Resolutions were made to be broken, it seems

Despite saying less than a month ago that I would post on this blog every day, illness is forcing me to take a break. I'll be back in the New Year.

Murakami/Rabinowitz/Hobbit

Today I read the next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled Wonderland. As I said in my last post, there are a number of connecting points between the two parts of the novel, but they also diverge significantly. ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland,’ as befits a narrative clearly influenced heavily by the crime fiction of Raymond Chandler, is much more action-driven than ‘The End of the World.’ In this section, the plot surrounding the Calcutec and the skull given to him by the scientist thickens considerably when some independent operators break into the Calcutec’s apartment and attempt to intimidate him. It also appears that the scientist has gone missing, although the scientist’s exact loyalties and aims are becoming increasingly obscure. The pace of ‘The End of the World,’ meanwhile, is much more sedate. At the urging of his shadow, from whom he was surgically separated upon his entry into the town, the Dreamreader attempts to make an exact map of the town. This proves to be much more difficult than he anticipates, partly because of the difficult terrain, and partly because of a pervasive air of threatening unreality that the Dreamreader feels as he moves about the town. His map-making clearly proceeds not only out of sense of obligation to his shadow but also out of the Dreamreader’s own desire to understand his new environment (and perhaps to find a way to escape from it). It also serves, of course, to give the reader a much more vivid sense of the setting of this part of the novel.

I also read the first fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s 2002 book Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-11481-3/. I remember the first time I read Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front being overwhelmed by the range of the work and the huge amount of research that must have gone into it. http://www.versobooks.com/books/523-523-the-cultural-front Although Rabinowitz’s book is more modest in scope, it reminds me of Denning in that it also has tremendous range in its examination of noir. It’s worth mentioning that this range could be a potential problem. On the whole, I have an issue with the way in which the definitional scope of the term noir keeps being expanded in an opportunistic and frequently unthinking manner, leading to a situation where the term becomes progressively depoliticized as it’s made over into a lifestyle term. Although Rabinowitz is expanding the term noir far beyond its conventional association with film noir, she is repoliticizing rather than depoliticizing the term by exploring what she calls the noir sensibility, which she defines as a form of social and political expression that seeks to uncover and come to terms with the pervasive and persistent role of violence in American history and culture (in terms of both slavery and class conflict). This is a very ambitious project and right off the bat two things stand out about her approach: 1. She spends relatively little time discussing film noir. 2. The book is hugely eclectic in terms of its subject matter. The reason for the lack of attention to film noir is simple: as Rabinowitz says, there’s been a huge amount of excellent critical work on that subject and she wants to do something different. As for the book’s eclecticism, Rabinowitz defends herself well from the charge of possible incoherence: “precisely because the book ranges among seemingly disparate fields of inquiry, it demonstrates the wild totality possible through interdisciplinary work.” This kind of argument could easily be self-serving but the delicious phrase “wild totality” describes exactly what Rabinowitz seems to have achieved in this book.

I also watched The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Just as with Catching Fire, I watched this movie with my 13-year-old daughter, who loves Tolkien even more than she loves Catching Fire (thank goodness). She didn’t have any problems with the various changes that Peter Jackson made to the source material in this film and for the most part, I didn’t either (if you really care about that kind of thing, by the way, this article is a veritable nerd’s delight: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Tolkien-Nerds-Guide-to-The-Hobbit-The-Desolation-of-Smaug--236566281.html). With that said, I did find the she-elf/dwarf romance narrative pretty ridiculous, and certainly the most egregious example of new elements being introduced with seemingly no other purpose than to stretch the running time enough to allow for a trilogy of films (though I suppose one could argue that it was done to generate a different audience for the film?). Desolation is much better than the first film in the series (no singing dwarves and more action scenes both represent a huge improvement) but ultimately this is a film with a lot of visual style and very little substance. It’s a shame that Guillermo del Toro didn’t stick with this project. I would love to have seen what he would have done with it. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/guillermo-del-toros-hobbit-what-401909

Murakami/Anderson/TheFall

Today I read the next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled Wonderland. The two threads of the story are starting to come together in the form of a skull and a librarian. After completing the first part of his assignment, the Calcutec working for the scientist is given a skull by the scientist, apparently as a gift. The Calcutec doesn’t really know what to make of this gift until someone paid by the Semiotecs attempts to steal the skull, and then he starts to realize that there is something significant about it. Meanwhile, the Dreamreader starts his job in the town library, where he learns from the Librarian that the dreams he has to read are all contained in unicorn skulls. The other point of connection is the figure of a Librarian: in one story, she trains the Dreamreader, and in the other story, she provides the Calcutec with books and information as he attempts to understand the significance of the skull he’s been given. Murakami does a masterful job of developing two separate fictional universes economically and evocatively, so much so that even though connections are starting to emerge, you would continue to read even if no such connections existed. Part of the reason for this, I think, is Murakami’s adroit use of the tropes of genre fiction, including crime fiction and fantasy/speculative fiction. In this regard, it’s no accident that one of the books recommended by the librarian to the Calcutec is Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/23/caspar-henderson-rereading-jorge-luis-borges

I also finished the special issue of New Left Review written by Perry Anderson on American foreign policy. This final section, titled ‘Consilium,’ reviews the mainstream literature of the last 20-30 years on America’s role in the world. I found this section of the analysis much less interesting than the earlier discussion of American policy, but I still have to take my hat off to Anderson for plowing through so much grandiose and verbose prose (although I suspect that Anderson actually enjoys this stuff!). One of the least surprising but also most depressing features that emerges from Anderson’s discussion is the sameness that characterizes the available literature. In other words, although there may be disagreements about the most immediate or the most serious challenges facing the maintenance of American hegemony, along with related disagreements about the place of, say, China or Iran, in American policy, such disagreements are minimal next to the uniformly held belief that America has a (divine) right to lead the rest of the world. The insistence on this point seems to me to be a product of a peculiarly American combination of monomania and megalomania. And the worst of it is, the longer one spends in this country, the more commonsensical such a belief appears! This is just one reason why regular trips outside the US are essential for the maintenance of sanity.

