oppenheimer (w&d nolan, w. kai bird, martin sherwin) / barbie (w&d gerwig, w. baumbach)

Along with my co-writer, we did a double bill of Barbie and Oppenheimer at the Picturehouse. The audience for Oppenheimer was serious. The audience for Barbie was clearly there for a good night out. There was fancy dress and bottles of bubbly being taken in. Whoops and cheers, not such a British thing, greeted the opening titles. From the audience demographic it would have looked like these films had nothing in common. However….

Talking with my co-author’s partner after Oppenheimer, we came up with the term ‘intellectual popcorn’. Nolan has long been a prime purveyor of this, alongside, perhaps, Tarantino, Fincher, etc. Whilst the term sounds sniffy, it’s not meant to be. Cinema is a pretentious art. A  film has two, in this case three, hours to compress its intellectual discourse, whereas a book can play out over much more time, permitting a more nuanced exploration of the themes the author wants to tackle. Nolan is something of a master of the exploration of time, and he has explored this with a certain verve, investigating the aesthetics and physics of time in a way that is entertaining, luring a paying audience in to not only sit back, but also to think. The theme of physics is of course central to Oppenheimer, and the ambition of Nolan’s film can only be applauded. Who else is managing to make big budget films about dead physicists?

Gerwig has been criticised for selling out, as Barbie is a film about a toy manufacturer’s product, which is also financed by said manufacturer. On paper this sounds awful, and when said manufacturer’s logo appears in the titles, it’s even more disconcerting. However, Gerwig and screenwriter, Baumbach, are more than smart enough to be aware of the feminist discourse around Barbie, and dolls in general. They turn this into the meat and drink of the film itself, which is a softcore intellectual thesis on contemporary feminism, the patriarchy and also, slyly, the crisis of masculinity in the late patriarchal age.

As such, both films feel a bit like being given a lecture on their respective topics by a trendy professor. Gerwig’s effort is far more aware of this, and therefor more playful and ultimately, to this viewer, effective. Both seek to drown the discourse in aesthetics. In Nolan’s case, the key drivers are the frenetic edit and the relentless score, along with the use of slightly mannered cameos from the likes of Oldman and Affleck, C. In Gerwig’s case, the key driver is art design: the cheesecake tones of the Barbie aesthetic which is then contrasted with the washed out tones of ‘the real world’. (Is California really the real world?) Both employ a device at the start of the movie which they soon drop: Oppenheimer using abstract visuals to represent the complexities of the physicist’s brain; Gerwig using the acid tones of Mirren as a narrator, who soon largely disappears, save for one acerbic and on-point zinger, a zinger that perhaps highlights the weaknesses of Gerwig’s neo-feminist standpoint, when Mirren pops up to comment on the fact that Margot Robbie’s almost artificial beauty is in no way representative of the ‘normal’ female.

Neither film is particularly good at what might be described as emotional intelligence. Gerwig introduces some ‘normal’ people to seek to root her story in a more mundane reality, which half-works, half-doesn’t. (The cheesy husband cameo being the best example of this). These aren’t real people, they are ciphers in an intellectual argument, who are there to do exactly this, as both mother and daughter articulate with great clarity the apparent feminist thesis of the film, hitting nail effectively, if heavily, on head. Nolan’s Oppenheimer remains an aloof presence. Supposedly a bon viveur and a loose cannon, attributes which lead him to flirt with communism and therefore become his Achilles heel in the McCarthy era, he becomes ever more sphinx like as the film progresses, almost drifting into the background of his own story. Robert Downey Jr, as his supposed antagonist, starts to take over, despite having been a secondary character in the first two acts. (Act 1, Oppenheimer’s development as scientist; Act 2, Los Alamos; Act 3, post-war vilification.) The intriguing story of Oppenheimer’s relationship with a suicidal Communist party member feels like a contrived attempt to humanise the distant scientist, and her character, played by Pugh, is brushed off lightly. More than anything, one comes away with the sense of a film trying to bite off more than it can chew, with the manic edit supposed to be a propulsive force but ending up giving the film the feel of a never-ending montage sequence, punctuated by one little Atomic bomb.

