The Knowledge Eater

Essay: The critical reception of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness"

2011-10-02T12:33:00.002+10:00

Whilst the literary history of science fiction (SF) has been marked primarily as a male domain, ‘women have been writing science fiction for as long as science fiction has been around’ (Larbalestier 2006:xviii). Indeed most commentators agree that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), was the first genuine example of SF. Thus, it could be said that the genre of SF was inaugurated ‘with a woman’s critique of scientific or technological development within a patriarchal society’ (Mellor 1982:244). With the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, feminist SF emerged, which embraced ‘the political “sexual revolution”, uncovered the genre’s ingrained sexism, and challenged male supremacy through time and space’ (Jones 2009:485). In this essay I will be discussing the critical reception of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), one of the most read texts in the feminist SF canon, if not SF as a whole. In particular, I will be focusing on examples of the early criticism that arose, with particular attention on the supposed failures of Le Guin’s imagining of an androgynous society, and her widely criticised use of the male pronoun.

The relationship between science fiction and feminism becomes apparent when you consider how both fields engage with discourses that repeatedly challenge ‘the stability of boundaries between categories and concepts’ (Seed 2005:n.p.). One of these concepts is gender. Feminist thinking which is inherently utopian, in seeking to eliminate discrimination on the basis of gender, ‘posits a gender-free alternative world that does not now exist but which is possible within historical time and space’ (Mellor 1982:243). In this way, feminist writers have turned to SF as a genre, which ‘provides the opportunity to test various hypotheses concerning societal organisation and ethical codes’ (Mellor 1982:244). As noted by Annas (1978:144; my emphasis)

Implicit in science fiction literature is a non-ethnocentric and dialectical vision of society: non-ethnocentric in that a fundamental premise of the genre is that things-as-they-are should be questioned rather than merely accepted and described; dialectical in that alternate paradigms are played off against any given reality. Science fiction…is structurally suited to a role as revolutionary literature.

According to Le Guin (1979:162), The Left Hand of Darkness, ‘is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking’. It is a ‘thought-experiment’ in the same way that Schrödingers’ cat was in quantum physics. She notes that ‘one of the essential functions of [SF]…is this kind of question-asking: reversals of an habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination’ (Le Guin 1979:163). The radical and revolutionary thought-experiment Le Guin was interested in posing was a society in which gender is eliminated ‘to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human. It would define the area that is shared by men and women alike’ (Le Guin 1979:163). However, she notes that, ‘as an experiment, it was messy.’ Regardless of how messy it was, The Left Hand of Darkness has been immensely important ‘for people writing from a feminine perspective or looking for ways to question discourses of gender and sexuality’ (Pearson 2010:139).

The winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, The Left Hand of Darkness not only established Le Guin as a major science fiction writer, but it also drew significant critical attention to her work, and indeed ‘[m]ore academic work has been written about Le Guin than about any other SF writer, including H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley’ (Pearson 2010:136). In November 1977, the academic journal Science Fiction Studies, dedicated its entire issue to “The Science Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin”. As a self-declared feminist, Le Guin has ‘influenced and inspired several generations of SF readers, writers, and critics…and is credited with being influential in showing that SF has literary merit’ (Pearson 2010:137). This has mostly been due to the attention that has been paid to her by critics outside SF. For example, in Robert Scholes’s essay, “The Good Witch of the West”, he asserted that Le Guin was ‘the best writer of speculative fabulation working in the country [at the time], and she deserve[d] a place among our major contemporary writers of fiction’ (cited in Bittner 1979:37).

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin imagines the possibility of biological androgyny; that is, a single reproductive sex fused with male and female characteristics’ (Mellor 1982:251). Set on the imaginary planet of Gethen, also called Winter, Gethenians are biologically neuter. In the chapter, “The Question of Sex”, the female narrator, in providing an ethnographer’s field report, theorises and describes Gethenian sexual physiology. Thinking the alien race ‘an experiment’, we are told that ‘the sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days’, for which ‘21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent.’ On about the 18^th day, the individual enters a period called kemmer. In this 6-day period of fertility,

the sexual impulse is tremendously strong…controlling the entire personality, subjecting all other drives to its imperative. When the individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated…until in one partner either male or female hormonal dominance is established. The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly, foreplay intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the change, takes on the other sexual role…Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be male or female (96-97).

In regards to childbirth, ‘the mother of several children may be the father of several more’ (97). It is in this way that Le Guin is able to write one of the greatest sentences in the history of literature: ‘The king was pregnant’ (106).

The narrator of the chapter then looks at the social consequences of this biological androgyny. Given that any Gethenian is liable to be

tied down to childbearing…no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be – psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally…Therefore, nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else (100).

On Gethen, ‘there is no unconsenting sex, no rape.’ There is ‘no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive’. In fact, there is ‘no tendency to dualism’ (101). Perhaps the most remarkable conclusion of this is ‘the elimination of war’. The narrator quotes an ancient source: “did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped?” (102).

Critical reception of The Left Hand of Darkness has ‘displayed a tension of opposites appropriate to the novel’ (Spivack 1984:57). According to White (1999:47), when the novel first appeared, it did not garner completely favourable reviews.’ For example, Alexei Panshin, reviewing the book for Fantasy and Science Fiction, deemed it a ‘flat failure’, and was the first critic to object to Le Guin’s use of masculine pronouns when referring to the androgynes (cited in White 1999:47). The feminist scholar and science fiction writer, Joanna Russ, in her article, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction”, laments that whilst Le Guin was able to imagine how a people’s culture and institutions would be very different from ours, she fails in leaving out the family – ‘childrearing is left completely in the dark, although the human author herself is married and the mother of three children.’ Russ (1972:89-90) also criticises the use of the male protagonist, Genly Ai, a human anthropologist on Winter, and the fact that the Gethenian main character, Estraven, is represented primarily as masculine – ‘at least, “he” is masculine in gender, if not in sex.’ With regards to the use of the male pronoun, she concedes that due to ‘a deficiency in the English language…these people must be called “he” throughout’ (Russ 1972:90).

The controversy continued in 1971, when Australian science fiction magazine SF Commentary, published an article by Stanislaw Lem. In “Lost Opportunities”, Lem criticises the novel, noting that ‘[i]t carries an important message, but it does not develop the message.’ He notes, [a]lthough her anthropological understanding is very good, her psychological insight, on the other hand, is only sufficient and sometimes even insufficient’ (1971:22). Lem feels that the novel is ‘psychologically unsound because the Gethenians’ constant gender change should wreak havoc on relationships and personal identity’ (White 1999:47). He takes further umbrage at Le Guin’s failure to represent the Gethenians as anything other than wholly masculine – ‘because Karhider garments, manners of speech, mores and behaviour, are masculine. In the social realm, the male element has remained victorious over the female’ (Lem 1971:24).

In a later issue, Le Guin (1972:91; original emphasis) vigorously defends Lem’s challenges. She invites Lem, or anyone else, to ‘point out one passage or speech in which Estraven does or says something that only a man could or would say.’ Instead, she blames cultural conditioning, such that ‘we tend to insist that Estraven and the other Gethenians are men, because most of us are unwilling or unable to imagine women as scheming prime ministers, haulers of sledges across icy wastes, etc.’ As for Gethenian clothing, she notes that she modelled the garments on typical Eskimo attire (Le Guin 1972:92). In reply to the common argument over the use of the male pronoun, Le Guin (1972:91) acknowledges how the ‘use of the masculine pronoun influences the reader’s imagination’, but defends her use on the basis of the limitations of her medium, and not wanting to ‘deform English’. She even gives an example of the difficulty of deploying a neuter pronoun by re-writing a passage using se/sem/sen. It should be pointed out that the Australian SF author Greg Egan successfully used a neuter pronoun in the impressive post-human novel Diaspora (1988), where he used ve/vim/vis.

One of the most interesting aspects about Le Guin as a writer is that she is also a critic, and open to changing her mind. She says, ‘it is rather in the feminist mode to let one’s changes of mind, and the processes of change, stand as evidence – and perhaps to remind people that minds that don’t change are like clams that don’t open’ (Le Guin 1989:7). In response to her many critics who all brought her to task on her decision to use male pronouns, her unwillingness to allow Genly and Estraven to have sex, and the masculinity of her imagined world, she wrote two essays. In the first essay, “Is Gender Necessary?”, Le Guin (1979:163) identifies herself as a feminist, and explains the process by which she eliminated the Gethenians of gender to ‘find out what was left.’ The essay is mostly a defence of her decisions, including the use of the male pronoun, but she does admit that she might have been more clever in creating the Gethenians.

In the second essay, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux”, Le Guin (1989:15) notes that in the first essay, ‘I was feeling defensive, and resentful that critics of the book insisted upon talking only about its “gender problems”. She also changes her mind on the use of pronouns, noting the exclusionary effect of ‘the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his’, which ‘exclude[d] women from discourse’ (1989:15). Le Guin ultimately capitulates, accepting that ‘this is a real flaw in the book.’ She also gives in to the critics who noted that sexuality for Gethenians is necessarily heterosexual – ‘I quite unnecessarily locked the Gethenians into heterosexuality. It is a naively pragmatic view of sex that insists that sexual partners must be of the opposite sex!’ (Le Guin 1989:14). With regards to the male point of view, she notes that the book ‘allowed men a safe trip into androgyny and back, from a conventionally male viewpoint. But many women wanted it to go further, to dare more, to explore androgyny from a woman’s point of view as well as a man’s’ (Le Guin 1989:16).

In conclusion, this essay has provided a discussion on the critical reception of one of the most important and widely criticised texts in feminist SF, and SF in general. Examples were provided from critics who noted the limitations, gaps and problems in Le Guin’s imagining of a biologically androgynous society. Whilst many other examples could have been provided, the discussion has been limited to criticism situated around the early reception of the work. Understanding how The Left Hand of Darkness has been received critically also sheds light on how SF as a genre is received both within the genre, and outside it. Finally, as a canonical text, further enquiry into the history of the critical reception of the novel may also bring into question the processes of canonisation, and where SF stands in the literary firmament.

References
Annas, P.J. (1978) “New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Feminist Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, 5 (2): 143-156.

Bittner, J.W. (1979) “A Survey of Le Guin Criticism” in J. De Bolt (ed.) Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyages to Inner Lands and to Outer Space. New York and London: Kennikat Press: 31-49.

Egan, G. (1988) Diaspora. London: Millenium.

Jones, G. (2009) “Feminist SF” in The Routledge Guide to Science Fiction. e-book, accessed 21 September 2011, .

Larbelestier, J. (ed) (2006) Daughters of the Earth: feminist science fiction in the twentieth century. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Le Guin, U.K. (1969) The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books.

Le Guin, U.K. (1972) “Re: Lost Opportunities”, SF Commentary, 26: 90-93.

Le Guin, U.K. (1979) “Is Gender Necessary?” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons: 161-169.

Le Guin, U.K. (1989) “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press: 7-16.

Lem, S. (1971) “Lost Opportunities”, SF Commentary, 24: 17-24.

Mellor, A.K. (1982) “On feminist utopias”, Women’s Studies, 9 (3): 241-262.

Pearson, W.G. (2010) “Ursula K[Roeber] Le Guin (1929-)” in M. Bould, A.M. Butler, A. Roberts and
S. Vint (eds.) Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction. London and New York: Routledge: 136-141.

Russ, J. (1972) “The Images of Women in Science Fiction” in S.K. Cornillon (ed.) Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press:79-94.

Seed, D. (ed.) (2005) “Introduction: Approaching Science Fiction” in A Companion to Science Fiction. e-book, accessed 21 September 2011, http://www.blackwellreference.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/subscriber/book?id=g9781405112185_9781405112185.

Spivack, C. (1984) Ursula K. Le Guin. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Various contributors (1977) “The Science Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin”, Science Fiction Studies, 2 (3).

White, D.R. (1999) Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics. Colombia: Camden House.

Essay: A critique of the morality of violent video games

2011-05-28T16:37:00.002+10:00

What are the arguments that violent video games are immoral? Which arguments provide the strongest reasons for regulation? In recent times there has been a moral panic over violence in video games. Some media commentators have sought to link video game violence to the horrendous spate of school shootings which have become a sad reality in the USA and Europe. Whilst we should be concerned over the avid consumption of media which portrays violence and other immoral content, the arguments posed by such commentators tend to be overly emotive and simply based on rhetoric, rather than hard evidence of causation or real harm. This essay will discuss the questions first posed. This will be achieved by looking at the problem through the lens of three ethical approaches – consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethics. Ultimately, it will be shown that violent video games are immoral, not because of their effects, consequences, or failure of duty, but because of the impact they have on the virtue of the player.

The most vociferous argument from the moral panickers is that video games are immoral because exposure to so much simulated violence and death desensitises the player to violence and death; therefore, such exposure will make it easier to perpetrate real violence. It is within this context that violent video games are blamed by the media, or invoked in discussions about high school massacres (McCormick 2001, p. 277). To support this argument, empirical research which supposedly links violent video games and real world aggressive behaviour is raised in support of this position (Schulzke 2010, p. 127). The argument then follows that the distribution of these violent video games should be restricted through legislation (Sicart 2009, p. 3).

This is the most prevalent type of objection to violent video games, and comes from consequentialist moral reasoning. Such an approach is concerned with the way an ethical subject acts to produce the best consequences for all concerned. However, in taking the interests of others into account, a consequentialist must balance which consequences are considered and how much weight is applied to each. A utilitarian approach is often taken, which suggests the best course of action is that which maximises the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (LaFollette 2002, p. 9).

The act of playing computer games has many consequences, however, the moral implications of playing violent games is hard to determine (Reynolds 2002, p. 4). For example, whilst there are plenty of meta-studies of the literature which argue that simulated violence is harmful, there is also a significant amount of work on the contrary that shows bias among researchers critical of gaming (see Anderson and Dill 2000; Ferguson 2007). There may also be positive benefits which outweigh the potential harms of video games. These benefits include: entertainment value, increased dexterity and problem solving skills, economic advantages, and technological advancement (Schulzke 2010, p. 130; Reynolds 2002, p. 5).

So, even if the empirical studies turned out to be true and there was a causal link between these games and violence, a consequentialist arguing for their immorality would have to prove that the costs outweigh the benefits. Furthermore, the cost of banning and/or censorship has to be considered as an imposition against free speech, which is essential to liberal democracy and carries a high priority as a right (Schulzke 2010, p. 135). If it is to be accepted that some games are banned (as some are in Australia), it follows that in order to be consistent, other media or activities which display similar or a greater amount of violence should also be restricted (Schulzke 2010:135; Fyfe 2011). This then, is the weakest of the moral positions that violent video games are immoral.

The next argument comes from Kantian deontology, which is based on moral obligations to duties and rights, in which the rightness or wrongness of an act is judged according to its conformity with duty, and is to be considered removed from consequences (McCormick 2001, p. 282; LaFollette 2002, p. 10). From this perspective, the immorality of a violent video game should focus on how players act, with the morality of the act being determined by how others are treated within the game world (Schulzke 2010, p. 128). This approach starts with Kant’s (1996, p. 73, 80) second formulation of the categorical imperative which states:

Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.
So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.

It is clear that real violence against another human violates the first statement. However, given the fictional nature of violent video games, the player is not committing violence against another human; rather it is violence against a representation of a human (or alien, animal, etc) character. Therefore, violent video games do not violate the first statement (Waddington 2007, p. 124). In the second statement, a player could be said to be violating this maxim if they were to behave with bad sportsmanship in a game against another player. This is because the player gives their personal interest priority over that of an opponent and treats them poorly in the interest of gratification (Schulzke 2010, p. 128).

In focusing on respect for others, the deontologist could argue that as the game encourages using others to progress through the game, it encourages the player to treat others as mere means to an end (Gotterbarn 2010, p. 375). In destroying an avatar, the act is immoral only when there is an intention to actually harm someone (Schulzke 2010, p. 129). Where the deontologist does have an argument, is that there is clear justification for regulation based on the duty of governments to protect its citizens from harm. It is the responsibility of governments to protect minors from harm and inform consumers through suitable systems of content classification (Reynolds 2002, p. 7-8). Here we have John Stuart Mill’s famous harm principle – ‘[t]hat the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’ (Mill 1971, p. 15; my emphasis).

The final ethical position is also the oldest and takes its cue from Aristotle, who defined ethics as ‘a practical science, as a practice of virtues oriented towards the achievement of a better life’ (cited in Sicart 2005, p. 15). This position is best explained by McCormick (2001, p. 284) who provides the example of holo-rape and holo-murder, in which a simulation allows a player to commit these heinous and grossly immoral acts in a virtual environment. He notes that there is something wrong with the activity without having to look outside for consequences or breaches of duty – ‘there is something wrong with the act solely with respect to the person who commits it’ (McCormick 2001, p. 285).

Returning to Aristotle, the question of a player’s character is ‘more fundamental and important than a person’s obedience to rules or conduct’ and exceeds the ‘implications of an act for other people’ (McCormick 2001, p. 285). Therefore, the virtue ethicist can provide a reasonable account for our strong moral intuition that games which involve extreme immorality such as holo-rape and holo-murder, and by extension, violent video games, are immoral. In participating in these ‘simulations of excessive, indulgent, and wrongful acts, we are cultivating the wrong sort of character’ (McCormick 2001, p. 285). In other words, the virtue of the player is eroded, and they are distanced from the chance to achieve eudaimonia – a deep and fulfilled happiness through the capacity to reason; that is, to be human (McCormick 2001, p. 285).

However, whilst the virtue ethics approach provides the better insight into the immorality of violent video games, it can’t answer for their regulation. Simply being immoral is not reason enough to justify legislation for censorship or outright banning. To ban or restrict any type of media based on purely supposed immoral grounds is paternalistic and a form of legal moralism. In other words, it is the interference of the state with another person against their will, with the defence that they are being protected against harm; that is, ‘the idea that certain ways of acting are morally wrong or degraded and may be prohibited’ (Dworkin 2010).

