But Lulu had a special significance for me, because she had curls and so did I. Curly hair went in and out of fashion—Twiggy was to get revenge on behalf of the straight-haired in the late nineteen-sixties—but, in the Shirley Temple-dominated nineteen-forties, curls were at a premium, and it was horrifying for me to witness the Torquemada-like tortures inflicted on my friends’ heads by their mothers: their hair was twisted up in damp rags and secured with bobby pins at night, producing, in the morning, a few limp spirals of hair that would quickly wilt. Whereas Lulu and I were all set! Soon I would surely get a job selling that new consumer item, Kleenex, just like her. (This failed to happen.)
But Lulu had a few other things going for her, in my eyes. She was little, as was I, but this did not stop her for an instant. The eternal problem of the boys’ clubhouse—not being let into it, that is—was treated by her, by and large, with a phnuh. She had other, better things to do, and anyway, she—being the title character—was smarter, so there. And, in an age somewhat devoid of female title characters, she was the title character. One could therefore be little, and a girl, and nonetheless the title character. Move over, Jane Eyre!
Before Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart even made it into bookstores, movie audiences had already welcomed Sailor and Lula, the “Romeo and Juliet of the South,” into the pantheon of American outlaw couples. In May 1990, nearly six months before the book’s publication, David Lynch’s adaptation of Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Wild at Heart screenplay, written by Lynch and vetted by Gifford, follows the broad contours of the darkly funny novel. The story centers on the parole-breaking cross-country quest of the ex-convict Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage, peacocking in his prime), and his barely legal girlfriend, Lula Fortune (a leonine, red-lipsticked Laura Dern). They cross state lines to flee the clutches of Lula’s overbearing mama, Marietta Fortune (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother), and Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton), the private eye tasked with tracking them down. Gifford’s neo-noir antiheroes are indelibly embodied by Cage and Dern. Their kinky, if somewhat dimwitted, chemistry placed Sailor and Lula alongside other, more murderous fugitive twosomes: Bonnie and Clyde, for sure, but also Kit and Holly, the Badlands couple inspired by spree killer Charles Starkweather and his underage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate.
Wild at Heart sparked a spate of films about dangerous duos on the run: Thelma & Louise (1991), True Romance (1993), and Natural Born Killers (1994). The movie is still eminently quotable, owing to a combination of pungent original dialogue and the bushy-tailed cheesecake served up by the lead actors. Cage, doing a kind of swamp-thing Elvis impression, repeats the mantra behind Sailor’s snakeskin jacket: “This jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.” Lula, slithering in a black lace bodystocking, drawls an intimate summary of her love: “You move me, Sail, you really do. You mark me the deepest.” But the manic interpretation pulled off by Lynch, Cage, and Dern also effectively stole the thunder and shrouded the sharp intelligence of the road-tripping couple as they were conceived of and written by Gifford.
In the run-up to Hungary’s parliamentary elections in 2018, one of the cabinet ministers of the country’s ‘illiberal’ prime minister Viktor Orbán travelled to Vienna in neighbouring Austria, where he filmed himself walking through a part of the city where a number of immigrants have settled. As pedestrians go about their business in the background, their movements overplayed by a mournful piano melody, János Lázár earnestly tells the camera that there are hardly any white, German-speaking residents left in this part of town. Lázár then warns Hungarians that the same fate could await Hungary if they failed to vote for Orbán’s Fidesz party in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Lázár’s stunt was about raising the fear of difference, but it also played into an opposite, one might say complementary, fear – that Hungary could become just like everywhere else. This anxiety about homogenisation is not limited to Right-wing thought. It is traceable across the political spectrum, suggesting that what people most fear is not difference, but instead a world in which nothing and nowhere is truly unique, one in which everything and everyplace is the same.
The number of times you have to explain to your children what a boomer is, before they stop saying “OK, boomer” is … well, I do not know the answer to this. I have to assume it is infinite, and they will never stop. Anyway, I am not a boomer, as I was born long after the mid-60s, and nor are/were my parents, who fall into what went before – the silent or beat generation. These distinctions are important when it comes to cooking, because boomers cook one way (the women can’t cook at all, because of feminism, and they vie with each other to see who can do the most disgusting thing to an aubergine; the men all cook like Keith Floyd), Generation X cooks another way and the beat generation does things that must be recorded now, because once they have passed out of fashion, they will never be discovered again.
Communicating without a shared context is hard. For example, radioactive sites must be left undisturbed for tens of thousands of years; yet, given that the English of just 1,000 years ago is now unintelligible to most of its modern speakers, agencies have struggled to create warnings to accompany nuclear waste. Committees responsible for doing so have come up with everything from towering concrete spikes, to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, to plants genetically modified to turn an alarming blue. None is guaranteed to be future-proof.
Some of the same people who worked on these waste-site messages have also been part of an even bigger challenge: communicating with extraterrestrial life. This is the subject of “Extraterrestrial Languages”, a new book by Daniel Oberhaus, a journalist at Wired.