I am Daniel Blake

Watching I, Daniel Blake I am not ashamed to say I was moved to tears. I left the cinema still welling up inside. It does take a lot to make me cry, but an overwhelming sadness was not the only thing I felt. The other feeling can only be described as white-hot fury. I can still feel the heat of that burning anger now.

It’s not that the film shows us what we didn’t know, it’s that the film conveys the reality some of us know all too well. Dan embodies the suffering and humiliation of benefit claimants. Katie and her children stands for the single-mums and their plight in these dark times. I thought of my mother as I watched Katie go hungry to feed her children — as my mum so often did.

We know what it was like to live in damp houses without proper heating or appliances. We know what it was like to live from hand to mouth with the fear of not being able to make the rent and the bills. We know how to fill a bath with water boiled in a kettle because there is no hot water. We know how to get to sleep on bare floorboards.

Truly morally-stunted people will dismiss I, Daniel Blake as just a work of fiction from an old left-wing filmmaker. These people are irredeemable. You can’t expect people like Toby Young and Kwasi Kwarteng to see the truth that they are paid not to see. There is no point trying to persuade these people of the scale of misery in this country. It is no accident the degradation of poor people escapes their purview.

It’s not like it is common for a film to take the side of the benefit claimant, one of the most demonised figures in British society. We live with Benefits Street and Jeremy Kyle, where the unemployed are presented as a bunch of free-loading scumbags. People who need a dose of tough love. By contrast,I, Daniel Blake has been criticised for showing us an unemployed man, who is not dysfunctional and struggling with addiction.

Daniel Blake is out of work because of no fault of his own. His bad heart means he can’t work, yet he is found fit for work by the job centre. He comes across Katie and her kids, who have been sent to live in Newcastle having been evicted by a landlord in London. We follow Dan and Katie through hungry queues at food banks and the bureaucracy of the benefits system. Yes, people do live like this in real life.

This is not a saccharine depiction of working-class life. It is not ‘sentimental’ to portray an unemployed man with a moral compass. Middle-class people are often shown on film as upstanding, moral citizens with few problems (except maybe a break-up or the odd murder). Meanwhile the only problem facing the super-rich is what to do with all their ill-gotten gains, as we see in movies like Wolf Of Wall Street.

In this regard, Ken Loach has succeeded in capturing the travails of working-class people without concessions to the gutter press and its view of poor people. It would be inappropriate to show Dan smoking dozens fags and drinking his way through six packs of cheap lager every night. Not to mention the fact that the man suffered a major heart attack.

So we’re meant to expect an irresponsible feckless stereotype as a representative of the out-of-work poor. Shell suits, Burberry caps and roll-ups are in order. Cans of watered down lager, obligatory. Anything short of this tabloid image is ‘unrealistic’. This is what we’re led to believe by the chattering classes. It’s almost as if working-class pride has been erased from public life.

Working-class people are regularly stripped of their dignity. You can see this whenever you turn on daytime television or open a red-top newspaper.I, Daniel Blake covers the form this humiliation takes at the job centre. Ken Loach and Paul Laverty are not obliged to play to the middle-classes and how they view less privileged people.

The critics who deny the film’s accuracy confirm its truth in doing so. The media response shows you why I, Daniel Blake is accurate and why it had to be made. It is a fictional account of what happens to ordinary people, both good and bad. The point is that if you are a respectable member of the ‘deserving’ poor, the system will not spare you. There are no exceptions and the odds are stacked against a happy ending.

If there weren’t thousands of Daniel Blakes across Britain, this film would have never been made and it would not be dismissed if it weren’t true. Too many people don’t like the truth. It’s inconvenient and often painful to accept. Like many great film makers Ken Loach raises a mirror and demands that we look at ourselves. So he should. And we are obliged to do so.

This article was originally written for Notes from the Underclass.

JG Ballard predicted the rise of the selfie

Upon the release of High-Rise in cinemas, Tom Hiddleston read out chunks of an interview with JG Ballard to highlight the man’s prescience. Here are the excerpts from Jon Savage’s interview with Ballard from 1978. Note Ballard more or less predicts the coming age of social media, digital news and selfies:

“I think the biggest developments over the next twenty, thirty years are going to be through the introduction of VHS systems, and I don’t just mean the cassette thing, playback gadgets – that in itself would be quite revolutionary – but when, say, every room in everybody’s house or flat has got a camera recording what’s going on – the transformation of the home into a TV studio is a creation of a new kind of reality. A reality that is electronic.” 

“… when you at last get a camera, you spend your time photographing children in a paddling pool. But after a while, you get more ambitious and you start taking an interest in the world at large. I think the same thing will happen, beginning with people endlessly photographing themselves, shaving, having dinner together having domestic rows. Of course, the bedroom applications are obvious. But I think they’ll go beyond that, to the point where each of us will be at the centre of a sort of non-stop serial, with all kinds of possibilities let in.” 

“I can see that coming. But I can see a sort of huge extension of video. Live material which will be accessible at the press of a button, so that as now you can dial a poem or a record of the weather, you’ll be able to dial a visual input of, say, all the newsreel material filmed yesterday in Los Angeles – I’m talking about somebody living in a London suburb.”

Outrage, Justice & Rum.

 Well Mixed. 

So I finally went to see the film adaptation of The Rum Diary, it had been coming out for about 3 years and I had read the book in the summer. It was one of the early works of Hunter S Thompson, written in a style which aped F. Scott Fitzgerald who had a profound impact on Thompson with his almost perfect novel The Great Gatsby. This is before the acid enhanced tales of Freak Power nor is it the search for the American Dream or an honest politician. It has the early signs of Gonzo which Bruce Robinson and Johnny Depp exploded onto the big screen. No doubt the personal knowledge Depp has of the man helped to craft a story on how Thompson found his voice as a writer. In other words it is primeval to the emergence of Gonzo journalism which Hunter S Thompson pioneered first with The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved for Scanlon's Magazine. Of course it is a "vanity piece" to some extent as Peter Bradshaw has commented smugly, as Depp was out to effectively play Thompson out of admiration for him and his work. The man dissolved in a vat of alcohol and drugs in the end, entertained conspiracy theories and gave up the good fight when he blew his brains out. But these are not the reasons we read Dr Thompson.

