Argento Against Andre: Surrealism as Anti-Neorealism

Both emerging from the Italian film industry, albeit at different epochal contexts, the neorealist movement and the cinema of horror/giallo auteur Dario Argento begs comparison. Whilst they ostensibly seem worlds apart, these two distinct perspectives on film exist in dialectical conversation with one another, with Argento clearly decrying the foundational ethos of the preceding generation of Italian cinema.

Where film critic and theorist Andre Bazin saw realism and immersion as film's ultimate goal (1967a), Argento is far more interested in providing a cinema of spectacle and whilst Argento's early films in the giallo sub-genre (the proto-slasher films that often invoke the works of Agatha Christie) are certainly more tame than his later experimentation with technicolor intensity and supernatural storytelling, they possess a disregard for stern realism all the same. For example, the passage of time, which in Bazin's formulation should be continuous and naturalistic (1967a), is played with particularly in Tenebre (1982). Scenes play out of order as flashbacks disguised as dream sequences slowly unveil the film's secret.

The flashback-qua-dream sequence in Tenebre (1982).

This is perhaps the most transgressive instance of that giallo trope which emerges perennially throughout Argento's films, wherein which an element shown early in the narrative becomes pivotal to solving the core mystery. This is more obvious elsewhere in the film, particularly when the young Gianni attempts to remember the telling detail he had repressed from viewing one of the murders, but in the flashback-qua-dream sequence particularly the flow of naturalistic time is disrupted.
This echoes similar moments in Argento's directorial debut, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Argento, 1970), and his wider oeuvre, even playing a role in the supernatural gialli Suspiria (Argento, 1977) and Inferno (Argento, 1980). In Suspiria though, Argento disrupts normative time in another way: by utilising the soundtrack. Goblin's prog-rock accompaniment blares out "Witch" for the audience, long before the story the character's suspect the secret of the Tanzakademie, ensuring that Suspiria presents itself as a non-chronological experience. I think we can say that the use of music in Argento's cinema is also decidedly anti-realist in its implementation, as often the line is blurred between diegetic and non-diegetic sound (notably in Tenebre's use of classical music).

Rose is attacked in Inferno (1980).

Whilst Suspiria and Inferno are both anti-realist in their supernatural subject matter, I think that's less relevant to the Argento rejection of the neorealist tendency than a wholesale commitment to "simultaneous cohesion and incoherence" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 19) that permeates the giallo and its supernatural counterparts alike. That being said, the supernatural subject matter, and the intention to cultivate a Gothic fairytale aesthetic, accommodated a space for Argento to push against realism in fiercer ways, with Suspiria arguably being the zenith: "Every facet of Suspiria is laced with a knowing self-awareness that not only shuns but also aggressively mocks any attempt at realism" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 14).

Reflecting on the "pure" cinema of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Bazin highlighted that there was "[n]o more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema" (Bazin, 1967b: 60). Suspiria doesn't cast non-actors, in fact it casts actors with a subtextual specificity. Arguably bringing an audience out of the immersion, but operating in a sphere of recognisable consciousness and signifying meta-narrative traits, Argento cast Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion, who has become known for presenting "characters that straddled innocence and experience" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 33), a relative neophyte to co-stars and cinematic icons Joan Bennett and Alida Valli. There is potentially something to be said about the resemblance between Harper and a young Joan Bennett, but both of the older women are utilised to play homage to the noir genre and their roles within it (Schulte-Sasse, 2002).

However, interestingly, Argento doesn't seem to reject the realist ethos with regards to location shooting so vehemently. He utilises some shots on location, notably Berlin's Königsplatz, but it's important to note that even here the reality we see is distorted and warped, akin to the meticulous set design that elsewhere invokes surreal, dreamlike qualities.

The iconic line in Suspiria, suggesting that "bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds" (Argento, 1977), is considered by Heller-Nicholas to be rendered totally false by the subsequent discussion with an occult expert and the 'reality' of the film's witches (2015); I would disagree, as I think the line instead operates as one face of the film's duality, and a key component in the blurring of the fantastical realm and the real one. That the witch of Suspiria appears to be real belies how fundamentally unreal the rest of the film is designed and, from her first steps into Berlin, protagonist Suzy Bannion is confronted with a warped fairytale world of artifice. Meticulously designed sets and non-naturalistic lighting choices can be read as eschewing the idea that any of this is really happening.

Meticulously constructed set design delivering an eerie, dreamlike visage in Suspiria (1977).

As the film delivers an eerie effect of the nightmarish unconscious brought violently to the forefront, Professor Milius, who seeks to disprove his cynical colleague Mandel, does not go against the earlier statement, but rather aligns himself with the broken mirror, rather than the broken mind. Suzy is trapped in a nightmarish hellscape, caught in the battle between philosophies of the real and the fantastical; she is free from the nightmare only once she synthesises both viewpoints, that it may well be the case that nothing is real, but she must act as if it's real nonetheless.

If Argento's films are concerned with making sense of that which cannot be understood then they are in direct conflict with the neorealist desire to be immersive and its dealings with understandable, even universal, experiences. In fact, in Tenebre (Argento, 1982), Arthur Conan-Doyle is invoked to this effect: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". This, perhaps, is Argento's manifesto, his guiding principle, in his surrealist approach. If the approaches differ, I think we should look to where the contexts converge, particularly with the politics of fascism. To the neorealists, fascism was pertinently present, always only slightly out of view. For Argento though, enough time had passed for a Europe in thrall to fascist fervour to transition into history and, then, into fantasy. Where neorealism sought to explore societal redefinitions in fascism's wake, Argento invokes fascistic (both Italian and German) historical context to blur the lines of the actual and the macabre. In the aforementioned Königsplatz, the fantastical invocation of history turns a blind man's dog upon him, murdering him brutally. Witchcraft is linked to the natural in Argento's two supernatural classics, with the possessed dog and maggot-infestation in Suspiria and murderous cats and rats in Inferno; it is the consigning of fascism to regrettable, but naturalised, history that is at the core of its re-emergence in violent form. This elucidates a key difference in the two cinematic portrayals of fascism: neorealism is concerned with the structural violence committed on the subject of (post-)fascism and the scars it leaves behind, where as Argento invokes it as a fearsome return of the repressed.

"[I]t is clear that if we wish to remain on the level of art, we must stay in the realm of imagination. I ought to be able to look upon what takes place on the screen as a simple story, an evocation which never touches the level of reality, at least unless I am to be made an accomplice after the fact of an action or at least of an emotion which demands secrecy for its realisation. This means that the cinema can say everything, but not show everything. There are no sex situations-moral or immoral, shocking or banal, normal or pathological-whose expression is a priori prohibited on the screen, but only on condition that one resorts to the capacity for abstraction in the language of cinema, so that the image never takes on a documentary quality."

(Bazin, 1967b: 174)

Berlin's Königsplatz in Suspiria (1977).

Bazin decried the making visual of sexuality and violence, if films were to possess the qualities of art. I'm sure Argento would disagree. The differences and divergent points continue: where the neorealists looked towards new, post-war configurations of masculinity, Argento seems more concerned with femininity. Neorealism took its inspiration from the streets, embodying documentary quality, and Argento took his inspiration from literary works and high art. "Argento's narrative universe is one where logic and reason are destabilised and subverted," (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 32), where as neorealist filmmakers, such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, had depicted the logical, sequential consequences to actions. Through all the minutia, Argento has placed primacy on the spectacle, an act that any neorealist would consider perverse.

Works Cited:

Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heller-Nicholas, A. (2015) Devil's Advocates: Suspiria. Great Britain: Auteur.

Schulte-Sasse, L. (2002). The "mother" of all horror movies. [Online] kinoeye. Available at: http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/schultesasse11.php [Accessed on: 07/04/2019]

Films Cited:

Suspiria (1977) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: SEDA Spettacoli.

L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: SEDA Spettacoli.

Inferno (1980) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: Produzioni Intersound.

Tenebre (1982) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: Sigma Cinematografica.

Ecoporn: For Pervert's Eyes Only?

