E(nmity)-Mail

You don't need to be a confirmed Lacanian to realise that to read an email is, already, to misread an email. One could evoke the old Russian formalist distinction between fabula and syuzhet: there is the actual bare words of the email itself (syuzhet), and then there is the story, and the affect, we interpret and, in a sense, invent ourselves, from these words (fabula). As in film, the two can never fully coincide, nor do we have any guarantees that that latter conforms in any way to the author's intentions. In a film, it could certainly be argued, this does not matter. With Stanley Cavell, we can argue that the filmic object is what we remember of it and how we interpret it. When dealing with emails, this presents fairly obvious practical problems. 

Will Schwalbe and David Shipley, authors of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (a book which I have not read, so please forgive me if I repeat anything they say) are fond of saying that "email is an affectless medium" and offer various tips for better, friendlier, more productive, email communication. But why should this be so? Why do we need to overcompensate for the coldness of electronic communication with emoticons and multiple exclamation marks? Why is it so hard to imagine a book of the collected emails of some great author, poet, or statesman, when so many similar collections of 'snail mail' letters exist? 

I suspect one reason is the way email simulates intimacy. Its model has really never been the letter, and it is rare to apply the formal rules of letter writing - even to a complete stranger - that come so naturally when using the postal service. When writing emails, we tend to write as though we were talking ("Hi, how's it going?" scarcely "Dear Sir,") and so we read as though we were listening. Email fakes an imaginary presence which tends towards the illusion of making the medium seem invisible, whereas a letter will always remind us of its own frame. When reading, we tend to superimpose a tone of voice - and almost inevitably a different tone of voice to the one with which it was written - onto an email without thinking about it. This then skews our understanding, creating a kind of paranoid hermeneutic which would be quickly dispelled if we were talking in person (due to cues - themselves as good as invisible - such as tone of voice, facial expression, etc.).

Yet, despite all the formal signs to the contrary - the dear sirs, the letterheads, the yours sincerelys - a handwritten letter actually is more intimate. For even without any understanding of graphology, a letter retains the mark of the body (it's grain, if you like, following Barthes) - the slope of the characters, the pressure on the paper, little crossings out - all speak to us directly from the fingers whether we consciously realise it or not. We can pour our heart out in a letter, somehow we can only vent spleen in an email. And it wouldn't take much surfing (pick a message board or a comments box at random to see what I mean) to find evidence that this problem of false, forced directness is far from restricted to email, but infects almost all web-based communication.

Then again, perhaps behind my words (and those of Messrs Shwalbe and Shipley), there is an implied idealist vision of communicational utopia, wherein, if only we all understood the medium better we would all just get along fine and all the world's problems might be boiled down to a simple matter of misunderstanding. I can't help thinking of the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which, by removing all barriers to effective communication between different cultures, causes "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation". The crucial thing, perhaps, is to recall, with Lacan, that we understand the other's speech best when we recognise the impossibility of our own understanding, the necessary and constitutive gap which makes any communication possible. 

Protest Today

Reading the various commemorative pieces on the twenty year anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin wall, I am struck by a curious thing: the numbers. From The Observer, "In early November, a mighty Berlin demonstration drew half a million to thunder calls for change ... on the night of 9 November, 50,000 East Berliners rushed to the Wall." Half a million people, 50, 000 people... No small change by anyone's standards. But then, a little under fifteen years later, on the 15th of February, 2003, over a million people protested against the Iraq War. The effect? None whatsoever. So, in East Germany, a supposedly totalitarian state, half a million people can bring about regime change - in the UK, a supposedly liberal-democratic nation, twice the amount of people are nonetheless totally impotent. A little later in the same article, we read that the rumoured death of one student at the hands of the police in Prague on November 17th was enough to bring half a million people to the streets and ultimately kick start the Velvet Revolution. It later turned out that the rumour was in fact false. On the 2nd of April this year, after kettling in several thousand protestors, the police are caught on video beating a newspaper salesman, Ian Tomlinson, to death. The consequences? One officer is interviewed on suspicion of manslaughter. Now, what, ultimately, were the demonstrations across eastern Europe in 1989 about? What did they want? Well, supposedly, democracy, liberal freedom, the right to dissent. In other words, they were protesting for the right to protest. Evidently, this was a freedom they basically already had, and we no longer do.

Artist-Critic

"Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all,
worthy of the name ... All fine imaginative work
is self-conscious and deliberate."

- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

As both a critic and a practitioner, someone who both does and makes stuff and also writes about the stuff that other people do and make, I seem to find myself in a slightly precarious position. A friend who is both an actor and a screenwriter recently wrote to me on Twitter, having just read some film reviews I had written for The Quietus, "You sound like a real critic. Are you sure that's a good idea?" Knowing the man in question, I suspect that this was intended with a certain arch good humour which might tempt us to dismiss the comment as mere banter, were it not for the fact that it is by no means in isolation. In film and pop music alike, anyone who attempts to cross the great divide is often regarded with a certain suspicion - as are auto-critical works of popular art. 

"Pop music about pop music," sniffed Popjustice dismissively a propos The Pipettes, and K-Punk recently asked of popular films that they "dare to be a symptom," as though the work must stand dumb and inert awaiting outside critical enlightenment. Is it not the case though that being a mere symptom is in fact the least that a work of popular art can do? It can hardly help but be a symptom - but isn't it somehow more exciting if the work is both symptom and diagnostician? Able not only to exhibit the trace of some greater syndrome but also, in a further step, to comment on and analyse, either explicitly or implicitly, the syndrome itself as well as its own relationship to that syndrome, to make us think and pose new questions to us, rather than simply providing example to an answer we have already decided upon. This needn't be dismissed as mere po-mo eyebrow-raising, and works of this nature go back much further than anything we might sensibly call post-modernism - indeed, isn't the verse philosophy of Parmenides just that? 

It is therefore my contention that the world might profit from greater consort between critics and those they critique and that some fine work might result from this collusion. The nouvelle vague and British Free Cinema movements provide some support for this assertion, likewise the horror films of Dario Argento, and Paul Morley's involvement in ZTT records, but otherwise examples in popular culture have been relatively unusual. In 'classical' music however the opposite is almost true, and has been for nearly two hundred years now. Mendelsohn, Lizst and Wagner all wrote extensively about music, both in the form of prescriptive essays and more standard review articles. In the twentieth century, the career of Pierre Boulez has almost been defined more by his polemical writing about other composers than by his own actual music (anyone who doubts Boulez as a writer would be wise to recall that roughly half of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts are lifted straight from the pages of Boulez), and lest we forget, no less a music writer than Theodor Adorno had a parallel career as a composer. These two are far from alone in proving that aestheticians need not fail ontically in order to fully grasp artistic ontology.

Under market capitalism, critics and producers are engaged in a curious dance. Each is basically addressing the other at all times and acting as big Other for the other, whilst constantly pretending otherwise. The artist claims to be working for some reified and mystified entity called the Audience, secretly aware that it is the critics' judgement that will more decisively shape their future, and the critic claims to speak for the consumer, the man on the street (this obscure beast, the Audience again), but really longs for recognition by practitioners and prays that their barbed comments will strike the artist to their very marrow, perhaps even encourage them to work differently. For some reason, however, full assumption of this dance - for the dancers to actually look each other in the eye, perhaps even kiss - is strictly taboo.

On the part of critics, this may be due, at least in part, to the roots of popular cultural criticism in anthropology, to engage would thus be to 'go native' and any work that is itself critical can safely be dismissed as being 'uppity'. For practitioners, it may be an odd mix of fear and envy towards the subject supposed to know. In fact, I rather suspect that people who make films and pop music regard critics more highly and rate the power of the critics more highly than anyone else does - and this precisely is the source of their resentment. The critic can then safely become a scapegoat for all personal feelings of failure. If these two can be overcome, what of the notion of critical distance? Where goes the critic's objectivity if they are forever canoodling with the objects of their discourse? Surely, the only good materialist response here is to admit that there never was any critical distance in the first place, that critics do not stand aloof from the world, able to pass objective judgement on it from some olympian height, nor should we want them to. Granting this, I fail to see how a more intimate 'insider' knowledge of the process of production could possibly harm the critic, nor how greater critical reflection, or even academic abstraction, could possibly harm the author. Artists are not children and it is time we stopped treating them as such. Critics of the past have hitherto sought only to comment on the world of popular culture, the point is to change it.

Living with the Dead

In the immediate wake of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground, Mark Fisher wrote about the extraordinary resemblance between police instructions to shoot a suspected terrorist in the head in order to 'extinguish the brain completely,' with the well-known formula for killing zombies in the classic horror films. At that time the zombies om our cinema screens were still anonymous marauding hordes, but significantly, as the police claimed of de Menezes, they ran.

