Channel4.com Text Only

[ News  | Homes  | Life | Entertainment  | History  | Science  | Community  | Shop ]
| Sport  | Culture  | Cars  | Money  | Broadband  | Learning | Health  | Dating  | Games ]

[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]

Hello Culture

Home | What is Hello Culture? | The grid | The interviews | Find out more | Credits

MC: There are a lot of themes that come up in that play. One is reality and how reality can be hard to bear. But in our age now, reality seems to be the only thing that we want, instead of anything sort of slightly above reality. We don’t really want anything spiritual or any higher values. We want to be absolutely cynical and clear-headed and disillusioned, so that we only look at the hardest reality. Do you think that we are a uniquely reality-obsessed age or uniquely cynical age?

LT: Probably not uniquely. Pretty cynical, but I don’t know if we’re unique in our cynicism or not. I’m not enough of a historian to know.

MC: But you can feel your way into the past. And the bottom line now is success.

LT: There’s a greater critical mass of us to be more cynical. Maybe it weighs heavier on the planet, with more people.

MC: And you hear more about it, maybe.

LT: And also we have more people, you know. So, whatever way the scale tips, we have more people, maybe more cynical people than we’ve ever had on the planet in all time. Maybe it’s just inherent to the Western countries. Some of the more fundamentalist countries are probably very bound to their values, which are also questionable.

MC: Well, ordinary worldly success is …

LT: Where they would call them spiritual values.

MC: Well, they would and we might be frightened of them. But ordinary, worldly success is a necessary part of anybody’s reality. You’ve got to have it. But we imagine that, in the past, there was something that went with it, or a complement to it, which was a concern with the spiritual or a concern with higher values. And we suspect that, in our own age, we only pay lip service to that concern. We don’t really have it.

LT: I don’t even think we pay lip service to it. What you were just saying, even if it was an illusion or a delusion, we thought that, for most people who were successful, their success came from something positive, theoretically. We don’t know how true that really is because, most of the time, we don’t really know what goes on behind the veil. But now, we don’t even have to have that illusion. People can be celebrated for any number of things, just so long as they’re celebrated.

MC: Yes, and from a moral point of view there’s something sordid about that, that we think that there simply isn’t a moral point of view. We’re obsessed by celebrity.

LT: But that’s partly the artists’ fault, too. The artists used to be a kind of moral barometer, you know. But now you’d be laughed out of your industry if you’re too idealistic. For instance, this play we’re doing now, when it debuted in 1985, Frank Richard of the New York Times said it was the most subversive play that had appeared on Broadway in decades or something like that. And at that time, I thought the only thing that’s truly subversive about this play is that it’s tender.

MC: It’s tenderness in a time of harshness …

LT: Yeah, and now, that’s even more true. I mean, we have even less room for tenderness or embraces or forgiveness, or some kind of balancing of understanding how complex and conflicted the human species is. So this play has a tenderness rather than a cynicism, a harshness, an ugly rejection, dismissal.

MC: Yeah, I think that’s true.

LT: And one does not generally seek anything tender in their work, in this day and age, in film.

MC: No.

LT: I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions — there certainly are. But by and large, your success is more assured if you have a more cynical point of view.

MC: And that cynicism is really to do with seeing the bottom line of everything and rather despising anything above the mere bottom line, thinking that that’s an illusion or a foolishness.

LT: Well, yes, exactly. The world is a harsh, you know. It just keeps exponentially turning on itself. Kids are really disenfranchised who have nothing, don’t have any kind of valued home, maybe they don’t have any kind of real family, or they’re shunted around, or live in very harsh circumstances. Because society just perpetuates this. It’s not like it’s invented in one corner of some place. It’s all a part of our own rolling, rolling, rolling — the snowball gets bigger and bigger. Our own integrity starts eroding, because the standard of what’s valued and what’s respected is diminished and diminished and diminished. And you could be at a point now when you think you have integrity, but maybe it isn’t the same integrity you had 25 years ago. Maybe you had a much higher sense of what was right and noble and good and making a contribution. And, you see, I’m even smiling as I say this, which is really an indictment, like myself, being a victim.

MC: Well, no, because you’re talking about an age where there could be such a thing as ideology. Or there could be an ideology that had to do with positive values or what we would call positive values.

LT: Yeah, or just aspiring to something more noble in the species, that we are a better group than we are, rather than just pandering to the darker, baser side of us and being rewarded for that. We are always going to have the darker side. But maybe as we evolve … maybe we’ll never evolve, maybe we’re just animals, truly. As I say in the show, we have 98.4% of the same genes as a chimpanzee.

