General

CSI: The Big Sleazy,
by Tom Jennings
[essay / book review published in Variant, No. 31, March 2008]
CSI: The Big Sleazy by Tom Jennings

[essay / book review published in Variant, No. 31, March 2008]

James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown (Orion Books, 2007) is the 16th and most successful novel so far in a widely-acclaimed hardboiled crime series featuring Dave Robicheaux – a multiply flawed and emotionally damaged, world-weary but basically decent Sheriff’s Deputy in New Iberia, 125 miles down the Louisiana coast from New Orleans. The book opens with this Vietnam veteran cursed with a recurring dream of that carnage: “Their lives are taken incrementally – by flying shrapnel, by liquid flame on their skin, and by drowning in a river. In effect, they are forced to die three times. A medieval torturer could not have devised a more diabolic fate” (p.2). On waking, he reminds himself that,

“the past is a decaying memory and that I do not have to relive and empower it unless I choose to do so. As a recovering drunk, I know I cannot allow myself the luxury of resenting my government for lying to a whole generation of young men and women who believed they were serving a noble cause … When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.
But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature” (p.2).

As this excerpt promises, there is much more in this story than typical noir thriller fare. The author’s abiding concern with the struggles of the powerless to handle the larger forces, violence and depravity that confront them while retaining some semblance of dignity and honour has consistently been deployed over five decades to mull over America’s conflicts of race, class, and good and evil, here seen through the deeply ambivalent prism of Cajun working-class masculinity contextualised squarely in the genre traditions handed down through Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The first major work of popular fiction dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina [1], which devastated New Orleans on 29th August 2005, Blowdown demonstrates both the possibilities and problems of attempting to tell the truth through drama – from a writer who does “not trust people who seek authority and control over other people” [2] aiming to force Americans “into an introspection that … will lead people from dismay to anger” at a continuing tragedy which, he asserts, signposts a dismal likely future for the whole country [3]. And, we might add, for the globe, as corporate governance, graft and greed negotiate Nero’s course through environmental ruin …

A Chronicle of Death Foretold

Citing literary inspirations like Faulkner, Hemingway, Orwell and Tennessee Williams, Burke’s prose has always been noted for its emotive supercharge, verging oftentimes on delirium; but also for an elegaic, lyrical elegance in characterising his beloved native Gulf coast, where he still lives for part of the year. These attributes dovetail as Robicheaux bears witness to Katrina: before its landfall, in realist dread watching the telly; afterwards in disbelief, with shades of Blake, Bosch, and Ballard, as he’s seconded to an overwhelmed New Orleans Police Department many of whose personnel went AWOL and/or rogue. In effect, he concludes, “The entire city, within one night, had been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages” (p.34). Yet, for days before the hurricane struck, “the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, has been pleading for help to anyone who will listen. A state emergency official in Metaire has become emotionally undone during a CNN interview … He states unequivocally that sixty-two thousand people will die if the storm maintains its current category 5 strength and hits New Orleans head-on” (p.23).
This scale of disaster indeed transpired, with Robicheaux summarising the geological backstory:

“a tidal surge … can turn a levee system into serpentine lines of black sand or level a city, particularly when the city has no natural barriers. The barrier islands off the Louisiana coast have long ago eroded away or been dredged up and heaped on barges and sold for shale parking lots. The petrochemical companies have cut roughly ten thousand miles of channels through the wetlands, allowing saline intrusion to poison and kill freshwater marsh areas from Plaquemines Parish to Sabine Pass. The levees along the Mississippi River shotgun hundreds of tons of mud over the edge of the continental shelf, preventing it from flowing westward along the coastline, where it is needed the most. Louisiana’s wetlands continue to disappear at a rate of forty-seven square miles a year” (p. 28).

Unsurprisingly then,

“The levees burst because they were structurally weak and had only a marginal chance of surviving a category 3 storm, much less one of category 5 strength. Every state emergency official knew this. The Army Corps of Engineers knew this. The National Hurricance Center in Miami knew this.
But apparently the United States Congress and the current administration in Washington, D.C., did not, since they had dramatically cut funding for repair of the levee system only months earlier” (p.32).

Charged with investigating the murders of alleged looters, Robicheaux and fellow officers navigate the institutional vacuum, infrastructural wreckage and social chaos of the stricken city, surveying victims and survivors and striving to differentiate predators from prey among the latter. Many of those unable to leave, especially from the Ninth Ward, took refuge in the Superdome and Convention Center: “The thousands of people who had sought shelter there had been told to bring their own food for five days. Many of them were from the projects or the poorest neighbourhoods in the city and did not own automobiles and had little money or food at the end of the month. Many of them had brought elderly and sick people with them – diabetics, paraplegics, Alzheimer’s patients, and people in need of kidney dialysis” (p.35). Elsewhere:

“From a boat or any other elevated position, as far as the eye could see, New Orleans looked like a Caribbean city that had collapsed beneath the waves … The linear structure of a neighbourhood could be recognized only by the green smudge of yard trees that cut the waterline and row upon row of rooftops dotted with people who perched on sloped shingles that scalded their hands.
The smell was like none I ever experienced. The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals. Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines. The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. The bodies of dead animals, including deer, rolled in the wake of our rescue boats. And so did those of human beings, sometimes just a shoulder or an arm or the back of a head, suddenly surfacing, then sinking under the froth.
They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest” (p.37).

Then a little later, a preliminary cognitive mapping:

“It wasn’t the individual destruction of the homes in the Lower Ninth Ward that seemed unreal. It was the disconnection of them from their environment that was hard for the eye to accept. They had been lifted from their foundations, twisted from the plumbing that held them to the ground, and redeposited upside down or piled against one another as though they had been dropped from the sky … The insides of all of them were black-green with sludge and mold, their exteriors spray-painted with code numbers to indicate they had already been searched for bodies.
But every day more bodies were discovered … Feral dogs prowled the wreckage and so did the few people who were being allowed back into their neighbourhoods” (p.199).

These and countless other vignettes throughout the novel are as powerful and evocative in their own way as Spike Lee’s heartbreaking visual testament, When The Levees Broke, and Greg MacGillivray’s meticulous documentary detailing the ecological significance, Hurricane On The Bayou (both 2006). However, the conventions of crime fiction offer much greater potential for situating such events in a narrative with full cultural, historical and political texture and complexity – most crucially, from perspectives towards the bottom of the social hierarchy rather than according to the agendas of the Great and the Good; Burke himself seeing the genre as “having replaced the sociological novel. We know a society not by its symbols but by its cultural rejects and failures” [4]. So, progressively immersed in escalating webs of malice, misdeeds and moral compromises spun long before and in Katrina’s aftermath, Blowdown’s unruly welter of unreliable characters tell variegated tales as revealing in their conceits, discrepancies, and silences as in their manifest content.

