WARNING contains spoilers for Miracle on 34th Street and very minor spoilers for one episode of Supernatural in season 3
Many people assume a cynical atheist like myself would hate Christmas but as a matter of fact I actually quite like Christmas. I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes along with Christmas, chief amongst this hatred is the music. I used to work in a supermarket that seemed to have only two Christmas albums, which is fine for the customer who would likely be done before even the first album finished. I found listening to the same twenty songs torturous. Most songs that are released in conjunction with some event are not very good and Christmas is no exception. I don't see why just because it's Christmas we should listen to bad music but that is what most musicians have given us. Over the years a number of reputable artists have released Christmas albums or the odd original song as well as a wide selection of interesting covers. Some of my favourite Christmas songs include Christmas All Over Again by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the wonderfully blasphemous Jesus the Reindeer by Emmy the Great and Tim Wheeler, Get Behind Me Santa by Sufjan Stevens and Just Like Christmas by Low and they are all artists that pass my stringent criteria for being real musicians. The undisputed best Christmas song is Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love and there is an excellent cover by Slow Club. Love's original is full of emotion and her voice is absolutely outstanding and say what you like about Phil Spector he knew what he was doing when it came to music.
Matt Berry seems to have inside knowledge about what television and music I like - not content with only appearing in Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box,Toast of London, The IT Crowd and more he is also a brilliant, albeit exceedingly odd, musician. He has released four studio albums and a live album and I recommend them all (Opium is the oddest while Music for Insomniacs is very much what it says it is). In terms of Christmas a number of year ago he made a half-hour rock opera about the Nativity but from the point of view of the relatively minor character, the innkeeper who had no room. It is thirty minutes of absolute genius and/or madness, perfect Christmas viewing and has one of the best titles of anything and really the only acceptable name for a rock opera about the birth of Jesus, AD/BC.
Julian Barratt playing Tony Iscariot
My go-to film for Christmas is Scrooged, a Christmas story with no Santa Claus or Jesus, but with Bill Murray. Murray is the perfect star for a Christmas film as he shares many of the characteristics of the two main characters associated with Christmas; he is a seemingly legendary or mythic character, known for inexplicable acts of kindness and oddness whose career seemingly died and was then resurrected and unlike them he's not imaginary. And this year Bill Murray has released a Christmas Special on Netflix! It looks like some odd comedy vehicle, rather than a genuine Christmas show (think Knowing Me Knowing Yule with Alan Partridge). Aside from Scrooged other good Christmas films are The Nightmare Before Christmas, Muppets Christmas Carol, Gremlins (but be prepared, that's a much darker film than people remember) and if you only want the mildest hint of Christmas these films are set at, but not about, Christmas; Die Hard, Batman Returns, Trading Places, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and if you're looking for something particularly dark, Terry Gilliam's dystopian masterpiece Brazil was set at Christmas. I do like Miracle on 34th Street but I am of the opinion the judge in that film made the wrong call, if I'd been the director it would have ended very differently.
The much darker than remembered Gremlins
I find myself increasingly annoyed by Russell Brand, his foray into politics was a disaster, and I am not amused by many of his recent antics. However, every so often he will do something brilliant. Sometimes it's a documentary on Jack Kerouac, or the "pound shop Enoch Powell" insult to Nigel Farage which perfectly summed him up, or him discussing what happened to his mind when he was the lead story on every news programme in the country. So he's not someone I can completely write-off and another Christmas tradition Spooky Reading Girl and have is to watch the Christmas episode of Ponderland. This was a Brand comedy vehicle where he would do standup around a particular topic like Science or Family and it would be interspersed with archive footage of documentaries and similar cultural objects and the Christmas episode might be the best one. It is deliriously funny at times particularly a memo from a department store concerning problems with their in store Santa Claus. The description of the problems they had was funny enough and when Brand revealed the name of the fired Santa was Norbert Cleaverhook, a name for a 1970s movie serial killer and such a name should preclude any employment let alone as a store Santa Claus.
Father Ted gave us one of the best Christmas specials but more recently the Christmas episode of Peep Show has become a tradition in our house. One of the few things that Jez does believe in is Christmas and despite never really trying with anything he tried hard with Christmas; researching the perfect turkey and buying perfect presents. Mark on the other hand bought Jez salad tongs. Although when Mark's family turn up it is understandable why he has less pleasant Christmas memories than Jez. The behaviour and attitude of Mark's father explained an awful lot about Mark's insecurities.
Mark's surprisingly thoughtful Christmas presents from Jez
The final piece of Christmas entertainment is an episode of Supernatural, Season 3's A Very Supernatural Christmas, that at first seemed to be an anti-Santa monster who punished bad people but was actually a pair of jolly Christmas loving pagan demigods who also like sacrificing human beings, and so break into people's houses and carry them away in a big sack. The pair present themselves as a very respectable married couple, wholesome, polite, they even wear Christmas jumpers, which I have always assumed are only worn by the most evil of creatures. It shouldn't come as too much of a spoiler to learn that the heroes of the show killed them both.The show does remind us all that so much of our Christmas tradition has a pagan origin.
The jolly Christmas sacrifice
So here's to a Christmas full of pagan gods, nativity inspired rock operas and most of all Bill Murray.
Major spoilers for The Matrix, Minority Report, Gattaca, Red Son.
My girlfriend, Spooking Reading Girl, once had an example essay question while she was at university which asked if Sauron and the Ring hadn't come along and spoiled everything would the Shire and the life the hobbits lead be an example of a utopia? When I saw this I thought two things. First, that would be a very boring book, and secondly, for me it would be awful. The pleasant countryside existence of the hobbits would be my idea of Hell. It's all so twee and gentle, everyone has silly names and does silly things. I would find it very tiresome.
The twee horror of The Shire
Utopias and dystopias are a favourite topic of fiction, the word utopia was first used by Sir Thomas More in his book, Utopia, in which he imagined a perfect, or at least much better society. A dystopia is a society that is much worse that ours. The most famous dystopia is probably 1984 in which George Orwell imagined a future society constantly under surveillance by secret police, fighting never-ending wars and where, effectively, facts no longer existed and they could be rewritten to suit the circumstances. Orwell based a lot of this on Stalinist Russia where history books were rewritten to show Stalin as more active in the Russian Revolution than he was and downplaying his enemies contributions. You get far fewer utopias in fiction for the main reason that they are quite boring. A genuine utopia would have no crime, no war, no conflict, what would there be to write about? Aside from perhaps More's own work the most famous utopia I can think of is the Federation in Star Trek. The Federation is a nation of many planets and different alien races working together for the betterment of society. Earth especially is pictured as peaceful, prosperous and happy. Star Trek was created during the Cold War and the idea of a future Earth where we all cooperated instead of fighting each other was the stuff of science fiction. On the bridge of the Enterprise there was mix of races and cultures, Chekov is Russian but aside from the occassional forays into time travel that detail is completely irrelevant. Perhaps most famously the Federation had no money and they have evolved some other way of allocating resources fairly. This is made very clear over the various films and tv shows and in their universe at least is seen as a very good thing.
Some dystopias aren't as bad as all that. The Matrix is a classic dystopian world in that in the film intelligent robots and computers have rebelled against their human masters and eventually use humans as a power source. Humans lie asleep in little pods while various wires and tubes carry away the energy they produce. However instead of just letting the humans scream and cry in their little pods the robots created an artificial reality for the people to live in. This reality was a representation of what the world had been like near the peak of human civilisation, more or less, the late 1990s. Humans spend their entire lives in this artificial reality unaware of what is really going on. I must say, this is very charitable of the robots as that doesn't sound too bad to me. Instead of having to live in a world virtually destroyed by the human-robot war, in which the Sun has been blocked out, they live in a much nicer world. That is far better than humans treat most cattle and livestock and if I had to choose a dystopia to live in I think I'd pick that one. Certainly these robots are far nicer that the ones in Terminator whose tactics are to completely wipe out the human race. Agent Smith in the film even says the first artificial reality they made for people was really nice, where nothing bad ever happened but that people just wouldn't accept it as real. One of the characters even made this argument in the film, he didn't care if it was artificial, it was a better existence than the one he had free of the Matrix. All I can say is that I, for one welcome our new robotic overlords. Incidentally, having watched The Matrix again recently how good is Hugo Weaving in that film? He is clearly the best person in it.
The scene stealing Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith
If we're trying to work out the worst dystopia I would argue it is Brazil. Terry Gilliam's dystopia is similar in many ways to 1984 but the sinister government isn't just evil they are actually rather incompetent. A typing error leads to the arrest of the wrong man and when he died in custody it sends ramifications through their failing system. Bureaucratic inefficiency and indifference is life threatening in this world. Surely the sign that this is the worst of all possible worlds is that Michael Palin - generally acknowledged as the nicest man in the world - played a terrifying government torturer. Any world in which Michael Palin could do these things must be a very bad place indeed.
