Tom Jennings

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

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.
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Dogville Rendezvous by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 7, April 2004]

In some ways a marvellous film, Dogville is at root a con trick – which neither its director nor the critics acknowledge, argues Tom JenningsDogville Rendezvous by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 7, April 2004]
 
 
In some ways a marvellous film, Dogville is at root a con trick – which neither its director nor the critics acknowledge, argues Tom Jennings
 
In Dogville, Lars Von Trier claims to tackle big themes – (among others) religion and humanism; a community’s treatment of refugees; forgiveness and revenge; and the nature of modern (US) society. If that wasn’t enough, we’re saddled with various devices and genres – a starkly-lit, minimal, Brechtian set with white outlines painted on the floor instead of walls and roads; Dickensian chapter titles and all-knowing European voiceover; the American tradition of literary fables and parables, and its cinema of small town life (from the Western and Frank Capra through to David Lynch); all filmed in jerky digital video with realistic sound effects bearing little or no relation to the visual aesthetic. Despite vast overegging, the pudding’s artifice unexpectedly works, in the sense of fully engaging viewers with emotional power and immediacy for all three hours – justifying Von Trier’s ambition in artistic terms at least. In the calibre of its philosophy and politics, though, the film narrative suffers a similar fate to the mainstream bourgeois culture parodied – barely even raising the questions it purports to explore. But, unlike the director’s previous pretensions to profundity – e.g. Breaking The Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancing In The Dark (2000) – this heroic failure still gives more food for thought than most entertaining provocations can aspire to.
 
A glamorous Grace (Nicole Kidman) seeks refuge from a carload of heavies in a bleak Rockies village where a selection of stock stereotypes eke out an impoverished living. Middle class Tom (Paul Bettany) persuades the town meeting to grant her sanctuary in exchange for her communal labour, as part of his omnipotent fantasy of fashioning noble meaning in his life. The superb ensemble acting (particularly Kidman’s open-hearted humility) makes believable the defrosting of Dogville’s chilly conformist piety into something like loving collectivity, making its subsequent cruelty to her when the authorities close in all the more shocking. Once Grace exposes Tom’s motives he grasses her up, and after a lofty confab with her bigshot father his henchmen massacre the townspeople.
 
In effect, the structural trickery and cliched characterisation conceal Dogville’s underlying dishonesty. Grace is no outsider of equal status – she is not only posh, but specifically represents those historically responsible for the townspeople’s miserable grind. The twists and turns of the melodrama hinge on their response to this history – displaced onto her since active struggle against oppression has long since disappeared from their consciousness, just as the elite and their money have absconded over the mountain passes. This comprehensively compromises all talk of faith, arrogance and redemption among ordinary people, leaving the film merely as a meditation on the duplicitous malevolence of institutions whose pious pontification is ably backed up by their cultural lapdogs – in this case the megalomania of cinema, recalling Paul Virilio’s metaphor of it as a (class) ‘war machine’.
 
It certainly isn’t the anti-American tract many have supposed – it could have been set anywhere, although local idiom and provenance were obviously necessary; and box office returns would have suffered if it had been set in the director’s native Denmark. So, the harrowing final credits sequence of photographs from the 1930s US Depression documents the contemporary reality of Dogville’s period, with the clear implication that its contrived horror can in some way illuminate or explain the human condition and the real tragedies of history. But the hysterical hubris of the director, along with the great cultural traditions he references, merely exemplify the ascription of evil to the weaknesses of us lesser beings, which it is then the godlike responsibility of power to clean up (the state, capitalism or other gangsters in the political economy; and their religious and artistic apologists in the imaginative realm). Like many former New Left utopians, Von Trier delights in focusing his misanthropy on the potential for solidarity among us hapless ordinary dogs and bitches – which fails miserably due to our venality. Whereas in their moral superiority, the rich and powerful create spectacular havoc. Responding to this pessimism, we might intuit that the former is to a large degree (whether by accident or design) sedimented and structured into our lives precisely by the activities of the latter – and, adding insult to injury, subsequently interpreted as evidence of our unworthy status. OK, so we’re reminded what a vicious doghouse we’re in, but how we get out is trickier still. Unfortunately, amongst its other agendas and subtexts – which are accomplished most impressively – this is a tale that Dogville refuses to wag.
 
 
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Moral Politics at Play School by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 11, June 2005]

Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators has some interesting angles despite its sneering at childish idealism, finds Tom JenningsMoral Politics at Play School by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 11, June 2005]
 
 
Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators has some interesting angles despite its sneering at childish idealism, finds Tom Jennings
 
The Edukators surf the new wave of smart, sophisticated and popular German language cinema which – even better – tackles ticklishly controversial social and political subject matter.1 Here Jan (Daniel Brühl), Peter (Stipe Erceg) and Jule (Julia Jentsch) manifest their revolutionary zest in a postmodern pastiche of cod-situationism, terrorising the upper classes by rearranging their furniture to prefigure revolution turning the world upside down. The ethics of violence loom once their playful innocence turns sour in the crucible of realpolitik (symbolised by Burghart Klaussner’s yuppie tycoon), and the spectres of Baader-Meinhoff and all the other spectacular disasters of modern ‘propaganda by the deed’ cloud the horizon. Tackling far too many complex levels at once, excessive ambition here inevitably trivialises and patronises much more than it edukates.
 
True, most cinematic treatments so far have conceived the Western urban guerilla purely in terms of personal conflicts and inadequacies fully determining political motivation, consciousness and action – with attention to character depth and ideology in the context of involvement in real struggle omitted in the unseemly haste to ram home the message that all resistance is futile.2 This film sidesteps such conclusions, while flirting with them – for example the only genuine activism we see is an earnestly inoffensive anti-sweatshop high street demo mopped up by the riot squad. And, whereas many of the hundreds of thousands descending on meetings of the G8 and other organs of the New World Order have already moved robustly beyond the celebratory passivity of ‘Feed the World’ charitability, concrete agendas resonating with the everyday concerns of ordinary folk have yet to crystallise. If you can stomach its contempt (and total ignorance of current radical politics), this is an enjoyable and entertaining contribution (of sorts) to such debate.
 
Co-writer (with Katharina Held) and director Hans Weingartner claimed to want to depict the quandary facing contemporary European youth in embracing revolutionary politics – given the death of communism, decline of the Left and neoliberal triumphalism. He didn’t specify exactly which youth he meant, and the social background and present position of his protaonists are somewhat lost in translation. Worse – and with a significance unnoticed by the critics – the film’s title mutates from the evocatively ominous ‘Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei’ (‘The fat years are over’) to the vaguely uplifting progressivism of the English release. As one of the slogans graffitied on yacht club members’ walls,3 the original emphasis appears to identify the trio’s targets, but actually refers to their political discourse itself – the edukators’ relentlessly (and tiresomely) moralising judgmentalism representing conversations with the ruling classes rather than any autonomous sentiment of what might be done about them.
 
The only glimmer of strategic savvy is Jan and Peter’s relish at newspaper coverage of their growing notoriety, anticipating a copycat epidemic of enforced feng shui infecting the private spaces of power.4 This is an amusing (if unthreatening) fantasy of a ‘revolutionary situation’ – though which historical agents might foster the transition from home makeover to insurrection are similarly unclear. The plot enlightens us in this respect in the transition from student pranks to serious matters of life and death, where Jule’s experiences as a downmarket femme fatale undermine the Boys Own adventure. Her humiliation by the boss and patrons of a posh restaurant compound her outrage at the ‘injustice’ she suffers, having been diverted from aspirations for a comfortably useful life as a teacher by her uninsured collision with Hardenberg’s Beamer. The ensuing ‘oppressiveness’ of damages payments leads to her dead-end waitressing, and then further blunders – hitting his pad on a whim, the kidnapping, and subsequent shilly-shallying disarray.
 
 
Moral Politics at Play School
 
Put bluntly, the ‘fat years’ are certainly not finished for the rich – and given their propensity for rapid-fire condemnatory statistics, the edukators would hardly be unaware of this. But the good times are precisely over for the contemporary new middle classes facing the rapid proletarianising precariousness of their previous privileges.5 Read through conventional Freudian spectacles, these late babyboomers are rebelling against the world bequeathed to them by their parents. In routine middle class adolescent fashion, their moral disgust clothes itself in rhetoric of the global poor, but its emotional force derives more from self-pity and criteria of taste and lifestyle. These are values inculcated in them by, and showing their complicity with, consumer society – reproduced also in the camera’s loving fascination with those sumptuous but emotionally frigid mansions. Meanwhile, the older generations grew up with utopian dreams of a better society, but went with the flow trying to get by – only to get slapped in the face by the infantile tantrums and highminded self-indulgence of their kids.
 
Then, when the power relations are reversed, so too is the conventional ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Secluded with fat cat hostage in the mountains, our heroes are seduced by his self-effacing fatherly realism and personal charm, forking out for provisions and disclosing that, back in the day, he too was a revolutionary hanging out with the Berlin class of ’68 SDS leadership. The pace of The Edukators slows to a standstill as the utter bankruptcy of their oppositional project becomes clear – most fatally flawed from its dependence on the enemy to provide tactical momentum. At the end they waken from their hypnotic trance in thrall to bourgeois power, having learned that comradeship can transcend Oedipal complexes and the complexities of love. Again, their decision to break properly from their roots is precipitated by Hardenberg’s entirely predictable betrayal, but the upbeat denouement shows the newly adult edukators outwitting the government. And who knows, if they get round to formulating worthwhile aims external to their insecure egos, they might yet proceed to genuinely radical shenanigans …
 
 
Notes 
1. including the good humour of Goodbye Lenin (dir. Wolfgang Becker; also starring Daniel Brühl), Michael Haneke’s savage dissections of  bourgeois mores, and Fatih Akin’s subversive genius – all reaching beyond the various austere modernisms, elitist arrogances and existential angstiness of Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder et al.
 
2. Recent examples being Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night (Red Brigades) and Robert Stone’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (Symbionese Liberation Army). Manuel Huerga’s forthcoming Salvador (yet again starring Brühl) may or may not buck the trend in portraying anarchist bank robber Salvador Puig Antich (the last Spaniard garrotted under Franco).
 
3. along with strictures such as ‘You have too much money’ (duh!).
 
4. the results of which suggestively resemble so much contemporary installation art.
 
5. see contributions to Mute, issue 29, which usefully outline European ‘precarity’ theory and practice so far (www.metamute.com).
 
 
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Extracting The Michael and Slurs & Stereotypes by Tom Jennings

2 reviews of Fahrenheit 911: essay published in Variant, No. 21, Autumn 2004, pp.7-9; review published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 15, August 2004]EXTRACTING THE MICHAEL(Variant 21, 2004)

