Welcome to Beyond the Thunderdrome: Cinema verifies Post 9/11 Decade

Fiction is confirming that we have moved beyond the thunderdrome that came after the ‘End of History’.

I submit this as cordial evidence: went to see two films last week. The first — Avengers Assemble — is a Marvel comics mega-mash up, brought to us directorially by Buffy-inventor, Joss Whedon (which means more one-line quips than would normally be otherwise). The second was The Dictator, Sacha Baron-Cohen’s latest obscenely, excessive, stereotype cipher. I don’t really want to review either of them here (the former: enjoyable, yawningly patriotic, predictable; the latter, unpredictably hilarious); rather, suggest that both films could never have been released before this year — 2012 — because they’re both ‘Post 9/11 Decade Films’.

That decade began eponymously when the digits say it did; then seemingly ended (farcically) first in 2008 with the global financial crisis, only to truly die again (like Buffy, coincidentally) last year, when the remote-camera-wired Navy Seals crashed into Osama Bin Laden’s lazy TV viewing evening, and finally smoked him out with all the technological panache of the most expensive first-person video game in the world. Bin Laden at this point apparently had been reduced to amassing prodigious amounts of (American!) porn in his basement, perhaps because the Arab Spring (/Uprising/Awakening/Thing) was well underway, yet still way before the so called Islamists and Salafists would step into the void left by the liberal Twitterocracy afterwards. Awkward period. Osama had no bizness left to bother with in 2011. His belated, biological death was — again like Buffy — a second death, coming after the symbolic waning of his symbolic power. That his body was disposed so seamlessly and invisibly at the bottom of the sea perfectly bookends the decade that started with suicidal airplanes, smoke and sky.

Soon after, Hollywood’s habitual fetish of blowing-up Manhattan in the movies became total taboo. Death-drive, wish fulfilment, thank you Herr Freud: now we really get it. ‘Fantasy realised,’ paraphrases Zizek in The Perverts Guide to Cinema, ‘has another name: nightmare.’

Fast-forward to May 2012 — the year anniversary of Osama’s assassination — and Manhattan is painstakingly destroyed in glorious CGI 3D by salamander alien spaceships and Thor’s pissed off step-brother. Avengers: Assemble is no longer in the 2001-2011 prohibition era. Manhattan is fictive fair game again. Watch the Empire State building crash and crumble as the mechanized tail of the serpentine invader lashes liberal death to order and metropolitan civilization. It’s like aliens can’t take over the world until they’ve turned Manhattan into a demeaned dust crater. Until we see our precious symbols subjugated by what we secretly — terrifyingly — desire the most.

The Dictator does Post-9/11 Decade differently. Now that so many of Ameeraka’s flamboyant, mortal enemies are dead-dead-dead (Qaddafi, Kim Jong-il — though Osama seems to be staying in a guest-suite in the state of Wadiya), and Arab Spring sequels into scary sectarianism, all the ludicrous details can be retrospected. Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Dictator is hauled in front of the UN to make a statement about Wadiya’s nuclear proliferation. Wadiya is therefore, in part, Iran: Amerika’s enemy du jour. Now that the ‘difficult’ Sunni’s have been brought into line (or shoved down to Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria), it’s time to deal with the Shi’a mother ship. Because you gots to have a Nemesis, a spectral foe, whether its from outta space or inner Communism or immanent terrorism. Widespread acceptance that Iran is now the primary source of badd future is another symptom of how the decade that was, now no longer is. The Dictator careers through a litany of liberal and illiberal clichés that adorned the various fought wars on beards and burkinis and anti-universalisms. I’d like to list what all of these are but it’s easier to urge you to see the film for yourselves.

I’ve written here about how Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was a sign that Dubai had emerged from its 2001-2008 era where cinematic fiction was unemployable and impotent in the face of nation state fiction-realism.

True Lies. Total Recall. As if our dreams secreted out into the streets via the silver-screen.

Travels in Pseudoreality: The Only Way is Fake

Published in the ‘Nostalgia‘ issue of Tank, Spring 2011

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Illustration by Olivia Meier

From TV to Wikileaks, the Only Way is Fake

“I can’t imagine having real boobs again, can you?” The other girls in the Jacuzzi, sipping champagne, immersed in bubble bath, nod their heads in vigorous approval. No, like Chloe Sims (cup size: 34EE), they too can’t, won’t and never will have to experience what it means to bare breasts that are entirely their own. Chloe Sims – not of the virtual reality computer game The Sims, but the hit TV show The Only Way is Essex - isn’t nostalgic for a former time where bodies were genuinely real. Authentic. Pure.

Chloe and her pneumatically prodigious, perma-tanned, hair-extensioned, Botox-baring best friends live their lives truthfully – on camera, for us to envy and disparage equally – with this mantra permanently in mind: the only way is fake.

The programme in which this scene so honestly unfolds cannot be as clearly categorised as the breasts under scrutiny – ie “fake”. In fact, some of the most popular TV shows of the past couple of years in America and Britain - The Hills, The City, Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore, Made in Chelsea, Desperate Scousewives - have fuzzed the flimsy wall between real and fake, fact and fiction. They introduce a format capturing the audience’s jaded attention spans today: pseudo-reality.

Ever since Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County aired in 2004, pseudo-reality programmes have given us a mash-up of documentary and soap opera. They proffer “real people” with “real names” (Whitney, Spencer, Chloe) whose lives pre-date the shows and continue to spill out into “real life” once the cameras stop rolling. Pseudo-reality programmes are full of “larger than life characters”, but Whitney, Spencer and Chloe are not fabrications from a scriptwriter’s keyboard. Life has delivered them to TV as ready-made chancers, seen on the E! channel, cascading down the steps of the Chateau Marmont in their off-screen time. Even the PR agents, skulking behind the bushes, are for real. Believe it.

Yet Whitney and Spence’s daily machinations of love, betrayal and very big hair do not manifest on-screen in the garb of realist documentary film. Instead, these programmes have a slick, carefully crafted look akin to aspirational, MTV-friendly dramas such as The O.C. and Gossip Girl. Shot/reverse shot. Lingering close-ups. Cool fade-ins/outs of brightly coloured indie songs. No one in pseudo-reality ever fluffs a line, is ever lost for words, talks over each other, or has their back clumsily facing the cameras – facing us.

