tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48603652713991170742024-03-06T07:19:02.985+00:00Room 207 Pressthe blog of bram stoker award nominee howard david inghamhoward david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comBlogger623125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-7591859488247834542024-02-12T13:49:00.003+00:002024-02-14T15:42:39.432+00:00Why the Fire won't be caught any time soon<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCSatcZ4rpmlWNcFnJ3NrnrXwQ-R3NJhgTYKu9nhMp6au55BxkRFG1J-1O2_0YdyEARUiapFPlJ2YVM8LBfT5x8gHxafoXJVpx5NQmiUld6MeyyuqRwEhm4TNbXPzQ2muq6PjhD-PMb3X0YbV4N2O8roEM7bEjevGMwkRri6DgPklcWRlhc26XELnyqRGe/s4032/20240212_130859.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCSatcZ4rpmlWNcFnJ3NrnrXwQ-R3NJhgTYKu9nhMp6au55BxkRFG1J-1O2_0YdyEARUiapFPlJ2YVM8LBfT5x8gHxafoXJVpx5NQmiUld6MeyyuqRwEhm4TNbXPzQ2muq6PjhD-PMb3X0YbV4N2O8roEM7bEjevGMwkRri6DgPklcWRlhc26XELnyqRGe/w400-h225/20240212_130859.JPG" width="400" /></a></i></div><i><br />I first posted this some time ago on my <a href="https://patreon.com/room207press" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Patreon</a> page. I've had a revamp of the Patreon recently; it's where all my writing is posted, although occasionally I'll put something here eventually. It's one American dollar for pretty much the full archive; there's options of higher tiers, including one that'll allow you to commission work from me. </i><p></p><p><i>But for now, this is me in full polemic. <span></span></i></p><a name='more'></a><br /><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">1 The Church's One Foundation
</h3><p>In 1904, South Wales experienced a revival. At the time, it was a massive shift in the cultural landscape of Wales. From Carmarthen to Newport, with all the cities and the valleys in-between, a flood of evangelical conversions transformed the way that the people of Wales saw themselves. Churches sprang up everywhere. The 1904 revival had consequences for evangelicalism across Asia and Africa, especially in South Korea: <i>Revivals Make Missionaries.</i>
</p><p>
In my home town of Swansea, there are literally dozens. It seems like there are buildings on most of the streets of the town which were built as chapels, churches and gospel halls. But few of them are still actually churches: some of these buildings are derelict, while others are used for other purposes, for example, community centres or secure housing for the elderly. Several are mosques and Islamic community centres[1]. Of the few built after 1904 that are still churches, some have been taken over by Christians from Asia – China, South Korea and Singapore – who have come back to the nation that originally took Christianity to them, treating it as now as a mission field.
</p><p>
The working life of most of these buildings as places of Christian worship was measured in a handful of decades. And the reason is that while the cultural effects of the 1904 Revival remain in the city’s psyche even today, the actual faith of Christian believers, shaken by two world wars and a changing world, largely fizzled out over a couple of generations.
</p><p>
Christianity is a religion practised in community, and the question of what even counts as a practising Christian is further complicated by things like the varying status of Christian denominations, and the cultural status of a country where we’re still considered Christian by a sort of default.
</p><p>
The 2021 Census of England and Wales recorded for the first time that fewer than half of the 94% of people in England and Wales who responded to the optional religion question call themselves Christian. That number has been dropping steadily since the Second World War. The question of how many of them are in fact practising members of the religion is somewhat more complex. In 2015, the Church Statistics Report recorded that 4.8% of people in England and 4.9% of people in Wales actually went to a church, or, to put it another way, only about one tenth of people who consider themselves Christian actually attend a church. It is reasonable to assume that if the numbers have since changed, they have fallen.
</p><p>
Revival didn’t last here. And the evangelical Christians who still cleave to it, who hoped against hope that 2004 would bring a centenary outpouring of the Spirit that would transform Wales once more, are disappointed over and over again. Attempts at revival keep being made. </p><p>Each one, rather counterintuitively, brings the church closer to extinction.
</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">
2 At the Cross, At the Cross
</h3><p>The most powerful, vocal and visible Christians in most English-speaking countries – the exception being of course Ireland – are Evangelicals. And you need to understand that outside of the USA, they’re not remotely the majority. It’s also important to understand that evangelicalism is <i>not </i>a denominational group in itself.
</p><p>
Evangelicalism is an <i>approach </i>to Christianity. It is largely characterised by the openly expressed assumption of evangelicals that they have the <i>correct </i>approach to Christianity, and the <i>only </i>correct approach. </p><p>The vast majority of evangelicals belong to Protestant denominations. And in fact while Roman Catholic and Greek/Russian Orthodox evangelicals aren't unknown, it's a lot harder for a Catholic to be an evangelical and remain an orthodox Catholic. The historical practice of the Catholic denominations isn’t, as we’ll see, entirely compatible with an evangelical approach to belief, so evangelical Catholics tend to be pretty bad at being Catholic.
</p><p>
As the most vocal and publicly visible branch of Christianity in the English-speaking world, the evangelical narrative has successfully propagated enough that even enemies of Christianity often assume that evangelical Christianity represents not only the Christian religion in its totality, but religious belief and practice, period. And Evangelicals would have you believe that – if they’re the only ones doing religion properly, it follows that only Evangelicalism represents actual religion. It suits them that New Atheists take them as the baseline.
</p><p>
Often, writers will conflate "fundamentalist" and “evangelical”. This is understandable, since there are two generally accepted understandings of the word “fundamentalist”. Small-F fundamentalism, as you know, is just a generally used term for an extremist, hard-line take on an established religion, and you will hear about Islamic fundamentalists too, for example. It's falling out of fashion a bit: you’re probably more likely to see these people labelled as “radicalised” or “extremists” these days.
</p><p>
Big-F Fundamentalism is the name for a specific movement among evangelical protestants to label themselves as adhering to five “fundamentals” of Christian belief: the divine nature of Jesus Christ, His Virgin Birth, His death and resurrection, His eventual prophesied return, and the inerrancy of the Bible Scriptures. The idea is that <i>you are not doing Christianity right </i>if you don't believe those. </p><p>Now the first four of those are frankly no big deal. They've been the go-tos of orthodox Christian belief since the Nicene Creed was codified in 323CE, and departing from any one of those four does in fact separate you from Christian orthodoxy. It literally makes you a heretic, by the most technical definition of the word.
</p><p>
The last one is a sticking point. If you're Catholic, the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy is that the Bible is solid and consistent, that it is a holy book and the foundation of Christian belief. If you are a Fundamentalist, it really means that you believe that the Bible is literally, factually true. We’re talking about people who are certain that it is <i>factually, empirically the case </i>that Lot’s wife turned into an actual pillar of salt, Nebuchadnezzar actually went werewolf, Jonah actually survived being eaten by a whale (or a very big fish – this is the subject of controversy), Adam and Eve actually ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and got expelled from the Garden of Eden.</p><p>We’re talking about the conditions that gave us Answers in Genesis and that Ken Ham Creation Museum with people sitting on dinosaurs.We are talking about the reason that the evangelicals who ran Hobby Lobby wound up at the centre of a ring smuggling antiquities for their Bible museums. <br /></p><p>
The idea of fable or metaphor doesn’t sit well with this sort of inerrantist. </p><p>Take the story of Jonah for example. Quite apart from his surviving a Mediterranean voyage in the gullet of a large sea creature, the story of his preaching to Nineveh, causing the evil city to repent of their sins and escaping destruction, in fact <i>postdates </i>the annihilation of Nineveh by two centuries. Suggest that maybe it's, you know, a story about something else, and the Fundamentalist will produce a spurious reason why you're wrong and tell you it's obviously older, because the text says says that Nineveh was saved, and the assumption is that it is trustworthy by a modern definition of trust. The Bible is obviously factually true because it says it is. <i>2nd Timothy </i>3:16: (“All Scripture is God-breathed”) will be quoted, and the reasonable objection that it is unlikely that this was ever supposed to mean “factually accurate” will be rejected by the inerrantist as sophistry. Never mind that the Scripture also warns against readings like this as dangerous (<i>2nd Corinthians </i>3:6: “The letter kills but the Spirit gives life”): this objection will also be rejected as tricksy and dishonest.
</p><p>Now this sort of reading of a text isn’t unknown outside of the church – for example, compare any number of internet fans who believe that Marvel movies, for example, are inclusive and progressive because they say they are, and that they are hopeful because they make you feel good, regardless of how they are actually Liberal despair narratives that repeatedly have the moral that working for change is destructive. <a href="https://www.room207press.com/2022/11/yknow-i-guess-one-person-cant-make.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">But that‘s another hobby horse of mine. </a></p><p>It is useful to make the distinction that not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. But all Fundamentalists (capitalisation intentional) are evangelicals.
</p><p>
The best academic definition of Evangelicalism was coined by the British historian David Bebbington, who in his 1989 book <i>Evangelicalism in Great Britain </i>came up with four characteristics that evangelicals share, namely <i>Conversionism, Biblicism, Crucicentrism, </i>and <i>Activism.</i>
</p><p>
<b><i>Conversionism </i></b>is the assumption that you're not a proper Christian unless you've had a conversion experience and made a conscious decision to be a Christian. For the evangelical, it is not enough to be part of a Christian community or to have been raised by a Christian family. You have to have made a decision to be personally invested in believing and practising Christianity. You have to police yourself and work on the basis that in becoming a Christian – and becoming is the only acceptable way to enter the Christian faith – you are living a different life to the life you lived before.
</p><p>
This is important because it creates a clearly defined “in” and “out” group. If you have converted to the evangelical truth, you are a Christian. If you haven’t, you are <i>not, </i>regardless of whether you’re a member of a church community. If you haven't bought in, you’re not welcome (and the only outsiders who aren’t viewed with a sort of suspicion are the ones who are specifically being courted because they might buy in at some future time).
</p><p>
This conversion has to be personal. It has to be individual. It trumps familial bonds, and overrides friendships and life relationships. The relationship between you and God is the one primary relationship in your life. </p><p>On occasion I will say to Christians, “If you don't love other people more than you love Jesus, you don't love Jesus” (as per the words of Jesus Himself, <i>Matthew </i>25:40-45).
</p><p>
It’s always the evangelicals who balk at this. It's a line you can’t cross and remain evangelical.
</p><p>
<i><b>Biblicism </b></i>is about the centrality of the Bible. Biblicism is about using the Bible as the sole central authority for teaching and doctrine. Theologians call this doctrine <i>Sola Scriptura</i> (which is just Latin for “Bible only”, but it’s worth mentioning the term).
</p><p>
Now this is the bit that causes clashes with the more hierarchical, established Christian groups. Churches that have hierarchical structures tend to base their teachings on a trifecta, which they give as either <i>Scripture, Tradition and Reason,</i> or (in the case of Roman Catholics) <i>Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium. </i></p><p>Here, <i>Scripture </i>is the Bible, <i>Tradition</i> is how the church has evolved in the way that it has done its thing over hundreds of years, as expressed in things like liturgies and sacraments; <i>Reason </i>is plain common sense; and <i>Magisterium </i>is the authority of the church to expect people to take what it says respectfully and humbly because it knows what it’s talking about, on account of having been instituted by God (this is the basis of things like the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility).
</p><p>
Evangelicals often reject tradition because it’s not in the Bible, and they eschew nuanced readings of Scripture because they’re not, to the evangelical mind, literally true. If only God has the authority to make pronouncements about morals, ethics and theology, then the claims of the Catholic Church to authority are nonsensical.
</p><p>
It boils down to this: if it’s in the Bible, it’s good. If it’s not in the Bible, it’s suspect. This often winds up going hand in hand with the doctrine of Inerrancy, but evangelical Biblicism is about how you <i>use </i>the Bible; Fundamentalist Inerrancy is about how you <i>interpret </i>it.
</p><p>
<b><i>Crucicentrism </i></b>is a focus on the importance of the Cross (and Jesus’s death on it) as the central point in Christian faith. Now, this isn’t to say evangelicals don’t believe in the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection – they absolutely do – it’s simply that the death of the Divinely Natured Jesus on the Cross is more important to them than any of it.
</p><p>
Honestly any idiot could get himself killed by the police and coming back from that might reasonably be seen as the actual trick. But nevertheless, and I speak from personal experience of several evangelical churches here, it is quite possible to go to an evangelical church for several weeks and never once hear about the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. The Cross matters more to an evangelical much more than any of these.
</p><p>
This is because evangelicals almost wholly subscribe to the doctrine of <b><i>Penal Substitutionary Atonement. </i></b> </p><p>Strap in: this is where it gets technical. In short, Christian theologians have spent centuries trying to find reason in what a modern reader of the Gospels might interpret as “death by cop”, let alone the bit 48 hours later where he got better. The explanation of this favoured by evangelical Christians is that people are fundamentally bad (sinful) by nature. No matter how good a person tries to be, they are tainted by the stain of sin and are by default punished with eternal damnation. Because Jesus is the Son of God, and one of the three Persons of God, in dying on the Cross, Jesus took on Himself the punishment that every human was due to receive on dying. He spent those two days between dying and rising in Hell. And at the end, the sins of the human race were written off.
</p><p>
To someone not brought up in evangelical Christianity (or, in my case, an abusive home) the idea that people might be condemned to eternal pain, or loneliness, or suffering, for literally nothing that they are responsible for seems monstrously unfair. The idea that God might then impose this punishment for a condition that He dictated in the first place on His own Son seems even more unfair, or as the evangelical writer Steve Chalke would put it in <i>The Lost Message of Jesus </i>in 2004, “cosmic child abuse”. </p><p>Steve Chalke is actually a good example here to show how important this is, because although he was once the number one celebrity in British evangelical circles, he got so comprehensively cancelled by the evangelical world back then that he even tried to blame his ghostwriter for the idea for a bit. He is still active, and has gotten more progressive as time has gone on, but twenty years later, he is still an evangelical persona non grata.
</p><p>
Now tie this in with the idea of Conversionism: Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross <i>only works for the people who buy into it. </i>The people who don’t capital-B Believe are still damned. If you've prayed the Sinner’s Prayer and made a decision to follow Jesus, you get to be in the in-group. If you have not, you go to Hell when you die.
</p><p>
And this is an important, but little-commented on point: the death of Jesus on the Cross, one of the three persons of an infinite triune deity, is <i>finite</i>. It only serves for the people who buy in. In the intersection of Conversionism and Crucicentrism, Salvation becomes a resource given an artificial scarcity.
</p><p>
This feeds into the final point: <i><b>Activism, </b></i>which, in evangelical terms really only means one thing: evangelism. Proselytising. Evangelical Christians are told with no small amount of urgency that they have to tell people about Jesus and the Cross.
</p><p>
It’s not hard to see in evangelicalism a very capitalist way of doing a religion. Like the capitalist conception of the nuclear family, it works to erode relationships outside the group and pushes a kind of brand loyalty, where the more you put in, the better your experience is. The scarcity of salvation is a thing to be given the hard sell; it is marketed so its buyers are sold the belief that they are an elite.
</p><p>
This is a manifestation of what Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism: the idea that the basic assumptions of capitalism about material resources are in fact how reality works, even in terms of abstract things like love, rights and spirituality. You see it in the way that we assume that you can only love one person. We see it in the way that we think that if you give someone more human rights someone else has to lose some. And we see it in the way that the supposedly infinite love of God is a limited thing that needs to be marketed.
</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">
3 Here is Love, Vast as the Ocean </h3><p>Christianity is dwindling in the United Kingdom. Evangelicals are falling in numbers more slowly, but they are still diminishing.
</p><p>
Ironically, the way in which evangelicals attempt to initiate growth – which they frame as the movement of the church towards the elusive Revival – is hastening that decline. And here in Wales, it is still all about recapturing that 1904 energy. But it won't ever happen again. And they're sort of in denial about that.
</p><p>
What evangelicals in Wales don’t like to admit is that back in 1904, when folks were flocking to the chapels and singing hymns like “Dyma Gariad” with gusto, there wasn't a single person there who hadn't had a Christian education. Maybe they were Anglicans, maybe they had grown up with Sunday School. Every one was, in most reasonable non-evangelical terms, a Christian. But they weren’t evangelicals, and because evangelicals don’t think you count as a Christian if you’ve not had an evangelical awakening, these newly enthused people counted as converts. And this is important, because it skews how these things are seen, and explains why these things don’t work now.
</p><p>
In a culture where people have always had some experience of going to church and some basic background in Christian morals and the Bible, you can skip all that stuff and go straight to imbuing people with the importance of believing and acting on that belief. In the modern day, this has important consequences.
</p><p>
First, the bar for a “Revival” is lower, and often churches will tacitly acknowledge this by referring to events like these as “Moves of the Spirit” or “Outpourings” or the like.
</p><p>
Second: they reduce the evangelical population. Always.
</p><p>
This may seem to be a controversial statement.
</p><p>I am going to lay out my thinking here. Stay with me. <br /></p><p>In the evangelical scene in the UK (and also in the US), Revivals, Moves of the Spirit or whatever tend to be concentrated in certain church communities. When these revivals happen, these church communities explode. People come from far and wide. The church sees the expansion of its congregation as proof of God’s goodness.
</p><p>
But they do not look too closely as to where these people come from. And of course if they were to ask, they would find that nearly all of them come from the same place. Other evangelical churches.
</p><p>
The nature of evangelicalism as the Perfect Capitalist Religion inevitably filters down to congregations. We’ve talked about the top end, the artificial scarcity of salvation and the way churches market, but the effect works from the bottom up as well.
</p><p>
In church terms, this means that the nature of the evangelical approach to churches encourages shopping around.
</p><p>
Many of the most successful evangelical ministers either belong to non-conformist denominations (the various sorts of Baptists, for example) make their living from congregational donations. It's why they're always banging on about the practice of tithing, which is where you give 10 per cent of your income to your church. As a young evangelical, I would forego meals for the sake of giving my 10%. Many still do.
</p><p>
A church that depends on the pockets of its congregation markets aggressively. And I understand that the word “marketing” is going to be an offensive term, but that is what it is. <i>Marketing. </i>When you treat your congregants as consumers, they start to behave like consumers.
</p><p>
So when a Move of the Spirit happens in a church, a big chunk of evangelicals hears about it. These people jump ship from their current congregations and move to where the fun is.
</p><p>
And that happens over and over. The thing about church shoppers is that they're not tied to churches, and not in the communities that reinforce and control their church attendance. It has been recognised as a problem for many years, and I recall many conversations back in the 90s where “church hopping” (without the s) was condemned, mostly held in a church that at the time benefitted greatly from the phenomenon – it was important that having gained the congregation, they didn’t go anywhere else, after all. Which, of course, they did. <br /></p><p>
Because it fizzled. These migrations happen when the current Move of the Spirit fizzles out. It always does. It might take three years, two years, or ten years, but it will. </p><p>And this is the crucially important bit: whenever these migrations happen, people always slough off the edges. Because the Revival didn’t happen and the Move of the Spirit didn’t change anything. It didn't include these people. Disillusionment and disappointment occurs and these people, who never really had roots here, drift away.
</p><p>
In the USA, this is still entirely sustainable. But then the numbers of evangelicals there dwarf the UK. A “modest” Southern US congregation of about 1000 members would be one of the 20 biggest in the whole UK. Here in the UK, if your congregation has over 200 members, you’re likely one of the two biggest churches in a radius measured in tens of miles, if not the biggest.[2] <br /></p><p>
The result of all this is that the endless thirst for revivals is actually accelerating the death of Christianity in the UK. The illusion of growth is leached from other congregations, and ignores the attrition of people unmoored from these things.
</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">
4 I'm not ashamed to own my Lord
</h3><p>The biggest objection to this whole “there's actually no such thing as a Revival in the way that people seem to think there is” thesis is that people do in fact convert to evangelical Christianity from non-Christian backgrounds.
</p><p>
On October 5th 1994, I became one, in fact. Never mind that although I was brought up as a member of what is technically a sect I went to a church youth group for five years as a teenager. I did that specifically to upset my parents, which probably explains a lot about me if you think about it.
</p><p>
When they do get a Real Convert, evangelicals don't just do everything they can to keep their claws in that person, but they make them prominent, and they wheel them out whenever they can. Again, this was my experience. For a solid three years I was the one they put up onto the pulpit and made to tell my story. And honestly, I loved the attention. But it wasn’t out of any admiration for my talents as a speaker. It was because I was <i>the only one they had</i>.
</p><p>
Because the reason that Real Converts get put front and centre is that even if it’s a convert like me, with several years of priming, converts of my kind are statistically insignificant.
</p><p>
I remember the CU missions at university where One Guy Came to Christ and every time he was treated like a trophy, a medal. But it was one guy, at most.
</p><p>I remember being a student at one of those Christian Union meetings, and hearing a speaker tell us to imagine that everyone we know is blindly running headlong to a cliff edge and only we can catch them. It’s that level of urgency. We weren’t supposed to make friends unless we were going to tell them about Jesus. We would invite people to dinner parties to tell them about Jesus. We’d have board game nights with Gospel talks. We’d have pizza nights with Gospel talks. We’d have beach barbecues with Gospel talks. If you couldn’t tell people about the Cross, there was no point doing anything.</p><p>And here is why evangelical Christians find the idea that if you don’t love other people more than you love Jesus, you don’t love Jesus so very baffling: because this is how evangelicals understand their duty to love the world. For many evangelicals, the only love the world deserves is the love expressed in the Gospel of Jesus. You love people by proselytising to them, and while it is a long time since I have heard suspicious rumblings about how a “social gospel” of public good works is a compromise of the Good News (and indeed, most – not all, but most – of the prominent evangelical churches in the region are involved with the food bank), it is still strongly held by evangelicals that the act of proselytisation is the tail that wags the dog of Christian practice. <br /></p><p>
Occasionally people in those student circles would put forward that existing in people’s lives as principled, kind and decent Christians was evangelism enough. A favourite quote from St Francis of Assisi, “Preach the Gospel at all times, and if necessary use words,” would be quoted. Suffice to say that the CU, and especially their staff workers from the monolithic and ultraconservative cross-university governing body UCCF, looked upon this ”friendship evangelism” with suspicion, because they knew it was really just a way to avoid calling it “actually having friends”. I remember expressing old Frankie's axiom to a UCCF employee once, and he just dismissed it out of hand, mocking it as a platitude from “the Christian Dr Doolittle”. </p><p>He wouldn’t be led to spell it out, but he clearly believed that actually having friends you weren’t planning to preach to – and God forbid a girlfriend or boyfriend outside of the church – was a no-no. And he imposed that on his charges.
</p><p>
Obviously, making everything about chances to proselytise alienates the <i>fuck </i>out of people. If you’re only friends with someone because you want to convert them, they’re going to notice, and then they won’t be your friends for long. And then when they’re not your friends, you can fall back on the church.
</p><p>
But cold call evangelism, street evangelism, hard sell evangelism Just Doesn't Work and OK, there are always exceptions – exceptions like a young person, new at university, away from an abusive home and an institutionally abusive school setting for the first time, and desperate to people who seemed to present real, warm, friendship. But people like that traumatised 19 year old are vanishingly rare.
</p><p>
Hard sell evangelism is so horrible because it objectifies people. It makes them a scalp, a sale, a statistic. A target.
</p><p>
And that “sale” point goes back to how evangelicalism is now the Faith of the Market. Consider how little you need to change the infamous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4" target="_blank">Let's Go Whaling </a>seminar to make it basically about evangelical methods of control.
</p><p>
Hard Sell Evangelism repels anyone who wasn't looking to buy in to begin with. It objectifies its targets, who might even be people you love. It assumes that the people you're proselytising to are less than people. And so, it's all right when they tell you no because they're not really Fully Realised People, just Marketing Targets, and you can just ignore their feelings, and go back to the Real People at Church, who are your Real Friends, your Real Family.
</p><p>
"Do not be yoked with unbelievers" wrote St Paul (<i>2nd Corinthians</i> 6:14). He knew why.
</p><p>
Big Evangelical Revival Events demonstrably don't work, but evangelicals do them anyway as much as they possibly can. Because getting new people in are not really what they are for. They’re for selling your community to other, outside evangelicals who might be dissatisfied with their own church, and they are about retention, and once again the more you think about it the more capitalist it is, and just like capitalism it happily discards the edge cases. It treats people as resources and dispenses with the low spenders. They are whaling.
</p><p>
The church folk migrate, and every year as each migration happens, migrations inspired by marketing efforts that evangelicalism needs to happen in order to be evangelicalism, the market shrinks.
</p><p>
And the death spiral continues. Capitalism is a worldview that feasts on itself. Evangelicalism is its perfect religion. </p><p>__</p><p>[1] Swansea's largest stable minority community is Bangladeshi and Muslim.</p><p>[2] Evangelical culture, like any strongly ideologically bound group, is factional, and evangelicals in the UK often like to have a church they <i>don’t</i>
go to, a model that very often supports two congregations that work as
friendly rivals when they are not outright enemies: see for example St. Aldate’s and St. Ebbe’s in Oxford,
who express two very distinct versions of evangelicalism.
