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I am a critic and researcher of sf, with interests in queer theory, postmodernism, psychoanalysis and other long words. I have various blogs.
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I See Dead London

“Disfigured Myth: The Destruction of London in Postmillennial SF Film”, Foundation 122, pp. 122-32.

There is a moment in Rob Bowman’s Reign of Fire (2002) when the hero, Quinn Abercromby (Christian Bale), climbs a wall from a river and gazes across at a semi-destroyed Palace of Westminster and says, ‘Well, this town’s gone to Hell.’ It is not the only landmark to have survived several decades of destruction: Tower Bridge has also made it through. This article explores the symbolism and meaning of such landmarks, drawing upon the ideas of Charles Peirce, Roland Barthes and Sigmund Freud, within a number of recent British science fiction films: Reign of Fire, 28 Days Later (2002) and its 2007 sequel, and Children of Men (2006). To already indicate the instability of a British identity that these films work to prop up, only 28 Days Later is a fully British production whereas the others are co-productions. The director of Reign of Fire is American, of 28 Weeks Later Spanish, and of Children of Men Mexican, but they all feature a British-born star (although the protagonist of 28 Days Later is Irish-born).

This is a version of the paper “London Death Drives” I gave at the Worldcon in August 2014, fleshed out and theory-enriched. It strikes me that there are a couple more films that could also be included here (I watched Doomsday (2008) and Flood, but neither quite fitted in the word count) and I’m sure I’ll return to British sf film soon.

May be we are set in our ways — I note here I am still in the Freudian paradigm with the uncanny and the death instinct — but note also the importance of Tom Shippey’s chapter, “The Fall of America in Science Fiction”, in Tom Shippey, ed. Fictional Space, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for The English Association, 1990), pp. 104–32. That Shippey collection was some of the first serious sf criticism I read and it influences me more than I usuallly realise.

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Until You Find the Key to Your Life

L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

There was a documentary on BBC Radio 4 over Christmas about Alice — a couple of books to which I sometimes have an allergic reaction — that said something along the lines of the Alice books became popular in the 1960s in America because the US had had no fantasy aside from the Oz books.

Ho hum.

But presumably Alice is a taproot text — a young girl who falls into a fantastical world and undergoes an almost random series of encounters before returning home. Baum gives the story more architecture: there is the journey to the City of Emeralds; the journey to the Wicked Witch of the West and the return to the Emerald City. She is given more defined companions, each with a quest of their own: the Scarecrow; the Tinman and the Cowardly Lion. A recurring trope in the book is their restatement of their needs, a fairy tale recurring rhetorical structure.

The gimmick is surely clear from the perennial Newtonmas screenings of the film version — the titular Wizard is a humbug and you must search for the hero inside yourself. (Incidentally this is a variation on the anti-technology sf movie dependent on technology to narrate its tale — the fantasy narrative distrustful of fantasy and illusions.) The Wizard isn’t who he claims to be and that is a Bad Thing, but the Scarecrow, Tinman and Cowardly Lion must pretend to be who they want to be and that is a Good Thing.

The book doesn’t have the is-it-a-dream-or-not? frame of the film, in which various farmhands are anticipatory doubles of her companions. The farm sequence is pretty brief, barely a chapter, as Baum clearly knows to get her to the fantasy land as soon as he can. On the other hand, there’s little sense of why she wants to go home (although in the film it makes no sense at all). The flying monkeys are less scary than they become in the movie, as indeed is the Wicked Witch. If more incidents are thrown at Dorothy and the gang in the book than the film, they are dealt with chapter by chapter. Can one whisper the film is an improvement on the novel? Or maybe got to me first.

I think a comment needs to be made on gender, and the power vacuums created and filled by the narrative. Oz is divided into four segments, North and South ruled by good witches, West and East are ruled by bad witches. Four domains, four female rulers. The central zone is the Emerald City, built by the humbug wizard (but see The Marvelous Land of Oz) In the course of the novel two of the women are killed and one is replaced by a male character (it is not clear who rules Munchkinland, but presumably Dorothy has squatter’s rights). The male Wizard is replaced by the male Scarecrow, marking a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. The novel was written in the era of the New Woman and an era of suffragism.

Perhaps this will become significant in the sequel.

