Who is left to defend Love Island? As the sixth series has dwindled to its conclusion, its final weeks have perhaps been mired by controversy more so than ever before. The tragic death of former host Caroline Flack lingers over the final episodes, transforming the trashy, guilty pleasure into a true exercise in guilt, only now with no corresponding pleasure. The deeply uncomfortable ‘tribute’ episode may have opened with a sombre, reflective eulogy in place of a witty recap, but that which followed played out exactly the same as any other episode, with the same tone and the same sardonic commentary as ever. Bar the tribute to Flack, it was, in fact, the exact same episode that was pulled from air after the news of her death broke. Jarring is certainly an understatement. It has left the remainder of the series limping to the finish line, but tonight’s finale will see its young, not-so angsty contestants participate in a climactic ritual to wash away people’s cynicism, albeit temporarily.
Flack’s replacement, Laura Whitmore, will enter the villa and whichever couple has enamoured themselves most in the eyes of the public will then be faced with one final challenge: Will they split their cash prize with their Love Island partner, or will they steal the full amount, no doubt dumping their partner in the process?
Last year's winners face their Split/Steal dilemma.
It is, admittedly, less of a challenge, and more of a formality, as over the past five years, no contestant has managed to channel enough pure chaotic energy to gift us with the TV moment that we all secretly yearn for. As such we have to ask: is stealing the £50K even possible?
Yes, yes, the prize money is paltry in comparison to what their minor celebrity status will bestow upon them in the show’s aftermath, and perhaps marking themselves as a villain will remove some financial viability to their post-show careers (though how much I do wonder…). Maybe there is, in fact, a moral line some are unwilling to cross. There are valid reasons contestants simply wouldn't want to steal the money. Still, reasoning such as this belies the specific function the ‘choice’ and prize money serve in the show’s design: it is not that the cash money is a lesser prize, it is that it is no prize at all. The money has to be forsaken as a final legitimisation of the performance of love. Perhaps their attraction has seemed false, perhaps we do not believe their confessions of love, but by refusing the prize money they have allowed selfless love to conquer over personal self-interest and we, the audience, can now believe in them unironically. Even more than this, after having restored or encouraged our faith in the (now-deserved) winning couple, the choice justifies the series as a wider product.
It functions as our one true moment of ‘romance’; the dates and the gestures which precede it, where couples enact bizarre proposal scenarios simply to make their coupling official, constitute only a surrealist performance of romance. It is not one which we are expected to engage seriously with. It is a show put on for the audience, not representative of these character’s own truths. But, in this final, guaranteed story beat, Love Island itself is orientated away from pleasing the court of public opinion and into the gauging of love’s authenticity. You are allowed to doubt the show at any point except this. Everything up until this moment can be faked, scripted, overly edited or staged, but this has to be read as authentic. Going back to the earlier seasons we can see this more explicitly; we should recall that in place of the 50K envelope there was instead a Golden Balls-esque decision between ‘Love’ and ‘Money’. The key assumption being that the former was as material and as quantifiable as the latter. Is it not true that were someone to elect not to split the cash then the show would cease to be Love Island? It is an option never to be picked: freedom of choice, so long as you choose correctly.
Then, let us imagine that tonight one of our darling 20-somethings is revealed to have been a Machiavellian gameplayer all along. What do we expect to actually happen? The audience will jeer, Laura Whitmore will swoon and, no doubt, the heartbroken partner’s face will melt as if they had looked into the Ark of the Covenant. The producers will panic, frantically attempting to reconcile their celebratory tone with the anti-romantic horror taking place in front of their cameras. The same planned music may well play or, perhaps, the final episode of Love Island will fade out with awkward silence. Some days of media furore will follow, as each tabloid rushes to abandon any lesson they might have learned from the maltreatment of Flack to hound winner and loser, villain and victim, alike.
And, once the winner is sat back home, checking their mobile banking app, they would see not a deposit of £50K, but a deposit of £25K, twice.
