The Quirk: The latest addition to the High School freakshow

Imagine being forced to spend five years of your life in an intellectual rat-race, judged on your ability to recollect useless trivia. Now imagine that you’ve got some kind of horrible skin condition, oversized limbs, and everyone else in the race is your exact same age; so day after day, with the clinical certainty of a eugenics study, you get to gauge how much of a genetic monstrosity you are. Finally, imagine all the contestants in your race being so pent-up with anxieties and hormones that during the one hour of the day you’re allowed to talk to each other, you all erupt in a hypersexualised drama-bomb of back biting, fist fights, and humiliation.

Yeah, high school fucking sucked. Like being born, it’s a universal trauma; unlike birth, we get to remember all the gory details. It’s no surprise that cinema spends so much of it’s energy running down these acne scarred corridors of our collective memories. What is surprising is that a new archetype has been added to the mix of this psychosexual pressure cooker: the Quirk.

The Quirk is a close relative of the Freak. Both are total misfits within the high school social hierarchy. Though where the Freak actively assumes a combative stance towards ‘the norm’, scorning it for its triteness and venality, the Quirk seems either completely unaware of it, or barely affected by it. Take the blissfully ignorant Napoleon Dynamite or the unflappable Juno ~ call either of the kids a ‘loser’ and they’re not going to care (or remember) for more than half a second. When did our high school freaks and eccentrics become so safe, so self assured?

High school, least according to the defining teen films of the 80’s and 90’s, is supposed to be a war zone. The Breakfast Club, Heathers, American Pie, She’s All That and Cruel Intentions all centre around characters pre-occupied with exploiting, attacking, or gaining status within their respective social hierarchies. The hierarchy was always the psychological engine room of these films; you either wanted to gain validation in it (by losing your virginity), maintain your position in it (by acrylicly clawing the eyes out of your competition) or see it burn to the ground.

The desires of the jocks, nerds and princesses were pretty linear with respect to the pecking order: move up, survive. Things were a lot more confusing for the rebellious Freak, who was caught in a double bind. If the freak refused to take part in the hierarchy completely, they would simply be dismissed as a ‘defective’ by the popular kids, and in turn become fuel for the chain of domination by tacitly validating the superiority of their tormentors.

If the freak tried to escape this bind by proving to the popular kids that they were superior to their petty and superficial judgments, they’d be paradoxically trying to earn the respect of the people they purportedly didn’t give a shit about. It’s a Catch 22 that has proved the tragic flaw of many wannabe high school rebels (including myself). Some, like Veronica in Heathers, engaged with the popular kids in a guerilla capacity; pretending to enjoy their company, only to find themselves being forced to engage in the same petty predation as their enemies in order to maintain their cover. Others, like John in The Breakfast Club alienated themselves through self destructive machoism, in a doomed attempt to prove their superiority to, and disregard for, the jocks (this particular tragic formula runs a celluloid trail all the way back to Jim Stark of 1955’s Rebel with out a Cause) . In the 80’s, 90’s and the decades preceding, the hierarchy was there and you had to give a shit about it, even if your only desire was not to become social cannon fodder.

Somehow, the Quirk of the years '00 has managed to short circuit the double bind of the Freak, and truly distance him/herself from the social shitstorm of the high-school hallway. Napoleon and Juno don’t really seem to care in the same way. For Generation Y Grandpa’s like me, the immediate inclination is to assume that kids these days have it easier. It’s gratifying to think that these pampered young rapscallions will never endure the school of hard knocks that we survived (all of 5 years ago).

I even critically validated this imaginary rise in schoolyard tolerance by correlating it to a shift in our society’s treatment of difference in their consumption habits. Once, while the western market was expanding, we were told to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ and buy the same newfangled, lifechanging gizmo that everyone else was buying. Then when the market was saturated, capital was forced to turn in on itself, and re-categorize existing markets into niches. Now we consume to differentiate ourselves from the Joneses, rather than keep up with them. Difference, once a threat to capital, has become a commodity, just like everything else. Consequently, the cultural differences in music and clothing that a Freak would once have been ostracized for, are now cool (or at least tolerable).

I was feeling very pleased with myself for mincing out this highfalutin theory. Then some geometrically fringed fucker plunged a mascara smudged thumb in my eye. Fucking Emo kid!

Now, Mods, Goths, Hippies and Punks have all copped their fair share of shit, but surely, none have experienced quite the same degree of damnation that our generation has heaped on Emo culture. There is no way that Generation Y could be said to be more tolerant than past geberations when we unleash such incredible scorn upon such a harmless subculture. Eclecticism in our globalized consumption might have taken the edge off our xenophobia, but the inherited desire to degrade and dominate is still alive and well amongst us youth. High school is still a battlefield; a fact that is attested to by the endurance of the old style of teen flicks alongside the fledgling ‘Quirk’ subgenre. Seth of Superbad still has to cope with being spat at, and is obsessed with shedding the stigma of his virginity. Mean Girls is pretty much a remake of Heathers, following the guerilla warfare that Cady wages upon a haughty clique of ‘Plastic’ girls.

If you look closely at Napoleon Dynamite and Juno, past the whimsical coziness, you’ll find the hierarchy is still in operation. Napoleon has to put up with some jerk smushing his pocket full of potato tots, and Juno endures derision from the jocks (who she knows are secretly in love with her, none the less). The high school food chain is still grinding away in the background: it’s just totally periphery to Napoleon’s passion for dance, martial arts and time travel or Juno’s interest in The Stooges and Paulie Bleeker. It is not high school that has changed, but the freak. But what was it about the noughties that made it possible for the Quirks to achieve this superhuman level of disinterest in their high school politics? I couldn’t figure it out.

Despondent, I mooched over to my computer and sank into the internet. I must have spent at least an hour dicking around on obscure Facebook communities before I realized the answer was glowing at me from my profile page.

Back in the days before the internet (or the days when the internet hissed and spat at you before you could connect) the only community you could realistically interact with was the arbitrary cross section of teens you found yourself lumped with in school. You had to make do, and socialize with this slice of anxious hormonal rage, for they were the only crowd you could really speak to and build a reputation with. Quite often you had no choice but to band together with people you had very little in common with, simply in order to survive - you had to wait until uni or grow stubble/breasts enough to walk into a bar before you could spoilt with the choice of selecting friends who appealed to your passions and interests.

