Lilya 4-Ever

Possibly the bleakest film ever made, Lilya 4-ever (2002) tells the story of a 16-year-old girl living in extreme squalor in the former Soviet Union (Paldiski in Estonia, to be precise) who ends up becoming tricked by a 'boyfriend' into moving to Sweden in search of a better life only to find herself forced into a life of prostitution. Her departure leads her only friend, a boy named Volodya, to commit suicide. In the most touching scenes in the movie, he appears in her dreams as a guardian angel - the role she played for him but abandoned, just as her mother left her for the United States at the start of the story - and eventually advises her that her pimp has mistakenly left the door to the apartment unlocked, so she can escape. This she does... only to throw herself impulsively off a motorway bridge and die.

The key to the film comes at the end of the final credits in a dedication to 'children around the world exploited by the sex trade'. It signals that the film is bleak for a reason. Its naturalistic style is designed to shock viewers - especially Swedish ones - into recognising that all this actually happens, and that Sweden may be a wealthier and in some ways healthier nation than the states of the former Soviet Union, but has turned a blind eye to the practice of enforced child prostitution. The film is based on the real story of Danguole Rasalaite, a 16-year-old Lithuanian girl who died in similar circumstances in Malmo in 2000. But, at the same time, the film is art not documentary. Maybe I spent too long reading Iris Murdoch's aesthetic theory but a film like this can't help but make me wonder whether art has a duty to provide some kind of redemption to its viewers. The only glimpse into redemption here is the secure but limited afterlife inhabited by Volodya. But his suicide is something he regrets.

Still, seeking relief after the final credits, I turned over to BBC4 and saw an extraordinarily cynical piece of historical revisionism which made Lilya 4-ever's determination to be accurate all the more laudable. 'Taking Control' was a documentary about Janet Jackson, which used the manipulative 'talking heads' format (show someone a clip, ask them to describe it, then edit to make it look as if the topic was so memorable it's impact is still fresh in the interviewee's mind) to try to convince us that she was a hugely influential R&B artist whose 1980s output changed the face of music history. I remember the 1980s, Janet, I was there... I'm not having that. Where's the nearest motorway bridge?

The X Factor and the H Factor

TV is a naturally self-reflexive medium and the TV genre which demonstrates this most clearly is the reality game show. Rising above the myriad sentimental mini-stories which makes up the background of its contestants, the real story of each X Factor series is television's power to transform the lives of ordinary people. The contestants are invited into the televisual universe with the promise that they'll never have to go back to their own, non-tube world. This year's X Factor represents the summit of its particular way of executing this promise, due to a perfect blend of hype, suspense, and reasonable singers. Most of all, though, it is being achieved through the X Factor's mastery of the key principle of reality TV shows: transformation.

But here we can see that the X Factor has now gorged on itself until bloated with its own excessive content. Here are the symptoms:

1. Two judges (Tulisa and Kelly Rowlad) who possess minimal credibility - at least when it comes to the business at which they're professing to excel: scouting and producing talent. Discovering talent and transforming the artists into what they wanted is the background of Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh, and ensures they each possess authority. But Tulisa and Kelly are just singers - for all their 'urban' credentials. (And Tulisa protests her urban credentials so much it comes to seem suspicious. I suspect stage school...)

2. No alternative to Walsh's almost uniform praise. This series is giving us the spectacle of one average karaoke performance after another being greeted with a chorus of 'you have a great voice'. Great? Shouldn't that word be saved for something genuinely special?

3. The dismembering and re-assembling of bands by the judges. A feature of this series is under-qualified judges (see point 1) hubristically creating bands, mixing up members of existing bands (which themselves seem thrown together in the first place). This should really be a new kind of XFactor-type show, in which individual singers are slotted into bands designed and managed by the judges and left to fight it out on stage, a kind of musical Bamzooki. Maybe it could be called...Popstars?

