THE HIPPOPOTAMUS: The film, not the animal.

Stephen Fry

Just when I despair of ever seeing anything worthwhile on Netflix, I stumble onto something that makes me happy.  This time is was a film called “The Hippopotamus” which was not National Geographic, but rather British fol-de-rol.  It’s actually a Peter O’Toole film, or maybe a Bill Nye vehicle, which would not be remarkable except that the crucial centerpole is played by that sober and fatherly supervisor of “Endeavor,” DI Fred Thursday, who is played by Roger Allam.  He does look something like Stephen Fry, who writes autobiographically about his gay, bipolar self.  

This time Allam is the outrageous and self-destructive crazy uncle.  It hadn’t really occurred to me he could play anyone but Thursday, but he’s even in Game of Thrones as Illyrio Mopatis, though so shadowy he’s unrecognizable, but he’s done enough voice-overs that I ought to have recognized that.  In the English tradition, he’s really more of a stage actor and thus quite versatile.

This plot is flimsy but crammed with Englishisms centering on the big manor house and its grounds, sheltering ingrown families whose members all hate each other even though they may have once been married to each other.  Maybe because of that.  Most boxes in the oeuvre are checked: the ancient butler, the out-of-it-patriarch, the animals in trouble, insane driving, mysterious ailments, too-gorgeous mothers and their unmarriageable daughters, etc.  A part probably bigger than it deserves to be is the huge loud gay man braying at the elegant dinner table.  Stephen Fry can get away with writing it because of who he “is.”

In fact, in a wildly entertaining opening scene he nails a pretentious staging of well-endowed, nearly nude, young men spouting nonsense.  Without his personal history he couldn’t do that either.  (Wikipedia serves the facts well-enough, so I won’t repeat here.)  The whole film is really an occasion to rehearse Fry’s ideas about religion when it is assumed to be magic, art when it takes on empty social values that the consumers don’t really fathom, and the touching but rather desperate attempts of sons to become something exceptional and full of genius.

For some of us, that’s well-trodden territory, but what makes it worthwhile is the wittiness of the dialogue and the sincere compassion that is under it.  Sure, it’s all hallucinations, constructs in the mind that can’t be resolved, totally controlled by social assumptions.  In the end, if one faces these eternal dilemmas squarely (even when drunk) then the stuck-ness that ordinarily haunts all creative people will be broken through by love and laughter to get things moving again.  The result, of course, is bound to risk being ridiculous.  The first poem that comes out of this blocked writer is entitled “The Hippopotamus”— and there you go.  It’s the first of a cataract.

In the US we tend to take these issues so seriously that they become murderous, esp. when the issues are intra-family.  The English gentry’s estates are only matched by giant ranches and none of them is much older than the Civil War.  Miraculous cures and some religious issues are delegated to the indigenous population, shamans and so on.  Well, that’s not the reality, but much of the plot fodder.

Writing in the US is money-making like everything else and we see it as a matter of workshops, MFA degrees if you can afford them, or the transformative holocausts of poverty — often delegated to a female survivor like Daenerys Targarean who can literally walk out of a bonfire.  (“Literally,” of course, in movie terms.)  In the US we punish hoaxes severely; in the United Kingdom, everyone laughs and goes on.

The basic issue of the hippopotamus is an equation of sex — very literally — with the creativity of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the most religious of poets.  It’s impossible to argue with the seriousness and skill of such a poet.  It’s not even very easy to make fun of him, much less imitate him.  But surely the fountain of inspiration is always hormonal and poetry must be bodily because it is based on sensuality.

A subset of this issue is that of healing: the argument here is against healing, which is a kind of denial of suffering, but also means ignoring what is learned from affliction, being forced to find one’s inner resources, which is not always respected by those around the sufferer, who react in ways that help themselves, either by aggrandizing the pain or by denying it.

Bipolarism is a self-management problem that is romanticized and even valued by our Brit-based culture.  Life is considered exhilarating if one goes from valley to peak and then is cast down again — as long as the progress keeps moving towards some grand climax of literary prowess — like “King Lear” or “Moby Dick.”  That’s why people climb Mount Everest, to fulfill that pattern.  Asian cultures where calm and temperance are admired are alien to us and some have suggested that our antipathy to Obama is due to his Indonesian elegant self-control rather than his skin color.  

We much prefer the violence and intemperance of the Red Neck American South.  The shocking excess and confrontation of the central character in this film are, I suppose, the British equivalent of a tractor pull.  But the wickedness is symbolized by old-fashioned alcohol rather than opiates, which have captured our mainstream, forcing the poets to return to hallucinogens in hopes of miraculous visions.  The Irish, of course, have not given up whiskey and enjoy their visions anyway.  Something about acid.

But Fry’s comments, acid as they may be, and more useful for flaying than healing, are still capable of clearing the artistic way that has become rotten and paralyzed.  A hippo is famous for submerging in rank old waterways, rising up to spray its fecal by-products by spinning its tail, a source of fertility.  However, hippos — clumsy and ugly as they may seem on land — are quite capable of killing a person.  Climbing too high without proper skills can also kill a person.