Somnopolis

A relation of mine was recently married to a fellow who shares his name with a certain dour, American novelist. I briefly considered buying a selection of McCarthy’s work as a wedding gift, but thankfully was talked out of it as no one else would have got the joke.

Never having read much of his work, I am nevertheless excited to see the film adaptation of The Road, a bleak addition to the post-apocalypse genre. It stars Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron, looks to be visually stunning and given the story material emotionally draining. Mortensen plays the widower known only as ‘Man’, who together with his son travels across a tortured landscape towards the sea, where they hope to find sanctuary. Along the way they encounter maraudering gangs and cannibals. The world itself has suffered some unnamed catastrophic environmental collapse, with most forms of life now extinct.

Upon watching the trailer promoting a film which the Guardian’s Xan Brooks among others have lauded as a masterpiece in the tradition of Children of Men, I found myself thinking…..looks an awful lot like Fallout 3.

The game franchise inherited by Bethesda – currently involved in nasty arbitration against its original producers – also tells the story of a father/son relationship in a world ruined by disaster. Players enter the game as the son of a scientist who has wandered into the wilderness, leaving you to follow menaced by, you guessed it, cannibals and violent gangs. There is even a further echo of McCarthy’s book where you encounter a pleasant community composed of two seemingly normal families, still dressed in pre-cataclysm attire,  hiding a dark secret.

Have Mr McCarthy’s lawyers been made aware of this? I wonder if there is grounds. Although I don’t want to encourage especial litigiousness in the author, given the wonderful parody of his writing that features in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

Peter Bradshaw’s review of Inglourious Basterds inspired this Guardian blog, hosting a thread that has Tarantino defenders and critics battling it out. In fact when I last blogged about Inglourious Basterds, I predicted just such an outcry.

Always fun to watch these things play out.

*SPOILERS*

Today I received a message from a Tarantino fan that read as follows:

“Hitler took a full magazine of slugs to the face. and for that Quentin, I shall be forever in your debt sir… or as aldo would say, ‘In Yo Debit suh’…”

This reveals one of the key aspects of Inglourious Basterds and one which is at least partly responsible for some of the criticism directed at the film.

Hitler gets killed by cinema.

Much like Mel Brooks transformed Nazism into a camp joke with a few funny one-liners (”Don’t be stupid/be a smarty/come and join/the Nazi party”), Tarantino has taken the tragedy of the Holocaust and Hitler’s rise to power and invented a fictional resolution to these events that could only take place in a schlocky B-movie. Which Inglourious Basterds most certainly is.

Whether that is the viewer’s cup of tea or not is a matter of opinion.

All that being said, there is something troubling in just how divorced from any sense of reality Tarantino’s vision is. Horrific violence is incidental, sex is momentary and dialogue unfolds during a scene without a care for the next set-up. The films themselves are atypically numb to such concerns, as they have become excessively glutted by cinema itself. Not pure cinema, or refined artistic examples of Cinema, but kitsch and camp exploitation movies. Grindhouse style, the term Tarantino helpfully popularised. Pulp Fiction/Kill Bill and the rest also appear to be stories occuring within a shared fictional universe, with occasional images and character names popping up as hints that we have never left.

There is something astonishingly adolescent about all this. There is even a trace of Asperger’s obsessiveness in the amount of detail given to parodies of films few have ever seen. It may be the case that to Tarantino this world is more ‘real’, than the one inhabited by his audience. The growing resentment and complaints of indulgence would seem to testify to that. Tarantino has left this world behind and is retreating further and further away, free to enjoy his Big Kahuna Burgers and Red Apple Cigarettes.

Ah Deadvina.
Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set, the ‘zombie Big Brother’, show was transmitted over five consecutive nights. Meaning internet fandom were online discussing it every night. And within hours Ms. Davina McCall had a new moniker.

Here’s why -

Charlie Brooker works as a television critic for the Guardian. I’m a fan. He spits his way through hate-filled articles on various shows or things that have happened to annoy him this week. Entertaining fellow. He has also, however, written exhaustively about Big Brother – both ‘normal’ and celebrity versions. At times the reviews spilled over into pure bile, but yet he continued to write about them. I could never understand why.

Course for his first television script, he wrote what he knew. It seems Brooker knows a lot about Big Brother. And Zombies.

For Dead Set is a very well written horror script. It has the necessary amounts of gore, suspense and humour. The characters are almost all incredibly selfish and entirely self-absorbed. Fatal traits in the middle of a life or death situation. What’s more the people fighting the undead are not mere cardboard cut-out figures, a fault with many zombie pics. Even in the best of the genre, Romero’s Dead series. Their obnoxiousness makes them more believable. You don’t want them to die, because they’re people. It’s a change from the poor acting and poor dialogue of typical horror films actually encouraging audiences to wish death upon the cast.

