the all seeing eye

One of the many strange scenes in Powell and Pressburger's 1946 masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death - a film choc-full of fabulous strangeness - involves a camera obscura, an optical device which projects an image of its surroundings onto a screen.

This particular camera obscura is used by an English country GP to observe the village he lives in. The doctor is a kind of ordinary superhero, the ultimate idealised Englishman in fact, who as well as being an extravagantly clever doctor and gifted surgeon, is an expert ping-pong player, a demon motorcycle rider (although he suffers a fatal crash on a country lane linking him, presumably deliberately, to T E Lawrence) and all-round rugged pipe smoking hero.

The doctor's role is quite explicitly ambassadorial. He represents England and Englishness in a celestial courtroom deciding the fate of the film's other hero, an airman played by David Niven. Although Niven is ostensibly the hero - a pilot shot down over the channel who has miraculously managed to escape death due to an administrative error in heaven - he is largely powerless, prone to drifting off into a netherworld between life and death.

It is the doctor who is the film's man of action. He lives in a house with a tower in which the mechanism for the camera obscura is installed. Despite the pretty gentility of the location the doctor's house is a kind of machine serving a very specific and somewhat intrusive purpose. Effectively, he lives inside a pin-hole camera, with the windows shuttered and an image of the outside world projected onto a white painted table in the centre of the room. His house is not so much a machine for living in, as one for looking out of. It is an optical device, one that allows him to achieve a panoptic view of village life.

The purpose of the camera obscura within the film's storyline is less clear. Neither the machine's workings nor the doctor's use of it are particularly explained. As a narrative device it allows for a homoly on the social cohesion of English village life, but it also has a more ambiguous quality especially in relation to the film's purpose as propaganda and the fact that it was commissioned by the Ministry of Information. The doctor's panoptic screen is a benign version of Orwell's Telescreen. Or a kind of antedeluvian precursor to our CCTV obsessed network culture. It is also like a scientific instrument, offering empirical evidence for the doctor in his celestial defence of both Niven's pilot and England's important role in a post war world.

reception

I wasn't going to write anything about Inception - partly because of its sheer ubiquity - but then I read this review by David Denby in the New Yorker and it irked me into action. It's easy to knock Inception for being overblown and somewhat silly but Denby's problems with it are wholly predictable. Not only that but they're indicative of a particular kind of critical literalness that is anti-visual and, ultimately, anti-cinematic.

Having admitted that the film is "..an astonishment, an engineering feat and, finally, a folly" - all of which sounds pretty good to me - Denby goes on to castigate it for a lack of human involvement and for an emphasis on "strenuous process". He's too urbane a critic to actually say it, but he comes close to the old Barry Norman standby of film criticism of concluding that, ultimately, he didn't really care about the characters.

Another criticism of the film - along with its lack of an emotional heart - is that the dream sequences are not nearly dream-like enough. Ryan Gilbey, writing in the New Statesman, suggested that there was a lack of anxiety, absurdity and inappropriate nudity to truly constitute a film about dreams. But, as even David Denby concedes, Inception is not about dreaming at all, but about movies. The dreams within it are really a series of miniature films all folded into each other, like egg whites.

The characters fall into each dream/film from the one before, like linked platforms in a computer game, except here you can't escape the final level until you've escaped the first. According to the films' internal logic, the characters are going deeper and deeper into someone's sub-conscious but, really, they're piling one absurd caper up onto another. Each level is more ludicrous than the next so that the ultimate one, the 'heart' of the film, turns out to be a cross between On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Where Eagles Dare. Almost everyone has bemoaned this scene in particular complaining that the most extraordinary thing that Nolan can imagine turns out to be a hoary old Bond film. But it depends how much you've swallowed of what came before. Like the rest of Inception, this (anti) climatic scene skirts a thin line between abject silliness and labyrinthine complexity. Like a very, very good episode of Doctor Who, but with an unlimited budget*.

One moment, albeit a long, lingering and pivotal one, justifies the rest of the film for me. Somewhere towards the end a van containing all the central characters careers off a bridge. The film slows almost to a standstill as the van begins its plunge into the river below. This is a standard issue scene from almost any thriller movie. Conventionally, the hero would be trapped inside, locked in combat with an opponent or already tied up and struggling to get free. As the camera switches back and forth between the sight of the van plunging towards its fate and the action of the protagonist inside we ignore the real time of the falling vehicle and will the hero to escape.

But Nolan not only suspends the van in mid-air - letting it drop so slowly that it starts to resemble a Tex Avery cartoon character that has run off a cliff and has yet to realise there is only air beneath him - but collapses a whole series of other last minute escapes inside its decent. The Russian doll-like nature of the plot(s) means that the protagonists need to free themselves from three different interlocked situations before the van hits the water. All of which takes up about a third of the movie. It's a brilliant genre bending moment, simultaneously thrilling and confusing, so that you will the characters to escape their individual fates whilst actively suspending disbelief. At the same time the construction behind this kind of cinematic manipulation is laid bare.

Inception starts (almost) at the end, with DiCaprio dragged out of the sea after a final escape. This temporal mix-up is not the result of some Tarantino-esque desire to mess with narrative so much as the fact that the film is made up of one long climax. Inception evacuates the plot of almost any forward motion - that is, any of the things that Denby laments - and replaces it with a string of climatic final reels strung out over at least an hour. It is a totally baroque confection, a dizzying conflation of finales, each one warping the other.

The relentless emphasis on traditional literary values - on fully-rounded characters who act out a naturalistic story arc - strangles cinema and turns it back into theatre. Inception's meaning lies elsewhere, in the structure of the film and in its visual and cinematic complexities. It is the element of human drama in Inception - Leonardo DiCaprio's need to return to America and see his children - that is by far its weakest element, a drippy concession to some form of catharsis. It would be far better if the film had no ending at all and instead just carried on and on indefinitely until people finally grew bored and left the cinema. It's not so much that the film suffers from too little human engagement, but too much. Ditch the dubious Di Caprio love story and it would be utterly brilliant.

* Like Doctor Who, Inception shares a love of paradoxes, labyrinths and Escher drawings. Like some Prog Rock LP cover it has a rather literal, almost cheesy, surrealism about it. None of which ruins it for me.

Sweet and Tender Hooligans

What's interesting about Awaydays - the film based on Kevin Sampson's book about football hooliganism in the late 1970's - isn't the supposedly shocking violence, or the sub-Trainspotting scenes of heroin taking, but its depiction of a very particular British sub-culture.

