Ayoade on Top

by Richard Ayoade

Barreto then treats us to an artful top shot of a small table holding up a birthday cake, like some kind of trestle Atlas. Again, Barreto trusts us to fill in the gaps: someone must have placed that cake on the table since it was brought out of the trailer by Donna’s Mom in shot 3. But who? Answer: it doesn’t matter. That’s why Barreto didn’t show it.

A lighter enters the frame. A female hand attempts to light one of the candles. There’s a spark but no flame. A deft foreshadowing of a failed romance to come.

Lord, this onion’s layered.

When we return to the same top shot of the birthday cake, an off-camera gust blows some napkins and paper cups through the frame. We know almost immediately that it’s windy. Just through image.

Conclusion? Lighting these candles is going to be no picnic. And it’s windy! What kind of fun can you have in wind?

We are low-angle, over the shoulder of an unidentified sleeveless boy (it must be windy and hot). A dejected Young Donna looks at the cake. It now has six candles on it. This seems like a more realistic age for her. Has there has been an off-camera discussion between Young Donna and Donna’s Mom that perhaps they could stretch to another couple of candles to better reflect her actual age?

As an only child, I never learned to conspire, no one showed me how to rebel. I simply did not know how to transgress. I did everything I was told. My first words were, ‘Will that be all for today?’

The balloon lifts away and disappears. The frame widens past its Super 8 square shape to become the widescreen of our feature presentation, a change of texture and ratio as bold as anything in the woefully self-conscious Wizard of Oz or Andrei Tarkovsky’s slumber party Stalker (which I thought would be a slasher film, not a challenge to my desire to remain conscious).

A whole world has been built; a backstory has been painted in but a few brushstrokes; sixty seconds have slipped by in what seems like mere minutes.

If Orson Welles had had this gift, Citizen Kane might still be remembered today. He could have clarified that weird ending with a simple line of VO, saying something like: ‘And that’s when I, Citizen Kane, realised how much I loved sleds.’

My father found it hard to cope with waiting in general, and at restaurants in particular. He felt that the food should be at the table before he was. That’s why we never went out to eat. Why would they entice you with pictures of food that they hadn’t even started to make? That would be like going to the newsagent and waiting for the journalists to finish writing the captions. Who had that much time to spare? He had news to watch, letters of complaint to compose, feet to put up, half-moon glasses to misplace.

Bruno Barreto’s camera tilts down from the sky to a tableau of the adult Donna Jensen (Gwyneth Paltrow) sitting in front of her mother’s trailer. The elegance of the camera move almost threatens to distract us from its symbolism. Barreto, working from an Eric Wald screenplay, contrasts the still-relevant concepts of ‘up’ and ‘down’ with the more esoteric notions of ‘front’ and ‘behind’ by directly tying them to physical, observable forms. Up there (sky) lie dreams. Down here (land) lies reality. Donna is sitting on her bottom (behind) in front of a trailer. Behind her, lying on his behind (on a soiled couch), seemingly asleep, is her mom’s fourth husband, Pete. This is the bedrock of great directing – translating ideas into images. Donna needs to get off her ass and reach for the sky, or she’ll end up here for ever!

Donna turns her head back towards the lens and gazes out (note the direction – she wants ‘out’ of Silver Springs), her expression unmistakeably sad or bored or perhaps tired. But Barreto is not so foolish as to rely on the communicative capacity of the human face! He cleverly reinforces the moment with a clarifying line of voice-over: ‘I still had my mind on a different life, beyond Silver Springs.’

Cinema helps us to remember that although we all have the right to shine, some of us must shine in the background, out of focus, and not too brightly. It’s also to the film’s credit that the motif of Donna working in the baggage department (while working through her own ‘baggage’) never feels arch, but merely thematically on point.

Another director might say, ‘No, we can’t have a scene every five minutes in which the Hot-Tempered Cop is dragged screaming from a fight by the Even-Tempered Cop. No, we can’t do all our exposition in bars. No, we can’t have the top brass call the protagonist the Best Damn Cop on the Force. No, we can’t give his best buddy a gambling problem. No, we can’t have a scene where someone is confronted over unpaid parking fines with the line, “You’ve got parking tickets up the ass.” No, we can’t have his childhood friend go into organised crime.’ Not Barreto. Barreto says ‘Yes’ to all these things. It is in the unvaried repetition of familiar motifs that Barreto’s originality lies.

