Eruditorum Press

A magical ritual to pay our rent

An Accurately Named Trilogy II: The Dark Knight

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It seems silly to start anywhere besides the Joker. We’ll set aside the cynical but not entirely unfounded question of whether the performance would be as celebrated as it is were it not for Heath Ledger’s untimely death and the ghoulish speculation (since refuted) that the psychological intensity of the role was a cause. Sure, it’s tough to imagine a Batman film winning an acting Oscar under less tragic circumstances, but that’s in no way what’s interesting here. What’s interesting is that Ledger and Nolan took the most oversignified character in Batman mythos (and yes, of course I’m including the big rodent himself) and offered a game-changing take on him. The hunched, disheveled figure with a Glasgow smile is a new angle, skewing the Joker towards a materialism that is generally precisely what’s discarded in other efforts to make him more grandiosely crazy. Ledger and Nolan offered a new way for the Joker to be.

By some margin the least interesting parts of this are the most often remarked upon. Yes, Ledger’s schlubby maniac was an easier fit for a certain strain of geek masculinity than the more overtly queer portrayals that came before him. But frankly, anybody who needed reassurance that the Joker’s makeup was “like warpaint” before they’d dress as him for Halloween needs to be fired into the sun. “Why so serious” is a great marketing line, but it’s a trivial part of the character’s personality – a line he uses in one of the mutually contradictory origin stories he gives – and reducing Ledger’s take to his leering transgressiveness is how you get Jared Leto’s performance in Suicide Squad.

To understand what’s going on with Ledger’s Joker, it’s necessary to understand the basic oversignification of the character. For that, let’s turn fleetingly to what is both the best comic story written about him and the low point of Alan Moore’s career, Batman: The Killing Joke. (This being where Nolan’s “multiple contradictory origins” idea originates.) For all that Moore crafts a typically symbolically rich take on the Joker, the big problem with the story, as Moore readily admits, is that he didn’t define the Joker as anything other than Batman’s archnemesis. He represents nothing save for a particular limit point for Batman – an irreducible reality of his mythos interesting for few reasons other than that homicidal clowns with good visual design are kinda cool.

This is not what the Joker in The Dark Knight is doing, although it’s easy to miss that fact. The centrist liberalism that is the default setting of most popular culture means that we’re most used to villains who are cuddly versions of fascism: Voldemort, the Empire, the Daleks, etc. It’s easy to make too much of this – the defanged fascists of popular culture villainy are generally so cartoonishly that if they have any political effect, it’s to blind us to fascists that don’t literally call themselves Death Eaters, have the Imperial March as their theme song, or shriek “EXTERMINATE” a lot.…

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The Punishment of Luxury: Album Reaction and Commentary

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With a title like The Punishment of Luxury coming out into a geopolitical climate like this one, and knowing OMD’s past dalliances with progressive social and cultural criticism, I can’t help but read great things into this new album from the get-go. It’s been out since September so literally everyone in the world has had a chance to listen to it before me, but my copy (yes I still buy CDs, certainly when it comes to stuff like this, shut up) just arrived a few weeks ago as of this writing due, happily, to the fact it was out of stock on release date, which implies it’s selling really well! I’m not going to attempt a “proper” review or anything like that: I’m not a musicologist, music historian or music critic (Andrew Hickey and Phil are both much, much better at that sort of thing than I could ever hope to be) so I’m going to stop pretending I am and just give my thoughts on what this album says to me and how it makes me feel on a gut personal and emotional level.

The first thing we have to square away is the business of that title though. Many of OMD’s past albums have derived their names from things like paintings, art exhibitions or academic theory books (Architecture & Morality, Dazzle Ships, History of Modern) and this is the case with The Punishment of Luxury too. The problem is this time the name’s not taken from a cool post-Vorticist painting or a book of architecture history, but from a nasty bit of misogyny called The Punishment of Lust, an 1891 oil painting by one Giovanni Segantini. The painting showcases Segantini’s views that women are natural-born mothers and caregivers, depicting those who “failed” in that obligation (especially if they had gotten abortions) as either sinful, tragic or both. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (where Andy McCluskey saw it) acquired the painting in 1893, but retitled it The Punishment of Luxury, which helpfully obfuscates the original meaning of the work.