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Saving Captain Powers

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

Actually, that’s not fair, there’s a scene where the train crosses a bridge in New York or Brooklyn that is clearly meant to mirror a sequence when Hanks is leaving East Berlin by train.

I tend to prefer Spielberg’s Entertainments. I can see why he’d want to make something like The Color Purple or Schindler’s List as a means of getting films made that a less money-making talent would struggle, but I think there’s a political confusion to his serious efforts that he hasn’t lumbered his thrillers with. As Greg Tuck pointed out to me years ago there’s something disturbingly exceptional about his subject matter — Jews who survive the holocaust or slaves who get to go home. Gotta have that triumph of the human spirit.

But of course Spielberg can tell a story on a big canvas and has trained us to watch crowds — but he never knows where to end a movie. Imagine how devastating Minority Report would have been if it had ended with Tom Cruise in jail rather than conjuring up an estranged wife who suddenly forgives and springs him out of jail.

Bridge of Spies is the same. And it is posing as an Entertainment.

It should have ended with Tom Hanks on the bridge, unclear as to what will happen next, rather than bringing him back home to hearth and family and acclaim. There’s a line in the film about how it doesn’t matter what people think of you as long as you know that what you have done is right. But Hanks’s character is given redemption and applause, in a scene that echoes an earlier restless silence in a train in which he has been viewed as a traitor.

The film begins with a bridge — the Brooklyn bridge — and Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) posing as an artist in Brooklyn and receiving some nuclear secrets of one kind or another. He is arrested and put on trial — and in order to show that the American way of life is sacrosanct, he is given a trial of sorts, with insurance litigator James Donovan (Hanks) called upon by his boss (Alan Alda) to defend the indefensible. The trial is not as rigged as it might be, but in here we have a commentary of the importance of the constitution being followed even in times of war. I’m guessing we’re meant to have Guantanamo Bay in mind.

And Hanks is the most Mr Smith style actor in Hollywood today, with rare exceptions playing the decent, sincere, all-American man. If anyone can make us care for an insurance man as Capraesque rather than Kafka-esque it is Hanks. And Alda, in M*A*S*H*, played one of the most decent characters in sitcom history, so much so that he’s mostly acted against type since. He is very wary about Hanks’s attempt to appeal on Abel’s behalf. Donovan was smart enough to know that at some point an American spy would be captured and a swap could be made with Abel if he were still alive rather than executed. (Is Abel his real name? Is seems too NATO phonetic alphabet to be entirely genuine.)

And into this plunges U2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers and obviously Donovan is sent to negotiate his release.

We sort of know how it’s going to end because, yanno, history, but the waters are muddied by an American PhD student who gets caught in the wrong side of the wall in Berlin. Meanwhile, Spielberg brings his fetish for widescreen historical reconstruction, in this case of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

And you can’t help noticing that this is a male world — the only women are wives, daughters, secretaries and cleaning ladies and everyone else is about bone structure. I suspect it’s a nearly all white world — the only African American I recall being on the back of a lorry in Brooklyn. But America is recuperated and that is hardly exceptional for Spielberg.

Hanks is solid throughout, but frankly the film is stolen by Rylance, whose portrayal of Abel is somewhere between his Thomas Cromwell and Private James Frazer from Dads Army. You kind of despair for the CIA, of course, as they think that Abel might come from Northern England. As in Scotland, Northern England. But he is wonderfully dry and curiously makes you feel sorry for a spy.

And so in the end, the Guantanamo parallels aren’t pushed to their limit. The American way of life is recuperated and following the Constitution is the thing to do (and I wonder if we needed a little historical context for the pledge of allegiance “under God” in the school sequence, which dated from 1954 and the McCarthy era). And rather than leave Hanks unclear as to the fate of his unlikely friend, we need to bring Hanks back to home and family and people thinking right of him.

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Strangers on a Train Set

Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

This is a haunted film.

It’s based on a pseudonymous and groundbreaking 1950s novel by Patricia Highsmith — got but not read — who is better known for those queer crime thrillers Strangers on a Train (filmed by Hitchcock from a Chandler script) and the Ripley trilogy (filmed in various versions). Groundbreaking because — spoilers — it has a happy ending unlike the gay gothic ending of most other gay and lesbian novels of most of the twentieth century. The instinct is It Can’t End Well.

