the odyssey (w&d nolan)

Random Thoughts on the Odyssey

Throwback to the seventies. Waiting for Burt Lancaster to pop up. 

Damon is playing a man who is in exile and far from home. However, he always comes across as someone, in every scene, who is completely at home. With himself, with his surroundings, with his colleagues. Of course, he is at home because he is on a film set, which is where Matt Damon, the person, rather than the character, feels at home. But this works against the character he is supposed to portray, and strips the film of much of its tension. 

Like Scott’s Napoleon, one can imagine a teenage film buff dreaming of making a big budget movie of one of his favourite texts. Don’t we all do that? Filmmakers or not? Dream of making a film of a text we love? Only Nolan has the chops to make it happen on a budgetary scale that can allow him to realise his vision. The trouble is that the film comes across like an adolescent vision: lots of noise, battles, pretty girls and clunky dialogue. 

Rhythm - the film casts the rapper Travis Scott as a variant on the blind Homer (who was an enigmatic invention too). He beats out his song to the rhythm of the hexameter. Nolan was always a master of rhythm, the way in which a film is constructed out of carefully edited beats and the manipulation of time. Momento, Dunkirk, Inception, all benefitted from this vision, capable of translating complex ideas into the language of cinema, with its impatient rhythms - you only have an hour and a half to three hours to fit it all in. But here, as for me, in Oppenheimer, he seems to have lost his touch. The rhythm is off. Odysseus’ return journey takes seven years or more, but events in Ithaca can’t keep pace with this and remain trapped in the present day. The timelines, which gelled in such a Borgesian manner in the other named films, don’t quite seem to click together. 

Finally - what is this film actually about? When Damon talks to Hathaway at the end, expressing a jaundiced regret for the genie of war he has let out of the bottle, we flash back to the dreadful pillage of Troy. And yet, over the course of this past decade, we see things far worse on our phones, day-in, day-out. When they used to sing of war, those who listened thankfully had a disconnect from its realities. Nolan is singing of war; but we no longer have the privilege of that disconnect. Modernity, the smartphone which the director famously shuns, means we carry the realities of war around in our pockets. The film’s recreation of war feels like a pale, sanitised imitation. As ever, the barbarity of another middle eastern conflict, Gaza, overshadows everything. Hollywood exists in such an escapist bubble that it really has no right to pontificate about civilisation and war. Or if it wants to, it should do it consciously and overtly. Metaphors feel cowardly. The message of this movie has all the punch of an instagram post. 

brief encounter (w&d david lean, w. noël coward, anthony havelock-allan, ronald neame)

When the lights came up in Montevideo’s Cinemateca, there was more one person who could be seen unashamedly in tears. How can a black and white, subtitled British film made in 1945 continue to exert such an effect? The answer is twofold. On the one hand it’s simple. This is one of the classic cinematic Ur-Love Stories. The account of the doomed love affair of Dr Alec Harvey and Laura Jesson represents a transcendent vision of that thing called romantic love upon which so much of our western dreamlife is predicated. Their love is uncomplicated, unconsummated, and clear as mountain stream. It is a kind of dream we are born and bred to share and when we witness this framed within the rectangle of the cinema screen, it has a potency that real life, with all its complications, struggles to emulate. On the other, this is a result of delicious artistry. From Lean’s opening shot, as the camera initially focuses on Stanley Holloway flirting with the station cafe manageress, before panning to the protagonists, the film exudes a delicacy blended with high passion. We are spies on this couple’s intimacy. Coward’s script is a thing of joy, blending reserve with those moments when the reserve breaks and Howard declares, with an unbridled simplicity, that he loves Laura. The violence of love is laid bare, the way it creates great joy, but an equal measure of sorrow. Somehow Coward manages to squeeze in a reference to Keats, the prince of romantic poetry. This violence would, of course, have had a heightened resonance at the time of the film’s release, a moment when so many relationships would have flowered briefly only to be torn apart by war. Of course there is something that feels inimically British in the way that the characters wrestle to keep their passions under control, but at the same time the film makes one think of another great unconsummated cinematic love story, Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The yearning of love, also known as the tugging of the heartstrings, is a universal emotion. Lean and Coward’s encapsulation of these emotions, delivered in the flesh by the sublime performances of Howard and Johnson, reverberates across the decades.

