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.