On The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Its Critics

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by Billy Perkins

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in the title roles respectively is, according to Quentin Tarantino, the greatest film ever made.

He's not alone in this assessment; many people love it and name it as the purest example of cinematic art brought to a moment of absolute perfection thanks not only to the performances of the three stars and the directorial skills of Leone, but also the magnificent photography by Tonino Delli Colli and the famous score composed by Ennio Morricone.

It's surprising, therefore, to discover that upon its release it was met not with universal acclaim, but, on the contrary, fairly widespread hostility and critical disdain. Not only was the violence found objectionable, but the length of the film led some to label it dull and interminable. Meanwhile, the fact that it was an Italian re-imagining of a classically American art form - a so-called spaghetti western - led even Roger Ebert in his original review to deduct a star purely on the grounds that, as such, it could not be art.  

It was Italian-born Renata Adler, however, who really took against the movie in her New York Times review from 1968, dismissing it as "the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre". This is particularly disappointing coming as it does from the pen of a woman with a background in philosophy and comparative literature.

Disappointing too is the review of Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, published two months after that by Adler. Kael - described by some as the most influential film critic of her generation - called the film, garish, gruesome and stupid. She particularly objected to what she perceived as the mindless sadism and fascistic nihilism of the film in which all noble and heroic elements of the traditional (American) western have either been omitted or spat upon. 

What this demonstrates, I suppose, is that even very smart, very well-educated critics can sometimes get things very wrong; particularly when confronted with the genuinely New (i.e. that which comes to us from the future and shatters the past). 

One recalls in closing Woody Allen's remark about Kael to the effect that she has everything a film critic needs except judgement: 'She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising.'

The N-Word

 N-Word - Nieema Foster

Many words once branded obscene and not fit to print or be spoken aloud in decent society - words mostly related to parts of the body below the navel and to acts associated with them - have now lost much of their power to shock. Gradually, their letters have been reinstated and the little stars removed and we should all be grateful for this.

Unfortunately, however, this hasn't stopped society from engaging in word taboo and today there's a new list of terms branded as so offensive that even to speak them when reporting their usage or read them in an entirely appropriate historical context is now thought unacceptable. Indeed, it can cost you your job, your reputation, and perhaps even your liberty if some oafish policeman or other exercises his right to arrest you. 

The word nigger is perhaps the term most likely to cause moral outrage and horror today and we are expected to write and to say the n-word whenever its usage becomes unavoidable. Obviously it's a term loaded with a lot of shameful cultural baggage and carries ugly and violent racist associations. Obviously it would be a nicer world if the word was not used in order to insult and dehumanize persons of colour.

But, nevertheless, it's absurd and unbecoming when a term such as this is allowed to terrify social consciousness and haunt the conscience of white liberalism. The more we attempt to repress usage of the word and drive it into a non-discursive limbo, the more it returns and looms up magnified out of all proportion, frightening us silly beyond all reason. 

As Lawrence writes, when certain words, certain ideas, and certain memories become taboo and subject to censorship then we risk driving ourselves insane with a degraded sort of terror and nothing is more dangerous in the long run in a society such as ours as mass-insanity. And so, ultimately, I find myself in opposition to all those who react with a kind of hysteria whenever they hear a taboo word; ready in an unthinking instant to take to Twitter and other forms of social media in order to express their mob-indignation and mob-condemnation. 

Further, I don't support the cleaning-up of history, the alteration of literary texts, or the use of euphemisms which are not only dishonest and hypocritical, but patronising to the people directly affected. As the African American comedian and social activist Dick Gregory points out, using the phrase n-word instead of nigger ultimately denies the hard truth of the modern black experience in relationship to the white world.   

Note: whilst this post was partly written in response to the Jeremy Clarkson eeny-meeny-miny-moe case, I in no way wish to defend him. For if he wishes to wilfully engage in casual racism either as an act of bluff bravado or in order to court controversy that's his choice, but he must then be prepared to accept the consequences. His absurd and embarrassing attempt to both explain and apologize for reciting a nursery rhyme which contains the word nigger whilst filming an episode of Top Gear, only added insult to injury.       

In Praise of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is twenty years old this month having premiered in Cannes, May 1994. 

