Donald Trump: The Orange Blob From Outer Space

The Blob. A horrid orange lump of an alien comes from outer space to wreak havoc upon the lives of a small rural Pennsylvania town. The 1958 science fiction-horror film (re-made in 1988) was distributed by Paramount Pictures as a double feature with I Married a Monster from Outer Space. Prophecy?

Sixty-two years later, it’s hard not to think the film was exactly that. In 2016, the orange blob was elected President; Melania found herself married to it. We have been living that double feature for four years.

I decided to come to America on the eve of my 50th birthday, November 4th, 2008, which was the day Barack Obama was declared the next President of the United States. I so wanted to be part of history; to live in a progressive country that had the foresight to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. I cried tears of joy and, just weeks later, found myself in Los Angeles at the start of an adventure that sees me still here 12 years later.

In 2016, I found myself sobbing in a bar as the election results were announced. The orange alien had descended and was among us. In the film, the blob grows redder as its power increases and, since Joe Biden was announced as the winner, the orange one’s redness has increased to the extent he looks as if he’s on the point of self-combustion. If Covid didn’t get him, his internal anger eventually will. The heart can take a lot of beating from external forces; what it can’t sustain is being its own punchbag. 

I recall seeing The Blob in 3D – the first time I had ever been given 3D glasses to wear in the cinema – but nothing could have prepared me for the three-dimensionality of the past four years. Can this be real, I have asked myself over and over, reading Trump’s deranged rants as he conducted foreign policy on Twitter? Did he genuinely not care about the American people as they faced the terror of Covid, the monster blob, whose chief job was maybe to take out the lesser blob (and succeeded)? Did he really refuse to recommend mask-wearing, say 13 times that the virus would just go away, and it would be “beautiful” – then have the audacity to say that the development of a vaccine happened on his watch? No, Mr Blobby: it happened in spite of you, not because of you. 

But now, there is hope, and we can look forward to that future feature: Return to Outer Space. We’re not quite there yet. At the end of The Blob, the creature is frozen and transported to the Arctic, and Dave says that although the monster is not dead, it will at least be stopped. “Yeah,” says Steve, “as long as the Arctic stays cold.” As the blob is lowered onto an arctic ice field, the superimposed words “The End” morph into a question mark.

Climate change could yet see the orange alien descend upon us yet again.      

Love, Loss, and Gratitude

 The cliché goes: “It’s always around Christmas.” 

Illness. Death. Heartbreak. But the truth is, “it” is around us just as much every other day of the year – and especially so in 2020; it’s just that at Christmas, it feels more poignant because it’s a time when we are all supposed to be feeling jolly with the yo-ho-ho-ness of it all – and this year, it was hard to summon up the tiniest yo-ho. 

Christmas in adulthood is inevitably different from how we felt as children; it doesn’t mean that we are incapable of joy, but pleasure comes tempered with the knowledge of corresponding sadness.

I lost my father just after Christmas in 1990 and my mother in April 2019. During 2020, many other friends lost a parent, and so many others the world over lost loved ones to Covid. Death felt like the unwanted guest at the festive dinner table this year.

It is hard to think of anything new to say about the one thing that every living creature has in common. We are all born, and we will all die - there you go, another cliché, but no less poignant for its being so.

But it is in times of loss that we find comfort in clichés: they are a uniting force in a world that continues to separate us in so many ways. Clichés are the emotional levellers: the things that strip us to the core and reveal that, at their deepest level, our raw, primal instincts are the same: we want to love and we want to be loved, and the thought of either being taken away is, at best, painful; at worst, unbearable.

The manifestation of those two primal urges leads us into all sorts of difficult territory - desire, jealousy, insecurity, paranoia… I could go on - but when we lose love, it hauls us back to the heart of the matter: the very beating of existence, physically and emotionally, that defines us, independent of the social mores and other “stuff” we find ourselves heaping upon it to make life more difficult than it need be.

Because, as better people have said, in superior clichés from those I am managing, love is all. Corinthians 13 tells us everything that love should be, in its purest form, but it’s pretty unsustainable in the modern world. But, when the physical body of a loved relative or friend departs, one is left with that very spirit, the essence, of love - at least, if you have been lucky in the people with whom you have encountered it. 

We may delude ourselves in sugar-coating the less than savory aspects; we may hide our grievances and guilt in shadows we might not wish to revisit for many years; we may lie to ourselves and others about life, death, and everything in between. But in that moment of departure and what it entails, we become as babies once more, especially when that death is one’s mother: the being who brought you into the world; the person who, literally, gave you life. You really are on your own now; the umbilical cord severed.

At the end of a very difficult year, this wasn’t quite how I imagined wishing everyone a happy 2021, because, in these unpredictable times, we really can’t gauge anything, least of all happiness. So, I’m going to change it slightly and wish you all a Loving New Year. 

