Cult Classic: ‘Withnail and I’

A British masterpiece in dark humor

“We want the finest wines available to humanity! We want them here and we want them now!”

You had to be invited in order to gain entry. I stood beside Shuffling Pete, a dimwitted personality whose sense of self was enveloped in his ability to smoke as many bongs as possible. He knocked. Then knocked again. Paused. Then knocked four more times. I rolled my eyes. All I wanted was to score some pot and get the fuck out of there. Matt the Dealer opened the door and beckoned us inside.

The TV was barely visible through a haze of smoke. We sat on the couch facing the screen next to Matt. He pointed at the box and asked if we had ever seen this movie. The sound was turned off. As our eyes adjusted to the dark of a pothead’s apartment, I could make out several figures lounging around the room. It was like some strange cult. Everyone was reciting the script as the actors played out their roles. Dealer etiquette required me to stay for at least one joint before I left. To my horror, Matt the Dealer was skinning up a Camberwell Carrot in honor of the movie we were watching.

“Rewind man…uhhhh…rewind….classic…”

We stayed and watched the scene on repeat over twenty times. The Camberwell Carrot was still going strong when we left.

Withnail and I wasn’t my coming-of-age movie. I was fourteen when this film hit the big screen. It immediately became a cult classic. Years before the term ‘Slacker’ defined a generation, two aspiring young actors scratched and clawed their way up the slippery pole of society.

At the ripe age of twenty-one, I got my first glimpse of the duo on a bootleg VHS tape. The film had already made its debut on the terrestrial channels in the UK and was now widely circulated on the student scene. There was no pre-loading back in the 90s. You arrive at a party, swig as much alcohol as possible, and moved on when the beer ran out. This particular party was in a squat in North London. Scabby mattresses butted the walls. Roaches carpeted the floor and a solitary TV with a Mickey Mouse aerial transmitted its dull glow to an inebriated audience.

A drinking game was in session. Everyone was welcome. The rules were simple. Each time the lead character, Withnail, subsumed any alcohol, everybody had to down the same substance. For the record, that’s roughly nine and a half glasses of very cheap red wine, a one and a half-pint of cider, one shot of lighter fluid (this separates the men from the boys), two and a half measures of gin, six glasses of sherry, thirteen drams of Scotch whisky and a half-pint of ale. Very few make it to the end of the movie.

I didn’t bother keeping up. I’m a lightweight when it came to booze. My best efforts were lodged as six double Wild Turkeys before throwing up in a Welsh gutter somewhere in Mumbles. What I did love was the characters. The sheer desperation of the two as they struggled to survive the hardships of life. Eventually one of them makes it as an actor while the other continued to waste away in squalor.

The film starred Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant. This was the movie that embedded Grant to me as a cultural hero. He sat alongside Malcolm McDowell in the effortless cool stakes. Both of my heroes made a plethora of shit movies after their cultural nadir. For McDowell, he never lived up to his ‘Clockwork Orange’ or ‘If’ status. A legend that should have died young to preserve the memory of genius. Likewise, Grant barely made a respectable movie after Withnail until ‘Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life’. A twenty-minute short film that captured the essence of Grant’s bugged-eye mania. Gosford Park in 2001 arguably would be Grant’s next best role. Such was the power of his performance in his debut movie that everything afterward seemed tame by comparison. Paul McGann became the eighth Doctor Who. A largely forgettable Doctor much like the rest of McGann’s career. His role in Withnail was the straight guy. The prop to Grant’s menace.

“I don’t advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into you brain! This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.”

As the years passed, I would meet many dealers who spoke like Danny. Each and every one of them would skin up their version of a Camberwell Carrot. “Who says it’s a Camberwell Carrot?” asks Withnail. “I did. I invented it in Camberwell and it looks like a carrot.” Every dealer was able to quote Withnail and I’s Danny verbatim. “It’s impossible to make it with anything less (than twelve skins).” Danny’s long-awaited screen comeback would be as a roadie in Wayne’s World 2.

My favorite scene had to be at the police station. Withnail had just been caught by the fuzz driving erratically down the motorway. All Along the Watchtower blares as the clapped-out old motor, a Jaguar MK2, swerves from side to side, barely dodging other road users. When the police van finally pulls him over, he refuses to take a breath test. Instead, he gets frogmarched to the station to submit a urine example. Taking an extraordinarily long time peeing, the policeman pulls back the screen to reveal Withnail grasping a catheter filled with the piss of a schoolboy. The warm liquid fountains everywhere much to the disgust of the officer. Several arrests in my youth had me pondering where I could procure a child’s urine for subsequent drug testing.

This film has had the biggest impact on my life than any other bar ‘The Life of Brian’. There was no time in my student life when somebody would not quote this movie. I can’t remember ever going to a student’s digs without them having a copy of ‘Withnail and I’. It is an immensely quotable film all played out in colloquial English. From the pot-smoking to the drinking, the Withnail world is a bleak place of desperate measures. Bin liners for footwear. Deep Heat covered bodies for warmth. The smirking euphemisms of amorous and very horny, Uncle Monty, as he attempts to seduce the lead actor.

Everything about this film is fearlessly British.

It was like a reverse hippy flick. Where the States did the 1960s as free-flowing LSD, florid colors, bright sun, and sex on call, the British view was a depressing flipside to the swingers of California. There was no sunshine in 1969 London. This was the fag-end of the Free Love movement. Cold, hard, realism served up in weeks-old teabags.

To me, there will never be another movie quite like it.

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