Momentous moments of mirth

A quick post today, highlighting a superb article from Tanya Gold in The Guardian about that uniquely British phenomenon – the Carry On movies, a set of (very cheesy) UK comedies made in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

If you’re British, you don’t need me to tell you about them. If you’re from anywhere else, you won’t have heard of them – and you certainly won’t have a sense of their omnipresence in the British, and particularly the English, cultural mindset.

There are some very specific reasons for the deep impression they made on us, that Tanya pins down with absolute precision:

‘The Carry On films are not funny. They are parables about failure. The typical Carry On hero is an everyman who lives a life of misery, unrequited lust and boredom…. So why did people like them? Because it was happening to them. Carry On held up a cartoonish mirror to the depressed and repressed Britain of the 1950s and 1960s.’

Bang on. My favourite Carry Ons now are the ones with contemporary settings; the ones that take us into the backstreets of suburban England and show us the lively, limited, busy, thwarted worlds that never appear in more narratively and aesthetically ambitious films.

The Carry On characters would be little more than extras in such movies; here, they, and their local, petty, entirely human desires are given centre stage, and allowed free rein, creating a mythology of English suburbia that is both precise and timeless in its vision and its impact, and that haunts the English accordingly.

That haunting is leant depth by the gap between the superficial froth of the films, and (as Gold points out) the desperation of so many of the lives that underpinned them. The on-screen comedy of failure was underpinned by a series of off-screen miseries that failed to ever develop into anything as resolved and satisfying as tragedy, instead petering out in alcoholism and waste, squalor and death.

There’s something very recognisably English in the deep efforts of repression, the sense of forced jollity and pretence that all’s well, that that reality / fiction relationship embodies. As a nation, we’ve spent the last fifty years or so failing, in one way or another, while beaming joyfully and pretending that nothing’s gone wrong at all.

The Carry On comedies aren’t just myths of suburbia; they’re myths of that pretence, as well, a pretence of normality and worth that’s regularly undercut by the serial collapses it’s not quite managing to hide.

The rest of the article is here, and well worth checking out; and here’s a brief sampler of Carry On-ness, courtesy of YouTube:

Here’s Kenneth Williams, as Julius Caesar, delivering the infamy line:

And here’s another key bit of Carry On-ness – Sid James’ laugh, possibly the single most lecherous sound in cinema. It’s a short clip, alas the best I could find:

More over the weekend, on dictatorships, kings and democracies. So, in true cinema style, ‘COMING SOON… WEIRD PONDERING ABOUT CAVALIERS, ROUNDHEADS, AND YOU… FILTERED THROUGH BRYAN TALBOT’S MAGNIFICENT LUTHER ARKWRIGHT AND HEART OF EMPIRE GRAPHIC NOVELS!!!!’

Oh, and there’s popcorn and hotdogs on sale in the foyer, now!

*cues crap curry house ad*

A Knievel Christmas

Well, I was going to type  my Happy Christmas post last night, but alas I got sidetracked by Evel Knievel’s early 70s masterpiece, ‘Viva Knievel’. What to say about a film that begins with orphans casting their crutches aside and thanking EK for healing with them, moves on to showcase a berserk anti-drugs plot delivered by a clearly completely stoned cast, and climaxes by teaming Evel with Gene Kelly (yup, that Gene Kelly) to go head to head with Leslie Neilsen and sundry 70s TV staples in a nutty Porsche’n'motorbike chase around a mountain, some roads and (for no apparent reason) a Mexican restaurant. Well, it made my Christmas.

But alas I don’t have time to pontificate on it properly, as I’ve got to hop in the car and drive to Devon - and I haven’t even packed yet! So I’m off to sort that out. In the meantime, have a Very Merry Christmas and a Wonderful New Year! And see you in 2008…

Life with the Vaders

Well, a busy day at Allumination Central, so for your delectation – and following on from yesterday’s Star Wars referencing post – here’s the first of the magnificent online saga that is ‘Chad Vader – Day Shift Manager’.

It’s about Darth Vader’s somewhat less adequate little brother, and his daily battles as he manages a 24 hour convenience store somewhere in the States. Quite apart from being very funny, it’s entirely justified by the acoustic guitar version of the Imperial Theme that plays over the opening titles.

The rest of the episodes are here.

So – enjoy!