Thankfully for us though the band have taken that title and completely reappropriated it (Andy McCluskey himself takes care to stress they’re interpreting the title a very different way): On this album, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys lash out with a crippling indictment of every single hollow vapidity of late-stage capitalism, all while weeping for those living under its boot and praying for a better life for us all. The Punishment of Luxury is just about as toothy, emboldened, inspired and as emotionally powerful, profound and resonant as I have ever heard Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

It is impossible to ignore the context of this album coming out into a world that’s seen both Brexit and a Donald Trump presidency (hell, the latter even shows up in the music video for the title track), especially when track 4 is called “What Have We Done”. It would do The Punishment of Luxury an enormous disservice, however, to simply call it OMD’s Brexit and Trump album, just as it would do Dazzle Ships an injustice to call it “just” a Cold War and Falklands conflict album: This is something with a far grander reach and a far more holistic and meaningful message to deliver, even if perhaps it couldn’t have happened before now.…

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The Vault of Horror and the Ambassadors of Death

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It’s November, a time of complicated anniversaries. Of Octobers that became Novembers and barrels of gunpowder left in the bowels of a building that fire would eradicate in a couple hundred years anyway, sadly emptied of the fat landowners and wealth horders of the day. We’ve had Samhain and All Hallow’s Eve and the fields are asleep until the planting time.

Perfect for watching the rain hit your windowpanes and relaxing in the warm with some audio goodness.

I’m very pleased to be able to finally announce the return of Pex Lives.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/41-the-ambassadors-of-death-or-i-dont-believe-in-them-thats-why

Kevin and I talk here about The Seventh Seal, Jodie Whitaker, the Ambassadors of Death, personal hypocrisies and much more. It’s good to be back. Kevin seems to have recorded on location from a cathedral of furious wolves, so that’s something.

Also very happy to have a new City of the Dead, the podcast Lee and I do about every Amicus film. We’re actually nearing the end of this journey so jump onboard while you still can. One of the things I love about CotD is that it isn’t a show that demands a huge time investment of the listener but can still get some great, fun analysis done and be a cool place to hang out. Come hang out with us for a cup of coffee.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/city-of-the-dead-16-the-vault-of-horror

Finally, though it isn’t out yet, I’ve got an episode of the Last Exit Show recorded that’ll be coming down the pike. It’s a show I’ve been doing with my friend, New York Times and Vanity Fair writer, Kaleb Horton. He makes me laugh more than anyone in the world. Check out our back catalogue here.

http://lastexit.libsyn.com/

As ever, you can find exclusive audio and written content from me at my patreon and help all this podcasting stuff happen by supporting me for only $1.00 a month. I’d be ever so grateful. Check out the free stuff on there, see if you’d want more of that kind of thing. I think you would. It helps me not get devoured by my frankly horrible minimum wage job.

https://www.patreon.com/jimslater

Cheers, until next time.…

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An Accurately Named Trilogy I: Batman Begins

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It may be an accurately named trilogy, but its edges are both fuzzy. The Dark Knight Rises ends by gesturing forwards to an unrealized draft of DC’s film aspirations. Batman Begins, on the other hand, is inexorably tethered to the Burton/Schumacher films its title declares its separation from. Batman begins because his franchise had been driven into the ground by Batman and Robin eight years earlier. The choice of villains is perhaps the clearest remnant of this – two villains who had not been used in the previous series, including the Scarecrow, who was going to be the villain of a fifth Batman film ever since it was going to be directed by Joel Schumacher and called Batman Unchained. Even Hans Zimmer’s score interpolates Danny Elfman’s.

Even considered purely within terms of the Dark Knight Trilogy, Batman Begins is odd. Again, the title is a clue – it’s the one part of the trilogy not to have the phrase “Dark Knight” in it. But more to the point, it’s the only film in the trilogy to be directed by Christopher Nolan, promising young director coming off of Memento and Insomnia as opposed to Christopher Nolan, director of major blockbusters. And this shows. Batman Begins is by some margin the smallest of the three films. Its action sequences are considerably more restrained compared to the other two, still unburdened by the pressures of perpetually topping the previous iteration. It’s also much more rooted in the classic superhero blockbuster structure where people end scenes with lame quips. (Not even Gary Oldman can make “I’ve gotta get me one of those” work.)

And so Nolan gets a relatively blank slate to define his Batman on – one neither colored by his own brand nor by anything save for “not Batman and Robin.” And Nolan deftly avoids the one way in which that could pigeonhole him, reacting against the quasi-Adam West aesthetics of Schumacher’s film by emphasizing “dark and gritty” at the expense of everything else. Nolan’s film is comparatively dark, yes, but he avoids the Frank Miller style histrionics that one might expect from that brief. Yes, the film nicks a character and a couple of plot points from Year One, but it’s manifestly not an adaptation of that comic. Indeed, while one suspects Nolan is not enough of a comics geek to intend it, the use of Carmine Falcone as a throwaway villain defeated by the Scarecrow, who is himself not actually the film’s big bad invites reading the film as a repudiation of Miller’s puerile maturity.

