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Set during World War II, the film tells of a mismatched group of people who are forced to share a lifeboat when the Nazis torpedo their ship. Rather than turning this set-up into a thriller, Hitchcock places his emphasis firmly on the characters as they wrestle with the responsibilities and challenges of leadership. Indeed, the film can be taken as an exploration of Plato’s metaphorical Ship of State and the question of who is best suited to rule. Is it the successful businessman? the blue collar tough guy? Or is it the Nazi superman?

Looking beyond its political themes and its character studies, Lifeboat displays the fondness for small sets that reappears in such better-known Hitchcockian classics as Rope, Dial M for Murder and Rear Window. Unsurprisingly, the film received a bevvy of Oscar Nominations for its searing black and white cinematography and the directorial flair required to set an entire 98-minute film on a solitary lifeboat.

Technically superb and filled with lovely cinematic moments, Lifeboat is a powerful reminder that there was more to Hitchcock than perfect pace and clockwork plotting.

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The fact that The Ledge got made at all offers an interesting insight into the difference between British and American attitudes towards religion. For example, despite having an official state church and being an ostensibly Christian nation, British society is now so profoundly secularised that atheism is now our cultural default. In other words, when you meet someone new you do not automatically assume that they are a Christian. Instead, you assume that they are either an atheist, an agnostic or sufficiently non-religious that you do not need to worry about offending Christian sensibilities in casual conversation. In fact, British society is now so profoundly secularised that many intelligent atheists are becoming annoyed at the shrill combativeness of the so-called ‘New Atheists’, thereby creating a market for books that embrace a less confrontational form of atheistic thought. America, on the other hand, is still a de facto Christian nation. This is evident from the fact that politicians tend to speak in explicitly Christian terms while even the more outlandish Christian beliefs are seen as serious moral positions. Simply stated, no British person would think to make a film like The Ledge because British public discourse has effectively banished the more outlandish Christian beliefs meaning that the confrontational attitude of the New Atheists comes across as bullying and uncouth.

Even more problematic is the fact that The Ledge is not the film it purports to be:

Despite ostensibly resembling a thriller, The Ledge is actually quite a talky and slow-paced film constructed around a series of set pieces in which characters deliver extended speeches for and against a belief in God. Given that Chapman places so much emphasis on these speeches it seems safe to assume that The Ledge is intended to be a film about ideas. Unfortunately, Chapman’s attempt to make a film about the clash between atheism and religion fails on two levels: Firstly, none of the ideas contained in The Ledge are particularly new or profound. In fact, the characters of Gavin and Joe are so unsympathetic and intellectually stilted that it rapidly becomes clear that Chapman has just as little insight into atheism as he does into religious fundamentalism. Instead of providing us with well-rounded characters and thought-provoking ideas, Chapman delivers banal caricatures filled with nothing more than hot air. Secondly, despite bloating the film’s running time and draining the thriller elements of all urgency and tension, the polemical aspects of the film are so poorly integrated into the plot that they seem more like a distraction than a primary focus. Look beyond the PR guff about ideas and The Ledge reveals itself to be little more than a squalid melodrama about a traditional love triangle.

Even more problematic is that, once you strip away all the God-talk, The Ledge is revealed to be a deeply misogynistic piece of filmmaking. At the heart of the film is a confrontation between two individuals who are so convinced of their moral and psychological superiority that they feel utterly entitled to the love of a beautiful woman. Indeed, while Joe dominates Shana by dragging her to a series of increasingly repressive churches, Gavin dominates her using mind games designed to make her fall in love with him. The Ledge is a profoundly misogynistic film because both forms of domination not only succeed but also go completely unchallenged by a director who refuses us all access to Shana’s thoughts and feelings. Denied both agency and meaningful self-expression, the character of Shana is nothing more than an empty vessel for the desires of selfish and hateful men. Time and again, Shana is given the opportunity to speak up for herself but instead Tyler simply stares impassively into the camera like a beautiful doll whose sole purpose in life is to be owned by an alpha male.

The Ledge is easily one of the worst films I have seen this year. Now that the scars have begun to heal on the viewing experience, I am almost tempted to say that the film is ‘so bad it’s good’ but then I think about the scene in which the atheist crows about getting Liv Tyler’s character to masturbate while thinking about him and I’m reminded that this is nothing more than a dull and misogynistic piece of pseudo-intellectual garbage.