For Paltrow to enter an establishment without being offered ionised cucumber water is unthinkable. But it is Barreto’s job to make us think the unthinkable.

Goop is the online manifestation of the party into which the Blue-Collar Hero walks; a party where everything is strangely clean, where uptight sophistos sip complex cocktails; a party where an Alpha Yuppie says to the Blue-Collar Hero, ‘Nice boots, did the hobo mind when you stole them?’, forcing the hero to ask the Alpha Yuppie if he wants to repeat that, so the Alpha Yuppie says, ‘Are you deaf as well as dumb?’ while his Beta Yuppie cohorts laugh and high-five in the background, so the Alpha Yuppie modulates his voice into a low hiss and impugns the Blue-Collar Hero’s position in the linear intrasex ranking system with a salty remark about the latter’s mother, whereupon the Blue-Collar Hero puts out his cigarette in the Alpha Yuppie’s complex cocktail, causing the Beta Yuppies to go ‘ooh’ and the Alpha Yuppie to say, ‘Shut up, you chicken shits. Hold my Armani jacket – I don’t want to get blood on it when I break this motherfucker’s nose,’ but as soon as he turns, he’s met with a swift uppercut to his pinstriped chest. The Blue-Collar Hero leans over the Alpha Yuppie’s felled form and says, ‘You talk too much,’ before riding off on his motorbike with the Peach-Skinned Prom Queen and giving her sweet boom-boom on a weirdly clean hay bale, because all these uptight broads basically just want to be shown What’s What by a Real Man with a single strategic smear of bike oil on his vest.

Jensen’s first line of the scene – ‘I caught you’ – is, like so many in the film, loaded. Boulay is reluctant to let her read the contents of the envelope and secretes it in his back pocket. Donna flirtatiously retrieves the item and opens it. It’s a birthday card. But when she reads the message contained within, her face crumples, like a drained can of Fanta under a Cuban heel. Barreto resists the temptation to cut to one of his statement insert shots, and instead lets this moment play on Paltrow’s harrowed face. Tommy Boulay is breaking up with Donna Jensen. Donna can’t believe that Boulay would break off intimacies with a birthday card. Displaying a disingenuousness that will guarantee he no longer participates in the narrative, Boulay flippantly says that it’s because they don’t make ‘breaking-up cards’. Evil, thy name is Boulay.

We don’t need to see Donna buy the book; the act of purchase is implied when Barreto cuts to her reading it. Pure Eisenstein. A third meaning created by the juxtaposition of two shots: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Bravo, Barreto.

Working as cabin crew (the term ‘stewardess’ is hopelessly dated, but we must bear in mind that Top was released in 2003, before feminism finally found its footing) is exceedingly demanding. One would think that only those with an unexplained fetish for blocking narrow passageways would be attracted to this role, so onerous are its duties.

We meet her in the staff bathroom as Donna practises saying, ‘Sir, please fasten your seat belt’ in the mirror. Following the sensual sound of a cistern emptying itself, Sherry slinks out of a stall, a vision in purple nylon. Any thought as to the accompanying odour is far from our minds as the camera pans up from her oddly futuristic boots.

Sherry asks if Donna is nervous, the implication being that if she too needs to void her bowels, that’s totally cool. Donna flashes a smile that tells us she’s either bunged up or she’s dumped her load. With a knowing wink, Sherry struts to the basin, insouciantly turns on the tap and fixes Donna with a look that says, ‘This is my toilet, and don’t you forget it.’ Donna watches Sherry as if to say, ‘Wow, this dame sure knows her way round a toilet.’ Indeed, Sherry delivers a one-woman tutorial in no-soap handwashing. ‘All you need do’, the implied dialogue goes, ‘is simply rinse off any visible urea and faecal matter before drying.’ For this, Sherry uses a wall-mounted hand dryer. Donna watches in awe. Perhaps she’s never seen one before? Maybe her school was a hand-towels-only affair. But that might be for the good. We all know that flushing a toilet can cause faecal matter to travel up to fifteen feet in the air, but what is less known (aside from who the hell has fifteen feet of air space above their toilet) is that said faecal matter can be sucked up by said hand dryers and turbo’d back onto said hands. Said faecal matter can also lodge itself in garments. That’s why, when I use a public latrine, I leave my jumpsuit in the stall and walk out the way God intended.