The film does this with the obsessive eye for period detail of a Jane Austen adaptation. Only, in Awaydays, it is old school trainers and Adidas wind cheaters that are fetishised rather than Easter Bonnets and Empire line dresses. The storytelling is straightforward and the fight scenes are wholly unconvincing (I've seen scarier episodes of The Bill) but it gets the clothes and the haircuts right.

Set in the Liverpool suburb of Birkenhead in 1979, Awaydays follows the attempts of Carty - a lower middle class lad - to join The Pack, a fearsome group of Tranmere Rovers fans. The Pack's fashion sense is precisely rendered: a fusion of mod (Fred Perry T-shirts, parkas) casual (box-fresh trainers) and soul boy (white jeans) that looks startlingly modern against the backdrop of brown suits, donkey jackets and flared jeans worn by the supporting characters.



The film is only ever partly about football hooliganism. It is also about male bonding and the way that men tend to measure friendships through the obsessive documentation of their interests: clothes, records and drinking in this case. There are no significant female characters in Awaydays, with the sole exception of Carty's sister. Significantly, his mother is dead and the film begins with a visit to her grave, an event from which Carty flees to begin his initiation into The Pack. The only other women to feature are brief objects of either lust or derision, treated as casually by the film as the men in it.

Despite this there is a lot of unrequited love about: between Carty and his sister - who idolises her brother to the point of incestuousness - between Carty and the lads on the terraces who are suspicious of his middle class manners and ultimately reject him, and between him and Elvis, the film's real hero. Awaydays is in love with Elvis, a Scouse bohemian with a floppy fringe and an immaculate wardrobe. Elvis in turn is infatuated with both a doomy rock'n'roll mythology and Saturday afternoon violence. And while Carty earns the begrudging respect of the pack, Elvis begins to drift away, lost in his flat chasing the dragon to a soundtrack supplied by Echo and The Bunnymen and Joy Division. In this, Elvis predicts the supposed end of the organised gang violence of The Pack, the period a decade later when the Ecstasy culture of the Happy Mondays and Technique-era New Order nullified the culture of the terraces.



Elvis is an art school reject, a rebellious, effortlessly cool bohemian. He mixes the Mod/Casual chic of The Pack with military overcoats and foppish scarves and lives in a cavern-like flat, the walls of which are completely covered with pop art posters and occult objects. Elvis is the encapsulation of every Liverpudlian working class rock'n'roll hero and gobby popstar ever: a composite of Lennon, Ian McCulloch, Pete Wylie, Mick Head, Lee Mavers and countless other wannabees. In a way, the film is actually about Liverpool. Elvis likes to stand on the banks of the Mersey uttering profundities, in love with the city's grandiose self-image and cultishness. It is a cultishness that, for all their mutual antagonism, Liverpool shares with Manchester.

Like football hooliganism this antagonism is mostly for effect. Revealingly, the soundtrack of Awaydays veers between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, four cities caught up during the '70's (and beyond) in vicious football rivalry. As well as the Bunnymen and Joy Division, there's Magazine, OMD, The Mekons, Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League.

I watched Awaydays partly out of an interest in the territoriality of football hooliganism, the way it carved areas of the country up into warring factions. Like Orwell's continuous war in 1984 football hooliganism was never about winning. The fights were literally pointless. Neither total defeat or total victory was seriously on the cards nor was it particularly desirable. The enemy was always needed as a convenient hate figure.

In one sense Awaydays is true to this pointlessness. There are fights and retributions, but no progress or forward motion. No one wins. The crude plotting sets up a series of antagonistic face offs, a sense that one kicking always demands another. But, of course, it can't afford to be that bleak. So the end scenes have Carty walking away from The Pack, damaged but not defeated.

The films suggests that there are perhaps only two escapes from the mindless violence of The Pack: the middle class pull of career that Carty is intent on resisting and the romantic dreams of Elvis. At the end only one of them appears to be viable.

"This Means Something!"

"I figured it out, that's all. Will you just listen?... Have you ever looked at something and it's crazy, and then you looked at it in another way and it's not crazy at all?... Don't be scared. Just don't be scared. I feel really good. Everything's gonna be all right. I haven't felt this good in years."

I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind again the other day. It's a fabulous film in many ways, imbued with an almost lyrical technological optimism. Despite coming from a golden age of cinematic science-fiction, it's completely different in tone to anything else from the period. While Star Wars, for example, can be read as an allegory for the Cold War and America's struggle against another Evil Empire, Close Encounters is a plea for tolerance and understanding. Even the military appear relatively benign in it.

It can also be seen as having another, more unlikely, sub-text; one about issues of representation and communication. The film's central character is Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfus). Following a close encounter with an alien spaceship Roy becomes obsessed with visions of a strange, mountainous formation. He notices this shape everywhere: in the folds of his pillows, in the blob of aftershave in his hand and in a mound of mashed potatoes on his plate.



He starts to create maquettes of it in clay which become ever larger and more elaborate. Eventually, having alienated his entire family to the point where they move out, he creates an enormous model that fills his entire house. To make this model he ransacks the garden for materials, chucking them through a broken window into the living room to the horrified bemusement of his neighbours.

The resulting model is an utterly fabulous object, a grotesque assemblage of mud, vegetation, rubble, furniture and bits of string. It is both mimetically accurate (as we and Roy will later find out) and highly expressionistic, as if created by a bizarre hybrid of Robert Smithson, Jessica Stockholder and an acid-crazed model railway enthusiast.

Just as Roy is nearing the completion of this extraordinary object he realises what it means. The TV that he has blaring in the corner of the otherwise devastated living room has a news report about a bizarre shaped rocky outcrop in Wyoming. Roy looks at the footage of Devil's Tower and then back at his creation. He sits down in shock.



In some senses Roy is like a typically Hollywood-ian depiction of the artist: a half-crazed, anti-social lunatic in search of some intangible truth. Except he isn't an artist. Nor is he mad, just a little intense. And the film also wants us to take him seriously. His sculpture, as he repeatedly explains whist making it, really does mean something.



The film is obsessed with issues of representation and non-verbal communication. The famous five-note score that the scientists use to communicate with the aliens, for example, effectively replaces speech. The chief scientist is a Frenchman (played by film director François Truffaut) who makes no more than one or two gnomic utterances and is accompanied throughout the film by an ineffectual translator. The fact that none of the Americans can understand him seems to imbue him with some special understanding of what is going on.

Roy can't communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it. And he's not alone in his obsession. Another character - Gillian Guiler - is also obsessed with Devil's Tower. She draws it over and over again. In a brilliant scene the two of them converge on Devil's Tower aware that it's the location for the alien spaceship's landing. Trying to work out how to scale the mountain Roy reveals that his knowledge of its topography is vastly superior to Gillian's. "You should try sculpture next time", he deadpans.