For me, 2020 was a year of some great stuff, some less than good, to say the least (most people would say the same, I suspect); a time in which I learnt a lot and, I hope, shared knowledge I have been lucky to glean, with others. It was a year in which I was often great fun and, I have to be honest, at times a right pain in the ass. A year in which my friends loved me for the former and forgave me for the latter - and in which I, too, loved and forgave them for both, too. It was a year in which we had to give everyone a wide berth.

Because we’re human beings. That’s what we do. We mess up and we repair. None of us sets out to do a bad job, and the fact that we end up doing so at times doesn’t really matter; it’s how we put it right that counts. And the people who love us know that. 

And so, my sincere condolences to my friends who have lost people dear to them this year, and my thoughts and positive vibes go out to the many people I know face ongoing difficulties with treatment for their various illnesses; you are braver than I could ever be.

I am blessed having you all in my life, and thank you for your patience, kindness, acceptance of my eccentricities (even though, to me, I am the most normal person on the planet, obviously). In this year, more than any other, thank you for the music of laughter.

I send you all the love I have for the year ahead. 

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I Could Have Prommed All Night - Why I Loved The Prom

For the first hour, I was hooked. When a movie has the title I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and the opening voiceover begins with a character saying precisely that, you’re kind of interested. I made it to a little over half time when, quite frankly, I was thinking of ending things. 

The road trip taken by boyfriend and girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons) seemed longer than the road. I doubt there’s a road in the world capable of accommodating the conversation that went down in that vehicle (Wordsworth? Really? You could walk the length of the Great Wall of China and not finish reciting his work). I just about managed the journey to the Jake’s parents’ house in the middle of nowhere; but having to endure it all the way back again? 

I won’t even try to explain the movie, but if you’re into pervy killer caretakers, suspicious basements, Alzheimer’s, snowstorms, and the musical Oklahoma! then this one’s definitely for you. Enjoy.

For me, though, it was a huge relief to turn to The Prom, and it made me glad I had decided not to end things. The arsenic is back on the top shelf, although I have heard it might have to come back down for Nomadland which, although apparently wonderful, has put all my friends on suicide watch. I may yet want to end things.

But back to The Prom. Based on the Broadway musical and directed by Ryan Murphy, it’s a real feelgood movie from Netflix. I loved it. Uplifting, joyous, great music, fabulous performances; it was just what I needed to bring me down from the ledge - not just from the previous movie, but from 2020 as a whole.

Its detractors have criticized the straight James Corden being cast as a gay man; others have criticized the fact that his character, Barry, is a stereotypical gay – a theatrical actor (pronounce that as act-awwwwww), with a skill for transforming lesbians into swans through his make-up and costume skills.

Personally, I love Corden’s performance and found it no less stereotypical than every other character in the movie, not to mention the plot; that’s the point. It’s a play within a play – the four leads are like the Rude Mechanicals of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: they are all stereotypical and, as actors, stepping out of their normal roles into the second play that is someone else’s story. They are performers who, within the second play, find themselves reflecting on the reality (albeit a false one) they have created in the main drama of their lives. 

There’s the egotistical, handsome Trent (Andrew Rannells), the girl-who-never-gets-the-part Angie (Nicole Kidman), and the selfish, ego-driven diva, Dee Dee (Meryl Streep, in magnificent form). Stereotypes, all. And all the more glorious for it.  

As for a straight man not being allowed to play a gay… for gawd’s sake. Corden is a huge talent, whose singing and dancing is in top form, and he also brings depth to the character’s evolvement. 

It’s called acting. Straights should be allowed to play gays without being admonished for it; anyone should be allowed to play anyone if they are right for the part. Where do we go next, if this ridiculous logic continues to prevail? Ban the likes of Hugh Jackman from something like The Greatest Showman because he’s never run a circus? Consign the entire 10 years of Frasier to the scrapheap because gay David Hyde Pierce played Niles, a straight man sexually obsessed with a British woman? 

So, I am not going to feel guilty for loving The Prom, on either front.

Stereotypes exist in real life; that doesn’t mean they can’t, or shouldn’t be, represented. Well over 50% of my friends are gay men and, yes, a lot of them working in the acting profession and/or theatre are stereotypical (so are a lot of my straight friends, come to that). So what? 

And actors act. It’s what they’re paid to do and what we pay to watch. There’s a truly wonderful speech that Dee Dee’s love interest, Tom (Keegan-Michael Key), delivers about exactly that, and it delivers the third dimension: the person outside the play, watching the play within the play, and that character inadvertently becomes the director of both, and dictates both outcomes – he’s the hero (and he’s black – there you go!). It’s a very clever device and one that has been overlooked amid the outrage.  

So, until you can find me a man who can turn water into wine, who would absolutely nail the miracle performing part of the audition, I’m happy to carry on seeing anyone play Jesus. Yes, even James Corden. 

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