Eruditorum Press

Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception

God and Monsters

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Sorry for the slightly belated update, but this week has been busy. This week in Oi! Spaceman, we put out the next episode of Searching For Fuchal, discussing Series One, Episode 4: “Waiting For God.” The episode is very much about the search for meaning in a vast and uncaring universe, and our podcast attempts to connect Lister’s rejection of his own godhood with his essential goodness, and Rimmer’s finding patterns that aren’t there with the Quagaars with the Cats coming to worship Lister’s laundry list. “Waiting For God” is probably the most on-point to the central message of Red Dwarf we’ve seen yet, and it was actually a joy to revisit for the podcast. Download it here. 

Over on They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, we welcomed the triumphant (half) return of our old co-host Paul by discussing two sci-fi action films from 1990: Robocop 2 and Predator 2. Highbrow choices, I know. We had a great time chatting about the plundering of public resources by private enterprises, the birth of the neoliberal agenda, and the terribly racist idea of what drug cartels actually did. Also: why Robocop should really be the perfect negotiator. Check it out here.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 25th, 2016)

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Neoreaction a Basilisk ebooks went out to Kickstarter backers yesterday. The first sentence never seemed so apt. I doubt I’ll find myself writing anything substantial on Brexit before the Capaldi volume of TARDIS Eruditorum, and thus with the benefit of a couple of years’ historicization. It’s obviously never a good thing when this many fascists are this happy, though. I honestly didn’t believe Britain would vote for the side that’s literally got Nazis gunning down its enemies in the streets. But then, as I noted last week, I honestly didn’t believe Britain would be a place where Nazis would gun down a politician in the streets. But of course, there’s always been more to Britain than the bits I love and have written at length about. Equally, that doesn’t mean the Britain I write about isn’t there. It’s always been a Britain of the margins. It’s still a land of madmen – poets and snake-worshippers and yes, of course, with boxes. It’s all still there, and still as important and central to what Britain is as it ever was. And if there’s one thing it’s lurking in the margins, ready to flood back in. 

That doesn’t make it any less of a depressing day, though. And I know I have a lot of readers for whom this was a particular gut punch. So consider this your open thread to vent, make fatalistic jokes, or cobble together fleeting optimism. 

Game of Thrones review will be Monday morning again, followed by Brief Treatise in the afternoon. Take care of yourselves and each other.…

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Pulp Frission

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(Content Note: This piece contains descriptions of fictionalized violence against women of a possibly sexual nature and descriptions of bodily objectification through male gaze. It also contains some mention of foot fetishism and uses an extended metaphor around piss play. Consider yourself warned.)

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is generally considered to be the least impressive of his filmography, even by Tarantino himself. It’s a film obviously constructed around a car chase sequence and as the second half of a double bill whose lead-in is a mildly diverting action-horror-comedy; it’s none-too-surprising that few critics were all that kind upon release. I haven’t seen anyone on Eruditorum Press beat up on the Guardian lately, so let’s let Peter Bradshaw stand in for the critical consensus:

…Tarantino has had to pad this film with stuff that would hardly make the DVD’s “deleted scenes” section: long, long, long stretches of bizarrely inconsequential conversation between the babe avengers which are a big comedown from the glorious riffs from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino appears himself in a wooden acting role (a real downer) and awards an unlovely cameo to his friend Eli Roth. But check out that head-on collision.

In defense of the commentariat of 2007, Tarantino has crafted a film that seems like just that kind of mindless fluff on the schedule of a week-by-week major-release movie reviewer. Few great films can be fully understood on a first viewing (unless you’re Pauline Kael I suppose). Then again (if I must take the opportunity to shit on the Guardian), the words “Zoe Bell” appear nowhere in Bradshaw’s review, meaning he entirely missed the greatest pleasures of even the surface level.

Nine years later, we need take no such excuse. Tarantino is a consummate filmmaker, hugely controversial, thoroughly aware of the controversy his films create, and in interviews manages to simultaneously talk incessantly and refuse to reveal anything of importance as to the intended meaning of his work. His persona and body of work are expressly designed to provoke a reaction, and even if Death Proof is the least of his films, it’s worth a second look. What are those interminable dialogue scenes doing, and why isn’t anyone talking about Royales with Cheese?

