Monthly Archives: July 2006

  • Shock Corridor – Written Dir Prod Sam Fuller 1963

    Shock Corridor – Written Dir Prod Sam Fuller 1963 –

    Peter Breck, Constance Towers.
    Viewed on 16mm print at Side Cinema, Newcastle June 6 2004 by Adrin NeatrourShock Corridor – Written Dir Prod Sam Fuller 1963 –
    Peter Breck, Constance Towers.
    Viewed on 16mm print at Side Cinema, Newcastle June 6 2004 by Adrin Neatrour
    The overt story here is that a newspaper reporter – Peter Breck – goes undercover into a mental hospital to find out who murdered man called Sloan who had been a patient in the hospital. The purpose of the reporter’s quest is to win ‘the Prize’. In Shock Corridor the Prize is not ‘an apple from the tree of life’ or ‘water from the well of youth’, but ‘the Pullizter’ America’s most prestigious award for outstanding investigative jounalism. The story from its opening fake psychiatric session, in which Breck is being coached by a psychiatrist friend to play the part of an incestuou s brother who is fixated at an early age on his sister’s ‘braids ‘ (Goldilocks), has a distorted mythic/fairy tale like structure – the architypal quest. Donning the mantel of insanity the reporter has to pass into and through the rings of hell in order that he may return to claim his Prize. The trophy he covets is public acclaim and recognition of himself as hero. Breck is a loner in the Hollywood tradition of the individual driven to achieve his goal but caste by Fuller into the quasi mythic realm of fairytale the story is given a psychic twist that jolts it into dimension that undermines its Hollywood format. The film is a journey into the madness of America, a Dantesque descent. A film in which America is a lunatic asylum in which the victims of communist witch hunts, race and the military industrial interests are opponents of social mechanisms that conspire to destroy their minds. However its most powerful visual component is the specific use made of superimpositions of the ‘Beatrice image’ in the form of Cathy, Breck’s girl friend who poses as his sister. As Breck lies on his hospital cot at night his demon conjures the presence of Cathy beside him and the sequences are burnt through with a radioactive element of incestuous eroticism. The pretext for Breck’s forced hospitalisation is the claim by his girlfriend Cathy that she is his sister and that he has incestuous designs on her. Cathy -the sister/ girl friend stripper, madonna/ whore role is played out with high octane carnal charge by Constance Towers. In Breck’s dreams she appears in superimposition hot and close to his body. Her image in these sequences is suspended in space and time and like x-rays burn into Brecks consciousness brazenly flaunting the sexual contradictions of a culture that has two dominant female roles – virgin and slut. A culture which not only expects women to perform both parts in the appropriate setting, but which in the filmic world of the American male imagination has no other roles for women. Certainly Fuller’s depiction of Breck’s splitting male ego, is as a schizoid response to these inherent contradictions, the double bind Breck experiences in trying to contain these two polar ideas within the persona of Cathy. The end result of the process for Breck is violence and catatonia – total emotive investment (confusion of you/me) followed by complete emotional withdrawal(total immobility). Fuller in his powerful use of erogenous superimposition points directly to the decontextualised nature of the female and the price paid for this process. As Breck moves through the rings of hell he encounters America as machine that destroys its finest minds at the point where they experience the contradictions which like fault lines lie just beneath the surface of this society. The inherent tensions between phantom recognition of equality and engrained racial oppression, between the coercive military imperative to build an empire of death and the individual conscience, between state certainty of its invincablility and individual confusion. These inherent and multiplying oppositions between the ideal and the actual create chasms of insanity into which those unable to internally resolve the flow of contradictions, disappear. The most brilliant sequence depicting this process is the ‘race riot’. In this section the hospitalised young black civil rights champion takes on the mask of a Klu Klux Klan leader and incites the inmates into a lynching mob against the only other black patient. Introducing this sequence are a number of archive/ documentary shots of what I think was a New Guinea village. The figures in this sequence are dressed in their extraordinary constumes and as a presage of what is to come act as prefatory images to the lynching sequence giving context to situations in which peoples are both broken up in and by space and time and exist eternally through time in memory. People who have lost everything can still remember what they once were. Even shards of reliquary documentary footage have this power. Breck’s descent into the circles of madness is motivated solely by the prospect of attaining his pure self ordained intrumental ends. A fairy tale architype terminally distorted by Hollywood scripting: the enthronement of the individual success. Breck is fixated on finding out who murdered Sloan – who Sloan was matters not; all that is important to Breck is the instrument of his death. Breck’s fixation on his own personal desire to get the Prize, leads him to purely exploitative relationships with his respondents. The inmates only exist to supply him with the leads that he needs to take him to Sloan who takes him to ‘the Prize’. Overwhelmed by his desire he cannot hear their voices. He is deaf to their real story told in their real voice as his cynically manoeuvres and manipulates the patients to get the information that he needs. Uninterested in what they tell him he leaves them who desperately need voice, without voice. Finally having squeezed them for facts he abandons them ever more deeply embedded in their schizoid states than when he first encounters them. Betrayed. For Breck the final sum of the totality of contradictions and betrayals experienced within the insane asylum is the loss of his own voice. He who uncoupled the stories of the voices that spoke to him from what he wanted to hear (in the tradition of poetic justice) pays physically with the price of his own voice. The detachment of the means of expression from the actuality experienced conducts Breck into a state of muteness. As the doctor of charge of the hospital says: “ It’s tragic: he’s the first Pullitzer Prize winner who’s a schizophrenic mute.” At the heart of the film lies a deluge of truly Biblical proportion as Breck hallucinates that the asylum has been overwhelmed by the realm of water: a realm that at once cleanses and is a reminder not to forget. The section is fine piece of film, it succeeds in having the intensity of eschatological prophecy, it feels like the end of the world. The sequence is suberbly shot and crafted using post production superimposition of lightening to direct Olympian bells and bolts intimately and directly at the crazed Breck. The use of supereimposition of lightening with an erotically charged personal intensity mirrors the earlier images of Cathy, in fact they are like the return of the female furies, conjured by Breck, who after driving him insane with their body now return in the form of pure electrical presence to turn his body to immobile stone. This Flood in total seems to be part of the deeper circuity of the film that channels the film into phases of forgetting and remembering, remembering and forgetting, forgetting to remember and remembering to forget. The characters forget and remember what has happened to them, they forget and remember who and what they are. Shock Corridor seems to have as the primal charge coursing through its circuitry the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence. All this remembering and forgetting all these cosmic reminders are the destiny of the damned forever to repeat the experience of history. Shock Corridor is framed within its opening and closing shots. The film opens with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” The film closes with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” Adrin Neatrour June2004

  • A History of Violence – David Cronenberg USA 2005 – Viggo Mortensen

    A History of Violence – David Cronenberg USA 2005 – Viggo MortensenA History of Violence – David Cronenberg  USA 2005 – Viggo Mortensen
     
    Empty form
    I think that David Cronenberg’s (DC) movie demonstrates – QED – the bankruptcy of the mainstream forms of Hollywood film making.  A History of Violence is built around a  back story that has been used many times before. It’s the story of the man -Tom – with the past – when he was called Joe – which comes back to haunt him. The film proceeds to fill out the machinations of the plot line with a series of graphically violent encounters as the protagonist Tom struggles to square his present reality with Joe, himself of yesteryear.  It’s not that either the idea or the story do not have interesting possibilities.  Rather it’s the way the film is structured round a series of violent set pieces that reduces the movie to the level of yet another parody.    A History of Violence is tricked out with a stylistic hyper real look with regular measured doses of sex and violence and has made box office.  But it is evidential testimony for the proposition that film based on narrative action image is now running on empty and that any attempt to make such films that do anything other than pander to the debased currency of entertainment is either the result of dishonesty or self deception.
     
    The film is built up on a skeletal framework of five epically composed episodes of extreme violence connected by the narrative of the suburban man whose past is provoked into finding him.  This key idea is a Jackle and Hyde schizo story in reverse, with suburbia as a  drug induced state of catatonia,  that is only relieved by engaging in acts of violence.  Violence is the antidote that overcomes censorious inertia.   Violence is a suppressed mode of behaviour that stems from a state of mind characteristic of earlier consciousness.  America realised as a prepubescent repressive culture.
     
    To highlight the shizo awakening DC employs his usual hyer-real stylised mis-en-scene.  The film looks like its shot on HD with separation of foreground and backgrounds suggesting dis-association.  This effect is reinforced by the set construction and of wide angle lens all working effect sense of distortion and proportion.  Complementing the settings the action adopts a highly stylised and graphically expressed representations of violence.   But for violence to work in this situation at any level beyond that of fantasy entertainment, the violence has to have some moral basis that grounds it within the fabric of the film.  But moral basis there is not.
     
