The Penguin

Watching The Penguin is a deeply unpleasant experience. 

That's not a criticism. Presumably, it is supposed to be. The protagonist, Oz Cobb (nee Oswald Cobblepot) is portrayed as a genuine monster. His own mother thinks he's the devil. Normally, when villains and gangsters take centre stage, they are shown to have redeeming features. The Penguin has none. He's so amoral he makes Richard the Third seem like a nice chap.

Batman is probably more than any other character defined by his Rogues Gallery. Even if you aren't a fan you have heard of Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman.... If you read graphic novels you can list half a dozen more. Superman really only has the bald guy; and possibly the guy with the unpronounceable name. Most of Batman's enemies are grotesque and comical and very probably mad. The Penguin is posh and aristocratic. He wears tuxedos and top hats. He has a cigarette and a cigarette holder and usually carries an umbrella. In the Silly Era, gimmick-laced umbrellas were his modus operandi. Unlike Joker and Riddler, he's not a clown, although Burgess Meredith brought a large touch of W.C Fields to the 1960s TV characterisation.  

One could see the point of giving The Joker his own movie franchise. The Joker is iconic. The evil killer clown has a certain archetypal charm even when isolated from Bat-lore. The guy with the hat and the nose and umbrella, not quite so much. Especially when you take away the hat and the umbrella. 

In the last but one cinematic version of Batman, Penguin was the secondary antagonist. The main bad guy was the Riddler. The Riddler was a very minor comic book villain made unavoidably iconic by Frank Gorshin in the TV show. The comic book and TV versions of the Riddler wore silly green suits with silly question marks all over them. The movie version didn’t. He was a psychotic serial killer who turned out to have a political agenda. He did, however, leave riddles at the scenes of his crimes. Not that a serial killer who obsessively provides his antagonist with clues is a particularly unusual plot device. But you can see the point of connection between the guy in the film and the guy in the comic. He even says “riddle me this” at one point.

That seems to be the unique selling point of Ther Batman. Characters who are a little bit suggested by characters in the comic book, but properly frightening and without the fancy-dress costumes. (Except the Batman. The Batman dresses like the Batman.) 

Oz/Penguin runs a night club for the top gangster in Gotham. He doesn’t wear a suit, particularly, or have a top hat or an umbrella or talk about his fine feathered friends. He does have a big purple car but he doesn't call it a Pengy Mobile. He does have a big nose, and he waddles a bit due to his bad leg. He's still alive at the end of ther Batman, and clearly lined up to be the main villain in ther Batman 2, currently expected in 2027.

Edgar Rice Burroughs thought that Tarzan films ought to come out each year so kids could look forward to them in the way that they looked forward to the circus. (There were silent movies in 1918, 1919, 1920, and 1921. Johnny Wiesmuller made twelve talkies in sixteen years.) Five years is a hell of a gap between a movie and a sequel, particularly if the movie and the sequel are meant to form one coherent narrative. 

A superhero movie costs, like, two hundred million dollars to make (two! hundred! million!) but stands to earn six or seven hundred million (seven! hundred! million!) if people like it. We spent far more time and energy looking forward to these movies than actually watching them. There are teasers and magazines and web sites dedicated to this Looking Forward process. But in the end two hundred million dollars and five years boils down to a hundred and eighty minutes in the cinema. I don’t see how any film can possibly carry that weight of expectation. I don't see how any film can ever be anything but an anticlimax. We waited a decade for the Force Awakens and there are now people whose whole identity is disliking it.

Big Dinosaur Movies work best. You can go and see Big Dinosaur Movies over and over again because you are only there because you like looking at Big Dinosaurs. You wouldn't say you'd seen the Big Dinosaur once and don't need to see it again, any more than you would say that you once ate a cheeseburger and don't ever need to eat another one. If there is Another Big Dinosaur Movie, well, that refreshes the experience. I saw Star Wars eight, ten times during its first release. There is a story about Alec Guiness meeting a little boy who'd seen it a hundred times. Does anyone really need to re-experience Batman and the Riddler simmering at each other through the bullet proof glass in Arkham over and over and over again? 

Three hours every five years. 

Gotham City exists in a kind of no time at all. Everyone has a mobile phone. (Everyone has the same ringtone, and if you have a soundbar on your TV, it can be rather confusing.) But Arkham Asylum is a kind of nineteenth century lunatic asylum, men in white coats and bare walls and inmates who kill each other without anyone seeming to care a great deal. The tabloids tell us that prisons are like luxury hotels and borstels are like summer camps, so maybe its essential for Batman to deposit bad guys in a nightmarish fortress. Otherwise he would seem to be rewarding crime and would have to become a freelance executioner like the Punisher and the Crow. In the second Joker movie, Gotham appears to have an anachronistic electric chair. 

Or perhaps it's all a metaphor. Arkham represents Gotham's collective unconscious; and the villains are all symbols of Batman's own madness; grinning laughing ha-ha-ha-ha- bedlam madness, not human beings with mental health condition. But then Batman himself has always been a metaphor which is why those memes in which Alfred tells him to spend his dough on drug rehabilitation programmes rather than Batcopters are so senseless. Is there any point of bringing social realism into a world built of metaphor? 

The Nth Batman movie, the one with Heath Ledger, did as good a job of being The Godfather Only With Capes as any film is ever likely to. Ther Batman did the same kind of things very nearly as well. I rewatched it as a warm up for the TV series. I still don’t buy the man in the silly suit standing around crime scenes with hard-nosed believable cops, one of whom may or may not be Commissioner Gordon, but that may be the point.  

So, Penguin, the one really memorable character, now has his own TV show. Only it isn't really a TV show: it’s an eight hour movie released episodically. I rather approve of eight hour movies: I think they are probably what young people in the next century will have instead of books. The Daily Telegraph, which complains endlessly about young-people-nowadays having short attention spans, complained that Penguin was long and boring. And it was long. And it did require a sort of commitment, a sort of buy-in, without ever making it quite clear why we ought to invest in it. I don’t think we should praise films for being novelistic any more than we should praise dances for being architectural, but I do think that the eight-hour-TV-show is the place where the depth and complexity of Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy is most likely to survive. 

