Video Nasties: Rewinding to 2005

Is there a statute of limitations, after which one should forgo replying to criticism? Probably, but this weekend I noticed a dig at me in print and worthy of comment. I know the standard procedure is to start these rebuttals by saying ‘it has been brought to my attention that…’, implying that I am too important to read Film Ireland but one of my many underlings summoned up the courage to break the news on this potentially indelicate matter. (In truth, I was trying to find this article on Questia* and stumbled across ‘Fresh Hells’ by Niall Kitson, normally behind a paywall or in print-only format. The vacancy for an underling remains unfilled.) Maybe it's a genuine mix-up, but the author makes me say the opposite of what I normally say on these matters.

Here’s my original article; here’s how it is summarized in Film Ireland:
The meeting of minds seem to come from top down as well as bottom up in the cultural hierarchy, but whether these films are appreciated in the same way is another matter entirely. As critic Graham Barnfield noted 'horror films preach to the converted and providing excess for hardcore fans is the name of the game, hence the reappearance of many video nasties, ironically touted as "classics"'. This argument implies that a reasonably-minded audience will be appalled by the rape scene in Irréversible (2002), by the killing of a child in Funny Games but for the unwashed horror audience these scenes amount to little more than stalk and slash set pieces. Similarly the ne plus ultra of rapid-cut New Brutalism - Requiem for a Dream (2000) - is to be read in certain quarters solely as an adrenaline ride straight into hell, and not as a harrowing cautionary tale about the evils of drug abuse. Such reasoning smacks of self-justification, but it does raise important issues for the future of the horror genre: In an era where the most frightening movies are no longer horror movies how do you keep your audience?
A key word here is ‘implies’, which can cover a multitude of sins. In 2005 I was probably too tentative about saying that Extreme Cinema was becoming a genre in its own right, where the fictional depraved acts set the pace, and the dialogue, typically reflecting on the futility of modern life, acted as the padding in between. In that respect, the comparison with There’s Something About Mary (1998) remains apt. (Bear in mind this was before the outbreak of full-on torture porn.) I don’t really say anything much about fans in my article, unwashed or otherwise, apart from my reflections on being a fan. But it is worth saying that the genre fan generally knows ‘the rules’, meaning s/he appreciates certain scenes that can seem gross and unpleasant to the uninitiated. Fans can also differentiate between the fun and depressing or upsetting forms of splatter, as a trip to FrightFest will confirm. (Niall Kitson is right that horror film audiences get appalled by certain scenes of nastiness, but he also seems to confuse horror fans with mainstream audiences who see the odd horror film from time to time.)

My point about art-house gore is how often it becomes a form of genre filmmaking in its own right; for instance, Baise Moi (2000) would be (now) seen as a lazy and clichéd if positioned as crime movie, while A Day of Violence (2010) – ‘you just killed seven people, you twat!’ – was marketed as Euro-giallo yet it had more in common with the last 15 years of crime Britflicks. My argument had nothing to do with whether or not audiences react against scenes of fictional rape and murder: it was about the lazy use of these scenes as a shortcut to a reputation for artfulness. If audiences fall for it, more fool them. Generally the horror fan – who is not the same as the casual moviegoer dropping into the latest Saw installment every Halloween – has more sense.** For the record, reading my argument as being about 'unwashed' horror fans doesn't add up. I am on record as opposing the double standard where gruesome foreign language movies can get past the BBFC uncut whereas equivalents films in English are to be quarantined from a mass audience. (Whether either type of movie deserves an audience is a story for another day.)



* Publication Information: Article Title: Fresh Hells. Contributors: Niall Kitson - author. Magazine Title: Film Ireland. Issue: 103. Publication Date: March/April 2005. Page Number: 36+. © 2005 Filmbase. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

** One exception to this is A Serbian Film, buts that’s another story.

Another Fiennes Mess...

Academics in cultural studies have long resisted seeing cultural products, or ‘texts’, as mere epiphenomena of the process by which the economic surplus is transferred from the producers to their exploiters – class war. Sometimes the Cultural Studies 'field' has searched popular culture for signs of ‘resistance’ while in a parallel development, often expressing a problematic relationship between Cultural Studies and earlier forms of ‘ideology critique’, critics of the culture industries have long presented institutions like the Hollywood movie or the paperback thriller as vehicles for promoting and reinforcing reactionary beliefs and capitalist hegemony.