In conclusion, this essay has sought to answer the questions first posed: What are the arguments that violent video games are immoral? Which arguments provide the strongest reasons for regulation? This was achieved by looking at the problem through the ethical approaches of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. It was found that the consequentialist position provides little support for regulation and is the weakest argument from a moral standpoint. The deontological response, whilst it struggled in condemning the immorality of violent video games, actually provides the strongest reason for regulation due to the duty of governments to inform consumers and protect minors from harm. Finally, the virtue ethics approach provided the strongest approach to understanding why such games could be considered immoral, but failed to provide an argument for regulation.

References

Anderson, CA and Dill, KE 2000, ‘Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviour in the laboratory and in life’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 78, no. 4, pp: 772-790.

Dworkin, G 2010, ‘Paternalism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 edition), viewed 17 May 2011, .

Ferguson, C 2007, ‘Evidence for publication bias in video game violence effects literature: a meta-analytic review’, Aggression and Violent Behaviour, vol. 12, no. 1, pp: 470-482.

Fyfe, M 2011, ‘Video games reform rebuffed over violent fears’, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 2, viewed 17 May 2011, .

Gotterbarn, D 2010, ‘The ethics of video games: mayhem, death, and the training of the next generation’, Information Systems Frontiers, vol. 12, pp. 369-377.

Kant, I 1996, ‘Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals’, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 42-108.

LaFollette, H 2002, ‘Theorizing about ethics’, in H LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (2^nd edition), Blackwell Publishing, Cambridge, pp. 3-11.

McCormick, M 2001, ‘Is it wrong to play violent video games?’, Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 3, pp. 277-287.

Mill, JS 1971, On liberty, representative government, the subjection of women: three essays. Penguin Books, London.

Reynolds, R 2002, Playing a “good” game: a philosophical approach to understanding the morality of games, International Game Developers Association, viewed 15 May 2011, .

Schulzke, M 2010, ‘Defending the morality of violent video games’, Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 12, pp. 127-138.

Sicart, M 2005, ‘Game, player, ethics: a virtue ethics approach to computer games’, International Review of Information Ethics, vol. 4, pp. 13-18.

Sicart, M 2009, The ethics of computer games, MIT Press, Cambridge and London.

Waddington, DI 2007, ‘Locating the wrongness in ultra-violent video games’, Ethics and Information
Technology, vol. 9, pp. 121-128.

In search of an aetiology of evil - The Pandora Myth

2011-05-02T18:02:00.004+10:00

Around the time I first started this blog I wrote a short piece regarding my desire to write on the Pandora and Eve myths, and how these narratives have worked to structure patriarchal views about women. At that time I was too busy to see the project through, but have now been fortunate to return to the idea as a serious research project for my Myth and Meaning in Ancient Worlds unit.

I thought I'd share my work in progress with you. Here is the first part of my essay. I will next move into a close reading of Genesis 1 and 3, and then return to look at how both these myths have worked to keep women subjected under patriarchy.

Essay (WIP)

The notion of an origin holds an important and powerful force in the human psyche. Such narratives can function to provide an explanation for where we have come from, where we currently are, and where we will be in the future. In particular, creation myths provide valuable ‘insights into a society’s ethos, its root beliefs, and provide the basis for many of its customs and even its legal system.’ This essay will seek to discuss the origin of evil. This will be achieved through an aetiological investigation and comparative analysis of two myths which describe the creation of the first woman: the Greek myth of Pandora and the Judeo-Christian myth of Eve. In examining these myths from a feminist perspective, it will be shown that blaming woman for the origin of evil is a patriarchal construction, which has had a negative and pervasive influence on Western society – in particular, on misogynist attitudes towards women, and their subjection and abjection as ‘second class creatures’.

Written towards the end of the eighth century, Hesiod chronicles the myth of Pandora across two poems, the first in the Theogony, and the second in Works and Days. In the Theogony, Hesiod characterises Pandora as a ‘beautiful evil’ – a ‘hopeless trap, deadly to men’. In another translation, she is a ‘lovely curse’, personified as ‘sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.’ Ordered by Zeus as a punishment for Prometheus’ trick of the sacrifice and subsequent theft of fire, Pandora is fashioned out of the earth in the ‘image of a girl’ and ‘a modest virgin’ by the craftsman of the gods, Hephaistos. She is then dressed by Athena in bridal ‘robes of silver’, with ‘a veil, and ‘a lovely wreath of blossoms’, and a ‘crown of gold’. Thus adorned, she is ‘an evil’ sent upon men as ‘a price…to pay for fire’. And ‘from her comes all the race of womankind, the deadly female race and tribe of wives who live with mortal men and bring them harm’.

Not only is Pandora the first woman, but she is also the first bride, and it is in marriage that the source of a second evil is to be found. Hesiod tells us that

if a man avoids marriage and the troubles women bring and never takes a wife, at last he comes to a miserable old age, and does not have anyone who will care for the old man. He has enough to live on, while he lives, but when he dies, his distant relatives divide his property.

The picture is also bleak for the man who marries a ‘good wife, suited to his taste’; this man gets ‘good and evil mixed’, and ‘lives all his life with never-ending pain inside his heart’.

The narrative of Pandora’s creation is repeated in Works and Days but this time with a more misogynist tone. It is also here that the full nature of the significance of her evil is revealed. In payment for the theft of fire she is ‘another gift to men, an evil thing for their delight, and all will love this ruin in their hearts.’ In the lines which document her creation, she is once again crafted by Hephaistos. This time she is given ‘a voice’ and ‘a face like an immortal goddess’, and the shape of a ‘lovely figure of a virgin girl.’ Athena teaches her to weave, and Aphrodite pours ‘charm upon her head, and painful, strong desire, and body-shattering cares. Hermes is ordered to give her ‘sly manners and the morals of a bitch’ and in her chest put ‘lies and persuasive words and cunning ways.’ It is in this passage that she is given her name Pandora – ‘all the gifts’ – and declared the ‘ruin of mankind’.

Thus adorned, ‘the deep and total trap was now complete’ and she is sent as a bride to Epimetheus who, although previously warned by his brother Prometheus (foresight) ‘to take no gift from Zeus’, in fulfilment of his name (hindsight), ‘he took the gift, and understood, too late.’ This is because Pandora ‘opened up the cask, and scattered pains and evils among men’, with only ‘hope’ remaining. We are also told that prior to the creation of Pandora, mankind lived ‘apart from sorrow and from painful work’ and were ‘free from disease’. Thus, not only do we have an aetiology of evil, but we also have the source of the human condition – that is, ‘bringing death and evil into the world along with laborious toil of human existence.’

Essay: Fuhgeddaboudit! The Sopranos - a genre and audience analysis of the best TV drama ever!

2010-10-11T15:27:00.008+10:00

The popularity of Home Box Office’s (HBO) award-winning serial The Sopranos (1999-2007), continues well beyond the finale of what is often cited as the ‘the best TV drama of all time’ (Nelson 2007:29). The show has also been credited with changing the way that television is being made, contributing to what some have called ‘the HBO effect’ (Leverette et al 2008:1; Keeton 2002:131). Clearly drawing on generic antecedents from the mobster movie genre, the show is also a family melodrama and owes its lineage to earlier television conventions from which it has borrowed, ultimately transforming and transgressing the expectations of the gangster genre (Nelson 2007:36; Keeton 2002:131; Leverette 2008:125-126). In this essay I will discuss the show with regards to genre, and the way that genre necessarily constructs a particular audience. This will be achieved by looking at the show from three perspectives: industry, audience and text, which are not mutually exclusive, but operate together and provide a suitable basis for textual analysis in television studies.

The term genre is a French word meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’, which was first invoked in literary studies, and then later applied to film analysis (Neale 2000:1; Turner 1993:85). Whereas the literary use is concerned with the categorisation of fiction by subjective categories with little regard for industry and audiences, genre study in film and television, due to the nature of the material conditions in which it operates, must examine the relationship between industry, audiences, and texts (Schatz 1981:15-16). Genres are also defined as ‘a particular set of conventions, features and norms’, which are ‘a fundamental aspect of the way texts of all kinds are understood’ (Neale 2008:3). They also bring with them a ‘horizon of expectations’ for the viewer, and construct a ‘generic audience’, one that is sufficiently literate and familiar with a genre’s conventions, and who participate ‘in a fully genre-based viewing’ (Jauss cited in Neale 2008:3; Altman cited in Neale 2008:3).

Neale (1990:49) also notes how genres operate through the process of ‘intertextual relay’, which he describes as

the systems and forms of publicity, marketing and reviewing that each media institution possesses – plays a key role not only in generating expectations, but also in providing labels and names for its genres and thus a basis for grouping films, television programmes, or other works and texts together.

This can be seen in the way that critical, industrial and other discourses surrounding The Sopranos are presented in terms of ‘quality television’, and ‘original programming’ – what I call meta-genres, or generic signifiers which represent, not just a particular period in television production, or institutional programming policy and market strategy, but also issues surrounding authorship, aesthetics and audiences (Santo 2008:19-42; McCabe and Akass 2008:83-92).

Since going on the air in 1972 as one of the first nonterrestrial cable networks (and becoming one of the first to broadcast via satellite in 1975), HBO has continually striven to redefine television, and has gained a reputation for offering high quality original programming (Leverette et al 2008:1). Indeed, HBO has come to be regarded as a premier site of what has come to be called ‘quality television’, which according to Thompson (1996) is defined in contrast to the earlier broadcast period of ‘least objectionable programming’ (LOP). This was ‘the strategy in the network era of making bland programmes which would build and sustain audiences not by directly attracting them but by offending the fewest’ (Nelson 2006:62). As Thompson (1996:13) has pointed out ‘[q]uality TV is best defined by what it is not. It is not “regular” TV’.

This very point is inscribed in the HBO tagline: “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO” (Nelson 2006:62). A clever marketing strategy, and as HBO relies on viewer subscriptions, a key marker of difference which helps the organisation separate itself from commercial stations, and, consequently, take chances (Leverette 2008:15). This risk-taking can be seen in HBO’s policy of ‘original programming’, which it instituted, staking its groundbreaking reputation on ‘notions of “quality” based on branding, cost, and innovation as it sought to find a place for itself in the overcrowded television marketplace’ (Leverette 2008:16). However, whilst HBO may define itself as “Not Television”, most of the content appearing on HBO ‘draws upon existing television forms, narratives, aesthetics, themes, and economic and institutional practices in order to articulate [its] difference’ (Santo 2008:24).

HBO has also ‘relied upon various regulatory and economic differences between pay and regular television to add variation to its programming strategies, but very rarely produces anything non-televisual’ (Santo 2008:24). In this regard, HBO holds two considerable advantages over its network competitors. Firstly, its shows are not subject to the same censorship regulations as broadcasting. This is due to the outcome of its court battle with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Court of Appeals’ declaration that cable, due to being purchased rather than ‘freely distributed’ like radio and broadcast television, was ‘more akin to newspaper publishing, which is offered protection under the First Amendment’ (Strover in Santo 2008:25). This means that HBO is able to ‘incorporate nudity, violence, and vulgarity in ways the networks [can’t]’. Importantly, this gives HBO a competitive advantage whereby it can appeal to audiences as a site for content they can get nowhere else (Jaramillo 2002:65). However, I would suggest that in recent years, due to the ‘HBO effect’, groundbreaking shows can be found on competing cable networks such as Showtime (Weeds, Dexter) and AMC (Mad Men, Breaking Bad), and on commercial networks such as ABC (Lost, Desperate Housewives) and Fox (24).

Secondly, due to being subscription-based, HBO does not to have to ‘tailor the content of its programming (as the networks do) in order to appease merchandisers seeking inoffensive material appealing to the greatest common denominator’ (Santo 2008:27). But there is also a considerable textual advantage too. By not having to incorporate commercial breaks, HBO programs can be written, such that they ‘build steadily towards a climax through multiple examinations of a particular theme from myriad perspectives’ (Santo 2008:28). I would also say, that by deploying a serial narrative structure, characters can be better psychologised, ultimately lending a greater degree of realism to their representation.

These factors work to target a niche audience – ‘an elite…intellectual audience with high expectations, willing to pay a premium price for the subscription service’ (McCabe and Akass 2008:91). This means that HBO can demonstrate a greater respect for its audience, and according to Jaramillo (2002:66), it ‘implies that [HBO’s] consumers can handle graphic language, sex and violence in a more thoughtful and productive way than broadcast viewers.’ Santo (2008:33) adds further that this sort of exclusivity offered at HBO, ‘supposedly grants paying viewers membership in a distinct community that clearly ranks above the riffraff who watch the standard broadcast and cable stations.’ From a creative perspective, David Chase, the creator/writer/director of The Sopranos, notes that his authorial latitude is granted in terms of the audience: “We all have the freedom to let the audience figure out what’s going on rather than telling them what’s going on” (cited in Lavery 2006:5). In this way, the show rewards ‘active viewing’, in which the viewer ‘has to dig for links and meanings beyond what’s spelled out on the surface and is often left with mysteries’ (Yacowar 2002:12).

The Sopranos, then, can be classified as ‘quality TV’, which according to Thompson (1996:15) ‘creates a new genre by mixing old ones…tends to be literary and writer-based [and]…is self-conscious’. In this regard, The Sopranos has created a new genre – let’s call it an existentialist gangster drama – by mixing the mobster film genre with television family melodrama. For example, the show takes the conventional gangster as protagonist, but mixes with it with a family melodrama storyline. One of the early taglines for the show was ‘Family. Redefined’. By combining these two genres, the show is able to expand on the various constructions of family – crime family, work family, private family (Jaromillo 2002:68; Nelson 2007:36).

Nelson (2007:36) points out that as a family melodrama, ‘the strong women in…Tony’s life [feature] fully, partly in relation to him, but also in their own right.’ For example, Carmela (Edie Falco) Tony’s wife, holds the family together and takes the major responsibility for bringing up their children, Meadow (Jamie Lyn Sigler) and Anthony Junior (Robert Iler). This is evident in the pilot episode, in which Carmela is making preparations for Anthony’s birthday, and later, due to catching Meadow climbing out her window, has to discipline and ground her, temporarily upsetting the order of their mother-daughter relationship. These family dimensions ‘afford intercutting of action-adventure sequences and scenes of gang conflict and violence, typical of a mobster movie, with domestic locations and issues (Nelson 2007:37). And according to McCabe and Akass, in The Sopranos, ‘the gangster genre collides with the [family melodrama] in a series in which the mobster finds himself in unfamiliar generic territory characterised by mundane chores and domestic worries’ (cited in Nelson 2007:37).

This notion of being in unfamiliar generic territory also extends to the audience. According to Keeton (2002:132), ‘[w]hen viewers tuned into the premiere episode of The Sopranos in 1999, most expected a conventional gangster narrative, but what they saw did not match their expectations.’ The opening shot after the credits frames a nervous, angst-ridden middle-aged male half hidden by a statue of a naked woman. Yacowar (2002:16) suggests that this shot ‘expresses the anxiety of a man insecure in his manhood’. Looking at Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) body language he is clearly uncomfortable in his environment, suggesting to the audience he is on unfamiliar turf (Keeton 2002:132). When he finally goes into psychiatrist Dr Melfi’s (Lorraine Bracco) office, the camera cuts between them as they study each other, moving from longer to closer shots. Melfi then breaks the silence.

In the exchange between the two characters that follows, it is established that Tony has had a panic attack, and that due to ‘the line of work [he is] in’ it is ‘impossible [for him] to talk to a psychiatrist’. In this opening scene, we have a new meaning being circulated for the audience, which has been created through frustrating the conventions of melodrama. In other words, the conventions of the gangster genre prohibit Tony from speaking to a psychiatrist because what he does is illegal. And as those audience members who are literate in the gangster genre would know, he is bound by the code of silence – omerta.

This scene also establishes the tone of Tony’s intense feelings of anomie and alienation, which permeates most of the series, and can be read at a wider cultural level, of reflecting postmodern concerns of a loss of meaning in the midst of unprecedented potential for affluence (Keeton 2002:133). For example, in the scene, Tony recounts his state of mind the day of his first panic attack: “The morning of the day I got sick, I’ve been thinking. It’s good to get in on the ground floor. I came in too late for that. I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end, that the best is over.” Melfi replies: “Many Americans, I think, feel that way.” Tony continues: “I think of my father. He never retired. He never reached the heights like me. But in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his standards, his people, his pride, not like me. What have we got?”

So even before the first guy is ‘whacked’, this initial exchange ‘suggests how far the show has moved from its traditional gangster roots of the working class ethnic underdog forced into a life of crime by the closed hierarchy of capitalist society’ (Keeton 2002:133). This scene serves another purpose in that it creates sympathy for Tony as he works through the traumatic revelations of his childhood abuse, which are later discussed with Melfi. In representing Tony as a gangster with working class roots, it further encourages empathy because he ‘romanticises the time when a working-class man with minimal job skills could enter the workforce and support a family’ (Keeton 2002:142). This also invokes a moral ambiguity for the audience, as it encourages empathy towards ‘a thug whom we watch committing heinous acts’ (Holden in Yacowar 2002:17).

The show wears its proud gangster generic heritage through the self-conscious intertextual references to The Godfather (1972-1990) trilogy of films and Goodfellas (1990). This works to also encourage a degree of authenticity, which stems in part from the ways in which these references are used by the audience – or those who are familiar – to locate the fictional world of the series (Johnson 2007:17). For example, in the pilot, there is a scene in which Tony ranks Goodfellas against The Godfather trilogy. In episode two, “46 Long”, Silvio (Steve van Zandt) quotes Michael Corleone’s famous line from The Godfather: Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.”