I do not think The Penguin is as good as Our Mutual Friend, although it is arguably the story of a city, and quite interested in questions of class. I do not think that The Penguin is as good as Jude the Obscure although it is very nearly as depressing. But it does says “let's spend some time with these characters even though they aren't doing very much". And it says "lets suspend the action and go into a completely gratuitous flash back". That only happens when you have four hundred and eighty minutes and the winter number of Strand Magazine to play with.

Actual comic books go on and on forever but only in twenty page segments.

Clearly, the reason the Penguin has his own TV show is that he is going to be the main antagonist in the Ther Batman 2. Did someone think that audiences would have found it implausible for the night-club manager in part one to have risen to be Kingpin of Gotham by part two? But it would be too boring to waste some of those precious once-in-five-years minutes showing or explaining his rise to power, and therefore the backstory has to be dumped onto Now or Sky in the hope someone will watch it there. Or at any rate, know that it exists. 

Maybe Colin Farrell just had so much damn fun being evil that he begged for the chance to do it again, more expansively? 

Or is this, perchance, just the movie someone wanted to make, back-story and franchise and audience expectation be damned? 

Many, many, many years ago, when we were young and Batman looked like Michael Keaton, I said in some fanzine or other that Batman was a marketing campaign with a movie attached to it; that so long as there was a Batposter on every hoarding and a Batshirt on every tennis crowd, the film didn't need to make sense. It's only function was to not be boring -- to distract people's attention while they were in the cinema. But Ther Batman and The Penguin are too long and frankly too dull to appeal to the mainstream popcorn consumer: if you don’t to some extent, care what happens to Oswald Cobbedecook and his cute stammering sidekick you won't get to end.

I am compelled. I am engaged. I cared. It helped that I was by myself over Christmas had had time to binge watch with rather too much rum and stilton. I don't know if, under normal circumstances, I would have stayed the course. 

Game of Thrones created a genre which could be called “cinema of of ordeal”. You don’t so much consume it as try to get through it. The characters are believable and human and realistic—if they weren’t, it would simply be one more splatter movie. And then horrible things happen to them. Relentlessly. Over eight gruelling hours. People are set on fire; and have their arms amputated with razor wire; and have their fingers cut off with wire-cutters. Many, many heads are smashed into walls. Many, many brains are blown out with guns, Broken bottles are thrust into abdomens. But the violence is mainly release from the psychological trauma. Victor, Penguin’s adopted teenaged side-kick, at one point decides to do a runner and leave the state with his girlfriend. It's at just this point, naturally, that the Penguin starts telling Vic how much he trusts him and how much he looks on him as the son he never had and how much they are going to achieve together for Gotham City. It’s the “what will Oz say and how will he react?” which grabs us by the throat; not the “will Oz kill Victor when he finds out?” One of the flashbacks into Oz’s childhood I found myself having to fast forward through. The last time that happened was in one of the sex dungeons scenes in the Boys. Sensitive readers may care to know that although there is lots and lots and lots of violence and lots and lots and lots of trauma in the Penguin, there are hardly any breasts and no penises at all.

The gangster thing, has, truthfully, been done before. The Penguin kills the heir apparent to the crime empire from the last movie, and spends eight episodes playing everyone else off against everyone else. His amoral machiavellianism is very clever indeed. But it's very slow burn. Oz's rival for control of the mobs, and the sister of the guy he killed, Sofia, is an even bigger psychopath than he is. She's released from Arkham in the first episode: I don't think I was properly hooked until an extended flashback in episode four revealed how she came to be in there in the first place. The Godfather taught us that Mafiosi are violent and scary but that’s okay because they are honourable and loyal to their families. There is nothing even slightly okay about either Oz or Sofia. At best we can pity them, a bit, because Oz was poor and Sofia was abused. 

Oz's one redeeming feature is that he visits his old mother who has dementia. By the final part, his relationship with her is revealed to have been a complicated oedipal vortex. His final action in the final episode is pointlessly, gratuitously evil, and comes from nowhere, and yet is somehow in character. Is the plan that by the time we get to see Ther Batman 2 we will hate Penguin so much that we will be fully on board with whatever vengeance the caped crusader exacts, content in the knowledge that nothing, literally nothing, not even that Victorian mental institution, can possibly be worse than what he deserves? Or are we supposed to feel some level of empathy for him? This too is a human being. 

Meanwhile, there is a trailer for the sixth Superman reboot, due out next July. Superhero fans are very like Charlie Brown and his football: however many times we've been hurt by faithless adaptations we are quite sure that this time we'll have a Fantastic Four movie that is true to Stan and Jacks original vision and this time someone will do Superman justice. But certainly, the vibes that the trailer has generated have been universally positive. The Penguin is an extended setup for a proper serious gangster movie that happens to have Batman in it. But Superman may render all that passe. By 2027, the peanut crunching crowd may be expecting red telephones, Batpoles, visible sound-effects and Ace the Bat-hound.

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Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

At one stage, Tolkien wanted the Lord of the Rings to run to four volumes, rather than the published three. Volume IV would have consisted of a greatly expanded version of the Tale of Years: a narrative timeline summarising the history of Middle-earth from its creation to the “present” day. Readers would have first experienced the War of the Ring from the inside, as a story, picking up tantalising hints about Numenor and Rohan and Gondor along the way, and then, once the story was over, they would see the whole history laid out before them in a linear sequence.

If he'd gone through with this plan, the core events of his imaginary history would have been fixed in print in 1955. Would that have hastened the completion of the Silmarillion, or made it even harder to achieve? Or would the Professor conceivably have decided that his Great Work was now finished and that he could move on to something else?