 

how to win an information war (peter pomertantsev)

Arrived at Pomertantsev’s book about Sefton Delmer via reading Marias, who cites Delmer in his recondite spy novels. Pomertantsev talks through then way Delmer coordinated and was the creative urge behind the British propaganda campaign against the Nazis during WW2, mostly via the medium of radio. Delmer is a curious character, whose approach was amoral, Wellesian, instinctive, and possibly brilliant. The word ‘possibly’ is because the author seems so taken by his subject that it becomes hard to evaluate from the book how effective Delmer’s broadcasts were - at times, it’s hinted, they were even counter-productive. Pomertantsev connects Delmer’s work with the way in which information is manipulated in the 21st century. The upshot would appear to be that you have to fight fire with fire: the power of coordinated propaganda is so effective that the only way to fight back is by playing dirty, ignoring any arguments based on idealism. In a fucked-up world, this might be true. Then again, it might not. 

unfinished business (michael bracewell)

Bracewell’s novel is reminiscent of Szalay’s London and the South East. Middle aged man losing his way after a life spent in offices. After reading Souvenir, with its playful non-fiction elements, Unfinished Business feels less adventurous in its approach to a London that has been loved and lost. There’s a plethora of characters who gravitate around the hapless narrator, including his ex-wife and in-laws and daughter. Bracewell plays with time as we skip in and out of the present. At one point he writes of the narrator: “To walk through London, he always felt, was to walk through the many chapters of his unwritten autobiography.” The novel is perhaps at its sharpest when it reveals the way in which our personal histories become inscribed in the bricks and mortar of the city. 

decline and fall (evelyn waugh)

Waugh’s first novel may be a minor piece of literature, but it still has the feel of a writer who knew how to capture the zeitgeist. Which is half the battle. The title itself is instructive. The decline and fall is not of the Roman Empire, but the British. However, Waugh is writing during the empire’s swansong, when Britain was still arguably the most powerful nation on earth and the map was still covered in pink. The world my grandparents grew up in, which would come to a terminal halt with the outbreak of the Second World War. Waugh namechecks Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The Honourable Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s Elizabethan Manor House is rebuilt as a modernist masterpiece/ horrorshow. The protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, is sent Virginia Woolf’s latest novel to read in prison. Waugh might be a young fogey, but he’s a fogey who knows which way the wind is blowing. The novel is a satire, but this is a gentle rather than Swiftian satire, with a commercial bent. Waugh came to my attention then other day when Peter Hitchens posted an interview with him, saying that the way he spoke English took him back to his youth. HIs lack of intellectual ambition feels like the product of high-englishness. As though to say, why in the world did this little island come to be so important? A historical fluke and a mercantile instinct, which had unforeseen and unnecessary consequences, whose demise was always imminent, even if it took a hundred years to fulfil. The United Kingdom today is not so far removed from Waugh’s world, with its archaic traditions and social divisions intact, but the full effect of the decline and fall has now kicked in, and it has become a country gradually slipping further and further into irrelevance, an archipelago of historical resonance. 

my childhood/ my ain folk/ my way home (w&d bill douglas)

There are figures who float on the edge of our knowing. Think of all the books you will never read, all the films you will never watch. Many of them in their own way, masterpieces. Or maybe not. Douglas is one such figure, a name, an idea, a part of the world, cinematic and more, that I have inherited, but until this weekend I had never watched his work, never known why the name of this obscure scot, who died in 1991, had ever been on my radar.

Cinemateca screened his trilogy this weekend, so I saw all three films. They are all short. The last, My Way Home, is the longest at 77 minutes, whilst My Childhood is a mere 44 minutes. Collectively, however, they add up to a vast, sweeping epic, consciously echoing the work of Maxim Gorky, consciously laying down a marker for a vision of British cinema as image-lead, sensorial, affective. Impossible not to see the seeds of Ramsey’s work there, not merely because of the correlation of Scottishness and poverty. More due to their shared capacity to make the image sing a song, to mine poetry from the banal.

The trilogy depicts the childhood and young adulthood of Jamie, growing up in a poverty which nowadays might be classified as third world. The palette is black and white. There is humour  and melodrama in this black and white world. The Scots may be portrayed as dour, but in a way this just shows up the moments of warmth and kindness. Douglas relishes the beauty of to be found in the everyday. The film is a lyrical ballad to the potential of a turnip field, an apple, even wallpaper. The final film in the trilogy includes a breathtaking long shot of Jamie stood in the ornate surroundings of a Cairo mosque. This is contrasted with the closing image of an apple tree orchard. All things have a remedial beauty in the world, and Douglas, recounting the story of his youth, hunts down that beauty with the eye of a cinematic panther. 