On balance it felt as though Gerwig’s intellectual popcorn exercise was more effective than Nolan’s. In a way both films are just as laudably pretentious, but Gerwig shows more self-awareness, wearing her discourse on her sleeve, and this permits her film to feel less heavy-handed. Nolan’s film feels as though it is striving to achieve a transcendence which it will never attain, and the underlying issues of the film, the heavy shit which audiences don’t want to share with their popcorn, (nuclear war, the arms race, the possibility of mass destruction) are roller-skated over. In spite of myself I couldn’t help but think about Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, another film which addresses the horror of nuclear war in a roundabout way, which one suspects Nolan watched and borrowed from, but one which achieves an altogether more harrowing and emotional bond with its public, even if that public is unlikely to be watching the film whilst munching popcorn. In a similar way, for all the ingenuity of Gerwig and Baumbach’s film, one doesn’t come away feeling as though the patriarchal order has been shaken by its roots. One comes away thinking that this is a nice enough film which little girls will enjoy as much as the adults and will help to sell merchandise which is the prime reason for the financiers to have sought out Gerwig to direct a film about their product. This is where high-end Hollywood is at: making films which seek to find a way to infiltrate mainstream society with some kind of intellectual discourse, but, recognising this is a Sisyphean task, veer towards smart, sassy or bombastic filmmaking that they hope will please the crowd, as both of these films clearly have done.

a sentimental journey through france and italy (lawrence sterne)

Sterne’s unfinished travelogue has a quixotic flavour. The narrator, Yorick, a Shakespearian name which comes to his rescue when he seeks to obtain a passport in France, is a whimsical character, more interested in the flora and fauna of the France he travels though than the politics or the architecture. The book recounts several would-be romantic engagements that never lead anywhere, with the intricacies of inter-gender entanglements in France, as opposed to Britain, put under the microscope. He travels in the company of Fleur, his would-be Sancho Panza, who also finds himself caught up in the narrator’s romantic shenanigans. The tone of the novel is always light-footed, even jocular, but it is also reminiscent of the the offbeat style of much modern travel writing (aka psychogeography) where the emphasis is on the peculiarities of the journey, the otherwise unnoticeable details, rather than the grander sweep. At one point the narrator suggests that Britain and France are actually at war, (The Seven Years’ War), although you would never have guessed it from anything other than a throwaway remark in the text. What stands out, apart from Sterne’s laconic wit, is perhaps the way in which Yorick rarely seems to feel anything other than comfortable as he moseys from Calais to Paris and then further south. Travelling comes across as a thoroughly relaxed and enjoyable process, which essentially exists to permit the traveller to enjoy small, unthreatening adventures and flirt with the locals of the opposite sex. 

the island (w. ana maria matute, tr. laura lonsdale)

Matute’s book belongs to a genre which might be called mythological reminiscence. Sitting alongside The Grand Meaulnes, for example. Perhaps Ferrante, although I have never read her. It’s a tale from the Spanish Civil War, told through the eyes of Matia, a fourteen year old narrator, living on the island of Mallorca, long before it became a playground for the rich. Matute’s island is a depopulated place where kids can roam, row around by boat, have fights with rival gangs and discover secrets. It’s also an island split by two fissures. Firstly, the differing sides of the Civil War, with Matia’s grandmother firmly on the side of Franco, and secondly a more ancient dispute, when the Jewish inhabitants of the island were persecuted in the inquisition, even if their descendants live on. As such, a violence underpins life on the island, a violence which is connected to Matia’s grandmother’s relationship with her children, who are all away, caught up in the war, and the other locals. Matia strikes up an adolescent friendship with Manuel, whose Republican father has been killed. It’s a relationship which teeters on the edge of politics, adulthood and sex. Her cousin, Borja, who lives with her, who is resentful and jealous, plots his revenge. The Island is a delicate, nostalgic tale, anchored in the scenery and nature of the island, an opaque coming of age tale which subtly seduces the reader with its mysteries, as well as framing the war as a tangential, background event in the lives of these children as they grow up. 

medusa (w&d anita rocha da silveira)

Medusa has some elements in common with a project we are working on, which also has its roots in Latin America. It may be a massive generalisation, but it feels as though the issues surrounding feminism, which include class and race, not to mention violence and femicide, are lived on a sharper edge in that continent. Medusa spins the trope on its head, opening with a scene where a band of women hunt down their female prey, accusing her of being a slut and beating her up. The vigilante band, to which the film’s protagonists belong, are religious evangelists, who sing sexy songs in the name of Jesus for their church choir. The church is lead by the handsome and charismatic pastor who also has a band of vigilante boys as part of his congregation. As the film unfolds, the protagonists undergo a perhaps predictable transformation, turning against the church and indulging in sexual relationships out of marriage, as well as becoming victims of male abuse. The film has various narrative threads which seem to function more as platforms for its discourse than roads to go down. A missing mythical burns victim, a lesbian romance, orgies in the woods. Nevertheless there is a verve to Da Silveira’s direction which keeps driving the movie forwards. The preacher who embodies the Bolsonaro subtext is righteously skewered, and the narrative around evangelism, so strong in Brazil, helps to illustrate the way in which oppression of women is perpetrated in many different guises. 

