used in Withnail to sign the film, putting the producer, George Harrison’s, mark on the picture at its end.

Withnail’s final speech is from Hamlet (Act II, scene ii).

According to the script, "I" is named "Marwood." We don’t know his first name. Misheard lines account for some writers claiming that Marwood’s first name is "Peter."

　



On Cult Films

What is a "cult film"? What characteristics do "cult films" share?

My thesis is that cult films involve the representation of forbidden subject matter but with a specific morally neutral stance. It is the film’s attitude toward its material that differentiates a cult film like Withnail from a picture like The Lost Weekend which shares thes ame general subject. In a cult film, transgressive subject matter is portrayed in a manner that is non-judgmental or, in the alternative, even approving. For instance, Withnail and I portrays alcoholism and drug use in a way that resists any immediate implication of disapprobation. The audience is invited to enjoy and, even, vicariously participate in the substance abuse that is portrayed. The reason that Withnail and I transcends mere cult film status is that, ultimately, the picture has broader ambitions and meanings than simply portraying heavy drinking and marijuana use. The core of the film is sexual ambivalence and a classically British lament for that most perishable of attributes: glowing and beautiful youth. Ultimately, Withnail and I is about an entangled web of related themes: lost youth, the refusal to grow up, friendship, and homosexuality. Withnail is politically incorrect, although all the more touching for its retrograde attitudes about a certain kind of homosexuality – the film posits that homosexuality involves, at least, in some of its attributes a desire for a lost paradise of youthful friendship. The imagery of young men chastely sharing beds together, boozing, and tramping about the murky and wet British countryside has something elegiac, even poetic about it – there is an element of A.E. Housman in the film. The monstrous Uncle Monty is a poet, or an admirer of poetry, and the beauty of young men is an important element of the film’s implicit lament for lost youth.

Cult films made self-consciously by John Waters represent homosexual behavior in a way that, in fact, endorses that life style. As society evolves to accept such things as same-sex marriage, of course, Waters’ "bad boy" attempts to shock the bourgeois (epater de le bourgeois) have become increasingly passe – his films devolve from cult status to becoming mere antiques. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a famous cult film, also has become outdated, a quasi-Victorian artifact of another era – that film endorsed homosexuality as more hip, knowing, exciting and sophisticated than square homosexuality. As a consequence, the film was revered but only so long as homosexuality was generally regarded as forbidden. Social acceptance of homosexuality voids the film’s cult status.

Of course, the young are more prone to identifying a film as "cult" because more things are forbidden to them. Cheech and Chong pictures, movies that feature pot-smoking such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed and Confused have cult status. The forbidden relationship in Harold and Maude and that film’s black-comedy portrayal of suicide created a cult around that 1971 movie. Some cult films attain their status by showing alternative lifestyles without moral disapprobation – for instance, the slacker lifestyle celebrated in The Big Lebowski, the disaffected suburban kids in Mallrats, the surfers in John Milius Big Wednesdays or the skateboarders in Surf Nazis Must Die. Of course, the thing that is ultimately forbidden is sheer, hopeless incompetence and many films attract audiences and cult following because of their sheer ineptitude – for instance, Ed Wood’s films such Plan 9 From Outer Space, you watch the film with a cringe, ashamed of being a spectator, like a rubber-necker at a highway accident.

Ultimately, a cult film is transgressive, but not too transgressive – a picture that is enjoyably transgressive because it assembles around itself a group of like-minded fans. The curious feature of cult films is that the people attending something like El Topo or The Human Centipede thinks of themselves as unique, unusual in their world-view, unashamed to be different – but they perceive themselves in that way only as members of group, as a cult. Thus, the cult film provides the benefits of transgressive individualism while, nonetheless, offering the comforts of being part of a group, that is, the cult that admires the picture.

In any event, the term "cult" film is fundamentally meaningless. A concept that embraces Ishtar, Eraserhead, Driller Killer and a sentimental Nazi comedy such Feuerzangenbowle, the number one cult film on German college campuses, is too broad to be useful.



Quiz

The film credits Richard Starkey MBE at the end of the picture. Who is he?

What Minnesotan played a famous guitar solo on While my guitar gentle weeps in 2004 in honor of George Harrison’s posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?