Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

‘Life is very long, when you’re lonely.’

(The Queen is Dead, The Smiths)

'All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?'

(Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles)

Whenever I teach An Inspector Calls at school, I show my students a trailer for Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life, a documentary about a woman named Joyce Vincent. Vincent was a woman found dead in her flat three years after she died. The smell had grown so repulsive that her existence could no longer be denied. Throughout the film, her friends and former colleagues reminisce on a woman they describe as talented and beguiling (her family are conspicuous in their absence). Essentially, what Joyce’s life teaches us is people can fall between the cracks. If someone moves to a city for a job, they may not have family nearby; if they’re single, the closest contact they have is with colleagues. With agency work and short-term contracts, bonds are hard to forge. Vincent’s life is a warning to look after the young as well as our old. There are befriending services for the elderly, but nothing for young adults. It’s only in the last ten years when pensioners have felt able to ‘come out’ as lonely; for younger people it remains taboo.

The newspaper report on Joyce Vincent.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the 2017 Costa Book Winner by debut novelist Gail Honeyman. Honeyman began the book after turning forty; her jobs up until that point had been in the Civil Service and university administration- back office stuff as opposed to the creative work of fiction. On reading about how a young woman went from Friday at 5 to Monday at 9 without speaking to anyone, it got her thinking about loneliness. During her lunch breaks and free time, she wrote the book that was to become the subject of a bidding war – it's subsequent success has seen it ‘optioned’ by Reese Witherspoon, with the actress rumoured to play the lead.

Eleanor Oliphant is a woman that has a routine office job and a routine life.

From Monday to Friday, I come in at 8.30. I take an hour for lunch. I used to bring in my own sandwiches, but the food at home always went off before I could use it up, so now I get something from the high street. I always finish with a trip to Marks and Spencer on Friday, which rounds the week off nicely. 

From the opening pages, Honeyman constructs a character where order is the thing. Her arrival time is the same. Her lunchtime is the same. Her week’s end is the same. There’s subtle commentary here too on the travails of singledom: the food going off before it could be eaten. Many single people can empathise with this: supermarkets hardly have individuals in mind when it comes to their supersize packaging. However, everything 
seems fine here. There’s no problem with one’s life running to clockwork; it provides control in a chaotic world.

The first sign that everything may not be completely fine is the expository information on Eleanor’s job:

I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.

An unusual heroine has been established. The university education connotes bookish intelligence, but the blank, carefree description of her physical injuries implies a lack of emotional awareness. Why wouldn’t you postpone your interview if you’d been subjected to a heinous beating? Over the course of the novel, we’ll learn that the Classics degree is ironic: she can neither read the past, nor connect it to the modern day.

The blink-and-you-miss-it revelations into Eleanor’s past means the full scale of her trauma is postponed to later in the novel. Instead, earlier sections have a sitcom feel to them with Eleanor- socially naïve- visiting the doctors; (Reason? Back pain. Eleanor’s diagnosis? Breasts. ‘You see, I’ve weighed them, and they’re almost half a stone combined.’) the beauticians (misunderstanding her Hollywood, she complains, ‘I am interested in a normal adult man. He will enjoy sexual relations with a normal adult woman. Are you trying to imply he’s some sort of paedophile’) and ordering a pizza (‘The flaw with the pizza plan was the wine. They didn’t deliver it, the man on the phone said, and actually sounded quite amused I asked.’) 

Simply, Eleanor hasn’t been given the co-ordinates to navigate the world. After a few chapters it becomes clear that Eleanor isn’t suffering from a learning difficulty; it isn’t nature that’s made her awkward, but nurture. When a social services visitor comes round at the end of the first section, we discover there’s darkness behind the laughs. From hereon, Eleanor isn’t to be laughed at as ridiculous, but cheered on as resilient.

Eleanor’s upbringing is strange; consequently, her behaviour is too. When she falls for a musician at a gig, she fantasises over their life together. Her head-in-the-clouds obsession of him is one feature of the book. Counter to this is a down-on-the-ground moment that has a huge impact on the story. One day when a colleague Raymond walks out of work with her, they find an old man sprawled outside; with his head cracked and consciousness scrambled, they have to move fast. Raymond takes control whilst Eleanor panics about ringing 999. This intervention in someone else’s life will change her own.

By the end of the novel there will be more details about Eleanor’s past; what’s more interesting though is where she's heading. You see, Honeyman’s story is a call-to-arms, to embrace the Eleanor Rigby/Oliphant’s of this world with the attention they deserve; to bring them out of their cocoons into a butterfly world of soaring possibility. 

