Videovista have my review of F. Gary Gray’s genuinely lamentable Law Abiding Citizen.
I hated this film. I hated it not because it is intensely stupid – some stupid films can be great fun – but because it is an intensely stupid film that tries to pretend that it is insightful and politically engaged. This is the cinematic equivalent of the Tea Party : Fascistic chest-pounding and bellowing masquerading as debate.
If you were to cast your eyes over some of the writings of Stephen Jay Gould you would find him picking a fight with the concept of Phyletic Gradualism. Gradualism is the idea that species adapt gradually to their environment and that this rate of change is so slow and even that it does not really make sense to speak of there being real differences between ancestral species and descendent species. Under Phyletic Gradualism, different species reflect our knowledge of the fossil record and not the realities of evolutionary history. Gould argues instead for a model known as Punctuated Equilibrium. A theory that posits that most species do not change at all and that when evolution does occur, it occurs rapidly and locally. Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have responded to Gould’s arguments by pointing out that nobody, not even Darwin, has ever subscribed to the model of Phyletic Gradualism Gould attacks in his popular writings.
As we see from Dawkins’ memes, the process of evolution is a neat metaphor for other forms of change. Indeed, some thinkers have used the theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain how institutions react to change. But the model could also be applied to individuals as a means of understanding the process of psychological change : People develop understandings of themselves and their surroundings and, over time, these understandings cease to apply. So people allow their ideas to evolve. They adapt their images of themselves and their ideas about the world to suit the new environment. They adapt. They evolve.
One of my favourite things to do when watching a drama is try to work out whether the writer is an emotional Phyletic Gradualist or a Punctuated Equilibrist : Does the drama present emotional change as a slow and gradual process or does it suggest that we exist in a state of emotional and psychological stasis until the levee breaks and we have to evolve in a hurry. However, as with biologists, the best writers are those who do not allow themselves to be trapped by artificial dichotomies. They allow for the idea that people change at different rates and in response to different forms of pressure. They do not distort their characters’ psychologies in order to slot them neatly into a narrative. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Le Pere De Mes Enfants is an example of this kind of drama. It is a film that deals with drastic and sudden emotional change but rather than seeking to pin the process of evolution down to a question of Big Events or Epic Journeys, it contents itself with showing us a few moments along a path travelled at different rates by different people. It also calls into question the vocabulary used by film-makers to communicate these rates of emotional change.
Dig through the history of Horror and you will find, buried beneath the Vampires and the Werewolves, a more enduring monster. A monster that fits uneasily on the cinema screen because his depiction requires no make-up or special effects. A monster that looks exactly like you. A monster which, in fact, is you.
From Poe’s “William Wilson” (1838) to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846) through to Kurosawa’s Doppelganger (2003), it is clear that one of the greatest fears humanity has is to wind up face-to-face with itself. Terror is dealing someone who knows all of your secrets, who knows all of your bullshit, who knows what you are capable of… and who can do it too. The doppelganger is a reminder that as much as humanity fears the Other, it fears the Self just as much. Perhaps there is a reason for this. Perhaps what we hate about the Other is what we hate about ourselves. Perhaps all hatred and fear is externalised and projected self-loathing? This idea has a nicely psychoanalytical feel to it. You can imagine Uncle Sigmund whispering it in your ear as you cough up his fee and prepare for the long slouch back home. Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s you. How far can we take this insight into our fears and terrors?
Johan Grimonprez’s documentary essay Double Take attempts to answer this question by using the doppelganger as a device for examining not only the politics of the Cold War but also the relationship between television and cinema.
One of the themes I keep returning to in my writings about film and literature is the tension that exists within us between the individual and the collective : On one hand, we all want to be true to ourselves and to express ourselves to the fullest without giving in to external pressures or allowing other people to take advantage of us. On the other, we are also deeply sociable creatures who yearn for human contact and the joys of sharing our successes and failures with friends and loved ones. While these two sets of desires are not mutually exclusive, they can interfere with each other. Resolving this interference pattern is not only central to our day-to-day existences, but also our political system.
Or is it?
It is extremely easy to fall into the pattern of seeing everything as a tension between two diametrically opposed extremes : Good and evil, capitalism and socialism, law and chaos, religion and atheism, nature and nurture, mysticism and rationalism, us and them. However, the simple fact that this kind of pattern can be applied to pretty much anything does not necessarily entail that it is picking up on some profound fact about the world. In fact, I would argue that it is a shallow and empty hermeneutic whose very shallowness explains its seemingly universal application. This kind of shallow analytical framework does pose significant dangers.
