Merry Christmas One and All!

Sorry, I just had to steal this wonderful .gif from this great tumblr. Just in time for Jesus's birthday! Sad that Hitchens died recently though, I'm sure he would've received 1000 Christmas e-cards with this very .gif in it. All from me.

Annyeong, Kim Jong Il!

Note: Annyeong (안녕) means goodbye, and is not a reference to Arrested Development.


Yes, grief hits us all differently; for the internet, laughter is a common defence mechanism.

You may have seen videos of the frankly mad outbursts of public crying by the denizens of PyongYang:



The super-racist part of me wants someone to make a .gif of that and slap a caption on it about getting bad grades at school. That, or the nation running out of dog meat. I'll leave now...

Hard to know if it's true brainwash-induced sadness, or if surrounding guards have a gun to their kids' temple off-screen or something.
Apparently a good deal of the refugees who escaped the country at great risk to themselves still believe in their nation's leader and ideals, such is the power of their upbringing...

I think this is a good opportunity to post about an awesome video Vice did after riskily finding a way into N.K. I can't embed the video so link to part one here.

It's a truly mesmerising doc, and gives a fascinating insight into a country that is able to remain completely insular and controlled despite existing in the modern era of information technology. It's also ashamedly humorous to see the sheer po-facedness of their jingoism.

Not that I'm a typical Westerner laughing at how repressed and backward N.K. is, whilst falsely assuming that I live in a land of sober, unfettered liberty.

As Julian Assange said in a recent interview: "Censorship is a sign that your country's government is healthy, because it's still scared of the power of information". I'm paraphrasing, so here's the original interview/debate with Slavoj Zizek:

Meanwhile

I haven't posted in a while; unfortunately my time is currently split between a full-time job and my part-time apathy. Maybe it's seasonal blues...

In the mean-time, here's an ambient .gif to while away the hours...

Somewhere in the Midwest...

Remember this??:

No?? It was briefly a meme some months ago (it was trending hard on the interwebs I tell you!). One of those deliciously random videos that's equal parts weird and awesome.

Now there's another:

Somehow, this just sums up the Midwest for me. I lived in Oklahoma for a year and although none of what is depicted here actually occurred, this still just nails it for me. I love the music, even though it's not necessarily something I'd listen to. It's clearly a professional production, and has a peculiar midwestern aesthetic a la American Gothic:

Maybe it's some viral promo akin to Die Antwoord's Zef Side video that everyone thought was a real slice of South African white trash' life:

Oh Youtubes, what incongruous delights will you give me next?

Fun links

I figure I've written a number of long, verbose, over-involved posts in recent times, so instead here's some quick-fire links to energise you like a bottle of coke to the face:

Penguin crime! (BBC)

Happy Birthday EpicMealTime! (YouTube)

Quantum Locking! (io9)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses! (Jezebel)

Chaos Cinema! (Filmdrunk)

Mind-fuck animation! (David OReilly)

Police Academy sound-fx guy's still got it! (Filmdrunk)

The Birth of Think Tanks! (This one is long, but excellent. BBC Adam Curtis)

Harrison Ford play Uncharted 3, and likes it! (SlashFilm)

"Jumping to Conclusions" bias in Schizophrenia, and Negative Capacity! (British Journal of Psychiatry)

Possibly the greatest Food blog of all time! (The Sneeze)

How the opening credits of Tintin should go! (SlashFilm)

8 Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression! (PsyBlog)

And Finally:

Some General Awesomeness! (Dark Roasted Blend)

Occupy Wall St

So is it just a case of white people problems? Is the "other 99%" composed of Frappuccino-sipping hipsters whining about their student loan debt?

The truth is, yes and no. As a starter, I refer you to Pierre Bourdieu, and particularly his concept of symbolic violence.

Then ingest a good deal of Michel Foucault, maybe watch some Adam Curtis documentaries.

Then read Smith, Hayek, Friedman, Marx, Rand, Gramsci, Marcuse, and Fukuyama, while doing your Masters degree in International Political Theory. As a starter, mind.

Or just read a bunch of articles confirming your preconceptions and feel smug...

Look, I'll say that in my view the outcry is utterly legitimate. I'd be a hypocrite if I said that those "occupying" Wall Street were just making an empty symbolic gesture, since on some level I defended the meaningfulness of the impotent outbursts of the London rioters this Summer, which by comparison clearly made little political impact and were completely devoid of ideological thrust.

It's vital to express the frustration and upset caused by a system that has resulted in so many being metaphorically sodomised (by the invisible hand no doubt...).

On the flip-side, there appears to be very little in the way of consistent and structured policy demand-making. There is a lot of vitriol around dodgy financial practices, as well as general economic inequality. Incidentally, there also seems to be some confusion about the true locus of perceived wrong-doing; some protesters claiming "the real villains are in the White House!", shudder.