I also watched episode two of ‘The Fall.’ One of the things that surprised me about the first episode is that it didn’t make very much use of its Belfast setting. That’s still true in some ways (the vast majority of scenes take place indoors, for example) but this second episode is starting to introduce more plot lines that draw upon the complexities and tensions of policing in Northern Ireland. It’s not that I’m opposed in principle to introducing the subject of police/political corruption into a show of this kind (indeed, one might argue that it’s essential) but there’s no denying that in doing so, ‘The Fall’ is becoming a police procedural as much as (more than?) a psychological study, and I suspect the success of the series will depend in part on how well it balances these two parts of the show. The other thing that strikes me about this episode is the interesting ways it juxtaposes images of life and death. This is the kind of thing that could easily seem very corny or hackneyed (in the midst of life we are in death, etc), but it’s actually done very well in this case. For example, the scene where the father identifies his murdered daughter and asks if he can touch her is balanced by a scene featuring the murderer’s wife, who works as a neo-natal nurse, cradling a baby is very thought-provoking. I know, it sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it does. Another example of paired scenes involving hair-washing are powerful and creepy in equal measure. And can I just say that, up to this point at least, the murderer is blessed with an amazingly unsuspicious and trusting wife?! Some suspension of disbelief required on that point…

Murakami/Anderson/TheFall

Today I read the first fifty pages of Haruki Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/site.php. So far I’m enjoying the novel but expect to spend most of the first fifty pages figuring out what the hell is going on! The novel oscillates from one plot to another from chapter to chapter. The odd-numbered chapters tell the story of a ‘calcutec,’ a person trained in data encryption, who is doing a job for a scientist who is researching, among other things, sound removal. The calcutec and the scientist both work for the System, unlike the semiotecs, who work for the Factory and who dedicate themselves to trying to steal information, including the scientist’s research. The even-numbered chapters are set in an unnamed walled town possessed of a large number of unicorns, all of whom are sent outside the town walls each night by the Gatekeeper before let back in at the start of the next day. The main character of this part of the novel is a young man who has just arrived in the town to become a dream reader, a process that involves having his eyes mutilated by the Gatekeeper so that he cannot go outside during the day. His work as Dream reader takes place in the town’s library, but what exactly it involves, and whether the two halves of the plot will have anything to do with each other is as yet unclear. All will (hopefully) be revealed!

I also read the next section of the special issue of New Left Review written by Perry Anderson on the subject of American foreign policy. In about sixty pages, Anderson covers American foreign policy from the beginning of the Cold War to Obama’s second term. Obviously, in such a broad sweep, details are going to be lost, but what one gains is a sense of the continuities that underlie American conduct and ambitions during this period. For example, from Anderson’s perspective, the differences between, say, Reagan and Bush on the one hand and Carter and Obama on the other are so minimal as to be insignificant. Indeed, one of the most useful contributions of this overview from my perspective is to underline the perplexity I always feel when so-called American leftists continue to portray Obama as a progressive. This is where Anderson’s understated style can be strangely powerful. “Democratic take-over of the White House in 2009 brought little alteration in American imperial policy.” Indeed. Anderson also explains why Obama’s championing of drone warfare has a deadly cynical logic about it. Most Americans have only ever cared about American aggression abroad when American casualties are involved. Remove those casualties and Obama can more or less proceed with impunity because the fact of the matter is that dead foreign civilians are no competition for most Americans’ need to believe in Obama the savior. Anderson is witheringly accurate on this point: “No-one would accuse this incumbent of want of humane feeling: tears for the death of school-children in New England have moved the nation, and appeals for gun-control converted not a few. If a great many more children, most without even schools, have died at his own hands in Ghazri or Waziristan, that is no reason for loss of Presidential sleep.”

I also watched the first episode of the 2012 television drama series The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wrk40. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I worship Anderson and think that she should basically be put in charge of everything (she was the only good thing in NBC’s awful Hannibal) so I can’t even pretend to be objective. Her role in this series inevitably reminds one of Helen Mirren in the Prime Suspect dramas and it speaks volumes about Anderson’s performance that she survives that comparison. The other thing that struck me about this opening episode is how the serial killer character was portrayed: as a family man (wife and two young kids), as someone with a job (a bereavement counselor, no less!) and a functioning social life, and as someone who is very physically attractive. Each of these decisions works to both generate audience identification with this character, as well as working against the stereotype of serial killers as either asocial loners or genius-level ubersmenschen. Spector is a part of his community in multiple ways. The question then becomes what The Fall will do with the fact: use it or squander the opportunity it represents.

