Hardcore for Nerds

Act of Valour [sic - or not, depending] review in the Irish Times

I went to see this recently (and dragged a couple of people along too). It’s not quite hilariously bad. In fact it’s impressive how little outright hilarity there is in its cheesiness. Instead it’s interestingly bad, or disquietingly bad.

The introduction mentions ‘authentic’ or ‘authenticity’ at least three times. It’s not, of course, except to a certain idea of literalism and straightforward belief in the righteousness and rectitude of everything you do. This is a world where terrorism is literally a man blowing up an ice cream van in a school-yard full of children. Where violence is horrific and total, but just off-screen enough not to cause visceral discomfort or presumably to give what is widely described a Navy SEALS recruitment film an adults-only rating, and yet where language is never worse than ‘assholes’ (liberally applied, but only to terrorists).

As a war film this shows certain aspects of military hardware to good effect. Less so than Transformers, but one gets to see the sharp end of American force applied, in a rather surgical way. But unlike the fantasy genre of desperate fighting against inhuman odds (from Independence Day to War of the Worlds and Transformers, and onwards to the godawful-looking Battleship) here, and in any documentary account of modern wars, there is the awkward sense of unavoidable technological might. Awkward not because America’s modern super-soldiers are invulnerable - IEDs took care of that idea, and a single shot can still kill - but because they are faced with a mass of human (however ideologically culpable, terrorists - or ‘assholes’ - are still human) vulnerability.

This mass of enemies chiefly has power through numbers and persistence - virtues the US military also still needs to maintain, albeit in different ways. So the threat is out there - or in this case, soon to come here with a novel development that inexplicably threatens mass panic (and ‘economic disaster’) on a scale worse than 9/11. Ironically, the very existence of the media comes in for some heavy bashing, as an irresponsible, irresistible vector of moral fear. There are values to defend at home - they are painstakingly spelt out - so the SEALs have to go out into the world and kick ass: 

“When Bush said that we are fighting the terrorists “there” so that we won’t have to fight them “here”, he was making a very distinctively American political move. It is certainly not a rhetorical trope that makes any sense in Europe, for example. Because “there”, whether it’s Lebanon, or Gaza, or Baghdad, or Basra, is actually just a short plane ride from the borders of the EU; and what you do there, to “them”, has immediate consequences for their fellow Muslims or Arabs or outsiders in Hamburg or the Paris suburbs, in Leicester or Milan.” - Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century

And what a world it is. Basically, if you live by the coast in the less developed world, expect NAVY Seals to swoop in by nightfall and start shooting. No doubt as part of the ‘authenticity’, armed men in Africa are referred to as ‘skinnies’ - as popularised in Black Hawk Down, the precursor to this kind of ‘real’ action movie, and ‘defined’ by the Urban Dictionary as “militia forces hailing from an impoverished nations… also used in Multiplayer Games, such as Command and Conquer: Generals, to describe the Terrorist teams”.

It’s scary how much the close-quarter fighting resembles modern first-person-shooters. Not just in the gun-sight views as the SEALs move through murky corridors, which is a simple case of life imitating art imitating life in the form of ‘authentic’ art, but in the copious amounts of headshots (again, seen through the gunsight, flat and dimensionless) and the interjections of the female communications soldier - “mission not complete”, said in exactly the tone of a computer game.

In short, what it so scary about this film is how unreal it is, in any kind of liberal, civilised world, on the one hand, and on the other how apparently ‘authentic’ it is to the shadow world of glorified violence, necessary death, and power as beauty:

“Perhaps the fascists were last to believe that power was beautiful.

That power was beautiful, yes. Communists of course believed to the end that power is good: invocations of power, properly surrounded by the right doctrinal packaging, could still be presented without apology. But the unapologetic presentation of power as beauty? Yes, that was uniquely fascist. But I wonder whether you are correct for the non-European world. Think of China, after all, the most obvious case in point.”

Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, ibid., p. 165-6

It’s a tough world out there, no doubt. But I wonder do we celebrate acts of value - humanitarian, political, even philosophical, the stuff that democracy is actually made of - enough, rather than valour which, while important, is meaningless without context; and the context here is, baldly, a world where American military action contributes to the danger of, and motivation for, terrorism. There’s a value in this film in that it shows the terrifying normality of militarism as a modern-day fascist ideology, dressed up as a defence of democracy. 

Mark Kermode: How to make an intelligent blockbuster and not alienate people - Books - The Observer

Very interesting - and so-titled - ‘polemic’ about the film industry, as seen through the lens of “diminished expectations” such as created by living in poorly-maintained post-war social housing. Which means, when applied to blockbusters, that people will put up with anything, especially Michael Bay. But the important point he subequently makes is that, with guaranteed returns for big-name, dazzling and ostentatiously expensive productions, they can and on occasion are made into quite intelligent works at less risk than medium-sized films resting on a good script and performance. I don’t know enough about contemporary movies to comment on the accuracy of what he says, since I can’t even remember the last time I was even in a cinema or watched a new release, and haven’t seen any of the examples he gives here (Pearl Harbour, Transformers, and on the good-enough side, Inception - though I have seen Cristopher Nolan’s Memento and I saw Batman Begins in the cinema, but thought it was a load of quasi-fascist nonsense).

