I was 17. It was July and it was boiling. Sweat made a snail-like progress down my neck – but I didn’t care. My swishy, three-quarter-length coat was half my personality. They would have had to surgically remove it from me. I was dressed for action. The particular action I wanted was what I had seen on a shady DVD version of Withnail & I a few months earlier. I wanted booze and drugs, and to cause outrage in provincial tearooms. In fact, I just looked like a dick, and wouldn’t have known weed from oregano. Still, the film left an imprint like a branding iron.
I was one of many, obviously. None more so than Toby Benjamin, whose latest book, Withnail & I: from Cult to Classic, charts the journey of a film that was initially a flop, gained a following among students – with their propensity to pass around VHS copies – and then assumed a granite-like position in the culture, comparable to the King James Bible or Cilla Black. It speaks to us as clearly today as it did when it was released in 1987. In straitened times, excess and débauche sometimes seem the only answer to harsh reality. What else is there to do, after all? Maybe that’s why it still resonates.
The film is set at the fag end of the 1960s. After a multi-day bender, Withnail (Richard E Grant) and Marwood (played by Paul McGann, who looks like a nymph done by Donatello) retreat to a country cottage owned by Withnail’s uncle. The house has an outdoor lav, no sticks for the fire and a want of electricity. But what it does have is a supporting cast of local loons. A poacher threatens them with a half-dead eel, a pissed-up publican gives them free drink, they make a mutiny in central Penrith, and Marwood has to bat off the unwanted advances of Uncle Monty, whose hands seem to move more quickly than his portly frame would imply.
Then the denouement comes, in which Marwood gets the central role in a play and they return to London. The relationship between the two is all over now. “I shall miss you, Withnail,” Marwood says, with a touch of his shoulder. And then he’s gone. Cue tears, heavy rain and a random dog in shot who doesn’t seem to know his visage will be committed to celluloid for ever.
This is an age of rackety behaviour. Withnail is a story about rackety behaviour. More than that, it is about decay and disdain for the authorities that contrive to make us miserable. And who can say they haven’t felt the misery of life now? Walk down the high street in Stoke-on-Trent, or past Hackney Walk, that ill-starred parade of gold-fronted shops and £100m hubris in the capital, and marvel at the mismanagement by our rulers. Who doesn’t want to threaten Rishi Sunak with an eel freshly poached in Penrith?
Withnail taught me many things. I might not have understood the film when I first saw it. But the sense of freedom, even if ill-conceived, spat at me like water from a fatted pan. These were my people. I recognised the nihilism, the attraction of necking booze from the bottle at lunch, and the hard, unspoken words of love.
The endlessly quotable lines in Withnail built its own particular vernacular brick by brick; a whole world of phrases. To repeat them, to guy your friends with them, to entice the people you want to shag with them, is to enter into the spirit of the film, and to enter into the spirit of the film is to find that at times you will be Withnail and at times you will be Marwood. Never a week goes by that my boyfriend – often when in drink – doesn’t shout: “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”. Reader, we had not gone on holiday. To recognise that is to recognise yourself, and to recognise life as you spin through it: sometimes in control but more often than not at the whim of the world and those around you.
Uncle Monty, in a rare moment of clear-sightedness, says: “Oh, my boys, my boys, we’re at the end of an age … Shat on by Tories, shovelled up by Labour. And here we are, we three; perhaps the last island of beauty in the world.”
Who hasn’t felt, and who doesn’t want to feel, as if they are the last speck of kindness in this cruel world?
Max Wallis is a writer and poet