Looking again at the surface first, the conversations in this film are almost entirely among women. Young women to be precise, traditionally attractive party girls interested in booze, drugs, and hard cock. And in trying not to be judged, either by the other girls or by larger society, by how they like to enjoy that cock. And, over and over again, the omnipresent threat of aggressive men using their size, their social influence, their presence to dominate these young women sexually, to control female flesh for their own purposes.

Butterfly makes out with her nebbish boyfriend, clothes on, and makes him leave with a hard-on, and her friends laugh in disbelief, judging her for not just fucking him. Later, she’ll be pressured by social convention and by an aggressive masculine charmer in Stuntman Mike to perform a lap dance in the middle of a crowded bar.…

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Psychic Landscape 1: Conjuring the ’70s

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This post is based on a true story.

 

The Conjuring movies are interesting for various reasons.  There is, for instance, the way they use the 1970s themselves as a source of horror.

Actually, this sort of thing has been happening for a while now.  As far back as The Sixth Sense, 70s clothing has been pulled into the mix.  Moreover, Sixth Sense borrows heavily on the detached, clinical style of certain 70s and early-80s horror movies, such as The Exorcist and The Shining.   You know the kind of shot I’m talking about.  Steady or static shots of carefully framed tableaux, often in deep focus, usually with something irrational or horrific intruding matter-of-factly into an otherwise domestic, mundane, or banal – perhaps even aggressively banal – setting.  The resurrection of this stylistic tick is in marked – probably conscious – contrast to other styles of horror filmmaking which were on the rise at the time, most particularly the ‘found footage’ style, the early phase of which was exemplified by The Blair Witch Project.  Both styles were probably, in their different ways, reactions against the styles predominant in the late 80s, which tended to be very heavy on overt depictions of monsters, gore and/or body horror.  These make-up-and-practical-effects-heavy films were also often very frenetic, witty, and self-aware.  It’s no coincidence that the last gasp of such films (before they started getting re-made ‘on the square’) were boastfully self-aware, even pop-postmodern, films like Scream and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. 

 

 

There’s a definite sense in which films like The Conjuring movies are an attempt to reclaim or relive the feeling of ‘seriousness’ in horror films.  Of course, the irony is that this very ‘seriousness’ is a function of the immaturity of the people who perceived it.  I’m not calling them immature now; I’m saying it made its mark on them in the way it did when, and because, they were immature.  The perception of seriousness comes from the intensity of unease which certain films inspire, and the unease is bound up with childhood.  The attempt to use the mundane iconography of a bygone era – the 70s and early 80s – is the tell here.  It harks back to an era when people my age – and James Wan, the director of the two Conjuring movies is a year younger than me – were encountering horror as kids. 

I remember how anxiously fascinated I was by Tobe Hooper’s Salems’ Lot, Kubrick’s The Shining, The Wicker Man, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist, and other films (such as Peter Medak’s neglected masterpiece The Changeling) which, to the very young me, seemed deadly serious, transgressive, deeply unnerving, potentially traumatising, repellently alluring… and also inextricably bound up with flares and very wide lapels.  I was, paradoxically, more able to get my hands on films like these than the films which were ‘current’ at the same time.  In contrast to brand new films, which were in cinemas that wouldn’t let me in, or on VHS tapes I couldn’t afford and which my parents wouldn’t buy or rent for me, a lot of the previous generation of movies were on TV, recordable late at night. …

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Comics Reviews (June 22nd, 2016)

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From worst to best of what I bought.

She Wolf #1

Nothing wrong with this comic as such – the art is tremendously striking, the themes are interesting. But there’s also nothing that particularly draws me in or makes me invested. By the end of the first issue I still wasn’t entirely clear on the premise. Will probably read interestingly in trade, but this doesn’t look like a single issue sort of thing to me.

