Missing Out - Not Watching The Wire, Watching A Film Day and The Inevitable Mortality of Authors and Readers

At Christmas I was kindly given the complete box set of The Wire which I am slowly working through and enjoying. The Wire is a television programme that many cite as being the best thing ever on television beating even such gems as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, but despite it's huge critical success I had never actually watched it. The Wire is a drama based in Baltimore about crime that featured the police, journalists, lawyers, criminals and more. Each season took on a different aspect, some being from mainly the perspective of police or journalists, even looking at schools and how they impacted on crime, the important thing being that it was examining crime and the causes of crime. It is odd that such a programme passed me by as it is exactly the sort of thing I would like (including the pretentious kudos of watching an imported high quality drama hailed as the best thing ever that most people haven't watched) and it was even picked out on Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe and higher nerd praise does not exist. Actually as Spooky Reading Girl pointed out Charlie Brooker didn't just mention it on Screenwipe, when we bumped into him in Edinburgh he told us specifically to watch it.

The best tv show ever?

I was perhaps too young when The Wire started and many people say it is hard to get into with complex dialogue that took no prisoners. There is also definitely a state of mind people enter where they actively resist something that is being watched by everyone else. A lot of people got so annoyed about people asking them if they had watched Breaking Bad, they swore never to watch it. For a long time I did not believe television was capable of making something that was genuinely brilliant. This was a huge hole in my pop culture knowledge and something that I was going to have to address. I held film in high regard and saw television as very much the inferior medium, where even the good stuff was drowned in an ocean of gameshows and reality television. Eventually I changed my opinion and it wasn't just the relatively recent prestige television but realising just how good something like Buffy The Vampire Slayer was. 

Spooky Reading Girl for a long time had a similar problem but with films. When we started going out and we talked about our favourite films, tv shows etc. I felt that she hadn't seen a lot of classic films. Importantly, this doesn't necessarily mean good films, but films that most people have watched, films that are perhaps cultural touchstones. I think everyone  has some gaps in their knowledge, to this day I have not seen Raging Bull despite being a huge Marin Scorese fan. Some of the films that SRG hadn't seen included Rocky (and to this day we argue when SRG refers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show simply as "Rocky", that name is already taken by another very famous film), Back to the Future, any James Bond film, any of the Star Wars films and eventually she became tired of the exasperated cries of "How have you never seen Back to the Future!" and for a year watched a film a day, crossing off many of these films. Spooky Reading Girl found it a very interesting experience and watched, and loved, many films that she wouldn't have normally watched. It also got her, and by extension me, into listening to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's film radio show.

Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode do the best film
show in all of radio, tv and podcast land - hello to Jason Isaacs

There have been many other things that I got into late, or in the wrong order. I loved The Foo Fighters before I even knew about Nirvana. I didn't buy any LCD Soundsystem albums until after they had broken up. Being born in 1983 I missed the 1960s, the decade I consider to be the best in music history so what chance did I have? There will be numerous bands lost in the mists of time that I would love and will remain forever hidden. I only watched Firefly when it was being repeated for the fiftieth time on the Sci-Fi channel and that is one of my all time favourites.

Usually when people talk about things they have missed or haven't got round to watching yet are cultural behemoths, Star Wars, Bond films, The Simpsons, things that even if you don't like them you should still watch them as they will help you understand culture better (I have heard this argument used for both Shakespeare and the Bible). Some things though are missed because they were never that successful or always just maintained a cult following. Garth Marenghi's Dark Place is one of the funniest programmes ever on television and there is a grand total of six episodes, just the one series on Channel 4, but to merely mention the name Thornton Reed is enough to reduce some people to laughter. Arrested Development, perhaps the best sitcom in the history of American television struggled for three seasons to find an audience but was eventually cancelled (Netflix did give the show a reprieve). Films like Vertigo or television shows like Twin Peaks are going to be glaring omissions but with really cult things you might never even be aware of what you're missing out on.

Arrested Development - Arguably the best sitcom that hardly anyone has seen

Marcus Brigstock hosted a very interesting radio, and later television, show called I've Never Seen Star Wars on which the guests would check through a list of things that most people have done, with having seen Star Wars being used as the classic example. The show would then pick some of these things to - the guest would watch Scarface, or eat sushi, or listen to The Archers. Most of the time the guest would not really enjoy whatever new thing they had done, as after all, people will probably know whether they will like something like The Archers but occassionally they would really enjoy the experience and it is certainly true that that has happened to me, where my conception of what something was like was completely inaccurate. When Harry Met Sally is a good example as I had expected a very boring, very straight forward romantic comedy (the second worse genre of film after musicals) but was in fact something very different and far more interesting and funny than I had anticipated.

I have heard some people say they won't start reading a series of books until the series has been completed, so they know it has been finished (poor George R. R, Martin, creator of the Games of Thrones series of books has to endure constant speculation about his own health). There is a similar thing with tv shows with people not wanting to invest time in a show that gets cancelled after one season. This is all well and good but what about if it's not the cancellation of a show or death of an author that is worrying, what if it's your own mortality? Dying is a pretty bad thing to happen but knowing that almost certainly I will die in the middle of a book is incredibly frustrating. I will die in the middle of excellent tv programmes or eagerly awaiting a sequel or I've bought tickets to see a comedian but will never make it. This would all be okay if I believed in an afterlife but as an unapologetic atheist I know I will miss out.

