Tears in rain (refix)

Catherine Lupton notes, in her monograph on Chris Marker, that Sans Soleil (1982) is replete with instances of the last moments of things. The one the film opens with, and returns to at the very end, is that of a shrine “dedicated to cats” in the suburbs of Tokyo: a couple, who have lost their cat, Tora, kneel and light incense before an altar covered in identical maneki neko statues, to “repair the web of time where it had been broken”. When Tora dies, we are told, it is vital that “death will call her by her right name”: Tora's being will disappear, will be forgotten, in the proper manner, and thereby her former being, her memory, will take its proper place and substance within the “web of time”. This almost archetypal structure is itself repeated throughout the film: in the people attending with flowers after the death of a panda in Tokyo Zoo; the incineration of dolls in a pit; the Dondo-Yaki ritual of burning the debris that accrues during the Japanese New Year celebrations; the purification ceremony performed by a Noro priestess on Hokkaido, of which there will be no more, following the devastation of the indigenous culture by the American occupation in World War II. We find here articulated a dialectical structure encapsulated in Krasna's aphorism that “Forgetting is not the opposite of remembering, but its lining."

 

This corresponds, interestingly, with Walter Benjamin's remarks on the question of happiness and the mémoire involontaire in Proust: “Is not the involuntary recollection […] much closer to what is called forgetting than what is usually called memory?” The substance of involuntary memory is lost in the unconscious until the moment of recollection; things must disappear in order to assume their place in the scheme of time. Benjamin explicitly connects this with the structure of awakening, and “the Copernican [...] turn in remembrance” outlined in The Arcades Project. Proust's work seeks to catch at the “few fringes of the carpet of lived existence, as woven into us by forgetting”. His paralysis, his entrapment in the vast labour of Á la recherche du temps perdu, stems from the difficulty, at that juncture, of the task described by Benjamin in 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', the production of “experience, as Bergson imagines it, in a synthetic way under today's social conditions”. The reclamation of “genuine historical experience [erfahrung]” in the context of “the alienating, blinding experience of large-scale industrialism” would be the recollection of modernity's dream-image, the utopian glimpses buried at the very beginning of that experience. The image stands on the threshold between “the world distorted in a state of similarity” – the memory-saturated world, that is, in which temporal correspondances reign, the intentionless, auratic world of dream – and the world of purposive action.

Stoppages punctuate Sans Soleil. In the Cape Verdean and Tokyo sequences images freeze for a handful of seconds: ; In the film's second half a number of sequences are composed of stills – the digression on a Japanese museum of erotic artefacts, the film's meander through Vertigo, that extracts images from the film whose Technicolor is rendered almost hallucinatory, as if lit from within. Marker's playing with stillness reminds us that forgetting is a part of the memory of the cinematic image: the individual film-frame, the material substrate of the image, is blocked in projection as many times as it is exposed, and half of the time in which the image appears on the screen is composed of darkness (persistence of vision permits us not to notice). When Krasna catches the gaze of a Cape Verde woman “for the 24^th of a second, the length of a film-frame”, the reminder of the disappearance that awaits either side of this moment of connection (a version, perhaps, of the classic Hollywood star close-up) is palpable; it must be reduced to a still, an image in Hayao Yamoneko's Zone, its immanent amnesia erased, in order to be preserved. The theme is recapitulated in the traveller from the future who forms the protagonist of Krasna's imagined film Sunless: in his time, we are told, nothing is forgotten; for this very reason, it is difficult for him to experience the reality of the past (our present) – “memory without forgetting would be memory anaesthetised”. It is through his understanding of forgetting that he comes to begin to remember the “long and painful pre-history” embodied in Mussorgsky's song-cycle, “towards which, slowly and heavily, he begins to walk”. The utopia of the unwounded image, visible to a vantage-point “outside of time”, is necessary but insufficient; only in its glimpses of “the poignancy of things” as they depart can memory move beyond itself, decentering from individual memory into the collective daylight of historical action.

 

Another image does something of this work. In Blade Runner – again, 1982 – Rachael (Sean Young) sits at Deckard's (Harrison Ford) piano. The score on the piano's music stand is almost entirely obscured by photographs, which proliferate on top of the piano body too. (The notion of a connection between the two films is reinforced by the fact that this scene is quoted in Marker's short film Cat Listening to Music, later included as an interlude in The Last Bolshevik (1993)). She scrutinises one – an ovoid sepia picture of a woman's face that bears a certain distant resemblance to hers. Scott here cuts to Rachael's face, as if in a reverse-angle reaction shot, urging us to compare the two. Earlier, Rachael presents Deckard with a photograph as proof of the authenticity of her memories. He responds scornfully by describing a number of her most private memories, showing that they do not belong to her. (Leon, too, collects photographs.) Rachael's experience has the reality of images inscribed in media. These are, notably, analogue media, representing a previous stage of technology purportedly closer to authenticity than the high deception of replicant production, or the vast array of screen images that flash up in the urban environment. The normal epistemological operation here is reversed: the photograph does not derive its reality from indexical reference to the diegetic 'reality' of the film's world; the filmic image can appeal to no 'deeper' reality, no noumena, beyond its own intensely mediated phenomenal being and the seductions of the densely layered appearances of Scott's shots. The very presence of these photographs in his apartment suggests that this is the case, too, for Deckard. Certainly Ford's withdrawn performance, in contrast to the then-still-fashionable Method style, suggests there is little to him except for the surface borrowed from media – the look, movement and voice of the film noir protagonist. He, like the replicants, is an image in a reality objectively composed of images, of mediations without origin. Like cinematic images, they pass through time – too quickly for the liking of Roy (Rutger Hauer), who seeks to extend their lifespan – into the darkness of amnesia, destined to become the waste of industry. Their momentary appearance, and hence their disappearance, is their reality. Thus the desperation with which Deckard pins Rachael against the wall, with which he tries to know her reality: “Put your hands on me.”