Increasingly, images fetishising nature seem indivisible from everyday digital life. Critics, such as Lydia Millet, highlight the failure of these digital images to provoke substantial discussions regarding environmentalism (2004). Coining the term 'ecoporn', she described the consumption of these images as delivering:

“picture-book nature, scenic and sublime, praiseworthy but not battle-worthy. Tarted up into perfectly circumscribed simulations of the wild, these props of mainstream environmentalism serve as surrogates for real engagement with wilderness, the way porn models serve as surrogates for real women.”
(Millet, 2004)

Yet, it may not be as perverse an action as this dramatised commentary would have us believe.
If we take pornography to mean a distortion of reality for pleasurable consumption, when locating the pornography of ecoporn, we find it not in the corrected, artificial images themselves. Instead, it is their captions, the anchors to reality, which always accompany an image with the name of the place they supposedly represent, and which credit the photographer akin to an artist, from where pleasure is derived.

Consuming ecoporn is less an act of naively enjoying the fine-tuned, cherry-picked image, and more of a willing disavowal of one immediate reality for another constantly detached fantasy.
The perversity of reframing and the voyeuristic tendency is found throughout photography as a form itself and is not unique to images of ecoporn (Berger, 1972). Yet what I think we can see is a juxtaposing of place, a clear distinction between the Here and There. If we look to the caption attached to this prominent and popular /r/EarthPorn image, Texas is the monotonous, prosaic Here, where Alaska is the detached, fantastical There, ever separated from our everyday experience of a natural world.

At its core, ecoporn exists as a fantastication of the mundane and everyday; an escapist promise for those trapped in post-industrial urban melancholia of nature's magical qualities. That it is a longing for something more real than reality is similarly important- what's the point in a heaven, not on Earth?

 
Ecoporn may be cynically developed by the wealthy, those who possess the time, skills and high-grade equipment required to produce such images, but its consumption occurs at the popular level. The "gratification without social cost" (Millet, 2004) may prove insulting to the environmentalist, immersed in nature, but to those who see nought but concrete, ecoporn can take on a form of popular imaginative liberation. Though the fetishisation of the natural world absolves us of guilt for the human role in environmental destruction, it is rarely targeted towards the people in positions of transformative power. No one's tagging the Fortune 500 in their holiday pics.

When we read ecoporn as merely a mediation of nature's reality, we deny this imaginative potential. Beyond personal liberation, activist movements have drawn off the principles of ecoporn in spite of this contemporary cynicism towards it. Historically, pre-digital ecoporn had yielded significant victories for green movements long before the Instagram filter: notably, in the campaign for the 1964 Wilderness Act in the US (Meisner, 2010). Similarly, is it not the convergence of biophilic fantasy, of mass anthropomorphism and the proliferation of widely accessible and emotionally moving ecoporn that has yielded a modern, resurgent green movement? If we look to the recent youth climate strikes, this sentimentality abounds. Concerned with the failings of humanity as nature's paternalistic caretaker, progressive views on the natural world have come about not in spite of ecoporn, but because of it.

Photo from the Youth Climate Strike, by Ting Shen.

Works Cited:

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: Harmondsworth: British Broadcasting Corporation ; Penguin.

Meisner, M. (2010). Blinded by Ecoporn. Alternatives Journal, 36(1), 7.


Millet, L. (2004). Ecoporn Exposed. Utne, (125), 34-35.

(Don't Fear) The Singularity: Asimov's Multivac and the Law of Accelerating Returns

In Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question, "Multivac" is the first iteration of a giant supercomputer that promises to usher in new eras of technological advancement, each more splendiferous than the last, eventually taking humanity beyond scarcity, beyond Earth and even beyond humanism itself. His conceptual Multivac manifests as an impersonal, artificial intelligence, whose prime service initially appears to be the answering of questions from its human users. It's a feature we're familiar with from homages paid in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and our own personal "Microvacs", Siri and Alexa, but at its core the story is concerned with the unending, unyielding and unstoppable march of the future. Multivac is not satisfied with centrally planned economies, but seeks a centrally planned humanity also.

"Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. [T]hey knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole."

Writer and inventor Ray Kurzweil would later bring these ideas out of the science-fiction magazines and into mainstream futurism, particularly ideas surrounding the potential for a biological convergence between man and machine; a technological singularity where the boundaries between tool and wielder aren't just blurred, but totally meaningless.

Kurzweil coined this 'singularity' as "a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence" (2001b) and the result of his "Law of Accelerating Returns" (2001a). Invoking the exponential nature of technological progress, Kurzweil predicted that the future would see an indistinguishable human-machine consciousness, but, if we are to take this thinking to its logical endpoint, Kurzweil's bio/technological singularity can be nothing but a posthuman apotheosis. Perhaps rather than the ever-feared robot revolution overthrowing humanity, it will overthrow god instead. With no upper limit to Kurzweil's Accelerating Returns, the man/machine hybrid could supersede all authority, installing itself as the authority from which all other authority is derived. This has Asimovian roots, as his story concludes with the Multivac's own ascent into godhood. Long after every star in the universe has burnt out, the supercomputer commands: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

What's a King to a God?

Kurzweil and Asimov make such a poignant comparison because of how much overlap there is, despite a seeming rift in profession and interests. Where Asimov wrote speculative fiction, Kurzweil attempts to chart objective futures; it's notable that they seem to come to such similar conclusions. Why, then, this convergence?

"Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral." (Basalla, 1988: 7): it is a distinctly political matter and one that is flexible like a text; the phantom of technology can be reappropriated by its users, transformed in idea, design and function at will. This moral vacuum lends itself to imaginations in the popular consciousness surrounding the failure to imitate human morality or in superseding it totally. Where the former is perhaps a more common trope of science-fiction, it is in the latter where we find both Asimov's Multivac and the bio/technological singularity; these are at least somewhat optimistic futurist ideas.

Works Cited:

Asimov, I. The Last Question. Princeton University [Online]. Available at: https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf [Accessed on 24/03/2019]

Basalla, G. (1988) The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kurzweil, R. (2001a) The Law of Accelerating Returns. Kurzweil accelerating intelligence [Online].
Available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns [Accessed on 25/03/2019]


Kurzweil, R. (2001b) THE SINGULARITY: A Talk With Ray Kurzweil. Edge. [Online] Available at: https://www.edge.org/conversation/ray_kurzweil-the-singularity [Accessed on 25/03/2019]

Final Monsters: Intergenerational Repression And Horror Cinema

Criticism of the slasher genre often emerges from feminist framework, which often sees them as little more than gratuitous displays of power over the bodies of women, culminating in the approval of a 'good' femininity in the unsullied Final Girl trope. I would argue that there is more to the portrayal of youth in these films than merely the opportunity for some fetishistic titillation. If horror films are truly concerned, at least primarily, with a psychological return of the repressed, then it is no wonder that their focus has come onto increasingly younger casts of characters.

This youth is a transgressive one; one which emerged in a bastard world of their parent's making and responded to it with disdain. The subsequent generation would eschew the normality of their parents Americana, with the war in Vietnam putting a clear conclusion to any post-war optimism left for that generation's youth.

"The seams of American identity began to give way. Growing numbers in the civil rights and antiwar movements began by rejecting American practices, went on to reject American ideals, and soon, since America was its ideals, rejected the conventional versions of American identity altogether." (Gitlin, 1995: 68)

Wes Craven's Last House On The Left (1972) provided a critical lens of the end of the preceding generation, but the genre's development past that (moving closer to, and into, the 1980s) set out a series of horrors that didn't just mediate the violence committed by one generation unto another, but gave that generation an opportunity to fight back. It is in light of this that I want to propose the Final Girl not as a misogynistic trapping, but a performance of the genre's moral ambiguities. Particularly, moral ambiguities in line with, not only the sociopolitical context around the production of these films, but those which also mediate particularly intergenerational anxieties.

"What the previous generation repressed in us, we, in turn, repress in our children, seeking to mold them into replicas of ourselves, perpetrators of a discredited tradition." (Wood, 2003: 66).