As regular readers of this site will doubtless recall, I have a great fondness not only for the cinema as an institution but also its capacity to bludgeon us into a state of supine beatitude with no more than a thunderous explosion of transforming robot. In fact, I recently had a ‘best genre films of 2011′ piece published in the BSFA’s house journal Vector and my top ten included Takeshi Koike’s recently released Redline, an anime so beautifully animated and insanely visual that its finale rivals the pure cinematic spectacle of the opening sequence of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. However, despite enjoying both 3D and action movies projected on vast IMAX screens, my article expresses a good deal of concern over what I call the technological arms race that is currently raging between the cinema chains and the consumer electronics firms:

The race began when James Cameron resurrected 3D technology and made a fortune with his Smurf-based epic Avatar. Convinced that 3D was the future of film, cinema chains spent billions retrofitting their theatres with digital 3D projectors. For a while, this worked quite nicely and everyone made money. Then audiences began getting tired of having to pay extra for poorly made 3D films and technology companies soon found a way of providing 3D at home, thereby sending everyone back to square one. Next came the suggestion that the only way to experience Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol was on one of those giant IMAX screens that are usually used to entertain tourists with images of shipwrecks and dinosaurs. Unfortunately, while it is difficult to imagine Samsung and LG finding a way of making home IMAX systems, the failure to sell Andrew Stanton’s John Carter as an IMAX experience suggests that the popularity of IMAX may be even more fragile than 3D. Furthermore, if IMAX is to become the new benchmark for cinematic experiences, then cinema chains will be forced to spend even more money building thousands of new IMAX. With many industry insiders already talking up vibrating seats as the Next Big Thing, the toxic and self-destructive nature of this technological arms race is becoming all too apparent.

While I do not mention it in the article itself for reasons of space, I feel that a far better use of money would be to invest in updating the existing cinematic infrastructure so as to ensure that every screen in the country has comfy seats, good quality projection, properly functioning speakers, adequate sound-proofing and a concession stand that aspires to being more than a dementedly ruinous tuck shop.

For me, the cinematic experience is not some fairground ride but an act of almost religious devotion. I choose to see films in the cinema because I value the act of leaving my house and traveling to see a film. I choose to see films in the cinema because I like sitting in a space designed solely for the purpose of viewing films. I enjoy the distraction-free environment of a quiet cinema and I am more than happy to pay for the opportunity to use it because I believe that it is the best possible environment in which to surrender myself to a director’s vision.

And if you’re looking for a personal recommendation: My favourite London cinema is the big screen at the Curzon Mayfair.

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Set in the backstreets of Lisbon, The Portuguese Nun tells the story of a French actress who plays the part of a Portuguese nun in a historical drama. Left mostly to her own devices by a director who prefers shooting architecture to working with his actors, she aimlessly wanders the streets of Lisbon encountering a series of male archetypes who compel her to examine the person she has become. Hounded by self-doubt and self-loathing, the actress eventually finds redemption at the hands of a local nun who helps her to realise the similarities between her life and that of the character she plays in the film.

Beautifully shot and partly redeemed by a final confrontation that positively reeks of human desperation and beauty, The Portuguese Nun is a profoundly problematic film. The main problem is that while the film does contain some ideas and some elegant photography, these moments of beauty struggle to redeem a film that is ultimately nothing more than a boring homage to art films passed:

The first thing that strikes you about The Portuguese Nun is the eye-catching beauty of its cinematography and the purity of its visual composition. As with Jose Luis Guerin’s In The City of Sylvia and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, we spend so much time simply experiencing the city that its moods and textures come to form an integral part of the film itself. Indeed, The Portuguese Nun is probably best understood as an homage to the Portuguese director Pedro Costa whose films In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth attempt to capture the patina of life in a Portuguese city and reduce it down to some purified artistic essence. However, unlike Jarmusch and Guerin who use the interaction between their cities and their characters to tell a story and advance an idea, Costa and Green are quite content to treat their cities as ends in themselves resulting in excruciatingly boring but undeniably decorative cinematic experiences.