The Big Sleep of Reasons

Initial scenes mingling mayhem, disorder, suffering, selfless heroism, and cynical opportunism utterly confuse the New Iberia contingent’s senses as they descend into the flooded city, reflected in their contradictory attributions of responsibility for what they see. First, as putative public servants charged with protecting the populace, Robicheaux gives credit where most obviously due – “The United States Coastguard flew nonstop … They rescued more than thirty-three thousand souls” (p.38) – though soon undercut by his sidekick Clete Purcel’s caustic contrast with the Supreme Commander’s own aerial display: “Did you see that big plane that flew over? … It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a flyover. Gee, I feel better now” (p.41). The identification of honourable intent is similarly frustrated by reality on the ground for traumatised survivors and erstwhile saviours alike, with praise for rescue agencies unravelling in recrimination against officialdom, and the ethical superiority of law enforcers over criminals and vigilantes confounded by pervasive inept, corrupt, and lethal practice. Still, incidents of the latter tend to be described on reflex as ‘rumour’, with police reports, however hyperbolic or prejudicial, related as deadpan fact in Robicheaux’s breathless accounts:

“Looters were hitting pharmacies and liquor and jewellery stores first, then working their way down the buffet table. A rogue group of NOPD cops had actually set up a thieves headquarters on the tenth floor of a downtown hotel, storing their loot in the rooms, terrorizing the management, and threatening to kill a reporter who tried to question them. New Orleans cops also drove off with automobiles from the Cadillac agency. Gangbangers had converged on the Garden District and were having a Visigoth holiday, burning homes built before the Civil War, carrying away whatever wasn’t bolted down.
Evacuees in the Superdome and Convention Center tried to walk across the bridge into Jefferson Parish. Most of these people were black, some carrying children in their arms, all of them exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated. They were met by armed police officers who fired shotguns over their heads and allowed none of them to leave Orleans Parish … An NOPD cop shot a black man with a twelve-gauge through the glass window of his cruiser in front of the Convention Center while hundreds of people watched … Emergency personnel in rescue boats became afraid of the very people they were supposed to save. Some people airflifted out by the Coast Guard in the Lower Nine said the gunfire was a desperate attempt to signal the boat crews” (pp.38-9).

And the dangerous felony of desperate foraging by the starving sits awkwardly with wanton and organised neglect and execution:

“I saw people eating from plastic packages of mustard and ketchup they had looted from a cafe, dividing what they had amongst themselves … Some NOPD cops said the personnel at Orleans Parish Prison had blown town and left the inmates to drown. Others said a downtown mob rushed a command center, thinking food and water were being distributed. A deputy panicked and began firing an automatic weapon into the night sky, quickly adding to the widespread conviction that cops were arbitrarily killing innocent people … We heard rumors that teams of elite troops … were taking out snipers under a black flag” (p.44).

Given minimal time to make sense of his crime scene data, Robicheaux’s general conclusion resembles that famously reached by hip-hop star Kanye West [5], leaving an irksome FBI agent in no doubt about the greater scheme of things: “Hundreds if not thousands of New Orleans residents drowned who didn’t have to. I suspect that’s because some of the guys in Washington you work for couldn’t care less” (p.171). But as the specific murder case he pursues sinks into a moral quagmire linking all social strata – implicating upstanding insurance men, industrialists and clergy alongside petty thieves, Mob bosses, rapists, lone psychopaths and drug dealers – his own sanity, integrity and family come under mortal threat, triggering increasingly excessive violence to keep internal and external demons at bay. Along the way he reflects on the overarching structures and processes that both precipitate and thrive on the greater and lesser tragedies at hand:

“The images I had seen during the seven-day period immediately after the storm would never leave me. Nor could I afford the anger they engendered in me. Nor did I wish to deal with the latent racism in our culture that was already beginning to rear its head. According to the Washington Post, a state legislator had just told a group of lobbyists in Baton Rouge, ‘We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did’.” (p.83) [6].

By the time Hurricane Rita hit the Gulf coast three weeks afterwards, occasioning further mass evacuations,

“The original sympathy for the evacuees from New Orleans was incurring a strange transformation. Right-wing talk shows abounded with callers viscerally enraged at the fact that evacuees were receiving a onetime two-thousand-dollar payment to help them buy food and find lodging. The old southern nemesis was back, naked and raw and dripping – absolute hatred for the poorest of the poor … [while a] tidal wave of salt water, mud, dead fish, oil sludge, and organic debris literally effaced the southern rim of Louisiana” (pp.115-116).

And as for the larger reconstruction:

“Clete had said that after Katrina he had heard the sounds of little piggy feet clattering to the trough. I think his image was kind. I think the reality was far worse. The players were much bigger than the homegrown parasites that have sucked the life out of Louisiana for generations. The new bunch was educated and groomed and had global experience in avarice and venality … Staggering sums of money were given to insider corporations who subcontracted the jobs to small outfits that used only nonunion labor … It became obvious right after Katrina that the destruction of New Orleans was an ongoing national tragedy and probably an American watershed in the history of political cynicism” (p.148).

As Robicheaux judges later: “The job ahead was Herculean and it was compounded by a level of corporate theft and governmental incompetence and cynicism that probably has no equal outside the Third World. I wasn’t sure New Orleans had a future” (p.196) [7]. But it certainly has a long, dishonourable past, and Burke excels in excavating the sins of the fathers while retaining a nostalgic faith in potential redemption (with innocence scarcely realistic) in the present.

Crimes and Punishments

As Blowdown’s tortuous, labyrinthine plot proceeds, unlikely leads overlap and loose ends abound. Exasperated at every turn by the refusal of suspects, victims and informants to co-operate with (or even acknowledge) his knight’s errand, Robicheaux explains his embattled bafflement in terms of the simplistic worldviews of others – thus disavowing the contradictions and inadequacies of his own position as lone crusader for truth and justice floundering in the forces of darkness; maintaining self-belief via quintessential petit-bourgeois resentment:

“As Americans we are a peculiar breed. We believe in law and order, but we also believe that real crimes are committed by a separate class of people, one that has nothing to do with our own lives or the world of reasonable behaviour and mutual respect to which we belong. As a consequence, many people, particularly in higher income brackets, think of police officers as suburban maintenance personnel who should be treated politely but whose social importance is one cut above their gardeners.
Ever watch reality cop shows? … What conclusion does the viewer arrive at? Crimes are committed by shirtless pukes. Slumlords and politicians on a pad get no play” (pp.152-3).

These manic manoeuvres of splitting, denial and projection serve to fully implicate the respectable fractions of society colluding in processes which generate and nourish patterns of foul play, while insulating the untarnished detached self from both the seething mass of ignorance below and venal dissolution above. Though a wholly artificial balance between culpability and blamelessness, this facilitates the pragmatic separation of investigative wheat from chaff, but sedimented as belief-system has a seductive, self-serving clarity requiring Herculean physical and emotional efforts to sustain when the going gets tough – so extreme, indeed, as to virtually obliterate the boundaries between good and bad guys all over again. Nevertheless, an immediate payoff is a clearsighted appreciation of the thoroughgoing dependence of business as usual on class- and race-based contempt and domination in mainstream culture and its legitimising discourses.
History then resolves into a litany of criminal enterprise, with the fallout from Katrina entirely in keeping:

“In Louisiana, as in the rest of the South, the issue was always power. Wealth did not buy it. Wealth came with it. Televangelist preachers and fundamentalist churches sold magic as a way of acquiring it. The measure of one’s success was the degree to which he could exploit his fellow man or reward his friends or punish his enemies … In our state’s history, a demagogue with holes in his shoes forced Standard Oil to kiss his ring” (p.290).

The latter refers to populist Senator Huey P. Long, gifting, we are told [8], the state to the Costello crime family in the 1930s, who duly subcontracted all vice operations in New Orleans to a local Mafia outfit. The police and Mob coexisted comfortably (as elsewhere), running the French Quarter tourist area of the city as a joint franchise where, irrespective of legal niceties, nothing was allowed to interfere with the pleasure business – a “cultural symbiosis” responsible for the locals’ dubbing the city ‘The Great Whore of Babylon’ and ‘The Big Easy’ as well as Purcel and Robicheaux’s favoured ‘The Big Sleazy’; which, however, progressively broke down after crack cocaine flooded the city in the 1980s before finally drowning in August 2005.