Indeed, assuming that our original balancing act is not just an empty truism then how certain are we that it is a universal fact about human life? While the desire to balance the needs of individual expression with those of social integration is one of the most common ways of thinking about life in the West in the 21st Century, it is by no means clear that this motif enjoys the same popularity elsewhere in the world. Do members of isolated Amazonian tribes worry about hypocritically trying to ‘fit in’? In his book Black Mass : Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), John Gray suggests that a tendency to assume that all political cultures are the same as ours is one of the regrettable short-comings of Western liberalism. It is, he argues, the kind of unwarranted assumption about other people that leads to blood-shed as when we encounter people who are not like us, it is all too easy to move from incomprehension to hostility.
Fei Xie’s Black Snow (Ben Ming Nian) is an interesting test case for the applicability of our dichotomy : Made in China in the late 1980s, the film initially presents itself as a rather generic art house film in which an alienated and isolated individual battles to re-engage with a society he long-ago turned his back on. However, Fei Xie’s approach to this challenge reveals a political culture with a very different set of attitudes to ours.
Videovista have my review of Remi Bezancon’s Le Premier Jour Du Reste De Ta Vie.
Well directed, the film also employs quite a neat structural trick of focusing only upon five key days in the lives of a middle-class French family. However, despite the odd nice moment, The First Day of the Rest of your Life is an astoundingly unoriginal film dealing only in the boldest and most familiar of cinematic emotions. Dreadful.
Videovista have my review of Richard Kelly’s The Box.
From the director of Donnie Darko comes a weirdly iconoclastic film based upon a Richard Matheson short story. Initially, the film structures itself around a moral thought experiment asking us to consider whether we would kill someone we do not know for $1,000,000. However, then the film opens up into a science fiction conspiracy theory that is one part Alan J. Pakula to one part Arthur C. Clarke. Not entirely convincing partly because the ideas it contains are so utterly weird, but I did enjoy the rather brutal satire of Christianity as a sinister alien conspiracy.
Videovista have my review of Duncan Wood’s The Bargee.
Given that the film stars Harry H. Corbett, Ronnie Barker and Eric Sykes you might expect this to be a knock-about 1960s British comedy and, to a certain extent, it is. However, the writers of the film were Ray Galton and Alan Simpson who made their name with Steptoe and Son, a sitcom best remembered for its social realism and its confrontation of the British class system. The Bargee is very much a film in this tradition as beneath the rather lightweight comedy lurks a drama about the final working months of the British canal network and the culture of canal workers and lock keepers that depended upon it. Ultimately flawed, the film is still a fascinating look at a now extinct culture.
Back in July of 2009, I put up an article about some of the attempts to adapt J. G. Ballard’s work for the screen and, in particular, Harley Cokliss’ take on “Crash!”, one of the sections from Ballard’s experimental novel/short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1969). That article was written in order to help me work out a few ideas for a much longer piece I was writing for Vector – The Critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. That longer piece turned out quite nicely and, as it has been a bit slow around here recently, I have obtained permission to republish it online – at least until the BSFA sorts out their mooted online archive.
So, many thanks to Niall Harrison for giving me permission to republish this online and I suggest that all those not already members join the BSFA immediately, if only to get the chance to read Vector.
Walking around your town, prison yard or agricultural commune, you may have noticed strange stickers clinging to lampposts or the sides of buildings. You may have noticed them in several places and then been surprised when you kept seeing them again. These strange images – like Shepard Fairey’s “Andre The Giant Has A Posse” sticker campaign and Invader’s Space Invader-inspired “Invader” mosaics – are examples of Street Art. An underground art movement whose chief accomplishment seems to have been to prompt millions of bemused passers by to snort dismissively and ask ‘what’s the point of that then?’ But of course, this is an entirely legitimate question.
At a time when artists garner more critical attention by cutting up dead animals and sticking elephant dung to canvases, questions surrounding the purpose of art and the dividing line between the artistic and the non-artistic have never been more pressing : Is it supposed to be decorative? Is it supposed to make us think? Is it supposed to shock us? Are traditional art forms more useful than these modern forms? Is it supposed to make us ask questions like these?
The problem in part is that there is no clear frame of reference that allows us to begin answering these questions and even if there were, artists would go out of their way to deconstruct it : Art is decorative. Art is inspiring. Art is beautiful. Art is meaningful : Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.
Street Art’s reliance upon mass production and recycled imagery makes it particularly prone to these kinds of questions. In fact, these kinds of questions seem to be the motivating force behind Banksy’s documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop (2009), but as we shall see it is not only stickers on walls that invite these kinds of questions as once you start asking them, it is difficult to stop.
The Zone have just put up my twin reviews of The Crazies :
It is interesting to note that both films deal, on a thematic level, with the way in which America wages its wars : Romero’s version is a tightly focused critique of the idea that one can wage war in an ordered and rational manner. The film paints a viciously satirical portrait of an American military weighed down by petty bureaucracy and staffed by incompetent boobs. Meanwhile, Eisner’s version is a much vaguer indictment of the savagery stirred up by America’s decision to topple the Iraqi and Afghan governments.
Ruthless Culture 