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 has attracted frenzied debate among right-wing, ‘quality’ liberal and radical and alternative media and critics alike – all trying to enlist the meanings mobilised by the film into their own discourses of politics, journalism, and the ‘reality’ of the world. Fair enough, as far as it goes. Somewhat surprisingly, given its enormous commercial success and an audience already many millions strong, its significance as a film has received much less attention – as a commodity circulating in a popular cultural environment which articulates with, but cannot be reduced to, current affairs and documentary genres. So, though it may be necessary to carefully scrutinise the levels of accuracy and logic and to judge the status of the information and arguments presented, analysis of F911 so far has been reluctant to imagine what its impact might be on the attitudes of cinemagoers seeking spectacular entertainment, and what relevance this might have to its potential political resonance. From this angle, it may be impossible to disentangle the complicated presence of the director as author and film star, and his taking the piss out of power, from other substantive effects of the film. Nevertheless, what follows attempts to sketch out what would be needed to begin that task.
Reference to the song lyrics ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ ends the film, with George W. Bush attempting a quotation and, as per, getting his lines wrong. Counterposed to a line from Orwell (1984) – “the war is meant to be continuous … a war of the ruling group against its own subjects” – Moore aligns himself simultaneously with the US ruling elites and with the general populace (‘us’). Both are  counterposed to ordinary lower class Americans (‘them’) who, he asserts, join the armed forces to preserve freedom because ‘we’ ask them to. “Will they ever trust us again?” (my emphasis) is Moore’s rhetorical question. The slippage of agency is curious given F911’s demonstration of all the different ways the Iraq war and its policy corollaries have damaged nearly everyone involved both at its sharp end and in the distant ‘heartlands’. Meanwhile, as comprehensively and convincingly documented in the film (including with their royal Saudi and Bin Laden family business associates), the war’s biggest beneficiaries have been the same US corporate profiteers who bankrolled the 2000 presidential election campaign.1
This rather different kind of scandal is the film’s starting point. Even here, it wasn’t enough for the rabid neoconservative clique who engineered the Bush/Cheney victory to mobilise the usual panoply of seedy Republicans, fundamentalist Christians and other moral fascists against such an obviously pathetic yuppie pillock (Al Gore). To get their latest moronic puppet into the White House, they still needed media manipulation courtesy of Dubya’s cousin at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, blatant vote rigging in Florida presided over by his brother Governor Jeb Bush, and the final (and most revealing) farce of the Supreme Court and Senate lining up to slavishly protect ‘the institutions of State’ from any serious investigation. According to Moore’s hype machine, Fahrenheit 9/11 was intended to cut Bush’s cowboy gang off at the pass in the next presidential elections in November. If successful, this will allow upper class Democrat John Kerry to pander to corporate interests instead, just like Clinton did, but presumably without being quite so brazen about it.2
Star Strangled BannersUnfortunately, the fascination with figureheads and personalities is no aberration. Moore’s efforts in this direction in the past included the mantra of ‘Tweedlebush or Tweedlegore’ in his active support for Ralph Nader (who seriously eroded the Democrat vote last time) and, apparently in all seriousness, trying to kickstart a campaign to persuade talk-show host Oprah Winfrey to run for president. On the other hand, this track record does indicate that F911’s patronising conclusion about lower class kids and their parents duped into enlisting then being betrayed by their leaders, is no accident. Presenting himself as so right(eous), in opposition to those who are both wrong and evil, leaves him no real alternative but to portray his audience as hapless marks at the mercy of power and needing enlightenment from his bluff and bluster. Through what is, in effect, his (unconscious) identification with the powerful, Moore blends strategies drawn from homegrown populist political traditions with the emotionally resonant narrative and structural devices of popular culture genres. As a music-hall master of ceremonies, carnival huckster or rabble-rousing demagogue, his underlying motivational pattern is to inflate and project his own ego through his work, resulting in a concealment of intellectual deficiency under a blanket of narcissism and paranoia, energised with appeals to sentiment focused on his self-deprecating ‘ordinary guy’ charisma.
It certainly works as entertainment, as testified by the record-breaking box office of F911 particularly among working class audiences and in conservative mid-West and armed forces towns, who normally turn out for melodrama served up in standardised Hollywood dressings and who may shun worthy documentaries. Moore thus raises his stock in the media markets and boosts his personal star profile and mythology as a ‘working class rebel’. From this angle, inspired parallels are drawn between the economic destruction of Western urban/industrial wastelands and the military havoc wreaked in Iraq, along with the depression, desperation and grief suffered by both sets of inhabitants. This is set against the sinister prowling of armed forces recruiters and the cynical dishonesty of their patter; reproduced and attenuated later in the abuse of Iraqi citizens by those recruited. On their return home in both physical and psychic torment, Iraq veterans then learn that their government is enthusiastically cutting back the already pitiful levels of medical and welfare aid due to them. It’s not even deemed necessary to remind us of Vietnam.
Rarely are arguments like this put together so effectively on screen in front of such huge audiences. Better still, they are interspersed and augmented with a wide range of highly salient and suggestive information which, although already in the public realm and theoretically available to anyone with the resources required to collect it, is scrupulously suppressed, skated over, or (at best) detached from all context in mainstream current affairs reportage. So the press managed to spin into a semblance of coherence the thoroughly spurious and contradictory explanations and justifications over Iraq offered so hamfistedly by the government.3 If part of the project is to propel into a widespread consciousness elements of the kind of critique normally associated with meticulous scholars such as Noam Chomsky (whose readership is relatively tiny in comparison), then F911 has to be judged a triumph.
Likewise, plenty of footage is uncovered demonstrating the utter irrelevance of political processes purporting to protect against executive excess. First the top judges and senators (Democrat and Republican alike) refused to invalidate Bush’s election in the first place – better to disenfranchise a few thousand mainly poor Black Florida voters (and that’s just the ones known about) than question the integrity of the electoral system. Then the 2002/3 Patriot Acts legislated unheard-of degrees of surveillance and interference with ‘civil rights’, supposedly to facilitate anti-terrorist policing. Congress voted these bills through without anyone even reading them, but this was no regrettable oversight in a moment of panic. Instead we are assured by one put-upon Congressman that he and his colleagues never have time to examine what they vote on. The film’s failure to consolidate and interpret these demonstrations of the meaninglessness of liberal democracy’s institutions has to be its greatest missed opportunity. It mirrors the  comparably craven disregard for all those routinely excluded from the flag-waving decency of white Middle America, as various non-white and muslim people suffer heightened harassment – unofficially from neighbourhood racism and as terrorist suspects for the official kind. Moore looks the other way because he daren’t ask his main target audience any of these really searching questions.4
Less, Moore, Too MuchNote, though, that while characters, variables and phenomena in the political realm are the explicit nuts and bolts of the text, F911 doesn’t work as political analysis. Moore makes no pretence of providing any conclusions regarding the history and nature of the US state and the pivotal contemporary role of the media in its reproduction. Worse, those of a forensic disposition will be able to find many inconsistencies and dubious assertions in his innuendos. In those rational terms, what he often does is to collage verifiable information with found footage, in order to highlight correlations which are very pertinent to questions of various vested interests. Going over the top to insinuate direct causal relationships is mischievous, but doesn’t necessarily intend to be taken so seriously.5 As part of the narrative, this kind of trick milks humour from our intuitive awareness of the decadence of power, which can then be mobilised as grist to the mill of outrage. As such, his material is well worth projecting into the public realm – whatever the framing –  because there is just too much to be papered over. It defies easy answers; refuses pat cliches; shatters conformist homilies; and overflows any neat, naff attempts at conventional containment. The result is therefore intensely ambiguous, as with much of the director’s previous work.6
Moore’s tactic is to take an issue of contemporary concern and uncover 57 varieties of cans of worms in true muckraking gonzo journalism style and fashion. The material is then woven together with crescendos of hilarity, rage and horror, orchestrated by Moore the Magician into revelations of innocent individuals (and families) beset by the disgusting twin towers of organised money and power. The viciousness of the satire in the first half of F911 is undoubtedly effective in reinforcing the class hatred necessary to anchor any clear-sighted rational response in passionate engagement. Here the film is content to allow this tide to flow and ebb around the only piece of restraint on show – the blank screen of September 11th signalled only by sound effects from Ground Zero. Once the focus shifts to the diverse personal tragedies of communities and lives shattered by the war on terror, however, satire turns to sanctimony. The energising momentum of laughter is lost, as is the increasingly threadbare plot. Overkill centres on the choice of a single family from Moore’s home town as the prism through which to understand the effects of war. Lila Lipscomb from Flint, Michigan, whose son died in Iraq after she urged him to enlist, has to stand in for the global degradation of humanity that this chapter of US imperialism represents.7
Perhaps to many ordinary Americans this clinches his argument that Bush is a traitor, if feeling for the bereaved parent captures those who previously voted for him.8 But when it comes to the complexities of history and politics, and the collective reflection needed to work out what to do next, Moore always fails to deliver. Structural change never makes it onto his agenda, despite being clearly implied by the sorry mess of corrupt incompetence throughout the ruling elites, state institutions and tame media in the past four years. Here, the Bush administration’s foreign (and domestic) policy has amounted to war (full stop) – not on terrorism but employing it in Afghanistan, Iraq and the more or less low-intensity propaganda and repression aimed at opponents at home (also painted as un-American and thus, in effect, as ‘foreigners’) Furthermore this was always the neoconservatives’ explicit agenda, starting from outright opposition to any kind of peace process in Palestine. But without historical context in F911, this pattern is presented as somehow exceptional, rather than a particularly virulent example of business as usual.
The closing admonition to not be fooled again now sounds like a vain hope – simply the latest in a long line of failures of the popular will – which Moore can’t acknowledge without threatening the putative efficacy of the decency of ordinary folk in a narrative trajectory which depends on its appeal to an acceptance of the nobility of the ideals and traditions of the American political system supposedly disrupted by the Bush clique. F911’s downhome moralising, cheap jibes, exploitation of sentiment, and even its casual xenophobia, can then be understood as symptomatic of Moore’s failure of nerve. He cannot attack the myths of American ‘freedom’ and the history of this discourse in stitching together America’s diverse constituencies into a patriotic unity – which is not only every bit as fraudulent as Bush et al’s conduct but which has always underpinned the ‘manufacture of consent’. It’s a major part of the problem, rather than the reassuringly familiar wellspring of resistance that the film invokes.
The director imagines that, through its sheer rhetorical power, his cinematic rollercoaster can help transform the reactionary defensiveness of middle America into a movement for change. But on the face of it, and according to his PR, his desired outcome of voting out Bush would merely recuperate all of the energy generated back into the miserable electoral game, thereby re-legitimising what the film has already shown to be irredeemable. This does no justice to the visceral euphoria occasioned by the expert editing and structuring of images, sound (bites) and story arc in F911 create the expectation of a satisfying climax – according to Hollywood conventions, for instance. Whereas the film ends with (in no particular rank order): an appeal to human decency; an assertion of that decency’s gullibility; the stupidity and duplicity of leaders; and a faith in future, better leaders. Is Moore taking the piss, pissing in the wind, or just full of piss and wind?
The Power and the VaingloryMany have concluded that F911’s inadequate ending therefore confirms the judgement that it is a bad film, despite their acknowledgement of its power. But although it’s not difficult to show that the political analysis is unconvincing and the quality of the journalism questionable, these are hardly criteria of cinematic excellence. The reasons for its power thus seem more difficult to pin down. Even cinema critics – who might be expected to appreciate the blockbuster provenance and deal with the effectivity of its fictional universe accordingly – found themselves suspending their professional judgement and watching instead an unusually long party political broadcast.9 There appears to have been a widespread cognitive dissonance arising from the mismatch between the denouement and what has gone before. Many viewers (present author included) reported reactions of raw but conflictual emotion on emerging from the cinema – simultaneous distress and exhilaration, for example – along with a thoroughgoing confusion as to what the film has done to us, and what it might mean.
In contemporary cinema, though, singular linear narratives have for some time been out of fashion. Since the 1970s the formal structures of postmodern art films have seeped into the mainstream, with alternative endings, unresolvable red herrings, and playing with time, memory and perspective virtually the norm.10 F911 stirs up a whole mess of dormant and suppressed emotion, and rhetorically nails it onto the specific reality of this chapter of the New World Order via the cathartic power of cinematic audiovisual montage. No simple readings or conclusions are provided, actually, and the director as trickster almost delights in preventing these from arising. In responding to such experiences, the conflictual and contradictory elements of the audience’s psychology and everyday understanding interact to some extent with those of the image stream. We tolerate, and even seek this out, at the multiplex. In other situations which seem to require it, we gear ourselves up to be serious, rational beings. Here, strenuous effort may be made to resolve such chaotic fracturing – whenever awareness of it can’t be avoided – because it is so uncomfortable. Masquerading as documentary, F911 simultaneously prompts both these orientations.
If such a juxtaposition of fantasy and current affairs seems outlandish,11 it can be thought of in the context of the rise of many new visions of documentary in independent and alternative media. A growing awareness of the inadequacy of liberal notions of journalistic ‘balance’ has fostered dissatisfaction with the limited understanding possible of current affairs within this paradigm – given the stranglehold of commercial integration and monopolies of media programming.12 Similarly, in the recent renaissance of cinema documentary, other filmmakers concentrate on a more careful balance of information and narrative, inviting viewers to contemplation rather than reaction.13 Those of the newer UK ‘faux naif’ school place their subjective involvement in the discovery process and their personal social responses to their subjects more at centre stage. Nick Broomfield14 embarks on quests to understand controversial celebrities and events, encouraging interviewees to open up in response to his persona of a bumbling amateur investigator with an amiably naive liberal worldview.
Other such documentarists on television exercise their fashionable cynicism more openly in exoticising ‘minority’, ‘weird’ or ‘subcultural’ scenes, either from perspectives of superior knowledge and taste, or a more well-meaning secure upper class nerdy fascination.15 All the above maintain liberal detachment, so that the results amount to  tourism through worlds which – however threatening – remain forever bracketed off; never really meaning much to them, let alone fundamentally affecting or changing anything. The gathering of information, and any consequent enlightenment, therefore merge in the amusement of the protagonist and the entertainment of the viewing audience – neither of whom are ultimately touched by the experience. Their fundamentally complacent premise and conclusion is that, in practice, alienation and dissociation in cynical stasis are the only achievable values.
Shock, Horror – News as FarceBut Moore, though he may be smug, is neither liberal nor detached, and his expertise lies in provocation rather than scrupulous exposition or the search for an all-embracing ‘truth’. His method, using comedy conventions as a starting point, is to directly implicate the anguish and pain that is a fundamental ingredient of his audience’s own lives in illuminating and enlarging upon ‘objective’ situations about which we are usually only ‘informed’ by the cool authority of the news. Most of the debate about the value of F911, like views on the dwindling trust in mainstream current affairs on the part of the general public, or of tabloid power, assume that engaging the emotional response of the audience must be suspect, if not wholly negative – thus failing to appreciate our increasing orientation to the world through the lenses of our cultural literacy.
Before the last few decades of media diversification, remember, News was monolithic and monovocal – and generally understood as the singular voice of power. It could therefore be ‘trusted’ in that very specific and limited sense. Now the news anchor and star reporter stand in, but with the proliferation of images and gazes and postmodern splintering of our selves and societies we hear many versions and nuances of what used to be distilled into the one absolute word. The nature and modus operandi of propaganda have moved on, and the petty squabbling, internecine manoeuvering and decadent baseness of the ruling strata and those scrambling up the ladders of status are now visible for all to see. Overloads of trivia multiply the complexity of explanation – but then the world is complicated. The opportunities for satire are also vastly improved – through means which are always also inevitably partial, whether face to face, in local public fora and stagings, grass-roots publishing, or in making inroads into mainstream media in comics, animation, TV and film.
Comedy is potentially an extremely effective tool in savaging pretension and false authority.16 True, Moore flirts with the other end of the comic spectrum, displacing his audience’s unacknowledged self-disgust onto shared objects of prejudice – where the balm of laughter converts sorrow into hatred. Neurotic pride and vanity prevent such performers from extracting the michael from themselves – a far more effective ploy. The honest pathos of one’s own abjection generates genuine and conscious empathy – which, when handled with the requisite skill, facilitates analogy with the wider tragedies of the world. These too render us abject, but collectively so, and the puncturing by the satirist of the bad faith of the powerful takes the hilarity beyond catharsis. In the route from tame court jesters to carnivalesque subversives, and to the French revolutionary pamphleteers, for example, this becomes overtly political with an increased readiness to take action in the world – when it chimes with pre-existing tendencies for a wider clamour for change. But the comedy itself can’t create or lead anything, so our only option is to laugh uneasily at (not with) Moore for his delusional grandeur.17
One example which transcends most of the aforementioned problems with Michel Moore’s approach and that of the newer documentarists is Channel 4’s Mark Thomas Comedy Product – whose title immediately signals a self-conscious acknowledgement of the limitations of cultural commodities. Nevertheless the structure of the programme takes us back to the intimacy of club stand-up routines, and the studio and television punters are always invited to laugh at as well as with the comedian. The quest for answers to admitted naivete and ignorance means that methods are developed in practice, and a range of pragmatic forms of action advised. The emphasis throughout is on collective work and discussion, with the front man a delegate rather than leader. Overall, a dynamic sense of change implicates the audience too, rather than retreating to the complacency of existing beliefs. No perfect solutions are ever offered as a sop to satisfy the passive recipients of uplifting performance.18
Beyond a JokeTo sum up, regarding F911 as primarily a popular cultural product enables us to reverse the terms of debate about its qualities. The political intervention it proclaims is, in fact, part of its commercial promotion – not the other way round – and Michael Moore’s primary motivation, in practice, is to enhance his position (in terms of both economic and cultural capital, because these have become so closely entwined nowadays in the realms of public media). F911’s success has been engineered by a commercial strategy (or simulation) of ‘guerilla’ marketing using the convenient excuse of the political career of a more obviously tainted than usual US president.  It is an example of the persuasive potential of media and popular culture genres having entered the body politic through their saturation of our daily lives, from infancy, in the discourses embodied in cultural commodities – just as in the past it made sense to analyse folklore, mythology and religion in terms of the limiting and limited narrative possibilities offered there.
At home in his high-profile environment, Michael Moore can neither be extracted from his unconscious alignment with (other) celebrities in the star system, nor from other planets in the political universe – any more than current affairs are usefully considered to be analogous to hard-nosed theoretical physics (chaos, charm and entropy and all). As an individual Moore is far from an intellect of genius, has any number of prominent and visible ideological and personal warts, and wouldn’t pass muster in the real world as any kind of salesman let alone a politico (you’d be too busy laughing). But the egomania and drive needed to bring together large volumes of human and financial collateral in translating his vision onto celluloid probably also provide the entrepreneurial savvy to persuade investors to cough up. To them he’s doubtless considered a safe bet, in the established cinema tradition of paranoid mavericks prone to hysterical posturing. Some of these, such as Oliver Stone, also consider their work as ‘subversive’ – and it may be so, though rarely in the ways they imagine.
On balance, despite its many shortcomings and even its frankly reactionary overtones, I, for one, am happy that F911 is out there in the world and that so many millions of us are seeing it. Of course it’s important to be clear about the film and its director – the cowardice as well as the bravery, clangers and bullseyes, clarity and befuddlement. Further, it’s no bad thing to acknowledge that this is also a fair description of the human condition in general. In universalising the moral decency of common folk (Moore) and natural human common sense (Chomsky),19 we will always be found wanting.There’s little point bemoaning the fact that we are human animals with hearts, guts and minds; or that it’s a dirty world and we are in a mess. The mobilisation of emotion fosters an appreciation of the world and its people that both punctures the purity of power and avoids paralysis from imperfect knowledge.
The hints are also all there in F911that the imagined community of nation is the most profound con of the present era, with its mouldy cement of voting for leaders as liberal democracy’s feet of clay. A less opaque perception is possible of the close-knit globalising networks of domination and suffering disappearing over the on-screen horizon – from the complementary regimentation and abuse of underclass enlisters and Baghdad residents to the harassment of white US respectables and invisible internal ‘others’. Few show signs of fighting back in the film, but the implication is that any or all might. So might the audience; and more belligerently than by meekly lining up to vote or paying to be thrilled. Out of pain can come laughter, and there are many kinds of both. One laughter, one pain; one love, one blood – these are unlikely slogans at hustings for the lesser corporate-military evil. But they might begin to make sense to those viewers of F911 not prepared to sweep their gut reactions back under the carpet-bombing of presidential election news. Therefore our conclusions and interpretations can usefully converge around what active political use to make of all this – not trying to enforce as authoritative any of the many possible readings of what is, in the end, only a film.
Notes1. And although Moore himself might get even richer, thanks to the film, he is at least urging its internet pirating and distribution.
2. Cue a video outtake showing Bush addressing a fund-raiser gathering as “the haves and have-mores; I don’t call you the elite, I call you my base”.
3. Cue Secretary of State Colin Powell emphatically denying two months before September 11th that Saddam Hussein had any capacity for WMDs.
4. In his book What Next: A Memoir Towards World Peace, Serpent’s Tail, 2003, Walter Mosley stresses that, from their centuries of hard experience of noble US humanism in action, many Black Americans weren’t at all surprised that the country could be hated so much. Thus F911 could easily have found resources for such discussion very close at hand.
5. Interesting critiques which accept the f ilm in those terms can be found in: Todd Gitlin ‘Michael Moore Alas’, www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article-3-1988.jsp; and Robert Jensen ‘Beyond F911′, www.counterpunch.org/jensen07052004.html.
6. in television series such as TV Nation and The Awful Truth, bestselling books like Downsize This!,  Stupid White Men and Dude, Where’s My Country? and the films Roger And Me, 1989, and Bowling For Columbine, 1992.
7. She works as a employment counsellor to the jobless, so Moore’s rare appearance on camera hounding national politicians – only one of whom has offspring on Iraq active service – ironises as it humanises.
8. The matching shots of a grieving Iraqi mother impotently railing at American barbarism, however, are just as likely to reinforce depressive apathy.
9. So, for example, Mark Kermode (‘All Blunderbuss and Bile’, The Observer, 11 July) mistakes his lack of engagement with Moore’s vulgar exploitation of real grief and horror as based on Britishness; whereas B. Ruby Rich (‘Mission Improbable’, Sight & Sound, July, pp.14-16) is seduced by the Cannes Festival PR into discussing F911’s emotive power only in terms of swingometers.
10. see my ‘Class-ifying Contemporary Cinema’, Variant 10, 2000, pp.14-16, for further discussion.
11. despite the title being borrowed from a Ray Bradbury science fiction novel.
12. Two forthcoming documentaries tackle the significance of these developments in the present context: the independently distributed critique of Fox News, OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, dir. Robert Greenwald (see article by Don Hazen, www.alternet.org/story/19199/); and The Control Room about Arabic cable channel Al Jazeera, to be broadcast on BBC2.
13. For example Errol Morris reveals the inevitable partiality of perspective of his subjects in their particular fields, using expressionistic visuals, filming styles and editing to emphasise gaps and uncertainties in the stories told – in , for example, Gates of Heaven, 1979, The Thin Blue Line, 1988 and The Fog Of War, 2003 – the latter revealing the pomposity and shallow self-delusions of Vietnam war architect Robert McNamara.
14. e.g. in documentaries about Thatcher and South African fascist Eugene Terreblanche, two about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and Biggie & Tupac, 2001.
15. e.g. Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux respectively.
16. despite most ‘alternative’ comedians preferring to assert cool distinction by sneering at the cretinism of ordinary people.
17. and at others who reveal their (stars and) stripes in thrall to leadership cults – such as the Socialist Worker review calling on Moore to stand for office. For a corrective, see the No Sweat campaign’s more prosaic take on F911 (www.nosweat.org.uk).
18. Clearly inspired by Michael Moore’s TV work, disappointing tendencies sometimes cross over too, such as occasional hints of  little Englandism – but not too often. Respectability is decisively rejected in Mark Thomas’ insistence on retaining his own effing and blinding vernacular – which works for me, even if ensuring the show’s relegation to a minority schedule slot.
19. attributions which also seem to be transhistorical in their mythical persistence.