    In the violence DC renders in all the usual vivid heightened details such as: a knife driven right through a hand, a neck crushed under the heel of a shoe so that the jugular blood shoots out, brains slurping out of a shot blasted skull.  The overall effect is parody but even on its own terms within the movie the parody does not maintain a consistent moral line.  This is evidenced in the first sequence of the film which shows the aftermath of  the violent murderous robbery of a small motel by psychopathic killers.  Before the leaving the scene of the crime one of the hoods is surprised by a little girl.  The hood and the girl look at each other: we see the hood takes his gun aim and fire it from point blank range at the little girl. Cut.  We do not see the little girl. Unlike the other scenes of violence we do not see what the bullet from this gun does to her body: DC cuts and switches the action.  DC might say that he is working with a convention in which only ‘the badies’ get hurt.  But in which case why have the little girl in the script?  It is a moral failing that defines and typifies the film.  Graphic violence is central to A History of Violence: it is the very premise of its structure.   Throughout the film our retinas gaze on images of blood   mangled flesh and crumpled bodies.  Yet the most ‘shocking’ violence in the film is omitted.  DC pulls away from it.  He suddenly becomes reticent and shy as if he cannot allow himself to admit the full force of his own filmic logic.  The scene is suppressed; perhaps even unshot.  DC in making A History of Violence is caught up in the schizo contradictions of the culture as much as his subjects.  Lacking any moral stature the film becomes just another exercise in style another vacuous violent exploitation flic.   Empty parody without substance without life.  A film for the dead like the zombie gangsters that inhabit its frames, but collapsed and without meaning.
     
    The last shots of the Stall family having diner together is perhaps the low point of the film. This sequence, in which wife and son know the truth about Tom/Joe is shot without dialogue.  We see the whole family eating around the table and cut to a series of close ups in which the faces reflect a sort of gross disturbance.   DC seems to say that the horror of the knowing of truth has permeated their bodies their spirit, and results in the affect of this realisation  streaming out of their sensory expressive organs.  The visual effect acheived by DC is as if the actors are pissing with their faces, or about to be sick.  As a coda it is at least in tune with the rest of the film: an overblown stylised affectation.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • 8 Mile, dir. Curtis Hanson