And the Chandler link and the gun one of them has points towards the noir version of the tale, more suitable for pulps, with the ordinary Jo seduced and ruined by the femme fatale. It Can’t End Well. And Haynes has made the pulpish Mildred Pierce for TV, which I really must watch.

And then there’s the best film by the Wachowski Siblings, Bound, the best lesbian gangster money-in-a-suitcase movie yet made.

But here we have the linked lives of working class shop girl Therese (Rooney Mara) with sort-of boyfriend and monied older woman Carol (Cate Blanchett) with disintegrating marriage. We begin towards the end, with an apparently parting assignation in a hotel bar, and Therese seeing Carol walking through the New York streets from the back of a car. This scene anticipates a similar car journey with the roles reversed.

Then we cut to their first meeting in the toy section of a department store — Carol wanting to buy a doll for her daughter, Therese suggesting a train set, and Carol inadvertently leaving her gloves behind creating an excuse to meet again.

And then I remember a decade or two years old reading about butch femme power dynamics.

Then we cut to their first meeting in the toy section of a department store — Carol wanting to buy a doll for her daughter, Therese suggesting a train set, and Carol deliberately leaving her gloves behind creating an excuse to meet again.

Hmm. I think it’s an accidental meeting but Therese is always already masculine and fancies Carol and Carol recognises a kindred spirit in her. The affair feels like it should be doomed given the clichés of narrative. Therese dreams of a career in photography, either as artist or journalist, although fails to name check any of the female photographers active in the fifties. Somehow it was a suitable job for a woman.

We’re spared the worst of it, but it is hinted that Carol has to go through some pretty severe therapy to cure her of her moral laxity (the l-word is not actually used), but desire will out in the end. I’ve not read the novel, so I’m not sure if the narrative stays with Therese or allows us into Carol’s world. I wonder if it would be better viewed from the outside of Carol’s life, but we get more Blanchett with the double focus.

If I’m honest, I suspect the film is a little too long, too leisurely and fetishising the 1950s detail. I miss the mischievousness of Haynes’s earlier Velvet Goldmine. But clearly Haynes has fought for twenty years to get this made and it is glorious in its performances and luxuriating in a Carter Burwell soundtrack.

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My Heart Belongs To Dada

May contain spoilers

The Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, 2015)

I was seven when Star Wars came out – and I’d swear it had the subtitle then, but I suspect it was a couple of months into the run. I’d not seen The Searchers, The Dam Busters, Hidden Fortress or even Triumph of the Will, so it felt original. I’d probably seen Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, and at some point the Glen A Larson version showed up. I would have seen The Wizard of Oz, but didn’t make the link to Star Wars, but both were modern fairy tales and I knew them, albeit via panto and Disney and Ladybird Books. There was a novelisation, apparently by Lucas, which suggested earlier segments. I didn’t yet know The Lord of the Rings.

There was a space race of blockbusters — Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Empire Strikes Back, Superman — and at some point there was Star Trek the movie, nicknamed The Slow Motion Picture or The Motion Sickness and boy was it dull. But we saw the gang coming together for One More Mission and there’s that extraordinary ten minute sequence when Kirk and Scottie check out the old girl on the big screen. Talk about your male gaze.

And years passed and puberty hit and Empire was clearly the best of the three and the three prequels happened. Oddly the BBC paid me a lot of money to write something about sf for their website and to review the novelisation. I went into The Phantom Menace knowing the plot. But then (spoilers) we knew the ending — Little Orphan Annie Kin is going to go wrong. The poster told us. There were call backs — more westerns, an attack like the one on the Death Star, but only C3PO, R2D2 and x to link us to the trilogy. There was Obi Wan Kenobi, but in an odd non-Guinness style by Ewan McGregor. The prequels were pants.

And years passed and that seemed to be that — although there was an odd Star Trek reboot that felt more like Star Wars, and director J.J. Abrams clearly preferred that franchise.

And then Disney bought Lucas (not Lucas Entertainment) in a no-brained multi billion deal that would pay in terms of merchandising alone, even without a third trilogy and spin offs. Our friend would be back.

So what happens next? Well, Han and Leia retire to the suburbs and Uncle Luke bounces their kids above his knee. Although Han did turn into seventies dad in the original.

Well, Abrams only has one one thing to do — to not kill the golden goose. Because, frankly, the magic bean counters at Gold Mouse Central will have calculated that the deal is repaid by merchandising alone — and endless iterations in Lego.

