"MARIE
ANTOINETTE"
I had no
strong preconceptions of this film, but there are large areas of coincidence
between my daughter's tastes and mine, so off we went, 150 kms. to the nearest
large town where we could find it playing. Utterly unexpectedly, I spent the
next 118 minutes in tears or close to it. Nor was I just having an emotional
day. The next three viewings produced the same result - the experiment was
reproducible.
It's not much
consolation for the makers that one day this film will be taught in film
school. There is a correlation though for its patchy public, and critical,
reception – anybody doing anything important or wonderful these days, is on
their own. Maybe it's always been like that. Whether it's the Effect of Forest
Clearance on Rainfall, or the Music of Fela Kuti, you are the only person in
the whole Solar System peddling it, and your audience will stare at you like a
dog that's just been shown a card trick. So, there was a
big difference of opinions about “Marie Antoinette”. Either ten stars or one,
and not many of the ten. It's not your standard plot-driven film, and I think
this takes care of some of the one-stars. Some people would no doubt have been
pointed the wrong way, looking at the side wall for 2 hours perhaps - heavens,
in a mass society, intelligent people can be as stupid as anyone else. Who
knows. The Dog & Card-Trick is definitely one of the Weird Phenomena of our
times.
To appreciate
the film, it would be a help to have experienced a good rock concert at least
once in your life. It would also be a big help to appreciate paintings,
architecture, trees, dress. I'm not making excuses for the one-stars - but a
taste for van Damme is not a big help here. And so the first time I saw it, I
was in tears for most of the time, not because of the inevitable historical
ending, which I found I was able to forget about, but because the thing was so
beautiful - every square centimetre of every shot, and there's a lot of shots.
This is extraordinary even amongst 'painterly' film makers, but Sofia Coppola
using Versailles was one of the tremendous features of the story and film -
Doing the Obvious Thing being one of the symptoms of genius.
There is
drama through the entire film, but it's the perfectly sustained drama of a
great rock and roll concert where all the pieces - moments, moves, dress,
lighting, poses, music - float with perfect and equal poise, knit together by
what ? Style, energy, the 'moment' - something that may not even have a name.
That's fine and right too – it's music, it's film; a lot of it escapes the net
of words. There are dramatic moments in the film, but they are optical - the
opening of a flower in a cup of tea, a fish on a platter, a spreading tree, a
facade suffused by the setting sun, an elephant, fireworks. The film moves like
a river, until, in what seems like three awful steps, it goes over the falls,
leaving us with the blinding reflection of the sun off the lake, for all that
Once Was Beautiful.
The intensity
of those times in recent cultural history where fun and innocence have held
sway – the 60's, or more recent party seasons – have often made for great
music, but only very occasionally unforgettable films. “24 Hour Party People”
in part, and then you have to go to “Yellow Submarine” - or something.
Generally the moods that were the '60's, or the ecstasy generation, have
spawned almost nothing except music, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, and
bits of movies - which usually turn sour in the end. One of the most potent of
social upheavals is not reproduceable in the literate media, and so leaves a
strange lack of trace. Sofia Coppola is one of the very few to nail it, with
one of those things that rock is great at – the swan-song.
Kirsten
Dunst's sweet and wry is one of the faces of today's and tomorrow's parties.
It's a good face, and take on the world. It knows about the bad stuff, but will
be delighted with the good nevertheless. Her artless acting is a key to the
tone of the whole film - the artless singing of Annabella Lwin of Bow Wow Wow,
in “Fools Rush In”, the artless carelessness of accents – which makes
impossible the blunders of continuity or characterisation of dogged, 'serious'
acting. (It helps mind you, that these artless actors are very good actors.)
The much-criticised 'unreflective' attitude is precisely the point of the film.
Studied is often Contrived, Unreflective is often Grace, even - paradoxically -
at the Petit Trianon.
It helps the
seamlessness of the film that the director seems to have telepathic
communication with a phenomenal, largely French, Art Department. The entrance
of Marie Antoinette, stepping out of the French side of the tent, in the pale
blue dress with the off-centre hat, is just the first moment of visual, rock
and roll drama. You almost expect her to break into “Sweet Jane”. At this point
it should have been obvious to everybody that this film was going to demand of
us a different set of responses than the standard historical or plot-driven
movie.
