remission.pieces

2007-07-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

SPACE ODDITY

Rotten, crumbling, exposed. This is a harsh environment - thorny, dirty, smelly: the canals of Bow. Wanderers come here, like explorers.

There's a natural pace to the ruin, no sense of expectation.

It's been a pleasure to watch the decay, to watch time take it's sodden toll.

Tunnels and dark places. The lack of safety or concern is liberating.

People leave things here, knowing they won't be disturbed. A cemetary or lostorium.

Old paths tramped to oblivion by feet determined to move. Escape from the fantasies of the living.

Signs that may or may not be read, that may or may not even ever be seen.

No-one will miss it, no-one will remember what a horror it was. Something, however, will be gone for good.

Washed away by the tide.

Dead Time: George Romero's Night of the Living Dead

2007-06-08T20:29:00.000-07:00

To be born, to die, to be born again
and constantly progress, that is the Law.

Allan Kardec

When Night of the Living Dead was first shown to the American public in 1968, it received some favourable reviews and did moderately well at the box office. During the following decade it continued to play in limited runs at selected cinemas across the country and in the wider world. The reputation of the film has dined out on its early success. It is as admired for the economy of its production as for the achievement of its intentions. Indeed, the film gives the effect at times of being composed entirely of props: American flags fluttering in the wind, hammers, doors, bits of wood, gas pumps, fruit jars for Molotov cocktails, bullets, keys; its materials appear to have been slammed together with dirt and nails. For a work that has been lauded for its subversion of life in 1960s America, the technical aspects of its production affirm the merits of the society that it is held to subvert. A less flexible country and period would most likely not have permitted the creation of Night of the Living Dead.

As with the composition of the film, the plot is also direct: a brother and sister arrive at a secluded cemetery somewhere in the countryside to lay a wreath beside the grave of their father. As they are doing so, a figure approaches and attacks them, killing the brother. The girl then runs in terror to a nearby farmhouse, where she meets some people who we discover to be survivors of an unexplained outbreak of killings. As night falls, more and more figures encircle the farmhouse in search of people to kill and, as we learn, to devour. A failed attempt to escape leaves only one remaining survivor by the following morning. He is mistakenly killed by marksmen sent out by the authorities to exterminate the human devourers.

Anyone that has seen the film will be able to recognise these basic elements, but they will also note that the plot summary does not begin to tell the story. The narrative power of Night of the Living Dead rests on its ability to sustain multiple interpretations. One of the earliest and most dominant of these was the notion that the film is an allegory about the fantasies of apocalypse that were projected on to the Cold War. The first radio broadcast listened to by the survivors in the farmhouse, gives a sense of the climate of paranoia that pervades the entire film. During the broadcast, a reporter states unequivocally that, ‘there seems to be a sudden, general explosion of mass homicide.’ Subsequent news stories about US satellites carrying radiation from outer space add to the fear of the great dark unknown that is supposed to have terrified American people during this era.

A more palpable fear for the majority of Americans was that of social breakdown. The civil rights movements of the 1960s and the Vietnam war threatened to tear American society apart. Commentators who perceieved the shadow of social equality in the identity of the living dead lauded zombies as ‘blue collar heroes’. (Others would later denigrate the same as mindless consumers in Romero’s 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead.) Among the human characters in the film, the striking image of a black hero whose corpse is dragged out and burned by a group of white rural marksmen, seemed to affirm the validity of the film as a commentary on race. This has been lent support by the story that news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came through on the car radio as George Romero was driving to New York to sell Night of the Living Dead to a distribution company. To his credit, Romero has deftly evaded all critical objectification of his work. The casting of Duane Jones in the leading role is, he claims, owing to the simple fact that he gave the best audition. Therefore, no underlying message about the politics of colour is revealed.

On the other hand, there are fairly direct references within the film to events that were happening at the time. For example, Tom Savini, director of the 1990 re-make of the film, claims that the hooks used in the original Night of the Living Dead to carry dead bodies to the fire were similar to the wires used to lift up the bodies of dead Viet Cong guerrilla fighters to be thrown into graves. Such matters of detail do not actually reveal anything, however; they merely draw a connection between things that inspires thinking. Commentaries on Night of the Living Dead that attempt to situate it in a temporal framework become exhausted with the labour of trying to represent the film within that framework.

Perhaps the most powerful example of this is the idea that Night of the Living Dead is the expression of its creators’ growing hopelessness and despair at the failure of the various experiments in utopian living of the 1960s. This is a reading that has been underscored by Romero’s own comment that, ‘The film opens with a situation that has already disintegrated to a point of little hope, and it moves progressively toward absolute despair and ultimate tragedy.’ Like all good horror movies, Night of the Living Dead exists in a state of catastrophe, forcing the hand of every character to participate or be destroyed. The desparate choice often expresses the hope of the film. Night of the Living Dead may well have been motivated by nihilistic thoughts, but it is difficult to prove this considering that it has spawned three sequels, with the possibility of more to come.

The film does, however, put forward the idea that there are two forms of nihilism at work within its various characterizations: the active and the passive. The active form is expressed by the character of Ben, who appears to be motivated into making key decisions at precisely the moments in which hope has dwindled to nothing. The passive form is expressed in the despairing tone of several of the characters, particularly Barbara and Harry, who represent either inadequate or flawed behaviour in the midst of the crisis. Their decision-making powers are limited by their inability to acknowledge what is happening to their world.

Ben is unambiguously the hero of the film. He is always thinking of ways in which to help himself and the other survivors in the house. When he sees that one of the ‘ghouls’ has put out the lights of his car with a couple of rocks, he takes the hint and sets fire to another one to keep the others away from the house for a while. Furthermore, Ben’s nihilism is crucial to the understanding of the film. Even in this hopeless situation, or especially so, he shows that it is possible to make important decisions about his survival and that of others around him. Judith O’Dea’s performance as Barbara is sometimes criticized, but it must be understood that she has the most difficult part to play: that of a person who encounters the living dead for the first time and cannot accept what she has witnessed. When she recollects her experiences to Ben later in the film, it is as if she is remembering a fairy tale (‘And then, Johnny ran away.’) In contrast to Ben’s destructive fortitude, her confidence in the essence of things collapses into fantasy.

Every criticism of a work of art, whether knowingly or not, participates in a representation of that work. In a film as thoroughly dissected as Night of the Living Dead this has not failed to be the case, and it is hard to be objective about the claims that it is supposed to be making. But something might still be said for the uniqueness of the film in the context of a recently flourishing sub-genre of the horror movie. The Dead quadrilogy has helped to establish the ‘zombie’ film as a genre within the category of horror, in a similar way to the establishment of the noir within the category of the thriller during the postwar years in Hollywood. In their different ways it could be argued that Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005) have all contributed to the themes and possibilities of the genre. To this list we could easily add several others that also have given something back to the zombie horror film: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later are among the more celebrated examples, although connoisseurs deny the latter the status of a zombie film. Nevertheless, the work of referencing and establishing cinematic debts would no doubt add to the cultural wealth of Night of the Living Dead, firmly establishing it within the canon of seminal works of the American film industry.

No one is saying that it doesn’t deserve the accolades, but the film is not justified by critical success; for something continues to live in Night of the Living Dead. The modern zombie movie – stylish and preoccupied with standing out from the crowd – is a victim of orthodoxy in a way that Night of the Living Dead never could have been. The later Dead films, as well as other derivative works, tend toward the familiarization of their subject. In the service of a social meaning, the zombies in those films are given various human touches and mannerisms. The originality of Night of the Living Dead rests on its untroubled sense of finality.

The film is also unique as a work of horror cinema in that it never succumbs to the temptation to reveal what it is about. Not once in Night of the Living Dead is the term ‘zombie’ used. The identity of the human devourers is left unsolved except for some hints relating to extraterrestrial radiation. That enigmatic term – ‘living dead’ – dominates the title of the film as an irresolvable contradiction, a pathway that leads nowhere. George Romero claimed that he offered no ‘new thoughts, certainly no solutions, and not even any new questions, in my films’. In which case, we must assume that the questions at the heart of his films are timeless.

Diseases are new ways of life.

Georges Canguilhem

Within the scenario of Night of the Living Dead, a scenario that is played out across the three sequels, the living dead gain a numerical advantage over the living, so that the living finally become a terrified and self-enclosed minority in the land of the dead. How do the living dead achieve their numerical superiority when the living – as the more social beings – have the possibility of coming together to defeat them? First of all, this is because of the inability of the living to mobilise themselves against the dead (for reasons of power and self-interest). The breakdown of all forms of human social action is unfolded through the narratives of the sequels. Even from the first film, however, we gain an understanding that the dead are more single-minded in their pursuit of the living than the living are in pursuit of the dead. The reason for this is the insatiable hunger of the dead, which means that they will never become complacent. This distinguishes them decisively from the living, who are capable of rest.

Romero summarised the story of the film with the words: ‘A new society devouring the old.’ Perhaps meant to be taken in a literal sense, the closest human analogy to the living dead is not to be found in the largely symbolic and culturally diverse practice of cannibalism but in those terrible historical moments in which famine and starvation push people into consuming the rotting, meagre flesh of their recently deceased neighbours. For example, the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, estimated to have taken the lives of between six and seven million people, is accompanied by stories of such cases. A historian of this event has described how ‘before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings.’ In Night of the Living Dead there are many images that portray similar experiences of desperation amid suffering. In one scene a woman eats an insect that she finds crawling along the bark of a tree. This is incredible, unimaginable hunger, which makes it remarkable that the dead are able to move at all. When they walk in the direction of their prey, one arm is almost always stretched out and away from the head, as if pleading for help. The expressions on the faces of the dead are extraordinary, some of them close to tears, others so pure of motive that they seem beatific. These are not ‘zombies’ in the now conventional sense of banal and brainless lifeforms, but quite the reverse: beings in whom extreme hunger has whittled their existence down to the barest essentials of movement and co-ordination. The living dead live a more intense existence than the living, stalking them to their places of sanctuary and waiting impatiently for an opening through which they may enter and feed upon them.

The famous feeding scene in the film is accompanied by a low drone. The dead eat heartily in a moment that is both appalling and fascinating; they eat with the ferocity of those who have been without food for a long time. The importance of the scene is that it shows, emphatically, that the dead are not intent on killing the living: they desire only to eat them, and in so doing they display the hurried pleasure which follows a long fast. Again, the impression received is of their having overcome a period of great suffering.

All of this suggests a logic and an imperative within the film that discovers unconventional means to portray the conditions of human life. In the scene in which Ben recollects his personal experience of the crisis with Barbara, he tells her of how, ‘A big gasoline truck came screaming down the road…I could just see that the truck was moving in a funny way…it went right through the guardrail [and] ripped through the gas station…I could still hear the man, screaming.’ Anyone who has seen Dawn of the Dead will know that George Romero’s enchantment of things that move ‘in a funny way’ also takes place in the sequels. Each time there is the uncanny feeling of objects moving in an out-of-balance way, as if controlled by a different kind of force with a different motional logic to that which is normally observable.

Given the emphasis on uncanny resemblances, we should not be surprised to discover that there is little to distinguish the living dead from the living. The dead can move their limbs, albeit in a more restricted way, and they also have desires – primarily hunger – around which all of their other needs cluster. The dead have no language and they have no need for it. Their aims are communicated through action alone. By contrast, the living actively seek communication: the radio in the farmhouse is decisive in bringing the Cooper family out of hiding in the cellar and up the stairs into the living room with the other survivors.

The living dead can also be killed; they are mortal. The fact that only a shot in the head will kill them means that they are individuated and capable, to a degree, of self control. There is no central power guiding their actions. Indeed, the dead are more independent of each other and therefore less social beings than their counterparts among the living. The living dead are very much alive but, precisely by dint of their similarity to the living, it is difficult to accept that they are not dead.

