Exploring the intersections of ecology, technology, and ideology: Marx, machines, Gibson, and Shanghai.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Eastern Promises (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)


One of my initial responses to David Cronenberg’s latest film, Eastern Promises, originated before the film had even made its limited release debut on September 14th: this response was the noteworthy parallel running between Cronenberg and Wm. Gibson as two of the highest significance figures in cyberpunk fiction and technoculture both having taken lateral shifts in the last 2 texts each has produced. Furthermore, within these lateral movements into new realms that depart from conventional notions of cyberpunk genre, both Canadians have figured Russian mafia as a vital component in the movements of their contemporary world imaginings. As a Gen-X child of the Cold War late years—I was 16 when the Berlin Wall fell and the tanks drove into Tian An Men Square—I am provoked to wonder at this reinsertion of Russia by two of the most celebrated sniffers of pre-emergent zeitgeists, especially at a time when mainstream mass-media cannot stop thinking Middle East.
Perhaps a key to this resides in Cronenberg’s referral to a book he read while prepping the film: Violent Entrepreneurs by Vadim Volkov, a text that simultaneously investigates the specific context of violence and the Russian mafia in the construction of Russian capitalism that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and which uses this specific context to draw provocative speculations about the nature of 21st century late capitalism and violence in general. It is possible that by looking awry from the current ‘Endless War’ in which we feel hopelessly enmeshed anyhow, Gibson and Cronenberg offer insights into the structural realities that enabled this war and continue to profit from it. They show us a reality similar to Pynchon’s ‘Endless War’ in Gravity’s Rainbow: a world which is never not at war—violence is a chronic state of being within increasingly globalized capital—and the perception of war only as the discrete events punctuated by state-based declarations and surrenders/treaties are disdainful illusions.

Regarding the film as such, it fulfills the Cronenberg Promises of brutality that evokes visceral audience response, and because of this I am thoroughly pleased with the decision not to cheapskate a matinee, but shell out for opening night prime time showing: being in a packed cinema for the bathhouse attack scene was an unforgettable experience. Cronenberg has lured all of us in (and it was a surprisingly older crowd) with a certain seductiveness that is attached to mafia intrigue, but, as in Videodrome, when the audience gets all of what it bargained for, we cannot help but squirm in our seats, feel sweat on our foreheads, empathize with those who groan out load, and we all end up uttering a mixed groan/laugh as the absurdity of the violence and our fulfilled desire of it ending up in that confusingly complex and paradoxical emotional response of enjoyment at the promise being fulfilled and disgust at what fulfills it!!

In addition to violence—not a new issue for Cronenberg even though there seems to be a proliferation of chatter that includes Eastern Promises in discussions of a surge in Hollywood violence, masculinity is one of the most interesting issues the film raises in subtly crafted ways. The relationship between Kirill and Nikolai is represented as potentially homosexual, yet with Nikolai’s multiple motives of manipulation in every action, we are left very unsure as to their feelings for each other and their history of prospective intimacies. This mystery is counterpoint to the Father, frustrated at the queerness the London weather has induced in his son and who provides the example of being a man by raping the 14-year old prostitute his son will not (again, whether out of a moral character he at moments seems to display, out of homosexual orientations, or a combination is unclear).

Also, the “Eastern Promises.” The false promises of a better life in London that inspired Tatiana to leave her village in the first place, only to end up a mafia-property child sex worker. The multiple betrayals throughout the plot trajectory within the mafia members and associates. But especially the revelation that Nikolai is a mole working for the Russia Desk at Scotland Yard. The final scene of the film is a voice-over narration of the deceased Tatiana’s voice reading the words of her diary that refer to that promise of a better life in the West with the visual of Nikolai sitting in the restaurant, playing with his watch, thinking deeply, but on what. Now that Nikolai has the tattoos and is in a power position to be mafia king, but has spared Anna’s uncle Stipan and Tatiana’s baby (the latter for more pragmatic reasons), the last scene seems to leave open the future. To whom will Nikolai have made an Eastern Promise: the mafia that he will proceed to sabotage from not only the inside but the very top echelon; or, Scotland Yard, now that he has an opening to virtually unlimited power???

My only reservation about full laurels for the film: Cronenberg simply did not take advantage of Naomi Watts’s astonishing acting range—she was underutilized by a lack of dramatic opportunities to perform anything close to her hospital scene in 21 Grams.

Otherwise, my vote thus far for Best Picture 2007.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Nostalgia for Nihilism


Perhaps under the subtle influence of the use of grunge music in the promotion for upcoming network television series premieres, I netflikt Cameron Crowe’s Singles last week. It’s no surprise the soundtrack is and has always been the chief element of praise for this film; after all, if one is to remark on the acting it would have to laud Matt Dillon’s performance for carrying the rest. Eddie Vedder’s rigor-mortis cameo outshined (nice Soundgarden reference!) the leads.