So we shake the magic eight ball of plot and we find an orphan with exceptional abilities, the finest pilot in the galaxy, a cute robot, a wise cracking sidekick, the finest pilot in the galaxy and a new evil man in black to recreate the original plot, and bring back the older versions of the old gang. This is somewhere between fan service and prick tease — we know from the poster that Han, Leia, R2D2, C3PO, Chewbacca and the Millennium Falcon are back, and can make a few shrewd deductions about Skywalker’s absence from the poster but Hamill’s name on it. There’s a balance to be struck between delayed gratification and seeing what we want.

In a sense the original films were reruns — variations on Buck Rogers and the Flash Gordon Lucas had wanted to make. Both the later films in the trilogy and then the later we-shall-not-speak-of-it trilogy ape that, albeit with diminishing returns. The secret plans of The Death Star (which presumably are on file at the local council offices) are the secret map to Luke, entrusted to the faintly double entendred BB8, the cat to R2D2’s puppy, and inevitably this ends up on the not Tattooine desert planet which is home to this film’s orphan du jour, the kick ass Rey. BB8 is antenna in hand with ex-stormtrooper Finn, whose conversion to the light side is as easily and convincingly accomplished as Annie Kin’s was to the dark.

Incidentally, the crapness of this generation of storm troopers — shuffling embarrassedly out of shot at one point — could be used as a racist argument against diversity… Ooops.

And through such frail travelling coincidences we assemble the old team and the old set pieces — scavengers, trips across deserts, scrap dealers, strangulation by the Force, a cantina, hologram chess… Fan service. Give us what we want.

A character is killed off. Oh yes — although apparently the director was so enamoured with the actor that he is completely unexpectedly brought back. Because the thing we know about popular culture — I’m looking at you, Doctor Who — is that death is simply a matter of contractual obligations. But then, death didn’t slow Ben or Yoda down. So that death that comes later is clearly a wrench but there are two more films to play out.

And so we come to the new Big Bad, so evil he has to kill someone à la Vader, Kylo Ren, who hero worships a Vader he plainly doesn’t know. He appears to have a helmet fetish, which cramps in his impossibly bouffant hair style. Incidentally, his looks seem to be be more like an Alan Rickman than his putative father, suggesting his mother has the same kind of morals as Annie Kin’s mother with her “I got knocked up by the Force” cover story. This is a man, nay a boy, with anger management issues, who would throw his toys out of the pram with or without the Force, as witnessed in his really stupid light sabre attacks on consoles. Quite what the even Bigger Bad, Gollum Snope, sees in him remains a mystery.

It turns out that all the films are about relationships between fathers and sons — from Annie Kin’s anonymous trick to Darth Emo’s petulance. If we compare it to perhaps the only other multi-chaptered, anachronous saga — Shakespeare’s War of the Roses plays — we can see how the quasi-patricide of Richard II by Henry IV is still playing out in the relations of (spoilers) Hal and Falstaff and even Henry VI. We have divided good and evil fathers, fathers who can’t measure up, sons who can’t measure up (and as far as I recall, the spoiler of Luke-I-am-your-father, supposedly not known about when Star Wars was filmed and Leigh Brackett’s contribution to the saga, was there in the comic book adaptation released before Empire). Annie Kin’s missing father (and thus under developed superego if you buy Freud) is played out in Darth Emo’s over compensation.

But fathers are there to be obeyed. Well, the good ones.

When Star Wars was released in the late 1970s we had had a run of adult themed, grown up sf movies and were desperately in search of heroes in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate disillusionments. It made us children again — even those of us who were children. Arguably, Lucas and then Spielberg infantilised the sf genre with their fort da sagas. Again, again! And made shit loads of money. Fathers and sons, sons and fathers (but Indy was the dog).

The Force Awakens is a cosy old set of clothes and slippers and presses the buttons expertly. The question the remaining two films will have to answer is the nature of mothers and sons, but more importantly daughters and mothers. It is to be hoped that Rey gets to stay kick ass, rather than face the domestication Leia endured from agent to slave.