The horrifyingly nice Michael Palin in Brazil
There are lots of examples of worlds where people think they live in a utopia but are perhaps wrong. Minority Report is a world in which psychic beings can see the future and direct the police to stop murders before they happen. A new crime is invented where the criminal can be punished for a murder they were stopped from committing. But this better future comes at a price, as it always does, and Tom Cruise played the police officer in charge of "pre-crime" who became a suspect himself. Genetic engineering is the tool in Gattaca that has lead to a world populated by beautiful, intelligent, athletic people as virtually every baby is genetically engineered. As one doctor explained at the beginning of the film, the child is still made from the parents genetics but given the best of what they have. Ethan Hawke played one of the few people to be born "naturally" and the heart defect he was born with convinced his parents that their next child should be engineered. Hawke, frustrated by the limited life his "inferior" genetics gave him he adopted the identity of another engineered person, someone whose genetics wouldn't hold them back. The fact that Hawke was not only able to match the talents of his genetic superiors but also outdo them suggested that success wasn't just down to genes. Minority Report and Gattaca both present worlds that for most people are a utopia, a world free of crime and a world of smarter, healthier and just better people but there are those at the sharp end of this utopia. In Minority Report it is the people convicted of crimes they hadn't yet committed and in Gattaca those people left to do all the menial jobs their genetically superiors don't want to do.
It's important to remember as well that not all of have the same idea of a utopia. As I found the idea of living in the Shire distinctly unappealing some people would feel the same way about the arguably communist and atheistic society set up in Star Trek. As a socialist atheist leftie I can get happily get on board with the society in the Federation but I get the feeling Donald Trump would object. I think people are now inherently suspicious of anyone touting a utopian society and in the same way that most sorts of trouble start out as fun most, dystopias start out as an attempt at utopia. There is an episode of Doctor Who called the Happiness Patrol who basically murder anyone not happy but they had good intentions when they started out, trying to make people more happy. Individual freedom is often thought of as more important than anything else. In the fantastic graphic novel Red Son, the spaceship that brought Superman to Earth crash landed in the Soviet Union, not America. So Superman is still a hero, he saves people etc, but instead of having an idea that people should be free to decide for themselves he instead has been brought up in a society where it is okay for someone to intervene and he takes over the Soviet union after Stalin's death. He will actively make the world better. And he was, in a way, successful but many people would object to him forcing a utopia on them.
Notice the Hammer and Sickle on his chest
Perhaps the problem with utopias and dystopias is if you don't agree with their vision of society you're in trouble. Margaret Atwood, an author of several dystopian novels, said that every utopia has a problem, what to do with the people who don't fit in? In Doctor Who's The Happiness Patrol they were killed, in Red Son they were labotomised, and how a society treats people who don't fit in probably defines how close they are to either the utopia or dystopia label.
After having spent a productive morning organising my DVDs (just films, television is in a separate category) I was struck by how this relatively simple task was made far more complicated by my OCD tendencies. OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (or as Tobias Funke would call it The OC Disorder) and in the past decade or so has went from a little understood condition to something very familiar in the lexicon. According to OCD-UK 1.2% of the population of the UK has OCD, which works out as around 750,000 people. OCD has become something that many people will say they have when what they probably mean is they have OCD tendencies. OCD can take many forms but is basically suffering from intrusive thoughts; to use myself as an example I can get very concerned about checking doors are locked, that I turned the oven off, that sort of thing. When I am out I will get an intrusive thought that "did I lock the door?" and I will be anxious, worried that I didn't do it and all manner of terrible things will happen because of my mistake. If I don't go back to check I will often become more and more anxious about it.
Often I get two steps from my front door and go back to check I have locked it (incidentally I always have locked it), when I check the door is locked this creates relief from anxiety which reinforces the behaviour of going back and checking so the next time I leave the house I have an even more anxious feeling and will go back and check and this perpetrates a cycle of intrusive thought-anxiety-checking behaviour-relief which constantly gets stronger and stronger I don't say I have OCD because I can get by in my life without this being too much of a problem. If I am at work and I have an intrusive thought about locking the door I don't leave work to go and check, it doesn't really interfere with my life. To people who have OCD having the intrusive thought about the door and not checking is a terrible ordeal and I am fortunate my tendencies are so easy to deal with. The comedian Stuart Goldsmith made a joke about dyslexia, or rather the way comedians portray dyslexia, which would be amusing situations would arise as the sufferer misreads a sign and goes into the wrong set of toilets or whatever. Goldsmith pointed out that this is not what dyslexia is but is often what comedians say dyslexia is because that is funny (but incorrect). This is how I feel about OCD, that there is real and terrible OCD and the more everyday "OCD" desire for things to be neat and orderly often mined for comedy effect.
Anyway, as I was going through my DVDs I was hit by a number of categorising problems and my OCD tendencies kicked in, If I categorise them in the wrong place then my whole collection is wrong. Before we even get to specific problems there is the basic idea of how they should be categorised. In High Fidelity the main character tried to organise his records autobiographically, meaning that he had to remember how he got the record to know where it should go. I have never tried that but I did used to organise my CDs by how much I liked the artist and so any reorganisation became a heartbreaking set of decisions - did I really like The Smiths more than David Bowie? The next step would have to abandon even the idea of grouping the artist's various CDs together and treating each album individually. Thankfully I abandoned that system and adopted one based on the alphabet.
But to specifics, first, I have three James Bond films, should they be sorted alphabetically and independent of each other by title - Casino Royale, Goldeneye and Skyfall, or should they be put together and put under B for Bond. If the answer is together in this little block of Bond films how are they organised? Alphabetically, so Casino Royale, Goldeneye, Skyfall? Or chronologically from the year they were made - Goldeneye, Casino Royale, Skyfall. Or should they be put in the order of the Bond story which could be argued would have Casino Royale first as this was Bond's origins story but I have no idea which would come next. Some filmmakers seem to have been out to intentionally cause problems for example I own X-Men, X-Men 2, X-Men: First Class, X:Men Origins - Wolverine and The Wolvervine. Should The Wolverine which is part of this story be put under X for X-Men, or W for Wolverine?
And what about box sets of stuff? Against my advice my partner of twelve years, Spooky Reading Girl (SRG for short), bought a boxset of Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, the last one of these is considered by many to be the worst film ever made. Spooky Reading Girl is a term the comedian Jackie Keshian came up with to describe her own book-reading obsessed childhood and so is very apt for my partner. SRG and I have a shared DVD collection although interestingly we each insisted on maintaining separate book and CD collections. You may want to guess when I mention the DVDs in this collection which are hers and which are mine. SRG had not seen the last two films in the Batman box set and I had. SRG's position was perfectly sensible that it was cheaper to buy this boxset than it was to buy the two good films - Batman and Batman Returns. I felt this is an example when less is more and would have paid more money to just have the two good films.
I also own Christopher Nolan's trilogy of Batman films as well as the animated films Batman: The Dark Knight Return Parts 1 & 2 (based on the graphic novel which I would highly recommend as The Dark Knight Rises and the upcoming Superman Vs Batman film were hugely influenced by it). So I have three sets of Batman films, do they all go under B? I settled on the Batman quadrilogy is under B, as is Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Parts 1 & 2 but the Nolan trilogy is under D for Dark Knight as I, and indeed others, call it the Dark Knight trilogy.
I also started imagining my own peculiar film seasons based on the idiosyncrasies of our DVD collection. There is the decidedly uneven "Three Americans Trilogy" - American Beauty, American Dreamz and American Hustle. There is the Numbered Collection that started with Nigel Winterbottom's superb 24 Hour Party People followed by romantic comedy 27 Dresses and to end a double bill of not quite zombie horror 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. There is the spectacular Man & Men Season - A Serious Man, A Single Man, The Man Who Would Be King, The Man With Two Brains, The Third Man, The Men Who Stare At Goats and No Country For Old Men. And there is no surer sign of the inherent sexism of Hollywood (or perhaps mine and SRG's sexism) that in Woman & Women series there is just The Women.
Having completed the reorganisation I was hit by the final obstacle of friends returning DVDs they had borrowed that have lost their place in the collection and until I come to do it again will remain frustratingly out of place; showing up whole thing as the doomed to fail enterprise that it is and that I shouldn't let it bother me.
The Man In The High Castle is a novel by sci-fi legend Philip K Dick and I daresay that even if you haven't read his books you are at least familiar with some of the adaptations of his work; the most famous being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? adapted into Blade Runner. The Man In The High Castle imagined a world in which the Allies lost World War II and America was invaded and occupied by the Nazis and the Japanese. The Japanese took the western half of the country and the Nazis the East. The book dealt with the "Americans" living under the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes. Amazon Prime have recently adapted this book into a television show with the same name and I recently watched the first episode. I should say that while I am a fan of Philip K Dick I have not read the book.