Slurs & Stereotypes by Tom Jennings (Freedom 65 (15), Aug 2004)
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 has catapulted into the mainstream US media an overwhelming shitheap of crucial and revealing information about contemporary American politics which has otherwise been largely falsified, trivialised, buried in ‘quality’ programming, or ignored altogether. The film is also exemplary in the energy and passion with which the contrasting effects of the Bush government’s foreign and domestic policies on their corporate US and Saudi friends, and on ordinary US and Iraqi people, are catalogued and decried. Best of all, several pivotal examples are given of the way political institutions (Supreme Court , Senate and Congress – both Democrats and Republicans) instinctively protect themselves rather than admit failure – however tragic or (literally) earth-shattering the outcome. These are no negligible achievements given that, for example, millions of us watching the film possibly had not found the time to read Chomsky, may not previously have contemplated taking any radical or alternative propaganda seriously, nor even got round to questioning the precepts of patriotism, democracy and ‘freedom’. We may now.
F9/11 covers the period from the Florida vote rigging which allowed Dubya into office through the administration’s dodgy business practices and political slackness up to September 11th, and then into Afghanistan, the Orwellian domestic fear tactics, and the latter-day Vietnam of Iraq. Via a jumble of meticulously stitched together found footage, outtakes, soundbites and mischievous associations, the film mercilessly lampoons the lies, evasions, contradictions, vested interests and all-round general farce of government conduct. Around the fulcrum of the fall of the twin towers (signalled by an audio-recording from Ground Zero and a blank screen), the focus inexorably shifts from the complacency and duplicity of the victimisers to the grief and desperation of the victimised – in a brilliant paralleling of the wastelands and wasted souls left in urban America and Iraq by the corporate-military onslaughts.
Breaking cinema box office records even in traditional mid-West and armed forces towns, F9/11 succeeds partly because it mobilises so effectively a range of popular cultural traditions – from music hall comedy to Hollywood melodrama, for example – to engage and involve its audiences. Over here, too, many multiplexes have shown it in several packed auditoria at once to those who often turn out for action thrillers and other blockbusters, and whose emotional responses have been similarly intense. The key device used by Moore in all his work in television, books and films has been to solicit identification with his persona of the little man up against big finance and corrupt government. A staple of populist political traditions, this strategy has similar drawbacks and dangers – such as facilitating the careers of charismatic charlatans. Indeed, now a multimillionaire with formidable PR backup, Moore could be said to fit that profile. But then he’s only an entertainer, right? …
However, poking fun at incompetent, greedy and self-serving leaders as a prelude to outrage at the liberties they take is only a first step. Unfortunately, the force of polemic is not matched by rational analysis – either of the history and nature of the US political system or of the iniquitous role of the media and intellectuals in legitimising it. So, having dredged up the reserves of depression, apathy and reactionary defensiveness of middle America, and fashioned them into anguished hilarity and furious indignation aimed squarely at the status quo, F9/11 squanders its rhetorical power on a feeble reiteration of the inherent decency of the people, who are urged to choose better leaders next time. Such a false and miserable climax left many viewers stumbling out of the cinema in confusion.
In a sense this dissonance of thought and sentiment may mirror Moore’s own. After all, our gut-level understanding of the significance of the rich and powerful in the world and in our lives often is impeccable – even if it receives very little confirmation from official discourse. But it doesn’t translate directly into intellectual understanding, especially when it comes to working out what to do next. Being humble, we don’t expect it to – that takes collective work and struggle. Whereas Moore inflates his narcissistic ego in order to play the carnival huckster delighting us in his performance – where admitting ignorance and error would ruin the illusion. But political activism is rather more permanent than the temporary subversions of carnival, in which case a puffed-up ego easily succumbs to the hubris and paranoia of demagoguery. Come to think of it, film directors have been known to be megalomaniacs too.
And F9/11 is only a film. On one level an effort of memory and suggestive interpretation, the scope is  too short term to convince. In the end it retreats to a recuperation – complete with commercial pitch as controversial electoral revelation – into the same old political game that it has already mortally undermined. The really useful insight it offers is in presenting so much compelling material in a way that resonates emotionally with so many of us and our desired audiences at once – predisposing them to engage with the ideas. This is a method we would do well to study.
www.variant.org.uk
www.freedompress.org.uk
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Going Through the Motions by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 8, April 2005]

