The …

                                          The
                                     Hudson
                                         Review
      Volume LX, Number 3 (Autumn 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Bruce Bawer.


                                 BRUCE BAWER




                    The Way of All Flesh


O     ne day more than a decade ago, I ran across a diary of mine
      from more than a decade before that and ended up sitting
awake until the wee hours reading every word. Though short on
reflection, the entries were heavy on factual details, and as I read
through them I was stunned to find one long-dormant memory
after another springing to life. Reading, for example, about a
dinner with friends at a restaurant I'd never visited before or
since, I was amazed how vividly I remembered the place, the
company, the conversation, and my state of mind that night. I was
also struck by the ways I'd changed since then. Yet reading
proved an act of recovery: as I turned the pages, I found myself
slipping back, as it were, into the skin I'd worn all those years ago;
so that when I finally closed the book and returned to my then-
current life and self, I felt a sense of dislocation that was like
nothing I'd ever known before.
   I've often thought back to that night of time travel, and on
each occasion I've pondered anew the nature of identity, the
continuities and discontinuities of the self over time. But nothing
has brought that experience, and the reflections it engendered,
more powerfully to mind than my recent re-viewing of Michael
Apted's remarkable Up Series.1
   The first thing you need to know about this twelve-hour
documentary project, which has been decades in the making, is
that it had its genesis in Seven Up!, a thirty-nine-minute special
episode--filmed in 1963 and first broadcast in 1964--of World in
Action, a weekly program produced by Britain's Granada TV
between 1963 and 1998. As Apted has pointed out, Seven Up!
came along at a watershed moment--a time when Britain, after
nearly two decades of postwar privation, was undergoing a socio-
cultural upheaval, symbolized by the Beatles, Twiggy, and
 1 The first six installments of The Up Series are available in a DVD set from First Run

Features for $129.90. The seventh, 49 Up, can be purchased separately on DVD for $29.95.
THE HUDSON REVIEW



 Carnaby Street. (Apropos of the program's timing, the movie
 critic Roger Ebert, a longtime Up Series booster, has quoted Philip
 Larkin's line: "Sexual intercourse began / in nineteen sixty-
 three.") It was at this juncture that Apted, then a newly hired
 twenty-two-year-old researcher for Granada, was told to find
 participants for a program that (as he recently explained) would
 look at the country "through the eyes of children." Apted has
 been candid about the fact that Granada TV "was a very left-wing
 company" and that Seven Up! was intended to be a "barely
 disguised political diatribe against the class system." In his own
 words, Granada
   definitely had a very political left-wing agenda. I think the idea of the
   film was to show, from the beginning, that the class system wasn't
   changing. Therefore, I selected children from the fringes of society,
   from the extremely wealthy to the extremely blue collar, which
   ultimately was a mistake and a piece of manipulation. There were
   very few children from the middle ground. . . . These were socio-
   political choices although the film transcended these decisions. It
   was funny and moving and very resonant. It didn't just seem to ape
   [sic] its political intentions.

    Seven Up! focuses on fourteen children, all of them seven years
 old. As it opens, we see them at the London Zoo, gaping at the
 polar bears as a narrator tells us that Granada TV has brought
 together these youngsters from "startlingly different back-
 grounds" in order to get "a glimpse of England in the year 2000."
 The program goes on to show them interacting with their peers
 in classrooms and schoolyards, and walking or bicycling to or
 from school (we don't see their parents at all); mostly, however,
 they talk into the camera about their lives, tastes, interests, and
 long-term plans, answering (mostly) unheard questions posed by
 an unseen interviewer. The narrator repeatedly introduces larger
 issues (for example, noting that some of the children attend co-
 ed schools and others don't, he invites us to ponder "the
 influence of mixing the sexes"), and implies throughout that
 nothing will influence these young people's fates more than the
 class system. Yet what makes the program engaging is not the
 abstract concerns (however valid) to which it seeks to draw our
 attention, but the particularity of the lives and personalities of
 the fourteen subjects, all of them identified only by first name:
 Nick, a Yorkshire farm boy; Tony, an East End lad; Suzy, a rich
 London girl; Bruce, a Surrey boarding-school student; Symon
                                                                             BRUCE BAWER