The first episode was very good and did a great job of setting up this new world, with references to the Nazis dropping an atom bomb on Washington DC and clearly that was one of the reasons the Allies lost the war. I remember reading the comments of a Japanese general saying an invasion of America would never work as while you could perhaps defeat their armies it had a huge population that was heavily armed and any occupation would fail. In the show, especially in the Eastern Nazi half of America, they have done a lot of work imagining how the Nazis have kept the country under their control, for example, the Hitler Youth has been established in America suggesting that children are being brought up under the belief that being a Nazi is a good thing. There is a resistance to both the Nazis and the Japanese but increasingly this seems to be from the older generations, people who lived in the old, free America.
The story in the first episode involved a film that showed the Allies winning World War II, films that are supposedly made by "The Man In The High Castle". Possession of such a film would be considered treasonous. Whether it is a propaganda film made by the resistance or that it is meant that the timeline had been altered so the Nazis won and this film is rare evidence of that change, has not yet been made clear. A thoroughly chilling scene is when a truck driver is pulled over by a police officer and while they are talking ash fell to the ground from the sky, the police officer explained that since it was Tuesday the hospital would have just euthanised anyone considered a burden to the state - the crippled, the old, etc. What is most chilling is that this officer is an American, someone who fought in World War II against the Nazis and Japanese, who doesn't seem appalled at the awful murder of these people, to him it is just a simple fact of life.
This show has been made by Amazon and is available to Amazon Prime subscribers. A few years ago the idea of Amazon making actual shows would have been laughable, they sold stuff, they didn't make it. Certainly no one would have thought that it would be well-made quality drama. Amazon's stable of shows it's made include Hand of God, crime drama Bosch and probably most famously Transparent. Transparent is a sitcom about an elderly man who came out to his family as transgender and would henceforth be living as a woman. The main character is played by the brilliant Jeffrey Tambor who has been in many things but I knew him most from the imprisoned housing developer George Bluth in Arrested Development. Transparent has been a big success for Amazon and they have been lauded for the sensitive handling of this issue and, importantly, being very funny (I have not actually gotten round to watching it but I've heard good things).
Amazon is essentially in a two-horse race with the other online streaming service Netflix and they too have made a host of original shows. I originally subscribed to Netflix as it was the only place to legally watch Breaking Bad, then they were making a new season of Arrested Development and so on and so on. Personally I think Netflix has made much better programmes with House of Cards featuring Kevin Spacey as probably their biggest success. Other great programmes are:
Bojack Horseman - animated show about an actor who was on a hugely popular sitcom in the 90s but hasn't done much since. And he's a horse, but he's like a person, he talks, he wears clothes etc. It is hysterically funny but also at times very tragic.
Orange is the New Black - a drama in a women's prison based on the real life story of a middle-class woman arrested for a drug related crime she committed ten years ago, this is someone who would never have expected to be sent to prison. The show is very good at looking at the reasons why these people are in prison and how bizarre the prison system in Amercia is, for example America has the highest percentage of people in prison in the world, around 700 people per 100,000 is in prison, in comparison in England and Wales it is 145 people per 100,000.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Kimmy has been trapped in an underground bunker for years by an insane cult leader and the show started with their rescue. Kimmy goes out into the world trying to make a life after missing out on so much. This is a very dark premise for a sitcom but it is very funny and the cameo role of the cult leader is one of the best examples of casting ever.
Daredevil - television series based on the Marvel comic books, very dark and brooding. One of the best decisions of the show is that he doesn't wear the Daredevil costume at first but fights crime dressed in black and a mask pulled over the top half of his face. The fight scenes have a brutal sense of realism to them, Daredevil hits someone and they get back up, that doesn't happen with most superheroes. Also just released is Jessica Jones, another Marvel comic adaptation that exists in the same world as Daredevil.
They have brought back at least two great shows - the first being Arrested Development but also essentially making new episodes of Mr. Show with Bob and David, the HBO sketch show starring David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, under the new name of With Bob and David. I loved Mr. Show and never thought the show would be brought back, Bob Odenkirk has had recent success playing Saul Goodman/James McGill in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul and David Cross has subsequently played Tobias Funke in Arrested Development.
So far Netflix have made far more shows that Amazon and, in my opinion, better shows. But it is certainly true that both have made programmes that would have perhaps struggled to get aired on normal television channels.
In terms of which is the better service to subscribe to if you can only have one (in our household we subscribe to both) again I prefer Netflix. There is something odd but interesting about Netflix and the way they do business. Until very recently Netflix didn't organise it's programmes and films in the simple categories of Film - Horror or Television - Comedy, no instead they would have categories like Dark Films, Gritty Dramas, Classic Sci-Fi and often these labels seemed to have very little to do with the selection of films and programmes. While they have introdcued a more traditional system they have kept their peculiar categories as well.
Netflix also seemed to have more unusual one-off programmes and documentaries. It has the outstanding Ragnarok, the bizarre stand up from John Hodgman about the end of the world (who is my own personal hero and fake internet judge), old documentaries about the American Civil War, a lot of stand up comedy from American comedians not known well in the UK such as Mike Birbiglia, Nick Offerman and more.
If we must have a VHS-Betamax style showdown between these two online services I would definitely support Netflix - the weirder, more original one of the two and as inaccurate as this may be Netflix does feel more like the underdog against the giant corporation that is Amazon.
Spoiler Warning - some spoilers for The Exorcist, The Babadook, Rosemary's Baby and The Ring
I've previously written a blog about how I consider musicals the worst genre of cinema (and I stand by that) but horror is also an area of cinema that I don't know much about. I was given a very poor introduction to horror through films like Halloween and Child's Play and I maintain that they are awful films. I've never really cared for any of the "slasher" films and I don't like Scream - although that might be more because I was less aware of the conventions they were playing with. A few years ago I watched a very interesting series A History of Horror made and presented by Mark Gatiss. I'm a big fan of Mark Gatiss and despite not knowing much about horror it was very interesting and it did kindle my enthusiasm for getting better acquainted with horror.
I don't like having such gaps in my cinematic knowledge so I sought out horror films that might be worth watching. One of the first was Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's classic horror film about satanists trying to bring forth the birth of the antichrist. I loved the film and the creeping sense of terror and paranoia that took over Rosemary as she slowly became aware of the plot to make her child the antichrist. It is another film that told the viewer don't trust anyone and the closer they were to you just meant they could hurt you more. For a large part of the film it is unclear whether the satanists are really in touch with the Devil or just think they are. The behaviour of Rosemary's husband was typical not just of being involved a satanic cult but also an abusive husband; belittling Rosemary's opinions, keeping her from seeing friends and family, and trying to control more and more of her life. The shocking conclusion to the film is that Rosemary does give birth and the baby is indeed the child of satan and as the film ends it seemed that Rosemary had agreed to raise the child.
Halloween is a good opportunity to seek out horror films and I picked three- The Exorcist, The Ring and The Babadook and I felt this represented a good range of horror films, a classic Hollywood film, a more modern example in The Ring and absolutely bang up to datewith The Babadook. As with Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist is a classic film that I had wanted to watch for some time. I was a little disappointed with the film but bits of it were excellent. Essentially it is the story of a demonic possession and is one of those films that is stitched into culture and parts are so familiar from parodies and other films it has influenced. It also had an excellent soundtrack which turned a rather innocuous tune into something deeply sinister.
The stand out performance was of the mother of the possessed child and she excellently portrayed the exhaustion and panic that someone going through such a process would have. To the film's credit they spent a long time with doctors pursuing a medical or psychological explanation and it was only in desperation that they turned to an exorcism. Another brilliant move was to have Father Karras be a trained psychiatrist and was as skeptical as anyone about demonic possession.
Next up was The Babadook.This film dealt with some very dangerous territory; what if a parent hated and/or resented their child? The film is about a mother and her young son. the son was going through a difficult time in that he had a lot of nightmares about monsters and so would be unable to sleep, meaning the mother couldn't sleep either. The mother relied on the tested method of reading to her child to get him back to sleep and on one occasion the child picked a book neither of them recognised - The Babadook. It started off being very jolly and the sort of thing for children before completely changing tone and scaring the child senseless. What followed was the Babadook, a sort of ghost and/or monster terrorising the family, who has been seemingly summoned by the reading of the book. At one point the monster seemed to even possess the mother and the possibility of her killing her child is raised. The issue of resenting and or hating the child is skilfully dealt with. The mother's husband died in a car accident driving them to the hospital so she could give birth to the child. Even before the terror of the babadook the mother seemed to be close to some sort of breakdown. When the Babadook possessed her this tension is ramped up and at some points seemed to be on the verge of trying to kill the child. The film dealt with issues of mental illness and depression very well and some people have suggested all the bad things are only happening in the mother's mind.