I'm also irritated by the incessant accusations of greed and moral bankruptcy lodged against Wall Street traders. I'm certainly not saying that this isn't the case, there clearly is legitimised corruption en masse within the market-place, but by localising the problem to a few bad eggs with personality flaws we abstract the financial crash from its ideological and structural roots. In the same way that identifying our own complicity in the Holocaust is more effective in making fascism unpalatable than simply blaming Hitler, it's important for us to identify the ways in which we are complicit in perpetuating a system that rewards competitive, selfish behaviour.

Blaming the fat cats simply creates an Us vs Them mentality.

I do have a bank account after all...

“What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

― Bertolt Brecht

But back to my point: I made a crack at the beginning about people whining about student loans. The truth is that student loans are a massive problem in America, and have been one of several major themes in the protests:

Last year, Americans began to owe more on their student loans then their credit cards, with student debt reaching the $1 trillion mark. Many have flocked to higher education during the down economy, only to find themselves still unemployed or underemployed.

Perhaps a taste of things to come in the UK by the way... ;)

While this is indeed a crippling problem for an entire generation, it's hard to say what direct link there is between the rate of student loan debt in America and the perceived discrepancy in wealth between the top 1% and the rest...

As the relationship is indirect, the implication is thus that the protest is an attack not on individual greedy bankers, but on neo-liberal capitalist ideology itself. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but if this is the case, and the protests are intended to show neo-liberal policy to be fundamentally egregious, an alternative needs to be proposed. Otherwise it's easy for capitalist realists to portray the protesters as sore losers complaining about how unfair the game of life is and not taking individual responsibility for their problems. Even worse are the implications that the protesters are un-American (apologies for low-quality image):

To be fair, one might say that demands are not necessary at this point in time.

But I think that if you don't qualify your political stance early on, you leave yourself open to those motivated enough to swoop in and hijack your movement for their own ideological ends. Truth never speaks directly for itself; interpretation is always required.

Israel recently had mass protests of a similar nature during the Summer. Much of the economic inequality was being blamed on the high proportion of family-owned monopolies run on nepotism mutual back-scratching within these elites. According to a close Israeli friend, a major theme of the protests that emerged was a call to dismantle said monopolies in order to establish a truly free market.

This is exactly what happened in the 1970s in America and the UK and has essentially contributed to the common practice of CEOs stripping failing companies of their assets, selling them off and moving on to the next company, leaving employees to hang, as it were.

Here's a documentary on the whole thing: The Mayfair Set.

So here you have a movement led primarily by idealistic 20-somethings, like the Occupy Wall Street lot, confusedly allowing their protest to be used to push good ol' neo-liberal economic ideology.

SUMMARY

It's no small secret that I have an admiration for the works of Slavoj Zizek, partly because he's good, and partly because he tends to summarise a lot of current theory very well so I don't have to go out and read any of it.

I thought that I'd re-post the transcript of his speech at Sunday's protest taken from Occupy Wall Street. It's not complete as only so much was recorded. Here come the block quotes:

Part One

…2008 financial crash more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).

In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like - oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember: the problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest. They think (??? unintelligible). But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans…

Part Two

….Starbucks cappuccino. Where 1% goes to the world’s starving children. It is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture. After the marriage agencies are now outsourcing even our love life, daily.

Mic check

We can see that for a long time we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not communists. If communism means the system which collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over.

The change is possible. So, what do we consider today possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand in technology and sexuality everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon. You can become immortal by biogenetics. You can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the fields of society and economy. There almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible, we lose competitivitiy. You want more money for healthcare: they tell you impossible, this means a totalitarian state. There is something wrong in the world where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for health care. Maybe that ??? set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.

We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!

You can also watch the videos of his speech, but unfortunately due to a lack of a PA system he has to say small chunks of text at a time, then wait as the crowd around him repeat the words loudly for the rest to here. While it ruins the speech, it ironically forces Zizek's delivery into a weird religious ritual, as though the baying crowd were mindlessly reciting the dogmatic teachings of their holy leader! Perish the thought...

Check it oowwt:

Evenin' all.

DRIVE

Yes, Baby Goose rides off into the night with his sweet-ass Scorpion jacket and leather riding gloves to the sound of sweeping 80s synths and a gently purring muscle car... This is a twilight world where bubble gum and face-stomping go hand in hand, where silent stares are at once touchingly romantic and unsettlingly tense.

AND ITS BEAUTIFUL

In a recent interview for BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme (you can get the podcast here), Nicolas Winding Refn stated that he wanted to make the first half of the film like a John Hughes movie, all sweet romance and meaningful looks, and the second half..."what I would do to protect my wife"...

That statement is heavily loaded if you consider Refn's back-catalogue of films about violence, gangsterism, and psychopathy. And skinhead maniacs.

Note: One of these images is not from a Nicolas Winding Refn film.

I've been following Refn for a while now, ever since I downloadedlegally watched Pusher some years ago (look, it wasn't on DVD at the time, ok?), and I'm really happy to see him succeeding in Hollywood after the mis-fire that was Fear X.

