by Jonathan M

Absence of Mind (2010) By Marilynne Robinson – For Christ’s Sake Let it Go!

It has become something of a critical cliché to end a review or an essay with a phrase such as “…and find out something about what it means to be human”.  The elevation of this simple characterisation of a piece’s themes and ideas into a full-blown cliché is partly a reflection of its over-use by unimaginative critics and partly a reflection of the sheer number of works of art that attempt to engage with issues of personal identity.  Indeed, the crisis of identity is perhaps the central recurring theme behind all of modern literature.  However, despite all of the books, films and plays devoted to excavating conceptions of the self, surprisingly little headway has been made.  We are still alienated from our deepest desires.  We are still trapped between the need to be social creatures and the desire to be true to ourselves.  We are still fundamentally estranged from each other’s subjectivities.

In fact, art’s lack of progress has been so complete that one might well be tempted to conclude that art — whether it be literary, dramatic, cinematic or figurative — simply lacks the capacity to generate the kind of robust truths that stand up to close intellectual scrutiny.  After all, if one does not turn to interpretative dance when one wants to discern the nature of a neutron star, why should we turn to poetry when we want to discover who we are?

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson’s extended essay Absence of Mind – The Dispelling of Inwardness From The Modern Myth of The Self is an attempt to address this very question.  Robinson feels that the rise and rise of scientific conceptions of the self have resulted in a general impoverishment of discourse surrounding human nature.  An impoverishment that has left us alienated not only from the many ancient and richly metaphysical traditions embodied by the arts, philosophy, and religion, but also from ourselves and our willingness to trust our own insights into who we are and what we want.

Unfortunately, rather than clearly defenestrating these shrunken visions of humanity and providing a sustained and rigorous argument in favour of a richly metaphysical conception of the self, Robinson provides us with a one hundred and thirty page-long howl of entitlement.  Robinson is sloppy in her choice of targets, meretricious in her engagement with science and vacuous in her proclamations.  Absence of Mind is a book that fizzles with anger at the idea that scientists refuse to take Robinson’s private intuitions into account when formulating their theories but when the time comes for Robinson to articulate a reason — any reason — as to why they should, she remains oddly silent.  Absence of Mind is a book written with little insight and with little to say.

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by Jonathan M

BG 33 – Tell Your Own Damn Stories! Games, Overreading and Emergent Narrative

One of the most startling things about the opening to Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas is that the cut scenes are well-written.  Their characters are well drawn, their dialogue is consistently funny and their narrative arcs are drawn boldly and with a real grasp of human psychology.  In the world of video-game cut scenes such artistry is practically unheard of.  In fact, by and large, you are far more likely to remember a cut scene for its terrible dialogue or woeful translation than you are for its aesthetic quality.  Unfortunately, as far as most video-games are concerned, the problem stretches beyond a few laughable cut scenes and into the realms of systemic narrative failure: Like operas and porn films, video-games are universally badly written.

And yet games are more than capable of telling great stories.

My solution?  Hang all video-game writers and Tell Your Own Damn Stories!

My thirty third Blasphemous Geometries column over at Futurismic explains how.

by Jonathan M

Another Year (2010) – Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

“Work then without disputing,” said Martin; “it is the only way to render life supportable.”

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable design and set themselves to exert their different talents. The little piece of ground yielded them a plentiful crop. Cunegund indeed was very ugly, but she became an excellent hand at pastrywork: Pacquette embroidered; the old woman had the care of the linen. There was none, down to Brother Giroflee, but did some service; he was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss used now and then to say to Candide:

“There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.”

“Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but let us cultivate our garden.”

 

So ends Voltaire’s immortal novel Candide, ou L’Optimisme (1759).  It is an oddly enigmatic ending that has elicited much commentary and speculation.  By the end of the book, Candide has witnessed and experienced many hardships and horrors.  He has travelled the world and seen the worst of it.  Yet, when called upon to distill his all of his knowledge and insight, the optimist expresses only a desire to tend his garden.  This desire to return to the garden is not an ode to the unexamined life or a hymn to religion’s capacity to return us to Edenic bliss.  It is a belief, simply stated, that the world is what we make of it and that the harshness of existence can only be kept at bay by the construction of a carefully tended space.  A space that is ours.  A space that we control and that we care for.  When Voltaire suggests that first we must tend to our gardens he is telling us that meaning is not something that we discover in the world, but something we build into it.  Happiness requires work.  It requires continual effort.

