Monthly Archives: November 2008

  • Gomorrah, dir. Matteo Garrone (2008)

    This Toxic Thing of Ours, by Tom Jennings

    Gomorrah, directed by Matteo Garrone
    Wrong-footing viewers with the surreal slaughter of sleazebags in a tanning parlour, Italian Mafia drama Gomorrah then immediately switches gear to quasi-documentary war-reportage from the mean streets of Naples satellite suburbs – more the tragic downbeat naturalism of The Wire’s forensic dissection of the drugs trade than middle- or high-ranking criminal (anti-)romances like The Godfather, The Sopranos, Scorcese or Scarface. That the latter inspires a couple of young sociopaths here to enact their gun-toting fantasies, with predictably suicidal results, reinforces the film’s ambition to reflect grass-roots reality while courting international acclaim (e.g. winning the Cannes Festival Grand Prix). Its five storylines intersect to depict the brutal grass-roots degradation and depradations caused by Camorrah clan control of daily life in the most deprived region of Western Europe – selected from a tapestry of thinly-fictionalised accounts in the best-selling novel by journalist Roberto Saviano, now under police guard for meticulously exposing what is known locally as ‘The System’.

    From panoramas of the Scampia public housing project in the Caserta wasteland, twitchy paranoid camerawork stalks their decaying decks following the aforementioned outlaw-wannabes, a youngster graduating from shopping-delivery to footsoldier by setting up a customer whose son turncoated to a rival ‘family’, the neighbourhood ‘accountant’ paying remittances to imprisoned members’ kinfolk (the only available ‘welfare’), a talented tailor in a fake high-fashion sweatshop, and a personal assistant to a waste-disposal manager paying landowners to flytip international chemical effluent on their estates. The palpable all-round hopelessness yields the pervasive ruination of moral, social, physical and environmental health, with few hints of agency (the clothes-designer escaping to become a trucker; the PA walking away from the patron his parents were so proud to have wangled him a career with) sugarcoating the rotten-borough desperation – the rot so comprehensively infecting the entire biosphere and lifeworld that the individual heroic villanies of Italian and Hollywood cinemas alike seem utterly irrelevant.

    This Toxic Thing of Ours

    Vividly conveying the poisonous totality of organised crime in Southern Italy, Gomorrah nevertheless risks resigned detachment (‘Isn’t it awful!?) and invites correspondingly external solutions, tackling neither the phenomenon’s historical development in defensive community cohesion nor its complex intrinsic entanglement with mainstream institutional structures. This is ironic given the recent refuse-collection strike in Naples and the Berlusconi government ordering military intervention in its ‘war on crime’ pretence – whereas the national political parties have intimately colluded with shady business, so that ‘respectable society’ is virtually indistinguishable from the Mafia’s parallel dual-power structures (especially in Sicily, where Christian Democrat communalism dovetailed seamlessly with Cosa Nostra patronage; or the notorious interpenetration of right-wing cabals and corrupt commercial and Vatican banking). As if in recognition of its partiality, the film ends with statistics of the Camorrah’s financial scale (including massive investment in New York’s rebuilding at Ground Zero) – leaving audiences to infer the universal toxicity of government-by-capitalism and the futility of expecting its guardians to act against it.

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

    for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

  • Jar City, dir. Baltasar Kormakur (2008)

    Hardboiled and Hardwired, by Tom Jennings

    Mobilising the distinctive features of Iceland’s insular history and comparatively recent breakneck modernisation, Baltasar Kormákur’s 101 Reykjavik (2000) cleverly spun indie cinema’s staple of aimless slackers from dysfunctional families adrift in trendy youth culture. Heavily indebted to Pedro Almodóvar’s subversions of social and sexual conformism in contemporary Spain, he has continued to mine the tragic farces of kinship in sundry genres – from The Sea’s (2002) sins-of-the-patriarch saga to stock white-trash grifters in the over-Hollywoodised A Little Trip to Heaven (2005). Now, the debut’s counterpointing of harsh Icelandic geography and the long-suffering travails of its inhabitants returns with a vengeance – both literally and metaphorically – in another crime thriller scenario in Jar City, based on a novel by Arnaldur Indridasun. Here, however, while still brim-full of manipulative melodrama and mordant humour, there is also a recurring poignancy which transcends the director’s earlier comic misanthropy – evoking empathy for otherwise thoroughly unlikeable characters whose misery seems both self-inflicted and pre-ordained.

    The film’s sense of stifling structural determination is enhanced by Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson’s alternately majestic aerial pans across the Arctic landscape (with dramatic choral score) and claustrophobic interior cinematography. We descend into this forbidding environment via a grotty urban basement with dour world-weary detective Erlendur (Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson) expressing disgust at a “typical Icelandic murder – messy and pointless”. Lonely lowlife lorry-driver Holberg’s skull was caved in with his own ashtray, but the sole crime-scene clues are a penchant for porn and a decades-old photo of the grave of a child – whose later exhumation shows her brain removed before burial. Meanwhile genetic database administrator Orn (Atli Rafn Sigurdarson) obsessively mourns his young daughter succumbing to the same rare brain condition. These threads dovetail as the investigation implicates Holberg’s old criminal muckers – but one (the country’s “most notorious maniac”) is now in prison and the other found hidden under Holberg’s floor having been killed years earlier. Suspicions of their past sexual violence then also evaporate once a search for rape victims yields only Orn’s mother disclosing hitherto concealed youthful indiscretions. Realising Orn has independently pieced together his real parentage and killed Holberg (as we see in flashback), Erlendur is too late to prevent his suicide which extinguishes the catastrophic bloodline.

    Hardboiled and Hardwired

    The domestic box-office success of this entertaining and accomplished movie testifies to the strong resonance of thematic concerns which have wider, even universal, relevance. The obvious hook is the Icelandic DNA mapping project run by private company deCODE Genetics Inc, with the usual hype promising medical revelation via Big Pharma’s monopoly over life’s biological substrates – despite its empirical basis being as dangerously shaky as the governmental thirst for scientific population management supposedly necessitating exhaustive identity intrusion. But the title namechecks Reykjavik’s repository of the treasure troves of previous generations of pathologists – endless samples of pickled organs, etc – whose fleshy monstrosity now upgrades to sanitised digital simulacra. As Erlendur has it: “Tragedies, sorrows, and death, all carefully classified in computers. Family stories and stories of individuals. Stories about me and you. You keep the whole secret and can call it up whenever you want. A Jar City for the whole nation”. Whereas the novel was originally called Myrin (‘the marshes’ of Iceland’s lowland) – more sharply capturing the complacent edifices of our time built upon far murkier, unstable foundations; with the brave new hi-tech rhetoric merely a clinical corporate veneer on persistent older fictions which regiment racial purity, moral health and social conduct to suit the reproduction of hierarchy.
    The point, of course, is that whatever significance is ascribed to the role of genetics, it’s what people do with such ideas that really matters. And the attitudes of those involved in the plodding investigation here revolve around a comparable jarring of inward- and backward-looking fatalistic conservatism against the demands of an uncomfortable present and uncertain future. So prevailing homespun wisdom about dark deeds misguidedly blames the dire products of ‘tainted blood’ on “incest, rape, or foreigners” – thus attributing to biological imperative various skeletons actually closeted by purely cultural prejudice. Meanwhile dialogue is peppered with the detectives’ banter concerning their own and the suspects’ personalities and tastes, with his assistants’ contrasting narcissisic yuppie pretensions and sympathetic no-nonsense womanly intelligence offsetting Erlendur’s authoritative macho. Yet his response to the wreckage of his private life transcends blind obedience to warrior stereotype – tending an injured thug he’s chucked down the stairs, and caring for the pregnant daughter he’d previously abandoned to promiscuous junkiehood. Ingrained laws – whether of the State or jungle – make humanitarian sense neither of the case at hand nor the routine redemptions of altruism, conviviality and love.