H and I go movie

Well, a short entry today pondering ‘Carnival of Souls’ and last night’s piece of filmgoing, ‘Yella’. They are related, both being spooky and subtle tales of the possibly supernatural, but I can’t tell you why because I’d blow key plot twists

So instead of anything specific, a very quick thought. Writers who are primarily realists can see a step into the supernatural as being very liberating – and that sense of liberation can be very destructive, as it leads to the abandonment of anything like narrative logic and therefore any sense of satisfying resolution.

That abandonment is even more frustrating if the writing that surrounds it is superb. It shows a failure of imagination on behalf of the writer – or rather, a failure to realise that the weird isn’t an end in itself; it’s just one more tool to support the communication of truth through narrative.

After the party

Well, a very hectic weekend at Fantasycon. Some fascinating panels; some wonderful speeches; some great bookshoppping; and, most importantly, meeting lots of fascinating people and having increasingly *merry* conversations into the night. As a result, last night when I got home I was so tired I could hardly sleep – a combination of complete physical exhaustion and a mind buzzing around with all the input.

And now my mind is still feeling flattened, and (having just got back from a meeting at the Tallow Chandlers) I can’t think of anything to write about, because I’ve got too much to write about. So, as is wise at these moments, I’m going to default to YouTube, with wisdom on how the Lord of the Rings should have ended…

Becoming Norma Desmond

Out and about on Wednesday night (at an event run by the estimable Poet in the City, which everyone should know about – they do fantastic poetry events round the City of London), and, as it does in pubs, the conversation turned to fantasy and sf.

As it also does when you’re around people-whose-genre-is-literary, someone came up with the question – ‘why do you write genre fiction when it has nothing to do with reality, and therefore has no point to it?’

Of course this is a red rag to a bull for me; my answering rant went on for about half an hour. In fact, it only ended when I paused for breath and noticed that the bar staff were putting the stools upside down on the tables and everyone else had left.

One of the points I made was that modern literary fiction is a pretty late arrival on the literary scene, really only beginning in the 19th Century. Fantasy has been around forever, from Homer on.

But thinking about it, that’s not such a good point after all. Much of the writing that foreshadows or powers the modern fantastic – archaic Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Norse and other myth cycles, Christian narratives from ‘Paradise Lost’ to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, Renaissance magical tracts, and so on – were written as fact.

For their original creators and consumers, they weren’t fantasies at all; they were factual components of a coherent and internally consistent worldview. We use them as source material for fictions that know they’re fiction, but that’s absolutely not what they originally were.

The modern Western European worldview is a profoundly scientific one. So, it favours narratives that engage with reality in a way that’s based on quasi-scientific observation. Seen in this light, fantastic narratives can be seen as a hangover from an earlier, discredited way of understanding the world.

From this point of view, Fantasy writing becomes Norma Desmond; a glamorous, pointless relic. In ‘Sunset Boulevard’, she’s a leftover from the great days of silent movies, eking out a ghostly living in the LA of the 50s.

And if we look at Fantasy like this, then Norma Desmond becomes a very relevant figure. She’s a useful index of how less conscientious critics can perceive the genre; and her personal trajectory is an incredibly potent warning against both bombast in general (‘I AM big. It’s the movies that got small’) and the specific genre sin of letting fantasising become an end in itself, rather than a mirror with which to confront the world.

And so, to conclude, here’s Norma herself in the final moments of the film, in all her deluded, tragic magnificence. Broken, maddened and desperately alone, a murderess about to be arrested, a haunted and futile relic of a forgotten world, she steps in front of the cameras and stops the show, one last, unforgettable time.

‘50% Homme. 50% Dieu. 100% Sauveur.’

This week’s conversations about Gnosticism made me remember a slightly, erm, punchier take on the Messiah. So, from the early 90s, here’s the continental take on it all. Stallone stars in ‘Jesus II - The Return’, from French comedy heroes ‘Les Inconnus’. Oh, and this version is subtitled…

Tiger city

Well, a short one today as I was dining at the conference last night (in the Stationer’s Hall, with some Ethiopian diplomats and the bloke who’s job it is to make sure that Parma Ham is really Parma Ham - fascinating evening after a fascinating day!) and now have an early start to get to it.