MC: Yeah, but we know …

LT: No, the chimps don’t know it. Just that little tiny bit, just that little tiny bit, gives us a knowingness. But what have we done with it?

MC: Yeah. Our knowingness isn’t entirely base and evil. We have humour and we’re sort of clever and witty and we enjoy the surface of things now, but we don’t have any aspirations to anything greater. We don’t have real communitarian feelings. We don’t care about aesthetics or anything noble.

LT: Everybody’s out for themselves, in a very broad general way. I’m not going to indict every human being on the planet, but the media’s profoundly involved in this, too, because they seek out the most sensational.

MC: Do you think the media is the Satan, or have we created Satan? Is it their fault?

LT: I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg? Were the people satanic and the media just reported on that?

MC: The media just gives us what we want, doesn’t it?

LT: Well, that’s what they say. But they say that about everything. They say, 'We make the movies that people want to see.' Why did the barriers constantly erodey without any balance?

MC: If we wanted the movies to be different …

LT: It’s one thing — yes.

MC: … then surely they would be. It’s a mass medium — they do what the mass want.

LT: Yes, you’d think that. Everybody in the news media is constantly looking for some feature that's, like, sensational, sensational. I mean, you see things on the hard news programmes that you saw 10 years ago on the tabloid shows. That erosion just follows and follows and follows.

MC: No, the tabloid level is now agreed. That is our level and we pretty much agree.

LT: Yeah, and that’s acceptable, and that’s fine, and that’s what everybody wants to know. And we’re titillated, and we don’t have any pretensions to something more refined or something higher. Civilisation exists for a reason, because without some kind of order, we would be anarchists. Who knows what people would be doing — excreting in the streets?

MC: People do pay lip service to an idea of something higher, but in reality, they don’t really want it; otherwise they would try and get it. And we don’t really try and get it.

LT: But we don’t reward anybody for trying to get it. It’s not extolled. Kids are getting cynical earlier and earlier and earlier, but they still do sweet pappy things on television for toddlers. But, pretty soon, I guess, the Muppets will be in bondage or something.

MC: Yes, they’re becoming more cynical and we’re becoming more infantile. Grown-up culture is getting more infantile.

LT: I’m glad you’re here to give language to it.

MC: But do you think that we don’t have any high values, but we certainly are amazed by celebrities?

LT: By celebrities, right.

MC: Yeah. We don’t even necessarily think that they’re gods. We know they’re like us, actually, but we are obsessed by them.

LT: But they have money, they have all the …

MC: They have something more than us.

LT: I’m appalled because kids see limos, they see sports figures, rock stars, rappers and everybody else. They do anything in the world — drugs, guns, whatever — and they’re still as rewarded for it as ever. But there is nothing for a kid. If anybody wants to be a rock star or a movie star, or they want to be in the media and they want to make a lot of money, they don’t care how they make it. There used to be at least a little semblance of pretension that the standard was there. Even in the '60s, if you were rewarded, you only wanted to be rewarded for doing something good, for making a contribution.

MC: Yeah. We saw through that. We said, ‘Forget that bit. We’ll just keep the celebrity bits and the reward.’

LT: We’ll just take the most materialistic, superficial stuff. Everybody’s so narcissistic and posing. It used to be hip. Back in the '50s and '60s, hip had a real connotation of consciousness. People had some glimmer of consciousness of how much better the species could be, how much better the world could be. Now, hip is …

MC: Now it’s a style thing.

LT: It’s like everything is style and no substance. And that’s fine with everybody.

MC: Except if everything’s interconnected, and one thing is connected to another and connected to another and connected to another, and so we can’t really say what caused it, or can we? Why are we a cynical, materialist, celebrity-worshipping people?

LT: Because materialism is the watermark. It’s like you say, they just look at the bottom line. `that’s why I won’t blame the news media, I’ll just say, 'Because they look at the bottom line,' and they say, ‘Oh, well, they’re getting bigger ratings than we are. We’ve got to start putting a little of that in our show. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to compete, compete, compete.’ We used to have a line in The Search where Trudi says, ‘Throughout the universe there are lots of intelligent life forms that play to play. We’re the only ones who play to win. Could explain why we have so many losers.’

MC: But we’re not pursuing any spiritual values. We’ve stopped that but we’ve developed an incredible capacity for irony, and for being sort of clever-clever, and a sort of narcissistic cleverness which doesn’t go anywhere and has no purpose.

