The Books of My Life: On Kubrick

 

As I have mentioned several times previously, I have been a cinephile or film head since the 1960s. Relatively early in my film watching "career" I discovered the joys of the art cinema of foreign film auteurs like Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Francois Trufaut, Alain Resnais, and Eric Rohmer. Around the same time I also learned that art films were not solely a foreign product, that there were also art films by American directors like Stanley Kubrick, an American director born in the New York City in 1928 and who settled in England in 1961, and John Cassevetes and Woody Allen, also New Yorkers, and that there was even an art cinema beyond Americas shores in other English speaking settler societies like Australia and New Zealand, an art cinema reflected in the work of directors like Peter Weir and Roger Donaldson.

In those days of yore when one could only see older Hollywood films on television, particularly independent American TV stations, in America's second run cinema houses and particularly in American college towns, whether in film classes or in local cinemas, I sought out the films of Kubrick, Allen, and the Australian and New Zealand new wave, but particularly Kubrick, in the same way that I had earlier sought out the films of Alfred Hitchock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Anthony Mann. Soon I had seen most of the films of Stanley Kubrick. I saw The Killing (1956), Kubrick's film about rational criminal planning being trumped by contingent and irrational chance, a film Kubrick regards as his first serious film. I saw Paths of Glory (1957), Kubrick's film about the irrational "rationality" of war. I saw Spartacus (1960), a film Kubrick came to disavow because Kirk Douglas, more than he, had control over the film, a film about a former gladiator named Spartacus who leads a rebellion against patrician Rome. I saw Doctor Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), a film that was X rated at the time of its first release in the US but which I nevertheless managed to get into despite the fact I was underage at the time. I saw Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 

I have never, by the way, even though I have all of Kubrick's films on DVD or Blu Ray, been able to bring myself to watch Lolita (1962), Kubrick's and his then partner James Harris's adaptation of the famous and famously infamous 1955 novel about an older man obsessed with a twelve year old girl written by Russian emigre writer Vladmir Nabokov, a book which I simultaneously much admire while also finding it a product of self-indulgent navel gazing, because I just don't see how a film, that suffered the slings and arrows of the film censorship of its time could do justice to the book, itself the subject of battles over censorhip. And if said censorship tears the guts out of the book why adapt it in the first place other than as a way to get certain demographics into cinema seats thanks to cross marketing and branding? Why not instead do a film on a similar subject from an original screenplay that is already tamed and tailored for the world of film censorship?

As is the case with Nabokov's Lolita, I have long had a rather ambiguous relationship with the films of Stanley Kubrick. On the one hand, I admire Kubrick's sense of composition, his cinematic compositions themselves, and his artistic reach. On the other hand, I find Kubrick's films too mundane and too banal for my socialised eye of the beholder taste, though I realise that mundanity and banality are, to some extent, the point of Kubrick's films, something made clear by Kubrick's penchant for retake after retake after retake, retakes which seem to me to emphasise a kind of determinism, which, in turn, seems to make all marks of real spontaneous and emotional humanity persona non grata in KubrickLand. This realisation, however, doesn't make Kubrick's films any more pleasurable for me. It simply makes Kubrick's films less human for me. It makes them different from a television show I enjoy because I think it really does capture real humanity with all its messiness and greyness, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Additionally, I find Kubrick's films far too full of a misanthropy that is too misogynistic for me. I don't think Kubrick could have written a well rounded female character to save his life, though that again may have been, in part, the point as well. This too makes Kubrick's world very different from the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a world, perhaps, that has a lot more of the post-modernist in it.

Despite sharing a misanthropy with Kubrick, I have long had a love and hate relationoship with Kubrick's art films. I quite like Doctor Strangelove, for instance, a film about the madness of those who plot and pilot America's wars and the sociopathy and psychopathy of the American sapping our body fluids American right, a right that has increased in power and impact since the film came out. Strangelove continues to seem to me, despite the fact that it is almost sixy years old now, the sociopathy, psychopathy, or madness of human beings and the insanity of the worlds they have created. I like A Clockwork Orange, a film about a near future filled with gangs speaking a hybrid of English and Russian, and who nightly engage in a bit of the old ultra violence. My trouble with this film, apart from its deterministic patterning--what Alex did happens to him--something one sees again and again in Kubrick's films, involves Kubrick's jettisoning of the final chapter of Anthony Burgess's utopian and dystopian book, a chapter that counterpoints the tyrannical state attempt to cure Alex (Malcolm McDowell),  something Kubrick seems to be aiming his poison arrows at, to Burgess's more humane religious cure for the old ultra-violence (1962). Kubrick's elimination of the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange seems to me to reveal something important about Kubrick and his art. It reveals an art that is simultaneously detached and ethically and morally challenged and hence disturbing, but again this may be the point. I like Full Metal Jacket, a film about the horrors of the transformation of teenagers into killers via the intense socialisation (some might say brainwashing) of boot camp, and the horrors associated with the wars these now terrifying warriors fight, in this case the American war in Vietnam. Full Metal Jacket, like Strangelove, reveals the madness at the heart of human behaviour, well male human behaviour, in war. 

