My relationship with Alan Parker was the most important and seminal experience of my youth. He understood me in a way that very few people had the ability to ascertain at that time. Working together as we did was difficult, it was tumultuous; our personalities often clashed or were brutally misaligned. But he fundamentally knew what he could extract out of my aspirations for myself. And he alone enabled me to rise to a level of critical acclaim that changed the entire course of my career, almost instantaneously.
Alan was a major film-maker, who consistently sought to make movies that were in the tradition of his legendary mentor Fred Zinnemann, the Oscar-winning Austrian director who gave revolutionary actors such as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift their first leading roles in motion pictures in the early 1950s. He was also one of the last of the truly epic British stylists and auteurs who managed to combine serious subject matter with wide commercial appeal in a Hollywood that harboured him in the years before corporate takeovers sullied any future opportunities for a strong individual voice, such as Alan’s, to create a potent and culture-changing combination of the two.
Art and commerce were never at odds in his work. A singular thread runs throughout the fabric of the constantly oppressive and decaying worlds that he created on screen; a vividly-coloured strand of passionate rebellion and opposition set against the dull and entrenched banalities of everyday life. This was often manifested through an actor’s most uncompromising and ferocious emotions.
Below is an excerpt from his final film, 2003’s The Life of David Gale, in which a university professor discusses French philosopher Jacques Lacan’s Objet petit a; his 1957 treatise on dreams, desires and fame itself.
It’s no coincidence to me that this scene was set in a school classroom, with young students at their most formative and impressionable stage of intellectual, moral, and spiritual development. Perhaps this is not only his own homage to Fame, 23 years on, but to the explicit struggle and confrontation with the trappings of overnight success that my character experiences. It may even be his personal homage to the performance I was allowed to give under his tutelage.
Fantasies have to be unrealistic. Because the moment you get what you seek, you don’t or can’t want it any more. In order to continue to exist, desire must have its object perpetually absent. It’s not the “it” that you want, it’s the fantasy of “it”. So desire supports crazy fantasies.
This is what Pascal meant when he said we are only truly happy when day-dreaming about future happiness. Or why we say the hunt is sweeter than the kill, or: be careful what you wish for. Not because you’ll get it, but because you’re doomed not to want it once you do.
So the lesson of Lacan: living by your wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideas or ideals, and not to measure your life by what you’ve attained in terms of your desires, but those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self-sacrifice.