The horror films of the 80s are similarly concerned with the repression of previous generations, but they develop this towards its next logical step, by freeing the upcoming generation from the shackles of that repression and casting them as the leads, rather than as tragic victims. When John Carpenter defies readings of Halloween's (Carpenter, 1980) female victims as reaping what their sexuality has sewn, he is positioning them alongside his main character, not against her. Within this pantheon of youth. he even claims to not recognise the non-sexual, purely virginal Laurie Stode that critics have read her as:

"They [the critics] completely missed the boat there, I think. Because if you turn it around, the one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that killed him. Not because she's a virgin, but because all that repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy... She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression." (Carpenter qtd. in Clover, 1992: 48-49)

Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978).

Concurrent to this, Carol Clover also suggests that a shared masculinity also links the Monster with the Final Girl (1992: 49) and both these facets are instances of a repressed, returned. Outside of the parameters of a reactionary, judicial killing of sexual women, the Victims of the Monster express their own repression in taboo female sexuality and in refusing to perform their sexual femininity in the expectedly docile way. They do not fear men in a way they may have been expected to. This isn't a sign of youthful idiocies, of shallow, air-headed women whose lack of awareness of the danger around them signify them as ripe for retribution, but is rather a signifier for how these character's defy generational expectations. They no longer engage in acts of repression.

While the Monster seems to police the bodies of these transgressive women, the Monster himself fits into this formulation of the repressed, returned. This has tended to be the focus of writing on Horror cinema, discussions around how each Monster exists outside of normative hetero-patriarchy, how he is often a materialisation of that which we, the audience, have repressed, and so on. Repression of child sexuality, for example comes to the forefront in Halloween (1978). Repressed female sexual energy, or creativity, is positioned directly against the legitimated female labour in the film, as sex always seems to get in the way of babysitting. In the childlike perspective of Meyers, it is the abdication of babysitting duty that seems to be what antagonises the most.

What I'm interested in, however, is the convergence of these aspects. It is important to note that the Final Girl is similarly transgressive, insofar that her performances of masculinity (the tomboyish nature that the Final Girl's have in common, to varying degrees) and bisexuality, have been hitherto repressed. Once denied "drives culturally associated with masculinity" (Wood, 2003: 64), these are now brought to the forefront by the Monster. So the Victims, Monster and Final Girl all exist outside of conventional normality. The actions of the Monster, for example, are not merely those of an agent of the repressed arriving as arbiter of punishment, nor is it simply the revenge of a societal outcast. Instead, in these films, we see an entire sphere of societal transgressions played out against the previous generation's normative safe space: white suburbia. Heroes and villains alike are cast as separate from the normative order, which is presented as ignorant and ineffective.

The reveal at the end of Prom Night (1980) takes a meta approach to this, but delivers a flaccid, irresponsible parental order nonetheless. Engaged with our knowledge of Michael Meyers, escaped mental patient and horror villain, the film shows the police in search for the danger they (and the audience) expect. When he is found, not anywhere near the location of the titular high-school prom night, the police believe the danger to be averted and drop their guard. Of course, the threat is located elsewhere and the police have proved themselves to be no more adept at protecting the younger generation than that generation is at protecting itself. The identity of the killer, Kim's brother, further blurs the line between the Victims, Final Girl and Monster: in the slasher follow up to Halloween (1978) the Monster is no longer clearly Othered (the general plot of a covered up murder coming back to haunt people also fits nicely with the idea of the return of the repressed).

The killer attacks the prom in Prom Night (1980).

So it is particularly the police force and the nuclear family model which are shown incapable of providing moral authority or physical safety, with these two artefacts coalescing neatly in Nightmare on Elm Street's (1984) police family unit. Whilst Nancy's father cannot mobilise the police force to protect the street's youth, Nancy's mother's moral authority is stripped away by alcohol abuse and the part she played in her neighbourhood's original sin, in the creation of Freddy Krueger. In one reading, we can see the parental generation's failings as the reason that the film has no happy ending, when Freddy's final scare is to take his revenge on Nancy's mother, but I think the loss of the 'happy' ending actually occurs earlier- precisely, it happens when Nancy rejects any of the power and dominance that the nightmarish Freddy may have over her. Robin Wood describes the 'happy ending' as a "restoration of repression" (2003: 66). By sheer power of will, it is this which Nancy can not allow to happen. She takes her transgressive bisexuality out of the hands of an abusive force and restores, not repression, but transgression, by returning her youthful, sexual friends alongside her banishment of her harasser. The reneging of Horror films, since Night Of The Living Dead (1968), to provide such a 'Hollywood'-style, conventionally happy ending, is where I read a progressive tendency in the genre: the refusal to restore the repression transforms the film-viewing experience away from something fleeting and escapist, becoming a more tactile text.

Nancy turns her back on her abuser, denying him his power, in A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984).

That the Final Girl heroines rarely seem able to totally restore the normative, repressive status quo positions their role as transgressive characters as a progressive moment; in spite of their intent and desire towards a world where the repressed is restored, they can never go home again. It is here that I refer back to this post's title: The Final Monster. In my view, the Final Girl may be a heroic trope, but she should be read to be just as transgressive as any Monster she comes up against. The film language itself tells us this, when “we are linked, [with a first person camera perspective], with the killer in the early part of the film, usually before we have seen him directly and before we have come to know the Final Girl in any detail” (Clover, 1992: 45) and when our perspective switches over to the Final Girl entirely by the film's conclusion. She is inextricably linked to monster-hood. Not a bastion of purity and conservatism, she is seen rejecting the values and beliefs of previous generations and their halcyon views of youth. She also exists on the other side of trauma, often with no satisfying conclusion to her story, offering a nebulous fictional zone wherein which she can be doomed and liberated simultaneously.
And, of course, that's why I have no interest in watching any of the sequels to these films.

Works Cited:

Clover, C. (1992). Men women and chainsaws: Gender in the modern horror film. London: British Film Institute.

Gitlin, T. (1995). The Twilight of Common Dreams. New York: Henry Holt.

Wood, R. (2003). Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan ...and beyond(Expanded and rev. ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Films Cited:

Halloween (1978) [film] Directed by J. Carpenter. United States: Compass International Pictures.

Last House On The Left (1972) [film] Directed by W. Craven. United States: Sean S. Cunningham Films.

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) [film] Directed by W. Craven. United States: New Line Cinema.

Night Of The Living Dead (1968) [film] Directed by G. A. Romero. United States: Image Ten.

Prom Night (1980) [film] Directed by P. Lynch. Canada: AVCO Embassy Pictures.

Demarcating Digitality

The cultural shift from the early web to Web 2.0 and how we currently conceptualise digitality is accompanied by another shift; a shift within techno-paranoia itself. Where once our digital fears and anxieties, and the speculative fictions they inspired, were concerned with the authenticity of strangers now they seem to look more towards the authenticity of our neighbours and ourselves.

Whilst I think it would be disingenuous to say that our speculative fiction has totally moved away from the fear of the stranger (or some totally digitalised Other), the anxiety surrounding power within anonymity has increasingly become localised; it used to be the case that the person on the other side of the screen was a detached figure, a sex offender lying about their age perhaps, and always some deviant who could only exist without a real face or real name or any substantial, verifiable authenticity. These stories (both the conventionally fictional and those in the realms of entertainment journalism and sensationalist public service announcements) predicted futures based on that early web context of the late 1990s: total anonymous anarchy, with no space for the casual user and only room for the socially deviant.

The new paradigms of Web 2.0 meant those dystopian dreams of digitality would never manifest, as the development of user-based content production signalled a shift in how communities could form and how our relationship with the digital could be naturalised (Jenkins, 2006). Instead of fearing the detached stranger, our anxieties under digitality are concerned with our digital identities: our own digital selves, alongside the digital selves of our friends, family and neighbours (Negroponte, 1995). We question not only the authenticity of others, but the authenticity of ourselves and even our capability to now detach from ubiquitous, instantaneous communication. The convergence of consumption and production in the notion of "prosumer" (Toffler, 1980) is often at the heart of these post-digital anxieties in contemporary speculative fictions; when we produce our digital selves, we are in turn consumed. Likewise do we consume the digital selves that others have produced. Yet I would also say that the differences between the early web anxieties of late 1990s techno-paranoia and more contemporary works, such as "Black Mirror", may not actually be so significant, in so far that despite the shift from fearing the stranger to fearing ourselves, the cultural imagination around the digital has remained solidly in the spheres of a parochial technological determinism.