    Br(other) Rabbit’s Tale by Tom Jennings

    [essay on hip-hop, Eminem and 8 Mile, dir. Curtis Hanson, 2003; published in Variant, 17, May 2003]Br(other) Rabbit’s TaleOne of the central conceits of 8 Mile – Curtis Hanson’s (2002) film about an aspiring hip hop performer, starring controversial rapper Eminem – seems to have eluded the notice of critics and reviewers. This adds to the levels of contradiction and irony in the way the film tackles the subject of hip hop – which, if not ignored altogether in serious debate and polite conversation alike, is generally condemned and dismissed as one of the most scandalous, degraded and degrading forms of contemporary popular culture. Partly this opprobrium results from rap’s refusal to practice the subterfuge usually necessary to sidestep sanctions when bringing lower class vernacular into the public domain. But whatever its significance in terms of social class, hip hop and rap music derive from and draw upon the rich veins of African American culture, even if in America itself and on a global scale young people of all races and backgrounds have taken it to heart, and take part in it in their millions. Even so, the musical forms, performance sites and conventions, expressive styles and lyrical and narrative structures employed in rap are most usefully seen as developments – in the context of today’s social, cultural and technological environments – of African American community and artistic traditions also prominent in the blues, jazz, soul and funk, and in Black oral folklore, storytelling and literature.2
    Black and White and Read All OverSo despite its commercial success US rap is still generally perceived as a predominantly Black artform, even if increasingly marketed to white youth. What, then, does it mean for the main protagonist of 8 Mile not only to be white, but also to choose the stage alias of ‘B. Rabbit’? In the script his friends affectionately clarify the ‘B’ as the rather childlike ‘Bunny’. This is appropriate given the Oedipal conflicts experienced by Eminem’s character, Jimmy Smith Jr., and as a bonus also refers to cartoon trickster Bugs Bunny. But his ‘official’ nom de guerre as an M.C. who competes for supremacy in lyrical ‘battles’ is not Bunny, but B. Rabbit – referring to a figure from a different genre, but with similar levels of complexity and ambivalence and a parallel degree of social and political significance. Brer Rabbit, along with the predatory Brer Fox and other animals living in the ‘briar patch’, is a mythic hero of children’s stories, and for older generations something of a lower class antidote to Beatrix Potter et al. His origins lie squarely within fables and parables refined and passed down orally in enslaved communities – as social practice rather than literary form – educating Black youngsters in the ways of the world, how to stay out of trouble and even, maybe, come out on top.
    From their humble beginnings (at the cotton-picking grass-roots, so to speak), these cautionary and inspirational tales passed into acceptable literature courtesy of Joel Chandler Harris, from Atlanta, Georgia, who was the first author to publish such an extensive collection of ‘Negro’ stories, as related by fictional narrator ‘Uncle Remus’ standing for the realism, wisdom, benevolence and political savvy of Black elders. In literary criticism starting from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, Harris is cited as an exemplary case of the appropriation by white people of Black cultural resources. Now in 8 Mile we have the first Hollywood representation of underground hip hop, but written, produced and directed by white people, telling the story of a white rapper trying to get by. The choice of moniker refers to this troubled history, and to the contemporary exploitation of Black culture via the commodification of rap music and the ambiguous presence of white people within this field.
    Tourism, Tarzan and ToryismTo many critics, this presence is not ambiguous at all, but represents straightforward colonisation – a view appealing to politically correct liberals, who are already predisposed to rubbish hip hop (and any other lower class cultural expression resistant to their moralising). So novelist Jeanette Winterson sees Jimmy Smith as merely: “a tourist … a white man going into Black culture and, lo and behold, he does it better”.3 This echoes Black separatist discourses aiming to maintain the purity of hip hop as Black culture. In US rap magazine The Source, Harry Allen invokes the figure of Tarzan to explain the success of both Eminem and Jimmy Smith Jr.: “a white infant, abandoned by its mother and father and raised by apes, who rises to dominate the non-white people and environment around him”, taking advantage of “the Black facilitation of white development”. This process is argued to be pivotal to the contemporary “refinement of white supremacy” where, for example, “hip-hop is valuable for one reason only: because a lot of white people are into it”.4
    Both kinds of criticism are persuasive to a certain extent, arguing in essence that any active involvement of white people in Black culture necessarily implies theft and mastery – and, after all, the history of imperialism and white racism (not to mention, more specifically, Western popular music) has consistently led in that direction. Unfortunately, as well as entailing a rather simplistic, static and closed conception of both Black culture and hip hop, such judgements are extremely pessimistic about the potential for meaningful interaction between Black and white people, whether in culture, politics, or any other arena. However, Eminem’s character is not dubbed ‘Lord Greystoke’; and the origins and associations of Brer Rabbit have survived Joel Chandler Harris’s colonisation as well as Enid Blyton’s bourgeois white supremacist erasure. Maybe hip hop’s Black roots are still hardy and perennial in the briar patch, whatever their fate in the well-to-do garden.
    If so, a distinction must be drawn between what happens at the grass roots of hip hop among real live individuals and groups, and how this is mediated, transformed and distorted in the public sphere. The film clearly wants to straddle both realms in purporting to depict participation in a local hip hop scene, while itself being a commercial product aiming for mass consumption. Yet critical positions such as those outlined above refuse to consider such complexity, preferring ‘black and white’ caricatures which are just as crude, restrictive and downright unhelpful as those found in the discourses of politicians, the media, elite cultural institutions and all the other vested interests inimical in principle to any of our subversive pleasures.
    Into the Melting PotSo, in a post-industrial Detroit suitably photographed by Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros) as toxic and rotting, Jimmy Smith Jr. struggles to carve out some autonomy and escape the rabbit’s fate (to be tamed, captured and eaten). The hostility and hopelessness of the ghetto offer him only insecure drudge jobs, reinforced by his equally bankrupt family dynamics and relationships with women. His crew provides a nurturing surrogate family for its members, immersed since childhood in hip hop as part of the popular cultural landscape. They have gravitated towards the local rap scene, led by Future (Mekhi Phifer) who hosts regular nightclub events featuring contests between aspiring MCs. Witnessing and encouraging his emerging wordplay skills, his friends urge Jimmy to overcome his shyness and insecurity and take part. The film covers the period in which he tentatively enters and negotiates the contours of this vibrant public sphere, practising and elaborating his lyrics in various settings – culminating in victory over lead rapper of rival posse ‘The Free World’.
    8 Mile does capture, if sketchily, the atmosphere of grass roots underground hip hop – and is thus one of very few representations in the mainstream visual media of a phenomenon common in urban centres globally.5 It marks out the different interests and agendas of those involved, and correctly emphasises the quintessential site of hip hop performance – the party. Here boundaries between production and consumption blur as DJs, MCs and the dancehall audience collectively interact in call and response, bodily and aesthetic appreciation and ritual communal celebration.
    Slaughtered, Skinned and GuttedBeyond that, the meagre characterisations and backstory barely hint at how Jimmy Smith’s personal trials and tribulations have given him the drive and energy (let alone the poetic skill) to craft the rap performances that the film is structured around. Worse, B. Rabbit’s lyrical attacks as a battle MC are similarly one-dimensional. They do conform to some conventions of the form, weaving biographical and local material into references to popular culture, current affairs and the traditions and history of hip hop – focusing on the socio-economic position shared with his audience in the here and now. But he avoids deeper issues of identity, difference, roots and origins, except when criticising in others the commonplace discourses of racial prejudice and machismo’s sexism, misogyny and homophobia. So, pre-empting the recycling of ‘poor white trash’ stereotypes, he acknowledges and embraces these, glosses their injustice and external causes, and trumps them with well-rehearsed elaborations exposing their lazy repetition.
    Most seriously, the price of failure to invoke a positive presence of his own is an inability to boast – that archetypal rapping device crystallising one’s rhetorical manouevres and stylistic prowess into a stage embodiment of gravitas and purpose. Thus at one point he ‘dies’ on stage, unable to respond to a Black audience’s collective ridicule of his whiteness. He can deal with it individually, though, using his smart mouth to puncture his opponents’ pretensions. He cuts The Free World adrift from their roots in Black oral traditions, accusing them of empty posing (by copying 2-Pac – a seminal 1990s MC), rather than engaging in a genuine process of growth using the wisdom of the ancestors. Capped with the revelation of their middle class backgrounds, this clinches the argument for the crowd.
    B. Rabbit’s self-erasure is intelligible, given the historical status of ‘whiteness’ as a badge of automatic (fictional) superiority and (actual) domination over others. Flirting with the white racist denigration of Blackness, he insists on the pathetic nature of whiteness, and is content for the Black audience – as his social equals – to judge. Nevertheless, his rejection of minstrelsy (pretending to be ‘Black’), while important, extends to a weak integration of style, lyrics and music – he has no charisma, raps with a clumsy, fractured ‘flow’, and his rhymes consistently miss the beat and work against the rhythm. All that remains is linguistic trickery fuelled by disembodied anger, detached from a coherent personality, historical anchorage and the sense of cultural continuity implicit in African-American popular music. As it happens, this recalls the passage of Brer Rabbit from subversive West African trickster, via transgressive free-living slave, to sanitised cuddly toy.
    White, Sliced and WholesomeHaving rendered its hero insubstantial, inoffensive and bland, 8 Mile works as a safe, conformist narrative of ‘poor boy makes good’ in that long tradition of conservative Hollywood films exhorting the popular mass audience to keep their heads down, work hard and fulfil the promise of the (white anglo saxon) protestant ethic. But if the talent to justify success is now sacrificed to local ordinariness, hip hop’s invention and imagination are lost along with the complex, diverse artistry of its practitioners. As usual cinema can only represent the richness of lower class life in reductive stereotypes. But the big payoff is that the main attraction rap offers its audiences – a Black challenge to the hypocrisies of mainstream society – is falsified. All signposted in the allusion to Brer Rabbit.
    Ritual naming as transformation is a frequent theme in Black cultural visions of transcendence, yet this choice of name marks a space made vacant by violation, exactly signifying a lack of progression. Drawing attention to their own deceit is thus the film makers’ alibi for viewing hip hop through the lens of whiteness – because a biopic about any of the Black superstar rappers would have required none of these levels of concealment and evasion to guarantee healthy box office. But it would have had to tackle an issue that the big money behind Hollywood blockbusters is terrified of – the increasing centrality of race combined with class – a theme familiar in the daily lives of the mixed hip hop nation of American youth. Instead, 8 Mile counterposes class against race, just as all shades of reactionary and separatist US political discourse have consistently done since the 1970s – mystifying deprivation with euphemisms of Black deficiency in the former, and nailing the prospects of the Black poor to the interests of the vanguard middle classes in the latter.
    Convenience Food for ThoughtNaturally, in its cynical exercise of postmodern irony, the film wants to have it both ways, so the aspirational trajectory as well as the promotional strategy devolve onto Eminem. But he has been eviscerated of his exhilarating deployment of infantile excess, the shock tactics aimed squarely at respectable society and hysterical cartoon exaggerations exposing the effects of poverty and despair on the personal and social fabrics. Surely only the ignorance of critics, the gullibility of consumers, and the complacency of power could confuse this performer with this role. Now that is an unsavoury alliance – albeit one very convenient for those to whom culture is simply entertainment and hence profit.
    For 8 Mile to fit Hollywood conventions and its own publicity, the most salient features of both rap’s Black heritage and Eminem are effaced, so that the film hides its most serious flaws by trading on his reputation. Hamstrung by their wholesale collusion in this, the reviews were able to recognise neither the flaws nor the (limited) achievements.6 Now, the status of critics in the popular media is often predicated upon the public’s naive susceptibility to the commercial wiles of the Brer Foxes of capitalism. But here they unwittingly reproduce it, obliterating the distinctions between the marketing hype generated around a commodity, and what the material used might mean to its audiences. No surprise, either, that 8 Mile’s most convincing stereotypes are the hustlers picking over local rap for its juiciest packageable morsels, just as mainstream record companies do with their raw material. With Eminem this means crafting a celebrity brand image that isolates, fetishises and falsifies each of his attributes as unique and unsurpassed individual achievements of (white) genius, rather than the minor (if interesting) variations on well-established hip hop themes that they undoubtedly are.
    The Multiple Slim ShadyEminem’s vision starts from vicious infantile revenge fantasies, switching indiscriminately among targets – his mother, wife, peers, other MCs, the social environment, economy, media or government – attacked for their various failures to support his needs and wishes, in moods veering from depression and self-disgust to persecution mania and full-blown paranoia. The rage is channelled into lyrical anecdotes in the familiar hip hop registers of lower class teenage rebelliousness, abusive hypermasculinity and gangsta rap nihilism, with video vignettes dressed in the lurid iconography of exploitation film genres, comics, animation and a general wallowing in trash culture, kitsch and bad taste. Ice-T – an original ‘gangsta rapper’ – aptly describes him as the “Jerry Springer of rap”, practising the art of “saying the most wrong thing possible”.7 This captures the sense of a community of grievances being played out, but misses the psychotic core – a splintered and embattled self, deriving purpose and energy in combatting the absence of unconditional love (e.g. respect as an MC) with hatred, bile and malice.8
    The comic artfulness of the rendering of nightmare into narrative, and its catharsis as performance, positions Eminem as a tragic clown more in the comedy tradition (from Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor onwards) linking pain, shock and mirth. Whereas the many talented hip hop jokers have tended to play it just for laughs, the feelings Eminem expresses are audibly and visibly heartfelt. And what takes the shock tactics beyond the adolescent exuberance and sleaze of rap acts marketed as teenage rebellion, like the Beastie Boys or Smut Peddlers, is the focus on the dire social implications and circumstances of his existential misery, as well as the converging political and economic interests that demand it. Put bluntly, the party always goes (badly) wrong.
    This configuration follows the ‘deranged MC’ subgenre – itself derived from the urban mythic ‘mad and bad’ Black man. There is even the occasional presence of producer and father figure Dr Dre, or Detroit rap crew D12, as a social safety net, as with other famous rap portrayals of lunacy and inadequacy. But Eminem is basically solipsistic. Alone in his internal universe of conflict – not alienated from others but within – he has no shared aim or project for successful performance to embody. Unable to take solace and courage from a Black heritage, he accepts that the self-destructive logic of his abjection promises no escape.9 Thus the lyrics lay scattershot blame, vehemently but without specificity or the explanatory power to convince, at a system which is mad, or “politically incorrect”.10
    Hip Hop HypeJust as the compulsive staccato processing of language in multiple alliteration, rhyming and metaphor reproduces the obsessive repetition of psychosis; so the integration of linguistic elements into spoken flow and rhythm is likewise fragmented. Whereas what Adam Krims11 terms ‘speech-effusiveness’ is now typical of the most skilful and innovative rap, many practitioners of it are far more accomplished than Eminem – both in terms of the musicality of the vocals (pitch, timbre, texture), and their meshing with the antiphony and polyphony in the instrumental. Failing to align the voice and poetic metre with the beat hinders the pleasurable experience of the music with the body as well as the mind – hence the usual judgment within hip-hop that Eminem is very far from being the best rapper around.12
