david harvey

March 3, 2012

Legless in Legoland

Jack Grahamadam and joe, batman, commodity fetishism, david harvey, geek culture, marx, neoliberalism, play, primitive accumulation, star wars, toys2

I’ve become mildly obsessed by this image:

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!”

How do you get a Lego figure to look traumatised by the death of the woman it loves, and the supposed deaths of its newborn children, and the loss of its legs, and third degree burns over all of its body?

And what kind of a culture is it that even tries?

(Of course, as Richard Pilbeam – who brought the image to my attention in the first place – remarked, the Lego figure does a better job than Hayden Christensen.)

It strikes me that, the more Lego tries to cope with reconstructing scenes from movies – especially from movies like the Star Wars prequels or the later Harry Potter movies, that are self-consciously ‘dark’ – the more it has to bring in elements of painful ‘realism’, i.e. scars on Anakin’s face… but the addition of such features to the Lego aesthetic has an unfortunate effect… it starts to make it look like they’re taking the piss, South Park style, by representing things like serious injuries in crude, cartoon form.

This is particularly evident in the way the figure above simply has no Lego legs provided. Is there any child who ever played with Lego who didn’t, at some point, hold up a Lego torso/head combination without the legs attached and scream, on behalf of the figure, something along the lines of “AAAARGH! WHERE ARE MY LEGS????”, thus causing themselves wild hilarity? I know I did. (I hope I’m not telling you things about myself that I shouldn’t… but, to be honest, I write a blog that tries to subject Doctor Who to Marxist analysis, so, realistically, what have I got to lose in terms of being taken seriously?) The thing is that this exact same strategy – the leaving off of the legs – is now being deliberately employed by Lego to depict horrific mutilation.

Partly this is to do with the fact that a generation who grew up watching Star Wars are now writing and filming stories… and, in common with the fan mindset everywhere, they want to do the same kinds of stories, but better… more serious, more ‘dark’, etc. This is a double edged blade. It gave birth to the good and bad of the Virgin New Adventures, the good and bad of 2005+ Who, the good and bad of modern SF/fantasy fiction and film making. The apotheosis of the bad may be the awkward attempts to do ‘realist’ but bloodless and politically illiterate depictions of urban terrorism in the Nolan Batman films, with the urban terrorist opposed by a moralist ninja in a ‘realistic’ bat outfit. One side effect of this is that, increasingly, SF/Fantasy tries to be ‘serious’ and often tries to do this using what we might call The Gatiss Manoeuver, i.e. it tries to bring in pain and suffering.

Of course, there is a big dose of knowing, sly-winking, in-on-the-joke irony inherent in the whole Lego Star Wars / Harry Potter / Pirates of the Caribbean thing, the toys and computer games and film-recreations.…

August 13, 2011

Stark Contrasts

Jack Grahamcapitalism, david harvey, eleventh hour, exploitation, ideology, poverty, riots1

Here is the logic:

We live in a society that touts the pursuit of self interest. That tells people they should look out for themselves. And yet we also tell people pretty tales about community and cooperation and mutual respect.

Enterprise and initiative… but we’re all in this together.

The former ethic is for those who succeed to live by. The latter ethic is for those who have to budge in together in crowded conditions because, for whatever reason, they have not acquired enough material success to allow them to live the separated, isolated, private, individualistic life of the rich. The former ethic is for those with a private drive, detached dwellings, grounds, boundary walls and closable gates. The latter ethic is for those in terraces and flats with cardboard walls and laundry racks on their small balconies.

In short, if you live in a tenement or a housing estate, you must be public spirited. You must behave. You must get on with your neighbours. Your lack of wealth is your own fault; it is itself evidence that you do not have the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement… ergo, you must embrace community spirit because you are so inadequate that you must live in a community. Those with the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement can leave the graffiti-daubed, dog-shit-smeared romper room of community, and so need not attempt the cooperativeness that their very success shows to be against their nature in any case.

This is, in a roundabout way, a reiteration of the myth of innate and inborn destiny. It is the same myth that class societies have always told themselves, filtered through the hypocritical bad faith of modern liberalism.

It is not a scripted conspiracy, it is manufactured ideology. As such, it has all the chaos and contradiction of delusion. It is believed, even if it is a convenient piece of bunk. It is applied in a scattershot way, in all sorts of mixed-up and contradictory forms.

The apartheid inherent in it is not seen, is not admitted to, is often sincerely repudiated. And yet its persistence is tolerated, its expansion promoted. Nobody, after all, is ‘in favour’ of divisions between rich and poor. It’s one of those things that everybody formally disapproves of and yet continue.

When the people living in the cramped and dirty corners decide that they will no longer behave themselves, then we see the skull of class society beneath the moisturised, botoxed skin of liberal democratic discourse.

When the poor tear up their hovels, they are ticked-off for damaging their own ‘communities’ – as though this might not have occured to them, as though they might suddenly realise that they are trashing places that they actually find congenial, as though their behaviour speaks only to their own self-destructive madness and does not suggest that they actually find these ‘communities’ to be frustrating, grim, tedious, miserable, degraded places in which to be confined.

It is the same as the witless consolation that is offered to the suicidal. …