The good Doctor filtered reality through a freakish mania sustained or possibly endured with the help of copious amounts of (both legal and illegal) substances. For Gonzo the claims of 'objectivity' which permeate American journalism are false and absurd, the blind-spots of which provide room for people such as Richard Nixon to slither into public office. It is not just a writing style, it is politically charged dynamite and a self-critique of journalism. He once described journalism as "a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." Instead Gonzo wallows in its own subjectivity, it oozes provocative opinion as well as hard fact and comment meshed together with just the kind of sordid thoughts that will shock the squares. It has a lot in common with the Freaks of the 1960s, Thompson noted the word 'freak' should be an endearing term given the political trajectory of American society.

The hints of a politically conscious youth can also be found in the book, there are references to the "rise of communism", discouraging events in Cuba and the brutality of capitalism. The McCarthyite atmosphere of the day is captured as the newspaper is owned by a man named Lotterman, an ex-communist who attacks anything remotely left-ish to prove himself as a reformed character. Power is consistently portrayed as sleazy, amoral and self-interested. The Americans based in Puerto Rico as journalists, businessmen and soldiers are depicted as a horde of corrupt, perverted and sex-crazed sociopaths. There is Moberg who is obsessed with cannibalism, Zimburger who is described as "more beast than human", the reckless Yeamon and the unfuckable Sala. In the film version this depiction takes on a more political dimension as Zimburger's vitriolic anti-Communism is taken to an extreme, with him at one point claiming that 76% of "Negroes" are controlled from Moscow. Moberg is transformed into a collector of Nazi memorabilia and Lotterman becomes merely a cynical journo seen taking pleasure in the beating of protesters.

The political tensions which are about to reach a boiling point in the 60s are captured accurately. Paul Kemp is seen raging at the debates between Nixon and Kennedy, "How long can this blizzard of shame go on?" he asks. Later Kemp notes the smell of ink as the smell of bastards as well as truth. Kemp pledges to "speak for his reader" with a voice of "ink and rage". We can spot a Republican campaign poster for Eisenhower in Sala's apartment. In the novel, we might situate Kemp between Sala and Yeamon as a kind of "moderate witness" who is not as passive as Sala nor as rebellious as Yeamon. Paul Kemp participates and observes the mayhem, but manages to pull-back from the edge and gets to walk off towards the sunset as it were. Yeamon is gone completely as Robinson realised that Thompson had split himself into Paul Kemp and Yeamon. The aspects of Yeamon which were still necessary for the plot were amassed in Sanderson. So the formula of neither rebel nor passive but moderate witness is partially lost in the film. Kemp remains the moderate witness insofar as he gets away to tell the tale, whereas Sala and Moberg are left behind on the island. But neither adequately fit the roles of passive and rebel.

In reality we shouldn't kid ourselves that the good Doctor was an agonised human being who became too comfortable in resistance at the typewriter. One face of Thompson looked to ultra-leftist libertarianism while the other faced the establishment politics of the Democratic Party. He supported the last liberal to run for the Presidency George McGovern, as well as conservatives such as the Kennedy Brothers and Jimmy Carter who made way for Reaganomics. In the end it was all or nothing as the forces of reaction seemed to be winning in his lifetime, the threat to his vision of America was too much to stand but not enough to seriously fight for. He would have happily voted for Richard Nixon if he had ran against George W Bush in 2004. One can't help but note that Nixon was far worse than any of the Bushites, the atrocities committed in Vietnam make Iraq look like a children's game. It is a real shame he gave up before Mr Obama came on the scene. Thompson was a great one for the Civil Rights movement, no doubt he would've bludgeoned every other opponent as he did in the 1972 campaign.

A voyage into Gonzo.

"I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident." - Hunter S Thompson

The Rum Diary is not a piece of Gonzo journalism, for it was written in the late 50s when Hunter S Thompson was in his early 20s. But what is Gonzo? The particular brand which Dr Thompson dabbled in was as strenuously subjective and participatory as it is wild, this is where flat-out fantasy meets accurate reportage. The good Doctor filtered reality through a freakish mania sustained or possibly endured with the help of copious amounts of (both legal and illegal) substances. For Gonzo the claims of 'objectivity' which permeate American journalism are false and absurd, the blind-spots of which provide room for people such as Richard Nixon to slither into public office. Instead Gonzo wallows in its own subjectivity, it oozes provocative opinion as well as hard fact and comment meshed together with just the kind of sordid thoughts that will shock the squares. For Thompson journalism is nothing more than "a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

