Bad thoughts on recent events

Opinions are the mind’s way of taking a shit.

We take in much information, and a good amount of it we digest and use to nourish our minds. The rest, the excess, we dispose of. These are opinions: the worst of ourselves, the excess.

I feel as though I have heard a lot of opinions recently on the issue of university fees, and without wishing to add too much to the growing pile of shit that has been spoken about it, I have out of desperation had to sit down and offer up a few stools.

So the big stink is that university fees in the UK are set to rise from £3,000 to £9,000 per annum.

As a result, students have gone out into the streets in their thousands and on several occasions. They have destroyed some public and private property, have sat in on university property (students have actively carried out ‘occupations’), and have on some rare occasions undergone police violence.

What is at issue?

For student protestors is the obvious case that fees for higher education are trebling. Some students will now leave university with debts of around £40,000, if we allow for maintenance loans to be included as well. The government has pledged that students will not need to start paying back this money until they earn £21,000 a year or more. But even with this system in place, one can imagine students being 48-50 years of age before being clear of their debts – which means that they might conceivably get on the property ladder at about 65 years of age, just in time for retirement at about the age of 75 or so.

Also at issue is that the Liberal Democrats have lied. Having pledged not to increase the cost of universities, they have in their Tory-coalition-assemblage-form done an about face and done precisely that.

I don’t know how many of these students voted in the last election, how many voted Lib Dems, and how many will next time around be voting, presumably, Labour. But while Lib Dem followers do have a right to feel aggrieved, the general rhetoric of the anti-Lib Dem ranting seems somewhat pointless: if Nicholas Clegg’s policies had been popular, he might well have won more votes at the election, in spite of his supposedly ‘miraculous’ performance on the X Factor-style TV election debates, and in spite of consistent arguments that the Lib Dems would be a real force in politics if the UK moved to a system of proportional representation.

Even though I find it somewhat odd for people to point out that a politician has lied, or at the very least had to back track, I similarly find Mr Clegg’s defence of his decision somewhat baffling. He tells angry students that he has had to become realistic and to face facts and this is why he is not proposing blue sky thinking with regard to free education and similar ideas. If this is so, how poorly informed was he before the election, such that he made promises he would be in no position to keep?

Not only this, but one can imagine Clegg, like David Cameron and George Osbourne, being taken to some back room of Downing Street after his election ‘success,’ or perhaps to an underground tunnel, and being told the ‘truth’ – something that is kept from Joe Bloggs, because he would not understand it, but which those in power are told upon accession to its seat. Armed now with ‘the truth,’ all arguments against are unrealistic, naïve, idealistic, and other words that are unthinkingly branded as negative – even though we know full well that reality is malleable, that the future is not written, and that anyone who dares precisely to think differently (which is to have ideas, which is to think idealistically, which is to think about not reality as it is, but as it might be, i.e. to think unrealistically) offers up the greatest potential for contribution to this world. Invention is the mother of success – and invention requires bringing what was previously unreal into reality. So the disempowering discourse whereby we people in the street do not understand matters well enough to be able to act upon them, is baffling, even though Clegg in person seems to justify this given his U-turn in thinking and policy.

For me, this highlights what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have, among others, correctly identified as the crisis of representation. Not only is Nick Clegg part of a coalition government the Frankensteinian and monstrous nature of which no one – I repeat no one – voted for, therefore meaning that we are being represented by a government that in some respects was not elected, but it shows that politicians do not feel themselves to be representatives of their voters (by which I mean the people as a whole and not just those people who voted for them), but rather they feel that they can tell their voters what’s good for them. They do not represent anymore, then, but they dictate, even if we do not have one single dictator to identify (recourse to Hitler).

Let’s backtrack a second here. The preceding paragraph might have slipped into the assumption that everyone is behind the students and their protests. And yet I am not sure that this is the case. The tone of much press coverage has been damning of the violent behaviour that the students have shown, although this might be another form of dictation as opposed to representation, and there has been little in the way of solidarity movements from elsewhere. Against the student protests, then, might be the fact that the students and their lecturers are somewhat alone here, which suggests on at least a certain level a conservative desire not to change but to keep/conserve things as they are. In other words, maybe Clegg is representing a/the majority of people – and the students are in a minority, even though they and their teachers will themselves try, at least implicitly, to make out that this is because ‘normal’ people don’t know what’s good for them. That is, academia as a whole does seem to employ some of the same tactics that government does: you don’t understand, and you can’t (unless you pay me, and then I will tell you my secrets).

In addition, what I find interesting is that many of the students that are protesting will not be affected by these government decisions, which are set to come into being in 18 months, by which time a number of these students will be working as brand managers and management consultants. Perhaps those who are currently 16 years of age are too young to be out protesting, but that current students are fighting for future generations of their ilk, laudable in many ways as it is, might also be a case of misrepresentation. That is to say, this battle is not necessarily their battle at all. And while those who will really be affected (future redundancies in higher education notwithstanding) are perhaps too young (they don’t understand?) to do anything, perhaps it is they who should be protesting, whose voices we should be hearing.

A common and somewhat inevitable argument against the student protests is that the UK is running with a huge deficit. I shall return to this later, but within the logic of late capitalism, it seems inevitable that ‘luxuries’ like studying, or more particularly studying the Arts and Humanities, would face the chop. The Olympics, Trident, and various other British/British-backed endeavours that cause controversy seem to continue unabated, and from another (supposedly better informed?) point of view, this makes sense; but it also seems to outrage many people that it is students that suffer while these particular money pits suck yet more funds into their abysmal depths.

Here we can come to the issue of violence. The UK is an implicit supporter of violence, given the wealth that the country is willing to spend on defence, wary as it is that terrorist attacks can break out anywhere, while certain other dictators might need toppling in Iran or North Korea before too long. Okay, so the UK invests in violence in order to ‘prevent’ violence, or so we are told; but it is not the bookworm that is too busy learning to get involved in a fight. No, the UK is at the gym, pumping iron, despite being, in international terms, the 5’1” slightly aggressive small guy who once won a few fights and now likes to trade off his hard reputation (i.e. the UK is a bit of what in my world we call a cunt).

Now, I am neither here nor there (in this blog) with regard to whether defence spending is a good or bad thing. Even though I don’t, I want to – or perhaps just have to – trust politicians on some things – particularly because they tell me that I would not and cannot ‘handle the truth’ – and with regard to defence I’ll therefore let it go for the time being (I reckon I can handle the truth; it can’t be any more agonising than the frustrations of feeling like one cannot know). However, if implicitly the UK is investing in violence, it seems rich that the violence perpetrated by some of the student protestors is so roundly condemned.

So the students have smashed a few windows and chucked paint on a Rolls Royce (that happened to contain members of the royal family). Why is this violence so poorly regarded? To resort to violence is considered the ultimate in self-defeat, not least because any act of violence immediately raises the ghost of the t-word (terrorism). In some respects I can follow this line of reasoning, but in other senses I find it baffling given the allegiances and tendencies of those making the accusations. Personally, I do wonder that non-violent protests along the lines of (I here must take out a further loan from/increase my debt to Hardt and Negri) the White Overalls kids from the late 1990s in Italy might be more productive: irony, carnival, jubilation in protesting, as opposed to rage. However, I do also query the logic of the condemnation of violence. Almost certainly some humans have been caused harm by these protestors, especially perhaps some ‘psychological’ harm to those fragile minds that cannot take a smashed window. But the media coverage seems to focus in particular on violence conducted towards objects: smashed windows, paint on a car and (amusingly, as far as I am concerned) a burned Christmas tree. Counter-coverage, meanwhile, talks of students beaten with truncheons, and police brutality.

In other words, the violence seems to me to be rather one-way in that the powers of the state are carrying out brutal acts on their fellow humans, while, it seems, the protestors are venting their anger on objects. That this violence to objects is condemned, though, is revelatory. Even though 3,000+ people died on that day (RIP), it seems that since 11 September 2001 the worst violence one can commit is to objects, particularly buildings, especially buildings that can have invested into them some symbolic meaning. That is, the violence committed here, by the UK protestors of 2010, is the apparently insufferable violence towards established meaning. In other words, seeing objects not carry out their supposed use, to eke some excess of meaning out of them (they look better smashed, splashed with paint, or burning), is to be condemned, apparently. And yet it is the development of new meanings that drives humanity into the future, along the lines of the making real of the unreal outlined above.

Furthermore, this violence towards objects which is considered to be the most outrageous violence, such that it justifies police retaliation on people, serves to show that we invest in our objects, our cars and windows, as much if not more than we invest in other people. In some senses, then, the coverage of the protests as involving self-defeating acts of violence in some senses is self-defeating, too, since it shows that we are prey to the logic of late capitalism to such a degree that we do not even think twice about this absurd investment in objects such that their safety takes precedence over the safety of humans. Personally, I am not going to mourn the paintwork on Prince Charles’ Rolls; worse acts of ‘violence’ are daily carried out in the name of ‘humour’ (perhaps there is more irony from the Punk’d/Summer Heights High generation than I am able most of the time to recognise).

(How this is reminiscient of Cameron Fry trashing his dad’s Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – apparently the nation, like Mr Fry, loves not its children, his son, but a fucking car.)

If, to borrow a now-cliché from student favourite Fight Club, our objects own us more than we own them (Michael Landy, where are you now?), then this is no doubt a result of the systemic privatisation of matter and time. Violence to our property is violence to us (“get off ‘my’ land”). And nothing is worth anything if it does not make a profit (serving a purpose that helps the owner, a window being a shield, as opposed to helping someone else, a window being an object to smash).

The current emphasis on STEM subjects in higher education is also endemic of a society beholden to privatisation and profit. If it don’t make money, it’s useless (and can be destroyed?). But let us remember that the production of knowledge in all realms happened long before the privatisation of knowledge took place, such that people had to produce knowledge that was suitable for trading on the markets of commerce. One might – almost certainly legitimately – say that artists and those who understand and follow art will find a way to exist regardless. But then again, if we add footballers and bankers into our swathes of people who seemingly will not have to undergo any substantial cuts or debts in order to progress in life, it seems unfair that students are footing the bill for something that they most certainly did not provoke nor could have provoked.

A man, whom I shall name Keith Bellend, was decrying on the London Tube yesterday about how he does not want his taxes to pay for students that are not his own kids. In some sense, Mr Bellend’s point of view is fair enough, although while he does not want to pay for students to learn, presumably he is happy, as a friend explained to me last night, to fund various alcoholics and others who will piss his money directly up the wall. However, Mr Bellend is also misguided in many ways, for it is not really him that is potentially funding other students (well, luckily for him, it seems he won’t be), but it is students who are paying now for whatever systemic advantages he has had in the past. Mr Bellend did not look loaded; he was not Paul de Gascoigne getting commoners to push-start his plush car. But Mr Bellend has reaped rewards that a whole generation will perhaps never be able to know now.

A realist might say: “Well, the party’s over. And the young, ecologically-minded generation in fact needs to live an austere life to save the planet. Sorry, kids, but it’s the truth that we fucked up – but we’re too stuck in our ways these days to change, so you guys can do the hard work of bailing us out.”

However, as David Mitchell has pointed out (in an article that was pointed out to me by the same friend who brought up alcoholics), it was in Britain’s most impoverished moments after the Second World War that the welfare state and the free higher education whose death we have long since been mourning came into being. Of course, a lot of young people had just been killed at that particular moment in time, meaning that fewer universities needed to educate fewer people (something that I always think Lucky Jim should have explored but stubbornly did not). As the next generation grew up and needed training in order to be useful in the world, alternative/additional institutions needed to be created, and these have only grown in terms of numbers, not least despite the fact that the permanent UK population is relatively stable (the large and fluctuating numbers of more or less temporary visitors aside).

Perhaps, contra Mitchell, those post-war kids got a little treat in the form of higher education to compensate for their experience/make useful the shell-shocked and potentially useless men who had come back from war. While some subsequent generations also managed to sneak into the back of this club, now that club has to shrink or shut, and raise its cover charge to keep going.

A further defence of the increased student fees is that higher education in the USA is more expensive than here. I can understand this as a reasonable line of argument, but from what I understand, the difference between the rich and the poor in the USA has not recently been shrinking. To invoke common examples, the housing crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and other elements of post-industrialisation/rationalisation have left a huge number of people more hungry now than they were before, even though others have money coming out of their ears.

If it is practically impossible to get a well paid job without a degree (let alone the fact that, as per another friend of mine, huge debts upon leaving university will discourage entrepreneurship, Dragon’s Den-obsessed though this nation is, because students will have to take that job they might not otherwise have gone for because they know they’ve got to start paying the government back), then higher education is a massive tool for social mobility. Say what you want about pissed students drinking the whole time, watching Jeremy Kyle, and eating Pot Noodles (actually a relatively expensive commodity), the students at my university are more often than not working – and up to 40 hours a week – in addition to studying, such do they understand that if they want to get somewhere in life, they need to have a degree (even in something as supposedly ‘useless’ as Film Studies – although my views on how fundamentally useful this discipline is will wait for another time).