None of this is new, at least as points to be noted of that moment. By the early 1980s Baudrillard had already theorised the detachment of the symbolic economy from production, the image communing with itself in the elaborate exchange-rituals of “seduction”. The image-economy of early neoliberalism, of MTV and Keith Haring, Wild Style and Heaven 17, 'Borderline' and 'Club Tropicana', Dynasty and 'Ashes to Ashes', 'The Look of Love' and Denis Piel, in parallel and at times intertwined with the vast project of the restitution of class power carried out on either side of the Atlantic, is one of permanent dream. But as a reconceptualisation of the problem of postmodernity, in which mass leftist institutions and their double in the cinema begin to dissolve, this is at least possibly productive. The cinematic image enacts at once intense, sensual desire and the impossibility of the making-real of that desire's object-cause. The visual effects of Sans Soleil – primarily the VCS3 synthesizer – belong to the same sort of interstitial technologies that Scott used in the visual composition of Blade Runner, technologies presaging the universe of digital filmmaking and connecting it to early videogames. Yamaneko's Zone eerily anticipates not only the cloud-archives of web 2.0, of Youtube and streaming film and television, in which every action and image in the hegemonic field of mediation is preserved, rendered timeless and unchanging, but the digital-surrealist reworkings of 1980s image-technology of Cory Arcangel's Mario videos. The image's historicity – its connection to a material history in which the image's dream can be recollected and enacted – is erased: when Roy, in his final speech, laments “all those memories, gone, like tears in rain”, it is exactly this extinction to which the memory-image, technologised since the late 19th century, is now subjected.

The reality or unreality of the Zone's synthesized images is related to the question of the cinematic image in general. The Zone's images, Krasna says, are at least honest in the sense that “they declare themselves to be exactly that, images, not the portable and compact form an already inaccessible reality”. Thus the image is objectively determined by the social: society's opacity to the penetrative gaze of cinema reduces the image to one more appearance to be circulated, or, at best, removed from time. Sans Soleil explicitly relates these questions to the failure of the international revolutionary project of the 60s, the historical damage that infects the image. Sans Soleil preserves the moment of ambivalence, before the movement to digital, before the assertion of a new order in Geldof's Wembley and Nicaragua, in the south Atlantic and south Yorkshire. The account of the image summed up in the concept of the Zone is not the film's conclusion: there are, as we have seen, other ways of treating the image in the film; we should treat it, as a proposition, as a moment in the dialectic, even if one that moves in the direction of despair. As Laura Mulvey suggests in Death 24x a Second (2004), the cinema's movement from analogue to digital (as the medium of both production and preservation), the threatened “extinction” of film as a medium, “draws new attention to the index”, to the historical-epistemological questions inscribed in the origins of cinema. The memory of cinema comes into dreamy focus in the moment it is threatened with liquidation. Film theory in its postmodern phase Some film theory has sometimes responded by abandoning the index as part of a theory of the image, sometimes reinterpreting earlier work to suggest it is still relevant to the present situation. Miriam Hansen for example, in Cinema and Experience, argues that Benjamin's treatment of cinema's auratic possibilities should not necessarily “be limited to cinema based on celluloid film”.

As film's material reality becomes a historical relic, the image is historicised; cinema's historical actuality – and its betrayal – becomes ever more visible and important. Cinema is not deleted, liquified, but turned into a ruin. Damage, darkness, seep into the image. An analogy can be drawn with the process described by Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama: as with the turn to allegory, the dissolution of analogue film is the eruption of history into the indexical image. This goes some way to explaining what Edward Branigan calls Sans Soleil's air of “premature nostalgia”This is not quite to say that the film mourns cinema and its attendant historical potentialities – the air of tragedy comes five years earlier, in the grief-numbed close of A Grin Without A Cat, ending on the brink of the neoliberal experiment in Chile. This situation, Laura Mulvey writes, “has rendered the presence of the index anachronistic”; passing into memory, “[t]he mechanical, even banal presence of the photographic image as index takes on a new kind of resonance […] The index can now be valued in its relation to time and as a record of a fragment of inscribed reality that may be meaningless or indecipherable”. The critics who've queued up since his death last July to describe Marker as the cinematic laureate of network society, as the filmmaker as multimedia entrepreneur (in other words,as not-film-maker), as metaphysicist of failure, memory and nostalgia, refuse or fail to reckon with the material desires, the promise of undeadened time bound up in the archive, accumulating with panic since the 1980s, as a correlate of "the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter".

An earlier version of this post appeared at A Scarlet Tracery

Archaeology and/or Apocatastasis

In the closing years of this century we are being given the opportunity, under the aegis of pax atomica, to examine in some detail our naive notions of good and evil, of peace and violence, and of life and death. Sentimental notions of peace and love simply will not do. Man is, and forever will be, a microscopic zoo containing snakes and eagles, lions and lambs, fish and frogs. It may be alright for lambs to eat grass, but for a lion - a proper one - grass will not do. Human consciousness is now being presented with new symbols and new meanings. We have not come to terms with the inner animal; therefore, its countenance has become quite fearful, like a charging tiger. This time around we are not confronted with a "babe wrapped in swaddling clothes", which is easy enough to accept, but with a "rough beast, its hour come 'round at last", that slouched to Alamogordo to be born.

Dennis Stillings Meditations on the Atom and Time: An Attempt to Define the Imagery of War and Death in the Late 20th Century. Collected in Apocalypse Culture

Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the post-literacy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself. In this situation parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the "stable ironies" of the eighteenth century....This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call "historicism," namely, the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the "neo." This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at the least compatible with addiction - with a whole historically original consumers' appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudoevents and "spectacles" (the term of the situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato's conception of the "simulacrum," the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.