Watching the celebration of contentless meaning, however, gave this Gen-X’er a burst of speculative optimism. Perhaps the resurgent presence of and interest in Nirvana, Mudhoney, and the like reveals a desire circulating today amongst those infused with popular culture for the good old near-past when things could mean nothing. The heyday created by and creating the space for deconstruction—taking the time to take time to enjoy the blur without checking out or buying in. The truly Sub-Pop days—the not-so-subtle product placement in Singles.

Grunge & the 90s scene stands as a historical span of the enjoyment of consumption infused with the Dadaistic embrace of absurd juxtaposition that carried over from 80s American culture, music, and literature. From Talking Heads videos and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to Smells Like Teen Spirit, Cobain and River Phoenix oding, Lynch’s Lost Highway, the Circle Jerks screening footage of oral surgery on dogs on massive screens behind them as they play in downtown Seattle.

Constructing yet a New China: Survivor China


Last year the CBS series Survivor reasserted its position of prominence in popular culture conversation with its Racial framework for initial tribal assignments. For all the criticism it faced, labeling it a crude approach to a complex and serious issue, the program did raise important questions for a massive public in an accessible way. Moreover, competitor discussion over the use of minority representation in media played an important role in informing the jury’s decision for Yul to win.

Last night CBS launched the new campaign, setting history as the network put it by filming an entire US tv series in Mainland China. Behind this premise of Jeff Probst as the new Richard Nixon, however, is the fast-approaching Beijing 08 Olympics. Clearly this Survivor series is produced as a cultural advert for China, especially China as an exotic site appropriate to global competition. And the construction of this New/Old China is fascinating, with the actual geographical place of the competition being neither so remote as described verbally and through visual projection. The Zhelin Reservoir is not all that far from major cities in Jiangxi, not so deeply remote as is suggested from modern Chinese metropolis-life even though they are shown traveling into increasing technological and landscapalogical primitivities once setting out from Shanghai—featured in the footage of the new cast(aways) arriving in China. Most of the mountain footage appears to come from the Guangxi Province, near Guilin/Yangshou, and the wilderness footage interspersed between the human dramatics/competitions features pandas from Sichuan. Not to mention the opening welcome ceremony held in a Buddhist Temple—meticulously explained by Probst as a cultural and not religious welcome, yet cleverly presented to counter any narratives about China’s official attitudes toward religious institutions within its borders.

More on this as the series develops…

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

JG Ballard reinvented on Chinese freeway

Check out these links to text and visual recollections of a Chinese Mazda-gang harrassing a Hummer (the official car of coal-mine owners--and therefore of or not of the 08 Beijing Olympics?) on the open road.

Perhaps a new avatar of the technology infused sadism that was arising as a structure of feeling in 1973 UK/US via Ballard's Crash and Pynchon's Gravity' Rainbow??

If so, an inversion of conventional cyberorientalism...


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14495765&ft=1&f=1


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHRTxYNOyjA

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Kerouac's On the Road: 50 Yrs Later


The "American classic" was published 50 years ago today: September 5th, 1957, and Kerouac's novel holds a fascinating place in American literary history, celebrated by some as a signpost of his deeply spiritual (Catholic-Buddhist cyborg) relationship to words and silence, by others as a reinvisioning of the American landscape and the Western frontier, as well as one primary text that defined the Beat Generation.

But among all the blogposts and feelgood remembrances composed around this anniversary, I have yet to find mention of some of the novel's strangest moments:

p.117: Shortly into Part Two: Dean and Sal are driving Sal's brother's furniture north from Testament:

"Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York."


p.180:


"I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a 'white man' disillusioned."



What has remained unexplored in recent media coverage is the disturbing and disturbingly sadistic gaze of Sal as the reader's figure of identification in the narrative: one need only think of Sal's convenient relationship with Terry in the Grapes of Wrath intertextual interlude and how readily he leaves her, her child, and her poverty behind as aesthetic objects that have been enjoyed and now live on not in-themselves but only as objects for his reminiscence in moments of loneliness.

Score 1 for ASLE: Recycling in Spartanburg


Just months after the Association for Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) held the biennial conference in Spartanburg, SC, this town has been elected by Coke as the site for what will be the world's largest plastic bottle recycling plant!

Surely the grand opening of the plant will qualify as an occasion sufficiently special to open the old-fasioned Krispy Kreme that sits tantalizing yet dormant across the street from the new stripmallish one.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/09/05/ap4085003.html

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Why they're not drinking Peet's coffee in INLAND EMPIRE


David Lynch minces no words on the cinematic practice that began for the Gen-X cinema (un)consciousness with the entrapment of ET and reached a cynical apex in Wayne's World in this shocking clip from an interview during the Dallas Film Festival:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=F4wh_mc8hRE