LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, November 07, 2011

The Ides of March posted by Richard Seymour

George Clooney, Hollywood's meridian liberal, offers a story about a liberal politician making a run for president. This could be good, or it could be insufferable. (The presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman is a reasonable guarantee that it won't be too insufferable, though). You think you're going to get something like Bulworth, where the hero's progressive views are met with disapproval by party bosses and rich donors alike, but stimulate popular enthusiasm. Or you think, as the ambiguous title invites you to, that there's an assassination in the post. And indeed the movie obliquely alludes to this possibility - there's a brief, tense 'Wellstone' moment as the candidate, Governor Mike Morris, and his advisors sit in a small jet air craft passing through turbulence. There are other allusions - a dead intern, redolent of Chandra Levy, perhaps. If the CIA doesn't off him, if his donors don't hang him out to dry, if the media doesn't destroy him, maybe someone will frame him. Somehow, our liberal lion will be sacrificed to the Christians. But no.

At a simple didactic level, this film is closer to The Candidate, where an intelligent, principled reformist allows his campaign to be corrupted, dumbed down and pulled to the right in order to win. But that's not really the basis for two hours in the cinema - not for my money. And indeed if this film were reducible to its explicit politics, it would be fairly appalling. This is often the case with Clooney films. Up In the Air, for example, was a deeply conservative movie whose argument was that only families provide the durable emotional and financial bedrock that allow people to survive unemployment. Syriana was critical of the neoconservatives and the oil companies, but its hero was a fairly repulsive CIA agent. So, consider the elements of the candidate's appeal: the unproblematised liberal nationalism (we want America to lead the world again), the imperial chauvinism (we fight the war on terror by not needing "their product", which is oil), the hypocritical populism (the governor attacks the rich for not paying their dues, but his own wealth, the fact that rich people dominate the political system, is not seen as being problematic). This is 'Obamamania' reheated, without the story of racial redemption. In fact, on that subject, the film's racial politics are reprehensible. The only major black character is a Senator played by the excellent Jeffrey Wright, who is depicted as the basest, most reactionary snake oil salesman - in some respects, he's like a cross between John Bolton and (the fictional) Clay Davis. As I say, if this was all there was to the film, there would be little to admire.

The core of the narrative is the 'corruption' of Ryan Gosling's innocent, idealistic, blue-eyed, K Street consultant employed by the campaign who, we are led to believe, is not a completely cynical, self-serving piece of shit. He is a believer. He thinks Morris is the man who will make a difference. A wised up columnist from the New York Times tells him that he's an idiot, that the presidential race will make no difference to the average working "fuck", that the only real difference it makes is between him working in the White House, or going back to K Street to work for a million dollars a year. He demurs, charmingly. Events, which we won't describe in any detail here, lead the cornflower-eyed sap to revise his idealism, and realise that the drive for success has led both himself and the candidate to compromise themselves, and undermined the progressive content of the campaign.

Again, so far so boring. We have heard all this before. We've heard some of it from Joe Klein. There's very little of political substance here. For many who watched and enjoyed the film, it was yet another sermon about the corrupting effect of politics on integrity. If only we had a better media. If only the political system didn't smile on the ruthless. The liberal lament. And indeed they wouldn't be wrong to see all that. And ultimately, this has a tendency - if pushed to its conclusions - to collapse into the patronising argument that the average working fuck is at fault for being so suadible.

What I think makes the film a bit more interesting is the way it works as a deflation and desublimation of its own 'Obamamania', or rather of the elevating liberal discourse that Obama has mastered. At the start of the film, the basic liberal assumptions are in place. We have a charismatic liberal hero, someone who can make the difference, if only the media and the Republicans can be fought off. The system can be made to work for the good guys - Democrats, as far as this film is concerned - if only talented hucksters will come to their aid. By the end of the film, none of these comforting ideas have been directly contested or challenged: this is not Brechtian film-making. Rather, they are simply cast in a new light in which they appear to be worthless. It's not that the progressive potential of the campaign has been betrayed; it's that it was never there. The impoverished tropes of idealism, integrity, re-taking this country, etc., are just so much sublimated avarice, the language of bourgeois esurience levitated to the plane of 'the general interest'. And it's the affective level on which this case is made; it is only a shift of perspective that transforms dutiful conscientiousness into pitiless, self-serving ruthlessness. After which, the cynosures of Democratic liberalism, which Clooney undoubtedly believes in wholeheartedly, leave a sour taste on the palate of the working fuck.

