Confessions of a Revolutionary Anarchist in the City of London - Part 3

Read Part 1 here

Read Part 2 here

Well, my personal crusade has been sluggish and slow to take off. I feel like so much talking and cajoling and ranting has done nothing but increase the viscosity of any real progress; what’s desperately needed is the dilatory mechanisms of action.

Without my job tying me down to the endless restocking of more and more lowest common denominator shit, I have been able to delve deeper into the pool of anarchist revolutionary thinking, from Bakunin and Vaneigem to Kropotkin. You might think I could be tempted, with my new-found liberation, to fritter time away bed-bound in my shoebox room (prime London real estate for the budding unemployed), watching as the damp patch undergoes an achingly slow continental drift across the ceiling.

On my more cerebral moments, usually before losing consciousness, I see this patch of damp as strikingly symbolic of the rot manifesting itself throughout society, created by some undetected leak of malignancy that, without being addressed, would continue to spread wider and wider, perhaps over many years, until eventually the whole ceiling would succumb to decay and come crashing in.

The problem is, I end up realising, the patches of damp are dispersed across the ceiling’s expanse like acne staining teenage cheeks. Apart they are ineffectual, whereas if they were ever to coalesce, the structural stability would all at once become far more susceptible to collapse.

But no, languish I do not. I am up and down in the kitchen before Noam or Pierre can slump down in their uniforms of drudgery. Pierre, I have noticed, has become several degrees colder towards me since I announced that I had quit Poundworld. Occasionally, as he goes to the fridge for his bottled water, I try to impart upon him some drafts of the revolutionary manifesto I had written the day before for him to review on the tube ride to work.

“Sorry”, he says. He’s currently hacking chunks off of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ and can’t afford to lose focus on it even for a couple of tube journeys; the chasm that would open up in his conceptual understanding would then be wider than the inequality documented by Piketty’s data.

On Tuesday of last week we had become chorylatic in our discussion, as it came out that Pierre had attended a business gala evening at the terrace bar of the Houses of Parliament. My imagination running riot with ideas of Guy Fawkes, or at the very least a surreptitious turd on green leather, I was dismayed to hear how Pierre had failed to take full advantage of this unprecedented admittance to the seat of power.

“I did steal a side plate from the buffet though”, he said as he brandished the diminutive crockery with its gold-embossed portcullis seal.

“You couldn’t get much foie gras on that plate”, chortled Noam, enjoying his familiar balance on the diplomatic fence between Pierre and myself.

“What are you planning, to tear down the establishment one side plate at a time?!”, I spat at him.

“Look, this was a feat in itself. The security at that place is intense. I was pretty scared I’d get caught and hauled off to the Tower.”

As I said previously, occasions such as this only served to illustrate just how much of a joke those two were gradually beginning to see their old convictions, as if suddenly it had all become rather kitsch when not sat nursing pints in the students’ union.

In inverse correlation to this, Anne-Marie has doubtless instigated a propaganda war against me; Pierre subject to a prolonged exposure to her invectives as to my failings, whilst I am limited to the occasional air drop of counter-narrative during chance kitchen encounters. I'm fairly convinced that she has a pathological suspicion complex, which got me thinking of the grey area that confuses the borderline between healthy cynicism and out-right suspicion.

With her crystalline gaze that bleeds scorn, she casts aspersions as to my character and predicament, doubting the firmament of my will. Every so often, just briefly, the sun reflects off the fine web of jokes that she and Pierre have clearly spun at my expense. Pierre is, I can increasingly recognise, shuffling and being lead, like the rest of the bovine herd, into the abattoir of the neutered life, ready almost to place himself on the proffered hook of acceptability and obedience.

The sooner Noam's super-virus is ready, the better. Meanwhile, all I can do is print off several hundred copies of a hastily thrown-together poster, a Kitchener call-up for a guerrilla army of the oppressed, and distribute them during long rambling derives across the city.

All the while, my imagination overflows with visions of leading this straggling collective of malcontents across London Bridge and taking the fight direct to the City's streets; ransacking and hijacking the financial institutions, claiming them for our own ends in a grand hecatomb.

I see myself as a modern-day John Ball, whipping up a new Peasant's Revolt against the tyranny of the established order and perhaps, just for a moment, catching a glimpse of some mystical alternative.

