Some like it rough
Jude Law is a very handsome man, in a David Beckham-before-the-fall kind of way, clean-cut and somehow innocent, good to look at while he's sleeping. He stars in the remake of the 1966 film Alfie. It is very fit and meet that he does. Lots of young men these days look like that. Gentle.
In the new Alfie, Manhattan glitters and sparkles, snow falls in celebration upon the well-fed and housed and there is always a parking space. The girls are all beautiful and smiling, and a burka-clad woman will turn and give a nice-looking young man a wink. A chauffeur can afford to live in the Upper East Side and the woman next door, elderly and Polish, will turn to Alfie and say as he leaves in the morning with a girl, "Good to see you're going out with an African- American woman, Alfie." Perhaps soon all our cities will be like this. Perhaps like our young men, our cities will be transfigured. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
We have lost our appetite for gritty reality. We prefer the evidence of the screen to the evidence of our eyes. Only in the theatre does dire reality linger on, in murky plays by angry young persons. Those audiences dwindle - but we'll still turn out for Mary Poppins.
If you are a woman under 40 you will take what you're shown on the screen for granted. Women have the upper hand, as will seem to you right and proper. Loving Alfie may cause his emotional victims a moment's petulance because Alfie has "commitment issues", but his women have good teeth, high self-esteem, jobs to go to, abortion clinics to run to, and they occupy the moral high ground.
I hope the film does well. It can do nobody any possible harm. And Alfie learns better: a life-lesson. "Find someone to love and live every day as though it's your last." Can't be bad: another nice, feelgood message.
But I came out from the preview looking for a bus to jump under. It is a terrible thing to see your dreams come true. Sexual equality, as evidenced by this film, has been very bad for art. Morality, the struggle between good and bad, in the world and in our natures, has been subsumed into emotional and political correctness. The box office is hungry, and must be fed. It gets what it is thought to want, not what it needs.
Bad for art but good for people. The original 1966 film was painful, excoriating, true. Alfie was a predator, women were his helpless victims: they couldn't earn enough to keep themselves; they lived by the goodwill of men. They scrubbed floors and cooked pies for male approval, without which they perished, and their reproaches were plentiful, justified, and on the whole mute. One look from poor Vivien Merchant, as the mother-of-three made pregnant by Alfie, towards Denholm Elliott's moralist abortionist, told us more about human nature than the whole remake. Just briefly, Merchant howls like an animal, then prudence shuts her up.
"What's it all about, Alfie?" was the closing line of the original, and it gave you pause to think: what indeed? The line is left out of the remake - it's become a meaningless question. What it's about, which once was a paradox, is now all too clear: self-interest. Choice has replaced necessity. We are all nice people, and if love makes us unhappy then call it neurotic dependency. In the remake, Lonette (Alfie's best friend's girlfriend) has sex with Alfie not because she's hopelessly in love with him but because she gets drunk. She is not wretched; she is foolish.
It was the original Alfie that started me, and many of my generation, on the road to feminism. We watched it and left the cinema trembling. We saw that the indignity, emotional pain and helplessness that went with being a woman in the 1960s was monstrous and couldn't, mustn't last. It fell to writer Bill Naughton to speak for us: very few women wrote for the screen in the 60s - the job was "technical" and therefore not for females, who couldn't understand cameras. But Naughton could not appreciate, as only a woman could, that there was a new, more pernicious twist to the timeless Don Juan archetype. Sure, there had always been men who kissed and left. But this was something worse.
The pill had come along. Women, not men, were now "responsible for contraception", so men, relieved of the duty of care, and with no sanctions to restrain them, took advantage of this new arrangement and behaved disgracefully. Male respect for women diminished. Unmarried women who had sex were slags, and those who did not were frigid. How could you win? Those with any aspiration beyond admiring and serving a man were dismissed (and openly described) as ugly, unable to get a man, or in need of a good lay. Young men, outnumbered by young women, as they now are not, did the sexual picking and choosing. "Sisterhood" as a concept had not been invented: all women were assumed to be in constant competition for the attention of a man, and indeed were. The man was their meal ticket. "Sexism" as a word did not exist. As with "racism", also a newcomer to the language, as soon as it was there you could deal with it, fight it, change the world. Forty years on, things have settled down. Women have corrected the balance by attacking male self-esteem, making men, in their turn, over-anxious to be liked and in need of approval.
The change in society brought about by female contraceptives and women's new capacity to earn - not to mention the arrival of the domestic technology that means a house can be cleaned in half an hour and food put on the table in two minutes - has been sudden and profound. Give us another 40 years and we may get it all right.
Eroticism in the new world may have suffered somewhat on the way. The new Alfie has problems with "sexual dysfunction". The old Alfie wouldn't have even known the words, let alone the problem. The doctor our modern hero sees is a gay man - and Alfie's organ springs to life at his touch. Quite what point is being made here is hard to understand. Perhaps that anyone will do.
The original, callous Alfie lives with a girl briefly, and leaves when their child becomes too much of a nuisance. New Alfie takes up temporarily with a single mother, proving he's a nice guy at heart by being fond of another man's child: far too strong for today's tender audience were he seen to abandon his own. The strength of the original Alfie's monologues to the camera is that he refers to women not as "she" but as "it". It shocked even then. Now it is unthinkable, obscene.
In the meantime, in the remake, the sad, quiet girl who obsessively scrubbed and suffered in the 60s has been replaced with a manically cheerful girl who smokes (yuk), paints the walls a disagreeable shade of green without asking and gets dumped as a result. New Alfie has what is presumably an Aids scare, though the word is never mentioned. At least that fear never crossed the mind of the 60s girl. Sex was still holy, magic, sacramental, and linked in the mind with procreation, the creating of new life; that it might also be profoundly unsafe occurred to no one. In the original, Alfie develops TB, is obliged to think about mortality, and seduces his best friend's wife for consolation. The equivalent sin for the contemporary Alfie would be to have sex before the all-clear is given - but there's no way that can happen in a feelgood film of the new century. Not our Jude.
Nor, of course, can Lonette have an abortion, nor can Alfie get to see the result and be shocked and changed. That would be too real, too graphic, and what is more, one fears, might upset the pro-life section of the audience. Susan Sarandon as the older woman can't be fair, fat and 40 but still sexy, as was blowsy Shelley Winters in the original. Sarandon may be 50 but she must also be presented as smart, feisty, elegant, good-looking and desirable to all. Mind you, the two-timing Sarandon delivers the put-down punchline "because he's younger than you", superbly: the desire to speak the truth and the need to be kind battle it out in her face. That truth at least remains.
Sienna Miller, who plays Nikki "the Christmas miracle", (and is Law's real-life girlfriend) claims she couldn't watch the original all the way through because "she was shocked by the cruelty of Alfie's character". She is right. He was cruel. But the emotional cruelty was the point of the film. Alfie became aware of it and, with Alfie, a whole generation of men. They took on the burden of change, and succeeded. If New Alfie is seen as "bad", it's because of his failure to "commit". This is a social rather than an emotional crime. Surely men have some residual right not to love women if they don't want to? "Fortunately," Miller goes on to say, "in our version the people are developed" - I fear she is not joking - "and Alfie's emotions are more intense." True, Alfie hits a windscreen to demonstrate sorrow and frustration, but he doesn't look at you with the wary, predatory, cunning, winking charm of his dangerous forbear. He's much too nice: he's what all those suffering, scrubbing girls eventually made of Old Alfie. I hope they enjoy him. It was a hard task bringing him about.
