The Secret Scripture is a double narrative that mixes Irish history, family history and psychoanalysis in mellifluous poetic colloquialisms. At the centre of the story is Roseanne Clear, the principal narrator, an inmate in a lunatic asylum who has been there for perhaps fifty years. She is writing her story down: the story of her childhood, her father, her husband, her baby and the violences and beauties of her early life. 

Her personal memoir is interspersed with her psychiatric record, kept by the asylum’s doctor, Dr Grene – a man, who like a lot of other men in the book, is intrigued by Roseanne and wants to get something out of her. He wants her story. He also wants to offload some personal sorrows about his dead wife and failed marriage. His record of Roseanne from his observations and official reports sometimes corroborates, but often contradicts Roseanne’s own memories. And then in his stretches of the narrative, he merges her story with his own.

The lyricism of The Secret Scripture sometimes edges on the twee, but stays beautiful. Couched in the beguiling language are some big ideas about history and the multiplicity of stories. The book is partly an examination of how the same series of events can be told, retold and forgotten in many different ways.

Barry has dealt in historical fiction before, and uses his extensive knowledge of Irish history to show how the little personal stories make up the big narratives that end up in history books. It is something Barry has been praised for in his other works. Fintan O’Toole, a drama critic for the Irish Times, said Barry’s ‘incredible achievement’ had been fusing ‘experience of family history with a very serious examination of Irish history… It’s a very useful corrective to monolithic ideals [of history] that have existed in Ireland’.

Barry brings out a concern in his new novel, by prefacing it with a quotation from Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth:

’there is much uncertainty even in the best authenticated ancient and modern histories; and that love of truth […] necessarily leads to a love of secret memoirs and private anecdotes’.

‘I am trying to rescue my characters from the cold hand of history,’ says Barry in an interview with The Observer, ‘and from the silences that surround certain turbulent periods in our own history’.  It is an interesting exercise in how we think about history and how important it is to tell our own stories. Some characters in this novel are taken and covered by that cold hand – Eenas – the Catholic man who joined the army, is a ghost. And, as confessional as Roseanne’s testimony is, it is full of striking absences: how did her father die? What does happen to her mother?

The second quotation prefacing the book is from Sir Thomas Brown, ‘The greatest imperfection is in our inward sight, that is, to be ghosts unto our own eyes’. It makes the interesting connection between stories in history and stories in mental health: how the lack of the story or an understanding of who you are, can erode a person’s sanity and personality. And how being forgotten or discarded by your society – rendered a ghost – can be so detrimental to mental wellbeing.

However, though these complex ideas are expressed in fluid pleasurable language, I think the plot suffers under the weight of them: it is not a sturdy enough or convincing structure. The plot is too wandering, too miserable and in places, too sentimental. Roseanne’s father is murdered, her husband disowns her, her baby son is taken away immediately after she gives birth to him on the beach in midwinter and it all culminates in her being interned for nymphomania in a lunatic asylum by a Catholic priest for a substantial majority of her adult life.

As a beautiful young woman, Roseanne is surrounded and shaped by men. Not to labour the comparison, but as the country of Ireland, or Eíre, is often represented as a woman, it is not difficult to see parallels between the plight of Roseanne, beautiful and abused, and the plight of the country. Her story is more symbolic than human sometimes. And in pursuing this symbolism, Barry rather loses the credibility of the plot. This is where the melancholy sentimentality creeps in.

Wistfulness is perhaps inherent in the nature of memoirs, but certain things are too idealised, the bad is evil, rather than simply banal. Thus, Roseanne’s life sometimes has the glassy, gilt-edged feel of hagiography rather than a story or even memory of a real living woman. An emotional look at the murky lies and tricks of history and the redeeming power of words, but too sentimental to be a great novel.

Daniel Craig’s first outing as James Bond in Casino Royale, despite its box office success, was criticised by some (1) for its degradation of the Bond character. Casino Royale, they argued, reflected today’s confused, wishy washy and agonised subjectivity: gone was the confident, womanising, swaggering, technologically masterful secret agent. In limped a tortured, self-doubting, twitchy and fragile 007. Similar things have been said about Quantum of Solace. William Leith writing in the Guardian summed it up in an article headlined, ‘I used to admire James Bond – now I pity him’.

The stronger criticisms seem ignorant of the fact the new Bond is far closer to the character in Ian Fleming’s original novels. The new movies are trying to trace his emergence, beginning with Fleming’s earliest work. It’s in Casino Royale, after all, that Bond becomes 007 after achieving the required number of kills. Nonetheless, that this appeals now is telling. Quantum picks up exactly where Casino left off, not merely plot-wise – leaving a distraught, embittered Bond still hunting the killer of his lady friend from the earlier film – but also in terms of the absence of the traditional trappings of Bond movies: no Q, no high-tech gadgets, and Mary Whitehouse levels of sex.

But if Casino reflected the diminished subject in the form of Bond, then what Quantum reflects is contemporary society’s utter confusion about who the ‘bad guys’ are. It reminds me of Gordon Brown’s national ‘register of risks’, the UK’s amorphously flabby national security strategy, which encompasses everything from terrorism to bird flu to child trafficking. In Quantum, the ‘baddie’ is Dominic Greene, a businessman at the head of a shadowy corporate network who manages to somehow encompass everything considered ‘wicked’ today, in the most incoherent fashion imaginable.

We first encounter Greene in Haiti. As he strolls along the harbour, he recalls how his organisation was used to overthrow the Haitian president (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) because he antagonised international firms making T-shirts using sweated labour for trying to raise the minimum wage from 39c to $1 an hour. Greene meets a Bolivian general and hatches a plot to overthrow the Bolivian government and install him in his place, in exchange for a patch of apparently worthless land. His network is buying up pipelines, so the assumption is that he has found oil. The CIA twig what’s happening and get on board, buying the line that America’s distraction in Iraq means they need help to stem the ‘Marxist’ tide in Latin America. It later turns out that Greene wants the land to control Bolivia’s water supply, and later forces the Bolivian general to grant him monopoly control. Worst of all, Greene is posing as – wait for it – an environmentalist campaigner going around buying up rainforest to protect it from development, only to then secretly bring in the loggers.

None of this is in the slightest bit coherent. Perhaps constantly changing our understanding of what Greene does is meant to express the mysterious nature of his ‘Quantum’ network. Actually, it simply looks like a complete rag-bag of contemporary anti-globalisation conspiracy theories stuck together with the art of a two-year-old. Corporate power, sweatshops, oil, US intelligence, coups, counter-revolution, water, environmental degradation, blah, blah, blah. That one person could embody all these things is, naturally, incredible, and Greene is probably the most shallow, unconvincing and unfrightening Bond villain of all time.

This is because there is no underlying coherence to the story, which reflects the broader loss of any sense of what Britain now stands for and against. In the Cold War the enemy was perfectly obvious: the Soviet Union. The line between good and bad was, for better or worse, drawn clearly. Bond could arrogantly scythe his way through various Russian plots and see off nutcases with their own Dr Strangelove-esque ambitions. Whereas now, the enemy is everywhere and nowhere; to pin it down to a single individual is simply impossible.

But perhaps the least convincing line of the film is delivered by M (Judi Dench). As MI6 begins to twig what’s happening and Bond causes an international incident by leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, the foreign minister tries to rein in the intelligence services, telling M there was insufficient information to risk alienating the Americans. In response, M begs to be allowed to gather more intelligence so that the minister can pursue a ‘policy based on the evidence’. The foreign minister replies that oil is too important. This is so crude it’s laughable, an obvious invocation of yet another popular prejudice: Iraq was invaded for oil and the intelligence simply abused. The idea MI6 is somehow whiter than white (unlike the CIA) is ridiculous, as is the suggestion of its director pleading for adherence to New Labour’s obsession with evidence-based policy. British intelligence officials have only recently been accused of involvement in torture and extraordinary rendition. Indeed, Quantum opens (after the obligatory car chase) with M and Bond getting ready to torture one of Greene’s cronies. Presumably we are supposed to have forgotten that by this point in the film, but if anything, it really reveals the perceived moral vacuum on both sides.

Of course, Bond films were never meant to be serious. They are quite silly. They are not documentaries and do not aspire to tell us something about the world, unlike ‘worthy’ projects like Syriana. Unwittingly, though, Quantum of Solace tells us quite a lot about the current state of political and moral disarray in contemporary Britain, giving us not only a diminished Bond but a confused and confusing enemy. If we could only set aside the demands of the international box office that prevent Bond writers being utterly parochial, then the next Bond villain could well be Mr Maddiekiller, a social worker who secretly runs a vast international child-abducting paedophile ring and uses the profits to encourage youth gun-ownership and junk food consumption.

