Arts Diary: The Brutalist

Arts Diary: The Brutalist:  Everyman

Work In Progress -- Available.

The first section of my major new work in progress is now available as a PDF. 

Contents

I: War - What is it good for?         7

II: The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning’ 19

III: The Poet, the Tourist, and the Waterfall. 31

IV: The Voyage of the Italic         51

V: The Horse and His Australian         65

VI: The Importance of Having Bathrooms 75

Bibliography         93

Synopsis of Waterfall Story         95

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A Complete Unknown

On 28th August 1963, at the Washington Memorial, shortly before Martin Luther King gave a quite well known speech, Bob Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game. If you had been there, you would have heard it. The brief clip we see in A Complete Unknown is as close to the real footage as the director can make it.

On May 17th 1966, during a performance of Like a Rolling Stone at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a disgruntled folkie really did heckle him with the word “Judas!” If you’d been there, you would have heard it. Dylan really did reply “I don’t believe you!” In the movie he tells the band to “Play it loud”; on the bootleg you can distinctly hear him say “Play it fucking loud.”  But the event is transplanted to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Dylan definitely did premier the song at that event. Some of the audience certainly booed, although they weren’t as hostile as the Manchester crowd. Did Pete Seeger really try to terminate the set by cutting the PA cables with a fire axe? That’s the story; you probably heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who was there. So perhaps we should call it an oral tradition; perhaps more appropriately, a folk tale. Seeger subsequently said that his problem was not with the volume or the amplification but simply that the PA was so distorted that you couldn’t hear Dylan’s lyrics.

On January 29, 1961, Bob Dylan certainly visited Woody Guthrie in Greystone Psychiatric Hospital. (“Wardy Forty”, Woody called it.) But no-one knows what they said to each other. Dylan, in his sort-of autobiography, pointedly doesn’t tell us. Bob certainly wrote Song To Woody (to the tune of Guthrie’s own union song, 1913 Massacre) but there’s no reason to think that he actually sang it to him on that first visit. 

The story of Dylan gatecrashing a live recording of Rainbow Quest (Pete Seeger’s public access TV show) is pure fiction; but the scene catches Dylan’s arrogantly modest charm to a T.

There is no reason to think that it was Johnny Cash who leant Dylan a guitar for his Newport encore. But the made up incident perfectly encapsulates the story that the movie is telling us. Old versus new, folk versus rock, conformist versus rebel, acoustic versus electric.

There is what happened. There are stories about what happened, which we hear second or third or fourth hand from people who were almost definitely there. There are people’s honest reconstructions of the kinds of things which probably must have happened. There are stories which people make up out of their heads to tell a version of the truth, or to comment on what really happened. And there are out and out lies. 

Religious fundamentalists and religious skeptics would insist that only the first kind and the last kind count. If it didn’t really, really, really happen, then it’s a lie.

Someone once asked Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, if he believed that Three Kings really visited the baby Jesus. “It’s a legend” he said “But it works quite well as a legend.”

Todd Hayne’s absurdist I’m Not There turned Bob Dylan into six different fictional characters. None of whom are called Bob. The final incarnation is an aging Billy the Kid who faked his death and is still hunted by Pat Garett. (Dylan, of course, wrote Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door for the movie Pat Garett and Billy the Kid.) "Billy" represents Bob as he was in 2007, when the film came out. At the end of the movie, the aged gunslinger hitches a ride on a train and finds the guitar which belonged to “Woody”—the eleven year old black kid who represents the early, pre Greenwich Village Robert Zimmerman in the open segment. The message appears to be that Dylan ceased to be true to himself when he transitioned from folk to rock, and that his later career was a return to his authentic roots. 

Which works: if you think that Blonde on Blonde was an aberration and Good As I Been To You was a return to form.

At the end of A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan—having just deliberately ruined the Newport Folk Festival—tries to return a harmonica to Woody Guthrie. Woody gave it to Pete Seeger to give to Bob as a gift. But Woody won’t take it back. Scoot McNeary looks astonishingly like the late photos of Woody Guthrie, and manages to bring a large amount of characterisation to a man who, at this stage in his life, could barely move. They say acting is all about the eyes. (Are we okay with an able-bodied actor being cast as a man with late-stage Huntingtons?) It’s a scene rich with symbolism. Guitar or harmonica? Woody or Johnny? Folk or rock? (Own up: you thought, just briefly and for a second, of Luke and Rey, didn’t you?) Woody watches as Bob rides off on his bike, and Dusty Old Dust plays on the sound track one last time. Bob has moved on, and Woody can accept that he’s moved on; but Pete Seeger can’t.

Which may, for all I know, be, true. Woody Guthrie was nothing if not an iconoclast.

Pete tells Bob to take care on his motorbike. I was very much expecting the final caption to be that a year after Newport, Dylan crashed his bike and didn’t tour for eight years. (It decides to tell us about some Swedish literary award, instead.) Are we supposed to be able to fill this detail in for ourselves?

There are a whole lot of stories you could tell about Bob Dylan. There were a whole lot of mornings between 1961 and 1966. The Beatles' story has a known trajectory—Quarry Bank, Hamburg, Cavern, Palladium, India, Dakota. (Phillip Norman got it down to four words: Wanting, Getting, Having, Wasting.) Dylan is mostly still about the music. I suppose you could make a movie about how the radical firebrand came out of retirement to record an album of Christmas carols, or how he found, and perhaps more interestingly lost, Jesus. But “how Bob went electric” is as close to being a myth as anything is.

Bob arrives in New York. Bob meets Woody. Pete takes Bob under his wing. Bob becomes famous. Bob transitions into a rock star. The fans boo Bob and Pete is sad. The King died and then the Queen died.

I like Good As I Been To You very much indeed. The first time I ever heard Martin Carthy, he opened his act with Jim Jones in Botany Bay, and my first reaction was “Bob sings that.” Dylan is probably covering Nic Jones’ version. Carthy doesn’t feature in A Complete Unknown, although it is mentioned in passing that Dylan has spent some time in London. We don’t see him introducing the Beatles to weed either. Girl From the North Country is a little bit under the influence of Scarborough Fair and Bob Dylan’s Dream is a reskinned Lady Franklin’s Lament. Everything in folk is connected to everything else in folk. That may be what makes it folk.

Films about the lives of famous people; and in particular, films about the lives of famous musicians have a bit of a bad rep. Telling the stories of people who thousands of people worship with quasi-religious devotion. People who are still alive and could sue. Lives which mostly consisted of being driven from concert venue to concert venue in a tour bus. The best possible biography for a writer is “he stayed at home and wrote”.

Jake Kasdan’s wicked parody, Walk Hard, is often said to have killed the genre. Johnny Cash watching a newsreel about Folsom Prison and hoping he never goes there. Johnny Cash in bed with his doomed baby brother, listening to the Carter family and saying “June is my favourite.” Except—hang on, no—those scenes were in Walk the Line, the serious Johnny Cash movie, not the send up.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t completely avoid the cliches of the genre. We do see Bob Dylan waking Joan Baez up in the middle of the night because he can’t think of a good line to follow “He not busy being born…” We do see him strumming an unfinished Girl From the North Country over breakfast at Pete Seeger’s cabin and saying he doesn’t quite know how to end it. We do listen to Pete telling young Bobby things he already knows for the benefit of anyone from posterity that might be eavesdropping.

But it mostly avoids that kind of thing. It doesn’t quite feel real but it does feel like a dusted down polished up Platonic form of what the reality must have been; like a series of glossy album covers coming to life before your eyes. Bob can’t walk through Greenwich Village without passing at least one Man with a Tamburine. It fools us into thinking that we are looking over character’s shoulders and being carried back to the smokey Gaslight Cafe or the fractious Fort Adams State Park. Which obviously we aren’t and obviously we can’t be. But that hardly matters. From this moment, this is what the 1960s will look like and anyone who was actually there will become an increasingly marginalised heretic. It isn’t a matter of printing the legend. The legend has replaced the fact. That’s in the nature of legends.

Bob Dylan is not played by a CGI monkey. He does not help the Mayor of Pepperland defeat the Blue Meanies. Maybe he should have done.

I never saw William Shakespeare take a bow at the Globe or heard Wagner conducting the Ring Cycle. I did once meet Stan Lee, but I was nine and he was looking the other way. But on six different occasions I have been in the same room as Bob Dylan. Big rooms, with a couple of thousand other people in them, but still. I am a folkie and the preeminent artist of our generation is a folk singer. Correlation does not imply causation.

Timothee Chalamet’s face looks enough like Dylan’s to suspend disbelief; and his charisma and sexuality would carry any number of movies; but his attitude and poise and presence are hypnotic and his voice astonishes. When Blowin’ in the Wind plays over the end credits I can’t tell if it’s Timothee or Bob.

