Dark Days: Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court

(Picture Credit: The Financial Times)

This morning, Lady Hale read out the judgment of the Supreme Court, that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen that Parliament should be prorogued was unlawful. While I’m sure that many folks on the liberal and left were bouncing with delight and glee, later, as I sat in the café hearing Jeremy Corbyn, the Great White Hope, attaching himself to yet another seemingly populist cause of dissent, calling out, to rapturous applause, that the Prime Minister should resign, I could not see it as anything but another chapter in an ongoing calamity. As a perennially contrarian antagonist and agitator, I’m the last person to vote in favour of the maintenance of the status quo, but I couldn’t help thinking of the dark days ahead.

The decision of the Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament in the midst of the Brexit fiasco was questionable to say the least. At a time when we are approaching major upheaval as regards the future of the United Kingdom in the international sphere, to not have our elected representatives out there doing their best to secure a deal and create the foundations for a viable future is very foolish. Indeed, the case is particularly complicated over here in Northern Ireland. When we should be looking for viable solutions to the Irish border problem, Arlene Foster, the leader of our backwards ruling party the DUP, seems to be more content to pull the wool over our eyes with an illusion all wrapped up in symbolism, discussing with the Prime Minister a proposed bridge between Ardoyne and Scotland which, let’s face it, if this most ridiculous plan does come to fruition, will probably end up like The Bridge On The River Kwai, either by way of dastardly Republicans or the unexploded World War II torpedoes in the Irish Sea. Like that of President Herr Trump’s Great Wall Of Mexico, this grand image is, in essence, highfalutin hullabaloo, nonexistent vapour designed to distract from the issues at hand.

Still, despite my opposition to the parasites and crooks that primarily constitute, stinking up hallowed halls as their greasy sweat sticks to the leathered seats they so lazily stretch and sprawl themselves across while discussing the fate of the peons, I cannot jubilate in this decision. Some will celebrate it as an example of democracy coming through, as our politicians will sit once again on Wednesday, but I cannot. Our democracy has long since been sabotaged. Any semblance of the concept or the idea, the fundamentals behind what the word ‘democracy’ means are lies and the bedrock, source of manipulation from which these charlatans function, use as their base of operations. It will be business as usual as they continue doing nothing to institute change, real, positive change for the betterment of our nation’s inhabitants.

As the old man grumbled in the café while I listened to Corbyn’s declaration in my left ear over the loudspeakers on the radio, “I’ve never heard the likes of it,” I was uncertain as to where he lay, but I knew that whatever way it was a negative statement.

If Prime Minister Boris Johnson does or is forced to resign he will be adopted by the increasingly prominent extreme-right. As we have seen in the case of fringe figures such as Jayda Fransen and Tommy Robinson, everybody loves a martyr, and playing victim to the press in the name of ‘freedom of speech,’ perhaps accompanied by a picture with duck tape over their mouths, it serves to increase discontent. Instead of being a case of democracy, justice being served, these individuals, with their twisted, perverted logic will force themselves to see only what they want to see, that Boris Johnson was screwed out of doing right by the British people. Thankfully though, the plus side of this current brand of the far-right is they are a fairly jumbled bunch who create scenes, mere acts of provocation rather than anything lacking in legitimate meaning. The most dangerous thing about fascism is that it has a philosophy, and this lot are much too lacking in intelligence to be able to capitalise on that base, core simplicity, overloading their senses and sending their brains akimbo by behaving like a bunch of boors and louts. They couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery, much less an armed militia.

The left seem, on the surface, to have been doing a better job of it. Jeremy Corbyn has slowly been building himself into the figurehead they so desperately want, and a number of different organisations operate on a grassroots level, working diligently and patiently to win over supporters. However, I still can’t help but feel that, like Sinn Fein over here, the Labour Party across the water has too many dirty little secrets, the only difference being that while the Tories are playing out their dramas in public, Labour are keeping things close to the bone, inhouse, closed doors, or rather under several gag orders. The presentation they want everyone to see is that of a strong, unified front, but I suspect that behind the scenes there is something nasty and wicked lurking. Furthermore, the mass movements concern themselves more in creating a festival atmosphere of drinking and partying than any legitimate shock to the system, a glowing smiley-face emoji in place of the face of anger, not forgetting to get their sweeping wide-shots all over social media. Such is the nature of 21^st century protest.

Not everyone gets into politics on the basis of ulterior motives, but over time, unfortunately, most of these people lose sight of what brought them to the dance. They compromise their visions, let themselves go, fall in line with everyone else. Raising their feet in a ninety-degree arc, swinging arms together as they march like party animals, all original thoughts thrown to the wayside, lying dead in a ditch as a passing car splashes dirty mud water from a puddle on their carcass.

