One Function of the Guardian/Observer for the Middle Classes (Neatly Encapsulated in the Title of a Single Article)

'I feel defensive about my second home - but my guilt is largely unnecessary' (Ian Jack's column in The Guardian, Saturday 27 October 2012)

The Demon in the Machine: Paranormal Activity 4

The idea which runs through the Paranormal Activity series is that the visual technology which is so much a part of contemporary life might just capture something horrible, either by accident or design. In the original film (2009), a couple attempt to make sense of frightening paranormal disturbances which have been occurring in their new home at night – a light turning itself on and off in the hallway, a door opening by itself, loud thuds and crashes upstairs, etc. – by mounting a digital camera in their bedroom and recording while they sleep. This is followed by handheld cameras in Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), security cameras in Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), a prequel to the original, and now, in this fourth instalment, a series of networked laptops recording continually via webcam throughout the house.

Our handheld digital world has had a huge impact on cinema, and not just because the compact nature of digital cameras and smartphones – and their low prices – makes filming accessible to all. Where the mediatized global catastrophes of the Sixties were televisual (the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, for example), in the twenty-first century, they have been digital. One effect of this is the way footage from 9/11 and the 2004 Tsunami taught film-makers how to really ‘do’ realistic disaster (e.g. in Cloverfield - see previous post). But what Paranormal Activity suggests is that there is something disturbing about the technology itself, something dangerous about our very compulsion to record every moment of our lives. What if the devices we deploy to protect ourselves should uncover, or even unleash, a submerged world we would be better off not knowing about?

Jane and Louise Wilson

 

In its heyday in the late Eighteenth Century, gothic fiction specialized in exotic, enclosed spaces, fitting locations for heightened  drama, such as the rooms in castles or monasteries. Now we are as likely to encounter the gothic in the ordinary spaces of our everyday world – not only the urban architectural spaces explored in the photography of Jane and Louise Wilson, but in everyday suburban kitchens, bedrooms and garages. ‘Suburban Gothic’ is a label coined by Bernice Murphy to refer to a major sub-genre within American gothic over the past few decades, which expresses the anxiety that beneath the surface of the most mundane of environments something extraordinary is lurking, something virulent or evil. The Paranormal Activity series is a recent example of a sequence of films that include Halloween (1981) and Disturbia (2005). The original film was set in a modest example of ‘tract’ housing, the sequels in more affluent villas. Each, though, is representative of ‘suburbia’.

From the outset, the plot has been the weakest link in the Paranormal Activity series, despite the creditable attempts to embellish it in the sequels. A demon has attached itself to one of two sisters, staying with her throughout her life as she moves from one suburban locale to another, making sure she and her offspring stay in his possession, eliminating anyone who gets in his way. But why this is the case, and even how it works, is less clear. In a way the story is rather un-gothic: demons are more monstrous but less uncanny than ghosts. But in the end this doesn’t matter. In Paranormal Activity 4 the simple plot – demon wants boy back – is just a pretext for the real business of the film: to show us how menacing the spaces of our ordinary lives are. The films gives us the Freudian uncanny in an especially direct sense: our homes are made unhomely by the act of scrutiny. It may be that the most problematic inconsistency of the story is the fact that a force formidable enough to drag adults through rooms, start cars, and send chandeliers crashing down on people, is apparently unable to turn off a laptop. Yet this demon has no interest in stopping the camera, for it is his biggest ally.

*Bernice Murphy, Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2009)

When I'm Cleaning... etc.

Ah, George Formby Jr. Classic, supremely talented yet unfairly neglected, etc.

I just about 'get' what the George Formby thing is all about. It's a Northern thing. It's a British thing. It's the kind of thing that makes movies like The Full Monty successful, the idea that 'we' can never be as good as them because we're not as privileged nor as confident in ourselves as they are... But we can try and have fun amidst all the hardship and a sense of community and identity will result. And along the way we can produce pretty good music, films, etc. In other words: we lowly, down-to-earth Brits are not the Americans. And we Northerners are not like you guys from the South...

Frank Skinner's documentary about Formby (August 5th, BBC Four) was dressed up as a reappraisal, designed to persuade us that Formby was deserving of a position in the Twentieth Century roster of brilliant, influential artists. A brilliant ukelele player, and a composer of neat, comic songs, yes. But influential? There's the problem. As Skinner's own performances of Formby songs showed, it seems impossible to 'do' a Formby song without 'doing Formby' (ie. singing in that silly voice). It becomes an impression, a karaoke performance. Given that the style of Formby's music probably descended from ragtime roots and is thus flexible enough to be reinterpreted, it seems surprising that no-one's tried to re-do Formby's songs in his or her own style. But then we come to another problem: those lyrics...

London 2012 - Opening Ceremony

Another example of the self-reflexivity of our heavily mediatized everyday reality: the opening ceremony to the Olympics consisted of Danny Boyle apparently extending the phantasmagoric drug-induced hallucination scenes from Trainspotting to put together a trippy dream of British history and contemporary British reality, which included such bizarre random moments as the Arctic Monkeys playing a version of their 2005 (yes, 2005!) hit 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor' and then a cover of one of John Lennon's most meaningless, yet unmistakably 1960s, songs 'Come Together'. Ok, this was perhaps an Olympic sentiment. But then Paul McCartney was wheeled out to sing 'Hey Jude'. Why? What has this man and this song got to do with the Olympics and/or Britain 2012? The only explanation is that he represents a kind of rock Royalty.

This then became news, with commentators discussing it on the news channels late into the nights. Screened on the BBC, then analysed on the BBC as if it just happended to be a randomly-generated news event, when actually the BBC were talking about themselves!

Contemporary British Cinema

There are three kinds of British movie: 1. the plucky disenfranchised group working together to achieve a momentary success (The Full Monty, Made in Dagenham, Calendar Girls), a film which promotes the 'having a go' side of British life, as people force themselves to do something badly for the greater good and to cheer themselves up; 2. the aspirational (London) movie, where a group of affluent metrosexuals impress the Americans (Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc.); 3. the gritty, dark, bleak portrait of the futility of working-class life (Fishtank, Red Road, Made in England). Only the third is any good. What does this say about Britain and its sense of itself?

Who's Bad? The Jimmy Savile Scandal

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek once wondered why we were surprised when Michael Jackson's 'dark side' was first revealed, in the mid 1990s. 'Wasn't this "dark side of Michael Jackson" always here for all of us to see, in the video spots that accompanied his musical releases, which were saturated with ritualized violence and obscene sexualized gestures (blatantly so in the case of Thriller and Bad)?' (Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p.3). 'I'm bad, I'm real real bad', Jackson told us, but we thought he was joking. 'You know I'm bad, I'm bad, really, really bad....'

Zizek's point is that  'The Unconscious is outside, not hidden in any unfathomable depths'. This is surely also evidenced by the clips of Jimmy Savile on his TV shows in the 1970s, a girl on each arm, to which we are subjected now on a daily basis. At least part of our thirst for recrimination, and the programme of systematically bringing to justice every prominent light entertainment TV personality of the 1970s, can be explained by the fact that we were all duped and we need to acknowledge this...

'And the whole world has to answer right now, just to tell you once again, who's bad...'