The troubling sense of the unknown in the living dead (they are inadequately described as ‘ghouls’ throughout the film) disrupts the familiarity of the living. As a horror film Night of the Living Dead is daunting not because the monsters are ‘us’, but rather because the identity of the monsters as ‘monsters’ gradually becomes confused. The living, when scratched or bitten by the living dead, become themselves the living dead. There is a moment of silence, or stillness, during their transformation that appears to us as death. But since it is only for a moment, and considering the nature of the transformation that follows, we cannot assume that it is a death and then a re-birth that has taken place. There is a calculated refusal in this film to mark boundaries and clarify differences.

Importantly, the media is portrayed as the main source of representations of the dead. The first radio broadcast that we hear in the film describes ‘an epidemic of mass murder being carried out by a mass of unidentified assailants.’ References are made to people walking around in a ‘trance’ and to ‘misshapen monsters’. The radio broadcast continues to describe a state of ‘mayhem’, which it asks people to help to control by staying in their homes. The radio and later the television, constantly in the background during some crucial minutes of the film in which the characters begin to resolve the situation in their minds, announces that the dead may be ‘creatures from outer space’. Later, the TV programme reports that ‘persons who have recently died’ are returning to life, therefore discounting the earlier reports of mass hysteria. An explorer satellite from Venus, carrying ‘mysterious radiation’, is speculated as the cause of the ‘mutations’. But scientists and military men are shown disagreeing about the causes, and the various representations finally offer no solutions to the question of what these beings are.

Night of the Living Dead therefore leaves us with no answers and indeed, no new questions. The living dead are a representation of something that remains difficult and therefore necessary to explain. Their condition suggests a pathology, at the heart of which lies a struggle to define life itself; that this opposition between life and death is never expressed in a harmonious way tells us something about the philosophy of the film.

REFERENCES

‘The American Nightmare’ (Minerva Pictures, 2003)

Matt Becker, ‘A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence’, The Velvet Light Trap 57 (Spring 2006): 42-59.

Paul Gagne, The Zombies that Ate Pittsburgh: the Films of George A Romero (1987)

Robert Newman, ‘The Haunting of 1968’, South Central Review 16, 4 (Winter 1999): 53-61.

http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/famine.html

Beyond the Bullring - by Candice Smith

2007-02-11T04:36:00.000-08:00

Industry v Nature

Rooftops

Fazely Street Canal

Canal and derelict factories

Cuckoo Wharf and barges

Factory

Factory, Bordesley

Back factory door and graffiti

Water towers

Skyline with telegraph wires

Steven Seagal Movies

2007-01-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

Just a lowly, lowly cook

Good bad films. You know these films so well you’ve probably forgotten most of the ones you’ve seen. The ones that don’t make it on to film lists, the ones that people don’t buy, since they are frequently shown on TV. But among their number can’t be counted Titanic, or Gladiator, or another project of equal merit. Nobody who watches movies sees them in this way. They normally lack most of the established standards of artistic credibility: sound plotting, good acting, realistic pacing, good cinematography, and so on.

So how can they possibly be any good? And what’s so bad about them anyway?

There are several basic features of the good bad film. All of these features have their own context, which is to say, they are judged entirely subjectively. This marks good bad films as different from films which are simply made badly from a technical point of view.

Firstly, the good bad film represents an alternative kind of beauty to the ones that we are accustomed to admiring in film. One of the precursors of the good bad film is the good bad poem, which George Orwell defined as ‘a graceful monument to the obvious.’ Kipling’s poetry supposedly belonged to this category. In Orwell’s vision the good bad poem was one of the cultural objects in which the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘ordinary’ man’s tastes coincided, and was proof that within each lay some semblance of the other. If a good bad poem can be ‘a graceful monument to the obvious’ then a good bad film can also display a kind of artless grace, and a violence that dreams of dance, a sincere foolery.

The good bad film is also funny in a way that is unforeseen by its makers. For example, Teenwolf and Ghostbusters were designed to make audiences laugh, they are intentionally funny. Whereas Kickboxer and Commando are action movies that have breezed into comedy. The viewer calls the shots in the film’s categorisation, not the filmmakers. This might be described as postmodern but such films are poorly understood from an ironic point of view, since this would make them seem clever or laudable when we know that no such intention ever existed on the part of the makers. Instead, the good bad film should be celebrated for facilitating talk, in the way that it opens conversation that will never become earnest or unfriendly.

This is not to say that they won’t cause disagreements. The chief characteristic of the idea of good bad films is that they are determined by a personal choice. No two people will ever think of exactly the same ‘good bad’ films. Most people will agree on favourites, however (favourite movies and favourite actors: nobody really looks out for the directors of these films), and just as every cinematic genre has one or two unsurpassable performers, so the actor who stands at the summit of the good bad film is Steven Seagal. For around 15 years he has been the foremost artist of the unintentionally comic film. At the same time, he has divided opinion among those who take his work seriously.

Before exploring his career as an actor it is worth dealing with one common criticism of his films, namely, that they are ‘all the same’. Most of the time this is true, but even so it only makes the total body of work stronger in its consistency. Popular culture often throws up artists who are said to have produced the same work over and over again throughout their careers: Yasujiro Ozu, Cecil Taylor, Andy Warhol, and J G Ballard are examples. It is the distinction that is gained through repetition, and the way in which artistic continuity lays bare the emptiness of the ‘new thing’ of the culture industry, which makes the collective body of their work so powerful. It also makes them harder to criticise sometimes because they appear to be so accessible. In a similar fashion, it may be said that we have a too-easy time with Seagal movies, as if their meaning has been explained in advance by all of his predecessors in action cinema, and by his own previous work. It would be useful to have a clearer idea of what is unique about Steven Seagal’s achievement.

How's the action, boys? Mind if I play?

Steven Seagal’s first seven roles up until Executive Decision (1996), were as the leading man. He was not a new kind of action hero – martial artists had punched and kicked their way to screen success at least since the days of Bruce Lee – but Seagal offered new kinds of moves on account of his Aikido training and his spiritual discipline. One of his major early roles was as Mason Storm in Hard to Kill (1990), the first of many films in which he plays a wronged man who takes time to recover from a brutal attack by his enemies before gaining an equally brutal revenge on them. In Hard to Kill Seagal appears almost invincible, setting a trend followed in almost all of his films. Even Schwarzenegger died for his (and our) sins in End of Days, but Seagal is unlikely to agree to do anything that requires him having to act a death scene. The exception that proves the rule is his strange, fleeting exit from a high-altitude vacuum chamber in Executive Decision (1996).

Hard to Kill is worth pausing at for a moment because it also introduces several other trends in Seagal movies. For a start there is the title, Hard to Kill: three solid words that tell you everything and nothing about the film’s content. It is repeated throughout his career: Above the Law (the alternative title for Nico), Marked for Death, Out for Justice, On Deadly Ground…these are the better known ones. Similarly, Seagal’s character names begin to adopt a formula of tough, no nonsense efficiency – we’re not sure where he’s going but he’s sure as hell gonna get there. In Hard to Kill he is the police detective Mason Storm; in Out for Justice he adopted the more extravagant sounding Gino Felino; in the eco-friendly On Deadly Ground he played a man named Forrest Taft; in the Under Siege movies he was the sailorly Casey Ryback. In his films made between 1996 and 1998 he adopted more down-to-earth names, perhaps as a nod in the direction of the spiritual harmony and all-round earthiness that he was trying to acquire in real life. His heroes were named Austin Travis, Jack Cole, Jack Taggart, and Wesley McLaren. In his more recent European settings he has been, sadly, Jonathan Cold.

Another trend that begins with Hard to Kill is that one or several of the other characters praise him for being ‘the finest cop I know’ or some such professional commendation. In the case of female characters, he is admired for having large muscles and genitalia. Besides these, Seagal movies also follow trends that were set by earlier, pioneering good bad films such as No Retreat, No Surrender and Kickboxer, in which the hero undergoes a period of intense training after an initial setback or humiliation, using the new powers he has gained to finally defeat his enemy. After the training period is over in Hard to Kill, Seagal in his quiet voice reassures an anxious colleague that they will be victorious against their foes: ‘You wanna know why? Superior attitude; superior state of mind.’

Most of the plots and direction in Seagal’s films are formulaic and followed to the letter. A literary reading of his work would criticise such films on account of their clichéd dialogue, but for Seagal such limitations have a productive effect because they concentrate viewers’ minds on fights and punchlines. In Hard to Kill, when Seagal realises that his nemesis is a corrupt senator whose favourite soundbyte is, ‘You can take that to the bank’, he vows to take him, ‘to the bank: the bloodbank.’ There is also a fight scene set around a pool table, which Seagal watchers have learned to treasure in his movies. Finally, at the senator’s house, he gives the baddies the runaround, leaving lipsticked messages on mirrors (‘ANTICIPATION OF DEATH IS WORSE THAN DEATH ITSELF’) as they try in vain to find him.

What is he, a national treasure?

By the early 1990s Seagal had acquired a reputation as a hard-hitting, even sadistic action hero (his trademark move is the arm break). Under Siege (1992) proved to be his big moment. He was pitted against bad guy Tommy Lee Jones, who was himself between finishing JFK and filming The Fugitive, and the film has as its heroine Erika Eleniak, who was then hot property after having completed a three-year stint in Baywatch.

Among other things, the success of Under Siege put Seagal’s place as the prince of the good bad film in doubt. It was regarded as a good action movie: well put together, well-paced, with a good cast, and well-delivered. The lines had a quotable coolness that was completely lacking in his earlier efforts, from the noirish ‘another cold day in hell’; to the ironic ‘I’m just a cook’; to the positively Shakespearian ‘You and I, we’re puppets in the same sick play.’

For some reason, however, Seagal’s career never really took off like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s or Sylvester Stallone’s. Under Siege made $83 million at the US box office. Compare this with Terminator 2 ($205 million) and the Rocky movies (combined total: $300 million). None of his other films has come close to making the same sort of money at the box office as Under Siege did. Perhaps audiences found him difficult to warm to. There was little in his films in the way of the kindness and sensitivity that modern action stars were supposed to portray, and his vision of retribution is laced with cruelty and spite. Seagal tends to star in films containing terrible human massacres, some of which his enemies are responsible for, but most of which are his own doing. His thrusting and aggressive model of heroism – he is always pushing ahead into enemy lines – adds to the feeling that his characters are either too good, or too bad, to be acceptable.

In this sense it was no surprise that weird American subcultures began to revere him. Virginian backwoods rockers The Royal Trux closed their 1998 album, Accelerator, with a fried tribute to their favourite vigilante hero. ‘Stevie (for Stevie S)’ opens to a keyed up, dreamy blues accompaniment with the line:

You can blame it on the atmosphere / over the plains

It sets a tone of offbeat reverence that proceeds completely unironically. The Royal Trux give fulsome praise to their hero, singing

You’re the man/ defender of the underdog…

while admitting what the rest of us had realised from the beginning:

You don’t know how cameras work / there’s just always someone there to fix ‘em…

What makes the Royal Trux tribute so fitting is that it acknowledges America’s continuing need for an action idol who was, in whatever elliptical way, of the people. Forecasters who had predicted the end of American action cinema after the end of the Cold War did not realise that the extreme, if righteous, vigilante movie was a long-established genre of the American film industry, which had its place alongside the western and the noir thriller. Think of Sam Fuller, Dirty Harry and Death Wish and you will begin to understand Steven Seagal outside of the confines of his familiar classification as a martial arts superstar. Royal Trux knew where they would pledge their allegiance:

People think that the United States are a sweet bowl of plastic flowers / but you’re thinking something else and man I’m with you.

No mere raised spliff to an idol of Generation X-ers, ‘Stevie’ is the real deal, a record of the violent hero in modern, unknown America. It remained to be seen whether the good bad film would be able to maintain such an intensity of following.

What does it take to change the essence of a man?

For many viewers of his films, Seagal’s bizarre attraction lies in his combination of vigilante and eco-warrior, the man who is above the law but who descends from his lofty perch to make impassioned speeches on behalf of Mother Nature. And if he never gave the slightest sign of appreciating the ironies of the former persona, he nevertheless presented an utterly authentic image of the latter. The solemn lecture at the end of his directorial debut, On Deadly Ground (1994), was as suprising a move as any he managed to pull on an unsuspecting assailant. At the end of countless killings and explosions on Alaskan oil rigs we hear him venting forth on…the Earth’s diminishing natural resources? Heads were shaken, eyes were rubbed, but the pictures kept on coming.

