Month / March 2009

by Jonathan M

Don’t Let The Wrong One In : Re-inventing the Femme Fatale

*Please Note – This Piece is Full of Spoilers*

There are ideas that seem to be of a certain place and time.  Call them icons, if you will.  One of the most powerful icons of the early to mid twentieth century is the femme fatale.  Born of a cultural climate where gender was not divorced from sex and where women were expected to be virginal and submissive, femme fatales rejected this essentialist vision of gender by being sexually aggressive, socially independent and more than willing to use their sexual wiles to render men subservient to their own desires and goals.  Decades after the arrival of the contraceptive pill and miles down the road towards sexual equality, you could be forgiven for thinking that a society such as ours has outgrown the need for bold cinematic challenges to our understandings of gender.  Indeed, nowadays the femme fatale seems like little more than an anachronism; as out of place in the modern world as a cockney spiv might be in pre-Credit Crunch London.  However,  even the most liberal of societies falls into lazy thought patterns, habits of conception that need to be re-examined lest they go stale, rot and become oppressive dogma.  Swedish Vampire film Let The Right One In (2008) is a film that rides out not only against popular theories of gender, but also against the commonly held belief that children are innocent, pliable creatures who need to be protected from adults.  It does so by rejuvenating and reinventing that most iconoclastic of icons, the femme fatale.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Zack Snyder’s Orgasm Death Gimmick

I have always found my view of the genius perceived by others in Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1987) to be obscured by the looming presence of the bleeding obvious.  I respect the form, less so the matter.  Zack Snyder’s  Watchmen (2009) failed to turn this respect into love.  For most of the film I felt the adaptation so submissive and passive that I might as well have stayed at home and read the comic.  However, there are moments of greatness in Watchmen.  Moments that have very little to do with Alan Moore and a lot to do with Zack Snyder.  Moments when Snyder allows himself off the leash, and no… I am not talking about the stupid fight scenes.

In an essay entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud argues that pleasure stems not from stimulation but rather a lack of stimulation.  The lack of stimulation that comes, for example, from taking off shoes that pinch your feet and the moment not of orgasm but the instant of satiation immediately after the orgasm but before post-orgasmic tristesse sets in.  If pleasure is the complete lack of stimulation then it follows logically that death is the ultimate pleasure and that the pursuit of pleasure is somehow also the pursuit of death.  Freud called this drive towards death Thanatos.  No film maker argues the case for the connection between pleasure and death more aggressively than Zack Snyder.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Cinematic Vocabulary – Opening Scene of Touch of Evil (1958)

Write enough reviews and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of films as discrete cultural units.  Artefacts cut asunder from the rest of the world and presented to the audience in a neat little package.  Thinking of films in these terms tends to lead one to focus upon macroscopic issues such as plot, performance and theme whilst ignoring the fine-grained details of the film such as the cinematography, the sound editing and the techniques used to convey those plots and themes.  In an attempt to wean myself away from thinking of films as discrete cultural artefacts, I have decided to write a series of pieces that focus on individual scenes from a critical perspective.  My own take on the Anatomy of a Scene series if you will.

The first scene to go under the microscope is the opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Blasphemous Geometries 12

My latest Blasphemous Geometries column has gone up over at Futurismic.

It’s an attempt to lay down some thoughts on a different way of looking at story-telling in video games, but it’s also an excuse for me to make wise-arse comments about a number of different games I’ve played over the years.  Speaking of being a wise-arse I was intriged to discover a YouTube pilot for an Australian TV programme called Game Damage.  Starring The Escapist‘s answer to Charlie Brooker, Yahtzee Croshaw.  It will be interesting to see whether the show will be picked up because I think it highlights the problem with game commentary in a nut shell.  If you watch the pilot you’ll see Yahtzee pouring scorn on what is evidently the contents of a press release while the other two scramble to say something positive.  One the one hand, everyone who plays games knows by now that games companies are entirely self-serving massively dishonest and mostly incompetent.  On the other hand, ‘Yay! New games!’.

VideoGaiden came close to solving this problems by being mostly weird and curmudgeonly with interludes of interest and enthusiasm but I think the problem is that gamers and TV people have tended to be on different pages.  Gamers want to express their culture and that culture involves a good deal of snark and cynicism to counter-act the heavy handed and manipulative marketing techniques used to ensnare them.  TV people, want something that taps into the popularity of games and you generally do this by being up-beat about the thing you’re covering.  Result = generation upon generation of games-related TV that genuinely struggles to move past reading out press releases and playing game trailers.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : He Died with His Eyes Open (1984) by Derek Raymond

In order to grasp the devastating beauty of Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open (1984), it is first necessary to grasp the devastating beauty of another text; Conrad’s altogether more famous Heart of Darkness (1899).  Conrad’s book ends with one of the most memorable soliloquies in British literature :

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

‘The horror! The horror!’”

As one of the most commented upon texts in academic literary criticism, this passage has been found to contain endless meanings but one particular meaning has clawed its way up out of the Darwinian jungle of ideas with greater panache and ferocity than the others.  The most common interpretation of that final line is that Kurtz has somehow seen the savage, devouring emptiness that lurks at the heart of existence.  A heart of darkness that can only truly be grasped by the mad or the inspired who can free themselves of the comforting fictions that animate our day-to-day lives.  For Queen.  For Country.  For Myself.  For Love.  All fictions.  One reason for the popularity of this interpretation is that it echoes the themes of meaninglessness that pervade existentialism, that most popular of Post-War philosophical postures.

Noir crime fiction is seen by some as a form of populist agitprop for existentialism.  While Camus and Sartre took over the left bank, it was the Noir writers who were on sale in every news-agent.  It is only natural to read Raymond’s book as a continuation of this de facto intellectual alliance, but I would argue that Raymond’s take on existentialism is almost diametrically opposed to that of Sartre, Camus, Kafka or Marcel.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Socket (2007)

Videovista has my review of Sean Abley’s Socket.  A film that is not only a work of indie SF, but also of indie gay cinema.

The film itself is not particularly interesting or worthy of note (much like Rocco DeVilliers Pure Race [1995], which I also reviewed) except when you consider how close the film came to being genuinely interesting and how spectacularly it failed.   I am only linking to the review as I think that the failures in Socket point to a rather intriguing cultural battle going on at the heart of gay cinema at the moment.  If you doubt this, bear in mind that Brockas’ last film Boy Culture (2006) was shown at the 2008 London  Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.  Which is a piece of programming on a par with screening Confessions of a Shopaholic at Cannes.

See also my recent review of Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie for a real piece of gay filmmaking.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

Videovista have just put up my review of William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.

A couple of notes on this review.  Firstly, Masters of Cinema always include a little booklet with their DVDs containing essays.  These serve as DVD extras by whetting your thematic apetite and filling you in on historical context.  If I don’t mention these booklets in the reviews it is because they do not systematically get sent out with the review copies.  This is something I rather regret as I think that the extras (even in dead tree form) are part of the pleasure of discovering these old films.  Secondly, I recently crossed swords on a forum with an employee of Eureka or Masters of Cinema and he suggested I put on the subtitles if I couldn’t hear the words.  I took this as a suggestion that I needed to clean out my ears but evidently watching films with the subtitles on is  a ‘thing to do’ with DVD releases of old films.  So apologies to said employee if he reads this.