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.