Will Self

You can fool all of the people for some of the time, then some more of the time, and then – even with the benefit of hindsight – they’ll have been fooled for so long that it will constitute, de facto, all of the time. This, at any rate, seems to be what’s happened with 3D movies, which any objective person will tell you are shit: the image of, for example, a skull on the screen bearing a closer relationship to the anamorphic one in Holbein’s The Ambassadors than anything death-like rendered convincingly lifelike.

I thought it was me, but having this week canvassed an extensive empirical sample (the kids, Mrs Self, Mohandra and Meena in the corner shop), I’ve discovered that I’m not alone. “Everything looks dark and fuzzy”; “The figures sort of fall out of the screen”; “They look like decomposing ghosts” – these are some of my interview subjects’ comments, and that was before I even got on to the vexed business of those glasses. True, the first 3D movie I saw worked – if by working is meant that it did really appear as if figures and objects were protruding from the screen into the auditorium. The spectacle had a certain colourful novelty, although no more so than looking through a kaleidoscope, which still fills me with as much joy as it did when I was three. On the other hand, the sensation this intrusiveness provoked in me was nausea, pure and simple.

But that was Imax 3D, which everyone agrees does the job more effectively than ordinary cinema 3D. In a standard multiplex screen I find that unless I can get a seat dead centre, the 3D images just look fuzzily double-exposed and give me a headache to look at – and it makes no difference if I wear the glasses or not. Trawling the web, I find scads of such kvetches and yet the numbers of 3D films being released, and the audiences attending them, keep on growing. Oft times, sitting with one whelp or the other and watching hordes of computer-generated humanoids flow over some impossiblist landscape like silverfish over a draining board, it occurs to me that we, “the aud” (which is how Variety refers to us the audience), may ourselves merely be a species of cloned and fundamentally illusory consumers.

The take-up of 3D certainly supports that chilling notion, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Rather, what’s at work here are our old adversaries Ad Man and his more prosaic sidekick, Mark Exec. The investment in 3D technology has been enormous – there’s not simply the equipment needed to shoot the movies, there’s also all those hugely expensive 3D projectors that have been installed in cinemas from São Paulo to Scunthorpe. Indeed, it’s these latter, which have entailed extensive and well-nigh irreversible structural alterations, that may mean 3D – like RBS – is simply TBTF.

And when something is too big to fail, as we taxpayers know to our cost, the money has to be found to ensure that we go on spending our money, so that the whole psychic Ponzi scheme misery-go-round keeps spinning.

It’s often said that advertising cannot create a demand for a wholly new product: it only transfers consumers’ attention to another brand of the same one. But 3D isn’t a new product – it’s only 2D repackaged. And as for the comforting, individualistic self-suasion, that says: ooh, y’know I never buy anything simply because I’ve seen it advertised . . . this is arrant nonsense. When it comes to Ad Man and Mark Exec, history is made by the great mass of the deindividuated. They take their lead from the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, in whose The Art of War this hypothetical is posed: “You are fighting on the three fronts. On one you’re winning, on the second you’re holding your own, and on the third you’re losing – to which front should you send your reinforcements?”

The answer is: the winning front, because there the commitment of marginal numbers will have the greatest possible effect. Besides, once that battle has been won, all these forces can be recommitted to the other fronts. As I say, efficient capitalists have this strategy tattooed on their cerebellums – while we, life-size clay warriors that we are, simply sit in the stalls waiting to be buried by drifting popcorn as we watch the costly double exposures cavort on the silvery screen. “Eat shit,” we laugh, “100 billion flies can’t be wrong!” forgetting that on this matter – if no other – Freud was entirely right: there is no such thing as a joke.

“Yesterday’s anti-colonialists are trying to humanise the generalised colonialism of power. They become its watchdogs in the cleverest way: by barking at all the after-effects of present inhumanity.” So wrote the situationist Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life, his manifesto for an insurrection of the felt, the experienced and the real against the collective, the mediated and the fake. Vaneigem’s book was published in 1967 but it reads as fresh as ever: it is a bracing indictment of a society that inculcates alienation not through the whip across people’s backs (or at least not those anywhere too nearby) but by marketing the whip for £19.99, together with a range of pastel-coloured accessories.

All this weighed on me as I sank down on a crowd-control barrier that’s been installed beside a bus stop at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall. The barrier consists of the familiar, vertically pivoted steel members, each of which resembles a hydrofoil or an aileron, depending on whether you view the people they are intended to deflect as particles or waves (which in turn depends on whether you view the metaphoric ship of state as sailing the seas or the skies). Currently not in use, the barriers lie alongside the kerb – to extend the marine metaphor – like steely, dark grey whales about to be flensed.

On the pavement, directly between the barrier and the window of one of those charming boutiques selling souvenir tea towels decorated with red phone boxes and tit-helmeted “bobbies”, a curious gate has materialised – a crown-shaped pergola of thick, yellow-painted poles. In conjunction with the barriers that now seal off Downing Street and the ones that act as bagatelle bafflers (funnelling ball-bearing legislators into the Palace of Westminster, while deflecting tourists, malcontents and al-Qaeda franchisees away), the new ones complete the act of enclosure: the government quarter has become a right, tight little Kremlin.

I called a flak at Westminster City Council to ask about the new barriers. Nice young chap – Nick Thompson, I think he was called. Anyway, he’ll go far, because he puppyishly said he’d look into the matter, then called me back a couple of days later to tell me that my memory was playing tricks and that the barriers had always been there. I assured him that this was not the case (while restraining myself from pointing out that Oceania hadn’t always been at war with Eurasia, either). He conceded that the new barriers might have been installed for the state opening of parliament or possibly Elizabeth Windsor’s birthday and that he’d make a few more calls.

