On Zero Dark Thirty, The TUC March and thinking for yourself.

In 2012, during the trade union anti-cuts march, A friend of mine criticized Ed Milliband for turning up and making a speech suggesting that some cuts were indeed needed. The argument levelled at Milliband was that, after all these people made the effort to come to the rally and demonstrate it was offensive to them for Milliband to turn up and offer an alternative view. It prompted me to ask why you would go to a public gathering and listen to speeches – to engage in an argument, or to confirm what you already believe.

I finished reading Life of Pi yesterday, and a line towards the end struck me as an eloquent way to put that argument:

“I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That wont make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story.”

In the same way, one could level a similar question to the myriad of critics caught up in the furore around Katherine Bigalow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The level of outrage generated by column inch after column inch of angry polemical arguments took me by surprise – from Bigalow being called  ‘torture’s handmaiden’ by Naomi Wolf, the film being seen either as ‘torture porn’ in Al Jazeera or conversely as ‘CIA propaganda’ from The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald. She has been accused of milking victims for storylines in The New Yorker, and even Slavoj Žižek, someone I consider to be one of the greatest political thinkers that we have, called the film ‘Hollywood’s gift to American power’ and even went on to make a ridiculous reducto ad Hitlerium argument.

So, here’s the question. Why do you go to the cinema? To have your beliefs confirmed back at you, or to think?

 I find it hard to believe that these critics watched the same film that I did. The torture scenes are undeniably horrible and Bigalow doesn’t shy away from showing the full and horrible implications of torture. At one point Dan, a seasoned interrogator beats a detainee – Abu Faraj senseless before pulling down his trousers and taking the piss out of the detainee for shitting his pants. We see him waterboarding, hitting and humiliating Faraj. Maya, initially reluctant becomes hardened to the action and eventually engages in it herself.

The information gained from torturing victims is mixed, and instead of providing a clear line to Bin Laden leads Maya on a goose chase that takes up a good length of the film. In the end, through the muddled accounts of detainees she manages to uncover the identity of Bin Laden’s courier. Shortly after this however, having rooted round in the paperwork a bit, Maya’s assistant finds the information that they were looking for all along. So doesn’t this argue the opposite? That we can do this without resorting to torture?

I think Bigalow has done a brave thing in challenging conflicting views we have on the war on terror. For anyone in The West who celebrated the death of Bin Laden, Bigalow presents us with a grim reality: that in every conflict black-ops and torture are routinely used. Instead of giving us a simple narrative the film asks us whether we can square our view of Bin Laden being killed with the way the intelligence that led to it was gathered.

There’s one telling moment in the film that highlights this more than any other: Maya, Dan and several other operatives are sitting around eating having just tortured Abu Faraj. On the television Obama is giving his state of the union address, in which he insists ‘We do not engage in torture’. All of the characters stare blankly and Maya holds her head.

The situation is presented neither as an anti-torture or pro-torture film. Bigalow merely gives us what happened, and leaves us to come to terms with what we believe. It’s brave film making.

So, if you want to engage in a debate, I’d recommend this film. If you want your opinions confirmed back at you I believe Mr. Michael Moore is still going strong…

Les Miserables and an awfully wanky term…

I feel obliged to preface this little post with a warning. I will use the term liminal space  in the next few hundred words. I open myself to your ridicule, and fully expect it. It is, however, the only way for me to explain why I found Les Miserables such a failure. It will allow me (and I hope you will to) to compare the stage space and the film screen.

I think that in offering a criticism of Les Miserables I need to separate my disdain for the musical and my opinions of the film adaptation itself. I’m naturally bent to dislike the film and am not going to hide this or attempt a balanced review. But that isn’t what this essay is about. It’s about what you can get away with on the stage and on the screen.

Tom Hooper, in choosing how we should experience this sprawling tale, goes against what we see on stage: while at the theatre one can watch all of the action at a ‘mid-range’ shot (film buffs, please feel free to correct me on my terminology…) Hooper takes the directorial decision to film most of the set pieces close up (so close up, in fact, that I spent most of one of Hugh Jackman’s big numbers counting his nostril hairs…) and, conversely he chooses aerial wide-shots for the sprawling city scenes.

