Et In Arcadia Ego

This week continues to be a bit lumpy. Doctor Who rather knocked my chocks out, I think. Typically, when Real things go wrong I have some Fiction to fall back on - but obviously right now, that's not the case, as the Fiction is as bad or worse than anything Real can reasonably throw at me. I suppose there's always Blake's 7, that bastion of love, optimism and happy endings. And lots of bad Real stuff is going down too: everything has gone wrong this week. The highlight was probably almost getting electrocuted. Has my dad mortally offended Morgoth or something?

It doesn't help that I've been set a presentation of perennial emo-fave Nietzsche. I feel like I've finally become a teenager, and am going through my existentialist, t-shirt-icon, pretentiously pessimistic phase. I'm even listening to the Manic Street Preachers.

The Birth of Tragedy - by Mr Nietzsche. I can see the Doctor written all over it. Because of my associative mind, I tend to link up absolutely everything. This time last year, when the news of Tennant's departure came out, I remember reading about Aristotle, pain and fear, catharsis, and why we enjoy watching miserable drama the very next day. Now obviously the topics are related, but in retrospect (lovely Latinate word, that...) it was probably mostly my preoccupations colouring things. In the year which Tarantino and Shakespeare shared my obsessions, I remember a fantastic debate which occured about Reservoir Dogs AND Hamlet simultaneously. I'm sure it made sense at the time - I think I was criticising suspense and second act problems. I suppose no theory of art is comprehensive if it doesn't include low-art as well, and I was most struck with this:

"Because the Apollonian impulses of the Greek tragedians give form to the Dionysian rituals of music and dance, the death of the hero is not a negative, destructive act but rather a positive, creative affirmation of life through art."

Which is what I was trying to express last post. By Dionisian, he means wild, primal, frenzy, suffering, the reality of life. By Apollonian he means contained, light, dreamlike and detatched. His theory for perfect art is that the two should be balanced. On the one hand, I'm handling the full Dionysian brunt of that episode with my emotional response. But my inner Apollonian is very satisfied with the "form" of the thing - the way it mirrors Planet of Fire, the completion of arcs, the evolution of characters. Not sure what to say about the second half though. You'll be able to see me affirming the creative nature of life through art at the bottom of my second bottle and third Kleenex box on Boxing Day.

No one really knows what Nietzsche stands for, aside from a vague idea that he's a miserable sod who killed off God. Having read some I feel myself moved, impressed and with a huge boost to my morale, due to positive and beautiful philosophy. Am I doing this wrong? I feel like I've missed something, or else the universe has done Mr N. a huge disservice all these years. This is Sparknotes' summary:

"For Nietzsche, art is not just a form of human activity but is rather the highest expression of the human spirit. The thrust of the book is well expressed in what is perhaps its most famous line, near the end of section 5: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” One of Nietzsche’s concerns in The Birth of Tragedy is to address the question of the best stance to take toward existence and the world. He criticizes his own age (though his words apply equally to the present day) for being overly rationalistic, for assuming that it is best to treat existence and the world primarily as objects of knowledge. For Nietzsche, this stance makes life meaningless because knowledge and rationality in themselves do nothing to justify existence and the world. Life finds meaning, according to Nietzsche, only through art. Art, music, and tragedy in particular bring us to a deeper level of experience than philosophy and rationality. Existence and the world become meaningful not as objects of knowledge but as artistic experiences. According to Nietzsche, art does not find a role in the larger context of life, but rather life takes on meaning and significance only as it is expressed in art."

I think you can see why I'd find that appealing. Oscar Wilde said something similar about nature: we only understand it as beautiful because Art has told us a blissful hill is beautiful. In truth, it's scratchy and uncomfortable and there are insects everywhere. And much like my witterings about decay and mundanity being "ugly" purely because we don't expect to find it beautiful.

My whirlwind romance with Nietzche was, however, not to last. Turns out the World was right about him being a misery guts. This was an early work, and he goes on to describe it as:

"badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness"

Which is funny when you consider that would also be a perfect description of your humble authoress. Of course, the whole point of the essay is how Socrates invented rational thinking and therefore destroyed art - a valid point. I wouldn't blame Socrates, but then, with a bit of luck I won't have to give a damn what Socrates thinks very, very soon. More details as they emerge. I think I've just been rescued.