Other instances of referencing can be found in the casting decisions. For example, Dominic Chianese who plays Corrado ‘Junior’ Soprano, appeared in The Godfather II, and several other cast members are Scorcese alumni from Goodfellas. Indeed, Michael Imperioli who plays Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos, and who also appeared in Goodfellas, is able to reprise the fate of his character in that film. In episode eight, “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti”, he shoots a bakery clerk in the foot, clearly referencing the scene in Goodfellas in which Joe Pesci’s character shoots his character in the foot.

However, in my opinion the most important reference comes at the end of the show’s final ever episode, “Made in America”. Its significant because, whilst the ambiguous and non-closed ending can be read without the reference, it allows a rewarding reading to those literate in the genre. In the final scene, the family are getting settled around the table at a diner, and a man that has been sitting at the counter with a jacket that says ‘members only’, walks into the toilet. Just as Meadow enters the diner, there is a sudden cut to black, and that’s the end of The Sopranos, and if read as the end of consciousness of the show’s protagonist – the end of Tony Soprano. What this reading implies, is that the man walked out of the toilet armed with a gun and shot Tony – another Godfather reference. I would argue that the ‘members only’ jacket is a self-conscious wink to that part of the audience – the privileged ‘members’ – who have the literacy to figure this out.

Finally, the show is literary and writer-based, and due to its serial format is able to develop characters into complex beings, providing ‘a slice of life as textured, nuanced, and involving as a Charles Dickens novel’ (Yacowar 2002:13). Indeed, Schulman (2010:27) praises the show asking ‘has there ever been an existentialist social novel quite like The Sopranos?’ The pedigree of the writing can be seen in episode fifty-two, “Whitecaps”, in which Tony calls off the hit against Carmine Lupertazzi (Tony Lip), telling Carmine’s underboss Johnny ‘Sack’ (Vince Curatola) that it would ‘create chaos in the organisation and be bad for business’. To which Johnny replies, incensed that he can’t bear to go to work tomorrow, take orders again ‘like it never fucking happened?!...Creeps in this petty place!’ To the astute observer, this is a clever reference to Macbeth, and ties the scene to one of Shakespeare’s ‘great proto-existentialist moments, the speech Macbeth makes after he can only greet news of his wife’s death with indifference’ (Schulman 2010:38).

In conclusion, the above discussion has provided an analysis of genre by considering the way in which genre constructs a particular audience. In considering the ideas surrounding notions such as ‘quality TV’ and ‘original programming’, The Sopranos can be situated in a discourse which also explains the positioning of its audience. Examples were provided from various episodes which demonstrated the hybrid generic nature of the show, intertextual references to its mob gangster roots, and the degree of its literary qualities. Finally, it can be said that through transforming and transgressing the conventions of the gangster and family melodrama, The Sopranos has not just remade the rules and expectations of the mob narrative, but through the ‘HBO effect’, has been responsible for transforming audience expectations of television at large.

References

Jaramillo, D.L. (2002) “The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand”. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 26 (1): 59-75.

Johnson, C. (2007) “Tele-Branding in TVIII”. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5 (1): 5-24.

Keeton, P. (2002) “The Sopranos and Genre Transformation: Ideological Negotiation in the Gangster Film”. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 10 (2): 131-148.

Lavery, D. (2006) “Introduction: Can this Be the End of Tony Soprano?” in D. Lavery (ed) Reading the Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO. London: I.B. Tauris: 1-14.

Leverette, B. (2008) “Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits” in M. Leverette, B.L. Ott, and C.L. Buckley (eds) It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-television Era. London and New York: Routledge: 123-151.

Leverette, B., Ott, B.L., and Buckely, C.L. (2008) “Introduction” in M. Leverette, B.L. Ott, and C.L. Buckley (eds) It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-television Era. London and New York: Routledge 1-10.

McCabe, J. and Akass, K. (2008) “It’s not TV, it’s HBO’s original programming: Producing quality TV” in M. Leverette, B.L. Ott, and C.L. Buckley (eds) It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-television Era. London and New York: Routledge: 83-94.

Neale, S. (1999) “Questions of Genre”. Screen, 31 (1): 45-66.

Neale, S. (2000) Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge.

Neale, S. (2008) “Studying Genre” in G. Creeber (ed) The Television Genre Book (2nd edition). London: Palgrave Macmillan: 3-5.

Nelson, R. (2006) “Quality Television: The Sopranos is the best television drama ever…in my humble opinion”. Critical Studies in Television, 1 (1): 58-71.

Nelson, R. (2007) “HBO Premium”. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5 (1): 25-40.

Santo, A. (2008) “Para-television and discourses of distinction: The culture of production at HBO” in M. Leverette, B.L. Ott, and C.L. Buckley (eds) It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-television Era. London and New York: Routledge: 19-45.

Schatz, T. (1981) Hollywood Genres. New York: Random House.

Schulman, A. (2010) “The Sopranos: An American Existentialism?”. Cambridge Quarterly, 39 (1): 23-38.

Thompson, R.J. (1996) Television’s Second Age: from Hill Street Blues to ER. New York: Continuum.

Turner, G. (1988) Film as Social Practice (2nd edition). London and New York: Routledge.

Yacowar, M. (2002) The Sopranos on the Couch. London and New York: Continuum.

Filmography

The Godfather, dir. F.F. Coppola, 1972.

The Godfather II, dir. F.F. Coppola, 1974.

The Godfather III, dir. F.F. Coppola, 1990.

Goodfellas, dir. M. Scorcese, 1990.

The Sopranos, created by D. Chase, 1999-2007.

“The Sopranos” (pilot), airdate January 10, 1999, dir. D. Chase.

“46 Long”, airdate January 17, 1999, dir. D. Attias.

“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti”, airdate February 28, dir. T. Van Patten.

“Whitecaps”, airdate December 8, 2002, dir. J. Patterson.

“Made in America” (final), airdate June 10, 2007, dir. D. Chase.

Essay: Keeping woman in her proper place - An ideological analysis of two films: Double Indemnity and Basic Instinct

2010-05-23T21:52:00.005+10:00

Hollywood and the institution of film in general is one of the most pervasive cultural mediums for the dissemination of meaning throughout society. Despite the presence of women directors and other film professionals, however, the industry remains dominated by males, and as the producers of representation in general, and of women in particular, men control how women are positioned in the social order. Simone de Beauvoir (1989:143) makes this point in The Second Sex, arguing that ‘[r]epresentation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.’ The aim of this essay will be to demonstrate the recuperative nature of Hollywood cinema, which seeks to keep woman in her place. This will be achieved by looking at the figure of the femme fatale and how it functions as a disruptive power, which reveals the hegemony of patriarchal society concealed in the text.

The films Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944) and Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992) will be analysed with particular focus on the respective central female characters: Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) – two of the most infamous femme fatales in film history; and patterns of recuperation evident in the text. Ultimately, in examining the social conditions in which each film was produced, it will be shown that the femme fatale operates as a cultural barometer of the contemporaneous concerns of male anxiety and paranoia over the independence of women.

A femme fatale is an attractive and seductive woman, especially one who ultimately brings disaster to a man who becomes involved with her; and in French, the term translates literally to ‘disastrous woman’ (OED). Her history and evolution in cinema can be traced all the way from the ‘vamp’ in the original Italian and French silent films, to the ‘spider woman and seductress’ of the 1940s and 1950s noir era, to the more contemporary figuration of a dangerously independent career woman (Boozer 1999:20; Cook and Bernink 1999:187; Tasker 1998:121). Janey Place (cited in Hayward 2006:151), suggests that ‘[t]hese women are symbols of “unnatural” phallic power: toting guns and cigarette holders like the best of the men.’ Tasker (1998:117) notes further that the femme fatale is both ‘an archetype which suggests an equation between female sexuality, death and danger’ and a ‘textual space within which women function as the…centre of the narrative’.

In Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, the feminist film theorist Annette Kuhn (1994:32) suggests that an analysis of ‘woman’ as an organising structure in films and the way in which a ‘woman-structure’ activates narratives, can be used to reveal wider concerns of the ‘position of women in the society which produces the narrative.’ In this regard, any recurrent structures of enigma resolution in the classic Hollywood narrative model of order/disorder/order-restored can reveal the dominant ideology residing in the text and reflect power structures at large in society (Haywood 2006:109; Humm 1997:12). For example, Harlovich (cited in Kuhn 1994:34) notes that narrative closure is always dependent on the resolution of enigmas centring on heterosexual courtship. Kuhn (1994:34) adds further that this resolution often takes the form of recuperation, whereby a transgressive female may be ‘restored to the family by falling in love…by getting married, or otherwise accepting a “normative” female role’; and any who refuse to return to the social order are punished by ‘exclusion, outlawing, or even death.’ Therefore, structurally and thematically, it can be said that the classic Hollywood narrative attempts to recuperate woman to a ‘proper place’ (Kuhn 1994:34).

However, in the process of being recuperated the femme fatale must be investigated and exposed by the law of patriarchy and found guilty before she can be restored to her ‘proper place’ or punished by death (Hayward 2006:151). This notion of guilt and punishment becomes clearer when the femme fatale is examined from a psychoanalytic perspective. Laura Mulvey (2009:22) in her influential essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema argues that ‘the female figure [in cinema] poses a [deep] problem.’ In the psychic paradigm of the Oedipus complex, woman connotes lack; that is, lack of a penis, which implies a threat of castration to the male (Mulvey 2009:22). The male unconscious, and by extension Hollywood cinema, solves this threat in one of two ways: via the narrative structure of recuperation as noted above, or through fetishism (Mulvey 2009:22; Smelik 1998:11).

In the case of fetishism, the threat of castration is negated by the substitution of a fetish object; that is, ‘turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous’, thereby denying sexual difference (Mulvey 2009:22). This is achieved in Hollywood cinema ‘[b]y a fragmentation of her body and an over-investment in parts of the body (breasts, legs, etc)’ (Hayward 2006:288). The scene in Double Indemnity where Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) first meets Phyllis is a clear example of fetishistic fascination. As she begins to come down the stairs, we see a close-up of her legs and golden anklet, before we see her entire body; she is a piecemeal and fragmented woman made of moments and parts (Johnston 1998:92; Bronfen 2004:108; Dick 1980:48).

According to Johnston (1998:90), the title sequence of the film sets it under the ‘mark of castration’. The silhouette of a male figure in a hat and overcoat looms towards the camera on crutches. In the next sequence we see Neff, injured and bleeding, enter the offices of his insurance company and begin his ‘confession’ to Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). Johnston (1998:90-91) suggests that Neff’s confession to Keyes establishes him in the patriarchal order as representative of the Law – the symbolic father; and ‘[i]n the all-male universe of the insurance business, women are seen as untrustworthy’. For example, Keyes comments that women “should be investigated”, before any relationship is undertaken. Women, then, represent the possibility of social excess – “they drink from the bottle” – which the insurance business (patriarchy) seeks to contain (Johnston 1998:91).

Throughout the narrative both Neff and Keyes investigate Phyllis to reveal her ‘guilty secret’. Firstly, in the scene where Neff returns to the house the day after their first meeting, Phyllis complains about the boredom of her married life and asks about taking out accident insurance on her husband’s life. Neff interrogates her asking why she married her husband, and after she daringly asks how the policy could be taken out without her husband’s knowledge, tells her she “can’t get away with it”. Her guilt is confirmed in the love scene at Neff’s apartment when she reveals she wants her husband dead (Johnston 1998:93-94). For Keyes, however, because Phyllis is a woman, she is automatically guilty, and it’s his job as both claims manager and representative of patriarchal Law to relentlessly investigate the insurance claim and expose her guilt (Dick 1980:49). Finally, in the death scene, her duplicity is made emphatically clear for the audience when she says she “is rotten to the heart” and confesses that she never loved Neff (Johnston 1998:97).

In Basic Instinct, the investigation of the woman is situated within a legal discourse; in fact, all the women in the film come under scrutiny by the law (Sherwin 2008:175). Catherine Tramell is clearly coded as a femme fatale through her aggressive sexuality and criminality, not to mention her cigarette smoking. She is the suspect in a sex crime: the brutal murder of her former lover who was stabbed to death with an icepick during sex. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is the detective assigned to investigate her, and despite his initial belief that she is guilty, starts an affair with her (Sherwin 2008:176). During the investigation Tramell is called in for questioning, and in the infamous “crotch shot” scene asserts her power by fleetingly exposing her vagina to the male interrogators; and she further embarrasses them by ‘openly discussing her sexuality in terms that they would only have expected from men’ (Deleyto 1997:35). Her threat as a castrating woman is therefore reinforced visually by her revealing her ‘lack’, or as Gus (George Dzundza) crudely puts it, her “magna-cum-laude pussy”.

Remarkably, all the killings that take place in the film are motivated by rage specifically directed at men. For example, in investigating Roxy (Leilani Sarelle) and Hazel (Dorothy Malone), it is revealed that they both killed their families. The manner in which Roxy did it with “Daddy’s razor”, situates her symbolically as a castrating figure; and in Hazel’s case, using the knife she received as a “wedding present” connects her rage to marriage. Even Tramell has killed her parents, although Curran is unable to prove it (Sherwin 2008:177). Elizabeth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn) also comes under investigation as Curran tries to unravel the enigma surrounding the truth over her obsession with Tramell after they had a one-night-stand in college.

A pattern of guilt/innocence oscillates in the narrative between Tramell and Garner, and Curran eventually comes to believe Tramell’s version of the events – that Garner staged the initial murder to frame her. Whilst Garner’s guilt is never confirmed, she is killed by Curran after Gus is killed in her vicinity (Sherwin 2008:176). The film’s denouement deviates from the traditional recuperation/punishment structure in the traditional femme fatale film (Sherwin 2008:177). The ending neither establishes Tramell’s innocence (after all the evidence piled up against her), nor punishes her for her guilt. This ambiguity is demonstrated in the final scene, which refuses narrative closure. The film teases the spectator that Tramell may be reaching for something to kill Curran with during sex, but she turns towards him, kisses him passionately and they launch into a final round of love-making. The camera then tracks down the side of the bed towards where she was reaching and fades out signalling the end of the film. However, an unexpected fade-in reveals the camera still tracking to rest finally on an icepick under the bed. In a remarkable twist, the audience is left wondering if Garner was really the killer, and that Tramell may actually be a psychopathic killer (Deleyto 1997:25). The significance of this will be discussed shortly.

The narrative attempt of recuperating the guilty female object may not always be successful, and in the particular case of the femme fatale, it actually reveals the hegemonic work of recuperation obfuscated in the text (Hayward 2006:151). This can be seen in terms of the ideological contradiction she poses by being a strong, active and sexually expressive female vis-a-vis her domestic and passive sisters (Hayward 2006:151). Therefore, she must be recuperated or punished if the dominant ideology is to be maintained. This becomes clearer when we examine the patriarchal motivations for containment by looking at the socio-historical conditions in which the two films were produced.

In the case of Double Indemnity, the role of the femme fatale ‘emerged in the wake of World War II when gender roles were disrupted as soldiers returned from war to discover that their women had replaced them in the workplace’ (Rowe and Lindsey 2003:176). The returning veterans assumed they could ‘retake command of the family home front’, but to do so a defensive and repressive attitude against independent women had to be taken (Boozer 1999:21). Additionally, Mary Ann Doanne (cited in Bronfen 2004:115) suggests further that the femme fatale was a symptom of patriarchal anxiety about feminism. The femme fatale, then, was evoked against ambitious women, and in her role as catalyst for criminal behaviour in men, blame was directed at women’s sexuality, furthering ‘calls for her sexual repression and restriction to the household’ (Boozer 1999:21).

This can clearly be seen in Double Indemnity, whereby the unhappily married Phyllis, seduces and becomes sexually involved with Neff, and convinces him to set up a phoney insurance claim and kill her husband, so that they (or perhaps just she) can collect the payout and be together. Not only is Phyllis a deadly seductress who ‘threatens the moral and legal codes of marriage’, but she jeopardises ‘the economic codes of society at large’; and it is in ‘her longing for financial independence by way of sexual initiative that makes her so threatening to traditional phallocentric authority’ (Boozer 1999:21).
In the 1990s, the femme fatale’s desire for economic independence generally took the form of ‘careerist excess’. In this regard these seductresses were now portrayed as ‘sociopathic in their single-minded determination to dominate their chosen field’ (Boozer 1999:29). This behaviour is consistent with the ‘ethically corrupted marketplace competition and sexual exhibitionism’ which marks this period of post-modern and post-feminist sexual consumerism (Boozer 1999:29; Andrews 2006:60). However, compared to her traditional counterpart, the contemporary femme fatale’s ‘sexually tainted avarice is more deviant and perverse as a focus for blame’ (Boozer 1999:29).

The male anxiety that is clearly of concern in Basic Instinct, can also be situated in a socio-historical context; that is, the product of the successive rearrangements in gender relationships brought about by several waves of feminism and gay liberation movements, especially since the sixties (Deleyto 1997:32). Furthermore, as a bisexual (or perhaps a lesbian who faked her heterosexual desire), Tramell represents the ultimate threat of the independent woman to patriarchy. She manifests the real male fear that he might be expendable (Hoberman in Deleyto 1997:25). As Luce Irigaray notes, ‘male sexuality has traditionally been defined monolithically, in relation to the penis, but female sexuality…is plural’ (cited in Sherwin 2008:177; original emphasis). Therefore, the female as ‘polysexual’ suggests that men and heterosexual intercourse are not necessary to fulfil female desire; man is dependent on an other for sexual satisfaction, while woman is autoerotic and therefore needs no one (Irigaray in Sherwin 2008:177). Returning to the ambiguous ending of Basic Instinct, the significance of the final scene becomes clearer. By not punishing her with death, incarceration or recuperation into a patriarchal zone of containment, the film ultimately suggests that the threat of the ‘autoerotic woman’ is ever present.