In the event the supplementary volume proved too ambitious, and we ended up with a rather piecemeal collection of essays at the back of Return of the King. Some people will tell you that the Appendices are disposable—pedantic world-building notes about runic alphabets and hobbit calendars that only the hard-core nerd needs to bother with. But the back matter also contains a lot of narrative. Shortened narratives—sketched out narratives—narratives in the language of saga, not in the novelistic language of Lord of the Rings. But definitely stories. And who doesn't want to hear more stories about Middle-earth?

About half way through the Two Towers, there is an enormous gigantic battle at a castle called Helm’s Deep. Tolkien tells us that it was “called after the hero of the old wars who made his refuge there”. When Theoden rides into battle, the Riders of Rohan shout “Helm has arisen and comes back to war!” In the movie, King Theoden says “the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound again in the deep!”: Peter Jackson even puts a statue of a big guy with a war hammer [TM] outside the castle. Appendix A fills out a little of the backstory: Helm Hammerhand was a king of Rohan about a hundred and fifty years before Theoden; he was besieged by wild men (Dunlendings) in the castle and fell heroically in the battle.

Flipping between page 528 and page 1065 doesn't make the Helm’s Deep passages any easier to understand. The main text tells us that Helm was a great hero from the olden days; and the appendix confirms that he lived in the olden days and was a great hero. But it does greatly contribute to the illusion that Tolkien was recounting history, as opposed to simply making up a story. You focus in on a bit of background colour and find that there is a solid chunk of narrative behind it. We aren’t just looking at suggestive stripes of brown and green on a painted backdrop, but an actual fully realised tree. Which of course, allows us to believe that behind the appendices are more lives and more stories which Tolkien never told. And if you have the sort of mind that is inclined to play role-playing games or invent fan fiction—and nearly everyone who likes Tolkien does have that kind of mind—then the temptation to imagine what those untold stories would have been is overwhelming.

Does filling in the gaps create a Middle-earth even more real than the one Tolkien left us? Or does imagining the details which Tolkien only hinted at rather spoil the illusion? Some of my friends at college played a long, long Middle-earth Role Playing campaign in which they were Dunlendings. For all I know it is still going on. I am not sure at the time I could have told you what a Dunlending even was. “Our MERP campaign” has not changed Tolkien’s text, or rewritten Tolkien’s appendices. But it has probably changed how those six or seven gamers read those passages.

Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim hangs a two and a half hour movie on those five hundred or so words which Tolkien wrote about Helm Hammerhand. It’s an anime, or as we used to say, a cartoon, but it has Peter Jackson’s name on it in quite large letters; and borrows musical themes from Howard Shore. It begins with a hushed female voiceover, possibly Eowyn, talking about how history is remembered and forgotten. It ends with an Enya-esque dirge over the rolling credits, which feature sepia drawings of the main characters. It is, in short, trying really, really hard to be the fourth part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Possibly Kenji Kamiyama is pretending that the Hobbit didn’t happen. I know I am.

The film sticks really quite closely to the text. Helm really does call the Dunlending lord fatty (“you have grown big since you were last here”) and he really does suggest that they step outside (“the king does not permit brawls in his house, but men are freer outside”). When the King sneaks out of the castle during the siege and starts killing individual enemy soldiers with his bare hands, I must admit I found myself thinking “oh, now you have gone too far this is completely unTolkienesque”, but this is indeed exactly what Tolkien says happened. (the king “went out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands”). The Dunlending really do think that his wraith carried on fighting them after he died, and he really was found frozen solid but still standing.

I assume that Weta’s CGI models from Lord of the Rings still exist on someone’s pen drive; and have been reskinned for the purposes of the cartoon. Certainly Helm’s Deep and the Meduseld look exactly as they did in the Jackson trilogy. This sometimes creates the impression that painted characters are walking across photographic landscapes; and sometimes their feet appear to not be quite in contact with the ground. But everyone is proportioned like a grown up human-being and no-one’s face is caricatured, and the voices are all done by proper actors and it is mostly possible to forget you are watching animation and just treat it as a Jacksonian prequel. It’s all great fun, if people with beards, clashing shields and shouting “forth Eorlingas fear no darkness” is your idea of a good time. It’s very much a Tolkien movie for people who actually like Tolkien,

If there is going to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—and I am very far from persuaded that there ought to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—then clearly, somewhere along the line, someone is going to have to make stuff up which isn’t in the book. Anyone who has ever written fan fiction or run an RPG is familiar with the dilemma. Where are the narrative blank spaces? Where do the new characters or the new events fit into the established universe? Do you invent a new adventure for Sherlock Holmes which Watson somehow failed to mention? Or do you decide that the Baker Street Irregulars were off having adventures of their own, independent of the Great Detective? Or decide to make up stories about Mr Shereford Doyle who lived at 221A Baker Street and solved crimes when his famous neighbour was out of town?

Phillippa Boyens spotted a gaping narrative hole in Appendix A. According to Tolkien, a local lord with Dunlending heritage turns up at Helm’s hall and asks if his son could please marry Helm’s daughter. Helm is not impressed with the suggestion. Helm and the Dunlending have a fight. Helm, being legendarily strong, kills the Dunlending, by accident, mostly. So the son of the Dunlending vows revenge, and comes back years later with an army. He usurps the throne of Rohan and drives Helm back to what would later be known as Helm’s Deep. Despite his impressive snow-troll tribute act, Helm dies in the siege; and both his sons fall in battle. But after the long winter comes to an end, his sister-son rides over the hill with the cavalry and saves the day and starts a new line of Kings.

Now, according to Tolkien, the Dunlending lord is called Freca; his son, the usurper, is called Wulf; Helm’s sons are Haleth and Hama, his sister is Hild, the nephew who saves the day is Frealas Hildeson and the daughter who Wulf wanted to marry is called…is called….