The plot concerns eviction night at the Big Brother house. Reports are coming through on the news that riots have broken out all over Britain, but the show’s producer Patrick decides to carry on regardless. Of course the violence is due to a massive outbreak of zombiedom and during the filming of the eviction hordes of the undead storm the set.

The cast of Big Brother are completely unaware of what has transpired. Turns out the house is one of the safest places to be. Upon the arrival of a blood-soaked survivor named Kelly though, the incredulous housemates finally realize that ‘Big Brother ain’t watching us’.

Some see the producer Patrick to be Brooker’s Mary Sue. He certainly does look upon absolutely everyone around him with complete contempt and despite his utter cruelty, also displays a certain determined intelligence, pulling a McGuyver moment out his hat to deal with Deadvina. Kevin Eldon plays Joplin, a repeat of his ‘poet’, schtick. Brooker hands him a speech similar to Ken Foree’s in Dawn of the Dead, comparing the zombie outbreak to the Book of Revelation and asking whether this isn’t a punishment from God for humanity’s sins.

‘Yeah but why’s he been such a cunt about it?’ comes the reply.

Compare this to the portentous and heavy handed Diary of the Dead as a read on our current media culture.

And yes, yes, yes they’re running zombies, but classicism isn’t everything.

Zombies and vampires and werewolves – oh my!

Charlie Brooker, redoubtable Guardian columnist and sour wit extraordinaire, recently wrote a television show based around Big Brother. I say based as he introduced zombies into the mix. Now one complaint often thrown out there about the British version of Big Brother was that the contestants all were zombies – Brooker just took the next step.

The show has concluded and already plenty of words have been typed in response. Most interesting of all was Simon Pegg’s take. As one of the writers and stars of Shaun of the Dead – not to mention a confirmed Romero fan (as the zombie episode of Spaced can testify) – the actor took issue with the show Dead Set….zombies shouldn’t run. The article can be found here.

He describes the history of the zombie film extremely well – although I take issue with his remark that Romero was influenced directly by Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. I was under the impression that it was the Italian-made film adaptation starring Vincent Price that got under Romero’s skin. Certainly there are similarities between it and Night of the Living Dead. Brooker has already responded in his own column to Pegg’s argument.

It did get me thinking about zombies and their fanged relatives though. See as I understand it the myths of the vampire and the werewolf are steeped in Christian fears of damnation. Pegg mentions the zombie as a mournful, pitiful figure unlike the feral vamps – but that’s a fairly recent interpretation. Becoming a victim of a vampire in the work of Stoker, Le Fanu etc. was terrifying because the end result was either death or damnation. The soul still had currency in those times. Similarly the werewolf symbolises the loss of a good, honest Christian’s soul. They are bestial and brutish, which was perceived to be the nature of all heathens. Remove the religious fear from the equation and what are you left with for the modern cinema goer?

Steve Niles’ 30 Days of Night sought to answer that. It secularised the vampire, transformed the lordly Counts and dilettantes of Stoker to Rice into a separate race of disfigured monsters that communicate among themselves in an inhuman language and behave like pack animals. The Christian cross is not relied upon, although daylight still works. Niles’ comic book was also released as a film, with much running of the undead. Pegg mentions that death should be a handicap, not an advantage. Yet there they are on screen, running hither and thither. They are also deprived of their traditional character. While our times are more secular by and large, the notion of a creature without a soul that preys on the unwary still resonates with me. Joss Whedon’s Angel made good use of this as a theme, with the undead numbering among LA’s rich and powerful. Niles pitched his story as the anti-Whedon story. Make vampires badass he argued, less canoodling with teenage girls. Sadly I think he has diminished them.

The horror hierarchy is simple – vampires : werewolves : zombies. What I find interesting is that whereas the first two have common roots in European Christian influenced folklore; the walking dead derive from Haitian voodoo. While the Christian archetypes were broadly adapted by the slave workers of Haiti for use in their ceremonies, this was to disguise the true nature of the Loa spirits, deriving from African tribal mysticism. The Bela Lugosi starring White Zombie marks the beginning of Western popular culture’s exposure to the idea of the zombie, defined as a slow-moving, vengeful murderer. This is long before Romero got his hands on the concept, so the film based its story around a slave plantation in the colonies. From the outset the undead are a response to the wealthy Europeans who are exploiting the native people. An Italian spin-off from Dawn of the Dead – Zombi 2 – also follows this theme.

This may be why the zombie is so popular. There are no niggling absurdities attached to the religious baggage of its European cousins (as summed up by Eddie Izzard “does fingers work?”).The zombie is a monster for this material age, a mockery of previous era’s notions of an afterlife. The shuffling corpse is as close a vision of life after death as we are afforded. The writer of the Dawn of the Dead remake James Gunn memorably commented on his film overtaking Mel Gibson’s The Passion with the notion of Jesus being only one member of the undead walking the earth. Dawn had thousands. With supernatural horror no longer tied to religious concerns, it is more likely for ficitional characters to seek the practical safety of a shopping mall or an oil rig than a church.