This is pseudo-reality’s core capitulation: “real” people living hyper-real lives. Watching these programmes is like being in an ontological freefall sans metaphysical parachute.

FARAWAY, TOO CLOSE.

In the 1960s, film director Jean-Luc Godard popularised a theatrical device academics like to term “Brechtian distanciation”. Anna Karina would turn to Jean-Paul Belmondo, over a dead corpse, and inform him – and us – that “it’s not blood. It’s just red paint.” Decades later, and the UK comedy Peep Show is filmed entirely in direct address – towards us. Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, or “alienation effect”, was described by himself as “stripping an event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about [it].”

This tactic told you what you were seeing was not really a reality but something staged, constructed, scripted. Life-size quote marks. However, the pretext in cinema and theatre is already clearly signposted for us: we are observing fiction. What else are stages, screens, costumes and strange character names for, if not to transport us elsewhere? To alert us to the artificiality of the artificial is a neat, even cute conceit in these safe contexts and only truly disturbing if you think that cinema and theatre are, in the first place, a presentation of “the real”.

Tony Wood, creative director of Lime Pictures, which makes The Only Way is Essex, pitched the format to ITV as”Big Brother without the walls”.

An example of this occurs in an episode of Made in Chelsea when Ollie dumps Gabriella on the deck of a Thames pleasure cruiser, lit up by fairy light pathos. Daran Little, story producer on the show and The Only Way is Essex, said that Ollie had called the production team and informed them he was about to end things with his girlfriend. The shot and setting were swiftly orchestrated (cue fairy lights) by the production team. In the scene broadcast on TV, Gabriella seemed genuinely upset by the news. There were actual tears, in fact, and disbelief. But how much is set up, how much is sincere?

All of this probably sounds like the next evolutionary step in the interminable future of entertainment froth, but, seen from an even broader meta-perspective, it insinuates much about that fragile delineation between so-called fiction and so-called fact in our own off-screen lives.

Big Brother without the walls. It is a very neat equation. A perfect pitch for a pilot. One that describes contemporary reality as a whole. Think about it. Think back to Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, who believed he lived in authentic, suburban bliss, only to find out his reality had been meticulously constructed for the viewing pleasure of millions around the world. Millions who paid to watch him laugh, love and cry. In our own pseudo-reality, of course, there is no huge, Buckminster Fuller-type dome covering us, as there is in Truman’s town Seahaven, rigged as it is with theatrical lighting, 5,000 cameras and switch-controlled weather. In our pseudo-reality, there may not be a “backstage” as such, but there  are control rooms, directors, producers and scriptwriters we don’t know about and most definitely do not see.

Theirs is a one-way mirror upon us.

When WikiLeaks burst the information dams and the crusading antics of Anonymous exposed fragile corporate firewalls, we entered a new climate of super-structure exposé. WikiLeaks made the walls in international politics disappear so that real-reality seeps out into constructed reality. Or is it vice versa? That all this myth busting happened to happen the same time that pseudo-reality TV topped viewers’ preferences is all part of the pseudo-real plan.

Here’s a question. What was the most shocking thing about WikiLeaks’ various cables concerning Saudi Arabia, Iran, America and Europe? Answer: it was how unshocking most of it was. Unlike Gabriella when she was spurned by Ollie, we didn’t feel alarmed by what was revealed in diplomatic communiqués. It affirmed what we already knew but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept. Not unlike when watching The Hills or Desperate Scousewives,  we refuse to acknowledge that the whole thing is staged. Why?

The “shock” of the global economic crisis played out in eerily reminiscent fashion. We discovered that capitalism has engineered fictional frontiers of virtual money, and that this fiction cannot go on forever. The crisis is a sensational season-ending episode to 20th-century economics where the world’s “richest” countries are also the ones with the greatest deficits. Money, the ultimate pseudo-real invention.

BELIEVE IN ME.

The falsehood of reality has been an ongoing pet favourite of philosophers from time immemorial. Think Plato’s Theory of Forms and the shifty shadows in the Timeas’ cave. Descartes could only guarantee that our mind exists and that is only because it is able to think. Everything else? Big question mark. More recently, Baudrillard continued with this theme, focusing on the society of spectacle in which we drink the “simulacrum” of Coke rather than the real thing. You pay to be cheated.

Of The Only Way is Essex, Tony Wood has said: “At the heart [of what we do is] always a desire to put in the audience’s mind: ‘Is this real? Are they acting? Is it scripted? Is it not?’” And to leave  that as an open question for them.

Duplicity, paranoia and uncertainty: the pseudo-real building blocks of philosophy, politics and popular TV. Perhaps computer image specialists Hany Farid and Eric Kee at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire can help. They have invented a technique that measures how much a digital image has been manipulated. How someone’s eyes have been lightened, their crow’s feet removed, wrinkles removed, skin unsagged, and freckles, blemishes and unwanted hairs zapped away by Photoshop. This new software winds back the “impossible human beings” presented to us as fetishistic gloss, and shows us the “actual human beings”.

The ones like you and me.

To alert us to the artificiality of the artificial is a neat conceit in these safe contexts and only truly disturbing if you think that cinema and theatre are, in the first place, a presentation of “the real”.

To rewind to Chloe Sims’ rejection of the real, surrounded as she was by double-E implants, we may need to  heed her insight. For perhaps, like Descartes or Baudrillard, she can see through the nostalgia for authenticity.

The “real” was always just an iteration of the pseudo-real. More than ever, there is no uncorrupted core to aspireto, no loss to lament. If there is one thing we can take away after we have switched the TV off, it is that these programmes do not fictionalise reality in a duplicitous way. It is reality that fictionalises itself all the time.

Mission Possible and the Ghosts of Desert Protocol

I didn’t want to watch Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol until I was in Dubai. It seemed appropriate, given how much ballyhoo (is that a real word? in 2012?) was made about the fact that Tom Cruise & crew had managed to break through the obdurate Virtuality Curtain that has kept Dubai out of international cinema’s prurient gaze since … well, sort of since forever. Bits of the city-state appeared fleetingly as a recognisable but fictionally named ‘other’ emirate in Syriana.