O'Neill/Anderson/WhiteWorm

Today I finished Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. The novel ends with a whimper rather than a bang. Chuck Ramkissoon’s murder, which the reader was informed about earlier in the novel, remains unsolved, but I don’t have a problem with that lack of resolution, especially as we are provided with enough information about Chuck’s business dealings to imagine why he was killed. Instead, the weakness of the novel’s conclusion comes from its suspension of the more interesting aspects of what O’Neill had been doing throughout the rest of the novel. The question of Hans’ belonging, for example, is settled in a very formulaic and predictable manner when he returns to England and is reunited with his wife. His time in New York City, along with the threads of the novel that connected to 9/11, to the (post-colonial) status of cricket, and to Hans’ sense of identity with immigrants, all these things are ultimately nothing more than an interlude in Hans’ life. O’Neill self-consciously finishes the novel by placing Hans and his wife and son at the apex of the London Eye, with a panoramic view of the capital, and presumably with a panoramic view of everything that has happened to him. O’Neill deliberately frustrates such a simplistic reading, of course, but one is still left with a disappointingly mundane sense of resolution. In particular, the exact nature and meaning of Hans’ friendship with Chuck remains unclear. This could have been a great novel about the peculiar mix of intimacy and anonymity that defines friendships between straight men, but that novel remains to be written.

I also read the first fifty pages of the Sept/Oct 2013 special issue of New Left Review, an issue written entirely by Perry Anderson and devoted to the subject of “American Foreign Policy And Its Thinkers.” http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty/faculty-1/faculty-1?lid=252 NLR has only had three single-authored special issues in the past (Tom Nairn on Europe in 1972, Anthony Barnett on the Falklands War in 1982, and Robert Brenner on hyper-leveraged financialization in 1998), so this really is an unusual occasion. The issue is divided into two sections: “’Imperium’ examines the objectives and outcomes of US world power; ‘Consilium’ the thinking of its power elite.” The first fifty pages cover the evolution of American foreign policy over the course of the twentieth century, focusing in particular on its conduct during the two World Wars. Among the points that Anderson makes is the lack of American appetite for imperial expansion in the wake of World War I, a situation very different from the end of World War II thanks to the position of the Soviet Union. Aggressive American expansion during this period was hidden under the bland term ‘containment,’ and the architect of this term, George Kennan, is treated by Anderson with the brutal honesty he merits, contrary to his respectful treatment by other writers. Perry Anderson’s prose style is characteristically clear and understated, but he is capable of a zinger or two. For example, in the context of discussing the habit of successive American presidents to claim that God approves of American world domination, Anderson writes “America would not be America without faith in the supernatural.” By Anderson’s standards, this is verbal shade of epic proportions.

I also watched Ken Russell’s 1988 film The Lair of the White Worm, (very) loosely based on Bram Stoker’s 1911 novel of the same name. Ken Russell’s films are always great fun because they’re so over the top, and Lair is no exception. The dream/hallucination sequences in particular are gloriously overwrought, resembling nothing more than a Soft Cell/Culture Club era music video. Amanda Donohoe is to be commended for her ability to keep a straight face during some of the more absurd scenes. From the perspective of 2013, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is to see well-known actors at varying stages of their careers. We see a pre-Four Weddings and a Funeral Hugh Grant, who is as annoying as ever, a post-Dynasty Catherine Oxenberg, who looks puzzled to be back in England, and a pre-Thick of It Peter Capaldi. And, of course, Doctor Who fans will enjoy seeing Capadi at such an early stage of his career. One of my favorite things about the film is the contrast between the understated Englishness of the farmhouse scenes and the exaggerated depiction of everything else about the film. It might be saying too much to claim that there’s an implicit class critique in the way that the snake-worshipping lady of the manor victimizes the rural locals, but the nice thing is that with Russell you can never rule anything out, either. He is the most ‘grab bag-ish’ director I know. This would make a great double-bill with Russell’s Gothic.

O'Neill/Wee/ResidentEvil

Today I read the next fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. O’Neill continues to do some interesting things with the theme of belonging. At one point, Chuck Ramkissoon explains to Hans his theory of cricket as the original American game. Chuck’s rejection of the American perception of cricket as an immigrant sport is consistent with his (over)investment in his image of himself as American. Hans is not persuaded by Chuck’s theory, which suggests that Hans’ identification is with the immigrant as a dispossessed and rootless figure, but also as a quintessentially contemporary figure. For example, when Chuck takes him to a colonial Dutch cemetery, Hans feels no connection to these early Dutch settlers just because of their shared nationality. In a similar vein, once Hans moves back to London and is reunited with his English wife, he feels no particular sense of homecoming, partly because his Dutchness is more pronounced in England by virtue of the fact that this Dutchness excludes him from any sense of Englishness. In an interesting moment in this section of the novel, the subject of 9/11 comes up again and Hans fleetingly identifies himself with a virtual community of those who were impacted by the witnessing of this event. Almost immediately, however, Hans admits to himself that this essentialist claiming of an identity based on a shared experience is spurious in his case. Given Hans’ repeated rejection of different kinds of belonging, his friendship with Chuck becomes ever more important to both Hans and the novel as a whole because it seems to be the one constant during such a changeable period in his life.

