clash of civilisations

May 29, 2015

Furiosa and Furiosa

Jack Grahamclash of civilisations, feminism, gender politics, mad max fury road, orientalism, reviews, sexism1

Well, it’s basically a two-hour chase sequence with a few pauses… but yes, it’s amazingly well done. Old hand George Miller takes advantage of all the modern techniques – hyper-fast editing, CGI, etc – but he uses these things for storytelling purposes, not to show us how fast he can edit or how good his CGI is. He never sacrifices the clarity of the visual storytelling. The production and costume design has a gnarly, knotty detail and complexity. The brazenly ironic and stylised salvagepunk visual world of the movie makes it like an 80s auteur film made on a vast budget and with modern techniques. The result is jaw-droppingly good. It instantly makes just about every other blockbuster movie of recent years look quaint and windy. Mad Max: Fury Road makes Avengers: Age of Ultron look like a Cameron Crowe movie in which the assembled twee, privileged assholes play with action figures and make “boom” noises.

I’m not going to go into much political detail. I’ve junked most of what I’ve been trying to write about this movie, largely because of this article at Jacobin, which says everything I was groping for, and lots more of interest. It’s really good… though there are bits where I think the writer, Stephen Maher, goes too far. (There are also a few snafus which suggest he didn’t quite pay enough attention to the plot.)

Read it? Okay, then here are some caveats:

I don’t think Maher gets it exactly right. The film certainly does buy into an orientalist narrative about the supposed sins of pre-modern and/or anti-modern civilisation, and yes this is inevitably tinged with Huntingdonism and Islamophobia. In the film, patriarchy comes complete with a built-in death-cult, tribal masks, and a harem of the type sheiks always have in racist, orientalist Western fantasies. But I think the film is less a defence of ‘our’ modernity in the face of such things and more an attempt to implicate modernity in the same supposed sins. The death cult of the suicide bombers uses Northern European religious ideas (Valhalla), urges itself on with thrash metal music, and Joe decorates himself with Western-style military medals, etc. Plus the Mad Max movies’ usual anxious appropriation of the camp and performative hyper-masculinity of biker culture. It’s like the film is saying “see how awful we’d become if we degenerated in the face of a civilisational crisis… it’s buried inside our civilisation, waiting to creep back out… the seeds are already there, around us”. This is all problematic in itself, but maybe not quite as bad as the review above makes it sound.

It’s still an awesomely entertaining movie (reason enough to see it and enjoy it) with reasonably good gender politics.

Much of a meal has been made of the gender politics of the film, usually through the medium of stories about assorted reactionary bumwipes crying about how it’s a feminist lecture instead of a manly movie filled with manly masculine manliness. Firstly, this is crap. Max gets to be incredibly masculine in all those stereotypical ways. …

June 18, 2011

Gonzo Marx

Jack Grahamalienation, bible, capitalism, christianity, clash of civilisations, class, commodity fetishism, culturalism, evolution, genesis, historical materialism, history, language, marxism, myth, renaissance0

Ruminations on alienation, commodity fetishism, myth, etc. Don’t mind me.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Human beings have always made stuff. Broadly, that’s what humans are: the apes that make stuff. Even before Darwin, Benjamin Franklin called man “the tool-making animal”, a description apparently vindicated by our discoveries about early humanity, which seem to show the rise of the ‘big brain’ driven by the needs of the hand.

The flint tools and decorative beads of the hunter-gatherers. The pyramids and ziggurats of the great slave empires. The water wheels and ploughs of medieval Europe.

But the rise of capitalism brought the factory system. The division of labour. Specialisation without expertise. Organisation of time. The creation of new kinds of cities that worked as battery farms for thousands of corralled workers. Mass production. Heavy industry. Conveyor belts. Fordism. Mechanisation. Computer-run facilities.

The ape that makes things started to make things faster than ever before, in greater numbers than ever before. And the things started to confront the thingmaker as alien, autonomous, controlling, dominating. When you have to watch a clock to make sure you clock in and clock out at the right time, it’s hard not to feel like you are answerable to the clocks, even if you work in a clock factory making clocks.