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Craven Images

I’ve been slowly working my way through Wes Craven’s oeuvre of films because I thought he would be a good example to teach with of a horror auteur. And whilst so far there have been a fair number of stinking moments, there are a lot of interesting signatures that I’ve been picking up. There was a moment where I pondered that with showing Wes Craven’s New Nightmare as my auteur exemplar and Last House on the Left as controversy film, I should add Vampire in Brooklyn as the vampire film and maybe The People Under the Stairs to explore what horror is.

But you can get too much Craven.

I have to be careful about the original Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream tetralogy, because I’m teaching slasher films on my Popular Genres and Popular Culture module and there’s potentially student overlap next year. But in going through the material on slasher as feminist genre, I pondered if something needed updating (and ironically, I was teaching this the same day as materials on the monstrous-feminine in the horror module).

I don’t really buy slasher as feminist. I think there’s too much pleasure to be taken in the sexualised sadism against the female characters. The Final Girl is subjected to an extended ordeal. On the other hand, I can see the appeal of a screen character being more than just a victim. In the monstrous-feminine class I showed the softporn opening sequence of the original Carrie, and again I’ve heard arguments about this film’s feminist potential. But when there’s a male director filming a male scriptwriter’s adaptation of a male author’s novel,  I’m not sure how the female perspective can get into it in any entirely convincing way. (Some of the students seem not to be able to acknowledge that the full frontal nudity of the young women in the sequence might be sexualising and objectifying — even as the centra lingers in sift focus and Carrie soaps her body… Or see that this is problematic.)

So somewhere I came across the idea where the slasher  was an index of male anxieties about the role of women. I suspect I read this – but you might want to see Halloween as a response to second wave feminism. I suspect we can then trace the subgenre through reactions to new men and new lads and the antifeminist backlash and Scream is somehow in a conversation with third wave feminism. I’ve yet to sit down and trace this in any detail. Given who the victims of the slasher are, the ostensible villain is acting as the avatar of surplus repression.

Meanwhile, I rewatched Cursed and watched My Soul to Take. The former I suspect is an attempt to do for the werewolf subgenre what Scream did for the slasher. Whilst it has its moments, it obeys the first rule of virtually all werewolf movies I’ve seen: the werewolf will be a dog’s breakfast. The latter film  is a cousin to the slasher — sixteen years before the main plot some guy killed his wife and his psychiatrist and a cop or two and tried to kill the people in the ambulance and may or may not have died himself. It’s a series of set pieces and they barely make sense. He might be barking (but not in a werewolf way); he might be possessed. In the present day, the seven kids born on the same day as he died hold a ritual to face the monster, and one of them dies. 

The teenager of colour, obviously.

Although there’s also visually impaired African American.

Indeed, the teens are killed off one by one, with the twist that it may well be cute little malcontent shy geek Bug who is responsible. Who you think wouldn’t kill a fly. Or it might be his best friend Alex, who is bullied by a stepfather in a one-off scene that might well have been added late on for all I know.

My initial reaction is that it’s largely mindless by the numbers pap, although it passes ninety minutes or so.

It’s perhaps a bit early to think about this film in terms of fourth wave feminism, but I suspect here we have an example of the geek male as hero and a way of tracing the shifting patterns of hegemonic masculinity. Intriguing though Max Thieriot’s performance is — and he has to ventriloquise other characters — I think we’ve already seen the geek hero in a purer form in Jessie Eisenberg in Cursed. And whilst I need to rewatch the film at some point to focus on what Emily Meade’s character is up to, Cursed reminds me of what an interesting actor Christina Ricci appears to be. At some point though, I will need to go and look (again) at the late slasher films to see what they get up to in terms of masculinity and the flatter your audience ploy of putting the geek centre stage. 

Although, of course, in the slasher the most interesting male character tends to be the slasher “him”self.

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Out Damned Scott

The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015)

I hate this. I really hate this. I really don’t have the words to begin to describe how much I hate this. I mean, everyone else loved The Martian.

For a decade or so, I’ve wrestled with two dilemmas:

a) is Tony Scott a better director than his brother?
b) is Ben Affleck a better actor than his old mucker Matt Damon?

I’d think I’d have it resolved and that it was Tony and Ben and then I’d see a film directed by Tony or Ben and suspect I was wrong. I realise that Tony died in tragic circumstances and his oeuvre is complete, but he gave us The Hunger and (the best Tarantino film) True Romance. On the other hand, Ridley has two genuine masterpieces: Alien and Legend (not, obviously, to be confused with the recent remake). Tony rarely seemed to hint that his films were anything more than vacuous tosh (although with an African American protagonist surprisingly often), whereas Ridley seems to try for the Meaningful and miss, whilst white washing all too often.

