Misception

In my brief absence from the blogosphere, I seem to have missed the boat somewhat on Inception and meanwhile Mark K-Punk has gone and made almost exactly the point I wanted to make about it (though I think he makes it better than I would have). This is precisely what I was alluding to on Twitter when I said that the film was not as clever as it thought it was. There are basically two philosophical ideas in Inception, one of which is fairly boring, standard sixth form stuff (what if our reality is just a dream? etc.), the other is slightly more interesting (the strange loops stuff Mark talks about), unfortunately, at a certain point the writers clearly decided to 'go with' the former.

The thing is, I spent almost the whole film thinking that its whole structure was itself going to turn out to be a strange loop, like the paradoxical dream architecture talked about in the film - i.e., that the end, which had, necessarily to come after the middle, would turn out to be the beginning, which itself had necessarily to come before the middle. But it didn't do this, nearly but not quite - it just ended on the spinning top, in a vaguely Richard Herring-esque 'Ah! But what if all this is still just a dream? Eh? Eh??!' Well, more fool me, I suppose ...

Faith on Earth is a Thing of the Past : Le Vaisseau Fantôme at the Opéra Bastille

As the Vorspiel draws to a close, the curtain rises on a vast pale room. Stage left stands a vastly proportioned door which will make dwarves of the protagonists (and giants of their shadows), stage right a kind of frame within which shimmers the image of a woman gazing dutifully up at a painting of a storm. The curious insubstantiality of this image, its coved frame, raise the question whether this image of an image is itself a filmed projection (for soon we see the woman within shift her posture slightly), or perhaps (as we soon discover to be the case) sheltered behind a scrim. Is this woman but a dream dreamt by the present scene, herself dreaming of a ship lost on stormy seas - a ship that we soon discover ourselves, as sailors bearing ropes come marching through the great door, to be aboard? Towards the end we will find ourselves questioning the reality status of this painting once more, as lighting effects expose the audience to a collectivised Stendhal Syndrome.

Richard Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer (rendered in French as Le Vaisseau Fantôme), as performed last night at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, is an opera at the crossroads (meeting the devil, perhaps?), an opera of counterpoint and contradiction. Composed in the early 1840s after a tumultuous sea voyage across the Norwegian fjords, undertaken to escape his creditors, (but inspired just as much by a satirical tale by Heinrich Heine), Wagner no doubt sympathised with the sea captain Daland's willingness to offer up his daughter, Senta, to the Dutchman in exchange for his treasure.

Written, then, in something of a hurry, in the hope (vain, as it happened) of escaping penury, The Flying Dutchman lies midway between classical opera and Wagner's later mature style and contains elements of both. Performed last night (as it frequently is) absolutely continuously, without breaks between its three acts, and yet with clearly defined arias to disrupt the smooth flow of arioso. There is even at times, such as the early dialogue between Daland and the Dutchman, something approaching secco recitative, yet punctuated by chords far more caustic than anything you might find in Handel or Mozart. It is also contains some of Wagner's earliest uses of leitmotifs, and remains the earliest of his operas to have been performed at Bayreuth.

Generically, though based on a comedy, the story is a tragedy, yet its hero sings bass (with nothing of the buffo about him) with a ghostly tremolo, serving to emphasise the weak, effeminacy of his rival for Senta's affections, Erik (a tenor). A love story whose lovers scarcely touch, embracing only twice (both times within the same scene) and but fleetingly. They seem to spend most of their time divided by the vast blankness of the stage, looking away from each other, scarcely capable even of seeing each other. At one point they seem to almost pass through each other, both as ethereal, as insubstantial as each other. As Senta lays dying she clings not to the Dutchman's body but to his portrait, in love more with the myth than the man.

In stark contrast to the lush warmth of the orchestration, the mise-en-scene and lighting was all cool minimalism in blues and greys. Even as the lights brighten in the second act, it is the harsh winterlight of a Bergman film (fitting its Scandinavian setting). My companion and I found ourselves comparing the staging (by German theatre director, Willy Decker) several times to the cinema. Most conspicuously, with its obtusely projected stage, long shadows and acute forced perspective, to German expressionism. Before the Dutchman's first appearance on dry land, we see for a long time his shadow, projecting from the door jamb. The image recalls nothing so much as Dr Caligari's somnambulist, Cesare.