post-capitalist desire (mark fisher)

Mark Fisher has acquired guru status, something one suspects he would never have really desired. Desire being an actionable word, as this collection of the last lectures of his life in 2016 makes clear. Transcribed verbatim from recordings of said lectures at Goldsmiths, Post-capitalist Desire sees the academic wrestling with the failure of the counter-cultural movement that emerged in the sixties, as it fractured into representative silos, and the possibilities for hope for the future at the dawning of the age of Trump. One of the key aspects of the lectures is the way in which capitalism both constructs and satisfies the desires of its subjects, rewarding them for their obedience with shiny toys and the serotonin rush of purchase. Fisher sets out to investigate, looking at a wide range of references, how these desires are made and how the innate human yearnings of desire might be reconstructed within a society more concerned with ideas of fairness and empathy. (At one point he discusses why he is wary of words like Communism which have become tainted by their twentieth century associations). The series of lectures, punctuated by interventions from the students, are an inclusive format for entering into and understanding a discourse which so often blinds with its science. The discussion of Lyotard’s vision of different versions of Marx, for example, has a clarity which helps to unveil the complexity of the text being discussed. More than anything else, it feels as though this series of lectures, which remained unfinished due to the Fisher’s suicide, offers some challenging but bizarrely optimistic guidelines for emerging from the stasis and hangover of twentieth century political thinking which still afflicts us, as we move towards a world whose underpinning philosophical, epistemological and even erotic concerns are rapidly evolving. Permitting discussion of the way in which capitalism has succeeded in constructing a matrix of desire which, no matter how unjustly, serves to ensure it’s continued procreation, feels like an essential step in beginning to evaluate how we/ the world/ society might go beyond this reductive matrix and transform it into something more joyous and communal. 

on tangled paths (theodore fontane, tr peter james bowman)

Fontane’s novel is set in Berlin in the 1870s. Peter Bowman’s comprehensive afterword describes how the author only became a novelist at the age of sixty, after a long career in journalism. This novel describes the class divisions in Berlin, a city I was visiting as I read it. Lena is a seamstress who has met the Baron Botho whilst out rowing on a lake in Treptower park. The baron rescues her and her companion when it seems as though their rowing boat might capsize. He is then enchanted by her and they indulge in a brief, doomed affair. The class barriers are too firmly entrenched to be overcome and Botho ends up marrying a wealthy cousin. Where a more romantic vision of the tale might have seen one or the other of the lovers subsequently entering into crisis, Fontane resists this approach. Lena is too sensible to do anything foolish, and Botho, even if he is something of a dreamer, too cowardly. Each pines for the other but the novel concludes with each getting on with their lives. It’s an understated tale, which emerges from an era of relative peace. Berlin at the time was enjoying a period of gradual evolution, as the city’s limits expanded. After visiting Treptower Park and sat eating a wurst whilst observing the boaters on the lake, there is a sense that in many ways, the rhythms and dynamics of the city have not changed all that much. In a city where the botched experiment to destroy class divisions met its final dead end, people still probably have as much chance of crossing the class barrier if their boat needs rescuing as any other way.

n-w (zadie smith)

I came back to Smith via an article she wrote about Tár, a lucid article which touched on the falsity of the world when you ascend to the stratosphere of fame. I say ‘come back to’, because twenty years or so ago Smith was, for a while, so ubiquitous it was impossible not to be aware of or read her. I recall reading or trying to read White Teeth in the bath in Vauxhall, before giving up on it, disappointed, for one reason or another. Once I walked past her at the perhaps predictable venue of the Frieze Art Fair. I say predictable, because it seemed like the perfect kind of framing for her detached elegance, a post-colonial jewel on the UK map. It felt as though Smith became a representative of the establishment, part of that British literary world that exudes a certain arrogance, the likes of Amis, Rushdie & co. This is what was fascinating about the article in question, which appeared to reflect on the paradox of first world success, the way it affects the relationship between the artist as creator and the artist as producer, or artist vs. product; one of the more insidious cultural crises of capitalism, although of course artists have always flogged their work, or had to weigh up how much energy they should be dedicating to flogging their work.

