the world that jones made - part two
The second of the three films starring Paul Jones is as equally obscure and, in its way, just as disturbing as his debut feature Privilege. It is a comparatively minor key role but, for my money, a superior piece of acting. With the music performed by Pink Floyd and Arthur Brown, Jones is free to focus on delivering a fully rounded character role - and one with plenty to say.
ever smiling - Everyman
The Committee:
1968, directed by Peter Sykes, produced and written by Max Steuer.
The plot of The Committee is simple but bizarre: A nameless hitchhiker (Jones) decapitates a driver - but later decides to sew the head back on the body reanimating the victim who then drives away. Some time later the hitchhiker, now back at work, receives a summons to join an unspecified official committee. He attends a gathering at a rural estate and talks to the committee head. At the end of the weekend he accepts a lift home.
head ballet - Jones and Tom Kempinksi never see eye to eye.
Unlike Privilege where the ostensible narrative is the continual tightening of a screw and where the viewer is kept of balance by the very sturm unt drang that the film critiques; frenetic movement, hot colours and abrupt edits, The Committee has an even structure of three parts, and three locations, rural, city, rural and is content to maintain a deliberately languid pace, matched by the spare and over-focused photography. On the surface all is calm, bright and summery - an English summer’s day, warm and relaxing - alluring, a lure indeed.
oh England, my lionheart…
There is a contrast between the rural locations, (a forest glade and the Committee’s country home environs,) and the urban office with its stark interiors and machinery.
welcome to the machine
There is little of the hectic cosmopolitan commuter crush one might expect. The outstanding photography (by D.P. Ian Wilson) is modish, and attractive, resembling Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage or the pages of (the then contemporary) Nova Magazine.
fashionable cool - and note the resemblance to the cover of Patti Smith’s Horses album.
The emphasis is on orderliness (control) and the compartmentalisation of the individual.
people in boxes, alone in the lift shaft whilst the woman is stuck in her own car.
The alienation this engenders helps to later reinforce the Committee’s initial holiday home, “just a friendly get together”, atmosphere - even as the actual dialogue and character interaction undermines those very impressions. Jones’s boss becoming suddenly wheedling and flustered once he realises his employee is a potential Committee member, he talks nostalgically of when, “years ago”, he was invited onto a Committee and asked to decide which of five oranges was the roundest (the clockwork one - the viewer may be tempted to respond), finally he goes as far as to ask Jones out on a date in his desire to show willing and friendly. Jones plays it cool but his Manager’s reaction sets up the nervous uncertainty that Jones actually feels upon arriving in the country - and so the audience feels it too, though there is absolutely no evidence of anything untoward being planned other than the unspecific ‘tests’ that residents may be asked to complete.
This sense of oppression reaches its apex in the dialogue at the poolside with Jones and his brother talking of escape and its impossibility. In this scene Jones admits to a dread certainty. His tone is a flat ‘I’m fucked’.
It should be noted that there are some unexpected and surreal moments of Marx Brother style hilarity in the scenes at the Committee residence. At times ‘The Committee’ is vey, very funny. Jones comes face to face with his reanimated victim apparently none the worse for wear. “Do your teeth hurt?” Jones asks. Meantime another man is taken aback by a fellow’s resemblance to his wife. “It’s remarkable! Except for the moustache of course…” Needless to say, the fellow doesn’t actually have a moustache.
Arthur Brown, at full speed and pagan as Bowie might say, appears from nowhere to entertain the Committee residents. Dressed like some Martian priest and complete with burning horns, he is a sci-fi Bacchus as everyone begins to dance and loosen up, a go-go frenzy contrasting with the staid rooms of the LSE and the portrait of its founders - an infra dig visual reference that makes the film comparable to Lindsey Anderson’s If - only in that film the public school revolutionaries are armed and breaking out. In The Committee this emotional outlet is simply another measure of oblique control.
breakthrough in grey room; The Crazy World of Arthur Brown meets the Establishment head on.
Interestingly, this moment of group togetherness coincides with Jones’s low-point. Unable to join in he sits alone in his room still frightened after his poolside conversation. But his fears are unfounded - at least on one level. Jones is not in danger except perhaps of losing his soul (like Steve Shorter and Privilege). He begins to warm to the Committee and soon his indoctrination is underway.
The ‘interrogation’ with the director of the Committee (though the absolute nature of his authority remains unknown,) is the longest section of the film - the camera following the two men as they stroll unhurriedly around the grounds and talk, much like No.6 and No. 2 were wont to do in The Prisoner tv series of the time.
standing upon the square
That this section is far from dull, despite the enigmatic and rhetorical nature of most of their conversation, is testament to the effective build up that the film has achieved and to the quality of the performances, straight forwardly played by both Jones and Robert Lloyd (as The Director).
By now Jones has moved far from his previous pop singer persona (and from the ersatz Daltrey mannequin of Privilege) to become a young, concerned, somewhat preppy, slightly bewildered and very willing Everyman with whom the viewer can identify. It all looks very simple - always a testament to good naturalistic acting. The camera meantime makes the most of the locations finding grottos and dells to contrast with the open air and making the players and settings look good without becoming overblown or stilted in composition.
It is also here that the Pink Floyd soundtrack comes into its own, underpinning the dialogue, setting and mood. It is an unfussy musical backdrop containing proto elements of Sirius Minor, touches of Careful with that Axe Eugene and Saucer full of Secrets.
