Further Ghosts of Croydon
or how All of Us Strangers has made me feel I have developed a narcissistic personality disorder.
I almost never identify with characters in films. At the moment I can only recall doing so with Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. There’s always something about hanging back, not feeling part of the whole trick of it. That is one of the tremors in Andrew’s Haigh’s film All of Us Strangers, how a whole generation of gay people (I would say queer people, but there’s an exquisite dissection of the difference between the two identities in the film) find themselves subtly apart from the world from a young age, strangers in their own families.
So, I mention that I rarely identify with characters in films just to offset what might now seem like a worrying descent into narcissistic personality disorder. Before I’d even seen the film people who’d seen previews had told me I had to see it, or perhaps, I absolutely should not. Articles I read told me this tale would overlap with so many of my own specific personal experiences. Haigh grew up in a suburban semi in Sanderstead, the actual house featured in the film, in one of the poshest parts of Croydon and also the highest point in the town. This topography Haigh explores early on with vertiginous shots where it feel like we have not just reached the outskirts, but the edge of the world. This is the tipping point, where Andrew Scott’s character Adam – a writer – see-saws from the world of the practical everyday into a ghost world where his long dead parents are still alive, and he can visit them any time he wants to try to achieve the adult relationship he was robbed of. That relationship is particularly important to Adam because as an anxious and bullied gay child he never reconciled his inner and outer lives with them.
So, I grew up in another of Croydon’s highest points, the council estate of New Addington. And my parents died many years back too, when I was in my twenties. Since then I have also become a writer, though one considerably less toned than Andrew Scott. Did I ever feel I reconciled my inner and outer lives with my mum and dad? Well, they never met anyone I dated, and to be honest, at that point I hadn’t really dated anyone. The problem here was, I got on so well with them, too well, really. They acted in some ways as a shield, so that I didn’t have to seek anything other than quick encounters with other men to satisfy the gay part of myself, because all of the other emotional parts were invested in them. They also were terrible at feelings, boxing and hiding everything away. I remember talking to my mum about how sad I was that a guy I liked was going away to Canada. Her response was a brisk don’t be so wet, and that was that. After they died, and I was in my thirties, suddenly I began to have relationships. Had I been hiding this part of myself all along? Why was I now a teenager two decades too late? The first two proper boyfriends I had became an immediate conduit to feelings unconnected to them. My grief at the end of those relationships far outweighed the relationships themselves, feelings I now recognised as entirely displaced from one loss to another. These stunted emotional states are explored in the film, as we see Adam resist opportunities for companionship and love, that part of him seemingly bottled up in the sense of loss he feels for his parents, and an inability to move past it.
What would I feel now, if my parents turned up, still living in our house in Fairchildes Avenue? I passed the house recently, and rather than them waving from the window I saw that the entire front garden they had spent years planting with bits of cuttings from here and there had been ripped up, and a massive SUV sat there on the fresh grey brick paving. Would there be awkwardness reconciling them to my life? Not at all. Would I want to see them again? I think after several decades reconciling myself to their deaths the last thing I could cope with would to be some cheery instant rewind, a matter of fact return to my life. Grief is about distancing yourself, protecting yourself. There can be no distance or protection if the barrier between life and death could be so porous and two-way. Adam handles that side of it remarkably well. Even the thought of that makes me feel a bit shaky.
But there are other currents too. Growing up in the era of the AIDS crisis leaves Adam with a fear of sex that does not easily go away, just as it did for so many of us. You can never really dissolve away something so deeply held, it has to be fought over and again, different situations and people bringing it to the surface in new ways all the time. He summons that era with music that takes us back to that moment of crisis. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love (‘I’ll protect you from the Hooded Claw, keep the vampires from your door’). Blur’s Death of a Party (‘Should have slept alone’). And a banging tale of loneliness, Pet Shop Boys’ I Want a Dog. Loneliness is the upshot of these anxieties. Never trusting or relating to other, shutting yourself away, engaging superficially, but never really there, like a ghost. The club scene was shot at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a place I went every Saturday night for 15 years, to Duckie. Again and again the film walked over my grave.
Perhaps the most curious aspect for me, is that it is based on a book, Strangers by Taichi Yamada, that I worked on the marketing for when it was first published in English by Faber and Faber. I remember it being a really hard book to talk about, because it was as much an atmosphere piece as it was a story. The ghosts of Hideo Harada’s parents aren’t presented to scare or shock, this isn’t a ghost story for effect, instead using the idea of ghosts as memory to slide in and out of a life story. The ghosts are presented as flatly normal, just as they are in the film. My recollection of the book was its quesy tone of sickness and distortion, and the film starts off so matterof factly I wondered if it might be going for something quite different. But instead Haigh introduces the darker tone gradually. As a ghost story the film is not about the supernatural in the way that traditional horror or genre fiction might be, rather it feels like The Shining or The Innocents, where the memories and the clues suggest this might be all in the head rather than actually literally happening. Strangers was one of the best books I worked on, and it has stayed with me, much as I’m sure this film version will too.
So, now I have another high concept film I can identify with, one with fewer bleak jokes about living your worst life than Groundhog Day. All of Us Strangers is for all of us strangers, I realise that from the reaction it has had. But it can also mean something particularly personal to me, I can allow that too. The book, the place, the time, the era, the anxieties, the lost parents, the club, the grief, the depression, the loneliness, the empty towers, the ghost suburbs. Last year I felt I wrote a lot of maudlin stuff like this, and I decided to stop that. Well, thanks, Andrew Haigh. Thanks a bunch.
What a wonderful piece, John. The film is wonderful, and resonated strongly for me and I’m just a suburban girl of similar age to “Adam”, a pop fan, who has spent lovely evenings dancing at the Vauxhall Tavern. I can’t imagine how it was for you watching it, but thank you so much for writing this x
This is a brilliant piece, John. Thank you.