This is all context for the journey of this reader. Smith comes with baggage, and perhaps for this reason I have, ever since that bath time experience back in the day, shied away from her work. Which brings us to N-W, her fourth book. Firstly, it should be said that it is a fluid, easy read. Secondly that it is structurally playful, essentially comprising three books in one, each with their own chosen register. Thirdly, that it succeeds in representing a vision of post-colonial, diverse, London, with its range of characters, argots, and experiences. The common root of these experiences is the London housing estate where the characters grew up, a place not a million miles away from Gabriel Krauze’s more hard-edged Who They Was. The other side of the literary coin might be Lanchester’s bland Capital. The great modern urban novels (as opposed to the great urban character-driven novels), such as Ulysses or Berlin Alexanderplatz, employ an approach which isn’t afraid of alienating the reader. N-W flirts with this, with its fragmented structure. The third section is composed of 180 sequences, telling the story of Natalie/ Keisha from childhood to motherhood. The first section employs a similar device to describe a more specific temporal moment in her friend, Leah’s midlife crisis. But there’s always a sense of close-cropped control in the text. Even when Natalie goes rogue, and starts responding to personals where couples are looking for a black woman to have sex with, breaking away from her tightly-corseted life/career path, it feels like an aesthetic device, on part of writer and character. The danger is held at arm’s length as they observe the details of the random houses Natalie finds herself visiting.

Strangely, as the bookending sections of Natalie and Leah feel like they have a personal element to it (the philosopher’s hand on the prodigy’s knee, the crisis around motherhood), the section where it feels as though the most visceral content spills over is the central section. This is more classically composed, as the happy-go-lucky Felix spends a fateful day cruising around his London, more extensive than the N-W of the title. Everything in this central sequence feels both more expansive and more nuanced, in particular a vivid and complicated interlude with his over-privileged ex-lover who lives in Soho. The city’s interaction between second-generation immigrant and old money is laid bare, in a manner that succeeds in being ugly and affecting at the same time. Again, this is an entirely personal view, but it feels as though Felix’s peregrinations capture the city in a vertical fashion, where the other sections remain horizontal, skating over the surface of the teeming city, notes from the overground.

Having said all of which, N-W feels like a novel which is seeking to engage, to get in there, to ask what is this city/ country that is being invented, in the light of the history that precedes it and which its characters are caught up in. 

drug cartels do not exist: narcotrafficking in US and mexican culture. (w. oswaldo zavala, tr. william savinar)

Zavala’s book is fascinating for two main reasons. The first lies in the title, as the author analyses the way in which the concept of the “cartel” has been propagated and manipulated as a mediatic narrative device to mislead. Zavala’s thesis is that the cartels, as they have been termed, are in fact disposable front organisations which are placed in the limelight in order that we don’t look at who’s really controlling the global narcotics trade. The more that they are glamourised and fetishised, the more effective this strategy is in masking the true players. There is an impeccable logic to this, even if Zavala’s investigation into who is really controlling the trade, and why, is somewhat cursory. He notes that in many cases, the violence of the cartel wars serves as a useful pretext for the seizure of land which is rich in mineral or mining rights by the forces of neoliberalsm, displacing whole communities in the process. The narcos act like a forest fire, stripping the land for subsequent appropriation.

The second fascinating aspect of the book is the way in which it then traces the role that literature and culture play in this process. Referencing Mexican and other writers, including Bolaño’s 2666, Zavala interrogates the mythic construction of the cartel narrative, noting how many writers, even when seeking to construct a critical analysis of the concept, only serve to reinforce it. There are others he quotes who situate the narco-narrative within a framework which is more in line with his theory that the cartel is no more than a convenient construction. Much of the book is dedicated to Zavala’s analysis of the role culture plays in the construction of a mythic paradigm that plays into the hands of forces who seek to use this paradigm to conceal their own actions. It’s a great thesis, which ties in with Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators, and shows a level of understanding of the power of story in socio-political discourse that is rarely acknowledged.

(It would be interesting to do a similar analysis, for example of the way in which culture, both high and low, has played into the myth of British exceptionalism, whose effects have been so harmful in recent decades.)

the damned don’t cry (w&d fyzal boulifa)