In making a plea for tolerance the film also seems to implicitly reject language, as if our primary means of communication were somehow ultimately a handicap to understanding. Language seems to dissolve during the film, becoming ever more useless until it dissipates into the abstract lights and sounds used by the scientists to communicate to the aliens. It is, in many ways, an anti-logocentric film, a celebration of the non-verbal and the techno-haptic.

Unheimliche

I've been meaning to mention this for a while. More decay and dereliction, this time from wealthy East Hampton. Grey Gardens - a large timber clad mansion - was the subject of a 1970's documentary by Albert and David Maysles, directors of the Stones at Altamont film Gimme Shelter. The film followed the house's staggeringly eccentric owners - a mother and daughter, both called Edith Beales - and the self-induced squalor in which they lived.

The two Ediths (known as "Big Edie" and "Little Edie") let the house and gardens fall into a compellingly abject state of disrepair. Filthy, full to bursting with rubbish and home to semi-tame raccoons, it appeared in the film to be in the advanced stages of being re-claimed by nature. The Edie's themselves spent much of their time in a single room, mostly - in Big Eddie's case - in bed wearing an enormous hat.



Like the Mole Man of Hackney, the house became the subject of local authority inspections, and required extensive repairs and stabilisation. Even more bizarrely the work was paid for by Big Edie's niece Jacqueline Onassis. Little Edie's strangely stylish dress sense and odd terminology ("This is the only outfit for today") turned her into a cult figure, especially for fashion designers such as Mark Jacobs. Rufus Wainwright wrote a song about it and the whole story has recently been made into a film series starring Drew Barrymore.

What's most interesting about Grey Gardens from an architectural perspective is how it represents everything we fear most in buildings: structural instability, dirt, rottenness and the dissolution of boundaries. At Grey Gardens, nature has come creeping in over the threshold - literally in the case of raccoons - and started to overlay the carefully delineated domestic realm. The squalor here may be self-induced but that actually adds to its nightmarish quality. Grey Gardens represents a staple of horror films, the house gone to seed, a source of fear rather than comfort.

There is another more pragmatic sense in which Grey Gardens scares us and that is in the way it negates the literal value placed on houses. The insane speculative value that they generate means that their wilful neglect is an affront, an attack on our duty to carefully manage our assets and investments.

Today Grey Gardens has been restored back to its original luxury.

Titanic: A Big Big Love

Earth Capitol has a short but amusing post about the Titanic. I enjoyed this not only because the featured poem is so fabulous but also because I share EC's obsession with the Titanic disaster itself. Shamefully I have to admit to having seen every single film about it. As a consequence I can say that - contrary to what one of the post's comments asserts - James Cameron's Titanic is not the worst film ever made. The worst film ever made is in fact Lew Grade's Raise The Titanic.

Why this tragedy should have given rise to so much bad art is a mystery, but Raise the Titanic really is worth a look should it ever rear its head on terrestrial TV again. It concerns a bizarre cold war plot to find a mysterious substance ("Byzanium? That's absurd", says a character at one point, accurately) which has gone down with the ship. At the end Titanic is raised to the surface and sailed triumphantly into New York harbour, a wobbly toy boat covered in sea weed bobbing up and down against a badly painted backdrop of the Statue of Liberty. The plot summary is here, if you have the stomach for it.

Clearly Cameron's Titanic is equally bobbins, but the sinking scenes are technically phenomenal and actually quite thrilling. My colleague over at Strange Harvest has noted too that the CGI recreations of the ship can be seen as an inverted homage - or a strange endpoint - to modernism's obsession with maritime imagery. In Cameron's Titanic the awesome processing power of digital technology is utilised to recreate an Edwardian ocean liner, albeit with thrilling verisimilitude.

For all its technical prowess - and let's face it that's the only permissible reason to watch it really - the film sticks rigidly to the cliches of the Titanic story: the jigging Irish in 3rd class forever enjoying the craic, stoical band members playing as they descend into the waves, caddish upper class men stealing into the lifeboats etc.

It also contains a number of narrative absurdities and anachronisms. Chief amongst these is the fact that Kate Winslet's character is carrying several early modernist masterpieces in her luggage including Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. This is currently to be found in the Museum of Modern Art and not, as far as anyone is aware, at the bottom of the Atlantic. The film also includes one of the most exquisitely terrible bits of art criticism ever seen on film when Leonardo Di Caprio gazes at Picasso's painting and says "The colours, they're just so....intense".

Less facetiously I owe my obsession with Titanic to reading about its discovery in National Geographic as a child. Titanic was discovered by Dr Robert Ballard in the early 1980's and the magazine followed this story over several issues leading up to the incredible photographs of the submerged ship. I found it both moving and terrifying in much the same way that Earth Capitol describes. Amazingly, Ballard's discovery - achieved with state of the art submersibles and seabed scanning equipment - was actually a by-product of the cold war too. Ballard had been contracted by the CIA to search for the wrecks of nuclear submarines and, at the end of this period, had been allowed to spend a few extra days looking for the titanic. No mention of Byzanium though. Suspicious that.

Welcome To The Pleasuredome

Note: The following is a rough and ready sort of mini-essay about theme parks and artificial environments. Specifically it is about the anxieties and fears of such worlds explored through science fiction. It is also looks at the spatial/architectural characteristics of such places.

Westworld

The cult 1973 film Westworld, starring the fabulously strange Yul Brynner, is a classic piece of techno paranoia. The film depicts a futuristic world where intelligent machines develop a will of their own and turn on their human creators. But it is also about another kind of paranoia: the erosion of authentic experience through the creation of artificial or virtual worlds.

Westworld is set in a theme park called Delos which is divided into three historical zones: the Wild West, pre-Christian Rome and medieval Europe. Each zone is populated by robots who act as adversaries, sexual partners, drinking buddies or whatever else the human visitors require in order to have a good time. The guests - of whom there seem to be remarkably few - behave according to a crude, secondhand understanding of their chosen period, chasing after comely whenches in Medievalworld or starting bar-room brawls in Westworld. Behind the scenes an army of technicians programme, monitor and repair the robots.



The film makes heavy weather of the issue of authenticity from the off. A TV reporter appears in the opening scenes to tell us how real, genuine and historically convincing the zones are. Soothing female voices reiterate that visitors will be immersed fully in their historial epoch just as if they are really there. As well as a fear of losing control of technology, the film's underlying anxiety is the artificiality of the simulated experiences Delos offers.



