'THE MYTHIC METHOD: CLASSICISM IN BRITISH ART 1920-50'

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

(Onward with those art exhibitions reviewed after they close)

“Futurism and Vorticism have all gone under and we are in the full swing of a Classical revolution.”

- The Sunday Telegraph, 1919

The Classical Comeback

Which is more delightfully absurd? Going to the Sunday Telegraph to check what's the latest thing in Modernism? Or finding them to be on the money? Because artists who had been at the very cutting edge of Modernism one day shifted gear and came to embrace those cold marbles of Classicism. At the very same time that commercial art used it's solid-seeming reassurances to flog stuff.

Modernist Classicism - how did that ever happen? It sounds such an oxymoron. After all the very stuff the Impressionists had railed against had been quite literally wrapped up in Classicism. Why should figures in paintings pose around in togas, when they don't do any of that in the street? It's no coincidence that this antipathy was taken the furthest by the Futurists, who were based in Italy – centre of both Roman Classicism and the Renaissance. Who didn't want to transcend it so much as bin it. They'd look at all those noble-looking statues and column-fronted buildings and ask if anyone intended cleaning up around here. So vehement could they get that their manifesto was arguably one of their most accomplished artworks. Just taste some...

“It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours… we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards… Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!”

And even if their actions did not quite live up to their incendiary manifestos, at least not as far as taking up pickaxes went, how did we get from there to yesterday's news becoming the latest thing? Of course the immediate spanner in the great bus of progress was the Great War. After it's carnage, to misquote Othello, Modernism seemed to have loved the machine age not wisely but too well. War Memorials didn’t just affect a respectful tone, they often stripped their subject from all references to Modernity. The classically proportioned figure was held at odds to the machine guns and barbed wire which blasted and tore apart the actual human body.

But even granted that, how did this last till 1950? Because of course it reflected a wider impulse, of which the immediate post-war mood was just the spark. One which wasn't oxymoronic at all. The past is like the proverbial river, it may seem to occupy an identical space but you soon discover you can’t jump into the same past twice. And they had never been reacting against Classicism so much as an earlier Neo-Classicism, from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. This was not your parent's past.

Through this lens Classicism was, or seemed to be, the setting of the aesthetic rules we now live by. Hence Escher’s poker-faced joy in “mocking our unwavering certainties”, appearing to adhere to Classicism’s rules while breaking them. Hence any distinction between Classicism and the Renaissance is considered as essentially trivial, as both are concerned with trying to enforce an arbitrary geometry on the world. The world was held to be measurable and classifiable. You learnt to be a surgeon or a builder by apprenticing yourself to the masters and learning the pre-set rules, and you learnt to be an artist the same way.

Is any of this actually true? Perhaps to some extent. But that’s not really the question. It just needed to be true enough to sound credible. Art movements are forever trying to paint their predecessors as a flat stereotype, the easier to bounce off them. Almost without fail, each successive Modernist movement would pull this trick on their forebearers.

This show's an effective sequel to the Pallant House's 'Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War' exhibition, with many artists straddling the two. But there throwing the lens over on a specifically British response had seemed a smart piece of focusing. The jury is more out over how well things work here. There's little doubt that, like Classicism before it, Neo-Classicism was essentially a continental import. So to isolate it's British element might seem wrenching.

On the other hand, we were on precisely the opposite end of things to the Futurists. We have little genuinely Classical art and architecture of our own, even when things are stretched to the Renaissance. Of course we had amassed huge collections of the stuff, in the British Museum and other places, the plunder of empire. But that was the equivalent of best china, not for use but display. In our daily lives we did not move among the remains of Classicism, as people did in Italy or Greece. And that exacerbates an effect seen across Neo-Classicism...

To see this at work, look at the way John Armstrong's lithograph 'Pheidippides 490 BC (Greek Messenger)' (1935, above) reproduces a version of the Classical figures from a Greek urn. But with them come the shape of the urn. In fact the suggested curve of the urn is used to enhance the perspective, pushing the messenger ahead of the other figures.

Classicism is not just being cited but self-consciously referenced, a frame within a frame. The Victorians saw the Classical world as composed of distant relations, who had clearly intended us to inherit their fortune, even if no actual will was to be found. While Modernism essentially brought the distance back. It's no longer being assumed Classicism was explicable to us, let alone assimilable into our culture. Anything we say about it becomes by nature a commentary.

And this distances us from one particular use of Classicism in parts of the continent, which sought to deny that element of framing. Overall, there are not a great deal of positive things to say about Fascism. But it was very handy in demonstrating Classicism as pastiche. If companies invoked the reassuring, ordered world of Classicism the better to sell their products, then so did the goose steppers.

