Futurismic have my thirty seventh Blasphemous Geometries column.
Entitled “The American Dream is SPENT: Two Visions of Contemporary Capitalism”, the column looks at two different browser-based business simulation games and shows how, despite both operating on the assumption that capitalism is a functional rules-based system, the games use their different depictions of that system to produce withering critiques of contemporary capitalism.
Gestalt Mash have the first issue of my new column Stripp’d!
Stripp’d is devoted to independent and/or translated series of comics and graphic novels. The aim is to celebrate the diverse ways in which different comics, manga, graphic novels and sequential art approach ideas from the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror in an attempt to help open the field up to influences from other cultures and other forms of media.
For my first column, I decided to take a look at Richard Marazano and Jean-Michel Ponzio’s trilogy of science fiction graphic novels The Chimpanzee Complex. Originally published in French and translated by Cinebook, The Chimpanzee Complex is about the search for consolation in narratives of conspiracy.
There are times when you wish that Ayn Rand had been a literary critic. Who else could ever hope to capture the sense of adolescent rebellion with which critics and authors alike invoke the word ‘genre’? In contemporary culture, genre boundaries seem to exist solely as things to be transgressed. But so many works now ‘redraw the boundaries of genre’ and ‘confound genre expectations’ that genre labels are effectively meaningless. They are empty suits, paper tigers and straw men that exist purely so that authors and critics can claim them to have been defeated by some new towering work of genius. Might it not be time to accept that genre has been so thoroughly transgressed, redefined and deconstructed that there is no longer any glory to be found in escaping its clutches? Might it not be time for a more grown-up attitude towards the idea of genre?
Genre is like a long-suffering parent. Endlessly forgiving and endlessly patient, it responds to its children’s professions of hatred with an affectionate pat on the head and a mug of hot chocolate to calm them down. You can scream, “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” at genre till you are blue in the face and genre will still be there when you need your next film financing or a convention circuit for your book tour. There is nothing heroic or original in transgressing genre because that is precisely what it is there for. So perhaps we should look upon genre not as some cartoon tyrant that artists can easily defeat but rather as a part of what makes up a work of fiction no different to language or lighting or pace. Joanna Hogg’s second film Archipelago displays just this attitude towards genre.
Every inch the genre film, Archipelago sees Hogg taking the basic template of French art house drama (the Victorian novel’s obsession with psychological nuance combined with the system-under-pressure psychological mechanics of psychoanalysis and the sense of perpetual loss of identity forged in existentialism) and applies it to an upper-class English family that simply cannot say how it feels or what it wants. The result is a beautifully shot, exquisitely observed and surprisingly original work of cinema that uses genre expectations not as things to be transgressed but as a means of eliciting an emotional response from the audience.
Gestalt Mash have my fifth piece on Fumi Yoshinaga’s excellent Ooku: The Inner Chambers.
The fifth volume (the last one translated to date) of the series slows the pace down after the brisk historical jaunting of the previous volume. Again, the primary concern is the failure of the Shogun to provide the sort of leadership required to steer Japan through troubled times but Yoshinaga subtly shifts the emphasis of the book opening up whole new vistas. Indeed, while the previous volumes have been all about the need for the Japanese ruling elite to reflect the changed demographics of Japanese society, enough time has now passed that we are on (at least) the second generation of female rule. In Yoshinaga’s alternative Edo period Japan, women now have exclusive control over all aspects of society. This changes the power dynamic between the sexes and so presents Japanese culture with another ‘fact’ that it needs to reflect.
Gestalt Mash have my fourth piece on Fumi Yoshinaga’s alt-historical manga epic Ooku: The Inner Chambers.
Volume 4 shifts the timeline forward in order to see how later Shoguns fare with the task of managing a changing Japan. By allowing us to see the ways in which these later Shoguns struggle to fill the first female Shogun’s sandles, Yoshinaga not only invites a more generous appraisal of the first Shogun, she also shifts the series register away from an explicitly feminist analysis of gender differences and towards a more general political analysis of the responsibilities that accompany power.