Wonder Woman #1

Elsewhere in the wide world of uninspiring #1s, an issue of Wonder Woman that makes no real effort to sell a new premise or direction for the book. Rucka’s in typically competent mode doing the things he does well, which is to say soldiers and special ops stuff. He’s writing Wonder Woman in much more of a warrior/force of nature mode as opposed to the diplomat of his first run. Which is to say it’s lacking what made his first run interesting, and hasn’t really added anything to replace it. But it’s inoffensive and reasonably solid Wonder Woman, and I’m going to stick around for at least a few issues.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #8

A perfectly pleasant body swap issue that doesn’t really go anywhere, and ends with no real forward momentum into the next issue. Odd and a bit disposable, but still good fun.

The Ultimates #8

A tie-in that’s far better than the series it’s tying into, this is the first take on the big Thanos fight that kills James Rhodes that’s actually been well-done. Good character stuff for Monica and Adam. Needs more Ms. America, of course, but every comic Marvel publishes needs more Ms. America. Art is still gorgeous. All told, a solid issue that makes quite the silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Cry Havoc #6

This is an incredibly intelligent and well-done book, and I look forward to its eventual return (tragically not currently scheduled). I’m going to have to sit down and reread all six issues in one shot, because it’s definitely the sort of book that’s going to reward that, but its themes and approaches are both genuinely brilliant. The trade’s out in August, and I strongly recommend checking it out. 

James Bond #7

Ellis starts a new arc here, and at the outset at least it’s playing to his strengths much more than the first one did. I’m sure he’ll kind of annoy me by throwing in an all-action-sequence issue or abandoning all sense of single issue plotting, because that seems to be what Ellis does on James Bond, but for the moment I’m excited about this book again.

Bitch Planet #8

The most unapologetically social justice oriented book on the stands doubles down on that yet again, and as usual that’s not even the best part. The scene with Makoto realizing what’s happened to his daughter is heartbreaking, while the scenes between Cam and Whitney are full of twists and humor. Both are long on emotional nuance to boot.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Waves 3 and 4

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The final group of toys in Playmates’ Star Trek: The Next Generation line (that is, before all of their Star Trek toys were consolidated under one homogeneous brand label) have something of an unusual release history. The third wave released in three parts over the course of 1994, surrounding the premier of the movie Star Trek Generations, with a fourth dropping in the summer of 1995. I love how, as far as Playmates was concerned, Star Trek: The Next Generation fully remained an extent, relevant and marketable brand for at least a full year after the TV series itself went off the air. Even though the show was over, Star Trek: The Next Generation remained very much a present cultural phenomenon for some years after the fact, a theme I’ll be returning to in the remaining chapters of this volume. It almost kind of makes you wish the show itself had been around to bear witness to that, but that’s beside the point tonight. Tonight, it’s all about the toys.
 
And what toys they were! Playmates had already endeared itself to me as the makers of probably the greatest plastic effigies of anything ever, and these waves contained a number of my absolute favourite figures in the whole line. I am combining both of them into one essay, however, because a couple of these batches, particularly the 1995 one, didn’t quite have the same volume of releases as past years and I’ve already covered a great many of them in previous posts in this series. There was just no way I wasn’t going to talk about Tasha Yar, Ro Laren and Duty Uniform Deanna Troi and Beverly Crusher in the bridge crew essay, just to name a few notable examples. There were still a lot of new figures, of course, but the first set of releases from these waves continued the pattern from wave 2 by giving us a lot of variants: Aside from Duty Uniform Deanna, we got Commander Riker as a “Malcorian” (from “First Contact”), Geordi as a “Tarchannen III Alien” (from “Identity Crisis”), Worf in a “Starfleet Rescue Outfit” (from “Birthright, Part II) and two figures based on “Unification”: Captain Picard and Commander Data as Romulans.
 