Such is no longer the case for a teenager who’s wired up to Facebook or MySpace; on a daily basis these networking utilities can provide them with a constant stream of people,events and advertising that correspond to their particular fascinations. Being able to actively choose ones peer group is a choice that presents itself much earlier now. What does Juno care if the popular girls mock her for listening to The Stooges while they bust a move to Timbaland’s latest reggaeton abomination? She knows there’s a legion of people out there who think her shit rocks. This is what separates the eighties and nineties Freak from the noughties Quirk; the agony and fear of alienation isn’t so keenly felt, the drive to find ones place with respect to the hierarchy isn’t as pressing because high school is no longer the be all and end all of a teenager's social life.

This trend could be criticized for further atomizing our communities into isolated niches based around arbitrary consumption preferences, and this critique would not be without weight. However, the simple fact is that this new era of connectivity significantly reduces the horror of the schoolyard. Juno can become sub-culturally savvy without relying on the induction of an older peer, and craft herself into the eccentric gem she is without being pathologically concerned about total social rejection. And Hell, if accelerated social networking can open the space for personalities as sparkling as Juno’s, I’m all for it. Although the fact that Myspace is a giant Newscorp data-mining enterprise still scares the shit out of me.

Published in Voiceworks # 73

www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php

Prime Time Paranoia - on the non-existence of Pign' quack films.

If you found yourself jammed in a dark room with all the stars of prime time television you’d better damn well keep your hands to yourself, because going for the grope in such a situation would almost certainly entail feeling up a cop. It also might be best to sneak the fuck out of there before the vigilante psychic reads your perverted little mind. Don’t worry about tripping up and busting your face though, as next to every cop there is a doctor just waiting to suture your shit up with dental floss. Goosing a random blockbuster film character would be a completely different story. You might only get a handful of spray-tanned bone, but at least you wouldn’t get arrested or invited to an autopsy.

Our televisions are riddled with cop and medical shows: CSI, NCIS, East West, Law and Order (SVU, Criminal Minds), Cold Case, Medium, House, Grey's Anatomy, All Saints, ER, and yet, they’re damn near completely absent from our cinemas. In the 1930’s cops were all over the silver screen, now they’re stuck almost exclusively on the tube; and as for doctors - I’ve never even heard of a medical movie. So the question I ask is this: why do we let cops and medicos into our living rooms, but keep them out of our cinemas? Are pigs and quacks bad company for a night out, or do we just not trust them in the dark?

In a flight of patriotic good-will, I initially assumed the latter: that we, as a nation of swaggering, charmingly vulgar convicts, could not cope with the prospect of a 20 foot tall cop charging at us in a darkened theatre. I hypothesised that if we engaged with the fuzz at all, they were to be studied under a microscope – trapped on a small screen in a well-lit room where they could be swiftly dispatched with a remote control should they disturb our larrikin peace. Sadly, the thought that Australians might approach cop shows as the study of an enemy was not a fantasy I could entertain for long. Surely if we responded to pig soaps in such a way, our local police dramas (Blue Heelers, Water Rats or ABC's new appropriation of the hackneyed, 'black cop/white cop' formula, East West) would be populated by characters that reflect our Ned Kellyesque sentiments. But where in our cop dramas is our enchanting, incorrigible Kelly; TdAeluding the grasp of the authorities only to exact revenge on them for offending his unrelenting thirst for liberty? The only rebels with which we can realistically engage in these shows are cops themselves, forsaking their careers and our civil liberties in order to apprehend the 'perp'. We like to think of ourselves as a nation of recalcitrants and underdog backers, but our viewing habits speak otherwise - positioning us right in the palm of the establishment strong-arm. There must be something other than a proud criminal's fascination with the white n' blue Other that drives our fascination with pistols and scalpels.

So to what aspect of our cultural psyche does this daily cycle of swine soaps and scrub series appeal? The answer may lie between-the-scenes, which (conveniently for us screen critics) are populated by advertising breaks. Aside from offering us fat-busting ringtones and 7 easy steps to pole dance our way to dignity, advertising breaks provide us with an exact measure of who is supposed to be watching any particular program. The only reason television programs even exist is to allow those tooth-capped endorsements to slide over our retinas with Teflon ease. In the economically rationalised world of commercial television, a TV show is useless unless it can attract a marketable demographic whose viewing time can be sold to advertising companies. ?

Ideally, we’re all the target demographic of the cop and med shows, but the advertising seems to place a particular focus upon parents. Take an average Law and Order: SVU 'rape of the week' episode. Right after Ice-T expresses his horror at the rape and dismemberment of a young girl, you're likely to see a baby's bottom lovingly kissed before being strapped into the 'world's most absorbent' nappy. From this outrageously tasteful flow of program and advertising, we can discern that the show is either pitched at parents or pedophiles. Since pedophiles aren't exactly a 'marketable' demographic, we can safely assume that this program is directed at parents. If you can bear taking your finger off the mute button during advertising breaks, you'll VEfind that those convenient dinner solutions for belabored mothers, pseudo-healthy lunchbox ideas and happily four-wheel-driving families make a disproportionately more frequent appearance than they might do in other dramas. But why would parents like sitting themselves in front of a drama centering on the grisly murder of or multiple organ failure of a child?

The only answer I've been able to conjure that isn't entirely perverse, is that parents, as the demographic in our society with the most to worry about, have more of an impetus to keep tabs on the criminal/biological underworld. Through these badge-flashing, stethoscope-toting dramas, parents can gain some semblance of an insight into the contextual conditions of a kidnapping or the symptoms of lupus, and enjoy learning how these criminal/biological nasties can be subdued. Of course, the appeal of these dramas extends far beyond the ranks of the parental; all of us (except for a pathologically mellow minority) worry about being attacked or becoming grievously ill. The mechanics of these murderous people and diseases are naturally fascinating to us, as are the methods, and the people, who disarm them.

Given that watching pigs and quacks at work can (potentially) appeal to anyone with a survival instinct, it is easy to see how cop and med shows have risen to dominate the small screen. But for some reason, in spite of their vast attraction, police and doctors are all but absent from the cinema. There must be something about television in particular that makes us want to see some kid's face get stitched up, or some pedo get ruined by the homeboys of justice.