Sometimes a popular narrative will intersect with underlying economic realities and generate a moment of clarity as to the state of politics. Killer Elite (Gary McKendry, 2011) is an action movie adapted from The Feather Men (Fiennes, 1991). Set in 1980, it shows mercenaries hired to and coerced into assassinating current or former members of the Special Air Service (SAS). Danny Bryce (Jason Statham) and his comrades target individuals who are selected because of their work as 'military advisors' in 1970s Oman, particularly the Battle of Mirbat. Throughout the film – an unexceptional genre flick if not for the presence of thespian heavyweight Robert de Niro – a shadowy cabal plots to protect the lifelong interests of the entire Regiment and prolong its benefits spun off from 1970s counterinsurgency in the Arabian Gulf.

As a snapshot of significant attitudes accompanying three decades of class war, the various incarnations of The Feather Men can act as a set of map references for changing reputations. In its ‘factional’ 1980 setting, the story coincides with a period of British patriotism, stretching from 1945 into the Cold War. 1980 was also a year when the SAS enjoyed enormous prestige, following its intervention in the siege of the Iranian embassy in London; within two years Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government was injecting militarism into domestic politics and industrial relations – the so-called Falklands Factor. By 1991, when Bloomsbury published the ‘true adventure’ in hardback, SAS-based merchandising was a lucrative commercial activity, eventually prompting the publication of Who Cares Who Wins (1996), an illustrated spoof of such authors as Chris Ryan and Andy McNab. Fiennes prompted controversy by representing real people as caught up in events of questionable veracity. ‘Many events Fiennes describes simply never took place. Frankly, it's just another example of the Special Forces' reputation being exploited for commercial gain,’ a Ministry of Defence source told the Daily Telegraph.

If 1991 saw tensions between patriotism and commerce, rising it was also a time when UK-PLC was seeking closer integration with what was then the European Community. Elsewhere, the reputation of nationalism per se was increasingly tarnished, identified more closely with desperate territorial conflicts in the east than with once-prestigious national liberation struggles in Africa and South-East Asia (of the sort Special Forces were frequently deployed in). The Feather Men was published against the backdrop of Cold War certainties coming apart.

Cut to 2011, and a version of The Feather Men is on general release as Killer Elite. This reworking of the source material - whose long-ish timeframe is compressed into a single year - also indicates key changes in the ideological landscape. The feature film turns the SAS from protagonists into targeted victims; it strips the assassins of their geopolitical motives by recasting them as Anglophone mercenaries. Tellingly, it portrays British intelligence agents as oil-grabbing snobs supporting the vengeful Sheikh and retired SAS men forming an almost untouchable shadow government. In keeping with a contemporary cliché, the unacceptable face of capitalism is the shadowy backroom conspiracy. Cultural representations of the capitalist class hinge on it plotting by committee while finding time to betray ordinary Joes like Spike Logan (Clive Owen), invalided out of the Regiment and acting as an enforcer for the Feather Men.

No more heroes...



PS. One additional change from book to film is that the primary antagonist is no longer a Dubai Sheikh – perhaps for reasons I will be considering in the future.

Misread by Redhead

In younger, slimmer days I was frequently mistaken for an undercover cop. Too ‘smart casual’ to be a 1980s leftie, I guess – and yet still badly dressed. Almost two decades later, I was mistaken for a moral entrepreneur. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Oddly, something similar happens to me in a new book by Prof. Steve Redhead (admittedly, the chapter in question first appeared as a journal article in 2007, which I missed at the time).




In case you missed it, Redhead argues:

The Football Factory film was released to a highly contrived media moral panic in May 2004, shortly before the Euro 2004 football championship in Portugal. One newspaper critic (9) noted that the film had been ‘slammed in some circles as a fetid miasma of immorality. An academic commentator (10) saw the original novel as ‘centring on low life and lowlifes…social realism without the socialism’. The film was widely criticised, though enthusiastically received at the DVD stores, precisely because commentators claimed it used ‘real’ football hooligans as actors and advisers and evoked a ‘realistic’ atmosphere alongside an attitude that glorified the stylised football casual violence. The question of the ‘real’ in The Football Factory, however, is a much more complicated issue and relates directly to previous attempts at promoting social realism in British cinema and literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the reworking of such representations in the era of postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s.