After picking up a Razzie Award for worst director while also being nominated for best film by the American Political Film Society he went on to star in a series of films in the late 1990s that encompassed his natural-spiritual message. In The Glimmer Man (1996) he plays another classic ‘Seagal’ character, the man with a hidden or secret past. Normally this is taken as a reference to Seagal’s personal history and the possibility that he may have worked for a while as a CIA agent. In films such as The Glimmer Man the thrill of espionage is allied to a taste for Tibetan prayer beads (he’s a practicing Buddhist), black robes, and wise sayings. The dark colours he is fond of wearing reflect his own mysterious identity. None of the other characters in his films is ever quite sure who he is, and in the most laboured ones, neither are we. Yet his enemies continue to be terrified of him. Brian Cox, who plays a treacherous former colleague in the secret service, explains to a fellow evil-doer the origin of Seagal’s nickname in The Glimmer Man, which was apparently acquired during combat operations in the rainforest: ‘First there’s the jungle, then you see a glimmer, then you’re dead.’

In Fire Down Below (1997) Seagal is a government agent who exposes illegal toxic dumping being carried out in a small southern US town. In The Patriot (1998) he plays a bioscientist/cowboy who crusades against the government’s stockpiling of toxins and biohazards. Always being the best in the business means that it is often a slow journey to enlightenment for the rest of the characters in his films. Worse still, many will need enlightenment beaten into them, and Seagal never takes pleasure in dealing blows. His violence always goes too far, demonstrating the extremity of his persona. For example, his insults can sometimes have a silly charm (‘If your daddy knew exactly how stupid you were, he'd trade you in for a pet monkey’) but more often they smack of verbal assault (‘Now get your ugly white ass outta here and don’t come back’).

All of which makes us wonder: did he see any contradiction at all between the brutal message of the vigilante and the spiritual one of man’s harmony with nature? I can’t imagine that he did. He has always stood for a spirituality that despite its pretences to understanding other cultures is peculiarly American in its desire to achieve personal fulfilment. It’s an ethical code, but not a fraternal one – it stands for doing the right thing by oneself. This is the formula that links cold-blooded narratives of revenge with metaphysical ruminations on nature. It is saying: ‘This is what I have become capable of, these are the things that hard work has put at my disposal.’

Love is eternal - and that's a long time

By the early years of the twenty-first century Seagal had passed fifty. He was also approaching portliness as his shirts got baggier and his lower eyelids began to droop. Years of CIA training could not have prepared him for such changes. Although he retained the ponytail and the symbols of ageless spirituality he had given up on trying to run in his movies (possibly not an unwise choice considering his gangly style), and he now preferred to pose as a stoic, almost sagelike figure who knew when and where his enemy would meet their downfall: the next time that they met. Such certainty in the face of terror used to be received by his fans as a gift. Now, his designated roles were becoming less those of an action hero than of an avenging natural therapist.

Everyone wants to see him try harder in his films but these days he’s too overweight and more aware than ever that he’s in a film to chase bad guys who are due their comeuppance anyway. What is more, he no longer seems to be bothered about the world in general. In the past, what made his films successful was not the credibility of Seagal’s performance but his own reassuring presence in the face of hysterical danger. Drifting aimlessly through so many straight to video movies has left the semblance of a career in cinema looking more forelorn than ever.

Exit Wounds (2001) and Half Past Dead (2002) were moderate box office successes in which he starred alongside rappers such as DMX and Ja Rule. Seagal has often preferred to act around groups who are under- represented in American films, be they African American or Chinese American or Eastern European, perhaps because the actors are cheaper to hire and it allows him to break into different markets. His worldwide success as a star of rental movies is undeniable, and it might be the only thing that has kept his career afloat for this length of time.

Ticker (2001) was directed by a man who has been described as ‘the new Ed Wood’, and it marks a real decline. Seagal looks old and weary for the first time. His black clothing now covers bulges whose cause is no mystery. The poor direction also makes a big difference as the action seems hurried and dull. Perhaps the advice he gives in the movie was meant for disappointed fans: ‘Learn the nature of your mind and then you won’t be suffering anymore.’ Subsequent films such as The Foreigner (2003) see him uncomfortably in Euroland, trading blows with Danes and other continental bad guys. In the real world, he has persevered despite accumulating beefs with Hollywood producers, the New York mafia, and a whole lot of film critics.

Throughout his time as an actor he has been involved in the production of his films. In 2005 he has already released two – Into the Sun and Submerged – and is slated to have four more due. The legend continues, somehow.

Who needs the goddamn movies anyway?

To return to a question that was hinted at the beginning: how do Steven Seagal’s films help us to define the good bad film? In a way, his strange career can only be understood by switching constantly between two points of view. On the one hand are those people who take pleasure in watching unintentionally funny films, and who enjoy violence only when there is no suggestion that it could be real. On the other hand are those people who genuinely idolise Seagal, who follow his words and study his moves, wishing to emulate him in real life. In this way the good bad film reiterates contemporary cultural life’s need for ethics. In viewing such films as Hard to Kill and Under Siege the reaction of many viewers will be split between ironic laughter bordering on condescension and a vague feeling of dread that for some people this stuff is going down like a hot dinner.

In bringing the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘ordinary’ person together, Orwell discovered something unique in the good bad poem. To bring Orwell’s language to life in the present day, it might be said that the good bad film doesn’t so much bring two kinds of person together as two sorts of reception: the serious and the comic. In so doing, it demands that the viewer has the courage to reject the passive ironic response to such films. More may be at stake than we realise. Far from being an obscure field of popular culture, the good bad film is ground on which a new type of criticism has the chance to flourish.

Sunken Treasure: The Drowned World of Lost Movies

2007-01-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

A lost movie is like a locked treasure chest: until the seal is broken and the contents revealed, the possibility of limitless riches is enchanting. There are many reasons why potential masterpieces remain submerged, never to be seen by the public: directors are cruelly extracted from projects or unable to come to terms with the material; finances collapse or the money men are struck with fear of failure; studios assume creative control; negatives are misplaced or destroyed; and often, highly ambitious projects never get off the ground at all. Lost movies frequently generate wide public interest and become the focus of intense speculation—until that treasure chest is opened and shafts of reality expose the truth. The expectation surrounding these movies represent both our inner desire for greatness and our fear of destruction.

Inevitably it is the follies of great directors that frustrate us the most and there is no figure in the history of film more frustrating than that of Orson Welles. His is a lost career, not merely the story of a few incomplete films. His work exists in tantalising fragments. Only Citizen Kane, of his major films, remains as the great man intended. As early as The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles began to feel the waters rising, drowning parts of his work, the entire final sequence of that film re-shot by a rather opportunistic Robert Wise.

Incredibly a project lost to us forever predates even his first feature, the planned adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to be filmed in the first person and with a noirish voice over, was deemed too costly. The most famous of his Hollywood films to be butchered is Touch of Evil, the wisdom of the studio dictating that the opening credits be placed over the greatest shot in cinema. What exists now is a re-cut edition following the mandates of an impassioned 50 page memo by Welles.

This was just a prelude, however, to the grandest folly of Welles' fraught career: Don Quixote. For over 25 years Welles tried to scrape together the money and belief to complete the meandering epic, filming snatches here and there whenever the opportunity presented itself. Eventually, as a tribute to its indefinite delay, Welles titled the film When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? Mischa Auer played the Don for some years, he was then dropped for Francisco Reiguera, who died. Akim Tamiroff, cast as Sancho Panza, also died and it was this that finally killed the project, as Welles thought him irreplaceable and had over twenty years' footage to re-shoot! Welles was a true independent, but perhaps he needed more of the studio's stubbornness. He abandoned the fight for Touch of Evil to pursue Don Quixote, leaving one incomplete film for another.

Welles died with two significant unfinished films in production, an adaptation of Isak Dineson's The Dreamers and his own The Other Side of the Wind starring John Huston. The Dreamers indicated a new and understated style for Welles, but it’s only half-complete. Despite an unfulfilled promise from Peter Bogdanovich that he would finish the editing of The Other Side of the Wind, it remains adrift from critical existence, rumoured to be owned by the Shah of Iran, destined to be destroyed in an impending nuclear strike. Some say that Welles developed a fear of editing, and would perform as neat a disappearing act from the cutting room as any from his many magic shows. Perhaps Welles feared the final production, realising that completion was, in many ways, destruction, of the pure idea, opening the door to imperfection and failure. So, the incompleteness of Welles' jigsaw of a career cannot be wholly blamed on those acting against his grand vision. He was guilty, on occasion, of hiding the pieces himself.

Of all missed opportunities, it is Erich von Stroheim's Queen Kelly, which may well be the most crucial loss. Queen Kelly was to be a five-hour epic starring Gloria Swanson, and billed to be her tour de force and the crowning achievement of silent cinema, bankrolled by Swanson's lover, bootlegger Joe Kennedy. The ripe story of sex, death, abduction, slavery, suicide, prostitution, mysticism, and revenge—in the hands of the riotous director and glorious Gloria—is mouth-watering. However, Kennedy and Swanson became increasingly impatient with von Stroheim's seemingly wasteful, monomaniacal approach. Finally, he was sacked in the middle of an African sequence feted to be some of the most dazzling footage ever captured. The producers turned sour and cut the film together, with less than a third completed. In the 60's, von Stroheim released his own version, with explanatory notes. In 1985, a further reconstruction was cobbled together. What exists is outstanding, what remains outstanding—but much will never be recovered. Wonder and curiosity can reach only so far, the waters are too deep and hide too much.

A figure equally renowned for his almost absurd dictation, Stanley Kubrick envisaged a sweeping biopic of Napoleon, with Jack Nicholson. It is well known that Kubrick was obsessed with the Frenchman, apparently creating a system of filed cards that detailed every recorded moment of his life, in chronological order. It was the confidence of the financiers that Kubrick could not command. No doubt his personal and accurate portrayal would have been enthralling, momentous, particularly as played by a committed Nicholson who had not yet become 'Jack.' Unwilling to compromise the scale of the project, Kubrick watched it sink to the depths, his own image reflected back from its descent. He would mourn the non-film until his final years.

A story of a missing film more remarkable still is the completed yet never released Jerry Lewis production The Day the Clown Cried. The mere existence of this movie is painfully enticing. The story is set in Nazi Germany, Jerry Lewis playing a failed German clown who is branded a traitor and thrown into a concentration camp. While at the camp, he finds unexpected success entertaining the Jewish children, whom the Nazi's have had trouble controlling. They enlist Lewis to walk them pied piper-style to the gas chambers. Surely one of the most inappropriate, vile and intriguing film narratives ever conceived, The Day the Clown Cried, which was directed by Lewis, demands viewing. However, Lewis has withdrawn the film. Some say because it is too crass and insensitive. Others, the very few who have viewed its entirety, claim that it is uniquely morbid and deeply disturbing. Although the ailing comic has vowed to rework and release it, the negatives remain hidden away.

There are some wondrous projects that we'll never see, tantalising but stillborn. One such film was the adaptation of A Portrait of Dorian Gray starring Greta Garbo. Hitchcock famously abandoned the radical and sensational kaleidoscope, deemed to be overly concerned with sexual violence and homosexuality—thus a commercial risk. Philip K. Dick had a deal in place with a studio and wrote a screenplay of his awesome novel Ubik, but the idea was inexplicably dropped. Ridley Scott booked Shepperton studios in 1989 to begin work on a sequel to Bladerunner, but nothing happened. Francis Ford Coppola has been shooting second unit footage on his futuristic social epic Megalopolis since the early eighties. Billy Wilder's Schindler's List, whisked from under his feet by Spielberg, is another stolen gem. Who knows how Wilder's acerbic wit might have handled the subject? Terry Gilliam's own version of Don Quixote may yet still be raised from the depths. However, with his already dubious commercial influence dwindling, it is unlikely he will retain final cut on the project. And, of course, there are hundreds more stories that we never even get to hear.