This socio-economic fabric, however, was always co-constituted and crosscut with the legacies of racial segregation, where, in Robicheaux’s otherwise idealised post-Depression youth,

“The majority of people were poor, and for generations the oligarchy that ruled the state exerted every effort to ensure they stayed that way. The Negro was the scapegoat for our problems, the trade unions the agents of northern troublemakers. With the coming of integration every demagogue in the state could not wait to stoke up the fires of racial fear and hatred. Many of their consitituents rose to the occasion” (p. 187) [9].
Correspondingly, Burke himself is at pains to emphasise that, “Within New Orleans’ city limits, the population is 70% black. These are mainly hard-working, blue-collar people who have endured every form of adversity over many generations. But another element is … heavily armed and morally insane. These are people who will rob the victim, then arbitrarily kill him out of sheer meanness” [10]. Tellingly, this stark dichotomising of a rich, complex Creole culture into sets of Manichean opposites produces one asymmetry – poor whites led astray by external forces; poor Blacks generating monsters from within – which, though never explicitly acknowledged, echoes the official bad faith the author excoriates in responses to Katrina; yet its ramifications dominate his novel’s frantic denouement.Remember, the police perspective routinely focused on Black criminality as the major problem after the storm hit, even though the bulk of supposedly factual media horror-stories were officially admitted to represent unsubstantiated paranoia. Slavoj Zizek has perceptively remarked that, here, “The official … discourse is accompanied and sustained by a whole nest of obscene, brutal racist and sexist fantasies, which can only be admitted in a censored form” [11] – that is, masquerading as unfortunate truth. For all his enlightened liberal humanism, procedural protocols govern Robicheaux’s working life too, and his default template for understanding and dealing with the black underclass presumes the same lowest common denominator – albeit uneasily displaced onto and attributed to his disreputable partner in crime-fighting:

“For Clete, Bertrand Melancon seemed to personify what he hated most in the clientele he dealt with on a daily basis. They were raised by their grandmothers and didn’t have a clue who their fathers were. They … thought of sexual roles in terms of prey or predator. They lied instinctively, even when there was no reason to. Trying to find a handle on them was impossible. They were inured to insult, indifferent to their own fate, and devoid of guilt or shame. What bothered Clete most about them was his belief that anyone from their background would probably turn out the same” (p.76).

Nevertheless Purcel’s job is to locate bail fugitives, and in “any American slum, two enterprises are never torched by urban rioters: the funeral home and the bondsman’s office … [whose] huge clientele of miscreants was sycophantic by nature and always trying to curry favor from those who had control over their lives” (p.72).

The conflicting characterisations here clearly signal the ‘moral insanity’ of traditional police culture, which dehumanises in advance those attracting its gaze, backed with baleful institutional clout obliging its targets to shape their conduct accordingly. But even choosing respectable conformism as accommodation to systemic injustice generates troubling grey areas – witness erstwhile law-abiding members of the Black community obstinately shielding less savoury relatives or neighbours from the official attention they know as malevolent. Unable to assimilate this phenomenon, Robicheaux instead retreats to an Oakland Baptist minister’s retrograde assertion that the 1960s Black “Panthers did not respect either the church or the traditional ethos of the family” (p.296), and therefore their appeal would not last. This dubious thesis was destined to remain untested, however. For its audacity in flouting sterotypes and collectively eschewing passivity, 1970s Black radicalism was crushed by a merciless police and military onslaught courtesy of the government’s COINTELPRO conspiracy.
To Gary Younge, in a real-life setting far stranger than fiction, Blowdown’s “search for black rapists and looters and their white assailants is a literary version of wasting police time” – where, although “they do not act as archetypes … the characters must operate within the narrow confines of racial cliché” [12]. Unfortunately – possibly misled by lofty disdain for its artistic merits – Younge doesn’t realise that Burke is specifically drawing attention to the problems this causes rather than merely reproducing them. That’s why Robicheaux’s favourite passage from Hemingway (in Death in the Afternoon) suggests “that the world’s ills could be corrected by a three-day open season on people. Less heartening is his addendum that the first group he would wipe out would be police officers everywhere” (p.186). Robicheaux thus “has a classic flaw: hubris. The tragic hero takes a fall because of pride … When Dave acts in a violent fashion it’s almost always in the defense of another. But he knows violence is the last resort of an intelligent person and the first resort of a primitive person, and that everyone is diminished by it, usually the perpetrator the most” [13]. Acting-out violent fantasy, furthermore, has always been the stock in trade of the hardboiled detective.

The Unsound and the Fury

Private dicks began life as struggling entrepreneurs from blue-collar backgrounds in the utterly corrupt public miasma of the modern city. Unlike the detached aristocratic geniuses previously populating detective fiction, the hardboiled protagonist mucks in and deliberately intensifies the disorder he finds in the hope of shaking out clues. But to survive he has to be as tough and adeptly schooled as his adversaries in the evil they do – the thoroughgoing imbrication of the hero in the conduct for which he seeks to extract accounting or achieve resolution being the constitutive dilemma of hardboiled genres [14]. Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and their direct descendants thus handle their contradictory positions with ironic isolation from the decadence around them, maintaining a strict regime of masculinity to bolster immunity from the dangerous seductions of femme fatales [15] – a spartan solipsism inevitably eroded, however, with the emerging social structure of consumer capitalism, which offers the seeking of pleasures and blurring of patriarchal boundaries to ordinary folk as well as the idle rich.
Hence new generations of hardnosed investigators had to relax their masculinist certainties and rigid ego structures in order to convince their clients of professional competence (and their readers, of contemporary relevance). Yet this neo-noir worldliness and flexibility now makes it far harder to resist sinking into the moral degeneracy that they must be so intimate with to contest. As Fred Pfeil shows, the paradoxical outcome is that greater attentiveness to emotional depth and complexity necessitates ever more hysterical levels of violence to differentiate the honourably tough but vulnerable detective from the villain [16]. And whereas for most representatives of the genre, this

“sensitivity is both unproblematically positive and narcissistically self-regarding, Robicheaux’s is openly riven by ambivalence, troubled by complicit desires and doubts, and obsessed with its old, unhealable wounds … explicitly defined by its connective affiliations to and with a continuum of others, from the various white male monsters whose terrible appetites he finds within himself, to the innocent vulnerability of those morally pure women, children, and Blacks he saves and protects” [17].

His creator specifies that “Dave’s greatest anger is over the loss of the Cajun culture into which he was born. He’s never been able to accept the fact that it’s gone and won’t be coming back” [18]. His nostalgic yearning in defence against this fury is then set against fantasies of the purity and unconditional love offered by the isolated nuclear family, but in both cases the reality is infected with exactly the same social diseases and questionable motives that he prefers only to register in those marked irredeemably criminal. Robicheaux originates in a dysfunctional family with a capricious and cruel father and absent promiscuous mother, substituting his disappointment at a broken home with valorisation of the Cajun working class that at least had clear-cut standards to measure its failure. Similarly he idealises his intimate relationships but compulsively endangers them – his saintly second wife was slaughtered by thugs he was pursuing, and in Blowdown his third wife (an ex-nun) and adopted daughter very nearly suffer the same fate. The grotesque white psychopath who poses this most serious threat to Robicheaux (as in most of his novels) then obviously represents an incarnation of the alter-ego that he could so easily have become.
Burke’s evident awareness of all of these pathological dynamics is tempered by his focus on the overarching theme of redemption – sadly understood as an individual spiritual matter rather than a question of social and political dialectic, and therefore verging on vanity as well as pridefulness, where the conquering hero flatters himself on his goodness (and seeks regular reassurance to that effect from his nearest and dearest). Still, the author’s genre craftsmanship is such that the story’s resolution succeeds in tying all the narrative strands together, including Robicheaux’s encouragement (as part of his faltering attempt to transcend the racist mythology he grew up with) of the Black fugitive’s desire to atone for his many sins. Nevertheless, the scale of the central character’s hysterical propensities and the hyperbolic violence he has to be willing to indulge in to end up ‘on the side of the angels’ heralds the self-destructive nature of a quest condemned to endlessly repeat itself so long as collective remedies remain out of reach … In which case, as an allegory of the contortions of mainstream America avoiding recognition of its deep intrinsic culpability in the tragedy of New Orleans, perhaps The Tin Roof Blowdown is a minor masterpiece after all.