She doesn’t have a name. Or any agency. Or anything else. She doesn’t in fact have any function at all, except to not marry Wulf. So War of the Rohirrim gives her a name, Hera (which is, I think, Adunaic for “Mary-Sue”), and makes her the main protagonist of the story.

At one level, this is a very sensible thing to do. The focus on an “invisible” character enables the writers to invent new material without contradicting the source. It makes perfect sense that there were shield-maidens in Rohan before Eowyn; and that Eowyn (if the narrator is in fact she) would be interested in telling their story.

The decision to make Hera an all-purpose wonder-wench was a little, I don’t know, obvious. She rides horses wildly with her hair flowing out behind her; she outfights the boys; even giving Wulf a small scar when they were kids; she climbs up sheer mountains and talks to giant eagles and ends up (not a spoiler at all) taking an important message to a wizard whose name begins with a G.

It really is quite a lot of fun. But I kind of wonder if, as the narrator says, Hera was an important person who got left out of history, couldn’t she have been, say, a clever courtly lady working behind the scenes? Peter Jackson was understandably unhappy with an Arwen who sits at home doing embroidery throughout the adventure: but his solution, to put her on a horse and give her Golrfindel’s job, is not especially imaginative.

Tolkien fans are incredibly toxic. Well, fans are incredibly toxic. Or probably it’s just that some toxic people pretend to be Tolkien fans. Quite a lot of Tolkien fans think that the dark skinned dwarves and elves in the Rings of Power are part of a plot to abolish the white race. And quite a lot of Star Wars fans think that Rey Skywalker’s appearance in The Force Awakens was a preliminary step towards Walt Disney forcibly castrating the entire male population.

But in this case, the right wing commentariat are clearly in the right. War of the Rohirrim is absolutely a feminist appropriation of Tolkien. Re-inscribing the female perspective into a text which specifically excludes it is absolutely a political act. It’s somewhat akin to Jean Rhys retelling Jane Eyer from Bertha Rochester’s point of view. Kamiyama doesn’t just point out that Helm’s daughter doesn’t have a name: that would have been a perfectly valid feminist reading of Lord of the Rings. He goes beyond this: he creates a new story, which is extremely faithful to Tolkien—far more faithful than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, his Hobbit, or god help us the Rings of Power—which asserts the centrality of that marginal figure. This is absolutely an act of political subversion. The act of doing it is arguably more interesting than the way it has been done; but as we have seen, there exists a category of modern art where the idea is more important than the artefact. Masculinist Star Wars fans were ludicrously absurd to feel emasculated by the Force Awakens: they are absolutely correct to feel that their male supremacy is critiqued by War of the Rohirrim.

To which I say, loudly and clearly, fuck them.

I am not sure that we need new Tolkien-esque works; but if we are obliged to have them, films like this that critique and destabilise the canon are the way to go. The existence of blokes who are bothered by this kind of thing is precisely the reason this is the kind of thing we ought to be doing, good and hard.

My reviews of Rings of Power Season II, complete without outtakes, extras and lots of digressions is now available as a smart little PDF. 

It is available free (along with lots of other exclusive content) to all subscribers to my Patreon. (Just pledge $1 each time I write an article.) www.patreon.com/rilstone

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Art, post-script

Oh please don't agree with me! When people agree with me I feel sure I must be wrong! 

Is there no-one who actually likes and understands conceptual art who can tell me what I'm missing? 

Rings of Power Season 2

 

My reviews of Rings of Power Season II, complete without outtakes, extras and lots of digressions is now available as a smart little PDF. It costs $6.50/£5.00 (plus the Apple Tax, unfortunately). 

But I would prefer it is you did NOT buy it, and instead signed up to my Patreon (pledging $1 each time I write a Thing) in which case you get it for free. 

www.patreon.com/rilstone

Art

Conservatives really like sculpture. They specially like marble carvings of ladies in wedding veils, or with silk sleeves, or with little lace handkerchiefs draped over their perfect feet.

I'd be the last to deny that these carvings are very pretty and very skilful. It must be very hard to represent something as soft as lace in a medium as hard as marble. (Are the sculptors actually carving the lace and the silk? Or is there a trick involved, some way of fooling the eye so it looks as if there is a carved veil hanging over a carved face? In a way that would be even cleverer. )

But the conservatives who endlessly put pictures of marble ladies on the hate sight formally known as Twitter see in them a political message. These carvings, they say, represent the Decline of the West. In the Olden Days artists carved chiffon veils out of solid rock. Now they nail bananas to walls in the name of art.

Well: "thinking old things are better than new ones" is pretty much the definition of "conservative". My own taste is in fact rather unfashionable, not to say old-fashioned. For example, I have been greatly enjoying the recently discovered 1966 Morecambe and Wise shows currently playing on Radio 4 Extra. They consist largely of well-delivered but extremely laboured word-play. ("Ah, Little John, I fancy it will be venison for supper". "What makes you say that, Robin?" "Oh, just a haunch.") [*]

Puns are puns, and I doubt anyone currently working in comedy could spin a career out of such slender material. But if I say "This sixty year old radio show is really very funny" then a swarm of mosquitos would descend and say "And all modern comedians are completely unfunny" and another swarm would add "If you tried to tell those jokes on the radio today, the BBC would CANCEL you."

The decline-of-the-west argument seems to depend on the theory that art is about representation and nothing else: that oil painting is a primitive and slow version of photography, and sculpture is an inefficient method of 3-D printing. A statue of a lady in a silk dress is Triumphant and Western to the extent and to the degree that it accurately represents a lady in a silk dress. Jonathan Truss and Thomas Kincaid are by definition better painters than Monet or Picasso because if they draw an elephant or a cottage, it jolly well looks like an elephant or a cottage. Picasso invented the word "cubism" to cover up the fact he couldn't draw. If a very sophisticated 3D printer could create a marble statue that was even more accurate than one of the Renaissance masters, that would, on these terms, be a better work of art.