Though I absolutely adored both The Limits of Control and In The City of Sylvia, I genuinely struggle to see the point of the kind of films that are produced by the likes of Green and Costa. Beautiful photography and a steadfast refusal to indulge anything as proletarian as plot or characters are all very well but art house directors have been making variations on this particular theme for fifty fucking years! Frankly, there is only so many times that you can march your audience round a picturesque medieval city before people start questioning the artistic point of the excursion. When I reviewed Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth I argued that these types of films are a kind of shibboleth for cinephiles in that they are so profoundly and perversely uncommercial that they seem like nature’s remedy to the Transformers and Avatars of this world.  Unfortunately, beauty and truth do not triangulate and while the likes of Transformers are undeniably dumb as posts, it does not follow that truth and beauty will emerge simply by making the opposite decision to every choice made by Michael Bay. In order to justify lengthy run times in which nothing happens, directors must have a point to make or an argument to advance and it is increasingly clear to me that the likes of Green and Costa propose neither. Self-indulgent, pompous and not particularly intellectually engaging, these films are a toxic perversion of the techniques that go into true art house filmmaking. Frankly, I worry for a critical fraternity that struggles to see the very clear differences between smart films like In The City of Sylvia and ploddingly pretentious disasters like The Portuguese Nun.

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Revisiting this film was an interesting experience for me as I can remember both seeing it and reacting to it as a part of the vogue for nihilistic films that gripped 1990s American cinema. The set up is as simple as it is classic: A pair of fucked-up teenagers take to the road after accidentally killing a convenience store clerk. Moving from town to town, they rub up against the weirder elements of the American condition and try to come to terms with their place in the grand scheme of things. Each character voices a different attitude towards the sense of disillusionment and alienation that all generations feel upon coming of age. Indeed, this is a film that is as much a response to films like Easy Rider and Badlands as it is to True Romance and Natural Born Killers:

According to postmodern nihilism, nothing matters other than the mundane details of our lives. As might be expected from a broad cultural pattern, American film engaged with the idea of postmodern nihilism in a number of different ways. For example, at one end of the spectrum Quentin Tarantino’s patented blend of operatic violence and trivial chitchat spawned films such as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) in which nothing seemed to matter other than love. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) reversed the polarity and argued that Generation X actively avoided answering the bigger questions by filling their heads with talk of relationships and old TV shows. Trapped between the romanticism of Tarantino and the outrage of Clark lies Greg Araki’s The Doom Generation a film about costs and benefits of cynical detachment.

All things considered, I think that The Doom Generation is perhaps a little bit too ‘meta’ to be anything more than an interesting rejoinder to a more worthwhile set of films, but then perhaps that was always the point of the exercise? What better way to lend voice to the angst of Generation X than to suggest that everything has been said and that all we can ever hope for is just enough sex and violence to pass the time?

Corman is an interesting figure in the history of American film as he appeared at a time when the American film industry was very slow to react to the cultural needs of the post-War generation. By remaining attuned to the desires of the babyboom generation, Corman managed to bootstrap himself first into commercial success and then into a certain degree of artistic respectability:

One of the most poignant moments in Corman’s World sees Martin Scorsese and Peter Fonda reminiscing about Corman’s willingness to fund films such as The Trip and The Wild Angels. Filled with psychotropic imagery and language lifted from Vietnam War demonstrations, these films not only gave younger people a voice, they also laid the foundations for such ground-breaking films as Easy Rider. As people who rose to prominence on the back of the 1960s, both Fonda and Scorsese seem perplexed as to why Corman never followed them out of the drive-in and into the academy but this is because both men seem to have mistaken Corman for an idealistic filmmaker. Despite trying his arm at politically engaged filmmaking, Corman was never an idealist… he was a democrat and a capitalist who gave his audience idealism because that is what they wanted to pay for. The unease we feel about Corman’s willingness to pander to his audience is the same unease we feel about Hollywood as a whole: are they making art or are they making money? The answer suggested by Stapleton is that they are doing both because both activities involve telling people what it is that they want and need to hear.

Stapleton’s documentary is probably best understood as a companion piece to Peter Biskind’s book about the post-War movie brat generation Easy Rider, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-’n'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (2008). I say companion piece as Stapleton’s documentary leans quite heavily upon Biskind’s vision of a generation that stormed the barricades of Hollywood and launched successful careers before either collapsing into narcissistic self-indulgence or devoting themselves to selling toys. However, while Biskind’s book provides a deliciously unflattering portrait of that ‘golden’ generation of post-War filmmakers, Stapleton provides a far more enthusiastic picture of one of that generation’s most noted losers. Indeed, as I suggest in the above quote, Corman stood poised to become a ‘serious filmmaker’ but he somehow never made that transition and by the time he was in a position to capitalise on his success the likes of Lucas and Spielberg had pipped him to the post and convinced Hollywood that the future lay in pandering to audiences with multimillion-dollar B movies like Jaws and Star Wars.