9 Songs is the ‘dirtiest film ever shown in Britain’.1 If so thought must be dirty, as that’s all it aroused in Tom Jennings.Going Through the Motions by Tom Jennings
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 8, April 2005]
9 Songs is the ‘dirtiest film ever shown in Britain’.1 If so thought must be dirty, as that’s all it aroused in Tom Jennings.
Maverick director Michael Winterbottom’s demystifying of genre has yielded an unparalleled range of highly distinctive films.2 His latest innovation is that 9 Songs’ sex scenes are not simulated, featuring the full hetero hardcore checklist in fly-on-the-wall anatomical close-up – given an ‘18′ certificate uncut by the BBFC and striking a blow for what art can dare to project into the pub(l)ic realm. Through impeccable handheld digital video photography, appropriately dingy lighting and muted colour, effectively brisk editing and valiant acting, the waxing and waning of a love affair is depicted in flashbacks of sexual activity interspersed with concert footage, in an attempt to capture the way memory prioritises iconic moments and intensities.
So, following a one-night stand after a Brixton Academy gig, fun-loving American student Lisa (Margot Stilley) regularly fucks with academic Matt (Kieran O’Brien), but becomes increasingly frustrated by his hidebound cultural, social and erotic routines. She tries to awaken sensuality and enchantment in him (musically via salsa moves and sexually in sado-masochism-lite), but his tender trump cards (earnest cookery, icy seaside skinny-dipping, Christmas tree decoration) barely touch her. Lacking all conviction as a meditation on love, and laughably pretentious as existential philosophy, 9 Songs somehow does convince despite also falling so far short of entertainment or engagement.
Thanks to straightforward realism, the film implies that sex itself is actually no big deal, either as misguided aspiration for personal fulfilment or grounds for complaint. The mechanics of bodily connection fascinate us because physical pleasure can point beyond present disappointment towards meaningful possibilities of intimacy and exploration. However, as Michel Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality, the contemporary injunction to obsess about sex as the centre of identity displaces attention from both personal ethics and the overarching social and political disciplining of bodies. Base sexual urges scarcely represent the ultimate horizon of human yearnings for growth, even if twentieth century capitalism’s masturbatory individualism and narcissistic culture is exemplified by the pornography industry dressing them up for instant gratification. The tragedies of misogyny, homophobia and paedophilia testify to the damage done in falling for that illusion; and 9 Songs gestures at what consumerism promises but is constitutionally unable to deliver.
Going Through the MotionsThe film overturns this overvaluation of sexual behaviour – whose mediated forms embellish fantasy in a hysterical ‘frenzy of the visible’, ignoring anything heartfelt in the most fleeting throwaway consumption. Their seductiveness obliterates the less-thrilling reciprocal altruisms of shared solace and affectionate companionship which enrich mature sexual love and non-erogenous sensuous engagement with the world. Conversely, childish playfulness and polymorphous perversity are justifiably cherished in sexual or any other creative activity. Rather than any ideal integration of these unlikely bedfellows, perpetual reworkings of the dialectics of desire seem inevitable when danger, tragedy and farce circumscribe the human condition.
Absolute safety, security and purity are guaranteed only in death, where moral judgmentalism also leads. Healthy relations in any social sphere require continual pragmatic renegotiation of intention and consequence – but not, as here, among those sleepwalking their way through someone else’s script. The excerpt from Michael Nyman’s sixtieth birthday concert as one of the nine songs now seems less incongruous among the drearily derivative indie dirges. Along with the choice of profession for the male lead as glaciologist, Nyman’s stylistic variations on death-knell orchestral minimalism echo the film’s sterility, the pathos of the protracted decay of rock and roll, and the ironic desperation of postmodern culture.
More specifically, Winterbottom accidentally deconstructs humdrum mainstream masculinity as tediously adolescent and soul-destroying, and the smug flush of young middle class ‘enlightened’ courtship as so much shallow self-delusion. The hardcore conventions aren’t tarted up with titillation, the unexplained complicity of women and other trappings of the self-important patriarchal male gaze which work to conceal porn’s fundamental lack of respect. But images can’t convey fleshly force, heat, textures,  pheromones or feelings, and with no psychological complexity rendering the characters real to each other or prompting identification among viewers, their sex acts seem irrelevant.
The director’s negativity governs this show, and, hey presto, it’s cold out there in the unknown/unknowable continent of Antarctica/feminine desire – even if (as we’re told in the voiceover) the history of life on earth is tantalisingly fossilised therein, and which furthermore retains the capacity to thaw out and flood us all. But not in this scenario.
And if all this feels far-fetched – well, it’s pretty chilly in the bedroom, too, when the rich traces of bodily biography are reduced to hapless couplings by people displaying only the merest hints of awareness of self or other. So Matt resignedly (and fancifully) ascribes selfishness, wildness and impetuosity to Lisa in a denial and projection of his own imaginative failure to rise to the occasion and offer her anything she wants. Distracted ennui sees her turn from provocation to bitching about how boring he is, preferring a lapdancer or vibrator to his sexual presence, and eventually abandoning him altogether to stew in his own juices. It remains unclear why it was supposed that real sex between partners who don’t care for each other might be better than, for example, simulated sex between those who do.
9 Songs goes through the necessary motions of its supercool exercise in calculated miserablism – quietly rubbishing the preposterous  Four Weddings, Bridget Jones and all those other sorry antiseptic upperclass excuses for passion, but with absolutely nothing fabulous or of significance to offer in their place. Generically an (anti-)romance, it is undoubtedly an interesting experiment in critiquing both the fairy-tale complacency of love stories and the ridiculous pneumatics of porno. Unfortunately it fails to grab you by the attention (or any other parts, despite the shock-horror headlines) – and will really only exercise those who prefer to not be moved.
Notes1. according to the tabloids, anyway.
2. including Wonderland’s meditative ensemble tapestry of the intersecting lives of various Londoners, In This World’s quasi-documentary journey with a young Afghan refugee, Code 46’s speculative fiction, and 24 Hour Party People’s docufictional honouring of Madchester as well as more downbeat period dramas (Jude and the forthcoming version of Tristram Shandy).
www.variant.org.uk
www.freedompress.org.uk
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Same Difference? by Tom Jennings
[Essay on cinema representations of European Asians & Muslims, published in Variant, No. 23, May 2005]
[see also Part Two: ‘Breaking Cover’, Variant, No. 24, September 2005 – discussing documentary representations of British and European Muslim women]
Same Difference? by Tom Jennings
[essay on film representations of British and European Asians and Muslims, published in Variant, No. 23, May 2005]