and Paul, residents of a charity-funded London children's home;
Jackie, Sue, and Lynn, all East End classmates; John, Andrew, and
Charles, all pupils at a posh Kensington school; and Peter and
Neil, schoolmates in a middle-class Liverpool suburb.
   By turns charming, humorous, and poignant, Seven Up! was
successful enough to give Apted the idea, seven years later, of
tracking down the same fourteen children to find out what had
happened to them. The result was 7 Plus Seven, in which he
intercut new footage with flashbacks from Seven Up! Seven years
later, Apted did it again with 21 Up, at the beginning of which the
subjects, now twenty-one, were seen viewing the previous two
documentaries in a screening room and discussing them
afterwards at a cocktail reception (the only time since Seven Up!
when all the participants have been together in one place). And
21 Up was succeeded, in turn, at seven-year intervals, by 28 Up, 35
Up, and 42 Up, each of which mixes new footage with scenes from
the previous documentaries to highlight the transformations that
Apted's protagonists have undergone over the years. The latest
installment, 49 Up, came out in 2005.
   Apted has now followed the same group of people, then, for
over forty years.2 The result is a work the nature of whose impact
can't easily be compared to that of any other documentary--or,
for that matter, any work of art--that I know of. For me, perhaps,
the series carries a special charge, because I happen to be exactly
the same age as the participants and because I've been following
their lives ever since I, and they, were very young. Viewing each
new installment over the years has been like catching up after a
long separation with people one knew as a child. But it's also
been something more--it's been an invitation to look back at
one's own life, to examine the decisions one has made and the
ways one has changed.
   Objectively speaking, most of the fourteen subjects' lives have
been unexceptional. Though some have made a name for
themselves (John is now a Queen's Counsel; Nick is a professor at
the University of Wisconsin), all are more famous for having
been in the series than for anything else. None of them is
unusually charismatic--there are at least two or three, indeed,
  2 There have, to be sure, been defections: three of Apted's original fourteen subjects

have dropped out of the series, only to return later; two left for good--Charles after 21 Up,
Peter after 28 Up. It should perhaps also be mentioned that in recent years Apted has
initiated Russian, South African, and American versions of the Up Series, none of which
I've seen.
THE HUDSON REVIEW



 whom you'd probably consider drab and colorless if you met
 them at a party. Yet watching their lives unfold has never been
 anything less than captivating. Apted (who has also directed such
 movies as Coal Miner's Daughter) has said that the series "honor[s]
 ordinary life," and that he "had no idea" in its early days that the
 participants "would become such rich characters"--which they
 truly have. "Now," he asks, "is that telling me some great truth,
 that everybody has a story, that everybody has poetry in their
 voices? I don't know. I'd like to think in some way it does. If you
 celebrate the ordinary life, which these films do, then people can
 really deliver stuff that is illuminating." I can't imagine anyone
 disputing this claim after watching the Up Series. The cumulative
 effect is, indeed, poetic. Growing out of a program designed by
 socialists to promote a collectivist worldview, the series might
 almost have been created by libertarians to underscore the
 singularity and integrity of the human person. It is, in any event,
 an unforgettable lesson in the dignity of man and the importance
 of attending to people as individuals, in all their particularity, and
 the danger of generalizing about them too quickly on the basis of
 class, race, sex, or other such categories.
    Some, to be sure, don't see the point of the series. This in-
 cludes a few of the participants themselves, whose putdowns of
 Apted's efforts he has incorporated into several of the Up docu-
 mentaries. In 49 Up, for example, John dismisses the whole
 project as just another example of junky reality TV: "It's like Big
 Brother and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here . . . with the added
 bonus that you can see people grow old, lose their hair, get fat.
 Fascinating, I'm sure. But does it have any value? That's a
 different question." It's true that the series' early installments
 were precursors of today's reality TV--a genre that began in
 earnest with the 1973 PBS series An American Family, that came
 into its own with the 1992 debut of MTV's The Real World, and that
 entered its heyday with the introduction of Big Brother (Nether-
 lands, 1999; U.S., 2000). But the Up Series is as profound as Big
 Brother is vulgar and vacuous. To watch it is to stare into the
 mystery of time, to be confronted with the grand sweep of life.
 During my recent re-viewing of it, I was reminded of my first trip
 on an airplane, during which, flying from New York to Los
 Angeles, I spent virtually the entire time staring down, rapt, as a
 route that pioneers had taken months to traverse passed before
 my eyes in a matter of hours. Seeing the continent from such a
                                                         BRUCE BAWER



