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In advance, I apologise for the length of this response...
I just need to get a little bad out of the way first, before the good: I found F&C a little too forced-- too allegorical to be character driven, too much character to be pure allegory, and not really occupying a happy middle ground. However, I also found it interesting and watchable, not least because, as I saw it, it tapped into one of my favourite, timeless themes-- the loss of ideals to a world of pragmatism. It was, to me, about the death of a certain romance in the world, just as Shakespeare's Richard II and some of his Roman plays are. Citizen Kane too, or Boogie Nights...
In this sense, I saw the fantastic, whimsical, decadent chaos of the early stages as something flawed but optimistic and useful. Whereas Paul appears to stay in touch with it to one extent or another, Lizzie actively destroys it and denies it. Her life path from there is in a large part an active denial of those beginnings, the past under Paul's influence a sort of strange benchmark or conscience against which she cannot fail to measure herself and against which, further and further down the line, she comes short, a reality that she is forced more and more to confront. Hence her obsession with the idea that Paul will criticise her, which never happens, and yet which she still insists upon in episode (as it were) after episode.
The wedding highlighted the extent to which this was true of the whole establishment-- the artists who claim still to be inciting revolt from within the system which I took (perhaps wrongly) to be a palpable lie in order again to avoid confrontation with the notion that they had sold out, as they again find themselves measured against Paul-- he is sort of the ghost of Banquo at the feast, seeing so many people whose lives were made great because of him and because of the fervour and romance that he espoused and channelled. He is a silent accusation making everyone feel uncomfortable, yet is in fact not accusing anyone, not causing trouble. His mere presence, that reminder of their origins and what they now perceive as their shameful past, is enough to make the people shift in their seats. Meanwhile, he is the crocodile, waiting out the storm, taking on this guise or that but remaining romantic to one extent or another, and remaining a constructive yet anarchic genius (with a fortunate investment in good bookshops).
What was interesting about F&C was that it was optimistic (unlike Shakespeare or Kane, but like Boogie Nights). The sell out periods of the 80s and 90s, the denial of roots and origins of so much success (and then the destructive results of that denial)-- all these are laid aside, like old grudges, by the bonfire at a school at the end, where all the old characters are getting back in touch with the wild energy and romance of those early days.
What I also liked was that Paul was not so much an idealist, although Lizzie uses him as a measure against which to judge herself in moral terms (which he has not particularly demonstrated either). Instead it is just a sense of liberated creativity, sometimes well channelled, sometimes not so well channelled, but always worthwhile (hence the beautiful parties).
I think that Lizzie changes too much to be a crocodile in the sense that those aspects of the programme explored, although I suppose she has some of the aggression and ambition that must be another aspect of the creature. Paul is the survivor, hardly changing (even in his hippy phase) and the solid, unmoveable creature against which all these subsequent ages are judged and yet from which they all had evolved, for better or worse. Maybe it is the hope of this final combination that would create a big, man-eating, survivor of a crocodile-- the final union of the beast's different aspects in the team of Lizzie and Paul. |
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