Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception
We’re pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives – one that’s actually about Doctor Who at that. (You remember Doctor Who, right? It’s that show about hope that doesn’t air in years like 2016.) Specifically, it’s about The Mind Robber, i.e. the twelfth greatest Doctor Who story ever. There’s also discussion about Fidel Castro, America’s inexorable slide into a dystopian hellscape, and childhood mindscapes.
So we follow an episode that evokes The Edge of Destruction with one that evokes The Keys of Marinus. This goes about how you’d expect. It’s not that this is an episode devoid of interesting moments. And indeed, as I guessed it might be last week, it’s unusually light on genre cliches to hold the whole thing together. The problem is that it’s also lacking, in a forty-five minute framework, any space to allow the barrage of concepts to breathe and register. The result is that a series of reasonably clever ideas of the sort that previous episodes were painfully lacking in just sort of flash by without particularly registering. Which turns out to be far worse than the previous problem the show was having.
Let’s start with the biggest and most staggering problem in this regard: Quill angrily and furiously confronting the god she doesn’t believe in. This is possibly the best moment of drama of the entire series. Conceptually, it’s the equal of anything Moffat has ever done. And Ballon’s response to her, even if it is lightly ripped off from that Joan Osborne song, is also phenomenal stuff. But it’s wasted in a scene towards the middle of the episode that’s basically just the third fast-paced Macguffin acquisition sequence in a row. There’s no weight to it – the show doesn’t unpack any of the implications of Quill facing down her god, and the entire incident is basically forgotten by the time we cut to the next big set piece. It’s infuriating – at long last the show delivers something amazing and brilliant and new, and it doesn’t even seem to notice, instead barreling on to the next idea.
But then, what do you expect from an episode that wastes an idea like the Metaphysical Engine on something as fundamentally banal as cobbling together a pseudo-TARDIS, complete with an interior that literally looks like it was bolted together from remnants of the current TARDIS set? “All of the mythologies of every species ever are real” is a jaw-dropper of a concept that deserves to actually be explored and interrogated instead of being used as the technobabble to explain why we’re cycling through a complete litany of the default alien planets that BBC Cymru Wales can do. I mean, maybe this will get sorted out in the finale – certainly Dorothea seems to leave it as a massive hanging plot thread – but frankly, “shoved in as one thread of a forty-five minute season finale” doesn’t exactly sound like a sufficient platform for that idea either.
Meanwhile, in amidst all the whirl of underdeveloped concepts are a bunch of sub-par character moments. Ballon never gets built into anything enough for us to give a shit about the final fight with Quill, not least because we’ve already seen the outcome. His backstory never gets past a vague account, and the fight seems to mainly exist because apparently they don’t want to keep the character around, which rather raises the question of why he’s even in this episode in the first place.…
a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences
High-Rise is an arch film, its thematic building blocks routinely presented explicitly in dialogue. In an early and particularly gleeful instance Tom Hiddleston lectures, “as you can see, the facial mask simply slips off the skull” while literally stripping the flesh off a cadaver’s skull, a statement of theme and demonstration of method all in one. This is, of course, a Ballard thing; the assimilation of his characteristically declarative style into a cinematic language for which it is not an entirely natural fit.
A second example, from when Hiddleston’s character, Robert Laing, is first meeting the High-Rise’s architect Anthony Royal (a name contrasting with the similarly symbolic Richard Wilder, the film’s primary working class character): looking at a blueprint of the building, he proclaims, “it looks like the unconscious diagram of some kind of psychic event.” It’s as Ballardian a sentiment as has ever been expressed, and indeed a more or less direct quote from the novel. As with the casual declaration of the thin line between society and barbarism, this is a statement of both theme and method – in this case a restatement of the basic and underlying premise of psychogeography, namely that exterior landscape shapes internal experience. In High-Rise this is framed primarily in terms of architecture, and specifically in a critique of brutalist modernism and its utopian project. The principle applies more broadly, of course, but all in good time.