And so to The Ring. This is the original Japanese version which everybody seemed to agree was far superior to the American remake. I was on the understanding this it was a very scary film and while I enjoyed it I didn't find it particularly scary. I think many of the things I found odd about the film are probably just conventions of Japanese cinema. For example out of the blue one character stated he was psychic and that was never explored or questioned it was just accepted. One character, an elderly Japanese man, is one of the worst actors I've ever seen and whatever he tried to do seemed completely unreal and staged; at times reminded me of the Richard Ayoade's brilliant comedy performance of Dean Lerner/Thornton Reed.
There were also some moments that felt more comedic than horrific. Some time ago I watched the recent Japanese film 13 Assassins and while for most of the time it was a very serious, sometimes brutal, samurai film there were odd comedic moments that didn't match the tone of the rest of the film. The initial idea of watching a cursed tape that will lead to your death was very good, especially if like me you're watching it on dvd, but I was surprised at how quickly the characters accepted the curse was happening. Something the four horror films I've mentioned all have in common is children. Obviously in Rosemary's Baby there is a baby, in the Exorcist it is a young girl who is being possessed, in The Babadook the child is one of the two central characters and in The Ring the fact that the main character's son watched the tape has raised the stakes considerably. It is no surprise that anything where children are going to be harmed makes everything a bit more dramatic.
Bringing it back to Mark Gatiss I suppose I did watch some horror on television; namely The League of Gentlemen. Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson formed the bizarre sketch troupe in the mid nineties (and won the Perrier award at the Edinburgh Fringe) and although it was first and foremost a comedy it had plenty of horror. There was the mysterious butcher selling an unknown and addictive "meat", the odd family of toad enthusiasts with their twin daughters who act like the sisters in The Shining, the gypsy circus ringmaster who kidnaps women (who apparently many do find terrifying) and, of course, the proprietors of the local shop who only serve local people. I didn't like the show at first as I think I expected a normal comedy and found it all very weird but I stuck with it and found it to be one of the funniest programmes on television. Mark Gatiss is probably better known now for his contributions to Doctor Who and Sherlock but I still think of him as one of the League of Gentlemen. Shearsmith and Pemberton continued to work together and produced the even weirder Psychoville where horror is far more part of the show and the brilliant Inside Number Nine which at times forgoes comedy altogether and episodes will just be horror (and sometimes oddly emotional as well). Each episode of Inside Number 9 is it's own story with new characters, the hook being they all take place in a place denoted by the number '9'. The first series had an episode almost set entirely in a cupboard with people playing 'sardines', whereas the next episode had virtually no dialogue and relied on silent comedy. The second series has continued in this vein with all kinds of different settings.
The assorted League of Gentlemen team have always worn their references and influences on their sleeve and I think I must have missed many of the horror references in their work (I did catch the episode of Psychoville which was a homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in which the story took place in realtime and is about people hiding the body of someone they've murdered).
A less funny example of horror television is American Horror Story. I am years behind with this show and only just watching the first season but was intrigued when I learned about how each season works. The first season is very much focused on a particular house that the lead characters move into to. But each new season keeps the cast of actors but has them play completely new characters in a new location and a different theme. So the first season is mainly about this house, Season 2 an asylum, season 3 a coven of witches and so on. Again it took me a little while to get into the show but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wouldn't say it has been scary as yet but I am considering skipping season 2 completely as anything set in an asylum really freaks me out, whether it be One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest which is a brilliant film that I own but have only watched once or the episode of Peep Show where they keep trying to get each other sectioned under the mental health act. I do feel that not watching a horror show because it might potentially be too scary can only be a strong recommendation.
So far getting more into horror has only been a good thing but I am sure there are plenty of bad horror films waiting to be watched.
Major spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road and minor spoilers for Battlestar Galactica Ryans Adams is a very talented singer-songwriter from America. Bryan Adams is a very successful singer-songwriter who Canada has apologised for on several occasions. I am a big fan of Ryan Adams. On many occasions when I have expressed my admiration for his music someone has said how much they like Summer of 69 as well and that is very annoying. I hold a particular dislike of Bryan Adams who I put in arguably the worst category of musician: "someone who should know better" which is reserved for those people who do have talent but have used it very poorly, As you can imagine Ryan Adams hates this situation even more and has been known to throw people out of gigs if they shout out requests for Bryan Adams songs.
For years Ryan Adams has played with the dangerous flame of covering relatively recent songs, for example he covered Wonderwall by Oasis and so good was his interpretation that Noel Gallagher said it's better than the original. Even more recently Ryan Adams has covered Taylor Swift's album 1989 in entirety. I cannot stress enough that Ryan Adams isn't doing this in an ironic way and as far as I can tell he is a big fan of the album. My sarcasm and cynicism has become such a problem that I can't always convey sincerity convincingly but Ryan Adams genuinely meant this as a tribute to Swift. Covering a whole album certainly puts an artist on dangerous ground it reminds me of what John Cusack's character Rob in High Fidelity said about making a mix tape, you're using someone else's words to express yourself.
I am not a fan of Taylor Swift and I have become very isolated from what is popular and from what most people watch and listen to. That's not bragging - it's just a consequence of the way pop culture works now and anyone could do it. With the death of appointment television and the rise of Netflix et al I have very easily managed to avoid watching television in the manner it was originally broadcast so very few adverts, no reality television, just stuff I really want to watch. With music it's even worse as for years the only two radio stations I listen to are 6 Music and Radio 4 (Radio 5 Live does get an honourable mention for Kermode And Mayo's Film Review as I listen to the podcast version of that show) and I don't watch MTV so I am in something of an echo chamber of musical taste. just getting back more of what I like.
In terms of real pop music the only people I know about are Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift and I don't care for any of their music and I am dimly aware that Beyonce and Lady Gaga aren't exactly new acts. I had heard the song Shake It Off but it was only at a recent wedding that someone pointed out that it was Taylor Swift (and the fact that it took my attendance at a wedding to hear pop music says a lot about my cultural isolation). I do think the lyrics to that song are terrible and practically gibberish and seemed to be about explaining to children how verbs work "haters gonna hate, players gonna play" and the B-side might just be her reciting "I before E except after C". Now as much as I don't like Taylor Swift's music I really like the Ryan Adams version of it. Why is this? Well, Adams' covers are done in a different style, they're slower, more mournful, it is far sadder in tone and far less pop but the inescapable truth is that, Shake It Off aside, there must be more to Taylor Swift's music than I had first appreciated.
I think when talking of covers it is important to mention Me First and The Gimme Gimmes who are a covers band and play pop songs in very interesting ways. They sometimes veer too close to just being comedy but when they get it right they make a great song. This is their version of Nothing Compares To You
In cinema and television covers are remakes or reboots. Hollywood is very keen on these as they have been running low on ideas for decades. Not to say they don't have new good ideas, or that they aren't good scripts being written, but remakes are just so much easier and every so often rumour of a new remake will be reported like the first stages of a hurricane. Normally I'm suspicious of remakes or reboots but there have been two recent examples that are great - Mad Max:Fury Road and Battlestar Galactica.
The original Battlestar Galactica existed purely because some television executive saw how much money Star Wars was making and wanted to make a television rip-off of it. It was not a good programme. I hadn't expected much of the remake until I one of the best ad campaigns for a television show ever. Sky ran a series of adverts that started with a quote about BSG and it was things like "the most intelligent drama on television" and "the only show talking about the war on terror" and then it would say "Battlestar Galactica". And this was all true, BSG was doing episodes essentially about the War on Terror. It's not an original observation but good science fiction is a way to talk about what's going on now - Twilight Zone episodes about paranoia of alien invasion were discussing communist witch-hunts and Battlestar Galactica had a clash of religious/cultures, suicide bombings, occupation of foreign lands and trying to impose order, the moral arguments for and against torture.
Something it had in common with the Mad Max reboot was the presence of strong female characters, the acknowledged best fighter pilot was Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the President was Laura Roslin who would stare down admirals and killer robots. And so we get to Mad Max: Fury Road and what may be the best reboot ever. The original Mad Max trilogy is an odd collection of films and each could essentially stand alone and the same goes for MM:FR.