Instead, Nolan’s film unfolds with a sort of ruthless competence. 2005 was, generally speaking, a good year for this. The modern superhero book had been successfully kicked off with Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men film, but we were still three years away from the Marvel assembly line starting to roll. Competence was desired, but as Daredevil had shown two years earlier, still nowhere near being able to be taken for granted. And so much of Nolan’s work – which he was exquisitely suited to – came down to offering a detail-oriented and broadly serious take on Batman.…

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The Punishment of Luxury: Revisiting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in 2017

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Longtime readers will know it’s been a very long time since I had anything at all to say about pop music. Newer readers will probably not know that I ever did in the first place: In my late high school years and into college I started to get really into contemporary music, as, I suppose, you do at that age. I used to say music was the art form that touched me more than any other, and when I first started my writing career (or what passes for it) I spent a lot of time trying to write about music and used to do an end-of-year recap of what I thought were the best and most important releases for me personally of the past year. I stopped doing that in 2013 (incidentally the last year the band du jour released something), I don’t say anything that dramatic anymore and I thought I was kind of done with pop music after that: Almost all of my listening these days is done on Soundcloud and I couldn’t hope to be considered any kind of an authority for what’s out there now, nor, really, should I be (though I am known to get vocal when I find something new I do get into).

I feel, I hasten to add, that this remains true and I’m still not. However, when my favourite band suddenly re-emerges out of seeming retirement after four years to release an album in 2017 entitled The Punishment of Luxury, I’m kind of obligated to sit up and take notice.

There is no pop/rock outfit that has had a bigger or more profound effect on clarifying my musical and aesthetic sensibilities than Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. There have been times I’ve tried to deny this or talk myself out of admitting it, but it’s never not been true. 1980s synthpop, and its stylistic Top 40 descendants, was the soundtrack to the most formative period of my life. Not OMD per se, but bands that sounded a lot like (and probably in hindsight owed a great deal to) OMD. And not just in the 1980s heyday, but well into the 1990s and 2000s given the slow trickle with which pop culture made its way to the hills and mountains where I’ve spent most of my life (it is not an exaggeration to say we’re 20 years behind everyone else).

As soon as I knew enough to keep track of different bands, genres and albums, I went back and listened to radio stations that played music exclusively from the 1980s to try and hunt down and rediscover the music that had been so important and meaningful to me so long ago. And when I did that, one name kept coming up over and over again: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Here was a band who made music that sounded just like the way I remembered, and their songs always seemed to stand out from the crowd in terms of craft and quality.…

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About Time Volume 8 Review

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At long last, there’s a new volume of About Time. For those who are unaware, About Time is the gold standard of comprehensive studies of Doctor Who – a towering project whose Alan Moore it has been my pleasure and privilege to serve as Grant Morrison to. This latest volume covers from The Runaway Bride through Voyage of the Damned, with stops off for “Time Crash” and The Infinite Quest. The short form is that it’s another great entry in a great series that’s absolutely worth buying if you’re the sort of person who buys massive and sprawling reference boks on Doctor Who. You can get it on Amazon right here, or on Amazon UK here. I recommend it highly. 

Now for the meaty bits. I want to start with the kind of obvious red flag the book throws up, which is the fact that the entire book is covering just one year of Doctor Who.  For one thing, this incremental progress is frustrating given that the book’s been a long time coming – Volume 7 was four years ago. For another, at 350 pages this means that About Time is spending more time on the Martha Jones era than it did on Hartnell, Troughton, Davison, or indeed Tom Baker, though I think we can all agree that Volume 4 was overly scant. These concerns are not entirely off base, but on the whole the situation is better than it might appear. Given the announcement in the back of the book that Volume 9, rounding out the Davies era, will be out in 2018, it looks like the manuscript just got unruly in size and was split.

The larger issue is simply that unruliness. While it’s apparent that their working relationship was untenable, there’s no real way around the fact that About Time was better when Tat Wood still had Lawrence Miles as a coauthor. The tension between the two seems to have tempered everyone’s worst instincts, resulting in extraordinarily good books. Solo, on the other hand (or rather, with new cowriter Dorothy Ail, promoted from her “additional material” credit on Volume 7), Wood’s approach tends to bloat. The Continuity and Things That Don’t Make Sense sections are particularly out of control by this point, with the latter even seeming to know it, helpfully marking off its more excessive sections with section breaks and italics warning readers of, for instance, the one-page discussion of the bus timetables in The Runaway Bride or the page and a half on the dodgy geography of Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks. Equally, when you have to set multiple sections of your book off with disclaimers that practically beg the reader to skip them, it’s maybe time to cut those sections. Certainly it leaves one with the distinct fear that Kill the Moon is going to require its own volume in order to get through that section.