Le Petit
Trianon is the state of grace of the Party Season. The delightfully flippant
wit - “I love your hairdo – what's going on there ?” / “Oh the chickens are out
– fabulous !” may not have endeared the film to the “serious” critics. It's
wonderfully ironic that these negative critics are also themselves
demographically First-World - affluent, shop-a-holic, middle-class,
self-indulgent and 'me-generation'. We never like our faults in others. Many of
them, oddly, knocked the film for not being a historical narrative, which its
body language never promised for a second, although it probably got a lot of
the atmospherics perfectly. You might as well knock it for not being a
documentary on penguins. Even those that liked it, seemed to miss the point at
just about every opportunity. Can these people find no other work ?
The distorted
grimaces of the Court, turned into those of the movie-industry Court at Cannes,
whose weird features morphed further - into the faces of the mob calling for
the head of Sofia Coppola. Great art affects external reality, plays with
synchronicity, mirrors the times. Again, a demonstration that we sail on a Ship
of Fools, and of course the good cliché – as so many are - that major work is
rarely well received in its time.
In the final
act, like the hero of a formal tragedy, Marie Antoinette grows up. She faces
her duty. Much like the account of these events in “An Adventure” - a real
ghost story - the light-and-shade contrast disappears, the colours fade, the
cast thins out, then darkness, with a final flash of glorious light. Et In
Arcadia Ego.
If the decade
produces another film as affecting, it will have exceeded its contractual
obligation.
Posted by William Cobbett at 8:06 PM
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ECONOMIC
RATIONALISM
Economic Rationalism,
like heroin, invades a vacuum. Its tyranny feeds on little people - and little
people invite it. The Middle-Class Left invites it, by its intellectual
laziness, smug narcissism, and loudly-talking-in-public-places Good Opinion of
Itself. The late Working-Class, now the Subcontracting Class, invites it by
their loss of solidarity and culture to materialism.
Economic
Rationalism is the home of the talentless. Under its management, Australia's
SBS, once the best TV station in the world, now looks like an in-flight
magazine. The quality is squeezed out of our culture by the relentless weight
of management - carefully chosen for their lack of imagination, and Obedience.
Obedience to
who ? Cui Bono ? Well, of course, the Corporations. The soul-less, the creators
of a language devoid of life, for all of us to speak and think in. The
authoritarian organisers of the race to the bottom-line.
Their
commentators are all like Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Morning Herald, agents
of entropy, Black Belts of inertia. They talk with the enthusiasm of a civil
servant who writes because it is 9 o'clock in the morning again. Hitler's was a
corporate Reich also, but this one has no room for the genius of a Riefenstahl
or a Speer. There are no strange dreams of Aryan mythology, just the clicking
of accountants' keyboards, and the fatal litany of dead words. An Iraqi
Holocaust - 600,000 - lie smothered under the snow of “collateral damage”.
Posted by William Cobbett at 7:34 PM
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Another old
one, still remarkably fresh ...!
LOBBYISTS
Your left
activist lobbyist has to assume that we live in a rational world run by
rational people – that if they explain things to Government, Govt. will say “Oh
silly me” and run and put it right. Which pretty much precludes your average
lobbyist from being taken seriously. When Wilson Tuckey was put in charge of
trees in Australia, this particular mob was being told to buzz off, that they
were no longer funny.
The Green
Left, even the smarter ones, could not afford to believe the evidence of their
senses. The country is full of people mowing their lawns in a despairing effort
to keep at bay depression born of inactivity, and both born of meaninglessness.
Your lobbying activist however, has a meaning to life, something that gets
him/her out of bed in the morning. They are due at a meeting with the
Department of Primary Industries at the gentlemanly hour of 9 that morning.
They ignore that these professional lobbyist-meeters-and-greeters all have
faces like bottom-feeding fish, and are kept in dung-coloured broom closets -
our Concerned Person has an identity that allows them to think well of
themselves, and, perhaps, as a fringe benefit, ill of others. And Heavens, when
50% of all Internet users are playing with themselves in front of their
screens, why shouldn’t they feel a little superior ?
Lobbying can
work, don’t get me wrong - if you are BHP. However if you are not, it’s worth a
mention to those who don’t pay attention to the Wider World, that we live in
the era of Globalisation. This is the old game, Writ Large, of “Capitalism
always tends towards Monopoly” as Charlie Marx was so fond of pointing out
after a couple of drinks. This used to take place in different countries in a
fairly unsynchronised way. Krupp supplied the weapons to both sides on the Russian
Front of WW1; the biggest US corporations did business with Hitler all through
WW2. And so on. Little known, like many facts the size of Mt. Rushmore, but
there we are.
