Richard Ayoade versus Hollywood

Turn on Channel Four these days and chances are you’ll see comedian Richard Ayoade doing a version of the nerdy character he played in The IT Crowd. Whether it’s riffing on a late-night comedy quiz, playfully haranguing a fellow comedian in a semi-exotic locale, or presenting the rebooted Crystal Maze armed only with light sarcasm and a wooden hand on a stick, Ayoade has perfected his endearingly awkward persona.

But what makes Ayoade different from your average (or even above-average) light entertainer is his raised-eyebrow (or even raised-highbrow) scepticism about whatever he’s appearing in. Surely, his stiff-suited manner conveys, he’s above all this? And surely you, dear viewer, shouldn’t be speeding through clips of 8 Out of 10 Cats on your iPhone when you could be savouring, say, French New Wave Cinema?

What Ayoade would rather be doing is making French New Wave cinema. His first film, Submarine, was a homage to early Truffaut, as well as the films of Wes Anderson. Except instead of Paris or New York, it’s set in Swansea. (With a cracking soundtrack by Alex Turner.) His second film, 2013’s The Double, was a dystopia about a man whose life is thrown out of kilter when his sinister doppelgänger turns out to be better at his job and more successful with women than him. To preserve his sanity, he kills him. You can see why Ayoade was attracted to the Dostoevsky novella he adapted. A similar discomfiting duality energises his own on-screen personae—the nerd and the show-off. And after spending 48 hours in Jordan with David Baddiel cracking jokes about falafel, Ayoade could hardly be blamed for wanting to destroy—or at the very least sarcastically undermine—the conventionally successful Richard Ayoade.

The Double didn’t do brilliantly at the box office and Ayoade hasn’t made a film since. Instead he has produced three books on film for Faber that confirm him as an acute critic. This being Ayoade, though, his books do a very good job of disguising their perceptiveness through a surreal format. Ayoade on Ayoade parodied the often ball-achingly pretentious directors on directors series Faber also publishes; The Grip of Film delved into popular movies via another double, film fan Gordy LaSure, a man who “doesn’t just shoot from the hip, he shoots from the gut.”

A meta-textual footnote in Grip directed readers to an Ayoade treatise on what Gwyneth Paltrow justifiably regards as her worst film—the sort-of-romantic, sort-of-comedic View from the Top. But what was once meta, is now actually textual: Ayoade on Top, his new book, is a scene-by-scene guide to Paltrow’s nadir, analysing in excruciating detail every false note, misplaced joke and lazy plot strand in the 2003 film. The serious attention he pays to something so ephemeral is part of the joke, of course. (“How are we meant to sell a book about a film no one has seen?” he claims his editor asked him, and I suspect that was verbatim.) And clearly it's a parody of blow-by-blow guides like Geoff Dyer's Zona. But there is more going on.

Top is a such a poorly-made example of a Hollywood film that it’s actually a very good example of all that’s wrong with Hollywood. The proficiency that usually covers up the cracks is lacking, and so director Bruno Barreto unwittingly exposes all the deeply weird assumptions built into conventional rom-coms. Briefly, (and reader, I have watched every minute) the film follows Donna (Paltrow), an ambitious woman who escapes small-town life by becoming an air stewardess who serves warm nuts to sleepy businessmen. Along the way there is desultory romance with Ted (Mark Ruffalo), and a cameo from a cross-eyed Mike Myers. Top is “a film,” writes Ayoade, “that celebrates capitalism in all its victimless glory, and one I can imagine Donald Trump himself half-watching on his private jet’s gold-plated flat screen, while his other puffy eye scans the cabin for fresh prey.”

The sexual allure of the air stewardess is grist to Top’s mill, as Ayoade points out. Working at a low-budget airline, Donna wears a too-tight uniform and puffs up her hair—“In post-Reagan America: high hair=low class.” As she moves up in the world, her clothes become more subtle and aspirational; in other words, she starts to look more like Paltrow actually does. “Thus,” comments Ayoade, “the ‘make-over’ scene in any Hollywood film is not really about changing how someone looks, it’s about restoring someone’s looks.” The protagonist is always essentially successful and attractive; all they must do is shed the skin of failure.

Rom-coms often present a choice between achieving at work and following your romantic dreams—the classic head versus heart conundrum. But it’s rarely a proper dilemma since 1) This is a romance, so the heart must win out; and 2) The grammar of the rom-com can’t allow a couple to fall into unglamorous poverty. So the viewer always knows that the decision to abandon your career high—in this case, Paltrow flying to Paris for an upmarket airline—to return to Ted isn’t going to cost her much for long. And sure enough, with no explanation whatsoever, she ends the film as a pilot. As Ayoade says, “Only when you’ve established your dominion can you reward yourself with romance.”

Entertaining as these books are, I can’t help feeling that Ayoade would be better off critiquing Hollywood by making his own original films. He ends by saying, “We need more stories about cabin crew, pilots and ground staff, and we need new voices to tell them.” Indeed. Or maybe not new voices, just ones we haven’t heard from in a while. We’re waiting on the runway, Richard. Start warming those nuts.