Boy, that's such a great joke. Like many Americans, he probably thinks death is optional and eternal life is just a matter of the right combination of pills and food. God, that's good. It's funny because it's true. Because Americans are all narcissistic and vain and obsessed with health fads. Apart from the big fat burger-chomping ones, obviously. That's such a great line. It's me who should have been the comedian. Forget the fact that Allen spends almost the entire fucking interview talking about how his whole life has been shaped by his awareness that death is not optional, and that everyone knows that about him already, and that I listened at least enough to write it all down, and accuse him of being shallow on account of it, and that Allen in his films has frequently satirised health fads and commented on the futility of attempting to stave off the inevitable decay of the body - I, Bryan Appleyard, cultural commentator and cretin, have written that Woody Allen, being American, probably thinks that death can be avoided if you take the right pills.
Still tittering at how clever I am and the thought of all the time he probably spends in the beauty parlour, I ask him if he would take an immortality pill if he was offered one. He responds that it wouldn't work because it couldn't stop you getting hit by a car and the universe won't last forever anyway.
I don't get it. That isn't funny, unlike my Americans think death is optional line. But I find myself laughing, not with him, Lord no I'm far above that, but at him. God, he's so funny when he doesn't try to be. He's so serious. He's such a drag. He talks about death and melancholia and the problem of man's position in what appears to be a meaningless universe and all intellectual stuff like that. You don't catch the Chief Cultural Critic of the Sunday Times banging on about that kind of bummer. No, I'd much rather discuss Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
The man is so self-involved it's funny. Not like me. So I start to laugh at all this dreary pointy-head stuff. At first into my sleeve, at last openly. He doesn't seem to notice. Perhaps he's too wrapped up in himself. Or perhaps he's too polite to comment on my apparent hysteria, or perhaps he's realised I am a total fucking imbecile and not worth bothering about.
'I think I became aware of my mortality at the age of five,' says Allen. 'It was then I realised the situation we are in. It so traumatised me that, from that day on, I could never look at the world again except through a bleak prism which I find reality and which other people find pessimism, misanthropy, cynicism. I think I'm completely realistic.'
Giggling like a schoolgirl on pot by now, I suggest he is suffering from a case of arrested development.
Unlike I, Bryan Appleyard, who find myself giggling compulsively when someone talks about mortality, but am able to write mature and thoughtful articles on the meaning and moral power of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Really, how laughably juvenile to worry about trivial little things like death and the eventual destruction of the universe. Does he not know that aliens can save us?
Wrapped up in his neurotic and selfish little concerns about the decay of matter and the possible meaninglessness of existence, Allen seeks distraction. His craving for it is so strong he was unable to focus on his studies at New York University film school. This may be why, lamentably, when he talks of great film-makers he mentions only Bergman and Kurosawa and Fellini.
I, Bryan Appleyard, renaissance man and sexual self-starter, can name many more film-makers than that. Listen: Ford, Hawks, Wilder, Hitchcock, Keaton, Scorsese, Wong Kar Wai, Tarkovsky, Sokurov and Wankipantsky. Aren't I clever? See how many film-makers I've heard of? Never mind that Bergman and Kurosawa and Fellini happen to be his favourites, or the possibility that, not being a fucking autistic Rainman anorak-savant who thinks it's possible to make people acknowledge your intellectual superiority by browbeating them with an endless recitation of meaningless dropped names like me he is too polite and concise and aware of the fucking norms of social interaction among sane people to bore me shitless with an endless list of all the good film-makers there are. For heaven's sake, he doesn't even mention Joss Wheedon.
By his own admission he dropped out of film school. This is important because, lacking enough formal education, he became an autodidact. This infects everything he does. In his scripts, big ideas or philosophers' works appear with a kind of naive wonder. He has not been taught them; he has stumbled upon them. This can make them seem fresh, but he can't move on from concepts the averagely educated know well. Unlike me, Bryan Appleyard, who got a certificate from Oxbridge and can now move on from all that boring old intellectual stuff and write essays about much more important things like Reeves and Mortimer, Morecambe and Wise, teenage vampire-slayers and the reality of alien abduction.
He is resistant to suggestions that he has been influenced by anybody, even those on his stupidly short shortlist of heroes. A book of interviews with him, Woody Allen on Woody Allen by Stig Bjorkman, is unintentionally hilarious to me (although I find most things are since I took up wanking eight hours a day) for the fact that, on almost every page, Bjorkman the cineaste, who almost certainly finished film school and can probably name nearly as many directors as I can, detects an influence and each time Allen rejects it. For example:
BJORKMAN: Was the cocaine-sneezing scene in Annie Hall a homage to the heartbreaking sequence in Wankipantsky's 1932 epic of rural doom The Cruel Sods where Olaf is unable to join in the harvest dance because of his hay fever?