Sorry I haven't blogged for a while - I've been doing interesting stuff, but no time and less inclination. Here's a few updates:

I finally have a film season! I tried setting up a film club in the other place, and it didn't really work. When Calypso was brainstorming alternate ideas for LGBT events, I suggested queer cinema evenings. We found some helpful people in the Film Department who have given us huge rooms with huge screens, and at least 30 attendees and hundreds of recommendations for films. Woo hoo! The screenings will be on Wednesday afternoons, will be a mix between the more populist "camp classics" and serious/landmark movies. We've even had offers from lecturers to come and give talks. On my agenda? Definitely Madchen in Uniform, Victim, Beautiful Laundrette, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and (though I've already seen this one) Paris is Burning. I think Calypso is keen to show Boys Don't Cry, and the first screening - Transamerica - is set for next week. Very, very excited.


Greek is killing me. Our teacher is really nice and all, but she insists on going through the homework in lessons sentence by sentence. This is intensely frustrating: if I've done the homework, then it's really a wasted hour. I've been entertaining myself by doing Greek composition in the back to brush up my vocab. I was going to do some summaries, but I don't have enough words: I know Doctor and Master, but the closest word I have for Dalek (aside from ο Δαλεκ) would be η υδρια - water jar. Luckily, I do have enough generic words to do Blake's 7 -or ο του πολιτου χορος as it is best rendered in Greek. It's keeping me immensely entertained every time we get a new word list, working out what I can now write. This week we finally learnt "ship", "sail" and "kill" enabling me to much expand my mini-masterpiece. It certainly saved my neck in the Greek test we had this week. So far, I've summarised the first two episodes and introduced a few characters - Blake is ο πολιτες (the citizen), while Travis is obviously ο στρατεγως (the soldier). The best I could do for Avon and Jenna is ο φιλος (the friend) and η γυνη (the woman) - both of which are hilariously inappropriate. Still, it allows me to do a lot of "he frees the slaves" and it is coming in handy, albeit in a crazy way.

One of my favourite free-London-mags is Shortlist and Stylist. They come out one day after the other, courtesy of the gender binary. Shortlist is blue, and typically has a tough actor on the cover, and it has stories about cars, TV and technology. Stylist is a day later, is very pink - or has a very full-lipped and feminine close up of a lady icon on it, and naturally has sections on make up, travel and fashion. It's not quite as bad as it sounds: Stylist is actually pretty progressive, once you get over the hilarious covers. But that's not why I mention it. Stylist has just mentioned a documentary featuring five actresses, all who will be playing the Queen but in different decades. Barbara Flynn, for example, "depicts HRH during her "anus horribilis", 1992"

Oh, how I love geeky giggles. Spot the mistake! What Stylist was attempting to say is "annus horribilis", miserable year. Not "anus horribilis", which means miserable old woman. What a Freudian slip!

Did I update you all about Swapbot? I've now got about 20 art cards in my collection on topics as various as Alice in Wonderland, Imaginary Friends and the Disney Haunted Mansion. Half made by me, half made by partners all over the globe. The fun of it is really the scope - everyone has a different style, so while they are all individually a tad shoddy they look marvellous next to one another. One thing I've noted is how unsurprisingly female based it is: they're either teenage girls, or hockey moms from Idaho, with a penchant for scrapbooking. This has been a source of amusement, but also guilt - as I prepare to send off cards inspired by Watchmen to a woman who loves rabbits and whose favourite film is The Notebook, and one based on Reservoir Dogs to "Rainbow Colour ! Theme: Orange". So I was quite taken aback to find this swap in the listings. O-kay then. Not all scrapbookers and ribbon-obsessives then. I am really confused. I know there are people into True Crime and the like - I think it's a bit sick and strange, but each to their own. But WTF?! And who in their right mind has a favourite serial killer?

Oh yes. Right. Moving on.