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(1) Neither Shaken nor Stirred, Emily Hill, sp!ked,  24 November 2006

Lee Jones’ review of our book The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education is more thoughtful and nuanced than most (1). His assessment that ‘the evidence cited to prove therapy culture is the dominant pedagogic ethos varies in quantity and quality’ shows the careful attention he has given the book. Because of this, his review challenged us to explain further several of our ideas.

The counter-attack of the therapists

Jones is a standard above most of the recent commentators and reviewers who showed that vested interests were on the defensive before the book was even published. David Hinton, the chair of ‘Dignity At Work Now’, in a letter to the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine written before the book was published,  railed against ‘this appallingly slipshod work’ (26 June 2008). This rant prompted an (unpublished) reply from Bill Gibson, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University, that you used to say you can’t judge a book by looking at its cover, but apparently now you can judge a book without ever having seen the cover! Hinton’s response shows that many are deeply involved in a ‘victim’ culture and see a threat to the income stream the therapeutic industry opens up for a huge industry of consultants, psychologists and university research centres. Lee Jones is right that this sort of tirade does not deserve serious consideration and its self-interest is blatant.

A more measured response in a review by Gail Kinman in the THE raised the same issue as Jones, that of evidence: ‘Unfortunately, the authors provide little in the way of peer-reviewed evidence for the strong assertions made in the book. They rely heavily on “pop psychology” texts and unsupported hypothesis.’ (2)

Of course, supporters of therapeutic education agree with our criticisms and also dismiss much of what goes on as poor ‘pop psychology’. An easy appeasement would be to say ‘yes’, and accept that there is much that goes on that is good. But, apart from specialist work that treats serious psychological problems, all the interventions and activities we chart in the book are part of the dangerous therapy culture in education.

Arguing that we need more ‘peer reviewed’ evidence not only overlooks the vast array of documentary and practical evidence we brought together in the book, but, more importantly, avoids the point that it is perfectly proper to assert, and argue and that this has logical priority in pursuing research. First you make a case and argue its implications and then you carry out empirical research (3). Otherwise you won’t know what to look at, or what the implications might be.

Millions are being poured into therapeutic projects and a few fairly cursory ‘peer reviewed’ evaluations which are overwhelmingly supportive of the aims to start with because they work with a circular set of assumptions about a diminished human being. They assume that improving the self-esteem, resilience, self-confidence of children, young people and some adults are both ends in themselves and a first step towards being able to take part in education or training, let alone being able to benefit from it. For example, the London school of Economics is evaluating happiness classes, but you do not need to undertake an empirical study of something that is logically self-defeating. Self-esteem, confidence and happiness are all by-products of pursuing other things.If they become end points in themselves, whether in lessons or life, then they slip away. It you ask yourself ‘Why can’t I be happy?’, you won’t be. ‘Get a life!’, or ‘learn something meaningful’ is the right advice for those doubting their emotional wellbeing. Getting people to try to be ‘happy’ ensures they will continue not to be!

Evidence by example

Our methodology reflected the fact that we were trying to demonstrate a cultural shift manifesting itself in different ways in different contexts, and not the impact of a particular policy initiative or education programme. In discussions, many people have said to us that they just ‘don’t see’ what we draw attention to. Conversely, others have said that we illuminate things going on in their institutions. That is why we chose a methodology based on giving example after example to shift people’s perception of what was happening in schools, colleges, universities and workplaces. The power of examples is that they enable people to look and see for themselves by sensitising them to similar things so that they may shift their views. As Wittgenstein said, a solution to many problems in the way we try to understand the world was to follow the advice: ‘don’t think, but look!’ (Philosophical Investigations).

It is seeing things in ahistorical and old-fashioned or politically blinkered ways that is the problem. Building confidence and paying some attention to the affective aspects of learning while educating people, as some teachers did in the context of the social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, is not at all the same as building ‘self-esteem’ now in a context of no political struggle and, arguably, no politics at all.

Of course examples do not constitute a well-funded, peer-reviewed empirical survey, but are in no way poorer for their particularity. Their weakness is that they can be both powerful and misleading, but the response is still that we have to look and see whether they are misleading or whether they resonate with people’s experience. Even a major survey only puts together many examples and then challenges us to look and see if what is concludes is true.

A great benefit of this methodology is that it enjoins people to think for themselves. And many people, especially teachers, who did not agree with us at first, now write to us regularly with examples to show that our critique is correct.

Therapy culture

Our definition of therapeutic education is an education that emphasised emotion over the intellect. The question ‘But isn’t there a role for emotional education?’ has been raised by many people at our post-publication talks. Our reply is that therapeutic education is not aesthetic or emotional education, but one that systematically downplays the intellectual.

Jones suggests in his review that often the things we mention are not obviously therapeutic, but more explicit therapy is just one aspect of therapy ‘culture’; the other is the ‘culture’ itself in which seemingly normal activities, such as tutoring (even the Oxbridge Tutorial!), start to emphasise the emotions over the intellect. Initiatives like ‘assessment for learning’, and its techniques of feedback and questioning, started out as ways to improve pedagogy for better cognitive understanding within subject domains: in a therapeutic culture, assessment for learning has been easily hijacked for subject-free processes that focus on emotional aspects of learning.

Therapy ‘culture’ is just that, and although it is ubiquitous, it is stronger in certain arenas than others. It is because of this that the evidence for the therapeutic turn can seem to be patchy in our book. And although the nature of things makes it patchy, we argue that explicitly therapeutic education will deepen therapy culture.

Take the idea of the ‘therapeutic university’ as an example. Jones says that there is less convincing evidence in the book for therapeutic culture in universities. What he ignores is the strength of the theoretical instances we explore. The example of the major and most influential thinkers writing about the university in therapeutic terms (Ron Barnett, Stephen Rowland, John Cowen) shows that, despite the obvious difficulties of the university abandoning scholarly subjects to deal with the human subject in a therapeutic way, it is merely a matter of time unless this powerful theoretical therapeutic tendency is challenged. Since the book was published we have already collected many more examples of therapeutic initiatives in universities that make them seem more like school, from therapy days for staff to ‘emotional support pets’ for students.

Asserting subjects not subjectivity

Our short chronology of therapy culture shows it passing through various stages from the 1960s and accelerating in the 1990s, with the collapse of traditional working class institutions and of the faux alternative to capitalism represented by ‘Communist’ regimes. Therapy culture filled a political vacuum and gave politicians a way of relating to people. The strongest shift in political attitudes was from fear of the worker to fear for the worker. Instead of the active working class, there were now merely bullied victims in the workplace. Jones doesn’t see the force of much of what we briefly say about the workplace, perhaps because, in line with the educational focus of the book, we restrict what we say to training and staff development. Yet, therapy culture is everywhere at work. This chapter has had particular impact on many readers who are not teachers, opening their eyes to what is happening to them at work. That said, this is certainly a topic that we could write more about.

‘Class war’, we said, has been replaced by therapeutic ‘couch war’. But what is distinctive about the rise of therapeutic education, and what makes it very dangerous, is that it is an attack not just on workers but on the active human subject per se. The therapeutic educational project extends and deepens therapy culture: in a generation or so all children could, if it is not halted, grow up with a diminished notion of what it is to be a human being.

A point we began to develop in the book, and have developed further in recent writing and debate (4, 5) is that the undermining of the human subject, which presents people as hopeless, hapless and unable to cope, is part of a two-fold attack on both the human subject and on the curriculum subject. The curriculum made up of subjects is, of course, key to young people’s access to human knowledge. To deny them this is to take away their ability to know things and control their lives. The attack on knowledge removes the possibility of young people becoming fully human.

Jones says that we assert subjectivity instead of dealing with the political and sociological conditions that undermine subjectivity. Our view is that education is now the key to our future. This is not to revert to an archaic form of change through education but to recognise that, at the present moment, it is only by asserting subjects that we can develop subjectivity. How that will develop we cannot predetermine but without a defence of the subject, a defence of subjectivity will be as meaningless as Jones suggests.