But, you’d have thought this confection of neo-liberal fantasy – what Rem Koolhaas once called ‘a film-set with real problems’ – would have been hounded by the silver-screen from the get-go, laden as it is with ‘iconic’ backdrops, many of which would have started out on the same kind of 3D visualisation software that goes into making something like Ghost Protocol. So, why the coy injunction all this time? And why alleviate that prohibition now?

I first heard about the Mission Impossible+Dubai equation from a consultant for the Dubai Media Authority in 2010. She told me, both frankly and in hushed confidence, that most film-scripts submitted to the government for permission had always cast Dubai in a stereotypical negative darkness: dodgy financial dealings and naturally as a nexus of Jihadist terrorism. Each of these scripts had simply been batted away by the DMA – as had Sex & the City 2, for different, un-coy reasons (or they can smell a stinking dud even before it’s been filmed).

Not until Dubai had hemorrhaged from sublimely silly levels of debt, exposed in the sandstorm of 2009′s financial crisis, did it decide to embark upon – awful phrase coming up – a ‘rebranding exercise’.  Suddenly it needed the supplement of fiction, now that the fiction of its so called reality had financially imploded, and begun to sink, like The World is sinking back into the sea.

That would be the second reason no major feature films – or indeed fiction of any kind – have been staged here, till now (FYI, the next James Bond novel is to be set, at least partly, in Dubai). From 2001 to 2008, the place was a torrid, twisted excess of fiction you could Google Map. A Utopia sans social teleological project. Endless epic billboards and smooth video-promotions promising an unbridled future – but without, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, a community to come.

Entertainment fiction had no work to do here.

It was unemployable.

When Tom Cruise – aka Agent Ethan Hunt – tells his colleagues that they’re, ‘going to Dubai’ in the next scene, the cinema audience at Dubai Mall cooed with self-recognition, and a smidgen of cringe. We’d all known about the Burj Khalifa as acrobatic prop (which I wrote about in conjunction with the skyscraper’s first recorded suicide here, which Sophia Al Maria portraits piquantly here, and footage of which exists mesmerically here) – but how smoothly would the unlikely setting fit within the overall arc of the film? (A similar moment occurs in Contagion: the deadly, unknown infection targets Hong Kong, Chicago, Macao, Atlanta, London – and Abu Dhabi. Oh, that’s right. They – Imagenation Abu Dhabi – co-produced the film. Sorry!)

Back to Ghost Protocol. What soaring symbol do you greet the audience with, to lull them into a sense of specific place?

Camels. Yes. That’s the preferred transition device from Budapest to the Burj. For some mysterious reason, Cruise and crew’s drive from Dubai airport to Sheikh Zayed Road involves careering past luscious, dappled, desert dunes – and thousands of free range camels. Some have even established home in the middle of the dirt-track. Watch out Tom! Those aren’t speed bumps! More like speed humps! (Camel jokes are always lame.)

Sadly, real reality contests this dromedarian account: the trek from airport to downtown Dubai actually passes hoards of mirrored towers, finished and under construction, six lane highways, sinewy underpasses, a Pyramidal Raffles hotel, the immense Grand Hyatt, and a lot of advertising. Notice: no camels.

The New Orientalist fantasy continues when they arrive at the Burj, and the only extras in the background are Emiratis. No indication that in fact, Emiratis comprise only approximately 11% of the entire population, which is made of some 200 nationalities. Typically, lobbies are one of the spaces par excellence where you feel this decentred complexion.

When Tom runs – and as we know, he is obliged, contractually, to run very fast at least once in each of his films – out of the Burj, into a Biblically sized sandstorm, instead of slamming his face on the side of Dubai Mall or get drenched in the world’s biggest dancing fountain display, Tom’s, like, lost in the smog of a ‘traditional’ souk – not dissimilar to the quaint olde market the harpies, I mean girls, in Sex & The City 2 go to to have an ‘authentic ‘Arabian outing. Bargains! Old Men with beards! Handicrafts!

Mother-fuckin’ jump cut. Galore.

Of course, block-buster films are, by habit, ontologically loose with the limits of reality (most of the Los Angeles we’ve ever seen on-screen is actually Vancouver in drag) – but – it’s nevertheless interesting that the cinematic shorthand preferred here, in Ghost Protocol, is a kind of retro-fictional ghost of the post-crash Dubai its Emir has striven for it to be perceived against. Camels, dunes, locals, and a lone, fiendishly sophisticated skyscraper that has to be thwarted to save the world. Remember – all this had to have been sanctioned by the authorities for it to have happened there at all.

When Sheikh Mohammed – Ruler of Dubai – published his book of poems in 2009, this was the front cover:

Note: no camels – but also no Burj Dubai (as it was known then), no serrated skyline denoting supermodernity, no hulking machinery of industrial transmogrification and heaving human toil. The ghosts of the future and the ghosts of the past that never happened combine – in cinema’s present – as a living fantasy that serves the best purposes for ideology. I mean, er, fiction.

Goodbye Artifice

What do we mean when we say, ‘life is imitating art’? Does some conventional causal logic flip around? Is art fancier than life, in a gilded, auction-house-happy kind of way?

If art once ennobled life by dramatizing it in stylish ways—the Woah Factor—early 21^st century life has seemingly rendered art an impotent imposter to the real thing. The more art enumerates its importance—petulantly, waving a wad of cash in the air, citing Another French Philosopher—the less important it actually is.

This starts, for me, with those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. Beyond announcing the reality of systemic torture by the US Army, the stylizations of the photos were an idiot-accident-collage of Francis Bacon’s flesh-mounds, Pasolini’s pleasure fascism in Salo and, most chillingly, the carefree snap-happy amateurism of soldiers on holiday. Thumbs Up! Thumbs down: this was no Disneyland. It was Iraq.

I challenge you to find any artist authored images from that moment on that can rival the unadorned wrecked humanity of these pictures. This is a trend—if that’s the right word—that has escalated since, empowered by those precious little witness-machines we carry in our pockets: mobile phone cameras.

We make searing images in a milli-second. We consume difficult images everywhere. We laugh. We shudder. We don’t need artists to do any of this. Do we?