The most obvious simulacra are the robots themselves which are physically indistinguishable from humans. This immediately implies a cruelty and amorality in the various ways that guests. abuse them. But the entire theme park is also a simulated, pre-programmed experience. implying a comparable abuse of nature*. The landscape of Westworld is the spatial equivalent of the robots: an image of nature overlaying a subterranean warren of blinking computer screens, cables, switches and technicians that maintain the illusion. In switching between the lab coated technicians and the theme park the film emphasises the prosthetic quality of this landscape.

Delos is presented as a completely immersive space with no sense of the exterior world. Guest arrive via plane where they are bathed in audio-visual simulations of the coming experience. Delos itself has no edge or obvious limits. The fact that it is actually located in the desert helps to blur this boundary when one of the guests escapes. This idea of an artificial environment that is hermetically sealed but whose limits cannot be gauged is a crucial aspect of all immersive worlds including the classic theme parks that Westworld satirises**.



Like the picturesque gardens of stately homes, theme parks are carefully composed to appear limitless. Boundaries with the outside world are dissolved through the artful placing of screens of trees, the arrangements of buildings and the use of ha-ha's.*** Arrival and departure is carefully regulated so that the park acts as an island, an environment that cannot be approached any other way than by the official route. In this way no sense of the outside world is allowed to impinge on the illusion.

A recurrent anxiety about theme parks is that this carefully controlled environment denies us the ability to act independently. To visit somewhere like Disneyworld is to take part in a minutely choreographed experience where little deviation is allowed from the script. This is most apparent in the rides themselves where the same experience is repeated for each guest exactly, ad infinitum, like a Fordist approach to having fun. But it also occurs in the landscape between the rides where boredom, lethargy or other forms of deviant behaviour is frowned upon. Cast members constantly coax visitors into immersing themselves more fully into the concept. These cast members, like the technicians in Westworld, have their own separate circulation system from the public, appearing fully dressed and smiling as if from nowhere.



Logan's Run

Logan's Run (1978) is set in a post-apocalyptic society. This society is - for reasons that become sinisterly apparent - entirely populated by attractive under 30 olds who live in an internal and artificial world. This world appears to its inhabitants to be limitless but is in fact contained within a series of vast interconnected domes, a kind of Buckminster Fuller dreamscape full of fabulous Brazilia style monuments connected by swooshing monorails.

The anti-hero Logan's understanding of the fundamental inhumanity of this society only occurs when he escapes its limits and realises that a world exists beyond it. This outside world contains only one inhabitant, an ancient old man somewhat bizarrely played by Peter Ustinov, who lives in the overgrown ruins of Washington DC.





The idea of a dystiopian world contained within a hermetically sealed dome parodies the utopian qualities the same structures assume within architectural discourse. Here the transparent, infinitely expandable dome stands for a kind of democratic, non-hierarchical space. It is an idea that runs through architecture from the early expressionists, through Buckminster Fuller to the '60's avant garde of Cedric Price and Archigram and on into '80's and '90's High Tech. The glass dome represents an anti-architectural fantasty of a physically dissolved building, reduced to providing (in Reyner Banham's words) a well-tempered environment.

Arguably, such spaces are derived from the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, another spectacular representation of the world within a single vaulted space. Exhibition spaces are not meant to have positive qualities in themselves. They are assumed to be both formally and literally transparent. And yet like the vitrine in contemporary art they are loaded with siginificance. Ironically the supposedly formless, transparent dome has become a symbol of immersive artificial worlds from Fuller's proposal for roofing over Manhattan to the Eden Centre. The glass dome is like a giant specimen jar. It is an object that contains species and objects we wish to study. The anxiety of science fiction like Logan's Run is that we have become the objects contained under the glass.



The Truman Show

Peter Weir's film The Truman Show is set in a fictional world created for a real time television show about its one genuine inhabitant, the eponymous Truman. As we discover at the end of the film, this world is contained within a vast domed environment. It is like an inverted panoptican, or a giant petri dish, with the whole world looking in. The film exploits a contemporary fear that all our lives are simulated, somehow no longer real but insperable from mediated experience. It also echoes Donna Haraway's arguement that we are all already cyborgs, prosthetically connected to the machines that we use.

One of the interesting things about the film is that this artificial experience is located not in a futuristic Blade Runner-esque environment - the familiar cinematic landscape of our fears - but in the genuine Floridian town of Seaside. This cheerful piece of New Urbanism - home to buildings by Leon Krier and Steven Holl amongst others - plays to architectural fears of artificiality and authenticity as well as a more popular suspicion that overtly cheerful and perfectly manicured places mask something sinister***.

When Truman discovers the truth of his artificial existence, he attempts to escape and comes up against the limits of this world in a scene of exquisite poignancy. Escaping by boat he drifts on and on under a perfect blue sky until he floats up to and then, gently, bumps into the edge of the dome that encloses the giant set. It is as unexpected to us watching it as it is to him. He slowly gropes his way around the edge until he realises that this is indeed the absolute limit of his world.



* The term nature is taken here at face value although it too is an artificial construction to some extent.

** Westworld was written and directed by Michael Crighton and is in some senses a forerunner to Jurassic Park, a film about another themed environment and another gross misuse of technology. Jurassic Park is the ultimate theme park, a genuine island of artificial species.

*** A ha-ha is a ditch which provides a physical barrier which doesn't disrupt the view.

**** If the film were made in the UK it would be set in Poundbury.

Final note: I would like at some point to extend this to look at game space and virtual worlds like Second Life.

Carry On Crying

I've always thought that the most revealing (ooh er) moment in the Carry On films was not Barbara Windsor's bra snapping off - as assumed in many of the reviews of this new book - but a scene later in the same film when the Carry On regulars take issue with a bunch of hippies.

Carry on Camping was made in 1969 towards the end of the, err, classic run of Carry on Films. Here, the essentially 1950's world of the Carry On films comes up against - however flippantly - the late '60's counter culture. Although faintly ludicrous this meeting shows up the films' deep conservatism. The hippies in question turn up next door to the dreadful camp site on which the Carry On team are having a suitably dreadful holiday. Our heroes are appalled and, disguised amusingly as hippies, infiltrate the party to get it broken up and the hippies removed from the camp site.

In an interesting post recently, Infinite Thought's blog referred to George Orwell's essay on the saucy seaside postcard tradition. As Orwell points out, the heart of the postcards' humour lies in a thoroughly miserable view of human relationships. Men will always be sex obsessed but frustrated. Women will always be either nubile under 25 year olds or bitter old harridans. Men desire sex and women desire marriage (although the sexually predatory older woman, usually played by a man in drag, is a comedy staple of the Carry On films too). Marriage is always represented as a deeply unhappy institution in which the woman yearns for romance and the man itches for a bit on the side. The Carry On films are rooted in this culture.

