Dead Good

Contains spoilers for Dead Set, Hammer House of Horror

Over the last ten days or so I’ve been catching up with various episodes from the Hammer House of Horror series currently airing over on ITV3 – and what a treat they are. The three I’ve caught so far – Charlie Boy, The Thirteenth Reunion and Silent Scream (see here for further details on the series) – have been grim, desolate fun (although they may look a little hokey by modern standards). However, the one thing that these three episodes have in common is that they are all unremittingly bleak, which is a quality I don’t think you see often enough in modern horror.

A little while back I read something (probably on a blog somewhere, I forget) that suggested that all narratives needed to possess a certain degree of hope to make them meaningful and worthwhile experiences, as if drama is some sort of route to 'self-improvement' – this is something that the Hammer House of Horror holds no truck with whatsoever. Each episode ends on a decidedly downbeat note, where hope is taken outside and given a good kicking on the basis that that is where true horror lies: to witness the protagonist of Charlie Boy die through no real fault of his own is both disturbing and unsettling, which is surely what any respectable horror narrative should be aiming for. The Hammer series does this with a frightening regularity, and mostly without any unnecessary gore (which usually isn’t scary in the slightest).

One of my favourite films is My Little Eye, which has an ending so bleak that it made me feel physically unwell – which I think is a good thing. Throw in Session 9 and Blair Witch, and you have a triumvirate of some of the bleakest, most morbid films ever made (is it simply a coincidence that all three films are all shot on video? Maybe there’s something about the everyday, ‘homemade’ nature of the medium that makes these films genuinely unsettling).

So with these films in mind, it gives me great pleasure to announce that bleak is back with a vengeance, in the shape of the Charlie Brooker penned Dead Set, showing on E4 at the moment (last episode tonight). The pilot episode was terrific: unnerving and, above all else, genuinely frightening (again, shot mostly on digital video by the look of things). Like the Hammer House of Horror, Dead Set’s milieu is contemporary Britain, a recognisable scenario to anyone who’s seen more than ten minutes of Big Brother. However, Dead Set doesn’t go out of its way to satirise reality TV – if you’re looking for satire, then no doubt you’ll find it, but there’s more to Dead Set than simply putting the boot into Big Brother and its ilk. Even before the zombies show up (sprinting this way and that in true 28 Days Later stylee), the studio setting is bleak enough: a kind of claustrophobic maze where stressed out producers bark orders at interns, who are only too happy to be involved in the subterranean hell of TV production.

Also, Brooker seems to have got the tone just right – in today’s Guardian, Anne Billson says this:

Because horror movies tend to approach their themes more obliquely than other genres, they often succeed in getting under our skin where more self-consciously "serious" mainstream treatments of contemporary issues fail to cause a dent. Horror films draw on metaphors that are not polished and hermetically sealed, but misshapen or amorphous, like the monsters themselves, which leaves all the more room for individuals to interpret them on a personal level.

Brooker understands this all too well, and that’s what makes Dead Set such powerful viewing. Its narrative doesn’t labour the point with regards to reality TV, but at its core there’s something dark, twisted and nihilistic: witness the treatment of Davina McCall. Rather sportingly, Davina gets bitten in the throat early on by a member of the undead, and spends the first two episodes banging her head unthinkingly on a door in an attempt to get at Patrick the producer. Of course there‘s a certain glee in doing this to a well known TV celebrity, but at the same time, Brooker uses Davina’s familiarity to paint something bleak and ultimately hopeless. Hope be damned - when TV is as good as this, who needs it?

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Length

I’m not sure if I like Silent Witness or not. For the most part, it’s the older brother of Bonekickers, inasmuch as it spins stories out of a seemingly sedentary occupation. Pathology and archaeology both deal (mostly) with the dead, and there’s your challenge: how do you make a drama where your plot is partially driven by people who can’t answer back? Bonekickers continually wrestled with this question, and didn’t altogether do a massively convincing job (mostly because it seemed unsure as to what it wanted to be: teatime romp, or post-watershed ‘issue’ drama). Silent Witness is more assured, as it figured this question out a long time ago. Rather than simply popping up to proclaim foul play and chewing on the obligatory pathologist’s sandwich, Dr Leo Dalton’s team usually find themselves right in the centre of the action – mostly due to the addition of the hard-nosed, no-nonsense copper, DI McKenzie.

Next problem: you’ve got two hours of prime time TV to fill – does a story such as the recent Judgement penned by Christian Spurrier need two hours to tell its story?

I don’t think it does.

It’s been covered elsewhere of course, but Jane Tranter’s parting shot before heading off to LA (which can be found here) seems a hugely strange way in which to talk about the BBC’s ‘single’ drama output:

An audience doesn't think “great, a single drama's on tonight”.

(For an alternative view on this, see a David Hare rant here).