 
I didn’t have any of those figures except Captain Picard, and let me tell you, boy is he ever a boring toy. Although the likeness is absolutely spot-on, you’d expect that from Playmates by now and he has a whopping five points of articulation: Two shoulder joints, two swivel arms and a neck joint. He’s so boring they had to include the “Romulan Disguise Kit” as an “accessory” which, upon careful inspection, seems to mean not just his clothes and facelift, but a generic Starfleet bag with a Romulan insignia on it. Romulan!Picard also suffers the same fate as Guinan and Doctor Crusher (and another figure in this line) by being plagued by the curse of the long jackets: His Romulan hoodie or whatever is a solid chunk of hard moulded plastic, which means any action in the torso or legs area is out of the question.
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Creature from the Black Lagoon

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Last week we talked about the expression of the Beautiful throughout the history of Doctor Who, and gleaned different kinds of aesthetics employed by the show in the process – from awe at new, strange places… to the banal objectification of women… to an almost ritualized praise of monsters in the modern era.  And it’s this latter sense of beauty that I find most interesting, given how monsters are now used in Doctor Who, especially in the Moffat era.  Because monsters are no longer just villainous plot devices for generating scares.  Quite often they are secret protagonists, and weighted with symbolic value, especially when juxtaposed with our main characters such that they become telling metaphors.  This latter process I call the “monstering” of a character, and of particular interest to me is how Amy Pond becomes consistently monstered during her time on the show.

But what does it mean “to be monstered?”  What does that look like?  And how unique is it to the modern era?  To answer those questions, I’ll step briefly back into the past, to The Android Invasion, aa 4th Doctor story with Sarah Jane in Season 13.  In The Android Invasion the Doctor and Sarah Jane have landed on an alien planet that looks like Earth, but it isn’t Earth, it’s the staging ground for an alien invasion that will use android duplicates of certain Earthlings, which is pretty standard Doctor Who fare when you think of it.  Anyways, there’s this great cliffhanger where Sarah Jane has been replaced by an android duplicate, only the Doctor has figured it out and attacks her, wrestling her to the ground.  Her face falls off, revealing so much circuitry. 

Yes, this the best moment in the otherwise fairly dreadful tale (it was written by Terry Nation, for gods’ sakes), but it’s also freighted with some potentially interesting literary readings.  First of all, Sarah Jane isn’t the only android duplicate – there’s some regular UNIT personnel, and even the Doctor, all monstered by androids.  It’s uncanny because we see characters we’ve known as “good” behaving in ways that are “not good,” which is rather transgressive.  Aside from that, though, there’s the opportunity for the nature of the particular monster to inform us about our characters’ natures.  This works particularly well in the monstering of Benton and Harry – they’re programmatic characters.  Sadly, Terry Nation is not a particularly writerly writer, as the monstering of both the Doctor and Sarah Jane really don’t say much about them at all – well, unless we stretch it a bit.  For example, Sarah Jane’s role as a Companion is often programmatic, from assisting in asking questions for the audience to serving as a plot device.  And even the Doctor, well, it’s a role that could be (and has been) played by all kinds of performers, such that he doesn’t even have a real face anymore. 

Contrast this with the monstering of Amy in Night Terrors.  In Night Terrors, we see Amy transformed into a deadly Wooden Doll, the product of a child’s nightmare, a child who’s afraid of being abandoned. …

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Battle of the Bastards

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Let’s start with the good, a phrase that pretty decisively tips my hand as to the overall shape of this review. The direction is largely solid – Sapochnik’s sense of composition is reliably impeccable. The wide shot of Davos after he’s discovered what happened to Shireen is probably the most straightforward of them, but it’s hardly the only one. His shots emphasizing the absolute carnage are things we haven’t seen the show do with violence before. The long take of Jon in combat is exquisite, as is the scene of Jon crawling his way out of the crush. 

Many of the small moments are similarly strong. Sansa riding away from the parlay is delicious, a beautiful setup for the final scene, Sophie Turner getting to play imperious badass and absolutely nailing it. Her smile as Ramsay is ripped apart is perfectly poised, at once capping off a long-awaited bit of narrative payoff and letting it go just a little too far. Davos and Tormund’s version of “the men chatting before the battle” is delightful. And pretty much everything in Meereen is fantastic, from Peter Dinklage’s understatement to the basic satisfaction (and intelligence) of opening an episode that had been promoted as if it was another “Blackwater” or “The Watchers on the Wall”-style single location battle with a scene in Meereen, and more to the point with a spectacle-laden battle scene in Meereen. And then of course there’s “I never demand, but I’m up for anything really,” which is straightforwardly the best line of the episode, and probably of the season.