In this new film Max isn't even the central character instead it is Charlize Theron playing Furiosa (I'm a big fan of Charlize Theron especially her guest appearance in Arrested Development). The film is essentially a long chase - Furiosa drove the "war-rig" for the insane warlord Immortan Joe but it turned out on this drive Immortan's slave-wives had begged Furiousa to help them escape. When Immorten Joe realised this he goes off in pursuit. It's telling that Max isn't even mentioned in that plot summary and a good editor could probably completely cut him out. Max just happened to be present and he helped Furiosa and the other women. There is a lot of feminism in Mad Max, the wives show bravery and self-determination in risking their lives to try and escape and, to put it simply, Furiousa is a bad-ass. She's also a bad-ass with just one arm who probably would have beaten Max in a fist fight if it wasn't for outside interference. In one scene Max is trying to use their sniper rifle and kept missing so he gives the rifle to Furiosa and she rested in one his shoulder and made the shot. That is a lot of it right there, Max is there to offer support to Furiosa. So thorough was George Miller in wanting to portray women who had been the victim of such terrible abuse accurately the author of The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler was hired as a consultant.
It would be a mistake to think the film is "just" a feminist action film (which would be great already) whichever way you look at it it's spectacular. The special effects are amazing and aside from a storm are largely practical effects driven rather than computer generated. When a car flipped over it had really flipped over. This does matter as a single car crash in MM:FR has more impact than two hours of Michael Bay's weightless Transformers smashing into each other. The script is cut to the bone but still full of great lines. It makes you care about the characters and you want them to escape. It is a brilliant film.
So far I think it's the film of the year and Theron should win Best Actress at the Oscars but I don't think that will happen. A quick word on George Miller is the director for all four Mad Max films, Miller is seventy years old and has just made a film so thrilling that I'm not sure a seventy year old should watch, let alone direct. In between the last Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and MM:FR Miller has worked on Babe and Babe: Pig In The City as well as the dancing penguin movies Happy Feet. To put it mildly he has had an odd career.
Podcast Recommendation
As it has been mentioned I will recommend the Kermode and Mayo's Film Review on Radio 5 Live. It is a cliche to say about any BBC show that "it is worth the licence fee alone" but I will say however much it costs to run Radio 5 Live so they can report on sport and whatever else it is they do is worth it as it also produces this show. At first I did not care for Mark Kermode. I had seen him doing bits on the Culture Show, Newsnight Review and introducing films on channel 4 and I had him marked down as an intellectual snob and a bit pretentious. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem as I am an intellectual snob and a bit pretentious but I also knew he had given a Kermode award to High School Musical. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term for the stress caused by holding two contradictory opinions and that was how I felt about Kermode - was he a cultural snob or did he like cultural trash like High School Musical. How could he genuinely like something as weird and brilliant as Pan's Labrinyth and vacuous as High School Musical? And I assumed he was being disingenuous. After being badgered by lots of people to listen to his actual show I found out that, in fact, he does like both. The show is worth listening to just for Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's conversations and in-jokes but Kermode is an articulate and intelligent critic who really loves films. He is one of the very few critics who is as interesting and entertaining when praising a film as he is damning one. That said, here he is talking about the Sex and the City film (he doesn't like it):
Spoiler Warning - major spoilers for Inglourious Basterds, Supernatural, Heroes, Star Trek Into Darkness & Star II: Wrath of Khan and I, Claudius
Very minor spoilers for - Pushing Daisies, Casino Royale
I hesitate to call these spoilers but for American Beauty & Sunset Boulevard some information is divulged that you may not know; Hamlet -I know it's hundreds of years old but it will be spoiled, and Valkyrie - it's a true story so EVERYONE will know how it ends but this will also be spoiled.
The Trolley Problem is a set of famous thought experiments designed to bring up moral dilemmas and have people examine their ethical decisions. The classic example is to imagine yourself the driver of a runaway trolley (tram) and further down are five people working on the track. The only thing you can do is divert the trolley onto another track but this track has one person on it. Whatever you choose to do at least one person will die. The second part of the thought experiment is to imagine yourself as a doctor with five patients who all need different organs to survive and there is a sixth person who is a donor match for all five people but is perfectly healthy and unwilling to donate their organs. Is it morally right for you as the surgeon to kill the sixth person and give the other patients the organs they need? Most people think it is okay to move the trolley onto another track but wrong for the surgeon to murder one person for their organs but they both have the same outcome - five people alive in exchange for one dead person. These philosophical problems were dealt with adroitly by a programme called Pushing Daisies; it was an odd programme in which the central character, Ned, had the power to bring people back to life, all he needed to do was touch a dead body and they would be resurrected and touching them again would kill them. Ned used this power to help solve murder cases with a private detective he knew and they would split the reward. There are a few strings attached to Ned's power. First, if Ned resurrected someone and touched them again they die and will stay dead. Second, if Ned doesn't touch the person again and allowed them to live somebody else will die in their place. If we compare this to The Trolley Problem most people, I would think, would be of the opinion Ned shouldn't bring someone back from the dead permanently as that would mean another person would die and Ned is taking action that will cause someone's death even if the number of dead and alive people stayed the same. A scenario they never covered with the Trolley Problem was what if one of the people is Anna Friel? Such an oversight is typical of philosophers and when Ned learned of the death of his childhood crush - Chuck played by Anna Friel - he had to decide what to do. Not surprisingly he chose to bring Anna Friel back to life.
There are a lot of deaths in pop culture. Arguably, there should be a lot more, according to the IMDB only five people died on screen in The A-Team despite frequent gunfights, explosions and obligatory car crashes. The A-Team had a similar attitude to Tom & Jerry in regards to death in that no matter what happened the viewer knew that everyone would be okay. Flattened by an anvil? Wait till your body pops back to normal and walk it off. Your car flipped over and crashed upside down? You'll be fine.
Supernatural has so overused the plot of one of the two central characters dying it has taken any tension away from the show and it is even referenced that they have in fact died off-screen many more times. As Supernatural has added angels to their roster of supernatural creatures this issue has only gotten worse. In regards to what happens when you die Supernatural has shown, briefly, both Heaven and Hell and they are distinctly cliched. However, as the show has featured any number of gods outside of Christianity it is possible if you believe in Valhalla that's where you go when you die and so providing endless possible afterlives. Heroes suffered from this problem as well in regards to Nathan Petrelli dying at the end of every season although admittedly in the first season he is only presumed to be dead but is saved by the popular fiction trope of "magic blood" this not being actually magic but blood somehow imbued with superhuman healing powers and a simple transfusion is enough to undo virtually all damage.
Some characters are entirely immune from whatever happened in the plot - they will return. The two most obvious examples being the Doctor in Doctor Who and James Bond. The Doctor can regenerate and the new run of Doctor Who also seems to have done away with the idea that he has a certain number of lives. Bond is in some ways more interesting in this regard as the character is a human with no special powers. Bond was written as the ultimate Cold War spy but when this ended in the early 90s Bond carried on. In Pierce Brosnan's time as Bond he is referred to as a "cold warrior" and a"dinosaur" meaning that times had moved on and Bond hadn't. To make matters even more complicated Casino Royale is an origins story for Bond as it started with Bond getting his "00" status which he already had in the other films...but Casino Royale is set in the present day and they were in the past...but in those he has his "00" status...so when is this all taking place? This has lead to the curious theory that the name "James Bond" is actually a codename and passed on to new spies. This would explain how Bond has been fighting spies since the 1950s and is still relatively young and radically changed his appearance every few years.
One of the best screen deaths is in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. In order to save the ship and everyone on board Spock sacrificed his own life. Using his Vulcan logic he decided that to lose one life to save many made sense. This was genuinely a shocking death when I first saw it. Of course, the next Star Trek film, Search for Spock, had Spock brought back to life. This is a particularly interesting example as in the latest Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness a similar scene played out but in this version it was Kirk who sacrificed his life instead of Spock (again they used "magic blood" to heal him). Now, I hate the JJ Abrams Star Trek films. I hate them with a passion that goes beyond all reasoning. I am very happy to agree with the joke from The Onion Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable' , in the sense that those films don't feel like Star Trek; they feel more like Star Wars. Star Wars is the over the top space adventure with funny robots and magic powers whereas Star Trek has more of an ideology of exploration and cooperation where you learn about alien civilisations. I love Star Wars and Star Trek but they should occupy very different universes. When Kirk died in Star Trek Into Darkness I was happy (even though I knew they would bring him back) and when I watched the film I wanted Khan to win. The "death" of Kirk was nothing compared to the "death" of Spock.
American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard both played with the device of in voiceover at the beginning of the film a character informed the viewer that they are going to die. Usually voiceover in a film would suggest the character is going to survive as they are "telling" you their story. Certainly in American Beauty I was shocked by Lester's death even though I knew it was coming. In Sunset Boulevard there is such a sense of dread I was never able to forget this information. I'm a big fan of the film Valkyrie which is about the plot hatched by German army officers to kill Hitler - the fact that the audience knew Hitler survived did not lessen the tension in the film. The viewer's knowledge of the ultimate failure of their plot only gave more poignancy to their sacrifice. Kenneth Brannagh's character always believed their plot would fail but that it was important to try, if nothing else to show that not everyone in Germany agreed with what Hitler was doing. Inglourious Basterds is a really good film with a couple of terrible bits to it - the first being the message that to deal with Nazis you have to be worse than they are - and secondly, in their Hitler assassination film they do manage to kill Hitler. In fact, they manage to kill him three times as the explosives left by Aldo Raine go off, two of the Basterds shoot Hitler and Shosanna's cinema fire all happen. It is something of a cheat for them to successfully kill Hitler as everyone watching assumed that all the plots failed and so you are hugely surprised when he is killed.