The rise of science and technology. This was also part of the rise of capitalism. Galileo, who pretty much invented what we would call modern science during the Renaissance (or the ‘Early Modern Period’, the period during which feudalism began to give way to the rise of mercantile trade, finance, private industry, markets, etc.), sold his inventions, made in his own workshop, to the Venetians who protected him. His first telescope, based on Flemish spyglasses, were made to be sold to the traders on the Rialto (the Venetian stock market: centre and powerhouse of the thrusting, ultra-modern city republic), so that they could identify at long range which merchant’s ships were returning safely, laden with goods. Only later did it occur to Galileo that he could train his telescopes upon the moon and the stars and the planets. When he did so, he published his explosive findings on the market and had a bestseller on his hands.

Later, but still as part of the same process of the rise of the new system, the concept of entropy, and with it pretty much the whole of modern applied physics, came from the need to better understand (and thus improve) how engines work, engines that powered the industrial revolution.

The things that the thing-making-ape made became increasingly wondrous. The engines became bigger, faster, more powerful. They took us all across the world (usually to pillage and enslave). They created wars that devastated vast swathes of the globe. They ferried people to industrial murder factories. They allowed man to fly. To drop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in seconds. They put apes on the moon.

And they transformed inner space too. “You’ve discovered television, haven’t you?” And here we are, on the glorious interweb.…

May 30, 2011

Three Act Tragedy

Jack Grahamamy's choice, christianity, clash of civilisations, culturalism, dream lord, entropy, father ted, hitchens, last of the time lords, liberalism, rtd, series 3, simon nye, the big bang, the master, the pandorica opens, the sound of drums, toclafane, utopia0

And so it came to pass that Series 3 ended with a trilogy. And Jack looked upon the trilogy. And Jack saw that it was… umm… er…

‘Utopia’

Good stuff; the Master’s return at the end is the least of it. We have to put up with some of the obligatory “gee, aren’t humans just neat?!” stuff from the Doctor, but it passes soon enough. Yana is a touching, melancholic figure. Chantho is one of my favourite characters in all Who. The scene where the Doctor and Jack finally discuss Jack’s immortality is beautifully scripted and acted. The desolated conglomeration is beautiful.

The whole set up is pregnant with intricate, sombre, uncomfortable implications. At the end of everything, with even the galaxies disappearing… amidst a wasteland, haunted by a dead city and one lone survivor (who still clings to her obsolete cultural norms)… amidst all these things, there are two groups of humans… the unreasoningly fierce and cruel “futurekind”, with their gnashing sharp teeth, their flaming torches and their mindless desire to destroy… and the refugees who huddle together for warmth; who value family and friendship; who have created structure and purpose out of bits of scrap, food and dreams of impossible deliverance… and the Futurekind want to smash these aspirations for no real reason, while the refugees keep building even as they near the point of maximum entropy.

This is ‘Gridlock’ part II… but it’s less comfortable than ‘Gridlock’. More bleak. More gloomy. More fully liberal. Hence, more reactionary.

The faith of the refugees is in a better world, like the faith of the gridlockers… but they refugees have given it a name that has political rather than religious associations. ‘Utopia’ is usually thought of now as representing some age-old impossible dream of social perfection and total human equality. In the mainstream discourse, to be Utopian is to share the putative mistakes and delusions of the founders of the 20th century totalitarians. Lenin wanted to make a paradise; that’s why he ended up making Hell on Earth. (This isn’t my view, by the way. It is as simplistic and ahistorical as it is popular.)

‘Utopia’ is one of those stories that I love despite the fact that it’s highly open to a reactionary reading (like ‘Frontios’ for example, with which it shares some ideas).

In ‘Utopia’, the supposed dual nature of humanity is externalised in the form of two seperate tribes (who fight for no reason, as tribes always do in this view of the world), one of which is ‘civilised’ and one of which is ‘barbarous’ for no real reason. There is no reconciling this ‘clash of civilisations’. The nice people, who are associated in the text with science, technology, modernity, family life, democracy (via the concept of Utopia itself), must fight and/or escape the barbarians (with their medieval ways)… or be destroyed.

In the end, they simply have to leave the Futurekind behind (to die) as they blast off in search of Utopia. At least this story holds out some hope that Utopia (i.e.…