My review of the cancelled HBO series John from Cincinnati is up at Videovista.
It is not a flawless piece of television by any means but I simply adore the writing. The series is written by David Milch of Deadwood fame and it shares the same Shakespearean qualities and sand-box approach to narrative. It was also great fun to write about.
Sometimes it isn’t easy to love the cinema. Increasingly, the greatest popular art form of the 20th Century has become a means of oppression : Every year, the summer blockbuster season lasts that little bit longer. The season of empty months. Months during which the few decent films that do make it into cinemas are instantly forced out by over-hyped sequels and works of distorted genre. Works so disjointed and violent in their imagery that they have come to resemble twisted parodies of the world we know. Works that do not seek to elevate our collective humanity but to pervert it by filling our poor throbbing skulls with whole new vistas of psychosis and paranoia. Vistas we can only escape from with the help of consumer products, the antics of boy wizards and bellicose robots. Vistas produced by a media-industrial complex that keeps us supine and malleable lest we realise the living hell that we have made of our collective existence. A collective existence so cruel and unhinged that were we to grasp its true nature for even a second we would all run screaming into the streets, tearing at our clothes and flesh in a hideous and brutal attempt to somehow get clean and free of a system that has crushed us beneath its heel for far too long.
But then a film comes along that seems to recognise all of this.
VideoVista have my review of Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 20th Century Boys.
Watching this film put me in mind of archeology or anthropology. It is based upon a series of manga which, while hugely successful in Japan, have yet to acquire much of a cult status in the West. Because of the popularity of the source material, the film and everyone involved in t seem to be making a real effort to produce a film as close to the source material as possible. So in effect, the film is this huge homage to this pop cultural deity that I have never heard of. It’s like some weird and incomprehensible religion; to those within the sphere of influence of the manga, clearly the film is a big deal. To the rest of us all of the slavish respect seems irrational and incomprehensible. Which is probably a good state to be in when it comes to popular culture.
As has been noted elsewhere, James Graham Ballard died on Sunday. This was not an unexpected event. Ballard had publically announced his terminal prostate cancer and had even written an autobiography Miracles of Life (2008) which served to tidy up some of the biographical facts that might have been glossed over in Ballard’s fictionalised memoirs Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991).
I first experienced Ballard’s writing at school. I remember an English Lit timed assignment in which we had to read and write an essay about his short story “The Drowned Giant”. As a teenaged atheist and a cynic I immediately latched onto the story’s imagery of a wonderous and sacred thing appearing as a bloated decaying corpse. A corpse which is defaced and brutalised and mis-used by humanity until all that is left of it is skeletal ignorance and self-serving mystery and evasion. Not being the most voracious of teenaged readers, my love of Ballard would lie mostly dormant until rediscovering his work via David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash (1973) However, I think that Ballard only really clicked for me when I read Cocaine Nights (1996)
I have always found my view of the genius perceived by others in Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1987) to be obscured by the looming presence of the bleeding obvious. I respect the form, less so the matter. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009) failed to turn this respect into love. For most of the film I felt the adaptation so submissive and passive that I might as well have stayed at home and read the comic. However, there are moments of greatness in Watchmen. Moments that have very little to do with Alan Moore and a lot to do with Zack Snyder. Moments when Snyder allows himself off the leash, and no… I am not talking about the stupid fight scenes.
In an essay entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud argues that pleasure stems not from stimulation but rather a lack of stimulation. The lack of stimulation that comes, for example, from taking off shoes that pinch your feet and the moment not of orgasm but the instant of satiation immediately after the orgasm but before post-orgasmic tristesse sets in. If pleasure is the complete lack of stimulation then it follows logically that death is the ultimate pleasure and that the pursuit of pleasure is somehow also the pursuit of death. Freud called this drive towards death Thanatos. No film maker argues the case for the connection between pleasure and death more aggressively than Zack Snyder.
Videovista has my review of Sean Abley’s Socket. A film that is not only a work of indie SF, but also of indie gay cinema.
The film itself is not particularly interesting or worthy of note (much like Rocco DeVilliers Pure Race [1995], which I also reviewed) except when you consider how close the film came to being genuinely interesting and how spectacularly it failed. I am only linking to the review as I think that the failures in Socket point to a rather intriguing cultural battle going on at the heart of gay cinema at the moment. If you doubt this, bear in mind that Brockas’ last film Boy Culture (2006) was shown at the 2008 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Which is a piece of programming on a par with screening Confessions of a Shopaholic at Cannes.
