There is no energy left in Christopher Lambert. His words are tired, gestures weak, light hurts his eyes and cinema gives him heartburn. The glory avenues, the ones he used to walk, now lie in the past. Sighs are all he can muster, flatlined breaths toneless and hollow. Shame has descended and agitation grows from the disappointment. The latter we share, both him and us. The star’s light shrinks to a dim flicker.
What contrast, what change! The heights, we used to barely see them, such was their majesty. Now not even the memory stays: only the memory of the memory, remembrance of the heavenly heights, a few fleeting images retained during the plummet south. The horizon offers nothing -- no Highlander, no Mortal Kombat, no Fortress. The Lambert laugh can’t be heard, nor can the cheeky grin be seen.
There was a time when brilliance sang from each pore, when each stride easily dazzled onlookers. Lambert was admired, worshipped even, a receptacle for compliments and well-wishes. He was officially France’s best export, replacing the Eiffel Tower as the country’s icon. He was born heir to the French intellectual tradition and lived as a successor to its erudite radicality. Lambert never called himself a Structuralist, nor did he ally himself with Marxism. He left the nouveau roman to itself and shunned Oulipo. Despite being only eleven years old at the time, he stood back during the tumult of May ’68 -- ‘let others have the limelight,’ he said.
Lambert channeled his polemics into his art, brandishing heady ideas on the nexus of art and life. Thorns were driven into archaic doctrines, philosophies got ripped in two. He created a dialectical shitstorm from which emerged the truth of Lambert’s vision: a world shorn of needless ideas, needless fussing, needless restriction, a world of open paths and open minds. Yet, like Baudrillard and his despair at the exhaustion of ideas, Lambert took needlessness too far.
All was well up to a point, monies and kudos flowed from success. Highlander exemplified the period. But then a shocking event: there stood Lambert, fly undone, pissing all over everything. His determination to destroy the needless led him to destroy the things we needed, and these things ended up being soaked in his piss.
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