In Carry on Camping the main characters, played by Syd James and Bernard Bresslaw, begin the film by attempting to trick their wives into going on holiday in a nudist colony. Their wives are of course horrified by this prospect (male lechery must after all find its opposite in female prudery) and they all end up staying on a normal campsite. The domestic drudgery of this situation is alleviated (potentially) by the arrival of a group of hot young women under the prudish care of Kenneth Williams. Syd and Bernie then spend the rest of the holiday desperately trying to get off with Babs Windsor. That Syd and Bernie will fail in this is of course a given from the outset. Their various attempts will be endlessly frustrated through comic ineptitude with the ever present raised saucepan of their wives hanging over them.

The hippies arrival at the end of the films is a direct challenge to this accepted status quo of social and sexual dysfunction. Trapped in a world of thwarted ambition and terminal misanthropy the Carry On cast are utterly repelled by the concept of genuine free love. Ironically - for a series of films obsessed with the desire for sex - their humour lies in the fact that sex will always be out of reach. Even when it is available through marriage it will be deeply unsatisfactory. The hippies represent a genuine alternative to this dead end and therefore must go. Interestingly their successful removal reunites the dysfunctional married couples who, for the first time in the film, reveal some genuine affection for each other and start having fun.

The comedy of the Carry On films is rooted in dissatisfaction. The character's attempts to break out of this situation only serves to reinforce their limited horizons. Their jokey anarchy and free spirit is only ever skin deep. Even the series' title Carry On implies staunch resignation as much as it does a party spirit. And, if there was a party it would undoubtedly be rubbish. No wonder Morrissey was such a fan.

Goodnight Mr Bond

Review: The James Bond Films. Yes, all of them.

This is an attempt to write a review of every single James Bond film from memory. I was tempted to watch some of them again but thought that might be missing the point, such as it is. (N.B. Since writing this I have actually watched a number of them and was pleased/scared to find my plot descriptions were largely accurate. The one amendment I would make is that Moonraker is actually considerably worse than I remembered.)

Dr No

Based on one of the best books (not saying much admittedly) and, possibly, the only film to feature Sean Connery with his own hair. Set mostly in Jamaica, Bond spends a lot of time in a fetching terry towelling bathing gown/trunk combo. He also wears a trilby, although unfortunately not at the same time as the bathing gown/trunk combo. The book is casually racist about Jamaicans and the film features a terrible Uncle Tom caricature in Bond’s assistant Quarrel, only too happy to die for his honky master. Quarrel first appears in the books in the chronologically earlier Man With The Golden Gun, where his relationship with Bond is described as that between a Scottish Laird and his head gamekeeper. Which tells you most of what you need to know about Ian Fleming. More positively, Ursula Andress emerges from the sea with some shells. The ridiculous villain sets the tone for camp evil-ness that every subsequent film follows. He has no hands and channels a look somewhere between Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin.

From Russia With Love

Widely regarded as the best Bond film ever, perhaps because it least resembles a Bond film and most resembles a quite good spy movie. Depending on where you stand this is either a) not really the point at all, or b) a blessed relief from the usual nonsense. Bond is sent to Istanbul (to the banks of The Bosphorous, as people invariably have it) to get hold of a Russian decoder machine type thing. This is obviously a trap and the bait is Russian KGB agent Tatiana Romanov. The scenes with her are oddly touching and smartly written with lots of double entendres and are by far the best bits of the film. There is also a strangely viscious protrayal of lesbianism in pointy toed villain Rosa Kleb who belongs in another, less plausible Bond film. .

There is an excellent unmasking of the villain by way of his ignorance of the correct wine to have with fish, and a fight with two gypsy girls. Which is nice. Bond sets the tone in this film for his habitual incompetence, constantly wandering into dangerous situations and getting everyone else shot. It ends with a slightly interminable boat/helicopter chase which most people prefer to forget when discussing the films merits. Other than that though, it’s really very good.

Goldfinger

Bond hits the Motherlode with Goldfinger - everyone’s favourite movie (except My Mother, who professes to hate this and every Bond film every made. For some reason though she particularly hates this one, claiming both to be heartily sick of it and to have never watched it all the way through). It’s got everything in it you could possibly want including the scene where Bond emerges from the water in a wet suit with a duck strapped to his head. There is some witty banter with Pussy Galore (mostly minus the homophobic undertow of Fleming’s book - she was raped by her brothers as a child and as a consequence ‘turns’ lesbian. One look at Bond’s schlong though and like any good lesbian she turns back, presumably only revisiting for the sake of male titillation). Be that as it may, it’s a great movie. Connery looks super cool throughout, although his coolness is slightly illusional. In a telling detail, when Bond is tracking Goldfinger across the Alps, he is torn between jeopardising the mission by haring off after a woman in a sports car, or continuing on his way. He decides not to give chase, muttering “Discipline, 007, discipline” to himself. As Antony Burgess has pointed out, Bond’s hedonism is second to his sense of duty, marking him out as a product of the ‘50’s not the ‘60’s. Equally tellingly he makes a joke about hating the Beatles in this film. For all his cool wardrobe and ‘60’s’ glamour, Bond is a deeply reactionary establishment character.

Thunderball

A bit crap this one involving endless very boring underwater scenes (always hated underwater scenes, except ones featuring Jacques Cousteau). Features Bond looking silly in a jet pack. (Note: never put James Bond in a crash helmet, he always looks a knob - see every Roger Moore film). Like most Bond films the early bits of Thunderball are the best when very little is happening plot-wise and Bond is spending most of his time trying to seduce the nurses at a health farm.

This was re-made as Never Say Never Again, to no great note, except for some funny jokes about Sean Connery’s age and Kim Basinger acting very badly. In a thoroughly bathetic moment a supposedly high octane duel to the death is played out between Sean and the baddie on one of those table top space invader games that used to be in the lounges of cross channel ferries.

