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cinema

Solid Dick

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NOTE: This article has been amended to correct factual mistakes and clarify arguments.

 

Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jnr. and directed by Jon Favreau, is objectively one of the most evil films ever made. Possibly the most evil, actually.

 

Boilerplate

 

I’ll get around to justifying that opening statement in a bit. But first, I just want to say… ahem… fuck Tony Stark. Seriously, fuck him. The arrogant, smug, privileged, sexist, immature, selfish, capitalist prick. The rich, preening, self-satisfied asshole. The callous, self-involved, vainglorious, narcissistic wanker. This guy isn’t charming or funny or lovable. He’s scum, masquerading as humankind’s best friend. He’s the 1% as saviour of the world, at a time when the 1% are directly and knowing destroying the world. He’s the smiling face of the anthropocene (or rather capitalocene) extinction. He’s genocidal imperialism as (lone) humanitarian intervention. He’s neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign policy as a series of bad-boy quips. He’s private capitalist industry as heroism. He’s mega-wealth as heroism. He’s white male privilege as heroism. He’s militarism, imperialism and American exceptionalism as heroism. He’s the War on Terror as heroism. He’s everything sick and twisted and rotten and filthy and evil and insane and false about our world, presented to us as aspirational role-model. He’s Donald Trump in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask… no, scratch that… Robert Downey Jnr. is a rich, reactionary dick too, isn’t he… so we might as well say that Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jnr. in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask. In any case, Tony Stark is everything we need to tear down, ruthlessly demolish, trample on and bury, presented to us as the best of humanity.

 

There’s no secret about this, of course. I’m not expecting any awards for searing, original insight. Everybody knows who and what Tony Stark is. He is, quite literally, stark. The films themselves make no secret about any of this. On the contrary, they loudly and proudly boast of it.

 

This stuff is baked into the character. It’s part of him by design.

 

I don’t pretend to know much about the Iron Man comics, original or contemporary. Generally speaking, I’m not a comics guy. I intend no disparagement of comics; they’re just not my can of Tizer, on the whole. So I come to these Marvel Cinematic Universe films (as I come to most films adapted from comics) as someone with little knowledge of the source material. But I’m not going to apologize for that, or seek to remedy it, for several reasons:

 

a) I can’t be bothered,

 

b) I don’t think it’s necessary, since the comics cannot possibly fundamentally alter the meaning of the films that stem from them, and

 

c) the vast majority of the audience – target and actual – are, like me, coming to these films without knowledge of the comics.

 

Having said that, I was told – by Holly B., during Shabcast 9, in which we chat about Iron Man, amongst other things – that Stan Lee’s original goal with Iron Man was to create a hero whom the hippies would hate but also be unable not to love.…

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Insider Trading

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Remember Lance Parkin’s Big Finish audio ‘Davros’?  It’s quite good, isn’t it… if far too long.  But he does some interesting stuff with Davros’ backstory, subverting your expectations a bit.  (It’s got really good music too.)

Interesting stuff in it.  The Doctor is depicted as wanting to stop the fall of the corporations.  And, actually, I can see his point. At the moment, anyway.  And as long as we’re talking about a sudden, instant fall.   

Simply remove capitalism at the touch of a button today and human civilisation as it stands would fall, and the human race might die out… for much the same reason that the animals in a battery farm would all die if you murdered all the farm workers and the crime went undiscovered for weeks. As bad as it is, it is currently how things work. The system doesn’t function efficiently, or for human benefit, but it does basically function, and it relies upon keeping a sufficient number of people alive, and a sufficient level of social wellbeing going, simply because it lives off its human livestock. So it keeps the livestock alive by propping up the support systems that keep them alive, at least as a mass. 

On the other hand, isn’t the continuation of capitalism itself a kind of slow-mo apocalypse?  Is the damage currently being wrought upon the planet’s ecosystem not going to add up to the end of the world?  Does not the system as it stands condemn millions to death every year, and billions more to an alienated and impoverished living death?  There’s a case for saying that quotidian reality itself is a crisis, that our day-to-day world is not only leading us to armageddon but that, even if we survive it, that would not automatically for the best?  Couldn’t we reasonably say that the fall of the system, even in flames and mass-starvation, would not be inherently worse than allowing it to continue?

It’s tempting to not only appreciate the aesthetics of apocalypse, but to go beyond such an appreciation as an asesthetic statement and turn it into a political one.  As cold-blooded as this sounds, isn’t it possible to see the end of the world – millions of deaths and all – as a price worth paying for the end of capitalism?  The end of the world… I mean the end of the world as it stands economically, politically, culturally, structurally… would at least be general.  As the man said: “the thing about chaos is it’s fair”.  It could be seen as having greater moral integrity to say ‘let it all come down’ as opposed to ‘prop it up at all costs until we can change it piecemeal and as peacefully as poss’.  Propping it up doesn’t have such terrible consequences for me and a lot of other comfortable Western leftists and liberals.  I’m not personally all that harmed by day-to-day capitalism.  I don’t like it, but my outrage is mainly on behalf of others, and on behalf of humanity generally. …