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The film tells the story of two gay men who meet in a club and spend the night together. Upon waking, Glenn (Chris New) sticks a tape recorder under Russell’s (Tom Cullen) nose and asks him to give detailed feedback about the sex and the way the pair met. Horrified by Glenn’s frankness and yet compelled to accede to his request out of affection and desire, Russell begins to talk and when Russell begins to talk the one night stand slowly begins to transform into a relationship. Weekend is the story of how two very different people strive to overcome their differences in order to find enough common ground to exist as a couple:

It seems faintly absurd that, in this day and age, we should feel obliged to make the case for why it is that more straight people should watch gay films. Many fans of gay independent film will stress the educational benefits of watching a film about people unlike yourself but this makes it all sound a little bit too much like homework. People should not seek out Andrew Haigh’s Weekend because they feel obliged to be supportive of minority filmmaking or because they want to see something a bit different and exotic. The case for watching Haigh’s Weekend is the same for watching any great film: Watch it because it will help you to better understand yourself. In fact, Weekend is the single most grown-up film about human relationships that you will see this year and that is true regardless of who you are and how you live your life.

Needless to say, I adored this film and recommend it to anyone and everyone who happens upon this blog post. So many films deal in relationships and bndy about words like ‘love’, ‘desire’ and ‘loneliness’ but few actually address what those words actually mean. Weekend is one of those films.

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The film tells the story of a mother and child that are placed in a witness relocation programme after their abusive husband and father is sent to prison. Intensely nervous and over-protective, Anna refuses to allow her son to sleep in her own bed until she purchases a baby monitor that allows her to hear him sleep. However, once the monitor is plugged in it begins picking up horrific sounds of abuse coming from another device in the same apartment block. Assisted by Helge, a man whose status as the son of an overprotective mother allows him to understand the woman’s desire to protect her son, Anna begins investigating the source of the noises only for her entire life to begin unraveling.

At the heart of Babycall is the complex, unhealthy but ultimately humanising relationship between Helge and Anna. Fresh from her success as the original cinematic Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace offers us a veneer of faceless maternal anxiety that slowly peels away, revealing more and more humanity as Anna becomes more and more detached from reality. Similarly impressive is Joner who manages to find strength, courage and likeability in a character whose life has been defined by a cowardly willingness to apologise for the actions of a monstrous and tyrannical parent. These twin performances, though entertaining to watch in their own right, provide a sound human basis for what could all too easily have been a directionless attack on abusive parenting. The power of Babycall lies not in the decision to confront the issue of abusive parenting but rather in the capacity to make these types of parent appear sympathetic. Indeed, we feel for Anna because she is afraid and because she loves her son but when that love produces individuals as broken as Helge, we have to ask whether maternal love is really the unambiguously positive thing we have always assumed it to be.

Flawlessly paced, psychologically compelling and full of brilliant twists and turns, Babycall is not only a fantastic psychological thriller, it is also a very brave film indeed. Without wanting to give too much away, it might be worth seeing Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long (2008) before you see Babycall as both films tread quite similar ground (albeit in very different ways).

People with an interest in well-executed psychological thrillers might also want to check out Sletaune’s previous film Next Door (2005), which I reviewed over here.

As Peter Biskind notes in Down and Dirty Pictures (2004), the astronomical amounts of money generated by Sex, Lies, and Videotape kicked off a boom period for American independent film. Suddenly, American indies were big business but in order for them to stay big business it was necessary to replicate that success over and over again. The film industry has always reacted to unexpected success by repetition and the success of American independent films were no exception to this and so a template began to emerge allowing studios to keep making the same films for the same audience over and over again.

Here is my guide to creating an American independent film:

Begin by creating a character with a number of positive and negative personality traits. By possessing both positive and negative traits, the character will come across as being complex whereas in fact he is simply competently written. These traits should be extreme enough that exploring them creates feelings of both extreme sympathy (in the case of positive characteristics) and utter disgust (in the case of negative characteristics.