As an aside, it’s worth noting the extraordinary generation of filmmakers that emerged in the UK, some feted, some less so. Alongside Jarman, Roeg, Loach and Anderson, there are also Watkins, Clarke, Potter, Potter, Bleasdale, Greenaway, to name a few. An inordinately masculine list, but one that reflects a commitment to provocative, political filmmaking before the likes of Curtis, Mendes, even Nolan, took over. 

the lady vanishes (d. alfred hitchcock, w. ethel lina white, sidney gilliat, frank launder)

High jinks, dastardly europeans, cricket lovers and a folk dance historian. So much of Hitchcock’s film seems quintessentially English. As an Englishman, it’s hard not to feel as though the film tugs on some kind of deep national cord, and not just because of Caldicott and Charters’ overriding need to discover the score in the test match. This joke wouldn’t run anymore. There’s no way a thread about cricket could be used to activate the national consciousness. Something that might have seemed comically plausible back then would be absurd now. Part of the beauty of Hitchcock and his screenwriters’ representation of Britishness is that these aren’t all warm, sympathetic characters. THey’re a mixed bunch, with mixed interests. Cowardice and selfishness are also on display. Would a child born in the UK in the 21st century still recognise these archetypes? Or has that whole world gone the way of steam trains and cricket buffs? Post-war, Hitchcock would pick up sticks and move to Hollywood. If anything represents the definitive termination of the British as a significant global influence which, for better or for worse, was still the case when my grandfather was born, it might be Hitchcock’s exile. The war, which The Lady Vanishes, for all its comic import, prefigures, would be the final nail in the coffin of his career as a British director. From then on, he would become another immigrant craftsman brought in to embellish the North American empire.

 

hamnet (w&d chloe zhao, w. maggie o’farrell)

Two connected thoughts on Zhao’s take on the novel.

Firstly - In The Rider and at times in Nomadland, Zhao employed what might be described as cinema verité to great effect. Naturalistic lighting, a roving, deliberately unsteady camera. Muted performances punctuated by dramatic moments. In Hamnet, she stays true to this, in spite of what must have been an inflated budget (although the CGI London riverbank scenes feel slightly low-cost). The trouble is, and perhaps this is exacerbated by coming from an English POV, cinema verité in a faux elizabethan England is always going to be a stretch. Rather than the viewer being sucked in by the style, it draws attention to everything that possesses the artifice of cinema. In a sense the nature scenes are the most effective: here the backdrop feels no more than regularly artificial. In contrast Elizabethan Stratford/ London feels like a construction, as indeed it is. The plague that is a motif and key plot diver is communicated via cinematic shorthand.  Secondly, given the presence of star names doing a lot of heavyweight acting, rather than getting lost in their story, as is the case of The Rider, one is constantly aware of the heavy-lifting the stars are doing. The naturalism is undercut and what remains is pure performance. Which also explains why Buckley was a shoe-in for the Oscar.

the song of the earth (jonathan bate)

Bate’s examination of the links between romanticism and ecology offer up the moral that the poet is the unacknowledged connection between the soil and the mind. As such the poet, like the aborigine in the outback, can sing us out of the dystopia which we have constructed. At times beautiful and other time befuddling, the book ranges from Heidegger to Clare and gives perhaps unexpected prominence to Byron. Bate is strong on that paradox of modernity whereby an appreciation of nature is coupled with an alienation from nature. Are his conclusions in the end somewhat hippy-chic, as he discourses from this Oxonian ivory tower? There was a feeling in the reading of the book (and feelings are not to be negated according to his thesis) that the urgency of the opening chapters, or the radicalism of the opening chapters, became diluted as the book expounded its argument. However, this might also be an inevitability in the actual process of writing itself; perhaps according to Bate, the tendrils of poetry are the truest form of the word, and the more that writing seeks to investigate the roots of those tendrils, the less, ironically, it becomes possible to hear the flower’s song.