Masterworks of Cinema #4 - 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'

By most standards it would be a fairly tall order for a film to live up to a title so incendiary as ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. After all, we live in an era of 'Sharknado' and 'Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter'. So it is a real testament that Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic succeeds in surpassing all expectations to stand as one of the most demented and disturbing horror films ever made, with little of its raw power atrophied by advancing years.

Filmed in searing Texas heat over just 32 days, it maintains an uncompromising tautness throughout its 82 minutes. With a miniscule budget of $300,000, the end result is free of any big studio sheen and instead has a grim aesthetic provoking the feeling that nothing is off limits, that anything could happen; and a detachment resonant of a documentary.

From the very start it works more successfully than perhaps any other film to create an atmosphere of genuine foreboding – the deadpan voiceover warning you of the ‘mad and macabre crimes’ that were discovered, the subliminal flashbulb shots of bodily remains, and the opening close-up of a disinterred corpse, accompanied by discordant and inorganic sound effects that are at once industrial (buzzing and droning) and primitive (sporadic cymbal crashes).

The film’s premise is, by now, lifeless to the point of rigor mortis; although in 1974 the concept of the teen slasher movie had yet to become so drained of its lifeblood (‘Halloween’ was still 4 years away, 'Friday the 13th' 6 years away). A group of young friends arrive in a Texan backwater with the intention of checking on a family grave after a recent spate of bizarre robberies. They encounter a deserted farmhouse and one by one become lambs to the slaughter at the hands of a deranged ‘family’ of lunatics, including the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface (so called for his mask of flesh).

The principal reason for the film’s enduring legacy, not exclusively for its status as a horror milestone, but as one of the finest achievements of subversive American cinema, lies in the intermingling layers of interpretation that can be extrapolated from the superficial narrative.

The first and most obvious reading is to view it in context with the society of the time. By 1974, the Vietnam War was in its death throes, with the tide of public opinion having long since turned along with the steady homeward flow of body bags and reports of hideous atrocities such as the My Lai massacre perpetrated by the very soldiers that were supposed to inspire patriotism.

For years, the news had provided a steady diet of concentrated horror to the American people, and it was this together with events such as Watergate, the Kent State shooting, and the crimes of the Manson family, that symbolised a very definite bludgeon to the head of the wild and free-spirited innocence of the 1960s. It was surely inevitable that such an atmosphere of febrile tension would infect new cinema with a sepsis of brutality, and indeed this was borne out by films such as ‘Last House on the Left’ and ‘The Hills Have Eyes’.

In a sense then, the young victims, with their hippy camper van, flared jeans and New Age ideals, represent the strangers arriving in foreign terrain with good intentions, that are fatally undermined by the crazed hostility of the natives. Are Leatherface and his ‘family’ then, a mirror held up to reflect America’s xenophobic propaganda regarding the ruthless Vietnamese ‘gooks’; are they a stern reminder that, contrary to optimistic belief, barbarism begins at home?

Another interpretation of which I am particularly taken, is that the film is an advocating commentary on the social movement of vegetarianism.

We are introduced to the proximity of the slaughterhouse early on by the hitchhiker who gleefully shares polaroids of his grisly practice, and recounts that the "old-fashioned sledge" is the best method to employ. One of the girls protests “I like meat, please change the subject”, thereby embodying the wilful blindness that the carnivorous masses habitually seek to adopt.

As the horror unfolds, the victims are dehumanised and recast as animals to be slaughtered, and it is through their ordeals that we are invited to consider the suffering of animals to which we attempt to raise the shield of ignorance. They are struck with hammer blows, hung upon meathooks, incarcerated in freezers, chased relentlessly, and in the climactic scene forced to be a party at the family dinner table as the prelude to their own murder.

By anthropomorphising the plight of animals in this way, the notion that they may be oblivious to their impending deaths is forced into a reappraisal. Taken into consideration along with the frequent non-diegetic deployment of swinish squeals and bovine grunting, and it begins to appear like a fairly convincing reading of the film’s underlying moral purpose.

While the overarching influence on the perversities was the serial killer Ed Gein, there is the impression of the family acting out of some kind of insane workman-like obligation, fulfilling a task that cannot be avoided. As the cook (and de facto ringleader) says, “I just can’t take no pleasure in killing. Just some things you gotta do, doesn’t mean you gotta like it.”

