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Authors: Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd
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any signal correctly; in short I was in a situation that had, in my life, no precedent.
“No one can see above himself,” writes Schopenhauer to make us understand the impossibility of an exchange of ideas between two individuals of too different an intellectual level. At that moment, obviously, Isabelle could see
above me;
I had the prudence to stay quiet. After all, she told me, I might just as easily not meet the girl; given the thinness of my social relations, this was the most likely scenario.
She continued to buy French newspapers, although not that often, not more than once a week, and from time to time she would hand me an article with a sniff of contempt. It was around this time that the French media began a big campaign to promote friendship, probably launched by
Le Nouvel Observateur.
“Love can break your heart, friendship never will,” that was more or less the theme of the articles. I didn’t understand why they were interested in spouting such absurdities; Isabelle explained that it was an old chestnut, that we were simply dealing with an annual variation on the theme: “How to break up and remain good friends.” According to her, this would last another four or five years before we could admit that the passage from love to friendship, i.e., from a strong feeling to a weak one, was patently the prelude to the disappearance of all feeling—on the historical level, I mean, for on the individual one, indifference was by far the most favorable situation: once love had broken down, it was generally not transformed into indifference, and even less frequently into friendship. On the basis of this remark, I laid the foundations of a script entitled
Two Flies Later,
which was to constitute the apex—and end—of my cinematic career. My agent was delighted to learn that I was getting back to work—two and a half years’ absence was a long time. He was less delighted when he held the finished product in his hands. I had not hidden from him the fact that it was a film script, which I aimed to produce and act in myself; that wasn’t the problem—on the contrary, he said, people have been waiting for a long time, it’s good they’re going to be surprised, it could have cult status. The content, however…Frankly, was I not going a bit too far?
The film related the life of a man whose favorite pastime was killing flies with an elastic band (hence the title); in general, he missed them—you were, however, talking about a three-hour-long feature. The second-favorite pastime of this cultivated man, a great reader of Pierre Louÿs, was having his cock sucked by little prepubescent girls—well, fourteen at the oldest; he had more success with this than with the flies.
Contrary to what has since been repeated by media hirelings, this film was not a monumental flop; it was even a triumph in certain foreign countries, and made a considerable profit in France, without, however, reaching the numbers that one could have expected, given the until then vertiginous rise of my career; that’s all.
Its failure with the critics, on the other hand, was real; to this day I still think it was undeserved. “An undistinguished knockabout farce,” was the headline in
Le Monde,
differentiating itself from its more moralistic peers, who raised, especially in their editorials, the question of banning it. It was certainly a comedy, and most of the gags were very obvious, if not vulgar; but there were certain passages of dialogue, in certain scenes, which seem to me, with hindsight, to be the best thing I ever produced. In particular in Corsica, in the long sequence filmed on the slopes of Bavella, where the hero (played by me) shows the little Aurore (nine years old), whom he has just conquered over a Disney tea at Marineland in Bonifacio, around his second home.
“There’s no point in living in Corsica,” she hurled insolently, “if it means living on a bend in the road.”
“To see cars pass,” he (I) replied, “is
“No one can see above himself,” writes Schopenhauer to make us understand the impossibility of an exchange of ideas between two individuals of too different an intellectual level. At that moment, obviously, Isabelle could see
above me;
I had the prudence to stay quiet. After all, she told me, I might just as easily not meet the girl; given the thinness of my social relations, this was the most likely scenario.
She continued to buy French newspapers, although not that often, not more than once a week, and from time to time she would hand me an article with a sniff of contempt. It was around this time that the French media began a big campaign to promote friendship, probably launched by
Le Nouvel Observateur.
“Love can break your heart, friendship never will,” that was more or less the theme of the articles. I didn’t understand why they were interested in spouting such absurdities; Isabelle explained that it was an old chestnut, that we were simply dealing with an annual variation on the theme: “How to break up and remain good friends.” According to her, this would last another four or five years before we could admit that the passage from love to friendship, i.e., from a strong feeling to a weak one, was patently the prelude to the disappearance of all feeling—on the historical level, I mean, for on the individual one, indifference was by far the most favorable situation: once love had broken down, it was generally not transformed into indifference, and even less frequently into friendship. On the basis of this remark, I laid the foundations of a script entitled
Two Flies Later,
which was to constitute the apex—and end—of my cinematic career. My agent was delighted to learn that I was getting back to work—two and a half years’ absence was a long time. He was less delighted when he held the finished product in his hands. I had not hidden from him the fact that it was a film script, which I aimed to produce and act in myself; that wasn’t the problem—on the contrary, he said, people have been waiting for a long time, it’s good they’re going to be surprised, it could have cult status. The content, however…Frankly, was I not going a bit too far?
The film related the life of a man whose favorite pastime was killing flies with an elastic band (hence the title); in general, he missed them—you were, however, talking about a three-hour-long feature. The second-favorite pastime of this cultivated man, a great reader of Pierre Louÿs, was having his cock sucked by little prepubescent girls—well, fourteen at the oldest; he had more success with this than with the flies.
Contrary to what has since been repeated by media hirelings, this film was not a monumental flop; it was even a triumph in certain foreign countries, and made a considerable profit in France, without, however, reaching the numbers that one could have expected, given the until then vertiginous rise of my career; that’s all.
Its failure with the critics, on the other hand, was real; to this day I still think it was undeserved. “An undistinguished knockabout farce,” was the headline in
Le Monde,
differentiating itself from its more moralistic peers, who raised, especially in their editorials, the question of banning it. It was certainly a comedy, and most of the gags were very obvious, if not vulgar; but there were certain passages of dialogue, in certain scenes, which seem to me, with hindsight, to be the best thing I ever produced. In particular in Corsica, in the long sequence filmed on the slopes of Bavella, where the hero (played by me) shows the little Aurore (nine years old), whom he has just conquered over a Disney tea at Marineland in Bonifacio, around his second home.
“There’s no point in living in Corsica,” she hurled insolently, “if it means living on a bend in the road.”
“To see cars pass,” he (I) replied, “is
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