I first saw the Danish Dogme 95 film Festen in 1998 when I was 30. You had to go to the cinema to see films in those days, when small boys ran barefoot on a conveyor belt to turn the reels, and it’s possible I watched its depiction of a family torn apart by violence, resentment, alcoholism and sexual abuse in horror while crunching popcorn, eating hotdogs and drinking a big bucket of Fanta ™ ®. No wonder I was sick on the old Danish woman next to me. Luckily, in Denmark, being vomited on by a stranger is considered good luck, and we began a torrid affair.
But I watched Festen again in my 50s and found it hilarious, laughing out loud at its grim affirmation of bleak inevitability. But the film hadn’t changed. So what had the world done to me in the intervening years to make my sense of humour so black? Or had all that bacon and pastry I ate in the 00s somehow made me more sensitive to the Danish sensibility? Similarly, once I drank only Yorkshire Tea for a week and briefly became both resentful and ingenious.
On Monday night, I made my once-a-decade attempt to enjoy Sam Peckinpah’s flawed 1973 revisionist western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which all the women are semi-naked prostitutes or ex-prostitutes in clothes, and yet it’s the morals of all the respectable and fully clothed men that are really up for sale. Get it? Screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer is asking, who are the real prostitutes?
Meanwhile, Bob Dylan wanders about as a character called Alias, who doesn’t seem to know where he is, who he is, or what he ought to do. The teenage me found this frustrating, but to this 57-year-old man Alias’s blank-faced acceptance of fate seems like a rational response to 2025. Is it possible to get post-traumatic stress disorder by looking at a succession of internet memes of penguins complaining about tariffs?
Indeed, this time around Peckinpah’s mangled masterpiece made the most sense to date. Billy the Kid represents American freedoms under attack from big business, namely the cattle barons to whom people’s rights and lands are dispensable. And the lawman Pat Garrett has to decide whether to do the right thing, or bend the knee to tyranny to survive, like Keir Starmer, and to get rich, like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Snoop Doggy Dogg.
(Now there are no ideals or ethics in American politics, if there ever were, and everything is nakedly transactional, where once geopolitical powerplays were disguised as altruism. Here. Have these Jackson Pollock paintings. They will invalidate socialist realism. Here. Have these blankets. They contain smallpox spores and it’s cold on the reservation. Sleep well.)
And if, like Billy the Kid, you stand up to avaricious authoritarians, you end up dead on the porch in just some brown trousers while Rita Coolidge weeps, or detained at customs like a French intellectual. Peckinpah’s once reviled film is now almost too on the nose for 2025! But The Handmaid’s Tale seemed like science fiction back in the 80s, when you had to read it if you wanted to get a date with an attractive feminist.
But given that Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policies seem based on the same narcissistic notions of manifest destiny that forged the old west, maybe it isn’t surprising that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid suddenly speaks volumes. There’s a new sheriff in town and he’s working for the modern-day cattle barons, who are farming engagement on vast digital plains with great globs of porn and racism, and pushing out the people who went west to post pictures of cats and sad things about Palestine.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid at least has the edge musically on the Trump administration because it gave us Dylan’s three-chord classic Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, as opposed to a degraded version of YMCA, sung by an inauthentic manifestation of the Village People, still dressed as gay-friendly archetypes of the American collective subconscious, but stomping on a human ear – for ever!
The central conceit of my current tour show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, is that the bullies are taking over politics and comedy and we’re somehow seduced by their cruelty. World events currently approach the show head-on at such velocity that the jokes in it buffet around like ball-bearings in a pinball machine and bash into different news stories daily, while I flap the flippers like a blind idiot Brexiter.
Some throwaway yuks in last week’s column, and last week’s live show, about Russell Brand, another of the comic flatulists currently flourishing in the court of King Donald, underwent hasty last-minute rewrites as allegations coalesced into criminal charges, inconveniencing me enormously.
Playwrights write their plays only once and then walk away from the scenes of their crimes, even as their storylines are overtaken by world events. I, however, am required to retool my work nightly, while losers like William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett or Alan Ayckbourn benefit from the notion that their hastily tossed-off and then simply abandoned works are somehow “timeless”, when in fact they are just the products of lazy and careless minds.
When I wrote the current standup show last autumn it seemed pessimistic. Now it seems prescient. By the time it closes next year I am worried it will seem nostalgic. Will the newly enslaved Indigenous people of Greenland look back fondly on the 2025 tariffs and the Signal scandal as they mine mobile phone parts from rapidly thawing permafrost, while YMCA booms endlessly out of a subterranean speaker system? We’re doomed. Feels like I’m knocking on heaven’s door.