The Graeco-Roman counterpart to the story of Eden is that of the lost Golden Age. It is a story which has had an extraordinarily long and fertile history as a mythic and literary archetype. It tells of how all beasts had horizontal backbones and a gaze that looked down towards the earth, until there came Prometheus who ‘Upended man into the vertical’, and ‘tipped up his chin / So to widen his outlook on heaven’. Once man looked away from where he walked, the earth became vulnerable. The desire for transcendence, the aspiration to higher realms, was predicated upon a denial of biological origin, a departure from ground.

souvenir (michael bracewell)

This slight half-fiction, populated by pop stars and flaneurs, does what it says on the tin. It remembers. In a succession of vignettes, Bracewell traces an unofficial history of the capital from ’78 to ’85. This is the land of music and fashion, of the unheralded and the heralded. People who went to parties in council blocks or art galleries, people who walked the streets wondering at the dazzle, clocking the passers-by, living outside thoughts of the future. It’s a small, beautiful book which captures the city in the years before I knew it, albeit the traces of that time were still around when I arrived in 88, the last gasp of the pre-digital era. If you really want to know what London was like in those days, you can do much worse than spend an afternoon with Bracewell’s Memoir. 

These Polaroid photographs, by contrast, were deeply English, neo-Romantic in spirit: Paul Nash, John Minton, Derek Jarman; the lane in deep green evening light, abstraction on the beach, the personality of inanimate objects (a jar on a windowsill, a dirty windowpane, a stricken tree, moss on blackened brick); the stilled or violent atmosphere of time and place thickening to numinosity.

the shepherd and the bear (w&d max keegan, w. sabine emiliani)

Keegan’s doc is what might be called lovingly made, as it follows the travails of an ageing shepherd in the Pyrenees. The shepherd is one of the last of his line, happy to spend months living in a small shack in the high country. When bears are released into the wild, re-establishing a bear community, local livestock owners are fearful. The ancient conflict between man and nature has a new battleground. The shepherd keeps doing his thing, no matter what, even after a few savaged sheep carcasses make spectacular appearances. The film, like the conflict, simmers rather than coming to a boil, but it’s a well crafted portrait of a remote rural society which highlights the paradoxes around ideas of re-wilding and environmentalism, concepts that can lead to the sense of an agenda being imposed by metropolitan diktat on the rural communities who inhabit the countryside and the wild places the environmentalists seek to preserve.

 

pillion (w&d harry lighton, w. adam mars-jones)

For reasons that have to do with a long-held editorial stance the doe-eyed critic is not able to comment on Pillion, except to say chapeau to whoever chose to have Skarsgård reading several volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Screenwriter? Director? Art director? The actor himself? A tiny stroke of genius. (And of itself this detail/question illustrates how fluid is the process of 'writing' a film.)

mrs dalloway (virginia woolf)

The other day we walked through Bloomsbury and saw a sign for a Dalloway court, or some other confection made up to honour Woolf’s protagonist. Even though Mrs Dalloway doesn’t live in Bloomsbury, she lives in Westminster, and she never goes there. This seems to reflect the way that Dalloway (and perhaps Woolf herself) have become signifiers which might not have that much to do with their original essence. It’s not clear to what extent the author even likes her protagonist, a woman who has chosen an easy metropolitan life above any bohemian  instinct she might once have had. Who has rejected the more dangerous Peter Walsh and married Richard, a minor member of parliament, someone who couldn’t be more establishment if he tried. The Prime Minister comes to her party. She’s a far cry from the ideal of Bloomsbury independence and self-publishing. The emotional heartbeat of the book, surely influenced by Joyce, is the tragic returning soldier and his Italian wife. The soldier suffers from shellshock, or PTSD in today’s terms, and his delirium is at odds with the addled comfort of Dalloway’s life. When news of his death infiltrates her party, she feels resentment. A resentment at the realities of politics and history intervening on her idyllic set-up. Which in reality is far from idyllic, as she has lost touch with Walsh and her friend Sara Seyton, the two real conduits for any kind of emotional or artistic life she might have lead. Dalloway has been mirrored onto Woolf, but she feels like a vacuous copy. The sort of lady who lunches that would now be found in Notting Hill and environs rather than Westminster.

This mirrors the way that Woolf has been appropriated as an exemplar of a certain kind of studied, pseudo-aristo, pseudo-bohemian Englishwoman. An image that lurks at the edges of brands like Marks and Spencers and Laura Ashley. She has been appropriated by the marketeers of this type of ghoulish loveliness, to be consumed by the Mrs Dalloways of her day. Walsh, whose underwhelming career has played out in India, as part of the great colonial project, feels an extreme ambivalence about this England to which he has just returned. “Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage!"

At the same time, Woolf’s prose contains the lyricism of poetry. The most vivid moments are reserved for Septimus, the shellshocked soldier, and it’s via his shellshocked voice that the writer achieves an Eliot-esque song: “Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.”