Rather than taking issue with the ‘fetishisation’ of the single drama, perhaps it might be opportune to talk about the fetishisation of the series itself – or, for the purposes of this post, the two-parter. Many ITV dramas (Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost) wind up their stories in a single evening – granted, it’s still two hours of prime time hitched to a drama ‘brand’, but at least you don’t have to give up two evenings to catch the whole damn thing. That said, perhaps it’s worth pondering why a drama such as Silent Witness is shown in two halves. News at Ten occupies an immoveable place in the BBC schedule, which means that everything else has to gravitate around it, and the many gruesome autopsy scenes means that Silent Witness is not exactly pre-watershed fare. Regardless of the fact that a lot of TV drama mentioned here doesn’t really justify a two hour running time, this must put programme makers in a bit of a quandary. Judgement certainly didn’t need two hours, but the schedule *sort of* demands that it does. What’s the alternative? An hour one night, followed by thirty minutes the next? That wouldn’t work. Two hours seems to be the default setting, so two hours is what you get, whether the drama deserves it or not.

The other problem is that drama is not immune from branding. Silent Witness is now in its twelfth season and has been on our screens since 1996; in ad-speak, it would be described as a ‘strong brand’, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s probably the ‘hook’ that gets people watching in the first place. As with any brand, there are a series of identifying details that should be immediately recognisable: with Silent Witness, this identifier is partially contained within the title itself. The problem is that drama series often seem hampered by their reliance on these ‘signifiers’ – it’s almost as if there’s a checklist of branded bits that have to be ticked off before recognition kicks in. With single dramas such as The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (strangely enough, another two hour drama but one that fully justified its running time) this isn’t so much of a problem, and the drama seems stronger as a result. However, single dramas probably don’t achieve such a high ‘brand recognition’ as series do, which is a huge shame (but not exactly a problem that can’t be remedied, I think).

Perhaps Tranter’s comments come down to nothing more than the holy grail of viewing figures: David Hare’s My Zinc Bed picked up a derisory one million viewers (about 4.5% of the overall audience) when it was broadcast on BBC2 at the back end of August, despite having a cast that featured Jonathan Pryce, Uma Thurman and Paddy Considine – all this says to me is that if you don’t have an instantly recognisable drama ‘brand’, you have to rely upon starry name actors, a strategy that simply didn’t work with My Zinc Bed.

Is the solution more single drama? Probably not. Maybe it’s a question of giving writers greater freedoms in the stories they choose to tell without being constrained by ‘branding’ concerns (and also giving writers other than David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff a crack of the whip). However, given the woeful performance of My Zinc Bed, it looks as if the big drama brands are here to stay (that said, a new series of Spooks starts on Monday, which has at least been one series that the BBC seems to get consistently right).

Sherlock ‘Chip’ Holmes to the Rescue

Over the last couple of weeks or so, there’s been an interesting mini-debate of sorts taking place via the Shooting People Screenwriting bulletin along the lines that exposure to film and TV images can have (supposedly) a corrupting influence.

Here’s Alan McKenna:

It seems exposure to violent images predisposes us to greater tolerance of violence. Not a lot of doubt I'm afraid.

And here’s Allen O’Leary:

I've come across some interesting research lately about TV watching and behaviour. Take a read of this http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/09/25/risky.behaviors.tv.may.be. (...)

Precis: If you haven't had the experience of a risky sexual behaviour and you watch programs that show that risky behaviour you are more likely do it later REGARDLESS of whether the consequences of the behaviour are shown to be bad in the program.

That's very interesting indeed and implies there is a critical failure in programs that supposedly model bad behaviour as an 'educational' device - they could back-fire horribly...

And here’s Elisabeth Pinto:

My conclusion... was it was nigh-on impossible to make an anti-war film even if the film explicitly set out to do so. Not for physiological reasons per se but because of the nature of film narrative (which may amount to the same thing). By giving a sense of control over events (A happens, followed by B, followed by C etc), it is only too easy to project yourself into the action in a positive way. Which you end up doing because film romanticises and mythologises everything. And we all know how human beings yearn for myths...

With all due respect to these good people, I’m convinced that they are all totally, utterly wrong. But instead of merely stating that they’re wrong and leaving it at that, armed with my Psychology A level, I’m going to dig about and unearth some evidence as to why. In the meantime, here’s I.C. Jarvie from his book Towards a Sociology of the Cinema:

While people believed (believe?) that film and television do influence their children, and that if the programming is bad, then their children will be, too. Studies such as those done by Himmelwit (TV and the Child, London, 1958) and Schramm (TV in the Lives of Our Children, Stanford, 1961) reveal that this is untrue. Film may influence us toward good or evil, but if it does, then the way we are is much more complicated than what it seems to be on the surface, and it could even possibly be counterintuitive.

Broken?

Contains Spoilers for Breaking Bad

Stevyn Colgan’s blog steered me in the direction of the first episode of Breaking Bad, a new US import currently showing on FX. And it’s utterly fab. But don’t take my word for it – the first episode is available as a free download on iTunes (what a relief that Apple didn’t carry through their threat to shut it down, eh? The greedy, bluffing tossers).

In the same post, Stevyn says this:

Yet again I find that I'm praising an American show when I want to be praising British shows.

Which is when it struck me: there has to be a reason as to why we don’t generally see drama of this quality in the UK, and I’m struggling to figure out why. Perhaps it might be worth looking at Breaking Bad’s narrative for some clues:

* The protagonist of Breaking Bad is Walter H White (an almost unrecognisable Bryan Cranston from Malcolm in the Middle), a fifty year old part time chemistry teacher with an unexpectedly pregnant wife and a teenage son with learning difficulties. Walter’s part time teaching job isn’t enough to keep the wolf from the door, so he also works part time in a car wash, where his extravagantly eyebrowed boss harasses him into working extra hours cleaning cars, which isn’t really Walter’s job.

