I didn't hate Disney's Christopher Robin nearly as much as I intended to. It was funny when it was trying to be funny and charming when it was trying to be charming. It is hard not be charmed when the adult Christopher Robin walks across the Pooh Sticks Bridge and finds that Eeyore's stick house is still standing and accidentally falls down one of Pooh's heffalump traps. It seems to understand -- or at least have a passing interest in -- A.A Milne's original short stories.

I believe scientists have to write up failed experiments as well as successful ones, so honour demands a review. I am sorry it will not be as funny as it would have been if I had hated it. I promise to get around to the Tolkien biopic in due course. 

Christopher Robin is all growed up. He has a very boring office job working for a company which makes suitcases. His boss, played by Mark Gatiss, needs him to work right through the weekend, even though he had promised to spend it with his wife and little girl. While he is struggling through his sales figures, his old friend Winnie-the-Pooh pops up in the park outside his London home. With, as they say, hilarious consequences.

Almost the best part of the film was the opening credits, in which simplified versions of E.H Shepard's illustrations are gently animated to re-acquaint us with the stories of the boy and his famous bear. These tiny vignettes caught a very large amount of what is entrancing about the original tales. A little boy and his toy animals pull a fat teddy bear out of a rabbit hole. The bear gets stuck up a tree, floating improbably on the end of a toy balloon; the little boy rescues him by bursting the balloon with a toy gun. These animations lead directly into a "live action" version of the final story, "in which" Christopher Robin says goodbye to his childhood friends and leaves the Forest. 

Christopher Robin is played by a child actor and the forest is a real landscape, but the stuffed animals are 3D animations. The toys are part way between "classic Pooh" and "Disney Pooh": Piglet and Eeyore look very like Shepard's pictures but Tigger is pure Disney. Pooh is fuzzy and teddy-like and avoids being too bright a shade of orange, but he retains his red waistcoat. Christopher has a mercifully English accent; no gophers are in evidence. 

The scene starts out by following the book pretty closely, with Rabbit making his pompous "goodbye" speech and Eeyore reading out his awful poem; but it rapidly degenerates into CGI animals throwing bits of cake at each other. I suppose Corporate Pooh can only think in terms of slapstick and farce. Pooh and Christopher go to their enchanted place and say goodbye and deliver most of the lines from the book. The line "I am not going to do nothing any more. They don't let you" has been changed to "I am not going to do nothing any more. They don't let you in boarding school." We zoom through Christopher Robin's post Forest life -- school, army, death of parents, marriage, baby, job -- in a few moments, and then the story proper gets under way.

I remember when we were surprised by Roger Rabbit and Jar-Jar Binks and Gollum: but now we all accept that a stuffed kangaroo can be part of the cast of a movie. The day is not infinitely remote when the idea that human actors had to go into a studio and perform their lines will seem outdated and quaint. Fortunately that day hasn't come quite yet: Ewan McGregor carries the film almost single-handedly. The whole of the second act consists of him interacting with a CGI bear; the bear is joined by an entire CGI menagerie, but no humans, in act three. Ewan only gets to talk to actual actors in the finale. I never once doubted him.

The film has essentially the same plot as Hook -- the distant work-obsessed father remembers his own childhood and reconnects with his family -- but McGregor never allows the adult Christopher Robin to come across as a monster. We entirely believe that he is unwillingly forgoing his holiday because Mycroft Holmes has forced him to; that he deeply loves his daughter but honestly thinks that making her cram to get into a prestigious boarding school is the right thing to do. He doesn't embarrassingly revert to childhood, but there's a light in his eyes when he meets his old friends and starts to remember the olden days. He pitches the thing entirely right; treating Pooh partly as a naughty child and partly as an embarrassing old college mate.

And he never once calls him "my young apprentice".

The "iconic" theme song only troubles the score a couple of times, and even I can't begrudge the brief reprise of The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers. ("He does that a lot," says Eeyore, gloomily.) But I have always found the Disney version of the willy-billy-silly-old Bear incredibly charmless. Slow and lugubrious, it is very hard to imagine this Pooh composing a pome or inventing a honey pot shaped boat. Almost his only personality trait is that he sometimes says the kinds of things that you can put on greetings cards and motivational posters. When Christopher Robin said that he liked to do nothing, he did, in fact mean something. He meant that he liked doing the kinds of things which are important to children but which adults don't understand. Playing with toy bears. Having wars with toy soldiers. Making up stories. But Disney-Pooh uses "nothing" simply as a play on words: "People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day." It sounds vaguely wise; it goes nicely on a greeting card. But it doesn't actually mean anything at all. (How does the old Irish riddle go? "I am greater than God; I am worse than the devil; dead men eat me; if you eat me, you'll die. What am I?")

When he first visits Christopher Robin's house Pooh knocks over a cup which rolls along the shelf causing everything in the kitchen to crash to the floor. Someone has him confused with Paddington. The other characters come across very much as a rabble of badly behaved toddlers; only Eeyore feels like a character. Never having seen a grown-up before, the animals all assume that Christopher Robin is a heffalump. Which is rather cute.

The film has taken some trouble to think about the metaphysical status of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends. It would have been tempting to make Pooh function like Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes: a living being to Christopher Robin, but a stuffed toy to everyone else. But this Pooh definitely has agency and individual life and literal existence -- when people in the real world encounter the crying talking sleeping walking living teddy bear, they are freaked out. Although the film doesn't put it in these terms the Hundred Aker Wood seems to be a separate magical universe connected to our world via a magical tree. The magical tree is situated near Christopher's childhood home, but when Pooh travels back through the, as it were, wardrobe to 1950s England, he emerges in a park near Christopher's Bloomsbury home. "I suppose it is where ever it needs to be," he explains. He may be a bear of very little brain, but he knows a Plot Device when he sees one.

The trouble with this is that it removes any of the symbolism and poignancy which Winnie-the-Pooh could have had. This Pooh is not an imaginary friend: he's just a friend. 

You could make a good story around the question of what happens to imaginary friends when their children grow up. Perhaps they go and find new children to befriend. Perhaps they Cease To Be. Perhaps they wait around like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, hoping that their erstwhile playmate will appear again? Peter Yarrow sanctioned a picture book in which a little girl arrives in Puff's cave shortly after Jackie Paper deserts him. Father Christmas told young Christopher Tolkien that he wouldn't be writing for a few years, but would catch up with him when he had children of his own. A cartoon did the rounds on the internet a while back in which a grown up Calvin found an old stuffed tiger when his own little girl was being menaced by monsters under the bed. And there are some people who would say that "where does the delusion go once you are cured of it?" is a silly question, like "where does eighty miles an hour go when the car stops?".