I also finished Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror Films and their American Remakes. In this final section of the book, Wee discusses Kairo/Pulse and Chakushin ari/One Missed Call. The chapter on Kairo/Pulse is one of the strongest in the book because Wee accounts for the differences between the two films by stressing the industrial context of the remake’s production. Whereas Kairo has a philosophical and art horror feel to it, Pulse instead resembles much more closely the conventional Hollywood approach to horror (i.e., more violent and bloody special effects) because it was produced by the same studio that made the Scream franchise and for the same type of young American audience. I can’t help but wonder whether this kind of industrial perspective could have been applied fruitfully to other chapters in the book (the chapter on Ju-On and The Grudge springs to mind in particular). The chapter on Chakushin ari/One Missed Call was also very interesting for the way in which Wee stressed the fact that these films are recycling not only elements of early Japanese films, but also the films discussed earlier in this book; in other words, these two films are reflections and self-conscious reworkings of the success of the recent surge of supernatural horror films that is the book’s subject. Acknowledging this fact helps to further undermine the binary distinction between original and remake, a binary that must be problematized thoroughly for any interesting work on adaptation to be done.

I also watched the first Resident Evil movie, an embarrassing gap in my movie viewing that I was happy to plug. I will always have a soft spot for films that the critics hate and audiences love, partly because I’m a contrarian, and partly because I think it’s always useful to be reminded of the extent to which critics and audiences look for and expect different things from film. Critics look at the Resident Evil franchise and see only bad acting, simplistic plots, and loud and empty special effects. It’s not that the critics are necessarily wrong when they say this: as much as I love Michelle Rodriguez, for example, I’d be lying if I said she has a wide range of facial expressions. Indeed, it tells us a lot when her best acting comes after she’s been turned into a zombie. The point the critics miss, however, is why these things guarantee the movie’s success, rather than dooming it to failure. I look at Resident Evil and see a film designed carefully with a very specific audience in mind. It’s a film reduced economically and skillfully to its constituent elements and that’s exactly why the franchise has been so successful. Rather than being puzzled by its popularity, we should instead try to explain that popularity as carefully and in as much detail as we can, without relying on the usual truisms about the limitations of mass audiences. http://kotaku.com/5634542/let-milla-jovovich-explain-the-resident-evil-film-franchises-popularity

O'Neill/Wee/ParanormalActivity3

Today I read the next fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. At one point, O’Neill’s protagonist, Hans, describes himself as a “political and ethical idiot” and he’s not far wrong. Political opinions in the conventional sense, especially concerning America’s post-9/11 conduct, are instead given to Hans’ estranged English wife, Rachel, and it seems to me that O’Neill goes out of his way to make these opinions sound strident, clichéd, and even slightly hysterical. Hans’ almost total absence of political views is especially striking given his job as a financial analyst of the oil industry, a job with rich potential if this really were a post-9/11 novel, but with which O’Neill does practically nothing. In other words, it seems O’Neill is deliberately staying away from the truisms of a post-9/11 novel and doing something else instead. But what? One clue comes from the fact that Hans lives in the Chelsea Hotel, famous for its long history of bohemian residents. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/10/chelsea-hotel-oral-history O’Neill portrays the 21sy century version of the hotel in the same vein, with Hans joining an eclectic array of eccentric individuals all of whom are disaffiliated, in one way or another, from the American norm. This suggests that O’Neill’s larger theme is the need to belong or connect with others, a need that Hans feels acutely but is unable to satisfy due to a lack of imagination and a lack of energy. Perhaps Chuck Ramkissoon and cricket will fulfill that needs for Hans?

I also read the next fifty pages of Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror Films and their American Remakes, in which Wee discusses Honogurai mizu no soko kara/Dark Water and Ju-On/The Grudge. A couple of notes about Wee’s method might be in order at this point. In each chapter, Wee elucidates the similarities and differences between the original and the remake and I think she has a tendency to understate the similarities and overstate the differences. For example, she’s quite right to say that the similarities between Honogurai and Dark Water can be ascribed to the pervasive influence of patriarchal thinking in both American and Japanese culture, an influence that determines the films’ treatment of divorced mothers raising their daughters, but to say this is not to say very much. It might be more productive to approach these similarities in generic and narratological terms; in other words, what are the constituent elements of horror films that tend to be present in both original and remake, and why are these elements considered to be indispensable? In terms of stressing differences, my argument with Wee is not that such differences don’t exist, because they do; rather, my argument is that these differences do not always have to be the focus of the critical narrative. I would also add that only certain types of difference seem to count for Wee and that if one were to consider these films’ intertextual relations more broadly, a different type of analysis would result. For example, how can one properly evaluate Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance in The Grudge without mentioning Buffy?! http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/10/24/buffy-star-faces-fear-in-horror-remake/

Perhaps inevitably, I also watched the next film in the Paranormal Activity series, the imaginatively titled Paranormal Activity 3. Although this entry in the series is subject to the law of diminishing returns that impacts all franchises, it still has its strong points. One of my favorite things about this series so far is the fact that it’s organized as a series of prequels, with 3 being set in 1988. This is an interesting choice partly for technological reasons, in that the technology of camera surveillance gets less sophisticated as the series progresses, a fact that dictates how each film is structured, and partly for narrative reasons. Because earlier parts of the story are filled in with each new movie, the audience also gets to revise its opinion of events and characters from the earlier movies. For example, what we find out about the childhoods of the sisters in this episode changes significantly our view of the sister’s situation in the first two films. To be precise, we understand that they have been pawns in someone else’s game for a very long time, so that our view of the decisions they make when they’re adults, decisions that we assume are a product of free will, we now understand were anything but. This is a great example of the narrative complexity that cam emerge from genre films when they are considered together as a series rather than as single films. Not coincidentally, 3 was the highest-grossing movie in the series so far. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1673022/paranormal-activity-3-box-office-record.jhtml