    For that purpose, more open minds and hearts are required – precisely the potentials, as it happens, that decisive mutations in hominid evolution unleashed with the retention of infantile simian features. Neoteny – especially in brain morphology, and hence language and learning – relaxed fixed instinctual control allowing greater individual and collective adaptability and creativity. The rest is (human) history, with no programmed, predictable outcome – to the eternal dismay of control-freaks of all stripes. Ironic, then, to witness current regressions to the comforting delusions of innate determinism, as sociobiology – neoliberalism’s ideological handmaiden – fashions just-so fantasies of perfectly calculating psychopaths maximising profitable ‘fitness’. But not as organisms, peskily stubborn as we have proved in insisting that a better world is possible. No, instead we’re animated by swarms of sinister ‘selfish genes’, somehow orchestrating unbelievably intricate biochemical, behavioural, even conceptual patterns sidestepping social, cultural and political agency. And with this wholesale philosophical disavowal to be biotechnologically operationalised in the dissection and correction of chromosomes, you have to ask: Is this the apex of advanced civilised rationality, or proof positivist of the criminal insanity of capitalism?

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

    for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

  • Linha De Passe, directed by Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas (Brazil, 2008)

    Nils All, by Tom Jennings

    Salles reunites with long-term collaborator Thomas in the low-key social realism of early successes Foreign Land (1996) and Central Station (1999), which skilfully knit together narratives of everyday life in portraying the contemporary history of Brazil from the bottom-up. Linha De Passe is therefore an interesting contrast to both the director’s recent films – Behind The Sun’s (2001) intense magical-realist village vendetta, the fluffy tourist portrayal of young Che in Motorcycle Diaries (2004), and the naff Japanese ghost-story remake Dark Water (2005) – as well as lurid contemporary stylisations of ‘favela chic’ in City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002), City of Men (Paolo Morelli, 2007), and Elite Squad (Jose Padilha, 2008). The new release combines true-life scenarios, sophisticated construction, inspired cinematography and editing, and sympathetic casting and direction to avoid the overblown grandiosity and simplistic social stasis of these other films, while exploring individuality and collectivity via twin metaphors of family and football to illuminate with great humility social complexity and potential. Moreover the title has several ‘beautiful game’ connotations – from ‘keepy-uppy’ and developing teamwork to a wider philosophy of transcendence – but a resolute refusal of ‘Roy of the Rovers’ cliches make this, to my mind, the best football film ever.

    Nils All

    Single-matriarch cleaner Cleuza (a majestic Sandra Corveloni, best actress winner at Cannes) is pregnant by a fifth different absent father after another escape into drunken delirious fandom. She struggles to hold together four sons in a decrepit concrete shanty in Sao Paolo: Dario’s neighbourhood ball-playing genius, at eighteen too old to break into the minor leagues; Dinis’ womanising motorcycle courier, already with a child he can’t support, turns to violent car-crime; Dinho’s petrol-pump jockey looks to evangelical religion; and Reginaldo, the youngest, truants on local buses searching for his Black father. The petty filial conflicts and fierce loyalty, oscillating between selfishness, spite and big-heartedness, of these young working-class men with few prospects beyond endless drudgery – but still varying measures of agency – are seamlessly interwoven so as to deny neither crushing frustration nor the stubborn intelligence, resourcefulness and determination of lower-class life. A homage to the Italian neorealist classic Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960), Linha De Passe thus trumps its negativity – though the fairytale denouement of Dario getting a break and scoring the winning goal is hedged with cautionary suspicion that the pervasive corruption of the sport’s institutions will smother him. Meanwhile Cleuza gives birth screaming, Dinis decides he can’t hack wrecking people’s lives, Dinho assaults his boss, and diminutive Reginaldo drives away a bus in search of past, present and future …

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

    for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

  • Somers Town, dir. Shane Meadows (2008)

    New Wave Goodbye, by Tom Jennings

    East Midlands film-maker Shane Meadows has consistently crafted acutely-observed studies of the effects of capitalism’s structural adjustment in contemporary Britain where it has hit hardest in post-industrial working-class communities – his distinctive theme being male efforts at forging functional social networks to survive drudgery and despair under pressure from both material and psychic infrastructures decaying beyond repair. In scripts co-written with Paul Fraser, sharp wit and spot-on dialogue retain affection for and empathy with realistically conflicted characters while developing an understated but sophisticated understanding of personal pain – contriving hope without either pretension or patronisation. After the micro-financed Small Time (1996) captured aimless slacking and scamming on a Notts sink estate, Twenty Four Seven (1997) focussed on Bob Hoskins’ boxing club keeping kids (and himself) out of trouble, before A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) delved deeper into absent/bad father dialectics spinning teenage friendship and family breakdown. Then the bigger-budget Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) wove ersatz Western heroics into humble romantic comedy – falling rather naffly flat in the process – before the darker Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) convincingly twisted generic macho conventions with Paddy Considine’s Falklands vet relentlessly avenging his intellectually-challenged kid brother’s victimisation.

    Returning to intimate resonance, the partly-autobiographical skinhead story This Is England (2006; discussed in Freedom, 30th June and 14th July 2007) more successfully conveyed modern social and political interconnectivity. Now, before the long-planned King of the Gypsies (about a bare-knuckle prize-fighter from Meadows’ hometown of Uttoxeter), Somers Town visits pastures new – geographically, anyway – exploiting cinema history with renewed confidence to widen the narrative remit. Here, sixteen year-old Tommo (Thomas Turgoose) abandons Nottingham after a miserable childhood. Cheeky likeability doesn’t prevent him from succumbing to the mean streets of London, however, and on his first night after arriving at Kings Cross station he’s beaten-up by local thugs who steal his belongings. Meanwhile introverted Polish adolescent Marek (Piotr Jagiello) spends lonely days photographing the titular square-mile between Euston and St Pancras his brickie dad Marius (Ireneusz Czop) is working overtime to help gentrify – in particular taking countless snaps of Maria (Elisa Lasowski), a French greasy-spoon waitress he has a crush on. The unlikely lads hook up and vie for her attentions in between skivvying for low-rent spiv Graham (Perry Benson), and Marek smuggles Tommo into his room unbeknownst to Marius. The arrangement goes pear-shaped when they drunkenly wreck the flat after Maria suddenly disappears back to Paris, whereupon Graham puts Tommo up and he and Marek fantasise reunion with her courtesy of Eurostar.

    New Wave Goodbye

    Despite its deceptively light touch, slender running time (71 minutes) and generally life-affirming tone, Somers Town harbours more interesting undercurrents than may be initially apparent. As usual the comic accuracy of the banter is enhanced by improvisation, so that the subtle, engaging performances render somewhat unbelievable relationships satisfying and highlight the many set-piece gags and pratfalls. Moreover, Meadows’ trademark attention to details of place and movement within neglected and transitional spaces offers crucial small measures of freedom otherwise belied by heavy constraints on possible action. But the film transcends even these worthy (if parochial) achievements by deftly incorporating moods, scenarios and developments originally deployed in a whole swathe of distinctive European social-realist codes – the viewer’s long experience of which (irrespective of awareness) prompting specific expectations that can then be played with. Yet such elements are not flaunted with knowing postmodern flash and artifice. Instead they emerge unobtrusively and organically in the characters’ trajectories through happenstance, idle choice or practical necessity – and never distort or mystify a story more salient to the world-weary disoriented DIY cynicism of this rotten new millennium than the over-simplistic clean-cut idealism of the last century’s angry young grammar-school graduates marching into the media.

