While I’m at it, perhaps I should nod to
* I was sent one of his books (although not the one I was asked to review). Fortunately I had most of the back catalogue, but I paid good money to write the review…
I was invited to do an appreciation of Terry Pratchett for the Los Angeles Review of Books blog: “Death and the Author: A Brief Commemoration of Terry Pratchett“.
(Thanks to sister Kelly Butler for additional proof reading.)
So, along with the Saturdays searching through Good Vibrations or Rob’s Record Mart for copies of albums by Tangerine Dream or Edgar Froese or Peter Baumann or Yes there was a band called Gong. I might have been recommended them by my big bother, I might have just stumbled across them.
I bought Camembert Electrique with an ambivalent attitude toward its gatefold interior — too hippy and yet pleasing. The music itself swang from noise and howls to heavyish guitars. I bought a couple more albums, Angel’s Egg and You, but I never quite followed it up or understood what the pot head pixies were up to. Now, their lead musician during that period, Daevid Allen, has died of cancer.
I don’t think I can do more justice to him right now than quote from Solar Flares:
Allen had discovered works by writers of the Beat Generation in a bookshop in Melbourne and travelled to Paris in 1960, staying at the Beat Hotel in the Latin Quarter, frequented by poet Allen Ginsberg, and visiting jazz clubs. Travelling to Dover the next year, he wanted to be part of a band, and, inspired by the mythology of jazz musician Sun Ra, formed a trio with Wyatt, performing at William Burroughs’s happenings in London, before he helped found Soft Machine. Refused re-entry to Britain after a European tour, Allen settled with his partner, academic Gilli Smyth – who performed as Shakti Yoni – in Paris; in the lead up to the May 1968 student protests, they formed the band Gong. Their albums – including Camembert Electrique (1971) and the trilogy Flying Teapot (1973), Angel’s Egg (1973) and You (1974) – offered an expansive fusion of psychedelia, quasi-Eastern mysticism, concept albums and fantasy, with overt drug references. The band continued through many incarnations, changes of personnel and
different names over the next forty-plus years. The Radio Gnome trilogy drew upon Allen’s own mystical experiences, especially at Deià, Majorca; Zero the hero has a vision in the Charing Cross Road and goes through a process of seven initiations, enabling him to leave his body for the Planet Gong. Having gained an audience with the Octave Doctors (which appear in the form of a giant eye inside a cone inside an egg-shaped aura), he is charged with bringing the vision to the rest of the world via a music festival, but fails. Allen’s cosmology of pot-head pixies, flying saucers, flying teacups and flying teapots, the Planet Gong, the pirate radio-like Radio Gnome and the recurring characters such as Mista T. Being, Herbert Herbert Esq, Fred the Fish, Selene the Moon Goddess, the Good Witch Yoni and the Submarine Captain offer a kind of mind-expanding science fiction.
I’ve yet to follow up the Canterbury Scene or the Canterbury Sound (which arguably has barely more to do with the city than Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales), but I will one of the days. I suspect I missed Allen more than once at the Adelphi Club in Hull and at Lounge on the Farm, and now he’ll be missed forever.
Another one gone.
From “’We Has Found the Enemy and They Is Us’: Virtual War and Empathy in Four Children’s Science Fiction Novels’, The Lion and the Unicorn (2004), 28(2): pp. 171-185
[This article in part draws on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that the self has to respond to the other’s right to be and to aid the other, even at expense to the self. This philosopher was central to my PhD. The other three novels were Gillian Rubinstein’s Space Demons (1986), Robert Westall’s Gulf (1992) and Gloria
Skurzynski’s Virtual War (1997)]
There is a moment in Terry Pratchett’s Only You Can Save Mankind (first published 1992) when the hero Johnny Maxwell watches some television: “There was a film on the News showing some missiles streaking over some city. It was quite good” (22). By comments in subsequent chapters it becomes clear that the military action being shown is the Gulf War of 1991, a war which Jean Baudrillard has argued did not take place, and which for the children who are central to Only You Can Save Mankind has taken on the shape of a video game; indeed, they hear that the bombers have grown up playing such games:
“There was a man on the box saying that the bomb-aimers were so good because they all grew up playing computer games,” said Wobbler.