Oh, and because I’ve mentioned horror parodies in previous posts, if you want to see one of the worst films ever made, check out this Paranormal Activity parody currently streaming on Netflix! http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70291837?strkid=1531562959_0_0&trkid=222336&movieid=70291837

O'Neill/Wee/ParanormalActivity2

Today I read the next fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. In this section, the postcolonial dimensions of cricket take on a more prominent place in the novel as we hear of Chuck Ramkissoon’s plan to found a New York Cricket Club. Part of Chuck’s calculations involve not only the potential media audience for matches played at such a venue, but also the huge numbers of West Indian and South Asian immigrants in the New York Metropolitan area. In this way, O’Neill’s novel is both an immigrant novel in a long American tradition, but the 21^st century version of that tradition is very different—less focused on assimilation to an American norm and more on what immigrant cultures can bring to the host country—cricket is a nice symbol for this inassimilable otherness that immigrants embody. In this respect, it would be interesting to read this novel alongside CLR James’ classic study of the relationship between colonialism and cricket, Beyond A Boundary https://www.dukeupress.edu/Beyond-A-Boundary/. More tomorrow on what O’Neill does with the personal politics (or the absence thereof) of his protagonist Hans.

I also read the next fifty pages of Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror Films. This sections discusses the different ways in which Hollywood and Japan approach the subject of the supernatural in film. If one overlooks the inevitable generalizing, Wee makes an interesting argument about the difference between the either/or of the Western perspective on the relation between good vs evil compared with the both/and view of the Japanese perspective (influenced by Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism). This difference, according to Wee, leads to a further difference in how the two film traditions treat the supernatural—it’s something evil that needs to be overcome in the Hollywood tradition, whereas it’s more a question of restoring balance and harmony in the Japanese tradition. The next chapter on Ringu/The Ring allows Wee to ground these generalizations in a close reading of the similarities and differences between the evil videos in the Japanese original and its American remake. Perversely, despite the strength of her discussion, I found myself wanting Wee to also discuss the parody of The Ring in Scary Movie 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFt3KQhkQA. What can we learn from parodies of horror movies? And what is it about the horror genre that makes it so suitable for parody?

Funnily enough, the parody of Paranormal Activity in A Haunted House that I watched the other day took me in turn to the sequel, Paranormal Activity 2. These films are a work of genius in their own way. Just think of the combination of elements from a financial point of view: a cheap cast (no stars needed) and minimal special effects (hardly any gore because they’re not body horror films) and you’ve got a winning combination. I think the suburban setting is absolutely key to the success of this franchise, not so much because a suburban audience wants to believe that their habitat is dangerous, but because that audience wants to see into their neighbors’ homes, especially prosperous homes, and be convinced that these apparently picture-perfect lives are anything but. Schadenfreude, in other words, plays a particularly important role in this type of horror film. The other reason for their success is that they have a very accurate understanding of the state of our contemporary surveillance culture. To be precise, they go beyond the truism that we are being watched by Big Brother and instead recognize that we are often all too happy and willing to put ourselves on camera, to survey ourselves in the interests of knowledge and security. This results in a situation where the actions of the family under demonic siege in this film both seem rational, in a sense, and where our voyeuristic consumption of their plight is justified because there is a mystery to be solved. For these reasons, Armand Mattelart’s The Globalization of Surveillance would be a very interesting book to read alongside the Paranormal Activity films. http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=074564510

O'Neill/Wee/Cloverfield

Today I read the first fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel Netherland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W2ZXzM6wuI. I’ve heard this novel described as a ‘post-9/11’ novel but I think that misses the mark, and it would certainly be misleading to group Netherland with novels like Falling Man and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It’s true that the novel begins in Manhattan shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and that the attacks are, in a way, responsible for the collapse of the protagonist’s marriage, but beyond those facts, and at least for this first part of the novel, 9/11 is not the determining event or focus of the book and it remains firmly in the background. Instead, Netherland is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman who moved to Manhattan with his young British wife when they both took up well-paying jobs in the financial sector. When his wife leaves him and takes their young son with her back to England, Hans more or less falls apart until he finds some kind of meaning in his life in the unlikely form of cricket. He starts playing with a group of amateurs at the Staten Island Cricket Club and this routine gives Hans a sense of structure and community. Based on the fact that the other members of the club are overwhelmingly Indian or Caribbean immigrants (with Hans as the token white guy) I’ve also heard Netherland described as a postcolonial novel. We’ll see whether this label turns out to be any more accurate.

I also read the first fifty pages of Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror Films and their American Remakes. http://www.routledge.com/9781134109623. Oddly, the publication date is listed as 2014, so I feel very cutting-edge discussing a book from the future! Appropriately, the subject of the book is very timely, considering the success of films like The Grudge, The Ring, and One Missed Call, and although a great deal of critical work has been done in recent years on Japanese and Asian horror, much less has been done on American remakes of Japanese horror films, a subject that would also allow for interesting connections with the burgeoning field of adaptation studies. So far, Wee’s treatment of the subject is well-organized and comprehensive. She begins by reviewing the arguments for the cultural and aesthetic significance of horror film and does a particularly nice job of addressing the issue of whether or not film adaptations should be faithful to their sources. As she points out, part of the problem with such an argument in relation to Japanese horror films is that those films can’t be considered ‘original sources’ in the sense that they are also influenced by earlier films. She then moves on to a discussion of the representation of ghosts and the supernatural in American and Japanese horror film. One of the most interesting points she makes on this subject is that because Japanese culture has a very different relationship to the supernatural, Japanese horror films are much less concerned than their American counterparts with finding a ‘rational’ explanation for supernatural phenomena; instead, the supernatural in JHorror is allowed to exist on its own terms, as it were.