    But the publicity terms he has been saddled with – and which he consents to for the sake of a career – say otherwise, because those who succeed can then be held up as examples of ‘the American Way’ able to transcend their backgrounds (of class and/or race) – exceptions which prove the rule. So Eminem is produced and sold as universal (i.e. white) novelty pop,13 even while coincidentally undermining various racial stereotypes that neither he nor his commercial backers or critical detractors, for their diverse reasons, dwell on. A foul-mouthed, drug-crazed psychopath hardly fits the historic white ‘genius’ profile; there is none of the middle class ‘wigger’s affected pose of fashionable Black styles; and the depiction of family dysfunction and moral failure turns on its head the politically-charged discourse of Black pathology hiding behind class rhetoric – the latter being notable given rap’s reluctance to tackle this directly.14
    However, Eminem’s silence on his personal experience of racism – except individual prejudice against his whiteness – shows that he is no ‘race traitor’15. This avoidance allows him to assert the irrelevance of race, substituting the world view of the universal loser – just a “regular guy”16 like millions of others. If challenged, he projects back onto whoever is his enemy at the time – “I am whatever you say I am” – where the simulacra of his personae and their progress in the mediated world preclude any  ‘real’17 His personal route to salvation is instead implied by the honesty and humility of his engagement with hip hop. Against all the odds, this gives the gratification of finding a voice and deploying a language – a conclusion common to adherents of hip hop in all its manifestations across the world.
    Hip Hop HopeIf Eminem’s ravings lack the social embeddedness to provide historical perspective or communal insight into the nature of the processes which afflict people and make them mad – these are precisely the kind of criteria which have consistently given Black artists the desire and wherewithal to seek paths to redemption. This kind of ethics has been a preoccupation of hip hop since the start – notable in Afrika Bambaata’s Zulu Nation; Grandmaster Flash (‘The Message’); KRS-One, Public Enemy and Rakim; through to hardcore via NWA, 2-Pac, Wu-Tang Clan and Nas (among thousands of less famous examples). However, each new wave of rap styles has been facilitated, amid accusations of dilution, by the steady growth of relatively independent music industry sectors with a strong Black presence, striving to influence and moderate commercialisation. In this climate, class politics of any kind have rarely been prioritised, although a quietly persistent strand alongside the much heralded Black nationalism and pride.18
    So, Chuck D of Public Enemy is surely correct in saying that, being white, Eminem can tackle “issues that Black rappers are encouraged to leave alone for marketing and commercial reasons”.19 But that’s not the whole story. The Black traditions have persistently militated  towards subverting oppression by wresting its adverse cultural and discursive conditions into some form of social agency and control. Since the ideology of Black capitalism – popularised by the Nation of Islam, Spike Lee and Public Enemy, for example – came to be embraced by US hip hop entrepreneurs (and reflected in the music), economic control has taken centre stage. Thus record labels and management companies that are (at least partly) Black owned and controlled have gained commercial footholds by deliberately packaging the music to appeal to local Black community markets (in Atlanta, California, Miami, New Orleans, etc.), pandering to corporate media (so-called ‘hip-pop’) and/or crossing over to white rock and heavy metal (Run DMC, Ice-T, Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, etc).
    However, even the current ‘ghetto fabulous’ fairy stories of wealth and glamour, which incorporate mainstream pop and R&B, still retain muted elements of social critique in Blues laments and lower class sentimentalism. Similarly, the Black Mafia subgenre could be interpreted as an oblique critique of capitalism as crime, equating the competitive rivalry of the music industry with mob families who were once mere street gangs. If so, gangsta rap might represent an underclass corrective to the moral sophistry inherent in a philosophy of uplift through the success of the few – but which absolutely requires the continuing failure of the many.20
    Sadly, if predictably, marketing imperatives work hard to hinder such incipient political potential from clearing the space to develop. The media, politicians and major record companies may have their pound of institutionally racist flesh, but money sets the parameters. 2-Pac is a typical case – his attempt to meld lower class manifesto (‘Thug Life’) and Black Panther-derived social credo was sabotaged by the commercial strategy of his label, Death Row, who progressively spiked all but the most nihilistic material.21 On the whole, the transgressive power of lower class vernacular retains the affiliation of core audiences, but being presented solely in terms of Blackness sells more widely, engages the pro-censorship Black and white middle classes, suits the scaremongering of the media and conservative politicians, and fits various agendas of racial essentialism and Black unity (hence the furore over Eminem’s casual disruption of these rhetorics). Paul Gilroy characterises the outcome of this ideological tangle in the cultural compromise formation that is contemporary hip hop as “revolutionary conservatism”. He points out that its utterly hybrid and syncretic nature, and the diversity (especially in terms of class) of its producers and users account for both hip hop’s unprecedented global popularity and the consistent failure of public discourses to understand it.22
    Arts of ResistanceRussell Potter argues that the resistive potential of hip hop lies in its continuing capacity to articulate contemporary vernacular subversions of dominant cultures, in late capitalist conditions of increasingly global and frantic commodification. The significance of African American traditions is that their particular cultural trajectory from slavery till now has enhanced the ability to creatively steal, mock, honour and re-present ideas, words and sounds simultaneously, in order to convey experience, history, pain and desire in artistic expression – and have thus been especially well-placed to exploit post-modern forms of bricolage and revision.23 So from a core, or benchmark, of black practice, hip hop has mobilised the whole range of cultural material at its disposal, using all available techniques and technologies, to suit its own local and equally subordinated expressive needs – including those of racially mixed and culturally hybrid communities and scenes. This has enabled its worldwide dispersal, through a commodified ‘word of mouth’, to overflow and sidestep all of the clumsy and misguided attempts at policing and suppression.24
    But while these vernacular cultures can provide the necessary grounds for transgression, this can easily resolve into mere coping mechanisms on the part of the oppressed, who remain contained by power. This danger is acute given that the fetishised fashion accessory of superficial ‘blackness’ in style without content is now offered unremittingly for consumption, including the purely commercial manufacture of simulations of grass-roots practice. Many marketed hip hop acts, black as well as white, could be interpreted as domesticated Brer Rabbits in this sense, such as Puff Daddy/P.Diddy (a bourgeois ‘class minstrel’ and rather bad MC), Vanilla Ice (fake ‘black’ and fake ‘street’) or N’Sync’s Justin Timberlake (fake everything) – not Eminem, though, who is to some extent honourable even if failing to outwit the Fox. Conversely, various derivations of hip hop have virtually offered themselves up for recuperation, taking themselves too seriously through pretension or elitism. In the UK this might include the trip-hop and drum and bass genres, which sought to legitimise themselves in terms of mainstream aesthetic values and the accumulation of cultural capital; or the remnants of rave cultures whose absorption into mere weekend recreation seems virtually complete. Whereas in rap music the dense and sophisticated vernacular, the oppositional stance and refusal of respectability, and grass-roots credibility, affiliation and involvement combine in ways that, even after more than two decades, still seem to completely confound the status quo – as the reception of 8 Mile in clueless celebration or malicious dismissal suggests.
    James Scott has revealed how colonised and enslaved subjects communicate among themselves using ‘hidden transcripts’ in language and cultural activities.25 These nurture resistance to domination and keep hope alive, while the explicit versions in ‘public transcripts’ purport to and seem to fit the demands of the ruling groups – to whom the ‘real’ meaning is opaque. Scott concludes that when political action does develop against domination, it is the hidden transcripts which provide the discursive and cultural weaponry and ammunition which explode into overt expressions of revolt. Maybe hip hop’s enduring achievement will be that, in terms of surface appearance in the age of Spectacle, the hidden and public transcripts are the same – although the meanings are worlds apart. The complacent networks of privilege try to suppress the open expression of the vernacular, mistaking symptom for cause and in the process revealing the stupidity, venality and complicity of their cultural disciplinarians. But the politics of rap’s reception provides the younger, newer strata of colonised, enslaved, migrant and surplus urban populations with the opportunity to bear witness to the obscenity of the globalised New World Order and its neo-feudal military economy.
    This isn’t politics in the recognised formal, programmatic sense; it’s a set of cultural patterns which adeptly resist the hitherto false promises of such straightjacketing – on the part of those excluded from all other sites and systems of cultural and political expression. By the understanding and generalisation of the details of specific experience into actively shared anger, private dissatisfaction can be transformed into a rap(t) productive engagement when, all around, defeatist cynicism is a more intelligible response to today’s most unpromising of circumstances (and fostered as such as a deliberate tactic to shortcircuit opposition). As Paul Gilroy stresses, quoting Rakim, “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”.26 The question of where you want to go is still open.
    Notes1. from ‘The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story’, Joel Chandler Harris, in Uncle Remus:His Songs and His Sayings, illustrated by A.B. Frost, Appleton Century Crofts Inc., 1908.
    2. The best introduction to hip hop is still Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Discussions of the African American genealogy of the Blues and Black literature respectively can be found in: Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1984; and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifiying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, 1988. For the global reach of rap music see: David Toop, Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop, Pluto Press, 1991; and Tony Mitchell (Ed.) Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the U.S.A, Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
    3. in: BBC 2’s Newsnight Review, 17th January, 2003.
    4. ‘The unbearable whiteness of emceeing: what the eminence of Eminem says about race’, The Source, February 2003, pp.91-2.
    5. other than music videos, of course. The nearest mainstream cinema has come recently is the portrayal of a rap poet (Saul Williams) in Slam (Marc Levine, 1999), and a documentary on hip hop DJing (Scratch, Doug Pray, 2001).
    6. for example Ryan Gilbey, ‘In the ghetto’, Sight & Sound, February 2003, pp.36-7.
    7. in: Lock Up Your Daughters: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll, BBC 1, 2003.
    8. Most clearly seen in The Slim Shady LP (1999) and The Marshall Mathers LP (2000, both Aftermath Entertainment/ Interscope Records); and D12’s Devil’s Night (Shady Records/ Interscope Records, 2001).
    9. In ‘Insane in the membrane: the Black movie anti-hero of the ‘90s’, The Source, May 1997, pp.36-37, Marcus Reeves shows how this staple figure in Blaxploitation films relates social conditions to behaviour rather than to being. See also S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
    10. Eminem, in: Rhythm Nation, BBC Radio 1, 28th March 1999. His latest release, The Eminem Show (Aftermath Records, 2002) leavens the shock tactics with faltering attempts at serious commentary and some rather bland pop and rock sentimentality parachuted in.
    11. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
    12. Eminem freely acknowledges his shortcomings here, for example in Angry Blonde, Regan Books/Harper Collins, 2000, and Chuck Weiner (Ed.) Eminem ‘Talking’: Marshall Mathers In His Own Words, Omnibus Press, 2002. Hilariously, Will Self mistakes this for a “white sensibility”: Newsnight Review, BBC 2, 17th January, 2003.
    13. UK rap critics generally appreciate the wordplay skills (and little else) in the Eminem “circus”: e.g. Philip Mlynar’s review of The Eminem Show in Hip Hop Connection, July 2002, p.77. But again, the final judgement still tends to come down to race.
    14. unless veiled by ‘the dozens’ or displaced into sex stories. See: Robin D.G. Kelley’s contemporary-historical analysis, Yo Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, Beacon Press, 1997; and bell hooks’ painstaking and moving discussion in Salvation: Black People and Love, Women’s Press, 2001. Paul Gilroy examines related questions of freedom, race and gender relations in Black music in ‘After the love has gone: bio-politics and etho-poetics in the Black public sphere’, Public Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1994, pp.51-76.
    15. in the sense of “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”, Noel Ignatiev & John Garvey (Eds.) Race Traitor, Routledge, 1990; and contrary to Tom Paulin’s wish-fulfilment (ascribing to Eminem sentiments like “I don’t want to be white any more”), in Newsnight Review, BBC 2, 17th January, 2003. For whatever reasons, Eminem has scrupulously edited out of his lyrics all signs of the lower class white racism and much of the Black ghetto vernacular he will have grown up with. Incidentally in UK hip-hop, racism is also viewed depressingly often as mere individual prejudice rather than a historical and institutional phenomenon.
    16. This is Eminem’s mantra, repeated in countless interviews, apparently unaware of the skin privilege giving him the luxury of asserting it. So, receiving probation in April 2001 for a weapons offence, he stated that the judge “treated me fair, like any other human being” (Mansel Fletcher, ‘A year of living dangerously’, Hip Hop Connection, January 2002, pp.59-61).  Whereas a Black ‘regular guy’ would get jail time – particularly pertinent given the new ‘plantation slavery’ of US prisons and sentencing policy.
    17. ‘The Way I Am’, The Marshall Mathers LP. Meanwhile, the  media’s celebrity chatter remains oblivious to creative licence, obsessing about the lyrics’ literal truth, for example in Nick Hasted’s, The Dark Story of Eminem, Omnibus Press, 2003.
    18. Nelson George’s Hip Hop America (Penguin, 1998) gives a concise account of the commercial rap industry’s development.
    19. in: Lock Up Your Daughters: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll, BBC 1, 2003. Apparently Dr Dre also expected less censorship pressures on a white artist (Ian Gittins, Eminem, Carlton Books, 2001, p.17).
    20. see Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough For You? Popular Culture from the Hood and Beyond, Indiana University Press, 1997. As well as the liberal-conservative themes of films like Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton, 1991) and The Player’s Club (Ice Cube, 1996), there is now a sickening trend for hip hop celebrities to publish self-help homilies and cliches about believing in yourself and working hard to gain success (for example in books by Queen Latifah and LL Cool J). Also note that ‘gangsta’ now conflates the earlier terms ‘hardcore’ and ‘reality’ rap in a classic African American Signifyin’ move.
    21. see Armond White, Rebel for the Hell of it: the Life of Tupac Shakur, Quartet, 1997; and Michael Eric Dyson, Holler If You Hear Me: Searching For Tupac Shakur, Plexus, 2001. Earlier, the inspiring political initiatives from the 1992 LA uprising and subsequent gang truce were neglected in commercial LA rap: see, for example Mike Davis, L.A. Was Just the Beginning. Urban Revolt in the United States: A Thousand Points of Light. Open Magazine Pamphlets, 1992.
    22. Paul Gilroy, ‘After the love has gone’ (see note 14), and Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, Serpent’s Tail, 1993. The importance of hybridity and syncretic processes in the development of Black culture is stressed in his The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Many writers of the ‘hip hop generation’ use this kind of analysis to avoid the critical impasse which results from the assumption of a singular Black (or any other) identity – for example in Mark Anthony Neal’s superb Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, Routledge, 2002.
    23. Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. State University of New York Press, 1995.
    24. including occasionally from within the rap industry: see for example ex-The Source editorial staff member Bakari Kitwana’s The Rap on Gangsta Rap, Third World Press, 1994.
    25. James C. Scott, Domination: the Arts of Resistance, Yale University Press, 1990.
    26. Paul Gilroy, Small Acts, see note 22.
    www.variant.org.uk
    www.freedompress.org.uk
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Last Days – Gus Van Sant – USA 2004: Michael Pitt

