Coates on film

Just in time for the BAFTAs and Oscars, Tim takes his first steps towards stardom. On YouTube or, as one of his acolytes put it, U-Tube, he may be seen holding forth to the good people of Somerset.

We turned to our film studies expert, Professor Jean-Luc Bergman-Allen, of the University of Loamshire. 'What is interesting', he told us, 'is how the director here subverts traditional cinematic values of form and narrative structure and instead gives us work that, transcending its technical shortcomings, makes us ask the question, what is life and, if there are another 33 minutes of this stuff to sit through, is it worth living? In such a way, he gives us a Coates who is both Coates, and not-Coates, self and other, and it is in the dialectical relationship of these that we find such slight resolution that the work offers at the end. The crass fetishisation of the book leads us to speculate about the place of that object in the subject's infantile sexual awakening and, pace Lacan and Žižek, whether a radical hermeneutics of the library might not be an achievable project. More Pernod? Don't mind if I do.'