Eruditorum Press

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The Comprehensive History of Injustice

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A guest post by Seth Aaron Hershman.

…the entire world might be poisoned. This, however, seemed unlikely, as the world, no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, has never been known to succumb entirely.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is a book series, and currently a Netflix show, about three orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, who are chased from place to place by a man named Count Olaf who manipulates (and if necessary knocks off) anyone who might try to take them in so that he can have them–and their inheritance/trust fund–for himself.

Count Olaf is a rich man looking to get richer, who relies on transparent lies and cheap theatrics to get his way, casually uses and discards people, has a roughly third-grade literacy and vocabulary level, and works in entertainment.

It’d be easy to go that route, wouldn’t it?

The issue of timeliness is a difficult one for A Series of Unfortunate Events, a franchise which actively avoids setting itself in a specific era in a way that should be familiar to fans of, say, Archer or Batman: The Animated Series. Because the series goes out of its way not to take place in any particular time, it’s difficult to pin whether the obvious allegory is an act of authorial intent or merely a fortunate coincidence. (One could argue that the fact that these books were written a decade ago makes it a forgone conclusion, but it’s not like our president was anonymous in at the turn of the century.)

In fact, it’s difficult to pin anything. Which is perhaps part of the point–anchored to no time, the series is able to make a broader point about how all times and all eras are susceptible to the transparent lies and cheap theatrics of rich men looking to get richer.

The rich men themselves are not really the point of the series–after all, most of the series’ characters are comfortably well off, and our leads are victimized specifically because Olaf wants at their sizable inheritance. In fact money itself seems to be a little besides the point. The bigger problem is self-absorption, and the inherent flaws in systems built out of self-interest.

The reason Olaf’s schemes always succeed until the last moment is that self-possession is a character flaw on the part of all who take the Baudelaire orphans in. Their uncle Monty knows well enough to suspect “Stephano” but gets hung up on the idea that his new assistant is after his scientific discoveries rather than his newly aquired children. Their aunt Josephine is ruled by her intense phobias and too obsessed with her tragic past to suspect someone who’s obviously manufactured a similar one for the sake of sympathy. And Mr. Poe, the man in charge of the Baudelaire estate, is constantly talking about how important it is that he get back to his other business matters before he has the chance to do even the most basic checking-up on whatever circumstances he’s dumped the children in this time.…

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The Nintendo Switch Presentation: The Beginning and the End

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Edit August 207: Well, several months after the official launch of the Switch and I’ve been proven wrong on pretty much all counts here. I may even get a Switch myself by year’s end. However, in my defense, I will say my opinions in this essay do accurately reflect the climate of MISinformation that was being spread about the Switch in those early months. Somewhat unsurprisingly, fake and misleading news isn’t limited to politics and video game journalism is a theatre of the larger cutural struggles we’re all going through these days.
 
I was right about oen thing though. I’m sure never doing any game journalism again.
 
Here’s the thing about cycles. The wheel turns, but that does not imply that history will repeat wholecloth. Time, of course, does not exist. History doubly so: History is a patriarchal fiction. There are endings and new beginnings as the seasons change. Recognisable archetypes reiterate and reincarnate, but each spin of the wheel is an event of its own. Impermanence is all part of the cycle.
 
We in video game journalism appropriate some of this truth when we use terms like “hardware cycles” to describe the passing of the console generational torch (“generation” and “torch”, of course, both being metaphors taken from patriarchal master narratives). Video game consoles do not so much go out of date as they get supplanted. A history of invasions and conquests, or a season for everything?
 
Were I to do this normally, I would go through my notes and recap the Nintendo Switch Reveal Event Presentation beat-for-beat. But on this occasion, normality doesn’t seem appropriate. Nintendo did indeed flip a Switch with this event, but I doubt highly it’s the Switch they wanted to flip. Over the course of about an hour, my entire world was turned on its head, and I’ve been in shock trying to cope ever since (of course, I should be used to this by now-Shock, trauma and loss is apparently what my life is now as it’s been this way for three straight years). Within the span of not even 24 hours, my entire perspective changed entirely. I walked into the reveal super excited for the next new Nintendo console, and I left it seriously considering walking away from everything, starting with video games.
 