Notes

1. along with the title story – first appearing in Esquire in March 2006 (and so popular that the magazine reinstated regular short fiction features) – of Burke’s collection Jesus Out To Sea. These have been swiftly followed by several other notable novels in diverse genres, as well as a crude, action-based, Miami Vice-style cop series (K-Ville) from Fox TV.
2. from an interview with Martha Woodroof on US National Public Radio, July 30, 2007 (www.npr.org). In an interview with Skylar Browning, ‘No Regrets’, Missoula Independent Weekly, February 8, 2006 (www.theind.com), he fleshes out this conviction: “George Orwell put it much better than I. He said, ‘A writer writes in order to correct history, to set the record straight.’ By that he meant it’s an obsession. You feel that somehow — and it’s a vanity, of course — that inside you, you have trapped a perfect picture of truth, and you feel compelled every minute of the day to convey it to someone else”. More specifically, “We’ve given over the country to the worst people in it … In part, it’s because we’ve forgotten the importance of working people. … We’ve given up the high road to the people who have hijacked Christianity … We’ve allowed people who have no compassion at all for the working classes to pretend successfully that it is they who have Joe Bob and Bubba and Betty Sue’s interests at heart … Anyone who believes that the people running this country today care about the interests of working people has a serious thinking disorder”.
3. quotation from Burke’s Los Angeles Times op-ed, ‘A City of Saints and Sancho Panza’, September, 2005 (www.jamesleeburke.com). See also interview with Jeff Baker, ‘From Montana’s Heartland: Redemption for New Orleans’, The Oregonian, August 26, 2007 (www.oregonlive.com).
4. interview with Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com). Also, no doubt, audiences for detective stories are rather different from those for current affairs programming, however worthy – see Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading, Popular Writing, Verso 1983, for a pathbreaking account of the class connotations of popular fiction.
5. “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”, during NBC’s Concert for Hurricane Relief, September 2, 2005, after other unscripted remarks like: “I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it [the media] says, ‘they’re looting’. You see a white family, it says, ‘they’re looking for food’. And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black”.
6. And in his first town hall meeting after Katrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin invited an evangelist pastor to speak first, who called it a “purging and cleansing” of the city – Nagin himself later suggesting that God had taken revenge on America for the Iraq war. Despite Burke’s disgust here, though, his Catholicism also attracts him (and therefore Robicheaux) to equally ecclesiastical imagery; for example: “But the damage in New Orleans was of a kind we associate with apocalyptical images from the Bible” (p.195). For more on such theodicy and mainstream and crackpot godbothering in general, as well as cogent analyses of political and media treatments of the crisis, see Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell Or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, Basic Civitas Books, 2006 – who also cites the only significant remaining records of life in the drowned zones as being music videos by Southern rappers (and for further reference to their responses to Katrina, see my ‘Rebel Poets Reloaded’, Variant 30, 2007).
7. Robicheaux sees firsthand, and duly notes, the sundry paltry and woefully belated grassroots fruits of Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA; run by Bush crony Michael Brown with no experience in this, or any relevant, field) activity; i.e. granting enormous contracts to notoriously vicious, corrupt corporations like Blackwater, resulting in minimal resources trickling down to relief recipients. Given Blackwater’s record in Iraq, the Third World parallel is doubly ironic even while exposing the general logic of ‘private finance initiatives’.
8. for example: Blowdown, pp.140-1; and ‘A City of Saints and Sancho Panza’, L.A. Times (see note 3).
9. including very nearly electing ex-KKK Nazi David Duke as state Governor as recently as 1991. For the best review of Blowdown I’ve read anchored in New Orleans nuance, see Robert Maxwell, ‘After the Storm: James Lee Burke Answers Katrina’s Wrath with His Own’, Mobile Press-Register (Alabama), August 5, 2007 (www.press-register.com).
10. L.A. Times, note 3.11. in ‘The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans’, In These Times, 20 October, 2005; invoking a parallel with anti-semitism in Nazi Germany where, quite irrespective of any actual misdeeds, “the causes of all social antagonisms were projected onto the ‘Jew’ – an object of perverted love-hatred, a spectral figure of mixed fascination and disgust”.
12. ‘After the Storm’, The Guardian, December 1, 2007.
13. Burke, in Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal, note 4.
14. see, for example, John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, Chicago University Press, 1976; David Geherin, The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction, New York, Vintage, 1985; Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema, Routledge, 1993.
15. see Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, Routledge, 1991; and various contributions to Joan Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir, Verso, 1993.
16. in ‘Soft Boiled Dicks’, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference, Verso, 1995.
17. ‘Soft Boiled Dicks’, pp.116-7. Burke’s foregrounding of Robicheaux’s psychic conflicts also contrasts most sharply with the fashionable serial killer subgenre – for example, the Hannibal Lecter series, where class hatred is mystified and dispersed into outlandishly supernatural empathetic connections between detectives, murderers and amoral upper-class incarnations of the Devil.
18. in Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal, note 4.

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Cowboys and Injuries by Tom Jennings [notes from correspondence, January 2006]
Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, 2005

Cowboys and Injuries [notes from correspondence, January 2006]

Of course you’re right, the story of the two lead characters in Brokeback Mountain is the classic narrative of doomed love in a hostile society, and it accomplished the romantic tragedy angle perfectly – I reckon Ang Lee is one of the best directors around for translating literature to screen without trivialising or diminishing it (and he’s worked in nearly every genre too). I’ve not read the Proulx story, but I’d imagine he got the wider social complications and repercussions spot on from her too. Having said that, the differences from age-old mythic romance may be as interesting as the similarities.
That’s partly why the ‘gay cowboy’ thing is a facile label, to be sure, but more besides. Clearly there was no way the main sexual relationship wasn’t going to be central to the tabloid reception; so they might as well make a merit of it, I suppose. More to the point, the film (though probably not the written story) is full of visual and stylistic allusions to classic cowboy movies and characters; but where the naïve individualistic heroism of your average John Wayne is thoroughly and openly demystified – as both personally disastrous and inevitably conforming to the barbarity of so-called civilisation (i.e. not just genocide and slavery, but sundry contemporary forms of oppression too). This is something very rare in modern Hollywood blockbusters directly referencing the Western genre – the most obvious other recent example I can think of in this respect is Clint Eastwood’s revisionist The Unforgiven; but here the homoeroticism is conventionally submerged beneath Freudian father-son masculinity dynamics where women are mere cyphers (note, conversely, Lee’s sophisticated dramatisations of gender anxiety in many genres: e.g. The Wedding Banquet, 1993; Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994; Sense and Sensibility, 1995; The Ice Storm, 1997; Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, 2000; even Hulk, 2003 …).