</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-83386117507992406892023-12-18T13:33:00.006+00:002023-12-18T13:34:16.974+00:00Hell is the Absence of Other People<h3 style="text-align: left;"><i><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqfTAbJDXFquqQRuxyj7Eve12UGKuXv1zgutjJds4QOj4_mjENQldd-5d966eqmkyy-vk5MWNrVLSLcJdyCVZe8c2sw-25BCJRefSXoR5r6tswmNfYeqJZ1y1-yVkWHqMrfXk1HxhOujTWZ5i7vTlASKgY2TQB-kmdV2JrjZS9JB_FR2MoayyMhzkl1FNj/s1350/batman%20returns.jpg"><img border="0" data-original-height="896" data-original-width="1350" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqfTAbJDXFquqQRuxyj7Eve12UGKuXv1zgutjJds4QOj4_mjENQldd-5d966eqmkyy-vk5MWNrVLSLcJdyCVZe8c2sw-25BCJRefSXoR5r6tswmNfYeqJZ1y1-yVkWHqMrfXk1HxhOujTWZ5i7vTlASKgY2TQB-kmdV2JrjZS9JB_FR2MoayyMhzkl1FNj/w400-h265/batman%20returns.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Batman Returns </i>(1992)<br /></h3><p>Superhero movies are Not My Thing. And it is probably fair to say that the superhero I have the least patience with is Batman. Nor am I a particular fan of the work of Tim Burton. Why is it, then, that not only can I say I have a favourite superhero movie, but that it’s the second Tim Burton Bat-Feature, <i>Batman Returns </i>(1992)? That? The one that is so <i>very</i> Tim Burton, and a Superhero Christmas Movie to boot?<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>I mean, yes, it’s the really pervy one. OK, yes, I do enjoy dressing in fetishwear, and the costume design – and I am not just talking about Michelle Pfeiffer’s costumes – has much to offer a fan of kinky aesthetics. But that is not in fact the reason. Or even a reason at all. Most superhero films flirt with fetishism of some kind after all.</p><p><i>Batman Returns</i> comes from an era just before Marvel Studios locked the Superhero Movie into an immutable, rock-solid structure, and it doesn’t behave like a superhero movie. Maybe that’s it. Against a background of a snowy, fairytale Christmas – and remember, the memory cheats, it had a summer release – a series of images nightmarish and whimsical plays out before us, linked by only the most perfunctory plot. We meet scheming sociopath Max Schreck (Christopher Walken, Christopher Walkening it as hard as a Christopher Walken can), horny child-eating circus freak Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot (Danny DeVito), a whole parade of creepy sewer-dwelling circus clowns, a doomed Ice Princess, and, well, the usual broad strokes Gotham notables. People’s motivations are fluid and inchoate, and a rundown of the narrative won’t get me where I want to go. You’ve probably seen this film, or can easily see it, or don’t need to see it.</p><p>The only thing you need to hold in mind is this: Bruce Wayne (Keaton) and Selina Kyle (Pfeiffer) are <i>really not OK.</i></p><p>Both of them are coded with the classic signifiers of being “a bit weird”, which is to say that they show such obvious signs of being autistic that it doesn’t actually matter that this probably isn’t the intent – Keaton and Pfeiffer are underrated actors who know how to observe things and they know how to mimic what behaviour that people think of as “quirky” or “obsessive” or “eccentric” so accurately that, well, they can act autistic.</p><p>Selina is Max Schreck’s secretary. She is bullied, awkward, has no idea when not to talk out of turn, and she is lonely. She lives alone with her beloved cat, in an apartment full of toys and cutesy, infantile things. Her answering machine has a man saying he doesn’t want a second date, messages from her overbearing, controlling mother, and recorded marketing messages. But she is also a good secretary, and so when she forgets a thing at the office and is reminded by a voicemail she left herself to go back in the office and pick a thing up, she stumbles upon Max doing something nefarious, and smiling, Max throws her out of a window. Because that's what you do if you've got the power.<br /></p><p>She doesn’t die. Heavily concussed, and revived by alley cats, she returns to her apartment and numbly, dazedly repeats her homecoming rituals: alive or dead, or half-dead, or resurrected, they mean about as much. And then a marketing call on the answerphone causes something to snap.</p><p>At the consequences of capitalism intruding on her existence, at the realisation that capitalism has <i>wrecked her life, </i>Selina enters a screaming meltdown. The plushies go down the waste disposal. The quirky neon “HELLO” sign gets the O knocked off. She graffitis everywhere with a black spray can. And then she gets a shiny rubber mac and cuts it up into a costume and mask, and now she’s Catwoman. Now she’s a clawed agent of chaos. Now she is a revolutionary.</p><p><b><i>Mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it… but a kiss can be deadlier if you mean it<br /></i></b>Over and over again, Catwoman and Batman are juxtaposed. Bruce and Selena meet and are attracted immediately, each recognising that the other is Not OK, but also not OK in a way that means they immediately vibe.</p><p>Meanwhile, Batman and Catwoman vibe in a different way: their attraction is raw, and violent. They are each other’s fetish.</p><p>We are told they are the same. They are not the same. Over the course of the film, Catwoman’s costume gets progressively more and more wrecked; she patches it with other materials; it gains holes and tears.</p><p>Batman’s costume gets wrecked and punctured too – but he has a walk-in wardrobe full of identical Bat-suits, in a cave full of technological marvels and hi-tech weapons. Selina’s cave is a trashed flat, where the walls are defaced, the toys are broken, and the wall tells you it’s hell.</p><p>Batman drives to action in his Batmobile, a baroque, winged machine, made of speed and violence. Catwoman pulls her disintegrating latex costume on with her teeth while driving a little VW Beetle to town.</p><p>And Batman has Alfred (Michael Gough), a kindly retainer who loves working for “Master Bruce” and will do anything for him. Selina has a cat.</p><p>In the final act, both Bruce and Selina unmask themselves. Bruce tears off the Bat-mask, destroying his costume. He says, “We’re alike.” <br /><br />And they are not. Bruce is in cahoots with the police; Selina literally blows up the trappings of capitalism. <br /></p><p>But of course it doesn’t mean anything if Bruce destroys his costume. He’s got a room full of spares. <br /><br />His experience isn’t comparable. He’s rich. Even unmasking himself isn’t much of a stretch. It’s not that he doesn’t have anything to lose, it’s that there’s no real risk of him losing it.</p><p>It'd be obvious to comparre Pfeiffer's Selina to Ann Hathaway's version of the character In Christopher Nolan’s interminable, morally repellent and unapologetically fascist copaganda play <i>The Dark Knight Rises </i>(2012), where Selina is the sexy, amoral jewel thief of the comics, whose Randian ethics reward her with a stable relationship with Bruce Wayne and a retirement in moneyed ease. It's boring and empty. Be hot and unprincipled and get the guy with your enlightened self-interest. Yeah, who cares? </p><p>Actually, It's more interesting to compare <i>The Dark Knight </i>(2008) here. Now, when I talk about interesting here, there's caveats, obviously. The middle of the Nolan films (we're not bothering with <i>Batman Begins, </i>that's just a blank void where a film goes) isn't quite as interminable and is <i>marginally </i>less an exercise in morally repellent and unapologetically fascist copaganda, but that's comparing a 1/10 with a 3/10 and both of the bonus marks <i>The Dark Knight </i>gets are for Heath Ledger's tortured, final performance, and you knew I was going to say that. But what really matters here is the bit where <i>The Dark Knight </i>really tells on itself. And that's the scene where an accountant discovers that Wayne Enterprises is building Batman’s gear, and tries to blackmail Wayne’s tech man, Lucius Fox (America's President, Morgan Freeman) to keep the secret. And Fox laughs and explains that trying to blackmail a billionaire is nonsense. It’s treated like it’s somehow a good thing – <i>Take that, pencil pusher! Teach you to call out a billionaire for embezzlement! </i>– but at least Nolan openly admits it, so there’s that I guess. </p><p>Tim Burton does too, and I'm not sure if that's accidental – Selina knows that if Max Schreck faces institutional justice, he will be fine. So she expends her eighth life to do something more electrically final. Selina isn't law-abiding, and it's not like she's actually going to bring down the system. but as a friend of mine wrote many years ago in an academic paper, there is no one dramatic revolt, and no single site of resistance. You can't change the world with one electric shock. Only personal revenge is possible. It is the most satisfactory outcome left. <br /></p><p>Bruce and Selena are fractured; both have to navigate the choice between loneliness and respectability, or kinky self-determination. But Bruce can <i>afford </i>to be fractured. When you're that rich, you're not mentally ill or neurodiverse, you're <i>eccentric. </i><br /></p><p>But what happens if you<i> can't </i>afford it? What happens if the things you have to lose are things you can't afford to lose? What happens if you don’t have the means to fix your Batmobile or your Batwing? What if you don’t have a cupboard full of spare Batarangs and cans of Bat-Shark Repellent? What’s left to you?</p><p><b><i>I feel so much yummier<br /></i></b>Selina understands that there is an existential horror in living alone. There is an existential horror in living alone at Christmas. There is an existential horror in living alone under capitalism. <br /><br />Imagine. You’re extraverted – and by “extraverted” I don’t mean what people usually think when you say that, because that really parses as “introverted, but with an alcohol problem”. No, I mean that particular type of human nature, far, far rarer than people think, where you need human connection to survive in the world. Now imagine you’re autistic as well, with all the social awkwardness that entails.</p><p>You live alone, in an apartment the size of a hamster run, with a glass case full of exquisitely converted and painted model kits, for example, and shelves of rare books and board games you’ll never play because you have no one to play them with. You brush your teeth, and you shower, and you eat three meals. You exercise and do hobbies. You try to work. Your existence is a day to day hustle to keep a roof over your head, a roof you despise, that you absolutely cannot bring yourself to call a home, because you're trapped here and your only other option is sleeping in wheelie bins. <br /><br />Every day you scream inside. </p><p>Imagine how, whenever you try to tell people how awful it is to live alone, someone invariably thinks it’s helpful to tell you how amazing living alone would be for them, and you just want to scream in their face to just read the bloody room.</p><p>And sometimes you melt down. And sometimes you fracture and go out and dance in clothes made of rubber and plastic that look like you’re from outer space and bring about the downfall of civilisation and capitalism and the tyranny of gender with your spiky, magnetic <i>difference</i>. Why wouldn't you? </p><p>Even at Christmas. Especially at Christmas. <br /></p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-6627889535352697692023-10-27T20:16:00.008+01:002023-12-18T13:41:17.043+00:00You’ve gone wrong around the eyes like one of those crabs at the dump<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgie0W1hvtftrIhPTmJh6WLLXTs20FK47O_URe2v_SfryRdJVr3xAN9tuQrBBLFbW3gpU_l7-irPYaNa3_hgqlxR9uXhMd8-MCZe9alDeAoZfF3JJGOblIChbkMdOK47_kh2vlPfMQNLcfhpTUxAA1UQ0NemXjeBbRqUOU8H7vbtpzDWwauY2jluJ1AEpeQ/s1581/infinity%20pool%20mia.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1054" data-original-width="1581" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgie0W1hvtftrIhPTmJh6WLLXTs20FK47O_URe2v_SfryRdJVr3xAN9tuQrBBLFbW3gpU_l7-irPYaNa3_hgqlxR9uXhMd8-MCZe9alDeAoZfF3JJGOblIChbkMdOK47_kh2vlPfMQNLcfhpTUxAA1UQ0NemXjeBbRqUOU8H7vbtpzDWwauY2jluJ1AEpeQ/w400-h266/infinity%20pool%20mia.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Infinity Pool (2023)</b></i></h3><p>[<i>spoilers</i>]<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p><b><i>Our country is not a playground for foreign children</i></b></p><p>In recent years, both the authorities and the ordinary people of the state of Hawaii have been begging tourists not to come to the islands. Since 2020, of course, Hawaii’s out of control COVID problem has been a reason to stay away in and of itself, but the problem with tourists is more acute than a pandemic. Hawaii isn’t a cheap place to visit, and the sort of people who can go are often white and wealthy, and these white, wealthy visitors have a reputation among Hawaiians for taking the phrase “island playground” just a little too literally. They go outside of the tourist resorts. They trample over religious sites and places of historical significance, assuming themselves the sole exceptions to the “keep out” signs. They look for unspoiled beaches and swaying palm groves like the ones in the Elvis movies, and spoil them.</p><p>Having your home repeatedly desecrated by people who assume that they can make any bad thing they care to do go away with enough money is humiliating and degrading. And they can, in fact, escape any of the consequences for their actions with their money. It’s capitalist realism again: once again abstracts – here history, faith and dignity as well as rights – are reduced to purchasable commodities. And then they go home and live their lives and you’re left with the wreckage and the grief.</p><p>This hasn’t been approached in film with a whole lot of sensitivity in the past. For example in Danny Boyle's 2000 film <i>The Beach</i>, Leonardo DiCaprio (in that magical stage of his career where his girlfriends were still age-appropriate) finds a community of year-out kids and hippies squatting on a perfect, unspoiled island beach somewhere off the coast of Thailand. While the stereotype flower children and trust fund backpackers are by no means wholly sympathetic (with Tilda Swinton’s two-faced hippy chief Sal a highlight), the indigenous people aren’t really characters at all. A big chunk of the second half of the film can be best summarised as “Leo runs away from angry brown people with AK-47s.” The fact that a bunch of rich white trust fundies might be wrecking the “unspoiled” island is laid aside, while the local farmers are farming something illicit and are presented as murderous and – I used this word carefully and deliberately – “savage”.</p><p>Brandon Cronenberg’s 2023 thriller <i>Infinity Pool </i>does a much better job of critiquing this. Instead of dwelling on the sorrow of the local people – Cronenberg is careful to create a completely fictional country, Li Tolqa – he focuses entirely on the moral bankruptcy and monstrousness of the tourists.</p><p>Li Tolqa is, by implication, a minor Balkan state, and in fact the film was made in Croatia and part financed with Croatian money, which puts a lot of the film’s message in context. I’m reminded of the well-intentioned criticisms of Ari Aster’s <i>Midsommar </i>(2019) that accused that film of othering or exoticising the customs of Sweden, missing the fact that it was a Swedish production company who hired Aster to make a folk horror movie set at a Midsommar festival. But Midsommar comes from a different direction. Cronenberg Fils is doing something else.</p><p>It would be easy to see the Not-Balkan state of <i>Infinity Pool </i>as a sort of nasty caricature, with the grotesque “Ekki” festival masks, the glossy tawdriness of the Pa Qlqa Pearl Princess resort, and the summary violence of the legal system all feeding into a hostile portrayal of somewhere “savage”, “uncivilised”. The protestor we see trashing the beach on a quad bike is making a direct and violent statement (“He’s saying that he wants to put a long knife right through here. And after you die he’ll hang your body at the airport to scare off the other tourists”) and later the police are shown to be exactly as corrupt and brutal as every patronising stereotype of post-colonial law that Westerners believe in.</p><p>But the entire film is shown through one pair of eyes, white American eyes. They are our only point of view. We only really see the nonexistent nation our protagonist sees, and no scene in the film is without him. Often those eyes are shown in close-up; often the camera looks over a shoulder, or glimpses the protagonist from a place that seems somehow illicit, like it is some sort of voyeur. But he, or some version of him, is always in shot. He is always there in some version, and it is through him that the story is mediated.</p><p>The protagonist in question is James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård). He's a novelist who hasn't written a word for years, living off his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), a publishing heiress, and he's the sort of bourgeois milquetoast who mistakes his lack of creativity for a lack of inspirational material: <i>if only he was shown something interesting to write about, he could write something good</i>, he thinks. His holiday in the Pa Qlqa Pearl Princess resort is in some way supposed to find him some inspiration. But this is a lie. It’s a closed resort, and it’s implied that it is one of many (another resort, the Bot Vre, is described as “a few compounds along the coast”) and the cultural delights of Li Tolqa are heavily mediated. Li Tolqan traditional music performances soundtrack the breakfast buffet, punctuated with the announcement that you can get your Ekki mask in the giftshop. The same staff who marketed the traditional music will serve in the resort’s Chinese restaurant, and will perform “Indian Bollywood Dancing” for the guests. It’s all the same. It’s all foreign. And again, it’s mediated, seen through James’s eyes and packaged for the tourists.</p><p>Inspiration seems to come when James meets Gabi Bauer (Mia Goth) and her older husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), a pair of Eurotrash swingers who express admiration for James’s forgotten debut novel. Gabi and Alban, an actress who fails convincingly in ads and an architect who specialises in resorts – are quintessentially Ballardian characters. The whole of <i>Infinity Pool</i> owes a lot to JG Ballard, really. It’s very much in the tradition of Crash or High Rise, and in some ways develops them, going a lot harder than Ballard ever did after the bourgeoisie, for instance. And the Ballardian plot trajectory, where a protagonist, who is often called James, enters through a traumatic liminal experience into a dark world of sex and violence, is alive and well. The news in 2021 that Brandon Cronenberg was attached to a VOD TV adaptation of Ballard’s 2001 novel <i>Super-Cannes</i> comes as little surprise. Even if that never emerges,<i> Infinity Pool</i> already proves that Cronenberg can do Ballard just as well as his dad could.</p><p>The short version of the plot is that Gabi and Alban get James into trouble. They take him and Em on an illicit picnic trip outside of the compound. I appreciate that in 21st century cinema, “going for a drive with Mia Goth” is what in previous ages of cinematic horror would be more or less equivalent to saying “I know who the killer is. Meet me in the alley in five minutes and I’ll tell you,” but personally, I have never enjoyed films with genre savvy protagonists, and I don't suggest you start going that way either.</p><p>Softened up with barbecue food, alcohol and a bit of marital infidelity in the bushes, and peer-pressured into drunk driving, James becomes the culprit of a fatal hit and run. In the morning, the Li Tolqan police come and and arrest the holidaymakers. A detective named Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann, a veteran in this sort of role) pressures James into a confession, and James learns he has been summarily sentenced to death.</p><p>Except that in Li Tolqa, Westerners can avoid a sentence of this kind by paying a fine and being “doubled”: for a statutory fine, they create a perfect clone of the sentenced person, with their memories and personality, and with the awareness of their guilt. And then they make him watch himself die.</p><p><b><i>It's like a new skin working its way into place</i></b></p><p>The police station has its own ATM. It’s a mordantly funny detail in a film packed with them, but it also hammers in the point: this happens enough that easy cash payments are necessary. It happens a lot. It turns out, Gabi explains, that while the death sentence is liberally handed out, there are several regular visitors here who happily flout whatever laws they please, and, when caught, see their own executions as a delightfully macabre entertainment. James tags along, initially enjoying the consequence-free sex, drugs, and home invasion, until it dawns on him that he’s being played, and as the new guy he is subject to the most extreme hazing imaginable.</p><p>Em is horrified (<i>note</i>: I think it's probably an accident of casting that the only person who rejects the system from the off happens to be the only person of colour in the principal cast, but it is also entirely appropriate). But James gazes at his own execution, transfixed in a sort of exultant daze. As he brings back the jar that contains his own ashes to the hotel (“a souvenir,” Thresh explains), Em rounds on him, disgusted that James “could sit there and watch it happen. Like a robot.”</p><p>This only the first of several hints that there might be an explanation for James’s evident dissociation that is quite apart from the awakening of a member of the bourgeoisie to the fact that he exists in a world without consequences for him. It’s made explicit pretty shortly afterwards: “Do you worry they got the wrong man? Do you think they killed the real James?” says Alban’s drinking pal and fellow serial executee Dr Modan (John Ralston).</p><p>Later, Modan elaborates further: “ Do you know why the doubling tradition is unique to Li Tolqa? I’m starting to think it’s just their poetic flair. We’ve spent years trying to duplicate the process in the lab, but we’re far too literal.”</p><p>It’s almost as, Modan posits, the duplication process copies the meaning of a person, the spirit rather than the letter of the Scripture, if you will, and that he suspects that the duplicates cannot be as perfect, because science is trying to copy a person mechanically, and the Li Tolqans want the essence of a person.</p><p>But of course that’s not an entire copy of a person either. Either way, if it is the copy that survives, and then it is the copy that is copied, and the difference between an impressionist painting of an impressionist painting and a photocopy of a photocopy is surely academic.</p><p>Only seconds after Modan idly plays with his idea, which is all the man ever does, the tourists are dragged away, uncomprehending, by Thresh’s men. The detective says he wants this time to “make a statement.” Other versions of them cheer and applaud as they die. Was Thresh complicit in the theatre of this scene? Were they really the doubles, unaware of their fate? Or has that political statement been made without any of them noticing?</p><p>As statements go, it seems like it would be a bit futile, but in the real world, sometimes the only recourse of a colonised people is to get one over on a clueless coloniser – for unlike the tourists, for the colonised there really would be consequences in getting caught.</p><p>Is this what happens every time? Or only some of the time? Is our protagonist already a third generation copy, artifacted like a Jpeg?</p><p>And does it matter?</p><p>The only infinity pool in <i>Infinity Pool</i> is mentioned in passing: Alban’s first execution was for lethal negligence, while overseeing the construction of an infinity pool for the Bot Vre resort. An infinity pool, as you may know, is a swimming pool that maintains a constant flow of water in and out. It is a perfect symbol of the extravagance and pointlessness of tourist colonialism, a slow motion environmental disaster that wastes thousands of gallons of water every day. As a programmatic statement of the film – which is what a title is, isn’t it – it’s a sort of colonial reworking of Heraclitus’s Paradox: no one steps in the same river twice. And no bourgeois asshole steps in the same infinity pool twice. And yet, just as a river flows and irrigates its surroundings, so too does the infinity pool leach and destroy for that bourgeois asshole’s entertainment.</p><p>Which rather answers the question: does it matter? It doesn’t.</p><p>These people are hollow. When it’s time for them go home, they immediately put on the niceties of middle-class behaviour. Clothed in small talk, they become actors, architects, psychiatrists again. They’re all dead multiple times over, and regardless of whether we’re looking at second-, sixth-, or thirteenth-generation duplicates, they do the same damage to the world.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-60903976330040286172022-11-15T16:39:00.004+00:002022-11-15T20:52:17.910+00:00Y'know, I guess one person can't make a difference<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKHeEM1t260ny5eO4sCsgiJQxI4RFbdCwuWXzUmb_e_EqezV23tz3Ch5jaBaowEFiglSpSe3D5VxYH1OpfjkMOxBDuyjwhL6AHxAlR5nYW4ntrHh-y4bs5YV-dXBbWrgPT0R97qwoRj3SAQX-WgUTRZWYZvoq0u1yH8xdD3XUPyHUPh6JEt7fM8lZHtg/s880/wanda.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKHeEM1t260ny5eO4sCsgiJQxI4RFbdCwuWXzUmb_e_EqezV23tz3Ch5jaBaowEFiglSpSe3D5VxYH1OpfjkMOxBDuyjwhL6AHxAlR5nYW4ntrHh-y4bs5YV-dXBbWrgPT0R97qwoRj3SAQX-WgUTRZWYZvoq0u1yH8xdD3XUPyHUPh6JEt7fM8lZHtg/w466-h640/wanda.jpg" width="466" /></a></div><p><br />So this year I wound up seeing <i>Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
</i>(2022) twice in the cinema, without needing to pay. I don’t go out of my
way to see Marvel movies, but I was curious about this one, because I
wanted to see what a veteran director of genre movies with a distinctive
visual sensibility would do with the most policed and marketed
cinematic property of our generation. The second time, I was interested
to see if I was wrong. <br /><br />It made me sad. And even sadder the second time. </p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><br /><b>Come with me if you want to be awesome</b><br />First, let’s look at the good bits, and why they enable the bad. <br /><br />What
Sam Raimi did in this movie was pull in people he had worked with
before to give the thing a visual stamp that placed it in the lineage of
<i> Drag Me to Hell</i> (2009) or <i>Army of Darkness </i>(1992), that EC
Comics-inspired pulp tradition that he’s always riffed on, full of
pulp-tinged shrieking undead, herky-jerky zombies, cursed wastelands and
spooky mansions. Also, Bruce Campbell is in it. <br /><br />Raimi mixes his
own style with the hokey cosmic visuals of classic Dr Strange comics – Benedict Cumberbatch's brightly coloured costume and immobile
hair could have been illustrated by the great Gene Colan. (Note: Gene
Colan is my favourite superhero artist. Yes, I am the sort of person who
has a favourite superhero illustrator. You don't know everything about
me.) Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch looks like she’s flown out of a
comic book. There’s a big eyeball thing. Strange at one point saves
himself and his friends from a bus being thrown at them by creating a
giant magic cartoon buzzsaw and sawing the bus in half, which is not
really a thing you'd see in the majority of Marvel superhero comics made between roughly about 1984 and
2006, I reckon. Inevitable leader of the Young Avengers America Chavez (Xochitl
Gomez) makes these cosmic space portals that are delightfully
star-shaped and drawn by Steve Ditko. Dr Strange’s classic comic book love interest Clea
(Charlize fucking Theron) pops out of a dimensional rift in a bright
purple superhero suit. <br /><br />It is hands down the most visually
arresting Marvel movie I’ve seen, and although it is just as laden with
CGI as any of the others, it’s a film made by people who have an idea of
what an imaginary object would do in a physical space. Because Raimi
cut his teeth on practical effects, Raimi’s team have a better grasp of
fantasy physics, and rather than everything feeling oddly weightless as
they tend to in the other Marvels, with a bounding Hulk, for example,
who in film after film looks like a weird bouncy bubble, things have the
qualities of weight or weightlessness as appropriate for what they are.
In short, this film looks delightful. <br /><br />It is still nonetheless a
shining example of what the House of Mouse does when they take a
director with some distinctive stylistic quirks – say directors who made
films like <i>Hunt for the Wilderpeople </i>(2016) or <i>What We Do in the Shadows </i>(2019), or films like <i>Slither
</i>(2006) and <i>Super </i>(2010), or even a movie like <i>Serenity </i>(2005). And the
Dark Lord Mickey gets those directors to paint their style – the
irreverence of a James Gunn, the droll whimsy of a Taika Waititi, the
leaden liberal phoniness of a Joss Whedon – in a superficial way over the <i>same film</i>. Over and
over again. <br /><br /><b>With Great Power Comes a Great Merchandising Opportunity</b><br />What
to say about a film where one of the big Oh Emm Gee shocks is a scene
where a bunch of disposable alternative world versions of Marvel
superheroes turn up on a platform and they're like the Illuminati right?
So John Krasinski is Reed Richards, in advance of when he gets to be
our Reed Richards in an upcoming Fantastic Four movie. Squee! Oh wait,
that's Hayley Atwell as Captain Carter, from the Disney+ <i>What If? </i>show!
Double squee! Oh look, it's Lashana Lynch as Maria Rambeau! Remember her
from <i>Captain Marvel</i>? You can see that on Disney+ if you missed it in
the cinema! Squee! Is that, could that be Anson Mount as Black Bolt from
the <i>Inhumans </i>series, which you can also see on Disney+? Eh. I guess,
but no one cares about that one. <br /><br />But wait. Who's in that wheelchair!? HOLY SHIT IT’S PATRICK STEWART PLAYING PROFESSOR X. So. Much. Squee. <br /><br />And
OK, egos are at play here. Sir Patrick only agrees to be in your genre
media if he gets a bit that shows he’s wiser and more compassionate and more kickass than
anyone else (see also <i>Star Trek: Picard</i>). But apart from making sure we
know that Prof X is still cool when he’s like 120 years old, why are
these distracting and arguably detrimental Special Guest Appearances
even fucking here? <br /><br />Wait. Hold that thought. OMG. Facebook just gave me an ad for a Captain Carter action figure! <p></p><p></p><p>I MUST HAVE IT. <br /><br />Sorry, what was I saying? No, lost it. I’m sure I’ll think of it later. <br /><br />But.
OK. Look. I don‘t care about the merchandisable cameos really. What
matters is that this is the <i>same</i> film. There is a goodie. There is a
baddie with sympathetic elements (who is still a baddie). There is a moral. There is a big CGI
set piece that in fairness looks slightly less like spending half an
hour watching someone else playing XBox than usual. There are
collect-the-set cameos from other Marvel series and movies. There are
plot elements that will be enriched for you if you have a heavily used
Disney+ subscription. In fact, there are plot elements that <i>require </i>you
to have a Disney+ subscription to really understand. If you haven’t seen
<i>WandaVision</i> (2021), you are going to have trouble fully comprehending
why Wanda has turned into a villain all of a sudden. <br /><br />And there
is, more than anything, an underlying assumption that the same thing
will send you down the road to madness, violence and villainy, will push
you over the moral precipice and drive you to murder loads of
disposable but eminently merchandisable alternative universe superheroes
(but not the green minotaur dude, he’s from the comics and he’s all
right. Phew). And what is that? <br /><br />It's a wish to make substantive change. <br /><br /><b>That doesn't seem fair</b><br />So
in <i>Spider-Man: Homecoming</i> (2017), Adrian Toomes AKA the Vulture
(Michael Keaton, being a Bird Man again) is a blue collar construction
guy whose crew has been put out of a job by superheroes and the
government agencies that watch out for them. He decides to unionise by
scavenging alien/supervillain technology stuff and using it to support
his buddies. This is criminal and inevitably means he does bad things.