Anyway. There
were always plenty of geographical pockets outside this game, where people
traded salt for skins and feathers; you got lemons for next to nothing because
they grew just down the road; lamb chops ditto. No more. And this is the point
– there are to be no exceptions any more. It is a World Order. No nooks &
crannies, Nowhere to Hide, as they are so fond of saying, not even Libya or
Cuba.
Obviously,
under Globalisation, as in any World Order old or new, there is a script, the
Thing is centrally choreographed. There is no break in the logic here. The
steps in consciousness may be enormous, but the steps in logic, they are little
ones, and lead inevitably from one to the other. There is a central agenda, and
it is detailed. Each next step is obligatory - as long as the powers that run
the agenda remain in control.
These powers
are the Corporations, long warned about by William Cobbett, William Jefferson,
Karl Marx and indeed, Dwight D. Eisenhower. They are the Vested Interests,
represented by the military and economic superpower of the US at the moment,
but quite willing and able to switch to the European Union, or play both, as
circumstances demand. These corporations are known as the Transnationals, since
they owe no fundamental allegiance to any country, only to their own bottom
line. They only roost in countries where they pay no tax, like the Cayman
Islands, or little tax, such as the US, or indeed Australia.
The idea that
Governments, the area-managers for this Corporate Theme Park, can be talked out
of something that runs counter to the script, by a small roomful of well-meaning
people with a Spotted Quoll, is unreasonable, tragic and deluded. This
blindness to the Great Wide World can only be maintained by the lobbyist’s need
to maintain their self-image – self-image being the basis for many an odd
perception of the world.
The economic
polity is as alien to their understanding as if you had blindfolded them and
dumped them in South Central Los Angeles, or Baghdad. If it wasn’t for the
Bottom-Feeding-Fish-People, equally lost in the outside world, and their
job-description of endless Sensible Talking, the penny might in some cases
drop. Governments however place a great deal of importance on the Fig-Leaf, and
your Lobbyist plays an essential part in hiding some rather Unpleasant-Looking
Organs. Governments are elected, and they must maintain the fiction, within
what they privately refer to as the “chattering classes”, that they are
reasonable and responsible, or the Fig Leaf drops.
And if it has
not dropped in the reign of Bush, Blair and Howard, then, Heaven help us, I
guess it never will.
Posted by William Cobbett at 6:43 PM
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Labels: LOBBYISTS OF THE LEFT
Monday, July
6, 2009
MORDOR
An old one to
hold the door open ....
APOCALYPSE
NOW SWEEPS THE OSCARS.
Not hard to
see why “Lord Of The Rings” commanded attention. The Final Battle between the
archetypes Good & Evil, and the subsets Creation & Destruction, Order
& Chaos, Nature & Satanic Mills. All pretty damn contemporary stuff.
In each
footprint of the Great Democracy you see the spores growing: drugs,
pornography, prostitution, civil war, blighted landscapes, depression, poverty,
stupidity and ugliness. Any other culture is to be eradicated and replaced by
dependence on Mordor – most recently, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Should
the US implode, the EU would jump into its shoes. Saruman may find he is not
Indispensable.
Unlike The
Corporations. In 1830 William Cobbett called them “The Thing”(1); in 1989 Fela
Kuti called them “Beasts Of No Nation” (2). Everybody’s Creatures of the
Apocalypse. The Nazgul. Consider the Greenhouse Effect, one of the movies now
screening at your local Chaos Multiplex. The US, UK and Australian Governments
affect a para-scientific disdain for the notion, and hence do nothing. Back at
the Ranch however, the Corporate attitude to the G.E. is enlightening and
horrific both. Bechtel, Vivendi, and Lyonnaise des Eaux, set themselves for
total control, over what they believe to be a dwindling or undependable water
resource. Monsanto and Novartis position themselves and their gene technology
for control of food production in adverse conditions. The next step in this
sequence is interesting. If the vast investments of Bechtel or Monsanto were
threatened by efforts to reverse the Greenhouse Effect, they will help the fossil-fuel
lobby move Heaven, Earth and the Government to thwart those efforts. They need
the Greenhouse Effect. They may well do their best to help it along. The
blighted plains of Mordor are central to both their conscious and subconscious
logic.
Capital is
about as flexible as a brontosaurus, and once it has started to “adapt to
changed circumstances”, and throw money in that direction, it will freeze those
changed circumstances to the extent that it has the power to do so. The image
of Capital bringing technological delights fresh every morning with the
breakfast cereal is only cosmetically true. The Thing in its heart is utterly
conservative.