However, this precisely wasn’t a Western, since the whole premise of cowboy films is that the wilderness is beyond the limits of civilisation, where dangerous savages (usually feminised too, such as Native Americans) are tamed (usually annihilated) by male bonding macho pioneers who have to suppress or displace their feelings for each other in order to ‘get the job done’. Whereas the Brokeback wilderness is already fully colonised by political economy (disrupted only by remnants of barbarism like coyotes and bears). So it is a precarious sanctuary inside civilisation and the only place within which the free play of unfettered desire could express itself – albeit temporarily (think of discourses of tourism; except on Brokeback the protagonsists were dirt poor, although the Mexican ladyboys later on did yield to commodity relations) .
So the parallel with the Western then continues in the characters’ divergent trajectories. The rooted class realities reflected in Heath Ledger’s character’s attitudes and environment suppress development and constrain his options in ways he is (fleetingly) aware of and fatalistic about – although in many minor ways throughout he resists merely reproducing the patriarchal patterns that formed him (though these small acts of resistance typically neither succeed nor afford anyone much consolation). Whereas Jake Gyllenhaal’s more mobile drifter takes the aspirational route (in Westerns, this would mean lackeying for whoever was in power; here – i.e. modern ‘Western’ society – bourgeois social and economic advancement concealing his ‘corruption’), which requires the deliberate, selfish manipulation of those around him and the disavowal of responsibility for the consequences both for them and him, resulting in his eventual ‘lynching’ (in a manner similar, for example, to the traditional fates of transgressive, sexualised women or uppity lower castes).
Most of all, for me, the way the personalities, behaviour and interactions of the main characters were shown to affect and mingle in the lives of each other, their families and others rang very true – and the best cinema can achieve this level of subtlety without having to be put into words (whereas in writing there’s no choice). I’d have liked to have seen more from the perspectives of the wives, and more of the social ripples further out. But that’s just quibbling really. As for whether mainstream audiences go beyond stereotypical responses, at any level – well, maybe they do; but they’re on their own, since none of the critics did. As per ..

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Body Politics by Tom Jennings – film review of Sicko, directed by Michael Moore, published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 2, February 2008

Body Politics by Tom Jennings,
Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 2, February 2008]

The most effective and affecting sequences in this documentary about the US healthcare (dis-)service – where even middle-class people bankrupt themselves paying for treatment – show ordinary Americans recounting abject experiences at the hands of callous insurance companies and profiteering medical institutions. Michael Moore wisely holds ego in abeyance whereupon his subjects’ intelligence and resilience in the face of personal tragedy make his arguments for socialised medicine for him. As in previous films like Roger & Me, Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, this grass-roots approach to delineating his themes pays dividends because the subsequent commonsense basis for political debate undercuts the high-minded pomposity and venal dishonesty of the Great and Good bolstering the greed of their elite constituencies in the name of freedom.
Having established sympathy for the victims of such a corrupt and malicious system without rendering them passive, Moore wastes no time detailing, with great satirical flourish, the deliberate design and assiduous maintenance of this appalling state of affairs by successive generations of Republicans and Democrats from Nixon to Bush. The archival detective work again produces gems, such as Tricky Dicky in the 1971 White House Tapes rubberstamping the insurance sector’s rip-off masterminded by John Erlichman. The clincher? “All the incentives run the right way: the less care they give … the more money they make”. Then there’s Reagan telling his public that a proper national service was not only against their interests, but ‘anti-American’ to boot. Most tellingly, the roster of corporate lickspittles includes both Clintons – Bill’s healthcare reform ticket abandoned upon becoming president, and Hilary’s commitment to universal provision doubtful given her lobby funding by Big Pharma.

Of course, the populist demagogue persona inevitably surfaces at some point, and in Sicko it arrives in spades. Freed from demands of electoral name-calling, we instead get sickening paeans to Castro’s Cuba and Tony Benn proclaiming that killing the NHS would prompt revolution here, alongside similarly ridiculously idealised descriptions of the Canadian and French systems – with attention to neither the fatal inadequacies of their massive hierarchical bureaucracies nor the present insidious drip of privatisation by the back door. The paradox once again is that success as a media brand requires sensational self-aggrandisement, with corresponding cynical levels of manipulation both of the audience and the material to guarantee access to the big screen. The result – here fetishising big government – is as frustrating as ever: at least airing so many dimensions of the problem, but obstinately oblivious to the obvious necessity of real, not token, people power if it’s ever to be solved.

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A Bipolar Exposition by Tom Jennings – television review of Britz, directed by Peter Kosminsky, published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 2, February 2008

A Bipolar Exposition by Tom Jennings

Juggling simplistic stereotypes, Channel 4’s Britz illuminates neither the attitudes of UK Muslims nor the motivations of homegrown jihadists, concludes Tom Jennings

Peter Kosminsky’s television docudramas have tackled themes such as the Falklands War, child abuse and North of Ireland policy; recently criticising UN peacekeeping in Bosnia (Warriors, 1999), the creation of New Labour (The Project, 2002), and the hounding of Dr David Kelly over Saddam’s WMDs (The Government Inspector, 2005). Now with Britz (Channel 4, October 31st/November 1st) he abandons ‘faction’ (combining fictional speculation with supposedly factual material) altogether, seeking to explain why the 7 July 2005 London bombers, “second-generation Pakistani-Muslim Britons … blew themselves to bits, taking with them as many of their fellow citizens as they could”. Aiming to flesh out the precursors of extreme choices and facilitate understanding how intelligent and caring individuals come to commit horrific acts, consecutive episodes depict the experiences and life choices of two closely-linked characters, which result in vastly divergent trajectories fatefully colliding in a tragic denouement.
Sohail (Riz Ahmed) and his sister Nasima (Manjinder Virk) from Bradford are studying law and medicine respectively and, fully integrated into student life, tolerate their parents’ traditionalism without applying it to themselves. He sneers at peers taking prayers seriously, and to fulfil what he sees as a debt of honour to Britain (plus envisaging an exciting career), enlists with MI5 to combat terrorism – with his commitment standfast despite falling foul of anti-terror policing and taking part in persecution and torture. Naz, conversely, responds deeply to such phenomena and is politically active but, frustrated with liberal protest and traumatised by the suicide of a friend unjustly placed under a Control Order, opts to train for armed jihad. Both detach themselves entirely from friends and family in following their secret courses – but (despite superb acting) we never learn why on earth they embarked on them, leaving gaping chasms in the narrative arcs botched together with clumsy melodrama, action and suspense into a fatally-flawed and utterly unbelievable story.

For a while, the translation of government measures into local intimidation and racist police practice, and resulting outrage among Muslim youth, are convincingly conveyed (thanks to scrupulous research) – as is the coexistence in everyday life of religiosity and secularism and traditional and modern behaviour patterns. But the demands of the thriller format transform accurate representations of grievance, by default, into simple determinants of extreme responses – validating rather than undermining the state’s hysterical repression of symptoms mistaken for causes. Britz cannot distinguish between a majority who feel strongly and a tiny minority prepared to contemplate indiscriminate malice and murder on behalf of either Crown or Caliphate – equally unlikely alternatives which obliterate the myriad of real-world compromise belief formations and stances we all routinely assume. There is no sense of those from Muslim backgrounds reassessing this part of their heritage (irrespective of spiritual or political motivations) as a means to reaffirm family and social allegiance in the face of such immediate threat – whereas a contribution to genuine debate would show the spectrum of expression among ordinary people leading to neither regressive cataclysm or Hollywood action heroism. Unfortunately, media business-as-usual combines genre convention with promotional hype, artistic arrogance and political cluelessness to render such modestly worthwhile aims inconceivable.

Bipolar Disorders

Kosminsky drew on childhood imaginings of a rebellious sister alter-ego for his conformist self. After his immigrant European parents escaped the Nazis, he had an “almost visceral desire to dig into the host society – but part of me was ashamed of that … I still feel the battle inside”. Yet while class mobility has similar effects, and despite racial exclusion precluding ‘passing’, Britz acknowledges only upwardly-mobile, establishment views (in liberal multicultural guise) of integration and assimilation – marking as suspect more downmarket British tendencies towards irreverence, disrespect for and distrust of authority, horizontal loyalty and solidarity. So not only are the cultural and class foundations of both religious and political beliefs and practices underplayed, but questions of how and in what spheres these are put into action remain unasked. Disillusionment and anger with and alienation from, as well as affiliation and loyalty to, official political discourses and institutions manifest themselves multifariously, not as the Manichean opposites shown here. And, sure enough, the researchers found widespread fury and frustration but no-one remotely like Sohail or Naz.
Arising from the writer’s projection of his own conflicts into others – with subsequent misattributions of motives – this bipolar exposition on a cultural level requires wholesale repression of ambiguous and conflictual feelings and perceptions in drawing conclusions conducive to judgements of ineffable ‘otherness’ (and yields factual blunders too numerous to list). As in other mainstream fictional representations of British Muslims in recent years (see my discussion in ‘Same Difference?’Variant 23, 2005), Britz sacrifices an exploration of complicated biographies and social spheres in favour of individualised oversimplifications. Once stripped of social immersion, shallow sensationalised attributes chime with press headlines and political platitudes masquerading as objective criteria of liberal ‘balance’. Contradictory evidence is conveniently ignored – as with the recent Home Office Survey showing that UK Muslims identify significantly more strongly with ‘Britishness’ than any other ethnic group (with remedial citizenship classes therefore another alibi for officially disavowed Islamophobia).