How can a film show a lawyer mastering her craft? She carries stacks of books, she drinks coffee, she stares at books while rubbing her eyes, she eats Chinese takeaway from the carton, she lays her head on the desk in tiredness, she wakes up with an egg roll affixed to her cheek, she puts her hair up in a bun, she acquires horn-rimmed glasses, she starts wearing less revealing cardigans, she wins the case, she is rewarded by a romance with the less flashy of the two men who are sexually interested in her.

As Donna moves into her imperial phase of cabin-crewing, ‘I’m Not Anybody’s Girl’ by Kaci Battaglia plays non-diegetically. It’s a moving manifesto of self-attestation, in which the titular girl rejects her former lover and strikes out on her own. The verses outline what an absolute barnacle this bloke is, and how there is nothing he can do for her that she can’t do for herself, and when push very much comes to shove, this rotten blister could drop down dead and the total effect on Kaci Battaglia would = nil, the conclusion very much being that this chap can go hang for all she cares, i.e. relationship terminated, thank you very much. The last thing Kaci Battaglia needs is a man, apart from perhaps the two chaps who wrote the song. James McCollum and Jason Levine have done their bit, but as far as the coarser sex goes, that’s it, with the possible exception of Joel Diamond, who produced it, and Walter Turbitt, who did additional mixing. But now that she has the song in which she sings of her independence, it’s very much Kaci in the driving seat – a seat in a car that may have been made, yes, by men, but that’s not the point. Like Donna, she is ‘flying full speed ahead’ (on the ground – ground that has been tarmacked by men most probably, but why bring that up? It’s irrelevant).

When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks I’ll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I haven’t read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.

In 1971, the US-based National Airlines took out an advertisement featuring a stewardess looking straight at the lens. The type above reads, ‘Hi, I’m Cheryl. Fly me.’ What the advert doesn’t make clear is how that would be possible. Cheryl appears to have none of the qualities required that would allow her to travel unaided through the atmosphere without touching the ground, let alone if she were saddled with an overweight and horny businessman. Unless they’re tucked discreetly out of sight, there is no indication in the photo that Cheryl has wings or fins. Presuming she is no less heavy than air, we know that for Cheryl to achieve any kind of aerodynamic lift she’d need a propeller or a jet engine. And given there is no outward indication that Cheryl is an airbound insect, her only option for flight would be if she were launched ballistically as a human cannonball.

when Cheryl says, ‘I’m Cheryl. Fly me.’ Cheryl probably isn’t inviting the prospective traveller to join her in a compressed air cannon, to be violently expelled into a net in front of some semi-interested agricultural specialists. So what is Cheryl suggesting? Surely Cheryl isn’t being presented as an eroticised canvas onto which the male traveller is meant to project his own propulsive thrust? That would make the airline her pimp. Does National think that the consumer is going to be so gripped by the illusory prospect of stratospheric congress that he’s going to book a flight he wouldn’t have taken anyway? Is his wife going to wonder, ‘How come all these needless flights all of a sudden?’ Also, unless National are thinking that, post-ad, they’ll only be accepting one passenger at a time, is this an invitation to a ménage? Will robes and lotions be provided? Or will you have to bring your own lube?

Before long, National Airlines replaced the ‘Fly me’ ad, this time using one with a more Heraclitus-like tone: ‘We’ll fly you like you’ve never been flown before.’ Aviation regulations would dictate otherwise. Commercial flight has never been a playground for mavericks, no matter how droll the in-flight announcements can get. What’s going to happen is that they’re going to fly you in the exact same way as before, with as few variations as possible. If your flight is from Luton to Corfu, there’s one way it’s going to pan out – i.e. you get on the plane, the plane takes off, the plane lands your broken ass in Corfu, you get off the plane, they pretend to clean the plane, then a bunch of other shit-kickers get on the plane, and the plane hauls their broken asses back to Luton, the jewel of Bedfordshire. If they’re flying you in a way they haven’t flown you before, that’s because the engines have failed. And call me uptight, but the thought of falling to my death has seldom given me a boner.