When The
Observer (UK, 22/2/2004) leaked a US defence chiefs’ report to Bush,
“predict(ing) that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of
anarchy …. cities sunk beneath rising seas … nuclear conflict, mega-droughts,
famine and widespread rioting”(3), seasoned observers would have been stifling
yawns. In the Feb ’94 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Kaplan made waves
by describing exactly the same scenario - “The Coming Anarchy” - which he later
blamed on “Capitalism, the bull in the china shop of history”. (4). His
analysis was a popularisation of defence and security strategic thinking at the
time, making this current forecast the orthodoxy for at least fifteen years
now.
Prophecies of
Chaos tend, in addition, to be self-fulfilling – in this rather different way:
if that is what business and military strategists think is going to happen, then
those are the operating conditions they design for. They may then, as a
consequence, deliberately create chaos to suit their estimated strategic
strengths. (Chorus - “Yugoslavia, Afghanistan & Iraq”.) And of course Chaos is
a variant of the ever-popular Divide & Rule principle.
All of which
explains why, long long before any Seattles or Oklahoma Cities, the world’s
police forces seemed to have come across a job lot of Orc uniforms in some
global theatrical costumier. They knew it was going to happen. It makes sense.
If you intend to restrict all the transactions and money flow in the game to a
microscopic percentage of the players, as well as buggering up the social and
physical landscape, then you are going to have to make some effort to control
the errant or indignant citizenry, Left, Right and Criminal - 1st World as well
as 3rd.
In the
mid-90’s our state government here in Australia was proclaiming 7-year
sentences for graffiti, and knocking holes in the right to Trial by Jury; in
the state next door, the army was breaking into civilian houses. None of this
for any overt reason. Shortly thereafter Tony Blair lurched unpleasantly to his
feet, defining demonstrators as potential terrorists (6); and had the Ministry
of Defence police kick down the doors of Greenpeace (7). “Several thousand new
criminal offences…nationwide DNA fingerprinting, compulsory identity cards,
unfettered search and seizure powers, an end to the right to silence and jury
trials, and near-total TV surveillance of all urban public spaces and major
highways” - Larry Elliott, Economics Editor of the UK “Guardian”, (8) on
England in 1998 - but, under the centralised choreography of Globalisation,
that’s anywhere at all in the 1st World. Certainly the EU has no argument with
the principle. Homeland Security has been a long time in the making.
Mordor has changed the 1st world landscape
radically in the last fifteen years. Bush himself however, unlike some of those
behind him, is hardly Saruman material, just the Bad Cop in the old routine. In
fact, he’s a blessed relief after Good-Cop Clinton, “with his lingo of Recovery
(and) group therapy .. ‘concern’ and ‘healing’ (8). That was genuinely spooky,
and whole chunks of the Left, not at its widest-awake just then, swallowed it
hook, line and sinker. And what if .. the Corporate Reich found itself a True
Charismatic, a new Adolf ? No, I feel positively affectionate towards Dubya.
He’s recognisably a Bad Guy of the Old School in an increasingly alien
landscape. He can work a room full of drunks; he gives tax breaks to his fat
friends; he’s involved in good gross Skull-duggery. It keeps the movie simple -
Life on Earth, Yes or No ? The Flora, Fauna and 3rd World are in no doubt; it’s
the 1st World – Mordor and its immediate surroundings - that doesn’t seem to
care whether it lives or dies.
1. “Rural
Rides”, William Cobbett, 1830. Ed. George Woodcock, Penguin, 1981. Effects of
early
Capitalism on rural England.
2. “Beasts Of
No Nation”, Fela Kuti, Eurobond Records, 1989. Both sides classic.
3. “The
Observer”, UK, 22/2/2004. “Now The Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will
Destroy Us”.
4. See also
“Pulp Future”, BBC Panorama 1995. Television documentary around the same
material, updated to include 1st World scenarios.
5. UK “Guardian”,
Sept 11, 2003 “Liberty Goes To Court Over Use Of Anti-Terror Legislation”, et
al.
6. House of
Commons, Hansard, Debates for 6 June 1995.
7. “The Age
Of Insecurity”, Larry Elliott & Dan Atkinson, Verso, 1998. Fundamentalist
Capital in the UK.
8. Robert
Hughes, “The Culture Of Complaint”, OUP, 1993. How Government gave the US
Middle-Class Left enough rope.