Frederic Jameson Postmodernism: Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 

America in the movies is both mighty and weak, never safe for long. On the one hand, smug triumphs, banal rhetoric and globalising hubris conclude most of these films. But the fears which begin the films are of American weakness in the face of global hostility. America is rarely represented with interests to secure in the third world; this is much less explicit celebration of the benefits of imperialism than, for example, British imperial culture of the late 19th century. The only transnational economies seem to be drugs and guns; America brings rock and roll... and death. Often America is represented only by the 'democratic' military group or super-heroes. Like the ambivalence about the state, the simultaneous reduction of American presence and celebration of its global reach addresses a contradiction in ideology: it tries to square isolationism with the demands of super-power imperialism. It dramatises the extremism of contemporary international inequality, but also shows some hesitation or confusion about its appropriately benign or democratic costume.

Scott  Forsyth Hollywood's War On The World: The New World Order as Movie

The Dining Room in the Oil Rig

If there's a building which encapsulates in one structure what happened in Britain in the 1980s, and what afflicts it still, it's Lloyd's of London. Designed by Richard Rogers in 1979 and completed, just to coincide with the City's 'Big Bang' in 1986, it is usually interpreted in one of two completely inadequate ways. For architectural history, it's a monument to 'High-Tech', a style which arose in the mid-70s as a sort of last flicker from the white heat of the technological revolution, at the hands of currently ennobled, often American-trained architects - Baron Foster of Thames Bank, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Sir Michael Hopkins, Baron Rogers of Riverside. High-tech, or a version of it, has been the dominant form of architecture in the UK for the last two decades, though you can read a lot from the change in its functions - in the '70s most of the above were designing factories, now, with rare and telling exceptions, they design office blocks, cultural centres and luxury flats with a still residual 'industrial aesthetic'.

The other thing it is known as is a huge metallic embodiment of the Big Bang, a Thatcherite machine for underwriting in (it features on a Five Star sleeve, and a shop in the basement still sells Athena-style framed pictures of it in moody monochrome). Neither of these give any even slight indication of how monstrous, compelling and utterly fucked-up Lloyds is; the architectural critics can't talk about much more than the detailing, the anti-capitalists can't look beyond its (admittedly extremely unpleasant) function. In order to really capture it's weirdness you have to go inside. I've tried to get here for Open House weekend for most of the last decade, finally making it last month, with these people, the latter of whom took some of these photos.

One of the many things Lloyds is about is a strategy of tension between the two complimentary factions of the British ruling class. Before Rogers, the insurers were housed in a neoclassical building built as late as the '50s, contemporary with the Seagram Building - an embodiment of a practically unchanging British gentlemanly capitalism, resistant both to modernism and to swanky, brash American finance capitalism. On one level, Lloyds is Weinerisation to the nth degree. It houses one of the oldest institutions of the City of London, the insurance firm which can date itself to 1688 (neatly contemporary with the 'Glorious Revolution'), and it houses them in the most astonishing futurist structure ever erected in the UK. If it evokes any previously existing buildings of any kind, then they're almost always industrial - oil refineries, or the North Sea Oil Rigs which were built off the east coast of Scotland in the '70s, much beloved of high-tech architects. Both of these are visually striking typologies because of sheer utility, because their functional parts are in no way sheathed or hidden, and because the refining process requires the baffling, twisting intricacies of pipes and gantries. Like so many things with Lloyd's, you can just tick off the political-economic resonances - the oil boom that kept Thatcherism secure in its confrontations with the unions providing inadvertent inspiration for the aesthetic of the City itself at the exact point it was let off the leash.

Maybe this was some kind of unacknowledged appeasing of the gods of industry, paying tribute to it at the same time it was destroyed. It's also possible that Lloyds was and is especially thrilling for people who have never worked in a factory, the only other kind of place where services, pipes and ducts are habitually left so bare, in those places because 'nobody' is looking. Maybe. If there is a specific non-industrial built precedent, though, it's Rogers' earlier Pompidou Centre, the first of a very long and still unbroken line of non-specific cultural centres and tourist draws with wilfully spectacular architecture erected across Western cities. The 'Beaubourg' is often considered to be a '60s dream built, Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price's adaptable, anti-architectural 'Fun Palace' completed and then named after an anti-68 Gaullist. The 68ers immediately moved to disavow it, of course - the text So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg was the gauchistes' 'don't give me what I want because that's not it' response - but if it looks like a Fun Palace, quacks like a Fun Palace, etc. You can see where I'm going with this, right? An industrial aesthetic is used for FUN and then is used for CAPITAL. The finance-entertainment complex.

What makes visiting Lloyds such a bizarre experience, however, is seeing how the underwriters have conserved so many elements of their atavistic previous existence. These remnants are scattered around the new building, decontextualised fragments ripped from 1763, 1799, 1925 and 1958, rudely riveted onto the ducts and pipes. There's the antiquated uniforms worn by the service staff; the front facade of their 1920s offices is held up like a trophy on street level; inside, the Lutine Bell sits at the foot of 'The Room', more of which later; several paintings and bits of furnishings survive from previous buildings; and strangest of all, a complete 18th century dining room by Robert Adam was preserved and recreated. At first, it seems like these are tokens kept on a sort of reservation of gentlemanly capitalism in order to placate the old guard. After a while you realise that what is really happening here is more like a marriage, a reconciliation, a mockery of Wiener's idea that there should be any difference or hostility between the capitalism of gentlemen and the capitalism of industrialists. That comes about especially forcefully in The Room.