Things once cordially hidden or silenced have made their way to the surface of our attention-deficit attentions. The word ‘leak’—once limited to usage by plumbers or seafarers—is now prefixed by ‘Wiki’, or Al Jazeera. Our ignorance has run out of excuses.

Take the Arab Uprisings. When foreign journalists were not allowed in to Libya or Syria, we relied on discordant choruses of mobile phone clips. We become remote-witnesses. These clips are chaotic, unedited, over saturated with clashing sounds and terrible, true images. There is nothing artful about this ‘style’—and yet they convey a fragmentary sense of what it is like to be a mortal body caught in mortally threatening situations. Goodbye artifice.

The natural habitat of these documents is not the gallery or the museum but television, in its expanded form. Here these documents are immediate, their witnessing still raw. The emotional effect is also immediate. If indecipherable, unverifiable.

The poet Rilke wrote, ‘Events move in such a way that they will always inevitably be ahead of us. We shall never catch up with them.’

You only need to try and piece together the death of Muammar Qaddafi to discover how true this is. The best approximation to his last few minutes comes shaped in a series of non-continuous amateur video clips. The roar of the crowd is deafening, but that’s also because the microphone on the camera is not sensitive enough. Qaddafi is alive. Then he is pulp. A universe of non-special effects make this a cinema of the most ethically and aesthetically troubling kind.

When asked, why do novelists tend to prefer writing historical stories, Hillary Mantel replied that because a novel takes so long to produce, if you try and write about the present, it always slips through your grasp. The novelist needs a target to appear to be fixed so they can reveal the slippery secrets repressed by history.

If there is going to be a substantial response by contemporary art to the currents events in the ‘region’ it is, sadly, necessarily only once the life of those events has subsided into the past—for better or worse, with body counts as tragic proof that the present happened. Until that moment, life wins.

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Published in the first issue of Harpers Bazaar Art

 

Dear Leader and His Nation of 24.45 Million Extras

Kim Jong-il’s cinephilia was one of the few things the outside world knew about the inside of North Korea. You could have asked his first consort, the famous 60s actress Sung Hae-rim, who bore him his first (later discredited) son. You could have asked the South Korean producer and director, Shin Sang-ok, who, along with his ex (and then future) wife, the actress Choi-Eun-hee, was kidnapped in 1978 on the orders of Kim Jong-il.

Not yet ‘Dear Leader,’ five years earlier, in 1973, Kim had written this book:

It is an elegy for Kim’s love of film, as well as a manifesto on how, following Stalin’s proclamations half a century earlier, cinema was to be Communist Party social cement. The story of the story of Shin and Choi’s four year long incarceration, and then instant beatification by Kim as spearheads of his nationalist cinema dream, is the stuff of cinema-fantastique.

It’s all there: megalomaniacal hubris, North Korean C-movie versions of Japanese B-movies, the entrustment of vision not seen since Hitler appointed Albert Speer as B.F.F. And then, the final, sinewy plot twist: Shin and Choi’s betrayal by defection. Of all the insights revealed by Shin in his memoirs of this period, the one that stands out for me is that Kim was fully aware of the artificiality – and limitations – of stagey Communist theatrics. At the 1983 dinner where Kim explained to Shin and Choi why they had been kidnapped (four years prior), he confided that:

“The North’s film-makers are just doing perfunctory work. They don’t have any new ideas.  Their works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.”

On another occasion, a bevy of young women on stage were jumping up and down, screaming: “Long live the great leader!” Shin remembers that Kim shook his arm, pointed at the fawning display, and said:

“Mr Shin, all that is bogus. It’s just pretence.”

Fast forward to Wednesday 28th December, 2011, and the outside world is given a rare, brief peer into Pyongang, North Korea’s capital city. Why: it is the state funeral of Kim Jong-il. As snowy as Dr Zhivago and Dubai’s indoor ski-slope all combined, we see the funeral cortege comprised of American stretch limos (circa The Godfather), an immense billboard of the deceased Dear Leader, rendered in Social Realist Smiling style, schlepped slowly on a car-roof (viral movie poster). The corpse – which has been lying in a glass casket redolent of Lenin’s, which itself is a copy of Snow White’s – is ceremonially hauled through the city atop a padded, floral wig. There are hoards of soldiers too, frozen still not by the foreboding cold, but by unfaltering duty. Or, they’re CGI-clones, courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic.

And of course, there are The People. In their teaming masses – perhaps all 24.45 million of them – “crying and sobbing” hysterically, the kinds of tears shed for a mother, or a father, or a brother, or a sister, or a husband, or a wife, or a daughter, or a son.

Or – the kinds of tears shed by actors.

No. Let’s be more precise than that.

By extras.

Amateur psychologists like to explain Hitler’s power crazed death-drive by the fact that he was rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna – not just once (1907), but twice (1908). And that Albert Speer’s role of imagineering the grand, neo-classical pomposity of future Germania was in fact Hitler’s unrequited, unfulfilled alter-ego: that of a Great Artist.

Applying the same, shaky logic to Kim Jong-il’s unrealised dreams would have made him a wannabe Great Cinema Director who never truly consummated his true destiny.

But what if he did – by other means? By harnessing the resources – all 24.45million of them – made available to him once his father, Kim Il Sung, passed away in 1994? What if this most secretive and likely pernicious place on earth is a real-life, structured reality predicated on the directorial whims of the (now deceased) Dear Leader?

It makes the subjugated North Korean masses ‘extras’ in a similar – but distinctly different – way to all those extras employed on the TV set of The Truman Show. There, the entire planet – which included the cast, the crew, the other actors, a whole town of extras and the millions of viewing audience – was in on the fact that Truman Burbank’s life was made entirely for the edification of the camera. The only person that didn’t know was Truman himself. Seahaven – the town where he lived – was a solipsistic stage-set manicured around the delusion of his own (un)happiness.

In contrast, it could be said that Kim Jong-il’s epic production of North Korea (as much of a bubble as Seahaven ever was) inverts the Truman Show’s solipsism. Here, everyone – except Kim Jong-il – was to be in a Truman-like state of reality-delusion.