The Game Of Thrones series of books -
 more correctly known as A Song Of Ice and Fire

But does it really matter? Even if I accept that my own mortality and the vastness of culture available means it is impossible to see, read and listen to everything worthwhile...is that such a bad thing? It might not be objectively bad but it seems an awful shame to miss out on the good stuff especially when so much bad stuff is inflicted on me without even asking for it. I am rather proud of the cultural island I have managed to construct where I can keep most of the bad stuff out but even so I have heard songs by Justin Bieber, I have seen clips of Mrs Brown's Boys and even suffered the mindnumbing banality of The One Show and there is something wrong with a world where I haven't found the time to watch Raging Bull but have seen Batman And Robin.

"Revenge Is Sweet and Not Fattening" Alfred Hitchcock - Revenge in films, comedy and even a musical

Minor spoilers for The Revenant, Rushmore, The Machinist and Munich


Often when watching a film based on a true story the viewer will often think, "I couldn't have done that. I wouldn't have been able to take it." Well in Leonardo Di Caprio's latest role in The Revenant that is certainly true, I couldn't have endured what his character did. I also don't think I could have endured what Leonardo Di Caprio endured just doing the acting. It looked really hard. The Revenant is a story of revenge and what a person will go through to fulfill their desire for vengeance. Di Caprio's character is brutally savaged by a bear and left for dead, his revenge sustaining him and certainly at numerous points I thought, "I would give up, I would die". After all what does the character have to look forward to? It's the 1820s so medical science is not going to do much for him. Still, perhaps revenge will be enough. Revenge is a well trodden topic in pop culture and rarely does it turn out well for everyone.

My favourite example of revenge in film is quite possibly the wonderful feud Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman's characters find themselves in in Wes Anderson's brilliant Rushmore. After Murray stole the woman of his dreams Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer started a mad revenge against his former friend. A brief montage of their quickly escalating war is perfectly soundtracked by A Quick One While He's Away by The Who.

The greatest revenge fantasy (I'm hoping it is a fantasy) I have heard was from the comedian Paul Foot. I first saw Paul Foot at the 100 Club in London, Adam Buxton was headlining the gig and there were five or six acts on. One of them was Paul Foot. I did recognise Paul Foot from television, and if you have even glimpsed him once you will remember what Paul Foot looks like, but I didn't really know much about him. He did twenty minutes of material all on the subject of getting revenge on the landladies of Bed & Breakfasts and it is probably the funniest twenty minutes of standup I have ever seen. I love it when comedians have a short amount of time and instead of doing lots of short jokes put all their comedic eggs in one weird basket and Paul Foot did that. Paul Foot's revenge on the landlady was to put them through a complex themed nightmare which resulted in him smashing their collection of porcelain dollies including the precious "Super Dolly" with a tomahawk.

Rushmore is essentially a comedy and Paul Foot is definitely a comedian, and so the revenge can only go so far. It takes something more serious to get really into the depths of revenge. The Machinist is essentially a man taking revenge on himself. It stars Christian Bale as the eponymous machinist who is on some odd quest to destroy himself by losing as much weight as possible. Bale got a lot of attention as he actually did drop a lot of weight to play the role and Bale is almost skeletal in the film. He then put all of the weight he had lost back on and more to star in Christopher Nolan's Batman films then lost it all to be in The Fighter and then put on a lot of weight, and not in the attractive Batman way, for American Hustle where the first shot was of a balding Bale with a fat stomach.

The many different physiques of Christian Bale, I'll let
you work out for yourself which one was for Batman

I can only hope that Bale is never cast as someone with only one eye or hand as he may decide not to trouble the makeup and special effects teams and sort it out on his own. Whether or not such drastic weight loss and gain is a prerequisite for doing these roles I don't know and I would think it would be entirely reasonable for such drastic changes in appearance to be handled by makeup and special effects. I do think Bale is one of the best actors currently working. Anyway back to the film, why Bale's character is punishing himself is slowly revealed in the film and a shot of a healthy and normal weight Bale at the end of the film showed just how much had gone into his transformation.

Steven Spielberg's Munich is I think an often overlooked film and I am a big fan of it. Philosophically revenge is given pretty short shrift in most films, books etc, that ultimately you're harming yourself as much as those who've wronged you. and "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" is often hailed as the most wise advice. Munich is largely based on the true story of the murder at the 1972 Munich Olympics of eleven Israeli athletes by a Palestinian terrorist organisation. The film details Israel's response to this attack. Eric Bana is the Mossad agent (Israeli intelligence) who is tasked with hunting down those responsible.

Working in very secretive conditions the team set out across the Middle East and Europe killing their targets. Showing the slippery slope of vengeance more names keep getting added to the list, perhaps people who had nothing to do with the specific Munich attack but are enemies of Israel. The Israeli team, but particularly Bana, feel increasingly uneasy with the ever expanding list of targets and the each succumbs to the paranoia this life leads to - for example early in the film they put a bomb under someone's bed and one tells a story of a spy colleague who never slept in his bed and slept in the closet instead, for fear of a bomb being under his bed, something which Bana started to do towards the end of the film. The revenge Israel sought inevitably only escalated the violence and made the situation worse. All of the characters that made up Bana's team lost something in following the revenge mission.

