Eruditorum Press

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Build High for Happiness 2: High Rise (1975)

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ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures

As the precise center of the hypercube, Ballard’s novel is even more tightly bound into 1975 than the Wheatley-Jump film. Lacking the externalizing vantage point of futurity, Ballard cannot look at what the brutalist tower blocks became, and is forced instead to extrapolate out from what they are. Which is, of course, Ballard’s basic job description. He’s a science fiction writer by trade. His first four novels imagined apocalyptic scenarios, starting with The Wind From Nowhere, in which the world is destroyed by constant hurricane-force winds, and subsequently The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World, which feature flood, drought, and weird crystalline growths appearing on everything. But starting with his alarmingly experimental 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition, a series of reveries in which human bodies, mediated culture, and material carnage of the 1960s blend together into one of the most unsettling psychic landscapes of the 1970s (no mean feat given the decade), his career took a different track.

This resulted in a series of three books of which High-Rise was the culmination. These novels were still science fiction, but of an unusual sort in which there are no imaginative technologies or futuristic conceits. Instead they are all set in the present day of the 1970s, with Ballard taking the technologies and social structures of his time and twisting them to their most suggestively violent excesses. And so in Crash the automobile becomes a source of infinite perversions, in Concrete Island the median of a highway becomes an inescapable island, and in High-Rise, well, you know.

But it would be a mistake to read Ballard as particularly concerned with any of these technologies per se. Wheatley has proclaimed that “it’s important that the film isn’t seen as a critique of Brutalist architecture,” a goal he’s not entirely successful at, but it’s absolutely true of the novel. Ballard famously described his approach to science fiction as rejecting the notion of outer space in favor of what he called inner space, “an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge.” In this regard, High-Rise is no more a critique of brutalist architecture than The Drowned World is of water.

This is not to say that the building, or indeed brutalist modernism, are irrelevant to Ballard’s project. High-Rise has its own architecture, composed according to a structural logic that provides much of the book’s actual energy and momentum as it moves towards its conclusion. The book cycles among three viewpoint characters – Laing, Wilder, and Royal – in increasingly shorter stretches, starting with three consecutive chapters for each character, then a second pass with two, and finally a third pass through with single chapters for each character, with Royal’s final chapter further fragmenting so that Wilder breaks into it at the end, and a final Laing chapter as befitting his eventual ascension within the building.…

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Close but no Cigar

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“And that’s what he’s been like for forty-five years.  Fantastic!  Speeches that go on for four, five, six, seven hours…  I wonder if when he gets to 90 he’ll stop and say ‘But that’s enough about me… let’s talk about you’.” – Mark Steel, 2001

 

So, as you might have heard, Fidel Castro died.  Aged 90.  Ruler of Cuba since the revolution of 1959, which he led, and which unseated Batista.  Something something survived x many US Presidents something something Che Guevara something something Bay of Pigs something something…

…aaaaaand at this point we would normally go into a recitation of certain obvious points.  Different points depending on the political orientation of the writer, his publication, etc.

For the Right, we would recapitulate that Castro was a dictator, that there is little democracy in Cuba, that it’s a one-party system, that post-revolution Cuba has a dismal human rights record, that dissidents are persecuted, that political prisoners are often ill-treated, that the regime cruelly persecuted LGBT people, etc.

Unusually for the Right, this is all true. They generally don’t have to lie about Cuba.  They would if they had to, but they generally don’t need to.  Not about the basics anyway.  Which must be refreshing for them.  (Actually I don’t think they give a flying toss.)  They lie about the bigger picture, of course, characterizing Cuba as an exceptional abhorrence, while suppressing votes and supporting privatised slave gulags at home, and bombing Syria and cuddling the Saudi royalty and arming Israeli apartheid and invading Iraq, etc etc etc.

For the Left, we would probably stress the enormous improvements in education, literacy, health care, etc, which came from the revolution.  We’d talk about Castro’s support for the ANC against South African Apartheid (in contrast to most Western governments) and for similar liberation struggles across the world, Palestine for instance.  We’d talk about how bad Batista was (and he was a vicious dictator), about how pre-revolution Cuba was a playground for the US corporations and the mafia, about how badly the USA treated post-revolution Cuba (very badly), the hypocrisy of the West in condemning Castro when it snuggles up to friendly dictators (Pinochet, the Saudi royals, etc etc etc) and commits imperial atrocities itself, including multiple coups to put US-friendly dictators in charge of Latin American nations.  We’d talk about 600-odd CIA assassination attempts, and exploding cigars, and so on.