The ambiguity of the character is to be reflected in the ambiguity of the film’s tone. Despite dealing with the unravelling of someone’s life, it is important to occasionally lighten the tone with jokes about the character. This way the audience know not to take things too seriously and will most likely be impressed by the courage of a script that makes jokes about the unravelling of someone’s life.

Then, cast a well-liked character actor as this central character. This type of casting kills two birds with one stone as it ensures both that the audience will be well disposed towards the character and that the actor will have sufficient acting talent to explore the character’s negative personality traits without ever completely jettisoning the feelings of sympathy that bind the character to the audience.

Set the character in a quirky and visually distinctive region of America. Even if the character begins the film living in a large city, it is imperative that the bulk of the action takes place outside the city so as to pander to the audience’s patronising belief that non-city dwellers are somehow more emotionally authentic than the people who live in cities.

Surround the primary character with an array of secondary characters who exist purely in order to service either the plot or the psychological unravelling of the primary character. For example, it is wise to consider casting a physically attractive actor as the love interest as their attractiveness will prompt the primary character to take a long hard look at their life. After all, attractive people never date people with problems and the only reason anyone would ever confront their demons is on the off chance that they will get a shag out of it. Another useful secondary character is the friend who possesses the same negative personality traits as the primary character. The obvious negativity of that secondary character’s personality traits will thereby help the audience to realise that, no matter how badly the primary character behaves, they are not necessarily ‘all that bad’.

Begin the film by emphasising the primary character’s positive personality traits whilst only hinting at the negative traits that are also present in their personality. As the film progresses, the negative personality traits are to become more and more obvious until the character becomes nothing less than a complete monster. Once the audience’s disgust is at maximum, insert a beautifully shot sequence in which the character wanders around in a manner that suggests that they are either drunk, high or clinically depressed. Once rock bottom is hit, the character is forced to confront what they have become and begin the healing process.

If an up-beat ending is required, then it is wise to show the character learning from his lessons and improving himself. This can also be achieved via a scene set an indeterminate amount of time after the character hits rock bottom, this scene will reveal that the character has become what it is that he always feared but he’s okay with that as it means that his life is back on track. This scene will emphasise the positive personality traits explored at the beginning of the film. If a thought provoking ending is required, then it is wise to refrain from showing what happens after the character hits rock bottom. One solution is to have the character simply wander off at the end of the film, another solution is to have the film end mid-scene with an image of the character that hints at some of their positive personality traits. Either way, by failing to spell out the end of the story, the film is inviting the audience to make up their own ending. This generally makes the audience feel smart and if the audience feels smart at the end of the film then they are more likely to conclude that the film is smart regardless of the ideas explored in the film.

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This guide has already produced such successful films as Sideways (2004), Up In the Air (2009), About Schmidt (2002), Barney’s Version (2010), Win Win (2011) and The Descendants (2011). All of these films adhere by the strict standards of what must now be considered a cinematic genre and because of this, audiences are beginning to notice the re-emergence of certain key tropes. Clearly concerned for its bottom line, Hollywood has reacted to the growing awareness of the genre by producing films that draw attention to the tropes that it so studiously adheres to.

Jason Reitman’s Young Adult (2011) is an excellent example of an attempt to re-invigorate the genre by drawing attention to the boundaries of the genre that the film operates in. The film involves an ambiguous character played by the likeable character actor Charlize Theron whose character is a) naïve (positive), romantic (positive), and devoted to getting her life back on track (positive) as well as b) bitter (negative), deluded (negative), entitled (negative) and a raging alcoholic (negative). The film begins in a big city but Theron’s character leaves the city in order to return to her hometown where she attempts to seduce her old high school boyfriend. As the film progresses, the character’s naïvely romantic worldview reveals itself as a toxic and deluded sense of entitlement.

This toxicity is neatly reflected in that of the character played by Patton Oswalt who is even more of an embittered drunk than Theron’s character because he was crippled by a pair of drunken jocks who mistakenly believed him to be gay. The relationship between the two characters allows the film to explore the exact nature of the bitterness that engulfs the primary character. Similarly useful is the radical difference between Theron’s character and that of her ex-boyfriend’s wife who is almost impossibly noble and forgiving, thereby highlighting the wretchedness of Theron’s character but also under-cutting it on the grounds that Theron’s character must possess some potential for growth is someone as noble as her ex-boyfriend’s wife is willing to forgive her.