Film-set, real-life. What’s the difference? Just act the part you’re given. The best method-actors become the character they’re trying to play. I didn’t say ‘CUT’? That’s OK. The cameras are always rolling. You’re always on film. Remember that. I can see everything because I invented you, I wrote your part, your dialogue, your inner thoughts, your devotion. Remember – I’m the director. The producer. The leading man. You? You’re the extras. 

Extras. Think about the word – sanctioned by the film-industry everywhere. Extras: non-essentials, supplementary, add-ons. In a film – think Birth of a Nation or Gladiators – extras give the impression of crowds. Yet, the crowds assembled at Kim Jong-il’s funeral are not the same crowds that power revolutions (though they share filiality). These are crowds as unified, de-centred disempowerment. They are both essential and extra to absolute power. In Kim’s own words, they are “bogus…[ ] just pretence.”

“All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.” Kim Jong-il, 1983

Then, who did? It is too easy to dismiss the mass of mourning at the (cinematically charged) funeral as state-controlled and stage-managed. It fits the fantasy of a Western imagination to contrast ‘our’ free-will versus ‘their’ programmed predestination. It probably also allays the fear that we’re all most likely acting out roles we’ve been given by this superstructure or that, if we can point somewhere, over there, somewhere lost in 20th century time, where crowds beat their chests, wailing with all their breath, and the opposite of breathing, for the death of their beloved Dear Director.

Do you often confuse love and success with fame?

Do you want to be famous? Do you want to change the world? Do you think you can change the world by being famous? Do you have a plan? Do you stay up at night thinking about how exactly you’re going to become famous? Do you fall asleep with a faint, uneasy feeling that fame may, for lack of a better word, suck? Do you dream about sleeping next to someone else who is famous? Do you mind if they’re more famous than you? Do famous people dream of unfamous people the same way unfamous people dream about famous ones? Do you have a point? Do you think changing the world is cute but extremely naïve? Do you even know what the world is? Do you know for sure in a few years time there’s even going to be a world worth saving? Do you think about yourself a little too much? Do you think about yourself not nearly enough? Do you think in first person? Do you ever refer to yourself in third person like you’re a character in a film that’s based on you? Do you have the rights to the documentary on how you will become successful? Do you have your own website? Do you have an App available yet on the Apple Store? Do you have plans to change your name? Do you believe the Chicago-based economist who says that certain names bring success while others condemn you to socio-economic penury? Do you have parents that can help you in ‘the industry’? Do you measure success by Yen-signs or by how many people ‘LIKE’ your Facebook page? Do you Tweet enough? Do you Tweet about the wrong things? Does your name trend yet? Do you have a Google+ account already? Do you think it’s civilised to send an email bulletin every-day? Do you have a database you are proud of? Does your avatar faithfully reflect whom you are or whom you want to be seen as? Do you desire a portfolio-career? Do you think careers ever make sense looking forward—or only when looking back? Do you personally know enough influential people? Do you know if they generally know who you are? Do you feel comfortable calling them by their first names? Do you network enough? Do you plan on networking more vigorously? Do you ensure every social engagement you make might yield professional advancement? Do you hand out business cards or type directly into your iPhone? Do you hold that it’s necessary to hire a P.R. agency soon to represent you? Do you know what and how they charge? Do they know your work? Do you work? Do you have it neatly archived yet? Do you have your press release ready to go? Do you have an up-to-date CV on your MacBook Pro? Do you think your press release could be your CV? Do you take out an ad? Do you try and get media sponsorship? Do you mind being branded? Do you have a name for your brand yet? Do you go to enough casual ‘in conversation’-type events with advertising gurus? Do you mix-up your Saatchis? Do you announce that you’re ‘digital-first’: The Guardian said it is. Do you have a book out yet? Do you know for sure you’ve got the right person to blurb for the back of the thirteen edited books you plan to publish with cutting-edge, independent presses in the next 18 months using two graphic designer studios from the former Easten Bloc and two who graduated from Yale? Do you think long titles work best or should you stick to one-worders? Do you know if exclamation marks are still hip or completely crap now! Do you find Julian Assange heroic or annoying? Do you think he did everything to become famous or to seek revenge? Do you think more people know who Assange is than Ashton Kutcher? Do you think Demi did the right thing? Do you spend too much time on things that won’t really help you escape the rotten pit of anonymity? Do you have someone to ask? Do you confide in them? Do you look fat in this? Do you actually care what I think or just pretend you do? Do I care? Do you? You do.

-

Commissioned by the AA’s weekly news-sheet, Fulcrum.

Speaking in Tongues: English Speaking News Channels and New Nationalisms

From the Autumn issue of Tank magazine (Volume 7, Issue 3)

Have you watched the news lately? War? Famine? Rioting? Economic crisis? Make that crises. One is never enough! History repeating itself, as Marx would say, in all its tragic and comic fullness. The news amply reminds us, on a daily basis, that the world is a shitty, dangerous and dysfunctional disappointment.

Try as they may, No number of whooshing motion graphics and tribal drum effects can truly dull this fact. Not even a ‘feel-good’ item featuring a precocious ferret saying the word ‘Fuck!’ on cue. In that time, another bomb somewhere has detonated. Someone’s mother, father or child becomes a sound-byte primed statistic. Without numbers—or more precisely, body counts—the news couldn’t be the news.

How and why the world is such a pitiless shit-pit does depend on whose news you’re listening to. But does it matter what language they’re telling you it in? For many of the emerging economic—and therefore political—powerhouses in the world, the answer gleaned from surfing satellite channels today is a resounding ‘Yes’.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, one of the very last things The West was able to export to The Rest of the world was its moral superiority. Acclaimed news titles—BBC World Service, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, etc.—embodied Enlightenment values, wielded sword-like: truth, reason, rigor. This was media made to make everyone without a ‘free-press’ feel deficient, envious.

Even now, as the European Union faces systemic, contagious crisis, America’s credit rating was ‘downgraded’ for the first time ever, and the Murdoch empire sullied by phone-hacking hijincks, do we not all turn to the very same stable sources to find out what is happening around us? Probably not.

A proliferation of state-funded, English speaking news channels from Doha to Beijing has expanded available choice (which is surely one of the hallmarks of our time; apparently infinite choice, but the same finite number of hours in a day). It has ushered in new forms of International English borne from diasporic traces of international education aimed at like minded citizens.