The answer again, lies in programming flow. Every night, we snuggle down in our cozy living rooms to a gauntlet of murders, bombings, bludgeoning, gang fights, pedo-scares and celebrity diseases (AIDS/SARS/ebola/bird flu etc). This pandemonium of pre-primetime death calls itself ‘the news’. After having been thrown headfirst into the horrors of our world, there’s nothing nicer than to sit down and watch a series of shows that meets the criminal and biological demons of ‘the news’ head on, and destroys ‘em. When we go to the cinema, we’re out on the town, having fun, and not necessarily worried about the perils of modern society. Prime time, however, engages us when these perils are in the forefront of our minds. Crime and Med shows serve as the perfect foil to the paranoia induced by the news. Law and Order even claims to pluck its stories ‘straight from the headlines’ - unlike those headline stories though, the crimes are conveniently solved over the course of an hour. What a relief.

Perhaps rightly, cop shows (and to a lesser degree med shows) have received critical flack for painting such a utopian picture of law enforcement. If we were to take these cop shows as gospel, we would end up believing that most of ‘the force’ is populated by battle hardened (but secretly empathetic), ferociously hard working paladins of justice, who operate according to an incorruptible inner moral compass. We might feel inclined to surrender to them more power, especially since, night after night, these shows remind us that there is an unending tide of incurable psychopaths out there. The shows should rightly be critiqued for their tendency to promote repressive state apparatus, but I wouldn’t necessarily chalk them up as a conscious propaganda campaign. These cop and med shows are just giving us what we want. And frankly, it’s nice to see legions of our bogeymen smote by these gritty and realistic characters; it salves our worries (particularly parents, the worriers par excellance). VE

There is, however, a nefarious aspect to crime and med shows - and that is their constant attacks on civil liberties. These are nearly always shown as obstructing the true course of justice and medicine. According to Dr Gregory House, (and more recently, Grey’s Anatomy) You, the patient ‘ALWAYS LIE’. You’re always obstructing the proper course of medicine, refusing surgery with your flawed beliefs and silly motives. It’d be for the best if the doctors didn’t have to listen to you at all (as House doesn’t), and could just break into your home to discover the truth, then strap you down and give you what’s good for you. Similarly, the world would be a much better place if the cops could just force you to talk before your lawyer arrived and confused everything. Justice would move so much faster if the police could use the evidence they risked their careers to steal, or if they could just follow their hunch and not have to wait for a warrant. The producers are probably just trying to heighten narrative tension, but it’s almost impossible not to break out in a rash of illuminati conspiracies while watching these things. After all, the tendency of cop and med shows to disregard the rights of the individual in the name of ‘justice’ or ‘medicine’ has coincided with the incredible loss of human rights caused by the ‘war on terror’.

Hard though it is not to bust out the tin foil hats, it is quite possible to rationalise the overwhelming presence of TV cop and med shows as something other than a calculated attempt to ideologically entrench the authority of police and doctors. Prime time always follows news time, so it’s only natural for prime time shows to address the anxieties and issues raised by the nightly news. If cinematic screenings were preceded by reports on the latest pox or mutant sex murder, we’d probably see a much stronger presence of white coats and blue caps on the big screen. However, just because Television shows are responding to a cultural ‘need’ in the wake of news programming, does not excuse them from critique. The anxieties these cop and med shows address (crime, terror, disease, and pedophilia) are exactly those which inform the manner in which we vote and conduct ourselves in civil society. So although they mightn’t be an appendage of some brainwashing conspiracy, they are undoubtedly contributing factors to our societies’ authoritarian response to the heightened climate of global fear.

Published in Voiceworks # 72

www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php

Love Happens - A struggle with the Romantic Comedy

Love Happens.

A struggle with the romantic comedy.

“Being afflicted with a penis, I harbour the same hatred for romantic comedies as the majority of my hairy, unwashed ilk. Inside this pigeon chest beats the heart of a hard hitting, hard drinking, hard farting Scotsman; who proudly roars ‘Chic flicks are shit!’ while hurling his claymore at Hugh Grant’s foppish smirk. The only thing that prevents me from embracing these log tossing instincts of mine, is the fact that I’m a writer; and consequently crippled by introspective self-doubt. Recently I’ve begun to suspect that chic flicks aren’t as artistically bankrupt as I’ve always assumed them to be – and that my intuitive loathing of them is just some bullshit cultural-hangover from the days when a boy would be bludgeoned to death just for knowing what the word ‘moisturiser’ meant. I mean, a whole cinematic genre cannot be utterly worthless. Surely, there must be something of value buried within this saccarine haze of Valentines kitsch. Right guys? So for the sake of this sorry, tortured art called journalism, I’ve decided to set aside my penis size issues, get out a stack of Meg Ryan rentals and try my darndest to enjoy the fuckers.

The first hurdle I had to clear in my quest to embrace the romantic comedy (rom-com) was a gripe I had with the very foundation of the genre. The blending of romance and comedy seemed entirely perverse to me. What kind of cynical shit laughs at other people’s love lives? The last thing you want to happen when you’re revealing your passions to someone is for them to laugh at you – they would be mocking the stuff that gave your life its meaning. Yet somehow, the rom-com manages to bypass the callous cynicism that would be required to laugh at love. In fact, they’re utterly anathematic to cynicism – these ‘feel good’ films cradle and nurture our amorous clichés rather than flout them. How was this possible? I’d have to find out the hard way. Swathed in a doona, accompanied by an arsenal of chocolates, I curled up to the vaseline’d glow of Bridget Jones’s Diary, When Harry Met Sally, The Wedding Planner…

The battle with my culturally conditioned hatred was fierce. I was constantly beset by the urge to mimic puking every time the pretty people busted out the ‘L’ word. Eventually, it dawned upon me that there was no one around to be impressed by my masculinising display of contempt – I did not have to constantly affirm my manliness and was quite at liberty to enjoy these films without fear of persecution. Finally, somewhere near the end of Pretty Woman, I began to feel a cosy glow in the chest area. I was now comfortably canoodling with the rom-com, and as she wrapped her arms around me, I seized the opportunity to feel her up a bit.