Then there’s Matt and Ben. Meh. I’m a fan of Kevin Smith films. What can I say?

Everyone else has done the jokes already — if you want a character who gets left behind and needs to be rescued, Damon’s your man. You’d think he’d get the message. So, as in the book, Matt Watney (Watt Damon), has been left behind in a sandstorm on Mars and begins to work out how he can survive until the next mission survives. There’s rather more of the crew than there is in the book, softening us up so we actually care when one of them dies.

And then, otherwise, there’s a fidelity to the book. Damon might strike you as being more buff than normal, but that allows for the malnutrition of later sequences and film is much better at given you a tabula rasa onto whom the audience can project emotions than a book in which the author has to tell you what they are thinking. The mission log can be used to justify voiceover, but it isn’t overwhelming.

The fidelity is a problem. Just as it is a bit of a wrench when we cut away from Watney to Earth for the first time, so it is here. The parallel editing is surprisingly clunky as characters wonder “I wonder what he is up to right now?” or “Do you think he’ll work this out?” out loud. For a Ridley film, the cast is surprisingly more multiethnic than of late, although there are a couple of whitewashing. And there’s also, spoilers, some additional sequences at the end to Get All Meaningful. To turn it into a recruitment ad for NASA.

And somehow Damon can pull that odd combination of nothing-special and resourceful man. The NASA team balance that concern and bureaucracy. This is a film — like the book — where the only enemies are the cold equations. The lone astrogating genius perhaps needed to have his performance dialed back a bit, and I was uncomfortably reminded of the Random Pot Smoking Rastafarian in Thelma and Louise. There’s a geeky Lord of the Rings reference in the novel which gets repeated here, with added nuance that Sean Bean is in the scene.

And of course, we know that Sean Bean has to be killed off. It’s what he does well.

So, unbelievably, and I hate this, Scott has produced a reasonable film. I think Moon and Gravity pull off similar situations of isolation with more aplomb, and there are similar moments of massive disbelief suspension, but this might be the first non-crap Scott film since well… well… his Hovis ads.

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Take A Chance On Me

Take a Chance on Me

Risk (Turner Contemporary, 10 October 2015-17 January 2016)

The Anthea Turner — a gallery whose Chipperfield design works better in Wakefield — is committed to always showing some J. M. S. Turner and contemporary art, for which read the past one year’s except when it suits them. They’ve had some great solo shows (Mondrian and Colour was frankly more interesting than the Liverpool Tate show), which are interspersed with themed shows. The second exhibition, about Youth, was amazing, Curiosity had some good items but wasn’t more than the sum of its parts and the Self left me a little cold.

So, Risk. Art which puts the artist at risk or may offend against dominant values?

Well, yes, Ruth Proctor films herself falling off a scaffold onto cardboard boxes (here is the scaffold, here are the boxes), Bas Jan Ader documents the start of his transAtlantic voyage that was never completed, Ai Weiwei gives various landmarks the finger. Meanwhile we have surgery footage of Orlan’s cosmetic surgery, Gregor Schneider’s faintly uncanny film of two neighbouring houses redecorated to be identical, Martha Abramovic leaning back from a bow and arrow pointed at her heart.

But then it’s extended to chance and fate. Gerard Richter scrapes back at his paint with a squeegee, post Minimalists let their art hang according to gravity, Marcel Duchamp drops string and Chris Burden drops steel beams into wet concrete.

And then, brace yourself, Turner experiments to see how different paints dry or soak into paper.

Careful now.

There’s a print of an old life jacket and a reconstruction of an ancient Chinese earthquake detector.

What there isn’t is any Jackson Pollock who also allowed chance into his aesthetic through pouring and dripping or Helen Frankenthaler with her too-wet paint or Frank Bowling’s dribbles. One might object that being open to chance is an abandonment of craft, but presumably there’s a selection process. There’s a film (whose makers I forget) which is a kind of mouse trap sequence, where rolling ball sets off a chain reaction. We don’t see however many versions didn’t work. And we don’t see what Duchamp did with the templates he made from the string.