Finally, something from a genre I don't usually like; musicals. Perhaps my favourite musical ever is Gutted: A Revengers Musical. The show was written by Danielle Ward and Martin White and is an over the top musical about a woman, Sorrow, whose parents were killed when she was a child and the terrible revenge she planned against the culprit - she will grow up, marry him and then kill all of  his family. Not only are the songs great it is funny throughout and a fun feature is that every character is named after a David Bowie song or lyric (Sorrow, Kook, Jean). The cast featured some of the best standup comedians going - Thom Tuck, Humphrey Ker and David Reed of The Penny Dreadfuls, Sara Pascoe, Michael Legge and more. Tuck, Ker and Reed played two sets of characters, the first set are three spirits that are there to help Sorrow carry out her revenge and then in the second half a trio of police officers sent to investigate the murders; they have the best song in the whole show, In We You Can Trust, in which they encouraged Sorrow.

The revenge obsessed Sorrow

The whole thing is free to download via Sound Cloud (Gutted Musical) as well as other work by Danielle Ward and Martin White (such as Psister Psycho - a musical about an insane arms dealing robot nun obviously). The best recommendation I can give it is that as someone who loves music but typically hates musicals I loved it.

"There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory": Memory in pop culture and fictional famous people

In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a new character is introduced but in a very unusual way. The new character was Buffy's sister, Dawn, and this wasn't a sister who had lived with Buffy's father and had come to visit, or a long lost half-sister, but rather she appeared in an episode and everyone simply acknowledged her as Dawn, Buffy's younger sister, who had always been around. Fans of the show were confused as in the previous seasons Buffy had had no sister. What was even more confusing was that this wasn't cleared up in a single episode where it was revealed that Dawn was a monster who could alter memories, or was a weird ghost, but the storyline of where Dawn came from was the subject for the whole season and for a number of episodes nothing was made of her sudden appearance at all. At the time I had been convinced that they would never explain where Dawn came from and that Buffy had always had a sister but she had just never happened to be present or ever mentioned. I swore to stop watching the show if that was the case. Fortunately Joss Whedon had not elected to do a Stalin-esque style reimagining of history and there was a suitable sci-fi/fantasy reason for everything that had happened and indeed everyone's memories had been altered and Dawn had only started to exist a few months ago.

Michelle Trachtenburg playing Dawn - because of her
character's arrival I nearly stopped watching Buffy

This leads me to a curious and potentially terrifying idea, how do we know any of the people around us are genuine and our memories are correct? This is even more of a problem with celebrities and public figures in that most of us will never meet them. I raise this issue because I feel I have found two such instances of people who did not exist until very recently, two "Dawns" as it were. The first is Amy Schumer, star of Trainwreck, who I had never heard of before the publicity for that film. Now, I am a fan of American comedy, I watch a lot of standup and listen to a number of American podcasts where they discuss pop culture and I had never heard of her. Schumer was not some overnight star and people referenced her successful career to date but the fact that I had never heard of her was very suspicious indeed. Who was this woman who was so funny? YouTube is full of Amy Schumer clips, interviews and more, she has a wikipedia page, a website, twitter, IMDB page and more.

The potentially fictional Amy Schumer

The second example is even creepier. A few months ago I first heard the name Wilkie Collins, for those who don't know (which until very recently included me) he is a nineteenth century English writer known for such works as The Woman in White and The Moonstone and was a friend of Charles Dickens. I think I first heard about him on Robin Ince and Josie Long's Book Shambles podcast and all of a sudden he was everywhere. He was mentioned in books, articles, other podcasts and here is the really creepy bit...I recently read a book called Canonbridge, which is a novel about a mysterious nineteenth century author named Matthew Canonbridge who never really existed and was only created recently. And who does Canonbridge meet at one point in  the book? Wilkie Collins. That has to mean something very important and is definitely not just a coincidence.

This can't be the real Wilkie Collins - he's what an acting agency
would send to play stereotypical Victorian novelist

What is going on here? One conclusion is that I am not as well read and culturally savvy as I think I am (I think we can safely rule that out), the other is that new and interesting people are being inserted into our collective culture and memory. Look at the evidence, Wilkie Collins is not the name of a Victorian novelist, it's what the frontman of an obscure American indie band is called (probably Grandaddy) and as for Amy Schumer, many people seem to think women are inherently not funny so she must be fake. This could mean that all the other women I've thought were funny are perhaps fictional as well but we'll leave that to one side for now.

Memories are by no means an immutable record of exactly what has happened and are easily influenced.Groundbreaking psychology experiments by Elizabeth Loftus showed just how bad memory could be, in perhaps her most famous study people were shown footage of car crashes and then later on asked questions about what they had seen. Simply by changing one word in the question completely changed people's answers, so they were asked about what they saw when one car "hit" another or "smashed" or "contacted", these small cues had people inventing all sorts of details. If you phrase a question like in certain ways it affects the answers, far more people reported seeing broken glass when asked "did you see any broken glass" than asked to simply recite the things they had seen.
Pop culture is obsessed with memory, whether it's Guy Pearce's anterograde amnesia in Memento, which prevented him from making new memories and made him very vulnerable when trying to investigate his wife's murder, or  Arnold Schwarznegger in Total Recall playing a spy given a false memory of a boring every day existence.

Guy Pearce in Memento - he used tattoos to record important information

One of the most interesting and terrifying uses of memories is in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series of books which contained a truly terrifying villain, Aornis Hades who has the ability to manipulate the memories of her victims, at first she uses her power on the hero, Thursday Next, to try and empty out all her memories, When Thursday Next defeated this attempt Aornis has a new weapon. Instead of erasing memories she gives Thursday new memories, to be exact she gives her the memories of a non-existent daughter; Jenny. From time to time she will ask after Jenny and her family play along, "Oh Jenny is at a friend's house," or whatever but sooner or later Thursday will work it out and every time she goes through the horrible realisation that a daughter she thought she had didn't exist and goes through a unique and devestating mourning. All of Jasper Fforde's work is an absolute treat of quirky ideas, well-written and intensely likeable characters and to those well-read enough to get all the references in the literature themed Thursday Next series there are constant delights - please note that I don't get all the literature references and have to consult my girlfriend, Spooky Reading Girl, to explain reference to Austen, the Brontes and many other classics.

