The Beauty Of The Butterfly Effect

Time travel is a fascinating lie. Not everyone is a fan of science fiction as far as it concerns spaceships and rayguns, but at one stage or another we have all fantasised about travelling in time. Whether it is the desire to return to first year and spend less time in the bar and more time in books, to return to 1970 and use your hindsight powers to ‘discover’ punk before Iggy Pop, or even to zip forward to the 2016 Olympics so you can come back and make a killing at the bookies, we all love to travel time in our minds. As impossible as we know it in our hearts to be, science books like A Brief History Of Time need only suggest that it could happen in order to become instant best sellers, flying off the shelves to sate our imaginations.

Time travel in modern popular culture begins with two classic late nineteenth century novels, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and H.G Well’s The Time Machine. This is convenient because they also represent the two essential time travel groups, respectively: comedies about going back in time, and tragedies of visiting the future.  In Mark Twain’s novel we have a satirical account of a nineteenth century American waking up in Medieval England, wowing the inhabitants of the era with his modern technology and knowledge of ‘future’ events.  Similarly, films in which we travel to the past often hinge on the comic potential within the clash of old and new, and the caricature of historical figures. Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) presented Napoleon as a giggling moron obsessed with puppet shows; Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure(1989) portrays Genghis Khan as a dumb rock-star cliché, surrounded by groupies and susceptible to Twinkies; the Austin Powers (1997-2002) films satirise the free-spirit culture of 1960s Britain by bringing it face-to-face with the ‘boring’ modern values of monogamy and social conservatism.

Conversely, H.G Wells took us into the distant future, where the world was engaged in class-war of tribal feudalism. In the same vein, time travel films about the future most often serve as warnings of what will happen if we don’t set things right. This makes sense – we might as well laugh at the past, as we can’t change it, while we like to visit future dystopias so we know how to avoid them. The Terminator (1984) brings Michael Biehn back in time from a machine-ruled nightmare to try and save a society whose overreliance on technology will have disastrous consequences when the computers start thinking for themselves. Mike Judge’s Idiocracy(2006), though superficially a comedy about a man who wakes up in a future populated by idiots, has at its core the darker assessment that our dumbed-down Kardashian culture is not a far cry from a world where we water our crops with sports drinks and the US president is a pro-wrestler.

This summer’s critically acclaimed Looper (2012) brought us a future where time travel exists but is illegal. In this future world, state security makes it difficult to carry out murder, and so criminal gangs use time travel to send their enemies into the past to be assassinated and disposed of by special assassins there. These assassins are well paid, but they carry out their work knowing that at any point in time their future self may also be sent back for them to terminate. These are people who would literally kill their future selves in exchange for the money to finance their youthful hedonism, who would rather a brief existence of non-stop drinking and partying. Here we are being warned not so much about the future of mankind as a whole, but rather of the life we bestow upon our future selves when thinking only of the instant gratification offered by alcohol, nicotine and narcotics. It follows a long line of time travel films of critical social commentary.

Looper is also just one of many time travel action films that continue a trend begun in the 1980s. Before this, time travel plots had one essential problem: the headache of overcoming the paradoxes that plight any story in which people change the past. Thus, the concept was mostly reserved for low-key philosophical films in the serious Solaris vein of sci-fi, such as Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), or Chris Marker’s La Jetée(1962). It wasn’t until the success of Back to the Future (1985) and The Terminator in the late 1980s when filmmakers realised that if the story was entertaining enough, the multiplex audience was willing to take the plot-holes with a pinch of salt and a shovelful of popcorn.

Nowadays, cinemas have room for time travel both as food for thought and fuel for comedy or car-chases. It is everywhere, providing the backbone for everything from American teen-comedies (Hot Tub Time Machine(2010)) to Korean existentialist romances (2046 (2004)). Why all the fuss? I would argue that its greatest appeal lies in its affirmation that we are able to control our own destiny; all of that business with butterflies amounts to the wonderfully comforting thought that every action we take, however minor, can and will make a difference in the long term. As sci-fi critic and writer Sean Raymond once beautifully summarised:

“If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out.”

