by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 2

Gestalt Mash has the second of my pieces about Fumi Yoshinaga’s excellent Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

Having introduced us, in the first volume, to an alternative history of Edo-period Japan in which 75% of the male population has been killed off by disease, Yoshinaga goes about trying to explain why it is that this culture allows women to rule while also paying lip service to the idea of masculine superiority.  Intelligent, insightful and quite moving, Ooku: The Inner Chambers continues to be a very rewarding read.

by Jonathan M

Never Let Me Go (2010) – Tommy and Kathy and Paolo and Francesca

One of the founding myths of contemporary intellectual culture is the idea that, denied the consolation of religion and confronted by a universe both devoid of meaning and over-burdened with choices, humanity now finds itself in a world that has become disenchanted.  As Max Weber puts it:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ”disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

The term ‘disenchantment of the world’ is not in fact Weber’s but that of Friedrich Schiller whose critical writings — including Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) — can be seen as attempts to come to terms with his feeling of being somehow out of step with the world and more in tune with the by-gone age of classical Greece.  An age which:

Displaced humanity, and recast it on a magnified scale in the glorious circle of its gods; but it did this not by dissecting human nature, but by giving it fresh combinations, for the whole of human nature was represented in each of the gods.

With characteristic insight, Gabriel Josipovici suggests in Whatever Happened to Modernism? (2010) that this sense of displacement flows not from a fundamental change in the nature of the world or of man’s relation to it, but from a sense of romantic nostalgia.

This sense of somehow having arrived too late, of having lost for ever something that was once a common possession, is a, if not the, key Romantic concern.

This sense of detachment from the world and yearning after a time when life had meaning is elegantly articulated by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s new book All Things Shining – Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011).  In an early chapter, Dreyfus and Kelly compare the affairs of Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857)) with the adulterous affair of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s Inferno.  Whereas Flaubert depicts Emma’s betrayal of her witless husband in a way that can continue to command our sympathies, Dante depicts adultery as a form of moral incontinence:

The medieval couple knew that it was wrong to engage in an adulterous affair – there was no question about it; unfortunately, they couldn’t resist the sinful passion of lust.

The medieval couple lived their lives within religion’s enchanted bubble of certainty and, as a result, they knew that they were doing wrong whereas Charles and Emma Bovary, living in the modern disenchanted world, lack a basic moral infrastructure. In fact, despite her shallow tastes, emotional remoteness and infidelity, Charles comes to the point of admiring his unfaithful wife for her betrayal.

Dreyfus and Kelly’s account of Dante’s psychology is above reproach.  It is lucid.  It is elegant.  It is comprehensive.  However, the psychological model underpinning Dante’s characterisation is profoundly alien to our modern eyes.  If Paolo and Francesca were so sure as to the ‘right thing’ to do, why did they act otherwise? And, more importantly, how did they act otherwise?  Dreyfus and Kelly speak of the couple as suffering from what ancient philosophers called akrasia or weakness of the will, but they do not delve deeply into the psychology of akrasia and the ways in which a mindset characterised by moral certainty and a tendency to akrasia might differ from a modern one.  Indeed, as modern disenchanted readers we find it easy to empathise with Charles Bovary’s refusal to condemn his wife because, like him, we have trouble choosing which moral framework to apply to her actions.  Should we judge her by the standards of Christianity?  Or should we be understanding of the fact that she was trapped in a loveless marriage to a dull and unambitious man?  This inability to choose between frameworks is, according to Dreyfus and Kelly, the defining characteristic of our modern disenchanted state:

This sense of certainty is rare in the contemporary world. Indeed, modern life can seem to be defined by its opposite. An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and most of us could admit to find ourselves at least occasionally wavering.

But what is this “wavering” if not akrasia repackaged in existentialist livery?  Dante may claim that Paolo and Francesca knew that they were doing wrong but their actions suggest a degree of uncertainty as to whether or not ‘the right thing to do’ was actually the right thing to do in that particular situation.  It is my contention that, far from being a modern invention, existential anguish and lack of certainty are fundamental to the human condition.  They are necessary by-products of the way in which human consciousness engages with the world.  As John Gray puts it in Straw Dogs (2002):

When we are on the point of acting, we cannot predict what we are about to do. Yet when we look back we may see our decision as a step on a path on which we were already bound. We see our thoughts sometimes as events that happen to us, and sometimes as our acts. Our feeling of freedom comes about through switching between these two angles of vision. Free will is a trick of perspective.

While we may not possess free will, our consciousness is such that we cannot help but see ourselves as free.  This perception of limitless freedom and responsibility for making choices creates a sense of existential vertigo as we struggle to come to terms with the fact that we could have acted differently and yet did not.  This sense of existential vertigo is omnipresent in contemporary intellectual culture because all systems of value are now open to scrutiny, but even if our culture did not tolerate dissent or ‘shopping around’ for values, we would still feel that lack of certainty.  We would still feel that lack of meaning.  We would still desperately try to latch on to any system that would help our conscious minds make sense of our actions.

Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) explores both the universality of existential anguish and the universality of the need for consolatory myths.  Deploying science fictional tropes to create a world in which people’s lives have both a meaning and a purpose, Never Let Me Go suggests that the lost certainty lamented by Romantics is nothing more than another myth concocted as a remedy to our innate sense of alienation from the world.

 

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by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 1

Gestalt Mash has recently relaunched itself and it brings with it the first in a series of posts about Fumi Yoshinaga’s Tiptree Award-winning manga series Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

Set in an alternate Edo-period Japan in which the male population has been decimated by a terrible disease, the series is an examination of why it is that old values (in particular the myth of masculine supremacy) outlive their utility in the face of social and demographic change.

 

by Jonathan M

White Material (2009) – deColonisation / reOccupation

One of the most troubling things about colonialism is its language. Colonisation implies a degree of tentativeness and impermanence as though colonies are fragile attempts to implant humans into a landscape that has yet to support them.  Colonisation assumes unoccupied space just as discovery assumes that the thing being discovered has never been found before. Jyotsna G. Singh addresses this semiotic baggage in the introduction to her book Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues (1996):

Since the early modern period, this discovery motif has frequently emerged in the language of colonization, enabling European travellers/writers to represent the newly “discovered” lands as an empty space, a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their linguistic, cultural, and later territorial claims. – Pp. 1

What is offensive about the notions of discovery and colonisation is the fact that most of the lands discovered and colonised by European settlers were actually inhabited.  How can one discover land that is already well known and colonise places that are already inhabited?  Easy… by making the people who were there first disappear. As a result, one should perhaps speak not of lands being ‘colonised’ but of their being ‘occupied’.

A different way of looking at this question is to point out that ‘colonisation’ remains a useful term precisely because of the moral and conceptual absurdity of its connotations.  If one speaks of lands being occupied rather than colonised by the British Empire then one allows for the fact that all human inhabitation is morally neutral because nobody has a natural right to the ownership of the land they inhabit.  We all occupy the land and time brings with it no legitimacy.  The crime of colonialism was not that the Europeans laid claim to land that was not theirs, it was that they laid claim to territory and then used those claims to justify the exploitation of the people who were occupying the land when they first got there.  Colonialism is not a crime against the land; it is a crime against people.  All land is occupied.  From the perspective of the land, we are all colonists.

Claire Denis’s White Material examines the process of decolonisation without the assumption that there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of the land.  Denis’s film presents Africa as both perpetual virgin territory and eternally dried-out, exploited and ancient wasteland.

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by Jonathan M

Nenette (2010) – Behind Brown Eyes

We live the entirety of our lives entombed in our skulls.  Isolated from the world by a few inches of bone, we never experience what it is like to not be in our bodies and nor do we experience what it is like to be someone else.  Not even for a second.  Tragically detached from the world, we are forever looking out and speculating as to what it might be like out there, what might be happening inside other people’s heads.  Of course, evolution has equipped us to make these inferential leaps and studies suggest that within minutes of birth, babies have already acquired a preference for looking at human faces.  As a species of pattern-matchers, we seek out our fellow humans and we try to guess what it is that they are feeling.  We read emotions on faces and infer the emotional states that might be causing them.  As our understanding of both human psychology and ourselves expand, we build complex models that help us to make sense of other people by projecting our own emotions onto the facial expressions we see around us.  We assume that other people are like us because the alternative is unbearable.  It is one thing to be entombed in our heads, but it is quite another to be completely alone.

Our skill at pattern recognition is such that all too often we generate false positives.  We look at the weather and random happenstance and we infer a form of human agency that eventually becomes belief in a supreme divine intelligence.  We look at images beamed from the surface of Mars and we see faces in the rubble.  We look at animals and we think we recognise human emotions.  We project because that is what we do.  We project because we cannot stand the idea that we are the only people feeling what it is that we feel.  We do not want to be alone in our experiences.

Nicolas Philibert’s Nenette is a documentary film that explores this desire to project ourselves out onto the world in order to make sense of it and concludes that these acts of projection say more about the person doing the projecting than the thing being projected upon.

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by Jonathan M

BG 35 – Heavy Rain: Free Will and Quick Time Events

Futurismic have my thirty fifth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “Heavy Rain: Free Will and Quick Time Events”.