The first of the brilliant Thursday Next series

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind features memories as characters, most of what we see of Kate Winslet's character Clem is not the real Clem but the memory of her. The film was about a very niche company who would erase unpleasant memories and their clients are often people who want to forget about past loves, which is what Clem does and in response what Jim Carrey's Joel does in retaliation. The film is genuinely heartbreaking as memories are erased from Joel and inside his mind he tries to fight it as he realises the value of these memories and even if in the end their relationship didn't  work out the memories were too important to lose.

The confusing world of Joel's memory

So as we've established memories can be changed, deleted, or invented so is it really so hard to believe that both Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer are fictional creations the real questions are who has done this and why? Admittedly it gets a little more complicated with Amy Schumer seeing as she is...well, alive, but still not impossible. I suspect it to be a sinister and shadowy government organisation responsible for creating elaborate illusions of famous comedians and writers but unfortunately I am still at a loss for why. I am hoping that there will be a Wilkie Collins-Amy Schumer vehicle, probably an action-comedy buddy cop movie featuring Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer in which not only do they solve time travelling crimes against literature but she learns valuable lesson about motherhood - but perhaps I am reading too much into Schumer's IMDB page.

Fan Theories - The X-Files, The Tommy Westphall Universe, Lost and more

Major spoilers for The X-Files, St. Elsewhere, Lost, The Shining

As I watched The X-Files the other day I noticed something slightly peculiar. The episode was Chinga, which is about an evil cursed doll, but what was peculiar was the actor playing the sheriff had appeared in The X-Files before, in Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space', where he played a detective. I have looked it up and he has been in the show five times playing different characters. This happens quite often in television, especially American shows where they might have twenty episodes a season, But it perhaps offers an interesting additional insight. In the world of the show are they meant to be completely separate characters? The X-Files has had episodes about clones and about creatures that change their appearance, is there more going on here? The short answer is no, I'm sure the producers just knew he was a good actor so why not keep using him? There a lot of fan theories in television and movies, sometimes involving just the world of the show, sometimes more about how it was made.

Larry Musser - this guy played five different characters in The X-Files

The best fan theory has to be the "Tommy Westphall Universe" theory from the tv show St. Elsewhere. It's not a show I've ever watched but at the end of the show it became apparent that the entire universe of St. Elsewhere existed only in the imagination of one of the characters; Tommy Westphall. That isn't the weird part, the weird part is that some characters from St. Elsewhere have appeared in other television shows, which would suggest they only exist in Tommy's imagination as well, such as Homicide: Life On The Streets. Currently The Tommy Westphall Universe blog has listed 419 tv shows as potentially only existing in Tommy's mind. Really though it can effectively cover all of film and television as any actor appearing on St Elsewhere was just a creation of Tommy, so it could follow that Denzel Washington is his creation, and all of the films Washington has made are his creation and that all the actors in all those different films are Tommy's creations and on and on.....
To see the complete list of shows and more ideas about the theory go to https://thetommywestphall.wordpress.com/the-master-list/

Tommy Westphall - who imagined hundreds of tv shows

There are three main fan theory categories that have been suggested for so many things they've become a little cliched:

1. It's just someone's fantasy - examples -Harry Potter, Titanic, Saved By The Bell, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Friends - all these and more have been suggested as the fantasy of one of the central characters or a large part is fantasy. Something like Harry Potter, where a person is whisked away from a dull or bad life into something new and exciting and where they are very special is a common psychological problem in people who have had traumatic lives. Ferris Bueller's Day Off is said to be largely the creation of Ferris's friend, Cameron, the neurotic stressed out, weirdo who created the figure of Ferris Bueller to allow him to do stuff he really wanted to do.

Ferris Bueller...this guy was a fantasy

2. They're dead - Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Rug Rats, Grease, Mad Men, Interstellar, Breaking Bad - this is perhaps the most common, a central character has died and the story taking place is either the dying dream of the person or their perception of the afterlife. In The Fresh Prince of Bel Air Will was actually killed in the fight shown in the opening credits and living in rich Bel Air was Heaven. Just looking up these theories I found the one about Rug Rats, in that all the children apart from Angelica, are dead most disturbing.

Will Smith...this guy was dead

For category 1 and 2 it should be a distinction made between films where this is a fan theory and what is actually supposed to have happened in the story, so far example Grease is a film where there is a theory that Sandy has been dead all along, but  in The Sixth Sense Bruce Willis's psychiatrist actually has been dead all along.

3. Everything is connected - Tarantino, Pixar universe- these are theories about connected pieces of work and how they share a deeper connection, for example with the works of Quentin Tarantino. It started with the idea that Kill Bill starring Uma Thurman as a member of a team of assassins is very similar to the tv show described by Uma Thurman's character, Mia Wallace, in Pulp Fiction, is Kill Bill simply the film of the fictional tv show from Pulp Fiction? It has since been expanded with Inglourious Basterds into something far more complicated, in this film Hitler is gunned down, set on fire and blown up, which is obviously different to reality and a theory suggests that in an alternate universe that is what happened. In this alternate universe as these acts of violence brought an end to World War 2 pop culture is far more violent and aggressive so films like Kill Bill or Django Unchained are made. So there are two types of Tarantino films - first the ones like Inglourious Basterds which are the audience seeing this alternate reality, and second type like Kill Bill which are movies from that alternate universe. Tarantino has recently confirmed that this theory is right insofar as Kill Bill is the film version of the tv show mentioned in Pulp Fiction.