By looking at the lonely people, the affliction can be beaten, the disease cured. It's not ok in a civilised society to ostracise a colleague because they're different, to forget a child because they're quiet, to ridicule someone because they're on their own. In a population of plenty, it's important to remember loneliness is real and here.

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

They belong here with you and me, together in community.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is out now. 

The Good Fight

Take the interesting kids at school. They’re in an established group, a band of brothers, a coterie of girls, a mix of flavours. Their in-jokes have been in existence since the dawn of time. Explaining them is futile – you had to have been there. There’s a rhythm to the interaction too: an ability to see a friend in space, tee them up and deliver the joke emphatically into the net. Now, imagine the group disbands (a job opportunity comes up, a college placement opens up, a Yoko Ono enters the fray): what happens to that chemistry? Can it be transposed to a new group with different people? No, it can’t. You’re starting over. There’s a very real risk it’ll never be rediscovered. A chance that repartee rests in the rear-view mirror; rapport in the scrap book of history. 

  

For every Frasier, there is a Joey. Spin-offs aren’t a guaranteed success. Yes, the writing team and network producers may be the same, but the show isn’t. A character may work in a particular setting, interacting with regular characters; take them out of that world though and they appear lost, adrift. Many spin-offs don’t work because networks take for granted the good will of the audience. They think: ‘well, they all enjoyed the other show they were in, therefore they’ll enjoy this one.’ The mistake they make is that the audience enjoyed the group dynamic, the interplay and frictions – they weren’t interested in one character alone. Where Better Call Saul, Frasier and The Good Fight have succeeded is creating other characters that are as interesting as the surviving protagonists. Saul wouldn’t have worked without Chuck, nor would Frasier have survived without Niles. In spin-off, forget the old: the new characters are the thing.

My brother has the first season on DVD.

The Good Wife was the moniker title for Alicia Florrick, a wronged woman who stands by her husband following a public scandal. It tracked the attorney’s return to work and subsequent rise through the profession, superseding her husband and her own expectations in the process. It ran for seven years and is the Netflix box-set to go to if you’ve finished Breaking Bad. Worth noting, I also think it’s quite poetic that so many characters from David Simon’s superlative TV show The Wire pop up in the CBS drama, as both programmes are more than genre pieces: they examine politics, economics and social forces all whilst being thoroughly entertaining. Its successor is The Good Fight- the wife being dropped because Alicia is no longer a part of proceedings.

The original.

The show begins with Diane Lockhart ready to retire and set up home in Europe. She’s given her notice to the law firm that featured so heavily in The Good Wife. Unfortunately, just as she’s about to get the keys, her accountant calls and says the money simply isn’t there. Diane is one of Chicago’s best lawyers. She is to law what Capone is to crime. She’s the hot-shot with the enviable winning streak. It simply doesn’t make sense that she can't afford her autumn days. The reason she hasn’t got the money is because she invested in her friend’s get-richer scheme. A scheme that's defrauded million of pounds from hundreds of Americans. With her dreams in smoke, she goes back to the firm she helped make famous. They won’t bring her back into the fold on her terms though. History doesn’t count for much in the cutthroat world of criminal law. Despite growing the business, she can’t be made partner again; as a result, she walks.

What makes this show great is that it chooses not to focus on one character, like they did in The Good Wife. The spin-off isn’t the Diane Lockhart show. Her losing it and re-gathering it is an important focus of the series, but it isn’t the only one. Lucca Quinn, who was introduced towards the end of The Good Wife, is a tremendous heroine, every bit as interesting as Diane. On top of that is Maia Rindell, Diane’s goddaughter, whose father sold Lockhart the lie. The triumvirate are fantastic, representing the ladder of a law firm: from the fledgling Rindell to the aspiring Quinn to the established Lockhart. All three women come to work at the same firm, a growing company that specialise in police brutality cases. Lockhart’s heart bleeds liberalism; it’s a firm that matches her ideals. Ironically retirement's brought her a job she loves.

Quinn, Lockhart and Rindell.

The first season focuses on the investigation into Maia’s involvement with her father’s financial scheme, with other transitory stories running alongside. With this cleared up by the second season, the show enjoys a real political edge. Each episode title in this season reference how long Trump’s been in office- he is referenced regularly too. As a woman that had a picture alongside Hilary on her desk in The Good Wife, it’s fair to say that Diane is having something of an existential crisis. For her, the victories in court seem meaningless when the bigger fights are being lost in the Senate.

With strong women at its centre and diversity at its core, the show is anathema to creaky minded republicans. It’s fighting the good fight against Trump’s politics, and is entertaining to boot. What more could you ask for?  

The Good Fight Season 2 is available on More4. (You don't have to watch Season 1 to know what's going on.)