The film ends with Theron’s character hitting rock bottom and having sex with the character of Patton Oswalt. Upon waking up, the character wanders into the kitchen where she encounters the sister of Patton Oswalt’s character who tells her that, far from having to fix her life, Theron’s character is already far happier and far more special than anyone in her hometown. This suggests that Theron’s character will not learn from her mistakes but the film ends before we can see the issue resolved thereby making it more ambiguous and more ‘thought provoking’.

While Young Adult is just as formulaic as any successful American independent film, it does try to move beyond the boundaries of its formula by acknowledging their existence. The film makes this acknowledgement by having Theron’s character comment on the events of her life through the medium of a young adult novel she is writing. As the film progresses, the plot of the novel switches between a variety of different clichés as Theron’s character struggles to square her life away using the lens of genre fiction.  For example, when Theron’s character seems about to triumph, her Mary sue stands poised to win the man of her dreams. When Theron’s character winds up failing in her mission to seduce a married man, the Mary sue realises that she never loved the man of her dreams and needs to make it on her own. The problem is that while Theron’s character does indeed draw attention to the conceits of genre and the way in which stock plotlines can provide a sense of comfort, it is interesting to note that the genre that Theron’s character clings to is not American Independent Film but rather that of boarding school novels aimed at teenage girls. Why should seeing the world through the lens of young adult fiction be any less deluded and simplistic than seeing the world through the lens of American independent film? Making a film that critiques genre literature is a wasted opportunity because nobody expects young adult boarding school novels to be anything other than reductive and psychologically puerile. Had Charlize Theron’s character been a screenwriter working on a film starring Paul Giamatti then Young Adult might have had some bite. Instead, Young Adult directs its satirical edge outwards resulting in a film which, though entertainingly bleak, is really nothing that we have not seen before.

Early cyberpunk texts such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1989) articulate a deep sense of distrust and frustration with existing institutions. The archetypal cyberpunk protagonist is a supremely competent individual who has somehow managed to fall through the cracks of middle-class life and supports himself by occupying economic niches ignored by larger economic interests. Early cyberpunk is imbued with the rhetoric of class alienation, for while cyberpunk protagonists seldom have a place in the crystalline spires of the corporations they serve, it never occurs to them to either question or combat the status quo. Many critics assumed early cyberpunk to be a leftist dystopia because the corporations that dominate the cyberpunk skyline also overshadow our own. A more accurate interpretation would be to see these corporations as metaphorical stand-ins for the family-owned industries and old-fashioned financial institutions that were ripped apart by the first wave of Thatcherite deregulation. The early cyberpunk protagonists should not be seen as angry rebels but as aspiring corporate raiders similar to the aggressive young Turks who made millions in the City while entire regions were put to the economic sword. By emphasising Thatcherism’s economic conservatism while glossing over the social conservatism that sold it to both the British and American publics, cyberpunk was able to position itself as a literature of social alienation. It is only when we consider the wider history of the sub-genre that we realise the self-serving nature of cyberpunk’s radicalism.

The first warning signs were evident in the genre’s rapid cultural stagnation. For example, despite cyberpunk having been a product of the American cultural malaise of the late 1970s, traditional cyberpunk novels such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) continued to be published well into the 1990s. The reason for this stagnation is that the ambitious middle class people who were on the outside in the early 1980s continued to think of themselves as outsiders despite their cultural and economic triumph over the institutions of the post-War period. Indeed, it is only when Neal Stephenson published Cryptonomicon (1999) that cyberpunk finally began to recognise the true extent of its cultural impact.

Cryptonomicon took the values and formulae of traditional cyberpunk and merged them with those of the airport thriller to produce a story involving the staff of a high tech start-up company who finds themselves being sucked into a world of espionage and corporate intrigue. Cryptonomicon is very much a work of cyberpunk except that it replaces cyborgs with white-collar office workers and futuristic dystopias with modern-day America. This groundbreaking spin on the traditional cyberpunk novel formed the template for what we should think of as the Phase 2 cyberpunk novel.