The ending of the House at Pooh Corner is about a boy reaching a point in his life where he no longer plays with stuffed toys. The prologue to Christopher Robin is simply about a boy going off to school. Boarding school at that. It is taken for granted that the fall of man would have been averted if children never had to sleep away from home. Christopher Robin has become so busy with unimportant things like getting married, raising children and defeating the Nazis that he has lost touch with some of the friends he had when he was six years old. Once he gets back in touch with them, he's much happier.

I believe I remember the name of one (non imaginary) friend from when I was six. I haven't spoken to him in twenty five years. I still have some of my cuddly toys, though. The New York Library wasn't interested in taking them off my hands. 

The denouement of the film is quite clever. Christopher Robin applies Pooh's philosophy of "nothing" to the problem of suitcase manufacture and everyone lives happily ever after. Although the luggage company which Christopher Robin works for is very small, it is run by a mega-capitalist who owns nearly all the companies in England. Christopher points out that if he allowed his millions of employees time off to do "nothing"; they would be able to go on holiday and the company would sell millions more suitcases. 

You may think that trades unions had to fight tooth and nail for paid leave: it turns out it was actually gifted by a magic bear. Or perhaps that is the message. A world where mega-capitalists facilitate work-life balance of their own free will is about as likely as a talking teddy?

If this is the 1950s, why do Christopher Robin's "very important papers" appear to have come off a laser printer?

The more I think about the message of the movie, the more puzzled I am. Winnie-the-Pooh, who literally does nothing all day, is happy. When Christopher Robin hung out in the Hundred Acre Woods, throwing sticks in rivers and chasing non-existent heffalumps, he was happy. Now Christopher Robin has a job and a nice house in town and a nice cottage in the country, he is sad. Madeline Robin studies hard all day because her dad wants her to go to a prestigious boarding school: this makes her sad. When she stops studying and starts playing imaginary tennis matches with a balloon, she is happy. Play is good. Work is bad. School is bad: forests and teddy bears are good. Doing stuff is bad. Doing nothing is good. Quit your job. Lower your ambition. Spend more time with your friends and your family. Play instead of studying. Money doesn't buy happiness.

What was it Walt Disney paid to buy Winnie the Pooh from A.A Milne's descendants? Three hundred and fifty million dollars, wasn't it? The real life Christopher Milne's real life daughter got a cheque for forty four million. Which is nice.

There is nothing wrong with giving a child a book which says "be kind and generous and prayerful" when you yourself are cruel and mean and irreligious. That's just perfectly normal hypocrisy. And there is nothing surprising about grown-ups telling children actual deliberate lies. Of course an elephant can't fly if it wants to fly badly enough. But put the idea about and all the other elephants will start to believe that its their own fault they can't fly, that they would have been able to fly if they'd wanted to badly enough, and they will be content with their lot and go and work in luggage factories and not form trade unions like those nasty circus clowns.

But why on earth would anyone feed children with a morality that they themselves don't believe and which they definitely don't want the child to believe? If we all took on board the message of Christopher Robin, then it is certain that movies like Christopher Robin would never get made.

I'm Andrew. I write about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.

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The point of those articles was that someone said that they like a certain thing even though they thought it was terrible and I thought "I wonder what they mean by that."

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progres

No Hipsters. Don't be coming in hear with your hairy faces, your vegan diets, your tiny hands and your sawdust bedding. No, wait. Hamsters. No Hamsters.

7

Wil Self wrote a piece in the Spectator entitled "Why I Hate Hipsters." I hope they commission another piece called simply "Why I Hate". And then one from a hipster entitled "Why I Hate Wil Self." 

I got as far as the bit where he complained about people who play loud music in coffee shops and got lost. I think he is mainly cross about the existence of cappuccino. He uses the words "frothy coffee" and "dickhead" interchangeably. A Daily Telegraph sub-editor asserted that hipsters were now the world's most derided sub-group; which must come as quite a relief for all the pedophiles. 

Some people hate hipsters. They hate them even more than they hate immigrants. One of the things that makes them really really cross is that they drink orange juice out of jam jars, which is to say, one of the coffee shops on Stokes Croft has jam jar shaped glasses. I find that sort of thing quite fun, but I can't imagine getting cross about it. I suppose it's a class thing. When people say that they hate hipsters with their beards and their Oxfam clothes and their orange juice what they mean is that they don't like the way in which all the boarded up shops have been taken over by coffee shops and bakeries and forced the crack dealers and whores out of business.

It's gentrification, innit? According to Wikipedia, I myself am 60% Hipster.

I think that one of the things which make "Hipsters" so derided is their affected sense of ironic detachment. The hipster goes to the Cube and the Arnolfini but only in order to strike a superior pose and complain that they've gone awfully mainstream recently; the hipster gets a ticket for the first night of a new play but doesn't appreciate it because he was so busy appreciating how clever and sophisticated he was for appreciating it. When I get accused of being a hipster (a thing which has hardly ever happened) it's never because I re-read Judge Dredd comic books or have Superman radio episodes on my IPod. It's always because I once heard a concert by a Senegali guitarist.

Oooo you hipster! You only went cos you wanted to feel clever!

The hat possibly doesn't help.

8

I don't think that the person who says that he knows the books he likes are terrible or says that her preferred genre is "trash" has a low opinion of the things which they love. I think that they are simply signaling that they want to suspend criticism. They would rather you stopped thinking, please. They don't want to have, for the seventeenth time, the debate about whether one of the character's was a bit racist and whether there were enough female characters. (He was and there weren't but shut up about it already.) He thinks that if he lies on his back with his tale between his legs, no-one will start a fight with him.

And I was kind of expecting (and so were you) this lecture to end up with me saying "Silly people! Asking me to switch my brain off!  Telling me that I can only see Guardians of the Galaxy is I leave my critical faculties at the door! Saying that some things are immune from criticism! If I can write a long Freudian Essay about King Lear I can damn well write a long Freudian essay about Superman Brought To You By The Makers Of Kellogs Pep (the Super-delicious breakfast cereal.)

But instead I am going to wonder out loud: why does anyone think that this kind of thing is worth saying in the first place?

Isn't it because the hipsters and the critics and the fan fiction writers and the subversives and the social justice vigilantes and the people who should really have grown out of this nonsense years ago are always trying to erect a veil between you and the thing you are watching or reading. Who want to prevent you from, in Lewis's sense, ever receiving any work of art ever again. Who want your primary experience of Guardians of the Galaxy to be that it didn't have any major female characters in it. (Groot knows, the lack of major females characters in Guardians of the Galaxy was as obvious as the fact that Geoff Tracey was a puppet.)

I think that "I like this, but it's rubbish" is trying to safeguard a few tiny drops of actual, primary, artistic experience. In a moment, I'm going to use the word authenticity and everyone will be forced to leave the room.

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "don't look at the strings".

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I want to watch this, not through a veil of hipster pretension, but actually itself"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this uncomplicatedly despite the fact that we live in age of irony"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this."

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "This is good."