The console itself, it should be stressed, looks marvelous. As a piece of gaming hardware, it’s just about second to none. Much time and emphasis was spent during the presentation demonstrating the Switch’s impressive tech specs and functionality, such as its detachable JoyCon controllers, both of which boast highly sophisticated motion sensors and haptic feedback. The two controllers have independent left-right motion control, near field communication read/write capability (or at least the right one has that), and something Nintendo have obnoxiously decided to call “HD Rumble”. Basically, it’s a haptic feedback system that can emulate highly detailed acoustics, like (for example, as was demonstrated) ice cubes being dropped into a glass, and then the glass filling with water.
…

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Build High for Happiness 7: The Witch (2015)

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wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public

Many roads lead here, but we are unmistakably off the map. Like High-Rise, Robert Eggers’s film is firmly rooted in both place and location: the edge of a New England forest during the Puritan era. This in turn situates it a mere step away from A Field in England. Other distant reflections will flicker through the trees as we progress. Make no mistake, however, Whatever this belongs to, it is not our comfortable hypercube, with its cool brutality. This is somewhere else. Somewhere the land is cursed. Where the crops wither, the hunts fail, and the beasts turn against their masters. Where the sky is as stark as the muddy, useless soil. And that’s outside of the forest. Within its canopies there are even more horrors to be had.

At the heart of this malaise is the eponymous witch, a fact that led to an easily dismissed but frustratingly widespread reading of the film as somehow concerned with validating Puritan anxieties. It is tempting to dismiss this by asking whether this logic applies to all horror movies, or to point out that for all the film commits completely to the presence of an actual witch straight out of New England folklore it also repeatedly undermines Puritan ideology at large. But the more important angle to take on this is simply that this fundamentally mistakes the film for being about the family at large, as opposed to what is clearly demonstrated by the opening shot, in which William being exiled from the plantation is depicted not in terms of his philosophical and religious defiance, but in terms of how it is experienced by Thomasin, his eldest daughter. This may be a story in which a bunch of Puritans confront their biggest cultural nightmare, but what the story’s about is female sexuality and agency.

In this regard its ending, in which Thomasin becomes a witch, levitating into the sky at a Sabbat cackling with ecstatic joy, is a surprisingly vivid match for High-Rise, which similarly resolves into a murderously utopian vision of matriarchy. This is derived from Ballard’s novel, but Jump expanded on it considerably in scripting the film as part of a larger and welcome revision away from Ballard’s fairly banal overuse of rape, making the ultimate dominion of the building by its female residents into a point in its own right instead of a glib culmination of Wilder and Laing’s psychosexual architecture. But it is here, fully liberated from the tower’s phallic shadow, that the idea finds its fully developed form.

Central to the film is the way in which Thomasin is trapped and essentially powerless. This is a subtle thing in a horror movie, in that everybody is trapped and essentially powerless. What’s only gradually made clear over the course of the film, however, is that unlike all the other characters, it’s not the witch and her blight that imprisons Thomasin: it’s all the other characters. Her mother is vindictive and suspicious, her father is a mediocrity willing to lie and let her take the blame, her younger brother is more powerful than her in terms of the family dynamic but still looks to her for physical comfort and, increasingly, with lust, and the twins don’t obey her (and are worshipping Satan in the form of a goat).…

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The Final Problem Review

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I know, I said this wouldn’t be up for Monday. But then my weekend plans got spoiled by a stomach bug and I ended up home and watching Sherlock anyway. So it’s entirely possible that I’ve got a sour mood to match my stomach. Nevertheless, what a complete and utter disappointment this season of Sherlock has been.

The crux of the problem is one that plenty of franchises have fallen afoul of, which is thinking that you can introduce a character like Eurus and have her matter to the audience purely on the mythic weight of who she is instead of having to develop her. But it doesn’t work. She’s a distressingly one-note character whose characterization consists entirely of Mycroft asserting things about her. More to the point, her supposed powers are all bizarrely undersold: we’re told that she can effectively enslave someone by talking to them, but nothing about her comes off as particularly persuasive or charismatic. Mostly she sits around talking like a Markov bot fed on mediocre nihilist philosophy. And this is a real problem – the episode depends on her being the unholy fusion of Sherlock and Hannibal, but instead she’s just a generic megalomaniac. Which makes the resolution of her just needing a hug painfully unearned.

Making this worse is the way in which the episode is haunted by Moriarty. It’s not that it would have been better to actually bring him back, but having him popping up on video screens for dramatic effect and to have been the secret co-architect of all of this only serves to highlight how much weaker Eurus is as a villain. I’m not sure even Magnussen could have been effective with Andrew Scott popping up all over his episode, but Eurus doesn’t stand a chance, and the overall effect is to constantly remind the audience of a time when the show hadn’t used up its best ideas yet.