“See?” said Johnny. “That’s what I mean. Games look real. Real things look like games.” (116)
The virtual Gulf War is counterpointed with the computer game Only
You Can Save Mankind, which Johnny has started playing and indeed
entered into.
It must have been somewhere around 1984 or 1985, and it must have been in Kevin’s bedroom, one lunch time or after school, that there was an advert in a computer magazine for The Colour of Magic (1983). Maybe it was a bit later and it was The Light Fantastic (1985). At some point I bought both — I suspect at a long-lost sf and gaming shop in the Broadmarsh Centre — and read and enjoyed, although I preferred the novel to what was effectively a few novellas. I bought each paperback as it came out and, in 1989 in Leeds at a convention, had the slightly embarrassing experience of queueing up to get an already-signed copy of Mort (1987) signed by Pratchett. I had found copies of The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) in the local library and read them — indeed I bought the latter when the library sold it.
At some point in the early 1990s I went to a conference on Mikhail Bakhtin in Sheffield, and sat there wondering why no one was talking about Pratchett and Death. Eventually, this turned into an article for Foundation (“Terry Pratchett and the Comedic Bildungsroman” (1996)), which I was never quite sure whether was a parody of an academic or serious. As if there’s a difference. In time, Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James and I edited a collection of essays on Pratchett for Foundation, Guilty of Literature (2001), which was nominated for a best-related book Hugo, and when I started writing books for Pocket Essentials it was one of the ideas I pitched. That was a fun summer or autumn, reading the novels one by one, made weirder by receiving a missive from Colin Smythe.
It had come to someone’s attention that I was writing a biography of Pratchett and people were somewhat aghast that I hadn’t spoken to anyone more than remotely connected to Pratchett. I pointed out that this was a work of criticism — which wasn’t actually reassuring to all parties, but it was hoped that it would be better than the one that three people had edited a couple of years earlier. Coughs quietly. And indeed, I was led to believe that a biography might not be objected to — although I presumed that most of it would be about someone sat at a keyboard. I was invited to visit Colin Smythe and picked up from the station by a large expensive car, and was lent a copy of the book that was going to come out just as we went to press.
At that point I had OD’ed on the novels. At some point I wrote a piece on Only You Can Save Mankind (1992) in relation to other virtual reality war novels — “’We Has Found the Enemy and They Is Us’: Virtual War and Empathy in Four Children’s Science Fiction Novels” (The Lion and the Unicorn (2004) 28(2)) — and I was commissioned to edited a book on Pratchett for Greenwood Press, An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (2008), which damn near killed me. Certainly I could have done without an all-night proof read of the galleys putting right the errors introduced into the manuscript. And I learned — as I had with the Pocket Essentials — that some of Pratchett’s readers don’t like anything other than absolute praise. OK, sobeit: He was the finest comic writer of the last thirty years. But sometimes he nodded.
This is going to go on, but here are two parts of the intro to the Greenwood volume. I’m not sure I ever read Making Money, but I will and no doubt will be lured back to read him. Just because you love a writer’s work, doesn’t mean that it can’t be criticised. Continue reading →
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994)
Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher — the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… none of whom go to the cinema to see slasher films. Craven, finally, is allowed to visit his idea of a Pomo slasher and puts Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund and John Saxon at the heart of a movie about making an Elm Street style film, with a real Krueger going after the cast and crew. Alongside actors playing themselves, we have Craven as Craven and Robert Shaye as Robert Shaye and no doubt best boys playing best boys. As far as one can see, Langenkamp is better as Langenkamp than as Nancy, and Englund plays affable character actor troubled by nightmares.
Yes, it is clever and we have some more spectacular deaths, as well as further cameos from actors we probably last saw in the franchise. John Saxon as father figure melds into Thompson’s father and the original footage of A Nightmare on Elm Street is folded into the film. There is a sense of biting that hand that feeds them — dangerous with those metal nails — and possibly those actors would have gone to greater things than most of them did without the Elm Street resume.