There wasn’t any art that has been banned or challenged (Mapplethorpe’s photos, Magritte’s nudes might have been interesting, some of the vandalised art show at Tate Britain a couple of years back).

The biggest risk here, of course, is that there is such a show in a multimillion pound gallery in one of the more deprived corners of England — Margate was a Portas town, its twin industries of TB recovery and funfair being undermined by progress. Like Gateshead’s BALTIC, another venue which is curated rather than collected, it could simply do crowd pleasers (such as Grayson Perry), but instead challenges its clientele. It has to risk failure.

With a few exceptions, alas, in this it was a success.

Meanwhile, a ten minute walk, a megabaguette, a thirty minute bus ride and another ten minute walk away there is the UpDown Gallery, which specialises mainly in limited edition prints. ive not caught every show there, but those I have I’ve liked.

Upstairs, ending really soon, is the work of Loukas Morley, a ready-made artist in the tradition of Beauys with the colour sense of Hodgkin. Painting on various types of wood, either circular or rectangular or squaregular, clearly on the flat, he builds up layers of paint and resin, abstract yet active, usually allowing the ghost of the grain below. There are also witty sculptures – a board rubber, plastic lids from spray paints, crumpled metal á la John Chamberlain, a lemon as still life. He has been curated by Cedric Christie in the past and I suspect a cross-influence.

Meanwhile, downstairs, ending really soon, is Martin Grover and his (to be honest, annoyingly titled) The Peoples Limousine. It would be unfair to call Grover (like Magritte) a one-joke artist, even if it is a funny joke. He specialises in fake bus stop signs, wring out variants on the symbols, possible stops and kinds of route. One refer to Talking Heads songs, another to British movies set in London (Going Places: The London Nobody Knows/Meantime & High Hopes/Seven Days to Noon/The Fallen Idol/The Bells Go Down). Yes, it’s arbitrary, but it’s done with wit and charm.

There are also lists of lists, masquerading as compilation albums, depictions of famous musicians (Barry White, Marvyn Gaye) wandering around London or past CarpetRight. And then my favourites: The South London Procrastination Club (Established: not just yet). There’s a hint of the thirties railway destination poster about his more straight forward prints, but any of them should put a smile on your face.

It’s too late for this show — unless you go on Sunday — but keep an eye out.

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Out Damned Scot

Macbeth (Julian Kurzel, 2015)

I suspect — because it was my O Level set Shakespeare — that The Scottish Play was the first live Shakespeare I saw; a People Show production, I’m guessing at Nottingham Playhouse, with Bernard Hill and Julie Walters in the chief roles. We imagined, given it was the era of Boys from the Blackstuff that they’d play to their accents — The Scouse Play if you will — but it was played straight. Possibly even Scottish. We may have seen a BBC version, but what stays in the mind was Roman Polanski’s 1971 version with lots of violence and nudity.

And Keith Chegwin.

It was the first film he made after the Charles Manson stuff, the murder of Sharon Tate, and the violence is brutal — it precedes the rape/statutory rape scandal and the murky depths of whether he skipped justice or an unwise plea bargain. It is hard for some to watch a Polanski without the spectre of his life. The Scottish Play is a cursed play. Which is why you should never say “Macbeth”.

Gak.

And there was a Sam Worthington version a couple of years ago and now we have the version which Zack Snyder would direct in the tradition of 300 Spartans, but without the leather shorts.

Shame.

Plays are not films — the filmed play can seem stagy and closed in, but if you open it out you probably have to cut stuff to make room. Chunks of Shakespeare are scene setting, of course, his stages being almost bare rather than Wagnerian epics, so you can trim. The important thing is you can show rather than tell.

Oddly, however, the director felt the need to give us a written prologue that explains that a long time ago, in a country far far away, England was invading Scotland and Macbeth was top warrior. Why have a bloody man tell King Duncan the plot when we can read it?

We also have an invented scene of a burial for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s child. This is significant because at some point MacDuff, whose younglings have been killèd, says (perzoomably of Macbeth), “He has no children” and yet Lady Macbeth suggests that her breasts beasts have given sup. Either we posit that she is on a second marriage or a dead bairn. The two of them are thus grieving for a lost child, which they compensate for by arranging for lots more children to be killèd.