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References
1) Lee Jones, Therapy culture and its critics, Culture Wars, 2 October 2008
2) Gail Kinman, ‘Step outside the Rogerian circle’, THE, 28 August 2008
3) For example: Ecclestone, K., De Abreu, G., and Quinn, J. (2008) The impact of interventions for emotional well-being on constructions of the self in educational settings, Research Proposal to the Economic and Social Science Research Council, October 2008
4) See Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) Changing the subject?: the educational implications of emotional well-being, forthcoming special edition of the Oxford Review of Education
5) Ecclestone, K., Clack, B., Hayes, D. and Pupavac, V. (2008) Changing the subject?: interdisciplinary perspectives on emotional well-being and social justice, Economic and Social Science Research Council Seminar Series, 2008-2009

Celebrity photographs are such a regular part of our lives that we almost take them for granted. Unless we’re suckers for celebrity culture, we regard them - at best - as providing transient interest. At worst, we mentally swat them away like flies. If we bother to think about their producers - the photographers - we probably expect they exist in some sort of snapper heaven, getting glamour by proxy. Annie Leibowitz has been in the hot celebrity pits trade for almost 40 years, but this exhibition shows her life has not just been about catching a bit of the illumination from the golden glamour of the red carpet.

Leibowitz’s output has been prodigious. Born in Connecticut in 1949, she started her artistic career studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, but a Japanese holiday where she became interested in taking photographs led to her signing up for night classes in photography. Taken on in 1970 by Jann Wenner, editor of then-hip magazine Rolling Stone, she was given the assignment of photographing John Lennon, starting her career behind the lens in earnest. Two years later, she became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer. She was also official photographer for the 1975 Rolling Stones’ World Tour. In 1981 she had a further career advance when she photographed a nude Lennon and fully-clothed Yoko Ono for Rolling Stone. This photo was used for the commemorative edition of the magazine to mark Lennon’s death: in 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors would proclaim this to be best magazine cover from the past 40 years. Two years after the fatal shooting of Lennon, her first book, Annie Leibowitz: Photographs, appeared. In that same year she achieved another first: she joined Vanity Fair, becoming that magazine’s first contributing photographer.

So the exhibition gives us the celebrity stuff we expect. Or does it? For the unexpected lurks here. We see Cindy Crawford, photographed in New York in 1993, with a snake round her shoulders, her hand over her pubic mound, her expression a conflicting mixture of confidence and wariness. A year later we see Johnny Depp and Kate Moss in New York’s Royalton Hotel. Depp lies on top of Moss with an expression bordering on adoration whilst the girl from Croydon seems to be trying to keep a straight face. In the same year, Leibowitz’s lens captures Brad Pitt, clad in a half-open striped shirt and leopard skin leggings, sprawling with unexpected campness on a dishevelled bed in Las Vegas. From 1991 we see the famous photo of Demi Moore pregnant with Scout Laurue Willis, with the actress placing one hand under her stomach, the other over her nearest breast. But we also see Bruce Willis and Demi Moore pregnant with Rumer Glenn Willis from 1998, with a sharp contrast caused by the sight of Willis’ hairy hands covering Moore’s pregnant stomach. (These are pictures which are arguably groundbreaking by showing an explicit link between sexuality and pregnancy that mainstream photographers have shied away from.)

Performance artist, club host and Lucien Freud muse Leigh Bowery emerges from a 1993 photograph as a prancing - almost jerky - yet sinuous black latex-clad silhouetted figure. Nearby is lighting equipment which emphasises that both the photograph and its subject are the result of technical performances. Four years later we see novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty at home, with bright, alert eyes that show a wariness of intrusion - probably the product of a lifetime’s experience of being in the public eye. Leibowitz gives us formal politics in the form of the ‘Cabinet Room, The White House, Washington DC December 2001’. Here, President George W Bush doesn’t know whether to smile or look resolute, Condoleeza Rice seems quietly tough, scepticism hovers over the face of General Colin Powell (about the war? About what he may perceive as a waste of his time?) but for the rest of Bush’s cabinet members… well, the term ‘used car salesmen’ comes to mind. But Leibowitz also displays the practical outcome of politics: ‘Sarajevo: Fallen bicycle of teenage boy just killed by sniper’ (1994)shows the overturned bike and a wide skid-mark of fresh, thick blood. In 1989, Leibowitz had met the legendary cultural commentator Susan Sontag - famous for her 1964 essay Notes on Camp which, arguably, marked the emergence of homosexuality as a topic for investigation into the cultural mainstream and which would act as both a sourcebook and template for future gay studies - eventually beginning a relationship with her. It was Sontag’s influence that resulted in the photographer visiting Sarajevo during the conflict in the Balkans.

For Leibowitz, Sontag wasn’t simply a behind-the-scenes motivator. She was a subject, too. ‘Susan Sontag at Petra, Jordan’ 1994 captures Leibowitz’s lover caught in a cleft of rock in front a facade of the abandoned, mysterious city. One on level Sontag is a small figure, yet she’s at the centre of the photo: privacy and explicitness combine here. Leibowitz’s family is featured, too. ‘My Parents, Peter’s Pond Beach, Wainscott, Long Island’ 1992 shows her parents in exuberant mode on the beach. It contrasts with the more restrained ‘My Mother and Father in the Cottage’ of 1997. Here, her parents are both in a bedroom: her father looks cautiously back at the camera as he gets out of bed whilst her mother hunkers down into her pillow. Perhaps being on camera doesn’t always have its attractions, whoever may be behind the lens. Leibowitz’s output shows no sign of coming to a halt. Her work has appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. She has been made a Commandeur des Order des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and recognised as a Living Legend by the Library of Congress. In 2007 her career was marred by a blip when she was involved in a television documentary which appeared to show the Queen storming-out of a photographic session with her. The head of Peter Fincham - a BBC controller - rolled for that gaffe, but Leibowitz managed to rise above the controversy with skillful words of praise for the Queen.

But does Leibowitz’s outstanding career help answer the question about how seriously we can take posed photographs? No: the argument about photographic authenticity will go on and on. Meanwhile her work continues to show that the posed - the false, if you like - can help to reveal the truth, and that its ‘creators can capture the uncomfortable and the intimate, too. We can’t make snap judgement on snappers… well, certainly not this one.

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Ends 1 February 2009

We’re all familiar with Andy Warhol. His Campbell’s soup can paintings are the hay wains of Pop Art. But does he still deserve our attention? Isn’t it time to wash him out and toss him into the pedal bin of art history? This exhibition, which coinides with the 80th anniversary of the artist’s birth, shows that his work should continue, rightly, to fascinate us.

The exhibition’s subtitle, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is a clever one. This was the title of Truman Capote’s debut novel, published in 1948, and it captured the imagination of the young, gifted commercial artist Andy Warhola – born in Pittsburgh in 1928 to immigrant parents form a village in what is not the Slovak Republic - who had grown up in the Depression-hit town. Suffering from involuntary spasms as a child, he learned to draw whilst recuperating. At the same time, he was fascinated by Hollywood: this was its golden age, and was an avid collector of movie-star pictures. After majoring in pictorial design at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology, he moved to New York City in 1949. Starting as a window-dresser, Warhol – he soon dropped the final ‘a’ of his name – quickly became a prolific book illustrator and commerical artist for magazines like Glamour, Seventeen, and Vogue.

In 1952 he held his first exhibition, giving it the self-explanatory title, Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. Capote had shot to prominence with his first novel, and Warhol doubtless sensed a kindred spirit, not only as regards sexuality, which the book’s famous dust-jacket photo of Capote lying in a sultry pose on a counch with one hand on his crotch did nothing to hide – but also in the field of social climbing, at which the tyro novelist was proving himself to be exceptionally adept. Five years later, Warhol’s work was so successful that he established Andy Warhol Enterprises Inc.

But Warhol was not a mere social climber: his work was revelatory about the worlds of celebrity and those living on the sexual margins. It was also prodigious: we are overwhelmed with it here, for he not only painted but was also a photographer, film maker and television producer too. Warhol was a lifelong collector, both in his home and in his famous time capsules; boxes in which he would periodically seal up anything he felt to be of interest from his daily life and business. This exhibition is a treasure chest – Andy’s Chest, as it were – of his life’s work to be examined. What gets us thinking here?

We’re instantly confronted by the Marilyns, the paintings where the star’s smile seems to disolve into a contemptuous sneer at everything life has thrown at her, and Campbell’s labels. These pictures are keys to Warhol’s success. ‘Pop Art’ may have been loaded with varying degrees of pretentious theory by academics, but at heart, it’s straightforward representational art that gives people something they undrestand: and that is what they want to see. But Warhol wasn’t simply an advertising artist who struck lucky because of Pop Art – his gold leaf on paper drawing ‘Unknown Male’ (1957) is a study in sensitivity showing a young man with a military haricut under which lurk sensitive eyes and an upwardly expectant glance.