    So, minimal co-ordinates would include postwar Italian neo-realism’s naturalistic portraits of hard labour and even grimmer class and gender norms yielding stoic tragedies of wasted life, shading into 1950s Northern UK kitchen-sink protagonists impotently banging heads against the brick walls of an unjust status quo. And whereas the French New Wave’s iconic Jules et Jim et al shocked elders and betters with rebellious lifestyles, London’s Swinging Sixties dreamt of dissolving all tradition in consumer ecstasy while Polish and Czech experiments with black-and-white expressionism and surrealism were soon crushed by Stalinism. Traces of all these dimensions and levels of cultural rites of passage converge and collide here – referencing universal youthful naïvete morphing into adult disillusionment as well as the hopes and fears of 20th century social democracy’s disappointed children, and perhaps also Shane Meadows’ own directorial maturity in wielding such weighty themes in a whimsically subversive response to Eurostar’s tainted shilling commissioning a cool art-film to feed corporate vanity. As for the prognosis – for the likes of Tommo and Marek, and the rest of us – it may be naïve to predict we won’t get fooled again. But if false promises of consumerism are capitalism’s carrot, its stick is the engineered destruction of lifeworlds – and Somers Town sensibly suspends any resolution even when the die is decisively cast in the real location. Nevertheless the film clearly proffers horizontal rather than upward mobility, and collective as opposed to individual engagement, as the only realistically productive options.

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

    for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

  • Standard Operating Procedure, dir. Errol Morris (2008)

    Telling Tales of Torture, by Tom Jennings

    Iraq, 2003. Thousands of fleeing civilians and comparable numbers rounded up on extremely tenuous suspicion of involvement in the full-scale insurgency cower at its epicentre in Abu Ghraib prison between Baghdad and Fallujah under constant mortar attack and with guards outnumbered several hundreds to one. Ranking Guantanamo veterans and military, CIA and privately-contracted interrogators parachute in to extract information by any means necessary, backed by the Commander-in-Chief and his White House cronies with policies trashing the Geneva Convention. A contingent of young army grunts fresh to this hellhole witness the routine humiliation, torture and murder of detainees. Some complain, but are told it’s their professional and moral duty as warriors for liberty, and with varying degrees of diligence and enthusiasm comply with orders to ‘soften up’ prisoners using ‘standard operating procedures’ devised by superiors. Still partially disbelieving, many shoot cameraphone stills and videos of the planned and sanctioned insanity. These then leak into the public domain, and the rest is history – which director Errol Morris proceeds to comprehensively dissect in his new cinema documentary.

    Standard Operating Procedure centres around spoken testimony from five of the seven low-ranking ‘bad apples’ scapegoated by subsequent inquiries. Sergeant Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick – ringleaders choreographing the sexualised humiliation rituals – were still in jail, but Javal Davis, Sabrina Harman (notoriously smiling thumbs-up over a murdered ‘ghost’ detainee unlisted in prison records), Lynndie England (with hooded prisoner on leash), Megan Ambuhl (now married to Graner; supervising with Harman and England the ‘human pyramid’ of naked Iraqi men) and Roman Krol feature, as do several other former military police alongside their Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski (now demoted to colonel) and the Criminal Investigation Division’s Brent Pack (who assisted the prosecutors) [1]. The interviews – filmed using Morris’ famed Interrotron, whereby interviewees answer straight to camera while actually seeing the questioner – and the gigantised iconic snapshots and video clips (some never seen before in mainstream media) are supplemented by staged ‘illustrations’ of the events described, with ominously-lit widescreen cinematography and melodramatic score reconfiguring Abu Ghraib’s bedlam as sinister gothic otherworld.

    The film’s rendering of human beings in an inhuman situation rather than emblems of evildoing erodes stereotypes of underclass psychopaths relishing malevolence, despite rationalisations of unconscionable cruelty characterised by ambivalence, alienation and disgust at themselves, colleagues, and military and government hierarchies as well as towards purported enemies. Facing uncertain prospects for physical and career survival, the pathetic patriotic training-camp pep-talk of ‘noble causes’ couldn’t completely erase their intelligence and sensitivity or fully underwrite the twisted sadism required of them. And certainly neither could it equip them to comprehend their later demonisation without hefty doses of the bitter fatalistic cynicism and resentful detachment radiating from them now. So letters home from Sabrina Harman to her partner support her assertion that, whereas she saw no option but to follow orders, the photographs were intended as proof of what occurred. Naturally she didn’t imagine them scuppering an otherwise successful cover-up orchestrated by her top-brass – explicitly commanding all relevant visual evidence destroyed once the shit hit the fan – or that she would end up in the dock when those who actually tortured, maimed and killed detainees were never even considered targets of justice. In that sense, then, the whitewash worked.

    Telling Tales of Torture

    Thus far may have sufficed for your bog-standard crusading investigator exposing the stitch-up of relatively defenceless underlings as primary villains of the piece – their bosses all the way to the top wriggling and squirming behind pseudo-legalistic sophistry while pinning medals on each other. But ex-private eye Morris always digs deeper to deconstruct the framing of images (as well as of people) and their deployment in media and informational management to advance institutional interests – The Thin Blue Line (1988) famously saving the life of a prisoner on Death Row, and the Oscar-winning The Fog Of War (2003) laying bare the delusional arrogance of the powerful in the person of Robert McNamara (one of the US government architects of the Vietnam War). Here the material leads in many fascinating directions – most only hinted at, such as the much-vaunted prominence of women in the US armed forces unraveling into archetypal virgins (e.g. Jessica Lynch subjected to faked ‘rescue’ by US Special Forces), witches (Karpinski as ‘bad mother’) and whores (Harman et al fucking with Iraqi men’s heads); yet all, of course, puppet-mastered by patriarchs large and/or small-minded.
    In interviews Morris emphasises that ‘The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us’ [2] and a rare achievement of his film is showing this awareness emerging naturally among the MP patsies, irrespective of philosophically sophisticated ruminations on virtual hyperreality and spectacle [3]. To Ambuhl, “The pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don’t see forward, you don’t see behind, you don’t see outside the frame”; Harman concludes “The military is nothing but lies. I took these photos to show what the military’s really really like”; and England shrugs, “It’s drama, it’s life” – cementing the theme of fictionalisation at all levels. The questioning thus extends beyond why these particular images arose, survived and proliferated, to not only their editing and incorporation into discourses concerning the war but, most crucially, what focusing on them as the ‘truth’ of the matter therefore facilitated being excluded from consideration. More conventionally worthy efforts sometimes tackle such complexity – such as the Tate Modern media art exhibition 9 Scripts from a Nation At War [4], which presents the thoughts of various protagonists and observers with different positions, perspectives and prevailing understandings of the Iraq conflict. But the visceral impact of Standard Operating Procedure undermines any simplistic or transparent relationship between information and scientific ‘reality’, exposing the manner of its manipulation in wider structures of contemporary power.

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

    Notes
    1. The book version, Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris (Picador, 2008), integrates the participant accounts of the operation of Abu Ghraib’s torture regime gathered in research for the film.
    2. see, for example, www.greencine.com/central/morrissop for a comprehensive discussion.
    3. An exhaustive analysis of Sabrina Harman and the Cheshire Cat McGuffin of‘that’ smile can be found in Morris’ New York Times blog (‘The Most Curious Thing’ at http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/).
    4. June-August 2008; see Imogen O’Rorke’s review, ‘Flipping the Script’ at www.metamute.org.

    for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

  • Gone, Baby, Gone, by Dennis Lehane (1998); dir. Ben Affleck (2007)

    Public Service Denouncement, by Tom Jennings

    edited version published in Variant, No. 33, October 2008

    In ‘CSI: The Big Sleazy’ (Variant, No. 31), I discussed The Tin Roof Blowdown, James Lee Burke’s 2007 crime novel set in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina, in terms of the anger and sadness of the author at the abject failure of government institutions to respond adequately to the scale of that disaster. In the narrative, Burke’s surrogate is Dave Robicheaux – an ageing Louisiana police detective, Vietnam veteran and recovering alcoholic drafted in to bolster the restoration of law and order in the flooded city – whose progressive social conscience and keen class- and race-consciousness contrast with his proclivity towards the violent resolution of conflict and frustration. In effect, this character’s obsession with his individual weaknesses – expressed, for example, in nostalgia for a mythic past and a chivalric ideal of personal integrity that cannot tolerate or withstand the complexities of contemporary society – leads him to continually recreate the circumstances which cause him such pain in his life. Furthermore he projects these same dynamics onto his perceptions of the world around him, which are thus reflected in his professional conduct, personal relationships and impact on the lives of others. I concluded that analogous patterns of self-defeating, cyclical fantasies circulate culturally and politically too; an angle which helps to illuminate the ways Burke tries to weave larger phenomena into the unfolding of his scenarios. Operating within the detective mystery genre then allows the writer to dramatise these sorts of contradictions, linking macro- and micro-levels in a particularly powerful and compelling way.