How does this stuff even work? Could Timothee have a career as a folksinger if he ever gets bored with the movies? Or can a good actor “act a good singer” without really being a singer himself? (Or is there, perchance, some technical trickery involved?)

We’re witnessing an unrepeatable moment in the history of acting. A moment which has already passed. There are only a few years or months when an actor can play a child turning into an adult. At 29, Chalamet has played his last teenager. The transition from the ingenue who arrives in New York with a guitar slung over his back and the cult figure who snarls “I don’t believe you” to thirteen thousand fans is astonishing from a purely technical point of view. Watching Paul Atriedes grow from an awkward young nobleman into the emperor of the universe was a virtuoso performance even if you aren’t interested in giant worms, but this goes way beyond it. Almost thou persuadeth me to go and see Willy Wonka.

The film is overflowing with fictionalised folk icons; giving it endless replay value for obsessives. The man who gets punched at Newport—that’s folk archivist Alan Lomax. The man who would be happy to let a white blues band play Newport—that’s Paul Yarrow. (We briefly hear Puff the Magic Dragon being played as the older Bob smoulders through Greenwich Village.) But who is the guy singing Irish Rover in the pub? Bob’s civilian girlfriend is called Sylvie, reportedly at Bob’s own request; although surely everyone knows that she represents Suzie Rotolo? Rotolo wrote a book about their relationship and is the subject of a very good song by Ralph McTell, so it is hard to see whose privacy is being protected; although it does feel like a gentlemanly gesture. The word iconic is over-used and should probably only refer to objects of religious veneration. But if anything is iconic, it’s Bob and Suzie/Sylvie on the cover of Freewheelin’, which we catch a brief glimpse of here.

The jester sang for the King and Queen. You either go to the church of your choice or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital. If you are a certain kind of folkie, “Bob visits Woody in hospital” is kind of like “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.” In this telling of the story, it is Pete who invites Bob to play for his last idol.

“Are you shy?”

“Not usually.”

It’s stuff like this that prevents me from writing an actual review. When a film has literally made you cry before the opening credits have finished, you don’t want to think too much about what it was doing and how it worked. I’ve seen it twice and expect to see it twice more. Sofa-buddy, who likes Dylan fine but is not necessarily the folk-head I am, said that it feels like a completely different movie the second time through: there is so much detail, so much structural nuance, that you could almost believe that you had slept through the first viewing.

Edward Norton inhabits Pete Seeger. Or possibly vice versa. Impersonation and acting are not exactly the same thing: Michael Sheen precisely mimicking Tony Blair’s mannerisms is a different proposition from Anthony Hopkins playing fictional characters based quite closely on Picasso or Freud or CS Lewis. Norton is so good that you wonder if reports of Seeger’s death were exaggerated; or if some kind of deepfake CGI had brought him back from folk heaven.

This kind of film does, indeed, raise questions about Modern Technology. Will we still want to watch brilliant actors pretending to be famous people when computers can create illusions that are realer tham the real thing Does part of our engagement with A Complete Unknown depend on our knowing that what we are watching is not Dylan at Newport but a human being interpreting Dylan at Newport—that what we are watching, despite its factual basis, is a story. (It works quite well as a legend.) What would it feel like to be presented with a 1960s fly-on-the-wall documentary of what Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were doing on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis while at the same time knowing that it was built of ones and zeroes with no human involvement? (And would that necessarily be more voyeuristic than watching actors role-play the moment—which probably never happened, in any case.)

And come to that, what is the point of getting Paul Atriedes to pretend to be Bob when yards and yards of actual footage exists? We watch Peter Jackson’s Get Back and imagine that we are just watching the Beatles, unmediated, as they were. But in a way it is just as artificial and constructed as King Kong.

You could say that A Complete Unknown is really Pete Seeger’s story: but I notice that El Sandifer has already said that she thinks it is really Joan Baez’s. It’s an old saying that “Doctor Who” is not a name but a question, and the TV show was about the people who have asked the question. Dylan is an enigma; the film plays cleverly with his propensity to fib. Joan only find out that his real name is Zimmerman when she stumbles across a childhood scrapbook. When he repeats the preposterous story of learning guitar from singing cowboys when he worked for a travelling circus, she tells him directly he’s full of shit. But where, in fact, did he learn to play? When Seeger puts him on stage after Joan Baez at a folk club he’s clearly already accomplished musician who knows how to work an audience. If Ramblin’ Jack Eliot gets a mention, I didn’t spot it.

Unless you find his fellow traveller politics unforgivable—and some of the pre 1942 party line pacifism is pretty uncomfortable in hindsight—I have never come across anyone with a single bad word to say about Pete Seeger. He meets Bob and takes him home and puts him on stage and smiles so warmly when the audience start to sing along with the Times They Are A Changin'. When an officious night nurse won’t let him sing Blowin’ in the Wind in the hospital, Bob gets all teenaged and shouty, but Pete calls the nurse by his first name and talks about how he is sure they can smooth it over. It’s just the song. He honestly doesn’t mind that Bob is world-famous while he is still doing public service TV shows provided people are hearing folk music. A shamelessly cartoonish Johnny Cash personifies Bob’s darker angels, positively encouraging him to ruffle feathers and tread mud on the carpet. Seeger is John the Baptist, happy to decrease while Bob increases. But he is also Frankenstein, destroyed by the monster that he himself unleashed. 

Except he’s not destroyed: he smiles and clears away the chairs and carries on. We see him singing This Land Is Your Land on the steps of the court having been convicted by the HUAC for contempt of congress. Half a century later he sang it at Barak Obama's inauguration. 

It’s hard not see Dylan as a bit of a prick: a shy, unsure of himself prick in the first half, and a supremely confident prick in the second. Could he really not have played an acoustic set at Newport and launched his electric career in some other venue? We see him in a double act with Joan Baez, realising that the audience only want to hear Blown’ In The Wind, refusing to sing it, claiming that his guitar is broken, and storming off stage, leaving Joan to carry the set like a trouper. I understand that singers aren’t juke boxes. I understand that Bob had moved on. Like Mitch in A Mighty Wind, he knows that that man no longer exists. I never once heard Chumbawamba play Tubthumping, although Boff Whaley is very upfront about how being a one-hit wonder bankrolled all the more interesting things he’s done since. But Ralph McTell, who has for decades primarily been a very accomplished bluesman endlessly, graciously, revisits Streets of London. “As long as you want to hear it, I want to play it.” Present day Bob sometimes sings Blowin’ in the Wind and sometimes sings All Along the Watchtower and sometimes sings Desolation Row but never ever does a greatest hits concert. The closest I ever came to witnessing a Judas! moment was at a Cardiff concert when two out of every three songs were from the Frank Sinatra covers album.

Bob plays Blowin’ In The Wind on Woody’s iconic guitar, the one with This Machine Kills Fascists printed on it. (Pete Seeger’s banjo had “This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to surrender” on it which tells you everything you need to know.) But a guitar isn’t a particularly traditional instrument. Real cowboys would have had squeeze boxes or fiddles or mouth harps. Woody took a song about a steam train and turned it into a song about a hydroelectric plant. Authenticity is a mirage; this stuff isn’t as old as we sometimes like to think. A lot of the “traditional” English repertoire was probably written for actors playing the roles of peasants in eighteenth century theme parks.

The Manchester footage exists. Some of the fans were angry; someone really did shout "Judas!" (Someone else shouted “What about Woody?”: I’m surprised that didn’t make it into the film.) Doubtless folk audiences are more genteel today than they were back then. The most hostile reaction I have ever witnessed is polite applause. (When Dylan toured with Mark Knopffler in 2007, it was the non-folk part of the audience who started to slow hand-clap Michael McGoldrick and John McCusker’s instrumentals.) When Jim Moray started to put electronic samples and night club beats into an otherwise traditional repertoire, some journalists tried to build him up as the bad boy of English folk. But the traddies embraced him almost immediately, because he was clearly very interesting and more importantly very good.

The film constructs the conflict as if the rebellion against acoustic folk is a rebellion against fame itself. Joan Baez, at the end of the film, says that Bob has freed himself from “us and all our shit.” And that reads pretty well into the Newport set, with “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more…” being a personal Declaration of Independence, and “how does it feel to be on your own” clearly about someone walking out on someone, and even his conciliatory acoustic encore, “its all over now baby blue” also about a break up. And he’s just broken up with “Sylvie” and done a live Carter-and-Cash style domestic row with Joan through music using “it ain’t me babe” as a weapon.

We don’t hear about Hattie Carol or Emmet Tell or really Medgar Evers. This Dylan isn’t a man with a cause. He’s rebelling against anything on offer. Maybe he really did borrow that coat from James Dean.

Andrew Rilstone is not an AI. 

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Make Good Art

Wagner was an anti-semitic proto-Nazi. I understand why some people don’t want to listen to music composed by anti-semitic proto-Nazis. I even understand if some people think that no-body else should listen to music composed by anti-semitic proto-Nazis. My difficulty comes when they say that Wagner was an anti-semitic proto-Nazi and therefore Ride of the Valkyries is not a very good tune.