I like Clone Wars even though it is terrible; I like Superman on the wireless even though it is terrible; I like 60s Marvel even though it is terrible. 

But truthfully; truthfully truthfully truthfully, I think that Doctor Who and Star Wars and Macbeth and the Ring Cycle are terrible too.

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progress

6

I have a friend who makes a point of reading stories against the grain. If it's a comic book about a hero who catches thieves just like flies then he decides that the thieves are all heroic Jesse James types and the hero is a fascist oppressor. (OK: the idea that bankers and vigilantes are baddies may not be that much of a stretch.) If it's a story about heroic warriors fighting bug eyed monsters in space he recasts the bug-eyed monsters as oppressed colonial victims. I assume he thinks that Doctor Who is a racist: the Daleks are just misunderstood. Or possibly Doctor Who is just impossible to misread; which probably means it's not worth reading in the first place. 

I can see how this game might keep an intelligent brain occupied while it's owner was watching movies about Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers. (Perhaps if you are bright and creative enough to rewrite the film in you shouldn't be watching the Lone Ranger in the first place.) I would guess that it renders (for example) Watchmen practically un-watchable. The text already undercuts itself so radically that it's hard to see what is gained by a clever reader willfully subverting it. "Let's read Watchmen as if Rorschache is the good guy." Well, yes, the text positively encourages you do that.  "Let's read it as if he's the bad guy." Yes, the text positively encourages you to do that as well.

On Lewis's terms, this sort of playful approach is the least "literary" imaginable. It is only interested in using the text as raw material for a game; anything that the actual author put onto the actual page is likely to disappear under the weight of subversion. Turning Star Wars (in your head) into a story in which Luke Skywalker is a religiously inspired terrorist is only one step up from school kids pretending there are dirty bits in Middlemarch. (Which is what they had do before the invention of the internet.) But can it really be that an active reading is worse than a passive one? Couldn't one equally make the case the kids comic annual that says "Look, space ships" and leaves the kid to do the actual imagining is one of the highest and most dynamic forms of literature. (It's also how good pornography works. So I'm told.)

If you are already taking the trouble to imagine that perfectly clean books are dirty ones; or of reading one novel and making up a different one in your head, then why not go the whole way, write your day-dream down on paper, and create completely new stories of your own? I suppose that's how Fanfic got started.

I don't think that a gay teenager, reading Legion of Superheroes and deciding that (I think it was) Bouncing Boy must be gay was consciously engaging in a subversive queer reading. I think that was a natural thing to do when there were no gay characters in comic books. The whole idea of Robin and Bucky was that you got to imagine that you were Captain America's or Batman's Very Special Friend. At one level, fan fiction writers are using popular fiction in the exact way it's always been used; in the exact way it's intended to be used. (Has any one ever read Harry Potter and not pretended that an Owl is about to drop a very important letter through their bedroom window? See also: Power Rings, Jaunting Belts, Light Sabers, Lenses...)

But it seems to be that when fan fiction becomes too much of a thing, the Legion and Harry Potter are basically reduced to a commodity: raw material to be chewed up and spat out and in new form, one where the baddie is the goodie and both of them are having kinky sex with each other. Which is fine. I mean, its fun, and its creative and its interactive and it doesn't do anyone any harm. I think it might be a pretty good working definition of the difference between a fan and a critic. A critic writes an essay about a book. A fan write three more chapters. (And then dresses up as the main character.)

But. There is Doctor Who fan fiction online before the closing credits of this weeks episode have been ruined by the continuity announcer. When Amazing Spider-Man 2 came to an end, I sat in the cinema for eight minutes to see if there was a post-cred. My fan-fic writing friends used those eight minutes to write a short story based on the premise that Aunt May was having an affair with Norman Osborne, and posted it to the internet before I left the cinema. They must literally sit through the actual movie thinking "What if this character were gay? What if I added a sex scene here? Could that background character be reimagined as the protagonist of the movie?" They have their reward. But this critic wonders if they can be said to have ever actually "seen" the movie they are writing about?

there's more

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress

5

Some people would say that the writer who can write a 15 minute script which ends with the hero getting captured in such a way that millions of children literally can't wait to find out if he escapes or not is just as clever -- maybe cleverer -- than the one who can write 4,000 pages about the minutiae of his childhood in such a way that the broadsheet newspapers salivate over it. But I don't think they really believe it. People also say "You have to be just as good an actor to play Widow Twanky as you do to play Hamlet" but I don't think they really believe it either."

I think that what everyone really believes is that there is a sort of league table of genres with Superman at the bottom, Middlemarch is at the top, and Agatha Christie in the billiard room with the lead piping.

Which means we have been making very heavy weather of a very easy question. "I like this even though it is bad" means "I like this despite its low position in the the hierarchy of genres"

Emotionally, I am pretty sure that this is what I believe. Middlemarch is "better" than Superman. One is about a whole community and a whole nation and asks us to redefine our whole definition of psychology and narrative, where the other sold breakfast cereal to American kids. I definitely feel that Middlemarch is better than "some text that some copy writer wrote on the back of a box of Kellogs Pep" although I also accept that advertising copy writing is a hard job and neither me nor Mary Evans could have done it. 

But I am not sure that I could rationally defend these feelings. What does "better" even mean?  I could just as well argue: 

Superman — Poked fun at the Klu Klux Klan when it was dangerous to do so; encouraged literally millions of kids to practice tolerance and clean living

Middlemarch — Approved of by F.R Leavis

Superman — Millions of kids ran home to school to listen to it 

Middlemarch — Literally no-one would read it if someone hadn't decided that an English Literature GCSE was needed to get certain kinds of job. 

Superman - Figure who literally everyone on earth has heard of; genuine 20th century myth. 

Dorothea Brooke - Who she?

6:

Mr C.S. Lewis proved that what defined a "good" book was that the reader had a "good" literary experience. One of the markers that a "good" literary experience was taking place was that once the reader had finished the book, he might go back and read it for a second or third time. The person consuming a romantic story in Woman's Realm (intending to throw it away once he's finished it) is doing a different kind of thing to the person sitting down to read Barnaby Rudge for the fourth time. 

I have never read Barnaby Rudge. I have no idea why that was the example which occurred to me.

I don't know if would be prepared to argue (except in order to annoy my Mother) that Doctor Who is "better" than Coronation Street in some objective way. I don't think that it necessarily has better actors, better writers, better directors or cleverer plots. I suppose I could say that it's cleverer to create an alien planet that people believe in than to create a Manchester kitchen that people believe in but on the other hand we've spent 50 years apologizing for the sheer unbelievableness of many of Doctor Who's planets. And some of his kitchens.