As for me, I am that academic commentator, dear reader, a footnote in his story (footnote 10 to be precise). I was also a bit surprised to see that, within a sentence of Redhead identifying ‘a highly contrived media moral panic’ in 2004, he cites me as part of the scare story. It takes a wilfully perverse reading of my second article on The Football Factory (excluding pseudonymous stuff) to see me as an early adopter of that panic (read it for yourself).

My review of the film was framed by my attack on both the panic – articulated by Richard Williams at the Guardian – and on the incorporation of media effects theory into the sports pages. In one paragraph I revisit my short, admittedly grumpy review of the novel in 1996. How this leads to my implied advocacy of a minor moral panic in 2004 is a mystery to me. But as Prof. Redhead says:

The media moral panic surrounding The Football Factory has been shown to be incorporated into the advertising and marketing of the film in a postmodern loop, especially on DVD, making the notion of the ‘real’ much more blurred. (p.27)

So blurred, it seems, that my lukewarm review of a movie has made me into Mary Whitehouse.




Note: There is, for now at least, a online version of this essay in PDF here. Page numbering in this blog posting is taken from this version.

Less than 127 hours later

After Wednesday's press screening, my review of Danny Boyle's 127 Hours is up on Spiked. I have since filed Aron Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place with my other self-help books.

Time to view

For UK viewers, Ozon's Time to Leave has finally made its way onto terrestrial TV. It was one of my hot tips on release; now see if you like it too. Er, at 2.45am BST on Sunday 28 March.

After watching Watchmen...

... I reviewed it for Spiked here.

I doubt if I'll also be watching the DVD.

On the Wayne

My take on the new Batman film and its popularity appears on Spiked. (If you are reading this blog after reading "Nostalgia for Kidults", then you know that already.)

The (Cannibal) Holocaust: Not Again

27 January 2008 and I suddenly slipped back in time 25 years. 1983: a chance to put things right and, ignoring any Prime Directive, to make a difference. Looking slim, GB!

Except I was reading the Sunday Express, the self-styled world's greatest newspaper: Outrage at Sick Nazi DVDs for Sale. In the frame are SS Experiment Camp, Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave and Faces of Death. Missing from the line-up are The Evil Dead and Driller Killer, but otherwise this could be a library story on the front page. Recycling rules at the Express.

Only the availability of these films on DVD now instead of VHS differentiates this panic from its carbon copy in 1983-85. Even Keith Vaz, a prospective parliamentary candidate for Leicester East seeking to unseat rentaquote MP Peter Bruinvels at the time of the video nasties panic, is in on the act.

The facts are simple - only the first of these vids has a "Nazi" title to highlight the lurid content, spoofed recently by Rob Zombie: the rest have no (formally) fascistic leanings, unless pretend sadism counts as fascism these days, yet academic writers have repositioned Holocaust as a critique of media manipulation and Spit as a feminist rape-revenge flick. Faeces of Death remains a risible compilation of mondo, fake and news footage of its subjects' final moments.

We've been here before. Only a dimwit could have failed to notice the staged torture scenes that pepper the multiplexes, if the pirate DVD guys don't get there first. Even the posters on the Express web forum seem more upset about Islam than the availability of these movies.

The Sunday Express - weak at the weekend. An old prediction of mine went "don't expect an SS Experiment Camp revival any time soon", although maybe Express Investigations Editor James Murray can instigate one through his pointless outrage.

Always time for crime

On and off, I've been writing for Crime Time for over a decade now, first appearing in issue 2. (Birthdays can cause one to reflect on the passage of time in this way.) I've been through magazine, photocopy, magazine again, trade paperback - one day the font will be large enough for me to read it - and website versions. Here's to the next 10 years of Crime Time.

Looking Daggers

There are times when I miss teaching, so it's good to see an article of mine being used to teach film in Lexington, Kentucky. Ahh, film school, I'm almost tempted to enroll myself...

On motors and mobiles

The car may be death-proof, but the film's not above criticism (see my review here). Getting a less bumpy ride from this reviewer is Cell Phone Culture by Gerard Goggin.

The fallen

My Spiked-online review of the movie Seraphim Falls, recently released in the UK, appears here.

I have known few people tough enough to get through the real life equivalent of the fictional ordeal inflicted on Gideon (Pierce Brosnan) in Seraphim Falls. One of them was my late grandfather, Bert Allton; another was my friend Dave Hallsworth, an inspirational figure who died last week. He will be much missed.

This link takes you to Dave commenting on Grandpa's war diary. Dave Hallsworth, Presente!