So, here’s a very groovy animation to be going on with:

Gnosis, meatware, cinema and the Cathars

Well, I’m off to a conference today and tomorrow about branding nations – should be fascinating, might well post about it – so an early morning post, written on Sunday. It’s today for me, yesterday for you, so one or other of us is travelling in time. Whoah…

Anyone, I was pottering round the flat wondering what to talk about, when I noticed my copy of Theodore Roszak’s ‘Flicker’. Now that’s quite a book; it’s actually more interesting than Marrakesh, which I found out when I went to Marrakesh and couldn’t stop reading it. So what’s so great about it?

Well, it’s the only Gnostic conspiracy thriller that conclusively demonstrates that cinema was invented by the Cathars in the Fourteenth Century while also rewriting the modern history of cult movie making that you’ll ever need to read. Put simply, it rocks like a bastard, and everyone should have a copy. Go buy now!

OK, now you’ve been to Amazon, or your alternate book seller of choice, let’s ponder why it’s so engaging. It’s not just the taut, gripping writing or the fascinating conspiracy that’s unveiled – it’s the book’s roots in Gnostic thinking, which reflects back in so many interesting ways on how we live in the world now.

Gnosticism was an early variant of Christianity, suppressed (I think) in the 5^th Century BC or thereabouts. The Gnostics radically recast Christian cosmology, understanding this universe to be the flawed creation of the Demiurge, a kind of fallen sub-god who mistook his own partial divinity for absolute god-ness. His mistake trapped the sparks of light that were our eternal selves in the flesh.

Hence, this flawed world – essentially, it’s the physical expression of an almost-almighty egomaniac’s wildly self-indulgent power trip. Our basic mission in life is to transcend the meat he’s trapped us in and return to eternity, leaving his flawed creation behind us. Of course, that’s an incredibly reductive and simplistic take on Gnosticism – but as a working definition, it’ll do.

What’s interesting is the extent to which Western popular culture is now built on an implicitly Gnostic worldview. The flawed material world / ideal conceptual world duality exists everywhere. It’s most evident online; as Erik Davis points out in ‘Techgnosis’, virtuality’s desire to escape meatspace is a directly Gnostic attitude.

But it’s also evident in our broader culture. My conference tomorrow is one part of it. Brands exist within an idealised world, one that points up our daily imperfections and promises escape from them. They’re simultaneously unreal, and more real, than anything that’s physically present around us; platonic ideals that we aspire to reach but never quite can.

That sense of an unreachable, perfect world that – if only we were good enough – we could reach pervades our world. It’s present everywhere, from our shared hunger for celebrity lifestyles to our destructive political preferences for a dream of the Middle East.

Though looking back over that, I can’t help thinking that I’m being unfair to the Gnostics. Back in the day, they felt that achievement of the Pleroma was an escape from illusion, not an escape into it – the reverse of the examples I’ve given above. So perhaps our real problem is not our desire to transcend but rather our inability to do so, as we remain as tangled as ever in the great false nets that the Demiurge – that most lethal of failed gods – has thrown out to perpetually hold us back.

The butcher’s apprentice

I’m at home, watching trailers for upcoming movies on Five. Guns, fisticuffs – combat as a fundamental dramatic component. It’s so all-pervasive, you don’t notice it any more.

And I’m sick of it. Sick of the reduction of the subtle emotional conflicts inherent in drama to meatheaded literal battles; sick of the constant presentation of violence as a positive response to problematic situations; sick of the idiot miscalled-morality that can only respond to opposition with absolute destruction.

Encoded in violence-as-entertainment is a whole broken world view, over-brought in to a narrative structure that demands a frangible antagonist for every protagonist, and makes every hero an innocent victim of evil, a by-definition justified responder to a situation that’s been forced onto him or her, thus absolving them of any real moral responsibility for their actions.

This sickened externalisation of such a limited view of evil, this self-indulgent definition of the other as both dispensable and perpetually unjustified, is at the root of so much of the damage we do in the world, complaining about our own hurt while butchering by the thousand to re-confirm our brutally narrow, boneheaded definitions of what heroism is.

You want to hold up a mirror to up to the worst parts of what we are? Turn on the television, and watch endless butchery presented as narrative positivity, casual massacres as a constant solution to opposition. We are our obsessions – and, in the modern world, our obsessions are so brutally, perpetually present and exposed.