First, I groped her archetypes. We are not supposed to laugh at romance in romantic comedies (romance is serious shit) - our chuckles are marshalled instead towards the ‘hopeless case’ characters to whom love comes miraculously a-knocking: The klutz/neurotic (Bridget Jones’s Diary); the hard nosed careerist (The Wedding Planner); the outcast/contextual misfit (Pretty Woman, She’s All That); the player/tease/commitment-o-phobe (Hitch, The Sweetest Thing). Almost all rom-com characters appeal to one of these four archetypes. The hilarity ensues as we watch these neurotic misfits screw things up royal before finally being knocked into place by the love pillow. We ‘feel good’ during romantic comedies, for they take us to a world where even a prostitute or an utter deadbeat is capable of throwing some hot (and often wealthy) piece of arse head over heels. In rom-com world, it doesn’t matter if you’re a social catastrophe or a relationship pariah – arbitrarily awesome shit is going to happen to you whether you deserve it or not.

Having copped a feel of the rom-com, I began to wonder where she came from, and why I, like so many others, derived so much pleasure from her. Now while romance and comedy have been sharing the same bed since A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ‘classics’ that established the rom-com as a film genre really didn’t arise till the 1980’s. Ironically, the rise of the romantic comedy coincided with the death of the love generation (can anyone imagine a late 60’s/70’s rom-com?). In a decade marked by ferocious materialism there arose a genre that acted as a salve for those who were disaffected by the instrumental relationships necessitated by consumer culture. People still wanted to see interactions that defied personal utility – watch people risk their reputations/fortunes/emotional health for the sake of someone else. The zeitgeist of the 80’s told you to wear Armani, drive a Porsche, befriend powerful and interesting people – the rom-com tells you it doesn’t matter what you wear, what you drive or who you know; you are capable of being loved.

A noble sentiment, but is love not acting a bit like snake oil here? No matter how damaged, degraded or instrumentalised you are in the rom-com, love comes along and sorts your shit out. But how did this love arise, and from where? Hot girl sees hot boy. Love happens. That’s it. Now as attractive as that equation might appear, for me at least, it rings a little hollow. I’m not going to say anything as outrageously unpopular as ‘there’s no such thing as love at first sight’, but surely there’s got to be more to love than some arbitrary, scopophilic hormonal surge. There must be some sort of poetic gravitas to your ‘love-at-first-sight’ that allows them to explode onto the narrative of your life and drag it into a passionate singularity. Shouldn’t there be some sort of reason for you having fallen in love with a particular person? It may be a reason you can barely articulate, a reason that has you trying to express something too subtle and too outrageous to be ensnared in words, but it’s a reason you feel is there.

Some rom-coms, what I will hesitate to call ‘good’ romantic comedies, do provide us with an insight into why two characters might have fallen in love. When Harry Met Sally cultivates a convincing yin-yang style relationship between a melancholic philanderer and dismissively optimistic monogamist ~ the poetic element to their relationship might not be frenzied or profound, but at least you can see why the two fall in love. For the most part, however, the love in rom-com’s is an artificial plot device. Consequently, far from defying the structured, rationalised and contractual relationships that characterise interactions in a consumer culture, the romance in many rom-coms begins to reflect them.

The romance in the rom-com has begun to operate on its own rational of contractual exchange: grand gestures of selfless surrender are traded in order to receive a pre-defined product (a relationship that bares all the signs of a fulfilling, hetero-normative romance). Mark forsakes his career in New York to stay in London with Bridget Jones in tern, for sakes her dignity and health by dashing after him in the snow, dressed in only a sweater and zebra striped panties. The gestures are exchanged, the two are now granted their meaningful relationship. Even a good romantic comedy, like When Harry Met Sally, falls short of defying this rationalised exchange. Here the entwining of complimentary opposites, where the two party’s strengths compensate for each others flaws, can be easily interpreted as a mutually beneficial agreement rather than surrender to ardor. While not promoting the rationalised signs of romantic transaction as overtly as other rom-com’s, When Harry Met Sally fails to cultivate poetic modes of meaning that lie outside the quid pro quo logic of exchange.

And this is what I feel is largely missing from the romantic comedy, they’ve never represented to me the peculiar, poetic and mysterious language that lovers cultivate between each other - that feverish and enthralling discourse, dancing at the intersection of agony and bliss, that radically alters the way you evaluate your world. A true love is meant to be ‘the one’, utterly unique, but precious few rom-coms provide us with relationships that operate on a thrillingly singular dynamism. There are a couple of films haunting the fringes of the genre that come damn close, such as the nurturing sado-masochism displayed of The Secretary, or the excentric (and mildly autistic) romance of Punch Drunk Love – but still these films, while awesome in their own right, still don’t speak to me of the wild poetry I recognize as love.

Perhaps I am simply asking too much of film. I might very well claim that it is impossible to translate that sort of maddening love onto screen had I not seen Hiroshima Mon Amour – that illustrates a relationship so brilliant it becomes the poetic lens through which the lovers make sense of their entire lives while they are entwined. For a brief moment, in this film, the city of Hiroshima and it’s brutal past becomes a song to the roar of this couple’s love. The language of these lovers is completely alien to the conventional understandings of ‘self interest’ – it even goes so far as to make a joke of the very idea of a ‘self’. Whether such a seething romance could co-exist with a comedy is a moot point, but damn it, if it’s possible, I’d love to see it happen.

Hense, for those of us who crave relationships that rise above the tepid world of contractual, rationalised exchange, the romantic comedy satisfies briefly, but ultimately operates like a bandaid over a bullet wound. They indicate that there may be these ‘self interest’ defying relationships out there, they teach us surprisingly little about how they arise or how they can transcend the banal logic of consumer culture in any meaningful way. In terms of how love, in it’s most profound sense, works it has very little to teach us. It’s a damn shame that the rom-com, as the dominant representative of romance in cinema, has only provided us with a pale shadow of love – weightless to those of us who’ve ever fallen hard for someone.

So having frolicked with the rom-com for a good couple of months, I can say for certain that she is a sexy chic, fun to be around, but, alas, not the best conversationalist. I’ll be keeping her number for the odd booty call, but I’m afraid a serious relationship just isn’t in the cards.

Published in Voiceworks # 71

www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php

Moral Macabre - The Ethics of Cinematic Violence

As a self-aggrandising wanker, I am possessed of a highly sensitive ethical compass. As a jaded, testosterone-addled film nerd, I also like to watch the inside of someone’s skull being sprayed all over the camera by some sharp talking mother-fucker with a magnum. Nietzsche claimed that the mark of a great personality was how many paradoxes it could contain without destroying itself. Perhaps the reason I love that man so much is because he manages to flatter me for opinions and tastes that ought to be damned as hypocritical.