But out of this over-comprehensiveness comes many of the book’s best features. The first side-essay, for instance – “Why Weren’t We Bovvered” – is an eight and a half page overview of the intersections between Doctor Who and comedy that opens by talking about writers David Whitaker tried and failed to hire.…

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Hyrule Haeresis 8

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This is the story they used to tell in the lands of Ordon.

A long time ago…

Many generations passed, before these lands were called Hyrule, its spirits sang a different song. The first people to land on these shores were the People of the Art, and thunder and lighting heralded their arrival as they rode their storm-ships down the sky into the barrows and fields. The People were very skilled sorcerers and oracles, and as they wove song-lines across the mythic landscape it was said The Art must have been part of the very fabric of their being. And when they spoke, their voices and those of the spirits were one.

The People were ruled by a well-loved and well-respected Shaman-Queen, who was unmatched in beauty as she was in spiritual power. The Queen ruled from her palace in the hills. She was very wise, consorting and allying with the Wolves and the Birds, whose language she could speak as fluently as her own and with whom she discussed the Mysteries of the Universe. The Queen rarely interacted with her subjects directly, but took questions and answers relayed through a male attendant and companion. Though she was rarely seen, her work was strong and kind and she was said to give very good counsel.
 
This is how it was for many years and many cycles, until one day the foreigners came to this land. The People of the Golden Goddesses came, and they brought new customs and new ways and new gods, and after a time the old arts and the old gods weren’t welcome anymore. There was a great war between the native people and the settlers, with much great and terrible fighting. The settlers did not like the ways of the land they found, and desired to change them to be more like their own. The natives fought back using all manner of magical weapons and techniques. Some of their warrior-shamans crafted a special mask used for hexing rituals and gave it to the berserker soldiers. It was said those who wore it were possessed by a fiery spirit of vengeance and wrath
 
The Queen predicted the natives would be see early victories, and this was true: For a time they were successful in repelling the invaders, but eventually their descendants got tired of fighting and stopped. The younger people, who had grown up knowing the ways of the settlers and alongside their own children couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Eventually, it came to pass that the People of the Art would retreat through the mountains and the barrows into the Otherworld, waiting for a time when they would be Remembered once more. In time the younger people even selected one of their generals to be king, but even in those days they loved the Queen very much and did not want to forget her, so the king would have to go to the hills as part of the coronation ritual to ceremonially ask for her counsel and protection.
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The Proverbs of Hell 26/39: Mizumono

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MIZUMONO: Dessert. Unlike savoureux, mizumono is in fact sweet, suggesting that the show has allied itself with Hannibal’s perspective as opposed to Will’s.

The shooting script called for a flash forward of Will screaming in pain from the end. Instead the episode begins with a moment of quiet ritual, with Hannibal writing out, in exquisite calligraphy, an invitation to Jack, setting their eventual confrontation as a piece of theater – a staged event the shape of which is defined by formal considerations of etiquette.

The opening sequence, which cuts between both Hannibal and Jack talking to Will and enjoining him to their side in the coming face-off. This is in some regards an odd framing for the episode, in that Will is never really given the chance to take a side, arriving on the scene after Jack and Alanna have already been dispatched. But it’s such a weird and uncanny visual that one is inclined to lay the blame on the denouement for not paying off its setup than on the setup. (Even more uncanny is the reaction shot to this, a split-screen Will.)

The otherwise unmotivated reappearance of Garret Jacob Hobbs – who seems at this point slightly dated in the face of Will’s newer murderous temptations and inclinations – is mostly here to set up the unexpected return of Abigail later in the episode. 

 

For all that Hobbs is fairly unmotivated foreshadowing that doesn’t work on its own merits, however, it is the excuse for the episode’s best hallucinatory image, and indeed one of the series’ best, as Will’s house is projected into a thicket of branches that implicitly suggest antlers as well. It’s massively oversignified, except that every interpretation works and speaks cogently to Will’s position and state of mind.

Bella’s return and evident deterioration is an unexpected gut punch. Like Bedelia’s return in “Tome-Wan,” its effectiveness springs from a combination of inevitability and a lack of immediate setup. Of course Bella is doing this poorly – we just hadn’t had cause to think about it by dint of not seeing her since “Takiawase.” But her inclusion is a smart and compelling choice – a way of forcing the audience to remember that Jack and Hannibal’s friendship is actually substantive. Bella’s lines about forgiveness not being a verb but rather an event that happens to you are particularly phenomenal, as is her aggrieved “you moved my punctuation mark.” 