Oh… and the book ends on a spectacular cliffhanger!
Futurismic have my thirty sixth Blasphemous Geometries column.
The column argues that the reason why we tend to swing to the right when we play games is because the video game interface changes the way we perceive the world. Strategy games effectively make us see like a state and when we see like a state certain human values (like the cost of grand strategies in individual human lives) and concerns disappear but other values and concerns (such as stability of the international system and efficiency of government) appear to take their place.
The column draws quite heavily on the work of James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) but I am much more willing to lend the state an agency of its own than Scott was in the context of that book. One reason why I did this is because I read and wrote about Scott’s more recent book The Art of Not Being Governed (2010), which really does present the state as a class of entity in its own right.
Every now and then, a film comes out that seems to slip completely through the net. Not picked up by the festival circuit, the major distributors or even the more cultish elements of the genre scene, it washes up on the shore of DVD review sites unloved and largely ignored. Kristjan Milic’s The Living and The Dead is the kind of film that provides a compelling argument for the continued existence of DVD review sites as it is not only unloved outside of its native Croatia, it is also genuinely brilliant.
Set in two different time-frames, the film explores the idea (much beloved of Nigel Kneale) that certain places in the world have a memory of their own. A memory so deep and so dark that it curves the emotional space around it. Sucking in positive emotions and leaving only misery and death in its wake. Despite clearly being a work of fantastical cinema, The Living and The Dead is relentlessly mundane in its focus… in fact, you could quite easily read the film as just the story of two groups of soldiers fighting and dying for the same insignificant scrap of land. But to do that would be to ignore some beautifully evocative ideas.
Videovista has my review.
More and more, I find myself attracted to character. Character not so much as a focus for empathy or even sympathy but character as an examination of human psychology and of the human condition as it is projected into the world. One way of exploring the evolution of human nature is by taking an extremely long view of the matters and looking at how the quirks of one generation can blossom into the crippling psychological ailments of another. This style of writing and approach to character underpins Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series as well as William Faulkner’s Snopes family series of books and short-stories.
The Long Hot Summer is an attempt to capture some of that psychological depth and complexity and communicate it through the medium of film. Based mostly upon the first of Faulkner’s Snopes novels, The Long Hot Summer features the great Orson Welles as an overbearing paterfamilias whose psychological quirks are strangling both him and his children. In order to escape from this impasse, Welles’ character needs a catalyst but what of the ethics of using someone else to solve your own problems? Paul Newman plays a catalyst by the name of Ben Quick. A catalyst who, it transpires, has issues of his own.
Videovista has my review.
Late last year, Rodrigo Cortes’s film about a man buried alive in Iraq was released to a good deal of serious critical attention. Ostensibly an experimental work primarily concerned with trying to inject textured tension and atmosphere without ever leaving the confines of a small wooden box. Though successful in this regard, the film’s use of the word ‘Iraq’ lead some overly eager critics to jump to the conclusion that the film is some grand allegory for American foreign policy. It isn’t. It’s a very silly film about a man trapped in a box which, despite glimmers of intelligence, is ultimately let-down by a decidedly lackluster script.
Videovista has my review.
In the review, I also mention Stuart Gordon’s film Stuck (2007), which I reviewed on this very site a couple of years ago. That’s a much better film, go and watch that one instead.
Gestalt Mash has my third piece on Fumi Yoshinaga’s alternate history manga Ooku: The Inner Chambers.
Following hot on the heels of the second volume in the series, volume three teases out a political conflict at the heart of the Shogun’s court. A conflict in which the forces of conservatism battle the forces of social progress for control of both Japan and the mind of the Shogun. Beautifully drawn, exquisitely written and awesome in the power of its insights into contemporary attitudes towards gender and sexuality, Ooku continues to be a fantastic piece of sequential art.
Ruthless Culture 