You Only Live Twice

Another excellent film, much mocked (rightly, it has to be said) for Sean Connery’s rubbish attempt at impersonating a Japanese person. This is unintentionally funny, but the film is also rather good and has an excellent theme tune and genuine all round groovy ‘60’s-ness. It revolves around a totally ridiculous plot by Spectre to capture American and Russian spacecraft in a bid to pit the superpowers against each other. For reasons I can’t recall this is sponsored by the Japanese. There is a long section towards the end of the film when virtually nothing happens for about twenty minutes. Also, of some note are Bond being “killed” at the beginning of the film and Bond flying a mini helicopter and, again, looking silly in a crash helmet. The volcano rocket base is probably the best Ken Adam set as well. Blofeld appears for the first time in a film and turns out to be Donald Pleasance. The film is, incidentally, far better than the terrible book which has Blofeld growing poisonous plants on an island and wearing a suit of armour.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Much underrated. I actually quite like George Lazenby and the film is, like From Russia With Love, a plausible thriller. Diana Rigg is splendid as his short-lived wife Tracey. Telly Savalas plays Blofeld, and Louis Armstrong sings We Have All The Time In The World. It’s a bit darker in places than normal Bond films although Bond does blow his cover as an academic bore by sleeping with all the women. Good skiing scenes and some particularly unconvincing blue screening. The mountain scenes were filmed in the Swiss resort of Wengen, just next to the Eiger where I once went on a skiing holiday myself don’t you know.

Diamonds Are Forever

Connery is back. A little older, with bigger side burns, but back all the same. This is the Las Vegas one, also featuring THE MOON BUGGY. Tiffany Case, starts off as a cool, smart criminal and ends up a dim bikini clad floozy and the plot is unspeakably rubbish. Very good start but it really runs out of steam and the final scene set on an oil rig (for some reason) is really dull. The ‘amusing’ homophobic running ‘joke’ of the two gay hitmen is just about the only connection back to Ian Fleming. There’s a good continuity fuck up when Bond roles a car onto two wheels in one scene and then emerges on the other two which exemplifies the slightly lazy-all-round approach of this film. For architecture bores some of the action takes place in a John Lautner designed house in LA.

Live and Let Die

Awesome. On so many levels. Roger Moore makes his debut, strolling camply down the streets of Harlem in black gloves and Crombi coat, looking more like he’s walking onto the set of Parkinson. This is the blaxploitation Bond, which also features the fabulous Wings Teem Toon (Sample lyric: "In this ever changing world, in which we live in") and some deep south voodoo shit man. Roger Moore is equipped with a magnetic watch (YES! A magnetic watch!) which he uses to undo a lady’s dress zip, mainly. Possibly the one film in which Roger Moore is technically young enough to play the character. Also, features a fabulous boat chase which – according to my 1980 copy of the Guinness Book of Records – had the world’s longest jump by speedboat, a bus, an exploding man and Jane Seymour. Quite probably, in reality, terrible, but I don't care. Largely unfantastic plot which involves heroin smuggling and Roger Moore in a range of terrible outfits. Best of these is his baby blue flares and blouson with low cut vest underneath. Features also some choice dilaogue: "there's a honky on your tail". Also introduces largely unamusing Dukes of Hazard-esque sherriff Coalpepper, who also appears to unfunnier effect in....

The Man With The Golden Gun

Dreadful book, dreadful film. Christopher Lee is Scaramanga, Brit Ekland is his girlfriend and Maud Adams makes the first of her two appearances as a Bond Girl (the other is the also utterly rubbish Octopussy – see below). Basically this is a film long duel, with Moore following Lee all the way to his Island hideaway where he is waited on by the dwarf from Fantasy Island. Lulu’s song is absolutely dreadful and I honestly can’t remember much more. Lee probably has a fiendish plan but it is so routinely generic that no one remembers what it was. Oh, and he has three nipples.

The Spy Who Loved Me

Huge when it came out this one I remember. It’s the one with the Lotus that turns into a submarine basically. The plot hinges on an underwater re-hash of You Only Live Twice with a megalomaniac stealing British and Russian nuclear subs – “Observe, Meester Bond, the instruments of Armegeddon” he says proudly when showing Rog around his sub stealing oil tanker. The bit with the Lotus always worried me because when it drives out of the water, Bond winds down the drivers side window to deposit a dead fish on the beach. Given that the car/sub would need to be, presumably, waterproof, I always wondered where this fish came from. The Teem Toon is sung by Carly Simon.

Moonraker

Features the pay off line: “I think he’s attempting re-entry Sir”. As the person ‘he’ is attempting re-entry with is called Dr Holly Goodhead, you could conclude that by this point the series has descended into a form of utterly puerile creaky old hornyness. For some this might be a good thing. The totally batty plot has Hugo Drax attempt to destroy the planet and start a new super race in space. Although to be fair this is no battier than Ian Fleming’s original and largely unrelated plot. The film also has Roger Moore looking silly in a space suit, and uses the Close Encounters theme tune in a slightly desperate attempt at being contemporary but which only reminds you of what a good film this isn’t. The Spy Who Loved Me’s pantomime villain, Jaws, returns only to become an unfunny and unlikely ally of Bond. The writers also see fit to give him a thoroughly unpleasant ‘romantic’ liaison with what appears to be a school girl.

Any pretence at making a ‘proper’ film – good script, quality actors, a point, any sense of plausible character/plot/idea development – has apparently entirely left minds of the people in charge by this point, as if the production team have jumped out of a moving vehicle, leaving it freewheeling vacantly down hill to its doom.

For Your Eyes Only

Distinguished in my eyes (only) for two reasons: 1. I remember going to see it when it came out at the Chelmsford Odeon with my family, an exceptional, unrepeated moment of familial bonding and 2. The playground rumour that the Bond girl had previously been a man. The latter apparently, is actually the true but for one of the Bond girls in Octopussy. Other than that I can’t remember much thing about it, except for the marvellous Sheena Easton song. Considered a return to the more serious films (relatively speaking) of the ‘60’s it was an attempt to get away from the insufferable fatuousness of Moonraker.

Octopussy.

Total nonsense from beginning to end. An unfathomable plot (try reading it here. Someone has spent a great deal of time trying to write it down totally straight and it still makes no sense whatsoever), involving Faberge eggs, two villains, jewellery smuggling and a mad Russian general. A friend alerted me to an excellently vitriolic dismantling of the plot's many faults by the equally Bond obsessed Will Smith (which you should be able to find here). What else is there? Steven Berkoff! An all-woman circus! Roger Moore disguised as a clown! Indian tennis player V J Amritag fighting people off with a tennis racket! A bomb in a circus canon! A fight on the roof of a train! I’m making it sound good. Almost legendary in its lack of logic, continuity, sense, rhyme or reason, Octopussy is equal parts entertainingly dreadful and almost too boring to watch.

View to A Kill.

