According to Greenaway, the "Tulse Luper is a sort of alter ego created many years ago -- Tulse could be said to rhyme with the pulse in your wrist, and Luper is a corruption of the Latin for wolf. So how about "danger lurking at the very door of your life?"
The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a multimedia project by Peter Greenaway, a Welsh film maker, consisting of three films, a 16 episode TV series, 92 DVDs, and web sites, CD ROMS and books. No wonder it took me so long to understand this damn thing.
The project is essentially an autobiography of a Tulse Henry Purcell Luper, a professional writer and project maker / fictional professional prisoner. It is structured around 92 suitcases allegedly belonging to Luper, recovered from his voyages across the world. Luper's life is set against the background of the 20th c. history of uranium. The kooky thing about this is, the multiplicity of narrative possibilities in the Tulse Luper project that constantly play with narration against a background that states “there is no such thing as history, there are only historians” History is only "his story", rather than an all encompassing doctrine that provides an empirical account of what truly went down in the past.
Luper spends his whole life in 16 prisons located all over the world. The website has a map in which one can trace the whereabouts of said prisons. It also has a time line, a manual, stories and characteristics. I am unclear as to the context for these stories (consisting only of titles like "The Fat Boy" and "The Kangaroo Lover"). I think I get the characteristics option, which includes the 92 characteristics of the 92 characters in the story. They are super obscure characteristics, like "climbed Christmas trees" (which conjured an image that totally made me LOL in the library.)
The number 92 is significant because it’s the atomic number of uranium. Each suitcase contains an object to represent the world, which advances or comments upon the story in some way, although in many cases its contents are metaphorical.
The time line goes through an incredibly detailed account of 9 segments of his history, complete with external links to Antwerp Stations official website, Wikipedia, random blogs, and resources that embed the life and times of this Luper character in reality. This is what makes him seem real. He is more than just a character in a film - the point of the project seems to be to make him appear as real as possible.
The ambition of the project over the next three years is to build an extensive online archive of his adventures, the places he goes, the people he meets, his prisons, the stuff he made, the objects that he hides in his mysterious suitcases from 1989 – 1921. This is stated on the site, but I don't know if this is an actual goal of the creator or if its part of the project. I can't imagine Greenaway stating something so obvious and un-mysterious about his personal artistic motives. The reason I feel this way is because I think he actually wants us to believe that Luper is real. I can't see him giving up the facade right on the website. It's Luper's website, not Greenaway's.
I don't think such a venture would be possible without the internet. Providing proof in the form of legitimate websites, scientific data, (the scientific aspect of uranium and the repetition of the number 92), and maps of the world. The internet is really conducive to reducing the great lengths people go to to achieve a sense of reality in what is non existent. Luper might not have flesh and blood, but he exists on the internet and on film insofar as his "life" is embedded in a series of interconnected companies, blogs and people.
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