It's also great to see a gradual move from the gritty handheld aesthetic of the Pusher Trilogy to the highly-composed, glossy images he presents in Bronson and Drive. I think he's cleverly moved with the times, realising that the pared-down aesthetic worked well as a shocking counterpart to the high-gloss of more formulaic cinema in the 90s, but now that Hollywood has caught on to this it feels fake and as though realism is to be used as a technique rather than a form of expression.

I also think it's smart to portray violence using pulchritudinous imagery. In the past, this has been described as crypto-fascist and exploitative, fetishising violence for the purposes of manufacturing cool and superficial beauty (this is certainly the case with Zack Snyder's irritating masturbatory slow-mo shots of people being shot/punched/stabbed in the face etc.). Here, at least in my opinion, it's so clearly stylised that it renders the violent acts both absurd and shocking, like a knife puncturing a mickey mouse balloon filled with blood, a mixture of kitsch and sudden gore. This is very much reminiscent of the forays into sexual violence seen in Blue Velvet, where the Disney-like sheen of suburbia is peeled back to reveal primal erotic thrills bubbling underneath.

Most shocking in Drive is the soon-to-be infamous face-stomping scene. According to the Kermode podcast he consulted Gaspar Noe of Irreversible fame, where Albert Dupontel stoves in a man's face with a fire extinguisher. No cutaways. Apparently, they used a combination of traditional latex and CGI to give it the finishing touches...

Incidentally, I've included a link to said fire extinguisher scene here, but I advise you not to watch it unless you're feeling like you haven't been profoundly traumatised enough of late.

I would warrant that a majority of so-called extreme cinema that presents violence in a truly disturbing and insightful manner is primarily made by well-educated upper-middle class men, who most likely have never been overtly violent or aggressive themselves. Think David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Gaspar Noe, Alan Clarke, Martin Scorcese, Andrew Dominik (I'm aware that many don't fit this mould, i.e. Sam Fuller, John Ford, etc...) All these directors provide excellent insights into the true nightmare hiding behind masculinity: It's empty, desparate, impotent, and only fully effective without empathy for others.

I don't know why it tends to be the educated not-so masculine men making such films, and they clearly are not just parodying the image of man that they don't measure up to, as many of their films simultaneously fetishise and satirise male violence. Perhaps it's a way of dealing with their own evocative daydreams of repressed sexual and violent urges. It is also possible that they are not willing to wholly condemn male violence, as they understand that these alpha-males are simultaneously victims: victims of socio-economic deprivation (e.g. Seul Contre Tous; Made in Britain), as well as simple respondents to a culture that rewards psychopathy (e.g. A History of Violence; American Psycho). For more on this, refer to my previous post on the London Riots.

LE LOOK

I think it's unfair to make a comparison between Refn and Tarantino, as many have made. Yes, both directors lovingly reference the tropes and narratives of Hollywood genre films, and this certainly is a film concerned with cool. But, as I just spent several paragraphs frothing at the mouth about, there's a big difference between the two.

As Refn himself said in a recent interview in Sight & Sound, there's a difference between a film that is stylised (for the sake of it), and one that is stylish. And Drive is one stylish movie.

The style here serves the purpose of elevating a particular male fantasy to epic, dark, fairy-tale proportions (apparently Refn was partly inspired by the Grimm Brothers fairytales). What I speak of is that particular Western fantasy that most men admire but seldom discuss: the loner who walks the earth without a name, speaks very little, and is highly skilled in a number of abilities that allow him to maintain a withdrawn, nomadic existence.

Gosling's performance is key here as he takes this cool archetype and injects it with a smidgen of borderline autism and extreme nervous tension, something he used to great effect in Lars and the Real Girl. Clint Eastwood certainly never rage-stomped a man's face in and then looked round to stare at his lady with an apologetic look of sorrow!

Here I can understand what Refn means when he describes the second half as "what he would do to protect his wife", as though it were a dirty but necessary job. Traditionally the cool nomad role is seen dishing out harsh but righteous justice, his strict moral code never really put into question. In those films there tends to be some event causing their code to slip briefly at the end, and is used to pithily highlight their humanity (see Le Samourai, and if you really have to, The American).

Here we have a cipher-like character who clearly seeks humanity, but a la Holden Caulfield, can't find it, retreating into a world where his strict code is for the sake of simplicity rather than some higher purpose. When he is finally thrust full-force into the world of humans, his behaviour, while reactive and potentially necessary, cannot be neatly integrated into the kitschy mini-utopia the romantic couple have nurtured during their courthip, and thus the Driver feels a loss of innocence and an exposure of his hidden beast, pushing his dainty belle away from his protective arms. This reminds me of the second half of the Deer Hunter, where the wheelchair-bound vietnam vet cannot face returning home to his wife for fear of disturbing the tranquil idyll of their American small-town existence with the trauma incurred during his tour o' Nam. Basically, just watch the entire Nicholson monologue at the end of A Few Good Men to get the whole "I'm the monster you secretly want me to be" thing.