“The media and politicians don’t talk about Christian extremism, fundamentalism or terrorism – but everyone who considers themselves a Muslim feels tainted due to the propaganda use of 9/11” (Paul Laverty)1
Adding to the abiding casual cruelty of skin prejudice, people of Asian descent in Britain have faced a panoply of extra pressures in the last three years or so as a result of government panic based on ‘intelligence’ concerning external and internal threats of international (unofficial) terror – handily projected into the ‘strangeness’ of diasporic Islamic culture, in concert with displacing the blame for the withdrawal of welfare onto migrants and refugees instead of needing to feed the greed of corporate gangmasters. However, from recent current affairs and documentary exposure of the dishonesty and duplicity of mainstream institutional and megabusiness interests,2 it is becoming more widely understood how political ideology in the age of hyperreal spin routinely manufactures history in ways fictional genres hitherto scarcely imagined. Narrative construction and the elaboration of fantasy with contemporary visual technologies clearly resonate with media-saturated publics at levels of effectivity different from the more traditional reliance on dispassionate journalism and intellectual integrity. In any case, given the age-old capacity of stories to appeal to our deepest feelings and to change perceptions and behaviour, fiction may also have a role in subverting the patterns of domination in late capitalist governance – just as the hidden transcripts of folk culture and common vernacular have always sustained the oppressed and confounded power.
So, this essay reviews two high profile fictional film representations of the lives of British Muslim people. Their production was motivated by a wish on the part of non-Muslims to set the record straight with realistic portrayals of men, women, families and social networks just as complex and multilayered in morality, ethics, problems and behaviour as any other groups within a modern multiracial, multicultural society. Readings of these films are then set against a work of European cinema released at the same time to similar levels of acclaim but with no such issue-led raison d’être – but whose subject matter might offer comparable if contrasting depth in this respect. Finally, the closing section assesses the significance of these and other popular cultural representations of Asian or Muslim Westerners, attempting to sketch out the grounds upon which a recognition can be nurtured of the presence of conflictual diversity in us all. Acknowledging how differences between us necessarily and irrevocably cohabit and mingle with our similarities may undermine the us-and-them crusader rhetoric of Islamophobia along with the deeper-seated (conscious and unconscious) white racism lurking behind it – as well as in the long run eroding the further horizons of all cultural/ethnic and biological essentialisms too.
Family Matters1. Home and the Broken-HeartedDirector Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty changed tack for Ae Fond Kiss (2004) – their third collaboration set in the West of Scotland following My Name Is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002) – in response to the dehumanising vilification of Muslims whipped up by the media and politicians since 9/11, and the consequently heightened everyday hostility experienced by British Asians. Laverty felt obliged to “do a story that saw Muslim people as rounded human beings; and family life as family life is everywhere, with its tensions and jealousies and guilts and the rest of it.” Similarly, to Loach: “Families are families; the surface details change but the emotional blackmail is the same … and there’s always rebellion”.3
Ae Fond Kiss sees the comfortable Khans from Glasgow’s southside arrange marriage between a distant cousin from Pakistan and their only son Casim (Atta Yaqub). He intervenes in a fracas between his sister Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh) and classmates when meeting her from her Catholic school, and a mutual attraction with Irish music teacher Roisin (Eva Birthistle)4 leads to them becoming lovers and a short break in Spain. They split over his impending marriage but reconcile when he comes clean with his parents. Then she is sacked because her priest (Gerard Kelly) denounces her for living in sin with a Muslim. His older sister Rukhsana (Ghizala Avan) plots to wreck the relationship to save her own marriage plans, and parents Tariq (Ahmad Riaz) and Sadia (Shamshad Akhatar) plead with Casim for family honour, offering as collateral the house extension built for him. His friend Hammid (Shy Ramzan) lives with a white woman but keeps it secret, and advises against sacrificing the entire family for a girl.5 Their final ploy flies in prospective bride Jasmine (Sunna Mirza) plus family behind Casim’s back, contriving Roisin to witness the scene. She storms off but when Tahara tells him all, he rushes to Roisin’s side …
The narrative arc of the story depends on Tariq’s insistence on ruling the Khan roost. Starting as effective comedy,6 this increasingly turns to pathos and farce as he refuses to acknowledge the limits of his power, culminating in hysterically smashing up the extension. Unfortunately his tragic experiences during the 1947 post-imperial partition of India7 are declaimed like a sermon halfway through the film rather than being woven into the story, which short-circuits any audience sympathy won by Riaz’ ebullient performance. Similarly, in the early sequence where Casim and Roisin first meet, Tahara makes a political speech listing her many conflicting loyalties and identifications.8 But while her intelligence and determination are heartening, we can’t appreciate the context of her (or her siblings’) development in and outside the family. Unexplained individual traits are forced to extremes in recognisably Loachian melodramatic fashion, and the chances of resonance among those whose families are “the same everywhere” correspondingly recede.
Variously lined up in traditional family structure positions – a device to represent diversity among UK Muslims – scant depth is shown in the Khans’ personal relationships, and we struggle to sense their feelings for each other. Worse, Roisin’s biography (including a failed marriage) is only mentioned in passing, so no parallels can be imagined between the lovers in terms of the demands of the past, the development of self in the family or its influence on present orientations and decisions. Birthistle is a strong and convincing actress playing a resolute character, whereas Casim’s dissembling makes him a rather unconvincing lover for her – seeming morally cowardly in concealing his concerns. But Yaqub is a novice actor and fails to convey ambivalence – unfairly matching the disproportionate pressures forming Casim’s character against her scripted mystery and fortitude – and we are further unable to interpret her surprise at the trouble their relationship causes among his family.9 Roisin’s apparent lack of connection to her ‘roots’ may indicate a decline of family values compared to their importance among those of Pakistani descent, but the erasure of her backstory makes it impossible to compare strategies of negotiation under varying terms of parental control. Plus, if the filmmakers’ preferred culture clash was in fact regressive conservatism versus secular modernism (in Islam/Rome disguise), then equity would surely require showing the kinship of both.
Seen as an unremarkable classic romance, Ae Fond Kiss unbalances the middle class aimlessness of its personable lovers with Casim’s ‘issues’, rather than critically examining these.10 Their future indeed seems full of hope; however, we learn nothing either about Roisin’s or the Khans’ class backgrounds. The nearest we get to economic threat is her priest’s “Tom, Dick or Mohammed” prejudice complicating Roisin’s career, while the Khan seniors’ intransigence revolves around social, cultural and economic capital – and Casim’s accountancy degree and college DJing coalesce in entrepreneurial nightclub ambitions, Rukhsana aims to maintain family integrity and achieve happiness in her arranged marriage into higher social status, and Tahara intends to escape to train in journalism. However, in lower class contexts family honour may be felt as a more desperate matter – where, given the prevailing institutional and everyday white racisms, the status at stake is that of survival and acceptance as part of society/humanity rather than stratifying superiority. Poorer young British Asians who find economic autonomy more problematic thus face different “fetters on their choices”11 in responding to generational and official control. Perhaps Yasmin (2004), grounded in West Yorkshire’s more downmarket provincialism, could contemplate some of the commonplace socio-economic realities that Ae Fond Kiss ignores.12
2. Marriage of InconvenienceYasmin was developed by director by Kenny Glenaan because “There’s an invisible war happening in Britain which British Caucasians may or may not see, but for the Muslims of our country, it’s similar to being Irish in the 70s and 80s – guilty until proven innovent”; with the intention of giving “a positive portrayal of British Muslim experience, post 9/11, as a way of almost putting your fist through this notion of Islamophobia that’s grown up since”.13 The eponymous local authority care worker (Archie Panjabi) drives from a terraced house on a Keighley estate in traditional Muslim hijab and burqa and en route changes into casual Western gear for work and pub sessions with colleagues – including John (Steve Jackson), with whom friendship may develop into intimacy (though she confides nothing of her home life). Then she reverts to dutiful unpaid caregiving for her strict father (Renu Setna) and teenage brother Nasir (Syed Ahmed) – who also defers to custom in morning prayer duties at the mosque, but otherwise indulges in petty drug dealing and consorting with local girls.
Yasmin’s respect (though not, perhaps, ‘love’) for and loyalty to her father has even stretched to agreeing to unconsummated marriage to rural Pakistani goatherd Faysal (Shahid Ahmed) until his UK citizenship is assured, but she barely tolerates his presence or parental authority – and her increasingly caustic tongue suggests she’s marking time. Then after September 11th the uneasy local equilibrium goes sour, with increasing hostility at work, abuse in public, and a complex range of fear, confusion and anger on the home front. Faysal’s regular international phone calls to relatives lead to SWAT teams swooping on him, Yasmin and John; but rather than seize the chance to get shot of her spouse she stands vigil till he’s finally released and falls into her arms. Meanwhile Nasir’s seduction by recruiting jihadis sees him preparing to leave for training in Afghanistan.
Yasmin may capture the outrageously arbitrariness of Blunkett et al’s blind bungling sweep through Muslim neighbourhoods. But shoehorning in so many urgent domestic ramifications of the War on Terror means that the thoroughness required to portray the details of how Yasmin’s personal situation has developed get squeezed into perfunctory signposted moments and backstory references to make time for the menacing armed police thriller farce.14 At least the denouement is left open when she visibly begins to reorient to her marriage and future and the place of Muslim customs in her life – Ae Fond Kiss also refused to foreclose on any options, though in woolly optimism compared to resignation here. But, again, what is sacrificed is the emotional ebb and flow of individual growth amidst the seductions of Western lifestyle and consumerist fulfilment as against submersion in or submission to whatever illusory or real comfort and security home and community can promise. The former offer little beyond her second-hand cabriolet, given Yasmin’s white Keighleyites’ implausibly unanimous cruel indifference shading into violent hatred – apart from one elderly shopper chastising youths throwing milk over Muslim women in the street.15 Before and after being banged up, John also far too easily succumbs to basic prejudice for Yasmin ever to have taken him seriously.
In fact all her work, family and neighbourhood relationships are rendered in cursory cartoonish sketches16 – yet it is precisely the fine-grain of these that would have encouraged genuine understanding of and empathy with her choices (such as they are), especially when both script and Panjabi’s superb acting illuminate a forceful, imaginative and highly intelligent, as well as believably impatient, ambivalent and troubled, personality.17 Not that weak, boring, stupid simpletons like Faysal deserve their fate either, but the unintentionally victimological nature of Yasmin’s diagnosis squashes any agency for local British Muslims beyond surrender to the righteous proponents of violent jihad parachuting in to regiment their confusion. Its most effective exaggerations reflect the shifting local tectonics after 9/11 whereupon everyone’s complacencies are shaken – but the orchestration of collective neurosis in the background hum of Bush/Blair’s banal ‘peace and freedom’ bullshit are mirrored in the film’s subsequent lazy hyperbole. Nowithstanding the alibi that “everything in the script actually happened”,18 the question of what might happen next eludes active viewer involvement almost as much as the cast’s heavily circumscribed capabilities.
Furthermore, both Yasmin and Ae Fond Kiss unnecessarily situate their young protagonists’ dilemmas predominantly against the stark demands of first-generation immigrant parents trying to sustain dignity in the face of massive dislocations in their lives, translated into a determination to bequeath to their children the emotional and cultural resources that have kept them going. Obviously this has been a central unifying dynamic in most British Asian family histories; but its defensive, backward-looking construals have for at least two decades been overlain with the desire and practical orientation to explore the fullest range of possibilities available in UK society. Put briefly, second, third and fourth generations increasingly grow up with a phenomenological ‘knowledge’ of being British – blurring into  an immense diversity of other entangled individual and social identifications.19 Regrettably, the structural imperative in these two films to instruct ignorant white viewers of the historical underpinnings of Asian traditionalism leads to oversimplistic opposition rather than complex interaction – implying that acknowledgement and incorporation of Asianness inevitably compromises Britishness and vice versa.20
This crude dichotomising of lived spectra extends most damagingly in Yasmin to Nasir’s unlikely lurch from general Western adolescent decadence into Al-Qaeda training21 – when lifestyle, cultural, economic and political developments are infinitely richer even in the grimmest parts of West Yorks.22 Yet again the material expressions of the white liberal imagination show accidental affinity with explicit far-right racism in reducing their objects to cardboard stereotypes.23 In the process, centuries of radical humanist and internationalist Islamic philosophy and practice24 – as well as recent British Asian mobilisation in grassroots labour militancy, Black anti-racist politics and contemporary multicultural interplay25 – all disappear into the medievalist fundament. But surely, even if casualties of integration and assimilation must be seen at the purely individual level beloved of UK social realism, their putative tragedy should still be capable of imaginative moulding into some manner of positive potential without disavowing the potency of poisonous circumstances. The German film Gegen die Wand relishes this task and tackles it Head-On.
3. DIY Arrangements Although chronicling the self-arranged marriage, separation and love of two Turkish-German misfits and family exiles via a variety of traumatic vicissitudes, Head-On’s writer and director Fatih Akin26 had no intention of engaging in social critique: “I never thought much about the cultural environment; that’s really from my subconscious … The media focused on the background; the audience beyond the media see the love story and not the culture clash”.27 Like the two UK films, Head-On hysterically ratchets up the melodramatic excess arising here from the psychically fragile main characters’ self-destructiveness. Thus no one could mistake them as representative of anything other than human distress in extremis – so if their struggles to live and love are to be interpreted in terms of social, cultural and political reality, this will have to be a deliberate conscious exercise rather than any spoon-fed pat contrivance.
Starting in the working class Hamburg district of St Pauli,28 young Sibel Güner (Sibel Kekilli29) notices middle-aged potman loser Cahit Tomruk (Birol Ünel) at a psychiatric hospital, after he drove into a wall when debilitating depression overtook the palliative of drink and drugs. She has slit her wrists (again) to escape the traditional family suffocation ordered by father Yunus (Demir Gokgol) and violently enforced by brother Yilmaz (Cem Akin) – while her mother Birsen (Aysel Iscan) is sympathetic but helpless. Intrigued by Sibel’s spirit and passion for sensation, Cahit agrees to her proposal of sham marriage, and his old friend Seref (Güven Kiraç) helps fool the folks.30 After the wedding he gradually falls for her despite her reckless promiscuity, and gets her a hairdressing job with occasional girlfriend Maren (Catrin Striebeck). But when he’s jailed for the manslaughter of one of her more misogynist flings, her furious family patriarchs rumble the deception thanks to the media coverage. Fearing for her safety she flees to yuppie cousin Selma (Meltem Cumbul) in Istanbul after pledging to wait for him.
Crop-haired, devoid of ornamentation and drained of zest, she confides in a letter to Cahit that she is “the only lifeless thing in this city”. Abandoning drudge work as a chambermaid at Selma’s hotel, she roams the streets in a chemical haze and is raped by a barman at a disreputable club. Her downward spiral culminates in trumping the insults of three thugs with florid speculation about them, their wives and mothers, and she is found in the gutter beaten to a pulp and gutstabbed – apparently fatally. On leaving jail Cahit borrows Seref’s savings to reach Istanbul, and patiently seeks to link up with her. Eventually she comes to him and they make love for the only time. Though now living with her taxi driver saviour and their son, she agrees to consider starting afresh with Cahit in his ancestral family village. However, she doesn’t turn up at the bus station rendezvous, so Cahit embarks alone …
The film segments are separated by scenes of a traditional Turkish band playing gorgeously haunting love songs to camera on the shore of the Golden Horn (the Asian side of the Bosphorus) with Istanbul’s St Sophia over the water. This foregrounding of Turkish cultural aesthetics grows in satisfying effect, meantime recalling Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Brechtian use of narrative dislocation to enhance emotional intensity.31 Conversely Cahit’s somewhat naff (despite Ünel’s valiant efforts) punk posing is reminiscent of the amour fou of the fashionable French cinema du look. If yet another influence was the uncompromising grit of (the far from black and white) La Haine – itself referencing nouvelle vague and new African American cinema – and the ghettocentric cinema du banlieue cycle that film inaugurated, 32 the sense grows of a postmodern existentialism where many popular and artfilm roads cross.
Head-On’s unique and truly innovative cinematic culture crash envisages the past, present and future – as well as ethnic identification, pride and straitjacketing – as utterly and intrinsically inseparable. Each tangle layers, filters and deepens the significance of events; in the process rendering as redundant all simple or absolute moral judgements. Generational and gender conflict, the exigencies of class and social status and tragic romance also blend, but in this film conventional characterisations are utterly upturned while the chances of personal redemption depend on the sharing of love, pain and hope between men and women in social networks they shape according to their own biographical, family, friendship and cultural accidents. All chime inwards and outwards and can be mobilised – in turns or simultaneously – for narcissistic, cathartic, affectionate, defensive or altruistic purposes. Choices made are provisional and ambiguous – including the ending where utopia of love fails to transpire; but hope is not lost.
The prodigious volume of blood, guts, death and darkness on show (though annoying most critics) refers steadfastly to all the mortifying wounds both of history and of the spirit – representing social-psychosomatic resources which belong to the protagonists to deploy on their own account, whether purposively or on autopilot. When Cahit muses, “Without her, I could not have survived”, the film is so characterising all of the poignant, magical and dangerous uncertainties in life, including the cultural materials available for reclamation by personal and collective selves. Similarly there is absolutely no hypocrisy in Sibel resisting male street hassle by declaiming her protected status as a married Turkish woman. The performative subversion of identity in the languages of institutional discourse and discipline allows liberation to be conceivable if the future is destabilised – or it can be fixed in reactionary stasis.33 Even the major structural lacuna in the final cut – Sibel’s uncharted conversion to loyal partner and mother – can be interpreted as Akin’s respectful bow to the ‘unknown continent’ of femininity; or as an acknowledgement of the limited capacity of Eurocentric knowledge, Occidental genre or liberal capitalism to orient to the mysterious Orient in everyone.
Collisions, Collusions, Conclusions British cinemagoers now have twenty-years of cross-cultural romance under their belts since director Stephen Frears and writer Hanif Kureishi started the ball rolling with My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) – and their detailed imbrications of class, race, gender and sexual orientation in dynamic domestic political contexts continued with Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991).34 However,  it wasn’t until Gurinder Chadha’s marvellous Bhaji on the Beach (1993) that a British film could treat these themes by adopting a perspective wholly within the social network of a specific ‘ethnic minority’ community – whose characters, furthermore, weren’t primarily concerned with the condescending vagaries of either upper middle class sensibilities or lower middle class aspirations.35 Since then the range of Asian experiences and contexts depicted comically, melodramatically or tragically has broadened, though problematic and/or forbidden love is still usually a key narrative driver.36
The exploration of comic potential has also been exhaustively mined, finding its most effective expression in television comedy’s time-honoured antecedents in music hall vulgarity and the deflating of pretensions and the sitcom preoccupation with class and family respectability. The BBC2 series Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42 partook of both old and new generic markers,37 and its affectionately exuberant skewering of British Asian stereotypes succeeded in appealing to unprecedentedly large audiences while consistently exploding the one-dimensional attributions that white racism (and ‘well-meaning’ liberal efforts) typically doles out to British Asian men, women and children.38 Capturing with such flair the intimate fluctuations of warmth and callousness common to ‘quality time’ in most families of all backgrounds may have been the crucial stroke of genius here. And whether the viewer’s connection to narrative hinges on laughter or pain, it’s striking that relationships between the generations provide the most poignant tensions in virtually all of the fictional families so far discussed.
Generational conflict embraces the expectations, hopes and aspirations for children which stem from the parents’ own experiences of being parented in specific circumstances, but now reversing roles in new contexts, environments and more or less pressurised conditions. The offspring’s responses further vary according to the degree of cognitive, emotional and material autonomy carved out so far, and the relative amenability of parental authority to reinforcement in the extended family, neighbourhood, culture, religion and patterns of government. Economic constraints are, as always, crucial in that the comforts and agonies of home life derive their most powerful significance depending on the choices available or withheld – and the physical, spatial and psychic room there is to come to know about and reflect on these possibilities as well as in ascribing responsibility for them.