The desire to see that which will never be seen is a simple one: we all want what we can't have. We want perfect art, never-ending lives. Any attempt at perfection inevitably falls short in transition from thought to actuality. However, the lost movie retains the power, perfectly formed and timeless in concept. Something never released into the public consciousness can be nothing but successful, in that it cannot fail. Recently, the Exorcist prequel directed by Paul Schrader, which was withdrawn for being 'too intelligent' was another lost movie generating impossible expectations, until it was released on DVD. It wasn't too intelligent and it wasn't very good. In 1994 a version of Welles' It's All True [a film he was commissioned to make for the purpose of keeping South America on-side during the war effort] was sent out into the world. Although it is unfair to judge any incomplete work, the captured footage was notably dull. There is so much that isn't there in the history of the cinema, so many gaps, missing reels, and conspicuous silences. In many ways it is an art form of absences. La Regle du Jeu was, like much of Renoir's celebrated work, until recently, not available in its complete form. What else lurks beneath the surface that we'll never know about? DVD has made us realise how much is left behind. The inclusion of deleted scenes on commercial disks is of debatable worth, but it certainly makes us aware that the formation of a film is a sensitive thing, like spinning a potter's wheel, making impressions in the clay with tremulous hands. There is a tension between the fragment and the complete, the beginning and end. Foucault believed there was a thread between narrative and sexual closure. The wish to delay indefinitely the finality of pleasure pervades human nature, in sex, in life, and in the inescapable fear of death. Is there anything more fatally iconic than the words “The End” that seem to present themselves on the screen or printed page, even in their absence, at the closure of a story? The unfinished film, the unconsummated project, cannot end, if it is never finished, or even begun. It is a curious, particular type of ideal art whether intentionally created or otherwise. Nothing is lost in this drowned world of non-films—in them, once more, we escape the failure and disappointment of mortality.

P. Cabrelli

Videoshit

2007-01-20T16:50:00.000-08:00

Press Play video. Formerly South Essex Video, but that was 10 years ago. The sign, scrawled on the outside, on curling neon card reads: ‘3 for 3: 3 videos 3 pounds for 3 nights, ask in store for details’ what more can possibly be explained? I look to see who’s on duty. Good, it’s Lee. He won’t hassle me about my fine. When I tell him my number, he’ll type it in and it’ll beep. I hate that fucking beep. The system turns the screw. Standing in line, they all know you owe money. It should be more discrete – a hand signal from Lee and an acknowledgement from me. Men of the world. I’m not paying tonight. There’s something between us, anyway. He’s been working there since I was 11, so he’s fucked in other ways. So what if I owe money? Lee is a lean motherfucker. Everything I know about him consists of ten years of overheard whispers. In my tiny world, Lee has too much space. I once heard him claim he had an Olympic cross country time. Finally, however, in the hierarchy of my imaginings, he bows down to Marc, the boss. Or so I thought. Marc is a shrewd Mauritius businessman. In many ways a great ambassador for the tiny Island of poker players. However, even Marc (who is fond of humiliating me about my lack of money, knowing I’ll always return with my tail between my legs, squeezing the box of Innerspace for moral support), yes even Marc bows to the big boss, his wife. One day, a cool breeze blew across the store as this Karen Brady-type sexless pioneer laid down the law to her quaking husband: ‘This is my shop and we’ll run it my way – DVD’s!’

Things have never been the same. Lesser employees have been Koski (on a sojourn from his destiny as the head of the family’s Kebab empire) and Sharon, whose R&B mix tapes of Jodeci and TLC are sorely missed. I think she had a Klingon boyfriend who abused her. And of course Emma, whom I was attracted to when I (and she) were young and innocent in the park. But she ages at twice my rate and has since turned to dust. Anyway, when it beeps, it’s actually not my number. I share it with a friend. I’ve been doing it for so long, they’re confused. Misdirection. They don’t understand our relationship. It is complex, admittedly. It’s not even my friend’s number. It’s his half sister’s from about 14 years ago. I once ran up a huge fine. It was 53 pounds on Fifa 95 and Best of the Best. Fifa had Peter Schmeichel on the cover. I was so lazy. Press Play is about 7 minutes walk from my house but I kept it for three months because after a week I was gripped with fear about returning it so late. Eventually they created a second account that I was to repay. But they’ve forgotten about that, too. Don’t they even care? Anyway, if they ever go after it, Alice During (now of Washington D.C) will get a nasty surprise.

Barely alive

I enter the building, take in the air and wander over to the new releases. I’ve already lost interest. There’s nothing out there for me now. I’m nothing. It’s me, not them. Other people are happy. I slowly take my inevitable, invisible route, on the blind side of the counter to the ever diminishing section of old and largely unrented selection of videos. So much has been lost but there is still so much to enjoy. The cover that first draws my eye, of course, is Hellraiser. My fear of the Chinese, rationalized. Pinhead is a great man. A man of ideas. The cover is faded, like Pinhead’s empire of pleasure and pain. It’s our loss. And Unkle Frank’s. Many other Hellraisers pop up but I won’t describe them. The other titles arranged nearby, an ancient display of some kind, are so distant that I fear either they or I are becoming less real. Candyman (Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman!) and Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (fun while it lasted, huh?), the absence of Candyman 3 is suspicious though; Nightbreed (pah!); The cover of Demon 3 (I don’t think 1 & 2 were ever officially made, making it the first and last in the trilogy) proclaims that ‘Angela is up to her old tricks again’. I move on, with the eye-glide, unable to face up to my past. I look over to Lee and the tagline to Hellraiser rings ever truer: ‘To some he’s a demon, to others an angel’. Oh, Lee. The horror section holds some real beauties. The Child’s Play series in full force. Brad Dourif perfectly understanding the demands of the role: a prescient, eternal impishness that was effortlessly matched by groundbreaking puppetronics. The prominence of reds, blacks and lurid greens stir pornographic excitement before I even read the labels. What optical witchery is this? I already feel the mutilating desire that even now, as I’m holding back, seems the worst decision of my life. Leprechaun is a truly evil little piece of shit. The elegant tagline, ‘Your luck just run out’, may well refer to the act of renting the film. It is a really menacing creation. I wouldn’t recommend Leprechaun 2 (‘This time luck has nothing to do with it’) or number 3 (‘Welcome To Vegas... The Odds Are You Won't Leave Alive!’) but Leprechaun 4: In Space, is a natural arc for the series (‘One small step for man. One giant leap of Terror!’) all written and directed by Mark Jones and Brian Trenchard-Smith, a man obviously enchanted by the universal fear of the Irish. But Leprechaun 5: Back 2 tha Hood (‘Evil has a whole new rap!’) has everything (Racism and murder) Steven Ayromlooi (Return of the Sun devil) takes over the reigns of this tiny franchise with inestimable effect. The connectedness of life presses down on me as I spy Mark Jones’ Rumplestiltskin, practically the same as the Leprechaun character but somehow a bit nastier. I hate midgets. I feel sick as I fondle the case of Monkey Shines, that quadriplegic nightmare. Nightmare on Elm Street glistens like the light of life itself. All the sequels are present except the all too samey numbers 4 and 5 (The Dream Child and The Dream Master respectively) and Wes craven’s Final Nightmare. I cherish my strong relationship with the Freddy series. There have been moments of deeper affection that I can’t explain. I think we envy each other. Tucked in behind these worriers is Wishmaster, The Mangler and Night Terrors, making this a Robert Englund section. I honestly don’t believe this is the design of man, an arrangement made by some anybody. Certainly not Lee or Koski. Perhaps something else. The emergence of intelligence within the video cases. Some form trying to communicate – what is it saying? How do I reply? I’ll let it incubate. There are more, nastier films that I can no longer get to, mentally. The Plague, man this film was so cheap that it couldn't even afford any special effects. It’s hard to explain but there’s nothing in it. Ed Hunt has made other detectable shit but none worse than his follow up to The Plague, impartially titled UFO’s are Real. This is actually a documentary. His last film (before he was assassinated by the Vatican) was The Brain, which is quite brilliant. A TV doctor and an alien brainwash America. It also has the best tagline of any film ever made: ‘The Pounding of the Afterbrain Signals Vengeance and Death!’ This film always reminds me of Class of 1999, released in 1990 and made the brave massive foolish assumption that in nine short years high schools would be policed by androids. Stacey Keach is in this film, a damn shame. But it is quite good and has moments that make you realise that Pam Grier would have been a great actress if she was born as someone else. I don’t see Blood Birthday, part of the ruthless VHS cull, no doubt, Ed Hunt’s best last chance.

There is a part of me that wants to keep on living, the part of me that still believes in the perfect 3 for 3 combination.

Dad, i've got nothing left to prove

They have sold off Bats, starring Lou Diamond Philips as a prickly testicled sheriff dumbfounded by the attack of bats on his sleepy small town. I bought it. On the cover, the title is upside down – like when bats sleep! GEDDIT? I learned more about bats from that film than a life-time in education. It’s the worst thing there is. But I try to move on. All I have to do is put one foot in front of the other to leave the horror section. But like thousands before me, the unemployed paedophile masses, I can’t. I look down at the carpet. Am I someone else? Is my face jelly? My jaws ache. On the lowest shelf something wonderful is happening. Piranha is existing there. A truly exciting piece of film with graphic sex and people who can’t stop being mauled by fish. And there’s Alligator (with the existentially satisfying strap-line of:’ Nobody knows it's down there except the people it eats.’), a deeply moving love story about a giant alligator living in the sewers and a cop with an endless supply of grenades. I’m okay, after all, I like being alive. Then I see Bloodsurf and Born in Hell 4 and I don’t know anymore. There are insects just under my skin. I’m still here, swaying. My trembling hand reaches over to touch the cover of Cirio H. Santiago’s Vampire Hookers (tagline: Warm Blood Isn't All They Suck!) but my hand passes right through it. The disco and bad jokes of Vampire Hookers washes over me like air from a tomb. I’m leaving. My two pounds are staying deeply pocketed. But between me and the door, they’ve constructed something special. Something arranged by the staff – the Van Damme section. I’m drawn here like a ghost. Kickboxer, Universal Soldier, Legionnaire, Bloodsport, Street fighter (‘M. Bison, you bastard’), The Quest (directorial debut, ‘ the degraded James Remar bellowing ‘New York Cit-ay’ for no apparent reason), Sudden Death (the hockey scenes are very realistic) Double Team and a very old, sun bleached, perhaps pre-human copy of that playground favorite Cyborg. No retreat, no Surrender? Don’t even think about it. He’s barely in it. And we’ve only just begun. Because to my itchy left, like a wooden mask haunting my shoulder: The Steven Seagal section, receding as they sell them off for 1.99. Under Siege is still going strong (‘this isn’t the work of a cook’ growls Tom Berenger, ‘I’m just a cook’ challenges Steven), and, wow, On Deadly Ground (directed by SS, some great lines, spiritual sequences and a 9 minute lecture on the abuse we are heaping on our ‘magical planet’. Great line: ‘I’d like to tell you about the damage your oil has caused millions of people….but you’re just a piece of shit fronting a dogshit empire’). The recent Fire Down Below is still in the top twenty UK video rentals according to the 1st on video magazine (formerly Screens). But Seagal really hits his stride after Under Siege 2 (super chef Casey Ryback is now on a train) with Half Past Dead, Ticker, The Glimmer Man, The Foreigner (he plays Jonathan Cold along side an actor named Harry von Gorkum), and the brilliant Out for a Kill where he plays Prof. Robert Burns (a name I feel they arrived at by chance), an unsuspecting university professor and unwitting accomplice in a foiled Chinese cocaine deal. Wrongly imprisoned, he escapes to take his revenge and prove his innocence. The action genre really tails off with the Lamberts and Lundgrens – Fortress 1 and 2 (‘A Prison of the Future. A High-Tech Hell. Built to Hold Anything... Except an Innocent Man’). Highlander (1, 2, 3 and Highlander Engame). A point to note is Lambert’s Scottish accent in Highlander – only slightly upstaged by his New York accent, ‘Aye, Blossom. Back when the glen was green’. Lambert’s techno adaptation of Beowulf stands out like girl Nazis at a pillow party. Lundgren’s offerings have little appeal now I’m through with his take on the termite art form of screenbody movement. Universal Soldier (‘I’m all ears’) - who made the decision to let him have it in his section? Surely, as victor in the film, Luc Devereaux (van Damme) deserves it in his section. I know that Lundgren needs all the help he can get but how does that make me feel? And why were a Frenchman and a Swede even in Vietnam? Silent Trigger, Lundgren plays a character named Waxman in this exclusive art house action picture. Directed by the weird Russel Mulcatty (of Highlander fame), it hits all the existential notes in the wrong order, composing ugly, aborted metaphysical music. In Pentathalon, as Eric Brogar, Lundgren basically runs around, allowing circa Rocky IV sweat drip from him. Is it the same sweat? You are left guessing. I sneak a look at Fat tits and Gangbang Girls 3 on the top shelf. What is it about those Gangbang Girls? Will I ever be old enough before I’m too old? There are a few sports collections: Own Goals, Raging Beasts of the Ring (Roberto Duran is on the cover punching a woman), Cage Fighter 1-4, Ultimate Fighting. Violence is good. These move on to the Kung-Fu films like Kung-Fu King, Pillars of Death, The Shao Lin Men, Disco Kung-Fu, American Ninja with the irrepressible Michael Dudikoff of Bounty Hunters fame (he played the impossibly named Jersey Bellini) which was ‘directed’ by George Erschbamer of Snakeeater 1-3 renown. Snakeeater is a special trilogy starring Lorenzo Lamas, who himself has formed a reptilian triptych with The Viper and Latin Dragon – he is a man of charm, beauty and sexy aggression. We are now seamlessly into a lower brand of action film that spreads for what feels like miles, decades. Vibrations starring Christina Applegate pleads for my attention (‘A futuristic subculture erupts from the electronic underground’) against China O’Brien. I used to think Cynthia Rothrock was attractive, now I know she is just another one of them. I let my hands move independently, sliding over the cover of The Board, on the back cover is Burt Reynolds pointing a gun at a stripper who is pole dancing on a giant neon chessboard (Tagline: ‘Make your move’). Go, hands, go. What are these fleshy weasels searching for? I look at them. One holds Innerspace and the other Uncle Buck and I realize they have dragged me to the comedy section, like disobedient children. My nails are broken and bleeding. Bad hands. Bad little monsters.