See also my recent review of Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie for a real piece of gay filmmaking.
Based upon the 1995 novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira (literally Essay on Blindness) by the Portuguese Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago, Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of Blindness serves to demonstrate the conceptual limitations of the allegory as a narrative device. Where the book was an allegory about allegories, the film aims for the allegorical only to collapse into a film about the relationships between characters who were only ever supposed to be symbols.
There’s an excellent article in The Guardian Today about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1980). Written by Geoff Dyer in preparation for the film’s screening at the BFI Southbank on the 10th of February, Dyer tries to work out what it is that makes Tarkovsky’s film such a powerful work. The article gives some nice biographical information about the making of the film and trots through a number of different interpretations without any of them sticking but the really interesting part of the article is a particular quote that perfectly encapsulate how I feel about the film.
“The film itself has become synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm for it – “every single frame of the film is burned into my retina” – attests not just to the director’s lofty purity of purpose, but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement.”
Videovista has my review of this mini-series based upon a novel by Fay Weldon.
I’ve read better examples of Feminist SF. Hell, I’ve seen better examples of Feminist SF but I think The Cloning of Joanna May demonstrates one of the more interesting historical quirks in the way that Feminist ideas permeated into mainstream culture.
One of my problems with with a lot of Feminist SF – certainly at the level of the classics of the sub-genre such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1970) – is that many of its central concepts have never seemed that revolutionary or alien to me. I was born in 1976 and growing up, I was well aware of parents who would keep their little boys away from war toys whilst encouraging their little girls to play football. So when it came time for me to read about some of these ideas, I always felt that the battle had been won and that the ideas of a lot of Feminist SF were old hat, mainstream or blindingly obvious.
However, while I took one lesson away from these ideas, others took a quite different one.
The Cloning of Joanna May is the product of a profoundly cynical culture trying to have a debate with itself. Britain has never been overly fond of ‘public intellectuals’ and its public debate is arguably shaped more by comedy than it is by reasoned discourse. For example, consider the ipact of the idea that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants or Vince Cable’s parliamentary zinger that Gordon Brown had turned from Stalin to Mr. Bean. Indeed, the most significant works of political drama in the last 30 years have been comedy in the shape of Yes Minister and The Thick of It. Both series were far more potent in shaping how we see government than any Guardian editorial or Think Tank press release.
The camp and exploitative production values of The Cloning of Joanna May push it dangerously close to being a black comedy but it is also quite sincere in its desire to deconstruct traditional gender roles. The same is true of The Two Ronnies’ series The Worm that Turned.
As with The Cloning of Joanna May, The Worm That Turned combines Feminist SF with women in skimpy outfits. Intellectually, the writers accept the ideas, but their cynicism and resistance to these same ideas comes out through lapses into end-of-the-pier comedic imagery. As parodies of Feminist thought, both series are utterly toothless so the comedy elements of both series should perhaps not be seen as resistance at all, but rather an adoption of the traditional forms of British public debate.
One of the peculiarities of Western pre-scientific thought is its fondness for certain numbers. For example, consider the tenacity of the four elements that became the four humours or the trinity that also pops up in the works of Freud and Clausewitz. However, the undisputed king of pre-scientific theoretical numbers is the number two. From politics to ethics, metaphysics to epistemology, and cosmology to the philosophy of mind, humanity seems deeply wedded to the idea that reality can be seen as made up of two different kinds of things. I suspect that this strange fetish has its roots in some banal fact about us as a species; perhaps just as our fondness for base-10 arithmetic stems from having ten fingers, perhaps our love of dualisms comes from the fact that we can all hold up our hands and say “on the one hand… but on the other…”. Indeed, the near-universality of the concept of the ‘duality of man’ is unarguably behind the enduring popularity and the flexibility of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
Over the years, the story of a Victorian scientist who unlocks his darker side has been interpreted in a number of different ways. As well as the original duality of man as a mixture of good and evil, Jekyll and Hyde have also been used as personifications of introverted intelligence vs. extroverted cunning, superego vs. id and as metaphorical explorations of the use of drugs. However, while it would be interesting to compare and contrast all of the different tellings of Stevenson’s story, this review will deal only with one; the 1931 adaptation directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, an adaptation that deals with the tension between man as an animal and man as a civilised being.
Ruthless Culture 