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The Final Problem Review

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I know, I said this wouldn’t be up for Monday. But then my weekend plans got spoiled by a stomach bug and I ended up home and watching Sherlock anyway. So it’s entirely possible that I’ve got a sour mood to match my stomach. Nevertheless, what a complete and utter disappointment this season of Sherlock has been.

The crux of the problem is one that plenty of franchises have fallen afoul of, which is thinking that you can introduce a character like Eurus and have her matter to the audience purely on the mythic weight of who she is instead of having to develop her. But it doesn’t work. She’s a distressingly one-note character whose characterization consists entirely of Mycroft asserting things about her. More to the point, her supposed powers are all bizarrely undersold: we’re told that she can effectively enslave someone by talking to them, but nothing about her comes off as particularly persuasive or charismatic. Mostly she sits around talking like a Markov bot fed on mediocre nihilist philosophy. And this is a real problem – the episode depends on her being the unholy fusion of Sherlock and Hannibal, but instead she’s just a generic megalomaniac. Which makes the resolution of her just needing a hug painfully unearned.

Making this worse is the way in which the episode is haunted by Moriarty. It’s not that it would have been better to actually bring him back, but having him popping up on video screens for dramatic effect and to have been the secret co-architect of all of this only serves to highlight how much weaker Eurus is as a villain. I’m not sure even Magnussen could have been effective with Andrew Scott popping up all over his episode, but Eurus doesn’t stand a chance, and the overall effect is to constantly remind the audience of a time when the show hadn’t used up its best ideas yet.

It’s not that there aren’t good bits. The relatively bottle-episode nature of it such that the majority of it is just Sherlock, John, and Mycroft is good, and all of them get some lovely character moments throughout. Mycroft, in particular, shines, getting a wealth of small emotional moments of the sort that he hadn’t really had before in the series. But John’s incredibly well-used as well, even if I don’t entirely buy him backing down from shooting the warden. And of course Molly’s scene was incredible.

But none of that masks the fact that this is just The Great Game done over with the melodrama pushed past the breaking point. The reveals just don’t work. The big one – that Redbeard was actually a person that we’ve never met before and aren’t particularly invested in – is a complete flop. We’ve already seen five people get murdered this episode. Finding out some kid from Sherlock’s past got killed instead of his dog doesn’t carry any particular weight. If anything, it was easier to be upset when it was a dog, which at least felt like a fairly fleshed out dog.…

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Faeces on Trump 6

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This is the final part of ‘Faeces on Trump’… which now seems a peculiarly poor title for this series… all the worse for being so nearly right.  Still, I daresay I shall have more to say about Trump and related issues in the years to come (if I’m spared).  But this first line of thought draws to a close.  This post is, as a result, a kind of ‘summing up’.  (God, I sound pompous, don’t I?)  Further thoughts, or lines of thought, will have to stand alone from now on – and so I’ll be able to retitle for more relevance when I arrogantly shit them all over the internet, as if my opinion matters.  But anyway, this is the last squirt of diarrhea from the bellyache that Trump’s victory gave me.  Further dyspepsia will doubtless cause more and different effluvia to rain down upon you, because clearly I can’t help myself.  (And you’re not even paying me!)  Watch this space, you poor doomed motherfuckers.

 

Fuck it, let’s not bother with any more piss jokes.  Let’s have some Lenin.  We might as well, in a world in which making a Ghostbusters film with a female main cast is enough to get you called a Marxist:

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor… [D]eceit, violence, corruption, mendacity, hypocrisy, and oppression of the poor is hidden beneath the civilized, polished, and perfumed exterior of modern bourgeois democracy.

– Lenin, from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (as quoted by Cliff in Volume 2 of his biography of Lenin)

Paul Foot put that quote up over his office door at the Daily Mirror – where he worked before Robert Maxwell was allowed to take it over so he could bust the unions – just, in his words, “so there could be no doubt about where I stood”.