This is, of course, a temporally bounded concern, restricted to the mid-seventies milieu in which Ballard wrote the original novel. As director Ben Wheatley puts it, “if you’re trying to develop a film of High-Rise in 1978, it makes sense to set it further in the future, because the book is probably set in ’82 or ’83. But then that thinking goes on and on, and eventually you get too far away from the book, and more importantly from the technology. You get into the world of social media, and then the story about the isolation of the tower doesn’t work any more.” The fact that the high-rise is a spatial prison is made explicit in the film in a sequence where Laing attempts to leave the building to go to work only to be seized by agoraphobia and sent rushing back, but it is essential to realize that in fact the building’s residents are imprisoned in both space and time – the circumstances in which their slide to barbarism takes place tightly constrained to the London Docklands, 1975. It is, in other words, not merely a tower block but a tower hyper-block, which is, in point of fact, what Royal’s blueprint most obviously resembles.
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The ironic effect of demarcating a fourth dimension of this prison is to increase the number of adjoining spaces, just as extending a square into the third dimension increases the number of walls. This question of neighboring spaces is explicit in the film’s closing moments, as Laing, finishing up the dog, looks over at the second high-rise in the complex, awaiting its descent, “ready to welcome its residents into this new world with open arms.”…
Or ‘These Theses on Faeces and Fasces’
First some very important business. There’s a new podcast in town, Wrong With Authority, created and starring myself and my friends, familiar to you all, Daniel Harper, James Murphy, and Kit Power. It’s yet another movie podcast… but it’s also about History. So that’s exciting then. Specifically, it’s about movies about historical events, and how full of shit they are. Our first episode is just out and it covers the movies Murder by Decree and From Hell (adapted from a graphic novel some of you may have heard of) and their relationship to the historical ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders. Download our first episode here. And please feel free to recommend and share. We won’t mind, I promise.
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As you probably noticed, the word ‘fascism’ is being thrown around a lot in response to Trump and his election. I don’t happen to think terminological issues are unimportant. I think this issue is worth investigating.
For instance, I agree with Phil that the term ‘alt-Right’ cannot and should not be reduced to ‘neo-Nazi’. Just to be clear (as if I haven’t made it clear where I stand): this is not in any way to defend the alt-Right, who I think are just about the most contemptible rabblement of toxic shitbags on the planet. But they’re their own distinct flavour of toxicity, and the emergence of this flavour helps us know where we are now, and why. Terminology is important precisely because it enables us to get a grip on complexities like this. The intentions of many who are saying that “alt-Right = Neo-Nazi” are, no doubt, honourable, in that they are trying to expose a dirty truth that is being concealed. And the claimed equivalence has more than a germ of truth in it. However, the conflation is potentially damaging. The alt-Right do, no doubt, share much that is crucial in common with Nazis, whether we use that term specifically or colloquially. And I’ve referred to both Milo Yiannopoulos and Davis Aurini as Nazis in the past, with justification I think. However, the alt-Right are a distinct phenomenon.
This terminological issue is why I took a post to (roughly) define fascism in what I think are the correct objective terms. There is a risk when you take this approach of falling into pedantry for its own sake, which won’t help anyone. But I hope I have more to offer than just doing the equivalent of quoting the dictionary during a debate. I’m going to try to test Trumpism against my definition. Not in an attempt to decide whether Trumpism ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ fascism in some simplistic way. As I said at the head of my last post, fascism shouldn’t be reified and essentialized into an alien thing squatting outside the real world, a distinct and discrete entity that can be identified in the same way as a specific variety of phage or bacterium. Political realities may have lineages and heredities and families but they don’t have DNA fingerprints.…
There is no time to process what has just happened. No time to even be shocked about it. Not only has the dust not cleared from the explosion onboard the runabout that killed Tal Berel, but it actually hasn’t even finished exploding yet before Kol immediately blames Marok for assassinating the ambassador. An indignant Marok fires back, demanding Kol explain why he feels the Cardassian Empire would have any reason to destroy a Federation runabout and murder a mediator. Kol threatens to kill Marok where he stands, to which the Cardassian diplomat basically says “bring it” before Commander Sisko intervenes, breaking up the fight and imploring the delegations to stand down until an official investigation can be launched.
