Paul and Sandra Fierlinger (2009)

It’s not easy to see what kind of audience the film is aimed at except, for sure, people already au fait with J R Ackerley – people like Paul Binding, whose rave review in the TLS nowhere acknowledges that the uninitiated are likely find this animated feature bizarre.  As I did, even though I knew a fair amount about Ackerley and had read his novella We Think the World of You (1960), albeit not the memoir My Dog Tulip (1956)[1].  Although Christopher Plummer voices him very well, the protagonist and narrator Ackerley is given no context here:  he’s simply a late-middle-aged, middle-class Englishman, who has a day job and adores his Alsatian bitch, Tulip.  The man’s feelings for the dog are so strong and unusual that, without illuminating his character, the material is mystifying.   Binding says the book was controversial because of the prominence given to canine mating and defecation and these, of course, have an unignorable, visceral effect in the film:  on screen, the shit and vomit are (as it were) in your face.  Yet what was surely more shocking about the book – and, to me, still is shocking – is Ackerley’s rhapsodising fascination with Tulip’s bodily functions.  Some of the anthropomorphisms he uses to describe them are amusing – having a perfunctory piss, she looks, he says, ‘as if she were signing a cheque’.   But when Tulip’s on heat and clinging to her owner’s leg or, according to Ackerley, has a tickly vulva, the sense that he’s stimulated is discomfiting.   Another consequence of adapting from page to screen is that these are the aspects of Tulip’s life with Ackerley that have the most visual potential.  It’s not surprising that Paul and Sandra Fierlinger concentrate on them – the project of finding a mate for Tulip is at the heart of the film and must occupy a good twenty minutes (out of only eighty-three) – but the effect is mildly pornographic, not unlike that of the recent BBC adaptation of Women in Love.  (Lawrence’s novel may be all about sex but it’s not all sex.)

Paul Binding praises the visuals and I can appreciate the skill and inventiveness of the Fierlingers’ drawings.  But (and I guess this is a problem I have with animated film more generally) I can no more find that sufficient than I can the ‘stunning’ photography in a live action movie.  Nevertheless, My Dog Tulip does (as far as I know) take the animated film genre into new territory.  Until Waltz with Bashir and the otherwise uninteresting Chico and Rita, it hadn’t occurred to me that animation might be used to present material that would be much more controversial as live action.   In the case of My Dog Tulip, there are, of course, more basically pragmatic considerations too.  It’s hard to see how real dogs, however well trained and shrewdly edited, could have been used to play Tulip and her various suitors, not at least without the film-makers being accused of cruelty to animals.   (The mating sequences go beyond what we’re used to from natural world programmes on television.)  As well as Plummer, the voices include, among others, those of Isabella Rossellini and, as Ackerley’s gruesome sister Nancy, Lynn Redgrave (the last work she did – the film is dedicated to her memory).  The sprightly, faintly martial music by John Avarese is agreeable but makes the experience of My Dog Tulip more confusing:  it almost suggests that the Fierlingers are satirising our expectation that an animated film is inherently innocuous, even though what we see and hear from the narration is telling us otherwise.   But perhaps the music is to be taken straight:  admirers of the film (Philip Kemp in the Observer and someone writing on IMDB, as well as Binding) praise it as ‘gentle’ and ‘delightful’ and so on.