As in Phase 1 novels, the protagonists of Phase 2 novels such as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008), William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) are middle class outsiders with a deep distrust of established institutions. However, while the protagonists of early cyberpunk novels had fallen through the cracks of middle class society, the protagonists of Phase 2 cyberpunk novels intentionally position themselves outside of the ‘mainstream’ of their culture. The recognition that middle class alienation and cheerfully commoditised rebellion were suddenly integral parts of American corporate culture lends Phase 2 cyberpunk novels a celebratory smugness that can be nothing short of nauseating. Like characters in the films of Sofia Coppola, the protagonists of Phase 2 cyberpunk novels breathe a rarefied cultural atmosphere of fashionable nightclubs, swanky hotels and cutting edge cultural events thanks to their ability to stay one step ahead of the technological curve. The celebratory nature of Phase 2 cyberpunk is also evident in the decidedly neoliberal tendency of science fiction writers to globalise cyberpunk narratives by exporting them from America to the developing world (as in Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Arabesk trilogy and works of Ian McDonald including River of Gods (2004), Brasyl (2007) and The Dervish House (2010)). Looking back on Phase 2 cyberpunk novels, one is struck by both the complacency and the sense of entitlement of a wealthy middle class that was utterly incapable of predicting its own eventual downfall. After all, if the long boom of Thatcherism had enriched the Western middle class why should it not do the same for the entire world? It was not until Phase 3 that cyberpunk finally began to question its affiliation with neoliberalism.

Thus far, the defining text of Phase 3 cyberpunk is Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland (2008). Set in a South Africa so corporate and gentrified that it could just as easily be America or Britain, Moxyland brutally deconstructs the smugness that formed the cornerstone of the Phase 2 novel. The difference between Phase 2 and Phase 3 cyberpunk is that while Phase 2 authors such as Gibson and Doctorow present their protagonists as aspirational figures, Beukes presents the same type of character as spoiled, deluded and morally compromised imbeciles. It is far from accidental that Moxyland appeared at a time of economic crisis as Beukes’ decision to question the underlying ethics of the cyberpunk movement reflects a wider cultural sense of buyer’s remorse. The West swallowed the teachings of Thatcherism and clung to them right up until the moment when the entire global economy seemed about to implode. The anger of Phase 3 cyberpunk is an anger of profound disenchantment not only with established institutions but also the aspects of human nature that created such institutions in the first place. This same rage surges through the veins of Tim Maughan’s debut short story collection Paintwork resulting in a story cycle imbued with a profound sense of sadness and disappointment with how the future has turned out.

Paintwork’s eponymous opening story is set in Maughan’s hometown of Bristol. The story tells of a ‘writer’ named 3Cube who spends his time sabotaging QR codes so that, rather than displaying adverts, they display idealistic and uplifting works of digital art. However, as soon as 3Cube and his friendly neighbourhood hacker vandalise one billboard, someone comes along and replaces 3Cube’s art with a work of 2D art that both mocks his idealism and uses his imagery to sell product. Furious at what he assumes to be a calculated act of disrespect, 3Cube tries to work out who it is that is sabotaging his artwork.

Paintwork’s second story “Paparazzi” tells the story of John Smith, a man who made his name as a documentary filmmaker by chronicling the online restaging of a key battle in the War on Terror, a battle that was fought and refought in digital space until the desired outcome was eventually achieved. Based on his reputation for both honest reporting and infiltrating online cliques, Smith is hired by an MMORPG clan to capture footage proving that a rival clan’s general is actually controlled by more than one person. By proving the general is nothing more than a media construct, Smith’s adoptive clan hope to undermine their rival’s popularity and thereby attract more skilled players to their banner. In order to gain incriminating footage, Smith is handed an MMORPG character and trained in how to play the game well enough to pass muster amidst expert players. Initially approaching the task as a simple infiltration mission, Smith is rapidly enchanted by the sense of community and shared adversity that forms the core of online play. The more time he invests in this community, the more he values its achievements and the more he values the interests of his clan, the more his clan come to consider him as one of their assets.

The book’s final story “Havana Augmented” takes place on the island of Cuba where local gamers have organised a demonstration fight between one of their home grown clans and the generals of the internationally renowned video game clan that features in “Paparazzi”. Given that Cuba is still the subject of a US trade embargo, this fight should not be able to take place as the citizens of Cuba are not officially allowed to access the kind of games where clans do battle. However, because Cuba is legally off the net, a group of Cuban gamers have hacked some gaming software and transformed it into a piece of Augmented Reality software that allows them to stage giant robot fights all over their city. Intrigued by the software and always mindful of a PR opportunity, the clan’s leadership travels to Cuba where the Cuban gamers are forced to choose between protecting their country and becoming international superstars.