The problems, then. Sapochnik’s direction is mostly excellent, but his taste for visual perversity, so effective in “Hardhome” when he was doing zombie horror battles, is just irritating here. Things like the gratuitous shot of Rickon’s body being riddled with additional arrows, or the decision to play Wun Wun’s death as a punchline with an arrow going through his eye are just crass – the worst instincts of the Red Wedding distilled into singular shots, included for no other reason than the fact that Game of Thrones is a show that is apparently fundamentally obliged to include tawdry spectacle.

Furthermore, while sloppy plotting vulnerable to refrigerator logic is a standard feature of Game of Thrones that I’m usually not bothered by, this episode is particularly egregious. Many of these are small things that can easily be ignored – the degree to which the starving dogs comply with dramatic pacing in exactly when they devour Ramsay, the fact that Sansa wasn’t actually there when Ramsay said he hadn’t fed them, or Ramsay’s mysteriously improving aim as Rickon recedes. Their aggregate is perhaps a particularly bad run of sloppiness, but none of it is outside the realm of what the show’s basic narrative engine depends on the viewer being willing to forgive.

But the Rickon scene also starts to get at some of the larger problems. Ramsay’s supernatural archery skills are highlighted by the fact that the scene is a drawn out spectacle of unpleasant anticipation.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 4.04: Oathkeeper

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Burn Goreman finally lands a job more ridiculous than Torchwood.

Review of “Battle of the Bastards” will be along later today – I’ve got an early morning, so can’t get it up the night before I fear.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister

Dragons of Meereen: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow, Bran Stark

The Mockingbird, Petyr Baelish

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Direwolf, Sansa Stark

Shields of King’s Landing: Brienne of Tarth

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

With the Bear of Meereen, Jorah Mormont

The episode is in seven parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set in Meereen. The opening image is of the fire by which Grey Worm and Missandei are sitting.

The second runs five minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys overlooking her city as the hundred-and-sixty-three people she crucified scream in agony to Jaime and Bronn swordfighting.

The third runs three minutes and is set on a boat. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Jaime talking about Sansa to Sansa.

The fourth runs two minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, with Littlefinger talking about his new friends and saying the Tyrell words to Margaery and Olenna.

The fifth runs four minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Margaery’s stunned face to Jon and the men sparring in the yard of Castle Black.

The sixth runs ten minutes and is in three sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; he transition is by hard cut, from Locke and Jon to Cersei drinking. The second section is four minutes long; the transition is by family, from Cersei and Jaime Lannister to Tommen Baratheon, and by dialogue, with Cersei and Jaime discussing the security around Tommen’s bedroom to Margaery breaching it. The third section is five minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tommen to Jaime.

The seventh part runs nineteen minutes and is in four sections; it is set at and around the Wall. The first section is five minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Brienne and Pod riding away to Sam fussing at scrolls. The second section is six minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Jon Snow talking about a mission to Craster’s to Karl Tanner of Gin Alley drinking wine from the skull of Jeor fucking Mormont. The third section runs five minutes long; the transition is by family, from Ghost to Summer. The fourth section is two minutes minutes long; the transition is by image, from Craster’s Keep to Craster’s last son. The final image is of a baby landing on a snake and acquiring purple eyes.

Analysis

On its most elemental level, a further development of the tendency towards compacted play – a mere seven parts, without even the reliance on a big set piece.

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Saturday Brunchtime Waffling

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I’ve successfully moved, and even unpacked most of the boxes. So that’s nice. Settling and finally getting back to work, at least when I can avoid being horribly distracted by the book I’m reading. (It’s a really good book, but alas I can’t mention the title.) Finally back to work on Last War in Albion, both revisions and new material. Just had cause to crack open How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way. And the Neoreaction a Basilisk copyedits are almost done. So life is largely good. 

“Battle of the Bastards” review will probably be up Monday morning, as Jill’s first day of work is Monday and I’m somewhat disinclined to stay up til 2-3am reviewing Game of Thrones the night before that. 

In other news, friend of the blog James Wylder is running a Kickstarter for Goblinpunk, a Pathfinder and D&D compatible adventure. They’re just under $270 from goal with just over a day remaining, so if that’s a thing that interests you, well, do the obvious thing.

And that’ll do for this week, I reckon.…

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