But Kol is not having it, demanding Sisko and the Federation back the Klingons because of their treaty arrangements. But for his part, Marok tries to manipulate Sisko into siding with the Cardassians, claiming that the Cardassians and the Federation have always been “brothers in spirit”, and transparently threatening him with Gul Dukat’s presence, claiming that he “would hate to see him get a chance to sit down in his old chair again”. Meanwhile in Quark’s, it’s after hours, but the titular Ferengi lets Maura in anyway, and that’s before she reveals she has a case full of gold-pressed latinum, plus more on her ship, that she’s willing to give him if he sells her the bar and leaves Deep Space 9 for good.
In the Gamma Quardrant, Jadzia Dax, Doctor Bashir and Koleth have arrived in orbit around Keltara, the last planet the K’Tang was known to have visited before being destroyed. They beam down to what looks like a frozen wasteland, but then Bashir gets attacked by a giant purple snow beast and is saved by a member of the survey team the K’Tang left behind. Koleth and Dax fill the landing party in on the situation, but the commander is adamant that the Cardassians would never dare make war with the Klingons. Koleth tells the commander that he had privileged access to the K’Tang‘s distress beacon, which claimed that while the Cardassians attacked them, their weapon and defense systems had already been sabotaged prior to their opening volley. Dax is irritated that Koleth didn’t find it necessary to share that information with her and Bashir, his nominal commanding officer and crewmate, but before she can reprimand him the commander of the away team begins to mount a defense of his team, the surviving K’Tang crew. Dax reassures the commander that in no way is she accusing him or his crew, but rather wanted to ask if he knew where the K’Tang was scheduled to go after leaving Keltara, as Captain Krek never filed a proper flight plan. The commander points them to Caldonia 3, the best place to restock and get information on this side of the wormhole.
A guest post by Noah Berlatsky, from his new book The Hammer Dracula Films: And Other Vampires. Which is great stuff that you should check out.
You can’t see a vampire in the mirror for the simple reason that the vampire is your reflection. The monsters onscreen are projections of human desires. Hammer audiences lick their fangs with Christopher Lee at all the delicious bosoms beckoning. Dracula pierces the exposed neck with a phallic oomph, just as the vampire hunter drives his rigid stake into the nubile beauty’s trembling form. Lust and blood drive both the living and undead; the population of Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot is murdered by proliferating vampires, and then murdered again by the heroic vampire killers. First the vampires rage through the town like a consuming fire, and then, at the end of the book, they are themselves consumed. The same townspeople are destroyed once, then twice— as if the first time was so much fun it needed to be rewound and watched again.
In King’s Salem’s Lot (1976), the fact that the vampires are in fact, just us, is the point of the novel and its horror. King hates the people of Jerusalem’s Lot, and loves that hatred with the same vicious delectation of his vampire antagonist, Straker. The people in the town cheat on each other, loathe each other, lust after each other, betray each other and beat their children. They are squalid, loathsome, mean-spirited and ugly—King shines his narrative upon them, and they hiss and burn and thrash feebly, just like they do when they become vampires and are pulled out of their sleep and into the sunlight. As police chief Parkins says before he heads out of town, Salem’s Lot “ain’t alive…That’s why he came here.”
It’s dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country’s goin’ the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin’s in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin’ popcorn and cheerin’ ‘em on.” He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. “They prob’ly like bein’ vampires.”
The kids Parkins describe eagerly watching carnage on those movie screens are, of course, much like the kids eagerly turning the pages of Stephen King’s novel. The magic of the vampire narrative is that it reaches out and bites you, changing you into the fiendish antagonist you are supposed to hate and despise. Readers, like Parkins, wait with leering, moralistic satisfaction for evil to be done, and for the deaths that follow —first of the humans who are vampires, then of the vampires who are human. If you enjoy Salem’s Lot, then you all, along with those townspeople, “probl’ly like bein’ vampires.”