But there is no question that we Doctor Who fans do go back and watch our favourite episodes over and over again; but the the idea of anyone going back and listening to old episodes of the Archers is obviously silly. I think I am correct in saying that soap fans, if they miss a few installments, don't try to "catch up" by watching the parts that they missed: they simply start watching again from this weeks episode and take it for granted that the characters themselves will bring them up to speed on what has been happening while they've been away. A bit like real life. There are DVD collections of Inspector Morse, Grange Hill, and the Banana Splits but none of EastEnders or Coronation Street.

On Lewis's view, a "good" reading is one which "receives" the book — that looks at what is there, and only what is there, which appreciates what the writer is doing and tries to have the emotional reaction that the writer wanted you to have. A "bad" reading is one that "uses" the book: which takes some descriptions of sails billowing in the wind and jolly rogers being run up flagpoles as a jumping off point for a day dream that has nothing very much to do with what the author wrote. It's the difference between the person who listens to the classical concert in silence (because he wants to hear every single note down to the last triangle) and the person who is glad that the brass band has started playing because it gives him the excuse to sing along terribly loudly. On Lewis's terms, virtually all pop music is bad. The whole point of pop music is that you "use" it: you dance to it; you use it create ambiance for your party. If you go to a live concert you scream down the band. 

Well, yes. But a dance band is there to provide music for people to dance to; and it might do that well or badly. It might take just as much skill to get everyone in the disco bopping as to win a standing ovation from the cognoscenti in the Albert Hall. Lewis is right that sitting and listening carefully is different to singing along; but I am not sure where he gets "listening carefully to music is better than dancing to it" or "music that you listen carefully to is better than music that you dance to" from. Morally? Psychologically? Theologically?

continues....

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress

3

When someone claims to like bad books or bad movies, they are not using "bad" as a description of quality. They are using it as a label for the kind of book that they like. 

At some point in the past "soap opera" was simply a cuss word meaning "bad drama". "Space opera" was what clever science fiction fans called the stuff that they didn't read. We'd now happily say that Iain M Banks was writing "space opera" without even the slightest implication that he really ought to have been trying harder. "Pulp" used to be a literary slur directed at stuff written quickly and printed on cheap paper: it's now a perfectly neutral way of describing stories about detectives and barbarians and pirates. 

("What a shame we are no longer allowed to go out into the garden and admire all the homosexual flowers and listen to a homosexual tune on the wireless!")

People who like "bad" books might perfectly well draw a distinction between good "bad" books and bad "bad" books. And we could point to any number of bad "good" books. The possibility of bad good "bad" books and good bad "bad" books is left as an exercise for the reader.

Some people think that a long literary novel with a forty page digression about the smell of the protagonist's granny's nightie is basically a pulp novel done badly. "Silly man" they say "He understood so little about pacing that he honestly thought we wanted endless pages about a Russian psychopath wondering the streets thinking about predestination and existentialism when he obviously should have cut straight to the actual murder." (This condition, known as "subtext blindness", is more common than you'd think.) And some people think that a pulp adventure novel is what you are left with when someone tries and fails to write a serious literary psychological doorstep. "Why didn't the writer focus on the effect of shell-shock and PTSD rather than wasting our time with endless descriptions of medieval cavalry charging down orcs with lances?" they ask.

The blessed Germain Greer thought that the Spider-Man movie took a wrong turn when Peter Parker decided to use his powers to fight crime. Surely it should have been about the Kafkesque alienation of an insect person? (She also felt that Master and Commander was too focused on boats.) Paul Merton claimed that Lord of the Rings was the worst book he'd ever read because it didn't contain any laughs; which is a bit like John Cleese telling Malcolm Muggeridge that Chartres cathedral wasn't a very funny building.

Germain Greer didn't really say that the Aubrey-Maturin series was too much about boats. What she said was that setting a story in the Nelsonic navy is a choice: in this case, a choice to tell a story which is mainly about manly men being macho and hardly at all about womanly women being feminine. Only caricature feminists have ever said that Moby Dick, Hornblower and Master and Commander ought never to have been written or that they ought to have had alternate chapters about what the mostly female civilians were doing while the mostly male sailors were out annihilating aquatic mammals and flogging each other, or that they would have been improved by the addition of one of those folk song ladies who dressed up as a boy and went to sea. What feminists actually say is "There are great number of books of the first kind, and very few of the second kind. And only the first kind seem to get turned into movies. Why do you think that is?"

Fanny Price only gets to spend three chapters agonizing about what necklace to wear to a ball because there aren't any French people firing cannon balls at her head. 

4

My go-to example of loving and forgiving something which I believe to be bad is, of course, my MP3 collection of the 1940-51 Superman wireless serials. There are about a thousand 15 minute episodes and I adore every one. (Well, maybe not the alien cook who speaks in rhyme.) I understand that it went out 5 evenings a week, to be listened to by American kids when they got home from school. Episodes are simultaneously breathlessly fast paced and excruciatingly padded. The kids have got to be engaged; but the story has got to be drawn out for as long as possible. Copy boys run to Perry White's office with urgent messages; but it can take a whole episode for anyone to actually get around to reading them. "Message you say, can't you see that I'm too busy to read a fool message?" "Gee, chief, but there might be something important in it, we haven't heard from Lois for three days" "I can't nursemaid every girl reporter on my newspaper! And don't call me chief!" "What about the message?" GET ON WITH IT!

In this kind of format, it's essential that you can tell which character is which the minute they open their mouths. So practically everyone is a stereotype. Henchmen speak in that "de spring is sprung de grass is riz" Brooklyn accent. Policemen begin sentences with "to be sure, to be sure". Cab drivers sound like de black fella. Butler's are English cockneys. Jimmy Olsen says "swell" a lot. On one occassion the villain leaves a white rose at the scene of the crime and Clark Kent questions the florist. Sure enough, he sounds English and effeminate.

This tendency to very broadly drawn characters is part of the show's texture; part of the aesthetic; part of why I adore it. It wouldn't be improved by telling me about the florist's background; or by casting against type and making him a big tough guy with tattoos. But the line between broadly drawn characters; stereotypes; and out-and-out racism can be quite a wiggly one. There's a 1942 episode in which Clark switches two prisoners and remarks. "All Japs look much the same, after all." My attitude to the series might be rather different if most of the wartime episodes were not lost to posterity.  

But then again. In a pulp war story, all the enemy have to pretty uncomplicatedly baddies. That's part of what makes it a pulp war story. If you stop the action to wonder who the Jerry you just shot was, and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart; or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home, and if he would really rather have stayed there in peace, well, you might possibly have a better story, but you'd have a much worse pulp war story. 

So perhaps the person who says "I like this even though it is rubbish" is not talking about aesthetics or genre. Perhaps he is admitting that his pulp books are bad because they are, or sometimes are racist -- or sexist, or morally simplistic. He's not talking about literary quality, but morals. He is much more like someone saying  "I must admit that I enjoy looking at pornography, even though I know I ought not to" than someone saying "I must admit that I like this painting, even though the lady's head is out of proportion and her leg twists round in a direction it couldn't actually go."

continues in this vein for pages

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

A work in progress

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
1

Do you remember Thunderbirds? 

That is a rhetorical question. Of course you remember Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds?

That is also a rhetorical question. Of course you liked Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds even though you could see the strings? 

Did you like Thunderbirds because you could  see the strings? 

Are you pretty sure that most of the time you couldn't actually see the strings?

Or did you just wish everyone would shut up about the bloody strings?

I mean, it would be perfectly reasonable to regard the strings as an insuperable barrier to enjoying Gerry Anderson. This is an action adventure series where the characters are obviously dolls and where no-one has gone to much trouble to conceal the fact that they are dolls, so remind me, why is anyone watching this thing to start with? 

It would be also be perfectly reasonable to watch it "ironically": to watch it because you can see the strings, because it is funny that you can see the strings, to endlessly replay sequences where the strings are see-able, and to pat yourself on the back for being so much cleverer than those silly people in the 1970s who couldn't have spotted a string if it had leapt out and bit them on the nose. 

And it would be understandable if a Gerry Anderson fan got all defensive and said that actually you can't see the strings most of the time and televisions were much smaller in those days and lots of people were watching in black and white and they were meant for children who just accept this sort of thing for what it is and just shut up about the strings, okay? 

It's a while since I last watched Thunderbirds. If I recall correctly, for the first ten minutes the strings are intrusive, but you rapidly slip into a state of mind where you are perfectly aware that what you are watching are puppets but somehow you bracket off the puppetyness and accept it as an exciting science fictiony James Bondy disaster movie. At which point the one with the aliens in the pyramids is quite claustrophobic and the one on the bridge is quite tense and Lady Penelope is always a hoot. 

Yes: of course they are puppets. Any fool can see that. Why did you think it was even worth mentioning? 

See also: Clone Wars.

2

People sometimes say that they like a particular book or movie or television programme "even though it is terrible". 

Sometimes they sat it in a self deprecating way. "Ha-ha silly me I love trashy horror novels!" 

Sometimes they put it in a defensive way "I love the Twilight series and yes I know it's rubbish." 

And sometimes they are positively aggressive: "What I like BEST is to find some RUBBISH to read and the BIGGER LOAD OF RUBBISH it is the BETTER I'll like it." 

Can you like something and consider it bad? I would have thought that "Works of art I like" and "Works of art I think are good" are pretty much synonymous. Wasn't it Plato who said that no-one considers themselves to be evil, apart from Galactus?

Everyone agrees that Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written — certainly the greatest long American novel about whale hunting. Everyone also agrees that it is is long, uneven, repetitive, digressive, pretentious and repetitive. But no-one can quite agree what the editor should have done to improve it. The minute you say "Well, he could have ditched the 40 page sermon about Jonah for a start" someone else well say "But that's my favorite chapter."

Moby Dick is seriously flawed. But then, everything is seriously flawed. (I think Theodore Sturgeon said that.) If you are only going to read flawless books, your reading list is going to be quite short.

See also: Cerebus.

Some people do seem to read with their eyes ever vigilante for the chink in the armour that will reveal that this is not the Perfect Book and therefore does not need to be read. "Well, I started reading this book, but on on page 3 the elephant hunter used a rifle that didn't go into production until 1898 even though the book is set in 1897 so naturally I didn't read any further." "On page 54, the writer used a word I didn't know so naturally I tossed the book to one side." I forget who it was who stopped reading Lord of the Rings after Elrond said "This is the doom we must deem".  

F.R. Leavis used this method to reduce his reading list to four English novelists. You have limited time on this earth; and most great novels require several readings, so why waste your time on any book except the great ones? 

C.S.Lewis, on the other hand, felt that the correct approach to a study of sixteenth century English literature (excluding drama) was to read every surviving scrap of literature from the sixteenth century plowing through pages and pages of "drab" writing in order to track down the occasional good bit. I don't suppose Lewis would have said that he liked 16th century literature "even though it's terrible". (He would probably have said that he was a scholar, and "liking" and "not liking" were neither here nor there.)

Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Of the four dead white males two were female although one of them had a boy's name. When asked if there was anything special he wanted for his fiftieth birthday, Lewis replied "I suppose the head of F.R Leavis on a platter would be rather too expensive?" 

Continues indefinitely....

What Do You Mean, We?

I know six things about the Lone Ranger. That’s probably one more than you do.

1: He wears a mask.

2: He has faithful Indian companion named Tonto, who calls him "kemo sabe".

3: He shouts “Hi-ho, Silver!” to his horse.

4: He uses silver bullets.

5: His theme tune is the William Tell Overture.

6: He’s the Green Hornet's great-uncle.

And that’s literally it. I have no idea if he had a secret identity, a supporting cast or a back story. I assume that’s why the character was so durable -- three thousand radio episodes, and a TV show that ran for five seasons. He’s a peg on which to hang any cowboy story you feel like telling. No-one knows his name; he rides into town; he sticks up for the little guy against the big guy; and then rides out again. And that's it. 

But it turns out there's a narrative. I took the precaution of watching the first episode of the Clayton Moore TV show before writing this piece, and was surprised how much of it was carried over into Johnny Depp movie. I don't know if that shows a terminal lack of imagination on the part of 21st century screen writers, or a touching respect for foundational texts. Seven Texas Rangers ride into the badlands in pursuit of a baddie called Butch Cavendish. It turns out that they're being led into a trap, and Cavendish kills them all. But then it turns out that one of them is only mostly dead. A passing Indian, Tonto, nurses this Ranger back to health, and they decide that they'd better hunt down bad guys in general and Cavendish in particular. So much for the joke about why he's the "lone" Ranger if Tonto is always with him. 

Stuff I thought was probably late-in-the day over-interpretation (like the idea that the Lone Ranger’s mask is made out of his dead brother’s jacket) turn out to go back to the TV show, if not to the original wireless version. The one substantive change is that the original Lone Ranger was a creature of the Westward expansion, whose every adventure contributed to the development of this great country of ours; the movie version (like Jack Sparrow) represents the last hi-ho of a dying age, starting his adventures just as the coast-to-coast railway is taming the wild West once and for all.

This summer’s misbegotten Man of Steel was so heavy with invented back-story that I wondered why they had even bothered stamping the Superman branding on it. Poor Henry Cavill hardly got to play at being Superman at all: he's mostly a pawn in a manichean struggle between God, voiced by Jor El, and Satan, ghosted by Zod. But the bit about ickle baby Kal being shot into space when his planet blows up remained in place, as if that was the inviolable core that makes it a Superman movie. The Lone Ranger movie makes the killing of Dan Read (our hero’s brother) and the other rangers a cog in a huge conspiracy in which an evil rail-road magnate is in league with a psychotic cannibal who may or may not be Wendigo in order to get possession of a secret Indian silver mine which would enable him to buy all the shares and thus....I admit I got a bit lost. Ever since Jack Nicholson turned out to be both the crimer who shot Brucie’s mummy and daddy and the crazy grinning guy with green hair, superhero movies have worked a bit too hard to tie everything together into single all-encompassing plots. (Did Sandman turn out to be the burglar who shot Uncle Ben? I think I wasn’t paying attention.)

But this time around the backstory avoids smothering the Lone Ranger and Tonto. They may be embedded in a CGI and pop-corn remake of "Once Upon a Time in the West" but they are still basically a whiter than white white guy in a mask and a wise Indian scout who ride along trails and fight bad guys. Every conceivable buckle is swashed. Horses race trains (repeatedly); heroes leap from burning buildings into hails of bullets; the pair rob a bank (for good and adequate reasons) and are buried up to their neck in a scorpion invested desert. Logic and physics are completely abandoned for a climax involving trains, horses, firing squads and exploding bridges. And a ladder. (With the theme tune blasting out in the background, or course. Who was it who said that an intellectual is a person who could hear the William Tell overture and not think of the Lone Ranger?)

God knows, it's a flawed movie. It runs for two and half hours and feels like five, although it is far from obvious how you could make it shorter and retain its encyclopaedic scope. Uneven in tone doesn’t even begin to cover it. Parody of the Lone Ranger? Affectionately camp reworking? Pastiche? Serious engagement with an American icon? The final minutes include a very wholesome tribute the TV show, with everyone thanking the Lone Ranger and asking him to stay around before he rides of into the sunset. No-one says “Who was that masked man?” but you feel that someone might have done. (Like "Play it again Sam" and "Beam me up Scotty", it's a very famous quotation that no-one ever actually said.) But then we cut to him wondering whether to call himself “The Lone Avenger” or “The Masked Rider” which is straight out of Black Adder. I'm not quite what the the point is of making us sit through three hours of John Reid's personal journey from inept goody two shoes to fully fledged hero, only to portray him as an oaf in the final seconds. It really does feel like a cut and paste job between four or five different scripts.

When you don’t have pictures, you need verbal signals to tell the audience what is going on. Radio Superman used to say “Up, up....and away” to signify that he was flying; radio Lone Ranger similarly said “Hi-ho silver...away!” to warn of an impending chase sequence. The TV series used spoken voice overs (quite effectively, based on my extensive survey of one and half episodes) to make the pictures more dramatic, but kept the “Hi-ho silver” catch phrase, must famously in the opening credits. When Armie Hammer delivers the line, Johnny Deep wearily replies "Never do that again." That joke arrived approximately 60 years too late.

The burlesque may be mostly unfunny, but the Lone Ranger’s basic goodness is left intact -- this is the character about whom all those jokes about cowboys walking into saloons and ordering glasses of milk were originally made. We're nearly always laughing with him, hardly ever at him. We are never asked to find the idea of goodness funny, as we were in those cynical Mummy films. We’re nearly always on the hero's side. Johnny Depp’s Tonto is a lot less over the top than I expected him to be.

Don Quixote is the story of the friendship between a man who is clever but insane and a man who is sane but stupid. Together, they just about make up one hero. This most Quixotic of movies gives us a hero who is good and brave but completely inept; and pairs him with a companion who is wise and clever but crazy and cynical. Tonto honestly believes that the Lone Ranger, having died and risen again, is the legendary spirit walker who can’t be killed and whose gun never misses. Both sides are arguably frauds: Tonto is making up Indian mythology on the spot (his own tribe regard him as a crackpot) and the Ranger is a lawyer thrust into the role of hero by accident. The idea that these two half competents together make one superhero works better than it probably ought to. The relationship is unpredictable enough and funny enough to very nearly hold this monster of a movie together.

The whole film is wrapped in a frame in which a little boy in a Lone Ranger suit encounters the elderly Tonto in a 1933 Wild West Show. Why? Why, oh why? As if the thing wasn't long enough and confusing enough already? Perhaps it's intended to place it all in some kind of historical context: the Lone Ranger folk tale emerged at a time when the Wild West was still very nearly contemporary -- as close to the first radio listeners as the 1950s are to us. Perhaps it wants to make the point that the Lone Ranger is an iconic figure of whom you ought to have heard, for the benefit of the 90% of the audience who looked at the posters and said “The Lone what?” Perhaps the frame is an apology for the preposterousness of the action: maybe what we’re watching is a tall story, made up by Tonto. Maybe one of the dozens of discarded scripts was going to be reveal a realistic, “historical” Lone Ranger who lay behind the myth. Or maybe someone involved just really liked the Princess Bride. 

There’s definitely some weird shit going on: when Tonto pours peanut shells over the graves of the murdered Texas Rangers in the “historical” segment, the little boys “modern” carnival peanut bag blows across the screen; Tonto is first seen as a waxwork in the exhibition, but then, without explanation, he comes to life. I would bet pence that the original idea was for the little boy in the Ranger suit to have been looking at museum tableaux of the Wild West and then imagining, or dreaming the story, with himself as the hero. Remember the poignant ending of the original Secret of Monkey Island RPG? (1)

All through this summer, and every summer, we’ve had bigger and louder space movies until even those of us who love Marvel Comics with all our hearts are wishing we could just take off the 3D glasses and calm the hell down. The Lone Ranger is having a dang good go at being something better and more interesting than that. It’s a big meaty mythological movie which acknowledges that the guy in the white hat who carries six-guns but doesn’t kill anybody is basically ridiculous. That's what the frame is about, I suppose: it's telling us that this is fantasy wild west; peep show wild west, pop corn wild west, frankly rather racially patronising wild west, the wild west as imagined by a child of ten -- but that at some level, the material is so iconic that it has to stand as some kind of aetiological myth about America. 

It doesn’t work, of course. I lost track of the plot several mcguffins down; and the action is so relentless and over the top that a law of diminishing returns sets in quite quickly. (My heart sank particularly when we arrived at Helena Bonham Carter’s brothel.) On the other hand, the revelation of what the railway boss was planning to do with Tonto’s silver genuinely impressed me, and I can’t deny letting out a (very quiet) whoop of excitement when the Lone Ranger throws the silver bullet to his nephew. I wish that these heroes could be allowed to exist in something like their trashy pulpy context; part of what made Superman and the Lone Ranger and, er, Doctor Who seem so epic is that they appeared in an endless sequence of small adventures; saving America one homesteader at a time, every week for twenty years. An eighty year old radio show is very flimsy material to build a multi trillion dollar epic out of. But where Star Trek and Man of Steel and the Hobbit seem to hate their source material, the Lone Ranger seems to be created by people who love the masked rider of the plains and want to honour his memory. It's much better than I expected it to be, and very much better than it had any need to be.