If my students with their current fees are working the hypothetical equivalent of 4 x 7.5 hour working days per week (like fuck people only work 7-8 hours a day anymore; like fuck they get rewarded for this), then, to continue a reproductive theme, fuck knows how they’ll afford £9,000 a year. In other words, as per the USA, the proposed cuts will stifle social mobility.

Here is where I wonder not about the motivation of the protestors, but about their closed-mindedness. No one likes to be accused of closed-mindedness, and I suffer from this ailment as much as anyone else, and almost certainly do not know enough protestors to be able fully to judge them, but it does seem as though the government is making noises about increasing support for students from impoverished backgrounds. That is, the present government claims to be ‘right’ behind social mobility, and perhaps in an astute way it is not going to fund middle class kids whose parents can afford to pay for their kids until they are in their mid- to late twenties anyway (like the parents want to!).

On this topic, people I have spoken to seem to become unclear: are poorer potential students being thrown the bone of a loan to cover these fees, or will they get the equivalent of scholarships and reduced fees? If the former, then in fact they are offered less incentive than they might be, since what social mobility their degree is supposed to afford them is seriously compromised by the debts that they will accrue (but who said social mobility was either one way or easy?). If the latter, then perhaps this government is not so bad. In fact, no one I have spoken to seems to know, and I am not sure that this has been made entirely clear. Universities that charge the full £9,000 per annum (and which universities will – have to? – do this has not been announced either – although it is thought that ‘most’ will) will have to offer scholarships, while those students who have been eligible for food money at school apparently can apply for two years’ free tuition – meaning that they would only pay for their third (and typically final) year to receive their degree. This is not ideal, but there are some laudable thoughts behind it. More importantly, I report on the confusion about this matter in order to say that, in spite of all of the good reasons to protest (above and beyond the point of protesting in and of itself – people need reminding that we are the people, and we are the makers of our own destiny), the protests seem somewhat confused and confusing themselves.

Again, confusion is not necessarily a bad thing, and for the protests to have more direction might be to fall into the kind of thinking that is already too rational to be truly effective in forcing the world to pose questions about the consequences of its actions.

But there is some (deliberate?) sense of misguidedness in the protests that we are seeing, however unpopular conveying this opinion might make me among those who feel most involved in the actions. But the reason that I say this is because these protests show the libido/desire for change, but not necessarily change with regard to higher education. Higher education is in some respects not the point of what is going on. Instead, the point of what is going on seems to be the constitution of a generation through its conflicts that will endeavour, like those that have come before it, to strive for an alternative means of existence. Perhaps it will be one, after Hardt and Negri, based on common wealth and a simultaneously singular and plural multitude. In which differences are tolerated and actively supported, rather than homogeneised.

Ecologically speaking, it seems as though we have to change the world if we are to survive within it, and if it is to be able to support life in its current manifestations. In some respects, these protests are proof that we are stepping up to the task. But in the same way that the tools we used to dig this hole (the spades and shovels of capital) now are not going to help us necessarily to get out of it (when you are in a hole, stop digging!), then perhaps we need different tools to get out of it. If we might think about filling the hole in with one thing, it might be with shit. These opinions of mine, then, might be a modest and malodorous contribution to that mission.

Becoming Light (on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Thai cinema, Uncategorized

For Einstein, light was the absolute limit of the universe. In his view, provided I have understood it correctly, nothing can move faster than light.

Without light we cannot see. This does not mean per se that we cannot sense without light, but even non-seeing species have skin that is sensitive to light and also to the warmth that light brings. Plants, for example, convert light into growth and life – as per photosynthesis. Perhaps human vision is simply the very long and slow development of photosensitivity (sensitivity to light) as a means of survival.

Human perception seems to be based on the ability to see different objects. Different objects are visible as a result of the simultaneous existence of light and, as far as the human eye is concerned, the ability of organised and solid matter to reflect and to absorb certain frequencies of the light spectrum.

If there was no light, there would only be darkness. Without any light to see, then, we might be able blindly to bump into things, but our ability to divide the world into different objects, surfaces and so on and so forth might be heavily compromised.

Similarly, if objects all absorbed and reflected the same frequencies of light, then we would not be able to see depth or different objects; all would be monotonous as we fumbled blindly in a ganzfeld.

We have light, then, and we have matter.

It is only as light travels into ’empty’ space that it illuminates things for us to see them. Without that light, that section of the universe is as good as non-existent; it is only when/that we can see it that it can be said to exist. In this sense, space is only as big as the area into which light can/has fallen.

We know how old the universe is because of how big the universe is. It is because light has an absolute speed that we can put a time value on the distance value; in fact, we cannot really measure distance without measuring time. In some senses, then, speed (namely, light speed) is the known measure of the universe. Time and space are inseparable; one is the measure of the other.

This part of the argument is somewhat harder to follow: if light allows us to see different objects in space, then perhaps light is also useful in allowing us to perceive different moments in time. If without light all objects in space would not so much cease to exist but collapse into one, inseparable chaos, then so, too, might this happen with time. An absence of light would not necessarily lead to the cessation of change (over time), but it would lead to an inability to perceive difference over time. That is, radioactive material might still decay at a predictable rate, but we’d not be able to measure this.

If light is what enables time and space, because it enables the perception of both spatial and temporal difference (and I would take these arguments further, since they are somewhat incomplete here, if sufficient for the hypothetical argument I wish to make in this blog), then light also enables history and memory. History is the process of change itself – the ongoing creation of differences that is perhaps the stuff of all life. And memory is the imprint of that change; it is perhaps, after a fashion, its own form of photosynthesis – an intake of light that is stored in the body, but converted into something else, something that allows us to grow by allowing us to retain information and to learn. It is, like a plant photosynthesising light, not a direct storage procedure, but a transformation, a turning of light into some form of energy, here called memory.

In this sense, memory is a form of photosensitivity (and here I can expand a little outwards from the ‘limited’ argument confessed to above: by ‘light’ I suppose I am talking about waves in the widest sense of the word – we may only see 5 per cent of the light spectrum; I am talking about all frequencies of eletromagnetic radiation; I might even say that I am talking about all that touches us – sounds and matter included, but this is a much bigger argument I cannot get into here, but it seems vaguely plausible provided I have not misunderstood the occasionally derided theory of superstrings, whereby all – everything – may consist of base ‘particles’ that vary in mode as opposed to kind).

If memory is considered as a form of photosensitivity, then it is important to remember that memory needs matter, it needs a body for storage purposes.

The problem with matter is that it changes over time. Or rather, part of this change, as far as the temporary units of organised matter that are called human beings are concerned, is death – and death does pose a problem to those who are particularly attached to their bodies (as we all can but be, whether we ‘like’ our bodies or not).

I occasionally take the radical point of view that there is no death, per se; the matter of which I consist will travel onwards and be involved in ever more intricate/basic (self-)designs, regardless of my involvement as ‘me’ in the process. Even though I say so myself, this is radical, because I do not draw a hard and fast line between life and death; I see life as a process of organisation, as the process of organisation. The principle requirement for organisation is matter. That is, all matter has the potential for life; I just happen to be a clump of matter that is more intensely or complexly organised (and by virtue of my relative complexity, I would hazard that I am a relatively inefficient organisation of matter, if the KISS rule of Keeping It Simply, Stupid applies here as it does in most places). And since I measure that potential as being real, I conclude – like I say, occasionally – that everything is alive, that there is only life.

By ‘only life’ I don’t necessarily mean only life; I’ll get on to that in a sec. But first: why only occasionally? Because I am of course scared of dying when on occasion I feel the vanity of not knowing what it would be like without my body. And second: light is a wave and a particle; light is life as much as the more recognisable objects around us (‘matter’) are life, according to my slightly wacky proposition.

If it is our bodies that set the limit to memory storage – if our bodies expire, and basically we humans are bound to die – then one means of trying to survive beyond our physical deaths would be to outsource as much of existence as possible from our bodies.

If memory is the incorporation of light in its widest form (if it is ‘experience’ felt in the body), then we reach something of a cul-de-sac: how can we do without our bodies, when every attempt at outsourcing experience (i.e. technology, including cinema) requires our bodies in order to exist? In fact, technology perhaps constitutes that (admittedly changing) boundaries of our bodies as much as we constitute the boundaries of technology (though whether we can actually pin a boundary down regarding where I begin and it ends is not something I would like to try to do with any accuracy at all).

One way might be to change the nature of that body; that is, to have a body that is dispersed across space and time in such a way that it is always alive, if that makes sense. To be omnipresent in terms of time and space. There is a substance that is the limit of time and space, and which therefore might a convenient tool both for memory storage, but also for the embodiment of our continued selves that, through this new ubiquitous and everlasting ‘body’, would ‘live forever.’ That is, if one could become light, then perhaps one could live forever.

Cinematography means writing with movement; but cinema is dependent on light in order to exist – both in terms of its construction and in terms of its reception. To become light, therefore, might involve some element of becoming cinema. Or rather, to become cinema feeds into the idea of immortality, via becoming light.

The title character of Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Spain/Netherlands, 2010) explains a dream he has had. In this dream, ‘future people’ exist as images, or so Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) seems to suggest. ‘Past people’ are not welcome in this world, and when they are discovered, they find themselves projected in such a way that, for this viewer (me), they are brought into ‘the future.’ This involves, presumably, leaving their bodies behind.

This obviously has geopolitical resonance. In a film that, like others of director ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul, pits modernity, particularly in the form of medicine, against ‘tradition’ – in the form of superstition, religion and, most of all, nature as manifested in the jungle, there is a sense in which Uncle Boonmee is about that which is not – that which perhaps cannot – be made into a film. That which cannot or is not allowed to become cinema. This is geopolitical, because within the (admittedly and alas quite specialised) realm of cinema, there are the stars (those which have become light, as stars are) of mainstream cinema – and then there are the forgotten whose existence onscreen is only ever as a minority – if they exist onscreen at all.

Cinema has a tendency, then, of leaving out ‘past people,’ and/or if it spots them, it projects them, too, on to a wall such that they also become light. But that which is apparently ‘worthy’ of cinema – that which attracts the most attention in terms of audiences (who are inculcated only to ‘like’ certain types of cinema) – is only that which is glamorous and spectacular. The slow, the obscure, the unpretty, the old: these are things that for most people are not ‘worthy’ of cinema. And yet this is precisely what cinema, if it were democratic, can and should bring to light. And, within the rarefied field of ‘film festival films,’ perhaps it does.

But this is not without its paradoxes. For, to lose one’s body and to become light, to become a spectacle that is/has only a spectral/unbearably light existence is to forego life; it is to become a spectre, or ghost. To become immortal, one must perhaps die in the most profound sense of the word: one renounces the possibility of change, the possibility ever of becoming something different again, instead being fixed forever in a limited form by the images that become our constitution.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Boonmee seems to fear the contents of his dream. For as he knows too well thanks to his ailing kidney, he is his body. And if immortality requires the giving up of the body, then the immortality that is becoming light, that is becoming cinema, is fundamentally to give up what he is.

In other words, cinema can never truly depict that which it seeks to; it can never truly have a body in the material sense that humans have bodies, even if the human body is a constituent, perhaps the key component of the cinematic experience. Or rather, if light is matter, it is not the same matter as human life is at present.

What is the difference between the matter of light and the matter of a human (or other) body?

I shall answer this question shortly, but first I shall try to reconstitute the above in a different fashion, one that is far too JudeoChristian/Western for Uncle Boonmee (as a Thai film), but which seems relevant. It is ironic that so much Christian thought relies upon the renunciation of the body, based as it is upon the purging of sins committed by the flesh, since to be made up of flesh seems an originary sin without which none of us is. For if to be without a material body is to be light, then to be ‘en-light-ened’ (the ‘civilising’ drive of the West as it brings the rest of the world into the age of Empire) is also to be prey to Lucifer, whose name means ‘bearer of light.’ In other words, there is potentially a satanic element to becoming light.

This must be worked through a little bit more, as per the question above. Light is a form of matter, just a form that is different from the organised body that we inhabit if we have eyes, brain or internet voice software to read or hear this blog. So if I am talking about becoming light as a means of constituting a different form of body, what is it that I mean?

Principally, it is this: as humans made up of matter, we are not simply made up of light, even if the ‘particles’ that in string theory potentially constitute everything are the same ‘in’ light as they are ‘in’ me and other ‘solid’ forms of matter. What particles we are made from are in a different mode (or oscillating at a different frequency) to light itself (which must be the case, since if we oscillated at the same frequency as light, we would not be able to tell it apart from ourselves; it is the different speed, or temporality, of our oscillations that individuate not just us as human beings, but all different bits of matter; different temporalities articulate difference itself; in short, every thing has a different tempo).