After the paintings, Warhol’s films are up for examination. He was unable to interest Hollywood in his film projects, so established his own production system and made them himself. If you like a mixed bag of films that range from the tedium of ‘Empire’ (1964) showing the Emprire State Building over several hours, or the claustrophobic rows of ‘Chelsea Girls’ (1966) then these are for you. It’s difficult not to feel Warhol exploited then currently fashionable European realism in films in order to either grab critical attentions (as with the former) or so imply a certain brittle lifestyle (as with the latter). The presence of German singer Nico in ‘Chelsea Girls’ is a reminder of Warhol’s influence in rock music and his role in the career of the Velvet Underground, an outfit which would have seminal influence on glam rock and punk a decade later. The exhibition is enlivened by a thumping soundtrack of relevant pop goodies such as the Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus in Furs’ and Blondie’s ‘Union City Blues’. (In his Diaries - a copy of this monumental tome is in the exhibition – Warhol said of Blondie’s singer Debbie Harry, that ‘Debbie actually was the first Madonna’). Glam rockers, punks, new romantics and today’s more extreme street fashion club kids can all be said to be Warhol’s children.

Warhol’s films received varying degrees of critical acclaim and provided employemnet for the hangers on who frequented his studio, known as the Factory. The name was not a patronising nod to proletarian sweat – hard work was carried on there, and it also acted as a sort of job centre for hustlers, transvestites, and others who – in theose pre-Stonewall, pre career-queer days – might have percieved some difficulty in gaining legtimate employment. One of those hangers on was Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), a radical feminist group and author of the SCUM Manifesto, a separatist attack on patriarchy. In 1968, feeling exploited by Warhol, she shot him. We see an anger-filled letter from her, addressed to Warhol, where she refers to him as ‘Toad’. We also see fellow photographer Richard Avedon’s photograph ‘Andy Warhol Artists’ (1969), a close up of Warhol’s post-shooting, scar-slashed chest. The scars this event would leave on Warhol were emotional as well as physical including – crucially, as it would turn out – a lifelong fear of hospitals.

Among Warhol’s photographs, it’s the polaroids that are the most eye catching. In 1977 we see a playful Mick Jagger biting the ear (or is he tonguing it?) of fellow stone Charlie Watts, whose face is either contorting in pain or, maybe, writhing in social discomfort. In 1976 a reflective Jimmy Carter contrasts with an imperious Joan Collins of nine years later. Polaroids of Warhol himself in drag give him a remarkable resemblance to Nancy Reagan, which is ironic given he was a lifelong Democrat.

Television was another medium with which Warhol busies himself. His Andy Warhol’s TV ran from 1980 for two years and featured celebrities being interviewed. We see extracts from shows including people such as actress Brooke Shields, socialite CZ Guest, and fashion designer Halston. They look rather stilted, but they’re a reminder of the days when celebretory status depended on either possessing a certain inherited social standing or having achieved it via hard work in the creative/media world. Warhol may have prophesied that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, but the hard-working boy from Pittsburgh certainly wasn’t the high priest or the airhead ‘sleb’ (slob?) of celebrity culture today. Unlike some modern celebrities, or rather, people who find themselves in the public eye, he didn’t see victim status from his sufferings, although his hard upbringing and his shooting gave him plenty of scope for his. His unexpected death in 1987 following a gall bladder operation – which, arguably, might have been avoided had he sought medical attention earlier – spared him witnessing the current media exaltation of non-entities.

The motivation for Warhol’s work continues to be a mystery. Was he a success-hungry kid who wanted to show the dark underbelly of American life by warping its glamour? Or was he simply in love with American life in all its gaudiness and wanted to celebrate it? Then again, maybe his Catholic upbringing – he remainted a faithful churchgoer until his death – provides a clue to what made him tick. Rather than seeing art as a substitute for religion, he may have seen it as a transient toy and, like a sort of holy fool – a standard character from the Eastern Europe of his parents – was using his lack of seriousness to mock artistic pretentiousness. His very manner – at least in public – suggested a sort of dissonance with the world around him, as if his eyes were fixed on eternity. Part of him liked anonymity, and he probably enjoyed the confusion his work inspired. Warhol was famous for saying little about himself to the media: the exhibition features sound interviews with him, including Gretchen Berg’s 1966 one with Warhol yielding up short non-committal, montone explanations about his work, and a 1974 one where controversial Nazi-era film director Leni Riefenstahl gently but firmly lectures him. The exhibition doesn’t solve the puzzle of Warhol, but it does give us an array of clear and often colourful raw materials from which we can try and draw our own conclusions. For which we can only say, oh, gee, thanks Andy.

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Ends 18 January 2008

Francis Bacon is famous for being the painterly portrayer of screaming popes and screaming queens. Because of this, it’s easy to dismiss him as a gay schlock merchant and his work as a sort of story-board from a Hammer Horror film scripted by Oscar Wilde. An exhibition to mark the forthcoming centenary of his birth – and it’s the first UK retrospective since 1985 – gives us the chance to re-evaluate this view.

Born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents, Bacon fled his home as a teenager because of his homosexuality – he was discovered by his father wearing his mother’s clothes – and, before the war, lived in London, Berlin and Paris. Originally an interior designer, he began to paint around 1928, but was not professionally successful – he survived with the aid of a small allowance from his mother, and by doing odd jobs and working as a gentleman’s gentleman. It was only in 1945 that he emerged as a major force with his ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’. It’s with work from that period in his life that the exhibition commences.

And it plunges us straight into Bacon’s world of suffering. ‘Figure in a Landscape’ (1945) gives us prone figure who seems to have collapsed with exhaustion – from life – in a landscape of scrappy flowers and jagged vegetation. ‘Figure Study 1’ (1945-46) shows us a sleeping vagrant in a hat and herringbone coat. ‘Study for Crouching Nude’ (1952) portrays a crouching, gymnast-like figure who is given emphasis with a characteristic Bacon technique of seeming to be boxed-in by cage-like thin bars, a scene which recalls Bacon’s stated view of the city as a sexual gymnasium. ‘Study for a portrait’ (1953) shows a man in a darkened room, whose face is seized by a harsh, cavernous laugh shining with sadistic pleasure at some unseem torment. A year later there is ‘Man in Blue V’, which also shows a man in a darkened room, except this time he is in a sort of illuminated box – all the better to display him – as if he were the defendant in a criminal trial. Indeed, he has the wary weariness of a war criminal on trial for his life.

Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962

Crucifixion is a topic that gave bacon continual inspiration. ‘Three Studies for a Crucifixion’ (1962) is a triptych. In the left section are two seemingly-drab characters. But in the centre panel is a wounded figure lying on its back, its legs rolled up in fear, vainly seeking to protect itself. In the right section is an upside-down body, its ribs exposed, its mouth emitting a shriek caused by unimaginable physical – and mental – torments that seem beyond any conceivable pain. Suffering of a different sort comes in his ‘Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI’ (1957). With its bright colours this seems at first to be a knock-off of Van Gogh, a sort of jokey artistic gesture, until we see that everything – including the painter, and the landscape in which he finds himself – is lopsised, emphasising Van Gogh’s mental state. And, possibly, the anxieties of Bacon himself.

And Bacon’s love life was a major source of life-long anxiety. His ‘Three Figures in a Room’ (1964) shows a triptych of Bacon’s then lover, George Dyer, on the lavatory, lying on a couch and sprawling, seemingly tough yet insecure, as if out of his depth somehow. Four years later, ‘Two Studies for Portrait of George Dyer’ gives a double picture: Dyer the sitter, shown as a swirling figure with a tough pout, looks at a splattery representation of himself on canvas. Dyer would later commit suicide. Interestingly, the face of the subject of Bacon’s ‘Portrait of John Edwards’ (1988), his next lover, shows a tough, pugnacious look, as if he were determined not to go the way of Dyer.

Three Figures in a Room, 1964

Despair was an ever-present feature of life among Bacon and his friends, a milieu captured brilliantly in Keith Waterhouse’s play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. Bacon’s picture of Henrietta Moraes (1966) shows his muse – a well-known figure in the Chelsea and Soho artistic scenes of that era – flopped on a bed, simultaneously almost snarly yet remote, as if she’s cut herself off from the invasive artistic work of the depiction of her nude body. His ‘Self-Portrait with a Watch’ (1973) shows the despondent artist in a room with a gold watch prominent on his left wrist, seemingly resigned to the passing of the years. There’s darkness on the left of the picture, in front of him, awaiting him, while behind him the door of the room has no handle, like the inside of a prison cell door. The artist has extinction to look forward to, and cannot escape to the past. His ‘Blood on Pavement’ (c.1988) shows varying shades of red and crimson against grey pavement, as if to say this is all that’s left of his life. Bacon died four years later.

Bacon had a nihilistic view of life, and whether that can be attributed soley to the after effects of the Second World War is open to discussion: some have said ‘Three Studies’ got the reception it did because it summed up the post-Holocaust despair of the time. One suspects his loveless childhood sowed the seeds of his attitude to human existence, and a generally unsuccessful love life helped it blossom. He fed it, too, on a variety of pictures and photographs he collected over the years, and which came to light after the revelation of his notoriously messy Kensington studio and its contents following his death. The Archives section of the exhibition shows a trove of photos, illustrations from art books, pictures of animals and sportsmen in motion, and pictures from newspapers and magazines showing the dead and wounded from terrorist attacks.

It’s easy to dismiss Bacon’s work as the product of a miserabilist outlook that goes against any ideas of human improvement or triumph over adversity. But is this strictly correct? Can we praise his work without accepting the terminal emptiness it celebrates? In the Soho bars and drinking clubs he frequented, the wealthy Bacon would often, with a cheerful rasp, order ‘Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends’. He is continually a real friend to us because he reminds us of the real pain of the human condition, which we underestimate at our peril. There must be decay before rebirth. Bacon gives us the raw meat of the human condition to continually, and nourishingly, chew over afresh.

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Till 4 January 2009

In relocating Othello to the blood red dinge of a run down Northern pub, Frantic Assembly have transformed it from personal to social tragedy. Here, culpability for the final body-strewn pool table lies not with the individual whims of Iago, but rather the culture of respect in which he is immersed. All is aggression and ‘reputation, reputation, reputation’ in an intelligent and thrilling indictment of macho malignity.

In whittling the play down to a brisk two hours, directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett can only nod towards the gradual process of its deception, but there is plenty of interpretation to be found in visual details. In The Cypress pub, under the luminescent flicker of a slot machine, men transform into beasts as drink ‘steals away their brains’. They take pool cues and bottles as swords and daggers, swaggering and aggravating in a battlefield of leisure.

In fact, it is surprising how well the location befits the text. Race remains a constant presence without being bludgeoned into place, and the local gang preserves the hierarchy and responsive violence of Shakespeare’s military setting. If anything there is added brutality, without pillows and noble swordsmanship to soften the blows.

What the production loses is a sense of tragic downfall, as Jimmy Akingbola’s Othello is only great when viewed from within the culture under attack. He is a picture of hostile masculinity elevated from a pack of dopey shellsuited henchmen, too easily coaxed into irrational suspicion. That Charles Aitken’s Iago is a teenager out of his depth and, increasingly, out of control, points the finger of blame back on Othello himself and the respect he demands. He seems to play at the only adulthood he sees reflected around him.

Amidst the broad, bold adaptation are some deftly subtle touches. Brown ale is spat across the stage, while bottles of WKD are readily ingested. In a nod to his ‘motiveless malignity’, Iago wears a Nike T-shirt emblazoned with the logo: ‘Just Do It’. Aurally, however, Frantic Assembly miss the target – much of the dialogue flattens to a grating monotone, delivered with the push of aggressive syllables and generic Northern dialects – and just occasionally the dance becomes overly smooth and polished, softening its vicious gall. Overall, however, this is bare knuckle Shakespeare that you can’t afford to take your eyes off for a second.

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Till 22 November 2008

With the world teetering towards debt-ridden recession, Robert Massey’s Rank serves a light-hearted reprimand for excessive financial risk. Standing in for big time bankers is a ragbag collection of smalltown gamblers and gangsters tangled together in a tightly wound knot of arrears and affairs. While dryly amusing, Massey’s double crossing plot struggles in the unwinding, abandoning originality in favour of limp familiarity.

On top of overdue mortgage and credit card instalments, cabbie Carl Conway has racked up several grand’s worth of gambling debts with local Irish Mafioso, Jack Farrell. Served with a stern warning from Farrell’s dopey son Fred, Conway enlists the help of colleagues – his father-in-law George Kelly and scruffy lothario ‘Two in the Bush’ – in repaying the debt. With a combination of blind luck and bluff, they aim to turn Conway’s hapless situation around.

There are some exceptional performances within. As Carl, Alan King is a wonderfully overgrown child, as down in the mouth as he is on his luck. His first scene with Bryan Murray, who plays Jack with rigid menace, fizzes with comic chemistry. John Lynn is hilarious as ‘Two in the Bush’, gently lilting his way through rambling monologues and precarious situations with Fred Farrell, with whose wife he has recently slept.

Though Massey’s script is full of deliciously bleak witticisms, waxing lyrical on phone sex lines and Aldi, it is ultimately contained by its own linearity. His delicate build of tension in the first half is entirely undermined by the predictability of the outcome. The problem is that theatre played this straight cannot match the grand twists and connections possible in a multi-layered, quick-cut film. Despite snappy direction and sharpshooting humour, Fishamble’s production ultimately succumbs to ambitions too lofty. Rank is more writers’ block than Lock, Stock.

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Till 22 November 2008

Excessive success?!

In the week after the best Battle of Ideas festival so far, CW is (modestly) celebrating! This week, Dr Andrew Calcutt takes a look at Satan’s Rage, and argues that his concept of countercultural negativity in ‘supercapitalism’ fails to capture anything significant about developments in American society, and leans too heavily on Bataille’s notion of ‘excess’. Aidan Campbell muses on the dark side of sucess in a review of Cosmo Landesmans’s Starstruck. Meanwhile, Editor Dolan Cummings is faced with the sobering reality of a puppy in the White House with the election of Obama, and advises that real change must mean more from the American people.

In theatre, though, the dream lives on in Unicorn Theatre’s Red Fortress. And take a look at CW new essay category, where we will be publishing exploratory essays on culture, society and politics over the coming months. This week, a survey of Bollywood’s portrayal of the ‘other’ and partition in Pakistan, in a response to a 2005 piece on Culture Wars, conclude with asking others to take up the torch.

7 November, 2008

Will this review of a book by Sunday Times film critic Cosmo Landesman make me famous? That’s one question that runs through this highly entertaining work: what must the star struck do to make the A-list? Is fame lame; is aloof discretion the better part of glamour? Landesman can’t decide what is the more compelling: being renowned or being a recluse. On an individual level this is an issue of personal choice, though more curious is the book’s idea that celebrity is a flimsy, worthless achievement. He also argues that the longing for fame has secured a stranglehold over contemporary society. It strikes me this frothy fame-game has put down some extremely resilient roots. Can it be that superficial celebrity culture conceals a more serious purpose?

In the mid sixties, a bohemian American family seeks their cultural fortune on the streets of London which, as everyone knows, are paved with gold. What a mistake! Fortunately the Landesman family myth is that London is kinder to failure than New York. Another mistake! The family falls apart and gets back together several times. En route, they encounter many celebrities. The end? 

The book is full of hilarious reminiscences, written with Woody Allenesque self-deprecating humour. But comedy cannot realise its full potential without some misery to whet itself against. The tragedy comes as Cosmo is forced to wash his family’s linen in public as he struggles manfully to cap his flamboyant parents’ yearning for fame. Though, a good third of Starstruck is devoted to Landesman’s cultural theories, which are much more interesting.

I first heard of Landesman’s book – ‘Project X’ he called it - from the affable dude himself over lunch when we were both researching at the British Library at St Pancras a few years ago. Starstruck is a brave stab at constructing an embryonic theory of stardom and celebrity with many welcome insights, but sadly few cojones.

In Cosmo’s cosmos, modern life doesn’t bustle: it is staid, boring and amounts to being buried alive. On the other hand, the squalid cash interpretation that many put on ‘being a success’ is diseased too. Britain is more civilised than America because both these outlooks are in decline here. Their empire may have fallen, but the British made time for manners, they were congenial and civilised. Landesman is star struck by the pop culture that blossomed in London during the swinging sixties, since it provided a route for talented ordinary people to escape monotonous routine. But the election of Thatcher upset the applecart. Determined to rejuvenate ‘go-getting’ enterprise, she destroyed communities and unleashed a selfish individualism. Her lasting legacy isn’t the market-maniacal yuppie, but a celebrity culture that means hoards of people demanding our attention. Farewell to British reserve.

Why did this incredible upheaval happen so abruptly? If the British were so civilised and disdainful of ‘spin’, why did they prostrate themselves so readily before the sordid idol of fame? There’s another reason that explains why inept celebrity attained such a solid footing in sophisticated society.

The decline of Western dynamism during the last century signalled its collapse into a lengthy depravity punctuated by brief interludes of expansion. It was definitely not the rebirth of civilisation. Even the long boom of the fifties was accompanied by the overwhelming fear of another sort of boom: nuclear holocaust. Pop culture and London’s swinging sixties played a tiny role in the development of that decadence, a ‘plebs make good’ sideshow sidelined by the main event: the West’s discovery after the Nazi experience that it profoundly loathed its own imperialist heart. From then on it could only consistently organise around what it stood against – communism – instead of what it stood for. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s sent the West into a huge flap. Why should anybody follow its lead anymore? With its traditions exposed as disreputable, a disorientated establishment looked into the abyss and lost its nerve. It sought anything that could reconnect it to its rapidly vanishing constituencies, and seized on the one phenomenon that still enjoyed mass popularity: the surreal pop culture that until then it had thoroughly despised.

Zany pop was the only show in town, but it wasn’t the establishment’s show. Previously pop had been considered too impertinent to cater to upper crust taste. What to do? Well-bred bigwigs took a deep breath and heaved their refined scruples overboard to sponsor anyone wanting to out-relativise the insolent relativisers of pop. The youth of the new celebrities helped negate the aging rock stars but this vigour alone was insufficient to trump pop’s pre-eminence. Top-ranking palefaces started celebrating all cultures in the name of ethnic diversity. Talent and proficiency were jettisoned in the creation of a multicultural society. Everyone who wannabe could be an artist. This vacuous democratisation championed by the elite opened the floodgates of culture and put paid to pop’s supremacy. But such relativism can be dangerous if taken too far: nobody wants racism or paedophilia running rife. But how can a culture with an ‘anything goes’ mentality be ruled? – In part, the rise of the green movement has served to impose boundaries on the chaotic celebrity cult.

Environmentalism doesn’t get much recognition in Starstruck. Landesman mentions his parents immersed themselves in the macrobiotic food fad of the early seventies, but he treats the phase as a temporary lull in their relentless attention-seeking activities in the arts. Green ideology was fairly irrelevant to 1960s’ pop culture, but it has now come into its own by trying to divert celebrity frenzy into more dependable channels.

Sustainability is chic because moribund Western capitalism thinks that if it finds it hard to produce efficiently, nobody else should. The suggestion is that the planet faces ruin if anyone tries. Ecological awareness has made contemporary society more receptive to such tales of eco-woe. The eco-warriors became eco-worriers. The tsunamis of panic that have swept the globe in various forms since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 confirm we live in a decadent era brimful with dread. Rather than usher in a glorious age of culture, our openness towards the mysteries of art renders us susceptible to the mystifications of terror. This is far from the prodigious renaissance Landesman feels is being slighted by the shallow hankering after fame.
Landesman makes a clear separation between the glamorous world of celebrity and the shabby but wholesome life of ordinary folk. Some people may experience the thrills of celebrity lifestyle vicariously, but ultimately, humdrum proles and prominent personalities are clinging closer together thanks to the impact of eco-hysteria.

Panic about nature and concern for an unknown future is welding careless celebrity to careful commoner. The role that celebrity notables play has fundamentally altered from that formerly enjoyed by stars. Many believe the tantalising promise of success offered by pop culture is spurious and tawdry. But a rock star’s dream of consumer paradise is a million times more preferable to the nightmarish vision of disease, disaster and death that celebrities suggest is remorselessly headed our way.

The Green lobby is nudging eco-deferent celebrities into serving as nature’s ambassadors to the masses. Celebrity triviality and sustainable sobriety are gradually being fused, leaving the establishment to hope the new crew campaigns to reinstate its bankrupt authority for the sake of the planet. Who are these eco-celebs? Landesman himself seems a good candidate, and towards the end of the book he admits wanting to be famous. He has also penned an article acclaiming tree-hugging and plans to plant a forest in Hertfordshire (1). On the other hand, Cosmo believes his Landesmanic yearning for fame is necessarily diluted by his desire to spend more time with the Landesman clan.

Perhaps Landesman senses the edifice of celebrity is immature; its characterisation unconsolidated. Like those decaying stars that burgeon into red giants, its luminaries will only prove themselves once the system plunges into prolonged crisis.  Meanwhile, can we look forward to a Starstruck 2 or a Landesmania: the Next Generation? I know I will be.

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(1)  Cosmo Landesman, ‘Come Hug a Tree with Me’, The Sunday Times, London, 3 August 2008, p7

Film is not just an entertainment medium. It has been used and continues to be used to view history and can create and reinforce perceptions about the ‘Other.’ In Hindi cinema, the largest film industry in the world, depictions of the partition of India have been used to not only distort but propagandise how Pakistan and Muslims are viewed. A sanitised view of oneself and a muddied view of others is dangerous and irresponsible if left unchecked.

‘Cinema is the great interpreter of the past and constantly programs the memory of its audience,’ wrote Gaston Roberge (131). The twentieth century saw the greatest exodus known to mankind. Partition resulted in a displacement of 12 million refugees, over a million killed and tens of thousands of women kidnapped. Independence and its resulting traumatic partition was a subject mainly ignored by film makers at the time. After the second war between India and Pakistan in 1971, however, the political winds changed, and so did cinema. Indian cinema (commonly known as Bollywood) has shifted from a position of ignoring this phenomenon as a taboo, to being more antagonistic towards Pakistan and its Muslim population.

Gurinder Chadha, an English filmmaker of Indian descent, has written about the earlier use of propaganda in film, to challenge British rule: ‘One of the earliest weapons they [Hindi film makers] had was the non-English language. They used common metaphors, religious stories and codified messages. Indians had a lot to play with to subvert rulers at the time.’ Although the tables have been turned and India is free, it has continued to use the lessons it learnt in using film to communicate and influence using subtext.

I was motivated to write this essay while I was researching the partition of India and Pakistan. I live in the US, but have parents who went through the trauma of partition. I found the stories in books (fiction and non-fiction) as well as in film to be at odds with their experiences. As there are not many more than a handful of feature films on this subject, I have watched these films repeatedly and wanted to analyse the narrative and the subtext under the entertainment.

A more detailed view of how Pakistan is perceived in Hindi cinema and the position that it holds as both a leader and follower of public opinion, was given by Arti Shukla on Culture Wars in 2005.

..in none of the films, perhaps except Mission Kashmir, is there any reference to follies that might have been committed by the Indian army or state. (In this film the police kill some innocents, but justify it as a mistake, because it was impossible to distinguish between the innocents and the terrorists.) The Indians are good, humane, patriotic, peace loving etc, although there are a few rotten apples (the traitors), whom the film protagonists always, of course, uproot. Thus, almost always the Indians have an embellished image compared to that of the Pakistanis.

I would like to carry on where Arti Shukla left. The films discussed below all play a key role in reinterpreting history. Train to Pakistan (1998), Gadar (2001), and Pinjar(2003) portray in many ways the political pulse and tensions between India and Pakistan at the times they were made. Although Hindi films have been known to be merely melodramatic, the portrayal of Indian Sikhs and Hindus as protagonists and Pakistani Muslims as antagonists is a theme that is reinforced throughout most but not all of these films. In the last few years political relations between the countries have improved and there is an effort to promote peace, love and commonality with some film makers. This is reflected in one of the top grossing films Veer Zara (2004).

While watching these films what has piqued my curiosity are the following questions.

• Why in these films is it always a Muslim girl falls in love with a Sikh or Hindu man? Why not the other way, which in the real world is a little more common, a Hindu or Sikh girl falling in love with a Muslim man. Conversions to Islam are a lot more common than people leaving Islam.

• Although some of the earlier films are a little ambivalent, why is the protagonist always a Hindu or Sikh in Hindi film? At best Muslim characters are weak or at worst, wicked. Why are Indians the benevolent, peace-loving, tolerant type and the Pakistanis the war-mongers who are the hard-line villains, devoid of human compassion?

• Where are the Muslims? Why aren’t they doing all they can to balance or correct these vile images of themselves?

Below are specific themes and examples that are found in the films.

History, and ‘who started it?’

Cause and effect are very important in establishing how we view a historical narrative. This genre of films always shows Muslims are the cause of trouble; the effect being that Hindus and Sikhs have to defend themselves.

In Train to Pakistan, once the Sikhs hear news about the ‘ghost trains’ from Pakistan (whose passengers have been attacked while fleeing to India after partition) they argue about how to respond. ‘Our daughters and sisters are being raped. If they kill one of ours we will kill two of theirs. If they kidnap one, we will kidnap two,’ says one. One of the more level-headed says, ‘What is bravery in killing the innocent?’ To this the crowd replies, ‘Who is innocent? This is war. Children of Hindus and Sikhs who were killed in front of their mothers?’