Even so, Foot wrote an entire book – and a very good one, which I recommend – about how great the The Vote was, and how many people had to struggle so hard and for so long to get it.  Arguably, Foot under-stresses the extent to which the vote has not just been betrayed (by Labour) or undermined, but also repurposed as part of a system of consent to continued capitalist rule.  You have to remember that huge numbers of working people thought of universal suffrage (however they defined it) as a means to fundamentally change society in favour of working people, including redistributing wealth and property.  This ultimately didn’t happen, obviously… or rather, it did, but the wealth and property were redistributed upwards.  This is neoliberalism, and a vital part of how it works is the repurposing of popular democracy, more than just its subversion.  You could even say that neoliberalism is the great expression of that repurposing.  Neoliberalism, as a global system, is a direct – and, at the lower and earliest levels, consciously connived – counter-revolutionary response to the post-war social democratic era, which was itself an extemporisation on the part of the capitalist system, a survival strategy to appease a global rejection of the inequalities of the pre-war system.…

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Hyrule Haeresis 5

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Patriarchy is built on epic time. Learned male history requires exhaustive documentation of political kingdoms and dynastic successions. The Chosen Warrior-Hero God-King must come of age, become anointed, take a throne and lead his people to victory in battle before retiring and passing his crown on to the next generation. Rise, fall and rise. In our language, we call this canon, and the canon of the aristocratic literate patriarchy stands in stark contrast to the cyclical deep time of the feminine and feminine understanding. This is, in fact, the true first war in the world, and its battle scars have played out across the visage of our ideaspace since the start of all time.

And so, deeply fraught and conflicted is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Like the Celtic mythology from which it draws its inspiration, the tune this Ocarina plays is a melancholy one, a lament for a world that was lost before history began. Its story opens as if a folk tale (perhaps a fairy tale). The narrator speaks in the voice of a storyteller relating events to an enraptured audience, presumably comprised of children. Ironically, or maybe inevitably, this is a story about having childhood ripped away from us and mourning the shock and trauma of its loss throughout a grieving adulthood. One does wonder about the mental state of young-at-heart Shigeru Miyamoto during this game’s development period.

Although it has the shape of an oral narrative, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time immediately lurches straight back into the epic history of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There are Golden Goddesses, and mysterious, beguiling boys with great destines laid out before them. And, fittingly for a game originally conceived of as a straight remake of A Link to the Past, Hyrule’s Genesis by way of the Golden Goddesses is rendered with the flashiest and most impressive graphics tech 1998 could give the Nintendo 64. The canonical origin story of The Legend of Zelda, perversely conveyed by a storyteller, just as male storytellers have co-opted feminine voices and feminine spaces since the war began in order to assimilate and suppress them. This is the new origin story; the game that singularly defines Zelda and her canon from now until the rest of time infinite.

Or at least, this is the story we are expected to hear.

For there are secret songs here, just as there are everywhere. We just need to learn not to overlook them. It is, for one thing, deeply strange that the supposed ur-Zelda would put such a focus on the mutable artifice of time and therapy for the trauma of a seemingly inescapable oncoming eschaton. For this is the real face of the Demon King: Aristocratic patriarchy and its learned literary teleological history. Ganondorf’s rise to power is foretold, documented and canonized, and, in contrast to the unnamed and inconsequential King of Hyrule who exists only as a piece of worldbuilding trivia, Ganondorf has a defined backstory, character, set of motivations and epic narrative shaped for him, one which would plunge Hyrule into darkness and strife if allowed to come to pass.…

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Build High for Happiness 6: A Field in England (2013)

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Wandering in open country is naturally depressing

A Field in England is a precise antipode to High-Rise, a fact acknowledged by Ben Wheatley, who has spoken about the way in which he is inclined to make one project a reaction against the previous one. But the thing about the alchemical union of opposites is that it works largely because of the similarities. Just as “up” and “down” presuppose movement in three-dimensional space and “left” and “right” presuppose neoliberal democracy, High-Rise and A Field in England presuppose a director doing sci-fi/fantasy inflected period pieces rooted in the psychogeographies of English spaces. In some understandings of conceptual space this is how the hypercubic prison works – through the systematic construction of axes bounded by opposites that, when multiplied sufficiently, create a territory that is at once infinite and contained.

This is in essence the problem that faces Whitehead, who winds his way through a recurrent series of at best gradual enlightenments in pursuit of no obvious goal or trajectory for escape. More to the point, his problem is heavily location-dependent, in both spatial and temporal senses. Spatially he is confined to the eponymous field, a setting we’ll unpick momentarily. Temporally, however, he is bound by the English Civil War. It has often been suggested that this event serves as the origin for the contemporary socio-political system, an argument that’s generally based on reading it as a transition between the established aristocracy of Charles I and the revolutionary fervor of the Puritans. This is an oversimplification in countless regards, not least that it misunderstands history as something with an origin as opposed to as a series of debts inherited and bloodily paid off from era to era. The English Civil War is certainly an instance of this, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that what emerged from it is somehow a sui generis origin as opposed to an if not inevitable at least entirely sensible consequence of what came before.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Whitehead straddles both sides of this transition, or perhaps more accurately, is stepping over the divide himself.  His status as an alchemist clearly situates him in the world that is receding. But the arc of his slow ascension is clearly towards a measure of individual liberty and away from the crass and domineering tyranny offered by O’Neil, which affiliates him more with the Puritans. Like us, he’s trapped on the inexorable slide down history’s birth canal – just from a substantively different angle. Or, if you prefer something in keeping with ascension, headed up the chimney, an identity gone up in smoke.