What is particularly interesting, though, is how is description of the industry reads like a critique of its capitalism: “For all the bleating and moaning and carping and whingeing that we constantly hear about studios struggling to make ends meet in the multimedia age, those with the means to splash money around will always come out on top.” Yet, after spending a lot of time trying to ape Charlie Brooker, his end prescription is really a pretty toothless call for corporate social responsibility: “This is no time to be nice to big-budget movies. This is the time for them to start paying their way, both financially and artistically.”

But what if instead of expecting responsibility from those with all the money, what if we just took some of it (and the control it brings) out of their hands? A dangerously socialistic idea, of course, but I’m simply talking about public broadcasting, where commercial motives come secondary to providing something of cultural and social value. Or at least that’s how it works with TV in Britain and in Ireland, and many other countries besides, if perhaps not the US - where film has acquired the critical mass to fund gigantic productions, unlike the regional subsidies required elsewhere. And public broadcasting began as a somewhat paternalistic 20th century approach establishing a technological monopoly over the radio and television mediums, and then was later up to gradually increasing competition with commercial companies - so there’s no historical example of the expropriation required to wrest cinema away from the major studios. But who can seriously defend the quality of cinema provided to the masses - read the description above again - when that entertainment forms such a large part of our popular and thus, presumably, public culture? Plus, if serious cinema is being replaced by TV drama - hitherto American and commercial, whether it be HBO’s The Wire or AMC’s Mad Men - then there’s a good example in the BBC’s recent production of a minor equivalent of the latter, The Hour - ironically about a 1950s current affairs show biting against political interference at that broadcaster - of how publicly commissioned/produced art can fill the gap left by commercial vapidity.

Trainspotting, 1996

Was watching this on Film4 last night, and marvelling at how good it is. This line jumped out at me in relation to this article in The Atlantic by Natasha Vargas-Cooper on hardcore pornography and male sexual desire in the current internet age. I think it’s pretty good, although it misses a few points, and that the ending, which discusses the rather un-contemporary Last Tango in Paris, is close to terrific. However, this morning I see andrewtsks coming up with some really quite substantial objections to it in a way that I hadn’t expected (and here, and here). I mean, I’ve obviously never taken Feminism 101, so I’m not exactly sure what “gender essentialism” is, and although I like to think of myself as sensitive to a wide range of liberal concerns, I guess sometimes I’m just naturally more conservative, or at least more accepting of conservative viewpoints, than I’m aware of.

The above quote is in favour of something that’s fairly innocuous (heteronormativity aside) in much of the Tumblr-verse, if not the wider world: you sexual preferences are your own. And it’s talking about in terms of real-life relationships (or, er, rave-y nightclub hook-ups) rather than online pornography, but let’s expand it to that wider view of sexuality anyway. What’s interesting is the justification by way of aesthetics and not morality, and indeed excluding morality. Which indeed reflects much wider themes in the text, namely drugs, crime, betrayal, personal responsibility… so take it with a pinch of salt; but still, what’s beautiful is true, right?

The Atlantic piece claims that pornography’s “pervasiveness clearly exacerbates the growing moral nihilism of our culture”. Which really is nonsense on a par with the Victorian-era idea that masturbation turned people into degenerate idiots. It then continues:

“But removing pornography won’t alter the unlovely aspects of male sexuality that porn depicts and legitimizes. The history of civilization would seem to show that there’s no hope of eradicating those qualities; they can only be contained—and checked—by strenuously enforced norms. And given our à la carte morality and our aversion to cultural authority—a societal direction made plain by porn’s very omnipresence—I wouldn’t put much faith in enforcement.”

While I agree with the article’s ultimate conclusion, that “The most frightening truths about sex rarely exist in the physical, but instead live in the intangible yet indelible wounds created in the psyche. Go try to find that on the Internet”, I don’t see how it follows from the above. Much of the porn on the Internet is crap, in fact probably most of it, but you can make that judgement simply from an aesthetic point of view rather than a moral one. In fact, you shouldn’t do so from the point of view of morality, because that has little to do with human sexuality.

Of course from a feminist perspective, or a humanist one, there’s a whole lot of objections to such an amoral idea of behaviour - rape culture, respect for women, respect for the person, for the individual. And it’s all true, but it’s less about morality than it is about ethics: standards of behaviour for how people should behave when they interact, not for how they should feel about their actions or desires*. Andrew’s objections to the article centre on two opposing forces controlling the perception and dissemination of pornography, and thus its effect on male sexuality: “late-capitalist materialism-driven consumer culture”, and “horrified puritanism” or more generally “restrictive social mores”.

If there’s a “growing moral nihilism” in our culture, it’s because of the tensions between those two factors, not because of more pornography. And both are due to a breakdown in ethics, or more accurately in the case of the latter, due to a failure to construct proper ethics in the wake of a newly liberalised morality in modern society. Public morality now no longer ought to have anything to say about sex, only the ethical dimension of the interactions between members of society (either directly in person, or mediated through culture including, but hardly limited to, pornography). Private morality is a different beast altogether, and I guess is where things get really personal - go try and find that on the Internet.

(*I’m not sure what the exact standard philosophical definitions of these terms are, or how they differ, but with respect to B. Michael I think it does mean that, indeed, ‘the avant-garde need not be moral’ - yet that we have a damn good claim on it being ethical, and thus not abusive or supportive of abuse.)