Meantime

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Still recovering from jet lag, trying to connect to everyday life is a battle that can’t be won. One has to wait it out and deal with the fact that I’m not here mentally at this location. When I close my eyelids, I see myself walking down Meji Dori in the heart of Tokyo, and then when I open my eyes, I look out the window and see Waverly Drive here in Los Angeles. The action between those two is disconcerting because nothing is happening, but I feel the bridge I’m crossing is shaky and about to fall apart.

To ground myself, I’m reading Edogawa Rampo’s campy and goth-like Japanese thriller The Spider-Man, written in the late 1920s. Obviously, reading the book now, it must have been serialized in a newspaper or publication of its time. It’s a combination of a detective and horror story that takes place in Tokyo, in which a killer plaster casts body parts and sells the work to various galleries. Rampo is a master of sexual violence and everything wrong in this world, but it is done in a very pulp-like manner of writing. In other words, I love his stories. Edogawa Rampo is the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allen Poe. So, yes, he’s a writer who knows tradition. Perhaps not the healthiest thing to read in my state of mind, but there you go - it’s a touch-and-go landscape that we are all in, and if we topple over, that’s the danger of putting too many eggs in one basket.

Between reading the Rampo novel and waiting for my jet lag to leave my consciousness, I watch a British film made in 1983, Meantime, directed by Mike Leigh, and with an incredible cast of actors: Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Phil Daniels, Marlon Bailey, Pam Ferris, Jeffrey Robert, and the consistently remarkable Alfred Molina. The TV (shown on Channel Four in GB) film is about a working-class family, primarily unemployed, in East London, living in a flat among other flats, which is a depressing existence. There are no big moments in the film, but more of a group of people waiting out their current existence.

The Mike Leigh approach is putting together a framework for the actors to work through a process of improvisation, and there is a great deal of rehearsal for the actors to put their input on their characters. Watching Meantime is like seeing a puzzle put together in real-time, with everyone on the same page regarding how the scenes work out. There is a theater feel in that this could have been a play, but Leigh is very cinematic in how he captures the inside of London Flats and the streets around the neighborhood, in that they become characters in this film.

The film focuses on the dynamics between the family members—father, mother, and their two sons—all living in a cramped apartment. Tim Roth’s Colin is underdeveloped as a young male compared with his bigger brother Mark (Phil Daniels), who is a borderline bully but understands the dynamics of his family and friends. Colin can’t articulate his feelings or thoughts, and Roth’s interpretation of this character is effective in that everyone either knows such a character or lacks articulation that they can identify with Colin. There is a contrast between this family and the Wife’s sister, who is married (but not happily so) and lives in another part of London that is slightly upscale but still drained by the politics and world of Margret Thatcher.

So, I sit on my couch, reading Rampo and waiting for my uneasiness to settle while watching a film about meantime, the characters waiting for the other shoe to drop.