Unless you think that art is always and only an expression of the artist’s personality: that Wagner’s music is Wagner’s soul transmuted into sound, and that if Wagner had a fascist soul then Wagner’s music is fascist music and would be fascist music even if you knew nothing about Wagner’s life.

Or perhaps you think that Wagner’s music has been irrevocably tainted by the uses it has been put to? Ride of the Valkyrie may not have been fascist music when Wagner composed it, but it sure as hell became fascist music once Hitler got his hands on it.

The story of Noah’s Ark means what Jews and Christians have understood it to mean for the past three thousand years. Some lost Babylonian poet may have originally meant it to mean something entirely different. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s not his story any more. Sensible scholars sometimes claim to have found traces of the original story, and what it meant, in the surviving text. That is, of course, terribly, terribly interesting. But I grimace when someone assures me that the God of the Jews is really a red headed giant with a gigantic cock because there may have been a deity with those attributes in the texts which may underlie some parts of the Old Testament.

Wagner’s operas are only encountered in production. The author’s ideas are mediated through the ideas of the producer and the performers. This is true if the singers wear their street clothes and stand in a row and sing the exact notes in the score, and it is true if Tristan and Isolde meet in a Berlin public lavatory and Lohengrin’s knights are giant rats. The absence of interpretative ideas is itself an interpretative idea.

But books, by that argument, exist only when they are read. The author’s ideas are mediated through the mind of the reader. If I go to the theatre, I don’t see Hamlet: I see Olivier’s Hamlet or Branagh’s Hamlet. But if I sit in my book nook with a copy of the Penguin Complete Shakespeare, I don’t just experience Hamlet: I experience Andrew Rilstone reading Hamlet.

Imagine that JK Rowling had written a Harry Potter book every year since 1997—so we are now up to volume 28. And imagine that each volume had been better than the previous one, that the books had grown up with the audience, that the wizarding world had become progressively less important, and the books had become character-centred experiments in literary form. Imagine that very respectable critics felt that the writing in the later volumes was possibly as good as James Joyce—certainly as good as Salman Rushdie. But imagine that J K Rowling’s obsessive gender essentialism was just as obsessive and just as essentialist as it is on our time line; and that the latter Harry Potter volumes had taken Rowling’s obsessions as their primary theme.

I have a full sized figure of Cerebus the Aardvark in my front room. I once had a post-card from Dave Sim. I feel your pain.

I remember a silly essay by a silly vicar in a silly newspaper. He’d just found out that Sylvia Plath was on the A Level Syllabus. Oh no, no, no and thrice no, quoth he: Sylvia Plath wrote about neurosis and morbidity. English Literature is about giving children the brightest and the best, not the maddest and the most suicidal. Why show them the outflowing of a diseased mind when you could give them words which flew out of the mind of the greatest and most healthy mind ever to grace this great country of ours, that belonging to Mr William Shakespeare of Stratford?

Are there any writers apart from William Shakespeare, I sometimes wonder? Educational vigilantes sound like KJV fundamentalists. Every book in the world either says the same thing as the Bible, in which case it is superfluous, or else it says something different from the Bible, in which case it is blasphemous. So get rid of any book which isn’t the Bible. Or, at any rate, like F.R Leavis: as long as Middlemarch exists, there is really no reason to ever waste your time reading Our Mutual Friend. Shakespeare’s poetry is wonderful poetry because it was produced by Shakespeare’s mind. Shakespeare had a wonderful mind because it produced Shakespeare’s poetry. Only the great poetry is truly Shakespearian: the silly bits and the dirty bits were inauthentic, forced on him by theatre managers and people in the cheap seats. As long as This Royal Throne of Kings and We Few We Happy Few exist, why on earth ever read anything else?

Sylvia Plath was a good (albeit obviously minor) poet precisely because she put her state of mind, unhappy as it undoubtedly was, into poetry. She may have been at times unhappy and unwell, but she made good art.

Did history, in fact, pardon Paul Claudel?

It would make a difference if it turned out that Alan Moore had all along been a mild mannered Church of England vicar who put on a false beard and adopted the magus persona as a prank. And it would make a very great difference indeed if it turned out that the Diary of Anne Frank was a purely literary creation—a well-intentioned hoax, perpetrated decades after the event. The actual words themselves are not quite the point: the point is that they are the actual words of a particular person in a particular situation at a particular time. “People are really good at heart” isn’t a very profound statement in itself: it’s a profound statement because it is spoken by a very young woman about to be murdered by one of Wagner’s fan-boys.

“Death of the Author” is a literary theory. Books can be read in more than one way: you can’t invoke the supposed intention of the original writer to disallow a particular reading. Olivier’s Hamlet and Branagh’s Hamlet and (most especially) Andrew Rilstone’s Hamlet are all valid. This doesn’t mean I am free to say “In my reading, Winnie-the-Pooh is a shark and Piglet is an exiled Jedi Knight.” But I am entirely free to like Rorschach and think that he got the better of the argument. The Rev Alan Moore has no right to tell me that I am wrong and that I am not allowed to have those thoughts about his story. It doesn’t belong to him any more.

What we now know about Marion Bradley makes it impossible to re-read the Mists of Avalon. Literally impossible: the book we read in 1983 no longer exists. What we now know about David Eddings doesn’t change the Belgariad in quite the same way. Partly, because Mists of Avalon is very much about sex, where the Belgariad is not particularly about cruelty to children. But also, I think, because the Belgariad is just not a very good book. The author doesn’t matter in quite the same way.

If you didn’t live through the 70s you can’t possibly understand how important Jimmy Savile was. It really does feel as if a whole chunk of your life has been overwritten. I can’t think about old Doctor Who without thinking about what was on directly before it. I can’t smile affectionately and tell the story about how there was Jim’ll Fix It stunt at my school ever again. (I can’t even laugh at Basil Brush singing The Noses on the Faces of the Ladies of the Harem of the Court of King Caractacus.) I am far from certain that pixellating faces out of old footage helps but I understand the urge.

At the turn of the 1980s, comic book writers started to acquire a rock-star status they had never had before. Stan Lee had inserted himself into his stories, of course, and given himself a Walt Disney status as Marvel Comics’ presiding spirit; but it was clear to everyone that this was mostly bluster and self-parody. The British 2000AD creators headhunted by DC had youth and good looks and a kind of post-punk prestige. I went to some comic conventions in the years after Watchmen changed everything. John Byrne (Superman) and Chris Claremont (X-Men) were firmly of the old-school, middle-aged, jobbing hacks who were quite willing to chat affably to fan-boys about the writing trade. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman were cool and slouched and looked like characters in their own comics and had just the right mix of arrogance and self-deprecation and fashionable clothes. It was Cliff Richard, wasn’t it, who said that Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were people you could listen to and admire: but Elvis Presley was the person you wanted to be.

We engage with popular culture in very particular ways. Doctor Who isn’t just a TV show; Star Wars isn’t just a movie; Harry Potter isn’t just a book. All fiction is about vicarious experience to some extent: but I don’t think Scandi-Noir enthusiasts long to have serial-killer themed wedding receptions. You don’t just read about Hogwarts: you imagine yourself to be a pupil there. Harry Potter wasn’t a character in a book, he was your only friend in teenaged night. There is a story about the little boy who told Alec Guinness that he had seen Star Wars a hundred times; and Alec Guinness told him to maybe consider not seeing it again. I can put myself on both sides of that argument. I saw Star Wars, not a hundred times, but certainly twenty: not to admire the cinematography; not even to have my breath taken away by the spectacle, but because I wanted a lightsaber of my own.

One of the kids in Skeleton Crew gets a lightsaber of his own. I wouldn’t be watching a TV show which amounts to The Famous Five In Space if it didn’t have a spurious theoretical connection to the movie I saw in 1978.

It has been quite a wrench to acknowledge that the thing which now goes by the name of Doctor Who is no longer connected with the TV show that I once loved. There is a kind of fan who believes that a single thing called Doctor Who exists forever through a kind of apostolic succession. Either there is no such thing as Bad Doctor Who and anyone who doesn’t love the current season is an apostate and a schismatic. Or else the current custodians have violated the holy church by introducing a new bad guy, altering the deep lore, casting a black man in the lead, making it, as they say, endlessly, “woke”. But I have come around to the idea that what is really happening is that a very clever and talented man is utilising tropes and signifiers which have existed for half a century to create his own new thing, a thing which some people evidently like although I happen not to. My memories are not changed or violated or overwritten, and I still have the DVDs.

But sometimes I think. These aren’t new adventures of Doctor Who. These aren’t new adventures of Luke Skywalker. This is something that someone has made up. Someone who used to read the stories is now telling them. What makes his made up story more valid than, say, mine?