LE ACTING

As regards the acting in general, Gosling holds the screen with his unblinking gaze that is steely but always teetering on the edge of dreamy and forlorn, sort of a mix of James Dean, Steve McQueen, and Alain Delon. Some have made disparraging comments about his slightly listless eyes (which I had a problem with in Half Nelson), and in fact my fellow cinema-going compatriot next to me thought he looked a bit retarded, but I think he does a great job of burying emotion underneath deep layers of borderline aspergers-like cool.

All the side characters are excellently played, and convey a richness and backstory with very little dialogue. Other Refn films have been more verbose, and its possible the cudos should go to screenwriter Hossein Amini, who I've literally never heard of (nor have I heard of any of his other screenwriting credits).

Albert Brooks is fantastic playing against type; I shall never look at that man's eyebrows the same way again. And as for Ron Perlman, well, I've been a fan of his ever since La Cite des Enfants Perdus.

Even the father of the cute-as-a-button boy that Gosling becomes surrogate protector to is given nuance in just a few choice lines. He's also very well played by Oscar Isaac, who's completely unrecognisable from his role as a massive douchebag in Robin Hood (his British accent fooled me!). His character is clearly a bit of an aggressive dick but smartly isn't reduced to a thuggish latino stereotype.

Then, there's ol' chipmunk cheeks herself. I'm being mean really, as Caret Mulligan is a fantastic actress, as evidenced in An Education. As might be expected, she plays an impossibly sweet, shrinking violet who is a warm and engaging damsel in distress. It's perhaps an unfair role, but she quite honestly gives it all kinds of class and subtlety, and I have to say I love her as an actress despite myself.

I'm not sure what irritates me so much about her. Perhaps it's because she plays such sweet winsome characters when clearly she's cynically dumbing herself down and is clearly as sharp as anything. This can be seen in the way she somewhat overcompensates for the fear of being mistaken for one of her characters in real life by coming across as ever so mature and well put together:

Not that I blame her really, I spent years putting on intellectual airs and being supremely adult in order to compensate for my ridiculously boyish looks. Hitting my mid 20s, I've since realised that A. I don't give a shit how I come across any more, and B. I realised that true maturity and magnanimity doesn't necessarily express itself in carefully composed facial expressions and an assured tone of voice.

Tangents on frighteningly intelligent girl-women aside, I think I've made my point quite clearly here tonight: In opposition to the many critics whose primary conclusion about Drive was "It's great fun and looks good but that's about it", I feel that Drive has substance under the bonnet.

*pause for laughter*


Thank you and goodnight.

Thank you Ultra-Culture!

If your baffled by this, see here

I feel like this most mornings

There's nothing to say about this clip really, except that this contains more excitement and coherence than the whole of Transformers 3's 2h36 minute running time. Did I mention I recently saw it and had to take a shower afterwards?

How bad a director is Michael Bay? He's so bad, he recycles his own BOOMS:

Thank you and good day.

Happiness Part One

A potentially subliminal nod to the release of von Trier's new film about being depressed and welcoming the end of the world, I've decided to tackle that elusive thing Americans aggressively pursue as part of their constitutional rights (even if it is seemingly reserved for "job creators"): Happiness.

My axe to grind on this topic initially relates to a combination of both the increased interest in happiness research within my field, and the almost fetishistic uptake it has seen within both the corporate and political worlds:

Not that the uptake of positive reinforcement and nurturing "belief in the job" isn't fruitless in promoting job satisfaction:

And, to give further balance, I'm certainly not here to say that the move towards "purpose motives" in industry isn't a vast improvement over traditional, cold financial incentives*.

What I am going to say about happiness (and its measurement), is hopefully more nuanced.

SOME INITIAL CONTEXT

Whatever personal, idiosyncratic definition one may give Happiness, this tends to encapsulate some vague, abstract feeling of how much we've bridged the gap between the goals we set ourselves, the standards presented to us, and what we've actually achieved, as well as a bunch of other shit (citation needed). Because of this lack of parsimony, subjective measures don't seem to be able to pin down what Happiness really is:

When asking research participants to report on their happiness, researchers usually provide at best a vague frame (‘In general…’). Judgements are still relative, and people presumably make a comparison between what they believe about themselves and what they believe about other people who are in their immediate vicinity or who are otherwise relevant. This may explain a pervasive finding, that most people rate themselves as somewhat above the midpoint of a happiness scale, whether they are multimillionaires in the United States (Diener et al., 1985) or homeless prostitutes in Calcutta (Biswas-Diener & Diener, 2001). These findings are usually presented as showing that ‘most people are happy’, but another way to describe them is to say that ‘most people judge themselves to be happier than they think other people are’ (cf. Diener & Diener, 1998).

However, said subjective measures apparently correspond well with behavioural measures and third-person reports. The trend towards above-the-midpoint scores may therefore reveal the unscientifically broad operational definition of happiness more than anything else.