Martin Short: fuck him

It’s a whole new world. Moving and See no Evil, Hear no Evil kind of rise in front of me like vampire gods. Richard Pryor in pre MS late period spasm. Eddie Murphy’s Raw makes me instantly accept that whites are bad. Then I hit what the gold diggin’ 49’ers used to call a ‘fat vein’: like a clamp on my brain, Captain Ron, [IN] Police Academy,[EVERY] Mr. Nanny, [DESPERATE] SkiSchool , [ACTION] ViceVersa, [THE] Only the Lonely,[DIVINE] Cool Runnings,[PRESENCE] Mannequin 2: Mannequin on the Move, [OF] Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, [GOD]. Stay Tuned [BABY]. What has compelled me so? The atrocity exhibition before me is like some future library of nostalgic filth. I can already see generations of cowboys to come (it is only a few years from now that the violent cowboy renaissance takes place) drinking lemonade on porches across the blood thirsty Welsh border towns, looking out on the nuclear prairie with a TV blasting out the infectious death rattles of Martin Short (who just can’t believe that Dennis Quaid is inside him). That’s the thing about Martin Short, isn’t it? Lee is looking at me. Don’t look at me, Lee. When you look at me, I look at me. I know I’m still here. I haven’t made a choice. I know that. I know that I’m still here. What has Lee got that I haven’t? Unlimited access to the videos, that’s what. I’ll never have it. With that realization, I leave. If I can’t have it all, I don’t even want a taste. Press Play recedes in the distance behind me. I have no video. Later, I go back. I rent Johnny Handsome. It’s terrible but Mickey Rourke is great.

Virtual Memory

2007-01-19T14:18:00.000-08:00

At a certain point in my adolescence, a threshold between childhood and adulthood, everyday decision-making passed from interest to necessity. The world’s spell had worn off, and time, from being the stranger who led me from place to place, became the mother who dispenses advice about what should be done next. Play became secret, frivolous and removed from everyday life, intensifying the sense of loss experienced in that transition. I can not remember when I was a child who it was that was playing, myself or the game; but as an adult the answer that it is the latter has not ceased to be obvious. And this is only natural, for any game can produce a feeling of anxiety, the worry of being caught up in its flow, of no longer being able to recognise it as something external to oneself. The fear of being implicated in this way has maintained its hold over a generation of video game players who had stepped into its province in the 1980s.

To ask what those days of childhood were like and to understand the contradictions that are lived today is not possible without finding out how the memories came to be, because these memories impinge on things which lack substance. No memory is real but in the past archives had made it possible to count on remembrance as a form of verification. Now this idea has become outmoded because of their replacement by virtual memory. This is computer memory that appears to exist as main storage, although most of it is supported by data held in secondary storage. The memory of the first computer game I played is virtual to the extent that no record of it exists that cannot be repeated exactly at any time in the future. This is the reality to which Chris Marker was referring when he said that the future of a memory is also a memory. Computer games store memories that are waiting to happen and can be accessed, experienced or, to use the preferred verb of the present day, consumed. There has always been a philosophical question about memory, namely, whether we possess it in some kind of storage facility in the brain or whether it takes possession of us during a moment of recollection. In the era of computer games this question loses its lustre because it will not answer for virtual memory, which depends on nothing and is there, ready for use, but equally ready to be forgotten. Just like a game. Attempting to write an account of my childhood that centres on the play and the flow of computer games could be accused on these grounds of lacking credibility, for how much of this has really happened and how do we know that I am not simply making these memories up? No answer is possible, no story is available, precisely because it is the Real that here reflects on itself as a construction of actual and virtual memories.

My uncle - my father’s younger brother – had bought our first console: a NES with Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. The latter we had recognised from the beginning as a makeweight in the deal, with the trivial apparatus of the lightgun being of serious interest only to very young children and adults. Even in the earliest days of our ownership of the game it had a whiff of fairground entertainment that couldn’t match our dedication. Besides, we could always just walk up to the screen and shoot at the ducks. The clay pigeons were more difficult to hit but the less animated screen also made the attempt seem less worthwhile. Super Mario was at the opposite end of the spectrum. This was a game that demanded hours of commitment, and we worked harder than we had ever worked before in our young lives to make it a success. The levels were completed with great difficulty and, since the save function was then nonexistent, everything was a degree harder than today’s pampered gamer might imagine. My fondest memories lie in the discovery of the warp zones that transported us to future levels like a heavenly stairway. To go from the happy-go-lucky fourth level to the eerie black background of level six was a step that took great planning and effort. Jumps needed to be measured carefully, response levels had to be acute. Mario’s arrival in transformed surroundings always appeared uncanny and hesitant, without announcement or fanfare, allowing the shock of the new to strike with the greatest possible force. Over the months and years that we played the game this effect never seemed to diminish. It stood proudly at the end of a tradition of games that thrived on the decisive effect that basic animation was able to achieve.

On the occasion of my brother’s birthday, my father secretly took me outside the house to show me the boot of his car, where he was hiding his gift: Streetfighter 2. The special-edition box in which the accompanying Supernintendo – I cannot give it greater importance than the game itself – was packaged retains the unsurpassable glow that even at the time hinted at an idea of prosperity. For computer games were one of the portals through which I discovered a world of social difference that couldn’t yet be passed on through human communication. There were friends who owned Super Nintendos, and there were those who didn’t. The divide was uninteresting, insurmountable.

The game brings no new memories but the box in its faded gold background was an instinctive triumph on the part of its designers: not only did it do the job but it also appeared to be its own reward for doing so. For the first few weeks, the box protected its contents except when they were in use, and at all other times it was stored in the musty cupboard under the stairs. Soon after, though, when our resistance to its invisibility began to crumble, we put the console next to the TV in a corner of our dining room. Some measure of its attraction can be taken by the fact that, prior to its arrival in our lives, my brothers and I had designed a hand-made game using fighting cards made of paper, on which the imagined attributes of each character of Streetfighter 2 was entered. We would proceed to do battle with dice on the basis of the hit factor of the player who we had drawn. All of this was possible and to an extent necessary because for schoolchildren of a certain age there was no escaping the names of all of the characters. The content of many of our conversations was shaped by it, we all lived in its singular glow; so much so that the slowest (because heaviest) of the footballers at lunchtime would be nicknamed E. Honda, after the sumo wrestling character; and a friend of ours who we later realised was suffering from an illness related to the growth of a tapeworm inside his stomach received the cruel epithet of Dhalsim, the Indian fakir.

The names of computer games seldom lack in intensity: Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and Golden Axe were all great successes in their day. Even the less pugilistic affairs impose a clammy and needy quality: Mario Kart, Tetris, Sensible Soccer. Was it the natural intensity of adolescents that the game designers had tapped into, or did computer games possess a dark quality that was previously unknown in play? It is hard to be sure. Games seem as assured of their fate as it is possible to be considering the vicissitudes of the market, although few badly-named games, if any, have challenged the hearts and the minds of players.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World was a Mastersystem game, one which I remember far more vividly than the famous Sonic the Hedgehog. Perhaps it is because it was the game that one of my father’s closest friends – who by definition was an ‘uncle’ – was playing when we visited him for the first time in his new home. He had been lodging with us for several months previously, and from the perspective of his former insecurity the possession of a console, let alone one that we did not own, seemed audacious. What was more, the machine was a Sega and to us Nintendoids therefore an object of profound mystery and suspicion. As a visitor to a foreign city instinctively compares the worst traits of that location with the best traits of his home, so I observed with distaste the clunky and obvious design of the Mastersystem, a name which seemed to deny itself the right to exist. Yet there it was in my uncle’s living room asking to be played, and my curiosity to see what Alex Kidd was like (in comparison to the righteous Super Mario 3) got the better of my aversion.

Need I add that I was disappointed by the experience? A small boy with one huge fist as a weapon against a world of traps and enemies. It was beyond ridicule and I smirked inwardly at its egregious gameplay while carefully noting the details of the landscape, its fairy-tale quality, and the freedom of movement and expression of the main character. This was how my uncle spent his free time in this foreign country, where for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, he worked in a petrol shed (we never called it a station).

The aura of the console has changed. Most people who play computer games today own a PS2. The market for other consoles is comparatively non-existent. No competitive rivalry exists, certainly no Jaguar-like model of exclusivity which only a chosen few can afford to own. Everything is available should you want it, and if you want it then it goes without saying that you will be able to afford it. Things were hardly the same way a decade ago, when besides the trade war between Nintendo and Sega there was the spectral glimmer of the Neo-Geo lurking in the inner life of schoolchildren like a secret domesticity lived behind lace curtains. It appeared that we were all so in thrall to this apparition, in our own private ways, that we were gratified to have our secret revealed to us from time to time, for this is what happened when a new boy at our school, S C, made friends by word of mouth that he owned a Neo-Geo. As far as I know he never made it clear whether he owned one or not, but the special quality that being associated with it had lent him made such nagging questions seem irrelevant.

Has anybody seen a Neo-Geo and, if so, do they remember what it looked like? One of my friends, I K, who was a dedicated liar and as such gifted with the ability to tell some thrilling stories, told us that he owned the console as well as its piece de resistance: the legendary beat-em-up, Samurai Showdown. Very few of us had played the game but everybody understood what was at stake in not knowing about it, and so everybody pretended that they had a favourite character and combination of moves. Only my friend, however, was continuously able to dig up new stories about it, thus feeding the notion that he was the genuine article. And to this day I believe that the myth of his school-wide popularity rested on his ability to preserve to the last detail the appearance – never mind the truth – that at the end of each school day he would return home to the bleeding embrace of Samurai Showdown.