godlike perspective, I felt as if I'd magically overcome the limita-
tions of space; in the same way, viewers of the Up Series can feel
they've stepped outside of time.
   Indeed, as I re-viewed the series, I found myself thinking not of
Big Brother but of Proust, who sought to capture all of life in one
comprehensive work. And I found certain lines of poetry running
over and over through my mind, especially these two: "The bell
tolls for thee" (Donne) and "It is Margaret you mourn for"
(Hopkins). Why these lines? Because to watch the Up Series is,
ultimately, to gaze into a mirror--especially, perhaps, if the sub-
jects are one's own age. At age seven, even if they're British and
you're American, they look very much like kids who might have
been your second-grade schoolmates. You recognize the way their
parents dress them and cut their hair; there even seems to be
something indefinably period-bound about the way they move
and talk and gesture. To watch them live through the same
decades you've lived through, their clothing and haircuts and
language adjusting to the passing fashions, may be as close as
you'll ever come to watching a film tracking you through your
own life. To re-view the whole thing in the space of a few eve-
nings, moreover, is to see the period in which you were first
conscious of the world withdraw with terrifying speed into the
mists of history.
   The technological advances from one installment to the next
enhance one's awareness of the passage of time. The grainy
black-and-white of Seven Up! gives way to color images of steadily
improving quality; the sound gets better; the camerawork
becomes more fluid; the tone of the narration grows more
natural. Apted himself has pointed out that the evolution of his
directing technique--from an emphasis on seated "portrait-style"
interviews to "interviews on the move"--reflects the fact that
"documentary styles have changed" over the decades.
   Also reflected in the series are the dramatic shifts that have
occurred in social attitudes over the last half century. As the years
go by, the subjects feel freer to address once-uncomfortable
topics. We see boys who were raised to keep a stiff upper lip grow
into men who are willing to probe their feelings; we see the
children of emotionally undemonstrative parents who sent them
off to boarding school grow into openly affectionate fathers and
mothers who would never let their kids be raised by others. We
watch illegitimacy, still a scandal in the early sixties (when
THE HUDSON REVIEW



 Symon's unwed mother placed him in a children's home),
 become matter-of-fact: in 28 Up, Jackie talks casually about having
 a son out of wedlock. Several participants discuss their divorces.
 Tony and his wife thrash out his adultery. In 49 Up, taciturn,
 working-class Paul, the kind of guy whom you might have
 expected to resolve marital conflicts with a punch in the mouth,
 opens up about the psychiatric help he's sought (and from a
 woman doctor, no less) to overcome his crippling lack of self-
 esteem and save his marriage.
    As for the class system, if it was still a force to be reckoned with
 in the Britain of Seven Up!, by 42 Up the participants were divided
 on whether it even still existed or, if so, whether it had any clout.
 In the view of working-class Jackie, "class as such" had disap-
 peared, while upper-class Suzy opined that although it did "still
 exist to a certain extent," she cited the British royal family ("What
 a mess!") as proof that "money, wealth, [and] position [don't]
 give you happiness or health or anything like that." For what it's
 worth, the Up Series is in large part a tale of upward mobility:
 though the rich kids have remained rich, the poor kids have
 ended up considerably better off than viewers--or the film-
 makers--would likely have expected in 1964. While "England's
 still governed by . . . the accident of birth," Apted recently said,
 this is true "to a lesser and lesser extent."
    Certainly the project's original fixation on class has come to
 seem increasingly shallow and reductive, even beside the point,
 in the face of the complexity and unpredictability of the subjects'
 real lives. Once upon a time Apted believed that viewers unfa-
 miliar with Britain's class system wouldn't even be able to under-
 stand or appreciate the series; not until he attended an American
 screening of 28 Up, and saw it receive as enthusiastic a response as
 it had back home, did he recognize that, as he put it, "these films
 aren't what I think they are"--that they aren't about class or
 politics or economic issues but, quite simply, about life, about
 "being alive and getting through the day and growing up and
 making all of the choices that we all have to make." In retrospect,
 Apted has concluded that after 21 Up "the political side of it
 became secondary to the human side. We had kind of grown
 through that [preoccupation with class]. Those arguments weren't
 meaningful anymore. What was meaningful were people."
    What happened to the series after 21 Up is, in fact, astonishing.
 In both 7 Plus Seven and 21 Up, the mere act of cutting back and
                                                          BRUCE BAWER