Which they pretty much had to. Their ideology was more a fever dream of the Twentieth century than a coherent political position, an incoherent jumble of often contradictory concepts held together only by the formal fetishisation of unity. In his early days, Mussolini had flirted with the Futurists. But he soon decided “established 1922” was not much of a sales pitch to be using in the Twenties, so claimed to be based on an original idea by the Roman Empire. Then, particularly once in power, Fascism could indulge it’s taste for a kind of Ratners Blinging Classicism. It's marbled drapery was not just decoration but a necessity, to figleaf their unendowedness.

The Great Generation Gap

And this framing evident in Armstrong, though rarely absent, could manifest in different ways. Before we've even entered the first room, the show is quoting TS Eliot's 1923 essay on Joyce's 'Ulysses'. It's “parallel between antiquity and the uncertain present” turns then and now into a set of antonyms - the great and the small, the epic and the ordinary.

Perhaps even the eternal and the transient. In Ithell Colquhoun's 'The Judgement of Paris' (1930, above) Paris is not only depicted in duller colours than the radiant Goddesses, he's pushed so far in the foreground he's virtually in the audience with us. Despite his ostensible 'judging' role he looks meekly down as the mighty Goddesses gaze up. Mortal even in the myth, Paris is made one of us. The distinction isn't between then and now so much as them and us.

Similarly 'Arcadia' (1928/9) by Edward Burra (an old favourite of ours here at Lucid Frenzy) depicts a garden party of bright young things. The composition places their jumble of gesticulating figures below more composed (pun intended) classical statues. Some of the party sport classical-themed fancy dress, which just accentuates the difference.

At times, the juxtapositions can become so pronounced we're essentially looking at collage. In Meredith Frampton's 'Still Life' (1932, above) the bust head with the laurel crown is not, as we might expect, at the top of the frame but displaced by flowers. (With the garland-like crown comparing the two.) A painting focusing on a vase of flowers seems more of an Impressionist thing to do, so we might want to read the work as Modernism displacing Classicism.

Yet the composition is split in half, into classical and nature sides. And yet the unspooling measuring tape is allowed to unfurl itself across that split. Measuring tape itself is modern. But the act of measuring is often associated with Classical rules of proportion. (In Hans Feiburch's advertising gouache 'Architects Prefer Shell', 1933, a modern measuring rod is placed alongside some compasses.) Those “and yets”... ultimately, they're the point. That the relationship between the Classical and the modern world is not a set thing, but ever-shifting.

In others, it's hard to tell the joins and that's the point. Madame Yevonde's 'Crisis' (1939, above) sharply combines juxtaposition with verisimilitude. The gas masked bust relies not on our expectation that we see busts in art, but that we encounter them in the real world. Had this been a painting not a photo, it would have much less impact.

But conversely, other works can look to a synthesis. Dod Proctor's 'Early Morning' (1927, above) has not just modern furniture. Even without the title, the lighting would pin it to a time of day. (We know precisely where the sunlight falls from, even if it's not shown.) Yet the show is right to say it also has a “sculptural quality”. This is not just it's stillness. There's the pallid colours. Classicism is associated with whiteness, however wrongly.

And more importantly, as Charlotte Higgins commented in the Guardian, “the white sheets and nightgown that Procter has arranged around her model strongly recall the pale chilliness of antique sculpture.” Classical sculpture would try to capture the momentary folds of drapery but then inevitably freeze them in stone, a feeling evoked here. Similarly, Hans Feurbach's 'Narcissus' (1946, below) is a virtuous combination of the solidity of statuary and the fluidity of oil.

While William Roberts' 'Judgement of Paris' (1933) is less bothered with Classical forms than by universalising the myth. With the absence of architecture and the figures nude or near-nude, we have no handholds which might pinpoint it to an era. If anything, the multi-racial figures would suggest to us modern times. (Wrongly, but then it's the image of Classicism which counts here.) And, like Joyce, he trivialises. His naïve, flat-footed tubular anatomies, so at odds to the Classical rules of proportion, suggest some sort of myth diorama, staged with toy figures who have lost their clothes. (And the way Roberts' take on the myth can be so utterly unlike Colquhoun's shows in itself how many pasts there were to pick from.)

Generally the sculpture in this show, unlike the sculpture-derived painting, is a weak point. Jumping between media acts against the merely imitative, and pushes somewhere new. Until that is, we reach Henry Moore. He really attacked the problem from the other end, collapsing the difference between Classical and primitive forms and arriving at something which does suggest at the eternal. (See 'Reclining Figure', above.) 