This is my way of telling him not to bother. Over the past 20 years – and, in particular, in the 12 years since the attacks of 9/11 – Westminster has become the political equivalent of Battersea Dogs Home, so loud is the barking of the former anti-colonialists. The years-long sleepover of Brian Haw and his confrères; the Tamils’ fortnight-long occupation; the student protesters’ saturnalias – anyone with a sentimental attachment to British democracy could be forgiven for thinking that these represent the vigorous contesting of public space. But the truth is that as parliamentary democracy in this country comes increasingly to resemble a dumb show (without even the virtue of the players remaining silent), so the physical manifestations of that impotence are erected with greater and greater frequency.

As I sat on the barrier, there was a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square, milling about beneath a gantry from which hung four giant TV screens. They seemed to be watching some sporting event or other and doubtless the mayoralty was involved, working for London by walling-off the here and now with the then-and-elsewhere. Except that central London is no longer a place at all but merely a commodity to be flogged to tourists who issue their own receipts in the form of digital images that they’ll never, ever look at again.

Under such circumstances, it’s ridiculous to view the barriers as expressing anything as crass as the rulers’ fear of the subjected. Rather, we should see them for what they are: turnstiles that regulate the flow of bargain hunters through this pound shop of ideals; one that never ceases in its efforts to stimulate consumer demand by hanging out the red, white and blue banner that’s blazoned: “Closing-down sale, all stock must go!”

In the 1970s, when the world was just as evil and scuzzy as it is today but my gastrointestinal tract had a certain innocence – and even freshness – there was a pizza joint in Hampstead with the predictable name (at least to the ears of our current era) of Pizzaland. I remember nothing much about Pizzaland’s food but the decor has lodged in my memory – “lodge” being wholly apposite, because it consisted of banquettes topped off with little pitched roofs like lychgates, a lot of wooden fretwork, and a series of murals depicting skiing scenes that looked as if they’d been painted using an Old English sheepdog dipped in Artex.

Why it was that this Neapolitan foodstuff had come to be associated with the Tyrol is beyond me. I thought no more about Pizzaland from that day until this; there was no need, as in the intervening years more and more pizza joints have come slaloming into my consciousness. Then, casting around for another chain restaurant to add to the mighty skein of Real Meals, I alighted on Bella Italia. Bella Italia has only 80 outlets – which makes it a mere charm bracelet when dangled beside the mighty hawsers of Domino’s and Pizza Express et al – but these are spread throughout Britain, a legacy of the fact that in the 1990s it was a much greater thing: an amalgamation of Pizza Piazza, Prima Pasta, Bella Pasta and – yes, you guessed it – Pizzaland that boasted 200 restaurants countrywide.

Now, only the rebranded Bella Italias remain, a mere rump of the former imperium. Yet these Bella Italias have – dare I mix my coinages? – a certain je ne sais quoi. They are, to put it bluntly, such incredible fucking clichés, what with ristorante plastered across their façades and their sepia-scumbled interiors cluttered up with more pseudo-Italianate cod-rustic gubbins than you can shake a breadstick at. The branch we ate in boasted a framed poster for La Dolce Vita, wallmounted spice racks and jars, pot plants and raffia baskets and a trompe l’oeil map of the bootylicious peninsula that compressed so many layers of illusion into a single surface that it made my poor old head spin.

To elaborate: the “map” was painted to resemble a parchment hung on the wall but the wall was further embellished with the effect of plaster having fallen away to expose brickwork, which was itself painted. And rather than being in some Tuscan hilltop town, the whole assemblage was in the middle of an English city. Still, the extent to which this can be called fakery is debatable; indeed, sitting quite happily in Bella Italia (in brutta Bretagna), two things occurred to me: first, that while the country may appear to be chockfull with a Babel of polyglot eateries, there remains this historic stratum of trattorias; and second, that just as the Tudorbethan style of English suburbia was so ubiquitous that it deserves to be viewed as an authentic architectural period, so there is nothing remotely inauthentic about the likes of Bella Italia.

Cheered by these insights, we turned our attention to the menu – and then turned it away again, because there was nothing there to hold our attention, just the usual spread of pizza, pasta, fish and meat dishes. As I pondered the drinks list, my eye was caught by the “Appletini”, a cocktail composed of Martini Bianco and apple juice “topped” with lemonade, and I cast my mind back to the darkest and most desperate periods of my own alcoholism, trying to decide whether even then, I would’ve considered putting anything that sounded quite this vile in my hurting mouth.

I ordered a salmon salad, the boy spaghetti and meatballs. Long since having ceased to be a denizen of the mad realm ruled over by King Alcohol, I ordered a sparkling mineral water – yet (and hopefully never) to have become one, the boy called for an Appletini (sans the Martini and apple juice). The food was bearable but the saving grace – as so often in such establishments – was the staff, who were courteous, considerate and responsive to our picky requests (me for no onion or garlic, he for his meatballs not to be “too spicy”). A few years ago, Bella Italia got into trouble for skimming off its waiters’ tips but that unpleasantness is over now. Still, these folk won’t have been on more than minimum wage plus a cut of the overall tip kitty, and despite such slim pickings they maintained their good cheer; either that – or this was just another illusion to add to all the rest, and they were actually nipping out the back every few minutes for a beaker full of the warm south.