forth between close-ups of the subjects at different ages was
enough to keep viewers absorbed. Apted admits to having wor-
ried that the series would grow boring after 21 Up because the
differences in physical appearance from one installment to the
next would necessarily be less arresting. But after twenty-one, he
found, the relative subtlety of the subjects' physical changes
didn't matter at all, because their ongoing emotional and psycho-
logical transfigurations turned out to be absolutely riveting.
   If the producers of Seven Up! divided their fourteen young
subjects by class, the adults these children have grown into split
more naturally along other lines: their marriages have either
worked or not; they've either had serious medical problems or
they haven't; they've either been ambitious and motivated or
they've just drifted along. (Sue, who's worked her way up the
professional ladder, says she hopes "my children want something
and go for it"; Jackie, who's floundered, resolves to push her kids
"a little bit harder" than her father pushed her.)
   The most significant distinction of all may be between the
more outgoing participants and the more introverted ones--
chief among them Neil, long the series' most haunting figure.
Cheerful at seven, by fourteen he already had a sadness in his
eyes that could still be observed in 49 Up. At twenty-one, crushed
over his rejection by Oxford, he had dropped out of Aberdeen
University and moved into a London squat, where he told Apted
that "I'd like to be somebody in a position of importance. . . . I'd
love to be in politics"; at twenty-eight, plagued by psychiatric
problems that made it hard for him to interact with others, he
was homeless and unemployed, collecting welfare in a bleak,
rural corner of Scotland where he admitted to being "known as
an eccentric"; at thirty-five he was living in public housing on the
remote, misty Shetland Islands. (Apted: "Do you ever think
you're going mad?" Neil: "I don't think it, I know it.") 42 Up
brought something of a shock: though still on the dole, Neil was
now in London, serving on a local government council, and was
more involved with others than he'd been in decades.
   Though Apted could certainly never have planned such a
thing, Neil, as it turns out, has played a special role in the series:
he's embodied the terrible aloneness of the human condition;
he's Everyman, a solitary soul wandering the earth in search of
God and meaning, a figure whose fragile, passionate presence
reinforces one's awareness of the preciousness and precarious-
THE HUDSON REVIEW



 ness of life. He also serves to remind viewers not to take for
 granted some people's ability to work, pay the bills, maintain a
 relationship, raise children. Neil's example reminds us that even
 the most "ordinary" life requires real effort, in some cases (such
 as that of Lynn, who's persevered in a demanding library job in
 the face of serious illness) a genuinely heroic struggle of which
 not everybody is capable.
    Neil isn't the only series participant whose life has taken an
 unexpected turn. Between 21 Up and 28 Up, Suzy metamor-
 phosed from a neurotic chain-smoker who was acidly cynical
 about parenthood into a serenely contented wife and mother. In
 49 Up we learned that cautious, conservative Andrew, who'd
 obediently followed his parents' script for his career and who
 seemed foreordained to stay at the same law firm forever, had
 quit the law, was converting an old barn for his family to live in,
 and was encouraging his kids' sense of adventure. And Symon,
 who at twenty-eight seemed resigned to a humdrum marriage
 and a dreary warehouse job, skipped 35 Up because he was going
 through a tough divorce only to return in 42 Up as a happily
 remarried man who shared his new wife's joie de vivre and had an
 office job he enjoyed. Every now and then, the Up Series reminds
 us that even people whom we've known (or feel we've known) for
 a long time, and whom we may have come to regard as thorough-
 ly predictable, can astound us.
    Most surprising of all was Bruce's about-face. A longtime
 bachelor who'd consecrated his life to teaching immigrants' kids
 in the East End, Bruce got married in 42 Up and seven years
 later--now a father of two--had traded in his East End pupils
 and modest East End home for the exclusive, thousand-year-old
 St. Albans School in Hertfordshire and an elegant country
 manse. Once a harsh critic of establishments like St. Albans,
 Bruce now said that he valued its "higher academic level" and
 that it was important to him to know his children were safe. His
 efforts in the East End, he confessed, had finally worn him down:
 "I just thought, `I don't think I can do this till I'm sixty.'" Though
 old friends accused him of becoming a Tory, his wife said she'd
 "stopped him apologizing" for his career move. Was Bruce a
 fallen saint or a wised-up sucker? Neither--by 49 Up he, like
 other Apted protagonists, had grown as complex and ambiguous
 as a character in Henry James, the meticulously selected and
 intercut layers of his past adding up to an exquisitely suggestive
 portrait of a man who, while deeply and genuinely good, had
                                                             BRUCE BAWER