Perhaps then, the film is also an extreme analogy for the impacts automation and modern technologies have on traditional working practices, as rural communities are abandoned in favour of the new and most efficient means of production, with scant consideration of the nefarious side effects such a socio-economic shift might inculcate (or, Marxism with chainsaws…)

However you choose to interpret it, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ is a deeply unsettling and thoroughly worthwhile example of raw cinematic horror. It is a swirling riptide of madness that ratchets up the intensity until finally cutting away in the midst of Leatherface’s demented dance, in so doing, yielding little in the way of redemption or comforting closure. The slaughter for meat must presumably continue…

Views on Sport

Ancient Rome propagated the theory of ‘panems et circenses’ (bread and games), in which the appeasement and subjugation of the populace could be ensured so long as these two critical factors were sufficiently provided for. This metonym for state-sanctioned diversion, I think, holds considerable water in our modern age where sport has flourished to occupy an unrivalled place in our collective imaginations.

My views may seem heretical to some, or maybe just obstinate, but on a personal level I have managed to arrive at a place where sport has virtually no influence on my life at all. I'm constantly aware of it, I know it persists within very close proximity rather like drainage systems snaking unseen around buildings; yet I have allowed myself to descend into a wilful blindness towards it all.

Such is the stranglehold that sport (and in particular, football) has on Western culture, that when meeting someone new, very often their first impressions are fired in the oven of personal sporting allegiance. When faced with the awkward abseil down a precipitous social encounter, sport is very often the equivalent of the safety harness in which you can descend in as much comfort as possible.

On countless occasions I have met someone for the first time only for the question of sporting preference to arise and for my unhelpfully dissenting reply to trigger an almost visible mental reaction in them as they rapidly slam conversational doors shut and scramble for ways to accommodate this social leper within their field of reasoning.

It was not ever thus. Like every other young boy I played in a local football team, inspired by the glorious summer of Euro 96. My enthusiasm slowly waned as I realised my destiny wasn’t to turn pro, and was further compounded by being coerced into playing for the school rugby team. During the winter, every Saturday morning I would be trampled into the cold and rain-soaked mud by simian schoolboys who I presume all had the advantage over me that they had at least watched a rugby match and were aware of the rules.

But the umbilical cord binding me to sport was finally severed by the electric guitar I received for Christmas aged 13. This was the distorted, dissonant and often infuriating escape ladder that I ascended to the safe haven of music.

My present antipathy towards sport though was cemented by the year I worked in a construction site office in Manchester. For the first time I was exposed to the almost militant fanaticism that inflected almost all of those who worked there, from the young labourers right up to the foremen and engineers, football was a kind of morse code through which everyone could communicate on an apparently level playing field.

On one occasion, seeing me with a book during my lunch break, a gruff site foreman thrust a book that was positively wilting from re-reading at me, with the words “this is the only book you need”. It was Brian Clough’s autobiography…

Amongst them though were a handful whose professed allegiance to their particular team didn’t quite seem to ring true, and I became convinced that actually they had as much disinterest in football as I did, but had grown to accommodate their ‘support’ in the same way as an animal evolves to survive in response to its harsh environment.

So much of the ‘banter’ that was exchanged week-in week-out, was predicated around risibly antiquated, yet clearly deep-seated, regional rivalries; to the point where the football itself appeared to be nothing but an illusory scaffold on which to construct the most out-dated tribalism. At its most puerile, people would invoke tragedies like Hillsborough, Munich ’56, and the Leeds fans stabbed in Istanbul, as shot puts to be lobbed clumsily into argumentative sandpits.

Just before this summer’s World Cup, I found myself watching a BBC programme in which David Beckham was sent deep into the Amazonian rainforest, presumably in an attempt to abandon his revered place in modern culture and begin a new life in the jungle like a footballing Colonel Kurtz.

At one point, he ingratiated himself with a primitive forest tribe, a self-sustaining nomadic collective of people who remained isolated from 21st century civilisation. Men, women and children alike were all shown pulling together to forage and collect resources for the mutual benefit of them all, thereby maintaining their humble existence.