Going by the trailer of the film adaptation it would seem that the director Bruce Robinson (another seasoned drinker) had sought to extrapolate the Gonzo style throughout the story from the early hints of Gonzo lurking in the work. Undeniably there are the early signs of Gonzo in the piece, the drunken adventures of Paul Kemp in Puerto Rico carry the same filthy and sinister tones to them as in Thompson's later works. The language is simple, as well as wild and precise on the important details. Just as in The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved the reader is left waiting for the major event which never actually comes. Instead the almost masturbatory run-up to the event becomes the central focus of the piece. The derby is never covered in the sports article Thompson wrote. The Gonzo style of the narrative is complimented with the ultra-surreal and grotesque illustrations of English artist Ralph Steadman, who was out of his face on psilocybin at the time. The assignment was botched and Thompson saw it as a brutal failure, until he received wave-after-wave of positive feedback.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the reader only sees the beginning of the motorcycle race that Thompson was sent to cover in Nevada. Instead the depraved duo of Hunter S Thompson and Oscar Acosta became Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo, the mad trip through Las Vegas which followed was likened to a "savage journey to the heart of the American dream". The American Dream does not seem to be covered in any way other than some abstract analogy between all-American ideas and the cultural revolution of the 60s which had died by the early 70s. Perhaps it is the journey itself which falls short of finding the Dream. In The Rum Diary there is no sidekick for Paul Kemp, at least not to rival Oscar Acosta and Ralph Steadman. The role of the foreign compatriot in these instances is not to provide a domesticated semi-by-standing assistant to the character arc of a white man, rather Acosta became a full participant in the story just as Thompson did. Oscar Acosta was a radical lawyer who went on the road with Hunter S Thompson to Las Vegas where their antics were immortalised in Fear and Loathing.

The hints of a politically conscious youth can also be found in The Rum Diary, there are references to the "rise of communism", discouraging events in Cuba and the brutality of capitalism. The McCarthyite atmosphere of the day is captured as the newspaper is owned by a man named Lotterman, an ex-communist who attacks anything remotely left-ish to prove himself as a reformed character. Power is consistently portrayed as sleazy, amoral and self-interested. The politics of Thompson were one part ultra-leftist sentiment, one part Democrat and three parts Freak Power. As a man of contradictions Thompson was at once facing the liberal establishment and the radical strand of American populism. So he can support JFK and Jimmy Carter at the same time as he launches into vociferous attacks on Richard Nixon. In his dedication to George McGovern he set out to destroy all Democratic opposition with his typewriter, before moving on to do the same to the Republican candidates. In the end it was all or nothing for the good Doctor, he gave up the ghost before he got to see the first African-American walk into the White House as President. In the end it was all fear and loathing...

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside." - Hunter S Thompson

In the Temple of Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick's filmography spans many genres and themes, from horror to comedy and war to costume drama. A multitude of themes and messages can be found in these films, often concealed through semiotics and steganography, in Kubrick's works. Kubrick's first big hit Paths of Glory which, as  noted by Žižek, was a pacifist film in that soldiers are depicted as exposed to suffering and death without meaning as sacrificial lambs slaughtered for "an obscure and manipulated Cause." Contrast this with Spielberg's Schindler's List in which the Nazis represent the material rage of the paternal superego and Schindler is the paternal figure of the Jews, who are helpless children for which Schindler has be transformed into a responsible father. As Hannah Arendt pointed out that there is nothing fundamentally evil about the character of bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann. The psychological and personal profile of Eichmann tells us nothing of why he committed such atrocities against Jews. Similarly the attempt by Spielberg to investigate Amon Göth as a person and not a cog in the most homocidal regime in history.

The work of Kubrick is far less simplistic and can actually convey fascinating ideas to the audience. Just take 2001: A Space Odyssey which begins with the dawn of man, the apes handling bones and encircling the monolith. Near the end of 2001 we encounter the imponderable X, which Lacan would describe as objet petit a, when the view penetrates the monolith and an intense abstract visual sequence follows. It soon turns to a hyper-realist representation of fantasy-space. As Ager pointed out, the monolith of 2001 is actually symbolic of the cinema screen and correlates with the fetishisation of art that Walter Benjamin identified within culture. Originally art became fetishised out of the way it exists in one place and can be seen only in that place at any one time. Through its own uniqueness in space and time, the work of art resists becoming truly available to the rabble. This is captured by the incomprehensible nature of the monolith and it's unexplained fetishisation by apes and spacemen alike, which is constant throughout. In a sense it is a meta-fictional aspect of the film, it's presence an insightful joke about art at the expense of the viewer.

On this blog I intend to review in depth specific films and novels, in the past the works of Chuck Palahniuk and JG Ballard been the subject of articles. There will no doubt be many more analyses on this blog, especially when it comes to artists of Kubrick's calibre. So far I have looked in depth at The Shining and Full Metal Jacket so far, both of which are adaptations of books and great examples of the two genres of war and horror:

The Shining and the Slaughter

This is Vietnam, the Movie!

These two articles look at the films in socio-political terms. In The Shining the "founding crimes" of the American Republic emerge from the elevator as a river of blood, whilst Kubrick ignores the perspective of the victim in his take on Vietnam - with unsettling implications. The critical look at Full Metal Jacket is appropriate as it is devoid the bravery shown previously to fill The Shining with hints and themes related to the genocide of Native Americans. A general suspicion of all forms of authority runs through Kubrick's work, although his earlier films are more liberal than his later movies. From lampooning a campaign by the John Birch Society against fluoridation in Dr Strangelove. Though this suspicion of authority led him to permit the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese in the name of anti-Communism. The mockery of the red fear rampant in America throughout the Cold War is almost totally absent, except in the form of the drill instructor's absurd jingoist rhetoric.

It also may be the reason for the conspiratorial themes throughout many of Kubrick's films, which were displayed most overtly in Eyes Wide Shut. In a scene reminiscent of the widespread rumours of orgies, organised and attended by the KGB, in Stalinist Russia the super-rich and powerful meet to engage in ritualistic sex. The faults of the system cannot be a result of a systemic flaw that inevitably produces certain consequences over time. Instead, there must be some meddlesome entity which disrupts the system and must be stopped. For Kubrick is the authorities, who are responsible for nuclear weapons and indulge in orgies at an obscure estate in New York. At the same time, The Shining reflected the emergence of the angry white male phenomenon which would dominate American politics years later. It would represent a new take on the right-wing authoritarianism Kubrick mocked in Dr Strangelove. Except it was Timothy McVeigh who learned to love the bomb in the 1990s.

This is Vietnam, the Movie!

First to Go, Last to Know.