The news-studios’ brightly coloured layouts, anchors’ sleek desk designs, their groomed suits, the ticker-timer running across the bottom of the screen desperately updating you with what’s now right now. All these are visual, aural, informational tropes that have been taken up from Tehran to Mumbai. They signify ‘this is Serious Objective News,’ comparable to BBC World Service, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel…

Despite a third of the world’s population being Chinese or Indian (a convincing argument surely for Cantonese, Mandarin or Hindi as the next universal lingua franca), the colonial language of choice—English—now serves a cunning post-colonial purpose. English’s purported neutrality smuggles through all manner of vested political propaganda and regional hysteria.

Watch simultaneous coverage of the same news-story on several channels, and not so subtle nationalistic differences of perception present themselves—in the polite garb of Malay or Columbian accented English. The form says one thing, the words another, and the hybrid accents something else yet again. If the world is not flat, the use of English to describe it on a daily basis makes it look as if it is.

Here is a selection of what’s out there.

PRESS TV
There is a fine line between myth-busting and paranoid conspiracy mongering. And this is the very line that Iran’s state-controlled Press TV builds an entire news-mandate from. It is fired by the same anti-Imperialist, straight–talking vim that fuels Iran’s casually attired president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. No opportunity is missed on Press TV, and many are created, to lambast America’s political hypocrisy and meddling interventionism. In fact a whole programme is dedicated to this pursuit: Afshin Rattansi’s Double Standards. Imagine Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, but with hand-drawn cartoon piss-takes of American politicians. Rattansi’s English could pass as indigenous at Eaton Boys’ School, but this all the more arms him to satirize the West’s follies from within. The Kaiser Report—which is also aired on Russia Today—extends the America bashing to the endemic corruption inherent in the greed-fest that is also known as the global financial marketplace. Is it ironic that American accents are aplenty across all the channel’s presenters? Or mocking? As in, ‘Look! We can find American educated people to defame the country that gave them this accent!’ Press TV’s male anchors never don neck-ties (an Iranian no-no) and sport well trimmed beards; while every female correspondent, Muslim or not, is required to wear a hijab, thus exporting the revolutionary dictate of the Iranian Republic to secular countries worldwide. Last but not least, George Galloway’s late-night phone-in rants surely evidence the channel’s stated plight to ‘Encourage human beings of different nationalities, races and creeds to identify with one another.’ That is, if they can decipher Mr Galloway’s perma-irate, Scottish pronunciation.

RUSSIA TODAY
‘The channel is government funded but shapes its editorial policy free from political and commercial influence… We’re here to bring you another story.’ The Cold War may have officially thawed 20 years ago, but its legacy lives on in Russian media. Russia Today (RT) opts for citrus green as chromatic background, inverting any assumption that Russia is, or was, Commie Red. Stories of border disputes with former Soviet satellites remind you that the Union survives in idea if not in international law. Vladimir Putin appears with calming frequency—clothing optional—to share his nation’s schadenfreude at America and Europe’s economic and military woes. News anchors: chiselled in appearance, their delivery of English tinged with Eastern bloc stoicism. During the Ratko Mladic trial, RT chose to highlight a different narrative than the Srebrenica massacre where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys had been killed. Instead it chose to ask about the deaths of Serbs at Bosnian hands, insinuating that similar genocides had taken place but without the disapprobation of the international community. They did promise ‘another story’, didn’t they?

CCTV NEWS
Broadcast from its iconic, looped skyscraper in Beijing (designed by the Dutch firm O.M.A. in favour of an indigenous Chinese architect), state-controlled CCTV announces that ‘A new Asia has emerged,’ and this is its voice. Whether the question of Tibet, Google or the Chinese Communist Party comes up, China oft states that the outside world simply does not—or can not?—understand its psychology or principles. CCTV News is an uncharacteristically unbelligerent attempt to project China’s moderated modernism. Its emphasis on Asian interest-stories, and by implication, China’s moral or economic influence therein, is portrayed by a core crew of Chinese news-anchors whose English is openly inflected by Cantonese. Chinese domination of the English language does not involve embodying it entirely, but appropriating it the way the fake Apple Store in Kunming recently revealed the fake iPhone 5 months before it is even mooted to come out. You also find American, English and Australian English speaking reporters to provide that authenticity patina common to all of these channels: Vested Internationalism.

AJ JAZEERA ENGLISH
Between 2001 and 2006, according to the Bush regime, the words ‘Al’ and ‘Jazeera’ were short-hand for Taliban-sympathizers and media-mouthpiece for Al Qaeda. Much of that demonization hinged on Al Jazeera being in Arabic, a language that said ‘terrorist’ as unambiguously as did a turban. Then Qatar launched Al Jazeera English (AJE). Ever since, it feels like the gravitational centre of international news-reportage has shifted eastwards, more so since the start of the ‘Arab Spring’ (which is fast heading into the ‘Arab Autumn’). It’s not only that AJE was formed from the ashes of recently redundant BBC staff, that it pinched well known journalist-personalities like Rageh Omaar and David Frost, but it was the first international news-network to have four broadcast-centres: Kuala Lampur, Doha, London and Washington D.C. As the world turns, so does AJE’s coverage. Ethnicities, skin colours and accents vary across the anchors but the language of English unites them all. ‘Balance’ may be a word once associated with BBC news service, but AJE actively enacts it in programmes like Inside Story, which pits three divergent experts against one another on a single topic for 30 minutes. Like many of the other channels mentioned here, AJE commands a regional focus (the Middle East), but its in-depth coverage of Latin America and Africa adheres to the station’s ambition ‘to balance the information flow between the South and the North.’ So far, so ground breaking. However even this new behemoth has its political blind spots, to be found in what isn’t said about delicate matters in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and its own backyard, Qatar.

The only language universal enough for these instances is silence.

Careering

The following excerpt comes from an introduction I made to Momus at a very special AA event, on October 31st, to inaugurate the New Soft Room. Public Image Limited’s bass heavy wail, Careering, provided the evening’s title and theme: starting from Nick Currie’s polymorphous career (a word he would never personally use to describe his own trajectory) outwards into the shapes and significances of inspiring careers (Bowie, Brecht). We were joined by the very talented trio of Victoria Camblin, Zak Kyes and Brian Dillon.