In fact, humans are not made uniquely from light; we are also made of what I shall term darkness.

I term it darkness because this is as good a term as any to think of that which is ‘not light.’

It is also useful because we know that we need darkness in order to see. Blinking in the human’s way of periodically assuring that we continue to see. Not only does this protect our photosensitive eyes from too much light – which would blind us – but it also moistens our eyes so that the heat from the light does not dry them out, thereby similarly saving us from blindness (it does not matter what ‘colour’ blindness is; simply that blindness means an impaired or void capacity to see difference).

These seemingly imperceptible periods of darkness help us to see. However, there is more darkness to us. Our brains are permanently in darkness, as are most of our insides, unless we happen for some sad reason to be ripped open. Our skin is the barrier that separates us from but also connects us to the world, and our skin is photosensitive, as we know from its fluctuating pigmentation under sunlight (and sunbeds). We do feel things beneath our skin, from vibrations in our viscera, to memory in our muscles. But these things are for the sake of present circumstances invisible; they are in darkness – and they are as constitutive of who we are as any interaction we have with the light of this dimly lit universe. If we became wholly en-light-ened, these invisible parts of ourselves would be fundamentally destroyed; by being brought into the light, they would cease to be.

In other words, it seems that our bodies are darkness. We can reason that we die anyway, so if we became light, this death would only be a different form of death, perhaps less unpleasant, than the physical decay that our bodies will inevitably undergo. Indeed, if we are destined to evolve, then perhaps becoming light is the next step of evolution, so maybe all of this is a ‘good thing.’ Why the long face about the end of darkness, then?

Perhaps what I am terming geopolitics can once again step in to help us think about this: if humans are destined to evolve in this fashion, then so be it. But perhaps there is no need to impose this process on everyone. If ‘darkness’ is all that one has, then perhaps some people do not want to or would feel unhappy about the prospect of having even that taken away from them under the presumption that other people know what’s best. Perhaps some people do not want to live forever. Why force it on them?

Alongside economic and military warfare, perhaps cinema is the imperialistic tool par excellence – and by cinema I mean here cinema in its most expanded form, to include maybe all audiovisual media, but certainly the mainstream ones. It is arguably a force for homogeneisation – the rendering similar/same of all things, the production of a cultural ganzfeld in which difference is lost.

If this ‘ganzfeld‘ is created by making everything visible, then within the geopolitical realm of cinematic production and distribution (and reception?), there resides an enormous paradox: maybe some filmmakers need to resist the ‘monstrous’ drive of cinema to show any and everything (‘monstrous’ because montrage, from the French montrer, to show, wants to show us everything; the word also implies the economic imperative of exploiting all things for profit by showing/making a spectacle out of them; as Jean-Luc Nancy has pointed out, moneo, implying a warning, is also the root of money; perhaps showing (etymological) roots are the money of all evil).

If some filmmakers take up the challenge of hiding things, of working with the invisible, of working with and in darkness, then Thai cinema emerges as particularly relevant – though I could not be sure as to why. For one of the most important moments in recent cinema, a moment that brings us to the black hole of cinema, can be seen at the climax of Weerasethakul’s Sang sattawat/Syndromes and a Century (Thailand/France/Austria, 2006), in which the camera tracks calmly around an empty room before honing in slowly on the black hole that is the end of a ventilation shaft/extractor fan.

All that we can see is supported by all that we cannot (consciously) see. To emphasise, as cognitive film studies perhaps tends to do, the purely visible elements of cinema is to miss half the story (not least because of the darkness that lies between every cinematic frame). That which exceeds our vision is always inherently in the image: the excess incessantly ‘inceeds’ the image, even if it exceeds our vision.

A final paradox: perhaps light itself is invisible, too. We can see the objects illuminated by light because they absorb some frequencies and reflect others. What it is harder for us to see is the light itself. As if each photon were only visible because it comes into contact with matter in another mode, contact which switches it from invisible to visible. As if vision itself were vision of vision; that is, the photon is invisible until it touches matter in another mode, which switches it from invisible to visible, meaning that we cannot see, but can only see that we can see. As if within light itself there were its opposite, or darkness.

The blind leading the blind.

I need to sign off, and so beg forgiveness for these ill-considered thoughts. If at all they merit interest, there will be more to come, but not within the time and word limits my body has set for myself tonight.

Certainly there is a great mystery afoot, a black hole the effects of which we can see even though we cannot see it itself, and which lies at the core of our understanding of cinema, perhaps ourselves, and perhaps the universe we inhabit (which is a too bold proclamation to make by far, no doubt).

If it cannot be seen, then perhaps it cannot be shown, even if we can see its effects and claim at times to feel it. Perhaps it is the God particle that is also made up of fragments of soul. Time must also be considered more thoroughly to get into this conundrum.

This blog cannot do so tonight and perhaps will never do so as much as watching Uncle Boonmee, together with Syndromes and a Century, can do. But these are – I wonder, I vainly hope – the absolute limits of… something. Lame last sentence: no wonder the Cannes jury felt that it was worthy of this year’s top honours.

Mike Leigh in Ruins

Blogpost, British cinema, London Film Festival 2010, Uncategorized

This blog is not going to say Mike Leigh is really in ruins. With his new film, Another Year (UK, 2010), Mike Leigh proves that he is still on good form. But the idea is also to compare this new film at least in part to Robinson in Ruins (UK, 2010), the new documentary from Patrick Keiller, and which I saw at the 2010 London Film Festival.

For both films are concerned with the decay of a certain mode of British existence and both films are concerned with history.

Condescending towards his characters. The characters are stereotypes. Bittersweet. These are the stock opinions and phrases that are wheeled out to discuss the work of Mike Leigh. All hold true here, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Another Year centres around the Hepple family, which consists of Tom (Jim Broadbent), Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a couple in late middle-age, and Joe (Oliver Maltman), their 30-year old son. Tom is a geologist; Gerri is a counsellor; Joe is, from what I can tell, a barrister. They are all, after a certain fashion, happy go lucky, in that they all make light and learn to find the positive side of the tribulations and slings that life puts in their fortunate way.

They have a lovely house, a back garden, and an allotment somewhere in London (not specified, unless I missed it). They also have a small group of friends that includes:

– Mary (Lesley Manville), who is perhaps in her late forties, who is single, and who desperately wants to find a man, preferably a young man, perhaps even Joe;
– Ken (Peter Wight), who is an old university friend of Tom and Gerri, who is similarly single and in need of love, and who lives in Hull;
– Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom’s brother, who towards the end of the film becomes a widower, and who moves down to stay from Derby with Tom and Gerri.

There are other friends – but these are the main ones.

Mary and Ken in particular drink like fishes. In fact, each sequence in the film is more or less divided into Tom and Gerri receiving house guests, notably Mary and Ken, and watching them get pissed as a way to cope with their nervousness and with their solitude. Tom and Gerri do drink, but not like these people.

Mary and Ken come in for the worst treatment. Ken is a fat lad who is annoyed with the fact that ‘his’ pubs in Hull are now populated by young lads – particularly graduates (Ken graduated from Manchester with Tom and Gerri) – who make a lot of noise. In one particular scene, he drinks about four large glasses of red wine in about three minutes while delivering a rant with his mouth full of food about the above decline in his social life: the UK does not want old people to be seen or heard.

As he scoffs more food (despite having a seemingly empty plate) and drinks more wine, we cut to shots of Gerri in particular looking down at his glass of booze, which he then slugs in an oblivious fashion – as if his behaviour were beyond his control/he was beyond the censure of others.

Similarly, Mary gets pissed round at Tom and Gerri’s place, she seeks to flirt with Joe (and Tom on occasion), and she expresses repeatedly her angst and nervousness at being alone in the world. Men have treated her poorly, while there is also a sense that she ‘wasted’ a good chunk of her life working in bars in Mallorca and Corfu (perhaps chasing dreams that Shirley Valentine might also have chased), and, perhaps, that she has addled her brain from smoking a lot of pot, also in her youth.

Booze features prominently in the film: Tom, Gerri, Joe and Ronnie drink it more or less constantly, but Ken and Mary drink it most of all, since they drink it copiously and constantly. Furthermore, Tom and Gerri repeatedly hint at both of their friends that they should stop drinking or cut down – though never outright do they say it.

Instead, the film is indeed full of furtive glances at the glasses of these characters as they become drained. And slowly it begins to emerge that Tom and Gerri do actually judge their friends. Not obviously, but implicitly.

This is made most clear through the role that their house plays in the film. Aside from a few brief forays on to the road (with Mary, who has a new car; with the Hepples as they travel to the funeral of Ronnie’s wife; a golf course; opening shots of everyone at work), the house and Tom and Gerri’s allotment are the only settings for this film. Coming to stay with the Hepples is a real treat for Ken and Mary – as it is for Ronnie at the end of the film.

In fact, Ronnie’s Derby home is depicted as about as grim a 1950s north Midlands house as you could wish for: VCR stacked on top of old television about four foot from the settee, with an unwelcoming grey-green wallpaper, cramped hallway and staircase, tiny kitchen for one. “This place has not changed,” says Tom, or words to that effect when arrives at his brother’s house.

The implication being that he has left and never really bothered to return to Derby, since he has, unlike Jenny from An Education (Lone Scherfig, UK, 2009), had an academic education, and he has used this to escape from the grim north and down to the beautiful south.

Never would the Hepples entertain the idea of staying with Ronnie, nor even of helping him out from a distance. The only way to make Ronnie’s life better is to take him into their homely pad where he can rehabilitate/come to terms with his grief.

Similarly, although Mary and Ken both describe their pads, we never to get to see them; why would we want to? They don’t want to be at home; they’d rather be chez Hepple, too. And so the assumed betterness/superiority of the Hepple household is confirmed in the mise-en-scène of the film, which does not allow us into the homes of the other characters.

With the ‘betterness’ of their home comes a sense of betterness more generally. Joe reveals this early on: in his job, he represents an old man, Mr Gupta (Badi Uzzaman), who has been ill and who now faces repossession if the court does not find that he has not been paying his bills due to the enforced absence that his illness provoked. “Hmmm, lovely,” says Joe to Gupta and his young lady friend (Meneka Das), when she explains to him that they own a restaurant. Joe’s tone is one of condescension and is met with awkwardness by Gupta and the friend.

As if the aspiration of owning a restaurant were a bad one – although Mike Leigh did make much of a fool out of Aubrey (Timothy Spall) in Life is Sweet (UK, 1990), who opened and aspired to make a success of the Regret Rien.

Where Aubrey does come to regret his restaurant, though, it would seem as though Tom and Gerri here have little to regret – while Mary and Ken’s lives are full of nothing but. And because they have nothing to regret, because everyone wants to come round their house, they can look upon others not with disdain per se, but with a hidden and never-to-be-expressed self-congratulatory sense of self that is in fact fundamentally disinterested in other people as, precisely, people.

More on this: Tom has evidently not been to Derby for a long time – and so is obviously not particularly bothered to keep in touch with Ronnie. However, he then chides Ronnie’s son, Carl (Martin Savage) for not being involved in family life with father Ronnie and his late mother, for not being a good son and staying in touch with his parents. Carl is a bad son, while Tom is a good brother – when he wants to be. Unspoken/unseen in the film are presumably all of the times that led to Tom and Ronnie being such different, perhaps even opposite, people, despite being from the same family.

Family is everything here, as Gerri says to Mary at one point – again provided that that family is nice and cosy – and when everything is nice and cosy it is easy to sermonise to others about how badly they lead their lives.

Gerri’s turn: one of the opening scenes of the film shows Gerri talking to Janet, a woman who is sleepless and who is depressed, who gives her life a 1 out of 10, and who would not change anything but everything about it if she could. Janet does not want treatment, really, from Gerri, but she has to go if she wants her sleeping pills.

That said, while Janet may ostensibly be set up as a key figure (not least because she is played by Imelda Staunton), she in fact disappears from these opening moments in the film and never surfaces again. As she expresses resistance to Gerri’s desire to ‘help’ her, Gerri ends up saying that only Janet can decide whether to come to therapy or not – the implication being that Gerri feels that only therapy can help Janet, and that it is Janet’s fault if she does not want to help herself.

Loaded into this, if it is accepted as what is going on in the film, is a deep-seated self-righteousness that could never even be pointed out to the character were they alive to hear it, because even if they did hear it, immediately it would be denied, since every safety mechanism has been created to disengage as and when any trouble comes along and to blot out of her life anything that does not conform to expectations.