Again, all true.  Truer, perhaps.

Occasionally, you’ll get an article which mixes the two approaches in the name of nuance and balance.  Even Owen Jones managed this basic feat.  But even in such cases, the exercise is still in the mixing of two distinct approaches.  (With Jones, the result was a classic case of ‘this, but on the other hand this’, followed by his customary moralising at the Left.)

And that’s the point.  Both sides are more-or-less right about Castro and his Cuba.  Maybe not in their ideological conclusions, but in their factual cases.  

But very few commentators have stopped to ask why these two realities overlap.…

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Myriad Universes: Hearts and Minds Part 3: Into The Abyss

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Rom finds an obviously distressed Quark in his quarters, who inquires if his brother has consulted Odo. Though he doesn’t understand what’s going on, Rom answers in the affirmative, and that Odo told him to have Quark meet him at Docking Pylon C. As Quark leaves, he tells Rom to tell anyone who asks about him that he’s “gone on vacation”. At the aforementioned rendezvous point, Quark fills Odo in on the situation involving Maura, namely how she threatened to kill him if he didn’t sell her the bar. Odo agrees to check it out, but advises the Ferengi to do something he didn’t entirely want: Sell Maura Quark’s Bar.

In the Siskos’ quarters, Jake arises early and tells his father he’s worried because everyone around him is convinced the Klingons and the Cardassians will go to war. Ben says “When people believe that strongly in a thing, it makes it that much more likely it will happen” and Jake agrees, saying that’s what he’s told all his friends. But apparently, they’re not listening. Jake hastens to add that he knows his dad is doing everything he can, but Ben confesses he’s frustrated because nobody is listening to him either. Then, Jake gives his father some advice of his own “If they’re not chasing your fastball, throw them your curve. It always works with me”.

After leaving Quark, Odo checks in with Miles O’Brien. Although he’s almost finishing rebuilding the bombed out runabout, he hasn’t gotten any further in figuring out what happened to it in the first place. The saboteurs were so skilled they left no physical evidence behind for the chief to go off of. Odo tells Miles about Maura and her attack on Quark, and they both agree that makes her at the very least a person of interest in the investigation into the assassination of Tal Berel as well. Quark closes the deal with Maura and Delgar via subspace, while Odo monitors the exchange from behind him. Maura closes channels and tells Quark to meet her at 0400, and Delgar to prepare for “stage 2”. Odo and Quark banter, leave Quark’s quarters and begin to go over a plan of their own.

Jadzia Dax records a Captain’s Log entry announcing she and her crew are on their way to The Abyss, and recapping what we learned about it last time. Doctor Bashir is sceptical about the legend of Bahal’s Bird, but Dax reminds him “Most legend has a grain of truth to it”. Koleth, meanwhile, is still convinced the Cardassians destroyed the K’Tang, but Dax reminds him that as a Klingon Attack Cruiser, the K’Tang shouldn’t have gone down as easily as the reports seem to indicate it did. Though the ship’s sensors initially don’t pick up anything unusual, Koleth, Dax and Bashir eventually hit upon the idea of using the data they have to triangulate the origin point for the probe the Klingons picked up, thereby identifying the precise location of the battle where the K’Tang died.…

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Eruditorum Press Books Make Great Christmas Presents

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It’s not still Black Friday or Cyber Monday or any shit like that, right? OK, good.

So, first of all, thanks everyone for funding us through eight Class reviews on Patreon. They’ve been fun, they’ve been infuriating, it’s always nice to write adjacent to Doctor Who again. I’ll keep the $300 threshold for a Return of Doctor Mysterio review, and expect S10 to be in the same general range, maybe a little higher because I can probably get away with it. Still cheaper than making me go episode by episode through the Chibnall era might end up being.

Second of all, I did want to politely direct your attention to a few things that might be of interest during the holiday shopping season. Supporting independent leftist media is a revolutionary act, donchaknow. First of all there’s Josh Marsfelder’s Vaka Rangi, A briliant critical history of Star Trek that anyone who enjoyed TARDIS Eruditorum will get a kick out of. For the smart Star Trek fan in your life. Or because you want him to be in a good mood when I try to get him to podcast about Star Trek: Discovery next year.

Second, there’s the myriad of books I’ve written. Nothing new yet this year, though note the word “yet,” but all the old favorites like the first six volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum, A Golden Thread, the book on Flood I did with Alex Reed, and the Choose Your Own Adventure-style edition of Recursive Occlusion. Plus one I’d like to highlight, Guided By the Beauty of Their Weapons, my 2015 essay collection on thinking progressively about science fiction in the face of the alt-right. If you’re minded to start 2016 by thinking about fighting back, I’m comfortable saying it’s one of the most up-to-date books on the market.

