“It is impossible to avoid mentioning that this story has been told on screen before, in a mini series that was broadcast in 1982, and that holds up remarkably well,” A O Scott of The New York Times wrote in his review of the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, directed by Julian Jarrold. “Mr. Jarrold’s rendition … is necessarily shorter and less faithful to Waugh’s book, and also, for what it’s worth, less cinematic. It is also tedious, confused and banal … In Waugh’s book – and I’m compelled to add, that fine old mini-series it was made into – religious commitments and social relations were part of a thickly detailed, complicated and ancient lived reality. The long experience of English Catholics as a religious minority, the subtle gradations of class in the British university system, the crazy quilt of sexual norms and taboos governing the lives of young adults: all of this is what makes Brideshead Revisited live and breathe as a novel. None of it registers with any force in this lazy, complacent film, which takes the novel’s name in vain.”
The movie of Brideshead Revisited misread its heart, draining the beauty from Lady Marchmain’s religion, two thousand years of ritual, music, art, power, intrigue and violence reduced to Emma Thompson’s cold greyness and severe emotional calculations and bullying. When Lady Marchmain tries to enlist Charles’s help in monitoring Sebastian’s behaviour it’s a seduction, she’s trying to stir something within his spirit. In the television series Claire Bloom’s fine beauty captured the sensuality in faith and worship. “I’ve always found theology a certain kind of delightful titillation,” Leonard Cohen said in 1995. “Theology or religious speculation bears the same relationship to real experience as pornography does to lovemaking. They’re not entirely unconnected. I mean, you can get turned on. One of the reasons that they’re both powerful is that they ignore a lot of other material and they focus in on something very specific. In these days of overload, it’s very restful to know, at last, what you’re talking about.”
The eleven hours of Brideshead Revisited were first broadcast in 1981. The Sex Pistols had released “God Save The Queen” in 1977. The world’s financial markets were depressed. And the next year Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner would be released. It would initially fail, but the vision of a ruined world that humans had lost control of would grab hold of architects and designers and musicians and the movie has steadily grown in influence ever since. Tyrell’s office and home were similar to Brideshead, architecturally imposing and full of art and fine furniture and exotic creatures. But all of his wonders were synthetic: the real world had been destroyed and he’d had to remake it. He’d played God, creating organic machines, replicants, that were smarter and more powerful than people and dangerous, because they had no feeling for humans. They resembled humans and the surest test of a replicant was to see if it showed genuine compassion. But the replicants were searching for meaning. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the replicant Roy Batty says at the end of the movie, after going against the grain and saving the Blade Runner Deckard’s life. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the darkness at Tan Hauser Gate, those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.” And he released a dove that fluttered up into a dawning sky. It was an image like a piece of religious art.
The world was shifting from analogue to digital. From the full spectrum to sampling. Blade Runner was a bridge between worlds. It was romantically old fashioned movie making, its effects were created with paintings and models, built up in the camera, assemblages of exposures on celluloid film. The flying machines hung in the air on wires. The world was the story: the architecture, the furniture, the artifacts. People were “enormously distracted by the environment” director Ridley Scott said in 2007. Viewers were also enormously distracted by the environment of Brideshead Revisited, it was similarly old fashioned and richly detailed film-making.
Blade Runner feels eternally contemporary while Brideshead Revisited might be two and a half centuries old rather than two and a half decades. The richly eloquent language Charles Ryder uses in his voice overs feels more archaic than the straightforward lifting of the story directly from the novel’s pages. “It’s true that Shakespeare’s language is one of the glories of English, perhaps its crowning glory: and as an actor it gives one enormous satisfaction to speak it in public, to exploit its rhythms and musicality,” John Bell wrote in his memoirs, about staging Shakespeare’s plays for contemporary audiences. “But for all its beauty, the language is slipping from our grasp and becoming increasingly incomprehensible to each succeeding generation. The day will come when we’ll have to translate Shakespeare, not just the odd phrase, but the whole box and dice. This won’t be altogether a bad thing, if it’s done, say, with the skill of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. It will need a major poet to do it, but the result could be electrifying.”
Classics become classics because they’re based on timeless truths that speak to successive generations, they can be re-worked, re-arranged and given a new context. Watching Brideshead Revisited on DVD rather than broadcast television the message it has for our time is able to be isolated, two hours out of eleven, episodes eight and nine, where Charles Ryder experiences that whole world of ancient art and beauty slipping from his grasp. After being so caught up in the lives of the Flyte family while at university with Sebastian: he falling in love with the art and sensuality, even the stifling rituals and rules of their world and their God and they being attracted to his austerity and modernity and suspicion of religion, he hasn’t seen any of them in a long time.
Episode 8 is called “Brideshead Deserted”. Lady Marchmain has died. Sebastian is drinking himself to death in Tunisia. Julia has married Rex, a shady American businessman. Charles has been asked to paint four small oil portraits of Marchmain House in London before it’s demolished to build an apartment block. They will establish his reputation as a painter. All of the beauty that he found in Brideshead is concentrated in the living room he’s painting. It’s upholstered in the crimson of cardinal’s robes, detailed in gilt and filled with old masters and small pieces of classical statuary. The youngest Marchmain child, Cordelia, now a teenager, watches Charles paint and he takes her to dinner. “My theme is memory,” he says in a voice over. “These memories which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me for nearly ten dead years after that evening with Cordelia. I was borne along a road, outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting, did I come alive as I had during my time with Sebastian. I became an architectural painter. But as the years passed, I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing room at Marchmain House: the intensity, and the singleness, and the belief that it was not all done by hand. In a word, the inspiration.” What he calls inspiration the Marchmain family would call God.