Perhaps the most telling of all the symptoms of decadance - more than the vast number of dancers upstaging every act in dazzling displays, more than the hubristic appearance of contestants appearing as 'stars' in an M&S Christmas ad - is Frankie Cocozza's accelerated entire rock n' roll-biography-in-6-weeks demise. Of course this could have happened any year, but somehow it seems as if it could only happen this year, the year the X Factor - or H for hubris Factor - ate itself.

Signed by Katie Price

Meanwhile, back at Reality Talent Show Central... Katie Price has launched her own version of the X Factor, but with a twist unprecedented in world of reality talent shows. This time Katie and her team of judges are looking for... another Katie!

The contestants go through what is by now a highly familiar sequence. The ‘live’ auditions (in front of the audience, Katie, and an unconvincingly stern couple of fellow judges who resemble bullied men each tentatively trying to inhabit the persona of an alpha male) are followed by the ‘judges' house’ section (only it’s not really Katie’s house, but a country pile which stokes the aspirational hysteria of the contestants still further), then the 'final twelve' stage (only it’s thirteen, for some reason... and then twelve again as one gets sent home early because he backed two horses on the reality talent show merry-go-round and goes off to appear on Big Brother) as a handful of lucky contestants get to move into a luxury house together to go through an increasingly exacting series of tasks.

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There are hysterical celebrations at the luxury surroundings, tears as the contestants vie with each other for Katie's affection, and lectures or hugs from the hostess as she awkwardly tries to display her 'people-skills' (actually she seems uncomfortable, even a touch timid, whenever she has to address the contestants).

As familiar as all these rituals are, however, one question lingers over proceedings. What, exactly, are the contestants auditioning for? 

Clearly the judges are looking for someone - either male or female - blessed with all of Katie's attributes: good-looking (especially if it's the kind of not-so-obvious good looks which mean one can undergo the transformation from 'duck to swan', to use Katie's favourite metaphor), business-savvy, determined, professional. But what exactly is the chosen one going to do, once 'signed by Katie Price'? We know from the business meetings we see between Katie and her management team that the winner will have their own website, a presence on twitter, and splashes in major media outlets. Yet can they be anything other than glamour models? The tasks in the series - at which point it becomes more like The Apprentice than the X Factor - would have us think they can. After all, they have been working together to achieve complex business goals such as, er, making homemade t-shirts. But surely it's impossible to repeat Katie Price's trick of being famous for being famous without doing so through one's own efforts and not those of a management team, no matter how media-savvy they are. Katie's own narcissistic drive has got her where she is. Displacing that drive onto a protege surely cannot work.

Writing about 'Loft Story', a French version of Big Brother, Jean Baudrillard outlined the principle of 'radical democracy' upon which he thought reality TV is founded. Democracy as we used to understand it was based on an 'order of merit, and on an equivalence between merit and recognition'. The more you deserved it, the more recognition you received. But in the world of Big Brother, 'there's no equivalence between merit and glory'. Contestants receive 'maximum exultation for minimum qualification'. Minimal qualifications are apparently crucial to Signed by Katie Price. One of them, Nathan, says, 'I just want to be known, big time'. Another, Susie, describes herself without a trace of irony as 'a blank canvas'. Jemma tells us 'I just want to show Katie what I can do', and then we see her climbing awkwardly onto a horse for a photoshoot and Katie telling her 'I want you like that... sort of, leaning'. The series is proof that what really matters in the reality talent show is not the content but the rituals, the structure, the very televisual mechanism itself. What drives it are: 1. the relentless desire of contestants to be known, big time (rather than to show off a particular talent); 2. the endless process of judging and elimination, 3. the mechanics of transformation, as a nobody becomes a somebody, a duck becomes a swan, all through the magical power of television. The contestants - and the judges, as X Factor proves - are all ultimately dispensible, all interchangeable, just so long as the machine clanks on. This is why Signed by Katie Price, though utterly execrable, nevertheless represents the genre at its purest.