I am lukewarm about Barry Lyndon, Kubrick's adaptation of William Thackery'a novel about the rise and fall of a roguish and above his station Anglo-Irish low status aristocrat trying to make his way in a world of insufferable eighteenth century English high status aristocrats. I am also lukewarm about The Shining, Kubrick's adaptation of a Steven King novel that takes us into a grotesque and uncanny world of male mental breakdown and patriarchal insanity which may be linked to a ghostly past. 

I don't like 2001 finding it a product of its countercultural cannabis, mescaline, and LSD times, a film in which pop art psychedela meets pop science fiction expansion of consciousness evolutionism (the same pop science fiction expansion of evolutionism that is reflected in Erich van Daniken's "non-fictional" 1968 book Chariot of the Gods and in the several "non-fictional" books of Carlos Castaneda). While recognising the historical and cultural significance and photographic beauty of the film, 2001 has always seemed to me, a mundane and banal film that one has to be in the right state of mind for, in that expansion of consciousness sort of way, in order to enjoy. Nor do I like Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler's novella that takes us into the marriagescape and dreamscape of a successful doctor residing with his wife in late 20th century Manhattan instead of Schnitzler's early twentieth century Vienna. I suspect that the film was transposed to late 20th century Manhattan for marketing reasons and because Kubrick was in ill health. Parts of England play the role of Manhattan in the film. I suspect that controversial Hollywood celebrity Tom Cruise, who I don't think really "works" in the film, and Nicole Kidman, his then wife, were hired for marketing and publicity reasons as well. Such, after all, is the reality of serious filmmaking in late 20th century Hollywood.

When I became a cinephile in the 1960s I not only watched films religiously, I also began to read about them beginning sometime in the early 1970s. If I recall correctly,  the first book on a film auteur I ever read, one that has stuck with me ever since, was Robin Wood's book on Alfred Hitchcock, a book whose mission it was to take Alfred Hitchcock seriously and analyse his films thematically in terms of content and style. Soon I began reading books on Kubrick, I read the first edition of Northern Ireland critic Alexander Walker's 1972 book on Kubrick. In the 1980s I read American academic Thomas Nelson's book on Kubrick (1982) and found Nelson's contention that the labyrinth or maze was at the heart of Kubrick's films an astute and compelling argument. I read bits and pieces of French critic Michel Ciment's combination coffee table book, interview book, and critical analysis of Kubrick's films (1980) in the 1980s and enjoyed it very much. When I found out that James Naremore, who I took a couple of classes with when I was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington in the late 1970s and early 1980s and whose work I have long found amongst the best and least theoretically problematic in academic film analysis and criticism, had written a book on Kubrick I had to read it too.

Naremore's On Kubrick (London: BFI, 2007) does what auteurist oriented film criticism, approaches that still remain dominant in academic film criticism and analysis despite the straw man argument that auteurism is a textless individualist romanticism of academic media scholars, always do. It rightly places film directors in artistic and social and cultural contexts. Naremore puts Kubrick in broader context placing him in the cultural context of the New York photographic and documentary schools and of the fin-de-siecle Austria-Hungarian Empire critical modernist culture of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzer, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, and Geza Csath with its obsession with the grotesque, the uncanny, the fantastic, the rational and the irrational, fairy tales, dreams, satirical and parodic dark or black comedy, and the psychic traumas associated with parent-child relations and sexuality. He places Kubrick's work in the context of the transformation of the Hollywood studio system in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling mandating that the studios eliminate their monopoly over film exhibition, the increasing number of widescreen and particularly widescreen epics made in Hollywood in the wake of that ruling and as a way to distinguish itself from television, which was becoming ever more prominent, the increasing distribution and exhibition opportunities available for home grown cinema and foreign art cinema that arose in the wake of that ruling, the increasing globalisation of Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood's increasing role in the post-World War II English film industry thanks, particularly, to the Eady Levy which offered Hollywood a subsidy for making films in the United Kingdom if it used British studios and British personnel to make them. He explores the themes--contentwise and stylistically--of Kubrick's art, the former which revolve around Austria-Hungarian modernism and the latter of which revolve around photographic like compositions,  the use of new and old cinematic techniques and technologies such as the use of widescreen, and a penchant for wide angle shots, zooms, and the handheld steadicam, all of which, Naremore argues, are used to emphasise both the the real and the grotesque. Naremore explores Kubrick's approach to actors and the acting craft, which Naremore argues, reflects Kubrick's obsession with realism, the uncanny, the fantastic, and dark comedy. Finally, Naremore explores the cinematic influences on Kubrick's art including that of the modernist Austrian filmmaker Max Ophuls, the Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, Orson Welles, and documentary realism.