Pinjar starts with a serene view of the Golden Temple and a peaceful Sikh procession. This is all interrupted when rampaging mobs of Muslims attack the Sikhs and slaughter them. As it is the Muslims who incite the violence, then the Sikhs defend and take revenge, so to the audience it’s a natural consequence and comforting to see the ‘bad’ Muslims getting speared and killed.

Gadar starts with scenes of mayhem before partition. This segues into a scene where a Sikh family is shown terrified, and the parents give their daughters poison, telling them it is better to take the poison than have their dignity taken by Muslims. Next we see the well-to-do Muslim Ashraf Ali about to depart India, shouting orders to his servants and demanding guarantees of safety from his Hindu peers. As his train leaves the station, the bloodshed starts. The train just arrived from Pakistan is full of massacred bodies of Hindus and Sikhs. It has a message on it which reads ‘Indians, learn from us how to slay.’ This not only incites the Hindus and Sikhs to taking vengeance, but justifies their actions.

Forbidden love: Muslim girl and Hindu/Sikh man

Although the reality of partition was very violent, most films still find room for some love interest. ‘Forbidden love’ has of course been a major feature of motion pictures since they began. What is unique about Hindi film is that the story always involves a Muslim girl falling in love with a Hindu or Sikh man, but never the other way around.

In Train to Pakistan the Sikh Juggut Singh, a local dacoit or hoodlum, is shown sneaking into his Muslim lover’s house and trying to get intimate with her. Her father, the village imam, hears the commotion. He is blind, and shown to be so clueless and gullible that his daughter is easily able to distract him. Later Juggut and his love are shown frolicking in the fields, and at some point she becomes pregnant, but this only subtly implied. (In conservative villages this phenomenon of a Muslim girl and Sikh boy would be hard to imagine.)

In Gadar and Veer Zara, once again under different circumstances a Muslim girl falls in love with a Sikh and Hindu protagonist. The implication is that Muslim men are not good enough for their women, and that the best qualities a man can have come from Hindus and Sikhs. It also says it’s OK for a Muslim girl to break her family and religious bonds even though this is forbidden in Islam. By making love the key theme, these films take a tragedy and turn it into romance. The underlying message being the oft repeated cliché that ‘love conquers all’.

Portrayals of Muslim men: weak and cowardly

India is a population dominated by a Hindu population with a minority 12-15% Muslim population. It is natural to show Hindus in stronger roles. However it is the total absence of strong moral Muslim characters that is surprising.

In Train to Pakistan an outsider arrives in town with no place to stay. He is mainly referred to by his first name, Iqbal, which suggests he is a Muslim, though his surname is the Sikh Singh. When he asks for a place he is told to go and stay at the local Gurdwara (Sikh temple) which he readily does. As the story develops Iqbal is sent to prison. There the police ask him if he is a Muslim. He tries to deny it, but they ask him to pull his pants down as they want to see if he is circumcised. When they see that he is, he still does not have the courage to say he is a Muslim, and instead blames circumcision on an infection he had.

Benevolent, chivalrous Hindu men

In Gadar, Sakina (a Muslim woman) is separated from her family and a hoard of Sikhs start chasing her. The protagonist Tara Singh (a Sikh) sees this rampage and tries to prevent it. Even though he has lost family he stops the hoard with a noble speech. And in Veer Zara, as the story unfolds we learn why Veer (the jailed Skih) has taken the ‘high road’ and not disclosed evidence which could exonerate him. Veer cares more about the dignity of Zaara (a Muslim woman from Pakistan whom he loves). He won’t say or do anything which could hurt her, even if it means staying in jail forever.

Even in Train to Pakistan, Hukum Chand is a just but conflicted Hindu village headman. Muslim courtesans come to his party, and a young teenage girl stays to keep him company when the others leave. Both the girl and her family are shown as very naive. The mother is shown as someone who is willing to sell her daughter without any consideration to her and their dignity. When the girls family leaves Hukum asks her what she can do. She innocently replies ‘I only know how to sing and dance.’ Hukum Chand is shown as someone who tries to control his passions and does not make any advances to her. After some song and dance, he tells her to go back, but she doesn’t want to. Although nothing explicit is shown, the scenes imply that she is promiscuous and wants to be seduced by Hukum, so rather than taking advantage, it seems instead that Hukum gives in to the girl.

Tolerant Accepting Hindus and Hardline Fundamentalist Muslims

We all like to root for the hero and despise the villain in a film. In this genre the Hindu family is shown as tolerant and sympathetic. Conversely the Muslim family is portrayed as fundamentalist and insensitive.

In Pinjar the protagonist is a Hindu woman called Puro, who on the eve of her wedding is kidnapped by a Muslim, Rashid. When her parents learn of her fate they go to the suspect’s parents’ house. The father and the panchiat (his advisors/uncles) give them the cold treatment. The father, the panchiat and later the imam who marries Rashid and Puro are shown as villains. Not only bereft of any decency but also any humanity. Later when more of her relatives are kidnapped they are shown in a household where the kidnapper is a Muslim drunkard and the pimpish mother-in-law has no sympathy for the young Sikh girl who has been kidnapped and enslaved.

In Gadar, Tara Singh and Sakina fall in love. There are no conflicts on the Indian side with his family even though he is a Sikh and she a Muslim. She is fully accepted and does not have to convert. This is not the case for Tara when he later goes to the not so tolerant Muslim Pakistanis, when Sakina goes to Pakistan to meet her family, and Tara has to follow her to get her back from the clutches of her fanatical father.

In order to keep his wife, Tara has to convert to Islam. Although to become a Muslim only requires one to give a one sentence declaration of the belief in Oneness of God and in the last Prophet, being Bollywood it appears Tara has to go through more of an ordeal. Not only must he give the declaration but he has to do it in front of a gathering of the whole town. The wicked imam asks him to make the declaration, and then the most inciting and creative dialogue takes place between the eye-popping father-in-law Ashraf and Tara Singh. Tara is asked now to say Pakistan is the best, and bless it, to which he reluctantly agrees. Then to up the ante Ashraf asks Tara to curse India, leading to the following dialogue:

Tara Singh: Why are you playing these political games? Pakistan may live long. We do not have an objection to that. But India shall always live long.

Ashraf Ali: Till you say ,‘Death to India’, how will our people believe that you are a true Muslim?

Tara Singh: There are more Muslims in India than this country. Their hearts always say, ‘Long Live India’, so are they not true Muslims?

ConclusionIf you take the same images and you repeat them over and over again, and the images teach us to hate a people and to hate their religion, what happens is that we, in spite of our intelligence, our innate goodness, actually turn around and let these images despise and vilify an entire people.’ (2001) Film is more than an entertainment medium. Following a survey conducted among Muslims in Britain, it was reported that those interviewed ‘found a direct correlation between media portrayal and their social experiences of exclusion, hatred, discrimination and violence’. What we can say conclusively is that film is an influential medium. How it portrays history and people of opposing beliefs or nationalities should be taken with great care. I hope this will give cause for someone else to take the baton and run with it. I will close with an old Indian tale which maybe has some insights. A father used to read his child bedtime stories. One day the child asked the father, ‘Dad, how come in all the stories you read, the hunter always bags the tiger.’ The father thought for a moment and replied, ‘When the tiger learns to write you will hear that story.’

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References Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 2005. Film: Bollywood’s message, Independent, 15 July Roberge, Gaston, 1985. Another Cinema for Another Society. Sheehan, Jack, 2001. Author Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Ward, Lucy. ‘From Aladdin to Lost Ark, Muslims get angry at ‘bad guy’ film images.’ Guardian, January 25, 2007

Some friends of mine have committed themselves to an ‘ethical lifestyle’.  Fantastic, I thought, how great it would be if everybody did that. It would only take the world’s worst dictators to join the bandwagon and we’d soon see massive improvements. But then I began to wonder. Which dictators would admit to not ‘doing the right thing’ already?  Some go to great lengths to convince people they are, setting up national broadcasting services for the purpose; other more deluded ones might genuinely believe their lives are ethical, that they do what’s best given the circumstances. 
 
It’s difficult to contest the idea of an ‘ethical life’: how can you stand up for being unethical? - it’s like trying to defend lying and hoping people believe what you say. When a person claims to be ethical, in the same way as with self-ascriptions of holiness, it generally ends debates rather than facilitates them. That’s why historically, authoritative claims to being ‘ethical’ were often frowned upon by Enlightenment-minded people. When the aim is Truth through respectful discussion and debate, we can’t begin by agreeing one protagonist already knows the answer.
 