Unless what we are admiring is not the artefact, but the skill which went into the creation of it. A photograph of a bowl of fruit might be just as pretty and just as accurate as an oil painting of one; but a painting is Art because it takes years of skill and practice to be able to produce one. In the decadent west, everyone has a camera-phone in their pocket.

I went to London to hear Bob Dylan sing some songs and to see Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw in Waiting for Godot, and spent the afternoon in between looking at Modern Art in the Tates Gallery.

The first exhibition I went to was a retrospective of an American artist named Mike Kelly. I had not previously heard of him. I had not in fact planned to see his exhibition; but it turned out that the Turner Prize was at Tate Britain and I was at Tate Modern. It seems that he was active from around 1980 to his early death in 2012, and that he was particularly known for doing surprising things with old teddy bears.

To my complete surprise -- this was honestly happenstance -- he also turns out to have had an interest in Superman. He didn't particularly care about the stories, but he was intrigued by the idea of Kandor. He was interested in the idea of a city-in-a-bottle: he was interested in the city's art-deco style. He was interested in the fact that there was no consistent depiction of the city -- it was reimagined each time it appeared in the comic. And he was interested in the fact that Kandor represents a sort of obsolescent futurism. It's both the lost home of Superman's childhood; and it's a 1950s vision of a future that never materialised.

The Kandor room in the exhibition consisted of four or five large bottles containing abstract shapes and objects which could be read as cities, and some enlarged comic book panels. I'm not exactly sure if the panels were part of Kelly's original work, or explanatory additions by the Tate. The shapes and colours were quite interesting in an abstract kind of way; there was abstract music playing and the room was in semi-darkness. But I didn't think that looking at objects in bottles particularly illuminated 1950s Superman, or urban design, or retro future town planning. I've always felt that silver age Superman functions as a series of evocative myths even when the stories are embarrassingly simplistic. You could also talk about Krypto, Superboy's childhood pet that is still romping around the asteroid belt. So I suppose what Kelly is doing is isolating the idea of Kandor and putting it in a room. He's saying "think of Otto Binder's idea as if it was a piece of art". Which is no more or less sensible than Yoko asking me to imagine that the moon is a tuna sandwich.

I was more interested in the film that was attached to the room, entitled "Superman Recites Selections From The Bell Jar and Other Works By Sylvia Plath", in which Superman does indeed recite selections from the Bell Jar and other works by Sylvia Plath. I enjoyed the dissonance of a fairly serious actor in a Superman suit being exhibited as Art in an Art Gallery; and the way in which Plath's very intense language was at crossed purposes to the space opera theme of the shrunken city. There was some interest in the way passages from Plath "sync" ironically with the idea of Kandor, rather as Pink Floyd (allegedly) syncs with the Wizard of Oz. And of course Plath is Literature and Superman is Popular Culture. But again, the fact of its having been done was more interesting than the actual doing of it.

Much of the rest of the exhibition struggled to pass the "quite interesting" bar. One room did indeed contain a kind of patchwork quilt sewn together from cuddly toys which the artist had acquired in thrift shops; which is certainly something I had not seen before, and something which one could spend more than a few seconds looking at. But the other side of that room contained more toys displayed in more or less purposeful piles. And evangelical church banners, with slogans saying things like "Fuck You! Now Give Me a Treat Please" embroidered on them. And a reel to reel tape of the artist's voice reciting all of Osvald's lines from Act 3 of Ibsen's Ghosts.

The explanatory notes explained that cuddly toys (home made) were symbols of love but also symbols of labour. Someone had made each one for some child, and needlework is traditionally woman's work. But they'd been turned into commodities by being sold at thrift shops. And that the act of giving a child a stuffed toy implied a transaction: the giver is somehow demanding that the child love them in return.

All very true. But I still felt that I was looking at a pile of cuddly toys.

"What happens if you perform only one part of a play" is not an uninteresting question. I once saw an actress performing the whole of Lady McBeth's role as a monologue, with the cues provided by a Greek chorus. And Ghosts is among other things about motherly love; so were we supposed to be drawing a connection between syphilis, euthanasia and cuddly toys? The artist was interested in ideas of ghosts and hauntings: the exhibition was called Ghost and Spirit. A lot depends on your being able to identify what text is playing on loop.

I think if I had gone into a trendy coffee bar or fringe theatre in 1990 and seen a huge pile of teddy bears arranged in a pattern on the floor I might have thought "That is interesting" and it might even have made me think "That is a bit sad and a bit sinister: some kid maybe loved that toy and now it's just in a pile." In an art gallery with explanatory notes it all feels a bit.... "so what"?

Another large installation appeared to be a large, irregular, wooden grid, almost like Ikea shelving laid on its side. Some sections had pink crystals stuck to the inside of them. This represented, apparently, the artist's high school, in so far as he could remember it: the crystal rooms were the ones he could not remember, possibly suggesting some kind of repression. Pink crystals might suggest the viscera we all have inside us; or it might suggest something extraterrestrial. He was interested in recovered memory syndrome and in supposed accounts of flying saucer abductions. Well, okay: but how could I possibly have known any of that if you hadn't told me? and now that you have told me what is interesting about the artefact?

I then proceeded across London to the Other Tate Gallery and purchased a ticket to see this years Turner Prize exhibition, as I had originally intended.

You know the format: four exhibitions, four artists, lots of outraged letters in the paper about how its all gone terribly woke, the weirdest and most controversial gets the prize.