I found Naremore's On Kubrick a worthy addition to the seemingly ever growing literature on the films of Stanley Kubrick. I was particularly intrigued by Naremore's arguments that Barry Lyndon was ultimately a critique of the English class and status system, that The Shining was ultimately a critique of paternalism and patriarchalism, and that Full Metal Jacket was simultaneously a celebration of and critique of the masculine culture of warfare. I found Naremore's implicit reminder that students of the cinema need to remember the distinction between Freudian theory, which its devotees and groupies, including hordes in Literary, Film, and Television faculties these days, claim is universal, and cultural Freudianism, the intentional play with Freudianism by writers, filmmakers, and television auteurs, a point ever worth remembering given the dominance of the Freudian cultural-institutitonal-bureacratic complex in academia, a complex that sees Freudianism as the fundamental and universal interpretive key to unlocking the deeper secrets of seemingly inscrutable texts, but only if that task of unlocking a text is in in the hands of those with the unique ability to decipher the esoteric secrets underlying a text and devouring it from below. Finally, it should be noted that Naremore places the Kent State tragedy two years before it actually occurred and he confuses Richard Strauss with Richard Wagner in the section on 2001. Recommended. 

 

The Books of My Life: Buffy Goes Dark

 

Scholarly work on the media worlds of Joss Whedon have become legendary, at least to that small coterie of devotees and analysts in the academic world of Media Studies and its adjuncts who have analysed the work of Whedon since the debut of Buffy on the WB netlet in 1997. Buffy Studies, the scholarly study of the Buffy text, seems to have begun in 1998 with the publication by then Yale Social and Cultural Anthropologist David Graeber, of his essay "Rebel Without a God" in the anarchist magazine In These Times in 1998, only a year after Buffy debuted on American television. Buffy Studies, in turn, morphed into Whedon Studies as Whedon turned to other projects including Angel, the Buffy spinoff that premiered on Fox in 1999, Firefly, Whedon's cowboy space opera which came to Fox in 2002, Dollhouse, with its commercialised corporate Actives or Dolls who serviced the elite and which debuted on Fox in 2009, comic books, particularly his Marvel, Buffy, Angel, and Firefly comic books, and films, including the film that was a continuation of his TV show Firefly, Serenity (2005),  his reflexive horror film, Cabin in the Woods (2011), his updated Shakespeare film, Much Ado About Nothing (2012), and his several Hollywood blockbuster superhero films, most prominently his two Avengers films of 2012 and 2015.

One of the publishers that has been central to, if not at the heart of the subdiscipline of Buffy and Whedon Studies over the years, is McFarland. Among the books that McFarland has published on Whedon's work, in this case Buffy, is Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009) edited by Lynne Edwards, Elizabeth Rambo, and James South, prominent figures all in the world of Whedon Studies. Buffy Goes Dark is a collection of essays that focuses ostensibly on the controversial, at least to some, seasons six and seven of the show, though given that Buffy is an unfolding text and has been since the first season, it also touches on earlier seasons and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The essays in Buffy Goes Dark explore various aspects of seasons six and seven of Buffy including its authorship, its themes, its narrative form, and seasons six and seven themselves, seasons, which Whedon and others associated with the show, said were organised around the dominant themes of oh grow up and it's all about the power.

As is the case with almost all multiple authored essay collections on any subject I have had the pleasure of reading Buffy Goes Dark,  is, when viewed synoptically, of variable quality. I found some of the essays very good, others good, some indifferent, and a few problematic. The very good first: Brandy Ryan excellently explores the Willow and Tara relationship, one of the few "normal" lesbian relationships on commerical American television in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ira and Anne Shull offer an excellent analysis of Andrew, one of the many characters who finds redemption in Buffy, in Andrew's case in season seven, as the Candide of the Buffyverse. Michael Adams nicely explores the transformation of Slayer jargon and slayer slang in the sixth and seventh seasons of the show after Buffy's second "resurrection", from verbal style to metaphysical and moral style. Rhonda Wilcox and Gregory Erickson and Jennifer Lemberg offer fascinating textual analyses of seasons six and seven and explore the ruptures and discontinuities in the Buffy narrative and style in both seasons thanks to their refiguarations of flesh and spirit, immanence and transcendence, de-manicheanising of humans and non-humans and their associated rapes and violations, and its subversion of narrative linearity and audience expectations, subversions Buffy had actually been playing around with for some time as in season three's "The Wish" and "Doppelgangland", season four's "Superstar", and in its often reflexive locker and poster mise-en-scene paraphernalia since season one.