To the extent that Pomo is radical rather than neoconservative it is fun and interesting and at least foregrounds the cynicism of film franchises, but now the final girl is the final mother, kicking slasher butt because she is the lioness protecting her cub. We’ve neatly been prepared for the denouement by the telling of Hansel and Gretel, and the script plays into the generic imperative of the open ending.
“Welcome to Prime Time, bitch.”
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991)
Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher – the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… and every so often one has to find a new set of teens to slash and eventually decided that an origin myth is needed. Or another origin myth.
What’s new about this film? It’s directed by a woman. This shouldn’t be an issue but there aren’t a whole lot of female directors for some reason. There’s an unfortunate almost collision between the bitch allusion title screen and this being A Rachel Talalay Film. I’d noticed the b-word being thrown around in the previous film and the language here is sweary. Talalay had been production manager on the first two Nightmare films, went on to Tank Girl (1995) and has reached the giddy heights of directing two Doctor Who episodes.
So, all the teenage kids of those who killed Freddy being killed, Krueger has now gone after all the other teens in town, with only one left in Springfield (was the town named before? I’m not sure.) The last teenager is escaping by plane, John Doe (Shon Greenblatt, how about that for Renaissance self-fashioning) and finds himself sucked out through a hole in the roof before awaking in a house that is in midair á la Wizard of Oz. Never knowingly underplaying a reference, Krueger (Robert Englund) does his wacky witch impression. Doe, having left the house next to the Thompson’s, in knocked out and amnesiac on the outskirts of town. Just as the manner of the killings in inexplicable save in terms of spectacle, so his survival is inexplicable, although this lacks spectacle.
Doe is taken to that other space that ideology send those who have not fitted into bourgeois family, the children’s home, home to the hearing impaired Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan), the drug-using Spencer (Breckin Meyer) and the sexually-abused Tracy (Lezlie Dean). One of the case worker, Maggie (Lisa Zane), with nightmares of her own, takes Doe back into town with the three teens stowing away. It turns out that there are no teens in town — the children’s home has missed this somehow — and, even worse, Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold cameo.
Freddy is back, clearly, with thus four more potential victims, but it is a sign of the depths to which the series has sunk that Carlos being stalked without hearing aid is played for laughs rather than menace. Johnny Depp, cameoing from the first film, gets to do an anti drugs message, the height of hypocrisy on the part of the film on acknowledging its post-Craven conservatism. Back at the home, no one seems to have heard of the three teens and Yaphet Kotto brings a much needed gravitas to the film as someone who tries to control his dream.
Unmentioned in the earlier films, it now turns out that Freddie had a child who was taken away from him and is part of the reason he is behaving so badly. Talk about over determination. The answer is to travel into hell and 3D effects and bring him back into reality where he can be killed. But by now we know that that second death is impossible — any death is temporary when it suits the plot. Or the studio, for that matter. Watch this space for daddy’s return.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989)
Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher – the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… By now we’re onto a new generation of teens — Alice (Lisa Wilcox) has been handed the baton — and since the opening sequence is a blue-tinted* sex scene with Dan (Dan Hassel) you can do your own double entendres. You’d think this would mark her for death and when she jumps in the shower that seems to be her fate, only she becomes part of a more complicated dream sequence.
There’s this thing in Jacques Lacan about being between two deaths and the impossibility of the second death. It’s a variant on what is called the death drive, although the death instinct is a better translation. Nature, according to Sade according to Lacan, demands a total anihilation. Everything must return to dust. Lacan discusses Antigone, who is bricked up alive for the crime of burying her dead brother when this was expressly forbidden (and also she’s being made to carry the can for her dad Oedipus’ shenanigans). Bro had not had the proper rites read and thus his soul cannot rest — he needs the right rites. Antigone is a kind of Schrödinger’s heroine.
Think of all those horror films when characters have been buried alive or put to death with some kind of curse or rite. Some idiot comes along and reads the rite and brings them back — the undead being then seeks revenge. The only way to sort things is out — having read the wrong rites — read the right rites, right? But you never know when someone else will come along and read them again.