I also watched the 2008 film Cloverfield, which could be said to have a connection to Japanese film in as much as it’s essentially a transposition of the Godzilla genre to contemporary Manhattan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvNkGm8mxiM. I first watched this film on a flight from Chicago to Seoul not long after it was released. As it was a long flight and it was the only film I wanted to see, I watched it six times in a row. It wasn’t until I looked out of my hotel room in Seoul and saw a city not unlike the one I’d just watched being destroyed by a giant monster for the previous 12 hours that I realized what a bad decision I’d made; I felt so paranoid I wanted to just hide under my bed until it was time to go back to the airport! Despite this inauspicious beginning, I still watch the film fairly regularly because my dislike of models and yuppies is only matched by my dislike of yuppies that look like models, and so seeing a whole group of them traumatized and dispatched during the course of this film is very entertaining. I have to say that to me it’s ironic that this is a described as a ‘found footage’ horror film. Technically speaking, it is, but the suspension of disbelief required to accept the fact that the amateur videographer whose footage constitutes the film would have both the presence of mind, not to mention the intestinal fortitude, to keep on shooting throughout the film’s apocalyptic events, is considerable. Although a much less entertaining film, Barry Levinson’s The Bay (2012) does a much better job of interweaving various forms of found footage into the film in a consistent and believable manner.

Phillips/LandscapeofMurder/SherlockJr

Today I cheated and read the rest of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell because I was so desperate to finish it and move on to something else. In this last 100 pages, we finally get to the trial, which Phillips managed to divest of almost all drama, which is no mean feat bearing in mind that it was held (just like Powers’ actual trial) in an opera house. Although the trial would have been an obvious moment to flesh out Powers’ character, he remains little more than a cipher, a boogeyman in whose motives and personality Phillips remains conspicuously uninterested. As I mentioned before, this would not necessarily be a weakness in the book if there were other characters about whom we cared, but there aren’t. Inevitably, Emily ends up adopting Mason the street urchin as her legal guardian and by the end of the novel, Powers is safely executed, Mason is safely at boarding school, and Emily and William are safely on their way to a romantic trip to Paris after exchanging commitment rings by the graves of the Eicher children (an odd choice!). Nothing could be more sentimental, predictable, or tedious. Thank goodness I’m done.

On a happier note (sort of), I also finished Antonio Olmos’ book of London crime scene photos, The Landscape of Murder. The main part of the book consists of large reproductions of 79 of the 210 photos Olmos took for this project, and then all 210 photos are reproduced in thumbnail size at the end of the book. Each of the photos is accompanied by a short text that gives the name of the victims and perpetrators, the location and circumstances of the killing, and the legal conclusion of the case. This final piece of information seems to me to a weakness in the book in the sense that it is there as a salve to the reader’s conscience. By implying that justice has been or will be done, it both gives the reader a sense that our perusal of these photographs is socially useful and that the circumstances of the deaths are a little less bleak than they seem. I’m not sure that either of these implicit claims is true, but it does put the text and images in the book in a curious tension with each other. One final observation from the perspective of a British ex-pat who has lived in America for many years: it’s striking to me how few of these murders feature guns. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how much higher the death toll would be if guns featured not only in the events depicted in this book but also in the thousands of punch-ups in which the end result is just cuts and bruises. I think this is the aspect of the book that would stand out most to an American reader.

As a scholar of crime fiction, I’m always interested in film adaptations of the genre, so the title of Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr. caught my eye. As it turns out, only the title is really significant in this regard, as an example of how early Sherlock Holmes became the ‘type’ of the detective, but this is a great silent slapstick film for many other reasons. Keaton plays a movie projectionist who is also studying how to become a detective, and when he’s accused of stealing from the house of his would-be love interest, Keaton ingeniously combines these two worlds when his character ‘dreams’ himself into a movie he’s showing as a detective figure. There are the trademark sight gags and stunts that we associate with any Keaton movie (including one in which Keaton apparently injured himself quite badly) but the best part of this film is the self-referential way in which it blends the ‘real’ world with the fictional world of film. There’s a lovely example of this at the end of the film when Keaton and his love interest are reconciled and Keaton studies the love scene he’s projecting for cues on how to behave in real life. This goes smoothly until the film’s reconciliation scene jump cuts to marriage and children, which gives Keaton’s character pause! Beautifully done.

Phillips/LandscapeofMurder/CatchingFire

Today I read the next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell. Just when I thought this novel could not get any worse, Emily Thornhill, while getting ready to cover the Powers trial in Clarksburg, VA, adopts Mason, a street urchin who tries to rob her, and sets about converting him in Ragged Dick fashion. One new set of clothes and a system of values later and presto! Mason is Emily’s research assistant. Happily, Emily still had time to have sex by a deserted skating rink with her bank manager lover William, having thankfully had the foresight, as Phillips tell us, to leave her underwear in her hotel room beforehand. I’m going to have a celebratory drink once I get to the end of this novel.