Some things just like to kill everyone and be done with it. In Hamlet only one major character is left alive. If we start with Hamlet's father's then it goes
King Hamlet = ear poison
Polonius = stabbed
Ophelia = suicide (drowned)
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern = killed by King of England
Gertrude = poisoned
Claudius = stabbed and poisoned sword
Laertes = stabbed with poisoned sword
Hamlet = stabbed by poisoned sword.
This death toll may seem excessive until compared to I, Claudius. The classic BBC series based on the books by Robert Graves told the story of Claudius, a minor member of Rome's imperial family who somehow became emperor.
Marcellus = poisoned
Augustus = poisoned
Germanicus = poisoned
Agrippa Postumus = stabbed
Gaius Caesar = poisoned
Lucius Caesar = drowned (murdered)
Sejanus = stabbed
Tiberius = suffocated with a pillow
Caligula = stabbed
Drusilla - murdered by Caligula
Livilla = starved to death (murdered)
Messalina = decapitated
Castor = poisoned
Claudius = poisoned
And I am sure I have missed off some deaths as there are just so many and the amount of poison being splashed about will make even the least paranoid person worry about what is in their food.
Very minor spoilers for Magic In The Moonlight, X Files, South Park and The Simpsons
Woody Allen has surely become the very shark he talked about in Annie Hall - he has to keep going or he'll die. He continues to make a film a year which regardless of the quality is amazing. At the age of 79 he has 52 directing credits and 76 writing credits (this is according to IMDB) and surely he is going to try and up his rate of writing so he can have written a film a year of his life. The quality of Allen's films does vary a great deal and undeniably the best stage of his career is behind him but he is still more than capable of making great films (Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine are both from this decade). Essentially I think any Woody Allen film is worth watching and so it was that I watched one of his very recent films - Magic in the Moonlight. Set in the 1920s Colin Firth played a hugely successful stage magician whose hobby was to expose psychics, mediums, etc as charlatans. Firth's character knew all their tricks and was probably better at them.
A friend and fellow magician approached Firth's character about exposing a psychic who he had been unable to debunk, Firth's character not only doesn't believe in psychics etc but is absolutely sure there is no god, no afterlife etc. One of the reasons I was reluctant to watch this film was because I consider myself a rationalist and a skeptic and whenever issues like skepticism are discussed on film and television nearly always not only is the skeptic incorrect but they are mean for spoiling other people's delusions, have a closed mind, their lives are lacking "magic" etc. I won't get into all my arguments against this but I disagree. Nobel Prize wining physicist Richard Feynman described an argument with an artist friend of his who said that while he saw a beautiful flower as a scientist Feynman would take it apart and make it a "dull thing". Feynman's argument against this and the idea that science and rationality takes away from life is a billion times better than anything I could write -_
So my worry was that in this film Firth's rationalist view would be challenged and he would change his mind and see why he had always been such a fool. I won't get into what happened in the film but I was annoyed and pleased in equal measure. Of course, it is worth pointing out that in any piece of fiction, if Character A believes Premise 1 and the whole film is steadfast in his refusal to change his mind and the film ended with him still thinking the same thing - that's not a film. Character A has to go through some change or crisis so a skeptic must at some point at least have some doubt. What annoys me is that rarely does it go the other way, a believer abandoning their beliefs in light of evidence and this being a good thing.
The X Files
First of all, I will say that I love The X Files. It was a great programme, very original, both lead actors were very good (especially Anderson) and when it got everything just right it was brilliant. Due to the episodic nature of it, each week they have a new case to solve, some episodes are much better than others but overall I would rate it very highly.
I have recently been rewatching the show from the start. I have seen all the episodes before when I was a lot younger but often out of order and in fits and starts. In terms of dealing with skepticism TheX Files is probably the worst offender in all of pop culture as they intentionally set up confrontation between skeptical and non-skeptical worldviews. Virtually every week Mulder's borderline insane theories are proven right and Scully's narrow minded skepticism shown up as thoroughly wrong. Watching the show now with more of an interest in skepticism, science and rationality I watch every episode and think Mulder is an idiot. The man believed any old nonsense that is presented to him. To paraphrase the comedian Nick Doody he will even believe in contradictory forms of bullshit. He was perfectly happy believing nonsense astrology about the alignments of planets giving people superpowers while also that a child can have genuine stigmata wounds - astrology and Christianity can't both be right as they each claim to have the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Even ardent believers in something like alien abductions think that many of the reported cases will be people who have imagined it or are lying but Mulder is open to anything. Of course, in the show Mulder is right, usually there is no room left for another interpretation of what happened. I do think that him being right is a fluke as the initial evidence did not merit his certainty. I am convinced that for the nine seasons and two movies worth of cases where Mulder was right there are thousands of "unseen episodes" where Mulder has dragged them to the other side of the country to investigate Big Foot and there was a perfectly rational explanation and come his annual appraisal he had to explain all the expense claims.
Boss: "So, a ticket to Michigan..."
Mulder: "Yeah, we thought there was a Big Foot like creature there." Boss: "Well, lets leave aside why that is FBI business for the moment, but was there a Big Foot?"
Mulder: "Er...no... it was some guy in a suit." Boss: "Plane tickets, car rental, motel, animal tranquiliser...this is $10,000. How am I supposed to justify this expenditure? Why did you think this creature was there?"
Mulder: "Er...this guy had taken a blurry picture...and..."
A number of years ago I read a non-fiction book called How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World by Francis Wheen and it contained some fascinating information about The X Files. Chris Carter, creator of TheX Files, had met a skeptics group to discuss The X Files. They wanted to talk to him about the atmosphere of paranoia and irrationality that, in their opinion, his show had helped create. They cited examples of university students who would use The X Files as a source - and these weren't media students but people studying history or science. When challenged that The X Files was fiction the students often responded, "Yes but it's based on true stuff". Carter was quite clear that as far as he was concerned it was all fiction and he wasn't trying to suggest this stuff was real - they were just interesting stories. Richard Dawkins in his 1996 Dimbleby Lecture suggested if a cop show every week had two suspects of different races, and every week the guilty person was always of the same race people would, rightly, complain of the slanted perception and racist view it was giving. But in The X Files often two different explanations would be given, Mulder's "believer" view and Scully's "skeptic" view and nearly every week the "believer" was right. I don't entirely agree with Dawkins' views as I don't think it's talking about the same issue (I often find myself distancing myself from Richard Dawkins' views these days) and I don't think you can hold Chris Carter responsible for people thinking his fiction is fact.
Then there are the conspiracy theories in The X Files. Just about everything in The X Files is a conspiracy and just about everyone is in on it; the US government, the UN, the army, the police, the medical establishment even the FBI (who for some reason allow Mulder to continue investigating conspiracies). The number of people who would have to be involved in these conspiracies does make it perfectly valid to ask the question - if more people are involved in the conspiracy than aren't, is that still a conspiracy? TheX Files does mock it's own madness at times, in 'Jose Chung's Outer Space'
a writer interviewed Scully about a particular case and he mentioned he'd met with many people involved and everyone had a different take on the events. Some people even think of Mulder and Scully as sinister government agents, that they are part of a conspiracy, with Mulder being a robot and Scully clearly a man in drag. In that episode the real conspiracy is actually that UFO abductions are just people being kidnapped by the government with UFOs being a handy subterfuge. In an interview Chris Carter did said that his original intention was to have the skeptical view proved right as often as the believer but those were very dull stories.
Skepticism is not well served in fiction in any medium and perhaps Chris Carter is right in that rational explanations make bad stories. There are non-fiction television programmes taking the skeptic side. Most of Derren Brown's career has involved him repeating the tricks of psychics and mind-readers and he goes out of his way to explain how he has no magic or su
pernatural powers - they're just tricks. The American magicians Penn & Teller have a similar line in debunking people who claim special powers. There is a noble tradition of stage magicians showing up charlatans that includes the legendary Harry Houdini. The most famous magician who ever lived despised psychics and their ilk so much so that he fell out with celebrity spiritualist believer Arthur Conan-Doyle - as retold here by Drunk History.