It Follows and Ghost Stories

Horror is a divisive genre: for some it’s the purest form of cinema, a visceral experience of dug fingernails and sweaty palms; for others it's a low art form, taking short-cuts to emotions.

If I’m honest it’s always been a genre I’ve denied. As a teenager – unlike others in my age group - I never felt compelled to watch them. I remember as a child finding an old VHS labeled ‘Silence of the Lambs (Boys do not watch!)’ – ever the obedient kid, I didn’t watch. Even the name struck fear into me. Typically, horror is incredibly popular with a teen market; it’s illicit and forbidden, a chance to display courage in front of friends, a way to demonstrate maturity in youth. The only horror I watched as a teenager was Scream, which if anything is more of a heartfelt pastiche than loyal rendering.

This cover-art is terrifying.

Being a fan of Mark Kermode’s film reviews I’ve become more interested in the genre. He is a huge fan of horror, writing his PhD thesis and lecturing on the topic. He opposes the crash-bang-wallop of horror cinema, praising instead filmmakers who carefully marry music with mise-en-scene; in doing so create a safe environment for people to face their fears. Even though Kermode has proselytised the value of the genre, I didn’t truly become converted until I watched Stranger Things. I believe the Netflix series has served as a gateway drug into the slightly harder strains I’ll write about today. That show pastiched the 80’s movies of Carpenter and Spielberg, re-imagining them for a box-set generation. On reading up on the show and its references, I realised there’s a lot of good horror I’ve missed, all because I associated the genre with physical torture as opposed to mental suffering. I've since discovered good horror directors go medieval on your brain, shackling your mind to the rack, pulling your fears to the fore. Meanwhile, bad horror directors mistake ‘show don’t tell' storytelling, showing too much, making you feel sick rather than afraid.

Over the holidays I’ve watched two horrors, It Follows and Ghost Stories. The first was critically lauded on release, gaining art-house as well mainstream success. The director David Robert Mitchell explained how the movie originated from an anxiety dream he had as a child. In this nightmare he was constantly being followed. This 12A rated hallucination has been upgraded to a 15 for the movie. Along with the stalkers, Mitchell has added a sexual element. In his film a person is followed after having sex with a ‘carrier,’ the only way the following can stop is if the new host can pass on the disease to another.

The movie immediately disorientates you by throwing the viewer into a perverse situation. A girl in vest top and heels is seen sprinting out of a house. Her running is wild and frenzied. She arrives at her house distracted and uncommunicative. Her father asks if she’s ok. The girl gets into her car and makes her way to the beach. We cut to a new scene: a corpse lies in the sand, its leg snapped into an impossible position. The opening appears like a woman’s worst nightmare: a man chasing a girl down because she had the audacity to say ‘no.’ However, we soon find this isn’t a tale of misogyny but mystery.

In the next scene a young girl Jay is swimming in a pool. She’s blissful and content, revelling in her youth, dreaming of her date. Said date is Hugh, a charming college kid that takes her to see Charade, a movie where the male lead isn't what he seems. Whilst sitting down to watch Hepburn and Grant, Hugh sees something that spooks him, causing him to run outside for fresh air. He explains his exit with reasonable sanity, allowing for further dates. Soon it isn’t long before Jay and Hugh have turned a car into a makeshift bedroom, stripping their bodies of innocence and throwing their desires to the headrest. This moment of ecstasy jarringly gives way to a picture of terror. Jay is tied to a chair – again, the imagery suggests sexual abuse is imminent. However, it’s just a way to constrain Jay whilst Hugh tells her what he has done: he was being followed by a thing, sometimes a stranger, sometimes a relative, but now he has passed it onto Jay. Now, she will be followed until she sleeps with someone else. If she’s found and killed they will come for him. (Hugh's reasoning that he chose Jay because she’s young and pretty and won't have trouble sleeping with someone is quite the double-edged sword. Yes, it’s wonderful when someone compliments your physical magnetism, but many would rather it didn’t come with the side-effect of being chased by psychos.)

From here, the film comes into a class of its own. The premise is fantastic: because anyone can be the stalker the viewer is apprehensive the whole time. With Jay in the foreground you’re always on tenterhooks as to what’s going on in the background: are those people moving towards Jay or are they just passing her? The score by Disasterpeace is an eerie exercise in tension building. Known more for his work on video games, the electronic compositions infect the frame with the same terror the stalkers do.