In particular, the interplay of gender and generation inflects responses to masculinism, in British Asian families just as for other groups despite the massive divergences of historical and biographical particulars. Gender differences are especially acute in poor areas, where macho orientation and camaraderie provides differential access to the public sphere for men39 – while also allowing the reproduction of imperious male rule irrespective of religion; whereas middle class education, career and mobility horizons offer a spectrum of escape routes for both sexes. No doubt this helps sustain myths of the passive victimhood of Muslim women, but the arrogant class and race blindness of some feminists only adds insult to injury40 – blaming the primitive sexual politics of medieval cultures which the women in question understand as a defensive haven in a heartless world. Even if the latter is a private hell, blanket condemnation simply reproduces the heartlessness and practically ossifies the isolation. Nowhere is this clearer just now than in the absurd characterisation of the Muslim hijab as symbolic of the fundamentalist crushing of women’s individuality – unless miniskirts and makeup as modernist Western female disguise are to be interpreted as the complementary Christian test case.41
Nevertheless, the integrity of Asian women prevents them from publicly blaming their men or masculinist aspects of culture or religion for the same reason that Black womanists and working class white women repudiate feminisms which treat machismo and patriarchy as singular transhistorical law rather than overdetermined symptoms of wider malaises of domination.42 Once the concept of social class is postmodernised to engage with the cultural diversity we now see clearly all around (and within) us – enriched with the vestigial hangovers of feudal divine rights (of whatever creed) and the ethnic absolutism of caste familiar from the Indian subcontinent and South Africa, for example – the political utility of the notion of postimperial decolonisation thus begins to seem more than a metaphor. Instead of merely the tragedy and farce of proletariat and alienating money; a complex set of dominative dispositions of human resources is glimpsed – by men over women, powerful geographical forces over external populations, and internally in a society via ethnic and  economic enslavement.43
Be that as it may, British culture has always been decisively hybrid throughout its recorded history since the Romans (and probably before).44 This should come as no surprise given that even the language is a hopelessly irrational melange – even more mixed when lower class and regional dialects are considered. Ironically, the resulting linguistic flexibility and openness of English is a logical justification for its candidature as ‘world language’ – rationalism as usual being the handmaiden of imperialism. So it’s no accident that James Kelman, for instance, feels little affinity with high-British or Scottish literature but more between African postcolonial writing and the existential prose materialisastion of his own Glasgow vernacular.45 Nevertheless, in cool Britannia a national cuisine of chips, curry and pizza, sweatshop-produced sweatsuits, Chinese consumer goods and the melting pot of teenybop pop look like the far horizon of liberal capitalism’s capacity to nurture a lasting tolerance of difference that extends further than  exchanges of fond kisses.
Multiculturalism in school education can do little more than enumerate and exacerbate the surface diversity of culture, because the liberal consensus requires the playing down of the cruel origins of lived practices (at home, abroad or in diasporas) in situations of oppression and suffering. Neither history curricula nor citizenship classes are likely to honestly assess the past, present and future certainty of dislocation and desperation accompanying the exigencies of colonial, capitalist and globalising economics that the political elites are currently implementing. Similarly, the institutional embrace of equal opportunity excuses for inaction or PR leads to the invention of oppression everywhere, leading concurrently to vicious victimisation and the imposition of victim status on those who otherwise, off their own bat, were getting on with the slow depressing drudge of dealing with and transcending it.46 This is why portrayals which mention only the most unfortunate examples of state- or religion-sponsored racial and cultural terrorism are so spectacularly unhelpful (to say the least).
So, the multicultural recipe-mongering which isolates each ethnicity in separate entries on a list of oppressions or identities not only cannot avoid but insists on the reification of essential otherness to be the root of conflict, rather than the denial of one’s own unbearable experiences and conflicts projected into convenient others and misperceived as their attributes or responsiiblity – thus preventing the recognition and acting-upon of affiliation. Fantasies of the heroic progress of civilisation, industry and science likewise feed into a simplistic complacent ideology of transparent social worlds with no room for reflection on shared experiences of suffering across culture, race, geography and history – forcing ‘difference’ to appear as cause in the defensively monolithic reaction of ‘faith schools’ and the equally nonsensical religions of rationalist liberal secularism.
The only route to genuine solidarity (if and where required and requested) – and hence to worthwhile political movement with any potential to transcend oppression (including in the politics of identity and representation) – is to take one’s cues from those bearing the brunt. Dictating to people how it is they suffer and what they should do about it – whether from abstract principles of law or philosophy, legal or bureaucratic rights or rules of governance, the profitable careers of market commodities and capitals, or the entrenchment interests of academic or professional experts – turns the tactics of freedom on their head into the patronising removal from above of patterns that the victims have had no agency in knowing or defining. This can only ever perpetuate dehumanisation and detract from the social self-determination and liberation from below that is so urgently and universally felt and sought.47
Notes1. interviewd by Demetrios Matheou, Sunday Herald, August 2004.
2. in particular Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Adam Curtis’ groundbreaking BBC 2 series The Power of Nightmares (both 2004) – see my reviews respectively in: ‘Extracting the Michael’, Variant, No. 21, and ‘A Pair of Right Scares’, Freedom magazine, Vol. 65, No. 22 (<www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk>).
3. James Mottram, ‘In the Mood For Love’, Sight & Sound, March 2004, p.23.
4. Roisin was scripted as Scottish, but Birthistle was a Catholic girl at Protestant school in the north of Ireland. Preferring actor proximity to role, Loach points out that, “then the question is: who’s the immigrant?”. Laverty: “When Catholics first came to Scotland 150 years ago they were seen as aliens with a loyalty to something foreign to the indigenous population … And now we’re demonising asylum seekers” (Mottram, note 3).
5. Atta Yaqub had kept a white girlfriend secret from his family/community, again facilitating role immersion (Diane Taylor, ‘Up Close and Personal’, The Independent, 6th August 2004).
6. The Daily Record billboard headline outside his shop reads: ‘Church tells Celtic fans no nookie in Seville’. One dog too many urinates on it, so Mr Khan wires it up and the next dog gets a nasty shock.
7. Loach: “He isn’t just a repressive father. His own history has been traumatic, and he has to live with it every day. That’s why he’s so keen to keep hold of Casim”; Laverty: “Partition left a shadow of massive suffering. It’s sectarianism, in another continent and in another time, but it still has a deep resonance in the personality of the children’s father today” (Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘When Sex Meets Sectarianism’, The Telegraph, 17th September 2004).
8. “I am a Glaswegian Pakistani teenage woman of Muslim descent who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic school …” Another Laverty and Loach teenage encyclopedia instructed Robert Carlyle on Nicaragua in Carla’s Song (1996).
9. or the pedagogical clumsiness using Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ soundtrack to a slide show of racist lynchings – ringing true as vacuous multiculturalism, but hardly connecting with her or her pupils’ daily lives.
10. To Loach this is “a situation where the circumstances are evolving … Essentially there will be a good outcome. The people of Casim’s generation are integrating into the rest of society, however it’s defined, and bigotry and intolerance, particularly on the Christian side, will fade … people will assimilate and learn to live together well … We are who we are now, but God knows what we will be like in 30 years’ time. The film challenges the whole idea of monogamy, of permament marriage that is either arranged or a love match” (Taylor, see note 5). The title’s more melancholy origin – Robert Burns’ poem, ‘Ae Fond Kiss And Then We Sever’ (1791) – includes the lines: “Had we never lov’d sae kindly / Had we never lov’d sae blindly / Never met or never parted / We had ne’er been broken-hearted”.
11. Loach: “The young protagonists are all graduates and they’re not from broken families. But for reasons of culture, language and religion there are fetters on their choices” (Mottram, p.22, see note 3).
12. Not surprising, despite Ken Loach’s track record, given his membership of the National Council of the Respect Coalition, whose electoral novelty – cosying up to ‘community leaders’ – resembles police tactics when legitimising ‘race relations’ PC/PR. Those at the sharp end may by default defer to conservative patriarchs or arrogant careerists of respectable church, business and local government agencies when busy defending themselves against outbreaks of the persistent UK anti-Asian prejudice (see, for example, succinct commentary on the pre-9/11 Bradford ‘race riots’ in <www.muslimnews.co.uk> 27th July 2001, or the recent Birmingham Sikh controversy), but surely no one imagines they represent any community’s multiply conflicting interests. This Left pandering to elites combines a Stalinist disposition and Leninist opportunism, with predictably alienating effects at all grassroots levels (as in the SWP’s regularly discredited fronts and u-turns, from Anti-Nazi League days through to recent anti-globalisation incarnations – see coverage of the European Social Forum, London, October 2004:  <www.enrager.net/features/esf/> or SchNEWS, no. 470).
13. Yasmin (2004) screened on Channel 4, 13th January 2005. Quotations are from the production notes <www.yasminthemovie.co.uk /iframes/synopsis.php> and Alan Docherty, February 2005 <www.culturewars.org.uk> respectively. Glenaan also made Gas Attack (2001, an even more sensationalist ‘docufiction’ about Kurdish asylum seekers in Glasgow) and the forthcoming Ducane’s Boys (about neo-colonial exploitation in contemporary football).
14. also rushed onto television after European cinema success and acclaim, when UK cinema distribution and exhibition faced years of market-cowardice delay – see Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 13th January 2005.
15. one of two such unscripted moments where passersby were unaware that a shoot was underway (see Jeffries, note 14).
16. comprehensively nailed by Munira Mirza in <www.culturewars.org.uk>
17. including a proclivity for class/caste-based racial insult. Darcus Howe’s Who You Calling a Nigger? (Channel 4, 2004) gave rare public insight into this subject. Conversely, the film’s most moving moment comes at the end – encapsulating its heroine’s ultimate dignity, integrity and humanity with a close-up of Panjabi’s face as Yasmin comforts the husband she’s previously so maligned.
18. The script was written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) after exhaustive research and workshops with Northern Muslim groups, drug rehabilitation programmes, university lecturers and many others.
19. just as in the rest of us, showing the inadequacy of conflating disparate generations – for example my own industrial working class ‘English’ family has ancestry from Wales, Ireland and Southern and Northern France (just to start with), and as little as two generations ago included itinerant agricultural workers roaming against destitution.
20. For comprehensive discussions of hybridity and diaspora, see Barnor Hesse (ed.) Un/Settled Multiculturalisms, Zed Press, 2000. Incidentally, both Ae Fond Kiss and Yasmin are interesting, enjoyable and/or affecting on many levels; not least in their different fusions of generic realism, naturalism and fiction, and some outstanding cinematic and acting skills on show. For the purposes of this essay, though, it’s mainly in struggling to meeting their predetermined artificially partial and formulaic aims that they get messed up.
21. left over from the issue-shopping concept (scuppered by 9/11) of Glenaan and producer Sally Hibbin (who previously worked with Ken Loach on Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, etc) of a young Yorkshire suicide-bomber (production notes, see note 18).
22. though Yasmin tells him “I preferred you as a drug dealer”.
23. taking a lead from Kilroy-Silk, BNP fuhrer Nick Griffin publicly characterised Islam as a “vicious wicked faith” before proclaiming his parliamentary candidature in Keighley. Note, though, that the far and libertarian Left fare little better in terms of “universal bigotry towards Muslims” and the ambivalently progressive potential of religious culture in general – see Adam K’s scattershot ‘Anarchist Orientalism and the Muslim Community in the UK’, and Ernesto Aguilar’s wise US perspective in ‘Winning the Grandmas, Winning the War: Anarchists of Color, Religion and Liberation’ (both 2004) at <www.illegalvoices.org/knowledge>.
24. see for example: S. Sayyid, ‘Beyond Westphalia: Nations and Diasporas, the Case of the Muslim Umma’ (in Hesse, see note 20).
25. Contemporary ‘urban’ music features increasing numbers of Asian performers and producers (see Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk & Ashwani Sharma (eds.), Zed Press 1996). Since the 1980s bhangra renaissance working class Asian youth have also been staunch supporters of local R&B club scenes (racist door policies and clienteles permitting), rather than the more upmarket trendy student-yuppie venues Ae Fond Kiss’ Casim probably envisages. On the marketing of UK Asian culture, see also Kaleem Aftab, ‘Brown: the New Black! Bollywood in Britain’, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2002, pp.88-98.
26. Gegen die Wand translates as ‘Against the Wall’ (UK release as Head-On, 2005). Akin has also directed Short, Sharp, Shock (Kurz und Schmerzlos, 1998; lauded as the German Mean Streets), the road movie In July (Im Juli, 2000), and Solino (2002). Head-On has won innumerable film festival Audience Awards and was voted the European Film Academy’s Best Film of the Year 2004 (ahead of Ae Fond Kiss, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Weeping Meadow, among many others).
27. quoted in Kaleem Aftab, 11th February 2005 <www.bbc.net.uk/dna/collective/>
28. famous for militant anti-racist SHARP skinheads and a radically community-oriented professional football team. Akin – a dual-national child of Turkish immigrants – hails from Hamburg’s Altona district, and is a veteran anti-fascist, former DJ (hence the outstanding soundtrack which accounted for much of Head-On’s budget) and hip-hop MC (he gave up the latter to attend film school). With Germany’s drift rightwards nationality by blood is now increasingly reasserted, and dual status is no longer available to the progeny of gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’) – noted in Head-On’s Istanbul taxi driver deported as a teenager for a petty drugs offence to a country he’d never seen whose language he didn’t speak.
29. cast from an encounter at a supermarket checkout; and giving a superbly nuanced performance. Her only prior acting experience had been in a couple of gonzo pornos – allowing the tabloids to controversialise Head-On preceding Kekilli’s disowning by her Turkish family (see Ahmet Gormez’ solidaristic celebration: ‘We Love You Sibel Kekilli’, 8th March 2004 <www.counterpoint-online.org/>). This prurient bad faith is itself mirrored within the film text in Yilmaz’ invitation to Cahit (which he declines) to join the men of Sibel’s family in a brothel session.
30. such DIY arrangements are not uncommon, according to Akin: “A Turkish girl once asked me to marry her … A lot of Turks marry very early, just to get away from their families and have legal sex”. Perhaps surprisingly, Akin receives more criticism from younger (rather than older) generations of Turkish Germans for the film’s sex, nudity and drugs: “It is a mirror of their own double morality and they don’t like what they see” (interviewed in Sheila Johnston, The Telegraph, 11th February 2005).
31. thereby connecting with his landmark anti-racist tragedy Fear Eats the Soul (W. Germany, 1973) with its middle aged German woman and young Moroccan lovers (see Asuman Suner, ‘Dark Passion’, Sight & Sound, March 2005, pp.18-21).
32. La Haine was written and directed by Matthew Kassovitz (France 1995). The first cinema du banlieue flush included Raï (Thomas Gilou, 1995), État des Lieux (Jean-François Richet, 1995) and Bye Bye (Karim Dridi, 1996).
33. and, quoting a 96-year old German reminiscing on his resistance against the Nazis (“It’s our duty every day to change the world”), Akin concludes: “I want to do that with my life, too” (Sheila Johnston, note 30).
34. Frears has recently turned in an equally nuanced response to contemporary UK immigrant life in Dirty Pretty Things (2002; written by Steven Knight). Young Soul Rebels was written by Paul Hallam, Derrick Saldaan McClintock & Isaac Julien (see Isaac Julien & Colin McCabe, Diary of a Young Soul Rebel, BFI, 1991).
35. Chadha has since embarked on a fascinating populist trajectory, progressively weaving in various aspects of the scramble for cultural capital on the part of those whose background lacks it, in Bend It Like Beckham (1999) and Bride and Prejudice (2004) – the latter a Hollywood/Bollywood hybrid drawing “parallels between the class differences of Jane Austen and the cultural divisions of India, which are fuelled not just by caste difference, but by the globalisation caused by air travel [among Non Resident Indians]” (Kaleem Aftab, ‘A Marriage of Two Minds’, Independent on Sunday, 8th October 2004).
36. for example in Brothers in Trouble (dir. Udayan Prasad, 1995; written by Robert Buckler); My Son the Fanatic (dir. Udayan Prasad, 1997; written by Hanif Kureishi), and East Is East (dir. Damian O’Donnell, 2001; written by Ayub Khan Din).
37. Of the latter, the Kumars’ sitting room chat show format stands out. Both series were conceived by Anil Gupta, screening between 1998-2001 and 2001-03 respectively.
38. The new Lancashire-set film comedy Chicken Tikka Masala (dir. Harmage Singh Kalirai, 2004; written by Roopesh Parekh) also ticks many pop-cultural crossover boxes – culture-clash, arranged marriage, North v. South, gay v. straight, Carry-On-style soap opera farce, trendily inept DV DIY aesthetics – and has promptly been critically savaged as more of an all-round turkey on the basis of its cretinous reproduction of stock characters complete with thoroughly regressive connotations. For another European corrective, see Only Human, dir. Teresa de Pelegri/Dominic Harari, Spain/United Kingdom/Argentina/Portugal 2004 – a Jewish/Palestinian family farce with a “tragi-comic final row in which the lovers blame each other not just for the events of the night but for the whole history of the Promised Land” (Liese Spencer, Sight & Sound, May 2005, p69). Or, for more sophisticated postmodern and Islamic ironic referentiality, see Kamal Tabrizi’s Lizard (Iran, 2004) – poking fun at clerical government and breaking box-office records  in Iran before being banned –  with its escaped con disguised as a mullah, and describing Quentin Tarantino as “The great Christian film-maker” tackling “salvation in ultimate darkness” (John Wrathall, Sight & Sound, May 2005, p.65).
39. for meticulous analyses respectively of the white working class masculine habitus and the political effectivity of conjoining gender and racial discourses, see: Simon J. Charlesworth, The Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2000; and Claire Alexander, ‘(Dis)Entangling the ‘Asian Gang’, 2000 (in: Hesse, see note 20).
40. see the writing of bell hooks for comprehensive discussions in the context of African America (for example: Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Turnaround Press, 1991; Black Looks: Race and Representation, Turnaround Press, 1992; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, Routledge, 1995; Killing Rage, Ending Racism. Routledge, 1996). Note also the contradictory US emergence of modern ethnic cultural distinctions at around the same time as racial identification and skin privilege – for example, in that the first waves of Swedish immigrants were not included in the category ‘white’ (see Noel Ignatiev & John Garvey (eds.), Race Traitor, Routledge, 1994; then fast-forward to 1950s Little England guesthouse signage (‘No Blacks, No Irish’).
41. Actually bothering to ask those who wear it about the hijab’s significance tells as many different stories as there are respondents.  See, for example: for the UK, photographer Clement Cooper’s Sisters (The Gallery Oldham 2004/5; also published in book + CD form); or the BBC2 documentary about the French government’s school ban on veils, The Headmaster and the Headscarves (written and directed by Elizabeth C. Jones, 2005).
42. Here, the experience of mixed-race love relationships can illuminate the dense co-entanglements of class and gender within and between individuals and families. For deep reflections from divergent positions on these matters, including the implications for practical negotiations around racism and societal meetings of cultures generally, see: Timothy Malinquin Simone, About Face: Race in Postmodern America, New York, Autonomedia, 1989; and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons, Women’s Press, 2001.
43. The conjunction of charity corporations, international aid and humanitarian ‘just war’ may perhaps be an especially disabling contemporary coalescence complementing the rather straightforward neoimperialism of global capital.
44. not to mention wider question of Western Europe’s cultural, religious and philosophical origins in prior cultures – see the controversies surrounding Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, Vols. 1 & 2, Free Association Books, 1987/1991; and Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics (ed. David Chioni Moore), Duke University Press, 2001.
45. for some of the ramifications Kelman forges, see ‘Oppression and Solidarity’ and ‘On the Asylum Bill’ in Some Recent Attacks, Essays Cultural and Political, AK Press, 1992.
46. true, for example, of the police in their modern liberal guises just as much as the old-fashioned fascism – see The Secret Policemen’s exposé of police trainee racism (BBC1, October 2003); and Munira Mirza, ‘Debating the Future: Living Together’, September 2001 <www.culturewars.org.uk>. The same, in principle, can easily apply to the equal opps. agencies and professionals who police us elsewhere in the social fabric.
47. This essay’s delineation of the concepts needed to express such a political ‘polylectic’ are necessarily vague. But the notion of dialectic is also completely inadequate to do justice to human history on God’s – or anyone else’s – earth; and any sensible deconstruction of Hegelian philosophy (and thus Marxism) will doubtless reveal its core Enlightenment problematic of religion as the Emperor’s New Clothes, with scientific materialism as an intelligible (but only provisional) poor man’s two-step beyond. So, I console myself with the ancient Eastern saying to the effect that pondering which are the appropriate questions may sometimes be more productive than prospecting for the (politically) correct answers.
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Hackney(ed) Crossroads by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 10, May 2005]