In recent years there has been a crossover between science and stand up comedy. The comedian Robin Ince does shows with Dr. Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain, who has a degree in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, does science shows on television. Tim Minchin, equal parts comedian and musician, has a lot of material on science and skepticism. Minchin's nine minute beat poem Storm took on all manner of irrationality, in one show he told a story concerning a fan of his who was also religious and told him of a "miracle" involving his mother's health and the song that Minchin wrote about this encounter seemingly started with an admission that there is a god, and turned into a song about all the rational explanations of what had happened. An honourable mention to skepticism in fiction must go to Scooby Doo, as Minchin pointed out in Storm, which is indeed the rational explanation television show that Chris Carter couldn't write. Every week in Scooby Doo there was a monster or ghost or some other supernatural mystery which was always revealed to be a person playing an elaborate hoax for nefarious purposes. Sherlock Holmes is a great champion of reason, logic and rationality but as already mentioned Conan-Doyle has form in the irrationality camp (he also believed in fairies).
The Simpsons and Futurama do well in portraying skepticism, science and rationality. In Futurama the Professor is, not surprisingly, a man of science and showed a lot of contempt for religion, alternative medicine etc. even if he does have some odd beliefs and practices. The Simpsons seems to err far more on the side of being god-friendly while not simply buying everything religion is selling. As well as seeing religion as fair game for comedy throughout the show it also has a number of hugely cutting attacks on religion - in an emergency Homer frantically flipping through the Bible and shouting "it doesn't contain any answers", in one episode Homer and Bart convert to Catholicism and Marge has a vision of Protestant Heaven and Catholic Heaven which surely is mocking the very idea of organised religion and in an episode with a Scientology-like cult Reverend Lovejoy denounced the cult as made up rules, silly rituals, only after your money and then after the briefest of pauses passed the collection plate while people recited the Lord's Prayer. There is, of course, The Simpons episode which featured Mulder and Scully when Homer thought he had seen an alien which turned out to be Mr. Burns. That episode is also really introduced Lisa as the go-to skeptic on that show and she reads the brilliant sounding Junior Skeptic Magazine and in the episode Lisa The Skeptic the townspeople find what they think is an angel skeleton and Lisa is...well...skeptical. (I just looked up Junior Skeptic Magazine and found that there is a magazine in America called Skeptic and after this episode made a section that was called Junior Skeptic - such is the power of The Simpsons).
As is often the case it falls to those defenders of rational thought Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski from South Park. Let's be clear, they don't advocate a rationalist worldview on South Park and they have episodes which rail against atheists (in particular the already mentioned Richard Dawkins). But consistently they set themselves up against the irrational:
The Biggest Douche In The Universe - TV psychic John Edwards convinced Kyle his grandmother is watching him from Heaven so he changed his life to please her. Stan goes through complicated arguments which are basically - these are cheap parlour tricks anyone can learn, our attempts to answer the big questions in the universe like why are we here are hindered by these charlatans, and a guy claiming to talk to dead people is a douche.
Mystery of the Urinal Deuce - basically an episode about 9/11 "truthers". The episode pointed out the problem with most of these grand conspiracies in that they are flawlessly carried out by organisations who struggle to carry out their normal duties.
Trapped In The Closet - in an episode that was famously never shown in the UK because of our ridiculous slander laws they took aim at Scientology and all they needed to do was repeat what Scientologists believe.
All About Mormons - A Mormon family moves to South Park who are undeniably lovely people and explain to Stan about their religion. Again all they really do is repeat what the Mormons believe and show the story of Joseph Smith founding their religion with a helpful soundtrack of someone humming "dum de dum dum"during the bits that are hard to believe and "smart sma-smart smart" when people question Joseph Smith's claims.
There are lots more and they go through religions - both major and cult, faith healing, alternative medicine, television evangelists asking for money, the list go on and on. What is very interesting is that as I said they will take shots at liberals, atheists etc and that their message is usually think for yourself and if you find yourself at the extreme on an issue that's probably not a good place to be.
There is perhaps an obvious champion for skepticism I have overlooked; Dana Scully. Aside from a couple of dodgy moments Scully maintained her skeptical worldview throughout the show and would often explain how if evidence was presented to her then she would change her view. As skepticism is often aimed at alternative medicine and other non scientific practices it is forgotten that skepticism is a key component to science. Every scientific theory is challenged by other scientists and they demand evidence. If new evidence comes to light they will abandon theories that do not match the evidence. For example both Isaac Newton and Einstein's theories have been abandoned for ones that better match the evidence. This process isn't a weakness of science but it's strength - unlike faith it will change when confronted with evidence. Scully demanded explanations not just of what happened but how, she remained critical of evidence through hypnosis, and applies Occam's Razor all the time(this being the idea that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best) but when confronted with evidence she could not dismiss she would change her mind.
People have often said to me that a skeptical view isn't fun or lacks magic and mystery. Now, I think that is a tacit admission that they know they're wrong but one reason that annoyed me is that there are genuine miracles in the universe, not religious or supernatural, that are far more impressive. When you tune an analogue radio and hear static, part of that static is the radiation from the Big Bang. All the atoms that make up my body were once in a star. We have been to the moon and discovered DNA yet are meant to be impressed by blurry photographs of UFOs and third-rate conjurer tricks.
Contains major spoilers for Legend, Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1 and minor spoilers for The Sopranos, The Wolf of Wall Street and Dexter
I recently watched the new Kray twins film Legend as well as the two French films made about Jacques Mesrine - Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1 and both of these films portray real life criminals who enjoyed some measure of fame, or infamy, with the general public as well as maybe some admiration and envy. How film and television portray real and fictional criminals is scrutinised a great deal and it is easy to make such people appear more like lovable rogues and outlaws than criminals. The makers of Legend did themselves no favours in calling the film Legend instead of perhaps Criminals or A Film AboutViolent Men Who Murdered People which I admit isn't as catchy. That is not to say I disapprove of Legend, I enjoyed the film but I thought the filmmakers had perhaps bought too much into the legend of the Krays.
The portrayal of crime and criminals has been a problem for a long time - Goodfellas, The Godfather, The Sopranos, Scarface and Casino all showed gangsters in a way which could see their lives as aspirational (and yes I know that not all of those are based on real people). They were rich and powerful people who did what they wanted, when they wanted. Of course, the characters often met unfortunate ends which you might think would put people off but apparently losing everything - money, freedom, family, life - is not enough of a downside.
In the film Legend both of the Kray twins are played by Tom Hardy and his performance is the best part of the film. The brothers were different from each other in many ways - Ronnie was an openly gay gangster with severe mental health problems and was prone to violent outbursts. Reggie was charming and polite (or at least could play at being those things) and he was the one in charge and seemingly in control but also a talented amateur boxer who could be just as violent as his brother. If these characters were anything like the real-life Krays, then these were interesting people and a dramatic story could be told about how these brothers became the most powerful criminals in London.
Films can be made about thoroughly terrible people without endorsing the things they did. The film Downfall shows Hitler's last days in his bunker as his empire collapsed and that film certainly does not glorify Hitler. Legend does show both of the brothers doing terrible things for which there is no excuse - Reggie beating his wife (although the actual violence isn't shown) and Ronnie's out of control attacks on any number of people. The film at least tries to show that they weren't just businessmen and that the people who suffered weren't just other criminals which is a defence often used by gangsters. At the beginning of the film as Ronnie walked the streets of London and everyone he passed had a friendly chat with him, near the end a barmaid spotted him across the street, stopped dead and then ran in the opposite direction which shows how much his image has changed to the people around him.
Jacques Mesrine was a notorious criminal in the 60s and 70s, presumably well known in France. So prolific were his criminal activities that just one film wouldn't do and two films were made starring Vincent Cassel as Mesrine. After I had finished watching the films I instantly went online to see if Mesrine had done the things the film showed, and broadly speaking it seems he had. He did sneak a gun into his own trial and escaped, taking the judge as a hostage, he did rob two banks at a time, he did wear elaborate costumes to escape detection - he was known as the Man of a Hundred Faces by the French press. From the beginning it seemed Mesrine wasn't interested in being just another criminal; he wanted to be something more. Throughout the film he showed almost suicidal daring and never did what was simple, easy or clever but made his life far more complicated and harder so as to live up to his own image. To some people he was a French Robin Hood as he supposedly had a code where he targeted only the rich - however like the Shadow in Blackadder he never got round to giving it the poor. He escaped from prison three or four times, including a maximum security prison, and when on the run from the police as "public enemy number one" would arrange interviews and photoshoots with the press.