In conclusion, it has been shown how the recuperative nature of Hollywood cinema seeks to keep woman in her place in the interests of maintaining the hegemony of patriarchy. This was achieved by demonstrating how a woman-structure informs Hollywood cinema through the pattern of investigation of the guilty object, with the ultimately aim of recuperation or punishment. As a contradictory figure, the femme fatale was demonstrated as a disruptive power which reveals the dominant ideology in the text. Examples were provided from Double Indemnity and Basic Instinct, and when considered in their socio-historical contexts, the femme fatale can be seen a cultural indicator of contemporaneous concerns of male anxiety and the paranoia over the independence of women.

Bibliography

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Bronfen, E. (2004) “Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire”. New Literary History, 35: 103-116.

Cook, P. and Bernink, M. (1999) The Cinema Book (2nd edition). London: BFI Publishing.

de Beauvoir, S. (1989) The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books.

Deleyto, C. (1997) “The Margins of Pleasure: Female Monstrosity and Male Paranoia in Basic Instinct”. Film Criticism, 21: 20-42.

Dick, B. F. (1980) Billy Wilder. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Hayward, S. (2006) Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (3rd edition). London and New York: Routledge.

Humm, M. (1997) Feminism and Film. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Johnston, C. (1998) “Double Indemnity” in Kaplan, E. A. (ed) Women in Film Noir. London: BFI Publishing: 89-98.

Kuhn, A. (1994) Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (2nd edition). London and New York: Verso.

Mulvey, L. (2009) Visual and Other Pleasures (2nd edition). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED). http://www.dictionary.oed.com. (accessed 16 April 2010)

Rowe, A. C. and Lindsey, S. (2003) “Reckoning Loyalties: White Femininity as Crisis”. Feminist Media Studies, 3 (2): 173-191.

Sherwin, M. (2008) “Deconstructing the Male: Masochism, Female Spectatorship, and the Femme Fatale in Fatal Attraction, Body of Evidence and Basic Instinct”. Journal of Film and Television, 35 (4): 174-182.

Smelik, A. (1998) And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tasker, Y. (1998) Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.

Filmography

Basic Instinct, dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1992.
Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder, 1944.

Essay: The Influence of Miles Davis on the History of Jazz

2010-05-02T01:58:00.003+10:00

The history of jazz encompasses a multifaceted mosaic of places, performers and progressions of style. While it is not possible to isolate a singular point of reference for its beginning, there are a number of individuals who stand out and loom large as leading figures. One such luminary is Miles Davis, trumpet player, band leader, musical innovator, and in the words of fellow musician Chico Hamilton, “jazz’s only superstar” (Kart 2004:201). This essay will discuss the influence Miles Davis had on the development of jazz by looking at his involvement at critical junctures in its evolution. In particular, it will focus on the stylistic innovations he brought to jazz, as well as looking at the importance he played in the development of bop, cool, modal and fusion jazz. Furthermore, he will be discussed in relation to how his contribution has been received by music critics and historians.

Davis emerged on the scene of New York in 1944 at the same time a revolution in jazz was underway (Merod 2001:72). Bop (the shorter version of ‘bebop’ or ‘rebop’) was a revolt against the big bands, commercialism, racial injustice, and the restrictive harmonic framework of the jazz that was in style at the time (Kingman 1990:385). In this period he played a significant role in the revolution, not as a pioneer or founding father, but rather as a participant, and worked with such notable figures as Thelonious Monk, Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and it was here that he ‘learned bop’s arcane language by imitation, informal tutelage, and constant jamming alongside players whose mastery was superior to his own’ (Merod 2001:72-74).

It was during this time of working with the Parker quintet that Davis perfected his approach to difficult melodic lines and rhythms which were played at breakneck speed (Merod 2001:72). However, at first Davis could not play high, loud or fast, and as he was young and still developing the strength of his lip muscles, he felt more comfortable playing with a light sound (Tanner et al 2001:219). This gave his playing an extraordinary emotional power infusing the sound with stark dramatic explorations of personal inwardness. And it was from this brooding and lyrical intensity that Davis’s trumpet persona emerged; and with it his own language – a heartbreaking plangent poetry of the soul, from which you could hear yourself think (Merod 2001:73; McConnell 1991:617).

In 1948, Davis collaborated with composer and arranger Gil Evans and the Claude Thornhill band who were working with ‘layered harmonic voicings’, and had introduced the french horn and tuba, and played them as ‘melodic rather than…rhythm instrument[s]’ (Merod 2001:86; Sales 1992:163). Dissatisfied at the increasingly virtuoso instrumentalism of bop at the time, the band was a confederation of sympathetic musicians who had been meeting in Evans’s apartment to rehearse and exchange new ideas (Sales 1992:163). Davis took an active leadership and secured a gig for the nine-piece, but most importantly, he secured a contract with Capitol Records.

The twelve sides they recorded between 1949-1950 were collected together for the eventual 1954 album Birth of the Cool, which launched the ‘cool’ sound and pointed the way for the sound of the 1950s (Tanner et al 2001:220). It is interesting to note one cut in particular from the album “Boplicity”, which can be seen as marking the transition from bop to cool. Kingman (1990:388) suggests that while the tempo has been slowed down, it still exhibits particular bop characteristics: the light style of drumming; the importance of the bass in keeping the beat; and that quintessential trademark of bop – the unison playing at the beginning of the piece.

Ironically, having fathered the ‘birth of cool’, Davis was among the first to turn away from it with the recording in 1954 of Walkin’, a twelve-bar blues whose straight-ahead funkiness loomed in contrast to the cerebral restraint of cool (Sales 1992:171). Known as ‘hard bop’, it came at a time when cool was being disdained as ‘white man’s music’, and was embraced as a welcome return to ‘soul’ and represented a return to the roots of jazz, especially its roots in black gospel music (Kingman 1990:389).

It was during this time that Davis emerged as the dominant influence in jazz on a number of levels:

as a trumpet stylist, as a best-selling recording star who broadened the audience for authentic jazz, as a leader with an uncanny gift for launching important new trends, and for introducing innovative musicians who were to help shape the future course of jazz (Sales 1992:176).

Importantly, Davis had also begun to develop the playing style that characterises much of his later work, borrowing the softer tone from his cool era, and slowing down the melodic activity. His phrasing also became fragmented leaving space for the rhythm section, from which he set himself apart by playing scale-oriented, rather than chord-oriented long notes. By 1958, he had freed himself further with the use of modal scales and slower moving harmonies. For example, ‘rather than weave a melody through complex bop or funk harmonies, he suspended his melodies based on early modes, above the harmony’ (Tanner et al 2001:223).

This can be seen in the Milestones recording with standard chord changes being abandoned, instead adopting a series of scales as the framework for improvising. This technique is called ‘modal’ and it had a ‘profound impact on the future of jazz’ (Sales 1992:178). It should also be noted that Davis did not invent modal jazz but popularised it (Sales 1992:180). The work that best exemplifies the sound is Kind of Blue, which was recorded in 1959 and went on to become the highest selling jazz album of all time with over four million copies sold, and is considered his magnus opus (Tanner et al 2001:224). The album is so significant that in 2009, the US House of Representatives voted 409-0, to pass a resolution honouring the album and declaring jazz to be a national treasure (ABC 2009).

Between 1969 and 1975, Davis went through the most productive phase of his career. While this ‘fusion’ period is marked by further experimentation and innovation, the direction he took is the most controversial (Svorinich 2001:91). In the face of the ascendancy of rock and roll, Davis began introducing electronics and a rock aesthetic. He added electric keyboards and a wah-wah effect pedal for his trumpet, and took on musicians with rock experience into his band (Svorinich 2001:100).

Always perceptive to what was in the air, Davis was aware that the use of a rock beat would hold the attention of his audience, regardless of how abstract some of the solos were. He was also evolving his studio technique, and started to adopt the rock method of recording large amounts of material and then editing it on tape and creating albums (Shipton 2001:858). This can be seen on the recordings In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew both recorded in 1969 (Milkowski 2003:29). However, critics were divided with some condemning that his foray into fusion was just a cynical attempt to grab a piece of the rock action. Regardless of whether they were right or not, the fact that the fusion movement remains very much alive today is testimony to the influence he exerted on the next generation (Sales 1991:202).

Through each of his stylistic incarnations, Davis was supported by a cohort of capable musicians, who went on to develop their own styles and forge their own places in the history of jazz. Among these were John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, and Tony Williams. Aside from his legendary trumpet playing, his legacy derives, in part, from his ability to assemble the right musicians at the right time, and from his leadership ability to provoke and extract the best results to augment his own. He insisted that his musicians ‘play beyond themselves, that they reach for more than they know how to execute’ (Merod 2001:80).

There is no doubt that music critics and historians revere Davis as one of the most influential figures in the history of jazz, and indeed, American music (McConnell 2001:616). Whether it is his ability to sense new directions, assimilate their attributes, and popularise the new style, he was certainly a maverick amongst musicians (Tanner et al 2001:225). His genius was centred on an ability to construct and manipulate improvisational probabilities, selecting and combining compositions, players, musical styles and other performance parameters (Smith 1995:41).

However, Walser (1993:343) points out that jazz critics and historians have never known how to explain the power and appeal of his playing, and notes that there has been a critical blindness to his actual trumpet playing. In this regard he specifically argues that Davis was ‘infamous for missing more notes than any other major trumpet player.’ But perhaps it was this raggedness and raw primal nature of his playing that characterised his personal style, which was conducive to his very intimate expression. This ‘flawed technique’ supported ‘a glimpse he often gave us of the raw emotional world emanating from his music’ (Tanner et al 2001:225).

The above discussion has provided an outline of the influence Miles Davis had on the development of jazz. In particular, his involvement was charted through the stylistic innovations he brought to jazz and the importance he played in the development of bop, cool, modal and fusion jazz. Ultimately, music critics and jazz historians have been unanimous in their agreement that Miles Davis has been one of the most influential figures in the history of jazz, pointing to his musical ability, his sense for change, and gift for bringing together talented musicians who would go on to become trendsetters in their own right. Finally, the legacy of Davis lives on through the way he still speaks to us through his music – through the intimacy of his horn he communicates to us directly, personally and immediately with whispered messages from another universe.

Bibliography

Australian Broadcast Corporation (2009) “US House of Reps Honours Miles Davis Album” http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/16/2773218.htm (accessed 29 April 2010).

Kart, L. (2004) Jazz in Search of Itself. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Kingman, D. (1990) American Music: A Panorama (2nd edition). New York: Schirmer Books.

McConnell, F. (1991) “The Prince of Darkness: Miles Davis R.I.P.” Commonweal, 118 (18): 616-617.

Merod, J. (2001) “The Question of Miles Davis”. Boundary 2, 28 (2): 57-103.

Milkowski, B. (2003) “Fusion: The Vaunted F-word: From Where Did It Come? And More Importantly, Where Is It Going?”. Jazziz, 20 (3):28-31.

Sales, G. (1992) Jazz: America’s Classical Music. New York: Da Capo Press.

Shipton, A. (2001) A New History of Hazz. London and New York: Continuum.

Smith, C. (1995) “A Sense of the Possible: Miles Davis and the Semiotics of Improvised Performance”. The Drama Review, 39 (3): 41-55.

Svorinich, V. (2001) “Electric Miles: A Look at the “In a Silent Way” and “On the Corner Sessions”. Annual Review of Jazz Studies, 11 (2000-2001): 91-107.

Tanner, P. O., Megill, D. W. and Gerow, M. (2001) Jazz (9th edition). New York, London, Sydney: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Walser, R. (1993) “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis”. The Musical Quarterly, 77 (2): 343-365.

Critical review - Jazz Latino at Alexis Bistro Ampang, 13 March 2010

2010-04-02T23:40:00.006+10:00

Jazz is one of the most ubiquitous and enduring genres of American popular music, and in the views of some cultural critics, America’s only indigenous art form. Whilst jazz began as distinctly American, it has since become internationalised and can now be found in most corners of the world. An example of this notion is Latin jazz, which will be the main focus for this essay. In particular, a discussion will be provided on the history of Latin influences on jazz. A critical analysis will then be applied to selected pieces from a live performance by Jazz Latino, which took place at Alexis Bistro Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, on 13 March 2010. According to the program guide, the band play a ‘high energy blend of salsa, Latin jazz, funk and even some straight-ahead bebop.’ For the purposes of this paper, however, pieces that were more closely aligned with jazz have been chosen for analysis.

Historically, Latin music styles and jazz have shared a common history, with both ‘intersecting, cross-influencing, and at times seeming inseparable, as both have played prominent roles in each other’s development’ (Washburne 2002:410). The idea of a ‘Latin’ jazz was not realised until the mid-1940s when it was determined that a separate label was needed to ‘differentiate Latin-influenced jazz from other jazz styles.’ This was also around the time that musicians began using the term ‘bebop’ to ‘distance themselves from their swing forefathers’ (Washburne 2002:411).

There was also a fusing of bebop and Latin jazz, under the name of ‘Cubop’, which was made famous by Dizzie Gillespie and his Afro-Cubano Drums Suite, which also featured Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo. However, the term ‘Cubop’ proved too limiting and ‘was eventually replaced by the more geographically-inclusive “Latin jazz”’. In fact, it was the band’s performance at Carnegie Hall on 29 September 1947, that marks the birth of Latin jazz’ (Washburne 2002:411).

Whist the collaboration between Gillespie and Pozo was brief due to Pozo’s untimely death, it wrought a profound influence on the style. It is thanks to Pozo that we have the conga drums in jazz ensembles today, and it was Gillespie’s nurturing of young Latin players, and his overall influence, which helped to legitimise and incorporate Latin musical structures and principles into jazz (Washburne 2002:412; Gonzalez 2004b:46). It was in this way that Gillespie became an ambassador for the internationalisation of jazz, even playing in Cuba, and for the last ten years of his life directed The United Nations Big Band (Washburne 2002:412). This is partly why, even today, ‘there is hardly any area of the globe…in which there is not some knowledge and appreciation of jazz’ (Kingman 1990:403).

Musically, the question of the Latin influence on jazz concerns the rhythmic aspects, which have their antecedents in Caribbean dance rhythms, for example, tangos, rumbas, sambas, etc. And given that jazz at this time was connected to dance, for example, lindies and foxtrots, the leap to playing Latin rhythms in jazz was only natural (Kingman 1990:355).

Having provided an outline of the influences on Latin jazz, attention can now be turned to looking at specific musical examples. The band members of Jazz Latino are from various nations further reinforcing the points made above on the ‘internationalisation’ of jazz, and exemplifying Gonzalez’s (2004a:10) statement that Latin jazz ‘is as diverse as the people who create it.’ For example, Eric Li (piano) is from Hong Kong; Marco (vocals, guitar, congas) is from Cuba; and Fly (electric bass) and John Thomas (drums), are both from Malaysia.

On the night of the performance, Jazz Latino take the stage, and after a request to the audience to not speak too loud during the show, they get started with their first piece for the evening, “Once More Once”. Influenced by bebop, this piece demonstrates the virtuoso pedigree of the outfit with each performer given an opportunity for a solo to show off their talented skills (Kingman 1990:385-386). The connection to bebop is perhaps best illustrated in the use of non-sensical vocals (scat singing), which Marco sings for the first vocal solo (Kingman 1990:387). Each solo is clearly improvisational, which according to Kingman, ‘is never a matter of “anything goes”...[i]t is a product…of a fine balance between discipline and freedom’ of which ‘balance is the real essence of jazz performance’ (Kingman 1990:375).

The piece opens with the delicate tinkling keys from Eric, and John Thomas (JT) provides a slow percussive beat with wooden block and cowbell, before picking up his sticks and laying down syncopated rhythms. Marco and Fly on lead and bass guitars, respectively, join in providing further texture to the groove, and the ensemble is in full swing.

The first solo is from Marco and features a hallmark of bebop – scat singing; and sung here, he exhibits the same fluidity and virtuosity to be heard later in the instrumental solos. The second solo is also courtesy of Marco, but here he demonstrates his guitar mastery with his fingers moving in a blur up and down the neck, strumming out faster and faster rhythms. Picking up where Marco left off, Eric’s fingers stab out an intricate piano solo, rising and falling in waves of struck keys, which progresses in a continuous and swirling movement to a high energy peak.

In Fly’s solo, the understated walking bass which has accompanied the ensemble so far, becomes a fast striding experimentation in deft fingerwork and adept skill. Similarly to Marco, his hands fly up and down the neck as he extracts faster and faster rhythms from his instrument, culminating at the top of the solo with Latin flourishes.

Just before Fly finishes his set piece, JT interjects with percussive hits, and by the time Fly reaches crescendo and bows out, he picks up the rhythm in a demonstrative performance of furious stick work, with frenetic cross rhythms and complex syncopation. The sticks disappear from sight with the speed of maniacal hitting with cowbell, snare and hats crashing and booming as JT takes the tempo to a fever pitch, before adroitly settling back into a rolling groove, and the rest of the ensemble join back in to take the piece out.

It was interesting to note Eric’s piano accompaniment during JT’s solo, with staccato attacks interspersed with Latin rhythms. The audience’s appreciation of the piece was sincerely felt with awed applause at the end of each performer’s solo, and rapturous ovation at the end.

Following on from a fast-paced Latin piece, “Stone Flower” is introduced as a slower number. Here we have more scat singing, but rather than allowing the performers individual solo space, the piece is really based around Eric’s piano playing, and an interesting episode in the middle between Eric and Marco, switching between solos in a call and response pattern.