I found several essays in Buffy Goes Dark good. David Perry does a serviceable job of exploring the work of Buffy writer and showrunner, Marti Noxon. David Kociemba offers a good exploration of the work of another writer and producer on Buffy (and beyond), Jane Espensen, by drawing extensively on her online blog about writing. Lynne Edwards and Carly Haines offer an excellent analysis of the continuities between seasons six and seven and earlier seasons and note correctly that Buffy went dark bit by bit. I would, by the way, trace Buffy's darkness back to the season one episode "Nightmares " with its realistic depiction of the terrors associated with broken families, to second season episodes like "Anne", "Surprise/Innocence", "Passion", "I Only Have Eyes for You", and Becoming, to third season episodes like "The Wish", "Helpless", "Bad Girls/Consequences", and "Graduation Day", to fourth seasons episodes like "Fear Itself", and to the entire fifth season. Edwards's and Haines's attempt to tie Buffy's earlier darkness to the the rise of netlets like the WB and UPN who targeted their product to specific demographics (market segmentation), on the other hand, seems less successful to me and felt akin to the expansion of a TV show that was short on time. 

Still other essays in the collection left me feeling a bit betwixt, a bit liminal, a bit hot and a bit cold despite the fact that I agree with the utility of the analogies they use in order to understand and unlock the meanings associated with season six and season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Perhaps this was because I was familiar with the themes they were exploring thanks to a fairly extensive reading of previous scholarly work on Buffy, thanks to reading similar interpretations of the show in other critical analyses previously, and thanks to my broad education in social theory and sociology and cultural anthropology. Elizabeth Rambo uses William Butler Yeats's gyre spiraling out of control before returning to its now changed centre while Paul Hawkins uses the myth of the heroes' journey as delineated by Joseph Campbell and mediated by Christopher Vogler, and particularly the hero's supreme ordeal late in his or her journey, a state in which the hero (there are actually several heroes who take heroes journeys in Buffy and the Buffyverse including Buffy herself, Willow, Xander, Spike, Anya, Wesley, Giles, Cordelia, Lily, Angel, and Andrew) is trapped in a liminal state between life and death, human and non-human, good and evil, and light and darkness, as interpretive means through which to explore the penultimate season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. James South uses the seventh season episode "Storyteller" centring on Andrew and narrated by Andrew in Masterpiece Theatre fashion, which is a story about stories, to argue that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, on one level entertainment and thus conventional and formulaic, romantic, an adventure, and about heroism, and, another level, particularly in season seven, is reflexive, educational, and deconstructionist. Buffy is, in other words, according to South, about, if imperfectly, the reality behind and underneath the conventions and formulae of traditional Hollywood films and television. Finally, South argues that the discipline of philosophy (I would add sociology and history for that matter and note that social and cultural anthropology has always been more broadly focused) must not forget that presentism and its fetishisation of the stories it currently tells, are, ultimately, conventions and formulas that separate the reader, the watcher, or the hearer, from experience and that it should never forget the importance of experience beyond conformity. I found the movement between philosphy and Buffy a bit dissonant, but perhaps that is the point.

Still other essays in Buffy Goes Dark were much less compelling for me and left me somewhat cold and, at the same time, theoretically seeing red. Alissa Wilt's essay on the Willow and Tara relationship in Buffy, is characterised by a number of problems which seem inherent to crystal ball textualism, the form of textual analysis that has become dominant in literary, film, and television studies in the wake of the theoretical revolutions of the late 1960s and which, because it is both contextual and non-contextual at the same time, characterised by a massive hole in its selectively empirical heart. Wilt's accuses Buffy, thanks to the shows killing of Tara by Warren, one of Buffy's trio of evil nemeseses in season six of playing, wittingly or unwittingly, the evil dead lesbian cliche card. Wilt's ultimately overdetermined by its normative assumptions and presuppositions, analysis of the Willow and Tara relationship, distorts the text of Buffy, as Ryan points up in her essay in the collection. Warren was not trying to kill Tara in the episode "Seeing Red". He was trying to kill Buffy. Wilts distorts the text of Buffy ultimately to score, as is characteristic of crystal ball textualism, ideologically correct points. In the process Wilts' paper raises the question of whether many, if not all, of the analyses associated with crystal ball textualism are the product of readers' cultural, economic, political,  geographic, and demographic contexts, since not only is the text as given (the exegetical level) distorted in favour of an analysis of the correct "realties" that ultimately undergird and devour the exegetical text from below (the homiletic level), but since absolutely no empirical quantitative or qualitative based random samples are provided or referenced that actually show how actual readers really read the Buffy text.