So I had to sign up for it. My motivation is this: as a collector, I want a diverse and interesting collection, and I'm sure this bizzare oppertunity will never come back. You have to design two cards, one with the serial killer of your choice - and the other your partner chooses. I still haven't found a way of requesting Jack the Ripper that doesn't make me feel like a horrific individual. Even though I designed a card partly inspired by him a whole two months back (but it was also about London, Dark London, smog, gothic horror, Victoriana, the Valeyard, Doctor Who and all sorts of other things). And I don't know what I'm going to do when I get a serial killer prompt from my partner. At least Jack is dead, and shrouded in fiction: part of the point of the card I made was exploring the ways he has been appropriated by the gothic horror genre and made "acceptable" by it. He's cameoed in Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Batman and Doctor Who in a way I can't see Charles Manson doing any time soon. Take a look at the two images on this page and see if you can spot the difference. I've found the pictures from the previous Serial Killer swap (there have been two. Why on earth has there been not one, but two?!) and they are quite beautiful as art.

But Jesu. Maybe I'll do my first kooky-collage, with all the art-bits I've been sent by the hockey soroity, and create something deeply ironic and brightly coloured.

I've updated my birthday list a bit. Expect stuff to keep crawling on there as I remember them

Dear friends, it is not often I ask you for favours.

But please: go to the cinema as soon as possible, and see The Vampire's Assistant.

If you don't, Universal will make a loss.

If Universal makes a loss, it won't make the sequel.

If it doesn't make the sequel, then I don't get to watch the sequel. I don't get the fun of watching Gavner, Larten and Darren climb a mountain. I don't get Kurda. And I don't get to see one of the most brilliantly cruel meta-chapters in fiction turn into a brilliantly cruel meta-moment in cinema.

In short, my life will be over.

Go to the cinema.

For the attention of parents and relatives: this is my most-wanted list.

To my student buddies: I am obviously overjoyed if you get me something off this list, but am equally happy with something second hand or cheap and cheerful.

FILMS:

Querelle (Fassbinder)
Victim (60s, Dirk Bogarde)
The Proposition (Guy Pierce)

"Great films", particularly westerns, noir, crime, cult classics, sci fi - oh y'know, everything and anything you think I'll enjoy.

Stuff by:

David Lynch (but not Mullholland Drive)
Rainer Warner Fassbinder (not Fear Eats the Soul)
Powell and Pressburger (not I Know Where I'm Going, not Matter of Life and Death, not the Red Shoes and not Peeping Tom. Unless you find a nice boxed set)

Telly:
Twin Peaks
Neverwhere

DOCTOR WHO:

Delta and the Bannermen (on DVD)

I really, really need more Seventh Doctor but I have everything which is out on DVD. Seventh Doctor videos (especially Dragonfire) make me happy.

Big Finish audio plays:
Spare Parts
The Gathering
Excelis Dawns

BOOKS:

Dorian Gray first edition (anime version, braille, e.t.c. - check my DG blog to see what I don't have)

Amanda Palmer songbook

Sheet music, any sheet music.

Origami instructions, but really tricky ones :)

Random books on London - particularly unusual sightseeing, creepy history, cool buildings, London: A Biography or similar.

Six Characters in Search of an Author - but NOT the original script. The revamped one, with Rupert Gould.

Books on:

Censorship + classification
Film, particularly film violence/reactions
Oscar Wilde (PLEASE no "wit and wisdoms" though)

MUSIC

Doctor Who Season 3 soundtrack
This Strange Engine (Marillion)
Space Metal (Star One)
Peter Gabriel III
Patrick Wolf (any of them)
Moths ate my Doctor Who Scarf
Brick soundtrack
The Tears (only one album so you can't get it wrong)

Al Stewart!
I have: Orange, Past Present and Future, Modern Times, Year of the Cat and Piece of Yesterday.
I want: anything else! Though preferly not live albums.

Other stuff:

The Blue Man Group concert DVD for the concert we actually saw. I'm not sure if it's available or not.

Religious propaganda, ludicrously racist/sexist memorabilia, hideously inaccurate science et al.

This would make me pretty darn happy:
http://www.chick.com/catalog/assortments/0915.asp

Antiquey stuff - old packaging, Victoriana, taxidermy e.t.c.

A cravat

Hats! Exciting hats!

The Seventh Doctor umbrella

The 70s toy Liberator which Corgi made

A poncho - big, warm and fuzzy. Preferably in a fun colour.

As a result of working hard on my film coursework, I am getting increasingly sickened with academia.

