First Drafts
Culture
Tom Chatfield —
21st March 2010
Uncharted 2: the nearest you'll ever come to being Indiana Jones
I was lucky enough to be at the videogames Baftas this Friday night and, through the drying glaze of my hangover, have a few thoughts on a fascinating evening. Game of the night was very much Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which picked up four awards. If you’re not a gamer, all you really need to know about Uncharted 2 is that it’s the title gamers most want to show you, just so that they can say, look: videogames these days are really pretty incredible artefacts. Try it and you may even believe them. It’s not the most original game around (and it didn’t win the game of the year award, which went to the superb Batman: Arkham Asylum). But Uncharted 2 is a terrific ambassador for its medium: big, beautiful, lovingly executed, and an enormous amount of fun.
Uncharted 2 will also, I think, be largely irrelevant and unplayed in ten years’ time. Sitting there on Friday, chatting to my guest and watching the big display screens fill with digital action of a kind that was simply inconceivable a decade ago, we realised that it was equally impossible to imagine what would be playing on those screens in ten years’ time. This is a dizzying, energising thing, with a hint of panic thrown in. Even the greatest play-mechanics constantly require new sets of clothes.
Temporal compression cuts both ways in the gaming world. I spend more time sunk in books than in any other medium, but I can’t go back and meet Gutenberg for a chat about moveable type any more than I can arrange an interview with the inventor of the television set or telephone. I can, however, share a room with the people who invented gaming and its greatest works. And perhaps the biggest hero of them all was there on Friday to receive an academy fellowship: Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of Mario and godfather of about 50 per cent of the best things in the modern gaming world. There are no other creative media where pretty much all the giants are still walking, and it’s a humbling thing to be among them. Read more »
Tom Streithorst —
19th March 2010
The fearsome dictator: why did he spare Bulgakov?
Stalin’s favourite play, The White Guard, opens next week in London and it is magnificent. No, don’t worry, it’s not about tractors, or Stakhanovite workers, or even the glorious Red army. Quite the contrary. The play is an ode to the bourgeois intelligentsia destroyed by the revolution. The Bolsheviks come out very badly, described as men “with no name, no past, no love… born of loneliness and frustration.” So why did Stalin admire this play, watch it 20 times, insist it be revived at the Moscow Art theatre, and—most uncharacteristically of all—not order the murder of its anti-Soviet author?
Mikhail Bulgakov, best know for his magical realist novel The Master and Margarita, based the play on his own family: proud Russians, committed supporters of the old order, soldiers of the White Guard, loyal to the tsar. Bulgakov (1891-1940) was the eldest son of a liberal professor at Kiev’s theological seminary. Both his grandparents were priests. Educated, cultured, and middle class, the family enjoyed theatre, opera, and literature. War and revolution destroyed their world.
The play opens in the Turbins’ large and comfortable apartment as they and their friends eat, sing songs, drink vodka, flirt, philosophise, laugh at each others jokes, and fret about the future. Outside is chaos; inside, their old world is still alive. Bulgakov believed the intelligentsia was “the best social stratum in our country.” You cannot watch this play and not feel heartbroken at the destruction of the civilization of pre-revolutionary Russia.
Read more »
Jim Pollard —
18th March 2010
Have men had done better out of feminism than women?
For whatever reason, Laurie Penny seems to have misread my article in the March issue of Prospect, “Why Feminism Favours Men.”
I agree that feminism was supposed to be about liberating both sexes from traditional gender roles, and the point that I was making was that, to an extent, this has happened. Our increased sexual openness was one example. I certainly never said women were not interested in sex, although I do think that men and women who are not interested—at least not to the degree our sexualised society sometimes seems to demand—can be made to feel abnormal.
I gave some other examples in my original article of how these changes have benefited men: the right to be interested in our kids, the right not to have to put up shelves, and so on. For reasons of space these fell foul of the sub-editor’s red pen.
Suggesting that Fathers4Justice accurately describe the lot of men in Britain today is like citing the Taliban for their exemplary reading of Islam. Of more interest to me, since I write about it frequently, is male mental health. You could, as Laurie Penny does, claim that 37 per cent of men “admitting to feeling low or anxious much of the time” in a Mind report proves that men are still imprisoned in old gender roles. I’d argue that the fact that these men can now admit to such feelings proves the opposite. The shackle of the stiff upper lip is slowly losing its grip on us, even if we don’t know quite where to turn in our grief.
Some men may well be made miserable by the shifting sands of gender, which leave them feeling rootless and role-less. But the real reason for that 37 per cent figure has nothing to do with that. It is down to economics which, even before the current crisis, had massively increased job insecurity. This was, of course, the point of my original piece: that we should be talking about economics a little more and about biology, evolution and Barbie dolls a little less (fun though it is). In a world where women put in two-thirds of the working hours for less than one-tenth of the income, I stand by that.