Spoilers Follow. Weathering With You (Original Title: Tenki no ko), Makoto Shinkai's 2019 follow-up to his preceding mega-hit Your Name (Original Title: Kimi no Na wa), is much more effective as spectacle and viewing experience than it ever is as a film. It should come as little surprise to those familiar with Shinkai's previous work that the production values are stellar, but fans of Your Name may find this new story to be an overall less affecting affair. Your Name was, of course, such a sweeping, international phenomenon that Weathering With You begs comparison to its predecessor. The film itself does little to dissuade this. It is clearly set-up as a spiritual successor to Your Name (and, as eagle-eyed fans have noticed, as a pseudo-sequel as well), and similarities between the two frequent: they are both bildungsroman, coming-of-age stories, both depict characters moving from the country into Tokyo, both feature light fantasy elements, stunning animation and music by Radwimps. There is a tragic loss, that is promptly undone in time for a happy ending. Weathering With You goes through these motions by way of a romance between Hodoka, a runaway, and Hina, a young orphan girl with the fantastical power of atmokinesis, of weather manipulation. Hijinks ensue.
Shinkai's films are often praised as timeless, or ageless, or whatever superfluous adjective confers his work rewatchability, yet I think they are rather the opposite. Whilst there is a universal romance to them, both Your Name and Weathering With You are expressly concerned with contemporary youth anxiety. This film, in particular, addresses the relationship between Generation Z and the environment- more specifically, the lack of any such relationship. Reflecting Japanese youth apathy to ecological disaster, the anthropocene takes a backseat in the lives of our focal young protagonists. Instead, for much of the film, it is the police, perhaps repressive society at large, who are depicted as the antagonistic force and enemy of young people. The police are repeatedly shown as inadequate, foolish and incompetent; frequently harassing the undeserved, at one point prioritising the pursuit of runaway children over the prosecution of a paedophile; incapable of performing their jobs, as they are repeatedly outwitted and outran by children; and, as you would expect, are proven wholly ignorant of the grander, fantastical elements at play. It is in resistance to the police that the core family of runaways is both formed and lost, and it is the abdication of ecological responsibility that allows the family's return at the film's climax.
For the majority of the film, nature is quite playful: it affects mood, rain makes people miserable and the clearing of the sky alleviates it. Hina can bring temporary relief from the rain, at the cost of a later, heavier downpour, something which the entrepreneurial youths utilise to charm the Tokyo citizenry out of their cash. Only in the film's epilogue is nature's destructive potential played out. Offscreen, in a time-skip. Refusing to sacrifice Hina to restore typical weather behaviour, rain continues to fall until half of Tokyo is submerged entirely in water. Typing it out makes it sound like such an obviously disastrous outcome, but this is presented to us as a happy ending. With half the city drowned, the film's resolution is one of its biggest curiosities.
If we perhaps view the character of Hina as representative of the anthropocene, as it is her atmokinetic powers which incur the calamitous weather conditions and her sacrifice which abates them, her decision to prioritise herself is pseudo-Randian; with the world pushing down on her shoulders, she shrugs. It's unexpectedly provocative material from Shinkai, considering the film is a mostly lightweight affair. One particular piece of dialogue resonates: "Who cares if we can't see any sunshine? I want you more than any blue sky." Hodoka confesses this to Hina at the film's climax, declaring defiantly that human will and human love should be prioritised over the relationship between people and nature.
Were the ending played differently, it would seem that the film is condemning a selfish, lackadaisical youth. But, in the film, there is no tragedy or horror to the ending. Life in Underwater Tokyo is presented as an undeniable improvement, as businesses expand, city infrastructure adapts and hopeful optimism abounds in the populace. For a film that starts off seemingly sympathetic to the vagabond, this ending shows little to no curiosity as to the wider effects of the lovers decision on the poorest of the city. Real world climate change, of course, will not affect us all in the same way: whilst the older, richer citizen is able to move out of her drowned house into high-rise apartments, many poorer people would be unable to do so. The mass displacement of people in the event of such a calamity would be a humanitarian crisis, not to mention the potential loss of life that may well have occurred in the transformation of Tokyo into Atlantis. The notion that the film's ecological disaster can be accepted as a return to the natural order actually serves as little comfort in this light. The anthropocene eventually rolling back is hardly something to look forward to, so long as the 'anthropo' still walks the Earth.
