In the Land of the Gobshitters...

 So, there I was television channel hopping on Thanksgiving Day in Albany, New York. I had heard that venerable local television station WRGB, channel 6, one of the oldest TV stations in the US and once connected to Thomas Edison's GE, and local channel 45, WCWN, once owned by the local PBS station, had been taken over by the radical right wing Sinclair Broadcast Group. On this Thanksgiving day I finally got to see the "fruits" of this takeover as I stopped clicking at Channel 45 to watch the news.

There, staring me in the face, was Boris Epshteyn, chief demagogue, chief ideologue, chief Republican polemicist and apologiest, and chief gobhsitter of the Sinclair Broadcasting Group. Epshteyn was going on about how socialist elitists in the form of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were trying to and turn the US into the USSR of Epstheyn's youth.

Leaving aside the fact, that this USSRing of the US is an old refrain in the radical right and goes back at least to the popular New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there was so much delusional fiction in Epshteyn's rant and in Epshteyn's person that one cannot help but remark on it. Take in the idiocy of elite Epshteyn himself. This populist raving about American elites went to the elite Georgetown University where he took an elite bachelor's degree in Foreign Affairs and an elite postgraduate degree in law. Take in the fact that the populist anti-elitist demagogue Epshteyn works for an elite and wealthy media firm that exerts much political influence on the Trump administration. Take in the fact that demagogue Epshteyn is calling Sanders and Warren propagandists when he is one of the chief ideologues and propagandists for a network that offers no, as far as I can see, opposing, and more empirically grounded, voices, something once mandated by the fairness doctrine of the FCC until Republicans eliminated it, a reflection of right wing self righteousness and intolerance of opposing American voices. Take in the bizarity of a media elitist calling out the media for its supposed "liberal bias" when in reality the commercial media's one god is mammon and its way of getting more and more mammon is to sensationalise, emphasising, or better over emphasising in the process, as the modern mass media always has, murder, celebrity, fires, cruelty to animals, and the lowest common denominator.

Take some time to take in the lunacy at the heart of contemporary America, a land where elitists whinge and whine about elitism, where demagogues whinge and whine about demagoguery, and where propagandists whinge and whine about propaganda. In closing let me note that the bullshite such as that uttered by gobshite Epshteyn is akin to yelling fire in a crowded theatre where there is no fire. Let me also note that such bs is eaten up by true believing groupie masses as if it were the best Russian caviar. Ain't that delusional right wing America?

The Books of My Life: Bonnie and Clyde

Lester Friedman in his brief monograph on the 1967 American film Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie and Clyde, London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 2000) claims that the film Bonnie and Clyde was one of the seminal films of the auteurist oriented New Hollywood movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Looking backward, it is hard not to agree with Friedman's assessment.

Friedman's excellent monograph puts Bonnie and Clyde in the broader historical, social, and cultural context of the  breakdown of the studio system in the post World War II era and in the traditionalist versus counterculture culture war of the 1960s and early 1970s arguing that Bonnie and Clyde's outlaws against "traditional" authority resonated with many of America's young. Many of America's young, Friedman argues, found in Bonnie and Clyde, as fighting against America's restrictive moral code and its repressive social institutions if in a different era, the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s.

Friedman also does an excellent job of exploring the production contexts of Bonnie and Clyde, thanks, in part, to interviews with the films director Arthur Penn, who began his directorial life in theatre and the new medium of American television, and with David Newman, one of the writers of the film along with Robert Towne, neither of whom had screenwriting experience or credits when they first wrote the script to Bonnie and Clyde. Friedman notes something that virtually everyone speaks of when they write about the film these days, that two heroes of the French nouvelle vague were asked to direct the film, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and that Truffaut helped give the film a narrative structure.