In my earlier piece on Moore I remarked on the centrality of his Shelter drawings, and how rooted they seemed in Grecian Hades. Here he's quoted: “Until my Shelter drawings I never seemed to feel free... to mix the Mediterranean approach comfortably with my interest in the more elementary concept of archaic and primitive people.”

Dissembling Arcadia

But let's jump to another corner of the board. Here we might see Classicism not through Joyce but Shelley, as something inherently Ozymandian. Here Classicism does not imply order or continuity but rupture and upheaval. It was a warning against hubris, a reminder empires fall. For if even the Romans didn’t last, why should we? (It's perhaps analogous to the way in music the Nineties were so often said to be the Sixties upside down, presenting not the view from Woodstock looking forward but Altamont looking back.)

Classicism is strongly associated with the cult of the body, like a Charles Atlas ad in reverse where it's the 'before' figure we should aim to be like. So in Michael Ayrton's 'Orpheus', his ravaged form could not be more at odds with the idealised anatomies of old. The myth of Orpheus incorporates anthropomorphism, his lyre playing said to be so beguiling it could stir the trees and rocks to dance. Here the opposite has happened, the landscape he’s in as ravaged as he is. In fact there’s little differentiation between them. The same ghostly grey hues are used for both, a touch of off-red on his lips is the only hint of colour. While the straggly bare trees are echoed in the veins on his chest.

After being unable to rescue Eurydice from death, a distraught figure wandered the earth. And the story’s ending is here associated with the end of Classicism itself, as if he’s exiled past his time and it’s the barren modern world which batters him.

Furthermore, it's a truism that we rarely see intact examples of Classicism. The broken pieces of pot, the limbless statue, the incomplete frieze… what's Classical comes down to us in a battered box with pieces missing. Our knowledge of it is a combination of assemblage and guesswork. Art can be used to overcome that, to reassemble Arcadia, take us back to when temples were intact. Or, conversely...

John Armstrong's 'The Three Orders of Architecture' (1927, above) presents this fragmentary, collage view of Classicism. Two different column caps are conjoined, while we only see pieces of the main figure, the rest suggested in white outline. And of course we are used to seeing Classical statuary in just this incomplete state, in the more iconic cases to the point where to now see it intact would be jarring. It's a visual metaphor for our incomplete understanding of the past. But it should also be seen in combination with other Armstrong works.

His 'Pro Patria' (1938, above) is more a companion piece to his ruin works from the earlier 'British Artists and the Spanish Civil War' show. There's the same jagged shards of what once were houses, wallpaper still attached. But this time he incorporates Classical motifs, such as the fractured statue face, and quite modern elements – such as the two peeling posters which shout at each other from opposite walls.

“Pro Patria” (“for the fatherland”) was a phrase from Horace turned into a slogan by Mussolini. It could be read as a promise that, like the Rome Mussolini modelled himself on, fascism would fall. But there is also something more sweeping and simultaneously beguiling to it. Is this post-attack or post-apocalypse? The green peeling paintwork on the right looks almost like foliage, as though this is the new nature, our new normal.

(After the earlier exhibition unearthed Armstrong, he was noticed by numerous well-informed critics. (And by me.) We're now told he was part of a mini-movement, the Tempera Revival.)

Frank Runacres' 'Untitled (Ruin)' (1939, above) perhaps goes further in turning bomb wreckage into collage. Ironically, amongst the damage, one figure is shown holding up entabulature. The pure geometrical forms – a sphere, a wheel, a pyramid – serve to emphasise what a jumble everything has been reduced to. The classical sculptures are missing limbs, but of course we have no way of knowing whether that's from the blast or they have just come down to us that way. The sky is deep storm-grey, though the scene is painted as if brightly lit. The show refers to this as “the destruction of culture through war”.

Notably, both these works were not journalism but heralds of war. JG Ballard, who experienced World War Two as a child, perhaps made one of the most important statements about Modernism when he said “war is surreal”. If Ruancres' image is a mite too arranged to look like an actual scene, it's perfectly possible a museum or private collection could have been bombed. And being based in a credible event grants it credibility.

It is slightly strange the show focuses on Eliot's essay on Joyce and not his own 'The Waste Land' (1922), despite it being widely seen as a foundation stone of Modernist poetry. In it Eliot quotes from Classical sources such as Homer and Ovid, and the second-hand Classicism of for example Shakespeare's plays. And notably this was another war work, though this time a reaction to the First World War.