Evidently, I am absolutely terrible at Quick Time events as I managed to achieve what is evidently the most downbeat ending that Heavy Rain has to offer (killer goes free, everyone else dies in misery), but despite my lack of basic competence at… well… video games in general, I nonetheless saw in Heavy Rain a quite revolutionary approach to gaming.  An approach that restricts interactivity whilst also managing to make what little interaction the game allows seem so much more important and meaningful.  A brilliant game and an enjoyable column to write.

by Jonathan M

Hotel du Lac (1984) By Anita Brookner – A Charnel House with 24 Hour Porterage

One of the numerous themes drifting through David Fincher’s exquisitely realised but biographically off-target The Social Network (2010) is the idea that social networking assumes an understanding of human interaction that is both unnaturally stilted and unhealthily reductive.  The fact that Sorkin’s script depicts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a social spastic, a high-functioning autistic and a ruthless bastard conveys the idea that Facebook does not so much replicate the college experience online as reduce it down to its component parts as understood by someone who, at some fundamental level, does not understand the beautiful complexities social interaction.  Facebook, we are lead to believe, is what our social lives would be like had Mark Zuckerberg coded human psychology.  The difference between Facebook friends and real friends is the difference between the way that Zuckerberg sees the world and how the world really is. While my viewing of The Social Network left me feeling that Aaron Sorkin simply does not understand where the founder of Facebook is coming from, I find it hard to disagree with the suggestion that social networking casts humanity in quite an ugly light.

Take a long hard look at your Twitter feed or your Facebook friend updates and you will most likely find not the carefree banter of people exchanging ideas and pleasantries but a lot of different people working a lot of different angles: Please RT! New Press Release! New Blog Post! Nominate My Stories For This Award!  Someone is Saying Something Wrong, Go Shower Them With Hate!  Spend enough time on Twitter and you start to wonder whether Sorkin’s Zuckerberg might not have been on to something when he boiled human interaction down to a simple numbers game.  Are those pleasantries and ideas ever anything more than currency in a game of self-advancement?  Do we have friends or do we have allies?  Do we do anything that is not motivated purely by the pursuit of power, prestige and pleasure?

Anita Brookner’s Booker prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac (1984) is a book that paints a similar portrait of human interaction. The novel suggests that beneath the genteel façade and old world charm of an off-season luxury hotel on the lake of Geneva lurks a hideous charnel house in which the modest and the self-effacing are dismembered and devoured by the greedy, the ambitious and the selfish.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Lost Patrol (1934)

One of the more depressing cinematic experiences I had last year was going to see Matt Reeves’ timid remake of Tomas Alfredson’s superlative Let The Right One In.  I was lured into the cinema on the promise that the American version teased certain elements out of the original text that Alfredson’s film missed but what I got was pretty much a shot-for-shot remake.  Pointless hack-work aimed at culturally insular Americans.  Some might say that this was inevitable and that there is no point in remakes, but I do not think that this is necessarily true.  Some films positively overflow with great ideas but somehow manage to fuck up the implementation.

As my review of John Ford’s largely overlooked The Lost Patrol makes, clear, I think that it is a film that is absolutely ripe for a re-make.  Set in the Mesopotamian desert during the first world war, the film tells of a group of British soldiers who lose their officer and their way in the middle of the desert.  Under attack from unseen assailants, the soldiers hole-up in an abandoned mosque and slowly go mad.  Boasting Boris Karloff, the film is rushed and has too many characters to ever settle down into the psychological register the subject requires but there are some lovely ideas hidden in this film.  They just need someone to unleash them.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Gainsbourg (2010)

While I do have my preferred themes and modes of expression (abandonment, despair, existential dread), I like to think that the range of culture covered by this blog is comparatively cosmopolitan.  I do films, I do novels, I do short stories, I do non-fiction, I do games and I’m going to start doing comics too.  However, there are two forms of culture that I hate and so will never cover.  The first is French song (la chanson francaise) and the other is musicals.  I hate both of them.  With a passion.  In fact, to borrow a turn of phrase from Alexei Sayle, I hate musical theatre more than I hate fascism.

And yet here is my review of Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg.  A musical all about French song.  And I don’t hate it.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Deep Red (1975)

Another month and another batch of new reviews up at Videovista.

Experience has taught me and I have learned my lessons well.  My natural film-viewing habits tend to be very director-based.  If I see a film I enjoy then my first reaction is generally to seek out that director’s other work.  Similarly, I will not go to see a film in order to see a particular actor, or to see the work of a particular writer.  But I will go out of my way to see a film by a particular director even if the subject matter does not initially speak to me.  This relationship is one of trust.  I trust certain directors to take me to certain places.

I do not trust Dario Argento.

Partly this is a reflection of the fact that he has had a very long career filled with many ups and downs but it is also due to the fact that I need to be in a quite specific frame of mind to tolerate the ostentatious silliness that characterises Argento’s style.  As my review of Profondo Rosso suggests, I was in the right frame of mind to watch a stylishly directed and fiendishly well composed whodunit.  Excellent job on the extras by Arrow too, who really are one of the best distributors out there when it comes to putting out old exploitation films.