Of course he does. <br /><br />In <i>The Falcon and the Winter Soldier</i> (2021)
the Flag Smashers are concerned about poverty and inequality. Inevitably
they quickly become murdering terrorists. Same goes for Killmonger
(Michael B Jordan) in <i>Black Panther</i> (2018) who is anti-colonial and
therefore has to be a murdering villain. In <i>Spider-Man: Far From Home</i>
(2019) Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the leader of a group of badly
treated white collar employees. The inevitable result of organising for
their rights? A long con and a heist. Of course. <br /><br />And then
there’s Thanos. This needs a little expansion: so, when Jack Kirby
created Darkseid as the villain of his<i> Fourth World </i>comics, he intended
that character as a personification of fascism, a kid-friendly warning
of the consequences Nazism brings. Jim Starlin’s creation Thanos was a
straight, explicit lift of Darkseid. It's a generalisation given thirty years of comics, but in some versions of the print character Thanos is in love with
Death. Like literally. Like he wants to date the Grim Reaper or
something. He’s kinky for murder. But the filmic Thanos (Josh Brolin,
mostly), present in approximately a gajillion MCU movies, is not that character. This
Thanos is driven to the murder of 50% of all living creatures by a
desire to make the universe better through making it possible to
equitably share resources. Wanting to end scarcity? Makes you want to
murder half the universe. Obviously it follows. Obviously. <br /><i><br />But all of these are bad people! </i><br /><br />And
that’s the <i>point. </i>None of these motivations – equitable treatment for
workers, ending poverty or colonialism or scarcity – are bad things. But
they are not just imputed as the motivations of bad people, they are
the <i>reason why</i> these otherwise sympathetic characters turn bad. <br /><br />It’s
not just Marvel movies, and just dumping on Marvel and Disney is a little bit specific here. It is endemic across the board in products of the Comic Book Movie-Industrial Complex. Take <i><a href="https://www.room207press.com/2019/06/capitulate-to-all-monsters.html" target="_blank">Godzilla: King of the Monsters</a>
</i>(2019) for instance, where the ecoterrorists (and repeat after me:
there’s no such thing as an ecoterrorist) decide that kaiju-enabled
genocide is on the table because they believe in human-caused climate
change. <br /><br />In <i>Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness</i>, Wanda’s
evil-magic-gathering alternative-self-possessing
toyetic-cameo-massacring apple-tree-blighting rocky-monster-befriending
rampage comes from wanting to alleviate the grief she feels for the loss
of her children. <br /><br />Wanda is a reality-altering sorceress and her
children – and it’s complicated, right – were never really hers, she
imagined them, which is explained fully in the later episodes of last
year’s series <i>WandaVision </i>(which you can see on Disney+ (which is only
about seven quid a month)). Wanda reasonably thinks that she can find them
elsewhere in the infinite Multiverse and discovers the existence of
America Chavez, a young woman with the power of multiversal travel. <br /><br />She
then decides, obviously, that she will need to murder America and steal
her powers and gets hold of the Darkhold, which is the evilest book in
creation and which drives you mad when you read it, to pursue America
with demons and monsters and possessed alternative selves. Because
that's what you do when you’ve got the power to change things and you
decide to change things. You go mad and start murdering people. And then you
attempt to murder an alternative version of you and steal her kids. <br /><br />One
of the worst and stupidest avenues of media narrative critique is the
fake plot hole, whereby some nerd boy will attempt to rewrite the story
how he’d do it, and then call it a plot hole because a story that
doesn’t satisfy his idea of how a story works has “plot holes”. And of
course that is not what a plot hole is. This is just a story that is
written in a different way. Inevitably I’ve already seen online a “plot
hole” critique of <i>Multiverse of Madness </i>that goes: why didn’t Wanda help
America hone her powers and find a version of her kids that didn’t have
a mum? Because in an infinite Multiverse that must be a thing, right? <br /><br />And
of course that isn’t really a plot hole. It's because they simply don’t want to
tell that story. Because that would be a story where wanting to make
substantive change works. Where someone could change their lot in life
through action and co-operation and this would be a net good. No: the
basic underlying message of the MCU is: “Yes, we get that you might want to
make things better, but trying to change your lot or change the
structures that confine you is wrong-headed and always turns to evil
ends.” <br /><br />And yes, it might simply be that there is a school of
screenwriting that assumes that a sympathetic villain is just more
interesting. There is. It's one of those saws that basic screenwriters reel out along with “save the cat”. Sure, it's a thing. But that is not the only thing at stake here. And the point is, <i>how
</i>these villains are sympathetic. <br /><br />I specifically used the term
“wrong-headed” there because it’s a liberal term, it is a Blairite term,
it is a Democrat term, it is the term of the sort of person who thinks
that a phrase like “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends
toward justice” as Obama used it is somehow not a reassuring lie to keep
us in our places. It is the term of someone who trusts our legal bodies
and structures of government not to embark on the systematic stripping
of human rights from anyone who is not a straight white man during the
administration of a leadership that professes to be about protecting
those rights and then watches helplessly while those rights are stripped
away. And then reads out an emotional poem on YouTube and sends out a
circular asking for money or something. <br /><br />And puts up a Pride flag. </p><p>Which
reminds me. America was brought up by two Mums! She’s got LGBTQ+ badges
all over her denim jacket! She is so queer-coded it hurts. She is a
walking gaydar magnet. And it doesn’t <i>mean </i>anything to her. <br /><br />This is not representation. Because her
mums are swiftly killed off (or as good as killed off) in her Tragic But
Only As Long As It Needs To Be Backstory. Because they are just badges,
and in every other way it’s just the same story as everyone else’s with
some pinkwashing and a slide into Kill Your Gays. It is tokenism. It is a
sop to distract us from the underlying point that the film wants us to
understand, and which even has Strange’s boss/friend/sidekick Wong
(Benedict Wong) say at the end: you don’t get to make a difference. Suck
it in and be happy with it. <br /><br />And by the way, we have some action figures to sell you. </p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-20182920457394704082022-10-04T16:38:00.001+01:002022-10-04T17:03:30.968+01:00The Question in Bodies #49: When the Aliens Won<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGTekgTYaWuTcigec6Om7AVv6ZSP-U050hNSAAwJPAjeIHqlXqwTDUUYjV03oeuYg5sNKPU6iE014WygK613W5NQRcY5Ziazi6OSwZQ3rI7d82hnYd8pw3-hPBmlYzWQ2UsfQ6m1sVf4ARwO6LVqZtl7DiOOUhoYUPYVOHwwuQAeSgNJlkOYnYwDCr0Q/s1395/tripods_episode_13_2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1057" data-original-width="1395" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGTekgTYaWuTcigec6Om7AVv6ZSP-U050hNSAAwJPAjeIHqlXqwTDUUYjV03oeuYg5sNKPU6iE014WygK613W5NQRcY5Ziazi6OSwZQ3rI7d82hnYd8pw3-hPBmlYzWQ2UsfQ6m1sVf4ARwO6LVqZtl7DiOOUhoYUPYVOHwwuQAeSgNJlkOYnYwDCr0Q/w400-h303/tripods_episode_13_2.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>I guess recent news in the UK reminded me of this.<br /></p><p>In John Christopher’s <i>Tripods </i>trilogy, beginning in 1967 with <i>The White Mountains </i>and serialised incompletely by the BBC in 1984 and 1985, the earth has been enslaved by an alien race who pilot three-legged war machines; it’s similar if not exactly the same as “what if <i>War of the Worlds</i>, only the Martians won?” <span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Everyone lives in a sort of feudal society, where technology is at a late mediaeval level and nothing seems to advance. At the age of 16, in what has become a coming-of-age ceremony, teenagers are taken up into one of the Tripods and “capped”: the aliens fuse a lattice of shining metal circuitry to each person’s skull, which controls their minds in a very specific way. They still love, hate, make friends, have kids, laugh, cry, experience grief and joy. But they no longer ask questions. They do not innovate. They no longer have the capacity to imagine a world that is not controlled by the unseeable Masters who hide in the shining machines that stride over the world like gods. They accept their authority and trust that it is for the best. The protagonist, a boy named Will, is disturbed by the distance he now perceives in his older brother, who has just been capped. Encouraged by an old vagrant who calls himself Ozymandias (and who is secretly a recruiter for the resistance), Will and his cousin Henry go on the run, beginning a fraught journey across Europe to a place of sanctuary. In the second and third books of the series, <i>The City of Gold and Lead </i>(1967) and <i>The Pool of Fire </i>(1968), Will becomes part of a desperate plan to penetrate deep into the heart of the Masters’ city, and to learn how to drive them from the planet.<p></p><p></p>
<p>So far, so Young Adult, but the part that stayed with me when I read <i>The White Mountains </i>as a kid was the early chapter where Will and Henry are taken in by a French family. They are kind and generous, but Will knows they cannot be trusted. Still, he falls in love with the youngest daughter, Eloise, and begins to conceive of a plan to tell her where he is really going and to get her to come with him. But, on the day he finally gathers the courage to do this, while larking around, he knocks off her headscarf, and sees, because her hair hasn’t grown back yet, that she has been capped. She’s been brainwashed all along.</p>
<p>These experiences of Will’s are exactly what it is like to be neurologically different. The thing that makes the <i>Tripods </i>trilogy really relevant in a study of identity horror is to recast what it feels like to be different, to feel like you’re the only person on earth with compassion or regard for people, who sees the harm in the structures our society unthinkingly perpetuates. Only, no one knows or believes that you’re different. No one sees it. No one sees the harm or how people are being crushed. No one sees that their masters want to enslave your strongest kids and kill the pretty ones and keep them in display cases like butterflies. It’s a thing they cannot conceive. It’s not invisible, it’s unseeable, so that even if it is shown to them, the conditioning they have received makes them incapable of seeing the harm, the murder, the evil of it. </p>
<p>And you meet progressive people, nice people, good people even, who you talk to and even start counting as friends, and then something happens, and something is said, or nearly said, and then the scarf falls off and suddenly you realise that they’re never going to be able to see and in a choice between you and the forces that control the world, they’re going to sell you out to the Outer Gods at the first opportunity.</p>
<p>I sound like a conspiracist, I know. I admit, many of the experiences are the same. But the only conspiracies that really exist conduct the mundane, inhuman reality of capital, where everything is a blank binary between profit and loss. The conspiracy theorists, the poisonous ones, always have someone to blame (usually “Rothschilds” to be honest) but in truth, we know that there is no one, just the structures we have built ever since the first coins were struck, a mindless conceptual creature that will eat us all, and then itself.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-81608956695808770192022-09-05T15:51:00.001+01:002022-09-05T15:52:19.988+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 9: Health and Horror, Dignity and Disgust, with Dr. Catherine Belling<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5u2Gvi-2HhBH4XWsfjCMKvGuWe-sjBdaKka9_8RXJ0zc1r3Old3TESYMorFPEj8LlSnAbzcqFfjnT_whdPvOiVJxyCLf7tS66N16QvljdYmj8-idPDMVb9fjzTUZXWmTDgvkixYaxF1x8l0QdjQ5iGWeiuQ5DgusnNbZ1NdzAGqCB4vg43RUKYauTnw/s1400/alien%20ash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="1400" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5u2Gvi-2HhBH4XWsfjCMKvGuWe-sjBdaKka9_8RXJ0zc1r3Old3TESYMorFPEj8LlSnAbzcqFfjnT_whdPvOiVJxyCLf7tS66N16QvljdYmj8-idPDMVb9fjzTUZXWmTDgvkixYaxF1x8l0QdjQ5iGWeiuQ5DgusnNbZ1NdzAGqCB4vg43RUKYauTnw/w400-h170/alien%20ash.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>It's always somehow nastier when the gore isn't red. </i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Bioethicist, expert in medical humanities, horror fan and <em>Jeopardy </em>runner-up Dr. Catherine Belling joins me in this week's episode to talk about why horror and health are inextricably linked. Starting with the throughline between Dr. Pimple Popper and the early work of Ridley Scott, we examine a whole casebook of media – including hereditary possessions, anti-Hippocratic oaths, verminous transformations and infested Mayan ruins – and touch on dissection, infestation, plastination, cancerification and death. </p>
<p>There's some pretty grim stuff mentioned in this one, so content warnings for discussion of suicide, eugenics, ablism, and that white goopy stuff that comes out of pimples and cysts. </p>
<p>By the way, the anthropological text neither of us could think of the name of was Mary Douglas, <em>Purity and Danger. </em></p><p>You can hear me interrogate The Question in Bodies on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet (like <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-question-in-bodies/id1632902426" target="_blank">Apple</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7tUVmpv4anqwZ2Vo5YMseG" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/0b489b51-57d8-46f0-afc4-449e9070b4be/the-question-in-bodies">Amazon Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL1RoZVF1ZXN0aW9uaW5Cb2RpZXMvZmVlZC54bWw" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> and others) or find the archive at <a href="https://thequestioninbodies.podbean.com/" target="_blank">The Question in Bodies Podbean site</a>. </p>
<p>Want to hear episodes early? Back my <a href="https://patreon.com/howarddavid.ingham" target="_blank">Patreon. </a>It's just one of those American dollars a month for all the stuff. </p>
<iframe title="Episode 9: Health and Horror, Dignity and Disgust, with Dr. Catherine Belling" allowtransparency="true" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" scrolling="no" data-name="pb-iframe-player" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=ij36i-12b6ada-pb&from=pb6admin&square=1&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" allowfullscreen="" width="100%" height="300"></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-23002770338528776482022-08-29T12:40:00.002+01:002022-08-29T12:40:18.228+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 8: The Death of the Mid-Budget Movie, with Raquel S. Benedict<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwvwiSp837x_mP8hFoRQZcn_XI54yGOG42diHGyj1wspJuhoWCg3yZofbmP5PAbt3Cbkpkv6_IeAzLSp08Oq0YRsgylq4LjFtThN5Hyor1Jo4Zgy7DDPfDn0NaGQtHNCA_pBQVl9QjC2jrS9tYLodj7o2aRQPGeZdUWZH_ZY068baGTNB8EBRUdd4gzA/s750/john-wick-4-keanu-reeves-new-trailer-release-000.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="750" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwvwiSp837x_mP8hFoRQZcn_XI54yGOG42diHGyj1wspJuhoWCg3yZofbmP5PAbt3Cbkpkv6_IeAzLSp08Oq0YRsgylq4LjFtThN5Hyor1Jo4Zgy7DDPfDn0NaGQtHNCA_pBQVl9QjC2jrS9tYLodj7o2aRQPGeZdUWZH_ZY068baGTNB8EBRUdd4gzA/w400-h266/john-wick-4-keanu-reeves-new-trailer-release-000.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The exception that proves the rule: John Wick</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>In episode 8, Raquel S. Benedict, most dangerous woman in speculative fiction, joins me to talk about what a mid-budget movie is, what's great about them and why they're an endangered species. Expect a discussion of the magic of <i>The First Wive's Club</i>, the deadly influence of the Thinkpiece-Industrial Complex, and how James Gunn became a victim of his own blob. </p>
<p>Go check out Raquel's own podcast, <a href="https://kittysneezes.com/category/podcast-3/rite-gud/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Rite Gud</a> (Patreon <a href="https://www.patreon.com/ritegud/">here</a>) and <a href="https://bloodknife.com/is-it-imposter-syndrome-or-are-we-all-imposters/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">here's Raquel's most recent contribution to BloodKnife</a>. </p>
<p>You can hear me interrogate The Question in Bodies on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet (like <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-question-in-bodies/id1632902426" target="_blank">Apple</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7tUVmpv4anqwZ2Vo5YMseG" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/0b489b51-57d8-46f0-afc4-449e9070b4be/the-question-in-bodies">Amazon Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL1RoZVF1ZXN0aW9uaW5Cb2RpZXMvZmVlZC54bWw" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> and others) or find the archive at <a href="https://thequestioninbodies.podbean.com/" target="_blank">The Question in Bodies Podbean site</a>. </p>
<p>Want to hear episodes early? Back my <a href="https://patreon.com/howarddavid.ingham" target="_blank">Patreon. </a>It's just one of those American dollars a month for all the stuff. </p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" data-name="pb-iframe-player" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=a8i59-12ad9fd-pb&from=pb6admin&square=1&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" title="Episode 8: The Death of the Mid Budget Movie, with Raquel S Benedict" width="100%"></iframe>
howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-55091355475824515782022-08-15T09:16:00.005+01:002022-08-15T09:21:06.438+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 7: Horror on Screen vs Horror on the Page, with Montilee Stormer<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgek1Sc0FpdJUt_N310-uRSVFOMFs7atBqDS8vnbON1M5WuHXXiQZHcLdRjoz5etahIvLai3uc9E4noj69rlbsBvjUw31KoQ5UnR335Nt6oCc7nvlFWvQwi2CS6J7HajUjL2yeWidEsiCypII2iUIq7eTNOTsAN_31VJnW0owyskbaMWD9acVfNMe5MJA/s1364/annihilation%202.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="566" data-original-width="1364" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgek1Sc0FpdJUt_N310-uRSVFOMFs7atBqDS8vnbON1M5WuHXXiQZHcLdRjoz5etahIvLai3uc9E4noj69rlbsBvjUw31KoQ5UnR335Nt6oCc7nvlFWvQwi2CS6J7HajUjL2yeWidEsiCypII2iUIq7eTNOTsAN_31VJnW0owyskbaMWD9acVfNMe5MJA/w400-h166/annihilation%202.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Contentious adaptations of books you say?<br /></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />In episode 7, horror writer, movie critic and troublemaker Montilee Stormer
is here to talk about the difference between horror on the page and
horror on the screen. Join us for an invigorating chat about final
girls, the ascendance of the TikTok Moment, how green bubble wrap is
better than crap CGI, whether the current crop of horror novels could
even be novelised (and how many words of text Midsommar might actually
amount to), why we all need Bad Decisions, and what makes an unfilmable
book unfilmable. <br data-mce-bogus="1" /><p></p><p>Check out this <a data-mce-href="http://glahw.com/friends-of-glahw-montilee-stormer/" href="http://glahw.com/friends-of-glahw-montilee-stormer/">interview with Montilee at the GLAHW </a>here and then make sure to subscribe to <a data-mce-href="https://moviereelist.com/" href="https://moviereelist.com/">Movie Reelist</a> for Montilee's regular movie reviews. </p><p>You can listen on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet ( like <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-question-in-bodies/id1632902426" target="_blank">Apple</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7tUVmpv4anqwZ2Vo5YMseG" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/0b489b51-57d8-46f0-afc4-449e9070b4be/the-question-in-bodies">Amazon Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL1RoZVF1ZXN0aW9uaW5Cb2RpZXMvZmVlZC54bWw" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> and others) or find the archive at <a href="https://thequestioninbodies.podbean.com/" target="_blank">The Question in Bodies Podbean site</a>. Want to hear episodes early? Back my <a href="https://patreon.com/howarddavid.ingham" target="_blank">Patreon. </a>It's just one of those American dollars. </p><p><br /></p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" data-name="pb-iframe-player" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=83pm5-129bb8b-pb&from=pb6admin&square=1&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" title="Episode 7: Horror on Screen vs Horror on the Page" width="100%"></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-1371794542284590712022-08-08T11:48:00.003+01:002022-08-08T16:58:52.555+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 6: We Appreciate Power, with Tamsin Davis-Langley<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirtu4xlTEQm_-unA_QxHcw7zpKdX5ItJy5tA2n8iZ-a_9ySkGY6dA4O5qUWkPyi4fT5yDrDETVi41_p0O2q_N9yHatYR4jDbIMHz094LqfFwgtc6PgHbHoU_vD2sHO1IkYhbpUsmRq3CSpx0nuMnmUOvUKRa9LiNitVMvCnjAXmMPzYzN4dRlyJqmYWQ/s1900/grimes%20v%20poppy.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1074" data-original-width="1900" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirtu4xlTEQm_-unA_QxHcw7zpKdX5ItJy5tA2n8iZ-a_9ySkGY6dA4O5qUWkPyi4fT5yDrDETVi41_p0O2q_N9yHatYR4jDbIMHz094LqfFwgtc6PgHbHoU_vD2sHO1IkYhbpUsmRq3CSpx0nuMnmUOvUKRa9LiNitVMvCnjAXmMPzYzN4dRlyJqmYWQ/w400-h226/grimes%20v%20poppy.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(<i>Grimes and Poppy, not me and Tamsin as you might have thought</i>)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />This episode, I'm joined by queersoteric hero Tamsin Davis-Langley to talk about one of the Great Questions of our era: Grimes or Poppy?
<p></p><p>That's where we start, anyway. But it gives us an inroad to talking about billionaire Singularity enthusiasts, whether consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, the shocking history of sideburns and sandwiches, and how you get a banging pop tune inspired by the sort of people who want us dead. </p><p>Stick around for the discourse, and then go and find Tamsin's book (writing as Misha Magdalene) <a href="https://www.llewellyn.com/product.php?ean=9780738761329">Outside the Charmed Circle</a>. </p><p>You can listen on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet ( like <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-question-in-bodies/id1632902426" target="_blank">Apple</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7tUVmpv4anqwZ2Vo5YMseG" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/0b489b51-57d8-46f0-afc4-449e9070b4be/the-question-in-bodies">Amazon Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL1RoZVF1ZXN0aW9uaW5Cb2RpZXMvZmVlZC54bWw" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> and others) or find the archive at <a href="https://thequestioninbodies.podbean.com/" target="_blank">The Question in Bodies Podbean site</a>. Want to hear episodes early? Back my <a href="https://patreon.com/howarddavid.ingham" target="_blank">Patreon. </a>It's just one of those American dollars. <br /></p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" data-name="pb-iframe-player" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?from=embed&i=e327s-1291b04-pb&square=1&share=1&download=1&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&rtl=0&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" title="Episode 6: We Appreciate Power, with Tamsin Davis-Langley" width="100%"></iframe>
Oh, we might as well have some of the music, I suppose. Here's a playlist.
<iframe allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/0aUQyNNsZgVTBHdYYVixxV?utm_source=generator" style="border-radius: 12px;" width="100%"></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-82959091604479531982022-08-04T11:42:00.059+01:002022-08-13T00:48:42.753+01:00The Question in Bodies #48: Rainbow Flags, Painted on the Sides of Missiles<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPeQ5owTiESlfFg4l8kRs4AODnnv7HHlBANTB8A0HfCeGKVQf91coPpSj_76zR0fv8kK6E0KPa1wY1cheLKoCuwsL68A9EnGHYzOL7J9Kf6JWPcBwCCDrrIYvjjbSirHTLbQviwZ9GWV8gTaaCgVDgZuIPvmlirCAPyx7rzx5iKVf1eab7fi5t3PUU4w/s1200/hyperdrive.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPeQ5owTiESlfFg4l8kRs4AODnnv7HHlBANTB8A0HfCeGKVQf91coPpSj_76zR0fv8kK6E0KPa1wY1cheLKoCuwsL68A9EnGHYzOL7J9Kf6JWPcBwCCDrrIYvjjbSirHTLbQviwZ9GWV8gTaaCgVDgZuIPvmlirCAPyx7rzx5iKVf1eab7fi5t3PUU4w/w400-h225/hyperdrive.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></div><b><br /></b><i>[I wrote this piece, which juxtaposes little-seen British sitcom </i>Hyperdrive <i>and Isabel Fall's short story "I sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" back in February this year, and you can see the original version of it on my <a href="https://patreon.com/howarddavidingham" target="_blank">Patreon</a>. It's just my luck that the very week I choose to make it public is the week that the Helicopter Controversy gets a rather revealing and depressing coda. I've had to do a little rejigging because of that. But nothing's been toned down. If there's a content warning, it's for unvarnished rage.] <br /><b></b></i><p></p><p><b>Commencify</b><br /><br />Few people commented, even at the time, on Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley’s BBC sitcom <i>Hyperdrive </i>(2006-2007), but weirdly, it reads better now than it did back when it was broadcast. The basic concept was straightforward. Britain, a couple of centuries in the future, a nation which has not, contrary to more optimistic space operas we could name, sorted out its issues with the rest of the world, protects its interests in the stars. The show follows the HMS Camden Lock as they engage in interplanetary diplomacy in a changing galaxy. The comedy comes from the simple idea that a British space navy would still behave under the delusion that it mattered on the international stage and that it was competent and compassionate. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>A ship full of petty bureaucrats and jobsworths flies through space, its crew convinced they are heroes. They travel to far off worlds and contact new civilisations so they can build supermarkets, use these new planets as nuclear waste dumps, and sell the more unprincipled indigenous rulers bombs. They represent Britain in the stars, and they have exactly the same amount of awareness of how poisonous they are to themselves and everyone else as individual cancer cells do.<br /><br />This would make for depressing viewing if the tone wasn’t so daft. Nick Frost and Miranda Hart as the incompetent Commander Henderson and the thirsty Science Officer Teal play versions of their usual comic characters, only in space, while Kevin Eldon as the psychopathic First Officer York doesn’t so much take his performance over the top as into outer orbit. Space opera jargon in the mouths of these characters becomes word salad (“Commencify, Mr. Jeffers”). The extraterrestrials are especially daft, for they spoof already daft <i>Star Trek </i>aliens: the Lallakiss are Estuary Klingons who declare their enmity for the human race with a catchy viral song; the Shiny Red Robots of Vortis are a cut-price Borg; and Geoffrey McGivern, as the recurring Tyrant of Queppu, is just a bit insecure for an alien dictator (“You marvel at my power! There – you <i>marvelled</i>! I distinctly saw you marvel!”).<br /><br />But, as has been the case for British situation comedy from <i>Steptoe and Son </i>through to <i>One Foot in the Grave </i>and beyond, the daffiness is a fig leaf for the misery, the disillusionment. All of the technology is broken, disappointing and shoddy; each of the main characters is in some way broken, disappointed and lonely. No triumph is allowed without it being spoiled in some way; any moment that could be uplifting or inspiring has to be deflated. And while the tail end of the Blair era seemed at the time to be a miserable period, there’s something indefinably Brexit about <i>Hyperdrive</i>, in the way that it marries the delusions we have of our goodness – our heroism even – in the face of every evidence with the bitter truth: Britain, even in the best case, does nothing to improve the world. It feels right for now (except of course, we don’t get to make the comedy of disillusionment on the BBC anymore, so it couldn’t have been made now either).<br /><br />There is probably value in a long-form defence of <i>Hyperdrive</i>, which was poorly received, little watched and only reluctantly promoted, but really we’re here for the one dystopian concept in the show that has real bite. Becky Sandstrom (Petra Massey) is the ship’s navigator. She’s an Enhanced Human, which is HR speak for “cyborg”, connected to the ship’s systems, the better to make the ship run better. If anyone is home inside her metal-encased skull it’s hard to tell. Becky signed up for cyborg enhancement because her student loans would be paid off. She assumed the safety warnings were a formality because she trusted that the authorities knew what they were doing and cared enough to do a good job of enhancing her, displaying that quintessentially British blind trust in dangerously incompetent authority figures that got us all exactly where we are right now.<br /><br />Sandstrom doesn’t remember who she is. She smiles vacantly and talks like an automated telephone queuing system. While the Commander balks at the description of her as “an innocent woman… turned into your techno-slave” he admits in the same breath that she does obey every order he gives and then immediately infantilises her: “...but she loves it! You should see her little face light up when I give her a command!”<br /><br />Sandstrom is only permitted to eat “nourishment gel”, which is probably exactly as depressing as it sounds, and god forbid she taste chocolate, because it short-circuits her digi-brain and sends her into a homicidal rage. Sandstrom can’t find her way out of an open door without a bit of help, helplessly bouncing off the doorframe over and over again with plaintive servomotor whines. A computer virus infects her mind and forces her to spout curse words randomly. The crew deal with her malfunctions with the weary resignation of the employee who just has to work around the crappy systems their workplace uses. And two of the male bridge crew are in love with her, because of course they are. In return Sandstrom holds a flickering digital torch for York, the crew member mostly responsible for programming and repairing her, who calls her things like “loyal digi-servant”. Sandstrom loves her slavemaster.<br /><br />Consider: when, in using your smartphone, laptop, smart TV or whatever device you use, was the last time an app malfunctioned or crashed? When was the last time you saw an intrusive ad while watching a video, playing a game or scrolling social media? When was the last time a spam email or text message avoided your spam filter and wound up in your inbox? The answer is probably some variety of “very recently”.<br /><br />And if the answer to those questions is not some variety of “very recently”, what did you have to do to avoid these things? Having to install an adblocker, for example, requires conscious effort to avoid intrusive adware and causes other obstacles and sometimes online pushbacks. A better spam filter needs to have been tweaked by someone who knows what they’re doing. Somewhere along the line we became acclimated to these things. And even if it works elegantly, you don’t technically own it. It’s designed to stop working in two years, so you’ll have to upgrade when the next model comes along. It’s made in a factory where conditions are so bad that they have nets around the sides of the factory to catch workers who attempt to commit suicide by jumping off the roof. But you’ll accept that. Because you have a phone.<br /><br />In <i>Hyperdrive </i>it’s played in broad strokes, but there is a banal horror in Sandstrom, of a human being transformed into an appliance, into something less than human, and having that called “enhanced”. And what is especially horrific in a woman being made into a depersonalised thing and that being called an improvement is that in the psychopathic schema of capitalism – and I use “psychopathic” precisely here, with its connotation of manipulative charm as much as violent disregard for the human spirit – it really is an improvement. It makes us into the things that capitalist society needs: helpless, obedient consumers, faulty at the point of manufacture, only temporarily reparable, and that for a price.<br /><br />Someone is going to have to have been the guinea pig for that. We’ve already seen stories about all the monkeys tortured to death by steel plates and interface chips implanted in their skulls (thanks, Elon).<br /><br />People turned into literal Human Resources is a phenomenon that fiction has approached. But hardly anyone seems to have written about the <i>crapness</i> of it, the way in which the neurally linked cyborg will have to contend with dismal obstacles like viruses that scramble our language centres and make us call out swears at inappropriate moments, or targeted pop-up ads projected over our retinas, or having our memories paywalled, or having our implanted technology subject to data plans or broadband outages. The concept is largely absent from fiction (although <i>Sorry to Bother You</i> does supply an adjacent example; Jeunet's recent <i>Big Bug </i>is another). Sure, science fiction is full of technologies that warp and control minds, but if they don't work, it is normally for story purposes. Technologies that are faulty because they are made by entities for whom profit is the only metric of success and who only fix things if it’s financially viable to do so are rare in fiction.<br /><br />Forget sex and gender, the reluctance of so much of science fiction to write about these things is one of our final taboos. But the idea that the foundational ideal of Western society itself is a ravening creature that destroys souls is more real and more terrifying than anything a Lovecraft could have thought up because we live it daily.<br /><br />And it’s more horrific still because not only do people live it, they are so used to living it, they do not see it, they can only see through it and past it, and if you make comedy about it (and remember that the comedy that punches up, the good comedy, is often predicated on horror), they won’t even see that there is supposed to be a joke – certainly, this is what happened with the critical reception of <i>Hyperdrive</i> – and if you make horror about it, people will be so confused by what they see as the absurdity of it that it won’t even scare them. <br /><br />Because of that, mistakes are made.<br /><br /><b>Of Helicopters and Tactical Gender Reassignment</b><br /><br />When I started this project, I wanted to concentrate on the horror of the self in media, in film and television. And then I thought, perhaps I would try some literature. I thought I might just look at things, film by film, book by book, and draw some ideas from them, like I did in that book that everyone liked so much.<br /><br />But I started to experience horror myself. I realised that the most horrifying thing I could imagine was to be trapped in here, in this body, with me. And then I realised that, more horrifying still, was to be trapped in here, in this body, with me, in a society that chews people up and spits us out, and whose evils are not invisible, but <i>unseeable</i>. And we who see it begin to think we might be mad, because no matter how loudly we scream to the world about the formless invisible monster that controls our destinies and brainwashes us into trusting that it cares, no one hears.