Another essay I found problematic was that of Agnes Curry and Josef Velazquez. Curry's and Velasquez's exploration of the theme of the chosen family, the family of choice rather than blood, in Buffy is, like Wilts's similarly grounded in and on assumptions or presuppositions that are questionable. Curry and Velazquez argue that the chosen family in Buffy is grounded in three glues: the eschatalogical, the proto-fascist or hierarchical racialised and sexualised glue, and the we are the chosen people glue, all very similar to the glues that have historically held together theocratic varieties of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam not to mention nation-states. Curry's and Velasquez's conceptions of these glues, however, fails to recognise that, Buffy and the other often changing members of the Scooby Gang, are fighting a reactive war, a real rather than an imaginary war. It fails to realise that Buffy is more Nieburian (Reinhold Niebuhr was a liberal like Curry and Velasquez) than Quaker in its social ethics and morality and notions of human nature (Niebuhr took issue with the liberal variant that had as its sacred key symbols teleological optimism and utopianism, and with Quakerism, whose secondary symbols, secondary to the central symbol of the inner light, were optimistic, utopian, and pacifist in teleological ways). Curry's and Velazquez' reading fails to recongnise that real evil exists in the Buffyverse and that evil, even though it is complicated, complex, and much less manichean than in other mythologies, including that of American nationalism, exists. Finally, Curry and Velazquez fail to realise that the humans, demons, ex-demons, vampires, and witches who make a choice to fight against evil in the Buffyverse do so under the leadership of the charismatic slayer, a charismatic slayer alone among slayers fights the neverending good fight with the help and support of others. 

Because the ideologically correct etic assumptions Curry and Velazquez ground their analysis in are different from those of the Buffyverse they miss the fact that Max Weber's conception of power and authority--charismatic, patrimonial and traditional, and rational bureaucratic (most militaries in rational bureaucratic social formations are largely rational bureaucratic, by the way)--is more relevant to an emic and etic analysis of the Buffyverse than the anarchistic-democratic and fascist ones they ustilise. Given this war against evil Buffy has to fight, Buffy is an exceptional and radically other, though not a singular, charismatic saviour figure (making Buffy and the redeemed Faith, one of the three slayers in the Buffyverse, different from the traditional and bureaucratic saviour figures constructed by patrimonial, rational bureaucratic, and theocratic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) who gains, over time, increasingly adult power and authority that is recognised by other members of what might be called, the slayer sect, the slayer religion, a charismatic religion with its own meaning system and power and authority structure (one that is a community of choosing others, hence sect like, that interestingly becomes more Quakery in its politics in season seven). Given all this, and given that Buffy's power is gendered as female (as is Faith's), the issue of the matriarchal or patriarchal nature of the Buffyverse seems moot to me. Finally, I should note that chosenness and proto-fascism are both variants of ethnocentrism (as are the constructs of racism and genderism) making Curry's and Velazquez's delineation of two of the "family" glues in Buffy somewhat redundant.

All of the above criticisms of textual violation, by the way, are not new. I, for instance, recall Rhonda Wilcox, the mother of Buffy Studies to Lavery's fathering one, once telling me that the work of those engaged in Buffy Studies, and by extension Literary, Film, and Television Studies, with their theoretical and homiletic assumptions, had to be engaged with in a scholarly fashion, in other words, which is fair. The problem with such an argument, however, is that criticisms like those above have been offered about crystal ball textualism at least since the late 1960s though they always seem to land on what appears to be impervious to criticism holy and sacred soil of the crystal ball textualists and which automatically rejects such criticism because, as one Film Studies scholar once said, crystal ball donut hole textualism is founded on and grounded in religious like beliefs or meanings and assumptions that undermine what should be a dialectical process of criticism making criticising Buffy crystal ball textualism a waste of time and energy in the same way that criticising fundamentalist brands of religion is ultimately a waste of time and effort.