I made the unlikeliest of friends through the swapping of games. L E, one of the school’s toughest kids, from an Irish family, borrowed Super Mario 3, with the gaudy and dispiriting Super Mario 2 coming my way in return. He lived in a flat above the local swimming baths, which were later demolished after many years of neglect. There was also M P, from whom I borrowed Cobra Triangle, and for whom I lent in return a game that I can’t now remember. Cobra Triangle was one of the most difficult games that I had ever played. As early as Level 2, many of the rapids that needed to be crossed by the gameplayer’s tiny vessel refused to negotiate with it, rendering further progress merely imaginary. As frustrating as the game were the weeks I spent in its miserable company, seldom playing it but waiting to return it to my friend, who had been playing a canny game of his own in avoidance and delay. One day I went to his house to confront him about the matter. (On reflection, 'confront' seems too reckless a word to use in the face of a powerful young man with four even more powerful older brothers. One of them passed by me on his way into the house as I stood by the doorstep, muttering to his sibling, ‘Who is this Indian?’ I wavered on the matter of correcting him that I was in fact Sri Lankan.) I waited for an explanation as to why my friend had not returned the game when I had plainly drained the last drop of fun out of his offering. He was a master of evasion, though, and used it to gain the upper hand in our conversation. Fortunately for me, my friend’s mother, a forthright West Indian lady, appeared at the scene to ask him what was the matter. A moment later they were out of sight and in discussion, and a moment after that I was surprised and a little fearful to hear the sound of her palm connecting impressively with the side of his face. He returned with a countenance which was surprisingly unaffected except for an expression of determination, which he had successfully channelled into a business-like calm as he returned my game to me.

Mario Kart was the ‘other’ SNES game, a plucky fighter for our attention and affection under the dominant shadow of Streetfighter. But there was one level in the game which was the equal of anything else I had seen. It is very hard not to describe Rainbow Road with the hindsight that later experience has brought, but it is impossible to forget the vibrant play of darkness and expansive colour which filled the screen as it raced through my mind. The racetrack was formed of tiled rectangles arranged in a non-uniform way, each one emitting a flickering light in a different tone. It was so difficult to negotiate, such an effort merely to stay on the road and not constantly to fall off the side where there was nothing but empty space.

As a child I had been disappointingly uninterested in space. The cosmic forces of the universe spoke to me no further than the edges of the map of the solar system that hung on the wall of the school science laboratory. But it was precisely in this disinterested state that the confused exhilaration of Rainbow Road had the brightest effect, for I was less struck by the massive expansion in the range of the senses that the experience seemed to foretell than by the twinkling colours which lit up the screen like the runway to an unknown destination. The music of Rainbow Road was also unimaginably joyous. The melody was probably composed with a synthesizer, but the sound was achieved by stretching the notes played by string instruments beyond their natural limit. The elastic, elongated tone which resulted seemed to be filled with the expectation of things to come. None of this proved helpful in improving my ability to race the circuit, however, and I lost count of the number of times that I slid off the track and into infinity.

As significant as the landscape of the game world, and far easier to ignore, is the environment in which the game is played. It may surprise people to recall the number of different places in which they have played computer games. The introduction of the Gameboy has made all such estimations strictly relative, but before its heyday there was a form of travel that thrived on the curiosity of children and the competitive instincts of their parents, and above all the sheer boredom of sea voyages, to expand the range of locations in which games could be introduced. I am of course referring to the ferry, and it was on such a vessel that I played 1942, a World War II aeroplane simulation. It’s graphics were bold and colourful, there was a freshness about the phenomena of flight which restored the thrill of earlier flight sims in which contingency was a key factor in getting a plane to move in a straight line on the runway, let alone take off. The plane in 1942, however, was large enough in comparison to the screen to appear swollen, resulting in the unfortunate circumstance, at times, of concealing enemy fighters until it was too late.

This inner voyage took place in an arcade machine on a Danish vessel, which plied its trade between the towns of Arhus and Fredericia. Of the journey I remember only, and possibly falsely, pitch black darkness and mist. Such is the image of northern Europe I still carry with me. More plausible is the memory of the strange elation of having to insert coins with holes at their centre into the game slot. The Krone was the single interesting detail about Denmark. Considering the unfavourable exchange rate of the time this is a story that my parents, from who I borrowed a large sum during that journey, will also have remembered very well.

I seldom played on an arcade machine except for Street Fighter 2 and even this did not happen very often. Having access to the game at home, I simply wasn’t interested in saving lunch money to play on another machine. My one clear memory of an arcade matchup was when I played my friend A G in a half-hearted battle after both of us had boasted for weeks of our superiority at the game. He picked Ryu and I foolishly thought to trump him by picking the more elementary Guile. Immediately I realised that I had made a mistake, not in picking a character whose moves were relatively easy to execute (and defend against) with a joystick and big buttons, but in picking a fight against an experienced arcade player. It wasn’t so much his resounding superiority over me in every department that bit so hard that day, nor his ‘perfect’ in the first round – indeed I had managed to salvage some pride by taking the second in a scrappy affair. He would put that one down to complacency. No: what seemed unacceptable to me was my inability to rely on the age-old Plan B of button-bashing when things were not going my way. My friend was equal to every bizarre combination that I attempted to execute, responding with counter-attacks of brutal swiftness and precise targetting. Even during the respite that the second round afforded me, I realized that I had got away with tactics of shoddy blocking that a couple of quick throws would make light work of overpowering, and so it happened in the third.

Striker was a football game that British children with Super Nintendos naturally owned. For a couple of months in the early 1990s we probably played it for more hours in the week than we did any other single activity, including sleeping. It was a game that could build up delusions of grandeur. A friend once visited my house to play this game, which my brothers and I had of course assumed our invincibility in. He beat us all one after the other before returning to his home. The graphics were larger than those of Sensible Soccer, but the view and the gameplay were probably quite similar (we were one of the seemingly 0.1% of the population who didn’t own that game). The most interesting alternative in Striker was the ‘indoor’ option, which was a concept that was totally antithetical to professional football but for the same reason capable of arousing curiosity. Indoor mode allowed you to select only 6 players per team and Germany were naturally the best considering the game was developed in the aftermath of the 1990 World Cup. The names were familiar to us by this stage but one stood out for the opposite reason: a German striker named Sauer. Who was he? I recognised the former stars of international teams who were included in the game: Charlton, Mirandinha, Kempes, and others, but Sauer appeared to be a very useful striker who I couldn’t recall having ever actually existed. Whether he was real or not, in football simulations which followed Striker the trend of fabricating players would be notched up a level as EA Sports claimed exclusive naming rights, leaving most of the other companies to make up the names of entire teams and leagues.

When I was very young my brothers and I often stayed over at my grandmother’s house, where my uncle also lived. The latter was the first person we knew who owned a PC to which we had access. At first, this access was strictly controlled, since he was a computer programmer who needed the machine for his work. But we soon gained his trust – as much by our refusal to respect the arbitrary boundaries set by him as our ease in handling elemental aspects of MS-DOS. We knew only as much as it took to enter into the world of his games, of which there were many, including platformers such as Commander Keen and an early version of Duke Nukem. These were interesting adventure games that could only take you so far: for the remainder of the journey you had to play games such as the evocative RPG, Legend, and the spellbinding puzzler D-Generation. Legend stayed years in my mind for the gratification it offered when a successful spell was procured, relevant ingredients bought, potions made, and finally the spell cast to defeat an enemy or help one’s own characters. The uncanny mood of vulnerability that it evoked, especially in the sections in which the four brave adventurers found themselves in sprawling underground labyrinths, was shared by D-Gen. I felt a weird pang of recognition upon learning that the aim of the latter was to locate the whereabouts of a mysterious scientist named Derrida. The Tron-like ambiguity of geometrical perspective and the metallic sheen that overlay all of the basic colours that were used, added to the startling effect of the simple and precise graphics. D-Gen is a game that will never lack for wonder, but the esoteric heart of my uncle’s collection was undoubtedly Cadaver and the Payoff, a game whose very name seemed to grant the end of a former understanding. This game is so hazy in my mind that I can’t clearly recall what it’s object was, how it was played, or even how it looked. I remember only a room composed of tiles, not every one of which was designed to be stepped on, and a character who wasn’t quite human and not quite Fraggle but who wore a long wizard’s cloak. Yet this game whose elementary commands now completely escape me had remained inexplicable throughout my childhood: Who was Cadaver? Why was the pay-off? What was going on?

Much later, my uncle owned Wolfenstein 3-D, the murderous intensity of which achieved a perfect arc of terror at the moment that the end-of-level baddie – each time a hideously well-armed incarnation of Hitler – appeared, owing as much to the extremity of his presentation as the weird gloopy sound that the tinny 8-bit PC speakers managed to churn out to announce his arrival. Each form of der Führer was designed with a particular method of killing, be it machine-gun arms, ku-klux-like flame throwing, or the particularly sadistic version who was able to hurl knives at your character from a very great distance. The monolithic size of the rooms offered very little respite in the face of such deadly accuracy. The sound that accompanied Hitler’s arrival is what brought the memory of the other details into focus, demonstrating how at the centre of every recollection is a sensation that echoes across the intervening time.

For a while I was hooked on a wristwatch game, a simple Mario-esque single-screen game that I was unable to turn away from during break times at school. My friend J P, who owned the watch (he was a good friend), was also the first person to own a Gameboy among our group at school. The heady excitement of being able to walk all the way back to the beginning of the level in Super Marioland seemed to me totally at odds with the limited possibilities of the format. Then there was Tetris’ inexplicable attraction. Blocks made in combinations of four perfect squares, falling with perfect regularity from the sky, which must be composed, if necessary by rotating them up to 360 degrees, to form unbroken horizontal lines or walls. Each formation of the latter would remove them from the screen in a puff of air accompanied by an invigorating ker-ching of points. Allow ‘unfinished’ walls to dominate the screen and they would clog up the arrival of new blocks, and the game would shortly be over. It was the game’s simplicity that allied it to an idea of genius, both of the designer and of those masters who we would sometimes hear about, who were able to amass scores of thousands of points with ease.

During another friend’s birthday party I spent most of the proceedings engrossed in a hand-held version of Top Gun, explaining my unsocial behaviour on account of a (fabricated) headache that I was suffering from. These little one-offs were very dear to my heart. A handheld American Football simulation, a sport I know nothing about, continued to hold my attention for months after we had received it as a gift. The extent of the tactical plays available to the player was mystifying, so I used only one or two of them, and these without much sense of purpose. Fifty yard touchdowns were a rare pleasure, during which the repetitive intensity of the lines of the gridiron reminded of the effort that was being expended to reach the end zone.

From my friend I K I borrowed a handheld game that – wonder of wonders – glowed in the dark. It was a motorcycle racing game that involved the simple negotiation of ramps and short jumps, but in combinations that would have occupied me for years had I not had to return it to him relatively quickly. It came with several appendages, including a peripheral controlling device – not a control pad. The game was built into the machine. The strangely passive joy I felt at night lying in my lower bunk bed, knowing everybody was asleep and that I was the only one in the house who knew about this form of enjoyment, let alone had access to it, was related to the strongly verdant glow of the colours of the screen against the pitch black surroundings.