Labels: american ruling class, democratic party, film review, films, liberalism, the ides of march, us politics

Saturday, September 26, 2009

The very trite and vulgar picture of 'Dorian Gray' posted by Richard Seymour

A very brief and partial review. I did not, could not, sit through the entirety of the latest film version of Dorian Gray. Everything that could go wrong with such an adaptation did go wrong. Unbelievably, the makers have taken an already camp and melodramatic novel and turned it into an absurdly overblown bit of kitsch. They dispensed with most of Wilde's deathless aphorisms, stripped away vital scenes of dialogue, threw in unwieldy scenes that weren't in the original, including a backstory of abuse suffered by Gray that doesn't really seem necessary, degraded some of the already paper-thin characters so that they may as well have been played by mops with papier mache faces stuck on, sucked all the sexual tension from the relationship between Basil Hallward and Gray, and made the terror in the novel's later passages feel contrived. Ben Chaplin, as Hallward, doesn't seem so much enthralled with Gray as irked by him. The gory murder advertised from the first scene in the film feels so trivial that it reminds one of Wilde's quip that "One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell". They have also thrown in some soft porn to make it a bit edgier, but to my mind that is far less sexy than suggestion and well-conceived innuendo.

In fact, the film makers seem to have been unsure as to how much to rely on suggestion. They decided, for example, that the original corruption of Dorian's boyish soul should be symbolised by him accepting a cigarette from Lord Henry Wotton. It is known that in Wilde's circles, the young 'Uranians' that he used to have it off with, the sharing of opium-tipped cigarettes was a preferred oral pleasure. And it is known that Wilde presented his young lovers with cigarette cases, as Wotton significantly does to Dorian in this film. But it still feels like a rather tame and tenuous symbol of sensual indulgence, particularly when the following scenes have the pair visiting an opium den and being descended upon by unrealistically glamorous prostitutes. The worst aspects of the novel, meanwhile, are preserved. Wilde's depiction of women, for example, is often deeply misogynistic, despite his feminist politics. The film does not make these shrill caricatures any more interesting.

The casting doesn't work either. Whoever the fuck this Ben Barnes is, he isn't Dorian. If anything, he is utterly nondescript, by no means the unconsciously beautiful ingenue that he is supposed to be channelling. Perhaps he missed his calling as a backing singer for a boy band, or as an ornate ironing board. Colin Firth looks as fat and slimy as a slug in his role as Lord Henry Wotton, not at all the dangerous and seductive quasi-Nietzschean mentor that he is striving to emulate. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it," he intones. "Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself." This should be a memorable and subtle moment, but he just sounds like a bloated old lech trying to get his end away.

It is important to say that The Picture of Dorian Gray is, in its way, a deeply moralistic affair. Arthur Conan Doyle understood this much, and defended it from the philistines of the age who decried it as 'decadent'. Wilde may have wished to be Dorian "in another age, perhaps", but the novel clearly reviles his behaviour. This is perhaps a strange thing to say about a novel which opens with a series of epigrams that warn the reader not to expect an 'ethical sympathy' on the part of the artist, and which insist that "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all." But then, for Wilde, concepts such as 'evil' and 'ugly' were almost interchangeable. The most damning indictment that Wilde could offer of anything was that it was "vulgar". It is not an accident that Dorian's evil expresses itself as the corruption of a beautiful work of art. In The Critic as Artist, Gilbert vocalises Wilde's contempt for England's vulgar intellectual culture by remarking that "There is no sin except stupidity". And nor was this a "sin" he looked upon lightly. While in Reading Gaol, Wilde responded to a query about the obscenely popular trash writer Marie Corelli by saying, not entirely in jest, that "from the way she writes, she ought to be in here". I know he would have recommended a similar punishment for the makers of Dorian Gray. Still, this humungous slice of cheese will probably become a cult classic one day, alongside Showgirls, just as Corelli's sentimental drivel enjoyed a subterranean audience in gay London for its sheer camp flamboyance. But goddamit, if you really must, hold back until the box office closes.