    Last Days – Gus Van Sant – USA 2004: Michael Pitt

    Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 20 Sept 05; Ticket – £6-00Last Days – Gus Van Sant – USA 2004:  Michael Pitt
    Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 20 Sept 05; Ticket – £6-00
     
    Do what thou wilt
     
    In his last two films GVS has turned to myth as structural device.  In  both Elephant and Last Days there is no doubt as to what will happen.  It is mythically certain.  The point is our relation to and understanding of what we have experienced.
     
    In these two films GVS is not only employing a mythic structure but also taking up the central mythic theme of death and reworking it in the context of America as a necropolis, the  new world of the dead.  In GVS’ vision of America it is not only people who die whether they be superstar deities or ordinary folk.   Something essential is dying:  the idea of America.  The America whose people are free to pursue happiness through the satiation of desire.   America the last Titan, as an autophage, consuming her own constitution in  which happiness is an object rather than a state of being.
     
    Elephant and Last Days, are both observational in form.  GVS’ camera takes a definitive role in relation to the action on screen, present yet detached, playing the part of quasi historical observer like a Pliny the Younger witnessing the eruption of Mt Versuvius.  What we see is not explosion but implosion of a culture that has become a death centred.   Both films are characterised by camera tracks that have the stylised movement of an Egyptian funerary procession.  GVS uses these long tracks to follow the paths of the doomed young Americans.  In their pacing and deliberation the camera movement is like a remodeling of the tomb paintings and friezes in the Valley of the Kings, where the Egyptian golden ones, bearing their treasure, process towards their deaths.  Last Days  and Elephant are ‘descending’ films in style and intent.  They are constructed as long going downs into the earth.  Going downs that are orderly and controlled without melodrama or fake emotion,  going downs as a cultural observation.
     
    GVS has centred his last two films around specific structures located in specific milieu.  We know ancient Egypt though its surviving monumental structures.  America too is observed through the portals of its architecture.  In as much as the structures of ancient Egypt, the Pyramids,  Karnak, the tombs of the Pharaohs directly communicate their obsession with the dead so GVS mediates the idea of the death of America through its contemporary vernacular architecture.
     
    In ‘Elephant’ the victims have a sacrificial quality as if they were sleep walkers in some Nietschean parable where a mad man crashes into the school and cries out: “America is dead! America is dead!”  No one hears.  They are all walking towards oblivion.   The students don’t understand that the society whose culture they are assimilating died years ago. No one notices.  No questions are asked.  They continue as if nothing has happened.  Nothing can save them from being claimed by the forces unleashed.  In some respects they are like the faithful trusting slaves and retainers whose throats were slit before being entombed with their ancient kings and queens.  
     
    GVS’ setting for ‘Elephant’ is the school, a building that has a sepulchral quality.  Set in a vast headstone suburb the school is white and bony, a structure that encloses its inhabitants and sends them on long mazy journeys.   Like  a catacomb it is a sealed enclosed world, a perfect medium for the unremarked entry of avenging angels.   The house in Last Days where the singer songwriter Blake(a character dedicated by GVS to the memory of Kurt Cobain) resides, is in itself a sepulchral peeling decaying edifice, harbouring an outhouse in the familiar shape of a Victorian mausoleum. 
     
    Last Days is centred on this big house in the woods. As the desert is the setting for the Pyramids so the woods are the setting for the big house.  The natural world and the man made world exist as counter attractions for the human soul which becomes a virtual extension of the meaning embedded in these outer forms.  The woods are part of the natural world and in entering them personal history becomes insignificant, only the body is important.  In the woods there is the abrogation of individual destiny.  To go into the house is to accept individual destiny, a destiny that is bound to culture and history. 
     
    The house in up state New York, which is the setting for Last Days, resembles one of those stone piles that are found everywhere in Scotland.  Comprising many rooms the houses are labyrinthine, riddled with stairwells and passages. Mostly they were built by wealthy industrial magnates to serve a lifestyle and culture now gone.  As with the monuments of Egypt, you can feel in these houses a permanently frozen way of life: the presence of the dead. Appropriately these buildings are usually very cold a phenomenon often mentioned by contemporary visitors to these houses in their hay day.  In Last Days although the house is cold there are no fires in any of the grates.  The only fire in Last Days is the bonfire Blake lights in the woods when it gets dark.
     
    During the film I kept getting images of Alistair Crowley who owned one these Scottish piles called Baleskine situated by the edge of Loch Ness.  Crowley is part of the drifting subterranean current of American / Californian thought forms.  Crowley bought Baleskine in order to exploit its remote situation to further his ‘magik’,  magik that revolved about the idea of the Great Invocations and calling up of the spirit world in particular the Egyptian spirit of Horus.  His house like those Egyptian tombs with their multiple chambers became part of the world of the dead.
     
    Crowley an interesting but bloated egotist was consumed by desires above all to be the greatest ‘ master mage’ of his generation.  But Crowley by his own account nearly had his brains and sanity blasted away as a result of an invocation ritual that went out of his control.  He was totally overwhelmed by what he had summoned and his inability to halt the process.  He wandered about for days in shock at what he had called up into his presence. 
     