It opens with Eric’s floating piano, and develops shortly with low sustained bass chords, whilst tinkling sounds rain above, and the whole structure circulates with purposeful phrasing. JT gradually introduces shuffling cymbals, simple drumming and percussive fills, which is understated enough to give room to the piano in the overall sound. As mentioned above, Marco joins in with guitar accompaniment, and the piece starts to shape itself around the solos between Marco and Eric. Meanwhile, Fly stays cool on bass, thumbing out a steady rhythm, and Marco now comes in with his ‘scatted’ vocal gymnastics.

In this piece, the piano playing of Eric really takes a dominant role, and it’s his instrument which holds the rest together in a cohesive way. The piece closes in the way it began, with the solo piano repeating similar patterns, but with a direct movement to a final close.

The third piece to be discussed, “Cloudy”, also follows after a highly energised Latin number, and is the slowest piece of the performance. Once again it predominately features Eric’s inimitable virtuosity, and the wistful and dreamy piano sets the tone for the rest of the number. Marco joins in early from the beginning with soft slaps on the congas, and JT supports with the gentlest of percussive accompaniment. Fly provides a simple slow grooving bassline, and later into the piece, Marco complements the piano with a tempered guitar rhythm. Whilst the piece remains delicate overall, the complexity of playing for each instrument increases after each movement, but never rises to the sort of frenetic pace or compulsive vibe of previous pieces. By the end it is clear that this was an exercise in cool, measured and restrained temperament.

In considering the whole set, Jazz Latino put on a superb performance which traversed both spectrums of jazz and Latin, with elements of each in every piece. It is interesting to note that the program guide suggested ‘music to move your body to’, however, the music that was performed was far from danceable due to being either too fast, or in some cases, slow. This perhaps also lends credence to the bebop aspect of the performance, in that bebop deliberately discouraged dancing in its revolt against the big bands (Kingman 1990:385).

From the above it should be quite clear that Jazz Latino are consummate professionals, and this was clearly demonstrated through the sheer proficiency of both individual performance, and ensemble performance as a whole. At times it was as though they drew the same breath and were connected psychically as a single living and vibrating organism.

References

Gonzalez, F. (2004a) “Editor’s letter: On Latin jazz, looking in and looking out”, Jazziz, 21 (9), p. 10.

Gonzalez, F. (2004b) “What Latin Jazz? Moving Beyond Jazz-with-Congas”, Jazziz, 21 (9), pp. 46-47.

Kingman, D. (1990) American Music: A Panorama (2nd edition). New York: Schirmer Books.

Program Guide for Jazz Latino. http://www.alexis.com.my/html/content.php?id=180 (accessed 29 March 2010).

Washburne, C. (2002) “Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz”, Current Musicology, Spring 2001-Spring 2002, (71-73), pp. 409-426.

Talkin all that jazz

2010-03-27T23:52:00.016+10:00

I am presently in the throes of writing an essay on jazz. In my research I've come across particular pieces which are historical markers for the form, and thought I'd share them and have a chat about jazz.

The first piece is 'Dippermouth Blues' by King Oliver & His Creole Band, which was originally recorded in 1923. According to Daniel Kingman, author of American Music: A Panorama (2nd edition), this piece is representative of the traditional, or New Orleans style. It is also a good example of the fundamental variation of jazz technique. You can clearly hear the clarinet, and later the cornet, emerge as soloists. Of note is Louis Armstrong, and here he is playing the cornet.

A vital ingredient of jazz method is improvisation, which is not a matter of 'anything goes', but a fine balance between discipline and freedom. It is this balance, which Kingman says in the 'real essence of jazz performance.'

This notion of improvisation can be illustrated in contrasting two examples. Firstly, we have "Embraceable You" by George Gershwin (1928), and secondly, Charlie Parker's version (1947). Listen for Parker's inventive improvisations on the tune, with a rhythm section of just piano, bass and drums.

As well as reliant on improvisation, jazz is also notable for soloists, as was seen above. Perhaps the most gifted soloist was Louis Armstrong, who was one of the performers who helped to define the 'hot' style of playing in the 1920s, and was an early proponent of 'swing'. Kingman notes that Armstrong's solos, 'with their melodic inventiveness, rhythmic drive, and variety of tonal colour, especially during the period from the 1920s through the late 1930s, were models that had a great influence on the course of jazz as it moved out of the traditional period.'

The example I have chosen features Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra. If I've done my research right, then this is from 1928. The name of the song is also interesting, with 'Muggles' being slang for marijuana. So it would seem that Louis also liked a toot. Pun very much intended.

Whilst any discussion involving the provenance of Jazz invariably speaks of New Orleans, Chicago and New York are also important when looking at its move into urban centres across America. Both cities benefited from the emigration of New Orleans 'jazzmen', and musicians both black and white, were now playing jazz.

With the shift came new players and new ideas, which changed the way jazz was played. In particular, the 'traditional free-wheeling, relaxed, improvised style was lost.' This can be seen in the so-called Chicago style. Unfortunately, due to the attitude and conditions of the times, white musicians, mostly trained by blacks, were reaping the rewards and enjoying a disproportionate share of the economic gains.

According to Kingman, the Chicago style is demonstrative of a kind of adolescence between the carefree youth of the traditional, and the maturity of the soon-to-come, big band style, with its sophisticated craftsmanship. This can be heard in the next two examples "Royal Garden Blues" and "Jazz Me Blues" with Bix Beiderbecke and the Wolverines (1927).

The shift to New York brought with it three developments. The first was a solo piano style, which grew out of ragtime. Alternatively named 'Rent-party', 'Parlor-social', 'Harlem', or 'stride', these describe, 'in terms of economics, geography, or left-hand agility, a solo piano idiom'. This is best illustrated in the work of its recognised founder, James P. Johnson. The following example, "Carolina Shout" (1921), demonstrates his 'rollicking piano style'.

It's interesting to note that the Harlem rent party was a phenomenon born out of Prohibition and made necessary by the Depression. The aim of the party was to raise the rent, and anyone who could donate a quarter admission, was admitted.

Here's another example from Johnson, "You've Got to be Modernistic" from 1929.

Fats Waller was another stride player, and along with Johnson, became influential in the mainstream of jazz. Before we get to the example, it's interesting to note that Waller was abducted by Capone's gangsters in the 1920s to sing him 'Happy Birthday'. Hustled to the party which was in full swing, Waller was forced to the piano with a gun to his back! This piece is titled "Handful of Keys" (1929).

To be continued...

Essay: Film form and narrative in David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'

2010-03-21T19:24:00.016+10:00

Once known as the ‘dream factory’, Hollywood has been in the business of creating and selling dreams for almost a century. Throughout this time, Hollywood has been influential in the way films are made and the conventions that have come to dominate filmmaking throughout the rest of the world. In particular, formal elements such as the use of camera, editing, lighting, sound, mise-en-scène and narrative technique, have become determining factors in the way meaning is produced in films. This essay will present a discussion on film form and narrative, which will be supported by a formal analysis of selected scenes from the film Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997).

Classic Hollywood cinema is a tradition of filmmaking that dominated Hollywood production from 1917 through to around 1960, and remains a pervasive style in western mainstream cinema to the present day (Bordwell et al 1985:9; Hayward 2000:64). The most important criterion in the classical system is narrative causality, which works within subordinate systems of time and space (Bordwell et al 1985:12). Narrative describes the way in which story events are structured, of which the classical system is dependent on a pattern of order/disorder/order-restored. In unifying causality, motivation is necessary to explain justification for certain elements within the film’s diegesis; that is, inside the story world; and by the same token, nondiegetic refers to the space outside the story world (Bordwell and Thompson 2008:66; Lehman & Luhr 2003:27; Hayward 2006:101).

It is useful here to introduce the concept of mise-en-scène, which essentially means, ‘putting into the scene’ (Bordwell & Thompson 2008:112). The term is used to signify the control that a director has in staging a scene for the framing of shots, and includes such elements as setting, costume, lighting, and overall movement within the frame (Hayward 2000:231). Mise-en-scène is important for the consideration of space, in that it serves to explain compositional motivation through the choices that the director makes, and functions to establish a cause of impending actions so that the story can proceed (Hayward 2000:242). To avoid the film drawing attention to itself, the Hollywood filmmaker relies on continuity editing, ‘a system of editing which uses cuts and other transitions to establish verisimilitude and to tell stories efficiently’ - with each shot having a causal relationship to the next shot - and the strategies of mise-en-scène, to ensure narrative continuity (Corrigan & White 2004:125-126).

Whilst the discussion so far has mostly concerned the visual aspects of film form, it is important to also consider the use of sound, which from a film studies perspective has been marginalised by the hegemony of the image (Chion 1994: xxvi). Sounds can be situated at different narrative levels: the diegetic, for example, synched dialogue; and the nondiegetic, for example, background music, sound effects, etc (Chion 1994:67). The main function of sound is to unify and connect the flow of images, which it achieves with sound overlaps, the creation of realism with diegetic sounds, and invoking atmosphere through the use of nondiegetic music (Chion 1994:47). In these ways, sound participates to add-value to an image; that is, it ‘enriches a given image so as to create [a] definite impression’ (Chion 1994:5).

Having looked at the formal conventions of Hollywood cinema, and the way it works to present a unified image and narrative, attention can now be turned to looking at specific examples from Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997). According to the press kit, the film unfolds with the ‘logic of a dream, which can be interpreted but never explained', and it is this preoccupation with cinema as dream which best explains Lynch’s aesthetic (Herzogenrath 1999:4; Szebin & Biodrowski 1997:37). This notion of a dream logic is best exemplified by a number of events that take place which defy normality. For example, Fred (Bill Pullman) turns into Pete (Balthazar Getty); dark-haired Renee (Patricia Arquette) who was murdered by Pete, reappears as Alice, the blonde femme-fatale (also played by Arquette); and then there is the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), a character who can be in more than one place at once.

Structurally, the narrative is constructed around the shape of a mobius strip, a surface with one side and one boundary. This is demonstrated in the way in which the film ends, virtually where it began, subverting the circular narrative structure of conventional filmmaking (Press Kit). Also, the two stories of Fred and Pete are the inverse of each other and according to Lynch ‘[t]hey’re living the same relationship…but living it in two different ways. They’re victims in different ways, in both worlds.’ However, it’s not until the scene in the desert that the two worlds are connected; Pete disappears, and Fred resurfaces again, bringing us full circle, or perhaps, repositioning us along the mobius strip (Herzogenrath 1999:3).

The idea of two worlds is best exemplified by looking at how mise-en-scène is used in the film to delineate the separate alternative realities (Vass 2005:20; McGowan 2000:52). The first part of the film takes place in Pete’s world, which is infused with mystery and a sense of emptiness, or unfulfilled desire. According to McGowan (2000:54) this can be seen in the use of minimalist décor and subdued lighting in Fred and Renee’s house, which is emphasised by the depth of field in the shots, further working to demonstrate a sense of depthlessness in their world. The colour scheme is also drab with blacks, greys and dark orange. The mise-en-scène in Pete’s world, however, appeals to more realistic conventions with bright lighting, more realistic furniture and décor, and a deeper depth of field (McGowan 2000:54).

The aural space in the early scenes between Pete and Renee is also interesting in that essentially it is empty, with the soundtrack having long periods of silence with no background noise. This use of silence exemplifies Bordwell & Thompson’s (1985:184) point that in film ‘silence takes on a new expressive function.’ And in the example noted here, silence works deliberately to communicate the distance in the relationship. This can also be seen in the sparse dialogue and resonance of delivery, which further emphasises the tentativeness of their relationship (Herzogenrath 1999:22).

In shifting the story back to the beginning, Lynch signifies this move through repeating the song with which the film began, and indeed set the tone for what was to follow – David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged” – which is underscored by the same shot of the highway at night which began the film, and continues on into the credits (Mazullo 2005:500). Another example of Lynch using a song to signal a shift in narrative is the use of Lou Reed’s version of The Drifter’s “Magic Moment”, which is played at the first time (the magic moment?) in which it is realised that both characters from ‘the first half of the film, Fred and Renee, are present, in different bodies, in the second half’s alternate reality, as Pete and Alice’ (Mazullo 2005:502-3).

As can be seen, the use of soundtrack for Lynch involves a sophistication of choice, which is affirmed by his comment that ‘[h]alf of [a] film is picture…the other half is sound. They’ve got to work together’ (Press Kit). Herzogenrath (1999:9) suggests that, for Lynch’s work, the soundtrack is ‘a most important factor to enhance the mood of a scene’, or as mentioned above – ‘add-value’. The use of background sounds, and in particular Lynch’s use of ‘drones’ clearly demonstrates this point. For example, when Renee first finds the videotape a low bass sound rumbles, which can be seen to signify the threat of the outside (through the videotape) entering the inside. In the cinema this would have produced an unsettling affect with the low frequency being felt physically by the audience (Herzogrenath 1999:10).

The above discussion has provided an outline of the formal conventions of filmmaking which have been developed over the last century and still continue to influence the way films are created today. Examples were provided from Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997), which not only demonstrated the filmic context of the concepts under discussion, but also illustrated how film form can be subverted to produce a text that is outside the dominant style, and outside the normative assumption that films must finally, in their denouement, bring the experience to a satisfying and explanatory resolution.

Bibliography
Bordwell, D. and Thompson, J. (1985) “Fundamental Aesthetics of Sound in the Cinema” in Weis, E. and Belton, J (eds) Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K. (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London and New York: Routledge.

Bordwell, D. and Thompson, J. (2008) Film Art: An Introduction (8th edition). New York: McGraw Hill.

Chion, M. (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.

Corrigan, T. and White, P. (2004) The Film Experience: An Introduction. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Hayward, S. (2000) Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (2nd edition). London and New York: Routledge.

Hayward, S. (2006) Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (3rd edition). London and New York: Routledge.

Herzogrenath, B. (1999) “On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology”. Other Voices, 1 (3): 1-22. http://www.othervoices.org/1.3/bh/highway.html (accessed 20 March 2010).

Lehman, P. and Luhr, W. (2003) “Narrative Structure” in Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying (2nd edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Mazullo, M. (2005) “Remembering Pop: David Lynch and the Sound of the ‘60s”. American Music, 23 (4): 493-513.

McGowan, T. (2000) “Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch’s Lesson in Fantasy”. Cinema Journal, 39 (2): 51-73.

Official Press Kit for Lost Highway. http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpress.html (accessed 20 March 2010)

Szebin, F. and Biodrowski, S. (1997) “David Lynch on Lost Highway”. Cinefantastique, 28 (10): 32-41.

Vass, M. (2005) “Cinematic meaning in the work of David Lynch: Revisiting Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive”. Cineaction, 67 (Summer): 12-23.

Filmography
Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch, 1997.

The end of the world as we know it. A review of two films.

2010-02-26T20:35:00.009+10:00

The end of the world is nigh! Well, at least it is at the cinema at the moment with the post-apocalyptic offerings of The Road and The Book of Eli. The characters of both films are survivors of cataclysmic events which have left their respective worlds barren, desolate and lawless; only the rule of survival remains. Peopled by cannibals and the desperate, they make their way along the road, overcoming obstacles and threats on their way to an ultimate destination, where it is hoped things will be better.

Having read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, from which The Road is adapted, I had reservations over whether director John Hillcoat could replicate the sheer lyricism of the novel. The film is good, and Viggo Mortensen’s depiction of ‘the man’ is superb, however, the film doesn’t match up to the art of the novel.

It was always going to be a great challenge to any director who took up the task of adapting McCarthy’s work. His prose is bleak, halting and trudging, and mirrors the journey along the road both tragically and beautifully, and cleverly captures the reader with a lyrical sublimity, which seems difficult to accurately render on film.

The only director who could have realised such a vision – and forgiving his average remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho – would perhaps have been Gus Vant Sant. By using a combination of conventional and non-conventional techniques, he may have achieved a similar award winning result as he did with Elephant, a winner of the Palme d’Or.

A great strength of The Road was the outstanding cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe. Eschewing the use of CGI, stock footage from Hurricane Katrina, images of bloody tracks in the snow from the Kosovo Conflict, and real locations of abandoned highways, and bleak and wasted landscapes, were used to more immediate effect in creating the post-apocalyptic mise-en-scene. I read in a separate review that this can perhaps be read that apocalypse is potentially with us presently, and if not careful, we could well find ourselves in similar circumstances.

In The Book of Eli, the story takes a more action-oriented approach, with breathtaking moments of cleanly choreographed bloody fight scenes, which are supported by great editing. The first fight is shot with Eli (Denzel Washington) in silhouette as he takes out an entire gang of highway robbers with precise and deadly strokes from his large knife.

Making his way west, Eli stops at a local town under the influence of Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who is searching the country high and low for the titular book – the last of its kind. It just so happens that Eli is carrying the book, which he reads from every day. Blamed for the atrocities that caused ‘the flash’ thirty years ago, all the books of its kind were destroyed in the wake of the war. Carnegie is obsessed over gaining possession of the book, which he calls a powerful weapon, so that he can influence and be worshiped. He lacks the right words and ideas, however, which he knows can be found in the book.

The film is a decent effort by directors the Hughes brothers, but suffers from two major flaws. Firstly, the introduction of Mila Kunis as a sidekick forces Eli into expository dialogue, which had been avoided in Gary Whitta’s screenplay. She is perhaps also miscast, making you wonder what a fashion model is doing roughing it on the road.

Whilst the cinematography was great overall, the use of CGI seemed out of harmony with the rest of the mise-en-scene. The digital composites stuck out rather than dissolving into the screen.

The greatest problem, however, is the film’s ending. There is a moment towards the end which provides a logical spot for ending the film, however, for whatever the reason it continues into a final act. Rather than tie off hanging story threads, it confuses with illogical plot developments.

Regardless of the negatives mentioned above, both films are above the blockbuster standard, and give great opportunity to experience the post-apocalyptic genre film from two different directorial viewpoints.