The interconnected Tarantino films

The Shining is a film with so many bizarre theories they made a film about some of them, Room 237. What is the film really about? One of the most interesting theories is that it is Kubrick's confession that he faked the moon landing footage and while I don't believe this for one second there is a somewhat convincing argument.  The proponent of this theory goes to some lengths to show how everything in a Kubrick film is put there intentionally - another documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes showed the huge lengths Kubrick went to to get things exactly right - so why is Danny wearing a jumper with the Apollo 11 rocket on it? That was Kubrick's subtle clue that he had filmed the moon landing. Other theories include the film is all about the genocide of Native Americans, or that it's about the holocaust. Many peculiar little features are pointed out, the layout of the hotel doesn't seem to make sense and why does the typewriter Jack used change colour? And if you think that these odd little mistakes are just some oversight on Kubrick's part then you don't know Kubrick. As mentioned if something was in shot it was there for a reason, if that typewriter changed colour it's because it meant something to Kubrick.

The Shining - Kubrick's elaborate confession that he faked the moon landing

In terms of fan theories Lost is very much The Shining of the television world (but is certainly not it's equal in quality or originality). I gave up on Lost as I felt like the writers had no idea where it was going and that their plots were picked the same way South Park claimed jokes were written for Family Guy. Every week something new and weird popped up and there came a point where I realised the writers were never going to be able to satisfactorily explain it all. In fact, fans of the show had guessed the plot-twist, that they had been dead all along and the island was some weird purgatory, quite early on but this was denied by the writers. Lost is the perfect show for fans to make up their own theories as the show was so overly complicated and had all kinds of weird stuff going on and even when the "real" explanation was given fans have kept coming up with their own "better" theories.

Lost - there are far too many theories for this show

Here are a few of the suggested theories:

• The island is Hell, 
• The island is Eden (as in Adam and Eve Eden), 
• The island is Atlantis.
• The island is a broken time machine from the future.
• The island is an alien spaceship
• The island was created when the moon and Earth collided,
• The island is a "Truman Show" style reality tv show/board game played by powerful people/social experiment
• The black smoke monster is a cloud of nanobots 
• The whole thing is caused by the Y2K virus
• Clones!
• Dinosaurs!
• Zombies!

Increasingly some of these theories don't have much evidence behind them other than just being weird. The actual finale to the show was considered to be a disappointment by many as it failed to tie everything together in a pleasing way. I think to do that you need to know from the beginning what is going to happen and where the show is going and I can't help but think they just made it up as they went along. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica struck me as a show where the writers had planned everything out in advance and broadly knew what was going to happen every season but Lost just seemed to have the weirdness turned up to 11. In many ways Lost is similar to The X-Files in that The X-Files showed lots and lots of weird things happen and for all of it to make some kind of logical sense was impossible.

So we're back to The X-Files which is back on television and I am watching very closely to see if this guy turns up again.

"Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories".- Villains who have inspired me

Major spoilers for Die Hard, The Matrix and Blackadder


In an earlier blog I picked three characters from films that were a big inspiration to me, to the person I wanted to become - they were Westley/The Man In Black from The Princess Bride, T.E Lawrence from Lawrence of Arabia and Gustav H from The Grand Budapest Hotel. These three are the heroes of their films and with the recent death of Alan Rickman I put some thought into if there might be villains who were equally inspiring.


Hans Gruber  - Die Hard

The benefits of a classical education

Alan Rickman was a great actor and had a career that gave him a chance to play every sort of role but for me, and for many others, his best role was as German criminal mastermind Hans Gruber in Die Hard. It may not have been Austen or Shakespeare but Die Hard was a great film, but it was a great film with a terrible flaw, the villain was so much better than the hero. Every time I watch it I'm on the side of the articulate, well-dressed and composed European, not the frantic New York cop running around with no shoes on. For those who don't know in the film Die Hard a group of mainly European criminals take over the Nakatomi building and hold the staff hostage. They are professional, well-prepared and know exactly what they are doing. At first it seemed that these men were terrorists, wanting the release of fellow terrorists but actually they were planning on stealing the millions of dollars in the building. Their plan was thwarted by John McClane, the estranged husband of a high-ranking employee, who was also a cop back home in New York. The criminals were lead by Rickman's Hans Gruber, the most effete criminal mastermind this side of Raffles the Gentleman Thief.

Certainly if I was to be a movie villain I'd be more Hans Gruber and less Scarface or Hannibal Lector. McClane doesn't think much of Gruber seeing him as little more than an ambitious bank robber but I think McClane has underestimated him. The safe they are trying to break into is protected by electronic locks that they can't disable and throughout the first half of the film this was presented as an unsolvable problem but Gruber has thought about this. When McClane managed to alert the local authorities of the hostage situation, Gruber didn't really care, this was because his plan was centred on the police being made aware - why? Because in a hostage situation the FBI would follow procedure and cut the power. Gruber had the FBI do what was impossible for him to do, turn off the electronic locks. For all that he is the villain of the film Gruber is not even the most unpleasant person in the film, that honour fell to the coked up businessman douchebag Harry Ellis, a thoroughly terrible person and a pastiche of 1980s businessman/executive cliches. There is also the hideous news presenter who through sheer stupidity almost caused the death of McClane's wife. True neither Ellis nor the news presenter killed anyone but they were self-serving idiots who didn't care what happened to other people - at least Gruber was more up front about it.