From its opening storm to its Hoffmann-esque themes of the uncanny intrusion of the supernatural into the quotidian domestic sphere, The Flying Dutchman may be the ultimate romantic opera, the very apogee of romantic art. But in pushing romantic illusionism and suspension of disbelief to its limits, it seems to leap out of its frame (like the jutting stage itself) and force a certain self-doubt, a radical questioning of its own artifice which looks to the future in more than one direction. Last night's performance may have offered us a dream within a dream, a dream that dreams itself in an endless strange loop, still, for all its spectral shimmer, it retained a certain crisp clarity. Like lucid dreaming, it offered the dreamer the chance to become aware of its own reverie, thus offering the utopian possibility of infinite transformation.

Resisting the Happy Ones: Children of the Stones

There are a number of found objects featured significantly in HTV's (1977) series, Children of the Stones: the engraved stone found by the poacher, Dai ("It's mine! I found it!"), which seems mysteriously to match another in the museum, found a hundred years ago beside a skeleton that had been dead for hundreds more; and Matt's painting ("He found it in an old junk shop") that seems to offer the key to the strange events taking place in Milbury. Co-written by former Dr Who script editor, Trevor Ray, the series is structured like an ouroboros, almost like one of Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops. The village is apparently trapped in a "psychic bubble" or "time circle" and the discovery of these objects seems to imply a kind of fault or slippage between different cycles, different levels of the moebius strip.

Several British films and TV programmes in the 60's and 70's transpose the classic dystopian theme of an individual or small group against the ominous and threatening community from its traditional future city to a more rural, or at least far from metropolitan, setting. Children of the Stones borrows liberally from all of them: the pagan themes, masks and morris dancing from The Wicker Man; its rituals and chanting and supernatural mystery from Nigel Kneale's film, The Witches, for Hammer; and the sinister newspeak greetings shared by the community insiders ("Happy day!") from The Prisoner ("Be seeing you!"). Children of the Stones, however, was made for children's television, anticipating the pre-tea time strangeness of The Tomorrow People.

Like The Tomorrow People, one of the most extraordinary things about Children of the Stones is its music, only in this case achieved without the aid of Delia Derbyshire's VCS-3 synthesizer. Producer, Peter Graham Scott recalls hearing a piece by Penderecki on the radio while driving to the show's location in Avebury and being so inspired to suggest to composer Sidney Sager that he try something similar. Sager agreed to the use of a choir, only insisting upon adding the solo soprano voice which completes the haunting opening theme. The theme was sung by The Ambrosian Singers, started by British early music specialist Denis Stevens and famed for their pop collaborations (including the intro to 'Inside' by Stiltskin) and light music collections. It is based around the acoustic (or Lydian dominant) scale, favoured by Bartok and Franz Liszt for its tonal uncertainty.

Based on the results, the piece by Penderecki may well have been his Canticum Canticorum Salomonis (1970-73). The music shares with Penderecki's great choral work more than just its unusual technical effects - whispering, groaning, murmuring, wailing - also its post-Second Viennese School melodic leaps and cross-wise motion. We hear shades of Berg and Berio, but also Philip Glass and Meredith Monk. It's sweeter than Penderecki, warmer and more repetitive. Nonetheless, the disjuncture between the happy smiling faces of the supplicants and the eerie, strangely weightless dissonance of their chant makes up a large part of what is so uncanny about this most singular of programmes.

"When Bill Cosby chastises you, you forget that you're grown."