Justin Villiers —
17th March 2010
Poland's Black Orpheus—a cinematic triumph, but will risk-averse distributors see it that way?
The cult novel from which Xawery Zulawski’s latest film Snow White, Russian Red was adapted has been hailed as “the Polish Trainspotting.” Yet this extraordinary piece of cinema, which was screened in early March as part of London’s 8th Polish film festival, is actually closer to the work of David Lynch and Gaspar Noé. Why, then, has it not found a distributor?
On its digitally-foliated surface, Snow White, Russian Red is a boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back-again tale. But looking closer we find ourselves caught in a hallucinatory, visceral, hilarious vision of the rotten core of post-communist, pre-EU Polish identity, seen through the dilated pupils of track-suited lovelorn yob, Silney.
With his bald head and child-like face, Zulawski’s protagonist resembles a fallen angel just landed on earth; as he steps from the murk into razor-sharp focus, sweating, it’s as if his scalp has been dipped in heated wax. The film’s exquisite high-definition photography is reminiscent of Michael Mann’s Collateral, with palettes of queasy greens and misty browns, or of Sophia Coppolla’s Marie Antoinette, as the harsh electric reds of the Polish flag cut through hazy landscapes.
Read more »
Duncan Brown —
15th March 2010
Sarko and Carla: a bona fide pair of "hot rabbits"?
When 24-hour licensing was introduced in 2005, the government said it wanted Britain to imitate the “continental” drinking culture, where everyone sipped half-pints at café tables and the virtues of moderation were imbibed with spritzer at the age of five. That is a complete fable, says Jim Pollard in the forthcoming issue of Prospect, available on 25th March. The drift has been in the opposite direction: in Paris, le binge drinking est bien arrivé—and it’s because the French are increasingly imitating us.
It’s only the latest, Pollard says, in a long line of English imports ranging from pop records to corporate brands to street slang. And this shift is beginning to affect people’s private lives too, wrote Lucy Wadham in a previous issue of Prospect. When his last marriage to the long-suffering Cecile broke down, Nicolas Sarkozy was attacked over his lack of “pudeur” (a word part-way between shame and modesty) as he pandered to the press: an Anglo-American tactic that went against the grain of the Fifth Republic’s Catholic origins.
However, all the French coverage of the recent alleged Bruni/Sarkozy dalliances isn’t necessarily a sign of the French media becoming more like the British in its appetite for celebrity scandal. Rumours that Sarkozy’s liaison with his ecology minister has been invented to salvage his reputation as a “sex dwarf” (in the face of being cuckolded by his man-eating wife) point to an undiminished gulf between French and English attitudes to sex.
We have no concept of the chaud lapin: the very idea of a prime minister sleeping with a member of his cabinet would make English blood run cold. But for the French, such news can be bundled together with Bruni’s liaison as “extramarital affairs” as a face-saving measure. Meanwhile, the English-speaking internet resounds to a dwarf joke about Sarkozy that David Cameron made in September. We’re not identical yet.
Judith Mackrell —
15th March 2010
The Judas Tree: MacMillan's controversial ballet
Kenneth MacMillan triple bill
Royal Opera House, 23rd March-15th April, Tel: 0207 304 4000
In 1992 Kenneth MacMillan died, both tragically and fittingly, backstage at the Royal Opera House during a performance of his ballet Mayerling. Had he lived, he would now be celebrating his 80th birthday. Yet amid the tributes being paid—the publishing of a new biography (Different Drummer by Jann Parry), the performance of a dedicated triple bill—the nature of MacMillan’s legacy is still being debated.
Back in the 1960s MacMillan established himself as the angry young man of ballet. Frustrated by the art form’s lingering fairytale cuteness, he made it his mission to embrace the darkness and danger of real life. He could craft beautiful steps with the best of them, but he choreographed works that dealt with madness, brutality, war and loss, and tested the limits of the classical vocabulary.
In many ways the urgency of Macmillan’s quest made him the most important choreographer of his generation. But critics sometimes saw a muddle of means, and an incoherence of tone. His last ballet, The Judas Tree, was as controversial as any he made in its heated convergence of mysticism and gang rape. And the debate will be revived when it returns to the stage in the Royal Ballet’s tribute programme, alongside the more innocent, crowd-pleasing ballets Concerto and Elite Syncopations.
