Regardless of whether your passion is for books, films, games or comics, the chances are that your home contains a large stockpile of unconsumed culture. Depending upon the exact nature of your passion, this stockpile can take a number of different forms including:

• A pile of books marked ‘To Be Read’
• An array of downloaded or recorded TV series you need to ‘Catch Up On’
• A Steam account containing games boasting zero hours of play
• A shelf groaning under the weight of shrink-wrapped DVD box sets

As perverse as this kind of cultural opulence might seem, it is as nothing when compared to the mind-boggling absurdity of our tendency to buy new books and films when we have dozens of perfectly wonderful titles sitting at home on a shelf. Why do we do it? Why do we buy books we don’t read? The answer lies in our postmodern condition, the economics of human attention and the ever-changing nature of the self.

1. We Are What We Buy

There is a wonderful scene at the end of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) where the adrenaline-soaked bomb disposal expert returns home to the US and finds himself frozen in terror before a wall of supermarket peanut butter. The source of the man’s terror is not the peanut butter itself but rather the realisation that he has no basis for making a meaningful choice between the different brands, textures and flavours of peanut butter. Horrified by this newfound freedom, the character promptly returns to Iraq in search of a simpler (albeit far more dangerous) existence. This scene perfectly encapsulates what some thinkers refer to as the postmodern condition.

Postmodernism means a million different things to a million different people but one can think of it as the realisation that the world contains no objective values. On one hand, this realisation is liberating because it allows us to live our lives unconstrained by the feeling that what we are doing might be objectively wrong. On the other hand, this realisation deprives us of the sense of satisfaction that comes from doing something objectively right. In other words, while postmodernism may have freed us from the oppression of traditional values, this liberation cost us the ability to live lives filled with meaning and certainty. To speak of the postmodern condition is thus to speak of a profound spiritual malaise that stems from the fact that all of our choices are arbitrary and that, no matter who we decide to become, we could just as easily have chosen to become someone else. Like the character attempting to buy peanut butter, we are inundated by choices and yet have no basis for making a meaningful decision.

This aspect of the postmodern condition is explored in the TV series Dexter.  Dexter Morgan is a psychopath who struggles to understand the thought processes of normal humans. Aware of Dexter’s proclivities, his adoptive father attempts to ‘solve’ Dexter’s alienation from human values by teaching him a code that might allow him to function in human society while also assuaging his urge to kill. Initially, Dexter treats the code as an objective value about the world but as the series progresses, he realises that the code is really nothing more than a set of arbitrary principles imposed upon him by a hypocritical authority figure. Once Dexter realises that there are no objective values, the code begins to seem flimsy and its moral elements cease to provide him with much satisfaction. Though Dexter explores a number of radically different solutions to this problem throughout the series, it is interesting to note that all of his solutions retain an obsession with the ritualistic elements of the kill. Indeed, while Dexter may kill a number of different people for a number of different reasons, he always has his killing room and he always retains a physical trophy.

Dexter’s obsession with the physical trappings of his passion reflects a very human need to lend the things we care about some kind of physical form. By killing in a certain way, Dexter is reminding himself (and the world) that he is a particular type of person. Similarly, when we purchase certain kinds of product, we are reminding ourselves (and the world) that we are the kind of person that buys those kinds of things. For example, my DVD collection marks me out as a fan of art house cinema, just as my collection of critical texts marks me out as someone with an interest in criticism. I buy these things because I enjoy them, but I also buy them because I want to remind myself that I am that sort of person. Purchasing decisions not only serve to broadcast my identity, they also lend a form of concrete physical reality to a sense of self that has been rendered flimsy by decades of postmodern deconstruction.

2. Clicking is Easier than Reading

The more observant of you will have noticed that, while the above paragraph talks about purchasing decisions as a means of broadcasting one’s identity, it does not mention the transformative powers of the books and films themselves. The reason for this omission is that buying a book is quite different to reading a book and this is precisely why people buy books they do not read.

Broadcasting one’s identity through consumerism is a mature and complex system in so far as it is possible to vary one’s identity through subtle shifts in purchasing behaviour. For example, when I buy Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) on DVD, I am broadcasting the fact that I am someone who knows enough about anime to buy that kind of film. However, if I buy the exact same film on Blu-ray, then I am also broadcasting the fact that I care enough about the film to pay a premium in order to own it on a non-conventional format. Indeed, one reason why Blu-ray survives as a format is because it allows fans of particular films to reassert their devotion to certain films by buying them again in a more expensive format. People who own The Godfather trilogy on Blu-ray are not just saying they love The Godfather, they are saying that they love The Godfather enough to buy it twice. This also explains why people keep buying and re-buying all the different re-releases of Red Dwarf and Star Trek.

Aside from expressing varying degrees of affection for particular films and books, consumerism also allows us to express our aspirations. For example, when I purchase Paprika on DVD, I am not just asserting my identity as an anime fan, I am also expressing my desire to be the kind of person who has seen Paprika and who can discuss it in a knowledgeable manner. The gap between these two different identities provides us with some insight into the puzzle of unread books.

To become an expert on Dostoyevsky would require a lifetime of study and an inexhaustible fascination with comically scandalous dinner parties. While I can think of no goal worthier than becoming an expert on Dostoyevsky, it is nonetheless worth noting that the role of expert is not the only role available to us. For example, those of us who grow easily bored with scandalous dinner parties might refrain from devoting our lives to Dostoyevsky but this does not mean that we cannot read all of his work and enjoy what it is that we have read. We can become that person a lot easier than we can become the internationally renowned scholar. Those of us with other interests might even want to become the kind of person who has read and enjoyed a few of Dostoyevsky’s novels but ultimately prefers fantasy novels involving dragons and elves. Again, we can become this person as long as we have enough care and attention to fill that particular role. One of the reasons why consumerism is so popular as a mode of self-expression is because it allows us to begin climbing this sort of aspirational ladder without investing very much time or effort. Indeed, in order to become the kind of person who owns all of Dostoyevsky’s novels, all that is required is the time and dedication it takes to place an online order.

The French philosopher Voltaire once stated that, when faced by the collapse of all values and the death of God, the only thing left for us to do is to cultivate our garden. While this enigmatic response to the spiritual void of atheism has drawn a lot of different responses, my interpretation is that we should respond to the death of all values by investing our care and attention into a particular identity or worldview. The garden we are tending is the garden of our own subjective values and by investing care and attention in these values; we build a garden of meaning that (at the very least) distracts us from the meaninglessness of existence.

If we feed this idea back into our discussion of Dostoyevsky-related consumerism we find that the more one invests in a particular ladder of aspiration, the more satisfying that ladder becomes. I imagine there is a good deal of satisfaction to be had in looking back over a life devoted to the study of Dostoyevsky. Similarly, there is a good deal of pleasure to be found in reading all of his novels but while this pleasure and sense of accomplishment is far greater than the pleasure we get from being the kind of person who owns all the novels, this does not mean that there is no pleasure at all to be had in being that person. One of the great virtues of consumerism as a form of self-expression is that it allows us to make small investments for small returns.

We buy books we do not read because the act of buying a book is in and of itself rewarding. Indeed, while the pleasure to be had in being the kind of person who owns a Powell and Pressburger box set is much less than the pleasure to be had in being the kind of person who is an expert on their work, the economics of human care and attention mean that the buzz we get from expressing ourselves through consumerism is often more than adequate to justify the financial cost of the objects we purchase.

However, while the economics of human attention along with the self-expressive powers of consumerism may explain why there is value in buying books you do not read, they do not account for the fact that hardly anyone consciously buys books, films and games purely for the sake of owning them. In order to explain this, we need to consider the fact that our sense of self is in a constant state of flux.

3.    You are not the Person You were when You bought that Book

What were you thinking when you spent your time screaming and shitting yourself? Why would you just lie there while your parents changed your filthy undergarments? What were you thinking when you spent four hours sucking face with a thirteen-year old girl or gave a blowjob to the guy in the letterman jacket who said he liked your hair?

The answer to all of these questions is that we are not the people we were as infants and teenagers and so should probably not be held to account for our actions at the time.

Why did you spend an hour laughing uproariously at your own jokes before puking your guts out? Why did you lie in bed for an entire week without eating properly? What kind of person believes that they are a golden god and decides to jump off a roof?

Again, the answer to all of these questions is that we were ill, drunk or high when we did those things and so should probably not be judged by the same set of criteria we use to judge actions undertaken in a normal frame of mind.

