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We’re meant to love the heat. Culture seems implicitly aware that autumn cool is more attractive
s the torture over? Maybe not. I still have the door open to the back garden. The shaky sense of climactically induced unease is still beating about my fragile psyche.
By far the least significant downside to climate change is the irritation that “Indian summers” bring to those already unhappy enough with the conventional version of that season. We comprise multitudes. Yet the assumption remains that the entire citizenry relishes blazing heat and blasting sunlight. You see that in the responses from climate-change deniers to even the most responsible reporting on dangerously hot weather.
“Bloody misery guts. In the olden days we’d have a 99 and play a game of kickabout. Now a tiny bit of sun in this miserable grey country and it’s the apocalypse. ” You know the sort.
Anyway, the time has come again to stand up against the hot-is-good orthodoxy. Those who begin emails with “Hope you’re enjoying the nice weather”. Those who believe “it’s turned out nice again” when you’re having difficulty breathing. Speak for yourselves.
Venice Golden Lion goes to Woman Unknown, postwar film about ‘female body as battleground’Barry Ward: ‘The fear is, if you’re trying to re-create New York in Skibbereen, it could look a bit hokey’ In a less worrisome universe, we would, at this point in the calendar, be able to taunt such monsters with the end of their favoured season. Not until the clocks go forward again need we worry about where to keep our wallet when it gets too steamy to wear a jacket.
Not until then will taking a bus remind us of Alec Guinness’s experiences in that tin shack during Bridge on the River Kwai. This is now a delightfully diverse society. But many of us still have complexions suited to hiding from woolly mammoths in northern caves during the Pleistocene epoch. We turn pink upon hearing a bar of Walking on Sunshine.
We react as equably to tropical climates as did Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. And we are not yet able to welcome the end of it all. The sweaty backside of summer now remains exposed as the leaves begin to fall. Will we never be set free?
Culture seems implicitly aware that autumn is a more attractive and complex season than summer. Did you know that the three best autumn films have “heaven” in the title? I’m talking about Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, from 1978 , Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows, from 1955 , and Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, from 2002 .
Okay, this is a bit of a cheat. As you can tell from the synopses, Haynes was paying tribute to the Sirk picture in his later masterpiece. But there is an unmistakable relish for the changing season in all three. The Sirk and the sub-Sirk film are both conspicuously aware that these months offer a russet analogy for changes that will turn the characters’ lives upside down.
Summer is good as metaphor for nothing other than the boredom of endless uniformity. It is equally revealing how many of the great summer films acknowledge the demerits of that season.
Think of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, from 1975 , Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from 1954 , and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, from 1989 . All three films make an enemy of the season musically eulogised as one of “soda and pretzels and beer”.
It is not something into which you slip gently. It is something that nags, pesters and pokes. Treat it casually and you will get burnt. Relax your guard further and it might send you insane.
Of course, even in the current changed circumstances, an Irish summer is unlikely to cause as much psychological mayhem as would one spent in Spike Lee’s Bedford-Stuyvesant. I was in New York when Do the Right Thing was shot – Public Enemy’s Rebel Without a Pause on every boom box – and, though the weather was utterly beastly, I was surprised and relieved to discover that few New Yorkers thought otherwise.
If someone said “nasty weather today” they were rarely speaking of unseasonal downpours; they were more often objecting to heat and humidity. Nobody forced you to sit outside before dusk. Nobody put on that offended expression if you admitted to wishing for the unthreateningly overcast days of mid-September.
If we could somehow meld the New Yorker’s attitude to summer with what used to be the Irish version of that inconvenient season then the country would become an infinitely less irritating place to dwell. How John McGahern wrote: ‘Everything begins in a copy book.
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