Agata mentions Koyaanisqatsi the first time she sees The Room, and that captures some of its sense of controlled, mechanised mania. It's an enormous, multi-storey concrete atrium dominated visually by two things, on an axis so that the link between the two is unavoidable. There is a web of criss-crossing escalators, which can take the client to the underwriter at speed. These align with the open-plan offices on every side, creating a sort of visual simulation of industrial activity. As you see all this it's hard to imagine that nothing is actually being produced here; the look of some putative industrial hub employed purely for the purposes of immaterial, literally speculative finance. The open floors and the dynamism of the escalators draw the eye straight away to the more sentimental of the assembled, decontextualised objects, the Lutine Bell itself. What you can see is a neoclassical rostrum housing the bell itself, made in the 1920s, mahogany and Corinthian columns, with an antiquated clock on top. The bell inside is rung when a member of the Royal Family dies, and on the rare occasions when a ship they have insured sinks, as was its original function. After that, look up, and you'll see a glass barrel-vaulted roof. You're in a gigantic '80s version of The Crystal Palace, the 1851 iron-and-glass fantasia that Martin Wiener considered British industrial capitalism's unsurpassed zenith. These two sentimental remnants are what they whole high-tech assemblage revolves around. Like the Gothicism of services on the facade, the Room is a quite ridiculously thrilling thing to behold; you have to catch your breath and remind yourself where you are. What this is.

With its glazed lifts, moving parts, girders, cranes, components all crammed into a tight, fierce, metallic mesh, Lloyds has always been a building that has (on me, at least) much the same shivers-down-spine effect as The Human League's 'Dancevision', or 'Strings of Life', or 'Trans-Europe Express': a mechanical sublime that sweeps away any residual humanist resistance with your willing participation. Fully aware of this, there's also a series of get-out-clauses left here by the architect. Rogers was and is a figure of the soft left; as a Labour Party peer, he'll have been one of those who were the NHS' unlikely last line of defence last week. The other stylistic influence here, one which Rogers draws attention to in his books, was the unbuilt projects of the early Soviet Union. The lifts shooting up and down the metal frame are taken from Leningradskaya Pravda; the overwhelming metal-on-metal rush of the street facade is taken from Iakov Chernikhov; the irregular, techno-Gothic approach to the skyscraper is from Ivan Leonidov. So add to the list of ironies the era when the USSR was considered to be capitalism's gravedigger being evoked on the eve of its suicide, for the purposes of the forces that would soon drag its territory into a ferocious gangster capitalism. Another get-out-clause is adaptability. The building is adorned at the top by fragments of the cranes used to construct it, as if to tell us that the thing is in flux; the floors, too, are moveable. The suggestion seems to be that one day it could all be made into something else by someone else. The building is about to be Grade 1 listed, so that's certainly not happening, pending another glorious revolution. Then there's the promise of an organic, reformed and reformist city, which made Rogers a 'New Labour consigliere', in which capacity he was probably the last major British architect to have any ideas about society whatsoever. From 1997 to 2010 the architect had a semi-governmental role advocating street life, compact cities, let's-be-like-Barcelona-or-Berlin-rather-than-fucking-Texas. But the Lloyds Building, no matter how astonishing it might be to look at as a passer-by, meets the street with a moat.

The real moment of madness in Lloyds is the Adam Room. While much of Lloyds evokes the more ruthless side of '80s cinema - a John Carpenter film, The Terminator, Robocop or Gremlins 2 could all be shot here - this place is pure Tarkovsky. It's the last scene of Solaris, where the alien intelligence re-creates the familial hearth. On the 11th floor, the high-tech corridors, with their Gigerish sculptural ceilings, suddenly meet a white concrete block. That concrete block is decorated with classical details. Lloyds is not generally thought to be postmodernism in the usual sense of irony and historical montage - in fact it's often presented instead as 'late modernism', a strident keeping-of-the-faith; Rogers' continuing role as antagonist to the Prince of Wales helps that presentation. Yet here's an absolutely pitch-perfect bit of pomo, a seemingly mocking, parodic reproduction of an Alexander Popish 18th century thrown into a completely alien context.

Walk into it, and you're as far into the heart of the establishment as a commoner is ever likely to get (one weekend, every September). The Adam Room, named after its designer, was originally part of Bowood House in Wiltshire, was commissioned by the first Earl of Sherborne, and is rammed so full of objets d'art that ten increasingly head-bangingly boring series of Antiques Roadshow could be built around Michael Aspel inspecting it piece-by-piece. The sensation it creates is of reaching the inner sanctum of the great parasite itself; all that outside is just for show, a display of how sprightly and modern and with-it we are, a delicate subterfuge, an elaborate joke about deindustrialisation where we can look at paintings of galleons while the shipyards are closed. In here, Lloyd's of London are the same organisation that built itself on the slave trade; it's a time-machine that physically brings Old Corruption back to the site of its inception. They play at modernisation, but always keep this place in reserve, are always able to return to it. We queue to get in outside the Palladian bunker, and then circle round the table for our allotted time.

Malcolm In The Middle

Despite its bad press these days, through a perspective that binds it so closely to the ravages of neoliberalism, at the time I could feel the appeal of postmodernism. With youth and receptive innocence being so important to how we respond to pop music, the records below may represent the best examples of its overtly self-conscious, postmodern 80s variety. High-concept po-mo pop (including short-lived sensations like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but mainly miserable failures like Sigue Sigue Sputnik) reached saturation point around mid-decade, with a plethora of acts borrowing their template for marketing gimmickry from Malcolm McLaren. The British music press between 1983-87 was full of talentless chancers armed with nothing more than a slogan, a haircut and gaudy graphic design. McLaren's role in the great punk swindle has been over-documented to death elsewhere (not least by himself), so perhaps it's time to view his entire career for what it actually was: a risky celebration of play for its own sake; the basic lesson any clever art school kid learns. It was all a game to McLaren and it was obvious that, unlike more famous contemporaries, he thoroughly enjoyed playing the overgrown child. The staged battles over his little pranks, the cod-situationist aphorisms, his many daft interviews, and his somewhat unsavory fixations (namely, a recurring focus on pubescent girls' sexuality) didn't take away from his cunning pop smarts. He acted as role model to all kinds of of zeitgeist-chasing wannabes, the vast majority of whom fell flat on their faces trying to emulate him. Maybe it was because they lacked enough conviction in their silliness.