So if we are not the same people we were in our youth and we are not the same people we are when we are off our heads, when do we get to be ourselves? What is a ‘normal frame of mind’? According to an array of philosophers stretching back at least as far as David Hume, there is no time at which we get to be ourselves because there is no such thing as the self, there is only the thing that does the experiencing at any given moment. As Hume himself put it in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding (1739):

When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.  I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.  When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.  And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity

While I leave it to people more learned than I to flesh out the link between the rising popularity of Hume’s attack on the self and the postmodernist attack on the idea of objective narratives, it is nonetheless interesting to note how compatible these two ideas can be.

Thanks to the influence of postmodernism, we use consumerism as a way of making our lives more meaningful and our values less flimsy. However, while postmodernism asserts that there are no objective values ‘out there’, Hume and his intellectual descendants assert that there is no fixed self ‘in here’. Combine these two observations and you have a perfect explanation for why people buy books they do not read.

As our neural chemistry fluctuates and our sense of self is re-drawn, the things we care about tend to change. One day we are all about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the following day we are all about the films of Michael Haneke. While some areas of interest stay fixed over long periods of time, there is no denying the fact that what we care about changes on a day-to-day basis. Indeed, what we care about changes because who we are changes.

While our sense of self is in a constant state of flux, the illusion of homogeneity is almost complete meaning that it is subjectively impossible to tell whether we are serious about Dostoyevsky or whether this is just a passing fad that will be gone tomorrow. The illusion of homogenous selfhood also explains why we struggle to notice when it is that we are being irrational. A beautiful example of this type of thing appears in the situation comedy 15 Storeys High. In this scene, a man announces his intention to lift weights using only one arm so that he can have one arm for tasks requiring strength and one arm for tasks requiring precision and delicacy such as icing cakes and stroking cats. After some discussion, it transpires that the man is only making this suggestion because he rode in a lift full of people smoking weed but his conviction that he is being perfectly reasonable is a beautiful example of how difficult it can be to tell the difference between a short-term self and more enduring long-term patterns.

One reason why we buy books we do not read is because when we buy them we think we are going to continue being a particular kind of person. However, when the neurochemical spike that created the Dostoyevsky fan dissipates, we are left with nothing but a collection of difficult books and the sheepish feeling that we might well have made a terrible mistake.

4.    In Defence of Unread Books

Many of us look upon our TBR piles with feelings of shame. Here are books and films that we know are worthy of our time and yet we somehow manage to find other things more demanding of our attention. Of course, the real source of our shame lies in the fact that we realise that we are not actually the kind of person who does care enough about Russian literature to read Anna Karenina or Oblomov. We may aspire to be that person but in truth, that is not who we are and these books serve as a very physical reminder of the fact that the self we have is not the self we would like. However, the more I think about it the more I think that these feelings of shame and disappointment are misplaced.

There is no way of telling what kind of person you will be next week, next month or next year. When you bought those books you never got round to reading you were the kind of person who was happy to spend a little bit of money for the short term pleasure of being the kind of person who owned those books. However, because there is no way of telling where your future interests may lie, tomorrow may well see you circling back towards those books. You could become the kind of person who reads and understands Dostoyevsky. You could become the kind of person who becomes an internationally renowned scholar of scandalous dinner parties. You could become any of these people and because you happen to own all the books, those identities are just that little bit easier to assume.

Many left-leaning thinkers pour scorn on consumerism as a hollow experience but my view of consumerism is that life is short and people need to take pleasure wherever they can find it. The great god Pan is dead and so is Baby Jesus and if owning a load of DVD box sets gives you joy then you should not feel any shame or regret about being that person because being the person who owns books he hasn’t read is far more rewarding than being the person who owns no books at all.

FilmJuice

Given that Melville is best known for such noir crime thrillers as Bob Le Flambeur (1955) and Le Samurai (1967), it is surprising to discover that his first film is neither a thriller nor an homage to the noir classics of Hollywood’s golden age. In fact, Le Silence de la Mer is an adaptation of a novel written by a member of the French resistance. Densely atmospheric and pointedly stripped of all extraneous dialogue, the film tells the story of the relationship between a pair of French people and the Nazi officer they are ordered to provide with lodgings. Every evening, the Nazi officer comes home and trots out a few pleasantries that the French people pointedly ignore. As the months go by, the officer’s love of France and desire to talk bubbles over into a series of impassioned speeches about his hope for the future of Franco-German relations. Aside from being beautifully composed and wonderfully still, Le Silence de la Mer is also wonderfully ‘of its time’ thematically speaking:

Aside from its technical brilliance, Le Silence de la Mer also offers a fascinating snapshot of a French intellectual class that was still trying to come to terms with the implications of widespread collaboration. Indeed, between the officer’s status as a ‘Good German’ and his lengthy speeches on the greatness of French culture, it is easy to read this film as an ode to the majesty of France (the film is based on a novel written by a member of the resistance) but look beyond the foreground and you find a morally ambiguous world full of silently complicity French people, bars closed to Jews and a Nazi delivering what was effectively the Petainist line that France would become greater through collaboration. While Le Silence de la Mer may lack the slow-burning outrage of Melville’s more famous indictment of French collaboration L’Armee des Ombres (1969) this is still a heroically ambiguous film from a time when France was desperate to escape all suggestion of moral ambiguity.

As someone who owns the Mieville DVD box set, I was somewhat taken aback by how different this film feels to many of his better-known works. Indeed, contained in this still and ambiguous early film are the blueprints for an entirely different cinematic career… what if Melville had not become a maker of thrillers but a more traditionally art house experimentalist? This is a film that captures the attractions of just such a possibility.

FilmJuice

Two Lane Blacktop is a film about a pair of twenty-somethings who support themselves by moving from town to town and participating in drag races. This pair are so complete adrift in the world that they possess neither home nor name, all they have is their car and the open road. In fact, the pair are so emotionally detached that it barely registers when an attractive young woman decides to join them on their aimless journey. One day, the pair run into a middle-aged fantasist and challenge him to a long distance race. Sensing some element of menace from the youngsters, the fantasist agrees but is puzzled to discover that the young people have no interest in actually winning the race:

At one point the middle-aged man is driving along and spots the youngsters having breakfast in a diner. Annoyed that they seem to be taking his challenge so lightly, the old man pulls over and confronts them, angrily asking “Are we still racing?” but no answer is forthcoming. Increasingly ill at ease with this strange relationship, the older man convinces the young girl to travel with him and he takes off while the other two are racing a local. With steel in their eyes, the pair take off after the older man but rather than confront him about cheating or stealing their girl, their annoyance seems to come from the fact that he moved the relationship from one of mutual cooperation to one of competition. As the older man drives off alone, he begins to weave lies about how he won the car from the younger men using his customised muscle car.

The middle-aged man spends the entire film telling lies because he cannot cope with the hollowness of the existence he experiences on the road. Too old and too set in his ways to come to terms with life’s lack of meaning, he spins lies to make sense of his life and that of the youngsters while the youngsters just keep on moving from town to town without ever asking for or receiving any answers.

Released by Masters of Cinema with a bevy of essays and documentaries designed to bolster its status as an overlooked classic of 1960s counterculture, Two-Lane Blacktop captures the beauty and alienation of a life lived outside of traditional culture in a way that Easy Rider never quite managed.

Futurismic

I originally wrote the column about ten days ago but last weekend I became aware of two significant blogospheric shit-storms that seem to provide an interesting context for the column.  The first shit-storm involves a bunch of people being upset by an article about yoga and the second shit-storm involves a bunch of people being upset by a review of an epic fantasy novel. Though ostensibly very different in their origins and subject matters, both shit-storms involve a community reacting very angrily to negative coverage from a perceived outsider. In the case of the ‘yoga community’, the outsider is the New York Times senior science writer William Broad and, in the case of the ‘epic fantasy community’, the outsider is the Strange Horizons reviewer and post-graduate student Liz Bourke.

The link between these blogstorms and my most recent video games column is that ‘Hang All the Critics’ is an attempt to confront the fact that the age of the critic has now passed. Criticism and its less well-heeled cousin reviewing rely upon the assumption that a person of reasonable insight and creative flair can consume a cultural product and issue an opinion or reaction to that will be of use to other people despite the fact that these other people might have very different tastes and interests.