It's a fabulous film: a cinematic desiring-machine in which everything magically comes together and functions perfectly at the same time, despite being cut across a trio of stories and a non-chronological assemblage of scenes that involve violence, humour, romance, and plenty of what Mia might describe as mindless, boring, getting-to-know-you chit-chat which dazzles and delights in its very banality.

The critic who said, rather sneeringly, that whilst it has several great scenes, it's not a great movie simply fails to understand that whilst Tarantino is concerned with creating a singular work of art, he is not attempting to bring its various elements together so as to form a Whole; the kind of unified work which cries out to have 'The End' stamped upon it and is consummated by this.  

For Tarantino belongs to a super-smart and super-literate generation of film-makers who understand that breaks in the flow of action or even moments in which the narrative stalls leaving viewers confused and bored, are in and of themselves productive and vital processes of becoming and eternal return.

In this respect, Tarantino is the Marcel Proust of Hollywood; one who knows that we live today in the age of partial objects and multiple scenes in which the artist's task is not to produce a finished masterpiece in which heterogeneous bits have their rough edges rounded off so that they might all fit together smoothly. Rather, the task is to think fragmentation, difference, and multiplicity. 

     

Believe in the ruins ...!  

There's Nowt so Queer as Folk

 Rolf Gardiner performing with folk dancing friends in 1939

Photo: www.dorsetlife.co.uk

It's perhaps not widely known or remembered, but Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover ends with a long letter written from Mellors to Connie in which, amongst other things, he proposes a non-conventional solution to the industrial problem as he understands it: train the people to live in handsomeness without the need for money.

What this means in practice is a neo-pagan folk revival in which men and women reject capitalism and consumer lifestyles and relearn old skills and handicrafts, as well as how to sing their traditional songs and dance the old group dances (preferably whilst naked). It's an anti-urban as well as an anti-modern fantasy, based on a rejection of the present in favour of a mythical medieval golden age that we can literally hop, skip, and jump back into. 

This utopian dream of a Merrie England was not one peculiar to Mellors or to Lawrence, however. Figures such as Cecil Sharp, Mary Neal, and Daisy Daking all played a part in the English folk revival that took hold in the early twentieth century. 

As of course did Lawrence disciple and Kibbo Kift Gleemaster Rolf Gardiner. A far more controversial and politically extreme figure than Sharp, Gardiner illustrates how neo-paganism and attempts to rejuvenate the nation via folk cultural and faux spiritual activities such as morris dancing, nude calisthenics, and solstice worship can very quickly turn fascistic.

Gardiner believed that morris dancing, for example, was a form of magical ritual that connected the fourfold of earth, mortals, sky and gods. As - for some unexplained reason - female participation would disrupt the elemental energies at play, he insisted that morris dancing should be for men only. But not all men: only virile Englishmen and others of pure Nordic stock for whom it was an expression of their racial soul. 

Little wonder then that by 1936 Gardiner was an open supporter of the Nazis and became a close friend to Walther Darré, a leading 'Blood and Soil' ideologist who served as the Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942 in Hitler's Germany. Admittedly, during the war years and once the full horror of Nazism was exposed, Gardiner modified his unpleasant political views and his racist interpretations of folk culture.

    

But it was too little, too late - although that's not really the point of this post. Rather, the point of the post is this: David, you have more to worry about in being a morris man than how it might reflect on your masculinity or sexual orientation; Lawrence-loving activists and pagan folk practitioners can dance to a dangerous tune if they're not careful ...

Her Rich Attire Creeps Rustling to Her Knees

Image from phantomseduction.tumblr.com

Manufacturers of extremely beautiful and limited edition handmade silk knickers Strumpet and Pink make use of an intriguing tagline or company slogan in their advertising: Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees. 

For those who don't know, this is taken from a famous verse by Keats entitled The Eve of St. Agnes, written in 1819 and published the following year. Considered by many to be amongst his finest poems, it gripped the literary and pornographic imagination of the 19th century telling the tale as it does of a pair of illicit lovers, Madeline and Porphyro.

Keats based his poem on the popular belief that a young girl could summon a future husband to her if she performed certain magical rites on the eve of the feast day of Christian martyr Agnes of Rome, patron saint of virgins. These rites include going to bed without supper, stripping naked and then lying flat on the bed with eyes wide shut facing the heavens, hands kept firmly under the pillow at all times. 