I was impressed with Friedman's exploration of the contexts, production history, and analysis of Bonnie and Clyde, particularly its attention to the historical context of the film. I recommend the monograph to anyone interested in film, interested in American film, interested in the brief revolution in American film in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Books of My Life: Eyes Wide Shut

As I have mentioned previously in these blogs the films of Stanley Kubrick often leave me cold. That--leaving me cold--sometimes seems to me the very essence and meaning of Kubrick's chilly, mechanical, and ultimately misanthropic and perhaps misogynistic films. They show, it seems to me, in a mechanical way, the absurdity of the human condition.

I have long admired Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1972), a film in which Kubrick's decision not to end the film with the last chapter of the book and which, as a result, tells us much about Kubrick's themes, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), but his other films have generally left me both impressed and unimpressed at the same time. Additionally, his films often seem to me to be very much of their time to their detriment. 2001 (1968), for instance, seems, to be aimed at the psychedelic wow that is far out generation.

Eyes Wide Shut, the subject of film critic Michel Chion's monograph Eyes Wide Shut (London: BFI, Modern Classics series, 2002) is not one of my favourite Kubrick films. It is, however, one of the favourite Kubrick films of critic Chion as he makes clear in the opening segments of the book. Chion explores the differences between the film and the Arthur Schnitzler novella on which it was based (Traumnovelle, 1925/26), narrative form, camera shooting strategies, colour scheme, sound picture, something Chion specialises in in his film criticism and analysis, music, and editing of Eyes Wide Shut. Chion argues that words, words parroted and words first said, are at the heart of the meaning of the film. It is only, Chion argues, when the characters awake from their repetitious parroting slumbers that their eyes are opened if only in a non-Hollywood happy happy ending way.

Recommended for students of Kubrick.

The Books of My Life: In the Realm of the Senses

For film scholar Joan Mellen the films of Oshima Nagisa, including Ai no corrida/In the Realm of the Senses, the subject of Mellen's book in the BFI Film Classics series (In the Realm of he Senses, London: BFI, 2004, are rebellious and even revolutionary. Oshima's films, argues Mellen, are reactions to modern Japan, the Japan of industrialisation, the Japan of militarism, the Japan of nationalism, and the Japan of feudal victimisation.

Mellen explores the mise-en-scene, particularly Oshima's use of colour, camera angles, close-ups, and real sex in In the Realm of the Senses. She nicely, as I mentioned earlier, puts Oshima's work in its Japanese contexts, specifically, Oshima's student radicalism and his opposition to modern Japan's militarism, nationalism, and sense of victimhood, a perspective not every student of Japanese film agrees with. She discusses the films of Luis Bunuel and their impact on Oshima. She nicely explores other films that came out of similar the same post-war atmosphere, namely Imamura Shohei's The Insect Woman (1963) and History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970), Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), one of my favourute films,  Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), which she rightly, in my opinion, notes doesn't go as far as Oshima (and I would add early Makavejev) in subverting gender ideologies, and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972). She explores the controversies that followed the film particularly in Japan where it was censored.

I found Mellen's discussion of the social and cultural contexts of Oshima's works and his Ai no corrida fascinating. I recommend Mellen's book to anyone interested in radical cinema and Japanese cinema.

The Books of My Life: Lolita

When I was a teenager and a twentysomething lover of cinema, Stanley Kubrick was one of the great auteurs of the cinephilic world. I have long had a kind of comme ci comme ça relationship with the films of Stanley Kubrick. On the one hand, I recognise the incredible beauty and studied composition of the Kubrick cinematic image and frame. Kubrick was once a photographer after all. On the other hand, I have long thought that Kubrick's characters were too stereotypical and cliched and that he (and most of his collaborators) could not write well rounded female characters to save their lives. In Kubrick films women are femme fatales, pin up girls, screamers, or the objects of male hatred. Finally, I have never quite been able to look past the studied and unleavened misanthropy of Kubrick's films and their often far too sophomoric humour.

