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.

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.

Still Acting Paranormally

The film critic Vivian Sobchack once argued* that in sci-fi films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) viewers are forced into an unusually active role by the sheer 'minimal activity' of what we see on screen. This seduces us into 'an attentive paranoia which makes us lean forward to scan what seem like the most intentionally and deceitfully flat images for signs of aberrant alien behaviour from the most improbable of suspects'. They thus bear out Lawrence Alloway's view that suspense is nothing happening. The rationale behind both Paranormal Activity movies raise this attentive paranoia up a notch by exploiting the familiar eerie, empty, luminous world of the security camera. As we sit in the cinema we feverishly scan every nook and corner of the rooms depicted on the screen waiting for an intrusion. It's a film, in fact, which counters the conventional logic of cinema in these times of supersize TVs. Paranormal Activity is really 'made for the small-screen'.

Paranormal Activity 2, somewhat improbably, manages to repeat the same trick as the original, largely by increasing the dimensions of the scrutinized space, the number of rooms, mirrors and doors, the number of characters (including the most vulnerable person of all, an infant), and adding more adept special effects and more chilling set-pieces. This time, too, I found the 'demon' myth more persuasive. In the first movie, the uncanniness of the sudden intrusions into the tableaux of domestic ordinariness (the dramatic making-unfamiliar of the familiar, homely space) was diluted by the idea that the demon, a less uncanny horror figure than ghost or poltergeist, was living in the loft like a difficult lodger, burning photos and dragging bits and pieces upstairs. PA2 provides a more intriguing back-story, to the effect that Katie and her sister's grandmother must have made a deal with the demon in return for giving him (it?) the first-born male child from her family line. It makes Katie a much more sinister figure - and increases the uncanny feel of the demonic possession scenes involving both sisters.

The film also does an admirable job of remaining compatible with the narrative of the original film - and expanding it. PA2 is not just a sequel but a kind of prequel and 'simul-quel' too. Yet the three-weeks gap following the transfer of demonic energy from one sister to another makes me wonder even more about the demon. It asks us to imagine that a creature which has largely confined itself to living in an untidy cellar, periodically making clumsy trips upstairs to rattle pans, turn off lights and remove the pool cleaner from the pool, is capable of negotiating the busy highways from one part of California to the other in order to hatch a plot whereby he will inhabit one sister, kill her boyfriend, return to the original house, kill the other sister and her husband and then take an infant which he surely could have simply kidnapped without fuss in the first place. It is not the most efficient campaign. This demon clearly has a taste for complexity - or rather a strong aesthetic sensibility. What is curious throughout the films is not his terrifying power so much as his restraint. Why, when he is capable of subduing an Alsation in an instant or dragging an adult downstairs and possessing her within minutes, is he apparently unable to remove an unsuspecting child from his cot? Why, for that matter, is a creature who is able to manipulate teenagers into spelling out 'Hunter' on a ouija board seemingly unable to scratch out something legible on the cellar door? The only conclusion is that the demon is not just the reason for the terrible narrative but its auteur as well. He knows that Alloway is wrong. Suspense is not 'nothing happening' but lots of little things escalating over time into bigger things.

The question the film leaves us with is how the third instalment - if there is one - will unfold. My money's on a representation of a different kind of domestic normality, where the teenager Ali tracks down the Demon, Katie and Hunter to an untidy apartment somewhere else in California, where they live in dysfunctional splendour, trying to manage his demonic outbursts, and watching reruns of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.


*in Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1997)

The Apprentice

Joy Stefanicki: fired, 13th October 2010

I spend half of each episode of The Apprentice constantly on the point of switching over. I find the abrasive stupidity of the contestants almost unbearable. These are not the sort of people I want to spend any time with - even if they are on the other side of the screen. Here we have the normalized 'narcissistic personality disorder' of the Big Brother generation fused with the normative ideology of business: 'I say exactly what I think, I get exactly what I want, I will win at all costs...'. The beauty of Big Brother, though, is that the format itself - especially the extreme length of the time most contestants must spend in the house - means that this ego-shell is peeled away bit by bit until it's patently obvious that the proclamations of the contestants is all bluster.

A similar argument is often used about the moral punishment dealt out on The Apprentice. The beauty of this show, the argument goes, is that we can rejoice in seeing the most obnoxious people flayed by Sir Alan, scourge of the vain and stupid, in the boardroom at the end. Last night's episode, for example, revealed Joanna as mouthy and unnecessarily combative in the tasks and then forced to acknowledge her 'aggressive' nature by Sir Alan. Strangely, though, neither she nor her inept team-leader, Laura (who boasted at the start she could deal with any kind of personality only to demonstrate she could deal successfully with no-one) was fired. No, it was their fellow team-member Joy - ironically-named yet essentially well-meaning. Why? Because she was deemed to have shown Sir Alan 'nothing' in two weeks. And this, ultimately, is why I hate The Apprentice: the narcissistic aggressivity of the candidates is validated by Sugar's own business ethic. The lesson of each episode is: you have to show yourself as mouthy, aggressive, contemptuous towards others, determined to win at all costs... but you just have to do it in the right way.

A Lethal Weapon

On the day after Derrick Bird shot dead 12 people in Cumbria BBC Radio 4 broadcast a play entitled Six Impossible Things. Based on the true story of a murderer, it contained the line 'I'll put a bullet in your brain'. 66 complaints were made to the network, which quickly apologised and declared it had been wrong to broadcast the play. Why did this upset people? Who were they? Could they be protesting about anything more than ironic coincidence?

This seems part of the disturbing willingness to be part of a 'community of grief' which has marked British society since the death of Diana. People seem to need to think of themselves as 'victims' of tragic events, imagining that it's just too painful in their grief-stricken state to be confronted with images of any sort of violence. I vividly remember that a day or so after Diana's death the scheduled movie, Lethal Weapon III, was replaced by the sentimental (and wonderful) film, Field of Dreams, as if watching Mel Gibson's wild staring eyes as he brandished the eponymous firearm was just too upsetting for those in a fragile state after the tragedy. Of course this sentimentality is all media-led, as the duty of the news networks and newspapers is seemingly to create a community united in outrage and grief. The BBC is the prime offender here, so at least there is another irony: that its drama wing has to play by the strange rules it enforces elsewhere.