No matter what she experiences, Madeline is instructed by a wise woman to remain silent and supine; only then is the man she yearns for guaranteed to appear - in dream form if not actually in the flesh - and he would come with kindness, kisses and good things to eat for his bride-to-be. 

Originally, Keats played up the erotic aspect of this tale, but his publishers obliged him to tone it down fearing they would be at the centre of a public scandal. Even so, there remain plenty of controversial and kinky aspects: for having secretly stolen into Madeline's bedroom on this very night, Porphyro hides in the closet from where he spies on the girl as she says her prayers, lets down her hair, takes off her jewellery, and then removes her clothes: 

"Anon his heart revives: her vespers done, / Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; / Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; / Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees / Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees."

Porphyro continues to play the peeping tom and to perv on Madeline as she lays on the bed in a semi-conscious state, gently trembling with the cold and anticipation. She has never looked more beautiful to him than at this moment, naked in the moonlight; he is entranced by her and the sound of her breathing. He also continues to be fetishistically fascinated by her discarded clothes and gazes long upon her empty dress. 

Finally, believing Madeline to be fast asleep at last, Porphyro creeps out from his hiding place and approaches the bed. His plan is for them to enjoy a midnight feast together of rare exotic delicacies that he has brought along with him, including candied fruit, quince jelly, and spiced syrup. Unfortunately however, he has trouble waking her and when Madeline does rouse she mistakenly thinks him to be part of a dream and pulls Porphyro onto the bed with her - the poem thus taking a sudden diversion into the problematic area of sexsomnia. 

Only after they have consummated their relationship does Madeline fully wake-up and, although feeling vulnerable and violated, she tells Porphyro that she cannot hate him for his actions, as her heart belongs to him. Concerned, however, that, having fucked her, he might now simply abandon her, Madeline seeks some reassurance: she tells him that if he leaves her now she'll be damaged goods; like a forlorn bird with a broken wing. Happily, Porphyro declares his love for her and the two of them elope into the night - like two phantoms.

I'm not sure really what to say about the poem; at 42 stanzas it's certainly lengthy and, at times, slow in pace and dull to read. Nevertheless, its combination of supernatural elements and illicit sexual activity qualify it as an interesting example of queer gothic verse. And although it might seem as if Madeline is both object and victim, it could be of course that the whole thing is just her spectro-masturbatory fantasy; that she simply imagines a fair knight who comes to carry her off to a far-away land and make her his wife against the wishes of her parents - doesn't every girl?

Women in Uniforms

I Love Women in Uniform by Griddles

www.deviantart.com

Many men are attracted to women in uniform; nurses, maids, flight attendants, and even officers of the law or girls with guns in military fatigues. The appeal is clearly twofold:

Firstly, there's the fetishistic aspect; the uniform itself has physical allure thanks to the material, the cut, the detailing, etc. all of which is designed to enhance the body and encode gender. 

Secondly, uniforms signify status and allow us to know not only what degree of power the wearer exercises within the legitimate and familiar world of work, but that they are prepared under certain circumstances to submit, to serve, and to obey - and nothing excites the pornographic imagination more than this!

Of course, when a lover puts on a uniform in the bedroom it is divorced from the social context from which it derives meaning and turned simply into a piece of erotic costuming. Nevertheless, a uniform may continue to excite long after it has been diverted from the realm of value and entered the world after the orgy; a world that is not about real power and politics or even sex, but purely a seductive play of appearances.    

All of Us: The War Poems of D. H. Lawrence

The forgetting of war is itself an act of violence: the extermination of memory and of history. And so it is doubtless right that the UK government should officially commemorate the First World War, which began a hundred years ago in the summer of 1914 and resulted in the loss of almost a million British lives.

But commemoration shouldn't mean the construction of an artificial memory which effaces the real, any more than it should involve the commercial and political exploitation of a past event; what Jean Baudrillard would describe as the capturing of leftover heat from a catastrophic occurrence in order to warm the corpse of the present.

Hundreds-of-thousands of dead soldiers, having marched through the mud in the name of King and Country only to end up buried in mass graves or sent home like Clifford Chatterley more or less in bits, should not now be made to march anew in the name of corporate-media spectacle and enforced public sentimentality. 

The Great War was a tragic historical event with causes and consequences open to critical analysis and it should primarily be remembered as such. If, even as it unfolded, it gave rise to art, it is nevertheless mistaken to transform it into a universal myth or some kind of absolute point of reference that everyone is expected to feel moved by - including those who were not even born in the twentieth century, or whose parents have come from countries and cultures that had nothing to do with the conflict.   