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1 Redmond, Sean (editor). Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press, 2004.^↩

Why Kurosawa Kicks Ass

This is an article I originally wrote for the 'Director's Cut' series of UCL's 'Pi' magazine, in which each issue features an appraisal of a particular film director.  I went with seminal Japanese badass Akira Kurosawa, but the article that went to print in Pi was edited from what I originally submitted, and in addition I have since gone back and redrafted it. Here it is in its better form.

Kurosawa was one of the first Japanese filmmakers to gain serious attention from Western critics. It began in, 1950 when ‘Rashomon’ won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and introduced art-house admirers to the thrilling exoticism of the land of the rising sun.  It is a film which encapsulates his signature: a simple story often derived from folk tale or tradition, usually in a period setting, told as much as possible through lighting, composition and sound. He may never have been able to draw serious money from Anglophone audiences, but filmmakers obsessed with the search for a ‘pure’ cinema adored him, with many of whom going on to become directors of far more successful films that were heavily influenced by his style.

Akira Kurosawa, or 黒澤 明 to his friends, was born in 1910 in the Oumari district of Tokyo, his early life besot by tragedies both public and private; the youngest of eight children, he bore witness to the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which took nearly 150,000 lives. His older brother  Heigo committed suicide ten years later.  A decade after that, Hiroshima was destroyed.  It would be no stretch to say that these early horrors brought a dark current of nihilism to Kurosawa’s artistic expression.   All the same, the thematic nastiness of banditry, betrayal, death, madness, corruption, death and death by serious amounts of arrows (note the unforgettable climax to ‘Kumonosu-jō’) was always contrasted with the riveting beauty of the camera work that frames these descents into destruction.  Unsurprisingly, he began his career as an artist, and often chose to frame his shots as if they were paintings.

The importance of Kurosawa’s impact on cinema, aside from the universal truth that samurais are awesome, lies in his emphasis on telling as much of the story as possible through picture and sound alone.  He would use minimal dialogue, preferring to show fear through a sudden jolt of percussion, to show the way characters relate to each other through the way they are placed within the frame.  He also liked using the weather to reflect characters’ emotions - as perhaps expected, several of his films climax in a violent storm.  This style of ‘pure’ reticent film can seem rather tedious at first.  With perseverance, however, there is much to be gained, as his are works that build up gradually to an often incendiary conclusion, like a fallen candle leading to a city-consuming inferno.

The slow-burning style of Kurosawa is a common trait of eastern and particularly Japanese cinema, but what is also interesting is the extent of Western influence on his work.  From Shakespeare, he borrowed from King Lear to make 1985’s Ran, and adapted Macbeth into the aforementioned ‘Kumonosu-jō’ (a.k.a ‘Throne of Blood’, but translated titles are for sissies);  from Dostoevsky, he interpreted ‘The Idiot’ in 1951’s Hakuchi .  His stories also borrow a lot from the Western tradition of John Ford.  This influence from Westerns was reciprocated; it is often repeated that hit 60’s Western ‘The Magnificent Seven’ was a remake of Kurosawa’s 1954 magnum opus ‘Shichinin No Samurai’ (The Seven Samurai).  Similarly, Sergio Leone’s seminal brute western ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ borrowed/stole heavily from Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’, this time unofficially.  Not that it matters much in hindsight, because creative stealing is always better than dull originality, but it is interesting to note the ease with which one can adapt Samurai films into Westerns just by swopping swords for Stetsons and Kabuki flutes for Spanish guitars.  The basic appeal is the same: skilled warriors/gunmen from a bygone era for whom the law is subjective, who can either help fight evil to uphold the common good, or help themselves to what they want and move on.

Kurosawa’s more famous fan base may not have always been kind in stealing his ideas, but it certainly helped him in his later career to have such devoted admirers in high places; his producers ran out of money in 1980 filming his epic ‘Kagemusha’ and the project was doomed until George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola agreed to pick up the cheque.  Steven Spielberg had to similarly step in to rescue 1990’s ‘Dreams’ when studios fled in fear following the lukewarm box-office reaction to Ran (1985), at the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made.

Nevertheless, the high cost of Kurosawa’s latter-era epics is understood when they are seen on the big screen in all their majestic glory.  The cast of ‘Ran’, whose 12 million dollar price tag could have barely paid for twenty minutes of one ‘Lord of the Rings’ film, features 1,400 extras all wearing hand-crafted suits of armour created over a period of two years, with 200 of them on horseback.  Colour-film was also a gift to Kurosawa’s aesthetic, with the added emphasis he placed on the symbolism of differently coloured costumes enhanced by his revolutionary lighting techniques. 