How can I, or anyone, support the anti-war movement one moment, and then gorge on cinematic violence the next? Should our off-screen ethics have any bearing on the way we feel about onscreen events? Or are ethics a bit of a third wheel when it comes to latex flesh and corn-syrup blood? Tarantino’s Kill Bill series and the recent Frank Miller adaptations Sin City and 300 demonstrate the acceptance of highly stylised, fetishistic bloodshed into cinema’s mainstream. More and more of us are consuming cinematic violence not as an expression of a hero’s moral force as in, say, Rambo or Die Hard, but as a conscious revelry in the spectacle of violence itself. But what place can our ethical convictions hold while we bask in the crimson glow of the latest skull-splitting symphony?

It would be nice to claim that ethical considerations do not apply to films because they are just simulations – neutering cinema as ‘mere entertainment’. But the practise of film criticism is predicated on the idea that films actually mean something. Perhaps then, it is not the films that are insubstantial simulations, but our ethics. Are morals just socialised superego niceties that censor our baser instincts for blood – things that can be neutralised in order to enjoy a hearty celluloid gore fest? Maybe – but again, that’s not the most attractive formulation of the human condition. Surely there must be some way to remain ethical while enjoying lashings of the ol’ ultra-violence.

But before we imbue our bloody filmic diets with ethical meaning, we must first establish the types of violence we are addressing. There are, after all, many flavours of cinematic violence – flavours so distinct you can identify a film’s director by the texture of its violence. There’s the slimy, septic violence of a Cronenburg film (Video Drome, eXistenZ); the snap, crackle and pop violence of a Wachowski Bros film; the crunchy violence of a Rob Zombie film; the insinuated, subterranean violence of a Lynch film; the torrential violence of a Takashi Miike film (Ichi the Killer); the rubbery, gushy, starburst violence of a Tarantino a film; and most recently, the treacly, photoshoppy violence of the Frank Miller film (Sin City, 300). Though the flavours of violence may be diverse, they still generally fall under two categories: ‘sweet’ and ‘savoury’. ‘Sweet’ violence tries to get you to whisper, ‘Cool’, as stylised arcs of blood and intricate kung-fu strikes hurl across the screen. ‘Savoury’ violence is the kind that wants you to screw your eyes up, clutch your gut and rasp, ‘Ow … my immortal soul.’

Our encounters with savoury filmic violence are not difficult to ethically affirm. There is little that is contemptible in confronting the iniquitous, putrid and cripplingly tragic aspects of the human condition. While it may be easier for us to quarantine the more horrifying aspects of our world from investigation – to dismiss the conscious cruelties of our social epochs as ‘evil’ aberrations to the rational progression of ‘the human good’ – it is far less fruitful than studying them.

Films can provide us with an intimate study of the mechanics of cruelty without anyone actually having to be killed. They can show us a psychopath or tyrant’s rationales and modes of evaluation (and indeed, allow us to investigate the modes of cultural evaluation by which we condemn their horrors). A thorough investigation of violence can disarm atrocities of their power to traumatise, debilitate and degrade, preventing them from bewildering us with terror. Even more importantly, a sound knowledge of violence (and our feelings toward it) can help us to prevent violence from subtly colonising our lives.

American Psycho presented us a character whose world was devoid of any meaning beyond egoistic consumption and instrumentalisation, to the point where he hacks people to pieces in order to experience some sort of intensity. While recitations of rape and murder drop casually from the glossed mouths of mellifluous news reporters, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, through its violently nauseating rape and murder scenes that had my friends and I shaking with rage and disgust, reminded us of what utterly harrowing and irreconcilable crimes rape and murder really are. Pan’s Labyrinth coaxes out our inner child with a fantasy story, then traumatises that inner child with savagely realistic war crimes to draw out the profound repulsion we felt for atrocities as children. Confronting such spectacles of violence on the screen re-invokes feelings that we may have thought were long-since desensitised by our constant engagement with violent discourse.

So much for the violence we loathe. But what of the violence we are meant to enjoy? The sweet violence, the violence that film directors package as a savage delight. Confronting this violence always troubled me - despite my wet dreams of being ethically impeccable, I couldn’t stop myself from loving the kaleidoscopic carnage.

For a long time I just assumed that I was a sucker for a bit of sanitised savagery – until I watched the latest spate of Frank Miller adaptations. The bludgeoning and slaughtering in those films was stylistically flawless, but goddamn those films were boring. I was never so happy to hate a film in all my life as when I yawned at one of Sin City’s shaved gorilla-men grind some guy’s face into the road by hanging him out of a moving car. At that exact moment the entirety of my psyche crooned in unison, ‘Yeah … this is utter shit.’ Finally, I knew that there was something more to my appreciation of violence than jugular slicing.

While I appreciated the technical brilliance of the visuals, these Frank Miller mediocrities have managed to get something grievously wrong. Somehow, they’d done what the Bible does – they managed to make violence tedious. This is because the characters of these films are completely vacuous and everything they stood for was a bore. The denizens of Sin City were as thin and transparent as beer-sodden souvlaki paper. And the film’s three plotlines are almost exactly the same: hard man’s sex-working dame gets fucked with by bad men, so hard man shrugs his shoulders and goes on an all-or-nothing rampage until his dame’s shit is sorted.

It was almost as if the film was trying to critique the vapidity of macho posturing by recycling the same humdrum adventure, but unfortunately these towers of testosterone were sincerely pitched at us as objects of admiration rather than ridicule. The three different men were so two dimensional, they actually managed to come off as exactly the same person. Devoid of depth or human interest, Sin City’s fight scenes ended up being as engaging as a computer screen saver. The fight scenes of 300’s Spartans shared a similar fate. 300’s warriors were such caricatures of masculinity that they couldn’t even say ‘I love you’ to their wives for fear of not being tough. Consequently, who was to care if they lived or died? They were just waxed chests attached to a bad cliche.