Labels: dorian gray, film review, oscar wilde

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

A brave stance against 'liberal guilt' posted by Richard Seymour

It began by laying bare the supposedly brutal treatment of Republican prisoners at The Maze. I'd been under the impression that standards at this facility were carefully maintained, if only because the cunning Brits were keen to fend off international protests about their dubious judicial arrangements. This wasn't, however, my problem. That lay elsewhere. Far from being shocked at seeing the inmates roughed up a bit, I found myself wishing they'd been properly tortured, preferably savagely, imaginatively and continuously.

Labels: british occupation, film review, northern ireland, oirientalism, torture

Friday, August 01, 2008

I don't believe in Harvey Dent. posted by Richard Seymour

Well, as John Pistelli argues, Hollywood's production mill is at a miserable nadir. One comic book fantasy after another, and all of them somehow parables about the 'war on terror' and the need for a hypertrophic superman to slaughter the evildoers without and the traitors within. The Dark Knight, the latest installment of the Batman flicks, follows on from The Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. The Iron Man was, of course, about a billionaire arms producer named Stark who drives fast cars and treats women like whores - one of his victims being a female reporter from the ubiquitous Liberal Media (who, we are invited to judge, had it coming). He gets into a dreadful scrape in Afghanistan, while flogging his weapons, which results in his capture by the banally evil Talibs (who look about as Afghani as I do). To escape, he builds an 'Iron Man' shell that turns one ordinary billionaire adventurist into a weapon of God, a furious monster that lays into enemies with mammoth hammer blows and every variety of weaponry known to a screenwriter. Having noticed that his weapons are getting into the hands of the evil ones (he finds killing sweet American boys rather than Afghan farmers objectionable), Stark announces that he no longer wants to make arms and retreats into privacy - but predictably is drawn back into action as the Iron Man to thwart the corrupt double-dealers in his own company who have been selling to both sides. And so on. The Incredible Hulk is, on the face of it, a glorified Beauty and the Beast fable for teenagers. Ed Norton is the unassuming prince who, due to radiation poisoning during a military experiment, becomes a ferocious, bawling, infantile green giant if his heart rate gets too fast. He is in hiding, because the corrupt colonel whose daughter he loves (the weepy, pouting Liv Tyler), wants to abduct him and return him to status of a lab rat so that he can develop this Hulk into a battlefield weapon. And what a weapon - he takes down helicopters, absorbes rocket blasts, repels bullets with contemptible ease, crushes tanks, and lays buildings to waste with his mighty muscles. Hulk smash! But the man himself is anxious to rid himself of the Hulk persona and is desperate to return to his sweetheart, which he duly does. He finds himself mutating into the green thing again, the better to protect Liv from collateral damage when the colonel goes after him with said tanks and helicopters at the college where Liv works, and the pair elope to a cave where the sobbing giant roars his heart out. Hulk wuvooo. And so on and on. You might think the Hulk is a bit more ambivalent about the need for a superman, but there is no implied critique of the military-industrial complex, and Norton eventually reconciles himself to being a viridescent chump. And, at the end of this race in which Norton finally outwits and escapes his would-be captors, he is propositioned by none other than Stark, the Iron Man. The way is clear for a fun-packed cross-over - oh frabjous day!