Not just the worst James Bond movie ever, but possibly one of the worst movies full stop. Roger Moore - looking increasingly like an elderly lady you might see pottering about the nursery slopes of St Moritz with his leathery tan, wispy rinsed hair and funny big glasses - waddles through a piss weak script that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a strange post-modern assemblage held together only through the utterly formulaic assumptions of what happens in a Bond movie. Overall, it has the feel of a particularly low budget TV detective show, an impression encouraged by the presence of The Avenger’s Patrick McNee who forms an unfunny double act with Roger Moore. Christopher Walken does his Christopher Walker thing only worse than normal. Duran Duran sing the song and Simon Le Bon wears a beret in the video. Any glamour the Bond series might have had has leaked out into a puddle forming at the base of Roger’s patent leather shoes.

Some of it seems to be about horses. There is an interminable scene set with Bond creeping about a stable. Then it’s somehow about Nazi’s and then it’s about silicone valley. It’s hopeless. It has a hot air balloon in it. At one point Bond is bound in a car and pushed into a pond. Yes, a pond. What happened to the laser beams, the anti gravity machines, the piranha fish? Now its death by water boatmen? It ends up in the San Andreas Fault for reasons too rubbish to go into. Bond also gets to sleep with Grace Jones which, due to heir age differential, is probably one of the queasiest couplings ever seen on screen. He also fails to catch any villains or cotton on to anything that is going on. His by now ubiquitous detective technique is to get invited to the villains lair under some utterly fatuous cover, provoke the villain in some threadbare macho contest (shooting, poker, starting a bar b q), sleep with the villains mistress (usually with the villains tacit approval – all villains are perverts who like seeing their girlfriends get it on with sixty year olds), get caught and bound up and tortured and then escape in order to come back and blow the entire place up. Not great.

The Living Daylights/License to Kill

I’ve lumped these two together because I can’t actually tell them apart. There is some kind of villain with an iguana and Timothy Dalton looks serious throughout, especially as he loses his 00 license and goes rogue for a while, although they are still silly enough to feature him escaping down a ski slope in a cello case. He has an Aston Martin that goes on ski’s too. But the bad hair and the era and the tuxedo’s just don’t seem to match. In many ways the 1980’s might have been an excellent decade for James Bond with a revived sense of glamour and consumerism, but for all that they were also a decade of strikes, unemployment and social unrest and an effete assassin in a bow tie probably didn’t seem that relevant. Equally, an attempt to give Bond both gravitas and some semblance of social conscience didn’t wash either. Later, the franchise would recognise this dilemma by attempting to bring Bond up to date through an ironic acknowledgement of his sexist (although not racist – that would be too troubling) cold war era proclivities in the general irony-overload of the 1990’s.

Goldeneye

This is quite good. Relatively. Pierce “Remington Steele” Brosnan is tremendously smug as Bond, Dame Judy “As Time Goes By” Dench overacts bearably as M, Samantha Bond injects a little life into hilarious desperate spinster figure Miss Moneypenny. It has an almost half decent plot with a twist. There is an enjoyably destructive tank chase through Prague and, probably for the first time since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it’s not actually total rubbish. Geoffrey “Slam in the Lamb” Palmer is also in it, as is the chap from Foyle’s War, bringing an enjoyably Sunday tea-time feel to global events. On the downside there is a fair share of “If it wasn’t for this purple cummerbund I would have split my copious sides” clubby jokes such as a femme fatale character called Onja Onnatop (Women on top? Goodness gracious) and more product placement than any film can really bare and still be the film and not the advertising break. More anally, it has a car chase between Onnatop in her Ferrari F40 and Bond in a 1964 (Goldfinger) Aston Martin which upsets my brother because the performance disparity between the two vehicles would render the chase highly unlikely.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Features a plot for Jonathon Pryce to take over the broadcasting rights to the Archers. Not dastardly at all. There is a good joke – delivered by John Cleese as R (Q’s replacement) - about a sandwich.

The World Is Not Enough

Features a female character called Dr Christmas Jones, and concludes in Istanbul, at the end of the year. This is mainly, or actually exclusively, so that Bond can say: “Always wanted to have Christmas in Turkey”. Having maneuvered the plot, timeframe, location and, indeed, named one of the main characters something completely improbable in order to make this joke, I’m troubled that it’s so rubbish. I mean, as a joke, it just doesn’t work. It isn’t a neat reversal of a popular phrase. It almost is, but isn’t. If it was an off the cuff remark made on the spur of the moment, this could be forgivable. But it seems to have taken the entire scriptwriting team and the whole length of the movie to get to it. It upsets me greatly.

Die Another Day

Traditionally, the final outing for each Bond actor is the worst (Diamonds are Forever, View to A Kill). This doesn’t buck the trend. Mostly rubbish for the following reasons: Terrible cgi, an invisible car, Toby Stevens’ villain, Madonna (singing and acting), an ice palace which Bond enters under one of his habitually rubbish covers. Pierce Brosnan has also become too irritating and smug to be bearable.

Casino Royale

Quite good, but that's not really the point is it?

The plot stays relatively true to the book by not re-locating the action in space or inside a volvano. Although, it has to be said, staying true to the plot of the books is no guarantee of plausability. Anyway, Bond confronts a money launderer over a game of cards and wins. Other stuff happens. Daniel Craig is thuggishly plausible rather than camply ridiculous. There are no gadgets. The jokes are wooden. In a way, it doesn't matter. You really have seen it all by this point. The film is battling a bigger problem, which is the strange pointlessness of making any more James Bond films.

As others have pointed out, the books contain an interesting portrait of the post cold war era and are more interesting as social documents than as thrillers. The plots were always silly and never quite held together. The diligent, almost anal, cataloguing of consumer products and menus and hotels and places at a time when contemporary consumer culture was just beginning is more interesting. Fleming frequently breaks off from detailing a chase sequence to give an oddly detailed account of Bond's lunch. Frequently this isn't even a remarkable lunch (valuable plot time is taken up in Live and Let Die with Bond ordering chicken sandwiches) but Fleming pedantically tells us anyway. This reads like a 1950's travel brochure, but it's still interesting for that. If you can get past Fleming’s rampant misogyny, homophobia and racism and somewhat puerile world view (not easy) they can still be fun. Similarly, the films have a nostalgia and period glamour which is principally their appeal. Nobody watches them for plot development or suspense. Acutally, we watch them for the opposite of suspence. We watch them I would suggest for their certainty, for the utterly formulaic way they unfold, as familiar and in some ways as rubbish as christmas.

So, perhaps the series should, at this point, finally end. At the beginning, with the first book finally made into a film. There are no more books, and certainly no more plots, left. James Bond is, ultimately, one man’s puerile fantasy that, for a while, became everyone’s puerile fantasy. But we’ve all wasted far too much time on it. I’ve spent too much time on it certainly, just writing this. It belongs in the 1950’s and 60’s and possibly, the silly 1970’s. But not now. Not any more. Enough already. Goodnight Mr Bond.