What I took from Hans Gruber whatever you're doing it never hurts to be well-dressed and well-read.

Agent Smith - The Matrix

"Mr. Anderson"

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I don't think being in the matrix is all that bad, certainly a lot better than many movie alternatives. But admittedly the agents who helped control that world were a pretty ruthless bunch. Seemingly the leader of the agents was Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith. Of all the unflappable, calm and in control agents he is the most unflappable, most calm and most in control. Hugo Weaving does an excellent job playing Agent Smith and before it was explained exactly what he was it's clear he wasn't a normal human just from the way he acted. I am a big fan of Hugo Weaving and that started with this film and a lot of it was based on the way he said "Mr. Anderson" the name of Keanu Reeve's character. He spoke in a dull monotone but still managed to convey contempt and disgust. Agent Smith's best moment was when after getting in a fight with Keanu Reeves he was hit by a subway train. The train screeched to a sudden stop and a second later Agent Smith stepped out of the train unscathed having taken over another body and still looking entirely unfazed by the entire incident - like I said, unflappable.

Agent Smith was cold, emotionally distant, rational - aside from the occasional rant about how he hated living in the Matrix, he took his time and spoke calmly. He wore a simple black suit unlike the over the top leather coats and sunglasses the humans wore. Agent Smith looked like someone in control, his movements were measured and precise. The humans were obsessed with all this mystical nonsense about finding "the One" but unsurprisingly the agents had more straightforward and concrete plans. There is an admirable amount of dedication in Agent Smith (and yes in the film he's the "bad guy" but the humans and robots are fighting a war of survival and the humans blocked out the sun so maybe they're not the "good guys") for example at the end of the film when it has been demonstrated that nothing they can do can kill Neo he stands his ground.


Edmund Blackadder - Blackadder

Edmund Blackadder shooting a pigeon...scarcely a court martial offence

I have loved the tv show Blackadder for a long long time. In the dark days when it was prohibitively expensive and space consuming to own all your favourite shows I had a single tape of Blackadder -the first three episodes of the fourth series - Blackadder Goes Forth, the World War I years, and I watched it over and over again. The star of Blackadder was Edmund Blackadder and each series took on a different time period and a different Edmund Blackadder. The first series was the uneven and least loved War of the Roses era Blackadder, with Edmund being the unloved and useless second son of the king, the second series was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, or Queenie as she is known in the show, and Lord Blackadder is a member of the court. Series three was set in Regency England Blackadder is the butler for the Prince Regent. The last series is set during World War I and Edmund is now a professional soldier who doesn't much like soldiering.

The character was transformed between series one and two from the stupid and useless but hungry for power fool to the charming and fiendishly clever courtier and it was the latter Edmund that I liked so much. Edmund Blackadder wasn't just clever and funny, he was witty, he always the knew the right thing to say and outwitted all those around him. The clever Blackadder is surrounded by idiots and he relies only on his cunning to survive and prosper. This is of greatest importance during World War I when those idiots are very keen on sending thousands of soldiers to their deaths on a daily basis. Blackadder's despair at the handling of the war is summed up by him declaring it was  "a war which would be a damn sight simpler if we just stayed in England and shot fifty thousand of our men a week" and the scary thing was  that was probably right. In series two and three Blackadder had been a cad and a rogue but in series four he was battling the insanity of the First World War and it is hard not to be on his side. My favourite book is probably Catch 22 and what Joseph Heller did in that book - show that war was not only Hell but it was ridiculous - the writers of Blackadder did in that series.

Of course in Blackadder we are supposed to be on his side, in that sense he is not too much of a villain at the same time he does do a lot of terrible things - murder, blackmail, theft, assault and many of these cruel acts are against blameless people. Even when picking on the harmless Baldrick we laugh and feel little sympathy for him. When Rick Mayall turned up in Blackadder Goes Forth as the heroic Lord Flashheart we still want Blackadder to come out on top. Flashheart is over the top, loud, and has no self-deprecation, not traits to endear him to the British public. We much prefer the sarcastic smart alec always insulting people.

So for my three villainous heroes I have a well-dressed German bank robber, an emotionally devoid computer programme and a cowardly and devious wit. The one characteristic they all share is being good with words - even Agent Smith has great lines- and while I didn't have that in mind when I picked them it is certainly a trait I really admire.

Mavericks: The Rules Were Not Made To Be Broken

Spoiler Warning - Major spoilers for The Shield, L.A. Confidential
Minor spoilers for House, Hot Fuzz

In one episode of House a mean hospital administrator guy tried to get House kicked out of the hospital. It was made clear with camera angles and emotive music that he was most definitely the bad guy. And before the hospital board he put forward his case - House was a drug addict, House not only broke ethical guidelines he broke the law, he refused to do things that were his job, he insulted other staff and patients and I quickly found myself agreeing with him; House should be fired. There were others on the board who tried to put forward a case for House, stating that he was singularly brilliant and did things no one else could do but they had a pretty weak case. Ultimately though House was impervious to this, because he was a maverick, and television loves mavericks. House is a genius who doesn't play by the rules! As with most jobs, but especially medicine, the rules are there for a very good reason and while people idolise mavericks on television I think most people would be uncomfortable if they had a maverick GP who didn't play by the rules.

