CARY GRANT: STYLE AS A MARTIAL ART
A conversation with Wu Ming 1 (2005)
At the end of 2004, we took part in an international three-day conference on Cary Grant at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, organized by professor/script-writer Giaime Alonge, who teaches History of Cinema at the Università di Torino. The following interview took place a few months later and will be included in the book collecting that conference's papers and proceedings. If the first answer sounds familiar, that's because it's an extended version of an answer we gave to "3am Magazine" in the same days.
GIAIME ALONGE - What gave you the idea to include Cary Grant in 54? What do you find fascinating in this character?
WU MING 1 - The first chapter in which Cary appears includes a long pseudo-historical and pseudo-theoretical tirade, a sort of marxist analysis of the Grant-myth and his value in the proletarian struggle.
The purpose was satirical, it's a parody of the attempts to rationalize why we like something, or someone. We are inclined to think of other people as bidimensional figures, we don't grasp the depth, we see a square where there's a hypercube. We don't expect a person's ego to be fragmented; we point at inconsistencies and, in our turn, try to show ourselves as consistent, every part has to fit well with all the rest. If someone asks you: "How does your love for Country & Western music fit in with your ideas on the origins of stars-and-stripes reactionary rhetoric?"; or: "You claim to be an ecologist, how can you say you like that car?", the temptation is to force that passion of preference back under the umbrella of your ideology that passion or preference. "Radicals" go out of their way to prove that the music they listen is "radical", leftists explain why a certain kind of shoes doesn't belong to the Right etc.
In the above-mentioned chapter an indefinite omniscient narrator rambles on Cary Grant, the working class, and socialism. This is also a pre-emptive self-parody. It was like saying: when you ask us the reason why we included Cary Grant in our novel, our answer will be something similar to this. At the same time, we exaggerated and added a sentence by Marx turned into a joke ("In a classless society, anybody could be Cary Grant"). It's as we issued a notice: don't take this description too seriously. It makes sense, more or less. It's fascinating. But it came later. We included Grant - availing ourselves on a mistake by Wu Ming 2 - because we like him, we find him intriguing, we like his style. I met the not-yet Wu Ming 4 eleven years ago, he'd just graduated and was about to begin university. The first time I entered his room, I saw a big poster of Cary Grant on the wall. It's not the movie star you expect to find above the bed of a nineteen year old. We have always admired people with style, those who knew how to turn their style into a martial art. "Style as a martial art" is also the name of a column I used to write for a local small mag in the late Nineties.
I hope this answer was intelligible. To avoid misunderstandings, I want to specify that I do listen to Country & Western, but I hate cars. I could never find them attractive. To me even the most glamorous Lamborghini is just a sad and lethal piece of plate.
GA - I beg your pardon? What was the misunderstanding with WM2?
WM1 - Well, leafing through a 1954 magazine, he found an article on the film stars preferred female readers loved the most. Gary Cooper topped the list. WM2 jotted in a hurry "G.C." on his notebook. A few weeks later, going through his scrawls he read "C.G." instead of "G.C." and thought: Cary Grant. At our meeting he told us: "Cary Grant was the most popular actor among the female readers of such magazine." Inspiration! Cary Grant! Lets get hold of the films and biographies!