LT: Who is 'we'?

MC: The culture. If you put everything together, like pop culture — high culture seems to be have been got rid of, anyway — it’s all kind of mainstream culture. Do you think irony sometimes goes with this stuff that we’re talking about? It’s arrested development, so we can’t get any further. We’ve decided to settle back and be merely ironic.

LT: No, I don’t think irony is all bad, do you?

MC: No, I think irony is delicious and irresistible, but it gets a bit tiring when it’s the only value, when it’s the only thing.

LT: Well, I’m not sure I understand. Give me a bad example of irony.

MC: No, irony is always good because it involves quick-wittedness, and it involves getting more meanings than one into what you’re saying. But it seems that other values have exited the picture, and we’re left only with celebrities or with success or something. Other ways of understanding things than irony have gone away, as well. So we’re able to keep doing things. We’ll ironically enjoy the '60s or we’ll enjoy the '70s and assume we’re going to ironically enjoy the '80s, because we don’t really care about getting anywhere else. We’re just kind of redoing the old stuff and find it glam.

LT: You think that’s all we’re doing?

MC: It seems to be one of the main things.

LT: I mean, what about all the futuristic things that go on? And as barriers are broken down, there’s always the human yearning for what’s familiar and what’s past, in many senses. That’s just nostalgia. I don’t think there’s anything so wrong with that. We can project the future but we can recall the past.

MC: Right, so when we’re turning over the past …

LT: But there’s plenty that’s futuristic. I mean, we’re sort of futuristic obsessed, too.

MC: Information technologies.

LT: In terms of movies and, yeah, technology and just trying to create new limits.

MC: Well, now is supposed to be the information age, but the information age doesn’t have any ideology, whereas the industrial age had an ideology of progress and new freedoms. There would be a certain amount of revolution, from the lower class upwards. The lower class would not be low any more. Whereas there are no values attached to the information age. It’s pointless.

LT: And all the leaders of the Industrial Revolution, they built museums and libraries and things like that to honour themselves, and to contribute to the city. But, I mean, God only knows how they got where they got.

MC: But now no one goes to the libraries. There’s no point. Libraries are free and they don’t care about them.

LT: Let’s get some margaritas and just get drunk. I don’t see any point in going on.

MC: Get drunk and comb our hair.

LT: As much as I’ve been present in the culture for a long time, I find the world daunting. You feel rather helpless against everything, all the things that go on in the world, the complexities. And so I’m usually happiest when I’m on the stage because I’m absolutely in the present for two-and-a-half hours, and I have a world that’s more to my liking.

MC: So you feel protected from it, then?

LT: I just feel a little bit more joyful. Because I would like the world to be a more hospitable, embracing place, where people try to do their best. I was a teenager in the '50s. And I saw movie roles, you know, and they were distinctly good women and bad women. And women were almost never the protagonists in the film. Even someone like Hepburn always got her fanny spanked by Spencer Tracey in the end. And we absolutely were influenced by those role models. So now, when young girls watch MTV and they see documentaries and stories about the porn industry and how this is a very viable career option, I don’t know what to say. I think the barriers are pushed too far out.

That’s what the play is all about. Trudi has consciousness when, as a creative consultant, she has thought of this incredibly inhumane idea that she’s going to sell munching to the Third World.

MC: Which fits with reality, in fact, with the depraved reality.

LT: Yeah, but that’s when she goes off the deep and becomes conscience. Because suddenly she’s reconnected to her own humanity. And that’s why the fact that people aspire to nothing but money and celebrity is just unfortunate for our culture.

MC: Do you think people do that because they don’t want to make fools of themselves, they don’t want to be sentimental or something?

LT: Absolutely. The world is so compressed now because of information and technology and everything, and there are so many more of us. And there are so many more who are disenfranchised.

When I saw Clockwork Orange for the first time 25 years ago, it was the first time I’d been in an audience when they were cheering the thugs. And I thought, 'Oh, this is a bad portent. Something's off here.' And ever after, if there’s a character that shows any tenderness or any vulnerability, they start laughing and deriding that character. You know, even if that character wins out in the end by his own wit or something, if he shows any vulnerability …

MC: They see him as a fool.

LT: Yeah, they see him as a fool, exactly. Because that’s how armoured we have become. Everyone feels they have to be against everyone else, everyone who’s outside of their own little circle. And everyone feels powerless, I guess, and the only thing that will make them feel powerful is to be famous or rich.