Meeting with the tribe’s patriarch – a sturdy, oil-skinned man wearing nothing but a loincloth – Beckham, never the most articulate, attempted to try and explain the concept of football and his role as its ambassadorial idol. It was an encounter that was both symbolic and revealing. Here was Beckham, the closest the secular West has to a demi-god, an icon of our times, trying to express the concept of a sport in which players kick a leather ball from one end of a field to the other, to someone completely oblivious as to the fevered significance that this trivial pursuit could hold for a sophisticated society.

On the programme, this was framed as a way of revelling in just how isolated these people were and how alien our modern world was to them. To me, it reinforced just the opposite; that this was a dignified indigenous community and it was us who had travelled so far beyond the realms of reality and into a collective delusion when a ball game is so sanctified and its leading lights lavished with such odious levels of fame and fortune. As far as I could tell, it was the tribe who were truly free.

I'm aware of innumerable psychoanalytic theorems relating to our obsession with following competitive sport; like so many brooms frantically sweeping to glide the curling pin nearer its intended target. Fundamentally, humans crave attachment to reliable forms, we yearn to be a party to an accumulation of others who gain strength from the weight of their numbers. We like to place our faith in a particular team, that by their success or failure we will experience the corresponding highs and lows that pay dividends according to our level of emotional engagement. Whereas, in times of antiquity, we placed our belief in mythology and the gods, intrepid explorers or hardened warriors; modern-day hero worship is channelled through the prowess and status of elite sport stars.

As well as this, what I've often sensed about sports fans is that, for a large proportion, the real allure lies not in the skill, the athleticism or the tactical mastery but rather in the potential for gambling that is associated with sport. It seems to me that very often, the primary aesthetics of sport are very often subordinated in favour of the opportunistic winning of money. This is analogous to those who drink alcohol, not to appreciate the varying tastes and nuances, but just as a means to get drunk.

For the state then, it is far from being a sizeable leap of the cynical imagination, to interpret sport as being an innately powerful distracting agent.

The more energy, time and scrutiny the masses expend on the pursuit of sport, the more their focus is averted from, at the macro level, the activities of the state itself, and at the micro level, their own 'personal lot in life'. This is certainly the case in America, where the endless analysing and poring over of statistics and performance-related numerology is the primary means of interaction with the otherwise static practice of spectating.

It is predictable then that elite sport, and football in particular, has become relentlessly commercialised and corporatized in precise lock-step with the neoliberal capitalist epoch of the last 30-or-so years. Traditionally a game for the working classes to enjoy from the terraces on a Saturday afternoon, nowadays a ticket to a Premier League game is oversubscribed and prohibitively expensive.

As economic elites have revealed numerous corrupt machinations to widespread public opprobrium, so too has sport been buffeted by the high seas of scandal to far less outcry - from athletic doping trials, to Lance Armstrong's deception, Formula 1's dodgy advertising deals, to Rugby's 'bloodgate' incident and Pakistani cricket's match-fixing allegations.

Meanwhile, Sepp Blatter with his FIFA 'droogs,' as well as the IOC, chauffeur themselves around the world championing the investment of vast sums of capital into extravagant Olympian boondoggles that rarely yield any lasting benefit to the host nations other than serving as a gigantic marketing campaign.

I always found it baffling how at the height of the last recession - when the Occupy movement had entrenched the symbolic notion of the '1%', and the anti-banker hysteria had cranked up to fever pitch - people remained so faithfully deferential to the sporting Mammon, which dictates that restless oligarchs buy clubs like ordinary people buy shoes, and footballers are paid a higher wage each week than a nurse or teacher might earn in 5 or even 10 years!

And this in an era in which investiture in the creative arts has plummeted. This could quite easily be argued as suggesting a declining interest in the arts, but evidentially this is far from the case. In literature (where authors' mean annual salary is now a paltry £4,000), you need only look to the panoply of creative writing courses, book clubs, fiction competitions and literary festivals that abound. Similarly in theatre and music, there has never been so much eclecticism and choice; yet coupled with the harsh reality that its perceived cultural value continues to decline.

The problem that I believe the arts face is that, contrary to sport, they are adverse to large-scale monopolisation yet exposed to piracy to a greater extent, and proceed largely at the often unpredictable whim of the prevailing fashion or trends of the day.

