My Withnail Coat
Spring has arrived in Melbourne, not with tender warmth but with a resentful sort of stickiness. Not for us a few months of tentative sunlight, like an old friend getting back in touch; instead we’ve been flung into an aggressive sort of heat, as if forced to resume an argument we thought we’d already won. The saddest part of this, of course, is it means my Withnail coat has been retired for another six months.
When I bought that coat, I wasn’t sure I’d actually wear it. My tastes in clothes have always tended somewhat to the flamboyant (I blame Tom Baker), but I worried the coat's regency stylings might be a step too far. I also didn’t particularly want to be flouncing around in costume. I love Withnail & I, for reasons I’ll mention below, but I’m not sure cosplay is really my thing. Besides, dressing up as a drunk, unemployed actor is a rather strange wardrobe choice.
I bought the coat after interviewing its designer, Andrea Galer, for a magazine piece on famous film outfits. Galer has been selling handmade versions of the coat through her website for the last fifteen years. She mentioned a friend of hers was looking to sell a secondhand coat and it seemed an offer too good to refuse. Sadly, that coat was too small, but Galer ended up making me a new one to my measurements. It arrived during a brief cool patch last November, a thing of beauty, stitched from Harris Tweed. Over the next few months, I would occasionally take it down from the wardrobe and stroke it, as if it were a treasured pet or some rare apocryphal artefact.
Suffice to say, I was probably the only person in Melbourne delighted by this year’s cold winter. After my initial hesitancy, I ended up living in that coat. It was like walking around in a particularly light and comfortable suit of armour — or a portable duvet. This was a coat you could disappear inside, no matter how visible its distinctive cut might make you. As it turned out, I did quite enjoy flouncing around, whether in the dog park, a shopping arcade or a delightful weekend in the country. I wore it while working in my unheated studio, while attending several underheated film festival sessions, while drinking at riverside pubs. I ate in it, I sometimes napped in it. It has been two weeks since I last wore it and I miss it slightly more than I miss my sister, who recently moved to Germany.
This week sees Withnail & I released for the umpteenth time since its premiere in 1987. I’ve already ordered the new limited edition boxset, which will mark the fifth time I’ve purchased the film in some format or other. I still fondly remember the initial UK DVD release, which had a booklet plastered with inaccurate quotes from the film, most notably: “I feel like someone shat on my head.”
There are very few films, books or albums that I’ve connected with quite as intimately as Withnail, which is odd as I was only vaguely impressed when I first saw it at 17. (A friend’s sister had shown me excerpts when I was about 11, but they only puzzled me.) Over the next week after my first viewing, lines kept repeating on me, to the point that I felt driven to watch the movie again the following weekend. On the small screen, it seemed a terribly profound and melancholic film. I was inspired to picture myself as a tragic poet, striding half-cut around moors and spouting Shakespeare. Years later, I saw the film on the big screen and realised it was actually a comedy.
I think my connection to the film — one that has evolved over the last 20 years — is that it embodies a kind of splendid failure. At different times of my life, I’ve enjoyed its romanticisation of drunkenness or male friendship, but it is the romanticisation of failure that endures. There’s a sense that the world isn’t good enough for Withnail and Marwood, that they are born to live the sort of bohemian lives that the post-war, post-1960s world won’t have time for.
These men are literate, witty, educated and utterly unsuited for the realities of employment. When drug dealer Danny bemoans that Woolworths are selling hippy wigs, we realise that the fringes of society are shrinking. This new world isn’t for artists, poets, novelists or actors. (The line “free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t” seems to grow more true with each passing year.) As the sixties end, everyone is being thrust back into the centre, where they will be expected to compete and consume and conform. Of course, Withnail is never going to conform. At the film’s end, there he is in the rain, alone, railing against the world and delivering the best Hamlet the world is never going to see.
I might no longer be drunk, I might no longer be an actor, I might be employed, but I think that’s still where I want to be. On the edges, wherever the edges might be, in the cold rain, clinging to the railings and shouting at the wolves. And if I’m going to be in the rain, then I figure I at least deserve a good coat.