Finally, I am going to get Last War in Albion for sale on Amazon in time for fairly easy Christmas delivery, so if that’s a thing you want/want someone to get you, rest assured it can happen. For those budgeting, it’ll be $4.99 in ebook and somewhere in the low $20s for print. Announcement when it’s ready. (Kickstarter backers, full update tomorrow.)

And as always, even if you can’t afford to give any money to support the blog, thanks for reading.

Oh, and I know loads of people who are in the general orbit of the blog have cool stuff for sale that people who read this blog might want to buy or put on their lists. If that’s you, please, post in comments. And if you’ve still got presents to buy for awesome people, check the comments.…

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Pex Lives 37: The Mind Robber

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We’re pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives – one that’s actually about Doctor Who at that. (You remember Doctor Who, right? It’s that show about hope that doesn’t air in years like 2016.) Specifically, it’s about The Mind Robber, i.e. the twelfth greatest Doctor Who story ever. There’s also discussion about Fidel Castro, America’s inexorable slide into a dystopian hellscape, and childhood mindscapes.

You can listen to that here.…

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The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did

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So we follow an episode that evokes The Edge of Destruction with one that evokes The Keys of Marinus. This goes about how you’d expect. It’s not that this is an episode devoid of interesting moments. And indeed, as I guessed it might be last week, it’s unusually light on genre cliches to hold the whole thing together. The problem is that it’s also lacking, in a forty-five minute framework, any space to allow the barrage of concepts to breathe and register. The result is that a series of reasonably clever ideas of the sort that previous episodes were painfully lacking in just sort of flash by without particularly registering. Which turns out to be far worse than the previous problem the show was having. 

Let’s start with the biggest and most staggering problem in this regard: Quill angrily and furiously confronting the god she doesn’t believe in. This is possibly the best moment of drama of the entire series. Conceptually, it’s the equal of anything Moffat has ever done. And Ballon’s response to her, even if it is lightly ripped off from that Joan Osborne song, is also phenomenal stuff. But it’s wasted in a scene towards the middle of the episode that’s basically just the third fast-paced Macguffin acquisition sequence in a row. There’s no weight to it – the show doesn’t unpack any of the implications of Quill facing down her god, and the entire incident is basically forgotten by the time we cut to the next big set piece. It’s infuriating – at long last the show delivers something amazing and brilliant and new, and it doesn’t even seem to notice, instead barreling on to the next idea.

But then, what do you expect from an episode that wastes an idea like the Metaphysical Engine on something as fundamentally banal as cobbling together a pseudo-TARDIS, complete with an interior that literally looks like it was bolted together from remnants of the current TARDIS set? “All of the mythologies of every species ever are real” is a jaw-dropper of a concept that deserves to actually be explored and interrogated instead of being used as the technobabble to explain why we’re cycling through a complete litany of the default alien planets that BBC Cymru Wales can do. I mean, maybe this will get sorted out in the finale – certainly Dorothea seems to leave it as a massive hanging plot thread – but frankly, “shoved in as one thread of a forty-five minute season finale” doesn’t exactly sound like a sufficient platform for that idea either.

Meanwhile, in amidst all the whirl of underdeveloped concepts are a bunch of sub-par character moments. Ballon never gets built into anything enough for us to give a shit about the final fight with Quill, not least because we’ve already seen the outcome. His backstory never gets past a vague account, and the fight seems to mainly exist because apparently they don’t want to keep the character around, which rather raises the question of why he’s even in this episode in the first place.…

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Build High For Happiness 1: High Rise (2015)

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a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences

High-Rise is an arch film, its thematic building blocks routinely presented explicitly in dialogue. In an early and particularly gleeful instance Tom Hiddleston lectures, “as you can see, the facial mask simply slips off the skull” while literally stripping the flesh off a cadaver’s skull, a statement of theme and demonstration of method all in one. This is, of course, a Ballard thing; the assimilation of his characteristically declarative style into a cinematic language for which it is not an entirely natural fit.