 

This simple realisation lies at the heart of Mike Leigh’s new film Another Year.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The String (2009)

As someone who watches quite a bit of GLBT cinema – without actually being either G, L, B or T – I am often struck by the way in which gay indie film directors present coming out as a very simple moral question.  Most GLBT films frame coming out as a question of personal honesty and self-actualisation.  According to these films, people are in denial until they are not, at which point they come out and it is up to their friends and families to deal with it and by ‘deal with it’ I mean ‘accept it unconditionally’.  Indeed, GLBT cinema traditionally presents the ethics of coming out as purely a question of acceptance.  If you accept your friend/relative/former partner then you are morally good, if you do not then you are morally bad.  But what of the morality of living a lie?  what of the morality of turning people’s lives up-side down so that you can finally be honest with yourself?  Surely these are not simple questions.

Mehdi ben Attia’s film Le Fil addresses the social repercussions of coming out in a way that most Anglo-American GLBT films refuse to do.  A loving satire of upper-class Tunisian society, The String asks whether hypocrisy really is a worse option than social isolation.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Seven-Ups (1973)

Did you enjoy Steve McQueen in Bullitt?  How about Gene Hackman in The French Connection?  Well… believe it or not the producer of both of those films went on to direct a film of his own.  A film with many of the same advisors and technical assistants.  The result?  A Big Dumb Stylish 1970s Car Chase Movie but, unlike Bullitt and The French Connection, The Seven-Ups is nothing else than a Big Dumb Stylish 1970s Car Chase Movie.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Sealed Cargo (1951)

Anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1980s will remember a time when TV schedules were bulked out with lesser-known black and white films.  Films which, as a kid, you would seldom find yourself watching.  There is a definite rainy-saturday-afternoon feel to Alfred L. Walker’s Sealed Cargo.  A war-time drama dealing with U-boats and the paranoia surrounding Nazi infiltration of the Danish merchant navy, Sealed Cargo features both some sublimely atmospheric moments of tension and some frankly demented action sequences.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days (2007) – Willful Stupidity as Self-Protection

In order to mourn the passing of the Humanist and Historian Tony Judt, the New York Review of Books decided to republish an essay of his about the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz.  In this piece, Judt draws particular attention to Milosz’s invocation of the concept of Ketman.  Ketman, originally an Islamic concept referring to a person’s capacity to pay public lip-service to the worldview of political authority whilst maintaining a private opposition to that world-view, was used by Milosz to explain how it was that Communism continued to hold sway over entire populations despite its myriad hypocrisies and impracticalities.  Judt then goes on to argue that American college students struggle with the concept of Ketman:

Why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach.

Judt then points out that market capitalism holds a similar sway over the West as Communism once did over the East.  We all know that capitalism is horribly flawed.  We all know that it makes some people disgustingly rich while denying even the most basic necessities to billions of others.  We know this and yet we simply cannot imagine what it would be like to live without the Market.

In Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

Set during the final years of Romania’s Ceauşescu regime,  Christian Mungiu’s 4 Luni, 3 Săptămâni şi 2 Zile is an exploration of what it is like to be held between two equally dehumanising intellectual systems.  Intellectual systems that demand complete ideological loyalty despite both being horrifically flawed.

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by Jonathan M

The Kids Are All Right (2010) – It’s a Woman’s World… Thanks to Men.

In September I wrote a piece about Debra Granik’s excellent Winter’s Bone (2010) examining the film through the prism of what the theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls ‘Kyriarchy’.  Kyriarchy is a concept designed to move discussions of prejudice and social dominance beyond the kind of simplistic oppositional dynamics that have for too long dominated this area of political discourse.  According to Kyriarchy, dominance is not a question of GLBT vs. Straight, Black vs. White, Male vs. Female or Catholic vs. Protestant but rather a patchwork of ever-changing power relations between all kinds of different groups.  According to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the face of human oppression takes myriad forms.  It is always changing and yet always present.  Winter’s Bone demonstrates not only that women can be complicit in the oppression of other women but that men can also find themselves forced into a particular social role that they may personally find oppressive and intolerable.  In Granik’s Ozark mountains, men are violent and psychotic because that is what they are expected to be.  If you are not violent and psychotic then you are not a real man and if you are not a real man then you might as well spend your time playing the banjo.