More generally, New Labour’s onslaught on civil liberties, in the wider project to criminalise dissent, spuriously associates individual experimentation with thoughts, words, images, ideas and lifestyles at odds with bourgeois norms as potential terrorism – conflating ‘anti-social’ behaviour with ultimate threats to society in legitimising ruthless monitoring and control. Parasitising this context in its purported realism, Britz perfectly fits the agenda of the ‘loyal opposition’ necessary for the manufacture of middle-class consent – which, incidentally, explains why MI5 (exemplars of the technocratic ‘intelligence’ fix) were so supportive during Kosminsky’s research. But interpreted as rhetorical fantasy more insidious than the BBC’s laughable Spooks (with Sohail, perhaps, like 24’s Jack Bauer), the writer-director’s spectacular smugness and pathetic pretense of critique are exposed – just as the fashionable rash of drama-docs he’s spearheaded specialise in substituting shallow simulation for serious analysis.

www.variant.org.uk

www.freedompress.org.uk

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Minutes from meetingStar and Shadow. Minutes General meeting 17 December 2007
Adrin, Bill, Eftychia, Phipps, Craig, Phil, Haz, Ilana, Pauline, David, Roger.

Apologies: Mat, Christo, Holly.

M/A
Free chairs – Craig is on the case, putting feelers out, contacted the 2 furniture coops – no chairs available at the mo but ongoing research.

Bottle recycling: We have a bin – need to clarify with Alan when it is collected.

Feedback from Lucero gig to Pauline:
As both Pauline and Stephanie were at meeting discussion about what happened Stephanie outlined problems and there was discussion around looking after volunteers and not becoming just a gig venue again. Also that events that do turn ugly have an impact on all events – especially in the light of petition Craig mentioned – he had heard about from local residents about restricting music events here – but we need to find out more about this. Ilana’s discussion with the council is that there are no probkes they know of regarding us.

Pauline described how she researchs music and is working and nurturing relationships with promoters, and aiming to talk them through contract as that seems to work better than just the text which is easy to ignore. In particular that doorstaff (ticket ones) need to be on door at all times. Also that there aren’t actually that many gigs, and reminder that so many of them are lovely events and these kind are rarer. And problematic for our venue to blanket restrict  types of music. Discussion continued about merits and problems with tightening up our structure and where we draw the line – seems that treating each case as it comes and nurturing relationships is the way forward. This needs to include SIA trained doorstaff where necessary – as we already have to on late license nights. Pauline already has a list of promoters not to invite back and ones that worked well.

Craig mentioned a petition that he had heard about from local residents about restricting music events here – but we need to find out more about this, as we don’t want to be restricted in everything by one or two events. ACTION.
Ilana’s discussion with the council is that there are no probs they know of regarding us.

Finances:
VAT report going in by end Dec.

Programming:
BFI issue being resolved. Bill point of contact for delivery and pick up. 

2nd Feb. Ghetto Method
Want to put on scenario event.   Film, music, live drawing. Needs suggestions of films for theme the devil that comes between us.
Adrin – suggestion to put out email for suggestion.

Phil – green festival.
Meeting date wanted to confirm but issue over wiki – what happens skateboarding film hadn’t been cancelled on the wiki. Caused confusion when things cancelled but not taken off.

Explained about confirmed C as discussed at programming. Reiterated that contact details are ESSENTIAL.
Roger outlined issues about personal contact details. As it is too difficult for wiki not to have details, solution is for individuals to set up new/forwarding email if it’s a problem to use a main one.

25th January. Green fest agm. Confirmed.

Need to look back at the idea for outlining how to programme for new promoters and connect in with Pauline. ACTION: make this happen find someone/people at programming meeting to do this.

Next meeting – 7th Jan. General. Next programming. 14th. In the brochure.

Eyes Wide Open – publicity needs to go out! ACTION: Steph emailing Debbie, Mat and Christo.

Building Maintenance – day was successful.
Phipps – can there be an email for building maintainers. Use like a diary? Ask Simon to set up – ACTION: Ilana to ask Simon, Phipps to activate its use.

Bar:
Feedback form meeting. Bulidng work happening. Roger can offer to get beer in his car.

What happens with New Year restart up? Lots straight after New year – 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th   6th

NYE – lot of volunteers needed. Email to Mike.

If Films letter.

Issue around protest. Need to find a way to discuss issues rather than cause conflicts to cinema users.

ACTION: Bring agenda item about being animal/cruelty free/vegetarian at next meeting.

S+S letter: apologise for what happened. Was not a volunteer. ACTION. Ilana.

New Membership cards.
Sarah Cook did last years– just put the year on. ACTION: Ilana to discuss with Sarah Make it white on black not black on white to distinguish

Volunteers for events after new year – Steph emailing out.

PA:
Offer of use of a PA in exchange for storage. From Bill – on loan not to borrow. He still uses it. Need to discuss re not getting it trashed. Pauline going to have some thoughts and bring it to another meeting.

Xmas party – who is entertaining? Will be S+S stylee (last minute and fun).

Ends.

Trading In Desperation, by Tom Jennings.
Television review of ‘It’s A Free World …’, directed by Ken Loach, written by Paul Laverty, Channel 4, September 24th 2007,
Trading In Desperation by Tom Jennings

[television review of It’s A Free World …, directed by Ken Loach, written by Paul Laverty, Channel 4, September 24th 2007, published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 21, November 2007]

Ken Loach’s new television drama (released for cinema abroad) tackles the theme of entrepreneurship as career option in New Labour’s neoliberal dystopia, focusing on the efforts of Londoners Angie and her flatmate Rose to rise above soul-destroying low-level dead-end admin work. Sick and tired of being shat on by bosses at foreign workers employment agencies, Angie resolves to start up herself and do it properly to get a better deal for everyone concerned (especially her family; though her solid old-school proletarian dad is appalled). At first the ambition to be ‘fair’ and still make a decent living seems promising, and direct interaction with the hardships and tragedies of those fleeing Eastern Europe and the Middle-East for ‘better lives’ gives them some insight and humility. However, the pair soon find themselves ducking and diving around the brutal logic of the concrete business jungle, where comprehensively sacrificing the interests of their employees is the inevitable price of staying afloat …

Contriving these Eastender (anti-)heroes as strong working-class women (one a white single mother, the other Black; both, sadly, with rather superficial personalities) allows interesting twists on treating humans as objects – whether of paper-thin sympathy, patronisation, even sexual domination. It’s a Free World … also successfully conveys the invidious positions of both ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrant workers, at the mercy of unscrupulous agencies and corrupt employers cynically squeezing every conceivable source of profit from their vulnerability – enhanced by official neglect and worsened by State persecution and the erosion of welfare and labour rights, all reinforced by mainstream media and party-political marginalisation and stigmatisation.
Their violent fightback here effectively glosses the recourse to criminality among the most oppressed – though it’s surprising that Polish workers, given their recent history, didn’t try other tactics first. Or maybe they did, but this story of the gangmistresses’ moral dilemmas couldn’t accommodate it – Loach’s intention being “to challenge the prevailing wisdom that ruthless entrepreneurship is the way that this society should develop … It seeks out exploitation. It produces monsters”. So, unable to secure legit viability, Angie and Rose embark on even shadier ventures preying on the weak. Unfortunately, without the ethical or physical nous and ‘muscle’ to back up their bravado, they’re completely unconvincing – despite the cod-Hobbesian spiv ‘realism’ about the ways of the contemporary world fitting the zeitgeist. Yet again, social-realist melodrama suffocates its narrative by ticking so many right-on boxes and exemplifying manifold ‘issues’ in its central characters – perhaps mirroring the disastrous fetish for elite leadership in the command socialism which inspires its makers.

www.variant.org.uk

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www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

The Substance of Abuse. Film review of Sherrybaby, directed by Laurie Collyer, published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 22, November 2007.