Fortunately, I also read the first half of a remarkable book, The Landscape of Murder, by Antonio Olmos http://thelandscapeofmurder.wordpress.com/. In 2011 and 2012 a total of 210 murders took place in London. Olmos decided to take photos of each one of the murder scenes, usually a few days after the murder took place. Although this project has some obvious surface similarities to the crime scene photographs of Weegee in the 1930s and 1940s collected in his book Naked City http://gothamist.com/2012/01/04/grisly_crime_scene_photos_from_1930.php#photo-1

I think a better comparison is the work done by the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report http://projects.latimes.com/homicide/about/. Like the Homicide Report, an important aspect of what Olmos is doing is to represent those acts of violence that the rest of the media ignores or just barely acknowledges. Even if just for a moment, Olmos’ camera and the accompanying text tell the story of a death and in doing so they invest it with the meaning of a memorial that will endure. Deliberately undramatic, these photographs capture the dreadful banality of murder, the fact that the disenfranchised and poor tend to be disproportionately impacted by it, and the attempts by friends and family to mark the scene of death with tributes to the person who has been taken from them. This book is essential reading.

I also watched Catching Fire, the second movie in the Hunger Games trilogy starring Jennifer Lawrence. Watching this movie was a salutary reminder of the fact that the meaning of a film can depend on whom you watch it with. In this case, I watched Catching Fire with my older daughter, who is a huge Hunger Games and Jennifer Lawrence fan. She loved the movie, while I thought it wasn’t as good as the first one, being much less invested in character and more in symbols. My point, however, is that my daughter’s investment in Lawrence’s character, and in particular the extent to which that character represents female empowerment for my daughter, gave me a new perspective on the hoary question of whether films of this kind have any politically progressive potential. The answer, as always, is ‘It depends.’ In this case, it depended on who I watched the film with, and the conversation my daughter and I had afterward about the movie.

Phillips/Perec/AHauntedHouse

Today I read the next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell. In this section, we follow Emily Thornhill as she journeys to Iowa to meet Harry Powers’ father. We learn Power’s real name (Harm Drenth) and the fact that although he came from good people (horny-handed sons of the soil, no less) he seems to have been a bad seed (surprise, surprise). We then go to Chicago with Emily to see the auction of the Eichers’ possessions, which allows Emily/Phillips to feel some righteous indignation at the ghoulish nature of people, before going back to Quiet Dell to witness a lynch mob trying to break into the local jail and deliver summary justice to Powers. Sounds quite eventful and interesting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, appearances can be deceiving. The irony of continuing to keep Powers in the background of the story is that we yearn for him even more.

I also finished Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, which includes the following pieces: “Robert Antelme or the Truth of Literature,” “A Scientific and Literary Friendship,” “The Winter Journey,” and some examples of Perec’s word games. The most interesting piece for me was the essay on Antelme, which comes from a much earlier stage of Perec’s career (1962). Sturrock’s footnote describes Perec’s attitude as ‘more political’ at this stage of his career than he subsequently became, but this is not a very helpful observation. It’s true that this essay does have a very different tone from the other pieces in this volume, resembling much more closely the traditional engagé type of French intellectual, rather than the playful tone of later Perec, but there are still important similarities. For example, in the context of discussing how various writers have treated the concentration camp experience, Perec singles out Antelme for praise because, rather than emphasizing the emotive, apocalyptic, or spectacular, Antelme is instead governed by “a desire for simplicity, for a previously unknown everydayness.” Even at this early stage of his career, Perec appreciated the possibilities of an examination of the ordinary, an examination he would pursue in so many different ways for the rest of his career.

Did I mention that my choice of films for discussion in this blog will be eclectic and not governed by whether or not they are ‘good’ films? If not, I think this point will be made by the fact that today I watched A Haunted House (2013), a parody of the Paranormal Activity films directed by Michael Tiddes and co-written by and starring Marlon Wayans. I’d like to say that I don’t enjoy toilet humor, constant swearing, and comedic stereotypes, but that would be a lie. I love the Scary Movie franchise, and this film is very much in that vein. Casting Cedric the Entertainer as a trainee exorcist recently released from jail is a stroke of genius and Marlon Wayans is an underrated physical comedian. For all its crassness, this film is valuable not primarily as a parody but rather as a critique of the assumed whiteness of too many examples of the horror genre. What happens when you take the threatened-suburban-white-couple that is the staple of films like Paranormal Activity and make them black? This film may not have very interesting answers to that question, but the question is still worth asking.

Phillips/Perec/ReeferMadness

Today I read the next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell. The novel is becoming less interesting the more it goes on. The character of Powers is still firmly in the background and in the abstract one would think that this decision to keep the killer out of the spotlight would be one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. The problem, however, is that Phillips has not been able to generate a character who holds the reader’s attention as much as Powers himself might have been able to. The reporter, Emily Thornhill, seems to be the novel’s protagonist, but Phillips doesn’t give us enough of a reason to care about her perspective on the case. Annabel keeps flitting in and out of the novel, but again, not enough is done with her to make her compelling. An example of a road not taken comes when Phillips includes a scene with Powers’ wife and her sister, emphasizing what kind of knowledge they did or did not have of Powers’ activities. Telling the story from the perspective of these characters could have been very interesting, but alas…

I also read the next fifty pages of Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. This includes pieces originally published in the collection L’Infra-Ordinaire in 1989. In “Approaches to What?” Perec talks again about the power of the ordinary, first by noting that it’s always the extraordinary and the cataclysmic that grabs our attention, and then by asking how we should then account for that which usually escapes our notice: “How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?” The other two pieces in this section of the book can be read as answers to this question. “The Rue Vilin” consists of Perec’s descriptive notes of a single street visited on a number of occasions over a period of years, whereas “Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Color” (written for Italo Calvino) is made up of 243 banal postcards that list a location, an activity, and a greeting. Reading all 243 is actually quite difficult because they are so banal and repetitive but eventually one settles into a rhythm of reading and then the minute variations in the ordinary start to become both more apparent and more weighty. Incidentally, for those who know Slavoj Žižek, I found Perec’s distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary reminiscent of Žižek’s distinction between visible and invisible violence in his short book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. According to Žižek, it’s always the first that grabs our attention, but we need to try and see the second type.