Despite being self-published, Paintwork’s writing is elegantly effective. Like many cyberpunk authors, Maughan favours both short sentences and unadorned syntax which, though clearly intended to keep out of the way of Maughan’s ideas, actually lend proceedings an edge of brittle hardness… as though everyone is walking around with gritted teeth, hoping to make it home in relative safety.

Maughan presents his ideas using the old cyberpunk trick of blending new technology with old brand names. This produces a heady mixture of today and tomorrow that is sometimes familiar, sometimes disorienting but forever tantalisingly out of reach. For example, Maughan’s story “Paintwork” re-uses Cory Doctorow’s idea of someone faking out gait-recognition software by intentionally hobbling themselves. However, rather than simply ripping off an existing idea, Maughan makes it clear that his character does this by wearing a pair of Nike trainers that are too small and because they are too small their seams have cracked meaning that they are no longer even remotely waterproof. Key to cyberpunk’s reputation for grit and realism is a willingness to present futuristic technology as not only old but also broken and there is something both intensely cyberpunky and very British about someone who is clever enough to mess with CCTV and yet vain and short-sighted enough that he winds up sacrificing a pair of over-priced trainers to the gods of British weather.

As a storyteller, Maughan is somewhat frustrating. Each of Paintwork’s stories carefully introduces us to its characters and setting before making the tensions between these two elements abundantly clear. The over-riding message of Paintwork is that no matter how clever you believe yourself to be, you will eventually be used, exploited and cast aside by the people who are actually in charge. Though Maughan takes his time explaining the trap and why his characters might choose to enter it, he never lingers once that trap is sprung. For example, “Paintwork” is 33 pages long but only a page or so is devoted to explaining the true nature of what has transpired. When used in a cinematic context, this technique can be very effective as it produces endings that are both shocking and ambiguous. Unfortunately, though Maughan’s endings are certainly surprising, they are not particularly ambiguous as it is always obvious precisely what it is that happens to each of the characters at the end of the story. Given that ambiguity was never part of the game plan to begin with, Maughan’s stories might have benefitted from a little more time sent unpacking the impact and implications of their endings. Maughan’s fondness for the scratch ending is frustrating as all his endings (short though they may be) allude to a world that produces intelligent and promising young people only to break them in order to make a quick buck. This sense of utter disappointment is not only timely but also central to the aesthetics of Phase 3 cyberpunk, an aesthetic that Maughan seems to perfectly understand.

Each of Paintwork’s stories articulates a profound sense of disappointment with the institutions of the modern world. In “Paintwork” Maughan explores an underground art scene and in both “Paparazzi” and “Havana Augmented” he explores the idea of an online gaming clan that have become so wealthy and powerful they now resemble a multinational corporation. Each of Maughan’s stories involves a character who becomes sucked into these new forms of institution because all of the old institutions have failed them. For example, 3Cube is a talented artist and programmer and yet he pins his hopes and dreams on online celebrity rather than the day job that the story alludes to. Similarly, Smith is a gifted filmmaker and yet no production company seems interested in hiring him let alone paying him money to make his own films. Paintwork’s protagonists are not the capable outsiders of Phase 1 cyberpunk or the smug middle class success stories of Phase 2 novels, they are something different… they are people who have lived by the book and acquired all the skills only to find that there was no job waiting for them at the end of the process. The closest thing to a Phase 1 or Phase 2 protagonist to appear in Paintwork are the hateful gaming celebs of “Havana Augmented” and the preposterous corporate artist of “Paintwork”. William Gibson would have turned such monsters into aspirational figures but Tim Maughan reveals them for what they really are: a cavalcade of smug and self-serving wankers who care more about the tailoring on their designer suits than they do about the plight of their fellow man. The world of Paintwork is not the world of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson; it is not a playground for elite hackers and it is not a place where anyone with a computer and an attitude can change the world. It is a world where the wealthy abuse the poor and where the poor get sucked into institutions that promise community but deliver only oppression.

Though clearly the work of a relatively inexperienced author, Paintwork remains a work full of both power and promise whose political vision strikes a resounding chord of disgust, alienation and profound disappointment. This is a cyberpunk novel that is a long way from the iPads and smugness of Phase 2 cyberpunk and I for one am delighted to have read it.