To like being a vampire is, first of all, to enjoy killing.…
Well that was a pleasant surprise, albeit on the whole more pleasant than surprising. It’s not quite fair to say that bottle episodes are easy to do well, because they’re very definitely not, but once you’ve got them working they tend to end up with enough momentum to pull off impressive things. “Detained” is a case in point. It doesn’t shed Class’s persistent problem of never aspiring to anything more than cliches done well, but it does at least manage to take the cliche to an interesting place that’s based firmly on what Class can do as a show.
What that is, given the singular lack of an original idea at any point so far this season, is good character work with an impressive ensemble. Which is maybe an obvious thing to say about a bottle episode – character work is what they inevitably end up hinging on. But “Detained” is a bracing reminder of just how good a cast of characters the show has. Even Matteusz and Charlie, who have generally been the weak links in the cast, get moments to shine here. The use of Matteusz as the first person to pick up the stone on one level speaks to his marginalization (and Ram also points out his odd status), but it also works, and not just because it doubles to establish him as the one of the crew who does things like step up and pick up a weird alien rock to throw it away.
Charlie, on the other hand, gets the last slot in the “pick up the stone and confess shit” list, and thus gets the episode’s primary hero moment, something he’s not actually gotten prior to this episode. This is interesting. On the one hand, he for the most part doesn’t behave how you’d expect. I mean, the existence of contours between regalness and vulnerability is obvious, but they come in fairly interesting places. On the other, most of these places are absences as opposed to presences. Other than the revelation of his claustrophobia, the most interesting things revealed are things like his relative lack of anger. Which is legitimately interesting, and yet still somehow falls short of developing him as a character. Still, it’s progress in what had been the show’s weakest area.
The other three characters, meanwhile, are also generally well-served. Of them Ram has the oddest episode, largely reverting to type in the face of the stone’s (somewhat contrived) ability to make everyone in the room angry. But his surliness sparks interesting confrontations as well. His breakup with April is devastating in the way that it’s at once obviously self-defeating and utterly in character, and the brash recklessness with which he picks up the stone is fantastic.
April is similarly good – I loved her account of herself after her confession, which highlights the sort of emotional maturity and practicality that makes her such an interesting character. But even more than that, I liked the way in which she still made mistakes, especially in her anger.…
This one has been a long time coming, I’m afraid, mostly because A) I took an extra week to get the book read, B) one recorded, I took my sweet-ass time getting the damn thing edited and C) this fucking election has taken basically all of my intellectual and creative energy over the last few weeks. Thankfully on the last, the election is now over, and all is back to something like normality, right?
Christ.
Anyway, in this episode James is back and we’re chatting Frank Herbert’s Dune. I know there was some question about whether we’d be talking about the whole series or any of the ancillary material, but the original novel is more than enough I think for a single podcast episode. If James is up for returning to this universe in the future, we might do supplemental bits, but that’s not on the agenda anytime soon.
Go give it a listen, if you like. If nothing else, an extended chat about the Great Houses of the Landsraad and the difficulties of resource allocation should completely distract us from the shitshow that 2016 has become. Or, you know, not.
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Or ‘Faeces on Trump 2½’
Or ‘Fasces on Trump’
So, a lot of people seem to be talking about fascism these days. It’s the ‘next big thing’ stateside, they say. There are even some people who say it could catch on here in the UK. So I thought I’d take a moment to have a look at it and tell you what I think. So here goes.
First, a disclaimer: There are many perspectives on fascism. I’ve just written down mine. I have not gone into others here which I don’t agree with. Because they’re wrong, and the people who hold them WILL be punished.
Oh, and another disclaimer: Fascism shouldn’t be reified into a ‘thing’ that can be easily and neatly classified. Fascism is a spectrum, not a discrete alien phenomenon. Fascism has contained many variations which have almost as many differences from each other as they do similarities: Italian Fascism, German Nazism, Spanish Falangism, possibly even Japanese militarism (this is hotly debated and I know comparatively little about it… which is my eurocentricity showing). Even so, certain essential common features can be delineated.
