A ghostly tennis match translated as unanswered letters by Jeroen Peeters & Jack Hauser.
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Brussels, Sept. 23, 2010
Dear Jack,
Just like Nicholas Cage and Werner Herzog I do have a penchant for “Animalerei”. In To live and let die (1973), James Bond is asked how much he knows about crocodiles – “Oh, I’ve always tried to keep them at arm’s length myself.” But then shortly after, their proximity forces him into a little choreography of jumping and running over them in order to save himself. The crocodile is not my ground though, by which I mean that I don’t walk on them – for our tennis match I would propose an altogether different gesture, which comes with the clothing René Lacoste equipped us with: he brought the crocodile close to the body, yes even close to the heart.
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Now, your vision of the ghostly tennis match is right and has its history even in cinema. One has to think only of the closing scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) to approach the ghostly aspect of what is a virtual tennis match, but not one that remains unanswered. After watching for a while the group of ravers dressed as clowns playing a game, the photographer Thomas decides to pick up the virtual tennis ball that has landed outside of the court and throw it back. As Slavoj Žižek famously commented: it is possible to play without a ball – there is no truth to be unveiled, only the desire to go on, pulled about by nothingness. So let’s play and cherish the hole, rather then re-enact a game already known to us from film history – whether it is one from Antonioni or Hitchcock or Jacques Tati or Woody Allen.
Tonight I don’t write to you from around the corner, but then the tennis game tempted me, so I was inclined to explore some film related to tennis, and ended up watching yet another Bond movie,which might as well be a Bond spoof, Octopussy (1983). The film has a small role for the famous tennis player Vijay Amritraj, who suffers a tragic death before we get to see any tennis, though his racket features briefly in a combat scene. Furthermore it has clowns, animals and desire in it, yet nothing speaks. In the film, the ball of the game might be the bubble of the cold war or an atomic bomb perhaps; it takes the form of a Fabergé jewelry egg. It is a clown that gets the mystery rolling, but he is killed in the process and leaves us with the egg – which doesn’t speak (“Yes, we have the egg, but we don’t have all the answers!”). A whole jungle and later on a whole circus of animals join the parade – yet none of the animals speak, even the tiger is domesticated upon a simple “sit!”. Bond tries very hard to get the game going though, well-versed as he is in tricks and whims and theatricality – Q even comments he’s had enough of Bond’s “adolescent antics” (and indeed, Roger Moore’s Bond is 56 years old at the time of this film!). We follow him swimming to Octopussy’s maiden island in a crocodile suit, later on meet him in the train in a gorilla suit, which he then exchanges in a second for a clown dress (including a white face, painted tear and red nose) for entering the circus in order to dismantle the bomb, which is hidden under the circus cannon. Of course, the bomb shouldn’t speak. And neither does the circus cannon – the film’s best moment is the human cannonball coming out and asking: “Now what?!” No need to say the film doesn’t stir a great deal of desire – the last word goes to the Russian Ambassador in London, saying: “My country categorically denies the incident ever occurred.” I couldn’t agree more.
Best,
Jeroen |
To Be Continued
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