Charles goes to Mexico and Central America for two years to create paintings for an exhibition called Ryder’s Latin America. “But still, despite this isolation,” he says, “and this long sojourn in a strange world, I remained unchanged, still a small part of myself, pretending to be whole. I discarded the experiences of those two years with my tropical kit and returned to New York as I had set out.” He is caught in a loveless marriage with an ambitious wife, Celia, and meets up with Julia Flyte on the cruise ship, on their way home to London. “You’re lean and grim, not the pretty boy Sebastian brought home,” she tells him. “You’re softer, and sadder,” he tells her.
In Episode 9, “Orphans of the Storm”, Charles and Julia begin an affair that lasts a couple of years. Everyone else is confined to their cabins with seasickness during a storm and they have the run of the ornate and luxurious ship. “Why did you marry Celia?” Julia asks Charles. “Physical attraction, loneliness, missing Sebastian,” he replies. “You loved him didn’t you.” “Oh yes, he was the forerunner.” Julia is initially uncertain about becoming involved with Charles. I can’t give you love she tells him. “Love. I’m not asking for love.” “Oh yes Charles, you are.”
The perfect, rich, ancient world that’s their backdrop, the cruise ship, art galleries, Brideshead, is under threat and will be broken down by the second world war. When Brideshead Revisited was being shown on television, the Sony Walkman was becoming popular. The way we are entertained was undergoing a revolution. The Walkman did for music what Gutenberg’s press with movable type did for reading, made it a private, portable activity. Sony applied the Walkman principle to all of its consumer electronics: televisions were shrunk to pocket size and designed to run on batteries. It would be twenty five years, and take the invention of the iPod and iPhone to make the activity of watching moving images on a small, portable screen rich enough to be satisfying, but the Walkman introduced the idea that made the cracks in the old entertainment world that would eventually shatter it. We’re almost at the point where broadcast television is irrelevant and episodes of series will be purchased or rentable or streamed through our computers. If the television station isn’t providing the context and background for a series, how do we find out about it and how do we understand it?
It’s astonishing to think that Sony is now irrelevant. The Apple computer company now drives how we entertain ourselves: our games, television programmes, radio, telephone, mail and message systems, novels and newspapers, are able to be delivered through applications on our mobile phones. Sony’s influence waned as the twenty first century rolled in. There was an extraordinary, ill-fated set of consumer electronics called the Qualia range in 1999. Sony seemed to be trying to create the kind of art that hung in Marchmain House and Brideshead as consumer electronics. These objects, extremely refined audio and video playback machines costing tens of thousands of dollars predated the steampunk fad, but had the same properties: consumer electronics devices trimmed in wood and brass with the design qualities of heirlooms. And what we were to consume with them wasn’t anything as ordinary as popular music or movies, the advertising talked about the particular, elite sensations of a glass of fine wine or seeing a raindrop on a perfect leaf in the rainforest along the Amazon. It seemed to be a throwback to the Victorian idea of cataloguing and collecting the natural world.
They’re only seen in the distance in Brideshead Revisited but the Qualia ads were a little like Charles’s paintings of the Amazon, lush and perfectly described but dead. By the time these paintings are exhibited Charles can no longer bear to look at them. At the opening he is listening to his wife talk to the guests and realizes she’s lost the power to make him cringe. “Charles lives for one thing, beauty,” she says. “And I think he got bored with finding it ready made, he had to go and create it for himself and find new worlds to conquer. After all, he has said the last word about country houses.”
Anthony Blanche, a university friend of Sebastian’s, who warned Charles about the Flyte family comes to the exhibition. “It’s simple creamy English charm playing tigers,” he tells Charles, who agrees with him. “Charm is the great English blight,” Anthony Blanche says, “It does not exist outside these damp islands. It swats and kills anything it touches. It kills love. It kills art. And I greatly fear, my dear Charles, that it has killed you.”
Charles goes from the exhibition to Brideshead with Julia. It’s the beginning of their affair, but in those scenes you can already see its end. Rex has taken over Brideshead, placed gaming tables in the great hall, and it now looks as cheesy as Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Charles and Julia will live together there, Rex keeping a discreet distance, until Brideshead decides he’s going to marry and can’t bring his wife into this sinful atmosphere, and Lord Marchmain will come home to die there, and suddenly reach for the faith he took on in order to marry, to comfort him in his dying moments, and Julia and Charles will spectacularly fall out, over religion. Then the second world war will intrude, and we’ll see Charles coming back to Brideshead as a soldier. The art has been crated up, the fountain drained, the lawns run over with tents as it becomes a base camp. But the chapel that was deconsecrated when Lady Marchmain died has been reopened.
At the end of Episode 9, Julia and Charles stand at the head of the roulette table in Marchmain’s great hall, while an instrumental version of “Anything Goes” is playing on the gramophone. “I wonder which is the more horrible, Celia’s art and fashion or Rex’s politics and money,” Charles asks. Evelyn Waugh’s novel was published in 1945. He wrote it in 1943 and 1944, and came to be critical of it. “It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful.”
The television series was a form of visual gluttony. But there’s something simple and human and touching in watching just two hours of it, when Charles realises that art without some kind of deeper connection to the world is just pictures, and love without some kind of connection to humanity (whether that’s called God or not) is empty. Both the television series and the book are a catalogue of a world that wouldn’t return after the second world war. Episodes 8 and 9 of Brideshead Revisited are a lament for a world soon to be lost, a love soon to be lost, and that’s a resonant message for any time, the world war II era when the book was written, the punk rock era when the television series was broadcast, and now.