It’s not that there aren’t good bits. The relatively bottle-episode nature of it such that the majority of it is just Sherlock, John, and Mycroft is good, and all of them get some lovely character moments throughout. Mycroft, in particular, shines, getting a wealth of small emotional moments of the sort that he hadn’t really had before in the series. But John’s incredibly well-used as well, even if I don’t entirely buy him backing down from shooting the warden. And of course Molly’s scene was incredible.

But none of that masks the fact that this is just The Great Game done over with the melodrama pushed past the breaking point. The reveals just don’t work. The big one – that Redbeard was actually a person that we’ve never met before and aren’t particularly invested in – is a complete flop. We’ve already seen five people get murdered this episode. Finding out some kid from Sherlock’s past got killed instead of his dog doesn’t carry any particular weight. If anything, it was easier to be upset when it was a dog, which at least felt like a fairly fleshed out dog.…

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Faeces on Trump 6

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This is the final part of ‘Faeces on Trump’… which now seems a peculiarly poor title for this series… all the worse for being so nearly right.  Still, I daresay I shall have more to say about Trump and related issues in the years to come (if I’m spared).  But this first line of thought draws to a close.  This post is, as a result, a kind of ‘summing up’.  (God, I sound pompous, don’t I?)  Further thoughts, or lines of thought, will have to stand alone from now on – and so I’ll be able to retitle for more relevance when I arrogantly shit them all over the internet, as if my opinion matters.  But anyway, this is the last squirt of diarrhea from the bellyache that Trump’s victory gave me.  Further dyspepsia will doubtless cause more and different effluvia to rain down upon you, because clearly I can’t help myself.  (And you’re not even paying me!)  Watch this space, you poor doomed motherfuckers.

 

Fuck it, let’s not bother with any more piss jokes.  Let’s have some Lenin.  We might as well, in a world in which making a Ghostbusters film with a female main cast is enough to get you called a Marxist:

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor… [D]eceit, violence, corruption, mendacity, hypocrisy, and oppression of the poor is hidden beneath the civilized, polished, and perfumed exterior of modern bourgeois democracy.

– Lenin, from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (as quoted by Cliff in Volume 2 of his biography of Lenin)

Paul Foot put that quote up over his office door at the Daily Mirror – where he worked before Robert Maxwell was allowed to take it over so he could bust the unions – just, in his words, “so there could be no doubt about where I stood”.

Even so, Foot wrote an entire book – and a very good one, which I recommend – about how great the The Vote was, and how many people had to struggle so hard and for so long to get it.  Arguably, Foot under-stresses the extent to which the vote has not just been betrayed (by Labour) or undermined, but also repurposed as part of a system of consent to continued capitalist rule.  You have to remember that huge numbers of working people thought of universal suffrage (however they defined it) as a means to fundamentally change society in favour of working people, including redistributing wealth and property.  This ultimately didn’t happen, obviously… or rather, it did, but the wealth and property were redistributed upwards.  This is neoliberalism, and a vital part of how it works is the repurposing of popular democracy, more than just its subversion.  You could even say that neoliberalism is the great expression of that repurposing.  Neoliberalism, as a global system, is a direct – and, at the lower and earliest levels, consciously connived – counter-revolutionary response to the post-war social democratic era, which was itself an extemporisation on the part of the capitalist system, a survival strategy to appease a global rejection of the inequalities of the pre-war system.…

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Hyrule Haeresis 5

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Patriarchy is built on epic time. Learned male history requires exhaustive documentation of political kingdoms and dynastic successions. The Chosen Warrior-Hero God-King must come of age, become anointed, take a throne and lead his people to victory in battle before retiring and passing his crown on to the next generation. Rise, fall and rise. In our language, we call this canon, and the canon of the aristocratic literate patriarchy stands in stark contrast to the cyclical deep time of the feminine and feminine understanding. This is, in fact, the true first war in the world, and its battle scars have played out across the visage of our ideaspace since the start of all time.

And so, deeply fraught and conflicted is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Like the Celtic mythology from which it draws its inspiration, the tune this Ocarina plays is a melancholy one, a lament for a world that was lost before history began. Its story opens as if a folk tale (perhaps a fairy tale). The narrator speaks in the voice of a storyteller relating events to an enraptured audience, presumably comprised of children. Ironically, or maybe inevitably, this is a story about having childhood ripped away from us and mourning the shock and trauma of its loss throughout a grieving adulthood. One does wonder about the mental state of young-at-heart Shigeru Miyamoto during this game’s development period.