ALLEN: Um, not deliberately, but you scare me so I'll admit it's a point of view, you sad fucking nordic obsessive.
Allen's central problem is that his films tend to be about himself and his obsessions, rather than say, me and mine, which would be much more interesting. Imagine a film in which Reeves and Mortimer emerge from a flying saucer to help Sarah Michelle Gellar fight a horde of vampiric autodidacts with unnnaturally youthful skin and you'll see what I mean. As a result, for me his career has been one long catalogue of failure in the middle of which rare works of brilliance such as Bananas, Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex, Sleeper, the other early funny films, Annie Hall, Hannah And Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours, Mighty Aphrodite and Melinda and Melinda have been freak anomalies.
He is right about himself. His fixation on death is the heart of the problem. It is narcissistic and infantile and he should bloody grow up and learn that death is a very petty matter compared to the debt that is owed to extra-terrestrials and the undead.
27/2/05
---
Addendum, December
Recent mails have made clear that Appleyard has just secured thousands of votes from Northern Ireland for Wanker of the Year following a somewhat tactless article he wrote on George Best's funeral:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1903611,00.html
(Highlights for me include his descriptions of Best's father as 'absurdly small' and his son as 'sinisterly suited'. But I gather the main objections are that he bangs on about the Troubles and is rather grudging about Best's achievements and legacy.)
At this late stage he is unlikely to be challenged so I am pleased therefore to invest him with the coveted Golden Fist Award.
Always keen to pander to popular demand, I also present:
A miasma of doom hangs over the little village of Foaming-at-the-Mouth. Ominously quiet now, it was once the scene of a terrible massacre in the English Civil War, and since then absolutely nothing at all has happened here that a lazy journalist can't connect to its bloodstained past. Yesterday, in the rainswept cemetery, journalist and onanist Bryan Appleyard was sent to join his fathers. (He had several fathers, none of whom would admit that he was their son.)
A naturally gifted dribbler, as a young man Appleyard trained himself to write nonsense with his left hand as well as his right. And do other things as well.
'Bryan, you lived your life like a leaky fountain pen,' read a placard carried by his mother. 'At first you wrote clear and smooth, then you left nasty black blots on everything you touched. And you stained several pairs of trousers.'
He was the man who threw it all away. A star at Oxbridge and Chief Cultural Critic of the Sunday Times, in later years he succumbed to his embarrassing obsessions with children's TV and UFO's.
'He'd be on the phone for half an hour, but we didn't talk,' recalled a colleague. 'He'd babble on about how beautiful Buffy the Vampire Slayer was and start crying. I would just start crying.'
...His ex-wives kept his surname. They had to, he'd married his sisters...
...Like Hurricane Higgins, he needed a long rest. And he liked the feeling of balls in pockets...
...'The most complete wanker I ever met,' said the vicar in his eulogy...
...Appleyard was a uniter. 'Bryan Appleyard? Tosser,' agreed everyone I talked to...
...They wanted him to be good, but he was really, really crap...
...Out of respect for Appleyard's beliefs that suits are sinister and short people are absurd, all the mourners wore swimming trunks and anyone under five foot two was turned away at the door.
Attendance was poor anyway. Although Appleyard himself had confidently predicted a turnout of 8 million, not including those arriving by flying saucer, in the event the congregation numbered 3, one of whom was a producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who had come to make sure the man really was dead and that he would no longer be pestered for help with Appleyard's philosophical studies and requests for Sarah Michelle Gellar's underwear.
True, a crowd of several thousand turned up at the graveside after the burial, but they spoke with Belfast accents and all wore dancing shoes.
Dec 05
---
Addendum to the Addendum
Thankyou to the various people who have mailed since to chime in with their own examples of Appleyard dreadfulness or ask me to have a go at other things he has written. Regrettably I must decline to get involved. I really don't have any axe to grind with him and I don't want this to assume the dimensions of some morbid fixation. He attacked Woody Allen, who is and always will be an artistic hero of mine, in a particularly moronic, repulsive, deluded and risible way, and I felt moved to point out what a silly wanker he was. Later some people from Northern Ireland wrote to me sympathising and expressing their grievance over the Best piece. It is this website's policy to keep on the good side of people from Northern Ireland with a grievance. Hence the funeral bit. That is all. Barring my coming across something of his that annoys me out of my habitual torpor again in the future, that will be all. If Bryan Appleyard attacked all you hold dear, debauched your mother in her rocking chair, or ran over your cat on a quad bike and threw the carcass in your paddling pool while your kiddies watched, I really don't want to know.
However a particularly regretful 'Thanks anyway' must go to the correspondent who wrote claiming that Appleyard had changed his name by deed-poll from 'Brian' to 'Bryan' and vowing to find corroboration. I believe being able to break that scoop would have justified the invention of the entire internet by itself. Unfortunately, however, it turned out not to be true.