    Meanwhile crime fiction has enjoyed something of a renaissance since the 1980s – aspiring to the status of serious literature as well as pulp populism, and embracing ambitions to critical social commentary from pungent perspectives outside of and in opposition to mainstream complacency. Many younger writers were inspired by neo-noir pioneers like Burke, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, who built on the genre’s founding characteristics pitting independent ‘working stiffs’ and ‘little guys’ against the corporate corruption of the monstrous modern urban machine. However, these authors’ somewhat old-fashioned, backward-looking sensibilities – partly, no doubt, due to their generational positioning – result in a pessimistic, ultimately even conservative, outlook concerning prospects for change. Beyond, that is, the temporary victories of cynically lovable rogues unmasking the amoral excesses of the rich and powerful – but which promise no enduring impact, either on the overarching societal structures and conditions which foster and shelter large-scale wrongdoing, or on the range of strategies employing variations of brutal and cunning self-seeking machismo shared by heroes and villains alike. These dispiriting trends are reinforced in the most popular latter-day descendants of private eyes in visualisations of urban chaos and crime at the cinema, where earlier shades of grey in classic film noir had mutated by the 1990s into lurid stylisation and the glamourisation of cartoonish violence – such as in films by John Dahl and Quentin Tarantino – with social and political context or nuance obliterated by technicolour nihilism and comic-book characterisation.

    But there is another trajectory in recent noir fiction which starts from the empirically obvious proposition that the suffering associated with criminal violence falls disproportionately and routinely on the poor. Lower-class strata may be stigmatised and marginalised in terms of media portrayal as well as in achieving American dreams, yet constitute the bulk of the population – so that a point of view properly rooted within their milieux and lifeworlds may more accurately encapsulate the contours of present social ills. Alongside authors such as Walter Mosley and Michael Connelly (Los Angeles), Andrew Vachss and Richard Price (New York), and George Pelecanos (Washington DC), a prime exponent of this new wave is Dennis Lehane, whose Boston-based stories deal with urban impoverishment, gentrification, racism, organised crime and political and institutional corruption in such a way as to meditate on how ordinary people collectively understand and negotiate extremes of adversity – preferring vernacular verisimilitude in geographical and temporal specificity to the quirkily baroque, drifting grifting misfits elsewhere. Since this writer attracted widespread attention with Clint Eastwood’s multiple Oscar-winning 2003 version of Mystic River (first published in 2001), several more of his books are now the source material for big-budget films whose producers expect equally impressive worldwide audiences. The next adaptation to reach the screen and fulfil the projection was Gone, Baby, Gone (directed by Ben Affleck, 2007; originally published in 1998), providing a convenient opportunity to evaluate any advances made by this revisionist hardboiled realism.

    In Loco Parentis

    Based on the fourth book in Lehane’s acclaimed Kenzie & Gennaro series, Gone, Baby, Gone’s UK theatrical release was delayed in sensitivity to the Madeleine McCann case – an association no doubt boosting box-office despite the two child abduction scenarios bearing scant resemblance. The salacious jostling of news-team vultures would be one common denominator – here descending on the depressed environs of Dorchester, South Boston, Massachussetts. Their typically hysterical saturation coverage highlights single-mother Helene McCready (a magnificent Amy Ryan) lamenting her disappeared four-year-old Amanda, shepherded by steely-eyed police with neighbours and family rallying supportively even in a prevailing mood of ominous pessimism. First-time director Ben Affleck (co-scriptwriter with Aaron Stockard) as well as the story’s creator also hail from these mean streets, while thirty-something protagonist PIs Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) have lived there all their lives. Passionate attachment to the blue-collar ’hood is reflected in the latters’ preoccupations (e.g. Kenzie: “Things you can’t choose … make you who you are”), and in the camera’s regular carefully naturalistic pans around inner-city blight, alighting on variously battered and beleaguered, resigned and/or residually energetic real residents – many of whom are also cast in supporting roles and minor caricatures complementing consistently fine acting by star-turns.

    Despite high-minded pronouncements by Crimes Against Children Unit cop supremo Captain Jack Doyle – who years ago lost his own child to kidnappers – and ace detectives Remy Bressant and Nick Poole being assigned to the case (Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and John Ashton respectively lending grizzled gravitas to proceedings), official inquiries quickly falter. Specialist skip-tracers hunting down debtors and errant spouses, the initially reluctant Kenzie and Gennaro are beseeched by Amanda’s aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) and uncle Lionel (Titus Welliver) to join the investigation. After putting the word out on the street, local confidence in their discretion immediately yields leads – first, a recently-paroled child-molester may be in the area; then, the potential involvement of notorious gangster kingpin Cheese Olamon (Edi Gathegi) and missing drugs-money. Helene’s own substance-abuse, chaotic self-centred behaviour and neglectful parenting compound suspicious unreliability, and her elusive boyfriend Skinny-Ray Likanski’s (Sean Malone) sudden violent execution clinches the link. No longer patronised by the police for naïve amateurism, the investigators uncover the cash and Doyle brokers a highly unorthodox exchange for Amanda at a remote flooded quarry. Unfortunately the botched switch leaves Cheese shot dead, and she’s believed drowned when a favourite doll is found floating in the treacherous waters. Doyle is sacked for culpable incompetence and retires in disgrace to the sticks; the little girl’s funeral is held; crime-and-punishment pundits seek new shock-horrors; and everyone sees tragic closure achieved.

    Except for Kenzie, who still smells a rat – but a subsequent spiralling descent into the violent degradations of child abuse and addiction eventually reveals depths of duplicity at all levels even he’d never dreamed (surely also wrongfooting most viewers – so anyone not wanting the suspense ruined should not read on). When another local child disappears, Kenzie’s old schoolfriend, now drug dealer, Bubba Rogowski (Boston rapper Slaine) confirms that cocaine addicts Leon and Roberta Trett (Mark Margolis and Trudi Goodman) are sheltering paedophile Corwin Earle (Matthew Maher). Not waiting for backup, Kenzie, Bressant and Poole’s shootout with the Tretts leaves the latter three dead, whereupon Kenzie finds the missing boy already murdered and kills Earle in cold blood. Soon afterwards, uniformed cop Devin (Michael Kenneth Williams) – another mate from back in the day – provides vital corroboration of the suspicions Kenzie has developed about Bressant who, disguised as a stick-up artist, desperately threatens to assassinate Kenzie and Titus to seal their silence. But a trigger-happy bartender gets him first and Titus confesses their collaboration in Amanda’s disappearance. Putting it all together, Kenzie and Gennaro travel upstate and discover Amanda playing happily with Doyle’s wife. However, refusing Gennaro’s ultimatum to leave the child where she’ll have a chance of a decent life, Kenzie reports the crime and Doyle is arrested. When the dust has settled, Kenzie visits the reunited mother and daughter. He finds Helene apparently cleaned-up, but preparing for a new date (courtesy of the local celebrity status afforded her by the media) and obligingly babysits, considering the situation thoughtfully as Amanda gazes mutely at the television …

    Rule of Law

    These plot twists in the last part of the film certainly serve to undermine our assumptions as cultivated so far – and Kenzie and Gennaro’s too, leaving them disagreeing over a final dilemma so fundamental as to terminate their professional and romantic relationship. Nevertheless, ultimate judgements and justifications concerning rights, wrongs and likely consequences remain suspended. Not only are heroic rescue, reassuring redemption, and cautionary tragedy refused, but the conservative grounds upon which viewers might expect such outcomes – from banal Hollywood crime-action pulp to the parallel (but no less fantasy-ridden) morbid tabloid shock-horror over current affairs – are comprehensively undercut. Such disquieting limbo was obviously deliberate, and scriptwriting decisions altering and cutting the source novel wholesale pass the buck to us even more starkly. But, when the crunch comes, the alternative courses of action are already so thoroughly tainted by association with webs of corruption, collusion, dishonesty and degeneracy that imagining integrity in any pat answer is out of the question. The story’s unusual strength, then, is to insist that apparently straightforward moral choices, posing isolated individual instances in simplistic good-versus-evil binaries, don’t stand scrutiny once their complex, ambivalent contexts and histories are laid bare – ‘doing the right’ thing thus depending on what inevitably has to be ignored, assimilated, or denied.