In a sense, therefore, the sequence of thirty-one war poems written by D. H. Lawrence entitled 'All of Us' and published in their full, uncensored form last year for the first time, is unfortunately named: for this sense of consensus or national unity has long-since vanished (if in fact it ever existed).

Nevertheless, the poems continue to speak to some of us and speak powerfully; i.e., without mawkishness, but with a good deal of genuine feeling, including horror and anger as well as deep sorrow and their publication provides a far more fitting memorial than that being planned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which seems to involve the dimming of minds as well as the extinguishing of lights on the home front.

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

On the Love of Maids

In a classic episode of Seinfeld, George is fired for engaging in sexual intercourse with a cleaning woman on the desk in his office (Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?). 

Six seasons later, Jerry hires an attractive young woman, Cindy, to tidy up around his apartment and he also ends up sleeping with her (or diddling the maid, as Elaine so memorably describes it).  

Freud would certainly sympathise with both men. For whilst they are in positions of power, they are themselves helplessly caught up in a common psycho-sexual fantasy long established within the pornographic imagination. 

Freud not only commented on this fascination amongst men for the peasant girl scrubbing floors on her hands and knees or doing the laundry, but he shared it himself - so much so that Deleuze amusingly suggests that those looking to develop an interesting research thesis shouldn't bother with complex considerations of psychoanalytic epistemology but simply start here.

Of course, Freud being Freud, he ultimately decides after a crucial moment of hesitation to resolve the question of maids and their erotic charm by considering it in relation to what was to become the central dogma of psychoanalysis: Oedipus. This is unfortunate and mistaken; for despite what his followers may insist, men who love maids do not secretly desire their own mothers. What excites, rather, is the opportunity to exercise social and sexual authority over a woman in a somewhat illicit manner and - as in George Costanza's case - in an inappropriate setting.

What disconcerts meanwhile is knowing that they are screwing around with a figure who is not only indispensable to their desire, but representative of a class which threatens to one day rise up and refuse their subordination; a class who will one day tell them to do their own cleaning.

       

Note: See Seinfeld season 3 episode 12 entitled 'The Red Dot' and season 9 episode 19 entitled 'The Maid'. 

Lawrence Contra Matisse

 Henri Matisse: La Musique, (1939)

Whilst I share Lawrence's high regard for Cézanne, I do not share his loathing of Matisse whom he accuses of being nothing but a clever trickster in paint; one who admitted Cézanne as his master only so that he might betray and then bury him all the more successfully beneath a new form of abstraction that disguised drab cliché with gay colour.

For Lawrence, Matisse's very virtuosity is grounds for contempt. If he succeeds in producing "grand and flamboyant modern-baroque pictures" thanks to his supreme technical ability, nevertheless his skill means he needn't be humble or even honest as a painter. Instead, Matisse could falsely pride himself on being "a clever mental creature who is capable at will of making the intuitions and instincts subserve some mental concept ... in a sort of masturbation process". 

Whether this criticism is fair or even meaningful is open to debate. But the fact remains that I'd sooner have one of the Frenchman's lovely-looking - and, yes, intelligently conceived, skillfully executed - pictures hanging on my wall, than one of Lawrence's canvases which, whilst not hideous, are - to be fair to the prosecution - often gross as well as inept.           

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Why I Love H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) 

 Photo c.1934 from the Archives of 

Brown University / Associated Press

There are several good reasons to love master of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft, many of which are presented by Michel Houellebecq in his highly recommended study entitled Against the World, Against Life (2006). 

Primarily, however, it's because of passages such as the following, written in a letter to a friend, in which Lovecraft amusingly sets out his case against religion:

"So far I have seen nothing which could possibly give me the notion that cosmic force is the manifestation of a mind and will like my own infinitely magnified; a potent and purposeful consciousness which deals individually and directly with the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck ... and which singles this putrid excrescence out as the one spot where to send an onlie-begotten Son, whose mission is to redeem those accursed fly-speck inhabiting lice which we call human beings ... It is all so very childish. I cannot help taking exception to a philosophy that would force this rubbish down my throat. 'What have I against religion?' That is what I have against it!"

- H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, written to Maurice W. Moe (1918).