Despite the portentous title, Boulifa’s film is ultimately an affectionate portrait of a mother-son relationship and a clear-eyed take on the vicissitudes of Moroccan society. Selim and Fatima are down on their luck. Thrown out of their grandfather’s home, they return to Tangiers and try to fashion a viable future in an inviable society. Fatima is a flakey flirt and her handsome son soon realises that following in her footsteps is the way to get ahead, as he enters into an uneasy relationship with Sebastian, the French owner of a downtown riad. The narrative keeps moving as the characters lurch from salvation towards damnation and back again. The precarious nature of life in Morocco, as in any third world country, is acutely described. What marks Boulifa’s film out, beyond all of the above, is his refusal to convert his twin protagonists into heroic figures.  Both Fatima and Selim are flawed survivors, getting by against the odds as they try to steer an independent path through a stratified society. Aicha Tebbae’s portrayal of Fatima, in particular, a middle aged ugly duckling convinced she’s actually a swan, is beautifully realised. In spite of her foolishness, Fatima is possessed of a survivor’s sly wisdom which keeps her both alive and sane, against the odds. If the film sometimes seems to skate over some elements of the harshness of the lives its characters endure (what is it really like to be a young man in a Moroccan prison?), it still succeeds in avoiding the trap of constructing a heroic or redemptive narrative of life in the third world, thereby offering a more convincing, less palliative depiction. 

paths of revolution (adolfo gilly)

Gilly is an Argentine writer who wrote for many years for the famed Montevideo diario, Marcha. He spent several years incarcerated in Mexico and is a figure who connects radical social movements across the Americas from Arbenz to Subcomondante Marcos. This book of collected essays is remarkable in the breath of its scope, with the writer acting as witness to the Cuban revolution up until the Zapatistas, and as such capable of lending his overarching gaze to more recent developments in the push-me pull-you of Latin American politics, as countries lurch from right to left in a post-dictatorship world. Gilly, who at one point mentions having meetings with a youthful Galeano, offers an astute analysis of the way in which leftist revolt so often connects with an underground stream of indigenous resistance, whose roots go back to the Spanish conquest and before. Much of this is based on time he spent in Bolivia and Mexico, societies where the indigenous cultures have retained a strong independence, for whom defeat is not a reality, with these things being no more than setbacks in a struggle destined to last centuries. Likewise, resistance on the part of these communities to the neo-liberal aspects of globalisation goes hand in hand with the fight to maintain an identity in the face of a world which seeks to erase them. Gilly’s observations on the continued sacking of resources by neoliberalism actually goes hand in hand with the observations of Zavala in his book Drug Cartels do Not Exist. Neo-liberalism in this sense is nothing more than an extension of neo-colonialism, a 21st century action which Gilly  helps to define. 

the naked year (boris pilnyak, tr. alexander r tulloch)

1917 was a year that changed the world and set up a paradigm for the twentieth century. What’s your take on Soviet Revolution? Amidst all the bombast and the dogma, the actuality of what it was like to be a human being in this moment, to live, fight, love, be scared, be confused, be Chekhovian, tends to be overlooked. Pilnyak’s remarkable novel, part Tolstoy, part Sterne, offers, as only literature can, an insight. Unsurprisingly, because on the whole writers need years like 1917 to give them polenta, there are several texts which deal with the human aspect of the revolution, including work by Babel and Marina Tsvetaeva, even if, like The Naked Year, these texts tend to be little known.

Pilnyak’s novel has a complex brilliance. It captures the effects of the revolution on a world beyond Moscow, out towards the East, on the edge of Asia. Here, even language becomes muddled up. Seismic changes occur and they are just changes. One particularly lovely sequence follows an elderly aristocrat, ordered to leave his stately home, who finds himself in a paradoxical way liberated, a freedom to just be a man walking miles to the nearest train station, even if that sense of freedom will only last a day or two. The Naked Year has no central character, moving through a panoply of different figures from chapter to chapter. The novel succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating how 1917, as well as being a forerunner for the century, also harks back to the dense, hermetic life of the Russian interior, a place where Europe and Asia are in constant flux with one another.

“The rulers of Russian during the past two centuries, since Peter, have wanted to adopt this culture. Russia languished in a stifling, utterly Gogolian atmosphere. And the Revolution set Russia against Europe. And furthermore immediately after the first days of the Revolution, Russia, in its way of life, customs and towns – returned to the seventeenth century. On the border of the seventeenth century there was Peter… there was a native Russian art, architecture, music… Peter came along – and genuine folk art disappeared… – Popular rebellion is the seizing of power and creation of their own genuine Russian truth by genuine Russians. And this is a blessing!… The whole history of peasant Russia is the history of sectarianism. Who will win this struggle – mechanized Europe or sectarian, orthodox, spiritual Russia?…”

This is one of the most instructive and playful texts about the Russian revolution, one which offers a perspective which incorporates the multiple truths of that event, truths which the subsequent victors of history, from both sides, chose to bury, because ambiguity is a fervent opponent of dogma.