It is no accident that the role of the critic has its roots in the cafe culture of the 17th Century as the coffee shops frequented by the likes of Samuel Johnson tended to be cramped places where all kinds of bourgeois intellectuals were forced to rub shoulders. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the Internet’s infinite potential for space is that people from a particular class and with a particular set of interests are no longer forced to rub shoulders with people with ever-so-slightly different sets of tastes. These days, if you are interested in steam locomotives but not other forms of train then you are in no way obliged to encounter the opinions of people who consider steam trains to be a quaint but outmoded form of technology. The more the Internet matures, the more interest groups fragment and the more interest groups fragment, the more isolated and tribal these communities become. There is no place for criticism in a world dominated by tribal conflicts and persecution complexes, this is why Liz Bourke and William Broad got it in the neck and this is why Rotten Tomatoes is filled with people reacting angrily to the idea that a film they haven’t seen might not be as good as they expect. The age of the critic is at an end and it is time to change the way we do business.

Needless to say, I am not the first person to notice the collapse of our culture’s public spaces. Indeed, many reviewers and critics have attempted to respond to the increasingly commercial and tribal nature of the public sphere either by retreating into the walled-garden of academia or by creating a tribal space of their own. While I can entirely understand this desire for retrenchment, I think that it is ultimately an act of cowardice:

As someone who has never once tried to review a game for a major site, I am not in the least bit opposed to the fracturing of public space in order to create environments in which inaccessible forms of writing are protected from the vagaries of commerce and popular tastes. A recent comment on one of my pieces described my style as “masturbatory” and I find myself absolutely powerless to disagree. There is something decidedly self-indulgent about sharing one’s opinions online — particularly when one makes little or no effort to reach out to the majority of people interested in a particular topic — and this kind of self-indulgence is not about subjecting games to serious intellectual scrutiny or ‘consolidating a continuous counterbalance’; is a cowardly retreat from the public sphere, driven by the recognition that my opinions are of use to nobody but myself. There is absolutely nothing brave or revolutionary about taking your ball and going home.

My problem with the critics of Bourke and Broad is not that they are wrong to feel the way they feel. Life in the 21st Century is frequently lonely and it is easy to begin thinking of one’s sub-culture as a kind of family that provides us with both an identity and a set of values. When you invest yourself that heavily in a particular sub-culture then it makes perfect sense that you should bristle when that elements of that sub-culture come under fire from outsiders. Even if you don’t like a particular novel or have your own concerns about the way that yoga is taught, it is one thing to hear those feelings from someone you trust and quite another to hear them from someone you don’t know. Ever bitched about a sibling to a member of your family? ever defended that same sibling when they came under fire from someone else? Some truths can only be spoken inside the family.

My problem with the critics of Bourke and Broad (or the people who complained about Uncharted 3 only getting 8 out of 10) is not that they are wrong, it is that they are being insular. As I said elsewhere, the most wonderful thing in the world is to have someone care enough to listen to you and tell you that you are completely full of shit. By wanting to protect epic fantasy from outsiders like Bourke, the defenders of epic fantasy (and those of yoga) are closing themselves off to a potential source of cultural renewal.

I would like to believe that there is a place for people like Bourke and Broad because I would like to believe that there is a place for cultural generalists and for people who take the ideas and values of one culture and carry them into those of another.  This blog is very much devoted to the idea that a single person can look at radically different forms and subject matters and say something of value about them. Unfortunately, while I would like to believe that there is a place for that form of cultural generalism, I think that the Internet is growing increasingly hostile to it. After all, why listen to random strangers when you can only listen to fellow academics, fantasy fans, yoga enthusiasts, republicans or furries? Why listen to anyone other than yourself?

FilmJuice

Punishment Park is set in what was the near future back in 1971.  In this near future, America has descended into chaos and the American government has responded to this chaos by setting up a series of tribunals who give political prisoners the choice between a long jail term and taking part in a training exercise involving members of the police and the armed forces. These training exercises involve the prisoners being chased across a desert.  If they make it to a particular point by a particular time without being captured then they are free to go. Needless to say, nobody ever manages to escape:

On one level, Punishment Park functions as a near-future work of dystopian science fiction. If looked at in these terms, the exaggeration of the establishment’s reaction to political dissent is only a matter of degree and the exaggeration serves to highlight real problems in American political culture. Similarly, the dissidents’ futile march through a desert towards an American flag stands as a poignant metaphorical commentary on Humanity’s quest for freedom and how the value of freedom can be all too easily undermined by the very people entrusted with securing our attempts to achieve it. On another level, Punishment Park is a furious attack not only upon the politically intransigent elites that run America but also upon the biased nature of so-called reporting and the intellectually incoherent and simple-minded nature of responses to those elites.

Released in typically wonderful style by Masters of Cinema, this is a great opportunity to discover a lost classic of American cinema.

An excellent example of a series left culturally isolated by changing social attitudes is Andrew Davies and Bernadette Davis’s Game On.

Like most sitcoms of its day, Game On was shot in a studio and broadcast with an accompanying laugh track. The presence of this laugh track is useful as it allows us to detect what audiences and producers at the time considered to be funny. Watching the first series of Game On is an interesting experience as the opening episode is littered with moments where the ‘audience’ hoot with laughter at jokes that are really not particularly funny. Indeed, most of the first episode’s big laughs come from repeated uses the word ‘shag’ or moments when someone is referred to as being either a ‘sad bastard’ or a ‘demented cow’. Listening to these disembodied laughs is a puzzling experience as changes to social values have deprived these jokes of the context that allowed them to be humorous. Did people really find the word ‘shag’ to be hilarious in 1994? Chances are that they did because sitcoms at the time tended to steer clear of both foul language and explicit sexual references meaning that, as with both Stephen Moffat’s Coupling (2000) and the original Sex and the City, people laughed not at the jokes themselves but at the willing transgression of social norms, social norms that no longer exist.

To characterise Game On as a sitcom that pushed at doors that are now wide open explains why much of the series no longer seems all that funny but it also fails to account for many of the subtle differences between the social norms that informed the writing of the series in the early 1990s and the social norms that inform how the series is received in 2012. While Game On may seem dated because of its somewhat adolescent attitude towards sex, its misogyny, homophobia and outright racism date it even more. However, what makes Game On a series worth revisiting is the way that Davis and Davies distance themselves from these attitudes by attaching them to a group of characters that are ambiguous to say the least.  Far from being simply ‘of its time’, Game On is an exploration of a set of values that were falling out of favour even as they appeared on the screen.

Set in a flat in Battersea, Game On chronicles the life of Matthew Malone (Ben Chaplin) and his two twenty-something tenants Martin Henson (Matthew Cottle) and Mandy Wilkins (Samantha Janus). Though Game On initially presents itself as the story of three horny youngsters sharing a flat, the real driving force behind the series’ narratives are the shifting power dynamics within the group. For example, while all three characters grew up together in Herne Bay, Mandy is actually the best friend of Martin’s big sister meaning that she is ever so slightly older and more experienced than her male flatmates. This age difference as well as Mandy’s obvious intellectual superiority over the boys lends her a degree of power that is in constant tension with the fact that she is an attractive woman living in a household dominated by a pair of priapic and emotionally stunted men who struggle to see past the boundaries of their Madonna/Whore complexes. Similarly problematic is the fact that Martin is the only one of the three housemates to have a decent job with a decent salary and reasonable career prospects. However, the social status and emotional stability that Martin gains from this socially enviable position is counterbalanced by both Mandy’s tendency to treat him like a child and Matt’s tendency to bully and exploit him. With both Martin and Mandy struggling to find themselves, it would be natural to assume that Matt (as landlord) would take on the position of community leader. Indeed, Matt spends most of his time bullying and insulting his fellow housemates while repeatedly reminding them that they are living in his home. Matt’s sexual bullying of Mandy is particularly egregious as is his raving misogyny and tendency to express horror at the idea that either Mandy or Martin might date someone who isn’t white. In the first episode Matt responds to Mandy’s announcement that she is dating a boxer by shrieking “But he’s black!” while Martin’s attempt to confide in Matt about his desire for a co-worker results in Matt interpreting Martin’s attraction to her swarthy complexion as evidence that she is a “darkie” and a “gorilla”. Similarly, when one of Mandy’s gay friends expresses his attraction to Matt, Matt responds with groans of abject disgust.

It is difficult to watch Game On without being struck by the relentless unpleasantness of Matt Malone as a character. A bully, a sex pest, a misogynist, a homophobe, a racist and a vainglorious fantasist, Matt Malone comes across as a truly despicable individual. However, to see Matt merely as an unpleasant character is to completely overlook Game On’s deeply satirical undertones.

Despite being physically attractive and occasionally sympathetic for reasons that will soon become clear, Matt is best understood as a comic grotesque in the tradition of Alf Garnett and Ali G. However, while Alf Garnett existed as a vehicle for satirising working-class fascism and Ali G existed as a vehicle for mocking both the white establishment’s desire to be seen as being ‘down with’ young non-white people, Matt is a vehicle for satirising the so-called lad culture of the 1990s.