Making Myth Into Psychology

Whether people from Classical eras believed in their myths with earnest literalism is one thing. (With what evidence we have pointing against a neat answer.) But, even when they focused on the exploits of individual heroes, they were always social stories with a collective message. Yet we've since seen the parallel rise of psychology and art more concerned with mental landscapes. Joyce's 'Ulysses' bases itself on 'The Odyssey' to emphasise the contrast, as art went from a macro to a micro focus - from the mytho-historic or even cosmogenic to a peep inside a single mind. In fact the show's post-Freudian title would seem to stem from this.

Glyn Philpott summed up the paradox: “For me the more personal has been my desire to create some expression of my own emotional or spiritual experience, the more readily have I accepted the aid of a theme drawn from myth and legend.”

It's only been three times already, let's turn to John Armstrong again. He didn't consider himself a Surrealist, but take a look at 'The Labyrinth' (1927, above). Objects as symbols and figures as cyphers, situated inside a bizarre architectural space strewn with apertures. The way the three figures are in the same pallid off-white, giving the walls and ruddy ground the most vivid colours, suggests the maze is a frame holding the figure together rather than dividing them. Hollywood's quasi-classical epics were always boasting of a cast of thousands. But perhaps this has a cast of one. The three figures are merely elements of a single psyche.

If we’re going for psychological explanations for a Surrealist work, Freud would seem an obvious fit. Wikipedia summarises his tripartite mental model: “the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.” And here we have three figures - the bullish brute id placed dead centre (the Minotaur), the advancing ego seeking dominance (Theseus), and the directing super-ego (Ariadne). (The plan, let’s remember, had been Ariadne’s.)

Yet before we close the case let’s note a few more things. Ariadne’s thread, a detail from the myth most remember, is absent. And without it’s linking device the figures look isolated. Both Ariadne and Theseus seem to look out of the frame. Pushed to the edge of the composition, it’s unclear whether Theseus is striding boldly forwards or simply sloping off. Besides which, Freud associated the super-ego with… surprise, surprise… the authority of the Father.

Psychological explanations of myth often assume it’s role is inherently instructive and even curative, about the symbolic restoration of balance. In this way they occupy the insidiously slippery slope where Jungism degenerates into New Age mush. Yet myth is more often an explanation for why things don’t work than why they do, and the Theseus story – with it’s litany of betrayals and failures, and long line of avoidable deaths – is a classic example.

The Minotaur was the progeny of Minos’ wife and a bull, shamefully consigned to the labyrinth. Traditionally he was depicted as a symbiote, half man half bull. Armstrong makes him more of a fusion, animal body yet humanised (if horned) face. And the unsocialised child is often likened to an animal. Perhaps the male figure is just that, not Theseus but simply standing for ‘the male’. In which case he could as equally stand for Minos, the father keen to finally rid himself of his troublesome offspring. It’s the Oedipus myth the other way up.

While, even in the original myth, Theseus breaks his promise to Ariadne and abandons her. In times past the labyrinth was not just a puzzle to be solved but a sort of spiritual journey akin to pilgrimage; you could pass through it, while trapping those plaguing evil spirits within it. But the opposite happens here. ’The Labyrinth’ is a portrait of a fractured mental model, three pieces which must be made to fit together but which cannot.

Looking backwards to go forward... This was the way Modernism had pretty much always seen primitive or folk art. The way to not become blocked by an immediate obstacle was to take a step back in the hope of leapfrogging over it. Ultimately, it’s Armstrong’s incomplete Classical statue which is the signature image. Classicism may first have been sought out for it’s reassuring orderedness. But it remained as a repository of imagery, as pictures already scalpeled and hence collage-ready. It presented images which looked like they should have been unifying but simply weren’t.

Coming soon! More art exhibitions reviewed after they've closed...

'PROMETHEUS' AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Not at all a proper review of 'Prometheus', but something of a follow-up to this

Prior to 'Prometheus', Ridley Scott showed little interest in expanding on films already in the can. Most famously, his director's cut of 'Blade Runner' did actually cut - it took more stuff out than it added, and came in at a shorter running time. For his “director's cut” of 'Alien' (an ironic term considering the idea was all but forced on him) he added sequences fans had clamoured to see, but insisted on balancing them out by removing other scenes. He has shown little interest in creating a credible origin story of, or even life cycle for, the Alien. The 'cocoon' scene, which went some way towards establishing that, was something he'd originally unceremoniously cut.

Me, I'd have done the same. If I wanted to put back a cut scene, I'd have included the confrontation between Lambert and Ripley. The 'quarantine' scene seems a little consequence-less without it. More about the Alien? It's a killer monster in an enclosed space. That's enough, isn't it? It should stay unknown. Isn't that more scary?