Although it has the shape of an oral narrative, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time immediately lurches straight back into the epic history of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There are Golden Goddesses, and mysterious, beguiling boys with great destines laid out before them. And, fittingly for a game originally conceived of as a straight remake of A Link to the Past, Hyrule’s Genesis by way of the Golden Goddesses is rendered with the flashiest and most impressive graphics tech 1998 could give the Nintendo 64. The canonical origin story of The Legend of Zelda, perversely conveyed by a storyteller, just as male storytellers have co-opted feminine voices and feminine spaces since the war began in order to assimilate and suppress them. This is the new origin story; the game that singularly defines Zelda and her canon from now until the rest of time infinite.

Or at least, this is the story we are expected to hear.

For there are secret songs here, just as there are everywhere. We just need to learn not to overlook them. It is, for one thing, deeply strange that the supposed ur-Zelda would put such a focus on the mutable artifice of time and therapy for the trauma of a seemingly inescapable oncoming eschaton. For this is the real face of the Demon King: Aristocratic patriarchy and its learned literary teleological history. Ganondorf’s rise to power is foretold, documented and canonized, and, in contrast to the unnamed and inconsequential King of Hyrule who exists only as a piece of worldbuilding trivia, Ganondorf has a defined backstory, character, set of motivations and epic narrative shaped for him, one which would plunge Hyrule into darkness and strife if allowed to come to pass.…

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Build High for Happiness 6: A Field in England (2013)

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Wandering in open country is naturally depressing

A Field in England is a precise antipode to High-Rise, a fact acknowledged by Ben Wheatley, who has spoken about the way in which he is inclined to make one project a reaction against the previous one. But the thing about the alchemical union of opposites is that it works largely because of the similarities. Just as “up” and “down” presuppose movement in three-dimensional space and “left” and “right” presuppose neoliberal democracy, High-Rise and A Field in England presuppose a director doing sci-fi/fantasy inflected period pieces rooted in the psychogeographies of English spaces. In some understandings of conceptual space this is how the hypercubic prison works – through the systematic construction of axes bounded by opposites that, when multiplied sufficiently, create a territory that is at once infinite and contained.

This is in essence the problem that faces Whitehead, who winds his way through a recurrent series of at best gradual enlightenments in pursuit of no obvious goal or trajectory for escape. More to the point, his problem is heavily location-dependent, in both spatial and temporal senses. Spatially he is confined to the eponymous field, a setting we’ll unpick momentarily. Temporally, however, he is bound by the English Civil War. It has often been suggested that this event serves as the origin for the contemporary socio-political system, an argument that’s generally based on reading it as a transition between the established aristocracy of Charles I and the revolutionary fervor of the Puritans. This is an oversimplification in countless regards, not least that it misunderstands history as something with an origin as opposed to as a series of debts inherited and bloodily paid off from era to era. The English Civil War is certainly an instance of this, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that what emerged from it is somehow a sui generis origin as opposed to an if not inevitable at least entirely sensible consequence of what came before.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Whitehead straddles both sides of this transition, or perhaps more accurately, is stepping over the divide himself.  His status as an alchemist clearly situates him in the world that is receding. But the arc of his slow ascension is clearly towards a measure of individual liberty and away from the crass and domineering tyranny offered by O’Neil, which affiliates him more with the Puritans. Like us, he’s trapped on the inexorable slide down history’s birth canal – just from a substantively different angle. Or, if you prefer something in keeping with ascension, headed up the chimney, an identity gone up in smoke.

This leaves location: a field in England. Central to this is its raw genericness. There are a lot of fields in England, another consequence of the way in which the whole of the island is the product of human development and intervention. And there were a lot of them in the Civil War; Alan Moore is fond of claiming one near Northampton as the place where it was won, although that was merely the first of three, and dialogue about Pembroke places this one during the second, a few years later.…

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The Lying Detective Review

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Well, this was certainly better than The Six Thatchers, though a season of Sherlock (or indeed anything) in which the Moffat episode is not better than the Gatiss episode is difficult to imagine. In comparison with the three other straight Moffat scripts for Sherlock, which is to say to the three best episodes of the series this is… possibly not actually in fourth place overall for the show. Nah, I’ll go with definitely not – I’m comfortable putting The Sign of Three ahead of it.