Although already familiar with rap, watching the video for 'Buffalo Gals' on kid's TV or Top of the Pops brought home the (then) disconcertingly alien aspects of hiphop as a subculture. For everyone who saw it as a particularly annoying novelty hit, there just as many who saw it as heralding an important cultural shift. It paid more attention to hiphop's more avant-garde aspects than earlier attempts at appropriation by trad-bands like Blondie or The Clash, who couldn't escape obedience to the 'rock band' superego. With so many different voices moving in and out of his solo records, McLaren didn't feel as much need to constantly claim centre stage. He presented himself as just another character, leading the dance. True to the historical mix-n-match of late capitalism, the rhythmic juxtapositions and lyrics of 'Buffalo Gals' placed it in a continuum of earlier American folk-forms - pop culture as rest and recreation from matters of manifest destiny (the inherent violence of which played as much a role in hiphop's later development as it did in country and western decades earlier). To UK audiences at least, it briefly 'made strange' American popular culture; something that's rarely happened in the charts since the 80s. To many a young ear, it piqued our curiosity. It's still as oddly compelling as it was three decades ago.

Of course, a true postmodernist like McLaren didn't just use history for his box of Lego. He did similar with geography too. 'Double Dutch' brought together strands of the Black Atlantic diaspora, from the urban playgrounds of New York to the brutally oppressed townships of Soweto (the colonial allusions to both places are in the title). It used South African styles with less morose vanity than Paul Simon's more celebrated Gracelands, and with arguably more sensitivity to the political struggles at stake. Unlike more pompous 80s performers (some of whom are sadly still with us), it didn't wave these struggles around as flags of convenience. That would have been too redolent of grown-ups too self-important or pretentious to be 'in' on his big punk prank (I liked to imagine him using a hand-buzzer to shake hands with Richard Branson). He simply acknowledged that those struggles took place in a world we all shared. Despite the horrors of this world, there was still fun to be had in the most unlikely of locations. After all, kids can be skipping in South Africa as much they can in North America. In contrast to the 80s, we're now less likely to accept what po-mo sometimes justified its own existence with: The (perhaps vain) attempt to s(t)imulate empathy via the use of play between divergent cultures and time periods, that may otherwise have seemed distant from - or opposed to - each other. However limited this approach may have ultimately been, it was certainly less offensive than stadium pop turning clear and present political emergencies into promotional pieties, and much less pseudo-aristocratic as a creative space. Not so much we are the world as you are the world. It was a respite from cultural and historical context into something less antagonistic, stratified or burdensome. 

This was the stated purpose of McLaren's concept album Fans. It attempted that most po-mo of tricks; dated in the obviousness of its concept, yet an approach now commonplace beyond all novelty: Harmonizing the highbrow and lowbrow, by applying pop R'n'B production to opera classics. A gimmicky move, sure, and perhaps distasteful to more devoted fans of either. However, it managed to serve up one of the most sublimely ridiculous, memorable and weirdly touching confections to grace the 80s pop charts; while doing it on the safe side of embarrassment or pretension. It granted opera more dignity than FIFA ever did, anyway. When I hear 'Nessun Dorma' nowadays, images of a drunken Paul Gasgoine wearing plastic tits to entertain the lads are sadly unavoidable. McLaren's 'Madame Butterfly' conjured up something altogether more beguiling and evocative; fusing high'n'low with more panache than so many other 80s attempts. The knowing world-weariness of the lyrics worked well, emerging as they do from the cheeky innocence of its conceit. For all of McLaren's unashamedly gauche childishness, moving on from the confrontational aspects of his earlier projects was his way of growing up in public. He learned the basic lesson that so many of us do past a certain age: Pop music should be fun, it should be inclusive, and all the rest is propaganda. It's not there to feed the world, but it shouldn't heave-ho its partners either. What the listener takes from it is what matters. McLaren just wanted to play, and anyone was invited to join in if they so wished. You'd have to be a pretty sour old punk to object to that, really.

Now That Fits Nice

In close parallel to the 1978-83 post-punk renaissance (as documented in Simon's Rip It Up And Start Again), funk, disco and the poppier side of side of soul was also having a damn good run of it at the same time (covered in Peter Shapiro's equally excellent tome Turn That Beat Around). With a vicious backlash, and fatigue at the cultural hegemony of Saturday Night Fever, the dust of disco settled into all kinds of interesting shapes - from the first stirrings of hiphop to hi-concept New York punky funky disco eccentrics like James Chance, Arthur Russell, the Was Bros. and Kid Creole/August Darnell. Punk, Afrobeat, reggae, fusion, electropop and Latino music were cheerfully appropriated for dancefloor use. Add the ominous dynamics of Reagan's victory and the constituencies he came to destroy, it made for a heady, implicitly political brew. It was perhaps unsurprising that new wavers like Talking Heads and The Clash hitched along for the ride. It was also apt that Bowie would end his run of greatness with Nile Rogers instead of Brian Eno. The integration of the audience was frequently as seamless as its collage of musical styles. It wasn't so much mutant disco, as hybrid; lending it a frequently unpredictable pizazz.