    The critical consensus concerning Gone, Baby, Gone, however, has been that the potential force of any such sophisticated philosophy is scuppered by the denouement’s implausibility – deeming it unbelievable that the entire saga should constitute a conspiracy choreographed by Doyle in connivance with his lieutenants all the way down to Helene’s disapproving relatives; with varying material, malicious and purportedly altruistic interests and self-righteousnesses interweaving in spiriting the lass to ‘safety’ while her mam drank in the bar. The ensuing host of casualties, whether dead or bereft – unmourned criminals, Bressant and Poole, sundry written-off lower-class dupes – are then blithely sacrificed, pawns for the patriarch’s peace of mind on relinquishing burdensome responsibility. But what really galls, one suspects – for those of conventional bent – is that out the window also go all pretensions of institutional credibility. Crucially, the scheme’s success hinged on acceptance at face value of the normal scripts, cliches and homilies of governance, public service and basic decency among higher- and lower-order model citizens obeying the law along with those charged with upholding it. Whereas not only does the arrogance of power lead the rogue detectives to assume they can get away with their scam, but we are invited to tacitly underwrite their belief that their actions are in the best interests of the child – which was supposed to be the official remit all along.

    Criminal Justice System

    Now, this narrative device – of illegal activity by law-enforcement personnel seeing no other way to fulfil their sworn duty – can be interpreted not as a rare unfortunate exception, but rather a particularly vicious and vivid expression of business as usual. Such might be the response, for example, of those on the habitual sharp end of prejudicial insult, harassment and stitch-up from police officers and, for that matter, officialdom in general. In which case an overarching metaphor comes into focus – the police force standing for the entire institutional paraphernalia of government, including its purportedly benevolent arms – whose main function is to keep the lid on all the cans of worms threatening polite society. From this jaundiced perspective, at least, Gone, Baby, Gone’s plot may not seem outrageous at all, resonating far beyond its particular setting to the War on Welfare everywhere. But in a South Boston rapidly decaying beyond reasonable hopes of salvation, Kenzie and Gennaro are cast as representative of a grass-roots, working-class sensibility, yet without the luxury of cynical fatalism if they are to nail the truth and do their job. And although the film loses the bulk of Lehane’s meticulous dialogue conveying the full convincing texture of conflicting attitudes in action, viewers are given several hints among the blood-red herrings that the protection of childhood innocence is a (perhaps the) primal pretext for other, guiltier, agendas.

    So, encouraged to perceive Helene harshly through circumstantial implication, explicit condemnation, and the harsh glare of unforgiving attention, we never glimpse direct evidence of her actual everyday relationship with her daughter. We are expected to assume the worst. Kenzie, though, sees genuine grief (as opposed to self-pity) beneath her white-trash bravado – which inclines him to accept the mission – while Gennaro embraces advocacy for Amanda herself, regardless of the concerns of the adults. These combined criteria, without which the case would have gone decisively cold, specifically rebut any stereotypical dismissal of Helene. Contrariwise, Doyle’s parental fitness is unchallenged, despite his known trauma and willingness to wreck lives to heal it. Who is the child, to him, beyond a substitute salving private pain? Do his influence and affluence – displaced from urban hell to rustic idyll – guarantee saintly credentials in arrogating to himself godlike choice? Then shouldn’t all the suffering children be saved from the agony of the ghetto and the evils impoverishment produces? Even if the manner of its accomplishment adds to the oppression and injustice nourishing desperation in the first place, simultaneously precluding youthful renewal? While, irrespective of increments of positivity which might (arguably) transpire, serving the selfish desires and fantasies of those in positions to exploit the system to advantage? … Anything for a happy ending?

    No. The relentless message from media and politicians is to abandon the irredeemable poor, demonising any deviation from passively respectable defeatism. The innocent purity to be protected here, then, is the lingering quasi-religious illusion that things might turn out right by trusting the benevolence of those in charge and believing their rationalisations. Whereas, surely, if a single soul spared is the best to hope for, this betrays an utmost cynicism – the complete collapse of legitimacy of the status quo to match its guardians’ insincerity. But Kenzie won’t give up on his people (or himself), following simple ethics, fulfilling his promise – returning Amanda to her mother – when others see Greater Good accepting thoroughgoing corruption in a broken society. Even he suspects he chose wrong, in the final scene mournfully contemplating prospects, Helene again out on the razzle. Yet with no individual correct solution to a collective quandary, maintaining honesty, integrity and compassion and nourishing them around you may represent a pragmatic faith preferable to fairytale wish-fulfilment making token exceptions to busted-flush rules. Credit is due to Gone, Baby, Gone’s makers for going against the grain to render such thorny issues even conceivable on mainstream screens.

    To Protect and Serve

    While acknowledging that it was no mean feat to adapt over five-hundred pages of original novel down to a script five-times shorter – yet still managing to effectively convey the spirit and overall ambivalence that the author intended – it is worth looking more closely at the heavy culling involved in the process of visualising Dennis Lehane’s scrupulously character- and dialogue-driven prose. In his writing, responses to, evaluations of, and wider ramifications pertaining to even the most harrowing experiences are contrived to flow naturally from the culturally and emotionally realistic perspectives of his protagonists and their idiosyncrasies – rather than the arbitrary manipulation to serve externally-imposed stock motivations that Hollywood is notorious for. Most obviously in this respect, the blockbusting set-piece action scenes and the extremes of violence portrayed sit awkwardly with the unsentimentally direct depictions elsewhere of mundane everyday poverty and its smaller-scale, if no less corrosive, aggressions and menaces. In fact Lehane admits to imagining the kinetic, balletic characteristics of such sequences according to cinematic iconography, and the film treatment certainly obliges – although with a consistent concentration on the visceral and psychological suffering incurred, evoking horror rather than cartoon titillation. Nonetheless the slick revelation and negotiation of their ugly depths cannot conceal the fact that the pivotal confrontation at the quarry and storming of the paedophile’s den, for example, are side issues both in terms of the specific narrative logic as well as the more abstract themes being developed.

    True, there is a balanced, gradual progression of heightening danger, more immediate physical threat and raised stakes the further and deeper into the mire Kenzie and Gennaro stumble. But in the book’s trajectory, although each blow dealt, injury sustained, and narrow escape accomplished wreaks indelible damage on bodies and psyches that is never trivialised, the objective qualities of these deadly situations are overshadowed by the shared struggle to interpret their significance in the light of limited, provisional understanding. So, not surprisingly, the very real evils of organised crime and the undoubted prevalence of child sexual abuse were considered prime candidates to account for Amanda’s abduction. As favoured moral panics they also feature centrally in prevailing discourses justifying the whole panoply of legal powers whereby the state protects society via monitoring and intrusion. Whereas here these are manifestly unfit for purpose, dysfunctioning only as pretext and smokescreen, so that any regressive catharctic release after the usual suspects are disposed of dissipates rapidly as no payoff accrues. With the child still missing, only obstinate dissatisfaction with received wisdom, relentlessly seeking sense, eventually makes the difference. And this perverse persistence feeds on a constant interplay of repartee, interplay and synergy between Kenzie and Gennaro mulling over matters arising within their network of close friends, colleagues and acquaintances among criminals, cops and ordinary folk – an immersion which is precisely what the film’s condensation abandons.