The so-called cannabis grandma, Patricia Tabram, 68, faces a possible jail term after a jury today decided she had breached the six-month suspended sentence she was given in April 2005.

So should the grandmother, from Humshaugh, Northumberland, who advocates the health-giving properties of the cannabis-laced casseroles and other dishes she makes at her bungalow, go to prison?

The judge at an earlier trial said he did not want to make a martyr of Tabram among pro-cannabis campaigners by putting her in jail.

But the judge in the latest proceedings, Barbara Forrester, said jail had to be considered as Tabram was in breach of her original sentence. She may be sentenced this afternoon after reports; if she is, we will keep you updated.

She seems to have a defiant attitude towards serving time, saying today she would be “everyone’s granny” in prison and adding: “I won’t have any medicine, I suppose. I will have to ask my son to bring in my walking stick and neck brace.”

It was also revealed today that Tabram had caused chaos in court earlier in the trial by revealing that cannabis she smuggled into court to put forward as evidence had temporarily gone missing.

Update: Tabram walked free from Carlisle crown court after being ordered to pay £1,000 costs and carry out 250 hours’ unpaid work for cultivating four cannabis plants and possessing the drug in powdered form. The conviction, her second, could yet see her evicted from her housing association bungalow.

@ Guardian.co.uk

This is another one of those stories that you just hope someone will transform into a novel.

Peter Solheim a parish councillor in Cornwall who professed interests in the occult, antiques, firearms and pornography, was killed by his partner Margaret James sometime in June 2004. Solheim was first sedated and then mutilated, before being dumped off the Cornish coast by James and her accomplices. Apparently she had been plotting his death for over three years, her motive being that he was about to leave her.

It gets better. Solheim had been enjoying an on-again off-again relationship with a woman named Jean Knowles for the past 20 years, with the full knowledge of James. It was Knowles whom Solheim was planning to settle down with. Had he done so James would have lost any entitlement to his earnings from the sale of antiques, firearms and porn (I just love listing his profession). Not only that, but his relationship with James had degenerated to the point were they referred to one another as IT, after having first met on a lonely hearts column with the shared interests of: “magic, paganism, sunsets and beaches.”

James told Solheim’s friends that he had gone on a fishing holiday round the coast of Spain and used his mobile to text them to this effect. However, in June his white dinghy was discovered adift and suspicions were raised. Money was discovered to have been stolen from Solheim’s safe and 24.000 pounds cash were found at James’ mother’s house. A further 900 pounds were stuffed under Ms. James’ mattress with a note that read “what go around, come around.”

The name of the boat which discovered the Solheim’s dinghy? The Clairvoyant.

Honestly you couldn’t make it up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,,1553819,00.html

I was reading the above article some days ago. It describes how the WRAF kept a record of possible lesbian members and after WWII censured them for ‘perverse behaviour’.

While reading it I thought what a wonderful idea for a novel this might be. It has a vital historical backdrop. Concerns gay rights. Subverts the image of a long-standing British institution even further.

And Hollywood adaptation….am I the only one who sees this here. The banner tagline writes itself. “They Lived. They Died. They Loved. Passionately.” etc. Punny titles like ‘The Mile High Club’, and so on.

With all likelihood though it would be an exploitational piece. Which is why I think the novelisation would be a perfect piece of chicklit, if one were to avoid such lazy marketing.

Now I’m not particularly familiar with this genre of writing. The closest I ever came were some Morgan Illewelyn books when I was ten….I don’t that those count. Chicklit seems to in the main concern middle-class wives in suburbia, or professional young twenty – thirty somethings damning men for their ails, while at the same time fretting that they will never find a husband.

Such a narrow field of writing deserves to be blown open. But what is the incentive, given that it is so profitable. Anyone have the figures for Helen Fielding’s latest? She and Dan Brown are the King and Queen of airport trash (and J. K. Rowling the little princess..)

Now lesbians in the skies, at-at guns blasting, maybe even a demented Kraut Dyke Red Baron!! You can visualize the Hollywood film and then we have the post-conflict Fall and the hypocrisy of the military establishment – drawing a neat comparison with contemporary gay rights.

See what we would have here? Non-homogenous female literature, something frankly that is needed to be made more popular. Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite are famous female genre writers – locked into horror with little mainstream appeal. Same goes for Anne McCaffery and Ursula Le Guin – fantasy. Hope Mirlees’ Lud In The Mist is possibly the most beautiful book I’ve ever read, but is a romantic fantasy bulldozed in a genre graveyard after the publication of Lord of the Rings, which ushered in the masturbatory ’swords and spells’, line of fantasy novels for pubescent boys.

The Mile High Club. Someone should write this.