Why Kiera Knightley Should Be Purchased By The National Trust

Review: Pride and Prejudice.

So, I’m in the Rio cinema in Dalston – possibly the most multi-cultural place in the world - and everyone here is white and middle class. Outside, the cars on Kingsland Road throb past with their neon glow and the kebab shops light up the street and yet, in here, all you can hear is the sound of horses hooves on cobbles and silver spoons clinking on china. The thought occurs: why would anyone want to make a film like this now? Isn’t it about as relevant as Quinlan Terry’s houses or Viscount Linley’s furniture? Well, I happen to have a soft spot for Quinlan Terry, but still, the whole idea of period drama is rather worrying: a curious fixation on a world of restrictive manners and social segregation. Is this what we should be thinking about in 2005?

Then there is the film itself. The whole thing is bathed in a honeyed autumnal glow. It begins with the sun rising over a misty swathe of English countryside and gets progressively more picturesque after that. This film is as stylistically intense as Sin City. The quality of light in it was so seductive that after it I felt like hiring a lighting crew to follow me around. What’s it all about? Well, basically, there’s the Bennet family who are farm people, a bit coarse but basically good sorts. They have five daughters and no son or heir, so the house and farm are due to be given over to a male cousin, who is, as Jane Austen put it, a bit of a knob. The father is an amiably sardonic farmer. The mother is a petty bourgeois social climber obsessed with marrying off her daughters to the highest bidders. The eldest daughter Jane is beautiful, honest and shy. The second eldest Elizabeth is beautiful, honest and sharp. Into this scenario rides Mr D’Arcy, an impossibly wealthy bachelor, and his friend, the only slightly less wealthy Mr Bigley. The Bennets and the two bachelors meet at the village disco – sorry, local dance - where Mr Bigley promptly falls in love with Jane, and Mr D’arcy and Elizabeth begin their tortuous and acerbic on-off courtship.

Most of the action – if that is the right word – takes place within a succession of house interiors where the manners are adjusted subtly according to location. The Bennet’s house is filmed in a succession of painterly scenes, somewhere between Breugel, Pieter de Hooch and the sort of sentimental pictures of young children chasing chickens that the Victorians used to hang in their nurseries. Pigs waddle in and out of shot, mud squelches underfoot and there is a rich choreography of honest farm folk and quacking wild fowl. The house, a mix of Queen Anne and Georgian with classical embellishment is lovingly pictured in all its flaking and scuffed glory: a sign presumably of both the Bennet’s near impoverishment and of our heroine Elizabeth’s straightforward honesty. Beginning with the girlish honesty of Jane and Elizabeth’s conversations at home, social interaction becomes ever more elliptical and strained as they move through a succession of ever grander residences. Basically, the posher the house the more mean spirited the people living in it. Except for D’Arcy who has the grandest house but also the best taste. In one scene, Elizabeth wanders through his copious hallways, her eyes lingering over the suggestive physicality of a series of Grecian statues. She is clearly the only other person in the film capable of appreciating such beauty.

Away from the claustrophobic civility of the interiors, Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for walking is seen as evidence of her free spirit. The countryside is depicted as free and natural – a naturalness, of course, that is mediated through the whole biscuit tin and tea towel world of the English picturesque tradition. When the camera is not focusing on the all round loveliness of the English landscape, it is focusing on the all round loveliness of Kiera Knightly. Her character is, of course, the moral heart of the story, showing that honesty and depth will win out over frippery and snobbishness. But, appropriately, her face is always perfectly made up, her ‘kohled’ eyes and flawless skin as ‘natural’ as the perfect countryside behind her.

Always a sucker for shots of rolling hills accompanied by swirling classical music, and entranced by Knightley’s triumphant goodness, I was utterly seduced by it all. Coming out, Kingsland Road was something of a shock. But, you know, in a good way.

The Super Streamlined Shiny New Retro-Futuristic Past Is Here, Now.

Film Review: The Incredibles.

In cartoons like The Jetsons and The Flintstones, the 1960’s nuclear family is transported to space or stone age conditions, suggesting that wherever we are in time - whether being chased by a woolly mammoth or teleporting across space - several constants can be relied upon; wives will nag, brothers and sisters will fight and husbands will miserably slope off to work in faceless office jobs. Similarly, In The Incredibles a thoroughly ‘normal’ family of superheroes find themselves facing a life of suburban drudgery after being forced into early retirement by an ungrateful world.

The suburbia in which The Incredibles end up though is a kind of souped-up parody of late 60’s modernism. Spaciously laid out grids of groovy bungalows - Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian house meets John Lautner – spread out for miles in an orderly, conformist utopia. The imagery in the film evokes the techno-modernism of the late ‘60’s but bathed in a nostalgic glow made possible by today’s super advanced computer modelling: everything here seems to shimmer in a retro-haze of rendered perfection. 1960’s suburbia is given a shiny newness it never had at the time whilst its modernity is simultaneously parodied as a period piece. So, cars are super-shapely Stingrays or even-more-outrageous-than-usual Oldsmobiles, the city is a vertigo inducing composite of Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham and the villain lives in the ultimate You Only Live Twice era Bond set.

The film both acknowledges and revels in the irony of re-creating such retro-modernism as silvery mono-rails swooping into hollowed out volcanoes or chrome staircases cantilevered at improbable angles – the groovy futurism of Ken Adam’s Bond sets surpassed visually and rendered by a technology still in its infancy when they were made. Like a beautifully rendered picture of an Amstrad computer, it’s technology looking admiringly at itself in the mirror.

It’s in this relationship between computer technology and the imagery it employs that the film may have something interesting to say about contemporary architecture. In The Incredibles, the latest computer modelling software is used to parody the design dreams of the past. In architecture, the same technology is used to create visions of the future. Nothing is new in The Incredibles, only the technology employed to make it possible. The computers used to make this film burn their way through improbable mathematical calculations in order to make Mr Incredible’s sagging paunch bounce up and down or render the dated Trimphone in his office. The computer render in architecture is (still) seen as a transparent, visionary tool, without its own values or representational codes. There is a functionalist strain of argument in architecture that says computer technology leads inevitably to certain kinds of forms: as if using the computer will lead automatically to a vision of the future. Pixar’s use exposes the fatuousness of this argument, using computers to model, with extraordinary verisimilitude, the chromium shine on a Corvette wing mirror, or the sun as it filters through the jungle mist. Not only that, but that they also achieve infinitely more subtle modulations of tone, atmosphere and, ultimately, value.