You all know what I think about Sandman. I liked the TV show fine. I haven’t reread the graphic novel in thirty years. I always thought that it was good of its type, and in some ways very good indeed, but lacked patience when it was over-praised, particularly when it was over-praised by people who hadn’t read any other comic books, or, indeed, any other books. I don’t think I ever quite cared about coolness in quite the right way.

At that same convention, a joke went round that Alan Moore had long hair, a long beard, and didn’t wear glasses; and that at exactly the moment he announced he was quitting comics, a new English writer, with short hair, no beard, sunglasses and a slightly over-embellished writing style appeared and started reinventing moribund DC properties. Who, the joke went, are they trying to kid?

I never totally shook that thought. Neil Gaiman was a slightly inferior, milk-and-water version of Alan Moore, in the same way that Terry Pratchett is a slightly inferior, milk-and-water version of Douglas Adams.

Sandman was fine. It wasn’t Watchmen. It certainly wasn’t Cerebus. To some extent I preferred the in-your-face visceral lavatory wall philosophising of Preacher. Some people loved it to Death..

There was a meme went round: Harry Potter was never good. You were nine.

This missed the point completely. Star Wars, I think was genuinely good: and I happened to be twelve. A.A Milne was very good indeed, and I was, in fact, six. And the Beatles clearly would have been very good indeed if I had been sweet little sixteen.

But whether Harry Potter was “ever good” is not the point. The point is that you bonded with Dumbledore at the same age I bonded with Ben Kenobi, and wanted a wand as badly as I wanted a lightsaber.

There are I suppose a very large number of people to whom this kind of talk is meaningless. “These are just books and TV shows and effing comic books you are talking about.” Literary people, I suppose, who have read Jane Austen frequently but wouldn’t want to live there; movie buffs who think that Star Wars was definitely one of the top five movies of 1977. What fills the hole in their lives I couldn’t say. Sport, maybe? Pets? Actual three dimensional human families?

Christopher Milne, remember, didn’t feel any need to hang on to his toy bear and his toy donkey: he wanted the things that were precious to him now, the things which were precious to him as a grown up, not the things which had been precious to him When He Was Very Young. And there may be people who loved Harry Potter and Star Wars and indeed Sandman and never loved anything else; and perhaps we could say that their imaginative growth has been stunted. Larry Marder said that Jack Kirby’s visual language was so awe-inspiring that some comic book fans never bothered to learn any other, which is a wonderfully nuanced way of putting it. I think they are like that fellow who keeps his decorations up in July and eats turkey three hundred and sixty five times a year. He has rather missed the point of Christmas.

I was too old for the Harry Potter books. But I read them, because everybody else was reading them. When Sandman was a thing, I was jaded and purist about comics and thought that nothing again would ever be as good as Stan and Jack. Now I am very nearly a hundred, which means that Pooh is very nearly ninety nine, but I will never quite get over thinking that the Hundred Acre Wood is my true home.

In a few weeks, the boffins will have perfected Artificial Intelligence software — predictive text algorithms — which can generate entire novels without human involvement. They may already have done so: it would certainly explain Rings of Power.

Genre fiction and formula fiction exist. Lots of freelance hacks think that they can take a corrupt sheriff, a call girl with a heart of gold, a whisky priest, a stage coach, some Indians, a nineteen year old cowpoke keen to prove himself, an innocent man headed for the gallows, a wise bartender and some wholesome homesteaders, shove them into their Nutribullet and blitz out ten volumes of the Wild West Library as quick as they can type them. In golden age of pulp that may even have been true. So why not cut out the middle man and sell an AI predictive text app that can generate an infinite number of brand new cowboy stories at the click of a mouse. Or, at any rate, the same cowboy story with minor variations. But isn’t that what Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour spent their entire careers doing? Isn’t that what genre fiction means?

If the author isn’t literally dead, he is certainly very poorly: author-less texts are just around the corner.

It’s not an entirely unattractive proposal. I would be very interested in feeding the whole corpus of 1960s Marvel Comics in at one end of the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Mill and seeing what narrative chocolate biscuit emerge at the other. New Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories? Or, at any rate, very, very good pastiches? What’s not to like?

There are now more than two hundred Rainbow Fairy books, all written by the redoubtable Daisy Meadows, who lives in a rose bedecked cottage with a two cats and two dogs. Except that no such person as Daisy Meadows exists: she’s a pseudonym adopted by at least fourteen different children’s writers. But perhaps she is a necessary fiction? Perhaps little girls need to think that there is a story-teller behind their stories? Perhaps every time someone says “Daisy Meadows doesn’t exist” a fairy drops down dead?

I once read about a man, a decent writer, who read a few dozen Mills and Boon romances and tried his hand at writing his own. He got a polite rejection letter saying that while he understood the formula, it was obvious that his heart wasn’t in it.

I think that the lady with the cottage and the cats is part of the Rainbow Fairy stories, and that if she went away, part of the story would go away, too. I think that Stan and Jack and the Bullpen were a big part of Marvel Comics, even though Stan and Jack hated each other and the bullpen didn’t exist. And the diffident nice guy with the leather coats and the dark glasses who wants everyone to just make good art is a big, big part of the Sandman saga, even though he never appears in it. It never quite was just Sandman, it was always Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

Sandman is, of course, very much about mythologizing the special power of Story and therefore of the Story Teller. Morpheus is Lord of Stories and there is a certain amount of entirely intentional confusion between the Author and the Character. If Sandman turned out to have been written by a committee or generated by artificial intelligence, it would no longer be Sandman.

This is even more true of Uncle Terry Pratchett.

If you loved Sandman then no-one can take from you the experience of having read it. But (it appears) no-one can ever give back to you the experience of having read Sandman in the voice of that particular storyteller because (it appears) that particular storyteller didn’t exist.

If you decide that you can still enjoy your memories of the stories, then I will support you. If you decide you can re-read those orphaned stories, I will support you. If you decide that the experience is tainted; that Sandman must be pixellated out of your life then will support you. If you decide that the physical artefacts must themselves be put on a bonfire then I may politely dissent. That sounds too much like the kind of thing Wagner’s number one fan might have done: but I understand the impulse. I think that I think that stories are stories and that once in the world they are in the world and that the Hundred Acre Wood would still be my true home even if something horrible came to light about A.A Milne or Christopher Robin.

Taking away Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Morpheus from a true fan is not like reassessing a work of literature or giving up on a TV series which has jumped the proverbial. It is closer, I think, to de-conversion.

I have a life sized figurine of Cerebus the Aardvark in my flat. Ride of Valkyries is a very good tune.

Andrew Rilstone is not an AI. If you enjoy his writing, please consider supporting him at www.patreon.com/rilstone.

The Penguin

Watching The Penguin is a deeply unpleasant experience. 

That's not a criticism. Presumably, it is supposed to be. The protagonist, Oz Cobb (nee Oswald Cobblepot) is portrayed as a genuine monster. His own mother thinks he's the devil. Normally, when villains and gangsters take centre stage, they are shown to have redeeming features. The Penguin has none. He's so amoral he makes Richard the Third seem like a nice chap.

Batman is probably more than any other character defined by his Rogues Gallery. Even if you aren't a fan you have heard of Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman.... If you read graphic novels you can list half a dozen more. Superman really only has the bald guy; and possibly the guy with the unpronounceable name. Most of Batman's enemies are grotesque and comical and very probably mad. The Penguin is posh and aristocratic. He wears tuxedos and top hats. He has a cigarette and a cigarette holder and usually carries an umbrella. In the Silly Era, gimmick-laced umbrellas were his modus operandi. Unlike Joker and Riddler, he's not a clown, although Burgess Meredith brought a large touch of W.C Fields to the 1960s TV characterisation.  

One could see the point of giving The Joker his own movie franchise. The Joker is iconic. The evil killer clown has a certain archetypal charm even when isolated from Bat-lore. The guy with the hat and the nose and umbrella, not quite so much. Especially when you take away the hat and the umbrella. 

In the last but one cinematic version of Batman, Penguin was the secondary antagonist. The main bad guy was the Riddler. The Riddler was a very minor comic book villain made unavoidably iconic by Frank Gorshin in the TV show. The comic book and TV versions of the Riddler wore silly green suits with silly question marks all over them. The movie version didn’t. He was a psychotic serial killer who turned out to have a political agenda. He did, however, leave riddles at the scenes of his crimes. Not that a serial killer who obsessively provides his antagonist with clues is a particularly unusual plot device. But you can see the point of connection between the guy in the film and the guy in the comic. He even says “riddle me this” at one point.

That seems to be the unique selling point of Ther Batman. Characters who are a little bit suggested by characters in the comic book, but properly frightening and without the fancy-dress costumes. (Except the Batman. The Batman dresses like the Batman.) 