It's been exacerbated by a volume in the Maughan library with which I am feeding my obsession, while picking through on spoilerific eggeshells. An academic volume dedicated to that great and ground breaking author of challenging post-numismatic discourse of the neo-Prydonian School: Terry Nation. He created the Daleks, invented Blake's 7 and wrote a lot of ace stuff for both series. What fun! Paragraph two, for example, begins a discussion on how far you can identify a single author in a television series. A very valid point - but it scuppers it by starting in this manner:

"authorship has been associated wiht power since the beginning of history in the Judeo-crhistian worldview, since God was seen as the author of the world and of humankind"

We now have academic substantiation to deify both him and Holmes. The second section of the introduction is even funnier - entitled "popular television and 'quality' :

"We believe that the work credited to Nation as creator and/or writer fails to fit some of the traditional criteria of 'quality'. It is largely in familiar generic forms, was made on a comparativelyt low budgets, and is addressed to a mass audience. As Bernadette Casey et al (2002:209)"

Oh, do you think? I can't believe they need to footnote statements like "Doctor Who often had crappy special effects".

I'm still waiting for them to do a serious discussion of his characters and themes. Normally, I bow to the Obviously Superior Wisdom of academics. After all, they might just know more than me underneath the scrambled prose. Doctor Who is something I do know the odd thing about, and so the illusion is broken - especially, while analysing form, they insist on referring to "cliffhangers" as "suspended enigmas". It's a childish and simplistic exercise in stating the obvious - inferences anyone could make from watching a single half hour of Genesis of the Daleks. Identifying things like "the Doctor and the companion separate and get into trouble", or "Doctor Who has a mystery which is solved at the end", and then crossreferencing it via Surviors and Blake's 7 which - amazingly! - does the same things. Damn you, that's what drama does!

So I have lashed out with violence, and this is the unpleasant result.

It's become an Accepted Film Studies Fact, much like the oedipal reading of Hamlet, that Alien is
"about" the male fear of pregnancy. Personally, I always thought it was a monster movie with a killer xenomorph first, and Freudian discourse second. Caylpso argued that it is a strong underlying theme - after all, what I choose to see as "people's innate phobia of having something growing inside them" is effecively pregancy. But I still think the focus on it is ludicrous.

To counter this, Calypso and I have decided to make our own unique contribution to the wonderful world of Film Studies wank.

Because Reservoir Dogs is undeniably all about the male fear of menstruation. Spoilers in the next paragraph.

Think about it: when Mr Orange is shot by a woman, it is a form of symbolic castration as she transfers "the female problem" straight at his poor, male abdomen. It is signified by the extreme fetishation of blood, and represents the terror Man has for the bleeding Female. The introduction of a feminised element into the hypermasculine atmosphere is the pivot around which the plot turns. As the blood seeps out, so does the femininity - through which Mr White is transformed into protective mother figure, creating the mother/daughter dynamic: helping a child through a first period. While the characters are confident to anatomise women at a distance - Madonna's big dick, the story of the super-glued-prick e.t.c. - they are unable to cope with a female influence brought into their all-masculine sphere. It provokes violence, suspicion and disgust, and causes the men to become even more masculine archetypes. Particularly in the patriarchal figure of Mr Blonde (straight razor = masculine attribute = Great White Phallus*), who lashes out with penetrating stabs to protest against reproductive expression. Ultimately, the menstruating feminine must be neutralised for the safety of the group.

I hope we call all agree that was the largest pile of bollocks this blog will ever produce.

But what is literary theory but a method to read film through? A Marxist will see every novel as about revolutionary politics - a revisionist will say anything as long as it hasn't been said before. If you've just been dumped, then everything you read is about your ex. Opinions represent your pre-occupations more than anything true and immutable about the text.

And you can't deny that most of what I said in the analysis above was correct. Mr Orange's injury does raise the tension, his presence drives the plot and he is mostly responsible for the eventual outcome. Mr White does behave in a motherly manner, that razor is long and straight. Men are unnaturally skeeved by periods. And Reservoir Dogs is the man's movie which women seem to love - perhaps because they see their own biological dilemma reflected in it. Subconsciously, obviously.

The facts are all correct - it's just been peverted through the prism of a crazy point of view. And yet the more we argue it, the more genuine it seems - which to me exposes the big lie at the heart of academia. You can convince yourself of anything.