<br /><br />And this brings me to the only short story to date, and probably ever, credited to Isabel Fall, which was published in January 2020 and taken down soon after. Originally titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” (and then, later, “Helicopter Story”), it was simply too good to be allowed to survive.<br /><br />The story is simple enough. The narrator, Barb, once presumably identified as feminine, but has undergone Tactical Gender Reassignment at the behest of the military, and now identifies their gender as Attack Helicopter, because identifying at the level of gender and sexuality with the killing machine they are programmed to pilot makes Barb a better weapon. There is no redemption in the story: right from the beginning, Barb commits atrocities. Barb delights in being a machine. Barb flirts with their similarly rewired copilot. The story is a nightmare of the military-industrial complex gone wild, Becky Sandstrom played straight as an unapologetic and mostly happy war criminal, affirmed and fulfilled in a gender identity created by the structures of a society that makes them do monstrous things. There is no hope here, just the acceptance of an existence in a dystopian world where those of us in minorities might proudly join our cishet white colleagues as tools of the capitalist-military enterprise.<br /><br />The story more or less spells it out. It isn’t even especially subtle:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>“Voice recorder’s off, right?” Axis asks.<br />"Always.”</i><br /><i>“I love doing this. I love doing it with you. I just don’t know if it’s . . . if it's right.”</i><br /><i>“Thank you,” I say.</i><br /><i>“Barb?”</i><br /><i>“Thank you for thinking about whether it’s right. Someone needs to.”</i><br /><i>Maybe what Axis feels is a necessary new queerness. One which pries the tool of gender back from the hands of the state and the economy and the war. I like that idea. I cannot think of myself as a failure, as something wrong, perversion of a liberty that past generations fought to gain. But Axis can. And maybe you can too. That skepticism is not what I need… but it is necessary anyway. I have tried to show you what I am. I have tried to do it without judgment. That I leave to you. </i>(Fall, “Helicopter Story”)</blockquote><p>Of course it’s a horror story. And like the best dystopias it’s not really about the future. Everyone probably knows that <i>1984 </i>is just 1948 scrambled, but people weirdly slide past what that actually means, instead either laughing because they think the promised dystopia never came, or seeing it as a warning about communism and reacting to it either way depending on which end of the political spectrum they are. Of course Orwell wrote a parable about his <i>now. </i></p><p>Orwell’s concept of Newspeak was based on the now pretty much disproven Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistics. In fact, you <i>can</i> think and feel things you don’t have words for – you can go back as far as Catullus to prove that – but what Orwell is doing is showing a society that systematises what his society, our society, already did, does, continues to do. He’s showing us a society that is deliberately trying to make it impossible for people to imagine a different one.<br /><br />Fall is doing the same. She presented a world where the language of revolt is almost lost. Barb cannot think of themself as something wrong. They cannot see that they are a perversion of the rights of the diverse. Axis can, but Barb is happy. Barb loves being gendered as a vehicle for atrocity, because Barb has been programmed to feel this way. Barb is unable to imagine not being a killing machine – Axis can, but Barb’s gratitude for Axis’s doubts lies in those doubts being, in Barb’s reprogrammed selfhood, a confirmation that this <i>is </i>right, the sense that as long as you’re aware of a thing and question it, that means you’re probably doing the right thing. Barb is a perfect, textbook liberal: Barb is forever sad about bombing schoolchildren, but thinks that being a diverse voice in bombing schoolchildren somehow redeems that.<br /><br />And that just makes everything worse. It’s not an awakening, it’s a confirmation that Barb is forever fucked and doesn’t even know it. </p><p></p><p>It is a beautiful and nuanced piece of writing. The rage under the Attack Helicopter’s streamlined nacelles, in the warheads of its shining missiles, is palpable. But it was never going to fly with the public. Because it it not subtle. It might beggar belief that people might not get it. But here we are. <br /><br />It seems counterintuitive, but the most brutal critics of the story were the very people it was for. The title, reclaimed from the already tired right-wing meme, aroused suspicion from the start. People seemed not to be able to see the critique in it. Inevitably, accusations of entryism – Fall, early in her transition (and I am using “her” because that’s how she was identifying when the story was published – I don’t know what pronouns Fall uses now) had been intensely private and had no internet presence under that name. People who should have understood the story read it and said – and at first assessment this is baffling – that they were hurt by it, that it was viciously transphobic. The inevitable accusation levelled at trans people who don’t play the game correctly, “internalised transphobia”, appeared. People simply couldn’t countenance the idea of someone suggesting that our society might pervert gains in inclusions and diversity to perpetrate its primary crimes. They mistook the presentation of a character unable to see the wrongs of this as an attack on diversity.<br /><br />Supposedly progressive communities, especially the Extremely Online ones, often have an implicit, unspoken moral calculus by which they can work out the cost of a human being’s expendability. And among the most expendable are queer people who don’t for whatever reason behave according to certain unsaid rules. Isabel Fall wrote a story that was powerful, that had a core of rage, that provoked and transgressed, that interrogated our societal shibboleths. And she did not step forward and declare her interests publicly. So, of course she paid for it. She was not performing her queerness in a domesticated way. Because the spectre of what Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism was so endemic in the speculative fiction community – <i>especially </i>in the speculative fiction community – people weren’t just inadequately literate to understand a sword-wielding archangelic metaphor blazing with fire and rage right in front of their faces, they <i>were unable even to understand what it was they were even reading</i>, and it disquieted them in the way that an angel disquiets the mortal and mundane. Do not be afraid, says the angel. But of course, fear of a thing that you are not equipped to understand is the only likely outcome.</p><p>Or maybe they did understand it. Maybe that was the problem. <br /><br />It turned out long after the damage had been done, that at least one of the prominent critics of the story, a trans person who claimed that the story was personally hurtful, in fact worked for
one of the biggest manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction. This rather
underlines the point really. Of course this person was hurt by it. This was the exact sort of person that the story is about. The trans arms industry employee was right to feel attacked by it, because <i>it was a direct attack</i>. If it had not hurt this person, the story would have not worked. What was wrong was equating a recognition of disquiet and upset with the idea that the story was doing some sort of harm. <br /></p><p>And because people were disquieted, they assumed that Isabel Fall was a bad actor. They behaved like they had the right to legislate her identity, and they didn’t care who this person was. Eventually it came out that Isabel Fall, traumatised by the response to her story, went back to her deadname and returned to the closet for the sake of safety. She had detransitioned. Isabel Fall was gone. Insincere regrets were expressed, justifications were concocted, non-apologies were made. Nothing changed. The existential manslaughter of Isabel Fall was effected, and her writing has been effaced largely by the very people who scream to the heavens that they are on the side of people like her. </p><p>The Sexual Counter-Revolution has consolidated its gains.<br /><br />Isabel Fall wrote a story about a world where multinational corporations that pay their slave labour employees poverty wages and bleed ordinary people dry the moment they dare to get ill paint their brand dress with rainbows one month every year and everyone smiles and applauds. She wrote about a world where people wouldn’t have a problem where a government might systematically put children in concentration camps and be celebrated for legislating equal marriage in the same year. Or where a person in a minority might be the landmark winner of a literary award whose ceremony is sponsored by an international arms manufacturer. Isabel Fall wrote about a world where diversity – and diversity is a good in and of itself and the fact I even have to write that is terrifying – is reduced by the forces that rule us to the implicit definition of allowing people to become the sole of the boot rather than the material the boot grinds underfoot. And a world where pointing out that your gains in rights might only make you the sole of the boot immediately makes you a thing that must be stamped on, hard. </p><p>Some people have <i>fought </i>to be part of that rubber tread, after all. <br /><br />“I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” is an utterly chilling story, absolutely terrifying, but the most entirely horrifying thing about it is how its author fell prey to the very processes she wrote about.<br /><br />True liberation cannot happen until we have places where we can safely imagine the ramifications of who we are without harming anyone, or exposing ourselves to harm. </p><p>We need to be allowed to imagine idealised or appalling forms immune to your shock. </p><p>We need to be depicted behaving badly on occasion, not because we are queer, but because we are <i>human. </i></p><p>We need to be released from the patronising need to be the perfect role model. </p><p>We need to be able to exist in fiction without being your representation tithe. </p><p>We need to say why we reject your claim that “everything will be OK” or why “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice” is a patronising lie designed to keep us in our place. </p><p>We need to explain we are not your property and why we are neither your fetishes nor your inspirational stories. </p><p>We need to have the right to reject your offered compromises, your bribes. </p><p>We need to get to choose who we are, without requiring your permission, for as it stands, the revocation of your permission spells our destruction as humans. </p><p>Until then, the best that we – and I <i>mean </i>that “we”, I’m including myself here – can hope for is a clean, well-lit, well-ventilated closet, firmly padlocked on the outside.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-42262650435479791322022-08-01T10:42:00.000+01:002022-08-01T10:42:04.730+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 5: Neurodiversity and Horror, with Joanna Swan<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhygRA8u_tbDmRSI2U9YyrVjBQt8g9f6NcmVViVyJIC1cG2cBcUgFdWRaW8I_amK0bwI4XS32Xl1gFfJlSofaIM7nigXBej9QuN9sFuj4UjdJ-VhTbZfJAI4N9UKq2QeNanerR3UR4bf2ZVXYj6TJu1O7wOSrx5HVzfpsZY_pivH9VrrlPPJxRY7bmOWQ/s1024/neurodiversity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhygRA8u_tbDmRSI2U9YyrVjBQt8g9f6NcmVViVyJIC1cG2cBcUgFdWRaW8I_amK0bwI4XS32Xl1gFfJlSofaIM7nigXBej9QuN9sFuj4UjdJ-VhTbZfJAI4N9UKq2QeNanerR3UR4bf2ZVXYj6TJu1O7wOSrx5HVzfpsZY_pivH9VrrlPPJxRY7bmOWQ/w400-h225/neurodiversity.jpg" title="Annalynne McCord in Excision and Angela Bettis in May" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Annalynne McCord in <i>Excision</i>; Angela Bettis in <i>May</i>.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>It's Monday, and it's another instalment in Season 1 of the Question in Bodies Podcast. In episode 5, I'm joined by actor <b>Joanna Swan </b>to talk about the horror of being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world, why the best depictions of neurodiversity in cinema are in horror, and to do some deep dives into the movies <em>Excision </em>(2012) and <em>May</em> (2002).</p><p>Check it out on your favourite podcast outlet (and maybe you know, subscribe), or just listen on the handy widget below. Or if you want to get episodes early, back me on my <a href="https://patreon.com/howarddavidingham" target="_blank">Patreon</a>.<br /></p>
<iframe title="Episode 5: Neurodiversity in Horror, with Joanna Swan" allowtransparency="true" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" scrolling="no" data-name="pb-iframe-player" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=e4vvm-12896b0-pb&from=pb6admin&square=1&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" allowfullscreen="" width="100%" height="300"></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-13046449793723683032022-07-28T11:20:00.004+01:002022-07-28T14:03:27.953+01:00The Question in Bodies #47: What say of it? What say of CONSCIENCE grim?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEink-ForajH_erwAdvG6ucUdnm4Q-QHl7qREyEaJgj-YfTzXp66HfwVBZ2_KrAmrDlv8kXg1XOL9KGIVQ2NLJ0rwFO9tWa2kjNJ2HNRhFqZr8nkxSo4dL_o49JcaF4jy36YTuduCnG8YYUKw-E764F1XLEpN8G1eQhPBnwimjGU3q63C_JzJfFo6yz7bQ/s819/spirits-of-the-dead.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="449" data-original-width="819" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEink-ForajH_erwAdvG6ucUdnm4Q-QHl7qREyEaJgj-YfTzXp66HfwVBZ2_KrAmrDlv8kXg1XOL9KGIVQ2NLJ0rwFO9tWa2kjNJ2HNRhFqZr8nkxSo4dL_o49JcaF4jy36YTuduCnG8YYUKw-E764F1XLEpN8G1eQhPBnwimjGU3q63C_JzJfFo6yz7bQ/w400-h219/spirits-of-the-dead.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alain Delon as William Wilson in <i>Spirits of the Dead</i> (1968)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>
<blockquote><i>“What say of it? What say of CONSCIENCE grim, that spectre in my path?” – Chamberlaine’s Pharronida – </i>Poe, “William Wilson”<i><br /></i></blockquote>
<p>I have never quite nailed down in my head whether I think Edgar Allan Poe misremembered the spurious epigrammatic quotes that pepper his work or if he just made them up. It doesn’t matter, in the end, but the effect is the same: an epigram offers up your text to be commented on by the world that already exists. It places it in a space, a context. But Poe’s epigrams all too often enhance the unreality of his worlds, the dreamlike nature of his stories. The footnotes in the editions of Poe I have – I have several – pretty much always say of the epigrams at the start of his stories and poems something like “this quote does not appear in the source it’s attributed to”.<br /></p>
<p>The one at the start of “William Wilson”, my favourite of all Poe’s stories, might be the best example.</p><a name='more'></a>
<p>William Chamberlayne (with a Y) was a relatively obscure 17th century English poet and playwright. There’s evidence Poe had read Chamberlayne – he briefly had something of a revival in Poe’s time thanks to an edition of his collected works – but while there is a line about conscience in the play <i>Love’s Victory</i>, there is nothing like this specific quotation anywhere in Chamberlayne’s work, and certainly not in his epic poem <i>Pharronida</i>. There is a sort of legitimacy in referencing a book that in Poe’s context many more people had probably heard of than actually read, but these are Poe’s words.</p>
<p>The line frames conscience as a threatening ghost that stands in our way. Conscience is a horror, a thing that you cannot talk about lest it destroy you.</p>
<p>The epigram matters because right up front it gives us the central key to the story, its moral point, a point that the main body of ”William Wilson” avoids telling you, even to the extent that the word “conscience” appears at no point in the body of the story: a man is plagued by his conscience, which stands in his way to thwart him, personified in the form of the most unsettling of all spectres: the Doppelganger.</p>
<blockquote><i>Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion when the suggestions of my rival were on the side of those errors or follies so usual to his immature age, and seeming inexperience; that his moral sense, at least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom, was far keener than my own; and that I might, today, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated, and too bitterly despised. </i> – Poe, “William Wilson”</blockquote>
<p>A synopsis: the narrator tells you he’s about to die, and that story serves as a sort of confession. He assures the reader that he is a creature of diabolical evil, and explains that he’s about to tell you the story of how he gave up the last vestiges of morality, the moment when, “in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily, as a mantle.” Since early adolescence, he tells us, he was plagued by a double, a man with the same name as him, who looked and acted just like him, and who always spoke in a whisper. This enemy dogs him through various adventures, thwarting every crime he tries to commit, until, finally, they meet in a duel of swords, and the narrator murders his tormentor, only to find that he has murdered his own self, or, more specifically, all that is good in himself.</p><p>Throughout the story, the narrator and his Doppelganger are named eponymously: <i>William Wilson</i>. But our narrator is also clear from the beginning that William Wilson is not in fact his name.</p><blockquote><i>Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn, for the horror, for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! To the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?</i></blockquote><p>For many people, most people, I suppose, their name is the linchpin of their identity, a vital part of the soul; those of us, like me, who lack any emotional connection with their names, who don’t feel that they have one, lack something fundamental. Our name is the idea of who we are that others attach to it. It is a signifier, the complex structure of a person’s meaning encompassed in a brief string of words, a picture in a person’s head, and the only fragile posterity most of us will ever have.</p>
<p>What then does it mean to read a story that hinges on the meaning of a name that isn’t a name?</p>
<p>He says his name is like William Wilson, in that it’s an ordinary name, the sort of name a lot of people have. But if that were the case, why would it be the immediate subject of hate and revulsion?</p>
<blockquote><i>I'm Nobody! Who are you?<br />Are you – Nobody – too?<br />Then there's a pair of us!<br />Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!<br />How dreary – to be – Somebody!<br />How public – like a Frog –<br />To tell one's name – the livelong June –<br />To an admiring Bog!</i><br />– Emily Dickinson, “Nobody”</blockquote>
<p>Certainly the only person who actually appears in the story – and there aren’t all that many, and you couldn’t really call any of them characters apart from the narrator – in whom the name inspires horror is our William Wilson himself. And he hates it because it’s an ordinary name. He feels he deserved to be called something elevated, something patrician. Something unusual. But he’s got the name of a nobody, a non-name, and he becomes even less of the bearer of a name by taking on a name that isn’t his. He becomes nobody.</p><p>Even his early life isn’t his own, really: the boarding school he describes is Poe’s, the author imposing his own life on the character. Which is a perfectly normal thing for a writer to do, of course. Writers insert autobiography into their fiction all the time – write what you know – but I think the point is that here it imperils Wilson’s personhood even more. He is only part of a person, and as such falls into the uncanny valley.</p>
<blockquote><i>I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me, than by saying I could with difficulty shake off the belief that myself and the being who stood before me had been acquainted at some epoch very long ago; some point of the past even infinitely remote.</i></blockquote>
<p>If he is nobody, then the other William Wilson, who becomes his classmate on the same day as him, who shares his birthday and his first and last name, is doubly nobody, a person only in the context of our narrator.</p>
<p>Hold on a second, though. It’s not cut and dried that the Doppelganger is wholly a product of the narrator’s imagination, either; he tells us that at school there is gossip among the higher forms of the school that he and the other Wilson are twins; a servant announces the Doppelganger’s intrusion; the double stands amidst the appalled victims and instructs them to find the doctored cards in his jacket; instructed to leave, his honour destroyed, the narrator accepts his uniquely tailored overcoat – except it isn’t his coat, because his own coat is already on his arm.</p>
<p>Wilson’s double has a physicality that extends beyond his imagination. People know when the other Wilson is present. They see. They hear. For them the Conscience is a different person.</p>
<blockquote><i>Immediately upon my entering he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me by the arm with a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words "William Wilson!" in my ear. I grew perfectly sober in an instant. </i><i>– </i>Poe, “William Wilson”<i></i></blockquote>
<p>Trying to decipher Wilson’s experience to make sense in some real world is missing the point. Sure, you could imagine the sixth formers getting confused because Wilson acted so differently when he was good that they thought he was a different kid and had a nicer twin brother, or that the scene in the card game is actually precipitated by Wilson, plagued by an attack conscience, coming clean in the face of Lord Glendinning’s despair and revealing everything. But that misses the point. We’re not supposed to decipher what “really” happened, or even make sense of it. Just as in our own heads, the story is rarely straight or sequential or Aristotelian in its unity. A fiction doesn’t have to be factual. It just has to be <i>true</i>.</p><blockquote><i>Could he, for an instant, have supposed that, in my admonisher at Eton -- in the destroyer of my honor at Oxford -- in him who thwarted my ambition at Rome, my revenge in Paris, my passionate love at Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in Egypt -- that in this, my arch-enemy and evil genius, I could fail to recognise the William Wilson of my schoolboy days -- the namesake, the companion, the rival, the hated and dreaded rival at Dr. Bransby's? </i><i>– </i>Poe, “William Wilson”<i></i></blockquote><p>It’s probably not a bad idea to compare the William Wilsons to Jekyll and Hyde: once again, we have a distinct person of sorts who is not a person at all, and how that fractionation becomes conducive to unease. But while Henry Jekyll takes futile steps to cordon off and defeat his sin, William Wilson successfully stabs his virtue.</p><p>The device of the “evil twin” is a standard of popular storytelling, but this, which surely must be one of the earliest if not the very first of the important examples – the story was published in 1839 – turns the idea around, for the evil twin is the narrator’s good.</p><blockquote><i>But, of late days, I had given myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening influence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more and more impatient of control. I began to murmur -- to hesitate -- to resist. And was it only fancy which induced me to believe that, with the increase of my own firmness, that of my tormentor underwent a proportional diminution? </i><i>– </i>Poe, “William Wilson”<i></i></blockquote><p>I wonder if it is a characteristic of authors prone to addictions to imagine themselves as split beings? Poe’s reputation for addiction was inflated, but that he had an alcohol problem is as indisputable as it was for Stevenson.</p><p>Once again, a writer imagines that alcohol makes a brute of you, that the conscience is dulled by your descent into addiction. And addictions really do damage us morally.</p><p>The Twelve Step Program, as initiated by Alcoholics Anonymous and widely used by recovery organisations, includes in all its variations as its eighth step:</p><blockquote><i>[We] made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.</i></blockquote><p>None of us live in isolation. Anything that makes us put a substance, or a behaviour, or an experience, or even perhaps an idea, an ideology, above our care for those around us damages our relationships and may cause material and emotional damage to the people with whom we maintain relationships.</p><p>Because human relationships are fragile and it takes courage to have them.</p><p>It’s as easy to spot an addict as it is to spot a fanatic, and when the throes of addiction and fanaticism alike manifest in conversation both give a signifier of something missing, something damaged, and perhaps something contagious. Something oddly repellent.</p><p>Those higher, better human traits still exist inside us, but they are locked away. They are consigned to a different state of personhood. They are over <i>there</i>, in that other person. They are the Doppelganger who whispers advice, fragile and intermittent.</p><blockquote><i>It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper; and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said -- “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead -- dead to the world and its hopes. In me didst thou exist -- and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” </i><i>– </i>Poe, “William Wilson”<i></i></blockquote><p>What does it mean to murder a part of yourself?</p><p>I don’t know. I don’t have a hated double to stab; I don’t have much skill with a rapier. In a fight between me and my other, I picture them driving their bladed nails deep into my face, their hands closing on my throat.</p><p>But the sort of person who’d take a toddler by the ankles and smash the child’s skull against the wall for the sake of Nazism – or the sort of person who’d go into a Black church and be welcomed and given coffee and then open fire on the congregants – or the sort of man who’d kill 69 children on a youth camp – or the sort of person who’d take a boat out into the English channel and attempt to sink a boat full of refugees – or the sort of person who’d convince themself that conversion therapy was compassionate and moral, regardless of the evidence of their senses – is a person in whom something has died, and these things don’t die naturally, on the whole.</p><p>The death of the partial self might not be consciously achieved – it might be the result, metaphorically, of slow environmental poisoning, of a botched surgical procedure, of criminal negligence, of reckless driving. Oppressive organisational bodies, whether military, legislative, religious or cultic, everything from antivax conspiracy groups, to national standing armies, to gender-critical activists, to bureaucratic employers, to, ironically, churches, strive to extinguish the whispering voice of compassion. The result is the same, and it is growing around us.</p><p>In Poe’s day, the image of a man’s higher self being stabbed was in itself enough to inspire horror. It happened every day in his society of course – the man lived in Virginia in the first half of the nineteenth century, after all – but now it feels like we’re seeing a move to destroy the human conscience forever on an industrial scale. A single murder is the first step to more deaths.</p><p>When we think about what William Wilson looked like when the good in him was dead, perhaps it is a long-ago precursor of how the human race will look once the genocide of the human spirit has been effected.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-23985313363861273062022-07-25T13:05:00.002+01:002022-08-15T23:28:48.457+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 4: Return to the House of Psychotic Women, feat. Kier-La Janisse<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBu0ySk7g5rQKpf51bOInxgyHHNZz5Kztw2eNN8O3F5xW8LUHgWgMIpl7aPw6ZrhSaf6b1jVO-xjP353LaMIYKZKpzOM01gKNJy1q4NpEiBYxOJlzlG4QkwwUhHu8ul21-Wm2UkLUV2h0BEqc8PyP3mB9I68VUXWedCK6zQ5oH1mZAqD_9tPTSsr-8fA/s1366/february4.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBu0ySk7g5rQKpf51bOInxgyHHNZz5Kztw2eNN8O3F5xW8LUHgWgMIpl7aPw6ZrhSaf6b1jVO-xjP353LaMIYKZKpzOM01gKNJy1q4NpEiBYxOJlzlG4QkwwUhHu8ul21-Wm2UkLUV2h0BEqc8PyP3mB9I68VUXWedCK6zQ5oH1mZAqD_9tPTSsr-8fA/w400-h225/february4.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emma Roberts in <i>The Blackcoat's Daughter </i>(2015)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>In this episode I talk with festival programmer, writer and editor, and award-winning director of <i>Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror </i>Kier-La Janisse, about the imminently released new edition of her hugely influential book <i>House of Psychotic Women. </i>We talk about how Kier-La created a genre, her favourites of the films that have been made since, and just how much bigger the new edition is – which you can order at <a href="https://www.fabpress.com/hopw-expanded-edition-hardcover.html">fabpress.com/hopw-expanded-edition-hardcover.html</a><br /></p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" data-name="pb-iframe-player" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=spsb8-1281573-pb&from=pb6admin&square=1&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" title="Episode 4: Return of The House of Psychotic Women, feat. Kier-La Janisse" width="100%"></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-73831218333327097582022-07-21T11:48:00.023+01:002022-07-21T17:44:30.513+01:00The Question in Bodies #46: Transeverything Identity in the Films of Julia Ducournau<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx-JUA_wLVOjU7cd0XEfvsp3SQYa9jl6NvKyZo7ciM_Y4hh4Ke0BSheH8WG24WIAB01a7mbfEG4DCJqCl-82lQtfI25Zy-VypB8-iWji1K-W17eUMA3z_FkZlNlV6Edq27Ev4wUgzyFWQHxBcW0l6Pf21cdcxZAHCDs3qSI8phR4u495CpkeNJkJpgng/s6641/Titane%202(1).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3736" data-original-width="6641" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx-JUA_wLVOjU7cd0XEfvsp3SQYa9jl6NvKyZo7ciM_Y4hh4Ke0BSheH8WG24WIAB01a7mbfEG4DCJqCl-82lQtfI25Zy-VypB8-iWji1K-W17eUMA3z_FkZlNlV6Edq27Ev4wUgzyFWQHxBcW0l6Pf21cdcxZAHCDs3qSI8phR4u495CpkeNJkJpgng/w400-h225/Titane%202(1).jpg" width="400" /></a></i></div><i><br />(Spoilers, all of them)<b> <br /></b></i><p></p><p><i><b>people are just not good to each other</b></i></p><p>A little girl mucks about in the back of a car. Her behaviour gets worse and worse; eventually she takes off her seatbelt, and her dad, his attention now thoroughly distracted, crashes the car. To reconstruct her smashed skull, a titanium plate is implanted, which leaves her with a distinctive spiral scar on the side of her head. Leaving the hospital, the child ignores her parents, running to the car, which she embraces, and kisses.</p><p>Cut to her adult life: now she is a bisexual, genderfluid adult dancer. She is also a casual serial killer, whose lack of care attracts police attention. She has sex with a fancy custom car, and gets pregnant by it. As her body experiences the changes that might come from bearing a semi-mechanical mutant made of flesh, metal and engine oil, she goes on the run.</p><p>Look. All that is probably enough to be getting on with, but really that doesn’t even get you past the first half of Julia Ducorneau’s stunning 2021 film <i>Titane </i>(simply, “Titanium”). And you really need to have seen this movie before you read this next part. I mean, you can read this and you’ll be fine, it won’t ruin your life, so perhaps rather than tell you that you need to have seen it maybe it is better to say that I want you to have seen it. I think it’s a film that travels in directions that are better seen than talked about. And I'm going to be breaking down scenes in detail.</p><p>Now, while “Spoiler” discourse is usually toxic and stupid, a way to strangle discussion and thought in the crib, some films are simply better experienced without you knowing anything about them. And there’s a reason a film that looks on paper like a fairly direct piece of New French Extremity wound up winning the 2021 Palme d’Or (and a reason that, quite frankly, if I’d been on that jury at Cannes, I’d have voted to give it the Palme d’Or as well). Because what happens next turns a film with a bit of body horror and some quirky and gory murders into something entirely different. It becomes something smaller, stranger, and oddly, dysfunctionally beautiful.</p><p>But calling it dysfunctional isn’t right either. Like the highly polished custom that fathers Alexia’s child, <i>Titane </i>hides precision engineering under its shining bodywork, and its unique quirks a signifier of a surprising amount of passion, and even love.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfR0OaL7tIA4xcRLnDvWgnjhqvCk_AoDSXLFzHwW0ytPv9P_S-6RUisHRKOyoh5DibjNkF7nOYL8Adl7IIk4y7kpKmwXzlVDy-OrAFbLVWMHTyVEiAlzNKnKeA62XjdSVty96en0DZ_FZoz0ttHxz1ZCF5GYyvhdsNSt_X4QV6TBPKiN45OodK_qAWqw/s6617/TITANE_Photo_2%C2%A9Carole_Bethuel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3722" data-original-width="6617" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfR0OaL7tIA4xcRLnDvWgnjhqvCk_AoDSXLFzHwW0ytPv9P_S-6RUisHRKOyoh5DibjNkF7nOYL8Adl7IIk4y7kpKmwXzlVDy-OrAFbLVWMHTyVEiAlzNKnKeA62XjdSVty96en0DZ_FZoz0ttHxz1ZCF5GYyvhdsNSt_X4QV6TBPKiN45OodK_qAWqw/w400-h225/TITANE_Photo_2%C2%A9Carole_Bethuel.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></div><b><br />we don’t think about the terror of one person</b><p></p><p>From the moment we see her, as portrayed by writer and model Agathe Rousselle, Alexia’s raw-boned, broad-shouldered sexuality is a threat. She glowers at you. We are inclined, to begin with, to discount that threat, to place the danger elsewhere. She’s followed through a pedestrian subway in the dark by a man who speeds up when she does: we necessarily expect the worst, but it’s just a fan, the exact sort of straight guy who has no clue how creepy and entitled he’s being. We read Alexia’s FFS expression as the impatience and frustration of someone who has to deal with this shit all the time. When he oversteps and forces a kiss on her, we read her leaning into it as a spur-of-the-moment survival tactic, her reaching for the chopstick that's holding her hair up as an improvisational move, and her ramming it through his ear and deep into his hindbrain with the sickening sound of an egg being crushed as something desperate, immediate.</p><p>Later, we might read her exultant use of a flame-painted lowrider as a solo sex aid as an act of catharsis, the rape-revenge trajectory.</p><p>But it’s not like that. Or it is a bit like that. But it’s not entirely like that. As the film goes on, we discover that this is not Alexia’s first murder; and that the “chopstick in the brain meat” method is in fact her signature killing move and may even be the reason she uses the thing to tie her hair up in the first place. Later, she will try and fail to abort her half-mechanical pregnancy with it; later still, the chopstick will be the only possession she retains after going on the run and changing her identity and gender.</p><p>Why Alexia kills is explicitly signified as for other reasons than the usual (inasmuch as any serial killer is “usual”). There’s no thrill in it for her. In fact, her attitude to it is, more than anything, weary. She sighs, and rolls her eyes, and tightens her lips and stares into the middle distance for a moment. Her use of gory and creative improvised weapons (the bit with the chair is a hard one to unsee) isn’t a mark of creativity or even sadism, it’s her not having the patience to plan anything more efficient. And it goes right back to that scene before the credits where she causes the accident and gets the titanium plate implanted in her head: she loses patience. And the messed-up connection in Alexia’s cyborg brain draws a direct line from “For fuck’s sake, will this person ever leave me alone?” to “Oh, for the love of God, I'm going to have to brutally murder this person too.”