Jeff Koons, Hook (2003)

And of course this particular show is not really about producing a Katie clone, or a credible replacement for her in some strand of her publicity empire. The title says it all: it's the signature that's important. What matters is being signed by Katie Price, just as the signature of the artist confers value upon an artwork - and indeed just as she herself sold millions of copies of ghostwritten novels (Angel and Crystal) by branding them with her name. This real aim of the show is alluded to subtly throughout. As the brief profiles are put on screen to enable viewers to disintinguish between the final twelve contestants, it is noticeable how many times, alongside banal, 'individualizing' facts such as 'hates spiders', 'is a mummy's boy', etc. contestants claim to 'fancy Katie Price', or to have 'a shelf full of Katie Price products' at home. The show is really a glorified fanclub outing, a meet your heroine day. One lucky fan, though, will become a walking postmodern work of art - signed by Katie Price.

The Banality of Magic: The Tooth Fairy

Before watching this, I couldn't help envisaging a children's film starring the terrifying serial killer in Red Dragon. And sure enough, the sinister implications of a job which involves intruding into people's homes at night and visiting their children as they lie alone in their beds is something the film can never quite conquer, despite the acquiesence of the child characters. It's made worse by the outfit that its hero settles on to play the Tooth Fairy - a combination of Disney fairy and ice hockey uniform, one of the looks favoured by scary characters in slasher movies, not to mention his charming habit of spraying an 'amnesiac-spray', which seems like CS gas, into people's faces to stop them questioning him. What a mischievous man!

But this is not the most problematic contradiction in the movie. Almost the last line in the movie is when the elf-like creature played by Billy Crystal yells 'I love my job!' as he sits on a goal-bound ice-hockey puck. It's amazing how important work is to Hollywood kids movies. The Tooth Fairy is another example (see Santa Claus or Monsters Inc.) of Hollywood's determination to show us that magic is a particular kind of work. It's almost impossible to immerse yourself in the movie without grappling with the obvious irony upon which it rests. In a world in which 'children just don't believe anymore', the movie sets out to demonstrate that magic really happens, and anyone can 'believe'. It does this by propelling its cynical, charmless hero, Derek Thompson (played quite appropriately, if not deliberately, without an iota of charm by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) into the world of the tooth fairy. Having been on the point of telling his girlfriend's six-year-old daughter that the tooth fairy does not exist (to get himself off the hook from stealing her tooth money) Derek is suddenly sentenced to a week's community service where he has to become a tooth fairy. And, surprise surprise, what does Fairyland look like but a large US corporation in which hierarchies are rigidly sustained, employees are cynical yet continue to do their jobs, and the whole operation depends upon a series of tried-and-tested processes being applied smoothly and without question. It's a kind of strange 'reverse-Marxism': the Hollywood machine seeks to uphold the values of magic by demystifying them, revealing that the escapist fantasy-world which provides the antidote to the dreary world of reality (signified here by Derek's declining career as a once-lauded ice hockey pro) in fact runs on precisely the same principles. Magic, in other words, needs to be run like a large business. More than this, to really change things does not require magic so much as hard work, energy and focus: this is how Derek finally rescues himself from a boorish hell, by working damn hard.

Berkeley Hippies

Berkeley, California: beautiful university, strange city. 'Come for the culture, but stay for the food', said the tourist slogan. But other than the University (very cultured, no doubt about it) it was difficult to see what other culture this might to have referred to, apart from its subculture... And I found this a combination of the disturbing and the commodified.

The most striking thing about non-university Berkeley is its culture of Hippiedom. Hippies live on the streets there, partying like it was 1969. Except of course we're long after 1969... So it made me wonder: is it possible to be a 'proper' hippy post-Manson? The hippies I encountered, predominantly men in their fifties sporting frizzy goatees and coloured round shades, and producing a half-hearted street-theatre (sitting on the pavement, walking on tightropes, selling clothes and 2nd-hand books, etc.), seemed uniformly menacing.