    A world in flux to be deciphered by the hard graft of socially-situated knowledge instead hard-boils down to showcase showdowns in a static fantasy universe of heroic fallen angels and archetypal demons puppet-mastered by unseen fiendish hands – resembling all those tiresomely mechanical detective thriller formats onscreen and in the genre literature, which pander to disgusted fascination at the depths of human depravity while working overdrive to reassure us of our distance from it. But Lehane’s version flirts with these conventions only to flout and transcend them, and Kenzie is no lone crusader for justice – despite the screenplay’s best efforts. Most importantly, Gennaro’s role is attenuated to the extent that she appears no more than a feminine accessory representing empathy, concern and support counterpointing Kenzie’s masculine detachment and objectivity – whereas practically the opposite is the case in the book, where he is intuitive and she more practical and organised, a better planner and indeed a better shot (she actually shoots Bressant, and saves Kenzie’s bacon much more often than vice versa throughout the series). As a partnership of rough equals, their conflictual relationship is central to the investigation’s progress, and their contrasting perspectives on relationships and family arising from their own wretched childhoods have left them both deeply flawed and of questionable moral stature in various different respects. Their estrangement at the end then reflects the deeply personal resonances of the situation rather than dogma – and even this is accommodated in the subsequent instalment, Prayers For Rain (1999), by which time each sees the merits of the other’s position.

    Moreover Kenzie, Gennaro, Rogowski, and Cheese, along with other excised characters, were all childhood friends, schoolmates or neighbours with shared histories straddling all sides of the law. Bubba Rogowski is the couple’s most steadfast friend and protector, not just an old acquaintance – a borderline-psychotic weapons-dealer and feared enforcer with extensive Mob connections rather than a local pusher. Devin (and his partner Oscar) are longstanding close friends too, and Homicide detectives (not patrolmen) into the bargain. They have been kept in the loop and in fact make the decision to arrest Doyle, who had not lost his own child at all; while Bressant was ex-Vice squad (where the rogue activities originated) and married to a former prostitute. Unable to have biological children or adopt legally, they had also stolen a child – with strong hints of an established pattern involving many parents deemed deserving or unfit. Thus, among countless elements lost from the plot, such details indicate that, for Lehane, the function of Kenzie and Gennaro’s familiarity with their neighbourhood wasn’t simply getting information from people who don’t trust the authorities. More ambitiously, it was to develop all of the themes of the story from the bottom-up, within a working-class community split along all manner of fault-lines, where no one’s hands are clean or consciences clear – our heroes being just as implicated in the degeneracy that they encounter and sometimes initiate as are the residents saturated with it, the police powerless to control it, and the traditional villains of the piece seeking to profit.

    Duty of Care

    Despite Ben Affleck’s laudable effort to translate the substance of its original subtlety and force into screen entertainment, then, Gone, Baby, Gone’s passage from the written word loses, to a significant extent, its characters’ embedding in a collective search for meaning in relation to self, family and class in a concrete historical setting. Here, the worldviews of those who grew up poor in the 1970s and 1980s, when the economic, political and geographical profile of urban America twisted so drastically, inevitably involve particular inflections of disillusionment with grand narratives of democracy and freedom and broken promises of upward mobility and social inclusion. The moral landscapes, intellectual priorities, and practical choices of those of the younger generations who still pursue a better life without succumbing to the seductions of materialistic misanthropy can hardly be expected to show patience with the middle-class liberal pieties that have failed them so miserably. Instead they fall back on their own resources – such as they are – and manage in this story to penetrate opaque veils of deception and delusion, misdirection and malice. In the process the fascistic overtones are exposed of a contemporary cultural eugenics foisted on the weak by the strong in the name of a humanistic duty of care which no alternative means can be found to fulfil. Yet the critics deem this preposterous to the point of mendacity – so that one wonders which world they inhabit.

    Without in any way minimising the dreadful anguish precipitated by a lost child, Lehane cultivates those associations of this iconic image which loom largest in today’s deprived neighbourhoods – not least the shattered aspirations of parents for their offspring and the vain hopes of a bright future among the youth themselves. The careful accretion of biographical detail and the backstories of the protagonists situate these problematics squarely within their lived experience, modulating their ethics and conduct, so that they are fully part of a local scene which, on the other hand, the filmmakers can only objectify in sweeping anthropological survey. Here, Casey Affleck’s self-effacing lead performance at least captures the author’s intention to sidestep the tortured existential solipsism of the traditional private dick (along with his femme fatale’s Oedipal supplement) as the driver of the narrative arc – even if the central role of Kenzie’s extended elective family is also sadly sidelined in the filmic logic. But in fact plot structures are secondary in most Lehane novels, being tailored to wider organising metaphors and signifying chains connecting working-class adjustment to changing conditions – especially in A Drink Before The War (1994) treating racism, gang warfare, political corruption and child abuse and Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) with serial killers given succour by family, neighbourhood, criminal and municipal complicity, as well as in Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River.

    However, while Eastwood’s cinema version of the latter retains the quasi-Shakespearean symmetry of three characters representing disastrous facets of masculinity, the emphasis was shifted entirely by downgrading its grounding in the mutual deterioration of their socio-economic and psychological wellbeing – a comparable truncation to that observed with Gone, Baby Gone. So it seems that mainstream US media remain unwilling or unable to countenance stories which properly respect the real misery neoliberal barbarism produces at home among its surplus populations, but also hint at the potential for “genuine solidarity and the pursuit of shared purpose in circumstances in which business as usual is decisively threatened” (see my ‘Rose Coloured Spectacles’, in Variant, No. 27). Whereas the opportunity to follow such lines of flight is increasingly exploited in new-school American crime writing, on screen the balance consistently tilts towards old-school staples of vicious impasse and hopeless tragedy – from, for example, Spike Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Richard Price’s Clockers (1992) through to HBO’s much-heralded television soap opera The Wire, chronicling the small-time drug trade and its policing in Baltimore, Ohio (featuring scripts by Price, Pelecanos and Lehane, among others). Conversely, one cinematic exception to this recalcitrant rule is Ray Lawrence’s remarkable Jindabyne (Australia, 2006). Here an attack on a child again radiates heart-wrenchingly throughout a community, with the murder whodunnit also irrelevant, yet the film closes optimistically as ordinary townsfolk mobilise their sorrowful social fabric towards fellow-feeling and a fresh start (see my review for Freedom magazine, available at http://libcom.org). In other words, it can be done – in the imagination as in real life – however much we are encouraged to disbelieve it.

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

    for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

  • The 3rd World, by Immortal Technique

    Globalising Ghettocentricity by Tom Jennings

    Harlem-raised after his family fled Peruvian civil war, Immortal Technique’s misspent youth included incarceration for violent offences, wherein he honed his hip-hop flow before redirecting rage onto rivals, winning open-mic contests across New York and further afield. So far, so classic ‘boy from the ’hood done good’ – except for the parallel awakening of revolutionary class-consciousness translated into the most explicitly political rap recordings yet. From the get-go favouring precarious autonomy over commercial straitjackets – McJobs paying for studio time, handling distribution personally – Revolutionary, Vol. 1 (2001) heralded his agenda in the ‘Poverty of Philosophy’:
    “My revolution is born out of love for my people, not hatred for others … As different as we have been taught to look at each other by colonial society, we are in the same struggle and until we realize that, we’ll be fighting for scraps from the table of a system that has kept us subservient … I have more in common with most working and middle-class white people than I do with most rich black and Latino people. As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat and it’s sinking, while these bougie motherfuckers ride on a luxury liner, and as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we’re all in, we’re gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole … You cannot change the past but you can make the future …”
    The debut’s burgeoning buzz prompted distro collaboration with independent labels for 2003’s Revolutionary, Vol. 2. Also far exceeding sales expectations, this was swiftly followed by Viper Records’ establishment to regain self-control. Apart from legendary single ‘Bin Laden’ (with refrain: “Bush knocked down the towers …”), Immortal Technique concentrated on consolidating talent like producer Southpaw and MC Akir, whose Legacy is the best hip-hop album in years.* At long last, then, a new album – The 3rd World, produced in mixtape fashion by Green Lantern (formerly house DJ for Eminem’s Shady Records) – continues Tech’s maturation, adding contemporary hip-hop styles to raucous minimalism. His vocals too have greater texture and engaging thoughtfulness than prior default tenors juggling psychotically omnipotent bragging and sneering hectoring when dropping political science. Both doubtless suit MC-battling but can become soporifically monotonous – militating against appreciating his prodigious lyrical dexterity astutely condensing contrasting levels of analysis into each theme with ferocious wit and insurrectionary wisdom.