Richard Corliss's monograph for the BFI Film Classics series on the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film Lolita (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1994), offers an interesting exploration of that film through a series of related fragments. Corliss explores the adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from novel to film, gives readers a brief biography of both Nabokov and Kubrick, explores the visual qualities of the Kubrick film, explores how the adaptation of Lolita by Kubrick fits with the themes of Kubrick's other film work, explores the casting of the film, explores acting in the film, and engages the issue of censorship, which limited what Kubrick could do in his film adaptation of Lolita.

Corliss's monograph is an interesting study of a film seems to have been caught in the no man's land of that era just before the censorship regime of Hollywood broke down under the impact, at least in part, of foreign cinema in the US. I recommend it to anyone interested in Kubrick and Nabokov.

The Books of My Life: The Office

Drawing on interviews with creators and production personnel and historical and cultural analysis Ben Walters (The Office (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2005)) explores the origins of the BBC Two docusoap The Office, a television which was transmitted for two seasons and a two part Christmas special between 2001 to 2003.

Like any social and cultural phenomenon The Office, as Walters notes, did not originate in a vacuum. Walters argues that on one level The Office is a product of the dog eat dog world of neoliberal corporate capitalism and the fears, anxieties, alienation, and absurdities of clerical office work in that brave new postmodern world of neo Ebenezer Scrooge capitalism. On another level, as Walters notes, The Office is the product of the merging of situation comedy and the documentary, a trend that can be seen in the rise of narrative form reality TV stretching back to An American Family (PBS, 1971) and its British cousin The Family (BBC, 1974) and the impact of these docudramas on films like the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984), situation comedies such as The Royale Family (BBC, 2006-2012), and and mock news shows like Brass Eye (C2, 1997, 2001). On still another level, as The Office co-creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, note in interviews, The Office is the product of the movies of Woody Allen--one presumes Take the Money and Run (1969) in particular--and American situation arc comedies such as Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998).

Though The Office has always left me somewhat cold Walters books is an interesting book on an interesting TV series. I recommend it to anyone interested in documentaries, situation comedies, the history of television and film, and the impact of neoliberalism on the media.

The Books of My Life: Edge of Darkness

Between the 1970s and 1980s British television drama changed, writes John Caughie in his book Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007). The 1970s saw the decline of the single play with its theatrical look and which had been a prominent part of British TV since its beginnings and the subsequent rise of the quality television serial with its more filmic look. Among these new dramatic quality serials was Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness.

Edge of Darkness was first transmitted between 4 November and 9 December 1985 on BBC Two and almost immediately rerun on the more popular of the BBCs channels, BBC One. Caughie's book explores the production contexts of the serial and what writer Kennedy, director Martin Campbell, producer Michael Wearing, designer Graeme Thomson, musicians Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen, and the actors, among them Bob Peck, Joe Don Baker, and Joanne Whalely, brought to the show.  It explores the broader political and economic contexts of the show including Thatcherism, worker strikes, tensions between the great powers, anti-nuclear activism, environmental activism, and ecological theory. It explores the generic contexts of Edge of Darkness noting that the show novelly mixes the spy thriller with the ecological theory of Gaia and its almost magical conception of the planet.

For Caughie Edge of Darkness is, as the name of the series of which Caughie's book is a part, a television classic. Edge, Caughie notes, has been a critical favourite and was listed by a panel of TV professionals as the "third greatest TV drama of all time". The response of viewers at the time, including Caughie, to Edge, claims Caughie though with little qualitative evidence and no quantitative evidence, was one of telephilia. The show had an emotional and intellectual impact on viewers making it memorable to them in the process, so memorable that Edge carries with it the political tenor of its time in the minds of those who watched it when it was first transmitted and who rewatch it on DVD or in rerun.

Caughie's Edge of Darkness is an interesting book about a very interesting television serial. Recommended to those interested in the history of British television, quality television serials, the spy thriller, and the impact of great power tensions and the environmental movement on television.