The Substance of Abuse by Tom Jennings

[film review of Sherrybaby, directed by Laurie Collyer, published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 22, November 2007]

In parts resembling by-the-numbers issue-led TV docudrama and quirky low-budget indie feature, Sherrybaby exceeds the limits of these genres thanks to the honesty and subtlety of its narrative and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s magnificent immersion in the role of Sherry – a 22 year-old New Jersey junkie fresh out of prison trying to turn her life around and resume motherhood of a young daughter looked after by her brother and sister-in-law. Gyllenhaal exudes worldy-wise determination, vulnerability, sass and naivete, yet this is no naff redemptive melodrama puppeteering its audience’s emotions and pimping its characters. Instead, shameless manipulation and sentimentality are located firmly in Sherry’s behavioural repertoire and are consistently marked as self-destructive, inappropriate and/or abject – but also intelligible responses to the arbitrary, corrupt environment in which she struggles in childlike desperation to negotiate friendship, family and official relationships.
Former documentary-maker Collyer based the story on a close friend’s life and her own experiences as social work assistant. So the details of halfway house, probation routine and rehab groups ring completely true – where those she encounters exhibit occasional goodwill but, in this soul-crushing system, more often hover between cynical, hostile and downright pathological. Sherry strides cluelessly into the morass fortified by the Bible and simple-minded personal growth slogans, freely deploying her open sexuality and self-obsession to open doors always threatening to slam shut. The excellent supporting cast flesh out Gyllenhaal’s convincing naturalistic depiction of conflictuality: unpredictably sympathetic, alienating, victimised, brave and foolish. A powerfully poignant realism allows her wholly unrealistic (and potentially catastrophic) personal mythology – caring for a child in actuality rather than fantasy – to crumble as she backslides towards addictive oblivion.

Collyer’s riskiest tactic was to contextualise Sherry’s conduct in the dysfunctional emotional quagmire of her parental home, prompting familiar reductive cliches of preoccupied distant mother and premature sexualisation via paternal abuse as precursors to a promiscuous infantile inability to maintain boundaries and sustain mature mutuality. These issues are not fudged, but creditably faced head-on – as they should be. Better still, the pitfalls are sidestepped by sketching the possibility of progress only with collective generosity and shared effort, the recognition of weakness and give and take among equals, and due respect given for following one’s desires. The flashes of genuine passionate connection between Sherry, her friends and family thus signal chances for a fruitful future as well as the very definite prospect of reproducing the cycle of damage – neither tragedy nor triumph being logically foreclosed or morally judged. And if you generalise the reference points of addiction, narcissism and objectification to the contemporary stranglehold of sociopathic consumerism – then that’s an unusually intelligent and worthwhile message to find on a cinema screen.

www.variant.org.uk

www.freedompress.org.uk

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Naming and Shaming the Backyard Bully, by Tom Jennings.
Film review of The War On Democracy, directed by John Pilger & Chris Martin, 2007, published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 22, November 2007
Naming and Shaming the Backyard Bully by Tom Jennings

[film review of The War On Democracy, directed by John Pilger & Chris Martin, 2007, published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 22, November 2007]

John Pilger’s new documentary spoils a concise exposé of US foreign policy with uncritical pandering to Latin America’s latest charismatic nationalists, finds Tom Jennings

The cinema release of veteran journalist John Pilger’s The War On Democracy (co-directed with Chris Martin) permits more wide-ranging thematics than his usual scrupulous but relatively narrow television coverage of specific historical outrages (most famously in Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua and East Timor). Summarising Washington’s installation of brutal regimes in Central and South America over five decades, he wanted to analyse ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as spun by Western governments: “revealing through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths … [in order] to understand the true nature of the so-called war on terror”. The replacement of social democratic formations with rule by death squad throughout the region is then contrasted with Venezeuela and Bolivia, where Presidents Chavez and Morales have recently been elected vowing to derail the rich and foreign elite gravy train in the interests of the dispossessed.
The experience in Chile – where Pinochet’s fascists seized power on 9/11 1974 with extensive CIA support – is contrasted with the 2002 right-wing coup in Caracas which failed purportedly due to street protests by the urban masses. Despite local and US media saturation denouncing Chavez’ project as evil communist insanity, ordinary Venezuelans clearly rejected the certain misery of unfettered neoliberal dictatorship – the film counterposes footage from 2002 with visits to shanty towns and a millionaire’s mansion, succinctly conveying the social bases of political polarisation in the country. Similarly, the litany of slaughter and repression under American tutelage precedes a chat with Duane Clarridge, ex-CIA chief in Chile, reiterating the continuing utter contempt for human rights. Pilger then interviews Hugo Chavez, showing his personal integrity, humility, and a warmth for the common people reciprocated in the barrios – cementing the populist appeal of promises of a basic welfare state now capturing imaginations across the continent.

Of course memories of the ravages of military regimes weigh heavily across the region. But two decades of the wholesale looting of resources by multinationals and local lapdogs (IMF and World Bank conditions for ‘democracy’ to return) – destroying subsistence economies with the concomitant growth of vast slums around cities – doubtless also inflect the motivation to vote for marginally lesser evils. Actually, a relative waning of Washington’s directly malevolent intervention (with its attention elsewhere) has coincided with very diverse developments in South American political spheres crucial to understanding what is happening now. However, framed only in terms of earlier US foreign policy, The War On Democracy ignores the crucial integration into global trade (and subsequent bankrupting) of entire nations – which that historic policy facilitated rather than caused. Thus the far-reaching political convulsions in Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador are ignored, and the significance (beyond boosting national budgets) of natural resource extraction by American coorporations – quite irrespective of Dubya’s posturing – is missed.*
The rise of so-called Bolivarian social-democracy in Venezuela and comparable state-capitalist compromises elsewhere are better seen as strategic nationalist defences against emerging lower-class social movements which have threatened to coalesce in much more radical directions. For example, Evo Morales has co-opted impressive grass-roots mobilisations of shanty-neighbourhood and indigenous groups (detailed by Forrest Hylton in New Left Review, 35 & 37, 2005/6) amid large-scale industrial unrest in Bolivia into a shaky electoral alliance, appealing to the military and local and international capital that revolution can be pre-empted. In ‘Is Latin America Really Turning Left?’ (reprinted on the libcom website), James Petras explains the contortions of the new parliamentary socialists negotiating corporate demands for super-profits while retaining popular support with negligible redistributive trickle-down from oil and gas bonanzas.
Both phenomena are clear in Venezuela, which has the largest heavy crude reserves in the world and hence room to manoeuvre in buying off popular discontent. After the 1989 Caracazo uprising, unprecedented social movements mushroomed in the country, while an abortive 1992 military coup attempt saw Chavez and other junior officers involved jailed. Later in the decade his alternative, parliamentary, organisation, and carefully-designed personality cult catapulted him to the Presidency and a world record number of election victories since with manifestoes stressing health, education, housing and job-creation. Sadly the grass-roots networks have been taken over and reconstituted merely as electoral groups and self-aggrandising militarised client bureaucracies dispensing favours, while precious few welfare benefits have materialised. Dissatisfaction at unmet promises is escalating, with any opposition dismissed as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and encountering increasingly repressive policing. Most seriously, the government’s economic strategy is to sell off the whole of the natural environment for pillage by multinationals (to their great satisfaction) demanding less than the going international rent in return and with absolutely no regard for devastating consequences for the rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants or global climate ramifications.** And we’re supposed to applaud a brave and honest desire to improve the lives of the poor …