Classical Conversations: The Inherent Doom of Woman

2010-02-14T18:11:00.020+10:00

In a recent conversation with good friend, scholar, and fellow blogger, Gidgette, I was speaking of the inherent doom of Woman in western civilisation. I pointed out how the problem of the subjugation of woman begins with her very name. Wo-man, is still a part of man. Fe-male likewise. In no instance does woman possess a name that is hers; a name separate to man.

Her inherent doom is apparent in biblical and Greek mythology, whereby she is the agent of evil. In the garden of Eden, it was Eve who plucked the apple - albeit possessed by Satan - and convinced Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit. In the Greek story, it was Pandora, the first woman, who was created by Zeus to bring evil to man, as punishment for receiving the stolen fire from Prometheus.

This is a general overview and over the next series of posts I hope to undertake a larger and more complex project. Using the works of the Greek poets, and Milton's 'Paradise Lost', I intend to discuss how woman has been doomed from the start, and it's from this first principle that the feminist struggle in a patriarchal society begins.

As I return to university in a few weeks, I hope to be able to continue to work on this project as time allows.

Summer reading - some brief thoughts

2010-01-31T09:41:00.018+10:00

James Joyce - Ulysses*
See previous post

Greg Egan - Incandescence
Whilst I'm giving this a 3/5, it is not due to being a bad book. The concept and story is galaxy-bending as ever. The hard part for me was the maths. Basically, he takes Einsteinian and Newtonian physics and explains them through the emerging understanding of an alien race whose intelligence is genetically programmed to trigger them out of docility in the event of threat. The maths is explained in terms of alien understanding, there are no references to Einstein or Newton, just complex descriptions of the the sort of maths and geometry being developed by the race to understand what is happening. But still, Egan delivers.

John Milton - Paradise Lost*

Plato - The Republic*
His simile of the cave, and his view on art and representation, are still relevant in the 21st century. Timeless

Linda Jaivin - A Most Immoral Woman*

Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality Vol.1
An interesting little read. Picked this up cheap as a Popular Penguin. Good way to test my understanding of Foucault's ideas learnt throughout the year.

John Keats - The Complete Poems
Presently inspired by Jane Campion's 'Bright Star', here is a poet that enamours the soul and touches the spirit. Some of the loveliest writing in the English language.

Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology*

Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth
This was a real delight. Lahiri has a measured charm to her writing and tells delicate and moving stories. Her characters are simply realised. Overall it's a wonderful example of poised and restrained prose, which helps her bring out the nuances of the immigration experience of Bengali/Americans.

Albert Camus - The Outsider
I really enjoyed this. A very interesting character and an evocative story well told. To be read again, and again.

Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus*

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
My first taste of Victorian literature. The text was heavily weighted with biblical and Romantic allusions, only some of which I picked up unassisted. Jane Eyre is an expertly and vividly drawn psychological character. Bronte's writing was breathtaking and whilst the overall vibe was somewhat dour, her attention to domestic detail was delicate, leaving a delirious sensation on the soul.

Nam Le - The Boat
A collection of seven brutally honest short stories by debut author Nam Le, fiction editor of The Harvard Review. His characters are intimately drawn covering everything from the Vietnamese immigrant experience; to the story of a child assassin in Columbia; to an American lawyer on the streets of Tehran; to the moments of a Japanese girl before the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima; and a wonderful and very Australian story set in a fishing village dealing with adolescent ins and outs and a dying mother. How he manages to cover such a diverse range of cultures with such unerring honesty and accuracy is beyond me. The mind boggles at such talent.

Emma Jones - The Striped World*

A.S. Byatt - The Children's Book
I write this mere moments after the last page was turned. The screen shimmers from the moisture in my eyes which threatens to spill over. Having traveled through the best and worst parts of the young character's lives as they grow up in the last decade of the 19th century, the inevitable consequences of war threaten and upset what is a beautiful and ideal story. Set against the back drop of Fabian Society, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic movement, and women's suffrage, A.S. Byatt weaves a textual dream that can only end in the history from which it was drawn.

Markus Zusak - The Book Thief
I found this to be such a sympathetic and sincere story, and whilst it is set in Nazi Germany, it has a wry and irreverent take on the German experience. He takes you not just into the world of the young book thief, but also into the lives of the neighbours, friends and rivals in the town in which most of the story is set. It's also quite obvious that Zusak has a love of words, but also a deep understanding of their contradictory power; to bring good, and evil. Highly recommended.

Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
So, was it deserving of the Man Booker Prize? There is no denying the sheer brilliance of the novel. Mantel has achieved a remarkable project in reconstructing the psychological character of Thomas Cromwell and the goings on of the Tudor Court from 1520-1535. Her research and dedication to the finest detail is exquisite. The book is flawed, however, and this is not just my own criticism. Mantel overuses the personal pronoun 'he', so you often find yourself lost as to who is speaking.

In my opinion, Byatt's 'The Children's Book', was a more deserving winner. Sometimes, second best is the best.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road
The best word that describes this is bleak. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the story is about a father and son's love and their journey along the road, as they move south through a desolate, cold and barren landscape. Under constant threat from survivors turned cannibal and the gnawing need for food and water, they do the best they can with what they have, all the while carrying the fire - a metaphor perhaps for their inner spirit or goodness. The prose is bleak, halting and trudging, very much like their journey along the road.

Iain Banks - Transition

I was suprised at how much I didn't enjoy this. Here we have Banks in his non-SF guise, but writing a quasi-SF novel. The concept is clever, but poorly executed. The characters are thinly drawn and over viced - too much pointless sex, and gratuitous drug references, which were the only veneers holding the characters together. Rip that away and the characterisation is vacuous at best. This is unusual for Banks and this sort of thing more resembles Peter F Hamilton. The use of multiple first person perspective was not particularly effective, and it wasn't really until the meeting of Adrian and Tem, that any benefit of the style choice was realised. The moments of clever philosophical insight and play with the overall concept were unfortately overshadowed by the novel's negative aspects. Still, I remain a fervent Banks fan - that's Iain Banks with an 'M' - and look forward to the next Culture novel.

Hesiod - Theogony; Work & Days*

* = if there are no comments, this does not mean the book was undeserving; rather it means that I didn't have time or was unable to write once I'd finished the book. My reviews are spontaneously composed at the time of completing a book and are the words in my head which spill out through my fingers and onto the screen.

Ulysses and the Mod Fenian

2009-12-18T09:14:00.010+10:00

A few weeks ago I finished what is arguably one of the most difficult feats of literature. With no respite I devoted every available moment outside of work to devour James Joyce's Ulysses in just seven days. The experience was viscerally unsettling as I witnessed the English language swallowing its own tail off every line, letter, word and page - only to be vomited back up and reconstituted in a wholly new form.

The biggest problem, however, with a text that is so uninviting and complicit in its own ostricisation from conventionality, is it leaves only academics - and the most intrepid - who dare to peel away it's mystery and accept the work for what it really is -- one of the greatest novels of all time.

On finishing the work, these are the words that best capture my reading of Ulysses:

And done the dragon he did slain.
Battled and bested in a seven day.
The Best of Erin, gutted not by steel, nor by flint.
Felled was he by the Eater of Words.
Devourer of Lines.
Slurper of Syntax.
By champion Lexis Mechanica extraordinaire.
Break, bend, barricade, bump, best and burn the Word.
Ye English is dead.
Long live the Mod Fenian and his tricks!

- lexis mechanica

Sex Slaves: Literacy in a Bleak Place (BWF Day 2)

2009-09-17T12:52:00.004+10:00

James A. Levine was struck by the discovery of literacy in a seemingly hopeless place: Mumbai's street of cages.
(Chair: Marie-Louise Thiele)

Dr James Levine is a scientist turned writer. He told the story of how he was kidnapped by ‘kids’ at Delhi airport and held captive for three days. Thankfully, he was rescued by the police and made it to Mumbai, where he was meeting the rest of his team. Dr Levine mentioned that the streets in Mumbai are set up around a single commercial focus. For example, there is an entire street dedicated to rows upon rows of wedding invitation sellers.

He tells of how he was walking down the infamous street of cages, which is the ‘red light’ district, but far more sinister than the shop fronts in Amsterdam. Standing outside of the cages are young girl prostitutes on display to prospective buyers. Passing a cage he saw a girl who was writing in a blue notebook. He stopped and asked his escort to ask the girl if he could ‘please’ look at her book.

The escort barked a command and basically demanded she hand over her book. To understand the significance of this, you need to picture yourself in the shoe’s of the young girl. You have no family, no future, and you live from one moment to the next, with no hope for a better life. The book then symbolises everything you have in the world; it’s basically your soul.

The girl ‘dutifully’ handed the book over and Dr Levine, whilst he couldn’t read the script, said that it was 2-3 word sentences, written in tiny handwriting – no doubt to conserve space in her precious notebook. He returns the book and thanks the girl, whose name is Batuk.
Sometime after this experience he became constantly haunted by her beautiful brown eyes, and was compelled to write his book The Blue Book.

It’s hard for these simple words to represent the incredible passion and feeling with which Dr Levine tells his story and truth be told I get upset writing this; it was a deeply affective talk. I’ll leave it to Dr Levine and the article he wrote for The Times to finish his story. And yes, there is a happy ending of sorts. Click on the link to read the article, "The Street of Cages".

View from the Middle East (BWF Day 2)

2009-09-17T12:37:00.005+10:00

Sydney-born Irfan Yusuf decided he should die for a Muslim cause. Joris Luyendijk spent five years as the youngest ever Middle East correspondent. Abbas El-Zein grew up in war-torn Lebanon. Lana Slezic has published Forsaken, a photographic essay of her two year assignment in Afghanistan.
(Chair: Matt Peacock)

I arrived a fraction late so had to sit all the way down the back, and I’d also missed the introductions. As I was finding my chair the panel started off discussing how there are so many different ideas of the Middle East, and through the media it is simply reduced for Western consumption to the issues of security.

The panel agreed that the Middle East has a history but this is often overlooked in the pursuit of sensationalist reporting. Each of the writers has in some way attempted, either intentionally, or not, to reclaim the Middle East

It was suggested to the audience that Joris’s latest book – Fit to Print: Misrepresenting the Middle East is about what journalists will never tell you themselves. Joris told the audience that his idea of The Middle East was skewed until he got there himself. On leaving for his first trip for Ramallah at the time of the Intifada in 80s, he thought he was writing his farewell. On arriving in Palestine he was amazed to realise it was just like Brisbane in many ways.

Having seen the images on the TV of stone throwing Palestinians, burnt out cars, Ambulances taking away injured protestors on stretchers, and the Israeli Army aligned against the unrestful masses on their side of the border, this is the scene he was expecting.

In a humorous anecdote he told of how he started asking the locals “where are the stone throwers?” To which he was told, to go down the street, take a right, then next left and at 2pm, they’ll start. Joris followed their directions and at the allotted time, students who had finished school for the day started to arrive, then the Israelis appeared on their side of the border.

Sure enough, just as clockwork, the students threw their stones, the Israeli soldiers fired their rifles in the air, then one of them shot a student in the leg, the ambulances arrived, a car was burnt out, and there you have the images that have been replayed over and over, with a white journalist on camera “reporting live from the battle zone in Ramallah” and saying “the chances for peace in the Middle East are slimmer than ever”.

What is remarkable about Joris’s experience of the stone throwers is that it was a public event, the locals came to watch the spectacle, and just as there would be pie sellers at a football game, there were falafel sellers at the “stone throwers”.

Conversation then switched to a more serious tone on the use of words used to describe the Palestinian situation in the media and their inherent difficulty. In calling it an occupied territory infers that it will be returned; calling it disputed suggests that the situation can be negotiated. It was also noted the Palestinian situation is not easily representable visually.

For example, if Israel wants to demonstrate its plight to the world, it simply shows the aftermath of ‘terror’ attacks by Palestinians. However, for the Palestinians to demonstrate the hunger, loss of land, social effects of sanction, etc, the visual images it can deploy are not as affective on the unsympathetic west.

Having spent two years in Afghanistan, Lana was able to give a view of the country that is not normally available to journalists. She noted that at the time of the recent war in Afghanistan, the western media were hailing the saviour of the Muslim woman – the burkha was gone. Women were liberated from oppression and young girls were back at school. However, the real situation on the ground was quite different. These were deliberate images of Afghanistan the west wanted the rest of the world to see.

When she first arrived she spent the first few months being indoctrinated by the military, and was only shown what the military wanted to show her. All journalists that arrive to report on Afghanistan go through this process, and she believes that this is why the stories coming out are all the same repetitive reporting with very few touching the deeper issues. She realised that to get to the heart of the country, she would have to stay on, and so she did, and her photographic essay The Forsaken, is a result of her time there.

Irfan told his story of how when he had finished school in the 80s, he wanted to go off and fight jihad in Afghanistan. He remarked at how if he was to say such a thing in today’s climate of ‘terror’, he’d be locked up. In the 80s, it was the US fighting a proxy war against the Soviets with the help of the Mujahideen. So, when you’re fighting Communists, jihad and terrorism are permissible acts of war, it would seem.

Questions were then invited from the panel to each other and Abbas asked a very interesting question: “Is the Middle East unknowable?” Lana mentioned that because little is really known by the west, what is unknown causes fear, and it is fear which creates a natural barrier to knowing. Joris ventured an ‘Orientalist’ view and suggested that keeping the region unknowable, plays into the hands of those who wish to dominate the region.

The Brisbane Writer's Festival - 2009 (Day 1)

2009-09-12T23:41:00.016+10:00

The following sets out summaries of sessions from my first ever writer’s festival. Aside from the little I could glean from the program guide I had no idea what to expect. I’d pre-purchased my tickets for the ticketed events, and I’d also figured out which of the free events I was interested in. I hadn’t really planned on setting up my event preferences in terms of theme, and certainly didn’t restrict myself to simply fiction or non-fiction authors.

As you will see I managed to cover a wide variety and have no regrets of missed opportunities, and certainly don’t feel I made any poor choices in my selection. It was a truly inspiring experience, and who knows, one day it could very well be me on the stage talking about my book.

This is interesting as I think the festival helped to reawaken something in me that has been dormant since my childhood. I recall loving to write stories, I even wrote a script for a play, but somehow along the way things happen, paths change, and destiny’s callused hand pushes and pulls you this way and that. Drifting and quite often disconnecting.
But that’s youth I guess, and with time’s winged chariot snapping at my heels, it’s time to get serious.

Day 3 (or my Day 1)
Sexing Up Historical Fiction
Linda Jaivin and Tobsha Learner discuss the possibilities.
(Chair: Glen Thomas)

I was looking forward to getting to my first session of the festival so I made an early escape from the office on Friday afternoon. In typical fashion I was early, so I grabbed a seat in the shade and waited to be marshaled into the Studio. Both authors did some readings from their latest books. Given that the session was on ‘sexing up’ historical fiction, it was no surprise that the chosen passages were steamed up with erotic imagery.

Linda read first from A Most Immoral Woman, which is set in China in 1904 against the backdrop of imperialism and the Russo-Japanese War. The story is inspired by the real life journal of Australian George Morrison, a Peking correspondent working for the Times of London. The other main character is Mae Perkins (the most immoral woman), and another real life character. Mae was none too shy in her sexual exploits and freely told her many lovers of her past episodes, the stories of which she used to titillate Morrison.

Tobsha read from The Sphinx, which is set in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1977. The timing was inspired by Tobsha’s interest in the postcolonial situation following Nasser’s socialist revolution, and takes place at the time that President Sadat visited Israel to make peace between the two powers. The result of which saw Egypt thrown out of the Arab League.

The story is told in first person through the eyes of Oliver, an English geophysicist. His wife, Isabella, is a marine archaeologist who dies having discovered an ancient artefact – an astrolabe - she’d been searching for all her life. Oliver is swept up in the intrigue and ensuing sabotage, and seeks to understand its mystery, which takes him to the past of Isabella’s once wealthy Italian-Alexandrian family.

Both authors were asked by Glen to talk about why they chose their respective settings, and to also talk about the sort of research that was required. As an expert on China, the setting came naturally for Linda, but the catalyst was her reading of Morrison’s journal, which is available in the State Library of New South Wales. Morrison, like Mae, was not shy in sharing his sexual exploits and it was here that Linda came across Mae. Given the social mores and morality of the time, Linda was fascinated in the context in which these sordid stories were told by Mae. Linda says her behaviour was so transgressive for the times, so given her personal interest in sexuality, Mae was ready made This then became the idea for her book.

Tobsha points out that there have been a lot of stories written in Alexandria, but none to her knowledge are set in 1977. Her story also goes back to London in the punk 70s, a time she experienced herself, so she was able to revisit those heady days of sex, drugs, and punk music. The astrolabe is also a real artefact, so with considerable research she was able to explore it’s mystery and use it in her story. With Isabelle’s family heritage, she could examine the postcolonial situation and the Italian diaspora. Tobsha discussed the Italian colonial history of Mussolini, and then Nasser’s Egyptian Revolution of 1952, in which the colonials were stripped of land and prestige.

A lot of the discussion revolved around research techniques and a question was asked by someone in the audience wanting to know how the authors got the nuances of dialogue and speech accurate. As with all the research, Linda and Tobsha both talked about reading the literature of the times, and Linda mentioned how in his journal Morrison wrote about his favourite author Kipling, so to better understand Morrison’s psychology, in reading what he read, she was able to construct his character.

Tobsha also talked about visiting the setting and in the case of The Sphinx, she spent a few months in Alexandria breathing in the location. She also mentioned the importance of, where possible, seeking out visual and auditory clues – anything relevant from the time to bring the landscape of the story to life.

Given my personal interest in postcolonialism it was amazing to hear both authors speak.