Take Gerri’s rejection of Mary. Mary acts like a silly heartbroken girl when finally she meets Katie (Karina Fernandez), Joe’s girlfriend, who also works in medical care (looking after old people, no less). However, while Mary is acting like a heartbroken 12-year old, it is not entirely her fault. However manic and imbalanced she is as a character/person (and the transparent nature of Mary’s character, in that she can do nothing to hide her desperation, might lead some to accuse Mary in particular of being a character condescended to, deprived of any real soul or depth, and played as a stereotype by Manville), it is not as if this car crash had not been anticipated. Joe flirts something rotten with Mary – and in front of his parents. He gets Mary to drink-drive him to Kings Cross, before dumping her with Ken, who is also cadging a lift to his train back to Hull. And he stares relentlessly at her to gauge her reaction to Katie when they are introduced. Something very cruel is going on here, principally through Joe, but with the whole family’s complicity, too. And having set a trap that someone like Mary would never be able to avoid, Gerri can soundly reject Mary, as can Tom and the others. And hereafter the knives come out: even though Mary has already been described as ‘special’ by Joe to Katie just prior to their first encounter, come their second one – months later – Katie is happy to make unpleasant gestures about Mary when she cannot see them.

Don’t get me wrong; Katie can indeed feel irked by Mary’s behaviour. She least of anyone could have anticipated how she would act upon discovering Joe to be in a relationship. But she quickly gets in on the game that sees the Hepples play the welcoming and warm-hearted family as long as it is on their terms and as long as no one steps on their toes – and quickly they will find a ruse not only to eject people from that place when they want to, but also in such a way that it is the fault of the other person and they can feel good about themselves. Classic passive-aggressives – as Gerri’s treatment of Janet and as her judging eyes on Ken and Mary’s wine glasses also show.

The question becomes: does the film share in this ‘passive-aggressive’ behaviour? Sort of. Carl is dismissed as a thug (perhaps it is relevant that he has moved further north than Derby, to Yorkshire, where it is even more grim than down in lov-er-ley Lahndahn). And Ken is a bore.

Given that the scene featuring Ken drinking an amazing amount in such a short space of time, and given that while doing this he is permanently chewing on food that is not on or from his plate (or so it would seem), Another Year seems to want to make an eating and drinking spectacle of Ken – and that rather than portray him realistically, we have instead a stylised rendering of gluttonous behaviour, masquerading as realism, as is Mike Leigh’s way. Is this Gerri’s point of view, then? Is the porcine Ken that we see in fact the version of Ken that Gerri is looking at and judging? Or does the film itself wish to say that Ken actually is this bacchanalean, and that we are therefore not given Gerri’s point of view in a calculated and signalled manner, but instead are sutured into her point of view, which is also the view of the film itself? That is, does the film endorse Gerri and, by extension, the rest of her family, or does it implicitly critique them?

To be honest, on this score I am not sure. Mary is treated like a fool, but this is okay because she acts like a fool. She buys a new car in this film, making her something of a grown-up version of Poppy (Sally Hawkins) in Happy-Go-Lucky (UK, 2008), Mike Leigh’s last sortie. In that film, Poppy learns to drive with Scott (Eddie Marsan), only to find that he is psychotic, and here Mary gets behind the wheel only to be led on in the car by Joe, groped by Ken and ripped off by the guys that sold the motor to her, since constantly it breaks down – although it is also her fault because she drives and parks badly (as well as while under the influence).

Not only might we implicitly find a message that the freedom of movement engendered by driving is ‘not for women’ (something that arguably continues with Sally Hawkins into Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, UK, 2010)), but also that where Poppy had aspirations to drive but learns to be happy with what she has, a miserable old wreck is where she might end up if she continues on. Except Poppy, being a teacher, had perhaps more of the Gerri than the Mary in her. So perhaps she will be fine. Maybe not an older version, then, but Mary is somehow Poppy gone wrong.

The film ends with Mary being allowed (as opposed to being invited) to sit again around the Hepple table as Tom, Gerri, Katie and Joe talk about all of the travelling that they have done and will do. Tom used to work in Australia and he and Gerri took seven months to travel back. It may not be the same thing, but Joe and Katie are going to Paris for the weekend (and we know that Joe has gone for the weekend to Dublin on a stag, too). Mary and Ronnie, meanwhile, sit silent, at the table but not party to the conversation. Mary, we know, had to choose between a holiday and her car; having chosen the car, it then broke down on the one time that she wanted to go on holiday – to Brighton – and in fact ended up back at the place where she grew up, Crawley. Ronnie, we suspect, has not left Derby for years.

It is not so much that there are generations of people who now have access to cheap travel via low-cost airlines and the like (although this may be true). It is more that the educated classes of any/every age get to travel and enjoy the world – and to be happy – while the non-educated, including Ronnie and Mary (who is ashamed of her secretarial qualifications in the face of Katie’s questioning about them), are left behind and can only dream of second hand travelling, of being at the Hepple family’s table, where they can hear talk of such things/avoid having to hear about them by drinking to excess.

Tom, Gerri and Ken were at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1968, as we learn from their reminiscences. 1968 was probably not the year I’d have chosen to be at the festival in the first three years of its running, since 1969 was Dylan and The Who, and 1970 was Hendrix, The Who, The Doors, Joan Baez and Miles Davis, while 1968 was ‘merely’ Jefferson Airplane and T Rex. But, of course, 1968 is the iconographic year of the youth movement and the Paris ‘revolution.’ It is made relatively clear that Tom et al did not really take part in/love the 1968 festival in the way that many hippies might have done at the time, but at least they were there. But implicit in this might be the notion that whatever 1968 stood for, they have perhaps sold out on it, swapping a wish for equality for condescension, while those who try still to relive their youth (Ken and Mary) are made fools of/are shown as fish out of water.

The older I get, the more I realise that history is important. This is a sentiment expressed by Tom when in bed with Gerri one night. And yet, he seems not to be able to connect with history, in that Tom did not really live 1968 as the myths have it as being lived. Or rather: for Tom, history is best when it is just that – history and subject to amnesia that misremembers one’s part in it. Meanwhile, Ken and Mary who try to keep the past alive, who in effect live ‘historically’ are derided. History is important, but it is Tom and Gerri that forget it, while Ken and Mary seem to want to live it. As such, it seems problematic not that the film explores these issues, but rather that the film wants us to take Tom and Gerri’s side, to ‘suture’ us into their point of view.

As such, the one-sidedness of Ken, Mary and Ronnie (which is not to mention Carl) seems deeply unfair and, indeed, condescending (Leigh as usual). Tom and Gerri are, as their name suggests, the real cartoon characters, while Mary, Ken and Ronnie have real issues to deal with. So closely have the Hepples worn the facade of happiness that they do not know how to get back to really living. The burden of really living is a hard one to bear, and it is easy to criticise a drink-obsessed culture when one disavows one’s roots and participation in it. But living a real life might indeed force one to seek solace in wine and beer. The Hepples have no real problems and so can frown upon drinking – they do not need it, in the same way that Janet does not need the sleeping pills, or so Gerri would have us believe.

And yet, no one perhaps needs drink and pills – and the provision thereof is in some respects therefore the ruin of the nation (whatever that is). But if you can do without drink and pills, then perhaps it is because happiness is, too, a social prosthetic used to hide the emptiness that lurks inside all human souls (?). Happiness is not something that we aspire to; it is something that we use to hide from reality (except that reality itself is vague enough to allow such a condition to be professed and upheld as, precisely, real). Happiness is a technology of the self: it helps us to understand ourselves – it is a tool.

Perhaps the real issue is the notion of selfhood, which could in other circumstances perhaps be called into question, and which perhaps was called into question in 1968. Ken, who, ironically enough, claims to have been born in 1896 – the year of cinema’s birth according to many of the records – also recalls going down the pub in his youth as a collective/group exercise. And he dreams of being part of the pack, or so it seems. And yet he cannot be.

Tom, who never really liked the crowds on the Isle of Wight, was always an individualist – prepared to create a small family because this was the best he could do to compromise between individualism and collective living; and those that really did pursue collective living, which I perhaps misread here as Ken and Mary, are left alone and to fend for themselves, idiots for having dreamt of something different.

Perhaps Another Year does not enact what it depicts. That is, the film does seem non-judgemental towards its characters – and we certainly are with Mary and Ronnie as the film ends and they sit silently as the Hepples and Katie talk off screen of hotels in the Marais. It is not that the film should come out and condemn the Hepples; far from it. Nor should it love Mary and Ken. But by not letting us into the lives of Mary and Ken (because Tom and Gerri are not really interested in doing so – or because the film is not really interested in doing so?), the film does run the risk of the usual Mike Leigh clichés.

That said, perhaps it is precisely for this head-scratching reason (is it the people or the film that finds Mary and Ken one-dimensional?), Another Year is deliciously ambiguous and sees Mike Leigh tread carefully through a Britain in ruins.

Meanwhile, Robinson in Ruins is Patrick Keiller’s long-awaited follow-up to London (UK, 1994) and Robinson in Space (UK, 1997).

In some senses, the film is no disappointment. Although Paul Scofield’s voice over has been replaced by the wry tone of Vanessa Redgrave, and although Robinson is no longer necessarily the character who always accompanies the speaker on his journeys, being instead now someone who comes and goes and who remains somewhat elusive, the film bears many of the traits of its two predecessors.

That is, the film is witty, informative, angry, and beautifully shot. It lingers on minor details of local and British history that most British folk would overlook as they busily travel around paying no attention to the very space through which they are travelling, obsessed instead as they are with the destination. As such, Patrick Keiller aims to take to his viewers the kind of passion about history that does allow us to know who we are and to learn – unlike Tom and Gerri, who seemingly talk a good game.

But much as I enjoyed Robinson in Ruins, I could not help wonder this, which is, unfairly to the film, the only thing I wanted to say about it, and which tenuously is only linked to this blog because of the films’ shared (at least professed) concern with history. And the ‘this’ that I referred to in the previous sentence goes as follows: as we are given yet more information about yet other places and details of history, one comes, or at least I came, to wonder that Robinson… is the first film of the Wikipedia age.

(Forget Facebook for the time being, though I may blog about that film at another time.)

For, hearing more and more details about various phenomena felt like clicking through on Wikipedia in order to achieve similar. I doubt that this would please Keiller at all, since one wonders that he wants precisely to present his films as somehow old fangled, hence the static cameras, the lingering takes of flowers in the wind, and so on. And Wikipedia is about rapid click-throughs (people hate an entry with too much information). So while diametrically opposed, I wondered if Robinson… and Wikipedia are in fact two sides of the same coin. And that may be this: the more we wish to preserve every detail in films like Robinson… and online, the more these prosthetic memories/our drive to outsource our need/desire to have to remember things, the less, indeed, we do remember things. Heaven forbid, because in so many ways do I disagree with myself for saying this, but Keiller may even be like Tom Hepple: history becomes important to him, but only a version of history that agrees with what he wants history to be. In this sense, both Leigh and Keiller’s perhaps ‘modern’ films are read ‘against the grain’ as ‘postmodern’ – and in fact are revealed to accelerate the ruination of the very thing that celluloid might otherwise have preserved.

Mickey Mouse Studies (for ODC)

Film education, Uncategorized

It is a tale told in a voice of urgency. It is a tale told in a state of extreme fatigue. It is important to enter into states of extreme fatigue, into extreme states. Knut Hamsun knows that it is by entering into liminal/extreme states that one achieves a sense of otherness. By going to places to which the body is not used, the mind must follow – and as a result new thoughts can be found, because new physical conditions are the conditions for new modes of thought, new mental conditions – or at least Spinoza might claim that this is so. What follows may not be new thoughts to you; they are not necessarily new thoughts to me – but they are thoughts that have tonight been illuminated by the spotlight of consciousness such that they merit attention in the form of comment. In the form of a blog.

Watch this. It will help.

It seems apparent that the Browne Report will involve a huge cut, maybe a 100 per cent cut, in funding for humanities at universities. What does this mean?

I am not sure – and never will be – that I grasp fully what is going on in the world. It’s a big world. It’s a world that is larger than I can fathom. How could I grasp fully the rationale behind the desertion of funding for the humanities in higher UK education? This is the response that logically will be given to this post (should anyone read it to want to respond): you don’t understand the bigger picture. Subtending this (as yet hypothetical) response is the supposition that the person who makes this claim does understand the ‘bigger’ picture – whatever that is.

I work in Film Studies: the camera can only take in as much information as it takes in, as can the human eye. If you have eyes to see the ‘bigger’ picture, then what you gain in size (‘bigness’), you lose in detail; what you gain in detail, you lose in size. By which I mean to say: I don’t know what the bigger picture is – because we all take light into our eyes, we all see – even the physically blind, and if I cannot trust my own sense of vision, in combination with my other senses – i.e. if I cannot trust my sense of self (whatever that is), then I must be blind. If I am blind, then my perceptions are pointless: I see nothing. If my own perceptions are pointless, then how can I perceive how pointful are the perceptions of others? And yet, it would be by telling me that I perceive poorly that my hypothetical antagonists would undermine what I am about to write. Well, I perceive as best I can, and I write as honestly as possible in accordance with my perception. And so if I am wrong, I apologise – but not to you who merely thinks me wrong – but to you, the invisible (to me – i.e. God) who knows me wrong.