Packing so much in, it’s understandable that The War On Democracy neglects historical and contemporary complexities in Venezuela. Unfortunately, the results reinforce prejudices about lower-class susceptibility to charismatic leadership while demonstrating little inkling of the real characteristics of the Bolivarian state, the prospects for its modest socialism, or the social, environmental or economic impacts of its national development programme. Just as parachuting reporters into warzones with no independent sources inevitably yields subservient conclusions, embedding perspective within the Chavista circus here obscures its real contradictions and conflicts. True, Pilger has consistently broken through the media’s role as poodle to power, permitted only sporadic fractional deviations from official dishonesty masquerading as serious journalism. But despite a welcome demystification of US machinations, this film reproduces the liberal-left’s fatal inability to transcend the us-and-them oversimplifications it derides in the mainstream. The need for simultaneous critique of imperialism and nationalism – of the interwoven structures of capitalism and the state – remains.

* George Caffentzis enlarges on the wider context in ‘Apocalypse and/or Business as Usual? The Energy Debate after the 2004 Presidential Elections’, in Mute magazine, May 2007 (www.metamute.org)

** Comprehensive analysis is provided by the Venezuelan affinity group Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas (CRA) in their excellent magazine El Libertario (with translations at www.nodo50/org/ellibertario/english/). See also Hanna Dahlstrom’s report on the CRA-initiated Alternative Social Forum, coinciding with the February 2006 tame corporate-liberal World Social Forum in Caracas, at www.upsidedownworld.org.

The War on Democracy will be released on DVD in 2008. Unlike Pilger’s previous work, it has not been shown on ITV.

www.variant.org.uk

www.freedompress.org.uk

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Trading In Desperation [television review of It’s A Free World …, directed by Ken Loach, written by Paul Laverty, Channel 4, September 24th 2007]

Trading In Desperation by Tom Jennings

[television review of It’s A Free World …, directed by Ken Loach, written by Paul Laverty, Channel 4, September 24th 2007, published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 21, November 2007]

Ken Loach’s new television drama (released for cinema abroad) tackles the theme of entrepreneurship as career option in New Labour’s neoliberal dystopia, focusing on the efforts of Londoners Angie and her flatmate Rose to rise above soul-destroying low-level dead-end admin work. Sick and tired of being shat on by bosses at foreign workers employment agencies, Angie resolves to start up herself and do it properly to get a better deal for everyone concerned (especially her family; though her solid old-school proletarian dad is appalled). At first the ambition to be ‘fair’ and still make a decent living seems promising, and direct interaction with the hardships and tragedies of those fleeing Eastern Europe and the Middle-East for ‘better lives’ gives them some insight and humility. However, the pair soon find themselves ducking and diving around the brutal logic of the concrete business jungle, where comprehensively sacrificing the interests of their employees is the inevitable price of staying afloat …

Contriving these Eastender (anti-)heroes as strong working-class women (one a white single mother, the other Black; both, sadly, with rather superficial personalities) allows interesting twists on treating humans as objects – whether of paper-thin sympathy, patronisation, even sexual domination. It’s a Free World … also successfully conveys the invidious positions of both ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrant workers, at the mercy of unscrupulous agencies and corrupt employers cynically squeezing every conceivable source of profit from their vulnerability – enhanced by official neglect and worsened by State persecution and the erosion of welfare and labour rights, all reinforced by mainstream media and party-political marginalisation and stigmatisation.
Their violent fightback here effectively glosses the recourse to criminality among the most oppressed – though it’s surprising that Polish workers, given their recent history, didn’t try other tactics first. Or maybe they did, but this story of the gangmistresses’ moral dilemmas couldn’t accommodate it – Loach’s intention being “to challenge the prevailing wisdom that ruthless entrepreneurship is the way that this society should develop … It seeks out exploitation. It produces monsters”. So, unable to secure legit viability, Angie and Rose embark on even shadier ventures preying on the weak. Unfortunately, without the ethical or physical nous and ‘muscle’ to back up their bravado, they’re completely unconvincing – despite the cod-Hobbesian spiv ‘realism’ about the ways of the contemporary world fitting the zeitgeist. Yet again, social-realist melodrama suffocates its narrative by ticking so many right-on boxes and exemplifying manifold ‘issues’ in its central characters – perhaps mirroring the disastrous fetish for elite leadership in the command socialism which inspires its makers.

www.variant.org.uk

www.freedompress.org.uk

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Doing The Rights Thing by Tom Jennings [film review published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 19, October 2007]

Doing the Rights Thing by Tom Jennings

[film review of Taking Liberties, written and directed by Chris Atkins, published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 19, October 2007]

A summary of recent attacks on free citizenship in Britain, this documentary was made for cinema because such a ‘one-sided’ (i.e. honest) appraisal of the Blair regime’s record would not survive the requirements of ‘balance’ (i.e. censorship) on television. Supported by the producers of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the film apes his populist combo of comic buffoonery and acid commentary in romping through New Labour’s neurotic erosion of rights to privacy, protest and freedom of speech, and the more-or-less tacit embrace of imprisonment without trial, unaccountable extradition and torture. Emphasising the personal experiences of a wide swathe of victims – from peace protesters to those persecuted in the War on Terror – the background to a convincing picture of escalating totalitarianism is then sketched via animated vignettes of the history of legal ‘checks and balances’ on state power over the centuries, set against a jaunty Britpop backdrop.

Unfortunately, the film’s broad-brush knee-jerk jingoism cripples any political understanding of either past or present. Ancient constitutional precedents are all very well for patronising children with, but the routine reality of peremptory injustice in recent decades has shaped the patterns of close monitoring and control now being ratcheted up – from Northern Ireland policy and racist policing to the internment of immigrants, and from Tory anti-union and criminal justice legislation to the intensifying harassment of ‘antisocial’ behaviour. After the fallout from colonialism, kowtowing to global capitalism necessitates that living standards and welfare suffer, while lower-class community, collectivity and autonomy is hammered to shortcircuit resistance – but Taking Liberties is oblivious to the structural and economic framework within which governments discipline their subjects, let alone how they achieve apparent consent for it. Instead we’re asked to sympathise with rich bankers the Yanks suspect of corporate fraud – after all, ‘we’re all in this together’; a supposedly ‘freedom-loving’ people …
The potential of mocking the powerful is further undermined by a tone veering from flippant to hysterical, with overstatements of incipient Nazi-ness among political leaders corresponding to astonishing naivete about influencing them. To Chris Atkins: “Our only hope is that Brown is desperate to claw back some of the popularity that Blair has lost, so if it becomes a big political issue then he might turn back the authoritarian tide to try and win votes” (Socialist Review); and “If several thousand people go to mass lone demos the Metropolitan police will beg Gordon Brown to repeal the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act” (www.eyeforfilm.co.uk). In other words, Taking Liberties may be better than nothing for removing blinkers among viewers somehow previously unaware of what time it is. But the fatal lack of analysis or insight leaves it wallowing in middle-class moral superiority and outrage, and self-righteous symbolic protest – which ultimately comprise more a recipe for apathy than revolt.

www.variant.org.uk

www.freedompress.org.uk

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk