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2010-08-15T12:31:00.004+01:00

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 12 – "Narc Force"

2010-02-13T15:51:00.005Z

The routine is rarely interrupted. Steven Seagal: Lawman – as seen from a random snapshot – flows easefully through time, a mist of ass-kicking justice wafting onwards, upwards, chasing a premeditated motion across the still televisual air. The narrative unravels in harmony with the clock’s ticking hands. Plot points pass, smacking upon retinas the swelling sites of a law abided. Sudden illustrations of a thwarted danger are served via channels of simplified apprehension, difficulty and equivocation consigned to the bin of bad decisions. The show pursues its mandate without fear of the penetrating cut of interruption; no digressionary deluge spills upon Seagal’s tight knit charge of drug busts and parole violations.

This is how Steven Seagal: Lawman unfolds, mostly.

Sometimes, however, a spectre rises from the shadows. Scenes are suddenly altered: pace falls away, meanings are inverted, lights dim as harpies invade the screen carrying epithets from a distant terrain. A banal patrol through the neighbourhood, Seagal a passenger amongst men, then enter peril: without warning their trajectory is reconfigured, tweaked by the mottled hands of a foreign agent. Rather than righting wrongs undeterred by antithetical forces, they are pressed to halt and confront an enemy.

A desolate landscape stretches out behind the protagonists, mediocre nod to the imagery of an unavoidable dystopia. Charred tree branches hang loosely and lonely above the highway. Abandoned vehicles, ditched belongings, putrefying carcasses, all such drab signifiers dotted around a scene stolen from everywhere. Seagal stands flanked by his cronies. A prophecy of armed combat swarms around them, their noses atwitch at the deathly fiend nearing them. And then it explodes into sight: a fiery menace sweeping up the narrative and announcing its change, a tornado of renaming and bastard connotation. The nexus is thrown open, a matrix-rotten glitch in the edifice of Lawman. Up into the runtime it lunges, infecting the brainwork with antediluvian spite and resuscitating a past long dead.

Pulled over gothic misshapen forms – a grotesquery hanging in the air – the spectre shows its face. There floating, afloat time’s vacuity, a reference to Jean Claude Van Damme. Taken aback, Seagal on the ropes, a missile launches from a deputy, but gets deflected by the talk of Van Damme. “Arrest that fucker,” cries Seagal. Thus ignites a war against stardom, type-casting and sticky genre roots.

Throughout this season of Lawman, Seagal has attempted to create a schism between his police work and his film work. The latter does not exist. Dutiful patrols of the city proceed as though fame was entirely absent. There’s not a reek of Nico while he admonishes hookers; there are zero knife fights during a DWI pullover. The filmic ego is dormant. The celluloid pyrotechnics, captured and enclosed within DVD form, once held the essence of Seagal; now reality discloses a different figure, sharply defined by its contrast to the former.

Yet, occasionally the genre backdrop becomes visible. Seemingly not even Seagal can fully escape the gravitational pull of the action B movie dynamic. But strangely this tethering is not orchestrated by the remnants of Seagal’s ego, nor his weak willed yes-men. It actually comes from the wicked men and women being arrested by Seagal. With cuffs strangling the hands and a jail sentence on the horizon, could there ever be a better time to draw Seagal back into the genre of his birth?

Possibly the best example of this is in the mid-season episode, “Medicine Man.” Seagal thinks he’s pulling over a typical drunk driver, a fool fresh out of the pool hall, loaded on whiskey, billiards for eyes. The last thing he expects is an explosion of geek conversation as the door opens. The perp spits his references every direction with not a care in his video-infused mind. Names cling to Seagal’s skin, damnable boils of rival spirits: Van Damme, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris. The conversation turns to hypothetical battles, what actor would bear the name victor when set against Seagal. Back and forth, the exchange rages on as Seagal retires to the van to meditate, leaving his comrades to pump the justice juice down the man’s maw. But they, feeble minded as they are, fail to escape the confrontation free of infection. In a later episode, “Street Justice”, they bust Seagal’s balls over the Van Damme connection. Only a blank face denial can protect against accusations such as Seagal was battered senseless by Van Damme, or Seagal wept when threatened by Van Damme’s boot. Nonsense requires stoicism for survival purposes.

This latest episode has a delinquent dealer call Seagal “Mr Stallone.” Amidst laughter and ridicule, Seagal quietly backs into the shadows, a tear hastily wiped away, cursing his forsaken past. The schism malfunctions, damaged by an onslaught of tiresome rhetoric. Worlds collide on the back of a dubious reference. The lesson is that genre status can only be expunged temporarily; Seagal’s place in the order is secure and unshakeable, and no amount of repudiation will change that.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 11 – "Street Justice"

2010-01-30T17:37:00.003Z

Not a lot has been missing from season one of Steven Seagal: Lawman. Each episode has buzzed with a wholesome singularity, the rules of society gloriously upheld, wanton acts fought by an unstoppable force. Dastardly youths have been seized, drug pusher antics curtailed, burglars slammed by the boot of justice. Consistent victims of the onslaught of evil, the neighbourhoods of Jefferson Parish have seen their thoroughfares purged of debasing foes and truculent intruders. Gleeful mammons have had their greed stones battered to mush. The charge led by Seagal, erasing negativity in a callous world.

Away from bettering society – in a narrative locked safely far from the menace of time – Seagal has visited sick children, trained attack dogs, fed hungry alligators, performed acupuncture and played a gig with his band Thunderbox. Zen wisdom has saturated his every word. Mystical somatic control has typified his every kick. Seagal’s presence is tethered to a disregard, surely arcane in character, to the limitations of reality. A polymathic freedom floats humbly airborne in the wake of his full-throttle nature. His level of certainty, held close to the core of Seagal, can be unhinged by no man.

Such has been the essence of season one of Steven Seagal: Lawman.

Yet one absence has been both glaring and subtle. Its unavoidable obviousness has rendered it invisible, adding equivocation to a set of affairs otherwise clear. By a strange dialectical inversion Seagal has transcended the antithesis stage to conjure a synthesis that blinds the beholder, shielding from sight an acute gap upon the topography of Seagal. The cost is high: a partner lost in the transition from one stage to another. Like Sherlock Holmes without Watson, Han Solo without Chewbacca, Seagal’s integrity is lessened as a result of his partner being absent.

Amid kinetic displays of roundhouse kicks and vengeful fists, Seagal’s films are marked by one dependable continuity: his ponytail. Thousands of scenes have receded into the past leaving only a scorched outline of ponytail, an indelible fragment of asses kicked and evil destroyed. Seagal’s ponytail – unerring in its capacity to act as more than mere adornment: a pulsating symbol of Seagal’s omniscience – stole easefully through the plot containers of Under Siege and Out for Justice, incurring neither harm nor insult. It blasted holes in adversaries, advancing to holy zeniths of ninety-minute mountains. The ponytail struck down barricades, tracing an unhindered path onward. Glowing at the heart of Seagal, but resting upon his head, was this object of unreserved victory, a greasy slick of hair captured in ponytail form.

But Steven Seagal: Lawman has no ponytail of which to speak. Recent episode “Street Justice” is a case in point. Seagal and his minions raid two crack dens, seeking a mix of substances and abusers. They discover the tiniest of crack rocks, far from anything substantial, and the individuals involved are mostly let go. Now, had Seagal possessed his ponytail, the crew would have stumbled upon a major drug-dealing operation. The motel room would look like a laboratory, all Bunsen burners and pipettes. Mind-fried junkies would writhe on the floor as a dreadlocked devil adjusts the settings on his chemistry set. Giant crack rocks would be found in the bathroom alongside forty snakes and a leper. It would transpire that a series of tunnels underneath the motel leads to Columbia. After three minutes of sprinting, Seagal and his gang emerge in the blistering jungle. Soaked in sweat, they find that a local businessman is pumping drugs into the US via the tunnel. An epic showdown ensues that ends with Seagal battling the businessman (clad in a special mechanical suit) on the top of a volcano.

The ponytail makes everything better.

Another example: after the drug bust, Seagal visits a kids’ karate school. He talks to the sensei and imparts some pithy words of wisdom to the youngsters – the usual stuff. But had he possessed his ponytail, Seagal would have noticed something odd about the dojo. Monotone voices and steroid-lit eyes would have alerted him to a wicked scheme, a plan to build an army of ultra-strong pre-teens. The megalomaniacal sensei would use these diminutive warriors to take over a military base under the masquerade of a school trip. Once in charge, he would start selling arms to terrorists. Upon unravelling the details, Seagal would have to fight off all the kids, before ending up in a tense confrontation with the sensei (now wearing a special mechanical suit).

I repeat: the ponytail makes everything better.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 10 – "A Parish Under Siege"

2010-01-23T17:16:00.001Z

Steven Seagal is a line graph, an image disseminated not only through the wet dreams of statisticians, but also through the pulse of television. The graph consists of two lines, both ascending, cast against a backdrop of his defeated enemies. Visually represented are the innumerable victories Seagal renders real in a season of Steven Seagal: Lawman. Halted outbreaks of evil plotted here and there; hints of profanation decimated along the X axis; a beast missing eyes, stomped supine by the boot of justice. All this lathers an otherwise vacuous system of cells with shimmering content and a reason to keep on looking.

A talent for waging dual wars spins two lines into the web of vertices and dots, two simultaneous campaigns captured by a graphically-intense suction, each line powered by a force labelled Seagal. One signals an ongoing mission, a mandated drive to prevent societal cataclysm; it purges the young and old of vice, eradicating a virus set to kill all that is moral and right. The other signals a need to shoot big rats.

The skill involved in balancing two such wars is rarely endowed upon a human. Seagal, however, has no difficulty maintaining two distinct fronts of attack. He battles one, he battles the other, united in a single instant of time. Of course we can only experience one of these at a time, hence Seagal’s staggered exhibition, his insistence upon unfolding the acts of each across an episode of Lawman. Seagal is always two lines etched on a line graph. This is only a metaphor, but metaphor is our only recourse, our sole route to comprehending the phenomenon of timelessness in which Seagal flutters.

One crusade has a band of hardened warriors stripping society of liquor-fuelled ills. A Friday night, damp miasmic dimension of revelry, suffocating in its raw stench of alcohol. Pavements are made slippery by the wash of vomit; quietude is shattered by the screams of grannies. A wasteland yields loutish satyrs, a parading troupe seeking lager highs amidst a cacophony of echoing rap beats. Battered miscreants hide behind half empty whiskey bottles, scattering when hit by the beam of a flashlight. A dirty scene straight out of pulp dystopia.

Charged with quelling this turpitudinous Friday excess is Seagal and his warriors. They admonish drunk drivers, kick vodka from the hands of the obnoxious, punch sober impoverished bench-kippers. Society’s brutalised alcoholics, slaves to the paroxysm of immoderate alcohol abuse, are dealt a heavy dose of judgemental advice and urged to reduce their beer drinking. Yet Seagal’s righteousness is justified. Whilst in Japan, he learned to relax through meditation, not intoxication. Alcohol clouds the mind and inhibits one’s ability to kick ass. Seagal can administer his wise Zen words of reproof by dint of his alcohol-free head, a cloudless mind that sees danger flood the dry pastures of the parish every Friday night.

The other crusade sees a separate spread of rodents fought against. This time the rodents are not the figurative nonsense of hitherto, but real rodents. The bothersome bastards are eating away the banks of our rivers and the ground upon which we build our homes. These sinister fiends, these nutria, are wrecking livelihoods and erecting dens all over the city. Someone must tackle the problem and quickly. Enter Seagal. At last we will get a glimpse of how Seagal squeezes the world free of pests like the nutria. But no: exit Seagal. A zany ethical trance usurps Seagal’s good sense and he recedes into the background. Enter the local SWAT team. They and some of Seagal’s colleagues enjoy a mad time shooting rodents and swigging jars of ale. Meanwhile, Seagal sits with the SWAT boss discussing humane alternatives to the mass slaughter going on elsewhere. That no grand plans are devised is quite obvious when we see the episode end with Seagal thrusting a nutria corpse into the jaws of an alligator. Circle of life and all that.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 9 – "Crack War"

2010-01-10T15:06:00.004Z

The story of Steven Seagal is scarred by the imposition of limits. It’s a recurring phenomenon, manifested across the totality of his output. The world cannot apprehend the amorphous quality of Seagal; so, like a fluid that kicks your ass, Seagal is squeezed into predefined boundaries, packed into finite space, incarcerated within solid walls of formal convention. His natural home lies outside the realm of common understanding, a site of absolute alterity. But certain routines have become necessary, foisting upon the illimitable obligatory barriers of shape and circumscription. Out of sheer compassion, utter pity for our paltry cognitive capacity, Seagal chooses to step into a constructed web of meaning, a matrix through which his majesty becomes comprehendible.

Seagal’s transmogrification from mysterious immaterial essence to corporeal fixture – an esoteric process too complicated for dissection at present – is itself obviously beyond our grasp. Our only recourse is to infer the nature of this rebirth through its allegorical manifestation, i.e. Seagal’s artworks.

In Under Siege, Seagal is forced to have a knife fight with Tommy Lee Jones. This involves forty seconds of rapid back and forth knife swiping as grimacing protagonists attack each other, cutting fresh scarlet upon the skin, the stark soundtrack one of clinking steel. Eventually Seagal stabs Lee Jones in the head and thrusts him into a monitor. The balletic interplay of the scene is apparent to us: the speed of the bodies, men tethered to an ill-begotten violence, fury captured in an endless series of cuts. But these are obstructions to Seagal’s true state. Had convention been abandoned, Seagal may have defeated Lee Jones by transforming the latter’s character William Stranix into Samuel Gerard from The Fugitive, in turn averting the impending fisticuffs.

Seagal is locked into a set of standards, as exemplified in Under Siege. His innate urge for deviation can never assume the character of explicit action. Implicit inscription is our only key to this realm of possibility, interpretation our sole method for reaching Seagal’s metaphysical centre. Stranix represents the rigidity of form to which Seagal submits. Akin to how the ship is the container for all the action, offering definable spatial limits and an identifiable mise-en-scene, Stranix is a walking imposition that annuls Seagal’s greater imagination and turns it into a knife fight. Seagal’s subtle acquiescence must surely be the most selfless act in cinematic history.

Yet whilst cinema barricades Seagal into a corner of hyperbolic ninja kicks and cartoon gunfire, television eliminates from Seagal something else. Rather than drain his imaginative might, television establishes a new agenda for the ambulations of Seagal, new coercions that drive Seagal to assume the attributes specified by hardened televisual rules. Here the real world is attached to the body of the aikido master. Gone are the mad bullet-ridden battles and copious explosions; these replaced with cups of tea and trips to the toilet. Realism has saturated Seagal, expelling his most maniacal of revenge dreams, leaving him in a world of actual social problems, actual suffering, a place where actions have consequences. Reality imposes its own unique limits on Seagal and eliminates his fictional omnipotence. This is observable weekly in Steven Seagal: Lawman.

The latest episode has Seagal and his colleagues tackling drug abuse in Jefferson Parish. They scour the streets looking for crack pipes, bust ne’er-do-wells seeking unearned highs and delineate the ruses concocted to score weed. The cops know the tactics drug fiends use; they recognize the elaborate practices in place that allow the procurement of drugs to go undetected. Accurate intelligence enables the police to stay one step ahead of the dealers and the users. When Seagal visits a crack den, he delves through an endless array of tampons and lighters looking for a crack pipe. He finds nothing – lucky for the hookers that he forces to wait outside – but it’s this level of meticulousness that is required in Seagal’s war on drugs.

Later the gang drop by a rehabilitation centre. Seagal’s Hollywood experiences have toughened him to the perils of drug abuse, giving him first-hand knowledge of what drugs and alcohol can do to a person. He tells the patients that he’s proud of them and leaves.

These are the restrictions of real world social problems. In Seagal’s last domain, the filmic, he would have decapitated anyone insolent enough to even touch a crack pipe, cleansing society of illegal substance abuse in a neat ninety minutes. But in this realm the best he can do is organise a fundraiser for the rehab centre – a best legs contest – and nominate one of his colleagues to take part. Limiting the illimitable is a cruel sight to witness. Seagal’s face during the final scene, the burlesque performance in the foreground, is a visage ravaged by melancholy, a connotation of his disappointment at having to stage the fundraiser, sadness at his inability to simply punch the addiction out of the patients. “It’s a little risqué,” he whispers to someone. Yes, indeed, it’s an outright indecency to have Seagal languishing in a world of limits.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 8 – "Medicine Man"

2010-01-09T22:30:00.004Z

In the depths of night a strange vision occurs. Up flashes a hospital interior, lit neon white. A low electric hum is heard. Injured bodies lie propped against the walls, warbling a diminished sound. Medical instruments are scattered unused on tabletops. A few white coats rush around, taking aimless flight through the chaos. Vomit is splashed upon the floor. A hideous stench can be smelt.

A gong sounds from afar. A breeze hits the staid air. Anticipation shows on the faces of patients. Across the sterile concourse strides a man robed in black, a ponytail flicking in the slipstream. He reaches the first patient. His hand glides over the aching muscles, screams stifled by amazement, a diagnosis taking rapid form. Dulcet words leave his mouth. An exchange of mutual respect and up stands the man, cured of all his ailments. Forty seconds of rapturous applause. No seen source, just a spontaneous burst of sonic celebration, the sort that only one man can ignite.

This purveyor of medical miracles – a medicine man powered solely by energy expelled from Buddha’s bell end – is Steven Seagal. He harangues deadbeat doctors, smacks cancer out of an old woman and heals a gunshot wound. He mends broken limbs, donates sperm to an infertile couple and counsels a bereaved child. Hands act as mighty palliative machines, driving out disease and correcting bodily disorder. Words too are for him instruments of medical efficacy – watch as he persuades fungi to leave its host anus. Seagal is Hippocrates reincarnated as a badass. Not only does he soothe ills, but he kicks a man free of tuberculosis. Seagal lives to heal and does so unhindered by lack of qualifications, actual medical training, etc. A true medicine man needs none of these things, for they are the empty nonsense of egotists.

Such is essentially the plot of the latest Steven Seagal: Lawman. Getting somewhat tired of crushing criminals, Seagal decides to explore his medical skills. Cue an opening sequence where Seagal slowly removes his sheriff’s jacket, revealing underneath a glistening doctor’s smock. But this switching of professions isn’t just due to the usual ennui of life on the job. No, as always there’s a pretext. This week one of his colleagues has been experiencing a pain in his knee. A cop’s beat is hazardous, it often consists of sudden chases, unpredictable breakneck sprints through backyards, difficult leaps over fences. All of which are hard to achieve if one has a dodgy knee. Luckily, Seagal the medicine man is here with a solution.

“A lot of people don’t realise that Steven knows a lot about Asian medicine,” says the colleague. Yes, it’s true. I tried to tell somebody down at the bus stop five minutes ago but they didn’t believe me. They chose to hide behind a veil of scepticism and are foolish for it. Incredulity has no place when it comes to Seagal. But we know the truth: in the sixties Seagal travelled to Asia to study the martial arts, Buddhism, oriental medicine and herbology, and has been studying and practising ever since. This is obviously true.

Seagal escorts his pal to the Chinese medicine shop, where they discuss alternative medicine and the proprietor suggests acupuncture for the knee problem. Naturally this arouses fear in the inexperienced mind of Seagal’s colleague. So Seagal steps forward, needles in hand, ready for the big finale. He slaps twenty needles into the faulty knee, takes a bow, and strides out of the shop doing a victory dance.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 7 – "To Live or Die"

2010-01-03T22:46:00.003Z

Defining the object should always be the first task of analysis. Narrow your eyes, focus on the object, trace the contours, ready the scalpel held clenched in the hand. It’s simple good practice. But Steven Seagal makes this difficult. His character – as we have witnessed it, a throbbing figure enclosed within the show Steven Seagal: Lawman – is in possession of many diverse attributes. Multifaceted Seagal oscillates at a rate of knots, switching hats with nary a thought for continuity. One moment he’s the pinnacle of Zen calm, the next he’s a furious implement of the law. Within minutes he goes from lecturing on the dangers of guns to playing real life Time Crisis in a tornado of grinning joviality.

Episode seven problematises our definition of Seagal even more. For some time Seagal and his comrades have been visiting victims of Hurricane Katrina, the poor people whose homes were wrecked in the storm. We see a couple having to rebuild their house from scratch. They are forced to live in a trailer by the side of the lawn, dedicating every spare minute to laying floorboards and putting in fresh windows. Misfortune has hampered their very existence. Luckily for them Seagal is coming round for tea. Not only does he sup down the tea with the finest Darjeeling swallow I’ve ever seen, but he also deigns to showcase a new skill. Enter Seagal the painter.

The maestro is seemingly a composition of innumerable tints. Cast across Seagal’s pupils are a thousand stelae, each one of which is inscribed with a long inventory of his skills. Alas we’ll never see them, never read their words, never study their meaning. All we have are the pronouncements given form in Lawman.

Seagal, paintbrush in hand, splashes white upon the house walls, warmed by countless loving looks thrust at him by the couple. They appreciate his good deeds. Seagal eases into a Michelangelo trance, colours twenty Adams and seven Noahs, then leaves to join his boys on the street beat. The artist has many drains upon his time.

Intercut with this dazzling display of aesthetic elegance are scenes of brutal criminality. These two threads are generated to underscore the antithetical relationship between artisanal creation and criminal iniquity. What can be more the obscene opposite of art than the dirty murderers that Seagal and co spend half the episode chasing? Homicide has no place in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. We see the officers don sober faces and bemoan the attack on two men. Seagal, angst-ridden and approaching a stage of despair, takes a moment to quote from Madame Bovary apropos their position: “our duty is to feel what is sublime and cherish what is beautiful.” Clearly the murderers hinder this mission. He goes on to poetically render his feelings further: “that really pisses me off bad.”

The episode ends with a final turn on the carousel of wildly burgeoning Seagalian talents. Seagal arrives back at the house-building couple. They have successfully rebuilt their home and are having a party to celebrate. Naturally they are jubilant at the arrival of Seagal. Not only has he brought upon them his presence, but he also comes bearing gifts. Enter Seagal the botanist. From the rear of his vehicle, now a makeshift greenhouse, come ferns and daffodils, roses and orchids, thick bushes of wholesomely verdant bamboo. The happy couple accept Seagal’s plants before Seagal rushes off to deliver a sycamore tree to another housewarming.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 6 – "The Student Becomes the Master"

2009-12-20T17:36:00.004Z

False modesty is a disease, a damnable scourge afflicting the citizenry with pandemic efficiency. The streets are lined with countless darkened imprints of a vanished modesty. Faces skirt past sidewalks beaming a contrivance – a suit mid-stride offers words to erect a facade of humbleness. The victims constitute a number too large to write. They are the fathers of sighs, the wobbling pens of polemics too obvious to compose. Seventy mouths echo in one monotone scream a line spoken by Tartuffe: “I do far less for you than you deserve.” Vile masticators of kudos, they downplay their actions to engender the praise and respect of others.

Sailing past this woeful scene is Steven Seagal. He straddles the bow of the ship, trying to avert his gaze, using hands to block out the empty rhetoric that threatens his ears. But the island Earth stimulates his sympathy. He can’t resist its pitiful murmurs. Seagal cries out in a bellowing baritone voice, causing a strong wind, trees to sway, monkeys to run for cover: “Do you not know the damage you are doing? Humanity! Have you not heard my sermons? Do you not heed my teaching? Have you not seen Under Siege?” And with that Seagal shakes his head and sails onward to Hades, a supreme ass-kicking on his mind.

Lessons only function if listened to. Parables only work when read. Seagal is only efficacious if heeded. When followers decide to ignore his wisdom, Seagal becomes the paragon of blamelessness. The propagators of false modesty have clearly cast from their minds the message of Under Siege. They have through their actions excoriated the fine words of Seagal, words perhaps his finest, a sweep of syllables that exemplify his modesty: “I’m just a cook.”

During this season of Steven Seagal: Lawman, Seagal has understated his fame. He’s consistently deflected the spotlight, shoving it away from himself with modest Seagalian gusto. An early episode featured a group of bystanders chucking tributes at him – a challenge to his modesty. But he absorbed those applauds and moved on, giving the limelight a mere minute to gild his person. Another example: a felon gets slightly star-struck in episode five when he’s arrested by Seagal. He requests a handshake, which proves difficult as he’s handcuffed and facedown on the ground. Seagal’s ego feels nothing.

Episode six sees an explosion of fanfare hit Seagal. On a routine drive through the neighbourhood frantic shouts whack the side of the car. A tense moment of vibrating jowls and the expectation of imminent danger quickly passes as locals are seen waving to Seagal from their lawns. “Hey, that’s Steven Seagal”, they yell. Smiles appear on their faces as hands are pointed towards the icon. A head protruding from a kitchen window exclaims, “Now there’s a sexy man.”

Seagal accepts all the epithets thrown his way. Yet his modesty never dims. In fact, this outpouring of fanfare helps Seagal and his deputies to forge ties with the community. A close relationship with the people is a crucial aspect of police work and nothing breaks the ice better than, “Hey, look: Steven Seagal.”

Aside from the community work, this episode also has Seagal reminiscing about his old chief, a manly inspiration to Seagal who died a year ago. The bereaved family has Seagal arrive for a visit, where he nostalgically regales them with tales of the past, before they all go and visit the grave. In sombre tones Seagal speaks about continuing the good work begun by his fallen leader.

Seagal is a man entrenched in history. Notions of legacy and continuity contribute extensively to his nature and deeds. The present is constructed from the past. The present is a constant, a condition of seeming perpetuity, but the past is a site of expiration, a dwindling nexus of cherished love and life. Our retention of the past – yes, even Seagal’s – is an agonising chain of forgetting. Time is grasped precariously by hands too weak to hold it. History is subject to the whims of random chance and has little connection to the will of the individual. As Walter Benjamin once wrote: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again.”

Seagal’s history is a sequence of images. Not only are his films a chronicle of a man’s flight through time, but Lawman too reeks of the past. Episode six ends with the swearing-in ceremony of the new police chief. During the ceremony Seagal cries pictures of a younger Seagal posing with his deceased mentor. A skinny fresh-faced Seagal flashes upon the screen, stealing a second of recognition, before vanishing into the vacuum of the past, doubtless never to be seen again (until the rerun).

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 5 – "Firearms of Fury"

2009-12-19T19:46:00.003Z

There’s a gene for masochism. There has to be. How else can we explain why the people of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana persist in breaking the law? Scientists have yet to scale the double helix in the detail necessary to reveal the hidden pores of these masochistic desires. The white coats stand aloof, shrugging shoulders in a gesture of undiscovered knowledge. The answer they murmur is no. Yet we see, week after week, a populace intent upon injuring the status of the law, bringing upon themselves a heavy dose of ironclad justice.

But that in-itself isn’t overly masochistic. Individuals are sometimes coerced into criminality. Be it an impulse born of poverty or exploitation, a range of determinants foist upon the good and the decent a life formed solely by illegal pursuits.

Where an unambiguous self-hate becomes manifest is when we consider he who is the harbinger of justice in this equation. Most parishes in Louisiana have sheriffs made of bone and blood – numerous flesh creatures ambulating through time and space. These are men and women whose lives are fraught with imperfection. They are professionals who defecate between patrols, entertain lusty thoughts about co-workers, and cry at forgotten memories just remembered.

Jefferson Parish, on the other hand, has to contend with a force so utterly perfect as to make us laugh outrageously at the actions of criminals and wrongdoers. At the core of their law troop stands Steven Seagal. Yes, that’s right: Steven Seagal, deputy sheriff.

To break the law in Jefferson Parish cannot be anything other than a purposeful attempt to satisfy deep psychological neuroses. The kid who steals twenty packs of Doritos from the local convenience store is seeking to damage himself, for he enters a state of guaranteed failure as soon as his act finds reality. It may be the inability to feel genuine emotion in this epoch of rampant simulacra. Or the redundancy of a survival instinct no longer needed in order to live. Either way, little Tommy’s getting busted – and he might get a forceful Seagalian boot in the backside for the trouble.

Tonight’s masochists are all hoodlums with guns. After several seconds of introductory Seagalian fervour, we catch Seagal and co charging through the city on their way to a gun-related incident. An eight-foot wolf has threatened a greengrocer – a vicious scene happening far from Seagal’s corporeal presence. The report confirms that the wolf yelled nasty words like “I will give you a right shootin’” and “Gimme that turnip” at the frightened grocer. Eventually Seagal’s brigade encounters the wolf trying to make a getaway in his jeep. But the beast is too slow, and to worsen his predicament, Seagal finds a firearm in the backseat. No amount of baying can deactivate Seagal’s furious stare – that is the lesson offered the wolf.

This episode, the fourth of the series, continues an examination initiated by Seagal in episode one. Then he participated in various games of shooting practice, propelling swarms of bullets at the heads of matches, startling everyone around him with his godly accuracy, while simultaneously propounding assorted Zen-gunfire maxims.

But this time the ‘guns are fun’ ethos of episode one has morphed into something else. Here we witness a complete inversion. The rich colours of burly blokes slapping ninety bullets into paper cut-outs amid laughter and good cheer is now a dank monochrome pit of pain and loss. Seagal races over tarmac to reach a man shot in the back. The report delineates the happening: on the corner stands a young chap, happily bullet-less, when suddenly up pulls a car driven by Biff Tannen, shotgun protruding through the window, and click – in a split second the chap standing on the corner is transformed into a victim. It’s this sort of brutality that summons profanity to the lips of Seagal. As the medics wrangle with the wound, Seagal shouts down at him, “It’s a dirty motherfucker shoots you in the back, ya hear me?”

I’m sure he did hear him. Bullet or no bullet, to ignore the words of Steven Seagal is a grave mistake that not even the ruffians of Jefferson Parish would dare commit.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 4 – "Too Young to Die"

2009-12-13T16:57:00.005Z

If the contemplation of art is united with a suitably assiduous mental effort, one can see on the canvas fragments of what might have been. Shadows of possibility lie embedded within the image, ghosts of ideas long-dismissed, ideas smote by the very mutability that heralded their original being. The visual assemblage always leaves a gap in its form, a cue for the overactive mind to insert what it deems lacking.

Consider Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. When we look at it we see a foreground in which the titular god, conceived as a giant deistical beast, feasts upon his offspring with ruthless alacrity. It’s a scene of compelling brutality – a crime that resonates with the deepest human compulsion for procreation. But stare into the darkness behind Saturn’s form for long enough and a new figure appears. Sneaking up behind him is Steven Seagal. Seagal wears a face of steely determination, head shot through with anger, a man about to beat down an infanticidal son-of-a-bitch.

We do not know why Goya chose to have Seagal as merely implicit in the painting. He could easily have had Seagal kicking Saturn in the side of the head whilst a virtuous nymph picks up the child. Or Seagal could have punched Saturn in the arsehole, causing the latter to release the child. But Goya opted to leave Seagal as a faint phantasm, a threatening bodily fog set as the moral antithesis to Saturn’s crazed power-trip.

One thing is for certain: Seagal will not tolerate harm being done to children.

This is also the primary thrust of episode four of Steven Seagal: Lawman.

Following a stormy intro sequence of weird shapes and furious cuts, Seagal and co are seen driving through a neighbourhood on patrol. The night has brought about its daily eruption of misdemeanour and iniquity. A man-sized mantis kicks over bins. A winged-demon soars through the air, someone’s pet feline clutched in its talons. Twenty harpies engage in vociferous debate with a politician. Each scene yearns for Seagal’s mighty fist of righteousness, an angelic remedy that only Seagal can distribute. The chupacabra defecating on the sheriff’s lawn needs ninety kilojoules of Seagalian punishment, the citizenry cries out for it.

But the nocturnal monsters will have to wait, for Seagal is required elsewhere.

A call comes in: a baby’s been hit by a car. The lights go on. The sirens start to chime. They rocket past other drivers, speeding to their destination, unsure of what to expect. All exit the car when they arrive. A mass of confusion meets them. Questions launch from Seagal’s face; a quiz now underway. Turns out the baby’s okay, there’s just a scratch. The nipper ran on to the road, the driver swerved – all is well. Let’s go home, let’s forget about it. But Seagal is not done; the incident has him greatly inspired.

Next day, Seagal and the lads visit the local children’s hospital. As Seagal says:

“For about twenty-five years I’ve gone to children’s hospitals all over the world.”

Yet, amidst poignant shots of Seagal chatting to terminally-ill kids – a commendable enterprise, no doubt – Seagal lets slip a frightening fact:

“Unfortunately me and my team can’t fight disease.”

What! There was me thinking I could rely on Seagal to beat my cancer, should that damnable day ever arrive. It’s immensely displeasing, but thankfully the rest of episode four is of such quality as to fully-eradicate the melancholy.

Enter Seagal the songster.

Not content with the visit, Seagal decides to organise a gig to raise funds for the hospital. Suddenly there’s an explosion of blues, the screen lashed by a chain of pentatonic scales. Twangy guitars are wielded, piano keys battered – poppin’ bass licks intermingle with smooth gospel humming. A carpeted rehearsal space quickly transforms into a packed bar, looseness giving way to the tight bang of a live ensemble.

Encouraged by the heady rush of the music, Seagal becomes ruminative, losing himself in a mad mental sojourn. In the end he evokes another great thinker held captive by the sonic dynamic:

“Nietzsche said…life would be a mistake without music.”

As Seagal is doubtless aware, that aphorism from Twilight of the Idols ends with the line:

“The Germans even think of God as singing songs.”

Clearly, if we take the audience’s reaction to Seagal as an indicator, it’s not only the Germans who deign to worship a tuneful god.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 3 – "Killer Canines"

2009-12-12T19:45:00.004Z

Minutes are compressed into seconds. The police car speeds furiously across tarmac and pavement, bolting forward through a gauntlet of haze, the hegemony of colour obscura: the warped cerulean discord of the siren sky, the smoke-ravaged hiss of a sullen red motorway – dream visions of a forgotten chase, a burst of zero meaning, all wobble and urgency, a needless exposition.

Time spit upon, bullied into supinity, cut into millions by a serrated Seagal, like a razor-wire minute-hand cut from the cloth of Chronos. The mad gallop ahead speaks of necessity, rendering a definite destination, lessening the hectic confusion by permitting a slight glance at the future. Seagal can already be seen stepping from the vehicle, torch hoisted high above his head. He advances on to the lawn to join his colleagues. The time has been shattered, the days and hours mutated beyond comprehension. Several miles traversed in one terrifyingly jagged opening sequence.

Forty thousand minutes consumed in forty blinks of the eye, gifts to the belly of Seagal, a stretch of time willingly struck down, its suicide the awesome entrance to episode three of Steven Seagal: Lawman.

A burglary is underway. Someone’s stealing picket fences from the ‘burbs. The underworld rises to the surface at night, summoned by the sun’s disappearance. A demon throws terrapins at the elderly from a rooftop, several banshees piss in a phone booth. The streets are now scenes of villainy, the peaceful daytime transformed into endless yards of spewed filth, stomata-sprayed scum lines the roads, a heinous gangrene spreading virulently throughout society. Tiny imps punch ballbags at inopportune moments. A snake-jawed thug batters coins out of passersby.

But Steven Seagal is here to quell the evil.

The police car decelerates as Seagal jumps from the passenger side. Others rapidly join his side as he runs to the house. Circles of torchlight smack the windows as Seagal tries to ascertain if the burglar is inside. A detailed check from the outside yields nothing but impatient faces. Seagal stands alone on the lawn, legs apart, a right hand clutching his chin, lost in the infinity of thought. Then his eyes widen, two giant spheres moistened by the effort of rumination. It’s time to get the dogs in.

Canine Branch pulls up. A brawny handler leads the mutt to the house. In through the window he goes. His mission: track down the bad guy. Sadly a conspicuous silence tells Seagal and co that the bad guy has already escaped. Lucky chap. Maybe next time he won’t be so lucky – perhaps he will break into the wrong house, as Seagal says:

“If this guy had broke into my house my dogs might have killed him.”

These are serious words uttered by Seagal. They also announce the theme of this week’s episode.

Often I have wondered what Seagal does when he’s not producing quality cinema and diminishing society’s evils in the form of sheriff duty. Well now I know: he’s training attack dogs.

Since Seagal’s teenage years he’s been training dogs for protection. Adolescence is a key stage of personal development, vital to the creation of a recognisable subjectivity. It’s a time that sees numerous attempts to distinguish oneself from one’s parentage by experimentation and rebellion. Adolescence is marked by rapid change, both biological and psychological. Fads are adopted and discarded; the line between individuality and conformity carefully trod. Teenagers trundle through many identities and tastes. But rarely does a teenager go through a training attack dogs phase. I guess that’s what makes Seagal such an ubermensch.

Most of the episode has Seagal attempting to train his new dog, a shaggy beast from Eastern Europe named Frankie. This canine finds it difficult working with Seagal’s current dog Kar, so Seagal gets a special trainer in to forge an alliance between the two. Cue a number of role-plays where a man is attacked by the dogs and Seagal yells “Stop” a lot.

A busy man like Seagal needs reliable beasts to guard his family whilst he works, hence the reason why this episode focuses on Seagal’s dogs. These are his hairy deputies, feral weapons that guard a Seagal-less household. They are not perfect but will have to do until he can get himself several centaurs for the purpose.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 2 – "The Deadly Hand"

2009-12-06T21:01:00.002Z

The silence is shattered by a hoarse jagged scream coming from the corner. An unseen assailant wears nothing but a frozen heroin grin. The damp night darkness dominates everything, casting a net of evil over every trace of light. Iniquity hides in blots of blackened sidewalk, out of sight, out of understanding, a derelict space of inhumanity. In each shadow runs a thousand scenes of law-breaking, every cutlet of skin a night’s toil for a brazen knife – grim nocturnal tyranny foisted on the unsuspecting and the innocent.

Such is the dank Louisiana cityscape prior to the arrival of Steven Seagal. His very presence erases the bad, the sordid, the lustful nightmare dynamic of pent-up, foil-lipped libidinal excess that’s spewing out over curb-stones and old grannies nightly. Seagal quells the mad rush of Tiamatian lunacy and unbounded eroticism. “The jecks” knew no limits before Seagal arrived to introduce a generous dose of civilisation. The panoptic eye gazes out from a gap in Seagal’s lower thigh.

Episode two of Steven Seagal: Lawman documents Seagal’s infinite hunger for justice, his undying determination to rid the streets of negative energy and mediocre “Zen practitioners”. The mission will demand all of Seagal’s powers. He will be forced to summon countless tidbits of wisdom, applying knowledge to situations of dire import.

Certainty is rarely possessed by the hero. Its fleeting presence eludes the grasp of so many. Yet Seagal clenches certainty in all its plenitude, trapping its divinity in a single fist.

This certainty provides Seagal with an endless amount of confidence. Years spent studying the martial arts have made him impervious to panic, immune to the onslaught of fear. Invincibility wears a mask stitched by Seagal. No attack exists for which he cannot harness an instant defence. But his fellow officers are not so blessed. They, the fools, have not spent forty years studying the intricacies of aikido. A mix of pity and concern leads Seagal to put on a training session for these helpless souls.

A sweat-stinking gym is the stage for Seagal’s transmission of wisdom. Craven eyes surround him as he delineates the philosophy of his fighting style. Use the opponent’s momentum, capture the forward thrust, enfeeble the attacker, drive him down, expel no effort, be a winner, make it look easy. Fortune will meet the focused consumer of high Seagalian teaching. He guarantees that frequent practise will turn even the puniest, the most shite, into hardcore warriors, wholesome symbols of meritorious equity, the colossal-hearted figures of a modern day gigantomachia. Seagal is forging an army of epic proportions. His pupils know it: each visage grows more and more admiring with every demonstration, more and more the colouration of love with every choice word of encouragement.

The episode ends with another training session. Here a team of trainee cops are the recipients. A mass of youthful faces stares star-struck at Seagal as he describes the combat arts. The natural philosopher surprises with his erudition, throwing expectations into a fire of juvenile wrongs. He advises them to forget all the nonsense about Steven Seagal the movie star, discount the unimportant in favour of the crucial message, the one maxim we must all cherish: “Steven Seagal can save my life”.

Yes he can.

Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 1 – "The Way of the Gun"

2009-12-05T19:12:00.006Z

Here we sit, arms interlocked, happily cohesive, happily idolatrous, happily sharing a rich platter of preconceived ideas. All thoughts point to one thing: Steven Seagal, exemplar of the arts, muse to the masses, bounteous treasure of humankind, is a presence whose force exists on a single plane, a splashing liquid life held inside one container, easily definable, easily spoke of, a friend to a simple understanding. The filmic rivers flow full of Seagal, alluvium of ass-kicking action coating every shingle, a righteous dynamic that constitutes the very integrity of the medium. Seagal is a movie star. His literature consists of pictures and sounds. He embellishes his theorems with car chases. He paints scenes in technicolour fisticuffs. Seagal is cinema and cinema is Seagal.

Yet our grasp loosens, we begin to cling with less force, our faces turn pale as news arrives to contradict all held dear. Not one but two, a duality, blocking the path, dissolving the singularity, superimposing a new state of multiplicity.

There are two Steven Seagals.

One is Steven Seagal, fictional officer of the law, a symbol of justice battering bad guys and keeping the streets clean. The other is Steven Seagal, actual officer of the law, a symbol of justice battering bad guys and keeping the streets clean.

What’s that? A man known for throwing his foes down elevator shafts is a cop in real life?

Fiction has truly spilled over into reality. I wonder if two decades’ worth of leg snapping, neck breaking ultraviolence will make the transition. There’s been a breach in the cinematic hull somewhere, make-believe vocations are rapidly escaping, spraying out unhindered. Seagal just punched a giant ontological hole in the fiction-reality divide.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Seagal says:

“I make a living in the movies, but for the past twenty years I’ve also been a cop. And along with some of the finest deputies on the force, I serve the people of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. My name is Steven Seagal. That’s right. Steven Seagal, Deputy Sheriff.”

So there you go, the hole’s been there all this time and you never even noticed. Shame on you.

Anyway, Seagal’s sprung from the cop closet for a new reality TV show called Steven Seagal: Lawman. This pseudo-Cops docu-diary series follows Seagal as he plays at police duty, busting hoodlums for possession, patrolling the “jects” and what-have-you. Shaky vomit-inducing cameras capture Seagal as he and his colleagues pile on a carjacker making attempts to avoid "juvie". Blurry collages of blue and red flank the screen as Seagal and co are called off the road to silence a drunken ne’er-do-well. All of this set to a soundtrack of shouty Seagal Zen-words and street-addled ambience.

To rest our eyes and ears from the gritty reality of quelling injustice, we get short scenes of Seagal showing a younger colleague how to shoot like a master marksman. The demonstrations are punctuated by sagacious words, slim aphoristic wisdom encouraging the neophyte to push the bullet, to guide the bullet, to be one with the bullet, give himself to the action without trying. Like a horrifically-inflated Yoda, Seagal leads by example: not content with successfully shooting the heads of cotton buds from a distance of twenty feet, he tries to light a match by shooting it. Alas this proves hard to achieve and Seagal retires for forty hours’ meditation in the fortress of Seagalitude.

Well, what did we learn from the first episode?

Steven Seagal is an ordinary working man, a duty-bound pillar of the community, identical to those he serves. His quotidian everyday-ness is a rebuke to the Hollywood stereotype, for he is a man respected as one with the commons, dishing up banquettes of justice for the poor and the hungry. Sure he wears sunglasses indoors and signs autographs, but regardless, the proletariat knows no better example.

The First Power

2009-09-26T17:15:00.008+01:00

Sixteen minutes, twenty yards. Time-lapse retinas screen the image. In rotation are twisted looks, unblemished contortions, signals of a face in motion, a battle endlessly fought, a soaring fable forging pathways through the gloomy melancholy. Sixteen minutes ago it ended, struck off the video box in a display of sparks, an unfiltered electromania, dazzlingly dangerous, an unforgettable jet stream of neon and static – and at that moment, fear beyond fear: a blackout.

Four hours, a kebab shop up the road. Loose-hanging limbs smack the face on entry. A few distorted apologies are issued, benign words spoken by earnest fellows unsettled by the malformed crawling shape. Lug this body, lug it good. Tersely mumbled well-wishes descend into theatrics: the prophet finds his temple. Slumped in the corner, debilitated arms and legs – recklessly dirt-covered and smelling of faeces – lying supine as the spoken bullshit rolls forth. “Let me tell you gents a fine tale. Perhaps the finest. There was once a man, a hard working man, a man of the law. His name was Russell Logan, but he mostly went by the name Lou Diamond Phillips.” At this point a turtle-necked ruffian interrupts. “Who?” he asks. Suppressing the primordial urge to beat said fellow senseless with a crowbar and a hammer, I deny all knowledge of his question and continue.

Thirty minutes, the corner of the avenue. The pavement is shimmering, clotted cracks yielding images. Pentagrams painted in blood. A serial killer stalking the stage. Homicides reported with haste. A spooky mask wears a silhouette holding a knife. What calamity! What nasty denigration of the human being! A cold wind thrusts a crisp packet into the face. The soiled curb again memorialises the events that began two hours ago. There sits Diamond Phillips in his apartment, half-eaten pizza and a cat his only pets. The phone rings. A mad nun on the line. She tips him off, her whispers describing the location of the next murder. Rising, striding, gun clasped in iron hands of Awesome: seven leagues east, a hero throttling through space to prevent an evil force. Give up, bad man, you’ve killed your last – the Sheriff of Fuck is on his way.

Nine minutes, one yard. A hazy recollection forces open tired eyes. Two rhythms: the first a dynamic Diamond Phillips chasing villain Patrick Channing; the other a body prostrate on the floor. One a sweeping mass of gunfire and barked commands; the other a state of inertia. The explosion that coincided with the end of The First Power must have rendered the body still. The recall is utter excitement, but the physical reality is corporeal shutdown. A tiny image maintains the spirit. Diamond Phillips knocks the bad guy to the ground, pummelling him with fists. Channing, with cheeky disdain, fights back, stabbing our hero three times in the belly. But the assault isn’t enough to disable Diamond Phillips. He returns with kicks and screams, ushering in a Lou Diamond Victory.

Two hours, the stench of tarmac. A grotty boot swings pendulum-like, causing havoc in the lower sternum, abdominal pains looming large. It’s a copper. He’s trying to disengage me from the road, a bed to which I cling. Hollers of Up, Up, Up ring with each kick. A few seconds of sentience hit me, enough time to yell a bitter rebuke to his life and ideals: “He got the death penalty!” I spit. “But that wasn’t enough. He came back. Back from the dead. Damnable spirit! He’s got the first power: the power of resurrection. How can Diamond Phillips fight a supernatural being? Channing – I understand he’s a minion of Lucifer – can possess any body. He’ll jump into someone; use their hands to enact his dirty deeds. Could be you!” I point a mottled finger at the copper. “I don’t know. We don’t know. Who knows? Diamond Phillips doesn’t know. Eh? His psychic sidekick aids the hunt, but I worry. I can’t remember the ending. I can’t feel my limbs.”

Ten minutes, one yard. I must escape this confinement. I need to rip asunder these walls. If I’m destined to fall into the empty world below then so be it. I can already see the innocent faces, oblivious, desolate – they lack the mana, the heavenly brew that only Lou Diamond Phillips can supply. The pupating solace, locked in a thousand memories, seeks freedom. It can’t withstand the penitentiary of the head. A breach will occur. I must jolt this shell of a body out of here, away from the epicentre, brave the colossal antagonisms of the outside, sacrifice comfort in the name of The First Power, tug tight the underlings and lick them clean of confusion. Fall to the floor. A shattering interjection, a gloss of resurging images: demon Channing playing games with Diamond Phillips, bounding in and out of bodies, creating chaos, paranoia, grumpy faces; death dealt by the hero has no effect, a swift leap later and Channing resides in another; hobos, alcoholic cops, nuns, bag ladies who imitate slapstick deadites: all are victim to Channing, all are targets of Diamond Phillips – scorn and shotgun await.

Five hours, a kebab shop up the road. Quaffing down a can of lager the ruffian eyes me dubiously. “Say that again, you worm.” I shoot him an angry glance, irritated. “An old abandoned waterworks,” stressing each syllable. His strained features ease. “What, like in Lethal Tender?” “Yes, kind of, now shut up.” A shake of the head suffices to exhibit annoyance. “As I was saying, big showdown, epic combat, stretched across netherworlds and our own, the triumph of Diamond Phillips, the extinction of Channing. What a time. The full extent of the tension, I can feel it; it’s a feeling that’s replaced every other feeling I’ve ever had. Channing gets thrown into a vat of acid. Then gets blown up. But still he comes back. It takes forty stabbings with the Jesus dagger to finally destroy the beast. Bring us into the light, Diamond Phillips! But no, you’ve got shot. The cops thought you were trying to stab a nun. Their mistake. But too late. You’re in a coma. The missus sits by your side; her psychic ability can't help you now. Bequeath us your powers, Lou Diamond Phillips; we may need them next time Channing returns.” At this point: a few blinks, some minor convulsions. A man decides he’s heard enough and throws a chip at me on his way out. The bastard.

Quaidscape Dream Potlatch

2009-07-27T22:56:00.009+01:00

Free daily newspapers swarm across the train carriage. Seven teenagers cower next to the sliding doors, hands held, earphones crisscrossing, the buzzing of faint guitar riffs filling the space between here and the next stop. Gnarled faces look askance at the cohort, gazes shifting at five second intervals, now concern, now indifference. A foul stench of ink and manufactured need diffuses in the staid air. The plague gets ever worse in the land of sun hours, the deep blue glow of months held aloft by titan summer hands, punishing swelter, a chthonic squeezing. A man gets smacked awake by an advertisement for Tunisia. A child screaming has its ululation silenced by a paparazzi fold-out – forty pages of tight angle leg snaps.

A young fellow stands near the rear, Young Gottlieb we’ll call him. His eyes bounce over pages of the most meritorious journalism, eyes buoyant in their absorption of relevant information, all that pulsating knowledge, true knowledge, the innumerable vital words that ceaselessly escort wisdom to inviting minds. His tail, were he to be so endowed, would right now be oscillating furiously at the excitement induced by this product of the press. Headlines and blurbs, reportage, cropped images of celebrities checking their email. Tireless hands fold one page into another, vestigial punctuation blurring into grimacing promotions coated in cyan.

A moth shoots past, now clinging to the window, a stain soon apparent.

Our young hero skips three pages, his enlarged neocortex pushing him forward, a bodily flow through the river of content. There it is, the TV listing open before him, casting rays onto his face, a rich yellow colouring anew his skin. His now-bulging forehead dips as he moves his eyes closer to the page. A few seconds pass as daylight’s programming is consumed, chewed up and discarded. Now the turn of night.

Suddenly the prophet sees his messiah. With a head looking more and more misshapen, Young Gottlieb sports a smile. He knows what is lying on page sixty-two. Never before has he had precognitive powers, but this time is different, this time an antediluvian spark spun from forgotten, dusk-hewn corners of his brain has left him with no doubts: page sixty-two is patched together in strands of Quaid.

Young Gottlieb – his head now beyond the limits of curvature – stares into the pages. Dreamscape is on tonight. Broadcast during the segue of the days, a bridge to tomorrow, how fitting. Epic nightfall treats are not mere items on the agenda, they are the agenda – and the agenda is written on the grinning face of Dennis Quaid. Dreamscape, thrust into repeated existence by randomness, is a treat in plural, its number not restricted to the inertia of one.

A jubilatory march erupts somewhere nearby – perhaps someone else knows the news.

Bubbles rise from Young Gottlieb’s head, spherical nebulae escaping from a fissure in his scalp. In them are contained concrete moments of Proustian glee. First a memory of a child’s viewing of Dreamscape. The precocious sprite sat down opposite the screen, distracted twitches of the head suggesting a preference for other things. Then rupture: images no longer filtered through the cathode ray, now spooled through miles of cranial flesh. The Dreamscape effect has the child delirious – assimilating or being assimilated, it’s hard to tell.

A second bubble has a spotty teenager being given a copy of Dreamscape. A scene of festivity surrounds the gift-giving. The bubble floats along the ceiling of the train, before reaching a hairy man engaged in a paperback. Initially he sees his reflection, the vain image forced upon him. A moment passes before the bubble reveals its innards. He seems affected by the scene of generosity. Pop. A splattering of mind pus later and he’s recoiling back into his paperback.

More bubbles sail through the air. One has Max von Sydow kneeling before a masked figure, seemingly pleading something, an imp prancing around behind him, cutting his Bergman chains, shoving him into exile. Another has Quaid helping a young disabled child cope with his nightmares. Beside a hipster lands a bubble in which Quaid fights a demon beast, Belial or some such, with a fork. A tourist watches a bubble ricochet off a window, the image of shameless Quaid grinning at a blonde swirling at its centre.

A noise is heard from the rear. It’s Young Gottlieb. His head has stretched to breaking point. Two seniors wrap themselves in newspaper, afraid of the imminent mess. Pop. Sheets of ooze fly over the seniors as a thousand bubbles fill the carriage. Some people tilt their heads, some lie supine, some stand with their faces in their hands. Kinetic scenes of bravery and sub-horror almost-Disney tit-fest Quaid-zone madness cascade through the air. Smeared with spit, the tantalising motif of 80s science turned bad becomes clearer as it sheds one gooey exterior. It falls into the lap of a nomad. He peers expectantly at it. Then the bubble shifts form, becoming the grin of Dennis Quaid. Now all the bubbles have become the grin of Dennis Quaid.

“What sacred gift is this?!” screams a little Bohemian girl.

The free papers drop abruptly to the floor. Eyes move from startled to amazed. A mighty surge of emotion overcomes the passengers. An idiot stands up and tries to hug one of the Dennis Quaid grins. He fails, then sits down. Fool. By the time we reach the station all the grins have disappeared, breathed in by anxious lungs, now tethered to the body’s interior. Grinning phantasms left to multiple in the hot moist cavern of the body, held in check by nothing, spreading Quaid cancers to everywhere. Organs shut down, masticated upon by chopping yankee gnashers, spelling the end of everything.

Too many things that begin as a gift, end as a massive inconvenience, like cancer. Thanks Dennis Quaid.

Repetition Roulette

2009-05-11T18:26:00.005+01:00

It started as a memo, just another anonymous sheet of white shuffled haphazardly across the political palms. No one foresaw its catalytic potential. Neither were there fleeting images of turmoil, nor discoloured memories of a dreamt controversy, for precognition lived elsewhere. The social reconfiguration born from its words remained entirely unknown. Eventually ignorance began to fade, unstoppable sentences of import coming to the fore. A new mentality infiltrated the present; now the memo cut gazes in two, spitefully begrudging a past rife with insolence. It was hailed as genius, the work of a visionary mind. In less than a fortnight, it was elevated from valueless office debris to the blueprint for a grand plan, schema for an unavoidable step towards utopia.

The obstacles were many. Six months passed, during which time vigorous preparatory steps were untaken, sleepless nights were washed away by the headache of practicalities, orders from above lashed tender heads, fragile pates whipped upon with tyrannous demands, speedy implementation the omnipresent priority.

Yet, dissent remained visible. Some saw an infringement of their rights, an evil divestment of their civic worth orchestrated on a massive scale. Others were puzzled at the government’s lack of justification, merely requesting elaboration. Bellowed remarks could be heard all around London, usually shouted by beards denouncing a dismantling of freedoms, inveighing against what they saw as surrender to the clutches of automatism. Questions wafted skyward from all quarters. Uneasy faces stared inert at their copies of the Metro, eyes becoming more and more indifferent to the ubiquitous silence. The concept of asking assumed new heights of nonsense as the torrent of questions failed to cease. After a while, Whitehall said No more. A gigantic billboard was constructed, erected high on granite arches, piercing the blotched-grey sky, on which were printed the words ‘No Questions’.

One still saw the querulous faces on the Jubilee Line – frenzied minds figuring out the best words for their queries. Sore disappointment was the sole offering upon their arrival.

Then the day came. Eager ministers watched as theory morphed into practice, as the epic outcome of six months’ arduous planning and preparation assumed a form. Unmarked vans arrived at the libraries almost in unison, a stuttering of ignitions the signal of their presence. The men, attired in civil service garb, dragged the large discs from the back of the vans, lifting them into the buildings. Inside the libraries they were positioned in central spaces. The discs, about six feet in diameter, were large wheels amounted on steel spindles, able to be rotated with ease. Markings segmented the circles, dividing them into different colours. Straps hung loose on the face of each disc, stuck on at places within the perimeter.

Queues formed almost immediately, their conformity enforced by the threatened viciousness of the law. The injunction to submit met with little resistance. And so the first person was strapped to the wheel, set in motion, hastily allocated the specifics of their day, and then turned away, the next in line ambling forward – thus heralding the new society of repetition.

The problem – a conspicuous wound in the fabric of society, the deepest of structural faults – was given great emphasis in the original memo. It diagnosed a world of too much variation; it described an existence replete with too many options. Choice and decision were identified as actions of iniquity. Baleful standards of societal thrust had taken control, giving rise to a multitude of outcomes, an endless revolt against banality, individual ends perpetually diversifying. A menace was hoisted into view, said to be the bane of society, and the government agreed: variety was to be no more.

Fragments of ideas were embedded in the text – unformed gestures toward a solution. But a feasible answer remained to be devised. Government employees set off on long journeys of meditative struggle, delving into chasms of difficult debate, immersed in frenetic brainstorming orgies and interdepartmental back-and-forth. Chins were worn down in fits of scratching; divorce numbers rose. At last a solution was assembled: men and women would have their day decided by the turn of a giant roulette wheel.

Naturally making people do only one single thing all the time would be cruel. Variation may indeed be immorality by another name, but to purge the earth of it entirely, that would be futile and stupid. As a consequence, the wheel was built to retain the chance of leisure, the possibility of a time free from the rank of employee. But that time would be closely regulated, and limited, by government decree.

Buildings of civic importance would be needed to store the wheels. Schools were considered too rowdy; hospitals too busy. Libraries were chosen, their recurring community presence and peaceful ambience supplying all the necessary reasons. One minister also saw a great poetic appropriateness to the choice of libraries. Shelves upon shelves, rows upon rows, books filling every corner – libraries are exemplars of repetition. Pages aligned in series, the same words written, the same conclusions reached, a cycle whose tail never enters the light. Subjects that secrete the same, an endless parade of the already touched upon. Three hundred books about Flaubert, ninety shelves on Antiquity, twelve paperbacks about a scene that was cut from The Shining. On and on, a tunnel of zero finish. Such was the opinion of one uninformed minister.

Every adult in the country was assigned a local library, a place to report to at the stroke of daybreak. Each morning the queues would start, quickly extending in length, sprawling forth like tentacles composed of tired faces, penetrating car parks and playgrounds alike. Awaiting their turn, those towards the front of the queue would see others spun on the wheel, spun into a proletarian routine. Another man to work, another woman to work, shades of the alternative rarely seen. Spinning would continue, edging ever closer to noontide, each revolution the father of the next.

It was some minor minister, perhaps he who rambled nonsensically over the state of libraries, who had the smart idea of strapping citizens to the wheel. Make it interactive, make them think they can influence the outcome, give it the ring of destiny, the frivolity of fate – as he argued. But mostly it just made people nauseous.

The Seven Lives of Blanka

2009-04-28T21:44:00.007+01:00

The street scene décor looks wooden. A few niggling cries of inauthenticity ring out, blackening the air with contrarian glee. Cleanly varnished surfaces reflect the light, a setting fresh at the touch, objects chopped and chiselled at little remove from the present.

‘But nonetheless!’ chant the chorus.

And so the street opens up. Cars and pedestrians, shops and eateries, blue-hued skies and matt-finished roads. Homey and homeless gouge the street, earning third-person glances and deferred interest. Careerists zip past the elderly. Mothers living the infant frenzy stomp the pavement, nudging street soldiers – always bolting ahead, always late.

‘Enough of the general!’ chant the chorus.

The mid-street café – a colourless fragment of the terrace, anonymous to all non-locals – coolly eases through the day. A quiet hideaway, sufficiently close to the bustle to maintain one’s grasp on the social nexus. Sun shines but the out-front seating, straddling gum-encrusted pavement, stands primarily empty. Only one seat taken – one table in use. A body fills the space, sipping tea and tapping a nervous hand on a newspaper.

‘Why, it’s he! Our hero!’ chant the chorus.

The smell of burgers and vomit is perceptible, noise of the bus lane audible. A couple stroll past walking a dog they named Hegel. Motor fumes course through the air. A woman madly bemoans “all that there NASA shit” to a silent telephone interlocutor. A toddler trips, suited men run for the bus, a kebab merchant discards his junk mail.

Green is reflected off the table steel as Blanka lowers his cup. Fatigue shows upon his eyes – fatigue or age? Frenetic happenings unravel behind him, a patchwork blur of technicolour ebb and flow. Little distracted by the environment, long-accustomed to the droning daytime, Blanka looks piercingly at the table. Someone has scribbled the word ‘Yeltsin’ on it.

‘Who be damned – where and why?’ chant the chorus.

Jutting out from below the newspaper is the cherished item of Blanka’s rumination: the latest draft of his memoirs – the myriad sheets of white, lathered in words and drenched in history’s reckoning advances, that have preoccupied his life these past months. He sighs, scratching a lump on his arm, dark green ever darkening. The newspaper he pushes to the other side of the table. The papers are revealed, bundled together in a rush. Blanka twists his neck away, yawning in tormented tiredness. Irksome tasks to do and their terrible completion rage behind his eyes.

‘Pay distraction no heed!’ chant the chorus.

Throwing no look to a nearby cyclist as she reproaches a van driver, Blanka lifts the pages and begins to sift through them. Every numbing memory of the writing process assails him, from the cutting of cherished passages, ones that took days to assemble, to hours lost through needless meditation on whether the word beatdown ought to be hyphenated. Fingers flick through the stack, eyes catching on headings. A nod intermittently ruptures the stillness of the air. A pen emerges from a shirt pocket, moving in rhythm to a baritone splutter gurgling its way up Blanka’s throat. Cough now free, the critical scribbling commences.

‘Soundless reading take flight!’ chant the chorus.

Chapter 6: The failed playwright

…I did not have the sense to start at the bottom. Things would have gone better that way, I am sure of it. A year or two making props, time arranging rehearsals, maybe a tour as Shylock – all would have been good preparation. But by that time my ego was too large. I demanded instant recognition. I could not wait for theatrical fame. And so I called myself Playwright and began to write…

…Some called Piss Piss, Mother Gods crass. Many reviewers tore it apart, writing at length about the unpleasant feeling it engendered in them. I was appalled. I did not expect such a backlash. I knew it was provocative; I was not naïve. But I believe it was misjudged. What they saw as misogynistic trash, I saw as a challenging metonymic critique of society. The scene in which Hank and Vera’s marriage is on the rocks is a perfect example. They argue over having children: Hank wanting them, Vera not wanting them. Tempers flare and voices are raised. After a minute of furious argument, Hank goes to retreat, but teary eyed Vera continues to harangue him. Hank turns back and shouts, “I will beat off in my hand and slap it in your fanny if you don’t shut up!” One reviewer centred his entire review around this scene, listing everything he saw wrong with it. Sometimes it confuses me. But I just assume they are ignorant…

Recollection of a dream spent talking to an ocelot returns to Blanka. Reading ceases as an intake of breath lightens the mood. Cheap ink stains his fingers, orphan biro lines running over his knuckles. Sputum interrupts his breath, a wad of opalescent gunk in ascension – now dislodged. The dreams involving the ocelot stopped a few months ago. Those twilight terrors ravaged Blanka’s sanity for years, hindering every new career, every new relationship. But now they appear absent, silent and invisible, enabling the byways of harmless slumber to be trod sans agony. Untouched anodyne sleep and myriad mind freedoms were the catalysts for the memoir, encouraging Blanka to finally chronicle his eventful life – now allowing him to do it.

‘Enter readerly delectation!’ chant the chorus.

Chapter 9: The fallen scholar

…I never knew him well. My cohorts spoke about him a lot. He was always held in high esteem. I considered it hyperbole. Our casual conversations never implied genius. We would exchange pleasantries on the odd occasion, that is it. He seemed to know much about the weather, but so did I. Then one day he comes up to me with a book. It was Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida. He insisted I read it, guaranteeing the enrichment of my mind. I said I would take a look. He ended by inviting me to a seminar he was organising. Yes, E. Honda was a Deconstructionist. I could not have guessed it. Appearances are deceptive. Who would see a philosophical mind in a man who hand slaps cars into scrap metal? His flying headbutt was using his head, but a head certifiably Derridean? After the shock subsided a new inspiration took hold…

…I had been teaching the dynamic of différance for three months. I thought I was doing well. A list of my career goals was pinned to the wall of my shared office. I would not forget them. My energies were focused, perhaps for the first time ever. Yet all was not to be. Complaints started to come in, mainly from angry parents. I had been illustrating the play of signifiers, the core of différance. I did this by throwing students at each another. Accusations of physical abuse grew in number and I was sacked. I thought it was a great way to show how signifiers jostle in a constant movement of deference. I do not understand the controversy. I threw the students with the lowest essay marks first…

Bone joints click as Blanka leans back in his seat. A fly pretending to be a wasp flies by. Lines of disenchanted workers roam across the backlit horizon. More coughing. Breathing only has further obstacles to surmount; it edges closer to the terminal spot. Some identifier will be there: the letter X, a skull, a picture of Guile winking, something to let us know. Blanka plays indifference but even he feels the hollow rush of mortality. A local tobacconist walks past, a copy of Minima Moralia protruding from his bag of groceries.

‘The else must have legs!’ chant the chorus.

Eyes glide over hasty records of a past lived quickly. Excursions into carpentry, yachting, rolling full stops for authors too famous to roll their own – the printed word slices easily through time. Notable understatement of the glories derived from Street Fighter, feelings of guilt at a fame bought cheaply. Hurried passages segue into elaborate exegeses on declined career paths. A sigh hovers over the mishmash of first book problems: lack of cohesion, unevenness, indelicate use of punctuation. But the yawns multiply with firm resolve, unable to be stifled by the calling of late authoring prowess. Blanka is buoyed by a desired success, but a success uncertain. He takes a tapering journey on words chipped away from the lived and the experienced, stolen from a monopoly of the past tense, crammed into paper repositories in the hope of beating Time’s advance. Another cough, this time wet and wholly penultimate. A page is turned, flipped by creaky fingers. There’s no more, only table steel. And the final sheet slides away finished.

‘The else has no legs...’ chant the chorus.

Tornado! (Starring Bruce Campbell)

2009-04-05T20:37:00.005+01:00

Given the usual incoherence of the morning I’m surprised I heard the banging. It was a sound from outside, it seemed, or maybe not, maybe inside. The origination was not immediately clear. An odd discombobulation of the ears reigned, a jolting rush of confusion threatening to capsize the day. Then a realisation, faint but not indiscernible: the sound, it’s coming from below, down the stairs, at the front door. Quizzically I slid down the stairs, the banging ever present. What wild ruckus is ensuing beyond the door? Should I risk showing my face? Am I to be met with death, is this the inevitable moment of my demise? Is my procrastinating walk only solidifying the nastiest facets of my execution?

Then the door is in front of me, hand reaching for the handle, pulling back to permit the light.

A man stands in the doorway, a flurry of sweat and dreadlocks. A large red satchel hangs off his shoulder, full of padded envelopes. The scorn etched on his face seems not likely to fade.

“Are you Mr Aaron?” he barks.

“I am.”

“You’re a hard man to get hold of!” he returns, one hand thrust into his bag.

A head devoid of words is a poor condition for the music of conversation, even the sweet warble of friendly badinage has trouble springing to life.

“I, uh, you’ve…what?”

“I’ve always the packages for you…you’re never in – man, packages for you,” he says lifting a grey box out of his bag.

“I’m here now, what is it?”

“A package – for you!” he yells without hesitation. “Take – and sign this.”

A box in one hand, delivery form in the other, a pen slid under the thumb, I playing the balancer as my signature struggles into motion. The courier’s angry glare causes my skin to freckle.

Squiggle down, I give back the form. His return to the road is instantaneous, his feet a speedy blur. A soundless insult tears through the air, his gaping mouth the only proof of something said. I stifle my cries and retreat into the fortress. The morning’s annihilation is truly complete, gone is the gentle caress of semi-sentience, gone is the clawing urge to yawn away the day. Day has begun, no ambiguities remain. And what’s more, day now has meaning, for a glistening DVD lies in the palm. The name of that DVD is Tornado! starring Bruce Campbell.

The promises are infinite, they occupy a bottomless of abyss of wisecracks and hilarious side glances. Potential, too, is well in abundance, stretching far into the horizon. Pre-packaged kudos, Tornado! finds itself cloaked in a great swarm of it. Imminent respect, love and lust are the promises of a Bruce Campbell film. His glorious name bestows on the most obviously dire pieces of cinema the chance of rebirth – cocoons of crud giving way to butterflies of watchability. He provides motivation where there might not be any, engendering reasons to view a film clearly made as a cheap cash-in on a more popular film.

Bruce Campbell is a beacon of truth. You’ll never carry pretence into one of his films, for he builds coruscating worlds that ostentation cannot assail. Most of his films are perfect examples of ‘it is what it is’ – we know the narrative and the characters, the setting and the outcome. No need to enrich matters with hyperbole or words of misdirection. Laid out naked is a story arc oblivious to experimentation, uninterested in striving for innovation. Bruce Campbell says: ‘you know what this is, I know what this is, but I’ll try and make it as fun as I can.’ He is the antidote to fame’s most nauseating proponents and affiliates, a man of honesty and decency. The proletarian actor par excellence.

Tornado! – also known in a different form as Twister – follows the actions of a hip young crew of meteorologists who live in the Texas area. Their hobbies include chasing tornadoes and barn dances. They dream of one day being able to accurately predict the appearance of tornadoes. Visions of saved lives and hot girls propel their scientific inquiries. Liquor deliria and trips to the zoo help them retain their sanity.

Bruce Campbell plays Bill Paxton, thrill-seeking leader of this band of maniacs. His chin feeds their lust for domination, tilting upwards when the reek of a tornado hangs in the air. He gives legitimation to their cause through his rugged features and array of checked shirts. Ernie Hudson smiles wistfully at Bruce, unsettled by the throbbing desire he holds for the man, a desire undiminished by years of meteorological comradeship.

A girl arrives, foretelling another Bruce-related coupling. Shannon Sturges, eyes attractive enough to ensnare Bruce, points forward in time to Chase Masterson, Bruce’s female partner in Terminal Invasion. They are linked across space, time and who knows what else by a common generational beauty and the kind of denim energy that usually dies a death in the graveyard of TV drama.

A tornado arrives, Derek I think it’s called. It roams across the plain, skirting about the place in an over-hyped dance of destruction. Roofs become airborne, livestock disappear, a housewife falls over. Normality sits crouched and crying. Cut to break.

Back from break: fire crews trudge through fallen walls, an engine roars an ambience unsettling but appropriate. Bruce Campbell/Bill Paxton shows up, open-top jeep, or not, and casts sympathy over the luckless locals. ‘I will get that fucking tornado, so I will,’ he declares.

Into the night he runs, jeep and cronies in tow. Helen Hunt or someone answers questions by the side of the road, a ghastly interruption. The tornado is sighted. It swirls menacingly. Bruce runs, the foulest revenge on his mind. A jeep follows slowly behind. The tornado veers to the left and sees him. Now it moves towards him, he towards it. An epic showdown is materialising, reality splintering to accommodate the inevitable disappointment. Clouds gather, Bruce is in the eye, the tornado sways to and fro. Drama plays out in a toneless picture of wind and rain. Combat continues into minutes, time getting more and more bloated. Hospitalisation can be the only result. Bruce takes his dagger and slices the tornado in two. The swirling menace decelerates into nothing. Bruce stands victorious, love is his prize. Ernie Hudson, Helen Hunt and Chase Masterson run to hug him, all united in a sentimental expression of man’s mastery over the weather.

Unsent Letters to Gary Busey: Letter 2 - Information Overabundance, the Agony of Thought & Ghost Rock

2009-03-29T17:00:00.007+01:00

Dear Gary Busey,

I refuse to have any more thoughts. That’s it, I’m done with them. Niggling though they are – and it’s incessant, the thoughts always puncture the most innocent of my pleasures, from a stroll to the shop, to air drumming to Slayer – yet I can’t avoid the necessary and the desirable, for they must be cut adrift from my mind. It’s the only solution I can see. It’s a problem to be destroyed. Thoughts are open sores on the warped flesh of a day’s traversal. Dispel the distractions, melt down the mental pathways through which they move. Block the rising reflux of ideas and opinions, conclusions and propositions. Label them leprous, sully their existence, and charge them with crimes against importance.

I know your view, Gary Busey. You’ve lived an era free from thoughts. You exorcised the tyranny in one swift movement, and it was the cleanest defecation known to man. Scullion told me about it one day. Any mistakes or omissions are his fault.

You, Gary Busey, had spent many years chained to your thoughts. They’d come to you from afar, wave upon wave of speculation. Daylight sentience grew them in abundance. Twilight yawns tore rifts in reality, opening doors to the walk of ruminating madness. Senselessness observed night’s fecund flow – what made no sense had night bestow upon it a meaning in the propagation of thoughts.

Did you have a bad time of it? No doubt. A terrible plague had befallen you, Gary Busey. You were a captive of your own thoughts. You polluted conversations with your declarations and assertions. You even had the effrontery to translate your thoughts into writing. It was a dark time. Sheer reminiscence is almost enough to force tears upon me. But I will be strong, Gary Busey, I know that’s what you’d want. I also know the past is a shadow to you, a spectral quasi-presence that you really couldn’t give a fuck about. But humour me.

Languishing in the armpit of despair, hostage to the baggage of thought, you needed a cure, or some means of escape. Then it happened, an intervention organised by Keanu Reeves on the set of Point Break. In a show of support, the cast assembled on set, urging you to confront your problems and relinquish your addiction to thinking. Being a former addict himself, Reeves was the perfect man to give advice on how to suppress the need to think. His inspirational example of a life lived thoughtless proved overwhelming to you, Gary Busey. You broke down, the tears ran in heavy jets, the screams rendered all inaudible. Then courage hit. Dismantling all the craven ways of yore, you stood up, wiped the snot from your face, and started to shake your head. The shaking got more and more intense as shouts of support came from Reeves. As the shaking intensified, you started smacking the side of your head with your palm. The banging and self-violence continued a minute longer, then you fell to the ground in a spasm of dust and sticky head-goo. Reeves ran forward, lifting you up, consciousness slowly returning to your being. You looked around. Onlookers stared on, curious to know if the cure had worked. Then you said it: nothing. And the place erupted in raptures, your silence bringing tears to many. Reeves shook your hand and strode off into the horizon. You glared at him, you glared at the audience, you glared at the sky – all were one and the same to you. The treatment was a success, you were no longer shackled to the monster of thought.

It’s quite a tale, Gary Busey. I hope I was able to capture the magic of it. I dare say not even biblical prose could reach the levels of hyperbole needed to convey the importance of that moment.

Alas, until Keanu Reeves decides I’m fit to be saved from my thoughts, I will have to continue to live bearing the curse. I may refuse those thoughts, ignore their pleading, shun their heckles, damn the revelations to irrecollection, but plough forward they will. I have no defence. My fractured genes leave predisposed a personality unprotected against the injunction to think. To consider and to write are the promises of the information surplus. The vast infoscapes are multicoloured encouragements to create and contribute. Add to the mass, use what is deemed usable, delve into the relevant and reject the rest.

Evolution put us in a place where we take in all the information we can. Look about you, hear the audible, smell the odorous, touch all you can. Identify the threats, signal the eatable, take the useful. Hold in the mind’s eye a portion of earth freed from mystery. Enough for the senses to work, to exercise their genetic endowment. Information to be compiled on a limited scale, use of a limited lexicon, dissection of limited resources.

Now that portion of earth has changed beyond all recognition. Rather than gawk at a few stones, we see an endless stream of information in perpetual motion. Always being modified, always added to – magnifying in direct correlation to our own sense of insignificance. Gaze upon the history of everything, peruse the geographies of the micro and the macro; do it all, for now is the only present on offer.

The reactionary response is to criticise. It recommends ignorance and stupidity, obliviousness to the benefits of technological progress. The comprehension is nonexistent, the chance for technology to empower and free is disregarded. The right circumstances, the right uses, are both foreign concepts. Nothing’s neutral, but potential shines through the murk of cowardice and disinformation.

Sure our brains buckle at the thought of the internet’s gift to us – or rather, our gift to us, the gift we give each other, the gift we construct on a daily basis. The brain’s shortcomings are laid out naked in the heat of the internet’s infinite deluge. I know you, Gary Busey, you harbour few woes along these lines. But for the head set to maximum consumption it’s a difficult condition in which to live. Compulsion comes already preprogrammed into late capitalism’s push to buy and be the best consumer possible. The problem sees us lodged in the web of market logic, hearing only the bang bang of buy buy.

They’re dull considerations to you, Gary Busey, I know that. You’ve got no answers to offer me. I don’t write you in the hope of attaining answers. On the foregoing issues, I can discern all you’ve got to offer me from your performance in Ghost Rock.

Truly no better example can be found of just getting on with it. Your turn as Jack Pickett solidifies the absence of caring, it stands for action and not thought. Where’s reflection in the act of doing if not dead and buried in the past. There are no wasteful minutes spent asking the same tired questions, praying for something better, clawing for guidance from a spot in the sun that’ll blind you if you look too hard. Conventional hesitation has no place in Jack Pickett, he’s the product of an instant Yes.

Men built of stone weather in the wind; Gary Busey is the wind.

The internet is all writers, no readers. Or so it seems. We’ll go with it, Gary Busey, because a little exaggeration goes a long way. All writers, no readers. Whereas Ghost Rock’s all film, no viewers. It has all the facets of a film production: actors, a narrative, horses, Jeff Fahey. But no one to consume it. Ghost Rock is the internet written in film language. It’s a theatrical representation of the blog surplus, a dusty emblem of a guilt that scratches the soul every day.

How can one feel anything but guilt in adding to the information flood, Gary Busey? To exasperate the situation and give truth to the idea of ‘too much’ is surely a shameful pursuit that deserves outright prohibition. Adding to the already said and the already written, isn’t that the definition of a futile act?

Some fools insist that there’s nothing left to say, that it’s all already done, in turn ignoring millennia of creative struggle fought by writers and artists. The fools assume an ease that was never there. As if Dickens scribbled a list of titles at the beginning of his career and just wrote them out slowly over time.

Then again, Gary Busey, did Milton have to check his email whilst writing Paradise Lost? Was Ibsen nipping onto Facebook to update his status every time he wrote a scene? Would Bertrand Russell have written 3,000 words a day if he had Youtube as a distraction?

There are no excuses, Gary Busey. The world offers as much as it takes away. For every impediment comes a new avenue. Vaults of creative inspiration, whose paths are unobstructed, or becoming so, flash into view on a continual basis. The ongoing project of the world is the birth and death of ideas. Well, that’s the case for us poor tragedians anyway, Gary Busey, those of us tied irrevocably to our thoughts. I know Ghost Rock points in the direction of ‘shut the fuck up and just do it’. I know the example you set, Gary Busey, is aghast at my seeming acquiescence. But we can’t all be Ghost Rock, however enthusiastically we pray for it. Thinking will persist. As will the guilt at adding more and more sand to the desert. All we can hope for is that that sand is worth frolicking about in; after all, no one likes shite sand.

Sorry about the words, Gary Busey. I hope Betsy and Ethel are well. I hear that preproduction on your Broadway show is going well. The cast sounds highly talented, you’re lucky to be working with such fine actors. I have no doubt that Diabetes the Musical will be a great success.

Oodles of love and affection,

Aaron

Unsent Letters to Gary Busey: Letter 1 - Sprawling Apologies & Silver Bullet

2009-03-26T18:04:00.012Z

Dear Gary Busey,

Words are not your forte, I know that. The merest fart of a word is outright prolixity to you. Sentences are vulgar extravagance, needless and distracting. I know your pain about the words; your agony has no place to hide. Conceiving expression as a set of inky shapes and phonetic blips, limiting communication to signifiers and signifieds, imprisoning infinity’s charm within walls of grammatical rules, tyrannies propelled through time from a past non-existent to the present – all that reeks of the clearest declaration of shite ever inscribed upon the world.

I know that, Gary Busey, don’t think I’ve forgotten; your advice resists death like nothing else. And I know your time is precious, not one second is unimportant, not one minute can be abandoned to wastefulness. Your life is time lived radiant, encrusted with forms of expressivity that make language appear crude and antiquated. For some this is unfathomable: they question a man’s recourse to frenetic bodily dance as a way of imparting information, and they assume puzzled expressions when an inferno of blonde hair conveys complex data concerning the ontological integrity of biscuits.

That’s not me. I harbour no misconceptions about you, Gary Busey. Disdain for words and desire for their extermination – to be sure, hefty missions that go unenvied – they constitute a remit fit only for a Busey. Let no one say Gary Busey was a man who needed ambition.

Recognition, that’s my point: I recognise your position. Your podium’s faint to me, I can barely see your feet, but I see enough to know all, enough for my senses to be thrilled into recognition.

Surely it’s predictable, but I ask you to wait. Fight the basest temptation to cast this missive from your hands. Don’t discard the fiend just yet. You may recoil in horror, you might be recoiling in horror right now, the words suffocating every blowhole you own. Naturally I leave myself exposed to severe retribution, but I ask that you not enact revenge upon my person. Or if you have to, at least warn me first, leave some of your teeth scattered round the kitchen floor, or something.

Your truths are inescapable, Gary Busey. I know I run the risk of a maniacal Hollywood outcast arriving on my doorstep brandishing a machete. I run that risk every day of my life. But if that’s fate’s plan, then so be it, for I must discuss Silver Bullet with you.

It itches night and day, it’s a disease of a fortnight’s lack of sleep. It scars deep, but the urges drive me forward, compelling this circumlocutory discourse. The urges are a source of propulsion for the tired and the graceless.

Self-evident truths are clearly a leitmotif of this letter, Gary Busey, sir. Anticipation of your reading organises all its content, shaping like clay all the words so abhorrent to you. Each remark I begin to type is accompanied by its apprehension by you. Each remark is modified into a truism before the sentence has finished. Only cliché and empty verbosity remain. Yawning gaps between the vital and the superfluous open up. By cruel convention the former are always the aspects to be sacrificed first, with turgid spills of banality left behind to consume.

Let no insults bloody your person, Gary Busey. No condescension is intended. Every utterance comes soaked in self-consciousness. You may not think so, you may see only contrivance. But I assure you it is true. And if you still balk at belief, play the game nonetheless: slide into the role of recipient, of confidant, of the man gestured at by the words Gary Busey. Dive into the performance, block the calls of the real, seek only validity as defined by the present arrangement of words (which you hate).

Allow me to say it: Gary Busey films are impossible to discuss in a manner cogent and elegant. Sure, there is always the necessity of translation, regardless of what the film is. Narrative form and the flow of images demand conversion into wieldy units, which can subsequently be used to celebrate or dismantle said objects. Film criticism is a translation of film spectatorship, it gives form to the formless act of watching a film.

However frequently the routine is performed, your films, Gary Busey, represent considerable problems in accomplishing this translation. Other than direct translation carried out by your fine self, I see no guaranteed routes to success. Like Samuel Beckett translating his French prose into English, or Vladimir Nabokov translating his Russian novels into English, only you, Gary Busey, can fit the essence of your films into a different idiom. Although it must be said, you would do so without resorting to the primitive ebb and flow of language.

Failure is the inevitable outcome, but I persist nevertheless in writing a word or two about Silver Bullet.

The bounds of realism were never made for Gary Busey. Speaking your name – both silently, encased within the mind, and aloud – leads one to consider the phantasmagorical to be the most appropriate sphere for you. Madcap imaginative horror and wacky science-fiction are genres born to be sutured to the name of Gary Busey. Silver Bullet’s showcase of werewolf shenanigans is perfect fodder for you.

That’s remark number one. Perhaps I should have numbered these. Alas, there is zero scope for editing in this everlasting present of ours. March on…

An acquaintance once told me that before the days of Coreys Feldman and Haim, a another delirious era of twosome excellence existed. Never would I have guessed that this miraculous coupling would have been comprised of Corey Haim and Gary Busey. Yet this is a fact as derived from Silver Bullet’s wealth of curiosities.

I’m slightly hurt that you never once mentioned being a component of this duo to me, Gary Busey. Had I known, I would have been more hesitant in dismissing Silver Bullet as just another awful Stephen King adaptation. You never know, I might have watched the fucker sooner, rather than torment it with twenty-three year’s worth of wait.

Yes, nephew Corey to uncle Busey. Wheelchairs with rockets attached, grotty nights lain across the poker wastelands, unfunny jokes cloaked in expectorate, and of course a ravenous werewolf to unmask and defeat. Buddy protagonists rarely attain such heights, for Busey-Corey combine to create an almighty opus.

Sadly – and I must voice criticism here, Gary Busey, there’s no avoiding it – the opus is surrounded by a constant rain of weakness and indecision. One minute we get an unnerving Fulci-esque sequence of stilled faces and sub-Goblins rumble, then we have a polyester wolfman playing the pantomime villain, then finally some sentimental Stand By Me coming-of-age nonsense. Brilliant if the objective is a patchy mosaic of entrails and wistful childhood memories; rather shite otherwise.

But dear Gary Busey, yes, I hear your reply, I hear your garbled screams. You are too correct, Silver Bullet’s deficiencies are not of your doing. Blame resides elsewhere. I wouldn’t dare tarnish your reputation with words of attack aimed to undermine a young (fictional) boy’s struggle to live with a disability and fight a werewolf. Nothing could be farther from my intention.

I come to the end of my words. I hope the projects you were telling me about last time have proceeded well. A slew of remakes, wasn’t it? Enhancing dire narratives produced without your presence, that’s correct, isn’t it? The Bigger Heat, was it? Older Boy? Well whatever they were, may success find you well. Do give my best to Betsy and Ethel. Sorry about the words and whatnot.

Oodles of love and affection,

Aaron

Crisis on Bearded Fahey

2009-03-21T16:28:00.006Z

A sanctuary no longer, an inner pit assailed by change, become a sanctum diminished beyond fix, a porcelain paradise loose of its promise, born anew in the miasmic after-burn. Death wills and toxic stench are the only remaining truths left, now found set inside its charred walls. Bathroom lies be damned, henceforth they stand enchained to the maligned gestures of flippancy and misdirection. Cold sterility is the lifeblood, the very pulse of walls and floor alike, surfaces blotted in black clarity.

The light is off, the room dead in darkness. An arm punctures the stillness, clutching myopically for a touch, a feeling, fumbling in hope of a meeting – mighty bestower of light be here now. A recognisable click later and a persona is imposed upon the arm.

Eyes lacking the ability to identify the arm of a Fahey have yet to be born, for here clear to all is the wondrous limb foretold by scripture: the thousand-jointed limb of a Fahey, segmented tribute to flexibility and boundless treasury of party tricks.

- Hearsay that Fahey’s uncle once begot a spider for a son remain to this day unconfirmed. Suffice it to say, Fahey’s insectual ancestors swim forever in the channels of his gene pool.

With the bathroom now lit, the door is thrust open and in strides Fahey. Shirtless and hairy, blue to the balls, Fahey steps toward the sink. The mirror above returns his gaze. Beautifying utensils lie disarranged on a small shelf. A filthy towel long untouched hangs on a hook. Unoriginal bathroom details drift aimlessly, scattered across a sky of white tiles and spilt mouthwash.

Fahey’s eyes remain steadfastly locked on the sink. A razor, not too blunted, not too smeared by prior use, attracts his attention. An arm is raised, making a motion to lift the object. Fahey’s eyes flick to the left, toward the bathtub, then back to the razor. Shaking fingers lift the razor as the faint sound of pen on paper becomes audible. Fahey clears his throat, eyes flick left, eyes flick forward. The sink begins to fill with warm water.

Discomfort drains Fahey’s face of colour as he tries to angle himself in a way that he stands back facing the bathtub. A foreign cough interrupts the aural hegemony of the flowing water. Fahey takes water in his hand and splashes it upon his face. Then he starts to lather shaving foam over every bushy inch of his beard. Sound of bubbles to the rear, a splash this time born not of the sink. Fahey shakes his head, ears closing to distraction. Now the razor is in hand, coming nearer and nearer the face of Fahey.

…I don’t know when it was. Too long to say, too long for certainty. Sure it was shocking, no one’s going to expect that, I know I didn’t. You just go about your daily business, that’s all, it’s not my place to wonder the intricacies of it. I noticed, yes, but after how long? No way to know. Was I oblivious? Probably. Was he there long before I noticed? It’s possible. Truth’ll never be known, not unless he decides to confess all, which I doubt’ll happen. This is how it started: one day I wandered into the bathroom, I was in dire need of a piss. So there I go, relieving myself, when I turn my head and see him, a man, sitting in my bathtub. Like I say, there was a shock to it. He said nothing, so I say Who the fuck are you? Why the fuck are you in my bathtub? No reply. Then I notice he has a notebook on his lap and a pen in his hand. He’s scribbling the whole time, as I piss, as I look at him, as I speak to him, the pen never ceases. I step over to him, I’m starting to get annoyed now. I look down at him. He’s hairless and wears casual non-descript clothes. I repeat my questions. Still no sound bar the echo of the pen. What can you do? Soon I was exhausted. I could no longer be bothered to repeat my questions. Clearly he wasn’t going to speak. So I left him. He’s been there ever since…

Steam rises, rendering abstract Fahey’s image in the mirror. A fly darts past causing Fahey to twitch suddenly. He lunges for it, anger boiling. Then: palliation by way of reflection, Fahey considers the absurdity of his situation. Normalcy, or the memory thereof, can be sought free from the ties of difficulty, for its shadow traces a line on the horizon. Normalcy’s dance pollutes the surface of Fahey’s distress, its virus set to reinfect a world divested of its inscription. What remains is Fahey’s incumbency, that irksome pressure to action, to transform, to resurrect pastures of the past. Or not, perhaps, subject as it is to individual whim.

Fahey turns to the bathtub. One note sounds in the air: a scratching, the scratching, the minatory wail ill-fitting Fahey’s very being. Daggers – each and every pen-stroke is a weapon. Cessation of the subtle attack is mere fiction, additional dagger-thrusts act to further damage the integrity of Fahey. Temporal lacerations causing Fahey to bleed time. Spatial lacerations causing Fahey to bleed objects born of his porcelain madness. Ever try and bleed a shower curtain? Unpleasant is one word to describe it. But Fahey’s threshold for pain knows no limits, either that or he jettisoned his limits long ago, perhaps in that film where he fights a dinosaur.

Fahey stands over the bathtub.

“You fucker!” yells Fahey.

Not a hint of deceleration befalls the pen. The man’s head rhythmically stirs, his gaze alternating between Fahey and the page. Whatever diabolical record is being composed continues towards its completion.

“It’s been fucking weeks, months even, since I’ve had a shave! Look at me for Christ’s sake!”

The metronomic tilt of the man’s head catches Fahey’s grimaced face, before descending once again to the page.

“I just want to have a shave in peace. I don’t care if you’re here, just stop writing. Come on. Give me five minutes, OK?”

No let up.

“Three minutes. I’ll be quick. I don’t care if I rip half my face off, I’ll rush it if I have to, but I need to have a shave. Give me that won’t you?”

Scribbling continues.

“You writerly sonofabitch.”

Fahey takes a step back.

“Those notes of yours better be the most profoundest fucking thing ever written…”

Exasperated, Fahey wipes the foam from his chin and storms out of the bathroom, knocking off the light on the way.

…I don’t know why I didn’t do anything to get rid of him. He seemed to have as much a right to be there as anyone, despite it being displeasing to me. After a while I learned to avoid the blasted room. My habits evolved to accommodate the man. Occasionally, when I could no longer hold my urine, I’d have to enter the room and piss. Each time he’d be there, sitting in the same position, writing with the same pen in the same notebook. I have no idea what he is writing. One day I stooped to see but it was indecipherable. Clearly words and sentences, arrayed accordingly, but it was impossible to read. Perhaps it was written so quickly, or written at odd angles in the bathtub, I don’t know. I don’t even know if the man could read the stuff, that is, were he inclined to do so. It could be endless pages of mad rantings for all I know. Or a biography of me written from the perspective of my bathroom. I doubt he’ll ever break his silence. I might need to move someplace else. Then again, maybe we can learn to live together, and maybe eventually I can shave free of his distraction…

The Misattribution of Jean Claude Van Damme

2009-03-15T17:22:00.005Z

A question and an answer, that’s how it started. An exchange lit by the crisp tingle of a monetary reward. The chime of the ringing phone, the disgruntled vibration of plastic on wood. A man’s death chamber bathroom frolics and the erasure of personal foibles.

Jean Claude Van Damme stands at a mirror, razor in one hand, phone in the other.

“A book signing?” he mumbles quizzically.

A garbled affirmation echoes from the speaker.

“Did I write a book? Was it those aphorisms from a few years back – is that a book?”

Distorted faint whisperings give the answer.

A further moment elapses before Van Damme resumes his enquiry. But at the first syllable cut loose from the chains of silence, the hum of Van Damme’s telephonic interlocutor recommences. Van Damme wears an attentive face. A drop of shaving foam slides from it. The razor drops into the sink. Now a let up in the other’s rhetoric, now a chance for Van Damme for speak.

“But I didn’t write Crime and Punishment.”

---

On a sea of stained carpet sits the eager and the idle. A Sunday afternoon, sun blasting outside, the smell of typeface portraiture and paper tyrannies. Unfolded plastic chairs are arranged in rows as a banner is unfurled in their gaze. Indifferent shoppers pass by, ignoring one corner of activity as a man is brought out to the song of restrained applause.

Van Damme sits at a wooden bench, his visage under the careful scrutiny of the dozen or so people before him. Some stand, some remain seated. Some hold tattered paperbacks, some fold their arms, expectation their only possession.

“Welcome and thank you for coming to this event…” begins the spotty bookstore clerk.

A man walks past, singing a song about an octopus. Books fall from the hands of a toddler as he sights an escalator to play with. Two men carry a smoke-machine, one stands on gum. An announcement explodes on the intercom: code nine at till five. A girl stares unimpressed eyes at a feeble classics section.

These are distractions of which Van Damme aims to free himself. His mind is swimming in anxiety. Regret that he took the buck, and at what cost? His public image? Already it features great discoloration. Do they know what he knows? Do they know what he doesn’t know? Are they aware in the same way he is aware? Van Damme’s mind ceases for not one second. Am I the only one who sees the ridiculousness of this situation? he thinks.

“Please give a round of applause to our special guest, the author of Crime and Punishment, Mr Jean Claude Van Damme.”

One distraction morphs into another as claps puncture the sonic abyss. White appears on black as the chequered senses of Van Damme get lifted, rising up in unison with his legs. Now standing before the baying bookstore minions, heat like a fireball raining upon the fuselage of Van Damme’s body.

“Thank you for having me. It’s a great honour…”

Platitudes subside as Van Damme searches his memory for words pre-prepared. The precipice of the void of nothing feels his approach, warming its belly with each and every word not retrieved. Stumbling formality gives way to the stuttered birth pangs of a modest auto-critique.

“When I started writing this book, I never…I mean, it’s scope was unknown to me, at the time, that is…I’m as surprised as anyone that I wrote this book.”

The exegesis continues as sub-school study notes pinned upon Van Damme’s cranium are read aloud. Raskolnikov’s moral distress, Sonia’s tragic piety, the place of Russian mores, St Petersburg as a kind of nightmare milieu. Ranging somewhere between the embittered and the cynical, Van Damme’s faux-English teacher oration progresses bereft of the silence that originally threatened it. Words flow unhindered by memory lapse or the pains of conscience. Words course through a rapid commentary on the novel of ideas. Names get dropped, dangling haphazardly from the lips of the speaker. Tiny spectral dots of Gogol; atomistically revolving spirals of Pushkin. Feigned conviction working to convince the unconvinced. Eyes open and close – an audience awake to the ululating spoken prose of Van Damme.

His time is up. He thanks his beholders. The reek of questions fomenting fills the room. Nose atwitch, Van Damme sneezes.

The map of his destruction has another section made visible. Questions erupt like volcanoes of literary puzzlement brimming on egos the size of Wales.

An easy beginning:

“Dear Mr Van Damme,” begins one.

“Monsieur JC,” begins another.

A tougher middle section:

“How is interpretative integrity certifiable,” a sweaty forest-dweller begins.

Life in ballets dressed up as action movies has made Van Damme tough. No one dares dispute that. But perhaps one ninja knuckle brawl too many has made Van Damme too tough. His answers come in showers of invective and deadly menacing word-fists. Jolting rejoinders delve into murky intellectual depths not even Van Damme could have envisioned. Tearing into one accusation at a time, he extends his critical eye over an entire kingdom of fallacy and error, pupils like sunspots burning through each falsehood.

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” he answers.

This is efficacy as bled from the stone of Van Damme.

The bookstore clerk rushes in to end the session. Premature but necessary.

“I’m afraid we’re out of time…”

At this, Van Damme’s whirlwind of comeuppance starts to slow. The shifting limbs of kinetic literary prowess return to Van Damme, decelerating as they assume former shapes and colours. Now a possessed dictator of authorial malice, now a gaunt frame stepping across a soiled carpet. The present is ointment for the sting of Van Damme’s singular confluence of energies.

Smoke clears, noise fades, pages float slowly from the ceiling. The feeling of cataclysm hangs in the air. Mental impressions that are cryptic at best hold sway in the pointillist wash of audience heads. Bound to failure, their deficiencies sentence them to a lifetime of wondering, of questioning, of dead night reflection and memorial damnation. Van Damme’s seed is capturable by the human eye, but grasp it you won’t, for its fortifications are impenetrable to all but he.

---

Out walks Van Damme. The street traffic a monotone din. Smog floats still on his face as he reaches for his pocket. A phone is produced, the display lit up. He lifts it to his ear.

“Van Damme,” he says, moving to the edge of the pavement.

The familiar drone at the other end again echoes.

“Yeah, it went well. I’ve just finished,” says Van Damme, an answer to an apparent question.

Once again the drone is heard.

Confusion enters Van Damme’s face, ears ceaselessly receiving.

“Another one?” he asks.

The drone warbles on. Van Damme scratches his head for a moment. A second passes. Now he replies.

“But I didn’t write Ulysses.”

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (and a tale: Twilight of the Care Bear)

2009-03-11T07:57:00.006Z

It took place one night last week: an ordeal, a trauma, a hurtful jab in the guts of slumber. Mere recollection sears the memory paths, for this was the sort of nocturnal nasty destined to be forever remembered. Maybe it was the urchins playing foolish games in the black of midnight, or maybe I ate too much cheese, I can’t say. What I can say, however, is that this was wholly unanticipated; not one inkling had I that such an event was to disrupt my sleep that eve.

So there I was, chasing sheep up and down Elysian fields, smirking at the planets, giving sagacious advice to Plato, when suddenly the façade was torn down and replaced with the foulest of sentience. The unlit abyss of my room faced me, the dark offering nothing but a faint rustling in the distance. Quickly the distance shortened, the rustling seemingly now beside me. Then I sensed movement, a jolting presence, not out there but in here, under the very sheets under which I lay. It was then I threw back the bedding, revealing none other than a Care Bear.

There it was, stooped on all fours, pink fur ruffled by the sheets, plastic nose poking about the mattress, glass eyes adjusting to the light from the lamp I had just turned on. It looked at me, I looked at it. Was that murder in its eyes? Did I detect the glint of lust? Perhaps it was on its way to the Forest of Feelings and got lost halfway? Should I hug it or bash its brains out with my alarm clock?

It shuffled towards me and I shouted at it.

“You Care Bear bastard!”

It was instinct, reflex, a product of being born in the 80s. I won’t allow risk to enter the equation, I can’t, positions of power must be established immediately. That Care Bear stared its dead eyes at me, unfocused brown still and mysterious. The scene was one of tension, an escalating dread and possible regret that I had somehow offended the beast.

Truth is, far from mauling me dead then eating my skin, the Care Bear only wanted to know if I was interested in switching to British Gas. I was stunned. A salesman, by god, this furry dream creature was. Before I knew it, a plethora of leaflets were arranged on the mattress. It was then I kicked it to the floor. The pleading sales pitch came like white noise to my ears as I grappled with the light switch. Eventually the Care Bear lost interest, packed up its paraphernalia and used the window as an exit, and I was left to finish my sleep uninterrupted by the dulcet dollar drone of Care Bears Inc.

Such a tale carries little of the blood and hunger that marks Death Bed. In fact, it’s fairly needless to start a review with such prolixity and sub-juvenilia narrative nonsense, particularly a review of a film like Death Bed, one that quite clearly requires no prologue. But moods must be set, words must be used, regardless of vulgar excess. Further: the title is not the only element lacking in ambiguity. Were one still in possession of questions, the subtitle carries enough force to dispel any and all queries – Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.

Central to the film is a bed, a grand four-poster number that sits in the cellar of an old house. A wash of black begins the film, during which time we hear a crunching sound, a carnivorous chomping that brings to mind a wild animal. Well, kids, surprise surprise, that sound is emanating from the bed – it’s lunchtime and its having a feast.

A curse cast long ago means that the bed is alive. Despite having the appearance of inanimation, the bed lusts after meat, after a person or persons to digest in its tank-like stomach. Luckily, even though it resides in a rural manor, the odd flaneur does come by to test its comforts. When this happens, a bubbling starts on the surface of the bed allowing the hapless victim to descend into its interior, a watery yellow soup given the close-up treatment whenever feeding commences.

Strange?

Certainly is. A monkey’s paw is one thing; we’ve seen that before. Familiarity kills fear, kills astonishment, curdles the creative juices. Look, it’s hairy, there are talons, it’s a certifiable threat! But listen, and retain your calm: any object is open to an injection of evil; whether it’s a video tape, a lift, a packet of bacon rashers, demoniacal gusto can be found living in anything. Perhaps it’s the guilt over our commodity fetishism that leads to us imbuing our objects with the potential to physically and mentally harm us (as if they don’t already do so!). Of course evil only has meaning in the context of the human; consequently, what we see is that with every increase in evil comes a corresponding anthropomorphization as the heinous object becomes a holder of human spirit and bodily presence. Observe the bed’s soft moans as a nubile undresses near it, or the tantrums it throws when bereft of food to dine upon, leading to the manor walls cracking and ceilings creaking.

Death Bed’s narrative consists of a young couple coming to use the bed for salacious purposes, the bed deciding pre-marital sex is not on the cards, the bed eating them, some digressionary scenes detailing the bed’s background, before finally three young ladies happen on the manor. Thus begins the main body of the story.

An unsettling voice-over gives the film documentary credence as a male tongue describes the actions of the bed, beseeching it to desist, to turn veggie and repent its homicidal ways. Less Fog of War, more Mondo Cane, the document is stirring. The voice-over has an odd efficacy in that its moral entreaties and observer position aligns it closely with the spectator, who has no one with which to relate. The narrator, a former victim of the bed who’s now imprisoned in a bizarre limbo behind a painting in the cellar room, is our only real figure of interest. Other characters are stock types, fodder for the screen cruelty, far from the glow of our sympathies. The artiste behind the painting, on the other hand, is a man of slightly more substance. He is essentially the sole user of language throughout the film (a few garbled screams is hardly a monologue) and is kind enough to gift us information as to the genesis of the bed.

His admonishments and whimsical questioning must compete with the influx of buxom ladies in the middle of the film. An eerie and eccentric atmosphere gives way to a Russ Meyer-esque showcase. Burlesque banality erupts as breasts are disrobed and intimate linens are wafted about. Struggles against the bed’s yearning stomach are conducted in wailed sex moans. The bed devours one girl, the other two look for her, then the bed devours one of the them, leaving only one remaining. With the mire of sleaze still present, the brother of one of the girls arrives. I thought for sure this would be the beginning of a fight back, the time for macho ass-kicking. But alas I was wrong. Big brother gets his hands stuck in the bed, it strips them of all their skin and muscle, and he spends the rest of the film sitting about looking at what remains of his hands, now simply bone, and whining about his own ineptitude. Fool.

Death Bed proves an enjoyable excursion into the odd spectrum of 70s comedy-horror cinema. George Barry’s film entered the cult cannon a few years ago, unsurprisingly, for it’s clearly made to be held in such esteem. I just hope we get that sequel, Death Bed 2: Death Bed Takes Manhattan, before too long. I can already visualise a manic Keanu Reeves engaged in a spectacular slow-motion fight with the bed, during which time a jet carrying a nuclear warhead gets nearer and nearer the city. It’ll be 2011’s most exciting blockbuster!

Surviving the Game

2009-02-28T19:03:00.008Z

The preceding moments were filled with trepidation. The DVD, held solidly in the hand, its contents a fog of ambiguity, returned the gaze I cast upon it. ‘What,’ I asked, ‘is this beast I’m about to watch?’ All this talk of survival, talk of games, words of promised action and forthcoming exhilaration, provided little in the way of answers. The central question, turning my senses wild with speculation, was the following: what game?

Monopoly rarely gives a man cause to fear death. Are we to expect some formula-tweak along the lines of Killer Monopoly? Is that what this is? Persons sit down to play the old property game only to find their rent being paid in blood? In the fashion of the finest Asian spook-fests, the curse of the Killer Monopoly, I presume, would circulate the area, an inner-city suburb, dealing death to a group of teenagers before falling into the hands of a young couple moving into their first home. What better way to break in a new abode than an exciting bout of Monopoly! But oh no, fun and games are not to be. A hotel on that square?! No, don’t do it, you don’t know what evil lurks beneath that red block! Don’t pick up that Community Chest; your husband’s already gone into anaphylactic shock, that’ll finish him!

Such were my expectations. These were the only answers I could summon forth from the bowels of the unknown. But to my great surprise, and also a painful blow to my skills of prediction, it turned out to be untrue. No menacing minutes spent glued to a board game, no city-sized strolls into Mouse Trap, no Scrabble modified to be playable with human organs. The game spoken by this DVD is a wholly different game.

Commiserate not, wise reader, for the games on display are of a quality equal to any flights of the imagination. I dare say not even the playful prose of Nabokov could concoct such an intriguing burst of ludic spirits. Surviving the Game is its own world of play – a sphere of gleeful competition peppered by faces both respected and adored.

All the board games have been retired, yet the logic remains. The screams of chess pieces taken with brutal rapidity echo in the background.

The words of the title imply a subject: who is doing this surviving? Surely the act of surviving cannot be bereft of a survivor, someone to enact the motions necessary to survive? With impeccable logic we discover cloaked in the drapery of survival a man called Ice T, or as his friends call him, Ice Motherfucking T. (No doubt Jacques Derrida devoted huge swathes of unpublished writing to Ice Motherfucking T, him and the metaphysical violence augured by he who is coerced into surviving, to survive, to be a survivor.)

Ice T is a hobo living down and out in the city. Downtrodden in the extreme, he can do nothing to prevent his dog being run over, his best friend dying in his sleep, or the memories of his dead wife and daughter returning to haunt him. One day, Rutger Hauer offers him a job. Ice T’s to lend his assistance to one of Hauer’s hunting trips, to act as a kind of rugged huntsman, someone to do the mundane chores Hauer and his buddies have no time for. So off he goes, flown by Rutger Airlines into the wilderness. Little does he know, they’re not about to hunt rabbits or deer – they’re about to hunt him.

Naturally this is where the film gets interesting. The slow beginning of Ice T’s introduction – the endless bereavements, the establishment of his a-man-with-nothing-to-lose character – fades out as quickly as the twangy guitars that underscore the scene where he’s in the bath. Soon the real meat is on show – the action unequivocally commences.

The bulk of the film is the following: Ice T gets chased through a forest by Rutger Hauer, F Murray Abraham, John C McGinley and Gary Busey.

Sounds like gold? That’s because it is!

Some genius actually thought of this scenario. What majesty of human creativity!

‘Get this, boys,’ the studio exec says. ‘A bunch of awesome actors from the realm of action fiasco and budgetless cinema run after Ice T…and we’ll throw in Charles S. Dutton, fresh off Alien 3…and we’ll give F Murray Abraham a whinny son to represent the liberal conscience; it’ll be magnificent!’

And magnificent it is. Straightaway bloodlust becomes mingled with strategy as each of the two parties attempts to outwit the other. Lit cigarettes are stuck in trees to create a false trail; cunningly-placed footprints do similar. Intellect and instinct run in unison. The hunters live in a dark patriarchal world in which the psyche’s most nefarious attributes are exhibited. Characteristics stigmatised by society are free to roam as colours shift hue from modernity to medieval times, the faces of Homo sapiens fade into those of former incarnations.

Hauer’s feisty leader makes for a joyous villain. He loves the hunt and survival is a sport to him, but his sense of humour remains – he never fails to spit some teasing remarks Ice T’s way. Hauer’s the calm counterpoint to Busey’s frenetic psychologist. Busey explodes on-screen in a tirade of psychobabble, lyrically exposing man’s deepest primal urges. The debris of scattered blonde hair and giant white teeth barely has time to settle before Busey starts once more into another monologue. This time it’s a biographical tale: 8-year-old Busey, still only a child, is forced by his father to fight a bulldog. The mutt prevails for a long time, permanently scarring Busey in the process, before Busey is able to break its neck. For a long time after the story is told, the maniacal glint of Busey’s eyes remains spread across the screen, surviving long into the black of the fade out.

I have no doubt that Busey was just playing himself in this film.

To conclude: Surviving the Game’s slight leftist tendencies are a buoy to my enjoyment. A Wall Street man, a bourgeois psychologist, some CIA-affiliated goons, persist in exploiting a poor man who’s been cast out of society. They look down on him, sneer at his poverty and see in him nothing more than fodder for their games, that is to say, games to them, but to him life and death. Such a political reading is a nice adjunct to the film; however, it is surely the dynamic play of images and Busey that makes the film stand out as a highlight of mid-90s action, to be slotted somewhere between Hard Target and Judgement Night.

Three Days of the Condor

2009-02-22T00:43:00.003Z

Rarely is the hero the one whose actions lie not in the realm of practice but in that of theory. Valour and strength typify the hero; physicality is the emblem of the hero. The champion protagonist is a protagonist of the body, a shifting somatic presence whose persona wrenches forth from the dynamic of the body. Shape and motion are inseparable from the tangible acts that the hero engages in.

Rarely is the hero the reader, that figure of mind not body. The routine of the reader is antithetical to that of the hero. The devourer of words is seen as passive, a spectator, a slave to the abstract manoeuvres of theory. The reader stands distinct from the kinetic picture of the hero. All of which is unjust, for not only is knowledge power, but words too have a power, a potency; words wield strengths wholly their own. The derisive expletive may be less effective than a kick in the ballbag, but a stream of torturous words does have the potential to be considerably more effecting and destructive than even that. Underestimate the power of the reader at your own peril.

It’s with this idea that we arrive at Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Pollack’s 1975 thriller starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway.

“I just read books,” confesses Redford’s protagonist Joseph Turner (codename: Condor). “We read everything that’s published in the world.”

Turner works for a secret subdivision of the CIA. This subdivision employs the clever and the wise to pour over books and magazines, searching out leaks and hidden codes, striving to derive new ideas and schemes. One day, while Turner completes his daily lunch run, a gang of armed men burst into the offices and shoot dead all of Turner’s colleagues. He returns to find the offices empty of all but cadavers and quickly escapes. Thus ensues three days of deception and murder, distrust and paranoia, as Turner slowly comes to see the sinister underside of his employers.

“That’s a very bright man,” says the gourmet at the local deli, pointing at Turner as he cuts a sandwich.

Turner is the reader, the theoretician. He lives in a place of observation, formulating analysis, creating theories. When chaos and confusion interrupt his life, he is forced into acting. The thinker becomes the man of action. Theory is thrust into practice, abruptly transitioning like Marxism into Leninism into Stalinism. Hopefully with fewer mistakes, it must be said, with less dire consequences. But that’s the thing about such a segue: it’s unpredictable, it’s its own test, its own experiment; the different ways it can evolve are myriad.

Turner’s unconventional hero must contend with his situation as best he can. Like Kurt Russell’s bookworm intelligence analyst in Executive Decision, Turner must adapt quickly, for he too is without Steven Seagal to help him.

The world is one of Kafka-esque bafflement. Layers upon layers of mystique hang over everything. Turner stumbles into a puzzling grid where only a few of the lines are discernable. A CIA boss remarks, “I don’t know, that’s what worries me.’ This is the void of knowledge that fills the film. Solace and comfort expire in the vacancy of information, and menace and danger take their place in the new, threatening reality. Turner is a man who usually does know, a man who usually does possess the facts. But for the first time he is sans knowledge. What he thought he knew is revealed as incomplete – the scope of his theory did not encompass everything. It was porous and failed to be comprehensive. Theory slides into powerlessness, turning insufficient, turning superfluous.

Faced with the failure of theory (the killing of a character named Heidegger acts as a convenient piece of symbolism here), Turner is left to embrace practice. Fights ensue, men are shot: the act takes centre stage. His eyes may twitch with rumination, but with his decision to take Faye Dunaway hostage (to get off the street, to get some rest, to get some time to think) and his later intimacies with her, he has unequivocally moved into the realm of practice. It’s as if Schopenhauer had suddenly transformed into Rutger Hauer.

The newly-formed hero has to try and discover the truth behind the murder of his colleagues. He is plunged into a world of clandestine schemes and whispered plans. A place where interlocutors change language mid-conversion if anyone happens to pass by. A place where the only sound heard is the dead echo of the ringing phone not picked up. Turner must contend with this dark, urban space, bleak like Dunaway’s photographs of New York in winter, her images of black and white isolation.

Three Days of the Condor is another sublime entry in the canon of 70s paranoia thrillers. Like Alan Pakula’s loose trilogy, the film speaks of the disillusionment of the time, distrust of the establishment. The events of Vietnam and Watergate float ominously in the background. These are years that saw the death of free love, the death of emotion, expression, release, the utopian ideal – all crushed by Nixon, by war, by dirty political games. The Cold War became not a thing out there, not something occurring elsewhere, but something right here, something right in the heart of democracy and freedom. It dawned, thick and clear: those guys we elected – the guys living our space, breathing our air, one of us, part of us – are no better than those guys over there, the supposed enemy. Turner’s presumption that his superiors can be trusted is ruthlessly destroyed as he sees his friends killed, as he tries to avoid his own death. Friends are foes in this place where distrust becomes ubiquitous.

All the facets of this paranoid reality come to life in Pollack’s expert direction. The stilled cameras and heavy silences, the increasing tension as the narrative slowly discloses the truth. The sparse soundtrack adds the chilling ambience of isolation, underscoring the evocations of dread and claustrophobia. Three Days of the Condor is a perfect slice of miasmic cinema, murkily captivating.

Cavalera Conspiracy – Inflikted

2009-02-15T08:41:00.011Z

‘Terrorize’ opens with a set of snorted declarations – notes about the self, notes for the self – Max Cavalera spitting bile-drenched epitaphs to the body:

‘I am the poison and cure,
I am the fire of doom,
I am the ghost and dust,
I am death from above.’

Uttered in venomous rapture, the lyrics subside and in strides a gargantuan riff. A chunky power groove, heaving with each beat blasted behind it. A simple, no-frills quake of guitars fills the lyric-less void before Cavalera’s noisome bark returns:

‘I am the jungle rot,
I am the sufferer,
I am the juggernaut,
I am death from below.’

A repeat of the former groove appears and then gives way to a melodic burst of shred-guitar backed by a rapidly firing rhythm sound. Song structures are cut up by quick alternation between growled syllables and thick eruptions of blistering guitars. The style is laid out on the first track, a mission statement written in an onslaught of metal. The remit is unambiguous: Your face will be torn in two, clawed off by a furious sonic attack. There is no resting place, there is no slowdown, forward motion is the only option, death to mediocrity, death to tranquillity – this is Inflikted.

It’s the big reunion of the Cavalera brothers, sibling gods brought together once more under the auspices of metal. The founders of Sepultura, having not spoken to each other in ten years, have finally seen fit to end their long dispute. Conversation killed at last the terrible familial rift that had separated them for such a time. The cure was talk, the aftermath is Cavalera Conspiracy. Joined by Marc Rizzo on lead guitar and Joe Duplantier on bass, the brothers got down to writing and recording new material, their first collaborative body of work since Roots in 1996.

Despite the happy melodrama that underpins the creation of Inflikted, the music here is angry. The mood powers forward in black, infuriation spilling out relentlessly from each song. Pissed off, enraged, an atmosphere drenched in anger acts as a foreground and a background.

‘My hostility,
My sanctuary.’

Hostility reigns. Sanctuary is the home, the container of each sonic attack compiled in the eleven track masterpiece. The riffs rip through everything, all lies numbed or shredded in their wake. The drums are a battery in constant blaze. Tracks scowl, move from fast to faster – trenchant displays of blinding rhythm attack.

Lyrics are so frequently a way to make political statements, to offer social critique, to polemise. They offer an avenue through which to dream, to implore, to eulogise. Lyrics are also implements of atmosphere. Cavalera’s vocal expectorate is but another notch of ambience alongside the wall of guitars and drums, a further level on the endless strata of generous musical punishment supplied by Inflikted. It’s the materiality of his growl that matters. Staccato screams of vicious words weave in and out of songs, adorning a web of intricate musicianship. Sure, meaning clings to the words, connotations are not absent, etymology is not dead. But form matters, as does style. What is spoken is the poetic void. Sounds as jagged and as splintered as the guitars are beckoned forth from Cavalera’s throat. They sweep forward in a wash of refusals, dancing in the rejection of any systematic poetics. ‘Nevertrust’ provides an inventory of persons and concepts we ought not to trust; to this we can add the signified, the fluff that the word points to. All I can hear is the unison of voice and instrument, the majestic venom of Inflikted.

The witness offers a reminder: one should not use such superfluous words in reviewing an album that is so anti-superfluity, so lacking in pointless digressions, so single-minded and determined in its mission to kill the needless. As the final song intones, ‘Must kill, must kill, must kill…’ Not an ounce of the prolix is to be found on Inflikted. No masturbatory descents into musical self-indulgence. Only the destruction of the gap between music and listener, only the angry aesthetics that flood the gap and bind music and listener together in grand bodily harmony – that is what Inflikted is.

Sudden Death

2009-02-09T06:07:00.003Z

A week after the inauguration of President Obama, Charlie Brooker wrote of contrasting feelings he felt watching the event. On the one hand, inspiration, the new, the fresh; on the other, the fear that at any moment the president would be gunned down. So ingrained is the image of the foiled celebration, the presidential assassination, that the idea of hope crashing to the ground in a second of gunfire seemed all too possible. It’s no surprise, for a surfeit of fictional rehearsals for such an ending lie scattered across the mediascape. Real death, the promise of actual murder, hides behind each frame. The simulacrum has a shadow. As Denis Leary once said,

‘We watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot live on TV one Sunday morning, we were afraid to change the fucking channel for the next thirty years.’

The catastrophe plagued Brooker in hypothetical tones. But what if Obama’s ceremony had been ruined by ne’er-do-wells? His brawn may have been ample to fend them off, to beat them into submission, perhaps. Spiderman’s already helped him, but who’s to say Peter Parker isn’t still wandering around taking pictures? On Obama’s back is one large shield constructed to deflect any number of Fox News wet dreams. The bullets will have a tough job, but one may still penetrate the shield, one gruesome nightmare of Coulter wishes and Limbaugh imploration.

What hero might fight this repulsive ‘what if’? Who will be the palliative delivered to this form of nauseating drivel, the ballads of talk radio and nonsense television? Who’s the destroyer of pernicious dreams? Who’s not only fit to stride into the hypothetical realm but to annihilate that very realm, to kill ideas best not thought?

The volunteers are many, as are the nominees, but only one is truly qualified for the task.

Jean Claude Van Damme, he is the legitimate heir to reality’s throne of decency. The man’s monopoly on virtue is surely enough to kill a few hastily-spoken words, to smash hate-filled hypocrisy. And as for any actual bullets, a swift kick would be enough to deflect them.

Van Damme has experience with this sort of thing. Important people assailed by the iniquitous, it’s merely something to do before lunch. His threshold for dealing with any swine attacking the Executive Branch is unlimited. Were his CV geared solely towards the attainment of such a job, one image would adorn it: the poster for Sudden Death.

It’s the final of the Stanley Cup. Van Damme, being a liker of the ice hockey, is there with his two kids. The Vice-President, being a liker of the ice hockey, is also there. A team of nasty terrorist-types, who may or may not be likers of the ice hockey, are there too. They take the VP and his party hostage, demanding grand sums of money or else murder and mayhem. And they have the arena wired to blow, with devices planted in every nook and cranny. Van Damme discovers this plot – then one of his kids gets kidnapped – then he decides to kill the bad guys and save the day. ‘Fuck you and fuck your kid,’ says one of the bad guys. Van Damme dons his hero coat and replies, ‘Now you die.’

Sudden Death? But how sudden? Not that sudden it turns out. It’s a good thirty-five minutes before Van Damme kicks anyone. I find it difficult to hide my disappointment, and words cannot possibly convey the hurt I feel over the misnomer, those lies that are spread in Van Damme’s name. Thankfully, lies soon transform into truth. Suddenness enters the present as Van Damme’s bouncy violence takes centre stage.

The tense hail of images proves effective, fun shifts in action creating a captivating feast for the eyes. Fights in kitchens, sharp one-liners, bones stabbed through the throat, all the proper ingredients are here. A bodily-armament montage segues into a tussle with a rogue agent. Early sacrifices in the name of plot exposition become forgotten as a film festooned with men sporting bullet holes in the head comes into focus. What was that guff about Van Damme taking his kids to the game? What boringly elaborate methods to capture the Vice President? All I see is Van Damme lighting a man on fire and throwing a helicopter into a big hole in the roof.

After a while, approaching the film’s thrilling denouement, I realised something: Van Damme already made this film. He made it seven years hitherto. It starred someone else and had a different name. In fact all the names were different. And it was set in an office building instead of an ice hockey arena. Die Hard is maybe the best film Van Damme’s made and not starred in, or had anything to do with.

Thus the writing begins before Van Damme. The words flow in anticipation. They pave a road leading to creation. The creation of what? Of Bruce Willis, of Alan Rickman, of scowling faces twisted, producing a wonderfully coruscating VHS reality. These are words sent from the present to the past. Every time Van Damme communicates with the authorities outside he is pumping words through a wormhole in time. Every time Van Damme tries to rescue his loved one he is slamming words into the abyss of the past.

It’s only in moments of real madness that he ceases the transmission of words. Such as the outlandish sequence where he joins the ice hockey game, makes the save of the year and then sentimentally gestures ‘I love you’ in sign language to his son in the crowd. I shit you not. If only John McClane had stopped for a moment to play skittles and then tap out ‘You complete me’ to his wife in Morse code.

Van Damme may have moved into the mould of self-deprecating art-house icon (and considering the quality of JCVD, we ought to be thankful), but his rich period of mid-90s action goodness remains a joy to come back to. The era of genuine Van Damage is forever accessible through the gifts he has given us.

Absolon

2009-02-01T19:49:00.005Z

There is no energy left in Christopher Lambert. His words are tired, gestures weak, light hurts his eyes and cinema gives him heartburn. The glory avenues, the ones he used to walk, now lie in the past. Sighs are all he can muster, flatlined breaths toneless and hollow. Shame has descended and agitation grows from the disappointment. The latter we share, both he and us. The star’s light shrinks to a dim flicker.

What contrast, what change! The heights, we used to barely see them, such was their majesty. Now not even the memory stays: only the memory of the memory, remembrance of the heavenly heights, a few fleeting images retained during the plummet south. The horizon offers nothing – no Highlander, no Mortal Kombat, no Fortress. The Lambert laugh can’t be heard, nor can the cheeky grin be seen.

There was a time when brilliance sang from each pore, when each stride easily dazzled onlookers. Lambert was admired, worshipped even, a receptacle for compliments and well-wishes. He was officially France’s best export, replacing the Eiffel Tower as the country’s icon. He was born heir to the French intellectual tradition and lived as a successor to its erudite radicality. Lambert never called himself a Structuralist, nor did he ally himself with Marxism. He left the nouveau roman to itself and shunned Oulipo. Despite being only eleven years old at the time, he stood back during the tumult of May ’68 – ‘let others have the limelight,’ he said.

Lambert channelled his polemics into his art, brandishing heady ideas on the nexus of art and life. Thorns were driven into archaic doctrines, philosophies got ripped in two. He created a dialectical shitstorm from which emerged the truth of Lambert’s vision: a world shorn of needless ideas, needless fussing, needless restriction, a world of open paths and open minds. Yet, like Baudrillard and his despair at the exhaustion of ideas, Lambert took needlessness too far.

All was well up to a point, monies and kudos flowed from success. Highlander exemplified the period. But then a shocking event: there stood Lambert, fly undone, pissing all over everything. His determination to destroy the needless led him to destroy the things we needed, and these things ended up being soaked in his piss.

Unable to live with himself, Lambert threw himself down the stairs, an act which we now call Absolon.

EXCURSUS: Geneticists have for years been trying to track and isolate the Lambert gene. Its existence has been a rumour since the time of Galen, who saw in Lambert and the four humours an odd harmony. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins, the men who discovered the structure of DNA, failed to show up in Stockholm to collect the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Later it turned out that they were busy working on the Lambert gene. But finally, in 1999, scientists cracked it. While working on a blood sample taken from a llama, Dr. Callisto Burton observed that a particular gene the llama possessed had almost all the traits of the Lambert gene. Further study proved conclusively that this was the case. A report called ‘The Lambert Gene: Why Christopher Lambert can now mate with llamas’ was later published in the journal Genetic Research.

Absolon presents for our examination a picture of the future. The prelude informs us of a catastrophe: a new disease has emerged and killed most of the planet’s population. That’s a bad thing. Luckily, a scientist creates a drug that nullifies the symptoms, enabling the users to continue to live providing they keep taking the drug. That’s a good thing. Sadly, the owner of this drug is an evil corporation who uses it for power and domination. That’s a bad thing. Thankfully, the scientist creates a proper cure to wipe out the disease forever. That’s a good thing. Then he gets killed. Bad. But Lambert’s on the case. Good. But Lambert’s shite. Bad.

And so goes the story. A nasty Sci-Fi Channel-type tyranny led by Ron Perlman is the villain. A cop investigating the murder played by the skin of Christopher Lambert is the hero. A buxom lady scientist played by Kelly Brook is the Daily Star wank fodder.

At some point in the narrative, after being tricked into drinking a bubbling solution in a beaker (always a bad idea), Lambert learns he now has the cure in him. Unfortunately the cure comes in two parts and he only has the first. Thus begins a race against time to get the sequel, and without it the only thing on the menu is death. Run Lambert, run.

Absolon is a mess of swishing HBO cameras, incongruous leaps into action and dreary reused sets. There is, however, one positive element here, one upbeat comment to be made: every now and then Lou Diamond Phillips appears. He plays the badass employee of the corporation charged with tracking Lambert. Revelling in every hammy moment, he runs around gun in hand, anger erupting in his eyes, a sour face ready to turn the goodies to mulch. Throughout the film, he roams the lands in search of our hero, taking the occasional minute to report to Hellboy. He’s the film’s unequivocal highlight: Absolon’s cardboard scenes have only Lou Diamond Phillips to carry the mantle of quality. He’s the beacon of light, but Lambert can’t see him, for his eyes are blind – he’s lost in the fog of cinema.

Lambert’s voice is a whisper, his face pallid, legs unsteady, he’s a man in need of a power ballad. The pain he feels must be gargantuan, the sting of his many adversaries. Not only Lou Diamond Phillips, not only Time, but also the script and memories of a better past. Lambert crawls through the film, refusing to show the slightest ounce of excitement or energy. Nothing is worn on his face except boredom. At one point, the plot has him raped by Kelly Brook (I think maybe she got him confused with Jean Reno). Now, would this change a man? Would this have the vigour return to Lambert?

Nope. If anything he seems even more lethargic after that.

Let us not waste anymore time. The true fact evident for all to see is that Lambert can’t be arsed. He’s given in, yielded to tiredness, he’s stuck in the web of the weary. Ready for his eulogy, he can barely be fucked to stand and his ears don’t work. Scream all you can but it makes no difference, the words’ll never penetrate his skull – Lambert’s decrepit body fades corroded by the juices of Absolon.

Against the Dark

2009-01-25T17:42:00.009Z

The testimony of the critic is no more. Steven Seagal has rendered dead the doubts, the scathing words, the formulas of scorn – all are past to the present, crumbled into nothing. The critic lies stunned, a wash of surprise dirtying his eyes. Seagal has veered off the pompously-wrought trajectory set by the critic, far from the lines of fate traced by the self-important twitches of Fellini-stained hands. Gone are the genre prisons that once contained row upon row of Half Past Dead and Flight of Fury. The old canvas of Action, dotted here and there by Revenge, Cop, Drug Lord, Revenge, Corruption, Terrorism, Revenge – now blotted out by a new canvas, a fresh genre in which to explore deep philosophical thinking as only Seagal can.

The shift: typicality gives way to horror, the domain of monsters and repulsive alterity. The previously untouched genre unfurls its wares in Seagal’s glow, ready to be transmuted into something wholly new: a horror film starring Steven Seagal.

Such is the essence of Against the Dark. It’s a journey to the frontier of each and every illusion we hold regarding Seagal. Sentences will need to be rewritten in the aftermath, the venture simultaneously breaking and remanufacturing everything we thought we knew. Orthodoxy is smote. Old words are necessarily chewed to mush. Only with Seagal’s sanction will the words work – otherwise they die in the fires of banality.

Against the Dark’s world is one we’ve all come to accept, the ravaged deathscape too often seen, one that now endears as much as it irritates. Like the senile aunt who regurgitates the same stories ad nauseam, the world where disease induces derangement in the citizenship, producing homicidal maniacs that want to feast on your flesh, leaving you a carrier of their infection – this too becomes an object of love. Let it unfold, they plead, give it your time, gratify its wants, freely lend your ears, for it means no harm and has been produced in the most sincere ludic spirit.

Humanity’s depleted numbers stand as potential victims, prey to the hordes of unleashed evil, the strange vampire-mutant xeno-who-the-fuck-knows? that now roam the city. Opposing this force is Seagal, who leads a team of sword-master vigilantes called Hunters. They spend their evenings strolling through the streets, killing as many creatures as possible. When their collective punch is called upon, you can be sure their timely arrival will furnish the screen in hope, relief and oodles of blood.

The main thread of the film has a group of survivors wandering through an abandoned hospital, waiting for Seagal and his pals to come and rescue them. Occasionally we cross-cut to a military encampment where Keith David’s army asshole plans to ‘disinfect’ the area, that is, bomb the fuck out of it. All of which sets up a scenario where Seagal must rescue the survivors and escape the area, time’s ticking hand a constant burden.

It’s a complex narrative. One that demands rumination, an hour or two of heady reflection. Don’t feel embarrassed if you need to reread the last paragraph.

The film is a picture of grey and green, floaty cameras stuttering in time to the plot. Superfluities of the colour spectrum become absorbed in a flash of quick-fire cutaways and slow-motion pans. Blurred tilts disclose the actions of Seagal and his team, a merry band that includes the Rock’s stunt double. Yes, the film is that star-studded! The producers have clearly set no limits when it comes to casting – the cheap Sarah Polley substitute being sufficient proof of that.

But let’s not be coy: no one watches a Seagal film to admire the talents of the supporting cast. Seagal poses his own questions, lives his own commentary, gives voice to the silent imaginings of his own interests. Between films he stores his ideas, notions collected and nurtured, milk in the teat ready to be drawn. Then it comes, spewing forth in deluges of acumen. The unnoticed becomes noticed, Seagal sails past Ithaca and enters a new realm, a place of vivid insight and melodious blues barre-chords.

Oh Seagal! at which puny hubris do you aim your magnificent mentality this time?

The answer, as always, lies in the title.

Keen observers won’t have missed this: an alliance, seemingly forged by Seagal over recent years. A mighty union, consisting of Seagal and shadow, hovering auspiciously over the latest crop of cinéma Seagal. A void of light in which Seagal beats up the iniquitous and saves the day – well, we presume that’s what happens, having had to squint to see even the merest boot to the stomach. We thought the lack of visual clarity was a gesture of defiance, a revolt against dominant Hollywood conventions of visibility. We surmised that Seagal’s avant-garde credentials were coming to the fore, spitting subversion and flipping middle-finger hyperbole at the hegemony of safe cinema convention.

But no, such an alliance never existed. A war was being fought all along. Seagal waging a campaign against the dark, darkness, the spawn of night-time, or as Flaubert once described it, ‘fuck all light.’ The enduring battle continues. For years it has been waged in secret. But now the truth emerges and the war moves onto its final stages. Urban Justice looks like a mere scuffle in comparison, a speck on the Seagalian corpus. Continuity is maintained as our hero pursues his own agenda, his interests fill the space opened up by Against the Dark’s dance of repetitive images and already-seen plot points. Seagal never fails to use film, to transform it into a tool for his application.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau produces an idea called la perruque. Workers, confined by time (the workday) and space (the workplace), use their situation to follow their own interests, taking time to indulge in creative pursuits, appropriating resources in the name of the individual act, independent of the machine’s dictation. One’s own work wears the mask of legitimate labour, time diverted ‘from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed towards profit.’

Seagal personifies la perruque. His crusade persists unhindered by the travesties of cinema that are sometimes fed his name. Whether he’s fighting Gary Busey or the malicious ineffability of the dark, Seagal’s consistency never wavers.

Damn, the dark truly picked the wrong man to pick a fight with.

Anyway, so the tale crawls on forever forward and eventually Seagal comes face-to-face with the dark. He knows his mission: he must end it, enclose the bastard dark in a container of light, sealed shut by starchy fingers of greased ass-kicking. Can there be light without dark? The relativist’s lack of Seagalian spunk spells his demise. Binary oppositions lie extinguished in Seagal’s wake. The line that separates night and day on Earth is called the terminator. Seagal’s destiny is to be that line. He stands between light and dark, throwing balletic ninja kicks at the dark, thrusting his knife at its minatory filth claws. His detractors say that no one can fight the dark with a shotgun – to this Seagal’s armoury replies, ‘fuck you!’

Bullets and the caustic swipe of his blade bite into the dark, first maiming it into submission, then finishing it off with a quick flurry of fists. Henceforth, only lower case letters will be used to spell the word dark and Seagal will go forth victoriously into the bright noon-shine of day.

Cobra

2008-12-07T20:04:00.006Z

His image in the dusk she seem’d to see,
And to the silence made a gentle moan,
Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
And on her couch low murmuring, ‘Where? O where?’

- John Keats

‘Where?’ I ask. Where indeed. Often I sit up unknowingly penetrating a waking dream faced with a question: ‘Where? O where?’ That selfsame query spoken by the Keatsian beauty, this time freckled and disjointed. The dream creature answers the damned plea:

“Why, in the curious shell of Cobra,” says the imp.

“Speak imp, my patience runs low.”

“Look at the film in your hands,” says the imp.

“Tell me what I don’t know, not what I do – there is no film, it’s all a dirty lie.”

“Curse my truisms all you want, but that cut of cinema with ‘Cobra’ scrawled across its face is a fact,” says the imp.

“I’ll never believe it!”

“Use your eyes and not your ignorance,” says the imp.

“But the latter has jurisdiction where the former does not.”

“Glance your hands quickly,” says the imp.

“I refuse.

“Cobra is a container of answers, free to be poked by the open-minded and clear-sighted,” says the imp.

“You imp bastard.”

And so ended the prophet’s sojourn. The sun rose on the night of dreams and brought into being a glistening spectacle: a copy of Cobra.

The where of the moment passes into the known, the instant secreting an answer to the question, a Stallonean punch to the gut of ignorance.

Where morphs into when.

When?

Now.

Listen. His words are speaking:

“In America there’s a burglary every eleven seconds, an armed robbery every sixty-five seconds, a violent crime every twenty-five seconds, a murder every twenty-four minutes, and two-hundred-and-fifty rapes a day.”

Criminological thesis or mission statement? Disinterested academic study or a pretext for shooting the balls off ne’er-do-wells? This is the monologue that opens Cobra, set to the image of a gun being lifted, pointed and fired at the camera. The resulting bullet tells us that this is probably not a rom-com.

Cobra is not a sequel to Sssssss. Cobra is prime Sylvester Stallone action goodness. A slab of mid-80s spectacle, cloaked in gunfire and the sheen of Commando. Stallone plays Marion Cobretti (hence why the film is not called Boa constrictor). He’s a renegade cop hunting a group of killers. His methods of law enforcement consist of using maximum force. Rather than negotiation, he prefers a boot to the throat. Immediate results are his forte, forensic attention to detail he has no time for. Police chiefs know he gets the job done but solicit his services only as a last resort, wary of the carnage he’ll leave in his wake.

Cobretti isn’t a vigilante per se – his actions are all authorised by a police badge. But yet he stands apart from the system of law, of the bureaucratic machine of justice, a figure independent of the restrictions brought upon his peers. His remit comes not from above; it’s occasioned by the degeneracy of society. As already quoted, the film starts with his lament for a nation plagued with crime and debauchery. The place assigned him is that of enforcer of laws flouted and ignored, a balancer of crime’s monopoly. Or, as he so poetically puts it when face-to-face with a gun-totting psychotic:

“You’re the disease, I’m the cure.”

Such diseases are in distressing abundance in the world of Cobra. It’s as if the Warriors were singing threnodies to society’s prosperity. Darkness prevails, murder is hobby, leisure ruled by larceny. Cobretti’s villainous counterparts are anarchic thugs led by Brian Thompson’s Night Slasher, a serial killer figurehead for the collective. They run around the city revelling in the joys of homicide, randomly attacking the hapless and the helpless. Cries of “the new world” rise from each life extinguished, a possible philosophy hidden beneath the coarse exterior. Seems they aim to pressure society into a complete meltdown, a dip into total degradation. It’s a form of anarchy eyeing up a glorious utopia placed somewhere between Frogtown and the Thunderdome.

Cobretti’s offensive, cherished like a pet, takes a knock when he must defend witness Bridgette Nielsen. They take a Blind Fury-esque trip into the American country, a place of long roads and diners, pastures of isolation dotted here and there solely with the farts of truckers. Fortunately, Thompson and the gang have a police insider who keeps them informed of all movements. The result being that our action glands have little time to feel hungry – blood-soaked satisfaction awaits in a punishing denouement that takes place at an industrial plant.

Cobra represents the wasteland of nothing, a space brutally absent of charity and cheer. We are in the abode of 80s nihilism, that Reaganist space where the human is divested of value. A stark canvas where rules no longer exist, the stench being one of foul fumes trumpeting the strengthening patriarchy. Violent justice is flexed in the name of justice long-assassinated by silent inaction. Welcome to the vast nothingness. No excess of description, no surplus of morals, Cobra typifies the attraction of 80s action cinema. But it’s an attraction living in the present, looking back through the glittering celluloid travesties of recent times.

Given the option, I’d rather watch a film I know is morally bankrupt than have to tolerate sanctimonious shite like Crash (the Haggis one). I’d rather have Cobra’s brutal celebration of violent justice than face the contrived moral dilemmas of something like Righteous Kill. The drab, posing morality of such films looks tedious in comparison with the colourful nihilism of Cobra. Those films don’t even have a soundtrack of thumping power ballads!

Gritty action flicks of this era are a nihilistic desert in the geography of cinema. Cobra and its various cousins, from Raw Deal to The Punisher, are filmic grunts, immune to degeneration. They improve with age, becoming sweet syrup for thirsty cinephiles. Artefacts of rough visual composition and swirling-camera action sequences, they are the nodes of nothingness into which we project our enjoyment, our laughs, our gleeful shouts of encouragement. They are grand annihilators of a lecturing cinema that bores as much as it annoys. Let Stallone kick to death the patronising tone of pseudo-moral ostentation and nauseating self-importance. Cobra’s cartoon fantasy is to be enjoyed guiltlessly, Stallone’s playful antics creating no more than a mere image in the dusk.

My Name is Bruce: A View to Downplaying the Godly

2008-11-30T21:54:00.004Z

He’s merely a man, as the title suggests. A fragile mortal, imperfect like the rest of us, subject to errors and the fickle dictations of mood. Why then do I feel obliged to offer grand sweeping hyperbole in introducing Bruce Campbell?

Deity status, a throne of beatitude, a kind of global genuflection, all are excessive children born from an attempt to convey Bruce’s brilliance. Restraint dies and a flamboyant display of tribute takes over. The murk of modesty, clearly a trait of the real man, becomes lit oblivion as quaint words evolve into epic narratives of analogy and metaphor, ending with Bruce upon a summit of reverence, shining glory downwards on a proletarian mass baying for his mercy.

Alas, too soon into this game of mindless exaggeration does comicality arrive to blot out all else. Laughable, lifeless words! Meaning has no place in the stream of overstatement, a surge instigated by justifiable admiration, but left demonically possessed by superfluous gestures.

Bruce is a god. Bruce is a genius. Bruce leaves my underwear steeped in the goo of lust.

Add repetition and in creeps banality. Hackneyed hindrance grasps the soul, drags it to a place where circularity holds sway, the result being one’s condemnation to repetition of the same tired phrases ad infinitum.

Curiously, it’s the endearing humility and incessant self-deprecation amply demonstrated by Bruce that makes him so frequent a recipient of such kudos. While appreciative, deification to this degree would no doubt cause him unease. After all, energies ought to be focused elsewhere (go and eat your Cheerios, son), be done with it, give to yourself the pleasure and resume foraging in the swamp of civilisation. Movement and action are the rightful consequences of inspiration; breathe in Bruce’s celluloid presence with a mind to use and utility. Don’t end at the beginning, Bruce’s omega appears to be an alpha the more one peers at it.

But the problem remains, the idol stands worshipped and cloaked in praise.

It would be disingenuous to call My Name is Bruce an exploration of this theme, some kind of ball-tightening treatise on celebrity, a filmic essay on the assumption of persona and the performativity of everyday life. It’s a comedy where Bruce Campbell plays himself. Enough said. That’s more than satisfactory to constitute a dream scenario for the numberless legions of his fans. But sadly a synopsis is built of slightly more than that and I’d hate to earn the scorn of my readers (more than I’ve already done).

The small town of Gold Lick is plagued by death and destruction as an ancient monster is unwittingly unleashed by a local teenager. Young Jeff (not Fahey) witnesses his buddies’ slaughter and just about escapes himself. Thankfully Jeff is well-acquainted with the work of Bruce, being a member of the hardcore division of the fan base (DVDs of Maniac Cop and Alien Apocalypse lie scattered about his car, nestled neatly alongside copies of Fangoria, probably hugged tight against his Bubba Ho-tep t-shirt on numerous occasions). This kid decides to solicit the services of Bruce to help deal with the monster. Bruce is brought to town, but naturally dubious he considers the entire situation artifice, a mere play orchestrated by his agent. Unities must be forged if Bruce is to see past the fallacy of his foolhardy mind and defeat the evil force.

Bruce’s character is himself. Or rather, Bruce’s character is Bruce Campbell, a spoiled, brash, insensitive B-movie actor who lives in a trailer and is constantly tormented by the thought of his ex-wife. Whiskey is the blood of his soul, his dog his only companion. His career lies wallowing in the pit of schlock, a place of budget-less cliché and inept actorship. A scene being filmed for a dire sci-fi flick called Cave Alien 2 is our first introduction to the man. Stilted dialogue and cheap rubber monsters abound in this unequivocal mockery of some of the real Bruce’s dodgy role choices, the past that dips into splatter pantomime, the genre pieces on which he has built his massive following.

The set of Cave Alien 2 sees Bruce affect obnoxiousness and a prima donna attitude. His grandstanding and self-importance is punctuated only by the lurid sleaze tactics unleashed upon his blond co-star. Looks of distaste and snorts of contempt are universal reactions from cast and crew alike. This caricature of egotistical posturing creates out of Bruce Campbell a new figure: ‘Bruce Campbell’. Or better, Evil Dead’s Ash, lifted from fiction’s prison and employed as a B-movie actor.

The stupidity (Bruce spends much of the film thinking the monster scenario an elaborate birthday gift), the callousness (a too-inquisitive fan in a wheelchair gets kicked out of shot, the squeal of a vehicular collision sounding as Bruce departs) and the cowardice (when confronted with the reality of the monster Bruce immediately runs away, leaving the local population behind to fend for itself), all are core traits of Ash. On arrival in Gold Lick, the local fanfare gets spoiled as Bruce harangues them, cantankerously complaining and poking fun at the yokel alterity each presumes. Coarse words said against the mayor prompts young Jeff into admonishing Bruce, alerting him that it is the mayor his words are being directed at, to which Bruce hilariously replies,

“I don’t give a shit if he’s the king of kiss my ass!”

It’s genius of this stature that impels one to soar to the highest echelons of highfalutin praise in describing Bruce. Impossible to resist, the tendency gets realised too easily. Especially when Ash-style hysterics get rolled out so often. The twofold sense of awe and expectation expressed by the local crowd harkens back to the similar reaction of the medieval peasantry in Army of Darkness. There’s even a Sheila for Bruce to fawn over.

A history of cinema lives in My Name is Bruce. The obvious send-up of Bruce’s career is there, lovingly arranged on jazzy tendrils of hilarity. But there’s also an array of other allusions and inclusions. Making an appearance as Bruce’s ex-wife is Ellen Sandweiss who played Cheryl in the first Evil Dead (remember the amorous tree?). Dan Hicks, who in a former life was Jake in Evil Dead 2, plays a citizen of Gold Lick, and Timothy Patrick Quill, who was the blacksmith in Army of Darkness, plays his lover. Catchphrases from the past feature heavily, notably used to humorous effect such as when Jeff attempts to seduce a zesty nubile with the words “give me some sugar, baby.” Casual references to obscure films like Assault on Dome 4 also contribute to the creation of this marvellous bric-a-brac Bruce Campbell landscape.

Super special, extreme mention needs to be reserved however for Ted Raimi. As if he wasn’t content with being the highlight of Bruce’s last directorial effort, Man with the Screaming Brain, he offers here another stunning performance. Actually, that should read performances, for he plays three roles. The snivelling agent wears the face of Ted Raimi, as does the painter charged with changing the town’s sign when a murder has occurred, updating the population figure while forever mumbling complaint at the sudden slew of work he’s been handed. Finally, and probably most amusing, he plays an old oriental gent who warns the town about the monster (a Chinese war god). Ted is one of the most underrated comedic talents working today, yet unfortunately it takes the work of either Bruce or his brother Sam Raimi for us to see him onscreen.

My Name is Bruce is an audiovisual massage for the fans’ glands. It’s an eraser of sores, a shield against inferior cinema, an assassin of high-minded pretension. A nutritious aesthetic paradise wherein all expectancy is fed to laughable heights, a delightful reservoir of satiated desires. The intended audience are the owners of Running Time, the squirming bodies queuing for a repertory showing of Mindwarp, the plucky fanboy exalting the merits of Bruce’s Herbie flick. The film’s appeal is to those who need not read the words of the title to know who Bruce is – they can easily recognise the titular presence without recourse to a formal introduction.

The culture is one where each reference resonates. Each in-joke contains the possibility of immense guffaws, the sort of laughter that’s a threat to the control of bodily functions. Indeed, loss of bladder control is threatened by the merest glance of Bruce’s distraught face when the scripts for Cave Alien 3 and 4 arrive in the mail, or when Bruce tries desperately to look knowledgeable about guns before the expectant eyes of the townsfolk.

Cries of genius and wailed positivity, deafening acclaim and romanticised imagery, these constitute the impossibility of discussing Bruce Campbell in a modest way. The obstacles of sheer sublimity, alongside words like maestro and ubermensch, make the impossibility a permanent symptom in the analysis of his work. Yell fool at the exaggerator and he’ll point to My Name is Bruce, hurriedly mumble something about “watch it, you ballbag,” and scamper off to a mental land of Bruce Campbell decadence and sumptuous reverie. It’s the only way it can be.

Suggestions for a Transcultural Narrative: When Beckett and Fonzie Collide

2008-11-23T21:27:00.008Z

Like words paroled from the page, free to travel to the inviting face, few actions enrich the soul more than the gentle throwing together of high and low culture. Films and music, novels and television, marked by difference, joined into something new, mated and left pregnant with the unseen and unheard. Take that universally-respected icon of Modernism, sidle up beside it the pornographic must of a 70s sleaze flick, and leave them to intercourse, merge and birth. Miscegenation it might be; a levelling of tiers it is. The erasure of bourgeois elitism. A unique gift of praise words to art adapted to be bereft of such opinion, to be deaf to an enviable avalanche of criticism.

Amalgamation is a nice label. Determined to avoid accusations of pretension, to have spit-laden “artsy bastard balls” invective snorted at your body, let the quick, easy wave of citing low culture assuage the risk. Find yourself writing an essay on Manuel Delanda’s Deleuzian analysis of expressivity? Include a problematising reference to Jeff Fahey’s loss of bodily oneness in Body Parts. Halfway through a delineation of Gogol’s class commentary in Dead Souls and despairing of the dry, academic tone permeating it? Figure out a method whereby Hellraiser VII: Deader becomes the main focus, perhaps hypothesise a situation in which Kari Wuhrer is condemned to life as a serf, freed from the confines of a truly awful film.

Sure it’s contrived. It maintains, to an extent, the original hierarchy. By recognising the layers of difference, whether or not situated in perception, we perpetuate the separation of high and low culture. Such a division lives in our treatment, in the mindsets through which all is dredged. But all action has potential to be realised, all is kinetic energy in the limbs, and a new cultural edifice can be born. By blindness to past categories can we transcend a narrow and simplistic compartmentalisation that sees Persona and Evil Dead defined so far from each other as to be constituents in two completely different worlds.

Labels of quality force the issue. Moulded preconceptions make the actions of cultural hierarchy important. Preordained good and preordained bad, these are effects by which we forget about the quality of Con Air, or From Beyond, or Gunmen. Discrimination elsewhere is being weeded out (as it should be), yet the music of Municipal Waste is automatically perceived as inferior to, say, Vivaldi. The fact that Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ is essentially heavy metal is deemed unimportant. Necrophagist’s winding musical compositions, because of distinctions laid culturally far and wide, fed into by a saturated media landscape, is victim to the needless rancour brought with it by the descriptive term ‘death metal’.

No levelling-out happens spontaneously. Walls of division can only be chipped away – a long process arduous and replete with contention. The natural human inclination to classify has to be fought, or rather remoulded. What needs reconfiguration are the labels, the terms that create the illusion of guaranteed quality. Time at a premium leaves us powerless in the face of a vast field of culture, body shaking in insignificance, an overwhelmed nose leaking blood, pus and snot. The words dropping in the rain dance of indecision come ideologically invested, they are products of their sociocultural domain – inscribed upon each are signifiers signifying the superiority of Dostoevsky over Bukowski. Let us advance to each undeterred by external pressure and deal death to assumption by capturing the ideas of egalitarian politics. A freedom born of equality, an equality born of eroded distinctions. Feed education by breadth of experience. Eat the fruits of niche and mainstream, high and low. Disregard in turn the nagging obligation to unthinkingly place one above the other.

Transcultural coupling is one route to undermining the hegemony of cultural labels. Yet the route is laced with troubles. Annoyingly we are reminded that such amalgams are rarely undertaken on equal terms. A victim meekly murmurs disenchantment all too often, the loser in a game devoid of balance. A dramatisation of Marx’s Capital, for example, starring Steve Guttenberg as linen, an important part in the early chapters on exchange value. Initially one assumes that this pokes fun at Guttenberg, it revels in his position as someone once famous, now languishing in TV Movie hell. But does it not also mock the dry rigor of Marx, the hoity-toity intellectualism of his treatise?

Perhaps the emphasis ought to be shifted. Rather than posit as the subjects of attack Marx and Guttenberg, the real subjects could be the consumers of Marx and Guttenberg. The empty leftist posturing of those first flicked pages of Capital from people in love with the image of revolt and marginality is surely worthy of attack. Here Guttenberg is the site of criticism, a reminder of another culture, acting as a grand decimator of pretension. The interstice between Marx and Guttenberg is a place where the very definition of high and low is mocked, a Golgotha where the carriers of hierarchism are showily crucified.

The term transcultural tends to be used apropos geographical reality. Cut up the world into nations, regions, continents, steep for long enough and an individual culture arises – clearly identifiable characteristics and conventions giving individuality to the culture. However much this usage predominates, the application to our western, capitalistic culture seems more than appropriate given the strength of our penchant for having culture separated by such gargantuan chasms. Translate and transmit, yield to gestures suited to transcend the myopic and ignoble state of affairs.

And the Beckett/Fonzie subtitle?

It’s too obvious and probably done elsewhere. There’s the echo of laughed joy in its genesis – an imagined past indissociable from the act. Each name connotes other names. To know that the latter was a central character in Happy Days and to know that the former wrote a play called Happy Days is enough information, a veritable glance into the future. The only question the wedding of the two asks is which direction shall be pursued?

The image of American youth culture in the 1950s, nostalgically and colourfully created by Happy Days, scripted by a man who specialised in showcasing the bleak arbitrariness of everyday life. Or perhaps take Richie and the Fonz out of their milieu – and Potsie too, if the mood is one of generosity – and have them scramble around within the abstract walls of a Beckett play.

Outlandishness is the priority, below which stands everything else. I quite like the idea of Richie and Fonzie doing the Winnie and Willie roles in the Beckett-created Happy Days. Sitting atop a grassy knoll, Richie would fastidiously lay out a range of items, lipstick and whatnot, probably stolen from Joanie, occasionally using them to beautify himself. (Already gender lines have become blurred as Richie Cunningham indulges in transvestism and, let’s say, turns out to be an incestuous pervert.) Meanwhile, Fonzie sits half-concealed on the knoll reading a newspaper, interrupting Richie’s staccato monologue every now and then with the words of a headline. Much would be the same with the Fonzie/Willie role, except of course every headline would be followed by a very Fonzie-esque “aaay!”

As the play progresses, Richie’s imprisonment in the routine of banal everyday practice would begin to gnaw away at his brain. His cries for recognition in the desire of the other would be ignored, his sole companion being his own fractured subjectivity. Speaking to Fonzie’s only visible appendage, an elbow jutting through a tuft of thick green, he’d continually deny the knowledge that it is himself to whom he speaks. The final scene would see Richie’s body almost entirely buried in the mound, kidding himself about a fictitious happiness supposedly forthcoming, while Fonzie stumbles down the side of the mound to jump the shark at a nearby beach.

Too many words have been given to this. An existential play sounding a new timbre, a result of the insertion of two sitcom characters, is too playful a prospect not to consider. As is also the idea of a Beckettian Happy Days (Mr Cunningham would make a great Hamm in Endgame). But alas, in the end, the act becomes a mere coda to the words.

Opeth - The Roundhouse Tapes DVD

2008-11-15T19:12:00.006Z

The passing of time is an odd thing. Ticking silently perched in the background or roiling noisily in clear sight, it’s a thing too easily forgotten about. In fact, to forget is natural, for time remains the dark side of the mind, cast in shadows of forgetting and indifference, passed over in the quotidian slipstream. Why count the seconds, why have time’s digestible chunks at the forefront of the mind? You wouldn’t – a canvas it is and a canvas it remains. Yet, too often the drift of minutes sheds its truistic shell and becomes a subject of cognizance, something that evokes thoughts and feelings, time’s reality giving way to timeless reflection.

Although Proust may have left it to cakes and such emo frivolity to summon the past, today’s past lives in technicolour and surround sound. No more must we trust in imperfect memory. Coming in coruscating images and the numb rumble of mediated representations is a pre-packaged past. Stolen from antiquity, a boon to the memory already hitting capacity. Consign memory and its shortcomings to the trash heap of obsolescence, DVD’s here to take its place. Like the substitution of simulacra for the events of history, personal experience becomes increasingly subject to recreation in the form of media. It’s an objectification, but an objectification carried out by hands not one’s own.

It smells slightly of postmodern pretension and the faddish hunger to mirror someone like Baudrillard or Virilio. It’s more than enough to bring bile to the back of the mouth, to have one shake when faced with the very depths to which they have descended. But this is what I think about when I approach Opeth’s new DVD, The Roundhouse Tapes.

Recorded on a cold, winter evening in London at the tail end of 2006, the show has taken an alarmingly long time to be released. Two years, in fact. The live album was put out one year after the event. Now two years later, we have the live DVD. Evidence it may be of how slowly things move in the music industry, of the restrictions felt by smaller record labels (Peaceville in this case), of video production companies overstretched, of red tape draped liberally upon all corners, how obstacles and the forward march of time unite to delay sights and sound for our eyes and ears – that may be the actuality of it, but the temporal remains the most interesting part for me as I was one of those present in the glow of Opeth that night.

The metal concert is a site of congregation, of fraternity, a place of common feeling and shared energy. Individuation has no place, the group takes centre stage. It’s an experience powerful and elating, a place where the body and the mind are dealt concurrent blows immediately both private and public. The expansive intimacy of the metal concert is what gives such resonance to viewing the recording of Opeth’s sublime performance. Attention is drawn to the two year gap, one’s mind operating in the present and the past: remember that time spent in line, shivering against the icy winter sky? remember the breakneck riffs raging across the crowd as on stage guitars are wielded and drums pummelled? remember beers in a local pub afterwards? Past and the present are interwoven, alternating in micro-movements, creating a vortex of a life, living one moment in a sweaty London music venue, another watching that moment recreated on screen.

The reminder is not just a personal one. It puts on display Opeth’s towering live presence, their faultless musicianship, that ability to play tough, technical passages while maintaining a captivating and galvanising stage presence. The audio has been carefully mixed and mastered and a great deal of kudos must go the band with this in mind. Not only do they successfully perform the music but they’re able to capture the depth of sound that appears on the albums, to capture the vast aural space that their recorded music generates. The juxtaposition of hard and soft, the epic quality evoked in the progressions, the mesmeric creative talents needed to construct these songs, all are on show. I was stunned on the night by Opeth’s live power. Watching the DVD, my opinion remains the same. There is only one word to use: amazing.

On the side of the negative, the DVD does suffer from somewhat dodgy editing. Shot lengths are seriously short, cuts are too abundant. A sight of Peter Lindgren soloing quickly morphs into a circle pit, hirsute bass throbbing is supplanted by frantic ride cymbal bashing. The aim, I suppose, is that the editing conveys a sense of being there, of the viewer having bodily presence in the energetic melee of the gig. However, it’s used far too frequently in concert films, the MTV aesthetic is assumed too broadly. Nevermore’s recent Year of the Voyager DVD, despite the music being absolutely phenomenal, is afflicted by such horribly jerky, impatient editing. The Roundhouse Tapes isn’t quite so extreme and isn’t constant in its flickering visual journey. Occasionally we do get a moment to see what chords Akerfeldt is playing, but sadly it’s rare. Luckily the strength of the performance allows one to overlook the editing; a few songs in and the music becomes the focus.

Alas I was not able to spot myself in the crowd, despite my keen narcissistic eyes being ever alert. Then again, the spotting of some dude with long hair dressed in black at an Opeth gig is going to prove quite difficult. Next time, to make it easier, I’ll wear a pink fluffy pimp suit.

Ocean by Warren Ellis & Chris Sprouse

2008-09-13T18:24:00.001+01:00

Below the surface lurks something unknown. Depths are forever home to objects gone from memory, matter driven from sentience, a refuge to both terror and the sublime. Seas rock in storms of taloned sea-bound bird beasts, gills with teeth, fallen creatures lifeless and exiled. Whether sharks or squid, the soft and the wet tear bravery to shreds, craven quiver remaining the only emotion to wield. Michael Crichton put alien intelligence on the ocean floor, as did James Cameron. Breathless lack of oxygen and claustrophobia assume new extremes. Foreign and crushing, lightless and inhospitable, sizable bodies of water conjure fear and mystery, inspiration to many a narrative.

Ocean, a six-part comic series written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Chris Sprouse, sees fit to explore just these watery conundrums and soaked shakes of puzzlement, this time shifting the action away from Earth. A big face asleep stares sightlessly from the cover, stilled slumber beneath an iced surface, the swollen presence of Jupiter hovering overhead. Space black cuts the background, sizzling cold as oceanic blue melts into the panels. Revealed are coffins, a numberless flotilla drifting submerged, deep in the blue. Housed in each coffin, a face shines forth, sleep-grimaced as puzzlement comes to the fore.

Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is the focus here. The series hypotheses that below its icy surface a vast ocean exists. With roots in reality, Ocean appropriates speculation in scientific quarters about what lies hidden under Europa’s exterior, choosing as a foundation proposals of a liquid interior. It’s an attractive idea and fertile soil for fiction, and clearly Ellis is interested in exploring such a possibility.

Introducing the plot is the discovery of lots of coffins in Europa’s ocean. A scientific research team posted in orbit around the moon make the discovery, forced into cautious shudder at the virgin sight, words of astonishment inflected with fright buoying their find. Cut to New York City and our protagonist Nathan Kane. He’s a United Nations weapons inspector, obsessed by the infancy of space travel, NASA’s early voyages into space, the way they seem so unsophisticated in comparison to the interplanetary travel of the present. He’s also been trained in the Samuel L. Jackson school of attitude (or should that be Attitude): the bald head, the curt remarks, the ballsy comic invective, the flights to violence. He’s been sent to investigate the coffin situation, for it turns out that the coffins are not the only objects populating the ocean. Mysterious weapons, canon-esque and ominous, float close to the coffins, as does a large ringed structure. Kane’s purpose becomes clear: strip from the objects their ambiguity and nullify any risk they may pose.

Working against him is a shifty corporation called Doors. They are carrying out their own research in the area and similarly discover Europa’s watery secrets. Given to the pernicious, weapon development is their principle interest and consequently moneyed glands are aroused by the potential offered by the mysterious weapons. Eventually the alien origins of all this is revealed: the coffins host a sleeping alien species that ran amok in the cosmos eons ago, then fancied a few thousand years of kip.

Ocean is an entertaining slice of science fiction. The proximity to truth that underlies the plot helps matters, giving authentic leanings to the comic flow as cosmological wonder parts to reveal aliens and action sequences. A dynamic is certainly created in the marriage of Ellis’s story and Sprouse’s wonderful artwork. Grand images provoke awe, a perfect container for the plot. Visual acumen facilitates fast-paced action, with each kick and sputter accorded due attention.

Alas it is the plot where Ocean falls down. Although enjoyable, the piece feels rushed. Granted, the restrictions of it being such a short series are apparent: it’s obvious that no great character study is going to be achieved in such a short time, the offerings reflect the limits of a run probably too brief. That being said, changes in structure, different choices regarding characterisation, the omission of redundant ingredients, could have worked to negate those restrictions. The characters are all drawn in archetypes: badass hero, promiscuous engineer, corporate villain, Asian scientist, beardy scientist, etc. The dialogue strains to be witty, and placed beside Ellis’s Transmetropolitan (that brilliant thread of Gonzo-quaking humour and exploding erudition), Ocean looks tired and uninspired.

Other elements reek of the already seen. The ringed structure mentioned before turns out to be a stargate-type construction, enabling one to move instantaneously from one point in space to another. Whether it’s Spader and Russell damaging perceptible spatiality, or Sam Neill going insane on the edge of a black hole, we’ve seen such an object before. The hibernating aliens, a humanoid bunch, it transpires that they are our ancestors. Before they went to sleep, they saw fit ‘to seed the requirements for human life on the young planet Earth.’ Again this isn’t a new concept, even a horrible movie like Mission to Mars posed the idea. In addition, propelling much of the narrative is the antagonistic force of the Doors corporation. Whilst I like the reference to Microsoft (Doors, Windows, see?), it might as well be Alien’s malevolent Company, perhaps swabbed in a different brand of conspiratorial cologne.

Ocean amounts to little more than a fun spurt of Sci-Fi, a tad too generic and derivative to earn the praise I would like to give it.

Doomsday

2008-08-26T20:19:00.003+01:00

Given the sheer amount of stories concocted by the human mind – the epic narratives and romantic fables drawing fiction curlicues over history – it’s no surprise that there may appear some overlap. Traits rapidly become shared. Fleeting ideas ascend to the level of principle, conventions to be adopted thenceforth. Through Deconstructing Harry we catch glimpses of Wild Strawberries. Sight of Stardust Memories gives way to 8 1/2. Such is natural: images reveal other images, words disclose other words. Influence is unavoidable – traces of the past remain inscribed upon even the best of culture born anew.

For criticism there is no easier method by which to offer commentary than to say such-and-such reminds one of something else: this film reeks of another, this novel’s a mere semblance of another, this painting appears similar to another. It allows for a common point of reference and works considerably to fill up the required word count.

Opening a review with opaque remarks on how references permeate the edifice of fiction is ominous for the object of criticism. To say Doomsday is a shallow collage of film references would be too simplistic but not untrue. Scenes progress as transparent tributes to preceding films. Plot points and stylistic devices are brandished with no attempt to mask their source. Granted, in interviews Neil Marshall speaks openly about the films Doomsday pays homage to. The usual clatter of Mad Max and Escape From New York are present, proudly erected audiovisual prayers offered to the cinema gods. There is intention and that’s fine, what the film can’t be accused of is trying to conceal its nature. All is on show, all is exposed, all is honesty driven across the filmic.

Where the painful castigation must begin however is at the point where we attempt to look beyond the references. What is beheld, alas, is of little substance, a mixture of the trite and the tired, the dull and the dry. It’s especially painful as Neil Marshall was proving himself to be one of Britain’s top young directors. Dog Soldiers was a buoyant debut, a fun slice of werewolf carnage in the Scottish highlands. It gave smiles to bloodlust and signified great works to come. The potential was brilliantly realised with his follow-up, The Descent. Claustrophobia and menace mingled superbly in this tale of a group of women trapped down a cave populated by vicious humanoid creatures. Perhaps the best film released that year, it was enough to make the words Neil Marshall a selling point in themselves. Whether Doomsday is a hiccup or the harbinger of creativity’s demise, we’ll have to wait and see.

The film is set in the near future. A virus has descended on Scotland, killing much of the populace. The country is sealed off, use of air space is prohibited and a wall runs along the border with England. Anyone trying to escape south is shot on sight, trigger-happy patrols line the border wall. A few years later, the virus breaks out in London. The government, impelled to take action in the face of mass panic, assemble a military team to go into Scotland where a number of survivors still roam Glasgow. Amongst these survivors is a scientist who apparently has the cure for the virus. The team, led by Rhona Mitra, must track down the scientist and acquire the cure. In the process, they discover legions of loutish survivors intent on murder and pillage. Will they combat the nasty people and successfully requisition the formula they desire?

Sadly I was too distracted by the endless parade of cinematic references gracing the screen to care about that. When Mitra and co stampede into Glasgow in armoured vehicles, the locals that ambush them might as well be Giger’s aliens, for the scene feels like a complete reproduction of the bit in Aliens where the marines arrive on LV-426. The Glaswegian locals, I presume, are also big fans of Mad Max 3 – their mincing around wouldn’t seem out of place next to Mel Gibson. The fortress city, the nest of danger that Glasgow has become, could be New York or LA, targets for one of Snake Plissken’s infiltrations; the immoral postures of the officials that send Mitra and co on their mission only go to reinforce the comparison. Films like these worked on the back of their grit, a dirty low-budget atmosphere that gave texture and nuance to the plot. Doomsday’s carefully crafted visual sheen lacks even the faintest ounce of grit; it fails where its antecedents succeeded.

Like I already remarked, references are inevitable hallmarks of cinema. The best directors don’t balk at the looming figure of influence, such impossible wishes are needless. But when surface is all there is, when all we have is a collection of references inserted sans content, then we’re left with a bland and disappointing film that can only argue its ‘watchability’ with silence. The concept of the infectious virus spreading and causing havoc has long drifted into cliché (cf. The Omega Man, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, etc). Early shots of London look like and shots of a crowded bridge look like Children of MenCloverfield. John Carpenter-worship assumes a new low when the rioting of Glaswegian ne’er-do-wells sparks memories of Ghosts of Mars. This is not to say that the action sequences are not competently shot and choreographed, they are, but this is not enough. Where oh where has dynamic originality absconded to! Marshall seems to be asking “what if all my favourite flicks was set in Scotland, wouldn’t that be cool?” Well not even the shades of Mad Max meets Trainspotting can enable to me to answer yes to that.

Any characterisation is senselessly mauled from the off by the dire quality of the dialogue. Mitra, still clearly playing Lara Croft, is the stoic leader, a badass with a goal. But in ways similar to how Doomsday transposes gritty narrative tropes into a glossy visual feast, in turn heralding its failure, Mitra prompts disinterest and indifference, for she is not the terminator. Drab characters mumble awkward lines of dialogue throughout the film. Even Malcolm McDowell’s cheesy Shakespearian villain, who sits in his Scottish castle brooding, isn’t enough to salvage the film. (Thoughts on Sean Pertwee will remain unsaid.)

The polished visuals, as well as negating the very elements that made Assault on Precinct 13 and its ilk so great, frequently work make the film look like an advertisement. Fittingly perhaps, because adverts are also assemblages of images with no content, all signifiers with no signified. Airborne shots of Mitra ploughing through the Highland countryside in a sports car bear a likeness to an ad for Nissan or Hyundai. Again competent, but the mix of gritty plot and glistening cinematography does not work. No glorious amalgam, no interesting juxtaposition, it just does not work.

The final car chase sequence aspires to be fun, a throwback to the ethos of Dog Soldiers. Exaggerated vehicular madness, crashes, explosions, all run to the tune of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes”. The light-heartedness and the clear revelry in violence make the sequence enjoyable, but the straight-faced tedium that preceded it is not forgotten. It’s a shame that this is where Marshall has gone to, all we are left with is hope that his next venture will be an improvement. A task that shouldn’t be too difficult, for in Doomsday he has created the Underworld of virus movies.

Johnny 2.0 (Starring Jeff Fahey)

2008-08-12T23:59:00.007+01:00

Coaxed gently out of its shell comes another film signed Jeff Fahey. Already the screams of hyperbole can be heard humming whimsy over the forgotten silence. The seconds sweep past bearing Fahey’s autograph, yawning into moments tailored to hold Fahey’s filmic image. His channels of cinematic hunger turned image are containers born to carry Fahey’s essence. Odourless and soundless, the vacuum has spilled into it coursing streams of artistry and erudition, malt froth bubbling insight, a wash of glistening texture.

From the kilns that mark his skin and drip through time on a carpet of wild blonde, films are given existence. The true, scientifically-verifiable nature of the process will never be fully known to us – Fahey discloses only through his art. The power of metaphor is the one tool we have to capture the process. To represent the genesis we must cast eyes into a lightless deep now alive in light, lit by blue flames that drive away the pitch past. The names differ upon each new notch pierced through the ether; this one calls itself Johnny 2.0.

It’s been said that snakes see in heat. Jeff Fahey sees in social commentary. His eye for topicality is clearly on show here and it bats admonitory lashes at both the few and the many. Never has Fahey had room for complacency – one time he met complacency for a drink but that was only because it promised him a part in a Stephen King miniseries. Complacency hangs not to Fahey, for it is the target for which he aims, one of the numberless targets that flee when the light of Fahey is turned on.

Fahey is Johnny Dalton, a scientist, who has perfected the technique of cloning. While celebrating the success of his research, industrial terrorists bust into his lab. They destroy equipment and set animals free, leaving the lab in flames. In the inevitable confrontation Fahey gets a whack on the head and is taken to receive medical treatment. Next thing, he wakes up twenty years thence. (The white walls are enough to know it’s the future – doubtless it won’t be until 2010 before some visionary finally invents those things.)

Fahey opens his eyes and meets the future. But it’s not Fahey, oh no, it’s a clone. His corporate paymasters have recreated him from the MRI scan he received after the knock on the head. So, poor Johnny Dalton died that night and it’s taken them two decades to complete his research and enable the cloning of a human being? Not quite. Dalton lived and continued his games with the double helix. The future not being too removed from the present, industrial terrorists are once again causing problems. They’ve kidnapped Fahey, leaving only one course of action for the company: build a new Fahey to find the old Fahey.

It’s an astoundingly brilliant scenario, one that’ll be appreciated by even those fools resistant to the charms of Fahey. Naysayers will crumble as the world of Johnny 2.0 flashes into view. A dystopia, swelling with Demolition Man jaggedness, where the nation state is no more, replaced by the corporations that run private police forces serving their needs, this is perfect terrain for Fahey the Second to find Fahey the First. Reluctance to the mission is soon dealt death as the sneaky money goons make it so Fahey cannot decline: a genetic defect in the clones means they die after a period of time, but Original Fahey has the solution to the problem. A race against time is what Cloned Fahey enters into, the motive foisted upon him unwillingly.

Best thing about this whole set up is Missing Fahey. Aged by many years, he wears a head of long silver hair with a beard similarly silver. His is the face of the hippy recluse, a character who should have starred in a Dennis Hopper film, who should have rode through America on the back of a Llama singing hymns to India. Fahey wore a hat in Ghost Rock, but his Johnny 2.0 guise, one of them, proves a new height in the field of Items that Fahey Wears on his Head. No amount of Stetsons can surpass the silver wizard hair that flows from atop Fahey’s skull.

In 1996, the first mammal was cloned. Her name was Dolly the Sheep. The news spread fast as media coverage was extensive. Discussion and debate raged, questions of ethics were raised, sheer curiosity mingled with uncertainty and hesitation. Fahey pondered this issue and then came out with Johnny 2.0 in 1998. Fahey’s conclusions, as suggested by the film, were that the power should not be in the hands of those bodies inclined to misuse it (big corporate powers), that lust for scientific exploration could potentially be supplanted by megalomaniacal urges for more power (and immortality), that clones should be the recipients of empathy (not gunfire), and that cloning should be a sacrosanct process functioning to assist the species (and not causing Fahey plot difficulties).

Fahey’s commenting eyes have winked words on technology and science in the past. The Lawnmower Man addressed virtual reality. Absolute Zero global warming. Scorpius Gigantus the manipulation of genetic materials. Fahey uses his art as implements with which to poke and prod the world, wealthy blue scrutinising the micro and the macro, the general and the particular. A vibrant web of meaning is created. Even his handle of choice provokes one into rumination: Dalton. The same Dalton who once graced the screen as James Bond? The Dalton of Licence to Kill, the finest film ever to emerge from the series? Perhaps. We don’t know. Fahey persists in always injecting some modicum of ambiguity into his work, just enough to stimulate our minds. Fahey’s grand matrix of commentary stretches far, one thing signifying another in an everlasting cluster of signification.

Johnny 2.0’s main gift to us is the multitude of Faheys. Two Faheys let loose to flame onscreen in dreamscapes turned real. The animosity of one Fahey towards another prompts a moment or two of Fighting Faheys. Fahey already fought his own limbs in Body Parts, but this is the first time he’s fought an entire self. It is truly as impressive as it sounds. And even after they form an uneasy truce, the tension between the two is enchanting. Fahey and his double – the double and his Fahey. The answerless question of autonomy is inscribed upon the fear of the double: am I the one or is it he? The singularity that defines the self is attacked by doubt in the dust of unsanctioned fragmentation. Bisected Fahey must make do with his own multiplicity, gain a new sense of identity and mourn his own lack of wizard locks.

Fahey’s journey in search of himself doesn’t consist of some lame Wild Strawberries-esque delving into the mind, a trip through memory and neuroses. Fahey has no time for that. His voyage of self-discovery has him set out to find his actual self, the man who has his face, his timbre of voice, his beaming blue, his mumbling lips of discourse – the man they call Jeff Fahey.

Night of the Lepus

2008-08-10T19:37:00.004+01:00

Bugs Bunny has killed Elmer Fudd. Killed him dead. Wrenched the life from right out his body. Mauling and gnashing; an insatiable bloodlust tearing into pieces a Fudd shocked and dying. Teeth and claws wielded with vicious intent, ripping flesh from bone, the sound of screaming fading as the seconds tick past. It’s a nightmare vision belonging to a world where Chuck Jones, homicidal glint in his eyes, murders his friends and family. It’s a genre defying leap into the mad and the perplexing. Why would a Bugs Bunny, mischievous as he is, proceed down such a violent avenue? To whom are we supposed to grant the moral high ground if Bugs is to revel in the degeneracy of crimson reprisal? Where are we left and what tools do we hold to deal with the blackening void in our social soul?

Elmer Fudd was not killed by Bugs Bunny. But he could have been, given the pathways opened up by Night of the Lepus. Potential acts in the realm of the cartoon are disclosed by the film, selflessly brandishing myriad methods by which we can alter, mentally and physically, the images that mark our childhood. Corrupt forces perhaps, but dashes of colour to be added to nostalgic thoughts discoloured by time. The colour proffered by Night of the Lepus? A glowing red oozing in time with the dirge of Merzbow and the juddered acumen of Artaud. Let it shift the mind into new dimensions, kicking creativity into perverse forms. No other result is to be permitted, the light cast by the killer bunny rabbit yields no options but one: imagine Bugs Bunny killing Elmer Fudd.

But hang on – killer bunny rabbits? I once saw a giant worm chase Kevin Bacon, but killer bunny rabbits? Surely my eyes and ears deceive. The spokes on the wheels of my mind must be bust. Yet it’s true. Bemused faces may radiate bemused looks at the idea but the truth remains as it is. Stretches the suspension of disbelief, sure, but we can’t ignore it: the bunnies are out to get us. Forget your sharks and your crocodiles, their carnivorousness is crude and uninteresting. Cute and furry, these are the traits of the killer in our contemporary society – and when I say contemporary I mean 1972, when the film was made.

Origins are sometimes interesting, sometimes not. Killers are shaped by different forces. Ichi was bullied. Lecter was hungry. Bateman was bored. The bunnies? Ah, isn’t it another case of science gone wrong? Pretend Brundle never got cocky, pretend West didn’t forgo ethics in the name of ambition and we might be surprised. But it’s not to be. Science’s festering underside is revealed to us once again.

Night of the Lepus opens with a short public information film, an alarming report on the growing population of rabbits and the negative effects to accompany it. Farmers’ crops are shown destroyed by scurrying hordes of rabbits. Economic stability finds itself undercut by mammals whose only crime is plenitude. Instinctual consumption brands the enemy, its rapid reproduction elevating it to the status of demon beast, a figurative monster holding sway over rural commerce. We are slowly brought into the fold by seeing the real dangers posed by rabbits. We lower our guard while simultaneously entertaining the concept of rabbits being pricks.

The narrative dramatises what the documentary footage introduced. A community is plagued by an excessive number of rabbits. A zoologist is called in to come up with a solution, something that will diminish the population without having to resort to shotguns and shaking safari lust. He, with wife and kid in tow, captures a few rabbits and transports them to his university lab where he hopes to create a formula that will effect a bloodless cull. In the middle of the experimentation his daughter removes a test subject, an endearing little critter she’s become rather attached to, and lets it loose in the countryside. Big mistake, for that rabbit has been injected with a serum that doesn’t prevent reproduction – as was the aim – but instead turns the creatures into giant flesh-eating killers.

The freed rabbit consequently infects all his brothers and sisters, they too turning a dark shade of ferocious. Dead bodies, limbs torn off torsos, terrified eyes blinking disbelief, these are the products of the enlarged bunnies as they go on nightly rampages through the community. The figurative monster of the intro gives way to the literal monster of the narrative. The bunnies are significantly changed, transformed into a demented counter-image, touched by nocturnal urges that impel them to feast on human flesh. And why are they nocturnal? I can’t say, a reason for this is never offered – I can only assume it to be a personal preference.

Dodgy overdubs and static acting help orientate us to watch Night of the Lepus. We know from the outset that an enjoyable horror movie is going to unravel before our spectatorial faces. A dose of blood, some teased scuttling in the darkness and devil driven waves of oversized rabbits bounding into town. Spooked or confused, such is the reaction by the populace, with a few exceptions. The protagonist, as is his scientific wont, keeps objective distance, spurred into curiosity by the situation and not once assailed by guilt. His pal, none other than Dr McCoy, also delves into the twists and turns of biological mutation without so much as a gasp. Cool-headedness rules supreme. Luckily, Janet Leigh arrives to satisfy the scream quota. Her and her daughter add needed ingredients of the human to our protagonist and permit themselves to get into peril just so he can rescue them.

Extreme close-ups guide our sight of the mutated rabbits. Sprints over dirt are recorded by cameras positioned only a small distance away, the zoom function exploited to the fullest. Scale models let us see the rabbits looting a convenience store and roaming past houses and over bridges. This is a technique barely concealed. Only the most suspended disbelief could fail to notice the use of miniatures. Perhaps it’s a commentary on scale or our sense of spatial perception – or it could just be crappy production values.

What I know even less is why every shot has the rabbits running in slow motion. Was there such a dearth of footage that they needed to slow down every sequence to meet the running time? The bats in Bats needed no extra time to flutter, so I don’t see why the rabbits insisted upon such a plodding march.

Night of the Lepus is fun. Corny but fun. It’s not on par with the quality of The Killer Shrews, nor does it match the rat lunacy of The Graveyard Shift, but as far as the concept of ruthless, man-eating bunny rabbits goes, it’s a winner. Short of seeing Elmer Fudd’s headless body lying beside the road, this film will be charged with satisfying every inch of our leporid bloodlust for a long time to come.

Music as Opposition: Akercocke’s Voyage into Northern Ireland

2008-08-03T19:39:00.005+01:00

In May 2007, English extreme metal band Akercocke appeared on BBC One Northern Ireland’s Nolan Live, a weekly late night talk show. They were on the show to discuss their impending gig in Belfast, an event that was courting controversy amongst Christian activists in the area who were aghast at the band’s explicit Satanism. The televised debate had host Stephen Nolan conduct questions and exchanges between two members of the band, beamed by satellite link into the studio, and two Christian representatives sitting in the studio. The ensuing debate acts as a microcosm of Northern Irish values, a snapshot of contemporary woes that see one generation attempt to succeed another, and the ethos of modernity striving to break free from the shackles of outdated traditions and revolting dichotomies.

There are no surprises in watching the debate. From the beginning Akercocke are vilified and framed as a danger to the morals of the country. An introductory clip mixes shots of the band playing background to a leather-clad maiden dancing seductively with live footage showing vocalist Jason Mendonca screeching death metal under waves of crimson lighting. Nolan’s first question asks whether the band is indeed intent on summoning the Antichrist to Belfast, self-importance resting unconcealed on each spoken syllable. Akercocke thankfully choose to focus on the real reason for their visit: the fans. They proceed to compliment Northern Ireland’s metal community and the excellent welcome they received on their last visit to Belfast.

Committed to maintaining the idea that the band is an evil virus come to infect the innocent youth of the nation, Nolan flippantly asks, “what’s so great about the Antichrist?” They reply with feigned befuddlement and bemoan the abstract nature of the question. Even when Nolan gets riled up, Akercocke hold their calm demeanour. They are well aware that such a show can’t be taken seriously, that they are the outsiders, that the limits imposed by the televisual sphere will not facilitate them a proper voice, that the only route to take is to demonstrate intelligence and sobriety in the face of spiteful and erroneous preconceptions.

The studio guests express arguments over-rehearsed and long overused, trite words that attack lyrics and imagery, that gesture towards censorship, that wobble haphazardly in tones of moral outrage, vituperation warning of young minds being corrupted by anything that isn’t Christian dogma. Nolan privileges the religious duo, while Akercocke are consigned to the background, left to be spoken over and baselessly accused of iniquitous deeds. The nadir is hit when the prosecuting triumvirate of Nolan and co start injecting spousal violence and racial hatred into the mix, conflating genuine moral issues with puritanical sensationalism and consequently demeaning the former.

But it’s obvious that Akercocke are not going to be hailed as equals on a television show of this type. The formal restrictions that accompany the medium mean that opposing views are disadvantaged: as Noam Chomsky has stated, new ideas require time to explain, to fully disseminate, and the tight time constraints that structure mainstream media, especially television, prevent that process taking place. Fresh viewpoints must battle with consensus, with dominant ideology. It’s an incredibly difficult task to introduce original ideas into the mainstream – immediate dismissal is often the only act precipitated by such ideas. Akercocke receive little chance to combat the conservative invective being spit in their direction, a type of invective already well-known to all who might watch the show.

The most negative representation to come from the show is that the Northern Irish are a group of close-minded, evangelical idiots. One of the studio guests, the fellow in the “Jesus” t-shirt, refers to “Northern Ireland people” as if he speaks for a homogeneous group. The assumption is that “Northern Ireland people” not only wish for Akercocke to stay away from this tiny outcrop of land lying astride the Atlantic Ocean, but that they even care enough to oppose some people playing music in front of some other people who incidentally love that music. Perhaps this idiocy is best exemplified by Joanne from Armagh who calls in to comment. She begins her opinion with the words, “I think the band should not come to Northern Ireland because…” and then ums and ahs as she tries to formulate an argument, ending with the very learned observation that the band members are “evil-lookin’.”

The stereotype of God-fearing ants controlled by church authority and holy text is as untrue as the assertion that Akercocke are going to ignite satanic longings in the heads all who listen to them. Northern Ireland is a heterogeneous society comprised of different people with different tastes and different beliefs. To speak of a single “Northern Ireland people” remains only a testament to the stupidity of the utterer.

The province is subject to divisions, but not between Catholics and Protestants. An internal gulf separates a caste of mindless traditionalists who persist in elevating the slightest of religious difference to a political doctrine and those who see these divisions of religion as meaningless. It’s encouraging to see the birth of mindsets that run counter to the traditional establishment, persons who can avoid being dominated by old ideologies and fears.

The problem, however, lies in the fact that political power rests in the hands of puritanical parties intent on perpetuating antiquated divisions. Just observe the remarks of Iris Robinson – Member of Parliament and wife of current First Minister Peter Robinson – who recently defined homosexuality as an abomination and morally homologous to paedophilia, remarks that she continues to defend even after a slew of negative publicity. It’s atop this protuberance of ignorance and myopia on which Northern Irish politics is hoisted. Sure there are parties fighting the status quo, but real political power is gripped by extreme corners.

Akercocke did play Belfast in May 2007, despite protests from locals incited by the appearance on Nolan Live. The visit permitted the band a look at two sides of Northern Ireland: the side aligned with religious fundamentalism, slowly retching its last dying cries, and a side untainted by indoctrination into twisted moral absolutes. The metal community is a space for distancing oneself from the old guard, of refusing to accept an identity based on the arbitrary dictate of the religion into which one is born. I don’t want to generalise too much – total uniformity is never present in any sort of subculture – but Northern Ireland’s metal community is commonly populated by people who don’t think Catholics and Protestants are eternal enemies, who don’t place importance on whether certain people can march in certain locations.

The power structure of Northern Ireland alienates people, it seems backwards, entrenched in orthodoxies that mean nothing in a cosmopolitan society that communicates with the world on a continuous basis. Such estrangement breeds the adoption of niche identities. Metal is a domain for creative exploration and solidarity along aesthetic lines. The fans of Belfast were able to enjoy Akercocke’s blend of aching brutality and dulcet melody on that date, undeterred by the seething protests typified by Stephen Nolan and his guests.

A final voice from the audience at the close of the show speaks of respecting difference, enjoying the band if you are inclined to do so and ignoring the band if otherwise. Sanity pierces Northern Ireland’s improving physiognomy at times, and does so more and more, but work still remains, we must slice away the ties of sectarianism and religious obduracy. If it means freedom for bands of the quality of Akercocke to come and play without restriction, then it’s all the more urgent that action happens now.

Seagalogy by Vern

2008-07-06T10:05:00.006+01:00

Looking back at a distant youth, my mind strains to remember its first encounter with Steven Seagal. Was it the patchwork of naval fisticuffs known as Under Siege? Perhaps the pugilistic tremble of Nico/Above the Law? Maybe the virgin trip to a place called Out in Out for Justice? Actually, although I’m hindered by a memory stumbling blind in the crannies of time, I do believe the most likely candidate to be Hard to Kill. The fable of Mason Storm, the coma, the beard, images that poke through the mist of time. A grand training montage and fleeting images of Kelly LeBrock ride into the mind’s eye, objects hitherto indistinct, now shifted into focus.

Then it becomes clear, this was a youth marked by Steven Seagal. Recollection represents a past mutated beyond the pedestrian crawl of reality. In place of the song of the ice cream van is now the musical thud of Seagal kicking a man. Forgotten songs are blotted out by Seagal’s sagacious words whispered aplenty. Toys and the cherished plastic of childhood are supplanted by idolatrous mimicry of Seagal’s every stance, every wobble of leg, every elbow shook in defiance of the Man. Life as a kid progressed spotted by the cheer of aikido combat and trenchant knee-face collisions; I was a sponge in a basin of Seagal.

With this history in mind, it’s clear I couldn’t ignore the publication of Vern’s adventurous new book, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal. It was to be read, a simple glance at the cover with its schematic of Seagal guaranteed that. Avoid this and a life of incomplete Seagalogical knowledge awaits, that was the warning. Thankfully a speedy purchase was enough to eliminate the risk.

Vern’s fame and notoriety comes primarily from his contributions to that hub of joyous internet movie geekdom Ain’t It Cool News. His reviews, often of the action and horror genres but not always, are words brandished like weapons, words slicing through the mire of cinema. His irreverent commentaries have become a staple of AICN, yielding Vern massive popularity. He’s a self-proclaimed outlaw film critic, a man resistant to the prevailing ways of understanding cinema, to the accepted methods by which a film should be judged, to the drab form that mainstream film criticism assumes. He strives for an individual voice, creatively free to entertain and educate in whichever way necessary. Vern’s rogue journalism has now spawned Seagalogy.

A weighty tome of some 400-pages, the book charts Seagal’s manoeuvres in and out of cinema over the past twenty years. It’s not a biography, although biographical information is imparted here and there. Seagalogy is a film by film study, running chronologically from Above the Law (1988) to Pistol Whipped (2008). Vern creates a narrative of Seagal’s filmography using a modified auteur theory where these films are presented as distinctly Seagalian: specific motifs populate his filmography, recurring frequently and making possible, where eyes are attentive, an effortless discernability. When you watch a Hitchcock, you know you’re watching a Hitchcock. Similarly, when you watch a Seagal, you know you’re watching a Seagal. Even in variations over the course of time – Vern describes a movement from theatrical action films concerned with political issues to straight-to-video action films replete with convoluted stories and excessive dubbing – a degree of distinction remains; Seagal’s auteurship is indelibly written all over these films.

Seagalogy’s major achievement is that it functions as an impressive political gesture. By this, I don’t mean the overtly political comments Vern makes, the digs at the Bush administration, the references to American imperialism, the leftist disdain for the specious logic of big business – these are laudable aspects but such rhetoric is present elsewhere in superior form. No, it’s in the realm of cultural politics that Seagalogy strikes an inspirational blow.

From chapter to chapter, film to film, Vern revels in the wash of low culture, celebrating its very essence and elevating it to the level of art. He eschews a tone of superiority, letting this much scorned corner of culture free from its imposed bondage, bringing to an end the oppression wrought by elite arbiters of taste. The enthusiasm that saturates every word is sincere and has the effect of generating in the reader a new respect for Seagal’s filmography (and other films of similar genre and position on the culture hierarchy). Political themes and assorted social commentary can mingle with cheesy one-liners and gratuitous violence we are told. There is no irony when the Iran-Contra scandal is cited in the discussion of Above the Law. Nor is there irony when Hard to Kill’s villainous senator is represented as a figure analogous to George Bush Senior. There’s a genuine respect exhibited for the ability of these films to make serious statements on important events happening in the world.

That said, there’s no shortage of humour here. While Vern avoids elevating himself above the films and resists writing a book composed entirely of mocking observations and derisory suppositions, he does indulge in the odd bout of ridicule. Naturally, instances of dodgy dialogue and sequences of cartoonish violence are open to myriad jokes and wry remarks, you’d be insane to pass up such an opportunity. Yet even when these are seized upon and Vern pokes fun at Seagal’s omnipresent ponytail, he does it with an endearing smirk, with a courteous nod of the skull, a cheeky wink in the eye. It reads like the gentle mocking exchanged between close friends. Plot holes are picked out as fodder for mirth, the unsubtle use of Seagal stunt doubles is material for sly asides, obvious examples that’d have even Seagal chuckling in agreement. Despite the mix of jokes and earnest analysis, there is a consistency in Seagalogy – Vern’s passion never falters, it permeates the entire thesis, making the book more than a mere comedy article.

Form as much as content facilitates the reappraisal of Seagal’s cinema that Seagalogy initiates. The prose is light and accessible, bereft of any tint of pomposity, yet buoyed by a keen intelligence. In the vein of writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, Vern succeeds in saying smart things in very simple ways, writing without ostentation or circumlocution, expressing insight in formidably basic language, conveying his interpretations of the Seagal canon in a concise fashion. The avenues by which he finds enjoyment in the shoddiness of some of the films, discovering hidden glimpses of coherence in the disordered, endeavouring to extract from the badly edited a linear narrative, are coated in accessibility and an enthusiasm that’s highly contagious.

The celebration of low culture has emerged as a fashionable pursuit in recent years, a vogue stretching from the blog world to as far as the tallest of ivory towers. We can look at Slavoj Zizek’s perennial disclosure of the tents of Lacanian psychoanalysis through the use of cinema, television and dirty jokes, or Fredric Jameson’s inquiries into science fiction. But regardless of the politics behind their disquisitions or the specific examples they wrench from popular culture, their work remains bound up within an institutional mode of discourse, adorned with academic rhetoric – bourgeois whispers carrying insight after insight on a carpet of restricted readership.

Vern’s everyman voice, by contrast, can be digested by all and doesn’t require citations of Hegel and Althusser to bolster its argument. The depth of his examination can be seen in the way he picks out minute details hitherto concealed by pace, pausing the action to identify newspaper headlines and diary notes, factoids that either enrich the story or cause an already confusing narrative to become that bit more confusing. He also humanises the productions by reminding us that there are genuine ideas that go into making these films, interesting and ambitious ideas that are in the end beset by financial and logistical obstacles.

The political gesture of Seagalogy is that of a fist shaken at elite naysayers who disregard the aesthetic worth of films of the sort that would feature Seagal, cultural products that are deemed to be low culture and often refused a chance to exhibit their worth. Action flicks, horror flicks, comic books, heavy metal, computer games, these are regularly subject to scoffs from elite opinion, looked down upon as homogeneous feed for the stupid masses, brainless sludge to keep the proletariat under the thumb – even Adorno held this view. I mean, I like high modernism as much as anyone, but I’d be just as inclined to watch Hell Comes to Frogtown as I’d be to read The Flowers of Evil; both are wonderful, individual works of art and merit many hours spent in their company. Sure there’s shite out there, but a work of art is shite in its own right, not by way of its genre classification or the cultural presumptions associated with it. We must not forget that there’s just as much creativity involved in the development of computer games or graphic novels as in, say, theatre or art cinema, and that the former have the ability to excite and enthral just as much as the latter. While I myself am given to extreme hyperbole and heavily ironic gestures, my passion for the cinema of Bruce Campbell is as sincere as my passion for Nabokov (I mention Nabokov not to neutralise the former but to create a field of equality and balance).

I'm reluctant to intellectualise Vern’s achievement too much since he is himself in part parodying academicism, just point some eyes at the book title or the footnotes that intermittently appear. But Seagalogy remains a sublime triumph for those concerned with the political shades of culture, with how the very hierarchisation of culture is a site of class struggle and needs to be fought against. Vern’s combination of diligent analysis, sardonic humour and welcoming prose make for a great addition to an attempt to stomp out cultural snobbishness. People are not dumb, they happily embrace the dual characteristics of Seagal’s filmic history, at one moment buzzing off the energy emitted off the fighting scenes, at another laughing at the corniness of it all. Vern puts it perfectly at the end of the book when he reviews Seagal’s gig in Seattle on the Mojo Priest tour: ruminating on the fans in the crowd, the ecstatic worshippers of Seagal, he writes: “A lot of them knew it was funny what they were seeing but they were genuinely appreciative of Seagal.” It’s funny but we love it, Seagal and Seagalogy alike.

The Eden Formula (Starring Jeff Fahey)

2008-06-23T23:56:00.009+01:00

The Eden Formula begins with an airborne shot of Los Angeles at night, lights flickering blue like a thousand tumbling turns on the freight train to pornsville. Shining up from the below, shifting into blurs, the mass of glaring blue retches forth, consuming the black of night. A strong tone of bluish valour echoes visual symphonies at the floating camera as it passes overhead. It’s a graph on which are plotted nodes of becoming, blue pockmarks giving words to thought, noiselessly lurching towards a final blackening.

This opening is not simply an attempt to justify the cost of hiring a helicopter for the day. Nor it is a chance to squander the final energies of the special effects team, to give them something to do while the titles-man finishes choosing fonts (oh Helvetica, oh Verdana, how are we to make these decisions?). This sequence establishes the mood of the film, declaring artistic intentions and gesturing to stylistic devices to be witnessed in abundance later. In fact, the entire film can be discovered laid out in these fleeting moments of introduction, a narrative exposed to the most perspicacious of eyes, nooks and crannies of story lit by anticipatory light. The colour of that light? The most scorching blue one could ever envision.

These images of night time cityscapes, glaring blue sparkling in a lightless gulf, anticipate the arrival of Jeff Fahey. They foretell his presence in the confines of this chunk of cinema we know as The Eden Formula. They have the responsibility of preparing the humble viewer for the reams of blue splendour awaiting him or her. Less than thirty seconds in and Fahey has already stolen this film and claimed it as his own!

Industrial terrorists and dinosaurs, corporate greed and broken fraternal bonds, these are the themes running through The Eden Formula. Fahey plays Harrison Parker, a research scientist working at a large company located in downtown L.A. He develops a serum – the eponymous formula – that can reproduce living cells, allowing for the recreation of organisms. Any organisms, it seems. For Fahey’s paymasters have taken it upon themselves to use this formula to create a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which they house in the basement of their corporate headquarters.

Fahey’s not long in describing to corporate peon Dee Wallace Stone his moral misgivings about the situation when a group of industrial terrorists led by Tony Todd arrive to steal the formula. They seize control of the central security facility and, by electronically unlocking every door, unwittingly unleash the dinosaur. Those pesky terrorists! As if Todd hadn’t caused enough havoc having spent much of the 90s running around in the guise of the Candyman. Well he’s met his match with Fahey. Todd seems to find the blue radiance of Fahey so blinding that he’s forced to spend most of the film wearing sunglasses. Even though he’s indoors. And even though it’s night. Such is the hurt dealt the eyes by those unwilling to submit to Fahey’s glistening sky hue.

Our hero must prevent Todd and co from acquiring the formula, escape the building in which he and his colleagues are held, and sort out the dino issue. A series of problems for sure. But not the sort of problems from which Fahey would shy away. Far from it. It transpires that Fahey was in Desert Storm and is a Special Forces badass with a host of hand-to-hand combat skills to go alongside his PhD in genetic engineering. Further complicating events, we have Fahey face-to-face with his old military superior, none other than Tony Todd. It’s a web of relationships to rival the most convoluted of soap operas. Here Fahey and Todd must square off in the arena this Sci-Fi Channel Original calls its narrative, battling across eighty minutes of zesty cinema nourishment.

Characterisation enters new levels with Fahey’s juggling of attributes: erudition and ingenuity mingle easily with the ability to kick a man in the sternum. One moment Fahey leads his pals to stairs they never knew existed, thus facilitating their escape – even the security guard who undoubtedly walks these paths on an hourly basis was oblivious to their existence. Next he’s killing a man by a mere whack of the boot. Fahey is the holder of traits not possessed by others; perhaps he siphoned off their qualities the night before filming, I don’t know. There is a scene in which a woman is shot through the shoulder and Dee Wallace Stone attempts to help her by tying a rag around her elbow. Clearly Fahey’s erudition remains for the most part his own.

The sinister corporation is a staple of the sci-fi universe, from Aliens and Resident Evil to Fahey’s own Lawnmower Man and Absolute Zero. They demonstrate our fear of large corporations, of that curious mix of the palpable (the people, the offices, the plants) and the abstract (the stocks and shares). Material and immaterial collide in the corporation and this produces anxiety. (Naturally the general iniquitous nature of a body that strives solely for profit also causes anxiety, or should do at least.) Unfortunately most films see fit to personify corporate malice, anthropomorphising the source of pain and suffering – usually in the guise of a snivelling corporate lackey. This isn’t symbolic representation. These films point to actual individuals pulling strings, shady chairmen dancing immoral pirouettes, bloated finance directors willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary to meet ends. Sure there are bastards atop the corporate chain willing to plumb the depths of human decency, but take them out and the system would still function as it does.

It’s the system of money and shareholders that pains Fahey in The Eden Formula. He mumbles sadness and regret at how his good work’s been appropriated by his corporate overlords. His breakthrough was never intended to produce a gigantic killing machine but the powers above insisted upon something to awe the shareholders, preferably something big and carnivorous. Fahey is the site of exploitation, his proletariat lips pursed in a gesture of defiance. A bulwark fighting monetary sleaze is Fahey, a man whose labour and creative power has been co-opted. He’s the everyman held captive by a system built to privilege the few over the many. His is an exploitation driven by patriarchal avarice and the abstract flows of capital.

Away from the struggle against big business, and indeed the sight of Fahey, there are several moments of tedium. Firstly we are given various scenes of Dee Wallace Stone driving around L.A. trying to persuade cops that there’s a dinosaur on the loose. They don’t believe her. Then there’s the dinosaur in question rampaging through the metropolitan landscape, eating hobos and interrupting film shoots. Both the dino and Wallace Stone prove to be dreadfully boring spectacles. Alas everything seems diminished in the absence of Fahey. But is it not the case that banal scenes in a Jeff Fahey film are in fact Fahey’s modesty? Could it be he suffers terrible guilt at his omnipresent awesomeness and insists upon an injection of shite on occasion? Could that explain the sewer scenes in Lethal Tender, the kung fu in Ghost Rock, or the entirety of Darkhunters? The sporadic seconds of Faheyless phenomena in The Eden Formula all point in this direction.

I bet when John Carl Buechler made Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College he thought he’d never top the achievement. And with good reason: Ghoulies III is a fantastic slice of comedy-horror and by far the best Ghoulies flick. But with his Fahey collaboration he has done just that. Admittedly, Fahey is the main cause of this and had he starred in the aforementioned film it would remain Buechler’s best.

Fahey’s grand synthesis with cinema continues unabated through The Eden Formula. Its jerky camera, which makes everything seem like a point of view shot, is only confirmation that it is through the eyes of Fahey that we see the world. Just remember, when we watch a Jeff Fahey film, we genuflect in the glow of a media marvel that will never be surpassed.

Assault on Dome 4 (Starring Bruce Campbell)

2008-06-21T00:30:00.004+01:00

I’m not the first wayward student of the geek arts to proclaim Bruce Campbell a genius. And I won’t be the last, I assure you. His screen presence mesmerises all who bear witness to it, engendering an outpouring of enthusiastic praise across all creeds and colours, sparking words like god and icon. The self-deprecating sense of humour, the good nature with which he approaches the worshipping fans, the general diligence that propels his career, these are the traits that place him atop the B-movie roster. He enlivens the most dire and plodding of films with but a mere stroke of the chin, setting afire spectatorial glands by way of fleeting cameos and brash one-liners.

Any film fortunate enough to carry the credit ‘Bruce Campbell’ can be expected to offer at least a moment’s grace, even if the rest leaves much to be desired. The pantheon of characters spun from Bruce Campbell’s fecund acting talents is both rich and blinding – a prolific and consistent set of filmic highlights: characters who distract from shoddiness, who ameliorate the woeful, raising the mediocre to exalted heights, turning shite into gold.

Take, for instance, Terminal Invasion. A group of people are stuck at an airport, snowed-in by the weather outside. One of the group is an alien, a vicious sort intent on making internal organs external. Cue tension as they endeavour to find out who is human and who isn’t. All standard fare, typical Sci-Fi Channel output. But throw in Bruce Campbell as a heroic convict and a substandard version of The Thing becomes a piece of art, a ninety minute barrage of Bruce fighting both aliens and the distrust of other characters. This Jack, a cipher for the Bruce Campbell persona, is a typical example of how films are suddenly bettered by a smattering of Bruce.

Through the mire of bit-parts – like his appearance at the start of Congo or his appearance at the end of Darkman – and the larger roles – his turn in Running Time or Bubba Ho-tep’s fine performance – it’s easy to ascertain a pattern. The diamond in the rough, the light punctuating the dark, Bruce consistently brings a smile to the lips and a shot of glee to the head. Whilst I am one to wax hyperbolic on the B-movie individual, forever inclined to celebrate the star’s very essence, Bruce’s appeal stretches considerably further than the peculiarity of Jeffrey Combs or the teeth of Gary Busey. Bruce is the most universally loved of Made for TV and Straight to Video’s thespian faces – he rules deservedly at the pinnacle of low budget heaven.

In Assault on Dome 4 (aka Chase Moran), Bruce repeats his past and future feats of cinematic salvage. He plays Alex Windham, a vicious master-criminal who breaks out of prison and takes control of a scientific research facility by the name of Dome 4. “Die Hard on a space station” is how Bruce describes the flick in If Chins Could Kill. He’s clearly correct to do so. Just before Windham and his cronies take over the compound and terrorise its inhabitants, the film’s hero, the rather lame space cop Chase Moran, arrives to visit his wife. The villains assume control before he can reach the wife and he must fight to rescue her and the hostages, taking out henchmen one by one and irritating Windham by sneaking stealthily around the dome.

As befitting the situation, Bruce hams it up greatly as Windham, creating a wonderfully caricatured image of criminality. We are introduced to him as he is being imprisoned within a high-security jail, lamenting to the warden that he is a misunderstood artist whose work of galactic terror goes unappreciated, undervalued by those minds too small to fathom his grandeur. He’s later featured quoting Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, mixing a lofty, aristocratic mentality with torture and bloodshed. Windham harbours the messianic vision of acquiring his own planet, one populated by less evolved humanoids who would worship him as a god. By doing this he’d escape the bland, artless hordes of Earth, creating like a good aesthetician a world of blossoming artistic culture. Bruce has rarely played such an ostentatious fellow and it’s a joy watching him orate in such highfalutin tones.

Beyond the ambit of Bruce Campbell lies an array of other familiar film faces. The mosaic consists of Jack Nance (Pete from Twin Peaks), Brion James (Swayze’s Steel Dawn, Fahey’s The Underground) and Mark Bringleson (a man who has had the good fortune to be marked by the scent of both Lou Diamond Phillips and Jeff Fahey, the former by appearing in The First Power, the latter by playing the villain in the classic Lawnmower Man). It’s a picture tessellated by Bruce, he is the star around which everyone else orbits. Even those not too familiar faces are inclined to follow suit. Joseph Culp’s hero Chase Moran is thankfully an unfamiliar visage, his tired action sequences and abundance of chinless posturing driving the film to pits of quality. His wife, too, is nothing more than an object to be paraded in front of the camera in a series of short skirts and fodder for Bruce to act sleazily. She’s the inverse image of Chase Masterson in Terminal Invasion, for at least ol’ Chase exhibited some heroic virtue and wasn’t mere adornment.

The Die Hard rip-off is an enterprise doomed to failure. Lethal Tender couldn’t transpose Die Hard’s awesome dynamic to a water purification plant, despite the presence of Jeff Fahey. Assault on Dome 4, with its slowed down action shots and vapid protagonist, also fails to emulate the tale of John McClane. But that we know. Obviously this TV Movie is going to be no masterpiece. Where it does get points, morphing into something watchable, is with the inclusion of Bruce Campbell. Again his soaring charisma and endearing spirit turn a film no one would have cared to waste five words on into a film worth a thousand. And maybe, by dint of a sharp imagination, you can watch the film and imagine Bruce had actually played Hans Gruber and was involved in some wondrous concoction known simply as The Battling Bruces.

The Dark Wind (Starring Lou Diamond Phillips)

2008-06-15T08:50:00.003+01:00

The field of cultural consumption is normally one of autonomy. You watch a film, there’s a film, there it is, unravelling before your eyes, stealing sight and blinding at one moment, the same moment, holding the gaze till a time when the light yields to black, the DVD comes slowly to a halt or the projector wheezes to a standstill. The film, watched and finished, becomes a memory, a fragment in the head, left to be pondered and dissected and filed for later reference; but in the real it is no more. The flickering images are past, slipped from time’s present, now mere background glimmer in the distance, hard to see, impossible to make out, drowned out in a wash of new films, new shows, new albums, new this, new that, left hermetic and standing alone.

On occasion this autonomy is ripped apart. A trace bridges the gap between one object and another, creating linkage where none would have seemed evident. Usually this trace accompanies certain figures, those radiant masters of the audiovisual arts, icons such as Jeff Fahey or Henry Bowers from IT: they take from one film and transplant to another – they are the surgeons of cinema.

I found an unexpected instance of this earlier today. Having spent a relaxing afternoon watching The Dark Wind, a film where Lou Diamond Phillips is a Navajo cop investigating dirty drug-homicide happenings on a Native American reservation, I thought I would unwind even more by following that up with a dose of Colbert. So on I threw last Thursday’s Colbert Report, ready for the laughs to tumble out the mouth. Was it not the case that Colbert dedicated an entire segment to the news that Native Americans are being pandered to by the presidential candidates? And did he not go so far as to actually interview a Native American activist on the issue?

Scream coincidence you might, I accept that, for coincidence is a wonderful thing, infinitely more magical than the workings of Fate or God – its arbitrariness makes it a sublime art. Yet this is not coincidence: this is the trace of Lou Diamond Phillips free from The Dark Wind and overflowing into the arena of The Colbert Report. The latter acts as an afterimage of what Lou Diamond Goodness packed the former, the slimy residue secreted by his screen presence and ability to squint at the camera. It would not have surprised me had I seen a flying Lou Diamond Phillips replace the eagle in Colbert’s opening sequence.

But it was not quite that explicit. Lou Diamond moves in subtle ways, always keen to push his minions to consider his actions deeply. He leads by example: examples wrought from Hollywood’s sparkling kiln, dressed up in swathes of enchantment, set to satiate the hungry cinema fiend with nutritious installments of Lou Diamond Drama.

The Dark Wind (1991) is one such example. Lou Diamond is Jim Chee, a member of the Navajo Police – no, not a gimmicky tribute band, but an actual band of badass cops intent on maintaining justice on a reservation shared by Navajo and Hopi tribes. When a man is found dead, young Chee becomes drawn into a series of events that include a robbery, drug smuggling and a plane crash. Events become more convoluted as Chee progresses, requiring him to use every clue-sniffing trick he has in fully mapping the conspiracy facing him and the community. Exasperated, he uses his skills of gentle rumination to claw away the layers of ambiguity and solve the case.

He is an action hero whose pen outdoes his sword. Every step is a word written in celluloid, etched in filmic ink. No impetuous assaults on possible culprits, no Lou Diamond Fists enacting violent reprisal. His mien is calm and considered, a bastion of tranquillity. Watch as he slowly picks apart the case granule by granule, questioning locals and whispering to shrubs, discovering footprints and coughing up the sound of pan-pipes.

Ah, but the meticulous pace at which he works benefits us, the humble viewers. For we all know that no one would solve such a mystery more quickly and more easily than Lou Diamond Phillips. It’s his great, buzzing selflessness that has him proceed slowly and methodically, stretching out the running time to almost two hours, all so he can draw us into the matrix of events, stroking our curiosity glands with his nimble fingers.

According to the film, the dark wind is a force that causes people to do bad things. Gusty iniquity is rife in Lou Diamond’s terrain and he must combat its carriers. Lou Diamond fights the man, the feds, the big power structures that piss all over the human race everyday, striking a Foucauldian blow straight to the balls of the social-symbolic edifice, all without once giving up his search for the truth.

The Dark Wind proves to be an exercise in Brechtian aesthetics, a trait I had not expected. As the narrative unfolds and cryptic events lead Lou Diamond around the desert, an odd visitor penetrates the screen at regular intervals: the boom mic. Lest we forget Lou Diamond’s Lou Diamond Perfection, allow me to speculate that this intrusion was intentional insofar as Lou Diamond allowed the mic to be drawn to him and his Brechtian impulses. It’s his rich desire to rattle the mind of the passive spectator that motivates such an occurrence; perfect is the smack of boom mic that juts out from Lou Diamond’s sense of artifice.

In the end, the film is a fun jaunt through the noir desert on the back of Lou Diamond Phillips, his narration acting as the warm wind against the face, cheeks flush with the burn of heartfelt caresses dealt by his palms. Sure, you can see where director Errol Morris (yes, he of acclaimed documentary-fame) would have liked to mix up the visuals a little, and perhaps he would have done so had artistic differences between him and producer Robert Redford not ousted him; but that notwithstanding, watching Lou Diamond Phillips run detective sprints within the walls of the 4:3 make this an above-average piece of cinema.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

2008-05-30T07:45:00.003+01:00

We learn lessons from many different places. I, for one, learned to what extent the desert is a harsh, dangerous terrain by watching the Patrick Swayze movie Steel Dawn. Sure, I had an inkling beforehand, how could I not? It’s really dry and has few inhabitants. Fair enough. But it took the sight of Swayze dancing filmic ballet to the sound of Brian May’s soundtrack to really concretise what were hitherto merely fleeting thoughts. Nomadic existence coupled with mullet: is there a more profound statement on the terror lurking behind each and every dune of the sandy ocean?

I doubt there is. I doubt even more that I could have been better prepared for Paul Bowles’ excursion into the wilds of North Africa. Swayze laid a foundation into which Bowles placed his opus, The Sheltering Sky.

A travelogue of sorts, The Sheltering Sky follows an American couple (Kit and Port) as they travel around North Africa, moving from one obscure settlement to another. Accompanying them is Port’s buddy, Tunner, a rather dull fellow, indecisive and weak, who Kit generally dislikes. The story focuses on the couple as they try to cope with both the foreign environment and each other. Neurotic and inclined to over-think seemingly trivial events, they become distanced, bifurcated by a hostile landscape brimming with the new and the unexperienced. They stand as lone figures on a sheet of sun-raped earth, links severed by the coarse wind, irrecoverably isolated with only the deepening darkness of the desert lying ahead of them.

Paul Bowles in many ways straddles the line between the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation. Ousting himself from the United States at an early age, he spent most of his life outside the country, primarily residing in Tangier. Over the 50s he became friendly with various expatiate poets and artists, ones frequently glazed with the label of Beat – Bill Burroughs being one notable visitor to his Tangier abode.

Yet, at least as far as The Sheltering Sky is concerned, a more accurate point of reference is that of Albert Camus. The meditations on the nature of the human and the sufferings of existence that fill The Outsider, typical of a Camus preoccupied with the individual ripped from the claws of religion and set down in front of a potential freedom, paint stark pictures of persons lost and exiled as they endeavour to function in the world.

Kit and Port are wayfarers in a sea of alienation, cut apart from each other, unable to bond with others except by the most tenuous of threads. The barren terrain of the desert perfectly allegorises the existential condition: the subject stripped of all social clothing forced to endure the elements of the world. Characters, failing to connect with the other, retreat into their own solitude – a solitude both geographical and mental. The fixity of Kit and Port’s marriage becomes as eroded as the sand upon which they tread. Locals are momentary decorations on their aimless journey, mere objects to colour the scene. The land is an abyss of dejection and physical torment, the bearer of disease and wanton disfigurement. Port’s illness, which emerges some halfway through the novel, spawns as if from nowhere, its sudden darkness swallowing him whole – the illness of isolation transfigured into a ravaging of the body. Kit’s descent into a cauldron of instability and tears also traces a progression from mental pain to physical pain. Kit and Port assume ‘an existence of exile from the world.’

What is worse: to be locked off from the mind of the other, or to be treated insignificantly by the world you never chose to be a part of? Both emerge as a double whammy of estrangement for our two protagonists. The gulf between the thought and the said is repeatedly used to show the discord between the interior self and the surface, and generates even more distance between one character and another. Dialogue scenes are marked by these snippets of interior reflection where Kit, say, will think what she wants to say to Port, but will then say something else, a banal mask for what she really thinks. The subject is concealed from the other, like Swayze enshrouded in his nomadic ways in Steel Dawn.

The web of social relations and the furtive eyes of the other may be off-limits, but the physical world of spaces and smells remains similarly a fount of despair. The desert assumes the form of another character, given body by long, winding descriptions flowing ruthlessly in and out of chapters. The desert is the site for loss; it takes and does not give, spiralling its prey further and further into its heart of darkness.

Bowles’ novel – as if the foregoing synopsis isn’t clear enough – is a bleak picture of people lost in the world. It can be quite harrowing at times, plummeting characters to terrifying depths, especially as the narrative reaches a climax. These later events work to such brilliant effect because by that time one has already become enraptured by the antics of the pair, of the curios of their minds, of their robust adventuring.

To go alongside the diegetic estrangement – the clawing remoteness separating Kit and Port – there is an odd reader estrangement prompted by the amount of foreign tongues not translated into English: the fragments of French, Arabic and countless other local dialects spoken throughout the book. This and the subtle use of ambiguity make an alien world for the reader also.

There are some moments of humour over the course of the novel, such as when Kit and Port attempt to ditch Tunner, but on the whole The Sheltering Sky is a dark tale. Here, the snapshot is sepia-tinged with edges frayed by loss. Bowles’ best known work is a wonderful creation in the vein of existential fiction; a joy to read and think about.

Living & Dying

2008-05-26T20:08:00.001+01:00

Reservoir Dogs has a lot to answer for. At the top of the list, chic crime, casual death and morose moral temper look penetratingly through the glaze of the celluloid. The film brought back a violent realism, spun in fibres of cool. But it earned its reputation by creating a knowing, stylised aesthetic, visually compelling and coupled with the sharpest of razor-edge dialogue. What the imitators do is take the blood ballet and firearm posturing of Tarantino’s firstborn and forget to include the elements by which it earned its kudos.

Living & Dying is no different from these copyists: it rapes and pillages from a clear set of antecedents, deriding influences left and right, almost in a snivelling attempt to mire by association. Thursday did it well, weathering the malady of QT to create a decent, enjoyable film, parading Tom Jane around the screen in a patchwork of comic fashions. It held on to the black humour and playfulness vital for the whole to work. Whereas Living & Dying lingers at the opposite end of the spectrum, a place for scorn to be expelled and invective spat forth.

Edward Furlong and some others rob a bank. While escaping they are forced to take refuge in a small café. Hostages are taken as the scared troupe expect the cavalry to arrive any time soon and of course little time is wasted by the cops in surrounding the building. But things get worse when two of the hostages turn out to be vicious ne’er-do-wells, shooting one of the bank-robbers and taking over the situation, using Furlong as a dummy to hide their criminality from the eyes and ears of the cops. Outside, Arnold Vosloo endeavours to lead the negotiations while combating a surly superior and the self-important owner of the bank.

Tensions remain non-existent and heartstrings slack as the film fails to deliver any excitement. Clichés beat down upon every scene, taking potential and nullifying it. Cinematic hostage situations of yore are presented onscreen saturated of any and all merits – it’s the negative images of remembered quality. No Dog Day Afternoon worth, no Airheads hilarity, not even any Mad City Travolta. Drab are the images fed us by writer-director John Keeyes. Lacklustre scenes include Furlong secretly calling Vosloo behind the backs of the villainous twosome, a co-opted news reporter entering the building to film live footage confirming the hostages’ well-being, and a shoddy western showdown for a finale. Scenes are poorly shot and constructed, with whatever hint of energy therein evaporating quickly.

Whilst there are a host of potentially awesome bad movie moments, they too tend to evaporate quickly. The shoot-out scenes are particularly funny as one character shoots at another a few feet away only to hit nothing but a potted plant. When the trio enter the café for the first time, they are surrounded by four or five cops all shooting blindly at them, while they shoot blindly back. It’s fairly amusing, looking like a low-budget student film that’s intent on having exciting action sequences. Even the actors look awkward seizing the firearms in their hands – they should just have cast infants and played it out like a gory episode of Rugrats.

Another key bad movie moment occurs when Michael Madsen appears. Not only does he lurch around the décor as an irascible government agent, sexist and gung-ho, but he also wears a cowboy hat. His moments are good, coloured in finely-tuned swathes of stupidity. Had he been granted more screen-time I’d be inclined to whisper sweet songs of tribute to the film. But alas it wasn’t meant to be.

The one good thing about Living & Dying – yes, there is one – is that it facilitates the return of Trent Haaga to our screens. You may remember Trent from the Troma archive, from the fine cinematic artefacts whittled by Lloyd Kaufman and associates. Cast your mind back to Citizen Toxie: wasn’t Haaga’s turn as the leader of the Diaper Mafia one of its highlights? Or Terror Firmer: was this not Haaga’s finest acting hour?

Here he plays one of the two evil-doers, the passive, slightly-emasculated one. Moments to be imprinted on the retinas include his numerous guffaws spawned by the killing of hostages and his vitriolic outbursts against the elderly owner of the café. But the spotlight truly floats his direction when he gets a chance to rape a busty news reporter who comes in. It’s like the guitar solo of the film, one of those overlong numbers executed in the key of bad taste. Ah, but it’s Haaga; others we wouldn’t excuse, but his wispy beard and camp, rubber acting get a free pass.

Take from this film nothing of worth, no humour, nor thrills. Tears can be shed elsewhere, Living & Dying leaves the eyes parched, stealing the minutes that could have been spent crying over some other nugget of shite cinema, one embroidered with the finest jewels of cheeseball nonsense this side of Van Damme’s Van Cock.

Five Scenarios Involving Lou Diamond Phillips

2008-05-25T12:00:00.011+01:00

Wilder Strawberries

On the table lay sprawled out and unread a screenplay. But there was no table. The office belonging to Lou Diamond Phillips – inconspicuously located above a food market in downtown LA – bore not a single furnishing, save for a waxwork of Kiefer Sutherland and a reel of claymation shorts modelled on Young Guns 2.

The screenplay lay on the floor, a white indentation on a desert of dust and rogue fire-ants. On its cover read in bold type the words: Wilder Strawberries – a screenplay by Dolphin Jones.

Lou Diamond strode through the door, coughing up a wad of sputum as he passed Kiefer. He looked at the screenplay, and then bent his knees to take hold of it. Knelt down in the middle of the barren room, the document clutched in his mitts and the harsh LA sun stabbing the room through its one window, he showed questions in his face. Questions such as: should I read this thing? do I really need to do another low budget, schlock-fest? why oh why doesn’t Woody Allen draft me for his next romantic lead? should I regrow my ponytail?

The seconds ticked past as dust particles danced visible in the rays of the sun.

The ants scurried as Lou Diamond sat down on the floor, cross-legged, the screenplay open upon his knees. Slowly the words entered the vortex of his mind, one by one sliding in and out of his beating mind, sloshing across prairies and obsidian recesses. He captured every fragment, idea and motif, numbing the screenplay’s unread mystery with ease.

The proposed film – inspired by Bergman’s tale of a retired university professor who travels across Sweden with his daughter-in-law to collect an honorary degree, during which time hallucinations and flashbacks prompt him to ruminate on his life and mortality – went some way to exciting Lou Diamond Phillips in the groin.

He would play Miguel the Human Flamethrower, a drug-dealer who travels across Mexico to do one last deal. Days before the trip, Miguel learns he has a daughter, a prostitute by the name of America. He is eager to initiate some father-daughter bonding and invites her along. She assents but with the condition that her pimp accompanies them, a cannibalistic midget known only as Jim. Together, the three of them head off across the Mexican country in Miguel’s pink Cadillac. On the way, they stop at sites of personal importance to Miguel: a small village where he fought rival dealers for control of cocaine supply routes linking Columbia and the United States; an abandoned factory that was once a most productive source of heroin; the graves of assorted politicians he had tortured and murdered; a town that witnessed his crowning moment where he single-handedly defeated a gang of Irish arms-dealers, turning himself into a weapon by attaching three flamethrowers to his body, one on one arm, another on the other, and a third on top of his head, secured by ropes and a series of pulleys that allowed him to operate them – an event that earned him his nickname. Flashbacks in the film dramatise his reminiscences, while America and Jim sell the former’s wares to local hombres.

Problems arise as Jim’s vicious nature and reckless drug habit spawn confrontations with the locals, and Miguel must fight to keep America out of peril. The road is not easy, Miguel’s path is lined with many banditos, and all the while he is pursued by a hitman seeking revenge for past deeds. But over the course of the film, he learns the spirit of family, the loyalties that accompany friendship, and rediscovers the great skill by which he acquired his moniker.

Lou Diamond Phillips sits on the floor, eyes bright and silvery, pushed wordless by the screenplay he’s just read. A single reaction zips through his mind, groping and gaining magnitude. It flies from corner to corner, bounding off and on to panels of fleshy pulp, hindered by nothing beyond its own importance, skipping south and ferocious, tunnelling ever closer to its end, skipping in lust driven forward, on and on and on, veering in motion to the mouth of Lou Diamond – and he expels the fragment from his lips gaping and salivating: “Yes!”

---

The Writing of Lou Diamond Phillips

He’s not Joyce. Don’t let people tell you he is. He most certainly is not. Nor is he Dickens. He’s not, and lies are those words that say he is. But words are not foreign to Lou Diamond Phillips. He says them every day – sometimes two or three times.

The words are select, chosen from many, snatched from lingual banks by mighty mental fists. The words curve up from his mouth, floating to the heavens, off to orbit minds faraway. No word is wasted, not one, each and every word is essential.

Words don’t have to be written down to be literature, this is what Lou Diamond Phillips teaches us. Utterance and utterance go unbroken in his films, through the dialogic imagination he moves unimpeded, summoning meaning to his palms.

Words don’t have to be words to be literature, another lesson taught us by Lou Diamond Phillips. Kicks and slaps, hair and sweat, common features in his films, all of them. Connotation drifts from gestures and sneers, every flinch is like music.

The mediators are few, translating the power of Lou Diamond Phillips into a language he himself has no need for. But they exist, latching words to the jolts felt in the light of his cinema. Jolly enjoyable it may be, but important it most certainly is not.

For the actions that grace the screen, a moving literature, require no transposition to letters and syntax. Lou Diamond Phillips doesn’t mock the minion caught attaching words to his wordless play, he merely admonishes with a warm wink of the eye.

Lou Diamond Phillips writes every day. But not with a pen. Every time someone watches Renegades, Lou Diamond is writing. Every time someone watches Young Guns, Lou Diamond is writing. And so it will go, long into the twilight of cinema.

---

Dialogue (Waiting for Lou Diamond Phillips)

[Two men stand at a bus stop. In the background a flute plays.]

BRONCHO: It’s five o’clock.
WILBER: Is it?
BRONCHO: Isn’t that what I just said?
WILBER: Just clarifying.
BRONCHO: Open your ears next time.
WILBER: I heard what you said.
BRONCHO: Then why the question?
WILBER: I wanted to be sure.
BRONCHO: What a needless inquisition. [He shakes his head]
WILBER: You hear a flute?
BRONCHO: I hear something.
WILBER: It’s definitely a flute.
BRONCHO: Well okay then.
WILBER: Where’s it coming from?
BRONCHO [angered]: You’re the one hearing it!
WILBER: Wish it would pipe down.

[The flute fades to silence]

WILBER: Where is he?
BRONCHO: He’ll be here. You know he’s always late. Five minutes time we’ll see him sauntering up the road.

[The conversation ends. The two stand aimlessly at the bus top, WILBER with his hands in his pockets, throwing his hips out every few seconds, BRONCHO scratching a burst vein in his cheek. After a moment, BRONCHO sits down on the low wall behind the bus stop, straining his neck back to see the river that flows out from under the road. A second later, he gets up and resumes standing by the bus stop.]

BRONCHO [to himself]: Ah Lou Diamond, Lou Diamond. [He cracks his knuckles] Lou Diamonds in the sky.
WILBER: Eh?
BRONCHO [looking towards WILBER]: What?
WILBER: What did you say?
BRONCHO: Nothing.
WILBER: I heard something.
BRONCHO: Must’ve been that flute of yours.
WILBER: Words. [Pause] Spoken words are all I hear.
BRONCHO: Save the poetry for later – when Lou Diamond arrives.
WILBER: He’s late.
BRONCHO [sullenly]: I know.
WILBER: Where is he?
BRONCHO: Give ‘im five minutes.

[Silence again cuts across the scene.]

WILBER: Did you ever see The First Power?
BRONCHO: One of my favourite Lou Diamond movies.
WILBER [getting enthused]: A classic thriller. A classic dark thriller. It has such a great mood, atmosphere. Really should be more well known.
BRONCHO: Russell Logan.
WILBER: Eh?
BRONCHO: Lou Diamond’s character.
WILBER: Ah yes. [Pause] Russell Logan…
BRONCHO: The film has everything that defines a Lou Diamond Phillips flick. It’s got the action, it’s got the grit. An original narrative that progresses through stages, each stage revealing more story, building up to an exciting climax. The First Power adds to that, that foundation, a strange aura, unsettling but wholly in tune with the film. Exemplary is that scene that has your boyo crucified by the dam. [He makes an understated crucifix gesture.]
WILBER: It’s a magic.
BRONCHO: Ever notice how everything tastes and feels different after watching a Lou Diamond Phillips film? Like the senses become altered, anew.
WILBER: Bit like how everything tastes mint after brushing your teeth.
BRONCHO: Yes, in a way. But…uh…at a more ontological level.
WILBER: Hate the way I get fuck all taste off a Crunchie after brushing. Really gets me riled.

[A bus goes by, but does not stop. BRONCHO turns to look at a poster stuck to the timetable notice.]

BRONCHO [reading]: “Born of goat is the man who fails to see in the eye of God salvation and neverending life. The glories of heaven and the prophet’s tears are two sides of the essence of man, over and under, one and two, levied upon the soul till his eternity beckons, yielding judgement and the final revelation.”
WILBER: Goat?
BRONCHO [still reading]: “Satan’s tentacles are a continuous malady to which we must be opposed. Never before has a civilisation been so vulnerable to the temptations of the ungodly. Sinful ways are the mores of our day.” [Pause] “Resist devilish lifestyle and fight the harbingers of iniquity - visit our church this Sunday.”
WILBER: Make a great Lou Diamond movie that stuff would.
BRONCHO [curious]: Yeah. Would.
WILBER: He could have a goat as a sidekick.
BRONCHO: No. Weren’t you listening? Goats are bad.
WILBER: Okay. Goats could be attacking the Pentagon and he has to fight them off.
BRONCHO: Um, maybe.
WILBER: And Al Pacino could play Satan’s tentacles.
BRONCHO: Why Pacino?
WILBER: Wasn’t there a scene in Frankie and Johnny where a tentacle monster eats Michelle Pfeiffer’s character?
BRONCHO: Frankie?
WILBER: Yeah.
BRONCHO: A tentacle monster ate Frankie?
WILBER: Yeah.
BRONCHO [furrowing his brow]: Dunno. Never saw it.
WILBER: Think it was Frankie and Johnny. [His gaze slowly floats away from BRONCHO.]

[A pigeon flies by overhead. The two men stand around the bus stop. WILBER puts his hands back in his pockets and looks at his feet. BRONCHO yawns.]

WILBER: Where is he?
BRONCHO: Give ‘im five minutes.

[A flute sounds in the background.]

WILBER: You hear something?
BRONCHO: Just your noisy yap.

[The flute plays, clearly audible. WILBER stands arching his head up and around, as if looking for something. BRONCHO sniffs and puts his hands in his pocket.]

CURTAIN

---

Happiness (Electrodes)

There was no happiness in the situation. Fear, trembling, isolation, these were the notions ravaging Lou Diamond Phillips. Shudder and more shudder. Happiness occurs in the present. Yet presently absent is the happiness that buoys us.

It wasn’t a dungeon but it was dark. A night of the mind with no dawn. In his head but no longer, strapped to a vertical board is he. Secured by leather and unable to move. A light presently appears, shining sight’s new vision for the hapless hero.

Without clothes he stands, motionless. An additional shudder, for what vision brings is no happiness in the present. Electrodes attached to his balls. Not good. Thoughts of escape overtake confusion but are themselves curtailed by helplessness.

We’ll be happy when we do this, that, accomplish, succeed, eyes cast upon the future. The present strives for a happiness only the future can supply. But no. Aims become supplanted by others, renewed, continuing the struggle against nothingness.

The balls tingle but the electrodes are still, no current is passed. The minutes tomorrow are contingent. The electrodes could fire up any second. Or not. Being is not the carrier of happiness: a continuous becoming sanctions happiness.

Change and growth, difference and the new, these are nodes sutured to happiness. It comes in the doing, the present work. The end and being are illusions, forever bred by the mind. Overcome the frivolous we might, but the electrodes remain.

---

Panda

The panda bent over, face crinkled in revulsion, wiped forcefully then threw the wad of paper into the toilet. It tilted its head up, checking its master’s reaction, what side of the coin would await the poor creature: clean and finished and no more, or still filthy and repeat? So much rested on the answer to this question. The eyes and brow looked calm, content for once that the panda had done its job – the time for bathroom labour was over, finished until next time.

The rumour was clear. What wasn’t clear was where it originated. But that didn’t matter much to Lou Diamond Phillips – the truth was of principal concern. And this truth was true, or it turned out to be so anyway.

Throw a bamboo plant in your bathroom and a panda will take up residence there, they said. Not only that, for it will also, as a gesture of thanks, wipe your arse for you every day.

Lou Diamond was sceptical at first, how could he not be. But since he’s an incredibly busy man with no time to wipe his own arse, he thought he’d try it out.

It was a mere matter of days before the panda showed up. He’d strategically placed the plant in the middle of the bathroom, in full view, and removed the air fresheners so the plant’s scent wouldn’t be nullified. Lo and behold, in walks Lou Diamond one morning to find a panda sitting on the lino chewing a bamboo shoot.

The deal, like a good business agreement, functioned well for both parties. The panda would have its bamboo goodies renewed when exhausted and Lou Diamond would be able to use his bathroom time as a chance to read over scripts. There was no transition period, each adapted perfectly to the situation. As soon as Lou Diamond stepped into the bathroom, the panda would be up and ready, perched precariously on the edge of the toilet.

Alas, the poor panda found as the years went by a great depression envelop its being. Daily cleaning took its toll on the creature. Its personality became warped as the panda turned cantankerous and began to resent the master. But it was forever chained to the deal, imprisoned in a thankless profession, fruitless and perpetual, that functioned to generate gains that it would never share.

Yet the fault did not lie entirely with Lou Diamond. He was as much a victim of the deal as the oppressed and exploited panda. Sure, the yield went to him and no other. But the gulf separating him from his underling worked to conceal their true relation, that of master and slave, blinding Lou Diamond to the reality of the situation and the misery of the panda. He was concerned with the state of his arsehole, all else paled in significance. In the end, the panda’s happiness was sacrificed so that Lou Diamond could work on making a new opus: Bats 2: More Bats.

I ask you, which was more important?

Vanishing Point - The Fourth Season

2008-05-18T21:38:00.002+01:00

Sometimes, when summer rays drift down from above and the sky is cloaked in blue, the discerning metal listener feels the urge to switch off the pummelled tones and furious tempos of norm. Cast against the fresh light of sun dancing in the background, juddering and callously wrought sounds born from a Nile album can seem incompatible, disharmoniously distant from the prevailing mood. The war caresses of Sodom, the guttural rants of Deicide, these wonderful purveyors of noise fit a purpose not aligned to the simple need for shimmering melody and decorous sing-song.

This is where The Fourth Season comes in. The fourth album (as if you had to guess) by Aussie prog metallers Vanishing Point delivers us some fifty minutes of sun-kissed delight, a collection of upbeat songs adorned with catchy choruses and consummate musicianship – all that good stuff we used to love.

Thrown on with little expectation, I was surprised and shocked to find an instantly likeable soundscape nestling under the grandiose bollocks of the album cover. Normally progressive metal numbers take a few listens to really gauge the quality – a positive and negative effect of an often complex and multilayered music – but Vanishing Point required no breaking-in period, no long nights spent sleepless trying to wrestle a concept to clarity, to map the contours of a sprawling 20-minute epic. No, instant gratification flows out from The Fourth Season. Simple structures underpin the coiled instrumentation, a linear trajectory running verse-chorus verse-chorus, dipping into solo breaks, before finally reprising the chorus. It’s a straight-ahead pattern, a welcome novelty, basic perhaps, but it’s not as if the Blotted Science album can’t be flung on at a moment’s notice to satisfy the need for wiry compositions and convoluted playing.

Prog metal, in many ways, but with a more direct approach.

It would be amiss, however, not to mention that Vanishing Point are in actuality a combination of power metal and prog metal, suturing the former’s airy histrionics to the latter’s penchant for intricate musicianship. In fact, they are often seen supporting power metal bands like Helloween and Gamma Ray.

Regardless of labels, The Fourth Season sports eleven songs starting with the svelte movements of “Embodiment” and ending with the subdued meditations of “Day of Difference”. No song goes by without a boisterous chorus erupting into life. Soaring vocals backed by multiple harmonies peak at regular intervals, singer Silvio Massaro successfully pushes his voice to the sort of sublime register visited heretofore by figures of the Geoff Tate ilk.

The album simmers with melodies, the guitars crisscrossing and copulating over driving drumbeats. As if the glorious sparkle of chanted choruses didn’t lift the ambience to a high enough plane, the sweet notes weaved by the guitars underpins and propels the joyous odyssey. The vulgar torqued fretwork of other, lesser bands has here been rejected in favour of tasteful arrangements suited to the song, the scalar treks discreet and effective.

On tracks like “The Tyranny of Distance” delicious keyboards smooth the edges of metal guitars to create a rather symphonic aura that works only to enhance the song. Had this synth layer not been the subtle entity it is, the music could easily have slid into a fug of mediocrity. Thankfully, the symphonic tendencies are used wisely and where appropriate.

Vanishing Point’s The Fourth Season makes perfect listening material for the summer ahead. Packed with juicy melodies and scorching songs, we can happily group it with albums such as Pearl Jam’s Ten or, staying with the prog metal theme, a Pagan’s Mind album, musical mosaics custom-made to suit the heated air and hovering sun.

Fragments of Fahey

2008-05-10T23:09:00.008+01:00

The kids were queued up outside a club, a liquor brothel bereft of light, rocking with the hum of drunken debauchery. Melodies coiled in the air, a copulating of inaudible speech and bass frequencies. I say kids, these figures were grasping a lost youth with office-stained hands, tobacco residue dangling from their three-day beards, tufts of stress and photocopied memories, lies inscribed on a Bullet For My Valentine t-shirt. The talk was of sisters or cisterns or some other offhand topic easily linked to a punchline. Swaying garrulous to a whiff of whiskey treasures, they dandered towards the bouncer, the gateway standing behind him. Just then, in the hazard ambience, a cascading wind flows down from above, circling at mid-torque over the crew. They break conversation, struck by the eerie whispers wrought by the wind. A summons of blue and chanting mumbles riffed and rocked. Then the wind assumes a form, stealing mystery from the air. The onlookers blink their eyes, amazed in space, for what floats in the air above their heads is none other than Jeff Fahey.

Yet before phone-cameras and digital soul-catchers can be retrieved, Fahey dissipates into the ether. Glances are fired around, person to person, did you see that? was that a face? was that him from Sketch Artist 2: Hands That See hovering in the air? They all shuddered querulous, lacking the faculties to comprehend the event. In the end, they went into the club and got pissed and fumbled a conquest or two, but never for a second did any of them forget the image of Fahey above their heads.

It’s not a rare occurrence for Fahey to appear in odd, seemingly arbitrary places at unexpected moments. Peppered throughout history are numerous such instances, Fahey flashes before Napoleon for three seconds when he’s in the bath, Fahey travels on one of Hannibal’s elephants, Fahey hangs over a crevice opened up when Pinatubo blew a few years back. History is embroidered in Fahey’s must.

But terrestrial history isn’t the only plane subject to Fahey’s fleeting visitations. Reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld we can find some 200-pages in the penetration of Fahey into the fiction. A veteran nun named Alma Edgar runs errands in the name of the Lord, driven by a young nun named Grace Fahey. Naysayers see this as Fahey invading the intimate spheres of our fictions, our fantasies and cherished dreamworlds. But Fahey has no pernicious bone in his body, his disclosure comes with the most virtuous of motives: to enlighten while effecting pristine pleasure in the eyes and ears. Grace Fahey is a fragment of Fahey interpolated into DeLillo’s opus to remind us that even when Too Hard To Die has finished, even when Epicenter gets thrown back into its box, Fahey remains nestled next to your soul, spitting up piety in a liver shadow.

One would presume a search on Google for ‘Fahey’ would bring up legions of web-altars dedicated to Jobe’s blonde and JT’s barbeque sauce. The truth is that other Faheys come up, Faheys not preceded by Jeff. Just another instance of Fahey’s fragmentation. John Fahey is a constant example, forever ready to lurch forth when you’re trying to acquire information on that one-liner Jeff said in Maniacts, the one that had you flicker ablaze with laughter.

Siobhan Fahey as well, another particle on the prism of Fahey, her name arises from the mold of Google Enterprises, reminding us that Fahey is, essentially, sexless. In fact, the Shakespear’s Sister song ‘Stay’ was inspired by Fahey yelling a “Fuck off” to his kids in Darkman 3.

Irksome so this omnipresence may seem, it is merely Fahey brilliantly permeating everything. Why would you want this state of affairs to be any different?

Kant once wrote that Fahey appears in the interstices of our world. His form twists into sight in the gap between the look-alike and the looked-like, in that moment of judder squeezed into reality by a stifled laugh, in those dwindling seconds between love and lust, wet and dry, pleasure and displeasure – he swells existence into one gargantuan Fahey-shaped monolith.

Fahey remains a surplus of the dialectic, neither thesis nor antithesis, but as an arbiter between both, and he also makes a damn good cowboy, as evidenced in Ghost Rock.

Travels in Scientology

2008-02-11T20:46:00.001Z

The Duke and I recently took a trip down to London’s Scientologists. Read all about it here:

Travels in Scientology – Part One

Travels in Scientology - Part Two

Renegade Justice (aka Urban Justice)

2008-01-05T23:12:00.000Z

“We want you to give a lecture on the latest Steven Seagal movie.”

AF: “Well I don’t know, I mean, Steven Seagal movies come out every week. Even his most hardcore chroniclers find it hard to keep up.”

“The most recent one you’ve seen will suffice.”

AF: “But surely someone more qualified could be found, an employee of Steven Seagal Enterprises perhaps, or even that guy who goes about Hyde Park quoting lines from Hard Target as if it were a holy book?”

“Cost and time constraints lead us to you.”

AF: “What exactly would you have me do?”

“Talk about the movie.”

AF: “But these movies have one line synopses, and even then the line’s not that great.”

“All we ask is that you keep it under thirty minutes, ya know, to allow time for Q & A.”

AF: “As if concision were the problem!”

“The party members come to these things with their own sense of the world. The new is confusing to them. Hence a question session will give ample opportunity for confusions to be cleared.”

AF: “Very well.”

---

Enter a man wearing a vest. He strolls up to the counter, orders a latte and sits down to wait on a nearby stool. It’s raining outside, yet he clearly doesn’t care. Water drops tremble down his hairless skull, flowing into one another, merging bigger and bigger until they’re slapped away in a fit of ticklish outrage, one callused hand destroying the image as soon as it forms.

The coffee aroma, the gentle hubbub of spoken words, the passing motorists on the road outside, these sounds suffuse the area, from the girl reading Hegel in the corner, to wet vest man, to the couple discussing Scarlett Johansson just behind me. I can’t help but wonder at this moment what would happen if Steven Seagal were to run in right now and kick our wet friend in the gut. We’ll pretend the latter is a pernicious drug runner who kills children for money, and is a Nazi, and a convicted rapist, and gave Seagal a dirty look in the street one time. Seagal has tracked the fiend to this café, allowing time for his alertness to be dulled by the vapour of freshly crumbled cookies, and then he strikes: boot to the belly!

Seagal would probably proceed to extract information from the hapless deviant, pulping his organs for key words while garnering admiring glances from all in the vicinity. Names and addresses acquired he would leave the man, standing up and motioning to leave. Just then wet vest would miraculously revive, grabbing hold of a tray of gluten-free chocolate brownies and hurling it towards Seagal. A quick duck, negating the offence, and Seagal would push wave upon wave of soaring fists shaking with justice into the soul of wet vest, driving him to his death chauffeured by grave knees to the chops.

Perhaps it’s only my impending address to the denizens of Seagal sparking these ideas. Perhaps the mundane ambience of the corporate coffee shop, capitalising on connotations established elsewhere. Perhaps it’s the first symptom of a growing dementia. Perhaps all.

Regardless, I sit presently trying to conjure thoughts related to Seagal’s Renegade Justice, aka Urban Justice; in truth enough of the bastards to fill a half hour’s sweated standing. Even I, with my tedious habit of prolixity, am having difficulty coming up with something approaching the required length.

I did toy with the idea of opening with a story, a warm-up narrative to loosen the audience, nothing longer than five minutes. It’d be like when an art cinema throws on a short before the main feature, time to adapt one’s eyes and ears, get comfortable and forget the bourgeois hussy speaking loudly about Henri Lefebvre in the back row. I’d enter the auditorium, tell the tale, then begin the Seagal-related disquisition. I’d tell them the story of the man who had a dream about a goat with jowls – they’d love it. Alas my employers might see me go sans fee for such audacity, and one must pay one’s rent somehow in this murky world.

To wrap up the synopsis in a vast array of Latinate adjectives as to guarantee at least ten minutes passed? Not a bad idea, but it could prove tough translating ‘Steven Seagal’s son is murdered, Steven Seagal seeks revenge’ into a sweeping epic of the sort that would scare Tolstoy.

A few words on topographical concerns: the hood provides Seagal a battlefield. A few words on familial concerns: son was a cop, now dead; wife divorced. A few words on lawbreaking: son was on the cusp of removing bad guys and exposing bent cops, the latter both remain alive. Notes to insert intermittently when eyes are caught fluttering into far-off dazes.

Some sort of slideshow hoisted up to my rear exhibiting film stills will be necessary. How else to illustrate the film’s incessant darkness, the shadows through which Seagal must lunge in order to travel from one plot point to another? As if we’re truly ignorant of Seagal’s burgeoning girth! I’m afraid some of us, pedantic fucks, will break the injunction to ignorance on this point. It’s a collective pretence that says ‘we know Seagal has got all chubby around the middle but we’ll act as if we don’t’, with an abundance of dark lighting sanctioning the lie. Let us accept it and move on. It’s people like this who still insist that Seagal survived the first fifteen minutes of Executive Decision, stubbornly holding that Kurt Russell died and Seagal had to save the day. Which was his mission anyway, being a lieutenant-colonel, hence I fail to see how magnificent the achievement actually is, he would merely be doing his job, satisfying the stipulations of his job description.

Some time would have to be dedicated to the reception of Renegade Justice. Hollers of glee and cries of jubilation searing through the firmament, hyperbole and grand speeches about ‘a return to form’, patriarchial philistinism clasping every syllable in a laser regatta of gunfire and cocaine deals. Such is the outpouring of kudos for the film, as garishly excessive as my own paeans to Jean Claude Van Damme. But what narrational nuance do they see that I’m missing? Can it be something as simple as the transposition from a military context to a gritty urban cop context, that is, eschewing the submarine masturbation of Submerged and the tattered fatigues of Flight of Fury in favour of Renegade Justice’s plain clothes and lack of submarines? Perhaps the comfort afforded by squeezing Seagal into the Death Wish matrix stimulates bliss in the heads of the fanboys (although I’m sure not nearly as much bliss as would be stimulated by a viewing of Kevin Bacon’s wonderfully pessimistic tribute to Charlie Bronson in the fun Death Sentence)?

Hard To Kill and such gems were never containers for a great deal of subtext and rarely did ambiguity or intentional ellipses in plot intrude on Seagal’s stylistic slaughter of those persons deemed immoral. They satisfy urges for fictional violence through cinematographically appealing to deep sadomasochistic instincts within the spectator, the latter locked into every Seagal knuckle maleficent in action. Renegade Justice, on the other hand, omits the aesthetic panache of a Nico, opting instead for a trite story spread over gloomy visual banality; at least the older flicks had the visual style accentuated to a level of decency. Even in the domain of character name, a frequent point of excellence for Seagal, we are served up the dull Simon Ballister. If a film ever yearned for a Mason Storm or a Gino Felino it’s Renegade Justice!

I can only hope the audience won’t be turned off by my earnest transition to negative critique. To prevent this I might be forced to solicit the services of wet vest for a re-enactment of the centrepiece fight from Under Siege 2. I’ll play the part of Steven Seagal and he can be Big Ed from Twin Peaks, together we’ll put on a spectacle so majestically enthralling that even the most stoic of observers will be shuddering in ecstasy by the end of it all. Hopefully that’ll fill some time too.

Judge Dredd

2007-12-03T07:40:00.001Z

They call him Judge, his last name is Dredd,
So break the law, and you may wind up dead.
Truth and justice are what he’s fighting for,
Judge Dredd the man, he is the law.

Anthrax, ‘I am the Law’

Like the musical narrative whittled in times past by Anthrax, the year nineteen hundred and ninety-five brought into existence cinema’s own take on 2000 AD’s most famous creation. The time was of buzzing anticipation: the sheen of helmet visors threatened to furrow into the social edifice like a knife lacerating cake, throwing into disarray convention and morbid inertia alike, fucking a decelerating conception of artistic expression into motion. A pioneering force was to be unleashed, let loose into the labyrinthine mines of the human psyche. The rising tide of orgasmic exhilaration reached crescendo heights upon the birth pangs of the film’s release, stabbings puncturing the accepted distinction between the myriad stages of production and the time spent straddling the irate hornet disposition of the box office.

Then it was splashed out into the world, soaked in amniotic bullets of ultra-violence, umbilical blows to the crotch in abundance. The masses cowered, unable to form the correct mien with which to address the rich numinosity of Judge Dredd. To acquiesce to the comic gyrations or to turn away in disgust, that was the question. Shot through the filament of the beating heart strings running transnationally across space, the film was subject to opal eyes and pale pregnant minds, sundering tedium parasitic on the social conscience. Never before had intact follies been redeemed with such gusto. Judge Dredd stole nobility from the arbitrary, redistributing to the meritorious deserved rewards.

How an inventory majestic in colour such as thus could have been perpetrated by a mere assemblage of images laced with sound is the beautiful centrepiece of this story. For imprisoned in the vulgarity of celluloid reproduction is a vivid set of pronouncements palatial in form, oozing their yield through a singular source, the fecund presence of Sylvester Stallone.

Shouldering Judge Dredd’s humming weight of disdain, Stallone is the fulcrum to this rocking web of explosions and titanic shouting. He is cast into the riotous crackles of Mega City One, a grim collective of wretched lawbreakers that makes Mos Eisley look like a port of saints. His job: uphold juridical integrity and punish those who would dare deface the rule of law. Felons are subject to judging on the spot, verdicts conjured by whichever Judge they are unlucky to be caught by. Of these civil enforcers, the most notorious and rigid of temperament is Judge Dredd. Whereas lesser Judges may grant lenience on occasion, overlooking minor misdeeds in a bout of discretion, Judge Dredd’s obligation to the profession pierces any and all merciful cries.

But duty is soon rescinded when a base conspiracy framing Dredd for the murder of innocents leads to him condemned to life imprisonment. With the system fissuring under corruption, it’s up to our eponymous hero to rip apart the shackles of the sentence dealt him and rescue Mega City One from the clutches of vile Rico and his lust for domination.

Unlike sumptuous twosomes unique in nature such as Dolph Lundgren and Brian Benben’s paean to love and friendship in I Come in Peace, Stallone is fortunate enough to be an ingredient in at least two of these dyads. Popping up with little regard to good taste is Rob Schneider. He wanders the narrative as the (explicit) comic relief, rubbed into the skin of Stallone like a particularly greasy and annoying moisturiser that delivers bad lines of dialogue at inopportune moments. In a skid mark of poetic justice, the wrongly convicted Dredd is united with Schneider’s snivelling fool, a petty stain he had unfairly convicted earlier on. Schneider becomes the personification of injustice, and a suitably odorous splotch at that. He also makes for a fine container of all that ails Judge Dredd.

Certainly little can be spoken in the negative about Judge Hershey, Dredd’s confidant and the object of his repressed lust. The bristling fabric of Dredd’s chin, ignited by entry of Hershey into the locale, belies his intention of late night masturbatory sessions lit only by a candle feeding light onto a picture of Hershey stolen from her locker.

Completing the order of known names attached to the film is Max von Sydow, often to be unseen off-camera calling to beg Bergman to make a sequel to the Seventh Seal, and Armand Assante, vying for the title of world’s biggest neck alongside Stallone and Henry Rollins. In fact Assante’s biggest contribution to excellence is relocating Josie Packard from Twin Peaks to Mega City One. Alas her sole gift to the unfolding drama is to be vandalised by Judge Hershey in the token ‘cat fight’.

No doubt, Judge Dredd is Stallone’s show. Even when cloaked in plastic headpiece his dirty upturned smirk clouds the entire mise-en-scene, turning invisible whole sections of Mega City One’s N64-spawned urban skyline. The codpiece protecting his swollen balls of virility also has such effects, cancelling out murmurs of dialogue, judging them superfluous and detrimental to close-up glimpses of Stallone’s simmering outrage. And who needs them when an endless barrage of “I am the law” explodes from Stallone’s lips with diarrheic regularity.

Never wildly conceding defeat to Assante and his jamboree of freakish clones, Stallone stoically drums up honour from dishonour, with the denouement dredging up a welter of runtime leaving only the finest crystals of Stallone’s fist smashing a villain’s face remaining. Impacts originating from the leathered knuckles of Stallone and a stream of bellowed invective cement Judge Dredd’s position in the arts, bestowing aesthetic gloss onto a film that regurgitates glee into the popular imagination.

Arch Enemy - Rise of the Tyrant

2007-11-21T07:05:00.001Z

Memories of Arch Enemy’s last two albums are warped in a spiral of negativity. Adjectives fasten themselves, locking into the memory, constructing associations running the gamut of banality and lustreless soundscapes. Plodding riffs cascading into groove, frequent gyrations on the screams of recycled rhythms. Protests cite the occasional tracks of quality, prodding at one to ignore the truth: that this album duo indeed fail to continue a streak of brilliance the band was cultivating so successfully. Alas, mediocrity can’t be erased by the recollection of past triumph.

Now, what is this? A new Arch Enemy opus, Rise of the Tyrant, studio release number seven, lunging from the palms of the Swedish quintet into our welcoming aural cavities.

Gone is the preoccupation with guitar tracks that jog along, toneless, fearing melody will catch them up. Here is the veritable “return to form”, oft-pronounced in the past, chanted from belfries with no consideration for the validity of the claim – but this is the genuine article, the album to overwrite recent dips in calibre, inverting memories mired in the pungent odours of disappointment.

The dramatic surge in quality comes through hefty bolts of vitality, a newly-discovered fount of energy flooding the band. Perhaps credit should be given to Christopher Amott, guitarist and co-founding member, who exited the band a few years ago only to return earlier this year. No doubt his head became layered in vast swathes of riffery during the hiatus, all to gush intensely outwards upon his return.

Songs like ‘In This Shallow Grave’ demonstrate the grilling heaviness present on the last two albums, but this time added with the missing element of ingenuity needed to captivate the listener’s attention – that wavering, fickle cord that links musician and enthusiast. ‘Night Falls Fast’ shuttles along in a similar vein, summoning comparisons with the thrash titillations circumnavigating debut album Black Earth. Yet never does the reverberations of Rise of the Tyrant fall short of sounding absolutely contemporary.

A crucial influx of melody underscores the album, warm lapidary lines of melodic sustenance boring through each and every song. Contrasts are established through the intermixture of thrilling sonic blasts of metal and decelerating pullulations of glowing harmonies, joyous juxtapositions coursing at exactly the right pace. The height of this convergence comes with ‘The Day You Died’, its central motif a roaming, dense riff of dynamic chugging overlaid with a melancholic lead shivering in sparseness. Reminiscent of In Flames Clayman-era (before the transition to insurmountable hideousness), this song is precisely that which has been lacking of late, the smooth touch expressed to perfection on Burning Bridges and Wages of Sin.

Even the dual guitar relays get a spark of rejuvenation here. The Amott brothers evidence their axe-wielding skills with biting force, encircling passages in winding double helixes of harmonised lead guitar, propelling momentum in lightning flashes of scalar dance.

It’s a relief to see equilibrium re-established here, for wrongs to be righted, past blips elided. The confirmation that Arch Enemy are producers of sublime musical expanses is a fact left numbing the head after listening to Rise of the Tyrant.

Street Fighter

2007-11-18T19:40:00.000Z

There’s a dream recurrent amongst the brethren of Jean Claude Van Damme – that subculture oft-overlooked by sociologists and census nazis, shunned off to corners untouched by light and made to endure mock rhetoric orchestrated by those too high-strung to acquire mirth from shoe-face collisions. The dream has the dreamer deliriously enchanted by a field in which runs every film ever blessed by the presence of Jean Claude Van Damme. On one bump of verdant unfolds the winding narrative of Kickboxer, another sees heroic postures interlinked with Dolph Lundgren’s vectorial oomph. A land of grace where the dreamer oscillates between orgasmic dizziness and pulsing delight, a place where inhibitions are shattered, crumbled to sand swept away in a gust of bicep.

It’s when the initial flood of joy and fear reach harmony, when guilt and insignificance are erased from the dreaming mind that corrupt forces puncture the idyll. Surging over the horizon suddenly appears the towering scowl of M. Bison, Van Damme’s opposite number in the opera that is Street Fighter.

This titan casts his glare onto each and every filmic grain scuttling its way across dense serpentine pastures of Van Awesomeness. Screens are instantly annihilated, scenes ceased incomplete, stolen from eyes and ears, replaced by blackened voids. Insensitive to the pinnings of the distressed dreamer, Bison rises from the holocaust, gleaming fragments of glowering lips cut the sky in two, and he exits into the firmament. The few seconds before the dream elapses entirely has the dreamer sight the carnage from afar, the turbid aftermath ringing out in the air, screams of deceased fisticuff denouements fading into silence.

Psychologists have yet to arrive at a conclusive theory as to the cause or meaning of this nocturnal disturbance. Freud was baffled at the illusion of grace offered by the pastoral canvas; Jung failed to traverse the spectral appearance of Dolph Lundgren; Lacan wafted to preoccupations concerning the dreamer and the dreamer’s dreamed self; Laing spent twenty-minutes dividing a promotional photo of Bison, then left the room.

The dream erupts at the core of the sleeping Van Fan in patterns yet undiscovered. Its variations remain nil, uniformity upheld in buzzing consistency. Some rumours point to the viewing of Street Fighter as an instigating element, a film widely known for its cresting of affect. Chances for the criss-crossing bodies and cross-cutting narrative of said motion movie to wedge themselves in the subconscious are abundant – that this is the case exists as a strong probability.

Let’s accept the hypothesis that enwrapping the pupil blacks in the aura of Street Fighter for ninety minutes induces the vivid dream aforementioned. Now, what are the precise cues embedded within its compass.

Van Damme is Guile, military commander of the Good Guys in a war-torn South-East Asian country. To his side is Kylie Minogue – after her tenure in Neighbours was crushed by the flaming fists of Harold Bishop, but before she had the good fortune to contract lethal strains of Pauly Shore. Flanking the duo of dynamism is another duo, starlets of the game from which the film is derived, the ever-present Ken and Ryu. And completing the altruistic wave is Doctor Chung Li and her henchmen.

Facing the legions of morality across a gulf of illegal kickboxing and speed boat games is the horde of evil, the nasty antagonists, whores to the rhythm of craven wishes. Propelling this jutting malignancy is M. Bison, herald of the mighty diabolical plan and arch-patriarch of the family Adams. Slotted below him are charismatic persons such as Sagat, Vega and Zangief.

In attempting to fulfil desires of world domination, Bison takes a group of innocents hostage, requesting some twenty-billion dollars to buy their safe release. Van Damme’s having none of this ransom lark and mounts his own assault on Bison’s temple headquarters, rented from the same people who supplied Pol Pot with quality interiors for years. Van Guile garners the assistance of his fellow Good Guys in the offence, and open threads of character development and conflict slowly converge on a grand finale full of cranial punches and thudding blows to the groin.

Disregarding the disappointing lack of stretchy limbs sported by Dhalsim and Blanka’s terminal secondary-character-syndrome, it’s hard not to shake with glee at the thought of Street Fighter. The zany audacity with which it places into the hands of ruthless villain Bison a copy of the arcade machine control panel as his master console is but one signifier of a film revelling in its absurdity. Characters clutching their one dimensions, cartoon scraps, the subtle allusions to hours wasted pummelling Sagat to see if his eye-patch falls off – and, of course, the Van Liner.

Even with stiff competition from Bison, Van Damme is able to steal the show: his delivery of the wry remark is simply unbeatable and the film is populated by their wise syllables. Words flow from his tongue like poetry, just admire the following: “It’s the collection agency, Bison. Your ass is six months overdue, and it’s mine.”

See what he did there, likening himself to a collection agency and Bison’s ass to the items to be collected. Genius! Almost as svelte as the kicks ushered from out of Van Damme’s pelvic juggernaut.

Crisp combos held by Van Damme help efface the dodgy sub-Michael Biehn antics that follow Ken, of Ken and Ryu-fame. His face may channel Kyle Reese’s most superb gestures to the well of cinema but he clearly lacks all the beatific substance that lines the organs of he who we must accompany if we want to live. Ample Van Dammage enables us to ignore such minor besmirchments.

Stephen E. de Souza, director, should at this very moment – if I’ve prepared things correctly – feel an appreciative tickle in bodily areas vigorously clothed. As if scripting Hudson Hawk were not testament enough, Street Fighter cements a reputation awash with brilliance.

Alas, in the end, only the Van Aphorism can possibly solve the mystery as to why this film prompts one to conjure such eccentric dalliances in the subconscious. It can’t be a repressed fear that M. Bison didn’t actually die, that he survived Van Damme’s final kick into the sheet of widescreens, his electromagnetic powers being slashed at the source. Or could it be that Bison somehow transcended the world of fictional action schlock, taking a place at the very heart of our nightmares, a wraith-like presence haunting with persistence an otherwise unblemished dreamscape?

It is a scary thought.

Black Sheep

2007-10-29T20:17:00.001Z

There’s something deeply unsettling about farm animals. We know rightly, clutching the fires of rationality, that huge swarms of these creatures must exist, how else do we find our carnivorous hunger satisfied at the merest request? Yet locked in our urban prison houses, we find the imagination lacking in forming a picture of the flocks and herds supposedly grazing out there. Add to that mental block the insidious characteristics attributed the farmer and his ‘simpler’ way of life, plus the grinding flesh pulp grotesques underscoring the scene, and it’s no mystery why metropolitan condescension might give way to bowel-shuddering terror at the thought of time spent in the company of living slabs of farm animal.

Cinema, never one to shirk the opportunity to revel in nostalgia for a lost past (agrarian or otherwise), has seen occasion to parade such creatures on-screen before now. While the nauseating family dreck of Babe is best forgotten, the same surely cannot be said of Pink Flamingos’ infamous chicken cameo!

Let them come and be counted in the rectangular spotlight of film, help us dear instrument of modernity to dispel from the mind fear of what lies beyond our myopic gaze.

But perhaps truth and reality and projectiles of fact are not priorities, at least where Black Sheep is concerned. I might hope so: the idea that a deranged woollen gargoyle will turn up in my room, bloodthirst on its tongue, doesn’t ease my sleeping troubles.

What relation does Black Sheep create between the humble pastoral mammal and its cruel dominator? Could it be an inverted victim/victimiser relation perchance?

Why, turns out the horror genre does it again, flipping in a dance of poetic justice the dichotomies taken for granted – meat for the man? master/dinner? “Get to fuck,” cries those with vocational qualifications in latex and the crimson fluids. And let’s rejoice, for it leads to wonderful articles of entertainment, a motion movie like the aforementioned, to name one.

Erasing from history that Chris Farley number from a few years back, Black Sheep even dares to leave David Spade on the shelf marked That guy who’s not James Spader. Born in New Zealand and content to let the film title gesture a pithy synopsis, the film has mutant sheep go on the rampage after being contaminated by a toxic goo. The outbreak of rabid mutton occurs while our hero, Henry, is rupturing a fifteen-year countryside abstinence by visiting the farm on which he grew up. Not only is the timing of the dementia epidemic unfortunate, but Henry is also afflicted with a phobia of sheep. Yes, even Lamb Chop gets his heart accelerating.

As the horde move to install a dictatorship of the sheep, converting whatever humankind they come across to their cause (by way of a swift bite to the jugular and a subsequent transformation of the bitten into towering Sheep People), young Henry and his newly acquired eco-warrior girlfriend must mount the resistance necessary to overcome the threat. Cue running, guns, splatter and wisecracks.

Wisecracks? Indeed, would you not say that such a narrative deserves the comedic touch? Naturally Black Sheep sees fit to enwrap itself in the fabric of comedy horror, the sort that enjoyed life in abundance during the 80s but that’s sadly diminished in the intervening years. The film shares with its Antipodean kin – a wealthy canon comprising such numbers as the Aussie Body Melt or the youthful outings of Peter Jackson – a love of black comedy mixed with self-deprecation and hyperbole. The irreverence of the Evil Dead series, the rubber violence of Troma, the Dr Moreau tapestry of Freaked – all are evoked by the absurdist logic of Black Sheep. It’s all pulled off with a keen cinematic expertise: the director clearly knows when to pull back and allow a Birds-esque menace to build. The action sequences are tackled with great success and the visual palette is most fetching.

For the non-Kiwi, the national specificity in which many of the gags are cloaked may prove daunting. However, the jokes are still effective and affecting, the air of blackened comic genius remains after any local subtext is stripped away. And with a cast featuring charming players such as a Kiwi Naomi Watts, what’s not to love? Certainly the special effects courtesy of WETA yearn for affection, as does the thought newly inserted in spectatorial heads of spin-offs concerning Sheep-Human hybrids attempting to become integrated into society, Meet the Applegates-style, maybe getting jobs as insurance salespeople. The possibilities are endless. Hell, they could even get roles as extras in a sequel to Dog Soldiers.

Finally we can converse with our brothers and sisters in New Zealand without having to mention that guy who made those films with the orcs and elves and assorted small people. All thanks to Black Sheep.