The video recording is here

“The word ‘career’ may not mean what it did 20 or 30 years ago. Specialization has often given way to collage careers, portfolio careers, careers that confuse parents, careers that don’t even know the meaning of the word career.

Seen from a particular vantage point, careers are design projects. They have shape, narrativity, possible predestination (i.e. What did your parents do?) and also serendipitous failure built into their wiring.

You might be a child-star aged six, and by age nine, no one knows your name, not even your own agent/mother.

Your name might be Haruki Murakami and before you became a famous novelist you ran a successful bar with your wife.

Your name might be James Franco, in which case, everything is happening at the same time—actor, artist, PhD candidate, visiting professor, poet—and no one knows whether you’re for real or just a real wannabe.

Your name may have been Muammar Qaddafi, and after 42 years of job security, not only has your career come to a complete, impotent halt, but the phrase, ‘You’re fired’ takes on a mortal, literal, decisive dimension.

We’re sitting in a room at a school. Many of you are pre-career. Do you know the course you’re going to take? Is it important to know? Can you really control it?

Many of you are mid-career. Has it turned out how you imagined? Is destiny still something ahead of you?

Are any of you post-career? If so, I’m very jealous. I want to be you.”

POSTSCRIPT – A future unrealised project is to translate paradigmatic career models into simple graphs, with time on the X axis, and a combination of fame or wealth or repute on the Y axis. Examples will include: The One Hit Wonder; Child Prodigy; Octogenarian Breakthrough; Slow Slump; Constant Reincarnation; Perma-fumbling; Consistent Safety and It Never Really Started Until I Was Dead.

A Human Universe of Flawed Details and Immeasurable Superstructure

Hollywood’s obsession with prequels and sequels comes from an age-old human preoccupation: how did things start and how will they end? Creation myths and the apocalypse. Birth, death. In between, this thing called life.

Famed careers are often the same. They actually begin before the biographers’ claim they begin. Did you know Don DeLillo used to work in advertising? Tadao Ando was a boxer? Richard Serra welded?

The film oddities 1, 2, 3 Rhapsody and The White Slave belong to Amsterdam in the latter part of the ‘60s and to a group called ‘1, 2, 3 enz’. Its members were journalist Rem Koolhaas; his high-school friend and film-maker Rene Daalder; Frans Bromet, a cameraman who later became a well known documentarian; Kees Meyering, future inventor of the Rolykit toolbox; and Jan de Bont, future director of blockbusters Speed and Twister. Other members came and went, in the spirit of the collective’s open-ended configuration.

Koolhaas started to work at the magazine Haagse Post aged 19, and would come to interview—in eccentric, satirical detail—the film director Federico Fellini, avant-garde artist-cum-‘hyper-architect’ Constant Nieuwenhuys, and pen a four-piece series entitled ‘Sex in the Netherlands’. Koolhaas’ father, the acclaimed author Anton Koolhaas, was director of the Amsterdam Academy of Film, from which most of the ‘1, 2, 3 enz’ group hailed. Koolhaas has said that his father, ‘did not have very good taste in film, and that is why I did not attend the academy.’

The short films entitled 1, 2, 3 Rhapsody (1965) are more notable for the ideology fuelling their production techniques than the merits of their bawdy scenarios. As announced in the group’s three-part manifesto, published in the cine-phile magazine Skoop, what mattered was acknowledging film-making as a collective, team effort—not as something heroically individual in nature. For them, the auteur cinema of the Nouvelle Vague deserved to be debunked. As such, Rhapsody places its protagonists on a merry-go-round where they each write, direct and act (or, more precisely, goof around). According to future co-founder of OMA, Madelon Vriesendorp, on-set laughter erupted (mainly from Daalder and Koolhaas) throughout the making of Rhapsody. Irreverence was paramount.

 

PERVERSE/REVERSE (SHOT)
1969’s feature film, The White Slave, is a very different effort altogether. Co-written by Daalder and Koolhaas, and directed by the former, it became the most expensive Dutch film ever made to date (after its nervous Dutch financiers had to be convinced by Luis Bunuel’s scriptwriter, Jean Claude Carriere, that the two twenty-something year olds actually had written a proper script.) It also went on to become one of the biggest commercial flops in Dutch cinema history. Ergo, its mythologized disappearance from view.

The White Slave’s plot centres around the trafficking of beautiful, young Dutch women sent to Tangiers allegedly as aid-nurses. On arrival, however, they are trapped in an Arab brothel, forced to belly dance and cavort with the white slave master, (played, not unironically, by an Israeli actor, Issy Abrahami). A ‘good German’, Gunther, keen to make-up for the war crimes of his people, helps to procure his newly found near feral niece and a bewildered au pair, whom he tries, unsuccessfully and repeatedly, to seduce.

The film both exaggerates and inverts grotesque colonial stereotypes, against an actual historical backdrop where African and Arab states were acquiring their independence. The ‘revenge of the post-colonial subject’ was imminent. Countries like Holland, France and Great Britain would experience an unprecedented flow of immigration from their former colonies, initiating the still troubled era of ‘multiculturalism’ and presaging post-9/11 Islamophobia by decades.

The atmosphere of The White Slave is somewhere between Luis Bunuel’s social surrealism and Russ Meyer’s 60s fast-cutting sex-fests. The latter dealt with the absurdities of male power and impotence. Meyer, a.k.a the ‘King of the Nudies’, was also Rene Daalder’s mentor, and occasional boss at the time. In one White Slave scene, doctors apply fake, trompe l’oeil wounds to perfectly healthy bodies. The doctor says, ‘With wounds, reality surpasses fiction.’ A year later, J G Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition would invoke similar, surgical themes, culminating in the erotic-masochism of Crash in 1973.

A number of palpable absences haunt the centre of The White Slave (a missing husband/brother, a missing wife)—around which Gunther assembles his own ‘harem’ of white women subservient to his whim. They all seem to congregate around fallacious motives (the central one being the need to ‘rescue Africa’). A low-level sadism pervades every human interaction. While the characterization of Abrahimi as a repugnant Arab may seem crude by the standards of our political correctness today, it is Gunther—the good, white German—that is the most ethically troubling of all. Why? Precisely because he sets out to have noble intentions.