For this highlights another critical psychological truth. Whereas we like to envisage the world, society, and our lives as a steadily inclining line of linear progression; actually we crave the comfort of routine, the sanctuary of predictability and cyclical time and this is, on the whole, what the following of sport represents.

As one sporting season ends it is only a brief lapse before it all begins again, the clock pushed back to the start; tournaments and major events come around like religious festivals or satellites constantly orbiting our lives. Of course, there are fluctuations in the fortunes and performance of one team or athlete over another, but these are as ephemeral as a change of government, in which the faces and policies might change to exert some minor influence on the country, but in the long run prove largely inconsequential.

Instinctively, I think the majority of people know this and yet don't much mind, for their support is ensured not on the basis of success or failure, but on the principle that the practice of supporting in and of itself is enough.

Running is a physical activity free from any associated costs. Same with walking, cycling (apart from the initial cost of a bike of course), and any ball game organised by a group of people of their own volition. These are pursuits that should be encouraged far more fervently; and where costs are associated, i.e. with playing fields, swimming pools, coaching fees, these should be covered by funds reallocated from the hyper-inflated investment in major sporting events that very often end up being lucrative promotional tools for corporations like Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Cadburys.

For surely, in an age of increasingly sedentary working lives, technologies that facilitate general laziness, and rising obesity (particularly amongst children), the emphasis should be placed on greater participation at a grassroots amateur level rather than continuing down the moribund road of idolising elite sport and just being satisfied with our daily allocation of bread and games.

Culture - July

Books Read:

Stanislaw Lem - 'Solaris'
Iain Sinclair - 'London Orbital' (non-fiction)
Marcus Aurelius - 'Meditations' (non-fiction)
George Bataille - 'The Story of the Eye'
Martin Empson - 'Marxism and Ecology' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Boyhood' (Richard Linklater) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'The Borderlands' (Elliot M.D. Goldner)
'Before Midnight' (Richard Linklater)
'Good Morning Vietnam' (Barry Levinson)
'Trouble Every Day' (Claire Denis)
'Norte, the End of History' (Lav Diaz) (at the ICA, London)


Albums Played:

Black Sabbath - 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'
Black Sabbath - 'Paranoid'
Morrissey - 'World Peace is None of Your Business'
Manic Street Preachers - 'Futurology'
Family of the Year - 'Loma Vista'
Yo La Tengo - 'Fade'
Swans - 'To Be Kind'


Gigs Attended:

The Brian Jonestown Massacre (at Roundhouse, Camden)
Black Sabbath (at Hyde Park, London)

BBC Proms - BBC Philharmonic Orchestra playing Mahler (Royal Albert Hall)


Events:

Marxism Festival 2014 (at Institute of Education, Bloomsbury)

Novel Published - Digital

The novel I completed in 2013 is now available through Amazon's Kindle Store at this link. You can read an extract below:


The informational streams linked to me by Wheeler open with a residential tower block undergoing a controlled demolition procedure. At his behest I scan through a montage of buildings collapsing into dust clouds. Multi-storeys disintegrate and fold in on themselves as though made of paper; bridge spans are released from sturdy rigidity into freefall guillotining the river below; oil rigs lurch like dying animals; vast stadia ripple into ruins like a structural tsunami; brutalist concrete monoliths implode as though the ground were sucking them in and exhaling a lungful of acrid smog.

Columns, beams, lattices of girders vacillate in their constructed forms, trying to adhere to their strict tensile limits before being vetoed by the higher hierarchical laws of physics. They pirouette in place, parts of an intricately choreographed architectural ballet, their steel frameworks buckling and contorting under stresses far in excess of their design parameters.

I ask him what the purpose of this thread of images is for, but get nothing but a continued binge of destruction. Chimney stacks topple like proud forest oaks, hotel complexes melt as though made of candle wax. The towers of the World Trade Center are swallowed up, each floor folding neatly away on top of the one below, ready to be packed away into storage until deemed sound enough structurally to be reinstated.

