Wall-E

Edward Hollis studied architecture before working on Shri Lankan ruins and on old Scottish breweries. In The Secret Lives of Buildings, he charts the history of 13 buildings through time and multiple transformations, from the Parthenon and the Alhambra to the Berlin Wall and the theme parks of Las Vegas. Below, he explains why Wall-E is his filmic alter ego.

In the future, movies will always begin in Manhattan. There will be an opening shot of the East River and the cloud-capped towers of Midtown. The cameras will do a wide, lazy pan, and then zoom into some crevice where somebody normal is doing something normal. It’s always the same.

Give it a few minutes, and it won’t be normal any more. King Kong will be battling biplanes on top of the Empire State, Godzilla will have surfaced from the deep, and the day after tomorrow, a tsunami will be followed by a great freeze. Thousands of years in the future, a robot boy will sit buried under the ice, staring at a fairground attraction.

I don’t want to be a blonde starlet caught in the arms of a gorilla (not this time), nor a dinosaur, nor an artificial child, but I do want to live in that future Manhattan of disasters and miracles; and when I’m there, my movie will start exactly the same way as all the others: the river, the towers, the pan, the zoom – and little old me, scurrying along the sidewalk, being normal.

Except in the future life of my alter ego, nothing is normal, and I’m not in Manhattan. Rather, I live in a gigantic simulacrum of that long-lost city, a simulacrum I have painstakingly constructed myself. The river is a river of dust, and I have built the great towers out of little cubes of compacted rubbish, the detritus of the original Manhattan.

I am a menial robot. Every day I scavenge for rubbish, and occasionally I find a treasure or two. In the evening I drag them back to an abandoned shipping container, and in my cabinet of abandoned curiosities, I rest until morning. I do not sleep. Instead, I spend the night watching my only film: it’s a story set in a vibrant, vanished, New York. ‘Put on your Sunday best,’ sings Dolly, in the guise of Barbra Streisand.

My alter ego, Wall-E, like the junk market at the beginning of Star Wars, the City of the Dead in Barbarella, and the leaking Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Blade Runner, reminds us that in the future, cities won’t be futuristic. They will be quite as messy as those of the past. Indeed, they will be made out of their broken remains, as they have always been.

At the end of the film, the returning human race turn the robot’s trash Manhattan into an Eden, then a garden, then a farm, then a village, a town, and a great city once again. Their efforts are represented in paintings that develop from cave painting to abstraction via every style in between. In each of them appears Wall-E, the robot rubbish collector, more mythic with every redepiction.

Perhaps it’s all happened before. Cities abandoned in jungles and deserts were futuristic once. That we have outlived them is a tribute to the toiling midgets who inhabited their ruins. In the future I want to be a scavenging robot, the sentimental fan of Hello Dolly, upon whose drudgery will be constructed an entire civilisation.

Yul Brynner in Futureworld

Writer Patrick Hargadon is obsessed with having a good view in the cinema, but has always been thwarted by people with large heads or big hair. His first film memory is watching Hitchcock’s Rope on television, but being told to turn it off to go to bed. This curtailed watching experience has led to countless viewing of Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’s experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon in the hope of getting to grips with the avant-garde. He is currently working on a non-fiction book: 366 Grand Things To Do When the Sky Is Grey and You’re Feeling Blue. His alter ego of choice is Yul Brynner as The Gunslinger in Futureworld (1976). EITHNE FARRY

There are moments in life when being Yul Brynner in Futureworld would be very useful. You’d just get things done quicker and more effectively. I’m not really the gun-toting lunatic type though, just sometimes in my mind when I’m angry. But I’d rather be Yul Brynner as the Gunslinger. I think it’s the lasso-dancing with Gwyneth Paltrow’s mum that impressed me the most. I have never before been so amazed by a fantasy sequence. Blythe Danner sits in a large contraption that records her dreams. She’s obviously got some problems as her unconscious makes her run around an empty house in a floral dress only to be captured by men in red body stockings and then be tied to a large cross. Yul saves the day, not only untying her but also lassoing her into what can only be described as a dance of love, all the time keeping those little shiny eyes fixed on her in a permanent glare. He may be a gun-crazy psychopathic robot killer, but his android heart beats a rhythm that makes this lady just wanna dance. Well, you might, after narrowly escaping crucifixion. It’s the only sequence I know where the invincibility of a male superhuman gone mad is undone by a starring role in a middle-aged woman’s hot flush. At the end of the scene, the scientists explain to Blythe’s boyfriend that she will need some rest so they aren’t going to wake her up immediately – understandable given the range of her imagination. So the Gunslinger exits into the distance to fight another day, or perhaps not, as it is only truly at this moment that the cryptic tagline of the film makes precise sense: ‘Futureworld – where the only way to survive is to kill yourself.’