This leaves location: a field in England. Central to this is its raw genericness. There are a lot of fields in England, another consequence of the way in which the whole of the island is the product of human development and intervention. And there were a lot of them in the Civil War; Alan Moore is fond of claiming one near Northampton as the place where it was won, although that was merely the first of three, and dialogue about Pembroke places this one during the second, a few years later.…

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The Lying Detective Review

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Well, this was certainly better than The Six Thatchers, though a season of Sherlock (or indeed anything) in which the Moffat episode is not better than the Gatiss episode is difficult to imagine. In comparison with the three other straight Moffat scripts for Sherlock, which is to say to the three best episodes of the series this is… possibly not actually in fourth place overall for the show. Nah, I’ll go with definitely not – I’m comfortable putting The Sign of Three ahead of it.

Let’s start with Mary, since she’s certainly the biggest issue inherited from last week. First the good: we’re not done with Amanda Abbington yet! In fact, she’s credibly the best thing going for much of the episode, with her snarky side-comments routinely being the best gags in it. On the other hand, the narrative reasons for her death are by and large still inscrutable. The most obvious choice – that Moffat wanted to tell a story about grief and fatherhood – is clearly not where things are going, what with Rosamund not actually appearing in this episode. Nor does anything particularly follow from Mary’s death, or at least, nothing that couldn’t have been done anyway. Sure, the specific resolution of Sherlock getting into it with Culverton Smith to get John to save him is a product of Mary’s death, but save for that one emotional beat, this was a story that could have been done anywhere and at any point in Sherlock.

Indeed, for all that they rightly hyped Toby Jones’s portrayal of Culverton Smith, as a villain he is something of a step down at this point. The two most obvious comparisons, Magnussen and Moriarty, were both elevated by their actors, but were well-written and compelling ideas in their own right. Smith, on the other hand, would be a nothing without Toby Jones to leer and cackle his way through the episode. Sure, Sherlock vs. Jimmy Savile as serial killer is a decent hook, but the hook is all there is to Smith. There’s no potential for him to be elevated above baddie-of-the-week status, which isn’t really a status that a show that does three episodes every couple of years should be using. And more to the point, it’s basically one the show has rightly avoided since The Blind Banker. Much of what made Series Three so strong was that all three of its episodes were big, weighty events in their own right. This just… isn’t. And while the Jimmy Savile angle is clever, it’s also obvious, leaving nowhere for Moffat to get his teeth in and push it somewhere meaty.

As a result, this episode ends up being… fine. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but there’s nothing particularly right either. Its biggest idea is Sherlock’s addiction, which isn’t strictly speaking a topic that plays to Moffat’s strengths. He can’t really muster anything on it that he didn’t already do with His Last Vow, acknowledging the compelling and nebulous space between decision and compulsion.…

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Faeces on Trump 5

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Dedicated, with all awareness of the impudence and absurdity of doing so, but also with sincere love and respect, to the memory of John Berger.

 

In the new Preface he wrote in 2010 for a reprint of his 1975 book A Seventh Man, John Berger explained why, in some respects, the book was outmoded.  It is a book of words and photographs – by Jean Mohr – about migrants.  It was written, as Berger says, before a great many things happened which would profoundly alter the world’s political landscape.  One of these things is, as Berger puts it, “the establishment of the global economic order, known as neoliberalism – or, more accurately, economic fascism”.

Not even in the remote vicinity of fucking about, was Berger, despite his customary elegance.