After 20 bloody years of US military intervention in Vietnam, the war ended and the country was united. The understanding of the war is that it was undertaken to prevent the spread of Communism from North Vietnam. However it was South Vietnam that was the major target of US aggression in the early years of the war. The Diem regime, which was installed and supported by the Eisenhower administration, was overthrown at the behest of the US in 1963. Even still it is the only war which the US did not come out of officially the victor. But it was a success in that the currents of independence in the region were crushed and Vietnam was prevented from emerging as a positive model of independence. To help soothe the wounds of this loss Hollywood has pumped out flicks like The Deer Hunter and Platoon which depict the American experience of the war. Oliver Stone tells us the first casualty of war is innocence, not the Vietnamese who died first, whilst Michael Cimino tells us that the Vietnamese liked to force American POWs to play Russian roulette - a lie of proportions fit for the Third Reich. These films take the side of the aggressor, not the victim.

Full Metal Jacket is in part a deviation from this trend. It is not a tissue of lies rarefied by the American national anthem, a tear sodden tale of lost innocence or a roid-pumped theme park for the white man to go "wild" in. Essentially the range goes from the jingoist celebration of violence to the shibboleths of liberal cinema, which see the need for thousands of deaths for the sake of a character arc. But it is still a film which takes the view point of the aggressor and, in doing so, inevitably sides with the oppressor. Where the Vietnamese perspective should be, there is only the American experience. The central focus of Full Metal Jacket is the process of training and indoctrination through which civilians are turned into killing machines - complete with nom de guerres like Cowboy and Joker - which is a way for the soldiers to be humanised for the audience. By contrast the Vietnamese are presented as faceless drones all too deserving of a death at the hands of American troops. The only real appearances made by the Other are of Vietnamese women, again only as prostitutes and killers.

The work of Stanley Kubrick is far too complex and so polysemic that to write it off so soon would be to ignore his ingenuity, greater discussion is required. Rob Ager argues that the scenes set in Vietnam are a satirical take on pro-war propaganda. Joker is writing for Stars and Stripes and in one scene the Chief Editor bluntly instructs the team on how to distort the coverage of the war. Behind him a banner reads: first to go, last to know. Joker and Rafterman enter the field to cover a platoon in battle, but they are part of a propaganda outlet and therefore we get a biased take on the story. Take the first battle of the film. It is an unbridled display of firepower and machismo, which quickly subdues the invisible enemy, which necessitates a piece of 1960s surf-rock soon after. The surf-rock continues to play as we see Joker's camera team filming the platoon in battle, the soldiers are lying down as if using concrete rubble for cover from enemy gunfire. But the camera men are not shot and are undeterred to carry on filming, there was no danger from enemy fire and the platoon was putting on a show for the press. A soldier even shouts "This is Vietnam, the movie!"


The "verfremdungseffekt", a distancing effect, which keeps the audience aware that the story is not of reality but an artefact of it. It keeps the audience in a state of heightened awareness, that prevents a emotional attachment with the story and keeps the theatrical set up from "naturalising" what appears as so unnatural. The dialogue of the soldiers is risible, particularly evident in a set of mock-interviews, contrasted with the serious and tragic nature of warfare. Before all of this we have observed the indoctrination process and not to mention the cynical instructions to rewrite a story and give it a "happy ending, say one kill". The satirical battles of previous scenes are cut away to make room for real combat as the squad descends into cowardice when faced with a sniper - who picks them off, one by one. After Cowboy's death the remaining members of the Lusthog Squad seek revenge on the sniper. Joker is caught off guard as his weapon jams and the sniper turns around - it's a woman! But she is swiftly gunned down before she can do him any harm and Joker puts her out of her misery.

The Shadow of White Men.

In the scene in which Joker and Rafterman cover a recently unearthed mass-grave, an atrocity committed by the Vietcong, a Colonel states "We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out." The depiction of the Other in the film is not just a simple case of "faceless drones" but of shadows which represent what the American troops have repressed as part of their training. This is down to the Jungian influence on co-writer Michael Herr, which made way for the concept of the Shadow - consistent of repressed weaknesses and instincts . The enemy is almost always to distant to see in battle, and when the enemy can be seen they are depicted as faceless silhouettes. It could be that the silhouettes of Vietcong killed in the film represent the weaknesses and instincts that the American soldiers have repressed as part of military training. Back at the mass-grave, the bodies of the deceased have been covered in lime and have been laid out in a similar symmetry to the recruits sleeping in their beds in previous scenes.

The objective violence of war is absent and filled by the subjective violence suffered by American soldiers. The suffering of the Vietnamese remains in the background and only occasionally comes to the forefront of Joker's story. The unearthed mass-grave is a crime committed by the Vietnamese against other Vietnamese, but similar crimes are absent in the film or only arise in allegorical forms. As is the case with the shooting at the end in which it is still Joker's perspective which matters and, like the prostitutes, she was asking for it and her death will be his burden to bare. We should build on the interpretation of the Vietnamese as a kind of Shadow for the Lusthog Squad and conclude that the women in the film are the realisation of man's guilt. This radical anti-feminist theme goes back to Adam and Eve, woman is conjured up out of man's desire and so if man "cleanses" himself woman will cease to exist. This is man's lowest mythology. In killing the Shadow the Lusthog Squad "purge" themselves of such desires and thus absolve themselves of guilt. 

There are plenty of Vietnamese who die at a distance in the film, but Vietnamese women are given greater screen time (out of the victims). Out of these women two of them are prostitutes and the third is a soldier who wastes three marines before being killed herself. Three soldiers killed for each appearance of women, one of whom is also killed, the cost of their sins is implicit and we might even interpret the sniper's killings as a form of violence which differs from the objective-subjective distinction. Similar to the Biblical locusts which comes seemingly out of nowhere, a means without an end, the divine punishment for man's sins - divine violence. The Benjaminian divine violence should be understood not as the vengeance of the People's Will, but as a sovereign decision to act made on the assumption of absolute solitude. The decision to risk one's life and strike blindly against the oppressor, enacting the point of non-distinction between vengeance and justice. It is Judgement Day for all the rape and carnage so flippantly indulged in by the Squad. Tragically the swarm of locusts is cut short as the sniper is wasted.

