Long Live My Hap­py Head

The brain and the heart vie for suprema­cy in Austen McCow­an and Will Hewitt’s wist­ful­ly sen­ti­men­tal fea­ture doc Long Live My Hap­py Head, which offers a tear-frost­ed win­dow onto the life of Edin­burgh-based com­ic artist Gor­don Shaw who has toiled for over a decade with an inop­er­a­ble tumour in his noggin.

What begins as the gen­tly mean­der­ing tale of a shy, indomitably self-effac­ing man attempt­ing to retain his spir­it and san­i­ty through the con­so­la­tions of art and love (the lat­ter via his long dis­tance rela­tion­ship with jovial Vir­gin­ian griz­zly bear Shawn) soon devel­ops into a piece about the bizarre obsta­cles that life throws up that make achiev­ing hap­pi­ness that much more difficult.

Gordon’s intri­cate sys­tem of cop­ing mech­a­nisms are pred­i­cat­ed large­ly on a num­ber of things being able to hap­pen: Shawn being avail­able to vis­it him as often as pos­si­ble; being mobile and sharp enough to design comics; hav­ing his fam­i­ly near­by to sup­port him. Yet the epic, morale-crush­ing patience-tester that was the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic throws Gordon’s already-pre­car­i­ous life through a hoop and leaves him fac­ing his dire exis­ten­tial jour­ney alone.

The film doesn’t choose to go par­tic­u­lar­ly deep into the med­ical aspects of the tumour, and instead focus­es on it as some­thing more abstract and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly per­ti­nent – a sit­u­a­tion that prompts a con­stant change of lifestyle and char­ac­ter. Gordon’s own acer­bic graph­ic nov­els detail his strug­gles with the malig­nant fiend which he has named Rick, and even the film’s var­i­ous ani­mat­ed digres­sions don’t see the pair engag­ing in much dia­logue beyond a dis­mis­sive, ​“Fuck you!”

One of the film’s main plea­sures, though, is its cen­tral rela­tion­ship between Gor­don and Shawn who, from the out­set, seem to have very lit­tle in com­mon with one anoth­er. Where Gor­don is intro­vert­ed and some­times a lit­tle inar­tic­u­late (a symp­tom of his con­di­tion), Shawn is loqua­cious and emo­tion­al, already ready to blast out an Irish dit­ty down the line. Much of the con­ver­sa­tion cap­tured on film is of the logis­ti­cal vari­ety, about flights and appoint­ments and organ­is­ing Zoom calls. Yet a cli­mac­tic scene in which both men break down while try­ing to take stock of their insane sit­u­a­tion con­firms the sin­cer­i­ty and strength of their bond.

This is a film about the highs and lows of ill­ness and how painful it is to con­stant­ly jack-knife between emo­tions. Although Gor­don tries as best he can to make a game of his endeav­our (turn­ing the clank­ing sounds pro­duced by MRI machines into tech­no music), there’s a sense that he’s only able to remain calm and col­lect­ed because the whole sit­u­a­tion is just so meta­phys­i­cal­ly unfath­omable. The moments where he sud­den­ly loos­es it are often the result him tak­ing stock of life’s won­ders, and his cool brav­ery in the face of such trau­ma makes you hope and pray that his bat­tle with Rick still has a long time to go yet.