Lad culture was presented as a reaction to the softening of masculine identity that took place in the mid-to-late 1990s. Buttressed by a caste of university-educated journalists writing for magazines like Front and Loaded, lad culture championed traditional masculine pursuits such as alcoholism and misogyny but rendered them social acceptable by co-opting the language of postmodernity. Thanks to lad culture, young men were finally free to get hideously drunk and wave their genitalia at women on the understanding that such behaviour was conducted in an appropriately ironic manner.

Matt is presented as a quintessential new lad. Aside from being articulate and physically attractive, Malone is always stylishly dressed and immaculately groomed. His lifestyle is also littered with such lad culture staples as a hatred of students, a fondness for extreme sports, an unquenchable sexual desire and an obsession with such celebrity figures as Steve McQueen, Robert De Niro and 1980s British TV pin-up Michaela Strachan. Davis and Davies use of Malone as a satirical vehicle is initially quite subtle as they routinely stray across the (actually non-existent) line between flirtatious banter and sexual bullying. Indeed, unlike the characters in more traditional sitcoms such as Robin’s Nest or its American remake Three’s Company, Matt does not just tease Mandy about the possibility of sleeping with him, he begins by pestering but then moves on to emotional manipulation and threats of eviction. This willingness to allow the character of Matt to stray over the line from culturally acceptable sexism into sexual bullying illustrates the decidedly modern view that there is no real difference between ‘flirtatious banter’ and ‘sexual harassment’. Similarly, Matt’s occasional forays into racism and homophobia remind us that despite all of the hair-gel, affected vulnerability and purported irony, Matt is really nothing more than a traditional male chauvinist struggling to come to terms with a world that is evolving out of his comprehension.

The second front in Game On’s assault on the character of Matt only becomes evident a few episodes into the first series.  Right from the start, we never see Matt leave the flat but as the series progresses it becomes clear that this is not some televisual conceit on the level of characters in The West Wing never going home, it is a fact about the character.  In truth, Matt has not set foot outside of his flat for all of six months and the isolation and boredom are starting to drive him insane.

Matt’s insanity is most evident in his relationship with the other characters. Matt presents himself as an entirely self-contained loner who lives by his own rules and most of his interactions with Martin and Mandy take place under the conceit that Matt is doing them both a favour by talking to them let alone providing them with a place to stay. Whenever Matt’s position in the social pecking order is questioned, he returns to his identity as a lone wolf and threatens to evict his tenants. However, every time Matt is confronted by the possibility of losing Martin and Mandy, his veneer of aloof coolness crumbles and he winds up practically begging them to stay. The fact that Matt is completely dependent upon Martin and Mandy not only softens the character by introducing a certain amount of pathos into the proceedings, it also allows the writers to make a broader point about the nature of Matt’s macho façade.

Matt’s inability to step foot outside of his front door manifests deep feelings of alienation towards the world outside the flat. One potential explanation for these feelings of alienation is that, while the outside world refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of Matt’s painstakingly constructed macho façade, the people who live inside the flat are happy to play along. For example, outside the flat Mandy Wilkins is an intelligent, educated, ambitious and sexually liberated young woman.  However, once inside the flat, Mandy finds herself having to play along with Matt’s fantasies because she cannot afford to pay the rent. Similarly, outside the flat Martin is a moderately successful bank employee who is frequently chatted up by an array of attractive women. However, once inside the flat, Martin’s desire to see Matt happy means that he struggles to intervene in Matt’s increasingly demented beliefs and actions. In other words, Matt needs Martin and Mandy because they enable him to inhabit the role of a misogynistic, homophobic and racist ‘lad’. When faced with the choice between going outside and preserving the integrity of his affected macho persona, Matt chooses to stay in-doors.

By forcing the misogynistic and demented Matt to rely upon the support of Martin and Mandy in order to function, Andrew Davies and Bernadette Davis are reminding us that racism, homophobia and misogyny only have a place in society because people choose to look the other way rather than confront it. The first season of Game On ends with Matt being dragged out of his flat in order to play a gig at a local pub. Forced on stage despite being in the throws of a full-blown panic attack, Matt collapses onto the ground and begins howling his rage and discomfort while his band-mates continue to play their instruments. This bawling gibbering wreck is Matt Malone’s true face, the face of a racist exposed, the face of a deluded fool who realises that his absurd beliefs no longer have a place in civilised society.

While the piece approaches Game On as a historical curiosity, it is important to note that much of the series’ satirical content retains its power. The suggestion that laddish culture deployed irony purely as an affectation designed to mask sincerely held racist, homophobic and misogynistic sentiments remains a powerful critique of postmodernism as a set of cultural values. One way of characterising postmodernism as a cultural force is to look upon it as a reaction to the death of such deep cultural narratives and values as those provided by religion, nationalism and various flavours of political ideology. One of the ways in which postmodernism explored the death of all values was by drawing our attention to the arbitrary nature of these values using an array of literary techniques including pastiche, parody, inter-textual referencing and irony. The idea was that by taking traditional symbols, stripping them of their original meaning and using them in a different and more ‘ironic’ fashion, people would realise quite how nonsensical and arbitrary those values and symbols really were. For example, an image of Queen Elizabeth with swastikas for eyes reminds us that there is nothing particularly British about the Queen as her symbolic power is purely a matter of social convention.

Sadly, though the techniques of postmodernism were originally developed in order to liberate us from traditional values, they are now used by defenders of the status quo to assert the legitimacy of those archaic and oppressive values. This re-tooling of postmodernism — though evident in Game On’s exploration of Matt’s fractured and ironic sanity — is beautifully demonstrated in a London Review of Books article by Peter Pomerantsev on Putin’s ideological advisor Vadislav Surkov.  According to Pomerantsev, Surkov uses postmodernism as a means of keeping his political opponents off-balance:

One blogger has noted that ‘the number of references to Derrida in political discourse is growing beyond all reasonable bounds. At a recent conference the Duma deputy Ivanov quoted Derrida three times and Lacan twice.’ In an echo of socialism’s fate in the early 20th century, Russia has adopted a fashionable, supposedly liberational Western intellectual movement and transformed it into an instrument of oppression.

By continuously shifting his political masters between the rhetorics of right-wing nationalism and those of traditional socialism and western-style liberal capitalism, Surkov ensures that his political opponents never gain a firm enough footing to successfully critique the government. Indeed, if Putin presents himself as being a right-wing nationalist and people critique him as such, Surkov promptly stage-manages a move towards liberal capitalism that results in those critiques seeming utterly absurd. The oppressive power of postmodern deconstructivism lies in its power to confuse intentions, obscure meanings and remove all accountability from words and actions. Game On’s Matt is as much of a racist, a homophobe and a misogynist as Alf Garnett but his ability to hide his bigotry behind a mask of ironic detachment makes both his words and his actions seem strangely acceptable.

Last week I went to see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Brad Bird’s well-received addition to the decidedly uneven Mission Impossible franchise. While my opinion of the film is that it is really nothing more than a competently made action film, the film’s central plot conceit is absolutely fascinating for what it says about how we perceive the workings of government.  Take a look at the trailer and you will see what I mean.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol trailer

The key passage is this:

An hour ago, a bomb blew up the Kremlin. The President has initiated GHOST PROTOCOL. The entire IMF has been disavowed. Now I’ve been ordered to take you to Washington where they will hang the Kremlin bombing on you and your team… unless you were to escape after assaulting Brandt and me. But if any one of your team is caught, they will be branded terrorists out to incite global nuclear war.

In other words, something disastrous happens in Russia and the President responds by a) summarily shit-canning an entire intelligence agency and b) blaming the disaster on one of that agency’s most respected employees before singling him and his team out for prosecution in what sound a lot like a series of show-trials designed to placate the Russians.

2. The problem is in Human Resources

There are two obvious sets of problems with this particular choice of policy:

The first is that it is insanely wasteful. Presumably the US government funds the IMF and presumably they have spent billions of dollars not only on training IMF personnel but also on setting up the kind of infrastructure that allows the IMF to operate in the field (and that’s without discussing how much it costs to build magnetic gloves and photo-realistic latex masks). Now, because of an unexpected series of events that really did not have all that much to do with the IMF, the President has frozen all of the IMF’s assets and sent all of its agents and support personnel to the unemployment office. That’s tens of billions of dollars wasted.