We could view the sniper as a vanishing mediator for Joker, a necessary even in his arc and we might generously note that in the context of a satire on pro-war propaganda the kill is necessary. The kill is the "happy ending" demanded by the Chief Editor, it is the inhumanity of Joker's institutional role - that of a war correspondent - revealed by Kubrick for the viewer to judge. So the death of the woman was a necessity in the narrative. In the ending we watch as Joker and the Lusthogs march onwards and childishly sing, oblivious to the depravity of their actions. Joker's mind turns to fantasies of a home-coming fuck with a "Mary Jane Rottencrotch". It does not seem as though this conclusion required the killing and that might be a testament to the meaningless and absurd nature of war. But it still feels too generous to Kubrick, the indifference of Joker at the film's conclusion is hardly noteworthy. Though Kubrick was interested in the indoctrination of young men which turns them into killers, it cannot be glossed over, this is not the side of the victim.

Ablution of the Oppressor.

When Joker encounters the first of the two prostitutes he remarks that half of Vietnamese prostitutes are members of the Vietcong. This comment is not meant seriously but hides a certain truth which is expanded on later. In the scene in which another prostitute is encountered, this time by the Lusthogs and we might infer that the death of the sniper is actually an allegory of the gang-rape of this prostitute by the soldiers. In war sexual deviancy and gang-rape are not uncommon, for instance in the Second World War Russian soldiers committed mass-rapes in Eastern Europe. The Vietnam war was no different and so we can make the assumption that the prostitute was subject to gang-rape by the Lusthog Squad. The sniper is taken by surprise, but Joker's weapon jams  and he can't fire and has to take out a smaller handgun while taking cover from her retaliatory gunshots. It is then that the sniper is cut down in a blaze of gunfire by Rafterman. When viewed as an allegory this scene changes and becomes particularly despicable.

We can see as Joker is about to pull the trigger, the peace symbol on his jacket is concealed behind his collar as he turns slightly. The shot fired is on the surface a crime which he has participated in, at the same time it symbolises his part in the sexual humiliation of the Other and the merciless destruction of Vietnam. In defence of Joker we might point out that he is a reluctant participant in this crime, there is nothing inherently monstrous about him nor malicious about his intentions. It is just a by-product of the indoctrination process and so on, which of course may well be true. There is still the troubling mystification of the victim, a killer yearning to be killed as a prostitute yearns to be fucked. Joker is devoid of a basic level of decency in the end, there is no grand reflection on his part in all of this. The juxtaposition of the sniper sequence and the scenes involving prostitutes may be an intentional hint on Kubrick's part, it is impossible to tell, that the sexual degradation of the Vietnamese in this way is equal to killing them. Again, this feels too generous but it is a possibility.

We could also read the sniper's death at Joker's hands as an allegory for the role he played in Pyle's descent into madness and eventual murder-suicide during the training scenes. It might even be a direct allegory of the scene in which Joker takes part in the beating of Pyle with soap bars. Out of the guilt for his conformity in beating a fellow cadet emerges the Other - a Shadow of this guilt that must be "cleansed" - which functions as a vanishing mediator. Once it has challenged Joker and he rises to that challenge, it can cease to exist. The challenge is the divine violence of luring the Lusthogs one-by-one to a drawn out death. But just as he failed to disarm Pyle, and "stomp" his guts out, Joker also fails to waste the sniper when it finally comes down to it. There is a sense in which Hartman took Joker's place in the murder-suicide which Joker was unable to prevent. We might go further to say that the sniper took Joker's place in being killed and that is the greatest humiliation for Joker. Note that the focus is still on the suffering of oppressor, even as he commits murder or fails to do so.

From this only a fractured normality can be restored, things will never be truly the same, in the aftermath. A reversion to youthful memories of Disney cartoons and immature sexual fantasies, coupled with the indifference to the magnitude of war crimes, is ultimately where the American troops are left. The indifference is all that is left over after the guilt has been "cleansed" and the Vietnamese, in all forms, no longer need to exist. A lot like the flushing of a toilet, shit is problematic only when there is a blockage and once this blockage is gone we can continue as normal. This is the horror of war cinema. The Other is just the filth conjured up by the American desire to fight Communism, promote democracy and freedom etc. The consequent guilt can only be "purged" with a full bucket of fake blood, strident imperial arrogance and persistent self-pity. The crimes can be recognised only to reassure us that we were the true victims all along. The Other can then be flushed away, it is no longer needed once it has served it's purpose in the narrative.

Crashing and Burning in Montreux.

The controversial book Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov and published in 1955, known for the innovative and lyrical style in which the narrative unfolds page-by-page, the infamy that has enveloped the novel is down to its content which focuses on the most sordid sexual deviancy - paedophilia. It is a dark tale of a middle-aged man and his obsession with a 12 year-old girl, the nature of this "love affair" is disposed towards rape and physical abuse. Nabokov insisted that his book did not convey any message, and it was not a work of "big ideas", stressing that he didn't want to "touch hearts" or "effect minds". I can't help but suspect that this element of Nabokov's work is partly due to his outlook and political views. Nabokov was a strident individualist and considered himself an old-fashioned liberal, which is likely given that his father was a prominent liberal politician, although Nabokov was also a close friend of William F Buckley and a fan of Richard Nixon.


