apocalyptics

Not New York

I have been thinking a lot about the “apocalytpic cities” section of my thesis. Initial thoughts are to focus on New York, but the whole idea of the multimodal mythic cluster means that New York is every city and every city is New York. Well, that is to say that New York is London, LA, Berlin, Shanghai, Hong Kong and various other nameless apocalyptic cities.

Just been searching out reviews of Children of Men a new adaptation of the P.D. James novel. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón(Y'Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Azkaban) it is set in a beautifully dystopic London cityscape. The film is set in a world where New York has been destroyed by an atomic bomb some years earlier so in a sense London becomes the haunted double of the destroyed city.

A number of the reviews criticise - as reviewers love to do - “gaps in the logic” of the film, but given Cuaron's other films and the bits that I have seen on the trailer I suspect the film has a compelling visual logic - a spatially imagined logic that is played out in the filmic recreation of “London”. A futuristic story is by definition one that will have gaps: the gaps of what has not yet been. The imagined city in such films is the fragile container of such aporia.

Just started today must try to see over the weekend.

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Technorati Tags: children of men, film, dystopias

9/11 in a Movie-Made World

Tom Englehardt poses a fascinating set of “what ifs” in an article that traces the “movie-made” world of September 11.

So here was my what-if thought. What if the two hijacked planes, American Flight 11 and United 175, had plunged into those north and south towers at 8:46 and 9:03, killing all aboard, causing extensive damage and significant death tolls, but neither tower had come down? What if, as a Tribune columnist called it, photogenic “scenes of apocalypse” had not been produced? What if, despite two gaping holes and the smoke and flames pouring out of the towers, the imagery had been closer to that of 1993? What if there had been no giant cloud of destruction capable of bringing to mind the look of “the day after,” no images of crumbling towers worthy of Independence Day?

We would surely have had blazing headlines, but would they have commonly had “war” or “infamy” in them, as if we had been attacked by another state? Would the last superpower have gone from “invincible” to “vulnerable” in a split second? Would our newspapers instantly have been writing “before” and “after” editorials, or insisting that this moment was the ultimate “test” of George W. Bush's until-then languishing presidency? Would we instantaneously have been considering taking what CIA Director George Tenet would soon call “the shackles” off our intelligence agencies and the military? Would we have been reconsidering, as Florida's Democratic Senator Bob Graham suggested that first day, rescinding the Congressional ban on the assassination of foreign officials and heads of state?...

If it all hadn't seemed so familiar, wouldn't we have noticed what was actually new in the attacks of September 11? Wouldn't more people have been as puzzled as, according to Ron Suskind in his new book The One Percent Doctrine, was one reporter who asked White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, “You don't declare war against an individual, surely”? Wouldn't Congress have balked at passing, three days later, an almost totally open-ended resolution granting the President the right to use force not against one nation (Afghanistan) but against “nations,” plural and unnamed?

Peter Manning, in an interview in today's Australian (not online) promoting his new book, argues that we shouldn't indulge in grand before and after 9/11 “new world” narratives, he points to other tragedies of much greater proportion such as Rwanda. But the reality is that 9/11 did fracture the world in a new way. The enormity of 9/11 cannot just be measured in the tragedy of the 3000 who died (how can you usefully “measure” 1000s or tens of 1000s of dead people anyway). The enormity of the event is in its production and its image. And as Englehardt points out, that is something radically new and powerfully familiar. Because of our “movie-made” world 9/11 was utterly familiar and totally startling all at the same time and that is the new sensation we are still getting used to even as we watch those towers fall again and again.

Technorati Tags: representing 9/11

Spielbergian meditations

Manohla Dargis' review of Munich in the New York Times make's Spielberg's new film sound much more interesting than other reports that I have read:

"Munich" is as much a meditation on ethics as a political thriller, but it takes nothing away from the film to say that the most adrenaline-spiked part of this genre hybrid involves getaway cars, false papers and the sight of the future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who pops up during a mission in Lebanon, mowing down terrorists while dressed in a woman's wig and high heels. In between the cloak, dagger and drag, the telephone bombs and a veritable alphabet soup of intrigue (C.I.A., P.L.O., K.G.B.), the years pass with increasing desperation and the team's numbers dwindle. Forced into a new kind of exodus, far from the homeland meant to provide justification for their every action, Avner and his men wander the continent that three decades earlier had been the staging ground for the extermination of European Jewry.

