Trouble in Mind

Met up with a very good friend after work to see The Trouble with Harry. We concluded this was an odd addition to the Hitchcock season at the BFI. I’d never seen it before. It doesn’t get shown that much. Hitch fans don’t rate it, I learned. It is unlike most of his other films.
I’d sort of known vaguely that it was about a body, but had always imagined it as a creepy, disappearing corpse drama. Or even, a creepy ‘corpse-won’t-disappear’ thriller. In fact, it was both of these things, but not creepy. It was meant to be a comedy, which is a lot more disturbing. The biggest surprise for me came at the beginning, when the opening titles revealed that it was based on a story by Jack Trevor Story. I remembered him from my teenage, when he used to contribute strange and disturbing shorts to Punch magazine, and was often referred to as the ‘bard of Milton Keynes’. I think he’d been invited to be the writer in residence to the new city when it was completed, but had then decided to stay there. Like name, like nature, I’d thought then. A number of his stories involved men with serious drinking problems and I had often wondered if these were autobiographical.
Anyway, in this strange tale there are lots of misadventures when a small boy discovers a dead body in the woods. Next, a retired sea-captain, out for a day’s hunting, thinks he has shot the man in question by mistake. There then follow a number of ‘comic’ interludes in which the body is repeatedly hidden, buried and then dug up again.
This might give the impression that it resembles the ‘hide-the-stiff’ high-jinx of a Whitehall farce, or the dead guest episode in Fawlty Towers, but it is like neither of these. There is a peculiar jokiness among the villagers about Harry’s death. All of them knew him, yet none mourn his passing. Most seem to think they will be suspected of killing him, although it is never really clear why he was so disliked. His widow is the most pleased to hear he is dead, although his only crime appears to be that he walked out on her on her wedding night.
The BFI’s free handout for the film quoted from an article by David Kehr in Film Comment (May/June 1984). He made a very nice point in saying that in “most Hitchcock films, guilt destroys; in The Trouble with Harry, it brings people together... The ending finds the harmony of a Shakespearean comedy... As if in a fairy tale, the magic day - the day of Harry’s death and the unification of the couples - it is a day out of time. It has disappeared from the calendar.”
This is true, and he’s thinking of the Forest of Arden, which is sort of where this takes place, but in a Shakespeare comedy we need to care about the lovers. However, these characters seemed almost heartless in their laughing flippancy towards the body of the deceased. It made me feel uneasy about them, alienated from their mentality. On the surface it is a somewhat sleepy piece, with no Hitchcockian edge to it at all. Emotionally, there was no focus, either.
I began to wonder whether Hitchcock was stitching in a very subtle message, one that could only be seen in what he was showing but not saying. The one person who says nothing is Harry. What was Hitch telling us about him?
Harry’s body is lying prone on the ground, exactly as though laid out for burial. People who die suddenly, whether shot, brained or felled by infarction do not take the trouble to lie down so neatly before dying... yet this is what the film requires us to believe Harry did. He would have toppled like a tree. Rigor Mortis fixes the body in its final posture - it doesn’t automatically straighten someone out. Harry is a ‘stiff’ and, in life, he must have been very stiff indeed - stiff as a board. Hitchcock is giving us a visual pun on ‘stiffness’ - perhaps, then, there are other visual clues to glean.
Harry’s body is immaculately dressed. He is in a stylish, grey city suit and very expensive shoes. We know he has come from Boston, but why should he be so smart just for a walk in the woods, way out in the country? Those shoes were not made for hiking. The other characters are very casually dressed, save when they are on a ‘date’. Clearly Harry was particular about his attire, but would have been conspicuous in such a rural setting. Fastidious, you might even say.