I also watched the infamous 1936 propaganda film directed by Louis Gasnier, Reefer Madness. http://web.archive.org/web/20060328163318/http://www.reefer-madness-movie.com/history.html Of course, I’d heard a lot about this film, but this is the first time I’d actually watched it from start to finish. It certainly lives up to its reputation in terms of its awful acting, its hysterical condemnation of marijuana, and its laughable hysteria about the dangers of weed, and yet there was something else about it that I didn’t anticipate. First, it was interesting how drugs are not racialized in this movie by having any connection with African Americans. Instead, both the pushers and the users in this movie are middle-class white Americans. In this respect, Reefer Madness is unusually accurate in its depiction of who sells and buy drugs in the US, much more so than most films on this subject. Second, while Reefer Madness should indeed be laughed at, we should not assume that we’ve moved on very far from this kind of anti-drugs hysteria. Here’s a story I came across the other day: https://www.change.org/petitions/president-obama-commutation-for-weldon-angelos-55-years-for-marijuana?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=43498&alert_id=lTrGzXTBEr_ZFAISBQiCp. A 55-year mandatory prison sentence for marijuana possession? Reefer madness is alive and well in the 21^st century US.

Phillips/Perec/Dahmer

Today I read the next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell. Phillips makes the interesting decision in this section of the novel to reproduce some photos of Powers’ victims, in addition to quotes from contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the case. The inclusion of the photographs (especially as they come about halfway through the book) suggests a surface similarity between this novel and true crime books, which also often come with a section of photos in the middle. The meaning of the photos, however, is different. In true crime books, the photographs heighten the journalistic flavor of the true crime approach (even if only superficially), thus making the photographs a guarantor of verisimilitude. Perhaps the same effect is intended in Phillips’ novel; in fact, the inclusion of the photographs in this case only heightens the gap between the actual people represented in the photos and Phillips’ recreation of them. For example, when the spirit version of Annabel reappears after the reader has seen the photos, still flying above the events while observing them, we feel Phillips’ strained contrivance even more than we did before. One can imagine a situation where this readerly self-consciousness about the inventions of fiction would work to the benefit of the book. This isn’t one of them.

I also read the next fifty pages of Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. This consists of short pieces originally published under the title Penser/Classer in 1985, including “Notes on What I’m Looking For” and “Think/Classify.” Unlike the previous section taken from Je Suis Né, these selections are less obviously autobiographical (thought this dimension is never entirely absent from Perec’s work). Instead, what comes to the fore here is what we might describe as the most Barthesian aspects of Perec’s work, as in “Twelve Sidelong Glances,” in which Perec studies fashion as a signifying system. Unlike Barthes, however, Perec never lets go of a taste for absurdity (for example, in imagining the possibilities for generating new types of fashionable trends) that gives his attempts at (critiquing) taxonomic enterprises a quality I don’t find in Barthes. Perhaps the best way of describing that quality comes from the fact that Perec is both obsessed with taxonomies and at the same time realizes that they inevitably fail. As he says in “Think/Classify,” “Taxonomy can make your head spin” and consequently the best one can do is “muddle along.” Perec the structuralist may yearn for a complete and workable system, but Perec the post-strucuralist enjoys the fact that such systems are always arbitrary, incomplete, and overwhelmed by the inexhaustible complexity of reality.

I also watched Chris James Thomson’s 2012 documentary The Jeffrey Dahmer Files. Having written about the Dahmer case extensively, I can’t say that I learned much that was new from this film, and I really disliked the sections of the film featuring a Jeffrey Dahmer lookalike in recreations of everyday episodes in Dahmer’s life, because I didn’t feel those sections added anything at all to the film. On the plus side, I liked how the rest of the film was organized around interviews with three individuals who all provided different perspectives: one of Dahmer’s neighbors from the Oxford Apartments, the coroner who autopsied all the victims, and the lead detective on the case. There are moments that jump out from each of these interviews. The Coroner at one point describes the experience of taking the lid off the large plastic barrel found in Dahmer’s apartment, saying that it was “quite unsettling,” which I presume is very strong language for a Coroner. The detective explains that the clothes that Dahmer wore during his first court appearance actually belonged to the detective’s teenaged son, which gives one a new perspective on the iconic photo of Dahmer on the cover of People magazine. Finally, the neighbor mentions that as news of the case spread, she had people offering her $50 just to come inside her apartment and sit on a couch that Dahmer had given her—a mundane but symptomatic example of the celebrity culture that springs up around serial killers. And if you have a taste for black humor, you will love the brief clip from a home movie featuring Dahmer in which he says that he has been eating too much at McDonald’s recently and that he will “have to start eating more at home.” Indeed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7WHSmhx0OQ