Oz/Penguin runs a night club for the top gangster in Gotham. He doesn’t wear a suit, particularly, or have a top hat or an umbrella or talk about his fine feathered friends. He does have a big purple car but he doesn't call it a Pengy Mobile. He does have a big nose, and he waddles a bit due to his bad leg. He's still alive at the end of ther Batman, and clearly lined up to be the main villain in ther Batman 2, currently expected in 2027.

Edgar Rice Burroughs thought that Tarzan films ought to come out each year so kids could look forward to them in the way that they looked forward to the circus. (There were silent movies in 1918, 1919, 1920, and 1921. Johnny Wiesmuller made twelve talkies in sixteen years.) Five years is a hell of a gap between a movie and a sequel, particularly if the movie and the sequel are meant to form one coherent narrative. 

A superhero movie costs, like, two hundred million dollars to make (two! hundred! million!) but stands to earn six or seven hundred million (seven! hundred! million!) if people like it. We spent far more time and energy looking forward to these movies than actually watching them. There are teasers and magazines and web sites dedicated to this Looking Forward process. But in the end two hundred million dollars and five years boils down to a hundred and eighty minutes in the cinema. I don’t see how any film can possibly carry that weight of expectation. I don't see how any film can ever be anything but an anticlimax. We waited a decade for the Force Awakens and there are now people whose whole identity is disliking it.

Big Dinosaur Movies work best. You can go and see Big Dinosaur Movies over and over again because you are only there because you like looking at Big Dinosaurs. You wouldn't say you'd seen the Big Dinosaur once and don't need to see it again, any more than you would say that you once ate a cheeseburger and don't ever need to eat another one. If there is Another Big Dinosaur Movie, well, that refreshes the experience. I saw Star Wars eight, ten times during its first release. There is a story about Alec Guiness meeting a little boy who'd seen it a hundred times. Does anyone really need to re-experience Batman and the Riddler simmering at each other through the bullet proof glass in Arkham over and over and over again? 

Three hours every five years. 

Gotham City exists in a kind of no time at all. Everyone has a mobile phone. (Everyone has the same ringtone, and if you have a soundbar on your TV, it can be rather confusing.) But Arkham Asylum is a kind of nineteenth century lunatic asylum, men in white coats and bare walls and inmates who kill each other without anyone seeming to care a great deal. The tabloids tell us that prisons are like luxury hotels and borstels are like summer camps, so maybe its essential for Batman to deposit bad guys in a nightmarish fortress. Otherwise he would seem to be rewarding crime and would have to become a freelance executioner like the Punisher and the Crow. In the second Joker movie, Gotham appears to have an anachronistic electric chair. 

Or perhaps it's all a metaphor. Arkham represents Gotham's collective unconscious; and the villains are all symbols of Batman's own madness; grinning laughing ha-ha-ha-ha- bedlam madness, not human beings with mental health condition. But then Batman himself has always been a metaphor which is why those memes in which Alfred tells him to spend his dough on drug rehabilitation programmes rather than Batcopters are so senseless. Is there any point of bringing social realism into a world built of metaphor? 

The Nth Batman movie, the one with Heath Ledger, did as good a job of being The Godfather Only With Capes as any film is ever likely to. Ther Batman did the same kind of things very nearly as well. I rewatched it as a warm up for the TV series. I still don’t buy the man in the silly suit standing around crime scenes with hard-nosed believable cops, one of whom may or may not be Commissioner Gordon, but that may be the point.  

So, Penguin, the one really memorable character, now has his own TV show. Only it isn't really a TV show: it’s an eight hour movie released episodically. I rather approve of eight hour movies: I think they are probably what young people in the next century will have instead of books. The Daily Telegraph, which complains endlessly about young-people-nowadays having short attention spans, complained that Penguin was long and boring. And it was long. And it did require a sort of commitment, a sort of buy-in, without ever making it quite clear why we ought to invest in it. I don’t think we should praise films for being novelistic any more than we should praise dances for being architectural, but I do think that the eight-hour-TV-show is the place where the depth and complexity of Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy is most likely to survive. 

I do not think The Penguin is as good as Our Mutual Friend, although it is arguably the story of a city, and quite interested in questions of class. I do not think that The Penguin is as good as Jude the Obscure although it is very nearly as depressing. But it does says “let's spend some time with these characters even though they aren't doing very much". And it says "lets suspend the action and go into a completely gratuitous flash back". That only happens when you have four hundred and eighty minutes and the winter number of Strand Magazine to play with.

Actual comic books go on and on forever but only in twenty page segments.

Clearly, the reason the Penguin has his own TV show is that he is going to be the main antagonist in the Ther Batman 2. Did someone think that audiences would have found it implausible for the night-club manager in part one to have risen to be Kingpin of Gotham by part two? But it would be too boring to waste some of those precious once-in-five-years minutes showing or explaining his rise to power, and therefore the backstory has to be dumped onto Now or Sky in the hope someone will watch it there. Or at any rate, know that it exists. 

Maybe Colin Farrell just had so much damn fun being evil that he begged for the chance to do it again, more expansively? 

Or is this, perchance, just the movie someone wanted to make, back-story and franchise and audience expectation be damned? 

Many, many, many years ago, when we were young and Batman looked like Michael Keaton, I said in some fanzine or other that Batman was a marketing campaign with a movie attached to it; that so long as there was a Batposter on every hoarding and a Batshirt on every tennis crowd, the film didn't need to make sense. It's only function was to not be boring -- to distract people's attention while they were in the cinema. But Ther Batman and The Penguin are too long and frankly too dull to appeal to the mainstream popcorn consumer: if you don’t to some extent, care what happens to Oswald Cobbedecook and his cute stammering sidekick you won't get to end.

I am compelled. I am engaged. I cared. It helped that I was by myself over Christmas had had time to binge watch with rather too much rum and stilton. I don't know if, under normal circumstances, I would have stayed the course. 

Game of Thrones created a genre which could be called “cinema of of ordeal”. You don’t so much consume it as try to get through it. The characters are believable and human and realistic—if they weren’t, it would simply be one more splatter movie. And then horrible things happen to them. Relentlessly. Over eight gruelling hours. People are set on fire; and have their arms amputated with razor wire; and have their fingers cut off with wire-cutters. Many, many heads are smashed into walls. Many, many brains are blown out with guns, Broken bottles are thrust into abdomens. But the violence is mainly release from the psychological trauma. Victor, Penguin’s adopted teenaged side-kick, at one point decides to do a runner and leave the state with his girlfriend. It's at just this point, naturally, that the Penguin starts telling Vic how much he trusts him and how much he looks on him as the son he never had and how much they are going to achieve together for Gotham City. It’s the “what will Oz say and how will he react?” which grabs us by the throat; not the “will Oz kill Victor when he finds out?” One of the flashbacks into Oz’s childhood I found myself having to fast forward through. The last time that happened was in one of the sex dungeons scenes in the Boys. Sensitive readers may care to know that although there is lots and lots and lots of violence and lots and lots and lots of trauma in the Penguin, there are hardly any breasts and no penises at all.

The gangster thing, has, truthfully, been done before. The Penguin kills the heir apparent to the crime empire from the last movie, and spends eight episodes playing everyone else off against everyone else. His amoral machiavellianism is very clever indeed. But it's very slow burn. Oz's rival for control of the mobs, and the sister of the guy he killed, Sofia, is an even bigger psychopath than he is. She's released from Arkham in the first episode: I don't think I was properly hooked until an extended flashback in episode four revealed how she came to be in there in the first place. The Godfather taught us that Mafiosi are violent and scary but that’s okay because they are honourable and loyal to their families. There is nothing even slightly okay about either Oz or Sofia. At best we can pity them, a bit, because Oz was poor and Sofia was abused. 

Oz's one redeeming feature is that he visits his old mother who has dementia. By the final part, his relationship with her is revealed to have been a complicated oedipal vortex. His final action in the final episode is pointlessly, gratuitously evil, and comes from nowhere, and yet is somehow in character. Is the plan that by the time we get to see Ther Batman 2 we will hate Penguin so much that we will be fully on board with whatever vengeance the caped crusader exacts, content in the knowledge that nothing, literally nothing, not even that Victorian mental institution, can possibly be worse than what he deserves? Or are we supposed to feel some level of empathy for him? This too is a human being. 

Meanwhile, there is a trailer for the sixth Superman reboot, due out next July. Superhero fans are very like Charlie Brown and his football: however many times we've been hurt by faithless adaptations we are quite sure that this time we'll have a Fantastic Four movie that is true to Stan and Jacks original vision and this time someone will do Superman justice. But certainly, the vibes that the trailer has generated have been universally positive. The Penguin is an extended setup for a proper serious gangster movie that happens to have Batman in it. But Superman may render all that passe. By 2027, the peanut crunching crowd may be expecting red telephones, Batpoles, visible sound-effects and Ace the Bat-hound.