(A problem with Film Studies regarding shot sizes: it seems to me that in general a close up is considered to be more ‘detailed’ than a long shot. But this is not the case. A close up is as detailed as a long shot. A close up fills the same amount of screen as does a long shot. As such, there is as much information in a close up as in a long shot. Indeed, a long shot is – permit some twisted argumentation – a close up of length, and a close up is a long shot of closeness. Like the camera, we take in as much as we can at any given moment in time. Our subjective existence is only ever as big as our subjective existence is – and if a pin prick destroys my belief in God, when others require an atom bomb for this to be the case, then the object of pin or bomb is irrelevant: the process of the destruction of faith is the thing that is important. As such, objects, which exist in space are often prioritised over happenings or processes, which exist in time. It does matter what is the catalyst. It matters, because the catalyst, the thing, has a material existence. It is made up of matter; as such, it matters. But in other ways, the thing does not matter at all – and the only thing that ‘matters’ is the process. It is the immaterial, the invisible that also, perhaps even really, counts: the process. Time is the overlooked element – because we impoverished souls cannot see it. But it is there, a black hole whose effects are visible everywhere while it itself can never be seen, because no light escapes from it. The Higgs boson as a particle of time; time as a physical entity. We are happy to accept that the bed that currently supports me is created from particles that have divergent origins – and if we separated this bed into its constituent particles, we would be happy, I suspect, to accept that each particle was not destined to become a bed, but that it had the potential to be a bed, that it had ‘bedness’ embedded within it. But we do not assume that time might be the same – which is what I wonder is the case: time, like space, consists of particles that, if we were to look at them from their point of ‘origin,’ would not cohere to the fleeting moments in time that are my breathing in and breathing out. Instead, they, like particles of space – like matter because they are material – in fact come from all over – and what coheres them together is simply organisation, as opposed to continued and persistent identity in the form of memory. Time seen from ‘without’ (Aeon) is not the opportunity for us to see the past and the future in a coherent sense; rather we see the chaos that is time, and it is the process of experiential time (Chronos) that makes ‘sense’ of time, and gives it a ‘chronology.’ Time in and of itself has no order; and what time we experience in life is the ordering of otherwise random particles, particles which, like those spatial particles that comprise a bed, come from all over the Aeon, are from any and everywhere, but which ‘randomly’/spontaneously cohere/self-organise. The point of this: to readjust the common assumptions made about time would be to readjust our common assumptions about identity, which in turn leads to challenges in the field of politics and ethics. In effect, to contemplate Aeon might lead to tangible changes in Chronos – in the way in which we lead our lives and act upon the shared assumption that we love each other.)

Back to the beef – and apologies if you are lost already – but it’s okay to get lost, because without getting lost you cannot find out where you are, you cannot re-think, I cannot learn: what do the proposed cuts in humanities funding suggest? Well, from my (by definition) limited point of view, they suggest a government-backed desire for universities not to encourage freedom of thought. Don’t get me wrong: a failure to back the humanities is not to say that the sciences, commonly if erroneously thought to be the humanities’ beautiful sister, do not encourage freedom of thought. Of course, the sciences do encourage freedom of thought. The sciences require freedom of thought for progress to happen. But it does mean that free thinking, perhaps the art that lends to the sciences its future, is undercut.

I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who works in Film Studies. Film Studies, as a relatively new discipline, often, like (New) Media Studies more generally, gets labelled a Mickey Mouse field of endeavour. What (the fuck) is the point of studying entertainment? Entertainment is simply there to entertain. It is not serious, and therefore is something not to take seriously.

Why do I think that Film, by which I mean the media more generally, is something to take seriously? Not only this, but why do I think that Film is perhaps the single cultural artifact to take more seriously than any other?

Firstly, the answer is in the way in which the question is posed. If one feels tempted to describe something like Film Studies as a Mickey Mouse endeavour, then the very fact that one uses a term from the history of film – Mickey Mouse – to describe the endeavour is highly significant. To describe Film Studies – among other disciplines – as ‘Mickey Mouse’ means that already one is influenced by the media – since Mickey Mouse is a media construct – that one wishes to dismiss. That is to say, to use the term ‘Mickey Mouse’ means that one is prey to not taking seriously precisely the media that helped to form the opinion that disciplines like Film Studies are ‘Mickey Mouse.’ If one is happy to use the term ‘Mickey Mouse’ without giving further thought to why one is using this phrase to describe this discipline, then the power of the media to hide their own operations already have you in their grip. We are encouraged not to take seriously the very thing that disavows how seriously we should take it. And, so I contend, as soon as we feel we should not take seriously something that shapes and helps to form our opinions, then this is the moment when we should begin to take these cultural influences – Mickey Mouse himself – most seriously indeed.

Teaching film is interesting: year after year (in the few, brief years I have been teaching it) I find students who express deep distrust in the idea that a piece of ‘mindless’ entertainment can influence our thinking. Two different but seemingly relevant examples come to mind.

Recently teaching Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928), conversation in class became obsessed with the idea that the prison guards who taunt and try to shame Joan (Falconetti) would not have had a metal pot – which occurs as a prop at one of these points in the film. It is not that students became concerned with the pot (which was raised as an example from them of an anachronism in the film) per se; or rather, I am not trying to single out a comment from a particular student as one in need of particular attention. That is, I am not trying to lord it over ‘ignorance,’ since I needed to go check on Wikipedia myself that metallurgy has been in recorded existence since at least 5,500BC. More, it is the idea that anyone – myself included – would think something like that 1431 would be an age in which metal would not be fashioned into something so basic as a pot/saucepan. By which I mean to say: that we collectively suffer from the perception that everything in the past was ignorant, and we are surprised – perhaps – by how long some ideas/technologies have been around.

I shall return to the above, but before that: secondly, in relation to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Germany, 1927), a student put forward the idea that because the film is ‘old,’ the world that Metropolis depicts is old, is irrelevant, and therefore that the film has nothing to say to us today and is simply an (un)interesting artifact of a time gone by in which – again – people were somehow less ‘clever’ than they are today.

Why are these examples worth mentioning? Well, let’s start with the second one first. In conflating the age of the film with irrelevance, we/I see the strange effect that film has on our society. That is to say, because the film is ‘old,’ it is alleged that it also has nothing to say about today. That a society of rich people is subtended by a society of impoverished and imprisoned workers apparently has nothing to do with the present age, because such problems have been eradicated – or so the theory would go. I personally believe that while things may from certain points of view have gotten ‘better,’ the world today is not perfect – and the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, in such a way that Metropolis remains a deeply relevant film – not least because it is set in the future, thereby suggesting that the ‘medieval’ not only coexists with the ‘modern,’ but that the modern needs the medieval to remain, precisely, medieval, in order for the modern to remain modern. But for someone to believe that this is so – that problems of class inequity – are today non-existent, an ‘artifact’ of the quaint and old-fashioned past, means that they are not given access to information that tells them about how such inequality not only persists but is the bedrock of contemporary privilege. And if they do not know/are in denial of the fact that problems of class/wealth do persist today, then this is perhaps because information about such things does not find its way into the media, is not publicised, which means that it does not find its way into the consensual consciousness. If people are not only unaware but also in denial of contemporary inequalities pertaining to wealth and class, and if this is related to the channels of information in the world, then a key question becomes: who has access to the channels of information/communication that do exist? Who controls these channels? And what is the agenda – be it conscious or otherwise – that determines the kind of information that is distributed via these channels? In other words: the media themselves, which here I umbrella under the term ‘film,’ determine our sense of the world – such that stories of class inequality are deemed to be ‘irrelevant,’ mythical even, in that they pertain to an age long since disappeared. Since this is not the case – that age of inequality is our age – the occultation of inequality via the media is something that we need to take very seriously. Cutting funding for the humanities – of which something like Film Studies forms a part – is to suggest that all is well with the media and the kind and channels of information that predominate. All may be ‘well,’ but to deny any encouragement critically to think about these things (via the removal of funding for the humanities) speaks of a complicity with – as opposed to a resistance to – the very messages and media that like to make themselves (the channels of communication and the agendas behind their content) invisible.

To return to the Joan of Arc example: this does not relate to Film Studies so much as to History – but the two are related. That we all are encouraged to think of our predecessors – the very humans that predicated our being here in the first place – as idiots and that everything that is ‘technological’ (i.e. pots and pans) is modern and ‘beyond’ the capabilities of those that lived less than 20 generations ago, is to fall foul of the idea that history in particular is not worth knowing. The past is another country, in the same way that countries that are ‘other’ to we Westerners are deemed somehow to be living in ‘the past,’ or ‘medieval.’ Film – and the media more generally – help to convey this message: if it ain’t fast and flashy, it is old and putrefied/shit. How fuckwitted might it be to assume that people from the past were fuckwits? And yet if – as I am contending – uncritically to think about our media and the messages that it distributes is also uncritically to assume that the contemporary saw the birth of everything ‘important,’ while the past was full of intellectual, cultural and moral retards, then a failure to take seriously the media that surround us might only lead further to this failure to grasp that at every moment in history, humans and all other creatures have been as brilliant (and probably as idiotic) as they can be. Perhaps we do not need to learn this lesson – in that no lesson is necessary, because we myopic humans cannot see time from without to know in advance what lessons will be useful to us before they become so. But that we can learn this lesson in and of itself means that we have developed a system of thought that probabilistically finds it useful to learn lessons – and in part to deny that – as the cutting of humanities funding seems to indicate – is not only to deny an opportunity not to re-perform the same mistakes as our ancestors, but it is also to deny in part something – learning from the past – that has become second/human nature.

Do the arts need funding to survive? Do the humanities? Nicholas Rombes has provocatively argued that young people today understand film and media far better than those that ‘educate’ them understand. In some respects, I have sympathy for this position. I do personally wonder that we have experienced something of a paradigm shift, starting with cinema, but continued with the digital era, whereby we think less in language and more in audiovision (for want of a better term, we think in ‘cinema’). Or rather: we – the multitude – have thought in cinema long before we have thought in language and will continue to do so. But language, not least because of the media, including voice and print press, that could distribute it, becomes the decentered medium for conveying thought, and is replaced by audiovision, by cinema, because cinema is more accurate, not least because it appeals to all of the senses, whereas ‘mere’ language – in many cases – appeals only to that supposedly rarefied – but in fact entirely embodied – phenomenon: the intellect.

If we think and, more importantly in the age of YouTube, if we express ourselves audiovisually, then the ‘translation’ that needs to take place in order for these audiovisually expressed thoughts and messages to be conveyed in the ‘old money’ of ‘rational’ and ‘academic’ language is always going to weaken the audiovisual message itself. Something – always – is lost in translation.

If this paradigm shift is happening/has happened, then perhaps the humanities do not need funding to survive. In the age of citizen tubing, then perhaps the arts do not, either. Or rather: maybe the arts and the humanities need funding in an absolute sense, but communication itself has changed such that language – spoken or written – no longer forms the core part of the process, but just another element, along with the tactile, sonorous and intellectual elements of film.

And if young people actually ‘speak’ audiovisual better than they ‘speak’ linguistic, then why waste money on training them to say in ‘old speak’ (i.e. in spoken/written language) that which they already understand through their bodies and which they already speak in audiovisual (here, ‘new’ speak)? In other words: why not cut funding in the humanities?

I am not saying that we should abandon spoken/written language; audiovisual does not replace it, but it sure as hell supplements and expands it. In fact, by this rationale, I think that not only should the humanities in general and Film Studies in particular benefit from continued governmental support, but that it is absolutely vital that this is the case. Otherwise we seriously risk alienation between generations and peers; we seriously risk failing to take seriously the ‘language’ that emerges when communication moves beyond words and into the realm of the senses. We the older people with the purse strings can moan all we like about how it is the fault of the young for not speaking our language; but it is our fault, similarly, for not speaking theirs. And humanities funding allows us to learn the (audiovisual) language of the young and to help it move into dialogue with the (linguistic) language of the old.

Do the arts need funding to survive? A year ago, I made a film called En Attendant Godard (UK, 2009). It has had some modest ‘success,’ and while I would be delighted to promise in this blog as a form of plug that I am happy to send the film to those that request it, provided they give me a postal address, the reason that I mention it is this. I made the film, which is far from being a good film (whatever that is), as a means of proving that one does not need funding anymore from anyone in order to make a… film. In other words, in the digital age if not before (but almost certainly before), artists do not need funding to survive.