Jones is asked to consider his ‘crime’ from every angle. What did he do exactly? And what results from the event in the glade? “I did something to myself” he suggests; I, Me, Mine.
The possible metaphor of the body politic goes unsaid - but it’s there. Similarly, since the crime may have been a daydream both the character and the audience are free to divorce themselves from any ramifications, the death of one man and the possible psychosis of another. What are we then as humans, as individuals, the sum of our actions, or our reactions? Jones is asked to ponder both prior and future Self - and to view them as separate… and to wonder, would one really care about the other? Why should they?
And then there is very strange moment of suspended time as the two men ponder their next move; “back to the lodge?”
“Yes, if you like,” chuckles “back to the lodge.”
And the moment hangs in the nanosecond before that chuckle, because ‘the lodge’ now conjures more than simply Freemasonry, it plays like a shout out to Twin Peaks with the black lodge, the white lodge, Wyndham Earl and Dale Cooper -which is an amusing associational coincidence and then the smiles come at the exact same time as the viewer’s and the figures on the screen are chuckling at the joke and have leapt forward into the now and are knowingly referencing the Lynch series. Impossible, impossible. ”Yes. If you like.”
If you like; that familiar phrase, so very John Le Carre, “So you’ll do that then? Just a few names you understand, you’ll enjoy it, might make some new friends, a pretty Fraulein or two eh? Good, so you will?”
“If you like.”
“Good man.”
Ultimately there is no single ‘answer’ - nothing is revealed (as Dylan sang that same year) - after all, the chief points out, would a person recognise it if they heard it? Would we understand? What would it sound like - and do we even understand sound? Perhaps not - but it is as well to remain suspicious, the disassociation to which the chief leads Jones (and us), away from time and self and space, is to a point where humanity may appear to be nothing more than “a bacillus”. Moral notions of right and wrong, feelings of guilt and questions of responsibility are therefore dissolved.
The viewer is left to realise that neither character may be speaking ‘the truth’, the film’s scriptwriter and director have not been using them as mouthpieces for their own opinions but instead the philosophical dialogue has been played out between two adopted personas ala Kierkegaard.
One of the most politically charged moments in Privilege is when Steve is offered the world, shown a view of the city from high above, the flats and apartments of London, as the Devil says; “What you have to realise is that the liberal Ideal of education and emancipation for all is a myth, utterly exploded.” In the 2000s this has become a frighteningly common assertion.
Such a view is often (but not always) used to reinforce strict ideas of control, the curtailing or restraining of individual and societal freedoms and civilian rights, but if liberal freedoms are dispensed with, what of possible liberal control? It is perhaps a question of expressions, of masks - the political differences between (say) Blair and Bush and their regimes may have ultimately been cosmetic, but cosmetic counts for a lot in contemporary culture. And The Committee understands this just as much as New Labour did.
Note; ‘new labour’ of course is officially talked of defunct, (‘old hat’ I should say!) but the media savvy training given to its members is still very evident. Listening recently to both David Miliband and Ed Balls on the radio it was hard to distinguish them as their vocal intonations blurred, (both eerily resembling Blair) and they relied on the stock weaponry of aggressive familiarity using the interviewer’s first name at every opportunity as well as hiding behind typical phrases such as ‘That’s a very interesting point’ instead of answering the question. This helps to understand why the comparative tactlessness of Conservative Cameron and his ‘tell it like is’ approach is very popular in the UK*. His deputy however, Nick Clegg, is clearly versed in marketing and sales techniques of the doublethink norm, koff! ‘progressive’, koff! 'regressive’. Quite so. Yes, thank you LSE.
The ‘committee’ itself can be seen as any authoritative body - a government, a state, a world, and certainly those shadowy groups and review boards often called Quangos or Think-Tanks. The appellations change with the times. The common denominator is that these organisations all have some degree of operative power (and power is control,) murky working practises and unexpectedly wide remits, all whilst remaining unelected and unaccountable. This is not (as we are often lead to falsely believe) a modern phenomena, but is certainly an ongoing contemporary concern. The Committee recognises and addresses this concern simultaneous with exploring the cult of personality as embodied by the smiling and superficially affable committee head, strikingly Blair-esque as he may seem to a modern viewer of the film.
i can't see for smiles...
“What interests me about authority is the fakery - and what interests me about the rejection of authority is the fakery there also.” The Director of the Committee.
Readers of William Burroughs will be all too familiar with the smiling and anonymous agents of civilised control as young Agents (of all and interchangeable sides) receive their training and education in many refracted scenes of interrogation; the individual’s natural desire to know, to learn, the search for meaning and being, all make indoctrination easy** - the eager subject is already doing half the work.
This is (in a loosely labelled sense) liberal Control - and nowhere does The Committee threaten or intimidate except in the most subtle manners of ironic phrasing, the very English lift of an eyebrow, a shrug. Everyone is allowed to enjoy and to be entertained, in a superficially permissive society there’s dancing; plenty of food and the way left open to possible avenues of sex and crime. In The Committee there is no horrific revelation, no grinning skull beneath the skin as there is (eventually) in comparable dramas such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Rite (Swedish TV 1969) or Kafka’s The Trial (which is more properly The Process and all the more Brian Gysin for that). But the paternally benevolent machinations of the committee are just as effective (and therefore frightening) as the Technicolor fascism of the coalition government in Privilege.
*on the world stage, however, Cameron is far from alone as hardly a day goes past without hearing some stunningly crass, abusive and/or ignorant headline grabbing pronouncement from elsewhere.
**as any thriving cult can show.