Of course, the arrival of Thriller, its almost totalitarian commercial impact, and the (arguable) backlash it provoked in the form of hiphop, swept this mini-utopia away; leaving dancefloors between a desexualised, deracialised, deradicalised Disneyland and the harsh admonition to 'keep it real' (until rave, itself a different kind of Disneyland, albeit existing largely in the head). Funk was eventually pushed to the margins, but for a while there the influence of George Clinton could be heard all over the place (yaoww!), and not just among his own P-Funk collective. This was before the horrors of AIDS and conservatism, when sexuality was openly celebrated; unlike the paranoid disgust of Jacko and his many imitators, or Material Girls insisting the only thing going on was the rent. Disco was assimilated into the default pop mainstream by the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman and Hi-NRG-lite like New Order and the Pet Shop Boys (their one true classic 'West End Girls' - the source of this blog's title - emerged from the New York scene mentioned above, but itself riddled with noirish sexual dread). The only Utopia Madonna pledged allegiance to was her own neoliberal success story. Jellybean Benitez served his instrumental purpose many movers and shakers ago. Despite her (increasingly desperate) bumping and grinding, the actual tracks sounded as sterile as any other by the late 80s. Disco vets like Prince stood out for the idiosyncratic niche he carved, but he was a rarity; reliant on MTV and Hollywood to make his mark. There were still somewhat anomalous exceptions, like Sly and Robbie's awesome 'Boops (Here To Go)'; but rather than prove influential, they ultimately suggested lost possibilities. 

Anyway, all the above is just an excuse to post some great tracks from the period. Ironically, the songs below are now most likely to be heard (if at all) in the twattier kind of hipster venue. Places that are far from sexy, integrated, adventurous, politicised or remotely Utopian. Where "fuck you" is the soulful refrain replacing "let's do it!" At least musically, things were a little more open then. Michael Henderson was an in-demand session player with fusion superstars, proving he could funk with the best of them, coiling his mighty bass around a filthy double entendre. Arthur Russell's deeply personal, spacious, spiritual style now has its due recognition. Rick James' Street Songs is the rare album that's excellent from beginning to end, and in a more just world, would have outsold Thriller to much healthier social and commercial effect. The production credits of Sly and Robbie speak for themselves, being in demand as producers with good reason. They eventually settled into the increasingly conservative and enclosed world of Jamaican pop. Frankie Beverly's Maze were relatively 'trad', reflecting the short-lived optimism of an emergent black middle-class; but never quite entered the mainstream with their lack of video glitz and high reputation as a live act. The last track (one of the greatest dance tunes ever, IMHO) is a lovely example of August Darnell's pop genius, and could be a manifesto for the whole milieu I'm lazily attempting to describe. Of course, with the exceptions of mighty Rick and Grace (for obvious reasons - look at 'em), none of these tracks had the pop videos that would be de rigeur by mid-decade. History was indeed made at night, but the Spectacle was closed to its potential; as pop (and nightlife) carried out its slowly gentrified, neutered facelift and eventual irrelevance. But whenever I hear this stuff, it can't help but evoke thoughts of a warmer world.

To Be, Or...

The structural similarity between much advertising and much modern art is not simply copying by the advertisers. It is the result of comparable responses to the contemporary human condition, and the only distinction that matters is between the clarification achieved by some art and the displacement normal in bad art and most advertising. The skilled magicians, the masters of the masses, must be seen as ultimately involved in the general weakness which they not only exploit but are exploited by. If the meanings and values generally operative in the society give no answers to, no means of negotiating, problems of death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect, then the magical system must come, mixing its charms and expedients with reality in easily available forms, and binding the weakness to the condition which has created it. Advertising is then no longer merely a way of selling goods. It is a true part of the culture of a confused society.

- Raymond Williams, 1980

Daydream Nation: Back To The Velvet

Critically and commercially, Back To The Future (1985) and Blue Velvet (1986) continue to be influential and popular in a way that so few hits of the 80s are. Frequently placed on 'all-time favourites' lists, the former continues to entertain school kids with frequent TV broadcasts, the latter still finds an enthusiastic college-age audience on DVD. In retrospect, what is most striking is how very similar both films are. The main difference may be their respective genres' terms of reference, but they have far more in common than first impressions indicate. Both films hark back to the 50s, not least the persistent myths of lost purity and cohesion. These myths even extend to their use of 50s pop music. The only non-white people visible in either film are 'Chuck Berry' and his band - taught how to play rock'n'roll by white Marty. For all of Blue Velvet's borrowings from Kenneth Anger and its sexual 'subversion', homosexuality is solely suggested by a camp rendition of 'In Dreams'. Women serve as battlegrounds, over which 'family values' struggle against fathers abusive or weak. Blue Velvet's kidnap plot takes a back seat to its sexual violence. Compared to symbolic flourishes and dream imagery, its crime 'mystery' is the least memorable aspect of the film. Similarly, Back To The Future's sci-fi trappings are largely there to open, close and advertise the film. The real genre connecting both is the fairy tale, where the hand of the princess and the keys to the kingdom are earned by overcoming demons external and internal. Both films' 50s genre adornments are mere 'McGuffins' to that most ancient of dramas: the Oedipal triangle. The real 'meat' of both stories concerns the affirmation of patriarchal authority, won via young men's journeys into an underworld (of dreams, dangerous curiosity, sexual turbulence, or the unknowable past). What makes them highly relevant to the 80s is their restoration and empowerment of the 'good' family, of traditional gender (and implicitly, class and race) relations.

As with most fairy tales since Grimm, both films are as conservative as they are perverse. Both screenplays cunningly exploit the thrill of taboo, while also working to repress the curiosity and traumas of the Primal Scene. By not hiding behind the symbolism of the Oedipal triangle, making the blood relations at stake explicit, Back To The Future was arguably more risky. This is a kid-friendly blockbuster where Marty McFly spends most of the film trying to discourage sexual advances from his own mother. It's rare to see any mother in a 'family' film portrayed as sexually assertive, especially when the object of desire is her youngest son. As with Blue Velvet, the story was years in gestation, tinged with autobiography and childhood nostalgia; 'personal' projects that rescued the director's reputation after a notable flop. Blue Velvet's characterisation is built around David Lynch's childhood memories of small-town life (including the traumatic sight of a bewildered, naked woman walking the streets). Back To the Future screenwriter Bob Gale stated that his story emerged from speculating on whether he would have been friends with his father had they attended school at the same time. It is perhaps logical that director Robert Zemeckis added further speculation - over the desirability, and indeed availability, of one's own mother if she also attended the same school. It may be its dreamlike tone and environment that allows Back To The Future to get away with this central conceit.