Computer games have several magical properties, the lighter or darker shade of which is – as with most things – entirely dependent on the player. The first trick is to be able to make time disappear entirely for long stints, only for it to return, to our incomprehension, hours later. Scratching our heads we wonder where it had gone. Role-Playing Games (RPGs), of which I had little experience as a child, are held to be able to exert the greatest powers in this respect, but I witnessed similar effects during many afternoons spent playing my brothers at Streetfighter 2. The second magical dispensation is the spell of wakefulness that computer games are able to cast on the player. Some innate anxiety had always prevented me from falling too deeply into this spell, but by dint of a contrast which was to remain long with me, I remember late nights for weeks on end when on my way to the kitchen I would pass through the living room, where my father would be trying to negotiate a sequence of tricky jumps on Super Mario. The third property also relates to the experience of time, and refers to the patience that games are able to draw out of the most easily distracted of children. It has been remarked how RPGs, and more recently Pokemon, have taken advantage of the age-old pursuit of collecting. It may be that in making an association with childhood the meaning of collecting does not go far enough, since it fails to give an idea of the confused excitement that accompanies the act of accumulation; and this has never been better expressed for me than with my own hoarding of acorns in a bedroom drawer during a particularly generous autumn of the early 1990s.

Most of my childhood was spent indoors and at home, a situation which at the time I believed was conducive to much self-pity. Besides school, our living room (which was really a large dining room) was our playground and the place of whatever reconciliations limited experience could offer. I remember the patterns of the carpet on which I used to deliberately tread when I listened to my mother or my father lecturing me. It seems impossible now that I needed to be told anything at all. The one time when this cloistering was broken was during our trips to stay with our cousins, who lived in Switzerland. We went yearly, for several years. Each time I remember wondering for weeks beforehand how they would look and where they would be living. In their second or their third home in that country, I can’t remember which, they arranged all of their gaming equipment around the television, which itself was accommodated in an intimidatingly large wall cupboard.

My cousins owned numerous games, two of which I remember particularly well. Adventure Island 2 was a game in which the player was required to collect eggs while riding on scaled-down dinosaurs across a two-dimensional, primeval landscape. My cousins’ impressive handling of the beasts was an element of control which I was never to master. My poor excuse is that the depiction of archaic reality was simply too spellbinding to focus instead on the gameplay. Tecmo World Wrestling, which was also on the 8-bit NES, even today, and despite my general dislike of button-bashing games, holds a special place in my heart for the delight it took in switching between camera angles during the execution of a ‘finishing’ move. The arrival of the supreme bad guy, the mysterious B King, brought a respectful dimming of the ringside lights. The dominant blue and pinkish colours of the game screen also seemed to signal the best of intentions, although nothing came close to matching the exhilaration of grabbing my opponent by the legs and spinning him round and around, gathering momentum until in a triumphant climax I would let go by pressing the B button. I would then watch with glee as the accumulated centripetal force launched him out of the ring and into the stands.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

2007-01-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

Strange Fires

All eras considered, what can we say is the common thread behind
all the “best” rock and roll? It’s a spirit long considered dead that
somehow reignites and reclaims its sustenance through the amazing
inventions of those arrested by its truth.

- Ariel Pink, January 2005

It is striking how cautiously that Ariel Pink has described rock and roll in relation to it’s ‘spirit’. According to him, the spirit of rock and roll confounds its own apparent death through invention, but the phoenix-like re-emergence of it’s spirit takes place during a moment of disruption and ‘arrest’. The return of an authentic rock music is therefore not necessarily triumphant, and could even be destructive as it comes to ‘reclaim its sustenance.’ Ariel Pink’s use of the metaphor of fire to describe this moment is couched in mystery: it is a fire that ‘somehow reignites’, without warning or meaning. It’s possibilities are exciting but also daunting; a strange fire, at once capable of benign and malign forces, whose action can not be equated with natural reason but only with ‘spirit’.

The second track from Ariel Pink’s debut album for Paw Tracks, the record label set up by Animal Collective, is entitled ‘Strange Fires’. A swirling, opiated number that appears to be calling to us from across a vast expanse of time, it is both an ideal and incongruous example of the music on his Haunted Graffiti series of records, which are currently being reissued. The main riff of ‘Strange Fires’ also sounds like the recurring motif from the hugely successful early-nineties Gameboy game, Tetris. The memories it evokes are therefore simultaneously very old and quite new. Lyrically the song is barely audible beneath the haze of tape hiss, but the line, ‘Love may / turn into heartbreak’ flies unmistakeably from the bridge between verse and chorus. Such equivocal statements are typical of this artist.

Strange fires burn for the present world but also for the world that is to come. Ariel Pink confesses that when he was young, rock and roll had meant the world to him. It was the promise of something else, and in search of this something he collected records and hunted down information about musicians. ‘I’d research and listen to everything that even merely had a passing stint in the Rock n’ Roll Halls of Fame/Shame, which inspired my own musical pursuits.’ An obsessive taste for popular music had fired his dream of sound and had helped him to articulate himself musically. His love of this kind of music, which dates from the 1960s to the present day, and includes almost every type of popular song that the West has produced, has been described as a religious love. His lyrics often tremble with uneasy statements of his admiration. In the song ‘Hardcore Pops Are Fun’, he exclaims: ‘Pop music’s your wife, / have it for life. / Pop music is wine, / it tastes so divine.’ The intensity of feeling is expressed in an almost esoteric language: pop music as wife/wine, tasting divine. The sentiment strays so far from recognised norms of lyrical expression that it is unclear whether he is blowing kisses to or throwing rocks at the music that he claims to love.

Perhaps that is the intention, for Ariel Pink’s love of pop music is not a pure and blissful love. No more profound sense of contentment emerges from his work than from the work of his predecessors. Instead, the love that grows out of his early interest in pop music is obsessive, and like all obsessive loves it estranges the lover from the object of his longing. This is not to say that the lover parts company with his beloved, but rather that love intensifies as the beloved appears more distant to him – intensifies and becomes something else. In ‘Loverboy’ he sings: ‘Lovergirl, / I love you like an animal. / I love you like a / dog or a snake or a mouse or a cat.’ The intensity of longing transforms the appearance of the beloved not once but again and again, into a series of animal images.

In a similar way, by mimicking older forms of pop music Ariel Pink’s songs are perverted by his obsession with their influences. The tension between his fidelity to their ‘spirit’ and his mistrust of the present day – a mistrust that must extend to himself – expresses itself in the form of interruptions and delays to the progress of the songs. Nothing is allowed to pass unexamined, and consequently everything is mediated by his own ambiguity about its meaning. This impatience with the accepted state of things extends even beyond the world of music: he has stated for example how in his love for his home town of Beverly Hills he would like to pervert the city into its hidden, true form: ‘I’d like to see every crackpot, squatter, gutterpunk, columbine kid in town set up tent in everybody’s lawn and party 24hrs a day. I want it to look on the outside the way it really is from within…They should hold Bar Mitzvah receptions at the BH County Jail. Mr. Chows catering szechuan pork dumplings. Axl Foley anyone?’

Artefact

You’ve lost what you never knew you had.

- Ariel Pink, ‘Artefact’

It has often been remarked that Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti consists of music that sounds as if it has been discovered from the past, like the aural equivalent of buried treasure. Considering the subject matter of his songs – loss, nostalgia, memory – the statement seems appropriate. Yet this image is distorting, for no other contemporary pop music is so unmistakeably a product of the present day. Ariel Pink describes his wish ‘to make the saddest music that ever was,’ adding that, ‘the pop quality in my music is so sad because it’s nostalgic – it is the sound of a happiness that’s not there anymore.’ Rather than playing host to nostalgia through his music, he bears witness to its effect on culture. Nothing in Haunted Graffiti is meant to remind listeners of an actually existing past.

The Haunted Graffiti material are a series of reissues: historical artefacts that have been given a second release. Ariel Pink began recording songs in 1995. He describes it as ‘a long learning process, caught on tape.’ He thinks up melodies which he learns to remember, and then records these on his home stereo cassette deck. Rather than grumbling about the subsequent fuzzy quality of the sound production, he affirms it, claiming that ‘I write music that I believe was meant to be realized on this particular machine, namely my MT8X Yamaha cassette 8 track recorder.’

Once a song is recorded it does not mark the end of the process of its coming to light: ‘I tinker constantly with old songs giving them makeovers constantly…I listen back and make follow-up mixes, sometimes as many as ten per song.’ Each song is replayed and dissected, reimagined and recomposed, each version adding a layer of his own time spent in its company into the mix. The distance that he acquires from his music as a result of this process is unimaginable, a distance moreover which strengthens rather than diminishes his hold over the material. The Doldrums was mostly recorded while he was finishing his last semester at California Institute of Arts, in December 1999 – April 2000. He claims that, ‘I couldn’t make the Doldrums today, even if I tried.’ Around 200 tapes remain unreleased in his apartment, products of that time of feverish activity. ‘Most of them are completed albums or master tapes with about 20 minutes of music on each.’

The effects of repeated taping and alteration are everywhere to be found in his songs. In ‘Young pilot astray’ the second chorus is brought into the verse by cutting abruptly from a bar in the preceding verse. In the context of that song it makes melodic sense. Many of the songs are similarly brought into clarity by cutting and splicing different sections together. The chorus of ‘Life in LA’ is brought in a moment sooner than anticipated by shifting the recording amplitude, heightening the intensity of the lyric amid the tired, sighing horns: ‘It can be so lonely. / Life in LA, / can be lonely.’

Given this emphasis on the warping of sound in his songs, it is important to distinguish between two types of distortion in Haunted Graffiti. Firstly, there is the distortion that is inevitable given the limited sound quality of the equipment used. Secondly, there is the distortion that results from the various audio techniques that Ariel Pink uses, to which the limited quality of the equipment has an added but indirect effect. In ‘Didn’t it click?’ there is a continuous and indefinable whirling sound that acts as the disorienting backdrop to the entire song. The distorted haze in ‘Don’t talk to strangers’ and ‘Good kids make bad grown ups’ disrupts and disorders the flow of these otherwise straightforward pop-rock numbers. Critics have claimed that Ariel Pink has thus ruined his perfectly good songs. The problem for these listeners is that Haunted Graffiti lacks clarity of focus, or to put it another way, the musicianship whose visual complement is the picturesque. Criticism that is based on the desire for better production misses the point of these songs, for such a move would only erase the abrasions and flatten the condensations of time that Ariel Pink raises above the smooth sheen of ‘good production’.

What the Haunted Graffiti series does is to make us think about music differently. Something in the songs is ruined, parasitical, but no less listenable as a form of pop music. Ariel Pink ruins his songs by alternating between melodies and cutting them into each other at unexpected moments, overlaying them in a haze of distortion produced by multiple takes and edits. Consequently there is often the appearance of two distinct melodies within the same song, each seemingly hidden to the other. He has observed in this trace effect of competing sounds ‘an objective quality that lives outside of time and reality.’ Because it is inexpressive of a culture or a history, the trace is untroubled by the things in which they have invested themselves.

The Haunted Graffiti material therefore seems entirely absent from history; yet the period of its production is quite specific. Clearly Ariel Pink believes that he was in the grip of something during the turn of the Millenium, and he is hesitant to declare whether it might return at some point in the future. In the annals of rock and roll these experiences are not uncommon, indeed they form the impetus behind a lot of radical music. However, Ariel Pink’s claim to history goes a little deeper than that. He is not merely concerned with expressing sadness, or even with articulating the return of the ‘spirit’ of rock and roll. Such excesses continue to be produced elsewhere in the mainstream with sterile frequency, and have a tendency to wear listeners out. But it is precisely in their worn quality that Ariel Pink has discovered a different experience of pop music.

Nothing is more apt than that a son of Los Angeles, the city of memory loss, should produce a body of work that feeds on this loss. Nostalgia, forgetting, and the memory industry that is represented by Hollywood itself ruins and lays waste to its cultural objects through endless repetition. Far from occupying the position of an avant-garde iconoclast, however, Ariel Pink’s work places him at the centre of this industry. He is an experimental artist only insofar as this describes his own sense of disorder amid the strange fires inaugurating the return of the ‘spirit’ of rock and roll. In approaching these fires time and again during the production of Haunted Graffiti, he has progressively ruined his songs. But things which are in ruin are also by their natures undergoing transformation; decay and decomposition are signs of life at the extremes of existence. It is our predicament that we should be able to appreciate only this, and not the disordering fires.