* After collapsing at the car wash, Walter is informed by his doctor that he has inoperable lung cancer, a fact that he keeps from his wife and son.

* Through his brother-in-law (a dumb, bullet headed cop), Walter becomes intrigued by the money that is made by the town’s drug dealers. Accompanying his brother-in-law on a drugs bust, Walter spies one of his ex-students sprinting from the scene. He collars the kid later and effectively blackmails him into becoming his new partner.

By now, great big fluorescent alarm bells should be ringing. Right off the bat, the protagonist of Breaking Bad is fifty years of age. Fifty! Man, that’s old! Not exactly your key BBC3 demographic there. Is that a significant fact (as an aside, I sat down and watched the superb Dad’s Army last night and wondered if someone would have the nerve to pitch it today)?

If relative old age is a demographic turn off, consider what else could make Breaking Bad a UK commission disaster zone: learning difficulties! Lung cancer! Drugs! Guns! Taken as standalone issues, I’m sure we can all name at least a couple of UK dramas that have taken these subjects as their main dramatic focus, but maybe that’s the problem: perhaps we treat subjects such as old age, learning difficulties and cancer too much as issues that need to be discussed ad infinitum rather than simply as factors that help establish milieu and character. And Breaking Bad is all about character – is that the difference?

Breaking Bad doesn’t do anything tricksy – there’s no intrusive voiceover, no smart ass structure, and its exposition is handled beautifully. Its moral universe is grey at best, as Walter wants to use the gains from his drug dealing to provide a financial cushion for his family, which means that there’s no cosy, Inspector Gadget-like ‘message’ tacked on – with a story this strong, you don’t need it.

It’s not as if the UK doesn’t produce quality TV drama, but the balance has been skewed in recent years in favour of the US. And there’s got to be a reason for that – right?

Arthouse or Mainstream? Let's Have Both!

Contains spoilers for Blue Velvet

I saw Blue Velvet when it first came out in 1986 – it was the first movie of that particular ‘type’ I’d seen and, although my friend and I emerged blinking form the cinema asking each other “What the flaming fup was that all about?”, I loved it. David Lynch has always made films that are defiantly ‘arthouse’, but what really distinguished Blue Velvet for me was that it seemed to exist at a crossroads between ‘arthouse’ and ‘mainstream’ cinema. To be honest, I’ve always had problems trying to distinguish between the two anyway (I’ve often asked myself why arthouse films can’t have more car chases, and conversely, why a lot of mainstream cinema has to be so unrelentingly dumb). Trying to put it down to an explanation that mainstream cinema relies predominantly on a traditional three act structure (as Karel Segers suggests) doesn’t really do it for me. If there are distinct differences between the two, they’re far more subtle than that.

Perhaps a major distinction between arthouse and mainstream cinema is the fact that in an arthouse film the dots are not immediately joined up for you. This can apply not only to the film’s narrative, but also to its visual style as well. By not providing an explanation of every little narrative or visual detail, a film can quite easily slip into the ‘arthouse’ camp, where it’s remarkably easy for a seemingly random detail to inspire someone to say, “What’s going on there, then?” (which was exactly the question I was asking myself throughout Inland Empire).

Blue Velvet is a case in point – during the concluding scenes, Jeffrey walks into a scene of torture and carnage in Dorothy’s flat. The scene is not explained via a huge landfill of exposition, so the onus is on the viewer to try and piece the various bits of elliptical logic together (that said, good luck to you if you try this with Inland Empire).

Now take an example that exists at the other end of the spectrum: Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners. For me the most notable feature of this rather daft bit of mainstream fluff was the striking visual of an injured dog: a memorable detail completely spoilt by the fact that it’s ruthlessly explained away. A director such as David Lynch would have felt no desire at all to have done this, which seems to me to form a distinction between the two ‘styles’.

Of course, ‘arthouse’ and ‘mainstream’ are not mutually exclusive. Here’s Karel Sagers again:

The darkest film I have recently seen is PRINCESS, a revenge tale mixing anime and live action. Subject matter: pornography and child abuse... the film was told in a traditional three act structure. Even if you believe your film will appeal to intellectuals only... you will need that conventional story structure. Because today without it you have no audience.

As above, I’m not sure that this is entirely correct. Princess is again a film like Blue Velvet that sits quite comfortably at the crossroads between mainstream and arthouse, which is absolutely fine by me. Given the problems that Tartan Films have been having recently, it might even be tempting to say that the market for arthouse films is in decline – this isn’t because audiences are somehow demanding more conventional story structures, but probably because ‘arthouse’ is in a constant process of being co-opted into the mainstream: perhaps Christopher Nolan’s successes of recent years are particular cases in point. And besides, whenever I hear the over-used term ‘blockbuster with a brain’, it invariably means that the brain has been borrowed from an arthouse sensibility – and there’s nothing wrong with that either.

What's the Deal with Planet Terror?

Contains Spoilers for Planet Terror

Hmmm – Planet Terror: a fun, fast and furious homage to the old b-movie schlock movies.

One problem here: doesn’t Robert Rodriguez make B-movies anyway (El Mariachi, Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn)? So Planet Terror is a homage to... Robert Rodriguez movies? I’m confused, but let’s face it – it doesn’t take much.
There’s nothing wrong with Planet Terror as such, discounting of course Quentin Tarantino’s role as Rapist #1 (subtle it ain’t). The thing that intrigued me most about it was Rebel Rodriguez’s (Robert Rodriguez’s son) resemblance to Danny Lloyd in The Shining – it really is quite startling. Robert Rodriguez makes a throwaway comment about it here, but I’m sure there’s more to this than meets the eye. The only evidence that the reference to The Shining was deliberate is that Rebel’s character in the film is called Tony, which was the name of Danny Torrance’s alter ego. Also, given the fact that Planet Terror is a homage to the exploitation movie (many of these released at around the same time as The Shining) it might have been possible for Danny Lloyd to bag a part in one of these flicks (the fact that he didn’t is neither here nor there). If you’re in the habit of ascribing a huge degree of intelligence to a movie when in reality there’s probably none, you might come to the conclusion that Rodriguez enjoys fucking with his audience’s collective head – until the point that Tony shoots himself with the gun that his mother has entrusted to him, leaving that particular narrative thread to go nowhere. Even weirder is that the film ends with a shot of Tony, frolicking on a beach with various survivors in some kind of weird idealised daydream. I no understand.

House of Wax

Contains spoilers for House of Wax.

You really don’t need me to inform you that House of Wax is a pile of unmitigated old flap, and ordinarily I wouldn’t even bother commenting on it (the fact that the movie was cast around
Paris Hilton – who didn’t even have to audition for her role – should tell you everything you need to know about it. That, and the involvement of Joel Silver, hardly your benchmark of quality). The point is that in terms of screenwriting mechanics and structure, the thing is so completely out of control as to tip it into the realms of the quite interesting – not that this is entirely what the writers were aiming at, I’m sure, which still makes it a pile of unmitigated old flap.

I’ve lost count of the number of horror films that stick slavishly to a three act structure, which usually means that nothing really happens in the first half hour as the narrative treads water waiting for that all-important first ‘turning point’. However, with House of Wax, nothing happens for 46 minutes, which is either a clever way of confounding expectations, or a massively misjudged wrong turn (I’m voting for the latter). Much of this time is taken up with a hugely pointless drive through the middle of nowhere as two of the six hapless teenagers being lined up for a little slice ‘n’ dice take off in search of a fanbelt; again, maybe this is meant to be unsettling – we’re so far into things now that surely something has to happen. Trouble is, it doesn’t – the creepy driver disappears until the very end of the film (where his re-appearance is almost wholly meaningless). Then, of course, everything goes bonkers for the next hour.

Surely one abiding convention of a horror film such as this is to keep the focus of the action tight. Look at The Thing – 12 men in the middle of nowhere get picked off by a weird, steamy alien – and by the middle of nowhere, I mean a single location. House of Wax has an intriguing location (a deserted town in the middle of nowhere populated by waxworks and two psychotic ex-Siamese twins) – problem is, only four of the six teenage dunderheads end up there, and even then they arrive in two waves. The first 46 minutes of the film seem intent on separating the larger group from each other, probably for the purpose of stringing things out to a respectable feature length. There’s even a completely pointless trip by four of the group to see a football game, but they get stuck in traffic and have to return to where they started from. The whole film is stuffed with bizarre narrative dead ends such as this – so much so that you start thinking it must be deliberate.

Perhaps House of Wax is some wildly intellectual anti-narrative experiment. Here’s David Boje on the subject:

Antenarrative is the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet. To traditional narrative methods, antenarrative is an improper storytelling, a wager that a proper narrative can be constituted.

Then you realise Paris Hilton is in it, and you’re forced to give yourself a good slap for being a pretentious arse. The problem with House of Wax is that its script is in dire need of least three more drafts and a good kicking - nothing more.

Celebrity Screenplays

I may risk going off on a tangent here (no change there then), but it suddenly occurred to me the other day that the one area of creative endeavour seemingly uninfected by the virus of celebrity is the screenplay. Sure, there are celebrity screenwriters, but they tend to be people who are first and foremost writers, and not celebrities double or triple-hyphenating their way across from other branches of the media and/or creative arts.

The cult of celebrity in the publishing trade is well known, to the extent that the use of ghostwriters is now commonplace – Naomi Campbell is reported as stating that she has never read the novel that has her name on the cover (Black Swan), and it’s obvious that all of Jordan’s ‘novels’ have been ghosted (by Rebecca Farnworth just in case you were wondering). For the most part, the name on the cover acts as a marketing hook – the celebrity functions as a brand name that can be utilised to sell anything from perfume to fitness DVDs to underwear and, of course, novels.

So why doesn’t the same exist in the world of screenwriting? Or, perhaps more to the point: should it?

Of course the economic model of filmmaking is entirely different from that of the mass market publishing industry, where the mantra is ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap’. However, it does seem a little odd (to me at least) how screenwriting hasn’t necessarily been ‘contaminated’ by celebrity in quite the same way that the publishing industry has.

That said, not so long ago it seemed that wherever you looked, some celebrity somewhere was penning a screenplay: Toby Anstis, David Emmanuel (well, maybe ‘celebrity’ is too strong a word, but you get the idea) – you name ‘em, they were all hitting the keyboard in the belief that it was the one surefire way to fame and riches. And you know what? Good luck to ‘em. Far be it for me to dictate how Toby Anstis spends his time, just so long as he’s not clogging up the airwaves with more bottom feeding reality shows.

However, Toby Anstis aside, perhaps the collision of screenplay and celebrity is a marketing tool worth exploring by aspiring and established screenwriters alike (I’m not entirely sure if I’m being sarcastic or not here, so bear with me).

A screenplay is a blueprint – of course it can function as a commodity, but unlike a novel, it isn’t a ‘reader friendly' format. However, if there are celebrities out there who are convinced that their screenwriting talents are going to bear fruit, perhaps it should fall to the screenwriting community to ‘assist’ them in their endeavours? After all, a screenplay with the name of a well-known celebrity on the front page would no doubt generate a certain degree of interest (depending on who the celebrity was, of course). So what if the words inside aren’t written by that celebrity? If the name on the front helps that screenplay gain attention, then surely that’s a good thing – right? Also, as and when that commodity is sold, the celebrity screenwriter could then be used as that all important ‘marketing hook’ to provide ongoing publicity for the production up until its release.

The most important thing from my own point of view is that this would almost certainly open up a new (if somewhat limited) market for spec screenplays. So, rather than Toby Anstis slaving away over a hot keyboard, his agent could simply shake hands with a ‘ghost screenwriter’ and have a product ready to hit the market that afternoon (maybe Toby Anstis is the wrong example: think Robbie Williams, Anthony Kiedis, Victoria Beckham, Katie Price).

Also, wouldn’t the whole concept of ‘packaging’ become a little more fun? Rather than trying to excite interest in a screenplay with the name of an actor attached, why not just attach the name of a celebrity as the writer? It could work. That said, knowing my luck, I’d probably end up with the Cheeky Girls or Michelle (‘How low can you go?’) Bass, thereby guaranteeing a slow, embarrassment laden death on cable TV.

That said, perhaps I am being sarcastic (but maybe just a little bit).

Full Metal Jacket – Structure-A-Go-Go

This post contains spoilers for Full Metal Jacket and Hidden.

I’ve always loved Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, so when I had to choose a subject for my MA 'effort' a few years back, it was a pretty straightforward choice. My title? The Use of Visual and Narrative Symmetry in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Catchy, eh? (OK, probably not). Rather than reproduce the whole thing here (and believe me, if you read it you would thank me a million times over), I thought I’d go over a few of its points just for the sheer fun of it...

First off, there is an excellent Kubrick resource here – it doesn’t look as if the site has been updated since 2002, but as far as on-line resources go, you can’t beat it. However, the one thing it doesn’t seem to cover in its discussion regarding FMJ is just how completely obsessed with structure this movie is – not just in the screenwriting sense of the word (where 'structure' usually means three acts, i.e., set up, conflict and resolution), but in its visual and narrative constructs as well.

I don't think it matters whether you regard FMJ as possessing two acts or the more traditional three, it is immediately apparent that the film is split into two very distinct halves – the Parris Island boot camp and the second part which takes place in Vietnam itself (which in fact is an abandoned gasworks in North London). Other than the apparent switch in location, the two halves of the film have very distinct visual identities: the Parris Island segment is ‘clean’, symmetrical, ordered. In the Da Nang segment, this symmetry has all but disappeared. The tension of the first act has almost completely dissipated and the film almost appears to drift, as if it is in search of a suitably involved narrative.

Some critics identified this as a major flaw of FMJ, but I think this is the whole point of the film. The Parris Island segment is structured around the figure of Sergeant Hartman, who stalks the boot camp within a variety of almost perfectly symmetrical shots. When Pyle kills Hartman, this pivotal figure is removed from proceedings altogether, and the ambience of the film drastically changes. To my mind, Hartman is the structural ‘core’ of the first part of the film, inasmuch as his words and actions provide meaning and organisation to what the recruits are experiencing. With Hartman dead, meaning and order evaporate, leaving the recruits to fend for themselves – hence the decidedly marked visual differences between the two halves.

There was a Kubrick interview in Newsweek around the time of FMJ’s release in which Kubrick stated that his intention with FMJ was “to explode the narrative structure of film”. Kubrick did this in FMJ by using structure to literally break up the narrative to the extent that the traditional notion of character is subsumed by structure itself. For example, the parade ground sequences demonstrate the rigid structure that the Marine Corps imposes on new recruits. Watch Pyle as Joker assists him in many aspects of Pyle’s basic training – initially, Pyle doesn’t get the hang of things at all. These sequences are shot from right to left, and show Pyle effectively going backwards. When Pyle starts doing better and responding to Joker's attentions, the sequences shift to left to right. In the first half of the film, character is expressed partially via the way that entire sequences are constructed. It’s probably the reason why FMJ has such a weird, unsettling ambience – the more formal elements of filmmaking have been brought to the fore, whilst the more traditional staples of narrative and character development are stripped back, leaving a film that is almost the diametric opposite of Platoon’s trite ‘war is hell’ message.

One of the most useful things I took from FMJ is that by suppressing or entirely doing away with the more commonly articulated elements of narrative, you can create space for interesting questions to be asked – a potentially far more intriguing state of affairs than the current obsession with McKee’s Story. Look at Michael Haneke’s Hidden – where a character’s ‘arc’ often describes a journey from non-awareness to enlightenment, Hidden does the opposite – a supposedly progressive liberal discovers that at the core of his being lurks an unpleasant, reactionary conservative – Georges’ ultimate reaction to where his ‘journey’ takes him is that he is more than comfortable with the way things are, a state of affairs that threatens to endure with the film’s famously cryptic and interminable closing shot.

All of which is very long winded way of saying that there can often be more to structure than meets the eye. The problem with discarding major narrative building blocks is that you’d better have something pretty compelling to put in their place, otherwise your script will look like an exercise in form for form’s sake – something that Last Year in Marienbad comes dangerously close to becoming. Alain Robbe-Grillet talks about his intention with Marienbad to "construct a purely mental space and time – those of dreams, perhaps, or of memory, those of any affective life – without worrying too much about the traditional relations of cause and effect, or about an absolute time sequence in the narrative." It all depends on the sort of script you want to write, and the types of themes that you want to explore.

Soaps and Responsibility

There’s an interesting interview in yesterday’s Guardian with Lesley Henderson, a sociology lecturer at Brunel University, who has written a book entitled Social Issues in Television Fiction.

Soaps, she says, are hugely significant in shaping public views. "You are talking about a genre that [can] attract around 10 million viewers per episode, and a lot of them are young viewers - people who wouldn't normally sit down and watch a news programme or a documentary about breast cancer or mental illness."

That power, she says, can sit uneasily with "making good telly".

The article reminded me of the (at times) rabid discussion that went on over at Lucy’s gaff a little while back. Many people piled in to state that the only responsibility they had as writers was to the story and nothing else. However, the discussion primarily focussed on horror movies, where creating an atmosphere of revulsion and/or terror doesn’t exactly sit well with a sense of social responsibility. To my mind, soaps are different, if only for the fact that they attract an audience “who wouldn't normally... watch a news programme or a documentary about breast cancer or mental illness." In which case surely the responsibility to get things right is paramount? Or maybe not:

As one experienced scriptwriter told her: "In the end, we are drama. We are not a sociological documentary... and although we try not to go terribly wrong we sometimes ignore the truth in favour of a good story... If we always stuck to the absolute facts we'd have no drama."

The problem arises when you introduce socially realistic story lines (such as mental illness) and expect them to be subservient to the drama. I don’t think that that soap writers and producers can have it both ways. Soap is well known for dealing with everyday issues and on the odd occasion, bringing an issue to the fore that previously, for whatever reason, had not been covered. Throwing a child with Down-Syndrome into the mix, as Brookside did back in the 90s, is of course admirable: however, shuffling that particular child out of the series when it no longer provides for good drama (or leads to a decline in viewing figures) is surely an irresponsible way of dealing with the issue? If elements such as these are going to form part of the dramatic mix, then we should expect that writers and producers should at least have the courage to take the story to its natural conclusion (whatever that may be).

The one thing I can’t stand is when drama (not just soap) attempts to address ‘issues’ to the detriment of the story. However, if you are going to shoehorn in an issue in order to give your drama some much needed contemporary or social relevance, then at least make an attempt to get the detail surrounding the issue right.

At least Emmerdale isn’t considering a story line concerning necrophilia in the near future (but I wouldn’t hold your breath!).

Spooky Spooks

I happen to like Spooks (but no doubt will forget to watch the next nine episodes). Last Tuesday’s opener twisted and turned through an hour of morally dubious decision making before leaving Asnik out on the streets of London, breathing something deadly and American all over an unsuspecting populace. No doubt if this was a movie, we’d arrive at this point after ten minutes, but as we have ten hours of this storyline to get through an hour was perfectly adequate. And very skilfully done it was too.

The only problem I have with it is that it all seems so reactionary.

The heroes of Spooks are members of the Security Services, which is all very well, but I can’t help hankering after the days of Edge of Darkness and Defence of the Realm for something a little more hard edged, subversive even. These well regarded series were informed by nuclear paranoia, and took strident and well considered anti-establishment positions.

Not so Spooks, which is set almost entirely inside the world of government. How much of this is a knock-on effect from 9/11 it perhaps difficult to quantify, but maybe it’s no co-incidence that, since then, we have seen a proliferation of series such as The West Wing and 24, where the machinery of the State is seen as being benign and even overly moral (or, at least, sacrificing the interests of the few for the many).

Where Edge of Darkness and Defence of the Realm explored complex conspiracies that went right to the heart of government, Spooks seems to invert this to give us a wholly new type of paranoia:

Series 5, Episode 10: An environmental terrorist group threaten to flood London if the government doesn't publish a secret document.

The role of government is now to protect us from an ever present array of long haired, loon panted left wingers and other assorted crazies with evil agendas.

Series 4, Episode 10: Ruth is asked to procure evidence that Harry was responsible for the assassination of Princess Diana.

Harry wasn’t responsible for any such thing of course – he’s merely been the target of another crazy person whom MI6 is duty bound to stop at all costs.

No doubt if a crusty old peace campaigner dared show his/her face in the world of Spooks at the moment, they would get a swift garrotting.

The current series of Spooks is a bit of a concern for precisely these reasons: we’ve already discounted the (now benevolent) Iranians as being behind the plot to let loose a deadly chemical agent on the hard working people of Britain (Copyright Gordon Brown), so I guess that leaves the old ‘splinter militant group’ fallback (Albanians? Disgruntled Russian business interests? It really doesn’t matter at the end of the day). What this does is to ensure that no-one is offended – a cop out in other words (didn’t The Devil’s Own do something similar?). Instead of taking some left field narrative choices to inspire some meaningful debate (like: what exactly is it that MI5/MI6 do that the police can’t?), I suspect that Spooks will focus entirely on just such a plot strand, but I hope (against expectation) to be corrected.

BBC Invent New Genre!

Bruce in Vegas, BBC1 – 5th October 2007.

Synopsis: Bruce Forsyth heads to Las Vegas, the Entertainment Capital of the World, in search of the stories behind such legendary entertainers as the Rat Pack, Elvis Presley, Liberace and many more.

For the sweet love of baby Jesus, nooooooo!

Suffice to say, Bruce does nothing of the sort. He takes his wife to the Venetian where he attempts to serenade a gondolier with toe curling results. He does a bit of a tap dancing, and looks flabbergasted when people stare suspiciously at his syrup and say, ‘Bruce who?’ Bruce and the wife renew their wedding vows. An Elvis impersonator makes a predictable appearance. Bruce meets Barry Manilow and attempts to steer the conversation round to himself. Bruce visits the Liberace museum and has a tinkle on an old Joanna. And on it goes. Where’s Songs of Praise when you need a bit of hard edged television?

However, rather than asking what the flaming arse the point of the whole thing was I think it’s tempting to surmise that the BBC has actually invented a whole new genre here. I mean, it can’t be classified as a travel show – we get shots of Vegas of course, but it doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know about the place (i.e., it’s a got a few hotels, the odd casino and an Elvis impersonator on every street corner). It doesn’t really tell you anything about the personalities that Bruce purports to interview, as the old duffer is too busy tap dancing/reminiscing/being irritating to pay much attention to whatever people might be saying.

No, what it is is an hour devoted to Bruce Forsythe: vanity television, TV’s equivalent to the vanity publishing industry (with the major exception that Brucie didn’t have to pay for it). As the programme served no real purpose, this has to be the only conclusion.

So, where next for this new genre? Well, the malevolent evil that is Cilla Black has been away for a while (save the odd spot of funeral advertising) – there’s got to be a few miles left in the old dear yet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update, 15th October - Censored by the Muppets! Sad news: I have been blacklisted by muppetcentral.com, so you'll have to put up with Bruce's gurning visage from the BBC website instead of the rather fetching pic I had of him and Fozzy Bear.

Holby City vs Dragon's Den

Whilst huffing and puffing at the gym tonight, I managed to catch a snippet of BBC’s Holby City that intrigued me (it was either that or Eat Yourself Thin). A seemingly unscrupulous businessman (with his eye firmly set on establishing his own company) was visiting his mother in hospital, who had apparently just received some new fangled treatment courtesy of the NHS. ‘What if the treatment goes wrong?’ the man asked his mother, ‘you could sue. Get a few grand out of them.’ So far, so good – but then, this – ‘How am I going to get on Dragon’s Den then? All the other people on there have their own businesses.’

The capacity that the BBC has in promoting its own programmes is limitless – Breakfast TV is absolutely chock-a-block with actors and presenters all flogging their next BBC shows – but to actually see it in a drama is quite surprising. I wonder if there’s an internal memo that goes round asking producers to cunningly insert the names of other BBC programmes into their scripts?

That said, this also raises an interesting dialogue between the two shows. Holby City is of course fiction – Dragon’s Den isn’t (I hesitate to call it ‘factual’). I guess I’ll have to read up on my McLuhan and Baudrillard, but wouldn’t it be cool if a fictitious character from a BBC drama showed up on a reality TV show? Of course, it wouldn’t happen (not on the BBC anyway) – the only reason that cross referencing like this occurs is for the sake of promotion, as if the almost subliminal mention of Dragon’s Den is going to make everyone tune in when it’s next on.

So, what can we look forward to next? Eastenders mentioning University Challenge? Last of the Summer Wine referencing The Mighty Boosh? Silent Witness shoehorning in a reference to CBeebies?

Sheesh!

Planks of Bullshit

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. (If you intend to watch Perfume or The Bourne Ultimatum, please be aware that the following post contains plot details from both films. And Poseidon as well – but I can’t imagine anyone in their own right mind who would want to watch that). I thank you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the more entertaining aspects of movie going for me is to find a stray plot thread and to pick away at it until the whole narrative comes apart in your hands like some knackered cat’s cradle (OK, call me sadistic, but this sort of thing is fun). On watching Perfume over the weekend, I thought it might be amusing to go a little bit further and to formulate a theory (of sorts) to illustrate this general lack of narrative coherence, which I shall term Planks of Bullshit, or POB for short.

Tom Tykwer’s Perfume is a good example of a POB in action. First off, if you're not aware of the plot, check it out here...

OK then. Our serial killer protagonist, Grenouille, becomes enamoured with the daughter of Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman), and resolves to capture her ‘essence’ as the key note in his perfumed piece de resistance. Grenouille is slowly hacking and slashing his way through the town’s virgins (and the odd prostitute), and it looks highly likely that Richis’ daughter is next, given the furtive way that Grenouille ogles her and follows her about whenever he has the opportunity. Although someone confesses to the murders that Grenouille has committed, Richis gets wind of the fact that his daughter is next, so whisks her off to a monastery for her own protection.

It was at point I scratched my head and said, ‘Huh?’

When that happens, I know that there’s some major nonsense going down – to wit, how does Richis know that his daughter is next in line for a slice ‘n dice? Answer: he doesn’t. He simply ‘intuits’ this information as if it was somehow in the air waiting to be breathed in and learnt by osmosis. It’s a device that is intended to give this particular chunk of the plot a suitably ‘dramatic’ conclusion – but in the process of doing so, it turns into a creaky narrative conceit – in Chip-speak, a Plank of Bullshit (POB). With me so far?

Bear in mind there are two different types of POB – a POB (such as the example above), and an EPOB, which is an Essential Plank of Bullshit - an essentially unbelievable load of flapdoodle without which the narrative would not function.

In a handy fashion, Perfume also contains its own EPOB: in the film’s penultimate scene, Grenouille stands on the gallows surrounded by the good townspeople of Grasse, ready for the drop. But wait – what’s this? Grenouille pulls out a phial of his perfume, made from the ‘essence’ of the previously mentioned virgins (not forgetting the prostitute, of course): he wafts it across the crowd and, overcome with the heady brilliance of his perfumic masterpiece the townspeople descend into a rousing bout of euro-shagging.

But here’s the problem: Grenouille’s perfume is made from the essences of thirteen women. Rather than the men being solely overcome, the women are as well – er, why?

The only answer I have is the fact that Perfume is built upon an Essential Plank of Bullshit – i.e., a narrative conceit that isn’t designed to be analysed in any great depth.

Take The Bourne Ultimatum (somebody, please, take it): Jason Bourne is able to see into a building from a distance of about fifty metres and watch as the big bad CIA boss opens a safe, enabling Bourne to clock the combination (he’s not just superhuman, he’s bionic as well). Bourne then lays a false trail, which forces everyone out of the building – he is then able to waltz in (incidentally, no-one notices him do this), and crack open the safe: which of course, is all utter bullshit, an essential part of any POB.

I prefer movies that don’t solely rely on POBs or EPOBs to build their narratives, which made The Bourne Ultimatum such a huge disappointment for me. I don’t necessarily want to see movies that are ‘realistic’ above all else, but what I do want is at least the semblance of a coherent narrative, not one that makes you throw your hands in the air at the first sign of something that seems convoluted or just plain clumsy.

OK. So far, so good, right?

The following is a quote from The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood, by Joe Esterhaus:

If your movie wins an Oscar, they’ll probably “forget” to thank you.

On Forrest Gump, everyone involved with the film who went up on stage forgot to thank William Groom, on whose novel it was based.

And on American Beauty, the director and the star forgot to thank the man who wrote the original screenplay, Alan Ball.

Is this because the writer is held in such low regard, or is it more to do with the fact that story itself is?

You could almost make the assumption that these days it doesn’t matter whether a movie contains a POB or an EPOB: the simple fact is that, above all else, we go to the cinema to be entertained. In fashioning something that is predominantly seen as an emotional experience, the basic elements of narrative can often be discarded – and what’s more, no-one really cares or notices. For the most part, lip service is paid to the concepts of realism and coherence, because that isn’t what we want to see. We want to be entertained, to be emotionally engaged, rather than to understand.

If that’s what you want, that’s cool. But my idea of a good movie is not one where you have to switch your brain off in order to engage. And besides, if you regard realism and coherence simply as barriers to whipping up some fevered movie emotion, you end up with little more than a theme park ride – which is probably what the majority of people want these days anyway. And besides, I can easily start to resent films that manipulate my emotions for the sole reason that they are able to do so.

So there you have it. POBs and EPOBs exist not because writers and script editors can’t be arsed to do their jobs properly, but because the concept of story has become subservient to emotion. That’s my theory anyway.

Poseidon is another good example, although this time round both coherence and emotional impact have been sacrificed for vast swathes of CGI – the assumption being that if the explosion is big enough and loud enough, you won’t notice what a drab, uninvolving experience the whole thing really is.

OK, so the theory needs a bit of work.

Maybe I’m just getting tired of walking out of a cinema thinking, ‘What the flaming arse just happened in there?’ To my mind, POBs and EPOBs drag you out of the story by making you question the narrative you are attempting to follow, which in my book, is never good.

And as for Perfume? I think Kubrick was right to pass on it. It looks gorgeous, but it’s a load of nonsense.