Room One belonged to someone called Pio Abad, a British Philippine artist. I understand his exhibition to have been a recreation of one he curated for the Ashmolean in Oxford. The whole of one wall consisted of highly detailed black-and-white line drawings of historical artefacts juxtaposed with modern objects. A south American statue placed alongside an angle poise lamp; some kind of African mask alongside a pile of paperback books. The drawings seemed to me to be good: I couldn't tell if they were major-award-winning-good or any-art-school-graduate-good. The rest of the room included actual historical artefacts from the Ashmolean with the artist's own interpretative text; and a large concrete representation of one of Imelda Marcos's vastly expensive diamond necklaces.

The second room, by Scottish Sikh artist Jasleen Kaur, is dominated by an old car with a gigantic doily draped over it: something which I have assuredly never seen done before. Music from her culture is playing in the background. There is a large perspex sheet hanging from the ceiling, on which are placed various objects, lovingly listed by the curators on an explanatory caption. ("Fake vomit" "Blessed iron brew" "Fruit pastel". These are literal examples and not satirical inventions of my own.) There are some photographs of cross-cultural Scottish/Sikh events; with an orange-sepia tinge; and an accordion and some finger cymbals which occasionally play themselves.

Romany artist Delaine Le Bas gets several rooms. They are all hung floor to ceiling with sheets of various fabrics; on which stick figures and icons have been daubed. There is clearly some purpose and skill to this: strange, demonic horses dominate the first room; the second room is dark; and the third is brightly lit with white ghostly figures holding leaves, and the words "know yourself" written on the wall. As you pass from the first to the second room there is a large paper mache representation of a horse, with a pair of shoes on the floor next to it. I don't know whether I am supposed to describe this as "immersive" or "interactive" or "walk-through", but clearly the whole complex of three rooms constitute a single artwork.

So: Pio Abad is pointing out that British museums are full of art looted from other countries, including his own; and asking us to draw ironic connections between, say, a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar and the cultural artefact from (I am guessing) on of the countries that was exploited for the sugar trade. I devoutly believe that our colonial history is fraught with exploitation. And I get that angle-poise lamps are kind of in one way nothing like ritual masks and in another way maybe a little bit like them. We are told that "much of the thinking behind the exhibition was staging these encounters". The artist says that "a lot of the work happens in that space in between, where the viewer contemplates something that I have produced in response to an artefact that I have looked at."

Very probably. But how is this "encounter" or "response" supposed to work? Someone once told me that to understand the abstract art of Mark Rothko you have to stare at one of his canvasses for a very long time; until the colours start to pulsate and draw you in. I can see how that could be true. I can at least understand what is being said. So is the plan that if I look at these drawings for a long time, the fact that the colonial exploitation of the Philippines was a Bad Thing would suddenly present itself to me? Or am I suppose to stand back from the wall, like Ozymandias, and somehow acquire some mystical insight from the grid of twenty or so small pictures, as opposed to studying each one? Or is the idea that I go away and do some homework and discover why that particular lamp resonates with that particular statue? But how do I do that in the exhibition I've just paid a tenner to look at? What's an appropriate amount of time to spend in each room? Or does this kind of art exist primarily in the catalogue and not on the wall?

The Jasleen Kaur room was, it turns out, more of the same. The photographs are tinted in orange because turmeric is important in Sikh culture and Irn Bru is important in Scotland. The objects on the perspex -- the scarf and the sweet and the bottle -- are all of particular importance to the artist. The car was the first car her father owned, and the doily signifies the fact that many Punjabi immigrants worked in the textile industries. Now you have told me that, I can see there is a certain amount of poetry to the image of the car draped in the cloth; and a certain amount of chutzpah in having physically created it. But I have taken it in at a glance; what am I supposed to have learned or felt? "Mass produced everyday objects are coded with symbols and images" say the captions. How? "Kaur cuts and pastes objects from her upbringing in Glasgow through the gallery to make sense of what is out-of-view or withheld?" In what way? "On the floor, found images of protest and restitution, described by Kaur as 'counter-images; aim to dispel myths around where solidarities lie." Well, they don't.

A couple of years ago at Sidmouth I saw a nice "folk opera" about a local lady who had recently passed away at the age of a hundred and something. The songs told the story of her life and struggles. In the final moments they unrolled a piece of embroidery that the lady herself had made. This was very moving, because we'd spent ninety minutes having the context explained. I don't know the context of the fruit pastel, and neither does anyone else.

The Romany piece -- which I found much more interesting as an object -- seemed to suffer from the same issue. Once you have given me the solution, I can see that the walk-through exhibition represented the journey of the soul to enlightenment. One room was, like, dark and the other was, like, bright, and there were even footprints going from one to the other. But it turns out that the drawings of horse-like-critters in room one, and the paper mache horse in room two, are representations of a china horse that her granny had on the mantlepiece, and the shoes represent the shoes that the artist wore as a child. Or something. How could I conceivably have known this? And once I have been told why is it interesting?

The last room, by one Claudette Johnson, was a series of paintings of people on great big huge canvasses. They were the kinds of paintings of people that look like the people who they are paintings of. Probably: there is some suspicion that the artist may combine the features of more than one sitter to get the desired effects. No-one has a name: the works have titles like "figure in raw umber" and "seated figure 1". There is some abstraction going on: a man in a solid turquoise shirt and a man in a red shirt pose in front of a solid yellow background; a man whose face is rendered in plain black pencil or charcoal is wearing a partly painted-in red and blue checked shirt.

It's not just a collection of portraits: it too is saying something. All the figures are black people; none of them are famous. The paintings draw attention to their artifice -- the tops of the canvasses chop the top or the side of the face away; a young man is turned away from the painter in an awkward pose. The paintings -- if I am allowed to say this -- seem to be interested in the actual physical blackness of black people; of the way in which light reflects off skin. Some of the images contain more light pigment than dark. There is one image of a dead or unconscious man in a red shirt laid across the lap of an older woman which is called "Pieta" but none of the other images appear to contain any conscious symbolism. The overwhelming feeling of the gallery is that the big, oversized faces are projecting personality: I found it slightly unsettling in the way that endless walls of famous white people in the National Portrait Gallery has never done. I checked the explanatory label: "This person deserves to win the prize because she paints pictures of human faces really well, and conveys their personalities really convincingly, with striking use of colour that makes you look twice", it said. No, of course it didn't. It turns out that the pictures "mediate questions about our private and public selves" "suggest that our identity is not fixed but is crated and changeable"; "embody" the idea that "black...is an unstable identity, physically, culturally, and politically." 

