In these recycling-conscious times, one wonders if it might be possible for cinemas to capture the tears shed by patrons going to see the movie Les Miserables and other artful tear-jerkers. I went to see and to weep at Les Miserables at Manuka from where cinema-shed tears could be easily piped across the road to the famous oval to impart a little extra greenness to its greensward.
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Les Miserables is an interesting test for those of us who like to think of ourselves as rational, intellectually detached folk. No one with a good, university-honed brain who takes that whole brain to Les Miserables should weep so much as a droplet over this contrived blizzard of sentimentality (and sexist sentimentality, too, for some women characters in the film exist only to be full-time victims). One can imagine true intellectuals like my good friend and occasional column co-star and ''world's greatest living atheist'' Richard Dawkins being left entirely unmoved by it (except for being deeply irritated by all the wet Christian bits and throwing his ChocTop at the screen).
Perhaps, arriving at the cinema for Les Miserables, I unconsciously unbuckled my brain (the way cowboys used to unbuckle their gunbelts on the threshold of respectably run brothels) and hung it up in the foyer. I feel that I watched the film without any help from my brain because, dreadful as the film is, I found it very Kleenex-demanding.
But the fact that every word uttered in the film is sung gives the drama an emotional edge. There is something about sung sentiments that lifts them out of the ordinary so that even to sing instead of just say to one's partner that ''Sandra, I'm going to the shops. Is there anything you'd like me to buy? Do we need any bananas?'' makes that matter-of-fact announcement a matter of heartfelt farewells (for you and Sandra are being cruelly parted by fate while you go the shops). This is one reason why opera lovers (this columnist is opera-crazy) love opera. When something is sung it can never be mundane (Andrew Leigh MHR might reinvigorate his faltering political career by actual singing some of his speeches about his drab electorate's kerbs and gutters) and when the thing sung about is a matter of love, life and death, it can feel prostate-wrenchingly profound.
But how one misses feminism! If we still had feminists, they would be picketing the cinemas showing Les Miserables and shrilling obscenities at the film's patrons. The portrayal of Fantine as an extreme victim is bad enough (although, in a way that would stoke terrible tantrums in Dawkins, she does go on to enjoy her ''great reward'' of everlasting life in heaven and with all her bashed-out teeth miraculously restored). But then there's the character of Eponine, who only seems to exist so as to mope about the fact that the man she loves, Marius, doesn't love her. She dies of course (almost everyone in the film does, and it may well win the Oscar for biggest body count). Even during the film and through my tears I was quietly urging her to get over Marius, a dork, and to find better fulfilment as a lesbian with a career, perhaps in politics or as a cosmonaut.
D ry-eyed again, I was commissioned to write a hymn of praise to Canberra to decorate the front page of this paper on New Year's Day. I'm enthusiastic about this city and it was a labour of love but I wrote far too much; the first 200 words were on the front page and the remaining 43,000 were sent trailing through the paper to finish on page 94 next to the ''shipping movements''.
And yet what this city really needs for the new year, methinks, is not so much a year of gushing about Canberra (this will happen anyway) as the cultivation of some fresh, intelligent criticism of Canberra and Canberrans. Good criticism puts people and cities on their toes. Just because I put on my white armour for my New Year's Day essay doesn't mean that I'm blinkered about this city. It is in many ways a dreadful place. But the standard of the criticism of Canberra is generally pathetic and cliched, and reads as if it is written by embittered people who, when they used to live here, (almost all of them are, like Gavin Atkins in Wednesday's The Australian, a ''former Canberran'') had poor sex lives or some other social misfortunes while living here and now want to blame those famines on the place where they occurred rather than on their own unfortunate lack of charm and charisma.
But where can we get a better standard of criticism from? We should really, for half or all of this year, have living here a visiting first-class ''Thinker-In-Residence'' who makes frank and fearless observations about us. Why haven't we got one? Perth and Adelaide do it and have had some beauties. Of course we don't have one because our centenary's organisers have been, as Atkins notices, so determined to make this year a happy-clappy, Canberra-praising orgy. This promises to be such a masturbatory year in Canberra (the wussy Like Canberra project is an example of it, and Atkins' criticisms of it and my own are wholly justified) that if we're not careful we'll all grow hair on our palms and go blind.