Let’s start with Mary, since she’s certainly the biggest issue inherited from last week. First the good: we’re not done with Amanda Abbington yet! In fact, she’s credibly the best thing going for much of the episode, with her snarky side-comments routinely being the best gags in it. On the other hand, the narrative reasons for her death are by and large still inscrutable. The most obvious choice – that Moffat wanted to tell a story about grief and fatherhood – is clearly not where things are going, what with Rosamund not actually appearing in this episode. Nor does anything particularly follow from Mary’s death, or at least, nothing that couldn’t have been done anyway. Sure, the specific resolution of Sherlock getting into it with Culverton Smith to get John to save him is a product of Mary’s death, but save for that one emotional beat, this was a story that could have been done anywhere and at any point in Sherlock.

Indeed, for all that they rightly hyped Toby Jones’s portrayal of Culverton Smith, as a villain he is something of a step down at this point. The two most obvious comparisons, Magnussen and Moriarty, were both elevated by their actors, but were well-written and compelling ideas in their own right. Smith, on the other hand, would be a nothing without Toby Jones to leer and cackle his way through the episode. Sure, Sherlock vs. Jimmy Savile as serial killer is a decent hook, but the hook is all there is to Smith. There’s no potential for him to be elevated above baddie-of-the-week status, which isn’t really a status that a show that does three episodes every couple of years should be using. And more to the point, it’s basically one the show has rightly avoided since The Blind Banker. Much of what made Series Three so strong was that all three of its episodes were big, weighty events in their own right. This just… isn’t. And while the Jimmy Savile angle is clever, it’s also obvious, leaving nowhere for Moffat to get his teeth in and push it somewhere meaty.

As a result, this episode ends up being… fine. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but there’s nothing particularly right either. Its biggest idea is Sherlock’s addiction, which isn’t strictly speaking a topic that plays to Moffat’s strengths. He can’t really muster anything on it that he didn’t already do with His Last Vow, acknowledging the compelling and nebulous space between decision and compulsion.…

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Faeces on Trump 5

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Dedicated, with all awareness of the impudence and absurdity of doing so, but also with sincere love and respect, to the memory of John Berger.

 

In the new Preface he wrote in 2010 for a reprint of his 1975 book A Seventh Man, John Berger explained why, in some respects, the book was outmoded.  It is a book of words and photographs – by Jean Mohr – about migrants.  It was written, as Berger says, before a great many things happened which would profoundly alter the world’s political landscape.  One of these things is, as Berger puts it, “the establishment of the global economic order, known as neoliberalism – or, more accurately, economic fascism”.

Not even in the remote vicinity of fucking about, was Berger, despite his customary elegance.

But it’s true, in very essential ways.  Fascism is marked by one of the treasured tactics of the liberal or the reformist leftist.  It is a ‘mixed economy’.  One of the first things the Nazis did, when they were handed power by German bourgeois politicians, was to privatise lots of key manufacturing industries.  Much as did Thatcher as part of the neoliberal counter revolution in Britain.  This isn’t to equate Thatcher and Hitler, but to point out that neoliberalism is a version of a strategy also central to fascism.  And yet, as is better known (thanks to the semi-coherent screeching on this subject from the contingent of pub bores and internet bloviators I am thinking of christening ‘the folk Right’), the Nazis also employed a policy of state direction of industry, and were ‘statists’ in other broader senses.  But then, as many have pointed out, neoliberalism is not really anti-statist.  It expands the state in key ways, even as – fascism style – it integrates state power with corporate power.  The great early triad of neoliberalism was Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet.  Pinochet’s Chile, supported by Thatcher, and helped into being by the US, was run as a kind of lab experiment in what has become known as neoliberalism.  The opening of the state to corporate interests, and the subsequent transfer of what had been socialised wealth into private hands, with the brutality of all that being buttressed with direct state brutality, with the growth of state power in areas such as police repression and military spending.  Military spending, once again, a key aspect of fascism.

Of course, in Euro-American culture, we say it isn’t fascism if white people aren’t in the camps.  If white people aren’t being locked up for thoughtcrimes, aren’t being murdered by the state, then whatever it is, surely it isn’t fascism.  Without for a moment wishing to deny or downplay the immense suffering of the victims of the Nazi holocaust, and of mid-20th century German imperialism more generally, it’s true that we reserve a special and unique horror for that particular form of aggressive and racist imperialism because it was committed against mostly ‘white’ people in Europe.  

(Though we must always remember that the category of ‘whiteness’ is socially constructed, and is therefore permeable, malleable and manipulable.…

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