    There is something similar in the dazed existence of Blake.  Blake has called up something which overwhelms him:  the terrible forces latent in the idea of America.  Its as if GVS is suggesting that the desires that fed Blake’s ego and  drove him to his destiny as a rock stargod once satiated, assumed form of a terrifying  and manifest presence that tore his mind apart.  Unlike Crowley, Blake does not have the strength to take on these forces and physically survive.  Most people don’t  resist these types of demonic forces.   They permit the dark powers possession of their souls whilst indulging the delusion born of their pride that there will be no price to pay.   But the price to be paid for desire fulfilled is the human soul. And, ‘Do what thou wilt’,  was the motto of Crowley.
     
    Last Days is an examination of the flip side of Faustian myth. What happens to the soul  unable to make the pact which is the everyday business of successful Americans?  Its premise is that a society dedicated to the pursuit of individual desire at any cost creates a culture of death and destruction to protect itself.  The obverse is that those who refuse or are unable to make this pact with the forces of success are either declared insane or driven to self annihilation.  This is the state of affairs in America.
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
    28 Sept 2005

  • Targets – Peter Bogdanovich – USA 1967

    Targets – Peter Bogdanovich – USA 1967Targets – Peter Bogdanovich – USA 1967
    Side cinema 21 March 2004
     
    Seeing Targets at the Side Cinema last Sunday made me want to visit Peter Bogdanovich and talk to him.  It was made at a critical time and place: America in hightail engagement in the Vietnam War; the assassinations of JFK and MLK.  Targets comes out of a society where after 35 years of the talkies and Hollywood global dominance, 15 years drip feed TV, the psycho-reality of the movie has invaded everyday streamed consciousness so that Americans (they first but quickly joined by the rest of the world) are starting to see and interpret actuality through the disjointed and distorting nature of the filmed image.  And also at this point our society is about to incorporate the computer and its programme into psychic functioning.
    The critical moment in Targets defining both the film and its concerns is when the killer types out a note written to himself which reads something like: ”It is now 11:40 in the morning.  My wife is about to get up and when she comes  over to give me a kiss I will shoot her and then I will shoot my other……then it will all happen.”   In this typewritten note killer is writing his own software, programming his mind to carry through a series of actions almost as if he were a prototype video game.   Targets at this level is a philosophical investigation into the nature of killing.   Belying the apparent visceral nature of its subject matter it is cerebral film looking at the controlling aspects of mind.  What Bogdanovich locates at the centre of his film is the idea of programming; the idea of individuals overcome by multiple circuitries of intensifying stimuli – the movies -TV – the suburbs- the family – constructing a simple override programme that resolves his situation with maximum economy.  Targets is a film, a cerebral investigative examination of the idea of self programming.  In the past evil may have inhabited us, taken possession of us or manipulated our actions and thoughts.  Today we do it ourselves: we write our own programmes.   Interestingly, Targets close film contemporary is Kubrick’s 2001 which also has a central preoccupation with computers and programming but is a very different take on the issue.
    In form Targets has a neo-realist feel.   We see it from the killer’s point of view. The settings are nondescript: drawn from anywhere any place-ville: the suburban house, the hotel, the gas storage tank.  There is no architecture of set, in fact the reverse.  The final setting of the drive-in movie lot is a deconstructed exhibition space, emptied of everything except essence – the huge screen.  The film is restrained in its use of expressive resources: the roles are played out neutrally by the actors with little emotive gesturing, the script pared back, the scenes mostly shot wide or medium in long takes with spare use of the close up.  This stark economy strips the film back to its working parts allowing clear uncluttered sighting of the critical intersection point that is the target of the film –  the programming soft ware that develops from  the meeting of the proliferating promiscuous and incestuous gun culture – with –  the absorption of  individuals into the movie scripts,
    In the gun store two old codgers (Mutt n Jeff) sell lethal hardware, guns as if they were  ball hammers, and bullets like they were nails.  The reality of the gun is not so much that it’s a tool for killing (it does do that) but rather it’s a cool tool to engender radical change of scene.  At a point where for whatever uninteresting reason an individual feels hemmed in, terminally bored, angry, trapped etc.  There is recourse to the scenario mapped out by the movies. Pick up the gun, aim and shoot; everything is changed.  It’s a machine for radically altering everything.  And as you squeeze the trigger, no matter who you hit: the foreigner, the wife or passing stranger you are the one in control. You come to power with power. In an atomising society: each is alone.  In the movie there is only individual destiny. To close his loop Bogdanavich calls on his protagonist (brilliantly played by Tim O’Kelly) to shoot and kill the audience from within the cinema screen itself.  This is Bogdanovich saying directly without metaphor, analogy, or any sort of circumlocution, pointing to what is in the movie screen and saying – killer.  The killer is literally in the screen; who is not seen because our senses are overwhelmed by the sensual experience of watching. These images upon which we gaze, line us up in their sights and one by one corrupt us and pick us off.  Just like the sniper shoots the audience in the cars watching The Terror. Interwoven with the snipers story is the Boris Karloff story.  This is told as the story of the old movie star who is tired with his film image, bored with the repetition and cliché of film and so determines to retire. Before retiring he agrees to attend a screening of his film The Terror at the drive -in and meet the fans.  Karloff looks into the nature of the film image and perceives that it is empty and vacuous and that it has sucked the life out of him. It is Karloff’s tired form that clinches the denouement.
    Bogdanovitch takes his film to its logical conclusion.  This is not a film about killing people it is a film about programming and how image works in the programme.  The ending called down upon Tim O’Kelly is to be defeated by multiplicity of imagery.  Emerging from within the screen he is overwhelmed by the merged images in his head of the real and virtual Boris Karloff. Confused by the moving images that he can’t reconcile he is reduced to a catatonic immobile state.  His destiny a little like the sort of psychosis induced experimentally in laboratory rats when exposed to conflicting stimuli.  They break down we break down he breaks.
    Stylistically Targets feels like a B sci-fi movie of the ‘50s and 60s. These films often used the subterfuge of a fantastical script device to record the underlying paranoia in US society.  The in-part politically induced social fear of invasive alien forces and the in-part culturally bound fear of living on and feeding on land that had been stolen from its rightful users.  Targets does away with any pretext that the alien forces might be anywhere else but in the here and now.  The force at work is the programming manufactured distributed and retailed in the USA and exported world wide.
    Adrin Neatrour 26 March 2004

  • In the Cut, dir. Jane Campion

    A Cut Above? by Tom Jennings

    [published in Freedom, Vol. 64, No. 22, November 2004]A Cut Above? by Tom Jennings  
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 64, No. 22, November 2004]
      
    In the Cut’s exploration of women’s sexuality and personal agency continues director Jane Campion’s project (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke) to represent, in diverse contexts, the ambivalence, conflict and pain, and the potential for individual freedom, growth and fulfilment, found in women’s experiences in the face of the powerful forces – both internal and external – which constrain all of our efforts to live better lives. In its sophistication and hard-won optimism, it’s probably her best yet.
     
    Based on a bestseller by Susanna Moore, who co-wrote the screenplay with Campion, In the Cut references many cinematic subgenres – a ‘postmodern’ strategy which may merely reinforce and celebrate shallow style over content, but here enhances depth and potency. Dion Beebe’s cinematography conveys well the claustrophobic paranoia of life in New York (or any contemporary city) with an inspired combination of blurring and sharp focus, restless camera movement and judicious hints of classic film noir’s dark shadows and neo-noir’s flashiness. But rather than mysterious femme fatales or the glossy predators of The Last Seduction et al, these female characters echo the troubled formulae of sexual expression, pleasure and danger found in films like Klute (1971) and Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). Similarly, while promoted as ‘erotic thriller’, the narrative has more in common with straight-to-video softcore pornography –often foregrounding female erotic sensibility and empowerment – rather than the blatantly exploitative and hysterically misogynist blockbusters based on softcore source material, such as Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct.
     
    Further complicating the identification of viewers with the stars, both female leads are cast against type – Meg Ryan from vacuous romantic comedies, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as hapless, helpless and not at all a latter-day Katherine Hepburn. Finally, unflattering close-ups and lack of make-up (among other devices) avoid the cheap titillation that the explicit sexual imagery might otherwise provide in portraying the complexities of desire. Succeeding in this precarious balance places In the Cut in the company of the new wave of European art cinema aspiring to sexual-emotional ‘realism’ – e.g. L’Ennui (1998),  Romance (1999), Le Secret (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001) and Swimming Pool (2002). However, In the Cut’s layering of genre conventions and resolutely female perspective arguably take it to a level beyond even these brave and intelligent films.
     
    Although making the detective story work was felt by Campion to be crucial, many mainstream critics have panned In the Cut as a failure on this score. True, the police investigation procedure is shoddy, and the poor calibre of the red herrings allows viewers to easily identify the psychokiller. But then bungled policework is hardly uncommon where women victims have ‘dubious morals’; and there was only time to sketch the various male ‘suspects’ (candidates as lovers and/or murderers) who were treated fully in the novel.  But anyway, all this misses the point, because the crime framework was primarily deployed to weave together Meg Ryan’s character Frannie’s efforts, on several levels, to make sense of life. Her Oedipal fantasies of  her parents’ courtship, her own awakening desires and fears, and her public, professional role as an English professor researching urban slang and poetry – all revolve around romantic myths and conventions, hope and tragedy. In short, her quest is to understand the relationships –  both in language and culture, and in bodily, lived reality – between the search for passionate fulfilment and the risk of spiritual death. And while psychological dynamics, identity and desire have been underlying motors for many crime narratives (classic private dicks/dangerous women; Hitchcock’s vulgar Freudianism; lesbian detective fiction), this film achieves an unusually intricate mesh of popular cultural form, gender-political content and philosophical depth.
     
