Category Archives: Review

Departing from reality

A year or two ago I had a brief affair with early film. In a marked and productive change from watching YouTube videos containing words like “fail” and “vs,” I started to look up silent films. I was amazed by Buster Keaton’s famous train scene in The General, which is not only a virtuosic performance but, with its dangerous stunts, could have been his last. As I clicked back through history, I discovered that the train was already cemented in film tradition at that early stage: one of the first pieces of footage ever shown to the public showed a train—that great Victorian symbol of the future—approaching from the distance. The first audiences screamed as the image rushed past the camera, unable to separate film from reality.

Soon, people were quite used to the apparitions projected by the likes of the Lumière brothers, depicting workers leaving a factory, and other similar scenes of which the best that can be said is that they were true to life. Cinema had already promised something better, a vicarious thrill, a way of putting the spectator in the apparent path of a train without the risk, of visiting extremes without leaving your seat.

And so, even in its inception, cinema was a departure from reality, a proving ground for the imagination akin to dreaming. George Méliès’s famous Voyage Dans La Lune imagined a spaceship landing on the moon (or rather, in his eye), while HG Wells’s visual, proto-cinematic writing explored the same issues of temporal and spatial contraction that were being ironed out in this new medium. Science fiction (SF) and film were born in the same moment, and you can’t tell the story of one without the other.

Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema (IB Tauris, £14.99), the new book by James Chapman and Nicholas Gill, takes pointedly against the “fashionable cult of Deleuze,” and opts for a historical reading of some of the key SF films. The authors reject “voguish trends in cultural theory,” arguing that the imagined future of each film sheds light on the anxieties of the times in which they were created. This may be a truism, but it is still a fascinating lens through which to look at 12 of the genre’s best-loved films—some global successes, others simply interesting examples of the genre. In each of the book’s essays, they look at the production history of a film with reference to the commercial successes and failures of the time, and the implications of the inevitable big studio chess moves. They tell the story of each collaboration leading up to the filming and release, and enjoy teasing out the implications of a promotional logline.

2001: A Space Odyssey marks a watershed, for the authors, as the first SF film to become a blockbuster, and to bring the genre into the mainstream. I first watched it a couple of years ago on holiday in a Welsh cottage. All I knew was that this was the film in which a computer called Hal tried to kill everyone. Neither I nor my girlfriend was prepared for what we saw. Particularly challenging was the part after Hal was shut down and the plot ended, but the film carried on. My girlfriend got up to “make tea” and didn’t return.

Reading Projecting Tomorrow, I finally know why I was so baffled by that final section. I had very much enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game with Hal, and yet I had absolutely no idea how the last section could have been allowed to exist, particularly by a director whose other films were obviously the work of a genius.

For a start, the authors point out that “there was never a definitive shooting script.” They track Stanley Kubrick’s collaboration with Arthur C Clarke closely, digging up variances between script drafts and quoting from correspondence to reconstruct their often differing opinions on how the project should progress. Kubrick was more preoccupied with “formal properties” than Clarke, who was concerned about “narrative comprehension.” Clarke had wanted a relatively clear ending where the main character, Bowman, meets aliens and brings some of their wisdom back to earth. Instead, Kubrick decided to end with a sort of weird LSD trip, landing abruptly in a floorlit Louis XVI-style apartment with an old man eating some carrots and that massive domino thing from the opening. The fatal cable from Kubrick to Clarke came in November 1967: “As more film cut together it became apparent that narration was not needed.”

The disagreements between Kubrick and Clarke are, like many other moments in the book, evidence for the authors of “the essential difference between SF literature, concerned as it [is] with ideas and philosophy, and SF cinema, in which visual spectacle is paramount.”