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Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

At one stage, Tolkien wanted the Lord of the Rings to run to four volumes, rather than the published three. Volume IV would have consisted of a greatly expanded version of the Tale of Years: a narrative timeline summarising the history of Middle-earth from its creation to the “present” day. Readers would have first experienced the War of the Ring from the inside, as a story, picking up tantalising hints about Numenor and Rohan and Gondor along the way, and then, once the story was over, they would see the whole history laid out before them in a linear sequence.

If he'd gone through with this plan, the core events of his imaginary history would have been fixed in print in 1955. Would that have hastened the completion of the Silmarillion, or made it even harder to achieve? Or would the Professor conceivably have decided that his Great Work was now finished and that he could move on to something else?

In the event the supplementary volume proved too ambitious, and we ended up with a rather piecemeal collection of essays at the back of Return of the King. Some people will tell you that the Appendices are disposable—pedantic world-building notes about runic alphabets and hobbit calendars that only the hard-core nerd needs to bother with. But the back matter also contains a lot of narrative. Shortened narratives—sketched out narratives—narratives in the language of saga, not in the novelistic language of Lord of the Rings. But definitely stories. And who doesn't want to hear more stories about Middle-earth?

About half way through the Two Towers, there is an enormous gigantic battle at a castle called Helm’s Deep. Tolkien tells us that it was “called after the hero of the old wars who made his refuge there”. When Theoden rides into battle, the Riders of Rohan shout “Helm has arisen and comes back to war!” In the movie, King Theoden says “the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound again in the deep!”: Peter Jackson even puts a statue of a big guy with a war hammer [TM] outside the castle. Appendix A fills out a little of the backstory: Helm Hammerhand was a king of Rohan about a hundred and fifty years before Theoden; he was besieged by wild men (Dunlendings) in the castle and fell heroically in the battle.

Flipping between page 528 and page 1065 doesn't make the Helm’s Deep passages any easier to understand. The main text tells us that Helm was a great hero from the olden days; and the appendix confirms that he lived in the olden days and was a great hero. But it does greatly contribute to the illusion that Tolkien was recounting history, as opposed to simply making up a story. You focus in on a bit of background colour and find that there is a solid chunk of narrative behind it. We aren’t just looking at suggestive stripes of brown and green on a painted backdrop, but an actual fully realised tree. Which of course, allows us to believe that behind the appendices are more lives and more stories which Tolkien never told. And if you have the sort of mind that is inclined to play role-playing games or invent fan fiction—and nearly everyone who likes Tolkien does have that kind of mind—then the temptation to imagine what those untold stories would have been is overwhelming.

Does filling in the gaps create a Middle-earth even more real than the one Tolkien left us? Or does imagining the details which Tolkien only hinted at rather spoil the illusion? Some of my friends at college played a long, long Middle-earth Role Playing campaign in which they were Dunlendings. For all I know it is still going on. I am not sure at the time I could have told you what a Dunlending even was. “Our MERP campaign” has not changed Tolkien’s text, or rewritten Tolkien’s appendices. But it has probably changed how those six or seven gamers read those passages.

Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim hangs a two and a half hour movie on those five hundred or so words which Tolkien wrote about Helm Hammerhand. It’s an anime, or as we used to say, a cartoon, but it has Peter Jackson’s name on it in quite large letters; and borrows musical themes from Howard Shore. It begins with a hushed female voiceover, possibly Eowyn, talking about how history is remembered and forgotten. It ends with an Enya-esque dirge over the rolling credits, which feature sepia drawings of the main characters. It is, in short, trying really, really hard to be the fourth part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Possibly Kenji Kamiyama is pretending that the Hobbit didn’t happen. I know I am.

The film sticks really quite closely to the text. Helm really does call the Dunlending lord fatty (“you have grown big since you were last here”) and he really does suggest that they step outside (“the king does not permit brawls in his house, but men are freer outside”). When the King sneaks out of the castle during the siege and starts killing individual enemy soldiers with his bare hands, I must admit I found myself thinking “oh, now you have gone too far this is completely unTolkienesque”, but this is indeed exactly what Tolkien says happened. (the king “went out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands”). The Dunlending really do think that his wraith carried on fighting them after he died, and he really was found frozen solid but still standing.

I assume that Weta’s CGI models from Lord of the Rings still exist on someone’s pen drive; and have been reskinned for the purposes of the cartoon. Certainly Helm’s Deep and the Meduseld look exactly as they did in the Jackson trilogy. This sometimes creates the impression that painted characters are walking across photographic landscapes; and sometimes their feet appear to not be quite in contact with the ground. But everyone is proportioned like a grown up human-being and no-one’s face is caricatured, and the voices are all done by proper actors and it is mostly possible to forget you are watching animation and just treat it as a Jacksonian prequel. It’s all great fun, if people with beards, clashing shields and shouting “forth Eorlingas fear no darkness” is your idea of a good time. It’s very much a Tolkien movie for people who actually like Tolkien,

If there is going to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—and I am very far from persuaded that there ought to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—then clearly, somewhere along the line, someone is going to have to make stuff up which isn’t in the book. Anyone who has ever written fan fiction or run an RPG is familiar with the dilemma. Where are the narrative blank spaces? Where do the new characters or the new events fit into the established universe? Do you invent a new adventure for Sherlock Holmes which Watson somehow failed to mention? Or do you decide that the Baker Street Irregulars were off having adventures of their own, independent of the Great Detective? Or decide to make up stories about Mr Shereford Doyle who lived at 221A Baker Street and solved crimes when his famous neighbour was out of town?

Phillippa Boyens spotted a gaping narrative hole in Appendix A. According to Tolkien, a local lord with Dunlending heritage turns up at Helm’s hall and asks if his son could please marry Helm’s daughter. Helm is not impressed with the suggestion. Helm and the Dunlending have a fight. Helm, being legendarily strong, kills the Dunlending, by accident, mostly. So the son of the Dunlending vows revenge, and comes back years later with an army. He usurps the throne of Rohan and drives Helm back to what would later be known as Helm’s Deep. Despite his impressive snow-troll tribute act, Helm dies in the siege; and both his sons fall in battle. But after the long winter comes to an end, his sister-son rides over the hill with the cavalry and saves the day and starts a new line of Kings.

Now, according to Tolkien, the Dunlending lord is called Freca; his son, the usurper, is called Wulf; Helm’s sons are Haleth and Hama, his sister is Hild, the nephew who saves the day is Frealas Hildeson and the daughter who Wulf wanted to marry is called…is called….

She doesn’t have a name. Or any agency. Or anything else. She doesn’t in fact have any function at all, except to not marry Wulf. So War of the Rohirrim gives her a name, Hera (which is, I think, Adunaic for “Mary-Sue”), and makes her the main protagonist of the story.

At one level, this is a very sensible thing to do. The focus on an “invisible” character enables the writers to invent new material without contradicting the source. It makes perfect sense that there were shield-maidens in Rohan before Eowyn; and that Eowyn (if the narrator is in fact she) would be interested in telling their story.

The decision to make Hera an all-purpose wonder-wench was a little, I don’t know, obvious. She rides horses wildly with her hair flowing out behind her; she outfights the boys; even giving Wulf a small scar when they were kids; she climbs up sheer mountains and talks to giant eagles and ends up (not a spoiler at all) taking an important message to a wizard whose name begins with a G.

It really is quite a lot of fun. But I kind of wonder if, as the narrator says, Hera was an important person who got left out of history, couldn’t she have been, say, a clever courtly lady working behind the scenes? Peter Jackson was understandably unhappy with an Arwen who sits at home doing embroidery throughout the adventure: but his solution, to put her on a horse and give her Golrfindel’s job, is not especially imaginative.

Tolkien fans are incredibly toxic. Well, fans are incredibly toxic. Or probably it’s just that some toxic people pretend to be Tolkien fans. Quite a lot of Tolkien fans think that the dark skinned dwarves and elves in the Rings of Power are part of a plot to abolish the white race. And quite a lot of Star Wars fans think that Rey Skywalker’s appearance in The Force Awakens was a preliminary step towards Walt Disney forcibly castrating the entire male population.

But in this case, the right wing commentariat are clearly in the right. War of the Rohirrim is absolutely a feminist appropriation of Tolkien. Re-inscribing the female perspective into a text which specifically excludes it is absolutely a political act. It’s somewhat akin to Jean Rhys retelling Jane Eyer from Bertha Rochester’s point of view. Kamiyama doesn’t just point out that Helm’s daughter doesn’t have a name: that would have been a perfectly valid feminist reading of Lord of the Rings. He goes beyond this: he creates a new story, which is extremely faithful to Tolkien—far more faithful than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, his Hobbit, or god help us the Rings of Power—which asserts the centrality of that marginal figure. This is absolutely an act of political subversion. The act of doing it is arguably more interesting than the way it has been done; but as we have seen, there exists a category of modern art where the idea is more important than the artefact. Masculinist Star Wars fans were ludicrously absurd to feel emasculated by the Force Awakens: they are absolutely correct to feel that their male supremacy is critiqued by War of the Rohirrim.

To which I say, loudly and clearly, fuck them.

I am not sure that we need new Tolkien-esque works; but if we are obliged to have them, films like this that critique and destabilise the canon are the way to go. The existence of blokes who are bothered by this kind of thing is precisely the reason this is the kind of thing we ought to be doing, good and hard.

My reviews of Rings of Power Season II, complete without outtakes, extras and lots of digressions is now available as a smart little PDF. 

It is available free (along with lots of other exclusive content) to all subscribers to my Patreon. (Just pledge $1 each time I write an article.) www.patreon.com/rilstone

Alternative, you can buy the PDF document for $6.50/£5.00 (plus the Apple Tax, unfortunately). 

Art, post-script

Oh please don't agree with me! When people agree with me I feel sure I must be wrong! 

Is there no-one who actually likes and understands conceptual art who can tell me what I'm missing? 

Rings of Power Season 2

 

My reviews of Rings of Power Season II, complete without outtakes, extras and lots of digressions is now available as a smart little PDF. It costs $6.50/£5.00 (plus the Apple Tax, unfortunately). 

But I would prefer it is you did NOT buy it, and instead signed up to my Patreon (pledging $1 each time I write a Thing) in which case you get it for free. 

www.patreon.com/rilstone

Art

Conservatives really like sculpture. They specially like marble carvings of ladies in wedding veils, or with silk sleeves, or with little lace handkerchiefs draped over their perfect feet.

I'd be the last to deny that these carvings are very pretty and very skilful. It must be very hard to represent something as soft as lace in a medium as hard as marble. (Are the sculptors actually carving the lace and the silk? Or is there a trick involved, some way of fooling the eye so it looks as if there is a carved veil hanging over a carved face? In a way that would be even cleverer. )

But the conservatives who endlessly put pictures of marble ladies on the hate sight formally known as Twitter see in them a political message. These carvings, they say, represent the Decline of the West. In the Olden Days artists carved chiffon veils out of solid rock. Now they nail bananas to walls in the name of art.

Well: "thinking old things are better than new ones" is pretty much the definition of "conservative". My own taste is in fact rather unfashionable, not to say old-fashioned. For example, I have been greatly enjoying the recently discovered 1966 Morecambe and Wise shows currently playing on Radio 4 Extra. They consist largely of well-delivered but extremely laboured word-play. ("Ah, Little John, I fancy it will be venison for supper". "What makes you say that, Robin?" "Oh, just a haunch.") [*]

Puns are puns, and I doubt anyone currently working in comedy could spin a career out of such slender material. But if I say "This sixty year old radio show is really very funny" then a swarm of mosquitos would descend and say "And all modern comedians are completely unfunny" and another swarm would add "If you tried to tell those jokes on the radio today, the BBC would CANCEL you."

The decline-of-the-west argument seems to depend on the theory that art is about representation and nothing else: that oil painting is a primitive and slow version of photography, and sculpture is an inefficient method of 3-D printing. A statue of a lady in a silk dress is Triumphant and Western to the extent and to the degree that it accurately represents a lady in a silk dress. Jonathan Truss and Thomas Kincaid are by definition better painters than Monet or Picasso because if they draw an elephant or a cottage, it jolly well looks like an elephant or a cottage. Picasso invented the word "cubism" to cover up the fact he couldn't draw. If a very sophisticated 3D printer could create a marble statue that was even more accurate than one of the Renaissance masters, that would, on these terms, be a better work of art.

Unless what we are admiring is not the artefact, but the skill which went into the creation of it. A photograph of a bowl of fruit might be just as pretty and just as accurate as an oil painting of one; but a painting is Art because it takes years of skill and practice to be able to produce one. In the decadent west, everyone has a camera-phone in their pocket.

I went to London to hear Bob Dylan sing some songs and to see Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw in Waiting for Godot, and spent the afternoon in between looking at Modern Art in the Tates Gallery.

The first exhibition I went to was a retrospective of an American artist named Mike Kelly. I had not previously heard of him. I had not in fact planned to see his exhibition; but it turned out that the Turner Prize was at Tate Britain and I was at Tate Modern. It seems that he was active from around 1980 to his early death in 2012, and that he was particularly known for doing surprising things with old teddy bears.

To my complete surprise -- this was honestly happenstance -- he also turns out to have had an interest in Superman. He didn't particularly care about the stories, but he was intrigued by the idea of Kandor. He was interested in the idea of a city-in-a-bottle: he was interested in the city's art-deco style. He was interested in the fact that there was no consistent depiction of the city -- it was reimagined each time it appeared in the comic. And he was interested in the fact that Kandor represents a sort of obsolescent futurism. It's both the lost home of Superman's childhood; and it's a 1950s vision of a future that never materialised.

The Kandor room in the exhibition consisted of four or five large bottles containing abstract shapes and objects which could be read as cities, and some enlarged comic book panels. I'm not exactly sure if the panels were part of Kelly's original work, or explanatory additions by the Tate. The shapes and colours were quite interesting in an abstract kind of way; there was abstract music playing and the room was in semi-darkness. But I didn't think that looking at objects in bottles particularly illuminated 1950s Superman, or urban design, or retro future town planning. I've always felt that silver age Superman functions as a series of evocative myths even when the stories are embarrassingly simplistic. You could also talk about Krypto, Superboy's childhood pet that is still romping around the asteroid belt. So I suppose what Kelly is doing is isolating the idea of Kandor and putting it in a room. He's saying "think of Otto Binder's idea as if it was a piece of art". Which is no more or less sensible than Yoko asking me to imagine that the moon is a tuna sandwich.

I was more interested in the film that was attached to the room, entitled "Superman Recites Selections From The Bell Jar and Other Works By Sylvia Plath", in which Superman does indeed recite selections from the Bell Jar and other works by Sylvia Plath. I enjoyed the dissonance of a fairly serious actor in a Superman suit being exhibited as Art in an Art Gallery; and the way in which Plath's very intense language was at crossed purposes to the space opera theme of the shrunken city. There was some interest in the way passages from Plath "sync" ironically with the idea of Kandor, rather as Pink Floyd (allegedly) syncs with the Wizard of Oz. And of course Plath is Literature and Superman is Popular Culture. But again, the fact of its having been done was more interesting than the actual doing of it.

Much of the rest of the exhibition struggled to pass the "quite interesting" bar. One room did indeed contain a kind of patchwork quilt sewn together from cuddly toys which the artist had acquired in thrift shops; which is certainly something I had not seen before, and something which one could spend more than a few seconds looking at. But the other side of that room contained more toys displayed in more or less purposeful piles. And evangelical church banners, with slogans saying things like "Fuck You! Now Give Me a Treat Please" embroidered on them. And a reel to reel tape of the artist's voice reciting all of Osvald's lines from Act 3 of Ibsen's Ghosts.

The explanatory notes explained that cuddly toys (home made) were symbols of love but also symbols of labour. Someone had made each one for some child, and needlework is traditionally woman's work. But they'd been turned into commodities by being sold at thrift shops. And that the act of giving a child a stuffed toy implied a transaction: the giver is somehow demanding that the child love them in return.

All very true. But I still felt that I was looking at a pile of cuddly toys.

"What happens if you perform only one part of a play" is not an uninteresting question. I once saw an actress performing the whole of Lady McBeth's role as a monologue, with the cues provided by a Greek chorus. And Ghosts is among other things about motherly love; so were we supposed to be drawing a connection between syphilis, euthanasia and cuddly toys? The artist was interested in ideas of ghosts and hauntings: the exhibition was called Ghost and Spirit. A lot depends on your being able to identify what text is playing on loop.

I think if I had gone into a trendy coffee bar or fringe theatre in 1990 and seen a huge pile of teddy bears arranged in a pattern on the floor I might have thought "That is interesting" and it might even have made me think "That is a bit sad and a bit sinister: some kid maybe loved that toy and now it's just in a pile." In an art gallery with explanatory notes it all feels a bit.... "so what"?

Another large installation appeared to be a large, irregular, wooden grid, almost like Ikea shelving laid on its side. Some sections had pink crystals stuck to the inside of them. This represented, apparently, the artist's high school, in so far as he could remember it: the crystal rooms were the ones he could not remember, possibly suggesting some kind of repression. Pink crystals might suggest the viscera we all have inside us; or it might suggest something extraterrestrial. He was interested in recovered memory syndrome and in supposed accounts of flying saucer abductions. Well, okay: but how could I possibly have known any of that if you hadn't told me? and now that you have told me what is interesting about the artefact?

I then proceeded across London to the Other Tate Gallery and purchased a ticket to see this years Turner Prize exhibition, as I had originally intended.