But it also reminded me that postmodernism, contrary to much of the theory, can be a very unself-conscious practice rather anything deliberately self-reflexive. You can 'be' someone by following a cultural script. But the script is complex and many-faceted, a veritable wiki-text of meanings and values. Manson turned the values of the 60s inside-out, in a process we could term (after Baudrillard) 'reversibility'. To be a hippy, all you have to do is buy the tie-dyed clothes and display the anti-authoritarian slogans. But this look is saturated not just with connotations of peace and love, but with Manson and Altamont.

For All You Champions

If it were possible to stick a microphone in front of the Freudian ego and record its stream of consciousness directly, the chances are it would sound like Chipmunk's current single (featuring Chris Brown), 'Champion'. The Ego, as emphasized by Lacan, is an essentially paranoid entity which sustains one's imaginary sense of self by relentlessly promoting an illusion about how important, valuable, beautiful, etc. one is, while constantly portraying others as hostile threats to this self. This is the world we enter on listening to 'Champion'. People are constantly holding Chris Brown back (and, I suppose, 'Chipmunk', too), knocking him off his pedestal, telling him he couldn't be famous. But he retorts, stirringly

I'm always pushing myself to the limit

making sure I stay ahead....

Some people have to learn

some people wait their turn

some people but not me

I was born a champion

Such egomania is common in contemporary 'R&B' (as it's misleadingly called). R. Kelly, for example, sings in 'The World's Greatest':

If anybody asks you who I am

Just stand up tall

Look 'em in the face and say

I'm that star up in the sky

I'm that mountain peak up high

Hey, I made it

I'm the world's greatest

How close this posturing comes to desperation, however, is clear from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's ironic but beautiful version, from his 2007 EP 'Ask Forgiveness', where his sweet, tentative, cracked delivery makes the words sound like the heartbreaking incantation of a damaged man. That's the thing about the ego: it deliberately misrepresents the outside world to protect the self. But Chris Brown's world is also that of so much of our culture: its character is that of the narcissistic personality, struggling to recognise true otherness. The fact that 'now my dream and reality is simultaneous', as Brown states, is not a positive outcome but a danger.

It may be stirring to misrecognise yourself in the lines 'it’s only you believing in you' or 'go get it in sonny!' which you hear in the background as you work the cross-trainer in the gym... But what happens when reality does intrude, and one's self-belief and determination lead nowhere? This is where we open the door to another space, next to the one labelled 'Champions' - the world of 'Nobodies Who Want to Be Somebodies' as featured in films like Taxi Driver or The Assassination of Richard Nixon. 'Here is a man who would not take it anymore...'

Catfish

I've rarely found a film so gripping, absorbing, disturbing as Catfish. It's a masterpiece, a film entirely representative of its age - whatever you might think of how authentic it is. Forum-posters and bloggers have been preoccupied by the question of whether the film is a real or a fake documentary (e.g. see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/board/nest/171604160). I'm a little unmoved by accusations of fakery in relation to fiction and film, for standard 'postmodern' reasons... If this is a fake, it only reveals how all representation of reality are faked, in so far as what they depict is edited, framed, constructed, etc.

Nevertheless there is something funny about the opening of Catfish, for it seems we're suddenly plunged into a story which requires some crucial scene-setting but which is not forthcoming. It looks as if the protagonist, Nev, has started to received paintings of his photos, apparently done by an 8-year-old girl, out of the blue, and is so intrigued he follows them up. Yet my suspicion is that the seduction has in fact worked the other way around: the paintings or at least further contact with their producer were somehow invited by the film-makers. Rather than Nev (pronounced Neev or perhaps 'naive') and co being sucked in to Angela's scheme, her fantasies have made her vulnerable to theirs...