In changing some of the fundamental rules of the fictional world, filmmakers had to take some things for granted—you can’t be radical about everything at once—and one of the genre’s historical failings, discussed without much depth by the authors, was its presentation of women as sex objects. In SF musical caper Just Imagine, Mars looks much like a tropical hotel lobby full of scantily clad show girls who try to undress the heroes; far more pleasant than their Earth, where by their own admission they “hate these modern women.” In Forbidden Planet, the main female character Alta serves no purpose beyond providing a focus for sexual desire. At one point the Captain chides her outright for her short skirt, which is likely to provoke a sexual assault from one of his randy crew, if he doesn’t get there first (he does). Later, in Logan’s Run, the eponymous character is utterly baffled when, wearing a sleazy kimono, he materialises a woman in his flat, says “let’s have sex,” and is refused (don’t worry, she does end up having sex with him, and also getting spontaneously nude in an ice cave). After decades of SF films pandering to male fantasy, I was pleased to see the authors note the appearance of Princess Leia in 1977 with thoughts and actions all of her own, though they see her relative lack of sexualisation as being “repressed: a breach with tradition in the genre… Star Wars was scant female liberation.” I’d say it’s worth considering what came before.

The book fares much better with issues of race representation, pointing out the disconcertingly Aryan population of Logan’s Run, though omitting to mention how much the Carrousel ceremony looks like the Ku Klux Klan Winter Olympics. The authors even beat me at spot-the-minority in Just Imagine; their winning hand reveals a lone Japanese-looking man in a crowd scene. They also draw interesting parallels between the caste system of Planet of the Apes and the American Civil Rights Movement. In an early draft of the script, an underclass of baboons had been protesting with placards saying “Down With Discrimination.” Perhaps even more interesting is Charlton Heston’s chilling observation of the extras on location:

At lunch, the ape actors lunched separately, since their makeups limited them to liquid foods taken through a straw. But beyond that, they self-segregated by species: gorillas at one table, chimps at another, and orangutans at still a third.

It’s in these moments that the value and attraction of historical research outweighs theory.

The authors run through a kaleidoscope of influences on Star Wars, drawn from a huge array of different cultures. George Lucas lamented the lost mystique of the Orient, with its promises of an exotic other. He originally considered casting a Eurasian Princess Leia, an African American Han Solo, and even using an entirely Japanese cast. His debt to Japan was clear, and many other cultures went into constructing the world around them: a keen ethnographer might notice that the Jawas spoke Zulu and Swahili played in double-time. The human characters in the first film were all white, however, and “the only African-American in the piece was the voice of pure evil.” There was a so-called “black-lash” after its release, though the first person to point out the lack of ethnic mix only noticed after he’d paid to see the film four times.

Through dedicated research, Chapman and Gill chart many other themes: the relationship between the British and American film industries; the primacy of grand visuals over ideas in SF films; the rise of the SF blockbuster. In doing so, they have compiled a book that will satisfy the curiosity of the film student about the little islands of history that bore the final reels. More than that, it’s a surprisingly accessible gold mine of trivia and wry anecdotes, essential reading for the pub quiz master and a reliable reference for SF fans hoping to settle an argument.

The book gives you the plots and twists from the first page, but then almost every SF film I’ve watched has been spoiled in advance. If Planet of the Apes came up in conversation, we’d end up talking about the twist at the end: the buried Statue of Liberty. Until I was 24 I’d never watched the original Star Wars films, but of course I had heard several hundred bad Darth Vader impressions, always croaking, “Luke: I am your father,” like emphysema patients. No one ruined Robocop for me, but no one cares how Robocop ends.

So if this article has spoiled any of these films for you, I’m not sorry. For profit and for society, they aimed to start conversations. They are often more eloquent about the preoccupations of their times than any film directly accountable to the constraints of here and now. They don’t show us the future as a prediction, but as a warning: we are all making the world we will have to live in.

Black Vodka by Deborah Levy

In Deborah Levy’s latest collection, Black Vodka, are ten stories which open up her world. They are stories about trying to find out who we are in the course of our everyday lives, and about how we can remain deeply imprinted by those who are close to us. Here, as in her previous plays, stories and novels, her writing exhibits a rhetorical severity which, at its best, has a mythic, lullaby quality, experimental and at the same time simple and beautiful.

