Freckles and Misery

I dare anyone to watch Dear Wendy and not find themselves walking with a bit of a swagger, wishing they had a pistol in their pocket.

If you haven’t seen the new Lars Von Trier/ Thomas Vinterberg collaboration, it’s about a group of misfits who fall in love with firearms and transform their self-images through their relationship with their ‘partners’. Apparently the rest of the world thinks it’s a pile of tosh, in particular the man in the front row (I believe it was Noah – Newcastle’s premier exponent of performance art as life*) who performed the most ostentatious yawn I have heard. I, however, liked it.

Maybe I liked it because I have also been a pacifist gun-lover. In the summer of 2000 I spent several months working in an American summer camp. Prior to going I made only one request on my application – that I would not work at a camp where riflery or any gun sports were taught. Having worked in one place for a few months I moved to another and requested that, since riflery was on the curriculum, that I be excused from escorting children to classes because of my pacifist beliefs. The camp manager was happy enough with this arrangement and all was well.

One extraordinarily dull day I found myself ambling round the empty camp with a couple of friends. Someone suggested we go down to the range and pointlessly shoot at tin-cans for the afternoon. Naturally I resisted. Then I relented. Then I fell in love. It was hard to justify but I was just so good at it! Just as when another human being likes you, you can’t help but warm to them, so I found it hard to resist the gun once it had shown its feelings for me.

So when Jamie Bell strokes his beloved Wendy in the film I felt a bit like I understood. Thankfully things did not end quite so disastrously for me as they do for the characters in the film. I just felt a bit guilty and embarrassed and never told anyone in England about it. Until now, obviously.

I’m hoping that vegetarians will contact me to say that they had a secret meat-feast in Bavaria. Except they wouldn’t, would they? Unless they were unprincipled wretches like myself.


*i.e. he dresses funny