But it’s true, in very essential ways.  Fascism is marked by one of the treasured tactics of the liberal or the reformist leftist.  It is a ‘mixed economy’.  One of the first things the Nazis did, when they were handed power by German bourgeois politicians, was to privatise lots of key manufacturing industries.  Much as did Thatcher as part of the neoliberal counter revolution in Britain.  This isn’t to equate Thatcher and Hitler, but to point out that neoliberalism is a version of a strategy also central to fascism.  And yet, as is better known (thanks to the semi-coherent screeching on this subject from the contingent of pub bores and internet bloviators I am thinking of christening ‘the folk Right’), the Nazis also employed a policy of state direction of industry, and were ‘statists’ in other broader senses.  But then, as many have pointed out, neoliberalism is not really anti-statist.  It expands the state in key ways, even as – fascism style – it integrates state power with corporate power.  The great early triad of neoliberalism was Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet.  Pinochet’s Chile, supported by Thatcher, and helped into being by the US, was run as a kind of lab experiment in what has become known as neoliberalism.  The opening of the state to corporate interests, and the subsequent transfer of what had been socialised wealth into private hands, with the brutality of all that being buttressed with direct state brutality, with the growth of state power in areas such as police repression and military spending.  Military spending, once again, a key aspect of fascism.

Of course, in Euro-American culture, we say it isn’t fascism if white people aren’t in the camps.  If white people aren’t being locked up for thoughtcrimes, aren’t being murdered by the state, then whatever it is, surely it isn’t fascism.  Without for a moment wishing to deny or downplay the immense suffering of the victims of the Nazi holocaust, and of mid-20th century German imperialism more generally, it’s true that we reserve a special and unique horror for that particular form of aggressive and racist imperialism because it was committed against mostly ‘white’ people in Europe.  

(Though we must always remember that the category of ‘whiteness’ is socially constructed, and is therefore permeable, malleable and manipulable.…

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Myriad Universes: The Deceivers Part 3: The Truth Elusive

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I don’t think any of the characters on the cover here actually appear in the issue. Certainly not that lady Romulan Commander: Davoros is male, I think.

So there’s recap. About a page and a half of it, but that’s to be expected. What’s not to be expected, or at least Team Beardy didn’t expect it, is that Geordi and the crew knew all about their betrayal ahead of time, which allowed them to alter the frequency of their own phasers so they wouldn’t be affected when the alternate universe crew reversed the polarity or whatever. This allows our heroes to subdue their counterparts and curtail their little hijacking attempt. How did they know this? Quite simply, and naturally, we underestimated Deanna Troi. Being empathic, she could immediately sense when Team Beardy started to plot against the crew, and spied on them to learn the details of their plan. However, as Bearded Geordi points out, this still leaves them with the dilemma of what to do about the rogue sun threatening the Beta Argotha system in his universe, or indeed how to tell which universe everyone is in. We get some more recap about why this is a problem, before Haspan announces that he might have figured it out.

Back with the Enterprise half of the story, we seem to have gone back in time a bit as the Ferengi Marauder hasn’t warped out of the Neutral Zone yet. But then it does, and Captain Picard has a conversation with Worf about why they shouldn’t chase after it before he suddenly comes to a realisation. Cutting off his train of thought, he has Worf call up Commander Riker to tell him he and his away team can come back because the mystery has just been solved. While on Beta Argotha One, Haspan explains why he thinks Team Beardy is actually in the right, and that they are in their universe. After some mildly ageist ribbing from Smithers and Gillette, Haspan explains that he’s been idly making some scans of the local flora and fauna when the other team members were busy trying to kill each other, and discovered evidence of recapitulation.

And here’s where I start to cringe, to be honest. This is a good story arc, but this plot point right here is straight up bad science. Worse still, it reminds me of one of Star Trek’s most egregious nadirs, “The Child”. For those who mercifully blocked all evidence of that episode from your memory banks, the initial pitch for that trainwreck was based on recapitulation theory, the widely discredited notion that embryos go through all the “previous stages” of evolution during development. So, for example, a human embryo would go through reptile, amphibian, rodent, primate and early hominid before reaching its “final form”. This theory rests on a dangerously inaccurate teleological conception *and* shoddy observational skills both, and that’s not touching on the political ramifications of discourse surrounding reproductive biology.

To his credit, writer Michael Jan Friedman doesn’t *entirely* throw this.…

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Build High for Happiness 5: Crash (1973/1996)

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a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration

Within the biotemporal omnipresence of the hypercube escape must be understood as an exit wound. In practice, this would manifest itself as an area towards which the natural flows towards annihilation congregate – the eddies along the surface where narrative tracks converge, scar tissue forming anticipatorily around the site of injury. Counterintuitively, then, a weak point is going to appear as the thickest part of the skin.