</p><p>Fellow dancer Justine and Alexia begin a relationship; she’s clearly into Alexia, but Alexia’s fascination extends to the rings in Justine’s nipples, a body with metal in it. But Justine, notwithstanding her Sadeian name, is simply not metal enough, not cyborg enough, and Justine inevitably gets the chopstick lobotomy. Alexia’s internal compulsion/obligation to kill leads to a messy, desultory massacre of everyone else present in Justine’s house that would be pretty funny if it wasn’t so ridiculously extreme.</p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiudd74RURaBEIktqCXlk42WVkfgMqukabaUlcRLtKrv7RpH_E_CPjeTlBIMj-uF3DZr7e5SOM-7xNBmmb9e-Z0Ijs8lfX2P-YuLrW0qSTvhyVt7B_lRE2zEiW6KPTYG_9UAnWKqpJv_JQ6cbV-_YiXoOV3dEyz381zGpWJ5vqh659HHXwQBKjCirgkcg/s6720/TITANE_Photo_6%C2%A9Carole_Bethuel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3543" data-original-width="6720" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiudd74RURaBEIktqCXlk42WVkfgMqukabaUlcRLtKrv7RpH_E_CPjeTlBIMj-uF3DZr7e5SOM-7xNBmmb9e-Z0Ijs8lfX2P-YuLrW0qSTvhyVt7B_lRE2zEiW6KPTYG_9UAnWKqpJv_JQ6cbV-_YiXoOV3dEyz381zGpWJ5vqh659HHXwQBKjCirgkcg/w400-h211/TITANE_Photo_6%C2%A9Carole_Bethuel.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />(we need to talk about Justine though)</b></i><p></p><p>Now, why should Justine matter at least as much as Alexia or (as we’ll see later) Vincent? Justine dies early on, at Alexia’s hand, after all. In plot terms, her death is there to get us to that gory and blackly comedic massacre – and “comedic” doesn’t have to mean funny, so much as it might be just grotesque. Horror and comedy rely on discomfort.</p><p>The thing that needs to be addressed then is that both of Ducournau’s previous films, the short <i>Junior </i>(2011) and debut feature <i>Raw </i>(2017) both star Marillier as a character called Justine.</p><p>Now, a lot of people are called Justine. It’s an enduringly popular girl’s name in both Britain and France. But the naming of characters in fictions does not follow the same rules as the naming of people in the real world. When you reuse names in this way – especially when you reuse more than one, something is going on.</p><p>Justine particularly is a Sadeian heroine. In the novel of the same name by the Marquis de Sade, Justine is a virtuous young woman whose virtue is rewarded by rape, degradation, humiliation and eventual death, as opposed to her sister Juliette, whose vice is rewarded. Justine never gets a break in Sade. Angela Carter’s <i>The Sadeian Woman </i>provides a strong critique of Justine and Juliette and their fates. But the Justine of Julia Ducournau’s canon is, I think, a Justine that Carter would have seen in a more positive light.</p><p>There is a strong temptation to imagine <i>Titane </i>as only a sequel to <i>Raw</i>, set in a time where <i>Raw’s </i>Justine dropped out of vet school and, now, slightly older, wound up go-go dancing to make her living.</p><p>But <i>Raw </i>also features an Alexia and an Adrien, who cannot be exactly the same characters that they are in <i>Titane</i>. In <i>Raw</i>, the story of a first year veterinary student who discovers that she has an awkward craving for the taste of human flesh, Alexia (here played by Ella Rumpf) is Justine’s older sister. But like the Alexia of <i>Titane</i>, she is still a sociopath, as the first of several bonkers twists in the film reveals. Meanwhile, the Adrien of <i>Raw </i>(Rabah Naït Oufella), who disappeared as a child in <i>Titane</i>, is Justine’s roommate. The fates of the three characters are very different to their fates in <i>Titane</i>, but there are commonalities, repeated images.</p><p>The act of Justine’s murder in <i>Titane </i>is messy, painful, inefficient. Alexia misses with the chopstick on her first go, and instead impales Justine’s left cheek; although the final result is different, the confrontation between Alexia and Justine in <i>Raw </i>inflicts the same specific injury. In both films, we see a close up of the tip of a sharp object – an everyday object not intended for violence – dragged across a floor with menace. In <i>Junior</i>, Justine wakes up to find that her skin has done some weird things. This happens in <i>Raw</i>, too. These very specific, disturbing images change their contexts and their outcomes but they are nonetheless the same, plugged into a new setting.</p><p>And that’s how it is with the character of Justine in particular: in <i>Junior</i>, filmed when she was about 12 years old, Marillier plays Justine as a tomboyish kid whose bittersweet transition into adolescence is symbolised by the shedding of her skin; in <i>Raw</i>, Marillier, now not quite 18 at the time of filming (but already starting to resemble a young Diana Rigg), plays Justine as a young woman whose entry into her sexual prime and the struggles it brings is symbolised by an awkward compulsion to see attractive boys as ”snacks” in more than just the colloquial sense.</p><p>In <i>Titane</i>, she’s destroyed and discarded.</p><p>Each time, she is the same character.</p><p>Fictional characters aren’t people: they’re symbolic representations of people, signifiers of some part of the human condition. They don’t have to follow the life arcs of people. We must live in the same world and must remain here until we die. But fictions can be reborn the same in different times and places.</p><p>Ducournau here is claiming the rarely used privilege of the fiction writer to reuse and reframe their protagonists. What if Justine, only a university student undergoing an endless series of hazings? What if Justine, only an erotic dancer at a car show who gets her nipple piercings tangled in her colleague’s hair?</p><p>(<i>Footnote</i>: another example that springs to mind is Michael Moorcock’s character Jerry Cornelius, who among other guises appears in print as a working class teenager, an assassin, a secret agent, a rock star, a post apocalyptic adventurer, three different starship captains, a Commedia dell’ Arte player, and the last of the elves.)</p><p>It’s useful to see <i>Titane </i>in this context, because these other stories illuminate it: it’s part of a body of work, of a piece with it, and we get to explore related themes in different contexts and from different directions. <i>Junior </i>and <i>Raw </i>both explore life transitions using fantastical body horrors. They explore the performance of gender. They are films of awakening.</p><p>And they’re also films where love of various kinds – and not sexual love, the altruistic love of family and found family – exists as an influence, a factor in these transformations and awakenings that mitigates the pain and the horror of identity. This isn’t always redemptive – Ducournau is clear-eyed in recognising some things as irredeemable – but there is hope here, there is affirmation, even if it’s very slim.</p><p><i>Titane </i>is the same.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcphIzvbz4vS8NlP-BfRXdYMGsVpvas5tVWIVaPEXg-k3NOADn-iSAsBQ2mHfqKDj2vj6xY4DK0oO1mJlgwTPinMW2ckc667-KmsNNOxRzeTln9Je_qPxTC5hzQHUh3O5hKK9whVJs2bH5iJ6_88QbB6EQfeOngkX4boSWUBRPZxe0eg4dk_ZcwcBD9Q/s720/TITANE_courtesy%20of%20NEON.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="720" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcphIzvbz4vS8NlP-BfRXdYMGsVpvas5tVWIVaPEXg-k3NOADn-iSAsBQ2mHfqKDj2vj6xY4DK0oO1mJlgwTPinMW2ckc667-KmsNNOxRzeTln9Je_qPxTC5hzQHUh3O5hKK9whVJs2bH5iJ6_88QbB6EQfeOngkX4boSWUBRPZxe0eg4dk_ZcwcBD9Q/w400-h203/TITANE_courtesy%20of%20NEON.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><b><i>ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love</i></b><p></p><p>Diagnosing Alexia is a fun game – inattentive ADHD? OCD, only where the obsessive compulsion is the death of people who try her patience? Cyborg BPD? None of the boxes quite fit – but then, they don’t fit any of us, really. She is certainly a psychopath (and Agathe Rousselle has confirmed in interviews that she did a lot of research into psychopathic behaviours when devising her performance, e.g. <a href="https://magazineantidote.com/culture/diner-antidote-fanzine-gucci/)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://magazineantidote.com/culture/diner-antidote-fanzine-gucci/)</a> but it is a specific sort of psychopathy, a fantastical psychopathy that comes from a rejection of humanity. Rousselle, interviewed in <i>Antidote </i>magazine, for example, describes Alexia’s sexual attraction to cars as “Stockholm Syndrome”.</p><p>It’s probably worth saying here that the idea of Stockholm Syndrome as a real-world psychiatric phenomenon has been discredited for some time. But for the purposes of the story, it makes a sort of sense. We are held captive by the machines that surround us, from the vehicles we drive to the tiny device on which I am writing these words with my thumbs. They hold our bodies and imaginations to ransom. What is a fetish for the machine other than an act of throwing our lot in with the captors, even if they are captors we have manufactured?</p><p>And the machine has agency here. The fancy custom car that Alexia danced on, dry-humping it with lascivious abandon, turns up, driverless, at her door, engine running, lights on. It’s like that scene in the movie where two protagonists have a Moment, and then later that evening one of them – usually the woman – turns up at the other’s door and they engage in passionate lovemaking without another word. Except she’s fucking an automobile, obviously. Which is also fucking her.</p><p>Ironically, the fantastical nature of Alexia’s predicament means that we can skip the common tendency of fiction to portray neatly diagnosable taxonomies of mental illness and just see a messy, tangled, screwed up (trans) human. Real people do weird things, all the time. The trick in making a film about these things is in making those weird things believable and human. And that is an important point for <i>Titane </i>because nothing Alexia does is normal.</p><p>For example she attempts to escape the consequences of her careless massacre by burning down her house with her mum and dad in it. And then she cuts her hair, punches herself hard in the face, binds her breasts and stomach and pretends to be Adrien, a long-missing boy, returned to his family after having vanished when very small. This might be seen by anyone rational as a ridiculously daft move. And certainly, it’s patent that this is a thirty year old woman pretending to be an eighteen year old boy. No one in the film is under any illusions. But the boy’s father Vincent (Vincent Lindon) immediately accepts Alexia as Adrien and inserts his “son” in the hypermasculine world of the firefighting team he leads.</p><p>Repeatedly, the guys at the station tell Vincent he is being played.</p><p>He is not.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitdj3tvqwZg0-fn6VSeSWPsVImiiIzxIZKY8JlwIlyS2ncewNs9E9BFMu0SY-gkvnM7FaiX7pm4D0ZgRrt4cspjgXBodMkeuDCsqTTjIna0nRAalPOX3hOFhA6Fl6xp5LPl5pUsnqFhlgP-ks_OWRLZarQDhr0ZrFGnTmdcTovSzSFOJJPQ9iBg4uo9w/s2048/Titane%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="2048" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitdj3tvqwZg0-fn6VSeSWPsVImiiIzxIZKY8JlwIlyS2ncewNs9E9BFMu0SY-gkvnM7FaiX7pm4D0ZgRrt4cspjgXBodMkeuDCsqTTjIna0nRAalPOX3hOFhA6Fl6xp5LPl5pUsnqFhlgP-ks_OWRLZarQDhr0ZrFGnTmdcTovSzSFOJJPQ9iBg4uo9w/w400-h200/Titane%201.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><p><i><b>a loneliness in this world so great you can see it in the slow movements of the hands of a clock</b></i></p><blockquote><i>Vincent</i>: I don’t care who you are. You're my son. You'll always be my son. Whoever you are.</blockquote><p>Although it isn’t immediately apparent to the viewer – again, <i>Titane </i>plays tricks with the way we naturally read the film – Vincent knows full well from the get-go that he’s not getting Adrien back. He is simply lonely, and he’ll clutch at even the slightest remission of his sadness, even if it’s entirely, obviously fake.</p><p>Vincent’s ex-wife (Myriem Akheddiou) – estranged by the tragedy as all too commonly happens – understands this at the moment she stumbles upon Alexia’s condition. She could expose Alexia to Vincent. She doesn’t. She doesn’t need to.</p><p>This big, hard-muscled, hard-faced man has been so eaten by grief and the growing knowledge of his mortality, his gnawing loneliness, that he simply does not care who this is. He will love this person as his son.</p><p>The transeverything cuckoo in the midst of Vincent’s firefighting crew throws every performance of gender in the place into peril. Vincent aggressively demands that “Adrien” be accepted as performing masculinity even when “Adrien” obviously isn’t even trying to, and because Vincent responds to “Adrien” with a tenderness that belies the hard-muscled, gung-ho nature of the firefighters. Vincent realises he can’t be a machine, and behaves as if that hard masculinity was an error to be put right now he has a son again (and who cares who this is? It’s a son). It’s the crisis of his masculinity that touches Alexia, his halting efforts toward parental tenderness, his conscious choice to accept and to love. And she responds.</p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-ekiyq9oNu0t6VC901cST2P2f7KTIAXH5iy7JTqQ3ywUqA0kzdPnzcXpFJdrjSXTwo8BsgyBY9s6Gppzg5LlntUfSZ_3JMbRqwYzAN1QNs5hEELUS7uzB1LtgG79PHMLH3oZPgtdanr8lL-G_1EjUhod0pNYbsRg7I6HouwVTjFazSQbVG2ZtQej7Ug/s6720/TITANE_Photo_8@Carole_Bethuel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3360" data-original-width="6720" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-ekiyq9oNu0t6VC901cST2P2f7KTIAXH5iy7JTqQ3ywUqA0kzdPnzcXpFJdrjSXTwo8BsgyBY9s6Gppzg5LlntUfSZ_3JMbRqwYzAN1QNs5hEELUS7uzB1LtgG79PHMLH3oZPgtdanr8lL-G_1EjUhod0pNYbsRg7I6HouwVTjFazSQbVG2ZtQej7Ug/w400-h200/TITANE_Photo_8@Carole_Bethuel.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />what we need is less brilliance, what we need is less instruction</b></i><p></p><p>Alexia’s queerness, her casual transing of herself, isn’t exactly unrelated to her nature as a cyborg, but it is independent. Her relationship to the machine – neither homo-, hetero-, bi- nor pan- sexual, she is more correctly, technosexual – of course influences how she expresses her gender, as it does with all of us. The only reason she can perform femininity – and it’s the showy, aggressive, hypersexualised femininity of the dancer – is because it’s literally a professional skill for her, a thing trained and practiced. She’s hot for the machine, and of course, just as Ballard wrote all those words proving, the most sexually suggestive machine is the automobile.</p><p>Her disappointment and loss of patience with Justine is because Justine can’t be like her – Justine’s piercings are external. Alexia’s body modifications go beneath the surface. They modify the body as a whole, as a self, a complete person. They go right to her core.</p><p>In <i>Titane’s </i>prologue, we see that moment that a lot of us experience in childhood when our first fetish is born. Often these things precede puberty, which is why they’re so powerful and difficult to untangle from our identities – if we have fetishes, our sexualities often exist in the context of them and are shaped by them, and not the other way around.</p><p>Alexia’s sexuality seems to slot neatly into a space where she could easily exist among the fetishists of <i>Crash </i>or <i>Tetsuo</i>, but it’s an illusion. While her first romantic contact with the metal came from a car crash, she lusts after the machine itself rather than its consequences. Having said that, a crossover slash fanfic featuring Alexia and <i>Crash</i>’s Gabrielle springs to mind fully formed.</p><p>(<i>Note</i>: placeholder for page of sexy <i>Crash</i>/<i>Titane</i> fanfic here)</p><p>The metal plate in Alexia’s head and the half-metal foetus in her womb are both growing into her body; she begins to lactate black, sticky colostrum with the texture of engine oil. Binding down her breasts and increasingly gravid abdomen becomes more and more painful; it’s bad enough for the flesh, but the body also rebels. At the end, the metal will begin to erupt from her whole body, bursting out of the tattered skin of her head and torso. It’s almost like it is shedding her flesh, except she can't be wholly metal. She is still human, and by the time she begins labour, she has entered her own crisis. She can’t choose humanity at this point. She rejected humanity too comprehensively at the beginning for the sake of the metal – the source of her psychopathy – and when she rejects the metal there is nothing left. A psychopath can’t actually stop being a psychopath, any more than I could stop being autistic.</p><p></p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhce9chEKICPf3aZEKSiI_ZpYiN5cBxrNP-uPrPUrMZiLnJw2U-VTa-V3_Op6gFoHJR_KY0tI4Cclmy1CgfNuQaSNtK0EfzP9bqpwSudE1z3h4ZyyUg72xYqhIxdAZyourNsz-rP0KPi_j93XA8oiy_bVmy5Hh-Ac9u4LwoBsghiqjxF7AhZIoHOB1hvg/s5821/TITANE_Photo_3%C2%A9Carole_Bethuel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3274" data-original-width="5821" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhce9chEKICPf3aZEKSiI_ZpYiN5cBxrNP-uPrPUrMZiLnJw2U-VTa-V3_Op6gFoHJR_KY0tI4Cclmy1CgfNuQaSNtK0EfzP9bqpwSudE1z3h4ZyyUg72xYqhIxdAZyourNsz-rP0KPi_j93XA8oiy_bVmy5Hh-Ac9u4LwoBsghiqjxF7AhZIoHOB1hvg/w400-h225/TITANE_Photo_3%C2%A9Carole_Bethuel.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />mutilated either by love or no love</b></i><p></p><p>Tattooed on Alexia's sternum are the (English) words “LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL”. That’s a real tattoo, belonging to Agathe Rousselle herself, but the lingering focus of the camera on it invites us to meditate on it as a programmatic statement. It’s a reference to Charles Bukowski. It’s the title of what’s arguably his finest collection and its title poem, a meditation on self and love.</p><blockquote><i>there is a loneliness in this world so great<br />that you can see it in the slow movement of<br />the hands of a clock.</i></blockquote><blockquote><i>people so tired<br />mutilated<br />either by love or no love.</i></blockquote><blockquote><i>people just are not good to each other<br />one on one.<br /></i>– Bukowski, “Love is a Dog from Hell” (1977)</blockquote><p>Bukowski as a writer defines the intersection between hardness and vulnerability, a man’s man. Vincent is in some ways very much a Bukowski version of masculinity – he exactly has that loneliness that you can see in “the slow movement of the hands of a clock” – but unlike Bukowski – who notoriously disliked people in general and women in particular – he transcends it. He achieves, through his relationship with a psychopath pretending to be his son, something more. Although he could be read as imposing his love on an idea of his son, a person who no longer exists, and who may never have existed, that isn’t it at all. In fact it is deeper and purer than that. Vincent has determined to love this person, whoever they are.</p><p>And the moment where you can see that is in Alexia’s labour. Present as she gives birth, Vincent doesn’t waste a single breath in switching to the name she wants (and she, in extremity, trusts him or has no choice but to trust him, with her real name).</p><blockquote><i>Vincent: </i>Push, Adrien!</blockquote><blockquote><i>Alexia (in agony):</i> My name is Alexia!</blockquote><blockquote><i>Vincent: </i>Push, Alexia!</blockquote><p>But she cannot live. As a psychopath, she cannot abandon her psychopathy; as a cyborg she cannot abandon the metal. Saying “I love you” was inevitable, but it ensures her destruction. You can’t go back on these things. It’s Vincent who successfully finds the way to get past this, by, crucially, fighting for someone other than himself. In talking about <i>Tetsuo</i>, we approached Angela Carter’s corrective to Sade: what place is there for love in the face of the machine’s demands, in the context of our instrumentalised personhood? But here, in the most unlikely of places, we find it. His mortality and his knowledge of his mortality inform his decision to throw in with the only posterity that matters: the children. Once again, we see that the solution is that the children must be allowed to live.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-42593970433228592252022-07-18T11:46:00.000+01:002022-07-18T11:46:59.005+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 3: Bodies in Space, with Gwendolyn Kiste<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgff6GHBKeOtX6fiojnSMcH5kzCRZ5SLkC11vmv4Ld3ewu0w77gj-hyF0i0WeS1Gb9L6S5QyszJd0oylhsq9zlAMj2p9qzfVNnaFzrwJUmSL_oGykT_bWnqt5znIlQyOpwRh52OK9eLQ9NtGbWO0syvaxUhx6XwQhYw4XLE0aLXEPJ1J8M83vB6HlsTMg/s960/gwendolyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="642" data-original-width="960" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgff6GHBKeOtX6fiojnSMcH5kzCRZ5SLkC11vmv4Ld3ewu0w77gj-hyF0i0WeS1Gb9L6S5QyszJd0oylhsq9zlAMj2p9qzfVNnaFzrwJUmSL_oGykT_bWnqt5znIlQyOpwRh52OK9eLQ9NtGbWO0syvaxUhx6XwQhYw4XLE0aLXEPJ1J8M83vB6HlsTMg/w400-h268/gwendolyn.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />It's episode 3! I'm super honoured to have with me multiple award
winning author, Perky Goth style icon and official Nicest Person in Horror Gwendolyn Kiste. I
talk with Gwendolyn – writer of <i>The Rust Maidens, Boneset and Feathers, And Her Smile Will Untether the</i> <i>Universe </i>and others – about
the modern Gothic, the relationship of the human body to its environment
and some other stuff, because we like digressions, like what an ambry
is. <br /><p></p><p>You should totally go and look at <a data-mce-href="http://www.gwendolynkiste.com/" href="http://www.gwendolynkiste.com/">gwendolynkiste.com</a>: her new novel, <i>Reluctant Immortals</i>, has just come out, so make sure you get on that. </p><p>Listen on your favourite podcast outlet, or visit <a href="https://thequestioninbodies.podbean.com/">thequestioninbodies.podbean.com</a> for all the episodes. <br /></p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" data-name="pb-iframe-player" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=g7vef-1276dad-pb&from=pb6admin&square=1&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" title="Episode 3: Bodies in Space, with Gwendolyn Kiste" width="100%"></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-31595281394636895272022-07-14T12:00:00.002+01:002022-07-14T15:54:50.470+01:00The Question in Bodies #45: That Haunting Sense of Unexpressed Deformity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp9HKzEAFKDI5PFKdoCAy7qdh1hYmDPl59xfvDSzgGbr6vBMyXOnilFiG-z1MZlPOY9UHdC6datoiC392KsdThdb-L3ZJ1jfxJdcYG6chMkDn_1UA3LclUyoEsSs1supJjO4nSilbE_XA2PjbO6j46DGvzmKtoGiyiEoMQtO7Aeep6CbYpiH1wWbyDlg/s720/jekyll.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="720" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp9HKzEAFKDI5PFKdoCAy7qdh1hYmDPl59xfvDSzgGbr6vBMyXOnilFiG-z1MZlPOY9UHdC6datoiC392KsdThdb-L3ZJ1jfxJdcYG6chMkDn_1UA3LclUyoEsSs1supJjO4nSilbE_XA2PjbO6j46DGvzmKtoGiyiEoMQtO7Aeep6CbYpiH1wWbyDlg/w400-h266/jekyll.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><blockquote><i>Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. <br /></i>– Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case”</blockquote><p>Living with duality is something that I think most people do to some extent; we compartmentalise our selves, we communicate in different ways in different contexts. And it’s a survival technique, a thing we do naturally to maintain social discourse and our place in it.</p><p>But what if you’re autistic and you don’t know you’re autistic, and these changes of tone and etiquette don’t come naturally to you? This isn’t theoretical. In the house where I spent my childhood, sex and gender weren’t just taboo subjects, they were active subjects of revulsion and shame. I learned about bodily differences embarrassingly late. No positive depictions or discussions of sexuality were tolerated at home; and my mother particularly responded to scenes of people enjoying the act of kissing or canoodling with disgust and revulsion. </p><p>(<i>Footnote</i>: I clearly remember the moment of the first same-sex kiss on British TV, between Colin and Guido on the episode of <i>Eastenders </i>broadcast 24th January 1989. I remember my parents’ seething outrage at it, having known in advance from the newspaper that this would be the episode where that happened, and having made absolutely sure that they tuned in and did not miss it.) </p><p>The result of it was that very early on I developed a private imaginary space where I could escape the constant surveillance under which I was kept. And actually, my imaginary scenes weren’t really anything to be ashamed of – they certainly weren’t the twisted evil I was scared that everyone would think they were, and in later life I’ve actually become proud of the unique and odd fantasy world I made, and I have even used it in my work. But it didn’t matter. An internal Demiurge in my brain had brought into existence a fantastical world where my sexuality and imagination lived, separate from the world I presented to those about me, and the result was that I fractured.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><blockquote><i>Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty, and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow loveable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found his way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life.<br /></i>– Stevenson, “Story of the Door”</blockquote><p>Readers of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella <i>The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde </i>who are familiar with any of the pop culture manifestations of the story (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) almost always find themselves surprised to find two things: first, how short the story is (my copy, a venerable Dover Thrift Edition, extends to a slim 54 pages); and, more importantly that Henry Jekyll is not in any way the protagonist of the story – and isn’t even in the story in person all that much.</p><p>The hero of the story is Mr. Utterson the lawyer, whose first name doesn’t even get mentioned until well into the second half of the book. Utterson is really the only real point of view character we have. Even when, in the final two chapters of the story, the first-person narratives of Dr. Lanyon (the only person to witness Jekyll’s chemical transformation) and Dr. Jekyll himself intrude, we are aware that these are written testimonies that Utterson is reading, and that we are reading with him.</p><p>The introduction of Utterson in the very first paragraph of the novella surely must be one of the finest character sketches in British literature. We meet a man who we have every reason to dislike, a man with the outer semblance of a hidebound Calvinist bigot. But by the end of that first page we’re on his side. The structure of the writing itself reflects the shape of the man: it presents us at the outset with all those aspects of him that seem objectionable, forbidding, and dull – and then, as Utterson himself does, surprises us by showing us how likeable he is. By the time Utterson is rallying Poole, the doctor’s valet, to join him in kicking down the door of Jekyll’s lab and facing whatever horror lies inside, with the assurance that whatever happens next is on him, we’re as ready as Poole is to follow him to the end. Because by now we know dreary, dusty Utterson to be compassionate, decent, brave and possessed of that elusive twinkle in the eye that makes you realise that the person you’re speaking to has hidden depths, that there is a duality at play here.</p><p>Just as the textual structure reflects the man, so does he serve a role in a larger, structural duality, for he is one of the two primary players in the story: he is the opposite number, the true mirror, of Edward Hyde.</p><blockquote><i>From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at noon when business was plenty and time scarce, at night under the face of the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post.</i></blockquote><blockquote><i>“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.” <br /></i>– Stevenson, “Search for Mr. Hyde”</blockquote><p>(Let us just for a moment take in that Stevenson had the balls to get that line over and done with before anyone else did, and executed it well.)</p><p>Utterson’s quest begins when he hears a story about a terrible thing done in plain sight by one Edward Hyde. He recognises the name from Henry Jekyll’s will – Jekyll is his friend and client – and already having profound misgivings about a man he has never heard of being Jekyll’s sole beneficiary, is horrified when he hears of Hyde’s increasingly horrible reputation.</p><p>Eventually his amateur detective work bears fruit and he meets Hyde. The meeting is brief, but Utterson registers the same sensation every person who tells of seeing the man notes: a wrongness, a sense that the man is, without being visibly deformed, somehow upsetting and repellent to look upon.</p><p>Pop culture has already spoiled the heart of the mystery for us, but the crucial thing to point out here is that while we think we know Mr. Hyde intimately by the end of Stevenson’s brief narrative, very little concrete is said about him. He receives only three objective points of physical description: he’s younger than Jekyll (Jekyll is fifty); he’s short; and he has more body hair than Jekyll does (Jekyll realises he’s changed without drinking the potion at one point by the hair on the back of his hands). Everything else is the perception of the characters in the book, and it is the central characteristic of Hyde that what is wrong with him can never seem to be nailed down by an observer. There is something inside.</p><blockquote><i>“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.”<br /></i>– Stevenson, “Story of the Door”</blockquote><p>Cinematic representations of Edward Hyde, with his hunched back, heavy brows and snaggle teeth, redolent of some primitive hominid, have drawn heavily on Poole’s descriptions of Mr. Hyde’s behaviour while hiding out in Jekyll’s laboratory: hunched over and masked; jumping out from behind boxes “like a monkey”; crying out “like a rat”; “weeping like a woman or a lost soul”. Earlier on, witnesses describe his murder of Danvers Carew as committed with “ape-like fury”. But the characteristics of an ape are only figurative, a signifier of Hyde as someone devolved (and remember that Stevenson, a convert to atheism, had a high opinion of Darwin).</p><p>Hyde’s nebulous condition is exactly what makes him so compelling as a character. Even what he does is only described enough to leave our imaginations to do the work.</p><p>To be fair, the two crimes that are described in detail are enough on their own to paint a picture of someone completely beyond the pale: a casual act of violence against a child, and the unprovoked murder of a man on the street. Both are performed on a whim, and although both happen by night, they are committed on city streets. The sense is that as terrible as these acts are on their own, what makes Hyde truly evil is that he just doesn’t <i>care.</i> It’s not that he’s unaware of the potential consequences of doing these things in a place where anyone can see him doing them, it’s that knowing this doesn’t stop him. The two things that keep us all from falling upon each other and tearing each others’ throats out are a functional conscience and a respect for the consequences of our actions – preferably the first, the second if we must, and a mixture of both for most of us – but Hyde is monstrous because he has neither.</p><blockquote><i>“Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine.” <br /></i>– Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case”</blockquote><p>Reflections, the standard go-to for metaphorical points in stories about doppelgangers and fractured identities, appear somewhat less in <i>The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i> than you might think. Hyde isn’t really a reflection of Jekyll, nor is he strictly an opposite. The complex middle-aged man who transforms himself into Edward Hyde to be able to permit himself to do whatever it is he’s so ashamed of – that what it is doesn’t actually matter, even though we can guess, is a powerful exercise in future-proofing – remains a complex man made of good and evil, basically decent, but still living the same double life that he lived before his experiment. Mr Hyde is only part of him, the part without inhibitions. He is the product of chemistry, or more properly, alchemy, the chemistry of the spirit. He is a distillation, an essential salt, a part of the mixture rather than the whole.</p><p>And that’s part of the reason why he is smaller, part of the reason for his “haunting sense of unexpressed deformity”. Stevenson, without even knowing the term, is referring to the Uncanny Valley, the (disputed) idea that a thing that looks and acts human but which is missing some part of the human creates an unconscious terror in the viewer, a gut-level emotional response.</p><p>But that can’t be all of it. If Hyde represents only a part of Jekyll, where does Jekyll go?</p><blockquote><i>It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion; it seemed to me at the time to be humorous; and I made my preparations with the most studious care. <br /></i>– Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case”</blockquote><p>Initially, Jekyll is giddy with the absolute lack of inhibition that being Hyde gives him. Jekyll remembers being Hyde but is only in control of his actions insofar as the personality of Hyde is in control when he is Hyde, and while they share memories, they are functionally two different people.</p><p>You can see in this an accidental metaphor for dissociative identity disorders. It’s not a bad metaphor, frankly. There are two alters. They have their own names, their own moral universes. As time goes on, the two personalities grow and develop. They argue with each other without conversing, their conversation unspoken but eloquent. As time progresses, the two alters become more or less prominent. The more in denial the person becomes, the more in conflict with their other selves, the more profound the fracture.</p><blockquote><i>To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost... it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it. <br /></i>– Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case”</blockquote><p>This isn’t where Stevenson was coming from, of course. It doesn’t mean you can’t read it that way or find truth or meaning in it, but It’s well known that Stevenson’s initial inspiration was the 18th century case of Deacon Brodie. Brodie, Edinburgh city councillor and deacon of the cabinet makers’ guild, used his encyclopaedic knowledge of locks and doors to maintain a prolific secret career as a burglar, partly to fund his gambling addiction, and partly for the thrill of it. Until he was caught and hanged, that is. Brodie’s double life – respected leader of craftsmen and august local politician by day, ruthless thief and profligate gambler after dark – struck a chord with Stevenson, not only in terms of the duality between virtue and sin, but in the experience of the addict.</p><p>Stevenson, who struggled with substance abuse issues for much of his adult life, supposedly wrote his first draft of <i>The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i> straight after a bad drug experience. I don’t know how much of that is mythology, but I think it’s telling how closely Dr. Jekyll’s experience cleaves to that of the alcoholic. He revels in the loss of inhibitions the drug gives him, the freedom from guilt. It makes him feel younger. Initially he thinks he can stop at any time; eventually he goes too far, repeatedly, and a terrible thing is done. He realises he has a problem, but thinks that if he’ll just stop drinking his elixir, he can escape all consequences.</p><p>But of course he can’t, and he’s lying to himself that he is not responsible for the things he has done or that simply deciding to be good will sweep away the irreversible, terrible thing he has done. The elixir has done its work and changed him forever.</p><p>He is stuck with Hyde, and he's kidding himself that there is any easy escape.</p><blockquote><i>Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered. <br /></i>– Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case”</blockquote><p>I don’t know for sure how deep my own fractures go. Jekyll’s double life unsettles me: the memory of a Bible I once had, defaced in my own hand, returns to me, just as the good doctor’s favourite pious work lies splayed on the floor of his lab, hideous blasphemies in its margins; the potential consequences of an inner life separate from the public sphere haunt me.</p><p>Because Dr. Jekyll cannot synthesise his other self, because he cannot accept it as just him, at the last extremity it eats him, and it becomes all he is. His vices weren’t all that much to begin with but in refusing to own them he creates opportunities to risk more and more, deluding himself that it isn’t him.</p><p>And then Hyde is all he is, and he is left with no choice. The more I think about that, the more it terrifies me.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-33837314598322508882022-07-11T09:43:00.004+01:002022-08-02T18:04:14.239+01:00The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 2: The Good For Her Cinematic Universe, with Eve Elizabeth Moriarty<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL62uDbi8qcb3No2Y6jZ5h_-1JF4oJ8RxDGbhjBV021caVy7Rf98O8L5RCIoojOTFAtRN6j2iv-4cOKDfDufU0A76m1sMJHz-EAYNrp4q0jESiN5_LaCwzuHweYg9Phzu7Upc93D1kscD3aXQkILPayq_fA4nYj4Icw7GP22b5VO_ByOSkyM6eAQgjOg/s1200/Promising-Young-Woman-scaled-e1607005765930.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="864" data-original-width="1200" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL62uDbi8qcb3No2Y6jZ5h_-1JF4oJ8RxDGbhjBV021caVy7Rf98O8L5RCIoojOTFAtRN6j2iv-4cOKDfDufU0A76m1sMJHz-EAYNrp4q0jESiN5_LaCwzuHweYg9Phzu7Upc93D1kscD3aXQkILPayq_fA4nYj4Icw7GP22b5VO_ByOSkyM6eAQgjOg/w400-h288/Promising-Young-Woman-scaled-e1607005765930.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />We got as far as episode 2! <br /><p></p><p>In this week's episode, I'm joined in a flurry of tripartite author names by my pal Eve Elizabeth Moriarty, to talk about the Good For Her Cinematic Universe: the "girl bossification" of horror, bad takes about <i>The Witch</i> (2015), <i>Midsommar</i> (2019) and <i>Promising Young Woman</i> (2020), and how all these things reflect more than just dodgy critique. </p>