Works Cited

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York; London: New York University Press.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave: The classic study of tomorrow. New York, NY: Bantam.

Selfie Identity And The Rejection of the Digital

In post-digital sentiment, the rejection of a digital hegemony now seems increasingly synonymous with rejections of selfie identity; so ubiquitous is the selfie to our contemporary digitality. If we were to imagine a post-selfie identity then it would be a post-digital one: an identity that rejects postmodernism's hyperreality and the blurred lines of our selves and simulacrum of our selves.

The academic fascination with the digital as a zone for unlimited experimentation with identity belies the fact that it is our postmodern cultural identities themselves that are "less stable [and] more malleable than they have been historically" (Reed, 2014) and the Web, as an individual, technological tool, only came after the commodification of self had already become rampant under the neoliberal turn and had reached new heights in the "no alternative" (Fisher, 2009) zenith of the 90's.

Even within a purely digital frame of reference, the re-representation of our lives, our intentional framings that present a so-called good life, predate the selfie: entwined with the hyper-mediated self, they already existed in every blog post, forum identity, early social media activity and in every shared meme (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). Information, by word or bit, was already reshaping our lives; only now it is done by instant image sharing. In this light, we were already abiding by Goffman's dramaturgical model (1959): the selfie has only made the usage of societal 'masks' more legible and only in that legibility has selfie identity developed its transgressive quality.

So I would say that the selfie hasn't actually signified some massive cultural shift or divergence; our lives did not change on the advent of the selfie. Instead I propose that our lives had already been changed at the advent of the digital, only selfies have managed to elucidate this to people more widely and, coded particularly with youthful, feminine narcissism, have been offered up to the altar of enlightened criticism.

But if selfies haven't ushered in a new form of digital identity, how can we explain the unique anxieties that surround the acts of selfie taking and sharing?

Selfie identity has meant that our relationship to self-commodification is now direct, tangible and (comparatively) universalised. This has perhaps cumulated in one particular anxiety: the idea that everyday digital inauthenticities are causing us to lose our authentic selves. Less a matter of simple identity loss though, I would assert that this feeling is derived from a transitionary confusion in the movement towards new, digitised identities; rather than lose our identity, we have lost the lexis to understand identity itself (elucidated by how we are often perplexed that the only way to express anti-digital sentiment is within digital spheres themselves).

Works Cited

Bolter, J. and Grusin, R. A. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: Zero Books.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Reed. T.V. (2014). “Who Are We Online? Digital Masquerade, Privacy, Anonymity, Community and Cyborg Dis/Embodiment,” in Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era. New York; London: Routledge.

Italian Neorealism in The Bicycle Thieves and Germany: Year Zero

Film theorist Andre Bazin distinguished between pseudorealism, that which is concerned with the aesthetic niceties associated with the conventionally 'realistic', and what he saw as actual realism. His formulation of such a realism concerns film's nature as reactionary and Italian neorealism was a movement that reacted to not only to the American film studio releases but to the world around it. The films of directors, such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, explored the renegotiations of class and societal roles in a Europe wracked by political upheaval and economic crises. They did so in such a style that reacted to material conditions and often invoked the documentary form, disinterested in the Hollywood theatrics like sets and movie stars. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini's Germany: Year Zero were two films born out of the neorealist movement, released in 1945 and 1948 respectively. Notably concerning two of the Axis forces most enthralled to fascism during WWII, it is in the post-war renegotiation of societal roles and values that the worlds of both The Bicycle Thieves and Germany: Year Zero manifest.

In the tradition of Italian neorealism, Rossellini shot Germany: Year Zero on the streets of Berlin itself. Like in Bicycle Thieves's Italy, the post-war/post-fascist Germany is more than an aesthetic deployed for the film: it is a snapshot of reality. This perception of a true reality, one which absconds from theatrical, character examinations in favour of characters who cannot be detached from the worlds they inhabit and are only footnotes of the wider reality, is definitional of neorealism in Bazin's thinking. He wrote that "…neorealism by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one" (Bazin, 1967b: 97). The neorealist films, to this end, forewent actor-personalities driven by star power. The film's are instead populated by non-actors who detach the films further away from any kind of preconceived notion around character-actors and theatrics in cinema. The characters are very literally the products of the world around them, as the world around them is where their actors were found. That a film can be unrealistic, yet wholly realist, would seem to have been Bazin's point. Cinema then possesses a mummifying effect, where, if used in the neorealist way, it can produce an archival history in and of itself; a means of "the preservation of life by a representation of life" (Bazin, 1967a: 10).

Many of the Italian neorealist films focused in on the disruption of societal roles in the emerging post-war and post-fascist context of post-1945 Europe. Germany: Year Zero transplants the Italian style to the German locale, but it doesn't stop there. It also transplants the post-war/post-fascist concerns of neorealism to a new nationality; that the film was directed and written by Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini suggests that there is not only the shadow of Hitler cast over the film, but the shadow of Mussolini as well. That the film is almost entirely in Germany's native tongue doesn't negate its Italian-ness. In light of this, I want to briefly talk about how these two films, set in two different countries and produced by two different directors, come together to provide a congruous, neorealist world.

One may be tempted to compare the characters Bruno and Edmund, who provide dual perspectives of the child in this movement of cinema, however, I think it would be more pertinent to compare Antonio to Edmund. Each are the closest each film has to a main character; the moral degradation and loss of innocence associated with living in an impoverished world hits these characters the hardest. Both Rome in Bicycle Thieves and Berlin in Germany: Year Zero are presented as cities that have more workers than work itself. The opening moments of these films are actually startlingly similar, in so far that they are both concerned with the possession (or lack thereof) of work permits. The 'truth' of Bicycle Thieves, that "in the world where this workman lives, the poor must steal from each other in order to survive" (Bazin, 1967b: 51), is the point of similarity between De Sica's Italy and Rossellini's Berlin. Like Antonio, Edmund has viable work taken from him (he is discovered to be too young and is fired). The loss of work, of a respectable way of navigating their impoverished cities and lives, precludes directly the moral compromises that will make both these characters social aberrations; Antonio the thief and Edmund the parricidal murderer.

Antonio and his son, Bruno, in Bicycle Thieves (1945).

That Antonio, on his mission to reclaim his bicycle, is let down by the supposed institutions of the working class- the police, the church and, finally, his own community- is preface to the isolation felt by Edmund before he is taken from proletariat to lumpenproletariat and experiences all the shame and social stigma attached therein. The exploration of post-fascist societies that is explored in Germany: Year Zero, but not in Bicycle Thieves, concerns how the supposedly defeated forces of fascism survive in downtrodden spaces. There's something prescient and valuable in this perspective. Edmund's socioeconomic miseries push him into a destructive relationship with a Nazi-sympathising ex-teacher and, when he sells an old record to some soldiers, Adolf Hitler's thunderous voice once again echoes throughout the ruins of Berlin.

Edmund walks through the ruins of Berlin in the conclusion of Germany: Year Zero (1948).

Germany: Year Zero may have been the final part of Rossellini's trilogy of neorealist war films, but I think the concerns of its characters, despite time and space, when placed alongside De Sica's Bicycle Thieves still can provide insight into the world the neorealist movement was reacting to.


Works Cited:
Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Films Cited:
Germania anno zero (1948) [film] Directed by R. Rossellini. Italy: Produzione Salvo D'Angelo and Tevere Film.

Ladri di biciclette (1945) [film] Directed by V. De Sica. Italy: Produzioni De Sica.

Freshening Up

Just thought I'd leave a quick note to briefly explain what's going on with the blog. A slight redesign, to make the posts somewhat more pleasant to look at, and a barrage of new posts are the significant changes.

These new posts, of course, aren't new at all- they were produced as part of my Communication, Media and Culture Masters degree*. Now that I've completed my studies for that, I wanted to bring my posts into one central location. Partially so that I don't lose access to them when my University blog eventually expires, but also so that I can feel marginally better about my productivity when I look back on this year as a whole.