 

Although controversial, Blue Velvet got away with its 'outrageous' scenario by presenting an America removed from any recognisable reality. 70s crime thrillers and neo-noir often focussed on the degradation of 'the excremental city' or town, where patriarchal order was hideously abusive (Chinatown, Serpico, Gloria), subject to mockery (Dirty Harry, Dog Day Afternoon, The Long Goodbye) or tragically ineffective (Night Moves, Cruising, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie). Left, right or liberal; the city was always corrupted, with varying emphases of blame. In the 80s, noir increasingly presented a hyperreal 'America' - a country in inverted commas where story, environment and performance became more overtly 'plastic', as in Body Heat, Blood Simple, Body Double, Trouble In Mind, Down By Law and Something Wild - moving towards stylized black comedy and away from urban realism. Complementing this noir trend, science fiction moved away from its earlier (and far less profitable) litany of doom, towards childlike optimism and renewed faith in family values. Again, comedy played a big part. Unlike the 70s, the Disneyfied America was no longer a niche - it was common parlance, as mise-en-scene turned away from 'realism', back to the fairy tale and its comforts.  

Along with the traditional hero, the 70s was a period when the cinematic father was thrown open to question. Despite the death of the western, its narrative set-ups moved into the suburb, the city or even outer space. The restoration of the father's Law and legitimacy can be charted over the first Star Wars trilogy; but came to dominate many genres like the Teen movie. Teens adjusting to social norms by asserting aspirational values over the indulgences and 'failed' authority of their Boomer parents was a common motif in 80s film (Exhibit A: John Hughes). Flattering the ideology in which its young audience was growing up, it was youth bringing the Law to town. When making Back To The Future, Michael J. Fox was starring in the popular sitcom Family Ties, a key show of Reagan's 80s. Where previous sitcoms played off the conservative father against the more progressive son, here roles were reversed. Fox played the right-wing yuppie, fighting against the hippy liberal values of his father (that's all I can remember about the show, apart from the distractingly youthful Meredith Baxter as the mother - herself adding a layer of Oedipal tension). In Back To The Future, it's not so much a conflict of values as attitude. Marty's family, especially father George (played by the very 'Lynchian' Crispin Glover) are a source of comic embarrassment, losers that disappoint the ambitious, energetic Marty. Their domestic discontent, their failure to keep up with the Joneses, is the desperate situation in need of narrative remedy (later continued into the following century and, somewhat appropriately, the wild west).

If the McFlys begin with a failed patriarch's impotence (and ensuing lack of domestic discipline), Blue Velvet opens with two versions of patriarchal castration, true to Lynch's usual approach of painting symbolism with boxing gloves. The red, white and blue of the idyllic suburb is disturbed by a sudden stroke, the father's hose out of control, punctuated by a dog that snaps away near his crotch. For the rest of the film, the 'true' father will be absent; as will the owner of the severed ear Jeffery Beaumont finds on the way back from his hospital visit. The rest of the film will be loudly dominated by the monstrous, obscene father (veering between 'Daddy' and 'Baby'); using his power to violate the Law in the absence of idealised, silent fathers. Compared to the difficult but well-judged performances of the other leads, Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth is as hammy and cartoonish as Christopher Lloyd's Doc - performances from the school of Robert Newton's Long John Silver. Like Silver, they are dangerous substitute fathers, unpredictable 'wizards' reliant on artificial enhancement, leading our young heroes into perilous (but ultimately containable) dreamworlds. The 'dream' being a hyperreal, mythologised America that must overcome temptation and confusion. Frank also incorporates the role of town bully (as goblin or fire-breathing 'dragon'), like Biff in Back To The Future. Both bullies must be destroyed, physically and/or economically - in the interests of hygiene: to cleanse the town, the home and the mind, a threat to be exterminated as decisively as the insects populating Blue Velvet. In accordance with 80s economic ideology, the first battle for social redemption is within the family.

In the interests of 'surrealism', Blue Velvet preys upon infantile anxieties and adolescent fantasy. Complementing those mysterious noises that emanate from mommy and daddy's room, Lynch adds imagery redolent of animal sex: reminders of why parents hastily lead children to the next cage at the zoo. The voyeuristic Primal Scene that introduces Frank has been analysed to death elsewhere. His 'bad father' sadism usually garners the most attention, Dorothy's 'bad mother' masochism less so. Why does she accept her 'punishment' so willingly, even encouraging it from a reluctant Jeffery? Despite his wilful violation of patriarchal order, Jeffery is still presented as the 'innocent' throughout. His response to Dorothy's abuse is foregrounded, as much as his own beating is given greater narrative weight than the regular violence Dorothy is subjected to. Instead of punishment or condemnation, his voyeurism is rewarded with a plot device familiar from any number of porno films - the virginal peeping tom 'punished' with fellatio (sex-with-stepmother also being a porno staple). Even the first-time viewer knows that the castrating knife she holds won't be used - being more of a Hollywood taboo than incest, or sexual violence encouraged by its victims. Jeffrey's position in the fairy tale (as son, as 'apprentice') allows for a license that Dorothy can't claim. 