These aren’t the words to describe the fantasy sequences in My Dog Tulip – during which the graphic style changes and Ackerley imagines, on the lined pages of an exercise book, monochrome pencil drawings of Tulip, clothed and feminised.  I don’t think that it makes sense either to say, as Paul Binding does, that ‘Tulip’s beauty moves us throughout’ (and not just because at least one of ‘us’ found that her yapping got on his nerves).  Surely it’s essential for her sometimes to revolt us too – otherwise, how can we get a sense of the extraordinariness of Ackerley’s absolute enthusiasm?  There is a bit of text on screen near the end in praise of canine devotion but anyone who can accept this paean as evidence that My Dog Tulip is about the bond between humans and dogs in any general sense is overlooking the fact that Ackerley is hostile to, or dismissive of, virtually any other animal, canine or otherwise, with which Tulip comes into contact: he is jealously possessive of her.  J R Ackerley was deeply unhappy and thoroughly misanthropic.  The Fierlingers express that with deft incisiveness through the human beings in the story whose smiles swiftly morph into sub-Bacon rictus grins, whose heads seem to turn into skulls.  The long, grey, lugubrious figure of Ackerley himself suggests a cadaver-in-waiting.   (Ackerley, at least after his dog’s demise in 1961, looked forward to death – ‘that dear, dark angel’:  in 1967, as Joan Acocella noted in her recent New Yorker profile of Ackerley, ‘she came’.)  There are occasional indications in the narration, which Paul Fierlinger has adapted from the book with additional material by Ackerley’s biographer Peter Parker, that Ackerley certainly didn’t see his attachment to Tulip as a weak substitute for human relationships – and that he regarded the latter as all more or less pathological.   Yet the humour of the drawings, the lively, airy movement of the images and the wit of Christopher Plummer’s readings all combine to occlude Ackerley’s black outlook – the grumpy-old-man eccentricity is alleviating.

Paul Binding thinks the film is so good that it avoids the limitations of the book:  the limitations placed on Ackerley by his time and place in society; and various aspects of the relative (to now) benightedness of Britain in the immediate post-war years – when homosexuality was illegal, people were snobs, dog owners kept their animals cooped up all day while they were at work and, when they misbehaved, hit them with impunity.  Binding doesn’t, however, mention another difference between then and now:  the people who berate Ackerley for letting Tulip shit on the pavement are presented as aberrantly illiberal.  I was baffled by Binding’s suggestion that Ackerley’s homosexuality came across strongly in the film (more strongly, Binding says, than in the book).   The biographical facts of the matter are that, in 1946 (the year his mother died), Ackerley bought an Alsatian bitch off the family of an ex-lover, a working-class boy called Freddie Doyle, who was going to prison for burglary.  (We Think the World of You is a fictional version of Ackerley’s relationship with Doyle and his family.)   Ackerley’s dog was actually called not Tulip but Queenie.  If you know these things, events in the film – like the fact that Tulip, after shunning the attentions of a succession of male Alsatians, is eventually impregnated by a mongrel – have a resonance which is lost without them.  The Fierlingers show us that Ackerley lived on his own with Tulip and hated this solitude to be threatened – but I’m not sure I would have known from watching their film, if I’d not already known, that he was gay, only that he was kinky.   (There’s plenty about Ackerley’s military past but I wouldn’t have known from My Dog Tulip that, at the time of the events being described, he was the editor of The Listener or any kind of serious writer.)  The Fierlingers put up black-and-white photographs of the real Ackerley and the real dog over the closing titles:  not an unusual device but more compelling here because it breaks with the animation.   Yet these glimpses of the prototypes serve to underline the opacity of Ackerley in what’s gone before.

Whereas the book came out during Queenie-Tulip’s lifetime, the film’s narration has Ackerley reporting her death at the very good age of sixteen.  The retrospective calm is anti-climactic:  if the film’s done anything, it’s to convince you of Ackerley’s passion for Tulip so that you can’t believe her death wouldn’t have been more traumatic for him.  The Wikipedia entry on Ackerley quotes him as follows:

‘I would have immolated myself as a suttee when Queenie died. For no human would I ever have done such a thing, but by my love for Queenie I would have been irresistibly compelled.’

Although I’m grateful they did, I wonder why the Richmond Odeon screened My Dog Tulip.  Ackerley’s small flat was in Putney and one of Tulip’s prospective mates lives in Sheen – was the film deemed to be of local interest?!    It seems just as likely that its doggie name and superficial theme and 12A certificate suggested family viewing.  As someone who always loves our cats too much, the strength of the attachment between Ackerley and Tulip wasn’t alien to me.  But I was still alienated by the nature of the attachment.  Part of me felt shocked by the 12A rating; part of me felt that the material was a bit much for any age.

17 May 2011

[1]  A film adaptation of We Think the World of You appeared in 1988