A second example, from when Hiddleston’s character, Robert Laing, is first meeting the High-Rise’s architect Anthony Royal (a name contrasting with the similarly symbolic Richard Wilder, the film’s primary working class character): looking at a blueprint of the building, he proclaims, “it looks like the unconscious diagram of some kind of psychic event.” It’s as Ballardian a sentiment as has ever been expressed, and indeed a more or less direct quote from the novel. As with the casual declaration of the thin line between society and barbarism, this is a statement of both theme and method – in this case a restatement of the basic and underlying premise of psychogeography, namely that exterior landscape shapes internal experience. In High-Rise this is framed primarily in terms of architecture, and specifically in a critique of brutalist modernism and its utopian project. The principle applies more broadly, of course, but all in good time.

This is, of course, a temporally bounded concern, restricted to the mid-seventies milieu in which Ballard wrote the original novel. As director Ben Wheatley puts it, “if you’re trying to develop a film of High-Rise in 1978, it makes sense to set it further in the future, because the book is probably set in ’82 or ’83. But then that thinking goes on and on, and eventually you get too far away from the book, and more importantly from the technology. You get into the world of social media, and then the story about the isolation of the tower doesn’t work any more.” The fact that the high-rise is a spatial prison is made explicit in the film in a sequence where Laing attempts to leave the building to go to work only to be seized by agoraphobia and sent rushing back, but it is essential to realize that in fact the building’s residents are imprisoned in both space and time – the circumstances in which their slide to barbarism takes place tightly constrained to the London Docklands, 1975. It is, in other words, not merely a tower block but a tower hyper-block, which is, in point of fact, what Royal’s blueprint most obviously resembles.

 

 

 

The ironic effect of demarcating a fourth dimension of this prison is to increase the number of adjoining spaces, just as extending a square into the third dimension increases the number of walls. This question of neighboring spaces is explicit in the film’s closing moments, as Laing, finishing up the dog, looks over at the second high-rise in the complex, awaiting its descent, “ready to welcome its residents into this new world with open arms.”…

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Faeces on Trump 3

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Or ‘These Theses on Faeces and Fasces’

 

First some very important business.  There’s a new podcast in town, Wrong With Authority, created and starring myself and my friends, familiar to you all, Daniel Harper, James Murphy, and Kit Power.  It’s yet another movie podcast… but it’s also about History.  So that’s exciting then.  Specifically, it’s about movies about historical events, and how full of shit they are.  Our first episode is just out and it covers the movies Murder by Decree and From Hell (adapted from a graphic novel some of you may have heard of) and their relationship to the historical ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders.  Download our first episode here.  And please feel free to recommend and share.  We won’t mind, I promise.

 

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As you probably noticed, the word ‘fascism’ is being thrown around a lot in response to Trump and his election.  I don’t happen to think terminological issues are unimportant.  I think this issue is worth investigating.

For instance, I agree with Phil that the term ‘alt-Right’ cannot and should not be reduced to ‘neo-Nazi’.  Just to be clear (as if I haven’t made it clear where I stand): this is not in any way to defend the alt-Right, who I think are just about the most contemptible rabblement of toxic shitbags on the planet.  But they’re their own distinct flavour of toxicity, and the emergence of this flavour helps us know where we are now, and why.  Terminology is important precisely because it enables us to get a grip on complexities like this.  The intentions of many who are saying that “alt-Right = Neo-Nazi” are, no doubt, honourable, in that they are trying to expose a dirty truth that is being concealed.  And the claimed equivalence has more than a germ of truth in it.  However, the conflation is potentially damaging.  The alt-Right do, no doubt, share much that is crucial in common with Nazis, whether we use that term specifically or colloquially.  And I’ve referred to both Milo Yiannopoulos and Davis Aurini as Nazis in the past, with justification I think.  However, the alt-Right are a distinct phenomenon. 

This terminological issue is why I took a post to (roughly) define fascism in what I think are the correct objective terms.  There is a risk when you take this approach of falling into pedantry for its own sake, which won’t help anyone.  But I hope I have more to offer than just doing the equivalent of quoting the dictionary during a debate.  I’m going to try to test Trumpism against my definition.  Not in an attempt to decide whether Trumpism ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ fascism in some simplistic way.  As I said at the head of my last post, fascism shouldn’t be reified and essentialized into an alien thing squatting outside the real world, a distinct and discrete entity that can be identified in the same way as a specific variety of phage or bacterium.  Political realities may have lineages and heredities and families but they don’t have DNA fingerprints.…

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Myriad Universes: Hearts and Minds Part 2: On the Edge of Armageddon

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There is no time to process what has just happened. No time to even be shocked about it. Not only has the dust not cleared from the explosion onboard the runabout that killed Tal Berel, but it actually hasn’t even finished exploding yet before Kol immediately blames Marok for assassinating the ambassador. An indignant Marok fires back, demanding Kol explain why he feels the Cardassian Empire would have any reason to destroy a Federation runabout and murder a mediator. Kol threatens to kill Marok where he stands, to which the Cardassian diplomat basically says “bring it” before Commander Sisko intervenes, breaking up the fight and imploring the delegations to stand down until an official investigation can be launched.