<p>Eve's take on <i>Midsommar</i> can be found <a href="https://www.room207press.com/2019/09/wdgb-midsommar-special-1-eve-moriarty.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">here.</a></p><p>
The podcast is gradually populating the usual podcast venues – Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Spotify, Audible and others – but you can find the podcast site <a href="https://thequestioninbodies.podbean.com/e/episode-2-the-good-for-her-cinematic-universe-with-eve-elizabeth-moriarty/">here.</a></p><p>Want to get episodes a couple of weeks early? Back my <a href="http://Patreon.com/HowardDavidIngham">Patreon.</a> It's literally only one American dollar a month. <br /></p><p><iframe allowtransparency="true" data-name="pb-iframe-player" height="150" scrolling="no" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=vthpw-126e8db-pb&from=pb6admin&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" title="Episode 2: The Good For Her Cinematic Universe, with Eve Elizabeth Moriarty" width="100%"></iframe></p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-74898346205304801842022-07-07T12:00:00.003+01:002022-07-07T17:52:49.881+01:00The Question in Bodies #44: Roko's Modern Basilisk<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIChlmS6tr-0lge419pYmXFkYorAS9tuuyrYQ9dD_Ww7hgJdYH3EIqs3A-E6IlrYdgig1-L7WHtSKzL1UloHk6_1yaxe-OZ1xmTzIzP3r46k2Rzdzs1OilE8la-TxGZM1P31TNdwCs0RIWbE3zHd5RVErS2_mVcsjv2DKLw_Zo3Q9jC5IRSOgtI7dUXg/s2500/190808-rockos-modern-life-static-cling-ew-322p.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1406" data-original-width="2500" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIChlmS6tr-0lge419pYmXFkYorAS9tuuyrYQ9dD_Ww7hgJdYH3EIqs3A-E6IlrYdgig1-L7WHtSKzL1UloHk6_1yaxe-OZ1xmTzIzP3r46k2Rzdzs1OilE8la-TxGZM1P31TNdwCs0RIWbE3zHd5RVErS2_mVcsjv2DKLw_Zo3Q9jC5IRSOgtI7dUXg/w400-h225/190808-rockos-modern-life-static-cling-ew-322p.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <b>We appreciate power (we appreciate power)</b><p></p><p>Transhumanism, as a response to the Question in Bodies, isn’t monolithic, any more than any other apocalyptic worldview; it has its schisms, its alternative approaches. There’s the benevolent version that posits simply that we simply have to let our children survive and change into something we won’t recognise – see “Low-Flying Aircraft” for this version, but also, see the joyous pansexual genderblend of <i>Sense8 </i>(2015-2018), where the evolution of humanity into clusters of linked consciousness is, although at the risk of exploitation (the main conflict of the series), the key to a coming age of empathy and hope.</p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Contrast this with the sort of technological gnosticism espoused by your Elon Musks and your Eliezer Yudkowskys. As Grimes and HANA would sing in 2018 with the aspartame allure of robotic sirens in “We Appreciate Power”:</p><blockquote><i>And if you want to never die<br />Baby, plug in, upload your mind<br />Come on, you’re not even alive<br />If you’re not backed up on a drive.</i><br />(Grimes feat. HANA, “We Appreciate Power”, 2018)</blockquote><p>Leaving aside the simple fact that “We Appreciate Power” is an absolute fucking banger of a tune that I've had on heavy rotation for pretty much three solid years, it’s also kind of evil, and conducive to a kind of accidental horror, the unknowing horror that comes from seeing someone espousing something that you know is appalling, inhuman, psychopathic, even, and celebrating it as if it's awesome. The horror of eugenics, or ethnic cleansing, or deporting refugees, married with the triumphant artfulness of Riefenstahl. That sort of horror.</p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="268" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gYG_4vJ4qNA" title="YouTube video player" width="476"></iframe>
<p>Here, for me, it lies in the realisation that anyone might find this version of the future exciting or inspiring, that it might sell the act of suiciding yourself for the sake of a bodiless backup copy at the mercy of corporate information storage as equivalent to immortality.</p><p>The class issues here are obvious. How are you going to afford this? How <i>much </i>of this are you going to be able to afford? if only a certain class of people ever get to be upgraded, won’t that mean that eventually the class divide will become a <i>species </i>divide? Richard Morgan’s 2002 novel <i>Altered Carbon</i> (televised by Netflix 2018-2020) attempts to approach this but doesn’t really get there, with Morgan’s baseline conservatism essentially shying away from getting the whole way.</p><p>A better critique comes in Amazon’s vantablack dramedy series <i>Upload </i>(2020), where digitally stored copies of the dead existed in a digital realm subject to monthly data plans and at the risk of their memories and selves being edited by hackers. The wealthy live in a sort of Heaven like a deluxe country club. The most nightmarish moment in <i>Upload </i>comes in the final episodes where we see the poorer clients of the program(me), who exist in blank white rooms and who freeze into black-and-white two-dimensional images if they use up their data allowance before the end of the month. Here, the difference between Heaven and Hell in the future depends on how much you’ve got in your bank account. For millennia, the consolation of religion for the downtrodden has been the idea that the afterlife will level the playing field, that while the reward for virtue may not exist on earth, it will be given in the Beyond. But now we have the technology to fix that. Now we can remove justice from the equation and create an afterlife that simulates our world in perpetual inequity.</p><p>One baffling thing about the idea of uploading is the way that so few of its proponents seem to be able to grasp how it butts hard against the age-old philosophical problem of Trigger’s Broom (or, OK, if you want to be fancy and elitist about it, the Ship of Theseus): if you take a copy of a human consciousness and put it into an entirely new housing, is it in any way the original person?</p><p>And anyway, that suggests that you can treat a human brain like a computer, a mind like an operating system. Can you copy a consciousness to another place and expect it to be even comparable to the human it duplicates without the neurology and chemistry that develops, influences and filters it? Would a digital copy of me still be autistic? What happens when you remove the ADHD from that copy like it’s some sort of virus or bug? Would a cloud copy of a human even be conscious, or just an externally convincing but internally mindless simulation of a person? Can a digital analogue ever be anything other than an oxymoron?</p><p></p><blockquote> <i>Simulation, give me something good –<br />God's creation, so misunderstood<br />Pray to the divinity, the keeper of the key<br />One day everyone will believe</i></blockquote><i></i><p></p><p>The classic example of how daft the whole idea of uploading gets is Roko’s Basilisk, the song that Grimes and HANA's kicking tune celebrates. The Basilisk is an inane thought experiment invented by “Roko”, a poster in the LessWrong online community, which is where a lot of the tech-libertarians and transhumanist neoreactionaries hung out in the first decade of this century. Roko’s idea takes the basic assumptions of digital transhumanism: inevitably, the Singularity is going to happen and the world will be controlled in the future by artificial intelligences, because when you’re a tech libertarian, totalitarianism is logical (obviously). This assumed, what will stop one of these putative AI overlords creating digital copies of everyone who didn't work to bring them into being, and torture these simulations eternally in a sort of digital Hell? (Aside from, you know, having better things to do.)</p><p>And further, Roko posited, knowing about this idea immediately makes you vulnerable to it happening to you (hence, “Basilisk”, the creature that destroys you when you see it). And yeah, it might never happen, but if it does, you’re now screwed because you know about it (and yes, I mean you. You’re welcome). What you get is basically a mixture of the stupid early 2010s meme of “The Game”, which you lose the moment you realise you’re playing it, and an ultra-degraded jpeg version of Pascal's Wager, overlaid with blocky artefacts and distorted colours.</p><p>Pascal’s Wager, or sometimes Pascal’s Gambit, is Blaise Pascal’s famous philosophical axiom that once you are given knowledge of the Christian religion, you’re betting your life. The stakes are one finite lifetime versus an eternity, meaning that you either choose virtue and make a finite loss (i.e. you pass up a whole lot of fun) for the chance of an infinite gain (clouds and harps and philosophical bliss), or you choose sin and make a finite gain (sex, booze, partying etc.) against the chance of an infinite loss (frying, freezing or whatever sort of torment floats your boat forever). Pascal posits that logically, then, virtue is more sensible. It’s a pretty important moment in the history of philosophy. But while it works in a vacuum as a thought experiment in probability, from almost the very moment Pascal’s idea was (posthumously) published in 1670, both theists and atheists have considered the Wager as a theological take to be pretty stupid, for a variety of reasons. </p><p>What about other religious revelations that are incompatible with the Christian one? How can your faith commitment be sincere if you’re approaching it as a mathematical exercise in relative stakes?</p><p>The Basilisk at least sidesteps these objections, but only because it contains no appeals to virtue. The Basilisk feeds only on your self interest.</p><blockquote><i>People like to say that we're insane<br />But AI will reward us when it reigns<br />Pledge allegiance to the world's most powerful computer<br />Simulation: it's the future</i></blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge1xlqpMu2ix-odwM6tiKRnfroD8e7yNdIhy2dWFtB0FRw5tUgtqXETscdqyPNl-GG5lrR9eaW3DOMg0woQJVvDNofQxG7OuWdBEEdMUMnq_apwuY-nVP7rxRGcUQjmkLvPAxEnF_5YS69lTv5pgkZDkbpjArVao8ae85G5wgaIbK07TzT7_ikMxyv6w/s1920/iajuu2l8ky821.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge1xlqpMu2ix-odwM6tiKRnfroD8e7yNdIhy2dWFtB0FRw5tUgtqXETscdqyPNl-GG5lrR9eaW3DOMg0woQJVvDNofQxG7OuWdBEEdMUMnq_apwuY-nVP7rxRGcUQjmkLvPAxEnF_5YS69lTv5pgkZDkbpjArVao8ae85G5wgaIbK07TzT7_ikMxyv6w/w400-h225/iajuu2l8ky821.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />It’s hard to know for sure if anyone on the web takes Roko’s Basilisk seriously, simply because if you do take it seriously, you can’t ever mention it. But it upset the members of the LessWrong community so much that founder Eliezer Yudkowsky eventually banned discussion of it on his forum. While William Godwin has been known in recent years to weigh in on online discussions of Godwin’s Law, Roko has, perhaps understandably, remained largely anonymous. After all, William Godwin is <i>clever</i>.<p></p><p>That Roko’s Basilisk is an absurd, incoherent idea isn’t even in question, even among many in the community where it arose, but an idea doesn’t have to be clever to be scary. Consider the Xenomorph in the <i>Alien </i>franchise – it’s undeniably terrifying in its signifiers, even though the creature itself is nonsensical, and the more you think about it or try to explain it, the less sense it makes (which is how you wind up with <i>Alien: Covenant</i>).</p><p>A lot of people think that Roko’s Basilisk is scary. A quick Google reveals about half a dozen articles describing it as the Internet’s “most terrifying thought experiment”. Which is completely baffling. How could anything about “What if Pascal’s Gambit, only with asshole robots playing video games with copies of dead people” inspire anyone with a lick of sense to give a shit? Why should I be the slightest bit discomforted that, long after I’m dust, a bodiless digitally artefacted copy of me – something that most probably won't even be anything like an actual person – might be put through a simulation of torment, when it isn’t even my eternity?</p><p>But that’s not the point. It isn’t even <i>my </i>eternity.<i> </i></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>What will it take to make you capitulate?<br />We appreciate power<br />We appreciate power.</i> </blockquote><p></p><p>A lot of us find the assumptions behind Roko’s Modern Basilisk (<i>Note</i>: I find that gag more amusing than I probably should, and certainly more amusing than “Rococo’s Basilisk”, the lame Twitter pun that famously led directly to Elon Musk hooking up with Grimes and becoming a troubling transhumanist power couple for a while) completely baffling. But for all the apparent futurism of it, it simply betrays how depressingly traditionalist the thinking behind the LessWrong mindset is. In the same way that dear old Thomas Ligotti’s antinatalist nihilism is really pretty conservative, Roko’s Basilisk plays on classical ideas of posterity that go back to the Romans and maybe even the Egyptians (and we get to that with <i>Possessor</i>). These people are the same people who get bent out of shape when you pull down a statue. Because the silver-spoon-sucking techbros that founded LessWrong (also, the lonely pube-chinned nerds who really want to be silver-spoon-sucking techbros who <i>also </i>post on LessWrong) come from a world that takes as one of its very basic assumptions that the worst crime you can commit against anyone is to damn their name for posterity after they are dead. Those of us who know full well that we’re going to be quickly forgotten when we pass (and are at peace with that) will never find it in ourselves to care. But the traditionalist, born to power and wealth, finds a gnawing existential dread in the idea that at some time in the future, history might look unkindly on them, or that someone might bring an idea of them to account.</p><p>Consider how vehemently people push back when reminded of the various – undeniable, historically recorded – crimes against humanity of Winston Churchill during the Mau Mau Uprising or the Boer War, for example; or the reaction of many white Americans to learning how George Washington had dentures made out of the teeth of people in slavery – and let’s dwell on that, because if they were teeth good enough to put into dentures, they were the teeth of young people, strong people, and they were either yanked out of the mouths of the living, or from the mouths of people who had been done to death before reaching old age. Which is a digression, but one that fits here, surely.</p><p>Roko wasn’t thinking about that. Nor had he taken into account those of us without a posterity. Unless you’re wealthy and powerful enough to make a difference to this, you don’t get to play, win or lose. Of course it’s not scary to us. We won’t get a statue to tear down. I won’t get a revisionist biography, a century down the line.</p><div class="ujudUb WRZytc"><i><span></span><blockquote><span>Neanderthal to human being</span><br /><span>Evolution, kill the gene</span><br /><span>Biology is superficial</span><br /><span>Intelligence is artificial</span><br /><span>Submit</span><br /><span>Submit</span><br /><span>Submit</span><br /><span>Submit</span><br /><span>Submit</span><br /><span>Submit</span><br /><span>Submit</span><br /><span>Submit</span></blockquote><span></span></i></div><p>The problem with this brand of transhumanism is the lovelessness of it, the low-key brutality of it. We assume that an AI will be unkind because we are unkind. We assume it will be a dictator because we would be in its position. And Roko’s Basilisk demonstrates these exact problems perfectly. “We Appreciate Power” is a hymn to a sort of fascism that’s only crypto in its currency, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will in the form of a 10mb MP4.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-49208220759847171042022-07-04T14:32:00.005+01:002022-08-02T18:03:55.989+01:00The Question in Bodies podcast, Episode 1: Hope, Joy and Storytelling, with Dr Monique Lacoste<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHVucWO8XJNnWwIlw19cdEsePPaadnKnYz_kc5k020yUkc_tZ5_9z_PK0DhWzTNjGHfGQ6Dw_UgkJXaMKUcdeZG7ZX4FYZOK2djxO_kr3U5bAzuCtlv6l4kW_qSRUS-Xz7-hNqcPnasutG2wUifoyeuyg6F0FRRWL5qWn4lY9-WiaxRR1f-Qx0T4j8g/s1280/13th%20doctor.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHVucWO8XJNnWwIlw19cdEsePPaadnKnYz_kc5k020yUkc_tZ5_9z_PK0DhWzTNjGHfGQ6Dw_UgkJXaMKUcdeZG7ZX4FYZOK2djxO_kr3U5bAzuCtlv6l4kW_qSRUS-Xz7-hNqcPnasutG2wUifoyeuyg6F0FRRWL5qWn4lY9-WiaxRR1f-Qx0T4j8g/w400-h225/13th%20doctor.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(But what sort of Doctor <i>are </i>you?)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>It's the beginning, and the moment has been prepared for. <p></p><p>For the next nine weeks, we're going to be putting out Season One of the <a href="https://thequestioninbodies.podbean.com/" target="_blank"><b>Question in Bodies podcast</b></a>, a catalogue of inconclusive conversations about culture, gender, bodies, literature, movies and horror. In this first episode I'm joined by the first of a wide cast of friends, colleagues and co-conspirators, <b>Dr. Monique Lacoste, </b>to talk about what representation looks like, whether we can imagine a different world, and whether or not we can find genuine hope and joy in a storytelling environment saturated with capitalist realism. When the only show in town is the MCU, where is the genuine chance to have hope, joy and, dare we say it, love? </p><p>Expect lots of questions, and few answers, but the getting there is entertaining. <br /></p><p>We shout out to Raquel Benedict at <b><a href="https://kittysneezes.com/category/podcast-3/rite-gud/">Rite Gud </a></b>in the course of this, which is our favourite podcast right now. Raquel is going to guest in a future episode (spoilers). </p><p>Over the next few days, you'll be able to find The Question on the usual podcast sources – it's already gone to Spotify and Amazon; Google and Apple are soon to follow. <br /></p><p>Thanks to Steve Horry for our logo, and the banging theme tune. <br /></p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" data-name="pb-iframe-player" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?from=embed&i=b4d6d-1265d26-pb&square=1&share=1&download=1&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&rtl=0&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7&size=300" style="border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);" title="Episode 1: Hope, Joy and Storytelling, with Dr. Monique Lacoste" width="100%"></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-7180602372180468772022-06-24T12:49:00.019+01:002022-06-24T15:13:47.784+01:00The Question in Bodies #43: F*** the Future (iv)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7UtjozKqweke1iWn4vWgduedbPg52J7yGfdQq0EuGpAre0LVww_Hn3n4fydRBQeqCRBUQTWFmMJBOsXyddfVqH6J0BrWgEocGYkqSL7eWfObmfpyge6FPpkmnDrOKVup80fKldMGQk0Goz4P3Z-wrBq1me0rJmFxZLAnwdWOu965f-SgEzt42h9qV0g/s1280/vlcsnap-2021-09-24-17h05m33s560.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7UtjozKqweke1iWn4vWgduedbPg52J7yGfdQq0EuGpAre0LVww_Hn3n4fydRBQeqCRBUQTWFmMJBOsXyddfVqH6J0BrWgEocGYkqSL7eWfObmfpyge6FPpkmnDrOKVup80fKldMGQk0Goz4P3Z-wrBq1me0rJmFxZLAnwdWOu965f-SgEzt42h9qV0g/w400-h240/vlcsnap-2021-09-24-17h05m33s560.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p><i><b>A cold and stylised rapacity</b></i><br />Is it messed up to admit you understand why the characters in a book like <i>Crash</i> find their fetishes as hot as they do (even if it’s not exactly your fetish)? It’s a rhetorical question, and you don't need to answer it, but Ballard wanted us, I think, to know that he did, for he named the first-person narrator of <i>Crash</i> James Ballard. Ballard the protagonist, a producer of television adverts, is not Ballard the author. All they really have in common is a name, and those of you who have names you are attached to will understand what a powerful thing that is.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>It is important to realise that this fictionalised Ballard – and his wife Catherine with him – are a bit kinky to begin with. Back in the 1970s, they’d have been called “swingers”, but nowadays we’d characterise them as poly, living together as a couple but being entirely honest with each other about what they describe as their “infidelities”. The kinky part lies in how, while they’re having sex, they both clearly get off on describing to other what they get up to with their various lovers. But the one thing they are really missing is affect – their tendernesses are clinical and precise; they talk of the penis, the vulva, the anus. The byproduct of the male orgasm is only ever called by its scientific name, and let me tell you, there’s more than one way in which this book is very, very seminal. The language of their relationship was always going to date, but also matters that we understand that Ballard (and for clarity, we’ll call the author Ballard and the protagonist who shares his name James from here on in) attaches no judgement whatsoever to what James and Catherine do at any point in the book. Ballard’s own take on the book’s moral status depended on who he was talking to and when he was talking. In his introduction to the 1974 French edition of the book he’d describe it as cautionary, but interviewed by Will Self twenty years later he would express regret at having done that:</p><blockquote><p>“[In the introduction] I claimed that in <i>Crash</i> there is a moral indictment of the sinister marriage of sex and technology. Of course it isn’t anything of the sort. <i>Crash </i>is not a cautionary tale. <i>Crash</i> is what it appears to be. It is a psychopathic hymn. But it is a psychopathic hymn which has a point.” – quoted in Will Self, <i>Junk Mail</i> (1995)</p></blockquote><p>Although I think that we can finally take him at his word here, whatever Ballard’s intention was, the text of what I’m pretty sure was his best book is straightforward in how sympathetically it treats its near-emotionless sexual adventurers – it’s the paradox of the thing, an empathic association with the profoundly dissociative. In some readers, <i>Crash</i> engenders that uncomfortable feeling of being a bit turned on while also being a bit repulsed, a feeling that I’m no stranger to, as you should have gathered by now. As it goes on, a sort of commonality with the abject imaginary perversions of the neurodiverse queer arises – I keep thinking about <i>Excision </i>here, about how that film serves as a sort of lonely Bildingsroman for the same feelings. It’s easy for those of us who relate to our bodies in this way to claim James and Catherine for the tribe of the neurodiverse – the same distance between body and consciousness arises in their sexualities, they tend to the same formal psychological theatre of their desires.</p><p>Ballard refuses to distance himself from the fetishised abjection of James and Catherine’s kinks; his text carries a determination not only to refrain from judging his protagonists but to in fact identify with them, even to the extent of bestowing his name upon his narrator. I think this is a big part of the reason why <i>Crash</i> still has the power to excite, scandalise and disgust readers: when an author will not moralise or judge, it can feel for the reader like they’re riding in this story without a seatbelt, which can be upsetting or frightening just as easily (or maybe more easily) as it can be thrilling. It depends who you are.</p><p>James is aware at the start of the book that, notwithstanding their sex games (or maybe even because it’s the reason for the sex games in the first place), he’s losing Catherine. He examines from the grief and anxiety that causes from a distance, viewing it with the clinical curiosity one might view a biological phenomenon through a microscope.</p><p>Again, that almost scientific, unemotional take on sexuality isn’t an accident. Ballard knew what he was doing.</p><blockquote><p>“I daresay the early decades of the next century may well be a time when we need to explore a whole new set of possibilities in our own lives, and emotions may cramp our style. I'm not saying we should abandon them all together, but that we should wait to see where they fit into the new scheme of things.” – Ballard, “Dangerous Driving”</p></blockquote><p>He’s not wrong, and as our society goes through profound changes, for good and ill the way that we are expressing our emotions has changed. Several researchers have reported in recent years that psychopathy is steadily on the rise (note: see for example Bill Eddy, “Are Narcissists and Sociopaths Increasing?” <i>Psychology Today</i>, 30th April 2018) but this doesn’t mean that it’s the only way our feelings and their expressions are changing and it doesn’t mean that reserve, or even dissociation, is always bad. In fact, it may be the only way we learn to cope.</p><p>James’s life changes with a head-on auto collision that results in severe injury to himself and the death of the other driver, the man’s corpse thrust through his windscreen, the woman in the passenger seat staring matter-of-factly at him. James encounters, apparently by chance, but really by design, a man pretending to be a hospital orderly with an enthusiastic interest in his injuries. He also keeps bumping into the other survivor of the crash, Dr Helen Remington (once again, medics and media professionals dominate Ballard’s cast of characters). They start to meet for sex, although Helen can only orgasm when inside a car. Ballard doesn’t settle it either way, but did Helen and her dead husband impact James’s out-of-control car as part of a sex game, or has she developed a kink for potentially fatal auto collisions because of the trauma? It doesn’t really matter – often we only discover what our kinks always were after we meet them, when we see or experience a thing that powerfully affects us, and we realise how we’re wired, what pushes our buttons. Either way, Helen draws James and then Catherine with him into her kinks, and into a community centred around gaining sexual fulfilment from near-fatal car crashes. At the centre of this is Dr Robert Vaughan – the man from the hospital – a former TV scientist.</p><blockquote><p>“...Vaughan had projected a potent image, almost that of the scientist as hoodlum, driving about from laboratory to television centre on a high-powered motorcycle. Literate, ambitious, and adept at self-publicity, he was saved from being no more than a pushy careerist with a PhD by a strain of naive idealism, his strange view of the automobile and its real role in our lives.” – Ballard, <i>Crash</i>, chapter 6</p></blockquote><p>Vaughan’s naive idealism – and idealism is, remember, a thing Ballard was at best ambivalent towards – has morphed into something else, something a little more extreme. Now he’s less a scientist, and more of an experimental pervert and voyeur, ghoulishly taking photos of collision aftermaths without anyone’s consent to keep and use as one would keep and use porn, and orchestrating recreations of celebrity car crashes with the help of a brain-damaged racing driver called Seagrave. Vaughan’s fall from grace appears to have coincided with his increasing inability to hide his consuming fetish, and his desire to implicate others in his scenarios, consensual or otherwise.</p><p>There are gaps in the backstory of Vaughan, and how he got from minor TV celebrity to disgraced pervert royalty isn’t clear exactly. His first appearance is in <i>The Atrocity Exhibition,</i> in the pivotal chapter “Tolerances of the Human Face”. The title here is taken from a medical text about how much trauma a human face can take before it ceases to be a face, and it is a reference repeated in <i>Crash</i>. Vaughan has been forcibly institutionalised by Dr Nathan in <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>, as a “first warning” to Traven. His advent there supplies some of the most electric and disturbing writing in The Atrocity Exhibition, gazing upon Ballard’s cast of ciphers with a “cold and stylised rapacity”.</p><p>In <i>Crash</i>, the attention of the plot, and the attention of James, Catherine and Helen, centres on Vaughan. The first line of the book frames where he is going:</p><p>“Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.”</p><p>Again, it's a killer opening sentence, the addition of one simple adjective opening up the Ballardian geometries of the story. And like <i>High-Rise</i>, the first sequence of the book – the aftermath of his demise – is also the last, contextualising and framing the whole thing. He compels, this scarred man whose sexual appetites are unhidden, unhygienic. We see him at the staging of a celebrity car crash with his hand down his trousers, masturbating in public, we see the stains of his ejaculate on his unwashed clothes. We imagine how sour he smells, his acrid breath, his sweat.</p><p>His obsessions are creepy too. Learning that James is filming an advertisement with legendary movie star Elizabeth Taylor (a figure whose person looms over <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>as well), Vaughan attempts to manoeuvre himself into a position where he can create an elaborate fetish scene involving the star’s death in a motor collision.</p><p>Vaughan is a classic example of Kristeva’s concept of the abject as something that at times both draws us close, even as it repels us. Catherine gets to engage in intercourse with Vaughan – in the back of a car driven by James, of course – but for much of the book, James fantasises about sodomising him, and Catherine encourages this, getting off on a clinical, or perhaps mechanical description of the sexual acts the two men might perform.</p><p>And when the men consummate, another consummation, in Vaughan's mind, needs to follow, and the twisted metal and mangled flesh of the novel’s beginning and end result; the automotive sex-murder of Liz Taylor thwarted, another death must to happen in its place. And always described in the language of mechanics, of a technological blueprint for a future variety of sex.</p><p>If the language of <i>Crash</i>’s very mechanical and precise pillow talk disturbs, with its idea of bodies as geometric figures, pistons, joints and shafts, consider how mechanical the sex act can be. Consider the two primary contexts in which people in our society specifically talk about using “lube”, and how similar in some ways those contexts are. Consider how mechanical we already are in our sexualities.</p><p>This is where we talk about Gabrielle. Gabrielle is a minor character in the text, but possibly one of its most important symbols. a social worker who bears scars of an auto crash that have transformed her body, melding her with the machine that damaged her.</p><blockquote><p>“On her legs were traces of what seemed to be gas bacillus scars, faint circular depressions on the kneecaps. She noticed me staring at the scars, but made no effort to close her legs. On the sofa beside her was a chromium metal cane. As she moved I saw that the instep of each leg was held in the steel clamp of a surgical support. From the over-rigid posture of her waist I guessed that she was also wearing a back brace of some kind. She rolled the cigarette out of the machine, glancing at me with evident suspicion. I guessed that this reflex of hostility was prompted by her assumption that I had not been injured in an automobile crash, unlike Vaughan, herself and the Seagraves.” – Ballard, <i>Crash</i>, Chapter 10.</p></blockquote><p>(<i>Note</i>: pro tip – don’t – <i>do not </i>Google “gas bacillus scar”. You’re welcome.)</p><p>Gabrielle will take James as a lover. Gabrielle’s body, transformed by her accident – the stages of the transformation recorded in Vaughan’s voyeuristic photo albums – the metal holding her legs together – the network of scars and the “corrugated ditch” on her thigh that serves as another avenue of penetration – makes her a very early literary example of the fetishised cyborg.</p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeGyvbDPhmxwYUKXe0mvM5ZUQBxQheHHmN9KaY0FpVa-3RfAZIqVbeaSKj7aSdCseGYMZbtq4l6uDOblfb2yOw65B7zDVo8OK7UF_arDCcMJmDjMF0WT5uCJDFPHXUzwzf6TnYJuLB-e9mc79hyylFwrtfDJ9iUZKrufh-9siY3Quh4UlbNEkzb5uAAg/s1280/vlcsnap-2021-09-27-17h41m57s934.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeGyvbDPhmxwYUKXe0mvM5ZUQBxQheHHmN9KaY0FpVa-3RfAZIqVbeaSKj7aSdCseGYMZbtq4l6uDOblfb2yOw65B7zDVo8OK7UF_arDCcMJmDjMF0WT5uCJDFPHXUzwzf6TnYJuLB-e9mc79hyylFwrtfDJ9iUZKrufh-9siY3Quh4UlbNEkzb5uAAg/w400-h240/vlcsnap-2021-09-27-17h41m57s934.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />Maybe the next one, darling</b></i><br />David Cronenberg understood this.<p></p><p>In Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of <i>Crash</i>, the scene with Gabrielle and James (Rosanna Arquette and James Spader) is present and, although made of implications and hints, engages fully with what it means, with the non-standard intersection of body part and body part unmistakable.</p><p>Back in the 1990s, when <i>Crash</i> was made, extreme body modification defined as more than a few tattoos – scarification, tongue splitting, genital piercing and more – began to move out of the underground and kink communities into the general public awareness. It is useful to note that Re/Search Publications also produced illustrated books of essays about industrial culture and a whole volume about these “modern primitives”, and marketed these books to the same people who were going to want an illustrated and annotated <i>Atrocity Exhibition</i>. The word “primitive” has thankfully been in large part left behind, and there’s simply not enough space to go into the profound problems that this movement and the industrial culture that worked alongside it had (note: Re/Search’s marvellous editions of Ballard sit on the same publications list as celebratory essays about neonazi-adjacent industrial artist Boyd Rice, for example, which reminds us that it’s not just the body mods that have gone mainstream). But the thing to hold on to is that this culture was never really “primitive” anyway, and that its most prominent and raw cinematic representations were the adventurers of Cronenberg’s <i>Crash </i>and the brutal machine fetishists of <i>Tetsuo</i>.