Was enjoyably wasting time earlier with my brothers, re-enacting bits of Withnail & Ir. We're a bit obsessed with that film. And of course it is a hysterical comedy, but I love/hate the ending so much - when two out-of-work actors living in squalor suddenly become just one out-of-work actor living in squalor.
I first read this when I was 15, and the passage got under my skin then, as it does now:
You see, it was no longer just me. Harvard was full of nut cases, and we'd all managed to find each other, as if by centrifugal force. People at school were sufficiently eccentric to offer a new playground for my neuroses, to create novel opportunities for acting out. But in the end, after the curtain dropped over these little dramas, they all seemed able to go back to their rooms and back to their lives, they all seemed to know that it was just a game. Only I seemed to be left behind, wanting more, wanting my money back, wanting some satisfaction, wanting to feel something. I was the only person going to a prostitute in seach of true love. But somehow, no matter how often I was disappointed, I was always game for the next round, like a drug addict hoping that a new fix will give him a rush as good as the first one.
Prozac Nation
And so Withnail is left reciting Hamlet to himself in the park. In the unpublished novel's ending - on which the screenplay is based - Withnail says goodbye to 'I', goes home, drinks, and shoots himself. This ending was ditched as it was thought to be 'too dark'.
"I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, forgon eall custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither."
1 comment:
I think the saddest thing about that final scene is the realisation of just how much Withnail is in love with 'I'...That heartbreaking repetition of 'no, nor woman neither' , the total and utter sense of abandonment and loss. I did not know the original ending had him committing suicide, but that would certainly have made sense.
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