(But it is not as if even the earliest professional artists did not need some form of payment – in terms of food and shelter – in order to survive. Artists need funding of a sort – but they will find a way to live even if their art is not what supports them in a material sense.)

To deprive people of things is to make them understand what they need, and it is to make them – perhaps – autonomous, in that they work out that of which they are deprived, and creatively they find ways to win it. Conceivably one might argue that there is a perverse benefit to cutting humanities funding: the humanities will have to find novel and innovative ways in order to remain relevant. Threaten it with death and at this moment it will feel most alive.

Beyond this, however, it was as a fuck you to funding bodies that I wanted to make the film. Not only that – but by having no funding, I could make the film I wanted, even if the film is (willfully) full of things over which I had no control and in which, in hindsight, I/the film revel – because having no control over, in particular, a large group scene that pays homage to Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1967), a scene that has had most criticism from people as a scene that should be cut from the film (as if other people knew better what the film should be [not because I do know better what the film should be, but perhaps precisely because no one can know what this, or any, film should be] meant that the film raised precisely these issues of what a or any film should be at all).

If I set out to ‘prove’ that one needs no funding to create art, and if I were successful in this bid (which is debatable), then what (the hell) am I complaining about? Well, what I feel upset about is that even if the unusual, even if the amateur, even if that most perplexing of phenomena in the capitalist world system – the useless – can and will persist regardless of the lack of institutional support that comes it way, it is still an insult not to support such endeavours. Because I made this – and my next film, Afterimages – for no money, I hope that I am exempt here from sour grapes. If no one ever gives me money to make my films, this will not stop me from making them. No one can and no one will stop me. I shall not stop.

But, as at one point I make Alex, the main actor and character of En Attendant Godard, say, the world needs the useless, it needs the previously un-illuminated, it needs the (even willfully) opaque, in order for there to be progress. Not that progress is the movement towards a pre-defined goal or telos. Who knows that to which we are headed? But change, the hope for something better, is dependent upon that which is not now understood, in order for us to come to understand. If, perhaps contra Nicholas Rombes, we do not understand everything already, then we can only understand more, we can only learn, by coming into contact with that which we did not previously understand, with that which we did not previously know.

Even if I say so myself, there is more to my Godard film than this; but by isolating this aspect of the film, I want to reiterate, but now in a blog as opposed to in that film, that that which is now apparently useless can indeed come to be useful. And even if it never comes to be useful or liked, it has its place in the ‘grand scheme of things.’ But to rule out before the fact that neither the arts nor the humanities will have use or value, which seems to be the message of cutting humanities funding at universities, is precisely to pre-determine the (lack of) use and value of the arts – which historically do have incredible use and value, even if it is not clear, known or recognised at the time of that art work’s creation. (And I am not claiming that En Attendant Godard is this; I could not know if it will prove ‘useful,’ but I put it out there – as feebly/best as I can/could – in order at the very least to give it a try.)

(Trying: trying is a sign of faith. Being prepared to take risks is necessary, not as a thing, by which I mean one cannot know in advance – in spite of pressure to know in advance – what will be useful. If we knew, there would be no risk involved. But taking risks as a process is the cornerstone of progress – again, not towards a previously identified telos, but as a process in and of itself. The apparently ‘useless,’ therefore, is most useful. Outliers are de facto precisely that: people who lie outside of the currently useful. Not that EAG is useful – perhaps it never will be. But I put it out there in good faith that I am taking part in a human process of… good faith. Bad faith is risk aversion, a refusal to try anything new, a decision to forsake the foreign for the familiar – a decision to prejudge the foreign, to exclude, to dismiss, to show no interest, to ignore – be the object of that prejudice, exclusion, dismissal, disinterest and ignorance something from a different place or, in the case of ‘old films,’ from a different time.)

A paradox, which takes us in the direction of tautology, which perhaps is the profoundest level of insight that we can have about the world (namely, that it is as it is, even if we contribute to and change it, even if it is dynamic, precisely because it is dynamic, and any attempts at essentialisation/reification are doomed to failure): if art and the humanities can and will get by without governmental support in the UK – which they will because no government has nor will be able to stop a culture from becoming aware of itself – even if we educators are wrong in feeling that we play an active role in this education happening (because the students know it all already) and even if we are as a result of this already redundant, regardless of whether our employers make this officially so – then surely there is no problem in cutting funding regarding humanities and the arts?

In some senses, this is true.

But if you turn your back on the useless in favour of that which is deemed singularly useful, and if then the world changes, and you go rooting around to find that which earlier you discarded because now you realise it will come in very handy, but cannot find it because it has been destroyed in a fire, then you, my friend, are fucked.

You burn your humanities, you burn your past. And with no past, you have no future.

Idiots that people in the humanities are, though, you people who despise the humanities and who despise artists won’t be fucked. Because we’ll still be here when you do need us – and we’ll be here even if that day never arrives and you can die smugly saying that you got by without us because we were, indeed, as far as your existence was concerned, useless and you were correct in burning us off.

And like idiots, if ever you do need us, we’ll be ‘naïve’ enough according to your standards, to let you take advantage of us in the same way that school bullies occasionally condescend to the swots because they need their homework doing. You’ll think us weak for being ‘kind’ enough to help you, because your value system would never help anyone for free, because you value system is based not upon courage and having a heart/cœur, but upon, precisely, attributing ‘values.’ You’ll think us weak and you’ll never realise that it is only the strongest who can take your persecution, as opposed to feeling that to persecute is to show strength.

The paradox, the tautology: you are right to forsake the humanities. But you are wrong in thinking that this is because the humanities are the weak point in the world. The humanities, like the poor, are the strongest. You may never learn that we let you fuck us over because we are the only ones that can take it and you are fools that need to feel justified in your military industrial sense of self. Artists, like people from the past, are from your perspective idiots. You feel like you suffer us. But the truth is that we suffer you. We, in fact the multitude that you wish was yourself, hence your need to try to make everyone into a person of use and value, are not the people that need you; to cut the humanities funding proves that you need us. You need us precisely to sacrifice us, tautologically to make us the others we always already were.

The ‘you’ and ‘we’ just described, though, are actually just a ‘we’: we are all together, and to divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’/’you’ is potentially counterproductive. We need we in our diversity; we need we artists, even if artists and humanities scholars all we are not. We – stupidly – continue to hope that one day we will treat ourselves equally and with respect. We are all in this together, and while some of us want to discard certain members because the boat might sink if we are not removed from the equation, others of us continue working and fighting until the bitter, salty end, in the hope, perhaps even in the knowledge, that we will triumph – all of us – because faith in others is in fact a thing worth retaining now as ever before. This, surely, is the key to the humanities, be they topics in the ‘Humanities’ or in the ‘Sciences’: we believe in humanity, however good, bad, same, or different. As such, we want humanity to blossom; not just certain aspects of it.

We don’t have to; we won’t, perhaps, remember. But remembering that humanity is the heart of the Humanities can never be a bad thing to consider.

Notes from the LFF: Rizhao Chongqing/Chongqing Blues (Wang Xiaoshuai, China, 2010)

Blogpost, Chinese cinema, Film reviews, London Film Festival 2010, Uncategorized

Chongqing Blues tells the story of Lin (Wang Xueqi), a sea captain who returns home to Chongqing upon hearing the news that his son, Lin Bo (Zi Yi) has been killed by the police.

Rejected by his wife, Lin begins to spend his time following his son’s best friend, Xiao Hao (Qin Hao), in order to get to know his son better.

As per other films that I have been by Wang Xiaoshuai, the film is contemplative in style. That is to say, the films move at a ‘gentle’ pace, and slowly allow audiences to accrue information about the characters, who typically are haunted by a loss of some sort.

In Shiqi sui de dan che/Beijing Bicycle (China, 2001), the lost object is a bicycle. In Qing hong/Shanghai Dreams, the thing is lost is the family’s life in Shanghai, to which they want to return. And in Er di/Drifters (China/Hong Kong, 2003), that lost object functions in part as both a place (a return home from the USA) and a son whom the father (Duan Long) wishes to see. Here, however, the son is dead – having been gunned down by police while attacking people with a knife in a supermarket. But the same motif of loss and a return home are still there.

The plot is important and can read ‘allegorically’: Lin represents a Chinese patriarch who has lost contact with and finds it difficult to understand the younger generation, who in turn feel adrift and without clear guidance in the absence of a father figure. This suggests a China that, tentatively at best, is feeling a rift between generations – not least because of the breakdown of the family unit in the face of the need to travel to work (Lin at sea), and also because of the fast-changing face of contemporary China, shaped extensively as it is by new technologies.

For, Lin obsessively looks at a Chinese equivalent of YouTube at images of his son’s crime – captured on a CCTV camera in the supermarket and placed online. He even has a still image of his son from this video blown up (twice) on to large photographs – in order that better he can contemplate what his son had become before his death.

And yet, these images of Lin Bo are pixellated, such that he is a blur of colour squares, recognisable perhaps at a distance, but fragmented and unrecognisable up close. Technology – here, digital imagery – seems to have played a part in this breakdown of the family unit, such that it has rendered Lin Bo unrecognisable to his father.

The mobile phone also seems to play a key role in the changing face of Chinese youth, with Xiao Hao in particular being literally chained to his phone (which he carries in his pocket, but keeps on a chain). Father Lin has a chance to speak to Xiao Hao’s father; the latter knows that his son works as a dancer in a nightclub and he does not see it as being genuine work, one gets the impression, but at least Xiao Hao is paid to do this. In other words, the older generation does not understand the bright lights and loud noises in which the younger generation immerses itself (most arrestingly seen when we go with Lin Bo into the deafening and neon-lit club – which serves as a stark contrast to the other scenes set in and around Chongqing, particularly its pastel seaside palette and its ‘blues’).

Notably, it is the moment that Xiao Hao does not answer his phone that, in part, leads to Lin Bo’s death. In need of help in the supermarket, Lin Bo calls Xiao Hao, but the latter does not respond. But whether answering the phone would have ‘saved’ Lin Bo or not, one gets the impression that relationships are not direct in contemporary Chongqing among the urban youth, but are instead highly mediated and dependent on real time telephonic technologies.

It turns out that Lin Bo was more or less stalking a girl who did not necessarily love him as he felt that he loved her. And it is his desperation to have her that, seemingly, leads him to commit his futile crime.

Here, then, we have a sense in which the new generation follows the lure of images, particularly of woman as image, perhaps, such that their human relationships are dysfunctional and idealised, as opposed to tangible and real.

That said, it is not as if Lin’s relationship with his wife is any better. She violently rejects him for most of the film and in one important scene she throws at him the newspaper report about Lin Bo’s death: Lin Bo has become himself pure image (both in print and online) and this copy (without an original?) is the closest that either parent seems to be able to get to their son. Even Xiao Hao, Lin Bo’s closest friend, finds Lin Bo an odd fish and seems to let the latter hang out with him out of sympathy and a sense of needing to protect him, as opposed genuinely to liking him.

If Lin Bo is something of a mystery, then, perhaps the only thing that ‘explains’ him is his insistence that his father will one day return and that he will be able to go fishing with him. Hence Lin Bo’s continual returns (in flashback) to the sea, where he hangs out for seemingly interminable periods of time, looking out to sea.

If there has been a breakdown in family and more general human relations, then, the youth in particular feels that it is because of the absent father that this has taken place.

Do we read the film, then, as being an allegory of the capitalisation/globalisation of China, with the influx of telecommunication technologies that this entails, and in need of a strong but now absent father figure (one cannot help but think back to the Communist regime, e.g. under Mao) to ‘sort it out’?

If – and this is a strong if – there is a sense of this at all, it is only more ambiguous than the last paragraph lets on. By which I mean that the film does not pose any solutions to these conundrums, and it is all the better for it. What has been done cannot be undone, and while the film engages at length in the trauma of loss (with Lin even tracking down the police officer who killed his son, who professes that he might get some ‘peace’ out of the meeting for himself rather than simply helping the father to understand what happened), and is instilled with a sense of regret, at the same time, the film seems determined not to explain the past too much (we never fully understand why Lin left), but rather to deal with the present.

A melancholy film, for sure, Chongqing Blues is an excellent addition to the London Film Festival line-up, even if to some extent a ‘festival’ film through and through.

Brief comment on Made in Dagenham

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, Uncategorized

There is quite a lot to say about Nigel Cole’s Made in Dagenham (UK, 2010), but I am going to stick to only a brief moment in the film.

As the actions of the striking Ford seamstresses bring the working males in Ford factories around the country to a halt, because they do not have enough car seats to continue fabricating the vehicles to completion, we see documentary footage of workers complaining. Men should be the chief bread winners, says one, while another says that the women should stop striking and let the men go back to work.