Well, all right. If you insist.

English literature departments used to teach The Death of the Author. "Texts" (which are not at all the same things as "works") were autonomous objects; a poem was a thing made, a thing which existed: the question was always "what does this poem mean" and never "what did the author mean by this poem." One assumes, I suppose, that if the poet is any good, the poem means roughly what the poet intended it to mean; but you can't bring his "intention" in from outside and force it onto the text.

Fools ask "Who is Godot?" and "What does Godot represent?" as if the answer -- Beckett's answer, deposited with his lawyer to be unsealed fifty years after his death -- would explain away all the difficulties of the play; as if Waiting for Godot, with an explanation would be more interesting that Waiting for Godot unexplained.

Bigger fools tell you that "Godot is God" or "Godot is death" as if that settles the question. The play "means" that God doesn't exist and won't ever come; or else it "means" that the thing that we are all waiting for is the thing whose arrival will signal not only the end of this play but the end of every play. But this is all non sequitur. Waiting for Godot is fascinating because it is "about" two people, waiting for a third person, who never in fact arrives, and what they do to pass the time.

Modern art -- modern art as mediated by the Tates Gallery -- seems to take the opposite approach. Don't say "death of the artist". Say "the artist risen again and ruling the universe; the artist who sits above the object and declares its one and only meaning". These horses and fruit pastels and wooden grids mean what the artists tell you that they mean.

It would be one thing to look at a picture of a scary man in a red suit and be told "This is a painting of the devil because the artist means it to be a painting of the devil." The painting of the man in the red suit is still just as good or just as bad a painting as it was already; but we have possibly learned something about why the painter painted it. But it's another thing to look at a small cube in an empty room and say "This is a sculpture of the devil because the artist means it to be a sculpture of the devil."

It isn't that the artist imposes meaning on the text: it's that the artist's meaning supplants the text: that the artist's meaning renders the text superfluous. What we are being offered is, in fact, empty rooms containing pure intention.

And the very first time someone did this -- Duchamp’s loo or Craig-Martin's glass of water -- it was possibly mildly interesting. The one hundredth time, not so much. Particularly when what is intended -- colonialism is bad, Glaswegian Sikhs exist -- is so banal.

[*] "So how did you fall in with the outlaws?" "I fell out with the in-laws"

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Arts Diary: Conclave

Arts Diary: Conclave: Conclave is just basically a really good movie. Nothing moves too quickly; actors acts; characters are characterised; the plot points are se...

Death

We keep being warned that the Assisted Dying Bill is a Slippery Slope. Allow physcians to prescribe suicide pills to terminally ill adults who request them, and before you know it, Kier Starmer will be telling everyone over the age of 29 to report to the Termination Center.

And it is in fact true that most social reforms happen incrementally. We abolished hanging for crimes other than murder in 1823; we abolished it for the majority of murders in 1954; and stopped killing criminals altogether in 1965. We decrimalised (fine word) homosexuality in 1967, but equal marriage didn't arrive until 2014. We banned corporal punishment in schools in 1983; Scotland and Wales banned all forms of smacking in 2020 and 2023, and its only a matter of time before England follows suit. 

So, in fact, yes: if we let doctors prescribe suicide pills to terminally ill people who positively want to end their lives, there is a distinct possibility that in a few years time Esther Rantzem or someone will say "Why aren't we prepared to do the same favour for people who are very old, people who are horribly disabled, people with incurable chronic clinical depression, people who have irrevocably besmirched their honour, people whose one true love has rejected them, people who don't much fancy the prospect of spending the next thirty years in jail, or for that matter people who just happen to be having a really bad morning."

And if you thank that outcome is undesirable, then surely it is better to not take the first step in the wrong direction?

I am very sorry for the twelve year old kids being sent to Tyburn for petty theft, but if we stop hanging children who steal pocket handkerchieves then in a couple of centuries we will probably stop hanging nurses who murder babies.

It's a slippery slope. Innit.

But why do we so rarely hear the converse argument -- what I suppose we could call the Rough Incline argument? The logic of those who are opposed to asssist dying in principle -- because longevity is to be pursued at all costs, because suffering may have value, because all killing is wrong, because life has a quality called "sanctity" -- would surely require you to say that suicide, with or without the assistance of a medical professional, is wrong under all circumstances. Rejecting the Assisted Dying Bill is a Rough Incline that leads inexorably to the repeal of the 1961 Suicide Act. Remember Charlie Chaplain's Limelight (1952) where the washed up comedian finds the ballet dancer with her head in the gas oven, and has to keep it secret because, as the doctor says "Attempted suicide means jail."

Which, I assume, is what some Roman Catholics clergy, at least, do actually want; and which would, as a matter of fact, be a relatively self-consistent position. It is very odd to have a law which says "It a serious criminal offence to help someone, or indeed to fail to prevent someone, from doing a thing which it is perfectly legal for them to do by themselves."

Granted that suicide is no crime, why do we need all these safeguards and doctors and committees? Won't there be something a little ghoulish about the spectacle of a late-stage cancer patient arguing before a judge that he's really does want to cash in his chips and at time and place of his choosing? Wouldn't it have been perfectly logical in 1962 to have fully legalised suicide and made suitable tablets available in chemist shops for anyone who chose to purchase them? Or, failing that, provide walk-in suicide clinics for people who wanted to avail themselves of their services? 