As such, it is a very strange film to view in 2020. It presents us a narrative wholly concerned with ecological calamity, but not with its prevention; the total antithesis of the messages of Extinction Rebellion, the Climate Strike and likely many of this year's Oscar acceptance speeches. In an otherwise easily consumed, whimsical fantasy, the ending proves a bitter pill to swallow. It must be said that, for all my gripes, it has certainly been the point where I've been most forced to grapple with the film, and its wider meaning. I do wonder if my failure to enjoy the ending is rooted in the void between Japanese youth sentiments towards ecological disaster and my own, Westernised perspective. As defeatist as it is, the suggestion that we (and young people, specifically) are actually powerless in the face of climate disaster may be closer to the truth than we'd like to admit. And maybe, if that is the case, then narratives of hope in the aftermath of climate calamity are a necessary, if unfortunate, tonic, to the rhetoric that suggests that our failure to prevent climate change signals the end of our species and planet.
Nevertheless, where I found the story unwieldy and alienating compared to Your Name's triumphant melodrama, I felt the animation and music were clearly of the same, if not higher, calibre. When Shinkai said that he found himself disappointed with Your Name, feeling that the studio hadn't managed to push the potential of the animation far enough and deeming the film "incomplete", I was shocked. My puny, prosaic brain couldn't imagine something surpassing Your Name, at the time. Weathering With You must have been what he was envisioning. How many films can you think of where one of the most startling sequences features someone eating a Big Mac? Where you will gladly watch long sequences of just rain, because each and every drop is stunning? Everything from sequences of food preparation to the sequences of Hina's atmokinesis are rendered with a level of care and dedication that makes nearly every frame desktop wallpaper material. The score and J-Rock musical accompaniments from Radwimps are of similar quality. It imbues the film with kinetic energy when it needs to, whilst never missing an emotional beat. Whilst some of the deployment of the J-Rock songs may be questionable, particularly with regards to the aforementioned offbeat ending, the songs themselves are a lot of fun.
Roger Ebert once referred to animation, particularly Japanese anime, as a form which "releases the imagination so fully that it can enhance any story, and it can show sights that cannot possibly exist in the real world." Weathering With You lives up to that potential and embodies spectacle-film in its purest. As the screening ended, I felt a sensation that this is what cinemas are still here for. Now, wide-release of international cartoons are not going to solve the woes of every dwindling multiplex or just-holding-on indie venue, but if you want an example of a film experience that cannot be simulated outside of a cinema, look no further.
I'm interested in seeing this film again! It just also seems like a crime to see it on any smaller screen. I don't want to watch it on my laptop screen, which I've never been able to get fully clean for very long, nor do I want to watch it on my TV, with its cluster of dead pixels in the bottom right. I want to see every detail of the animation blown to gargantuan proportions. I may be satisfied if we could screen it on the White Cliffs of Dover, but nothing less than that. That the film has received such a limited UK release is a deep shame. Everyone deserves to be able to see films like this on the biggest screen possible.
In school, I was a massive, embarrassing crybaby. If someone looked at me the wrong way, if a teacher shouted at me or even if I just wasn't receiving enough attention that day I was liable to burst into tears. Yet, for all that sensitivity, I rarely cried at movies. Or books. Or music. Or video games. I didn't really laugh along with comedies and never found horrors all that horrifying. And whilst I still had a deep love for the stories I engaged with, that love was logical and cold. More obsessional than sincere.
Nowadays I cry about 'real' life considerably less. In those terms, in matters solely relating to my own personal experiences, I can think of just one time I was reduced to tears in the past five years. And I was drunk, besides. It would seem that maybe I've totally closed myself off, or gone numb, or just finally grown up. Yet those tears do still come. Only now it is the slightest moment of sentimentality in an episode of The Simpsons that can have me blubbering for minutes on end. Some of the moments when tears have decided to flow have left me incredulous; seemingly mundane, unimpressive shows of hope, optimism and love.