+++

“It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

bass instinct (two fingas)

Bass Instinct is set in nineties London. Its protagonist is a cycle courier stroke DJ stroke Ladies Man. Much of the book is couched in the terms of a black macho identity, where women are little more than bodies and the music and the weed is all that makes life worth living. As much as a novel, this feels like a document of a time and a place, that esoteric world of clubs and high rises, of men and women doing humdrum jobs by day before transforming into romantic superstars when they head out into the glory of the city’s nightlife. This encapsulates the bittersweet glamour of living in one of the world’s great cities, where your mere allegiance to that tribe appears to endow you with magical powers, in spite of having little to back up that endorphic sensation.

 

london and the south east (david szalay)

Seeing the author awarded the Booker, and investigating his back catalogue, this seemed like a good entry point. A novel set in London in the world of telephone sales, and, as the title suggests, the South East. It’s a world I once had some knowledge of. My first “job” in London was in an institution very similar to the one where the protagonist, Paul Rainey, works, selling advertising space in spurious magazines. Unlike Paul’s world, which is white and predominantly masculine, based in Holborn, my workplace was in Cricklewood, and my most notable companions were from Ghana and Nigeria, as well as Meli Rome, an Italian former model who had a bedsit in Knightsbridge and had fallen on hard times. It was a world shadowed by the cynicism of the world Szalay depicts, but also a gateway to the more cosmopolitan universe of London, which also included IRA pubs and old colonels.

I only lasted a month, and was rubbish at it. Rainey has lasted 15 years, even if he too appears to be rubbish at sales. Something he recognises and wants to escape from. The novel follows his descent into a tepid midlife crisis. Paul, like his colleagues, his partner Heather, and anyone else he meets, is not a sympathetic figure. It feels as though we’re skirting the edges of the land knowns as Amis-country, a jaundiced trek through the sufferings of the lower middle class, men who spend their lives in pubs, women who are decidedly secondary figures. The book rolls along efficiently, and Paul’s misadventures boil up towards a comic denouement. Nevertheless, this feels like the kind of novel that the British literary establishment adores, a somewhat patronising peregrination leading to a foreseeable resolution. 

die my love (w&d lynne ramsay, w. alice birch, enda walsh)

It turns out that Scorsese, who sent Ariana Harwicz’s novel to Jennifer Lawrence, and I have similar taste. The complexity of translating first person prose to all-seeing-eye cinema was always going to be challenging, and the film has a hit-and-miss approach, with moments of visceral Ramsay-esque filmmaking and other moments where the story just seems to rumble along. Lawrence loves being a fucked-up mother, something she has a real flair for, but in some ways the star turn is Sissy Spacek’s. She retains a luminosity which seems made for the screen, a counterpoint to the film’s emotional extravagance. 

persuasion (austen)

I turned to Austen’s late novel in a bid to go back to a classic after wading through too many contemporary novels that seemed to be saying less than they pretended to. Austen has a sanctified status in the UK. A pioneer of the female novel, a subtle investigator of the human heart. Not to mention a fertile source of eminently commercial period drama.

The novel sets out a clear and predictable obstacle for Anne, its protagonist. Eight years after declining the proposal of her suitor, Wentworth, on the advice of friends and family, she finds herself still in love with him. When he returns to her circle after years abroad with the navy, Anne is convinced Wentworth has moved on, as well as harbouring resentment against her for having refused him. At the age of 27, she feels her best days are behind her, and has to come to terms with disappointment in love and life. Part of the problem with the novel is that Anne is so damned nice, whist the rest of her family are monsters. Austen mines this for both humour and moral judgement. Her father and two sisters are vain and selfish. Next to them, any normal individual would look good, but Anne is positively saintly. Beyond her lack of confidence, she never does anything wrong. There comes a point in the novel when we long for Anne to screw up in some way, but this never happens.

Which reflects the fact that, from the moment the novel moves with Anne to Bath, not a lot seems to occur at all. There’s a long chapter of exposition on the part of Anne’s friend to tie up a subplot regarding her cousin who seems intent on marrying her; a few set-piece moments where Anne and Wentworth cross before the final resolution of their story. But it all feels disarmingly pedestrian. The penultimate chapter contains Anne’s meditation on the difference between the sexes, which one imagines marries to Austen’s view, along with her wry observation that you can’t trust novels on the subject as the medium has been dominated by men. A delightfully arch observation, but this alone is insufficient to lend the novel any real sense of depth. It’s a strange experience to read a novel that has been so lauded, adapted and fetishised within British culture, only to find oneself reaching out for a branch of significance as one drifts away on its mellifluous tide. 