Patrick Hargadon

The Killer inside Me

Having spent his childhood shuttling between his dad’s flat in Austin, Texas, and his mum’s rentals in LA, screenwriter and novelist Ryan David Jahn ditched school at 16 for a job in a record shop and then headed off to join the army. Demobbed and glad to put that ‘ludicrous experience’ behind him, he used the hours spent reading James M Cain, Carver, Chandler and Stephen King in public libraries to good effect in Acts of Violence, his blood-drenched, contemporary noir debut. Based on a real-life crime – the killing of Kitty Genovese outside her New York apartment in 1964 – it explores the ‘bystander theory’ from multiple perspectives. His latest book, Low Life, is just as powerful – a tightly plotted, psychologically astute existential investigation of identity, murder and memory. Here he wonders what it would be like to be Jim Thompson. EITHNE FARRY

If it included having to live his life, no one thinking clearly would want to be Jim Thompson. The years of obscurity, the alcoholism that resulted in frequent hospitalisations, the money trouble, the strokes, and the anonymous death with his career at its nadir and every one of his books out of print: that’s not a life anyone would choose.

But if one could just be Jim Thompson the writer, that’s a different matter. Sitting at his typewriter he was fearless. He would not hold back. Most people can’t be completely honest with their shrink; Jim Thompson put his psyche on every page for the world to see. And more: he was entertaining as hell while he did so.

I think of Savage Night, in which the protagonist/narrator Charles ‘Little’ Bigger recounts meeting a man who claimed to grow sexual organs, ‘the more interesting portions of the female anatomy’, on a farm in Vermont:

‘I fertilize them with wild goat manure,’ he said. ‘The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night when they stand on their heads, howling.’

I think of the end of that same novel, when the goats return, and how it makes even the end of Cain’s Double Indemnity seem positively optimistic by comparison.

I think of the mad hell Doc and Carol McCoy find themselves in at the end of The Getaway, when they finally arrive in El Rey, towards which they’ve been running for the length of the novel. It’s a madness not even Peckinpah had the courage to try to capture on film.

And I think of Lou Ford’s sickness taking over in The Killer inside Me.

The façade is torn away, and all the darkest rooms of the mind are revealed.

Whenever I feel myself holding back, whenever I feel myself being careful, I think of Jim Thompson at his most honest.

This was a man who never worried what his mother would think.

Ryan David Jahn

The Fantastic Mr Fox

Twenty-seven-year old Craig Silvey grew up on an orchard in Dwellingup, Western Australia. He wrote his first novel, Rhubarb, when he was 19. His latest book, Jasper Jones, is an unforgettable coming-of-age novel, set over a shimmering hot summer of 1965. It tells the story of 13-year-old bookish Charlie Bucktin, whose life is upended by Jasper Jones, a half-Aborigine boy. Jasper, with his troubled home life and a charismatic sense of self-sufficiency, is implicated in the calamitous disappearance of a local girl, but is too mindful of the consequences to admit his involvement. Saluting To Kill a Mocking Bird, and Huckleberry Finn, Silvey movingly explores the stifling secrets that lurk behind the most ordinary of facades. Below, Craig Silvey tells us why he would be the Fantastic Mr Fox if he was a film character. Eithne Farry

Foxes, traditionally, get a rough deal. They’re crafty, resourceful, clever and ambitious – which yields resentment in most quarters, but admiration in mine.

There is something very attractive about Mr Fox. He’s charming and capable, generous and daring. He’s loyal to his competitive instincts, but he also understands that his nature is his weakness. The very things that make him remarkable also cause him the greatest peril. Still, the thrill of the squab heist almost always outweighs the pressure of being caught. He can’t help himself.

And so, in that sense, he is burdened by his own truth and he battles with the compromise. And what could be more human than the struggle to straddle the line between right and wrong, between the things you want and the things you should have?

And it’s tough. Mr Fox can only deny his nature for so long before it gets the best of him. He falls prey to his discontent and his lust for adventure, inspiring him to stage the mother of all coups, which, despite its success, has considerably dire consequences.

But, just like his nature imperils his community, it’s those same impulses that ensure their safety. And it is here, I must confess, that I feel some kinship with Mr Fox. Not that I share these traits, but I would like to. Like Randal P McMurphy, Cool Hand Luke and Atticus Finch before him, Mr Fox has the comforting ability to draw people in and settle their nerves, despite his own racing pulse. I’m attracted by that valorous sureness and strength of presence, and my heart goes out to his vanity and folly and insecurity. Under Mr Fox’s flawed leadership, even though he caused the clustercuss in the first place, we know that we’re going to be OK.