Hyped as a Brit Boyz N The Hood, Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy hits more ambitious bullseyes, according to Tom Jennings.Hackney(ed) Crossroads by Tom Jennings[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 10, May 2005]
Hyped as a Brit Boyz N The Hood, Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy hits more ambitious bullseyes, according to Tom Jennings.
Curtis (12) meets adored brother Ricky (20) at the end of his stretch for aggravated assault, driven by best mate Wisdom (Leon Black). Ricky is determined to go straight and keeps the peace in a stand-off with their old gang enemy Godfrey (Clark Lawson). Curtis returns alone to mum Beverley’s welcoming party as Ricky hooks up at a ragga club with faithful girlfriend Shea (Sharea-Mounira Samuels). Later Wisdom kills Godfrey’s pitbull before gifting the pistol to Ricky. Agreeing with Shea to leave town, he again fails to placate Godfrey, who trashes Wisdom’s car. Curtis and friend Rio (Rio Tison) bunk school to smoke dope on Hackney marshes, and Ricky misses another family get-together – this time with Beverley’s close friend, lay preacher Neville (Sylvester Williams). Instead he stands point when Wisdom busts into Godfrey’s crib and shoots up the place. Armed police raid Beverley’s flat and arrest Ricky, while Rio and Curtis play with the gun he’s hidden – but Rio is accidentally shot in the arm. Trying to protect Curtis, Beverley throws Ricky out. Shea also breaks with him and then he discovers Wisdom dead. Having given Curtis a man-to-man pep-talk on his return from making up with Rio, Ricky is shot dead by Godfrey’s gang as he awaits the last train out. After the funeral Beverley falls into Neville’s sexual and pastoral arms. Curtis retrieves the gun and throws it in the canal.
The film’s restrained picturing of northeast London’s towerblocks, terraces, playing fields and waterways showcases the troubled biographies, conflictual spaces and questionable futures of its characters. The uniformly assured performances are further testament to a first-time feature director of documentaries and a screenplay of accurately youthful Cockney vernacular. So as Ricky, Ashley Walters1 conveys a fully convincing self-fashioned code of adult integrity whose intelligence is fatally undermined by the ambivalent egoism of macho brotherhood that Wisdom can’t see beyond. As Ricky’s mother, Clare Perkins perfectly captures the contradictory nobility of working class single parents, whose strength in surviving thus far has demanded singlemindedness – but also an inflexibility which prevents her from helping Ricky with his very different difficulties. However, in beautifully distilling the nuances of pre-teen bewilderment and sagacity, Luke Fraser decisively makes this Curtis’ story.
Bullet Boy’s generally heroic struggle partakes in – but is not imprisoned by – the hoary old generic conventions of the coming of age crime melodrama. Against the usual odds, Curtis seems to emerge with a chance of neither succumbing to anti-social criminality (in striving to thrive in unpromising environs) nor decisively severing ties with his background (in class aspiration elsewhere). This is an achievement that the recent US cycle of ghettocentric cinema has so far largely forsaken, despite the purportedly political intentions of its exponents.2 Nevertheless, the more modest traditions of UK social realism allow the fine-grained attention to relationships and their vicissitudes to not be drowned out by neo-blaxploitation thrills or the more vintage baggage of hysterically overblown liberal issues and spectacularly reactionary menaces to society.3
Hackney(ed) Crossroads
Saul Dibbs and Catherine R. Johnson’s subtle script shows dawning adolescent masculinity in a context where peer pressure reserves mutual respect and consideration for those in closest proximity to the public self. The wider (middle class) social ethics spouted in educational and other local institutions – when not ignored as irrelevant – may be despised as hypocritical duplicity; yet the realm of private kinship suffocates desire and constrains growth within the childish purview of the mother’s embrace and overwhelming needs. Curtis clearly appreciates her position but understands why his brother rejected its ministrations. Meanwhile, merely reproducing the arbitrary authority of patriarchs is recognised to deliver none of its promises beyond recuperation into one of the useless status quos –  including the upped ante of ‘gun crime’ at increasingly hazardous lower class UK street levels.4
At this point it would be easy to ‘blame the parents’ – as in the currently fashionable reality TV treatment of ‘problem children’ or all the other class- and race-prejudiced nanny-state discourses. This is another mistake Bullet Boy avoids, along with its honourable disavowal of the nonsense that media glorification and youth culture ‘cause’ violence. So, destined for disappointment and pain, the mother’s lioness love for her seeds and her yearning for hope and meaning in life are eventually displaced into religious ecstasy – which offers communal experience, valuation of the self and an anticipated transcendence of suffering. This makes sense in the absence of neighbourhood cohesion or mutual solidarity or any dynamic or shared ideology (whether or not enforced with guns or father-figures), since the nuclear family womb can never fulfil the hopelessly excessive demands placed upon it as haven in a heartless world.
Finally, important ingredients missing from Bullet Boy include, firstly, the lure of the cult of consumerism, where a pseudo-spiritual fervour to fend off insecurity by hoarding cash and trivial secular commodities meshes perfectly with both globalising gangsterism and government wars on crime.5 Secondly, in reifying isolated individuals as representative of entire societies or historical epochs, European cinematic naturalist realism unfortunately forecloses on portraying the larger-scale reverberations of personal stories in the potential collective synergy of social action. And while one film could hardly cover all these bases, is it really too much to imagine several levels of analysis at once – for example, a Bullet Boy who could Do The Right Thing in these Strange Days?
Notes1. aka Asher D (of UK Garage supremos So Solid Crew) – himself recently released from jail for possession of a firearm.
2. for example Spike Lee, John Singleton, or Ice Cube. Paradoxically, the absence of moral agendas seems to enable postmodern nihilists such as Albert & Allen Hughes (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) or even blockbuster stylists like Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days) to drop more hints of the possibility of collectively creative solutions.
3. see also the French ‘cinema du banlieue’ inaugurated by La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), which likewise references Hollywood without pandering to it.
4. so, before ultimately ditching the weapon, Curtis tells Rio “I’d rather be a mummy’s boy than a crack-head”. And, despite her prior soulmate loyalty, Shea also refuses to accept Ricky’s repetition compulsion; thus Bullet Boy grounds optimism in both younger genders.
5. rendering New Labour’s fascination with faith and fundamental morality more intelligible – as desperate rearguard defences against the damage to sociability done by the feeding frenzies of spending which, ironically, represent their only vision of economic ‘health’.
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Bad Taste and Good Sense by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 19, October 2005]