Then one day he upped and said “what no one's done is simply gone back to re-visit 'what was it?' No one's ever said 'who's the space jockey?' He wasn't an Alien. What was that battleship? Is it a battleship? Is it an aircraft carrier? Is it a bio-mechanoid weapon carrier?...Why did it land? Did it crash-land, or did it settle there because it had engine trouble?...And how long ago?“

...questions people weren't asking because anyone who cared thought they already knew, because it was in O'Bannon and Shusett's original script. That ship was just a prior victim to the Nostromo, who landed or crashed on the planet to be overrun by Aliens. They're basically there to have a dead figure at a giant gun, showing even such advanced weapons couldn't protect them. They're incidental characters, one big warning sign. It was cut out of the final version, most likely to keep up the pace but also because no-one was likely to care where they came from. A skeleton that falls out of a closet, that doesn't need its autobiography written. (The real unanswered question might be how the Company knew about all the Alien in advance, if all this was happening out in deep space. But that one seems to be staying unasked.)

But the question gets asked anyway. Then sidelined. For a film fixated on mutation shows sign of mutation itself. Things shift around so much we even shift planet. We encounter a different derelict spaceship, with a different Space Jockey at the helm.

'Prometheus' is always referencing 'Alien', recycling its furniture. Yet (as we've seen) 'Alien' was significant chiefly for its look. And that so-copied look is so changed here it's like a yang has been built to accompany its yin. Spaceships are now big, white and gleaming clean, the alien planet is mostly seen in daylight. It looks, it cannot be denied, absolutely fantastic. While everyone else has been copying 'Alien', Scott comes up with something new. But it's also like one of those disconcerting dreams, where triggers are telling you that you're back in your old primary school, but everything actually looks entirely different.

And it's not just the look that gets yanged. Unlike 'Alien', the crew are a team of experts carefully assembled for this mission. (Pretty useless experts who make an even worse fist of it than the working stiffs of earlier, but never mind that.) Shaw, unlike Ripley, is a heroine on a quest. The film is full of the 'cosmic wonder' that made up the other half of Seventies SF, such as '2001' - the stuff that 'Alien' seemed in such opposition to. In fact it's Shaw's shadow, the mission director Meredith Vickers who's most Ripley-like. (Seemingly deliberately, for there's an echo of the originals' quarantine scene.) The difference is there, bold as brass, in the names of the ships. Nostromo, from Conrad, is existential, suggesting hearts of darkness. Prometheus, from Greek mythology, suggests at cosmic knowledge. (Albeit coming at something of a price.)

Many people have commented that this film sets out to answer a question no-one really asked, then gets sidetracked by a new set of questions, then fails to answer them either. In the Village Voice, Nick Pinkerton called it “prone to shallow ponderousness.”

But, counter to this rather damning verdict, Cavalorn has come up with an interpretation. It's imaginative and worth reading of itself, so I'll give it the barest summary here. It's basically the Von Daniken thing of grafting cosmic causes onto Earth mythology. Just like the King should symbolically die for the perpetuation of his people, so these Engineers have a cult of self-sacrifice and have sacrificed themselves (you know, a bit) to give us life. They're the antithesis of the bestial Aliens, who kill to survive.

(Which actually makes the plot line strangely similar to 'Aliens vs. Predator', just with Engineers substituted for Predators and another planet for Antarctica. One film awaited by fans, as the master director finally returns to his creation. The other damned by fans, seen as a sequel too far, as franchises got cross-bred to produce bastards. But never mind that...)

Clearly we have done something quite transgressive to get our elders and betters so all riled up. Well it could be pretty much any of the things we've done, take your pick. We've held parties while they were out, fought wars, screwed the ozone layer, litter-louted our way across the planet. Except this theory goes in for something specific. We killed Jesus. Jesus was their emissary, their supply teacher sent to bring order. And we killed him.

We know this is true because Ridley Scott said so. (Scott was asked if he'd considered making any direct references to Jesus and said he thought that “too on the nose.”)

All clear? Jesus was a spaceman. We're all very naughty boys and girls.

Except there's an alternate theory which works just as well. This superior race, why would we be anything more to them than an experiment? Anger? We'd be lucky to rouse anything more than mild disappointment? We're just something to set up and observe, then when you're finished rinse out the petri dish and start again.

And we know this to be true because... you guessed it... because Ridley Scott said so:

“Maybe there was something half a billion years ago which was a civilisation equal to ours? ...could we have existed before and if we did, who or what destroyed it? But also, who created us and who kicked it all off again?”