O Lucky Man!

Phil Smith is a British academic, writer, performer and playwright in experimental, physical and music theatres. His new book, Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways is a collection of diaries, letters, narratives, notes and other documents, written by artists and various practitioners of the art of walking that explores its modern uses, from meditative to subversive. To find out more, visit the wonderful Mythogeography website or the Triarchy Press website. Below, Phil Smith explains why he would be Michael Travis if he was a film character.

Michael Travis, the pilgrim ingénue of Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 O Lucky Man! is who I would be if I were a film character.

Travis because, when I can, I walk in his shoes. He’s an accidental explorer in a corrupt and magical England. And I like his corrosive psyche.

Malcolm McDowell plays Travis as a generous-hearted amoralist. He’s psychogeographic, feeling what his surroundings feel and playing the parts these worlds demand. In sales class he’s eager, among the rich acquisitive, under interrogation defiant. His lovers include Helen Mirren, but he leaves her the moment the road calls.

So what is Travis? Empty on the inside, he sucks in what he finds: a trainee coffee salesman who gets a big break. Driving a brown hatchback across North East England, he goes from thankless cold calls to the warm bosom of municipal corruption. Then a nuclear disaster sends him stumbling across a burning moor in a gold lamé suit to the bosom (literal this time) of a vicar’s wife in a harvest-bedecked country church. But this ‘green and pleasant’ soon opens onto a motorway, a lift in a Bentley and a medical institute’s voracious experiments.

I like this unfolding journey through paranoid landscapes where encounters with damaged mythic characters (bent coppers, mad designers, nomadic musicians, vulpine financiers) assemble themselves in a matrix of self-pleasuring order.

Making the film at the height of trade union power in Britain, leftist Anderson and writer David Sherwin eschewed collectivism, leapfrogging a generation to make a hero we are only just catching up with; a nomadic sleeper cell in the heart of shock-capitalism. Mick Travis pushes conformity and ambition to the point of chaos, an optimistic, anti-spectacular consumer-radical with an ache of hunger behind his chameleon smile; he helps as he destroys as he enjoys. I’d like to introduce you…

Phil Smith

Mythogeography

Astro Boy

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor Journal, Frieze and Nude, and in the anthologies The Last Sex, Digital Delirium, Undercurrents and London Noir. His novel Destroy All Monsters was hailed by The Scotsman as ‘a mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-there fiction’. His latest book, Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science and the American Century, has been praised by celebrated documentary maker Adam Curtis: ‘Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of technologies that drove the Cold War has shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of ourselves as human beings.’ It is available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information please visit Ken Hollings’s blog. Below, he tells us why he would be Astro Boy if he was a film character.

‘I’ve defeated the saucers. The robots won’t come anymore.’

Astro Boy takes on men, monsters and machines – and wins. He has this special smile on his face whenever he comes in to land: so self-contained and filled with happy anticipation. I want to be a machine and live in the future – just like him.

‘A robot has the same right to fight for justice. Captain, stand up and fight.’

Innocent, honest, trusting and brave, Astro Boy is a true marvel of tomorrow. He can speak over 60 different languages and sense whether people have good or evil intentions, smash solid steel with his bare fists and has the most unbelievably cute eyes. ‘He flies in the sky and goes round the universe,’ proclaimed the original Astro Boy march. ‘He is mighty, gentle and the fruit of scientific technology.’ He is a robot and proud of it. To have the same pride in being human seems a real challenge by comparison.

‘I hear that humans were created by God.’

Astro Boy first appeared in the sci-fi comic strip Ambassador Atom created by ‘god of manga’ Osamu Tezuka. Astro proved so popular that he was given his own series. Begun in 1952, Tetsuwan Atom – his original Japanese name, meaning ‘Mighty Atom’ – would run for 17 years, establishing its robot hero as a benign cultural emissary from the future both in Japan and abroad. Somehow atomic fission didn’t seem so menacing when you knew it was controlled by the heart-shaped nuclear reactor concealed within his chest.

‘There is no difference between humans and robots.’

With an electronic brain, atomic engines in his feet, powerful searchlights concealed behind his big wide eyes and a 100,000 horsepower punch, Astro Boy lives in a 21st-century city of skyscrapers and rockets, jet cars and factories. He is also the mechanical reincarnation of a dead child, the neglected son of a scientist reborn as a robot on April 7, 2003. He will always be the future we never had.

Ken Hollings

Ken Hollings

Listen to the podcast: Alex Fitch talks to animé expert Helen McCarthy about the work of manga and animé pioneer Osamu Tezuka.