</p><p>Here, Cronenberg makes it explicit: we see Vaughan being tattooed with complex quasimedical designs simulating the ideal sites of impact of the components of an automobile console on his flesh. In Cronenberg’s film, Gabrielle’s leg braces become a site of foreplay, and the awkwardness of navigating Gabrielle's cyborg legs for the sake of sex in a car is a fetishistic act in itself. She is part machine, made so by the machine she inhabits. Gabrielle’s cyborg sexuality is not defined by the machined voluptuousness of the Sorayama “gynoid”. Hers, although undeniably magnetic, is difficult, painful, industrial.</p><p>In Cronenberg’s adaptation, the lovemaking is prefaced by a scene where Gabrielle and James get into the mood by visiting a car showroom. They pretend to be looking for a vehicle that would suit Gabrielle’s legs, and Gabrielle ruthlessly teases a junior salesman as James looks on. It’s a sophomoric thing to do but we realise as we see the amused arousal of James and Gabrielle at the young man’s confusion that the tackiness of what they’re doing is the point. The theatre they’re creating is the stereotypical opening scene – the bit with the plumber or the vacuum cleaner salesman if you like – of the conceptual skinflick they picture themselves starring in.</p><p>Body fetishes are weird, slippery things. A body shape, a body part of a certain form or even a disability, when fetishised, objectifies the body it belongs to. The person becomes a tool of sexual pleasure for someone, an adult toy rather than a person. It dehumanises that person. I don’t think this is how it is for Gabrielle, though, both in the book, and more so in the film. Her own fetish for body modification lies in an action, an irreversible, painful one (compare the industrial fetishist of Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo, who penetrates his body with metal objects).</p><p>Gabrielle’s kink is to have her body changed by injury, and to have fulfilling, transforming sex with those who share those transformations. As written by Ballard, their sex scene is possibly the most notorious moment of an already notorious book. The nuts and bolts holding together Gabrielle’s shattered frame become as much the vehicle of kink as patent thigh boots or a latex hood. The scar tissue that criss-crosses her skin is a new erogenous zone. In Gabrielle, the motor car has become a vehicle for a transhuman autoeroticism.</p><p>The pun’s intended, but it works: by effecting her transformation, she is able to get off on herself.</p><p>Aside from a brief view of Gabrielle’s new orifice – Ballard’s “corrugated ditch” is already a succinct description of any number of quintessentially Cronenbergian transhuman prosthetic effects – in the film there is almost nothing to see, and everything to understand.</p><p>Which is what you’d expect, because of all the adaptations of Ballard’s fiction, Cronenberg’s <i>Crash </i>is easily the richest – the nearest in spirit, the most relevant to the present, and the most structurally and technically satisfying in pretty much every respect.</p><p>It's not hard to argue that Cronenberg had been in synch with Ballard for a long time. If his early film <i>Crimes of the Future </i>(1970) (not to be confused with his 2022 film of the same name) with its pervert scientists navigating a social dystopia had no direct connection to <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>, it certainly came from the same place. And in <i>Shivers </i>(1975), a tower block full of middle class professionals descends into a very different sort of apocalypse as a plague of parasites causes the inhabitants first to descend into a state of permanent orgy and then to spread out and welcome the rest of the world into their collapse.</p><p>By the time Cronenberg made <i>Crash</i>, then, he had already approached the New Flesh with <i>Videodrome</i> (1981) and had successfully and sensitively adapted Burroughs in <i>Naked Lunch</i> (1992).</p><p>So it makes sense that Cronenberg might have a good idea of how to make a go of adapting <i>Crash</i>. And it is no surprise that Cronenberg’s film is a great adaptation of a great book. It condenses and updates the text, changing and rearranging things to communicate meaning while giving the illusion that nothing has been left out, and at times adding scenes that are so in tune with the original text that it can be surprising to go back to it and find that they are not there.</p><p>The only thing that Cronenberg doesn’t – and really can’t – address is Vaughan stalking Elizabeth Taylor. Here instead Vaughan (Elias Koteas) engages in a plan with Seagrave (Peter MacNeill) to recreate the death of Jayne Mansfield that inevitably goes a little awry. In fact, it allows Vaughan the one moment in the film where genuine, uncontrolled emotion arises, when he realises he was not there to see Seagrave die, and that he was not there to die with him.</p><p>He’s contrasted here with James (Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), whose pillow talk, at times quoted verbatim from the book, is performed in a low, even monotone. Each is introduced while fucking other people – a man at the aircraft hangar where Catherine takes her flying lessons and a camerawoman at the studio. But James’s finish is thwarted when the moment is disturbed. As they report back to each other, Catherine commiserates: “Maybe the next one, darling.” And this is the final line of the film, too, as Catherine lies next to her wrecked car, and James asks her if she is badly injured. She says no. And he responds with the same line, without irony: maybe the next one, darling. This is the film’s biggest departure: the bookends of the film focus on James and Catherine, and it is their relationship, from a place of dissociation to the end, where they find sincere, loving fulfilment in each other through near-fatal collision trauma, that frames and contextualises everything.</p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaopXCqACZvai3R0tsilTkDoiVd59L94Fj0kxAEO7vgBDM5-aHL9mFcLP9_i-k99kzdHrv4SSlbdoUBOHscQtd2LL4tbUL-GUYMnTPqeScEFCzRpdPsqm_Z9NmLrJ_uE9UTYGsZA3EEzoi_v7Wn38ZpdhB1vm_rUIZ6libI1gtnsg7RUMUFtbkTEFcxw/s1280/vlcsnap-2021-09-24-16h26m06s955.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaopXCqACZvai3R0tsilTkDoiVd59L94Fj0kxAEO7vgBDM5-aHL9mFcLP9_i-k99kzdHrv4SSlbdoUBOHscQtd2LL4tbUL-GUYMnTPqeScEFCzRpdPsqm_Z9NmLrJ_uE9UTYGsZA3EEzoi_v7Wn38ZpdhB1vm_rUIZ6libI1gtnsg7RUMUFtbkTEFcxw/w400-h240/vlcsnap-2021-09-24-16h26m06s955.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />The profane mass</b></i><br />In <i>Crash</i>, the orgasm is a technological, staged thing, a moment of transformation, synonymous with the devastating, irreversible crunch of impact. And the transforming power of the orgasm is signified in a body modified by that trauma and wearing its signs.<p></p><p>Like a lot of porn, the sex these characters engage in has precise and specific forms: the repeated positions, the formal way in which each tryst begins with a single breast uncovered and cupped in a hand. And ritual is a thing porn shares with the devotional. Ballard, who clearly had a whole lot more to say about Cronenberg’s <i>Crash </i>than he would about Weiss’s version of <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>, made the observation himself:</p><blockquote><p>“I don't want to sound too pretentious, but there's almost an undercurrent of religion to it, religion of a pagan kind. These crashes are celebrated as a kind of profane mass. Bertolucci, whom I know slightly, called the film 'a religious masterpiece' and I know what he meant. The compulsive rehearsal of the same scenario - these endless crashes being planned and executed - is in fact no more than the sort of repetitions you find in religious observance.” – Ballard, ”Dangerous Driving”</p></blockquote><p>Unlike Ballard, I am not afraid of sounding pretentious.</p><p>The car crash is sacramental, because it has been made the vehicle of the orgasm. In a godless world, porn is a site of ecstasy, as transcendent and as divorced from reality and as prone to abuse and exploitation as any religion.</p><p>And porn, like religion, is a slippery thing, lubed like the workings of an internal combustion engine. The more specialist the desires, the stranger the observances.</p><p>We see the group watching a tape of crash tests, and Helen (Holly Hunter) becoming fascinated, excited and aroused by the mangled dummies and crushing metal. James and Gabrielle, on the sofa with her, draw closer. They affirm her, join in this. Everyone starts feeling up everyone else.</p><p>Although pornography is, usually, deliberately made in order to evoke a sexual response, it’s the response to it that makes it porn. You can make anything porn by contextualising it as porn. In some cases all an otherwise non-sexual thing needs in order to become porn is to be compiled in a place where it’s called erotic, each image innocuous on its own but transformed by context and repetition into something that cannot be read as other than sexually arousing. Or sexually arousing for someone, at least.</p><p>All sorts of things are erotic on the internet. elaborate piled-up hairstyles; soft onesies; headphones; chunky knit sweaters; business attire; spacesuits. It seems innocent enough, even comical. It’s how Rule 34 actually works in real life – it’s not that there’s a porn version of everything on the internet (although there is a lot of that, and frankly I’m going to be haunted by the erotic Elsa-from-<i>Frozen </i>photoshoot I stumbled upon while researching this for a very long time), it’s that there are places where you can find most things contextualised as porn.</p><p>This can quickly become a bit creepy. Leaving out the most problematic of all – a sexual proclivity for those who cannot consent – we might, for example, mention well-documented fetishes for alopecia, anorexia, amputees. We are back to the objectification of Gabrielle. By making the non-standard body the focus of a fetish, the bodily difference overcomes the meaning of the person, especially if that bodily difference is considered by the human being who has it as a disability, an illness or an injury. This is what Traven’s Sex Kit did in <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>: its basic horror lay in the reduction of a human into a set of eroticised components, a reification of something that we already did every day but which the internet facilitates with factory-machined efficiency.</p><p>But Gabrielle wanted this. She is her own fetish. That doesn’t mean we get to objectify her. Not that we necessarily would: by simply being what most people would find grotesque rather than sexy, the symbols of her fetish resist objectification, even while she literally becomes one with objects. Maybe that’s the point.</p><p>In Ballard’s books and Cronenberg’s adaptation of <i>Crash</i> alike, objects become as fleshly and erotic as flesh becomes mechanical. Cronenberg’s camera lingers over car bodywork, ogling it. A mangled car door bears a gouge resembling a vagina, penetrated by recovery machinery, aiming to extract its passengers.</p><p>Flesh and machine exist here in a sort of sexual union. </p><p>We have here a method, if we want it, to fuck the future. And if the issue of that union proves to be unrecognisable to us, we must have the courage to act like it’s going to be OK, because the human race continues through change. </p><p>We are alive. We are alive. The frightening thing is that this is the best we are ever going to hope for.<br /></p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-3913446527990700802022-06-21T12:36:00.017+01:002022-06-21T12:36:00.169+01:00The Question in Bodies #42: F*** the Future (iii)<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxfxuoiD0D2wzaASdRDW0jnadev0OJsI9tUvUPcheMdoyJTmxL377eav8ss_01ECfIB_9Xrf8_CXGUCOKaQx0tqtNGIWVniHVm5yUGL6t9JPy3VHDrSDSzP-omU1gzh1y3jwjKRDOj3nUNPZZP3j896rCbvetnvxl-Ys7Z0msAzePpi89Vd0K0sEQn-g/s765/Aparelho-Voador.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="765" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxfxuoiD0D2wzaASdRDW0jnadev0OJsI9tUvUPcheMdoyJTmxL377eav8ss_01ECfIB_9Xrf8_CXGUCOKaQx0tqtNGIWVniHVm5yUGL6t9JPy3VHDrSDSzP-omU1gzh1y3jwjKRDOj3nUNPZZP3j896rCbvetnvxl-Ys7Z0msAzePpi89Vd0K0sEQn-g/w400-h226/Aparelho-Voador.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></div><b><br />(<i>A digression concerning low-flying aircraft</i>)<br /></b>In Ballard's story “Low-Flying Aircraft”, a couple, Forrester and Judith, travel north to Sweden to have a baby. While there, they see the odd behaviour of a local doctor, who flies back and forth across the landscape, spraying lines in silvery paint. The world’s population has plummeted, due to most babies being born apparently deformed. In fact, we find out, human fertility has skyrocketed, and the supposedly deformed children – although blind they can sense their environment and communicate in ways “able bodied” people cannot – are the next step in human evolution, delayed by a desperate desire for eugenic purity. “Mutant” children are routinely aborted the moment they are identified in the womb, or summarily killed when they are born. Except sometimes they aren’t.<span><a name='more'></a></span><p></p><p>Forrester initially believes that the doctor is stealing art treasures from abandoned museums and galleries. But in fact the physician is spraying the ground to help a community of the evolved young people, among them his daughter, hidden and protected in the mountains: they can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, and the reflections of the silver paint help them to find their way. At the end of the story, Judith’s baby is born, a mutant, and the parents hand over the child to be raised in safety.</p><p>We need to contrast this with the other texts we are looking at. It would be easy, looking at these three pivotal parts of his canon, and in fact several others, to conclude that Ballard himself was prone to sociopathy, that the sometimes chilly, detached nature of his writing was his signature style. But this, one of his most quietly moving stories, really isn’t like that. The human race has clearly taken a horrific wrong turn here, and although he describes a world of shocking, matter-of fact cruelty, he posits the solution to extinction is to allow the children to be allowed to live and be different.</p><p>Solveig Nordlund’s Portuguese film adaptation of 2002, <i>Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude</i>, is pretty faithful. As a low-key feature adaptation of a fairly brief story, it has the space to flesh out its protagonists. Judith (Margarida Marinho) is given significantly more depth and the film explores her fear, sadness and despair, while her husband, here called André (Miguel Guilherme), is somewhat more sympathetic than he is on the page. The flying doctor (Rui Morisson) is as much the key to the story’s mysteries as his literary counterpart. The world’s descent into depopulated fascism is deftly portrayed in background detail and lightly-sketched events – fear-mongering visual propaganda; an encounter with a some border guards; the sad, lonely decor of the hotel where much of the drama takes place.</p><p>Ballard wasn’t afraid to write about post-apocalyptic scenarios – the earlier novels that made his name deal with different end-of-civilisation scenarios: <i>The Wind from Nowhere </i>(1961); <i>The Drowned World</i> (1962); <i>The Burning World</i> (1964); <i>The Crystal World</i> (1966). In the period that he wrote “Low-Flying Aircraft”, however, he had moved on.</p><p>“The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s head,” says a character in “Low-Flying Aircraft”. It’s about as programmatic a statement as Ballard would ever make. “Low-Flying Aircraft” serves as a sort of bridge between his earlier apocalypses and his 1970s social experiments. The apocalypse is underway here, but rather than wind up in a stereotypical wasteland-and-barbarism postapocalypse like, for example, handsy sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison’s near-contemporary <i>A Boy and His Dog</i> (1969, filmed 1975), Ballard’s is lower in key, more believable. As time has gone on, Ballard’s version of the twilight of Western civilisation is looking more and more like the kind of apocalypse we'd really find ourselves in, one where people just carry on living and working the way they always did, even as society collapses around them, and slides quietly into the excesses of fascism (conversations about COVID are so inevitable we’ll just assume that we’ve had this talk and leave it there). Ballard lived through several apocalyptic near-misses – the twentieth century was characterised by them, really. But he was, if not unique, unusual enough to work out what a twenty-first century apocalypse might really look like.</p><blockquote>“I can imagine Oprah Winfrey interviewing Hitler or Goebbels, and saying, 'Let's bring this anti-semitism thing into perspective'. As if in some way, by analysing their childhoods or getting them to be frank, one could somehow defuse the threat posed by unreconstructed anti-Semitism. Ultimately, I think this idealism is a refusal to look evil in the face, and to admit that apparently normal people are capable of appaling acts of cruelty.” <br />– Ballard, interviewed in “Dangerous Driving”, <i>Frieze </i>34, May 1997.</blockquote><p>The subtext of “Low-Flying Aircraft” is that ordinary, average people are able to normalise genocide. If there’s an accidental anti-abortion message here, it needs to be stressed that the abortions aren’t the problem. It’s the reason for them. By making the protagonists a couple who are desperately trying for a
child, Ballard makes that clear enough: unwanted pregnancies being
terminated are not the issue. It's the <i>desired</i> ones. The issue here is <i>eugenics</i>.<br /></p><p>Already medical science is working out how to screen pre-natally for various disabilities, the best-known being Down’s Syndrome. And it’s getting more complex as time goes on. If you knew that the child you initially wanted was going to be deaf or blind, would you still want to have them? </p><p>Ongoing research into the genetics of things that are at best arguably even disabilities – neurodiversities like autism – increasingly looks like a tool for those who wish to eradicate or “cure” the neurodiverse. This has been widely reported in the last few years. (<i>Note</i>: e.g “Prenatal Sequencing for Some Autism Genes May Soon Be Available”,<i> The Scientist</i>, 22 April 2019; “Are we ready for a prenatal screening test for autism?” <i>The Guardian</i>, 1 May 2014.) In September 2021, the Spectrum 10k genetics project in the UK was put on hiatus after concerns that it could be used as a tool for exactly this kind of eugenic meddling. (<i>Note</i>: “High-profile autism genetics project paused amid backlash", <i>Nature</i>, 27 September 2021.)</p><p>Scientists have been looking for “queer genes” too, for as long as genetic research has been a thing. And at the time of writing the spectre of eugenics has been raised by “gender-critical” campaigners freely thinking aloud about the low-key extermination of young trans people. </p><p>(<i>Note: </i>For example, “gender-critical” campaigner Helen Joyce, intervewed in June 2022: “<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">And in the meantime, while we’re trying to get through to the decision-makers, we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition... every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world... every one of them is a difficulty.”)<br /></span></p><p>I live with the deep, sickening certainty that if, back around the time when Ballard was writing these stories, my parents had known they would have a child who was autistic and queer, <i>I would not have been born. </i>There is no doubt of it. I don’t think I am alone in that. I don’t think I am alone. Even parents who actually value their children often fall in love with their offspring after they have been born. Before, the child is a potential, a cipher. The attachment of Pro-Lifers to the unborn doesn’t really extend beyond an ideological conviction rather than an expression of love (you only need to see the cavalier attitudes of these people to children after they have been born to realise that).</p><p>For Ballard, being afraid to allow the next generation to be something we might not currently recognise as human in the way that we define it is a fast track to extinction. Our future depends on our descendants developing in their own way. We have to let our heredity be mutable.</p><p>We have to be prepared to let the children live.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-20544538310314640842022-06-17T11:26:00.002+01:002022-06-17T11:26:00.202+01:00The Question in Bodies #41: F*** the Future (ii)<p></p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPj-H3dbVOeAjW8X1hNd7QGmltUmGVrbbHCmLavAKydM6jvItpFc9QxXl2PLX2aBza5v28xZXXQ1StbNI7gEnr9WjhbrUf1-gFjaS5tt7ZQ0iI6G-W_rzOvz5gZZcUTEjEdrqeD9GnwUQWfjSsaFGOWL7ScBJ5k_iDU6XefKmanbcIm7_ptgL6yW1sGw/s1000/high%20rise.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="1000" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPj-H3dbVOeAjW8X1hNd7QGmltUmGVrbbHCmLavAKydM6jvItpFc9QxXl2PLX2aBza5v28xZXXQ1StbNI7gEnr9WjhbrUf1-gFjaS5tt7ZQ0iI6G-W_rzOvz5gZZcUTEjEdrqeD9GnwUQWfjSsaFGOWL7ScBJ5k_iDU6XefKmanbcIm7_ptgL6yW1sGw/w400-h166/high%20rise.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />Welcoming them into the future</b></i><p></p><blockquote>“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within his huge apartment building during the previous three months." <br />– Ballard, <i>High-Rise</i>, Chapter 1.</blockquote><p>I’ve had a history, going back to my time in academia, of deconstructing first pages of fiction and let me tell you, as opening lines go, that's an absolute banger. First lines are programmatic things, carrying in them the full weight of the story to come, or, alternatively, sometimes acting as lies or traps. This opener does both in some really interesting ways. It introduces one of the (it turns out three) point of view characters. It suggests languor and thoughtfulness, and a character with time and space and the privilege to reflect (he’s a doctor, so you think he would). And also it suggests, in a single word, something that is, to the intended audience – literate, English-speaking – something terrible, some breakdown of the normal order of things, and more so because of what it suggests about the kind of man Laing is by the time it has happened, that he has the time to sit on a balcony and reflect on what happened here, but is still very much OK with eating someone’s pet.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>That dissonance is important throughout the text of <i>High-Rise</i>. Because as we read on we discover that Laing is keeping something from himself. By the beginning of the book – the rest of the book is basically flashback leading to the beginning, the first and last pages depicting the same moment – he's raiding abandoned rooms for food, eating the pets of dead neighbours, and keeping a pair of essentially disabled and vulnerable women in his room, who trade sex for his protection. One of them is his sister. And he still heads off to teach in the medical school most days.</p><p>Laing lives on one of the middle floors of an ultra-modern, brutalist high-rise block of the kind that sprang up in London in the Sixties and Seventies, and which is still new here. The second point of view character, a filmmaker called Wilder, lives towards the bottom of the building. And the third, Royal, the architect of the whole project, lives in the penthouse.</p><p>The class system here is fairly openly expressed: haves at the top, have-nots at the bottom, have-somes in the middle. But just as the high-rise block represents a sort of compressed class system, the class system within the building is itself compressed. Everyone who lives here is middle class, and the stratifications of class are actually fairly narrow, fairly nuanced. At the bottom there are airline hostesses and TV cameramen, like Wilder. These aren’t working class people; they are not poor. All of them are workers in technocratic occupations, and the internal hierarchy of the middle classes (plural) is manifest here in all its detail. Your position on this concrete pole depends on where you are in the implicit hierarchy of the bourgeoisie. It’s a kind of Russian doll dystopia we have here, only the dolls are shaped like concrete penises with balcony windows up the sides. In the middle floors we have Laing, who teaches at a medical school, a dentist with a yen for sadism (I mean, he’s a dentist) called Steele, and a psychiatrist called Talbot, a familiar name (it’s tempting to assume that this is the same man who contrived that Atrocity Exhibition we talked about). And at the top we meet a newsreader named Cosgrove, a film actress named Jane Sheridan, and a consultant gynaecologist called Pangbourne: the people in front of the camera lord it over the behind the scenes people, and the consultants are so high on the medical tree they don’t even have to call themselves Doctor anymore.</p><p>And at the top is Royal, the architect. Which again isn’t one of the elite roles, but it is a place of control here. Royal is, in the matryoshka system of the high-rise, king, and when the revolution comes, he has a king’s fate.</p><p>And Laing is, as we see as things continue, wrong about how things have turned out. The three tiers of the high-rise tend almost immediately to tribal violence. The infrastructure collapses straight away; the tenants of the high-rise are at odds immediately. If the collapse is steady rather than immediate, it is only because it takes the building a while to notice what has already happened.</p><p>By the end of the Seventies, the social experiments that these concrete monoliths signified were largely considered to have failed. You could think of the trajectory of Trellick Tower on Kensal Green, for instance, a utopian idea that, because of the reluctance of authorities to commit fully, wound up declining and becoming a byword for urban degradation. Eventually the building was revived and now, fully gentrified, is a Grade II listed building. Its listed status prevented attempts to hide its status as a Brutalist monolith, and when a fire hit the higher floors of Trellick Tower in 2017, the building’s fabric was sound enough to survive with relatively light damage. Grenfell Tower was not so lucky: covered with combustible cladding designed to “renovate” the building’s appearance, it went up in flames in June 2017. 72 people died; hundreds lost their homes.</p><p>The High-Rise in Ballard’s book has a little of Trellick in it, but much more of the Barbican Estate, a Brutalist utopia which was opened about the time Ballard was writing the book. Like Ballard’s towers, the Barbican has pretty much all of the amenities – visiting some friends who live there in 2018, I had the opportunity to explore the place and marvel at the intentionality of it. It’s a place you never really have to leave. The Barbican Estate has escaped the social rollercoaster of Trellick and the fatal institutional vandalism to which Grenfell was subjected, probably because its inhabitants are in large part the same affluent professionals with whom Ballard populated his imaginary towers. Only without the descent into post-apocalyptic guerilla warfare, cannibalism, incest and dog-eating, obviously.</p><p>In Ballard’s queasily hilarious text, though, this was always going to happen, and this is where Laing is wrong: the dissolution of the isolated bourgeoisie into monstrosity was never an unusual event. It’s exactly what you get, the fate to which the British middle classes seemed to tend when Ballard was writing by their nature.</p><p>None of this is the building’s fault. It’s fashionable in social discourse now to blame the building for
this sort of degeneration, to dismiss the Brutalist architecture of the
Sixties as somehow a dehumanising thing, a symbol of impersonal leftist tyranny, but this architecture was intended from the get-go to be egalitarian, to be for the <i>people</i>. Compared to neo-Gothic or neo-Classical architecture, which are really designed, just as their inspirations were, to signify where power is and power <i>isn’t</i>, the 1960s-style high-rise has only one hierarchy that matters, and that’s vertical.</p><p>It’s interesting that in their home, the bourgeois protagonists of Ballard’s vicious satire at no point pretend to higher standards of morality. It’s a space full of medical professionals who never once remember their Hippocratic oaths. There is no religion here, no philosophical urge to be better. They are in a space where they don’t have to pretend to be good. The High-Rise gives them the sort of anonymity where they have names, but not the full details of personhood. In the High-Rise they can reconstruct themselves to be utterly selfish, and it becomes a place where moral rules no longer apply. This looks pretty prescient to me. (<i>Note: </i>Look, I’m comparing it to the internet, OK? OK. It’s not rocket science, people.)</p><p>No one in the High-Rise has really been transformed. They have just been given the opportunity to be amoral.</p><p>While a different sort of precarity has resulted in our everyday lives, Ballard really did understand the widening gulf between the different strata of the middle class. In 1975 the distinction between a TV camera operator and a newsreader was relatively fine. Now, it’s vast. In <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>, Ballard predicted that we’d indulge our urges to perversion and cruelty in a conceptual space, only missing the nature of the space in which we would eventually begin to do just that. In <i>High-Rise</i>, he gives us a contained, single-serving apocalypse, and it’s only the container which has really changed.</p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cBb2caFB1TR-zC39rU-ckqICAM9TmEm75KdKAkXu5p4L9F1wzQRftHVPRySmm6FgzjcM2sUI0ZtWDmumB6EHJ3mn7ynnfFT14u9ND6JH0a5H4PT3Q0yxXiBtQLjcikGUaGDp6AMTzY7uGSD2qVQLIA0Fn3JavBTGPVpuWpf9zY8P_htimc9SiB9xxA/s5497/2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3092" data-original-width="5497" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cBb2caFB1TR-zC39rU-ckqICAM9TmEm75KdKAkXu5p4L9F1wzQRftHVPRySmm6FgzjcM2sUI0ZtWDmumB6EHJ3mn7ynnfFT14u9ND6JH0a5H4PT3Q0yxXiBtQLjcikGUaGDp6AMTzY7uGSD2qVQLIA0Fn3JavBTGPVpuWpf9zY8P_htimc9SiB9xxA/w400-h225/2.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />SOS</b></i><br />The social experiments that the old high-rises represented were pretty much done with even by the time Ballard was writing, and Ballard himself, as he continued to write into the 21st century, grappled with ways to update the concerns that threaded through his work. <i>Super Cannes</i> (2000), for example, has several superficial commonalities with <i>High-Rise, </i>bringing some of its ideas into a more recent era. I think the way in which <i>High-Rise,</i> of the texts we’re looking at here, has dated makes it a difficult text to adapt.<p></p><p>Which is I why, I think, that frequent director/screenwriter team Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump, made several of the choices they did in their 2015 adaptation of the novel.</p><p>The film has a strong 1970s flavour, but it isn’t set in the 1970s so much as intended to be set in what “five minutes in the future” looked like in 1975. It’s a 2015 idea of a 1975 idea of 1976.</p><p>While Wilder and Royal are major characters in the 2015 film (as played by Luke Evans and Jeremy Irons respectively), the only real protagonist is Laing (Tom Hiddleston). But having only one protagonist actually allows for the space for more developed supporting characters, and this is especially important in the case of the women, many of whom gain more space and more development than they do in Ballard’s book, among them Anne Royal (Keeley Hawes), Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller) and Helen Wilder (Elizabeth Moss). Absent however is Laing’s sister, whose role is mainly filled by the not-related Charlotte. Other characters, minor in the book, get more space, such as Pangbourne (James Purefoy), here given full villain status, host of surreal parties where everyone wears the outfits of early Georgian royalty while orchestral arrangements of ABBA songs play in the background. Reese Shearsmith as Steele and Peter Ferdinando as Cosgrove have somewhat more to do, while Neil Maskell, Tony Way, Bill Paterson and Dan Renton Skinner all play characters not seen in the book but who serve plot purposes that do support the book’s themes.</p><p>Neither Laing nor Wilder is, you could probably imagine, quite as monstrous as either is in the original text. I suppose you have to do that. A lot of people <i>like </i>Tom Hiddleston. The man has a brand. And besides, unless you’ve got a sure thing and a hell of a lot of money behind you, you want the BBFC to give you a 15 certificate and a chance of international distribution, and… you're going to have to make some compromises. So having Wilder and Laing do all the things they do in the book is not going to fly. Both men do go very wrong, and both descend satisfyingly into delusion, but they’re not repellent in the same way. Other choices Wheatley and Jump make are more questionable.</p><p>The retro trappings of Wheatley’s film, while unavoidable – since the source material is set in a near-future that didn’t really happen – don’t do the film any favours. At times it feels like a theme park rather than a place with real people in it, and the transition from uneasy living space to the Full Mad Max happens suddenly in the middle of the film, and I think that really misses where Ballard was going with <i>High-Rise. </i>Wheatley and Jump have produced an interesting and at times blackly comic film, but there's something missing from it, something immediate, and it evokes a sort of distant regard rather than the gut level reaction the book demands.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-38782140766337909242022-06-14T16:11:00.001+01:002022-06-15T10:59:40.926+01:00The Question in Bodies #40: F*** the Future (i)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBAydxYwLUfdHnHHwzZ1i2aKhPuvHhixot_bzhLOelScc3p6c3_TWCju990kceQ2h0SBpTo1stKHlCGnBvpusmBX-Jl5ad_pDoJFqZ7-eEt1VPknUyGESg51P9HuRRUJPmdPSeO9EDnyex4Qs48fjvdx_0Crr4CXejnlL8C7VmNTGrju3y-N-k_Ry1g/s768/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h38m38s387.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="768" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBAydxYwLUfdHnHHwzZ1i2aKhPuvHhixot_bzhLOelScc3p6c3_TWCju990kceQ2h0SBpTo1stKHlCGnBvpusmBX-Jl5ad_pDoJFqZ7-eEt1VPknUyGESg51P9HuRRUJPmdPSeO9EDnyex4Qs48fjvdx_0Crr4CXejnlL8C7VmNTGrju3y-N-k_Ry1g/w400-h300/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h38m38s387.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>(<i>This, first in a four-part look at the key works of J.G. Ballard and their film adaptations, first appeared on my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/HowardDavidIngham" target="_blank">Patreon</a>, about a year ago. Want to see stuff miles in advance and a bunch of stuff you wouldn't see otherwise? You know what to do.