TRUTH & METHOD
So, what to make of these filmic curiosities today? If we apply the famed Paranoid Critical Method, that technique of a posteriori fact-finding beloved of Salvador Dali and Koolhaas himself, what do we glean?

Firstly is the importance of the scriptwriter and the writing of a scenario, which becomes the basis of a plot. Right from Delirious New York (1978), this has also been one of the guiding principles for understanding the plan of a building: a plot waiting to happen.

Secondly, is a human universe where contingency and predestination seem to collude on a one-way course to tyranny, executed under the benign guise of moral, do-gooding rhetoric. The ultimate curse of morality is its self-destructive perversion.

And lastly, the same human universe is truly made manifest in details. Not the kind of details architects fetishize (shadow gaps, door frames, screws), but the idiosyncratic, unconsciously delivered details of human behaviour. Everyone is acting at being themselves all of the time. In the later Koolhaasian world of Bigness, Europe and the XL-ness of globalization, these telling, beautiful flaws of human nature will continue to manifest as narrative details against the immeasurable superstructure of economy and politics.

If life ever attains meaning, it’s either as a consequence of how it began, or, as a preparation for how it will end.

The End.
___

This essay was originally commissioned by The Architecture Foundation to accompany the UK premieres of The White Slave and 1,2,3 Rhapsody for its ongoing film programme at the Barbican, Architecture on Film. www.architecturefoundation.org.uk. With thanks to Rene Daalder for his invaluable insights and anecdotes during the course of writing this text.

For details into this period and the backstory to my text see Bart Lootsma’s phenomenally fascinating essay here: http://www.architekturtheorie.eu/?id=magazine&archive_id=108

Is there something hiding beneath the surface of ‘Super 8’?

On the surface, J.J. Abrams new film, Super 8, is just that: a heartfelt homage to his hero (and producer) Steven Spielberg that is nothing but successful surface effect. One reviewer has called it a pitch perfect impersonation. A friend I went to see it with said Super 8 was like a montage of immemorial Spielberg scenes. Another felt pesky disengagement because of all the pastiche-ing. Sum total result:  futile, formalistic.  #Fail.

So, why had venerated journal Cahiers du Cinema given it cover story this month? What subtle intellectual subtext had we totally missed?

I left the multiplex feeling we’d just witnessed a painstaking remake of a Spielberg classic, but not one that actually exists in his filmography. Rather, the ideal, Platonic Spielberg ur-movie, full of shaggy haired teenagers scuttling on BMXs, fragmented single-parent families, imagination-impoverished adults and a message about humanity that comes not from humans but from outer space. Remember how in The Tree of Life, the Mother tells the young Sean Penn character that there is ‘the way of nature, and there is the way of grace’? For Spielberg, the way of grace is often indicated by the compassionate nature of visiting aliens.

But J.J., dude, it’s 2011, and you’ve set Super 8—fetishistically—in 1979. That’s two years after Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind both came out. J.J., why doesn’t your new Goonie squad wanna make a Lucas or Spielberg homage? Why would they remake Romero-style zombie horrors? It’s 1979!

If there is a conceptual motive behind remakes (cashing in on established celluloid brands is not really conceptual, just bone-lazy), it is that something about the original harbours a universal message that applies today. All the story needs is a context shift.

So, in 2010’s Karate Kid remake, the symbolic national struggle is no longer between America and Japan (which during the 80s was being won by Sony et al), but now between a newly empowered China and an economically waning America. The latter has no choice but to disimburse its unemployed citizens—like 46% of its national debt—to the Chinese Communist Party’s eclipsing form of state-capitalism. In the end of the remake, unlike in real-life, America kicks China’s conceited ass. Woo!

There is, therefore, something innately post-modern in the logic of remakes. They tend to be knowing, winking, tongue pressed firmly against inside of ironic cheek. Gus Van Sant took this to an absolute extreme in his shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Imitation, flattery; homage, pathology.

Super 8 however is all absent of post-modern impulse. It’s full instead of cloying authenticity and periodicity. The biggest surprise in the entire film is how it’s so destitute of story surprises. Unless you count the fact that Alien Monster’s face looks a like a Transformer. Homage to Michael Bay?

It’s taken me a sleepless night under summer rain to realize that maybe I was looking in the wrong place. I expected to find meaning where we are accustomed to finding post-modern meaning: on the surface of the surface. But the more I focus on the Elle Fanning character (‘Alice,’ the lone female in a virtual triad of females where one has absconded and the other recently deceased), the more I suspect I ought to be looking under the surface.

Alice is a girl whose emotional intelligence transcends her modest teen-age tenfold. In a scene where she rehearses a scene for the Super 8 zombie-movie the kids are making, she abruptly leaps out of her of adolescent body into the affecting persona of a woman that knows intimately what it means to love and to lose that love. A switch so sudden. Like an alien possession.

This meta-scene has already been compared to Naomi Watts’ chilling read-through performance in Mullholland Drive. What makes both of these supra-acting acts so powerful is the violent irruption of the real just when there’s a complicit expectation of safe artifice. When representation is more life-like than life, you’re momentarily awake to how scripted reality can be.

Throughout Super 8, Alice seems to elicit exceptional compassion, tenderness, and judicious moral insight (look out for a scene where she wishes her father had died instead of the hero’s mother: it’s loaded with all kinds of theological ambiguity about predestination, the painful vacuum of personal loss and the responsibility of guilt). It seems that no one else around her is as consistently privileged to such human acuity. No one except perhaps the maligned and misunderstood Alien Monster.

And this is where lurking within Super 8’s surface pointlessness is something silently true. How sudden bereavement is like an alien invasion of the self; or like a zombiefication where you have to live despite inside feeling dead, dead, dead; or like a personality possession where your grieving childhood jump-cuts to adulthood.

It is no coincidence that the Alien’s exit away from planet Earth at the very end occurs at the very moment the two bereaving, suffering, possessed families find inner closure. Peace. Perhaps. The arachnid-thing can leave because it isn’t needed anymore.

Right, J.J.?