But Kol is not having it, demanding Sisko and the Federation back the Klingons because of their treaty arrangements. But for his part, Marok tries to manipulate Sisko into siding with the Cardassians, claiming that the Cardassians and the Federation have always been “brothers in spirit”, and transparently threatening him with Gul Dukat’s presence, claiming that he “would hate to see him get a chance to sit down in his old chair again”. Meanwhile in Quark’s, it’s after hours, but the titular Ferengi lets Maura in anyway, and that’s before she reveals she has a case full of gold-pressed latinum, plus more on her ship, that she’s willing to give him if he sells her the bar and leaves Deep Space 9 for good.

In the Gamma Quardrant, Jadzia Dax, Doctor Bashir and Koleth have arrived in orbit around Keltara, the last planet the K’Tang was known to have visited before being destroyed. They beam down to what looks like a frozen wasteland, but then Bashir gets attacked by a giant purple snow beast and is saved by a member of the survey team the K’Tang left behind. Koleth and Dax fill the landing party in on the situation, but the commander is adamant that the Cardassians would never dare make war with the Klingons. Koleth tells the commander that he had privileged access to the K’Tang‘s distress beacon, which claimed that while the Cardassians attacked them, their weapon and defense systems had already been sabotaged prior to their opening volley. Dax is irritated that Koleth didn’t find it necessary to share that information with her and Bashir, his nominal commanding officer and crewmate, but before she can reprimand him the commander of the away team begins to mount a defense of his team, the surviving K’Tang crew. Dax reassures the commander that in no way is she accusing him or his crew, but rather wanted to ask if he knew where the K’Tang was scheduled to go after leaving Keltara, as Captain Krek never filed a proper flight plan. The commander points them to Caldonia 3, the best place to restock and get information on this side of the wormhole.

Back on Deep Space 9, Commander Sisko expresses his concerns to Admiral Kernwill, who apologises before putting him in charge of negotiations onboard the station.
…

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The Genocide of the Vampires

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A guest post by Noah Berlatsky, from his new book The Hammer Dracula Films: And Other Vampires. Which is great stuff that you should check out.

You can’t see a vampire in the mirror for the simple reason that the vampire is your reflection. The monsters onscreen are projections of human desires. Hammer audiences lick their fangs with Christopher Lee at all the delicious bosoms beckoning. Dracula pierces the exposed neck with a phallic oomph, just as the vampire hunter drives his rigid stake into the nubile beauty’s trembling form. Lust and blood drive both the living and undead; the population of Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot is murdered by proliferating vampires, and then murdered again by the heroic vampire killers. First the vampires rage through the town like a consuming fire, and then, at the end of the book, they are themselves consumed. The same townspeople are destroyed once, then twice— as if the first time was so much fun it needed to be rewound and watched again.

In King’s Salem’s Lot (1976), the fact that the vampires are in fact, just us, is the point of the novel and its horror. King hates the people of Jerusalem’s Lot, and loves that hatred with the same vicious delectation of his vampire antagonist, Straker. The people in the town cheat on each other, loathe each other, lust after each other, betray each other and beat their children. They are squalid, loathsome, mean-spirited and ugly—King shines his narrative upon them, and they hiss and burn and thrash feebly, just like they do when they become vampires and are pulled out of their sleep and into the sunlight.  As police chief Parkins says before he heads out of town, Salem’s Lot “ain’t alive…That’s why he came here.”

It’s dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country’s goin’ the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin’s in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin’ popcorn and cheerin’ ‘em on.” He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. “They prob’ly like bein’ vampires.”

The kids Parkins describe eagerly watching carnage on those movie screens are, of course, much like the kids eagerly turning the pages of Stephen King’s novel. The magic of the vampire narrative is that it reaches out and bites you, changing you into the fiendish antagonist you are supposed to hate and despise. Readers, like Parkins, wait with leering, moralistic satisfaction for evil to be done, and for the deaths that follow —first of the humans who are vampires, then of the vampires who are human.  If you enjoy Salem’s Lot, then you all, along with those townspeople, “probl’ly like bein’ vampires.”

To like being a vampire is, first of all, to enjoy killing.…

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