BUT WAIT

To combat this rigourless vaguery, there has been a recent move towards more "objective" approaches, such as measuring the neuroscientific and evolutionary basis of happiness.

In addition, there is now a distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, the former primarily referring to fleeting, visceral pleasures:

and the latter referring to, well, some kind of suburban middle-class conception of a successful, meaningful life, whose emotional benefits keep us feeling safe and smug long after the middle-age realisation that the finality of death renders these achievements null and void has set in:



Obviously I'm exaggerating by saying that eudaimonic well-being (so scientific sounding!) is a wholly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant concept, but just look at the definition given by UPenn's Authentic Happiness research centre:

"Eudaimonic pleasure...pursuing personal growth, development of their potential, achieving personal excellence, and contributing to the lives of others"

It sounds a little like a quote from a book by infamous life-coach Anthony Robbins:

*taps mic* *coughs nervously* "That handsome devil might just awaken my giant within, janowadameen?"

A lot of this renewed interest in happiness research is partly due to the work of Martin Seligman, an American researcher and author of many self-help books.

The seed was truly sewn a couple decades before Seligman however by that eternal idealist and grand-daddy of positive psychology, Abraham Maslow:

Look at the winsome git

and his Hierarchy of Needs:

You'll notice at the top of the hierarchy is the somewhat indefinable final stage of "being awesome", Self-Actualisation. This is variously defined as realising one's true potential, becoming more than what one is... basically not wholly unlike the masculine platitudes of Rudyard Kipling's If---.

And sure enough, both Seligman and Maslow are big figures, not just in positive psychology but even mental health. Seligman's concept of Learned Helpessness has been applied to models of depression within a behavioural psychology context, i.e. we face the world as autonomous rational individuals seeking to assert our agency, then seemingly insurmountable obstacles are gradually put in our way, and finally we are slowly beaten into despondency and hopelessness by life's cruel happy slapping.

Similarly Maslow's hierarchy of needs feeds into models of Recovery and Well-being in mental health. I recently went for a volunteer training day at Oxfordshire Mind and the organisers actually wrote out the hierarchy of needs on a white board to illustrate their view of Well-being...

ME ME ME

What becomes evident is that throughout the literature and theories regarding happiness and well-being there lies the ever-present assumption that the self is the ultimate locus of all development and pleasure (even if helping others is valued as a self-actualising trait).

Where's the sense of community people? As George Costanza put it:




Not that I'm terribly self-sacrificing myself... But I certainly have a healthy aversion towards embracing the radical individualism that emerged in the West during the latter half of the 20th century.

Of course, individualism, particularly the concept of rational autonomy, is an older concept derived primarily from the Enlightenment philosophers (such as Kant), but it arguably found its scientific justification and mass adoption in the form of Nobel Prize winning Mathematician John Nash's Game Theory.

You remember who John Nash is right? Lovingly played by Mr. Rufty Tufty man Rusty Crowe in A Beautiful Mind? Yeah, apparently John Nash was kind of a dick in real life, and crucially a paranoid schizophrenic...

Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap tells his story beautifully; how Nash came up with an equation proving that given the option to keep what you have or to opt-in and run the risk of betrayal, the only rational solution is to be selfish.

This is best illustrated by the prisonner's dilemma:





Nash called it the "Fuck You, Buddy" game. Can you see why?

His paranoid self-interest proved enormously fashionable at a time when it really felt as though two world super-powers could blow each other up at any moment.

His work has had a profound effect on the Western world, along with Ayn Rand's philosophical justification of selfishness, giving impetus to the gradual domination of neorealism in international relations theory, neoliberalism in economic policy, and libertarianism in political philosophy.

Crucially for my story however, game theory has also had a huge influence on cognitive behavioural psychology in terms of what we think motivates us, what the targets of therapy are, and of course, what we think makes us happy...

i.e. rational incentives.

The prisoner's dilemma and its variants are still used to this day in many fields including evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics. I actually once asked my undergraduate tutor, an evolutionary psychologist, what he thought the point of art was, and he said "just to show off, nothing more". Indeed, truly a fundamentalist believer in autonomous, rational SELF-INTEREST:

"The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good"

Of course, I do realise the irony in that I began this long ramble explaining how happiness research has actually begun to lead us away from the cold financial incentives of yester-year's yuppies towards the more holistic, positive reinforcement motivators of today's behavioural economists, but nonetheless the focus on the self as an autonomous willful being trying to achieve its full potential still shines through:

Note that Bradley Cooper is fairly WASPy looking...


So what does this mean? That happiness is being Barney Stinson?




Well, not quite. What it means is that we've defined Happiness through the prism of Western liberal individualism, divorced from any political or economic context and thus rendering Happiness frustratingly dependent on the choices we make and not much else.

You see, we live in a "Post-ideological age" (or The End of History, if your name is Francis Fukuyama), whereby all other systems of government have failed and liberal capitalism is now the default background, a rational structuring of society that is pragmatic and objective, and thus requires no ideology. And since capitalism offers a level playing field, what is life and well-being but a series of rational choices that we must bear responsibility for?

