Shirley Dent
posted 18 January 2006

The production notes to Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: A Cock and Bull Story tell us that 'This brand new film manages to catch the spirit of Tristram Shandy (its exploration of narrative and of fiction/reality, its humour, and importantly, its humanity)'. Nice to give 'humanity' a nod there but in the context of this film it is a statement I profoundly disagree with: this cock and bull story in no way captures the spirit of humanity abroad in Sterne's novel but it does provide us with a lot of bull and balderdash about the human condition.

You can see where the trouble starts. Steve Coogan playing Steve Coogan playing both Walter Shandy (the father) and Tristram (the son) gives an interview to a documentary film crew (it's a film within a film - yes, that old chestnut, no Tristram reference intended) and says 'It is a postmodern classic written way before there was any modernism to be post about'.

For the record, as Melvyn New points out in the editor's introduction to the widely available Penguin classics edition of Tristram Shandy, there ain't nothing postmodern about a novel written by a practising theologian in the mid-eighteenth century: the passage most often used to prove the novel's postmodernist credentials is inspired by that postmodern classic I Corinthians 13:12. But what is really at issue in A Cock and Bull Story is not just its postmodernist tendencies but what postmodern has become shorthand for. Postmodernism in A Cock and Bull Story is a testament in the service of a different creed, namely the fuckwit and fuckup theory of humanity. A Cock and Bull Story is riddled with anti-human platitudes that tell us we are fragments at the mercy of a strange and wacky fate.

Tristram Shandy, with its famous rambling diversions on the world and its mother, its awareness of its own life as a text, and its story that goes nowhere, is indeed grist to the mill of a postmodernist argument that tells us nothing really means anything, nothing really matters and we can never really know. The innovation of A Cock and Bull Story is that it slips Sterne's eighteenth-century novel right into the anti-human and miserablist 21st century zeitgeist.

So we are constantly told throughout A Cock and Bull Story that 'we can't make life fit any shape', not because of the wonderfully human complexity of it all, but because we are fuckwitted creatures at the mercy of fate and we will inevitably fuck-up. The character who is flagged as the intellectual of the film, the Fassbinder-quoting runner Jennie, leaves us with this bon mot of wisdom: 'the way we all go wrong, the way we turn out is just a matter of chance'. Cheers darling!

A Cock and Bull Story turns Tristram Shandy's great narrative on its head because it doesn't understand it and has the arrogance to clog this great work up with its own petty take on humanity. The novel is for sure peopled with fantastic characters and their conversations and private trials and tribulations are a source of great humour and great humanity. But that alone would not have made Sterne's novel any more significant than a high-class version of The Archers. It is not the private domestic world that gives life to the novel but the public world of letters. It is a book populated not just by the memorable characters of the Shandy household but all the written knowledge and distant authors evoked by the narrative.

Tristram Shandy is not a book about navel-gazing and the minutiae of a private life, despite all the domestic chatter. It is a book that looks out at the world, a great quest novel, trying to make sense of life with all the human knowledge available. It fails but it fails brilliantly because what it does is full of the human joy of being human. A Cock Bull Story drains the tale of this life, due in great part to the excruciating obsession with the private lives of film hacks that the directors and actors indulge. It's soooooo boring. Bad enough that we have the ongoing 'I don't just want to be remembered for Alan Partridge' angst of Steve Coogan. We also have to put up with the incessant incestuous gabblings of British film industry apparatchiks, the sort of people responsible for the self-satisfied nonsense of Notting Hill or - God help us - Truly, Madly, Deeply.

One moment in the film did genuinely touch the human: when Steve decides not to sleep with Jennie the runner and returns to Jenny his wife, asleep in the hotel room with their baby. There seems to be genuine tenderness in their embrace and joy at being together. It was also one time in the film when everyone had shut the fuck up. Which is always a wise move if you have fuck all of sense to say.