So here, as the cast point out twice, Freddy Krueger has murdered children and been burnt alive, without a proper burial. His spirit cannot rest and seeks revenge until the rites are read — in Part III. Of course, Jason the dog comes along and pisses on the corpse — writing being much the same as pissing*** — and brings him back until the rites are read again in the form of the climax to Part IV. But that second death remains impossible. Freddy continues to go after Alice’s friends in baroque ways and has Dan in his sights.
Of course, he’s not the only one unshrived. Agnes Krueger, his nun mother, had been raped by lunatics at the asylum and sought peace through the end of her son in Part III. We see her haunting — even though we’ve also seen a gravestone. There is still unfinished business clearly. The mother — a distant relation of Mrs Vorhees, one assumes — is now the double to Alice as the latter finds herself pregnant with, presumably, Dan’s child. Paradoxically this makes her safer, as Freddy is using her foetus’s dreams to come back. Abortion is rejected as an option, however. Meanwhile, in dreams, Dan/Freddy seem to merge and the transformation of Freddy from bogeyman to father figure continues. (The following year, of course, Edward Scissorhands emerges as tragic hero.)
Theory aside, the film is visually impressive — with some of the dream sequences channelling M.C. Escher. The comic geek Mark Grey (Joe Seeley) seems to have reacted to nominative determinism by wearing rainbows — which one might assume was indexical of his sexuality, but for his desire for supposed potential supermodel Greta (Erika Anderson). Before we can say, “beard”, we can admire the transition from live action to comic books, but the duel rapidly turns silly. But then, of course, most of this is about the spectacle.
[I’ll paste in the Lacan reference later]
Notes
* Or white/gold.**
** This “joke” will make little sense sooner or later. It’s something about a dress and colour perception.
*** Especially when snow is involved. Cf. the excuse “I’m writing my name in Narnia.”
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988)
Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher – the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… except here one of them notices that they’re dropping like flies.
Of course this begins with spoilers — three of the original children of the parents that killed Freddy survive from Part III — Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), Joey (Rodney Eastman) and Kirsten (Tuesday Knight — replacing Patricia Arquette, who has presumably gone off to solve the civil rights problem) — and these three have to be removed for the plot to develop. I wonder if this was an inspiration for David Fincher and Alien3? Meanwhile Robert Englund gets pushed to top of the bill and given more lines. Here he is on the turn from evil villain to Arnie-style quipping antihero. He’s brought back to (un)life by a dog pissing on his skeleton — there’s an allegory there if you look for it. The dog is called Jason, because we can do intertextuality.
This is more clearly a 1980s film — big hair, pounding rock soundtrack, rap interjected into the closing credits, ray bans, nods to Jaws and motorbikes, as well as calls backs to the 1950s and a diner with a jukebox and Reefer Madness on the neighbourhood cinema. In the scripting corner we have to blame William Kotzwinkle — a novelist who had done an ET novelisation and sequel — Brian Helgeland, who is showing none of the talent you’d imagine would produce LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) and Scott Pierce (Jim and Ken Wheat, hiding under pseudonym). Apparently Helgelund wrote the script in a week. That long? They are clearly pushing the dream logic, as the characters’ deaths become more and more extreme. Kincaid is killed in the car graveyard where Krueger was buried, whereas Joey is drowned in his waterbed, seduced by a woman of his dreams, having not learnt from the seductive nurse monster of Part III.
There are plenty more teenagers Krueger can go after — an asthmatic moped rider, a sexy boy, a female weightlifter with big hair who turns into an insect… And then there’s Alice (Lisa Wilcox), Kirsten’s new best friend since she returned to the school from the asylum. Having watched or sensed her friends die, she finally fights back by breaking her way through the mirror; “Welcome to Wonderland!” cries Freddy, because by now we’re too brain dead to spot the reference. Having collected mementoes of her dead friends, she can imbibe all of their skills and fight back — and at last we have girl kicking demonic ass, in an anticipation of Buffy (whose filmic introduction was four years away). She (spoiler) wins…
… but the generic imperative wins out and we see a familiar reflection.
Lots of the teens here smoke — marking them for death — and there’s plenty of gratuitous nudity and more swearing here than the other films put together. Teens sneak out of upstairs bedrooms as if the film is parodying the genre. I suspect it is — clearly well enough to gain the highest box office of the sequence until Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003).
Subject to Change 