    The 3rd World’s concept relates “the streets here in the US to those around the world”. Moreover, in terms of cultural production, “the struggles of developing countries … are mirrored within the rap industry. In the same way that First World superpowers have continuously exploited the Third World for its natural resources, land, labor and industry, the major label superpowers have done the same” (Immortal Technique, www.viperrecords.com). So the into, ‘Death March’, emphasises that “We are now in a state of guerrilla warfare … through the streets of your psychology”. And if the equation of commercial rap to chattel slavery stretches credulity, the multiple analogy in ‘Harlem Renaissance’ powerfully links US urban political-economics to world-system wars and cultural recuperations past and present:
    “Harlem was once was red-light district-rated / Designated ghetto like the yellow star of David … / Until after the invasion of gentrification / Eminent domain, intimidation – that’s not negotiation … / Ivy league real estate firms are corrupt / They lay siege to your castle like the wars in Europe / They treat street vendors like criminal riff-raff / while politicians get the corporate kickback …
    When I speak about Harlem I speak to the world / The little Afghan boy and the Bosnian girl / The African in Sudan, the people of Kurdistan / The third world American, indigenous man / Palestinians, Washington Heights Dominicans / Displaced New Orleans citizens / Beach-front Brazilians, favelas that you living in / The ’hood is prime real estate, they want back in again …
    I didn’t write this to talk shit, I say it because / Some of ya’ll forgot what the Harlem Renaissance was / We had revolution, music, and artisans / But the movement was still fucked up like Parkinson’s / ’Cause while we were giving birth to the culture we love / Prejudice kept our own people out of the club / Only coloured celebrities in the party / And left us a legacy of false superiority / W.E.B. DuBois versus Marcus Garvey / And we ended up selling out to everybody / The Dutch Schultzes and the John Gottis / Banksters, modern day gangsters, immobilari … / Harlem Renaissance, a revolution betrayed / Modern day slaves thinking that the ghetto is saved / So they start deporting people off the property / Ethnically cleansing the ’hood economically / They want to kill the real Harlem Renaissance / Trying to put the virgin Mary through an early menopause / The saviour is a metaphor for how we set it off / Guerrilla war against the lease-owning predators”.
    Other tracks and guest appearances flesh out the grass-roots revolutionary stance with more depth than even Paris, The Coup and Dead Prez can manage – from the Spanish-language ‘Golpe De Estado’ (=Smash the State) through rabble-rousing anthems full of insight and intelligence. Meanwhile, several reflective cuts leave self-righteous preachiness decisively behind, including ‘Mistakes’ pondering wrong turns taken: “Some people learn from mistakes and don’t repeat them / Others try to block the memories and just delete them / But I keep them as a reminder they not killing me / And I thank God for teaching me humility / Son, remember when you fight to be free / To see things how they are, and not how you’d like ’em to be / ’Cause even when the world is falling on top of me / Pessimism is an emotion, not a philosophy / Knowing what’s wrong, doesn’t imply that you right / And it’s another when you suffer, to apply it in life”. So, even as a stopgap while The Middle Passage and Revolutionary, Vol. 3 incubate, this superb album has a compelling sound and vision all its own.

    * see my review of recent radical rap in ‘Rebel Poets Reloaded’, Variant 30, 2007 (www.variant.org.uk).

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

    The 3rd World is available on import, from Amazon or, preferably, direct from Viper.

    for further reviews and essays by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

  • Hunger – Steve McQueen (UK 2008) Michael Fassbender

    Hunger – Steve McQueen (UK 2008) Michael Fassbender; Stuart Graham, Rory Mullen
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema 4 Nov 08; Ticket price £6.85

    Film morphs into installation

    Steve Mc Queen’s Hunger takes as its subject Bobby Sands (BS) IRA commander and prisoner, who elects to die on hunger strike rather than to bow his head to the will of the British political establishment. With its bold use of close-ups and mounted camera to frame its subject it looks like McQueen has paid close attention to Carl Dreyer’s 1928 movie the Passion of Joan of Arc. Hunger might well be titled The Passion of Bobby Sands, as flesh transmutes into spirit. This Passion is divided into three distinct parts each of which emphasises both an attribute: body mind spirit; and an outer form based on: opposition, dialogue, unity.

    It is the first section of the film that takes on the structure of installation. By this I mean that it resembles an assemblage of elements which are ingenuously offered to the gaze of the viewer to connect understand and interpret. Also Hunger as installation creates for the viewer temporal space to absorb and understand what has been shown. Hunger uses time images such as the long shot of the screw in passing down the length of the block using a squeegee to clear up the pools of piss thrown out of the cells. The camera is still as the screw works his way down the length of the corridor into the eye of the camera. We need real time, our own time to understand this shot.

    The installation section of Hunger is defined by a series of oppositions that define the visual and audio fields: clothed and naked, the flesh and the will, inside and outside, cleanliness and filth. Hunger as an installation located in an infamous setting at a time now passed. A film set up in an H block of a present now past where the fittings fixtures and authentic props are frozen forever and the corridors landing and cells are haunted by holograms and soundtracks of the prisoners and screws locked into the eternal recurrence of their enmity. Walk through Auschwitz. Walk through Abughraib. See. Listen. Walk thru. Walls imprinted with collective memory.

    The installation section is charged with the key idea that the Maze prison ( like so many prisons, what a strange yet appropriate name) contains both the prisoners and the guards. There is no escape from the confines of this gaol. When the screw exits the gates of the prison to go home he never escapes its shadow; he is held ever closer in its thrall. The Maze confines and contains always and everywhere. It is defining in the same way as the Court Room in Rouen contained and defined Joan and her enemies and tormenters. In Hunger the prisoners and guards in this situation are bound together by ties of blood piss and shit, in unwanted inescapable intimacy. The Maze isn’t metaphor. It’s microcosm. It is the political situation in Northern Ireland compressed to its unbearable essence. Casual cruelty and cold murder. The body politic of intimidation denial and forceful suppression is faithfully replicated within the confined space of the prison onto the form of the human body.

    The body is at the centre of the opening section. The body as an instrument of the collective will of political power. The body as an extension of the singular will of the individual, a protoNietschean statement of an overcoming. Hunger opens in the home of a screw with a series of big close ups as in the morning he washes his hands in the wash basin. His grazed knuckles rinsed in the pellucid water. The sequence proceeds through his breakfast and the shadow that falls over him as we see the security procedure he follows before getting into his car. This opening sequence, with its series of close-ups comprising: tap wash basin plughole fried egg underside of car, set up a set of heightened oppositions against which we are able to understand the forces that are in play. In the Maze the IRA prisoners are ‘on the blanket’ – naked. They refuse to wear issued prison clothing and demand the right to wear their own clothes. Denied access to the toilets ( in order to slop out) by the screws (government) they exist in the putrid conditions of their own piss shit and bodily filth. Their bodies are caught up in a system of constraints privations obligations and prohibitions which their will refuses to acknowledge. In their nakedness, with their shit daubed on the cell walls, and their piss spilt out into the corridor, they oppose the political will of Margaret Thatcher.