(1) There’s a very odd moment when the boy interrupts the narrative to say that Tonto is getting the story wrong and that Dan Reid, not John Reid was the Lone Ranger. Tonto claims that “kemo sabe” means “wrong brother”. At first, I thought that this was some kind of continuity easter egg for advances Rangerologist. In the TV version, we are told that Daniel Reid is one of the murdered Rangers, and that he is the brother of the hero, but we pointedly don’t see the surviving Ranger’s face or find out what his first name is, although he had been called John on the wireless. But there doesn’t seem to have been any version in which he was called Dan.

Avatar (a film)

"I thought that was very good," said Andrew at the end of Avatar.

"I thought that was very good," replied Louise.

"I thought that was very good," added Jonathan.

"Bugger," said Andrew "What are we going to talk about for the rest of the weekend?"

Avatar is a gripping, involving, but not particularly original Cowboys and Indians movie; transposed to a well-drawn and convincing science fiction setting. Jake, our hero, has his mind transferred into the body of a member of a tribe of blue aliens called the Navee so he can learn their ways and help the Human Colonists negotiate with them. But – astonishingly – he Goes Native and sides with the Navee against the Humans when the shooting starts.

Jonathan, who reads Empire, tells me that all the alien planet sequences were constructed entirely on a computer: since I'd assumed that it was doing the Peter Jackson thing of recording footage in New Zealand and using a computer to enhance the scenery, this must count as an unequivocal success.

Some of the plot devices were a little clunky, but they were all either the kind of clunky plot device that is part and parcel of a movie of this kind -- or else so carefully foreshadowed that they don't seem that clunky when you got to them. It's pretty much inevitable that the squaw who finds the hero when he's separated from the cavalry is the daughter of the big chief, and equally inevitable that our hero will fall in love with her. And the silly climax, in which all the fauna on the planet spontaneously attacks the Bad Men who are going to burn the Sacred Tree, doesn't feel silly at all because we've seen our hero praying to the Sacred Tree and asking it to help him win the battle. Since we've already been told that the all the animals and plants on the planet are connected together into a sort of vegetarian computer, it makes complete sense that he should be able to influence the tree to influence the animals to attack the Humans. We spend the slightly too long final battle saying "How will the tree help out?" and react to this literal deus ex machina by saying "Ooo...clever," rather than "Oh, what a literal deus ex machina!"

It was, both literally and metaphorically, a little too green. Say what you like about the Star Wars prequels, and I have, but they keep jumping from one jaw-dropping landscape to a completely different jaw-dropping landscape, so your eye never gets bored. Avatar dumps you in one jaw-dropping rain forest and leaves you there for three hours, rather as if you'd had to spend the whole of Return of the Jedi on Endor.

And speaking of which: the final battle does rather lapse into Ewok logic. At the beginning of the film we are supposed to find it silly that savages think they can damage giant mega-tanks with bows and arrows; but at the end of the film we are are expected to believe that bows and arrows fired by a large number of really motivated and very noble savages would be able to do so. That we largely do believe this is a tribute to how well drawn and immersive the film is. But still. If a herd of really angry elephants charged a tank, I'm not completely sure which side I'd place my bet on.

The natives have a sort of biological scart cable in the pig-tails, and can literally plug their brains into the planets flora and fauna. They can become literally "at one" with their mounts; they can commune with planet's ecosystem; and the minds of their dead are literally downloaded into the biosphere. A nice science fictiony idea, this, and someone will tell me where it was swiped from. But I rather suspect that Mr Cameron has a notion that it is also a Really Profound Metaphor, and just as the Navee can literally plug themselves into the soul of the planet, so can we in a very real sense, commune with the Earth, provided we stop destroying the environment by fighting wars, burning carbon, going to the movies, etc.

The one really weak point in the movie is the characterisation of the human colonists, who work, of course, for The Company. (Sigourney Weaver herself shows up to provide the technobabble.) The Company are only interested in the planet as a source of a McGuffin called (I liked this) Unobtanium; it answers only to it's shareholders. The Colonel in charge is so one dimensional that he would be chewing the scenery if it wasn't computer generated: unable to quite decide if he's in Apocalypse Now or Moby Dick. When he announces that he's going to gratuitously nuke the Navee's Sacred Tree in order to generate some "shock and awe", his team of marines nod and grin, and seem to have been recruited entirely from the brute squad. (Had the humans been on the planet to obtain, say, a precious drug which was the only thing which could possibly save the human race from a terrible lurgyplague then Jake would have been faced with a genuinely difficult moral dilemma. Now, one man must choose, between a race entirely consisting of happy, spiritual folk living an idyllic life and a race entirely consisting of nasty sweary money grabbing thugs. Gee, which way will he decide?)

Clearly, the thing has been over hyped to an embarrassing degree: we are told that there are people who have seen the film dozens of times, that it has changed their life, that there may have been suicides by people who don't want to live if they can't live on Pandora. In fact a ludicrous amount of money and skill has been spent on what is really a very, very slight narrative.

But this doesn't matter: the film isn't making any particular claim to be a new religious movement, although the Hollywood publicity machine may be. From the opening moments when the crippled ex-marine agrees to have his brain transplanted into a Navee it is absolutely clear what kind of a movie we are watching, and it delivers on all its promises. The hero does indeed get the girl. The Navee do indeed, after much sacrifice and derring do, repel the invaders who want to steal their land. The hero does indeed get initiated into the tribe's ways, and we do indeed feel that those Ways are plausible and interesting and quite pretty and inspirational. The first time we see the nasty Colonel, he is in one of those Transformer-type exo-skeletons and, sure enough, after his big space ship has been destroyed and the Holy Tree has been saved; everything comes down to a one-on-one between Smurf and Armoured Space Marine.

The Skiffynow writer's guidelines list "does exactly what it says on the tin" as a cliché to avoid at all costs. But Avatar does.

The Killing of John Lennon

"Look then to be well edified, as the fool delivers the madman."

So, let's see. The murder of John Lennon, re-enacted on the spot where it occurred. (Allegedly.) John only briefly on screen, represented by an actor but his face in shadow: all we see is his hair-cut and his specs. (Can you say "iconic"?) Captions on the screen, start out giving the date, but end up just saying "Two days remain", "Three hours remain". Interminable voice-overs by Mark Chapman (Jonas Ball). The arrest, prison, a brief trial, the same quote from Catcher in the Rye for the third or fourth time. The killer taken off to jail. A final, redundant caption telling us he's still there. No John Lennon song over the credits. This tiny-budget movie couldn't possibly afford one.

