Tractatus Illogicus

Let's be realistic! Derek Jarman wouldn't have made Wittgenstein if the chap hadn't been a batty boy.

Not that it's a bad film. In fact it's probably one of Jarman's more watchable efforts - though to tell the truth it's the only Jarman that I've actually sat through all the way, so (to quote someone holier than me) who am I to judge?

It's not actually a biopic so much as a brief overview of some of the more pertinent facts about the man's life and work - pertinent that is in Jarman's mind rather than in that of his subject. And so we have a prepubescent and, at times, partially clothed Clancy Chassay as a Young Wittgenstein narrating a theatre-of-the-absurd-style "filmed play" featuring an Old Wittgenstein, played by Karl Johnson, performing little set-pieces from Wittgenstein's life as a young man in a slightly jokey, piss-take sort of a way. Chassay had previously been in Jarman's film War Requiem, so one can only assume that the old perv had taken rather a shine to him. But then with a script by Terry Eagleton one doesn't expect intellectual greatness, nor even an inkling of the spectacular lyricism of Wittgenstein's thought. And one doesn't get either either.

Wittgenstein himself was of course the last of the "great" philosophers - not so much in the sense that he was a man who produced good philosophy as in that he was a character whose life-story can be said to have encouraged a different way of looking at the universe. Where are the Kierkegaards and the Heideggers of today? Where have all the Kants and Hegels been since Wittgenstein's time? Where, for that matter the Rousseaus and the Descarteses? There have, if one reflects for a moment, been none.

There was actually rather more Wittgenstein-related fun to be had in a film I saw when it first came out in 2008 (but then never heard of again) called The Oxford Murders. It was set, coincidentally enough, in Oxford, and starred a post-Rings but pre-Hobbit Elijah Wood. It also featured lots of quotations from Wittgenstein, and seemed to be pitched almost as a pilot for an Inspector Morse-style TV-series - only of course I saw it at the cinema. In short, it was the sort of guff that would have had Douglas Adams turning in his grave. At the time I quietly thought it an overlooked geekgasm - almost as if the New Frodo had decided to take a leaf out of fellow hobbit Dominic Monaghan's playbook to do a bit of Hetty Wainthropp-style investigating, only instead of teaming up with John Thaw - with whom Monaghan had of course appeared in underrated WWII cozzie drama Monsignor Reynard - he'd plumbed for the Old Aragorn - Old Aragorn in this case being not Robert Stephens (already dead by that stage in his career) but John Hurt - at that stage still pre-Who.

Confused? Well, who knows?