And this is why I hate the footnoting obsession. Surely the first priority should be the film, the second one's own opinions - and third, third should be the weight of academic deforestation? Unless you are writing a response, the film is your primary evidence and your reaction the only prism through which you can appreciate it. "Who's Afraid of Literary Theory?" claims that Literary Theory exists so you can understand books. If you didn't know what a hero or a three act structure was, you wouldn't understand the significance, much like the way Indian music sounds awful to people not used to rasas and such. In other words, you cannot judge a work except in the context of your own opinions. The film is the primary source; all opinions are secondary, but yours takes priority because it is only from your opinions that you can interpret and then form any stance on a work.

It's not that other people's opinions aren't interesting. But they are not important compared to the film itself, and equally irrelevant to your own opinions, and the opinion of Bob the bus driver. A applied to B creates theory C - then C applied to D creates theory E and so on, further and further away from the topic under discussion. The ultimate aim of any writing on a book or film should, surely, be to enhance the enjoyment of that book or film by looking at it through different perspectives, on different levels and through different themes. If an essay doesn't make me rethink the film on a second watch, then it has failed. The film-snobs equivalent of pointing out movie trivia.

In a way, I'm reminded of my views on the Doctor and Master. I've never pinned down the exact nature of their relationship and wouldn't want to. Instead, I toy with different theories. Are they just friends? Lovers? Brothers? Father/son, both ways around? Is the Master the Doctor's dark side? Each of those perspectives gives you a slighly different reading, different things to notice or interpret or to think about. Much like sifting through various essays. But I would never pick just one, because at the end of the day, I come back to the text - the text which is totally ambiguous. An academic would pick one, argue it, argue how that related with Cuban Nationalism, argue how Cuban Nationalism could be explained by the Time War, and would be discussing the Marxist dialetic inherent in the nominisation of "Doctor" by tea-time.

This afternoon I found the Maughan's violence-in-cinema section, and because I've an urge to rewatch Reservoir Dogs, hunted down some academia. It genuinely distressed me. I was upset me to read how Holdaway has the ability to distinguish between the reality and artifice of postmodernity; and how the naming scene ("Mr Pink is too close to Mr Pussy") exemplifies the notion of catachresis and mimics the naming of Adam by God - but the idea that the name Mr Black causes quarrels signifies that blackness = violence and signposts the crisis in white cultural identity.

"The characterisation of Joe Cabot as "The Thing" from the 1950s D.C. comic The Silver Surfer foregrounds Joe as a fantastical genre character - also bringing to mind the Lacanian "Thing of the Real", the material embodiment of the chaotic and lethal violence of the Real - which is what Joe fails to control through the imposition of the conventional codes of reality of the gangster."

See, the difference between that and the menstruation theory is that I know I'm being ridiculous. And I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Let's talk Tarantino's representations of "blackness". QT is an offensive individual who likes shocking people, writing about offensive individuals. He scatters his works with the "n-word" because he can get away with it and he thinks it's streetwise, cool and also funny. But many of his characters behave in a way which that author identifies as codified "black bodies". That's because Tarantino is interested in, and has pilfered from, what white academics call "black culture". END OF DEBATE. I don't see anyone proposing to write a paper about the high levels of violence in my writings - and I think that's because it is perfectly obvious that it is only there because I enjoy violent literature and films. It's not a protest against the patriarchal system, or a representation of buried race anxieties - it's because I like shooting people up.

Applying that sort of deep-level analysis is especially upsetting to me when referred via Reservoir Dogs - a film which is deliberately surface deep, deliberately nihilistic. It means nothing: life is cheap and mundane. All we know of their world is given to us in 90 minutes of real time - the message, such as there is one, is quick and meaningless. By the end of the movies, nothing has changed and it's not meant to. That's what the final juxtaposition of horrible tragedy and comedy music signifies - it's reminding the audience not to worry, because it signifies nothing.

There is interesting academia to be written on the film, but on the story and characters. The way they are set up, and placed in opposition, the information we are given. The intensely clever way Tarantino uses and witholds information from the viewer: that's what academia should be studying.

So, any comments to make on my Reservoir Dogs theory? I'm horribly tempted to write and footnote it properly, and try and get it accepted.

*Yes, this is a real academic term.