We no longer see Gwyneth Paltrow and Mark Ruffalo; we see two bonobo chimps duking it out for dominance, and it’s thrilling.

Another well-placed VO allows her to deepen the dilemma of Free Will: ‘Why can’t all choices be simple? Window or aisle? Coffee or tea? Not career or romance …’ In short, why can’t life be idiomatically similar to air travel? Yet for me, ‘window’ or ‘aisle’ isn’t a simple choice, and if I haven’t checked in online, it’s often not a choice at all. I like to look out of the window so I can be the first to see if a wing goes missing, but I also have a weak bladder and dislike hurdling over the prone.

It’s very possible that a good relationship can spring up between a wealthy older man and a younger woman who has to bring him refreshments whenever he presses a button.

An exam hall. Barreto’s camera tracks past a distressed, flustered Christine towards a smiling, confident Donna. A less thorough director might have left it at that, forcing the viewer to divine the hearts of these two individuals from mere surface signs. But Barreto, the man who brought us One Tough Cop, starring Stephen Baldwin as an Italian American police officer who alternates between smiling like someone who’s apologised for farting but still finds it funny, and pouting so hard it looks like crime arouses him, is not going to rely on the accidental facial arrangements of actors. Thus, a colleague turns to Donna and asks how she’s feeling w/r/t the test/results thereof. Big D’s answer is emphatic: ‘New York, here I come.’

America is an immigrant country, or at least it used to be until some of the Caucasians decided to pretend that they’d always been there.*

Everyone’s true place of origin is the ocean.

As the boy hugs Donna in gratitude for this very on-brand gift, Ted takes a present to his grandmother. She’s a handsome woman with a fine set of gnashers. Good grief, these people live a long time. When I was born, only one of my grandparents remained, and she was clinging on by her talons. Ted’s grandmother looks in fine fettle: trim and with a knowing smile, the only evidence of senescence being near-deafness. But a condition that could well mean she feels isolated/frightened is mercifully mined for laughs. Ted gives her a universal remote control – a chance for the art department to excel once more, and a nice meta-textual nod to Adam Sandler’s matchless opus Click.

Donna opens the package. It’s a watch that has two faces, so that Donna can set it to two time zones simultaneously. Ted says that whenever a passenger asks her what the time is, she can think about him, even though the two things have nothing in common. As well as being terribly touching, this massively chunky watch can also help remind Donna that Ted isn’t sure that she can reliably add or subtract single and low double-digit numbers.

TED: Look, Ma, I know you handle all the sweater-buying round these parts, but this new girl of mine, she only wears things that are far too small for her. TED’S MA: Nonsense, Ted. You can’t wear wool unless it’s loose. Tight wool can drive a person crazy. Plus, you have to allow for shrinkage. TED: She don’t care about no shrinkage, Ma. It looks like everything she’s ever owned has been on a boil wash. I’m serious. She looks like she’s had an unexplained growth spurt. TED’S MA: Well, as far as I’m concerned, it’s Christmas, and Christmas is not the time for restrictive garments, Ted. What’s wrong with loose wool? I thought you said she was tall? TED: She’s twice my size, Ma. It’s like looking up at Mount Rushmore. TED’S MA: So she’s gonna need a large. TED: Don’t you buy her no large, Ma. TED’S MA: I’m telling ya, Ted, if this dame is as tall as you say, anything smaller’s going to be ridiculous! It won’t cover her belly button. TED: That’s the way she likes it, Ma. TED’S MA: What is she, an exotic dancer? TED: No, she’s classy, Ma. She just likes to get a little air around the middle – like everyone who came to prominence in the mid-nineties. Remember back then, Ma? It was all about the midriff. TED’S MA: You kids are crazy.

Donna’s afraid of becoming emotionally grounded. Her heart is that red balloon, soaring high, out of sight into the stratosphere. And because of something to do with atmospheric pressure that I find hard to understand, it will almost certainly explode.

Despite what many believe, Christmas is still celebrated in Ipswich, often annually, and in much the same fashion as it is in the developed world.

But what did Christmas mean for me? As an Ipswichian, I was grateful for what I had: easy access to reasonably priced, non-branded footwear, very few hills and a sense that any smugness about one’s circumstances was inappropriate.