In Legend the film ends with both Krays heading to prison and in the Mesrine films with the title character being shot by the police - I would say without doubt that in the film Jacques Mesrine was murdered, ambushed by the police at a traffic light in his car he was shot many times by heavily armed police without warning and no attempt made to arrest him or even talk to him (whether this was what really happened is far less clear). Mesrine had stated how he would not be taken alive and would fight if cornered and had already proven himself very willing to kill police officers. Both the Krays and Mesrine sealed their fates as they were too famous and made the authorities look foolish. The Krays flaunted their wealth and success and the inability of the police to do anything about them - they were celebrities. Mesrine reveled in his fame and constantly embarrassed the authorities and towards the end of his career became more politically minded - at least in the excuses he gave for his actions.
Comparing the Krays and Mesrine, Mesrine is certainly a more dashing figure, an outlaw rebel, he robbed banks and frittered away the money; to him there was no end point in having made enough money to be rich for the rest of his life he would always be compelled to commit more crimes. But even if he was more dashing, he wasn't Robin Hood, he murdered people, he kidnapped people, and if it was fame rather than money that motivated him, does it make him a better or worse person? Comparing Legend and the two Mesrine films I'd definitely say the latter were more successful in simply showing the subject's life and letting the viewer judge.
I do struggle with this idea of films and television glorifying gangsters and I like to think that if people see a gangster in a film as cool that they realise they're just watching a film. When I watch Goodfellas I do not think about how good their lives are as I can never escape the fact that they hurt people and that is no way to make a living. The Sopranos showed a lot more of the lives of gangsters than films can manage; films last a couple of hours whereas someone who watched The Sopranos watched eighty-six episodes with each being around fifty minutes long. Inevitably a dedicated viewer would identify with the characters. The first episode of the third season starts with an episode taken entirely from the point of view of the FBI and their efforts to install a listening device in Tony Soprano's house. In the episode the FBI perform their duties entirely legally, they obtain the necessary warrant from a judge and go about their work professionally yet when I watched it I couldn't help thinking "Bloody FBI, trying to bug Tony". The viewer knows Tony is a dangerous criminal and is without a doubt guilty but I took his side against the FBI. The Sopranos focuses as much on Tony's family life as his criminal life and he is a very well-drawn character; he seems real. People often struggle to deal with complicated figures and when people are genuinely evil we can struggle to deal with information that would contradict that - so if it is revealed Stalin gave a lot of support to animal sanctuaries people are confused - how can a brutal dictator and murderer also care about animals? So in The Sopranos we see Tony often being generous, at times being a good father and husband and yes, even being kind to animals, as well as being a violent criminal. It is this dissonance that allows the viewer to see Tony as a good family man who is in difficult circumstances which drive him to do awful things or a bad and violent person who likes to act the part of a caring individual either to manipulate people or salve his own conscience. There is also the third option of a complex person who can be different things at different times; a person who is not all bad or all good. He is a person you could spend a perfectly pleasant evening with and then he would go out and murder someone; which I imagine is what such people are like in real life. I consider The Sopranos to be one of, if not the, best television programme ever made and a huge part of this is the "shades of grey" existence of the characters. The show doesn't glorify them but shows them as real people.
The Wolf of Wall Street was criticised a great deal in that it glorified the people it depicted. In TWoWS Leonardio Di Caprio played Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street stock broker who made a huge amount of money by taking advantage of people and breaking many, many laws (the film is based on a book written by the real Jordan Belfort, and learning that he is a real person and not a fictional creation is like learning that Cruella Deville is real and 101 Dalmations was based on her autobiography). As well as showing the staggering wealth Belfort and his cronies accumulated the film also depicted the lives of excess that they lead -partaking in drugs, prostitutes and wild parties. These "wolves" also showed a contempt for anyone who wasn't like them, anyone who wasn't rich and taking advantage of other people, they also showed a level of decadence that was truly appalling, literally throwing money around, paying women to have their heads shaved, and all manner of juvenile and disgusting pranks and games. Like most recent Martin Scorsese films it is very long, 180 minutes and there was another hour that Scorsese wanted to put in but couldn't justify a four hour film. I felt the length was justified as you spent a long time with these awful people and their awful lives and the never ending party just ground you down and you saw just how far off the rails they had gone. The atmosphere at Stratton-Oakmont, the company they ran, seemed very much like a cult, or maybe just those posh secret societies at Oxbridge we keep hearing about. The company had bizarre initiations and a cult of personality had developed around Belfort.
It is interesting to see Scorsese, well known for making traditional gangster films, making a film about white-collar crime. If we compare it to Goodfellas, in my opinion the best gangster film ever, Jordan Belfort is Henry Hill, the youngster drawn into the criminal life, the over the top broker played by Matthew McConaghy (being in a Scorsese film is part of his Terrible Romantic Comedy Actor Rehabilitation Scheme he's been involved in the last few years) is Robert De Niro's James Conway, explaining the madness of the system to him and Jonah Hill is Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito, the member of the group who is so crazy he worries the other crazy people.
In the past few years we have seen the damage the financial institutions of the world can do - the Mafia can break your legs and burn your business down but Wall Street can ruin whole countries. In Britain Ed Miliband's supposed anti-business stance effected the stock market and dire warnings followed from the rich and powerful that Miliband as Prime Minister would cause financial chaos; which doesn't sound too dissimilar to scare tactics deployed by gangsters. Belfort ruined people's lives, he intentionally preyed on people and lied to them to get their money, and as is pointed out in the film this isn't usually just against rich people playing the stock market but working people trying to invest money wisely for their future. I am sure there are people who watched TWoWS who wanted to have Belfort's life of excess and wealth but they aren't people who I would want to spend time with. TWoWS reminded me of a sketch from Mr. Show - Mr. Show - More Money Equals Better Than as the characters in it had no measure of success other than money. As much as I hate most of the characters portrayed in the film I do think it is a really good movie with Scorsese showing the emptiness of their lives but I do wish that the real Jordan Belfort wasn't given a cameo in the film.
There is an example of glorifying criminals that troubles me far more than any of the films or programmes about organised crime - Dexter. I was a big fan of Six Feet Under and Michael C. Hall was brilliant as David Fisher and as he played the eponymous Dexter I decided to give ita try. Hall's character in Six Feet Under couldn't be further removed from the character he played in Dexter, in the former he was a pleasant, nice and cautious man, and if he was a little tense or wound up the idea of him hurting anyone was ridiculous. Dexter seemed worth watching just to see how Hall would handle this new and very different character.
For those who don't know Dexter is a show about a serial killer who kills serial killers - or at least that was how it was described to me. Dexter actually targeted people he deemed to be deserving of death, sometimes they are serial killers, sometimes they are not not. In one episode in the first season Dexter goes after a person who has been on trial a number of times for killing people in his car while drunk. It comes out that the driver doesn't care and he will continue to drink and drive. Now, the driver is a bad guy who should be in prison, but is he is deserving of the torture and murder (and yes Dexter tortured his victims) that Dexter inflicted? This person never meant to hurt anyone; he doesn't care and is still a risk to people, but he wasn't trying to kill anyone. This is a distinction most legal systems acknowledge but one that Dexter, the character and the show, aren't interested in.
The first season ended with a little voice over from Dexter where he said that if he was found out and all of his crimes came to light, yes, he would be arrested and put in prison but at the same time many people would think he had done a good thing. He had killed people who deserved it. I think the message of the show is in line with this idea, that, yes in reality, you shouldn't go round killing people, but if they're really bad people it's sort of okay. I disagree with this idea wholeheartedly and I might be a bleeding-heart liberal but everyone deserves a trial, everyone deserves justice. I have had many conversations with people who do think this sort of thing, that society needs such a person who will act in extreme ways when the "system" fails. I only watched the first season of Dexter and in all fairness the show might go on to explore these ideas but I don't think I could take any more of it. Much more interesting "serial-killer killers" are found in Seven Psychopaths which in a five minute murder spree montage does more to address the morality of what the serial-killer killers are doing than Dexter managed in the twelve episodes of the first season. And don't even get me started on what Dexter is saying about free will and nature versus nurture in how it sets it up that Dexter was always going to be a serial killer, it was inevitable, and the best way to handle the situation was his adoptive father to train him to kill the "right" people...if nothing else it's bad parenting.
Podcast Recommendation:
I love podcasts - they make commuting, housework and waiting a thousand times better. As this blog has been about crime my recommendation is the Judge John Hodgman podcast. Two people contact the podcast with a problem that they want "Judge" Hodgman to solve, it could be something very practical, a matter of etiquette, anything really. They call in to the show and Judge Hodgman and "bailiff" Jesse Thorn listen and Hodgman will give a verdict. It's always funny and often surreally brilliant - an argument between two brothers about how to deal with the bat infestation in their house is amazing, one brother suggests hiring exterminators, the other...well he doesn't really see what the problem is. Aside from the case being discussed it's worth just being able to listen to John Hodgman talk about stuff as he is one of the funniest and most informed people I have ever heard, he's sort of an American Stephen Fry but nerdier and weirder.
