Not painting it black: rewatching Withnail And I

Can any genuinely good film survive being turned into a source of memes and other online fodder? Er, no, I doubt it. Having just rewatched Bruce Robinson's Withnail And I, I reckon this (non-great) film suffers quite badly through selective over-exposure. The famous bits  -  "We want the finest wines available to humanity. And we want them here, and we want them now", "We've gone on holiday by mistake", "I must have some booze. I demand to have some booze" etc - now seem slightly ridiculous when you get to them in the film. Or so I think. Anyway, overall I more or less disliked this massively overrated film and wouldn't  at all have bothered blogging about it except that the dialogue in the druggy scene in their Camden flat near the very end caught my attention. Withnail and Marwood (or just "I") are back from their disastrous Penrith trip and Danny the drug dealer is rambling on about this and that  - haircuts (bad), monster spliffs (good), rodent infestation (bad, but also good if they're an excuse to withhold rent) - when he starts pontificating about the state of things, "politics":

"They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black."

Woah, the clunky W&I script has just veered onto a whole mega-topic: the end of the sixties, "hippie" values, authenticity, youth rebellion and possibly even Black Liberation (Presuming Ed, a black man, sits playing a drum as Danny drones on about all this). Danny points out that there are "only 91 days" before the end of this greatest of decades. Blimey Danny, that's deep. After all the over-broad comedy of the Lake District scenes with Monty and the local yokels, this is a big subject. Heavy manners. OK, the film's a comedy so everything's played for laughs but the hippie wigs being sold in Woolworths is a great image and nicely encapsulates the pathos of the film's end-of-an-era subtext. Withnail and Marwood's squalid Camden flat is the comedy version of Turner's druggie Notting Hill lair in Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance, another end-of-the-sixties film. While Withnail And I is mostly content with stereotypes and Carry On-style antics, Roeg and Cammell go much darker with their delirious and deliberately disturbing mash-up of Cockney gangster film and freaky profile of a burnt-out 60s pop star. Personally, I'll never again want to rewatch Withnail And I but I'd happily sit through Performance many more times (many more performances). I could be imagining it but I thought some of the best bits of W&I actually seemed to be consciously recalling Performance: the moment where the pair jump in their battered old Jag and there's a wrecking ball demolishing Victorian houses right nearby (filmed in Notting Hill), or the motorway scenes with Jimi Hendrix playing on the soundtrack. Yeah man, maybe I'm just an old hippie with a weakness for this fusing of music, trippy scenes and road movie-like flourishes. Or maybe I just don't like so-called "dark comedies" in the W&I vein. Anyway, Danny's hippie wigs comment and Presuming Ed's verdict that a whole generation of people in the 60s had failed to paint the decade black are the non-memes of W&I that I'd like to propose for modern-day meme-dom. No more we've gone on holiday by mistake nonsense, please. In his book on 1966, Jon Savage says the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black "initiated a mood of snarling negativity", which is sort of what you get with Performance (though not snarling exactly, more enervated negativity). There are only 91 days before the end of the 60s, man, and we still haven't painted it black. Time is short! Chuck out your DVDs of "classic" British comedy films and start listening to Brian Jones' gloomy raga-blues freak-out ...