Not only did this moment remind me of how it was for the sake of men’s wounded egos, or so it is argued, that many women ended up losing jobs in the film industry back in the 1930s – because women post-Wall Street Crash were denied jobs that perhaps traditionally they had had (e.g. as editors), and instead they went to men in order to rebuild ‘national’ (i.e. male) morale.

But also, what was notable about this moment is that one of the men complaining about the striking women is black. The only black person in the whole film.

Surely the filmmakers could have shown footage of someone else (i.e. a white man) making a similar and sexist comment, had they wanted to. So why have a black man say this in the film? Well, perhaps it is to say that sexism cuts across races – and that the history of female emancipation has been as hard for black women as it has been for white women. In some senses, this would be a laudable point to make.

However, there are no black women in Made in Dagenham. Historically, it may be so that Ford did not employ black women in Dagenham in 1968 (when the film is set) – and this not through an articulated policy of exclusion, but simply because no black women happened to be within commuting distance of the factory (although this becomes hard to believe). In other words, it may be ‘accurate’ not to show black women working at the factory at the time.

But this lack of black women, which became noticeable through the inclusion of one black man, did remind me of the work of Jacqueline Bobo, who says in one of her essays that black women have been a structuring absence of American cinema. And so perhaps are they a structuring absence in British cinema (pace work by Lola Young).

The whiteness of mainstream British cinema is here brought to the fore. And, in particular, the fact that black women are rarely seen in British films (with Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Thandie Newton disappearing to the USA; perhaps only Naomie Harris and Sophie Okonedo are well known and working in the UK right now, and they only get supporting roles).

(And this is not to mention lingering sexiam in the film industry more generally, let across ‘real’ life in general. I have been sad to hear other people’s opinions, for example, about how little chance Diane Abbott had of becoming leader of the Labour Party – as if she is not qualified for the job/as if she is a numbers-making also-ran. Whatever you otherwise think of her, not to take her candidacy seriously is only condescending. Which leads me to think about the bum deal that Hilary Clinton [least so], Sarah Palin [perhaps deserved] and Ségolène Royal have had in recent elections: the common argument/perception being that they are too ‘stupid’ [Palin and Royal, especially] to do the job – as if George W Bush, John Major, Nicolas Sarkozy and any number of recent politicos have been/are geniuses…)

Made in Dagenham asks for sexual equality. It implies some sense of racial equality by including the talk of one (sexist) black man (who appears, notably, in documentary footage – i.e. to reinforce the notion that black men really are sexist?). But it does not include any black women. Given how attractive the actresses are (I hate to put it this way, but their appearances are definitely more suited to the cinema screen than those of the real protestors whom we see later on in the film, again in documentary inserts), we could say that the film is not strictly that bothered with realism. And if it is not that bothered with realism, in that the film aestheticises its women participants, then why not have black actresses figure in the film, since the message of equality is the film’s chief aim as opposed to its being a critique of Ford’s (now outdated) sexist wage structures and the history of this particular moment in the/appropriated by the Women’s Lib movement…?

The truth is, I don’t know why – although I have my suspicions. But I’d like to see more and more prominent roles for and films featuring black British actresses – and actresses of all sorts of races and ethnicities – whither Archie Panjabi, Parminder Nagra, and, of course, many more?

As for my suspicions regarding the ‘truth’ behind the film’s ‘agenda’ – a rather large clue comes in the title: Made in Dagenham. ‘Made in…’ suggests something ironic along the lines of: the product being made is ‘pure British,’ with British here seemingly being defined by whiteness.

That is, Made in Dagenham is something of a flagwaving film about British identity, but the values of which, as we shall see, cannot stand up in the contemporary age.

Firstly, ‘Made in Dagenham’ seems positively parochial in the face of ‘made in China,’ ‘made in Korea,’ and ‘made in Taiwan.’ My point is not that ‘made in’ is the sole remit of Asia; plenty of things are made in Britain – as Elton John, in one of his most embarrassing songs, has suggested.

‘Made in Dagenham,’ however, seems to suggest something wholly and paradoxically British. If the Essex man is thought of as the lynchpin of Margaret Thatcher’s political career, Thatcher herself being considered one of the masterminds behind the ongoing de-industrialisation of the UK, then the Essex girl is here posited as a pro-Labour force – as is recognised by the co-optation of the Dagenham seamstresses by Barbara Castle in the film (with Miranda Richardson playing Castle as if indeed some ‘inverted Thatcher’ of sorts – a creation that can seem only to have made in hindsight, as is the whole ‘Essex’ discourse that did not necessarily exist at the time of the history being recounted/embellished in this film).

Barbara Castle was herself a supporter of decolonisation and racial equality – although it is not one of her beefs in this particular film. But that we should stick to ‘British’ – as the ‘made in…’ title seems to want to boast – is problematic (for me) in the face of globalisation, wherein in ‘made in…’ all too often refers to distant elsewheres whose sweat shop status is occulted in favour of ‘well, at least they have this job’ parlance.

The film’s all-white cast attests to the vision of Britain being put forward here and which might not conform to Barbara Castle’s in any direct way. It is also a vision of Britain that is at odds with the country’s present labourforce, which, since the dissolution of boundaries for EU citizens, has become increasingly diverse – above and beyond immigration flows dating back to the early post-war period. In other words, ‘made in’ does not mean much these days if in that place whatever is being made is being ‘made by’ a workforce of diverse national and ethnic backgrounds. That is to say, Made in Dagenham is nostalgic about its past (1968 – a time of hope across Europe, after all) – which becomes a nostalgia difficult to maintain in the face of the film’s whitewashing of that past.

Perhaps the film already knows this – but tries to hide it. Ford is an American company, well known for its founder’s embracing of making profit over cars built to last. So while there is a sense of the Essex girl being ‘made in Dagenham,’ the film, for all of its equality rhetoric, is still very much about a burgeoning transnational economy in which industry controls politics. Or so it would appear. American Ford exec Tooley (Richard Schiff) threatens her with the closure of the Ford factories should she back their demand for equal pay, and Castle tells him more or less to shove off. In other words, not only is Castle defined here as distinctly feminist, but also distinctly British by being anti-American, which, while perhaps a popular move in the minds of many British viewers of the film, is similarly to whitewash Britain’s own colonial past. Exploitation is projected on to American economic policy, as if Ford were the sole perpetrators of wage inequalities. This is further brought to the fore by the ineptitude of the British Ford bosses, who do not have dossiers or files on their Union bosses, etc.

The message seems to be that American imperialism started in/also affects the UK – so Britain seems indirectly to be claiming kinship in this film with that which it has anything but: the Third World, which Britain itself continues systematically to exploit in all manner of ways.

Made in Dagenham is certainly charming and funny, featuring some delightful performances (although I shall only single out Rosamund Pike, not because she acts Sally Hawkins and/or the others off the screen, but because she seems to have grown in confidence and nuance across her last few films). But it seems as though the things that are missing from it are also some of the things that bring out its slightly twisted politics. Namely, using a progressive political moment (equal pay for women workers in the UK) to also posit a deeply conservative vision of the UK as a country defined by whiteness, as in denial of its colonial past/present by projecting exploitation on to America, and as a country proud of its labour force, despite the fact that, with hindsight, the Barbara Castle of this film can be seen as only a minor dam long since obliterated in the tide against the de-industrialisation of the UK (as signalled by the slow demise of many British car manufacturers since the end of World War 2).

Yo, también/Me Too (Antonio Naharro/Álvaro Pastor, Spain, 2009)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Spanish film, Uncategorized

I saw Yo también as part of the recent London Spanish Film Festival 2010.

The turnout was excellent and, judging from the laughter induced by the advert from the Spanish Tourist Office which culminates in a relatively wealthy British wife and mother declaring “I need Spain,” the audience was predominantly Spanish.

The laughter continued into Yo, también itself, which, admittedly, is often a funny film. It tells the story of Daniel (Pablo Pineda), the first person with Down’s Syndrome to graduate from university in Spain. Daniel starts to work with the Seville council team, where he spots and then meets Laura (Lola Dueñas). He falls in love with Laura, who has 46 chromosomes, and who, according to various characters in the film, is an unsuitable partner for him.

However, in spite of the supposed disadvantage that Daniel has, he develops a strong friendship with Laura, a Madrileña who is going through something of a personal crisis in Seville (escaping from a relationship with her father that may well have been abusive) – and eventually, though for one night only, they become lovers.

Daniel is articulate and witty – rebuffing all of the unthinkingly prejudiced things that people say against him as the film develops – in particular attitudes regarding his sexuality and, by extension, the sexuality of Down sufferers in general. “Have you ever thought about prostitution?” Laura asks him at one point, making reference to the fact that Daniel finds it hard to control his sexual urges. “Do you think women would pay to sleep with me?” replies Daniel.

There is even a scene in which Daniel mocks those who are mentally disabled by hitting himself repeatedly over the head as Laura explains in a lift and in front of two onlookers that she is not interested in him as a lover. As Laura tells him to stop acting “subnormal,” the female onlooker rebukes Laura for talking that way to someone who is obviously ‘afflicted,’ which prompts Daniel – and then Laura – to burst out laughing. It is the prejudices of the onlookers that have been exposed, not those of Laura – and Daniel is mischievously pleased with pointing this out.

As Sharon Willis, among many others, has noticed, difference is a core part of the study of film: how film portrays people who are of different colours, different creeds, different nationalities, and different sexualities. Some films even attempt to address how mainstream cinema stereotypes, say, old people, although the issue of age difference (whether between people in relationships or just the treatment of old age in general) is underexplored. Similarly, ‘disability’ is relatively unexplored in cinema, even though Oscar perenially hands over his greatest prizes to ‘abled’ actors performing semi-retarded people (although as we have learned from Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, USA, 2008), he rarely gives awards to actors who go “full ‘tard”).

And so in many respects, Yo, también is an important film to counter the prejudices of ‘abled’ audiences towards people suffering from Down’s Syndrome. Although that Daniel can mock – lovingly or otherwise – people who are mentally handicapped in other ways does beg the question about ‘hierarchies’ of disability.

Daniel is educated – something the film makes clear that he owes to his parents: his mother (Isabel García Lorca, a niece or great-niece of Federico García Lorca) treated him normally, insisted that he go to school, and regularly reads to him in English, while his father (Pedro Álvarez-Ossorio) is a university professor, who similarly, we presume, treats Daniel like a normal human being. And because Daniel is educated, he has gained access to a different world not normally open to people with Down’s – or people who suffer from other physical and/or mental disabilities: he can look down upon those who do not share his abilities.

This is manifested in the film by the way in which Daniel does not take part in the dance classes organised for Down’s people by his brother Santi (Antonio Naharro, one of the directors of the film) and his sister-in-law-to-be, Reyes (María Bravo). Daniel in fact says that he does not like to dance, and only does so in the film with Laura when he is drunk. Otherwise, repeatedly we see Daniel looking down at the dance classes from an elevated position behind a glass partition. That is, Daniel is physically separated from the ‘normal’ Down’s people in the film – suggesting that he has, through his education, reached a ‘higher’ position in life.

Daniel is laudible: the film opens with an impassioned speech that he gives at a conference, and in which he asks that Down’s people be treated as equals to abled humans – particularly by giving them work to do. Obviously, Daniel has work. While it is rare that we ever see anyone actually doing their mundane daily grind in great detail in movies, it is striking that we never really see Daniel doing any work at the council. Instead, he mucks around at the photocopier and he gazes longingly at the women in the office, including Laura. What is striking is my own prejudice that was revealed to me: for, if I never normally question a ‘normal’ person’s ability to carry out work when watching movies, here I found myself wondering whether Daniel was in fact doing any work – or whether he was being retained by the council as a gesture towards equality. I should have supposed that of course Daniel can do this work, but I do suffer from lingering suspicions. (This despite having many years ago worked with a capable man with Down’s in a bar while at university.)

What condescension I have, though, I wonder Daniel also has. His education has made him an exception and, as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued in a vastly different context, exceptions prove the rule; they are a product of the rule; they are inside that from which they are made outside when they become exceptional. The rule to which Daniel is an exception is the rule that Down’s sufferers are not allowed to work. But Daniel perhaps reinforces that rule as opposed to challenging it – not least because he is so insistently marked as different from the other Down’s sufferers, as suggested by the use of space in the dance hall.

In this respect, by telling us the story of Daniel, who is exceptional, we get little, or at the very least less, insight into the lives of others with Down’s, the lives of ‘normal’ Down sufferers. That is, Daniel through his education does not have to suffer so much from the prejudices of others – and can even mock the prejudiced (and, indirectly, those with ‘greater’ disabilities than himself). But how about showing us the hardships of those who do not have the advantages that Daniel has? If actors don’t get Oscars for going full ‘tard, so, too, have the makers of Yo, tamién told us a story about someone who is ‘normal’ enough – thanks to his education – so as not to be alienating to audiences.