The decision seems to have been taken to play the action somewhat like a western; lots of open spaces and a slow burn (for what is a short and nippy play), although more to the point, none of the actors seem to open their mouths, which are for the most part covered in thick beards. Knowing the original text helps in working out who is speaking.

There are other liberties. Post battle, Macbeth — thane of Glamis — and his mate Banquo run into the three witches, who tell them that Macbeth is going to be promoted and Banquo should be proud of his children. Three witches, the three graces, the Virgin, the Mother and the, er, Other One.

Bloody Terry Pratchett rip-off.

Only, here there are four witches, and a child and a baby. Odd. Makes no sense.

So, Macbeth and his wife live in a simple yurted community with I think a Scandinavian church (or is it a feast hall?) and Shakiecams* follow their plotting to murder Duncan (David Threwfell) and pin the blame on his bodyguards. Then we’re meant to get one of the least funny clowns in the Shakespearean canon talking about brewer’s droop, but that gets cut. There’s some odd business with Duncan’s son Malcolm, which I think has been added, and then everyone buggers off the Bamburgh Castle and a Norman-style cathedral that pushes at the anachronistic. I mean, I suspect it’s about fifty years too early to be possible, and hardly seems likely. Meanwhile, they’ve finally found a tripod for the camera but can’t be bothered with continuity editing.

It’s been a long time since I saw the Polanski version of this and I know some people who would refuse to watch it on principle (and wasn’t there a Orson Welles one?), but however problematic it was, I don’t recall it taking one of Shakespeare’s shortest, speediest plays and making it just a tad dull.

Even if you did get Keith Chegwin.

* Shakiecam. As opposed to Steadicam. But there’s a pun there if you look hard enough. Possibly.

by flares

What we want is Watney’s

Andy Weir, The Martian (2011)

So there are exceptions — the Watership Downs and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Clenchers — which get rejected by dozens of publishers and then become bestsellers. And there’s the self-published which become bestsellers when they’ve gone mainstream. One has to admire Andy Weir for his success — which seems to have been ordained even before we learned that Ridley Scott was going to get his mitts on the manuscript.

Lots of books get optioned.

Some writers live on this — hoping the bloody film never gets made.

This time it did, but I haven’t seen it yet.

So, we have an astronaut, Matt Watney, on the red barrel planet, who gets separated from the rest of his crew in a sandstorm and is left behind. Or, since he’s telling us the story in the first person, possibly he’d nipped for a slash behind the yurt and got distracted. Anyhow.

Because he’s never read Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About Too…, he decides to Rebuild Civilisation by planting potatoes and keeping going until NASA can send a rescue mission. He sits there and does all the calculation in a sort of rivet-counting engineer in Heart of Darkness way, but we have not sense of jeopardy because it’s in the first person and it would be really naff to suddenly switch viewpoints and add This is the last of the tapes we found and Watney’s body was found buried under the sand. On wonders a little about the balance of amino acids he’s going to get with rations and potatoes, and surely the lunacy induced by just eating potatoes is higher than the lunacy of being on your own for four hundred days or being forced to watch nothing but seventies reruns and listening to disco.

Oh yes, yet another sf novel where the protagonist know no culture produced after the date of the novel being written.

There’s a certain kind of purity that comes from a tight focus on a single character.

…and then the action suddenly switches to Earth and NASA and what they want to do with it. They begin to anticipate what Watney will do and how rescue him, and set a new deadline for him to survive to. There are convenient other spaceships around to borrow and presumably extra rations for the rescue team and at least now we have a sense of jeopardy because we don’t know what Watney’s up to…

… only we do cut back to him and we aren’t really allowed to think he’s dead for more than half a page. At least once we get to the third person — and sometimes we see Watney from the third person and in italics if I recall correctly, so there is hope that he might die after all. At any point it could all go horribly Pete Tong.

It reminded me of two earlier novels — but not the exoticism of Barsoom or the nostalgia of The Silver Locusts or the ontology of Martian Time-Slip or the social richness of Red/Green/Blue Mars. Rather it took me back to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, which confuses pedantry with verisimilitude, and Ben Bova’s Voyagers, which has that international glossiness. Every one is competent, there are no real antagonists except the universe itself.

You might argue there are no people.

Hmmm.

It’s a long time since I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars, but I suspect that was a lot more fun. But this is that reasonable novel that does its job and yes, does keep you reading. But I’ll forget it within the week.