“He loved Big Brother.”

We stand on the precipice of a period of great uncertainty, and nobody has a clue what to do.

And yet, there is still hope. When I see people like Greta Thunberg, the courageous sixteen-year old activist who is travelling the world to enlighten people on the risks of climate change, I am inspired. It says something about the state of things when it takes someone like this to stand up fearlessly in front of The Big People and give them what for, take no prisoners and aim for the gullet. I bought a collection of her speeches, No One Is To Small To Make A Difference, earlier this year, and I’d urge everyone to pick up a copy. It’s inner-eye/mind-opening stuff. Of course, I worry. Already, the truth hurts too much for some. I have seen the writing on the wall in the rhetoric adopted by those who attack Thunberg. I don’t even like saying it, lest the suggestion has some sort of trickle affect along the psychic bond  shared among all individuals, but the state is crazy and messed up enough as it is that I would not be surprised is someone attempted to assassinate her, and all because she has the guts to say what needs to said, has the will to address what we refuse to admit. People might say, “oh, no, nobody would stoop so low,” but as history proves, our capacity to willingly commit such acts knows no bounds.

I hate to be the doomsayer, to have such a borderline apocalyptic worldview. I see it in my dreams when I sleep, the film pulled back revealing things to me, but for years we have been coming towards the edge. We are on the peak of history. On every single day that passes we are effecting change. The plural duality, aspect of humankind, we’re split one of two ways, either to save the race, fighting against the death-wish, the sex-death instinct, compulsive love of self-destruction, or going with it, wittingly or otherwise, letting ourselves plunge into the abyss.

Bubbles rise to the surface of the water as the kettle boils, brewing. The tension builds. We could be fighting in the streets, descend into chaos when what we is need order and stability. I worry, I fear for the future of our world, not my own.

But that is one possible future.

At risk of sounding like I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid, humanity has a strange and wonderful knack of surviving. In my heightened states of mind I imagine all possibilities operating on respective planes simultaneously, and yet the one I gravitate towards sees us transcending, crossing over, break on through to the other side.

Although we may have dark days ahead, I have no doubt that we will pass this crisis, walk forward, moving, in our way, learning, understanding, to live long, love our world and one another.

The Retch Effect - Ideas and Content in Extreme Cinema

Recently, for the first time I watched Gaspar Noe's 2002 film Irreversible. Associated with the movement of cinema du corps (cinema of the body), more popularly known as the New French Extremity, which has gained prominence since the turn of the 21st century. Highly controversial upon initial release, while featuring graphic violence and being constructed in an unconventional fashion, it is the extended ten-minute sequence at it's centrepiece, in which Monica Bellucci's character Alex is brutally raped and beaten in a long take, that has continued to live on in notoriety. It is an excruciating scene, and as I was watching it I felt physically sick and began dry-heaving, several times coming close to turning it off because I was so revolted at the suffering I was witnessing I thought I might not be able to continue. However, as horrific as it is, I was glad I saw the film through to the end, as within the cerebral experimentation I knew I was watching a picture quite unlike any I had ever seen. Weeks later, as time goes on I'm still thinking about the film, and while others may disagree (it has a mixed reception of 57% on Rotten Tomatoes), some quite vehemently, I do believe it to be a masterpiece. It got me thinking,

"What other works of art have elicited similar such emotional responses?"

Without focusing on art as a wider whole (if I did that, I'd be going so far as to include Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son), I am going to focus specifically on the genre of film known as Extreme Cinema.

So, what is extreme cinema?

The history of extreme cinema originates alongside the censorship of art films, exploitation pictures, the liberalisation of depictions of sexuality in the late-20th century, and excessive violence and torture. The term itself comes from the growth in the early-21st century of Asian films, specifically those of South Korea and Japan (the former UK distributor Tartan marketed a number of these films under the Tartan Asia Extreme label, giving many of them their most widespread releases), although Japan in particular was exploring these avenues for some decades before with the pinku eiga. American cinema also had it's ventures with the rape and revenge picture, the slasher and the splatter genres, and Italian has a historic tradition of genre cinema, but the extreme side came along in the seventies with the giallo and the cannibal film. These pictures are often a source of debate among film fans and film critics, some even going as far as rankling the ire of the political establishment (infamously, Ruggero Deodato, after initial charges of obscenity, had them amended to include multiple charges of murder in relation to his 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust, only being cleared by the courts after having to prove that the actors were not legitimately killed onscreen).

