The Trip to Poetry

Travels with Steve and Rob

In The Trip to Greece, the fourth installment of a series of films in which the actor Steve Coogan and the comedian-impressionist Rob Brydon play loosely fictionalized versions of themselves, Rob reads aloud a snippet from the Poetics of “Ari Stottle,” declaring that “imitation is for human beings both a natural and pleasurable act.” Imitations are what The Trip movies, directed by Michael Winterbottom, are best known for: feats of one-upmanship as Rob and Steve try to out-Michael Caine each other: You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off! There isn’t much of a plot to the films, each of which began its life as a six-part television series, yet each is held tenuously if episodically together by a self-consciously literary conceit.¹ In the first trip, aka The Trip, our heroes journey to the Lake District and quote Coleridge and Wordsworth; The Trip to Italy finds them on the trail of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; in The Trip to Spain Rob plays Sancho to Steve’s Don Quixote; The Trip to Greece, the final film, returns us to the omphalos of the Western literary tradition, Homer’s Odyssey.

These scenes coast on the comical disparity between the grandeur of the poetry and the pettiness into which each man is gleefully or spitefully immersed. Rob can’t seem to stop doing imitations of Al Pacino and is incapable of quoting poetry in his own voice rather than, say, Ian McKellen’s; meanwhile each scene of these movies, especially the first one, is saturated with Steve’s easily bruised vanity and buoyed by his pompousness about his increasingly successful yet never truly secure career in show business. But poetry too is a form of imitation—imitation conducted entirely with words, as Ari Stottle says. So what does it mean for viewers to watch these men drive, eat, and bicker, imitating tourists and food critics and themselves, while also at key moments imitating poets?

Poetry is a kind of virtuality—not virtual reality of the 3D goggles variety but a kind of perceptual potential stored up in and released by language. A poem in the grain of Romanticism charges up an array of vivid metaphors that lift off from the phenomenological world whose contemplation triggers them—a skylark, say, or an old leech gatherer, or the poet’s own wounded foot, or his baby asleep in its cradle, or a Grecian urn. From such objects the poem sets out on a mental flight that temporarily cancels the limits of bodily perception, conjuring a realm of absolute freedom and affinity, only to return or collapse back into quotidian, tangible, prosaic existence: “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” indeed. A poem is not a place but a flight plan, a circuit of travel that returns the reader to wherever she happens to be standing, accompanied maybe by a sense of refreshment, the sublimity of an elevation momentarily attained. It’s a simple feeling complexly attained and described—a sensation of possibility, ecstatic or elegiac in tone. Ecstatic because it is possibility—a glimpse into one’s own potential and the unlimited powers of desire. Elegiac because it is only possibility, unfulfilled potential that the reader is no closer to realizing at poem’s end than when they first started reading it.

The Trip movies are nothing if not a kind of second-order, self-mocking and self-referential take on Romanticism, akin to the mock-heroics performed so brilliantly by Romantic ironists like Byron. And Brydon and Coogan are performers, not poets. But the trick of The Trips is to isolate these people-pleasers from any audience but each other, at least for their first half (in the second half of each film company appears, usually female company, and no matter how hard the women laugh at the men’s antics I can never escape a sense of the fatigue they must experience in the face of all the conspicuous, continuous display of male vanity and neediness). Isolation follows them, like the camera, into moments of missed connection that lend the films their poignancy, their melancholic bite: alone in a hotel room or on a moor with a cell phone, reaching out for wives or girlfriends or professional opportunities in scenes gauged to measure the tenuousness of each man’s identity and life.

Death stalks the travelers, from the funeral oration Steve delivers for Rob in the first film to the imagined dialogue with a volcano victim at Pompeii in the second, through the scenes in the fourth film in which the men venture into a literal underworld, the Caves of Diros, followed soon after by news of the death of Steve’s father, which ends the duo’s odyssey and sends him soberly home. Rob, however, remains in Greece, a most unlikely Odysseus, reunited with his wife on Ithaca and singing conjugal praises to her in a lagoon, in a voice twice removed from his own, doing Anthony Hopkins reciting Homer. The very last shot shows us Steve back in England, in the back of a car, on his way to view his father’s body. In motion, a traveler to the undiscovered country, for the last time.

A series of eminently YouTube-able riffs, of glamorous locations strung together, of high-end restaurant tables, of episodes truncated and remixed, with that most minimal and durable of throughlines, the journey, serving in place of a plot. But there is something poetic, romantic, virtual built into the structure of these films, that elevates them above travel porn and makes them stick in my mind like a line of Wordsworth’s or Shelley’s. Their death-hauntedness gives these poems, these films, a sense of intensest life. They are holiday films, vacations, pastorals, but Et in Arcadia ego: Death, too, is in Arcadia, reminding even these most fortunate and privileged of men of “the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy.”² Neither man can quote Wordsworth, in Richard Burton’s voice or his own, without having his pretensions immediately punctured by the other—Rob can’t escape his inability or unwillingness to speak, literally, in his own voice, while Steve’s suffering face repeatedly brings him to the brink of an empathic understanding that collapses as soon as another human being enters the frame. (A gentle exception is made for the character of Steve’s son, who recurs as a character in each film and whose growing up we glimpse. I also want to praise Michael Winterbottom’s camera for its empathic touch, manifested in its tender regard for the women in the most recent film, all of whom have aged beautifully in the ten years since the original Trip was taken.)

Noble words, noble profiles, captured in stunning landscapes (Yorkshire and the Lakes District, the Amalfi Coast, Andalusia, Greek islands, etc.), undermined but never fully undercut by the verbal pratfalls and put-downs of Steve and Rob, who change places from one film to the next (Steve is the ambitious lothario and Rob the faithful homebody in the first film, but in the second Steve cares for his son while Rob has a fling with a female sailor) and above all, never stop quoting, whether it be the vernacular poetry of James Bond movies or the sublime kitsch of Abba.

1. The Poetics, by the way, claims that of all the methods of constructing drama the episodic is the worst.

2. From William Empson’s brilliant and strange book Some Versions of Pastoral, pg. 5.