The second is that, far from being an off-the-cuff overreaction to an unexpected series of events, the Ghost Protocols had their own code name implying that they existed as a policy document prior to the events at the Kremlin. In other words, someone must have called someone else into their office and asked them to come up with a policy for dealing with a certain kind of problem. This underling would then have gone away and had meetings with analysts and senior officials before typing up a set of recommendations including show trials and sacking every employee of an multi-billion dollar intelligence agency. This underling would then have had a meeting with their boss who would have passed the report up the chain of command to someone else who will have gone ‘Yes… shutting down the entire IMF sounds like an eminently sensible solution and show trials are always a good way of solving problems’. This person will then have handed the recommendations down to Human Resources who would have amended employment contracts to reflect the fact that summary dismissal, betrayal and scapegoating are all accepted parts of the IMF’s internal disciplinary procedures.

In other words, both the US government and its intelligence services are intensely bureaucratic entities that assume betrayal, irrationality, wastefulness and hysteria are the best responses to an international crisis. No wonder the US intelligence services dropped the ball on 9/11, who else but an idiot would choose to work for an organisation that betrays and scapegoats its employees at the first sign of trouble?

3. The Problem has Always Been With Us

The most striking thing about this plot device is that it seems entirely believable that the US government would turn on its own agents. One explanation for the credibility of this plot device is that the duplicitous nature of intelligence work has long been a pillar of the espionage genre. For example, if you look back to the first ever ‘spy novel’ Robert Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), you will find a sub-plot in which a protagonist is forced to choose between protecting his country and protecting the family honour of the woman he loves. This tension between duty to the state and duty to one’s principles is also a recurring motif in the spy novels of Graham Greene.  For example, in The Confidential Agent (1939), a foreign intelligent agent is sent to Britain to negotiate a trade agreement on behalf of his democratic government. However, once in the field the agent finds his attempt to serve his country plagued by agents deployed to serve the interests of his country’s former aristocratic rulers. This tension between different moral systems is particularly well captured in Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), in which a character tries to do the ‘right thing’ only to be forced further and further into the mud by the weight of what he believes are moral obligations. While Greene explored these moral tensions through the lens of Catholicism, John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) explored them using the lens provided by the values and relationships that comprise membership of a particular social class. Indeed, Bill Haydon’s true betrayal was not of his country or of his colleagues but of his old school friend Jim Prideaux.

What makes recent films like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocols different to old genre staples is the fact that these films assume the moral relativism of intelligence work to be standard operating procedure for most intelligence agencies.  For example:

In Philip Noyce’s Salt (2010), a loyal employee of the CIA is accused of being a double agent. Despite some initial scepticism, the CIA wind up accepting the accusation entirely at face value and so decide to assassinate the agent resulting in a series of high-octane gunfights and chase sequences. The film ends with an FBI agent effectively giving the agent carte blanche to carry out a vicious purge in which all corrupt members of the CIA will be summarily executed. Thus Salt features not only the CIA turning on its own agents, but the FBI turning its back on the CIA so that a disgruntled former employee can murder her former bosses.

In John Badham’s Point of No Return (1993) – a remake of Luc Besson’s Nikita (1990) – a drug addict is rescued from a death sentence and trained to be a government assassin. Once sent out into the field, the assassin decides that she wants to leave the service at which point another government assassin is brought in to ‘clean up’ both her assignment and her. This ending of the film differs substantially from that of Nikita where the assassin’s handler sits down with her boyfriend in order to discuss the assassin’s departure from the service after her calamitous final assignment.

In Joe Wright’s Hanna (2011), a CIA agent is ordered to kill a genetically engineered child. Rather than kill the child, the agent escapes to a northern wilderness where he raises and trains the child as his daughter. When the time comes for the child to enter human society, the CIA attempt to murder not only their agent but also the child resulting in her rejecting not only the life of a normal human but also the life of an agent.

In Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002), a CIA agent fails in his mission to illegally assassinate an African dictator. When the agent reappears with no memory of his previous life, the CIA sends a team of assassins to murder the former employee in case he goes public with the agency’s policy of illegal covert assassination.

An interesting corollary of this trope is the slightly different convention that traitors to the intelligence services are in fact acting out of loyalty to a set of principles that the services have themselves betrayed. For example:

In Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006), a young man begins his apprenticeship at the CIA by twice betraying his mentor who turns out to be a member of the British secret intelligence service. When the mentor dies, he warns his protégé to leave the business before his morality is utterly corrupted. Decades later, the protégé (now a leading light in the CIA) is forced to choose between the pseudo-familial bonds that tie the agency together and the blood ties that exist between him and the members of estranged family.

In Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), the head of the British intelligence service mounts a disastrous operation designed to reveal the identity of a suspected double agent. When the political repercussions of this disaster are felt, a senior official is forced to choose between his loyalty to the old chief and his ambition to continue working in the service. Years later, the senior official is recruited back into the service where he spearheads an investigation designed to expose the service’s leading clique as being part of a Soviet plan to use the special relationship between British and American intelligence to gain access to American state secrets.

In Tony Scott’s Spy Game (2001), a senior CIA official grooms and recruits a young operative. Decades later, the young operative finds himself trapped in a Chinese prison when an operation goes wrong. With their eyes on the bigger picture, the official’s bosses prepare to leave the operative to his fate forcing the official to choose between the comfortable retirement that comes from life-time loyalty and remaining loyal to the young man he lured into this life. Needless to say, the official chooses loyalty to his friend over loyalty to his agency.

In Billy Ray’s Breach (2007), a young intelligence operative is assigned to monitor the activities of a veteran agent suspected of being a Russian informant and a sexual deviant. When the young operative finds no evidence of immoral conduct, the agency expresses its willingness to smear the veteran agent in order to ensure a conviction. While the veteran does indeed turn out to be a Russian agent, the young operative’s experience of the agency’s attitudes towards its own employees so embitters him that he decides to resign from the service.

Audiences accept the existence of the Ghost Protocols because they are used to thinking of the US government as wasteful and the US intelligence services as morally corrupt. How could any country hope to protect its citizens when clowns like these are in charge?

Part of what makes these kinds of media depictions so interesting is the impact they have on real-world politics. For example, when the BBC launched its glamorous spy series Spooks, MI5 reported an increase in job applications. If positive depictions intelligence work result in more people seeking jobs in that sector then what effects might negative depictions have? It seems to me that it is not unreasonable to expect that, by systematically portraying the US intelligence services as incompetent and disloyal, Hollywood may actually be driving away potentially gifted spies. Needless to say, nobody worth hiring would ever confuse the Mission Impossible films with some kind of fly-on-the-wall documentary but if cigarette adverts have taught us anything it is that image management seldom functions on a rational level.

4. The Problem is Self-Fulfilling

Back in March 2010, I wrote a column about the tendency of First Person Shooters to feature plots revolving around rogue states, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and an aggressively expansionist Russia. In that column, I cited a fascinating paper by Matt Carr entitled “Slouching Towards Dystopia: The New Military Futurism”. In that paper, Carr charts the influence of science fictional thinking upon actual military planning:

The report also considered ‘strategic shocks’ that would not have been out of place in the fictional worlds of William Gibson or J. G. Ballard, such as the possibility that ‘synthetic telepathy’ would facilitate ‘mind-to-mind or telepathic dialogue’ and the invention of information and entertainment devices that could be ‘wired directly to the user’s brain’. Another scenario posited that advances in genetic research might lead to the ‘super-enhancement of human attributes, including physical strength and sensory perception’ – a development that could make it possible for ‘dictatorial or despotic rulers’ to ‘buy longevity’.

And

This image of the city as the primary battleground of the future is a key element in the military dystopia. In these images of the ‘broken’ cities of the future, military futurism really shows its debt to science fiction, in its fusion of contemporary urban battlegrounds such as Mogadishu and Fallujah, the blighted slums of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Port-Au-Prince with the ravaged cinematic cityscapes of Robocop, Escape from New York, Mad Max and video games such as Shadowrun: feral cities, whose designers promise exciting virtual combat in ‘decaying urban wilds, war-torn cityscapes, and cancerous megabarrens’ in which ‘the usual rules and constants of civilized society don’t apply’.

The intellectual feedback process is pretty obvious: People drift into strategic planning because of their fondness for certain kinds of ideas.  This fondness also draws them towards the films, books and games of science fiction. These works of science fiction then influence the professional thinking of strategic planners and thus science fictional concepts enter into the US military’s thinking about what is and is not a reasonable set of assumptions to make about the future of human society.