From there he forwards me to images of the legendary Las Vegas ruins. Like the international airports, Las Vegas lies as a symbol of former avarice and wealth marooned in the boondocks of the Nevada desert. The only visitors here are curious travellers who wish to document or witness the desolation and aura of time-worn dreams. The gargantuan hotel complexes and bombastic casinos lie in ruin like the fortresses of a fallen empire; the strip lies cracked and spalled; the hyper-real stimulation of the neon plumages extinguished and extinct. Everywhere the desert sands have encroached like the watermark of a steadily rising tide.

Wheeler points out to me that Las Vegas was, in retrospect, the geographical prototype for the online environment; a place in which any desire could be sated, any vice quenched, every sensation a distraction, a hinterland of abandonment and numbing simulation. The nucleus of a reality distorted by a myriad cynosures struggling for dominance and attention.

Wheeler says that if the ruins of ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, and the structures of Ankor Wat and Machu Picchu, encapsulate the illuminating touchstones of civilisation’s progression, so too the desolate ruins of Las Vegas represent the physical foundations for a new digitised landscape to emerge where the only limits are those imposed by each individual imagination.

Again, Wheeler probes the issue of my submitting to his new therapy-in progress. Like before I slide out of any commitment, our physical distance acting as the lubrication of my evasiveness. Instead I link him to a video stream of two people undergoing oral sex, their faces transplanted by those of Martin Luther King and Eva Peron, with the hope of fractionally distracting him.

Though for all my bluffing, I am well aware that soon I shall be ensnared in Wheeler’s psychoanalytic bear-trap; its grip tightening in increments with my struggling. I feel no sense of trepidation at the prospect of becoming some kind of experimental guinea pig at the behest of an eccentric fallen-from-grace technologist; merely that I fail to understand how it has fallen to me to fulfil such a dubious role. Have I, unbeknownst to me, been vetted, monitored and selected especially from a pool of many, or have I been hijacked at random by Wheeler under a misapprehension on his part of my prior involvement? Perhaps his faculties regarding this realm in which he is operating have become skewed, or critically eroded as popular opinion would gleefully attest.

In any case, I can feel that the time is drawing near where I will need to confront and oblige my interrogator, whose persistence I can’t help but think must belie some reasoned, if flawed, motive. I can sense his hold over my consciousness gaining ground, as though he were engaged in tactical trench warfare, shrinking the uninhabitable no-man’s-land between us. He is devouring my live stream and archives like an online parasite feeding on his host with my data as his elixir vitae.

Soon, for the sake of my own mental wellbeing, I will need to submit myself to his Structural Theory.

REVIEW - 'Norte, the End of History'

In an attempt at combatting the attentive deficits in the Twitter-age of ephemera, cinema has sought to elevate a sense of immersion within an increasingly anachronistic linear medium. 3D has inflated budgets and revenue returns over the last decade, and 4D is next on the agenda, with cinema seats shaking audiences like kernels of popcorn in a carton. But there is an innovation I don’t believe has yet been exploited – climate cinema.

So it was that on a muggy and sun-baked Tuesday evening, I went along to the ICA cinema on Pall Mall to see Lav Diaz’s new film ‘Norte, the End of History’. With no air-conditioning, as the lights dropped, the cosy 50 or 60-capacity screening room was soon a stuffy cave of hot and languid air.

Set in the Philippines, the torrid heat of the film’s environment appeared to seep through the pores of the screen to bear down onto the audience who could little more than wilt on the cushioned vine.

At 250 minutes, ‘Norte’ is, by any normal standards, an endurance test; although when you consider the marathon standards of Diaz’s previous films - ‘Melancholia’ at 7 hours, and ‘Evolution of a Filipino Family’ at a monumental 11 hours - it begins to look rather more like an effort at restraint.

The film takes as a skeleton narrative, Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, upon which muscular issues of humanity, morality, national identity and political struggle are grown.

Fabian and Joaquin are young men separated by class and circumstances. Fabian is a conflicted law student with pseudo-intellectual pretensions on truth, evil and revolution that he expostulates during drinking sessions with his gang of friends. Joaquin is a simple family man struggling to make ends meet following a leg injury, such that he and his wife fear their dream of opening their own eatery may now be hopeless.

The desperation of both men drives them to the gilded door of the heartless local money lender. When Fabian impulsively decides to murder both her and her daughter, Joaquin is apprehended and convicted for the crime.