also, for most of his adulthood, been self-denying to a fault, for
reasons at which we can only guess, though various details of his
life, vouchsafed to us over the decades, seem to hold out
tantalizing clues. The quiet mastery with which Apted shapes his
materials into such richly compelling portraits proves that a
documentary can indeed be an art work--an art work, one might
add, at a very high level indeed.
   "Give me a child at seven," says the narrator at both the
beginning and end of Seven Up!, quoting a Jesuit maxim, "and I
will give you the man." Viewed forty-plus years after it was filmed,
Seven Up does indeed turn out to contain clues to the adults these
children will grow into. Bruce, who will spend two decades in the
East End instructing the children of immigrants, at seven wants to
go to Africa and "try to teach people who aren't civilized to be
more or less good." Nick, who will become a scientist, says: "When
I grow up, I'd like to find out all about the moon and all that."
The seven-year-old Charles, who will go on to be a journalist and
documentary director, already appears to be an instinctive
interviewer: after John answers a question about which
newspaper he likes best, it's Charles, sitting further down the
couch, who jumps in with a follow-up question: "What do you like
about it?" Yet the Up Series is also a lesson in life's unpredictability.
In the director's commentary on the DVD of 42 Up, Apted recalls
his strong early suspicion that Tony, who at fourteen was hanging
around a racetrack and wanted to be a jockey, would end up
leading a life of crime; instead Tony became a hard-working
London cabbie and at forty-nine was a devoted family man with
homes in Essex and on the coast of Spain. (Apted tells us that
Tony, when apprised of the future he'd imagined for him, said
simply: "Mike, you can never judge a book by its cover.")
   Watching the Up Series, one reflects that there have been few
half-century-long periods in history during which ordinary
people in any given country have been able to live out their lives,
find happiness, and prosper (as almost all of Apted's subjects
have done) without seeing their world torn apart by war,
revolution, plague, pogrom, or economic disaster. Yet notwith-
standing Granada's original ideological motivation, the series, by
and large, has paid relatively little heed to the historical and
political background of its subjects' lives. While they were
growing up and growing old, the reins of British government
were being passed from Wilson to Heath to Wilson to Callaghan
to Thatcher to Major to Blair; man walked on the moon; the
THE HUDSON REVIEW



 Berlin Wall fell; 9/11 happened.3 Yet Apted makes no reference
 to any of these developments. "The film," he has acknowledged,
 "is often criticized for not being political enough," for presenting
 its subjects as if they "live in some kind of vacuum." Yes, he regrets
 having included so few girls in the original group and is sorry that
 none of them quite personifies the feminist revolution; yet it's a
 strength of the series, not a weakness, that it doesn't tidily reflect
 broad social trends.
     That being said, broad social trends receive more attention in
 49 Up than in any previous installment, owing to the rapid
 demographic makeover of London's East End, where several of
 the participants grew up. Bruce wasn't the only one to move out
 of the neighborhood between 42 Up and 49 Up; so did Sue, who'd
 lived there her whole life. "The East End," she said flatly, "has
 changed--it's changed a lot." Her classmate Jackie, now living far
 from London, wistfully described her new community as being
 "like the East End used to be." And Tony the cabbie, who in 42 Up
 had lamented the immigrant takeover of his old stamping
 grounds ("If that's what they call progress," he said, "so be it"), in
 49 Up was even blunter: "I like being with my own people," he
 said--while sitting on the patio of his house in Spain.
     Apted has long ended each installment of his series with the
 concluding moments of the original 1964 program, in which we
 see his subjects once again as seven-year-olds--their lives
 stretching ahead of them, their minds innocent of the things we
 now know about their future lives. Once again we hear the
 narrator say: "At the end of their very special day in London, after
 their trip to the zoo and the party, we took our children to an
 adventure playground. . . ." This ritual return to the series'
 beginning is always deeply, mysteriously moving. How extraordi-
 nary, one finds oneself thinking, that before Apted came along,
 nobody had ever thought to use the medium of film (or video-
 tape) to create such a work. Jaded though one may be by Holly-
 wood special effects, the Up Series--which has no need for high-
 tech wizardry--causes one to wonder anew at the technological
 miracle that makes it possible to capture moments of lives over
 the decades and to splice them together, as Apted has, in ways
 that can seem, to an awed viewer, to transcend the very laws of
 nature.
   3 Two of Apted's subjects, to be sure, no longer live in Britain: Nick has lived in America

 since 28 Up, and Paul moved with his family to Australia soon after Seven Up!