jumping jack flash (kieron pim)

This is a biography of David Litvinoff, a figure from sixties London who moved between the worlds of rock and roll, crime and cinema. He moved in the same circles as the Kray Brothers and the Stones, to name but two of his extensive web of connections. He was a friend of Donald Cammell and, the book asserts, the hidden animus of Performance. Events in that film directly echo incidents within Litvinoff’s own life. His face was slashed at one point in Earl’s Court as a punishment/ warning from the Kray twins for betraying them. All of which is fascinating, and Pim’s account of the interweaving of the criminal world and the rock world is comprehensive. However, there comes a point when the reader starts to realise that Litvinoff, whilst a larger-than-life personality, might not be quita as interesting as he or the book believe. Pim threads his personal fascination with LItvinoff and their shared Jewish heritage through the book. He travels to Australia, hangs out with Eric Clapton and minor aristocracy, as he seeks to get to the nub of his subject’s mystery. The B-narrative is why the author is so fascinated with Litvinoff, and there were moments in the second half of the book when this reader wishes that the author had gone further into exploring his own personal obsession. 

i’m alright jack (w&d. john boulting, w. alan hackney, frank harvey)

This film screened as part of a Sellers season in Cinemateca. It’s the only one I caught. The context is given perhaps because it seems such a curious film to watch on the big screen in Montevideo. The audience laughed along with Sellers. There was one particularly loquacious fellow who reacted effusively all the way through. Watching it now is a bittersweet experience. It should be remembered that this seemingly gentle satire came out at the same time as the Angry Young Men were doing their thing, and Kitchen Sink drama was on the rise. The cosy caricatures of I’m Alright Jack were already being eroded. Curious, too, that these stereotypes include the Trade Union leader, holding industry to ransom with strikes and pickets. This was a story which would continue for decades. In my youth, the Trade Union leaders were household names (Len Murray, Scargill, Hugh Scanlon) and seemed to wield a power which has faded, just as perhaps British industry has faded. The irony that Boulting presents in his movie is that despite their class differences, all the characters fall under the umbrella of a cosy British familiarity. The capacity to bond over a cup of tea or a drink is always there. (Irene Handl really steals the show here.) There is an idea of a unified Britain that will bind us all together, no matter what. And, given the film was made little more than a decade after the end of the second  world war, that’s perhaps not so surprising. Whether the same could be said of Britain today seems doubtful. As an Englishman I would not want to share common ground with the more bigoted sectors of society who the new right seeks to recruit and promote. But it might be that the Boulting view of Britain was always rosy-hued. A truer version would be revealed in the filmmaking of Loach and Clarke, the writing of Osbourne, Wesker, Pinter and Shelagh Delaney. Although it might be said that within the work of Loach, there lurks a lingering hankering for the Britain depicted in I’m Alright Jack, one of confident workers forever quarrelling with cunning bosses, with some kind of compromise inevitably reached by the end.

this is not propaganda - adventures in the war against reality (peter pomerantsev)

Pomerantsev’s book is an investigation into the world which shaped the world we live in. Even though it was published less than a decade ago, it already feels as though history is running away from those pre-pandemic times when the reality of what was about to confront us was something that people were warning about, rather than living through. Pomerantsev investigates on a global basis the evolution of the post-truth world, fuelled by social media and its bot farms, by individuals like Nix for whom ethics are an offshoot of capitalism, entirely beholden to the idea of profit. In the process of which are facilitated sense-deranging attacks on reality, allowing the wanton killing of women and children, the elderly and the innocent, to be reframed as actions taken in self-defence, and promoted as such to the point that anyone who questions this logic is in danger of being excommunicated. This is the world Pomerantsev saw coming, and now it has arrived. The dangerous edges of democracy, a system beholden to the manipulation of the masses, are laid bare. The author of the book outlines his personal journey from Soviet Ukraine to the UK. His family fled from a repressive totalitarian regime towards the hope of something called ‘the west’. But the west is not an ethical construction. It is a market driven society. And now the fusion of vast wealth which the technocrats of the internet have succeeded in generating and seek to preserve, with the autocratic ambitions of wealthy men and women driven by nothing more than personal ambition, threatens to decimate the planet with an uncontrollable ferocity. Anything that stands in the way of this behemoth will be levelled. Pomerantsev sees the writing on the wall and traces the way that this is a global epidemic. But there’s a sense that his concerns have been overtaken by the actuality of the present.