References

John Albert, ‘Lost and Found’, LA Weekly, December 2-8, 2005

Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (2001)

Jay, ‘Who said anything about pop music?’, www.tinymixtapes.com, January 2005

Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997)

Simon Reynolds, ‘Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti: House Arrest’, The Observer 22/01/2006

Ross Simonini, ‘It’s so lonely that way’, www.identitytheory.com, 13/01/2006

Lost Motives

2007-01-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

The detective story, as we recognise it, like some impossible labyrinth made only of centres, returns always to Poe. The three influential Dupin mysteries, are signposts within the maze, opening up avenues for the genre to follow. However, another of Poe's stories, lesser known and immeasurably more intense, extracts and manipulates the method of the investigator and transposes it onto the life of the lonely intellectual. Here we see the detective move further into his self with every step he takes of his pursuit. Here the detective, gazing at the suspect before him, sees only the back of his own head in a mobius strip of self-interrogation.

The narrator of Man of the Crowd describes the various types of people who pass in front of the London club in which he sits. Gazing through the 'smoky glass', out narrator, recovering from an undisclosed illness, takes an unnatural interest in the crowd flowing by. The narrator's analytic mind is capable of classifying the crowd into convenient types. However, he is unable to place a crook'd old man who passes the window. His instant fascination with this man of the crowd is arresting. Night has descended on London like a net, the narrator, from his well lit vantage point, in scrutinizing the old man, must simultaneously be looking at his own illuminated image in the glass. From the outset, our man is someone else. It is his desire to analyse this refraction of himself that drives the narrator from the club and onto the labyrinthine London streets in pursuit of this unplaceable other.

Our narrator almost immediately assumes a 'craving desire' to keep the man in view, as if trying to confirm his own reflection in a continuation of the doubling we expect from Poe. He maintains the stance of the detective, following closely, yet unobserved, processing possibilities and variables through his well reasoned mind. The narrator is searching for some motive, following the man for more than twenty-four hours through London's warren-like network of alleys and lanes, focussing solely on the hidden purpose of the old man, oblivious to his own. As he pursues the old man in a spasm of existential crisis, we too, equally without motive in this story without reason, pursue the narrator in a chain of curiosity linked by the most tenuous of suspicions.

The crime in this story sets the cautious, fractious tone of stories to come. The narrator circles some crime of the soul, some escalating metaphysical panic, following himself in practical isolation, finding the process irresistable and all absorbing. Our investigator grows 'wearied unto death' in the course of his all night chase, arriving back to the very point where he began, having learned nothing of the old man, concluding only with what he already knew: 'er lasst sich nicht lessen' - it does not permit itself to be read. The impenetrability of the mystery functions like some merciful barrier beyond which lies the dark realm of this 'genius of deep crime'. As the story ends, it seems possible that our narrator, drawn in as if self-doubt were magnetised, has transcended this essential barrier and become, himself a man of the crowd.

The detective figure is inextricably implicated in that which he describes, a likely, self-involving, feature of the existential detective story. In Jorge Luis Borges' two major contributions to the genre, The Garden of Forking Paths and Death and the Compass, the detective himself is the last clue, the final piece of the puzzle he is trying to solve. In both cases, the crime cannot exist without the intervention of the curious investigator. Death and the Compass presents us with the Dupin-like figure of Lönrott, the world's greatest detective. Lönrott's very role as a brilliant detective, attempting to stop a series of three murders, leads himself into the trap of becoming the fourth and ultimate victim of a vengeful plot designed solely for that purpose. Lönrott's instinctively critical, investigative mind works against him in an act of intellectual self-murder, unable to sustain itself in what we are told is the most perplexing of all labyrinths, that which is an endless straight line. Lönrott's complex mind, so used to inter-connecting narratives and motives, collapses under the open, self-effacing obviousness of the hideously straight labyrinth.

The Garden of Forking Paths takes the detective's participation in crime one step further. Our narrator, a German spy during WW1, can find no other way to communicate to Berlin the name of the city that the British are planning to bomb than to murder, and be hanged for the crime. In being executed, his very name, Stephen Albert, is broadcast as the name of the city to be bombed. The detective figure crystallises himself into clue, crime and solution - detective, victim and criminal in a maze of hazy implications.

The Man of the Crowd and Borges' short stories give trembling voice to the 'other who turns out to be me' theme that defines the existential detective story. A true example of this technique can be found in Beckett's Malloy in which the detective is abstractly transfigured into the very man he pursues. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy continues to explore this endemic notion of the detective's split identity further still.

Each of Auster's Chinese-box trilogy revolves around Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story of disappearance, Wakefield. Wakefield is a man who 'absents' himself from his wife as a brief prank but finds, having stepped out from his life, he cannot return. He spends the rest of his life investigating the empty space he has left behind. It is a particularly urban puzzle of a man who loses himself in a crowd. Hawthorne opens a theme conquered by Auster: the complex loneliness of the city. The detective figure, whose thought processes are linked by alleys and streets like synaptic nerves, moves through the city of his mind, wearied and decentred by some dissolving equation, some lost motive.

Auster takes his cue from Wakefield's self-imposed existential dilemma. Quinn and Blue become obsessively engaged, like Poe's compulsive narrator, in voyeuristic surveillance whilst Fanshawe pounds desperately on the door of the tantalisingly locked room. Manipulating the detective genre's fixation with closure, Auster’s anorexic investigators gaze hopelessly into a maze of their own making, denying themselves any morsel of satisfaction. The reader too is left starved by the narrative as each tale manages to unfold beyond its final word, unsolved, fully chewed yet undigested. Abstinence, in Auster’s work is a lunge for clarification; detection as selective consumption, sifting through clues, codes and signs for something to satisfy their needs once and for all. Quite often it is total destruction.

In Ghosts a man is in such ontological despair that he hires a detective to watch him constantly, as if existing only in the other's perception, reading detailed reports of his own behaviour. As seems to be the case in these metaphysical shoot-outs, the detective, so relentless in his scrutiny, begins to see no further than his own eyes. Auster uses the detective's method against the detective himself, like some cunning move in an infinite endgame.

As in the world of Borges, the solution destroys the solver. Quinn, as fraudulent detective, is obliterated by his own mesmerising construction, caught within himself, he learns that serious detection is no game. Auster's metaphysical reading of missing persons and investigative methodology make the detective figure seem like some rare breed of vigilant truth seeker, scratching at the core of some essential revelation without ever breaking the skin.

Ultimately, Auster's detectives are obsessed with nothing. Like Wakefield their fascination is excited by absence. Auster shares, with Thomas Pynchon, the ability to captivate his detective heroes with obscure signs and codes that lead nowhere but into complicated, multiplying darkness. In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa Maas circumnavigates the mystery of the Trystero - an all-encompassing, transparent cipher that leaves her on the edge of breakdown. Auster and Pynchon abandon crime for intrigue, the obsessions of their investigators masking an empty centre - a locked room never to be opened. They have identified something intrinsically odd about the professional detective, a person who is paid to know and to find out. They are obliged to witness and to validate. In discovering something two things are called into question: the thing itself and that which identifies and perceives the thing. The more ambiguous and blurred the case, the more uncertain and in despair the detective. If the thing ceases to exist, the missing person never found, the code never broken, then what becomes of the detective? He is left stranded, like an outstretched arm, without a body.

The tangled web of Auster's reflexive New York Trilogy arrives at the same conclusion of Jaques Tourneur's mazey PI classic Out of the Past, whomever it is you are paid to follow, in such a lonely and voyeuristic profession, you are only ever really chasing your self.

Film noir has always lustily invited existential possibilities, her characters locked in a prison of self-doubt. Rudolph Mate’s D.O.A (1949) begins with the ACTORS NAME stumbling into a precinct, wishing to report a murder ‘Who’s murder?’ the night watchman innocently asks, ‘Mine’ growls the troubled hero, presenting the necromantic riddle to the gaping audience. In flashback we see that he has tried in vain to investigate his own murder, trying to find the formless malice that has killed him, slowly poisoned him, to be precise. So, we watch him struggle in a knot of dud clues and dark alleys, resisting what none of us ever will. Edgar G Ulmer, disputed king of the B picture, offers us Detour, about a man whom circumstance points a jagged finger at – perfectly expressing Camus’ view that 'at any street corner, the absurd may strike a man in the face’ – Tom Neal’s only wish is to make it from New York to L.A, hitchhiking to reunite with his jazz singer lover. But his future collapses before his eyes, as the kindly driver offering him safe passage keels over. In a moment of foolish panic, Neal steals the car and drives away, locking himself in as suspect number one and assuming the dead man’s identity while destroying his own. Eventually, he finds himself unable to return to New York and unable to make it to L.A, where the police are looking for him – so he is trapped in constant flight, destined to roam the highways as nobody. Although not a detective film, Ulmer’s Detour illustrates perfectly the suspicion and uncertainty the noir hero has about himself, and how, without vigilance, given the opportunity, he’ll stick the knife in. He has no suspect to pursue. The compulsive investigative desire of the detective’s quest for the truth is wiped out. Noir is filled with these acts of self-betrayal, these ultimate double crossings.

The shadow-western, Pursued, introduces us to Robert Mitchum’s alluring fatalistic dreamer, hounded by images of violence from his childhood, his life seems guided by some perverted force, leading him back to the scene of his nightmares, and the slaughter of his family. He seems predestined to follow an invisible ribbon of violence, offering no resistance, almost willing his own ruin, finally accepting the noose around his neck.

Later films incisively extract this strain of anxiety from the detective noir and work it into razor edged paranoia. Harry Caul, in Coppola’s The Conversation, illustrates how the detective’s very existence is governed by information and how a misreading of this information can lead to a misinterpreted existence. Harry is a surveillance expert, but when he believes himself to be the centre of a corporate conspiracy, the skills which have brought him renown in his field are of no use without any point of reference. So, to make sense of the world, Harry uses himself as a receiver to his own transmissions, sending him into an inward spiral of feedback and frenzy. Harry investigates the case without ever leaving his own skull, in the end imbedding the mystery at a depth to far for him to strip down to, leaving him utterly exposed and vulnerable.

Equally eager to self-destruct is Warren Beatty’s Joe Frady in Pakula’s The Parallax View, vigorously undeterred by the certain fact that he will only truly understand the sinister motives of the parallax corporation at the point at which they destroy him. Frady buries himself under two aliases, and when his only undercover contact is murdered, he finds himself stranded in his own complicated theories, he becomes purely a fictional creation, and without substance he struggles toward the bright light of truth blindly. A figure stands before him, however, intruding on his personal fantasy with a blast of reality, confirming Joe’s suspicions while simultaneously rendering his flickering instant of realization useless, a history known to nobody.

Both Klute and Vertigo drown two vague detectives in a phychosexual whirlpool. Scottie becomes entranced by his own fascination with an onerous doppelganger and John Klute appears to be a man hiding behind his own eyes, peering out at his own voyeurism as his own case unravels of its own accord. These two pursuers isolate the detective’s obsession with following, force themselves into a erotic metaphysical slipstream of passing clues and fleeting connections, without ever knowing what they’re chasing.

Arthur Penn’s Nightmoves gives us the defeatist Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) who tails his own wife on a whim, discovering her infidelity. Like a jaded Wakefield, Moseby never returns and exiled from his own home, he takes a missing persons case that he immediately solves, only to uncover a smuggling plot that leaves him bleeding to death, driving in wide circles. Like the infinite chess move the title refers to, Moseby seems determined to confront himself with the hopelessness of his own actions, a realization that leaves the detective, a man of strategy and logic, literally spiralling out of control, moving off the board.

Other modern texts indicate that the existential detective story continues to thrive. Perez-Reverte's The Dumas Club, in which the literary detective becomes integrated into the very text he is attempting to decipher and Alan Parker's Angel Heart, where amnesiac detective Harry Angel tracks himself down as the corrupted Faustian crooner Johnny Favourite, both function on the inextricability of the detective figure within the crime that he attempts to solve. Angel has spent his time trying to piece together scraps of information about his missing person, ultimately discovering that he himself is the last clue to the solution of the mystery.

There are things which do not permit themselves to be read and there are detectives, those who must read them.