All year, this cigarette advertisement follows me around Tokyo. For Lark cigarettes, predictably a Phillip Morris product, it displays groups of surfers, tanned and muscular, hanging around the beach, having a butt, with the sun setting in the distance. The end of a perfect day. It’s simple, but I’m admittedly susceptible, cause that’s it, you know.
This morning, I woke up at 6, cause I took a nap early yesterday evening, and never managed to get out of bed. I rollerbladed (by the way, someone wrote me recently shocked and disappointed when he found out I bought rollerblades — and believe me, I’m not the rollerblade type, but what else can you do when you’re surrounded by concrete and dirty water, with not a basketball court in sight?) around the industrial wasteland that surrounds the banks of the Edogawa River, near where I live in Chiba, not so far from Tokyo Bay. I got back at 8:00 AM, took a shower, went into Tokyo for a Japanese lesson, after which, I hit this massive outdoor pool in view of the Shinjuku skyscrapers and the beautiful old trees around the edges of the Meiji gardens. One example of Tokyo insanity — it cost me 1500 Yen (or about $22) to go into this outdoor pool. I did some lengths, and lay around the side sunning myself, checking out girls, but mostly catching sightlines filled in guys in speedos. And then, I figured time was getting ripe for a matinee, so I thought I’d check out the Beach. Luck was with me, cause I got to the theatre 10 minutes late, and no one was standing near the door, so I was able to walk right in, without paying.
Anyway, like many, I could connect with Richard, the character in Alex Garland’s The Beach strongly. I read the original book, shortly before I found out DiCaprio was cast in the role. But ever since finding out, the memories of the book have been relayed to me in the voiceover of DiCaprio (I can recognize his voice anywhere — I recently walked into a house, and heard the famous words of French poet Rimbaud, “Eternity, it’s the sun in the middle of the sea,” and knew it was DiCaprio reading it, and sure enough it was the end scene of the movie Rimbaud, which I’ve not seen), and so DiCaprio’s voiceovers seemed to ring a deja-vu in me. And the scenery, too, of the movie — I’ve never been to Thailand, but scene after scene, the movie played itself exactly into my imaginings of the book.
But I guess that’s no accident, cause apparently the original beach, the location of the movie’s filming, didn’t exactly fit the image of the directors, either. So very controversially, they introduced new vegetation onto the island, and kind of remixed the island, so to speak. And that is unbelievable, one of the grossest examples of Hollywood’s excesses I’ve ever heard of. I’ve always marvelled that $100 million might be spent on a movie, filmed in countries with people starving all around, and then $100s of millions more are spent by the people that consume the movie and the surrounding products. It’s fucking stunning, isn’t it?
But anyway, I’m not trying to be moral. It’s just a movie, isn’t it? It’s just a beach, isn’t it? And you know, a lot of companies a lot smaller than MacDonalds have destroyed a lot more than a beach in their process.
Others have said — never mind what they did to the Beach, but what about what they did to Alex Garland’s novel? I’ve often thought about classic stories, and wondered what would happen, if something different happened halfway through the book. And that’s basically, what happens inside the Beach, the movie.
I think you could derive the truism from DiCaprio’s voiceover at the end of the Beach, the movie — that it is after all the process that matters most. And therefore, no matter how much I like this movie, I’m not sure that my enjoyment seems enough in this case.