In the aftermath of this tremulous upheaval in their lives, both men struggle to reconcile their fate with their actions. We observe Fabian, a wonderfully crafted character, gradually become infected by the pernicious virus of guilt. Before the murder, he is egregious and bombastic; holding forth on the ‘death of politics’; how heroes of the Philippine Revolution like Andres Bonifacio ‘fulfilled their purpose and then died’; and advocating a kind of confused proto-fascist state in which any perceived evil be forcibly eradicated.

From the start he is imbued with a reckless and destructive streak, splintering his circle of friends with the revelation of his affair with one of their girlfriends. All the while you can sense that by proselytising such ideals he is at a loss as to how to either live up to or repudiate them.

By murdering the greedy moneylender he makes his primitive strike against what he judges to be the ‘evil’ infecting the community; a one-man army almost anticipating the revolution to be wrenched into being from his decisive action. In the event though, like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, he is tortured on the rack of his own guilt, rendered inarticulate and aimless. He attempts to make overtures of reconciliation to Joaquin’s destitute family, but crucially can never bring himself to do the only true and moral thing which is to hand himself in, instead sinking further into the quicksand of self-destruction and brutality.

Meanwhile, Joaquin manages to withstand the torments of prison, taking it upon himself to nurse a sadistic inmate enforcer after he suffers a debilitating stroke; eventually transcending, in a visually Tarkovskian trope, to a higher realm of contemplative benevolence. Despite his freedom, Fabian is en-caged by his turmoil and gradually becomes ever more monstrous; whereas, in captivity, Joaquin, thorough his strength of conviction, is able to cultivate a stoic virtuousness that ultimately enshrines his humanity.

It is the plight of Joaquin’s young family that garners the most affecting examination. The scene in which his wife, at her wit’s end, contemplates committing infanticide, is an astonishingly potent example of the film’s real emotional heft.

Of course, this is a film that requires perseverance and patience; many shots linger interminably (despite the cinematography being constantly wonderful), and many scenes appear to languish unnecessarily; but the overall impact is of a sprawling, novelistic investigation into the lives and fates of two disparate men woven together by the strands of situation and circumstance.

As far as the 'climate experience' went, as the sweaty audience peeled themselves from seats to traipse out into the cool night air, I felt that the immersive potential could certainly be exploited elsewhere: plunge the cinema into iciness for ‘Into the Void’ or ‘Stalingrad’; pump up the tropical humidity for ‘Apocalypse Now’; or whip up the wind for ‘The Perfect Storm’...

Views on Space Exploration

'If you could see the Earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon...'
Galileo Galilei


On a recent trip to Moscow, a workmate and I paid a visit to the Cosmonautics Museum where the 'Conquerors of Space' that had blasted off in the name of advancing the Soviet cause were celebrated, almost as though Neil Armstrong had never taken his small step.

I wandered amongst the replica models of modules from the Vostok programme of the 1950s; the coffin-shaped capsules designed to transport dogs into orbit, and their slightly scaled-up equivalents for their human counterparts which, to my eyes at least, appeared to have all the technical sophistication of an over-sized baked bean tin. How such craft ever managed to survive the intense velocities and thrust pressures that were exerted upon them appeared to be something of a miracle in itself.

In the decades-long race to conquer space, Russia and America carefully manufactured enthusiastic consent from their respective populations to fund and pursue their imperialistic endeavours. In the wake of possibly the bleakest period in world history, the Second World War, with its detestable ideology fuelling untold barbarity and culminating in the horror of 'the Bomb', it is perfectly understandable that the masses sought a new 'grand vision' to invest some level of belief. If planet Earth was no longer quite so attractive in the light of such destructive evil, then the tempting propensity to turn attention to the frontiers of space was perhaps a wholly rational response.

From the start of Sputnik 1's extra-terrestrial bleeping, to Kennedy's solemn pledge that men would walk on the moon; the global morale needed a tremendous injection of vitality, and the technologically prosperous epoch of the 1950s was the ideal time for the Prozac of space exploration to be administered.

What was far more surprising, and speaks rather more profoundly about the human condition, was just how insubstantial the impact was on the collective psyche.