It's important that we consider Nabokov's life. Vladimir Nabokov was born into one of the most powerful families in St Petersberg and inherited great wealth at a young age, he lived in a large house of 50 servants. Though this life of luxury as a Russian aristocrat was cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution, foring Nabokov to go into exile just as he was reaching maturity. This separated him from his first love Tamara, Lolita could have been Nabokov's way of mocking the way he still reminisced on his relationship with Tamara even in old age. Particularly as he aged she would have no doubt remained the same age in his mind as he had known her. Nabokov's father was shot dead by a fascist in Berlin, his gay brother was murdered in a concentration camp. These events not only displaced Nabokov and changed his life forever, but it may be the reason for his individualism. From the trampled ground of Bolshevism and fascism Nabokov emerged, like Ayn Rand although less extreme, in opposition to "big ideas" and "utopian goals" like communism.

Nabokov's claim to not propagate any message or "big idea" in his work is typical of an "old-fashioned liberal", who would argue that the state should be minimal to protect individual freedom. In the past, and even today, the libertarian right-wing has argued that the Civil Rights act should be repealed on the grounds that it infringes on the freedom of business owners - the freedom to discriminate. Defenders of such a position often claim to be "neutral" and adhere to a minimalist view of the state as "non-interventionist" for the sake of freedom of choice. But in not taking sides and not interfevening in such a way you are taking sides and are interferring. As such "neutrality" is permissive of the racist practices prevalent at the time. In not taking sides in Lolita, neither explicitly condemning nor embracing paedophilia, Nabokov may have taken the side of Humbert Humbert.

Apart from his life as a novelist Nabokov loved football and was an avid chess-player, he was also an entomologist. As an entomologist Nabokov collected over 4,000 butterflies and even discovered a species, which was named in his honour "Nabokovia". The life of a butterfly is particularly interesting in regards to Nabokov's writing. A butterfly begins life as a caterpillar, before entering an immobile stage known as the "nymph stage" before emerging as a butterfly weeks later. During the "nymph stage" the insect is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, in that sense it is in a liminal state. The parallel stage among humans would be the teenage years - which are neither child nor adult - liminal like the "nymph" stage. In the story Lolita is a prepubescent girl of 12, which would place her just prior to entering this liminal stage as a caterpillar. But it is as she is reaching maturity that Lolita dies while giving birth to a stillborn child, she was just 17 at the time - not yet an adult, not yet a butterfly.

However, we must not be rash and conclude from this that Vladimir Nabokov was simply no defender of paedophilia. Humbert Humbert is not the last "nympholept", nor was Lolita the last "nymphet", spawned by the dark-side of Nabokov's imagination. Similar tales of sexual deviancy appear as early as 1939 in Nabokov's work, beginning with The Enchanter and ending with Laura which he never finished and was published posthumously against his wishes. In total there are about six novels in which young girls are lusted after by mature men. As Martin Amis noted, about two or three of these novels are masterpieces but the content is nevertheless unsettling. It would appear that "nympholepsy" is part of the decor of themes and motifs - along with butterflies, chess, Freud-bashing, mirrors; doubles and dopplegangers - that are recurrent in Nabokov's works.

The Enchanter is similar to the first half of Lolita in that the protagonist infiltrates the household of his prey by marrying the girl's mother, after the mother is out of the picture (e.g. killed off), the "enchanter" despoils the prepubescent daughter. Though the differences are more important, and perhaps more revealing, than the similarities between the two books. The "enchanter" has a single voyeuristic "moment" with his nymphet, whereas Humbert Humbert has sex regularly with Lolita for about 2 years. The Enchanter is less subtle and crude than Lolita in terms of writing, in the former Nabokov writes at one point "he began passing his magic wand above her body". And yet it is Lolita in which Nabokov judges Humbert Humbert, tacitly holding him responsible for the trajectory of Lolita's life - from her defiled childhood to her premature death, a life stolen by Humbert.

Interestingly, The Enchanter was published by Dmitri Nabokov in 1987, whereas Lolita was published in 1955 when Nabokov was still alive, even though it was The Enchanter which was written first in 1939. This might lead us to conclude that Vladimir Nabokov was worried about the release of The Enchanter, nothing particularly new there as Nabokov contemplated burning Lolita on several occasions and wanted The Original of Laura to be destroyed upon his death. But it was not until Nabokov's later years that he underwent a literary meltdown, beginning with Ada in 1970. As Amis puts it "When a writer comes off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident." It is in Ada that Nabokov creates a world which Humbert would have adored - where nothing matters and everything is permitted.

On it goes in Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), in the latter a Vadim Vadimovich marries a girl 43 years his junior. In Transparent Things an impotent misfit named Hugh Person visiting Switzerland, courting Armande and tending to Mr R an aging eccentric author and a paedophile. Person looks at a picture of Armande when she was 10, arousing and haunting him in dreams from then on, he later strangles Armande in his sleep and dies in a fire at the hotel. The sexual depravity recurrent in some of Nabokov's many novels may place such works further to the transgressive fiction of William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade. Though we might conclude Nabokov's writing on such a rancid transgression is really down to an obsession with the internal chaos of man. But I think that might still be too generous, even for an author of Nabokov's magnitude.

The American Experience.

The First Casualty of War.

 

Ricky Gervais once joked that the Second World War may have the best ending but the Vietnam war has the best sound track. He was referring to the horrendous use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese as less "entertaining" than the music of the 1960s. In doing so, whether intentionally or not, Gervais highlights the way war has been reduced to the realm of entertainment today. As we all know, since the end of the Vietnam war there have been countless efforts to immortalise the conflict on the big screen for all to see. The best of these films are often listed as Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. The Kubrick film being my personal favourite. But there are problems with the so-called anti-war films that have focused on the war which raged from the early 60s under JFK to the mid 1970s under the caretaker administration of Gerald Ford.