Hannibal’s demolition of his life – done, with characteristic irony, out of compassion for the patients who would be exposed to invasive scrutiny in the ensuing scrutiny – is an effective way of flagging the degree to which everything is about to burn down and the stable foundation of the show as “Will and Hannibal solve crimes with the FBI” is about to collapse in favor of something stranger and weirder. 

As may be clear by this point, I am not entirely enthralled by “Mizumono,” which I view as a contrived conclusion to a deeply underwhelming run of episodes that leads into an effective season cliffhanger.…

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How To Get Ahead in Colonialism

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If you’d like to hear me read a Weird tale, click here and you’ll be able to download my reading of Edward Lucas White’s ‘Lukundoo’.  See below for some background.

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‘Lukundoo’, though originally written in 1907, wasn’t published until 1925, when it was accepted by Weird Tales.  A very appropriate place for it to first erupt.

A best-selling author of historical novels in his day, the writer of ‘Lukundoo’, Edward Lucas White, started out writing uncanny stories.  He is largely forgotten now – except for ‘Lukundoo’, the finest of those uncanny stories, and a classic of Weird fiction.  And even ‘Lukundoo’ increasingly fades from our cultural memory.  It was once a frequently anthologised tale, and thus widely read.  But the ghost story anthologies which kept it alive – once a crucial rite in the childhoods and youths of many people – have long been in decline.

It will be a shame if ‘Lukundoo’ vanished into the interior.  It needs to be resurrected and theorised in the same way that many of Lovecraft’s tales have been.  It stands the comparison.  But it should also be better known by the general reader.  It is a very good myth to think with – even if doing so is far from a comfortable experience.  It is a startling tale, beneath the somewhat conventional genre trappings it wears like bandages to cover its dirty secrets.  It is queasy, febrile, hypnotic, disturbing, suggestive.

‘Lukundoo’ is also, without a doubt, profoundly racist.  Consider that a warning, and please heed it if you need to.  But – like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, written less than a decade earlier – it is profoundly racist because it is a profound examination of the psychology of colonialism, written from the anxious viewpoint of the colonialist.  It has nothing to say to us about the colonial subjects – beyond its assumption of their inhumanity.  Indeed, as in Heart of Darkness, such subjects are not subjects at all – at least not in the normal sense – but rather objects.  Objects of fear and loathing.  But ‘Lukundoo’ has interesting things to say about where such fear and loathing really comes from, and what it means.  It says more than it knows, because it knows more than it wants to.  China Miéville once described ‘Lukundoo’ as “the most unbelievably acute fiction of colonial anxiety – using monsters – I’ve ever read, and all the more remarkable because… I do not think [White] knew he was doing it at all”.  That ‘Lukundoo’ says far more to us than it is conscious of, is, of course, a large part of its unique, sickly, feverish power.

But I’m not going to tell you what ‘Lukundoo’ is about.  I hope you’ll listen to me read it and make up your own mind.  Alternatively, you can skip the experience of hearing me indulge my frustrated actor fantasies and just read it yourself, here.  I hope you enjoy it.  But I hope you’ll ponder it too.…

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Spirit Tracks: Chatting Retro with Bob from RetroRGB

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Remember how I had a podcast?
 
All joking aside, I’m really, really proud of this one. Please join me in extending a very warm welcome to the wonderful Bob from RetroRGB.
 
Bob has done tireless work gathering information on how to preserve every aspect of classic video games: Not just the systems and the games themselves, but the whole experience of retro gaming. From the best way to hook up your old consoles to a modern flatscreen digital HD TV to the best way to track down and safeguard a CRT to build your own personal arcade, Bob’s website RetroRGB is a wellspring of everything you’d ever want to know about the technical side of video game history and preservation. Over the course of an hour and a half, Bob and I share our thoughts on the retro lifestyle, some of our favourite video game memories and talk about what keeps us coming back to the old classics and retro aesthetics year after year.
 
This podcast is a real collaboration between RetroRGB, Eruditorum Press and the Forest of Illusions YouTube Channel. For the first time, I’m doing a proper crosspost: My YouTube viewers will get a video podcast (and, for the first time, get to see me in person), while fans of EP’s podcast network get an audio-only version hosted, as always on the Pex Lives Libsyn. But more to the point, Bob was kind enough to not just guest on my show, but actually do all the technical work recording, mixing and uploading it too. I could not have gotten this out in time today were it not for him, so I wanted to give him an impassioned public thanks here as well.
 
Some liner notes:

 

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