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.