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Fascism is distinctively a mass movement. It is not just normal reactionary politics in that it carries an active, energetic, and usually violent grassroots movement behind it. It doesn’t necessarily represent the will of the majority, but of a sizeable and active chunk of the population.
Fascism tends to opportunistically use electoral politics, but the big fascist takeovers are not generally the result of winning elections outright. Mussolini had been elected as a member to the Chamber of Deputies, and his fascists were part of a coalition government along with various other groups including liberals, but he was appointed head of the government by the king. Hitler’s Nazis never won a democratic election. They were, at one point, the largest party in the Reichstag, but failed to achieve the majority necessary to form a government under the proportional representation system. At the peak of their electoral success, the Nazis were vehemently opposed by a third of the electorate who voted for left-wing parties. The Nazis’ vote was on the decline from its peak when Hitler was helped into power by bourgeois and reactionary politicians who hoped to use him and his movement as a bulwark against the left. Franco came to power as the head of a military coup and counter-revolution against the revolutionary Spanish republic.
Like Franco, Hitler and Mussolini both rode a wave of counter-revolution and reaction in response to revolutions in their respective countries. Fascism is, at base, a counter-revolutionary movement.
Fascism is a coalition, at times when a capitalist nation is in economic and political crisis, between the domestic petty bourgeoisie, the middle classes, small businesspeople, officials, elements of the police, etc, and domestic big capital. In Germany, Italy and Spain, the middle classes which provided the fascist the base were caught between two powerful groups: big capital above and a powerful workers movement below. One of the quintessential traits of those groups attracted to fascism – including the relatively narrow layer of workers and unemployed who went for it – was their lack of a unified and distinct class consciousness. …
Moore, drawing from Bunyan, calls it Mansoul. Blake goes with Eternity, while the Aboriginal Australians call it the Dreamtime. Kabbalistically it’s Yesod. It is the world in which the implications of things are made real, their secret histories and imagined futures stretching into the horizon, ghosts and possibilities not haunting them so much as simply inhabiting them, the ordinary and everyday population of the vast and surreal psychic metropolis. When your children asked you where Mario goes when he’s out of lives, this is what you were afraid to tell them.
The peripatetic pink puffball before us may seem a strange psychopomp, but he’s got prior form, with his sole NES game also post-dating that console’s obsolescence. At least in his early days, this was simply what he did, the Nintendo character who appeared at the end of a console’s life to usher it into this glittering and sunken realm of lost nostalgia. And in a sense he’s the perfect guide to this shimmering realm; he is literally a consumer, eating the dream-creatures around him and taking on their essence and nature. This is, after all, how the mass culture of video games works. For years, it’s what we did. Now here, at the end of everything, he repeats the service.
Ignore the slight twinge of absurdity. That’s simply the state of things, a point John Higgs slyly makes when he uses Super Mario Bros. as his frame with which to explain the famously thorny question of “what’s postmodernism” during his astonishing history of the 20th century Stranger Than We Can Imagine. There is a place you go after you die, and when you get there you are greated by Kirby. He is terrifying to behold, falling into an uncanny valley you didn’t quite realize existed. On the occasions you imagined a video game character physically manifesting before you (and don’t even try to pretend you haven’t done that) you imagined it as a sort of explicitly digital thing – harshly delineated squares hovering in space in front of you, two-dimensional projections into a three-dimensional world. That or Minecraft. Either way, it was 8-bit. You never imagined this.
It’s not the way he’s always facing you even if you try to circle around him. That’s unsettling, triggering a vague sense of motion sickness in your memory of a physical body, but you have a conceptual framework for it from Doom or 3-D movies or the parallax effect on your phone. That’s uncanny, but at least within the domain of what you could imagine. No, it’s the shadow. Inasmuch as you expected him, you expected him to be pink like a raw nerve, pink like a 1 and not a 0, absolute and platonic. But instead there’s a dappled splatter of tincts across his surface, a depth map cast by an imaginary light that clearly does not exist in the space you inhabit.
Also, there are fucking scanlines. Jesus Christ that’s weird.
Still, you understand what you’re looking at even from the inadequate and low-res icon that it projects as its face.…