Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

The Genocide of the Vampires

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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.…

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Detained

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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.…

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What is a Moral Person on Arrakis? (Dune)

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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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Notes on Fascism

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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.

*

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. …

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A Pure and Awful Poetry of Fire (Kirby’s Dream Land 3)

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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.…

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Permanent Saturday: Something about the presence of a cat

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With deepest apologies to Chris Stangl, Permanent Saturday is a semiregular critical exploration of Jim Davis’ comic strips Garfield and U.S. Acres/Orson’s Farm.

The first level this strip works on is a standard joke about Garfield’s ego. We see variations on this joke, just as we see variations on all Garfield‘s jokes, show up infrequently every so often: Jon will make a quip about how the world does not revolve around Garfield (though he is big enough for it to), or that Garfield is not the centre of the universe, which Garfield will either deny or quip back that if he isn’t he should be. Sometimes the roles are reversed, with Garfield opening the strip declaring he’s the centre of the universe, which Jon will then proceed to reject.

The impetus for the joke’s setup comes from actual cat behaviour: Much of Garfield’s personality is derived from taking humans’ observations and interpretations of the things their housecats did and anthropomorphizing them: Cats are vain, cats are aloof, cats only care about me for what they can get from me, they claw things I don’t want them to claw, don’t listen to my commands like my dog does, and so on and so forth. So Garfield asks us to imagine how cats would display this behaviour if they could rationalize like humans do, and then, without missing a beat, turns around and points out the absurdity of its own question. Because for one thing, the joke is, of course, double-edged: Jon may mock Garfield and accuse him of having an inflated ego, but the cat is right. After all, whose name has the title of the comic been given, and who is its central character? The defense rests.

(Indeed, this may literally be the oldest joke in the book: Jim Davis has said that he *was* originally going to call the strip Jon, and just give his star a sarcastic and witty cat as a supporting foil, but his syndicate said the strip simply *had* to be about the cat, because that would make it an instant smash hit. This contradicts some other accepted wisdom about Garfield‘s origin, but it’s funny, and that’s all that matters. Deep time again.)

There are other ways Garfield gets amusingly bleak self-deprecating mileage out of this setup, but that’s for us to explore Another Time. The variation this time has Jon trying to disarm Garfield with an existential quandary, attempting to force him to contemplate his own mortality and impermanence. This is first of all weaksauce, because Garfield is fully aware of that already considering every year he views his birthday with an ominous sense of doom and nihilistic despair, seeing it as one more step towards erasure and nothingness. But Garfield more or less has negative continuity anyway, at least when it comes to characterization and character development, so this is a largely irrelevant counterargument. Instead, let us consider the cosmological appearance of Jon’s thesis.

First of all, returning to our initial reading, the world would not continue to exist without Garfield because Garfield is the world: It’s his mark.…

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Faeces on Trump 2

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The Democrats’ vote collapsed.  Many people who had previously voted Democrat, and many people who might’ve been expected to, didn’t go to the polls for Hillary Clinton.  There is, undoubtedly, a degree to which sexism is involved here. I don’t want to minimise that.  Hillary is the subject of a great deal of venomous misogynistic hatred.  She comes in for loathing more than male politicians with equally grubby histories.  She is often the redirected hate-object for people who have come to hate her husband and his legacy.  The Clintons generally have become obsessive hate-objects for many Americans – particularly but by no means exclusively conservative Americans, despite being both extremely right-wing in real terms.  The reasons are interesting but somewhat outside our scope here.

There is much to dislike about Hillary Clinton her purely on her own account.  Some people might not like my taking the time to go into this at the moment, but I think it’s very important we don’t allow (entirely rational and reasonable) horror at Trump to make us forget the very real horror of the system and its apparatchiks under ‘normal’ conditions.

Clinton has – as those tapes made all too clear, as if it weren’t clear already – been perpetually a friend of plutocrats, of Wall Street, of big financial firms, of corporations generally.  Those tapes were of speeches designed to reassure such people – people like me are silly and old-fashioned enough to call them ‘the ruling class’ – when, later, she made public speeches containing what would be, to their ears, dangerously left-wing rhetoric designed to woo the plebs.  (Her fee for private speech is, by the way, about a quarter of a million dollars.)