The problems of films like First Blood and Missing in Action are self-evident, as such films do not pretend to be anything more than a shallow display of steroid-fuelled jingoism and a mere excuse for a angry white man to go "wild". The problems of films that claim to show us the true horror of war are not often discussed in the same light. Even though the films, which take a less "positive" look at the Vietnam war, have made false depictions of the Vietnamese. One such instance being in The Deer Hunter where American POWs are forced to play Russian roulette for the pleasure of sadistic Vietcong. Thus, justifying the ruthlessness which Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken demonstrated in gunning them down to escape. It is the scars, both physical and psychological, of war that are depicted in the film. But only the scars inflicted on the minds and bodies of American soldiers.

Let's look at Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Vietnam war, which was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad's novella takes place in the Congo Free State, a private-colony of the Belgian King Leopold II, and the characters are working for a trading company which brutally exploits African workers. Apocalypse Now takes place in war-ravaged Vietnam and Cambodia, the main characters are soldiers. It is Cambodians who replace the Africans as the brutalised people, but also as "primitive savages" who worship Kurtz as a God. In Apocalypse Now Kurtz recalls a humanitarian trip to inoculate children for polio in a Vietnamese village, the Vietcong went into the village and then hacked off the arms of the inoculated children. Kurtz wept at the sight of the pile of little arms, before learning to admire the will of the Vietcong to commit such atrocities. Kurtz says "If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over very quickly."

The emphasis on the American experience of the war is a characteristic that practically all films on the Vietnam war share. The Vietnamese experience is severely neglected, even though it was 6 million Indochinese who died during the war. Not only is the war depicted from the side of the aggressor, it is the subjective experience of the war by soldiers carrying out the invasion which is the focus of such films. The objective violence of war, which is inherent to war regardless of the existence of any particular person, which becomes subjective violence in war films. Subjective violence in the sense of violence as impacting directly on individuals, violence which is partly dependent on the existence of an individual. Take Platoon the mass-killings and fraggings that take place is all part of Charlie Sheen losing his innocence, which is the "first casualty of war" according to the film's tag line.

Far from actually taking a moral position on the war these films actually obfuscate the important issues of the war. Instead opting to focus in on the perpetrator's traumatic experience, which enables the ethical and political background of the conflict to be suppressed. Why was the US in Vietnam? This question goes unanswered in most, if not all, American war movies. The fact that it was the events at Pearl Harbour that drove the Europeans out of South-East Asia and by the early 1950s colonial powers were struggling to maintain power.  Around this time the US government supported the French in their bid to regain dominance over Indochina. This attempt failed and the US ended up backing a nationalist regime in the South of Vietnam as the North was taken over by communists. In the 60s, the US moved to destroy all currents of independence in Vietnam - whether communist or nationalist - to prevent a "domino effect" across South-East Asia. 

In We Were Soldiers, which was dedicated not just to the Americans who fought at Ia Drang but also the Vietnamese who died there, the fall of French colonialism in the region is depicted in the opening scene. The problem in the ambush of French soldiers by Vietnamese rebels is that it is the Vietnamese who remain faceless aggressors and the French who are the victims of the assault. This goes as far as portraying a Vietnamese man literally stabbing a French officer in the back with a bayonet. It is the French who are overwhelmed, disarmed and executed mercilessly. This scene is supposed to explain how the Vietnam war "began", but it takes one battle out of context. The battle of Ia Drang was one of the last in the First Indochina war, which spanned 8 years and ultimately brought an end to over 60 years of French colonialism in the region.

It is as if the American film industry is obsessed with Vietnam in particular because it is commonly perceived as such a loss for the US and a pointless waste of American life. Not because it was fundamentally wrong and immoral, but because almost 60,000 Americans died in a senseless war. Never mind the 6 million people slaughtered all over South-East Asia, not just from Vietnam but Laos and Cambodia as well. It could also be argued that the US succeeded in its goals in Indochina, most currents of independence were eradicated and these countries were reduced to satellites of China. In that sense, the Vietnam war was no loss for the US and the thousands of Americans who died in the war did die for a cause - an immoral cause. The Americans were not the victims of this war, the people of Indochina were. Thus, a film about the Vietnamese experience of war is well over due.

Memento Mori.

A Tabula Rasa.

Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2001) explores the dull archetypal story of revenge combined with aspects of traditional detective stories, which have been recycled and churned out repeatedly by Hollywood over the years, through the cliche of a amnesiac narrator. Perhaps, what is so original, compelling and truly brilliant aspect of Memento is the structure that the story takes and the way in which Nolan combined old ideas in the piece. The protagonist, Leonard Shelby, suffered a head injury whilst trying to save his wife from intruders who had broken into their house. Since then Lenny has suffered from anterograde amnesia, amnesia in which he retains his old memories and knowledge but is incapable of maintaining new memories. The film is structured, to fit the unsettling subjectivity of the protagonist's view of reality, in reverse chronological order. As Nolan explains, Memento does not have a non-linear structure, at least not in the conventional sense, because each scene is directly dependent on the one before just as in a linear structure.


Though the film is enthralling on many levels, it introduces an age-old area of philosophy to popular culture and its audience. In the opening scene, we are confronted with a polaroid photograph of a man who has been shot dead. In reverse of the process taken in photographing the corpse, the polaroid slowly fades as it gradually returns to it's initial blank state before retreating back into the camera. The polaroid itself is passive to the camera and it's owner to determine the image of which it will ultimately convey. This is almost a metaphor for the blank slate, or tabula rasa, description of the mind, favoured by empiricists like John Locke. Empiricism is a philosophical school of thought focusing on the nature of knowledge, empiricists argued that all our ideas and knowledge are derived from experience via senses. For instance, our ideas of ‘white’ and ‘cold’ come from the first time we encountered snow. Our experiences shape our knowledge of reality and all the ideas we’ll ever have are taken from our experiences. There are parallels to this in Memento. The polaroids, notes and tattoos are the only ways in which Leonard Shelby can collect knowledge - which is derived from his daily experiences in his search for John G.