He is also shown wearing a pink shirt and a flamboyant pink and orange tie. Now, in the present day, a pink shirt has no special significance, but back in the 1950s it certainly had. It would not guarantee that the wearer was gay, but it would very strongly suggest it. Combined with a colourful tie, and baby-blue socks with pretty red toe-tips... I think we are intended to read Harry’s dress as (in the parlance of the day) ‘effeminate’.
Harry’s great ‘crime’ was not to consummate his marriage, and to abandon his wife on her wedding night, then flee to the city. Her son, it is revealed, is not Harry’s. There is a suggestion that he attacked a woman in the woods, but this is then shown not to have had a sexual motive, but because he thought it was his wife, who had assaulted him earlier in the day.
Harry’s surname is Worp, which would be an old Dutch name, originally Vander Worp, and so appropriate to New England, but it is worth noting how it would sound like ‘warp’ in English, as in ‘warped’. Hitchcock would recognise this as very similar to the British slang term ‘bent’ - at that time meaning ‘homosexual’.
It bothered me that there was a kind of running joke about Harry being taken for a rabbit. The body of a rabbit appears later, and the camera dwells on it, without comment. It’s a dead stand-in for Harry himself and matches his stretched out posture. Rabbits are proverbially seen as somewhat sex-obsessed creatures, and ‘bunny’ may have been an old slang term for gay prostitute.
When the sheriff comes to call, Harry’s body is hidden, yet the closet keeps opening all by itself. In fact, the body is not in the closet, but something hidden keeps being revealed. Whether the term ‘coming out of the closet’ in a specifically gay sense was in use at that time is possible though doubtful, but the idea of keeping things in the closet, or hiding a skeleton in the closet was well-known. The camera keeps focusing on the opening of the closet, which seems to be for no real reason. It may be for a symbolic rather than plot purpose.
This idle speculation doesn’t exactly redeem the film - it’s still a lesser Hitchcock, but it does seem to be that there is a curious subtext, possibly that of repressed homosexuality (and Boston at that time was renowned for such repression). It cuts deeper than that, though. There may even be a racial element hinted at.
We never see Harry’s face, save in Sam Marlowe’s pastel sketch, in which the predominant colouring seems to be browns and ochres, with a hint of orange and tan. Harry appears to have a somewhat dark complexion from this picture. In all the shots of the body, the soles of Harry’s feet (either shod or in socks) are shown in close-up. They are Harry’s most prominent feature. All we ever see of his naked body is a glimpse of his bare feet poking out from the bath. The soles of his feet are white, right enough, but then so are everybody’s. The soles of the feet, like the palms of the hands, have no pigment cells, so we can draw no firm conclusion about Harry’s race. Perhaps we are not meant to. Perhaps this is another outrageous visual pun. Could Hitchcock be hinting that Harry is a soul (sole) brother? There’s no clear evidence that this term for a black American was current in 1954, but Ray Charles and Milt Jackson released an album called Soul Brothers in 1958, which suggests it was clearly in use before then, at least.
The gleefulness of the villagers at Harry’s demise is troubling. I wonder if there is a very faint allusion from Hitch about the prejudices of the 1950s, against gay men, against people of other ethnic groups, against the outsider. No matter how they try to bury this body and to hammer down the things they hate, they keep popping up again. No matter how many times they close the closet door, it creaks open once more. Their happy ending may be sweet and nice, but it is not emotionally satisfying. It comes at a price. At the end, all the ‘trouble’ is ready to begin again... Harry will just not go away, and nor will everything he represents.