In other words, this isn't the first time the petri dish has been rinsed out. It's just the first time it's happened to us.

...which puts an interesting spin on things. Vickers says at one point “a king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.” The film's villain, Peter Weyland, this time's face of the faceless Company, plots to resist this and of course fails. All things have their time, whether individuals or species. Maybe the Engineers, while seeing themselves as keepers of our time, imagine themselves as above and immune. Yet they find themselves susceptible to their own rules, and come to the same fate. On what is technically known as 'an irony', their own creations in their weapons lab rise up to finish them off. (The Space Jesusers, meanwhile, don't have much of an explanation for what actually bumps off the cosmically superior, all-wise Engineers.)

It's a generalisation, but still a helpful one, to claim American SF tends to the optimistic and British SF to the pessimistic. In for example 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' (1951) the alien visitor is essentially Jesus, accompanied by a robot Archangel. While in for example 'Quatermass and the Pit', (1958) the aliens are quite explicitly devils. (Or more accurately our folk devils are a kind of race memory of aliens. Same difference.) Out of the Alien sequels, 'Alien 3' was dubbed “nihilistic” and fared badly in the US, but was more popular abroad. (Yet let's not make this too schematic. This video rant suggests the opposition is all down to Atlantic differences. But in his bio Cavalorn mentions owning a bookshop in Manchester...)

An American movie with a British director, that could maybe go either way. Last time round it took the pessimistic route, so maybe now that'll get yanged. Or, more interestingly, perhaps it'll take both ways at once. Perhaps what's intended is some SF version of 'The Innocents', like one of those drawings which makes up a face whichever way up you hold it. Which would be a cool idea. Ambiguity, after all, is what keeps art alive, while certainty damns it into being done with.

Unfortunately then, it actually can't be read either way. It's not two drawings in one, it's no drawings in one. Whichever direction you choose, you soon run into walls. Let's go through just a couple...

Of course it's something of a category error to fault movies for employing movie logic. In movie job interviews you pass by telling the interviewer imploringly “I need this”, not by spelling things right on your CV. You win movie wars by getting very cross and running shouting into a hail of bullets, never mind that training. If you take an instant dislike to a new movie co-worker, you will end up shagging them within the next thirty minutes. It's a different country. They do things differently there.

So maybe we should cut movie DNA some slack. If it in no way conforms to the rules of our-world DNA, then just imagine a subliminal disclaimer coming up on the screen, explaining that it differs from our DNA in any way favoured by the script.

But a movie Jesus? Okay they're talking about the mythologised Jesus of Jungian archetypes and bad New Age self-help books, and that “all-myths-correlate” claptrap the likes of Christian Vogler likes to come out with. But they're still talking about Jesus, they still want that cultural weight the Christian Jesus has.

And while I'm not the most knowledgeable person about Christianity, I still remember my school hymns. One of which went “he died to save us all.” Jesus comes here knowing he has to die. When his disciples resist his arrest, he tells them to stand down. He sacrifices himself to atone for our sins. It says so on the page. Crucifixion isn't even part of the plan, it is the fershluggin' plan! So how come Jesus' space buddies get so all-fired cross over a plan that worked?

It's like Kurt Vonnegut's take on the Bible, that poor plot construction led to its actual message being “before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.” If you don't believe in it, fair enough. Neither do I. But don't then try to bend its cultural weight. Why not have a kick-ass gun-totin' Jesus? Or a corporate-head plotting-Earth-acquisition Jesus?

And besides, even if you can buy Space Jesus as Movie Jesus, isn't the whole schtick of the Engineers supposed to be self-sacrifice? Wouldn't laying yourself down seem a noble mission? And, with their vast superiority over us, wouldn't they at least guess it might be coming?

Meanwhile, in a more narrative problem, the Space Jesus theorists have a hard time explaining the star maps. Described in the film as “an invitation”, they seem planted to draw us into visiting the planet. Why bother with all that, especially when its not even the Engineers' home planet, if their plan is for them to visit us and bump us off? Isn't that like having an air drop of escape routes before you bomb a town?

Whereas the petri dish theory explains this quite well. In figuring out the star maps and developing the technology to take us there, we're like the mouse in the maze triggering the electric shock. We effectively press our own delete key. We're signalling the experiment's developed to its conclusion, and the petri dish can be rinsed out again.

It just has trouble explaining so much other stuff, that's all. The film starts with an Engineer, seemingly sacrificing himself to seed life on Earth. Later, the Space Jockey seems angered by our presence. Neither of which seems the reactions of white coated guys, wondering how the mice got out of their cage, hoping clearing this up doesn't delay lunch. More like a Dad whose found out the teens borrowed the car without asking, then crashed it into the cop shop.