The innovations of zombie films have always reflected - and sometimes predicted - the violence of the real world. There is a distinct suggestion in Jean Yarbrough's King of the Zombies, filmed a year before America entered World War Two, that Henry Victor's zombie master is secretly a Nazi agent, and in 1998's Bio-Zombie, the creatures are the victim of an Iraqi weapon of mass destruction. From the mindless consumers of Romero's (1978) Dawn of the Dead to the yuppie socialites of Bianchi's (1981) Burial Ground: Nights of Terror, cinematic zombies have always provided a kind of social index or cultural barometer.

Two new films offer us a different perspective on the living dead. In Marc Price's super low-budget Colin, and Matthew Kohnen's horror comedy, Wasting Away, we are asked not so much to run screaming from the walking corpses as understand them, and feel the pain of their social exclusion. Both films, made within a year of each other, offer for the first time, zombie movies told from the perspective of the zombies, with the intention of inciting less our shudders than our sympathy.

Marc Price allegedly made Colin for a mere forty-five pounds (and spent most of that on tea and biscuits for his cast). Its impossibly circular plot follows young Colin as he staggers around south-west London, bleeding and biting people along his way. Colin starts off by introducing us to our eponymous undead anti-hero as an iPod loving hoodie, and then asks us to empathise with him, understand his confusion, and ultimately, like David Cameron, learn to hug the hoodie. Rather than a mindless agent of evil, Colin, played by Alastair Kirton, is just a troubled youth who nobody understands, trying to make his way in a hostile urban environment.

Written and directed by brothers Sean and Matthew Kohnen, Wasting Away switches back and forth between the black and white of the film's 'reality' and the comic book full colour of the zombie's point of view, in which they see and hear themselves as normal humans to whom everyone else seems impossibly fast. Our re-animated heroes are all cool youg hipsters, hanging out and working in a downtown bowlorama in this youth movie horror comedy. The zombies-eye-view sections of the film allow our desiccated friends not just to crack wise and goof off, but even fall in love. Though at first, they think of themselves as still normal, believing everyone else to be infected, only towards the end of the film do they realise the true horror of their fate, prompting a kind of undead existential angst. Upon this dreadful realisation, they come to recognise themselves as an oppressed and misunderstood minority group and, in a speech which refers to Israel, decide to seek refuge in the Inland Empire where they might live in peace, albeit dead and rotting.

Beneath all this hugging and learning, however, behind the supposed liberal tolerance of these films towards even the living dead, some groups, inevitably, are still excluded. Every zombie with whom we are asked to identify with in either film is, as in the title of Victor Halperin's (1932) classic, a White Zombie. The only black speaking part in Wasting Away goes to a character who complains he'd rather just get drunk than fight for his friends' survival. The actors in Colin appear to have used the script as an excuse to pull a spazz for ninety minutes like insensitive school children or von Trier's Idiots, and the guys and gals of Wasting Away seem to have a dreadful knack for walking into appaling racist jokes - a bar is called Chinks becuase the barman is a "Chinaman" who everyone addresses as Chinky, and the brains of Mexicans, we discover, taste picante when loaded into a taco. "We're not illegal immigrants," cries one of our soulless slackers, "we're zombies!" For some, it is clearly still preferable to be dead than un-American.

"Well, do you think they have a chance of winning? You are on their side, aren't you?"

Speaking of Le Camelot, the character in L'Atalante played by Gilles Margaritis, during an interview on the DVD of The Complete Jean Vigo, Georgian director Otar Iosseliani says, 

The other charmer [seducteur] is someone extremely touching. He hides. That's typically French. He hides everything under a form of clowning. He's impenetrable and neutral. He's cold and mechanical. But you feel that, despite all the misfortunes the director inflicts upon him, he always comes through - because someone is watching him. 

On a superficial psychological level, he is just talking about the character's exhibitionist sense of security before an audience. But doesn't this description, and particularly this "he always comes through - because someone is watching him," seem to apply equally well to Chaplin, Harold Lloyd or, perhaps especially, Buster Keaton? In a more profound sense, Iosseliani is talking about the position of the slapstick film hero - his safety is always guaranteed by the camera, and by extension, the audience. 

It is oddly fitting in a way that Michael Haneke's (1997) Funny Games came out almost at the same time as a film with almost the same name that sought to revive somewhat the tradition of the cinematic clown, Peter Chelsom's (1995) Funny Bones. For Funny Games is, in a way, the direct opposite of the old slapstick comedies, or rather it is the proof that such films are no longer possible. When Paul (Arno Frisch) winks at us and invites us into his confidence, we know, not only that no-one is safe, but that we will be ourselves responsible for what happens.