Of several summer film releases tackling themes of sexual expression and repression, Tom Jennings judges John Waters’ A Dirty Shame the daftest as well as the most radical.Bad Taste and Good Sense by Tom Jennings 
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 19, October 2005]
 
 
 
 
Of several summer film releases tackling themes of sexual expression and repression, Tom Jennings judges John Waters’ A Dirty Shame the daftest as well as the most radical.
 
For nearly forty years John Waters has exposed the damaging hypocrisy of respectable sexual morality, using aesthetic and narrative shock tactics to provoke disgust, fascination and outrage – in the process demonstrating how close psychologically these responses are. Long before radio jock Howard Stern, Jerry Springer and sundry other media gross-out specialists paved the way for ‘reality’ TV, Waters (the ‘Pope of Trash’) tested the limits of acceptability with a series of extravagantly awful undergound cult classics.1 Hairspray (1988) then initiated a cycle of films which increasingly subsumed rampant sexual excess under more explicitly critical and progressive aims2 – in effect, ironically echoing the social suppression of dangerous libido he made his reputation attacking, while travestying his own biography in the process. And although mainstream success and talk-show celebrity status certainly coincided with a blunting of the early edginess and impact, A Dirty Shame rediscovers some of Waters’ original Queer aesthetics and trademark  tastelessness. Mixing in deeper social, cultural and political insights, it is both profoundly silly and genuinely innovative.
 
Prudish shop assistant Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) refuses husband Vaughn (Chris Isaak) sex – bemoaning the moral degeneration of their working class Baltimore neighbourhood (a location Waters always returns to), and locking erotomaniac daughter Caprice (Selma Blair with enormous prosthetic breasts) in her room to stop her stripping as ‘Ursula Udders’ in local bars. However, Sylvia becomes uncontrollably randy after a tail-ending en route to work when awoken from concussion by breakdown mechanic and sexual evangelist Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville). He proclaims that her liberated libido will usher in the ‘resurrsextion’ and ‘day of carnal rapture’ to win the war of the freedom-loving perverts against the sex-hating fascistic neuters. Her frenzied and public search for pleasure antagonises her mother Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd) into leading a burgeoning campaign for the ‘end of tolerance’. Sylvia encounters other locals emerging from their closets after also hitting their heads, revealing a cornucopia of unlikely and obscure fetishisms that inexorably cross-fertilise and proliferate, overwhelming the decency brigade and climaxing in communal headbanging orgiastic bliss.
 
A riotous rollercoaster of affectionate naffness, slapstick, pastiche and kitsch complete with pathetic dialogue, ham acting, dodgy plotting, goofy design and editing, and even-handed comic stupidity, A Dirty Shame is often hilarious (if you can recapture your scatological adolescence). It also insidiously introduces several arguments subverting conventional wisdom about sex, society and politics (which most critics predictably missed). So, while clearly favouring sexual indulgence over oppressive restriction,3 Waters locates moral degeneracy in both extremes as childish self-absorption precluding negotiation and coexistence – but where each depends on the other for its coherence. Smug liberal clichés are thus avoided – exemplified in the city slicker yuppies who advocate cultural diversity in theory but leave town unable to handle the messy ramifications in practice.4 And when older neuters make comments like “I’m viagravated and I’m not gonna take it any more!” and “It wasn’t this bad in the 60s!” the film’s surreally retro Baltimore comes into focus as a contemporary USA where the puritans are presently winning politically and in the culture wars.
 
 
Bad Taste and Good Sense  
But this is no ordinary blue-collar America. There is no portrayal of sex-related work, abuse, exploitation, media or policing – neither prostitution nor patriarchy nor pornography, and precious little in the way of actual physical sexual relations either. It is actually rather chaste and almost childlike in its innocence. There is plenty of rhetorical posturing, though, and what makes A Dirty Shame scandalous is what it says, how, where and by whom this talk is conducted, and the use made of it by various vested interests. Paradoxically, in retreating from recognisable realism, the film scores by flirting with the dominant modern discourses rendering sex so problematic – revelations of original sin and ecstasy; the obsession with sexual identity as the core of human personality and society; and the consequent institutionalisation, control and commodification of sexual expression. In the realm of individual privatised consumption, sexual energy thus provides the means to divide, discipline and profit, whereas in uncontrollable vulgar public display it exposes and threatens power and prompts moral panic.
 
Waters’ finely-tuned cultural class-consciousness replaces the fashionable intellectual niceties of twentieth century sexology with contemporary working class lives dominated by drudgery, misery and no expectation of fulfilment. Sexual desire is here embodied in conjunction with exhaustion, frustration and resentment, so that carving out space for pleasure is a serious and difficult matter. Its achievement is often thus wild, reckless and even destructive – but far from the relaxed decadence of upmarket erotic gourmets. Further, given that the strategic security-blanket of respectability is heavily reinforced by religion and the state, sexual license is highly inconvenient to all sides of the status quo, and thus always under threat. But the perverts simply present a mirror image to those who deny their own dirtiness. Both attempt to impose religious regimentation on unruly diversity – recalling Michel Foucault’s insight that injunctions to rationalise and classify sex extend biopolitical government of the body by imposing shame and neurosis on physical intimacy, and thus wrecking autonomous ethical practice.5
 
Fortunately A Dirty Shame offers escape from this intransigent dilemma. Generally mistaken as merely the crowning glory of its freak show, the ‘headbanging’ hypothesis simultaneously evokes the parent’s impatience with squabbling children and skilfully answers both apologists for censorship and apostles of sexual liberation. If the biographical origins of sexual preference lie in the rich texture of personal responses to random events, then conflictual diversity is simply inevitable. Attempts to analyse, normalise, legislate for and reform personality as rigid individual certainty necessarily fail to do justice to this differentiation while violating its subjects (‘fixation’, indeed). Meanwhile the inherent inseparability of physical, emotional and psychological sensation in the complexity of felt experience weaves together fantasies and relationships with intensities of pleasure and pain. Subsequent patterns of arousal and behaviour yield ongoing social performances of self that sediment the most salient recurring tendencies into the structure of identity while always remaining subject to change. Of course, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that shape and change one’s course are more or less traumatic and susceptible to conscious understanding, and may or may not be associated with the sinister motives, misplaced love or carelessness of others. That’s life. The trick is dealing with it without wishing away the unwanted complications – and  this neither neuters nor perverts will be inclined to be capable of.
 
 
Notes 
1. such as Mondo Trash (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970) and the breakthrough Pink Flamingos (1972) – all featuring 20-stone gender-bender Divine (in the latter film eating a real dog turd on screen).
 
2. In Hairspray Ricky Lake’s white-trash teenage dance enthusiast urges grass-roots racial integration; in Cry Baby (1990) Johnny Depp plays havoc with stereotypical masculinity; Serial Mom (1992) has Kathleen Turner detonating the nuclear family; Pecker (1998) recuperates Edward Furlong’s naïve photographer into artworld pretension; and Cecil B Demented (2000) both applauds and ridicules avant-garde attacks on popular cinema.
 
3. arguing against the film’s US NC-17 rating, he asked: “Is it that bad if dirty dancing broke out in an old folks’ home?” – referring to a scene where Ullman flexes to pick up a bottle without using her hands.
 
4. see also J. Hoberman’s interesting comparison of A Dirty Shame with the “earnestly middlebrow” biopic Kinsey (dir. Bill Condon) in ‘Back At The Raunch’ (Sight & Sound, December 2004, pp.24-27). The documentary Inside Deep Throat (dirs. Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato) also fails to transcend the corruption/liberation dead-end dialectic left over from sixties counterculture, feminism and  ‘porno chic’ (see Linda Ruth Williams, ‘Anatomy of a Skin Flick’, Sight & Sound, June 2005, pp24-26.
 
5. as explored in The History of Sexuality, Volumes 1-3 (Penguin, 1979, 1987, 1988).

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Barmy Liberation Army by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 20, October 2005]

Guerilla: the Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone)Barmy Liberation Army by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 20, October 2005]
 
 Guerilla: the Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone) 
Screening on BBC2 on September 12th, Guerilla: the Taking of Patty Hearst is a feature from veteran liberal documentarist Robert Stone tracing the career of the Symbionese Liberation Army – a mainly middle class white student militia engaged in armed struggle in early 1970s California ‘on behalf of’ Black and working class Americans. Clandestine interviews with surviving SLA founders Russ Little and Mike Bortin, along with the views of prominent journalists covering the story, an FBI case officer and hostage negotiator, are expertly woven together with found footage of the most dramatic events and other material in a vivid, snappy narrative that captures the imagination while emphasising the wider context and drawing interesting parallels with the present.
 
The very first modern media circus followed the SLA kidnap of Patty Hearst – heir of the huge media conglomerate built by grandad William (‘Citizen Kane’) Randolph – and, in regularly ending her communiqués with: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the lives of the people”, her apparent ‘conversion’ to the anti-government cause. This was preceded and followed by generally botched SLA actions – assassinations, bank robberies, minor shoplifting – and when the initial ransom demanding exchange for imprisoned comrades also failed, the Hearst family agreed to distribute m dollars-worth of ‘food aid’ to the Bay Area poor. Even this ended in riots since the authorities were equally inept, and a vastly excessive SWAT shoot-out in South Central LA left most of the cadre dead.
 
 
Barmy Liberation Army 
Bortin stresses the frustration of educated youth after the optimism of the 1960s – what with poverty and racism at home, the arms race, and especially Vietnam: “We grew up being told we saved the world from Hitler … but we’re now being Hitler”. Little  concludes “The country was being run by criminals … I feel sad that I felt forced to extremes by Nixon and his thugs”. And while those from less sheltered backgrounds probably found the corruption of power less surprising, many others who turned to armed rebellion at that time managed without quite so much arrogance, pompousness and politically clueless sub-Maoist posturing as the SLA (not that the Black Panthers, MOVE organisation or Weather Underground, etc, ultimately fared much better). However, the SLA’s narcissistic fascination with media responses rather than organic links with struggle had more in common with later, equally futile, urban guerilla groups such as those in Europe – condemning them as grist to the Spectacular mill while also supplying their propaganda coup courtesy of the American princess.
 
Nevertheless Guerilla’s subtitle is for marketing purposes only, and the tedious celebrity autopsy of whether Hearst (who endorses this film) really was the brainwashed Stockholm Syndrome stooge she claimed is rightly avoided. The motivations for making the film included the 9/1 experience, the government use of ‘terrorism’ to erode civil liberties and the central role of the media in setting and pursuing agendas in this morass – and the coverage of the SLA’s exploits coincided with major technological and political developments in that industry (plus retrospective prosecutions have jailed several members since the film was made –  including Bortin). As for the group itself, Stone thinks that their mistake was not taking “the moral high ground, like Gandhi”. But moral certainty and self-righteousness was precisely the fundamental flaw, as within all grandiose vanguards bolstering each other’s inflated self-importance. Whereas humility, integrity and ethical transparency measured collectively at, by and for the grass-roots can avoid both the delusions of bourgeois radicalism flirting with power and the fatal distraction with the vicissitudes of newsworthiness.
 
 
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