Christmas Pop Culture

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.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Robotic Overlords - Best and Worst Dystopias and Utopias

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.

The Never Ending Story of Putting Things In The Right Order

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.