Mavericks are a very common trope in films and television, they are exciting, unpredictable characters, who do things their real-life counterparts couldn't do (often this is for very good reasons). Many mavericks are abrasive and rude and have poor people skills, they have substance abuse problems and have problems dealing with authority, despite often working in areas with very rigid authority structures.  The Fast Show played with this trope with adverts for a new programme called Monkfish which constantly showed a tough, uncompromising, belligerent maverick who morphed from police officer to doctor to vet in each new version of the show

Medicine is a curious field to want mavericks, given the years they spend learning the rules and procedures, but it is a fictional phenomenon that extends to many other careers. The most obvious is with the police and just about every fictional police officer from Dirty Harry to DCI John Luther were a law unto themselves and their films and shows make the argument that as they are on the side of righteousness, it's okay to break the law.

• Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry one of the earliest examples and often cited as the classic example of the maverick cop. The careful and considerate Sarah Lund, the main police officer in The Killing who doesn't even carry her gun is a million miles from Callahan, who goaded criminals into using their guns so he could kill them.
• Bud White, L.A. Confidential, uses violence and intimidation to get what he considers justice and is then used by the corrupt police chief to beat up his criminal competitors.
• Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle, The French Connection, was far more dangerous to members of the public than many criminals by his insane car chases.

• Gene Hunt, Life On Mars, the stereotypical 1970s policeman, very happy to frame people he doesn't like and no time for any woolly liberal ideas. Hunt is an odd case as he is only a maverick in  comparison with John Simm's modern Sam Tyler.
• Axel Foley, Beverley Hills Cop, does not take police work at all seriously.
• Martin Riggs, Lethal Weapon, a loose cannon with a deathwish.
• Vic Mackay, The Shield, in the first episode he murdered in cold blood another police officer so his side business of being a drug kingpin wasn't uncovered.

Some of these films and shows do criticise the maverick cops - Vic Mackay in The Shield is shown as absolutely corrupt and every season he seems to get into even murkier water, Gene Hunt is the exemplar throwback to dodgy police officers of the past whose reckless ways lead to innocent people ending up in prison and Bud White's tendency to ignore the rules made him easy prey for  a manipulative superior.

Mavericks in the military seem to be rarer and often depictions of soldiers etc. punish the idea of a maverick, you wouldn't want to be the maverick in the training part of Full Metal Jacket. However, in Top Gun Tom Cruise's character had the call-sign of "Maverick" to really emphasis his unpredictable maverick credentials. I definitely don't want a maverick in charge of a multi-million dollar flying killing machine. If we're going to have flying killing machines at all then I want level headed unadventurous types at the controls. That said, virtually the entire cast of Top Gun shouldn't be allowed near weapons, so obsessed with proving their superiority over  others and treating the whole thing like a very fun game.

The completely unreliable pilots of Top Gun

I've never really identified with maverick characters as usually I could see why the rules existed. They are few and far between but I much prefer anti-mavericks, these are people who can follow rules, work in teams, have good manners but are also very good at their jobs. When an anti-maverick appears in fiction there dedication to  doing their job properly is made into an interesting character quirk, rather than what you would expect. There are two perfect examples of these anti-mavericks.  The first is my favourite fictional depiction of a police officer, Nicolas Angel played by Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz and he is the quintessential anti-maverick.

 Angel was a brilliant police officer; intelligent, dedicated, incorruptible, who trained and studied hard, who understood both the letter and the intent of a law. He did his paperwork and he understood the importance of paperwork. He was not a maverick. He didn't break the rules. At one point in the film when giving a speech to schoolchildren he cited the importance of procedural correctness when enforcing the law. Angel was the perfect police officer. Angel's partner, Danny Butterman, was more interested in the over the top antics of maverick police officers in films like Bad Boys where any arrest those two actually made would be challenged by any lawyer for the litany of things they did wrong. In films police officers see themselves as being the one "who cleans the garbage off the streets" whereas Angel is commended for building positive links with the community. Best of all, Angel is a police officer who while trained to use guns, and has used them, does not like them. He is a very un-macho example of a police officer.

The other brilliant example of an anti-maverick is Amy Poehler's character Leslie Knope in Parks & Recreation. She actually had many of the same problems as Hot Fuzz's Nicolas Angel - fantastically good at her job, liked following the rules and struggled to coexist with colleagues who didn't share her level of commitment and brilliance. The idea of making Leslie brilliant at her job, and actually brilliant at most things she set her mind to, wasn't apparent at the beginning of the show and at first she was just weirdly obsessed about her job and her burgeoning greatness made the character make far more sense. It also changed Knope from somebody who could be pitied into someone who was impressive.

Sadly, I don't think my anti-mavericks will take off in quite the same way as their more rule averse colleagues as without the brilliant writers and actors behind Hot Fuzz and Parks and Recreation they could be a little boring.

Review of the Year

Spoiler Warning - Star Wars: The Force Awakens - not really any spoilers but I do mention who plays one character and that might trouble some people.


So it's the end of the year and while I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions I do believe in making arbitrary decisions about what has been the best whatever of the year. By the way, when I say "of the year" I'm referring to stuff I discovered in 2015 as from a philosophical point of view I can't guarantee that any of this stuff actually existed before I experienced it.

