From Rio to film polls, we can’t get enough of competition

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/23/rio-film-polls-competition-mulholland-drive

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Here’s a poser for you. Two polls were announced on Tuesday. In one, Mulholland Drive, the surreal headscratcher from David Lynch, was voted the best film of the century so far. In another, daft, farty sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys was named best British sitcom of the same period. Which was voted for by critics, and which the public?

As the universally panned Suicide Squad tops the box office for yet another week, the gulf between the two sets of judges has rarely seemed wider. Reviewers are keen on showing off their appreciation of the impenetrable; audiences, to misquote Basil Fawlty, are keen on the bleedin’ obvious. The battle lines are gouged, the possibility of rapprochement ever less likely. And that’s just how we like it.

For nailing our colours to the cultural mast has become central to our sense of self. As politics leaves us confused, people seek definition instead through their taste in TV, movies and music.

There is no real rationale behind these comparisons of vaguely contemporaneous works of art. All such forms of competition are ludicrous. We might like to write them off as the brainchild of wily studios, intended to drum up interest in their products, but such contests would wither were it not for the fact they allow us to indulge our appetite for competition. We grab the opportunity for posture and mutual grooming, and to squash underfoot whomever thinks the South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk isn’t a patch on the kooky American Wes Anderson.

The timing of both polls was artful. For up until a couple of days before their release, we had the ultimate corrective to such madness. The Olympics is one of the few places where competition is correct. People square off against each other. You give them a score and tell them definitively where they rank.

Lovely if you win, of course. Less so to have the definite and immediate knowledge, should you lose, that those four years of training weren’t worth it. The rest of us blunder through life uncertain as to the wisdom of our decisions. Such absolute vindication – or the opposite – rarely arrives. And perhaps that’s preferable. Optimistic fogginess could be bliss.

Scarface

I’ve recently acquired an above-eye scar suggestive of a knife fight. I picked it up in France on my holidays, meaning my new top tip for anyone feeling peaky is to hotfoot it there immediately. Even without an EU health card, emergency care across the Channel is incredibly cheap, quick, easy and efficient. Such no-nonsense scalpel work! Just five days for a comprehensive pus analysis to be posted home!

Swarms of Brits evidently stagger through their casualty doors over the summer eager for such treatment. This is indicated by the posters on the waiting room walls, which advise how to keep cool in the heat and come in various languages, the wording on each subtly different. For the French: drink more water and eat well. For the Brits: avoid all exercise and any alcohol.

Gone with the wind

Of all possible causes of death, “bagpipe lung” must be one of most specific and horrific. A new study has warned of the dangers of regular tooting, prompted by the awful case of a man who developed fatal hypersensitivity pneumonitis from fungi lurking in his drones. But the phlegmy reality of wind instruments will come as a shock only to those unfamiliar with such puffing. My childhood flute practice always ended with a grisly minute of draining each tube, then poking hopelessly away with a sort of absorbent wand. Enrol in a school band, and the finale of each session involves a shower of flicked spittle. Art always has a price.