Watching Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocols, I couldn’t help but imagine the possibility that a politician might unconsciously devalue the content of their intelligence briefings because they unconsciously assume that the person sitting in their office spends all their time looking for ways to betray their colleagues and lie to their political masters. Once present in the institutional bloodstream, distrust is difficult to expunge thereby making it more likely that the intelligence agencies will be marginalised, refused funding and deprived of both political influence and talented staff.

Films like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocols offer politicians a real chicken-and-egg problem: Are media depictions of the intelligence services negative because intelligence services are corrupt and incompetent or are intelligence services corrupt and incompetent because negative media depictions of them have robbed them of prestige? Either way, it is fascinating to note that we now live in a culture where media depictions of incompetent, duplicitous and morally corrupt intelligence services no longer raise any eyebrows.

The novel begins with Japanese high-society celebrating the accomplishments of Toshiko Tomura. These celebrations initially seem warm and heart-felt but it soon becomes evident that while Japan’s cultural elites are proud of Tomura’s native talent, they are also wary of it. The problem is that, while the novel begins with Toshiko Tomura enjoying all of the success associated with writing a commercially successful and critically acclaimed first novel, her recent success follows hot on the heels of similar successes in the worlds of acting and graphic design. In other words, Toshiko Tomura has tried her hand at a number of different artistic disciplines and has mastered them all before the age of thirty. When seen through the eyes of people who have devoted their entire lives to a single artistic discipline such talent is not merely enviable, it is downright terrifying. Nobody should be able to enter a film and master it immediately and absolutely nobody should be able to re-invent themselves so thoroughly and so successfully.

Sensing a potential scandal and the chance to suck up to Japanese high-society, a sleazy investigative reporter named Aokusa begins to follow Tomura around. Once Aokusa latches on to Tomura, it is not long before he has fallen in love with her and, once he has fallen in love with her, it is not long before he has become obsessed with understanding what makes her tick. After stumbling across what it is that Tomura does when in the privacy of her own home, Aukusa blackmails the writer into telling him her story.

The story that Tomura tells is structured as a series of flashbacks to earlier periods in her life. Each flashback follows the same pattern: A naïve Tomura enters a particular field and latches onto the most talented and well-respected practitioner of that particular art form. Before long, the target of Tomura’s affections is head-over-heels in love with her and Tomura is rapidly acquiring all of their skills. Then, just as the victim readies what will be their greatest work of art, Tomura emerges from their shadow and beats them to the punch by publishing a work that is absolutely identical to the work the victim was planning despite it having been created by Tomura. Obsessed with feelings of betrayal, the victim then destroys themselves either through an ill-conceived act of vengeance or by attempting to get their own work published thereby inviting everyone to see them as little more than a vulgar plagiarist.

Initially, Tezuka uses the journalist to explore the idea that Tomura is nothing more than a play-actor who owes her success to a form of highly evolved pre-emptive plagiarism. However, once Tomura leaves the relative safety of the art world for careers in politics, terrorism, crime and high-finance it rapidly becomes clear that she is doing far more than simply beating her teachers to the punch. However, what it is that she actually does remains something of a mystery as, despite featuring on nearly every single page of the novel, Tomura cannot really be said to be the book’s protagonist. Indeed, the plot of The Book of Human Insects is built around a series of contests between Tomura and the unsympathetic, misogynistic but highly skilled men who attempt to both possess and understand her. However, while Tezuka makes sure that Tomura’s true nature remains frustratingly out of reach, her unsympathetic male opponents are so easy to read that it is almost impossible not to wind up empathising with them. After all, like us, they are fallible humans trying to make sense of a character who is never anything less than alien.

By expecting us to empathise with a bunch of villainous misogynists, Tezuka is casting a critical eye over the nature of human relationships. Indeed, the title of The Book of Human Insects invites us to look upon the novel’s characters as a set of biological specimens, some of which are easier to identify than others. For example, when Tomura ties herself to an ambitious executive, we quickly join Tomura in recognising the man’s obsession with high-stakes gambling and his tendency to see all of life’s challenges in precisely those terms. Like all of the male characters, this executive is relatively easy to understand because, though his desires are hateful, ugly and misogynistic, they are at least recognisably human. By making these unpleasant characters easy to understand and emphasising the similarities between their desire to pigeon-hole Tomura and our desire to understand her, Tezuka places us in the position of unpleasant reactionaries who would rob something of its potential by seeking to render it comprehensible. The idea that Tomura might somehow be harmed by becoming comprehensible is what lies behind the anguished scene where she rebels against categorisation on the grounds that she is still a larva, something in the process of becoming.

Though Tezuka never provides us with any definitive answers as to what Tomura’s final form might be, he does raise two interesting possibilities:

Firstly, Tezuka raises the possibility that Tomura’s capacity for re-invention might mask some inner essence that has either remained hidden from view or been overlooked amidst all of the re-inventions. If correct, this theory would suggest that Tomura’s constant re-invention is nothing more than a process of trial-and-error whereby Tomura tries on different identities before choosing the correct one.

Secondly, Tezuka also raises the possibility that Tomura’s true nature might very well be that of perpetual change and re-invention. If correct, this theory would account for why it is that we find it easier to empathise with the hideous men who litter Tomura’s life rather than Tomura herself. Indeed, much like Tomura’s men, we are creatures with fixed natures and to gaze upon the mercurial and the protean is to gaze on something that is as hideous and alien as it is alluring.

At the beginning of this essay I referred to the character of Tomura as being “Mr Ripley-like”. This is a reference to the character of Tom Ripley who appears in a series of novels by Patricia Highsmith as well as the films Purple Noon (1960), The American Friend (1977), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Ripley’s Game (2002) and Ripley Under Ground (2005). The similarities between Ripley’s capacity for imitation and Tomura’s capacity for radical re-invention and psychological absorption are what lie behind my suggestion that The Book of Human Insects might be read as a psychological thriller. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of a psychological thriller is the presence of a mystery grounded in human psychology. At its most crude, this mystery can take the form of an FBI agent who pieces together a psychotic delusion in order to trap a serial killer as in Thomas Harris’s early Hannibal Lecter novels or, at its most sophisticated, Barbara Vine’s exploration of why a prim and moralistic woman would stoop to murder in A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986).

The Book of Human Insects can be read as a psychological thriller and its depth and pacing ensure that it works brilliantly when seen as such. However, a more rewarding interpretation of this manga is to take it as a critique of post-War Japanese society.

September 2 1945 did not only bring the end of the Second World War, it also saw the end of an Imperialist phase of Japanese history that began with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Aside from overturning the last Shogun of Japan’s Edo period, the Meiji Restoration also attempted to catapult Japan onto the global stage by having the historically isolationist country assume a more imperialistic and expansionistic attitude towards the outside world. As well as modernising Japan’s industrial infrastructure and massively expanding its military capacity, the oligarchs of the Meiji government promoted a form of cultural chauvinism so intense that it would eventually lead Japan to feel a degree of kinship with the Fascist powers of Europe. When Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, they were not just closing the books on the Empire of Japan, they were also calling time on a sense of national identity that stretched all the way back to the days of the Samurai.

As well as unprecedented levels of economic growth and a deluge of democratic and liberal reforms to the Japanese state, the American occupation of Japan also brought a profound sense of cultural confusion: If Japan could not fulfil its destiny by becoming one of the world’s great Imperial powers then what was to become of it? As people and institutions struggled to re-invent themselves, their growing identity crisis found a voice in what is now seen as one of the great golden ages of cinematic history. If you want to see a culture struggling to come to terms with foreign influences then look no further than the grubby Americanisation of Japan’s underworld as depicted in films such as Shohei Imamura’s Pigs & Battleships (1961) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (1956). Similarly, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) feature a sad acceptance of the inevitability of change while his Late Autumn (1960) transforms that sadness into optimism as that-which-once-was is gently replaced by that-which-will-be.

Manga itself can also be seen as a by-product of Japan’s post-War identity crisis as while we may now think of manga and anime as being quintessentially Japanese, the ‘Big Eye’ style that Tezuka pioneered is actually based upon American cartoon characters such as Betty Boop and Disney’s Bambi. Sensing a tension between manga’s Japanese character and the fact that its roots are in the popular culture of an invading power, Tezuka created The Book of Human Insects in order to address his nation’s identity crisis. This identity crisis would have been obvious to Tezuka who, born in 1928, would have seen an entire generation of Japanese people grow up and reach their prime in the shadow of American occupation. However, while previous generations of young Japanese people could find comfort in the history and values of a Japanese Empire that stretched all the way back to the feudal era, the post-War generation found themselves trapped between the discredited values of their parents and the decidedly alien (and occasionally oppressive) teachings of American liberal democracy. The sense of identity crisis engendered by the remodelling of Japanese institutions begged the question as to whether Japan was still Japanese.