Crash, then – first of Ballard’s three attempts at sci-fi without futurity, the book is a famously scandalous meditation on the eroticism of the car crash. Its film adaptation, in 1996, is suspended neatly at the halfway point between the twin towers of the Ballard and Wheatley/Jump High-Rises, and circles neatly around other touchstones. It’s directed by David Cronenberg, for instance, whose 1975 film Shivers saw him independently arriving at the concept of a modernist apartment complex descending into madness, albeit because of genetically engineered parasites who drive their hosts mad with lust as opposed to because of some inherent property of modernity. Its opening sequence – a slow tracking shot through an aircraft hanger, across the sleek bodies of airplanes, fragmented like a female body beneath the male gaze, until finally, in the middle distance, a woman undressing enters the frame and, as we move to close-up, exposes her nipple and lays it seductively upon the body of the aircraft, which she proceeds to relate to more closely and intimately than the lover who subsequently takes her from behind – draws a crucial link between the sexuality of cars and one of Le Corbusier’s other defining aesthetic obsessions, the airplane.

This connection is more subdued in the novel, but still present: Ballard’s wife (the main character is named after himself) is sleeping with a pilot and taking flying lessons, and Ballard has occasional descriptions like “even the giant aircraft taking off from the airport were systems of excitement and eroticism, punishment and desire waiting to be inflicted on my body.” The connection between cars and planes is hardly an unexpected one requiring reference to Le Corbusier, but the link is nevertheless generative. Le Corubusier’s aestheticization of mechanical functionality creates a tightly wound feedback loop that Ballard efficiently short-circuits. As Le Corbusier puts it, talking about cars, “through the relentless competition of the countless firms that build them, each has found itself under obligation to dominate the competition, and, on top of the standard for realized practical things, there has intervened a search for perfection and harmony outside of brute practical fact, a manifestation not only of perfection and harmony, but of beauty.” In other words, the mechanistic efficiency of cars naturally leads to the emergence of beauty, to which Ballard, quite sensibly, sets about trying to fuck.

The cold detachment that characterizes Laing is obviously a big part of this, but what Crash foregrounds that High-Rise does not is the eroticization of this clinicism, as evidenced by his description of a fantasy of “the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbreake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered forever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.”…

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The Six Thatchers Review

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Not sure these will always be on Sundays – they might migrate to Tuesdays, which this week will be Build High for Happiness 5. Anyway, Sherlock‘s back as the Year of Moffat continues, albeit, you know, with Gatiss. Speaking of whom, and in a rare concession to spoilerphobes, let’s start by saying has written what’s almost certainly the best script of his career here, a position admittedly previously held by The Empty Hearse and The Hounds of Baskerville. It’s not labyrinthine; Gatiss has never done that, and that, as opposed to his usual problem of stultifying unoriginality, has generally been his weakness on Sherlock. But it moves in unexpected ways. The substitution of Mary for the expected Moriarty plot is in many regards just the same trolling as “eh, we’re not going to tell you how he actually survived,” but the last twenty minutes felt extraordinarily inventive, moving in genuinely unexpected directions. The revelation of John’s near-affair is unlike anything Gatiss has ever done, small and human and actually like a writer who exists in a post-Russell T Davies world. The end, particularly with the injunction to save John, is unmistakably also the season-plotting influence of Moffat, but the small, moment to moment decisions of how it’s structured are chosen with a care and weight that’s as much of a leap forward for Gatiss’s writing as Scandal in Belgravia was for Moffat’s. On the back of this, I’m actually curious what he’ll do for what you’ve got to figure could well be his last ever Doctor Who script this year.

More broadly, it’s an interesting place to put the season. Past seasons have had fairly self-contained first episodes that end in some vague tease of future weight – twice Moriarty, once Magnussen. But it’s never felt as though there was too much to clear up in the next three hours. This time, with the fractured Sherlock/John relationship, the strange musings about death, Sherrinford, Moriarty, and a trailer that’s focused on a character with no obvious relationship to any of this, it feels like a show that’s going for something it’s never done before, trying to push itself into a new shape. It’s a good feeling at the start of 2017; what it seems like we want from the return of Sherlock. More of this thrilling, exciting sense of possibility please.

And, of course, less of this “we fridged Mary” crap. This is, simply put, a fucking awful decision. Maybe – maybe – there’s some way to justify it that we’ll see over the next two weeks. I certainly wouldn’t put it past Steven Moffat to turn a decision this awful around. But the fact remains that Mary Watson was one of the best things Sherlock had going for it. The Abominable Bride rightly celebrated the female characters that the show’s modernized approach let it have. Now they’ve taken the best one out in a cheap and arbitrary way that offers nothing save for an opportunity for Martin Freeman to get to show off his dramatic range.…

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