This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect
Charles Grant —
12th March 2010
Matt Damon stars in this tense chase thriller
Green Zone
dir Paul Greengrass. On general release from 12th March
Last year, British production company Working Title strayed beyond its natural comfort zone with dramas—notably Frost/Nixon and State Of Play—that failed to enhance parent company Universal’s bottom line. Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone might have been another such case until costly reshoots in late 2008 (its release was bumped all the way to spring 2010).
This troubled business context may be a factor in the transition from the property Working Title acquired—Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s account of the blundering postwar provisional authority in Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City—into the film it has made. The marketers are trying hard to suggest a pulse-quickening military adventure from the director of The Bourne Supremacy, with a trailer that omits the words “Iraq” and “Baghdad”—and who can blame them? The Iraq war has proved toxic at the box office.
The surprise is that, for once, the marketing doesn’t lie. Green Zone really is a tense chase thriller, in which rogue CIA officer Brendan Gleeson sees the perils of Paul Bremer’s wholesale dismantling of Ba’ath power structures, and tasks American soldier Matt Damon with bringing in an Iraqi general the US authorities wish to eliminate. Happily, Greengrass’s signature gritty aesthetic—shaky handheld cameras, grainy night-vision footage—licenses the discerning cinemagoer to overlook the film’s bad faith to its source material and surrender to a big-screen guilty pleasure.
Brian Eno —
10th March 2010
In February, a couple of friends went to Trinidad for the carnival. What makes for a great carnival? Living in west London, and having seen ours evolve from chaotic and lively to dully over-regulated, I’ve often wondered.
My conclusions: carnival is good when the number of participants isn’t grossly outweighed by the number of spectators, and when it’s easy for the “spectators” to join in (dancing and singing along). Carnival is good when the participants exhibit a range of skills from the absolutely minimal to the absolutely astonishing (the first being an invitation not to be intimidated—“Hey! I could do that!”—and the second an invitation to be amazed). Carnival is good when people of all ages, races, shapes, sizes, beauties and inclinations can get involved. Carnival is good when there’s too much to look at and everything’s mixed up and you have to sort it all out for yourself. Carnival is good when it dignifies and rewards all sorts of abilities—singing, jumping, laughing infectiously, writing the hit song of the carnival, wiggling your backside, standing on a soapbox praising Jesus or the local hardware store, frying salt fish over an oil drum in public, inventing symphonic arrangements for steel bands, building fabulously impossible things just for a day. Carnival is good when people try to outdo each other, and then applaud with delight those who in turn outdo them. Carnival is good when it gives people an alibi to experiment with being someone different. Carnival is good when it lets people present the best part of themselves, and be, for a little while, as they’d like to be all the time. Carnival is good when it gives people the feeling that they’re really lucky to be alive right now. Carnival is good when it leaves people feeling that life in all its manifestations is unbeatably lovely and touching and funny and worthwhile.
Now substitute “culture” for “carnival.” There’s a vision for the future of culture.
Tom Streithorst —
8th March 2010
Kathryn Bigelow arriving at the Oscars on Sunday
I’ve always been a huge Kathryn Bigelow fan. Near Dark is certainly the greatest redneck vampire film ever made, and who can forget the flaming gasoline-wielding “ex presidents” in Point Break? I even liked the gun fetishist stalker in Blue Steel, so when The Hurt Locker came out last year, I was very excited. Pretty much as soon as it arrived in London, I called up my friend Jonah and off we went to see it in Piccadilly Circus.
Jonah and I met in Gaza. We are both journos who have spent a fair bit of time embedded with the US military in Iraq, which I guess either makes us the perfect audience or the worst audience for this film. I hate to say that when we came out of the movie, we were both disappointed.
Read more »
William Skidelsky —
5th March 2010
Point Omega: oddly brilliant
Point Omega
by Don DeLillo (Picador, £14.99)
Don DeLillo’s short, very odd but oddly brilliant new novel is set in just two locations. One is a room in a New York gallery where an unnamed man obsessively watches a video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, consisting of repeat screenings of Hitchcock’s film slowed down so that it takes a whole day to run. The other is a house in the desert, to which neocon intellectual Richard Elster has repaired, pursued by a young filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants him to talk to camera about his experiences advising the Pentagon in the run-up to Iraq.
Little happens in either storyline—or little that would conventionally be called “action”—but that of course is DeLillo’s point: this is a novel about the “slowing of motion,” and the kind of watching and thinking that become possible when the usual time constraints cease to apply. DeLillo’s prose rises to the challenge: both the snail-paced footage and the desert scenery are mesmerisingly described. Does the novel offer any profound insights into American foreign policy? Probably not, other than functioning as a kind of anti-argument, a wholesale rebuttal of the “overarching ideas and principles” that Elster, in his role as “conceptualiser” of war, was required to supply.
This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect
Comment (1)