It is difficult to say what the collection is about, for two reasons. Firstly, to tell you the conceit of each story would, more often than not, misrepresent the experience of reading them (on which, more later). Secondly, as with many of the best writers, one can’t help but feel that, somewhere, Levy must be holding onto an ur-story from which all her others digress or refract. For Haruki Murakami, the received wisdom has it, this story would almost definitely involve cats, a haunting song, a bizarre sexual encounter, a dream sequence. So too in Black Vodka we glimpse, from time to time, the story that Deborah Levy is compelled to tell and re-tell. A rich creative figure, not quite clear of the (social or military) conflict in his past; a geographical foreigner who has become foreign to themselves; a young lady in a light dress who loves swans or their feathers; inward conflict blossoming into eczema; water and the danger, or perhaps the thrill, of investigating below its surface. If you have read Swimming Home, this may all have a ring of familiarity.

I have had trouble convincing people to read Swimming Home, even since its Booker nomination this year, because – and I feel this is a problem specific to Levy – the plot itself, which people tend to use as an indicator of what a book is ‘about’, is no more than an arbitrary vessel for her ideas. A middle class family goes on holiday to France, and a kooky ginger girl turns up to make trouble. It is almost as if someone has picked the idea out of a list of rejected film plots and challenged Levy to turn it into something interesting. It is a tightrope walk, a daredevil stunt. Part of the pleasure of watching her do it is that you don’t believe she or anyone can pull it off. But the writing is incisive and mercurial, the characters somehow depart from their archetypes to become unique, their experience of the world vivid and layered. As the main character from Black Vodka‘s title story puts it, ‘Better slowly to prove more interesting than I first appear.’

And so it proves. In Levy’s hands, the world of advertising, normally so glib and reductive and lacking in its capacity to really attach itself to human experience, transforms into a research centre for the exploration of the unconscious. Someone laughs uneasily when our hero insists that Vodka Noir has high cheekbones, but why not? He wakes from dreams of Warsaw with tears on his cheeks, ‘transparent as vodka but warm as rain.’ Rain is traditionally cold, but Levy has a Symbolist poet’s eye for telling substitutions. In a description from the story ‘Vienna’, a man muses on his lover:

She is middle Europe, he thinks. She is Vienna. She is Austria. She is a silver teaspoon. She is cream. She is schnapps. She is strudel dusted with white icing sugar. She is the sound of polite applause.

The description goes on, and we are carried with it. It is exhaustive and we never feel she is running out of steam. In these moments it is impossible not to believe in the sheer power of Levy’s imagination and the easy way she renders it in prose. Who cares what she is writing about? She is doing it so well.

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The only time that the collection falters is when the narrative voice strays too far from Levy’s own. ‘Cave Girl’ is the runt of the litter, and will very likely get beaten up by the other stories when you close the cover. In this story, a boy rhapsodises about his sister, who has had a dramatic makeover. There is still a lot of observant detail which carries the narrative forward, but I just don’t believe the voice. Levy can only do one voice – it is her own, and it is exquisite. But I don’t believe in a young boy who would talk in well turned out prose about Ancients, and condensing ‘them’ to ‘em’ or spelling stupid with two Os won’t change my mind. I’m not sure I would even wish to meet a boy who comes out with asides like, ‘Mr Lewinstein, who is quite good-looking I suppose (everyone knows he’s got a mistress in Malta).’ It would be like having to talk to a society girl without the anaesthetic of champagne.

‘Stardust Nation’, on the other hand, is Levy at her best. A strange, dreamlike atmosphere pervades this story about a man and his overly empathetic employee, who becomes confused and begins to tell the story of the protagonist’s life back to him. New information strings the reader along while incantations are introduced, repeated, mutated. What starts as a baffling unreality begins to seem dizzyingly inevitable. Levy writes the story of a man’s breakdown as a kind of thriller, borrowing technically from the genre without bowing to its overworked content. It is like reading an update of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘William Wilson’. The story challenges the myth that only literary realism can speak deeply of people’s inner lives, perhaps even challenges the myth of the inner life as something we create without the collaboration of others.