The Dark Knight is the most obviously fascist of the films. The billionaire playboy with a penchant for sadistic violence is back in action against the Joker, a criminally insane "terrorist madman" who issues demands in shaky-looking videos, which the weak-minded populace is often inclined to give in to. The Joker, of course, has no motives. He is just an Iago-like malevolence, pure vindictive chaos, who can no more be reasoned with than he can be bribed or bullied. As Alfred remarks, regaling Master Wayne with a tale of his colonial exploits in Burma, "Some men don't want anything logical like money. Some men just want to watch the world burn." And so it transpires: the Joker is a purveyor of purposeless, chaotic violence, who ends by placing a massive bet on the sociological assumption that most people are at root as viciously indifferent to other human beings as he is. The Batman's counter-bet is that people are as devoted to order, authority and hierarchy as he is. The bad guys are an assortment of freaks, black gangsters, Russian gangsters, mobsters and crooked Chinese businessmen. The good guys are, with the exception of a single side-kick played by Morgan Freeman, uptight bourgeois white Americans, and the most virtuous of them all is the blonde hero with a chin like a body-builder's arse, the District Attorney Harvey Dent. Elected on the slogan 'I Believe in Harvey Dent', he is the hallowed Great White Hope of the film, a potential legit successor to the Batman's subterranean campaign of terror. Dent's crusade against crime is on the legal side, but just because he is a pious public servant doesn't mean he doesn't sympathise with the aristocratic vigilante. After all, as he remarks, when the barbarians were at the gates of Rome, they suspended democracy and appointed a Caesar to protect the population. (These pompous jerks do love their classical metaphors). In fact, that part of Gotham's police department which isn't bought off by the Joker relies on the violent, lone storm-trooper to break legs, smash faces and torture on their behalf. And the Batman, with the enormous resources at his disposal, doesn't shrink from breaking international law to abduct a robotic Chinese criminal (because "the Chinese will never extradite one of their own"), or from erecting a colossal apparatus of surveillance which makes Bush's extensive illegal wiretapping look decidedly unimpressive, the better to catch the evil one. In protecting the population, he and the police confect serial lies and myths for public consumption - the 'noble lie', that is, which the masses need to sustain their morale. This struggle is not a collective one, after all, and the few members of the public who do try to 'copycat' Batman's antics end up being butchered.

The Batman is a man of steel, unlike Bruce Wayne, who is merely super-hunky and dashing. He has no limits, and can survive flesh wounds, stabbing, crashes, and falls from a great height, without putting a dent in his schedule. He moves with a fluidity and speed that must make him the envy of the Parkour kids, appearing out of nowhere, and disappearing noiselessly. His ferocious masculine growl is an exaggerated imitation of Dirty Harry. He is the ruthless, overbearing superego of Gotham city, animated not by compassion or solidarity but by an obsessive conscience. "The most urgent task of the man of steel," Klaus Theweleit argued, "is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines and feelings that calls itself human." People turn to men of steel in order to restore the imperilled fantasy of immortality, by ensuring that it is others who die. But the men of steel, whatever their protests to the contrary, do not desire an end to the chaos and destruction. They adore it, and are lost without it. If Bruce Wayne no longer had his epic fight against mega-crime, he might have to deal with picket lines at his company gates, people trying to 'redistribute' his wealth, immigrant workers becoming politically assertive, public prosecutors bashing on his doors to investigate his environmental or labour code violations, all of that petty stuff that real-life CEOs have to deal with. His romantic interests might realise that he was unworthy of love too, and anyone unfortunate enough to marry him would discover a controlling personality given to violent rages, a megalomaniac who spies on her every move through his system of cameras and hidden mics. And what's with all the secret chambers and torture equipment? He might even prove to be rather dim, bigoted and narcissistic, a more handsome version of Donald Trump. As for Harvey Dent, his 'idealism' would prove to be as tyrannical as it is selective. He would be rounding up petty drug offenders and shoplifters, 'cleaning the streets' of prostitutes and undesirables, jailing the homeless, going after the damned radicals and peaceniks.

No, I don't believe in Harvey Dent, or Batman, or the Incredible Iron Crock. Gotham needs a revolution.

Labels: batman, fascism, film review, the incredible hulk, the iron man

Friday, May 16, 2008

Politics of Disasters posted by Yoshie

A cyclone devastates Burma's Irrawaddy Delta, and an earthquake strikes China's Sichuan Province, and the empire smells blood, itching to send "aid at the point of a gun," urging the United Nations to invoke the "responsibility to protect": "France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta."¹ Why such an unseemly display of arms? Because a natural disaster can turn into a legitimation crisis, giving foreign powers a shot at regime change.

[N]othing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It's something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet -- China and Burma -- struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes -- and both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult to control.²

A regime's failure to respond promptly and effectively to suffering caused by a natural disaster, the failure that the opposition can exploit, can indeed become a factor in its downfall. Such was the case with the Shah's regime and the earthquake of 1978 that wiped out Tabas and damaged forty other villages in Iran.