"Fellas, coincidence and fate figure largely in our lives"

Agent Cooper once said that when two events, pertaining to the same object of enquiry, happen at the same time, we must pay the strictest attention. On this particular occasion, the object in question is The Beatles. At around a quarter to twelve, Freaky Trigger's Tom Ewing posted on his Twitter account, 'A number one hit from the world The Beatles destroyed' followed by a link to his Tumblr blog (the track in question was called 'Diamonds' by Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, 'this was what Young Britain sounded like just as the Beatles started to impact,' claims Ewing). Just a few hours earlier, at about half past eight, an article by Caroline Davies is posted on The Guardian website. The computer game, Guitar Hero, whose eagerly anticipated Beatles edition has just been released to rave reviews, is under fire from Bill Wyman, of all people, for discouraging kids from learning to play real instruments, "It makes less and less people dedicated to really get down and learn an instrument," he claims. It is perhaps interesting to note in passing, that in both these instances The Beatles are involved in the erasure of something, an older way of doing things, perhaps.

Leave me to weep - the music of Antichrist

The presence, amongst Antichrist's end credits of "Research on Music" (amongst, similarly, "Research on Misogyny", "Research on Anxiety", "Research on Horror", none of which are mentioned on IMDB), a phrase so different in its implications from the usual, "Soundtrack Coordinator," might give us pause. Especially when we consider that there is only one credited piece of music in the entire film, Handel's aria, "Lascia Ch'io Panga" sung by Almirena in Handel's opera, Rinaldo. This piece of music, we can fairly safely assume, has been chosen with some care. The most obvious connection is on the level of narrative. This particular aria, whose lyrics translate as 'Leave me to weep over my cruel fate, and that I yearn for [or sigh for] freedom,' is sung by a character trapped by a sorceress in an enchanted garden (c.f 'Eden'), begging to be left alone to her self-pity than be rescued by the king of Jerusalem. That most of the male parts, in the original performance of Rinaldo, were taken by castrati, and that this particular aria is most famous to movie-goers from featuring in a film, Farinelli, about a castrato, may have also appealed to Lars von Trier's thematic interests for the film.
It is interesting to note von Trier's insistence, throughout the interview process for this film, that he has been making the same film over and over again throughout his career. For if there were one tune that followed Handel throughout his career, it is this one. Starting life as an instrumental sarabande, a 'dance asiatique', in Handel's first opera, Almira, premiered in 1705 (and is it not the case that Handel's relationship with Asia is not unlike von Trier's with America - a vast exoticised other, known only through traveller's tales and the artifacts of its culture, wrenched from their original context?). In 1707, a lyric version was included in his first oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo et del Disinganno ('The Triumph of Time and Disillusion'). Sometimes known as La Bellezza ravveduta nel trionfo del Tempo e Disinganno (‘Beauty reformed in the triumph of Time and Enlightenment’), this extended dramatic cantata concerns a four part dialogue, written by cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, between 'Beauty', 'Pleasure', 'Time' and 'Disillusion'. The lyrics to our tune, here Pleasure's lament to the forces of reason and temperance,

"Lascia la spina,
cogli la rosa.
Tu vai cercando
il tuo dolor."

translate as "Leave the thorn, pluck the rose, you go seeking your own pain." This piece was then revised twice: first, in 1937, as Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verita, and then, in an English translation, The Triumph of Time and Truth, becoming his final work in 1757. Though significant changes were made to the score and its arrangement at each juncture, the sarabande remained. One thing about each of these renditions of this tune, except for that in Rinaldo (i.e. as 'Lascia Ch'io Panga'), is that is always preceded by a faster variation of itself ("Dangerously precarious and slightly frantic," according to Wilfred Mellors) in order to emphasize the very slowness of the sarabande. As though such were necessary! The first thing you notice about this piece of music is its extraordinary, unnatural slowness, like wading through oil - the perfect complement to the super slow-motion of Antichrist's opening scene. 

Of course, whether Almira is in fact the true ur-text of our tune is something of a moot point. Much as von Trier has been pulled up over Antichrist's various borrowings from classic horror films - the isolated log cabin from Evil Dead and Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe as Final Girl, etc. - so concerns over Handel's 'borrowings' have given sleepless nights to a few Handel scholars, worried that their idol may turn out to be "a wholly unoriginal composer". 'He takes other men's pebbles and polishes them into diamonds' said William Boyce, and so Lars von Trier has taken his thematic tropes from the video nasties and made of them something that is not itself quite a horror film - much as we might argue that Handel's oratorios were not quite oratorios but rather a means of pursuing his true love, opera, via other means once it had fallen out of favour.