But by paying such respect to audiences, the film’s ambitions are revealed as being somewhat slight. That is to say, yes, the film rightly raises awareness about the wants, needs and desires of people commonly thought of as disabled, but who want to and can in fact be contributing members of society. But it does not take us fully into the world of those with Down’s – using the educated Daniel instead as a mollification of an existence that people might not otherwise want to see but which, if they truly wanted to see or know the toughness and resilience that presumably are involved in the life of a Down’s sufferer, they perhaps should see.

Let’s not overlook the important love affair that takes place in the film between Luisa (Lourdes Naharro, presumably a relative of Antonio) and Pedro (Daniel Parejo), two Down sufferers whose relationship is seemingly outlawed by both the dance school at which they are partners, and by Luisa’s baker-mother. They run away and in a telling scene, they mock Daniel for his condescending manner towards them in explaining safe sex to them. As Daniel puts a condom on a banana, Luisa tells him that it is not an erect penis, but a banana. Daniel eats the banana – perhaps having seen something of his exclusion-through-education from his ‘own’ group.

Luisa, in perhaps the film’s most powerful scene, then tells her mother that she needs to live alone and be an independent woman. This is a key moment in the film, and there is much in these moments that contradicts aspects of the arguments I have so far been making in this blog. But on another level, one wonders why the film was not about Luisa and Pedro from the off…

Sex looms large in Yo, también. Daniel looks at porn on his computer at home and we have access to his fantasies about his co-workers dressed in bondage gear, bikinis, and the like. He lusts after Laura something silly. And sex between a Down sufferer and a ‘normal’ person seems to be the big taboo broken in this film. More heartbreaking, though, is the proscription of sex between Down sufferers that people try to place on Luisa and Pedro.

Furthermore, while the film has a liberal attitude towards sex in some respects (even Down sufferers want it and should be allowed to have it – with whomever they please), the film also rehashes stereotypical sexist points of view, in that Daniel lusts after women in quite a reactionary way. He has fallen in ‘love’ with Laura, it seems, before he has spoken to her – and so his conception of love and desire is as objectifying of women as it is ‘normalising’ of Down sufferers, in that we understand ‘them’ (as us) to have sexual desires and, perchance, needs. ‘I have a right to desire,’ the films seems to say; ‘but I also have a right to objectify women’ is the problematic point of view also put forward.

Finally, as the film was introduced, the speaker comented on the power of Dueñas’ performance as Laura. Surely Dueñas is excellent in this role. However, no mention was made of the Down actors. It seemed almost as if their performances were not registered as performances because they are, after all, full ‘tards already: the implication is that theirs are not performances.

And so while Daniel is self-consciously a performer within the film, Pineda, Naharro and Parejo, among others, receive no credit for their equally excellent performances.

When earlier I wondered that we perhaps need a film about ‘normal’ Down sufferers, unlike Daniel who has had a long and thorough education, a question is raised. Am I asking for a film made by a Down sufferer? Am I asking for a documentary about the condition? It is easy to imagine at times that Yo, también is a documentary/that this is not a performance. This is one of the chief tricks that the film pulls off in order to hide the elements within it that are retrograde (the singling out a single, ‘special’ hero whose specialness lies in being more like ‘us’ than ‘we’ thought others of his ‘kind’ to be – i.e. his specialiness lies in being not very special, in the sense of unique or different to us, at all – even if this marks him out as different to other Down sufferers; furthermore, the latent sexism in the film is also covered over in this way).

To give the Down actors their due as actors would be to make more prominent the at-times problematic (to me) politics of the film. This is not a fault with the film itself, which does credit the actors. But I wonder that the introduction which singled out Dueñas and not the Down performers reveals something odd – a hypocrisy of sorts, in that the film calls for Down’s people to be considered equals, and yet already they are removed from the system of judgment that is involved in rating a performance as good or bad. Furthermore, to do this (to assume that these are somehow not performances) means that we do not judge, say, Daniel’s sexism as precisely that, sexism, because we are instead induced into thinking ‘aw, Daniel/Pineda is being himself, we cannot judge him, the poor tot, because of his disability.’

Au contraire. Nobody’s perfect, as we know from Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, USA, 1959). But we live in a world where criticism and critiques are made and, painful though criticism often is for those receiving it, these are always ways for us to conceptualise and then perhaps to act upon ways of being ‘better’ people, perhaps even happier people. Treating Down’s sufferers with kid gloves will only perpetuate preconceptions of/prejudices against disability. Daniel’s a smart guy – he can come to understand that he should not treat women the way that he does. So let’s tell him what perhaps he already knows/learns in the film: don’t look down on others if you can help it. Then they will not perhaps look down on you (no pun intended).

Brief thoughts on (Not) Going the Distance

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Uncategorized

This blog will feed out of my former Ning blog, Cinema Salon, which is now defunct after I refused to pay to put my thoughts online (cheers, Ning!).

Where that blog was a collective endeavour to which anyone could and some people did contribute, this new wordpress blog forces me to do it the old-fashioned way – on my own.

It is to a certain degree appropriate, then, that my first – but brief – blog on this site will be about masturbation – or more particularly phone sex as (not) depicted in Going the Distance (Nanette Burstein, USA, 2010).

During this film, long distance partners Erin (Drew Barrymore) and Garrett (Justin Long) decide that, if anything is going to help his blue ball syndrome, then they must engage in some phone sex.

This is fair enough – and what happens is a relatively comic scene in which the couple begin to get it on before realising that they are engaged in different fantasies, which ultimately they find something of a turn off and mutually decide not to complete their telesexual and phony coitus.

In the same way that Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, USA, 2007) did not dare to show anyone shagging a sex doll (compare to Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s superior but still oddly dissatisfying Kûki ningyô/Air Doll (Japan, 2009), in which the doll gets pumped – and penetrated – on many occasions), Going the Distance similarly refuses to, well, go the distance when it comes to depicting sex on screen.

The phone sex moment is only one of several acts of coitus interruptus in the film: the couple’s first night together is spoilt – at least initially – by the ‘soundtrack’ provided by Garrett’s flatmate Dan (Charlie Day); their reunion shag after Erin has moved back in with her sister is spoilt by both sister Corinne (Christina Applegate) and her humdrum husband Phil (Jim Gaffigan – of whom Philip Seymour Hoffman is the rich man’s version). In the second case, frantically are they making love on the dining room table that they wake up Corinne, before realising that Phil was having a midnight snack alongside them all along.

Yes – this is all amusing, particularly when Dan interjects and explains that he was enjoying the fantasy that Garrett was putting forward on the phone. But what is interesting is what I shall call the prudishness of the whole affair: there is a level of frankness at play – sex happens – but never are we going actually to see it. Even though the film shows us more or less everything but a couple shagging in the dining room scene.

This is perhaps just all very standard Hollywood: no sex, please, we’re evangelicals. But what is interesting is that in the cases of sex, one gets the impression that no one minds being seen. That is to say, after Dan’s initial interruption, Erin says that he can deejay and they continue to make out (we cut to the next morning). And when Erin and Garrett are caught by Phil on the dining room table, one gets the impression that happily they would have carried on (for him), had Corinne not come down to spoil their fun. In other words, Erin and Garrett are happy to talk about sex. I would wager that they themselves are happy to ‘perform’ sex in front of other people. But the filmmakers are unhappy for them to perform sex in front of us.

What is interesting is that the characters in the film are wary of their audience and as such their sex is not just an intimate moment between two people, but it is a performance of sex that knows very well that it is being watched. Where diegetically Erin and Garrett are performers, Justin Long and Drew Barrymore as actors in the film will not perform that which their characters are prepared to. For the actors, sex remains private, but for the characters it is a public show – to which we audience members do not gain access.

This is not about film ratings necessarily. Or if it is, it is an issue with film ratings in general – because of course this film wants to maximise its profits and can only do so by achieving certain certificates (cue the usual argument about how extreme violence gets barely any censorship, but put human reproduction on a screen and everyone is up in arms). What I am trying to say is that Going the Distance suggests that Americans are very happy to perform sex, but that this performance – for other people – surely uncovers a refusal to engage in sex as a participatory activity between those doing it as opposed to a participatory activity between those doing it and those watching it. This is not just Garrett using Erin as a springboard to kudos from Dan (although there is an element of this at play somewhere in the film), because Erin is complicit in this and wants to show off her own sexual prowess to her sister and brother-in-law, after all. This, then, is about how in these cutesy relationships, people are not engaged with each other as people, but they are engaged only with themselves and an obsession with being perceived by others as ‘in love’ – as opposed ‘really’ to being in love (if we can know what that is).

Phil emerges as the bad guy when he criticises Garrett for his romantic gestures towards Erin. It is not that ‘real love’ is or must be devoid of romance; but the probably more ‘real’ relationship is critiqued for not involving the same element of performance of love. Or at least, so it seems.

For the film decides to damn Phil even further by telling us that he is into frotting – i.e. sex without penetration – something that Garrett and Erin catch Phil and Corinne doing at the film’s climax. In other words, the film projects on to Phil and Corinne the refusal of intimate contact that in fact lies at the heart of Erin and Garrett’s own relationship – this in spite of the fact that Phil and Corinne ostensibly have a child (I think played by Taylor Schwenke) – i.e. despite the fact that they obviously have had ‘real’ and reproductive sexual relations.

The phone sex scene can round off my thoughts about this film. While the film in general is cute, charming and often amusing, the refusal to perform phone sex (even though Dan must have heard Garrett wanking in the past – and vice versa, given how thin their walls are) seems odd. This surely would be precisely the kind of performance of sex that Erin and Garrett are into. Well, no. And the reason is because Erin and Garrett are into performing sex instead of enjoying each other – but only when they do not have to admit that their love-making is just a performance. For this reason, when faced with the obvious fact that they are performing sexually for each other, everything breaks down and they refuse to finish themselves off.

Or rather, if Garrett really has blue balls and if Erin really is turned on, one suspects that they happily finish themselves off – but not telephonically in front of the other person (even if Garrett will do so in front of Dan). What is it about the contemporary condition that people prefer to masturbate – or, in the case of Garrett and Erin’s sex, projected on to Phil and Corinne, to masturbate mutually – as opposed genuinely to making love with the other person?

We can turn this around: when was sex ever about genuine shared enjoyment as opposed to the reflected glory of masturbating into another human being in front of other people? But I’d probably stick to the first way of phrasing this conundrum, because masturbation definitely exists, it is an intensely private pastime, and one that few people, I mean couples together, manage to address. By which I mean to say: as humans seem to pursue ever greater lengths to pleasure themselves alone (check here for a recent shocking example, complete with a link to a photo that I did not dare to look at), few seem to be able to achieve the supposed satisfaction from love making that one would seem to get from wanking and other solitary sexual activities.

Perhaps it has always been thus and to hypothesise that it has ever been otherwise is to romanticise a mythical past in which things were different.

But if film has any influence on us at all, then the solitary act of fantasising about images, which is part and parcel of how the film industry seems to want to work with regard to audiences, cannot help to make this romantic and presumed superior notion of genuine contact any the more real. Film wants us to want images, not people. To get (to) a person, one has to go a distance further than simply a geographical distance, as happens in this film. In the same way that Erin and Garrett never go the sexual distance in the film, nor do they go anywhere towards love.

Perhaps they know this when they both say that they want to marry their best friend (i.e. Dan?). But one feels sorry for Corinne and Phil for giving it a go and for having the film mock them from start to finish for not being cynical hipsters in the Erin/Garrett mold.

Indeed, credit to Corinne and Phil: it might seem dysfunctional, but paradoxically it is more intimate of them to share their masturbatory practices with each other than it is for Garrett and Erin to refuse to acknowedge that this is what they are doing, preferring instead to hide the performative nature of their sexual relations. That Corinne and Phil do it on the same dining room table might suggest that both want to be like Garrett and Erin, in fact – but the film would of course not want them to be the happier couple and so that they are forced to engage in their own (mocked, unfairly) sexual practices in the same place as Garrett and Erin engaged in their ostensibly more real but paradoxically more dysfunctional relations is to be expected from this film.

A final note: Erin and Garrett get together at a gig performed by a band (The Boxer Rebellion) managed by Garrett. Performance brings this couple together – but in nothing like the provocative and ultimately quite destructive if productive way that Michael Winterbottom’s under-rated 9 Songs (UK, 2004) does, with its immensely graphic representation of sex. That film, Winterbottom’s, really does go the distance (and one wonders that Going the Distance even knowingly copies Winterbottom’s digitally shot film during a dinner sequence also shot on digital camera – by the looks of it – and in which Justin Long performs one-liners to Drew Barrymore wearing a Playboy-esque bow tie – what else?)…