Killing Joke

I was wondering what to say about this new film that has caused such a rumpus. I was a little unsure about how wise it might be to talk about it out loud on public transport, and wondered which euphemism to use. It was when I thought of referring to it as "The Entertainment" that it all clicked into place. I remembered where I had herd that phrase before. As a friend of mine put it: "this is a conspiracy that will require at least three rolls of tin foil for the hat..." Wrap cranium tightly, and follow my twisty tale...

Some years ago, fans of my old livejournal blog may recalls that I scribbled down my thoughts after reading David Foster Wallace's very, very long and highly unusual book Infinite Jest in a piece entitled "Is the joke on me?" 

Wallace committed suicide on September 12, 2008, in other words four years ago last Wednesday. This week the New Yorker carried an 'in memoriam' piece on him. 

Of course it's just a coincidence that this whole thing about this inflammatory film should emerge in the papers here on the anniversary of Wallace's death. Wallace's novel does have a plot, even though fairly few pages are devoted to it, but it is one that makes my eyebrows raise high right now. The story is about a film, called Infinite Jest. This film is so captivating that anyone who sees even a few seconds of it is drawn in, compelled to watch more. By the time they reach the end, they are obsessed. Viewers are unable to think of anything else in the world, except this film. Family, food, drink, bodily functions are all subordinate to the single most important necessity in their lives - watching the film again. Deprived of the film, addicts howl with pain, jibber incomprehensibly, scream only that they must see it. They are willing to suffer the amputation of fingers, toes or limbs if, in return, they can watch Infinite Jest. No-one who has not seen the film knows what it is about, nor what it contains since, once anyone has seen it, they can never communicate anything again, save their overwhelming urge to see it. Effectively, once anyone has seen even a glimpse of Infinite Jest, they are irreversibly insane. 

We discover that the film was created by military intelligence for use as a weapon in a possible Third World War. The CIA referred to it as "The Entertainment". The novel deals with attempts to trace the source of bootleg copies of "The Entertainment" which have found their way into the community. The first victims are a Saudi diplomat and his family. 

The resemblances between this present situation and Wallace's novel are striking. Like Infinite Jest, the creator of this film is hard to identify. Again, as in Infinite Jest, actors who appeared in "The Entertainment" say they were unaware of the true nature of the film, nor that they were involved in anything so strange or dangerous. In Infinite Jest, it is uncertain whether the lethal edit of the film is the one its director intended. 

The Madrid daily, El Pais, reported yesterday that this new film may not even exist: Un tráiler incendiario para una película que no existe. Their investigation reveals a history every bit as obscure and misleading as that of Infinite Jest. They conclude that there is nothing more to the film they call Inocencia de los musulmanes beyond a fourteen minute trailer. Not even the title is real. This appears to have been added later as well. Those ringing up Radio Bloke's phone-in yesterday claiming to have seen it, then, cannot have been telling the whole truth. 

If so many are aware of this film around the world, why had we in Britain heard nothing ourselves? Could it be that we, in the West, were not the intended audience?

According to El Pais some footage in Inocencia de los musulmanes seems to derive from an abandoned production called Desert Warrior. This had a producer called Sam Bassiel, from which the bogus name 'Sam Bacile' is clearly derived. Of course, they’ve now found someone who has a name vaguely similar to that, an Egyptian Copt, apparently, but I’d be very surprised if he’s really behind it. The name sounds made-up. It’s like ‘imbecile’ but also ‘bacillus’ or agent of infection. That, I think, is what we are really looking at. 

This is Infinite Jest in reality. A film that immediately obsesses those exposed to it. A film designed as a weapon of war. By the CIA? By Al Qaeda themselves? By someone else? It’s too early to tell, but the signs are ominous. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that buses in San Francisco have lately been carrying large advertisements openly referring to Muslims as ‘savages’ (Anti-Islam ads on San Francisco buses put Muslims at risk) Perhaps it is, but if that is the message someone wants to sell, the reaction to this film as it has been reported to us would appear to fit in very nicely with their campaign. Considering that Lebanese commentators believe war between Israel and Iran is now inevitable (Netanyahu pushes for a war the US doesn't want) I'd say grab your tin-foil while stocks last.

“Who was that Masked Man?”

Although there are many political and thematic differences between The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, if they are stripped back to their most basic level, that of a fight to the death televised for a watching audience, then they are part of a curious genre.  

