It’s hard to think of a more important English philosopher or cultural thinker this century than Mark Fisher. Far from the senior common rooms and manicured quadrangles of our blue-blooded universities, he taught at further education colleges and on short-term contracts, witnessing a procession of vulnerable young people who—too tired from having to take on extra jobs because of rising student fees; too wired by their dependence on electronic devices—were unable to focus in the classroom. Fisher, who died by suicide in 2017, believed that mental health was as much a political as a personal issue. What is it about our society that is making us sick?
Fisher wrote about psychiatry and psychoanalysis, about sport and music, about critical theory and pop music. His most electrifying work was published on a blog called K-punk. Here, in dizzying, neologism-packed prose, swooping high and low—a typical entry might cite Spinoza as well as The Fall’s Mark E Smith—he wrote about the decline of public broadcasting, hauntology, the failure of politicians and artists alike to come up with credible visions of the future. His passion, relentless output and dark humour mean his ideas continue to travel: a question he posed—“Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?”—often pops up on TikTok.
Film was just one of Fisher’s passions. He wrote, with great originality, about Nigel Kneale and David Rudkin, key figures in British folk horror. He loved Tarkovsky, Lynch, Kubrick. A startling essay on Basic Instinct 2 (2006) homed in on the image of Sharon Stone’s character “pleasuring herself using the ketamined-out [footballer] Stan Collymore as meat puppet sex-aid, while she drives a Spyker C8 Laviolette at 120mph through the heart of London”. He hailed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which he watched with religious studies A-level students, for recovering “the original Christ, the anti-Worldly but not otherworldly Christ of Liberation Theology: the Gnostic herald of Apocalypse Now”.
With Fisher’s reputation still growing, it’s inevitable that filmmakers are drawn to him. Foolish filmmakers? Philosophy tends to be solitary, wordy. Terry Eagleton, enraged that Derek Jarman had augmented his screenplay for Wittgenstein (1993) with a martian-like character called Mr Green, wanted his name removed from the credits.
Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor, directors of We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher, are wary of a biographical approach. There are many Fishers, they argue: “He was a translator of frequencies most of us couldn’t hear… a listener, a teacher, a pattern recognizer.” He appears spectrally, in the murky light of an online video lecture for a Düsseldorf arts centre, in the aftermath of a medical procedure.
‘He could fly through the strata of knowledge like a weird archaeological dig’
Talking heads are kept to a minimum. Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, author of Code Damp, an “esoteric guide to British sitcoms”, likens him to both Philip K Dick and Dame Julian of Norwich: “He could fly through the strata of knowledge like a weird archaeological dig.” Writer Tim Burrows recalls how, on K-punk, “discourse seemed to be effervescent and free”. More time, though, is given over to a fictional character—“Professor Parkins” (played by American-born artist Justin Hopper)—who is fretful, running, seeking. He’s a clever nod to the unreliable narrators in Patrick Keiller’s essay films London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997), as well as to theory-fiction hybrid Professor Barker (“Professor of Anorganic Semiotics”) who appeared in the publications of the much-mythologised “rogue academic” Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, of which Fisher was a part in the 1990s.
Landscape is the thing in this film. The screen-worlds through which “content” circulates exponentially and which the film, sometimes too graphically, tries to visualise. The eerie geographies of Canary Wharf whose financial citadels are accessed by driverless trains, of modern Lowestoft with its transit sheds and de-peopled container ships. The corridors of a Norfolk hospital that hint, discreetly, at Fisher’s ongoing struggles with depression. These are all counterpointed with sites of struggles—Stop the War marches, “Dump Trump” rallies—in which, historian and Guardian journalist Andy Beckett suggests, there arose “moments of possibility”.
Poulter and Mellor don’t lack for ambition. How many filmmakers would give time to explaining the concept of “hyperstition”? (“A cultural belief that makes itself real”, says philosopher Adam C Jones.) How many would feature both political theorist Jodi Dean talking about “the neo-feudalism of modern capitalism” and an occultist?
If We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher leaves us hungering for more—Fisher the humorist, Fisher the commissioning editor, Fisher the football fanatic—that’s a tribute to his teeming, generous intellect and personality. His loss is still incalculable.