For these wandering, bickering, argumentative Jews, every safe house and port of call becomes an occasion for yet another discussion about Israel and identity. Nothing if not conversational, "Munich" is organized around three crucial dialogues: Meir's discussion of vengeance with her advisers, which ends with her declaration that every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values; a brief discussion between Avner and a Palestinian who predicts Israel's defeat; and, finally, a bitter encounter between two Israelis who fail to find common ground even in that multicultural utopia known as Brooklyn. With its dead-eye view of Lower Manhattan and the twin towers, this scene makes clear (as if there was any doubt) that Mr. Spielberg is as worried about this country as he is about Israel.

Project Deep Impact

The NASA Deep Impact mission which has exploded a probe into an orbiting comet has released a series of impressive images. The mission named after the 1998 film has again blurred the line between popular science and popular culture. Everyone seems excited and impressed but not that clear what its all about. The pop science site Red Nova's report is headlined: “NASA cheers probes direct hit on comet”.

It sounded like science fiction - NASA scientists used a space probe to chase down a speeding comet 83 million miles away and slammed it into the frozen ball of dirty ice and debris in a mission to learn how the solar system was formed.

The unmanned probe of the Deep Impact mission collided with Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan, late Sunday as thousands of people across the country fixed their eyes to the southwestern sky for a glimpse.

The impact at 10:52 p.m. PDT was cause for celebration not only to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but also for the more than 10,000 people camped out at Hawaii's Waikiki Beach to watch it on a giant movie screen.

“It's almost like one of those science fiction movies,” said Steve Lin, a Honolulu physician.
The cosmic smash-up did not significantly alter the comet's orbit around the sun and NASA said the experiment does not pose any danger to Earth - unlike the scary comet headed for Earth in the 1998 movie, “Deep Impact.”

So much for the spectacle, and the science...

Rough images by the mothership that released the probe on its suicide mission 24 hours earlier showed a bright white flash from the comet upon impact, which hurled a cloud of debris into space. When the dust settles, scientists hope to peek inside the comet's frozen core - a composite of ice and rock left over from the early solar system.

Technorati Tags: Deep Impact

War of the Worlds

With the Australian media preview of War of the Worlds last night SMH film writer Gary Maddox has an intriguing little piece in today's paper. It's not really a review, it's not really a comment piece, it's a short reflection on post 9/11 culture and the new film:

Panicking crowds fleeing down streets. Buildings collapsing. A coat of grey dust on Tom Cruise's face. A crashed passenger jet. And the first thought when the explosions and killing starts: is it a terrorist attack?....

Other War of the Worlds adaptations tapped into fears about Nazis and the Soviets. While remembering the past, Spielberg has tapped into the new fears about terrorist attacks.

The strength of the movie is the resonances with other wars on humanity, including the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Spielberg is reminding us there have been many threats over the generations, but humanity can survive.

It's not the first time this connection has been made. In fact Spielberg has been drawing people's attention to it in many of his publicity interviews. He seems most articulate in this interview with the Chicago Sun Times:

“In my mind, there is that image of everyone fleeing from Manhattan across the bridge after the Sept. 11 attack,” Spielberg says. “That's a searing image that will never leave our minds.

”This movie is also about people being attacked for no reason. They don't know why they're being attacked. We certainly went to great lengths in the movie not to explain any reason for these attackers.“

His screen writer David Koepp says in the same piece that although the reference was explicit they worked hard to make sure the politics were not:

”Certainly, there are a lot of political undertones and overtones,“ Koepp says. ”But we tried consciously to never lead with the politics. That's a guaranteed way to make a piece of crap.

“The political tones of this movie will emerge for themselves. In the '50s, 'War of the Worlds' was, 'My God, the commies are coming to get us.' Now it's about fear of terrorism. In other parts of the world, the new movie will be fear of American invasion. It will be clearly about the Iraq war for them,” says the screenwriter.

Koepp and Spielberg also makes some interesting comments about the visual and plotting choices that were made:

Spielberg was clear about what film he wanted to make with “War of the Worlds” and what film he refused to do. The rules included: No U.S. landmarks in flames, no beating up on New York City, and no politicians, scientists or generals leading the way to victory. There would also be no shots of world capitals.

There could be airplanes crashing into houses, alien tripods sending a ferry boat the way of the Titanic and dead bodies floating sadly down a river and seen through the eyes of a child (Fanning), who comes across the horrifying site in the woods.

I'll wait to see how successfully he avoided some of those easy cliches - or rather if he did what others he replaced them with - the frustrating thing about Spielberg is that he is a bleeding heart liberal with an overtly American mythical view of family and nation. His rule about no generals/scientists leading the way to victory will undoubtedly be matched by a parable about the heroic little guy protecting his family. Of course neither point of view really comes to terms with the complex issues of individual and communal agency in the face of disaster.