Michel Foucault reported in Corriere della sera on 28 September 1978:

Who will rebuild Tabas today? Who will rebuild Iran after the earthquake of Friday, September 8 [Black Friday, when the army massacred hundreds of protesters in Djaleh Square of Tehran], right under the treads of the tanks? The fragile political edifice has not yet fallen to the ground, but it is irreparably cracked from top to bottom.

In the torrid heat, under the only palm trees still standing, the last survivors of Tabas work away at the rubble. The dead are still stretching their arms to hold up walls that no longer exist. Men, their faces turned toward the ground, curse the Shah. The bulldozers have arrived, accompanied by the empress; she was ill received. However, mullahs rush in from the entire region; and young people in Tehran go discreetly from one friendly house to another, collecting funds before leaving for Tabas. "Help your brothers, but nothing through the government, nothing for it," is the call that Ayatollah Khomeini has just issued from exile in Iraq.³

Neither Islamic nor Marxist nor liberal revolutionaries of Iran, however, called upon the West to claim its "right to protect" and send its armies to save them from the Shah. They overthrew the Shah's regime on their own, and Iran's Islamic Revolution has grown into a republic that can survive natural disasters, such as the earthquake of 2003 that destroyed Bam, killing more than 20,000 and injuring many more.

One of the casualties of the Bam earthquake was an American man, Tobb Dell'Oro, who was vacationing with his fiancée Adele Freedman in the city. Freedman, who credits the "kindness of the Iranian people" for her survival,⁴ became the subject of an important documentary film, Bam 6.6: Humanity Has No Borders (Dir. Jahangir Golestan-Parast, 2007), which shows Iranians' solicitude for her wellbeing and gracious hospitality to her parents who initially thought Iran would be a terrible place for Jewish Americans like them to visit but have changed their minds about the Iranian people.

The Bam earthquake also moved many of the normally fractious Iranian diaspora, as well as the populace of Iran, to solidarity, holding benefits and raising funds for their countrymen and women in need back home.

Artists did their part, too. Mohammad Reza Shajarian, the finest musician in Iran, held a concert
همنوا با بم [In Harmony with Bam] with Hossein Alizadeh, Kayhan Kalhor, and Homayoun Shajarian in remembrance of the victims of the earthquake.

Iran's Islamic government, by the way, did not reject international, including American, offers of assistance -- unlike the Bush White House who didn't let Cuba or Iran help Americans after Hurricane Katrina -- and welcomed international NGOs as well, even though well-intentioned outsiders can create as many hindrances as aids they bring:

In a recent lessons-learned meeting on the Bam earthquake in Iran, a polite and respectful colleague from the Iranian Ministry of Health related his frustration at international NGO coordination in the early days of the emergency. He said that, at the same time as he was desperately trying to set up field hospitals and bury the dead, representatives from over 100 international NGOs had individually requested meetings with him. He appreciated their help, he said, but some organisations wanted to ask him about the siting of rural clinics when he was still trying to arrange emergency medical evacuations. Was there no way, he asked, that these agencies could organise themselves better in the early days of a disaster?⁵

But Iran's government, even under President Khatami, would not have accepted international relief if it had been imposed upon it by a show of force.

1 Robert D. Kaplan, "Aid at the Point of a Gun," New York Times, 14 May 2008.

2 Naomi Klein, "Regime-Quakes in Burma and China," The Nation, 15 May 2008.

3 Michel Foucault, "The Army -- When the Earth Quakes," in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, U of Chicago P, 2005, p. 190. An endnote omitted from the quotation and replaced by a parenthetical editorial clarification.

4 Corey Kilgannon, "For One Earthquake Survivor, Joy Is Tempered by Sorrow," New York Times, 10 January 2004.

5 Jenty Wood, "Improving NGO Coordination: Lessons from the Bam Earthquake," Humanitarian Practice Network, 2003.

Labels: burma, china, film review, humanitarian intervention, imperial ideology, imperialism, iran, love music hate racism

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Rambo posted by Richard Seymour

My review of that atrocious, disgusting, sickening, repellent, idiotic film is here:

It is self-consciously "about" a real life situation. It is tempting to say that the morality tale is a thin disguise for war porn. But it is worse than that. The war porn is a thin disguise for an even more barbarous morality tale.

Read on...

Labels: film review, genocide, rambo