The problem with this is that, for most of the first half (before all of the barricadey stuff) it feels like one music video following on from another. Indeed, here is where I think the problem lies with the whole film: it doesn’t manage to keep up with the time and location jumps that the theatre production offers. But how can this be? Surely the stage is more limiting than the screen? It’s certainly easier to jump between one location and another on camera, it’s easier to show a dramatic change in a character’s health or age (Jackman starts emaciated, bald and bearded and ends up a happy Dickensian gent) and a simple bit of text on screen can signify the change of year. So what went wrong. Well, back to that term…

Somewhere between Hathaway singing her bald little head off and croaking and all that barricade fun there’s a bemusing hour or so where human photoshop accident Eddie Redmayne chases after that one from Mama Mia. We go to a nice house in the country, and then he pops back to the barricades for a chat, then goes back to neverland to chase after Julie Walters Amanda Seigfried. Nothing in the film feels connected – it’s one set piece after the next.

On stage, however, we accept this. The shifting of time and place is granted – we need only a little change in set or lighting for us to imagine a completely different city, and two things happening at different points in different parts of the stage allow us to imagine things occurring simultaneously. In short we acknowledge that all these different events take place at the same space in the same time.  That’s what the stage does: we view it as a transformative, we are open to whatever change may come without shifting our central reference point. We accept that the stage is Paris, and that the constituent parts all take part inside that Paris. It is a liminal space, never quite one thing, never quite another: the stage offers a border between places.

Life of Pi and 'notasgoodasthebookism'

Harry Potter? Not as good as the book. Lord of The Rings? Not as good as the book. Les Mis? Not as good as the musical. Warhorse? Not as good as the puppets. Butter? I can’t believe it’s not.

It’s a point of view that – even if you make it yourself – everyone must be tired of. Books, would you believe, give one a different experience to a film. Ditto theatre. Ditto puppet horses. You never would’ve thought it right – it’s the story that’s the thing, not the way it’s told. That’s why Stephen Spielberg is out of work. Well, yes, that’s horse shit (puppet or CGI horse shit).

Obviously the experience of reading a book is vastly different to a film. A book allows a good lot more inner monologue, a subjectivity in its narrator and it’s…well…longer. You can fit more in. A book allows you to exercise your imagination more freely, because the screen is, if you like, in your head. You spend more time with a book than a film, so there is perhaps the opportunity to get more attached to it – it almost becomes a comforter (my experience of reading Anna Karenina certainly started to feel a topsy-turvy long term relationship). Now, this is not to say that books are better than films. They are just different.

There are equally things that a film can do that a book can’t. Try to imagine mind-bending your way around  reading Inception for example.  Try imagining reading the storm in Life of Pi the way Ang Lee directed it. There are things that Ang Lee does that just can’t be translated into the book (the storm sequence gave me vertigo!). Now, there are things from the book that Ang Lee has to leave out, for many reasons. All that inner monologue would be oppressive and burdensome, Characters are cut out because of cleanness, the pace differs. That’s fine. It’s a sign of a good director, not a bad director that not everything is kept in – he is economic with his source material.

However, there are some instances where  ‘notasgoodasthebookism’ makes itself heard more clearly. It’s a jarring feeling perhaps, when you notice the two mediums scraping up against each other. It’s when a thing that is palpably a readers experience is lifted and an attempt is made to translate it into something else. I’ll give you an example. In Atonement (SPOILER ALERT) the final section alerts us to the fact that everything that we have been reading is a lie. Briony, now old, is a respectable novelist, and the prior 3 sections that we have been reading are from her latest book. In reality, Robbie didn’t survive Dunkirk and Cecilia died in the explosion at Balham underground station. The act of betrayal comes from the fact that you trusted the narrator throughout the period of reading that book, and in the outcomes of the characters. Now, this is not translatable to film (unless we made Briony a filmmaker…but this doesn’t really work either: Briony can’t be a budding 5 year old filmmaker in her bedroom, not in the 1920s). And so it goes with Pi.

Without wishing to give too much away, the ‘pulling the rug from under the viewers feet’ scene in the film seems inadequate, it’s not a feeling of betrayal we experience, because our relationship to the narrator in a book is not the same as to their equivalent in a film. Lee decides to show Pi’s horror in telling the second story, thus clearly demarking that as the real story, which goes against Yantel’s entire initial premise. I thought the film was wonderful, but the entire overarching argument of the book is lost in translation. Not so much ‘not as good as the book’ but ‘a different language to the book’.