The character of Toshiko Tomura is Tezuka’s attempt to determine the real essence of 1970s Japanese culture. Indeed, much like the economically resurgent Japan of the Cold War, Tomura makes her way in the world by absorbing the skills of others to the point where her expertise surpasses theirs. Tomura’s ability to systematically surpass the skills of her masters represents the fact that post-War Japan was a much more effective liberal capitalist democracy than America whose economy struggled until the deregulations of the 1980s. However, while 1970s Japan enjoyed both immense cultural vitality and explosive economic growth, its success appeared hollow to those elements who felt that liberal democracy was not the Japanese way.  By exploring the possibility that Tomura might have a hidden inner character or that her true nature might very well be that of constant re-invention, Tezuka is raising the possibility that Japan too might possess a nature founded on principles of constant change and re-invention.

The metaphorical nature of The Book of Human Insects is also evident from Tezuka’s style of art. Those used to the more uniform Big Eye style of contemporary manga might fall into the trap of seeing Tezuka’s artwork as primitive or overly cartoonish. However, look beyond the rubber-legged foreground characters and you will find not only extraordinarily detailed and ‘realistic’ backdrops but a capacity to change modes of composition to denote the manga equivalent of dream sequences and moments of heightened reality. Consider, for example, Tezuka’s use of traditional cartoon iconography in this seduction:

As well as the pinpoint realism of this attempt to locate the action:

And compare them to the twisted realism of Tezuka’s attempt to capture the essence of jazz in visual form:

Consider these three very different series of images together and you will get a taste of Tezuka’s artistic sophistication and his tendency to lapse into more and more ‘cartoonish’ styles to denote either heightened reality or increasing unreality.

By populating his novel with images of cartoonish characters in realistic landscapes, Tezuka is underlining their metaphorical nature. These characters, Tezuka seems to be suggesting, are not real… they are simply attempts to force ideas into a human form and project them onto the real world. By ensuring that the ‘real’ elements of his artwork are Japanese while the design of the ‘unreal’ characters is grounded in the aesthetics of American popular culture, Tezuka is forcing us to confront the identity crisis that looms over Toshiko Tamura as a character, manga as a form and Japan as a society. Every panel and every word of The Book of Human Insects cries out with a desperate need for a fixed sense of identity and a legitimate place in the world. The unease we feel upon being confronted by the character of Tomura is the same unease we feel when confronted by anything postmodern. Much like the men in Tomura’s life, we work hard at fitting ourselves into neatly ordered boxes and Tomura’s protean nature serves as an eerie and unwelcome reminder of how arbitrary and artificial those boxes can be. The truth is that we are all like Toshiko Tomura but she appears alien because she is willing to accept that there is no real Toshiko Tomura, there is only the boundless possibility of what Toshiko Tomura can become.

FilmJuice

Though not quite as subversive or as loveable as Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning (with which Vigo’s film shares the incomparable Michel Simon), L’Atalante still offers a fascinating portrait of a style of life that has long since been extinguished.  Set on a French canal barge, the film explores the tension between a young woman’s desire to be with her husband and her desire to see the outside world. Evidently a man of his times, L’Atalante concludes that young women probably should stay close to their husbands but while Vigo seemingly has little affection for the life less civilised, he does an absolutely brilliant job of capturing all of its glamour and mystery:

While the film ostensibly takes its name from Jean’s ship, the ship’s name refers to the Greek mythical figure of Atalanta who refused to marry until one of her suitors could beat her in a footrace. Like many strong female mythological characters, Atalanta is something of a feminist icon but Vigo presents Juliette’s escape in decidedly ambiguous terms. Indeed, while Jean is clearly a stick-in-the-mud Vigo’s depiction of Juliette’s travails in the outside world make it clear that he thinks that the best place for her is with her husband. The only thing preventing the sexism fairy from getting to this film is the fact that Jean effectively falls apart once he realises what he has lost in Juliette. While the strength of Daste’s performance and the affective power of Vigo’s depiction of Jean’s despair prevent the film from ending on a sour note it is interesting to see that it is Father Jules and not Jean who manages to track down and ‘save’ Juliette suggesting (in accordance with the myth) that it may be the colourful Jules and not the drably professional Jean who is Juliette’s true soul-mate.

Given that our media landscape is increasingly concerned with the new and the fresh regardless of its quality, it can feel oddly contrarian to go and see an 80 year-old film at the cinema. After all, these types of film are all available of DVD so why would you bother to go and see them at the cinema when you could go and see Ghost Protocol instead? The answer is that there is still something unique about seeing old films in the way that their creators intended. To be held spell-bound by images of people long dead in a world long disappeared is a really strange but entirely rewarding experience that I simply cannot recommend highly enough. Go and see this film in the cinema and, believe me, you will be glad that you did.

The death of DVD is being driven by a series of cultural shifts that are combining to put pressure on traditional ways of selling and consuming media:

Firstly, not only is the internet now a way of life for most people, its support infrastructure is now reaching the point where it is changing the way we relate to computerised information. Since the early 1980s, the standard way of relating to a computer is to have a box in one’s home that one fills with stuff bought in shops. If we want to play a game, we go and buy it on a disc. If we want to try out a new piece of software, we go to a website and pay to download it and put it on our computer. However, with more and more people now using wireless broadband all the time, it is often easier to keep all of our stuff in someone else’s box and access it only when we need it. Hence the tendency to put photographs on Facebook and to use online apps likes Google docs. Ever mindful of an opportunity to sell something new, techies refer to this type of set-up as cloud computing and many commentators seem to believe that it is the future of home and business computing alike. In fact, Apple are so certain of this development that they are investing heavily in something they call ‘The Cloud’, a set of inter-connecting synchronisation routines that should allow people to access all of their files and media across all of their Apple products regardless of where they might be at the time. Those of us less concerned with Apple’s great catholic experience are happy to use services like Dropbox with roughly the same results.

This shift away from storing and running stuff on our home computers is also evident in the way that, despite a bizarre series of PR disasters and strange business decisions, the US company Netflix has managed to convince a sizeable chunk of Americans that, instead of buying and renting DVDs, they would be better off streaming films directly to their desktop computers, laptops and/or home media centres. Media and tech people knew that this type of thing was coming (Blu-ray was never anything more than an attempt to squeeze a bit more revenue from an endangered business model) but the speed with which American consumers have taken to online streaming seems to have caught the big media and technology companies on the hop. Nobody expected physical media to decline this soon and nobody expected that decline to progress quite so quickly. With Netflix preparing to launch in the UK and DVD rental companies like Lovefilm suddenly making more and more of their streaming capabilities, DVD retailers are sensing that the UK will soon go the way of the US and streaming media will soon replace physical media.

Secondly, much of the force behind the shift away from VHS and towards DVD was provided by the promise that DVD would offer us things that VHS simply could not.  Aside from better picture and sound quality, this included extensive commentaries, deleted scenes and short documentaries providing endless amounts of detail on the films that people enjoyed enough to buy. The problem with this promise is that we do not tend to limit ourselves to buying only the films we love. Indeed, while the idea of watching documentaries about the making of The Godfather or Star Wars might be appealing, it is difficult to see much added value in a documentary about the making of The Hangover. As a result, DVD companies have tended not to deliver on their promise to produce extra content and most DVDs come with little more than a few extra trailers and some fluff interviews filmed to help promote the film upon its initial release. To make matters worse, the increased storage capacity of Blu-ray discs has prompted many DVD companies to try this trick again by re-releasing old films with even more extras and even more interviews but already, you can see that most Blu-rays come with little additional content and what content they do include tends to be worthless rubbish that serves no purpose other than to allow retailers to mention the extra content on the cover. The result is a situation whereby DVD and Blu-ray retailers are trying to sell their discs on the understanding that they contain loads of content that few people actually want to watch and nobody really wanted to produce in the first place. Blu-ray’s promise of all new content has only served to remind us of how much of a wasted opportunity DVD extras have become. No wonder people are increasingly failing to see the value in so-called ‘Extras’ and are opting instead for streaming media that gives them the film they want right now at a reasonable price.

Thirdly, like most consumer objects, DVD and Blu-ray discs serve the additional (and occasionally just as important) purpose of allowing their owners to stage-manage their public personas. Just as people would, once upon a time, line their offices with leather-clad books in an effort to appear erudite, people now do much the same with DVDs and Blu-rays. All of those shelves clustered around the TV do not simply place people’s media within easy reach; they also broadcast their tastes to anyone who happens to visit their home. Unfortunately, the shift away from bricks-and-mortar retail towards online retail has robbed consumer items of any cachet they might once have possessed. For example, I can remember when having a good number of Criterion box sets and the region-free DVD player on which to play them marked one out as a serious film fan and Criterion were swift to cash in on this realisation by effectively charging top dollar for luxury re-issues of films that were frequently available elsewhere for a good deal less money.