Buffy Goes Dark is not perfect as I noted earlier. Its concentration on auteurism, characters, narrative, themes, style, and season six and seven more broadly, gives short shrift to genre analysis and more could be done with the tone and change of tone and metaphors and the change in metaphors in the show over its seven seasons and particularly in seasons six and seven. Since such selectivity probably is inherent in the nature of the anthology beast, however, I am not sure this is an entirely fair cop. Additionally, it would be nice to see something that most of the essays in the book do not do, namely, more historical (including an analysis of primary source material) and ethnographic flavoured approaches to the Buffy text and its contexts.

Finally, one thing that should be kept in mind as one reads Buffy Goes Dark is the fact that the collection was written and published before Whedon's fall from saintly grace (humans do, and one can only assume this is functional in some way, shape, or form, often make holy saints out of fleshly humans). The reasons for Whedon's fall from grace have played themselves out in the often nasty and vigilante like court of public opinion and include condemnations of sexual affairs, the samizdat like release of his screenplay for the film Wonder Woman, which seemed sexist to some though not others and hence ironic given Whedon's self identification as a feminist, Whedon's taking over and transformation of one of the Justice League of America films, a film that brought the wrath of another cult like group down upon his head, in this case the cult associated with the devotees or groupies of Zack Snyder, and the subsequent release of the Snyder version of the film, and allegations of his authoratian behaviour at work, something that descriptively speaking puts Whedon in such company as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, George Szell, Bob Knight, a host of sports coaches, perfectionists all, and a host of celebrity and celebrity wannabe prima donnas or divas. 

The essays in Buffy Goes Dark thus represent the state of Whedon scholarship before the fall rather than after it. As a result, some critics and some of those who have worked with Whedon over the years have recently, in sadly very typical human fashion, have chosen to throw pots and kettles at what is now Whedon's glass house. In this context, however, we should remember that the character most like Whedon in Buffy, though all the main characters in the show have something of Whedon in them, including a bit of the authoritarian and authoritative Buffy, according to Joss, is, as Whedon has said on several occasions, Xander, a character in the show who is hardly perfect. How Whedon's fall will affect scholarship on the man and his work is still unclear though it has led to the demise of websites devoted to Whedon, websites which once celebrated him as a secular saint, like Whedonesque, and a change in the subtitle of the online journal Slayage (originally subtitled the Online Journal of Buffy Studies) from the Online Journal of Whedon Studies to the Online Journal of Buffy +Studies, after, one can only assume, a lot of gnashing of ethical and moral teeth, a renaming that seems to reflect a need for those studying the work of Whedon to ostracise and exile his now unholy name and concentrate instead on the products of this now absent auteur.

 

The Books of My Life: Doctor Who (Tulloch and Alvarado)

Doctor Who, along with the films of Alfred Hitchock, a favourite of my father's, stimulated my interest in the study of films and television shows. When I went to university in the 1970s, however, I did not become a Film Studies, a relatively new academic major and minor at the time I was in college. Nor did I become a Media Studies major or minor, an academic discipline or multi-discipline, which, like Film Studies, was relatively new in the academy at the time I was at uni. Instead I majored in Religious Studies and later took degrees in Cultural Anthropology, and History.

Despite specialising in and being socialised into certain academic disciplines during my undergraduate and postgraduate days, I long had a broader and multidisciplinary interest in theory, particularly Social Theory during my college days. I became interested in hermeneutic theory thanks to classes I took in Biblical Studies. From there it was an easy jump to the study of the giants of Social Theory including Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and the recent theoretical fad of the moment in academia and cultural criticism, Semiology or Semiotics. 

I became very interested in Semiology and Semiotics during my undergraduate years for several reasons. The university I matriculated at, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, was one of the major and leading centres of Semiology and Semiotics in North America at the time along with the University of Toronto. Both hosted a major Semiology and Semiotic conference every year, IU hosting it one year and the UofT the other. I attended what Semiology conferences I could, getting to meet writer Jorge Louis Borges, Umberto Eco, and the semiological anthropologist Mary Douglas in the process. While at Indiana I also took a postgraduate level course on the Semiotics of Names and a Semiology of Film Course with noted film scholar James Naremore and loved them both learning a lot about the semiology of culture in the process. What was so exciting about semiological or semiotic analysis at the time was that it seemed to promise a grand wholistic scheme that would bring together historical analysis, cultural analysis, the study of meaning, ethnographic analysis, and the deciphering of the deep structural codes at the heart of society and culture and its many "texts".