The idea of life-or-death games as popular television entertainment in a future, dystopian world crops up a number of times in science-fiction. There are many (perhaps too many… no, forget that word ‘perhaps’) episodes of the 1960s US television series Star Trek in which gladiatorial games feature. In two of them, Captain Kirk is teleported off the bridge of his ship to fight on some alien planet, the results of the combat being shown to his crew on their TV-like monitor (‘Arena’, Season One, 1967, Writers Gene L. Coon and Fredric Brown, and ‘The Gamesters of Triskelion,’ Season Two, 1968, Writer Margaret Armen) In another, they encounter a world exactly resembling Ancient Rome, in which the Arena is televised for a blood-thirsty public (‘Bread and Circuses’, Season Two, 1968, writers Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon). In yet another (‘Amok Time’, Season Two, 1967, writer Theodore Sturgeon), Kirk and Spock must fight each other in a Vulcan marriage ritual, once again, to the death in another Roman-style arena. This plot surfaced yet again in Season Three in ‘The Savage Curtain’ (1969, Writers Arthur Heinemann and Gene Roddenberry).

It is possible that the emphasis Star Trek placed on this type of story, and the regularity with which it returned to it, was not entirely coincidental. For American television viewers of that time, coverage of the Vietnam War was itself a real-life version of this idea and would have provided immediate inspiration. Conscripts into the US army were chosen at random by lottery (just as in The Hunger Games). The state-run ‘Draft Lottery’ converted dates of birth into numbers. These were then entered in the draw. The ‘winning’ numbers were published in the newspapers. As in the fantasy gladiator games, these ‘contestants’ were sent to fight to the death in an alien environment, monitored by photographers with stills and film cameras. The footage was relayed to nightly TV news broadcasts to audiences back home. Vietnam was the first televised war, and this concept almost certainly influenced the science-fiction dealing with gladiator-style TV gaming. This was history, not fantasy, however. 

William Harrison’s short story, ‘The Rollerball Murders’ (first published in Esquire, September 1973) was made into the hit film, Rollerball (1975), but also inspired Paul Bartel and the Roger Corman studios to produce an arguably superior ‘rip-off’, Death Race 2000 (1975). In both of these films, the population of the future is kept pacified by watching an excessively violent game-show on television, featuring gladiatorial contest and real murder. In Death Race 2000 there is an explicit link made between the celebrity of the racers and the political power of the president. It also shows how vulnerable this political system is, as even the highest can be legitimate ‘kills’ in the Death Race. 

Star Trek was probably the most influential of the ‘games’-based science-fiction, but it was not the first. The BBC TV series, Doctor Who, featured this concept well before Vietnam had come to dominate public consciousness. In his very earliest incarnations, Doctor Who battled malevolent, game-playing creatures from Outer Space, most notably the Celestial Toymaker (played by Michael Gough, faced by the First Doctor), the Mind Robber and the Krotons (enemies of the Second Doctor), all of whom set evil puzzles and games that must be solved, or death would result. Another point of comparison from this period would be the deadly jokes and games of The Riddler in the TV show, Batman.

The concept of evil games seems to erupt in the early 1960s, but does not feature too much before this, at least not in film. Philip K. Dick wrote many stories of macabre, lethal games, however. In Solar Lottery (1955), an officially random, but actually rigged game selects presidential candidates. In a second twist, an assassination game takes place, in which ‘contestants’ are randomly picked to have telepathic control of a robot gunman. In Time Out of Joint (1957), Ragel Gumm solves newspaper quizzes for a living in an artificial ‘arena’, not knowing the life-or-death consequences of his play. In The Game-Players of Titan (1963), the alien Vugs maintain control over a conquered Earth by means of an elaborate board game, in which all surviving humans compete. 

These stories all have the gladiatorial element and devilish tricks, but lack the televised factor. No-one follows the game-playing as an entertainment in its own right. However, the (unofficial) film version of Dick’s Time Out of Joint, The Truman Show, does include this. The world is hooked on a soap-opera/reality television series featuring the actual life of Truman Burbank. The life-or-death element extends to only one player, Truman himself, who is unaware that he is playing a game, but its deadly implications are made clear to him, and the watching audience, when he tries to quit. 

Other films of relevance or related interest here would include:

The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

Welcome to Blood City (1977)

The Running Man (1987)

Is there anything that links the idea of gladiatorial games and the vendetta of V? Why should these two images mesh at this time? What connects them?