                

However, films like ‘Ran’ are not just a tedious index of different apertures, lens filters, foley artistry and advanced mise-en-scène to be mulled over by cinephile anoraks.  Kurosawa himself always talked about his films in very simple terms of the beauty of nature versus the folly of man, and the thrilling appeal of justice, greed, vengeance and retribution in the tales he tells, together with the spectacular way in which they are captured, is universal.

Key films to watch:

Rashoumon – His first big hit, a simple tale of a murdered Samurai told three times from different perspectives.  At only 95 minutes, a good light starter.

Shichinin No Samurai – His most famous and best middle-period work, in which seven Samurai mercenaries are hired by a town to kick seven shades of shit out of the local marauding bandits.  At three and a half hours, a fattening main course.






Ran – His best film from his later colour-era, in which a warlord decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons so that they may unite their strengths.  Instead, this leads to jealousy, betrayal, and one of the best battle scenes ever filmed this side of Middle Earth.  In true mad-genius tradition, Kurosawa storyboarded the entire thing with full-scale colour paintings.


Also worth a look – Chris Marker’s ‘A.K’ – Not actually one of his, but rather a fascinating and enlightening documentary on his life and the filming of ‘Ran’.

The Chris Brown Affair

I hate Chris Brown.  I hate him more than getting my toe stubbed. More than mosquito bites.  More than three day hangovers, having your wallet stolen or the thought of being trapped in a rat-filled metro tunnel wearing a suit made of cheese.  I don’t usually think it’s worth hating celebrities, because we only know what we know of them through bias tabloid gossip reports, of the kind I hate almost as much as Chris Bloody Brown.  It’s not fair to have a bad personal opinion of people you don’t personally know, but there are exceptions.  Such as when there is photographic evidence and well documented proof that that person savagely beat up their then-girlfriend, in his case Rihanna.  Then, in addition to this, when the public reaction to this offense seems to be a brief tut-tutting, a year or so of shame, and then a return to buying his records and appearing at his concerts in droves, like nothing happened.  Something did happen, one of the base vile acts of human unkindness, and for this reason I argue that we as people should stop listening to his music.  But why?   The classic philosophical question raised by this is: should we shy away from art created by an artist at fault?

The instinctive answer of a philosopher, I am sure, would be no.  This, they would conjure, would be falling prey to the ad-hominem fallacy in which an argument is criticised through pointing out a negative belief or characteristic in the arguer.¹ According to this argument, shunning the music of Chris Brown based purely on his home-staged re-enactment of ‘Nil By Mouth’ is as ridiculous a reasoning as ignoring health advice from a doctor because they’re a Twilight fan.  Unfortunately, I’m now going to have to pull out my Beretta and cap this argument’s ass, because Chris Brown is an exceptional case.  To do so, we must consider an example of a great artist whose work stands apart from the alleged absurdity and assholery he upheld in his personal life: Michael Jackson.  I’m here to explain why Chris Brown is as far from Jackson as a turkey twizzler is from the kitchen of a four-star restaurant.

As anyone with fully functioning ears could tell you, Michael Jackson wrote, sang, and danced his way through a series of pop songs so iconic and universally adored that they could soundtrack a video montage of ‘The Human Race – The Best Bits’.  As everyone and their dog and their dog’s unborn babies knows, Jackson also had issues with child abuse allegations.  So why do I not feel guilty grooving my heals to ‘Dirty Diana’ on a Saturday night?²  Firstly, because Jackson was acquitted of these allegations. Whilst no one save for the children themselves will ever know for sure if Jackson genuinely did all the nasty things he was accused of, and we can all agree that he was indeed a tad strange, it is far more likely that he was a ten-year old trapped in an adult’s body, unaware that sleepovers with your friends go from childhood staple to bursting the mercury on the oddness-thermometer as soon as one of the friends is old enough to drive everyone home.³

Secondly, the allegations came at the tail-end of his career, meaning that ninety nine per cent of his work was made and enjoyed in a completely different era unaffiliated with these scandals.  Going back and saying we should deny the joy of ‘Smooth Criminal’ because of a court case that occurred 18 years later seems excessive – hardly anyone believes that Jackson was up to bad business in the era of ‘Bad’, so the creation and enjoyment of the song is surely irrelevant to his later mental issues.  