</i>)<br /><p><i><b>The Sexual Counter-Revolution</b></i><br />I think that the general consensus is that we are now more or less resigned to the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies having been subject to a lengthy and successful counter-revolution, with the result that society is right now less openly sexual than it has been for a long time. And certainly, while steps have been made since that time to support people with sexualities other than the hetero and genders other than the cis, the keys of power are working harder than ever to wind the clock backwards. A decade ago, many would have found it unthinkable that the UK would be <a href="https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/09/24/uk-council-europe-report-lgbt-hate-speech/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">listed alongside Turkey, Russia, Poland and Hungary as one of the worst places to be LGBTQ+</a> in the so-called developed world. The fact that in the USA there’s even a debate as to whether anti-gay conversion therapy should be outlawed is really quite a telling indicator of the way that the wind is blowing. For those of us who identify as queer, these are frightening times.</p><p>But while from the top of our societies down our identities and sexualities seem more at risk than ever, in the everyday traffic of our lives, it isn’t really like that. In fact, our passions have balkanised, divided into any number of communities, subcommunities and infracommunities, where we can talk about these things, where we can remain radicalised against the mainstream norms. We have whole samizdat spaces existing within the social media, entire languages. In a way this is how it's always been for most of history. The liberalisation of the media, and the bringing of us into the mainstream, was an enterprise of only a few decades. As media branched off and splintered, the multiplicities of human identity split off into entire phyla, leaving commodified, acceptable versions behind in the mainstream, husks of the human self, there for the hand of power to ram itself into and manipulate like a rainbow cavalcade of Muppets (and let's not even get to what happened to the actual Muppets). Multinational corporations – sociopathic and rapacious by definition – adding rainbow flags to their logos one month a year isn't actually progress.</p><p>The flip side of this, the good side of this, is that the communities on the new margins have networks that they never had before. It's easier than ever to find your tribe, no matter how esoteric its concerns might once have been. Our closets are conditional now, furnished with WiFi. We can functionally be different people in different spaces for good or ill.</p><p>When our sexualities have been balkanised, so have our selves.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDnTcBrGJrWoM6iNgxqbtx6UY3MdfGF3MokzQg4Xvfrbcy15o5g1OVV34eIiwVjSnK16ioTk2EIO3Fi7sFBR_PLNrCMBQVeJMrinmFExIWERZBfqkwicaIo8lTz-Lp-o01E62bH9KjqXB8qn_uOQhYaXcczrU4kTq-B8hpRRBVaE5ISfd_LJ7PIH9dA/s768/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h43m03s953.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="768" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDnTcBrGJrWoM6iNgxqbtx6UY3MdfGF3MokzQg4Xvfrbcy15o5g1OVV34eIiwVjSnK16ioTk2EIO3Fi7sFBR_PLNrCMBQVeJMrinmFExIWERZBfqkwicaIo8lTz-Lp-o01E62bH9KjqXB8qn_uOQhYaXcczrU4kTq-B8hpRRBVaE5ISfd_LJ7PIH9dA/w400-h300/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h43m03s953.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></div><p></p><p><b><i>Psychopathic hymns</i></b><i><br /></i>My favourite story about JG Ballard is about how from time to time chemically fried explorers of outer reaches of human perception would turn up at the doorstep of Ballard’s house in suburban Shepperton, expecting to find a wild-eyed prophet. But Ballard, who had been widowed early on, and who largely brought his kids up by himself in an era where single dads were vanishingly rare, was, although entirely comfortable with those folks, and his home was hardly conventional, really not that person. The story goes that he would invite these people in, give them a nice cup of tea, chat quite pleasantly about his work and send them, confused, on their way. I don’t have any idea if that’s entirely true – it made its way into one of his obituaries when he died in 2009 – but I really hope some version of it is, since it’s a perfect proto-example of the phenomenon I’ve been talking about.</p><p>It might seem strange that, having stated the likely success of the Sexual Counter-Revolution, I might go back to texts created in the height of that original sexual revolution to expand upon it. But of all the transgressive writings of that era, J.G. Ballard’s series of four psychosexual social satires written between 1969 and 1975 – not really science fiction, not wholly contemporary, absolutely identity horror – are among the most useful texts to look at here because they are, I think, prophetic in a way that a lot of the more celebratory or optimistic tracts of the era are not. And they're disturbing; they straddle the line between contemporary fiction, sci-fi and horror. They are at the heart of this. They are <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>(1969), <i>High-Rise </i>(1975), <i>Crash </i>(1973) and <i>Concrete Island </i>(1974). I’m going to leave <i>Concrete Island</i>, as interesting as it is, to one side, and look at the other three novels, along with “Low-Flying Aircraft”, a short story from the same period, for the simple reason that these four texts, the three novels and the short story, all have film adaptations.</p><p>The extent to which Ballard nailed his predictions of the future pretty much demonstrates itself in how appalled people were with <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>and, even more so, <i>Crash. </i>This phenomenon repeated itself in 1996 when David Cronenberg’s thoughtful but no less transgressive film adaptation of <i>Crash </i>hit the screens. And with Ballard, it wasn’t just the usual gatekeepers of public decency who were horrified – his own publisher, Nelson Doubleday, ordered the first American run of <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>pulped before it ever hit the shelves (but then, who could blame the Americans for getting cold feet, with chapter titles like “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”?). And in 1973 a reader at Cape, according to legend, reported to have written the wonderful marginal note on a manuscript of <i>Crash</i>: “This author is beyond psychiatric help... DO NOT PUBLISH.” Some editions of the book still use that as a blurb.</p><p>We’ve mentioned Cronenberg already, but <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>was filmed in 2000 by Jonathan Weiss, and Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump adapted <i>High-Rise </i>in 2015. Another Ballard story of the same era, “Low-Flying Aircraft” (1973), received a Portuguese-language screen adaptation in 2002 from Solveig Nordlund – both story and film deserve a look here, being closely adjacent to the discussion.</p><p>It’s interesting that if we don’t count Ballard’s script credit for Hammer’s 1970 “cavemen poking stop motion monsters with spears” movie <i>When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth</i>, of the seven filmed adaptations of Ballard’s fiction I'm aware of at the time of writing, amounting to five films and two TV episodes, four of the films are based on texts from this era. The fifth, <i>Empire of the Sun </i>(Stephen Spielberg, 1987), is based upon Ballard’s semi-autobiographical 1984 book of the same name, which once again had its genesis in one of the sections of <i>The Atrocity Exhibition.</i></p><p>I won’t go into the two TV episodes, other than to list them for completeness, and to note that they are both adaptations of Ballard’s early science fiction, adapted for anthology shows: the story “Thirteen to Centaurus” (1962), dramatised as part of the early BBC anthology <i>Out of the Unknown </i>(Season One, 1965); and “The Drowned Giant” (1964), as one of the better episodes of Netflix’s maddeningly patchy animated series <i>Love Death and Robots </i>(Season Two, 2021).</p><p>(<i>Note: </i>A TV adaptation of Ballard’s 2000 novel <i>Super Cannes</i>, directed by Brandon Cronenberg, was announced as being in pre-production in May 2021.)</p><p>This period of Ballard’s work, then, chimes with filmmakers. It’s not hard to argue that <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>, <i>Crash</i> and <i>High-Rise </i>are the fulcrum of Ballard’s prolific work and, quite possibly, the best and best-known things he ever wrote. Each of them deals with human identity – primarily but not entirely masculine identity – in the context of a mechanistic environment, as defined by the technocratic encasements of our society. Ballard argues in all three that our sexuality has become part of the machine of which we have become a part. They’re early transhuman texts.</p><blockquote>“Sex, of course, remains our continuing preoccupation. As you and I know, the act of intercourse is almost always a model for something else. What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow an exploration, without any taint of guit, of every aspect of psychopathology... however consoling, it seems likely that our familiar perversions will soon come to an end, if only because their equivalents are too readily available in strange stair angles, in the mysterious eroticisms of overpasses, in distortions of gesture and posture.”<br /> – Ballard, <i>The Atrocity Exhibition, </i>“Tolerances of the Human Face”</blockquote><p>All three share characters and the same view of human identity as defined by sexuality, itself defined by the mechanistic frameworks of modern living. In all three books, sex is described as an operation of geometry. Here, bodies intersect. Flesh is the material from which pistons, levers and girders are made; blood, semen and vaginal fluid are lubricant and fuel. Conversely, brutalist high rise buildings become phallic objects, the metaphor of a society encased inside a giant erect cock never explicitly said but always there. The “mysterious eroticisms of overpasses” signify the weight of bodies lying across each other, their blood and cum formed in flowing traffic, each cell itself a body. The damage done to automobile bodywork in a head-on collision is an act of penetration here.</p><p>In Ballard’s quasi-dystopia everything is mechanistic, and nested like a series of bracketed equations, one inside the other, bodies reduced to algebraic forms, inside bodies, inside bodies: the human inside the artificial inside the social, all only different in forms of degree, in living breathing mechanics, and every form, internal and external, material and imaginal, in its own way eminently breakable.</p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7x6ICLvaoFBbv4P3GHo1HGuHH4-RLNZqDAtyG5ynYv-5zVlJOh-enT3-DivmA6pbB4GKTQQFcFe0kccUgvtIpCsp5sBweG3api5dJSTKL0PJOljSu64gcvtaPd2wuxdz9ZIJryNrzFX9PZ1Edhl9M9Y7voWly9odHGLhuiQUzxkPYcxDsVmBcj_1_CQ/s768/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h41m32s149.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="768" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7x6ICLvaoFBbv4P3GHo1HGuHH4-RLNZqDAtyG5ynYv-5zVlJOh-enT3-DivmA6pbB4GKTQQFcFe0kccUgvtIpCsp5sBweG3api5dJSTKL0PJOljSu64gcvtaPd2wuxdz9ZIJryNrzFX9PZ1Edhl9M9Y7voWly9odHGLhuiQUzxkPYcxDsVmBcj_1_CQ/w400-h300/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h41m32s149.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />Imaginary Perversions</b><br /></i>In 1964, Ballard’s wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia while on holiday in Spain, leaving him single father to three young children. Many would have collapsed under the pressure.<p></p><p>His daughter Bea would write, shortly after his passing:</p><blockquote>“Few of my parents' friends thought he would manage, for it was extremely rare at the time to find single fathers bringing up children on their own. But my father was determined to do it. He felt that as long as the surviving parent was loving and remained close to the children, they would thrive. He was right. We not only thrived; we had the most idyllic childhood I can imagine.”<br />– Bea Ballard, “My Dad, the Perfect Mum”, <i>The Times</i>, 26th April 2009</blockquote><p>He doted on his family. Meanwhile, he channelled his grief into the pieces that would eventually become <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>.</p><p><i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i> is probably Ballard’s most challenging novel, really a collection of collected pieces, most of which had seen print elsewhere. Later editions of the book would include supplementary chapters, along with annotations and an afterword by the author.</p><p>Very loosely, a psychiatrist whose identity collapse is signified by the constant shifting of his name – Travis, Talbot, Tallis, Talbert, and so on, although Ballard himself stated the core name is Traven (<i>Note: </i>annotation to “2. The University of Death”, 1991 Re/Search edition, p19) so that’s what I’ll use – embarks on a project to recreate conceptually the horrors of the twentieth century in an attempt to trigger the onset of World War Three. It will, he believes, be fought in the human mind. All of this, following the logic of a man in a state of psychological fracture, constitutes some attempt to make sense of the Twentieth Century.</p><p>Traven’s wife Margaret, herself a psychiatrist, and Traven’s analyst Dr Nathan follow the disintegrating shrink’s movements, acting as a sort of Greek chorus. On his conceptual journey, he is accompanied by a shifting cast of figures, some of whom may be imaginary; foremost among them are two young women with whom Traven is having on-off affairs, Karen Novotny and Catherine Austin. Traven particularly treats Karen Novotny (and just as it is with Catherine Austin, the name is always fully stated, never just “Karen” or “Miss Novotny”) as a construct, a sort of walking toolbox for his psychosexual experiments. Karen Novotny dies repeatedly, in a number of ways – divining which if any of her deaths are imaginary is beside the point, she’s dead in the vignette at hand. She is even at one point reduced to a “kit” made of her discorporate erogenous zones, kept neatly and cleanly in a box, the final level of objectification and dehumanisation. We don’t get to see why Karen Novotny might want to stick around, or what she gets out of it. She is just, in the man’s mind, there, and at his (chillingly literal) disposal.</p><p>Ballard wrote Dr Nathan to be the “safe and sane voice of the sciences. His commentaries are accurate and he knows what is going on. On the other hand, reason rationalises reality for him, as it does for the rest of us… in the sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects today about which we should not be reasonable.” (<i>Note: </i>Ballard, annotation to ”6. The Great American Nude”, 1991 Re/Search edition, p54). Reason is a slippery thing, and it’s pretty clear in <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>that reason isn't adequate to approach the confluence of sex and death that Traven’s Atrocity Exhibition represents. Still, perhaps because he misses the point, Dr Nathan’s statements on the nature of future relationships revealed by Traven’s blackly comic experiments are as pertinent and prophetic as Ballard’s statements about what he represents are.</p><blockquote>“Sex is now a conceptual act, it’s probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all. The perversions are completely neutral, cut off from any suggestion of psychopathology—in fact, most of the ones I’ve tried are out of date. We need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions just to keep the activity alive...”<br />– Ballard, <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i>, “The Summer Cannibals”</blockquote><p>I don’t know if that was true in 1970, but I think that in the online spaces we inhabit it has to some extent become a reality.</p><p><i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i> is for me an exploration of the horror of unbound heterosexuality, how heteronormativity without checks becomes anything but normative. Ballard equates sex and violence, and Traven’s treatment of the acquiescent Karen Novotny follows the trajectory of violent control, becoming a sort of mechanised sexual fascism performed by a figure as devoid of character as his victim. As conservatism tends to fascism, so, <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i> implicitly (accidentally?) posits, heterosexuality tends to this.</p><p>It's something of a relief when the blandly monstrous Traven vanishes altogether from the text. The book ends with detourned plastic surgery texts with the names of celebrities inserted, some mischievous market research on the sexual impact of Ronald Reagan that might have given Chris Morris inspiration, genealogies of murder, and a description of the Kennedy assassination as a downhill motor race. To say these final sections – containing the funniest passages in the book – are tasteless is to miss the point: good taste is an affectation, an act of ineffectual avoidance.</p><p>(<i>Note: </i>I don’t think I've seen anyone else write anything that suggests they find <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>as funny as I do. So maybe it’s just me.)</p><p>In this world, men are monsters, and women are appliances. We mean straight men and women, of course. The queers are excluded from the sample, which is all the more notable because Traven is explicitly bisexual, without ever acting on his more homoerotic impulses. And without that control sample, of course Traven’s methodology is suspect.</p><p>No final result of Traven’s inevitably doomed experiments is even allowed to appear in the text – it’s not even designed to be read in order, really. In one of the later editions of the book, an afterword from Ballard suggests you flip through and find an interesting section of his strange work of prophecy, and then read around it, giving his blessing, I think accidentally, to use it as a vehicle for occasional bibliomancy, like people in the past have used the Bible and the Aeneid. The Scriptures and Virgil led Dante through Hell. <i>The Atrocity Exhibition</i> is Ballard’s private map of a psychosexual Hell, born of grief and the consequent fracture of the self that brings.</p><p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp9oML7h9SklxoDO310uidNWs4mvSFaTFqSZaDSeIY0PxPKJw3c-I5oOm6Xc_Ss-TQMAMU65d1RsPD2-LxkknSiiMv_oA5w5odAEWZKZEJ8BtTSKkFQZC6tAa6WrQy-sGt-HHrUAICZ6yZ0qahuA5anh-M-r1lPmi2yORxI67HeZdJPsiSTh0GgjSsCg/s768/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h40m21s865.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="768" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp9oML7h9SklxoDO310uidNWs4mvSFaTFqSZaDSeIY0PxPKJw3c-I5oOm6Xc_Ss-TQMAMU65d1RsPD2-LxkknSiiMv_oA5w5odAEWZKZEJ8BtTSKkFQZC6tAa6WrQy-sGt-HHrUAICZ6yZ0qahuA5anh-M-r1lPmi2yORxI67HeZdJPsiSTh0GgjSsCg/w400-h300/vlcsnap-2021-10-29-10h40m21s865.jpg" width="400" /></a></b></i></div><p></p><p><i><b>Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty</b><br /></i>Jonathan Weiss’s turn of the century attempt at translating <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>to screen appears, in that context, a little baffling. In short, it’s not completely a success. The non-linear scenes of the page, available for the reader to flip back and forth through or cut up with scissors now have an imposed order on the screen.</p><p>(<i>Note: </i>William Burroughs, pioneer of the cut-up technique, rated <i>The Atrocity Exhibition </i>highly: “Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book… this book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn.” – Burroughs, preface to the 1991 Re/Search edition, p7, being complimentary in only the way Burroughs could be.)</p><p>Weiss’s film is surprisingly dull, and that dullness is only emphasised by the occasional intercut footage of real-world sex acts, crash tests and war crimes. Victor Slezak doesn't have a lot to work with as (his name a constant in the film) Travis, and Anna Juvander’s Karen Novotny is nothing more than a gorgeous mannequin, to be posed and dressed, to have her shadow drawn around with Sharpies, and to be fucked in the back of a car with a photo of Ronald Reagan covering her face. This sounds like it might at least be weird – only it really isn't, because the contextless parade of closely adapted scenes that don’t connect makes everything tonally homogenous. Maybe that’s the point, I don’t know.</p><p>Ballard, of whom every account paints a picture of a man possessing tremendous professional and personal grace, made it known, as he would with Cronenberg’s <i>Crash</i>, that he was very much flattered by Weiss’s film, and he more than once called it “extraordinary”. But the DVD commentary, which features Ballard alongside a clearly starstruck Weiss, is mainly a (fascinating) conversation about what Ballard intended with his book, and barely mentions the mechanics of filmmaking or adaptation at all. About 40 minutes before the film ends, Ballard seems to let out a sound like the one you make when you puff out your cheeks and blow, and, quite abruptly, he says, “Let’s call it a day, shall we?” The commentary ends, leaving the film’s last sections without any further Illumination.</p><p>It’s quite a hard film to track down now, and the occasional rare copy of its sole DVD release on the secondary market tends to go for exorbitant prices (I was fortunate to find one that was simply expensive rather than bank breaking, thank heavens). But like many collector’s items, the primary value of a copy of Weiss’ movie lies in the acquisition of the object, not in the film itself.</p><p>Perhaps in this age of fractured viewing (Note: see my discussion of <a href="https://www.room207press.com/2018/09/the-question-in-bodies-18-id-love-to.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Poppy</a>) you could make a version in the form of a nested playlist made of randomised streaming videos, the brief, gnomic vignettes grouped and made to be played in any order. Ballard, of all the futurists of his age, was the one most in tune with the future. I would love to know what he would have thought of that idea.</p><p> </p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-66910763348051614042022-04-01T13:01:00.001+01:002022-04-01T13:01:20.477+01:00Five Versions of Dune<p>This is <span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">Episode 2: where I explore the different iterations of Frank Herbert's DUNE, Denis Villeneuve, David Lynch, Space Hats and Horny Space Nuns and all.
Patreon Backers get to see this before anywhere else. </span></p><p><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">This episode appeared on Patreon some time ago. For more, back my Patreon at </span><a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqa1VOR3VETmRuU0Q4RXVBS3c4SW9uRHhrWXlDZ3xBQ3Jtc0tuZDBucmx2UWRfY19lT0VLZFV1YkwxUVo3ZDRiVDRMTmF6Y1BQX0JwNzM3WFZNVDFmNGFLUnBCVG15cGw2Rm13bTZQa0hhTWU2aFVBZW5yc2xsWjU0UkRMaHNCOUpaOFdBaHctb3BRRmdBOGtlQXk2Zw&q=https%3A%2F%2Fpatreon.com%2FHowardDavidIngham" rel="nofollow" spellcheck="false" target="_blank">https://patreon.com/HowardDavidIngham</a></p><p><br /><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto"> </span></p>
<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S8kHyYmLCyk" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4860365271399117074.post-9475608328957876572022-03-31T18:08:00.000+01:002022-03-31T18:08:04.809+01:00The Question in Bodies 39: Bug (2006)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaoKaFqgVZjR294xQ5OscQrOHwBAHe_39u_RGiA8KFqyE4FIcLYMSeDsQmOPth5Tgm9kdZ0BVJoFK1bYPE2klIGgr9TRjlDEun3G3OXc-zkBabWT7YqPrInLj3T2Scx0GYAGK-1psz0phzVg2HdhfD6LAizvLtSOr5o1IYQw2IJbIA5qx6oSRv4iwLxA/s853/vlcsnap-2021-08-08-18h40m34s801.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="853" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaoKaFqgVZjR294xQ5OscQrOHwBAHe_39u_RGiA8KFqyE4FIcLYMSeDsQmOPth5Tgm9kdZ0BVJoFK1bYPE2klIGgr9TRjlDEun3G3OXc-zkBabWT7YqPrInLj3T2Scx0GYAGK-1psz0phzVg2HdhfD6LAizvLtSOr5o1IYQw2IJbIA5qx6oSRv4iwLxA/w400-h225/vlcsnap-2021-08-08-18h40m34s801.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />So some time ago, a colleague tagged me in a difficult discussion on Facebook about race, sexuality and religion. There was this one guy there who – let's just say his views weren't on the top two rows of the D&D alignment chart. I was brought in as an expert witness or something. But a read of the thread assured me that nothing I said was going to mean a thing.<p></p><p>Halfway through, the offending participant had said, after being challenged on the extreme nature of his views, “I had best friends try to stage a mini-intervention for me.” People who loved him had tried to get him to see sense. It hadn't worked.</p><p>That’s a red flag. If the people who love you are concerned enough to try this and you nonetheless haven't yet afforded yourself sufficient capacity for self reflection to think about why, in their love, they care enough to do this for you, you're in a place where ideology overrides healthy human relationships, and frankly you're not going to be deprogrammed by some rando on the internet.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>At about the same time, the final result of the NXIVM case hit the news, and we heard of the fate of Allison Mack. Mack, an actor, engaged in human trafficking on behalf of self help guru Keith Raniere. She physically tortured and emotionally abused converts, enthusiastically, training them to be perfect sex slaves for her leader. In the end, having cooperated with the court, she was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. On the day of her sentencing, she wrote an open letter to her friends and family, and to the family of the cult’s victims:</p><blockquote><p>“At the time, I believed I was helping… I also want to apologize to all the friends and loved ones I have hurt throughout this process... I know many of you fought hard to show me the truth... but I didn’t listen. I pushed you away and silenced myself toward you when you were trying to save my life. I am sorry I was so stubborn. I am sorry I was blind to your care and deaf to your pleas. I wish with everything in me that I had chosen differently... I lied to you, again and again, in order to protect the delusion I was so deeply committed to believing.”</p></blockquote><p>What got Allison Mack into deep water is exactly what we saw with our Facebook Fascist. The point that he revealed that people who loved him had tried to bring him back and failed is the point where any hope that he might have been engaged with rationally and intelligently was reduced to its metaphorical component atoms. He's in thrall to the sort of viewpoint where his ideology is more important to him than personal human connection and fellow-feeling.</p><p>Even if you completely ignore the ideological stand itself, however hideous it is, this is the actual point where you can tell it's messed up.</p><p>Because when it matters more than love, it endangers your soul. And there might be a moment when it can be engaged with, but it sure as hell isn't going to be on a Facebook thread.</p><p>How do you get to a place like that? It's easy enough to say that the people who fall into these places are vulnerable, but that isn’t the whole of it. It is a specific sort of vulnerability that causes a person to wind up brainwashed, or radicalised, or whatever you want to call it. And it is a sort of vulnerability that is easily hidden, and it affects people who are obviously broken and people who appear gilded with success. I think it comes from a desire to connect. Evangelical religions make a big deal of their rallies, and their witnessing, and their door knocking. But people join because they want to be among friends. The hucksters and chancers behind QAnon know this, setting up shop in existing online communities. I’ve seen it happen, watched one acquaintance with a research interest in synchronicities and the way folk memory changes things fall deep into the Q pit. It was shocking how easily it came to pass. But it comes from community. It comes from shared experiences. Which is why a group of women who had pretty much everything already wanted to be better, and trusted their friends, and wound up so invested in being a cult leader’s sex slaves they had his initials branded on their bikini lines.</p><p>And this is why it’s so impervious to love. Because it has replaced love, it sits in the place of love like some bloated, carnivorous demon.</p><p>All it needs a crack in the wall, a place where love is lacking.</p><h3 style="text-align: center;"><em><strong>Bug (2006)</strong></em></h3><p>In William (The Exorcist) Friedkin’s 2006 drama <em>Bug</em>, adapted from a stage play by Tracy Letts, we see a small, personal radicalisation, as the lonely, trauma-blasted Agnes (Ashley Judd) falls under the spell of delusional conspiracy theories. Agnes lives in a motel. She waits tables, and fools around with friend-with-benefits RC (Lynn Collins). Her no-good ex-husband Jerry (Harry Connick Jr) is out of jail and stalking her. The sight of an unattended trolley in the store makes her inexplicably sad. Occasionally she smokes crack. She's in a bad place, and we know very quickly that there is no way to a better one. In the end, the choices for a person like Agnes lie only in the direction of her inevitable descent.</p><p>Enter Peter (Michael Shannon), a man who RC brings back to the motel after what we are given to assume is a typical night of partying. Peter is a little intense. He is quiet and socially awkward, but for all that he is also, crucially, attentive. Agnes hasn’t met anyone like him.</p><p>Peter has that one skill common to people who have survived abuse: he pays attention to the state of people, he knows how to recognise the basic signs of pain and danger. It isn’t a particularly hard skill to learn, and yet people who don’t have it think it is a supernatural thing. Sherlock Holmes’s supposed genius powers of ratiocination (and those of Auguste Dupin, who the idea of Holmes was pretty much nicked wholesale from) really just boil down to looking at people: a guy acts like a soldier, has a limp and a suntan, there’s been a war on in the Middle East. It’s not rocket science. But you’d think it was telepathy, given the reaction people have to you. It carries with it a trap, of course – when people keep telling you that you see things no one else sees, it is the easiest thing in the world to believe that it is a superpower. Before you know it you’re calling yourself an empath and sharing memes on social media about how introverts are better, and then, congratulations, you're insufferable.</p><p>In <em>Bug</em>, when Peter – who, like the John Watson of literature, has come back broken from a war in a desert (one thinks of Gulf War Syndrome here) – discerns fairly easily that Agnes is lying about not having children, it opens the floodgates, the pain behind that. And then she opens up to him more. He has some odd ideas, the sense that he is being surveiled, persecuted. But she still winds up sleeping with him. Because he is the best man she’s met.</p><p>And this is why, when Peter’s delusions begin to come to the fore – he keeps getting bitten by insects, which were sent by sinister, powerful agencies that are using him as an experimental subject. The further into Peter’s conspiracy hole Agnes goes the more outlandish his theories become, but more invested Agnes becomes. The appearance of Jerry only confirms which side Agnes feels she should be on, and by the time RC turns up and realises that Peter is delusional, Agnes is ready to throw over the one friend she has for the of Peter’s increasingly manic theories. She is soon enthusiastically joining Peter in papering the walls of the motel room with tinfoil; she begins to feed his paranoia with her own. They enter a sort of feedback loop, each statement building on the next, until the shared delusion reaches its furthest logical extent.</p><p>While <i>Bug </i>betrays its origins in theatre – the vast majority of the action happens in one room, and there are only five characters of any substance, three of which only enter the plot in the context of Agnes and Peter – the performances in the film are uniformly excellent and it portrays in heartbreaking detail how quickly and completely Agnes falls prey to Peter’s delusions, body and mind: the apparently invisible stings of an ”aphid” develop through itching and gouging into deep wounds.</p><p>What we see has a known psychopathology – it’s called folie à deux (literally, “madness in two”). Characterised as a shared delusional state, recorded cases seem to follow a model where one person has a delusion and a second, who has a reason to be emotionally invested in their relationship with the first, accepts and adopts the first person’s delusions and eventually feeds them.</p><p>But of course, delusional psychopathologies are notoriously slippery things. At what point is a conspiracy theory, an ideological standpoint, an opinion about history or medicine, or a religious belief just an odd belief, and when does it become a psychiatric condition? The easiest and most obvious answer to that is that it becomes an illness when it detrimentally affects one’s quality of life and/or endangers the safety of the person with the delusion or the people around them. But I don't think that's the whole story. A lot of the ways in which we approach these things are socially constructed. Consider Lorraine (not her real name), a person I've known my whole life. When young, Lorraine began to hear disembodied voices and frequently saw angels, demons and ghosts. In the 1970s she attended a Spiritualist church, and the leadership there recognised in her the potential to be a psychic medium. In her training, they made sure that Lorraine knew that not all the voices told the truth and that most people would not understand her abilities and that therefore it was best to only talk about these things in certain contexts. Lorraine is quite elderly now, and is quite entrenched in her beliefs, which by now include the certainty that black magicians are performing rituals against her and that some of her neighbours are possessed by evil spirits. It is a matter of a couple of minutes to find a list of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and note that her experiences correlate with most of the accepted symptoms, but it’s also irrelevant, because Lorraine functions in society and in a framework that means that she has never come into contact with psychiatry, and likely never will. Is she schizophrenic, then? I will never know for sure. Only her experiences matter.</p><p>Psychiatry is a massively important discipline, but its limitations show themselves in the very context in which we might think it would be the strongest, in delusions. The ways in which we construct our view of the world are only illnesses when they are decided to be. In the 2020s, when conspiracy theories are running rampant across Western society, it’s almost moot as to whether they could be called ailments. Were the Capitol insurgents of January 6th, who adopted wholesale the delusion that the US election had been stolen, and were willing to attempt a ramshackle, incompetent coup for the sake of it, victims of a treatable disease? If a delusional belief is pathological when it is harmful to society, does that mean that COVID truthers and general antivaxxers are actually mentally ill? Is QAnon a case of folie à milliard? Is the charismatic evangelical who prays outside the shop owned by the gay couple because it is an “area of spiritual oppression” just sick?</p><p>And of course, the answer is, <i>we don’t know and it doesn’t matter</i>. These things are terrible because they just <i>are</i>.</p><p>Often these beliefs are the result of a conversion experience, a process of realignment that is always, whatever it is, psychologically traumatic. Medication and therapy might mitigate some of the effects, So it is with Agnes. Trauma, grief and substance abuse have beaten her into a place where she is ready to vanish into the pit and Peter is kind, and attentive, and sees her as worth something, and when you are in that place, let me tell you, even that slightest ray of light, the slightest sign of being wanted lights the fuse for the bombing out of your soul. She was already destroyed to begin with and her only agency lies in how her inevitable annihilation might proceed.</p>howard david inghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484660608671730796noreply@blogger.com