Sex without family is presented as the instincts of beasts, like the snarling dog or writhing insects of the opening scenes. As much as Back To The Future, Blue Velvet is very much concerned with 'taming' female sexuality. The casting of glamorous Isabella Rossellini, her relative youth compared to Hopper (or even the man playing her husband) throws her into the thankless position of mother as sexual being without domestic purpose; a guilt that seems to haunt Dorothy until the film's final shot. As with Back To The Future's Leah Thompson, she is written and played as more sexual (and disturbingly sexy) than the protagonist's 'real' girlfriend. Marty's mother's desire is subject to the demands of narrative and biological destiny (he has to procure the Primal Scene to exist). As 'mother', Dorothy bears the brunt of punishment, for the absence of supposedly stabilising influences of husband and child (whose hat, fascinating to Jeffery, could be read in similar terms to the severed ear, as severed/castrated from patriarchal coherence). Although Dorothy is often described as a 'femme fatale', Jane Greer, Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Bennett were never this willingly victimised; but then 40s noir rarely added 'failed' motherhood to its locus of betrayals (a notable exception being Mildred Pierce). Their characters also had a far greater role in manipulating events, a luxury brutally denied to Dorothy.

Lynch's highly acclaimed career would continue in a similar vein, with stories of women in trouble. The look and manner of his heroines echoing a re-imagined 50s, their agonies and mutilations a punishment for 'modern' sexual transgression. Even TV's Twin Peaks sold itself with the fetishised image of a young girl's corpse. Its film spin-off gloated upon the torture that led her there. The actions of Lynch's abusive father figures or murderous cuckolds are frequently explained away by a supernatural presence (deus ex machina as convenient as the Force, Superman's time-reversal, or opening the Lost Ark). Zemeckis would go on to be one of the most financially successful directors of all time, notably with Forest Gump: a celebration of political ignorance and revisionism, with historical punishment for counter-cultural discontent, particularly for women. The mid-80s may be the turning point where the Hollywood blockbuster and American 'art' cinema found a common ideological ground. As 'independent' film increasingly become an exercise in style and pastiche, it was a decade in which the post-modern condition closed the gap between notions of art and commerce, mainstream and counter-culture; all under the vigilant watch of neoliberal hegemony. Although social reality continued to move further away from domestic idealisation, American film pushed the family fairy tale as the only social 'unity' worth working towards. As with the 80s police procedural or war film, father knew best again. Hollywood made fundamental demands of faith from an increasingly juvenile audience. 

Reagan and Bush I were fans of Back To The Future, both citing it in speeches (the murderous presence of "Libyan terrorists" probably helped). Its idyllic treatment of the 50s, with a previously irreversible outcome available for correction and revision (history be damned!), had obvious Republican appeal. This attitude was even apparent in the making of the film: "We decided to shoot all the 50s stuff first, and make the town look real beautiful and wonderful. Then we would just totally trash it down and make it all bleak and ugly for the 1980s scenes." However, lifelong Republican Lynch's (very 50s) Lumberton sees its nocturnal, inarticulate inner city 'cleansed' by suburban outsiders; as Jeffrey's righteous resolve kicks in when Dorothy's violated, naked body 'violates' the wholesome space of his idyllic, retro suburb. It is also a journey to the new Morning in America; the restored strength of the white bourgeois family to which both films awake at the end, in blinding sunshine. A gentrification of the soul. Although some ambiguity persists (for the benefit of sequels... or critics), memories of urban degradation, sexual transgression or moral failure are conveniently devoured by the Law, nature (the robins), science (time travel) and right-wing family values. The patriarchal family is not only consolidated, but enhanced. 

For all the contradictory impulses and sexual dread of their protagonists, both films' denouements come after the most American of solutions. As manipulated by Marty, George McFly earns the right to be a father (the right father) as his trembling hands transform into well-timed, well-aimed fists (at a dance event called 'Enchantment Under The Sea', emphasising the fairy-tale Freudianism). With this, the family rapidly fading from Marty's photograph returns to visibility and future invincibility. Jeffrey enters sexual maturity (exiting the 'dark underbelly' of moral and sexual confusion) by blowing out the brains of the obscene dad of nightmare; and with that blowing out the 'dark' side of himself, foreshadowing Fight Club years later. This time the camera emerges from an ear free of insects and mutilation. Oedipus has completed his journey with both eyes intact. Initially meek, our suburban mother fuckers have enforced the Law; using the last resort of all politics, sexual, domestic or otherwise. Rescued from sexual coercion from 'undesirable' elements, both mothers return to their rightful role in the magic kingdom, after male violence is placed in the 'right' hands. If both films are about entry into (and escape from) dream worlds, it is physical force that has final say before the family can return to an acceptably altered reality: The 80s version of the American Dream.

Tell You All About Myself / And Let My Knowledge Be Born

Tech Noir Sex

Sexuality as the mediated, oppressive, conscious contagion attacking personal agency, biology and ontology. Subject to deception, technology, ideology and social stratification (The Law being as un/dead as Bela Lugosi). Subcultural neuroses that would eventually become common parlance, and then repackaged accordingly. AIDS was beginning to be diagnosed around the same time, but wasn't a mainstream panic until the middle of the decade. If sci-fi/horror's nightmares don't exist at its time of writing, it may be necessary to invent them shortly after.

All the above are cult classics, highly influential in their respective (sub)genres. 'Sleeper' hits that took years to grow an audience (or canonization for Blade Runner), their motifs moving across fashion, adverts, pop videos, and product design, ie. everywhere. A virus of the pleasure principle. Away from the peer pressures of cinema viewing, the lonely - guilty? - space of home video gave these films room to gestate. The lifestyles, behaviour and economic conditions of their characters now appear far less alien than they did in 1982/83. We may be more alienated than these doom-mongers could forecast. Consider the shape Cafe Videodrome has taken since, and your statistical likelihood of surveying either (a) a corporate-led social network, or (b) pornography shortly after looking at this blog. All those immaterial encounters... like tears in the rain...