Science is Stranger than Fiction
Marianne de Pierre and Peter McAllister join physicist Paul Meredith to explore the boundaries between science fiction and science fact and the endless possibilities in between.
(Chair: Jack Heath)

As an icebreaker and to get conversation flowing, Jack asked the panel to talk about what started them writing. Looking at my notes it looks as though I only scribbled down Marianne’s response, which in some ways is similar to my own. When she was eight she wrote an unashamed rip-off of Enid Blyton – “The Splendid Six”. I’d have to check what age I was, but I wrote a Wells rip-off, but mine was a little more obvious – “The Time Machine”.

The next question asked was ‘do SF writers set out to write an account of what the future will be?’ Marianne said that she wasn’t bound with an intent to predict the future, she simply lets her imagination go.

Jack then started to query the panel on the importance of plausibility in their constructed worlds. Paul suggested that it is essential as without plausibility the picture you are building for the reader is destroyed. Furthermore it was agreed amongst them that the logic must be rigorous, even in cases where technologies are invented by the author, the logic must remain constant throughout the story universe. The needs of drama also need to be considered as well.

Paul interesting also noted that scientists go through similar thought processes to creative writers, and that science itself, is a creative process. Looking into the future, is similar to writing fictional stories of possible futures. Peter and Marianne also discussed the balance between story and explanation, and said that it can be difficult to know how much information to give the reader. They also said that sometime you will have pages and pages of research notes, which at the end of the day, in the writing process only make it into a single sentence.

Towards the end of discussion the plausibility of posthumanism was discussed with Marianne a firm believer that sometime in the future we’ll have overcome the limits of flesh, and be able to transport, or imprint our consciousness into virtual, mechanical, or some other hosts. Paul was sceptical and disagreed.

Finally, during question time an audience member asked if they knew of the best way to contact extra-terrestrial life forms. Paul pointed out that if there is alien life out there, regardless of whether they look like us, they will be subject to the same universal laws of the universe, for example, physics, geometry, etc.

The only criticism with the session is that Jack, due I suppose to his young age (23), would interject the discussion, or introduce his question with a Gen Y (dare I say it) attitude. It was juvenile at times is what I'm trying to say.

Screen Theories Essay - An Analysis of the Representation of Family in Three Films: American Beauty, Blue Velvet and Mildred Pierce

2009-09-09T20:44:00.007+10:00

Here's another essay I'd like to share with you. It was a colossal effort and there were moments when the task seemed too much for me. I could have taken a very easy approach to the question, but in typical style I decided to challenge myself, and challenge myself I did. The writing didn't come as easy as some other papers, but after plenty of tinkering, I'm more than happy with the final result. Comments welcome.

Once known as the ‘dream factory’, Hollywood and the institution of film in general is one of the most pervasive cultural mediums for the dissemination of meaning throughout society. This essay will discuss the statement that meaning in any film is produced as a result of combining the formal elements of cinema (the use of camera, lighting, mise-en-scène, use of narrative technique, etc). However, this meaning is also shaped through normative assumptions about gender, race, class, work, the family, and so on, which exist in our culture. Films merely reaffirm these assumptions rather than contest them.

The aim of this paper will be to demonstrate that due to the very nature of Hollywood cinema, dominant ideologies are necessarily entrenched by producers, which work to uphold and perpetuate the hegemony of patriarchal capitalist society. In particular, the representation of family and its attendant ideological assumptions will be analysed with examples provided from two films: Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945) and American Beauty (Mendes, 1999); a third film, Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986), will be deployed as a counterbalance and will demonstrate how a work produced outside of Hollywood can work to disrupt such normative assumptions.

Classic Hollywood cinema is a tradition of filmmaking that dominated Hollywood production from 1917 through to around 1960, and remains a pervasive style in western mainstream cinema to the present day (Bordwell et al 1985:9; Hayward 2000:64). In The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, David Bordwell titles the opening chapter ‘an excessively obvious cinema’. At first glance this statement would seem to support the claim that Hollywood is a classic narrative cinema with an identifiable body of work, which conforms to a group style, immediately recognisable due to its adherence to certain formal and stylistic criteria (Bordwell et al 1985:5, 12). More importantly, however, he is referring to Hollywood as a set of practices that work together to create a distinct film style, which escapes observation by its very excessiveness (Bordwell et al 1985:11; my emphasis).

The most important criterion in the classical system is narrative causality, which works within subordinate systems of time and space (Bordwell et al 1985:12). The narrative is dependent on a pattern of order/disorder/order-restored, and invariably the agents of causality are individual characters, which are imbued with traits. These include attitudes, skills, habits, tastes, psychological drives, and any other qualities that distinguish the character (Hayward 2000:64; Bordwell and Thompson 2008:94). Traits also perform a casual function, in that the trait of desire, for example, can work to propel the narrative by setting up a goal, and will seek through its development to fulfil that desire (Bordwell & Thompson 2008:95).

In unifying causality, motivation is also necessary to explain justification for certain elements within the film’s diegesis (Bordwell and Thompson 2008:66). It is useful here to introduce the concept of mise-en-scène, which essentially means, “putting into the scene” (Bordwell & Thompson 2008:112). The term is used to signify the control that a director has in staging a scene for the framing of shots, and includes such elements as setting, costume, lighting, and overall movement within the frame (Hayward 2000:231). Mise-en-scène is important for the consideration of space, in that it serves to explain compositional motivation through the choices that the director makes, and functions to establish a cause of impending actions so that the story can proceed (Hayward 2000:242).

To avoid the film drawing attention to itself, the Hollywood filmmaker relies on continuity editing and the strategies of mise-en-scène to ensure narrative continuity. In this regard, the editing is invisible and offers a seamless, spatial and temporal coherence, which presents the spectator with a narrative that appears to have no breaks and no disconcerting unexplained transitions in time and space (Hayward 2000:74, 319). The only time when the temporal unity will be disrupted is through the use of flashback, which is ‘a narrative device used…to go back in time to an earlier time in the character’s life and/or history, and to narrate that moment’ (Hayward 2000:133).

In presenting a seamless reality, Hollywood participates ideologically to disguise the illusion of realism, thereby fulfilling Bordwell’s abovementioned observation that it escapes observation by its very excessiveness (Hayward 2000:311; my emphasis). It is this verisimilitude with reality which makes Hollywood a particularly powerful and pervasive medium for the dissemination of meaning throughout society (Green 1998:16-17). Therefore, it can be said that in presenting a world that appears ‘natural’, the process of naturalising functions to reinforce dominant ideologies and normalises assumptions of gender, race, class, work, the family, and so on (Hayward 2000:258).

According to Marx, the ruling elite, through controlling the means of production, also control the means to which ideas, meaning and reality, are disseminated through society, whereby ‘the ruling ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ (Marx in Eagleton 1994:7). In this regard, due to the immense and complicated effort to create a replica of the world, and due to its concomitant reliance on a capitalist mode of production, filmmakers are necessarily intertwined with owners and managers of financial and commercial capital, in whose interest it is to present social institutions as natural and normal, thereby perpetuating the hegemony of capitalist society (Green 1998:17).

It is therefore necessary that the visual images which are allowed to circulate throughout society are those that reinforce thinking which leads individuals ‘to believe that it is right, not merely necessary, to go to work, or to stay home and care for the children; or to obey the law out of a sense of duty rather than of fear’ (Green 1998:25; original emphasis). Thus, it can be argued that Hollywood in presenting social roles as natural, prepares individuals for those roles by making them passively accept, rather than challenge their conditions of subjectivity (Green 1998:17).

Nowhere is this more demonstrable than in the institution of the family, which ‘in so many films serves as the mechanism whereby desire is fulfilled, or at least ideological equilibrium established’, and functions within the narrative to ‘[establish] values of competitive, repressive and hierarchical relationships’ (Harvey 1998:36). According to Harvey (1998:37)

in its hierarchical structure, with the father as the head, the mother as subservient, and the children as totally dependent, [the family] offers a legitimate model or metaphor for a hierarchical and authoritarian society.

As a vehicle for the demonstration of normative values, she suggests that ‘through its manifestation of a whole series of customs and beliefs, the family functions as one of the ideological cornerstones of western industrial society (Harvey 1998:36). It is within this worldview that the dyad of heterosexuality is confirmed to be the norm, and anything outside of that is presented as deviant and threatening. Hollywood achieves this by purporting that happiness, and indeed survival, is only possible within the bounds of its ideologically constructed family and normalised sexuality (Green 1998:29).

Having looked at the nature of Hollywood narrative cinema, and the way it functions to uphold dominant ideologies and present normative assumptions, attention can now be turned to looking at specific examples. Mildred Pierce (1945), directed by Michael Curtiz, and adapted from the original novel by James M. Cain, is part film noir and part melodrama. An examination of the social context of the film’s production provides a clear example of the way in which meanings are negotiated in the production process, and how those meanings are concerned with ideological positioning for desired social effects (Haralovich 2008:239).

At the time of its production, women were going through one of the most dramatic periods of social change, as they took up positions in a workforce to support an economy that was at war. During this time, women were granted unprecedented freedom, however, with the return of the thousands of GIs, there was anxiety over returning women to the domestic sphere so that the men could return to work (Dixon 2006:147). As a shaper of social attitudes, Hollywood provided an important role in reminding citizens of their place in society (Sochen 1978:12).

In Mildred Pierce, this is shown in the complicated and contrasting manipulation of genre conventions, by which according to Cook (1996:69) ‘a hierarchy of discourse is established, suppressing the female discourse in favour of the male’. The narrative is split between a noir present, and a melodramatic past, which is told in flashback by Mildred, the main protagonist. The use of lighting and mise-en-scène can be seen to signify the gendering of the separate genres and the two discourses at play. For example, the scenes in the present are characterised by contrasts in lighting, unsettling variations in camera distance and angle, claustrophobic sets and framing devices, with the events taking place at night. This compares with the scenes from the past, which are evenly lit, with few variations in camera angle, and events occur during daytime (Nelson 1985:453; Cook 1996:71).

The generic split also encourages the sounding of two voices. For example, the female discourse of Mildred’s past is associated with typical melodramatic subjects of family, sexual and emotional relationships, etc. However, the present male discourse of the detective, is that of the law, which seeks to undermine the veracity of Mildred’s story, thereby privileging the “masculine” ideology of the police (Robertson 1990:42). This is further supported structurally in the use of what Nelson (1985:451) refers to as a ‘false suture’.

For example, the film opens with the murder of Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott) whose dying words are “Mildred”. Rather than reveal the killer in a conventional shot/reverse shot, the camera pans to the bullet-riddled mirror and the sound of a closing door. The next shot cuts to a car driving away, and then dissolves to a sequence of shots that put Mildred on Santa Monica pier, ready to throw herself into the ocean. The obvious affect of this sequence is to encourage a guilty framing of Mildred. Surprisingly, however, it is revealed after the second flashback that the murderer is Veda, Mildred’s daughter, and the murder scene is replayed, however, this time with the missing reverse shot (Nelson 1985:453).

The dominance of a patriarchal ideology can be seen at work in the film through the way that Mildred is punished for transgressing the traditional boundaries of the nuclear family (Corber 2006:6). After leaving her unemployed husband Bert, she sets up a successful business so that she can provide for her daughters in the absence of a father. This sets off a string of events including a tragic love affair with Monte, the death of the youngest daughter Kay, the transformation of Veda into a sexually treacherous femme fatale, the collapse of the business, and the eventual reconciliation with Bert.

According to Sochen (1978:9), the film worked as social control for women: ‘Women of America, know your place. Erase any ideas you may have to divorce your husband and/or enter the big, bad business world.’ This is important, because had Mildred been allowed to succeed in her transgression, she would have created a new social type: a career wife-mother. Therefore, she ‘had to be destroyed to eliminate any troublesome thoughts held by working mothers’ (Sochen 1978:13).

American Beauty (1999), directed by Sam Mendes, is also concerned with punishing those who dare to overstep the boundaries of their assigned social role. As with Mildred Pierce, a study of the conditions of the film’s production provides a social context which demonstrates dominant ideologies at work. At this time there was a pre-millennium anxiety over masculinity, which had suffered at the hands of feminism, civil and gay rights, and the ‘overall pressures and malaise of an increasingly materialist culture.’ Male authority was perceived to be under threat (Karlyn 2004:71).

This notion is clearly illustrated in the film’s early scenes, which show Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) trapped in a middle-American suburban nightmare. The affect of imprisonment is achieved through the visual style in which the camera traps Lester in a series of framing shots (Law 2006:126). For example, he is shown trapped behind glass in the shower and behind the window as he watches his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) obsessively attending to her perfect rose garden; and at work, his image is reflected on the screen, showing him imprisoned in columns of data.

The family is also in crisis. This is established through the effect of tableau, which works to slow down the narrative and encourages the spectator to contemplate the scene (Law 2006:127). For example, just before the first dinner scene, the camera lingers on the family photographs before cutting to a long shot of the family seated around the dinner table. The mise-en-scène is particularly important here as it sets up the distance between the family members. As the camera pushes in slowly towards the table the simmering tension between the family members is almost palpable.

Narrated by Lester in flashback, the film tells the story of his escape from his job, his overbearing wife, and the responsibilities of fatherhood; and finally, his death. He also goes through a questionable spiritual transformation, which is enacted through an infatuation with his daughter’s friend Angela (Mena Suvari), a sexually precocious teen nymphette. Lester’s lust for Angela signifies reclamation of lost masculinity. In portraying his desire, the filmmakers break from the conventions of Hollywood cinema, once again slowing down the narrative progression, and use stylised surrealist techniques, showing Angela in a series of fantasy sequences (Boeck 2007:184).

As well as being tied to the idea of emasculation, Lester’s rebellion can also be considered in light of the acceleration of consumer culture in America since World War II (Karlyn 2004:81). His mid-life crisis is driven by the need to reassert the freedom he enjoyed in his youth where all he did was ‘party and get laid’. Lester starts smoking pot and listening to 70s music, lifts weights so that he ‘looks good naked’, and buys the car of his dreams. However, whilst the film presents this as a claim for freedom, it fails to acknowledge that it is only due to the things that he is running away from, which enables him to entertain his rebellion. In other words, freedom is only possible if you can afford it (Karlyn 2004:82).

Ultimately, the film is contradictory, and whilst Lester’s transcendence is portrayed as heroic, it uses the disturbing attraction to Angela as the catalyst to which he reaches his epiphany. Guilt is deflected from Lester in the representation of Angela as the typical dumb blonde, which invites the audience to deride her for her ‘naiveté and shallow narcissism’ (Karlyn 2004:2004:87). Finally, given the opportunity to deflower her, Lester is shocked to realise that she is still a virgin, which snaps him back into his traditional fatherly role; he covers her up and offers to make her a sandwich. However, it’s too late for Lester to return to his abandoned social role.

As mentioned in the introduction, Blue Velvet (1986) was produced outside of the Hollywood system. As an independent project it didn’t suffer from the sort of dominant ideologies demonstrated in the discussion so far. Rather, it was able to turn such representations on their head and present a subversive critique of contemporaneous concerns. At the time of its production America was living through Reaganism, a conservative ideology which appealed to old-fashioned values of the past, in particular the post-war 1950s (Prince 2007:147).

Lynch invokes a postmodern style which evokes and mocks the icons of the past, whilst placing them in the present (Denzin 1988:469). By calling into question the ideologies of past representations, the nostalgic ideals to which they appeal are called into question, and ultimately shown to be inadequate (Coughlin 2003:305). According to Jameson (1983:112-113), postmodern texts participate in an effacement of boundaries between the past and the present. He notes the use of pastiche and parody, in which both ‘involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles’. In describing parody he says that it ‘capitalises on the uniqueness of these styles and seizes on their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce an imitation which mocks the original.’ Pastiche, on the other hand, lacks the ‘satirical impulse’ of parody.

In Blue Velvet, there is clear evidence to suggest that Lynch is parodying representations of the small-town conservative family, and the ideologies which are packaged with such representation (Coughlin 2003:305). For example, after the credits, the film opens with a close-up of red roses in front of a white picket fence with a deep blue sky in the background, then fades to a slow motion shot of an old-fashioned fire engine with firemen waving, riding with a faithful dalmation as they pass through. Coughlin (2003:305) suggests that ‘these commencing moments forecast precisely that [the] narrative will be located in imaginary small-town America, a concept so often summoned in conventional representation.’

Rather than depicting a traditional family, however, Lynch distorts the idea by exchanging it for a psychic family, and enacts an Oedipal drama, completely subverting the concept of the traditional nuclear family. These Freudian implications aren’t obfuscated requiring psychoanalytical investigation to reveal their meanings; instead they are presented on the surface, and quite obviously at that. For example, in the scene in which Jeffrey is hidden inside Dorothy’s closet and witnesses her ‘rape’ by Frank, the allusion to the primal scene is difficult to ignore. This is further affirmed when Dorothy discovers him and orders him to strip, wielding a knife dangerously close to his genitals, suggesting ‘castration’ (Berry 1988:84).

In constructing the Oedipal family, Dorothy is portrayed as the mother figure and her apartment with its red colour is reminiscent of the womb. Frank is associated with Jeffrey’s father, which is demonstrated in a subjective thought sequence where his father’s reflection is distorted by a mirror, which is quickly replaced by a shot of Frank. And to complete the Oedipal drama, Jeffrey has sex with Dorothy, and at the film’s climax, kills Frank (Biga 1987:46). Interestingly, in the ‘rape’ scene, Frank enters the apartment like a father returning home from work. In the act of copulation (or is it simulated?) Frank calls out “Daddy’s coming home” a reference to his sexual climax, but also to what would appear to be a parody of the sitcom father. This is further exemplified by having Dorothy call him “Sir”.