It is a year wherein which I have not published on this blog nearly as much as I'd have liked. That, perhaps, has mostly been down to pride. I am writing and envisioning content that I find myself too attached to for them to be published here. When I was using this blog primarily to rank the releases of  new X-Men comic books, the low reach of the blog was fine. Ideal, really. But as I (and my posts) have become more ambitious, this low reach has grated, leaving me sitting on many completed pieces and letting a great deal more languish in rough drafts and states of half-completion. I'm having to ask myself a lot of questions with regard to what I actually want this blog to be and whether I'm comfortable with it just being a sort of content backlog.

Regardless, I'm hopeful that this post and refresh of the blog can signal a return to more consistent posting. Regrettably, I did say that the last time I wrote one of these personal updates as well. So, in applying a modicum of self-awareness, only time will tell.

*For the nosy, I found great academic success on my MA, achieving a Distinction and yielding a score on my dissertation that I had convinced myself was impossible. It was tough, it was stressful, I was losing hair and skin at hitherto unseen rates, but I made it to the end anyway.

Teen Wolves, Teen Zombies And Reappraising My Boyfriend's Back

The Universal Monster version of the werewolf seen in The Wolfman (1941) may not have been the first cinematic werewolf, but it certainly remains one of our foremost visions of lycanthropy on the silver screen. Or it did, until Michael J. Fox taped hair to basketball shorts and changed our view of the horror mainstay forever.

Teen Wolf (1985) was not the first film to greet the horror icons with humour and flippancy, as it was with drive-in theatre B-movies that first brought those horror tropes into a recognisable teen movie formulation. AIP films, such as I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957)/Frankenstein (1957) and Blood of Dracula (1957), were released to tap into the drive-in zeitgeist and brought the phenomenon of a monster hunting angsty teenagers to the exploitation scene.

The teenager, as a subculture, has been intrinsically tied to the development of modern capitalism, particularly being read as an emergent feature of America's post-war economic boom. These teen-horror films appealed to the newly economically liberated teenager subculture, sympathising particularly with the angst of their self-declaration. In I Was A Teenage Werewolf, it is the sentiments of teen peers which motivates the protagonist to seek psychiatric help, rather than any adult attempt in coercing him to 'adjust' (and it is the very adult institution of psychotherapy which inevitably betrays him). The film proved a success for this portrayal of teens who teens themselves could relate to, but the film was in a way quite cynical: it may have sympathised with the teenager, but it also saw the subculture as an unfortunate byproduct of the development of modernity.

In the conflict between the futurist scientist and the nostalgic suburbia that his experiment-gone-awry (the titular Werewolf) wreaks havoc on, the film professes a strong cautionary tale against progress: "It's not for man to interfere with the ways of God." The adolescence that the new teenager is exposed to is depicted as the unfortunate offspring of the modern society/depravity that emerged alongside America's new primacy as a global power.

This struggle with modernity and the conditions of hedonistic capitalism would persist for as long as viable alternatives made themselves clear: naturally, it was the era of Reaganism, neoliberalism and late capitalism that would transform I Was A Teenage Werewolf into Teen Wolf, a film where there is no longer an alternative, no deviant or subversive element left to be feared. As yesterday's fears dissipated, so too did yesterday's monsters.

Where I Was A Teenage Werewolf ends with its teen wolf shot dead, and a lament over man's hubris in interfering with the territory of God, Teen Wolf straight up transforms into a basketball film for its final fifteen minutes. This was the journey that the supernatural film had taken: from the indisputable, pre-modern fear of the supernatural in The Wolfman, to a more nebulous fear of a modern degenerative, delinquent tendency in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, culminating in Teen Wolf's post-modern absence of fear. The subversive element, the monster, is no longer to be feared, since it can so easily be subsumed into the normative order. Michael J. Fox's wolf form causes no existential crisis for his fellow students or for his community, rather they prefer the wolf to his human form. The wolf is cool, adorned on t-shirts and becomes the school's new mascot. Does this not perfectly mediate the way in which late-capitalism has proven to assimilate all counter-cultural forces into its hegemonic block?

And Teen Wolf was not the only Horror-Comedy to demonstrate this inefficacy of outdated myth. The unrepentantly silly and absurdist 1993 RomZomCom My Boyfriend's Back, fits nicely into this frame. This RomZomCom, a term attributed to and popularised by Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) simply meaning Romantic-Zombie-Comedy, is unlike much of its peers; there is no modicum of fear to be found in its depictions of zombieism. It rarely, if ever, feels like a film actually about zombies. There's no slow, intense walk of the newly awakened dead, nor the frenzy rush of infected runners, but rather a diffident, inoffensive teenager (who just so happens to have a craving for flesh, but who are we to judge?). As such, I find the film makes for much more interesting comparison when placed alongside a more optimistic film like Teen Wolf than to any other comedic zombie affair.

For one, it seems quaint and cheesy in the face of modern successes, like Warm Bodies (2013), which it seems to have much in common with, and Zombieland (2009), which deliver their humour without compromising their status as a clear zombie film. More than this though, My Boyfriend's Back, like Teen Wolf before it, utilises the classic genre trope as a universal sign of misunderstanding. Werewolves and zombies (and later, vampires and ogres) are the deviant sexuality, or the radical communist, who we used to fear before capitalism made it clear that it would not be toppled. We now instead freely embrace them as part of the cultural salad bowl.

The film is unique in just how deftly it delivers its absurd everyday as part of its eschewal of the classic horror trope. Johnny Dingle's return from the dead is only ever met with slight surprise, as if he had gotten out of school an hour early rather than emerged from the grave and each line of dialogue is lent a pitch perfect deadpan that stuns you into bewilderment; watch the film and tell me that it doesn't leave you speechless, mouth agape, as you wonder just how on earth this got made. It doesn't do this by being shocking, but by being so unshocking that you can't help but be bemused.

Whenever it seems like Johnny Dingle might face consequences for his cannibalistic tendencies, he is swiftly forgiven after a polite apology or a romantic declaration. As his longstanding crush falls increasingly and illogically further in love with a gradually decaying corpse, she fetishises his very undead quality to a point where you have to question whether their relationship as two living people could actually work out, since the living appear to be so much more dysfunctional than the dead.

Its dream sequences operate for the sake of a gag or two and little else, proving to us that there are no hidden, psychic demons haunting the film. Yet, the film itself nevertheless has an almost constant dreamlike quality- where the most peculiar of things may happen, yet they persist as if they are normal, everyday occurrences. For some inexplicable reason, the majority of the films exposition is done through comic book panel sequences. It is never made clear why! I have no idea why! But this film defies such mundane questions as 'why'?

Much like Teen Wolf, the horror trope is burrowed deep under quirk and a comedic, consumerist optimism; an optimism wherein which the features of the horror movie are neatly resolved by its conclusion. In the post-modern revisitation of horror icons and tropes, there is nothing to fear. The second chance at real life that Johnny Dingle receives in the film's happy Hollywood ending is a negation of any of the preceding zombie deviancy: not just in the film proper, but across the genre as a whole. Sorry for the misunderstanding, we used to be afraid of zombies, but we know better now.

My Boyfriend's Back may be an incredibly dated film, but it is also a film that seems strangely ahead of its time and in need of immediate reappraisal. Watching it is a genuine experience: it's vapid, yet deeply funny; it is speciously a black comedy, but without any blackness; it is plain and inoffensive, yet, at the same time, incredibly surreal. It's also perfect as a Halloween movie for people who are too easily spooked.

Panned at release and more or less forgotten by the majority of audiences, I can safely say that this is the only film I will be recommending to people for the foreseeable future.

Post-Nuclear Utopia: The Fallout Franchise and Its Ultraconservative Appeal

Considering Bethesda's loud and proud anti-nazism marketing campaign for its alternate-history first-person shooter Wolfenstein 2, it's interesting to note that the fanbase of another of the company's major franchises, Fallout, is ripe with right-wing rhetoric, ultra-conservatism and, yes, fascism. That is, the same hyper-nationalist, white-supremacist fascism that was decried in the Wolfenstein 2 campaign. The Fallout game-franchise is, then, the backdrop for another round of the ongoing culture wars; the first step in unpacking the franchise's appeal to the ultraconservative is to isolate its origins and then to ask to what extent does Bethesda's own work account for this extremist fanbase.