Now, yes, this isn't true, and yes, we live in an apparently free society, and really our choices are undermined by economic and social inequalities, so that in effect our choices amount to superficial distinctions between market led options. But, going beyond this Marxist cliche, we are also presented with the pain of being burdened with an excess of choice whilst feeling that we don't have the proper knowledge to make the right ones:

In the "Marxist" version of this theme, the multiplicity of choices with which the market bombards us only serves to obfuscate the absence of any really radical choice concerning the fundamental structure of our society. There is, however, a feature conspicuously missing from this series: namely, the injunction to choose when we lack the basic cognitive coordinates needed to make a rational choice. As Leonardo Padura puts it: "It is horrific not to know the past and yet be able to impact on the future" ; being compelled to make decisions in a situation which remains opaque is our basic condition. We know the standard situation of the forced choice in which I am free to choose on condition that I make the right choice, so that the only thing left for me to do is make the empty gesture of pretending to accomplish freely what expert knowledge has imposed upon me. But what if, on the contrary, the choice really is free and, for this very reason, is experienced as even more frustrating? We thus find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge. To quote John Gray again: "we have been thrown into a time in which
everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free" - Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Hence we feel the need to turn to "wise" gurus that can help us make better choices and assert our finely crafted "selves" onto the world. Here's a delightful quote (conveniently found in the Wikipedia page for Self-Help):

The conservative turn of the neoliberal decades also meant a decline in traditional political activism, and increasing "social isolation; Twelve-Step recovery groups were one context in which individuals sought a sense of community...yet another symptom of the psychologizing of the personal"^[15] to more radical critics. Indeed, "some social theorist[sic] have argued that the late-20th century preoccupation with the self serves as a tool of social control: soothing political unrest...[for] one's own pursuit of self-invention."

D'ya geddit? Basically, by abstracting psychological and personal problems from their socio-political context and re-situating them within the self, the burdern falls to the individual to take responsibility for their lack of agency and happiness. This is then propped up by a self-perpetuating industry of self-help books, support groups, and New Age spirituality workshops emphasising self-development and healing. Just look at the current Conservative Government's attempts to take the nation's temperature by measuring Happiness...

A KINGDOM OF ENDS

But hey, who am I to judge. I believe in positivistic, evidence-based approaches to the study of human behaviour. Surely in principle there's nothing wrong with wanting to measure what makes people happy, and then trying to encourage an evidence-based approach to policy-making that maximises a country's happiness?

Perhaps we can simply, through the application of scientific methods, find the neural and genetic signatures of happiness and organise our society around that to create an objective social morality that would be one-size-fits-all. At least, this is what atheist extraordinaire Sam Harris believes. Brave New World anyone?

If you've actually made it this far, I salute you. This is probably too much for anyone on the internets to ever read, so I'll break here and rejoin this topic in PART DEUX!

*Incidentally, while the business and political world are slowly waking up to the possibility that rational, financial motives don't necessarily predict performance, Psychiatry is becoming keen to adopt Contingency Management, which is literally a way of saying "Operant Conditioning" without having to say "Operant Conditioning", and means that patients may soon find themselves being paid to take their meds...

This strategic re-naming reminds of the fascinating documentary on Edward Bernays (you can find it here), where it was claimed that Public Relations was originally going to be called Propaganda, but apparently the term had been "ruined by the Germans during the war"...

The Story of Film

Gif courtesy of hipster nonsense If We Don't, Remember Me (incidentally, the title is a quote from Kiss Me Deadly)

Hey Blogloteers,

Check out the first three episodes of The Story of Film: An Odyssey on More 4 while it's still available (although I imagine bit torrent will follow shortly...).

It's an adaptation/elaboration of Mark Cousins's awesome book The Story of Film that does a good job of telling said story in a non-academic but nonetheless rigorous manner.

Linearly enough for a true cinephile, he begins with Fred Ott's 1894 Kinetoscopic peep-show First Sneeze (literally, a man sneezing into the camera. 'Twas a time of simple pleasures):

And culminates more or less with Alexander Sokurov's 2002 one-take digital film A Russian Ark:

At least that's what he does in the book anyhow. The TV mini-series is more poetic, lyrical, political, and ultimately moving. The degree to which one might be moved by his narration is somewhat dependent on how you feel about Mark Cousins's voice, which is a love it or hate it kinda voice. An illustration by Adam & Joe:

The book has been my personal cine-bible over the past few years and so it's exciting to see filmed interviews with cinematic legends as well as choice cuts of seminal film history underlining the theories I've already digested.