You know the format: four exhibitions, four artists, lots of outraged letters in the paper about how its all gone terribly woke, the weirdest and most controversial gets the prize.

Room One belonged to someone called Pio Abad, a British Philippine artist. I understand his exhibition to have been a recreation of one he curated for the Ashmolean in Oxford. The whole of one wall consisted of highly detailed black-and-white line drawings of historical artefacts juxtaposed with modern objects. A south American statue placed alongside an angle poise lamp; some kind of African mask alongside a pile of paperback books. The drawings seemed to me to be good: I couldn't tell if they were major-award-winning-good or any-art-school-graduate-good. The rest of the room included actual historical artefacts from the Ashmolean with the artist's own interpretative text; and a large concrete representation of one of Imelda Marcos's vastly expensive diamond necklaces.

The second room, by Scottish Sikh artist Jasleen Kaur, is dominated by an old car with a gigantic doily draped over it: something which I have assuredly never seen done before. Music from her culture is playing in the background. There is a large perspex sheet hanging from the ceiling, on which are placed various objects, lovingly listed by the curators on an explanatory caption. ("Fake vomit" "Blessed iron brew" "Fruit pastel". These are literal examples and not satirical inventions of my own.) There are some photographs of cross-cultural Scottish/Sikh events; with an orange-sepia tinge; and an accordion and some finger cymbals which occasionally play themselves.

Romany artist Delaine Le Bas gets several rooms. They are all hung floor to ceiling with sheets of various fabrics; on which stick figures and icons have been daubed. There is clearly some purpose and skill to this: strange, demonic horses dominate the first room; the second room is dark; and the third is brightly lit with white ghostly figures holding leaves, and the words "know yourself" written on the wall. As you pass from the first to the second room there is a large paper mache representation of a horse, with a pair of shoes on the floor next to it. I don't know whether I am supposed to describe this as "immersive" or "interactive" or "walk-through", but clearly the whole complex of three rooms constitute a single artwork.

So: Pio Abad is pointing out that British museums are full of art looted from other countries, including his own; and asking us to draw ironic connections between, say, a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar and the cultural artefact from (I am guessing) on of the countries that was exploited for the sugar trade. I devoutly believe that our colonial history is fraught with exploitation. And I get that angle-poise lamps are kind of in one way nothing like ritual masks and in another way maybe a little bit like them. We are told that "much of the thinking behind the exhibition was staging these encounters". The artist says that "a lot of the work happens in that space in between, where the viewer contemplates something that I have produced in response to an artefact that I have looked at."

Very probably. But how is this "encounter" or "response" supposed to work? Someone once told me that to understand the abstract art of Mark Rothko you have to stare at one of his canvasses for a very long time; until the colours start to pulsate and draw you in. I can see how that could be true. I can at least understand what is being said. So is the plan that if I look at these drawings for a long time, the fact that the colonial exploitation of the Philippines was a Bad Thing would suddenly present itself to me? Or am I suppose to stand back from the wall, like Ozymandias, and somehow acquire some mystical insight from the grid of twenty or so small pictures, as opposed to studying each one? Or is the idea that I go away and do some homework and discover why that particular lamp resonates with that particular statue? But how do I do that in the exhibition I've just paid a tenner to look at? What's an appropriate amount of time to spend in each room? Or does this kind of art exist primarily in the catalogue and not on the wall?

The Jasleen Kaur room was, it turns out, more of the same. The photographs are tinted in orange because turmeric is important in Sikh culture and Irn Bru is important in Scotland. The objects on the perspex -- the scarf and the sweet and the bottle -- are all of particular importance to the artist. The car was the first car her father owned, and the doily signifies the fact that many Punjabi immigrants worked in the textile industries. Now you have told me that, I can see there is a certain amount of poetry to the image of the car draped in the cloth; and a certain amount of chutzpah in having physically created it. But I have taken it in at a glance; what am I supposed to have learned or felt? "Mass produced everyday objects are coded with symbols and images" say the captions. How? "Kaur cuts and pastes objects from her upbringing in Glasgow through the gallery to make sense of what is out-of-view or withheld?" In what way? "On the floor, found images of protest and restitution, described by Kaur as 'counter-images; aim to dispel myths around where solidarities lie." Well, they don't.

A couple of years ago at Sidmouth I saw a nice "folk opera" about a local lady who had recently passed away at the age of a hundred and something. The songs told the story of her life and struggles. In the final moments they unrolled a piece of embroidery that the lady herself had made. This was very moving, because we'd spent ninety minutes having the context explained. I don't know the context of the fruit pastel, and neither does anyone else.

The Romany piece -- which I found much more interesting as an object -- seemed to suffer from the same issue. Once you have given me the solution, I can see that the walk-through exhibition represented the journey of the soul to enlightenment. One room was, like, dark and the other was, like, bright, and there were even footprints going from one to the other. But it turns out that the drawings of horse-like-critters in room one, and the paper mache horse in room two, are representations of a china horse that her granny had on the mantlepiece, and the shoes represent the shoes that the artist wore as a child. Or something. How could I conceivably have known this? And once I have been told why is it interesting?

The last room, by one Claudette Johnson, was a series of paintings of people on great big huge canvasses. They were the kinds of paintings of people that look like the people who they are paintings of. Probably: there is some suspicion that the artist may combine the features of more than one sitter to get the desired effects. No-one has a name: the works have titles like "figure in raw umber" and "seated figure 1". There is some abstraction going on: a man in a solid turquoise shirt and a man in a red shirt pose in front of a solid yellow background; a man whose face is rendered in plain black pencil or charcoal is wearing a partly painted-in red and blue checked shirt.

It's not just a collection of portraits: it too is saying something. All the figures are black people; none of them are famous. The paintings draw attention to their artifice -- the tops of the canvasses chop the top or the side of the face away; a young man is turned away from the painter in an awkward pose. The paintings -- if I am allowed to say this -- seem to be interested in the actual physical blackness of black people; of the way in which light reflects off skin. Some of the images contain more light pigment than dark. There is one image of a dead or unconscious man in a red shirt laid across the lap of an older woman which is called "Pieta" but none of the other images appear to contain any conscious symbolism. The overwhelming feeling of the gallery is that the big, oversized faces are projecting personality: I found it slightly unsettling in the way that endless walls of famous white people in the National Portrait Gallery has never done. I checked the explanatory label: "This person deserves to win the prize because she paints pictures of human faces really well, and conveys their personalities really convincingly, with striking use of colour that makes you look twice", it said. No, of course it didn't. It turns out that the pictures "mediate questions about our private and public selves" "suggest that our identity is not fixed but is crated and changeable"; "embody" the idea that "black...is an unstable identity, physically, culturally, and politically." 

Well, all right. If you insist.

English literature departments used to teach The Death of the Author. "Texts" (which are not at all the same things as "works") were autonomous objects; a poem was a thing made, a thing which existed: the question was always "what does this poem mean" and never "what did the author mean by this poem." One assumes, I suppose, that if the poet is any good, the poem means roughly what the poet intended it to mean; but you can't bring his "intention" in from outside and force it onto the text.

Fools ask "Who is Godot?" and "What does Godot represent?" as if the answer -- Beckett's answer, deposited with his lawyer to be unsealed fifty years after his death -- would explain away all the difficulties of the play; as if Waiting for Godot, with an explanation would be more interesting that Waiting for Godot unexplained.

Bigger fools tell you that "Godot is God" or "Godot is death" as if that settles the question. The play "means" that God doesn't exist and won't ever come; or else it "means" that the thing that we are all waiting for is the thing whose arrival will signal not only the end of this play but the end of every play. But this is all non sequitur. Waiting for Godot is fascinating because it is "about" two people, waiting for a third person, who never in fact arrives, and what they do to pass the time.

Modern art -- modern art as mediated by the Tates Gallery -- seems to take the opposite approach. Don't say "death of the artist". Say "the artist risen again and ruling the universe; the artist who sits above the object and declares its one and only meaning". These horses and fruit pastels and wooden grids mean what the artists tell you that they mean.

It would be one thing to look at a picture of a scary man in a red suit and be told "This is a painting of the devil because the artist means it to be a painting of the devil." The painting of the man in the red suit is still just as good or just as bad a painting as it was already; but we have possibly learned something about why the painter painted it. But it's another thing to look at a small cube in an empty room and say "This is a sculpture of the devil because the artist means it to be a sculpture of the devil."

It isn't that the artist imposes meaning on the text: it's that the artist's meaning supplants the text: that the artist's meaning renders the text superfluous. What we are being offered is, in fact, empty rooms containing pure intention.

And the very first time someone did this -- Duchamp’s loo or Craig-Martin's glass of water -- it was possibly mildly interesting. The one hundredth time, not so much. Particularly when what is intended -- colonialism is bad, Glaswegian Sikhs exist -- is so banal.

[*] "So how did you fall in with the outlaws?" "I fell out with the in-laws"

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