If you cannot become intoxicated with a film’s character or passionately root for their goals, it is almost impossible to become lost in the frenzy of combat. Unless it can be meaningfully engaged with, filmic violence is nothing other than a reflection on the back of one’s retina. Pulp Fiction was such a treat on account of its magnificently flamboyant characters. We accepted their forays into violence because it seemed like the natural expression of those characters’ potency – they were paying the price of having lived so large, carving the final bloody stanza of their life poem before disappearing into death, exile or domesticity. In good exploitation films, the stylised violence isn’t a meaningless excess, it’s an avenue of a character’s expression. Nowhere is this idea presented more brilliantly than in Jim Jarmusch's west-ploitation flick Dead Man, when the Indian shaman turns to the protagonist William Blake – awkwardly holding a pistol for the first time – and says,

That weapon will replace your tongue.

You will learn to speak through it,

and your poetry will now be written with blood.

Within the cinematic context, violence is a means of expression that does not require the extinguishing of a biological life. When evaluating the ethical viability of sweet violence, perhaps we should ask ourselves what this violence is expressing, rather than prematurely damning the carnage as appealing to some inherent bloodlust.

Published in Voiceworks Magazine # 70

http://www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php

Darkly Scanned – Animation that Apes the Ratrace

Ever since our mothers sat us down in front of them to shut us up, cartoons have been a form of escape. Whether it is the heady moral optimism of Disney, or the arbitrarily poetic child-scapes of Studio Ghibli, the feature-length animation provides us with a realm of unadulterated fantasy. For an hour and a half we can set our minds out to pasture in a world of impossibly lush landscapes, talking animals, enormous eyes and ridiculous waist-to-bust ratios. Unlike cinema, magic in cartoons is not just a ‘special effects’ aberration of the reality principle, it is the rule. Cause and Effect? Supply and Demand? Gravity? Fuck ’em. In cartoons we can put reality on hold and chill out all the way down to our inner child. However, animation now has a bastard child running amok, ruining its snug reputation as a kaleidoscopic escape. A twisted hybrid of animation and live action footage, the rotoscoped film dances all over the distinction between real and unreal, animated and acted. And if that’s not enough to fry your yams, rotoscoping is an art that can be practiced on your own computer using standard post-production software (if you have the time, patience, and requisite neurosis).

For those of you who lack a fetish for experimental animation, rotoscoping is the art of animating over the top of live-action footage, using frames of the photographed footage as reference points from which to trace the animation. The technique itself is nothing new. Disney has been using it since the 30s. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, footage of live actors was used to help create scenes (such as dances) that would otherwise be extremely tricky to animate from scratch. What’s exciting about the latest incarnations of rotoscoping (such as Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life) is the way in which the technique is being employed. Unlike in Disney film, where the rotoscoped scene is animated over so heavily it blends seamlessly into the purely fabricated cartoons that follow it, A Scanner Darkly never lets you forget that you are indeed watching a character who was a flesh and blood person before they were mashed through production companies’ circuit boards. However, there are some points in the film where characters’ expressions are clearly exaggerated by the hand of an animator, or when the characters interact with overtly fabricated cartoons. Is what you’re watching photographed or simulated? It becomes impossible to tell.

While the rotoscoped flick wears its simulated nature on its sleeve, we cannot dismiss it as the pure fantasm of animation; there’s always the creeping sense of something incarnate bubbling below the surface of the rotoscoped frames. Linklater could not have chosen a better medium for transporting his audience into the hallucinatory world of A Scanner Darkly’s neuro-nauts: a world where thought experiments and paranoid fantasies are frequently confused for ‘reality’ and vice versa.

But in situating the film so firmly in the frayed neural minefield of heavy drug use, Linklater actually robs A Scanner Darkly (and rotoscoping) of its subversive potential.

Phillip K Dick’s original novel was a portrait of a dystopia where drug induced, ego-splitting neural freak-outs were one’s only escape from the homogenised banality of daily consumer life. Dick paints a picture of a world where both landscape and one’s sphere of potential action have become completely dominated by the interests of bodies corporate (the triumph of monopoly capitalism). Life there is described as ‘a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed’, strolling down its streets like walking on ‘a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over’. It was the crippling sameness and predictability of this world that forced Dick’s anti-hero, Bob Arctor, to forsake his comfortable family life and delve into the savagely poetic world of a junkie. Indeed, drug use seemed to be the only way for Arctor to even be able to think outside the neatly categorised and commoditised square. And a substantial chunk of Dick’s A Scanner Darkly is dedicated to tracing the bleak and sickeningly uncritical lives of the ‘straights’ (non-drug users) in a fearsome critique of the vapidity of consumer culture; a critique that seems to be largely ignored by Linklater in his filmic adaptation.

At almost every point in the text where Dick marshals an attack on our homogenised lifestyles, Linklater ignores it completely, plays it down, or cheerily dismisses it as one of the character’s fuddled, paranoid jokes. The only point in the film where Linklater does nod toward the triteness of ‘straight life’ is when Arctor illustrates the mechanistic tedium of his former life as a father. The result is that Arctor’s the characters’ descent into drug use can be easily dismissed as a midlife crisis or a juvenile avoidance of responsibility rather than a symptom of a society affected by a pathological concern for efficiency and production.

While Linklater presents us with a dazzling and harrowing tale of the dangers of drug use, rotoscoping would have been the perfect way to illustrate the soulless uniformity of Dick’s dystopia; its coloured cells could have sucked out all the subtlety and detail from the photographed frames, leaving behind only a clean, efficient, bear bones bland-scape. The ever present potential for animated chaos could not only have shown us the surreal mayhem of the drug user’s mind, but the frailty and contingency of that thin, quantifiable and predictable slice of the human condition we designate as ‘reality’. Instead, Linklater quarantines the unsettling and destabilising effects of rotoscoping by tying them solely to a narrative of drug use. ‘Don’t worry kid, all that weird shit’s just some junkie’s synapses misfiring. There’s only one real, and it’s still real. Stay off the drugs.’

The more cynical among us might wonder how subversive a rotoscoped film like A Scanner Darkly can ever be if it requires a multi-million dollar Warner Brothers budget to produce. If a major studio is involved, the answer is perhaps ‘not very’, but as RMIT student Thomas Kinsman has discovered, one doesn’t necessarily need a colossal budget in order to craft visual candy akin to A Scanner Darkly.