The way that a camera can serve as a model for the empirical view of the mind. Images are received and after a flash imprinted onto a polaroid, the tabula rasa, as the human mind is blank upon birth and develops an understanding of the world from sense impressions, according to the empiricists. The opening shot of the polaroid is a metaphor for the inner-workings of Leonard's damaged psyche - a truly empirical mind perhaps is one in which memories cannot be made. The distorting effect amnesia has had on Shelby's consciousness is why a priori knowledge is absent in his life after the incident. We do not live like Shelby because we can make new memories, we don't need all those notes and tattoos to get by. The reason: because Lenny is lacking something we are not. We can hold onto knowledge, probably because the mind isn't a blank slate normally. Rationalists would argue that we have a priori knowledge, which is independent of experience and sense impressions (if anything) "unlock" such knowledge. There has to be something in the camera to hold images, it can't just be a void.

Reason and Experience.

Immanuel Kant proposed a synthesis, a compromise in the epistemological argument between philosophers of the rational and empirical traditions. Most animals receive information through sense impressions, a dog can hear us speak but will not understand our language. It takes reason to understand the received information, which is what may separate us from the animals. The reason interacts with the experience and is not passive, if anything, reason dominates experience shaping it into concepts that we can understand. The concepts of ‘white’ and ‘cold’ exist to us, not because they exist objectively. But because we have imposed these concepts onto our subjective experience of reality, snow can appear to us as both ‘white’ and ‘cold’. This is not because the world is inside our minds. This is because our minds only have the capability to perceive the world in such a way. For instance, the unified notions of time and space that we hold are not entirely independent of our minds. We just cannot perceive the world without applying the concepts of time and space, otherwise nothing would be comprehensible.

This is a point enforced by the reverse linear structure of Memento. If we could perceive the world without applying the concept of time, as we understand it, the reversed structure of the film would be insignificant. Though, we can follow the storyline because we put things together as we're watching, the structure has a major impact upon how we interpret the story. When we first come across Natalie we see her as a possible love interest. This is due to the traditional depiction of female main characters as a love interest or play-thing for the leading man. In Memento, this assumption of Natalie is further played on when Leonard awakens after sharing a bed with Natalie. It is only as the story progresses, that it becomes apparent that Natalie is not a love interest at all and appears to be a manipulative character with her own goal of avenging her boyfriend's death. All of this is predicated on the fact that the audience would be caught off guard by the structure of the film. Though it's possible that the film could not even have been made if the concept of time was totally objective and unconnected to the human experience.

During the conclusion of Memento, which is actually the beginning of the story, Leonard acknowledges that there is such a thing as a priori knowledge when he says "Yeah, we don't need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different." In doing so, he rejects the notion that knowledge is derived only through sense impressions. We do not need to sense ourselves to know ourselves, we simply are ourselves and therefore know ourselves a priori - it is not acquired through experience but known. So this would mean that the metaphor of a camera for Shelby's mind is only partially accurate of his "condition" - a state of near passivity to knowledge, to others etc. Leonard has anterograde amnesia and the way he has been led along by Teddy shows the depth of his passivity. It is in the film that we see the transition Leonard Shelby makes from "bad faith" - acting as if one is a object passive to the forces around them - to authenticity and all the responsibility that comes with it.

The New Man.

Leonard Shelby is a highly original character, standing out against scenery in his cream suit and even standing incongruous to the banal revenge story he is part of. Shelby is remarkably independent, resourceful and determined for an individual suffering from such a "condition" - in contrast with the story of Sammy Jenkis who ends up in a home. But at the same time, because of his "condition", he vulnerable to the power of others. We can only watch as Leonard is manipulated by those around him. Teddy, Natalie and even Burt use his "condition" to further their own ends, whether it be for financial gain or revenge. Though the trust Leonard places in his notes keeps him from being easily manipulated by Teddy. On several occasions Leonard looks at the picture of Teddy and his comment "Never believe his lies" which stops him from following his guidance blindly. Partly this is the way that Leonard continues on his own independent path to find the killer-rapist John G. Of course, John G is already dead and Shelby is already free but trapped in "bad faith", allowing others to determine his actions.


Though it could be that this element of Memento cannot be understood fully without exploring the ideas of existentialism. Existentialism is a radically subjective philosophy that places the individual, autonomy, authenticity and the self, at the centre of importance. Fanon believed that the only way individuals could achieve true freedom, as opposed to the spurious bourgeois freedom of the West, is through violence. The very experience of violence would be cathartic and can awaken individuals from the West's insidious form of control. At the heart of existentialism rests a view of human beings not too dissimilar from empiricism. The way in which empiricists view the mind as a tabula rasa at the beginning of life is similar to the way in which existentialist philosophers viewed the attaining of essence after existence. But for the likes of Sartre, the individual is not a passive and blank slate waiting to experience the world. Sartre would have argued that the individual must not act in "bad faith" in order to attain authenticity and experience true freedom. "Bad faith" being to act as if one is passive and conform to the pressures that surround you.

The story of Memento relates closely to the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. This is also appropriate as Sartre was heavily influenced by Kant and pursued merging the duty-based ethics of Kant with existentialism. The act of killing Teddy may be the emancipation in itself, as it is Shelby's action that destroys the powerful force that he has been passive to for so long. After which Leonard emerges as a "new man" who has taken charge of his life and has purged himself of the "bad faith". The paradox of this relationship being the comfort and security of it, but also the turmoil and horror that is innate to the relationship. However, it could be argued that the emancipation Leonard achieved by killing Teddy was set in motion when he first wrote down Teddy's license plate, in the film's conclusion and the story's beginning, and in that sense it was that action, not killing John G, which was truly authentic.