But no matter how conscious or not any of the participants were of their role in the movie, I think what makes it so powerful is its structure. The viewer is carefully presented with the kind of virtual, layered, mediated world typical of twenty-first century life, a world of google maps, youtube, and facebook, only to be suddenly confronted, without warning, with a shocking aspect of reality. This is the world of the two severely disabled brothers whom Angela cares for. Even if she or her husband Vince (who delivers a suspiciously powerful and articulate monologue at the end of the movie, explaining its title), are somehow in on the scam, the life we're given a glimpse into is starkly, uncontestably real: this, we recognise painfully, is what looking after two helpless, unfortunate beings would be like. This is the unexpected triumph of the movie: never mind its self-reflexive commentary on self-presentation in the digital age, nestling within is an unfliching, unglamourised, picture of the kind of quotidian American life which is practically invisible across cultural forms: the isolated drudgery of ordinary, blue-collar American life, a world away from the affluent, loft-dwelling universe inhabited by Nev. And the fact that the movie shows us this is perhaps the single most powerful counter to the accusations that the whole thing is staged by clever, exploitative film-makers.

Bad Boys

Long after its original release I still hear Alexandra Burke emoting her line about how 'the bad boys are always catching my eye'. I wonder what 'bad boys' she has in mind. Shoplifters? Cheats? Murderers? Serial killers? No doubt they catch her eye because they know they've found a potential victim. Or maybe these bad boys are just blokes who leave her to do all the dishes and their washing without so much as a thank you?

The song is still around because it taps into a fantasy subscribed to by many women: The Bad Boy, a man who will treat you mean to keep you keen. This fantasy was the subject of an IT Crowd episode, where Roy sets out to prove that women choose 'bastards' by writing an insulting lonely hearts ad and seeing how many replies he gets. He is almost instantly successful. Yet the show's idiot-savant Moss grasps the spirit of the game even better than he does, writing 'I will murder you'. As a self-styled 'good boy' (just as much of a fantasy of course) I've always loved this episode. It's a kind of strike back at the Bad Boys... Can't imagine them watching the IT Crowd, though.

Katy Perry

I imagine Katy Perry standing in front of her mirror telling herself with pride (no doubt amongst other things) 'You have a strong voice'. But when I hear Katy's voice - as I seem to constantly these days, blowing out of open car windows, on cbbc, in shops, as if it's a nagging reminder of something I ought to know but can't quite remember - it makes me uncomfortable. Her songs seem to be sung as if she is permanently of the verge of tears, sobbing through all the pain and anger. You might want to put your arm around her, but know she'd probably push you away. 'I, know a place...', she sobs (on California Gurls). I don't' want to go to this place: the grass might be greener, but I know there'll be something distinctly ugly about it...

Barney's Version

Barney's Version resembles Sideways, one of my favourite movies of the last decade or so. Where at the heart of that film was the touching friendship between two men, here we have a sweetly loving relationship between father (Dustin Hoffman) and son (Paul Giamatti). This is the antidote to the Hollywood compulsion to portray Oedipal father-son 'tension then resolution' (a recurring sympton most evident in the remade Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, ie the one where Johnny Depp plays Michael Jackson playing Gene Wilder playing Willy Wonka... which makes only one significant addition to Roald Dahl's plot: the insertion of a 'wild psychoanalytic' explanation of just why Wonka is so wonky... it's because of the lack of approval from his mean dentist-father, of course!). In Barney's Version we have a father who loves his son unconditionally and it's refreshing to see.

The rest of the film is not in such rude health, however, but suffers from memory lapses and identity-crises. Of course it's a film about memory lapses and identity-crises... but it starts out as a Sideways-style portrait of an endearingly-dysfunctional male then becomes a murder-mystery and then finally a brooding study of Alzheimer's. Neither of these three stories is finished, just as none of Barney's women are believable (why is he so obsessed by the cold, detached Rosamund Pike character?). Ah, but isn't this how the film cleverly comments on the mystery of narrative construction? I'm not convinced. The movie suffers from having no way to replicate effectively the self-reflexivity of Mordecai Richler's original novel, which includes footnotes inserted by Barney's son to cover gaps in his memory and thus comments on the reliability of memory and narrative. In the end, the film is like a biopic of a famous person that we ourselves mysteriously can't recall. Without the context of a real life viewers are familiar with through the media - despite the brilliant acting of Giamatti - we're unable to understand just why the story of this man should be so important to tell.