As it deals with the poorest of the poor, it is easy to characterise Winter’s Bone as a depiction of a life that is particularly and unusually hard and so to conclude that the patterns of social dominance represented in the film are somehow an exception to the more normal and healthy gender relations that characterise the rest of society.  This is simply not the case.  The Ozark mountains may well make social dominance a matter of life and death but the same patterns of social dominance present on those bleak mountainsides play out all across our society.  Right up to the top.  The universality of Kyriarchal rule is elegantly demonstrated by the sexual politics of Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right.

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by Jonathan M

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) – The Altar of a Mad God

Back in 2006 an odd little programme snuck out on BBC Four.  The programme was called A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and it featured nothing but the hirsute and lisping Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek talking animatedly about his favourite films.  The director Sophie Fiennes did not impose any limitations upon Žižek’s ramblings: She did not ask him questions.  She did not impose themes.  She did not even demand that the films Žižek dealt with be ordered chronologically or in any kind of order that might render his analyses more accessible to a lay audience.  She simply let him get on with it.  Her sole input seemingly being at the level of mis-en-scene, ensuring that when Žižek spoke of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) he did so sitting in a motorboat crossing a harbour, or that when he spoke of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), he did so from the bathroom and balcony of the same hotel that appeared in the film.

 

In the four years since A Pervert’s Guide To Cinema first aired, it has come to be seen not as a documentary about film or a series of cleverly shot televised lectures and more as an experiment in documentary film-making.  The experiment involved making a documentary about the arts without seeking to explain either the act of creation or the fruit of that process.  By allowing Žižek to chat about his favourite films Fiennes was distancing herself from the obsession with biography and context that dominates cinematic depiction of the arts.  A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema was not a film about Žižek or a film about films, instead it was a cinematic appercu of the act of artistic creation itself.

 

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow sees Fiennes return to the same philosophical template by providing us with a glimpse into the creative processes of the German installation artist Anselm Kiefer.  Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is not so much an arts documentary as it is an invitation to worship at the unholy altar of an insane god.

 

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by Jonathan M

The Red and The Black (1830) – Forever Tumbling Upwards

The politics of sympathy and social advancement is always a tricky question.

Many stories feature characters with humble origins overcoming set-backs and challenges in order to rise to positions of prominence traditionally unthinkable for people from their social class.  Consider, for example, d’Artagnan from Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers novels; who would have thought that that nearly penniless member of the provincial nobility who crept into Paris on a sandy-coloured horse would wind up, thirty years later, as Marshal of France?  Stories in which sympathetic characters rise to the top of their societies serve to redeem those societies.  Indeed, the message to be taken away from the Three Musketeers is what while Louis XIII may have been a weak and easily-manipulated King who was cuckolded by the Prime Minister of his nation’s greatest military rival, he did at least preside over a society in which the cream could rise to the top.  Cardinal Richelieu is a sinister and ruthless presence but he can recognise talent when he sees it and this capacity for well-deserved social advancement means that Louis XIII’s France, much like its King, deserves a reputation for being ‘Just’.  If only a little bit.  The flip side of this depiction of heroic cream rising to the top is to be found in the genre known as the Picaresque novel.  Characterised by such works as the autobiography of Bienvenuto Cellini and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), the Picaresque novel frequently features a roguish and frequently unsympathetic character achieving wealth and status through under-handed means.  The implication being that if Barry Lyndon achieved wealth and position by being a scoundrel, it is probably safe to assume that the same is true of anyone in that society who possesses either wealth or status.

The difference between works such as The d’Artagnan Romances and The Luck of Barry Lyndon demonstrate that by adopting a different stance towards their protagonists, authors can adopt entirely different attitudes towards the societies they are describing.  A sympathetic character who rises to the top redeems his society by his accomplishment while an unsympathetic character damns his.

Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir walks a fine line between these two approaches to social advancement.  Stendhal tries hard to make his protagonist Julien Sorel appear sympathetic but despite being intelligent, ambitious, capable, romantic and democratic in sentiment, Sorrel’s rise to the top of French society constitutes one of the most vicious and wide-ranging social satires imaginable.  Stendhal’s book leaves the period of the post-Napoleonic Bourbon Restoration looking hysterical, preposterous and profoundly unjust.

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