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American Auton

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One thing has become clear: Clint Eastwood is actually a deeply left-wing, anti-imperialist auteur with a profoundly sceptical and cynical attitude to America, war and patriotism.
It’s the fake baby that proves it.  
A sentimentalised emblem of American family life… represented on screen as something blatantly unreal, synthetic, cheap, ersatz, evidently and transparently fake… and yet none of the ostensibly admirable icons of American values notice it!  Instead the fake baby is cooed over like a beautiful, perfect, inspirational, precious, living child… even as Bradley Cooper (who must have been in on Eastwood’s satirical joke at the expense of red-state America, the Pentagon and all so-called ‘Heartland values’) brazenly waggles the mannequin’s little plastic hand and pretends the baby is moving by itself.
Let’s repeat that: he pretends the baby is moving.  In this we see not only a Swiftian subversion of the exploitation of children as a lachrymose pavlovian trigger for tears of jingoistic pride in the eyes of America’s right-wing ideologues, but also a deeply disturbing reminder of all those babies – blown to pieces, dissolved in white phosphorous, or starved – who will never move on their own ever again thanks to the rampant violence of American military adventurism.
The symbol of America’s bright and moral future is literally a dead, hollow, plastic replica… and none of the characters notice.  Too brainwashed by flags and Fox News and the 4th of July to see the cold, lifeless truth even when they hold it.  And the idealised American child, the child of the patriot who has killed again and again for the US imperium, is also a reminder of the countless really dead babies that America has left in its wake across the globe.
Moreover, we – the audience – are evidently supposed to pretend we don’t notice.  And he’s tricked loads of reactionaries into doing just that.  Praising this superficially jingoistic, neo-con movie while silently passing over an insultingly blatant (and, on the face of it, ludicrous) piece of diegetic disruption. 
Eastwood – who is obviously secretly more far-left than Michael Moore – has trolled the entire country.  He’s even trolled those critics who have pointed out the fakeness of the baby!  Do they think he doesn’t know it’s obviously fake?  How myopic are these people?  How myopic are the liberal critics of the film who have totally failed to comprehend the depth of Eastwood’s scabrous, scathing subversion?  Eastwood has placed a blatant and horrifying truth about fakeness and sentimentality right in front of the entire United States… and he has stood back and let us watch as they all fail to see it.
It’s Eastwood’s most ascerbic bit of leftist absurdism, his most acidically situationist bit of surrealist theatre since the talking-to-the-empty-chair masterpiece (a performance of inspired performative lunacy that he managed to trick the GOP into letting him do on stage at their conference!).  
It’s also possibly the most devastatingly subtle – yet also furiously dyspeptic and radical – comment on modern America in recent cinema.
…

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Carry On Screaming

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Trigger warning / Spoiler Warning

Just watched Peter Strickland’s amazing film Berberian Sound Studio.  It stars Toby Jones as Gilderoy, a repressed (or is he just normal for his home context?) British foley artist and sound mixer hired by Italian filmmakers to create sound effects for a satanic exploitation flick.

Berberian Sound Studio is a study of male fear and hatred of women.

The horror movie that we hear (never see) being made is about the undead revenge of women who were tortured and killed as witches.  The slimey director spouts pretentious bullshit about how his film is an important social document, intended to honestly portray and condemn the abuse of such women, to recognise their suffering, etc… yet his film rests upon the assumption that the women who were accused of witchcraft were, in fact, witches.  Otherwise, how could they come back from the dead in satanic rituals?

The torture – involving, at one crucial point, a red hot poker being inserted into a woman’s vagina – is shown lovingly on screen… though, as I say, we (that is, the viewers of Berberian Sound Studio) don’t see it.  Gilderoy sees it though.  He sees it again and again and again.  He has to wait until the crucial moment to come round on a loop so he can drop fat into a frypan, thus creating the appropriate sizzling sound.  He has to rip the stalks from radishes to simulate the sound of hanks of hair being ripped from women’s scalps by the priests.  The film is comic in the way it shows the sound studio repeatedly ringing with the sounds of the hammering, stabbing and general abuse of various vegetables… yet, the comedy decays as we see the mangled fruit and veg decaying in buckets.

Like the tomato soup that gets splattered all over Gilderoy’s face as he uses a blender to simulate the sound of a woman being carved up with a chainsaw, the rotting cabbages and melons make us think of mutilated human flesh, dehumanized by abuse and then dumped like rubbish.  Gilderoy, who spends his normal working life in the UK making gentle documentaries about nature rambling, has never imagined such horrors.

In the studio he is surrounded by women who are working for the men in charge of the picture.  It is quite disconcerting to see the women co-operating (if reluctantly, in the probably vain hope of being paid one day) in the production of such a blatantly misogynistic film.  The men, needless to say, are unconscious of any such irony… with the possible exception of Gilderoy, who never manages to raise much resistance despite his qualms.  The only woman who seemed uncowed by the relentless male dominance in the studio is the surly secretary Elena, whose legs and bum Gilderoy furtively stares at when following her down a corridor.  Part of his transformation is when he learns to be rude and dismissive towards her. 

Silvia (one of the voice actresses dubbing the dialogue, hired for her ability to scream) is being sexually harassed by the same director who claims to be making an important meditation on the victims of witchcraft trials. …

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And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to…

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This article – from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian – is really great.  It’s about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism… and all that kind of stuff.  Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty – all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes.  Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies… just in a way acceptable to liberals.

Here’s a snippet:

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal ‘humanitarian intervention’.  I’m all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn… but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too.  I can’t help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar).  See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.

Oh, by the way, here‘s blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the ‘nuanced’ Zero Dark Thirty.  Like this ‘nuanced’ response, for instance:

 Nothing like ‘nuance’ is there?

(Actually, I’ve blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama’s aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects – here.  Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity.  It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she’s not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)

Why do I care about movies and TV shows?  *Sigh*  Look, fiction matters.  In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people’s opinions (and I include myself in that).

Ayn Rand never proved anything as a ‘philosopher’, but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued.  Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.

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ADDITIONAL:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda

http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html

 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html

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YET MORE (27/01/13):

“This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.”…

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