In conclusion, it has been shown that due to the capitalistic nature of Hollywood and mainstream film in general, dominant ideologies are necessarily embedded into films in the interest of maintaining the hegemony of patriarchal capitalist society. Examples were provided from Mildred Pierce and American Beauty, which illustrated how due to contemporaneous social concerns, dominant meanings were able to infiltrate the text. Blue Velvet was offered as a counterpoint, and it was clearly demonstrated how a film produced outside of the bounds of Hollywood can use subversive techniques such as parody, to call into question the representation of dominant ideologies. Finally, it can be said that films which are produced under the restrictions of Hollywood necessarily reaffirm rather than contest such normative assumptions about gender, race, class, work, and the family, which exist in our culture.

Bibliography

Berry, B. (1988) “Forever, In My Dreams: Generic Conventions and The Subversive Imagination in Blue Velvet”. Literature Film Quarterly, 16, (2): 82-90.

Biga, T. (1987) “Review: Blue Velvet”. Film Quarterly, 41, (1): 44-49.

Boeck, R. (2007) “Ways of Seeing in American Beauty”. Screen Education, 46: 181-187.

Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K. (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London and New York: Routledge.

Bordwell, D. and Thompson, J. (2008) Film Art: An Introduction (8^th edition). New York: McGraw Hill.

Cook, P. (1996) “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce” in E. Kaplan (ed.) Women in Film Noir. London: BFI Publishing: 69-80.

Corber, R. J. (2006) “Joan Crawford’s Padded Shoulders: Female Masculinity in Mildred Pierce”. Camera Obscura, 62, 21 (2): 1-31.

Coughlin, P. (2003) “Blue Velvet: Postmodern Parody and the Subversion of Conservative Frameworks”. Literature Film Quarterly, 31, (4): 304-311.

Denzin, N. K. (1988) “Blue Velvet: Postmodern Contradictions”. Theory, Culture & Society, 5: 461-473.

Dixon, W. W. (2006) American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. Oxford: Berg.

Eagleton, T. (1994) Ideology. London and New York: Longman.

Green, P. (1998) Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Haralovich, M. B. (2008) “Adapting the Family to Murder: Mildred Pierce” in M. Pomerance (ed.) A Family Affair: cinema calls home. London and New York: Wallflower Press: 235-246.

Harvey, S. (1996) “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir” in E. Kaplan (ed.) Women in Film Noir. London: BFI Publishing: 35-46.

Hayward, S. (2000) Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (2^nd edition). London and New York: Routledge.

Jameson, F. (1983) “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” in H. Foster (ed.) The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. PortTownsend: Bay Press: 111-125.

Karlyn, K. R. (2004) “Too Close for Comfort: American Beauty and the Incest Motif”. Cinema Journal, 44, (1): 69-93.

Law, S. (2006) “Looking Closer: Structure, Style and Narrative in American Beauty”. Screen Education, 43: 123-129.

Nelson, J. (1985) “Mildred Pierce Reconsidered” in B. Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods. Berkeley: University of California Press: 450-458.

Prince, S. (2007) America Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Robertson, P. (1990) “Structural Irony in “Mildred Pierce,” or How Mildred Lost Her Tongue”. Cinema Journal, 30, (1): 42-54.

Sochen, J. (1978) “Mildred Pierce and Women in Film”. American Quarterly, 30, (1): 3-20.

Filmography

American Beauty, dir. Sam Mendes, 1999.

Blue Velvet, dir. David Lynch, 1986.

Mildred Pierce, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1945.

Lisa Mitchell - Wonder (Warner)

2009-08-27T19:08:00.007+10:00

It's not often that I will get excited about a pop artist, but this week I've been playing the debut album from Lisa Mitchell over and over and over. It's cute and folksy with pop sensibility. Sweet but not saccharine.

Some of you may be aware of her from the 2006 series of Australian Idol. But don't let that colour your opinion. At the age of 16 she demonstrated an incredible maturity of songwriting and coupled with her guitar playing, she was a force to behold.

There's something mystical, wondrous and somewhat magical to her. I'm fascinated at how at such a young age she has developed a depth and vision of the world beyond her years.

Here's a fan compilation of her journey through Idol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qagwlXYTfwU

As the final song says 'I'll See You Soon' and indeed we did. In 2007, Lisa released her 'Said One to Another' EP, which went to #1 on the iTunes 'Top Albums' chart. She also toured and I was lucky to catch her show at the Troubadour, here in Brisbane. It was an intimate show with the audience seated in front of the stage, and everyone quiet, hushed and attentive. She simply sang, played guitar, and after a few problems with the harmonica brace, played that too. Remarkable.

Without going into further detail with her bio (see www.lisamitchell.com.au) I want to turn attention to her debut album - Wonder, which was released recently on 31 July. Having started the songwriting in 2007, Lisa moved to London where she worked with Ant Whiting (Zero 7, Sia, Arctic Monkeys) and Ed Harcourt, and songwriter Andy Barlow (Lamb).

Lisa is having the time of her life headlining her own national tour and playing to sold out shows. She also played at this year's legendary Glastonbury Festival in the UK.

So with such amazing talent behind her it's no wonder, that Wonder, is set to take the breath of a nation away.

Star Trek Essay: An Ideological Analysis

2009-08-13T16:21:00.005+10:00

Having been so proud at finally making a splash into the blog-o-sphere, I've been too busy with uni to put anything together. So, as I used to publish these on Facebook, I'll now share my essays with you here. Comments always welcome.

COM2409 Media Texts - First Essay

Star Trek is one of the most successful and enduring entertainment franchises of all time. Encompassing six television series, eleven feature films, a plethora of licensed merchandise such as video games, toys, hundreds of novels, and even a theme park, not to mention a horde of mobilised active fans, Star Trek is a significant cultural phenomenon. This essay will discuss the claim that Star Trek (like all contemporary science fiction) can never escape dominant ideologies of politics, race, gender and sex, in its depiction of a supposedly utopian/progressive future. The aim will be to demonstrate that whilst the text carries an intentional liberal-humanist agenda, in presenting a utopian future it necessarily relies on ideological markers which work to undermine its supposedly progressive viewpoint. This will be achieved by providing examples from two episodes: “A Private Little War”, from The Original Series; and “A Perfect Mate”, from The Next Generation.

Originally pitched by its creator Gene Roddenberry as a ‘wagon train to the stars’, Star Trek was envisioned as a science fiction series, which would carry Roddenberry’s unashamedly liberal-humanist agenda into the future (Gregory 2000:25; Bernardi 1997:214). In situating the dramatic narrative in a science fiction universe, Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to go boldly where no television program had gone before; to develop a show that was intellectually stimulating and addressed social issues (Johnson 2005:72). This was achieved through Roddenberry’s meticulous planning of every detail, whereby he created not just a new show, but an entire new universe with customs, morals, a complete technology, and an entire rulebook for operating in that universe (Theall 1980:248). According to Roberts (2006:15), the attention to detail and the comprehensive description of reality in science fiction texts means that, very often, they read like realist texts.

This idea of realism is significant for the conception of ideology, which Marx describes as the ‘beliefs, values and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality’ (Abrams 1993:24). He argued that the ruling elite, through controlling the means of production, also control the means to which ideas, meaning and reality, are disseminated through society, whereby ‘the ruling ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ (Eagleton 1994:7). This Marxist approach to ideology was developed further by later theorists and the concept has become a critical tool for textual analysis. According to Hartley:

it is useful in insisting that not only is there no “natural” meaning inherent in an event or object, but also that the meanings into which events and objects are constructed are always socially oriented – aligned with class, gender, race or other interests (2002:106).

With regard to ideology, television is interesting in that ‘it uses codes which are closely related to those by which we perceive reality itself.’ In other words, it appears to be the natural way of seeing the world (Fiske and Hartley 1978:17). Therefore, with such a close relationship to realism, the writers of Star Trek could infiltrate contemporary concerns of its production time, such as civil rights and the Cold War, into its diegesis (Gregory 2000:25; Bernardi 1997:214). Fiske (1987:44) suggests that where there is social change and a shift in ideological values, television can be part of that change.

At the time of the show’s conception in the 1960s, the myth of the frontier and its attendant utopianism was re-awoken in the American psyche through Kennedy’s Cold War political rhetoric about ‘the new frontier’ in space (Bernardi 1998:79). In his use of the ‘western’ trope, Roddenberry was also able to couple his vision of the future to the past idea of manifest destiny (Bernardi 1998:78-79). These observations are exemplified in the voice-over at the beginning of each episode:

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Just as the wagon train connotes an idea of adventurism, and a Puritan ethic of conquest and civilising the ‘new frontier’, the ‘voyages of the starship Enterprise’ also invoke such a reading (Bernardi 1998:77).

However, if the future was to be a utopia, the past crimes of racism, colonialism and genocide had to be forgotten. Instead, in the fictional futuristic world of Star Trek, the people of Earth will have united across class, gender, and racial divisions, and war, poverty, disease and the nation-state will have been eliminated (Bernardi 1994:61; Gregory 2000:18). Earth would also be a member of the United Federation of Planets, a powerful interplanetary body with similarities to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) (Bernardi 1994:64).

In Roddenberry’s outline for the original series, he insisted that, by the twenty-third century, racial discrimination would be a thing of the past (Banks and Tankel 1990:31). This is demonstrated in the deliberate multi-cultural composition of the Enterprise’s crew in both series, which further suggests that in the future, the contemporaneous concerns of civil rights, Cold War tensions, and later neo-conservative racism, and gender bias, will have been overcome. Whilst this may appear as progressive, racism does still exist, not between humans, but between other races, whereby race essentially signifies ‘difference’ to humans (Wagner and Lundeen 1998:169).

The Cold War has also been transformed into a battle for galactic supremacy between the Federation’s main enemies, the Klingons and Romulans, with the three powers separated by a neutral zone, or if you like, an ‘iron curtain’, that prohibits one side crossing into the territory of another (Bernardi 1994:63). This idea becomes more apparent when you consider that the Klingon Empire is actually an analogue of the Soviet Union - roughly equal in power and influence to the Federation, it is imperialistic and totalitarian; and like China following the communist revolution, the Romulans are a secondary yet formidable regional power (Worland 1988:112).

In the episode “A Private Little War”, which was broadcast on 2 February 1968, just two days into the bloody Tet Offensive, and two months after opinion polls registered opposition to the Vietnam War, there is clear evidence to suggest that not only was the episode playing out a Cold War scenario, but its message was a self-conscious Vietnam War allegory. (Worland 1988:113). Thirteen years after an initial survey, Kirk has returned to the planet Neural, a primitive Eden inhabited by humanoids who hunt with bow and spear, and is shocked to discover that the Villagers are hunting down the peaceful Hill People with flintlock firearms.

As explained by Spock, the normal innovation time from bow and spear to firearms is 1200 years, which arouses Kirk’s suspicion that the Klingon’s have been tampering with development on the planet. On investigation it appears that the Klingons, to allay detection of their intervention, have been gradually introducing the new technology in small increments. Faced with the moral dilemma to arm the Hill People with equal technology, or allow them to be wiped out, Kirk reluctantly decides to maintain the ‘balance of power’.

In defending his decision to violate the Prime Directive, the overriding Federation law of non-interference, Kirk, in explaining his action to the outraged McCoy, refers to the “twentieth century brush wars on the Asian continent”, which, he claims:

proved the desirability of maintaining a balance so that one side (presumably the Communist bloc, represented here by the Klingons) could not achieve the military domination that might have escalated regional struggles into a global holocaust (Wagner and Lundeen 1998:154).

The most telling quote, which demonstrates a political sensitivity and perhaps ambivalence to the Vietnam situation, is at the end of the episode. However, instead of finishing with a tidy light-hearted resolution as was the norm, Kirk calls the ship and bitterly orders Scotty to start manufacturing a hundred flintlock rifles, or “a hundred serpents…serpents for the garden of Eden.” Whilst Kirk is reluctant and conflicted in his decision, this clearly demonstrates an imperial mentality which is still dominant in the twenty-third century.

Skipping ahead eighty-five years to the timeline of The Next Generation series, the crew is still multi-cultural and under the command of a male captain, however, the mix of men to women has improved to reflect the prevailing real world concerns with women’s sexual and socioeconomic status, and their personal and professional positions (Bernardi 1998:106; Joyrich 1996:64). The deliberate attempt to improve gender representation is illustrated through the alteration of the opening prologue, changing ‘to go where no man has gone before’ to ‘to go where no one has gone before’. However, whilst women have greater representation, their roles are still in traditional caregiver roles. Rather than presenting a utopian future of equality, the viewer is invited to imagine a future in which the social hierarchy is still dominated by an authoritative, active and autonomous masculinity, against a supportive, responsive and passive femininity (Ott and Aoki 2001:404).

Furthermore, the heteronormativity which has been portrayed through both series is still the dominant. This is exemplified in the episode “The Perfect Mate”, which tells the story of Kamala, an empathic metamorph with the ability to “sense what a potential mate wants, what he needs, what gives him the greatest pleasure, and then to become that for him”. She is to be ‘gifted’ as a diplomatic ‘bride’ to encourage a truce between her people and an enemy they have been at war with for a long time. This reduction of her ‘womanness’ to that of commodity is troubling, and whilst Kamala says that she is doing it of her own free will, she admits that she has little choice in the matter.

The moral difficulty of the situation is played out in an exchange between Dr Crusher and Captain Picard, in which she accuses him of supporting forced prostitution. Picard defends his position by citing the Prime Directive rule of non-intervention, and refers to the use of arranged political marriages in other cultures. According to Joyrich (1996:68), Crusher’s failure to question the heterosexist demands of Kamala, simply assumes (and perpetuates) normative heterosexuality.

In conclusion, it has been demonstrated that whilst Star Trek has attempted to present a utopian progressive future, in articulating a discourse against dominant ideologies of politics, race, gender, and sex, and by appealing to a deliberate liberal humanist agenda, contradictions of representation have slipped into the text. Furthermore, these contradictions have limited the text as progressive, instead demonstrating that in the utopian future of Star Trek, imperialist wars are still fought, women continue to be fetishised as objects of male desire, and men continue to hold the highest positions of authority.

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. (1993) “Marxist Criticism” in A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th edition). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
Banks, J. and Tankel, J. D. (1990) “Science as Fiction: Technology in Prime Time Television”, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7: 24-36.
Bernardi, D. (1994) “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations: Diegetic Logics and Racial Articulations in the Original Star Trek”, Film & History, XXIV (1-2): 60-74.
Bernardi, D. (1997) “Star Trek in the 1960s: Liberal-Humanism and the Production of Race” in Science Fiction Studies, 24 (2): 209-225.
Bernardi, D (1998) Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press.
Eagleton, T. (1994). Ideology. London and New York: Longman.
Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. (1978) Reading Television. London and New York: Routledge.
Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Gregory, C. (2000) Star Trek: Parallel Narratives. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Hartley, J. (2002) Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts (3rd edition). London and New York: Routledge.
Johnson, C. (2005) Telefantasy. London: British Film Institute Publishing.
Joyrich, L. (1996) “Feminist Enterprise? Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Occupation of Femininity”, Cinema Journal, 35 (2): 61-84.
Ott, B. L. and Aoki, E. (2001) “Popular Imagination and Identity Politics: Reading the Future in Star Trek: The Next Generation”, Western Journal of Communication, 65 (4): 392-415.
Roberts, A. (2006) Science Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.
Theall, D. F. (1980) “On Science Fiction as Symbolic Communication”, Science Fiction Studies, 7 (3): 247-262.
Wagner, J. and Lundeen, J. (1998) Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos. Connecticut and London: Praeger Publishing.
Worland, R. (1988) “Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior”, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 16 (3): 109-117.

Filmography

“A Private Little War”, Star Trek: The Original Series, airdate February 2, 1968, dir. Marc Daniels, Paramount Television.
“The Perfect Mate”, Star Trek: The Next Generation, airdate April 27, 1992, dir. Cliff Bole, Paramount Television.

Introduction

2009-07-10T16:04:00.002+10:00

A while ago, swept up in fashionable blog-0-mania, I entertained the idea of setting up a blog. At this time, however, I didn't really have much to offer and the blog would have deteriorated into a series of glorified Twitter updates. It would have been rather banal and not the sort of thing I'd expect readers to find interesting.

Recently, however, I've returned to the idea of blogging, as now I have a lot more to offer - or so I hope. Firstly, I want this blog to serve as a platform for writing experiments. I want it to function as a space where I can test ideas and share those bits of politics, history and culture, which fascinate me.

I've named this blog 'The Knowledge Eater' as it is exemplifies my approach to knowledge. Just as a hummingbird flits from flower to flower drinking sweet nectar, I flit from text to text, devouring the food of knowledge. Knowledge is what sustains me. Knowledge is what makes me want to know more and more and more. I want to dive deep; not just skim the surface. I want to mine rich veins, shape ideas, and display them for all to see.

At this stage I should point out that in no way will I be casting myself as an expert critic on any chosen topic; rather, more as a commentator, or cultural observer.

So who am I? As well as being an enigma to myself, I am a dreamer, and a romantic. I am emotional and prone to sensitivity. I love words. I love word games. I love literature. With so much love directed towards the written word it is not surprising that I also have a passion for proofreading and editing, in which I will soon be officially qualified.

I work full-time and I am also undertaking a Bachelor of Arts (Communication) with Monash University. My minor is History and Politics and I am also doing a Writing specialisation. I am aiming to complete my degree with Honours in Writing, but that is a few years away.

The direction of my future studies is gradually taking shape and I'm increasingly becoming interested in postcolonial studies. Every time I begin to trace ideas and events of the modern world, I keep coming back to imperialism, and with it, the later events of decolonisation and the myriad effects that are still rippling through the world. It is in this space that I see myself exploring ideas of identity and belonging in literature and film, whilst also providing opportunity to engage with political, historical and media discourses.

Throughout I expect to learn more about myself, and look forward to sharing the journey with you - the reader.

Tim
lexis mechanica