Technorati Tags: War of the Worlds

Billy Jack Is Ready to Fight the Good Fight Again - New York Times

In a fascinating interview with the New York Times Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor, the husband and wife team that brought us Billy Jack - the classic outsider hero of the 60s/70s - says they are going to make a new film. They are looking at combining the film with political activism around the Iraq war:

“We despise both political parties, really loathe them,” he said. (“We” might be Mr. Laughlin and his alter ego, or it might include his wife, Delores Taylor, who played Billy Jack's pacifist partner, Jean; but one doesn't interrupt the man lightly.)

“We the people have no representative of any kind,” he continued. “It's now the multinationals. They've taken over. It's no different than the 70's, but it's gotten worse. And if you use words like 'impeachment' or 'fascist' you're a nut on a soapbox.”

So Mr. Laughlin and Ms. Taylor are planning to bring their characters back to the big screen with a new $12 million sequel, raising money from individuals just as they did to make their films three decades ago.

In this new film, they say, they will take on social scourges like drugs, and power players like the religious right. They say they will also outline a way to end the current war and launch a political campaign for a third-party presidential candidate.

They have already formed a 527 nonprofit committee with the aim of ending the war, and say they will run full-page ads in major newspapers beginning next month explaining their plan to withdraw from Iraq. (Money raised for that committee is separate from the film project.)

There is a sense that they are “Billy Jack” lots of talk about thier triumph outside the studio system and Taylor concludes:

“This is something we have to do. We don't know if it will be successful, but we're committed. We have to do it. Just like 'Billy Jack.' ”

Robert Sklar, professor of cinema studies at New York University notes the seminal importance of the Billy Jack films both in terms of the genre and in terms of the self-releasing model:

“He was the model for Rambo, for 'Walking Tall,' When you think of what 'Rocky' meant for the culture - Laughlin was ahead of all that. He represented the indomitable outsider, and he was the first one in that era. It was also true in the sense in which he fought to make the film, and fought to get it distributed with this terrific idea of self-releasing.”

We see here an early example of fusion between outsider hero character and outsider hero actor coming together as a political and business statement. A model that has been developed very differently by Arnold Schwazenneger and Mel Gibson.

Bush and Star Wars

Word from Cannes is that the final installment in the Star Wars saga: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith is making the links between the Empire and the Empire.

The last episode rounding out the seminal sci-fi saga Star Wars screened at the Cannes film festival today, capping a six-part series that remains a major part of popular culture - and delivering a galactic jab to US President George W Bush....

Reaction at advance screenings was effusive, with festival-goers, critics and journalists at Cannes applauding at the moment the infamous Darth Vader came into being. But there were also murmurs at the parallels being drawn between Bush's administration and the birth of the space opera's evil Empire.

Baddies' dialogue about bloodshed and despicable acts being needed to bring “peace and stability” to the movie's universe, mainly through a fabricated war, set the scene. And then came the zinger, with the protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, saying just before becoming Darth Vader: “You are either with me - or you are my enemy.”

To the Cannes audience, often sympathetic to anti-Bush messages in cinema as last year's triumph here of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 attested, that immediately recalled Bush's 2001 ultimatum, “You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”

The plot against leakage

Frank Rich has written another excellent article about the moral values scare.

He notes that a PBS affiliate in NY has rejected an add for the movie Kinsey because of the film's "controversial" subject matter. This is not unlike the reaction of the NYT in 1948 who refused to carry ads for Kinsey's breakthrough study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Another public broadcaster refused to allow a women's group to use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on air announcement. And of course no one will carry the United Church of Christ's ad welcoming gay couples to its congregations.

Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make "Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, it struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history....Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of "moral values" voters, we're back where we came in....But not unlike Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back to an American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did at the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence.

Rich goes onto note that the "pop cultural revolution" begun in Kinsey's era is in no danger but that the reaction to these cultural texts is indicative of more insidious measures being implemented in health care and eductaion.

No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact.

Although Rich calls his article "The Plot Against Sex in America" it is not just sex that is under attack. The folks over at Crooked Timber have been discussing the film adaption of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and note a London Times interview with the director where he says the anti-religious overtones will be cut from the film version of the book. The battle against an evil all powerful church is essential to Pullman's novel. But according to the Times:

Chris Weitz, the director, has horrified fans by announcing that references to the church are likely to be banished in his film. Meanwhile the “Authority”, the weak God figure, will become “any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual”. The studio wants alterations because of fears of a backlash from the Christian Right in the United States...

