Derek Jarman: A Biography

23. Montage Years

23 Montage Years Although Jarman maintained that what had always interested him about The Tempest was that ‘no one can pinpoint the meaning’,1 his own reading of the play was fairly unequivocal and deeply pessimistic . Jarman’s Prospero is, in the words of Michael O’Pray, ‘sinister, intense, secretive and cruel’. Such reparation as Jarman’s arrangements of the action allows is arrived at only through magic and in a ‘fantasy world’, not through any ‘real political or personal understanding’.2 The film deals despairingly with the chilly horror of imprisonment and enslavement, of being subservient to the whim of another; the unbearable sadness of banishment and exile, of being denied one’s rightful place in the world – themes that thread themselves through most of Jarman’s films, often more powerfully than the more obvious theme of sexuality. It is in keeping with the pessimism at the core of the film that it should be The Tempest for which Jarman experienced the most painful public rejection in his career as a film-maker. Fitting, too, that the bitter winter of its creation was also Britain’s ‘Winter of Discontent’, of strikes by lorry-drivers and grave-diggers, of rubbish and rats in London’s West End and a dissatisfaction with Jim Callaghan’s Labour government so deep and rancid that it poisoned the entire country. As the film was being edited, there was a general election in which the Conservative Party, led by Margaret Thatcher, swept triumphantly to power with a far-reaching political and social agenda that would notoriously banish the concept of society, certainly as understood by someone like Jarman. Later he wrote that although he ‘would hate to equate The Tempest, full of forgiveness and maturity, with the politics of Thatcher’s infantile regime’,3 with hindsight he could see clear parallels between the way John Dee was discredited by James I and the brutal manner whereby, under Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives severed Britain’s links with what Jarman saw as the essence of his country’s heritage. Although at the time of Thatcher’s first campaign , he tended to admire rather than fear the Iron Lady, he soon came to regard her with intense loathing. ‘A wild anger bubbles away like magma below the surface,’ he wrote in Dancing Ledge. ‘I check it. Burroughs said that sometimes he was possessed by the evil spirit – I understand the feeling: a dizzy surge in the blood, the heart beats faster, the eyes turn inwards. The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.’4 In The Last of England, he visualised his anger thus: ‘Elizabeth II’s boarding Britannia . . . The ship sails over the horizon with its geriatric cast. Hell-bent for a rendezvous with their assets in Laguna, far in the jammy West where the Imperial sun has not yet set. Leaving the rotting shires to rot. After they have gone, in the deathly silence a small boy dances on the quay, throwing a last stone for England and St George.’5 Meanwhile, Jarman’s body found its own, non-verbal way of substantiating the anger bubbling below the surface: around now he began to suffer from irritable bowel syndrome , a classic symptom of stress.6 Not for the first time in Jarman’s life, a shift in the fortunes of his country coincided with a shift in his own fortunes, making his empathy with the times in which he lived that much more acute; making the individual – from his public pronouncements to the private spasms of his colon – that much more of a mirror to his world. For a number of reasons (problems with the developers, a wish to reflect his growing distance from the Logans and their circle, a desire for a more central base) he decided that the time had come to stop 276 Derek Jarman running a ‘gay Butlins’ and to quit Butler’s Wharf. In July 1979, immediately work on The Tempest was finished, he ceded the studio to Jean-Marc Prouveur and, through Christopher Biggins, took a lease on a studio flat in Phoenix House, above the Phoenix Theatre. At £620 per annum, the rent was well within his means and the flat, although minuscule, perfectly adequate for his needs.7 The street entrance was an anonymous door just off Charing Cross Road. A noisy, semi-industrial lift ascended to the fourth floor and the flat itself, where...