     
    A Cut Above?
     
    Campion’s films, though, can hardly even begin to resolve some dilemmas. In particular, her heroines’ white middle class trajectories damage any feminist generalisability. In The Piano, Ada (the luminous Holly Hunter) exemplified high-bourgeois colonial taste, reproducing perceptions of New Zealand plantation Maoris as lazy, passive subhumans – and only Harvey Keitel’s Baines  (a Western immigrant ‘gone native’) offered a path to aesthetic, sexual and economic salvation. Things are a little less static in the multicultural modernity of In the Cut, where Frannie’s stepsister (Leigh) has a lower class background –  hinting at a rather different perspective on women ‘choosing’ physical danger in pursuit of pleasure. But the stereotypical shorthand of race, ethnicity and class still signpost the male threat – the working class Irish/Hispanic cops’ schoolboy sexism and the Black student’s lack of sexual restraint carry a sinister charge hardly matched by the inadequate narcissism of Frannie’s WASP middle class ex. At least, though, the ascription of obsessive, delusional, violent and masochistic tendencies are spread around more among the characters, making possible a response in terms of our own social situations.
     
    Finally, the lack of any sense of collectivity obscures the political usefulness of stories like In the Cut. However, it can be read as pointing towards the whole array of interconnecting levels where liberation is sought – from the unconscious, social, and cultural to the public and institutional – in all of which intimate personal relations are likely to be heavily implicated. The film’s central (erotic) relationship is the most convincing and promising, with characters who admit their flaws and share vulnerability. That prospects for change and redemption in an honesty of purpose are best found in the messy human reality of everyday life, rather than in the deadly idealisation of grand romantic narratives, should be an affirming message for revolutionaries as well as those seeking love.
     
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Inauguration of Pleasure Dome : ‘The Star and Shadow’

    Inauguration of Pleasure Dome : ‘The Star and Shadow’
    Inauguration of Pleasure Dome : ‘The Star and Shadow’

    Neil
    Young

    My
    favourite cinema, ‘The Star and Shadow’, is only two minutes from a bus stop,
    but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their
    way there, even on Saturday nights. Its
    clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of ‘regulars’ who occupy the
    same seat for every screening and go there for conversation as much as for the
    films. If
    you are asked why you favour a particular cinema, it would seem natural to put
    the films first, but the thing that most appears to me about ‘The Star and Shadow’
    is what people call its ‘atmosphere…’

    Admirers
    of George Orwell may recognise the above paragraph – it’s the opening of his
    classic 1946 essay ‘The Moon Under Water’ (in which he describes his ideal
    imaginary pub) rejigged by myself in accordance with the theme of the
    publication which you currently hold in your hand.

    ‘The Star and Shadow’ does sound
    more like a pub than a cinema, of course – especially as the name doesn’t make
    any astrological sense, unless said ‘star’ is the nearest one, aka the sun. I’m
    guessing that the ‘star’ here is a human one of the showbiz variety – like the
    brassy trouper who features on the painted sign outside that semi- (but not quite disreputable) boozer ‘The Star’ on
    the bottom section of Westgate Road, opposite what has recently become the
    Carling Academy, and was previously the Gala Bingo (boo!) and the ‘Majestic
    Ballrooms’. Before that, it was a
    cinema: ‘The New Westgate’ was opened in 1927, on the site of what had been the
    ‘Picture House’ – which burned down in 1918.

    But this isn’t a place to dwell on cinemas burning down and closing down. There
    are plenty of buildings in Newcastle that used to be cinemas. Now we have a
    cinema that used to be a building. One, brief, furtive look back should be
    enough: I saw my first film at CineSide (aka The Side Cinema) on November 11th
    2001. It was Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the
    Game from 1939. While fine, the picture didn’t match up to its uber-lofty critical status – even more
    disappointing were other lukewarm Side ‘classics’ like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Nov 01), Fellini’s 8 1/2 (May 02); Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (Nov 02); and
    Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (May
    03). But the point wasn’t that the films were only so-so – it was the fact that
    Side Cinema gave me the chance to see them on a big(ish), local(ish) screen,
    and decide for myself.

    And there were just as many times that a picture I saw there justified or
    wildly exceeded expectations: the legendary tequila-soaked screening of Sam
    Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo
    Garcia (May 03); William Burroughs (disappearing) in Anthony Balch’s
    short Towers Open Fire shown as
    part of the legendary red-wine-soaked ‘beat’ evening (Jun 02); Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude (Dec 02); Peter
    Bogdanovich’s Targets (Mar 04);
    Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man,
    projected in eerie (near-)total silence in Dec 04; Mervyn Le Roy and Busby
    Berkeley’s euphoric Gold Diggers of 1933 (May
    02); Albert Finney’s Charlie Bubbles (Nov
    03) and, the last film I saw there, John Farrow’s Where Danger Lives, a cracking little thriller from 1950
    that I knew nothing about until I saw it in the Side programme for November
    2005.

    ‘The Star and Shadow’ has a lot to
    live up to: but if Side was any guide, part of the fun will be discovering
    weird and unlikely stuff in a weird and unlikely setting. And hopefully the
    organisers will continue to be open to audience suggestions for their
    programming. Me, I’m dreaming of Limite, Mario
    Peixoto’s silent Brazilian classic from 1931. And that, when I settle down in
    my comfortable ‘regular’ seat, my enjoyment isn’t imperilled by any ‘drunks and
    rowdies’. Or maybe just one or two: ‘where danger lives,’ and all that…

    23rd
    February 2006

    Neil Youngs film
    site:

    http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/index.php

  • Zatoichi – Takashi Kitano – Japan 2003

    Zatoichi – Takashi Kitano – Japan 2003 Zatoichi – Takashi Kitano – Japan 2003
    Takashi’s film starts where it should have finished with Takashi remembering that what film does best is movement: shifting consciousness across many levels of perception through movement.
    Zatoichi closes with an unabashed rhythmic celebration of the film itself. A hip hop Hollywood dance routine that’s full of life and movement as the caste insinuate themselves into the choreography and we see everyone, the good the bad and the ugly, let rip in the music. In comparison the rest of the film is static. As actor/director Zatoichi is Takashi’s homage to Kabuki – Japanese popular theatre in which stock characters wearing heavy make-up and mask mix theatrical overstatement with rude farce and melodrama. Kabuki tells traditional stories told in a specific theatrical tradition and mode – different to but not dissimilar from pantomime. Film homage always risks dieing on its feet. Something to do with film and formal respect being a potentially ponderous combination. And in Zatoichi the Kabuki theatric form isn’t really shifted or structurally unravelled. There is immobility at the centre of the movie. The framing of the action, the shot-reaction shot sequences, the tracks and cranes are all heavy handed. The camera is not looking for anything. Its dead. the boundaries and interstitial zones marking potential areas of development and concern are unexplored. Except.

    Except for some brief almost glossed over sequences in Zatoichi where the camera looks at peasants as they work the fields and then prepare for what looks like some sort of fertility festival(large life sized corn dollies in evidence). In these truncated moments we glimpse the possibility of a film energised by rhythms and tempos of the earth. But these trail off to become no more than cinematic gesture.
    In Zatoichi what we have is a deadened outer theatrical form which gives us the retinal layered theatric experience of watching: actors playing yakuza gangsters in kimonos and dressing gowns(fancy dress) – some of them engagingly bald – hacking each other to death at regular interludes to gratify the needs of a revenge driven back story. It’s regurgitated reimported spaghetti Western with a catch all fake set which in long shot (except for the bridge which is quintessentially Japanese) suggests the plywood back lots of Hollywood Western.
    If it wasn’t for the detail that this was Takashi’s film I would let it pass as not my kind of movie. But coming out of a director who has demonstrated flare sensibility and insight into the potential of filmic forms, Zatoichi needed further thought.
    Even on its own terms the oppositions that it set in place are not interesting in themselves. The blind man who ‘sees’ everything is not interesting as it deprives him of his nature de-natures him. And the boy who chooses to be a geisha and the old gang boss who poses as a pot boy(usual suspect) are simply formal requisites of the narrative, purely mechanical theatric devices and treated as such.
    Although Takashi as the blind warrior masseur has a winsome charm of a smile and the camera likes him and his haircut(well so it should) the character is caught in a major dilemma. Unlike – Clint Eastwood films for instance – Zatoichi can’t do eyes, because the character is blind. As the film fails to locate any affective replacement for the eye, the film’s protagonist mechanically dissolves as the film progresses – interest in him dissipates. And the idea of playing the blind man by having his eyes closed doesn’t work: the theatrical ‘play’ inherent in this idea allows does not compensate for its lack of filmic conceit.
    Coming out of the film left me with the thought that Takashi needs to improve his massage technique. The massage he gives to the woman in the film was as unconvincing as his ability to massage the life out of costumes.
    Zatoichi will probably make the money but leaves me wondering if this was the driving reason behind the film. adrin neatrour – 21 March 2004.