Weitz made these controversial remarks in an interview with bridgetothestars.net, one of the many His Dark Materials fan sites. He said: “New Line is a company that makes films for economic returns. You would hardly expect them to be anything else. My job is to get the film made in such a way that the spirit of the piece is carried through to the screen and to do that I must contend with the fears of the studio.

“Needless to say, all my best efforts will be directed towards keeping the work as liberating and iconoclastic an experience as I can. But there may be some modification of terms. You will probably not hear of the church, but you will hear of the Magisterium. Those who will understand will understand.”

He said that he shared Pullman’s view that the Authority could represent any repressive establishment — political, totalitarian, fundamentalist or communist. “This gives me a certain amount of leeway in navigating the very treacherous issues that beset adapting His Dark Materials for the screen.

”

Meanwhile the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the European film industry is not being cowed.

Films about euthanasia, abortion and the hardships of immigrant life bagged the top prizes at the 17th European Film Awards today.

Head-On, about a young Turkish woman in Germany who escapes her strict Muslim home through a difficult marriage with an older man, won the best film award in the competition dubbed the "European Oscars".

Spaniard Javier Bardem won the best actor prize for his role as a paralysed man who fought for three decades for the right to die in The Sea Inside, a true story.

Briton Imelda Staunton took the best actress statuette for her turn as a working-class mother who performs illegal abortions in the harrowing drama Vera Drake.

What is interesting in all these instances is the play of resistances. Kinsey, Pullman, Vera Drake are certainly "cultural bellwethers" as Rich suggests. But they produce resistance largely because they represent "leakage" – neither the message of the moral values crusaders nor the message of change makers can be easily contained. Any notion of consensus reality or dominant ideology is much more fluid than either of those two terms suggests. Even Weitz explicitly states that he intends to produce the Pullman film in such a way as its ambiguities leak a range of messages.

Memories reminders ghosts and myths

I have been reading some stuff on "community of memory" (Paige Baty on Marylin and Barbie Zelizer on Kennedy) and then recently came across these two quotes from quite different sources.

Firstly Derrida's notion of ghosts from an this essay on the cultural history of the highway:

Jacques Derrida has suggested that ghosts come to talk with us both from the past and the future. Learning to understand these ghosts of the future-past or the past-future is necessary, he claims, if we wish to take responsibility for future generations:

[we must] learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (176)

In the case of highways, thus, it is important to understand the role that ghosts play in our constructions of the past and the future, if we are to learn to take responsibility for their role in the future. The way we imagine the roads of tomorrow suggests something about the way we value our selves, our environment, and our technologies -- and suggests something about the way we must act, if we are to have responsibility for our future selves.

Secondly this essay from the Boston Globe on Oliver Stone's new movie Alexander.

WRITING ABOUT the Romans seen on film 50 years ago, the French theorist Roland Barthes saw in their sweaty brows the mythology of "man thinking." These days, however, our Greeks and Romans do not think, they remind. They remind themselves of their destiny. They remind their followers of the glory they might win. And their stories remind us a great deal of our current empire, and its strategic uncertainties.

The author J. D Connor makes not just the obvious comparison to Iraq and the American empire but also takes this new taste for epics (Gladiator, Troy, Alexander and others to come soon) as a reflection of the global empire of Hollywood: "These days any commercial filmmaker (and particularly one with a fondness for casts of thousands and lavish period detail) needs a certain amount of imperial hubris: that is, he needs to believe that audiences will flock to his or her films around the globe."

Today's events are present in the history remade on screen:

Since much of the action of "Alexander," moral and military, takes place in what is now Iraq, it's hardly surprising that Oliver Stone takes some potshots at the president. What is unexpected are the heartfelt neocon speeches Alexander delivers. Standing on his balcony overlooking Babylon, he goes on and on: "These people want change, they need change," Alexander asserts. He lives "to free the people of the world."

To be sure, Stone lays the irony on thick here. After the first balcony speech, Alexander's boyfriend Hephaistion quickly changes the subject to his sovereign's dreamy eyes. And during Alexander's second major policy address on the balcony, he is too preoccupied with Babylon's "deep water port" to notice that Hephaistion is busy flailing away out of focus in the background, dying of a poison-induced fever.

When a trusted commander complains that conquering all of Asia "was not your father's mission," Alexander responds (again la W.), "I am not my father." Why stop now? Why stop ever? One more month, Alexander tells his men in India.

It's all here in a condensed image. The anxiety over empire, the anxiety of sexuality, the anxiety over expansion and retreat. We are reminded of history, we see ghosts of past present and future. We see cultural production.