Thirdly, and most importantly, because the kind of music Jackson was writing did not promote and encourage the sort of personality he was accused of – all his songs that weren’t about dancing, being in love or the alphabet were humanitarian pleas to peace and love.  He is lyrically all-age appropriate.

This distinction is crucial to the argument that an artist’s personal views and actions should be judged separately to their work; if the body of work they make is itself promoting these views and encouraging or defending these actions, this is when the two become inseparable.  We are able to enjoy the paintings of Salvador Dalí despite his apparent support for fascism⁴ because you’d have to take serious critical liberties to say that the melting clocks themselves represent support for Franco, or that a lobster on a telephone was his way of asking the army to please kill more heretics.  Dalí was first and foremost a surrealist, and is remembered as such.  His personal politics are not connected to his paintings.

In the aftermath of Chris Brown’s savage attack on Rihanna, however, he has crafted through his songs a sort of gangsta-lite misogynist persona that rather than apologising for his actions, stands by his distaste for women with typical lyrics of subjugation and self-aggrandisement.  I.e ‘Look at my bling and my bitches and ho’s.’  It didn’t take me long to find an example, from the first song on his latest turd of an album:

‘And no one asked you if you got a man / And do I care? I don't / That's when we started sexing’⁵

Later on in the same song:

‘2 girls I'm watching, no is not an option / lmma be the captain of the ship / They gonna have my motor rocking / Singing to them like Lionel Richie, all night long / Getting these bitches, and play in my song / And switching positions, I got the money so I'm gonna make wishes / I'll be that sugar daddy’

What Chris Brown did happened prior to his serious chart success, and thus each successive purchase of his albums suggests a tolerance and forgiveness of the ignorant and hateful frame of mind his lyrics promote. I’m not here to criticise misogynist rap lyrics as a whole, because that is entirely another argument.  In general, I would say that gangsta speak about bitches and ho’s, within moderation, is tolerable talk to a free-thinking audience because we know not to take it seriously.  If you’re old enough to know that the Death Star isn’t real, you should be mature enough to gauge that rap lyrics of this kind shouldn’t be taken as moral scripture.  But in the case of someone like Chris Colour-of-poo, he is documented as actually practising the kind of mistreatment and subjugation of the fairer sex that he preaches, and this adds a very sinister element. Domestic violence is a serious and inexcusable offense.  This is not like the Straight Outta Compton-rapped philosophies of drug hustling and turf-war, in which people from deprived areas are recounting through song the desperate measures taken to put food on the table and stay alive in a murder capital.⁶  N.W.A gave us genuine cultural insight into how some people live. Chris Brown-pants gave us ‘sexing’ as a verb.

Thus we come to my final argument as to why we should not forgive this clown’s behaviour, and stop funding his fame: he is no musical genius. He is an offensively average peddler of dull dance floor filler, a ten-a-penny r’n’b artist in an oversaturated market.  He is not pushing the envelope musically like Kanye West, he is not wowing us lyrically like Jay-Z, he’s not even making up for his musical blandness with a few funky costumes or a memorable music video.  His songs are sonic porridge.  If all you want is groovy but mindless dance tunes to soundtrack your intoxication, there are plenty of alternatives.  This is why I cry inside at Chris Brown’s continued success.  If Jonathan Ross’s well-established radio career could be killed because he told a dirty joke, than surely this joke of a pop singer should be consigned to shelf-stacking at a Walmart in hell for the rest of his dumbass days.

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1 Bro-fist to Wikipedia for a concise definition^↩
2 Alone in front of a computer screen, ‘natch.^↩
3 http://web.archive.org/web/20080523002355/http:/www.thesmokinggun.com/michaeljackson/0315051jackson_katz1.html">http:/^↩
4 http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/12/06/salvador-dali-fascist//^↩
5 Sexing? Sexing. From the verb ‘to sex’. Like Joyce before him, Chris Brown re-invents language.^↩
6 This argument might seem excessively liberal and defensive of criminal acts, but at the very least it’s one valid and possible interpretation.^↩