Best Thing of the Year - including television, film, books, podcasts etc
Winner: Rick and Morty It has so much in it that would appeal to me; science, time travel, parallel universes, shockingly unsentimental and cynical characters and it is very, very funny. A line of dialogue has become my new personal motto:

"Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV"

This is not as bleak as it sounds and actually came as very welcome advice in the show. I don't believe that people exist on purpose or for a reason, I don't believe the universe has some grand purpose and, yes, we are all going to die and I was really happy to see this idea not presented as a nihilist gloomy philosophy but instead as a way to enjoy life.

Every episode is excellent but particular stand out episodes are Love Potion No. 9  (which explained why love potions are really not cool), Meseeks and Destroys (bringing the brilliant character of Mr. Meseeks into existence) and Total Rickall (featuring memory tampering alien parasites (a lot of episode titles are puns involving Rick's name)).

Left to Right: Morty, Rick, Beth & Summer having some quality family time

Person Who Exceeded Expectations 
Winner: Bob Odenkirk, twice.
Spin-offs and reunions have a bad track record. Spin offs usually have diminishing returns and most reunions are not worth it but Bob Odenkirk has appeared in one spinoff and one reunion and both were better than I thought they would be. The spinoff was Better Call Saul, with Odenkirk taking the Saul Goodman character from Breaking Bad and doing an origins story for him. In Better Call Saul the lawyer is still using his real name, James McGill (that Saul Goodman isn't his real was stated in Breaking Bad). At this point McGill was more or less still on the right side of the law and didn't want to get involved with drug dealers and criminals unless he was defending them in a court of law. Breaking Bad was one of the best tv shows ever made and to be honest I didn't expect much from Better Call Saul but it easily exceeded my expectations. The show has a different tone to Breaking Bad and had moments of real pathos - Mike Ehrmantraut's face-to-face with his daughter in law being particularly affecting.

The reunion was that Netflix had effectively reunited the Mr. Show team. Mr. Show was a HBO sketch show in the nineties starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross - probably best known as Tobias in Arrested Development. Their nineties show was as weird and brilliant as a HBO sketch show should be and who knew if they would be able to recapture the essence of that show. But they did and it was as surreal and great as ever.

Person Who Can Seemingly Do No Wrong
Winner - Oscar Isaac
The winner is Oscar Isaac who in 2015 appeared in gritty crime thriller A Most Violent Year, mind-bending sci-fi film Ex Machina, the critically acclaimed HBO drama Show Me a Hero and topped it off with playing Poe Dameron in the new Star Wars film, so he hasn't had a bad year really.

Oscar Isaac posing for a calendar

Best Live Comedy
Winner: Jo Neary - Faceful of Issues

At the Edinburgh Festival I saw a number of excellent comedy shows but the best was Jo Neary. It's hard to describe Jo Neary's show, I suppose you'd call her a character comedian and in a show she might play numerous characters, like her previous show Jo Neary's Youth Club or just the one character as in this show. I first saw Jo Neary as part of Robin Ince's Nine Lessons and Carols For Godless People show where one time she played an extremely nervous and uncomfortable woman doing a talk on sex toys and another where she played a character who was straight out of Brief Encounter talking on the phone. Both were brilliant. In this show Neary adopted a very similar persona of a well-spoken, perhaps repressed middle-class woman but built up the character so it was far more than just a parody. The show was something like a variety show from a small village fete and of course everyone apart from Jo Neary's character has dropped out. From start to finish it was hilarious and sometimes oddly emotional and Jo Neary's character is surprisingly endearing and was as close to a perfect hour of comedy I have ever seen. Below is a preview of the Edinburgh show she performed which I am fairly sure she is fine with being available online.

Perfectly Tailored For Me Book Award:
Winner: Nick Harkaway - Angelmaker
I read The Gone Away World little while ago and really enjoyed it but it only partly prepared me for how amazing Angelmaker would be. It really does seem like Nick Harkaway scanned my brain to determine what would be the perfect book for me. The book has so many interesting ideas - from the organisation that praised the ideas of John Ruskin so much they devoted their lives to building unique beautiful items like submarines and trains, the spy organisation who during World War II recruited rebellious young women to be spies, to the idea of a doomsday device that relied on increasing the amount of truth in the world. It is wonderfully odd and entirely to my taste.

Surprise of the Year
Winner: American Horror Story

I have never been a huge fan of horror but I have been trying to work in this over the last couple of years watching The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, The Baba Dook and similar. I also tried giving American Horror Story a go. I had initially been intrigued by the way the show works; every season the setting and premise of the show changes, they keep the same actors but people play different parts.The first season is known as "Murder House" and focused on the various deaths and murders that have happened over the decades and the various malicious ghosts who occupy the house. The first time I tried to watch it I couldn't make it through the first episode but for whatever reason I tried again and while I still wasn't too keen on the first episode but the second turned things up to eleven and I really enjoyed it which was quite a surprise. The show  is absolutely bonkers and doesn't make much sense at times but it is very enjoyable and helped me watch more horror things. After much thought I am not going to watch the second season only because it is set in an asylum and I think it might genuinely terrify me.

The Thank God It Wasn't Awful Award
Winner: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
It is far too early for me to talk too much about Star Wars and I need to have some time to properly consider the film, but whatever else I enjoyed it immensely. No matter how many good things were appearing in the news and the great trailer part of me couldn't forget the awfulness of The Phantom Menace.

So that was a selection of stuff from 2015, things I'm looking forward to in 2016 include Quentin Tarantino's new film The Hateful Eight, the new West World tv show and Ben Wheatley's film High Rise.