I would say that over the Christmas period, I would eat between two and three hundred Christmas Biscuits. Each genus of Christmas Biscuit was stored in a large Tupperware box. The many layers of Christmas Biscuits were separated out with kitchen roll. The kitchen roll showed a festive tableau of Christmassy goodwill, but the grease from the biscuits would soak into the paper, giving the scenes a somewhat sullied feel; a literal blot on the season.) Christmas Meringues were made. (I would probably eat between eight and twelve Christmas Meringues a day. At no point did my mum try to stop me from eating Christmas Biscuits or Christmas Meringues. If I ever finished a plate of Christmas Biscuits, she would just bring me another plate of Christmas Biscuits. If I started to feel sick from all the Christmas Meringues, she would just tell me to ‘take a break’, the implication being that I would obviously keep eating Christmas Meringues, I just had to rest. Often she would wake me up in the morning with a plate of Christmas Biscuits or, if I was looking bloated, a couple of Christmas Meringues.) Throughout Christmas, I slept like a cobra, curled up, trying to break down the glucose. Even now, if I open a box of donuts, I have to tell myself not to eat all twelve.

My dad (a Nigerian whose principal adversary was levity) did not eat Christmas Biscuits/Christmas Meringues because he didn’t like ‘sweet stuff’. His favourite food was raw onion. I would frequently have to bring him raw onion slices as a snack, which meant I began to associate my dad’s hunger with crying. I looked forward to reaching a similar state of zen, wherein I too could view my lethal breath as Other People’s Problem. ‘Who am I trying to impress?’ he would say. Yet, ironically, his steadfast refusal to try to impress was impressive.

Norwegians have their main meal on Christmas Eve – roast Norwegian pork, boiled Norwegian cod and Norwegian sauerkraut (surkål). We were no different, except for the boiled cod, because my mum always felt cod was ‘too fishy’, i.e. too ontologically itself.

After the last of the sauerkraut had been washed down with a quenching draught of julebrus, we would clear the table, wipe the table, dry the table, replace the tablecloth, wipe the tablecloth, dry the tablecloth, wash the dishes, dry the dishes, put away the dishes in the cupboard, wipe the cupboard, dry the cupboard, vacuum any dust resulting from opening the cupboard, wipe the vacuum cleaner, put away the vacuum cleaner in another cupboard, wipe down and dry that cupboard, shower, dry ourselves, wash the towels, dry the towels and sit down on the freshly wiped sofa to exchange tokens of esteem. When I say ‘we’, I mean my mum and I. By this time, my dad would be asleep.

But of all my Christmas Memories, my most enduring is of a strange ornament that would hang from the architrave of the kitchen door. It was a mini-snowman (standard features: big belly, carrot nose, top hat, pipe), but below his bottom section/anus* dangled some foliage which – only now – I realise was mistletoe. I simply thought this snowman’s somewhat greenish poo had frozen on exit.

Donna is aghast. She says she certainly would not have said that, it being one’s flight-attendantly duty to inform the ‘musical case’-carrying miscreant that he had the option of buying another seat at half price, as per section 23.4 of the manual. Christine tries to wave away the awkward moment, saying that she can’t be expected to remember everything. Donna, sensing blood, presses on. But it was the last question of the exam, she says; surely Christine would remember that? If you aren’t on the absolute precipice of your seat by now, you’ve lost your adrenal glands.

DONNA: So you, Sally Weston, are telling me, Donna Jensen, that you, Sally Weston, can do nothing?

These scenes are handled with brutal efficiency. Barreto knows that the audience’s collective heart is pounding like a jockey’s balls on a saddle.

I have something in common with Ted Stewart: I, too, studied law at university. And to the amazement of all who taught me, I graduated. I have, out of respect to The Law, never practised it, nor made any attempt to understand it. But my degree does mean that when people ask me what I studied at university, I have the opportunity to see how easily other people can detect shame.

I am ashamed of many things, but studying law is the only thing of which I am ashamed to degree level. Even lawyers don’t study law at university. They study something that a human being might be interested in, like history or English literature, and after university, when they find out there’s no money in history or English literature, take a law conversion course. I’m not saying we don’t need lawyers. But that’s only because I’ve been legally advised not to make that statement.