For the unfamiliar, the Fallout franchise sets role-players loose into a retrofuturistic, post-apocalyptic America. Starting out in isometric form in 1997, the series would jump between developers and publishers until it was realised, in its current, recognisable form, as an extension of Bethesda Game Studios' first-person, open-world game design philosophy- a science-fiction counterpart to the Elder Scrolls' immersive fantasy experience. With the latest entry, Fallout 76, released on November 18th of last year, there has never been a more poignant time to imperil Fallout’s ultraconservative appeal.

The franchise tells satirical narratives of the future, with the “76” in Fallout 76 referring not to 1976 but 2076, and these narratives are often satirising conservative politics and lifestyles; suggesting that all a conservative mindset can give to us is the apocalypse. When we question why the Fallout franchise can seem so accommodating to audience’s who would, on a surface level, appear opposed to the game’s, and its developer’s, expressed values, we can see a few potential answers staring back at us. The first is simple: gun fans like gunplay. On a ludological level, Fallout’s lone-wanderer-with-a-gun approach to game design resonates with a subgroup of gamers who have an active interest in firearms, along with small government political policy; the open world allowing the player to enjoy the fantasy of a nomadic, libertarian existence. Yet, this reading is painfully myopic, on account of the wider, cultural appeal of gunplay. Naturally, there is a strict role of guns in the formation of the modern conservative identity, but gunplay in games is enjoyed across a vast swathe of fan subgroups and, certainly, conservatives have no monopoly on firearm fanaticism. So we are obliged to look beyond this and, when we do, we can see that actual conservative spaces have been carved out within Fallout fan communities themselves. I assert that this particular fan space exists, not due to the text, but in spite of it.

In the case of the open world's inherent appeal to far-right gamers, we see a selective enjoyment indicative of the wider ironic detachment that characterises not just engagement with Fallout, but with engagement throughout the digital era. Whilst the conservative reads the lawless wasteland as a reflection of policy and an idealised storyworld, they can simultaneously detach themselves from the deviant sexualities and lifestyles that make themselves present in the game and which run counter to their worldview. This is prominent in conservative fan assembly around the term, “degenerate”, used by in-game characters (and game director Todd Howard) to deride unsavoury storyworld elements. Accommodated by the in-game factions and multiplicity of in-game ideology and identity, any gamer (not just the ultraconservative) can engage with every constituent element without feeling that any one has any meaning outside of its fictional habitat.

There’s a prevailing belief that one can engage, ironically, insincerely, with every element of the digital era and this has incubated the normalisation and legitimisation of increasingly reactionary viewpoints. On the alt-right, Dr. Alice Marwick has said that “irony allows people to strategically distance themselves from the very real commitment to white supremacist values that many of these forums have”, which particularly rears its head with Fallout’s beloved fascist faction, the Brotherhood of Steel. To engage, ironically, with Fallout is to engage unironically with its satire. This, in turn, accommodates an unironic, unironic engagement, as an (reactionary) audience can only then read Fallout sincerely. They can read the promise of post-nuclear freedom and renewed Americana as part of the franchise’s brand, disregarding any subversive affect its creators may have intended.

The dissonance between conservative engagement and a proposed satire of conservatism, then, actually matters little; intentionally or not, Fallout’s constant negotiation and renegotiation of meaning allowed the creation of a space that could be filled by the ultraconservative and the hypernationalist. This though begs the question, where did the right-wing elements come from to fill this space? What is it about the world of Fallout that is so appealing to them?

Retrofuturism, a term used to describe the utopian fantasies of the futures of yesteryear, is perhaps the crux of the question around Fallout’s conservatism. In retrofutures, we see again the science fiction iconography that went hand-in-hand with that era; for the 1950s this included jetpacks, flying cars, homes of tomorrow and so on. Remnants of Fallout’s retrofuture are seen scattered across the wasteland, the abandoned vaults with every Cold War styling and amenity are littered with “Mr. Handy” servant-robots (and even the aliens of the franchise are more reminiscent of Roswell and UFO fervour than any other sci-fi touchstone), but the post-war, post-apocalypse has little to offer in its longing for yesterday’s future. It is in specifically pre-war sections of the game (flashbacks, simulations and the ilk), which are not the franchise’s focal point, where the retrofuturistic conservatism shines through.

As each new entry to the franchise gives an obligatory return to the pre-war retrofuture of the 2070s, Bethesda Game Studios reiterates a prognostalgia, a sincere sadness for a future that never came to pass, which characterises the rest of the game. This is seen in Fallout 3’s opening, where the main protagonist grows up in a time-capsule-like vault, and its sequel Fallout 4’s also, where the main character was present in the nostalgic pre-war era. Whilst other studios working on the IP forsook such direct flashbacks, Bethesda Game Studios weaves this sombreness, this regretful tone throughout the experiences of both games. This gives way to the accommodation of what I call the myth of Fallout. Rather than a legendary myth, this is a myth of the Barthesian sense, where in which the nuclear fallout depicted in the game is not the end of the world, but instead a rebirth of conservative politics. The promise of this myth is that, after the bombs fall, the nostalgic, conservative past will be returned to us, imbued with new vigour to pursue the same American ideals and dreams as ever.

No aspect of the game series encapsulates this renewed, militant Americanism like Liberty Prime; a pastiche “Iron Giant” who foregoes anti-militarism and anti-nuclear sentiment for an uncritical adulation of “democracy” and American capitalism. Liberty Prime, appearing in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, is shown as an imposing, if retrograde, American military marvel. Like any good American soldier, he is deeply patriotic, spouting anti-communist slogans and propaganda akin to what may have been heard during the Cold War. It’s even wrong to call the giant robot an instance of nuclear deterrence, as he hurls miniaturised atom bombs at his enemies. As metallic shouts of "Death is a preferable alternative to communism," ring through the battlefield, the robot exists as the zenith of Fallout’s retrofuture; a technological marvel constrained by the hatred and prejudice of its time of creation. It is, then, noteworthy how beloved the automaton became. Not as a criticism of myopic Cold War militarism, but as a sincere, bastion of libertarian values. Even now he is a touchstone for the reactionary, the ultimate vindication that their reading of Fallout is the right one. Take a look at some fan commentary from a YouTube compilation of Liberty Prime quotes:

Not only is the line between fiction and reality blurred, with desires to see the giant robot crush the enemies of fascism, but so is the line between satire and sincerity. In the unironic, uncritical responses to characters such as Liberty Prime and storyworlds like Fallout, we can see that the transformation of democracy from a rule of government to a set of intrinsically American values and beliefs has abetted the anti-democrat to take the violent pursuit of "democracy" into their own identity. As Liberty Prime would declare, "Democracy is non-negotiable," and now is a broader referent, one that encapsulates the American project as a whole. Fascism may be anti-conservative, in that it doesn't seek a return to the past but a rebirth based on past iconography, but it is that very distinction that attracts the ultraconservative and the fascist alike. Fallout's promise of a nuclear apocalypse which ushers in traditional values exists as both a return to Cold War Americana and a rebirth of the nation state, allowing a ground zero from which fascistic imagination can play.

The idealised past (that of course never existed) is revisited, in Fallout, in a form of perverse utopia. The ultraconservatives find, in Fallout's wastelands, a utopian world, free from the constraints and responsibilities of our present one. We can see this idealised past again, throughout the franchise’s Americana aesthetic. Particularly, the music creates a strong sense of nostalgic longing, but not for the in-universe character. These songs, famous jaunty pop tracks from yesteryear, are nostalgic for a prior state of the world. A world promised to the ultraconservative player, after the bombs fall. With Fallout 76's promotional material, merging The Ink Spots’ "I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire" (popularised by Fallout 3) with John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads", we can see that the anachronism (Denver's song was released in 1971, long after Fallout's 50s point of reference) means nothing. The music is not representative of the world's past, but rather our world's past which is, in turn, this world's present. The themes and tone of Denver's song are no coincidence either; a classic country song ushering you back to a vague notion of home; communicating the idea that the world offered in Fallout is a home, of sorts. One which appears as a safe space for the moral workings and philosophical lenses that no longer seem to have such a home.

As opposed to most retrofuturistic narratives, the core of the Fallout franchise actually affords us an element of subversion, threatening to turn the conservativeness inherent to retro on its head. We are brought into a storyworld where every American imagineer had their dreams fulfilled, where conservative social values (like the nuclear family and white suburbia) remained unchallenged, and yet this can do nothing but yield armageddon. The question of why Fallout’s future is so 50s referential, in particular, has been bounced around for a while, but I think I finally have the answer. The retrofuture isn’t merely a representative of an uncritical, happy time that can be universally enjoyed before the horrors of nuclear war takes it away; the retrofuture tracks a specific narrative, one where social values don’t accelerate to keep up with technological progress. It condemns retrofuturistic ideals specifically by having the outcome of their implementation being a nigh-total apocalypse. Why the 50s? Why invoke the imagery, language and iconography of Cold War? Simply, because it can be nowhere else. The unabashed Space Age optimism running alongside profound domestic and international anxieties in Cold War America is a duality that can not be undersold. To turn the retrofuture against itself, Fallout pushes this duality to its final, deadly conclusion.

Fallout, though, can never seem to outrun its sincere readers and perhaps this is because its very nature as a video game denies any definitive communication between authorial intent and an audience reading. This is, of course, only exacerbated by situating it in the open-world, role-playing genre. It may be the case that this openness is going too far for a developer to manage. You cannot simultaneously offer freedom of choice and effectively communicate a singular message or cohesive world.

So, to some, Fallout's wasteland is a utopian dream of rebirth, tapping into the spirit of manifest destiny. America, after nuclear war, can once again become the new frontier, pursuing a patriotic endeavour for a future characterised by its past. Whilst I’ve expressed that this is a counter-reading of the text, it is worthwhile to examine the culpability of Bethesda in the curation of this perspective. With Fallout 76's recent launch, a game that promised to transition the series from retrofuturistic satire to post-apocalyptic fun with friends, we cannot just assume that Bethesda has experienced a “death of the author” moment and lost all control over their text. Rather the commitment to apolitical, open design has cultivated this ambiguity of meaning in order to fulfil its escapist promise and to ensure a cross-political appeal.

Bethesda operates within a political vacuum, arbitrarily flitting between political statements so as to best sell the latest product. Wolfenstein played into antifa, "bash the fash", imagery in a sensational, timely campaign, yet The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (and, as I’ve laid out, the Fallout franchise) has intentionally curated appeals to the far-right, ultraconservative. White nationalism and imperialism are a window dressing Bethesda Game Studios often deploys uncritically, leading to a perennial contradiction between the proposed corporate ethos and the actual corporate product. Game franchises such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, which promote player choice and determination, simultaneously depoliticise and construct an in-game political sphere from which the player can act out political conflict with a sense of ironic detachment. There is no right-wing or left-wing, but Stormcloak and Imperial or Brotherhood of Steel and Railroad.

The trailer for Fallout 76 has currently amassed over 32 million views on YouTube and moves the subject of the franchise away from the conservative satire of previous entries, declaring in no uncertain terms that this latest franchise entry is about rebuilding America in the image of its idealised past. It seems that, on some level, Bethesda are embracing their nostalgic, hyper-nationalist base. There are, of course, always extremists willing to take counter-readings of popular texts. There is always a reactionary community that will contort and contrive to find representation or legitimisation from popular media, seen ever since the internet's very first hate sites. This, however, should not absolve the product that makes such entities feel welcome. At the very least, they should be interrogated. Fascism makes alliances and, in American fascism, it makes alliances with the traditionalist, the nationalist, the militarist and finds financial backing in big business and wealthy elites. For a long time, the perception of gaming as juvenile has absolved this particular industry of meaningful criticism. But, when we can see the conservative coalition forming around media products, we should not take that as an inherent reality of the form.

Fanfiction and "Feminizing" My Media Prosumption

After a not-so-restful Winter break and a severely stressful deadline season, my recent piece on The Simpsons has signalled (somewhat) my return to posting incessant nonsense. Over that Winter break though, I managed to produce something I have very conflicting opinions about: my first ever piece of fanfiction. I'm, of course, familiar with Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, but this was really my first sincere engagement with fanfiction. It was a part of a wider project, one that I want to take the time to discuss a little: my personal attempt to disrupt the ways I engage with texts as a fan.

Prompting this is the increasingly widespread sentiment that women, in fan communities, often have to assimilate to male-dominated paradigms and spaces. This is the idea that women, in entry to fandom, are not only changing the products they consume (transitioning to needlessly male-dominated franchises and genres, such as Sci-Fi or Superhero, from the likewise needlessly female-dominated franchises, such as Romance stories or Young Adult fiction), but the way they produce and give back to fan communities. Engaging with this idea as a male prosumer (producer/consumer) turned into a project where I've sought to perform the inverse. Where women are expected to transition from feminine space to masculine ones, I, as a man, would transition from masculine to feminine. The prime avenue for this has been in finally exploring the world of fanfiction, no longer disregarding it as a petulant, juvenile thing (an outdated sentiment held over from my experiences as a teenager engaged with fandom).

You can read the fanfiction here. Frankly, the quality of the story isn't something I'm particularly happy with. I find capturing the voice of someone else's characters remains incredibly difficult, regardless of how much time you've spent immersed in the fictions they're from. It's kind of a punishing sensation, as it never really reflects the research you've done to finish your writing and, in that sense, it's far more of a challenging instance of fanwork than what is purported as its masculine equivalent: the fan theory. Where fanfiction creates new stories, the fan theory intends to further explain or develop existing stories; yet, the word "theory" belies its inherently fictional nature. Whilst these theories are derived from the existing fiction the fan is engaged with, these fictional facts, truths and histories experience much the same kind of mutation as the characters of fanfictions do.

This isn't to say that either fiction or theory are necessarily masculine/feminine pursuits, but rather this is meant to elucidate the gatekeeping that occurs around the conventionally masculine spaces of fandom compared to the relatively more open feminine spaces. Fanfiction community is certainly a (cyber)space which emerged in response to the gendered politics of masculine fandom; the splits of these communities can be traced back to the ideas of geek culture as a sphere inherently for men. Can we not say that the fan theory, as masculine counter-part to the feminine fanfiction, is rooted in this gatekeeping? It abandons character and emotional intuition for methodical, in-depth knowledge of lore, demanding a almost ideological purity from its participants. The discord between supposed feminine and masculine fan spaces can be seen through the response to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Particularly, in its final duel between (female) protagonist Rey and antagonist Kylo Ren.

The comments section of that video is representative of the majority male response. Masculine fandom seems generally more focused on the laws of the storyworld: Kylo receives training in the magic system, this training allows for better skills with the lightsaber and, therefore, he should not lose to the comparatively untrained Rey. The response of feminine fandom was different,  generally more focused on character: Kylo is at a disadvantage in the duel due to some post-patricide emotional turmoil and, therefore, has to lose to the comparatively focused, survivor Rey.

(On Star Wars, is it not telling that the male response to their disappointment in Star Wars: The Last Jedi was to seek funding for someone else to produce their fanfiction ideas? There is such a disdain for feminine elements of fandom, both in its texts and its practices, that the majority of male fans can't even conceive of engaging with the conventionally feminine spaces.)

So, in my work, one thing I was really keen on doing was to move my engagement away from feats, power levels and so on, instead taking a look at emotional, character-driven conflict. I felt it would be counter-intuitive to engage with the fanfiction space and not with its sentiment. Keeping in mind that I don't think I did a particularly good enough job on it, my fanfiction was primarily concerned with what happens to someone's relationship when their preferred method of communication is taken away from them (in that I was writing in response to a superhero text, that method was telepathy).

Something I'm particularly interested in is what I call Critical Fanfiction. Simply, fanfiction that works to change elements of its mothership text to pursue a author/audience resolution. On one level, sure, this is a pretty arbitrary and meaningless term. Most fanfiction serves as this: a fan may prefer Lord of the Rings if it was set in a coffee shop or if it had a crossover with the Game of Thrones franchise, for example. But there are deeper questions to be asked when the fanfiction goes beyond a fan's wish fulfilment and starts to resemble a form of fictionalised criticism of the text. When does slash fiction cease to be fantasy and morph into a critique of the author's heteronormative writing? When does the submissive reader morph into a critical one, and what does it say that this transformation occurs within the immersion of the text itself? A personal favourite discovery of mine has been the Harry Potter Becomes A Communist fanwork; is this not valuable as a response to the politics of J.K. Rowling and the ideas she injected into the franchise?

In our era of ubiquitous communication, this is reaching new, more torrid depths. Where the author once responded to fanfiction with hefty lawsuits, the author is now responding directly to criticism through social media, seeking to retroactively assert their own authorial primacy. Fanfiction is, I think, then a useful tool not merely to interrogate and view fan cultures and communities, but as an act with merit itself. It is caught in battles both between reader and author and between segmented communities. Moving between these masculine/feminine communities and being critical of the distinctions and separations can not only help transform fandom away from its toxicity, but could also see the return of fan praxis. Not the fan activism that seeks to pressure production companies into providing them with more content to consume, but an actual grassroots reclamation of intellectual labour and property. This, and fan studies/IP in general, is something I want to write about in more depth at a later date.

Briefly, I want to return to my place in this process though (and I do consider it an ongoing process). To the end of disrupting my gendered media consumption/participation, tonight I intend to finally sit down and watch Twilight. From its release and time in the spotlight to its eventual fading away, I participated in the vitriolic male response that held it in such disdain without ever seeing it. I think it's wrong to suggest this solely came from a disregard for media texts intended for young women (certainly, women themselves partook in Twilight-bashing), but I also think it's wrong to overlook the significance of it (Lindsay Ellis did a great video on this that you can see here). Do I expect to like it? Not particularly. I'm a long-time Buffyverse fan and have a very specific imagination when it comes to vampires because of that. Nevertheless, it will be valuable to finally form my own organic opinion about it and be able to move somewhat away from the reactionary frameworks that have oft clouded my perspectives as someone who at least pretends to engage with media critically.

"Homer Loves Mindy": Desire At A Distance In "The Last Temptation of Homer"

Keeping in the spirit of working through heady, philosophical topics through episodes of The Simpsons, I want to analyse the fifth episode of season nine, "The Last Temptation of Homer" through Lacanian desire. The character of Mindy Simmons, a new employee at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant (voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer), performs as such desire for Homer; threatening to disrupt his model nuclear family and his marriage with Marge. Since Lacan's writings on desire is quite a hefty topic and I envision this post to be on the shorter side, I want to look particularly at how Mindy, as the object of Homer's desire, exhibits Lacan's objet petit a.

Whilst the episode's B-Plot sees Bart transition from cool kid to bullied nerd because of some over-zealous private practitioners, the A-Plot of "The Last Temptation of Homer" launches from a safety mishap in the Nuclear Plant. This inciting incident, caused by a masculine disregard for safety protocol, characterises working at the plant as a sort of 'Men's Club'; setting the stage for Mindy Simmon's hiring and her intrusion on the masculine space. Homer, Lenny and Carl gather to lament their incoming castration, fearing that the arrival of a singular female worker will so totally disrupt their workplace atmosphere that certain masculine freedoms will be removed from them (be it taking off their pants, spitting on the floor or peeing in the water fountain). That male anxiety is soon abetted by her seamless integration into the workplace, but whilst the rest of his co-workers move on quick from this new element, Homer is smitten. For him, his encounter with Mindy is a moment of pure desire upon first sight and it is accompanied by humorous hallucinations.

"Hey, Homer, you're hallucinating again!" "Not a good sign."

The hallucinations (and later in the episode, dreams) are important to how the episode communicates Homer's desire for Mindy. It is within them that we see what the objet petit a is: an intangible, extra-natural quality that is the actual point of what we desire. Caviar, for example, is not desirable to us because of its intrinsic qualities, how it looks, how it smells, how it tastes, but is instead only desirable because of the multitudes of meanings that its physical form belies: if you eat caviar, you will have social status, you will be a connoisseur, a person of taste and so on. The objet petit a, though, is an entity that is permanently absent. In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, when discussing the Freudian character of the butcher's wife, who tells her husband that whilst she loves caviar, he must never buy it for her, Lacan wrote:

“You love mutton stew. You’re not sure you desire it. Take the experience of the beautiful butcher’s wife. She loves caviar, but she doesn’t want any. That’s why she desires it.” (1998: 249)

Importantly, the objet petit a does not actually exist. This is why when we finally attain what we desire it loses the metaphysical, theological quality, the objet petit a, which made what we desired desirable in the first place. Homer's hallucinations represent the fantastical excess of the objet petit a: his first feelings of desire towards Mindy are not grounded in material reality, but are rather concerned with such untraceable, intangible qualities.

"Ain't you never seen a naked chick riding a clam before?"

Later in the episode, an interjecting dream sequence depicts Homer's Guardian Angel (who takes the form of Colonel Klink from Hogan's Heroes) showing the difference between the world where he stays with Marge and the world where he instead pursues a relationship with Mindy. Rather than this being a undesirable world though, it is quite the opposite. Not only are Homer and Mindy together, rich and happy, but Marge is the President of the United States, and her "approval rate is soaring". Here we see Homer's unconscious fantasy, that his affair would not only bring him a selfish, short-term happiness, but long-term happiness for himself, Mindy and Marge. But it is a fantasy of which there must be no attempt at realisation. Homer's desire for Mindy is based on the idea that his life, and that lives around him, would improve. To bring that to reality would only expose his desire as a farce, as reality can never live up to the fantasy.

 "Think unsexy thoughts. Think unsexy thoughts."

One of the great strengths of this episode is how Mindy is never shown to be some kind of disruptive, evil woman, a seductress with the explicit aim of destroying the nuclear family; she's given a nice bit of humanity. Meanwhile Marge has very little presence in the episode and even in the dream sequence exposing her potential, alternate life as President, she's only heard from off-screen. Unlike an episode like "Colonel Homer" (S3E20), where a conflict between Homer/Marge is clearly apparent, the story here is not a story about how awful Homer's life is and how he needs an outlet to assuage his mid-life crisis, but rather a story that is concerned with those tumultuous, sudden moments of desire that simultaneously manage to feel essential to our being and completely alien from us.

In Lacan's formulation, the act of desire is not a desire for just one thing (be it a person, food or whatever item you may desire), but is always a desire for desire itself. It's a wholesome sight when Homer returns to Marge at the episode's end and the relief an audience feels is made all the more tangible by how close it seemed Homer had come to pursuing a life with Mindy, instead of persisting with his marriage. Yet, can we not say that this was actually the true calamity? In that, were he to pursue his relationship with Mindy, he would realise she lacks that objet petit a and would realise that his fantasy did not exist in reality. That he returned to Marge has meant that, whilst he ostensibly loves his wife, he has also liberated himself to fantasise about Mindy ad infinitum. In this sense, Homer doesn't want what he thinks he wants, rather he wants to sustain the very act of wanting. By returning to Marge, he frees himself up to desire and fantasise about Mindy with no fear of reprisal. That is, on one level, he no longer has to concern himself with the deterioration of his marriage because of Mindy, but, further, his decision to keep his object of desire at a distance means that he never has to worry about the destructive convergence of his fantasy and reality. By not committing adultery on that one night, Homer frees himself to wander, lust and cheat on Marge every night, in his dreams and unconscious fantasies.

As a final point, I'd look to the scene where Homer and Mindy are eating dinner together at a fancy, romantic Chinese restaurant called Madame Chao's. After dinner, Homer opens a fortune cookie, it read: "You will find happiness with a new love".

"Hey, we're out of these "New Love" cookies." "Well, open up the "Stick With Your Wife" barrel."

This is a notion that Lacan would reject. Rather, we find happiness within our very distance from the objects we believe will make us happy. Desire is a Sisyphean phenomenon where the actual attainment of what we desire is one of life's most morose experiences. That Homer rejects the cookie's advice is telling; we will not find happiness with a new love.


Lacan, J. (1998). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. London: Vintage.