Being a person who engages in a physical fashion to the stimulus around me through my senses and my intellect, this particular reaction probably says as much about myself as it does the works in question. "The Retch Effect," as I refer to it, is when I am driven by such an instinctive, gut impulse that my whole body surges towards this sickness that has me sounding like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. There are only a couple of other films I can recall having conjured up such a response:

1. Audition - Takashi Miike's film is one I have hailed for many years. I place it prominently among my ten favourite films of all time and feel there's a strong argument for it being perhaps the greatest horror film of all time (the other half of that argument goes to George A. Romero's Night Of The Living Dead). Despite having seen it around a decade ago and holding it in such high esteem, I have only returned to it maybe three or four times since. The first time I saw it I dug my hands into a cushion so hard that the imprints of my fingers were left there days after. There are a couple of key scenes which produced this reaction.

2. Eraserhead - I am a big fan of David Lynch, but only in the past few years did I watch Eraserhead for the first time (on a side note, it was very important in the process of writing my debut novel, Cat's Miaow). Since then, I have watched five or six times, and no matter how much I may appreciate the craftsmanship of the picture and the strangely beautiful way in which the story unfolds, at the film's climax I am always brought forth towards the dry-heaves. The reaction is always the same, to the point that even before I get there I can already start feeling my body building itself towards that horrific denouement. There's something so personal there in the pain which just drives home in a traumatic manner.

The question from here is that if I can react in such a way to some works, why not so to other works, some even more extreme in their content?

While I would by no means proclaim myself an expert, I do watch a fair degree of tough movies, and go out of my way to seek the films which, for better or worse, have pushed the boundaries of acceptability in cinema. However, despite the fact that their content might be considered extreme, I fail to respond in such a manner and they do not stay with me apart from the fact I have a knowledge that I do not feel I have gained anything of real significance from having seen them. Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper is one I always come back to, as any potential qualities it has get lost in a muddled tone that is, if not intentional, then certainly openly misogynistic and homophobic. Eli Roth's Hostel is a laughably bad picture that did nothing for me as a teenager, and I can only imagine that years of hardened cynicism and all-round grumpiness won't make it any better. A sad case is Tom Six, whose first two Human Centipede films, while not being great works of art, were good pieces of trash cinema that delivered exactly what it said on the tin, while his magnum opus, the orgiastic Gotterdammerung that was Human Centipede 3 was an outrageously self-indulgent piece of ego-stroking. And people get angry at Lars Von Trier! Even the multiplexes have been invade. Look at The Hangover Part II. Admittedly, I didn't like any of them, but this was a Fulci-level exploitation film wrapped up in the guise of comedy. The same can be said for Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. These are big, loud, brash and bombastic pictures which are essentially exploitation pictures dressed up as big-budget blockbusters.

From here, comes another question: apart from me getting slightly cross, why was it that these films had to little to no effect?

It is because they lack any central ideas. I forget if this is the exact quote (I'm not just being lazy, I did try to research it) but I believe it is from the Mademoiselle in Pascal Laugier's 2008 film Martyrs: "the most frightening thing about pain is that it has a philosophy." The same can be said for the film itself. Although featuring some of the most savage brutality ever committed to cinema, Martyrs is a film in which all of the violence has meaning (which is more than can be said for the glut of torture porn and found footage grot plaguing cinemas) and I would argue is the crown jewel of New French Extremity. Speaking of Lars Von Trier, the same can be said for Antichrist. In his best film to date, through the committed performances of lead actors Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe he creates a telling work on trauma, heartbreak and mental illness. The oeuvre of David Cronenberg, most specifically his body horror work and adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Crash, all have something under the surface that engages on a level beyond that of simple revulsion. Cast the net back to earlier works such as Pasolini's Salo, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell's The Devils, and all of these are made by artists at the peak of their craft doing something of great merit or meaning. Even in cinema's relative infancy, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's 1929 short Un Chien Andalou, featuring one of the most disturbing images in cinema history, that of a woman's eye being sliced open with a razor, is designed around dream logic, Freudian free-association and the psychological implications it has on the viewer. These are no mere provocateurs.

Content alone will not truly get under the skin of the viewer. Otherwise it is without meaning. Rather, it is the ideas behind the content that make a particular work disturbing. It is not enough to simply splash such extremities up on the screen in a lurid and exploitative manner that indulges in a subconscious craving towards violence and objectification. The depiction and portrayal of extreme content should be executed in a manner in which the viewer, while not necessarily deriving enjoyment in the classical sense, should have gained something, learning from the ideas presented to them by the overall experience. While perception is indeed in the eye of the beholder, it is the artist's responsibility to get across their message and aim to deliver something of meaning,

thus, the ideas behind the content.