  • The Manchurian Candidate, dir. Jonathan Demme

    New Age Paranoia by Tom Jennings

    [published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 24, December 2004]New Age Paranoia by Tom Jennings
     
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 24, December 2004]
     
     
    Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate effectively updates John Frankenheimer’s classic 1962 Cold War conspiracy thriller – with Gulf rather than Korean War veterans brainwashed into becoming political moles and assassins by corporate, not Russian, agents. Given the present ‘War on Terror’ and the better-understood amoral criminality of the military-industrial complex (as well as the prevalence of government via mythology, mystification and spin), these revisions seem appropriate – as do the science-fictional (but only just!) electronic surgical implants replacing good old-fashioned behavioural conditioning. The unfolding plot (in both senses) shows the Army bureaucrat (Denzel Washington in Frank Sinatra’s role) and Vice Presidential candidate (Liev Shrieber for Laurence Harvey) gradually resisting their ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ zombification amid manipulation by Shreiber’s Senator mother (Meryl Streep instead of Angela Lansbury) and sundry political, big business and media masterminds, crooks, lobbyists, lackeys and lickspittles.
     
    However, while the new denouement is very neat, we lose much of the political sharpness of the source novel by Richard Condon,* wherein McCarthyism succeeded thanks to the Soviet plotters who found it thoroughly congenial to their authoritarian aims – a fascinating, if muddled, attempt to disentangle the contradictions of right-wing politics. Unfortunately, the supposedly liberal-left Demme substitutes benign intelligence agencies which only ever use dirty tricks to foil the multinational menace (I kid you not!) and honourable old-school patriotic Party patricians who have fought corporate takeover for years (yeah, right …).
     
    Conspiracies have long been fertile territory for cinema – where the close-up simulation of intimacy renders historical phenomena in individual terms. Action films hysterically mobilise adolescent masculinist muscle in desperate response, whereas at least political thrillers sense the world’s complexity. And given that paranoia represents the psychotic underbelly of individualism, parapolitics likewise seductively suggests that humanity’s ills result from the hidden agendas of evil elites. Of course the latter exist, and create havoc. But the more difficult truth – that domination is sedimented into the routine material of institutions, discourses, bodies, societies and economies – remains opaque to mainstream media, culture and politics. Both Manchurian Candidates aspire to stir up the murky depths. In their different ways, both fail enjoyably.
     
    * author of Winter Kills – which similarly smuggled unusually interesting political speculation into Hollywood (dir. William Richert, 1979).
     
     
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Confusion Is The Beginning of Wisdom – The beginning of an unfinished treatment

    Confusion Is The Beginning of Wisdom – The beginning of an unfinished treatment by Chris GowensConfusion is
    the beginning of wisdom -Socrates

    It’s amazing, after what, twenty years, as I look out of my
    window I can see maybe fifteen to twenty houses, houses in ‘my’ street, a
    street that I have lived in for one fifth of a century, yet I couldn’t tell you
    who lives there, I couldn’t tell you the names of more than four or five of
    them,…call them the others. Granted not all of my neighbours have lived here as
    long as me but still… After listening to it twice, I can remember most of a
    song or from two ‘meals’, the cooking times of a microwavable meal, stored for
    future reference, I’m sure I must have heard their names before, and things
    that may have occurred, so why not the details from this wealth people, a tribe
    who might own answers, whom I’ve never tried to look at never mind talk to, I
    mean it would be strange if I was trying to make friends with everybody in the
    world, probably ostracise myself further than the indifference in me does at
    the moment….  …. I wonder if they know me… unless they’ve stopped asking
    questions.

    Now as I wonder about names and the things these folk do,
    I’m asking myself why I’m dissatisfied with my lot ‘round these parts, is it
    actually the place that’s moribund or just the dead people, like me, who trudge
    on with full bellies, no hunger in their hearts, people who have stopped asking
    questions. There are questions that you can’t answer and there are questions
    that you answer without trying as part of who we are and the things we do….
    just fading away, sleeping, working, drinking, smoking, watching, thinking, and
    moving nowhere,… telling me, myself and anyone else who still asks questions
    why I’m not particularly happy, today, or yesterday and possibly tomorrow. So
    why am I thinking so much about it, it’s obvious, to change things, well you do
    exactly that, change events or practices and habits that occur in your day or
    week or whatever time frame you want to think about… but it’s crazy, it’s as
    simple as this, stop doing ‘a’ and do ‘b and c’ instead, so why
    isn’t it so easy? I don’t know.

     I hope that when I stop asking and wondering it is
    from happiness or the completion of a goal or dare I say it love, and not from
    a catharsis or misery, a misery that you can’t grasp just a fog that slowly
    clouds. Even the people with something to say they state and don’t probe, speak
    without ponder or wonder as the fog and mist restricts their view to such an
    extent that they just want to get by without a thorn in their side… at least
    I’m still asking questions….   One more question, who am I to judge
    the others.

    Me

    I’ll tell you who … it as good a place to start as any….
    Well where do I begin? With the truth? What’s that? Am I finished growing as a
    person? Who knows? Some substantial sideburns would be nice.

    Ok, I’m 25 at the time of writing, if we get to the last
    chapter together I’ll probably be very middle aged, I think this could take a
    while… on that note I hope we don’t get there as I may have stopped asking
    questions, for the right reasons though! So as I was saying, I’m 24 at the
    moment and that is a truth, what does that say about me? I’ve seen the rise and
    fall of Thatcher’s Britain, boom and bust, Blue Labour and relative wealth, but
    understand poverty, or I can say that I do, and believe I have enough in me to
    say this. I’ve had an easy ride though, Iron chancellors for parents, never had
    it all and never had a feeling of neglect materially, however I was forced to
    wear bad woollen cardigans on occasions in the early eighties when I was dressed
    by my legal and natural guardians. So I’ve never had to do without above and
    beyond the basics, but you know I’m never satisfied in terms of having things,
    not that I want them on a plate, but I want items, products, consumer goods,
    clothes, electricals, lots of…  you’d think I was an advertisers dream,
    but I hate them, I think I actively advertise goods to myself consciously and
    subconsciously, in my sleep, and in the day, I burn with desire, validating
    mobile phones and new mobile phones with MP3 players built in even though I
    already have a watch with an MP3 player built in that I don’t use to tell the
    time, or even listen to music on all that much! The strange thing is though I
    didn’t want an MP3 player particularly, or a new watch, now I have a limited version
    of both that I don’t use because they are limited, I made a bad choice. I’ll go
    on to tell you more about me, more rational things, coherent things and, to you
    maybe, more relevant things, but this says quite a lot about me I think, I made
    a bad decision.

    So me, I think I am, I know I am, one of the few assertions
    I’ll make, I am a good person, I am perverted, I must be to think that someone
    might want to read this, sometimes I shine and make others shine, sometimes I
    am the darkest most evil spirit imaginable, the dark side I resist however. I
    think a lot, but I feel like ‘my’ thoughts are exactly that, ‘mine’, and valid
    and not idiotic, na<ve maybe, but not idiotic. I bet everyone thinks that
    about their own thoughts, that they own them, that they cultivated them, I beg
    to differ, I can smell the stench of brainwash daily, I know that people rarely
    look in the mirror daily and think about things, they just look in the Daily
    Mirror, and think that they’ve thought, they don’t choose to poison themselves,
    because they think that they’ve thought what they speak about. Validating their
    uniform opinion on an editorial which must be good and proper because it’s news
    and it keeps them in the know, because of the safety net that millions of
    ‘others’ think that they think the same. I’m not specifying the news or the
    media or the advertisers or the Church, I mean the World, it seems numb to me,
    I know this is rich coming from a self proclaimed good person who hasn’t
    bothered with much more than a pea sized fraction of life’s ocean but I really
    think if you look and listen there’s not enough ‘people’ anymore. People want
    to fit into a demographic and be a piece of something big but not exciting,
    wallow in a safe pool of normality as long as they stand out enough, to like,
    be loved and to love and be liked, dressed in the right clothes in the meantime
    of course. I border on all of my accusations, that’s hopefully why I’m able to
    think about it, I hope I can see it, I hope I’m looking in the right direction
    and not into the mirror that tricks me into believing in what’s not quite
    there.

    I digress, back to me, well I really don’t know how to
    define myself on paper, being my friend or lover or something would let you see
    me, but I can’t understand how to tell you who I am, what are the facts that
    you need to know? A friend and a lover would see me, but different parts of me.
    Take pieces from the jigsaw and you get an incomplete picture, people who don’t
    think that there are pieces missing mistake what they see for the whole nine
    yards. So do I exist in an infinite amount of ways? Do I have a single self
    reserved for me and myself, well I think so. I am to you what you know of me,
    what we have talked about, what we have done together, what other people have
    said to us, to you about me, told us to do, where we have been, so my point, we
    are defined by experience and perception, these things that we share.

     So me!  I can’t define, I don’t know if it’s relevant
    to me, so what do I tell you,  I’m afraid you don’t get a list or much
    more of a description, I’ll ask us questions and tell you stories and give you
    some words on this paper, you can know me from hereon in Feel free to love me,
    or hate me, or vote for none of the above, my story is unorganised and messy
    and might not make much sense but the meaning will drip through, these words
    strung together are some of my life, some of what shape me and some of what I
    think, a neurotic northern boy and his views, a slice of a life and this boy’s
    thoughts. I hope you read on.

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