Recently, the media experience that affected me in such a way was during my play-through of Kingdom Hearts 3. I was roughly a year late to the party, but still found myself moved by its sincere performance of the inner goodness of all, the possibility for everyone to be redeemed. Reflecting back, it's almost a sickly sweet idea. But, hey, it worked at the time.
As it turns out, brutal authenticity is the theme of this post.
For those who don't know, the Kingdom Hearts franchise consists of a video games, movies and complex depicting a crossover between the intellectual properties of Square Enix and Disney. Angsty emo teens partake in anime-esque battles alongside Donald Duck, Goofy and Mickey Mouse. It is exactly as absurd and surreal as it sounds. It is that precise absurdity that places the series as a premier space from which to unpack nostalgic sentimentality; this is a franchise most shrewdly and conspicuously designed for you to purchase your childhood back. You might go as far as to say that Kingdom Hearts is one of the preeminent commodities of postmodern capitalism, but people would probably call you boring if you did so.
Throughout the game, you play as Sora, or some other spiky-haired protagonist, chasing after an ill-described macguffin (In KH3, this is the 'power of waking', which apparently isn't just an alarm clock) through the worlds of different Disney movies. Your true goal, of course, is to make the casts of these films happy. It is a simple joy. Dance with Tangled's Rapunzel, take selfies with Toy Story's Buzz and Woody, inexplicably yeet yourself off a mountain because Elsa told you to and so on. The game empowers you to fulfil the happy endings of the movies you loved growing up.
A scene from Kingdom Hearts 2 depicting what I can only describe as 'Goth Mickey'.
So it's a deeply nostalgic experience and its emotional resonance seems indubitably rooted in that nostalgia. Only here we hit upon a certain complication. I wasn't a Disney child. I wasn't even a Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy child. The vast majority of this content I only experienced for the first time two years ago. It may well be nostalgic. But it isn't for me. So why did its follow-up garner from me such a visceral, emotional response?
Of course, no doubt part of it was down to the craft of the game itself. It is good. Really good. The music is heavenly and the fact that the ostensible third game in the series is actually something like the ninth does hold you somewhat emotionally hostage. But that aforementioned delight in optimism, the joy of experiencing a happy ending for a change (you will note that I am writing a blog post about a video game, and not the ongoing Labour Leadership Election), still stops somewhat short of an adequate explanation for me. I feel that it is in the delivery of this sentimentality as much as the message itself. Similar to the viewing of Disney movies themselves, playing Kingdom Hearts is a practice in infantile regression. In that the player willingly takes on the role of a childlike actor and experiences nostalgia not in the literal sense, but as a genre unto itself: we aren't so much feeling the pain of a past that we can never return to, so much as we are entering into that past for the first time.
And is this nostalgia genre not what we are endlessly barraged with, in multiplexes and on streaming services? Texts we know are nostalgic before we partake in them, concerning brands and experiences that we have no investment in. It seems that a key feature of nostalgia today is that the nostalgic text professes to exist, regardless of your own personal investment in it. Perhaps, Star Wars was the seminal moment for this genre. Perhaps this is some inherent form of human storytelling. Still, I think most of us can tell there is some difference between George Lucas' nostalgic pulp space opera and J.J. Abrams' Star Wars by way of Star Wars.
Whilst I'm not interested in blanket-disparaging escapist fantasy, there is a danger in this wider nostalgia-qua-genre, both in that it's a creative dead end of glorified reruns and in that nostalgic experiences like KH3 are perhaps too sweet, too optimistic, provide too much hope. These are naturally not inherently bad qualities, but in so far as that these sentiments are directed not towards our future lives, or our present conditions, but to our non-existent pasts, they keep our imaginations dull and limited: to hope is the infantile fantasy of Disney movies and video games.
I'm now posed with the exceedingly difficult question of how to end this blog post without adulating the inherent cynicism in these products, without talking down, even betraying, my own personal experiences. Sure, I could lie and say that I've only ever been moved by old social realism films, and that cheap sentimentality produced by unconquerable media corporations has no effect on me, but what would be the point? Instead, I think I'm just going to go and cook a meal with my friend, Remy. The rat chef. From Ratatouille.
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 gialliSuspiria (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.
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.
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.
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.