    As Bobby Sands notes in the diary he kept at the beginning of his hunger strike, “ All the power of the British Empire never broke the will of a single man.” In performance the body lies at the epicentre of volatile concerns, a signifying system that is a battle ground for competing ideologies. Hunger works on the bodies of both parties in the Maze capturing them in their oppositional systems: the clean and the dirty, the shaved and the unshaven, the naked and the clothed, the beaters and the beaten, the alive and the dead, the inside and the outside. The screws break the bodies of the IRA; the IRA can kill in revenge culpable screws. In Hunger Mc Queen testifies to the separation; he also gives witness to the greater terrible unity of which both sides are also a part. The prison of Northern Ireland contains them all forever.

    The second section of the movie is a 17 minute long dialogue between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest. It seems to represent mind as BS and the priest verbally joust over the morality of BS’s intention to go on hunger strike. Again there are echoes in this section of the verbal jousting between Joan and her interrogators in the interplay of subtlety and mental strength that characterises the exchanges. The only section in the dialogue which I felt was suspect (others might not find it so) was the long story BS tells about an incident in his childhood which is intended to justify and explain his nature. It falls into a long line of such stories told on screen ( and to lesser extent on stage) such as Brando’s Kurtz telling the story in Apocalypse Now. BS story in this situation seemed formulaic, hence uninteresting. A sign the film was flagging.

    The last section – spirit – the culmination of the Hunger Passion, with its medical ritualisation and all white spiritual ‘production look’ is the culmination of the film.
    I think that this attempt to transpose the medical into the spiritual doesn’t work. We have a series of images, all immaculately posed and framed with that ‘white look’ taking us through the stages of BS’ death. The section never transcends or becomes anything more than a series of medical shots. McQueen has not found a language or an image that expresses the final stage of Sands’ Passion. In the final part of this section Hunger abandons its premise of staying with the BS in the now, and filmically elects to take us on a fake trip, supposedly his final vision complete with natural sounds, back to an arcadian reconstruction of Sands’ childhood (are we in the final section of 2001). This finale fails to do justice to what has preceded it; it feels like a cliché. The final section of the Passion needed a huge coup of bold imagination to complete. It probably might need to be short in duration and comprise of very few shots, as was Dreyer’s manner in finishing his Passion of Joan of Arc.

    For all its perceived weaknesses, McQueen’s Hunger remains a film bold in concept that remains true to a governing filmic idea that is mostly executed with stunning confidence and filmic awareness.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Gomorrah – Mateo Garrone (2008 Italy)

    Gomorrah – Mateo Garrone (2008 Italy) Salvatore Cantalupo, Carmine Paternoster, Alfonso Santagale
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema 21 Oct 08 ticket: £6.80

    Location Location Location Location Location

    Gomorrah has been flagged as a realist portrayal of the situation in Naples where whole areas of life are under the control of the local Mafia the Camorra.
    The film is structured in what seems to be the favoured fashionable form of the moment as: five intercut stories. Five stories that involve different characters unrelated to each other except that generically the characters are all either part of the criminal network or member of communities in which the networks operate. The characterising feature of the stories is that they are not interrelated or interlaced rather strips of action that serve only as exemplars of types of criminal activities: trash disposal, drug dealing, garment industry etc that define the relationship between gangs and populace. As such the film is a simple transposition of some selected elements of Roberto Saviano’s book that adds nothing filmicly or challenging to his propositions. Indeed this film of book, like most such adaptations detracts and cheapens the substance of its original form.

    In effect the film is an impoverishment of the books thesis ( the toxic effect of gangster control of areas of society) because lacking the book’s facility to support its point of view and journalistic incrimination of the Camorra, by piling up detail and statistics of the effects of a criminalised culture, the film is reduced to a banality of affective detail in which the links between action and effect are mechanically transposed onto the screen only through the medium of expressed violence. In Garrone’s Gomorrah there are no cognitive or ideational linkages through sound or picture allowing the audience to make connections that characterise a sick culture. The links in Gomorrah are all through the glamour of the gun; not through the effects of what happens after the gun. The realist settings are just a type of architectural backdrop to what is just another gangsta movie.

    When I say that the linkages in Gomorrah are mechanical I mean for example that the connections that the film suggests to its audience mostly film stem from either violent action or architecture. We are given simplistic film generated cause effect relationships that gloss over the latent forces at work.

    Linkage in relation to action. Gomorrah shows us men with guns. They shoot other men whom they see as opponents or in their way. The men with guns deal in death and fear, they get their way and assert control over whatever: drugs trash garment industry. The film is a simple fable of the ganagsta means: the ends of the gangsta in Gororrah are actually unclear. By repute I understand that the Camorra liked the movie. Of course they did. The gangsta loves the exercise and demonstration of his original power which stems from force and violence, and he approves of its filmic celebration.. What Garonne has achieved is a celebration of the gangsta through banal mechanical linkages. What Garonne has not filmed, and what was object of Saviano’s book are the consequences of the gangsta take over of social mechanisms, and the freezing (through fear) of social response to these consequences. The ends rather than the means. What we don’t see in Gomorrah are the piled up mountains of trash and filth that are caused by this situation; what we don’t see are the effects in disease caused by dumping of toxins in landfill. The corruption. Garrone sticks to the banality of the action, which we all know from long series of gangsta films. What the gangster’s fear, and what has caused them to run Savione out of Italy is the exposition and detailing of the real price people pay when the gangsta moves to take over vital areas of economic and social activity. The bang bang your dead bit is the least of the interesting connections to be made. The other mechanical connection made in Gomorrah is ‘architecture’. I think that the film fails because it substitutes, or perhaps confuses a concern with architecture for a concern with ‘world’. At one level this looks like copping out. It is much easier to send out a location scout and find fruity sexy backdrops for the action than to undertake the filmic chore of creating a sense of ‘world’. The function of architecture is fundamental to the working of Gomorrah. The exteriors and the interiors work as metanyms. In particular the main setting of the concrete housing project where the turf wars rage. The concrete structure of the housing project is used as an encompasser, a building that literally doesn’t just contain the life within it but also defines and orders it. In this sense the building is a metanym: its function in the film is to stand for something rather more than what it is. Gorarrah is using this structure to say that the compression and squalor that it represents mould and contaminate the people whom it accommodates. The problem is that I think that Garonne was content to leave the housing project as a symbol. We never get closer to the people who live there than this statement of architectural determinism. The people, except those busy killing each other, are sort of phantom entities who fill out the crowd scenes the way dust fills in cracks. The huge housing project is ultimately an empty shell, just another setting, a theatrical backdrop against which action can take place. Even in a film like Meirelles’ City of God which has a gangsta action/ revenge core, there is more of a feeling for the texture of Rio favella life. In Gomorrah there is an absence of anything other than fat men wearing T shirts of gruesome taste. It’s not enough. Likewise with most of the other locations: the quarry, the marshes, the subterranean car parks. The filmic objective seems to be to overwhelm rather than inform. The five strip intercut structure of Gomorrah seems to lead nowhere. The structure is a favoured shape for contemporary directors and such a structure it should give to the film some dynamic. A dynamic that might reveal itself in many ways: some emotive such as interdynamic bathos or pathos; some cognitive such as exemplative or understanding complementing or contrasting or both. There might be connections such as colour, geometry or auditory. The problem with Gomorrah was that the five action strips were all of a muchness. They had few characterising idiosyncrasies or distinctive features other than the architecture. The individuals populating the stories were often difficult to distinguish and the only character whose name I could remember was the tailor, Pasqualle. The only purpose served by the intercut sequences is to provide a series of dramatic cutting points. Even this has diminishing returns as the film progresses through its two hour plus duration. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk