GAUGUIN: MAKER OF MYTH

A solo exhibition at the Tate Modern which... mumble, mumble... actually closed in mid-January. A very good reason for the lateness in posting this will come at the end of the piece.

“Your personality is completed by the antipathy that it generates”

-       Strindberg to Gauguin (1895)

The Artist and himself:

Gauguin is a Name, of course. Enough of a name that the Tate’s website advises tickets be purchased in advance. But, as ever, fame is the treasure which turns out to come with a curse upon it.

It could be argued that between them, Gauguin and his sometime compatriot Van Gogh embody the two main stereotypes of the modern artist – one the deranged visionary, the other the bohemian adventurer who defied all convention and sailed off out of bourgeois society.

Though Van Gogh is perhaps better known, if anything this is a worse problem for Gauguin – who very deliberately cultivated an image for himself. As Adrian Searle has argued: “he personifies the idea that the artist is as much an invention as the art itself”. To spend time dismantling this concoction feels like an exercise in the obvious. Yet at the same time it’s too deep-rooted, too inextricably interwoven with the art, to just ignore.

The show acknowledges this self-image, even starting with a room of self-portraits, ‘Identity and Self-Mythology.’ There’s so much variety in the seemingly simple format, as if he changed his identity as often and as freely as David Bowie would years later. (Virtually the only constant is Gallic moustache, a signifier like Mickey’s ears or Tin Tin’s tuft.)

But it also pulls the rug from under this myth through historicising Gauguin. Before Tahiti it was Brittany that he idealised as a haven of “the wild and primitive.” Yet this had actually just been opened up by the French railways, with tourist trips were marketed to the “pure but backward” land. He railed against the French colonial influence on Tahiti, yet also used it for the cultural links and mail routes which underpinned his career. It points out where the pure savages he paints have poses stolen from Classical works. (And as Julian Mills of the Tahitian Tourist Board pointed out in the Guardian, “when Gauguin was there, many Tahitians would have worn full western dress.”) In short, the primitive “other” he fetishised was simply a construct of contemporary Western society – not a window onto another world but an unshaven looking glass.

Of course the myth of the artist escaping stifling civilisation is inherently absurd. It’s like a man catching a disease and trying to slip it by running to where no-one else will have it – he will become a carrier of the contagion, not the other way around. (Not is that all that much of a metaphor. Linda Zuck reminds us of a few unfortunate truths,   “Gauguin was a syphilitic paedophile and a sex tourist.”)

At times it misses a trick. It’s notable, even after the dedicated first room, how many different self-portraits there are. (Presenting himself as, among others, Jesus and John the Baptist.) But there are few other male figures. And the women, even when he’s painting specific different women, are variations on a type. Gauguin, to Gauguin, is a multiplicity, while all women are One. (“Timeless figures rather than specific subjects.”)

Yet the show does something more important – it strikes the balance right. It titles itself with a dual meaning – both Gauguin’s self-mythologising and the general world of myth.  But from there it acknowledges this “shrewdly cultivated legend”, while focusing on the art. Gauguin was hugely influenced by place, to a degree which we jaded jet-travellers find hard to fathom. But his work was always more fable than documentary, and his never-quite-separable self-mythologising should be looked at the same way.

Never quite still:

While still living a bourgeois family life in Paris, and working by day as a stockbroker, Gauguin whiled away his weekends with still lives. I am not sure if I had seen a single one of these before this exhibition. These more conventionally domestic scenes might appear inessential, what would be juvenalia were he not painting them up to his late Twenties. We have after all learnt to despise the cosy still life, dismiss it as the antithesis of Modernism, an attempt to wall art off from social change inside a static enclosure.

Yet they have the unsettling quality of never being quite still. We never seem to be seeing all there is to see. As if the focus was somehow askew, figures hover in the background, often looking predatory if not demonic – like Fuseli’s imp. They sometimes look a little like that movie trick of panning to something innocuous as something horrible happens just offscreen. (See ’Interieur du Peintre Paris Rue Carcel’, 1881, above.) The objects themselves are painted in a kind of flickering flux, in a style quite similar to van Gogh. Not for nothing is this room titled ‘Making the Familiar Strange.’

There’s a parallel between these and the paintings of his children sleeping, such as ‘The Little One is Dreaming’ (1881, below) and ‘Clovis Asleep’ (1884). Though the child looks locked in sleep, objects behind them such as the wallpaper seem to ripple and pulse behind them, as if the ‘real world’ was suffused with dreams.

You are never quite sure if these works are supposed to look like that or not, a feeling that will stay with you throughout the show. To quote Searle again: “The quality of Gauguin's art that is ‘off’ and strange – even a bit mismanaged – is also its strength.” He’s like a singer who doesn’t conceal his vocal limitations but utilises them, wrongfooting the audience. Is this simple naive art? A sophisticated approximation? Heartfelt or considered? You will never be sure. In this was he was a rock star before his time.

A Ticket to the ‘Wild and Primitive’:

Next thing Gauguin has ditched the stockbrokering, packed his bags, parted from his family and headed for Brittany. (The details vary depending on whether you are talking to him or anyone else.) It is here that the bohemian artist we are more familiar with begins to appear.

 However, note the “begins”. Searle describes his art as “a hodge-podge of inconsistent and seemingly incompatible styles and manners.” Never more than in Britanny did this seem true.  In an uncommented juxtaposition, the show puts ‘Breton Girl Spinning’ (1889) alongside ‘Breton Girls Dancing’ (1888, both above). Despite the similar dates and names, these paintings could not be further apart. ‘Spinning’ looks influenced by folk art: flat and solid, codified like a cartoon, everything a representation. Perspective is absent, distance conveyed only by placement in the composition.

‘Dancing’, conversely, is built around perspective. It gives off the vertiginous sense of the dancers about to burst out of the frame. The painting is flecked with detail so it almost shimmers. This, of course, is Guaguin still under the spell of the Impressionists. (It could even be argued that the Impressionists used form merely as a means to convey light.) Though both fine in their own right, the two works point to man undecided between Impressionism and Symbolism.

Yet in another work from 1888, the famous ‘Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling With The Angel’ (above), Gauguin sets the contradiction to work for him. The bonnetted women in the foreground are Impressionistic, their white hats coloured into contours, yet the background is vivid with solid blocks of ruddy pigment. Gauguin explained that this background “only exists in the imagination”, that the Bible scene is the vision the women are seeing after their sermon. ‘Yellow Christ’, 1889, has a similar division, if in less rigidly separated spatial planes. (This formal separation between ‘real’ foreground and ‘vision’ background recalls the ‘dreaming children’ of Paris we saw earlier.)

Sombre Savagery in Tahiti:

Yet by the time we reach Tahiti Gauguin had tired of this rapproachment and Symbolism had won. Impressionism was concerned with the inter-relationship between what was there and what our senses took in. Symbolism, and Gauguin from this point on, cares only for what’s already in our heads. Achille Delarouche said of these in 1894: “Whether (they) are an exact representation of an exotic reality matters little to me. Gauguin has used this extraordinary landscape as the locale for his dream.” Like Jimmy Stewart in ‘Harvey’, Gauguin wrestled with reality before finally winning out over it.

Or, a little more accurately, Impressionism is not so much abandoned as conquered by Symbolism. Questions which used to be concerns consequently no longer seem to matter. Perspective can now be conveyed in multiple ways, sometimes within one painting, without any particular jarring effect.

It also, to some degree, undercuts the criticism that Gauguin was merely concocting a primitive from his own prejudices. Partly he saw Tahiti as the land of his dreams, but there’s also a sense where it was merely a means to him to get at his dreams. Gauguin himself explained in 1892, “my artistic centre is in my brain – and not elsewhere.” What he was trying to convey was something in his head.

Try contrasting Gauguin to an image from the contemporary pulp magazine ‘Journal des Voyages’ which appears elsewhere in the exhibition. A Negress beams decorously out of the cover like an alluring shop assistant. She is no black woman, but quite definitely a Negress - in the way an apple in a still life is an apple. She’s a mere token, there to titillate and to please.

Gauguin’s women, while no more real, are at least symbols – they are not going to offer everything to the viewer so easily. Their existence is not contingent on ours. Moreover, they are phlegmatic as much as they are exotic. They often meet the viewer’s gaze, but recognise us quite impassively while they go about their lives. There is a sombre quality to them, a sense in which they simply are. They are Mona Lisas without the smile. Look, for example, at 1893’s ‘Woman Holding a Fruit’ (below). Look, for that matter, at the detail on the exhibition poster.

Did Gauguin actually recognise that there was something essentially inscrutable to these Tahitian women, a barrier beyond any geography? Or was it yet another projection of what was in his own mind?

The most likely answer is something of both. But I’d like to imagine he was tapping into something inherent to folk culture – what the Spanish call duende, or exquisite sadness. As argued in previous posts on folk and country music, true folk culture does not idealise a happy past or lament its passing – instead it is flatly fatalistic. While we might rail against conditions and try to ask penetrating questions, these women seem to see past all that – but the knowledge traps them into simple acceptance.

Of course it is entirely possible that I am merely grafting my own perspective onto Gauguin, even as he grafted his onto these women in the first place. But that is simply to describe what always happens.

Nor should we go overboard in Gauguin’s rehabilitation. These women remain depersonalised representations of the Other. A room is given over to ‘The Eternal Feminine’, an unchanging nature straight out of Simone de Beavouir’s accusation that women were trapped in a life of “immanence” while men were allowed “transcendence.” The women may be granted a little mystery within their strictly delineated realm, but that is all.

The nature of nature:

However, as ever, we are really taken back to the way Gauguin saw things. It is his art which is being granted more depth, not his sense of sexual politics. Ultimately, just as each individual woman is only there to represent Woman, Woman herself is used to present a view of something else. And that thing is nature.

Nowadays we are divided between two opposing views. One sees it as a kind of rudimentary machine, which now needs updating through genetic tampering and the like. The other takes the inverse view, that nature is a machine too sophisticated for us, an intricate set of interlocking systems whose micro-complexity we struggle to understand. In the heat of debate we fail to see what these conceptions have in common. We cannot understand Gauguin’s nature either, but that is because it is too simple, too savage. We can only connect to it through our dreams, not our brains.

This quality is perhaps conveyed most irrefutably in Gauguin’s palette, which is rich in an earthy sense, vivid without being bright. Like Bacon or Guston, Gauguin has one of those signature palettes you could recognise at a thousand paces. Those big blocks of colour can make his works look enticingly easy, like you could knock off some yourself given a roller and an afternoon. Yet they also have an unsettling quality, haunting and inscrutable, hinting at something we haven’t quite got yet. They’re like one of those games which take a minute to learn but a lifetime to master. As Searle says, “The simpler Gauguin’s paintings are, the better they seem.”

This theme is presented remarkably consistently, despite the ranges in his style. It is there in the early still lives, the fruit in the bowl still resonant of the forest from where it came. And from there it grows. There’s a recurrent image of a figure reclining on the landscape, in those bold colours somehow looking giant. It’s there embryonically in  ‘The Little One is Dreaming’ (seen above), more clearly in  the Britanny-era ’The Loss of Virginity’ (1890/1) and the Tahitian ‘The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch’, (1892, both above). A simple change to a standing figure would change so much, make it stand astride the landscape like the Colossus of Rhodes. As it is, the lying figure does not look apart from the landscape but in some way incorporated into it. (A theme we also found in the later sculpture of Henry Moore during his Tate Britain exhibition).

Notably, two of these three pictures should, logically, be interiors. But neither feels like it, there is nothing limited or confining about them; the walls just seem to dissolve into unimportance, they belong with the rolling hills and vast horizon line of the third. Nature cannot be kept at bay; it is in everything, including us. The notation tells us that, unlike the Impressionists, Gauguin preferred to draw in the studio. Yet the effect of his work is quite the opposite.

Breaker of Myth:

I have at times felt that contemporary exhibitions can tend to stuff Modernism back into a box, the very box many of its practitioners were straining to break out from. I have even, at times, felt this strongly enough to have to remind myself that there wasn’t actually some kind of conspiracy. However, at other times Modernism bigged itself up with a set of self-aggrandising myths which can and should be punctured.

Gauguin is perhaps more easily absorbed into the world of Tate retrospectives than Duchamp or Rodchenko. But nevertheless this is a superlative show, which works hard to contextualise (rather than flatter or rubbish) him and largely strikes the nail on the head. It might skimp a little on his relationship with van Gogh, but overall complaints are few. Perhaps my praise is partly down to it being grist to my mill, its approach based on the assumption that there is still something valuable to Modernism once all the bohemian clichés have been stripped away.

I have, incidentally, no good reason for the lateness of this – it just kind of happened! Truth be told, in deciding what to write up my eyes are always bigger than my belly. And I tend to go for the most recent on the list, as it is freshest in my mind. This increases the risk of other items getting perpetually shunted back into near-absurd levels of lateness. I would like to promise, however, that this sort of thing will never happen again... just as soon as my wealthy patron reveals himself and I no longer have to go into work every day.

DOCTOR WHO: ‘DAY OF THE MOON’

We fans have become rather fixated upon the differences between Stephen Moffat and Russell Davies. One of us would put a big long list of these on his blog, only for others to smartly chip in with extra items in the handy Comments box. (One is Welsh the other Scottish, has anyone had that one already?)

This has rather blinded us to their similarities.

There’s that nice anecdote about Moffat getting the idea for the crack from an actual crack running along his son’s bedroom wall. I am fairly sure Moffat always works this way, building his scripts up from images. His mind sees an astronaut walking out of a lake, a figure running with black lines scrawled along it, a mass of alien heads hanging from a ceiling like celestial bats, then works out a way of joining the dots. (Okay, Davies tended to write Big Pumping Events, like the Tardis towing a planet, but in practise there’s an overlap.)

This isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. This has never been a ‘proper’ science fiction show, the SF theme is just an excuse to incorporate the strange and the fantastical. After all, images are not mere eye candy. They’re more like a language in their own right, and can carry as much meaning and resonance as a line of dialogue. To see them reductively, as ‘clues’, is like insisting on seeing a 3D object only in two dimensions. Me, I’m a big fan of surrealist films, such as ‘L’Age d’Or’, which are composed of nothing but strange and arresting images, and are all the richer for it.

But if ‘Doctor Who’ isn’t ‘proper SF’, it isn’t a surrealist film either. You have to do more with those images than just line them up. We all knew this wasn’t going to be the big finish, just the ender of a two-parter which is setting us up for the big finish. But to do that some questions needed to be answered, and fresh mysteries whisked in to replace them. You need a dual level structure, a false bottom which falls through. You need to induce the feeling that all this is heading to be resolved, to actually resolve a whole bunch of stuff, only to thwart audience expectations at the last minute and let mystery rise to rule again.

What hit the screens was the feared drop between stools, neither a finale nor an incidental episode. It may just be the new American setting, but it is reminding me more and more of the tedious world of perpetual deferment that was ‘The X-Files’. I started to wonder if I was watching something with no heart, no core, but was more akin to flipping through the pages of a sketchbook.

A mystery or a misfire? Either the Silence used their insidious powers to make me forget their plan, or they never really had much of one. What I fear about them is that they are becoming more and more what they look like – generically evil. From inscrutable schemers to plot-function baddies, kidnapping the heroine because it seems the sort of thing they should be doing. (The only part that was really explained was how the girl could be calling the President.)

With all this talk of a network of tunnels stretching across the planet, had I just watched these two episodes I would be imagining some ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ scenario. Having crashed here in our prehistoric times, they have become like anti-angels, watching omnipotently over us, manipulating our every move. Yet in the last season they seemed a cosmic threat, about to “fall” across the whole of everything, causing vampires to relocate to Venice and all the rest of it. In which case, why should it be so important to control us?

And if they’re rendered visible simply by being injured, and have really been here as long as we have, surely one would have appeared through being caught in some crossfire by now. The Doctor can’t help but bump into his invisible Tardis, and he knows its there!

Instead of any of this, things end up with a variant of ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ and a rather random shoot-‘em-up, with Sherriff River riding into town. Not the sort of thing we hope for with ‘Doctor Who’.

Given all this, the headlong rush of a pace started to feel a little suspect. It’s not just that the pre-credit chase scenes could have lasted for longer. It’s starting to feel like a dodgy estate agent is showing us round a house in indecent haste, giving us no time to inspect the brickwork. What did happen between the last episode and this? They’re on the run from the Feds, yet both Delaware and the President are still on their side. Do Amy and Rory know to play along with Delaware’s plan, but not River? Never mind, time for the next scene!

So we end up precisely where we didn’t want to be - talking about this episode the way we did the last one, turning those images over and over in the hope of coming up with something. And it must be admitted there are cool sequences. In fact, while watching the episode I was never bored. Only when my brain attempted to put it together did it feel lacking.

Amy’s adventures in the Orphanage were particularly striking. (If somewhat reminiscent of the hospital in ’The Empty Child’.) As said previously her ‘pregnancy’ was only announced at the end of the last episode, but associated images had already been built up around it. In fact, after watching the first episode’s repeat I’m half-convinced there’s another one! It opened with Charles II questioning his daughter about the Doctor’s whereabouts. She feigns ignorance, but his lanky head is found underneath her skirts, naked and upside-down. The suggestion is illicit hanky-panky, yet the pose is also reminiscent of a birth. “They are making him rogueish yet boyish”, I said to myself. Yet this upside-down head motif reappears twice, in the prisoners’ tunnel and later when he leans over the deck of the Tardis. ... you may, at this point, be wondering where I am going with this. I have no idea where I am going with this. But it’s striking!

It’s also notable that Amy, almost as soon as she discovers the photo of herself with a baby, is reduced to a voice in the dark, not knowing where she was – another image of the foetus in the womb. We should remember that, for most of the last season, Amy was herself effectively an orphan.

With this and the new suggestion that the Doctor may father Amy a Time Lord child (surely hinted too heavily to be anything other than a red herring), there’s little time for either the Doctor’s impending death or the theme of memory failure. If the previous episode really was all about Easter, Maypoles were conspicuous by their absence. However, Rory’s reference to his Lone Centurion years, on how he can “shut the door” on his memories, are surely going to be significant. (And for another intriguing theory of what may be afoot, click here.)

Moffat may have created a plot structure too tricky to pull off, even for him, giving us a finale without it being the finale and instead managing only (charitably) another set of images to mull over or (less charitably) a muddled middle. It could be that his actual finale puts all such concerns to rest. But my concern is that, every time he defers and adds to the pile of questions, he raises the stakes.

While I will doubtless watch the rest of the series I am not sure whether I will bother blogging about the non-Moffat episodes, which weren’t particularly memorable last time round. (If anything is generic as that bloody Silurian two-parter, I almost certainly will not dignify it with comment.) I am as fannish about the good Doctor as the next man, but don’t want to write about something simply as a reflex action. In which case, we may not reconvene until June...

OKAY, THIS IS PREDICTABLE...

...but it had to be done...

“I CAN’T EVEN HESITATE”: RIP POLY STYRENE

Yesterday, Poly Styrene succumbed to cancer and “won her battle to go to higher places.” She only ever made three albums, two of which nobody bothered listening to after she helpfully described as “more spiritual”. But that pioneering X Ray Spex release, ’Germ Free Adolescents’... that was enough in it's own right. 

It’s classic British punk at it’s best – noisy yet tuneful, brimming with inspiration and energy, disdainful of all convention. (Alas that such frenetic creativity couldn’t be maintained, and it all became yet another sorry uniform.) It contains two of the great punk lines – “I can’t even hesitate” and the arch put-down “did you do it before you read about it?”

Plus, in an era when women were still struggling for their rightful place in popular music, she was an icon as bright as a beacon. When I first saw her, singing the single ’Germ Free Adolescents’ on ’Top Of the Pops’ with a brace on her teeth, I had to turn over – it was all too much for me!

First Ari Up then Poly, alas it seems the good do die young...

DOCTOR WHO: ‘THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT’ (POSTSCRIPT)

For those of you who like pointless and almost certainly inaccurate conjecture – read on! (Something nearer to a proper review here.)

The more I think about it, the more significant Easter becomes...

Okay, there was no Easter setting, no toasting of hot cross buns or mention of fluffy bunnies who died for you. Just a Public holiday, a timely point to relaunch the series. But those invites clearly displayed the date. (Which, correct me if I’m wrong, wasn’t the actual date of broadcast but instead Good Friday.)

The Doctor calls his companions for a meal (okay, not a supper). Wine is drunk. He not only recognises his assassin, he even seems to be expecting all this – and still allows it to happen.

If River Song is too obvious a candidate for our spacesuited swimmer, how about Amy? You would of course expect her to show some sorrow in the circumstances, but it was laid on that her grief was the greatest. The aliens seem yet to offer her any pieces of silver, but that is maybe to come...

DOCTOR WHO: ‘THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT’

Spoilers! (Of a blue-book variety)

 Well I was pleased it wasn’t the Vashta Nerada.

When menacing spacesuits filled the trailers the fact that they’d appeared in an episode called ’Silence in the Library’, and the lack of decent new monsters last season, led to me putting two and two together - and coming up with a negative.

Not that I didn’t like them the first time. But their antagonism was an enabler of that storyline, rather than the core of it. And when for example the Angels came back, it wasn’t for a major twist for which we’ve been waiting a whole season.

Besides, this show has very few recurrent enemies. Most of them felt worn out by their second helping, if they ever got that far. That might seem odd. With superheroes, for example, a decent rogue’s gallery is an essential component of a series. But that doesn’t mean that most monsters have been sub-par. (Though of course a fair few have, over the years.) It just underlines the difference between a superhero and the Doctor. The Doctor doesn’t fight them so much as come to comprehend them, dispel their aura of menace to see what makes them tick. Once it was revealed who the Dream Lord or the Empty Child was, any reappearance would be pointless.

However, I am not sure I like the look of the ones we got.

 Generic rubber-suited ’Who’ monsters  I could cope with. But these looked generically generic, sci-fi aliens who could have walked off ’The X-Files’ or any such show from the Nineties onwards. (You were apparently supposed to think of the Munch painting ’The Scream’, though I don’t suppose anybody did.) This may well be part of the point, as there’s some Roswell-like goings-on afoot. But even so...

The script crackled along, and the four leads are now so comfortable in their roles you’re almost happy just hanging out with them. There were some neat lines, cool scenes and strong images. (If you’re reading this you probably know what the astronaut-out-the-lake was a homage to, but it’s still a strong image.)

But if you paused to consider this rapid succession of events it did start to feel like Moffat was reshuffling his pack – portmanteau openings, creepy child telephone calls, the Doctor dying then reappearing younger, don’t look away etc. Of course, every writer relies on tropes. I just wonder what would have happened if Moffat had said to himself, “Right. New season. New page. New stuff. Let’s see what else there is.”

I was somewhat thrown by Amy and Rory starting the episode sitting on the sofa. We’d previously been led to believe they weren’t letting a little thing like married life hang up their adventuring boots. But, as things went on, it became clear this performed a function.

We’ve already seen how River Song “does to the Doctor what he normally does to others, turn up from outside his timeline and upend his life.” But this time round her role is extended to Amy and Rory, they’ve become more her companions than the Doctor’s. (Plus it’s now laced with urgency, there’s things they really want to tell him but can’t.) Establishing their separate lives at the start enables this.

I’ve previously expressed concerns about the whole ‘crossing timelines’ business, which seems one of those things which are so much easier to switch on that off. And enough timelines were crossed here to make the whole thing look like spaghetti junction. However, River’s speech to Amy suggests that the previously pliable substance ‘timey wimey’ is hardening into something more fatalistic. If there’s an internal story reason for this, it’s yet to appear. But it’s going to be a necessary change to avoid a rewrite of ’The Big Bang’, to avoid “ah, my death, I’ll just pop back in my blue box and fix that.” (On the other hand if River’s speech turns out to be mere misdirection I will scream. And I am quite the screamer.)

But perhaps all a first episode needs to do is intrigue, and if so it certainly succeeded. I have found myself continually coming up with theories which I almost immediately reject, which I would expect to be a common response. (Rather than “silence will fall”, “the net will never shut up!” would be a more appropriate catch-phrase.)

With those spare spacesuits there’s signs they’re working in the urban myth about the moon landings being a hoax. (One variant of which has it that aliens have already got here.) Yet that would seem to vie with the show’s normal celebration of human ingenuity... It would seem a little too obvious for River Song to be the figure in the spacesuit. And I can’t see how she can be the girl on the phone, who has a clear American accent. (Unless BBC English rubbed off on her through association with the Doctor.) It is possible of course that she’s Amy’s child...

...on that note, Amy’s revelation she was pregnant came so much out of left field that it surely can’t be, and was given a strange degree of significance for someone who’s just got married. Is this one of the things the aliens told her to tell the Doctor? Is it possible she didn’t know herself until that moment? (She saw the aliens well before the others.) Does she have mixed feelings about her pregnancy? The girl in the spacesuit seemed like a metaphor for an unborn child, and she shoots at her...

..anyway I digress. Intrigue is fine for a first episode. And while this is a two-parter (why haven’t they been opening the show with two-parters all along?), this is clearly the set-up for the season, we won’t get all our answers next week. But a first part is not a season and questions do not nourish the soul. We need those answers, Moffat has promised us them and one not-really-a-finale is enough. Contrary to the risible ’X Files’ tag-line “the truth is out there”, we’re going to want some truth in here before too long.

GIG-GOING ADVENTURES: TV SMITH & THE VALENTINES/ THE FALLEN LEAVES

TV Smith and the Valentines
The Hydrant (upstairs), Wed 30th March

Some, I’d sure, would class this one a guilty pleasure. TV Smith gets together with “glam punk” band the Valentines, to serve us up the best of the Adverts. True, up to now he’s been one of the original punk figures to explore new stuff and not attempt to keep living in 1977. And true, he was sporting what looked rather like the suit he wore to work, modified with spraypaint and stencils seconds before going on stage.

Yet his first words, as soon as he took the stage were “I’m in my mid-Fifties and I’m still pissed off!” (After a little audience prompting, he even mentions the massive anti-cuts demonstration of a few days before.) Ten years behind him, and I feel much the same. Punk was always primarily an outlet for negative energy, and there’s still plenty of that to go round. The music doesn’t just scratch a nostalgic itch, it flickers with life in your memory precisely because it still conveys that same sense of aggravation.

Mention punk to me and I will most likely think first of the old Ignition lyric, “I know what my anger means.” Despite what hardcore fundamentalists tell you, it’s not necessarily that they lyrics are political. In fact, other bands were more explicitly political than the Adverts. (And anyway, popular music had found politics long before punk.) It’s the music. It feels partisan, perpetually rousing itself in a war against boredom and ennui which may never end so long as the world’s still going. Perhaps it doesn’t do any of that for younger generations. But it still fans that fire for those of my time.

Resting on his laurels or keeping tuned into his roots? I doubt it was so simple as one or the other. But he rattled through the set like he meant it, man, and the glass was at the very least half-full...

This clip isn’t from Brighton, but it’s little more than a month later...



The Fallen Leaves
The Hydrant (downstairs, Sat. 16th April)

”Don’t follow the many, baby,
We are the few.”

So was classic-era British punk really about returning the clock from 1976 to 1966? Ex-Subway Secters Fallen Leaves would seem to suggest so. They come bedecked in cravats, waistcoats and neatly pressed check drainpipes, like they want to replay the very moment where mod met hippy. Their sound is white-heat amphetamine blues but with a hazy psychedelic edge, so they serve up both buzzsaw fuzz and shimmer. (Think early Kinks, or perhaps the Pretty Things.)

This might make for a neat comparison to their old frontman, whose return to gigging was reviewed on these shores last Summer. Though their self-description promises roughness (“pop played with passion rather than precision”), even without an adequate sound-check they’re actually a whole lot tighter than the band now under the name Subway Sect!

As said at the time, what makes Goddard so wrong as a frontman, what makes him a South London postie stuck inexplicably on a stage, is the very thing which makes him so right. Conversely, while Goddard poses as anybody, Rob Green is definitely somebody – he exudes charisma, merely of a bizarrely misplaced kind. He’s like a tweedy Thirties prep school teacher, haughty and aloof, looking disdainfully down on the back rows with elegant menace, finger permanently raised in the making of some point or other.

During instrumental breaks he turns his back upon us, hands clasped behind him like an eccentric Edwardian gentleman before the fire. At one point, he stops to pour out a flask of tea. (I think, however, he missed a trick by not sporting a pocket watch which he could consult.)

And there you have it. Subway Sect evade all expectations; even as you stand there watching them they slip through your sight’s grasp. Fallen Leaves have staked out their pitch, and live every inch of it. I think I might even prefer them out of the two. (But then they sport two ex-Secters to Goddard’s one, with guitarist Rob Symmonds.)

This gig was staged entirely for free by the good folks at Spinning Chilli. Knowing them from their pre-presenting days, I asked how they started. They explained they’d been in the habit of travelling out of town for music, then finally figured they could put bands on down here for the same money they were shelling out in petrol and hotels – and give everyone else a chance to see them! A welcome ‘Old Brighton’ attitude and a pleasant change to the current odious fixation with “business opportunities.” They even made the bar staff turn off’X Factor’! (Check out their site.)

While we are on those lines, the band themselves have a cool-looking site.

You may recognise the guitar line here...

ESSENTIAL KILLING/ ROUTE IRISH

Plot Spoliers Ahoy!

Just when we’d all got used to saying that cinema had made a risible attempt at tackling the so-called War On Terror, with its paltry efforts eclipsed by TV, then two exceptions come along at once. Let’s start with ’Essential Killing’...

When I coined the term “landscape porn” while reviewing ‘The American’, someone even commended me for it in the comments section. Yet truth be told I was merely adding to an already over-stuffed array of such terms - property porn, grief porn, shelf porn, tech porn, riot porn... I expect any day now someone will look quizzically at ’Razzle’ magazine before exclaiming “its like porn porn!”

“Porn” is of course being used as a shorthand for a thing fetishised out of any context. But at the same time the immediacy of film, it’s ability to throw us straight in the deep end of a situation, is one of the form’s greatest assets. Here the landscape isn’t some sweet-looking backdrop, like a moving photoshoot. In ’Essential Killing’ the characters couldn’t be any more in that landscape.

And we’re taken into an unfamiliar landscape not once but twice. First we’re flung into the arid crevices and caves of Afghanistan (actually filmed in Israel) alongside some Americans on some unexplained mission. But pretty soon we’re with rendition victim Mohammed, who escapes his captors to be confronted by the snowy mountains of Poland. Both times, we see the landscape through foreign eyes.

It’s notable that creator Jerzy Skolimowski previously scripted ’Knife in the Water’, which similarly took characters we knew little of and thrust them deep into nature. But the chief difference here is that speech is so scant. For much of the time its’ used as a sound source rather than for dialogue; it conveys ambience over information, like the voice can be with music. Characters are only named in the credits. This adds greatly to the sense of immediacy and forces the film back upon it’s core strengths – it has to show not tell.

 Silent throughout, Mohammed’s only contextualisation comes from his brief, semi-hallucinogenic flashbacks. Over the course of the film he both sins and is sinned against, but where did this cycle start? Is he an anti-imperialist freedom fighter, stolen from home, on the run from murder squads? A gun-toting terrorist fleeing justice? Or an innocent manipulated into battle by religious fanatics, then left freezing and alone? It could be any one of these...

...but I’m tempted to go with the third. An early scene seems to epitomise this, when an American interrogator confronts him with questions - but all he can hear is ringing in his ears from rocket fire. The sheer absence of communication becomes almost Babel-like, as if any common language has long since become confounded. There’s also echoes of the Frankenstein story, or at least the early parts of it, with the sole-befriender blind man in the woods replaced (significantly enough) by a mute woman. If Mohammed does monstrous things, which at one point cause him to break down and cry, perhaps he was made into that monster.

Like both comparisons above, ultimately the specificity is just a springboard from which to ask such questions of identity. In ’The Guardian’ Peter Bradshaw described it as “on the verge of delirium, a metaphysical drama.” Rooted in the political but aiming at the existential, the film is a kind of cousin to Steve McQueen’s ’Hunger.’

(After watching, I discovered a quote from Skolimowski which suggests even this interpretation might not be quite metaphysical enough: “I would leave the question of whether he is guilty or innocent open and ambiguous. The political aspects of the situation didn’t interest me: to me politics is a dirty game and I don’t want to voice my opinions. What is important is that the man who runs away is returning to the state of a wild animal, who has to kill in order to survive.”)

The infamous Vincent Gallo is well cast as Mohammed. But, true to form, he still manages to cement his crazy reputation. Though he performs Mohammed’s extreme feats of survival, running barefoot, eating wood ants and tree bark, the credits mention both “Mr. Gallo’s” water supplier and dietician!

But if ’Essential Killing’ slips the bounds of what might be expected of a political film, ’Route Irish’ dons the mantle with pride – just as you might expect from director Ken Loach. It covers similar ground to the recent TV drama ’Occupation’, the egregious law-defying role played by mercenaries in the carve-up of Iraq. When the company’s CEO announces he’s building the operation to the point where they could “sort out somewhere like Darfur”, it seems chillingly credible. Its unadulterated Blairism, the white man’s burden giving a faux liberal-intervention veneer, combined with the fundamental right of private corporations to make profits at everybody else’s expense.

Liverpudlian seems to be the media’s working class accent of choice, cropping up both in ’Occupation’ and here. I wasn’t entirely sure whether this was deliberate, but the film plays upon the twin popular stereotypes of Scousers. Frankie (played by comedian John Bishop) is the cheeky chappie, the affable rogue. Fergus (Mark Womack) is his sullen explosive Begbie-like mate, the one you hope Frankie won’t bring down the pub with him. But this then gets served the wrong way up. We find Frankie has died on operation before the film even starts and we must follow the brooding Fergus to get to the bottom of it, grief exacerbating his already troubled mind and lashing temper.

It could be the best Loach film for some while, expunging the wayward feelgood elements which marred ’Looking For Eric’. (As I grumbled about at the time.) In fact it’s lurching flashback structure almost relentlessly simulates the post-traumatic stress disorder which has become background noise to Fergus, now he is back to “shopping at Tescos.” (It might make for a good comparison with Shane Meadows’ ’Dead Man’s Shoes’,.)

Fergus’s volatility serves another function, keeping us on our toes. No-one outside of vested interests now supports the costly screw-up that was the invasion of Iraq, it’s a subject we made our minds up about some time ago, a closed book even as the occupation continues. So we need an ambiguous figure to frame it afresh. In an argument with Frankie’s widow, he swaps back and forth between attacking and defending the mercenaries, almost as if he can’t make the distinction.

Interestingly, paralleling ’Essential Killing’,there’s a theme of lack of communication. The film starts and ends with a series of unanswered voicemails. It could be argued that it raises more questions than it adequately deals with. Is male bonding a mere substitute for meaningful relations? With Frankie gone, does Fergus start a fling with his widow out of hope, desperation or just a grab for the most Frankie-like thing left? Is he really concerned with one dead mate more than a whole Iraqi family? But then the film is bookended by unanswered questions, and that seeming weakness may well be a strength. Shouldn’t political films attempt to corrode apparent certainties, rather than reassure them?

Loach films can sometimes have problems with endings, perhaps because they’re depicting situations which are by their nature unending. The one we get here is serviceable. It feints with a good mercenary/ bad mercenary structure, only to reveal at the end that the bosses dunnit. Credible enough of course, but hardly a twist. I was actually hoping for something different. What if Frankie’s death had been down to the very cause Fergus so adamantly refused earlier on, a simple case of “wrong place, wrong time”? His investigation could have revealed corruption and killings along the way, but a smoking gun pointing to every corpse except his buddy’s.

Reproducing the French film poster, for no other reason than it looks cool...

SOURCE CODE

Plot spoilers below!

It’s become almost ubiquitous to compare Duncan Jones’ new SF-style thriller to Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’ (as reviewed here). And points of comparison there are, though perhaps no more than to the lesser-cited ‘Twelve Monkeys’. But no small part of the reason for this may be the place the film occupies in the director’s career. Nolan had started on much more cerebral films like ‘Memento’ and ‘Insomnia’, then ‘Inception’ marked a far greater engagement with the mainstream. Similarly, Jones’ debut was the austere and low-key ‘Moon’. (Sort of micro-reviewed here.)

Such films are the cinematic equivalent of the organic sausages and gourmet burgers that populate modern-day pub menus. Once you shelled out for a prime cut of meat, or scrimped and plumped for the processed leftovers. But this apparent contradiction in terms is designed to signify a best-of-both-worlds combination. This is neither some generic fast-food thriller, nor an indigestibly good-for-you art flick. The poster tag “from the visionary director of ‘Moon’” becomes a selling-point, even for those who skipped ‘Moon’ because they thought it too short of explosions... probably especially for them. It’s a sign they’ve got a fully-fledged gourmet chef in to flip those burgers.

Of course there’s nothing automatically wrong about this, and indeed man does not live by Tarkovsky alone. But there has to be something genuinely gourmet to the burger, or else we’re sending it back to the kitchen.

And indeed, there are points of comparison to both ‘Inception’ and ‘Moon’. All three offer variants on the same central paradox, perhaps exemplified here the most neatly of all. Our hero, Captain Colter Stevens, is trapped inside a cannister, only able to talk to the girl (Captain Colleen Goodwin) through a monitor screen. (And even she is not necessarily to be trusted.) The implication is that between us falls the shadow. Yet at the same time the self is violable, the ‘besieged castle’ of the mission’s monicker. While it is hard to reach out to the person next to you, ‘they’ can get right inside your head. The film’s landscape overlaps with ‘Inception’ to the point of becoming interchangeable – shiny city blocks like architects drawings come to life, swooping bullet trains, offices built almost entirely out of shiny glass yet devoid of windows. The base’s webcam is so repeatedly reiterated it must be onscreen more than some of the characters.

It certainly has an ingenious premise, which makes you wish we knew less about movies upfront these days and could encounter it at the same time as Stevens. (Click here if you really don’t know it and want to.) At this point the film it doesn’t seem to resemble is ‘Groundhog Day.’ There the premise was almost capital-B Buddhist, about leaving the wheel, about living your life over until you had learnt enough to move on. This is more like a video game you get to play over, returning from each ‘death’ until you finally win. The figure in the tank, little more than a wired-up brain, is the game player, motionlessly oblivious to his surroundings, intent only upon the virtual world.

We tend to think of ‘video game movies’ as a derogatory term, shorthand for shoot-‘em-ups, films released only so the video-game tie-in can follow (or quite possible the reverse). I suspect this may work like the infamous accusation of “comic book plotting”, where those who never play video games only notice when their influence is at its most negative and superficial. (For example, I do that.) But, bypassing such paraphernalia and going for the formal qualities of video games, we actually end up in an interesting place.

Though it brandies guns and offers us explosions, these don’t set the tone and the film feels much more of a whodunnit. The thrust is thrown upon the train carriage where the suspects are all lined up - like ‘Murder On the Orient Express’, except with Chicago, bombs and body-swapping replacing Russia, knives and Albert Finney. For that matter, there’s even two whodunnits for your buck. Who the terrorist is on the train, and what’s the secret of Stevens’ origins, the subject being continually eluded at Besieged Castle?

Unfortunately, the two then tend to compete for screen time- and it’s the train which loses out. First we’re told we’re getting a clock-racer; every time our hero reboards the train, time is reset only in the virtual world. Real time goes forwards another eight minutes, while the next terrorist attack is imminent.

The film rather tips its hand when we’re given a montage scene. Earlier events had been more or less in real time, pressing home the clock-ticking motif. Any clue Stevens picks up, he has to do in front of us, nothing offscreen or up the movie’s sleeve. But the montage scene is all about the effect of ceaselessly being sent back upon Stevens, the strangeness combined with the pressure. The bomb on the train is really just a MacGuffin for a psychological study. (Plus our hero’s detection method more-or-less becomes to accuse people at random. Maybe not such a bad method when they will lose all memory of this inside of eight minutes, but hardly the stuff of Sherlock Holmes.)

 So it’s not so surprising that when the bomber is finally found, through a combination of luck and montage, he has little of interest to say for himself. There’s a Stars-and-Stripes bombing case and a quick gag about “racial profiling” to suggest the terrorist’s a Bible-bashing Militia man, more Timothy McVeigh than Osama Bin Laden. Is this the Hollywood liberalism so decried by Tea Party types, or did they just figure a suspect in a ‘Team America’ beard would give the game away? Whichever, his stated motives are so perfunctory they’d have been better off left as live mysteries in our minds.

Of course, it may be I simply bet wrongly upon the film’s course. But alas, the film’s chosen direction isn’t any more interesting. Turns out our hero is being used... get that, used... by the Corporation. A revelation rather undermined by being the very thing we’d suspected from the beginning - few films, after all, reveal Corporations to be secretly nice. (While ‘Moon’ had an almost identical plot twist.)

There are attempts to stir up some War On Terror style debate. (What if the people on the train were the people in the Twin Towers, now an expendable asset in a bigger ongoing war?) But this is rather undermined by the panto-villain playing of the base’s boss, Dr. Rutledge. He even has a Blofeld-style sinister accent and disfigurement. In short we get two villains, one characterised only by clichés, and the other not at all.

Abigal Nussbaum is correct to point out that making the bad boss a civilian, and his doubting henchman a military woman, is both cheat and cliché. (Besides, in the real world wouldn’t an oath-bound military officer be less likely to break ranks over an act of conscience? You’d get a court-martial, not just a refused reference.) And K -Punk is correct that we should be wary of taking at face value Hollywood’s willingness to paint corporations as evil.

Moreover, and alas, the way to depict corporations on film was already done perfectly in ’Moon’. Briefly, the rule is not to – to just show the results of their self-aggrandising actions. (Similarly, I always liked the way that in the first ’Alien’ film the Corporation appeared only as calculating instructions on a monitor screen. Alas, this restriction was reneged on for the sequels.)

They are, after all, faceless institutions who never care about us because they never meet us - indeed barely belong to the same reality system as us. Legally speaking, a corporation is a person, but they are more like a logo transformed into a ravenous, all-consuming monster. Even if you were to burst into a board meeting you would not really reach a corporation’s heart or brain, merely come across some of the more senior staff while they were passing through. Though the panto villainy on show here is egregious and absurd, it is to some degree the inevitable result of missing this essential point.

It may not have thought it needed it, but it’s notable that once the bomb plot is essentially resolved the film unravels. It breaks almost all its own rules and reverses its tone to serve up a happy ending, to a nadir of chutzpah beyond even the original version of ‘Blade Runner’. Pretty much everyone agrees the film falls apart at the point where the central ‘eight minute’ deadline is busted. But I was already having my doubts when the hero was allowed his one last mission, in defiance of all mission protocols. (He doesn’t quite say “I need this!” but he may as well have done.)

‘Inception’s achilles heel was dream worlds which could never escape the ‘architecture’ of video games – guns, strongholds, secret plans in safes to “take” like enemy Kings. ‘Source Code’, conversely, uses the formal devices of video games to create an invigorating premise – then succumbs to the basest of movie clichés. It becomes a tick-box exercise in the worst kind of Christian Vogler’s accountancy of storytelling. Treating the world like it’s your personal psychological terrain? Check! Atonement with the father? Check! Following your bliss and living for today? Check! Getting the girl as a direct result of this? Check!(As Martin Lewis of Strange Horizons puts it: “hello sky, hello trees; hello train, hello terrorists.”)

Maybe someone will one day make a film which honours the smart and enticing premise we start with here. As it is, you’re really better off walking out three-quarters through and making up your own ending.

PS: I did think of writing a reiterative review to celebrate the film’s structure, forever going back to the start again when some new idea struck me. (“This film is a whodunnit... wait, let’s start over...”) But in the end I couldn’t be bothered...

WHAT THEY SAID...

"THE BIG CUBE: Annual increase in wealth of the world’s richest man.
THE SMALL CUBES: [Barely visible in the photo as orange dots bouncing around the big black cube] Average UK incomes

THE RATIO: 500,000 to 1”

... so, in short, we’re all in this together.

Photo taken at the recent anti-cuts  ’March For the Alternative’ on March 26th. As well as the sheer size of the demo (longer than it’s own route, meaning many people were still starting after it had officially finished) it was marked by a high level of creativity. As well as the cube above there was a giant Trojan horse (presumably left outside the House of Commons after the demo was over), a Banker carried on a sedan chair... much else. Of course there were also the pack-drilled Trots with their inevitable “slogan slogan slogan, SHOUT SHOUT SHOUT.” But for once the day didn’t belong to them.