What’s so rich about Mitchell’s film is it demands re-watching. Instead of the camera shepherding you through clues, it points you in different directions so you miss what’s there. Photographs on the wall are significant; things at the back of the frame are vital: the film rewards the keen-eye observer, the passenger prepared to check the blind spots of Mitchell our unreliable driver. It seems rich in symbolism too: water is a recurring motif. Why? That swimming pool scene made me think of the birthing imagery of Gravity. Is the water an evocation of the womb, a vessel of innocence, where the threats of existence can’t get to you?

Ghost Stories was originally a play that debuted in Liverpool in 2010, before becoming a West End smash. I remember the posters all over the Underground advertising it as a frightening ordeal. My mate Jim had seen it and recommended it as original and inventive. In terms of theatre-land it definitely is. Given horror is such a high-grossing genre, it’s a surprise West End producers have ignored it for so long. Last year we took our students to see Women In Black, a show that’s been running for years – up until Ghost Stories it didn’t have any competition.

West End poster.

With the success of the play, creators Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson are bidding to scare a wider audience through a film adaptation. Both men have worked within the medium: Dyson co-writing The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse and Nyman featuring in Kick Ass 2 and The Commuter. Having more of a budget behind them, they have enlisted a stellar cast of comedy royalty from child Prince Alex Lawther (The End of the Fucking World) to King of comedy Paul Whitehouse. Even though Martin Freeman from The Office also features, this isn’t a comedy film. There are laughs, but not many. What it proves is great comic actors are able to turn their face to drama, something that can't always be said for dramatic actors and comedy.

Andy Nyman stars as Professor Phillip Goodman, who from an early montage we learn had a troubled childhood. His father, a religious figure, didn’t take well to his daughter's relationship with an Asian lad, so much so he disowned her. In seeing faith’s dark side, Goodman looks for reason in the rational, devoting his life’s work to debunking the supernatural. As well as an academic, he enjoys a TV career outing psychics. Like Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black and the unnamed protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Red Room, Goodman is a staunch skeptic – like them he’s about to question everything he thought he knew.

Most horror stories have a cynical protaganist.

The cause of Goodman’s descent (ascent?) into the supernatural is because a respected paranormal investigator has gone over to the dark side. This debunker calls Goodman to his caravan to challenge his arrogance, offering him three stories that will make him change his mind. Three inexplicable tales that can’t be explained away through logic or science. Just as Kipps and the unnamed of Red Room should never have opened the door on their house of horrors, Goodman’s disbelief leads him in too.

The first story is about what a night watchman saw on his late shift. Played by Paul Whitehouse, Tony Matthews tells Goodman his story. It was late at night. A radio phone-in was on. Nothing was to be heard. Nothing was to be seen. The place still gave Tony the chills. Previously, it was a psychiatric unit housing disturbed patients. It disturbs Tony too. Something doesn’t feel right about the place. This sense of unease is vindicated when one night strange things happen. The lights go out. The radio jumps in and out of frequency, eventually settling on haywire FM. A sound outside is sounded. Investigating, Tony stumbles through a corridor of mazes like a tortured rat. What he sees deeply affects him: his eyes come to resemble tunnels, embracing only the eternal darkness of that night.

The second story involves Lawther’s character taking his parents car illegally for a drive. His breakdown in the woods leads to his existential breakdown. Lawther is fantastic here demonstrating the outré behaviour that has seen him cast in Black Mirror and Howard’s End. The final story has Freeman’s country-yuppie character tell the story of his wife’s pregnancy. Complications arise and the outcome is chilling. Enlisting Freeman is a coup: as a recognisable face in America, he may ensure Stories becomes a cult success there.

All of the stories are interesting and compelling, but for me the joy of this film is in its structure. Both Dyson and Nyman were on the Comedians’ Comedian Podcast recently discussing the film. The pair talked about how comedy and horror resemble one another: both demand a physical response from an audience; both have the set-up, punch-line mechanism – in the case of horror, it’s the build up to the scare and the subsequent jump from the audience. For me, the ending is like an Edinburgh hour of comedy in that it has multiple callbacks to earlier moments. Every viewer will understand the ending, but some viewers will appreciate it even more if they’ve been paying close attention.

Aptly given the horror trope of the skeptic becoming a believer, I too am following that journey: whereas before I would laugh off the genre as ridiculous and stupid, I’m now starting to see things differently; I’m coming to recognise how the cranks and oddballs- associate fans of the genre- were right along. Like the protagonists of all horror stories, I’ve opened the door to the supernatural, walked amongst it and accepted I was wrong. I can no longer hand on heart debunk horror, instead I must atone for my sin and give it the attention it deserves. With that in mind bloggers, what three horror films would you send me off to investigate to complete my conversion to this strange, brilliant world? 

It Follows is available on Netflix and Ghost Stories is out in cinemas.