Having watched a couple episodes however, I'm slightly disappointed to see Cousins's typically understated prose be translated to screen using heavy-handed symbolism. He paints Hollywood as a red bauble, a shiny fantasy that reflects what we want to see of ourselves, and then has a shot of said bauble literally smashing on the ground in slow-motion, a shot repeated several times throughout the series. He also tantalisingly proclaims Ozu, the japanese auteur, to be "possibly the greatest director in the world". Don't get me wrong, I like 'im:

And I do agree that Hollywood has become a big, sweaty, coke-fuelled whore, plopping illegitimate cash-cow dumpster babies out of its morally bankrupt snatch with wanton abandon, but in the book he expressed a much more nuanced sentiment, stating the he just wanted to give a voice to seldom seen films from World Cinema, and not simply to show that Hollywood was trash and that we underestimate the contribution of India, Iran, China etc...

This is ultimately a tiny niggle though, and my wife and I have been utterly won over by his beguiling mixture of archive footage and his own static wide shots of intriguing and cinematic real-life landscapes from around the world. It's also one of the most relaxing documentaries I've seen in a while, and the relentless superimposition of one exquisite film clip after another is utterly hypnotic, like a glossy photo-book of sleeping cats.

Aaah, lovely...

Mark Kermode will be pleased

What will Hollywood do once Top Gun is re-released fully converted to 3D, as there'll no longer be any point to making films after the arrival of cinema's apotheosis? What do you mean it's a jingoistic, crypto-fascist, vapid cheesefest with homoerotic undertones!

Lulz aside, doesn't it just smack f desparation, after the lacklustre performance of 3D this Summer (more people went to see the major tentpole blockbusters in 2D than 3D) that they're now turning to apparently classic films in the hope of bolstering its dwindling popularity?
More on the topic in general here.

Not that I'm personally against 3D. I actually find that 3D works well for me, although my wife says it blurs and darkens the screen for her, which sounds like she might just be wearing her sunglasses... (I've included this "joke" to check if she actually reads this, how sad).

The sublime Coraline made excellent use of 3D for the Vertigo-ish pathway-to-another-dimension sequences, Avatar was an enjoyable spectacle, and, I'm ashamed to admit it, but I rather liked the cash cow/kids film Bolt in 3D.

Also, it's worth noting that not one but two aging German art-house auteurs (Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog) elected to shoot documentaries in 3D, although I'm not sure how much they did for 3D's profile overall (General Public: - German art-house docs in 3D? Yes please! Ooh, the encounters with ecstatic truth within nature jump off the screen right out at you!).

Both Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Pina are great and looked as though they made good use of the technology. I say looked, because the only cinemas playing these two films near me lacked the apparatus!

It's also important to remember that a run of big 3D tentpole flicks are just around the corner (Spielberg's Tintin, Scorcese's Hugo, and lest we forget, Jackson's The Hobbit), which I believe are all being shot in 3D as opposed to being converted in post-prod, which is considered a no-no by 3D enthusiasts (like James Cameron). In fairness, I can usually tell the difference between the two and find post-prod conversion to be fairly crap.

Either way, they still need to sort out the ridiculous over-pricing of 3D tickets. They actually increased the price of 3D tickets after its apparent "popularity" last year; the people responsible may very well now be licking their wounds and considering a lowering of prices in order to protect their investments....

In the end, I don't really care what happens to 3D, I just thought it was funny that Goose's death will now be enjoyed in three dimensions.

Here's a blog post on why 3D is scientifically stupid.

As Walter Murch puts it:

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing,
alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to
realize and get fed up?

Raul Ruiz 25 July 1941 – 19 August 2011

So I'm a little late to this news, but it seems a genuinely talented artist died last month (not the strong guy from Police Academy), and yet the cast of Jersey Shore continue stealing oxygen!? God is such a fickle Freddy.

The artist in question was Raul Ruiz, an exiled Chilean director and polymath who made witty, dream-like films that threw narrative to the wind and leisurely investigated memory, identity, and how much a film audience could put up with. Apparently even the French New Wave thought he was too whimsically elliptical for their taste...

In all honesty, film buff that I am, I had never heard of him until I read about his death in Sight & Sound.

Check out their wonderful obituary here.

And David Bordwell's here.

To rectify this grievous lapse in my filmic knowledge, I have decided to watch Mysteries of Lisbon

It's not quite his last film, but according to Sight & Sound:

Mysteries nevertheless stands as a perfect closing testament – a stately meditation on fate, memory and the possibility that our lives may be bewitching labyrinths of fact and fabulation.

I like Alain Resnais, similarly known for his frustratingly oblique approach to narrative and endless meditations on the fallibility of memory, so I'm thinking Mysteries will be good.

It's four... hours long... but... I'm sure I'll like it...

[Square brackets are great]

If you love Youtube user-made trailers for existing films, then we probably can never be friends.

- Is what I would normally say, but then I found Kees van Dijkhuizen's Youtube channel (Thank you Slash Film).

Trailers, both user-generated and official, are often just choice cuts from the movie set to thumpy music with broad appeal, simultaneously undermining and exploiting the glossy cinematography from said flick...

This man however understands how to edit footage and splice in music that both reflects and compliments the films and director he's paying homage to:

Jolly well done Sir.

Aussies, Psychos, and Adam & Joes Cont.