At first glance, producing something that looks like Linklater’s latest rototrip seems like an impossibly formidable task for the amateur film-maker. A Scanner Darkly was filmed on high-end HD cameras and rotoscoped using a commercially unavailable program nicknamed ‘Rotoshop’ that was specially designed for Linklater’s projects. It might not ever occur to the young film-maker that a similarly impressive job can be done in Final Cut, AfterEffects, Shake or Commotion, and that the quality of the footage rotoscoped does not drastically alter the end product. The standard post-production program Adobe AfterEffects has been Kinsman’s weapon of choice in rotoscoping his latest short film Alexander: The Not So Great … Pinecone Adventure, which was filmed on uber-cheap miniDV tape (with no great detriment to the quality of the animation).

While writing the script for his film, Kinsman wondered how he might actualise the fantastically absurd situations he had scripted on his non-existent student budget. He says,

I thought of turning it into an animation, only I didn’t want it to look like your regular low-budget student Flash animation. I then remembered seeing Waking Life a while back and how I’d loved how kooky and surreal it looked. Not long after, I did a few tests and figured out my own way of producing fully rotoscoped footage in AfterEffects. The results perfectly matched the films ultra-surreal content.

For the budding film-makers among us who want to give rotoscoping a shot, Kinsman recommends that you take some time to plough through the tutorials available with the post-production software, particularly those concerning masks:

Get to know AfterEffects and all the tools it has to offer. It’s an extremely versatile program and the creative possibilities are practically endless. However it can take a long time to produce something of worth, but if you’re keen enough to stick it out, you can often end up with something really nice.

For those of you interested in seeing what Kinsman has managed to create through his home-brew rotoscoping technique, visit www.alexanderthenotsogreat.com. The film itself should be unleashed into the short-film circuit come February/March.

So, whether you want to subvert (among other things) the distinction between the actual and the simulated, or simply find a low budget means of creating a film that stands its aesthetic ground next to higher budget productions, rotoscoping may just be your bag. On a purely practical level, the technique affords the director an enormous amount of freedom, allowing them access to the convincingly outrageous contortions of the animated character while retaining the subtle expression of the actor. Thus, in spite of Linklater’s Scanner slump, rotoscoping is shaping up to be a strong contender for the best thing since sliced celluloid.

Published In Voiceworks Magazine # 68

Aussie Aussie Aussie! yawn yawn yawn

As a Young Aspiring Australian Director (YAAD), the single most vital skill I could hope to possess is not artistic, but social. Before artistic brilliance even has a chance to rear its head, a young director must have mastered the art of the weasel. One‘s inner weasel must not only be able to:

A) Seduce some poor property owner into letting you and your unkempt crew trample all over their property for a day while armed with 1000W lights;

B) Coax disillusioned actors and malnourished crew to sacrifice their time (all on the same day) and turn up god-knows-where at god-knows-what hour of the morning to bust a nut making YOUR dreams come true,

But also:

C) Do all of the above by paying everyone SOLEY in reject shop lollies.

However, the guile and charisma exhausted by a YAAD in such efforts pale in comparison to the exquisite charm and nous one must command in order to weasel one’s way into the virginally narrow pockets of “The Industry” (an ominous, amorphous body of dejected artists upon whose whims your creations depend). Though perhaps I am painting the necessities of the YAAD in too broad strokes, for there is only ONE vital interpersonal skill that is essential to a YAAD’s inventory. One social kingpin upon which all your other charms depend. That talent is Dissimulation (or the ability to hide ones true feelings). Before you can get the haughty (though hot) actor to do what you want, you simply MUST be able to hide the fact that you think they’re an uppity wanker of lukewarm talent, otherwise your whole weaselly enterprise will crumble into a chaos of capped toothed screams and manicured slaps. You MUST be able to conceal from the boozy script guru that their ideas on writing are naive and ridiculous before you can convince them that their sagacious advice was integral to the formation of the 7^th draft of your script, and that were they to fund the creation of this film, they’d really just be sponsoring their own brilliant project.

My dissimulative abilities have been cultivated through the ‘school of hard knocks’. Once, my face was a veritable kaleidoscope of every malicious thought and conflict-friendly opinion that happened to cross my blackened, cynical little mind. However, after a series of actor tantrums and crew walkouts, I chiselled myself into the most unrelentingly optimistic and congenial fellow ever to have cared about your feelings. Now, I’m one seriously affable motherfucker. However, my amiable Achilles still has his heel. There is one subject upon which I cannot, no matter how hard I try, to disguise my unpopular sentiments. It is seriously debilitating, but I just cannot help it. It is though there is an unbreakable neural circuit between my ears and my face which curls my lips and rolls my eyes as soon as I hear certain phrases. I could be facing the head of the Australian Film Institute, it matters not. As soon as I hear the terms ‘Uniquely Australian’ or ‘Aussie Cultural Icon’ spill from the mouths of potential funding bodies, a huge neon sign erupts from my face that reads “I DON’T LIKE AUSTRALIAN FILMS.”

It’s not that I think Australian filmmakers are shit. If there is one thing 5 years of weaselling around amateur and student film circles has taught me, it is that I am a small fish in a threateningly large pond of talent. In almost all sectors of the Arts we are a nation with talent coming out our sunburnt ears, so why is it that I am always left feeling underwhelmed (and mildly depressed) as Aussie credits roll? The only explanation for the disjuncture between local talent and the mediocre output of our commercial film industry is that there is something going wrong with the institutions that allow local ideas to become commercial films: our funding bodies.

Based on the international, feature-length output of the Australian film industry over the past 10 years, I cannot help but infer that the funding bodies responsible for producing these films (both public and private) have a pathological fixation on creating ‘uniquely Australian ‘ films. ‘Uniquely Australian’ can be defined here as a film that ham-fistedly reminds an audience that they are indeed watching an Australian film with every passing frame. There are the exceptions of course (the stellar Lantana being the most obvious candidate) but by and large, Aussie films seem to be debilitated by a constant need to re-affirm their status as Australian.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a film being overtly set within Australia (truth be known, I’m really quite fond of this place). However I feel there is something very wrong with our funding passing over good scripts in favour of tepid, unsubstantial films that trade on the hallmarks of our culture.