Certainly, a lethal tablet is a dangerous thing to have in your possession -- you could take it accidentally, or use it to kill someone non-consensually -- but that's equally true of a knife or a can of rat-poison. Slipping a suicide pill in granny's gin without asking her first would be murder, and murder is already frowned on by the law. We don't generally ban a thing because there's a chance it could be misused.

And doubtless, the free availability of death drugs on demand would be rolled out in conjunction with lots of help and advise and psychological treatment for people in desperate situations who aren't ready to end it all; in the same way that when we legalise heroin drugs, we'll put lots of resources into medical and psychological assistance for people who want to come off it or not get on it in the first place.

But rather than howling that the state is going to start killing people, couldn't we reasonably ask what possible business of the state's it is to try to stop people from killing themselves if that is what they really want? 

Some of the people who are horrified by the assisted dying bill think that requiring manufactures to label product (so consumers know how much sugar and salt their cheeseburger contains) is an unacceptable intervention by what they call the nanny state. They throw up their hands in horror when Kier Starmer suggests that it should be illegal to smoke cigarettes in pub gardens, and indeed that tobacco might eventually become a prohibited substance. 

Why should nanny require a permission slip from two doctors and a judge before she allows you to do something which is not illegal in the first place?

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XI: Discourse

The Rings of Power is a talisman and a surrogate for a certain kind of toxic fan schism. I think that you think that I am a gatekeeper; you think that I think that you are a dyson airblade (*). The rest is discourse.

(*) Not a proper fan.

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(*) Not a real fan. 

X: History

The Rings of Power plays fast and loose with the imaginary history of Middle-earth. But historical TV shows and movies play fast and loose with real history all the time. People who know about these things tell me that Braveheart was a laughably inaccurate depiction of medieval Scottish history. People who care tell me that the Crown was a dubiously accurate fictionalisation of the life of Elizabeth Windsor and her family. And many cowboy yarns are set in an imaginary country only tangentially connected with America. Heck, Shakespeare's Richard III probably only has a passing connection to the dead historical guy they found under the carpark. 

So maybe the Rings of Power is not an inept dramatisation. Maybe it is a new and separate work that happens to use a pseudo-historical setting as its inspiration?

When I was Discoursing upon this subject, I said, frivolously, that someone with a knowledge and love of the history of the American West could be forgiven for objecting to Cowboy Movie in which all the characters had English accents; which placed California on the East Coast and made Abraham Lincoln the exact contemporary of Alfred the Great. My interlocutor pointed out that someone had, in fact, taken a story set in Medieval Japan and filmed it as if it happened in the Wild West; and indeed taken a story about Renaissance Verona and placed it in 1950s New York. 

Which is a slight non-sequitur. But I concede: if someone wanted to create a radical reimagining of Lord of the Rings set in the First World War, I'd be all on board with it. Frodo and Sam as a senior and junior officer carrying a dangerous new kind of bomb to a munitions dump behind enemy lines? A disguised Prince George pretending to be a scout named Strider? The Kaiser in his dark tower sending out nine secret service agents to assassinate them? 

Why not? Why not Tom Sawyer with the geography and social attitudes of a 1970s British sit-com? Oliver Twist in the modern American residential care system? 

This kind of thing is really done, all the time. And I am normally highly in favour of it. I liked (though I didn't fully understand) the production of Wagner's Lohengrin in which the knights were substituted for laboratory rats and the Swan was a Kubrick-esq space embryo. I thought the play about Queen Lear and her three sons illuminated Shakespeare's text in unexpected ways. It's normally the rest of the world who says "Oh, but Andrew, I don't think Richard the Third would really have been driving a tank."

I went to see the Lord of the Rings stage musical. Twice. I wish I had seen the original Canadian production that everyone says was much too long. As regular readers know, the show made many changes to the story. It describes the Rings as the source of magic in Middle-earth and insinuates that when the One is destroyed, magic in general will go away. It conflates Theoden and Denethor into a single figure called the Great King Of All the Lands of Men. It jumps from the Prancing Pony to Weathertop in single dance-routine. 

Why am I prepared to defend this kind of thing; but draw the line at being told that Isildur was a young man at the time of the forging of the Rings?

I don't have a satisfactory answer to that question.

But here is part of it.

The Jackson trilogy failed as an adaptation of Lord of the Rings but it worked, brilliantly, as an action movie. It ran rings around anything in the roughly contemporaneous Star Wars prequels, and it was also much funnier. The Guardian film critic of the day, who appeared to have no interest in fantasy and may not have read the book, said the Helms Deep sequences were as good as anything Kurasowa ever did. And in some cases (not all) it did a good job at dubbing Tolkien's epic language into the patois of the summer blockbuster: 

Book:  'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him"

Movie:  "I'm not a man."

One thinks of the modern Bible paraphrase which renders "Am I my brother's keeper?" as "Am I meant to be the baby-sitter?"

The stage musical works pretty well as a musical -- the songs remain forgettable, but the bollywood inspired dance routines in the revival were a lot of a fun; and it did a creditable job of turning the accomplishment of half a million words into an hourglass. The shrinking exercise had been undertaken by people very much in touch with the spirit of the books. The sudden eruption of paper flowers and rose petals at the end of the London version, and the distribution of packets of seeds to the audience at the end of the recent Watermill show don't reproduce the exact plot of the Scouring of the Shire. But they are in touch with its mythic emotions. Sam uses Galadriel's gift to heal the Shire. Jackson chopped out the healing and gift. 

The Rings of Power adapts an historical story, removes the history, and in return gives me...

Some pretty speeches and nice backdrops. Some generic fight scenes in cookie-cutter forests, Some Irish people claiming to be Hobbits. Some short, funny Scotsmen with silly beards. It is not a translation of Akallabeth into the language of a TV mini series. It's not a new story using the Fall of Numenor as a background. It really is an artistic vacuum. If it didn't have the title of my favourite book tattooed on its bottom, I wouldn't give it a second glance.  And neither would you. 

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