Marsh’s version of Martin Amis’ distasteful satirical novel Dead Babies is sometimes titled Dead Babies and sometimes Mood Swingers. By either title, it’s a failure, and its picnic episode a disaster.
Fueled by drugs and alcohol, Marsh’s picnickers become progressively deranged. The picnic begins pleasantly upbeat and then spirals downward.
The picnickers, a disgruntled group of twenty-somethings, are momentarily stopped by a sign in a pasture reading a sign, “Fuck off/Trespassers Will /Be Prosecuted.” Disregarding the warning, Quentin rips the sign off the fence post. Undeterred, they climb through the barbed-wire fence, and ignoring the cattle beyond them, they spread a blanket. Unloading suitcases of drugs, wines, and whiskey, they get high.
If it’s distasteful, this group will discuss it, especially body parts and sex. For instance, there is the lurid tale about Keith, whose father raped him and killed his mother. The women take off their clothes and compare breasts. Remarkably, the men keep their clothes on, except for the guy crapping in the bushes.
The picnickers madly scramble when a cow ambles over. Safely behind the fence, Skip stupidly smashes the heifer’s head with a brick, “Motherfuck, motherfuck,” he says when the cow falls over dead. Undeterred and ready to go on, Keith says, “Let’s get drunk.”
Marsh does not care about food. But in his novel, Amis’s picnickers bring beef steak sandwiches, sardines, liver sausage, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs, crispbread with smoked salmon, salad, Celery, radishes, cheese, apples, bananas, biscuits, six bottles each of Pouilly-Fuissé, St. Émilion, and Château Neuf de Pape, one Glenfiddich, one Gordon’s Gin, and one Napoleon Brandy.
See William Marsh. Mood Swingers (2001), aka Dead Babies (2000). The screenplay by William Marsh is based on Martin Amis’ 1975 Dead Babies