She is authoritarian on ‘law and order’, and – like Bill – has employed racially-charged dogwhistles.  She has been wobbly-to-retrograde on womens’ issues, including abortion.  Always she has cloaked herself in inspirational soundbites about equality.  In this election campaign she has made lots of noises about inspiring little girls, noises which have created rapture in the hearts of many white liberal feminists.  Samantha Bee, for instance, fawned over Clinton revoltingly, taking her ball about inspiring little girls and running with it all the way to a friendly, jokey chat with Bill’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once said that the deaths of half a million Iraq kids from US-supported sanctions (half of them presumably girls) was “worth it”.  Meanwhile, we were also supposed to be inspired by the activities of the partly Saudi-funded Clinton Foundation… which turned out to be a bad idea, even if we grant that charity is anything other than a way of managing the perpetuation of an evil system, usually run by the same people who benefit from it.

She has been a consistent enemy of welfare, helping articulate the right-wing arguments against it from within an ostensibly liberal discourse.  When Bill was governor of Arkansas, she joined with him in victim-blaming the poor, welfare recipients, and then teachers.  They extended the same logic to the Clinton presidency.…

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Brave-Ish Heart

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Still not a spectacular insta-classic, but at least it’s an episode that stays away from most of the obvious things it could be as well. The double-threat structure means that there’s building momentum at all moments of the plot, which is good. Less good is the no-doubt budget-required decision to have two of the three plot strands consist of people standing in a room urgently discussing the plot. The biggest problem here is probably the strand consisting of Tanya and her parents, which ends up being in the kind of awkwardly stupid position of ineffectually relaying information between the two actual plots. But none of the plots are particularly high on urgency – it’s a significant problem that the flowers plot requires Dorothea to simply declare that they’re running out of time in order to garner momentum, and a pretty big one that Ram and April are essentially left with nothing to do but walk around for most of the episode.

So that’s what keeps it just shy of genius. On the other hand, however, there’s what the show always has, which is a dogged determination to be interesting. For instance, Ram and April’s relationship continues to be pitched well. It’s very eager to shout “WE ARE NOT FALLING INTO CONVENTIONAL TROPES OF TEEN ROMANCE,” which is probably irksome to some people, most probably teenagers, but the flipside of that is that it’s legitimately not falling into the conventional tropes of teen romance. Personally, I hope the season ends without them saying they love each other. That would be fantastic. (Also, though I missed a fair chunk of the details of the dialogue, the conversation about Ram’s Sikh heritage was a hoot.)

Even better are Charlie and Ms. Quill, who continue to go in unexpected directions. Has there ever, in the history of Doctor Who, been such a concentrated effort to take violent revolutionary politics as a serious moral position? I mean, it’s far from perfect, and the show would be wildly more interesting if Quill were presented as a hothead who considers violence a legitimate tactic as opposed to an ideological warrior for whom killing her enemies is her default setting. Indeed, and this is obviously a viewpoint influenced by political concerns that the episode couldn’t possibly respond to, I think equating violent resistance to slavery with the fetishization of violence is grotesque and irresponsible. But I still appreciate that this is a show willing to take the accusation of slavery completely seriously in the first place. And I want to be clear, I like Quill’s tendency to fly off the handle in the general case – her last scene with Dorothea is brilliant stuff. And I like that she’s being freed from her slavery now and that we get to see her unchained. I just wish that the surprisingly nuanced portrait of revolutionary violence was subtler yet.

But for the most part this is still another worthy but unspectacular example of the show’s default setting. It’s not leaning on any overly obvious plot structures, which is nice, but it’s not replacing them with interesting ideas either – just with a different sort of autopilot and wallpaper.…

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Discussing Trumpism

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I’m sorry I haven’t been producing more content lately, either in written or podcast form. I’ve got a new Consider the Ray Gun about 95% done, discussing Dune with James Murphy, and the next Searching For Fuchal has been recorded, although I haven’t even begun to edit yet. I’ve also got an upcoming Oi! Spaceman on The Space Museum, and it looks like 2017 is going to be the year I take a systematic look at Quentin Tarantino and other 90s-vintage indie filmmakers. 

Jack, Kit, and I had been planning to do a US election podcast for the last couple of weeks, and suffice it to say this is not the episode I was hoping to produce. This was recorded late Friday night, and I think all three of us consider this to be a bit of a rough conversation about the issues discussed here, rather than a nuanced and final opinion on them. We chat about whether Trump’s presidency will be truly fascist (probably not), how opinion polling failed, the meaning of the safety pin, systemic issues with late-stage capitalism, and my experiences in dipping into the Fash the Nation podcast. It’s rough, both in content and form, it’s meandering, and it’s nearly four hours long. I think it’s pretty obvious that we’ll all be writing about and discussing these issues for at least the next four-to-eight years, assuming our ability to do those things lasts that long. 

Here’s a direct download if that makes it easier. And if anyone has a good source for county-level election results going back several cycles (that are either free or very cheap) please let me know, as I’m working up a much more detailed look at the mechanics of the 2016 election. …

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