You should read these stories – nine out of ten, anyway – for their ideas, and the sheer quotability of her writing. Levy puts poetry in her prose, and has the rare ability to make us see our familiar world afresh, ‘like new paint and old pain.’ I will be pressing my copy into the hands of my friends, and I will enjoy talking over the questions they raise about how we construct our selves and whether we can ever outmanoeuvre our past.

 

Habibi

habibiAt 35, Craig Thompson has already written three previous books: Goodbye, Chunky Rice, Blankets and Carnet de Voyage. But it was Blankets that propelled Thompson’s reputation as one of the leading lights in comics. Weighing in at around 600 pages, it was a major work that received widespread acclaim from both the comics and the mainstream worlds, and still sells well alongside the greats like Joe Sacco and Chris Ware.

With his new book, Habibi, he’s moved from comics publishers Top Shelf to mainstream trade publishers Faber, and although they are known much better for their poetry and literary fiction lists, they’ve pulled out all the stops with this. It’s an incredibly beautiful book, a real weighty tome, with careful attention to detail and high production values. They’ve taken a lot of the meticulous design that went into Thompson’s illustration and integrated it with the cover and endpapers, making a beautiful object of it.

It’s just as long as Blankets, which might explain how it’s taken him so long to write. In a 2004 interview, Thompson originally said he’d try and get it completed by 2005. Seven years on, it’s easy to see where the time went: not just in the sheer length of the work, which is frankly epic by graphic novel standards, but in the research, the beautiful Arabic calligraphy, the interweaving of various religious texts and tales in between the main love story and in the incredible attention to detail, describing the intricate patterns and textures of his world. It is a real visual feast, with a fluent, quick plot but pages that you could stare at for minutes at a time.

At the heart of this book, like his previous, is an unusual love story. We follow Dodola, a young slave girl who flees her captors with a baby called Zam, bringing her up on a strangely abandoned boat in the middle of the desert. As they grow up, they can’t keep the world around them from encroaching. Eventually Dodola is recaptured while Zam is out collecting water and we read on, desperately hoping they will be reunited.

The book draws on the Thousand And One Nights with Dodola as the Scheherazade figure, storytelling often to put off her own death, to divert the attention of men and boys and guarantee her own safety. The preciousness of water and words reminds me a little of Salman Rushdie and his children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, weaving in a rich tapestry of sources. Thompson pulls in stories from both the Bible and the Qu’ran, carefully throwing up the commonality of the Abrahamic religions. Of course, religion was writ large in Blankets, but in Habibi, rather than smothering the action, it provides a source of inspiration, wisdom and comfort.

The setting is in a fictional Middle Eastern state, far removed from Thompson’s own world. He knows what he’s doing but someone who has always lived in America is always going to fight accusations of Orientalism. For my part, I think he’s got away with it, but he’s treading a very fine line. I suppose the reason it works for me is that, whilst he plays around with the myth and magic of the Orient, we’re never asked to believe wholeheartedly in the charms and djinns that crop up in the book. In fact, having convinced half the desert that she is an evil djinn, the real tragedy is that the Sultan wants to believe her. He captures her for his hareem, expecting her to live up to the rumours of fiery curses and flashing eyes, but she disappoints. ‘I wanted to believe such things,’ the Sultan says. ‘Instead you’re only human.’

I think when an author has worked on a book for so long, and delivered such a huge work, it’s tempting not to hold them to their errors. It seems petty and ungenerous to keep too close an eye on the author’s individual choices, as if you’re complaining about the size of your dessert spoon at a banquet. But there are a couple of serious errors of judgment here, including the jarring use of the word ‘honkeys’ and an unexplained Cheshire cat during an opium scene. The problem with graphic novels is that, once the author’s got cracking, they’re on their own. No editor can save them from their idiosyncrasies.

That said, Habibi is an incredibly rich and complex story. It’s wildly ambitious and could easily have fallen flat in the telling, but here it is, a modern fairy tale that already feels oddly timeless. Blankets was subtitled ‘an illustrated novel’ and that’s the feeling that I get from this book, too. Habibi reads first and foremost like a novel, and it happens to be told in the language of comics, pushing out the boundaries of the form. If you’re interested in what a serious modern graphic novel can do, this is required reading.