(The Space Jesus theory does, however, have the advantage of explaining why the film is so elliptical and incomplete. Obviously the core of it has been cut out to avoid controversy, and allow the film to play in mid America!)

Moreover, both these explanations rely not on extrapolation rather than imagination. There is more making up of stuff than there is watching the film. Take that black goo, where's that at? First it creates human life, then later it mutates it into something else? Begetter or killer, where is it at? Cavalorn has an answer, it's judgement goo:

“the black slime... evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'... The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it.”

Which is an imaginative and intriguing idea. It's just a shame it wasn't included in the film 'Prometheus'. It might have fitted quite nicely there. As it is, the black goo of the film is just magic pixie dust, obliging the script with whatever is required of it.

What to do when nothing fits? The two most likely answers are i) argue about it over blog posts like this, without getting anywhere, or ii) wait for the sequel. For in the final minutes we're tipped off there may be a sequel which may even explain some of this.

As said previously, what in many ways made 'Alien' such a great film was that it reflected its era. And 'Prometheus' does the same thing, only in a slightly different way.

Once upon a time films were things that were shown in cinemas, at fixed times advertised in the local press. They were enclosed events. You'd see them, maybe talk about them in the pub afterwards and go home. Seeing a film now is never a done task.

This film, for example, is not an event in itself but one more step in an ongoing marketing campaign. Yes it came after the teasers, the trailers and the viral ads. But it comes before the commentaries, the director's cut, the multi-DVD release and the inevitable sequel. In fact, once we've paid our ticket money what's then shown to us virtually is a teaser for the sequel. Which, if made, will in itself become a teaser for the next sequel, and so on.

In 'Alien' there's an alien on a spaceship. The crew have to get rid of it before it does them in. Which they finally manage, and then the credits roll. In 'Prometheus'... well, what did bloody happen? It's not allusive or creatively ambiguous, it's frustratingly incomplete. And we still don't even know the answer to very question which brought us here, how that Space Jockey, the first one, got there, Maybe they're saving that up for the third instalment.

But then what did you ever expect?

The more you think about this film, the less you find in it. I suspect writing about it here has lowered it in my estimations. You're really just supposed to go “whoo... far out space stuff,” and any other response is a category error. You're better off treating it like a pop star interview in the music press, lots of sharp-sounding stuff thrown out, which is actually just froth and sound-bites. It can't stand up to any examination but, you know, it has great cheekbones.

THREE TODAY!!!

Yes, today's the day that the Lucid Frenzy blog celebrates its third birthday! (This may well be the first time this blog has ever brought in something on time...) Expect more of the usual sort of thing to come. But for today here’s some links...

1. Somebody has reviewed ‘Lucid Frenzy’!

Well, sort of... I have sometimes produced paper zine versions of old items, which I’ve given away to people I’ve bumped into at at the London Zine Symposium. During this haphazard prcoess, 365 Zines A Year was handed one and wrote about it...

2. My Flickr page

...updated only yesterday with more pictures of London, graffiti and the Sussex Downs.

3. My Share My Playlists page

...http://sharemyplaylists.com/members/lucid-frenzy/playlists>... found here. With playlists devoted to folk, punk, post punk, hardcore, psychedelic, kosmische and the human voice (among others)

4. K-Punk on ’Inception’

Only recently, I reviewed the film ’Inception’ through the prism of Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk’s) recent treatise ’Capitalist Realism.’ Click here for what the man himself had to say about the film...

5. K-Punk Playlist: The Metaphysics of Crackle

I’m actually listening to this playlist right now! My only possible complaint would be that it’s so well mixed I don’t tend to listen to it as a series of individual tracks, but a whole, so I’ve still no idea who any of the acts are...

6. Andrew Rilstone on Joseph Campbell

Regular readers (should any exist) will have seen me link to Andrew’s stuff before. This reaction to Joseph Campbell is sprawling and multiform rather than concise and incisive, but I’d like to think that’s a description rather than a criticism. And he does have his incisive moments...

”Campbell thinks that symbols mean what they mean, and there's an end to it. All stories have a meaning, and it's our job to learn the language or crack the code or remove the mask so the One Truth is revealed.

I think that this is a silly, reductive, limiting way of reading stories.”

(Believe it or not, and I didn’t, but it is in part a reaction to something I wrote.)

It starts here, though there are several parts.

Normal service should not be assumed...

JOSEPH CAMPBELL DOESN’T NECESSARILY COME IN CANS

In a recent blog entry, Andrew Hickey tears into ‘comparative mythologist’ Joseph Campbell, for the negative and homogenising effect he’s had on genre fiction.

”If there is one person who I wish had never been born, it’s Joseph Campbell...

The concept of ‘the Hero’s Journey’ has done more to ruin fiction and popular culture than any other concept I can think of. What annoys me is that something that was intended as a *description* is instead increasingly being taken as a *prescription*.”

In short, Campbell to Andrew is the man who said the hero can have a thousand faces, but only one sodding story! This low level of esteem is commonly held in our circles. Andrew Rilstone, for example, has written of “the increasingly cancerous influence of Joesph Campbell”.

I would readily agree that there are many points where Campbell’s work can be criticised. But is it really him to blame every time you see a crap film? Hasn’t he just become a handy target, whereas really we know better?

In fact it’s in the gap between Andrew’s two comments above that I want to insert my two-penneth.

How did we get into this situation? Campbell is now inextricably caught up in the popular mind with Star Wars. It probably was George Lucas’ namedropping of his Hero With a Thousand Faces  that propelled him into the popular consciousness. Without this connection would they have made a popular TV series about him, The Power of Myth (even filmed on Lucas’ ranch) or brought out the accompanying (and refreshingly slim-line) book?

Yet Hero itself had actually been published back in ’48 and all his major works completed at least decade before Star Wars was released. Moreover, Campbell had been writing studies on myths and legends for those interested in history, culture or psychology. There’s no suggestion anywhere that any of it was intended as a practical guide for contemporary writers. When Lucas finally caught up with him and showed him the Star Wars films, he confessed to ignorance of them – for he rarely visited the cinema and didn’t own a TV.

But the real villain of the piece isn’t even Lucas - it’s Disney Exec Christopher Volger who wrote the 1992 ‘guide’ The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures For Writers, a book so appallingly autistic that burning would be too good for it.

Volger reduced Hero to the clod-hopping, meritocratic, evening-classes-for-all notion that it wasn’t even a guide but a manual. You just have to enroll in the course, read the set book with due diligence, follow the requisite sixteen steps and – hey presto! – your writing is mythic. That’s what it says on this here certificate, don’t it?

Volger made Campbell into cans, something saleable and consumable. It’s the difference between shamanic flight and a package holiday. It reminds me of the William Burroughs story Ah Pook Is Here about the wicked American capitalist who reads myths, but as if he were reading Moby Dick to know about whaling and having to skip all the bits about the white whale. If you wanted to make the mistake the other way up, you could read a recipe book then complain it was hard to relate to the characters. There’s no point wishing Christian Volger was never born because he already has been. But maybe there’s some way to fix the problem retrospectively...

For all their wooliness and New Age tendencies, the insight contained in Campbell’s works is that stories take on their own power. Any writer will tell you there’s some point where the story seems to surge ahead of him and write itself while he struggles to catch up. (Of course the operative word there is ‘”seems”. Stories are sentient life forms only in the worst of New Age mumbo jumbo.)

The point is that writing is a way of unlocking something, of accessing parts of your brain you didn’t know you had. The Surrealists fixated on automatic writing as a method of unleashing the subconscious. But in a sense all writing – at least all good writing – becomes automatic writing. As is said on www.jfc.org>the Joseph Campbell Foundation website:

“All myths are the creative products of the human psyche, artists are a culture’s mythmakers, and mythologies are creative manifestations of humankind’s universal needs.”

Of course the gormless literalists don’t even have the courage of their own convictions. They insist endlessly ‘all stories are one’. So if that’s the case, why do they even need this stupid manual in the first place? It’s like saying all roads lead to Rome, so I’d better bring a map. If they really believed what they say, wouldn’t anything they wrote take on that form, manual or not? Shouldn’t they even try to break from the mould, secure in the knowledge their story would reshape itself back into the one ideal form? Of course they would never do anything so edgy, so close to surrendering control! This is an essential part of colonising Campbell, that you can leave enough of a veneer to make your money-making seem somehow ‘spiritual.’

To re-iterate my main theme, the workaday hack writers don’t get it. So what else is new? You don’t judge a book by its slowest reader. The stupidest, klunkiest interpretation of something may well be the easiest one to get. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one. There’s a simpler reason for all the bad scripts out there. There’s bad writers.

PostScript: For those who haven’t yet had enough of this sort of thing, I posted some comments on Andrew’s blog about the relationship of Campbell to Structuralism. Given this description, I am not expecting an unseemly rush...