Damn, clearly my prescience is an untapped supernatural resource and I should become a financial speculator, where I'd probably end up contributing to the next market bubble in Asia or ruin some third world country that the IMF will then bleed for loan repayments over the next 30 years...

No sooner than one of my inchoate rambles hits the interwebs on the topic of Psychopathy, BBC Horizon does a special on what makes us good or evil, and how Professor James Fallon (picture above) found out he fit the profile for a psychopath, and decided to research why it is he hasn't so far turned any women into lampshades.

Check it out here.

Courtesy of the Oxford Psychology Library

Just had to

Doesn't it just lift your spirits?? I mean, obviously the universe is still a meaningless chaos of howling despair, but hey, there's momentary relief.

Aussies, Psychos, and Adam & Joes

This is a million times better than any of the film-based re-appropriation memes out there. It's also probably the only truly successful meme using footage of Tom Cruise that doesn't make fun of his Thetan obssession, but rather his trademark po-faced intensity:

Speaking of which, apparently Christian Bale took inspiration from Tom for one of his finest roles. Can you guess which one? No, not Velvet Goldmine:

It was, in fact, AMERICAN PSYCHO. Quote:

And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy

Seriously, it's just a matter of time before these guys appear on-screen together and have a psycho-off

I find it wonderfully perceptive of Christian Bale to have picked up on the idea of "superficial friendliness, but nothing behind the eyes". This is a common description used for genuine psychopathy, a subject I could never tire from studying. The awesome Jon Ronson's new book sees his customary humanistic approach applied to the weird and terrifying world of psychopaths:

Psychopathy is considered a dangerous personality disorder, and while my jaded friends who've worked at Broadmoor may scoff, I do still find it shocking on some level that instead of serving the sentence one is given for a corresponding crime, claim to be coo-coo and you could end up in an institution for the rest of your life. This is because while a transient psychotic episode may (rarely) lead an individual to commit a violent crime, a personality disorder obeys the three P's:

Persistent – consistent and inflexible pattern of coping over time

Pervasive – can be seen across different situations such as work, family and social relationships, and not just specific to offending

Problematic – has negative impact for themselves and/or others

What that means is that you ain't gon' change, son. Which means that nobody knows what to do with you, which means that only "preventative measures" can be taken as a viable solution for your care i.e. the most fun you'll ever have from now on is brewing prison wine (I don't know if they do this in Broadmoor, it just seemed like a good moment to reference an excellent blog).

What's mildly chilling is that the Biomedical model of mental illness (i.e. all things CBT and prescription meds related) has gradually adopted this same approach to illnesses well beyond the scope of personality disorder.

I'm fairly new to clinical research in mental health, having come from an Experimental Psychology background (which is NOT the same thing), but I still find it shocking to think that a major assumption within current approaches to mental illness is that underlying all disorders are stable, enduring traits that cannot be changed. These underlying "vulnerabilities", may then create a higher predisposition towards developing affective or psychotic disorders.

This stems from personality research, which is somewhat poo-pooed in Experimental Psychology, but has become a dominant feature of modern Psychiatry, and purports that concepts such as the Big Five are stable over time and predictive of all kinds of social outcomes, despite mixed evidence here and there...

Modern evidence-based therapies thus concentrate not on changing the person, but rather helping them come to terms with who they are (or what they have, depending on your narrative), and learning to accept themselves while adopt compensatory behaviours that will hopefully limit their suffering and that of those around them. I acknowledge that CBT is designed to change cognitions, but this is not the same as striving towards changing fundamental aspects of the self (a dangerous term that no self-respecting psychologist would use for fear of ridicule by the empirical community, but that psychoanalysts bandy about willy-nilly).

I can't find a good reference that discusses these various points directly, thus undermining my argument, but this article certainly broaches the topic indirectly in that it is now apparently hard to distinguish between mental illness and personality disorder in the current approach to mental health.

Also, check out A Barefoot Therapist Speaks.

Obviously I'm massively generalising and what I'm saying is coming from someone who would very much like to enter the world of Psychiatry and become a practising clinician, so feel free to disregard/assassinate with logic.

It's also weird to think that a single academic's personality checklist has utterly dominated the field of psychopathy research for over 20 years.

In fact, as with many such things in academia, sadly, attempts to move the field forward are not always met with open arms.

Poorly referenced diatribes aside, I think I've gone quite off-track given that this all started with a funny video of someone doing an Aussie stereotype.

The video was actually made by Adam Buxton, one half of my fave comedy duo Adam and Joe, who sadly have ended their run of excellent podcasts (but have not been thrown in the bin/trash and forgotten about!).

No one understands our beardy man-love

Incidentally, the other, taller half of the duo, Joe Cornish, recently released his debut film Attack the Block, which I thought was very confidently directed and highly entertaining. I wonder whether the DVD release will suffer due to the recent London riots...(see my last post).

Ok, I've run out of steam, so I'll end by giving my Song Of the Day here.