The power of the DVD as a symbol of one’s tastes and status has declined by virtue of the fact that nowadays most people have not only a DVD player but also a reasonable collection of DVDs and because all DVDs are equally accessible once one has a region-free player, there is no cachet to be had from owning a particular disc. As the economy grinds its heals and average home sizes shrink year-by-year, the fashion is increasingly for the kind of clutter-free existence facilitated by online streaming and digital media storage. Even the most beautifully designed of DVD cases cannot compete with the elegant minimalism of a TV surrounded by nothing but blank wall and a black box that discretely hums as it disgorges all the wonders of world cinema.

In short: people no longer want these bloody things cluttering up their homes and while the infrastructure is still not quite in place to allow a completely cloud-based media experience, our desire to step onwards and upwards to the next big thing will drive the market for that kind of experience just as it drains the energy and profitability from business models based upon putting boxes on shelves in high-street shops.

As with any sea change in the media landscape, there is always the fear that what we wind up with might be somehow less rewarding than what we currently have. Indeed, consult Lovefilm’s current streaming options and you will discover that it a good deal easier to find a rubbish Hollywood action movie than a brilliant independent or foreign-language film. Before independent, classic and foreign-language films find their way into the cloud there are numerous problems to solve not least the questions of rights and what is to happen to all of the people who currently make their living selling DVDs and Blu-rays. When it comes to larger films, these issues are not that much of a problem but given how many small films find their way to market through boutique DVD labels, there is a real danger that the shift to cloud media will silence some of the most distinctive curatorial voices in contemporary cinephilia.

To give you some inkling of what we might lose with the end of physical media, I’d like to direct your attentions to three of my favourite boutique DVD labels:

Launched in October 2007, Shameless Screen Entertainment specialise in releasing cult films with connections (either financial, linguistic or directorial) to the world of Italian exploitation cinema. Since its launch, Shameless have unleashed a number of great Italian giallis (including Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat and Aldo Lado’s Who Saw Her Die?), post-apocalyptic SF movies (including The Bronx Warriors trilogy) and such classic horror films as Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Aside from allowing these kinds of films to reach a British audience, Shameless also put a lot of effort into their DVD extras including interviews, commentaries and even new-edits of existing films where directors re-visit their old works in order to correct their ‘mistakes’. Shameless also sell their DVDs in eye-catching yellow cases that allow you to recognise them almost instantly. While many of Shameless’s films are perhaps more interesting than good, there is no denying the value of a DVD label that stands for a very particular kind of film and that unique curatorial voice would be lost if we all moved over to watching films on Netflix.

Best known for their art house multiplex on London’s Southbank, the British Film Institute also operates quite a prominently branded DVD label. Aside from releasing films of historical and academic interest, the BFI’s DVD label clearly also has quite a close relationship with its distribution arm meaning that many of the most interesting films released in cinemas (such as Herbert Pontin’s The Great White Wall and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins) find their way onto DVD thanks to the BFI. Consistently good, consistently interesting and consistently well supported by essays, commentaries and intriguing on-disc extras, the BFI label really is a mark of quality and a guarantee that the film you are about to purchase is worthy of both your time and your money.

Last but by no means least is Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label. Often seen as a Region 2 version of the Criterion Collection, the backbone of the Masters of Cinema catalogue is indeed made up of the kind beautifully presented and critically supported prestige releases of classic films that have made Criterion such a well-known brand. However, aside from releasing established classics and lesser-known films by universally respected authors, Masters of Cinema has always tried to rescue under-appreciated films from obscurity and return them to the position of high-esteem of which fate and economics may have deprived them. Particularly note-worthy was their heroic attempt to rehabilitate Maurice Pialat, whose works disappeared from view in the English-speaking world. Similarly wonderful is Masters of Cinema’s decision to release both Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop at the end of January. Though well known in cinephile circles, neither of these films possess the levels of unquestioned cachet lavished on the like of Ozu or Lang. Were either of these films simply listings in a vast online database then it would be all too easy to overlook them but because they are being released by Masters of Cinema and because Masters of Cinema have a reputation for releasing great films, we know that these films are worth seeing.

As someone who uses these labels as a filtering system when determining which films I might be interested in watching, I am concerned that a shift towards cloud-based media might fatally undermine their capacity to function. As a result, I thought I’d put fingers to keyboard and come up with a couple of possible solutions to the problem of boutique DVD labels in a post-DVD world:

Firstly, I would like to be able to pay a monthly subscription directly to a DVD label and have them send me x number of new-releases every month. This thought occurred to me after I found myself reviewing (quite by accident) a number of films that Masters of Cinema have recently released. As I watched these films, it occurred to me that not only would I happily pay to own them (in fact, I have now purchased a couple), I would also pay to have films like them delivered to my home on a monthly basis. I trust Masters of Cinema’s judgement so much that I would be willing to enter into an open-ended commitment to buy x number of discs from them every single month.

A variation on this kind of subscription model is already offered by Audible who charges a certain amount every month for ‘credits’ that allow you to download one book. If there are no books that currently meet your requirements, Audible allows you to store up your credits and so, next time you feel the need to buy an audio book you can log on and choose several, thereby spending your credit back-log. This type of subscription model would tie audiences to their preferred label and provide these companies with a steady stream of income. Labels could even increase the sense of exclusivity by making the DVD boxes particularly nice and making certain titles exclusive to their websites thereby returning a degree of cachet to the process of buying and owning particular DVDs.

Secondly, the real players in cloud media are the studios. Whoever gets the streaming rights for the most desirable films will win the war and while people will doubtless be happy to pay subscriptions to more than one site, it seems clear to me that if streaming content is made available across dozens of sites then chances are that the format will not take off in the way that it should. Currently, battle lines are being drawn between Netflix, Amazon and the Apple iTunes store with the goal being to secure as much exclusive content as possible in order to lock people into being used to getting all of their digital media through one particular platform. Video game consoles are also an important part of this picture but because consoles have a limited lifespan and because gamers are only a sub-set of a much larger market, they are more peripheral figures despite their capacity to secure consumer loyalty to their own platforms.

With so much of an emphasis being placed upon breadth of coverage, it is easy to imagine a situation in which independent films are placed on a site with no distinction being made between big studio films and smaller films. Indeed, one of the great arguments in favour of long-tail economics and how they would benefit smaller content-providers is that Avatar would receive no more prominence in an online listing than Le Quattro Volte and so, in principle, people who go looking for Avatar might wind up discovering films about goats and animist re-incarnation. While this kind of equal footing might be good for film fans, it is not necessarily a good thing for boutique labels that cultivate a strong brand identity in the hope that their DVD boxes will stand out on a shelf. One solution to this problem would be for the boutique labels to assume an entirely curatorial role in having their own sub-pages within streaming hubs that allow you to identify ‘Shameless’ or ‘Masters of Cinema’ titles. Unfortunately, anyone and anything could set up this kind of curatorial service. In fact, I can imagine established critics earning some decent money by providing just such a filtration service for digital media consumers:

Want something to watch? Go check out Jonathan Rosenbaum of Film Crit Hulk’s iTunes page and find their latest recommendations!

While this type of service would benefit consumers, content providers and curators alike, it isn’t the kind of service that would keep the staff of a boutique DVD label in office supplies, let alone salaries. One solution to this problem would be for DVD labels to reinvent themselves as content producers in the sense that they would go out and find overlooked films and would then re-master them and make them available to subscribers alongside DVD-extra type material that could be either purchased or included as part of the subscription. I can certainly imagine myself paying to download a series of talks by Jonathan Rosenbaum or Tony Rayns regardless of whether I purchased the films they were talking about.

In the rush to move to the new technological environment, it is easy to spout capitalist platitudes about the need for businesses to evolve or die but the truth is that some technologies lend themselves more easily to certain kinds of product than others. While much of the promise of the DVD and Blu-ray formats have been squandered by DVD producers too lazy and cheap to make full use of the space, some DVD and Blu-ray retailers have produced extras that have added real value to what were often overlooked and forgotten films. I am as eager to move into the Cloud as the next guy but I don’t want my new environment to be less fun than the one I currently have and in order to make that happen, we need to find ways to ensure that critical and curatorial voices continue to be heard.