What have we just watched? The story of the death of John Lennon? Everything which normally goes into a a "story" – tension, suspense, motivation, resolution – is excluded in principal. No tension or suspense, because we already know the ending. No motivation because this is an account of an essentially motiveless act. No resolution, because, well, there's no resolution. It's a work in progress: one day, Chapman will get out, go on the talk-show circuit, get shot by someone who takes John's message of peace and love a bit too seriously. A Greek tragedy, the re-enactment of a sacred death? An exploration of the mind of a sociopath? Or just another excuse to pick at an extremely masturbatory scab; to blubber once more over the fact that the man who caused the sixties was killed for absolutely no reason at all.

Not so much The Assassination of John Lennon By The Coward Mark Chapman, more a passion play where the camera never leaves Judas Iscariot. The Beatles are bigger than Jesus, after all.

About two thirds of the way through, we come to the actual murder. We see Johnandyoko in their car; we see them leave it; we hear Chapman call out "Mr. Lennon!". We see slow motion bullets going right through actor-Lennon's body, leaving bloody holes in it. (Chapman's gun dealer tells him that a burglar would just laugh at him if he'd only bought a small gun.) It's an arresting image, of course: but it's far too pleased with itself to be actually shocking. It's a special effect. We know that dumdum bullets make big holes in people: we know that people who've been shot bleed a lot. (Lennon had lost 80% of his blood when he reached hospital.) It doesn't bring us into the event, but distances us from it. Neither Chapman, nor Yoko, nor, one imagines, John, could possibly have perceived events in this way. It's happening purely for the enjoyment of the audience. The Imagine documentary represented the assassination with a single image of a pair of glasses flying through the air. This brought me no closer to imagining the literally unimaginable.

The film is confused about its viewpoint. Most of the time we're inside Chapman's head: which is not, funnily enough, a particularly interesting place to be. We see him shooting the two "homos" he can hear having sex in the next room at the YMCA, and then we see him back on his bed, deciding not to shoot them after all. (I must admit, that had me thinking "Gosh; I never knew he did that", for a second.) We even see him in that field of rye, trying to keep the little kids from falling off the cliff. Quite a meta-textual knot, if you think about it: an actor playing a lunatic imagining that he's a mentally unstable fictitious character imagining that he's a figure in a folk song.

So: if it's all from Chapman's point of view, whose benefit are all those "Ten minutes remain" captions for? Lennon didn't know he had only a limited amount of time to live. Chapman only realized on the night before the murder that tomorrow was the big day, and obviously didn't know exactly when John would step out of the car. Is it simple audience manipulation: a cheap way of creating tension in a movie which announces its ending both in its title and its choice of subject matter? Or is there some reason why the film has to keep saying "Look at me – I'm a film"?

A couple of weeks before the murder, Chapman decides to go home to his wife. (I'd forgotten that Chapman was married. To a Japanese girl, at that.) He triumphantly tells her that he nearly did something terrible, but he's now defeated his demons. Because of the loonies-eye-view of the action, I couldn't quite tell if Chapman really went back to Hawaii, or just thought of doing so. Not that it matters: in a different kind of film, this would be a clever, tension filled, will-he-won't-he false ending: but here it is just one more move in the stations of the cross. And that could be the point: the fact that we know exactly what is going to happen mirrors Chapman's deranged conviction that he's doing something he's predestined for.

Director Andrew Piddington took the courageous decision to depict Chapman only through words that he really spoke. The voice-over describes, and the action reenacts, the moment when Chapman chances on a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in a public library, and feels that the book speaks to him directly: that, in fact, he himself is Holden Caulfield. We also see him discovering, also by chance, a book about John Lennon and deciding that he is one of Caulfield's phonies and therefore it's his job to kill him.

The film tells us that Chapman particularly objected to Lennon's having said "Imagine no possessions", even though he himself had a few bob set aside for a rainy day. "I had to kill him because he was a hypocrite" is at least intelligible; expressions like "I had to kill him because I am Holden Caulfield" and "The phony must die, says the catcher in the rye" are simply without meaning.

But hang on a moment. How do we know that Chapman was set on his homicidal path by happening upon a copy of Sallinger and a celebrity biog of Lennon? Well, because Chapman said so: we are listening to the post-murder Chapman explaining the pre-murder Chapman's state of mind. But Chapman, I think we can agree, is not terribly, terribly sane. Is there any particular reason to think that he remembers these events correctly, and even if he could, that he would describe them honestly? (When we hear the name "John Lennon", "Imagine" is the first song which comes to mind. That wasn't necessarily the case in 1980. Is the "no possessions" angle one that Chapman thought up after the event?)

Once you've spotted this, the movie starts to unravel. For the first half Chapman is a dull, self-absorbed, chauvinistic, homophobic sociopath. ("Cold blooded killer in 'not very nice' shock.") But after the murder, he becomes much more human and is transformed, instantly, into a victim. (Does the film give a fair view of the brutality of the American criminal justice system? It beggars belief that Chapman was deemed mentally competent to enter a guilty plea at his trial. If the law says that this fruitcake murdered Lennon while of sound mind, the law is an ass.) He's also much less clear about his motivation. Only a few hours after he has killed John, he is wishing that things could "go back to how they were before". He tells the police that he doesn't know why he did it; he tells the psychiatrist that there were lots of different reasons – but can't actually specify a single one. These sequences are – presumably – based on contemporaneous accounts and transcripts. We're looking at a recreation of Chapman as police officers and psychiatrists actually saw him; where before, we were looking at a recreation of Chapman as he wanted us to see him or as he imagined himself. Chapman's voice tells us – in the past tense – that while awaiting trial, he re-read Catcher in the Rye and had some kind of supernatural visitation in which he felt that his brain cells were on fire. As a result, he realizes that the point of the murder is to promote the reading of Catcher in the Rye. (Not quite so interesting as discovering that, say, Yahweh is the ball of fire at the earth's core; or that the world ended in AD 70 and everything since then has been an illusion. Perhaps God was having an off-day?) How much of the rest of the narrative is a retrospective rationalization based on this epiphany?

So. Punishing Lennon for being a hypocrite. A peculiar act of self-identification with a fictional character. A publicity stunt for J.D Sallinger. While in his cell, Chapman sees a news report about the attempted shooting of Ronnie Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. He comments (and again, this is presumably something which someone actually heard him say at the time) that if he hadn't been able to get to Lennon, he might have killed Jackie Onassis or Johnny Carson.

And I still think, depressingly, that this is the most believable explanation: a mad attempt to achieve celebrity by the ultimate act gratuit. Before the murder, we follow Chapman into a cinema where he watches Raging Bull and Ordinary People. The films-within-the-film take up the whole cinema-screen; but Chapman's silhouette is superimposed over them. We're watching him, watching them. Straight after the murder, Chapman says that John fell down like something out of a movie; and that now, he feels as if he is watching his own life like that of a character in a film.

"I was a nobody, until I killed the biggest somebody on earth." So what have we done? We've put him in a movie.

I don't expect you
To understand
After you've caused
So much pain.
But then again,
You're not to blame.
You're just a human
A victim of the insane....