The word ‘revenge’ should come through to us. One of the key ways in which Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) differs from its source film, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1963) is the theme of vengeance. General Maximus wants his revenge on Emperor Commodus, ‘in this world or the next’ and finally achieves it. His is a vendetta indeed, fought in blood in the arena, but also via intrigues in the senate, threats of loyal troops coming to occupy Rome, a charm offensive to win hearts and minds, and a political whispering campaign to poison the people against the tyrannical emperor. 

A popular series of films in the early 1970s reflected these two themes very acutely. In The Abominable Dr Phibes, Vincent Price plays the disfigured anti-hero, tracking down and killing the surgeons he holds responsible for the death of his wife. Each of them is subjected to a gruesome death of their own, related to the Biblical Ten Plagues of Egypt. In many cases, these revenge killings feature bizarre and elaborate contraptions, and in some cases the possibility of escape is dangled in front of the victims, if only they have the wit, ingenuity or courage to take the chance. At the end, the lead surgeon (played by Joseph Cotton) is presented with a surgical puzzle, a test of skill and nerve and a choice that could mean death to his own son. 

Are we meant to sympathise with Dr Phibes? He is a death-in-life figure who wears a mask (!) because his true face is destroyed, burned down to the skull in an accident that everyone assumed had killed him. He is clearly modelled on the figure of The Phantom of the Opera, who also wore a mask to hide his facial disfigurement, devised convoluted game-like tortures for his pursuers and sought revenge! Both are very strong contenders to be the origin of the character and form of V in V for Vendetta. 

Dr Phibes is a horror, but also is a sympathetic character. We fear him, yet want him to exercise his anger against these enemies. Our enjoyment is in seeing them die these intricate, elaborate deaths. In this, the successors to Phibes in the late 1970s and early 1980s are Michael Myers, the mask-wearing vengeance-killer in John Carpenter’s Hallowe’en, and Freddy Kruger, the facially disfigured, highly inventive and very vengeful ghost in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). 

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Dr Phibes rose again, this time as Jigsaw, the terminally-ill revenger in the Saw series. Like Phibes, devising ever more Heath Robinson devices to torment his ‘contestants’, Jigsaw uses TV and modern forms of communication to force those trying to save them to watch their fate.

Like a murderous version of Guy Grand from Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian, Jigsaw wants to see his tests fail. He wishes his victims to defeat his games, to solve the puzzles, prove him wrong and live, but they have to exhibit the required level of will to survive. Should they prefer to avoid pain, they embrace death. 

There is a strong sense in which Jigsaw is a revenger, although not with a single focus, like Phibes. His is a vengeance against the whole of humanity. He resents their casual acceptance of life and its pleasures while he has had to struggle to survive. He wants them to experience life intensely, or prove that they do not deserve it. They must redeem themselves or die. In Jigsaw’s world-view, everyone is guilty until they prove themselves innocent. If not, his vengeance continues. He, like Phibes, wears a mask, or, more accurately hides his identity behind a grisly ventriloquist’s doll, or (again, like Phibes) by making no physical appearance at all, but speaking his instructions via audiotape, telephone or video. Like Phibes, he is rarely if ever present at the kill, leaving his devices to work in his absence, making his ‘mask’ all the more perfect.

Most of the classic cartoon superheroes of the mid-twentieth century were masked avengers, but these, like the Batman, had masks to protect their anonymity. Although it is rarely explained why this was so important, it is assumed that this was to protect their private lives and family from the anger of criminals brought to justice by their vigilanteism. This seems especially pointless in the case of Superman, however, who doesn’t really need a day-job and, having all the powers of a god, is invulnerable to anyone who might want to seek retribution anyway. Nevertheless, he had a ‘mask’: the identity of Clark Kent, his daytime alter-ego. A long-running series of comic-book heroes from Marvel were even called ‘The Avengers’, although quite what it was they were avenging was never completely clear. 