I mention all of this because John Tulloch's and Manuel Alvarado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (New York: St Martin's, 1983), published in the year of Doctor Who's twentieth anniversary and which I recently reread, seems to me one of the best, if not the best, integration of historical analysis, production analysis, semiological analysis, and ethnographic analysis that came out during the era when Semiology was making its mark on the critical and academic world and particularly in academic Film Studies and in academic film journals like the British journal Screen, a journal, which, over time, integrated, or attempted to integrate, the film theory currents of the late 1960s, the 1970s, and 1980s, in France, Britain and the United States, a film theory integration that would, over time, come to be dominated increasingly by psychoanalysis and text centred analysis, a synthesis that has dominated Film Studies and by extension in Television Studies, ever since.

Tulloch's and Alvarado's book is simultaneously an insightful history of Doctor Who, an insightful history of British television and the BBC, an insightful history of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, an insightful exploration of the narrative and cultural codes reflected in and instantiated in Doctor Who between 1963 and 1982, and an insightful analysis, thanks particularly to interviews with those who wrote, directed, designed, and "filmed" Doctor Who, of the unfolding novelistic text, one that hasn't always been consistent over the years, of the British cultural institution that is now Doctor Who. As a case study, one that in turn makes use of case studies of Doctor Who episodes such as "Kinda", Tulloch's and Alvarado's book remains, at least to my mind, an example of how to do a historical, semiological, and ethnographic analysis of a television show, a film, or a work of literature.

One of the most interesting things, at least to me, that Tulloch and Alvarado explore in Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, and there are many, is that apparently eternal Sisyphean question and conundrum that remains at the heart of television and film studies practitioners: who, if anyone, is the author of a television programme or a film? The issue of film authorship is an issue that goes back at least to the 1920s and the early years of film criticism. Early auteurists focused particularly on those directors regarded as artists, people like D.W. Griffith and, later on art cinema auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Beginning in the 1950s auteur analysis was extended by the pioneering French film journal Cahiers du Cinema,  the pioneering British film journal of the 1960s, Movie, and the director focused writing of that American translator and adapter of French auteur theory, Andrew Sarris, to commercial directors in the Hollywood cinema. Auteurists who focused their gaze on Hollywood directors focused increasingly on the themes and visual styles of certain directors and used these, as evidence, of the veracity of auteurist theory, as evidence of the signature or marks of individual auteurs "writing" in the seemingly commercial and mass produced film culture that was Hollywood. 

It is important to remember three things about this post World War Ii auteurism. First, proponents of the theory, particularly those connected to Movie and Andrew Sarris, did not claim that every director was an auteur, only some of them. Second, advocates for auteur theory did not claim that only directors were auteurs. Those connected to Movie along with Sarris also looked at the authorial roles genre, writers, and the broader contexts of movie making, for instance, admittedly sometimes more in theory than in practise, played in "authoring" film and television texts. Third, many of the proponents of auteurism argued that auteurism was a policy and not a catechismal doctrine, though this too is often more in theory than in practise.

As was the case with many of the pioneers of auteurism, Tulloch and Alvarado, explore the layers of authorship--societal, cultural, historical, production--in Doctor Who. Tulloch and Alvarado, for instance, explore, the impact, or limited impact, of gender conventions or codes and changes in gender codes, narrative codes and changes in narrative codes, visual codes and changes in visual, codes associated with mise-en-scene, writing codes, genre codes and manipulations of genre, and historical factors and historical dynamics, all of which produce the Doctor Who text, an approach to film and television authorship that is simultaneously contextual, social, cultural, production centred, ethnographic, and historical, at the same time. Tulloch's and Alvarado's approach to auteurism, one that reflects in microcosm the approach of the book in general, should put the lie to those in Film Studies, Television Studies, and Literary Studies who maintain that auteurism is little more than contextless post-Enlightenment romanticism, though it hasn't and it likely won't.

Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text was supposed to be the first book of two on the show by Tulloch and Alvarado. The second was to focus on how readers or the audience interpreted Doctor Who. Eventually, Tulloch publshied several papers on audience or reader's response to Doctor Who in his and Henry Jenkins book Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek (London: Routledge, 1995). The essays on Who in that book, it seems to me, all of them by Tulloch, constitutes, along with Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, a classic in Television, Film, and Literary Studies that offers a viable and, in my opinion, analytically superior alternative to the far too often simultaneously contextual and contextless crystal ball textualism of so many contemporary Television, Film, and Literary critics.

 
 

The Books of My Life: Licence to Thrill

Though I was eight years old in 1962, the year the first James Bond film Doctor No, made by producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli and starring Scottish actor Sean Connery, came out, I never really became a James Bond fan or aficionado and have never been a fan or aficionado of the spy thriller genre, of which the James Bond novels, novellas, and short stories of Ian Fleming and the James Bond films are examples. I recall seeing most of the Bond films when they appeared on television in the 1960s and 1970s and I recall seeing all of them in their chronological order of release on television in Moscow in the 1990s while I was doing research in Russia. I recall, if memory serves, that the only Bond film I ever saw in the cinema was the Roger Moore Bond film--Moore replaced Connery in 1973's Live and Let Die--Spy Who Loved Me (1977) which I enjoyed but in a different way than I enjoyed and appreciated a Truffaut, a Godard, a Bergman, or a Makavejev film, films by whom I also saw in the cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. 

As a viewer I recall that I found the Connery and Roger Moore Bond films a pleasant if hardly earthshaking and earth shattering viewing experience. I recall, being fascinated by the seemingly little things in the Bond films, such as the crushing and compacting of the car in the third Bond film Goldfinger (1964) and thinking it was pretty cool. It was the first time I had ever seen one of those car smashers and compactors. Ah, the things we adolescents find intriguing. I recall thinking, from the vantage point of the Roger Moore Bond films of the 1970s, that I preferred the Connery Bonds to the Moore Bonds. I recall that by the 1990s my favourite of all the Bond films I had seen was the aforementioned Goldfinger. I recall enjoying the Pierce Brosnan Bond, the fourth Bond after Connery, Moore, and Timothy Dalton, The World is Not Enough (1999) and enjoying its parodying of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and yellow journalists and media moguls who could start wars based on flimsy evidence like William Randolph Hearst and his twentieth century heirs. I recall watching the first Daniel Craig Bond--Craig replaced Brosnan as Bond in 2006--whom I had enjoyed in the television programme Our Friends in the North (BBC, 1996), Casino Royale (2006) and finding that film overlong and overblown in that typical adolescent Hollywood megablockbuster kind of blow it up way even if it did attempt to add more character development into the Bond film mix. As I write, I recal the fact that I would never place that or any of the Bond films in my pantheon of favourite films including Citizen Kane (1941), North by Northwest (1959), Jules et Jim (1962), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), Celine vont en bateau (1974), WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), and the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003).

Though I am not really interested intellectually or critically in the Bond films, I am interested in British cinema and British television. I am also a fan of and interested in the British TV show and cultural institution, Doctor Who. It was through my interest in Doctor Who that I became acquainted with the research and writing of James Chapman, whose admirable book on Doctor Who, Inside the Tardis (2013), I read and much appreciated. Given my appreciation of Chapman's book on Doctor Who it was almost inevitable that I would be drawn at some point to Chapman's book on James Bond, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: Tauris, second edition, 2007).

As he did in his book on Doctor Who Chapman does an excellent job in Licence to Thrill of exploring the broader political, cultural, and ideological contexts of the James Bond films released from 1962 to 2006 and the production contexts of each of the James Bond films from Doctor No to Casino Royale. Chapman places each of the Bond films in the changing historical realities that impacted each Bond film from twentieth century great power politics and their World Wars and cold wars, to the war on drugs, and to the war on terrorism. He explores the cultural history of the Bond films and notes the impact of the twentieth century spy thriller books and thriller films, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, apparently one of Fleming's favourite films, on the books and the movies, He explores the impact of racism (outright racism zig zagging to more "subtle" forms of racism) and sexism (zig zagging from eye candy and bed candy for Bond to the independent female who fights before she falls in bed with Bond) impacted the Bond films if limitedly. He explores the rather humourous notion that Engand is still a player in the Great Power politics game and the nostalgia of some for the imperial days when England did matter in the imperial game. He explores the production of each of the films with their American financing and largely British personnel, thanks, in part, to the Eady Levy.  He explores the ups and downs and downs and ups of the British post World War Two film industry, the impact of changing demographics on the Bond films, and the fluctuating and changing costs of and factors affecting film production. Finally, He explores how Bond, like Doctor Who, periodically reinvented itself thanks to its Bond regenerations and its interaction with the dynamics of culture, ideology, politics, and economics.

Like many books on film, I felt that the Chapman book would probably have benefited it it had been article length rather than book length since there is, if understandably, a degree of repetition in the book. I would like to have seem more archival research by Chapman, something he did in his book on Doctor Who, and less reliance by him on second hand interviews with those involved in the making of the Bond films including writers, directors, and editors, though this may have been impossible given problems associated with access to primary source documents ensconced in corporate vaults and to film celebrities and stars. Recommended for those interested in the spy genre, spy and thriller films, and British cinema in post-World War Two Britain and the United States. Kudos to Chapman for not fetishising the Hollywood linear and aesthetic tendency to represent more recent films as more profitable and hence aesthetically superior (commodity aestheticism).