The Widely Accessible Aussie Film (WAAF) unrelentingly demarcates itself as ‘Australian’ by doing at least one of three things:

1) Fetishising the Australian Landscape;

2) Fixating itself on decorative cultural traits (such as accents or turns of phrase); or

3) Exploring Australian culture by identifying what that culture is not, often through focussing on an outcast, someone who struggles to ‘fit in’

The recently televised Japanese Story is a prime example of the first technique: two unlikely companions caught in the thrall of the vast and savagely beautiful outback terrain of Australia have a transcendent love affair (before the savage-beautiful landscape claims one of the lovers as its victim). The second tendency is, of course, exemplified in recent comedies such as Kenny, Crackerjack, and Razzle Dazzle. Aside its lapses into romantic comedy, what is Kenny outside of a fixation on the way Australians talk about poo? The final technique is utilised by ‘fitting in’ films as Little Fish and Looking for Alibrandi, where marginalised characters go about the complicated task of fitting into Australian culture (thus, negatively inferring what Australian culture really is).

Now, all of these examples, while being quite good films, say nothing substantive about what Australian culture really is, and thus leave one feeling just that little bit disappointed. Much like a Hollywood sex scene, they all flitter about the point, tantalising us with what promises to be unique Australian cultural modalities without really delivering the goods.

All the characters in Japanese Story are able to say of the Australian Outback (the overwhelmingly poetic landscape that catalyzes their unlikely relationship) is that it is Big and Old, Outside of these inanities, they seem to be able to say no more, they stutter, and the film compensates for this vacuum with thick lashings of sweeping landscape shots.

Devoid of their accents, is there anything ‘uniquely Australian’ about Kenny or Razzle Dazzle? Does America not have self-aggrandizing dance instructors? Do other nations not laugh at their shit? The turns of phrase that these films employ to identify themselves as ‘uniquely Australian’ on the international stage are merely decorations disguising conventional plotlines (such as Kenny’s romantic comedy).

Finally, in films like Little Fish or Looking for Alibrandi, we only get the sketchiest indication of what is essential about Aussie culture (what it really is) through the study of what it is not (the individuals who can’t fit in). The archetypal ‘struggling to fit in’ Australian drama shows us the misfits that surround the puzzle of Australian culture without ever giving us its centrepiece.

Why is it the WAAF can never provide us with anything that is substantially and essentially Australian, and instead only fuzzy outlines and decorative quirks? And why do the funding bodies persist in sponsoring such films?

In answering this question, I would first ask you to look at the eerie parallel between the means by which WAAFs demarcate their ‘Australianess’ and the techniques our politicians are using to consolidate our ‘National Identity’. The rhetorical techniques that the Howard government attitude employs to invoke it’s australianess seems to perfectly mirror the 3 WAAF methods outlined above.

Like the ‘struggling to fit in’ film (Little Fish), our Government is increasingly attempting to define Australia by what it is not, as opposed to what actually is. In my view, no politician in either of the major parties has succeeded in forcing Howard to clarify what ‘unAustralian’ means through concretely defining what it means to be really Australian. It almost seems that it is conceded on both sides that to be Australian is simply not to be unAustralian (for instance, not a radical Muslim, homosexual, or a latte-sipping elite). Like the filmic comedies (Kenny), our politicians give their doings a unique Australian feel through employing phraseology (like ‘fair go’ and ‘mateship’) when, in truth, our social, economic and foreign policies are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate from those of the United States. They are but decorations around a conventional political plot.

Like Japanese Story, our politicians stop short of being able to tell us just what is essential about Australia and its people. Howard claims that the primary achievement of his government has been to ‘restore national pride’ without ever telling us, ‘pride in what?’ Anyone who dares question of what actions exactly we should be recently proud, or what it means to be Australian, must be unAustralian and aggressively opposed. Real Australians don’t need to know what ‘Australianness’ is, they just need to have that Australian feeling when they look at the flag (or drape it round their shoulders).

My suspicion is that this striking resemblance between the mechanics of the WAAF and the Howard Government campaign to restore ‘national pride’ arises from a common root: an anxiety over the dissolution of Australian culture. . UnAustralian is almost impossible to distinguish from anti-American. Cultural values are disintegrating into the singular axiom of capital. There is no value to education outside of the money you can make from it, your health matters only to the extent that your wellness contributes to the economy. Your work only has really value insofar as your employer can gain from it – the socio-cultural value of your work is all but negligible. What is important is that you turn a profit. Globalisation has introduced a massive influx of new, niche marketed lifestyles - again, each only as valuable in as much you are willing to pay for them (the clothes, the car, the hair). Lifestyle branding has now made our identities an aestheticised and commoditised consumer choice. All that seems to be left of our culture seems to be the decorative quirks and phraseologies. Virgin airlines can become Australian by calling red ‘Blue’. American policies become Australian by using the terms ‘mateship’ and ‘fair go’. You are now Australian by virtue of your decoration and your not-unAustralianess, and little else.

Like any other institution of a neo-liberal state, the prime motivation of our film industry’s funding bodies is capital: to get bums on cinema seats.

The cultivation of a society in which value is only placed upon endeavours which are profitable, that disregard welfare, and in which individuals differentiate themselves through arbitrary consumer choices has, unsurprisingly, resulted in a marked degradation in social solidarity. And, for good reasons, this has scared the shit out of our politicians who now try to manufacture social solidarity through the creation of ‘outgroups’. We become a nation united by common enemies (unAustralians). However, unable to give any sort of definition of what Australianism actually is (because perhaps there isn’t one) the Government instead cultivates an ‘Australian feeling’ through the use of cultural aesthetics (such as the flag, or specific language).

And it is not just the Howard government who is gravely concerned with this profound loss of communitarian cultural values and ‘National Identity’. As our society fragments, we as Australians are likewise becoming acutely concerned with ‘what it means to be Australian’. Our film funding bodies, being primarily motivated by capital (like everything else operating under a neo-liberal economic orthodoxy), know all too well of this fixation and cannot help but cater to this widening market. Films that attempt to answer the insoluble riddle of ‘what it means to be Australian’ get bums on seats. But sadly, as a result of the aforementioned atomisation of Australian culture, the WAAF will never provide a satisfactory account of what distinguishes us from other privileged Western states. There will always be that little note of disappointment and depression as the credits roll.

Perhaps our Film funding bodies are not responding to the same anxiety that afflicts our Government..Perhaps they simply have no confidence in the abilities of our screenwriters to differentiate their films as ‘unique’ on the international stage without employing Australian symbology. Whatever the case, I believe it is high time that we started sponsoring films that are simply ‘unique’ as opposed to ‘uniquely Australian’.

Published In Voiceworks Magazine # 69

http://www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php