The last link in the masked avenger chain is the closest to home. The Wachowski brothers’ previous film hero, Neo in The Matrix (1999), has the biggest mask of all: his entire self. Morpheus tells Neo that his whole identity, life and body are the ‘world that has been pulled over your eyes’ to blind him to the reality of The Matrix, a computer-generated illusion, enslaving humanity. Neo’s telephone call to the machine authorities at the end of the film (spoiler!) gives them an ultimatum. He will show the masses what the machines do not want them to see: ‘…a world … without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries; a world where anything is possible.’ This is a call to a form of political awakening in the bulk of humanity, to become conscious of their situation. The way to defeat the machines is to become able to see them, to recognise their false world for what it is. Becoming conscious of their presence is enough to free the imprisoned of The Matrix. 

Likewise, in They Live! (John Carpenter, 1988) the donning of a ‘mask’ (the sunglasses) frees the people. Once the special polaroids are put on, wearers are enabled to see the alien invaders who have taken over America. The creatures normally appear to humans as young professionals in suits (‘yuppies’) or smart business people. The glasses delete their hallucinatory disguise and reveal them in their true form - much like the skull-faced Martians of Mars Attacks!. Of course, the wearers of the enlightening glasses also become less identifiable themselves. Classically, terrorists and paramilitaries from the 1960s onwards have worn dark glasses as part of their disguise. Like the followers of V, the free-thinkers of They Live! also look alike in their glasses ‘masks’ and share a powerful, political secret. At the end of the film (spoiler!) TV viewers across America share in the secret knowledge. V in V for Vendetta brings this back down to Earth... Showing the mass what can be done in rebelling against the repressive authority, he leads them to adopt his identity and dissolve their own into a collective anonymity. 

What is a revenger? By definition, it is someone who has been a victim. Like the Count of Monte Cristo, like Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the dearest wish of a revenger is to get even with those who have done them wrong. The revenger inevitably fits in very well with the concept of the ‘victim hero’, although the revenger crosses a moral line that, for example, the ‘tributes’ in The Hunger Games do not. In making a deliberate, conscious decision to kill or counter-attack, the revenger becomes a willing participant in the fight. The ‘gladiators’ in these modern ‘bread and circuses’ stories are forced into their conflicts, removing any taint of intent. 

It should, perhaps, not surprise us so much that revenger stories are popular again now. The original Jacobean revenge tragedies proved successful at a time of rising inflation (the early 1600s) and straitened economic times in Britain. High inflation on both sides of the Atlantic was a feature of the 1970s. People who had made money in the boom years of the 1960s found themselves losing it in their aftermath, with falling wages and a rapidly rising cost of living.  

Of course, curiously, V for Vendetta and the Saw series predated the economic crisis, but their resonance with the present monetary and political situation could not be more apposite. If V for Vendetta could be seen as growing out of the ideas latent in The Matrix, there are also reasons why its 1980s storyline would fit in with the situation in 2006. It deals with rebellion against a repressive regime, afraid of terrorists in its midst. Fears of curtailment of civil liberty freedoms in the wake of the War on Terror in America appear in other films, notably Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. There is fertile ground for these ideas from the 1970s and 1980s to be resurfacing now. 

Is the V mask a signifier? Yes, it is mysterious, strange and perhaps even frightening to those who have not seen the film but instantly meaningful to those who have… It is a shorthand for those who see the movement to explain what it is. The IRA didn’t start wearing balaclavas because they’d seen them in The Italian Job or something, but they did chose to wear black berets because of the association with the French Resistance, The Black Panthers and the Cuban Communists. They wore balaclavas because they covered their faces and made them impossible to recognise, and Anonymous have done the same thing with the V mask. 

It seems to me to be very significant what they didn’t use

For example, many existing mask memes were not used:

Spiderman
Batman
Zorro
Father Death (from Scream)
Freddie Krueger
Nixon / Reagan (Hallowe’en masks)
Hockey masks (Friday 13
Jokeshop ‘Groucho’ glasses/nose/moustache
Cowboy kerchief
IRA-style balaclava
PLO-headscarf
Gimp mask (Pulp Fiction)
Ned Kelly

None of these signify mass action or group activity. They say ‘Lone Avenger’ or ‘Lone Nut’