One of the best bits in Eddie Murphy's Raw is a skit early on in which Murphy recounts being chastised on the telephone by Bill Cosby for using so much foul language doing stand-up. Afterwards Murphy calls Richard Pryor, "And Richard was like, 'Tell Bill Cosby to suck my dick!'" The way he gets, just perfectly the vocal mannerisms of Cosby, and especially Pryor, betrays hours spent studying their records as a child. The mimicry is all in the voice - he doesn't really get them physically. It's a little like what Simon Reynolds is talking about in The Guardian - a portrait of the artist as a consumer. A similar thing happens towards the end of Woody Allen's much-maligned homage to the Hollywood musical, Everyone says I love you (the title itself is a homage to the Marx Brothers). Interestingly, it's all set up by the music: a scene before features an instrumental snatch of 'You brought a new kind of love to me', the song each of the three Marx Brothers sing in order to impersonate Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business, next a big musical set-piece opens with a couple of dozen dancers, all dressed as Groucho, singing 'Hooray for Captain Spaulding' (from Animal Crackers) in French. Then we have Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, talking intimately with Groucho disguises on, in the midst of a party where everyone has a Groucho mask. The dialogue itself is very Woody Allen but just a few times Woody throws in a few smirks and raised eyebrows that are just perfectly Groucho, betraying exactly the same obsessive watching and re-watching of old Marx Brothers films as Eddie Murphy with his Richard Pryor records. Curiously, when a comic pays his respects to another comic, he borrows the style and mannerisms (form) but not the actual gags (content), whereas a band will tend to cover another band's song (content) but will be expected to do so in there own style (form). Of course, there is a certain taboo amongst stand-ups around 'stealing' another comic's material and doing impressions is a common feature in comedy routines, whereas musicians are expected to develop their own style, their own 'voice', but playing covers is accepted as educative. However, what happens in a hypothetical situation in which Eddie Murphy is doing an impression of Bill Cosby chastising him for using swear words in his act, and as Cosby chastises Murphy he starts to impersonate him, so we have Murphy impersonating Cosby impersonating Murphy. Or what if the specific bit of Murphy's act that Cosby has a problem with is the bit where he does an impression of Bill Cosby, so we end up with Murphy doing an impression of Cosby doing an impression of Murphy doing an impression of Cosby ad infinitum. We find ourselves back in the territory of Douglas Hofstadter's 'strange loops'. How might this work in music? Already, with Allo Darlin', we have a kind of meta-music, a music with other music nested within it. If I (or, even better, Johnny Cash) were to then cover 'Heart Beat Chilli' with its reference to 'I Walk the Line', then we reach a kind of meta-meta-level, but still not the kind of tangled hierarchies we find in Gödel, Escher, Bach. 

These kinds of Epimenidean structures turn up a lot in marxism - Vladimir Tatlin's Escher-like Monument to the Third International springs immediately to mind. Or take Zizek's analysis of the relationship between politics and economics (in In Defense of Lost Causes), such that politics is determined in the last instance by the economy, but by an economy which is itself a political-economy, an economics imbedded in, and imbued with, politics. Of course, Zizek delights in seeming paradoxes like this, but it is interesting to see these kind of self-referential loops turn up even in the critics of marxism. Doesn't Simone Weil's image, for her critique of the logic of proletarian auto-liberation, of a horse riding itself, recall somewhat Escher pictures such as 'Drawing Hands'?

"I am the BOSS. I am all around you."

Dr Who - The Green Death

I remember distinctly seeing this episode as a repeat on BBC2 as an adolescent. I wonder what it was about this particular episode that stuck in my mind; was it the political conflict between environmentalists, coal miners, and a multi-national petro-chemical corporation, the combination of Dudley Simpson's eerie pitched percussion and Dick Mills's electronic screams, or was it the Cronenbergian body horror of the strange maggot creatures lurking down the mine that so piqued the interest of my pubescent mind?

This story, from what we might call the 'golden age' of Dr Who (roughly speaking, season six to season fifteen) is also notable for the use of the sonic screwdriver as a kind of sonic weapon to temporarily paralyse the maggots; a believable love story between Jo Grant and Professor Jones (not to mention more than a twinge of jealousy from the Doctor - albeit the resigned jealousy of an old rake who knows there will always be more fish in the sea); a computer that enjoys humming Beethoven and Wagner to itself and paraphrasing Oscar Wilde; and the Doctor's attempt to fox said computer with one of Douglas Hofstadter's 'Strange Loops':

"The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false."

In Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter uses these self-referential loops, common to both the drawings of M.C. Escher and the canons and fugues of J.S. Bach, to explain the emergence of self-consciousness in an apparently rigidly deterministic system such as the human brain, or that of a computer.

The other nice thing about this 'golden age' period is the gradual introduction of a whole host of semi-regular characters, beyond the Doctor's immediate assistant(s), who pop up from time to time: not just Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton, and Captain Mike Yates, but also The Master and the sinister High Council of the time lords.