The Space Age may have only lasted, according to J.G. Ballard, from the sonic response of Sputnik 1 in 1957 to the first re-entry splashdown not broadcast on TV in 1974, the merest of blips on the human evolutionary chart. In truth, the kind of fundamental shift onto a higher stage in the evolution of the human race failed to materialise in any real sense; dissipating away from anything substantive and into branding, merchandise and Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters.

The Apollo landings on the moon simply didn't provide the mass transcendental galvanisation in an imaginative or aspirational sense; instead, perhaps alienated by the sheer scale of the event, people slowly lowered their gaze to the more immediate and tangible earth-bound concerns. We did not, as Kubrick envisaged, have a colony settlement established on the moon by the year 2001; on the contrary, the zenith of the Space Age has become tarred by the modern brushstrokes of cynicism - apparently 7% (some 22 million) American voters believe the moon landings were faked.

My workmate's enthusiasm for the testaments of space exploration and the boundless possibilities for human advancement into the wider universe was infectious, and surely, no one could see any of the Hubble telescope images - vast coronas of opalescent colour splattered across the blank canvas like a cosmological Jackson Pollock - with anything other than awe. And yet, I could not help but try and peel away the carefully presented artifice of the museum to explore the less reverential reality of the subject matter.

It would have to be conceded that technological advances in space travel have yielded great benefits in terms of communications, environmental and meteorological investigations. Yet the fundamental moral dilemma persists - how can such far-flung ideological pursuits be justified when so many civilian problems remain? Particularly in the case of the Soviet Union, which subjugated large swathes of its population with poverty whilst funnelling millions into an ultimately futile race with the Americans, who themselves had a great many alternate earth-bound causes desperate for investiture.

I cannot help but ruminate on whether the Soviet Union's fateful collapse was in fact sealed by ceding the race to the moon to Nasa in 1969, and whether the psychological impact of such a defeat might perhaps offer a comvincing explanation for Russia's aloof and isolationist stance on the world stage; forever keen to portray itself as the underdog.

It is a moral charge that could be levelled today against India, who are pumping around $1 billion investment per year to fund their mission to Mars, a symbolic demonstration of national strength and development. Meanwhile, according to World Bank statistics, nearly 180million Indians live below the poverty line, whilst a lack of sanitation and child malnourishment levels are persistently high.

What space programmes represent is the same drive for empire that fuelled colonialism, the adventurous opiate of the masses that keeps them from querying why more of their nation's riches can't trickle down to help improve their lot rather than acquiescing to their leaders' whims of building the mythological Tower of Babel ever higher.

Neil Armstrong said, upon observing the Earth from space; 'I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet. I didn't feel like a god, I felt very, very small'.

It is this cognisance of the sublime, in possibly its most meditative incarnation, that I think demonstrates the true value of our travails into space. The fragility of the planet, a mere paper lantern blown by an imperceptible breeze, its effervescent glow melting the human construct of time, is exemplified in a way no more profound than by the god-like act of covering the world with a human thumb.

Today, we have some of the finest minds marinating their intelligence and energy in the inspiring yet stolid stew of Big Bang theories, compositions of black holes, and such like. Whereas, the investment of such intelligence could be far better encouraged to tackle the perennial problems afflicting human kind, in areas such as the environment, social inequality, medicine and fragmenting labour markets.

It is obvious that these kinds of perpetual issues afflicting society fail to inspire the same pioneering imaginative spirit as space travel, because ultimately they deal with the frustrations of detail, geographic disparities, conflicting opinion and constantly mutating parameters that very often prove insurmountable. It is akin to setting off to reach the moon only to discover it moving further away into space or shifting its coordinates to a new point in the sky.

As Frank Borman (the Commander of Apollo 8) expressed it with veritable incredulity: 'when you're finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that this really is one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?'

Indeed, I believe that Richard Branson should reassess the target audience for his imminent Virgin Galactic space tourism away from the glitterati and the moguls, and compel the political leaders of the world to embark on the voyage together. I think such an enlightening experience would surely serve to dissipate the intractable conflicts that currently blight so many regions of the world, address the fact that so much greed serves to disenfranchise so many, and perhaps retreat back from the current point at which the single gravest threat to the future vitality of the planet is mankind itself.

Alternatively, whilst they were all up there taking it in turns to stub out the world's light with their thumb we could lobby Branson to leave them up there in an indefinite orbit. For in space, no one would be able to hear their lies.