I find my friends’ ethical lifestyle admirable: they’re going green, offsetting their carbon footprints, recycling their waste and looking at ways to generate their own electricity and feed it back into the grid. It’s an expensive and time-consuming hobby, but seems worthy and slightly exciting.  Listening to them talk about it, it’s as if they’ve discovered the secret to changing the world, and it involves copying Richard Briars and Felicity Kendall from the 1970s sitcom The Good Life. 

Living The Good Life - inspiring an idea of ethical living since the 1970s

‘Ethical Man’ was the dubious term adopted by Justin Rowlatt on BBC 2’s flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight.  He committed himself to living in an environmentally friendly way for a whole year, examining every aspect of his family’s life and making changes whenever he could afford them (the BBC didn’t want to subsidise the project).  Food miles, the washing, the car, family holidays – every activity was judged by its carbon dioxide output.
 
The jarringly annoying part of all this is the conflation of ‘being ethical’ with ‘reducing CO2 emissions’. There’s nothing wrong with environmentalism, but let’s not confuse it with ethics. Indeed, even though contemporary manifestations of the ‘ethical lifestyle’ claim to involve thinking of future generations, they don’t seem to say much about being ‘ethical’ to help starving people in this one. The approach measures an individual’s ethical actions in purely self-centred terms; surely ethics is a social issue? Ethical living concerns physical impact; isn’t ethics more metaphysical than that?  Looked at this way, the idea of an ‘ethical lifestyle’ is almost as self-centred and materialistic as the way of life it seems to be ostentatiously rejecting.  And many who adopt an ‘ethical lifestyle’ and are smug about it are certainly being self-centred!
 
These ‘ethical lifestyles’ are an anomaly that jars with a growing consensus in the rest of society that finding right and wrong is a ‘work in progress’, ideas we can approach but never entirely survey. Our odyssey to be ethical is a journey where we know the direction but not the destination. Through ever-progressing ethics we ‘learned’ slavery was wrong a couple of centuries ago; racism and sexism turned out to be bad sometime during the 20th century; and homophobia became unethical a decade or so later. In another half century we’ll all become vegetarians. 
 
Richard Dawkins, the contemporary champion of atheism, advocates this view as an alternative to god-rooted ethics. It’s a neat rebuke to Nietzsche, who doom-mongered that, ‘if God is dead, then everything is permitted’. The theory of ever-progressing ethics gives us all hope, and like other evolutionary theories, it fits the facts rather neatly.
 
It can be wonderfully open-minded too, allowing many different strands to claim they are the New Way Forward. Feminists, environmentalists, free-marketeers, and socialists have all done this, as have those who argue against them.  Some mischievous advertising types have even pretended their product – washing powder, a flash car or cosmetics – encapsulates the next stage in our moral evolution.  The idea of ever-progressing ethics leaves open the debate about what is right and wrong, perhaps even encouraging it, even if some of the bids are a little wayward.
 
But ever-progressing ethics is misleading because it confuses three things, and when confused we make our fashions overbearing, our leaders overly self-righteous.  The three things are our ever-increasing knowledge about how societies and the world works, the ‘signalling’ function that comes from declaring something ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, and the deeper notion of being ethical. 
 
The first of these, our understanding of the world and society, evolves rapidly.  Societies change every generation; politics, the media and conversational topics change every day.  Our social thoughts focus on what’s new, what’s different, seeking out new events and trying to identify new trends.  Science is an industry of progressive knowledge accumulation, and social scientists do this with social patterns.  As this ever-increasing knowledge feeds into ethics, it makes for more informed choices and decisions that get better every time.
 
The second element within ever-progressing ethics is the signalling function, which is the stuff of propaganda and politics: ethics used to proselytise, and people only need to proselytise when they want to persuade others.  It can be used to describe oneself to fit current trends or attitudes – a party leader making a statement by riding a bike or talking fondly of their moral compass.  Or it can be used to address the problem of the day: ‘Dig for Victory’, ‘Think globally, act locally’, or ‘Education, education, education’.  These provide emphasis, and play to our bounded rationality (our ability to think about only a few things properly at once), so don’t expect these loudhailer ethics to sound at all coherent.  Coupled with our ever-increasing knowledge, it means the most gossiped about contemporary notion of what’s ethical is likely to focus on how to solve newly recognised problems.  That’s why politicians focus so often on the zeitgeist when they implore us to do something.  And hence the current obsession with polar ice caps, carbon offsetting and Felicity Kendal.
 
But the third element of ever-progressing ethics, the ground rock of it all, is something far deeper and more constant.  Adam Smith and David Hume identified sympathy as the basis for moral decision-making more than two centuries ago, concurring with older texts that respecting fellow men (later expanded to the whole species) is what it’s all about. There are some common notions of right and wrong that glare out from Hollywood movies: hard work should pay off; cheats shouldn’t prosper; nice guys should come through and so on.  Some of these may be culturally specific: the long strand of self-sacrificial heroes in English literature may have a biblical basis. But, dig deeper still, and it is still possible to discover a basic and largely unchanged notion of right and wrong. 

A little-changed idea of right and wrong in 2007’s High School Musical 2

 
 
Whether you dig for the ground rock of ethics through sympathy or divine for it through ethical grammar, it’s soon possible to survey a reasonably clear idea of right and wrong, one that everyone who uses terms like ‘should’ and ‘ought’ in a normal way is obliged to accept.  We can find out where we’re going.  Ever-progressing ethics isn’t the end of it: we can blow the clouds from the peak to view our final destination. 
 
Now my friends with their ‘ethical lifestyle’ certainly have part of the answer.  (Better than the dictators, admittedly – they’re part of the problem.)  But however much we all recycle, cut down on flights and fit solar panels, we’re only going to do some of the things we ought to do.  Environmentalism is a ‘more ethical lifestyle’, but it’s not the end of ethics, not at all.
 
It’s excellent that my friends are going green, and some of their home-grown organic vegetables taste wonderful. Labelling their way of life ‘ethical’ may even encourage others to copy them, doing much good to the planet.  But let’s acknowledge that proper moral awareness should extend way beyond the environment; exhorting people to adopt this ‘ethical lifestyle’ is just potty training for humanity. 

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Iain King’s new book, How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time: Solving the Riddle of Right and Wrong is published by Continuum.

Scott Wilson’s topics cry out for a book to be written about them: the negative urge lying deep in the very national consciousness that claims to represent everything positive about capitalism; the morbid imagination that challenges upbeat political branding and corporate impression management. Informed by the work of George Bataille, drawing on most notably The Accursed Share, this book makes inroads before blocking its own path with ‘cultural theory’ as thick and congested as the cultural practices it describes. It curses itself, just as ‘rap/metal’ puts a bad spell on its own neighbourhood. 

The opening bodes well. Wilson introduces the idea of fear of the Devil coupled with a desire for him, and goes on to establish the United States of America as a symbol of both good and evil. America connotes evil not only to those outside its borders, but for many born and brought up within them. Thus, Wilson sets the stage for a logical reconstruction of self loathing as it currently appears in the most advanced capitalist nation. But instead of stripping down this phenomenon and then rebuilding it to show how it is determined, Wilson takes us on a tour of its manifestations in the work of rappers (Public Enemy, NWA, Dr Dre, Ice Cube) and mainly metal bands (Korn, Negativland, Slipknot), though he extends the latter section as far as Nirvana. Each musical showing is framed by different theorists; but Bataille and the idea of excess is the riff that Wilson repeatedly returns to.

One of the problems with Wilson’s tour of music is that it is not sufficiently musical. He is comfortable discussing lyrics, but there is little reference to the grain of voice or texture of sound, and even less attention paid to the precise forms in which American ‘negativity’ appears as music. But why focus on music if the artform’s defining features are never mentioned?

The Wilsonian concept of ‘supercapitalism’ is potentially effective: it captures the sense of another, even more internally problematic layer of capitalism superimposed upon its earlier operations. But Wilson suggests that war is the default position of ‘supercapitalism’; that it hinges on permanent war as the point of articulation between the production and disposal of excess. This sounds like a new version of an old canard, reconfigured with Bataille’s The Accursed Share instead of Michael Kidron’s Permanent Arms Economy. All this jaw of war sounds odd when published during the year of unprecedented international cooperation - not conflict – fostered by the attempt to prevent financial crisis and industrial recession becoming an altogether different means of ‘excess’ capital disposal. Odd too that Wilson’s ‘supercapitalism’ is rarely engaged with the financial economy.

When Wilson turns from ‘supercapitalism’ to its soundtrack, in the early stages of his musical tour the main difficulty is the change of register between cultural theory and song lyrics, and he acknowledges that music is best heard. But as the tour proceeds this gap shrinks unexpectedly, especially when Wilson’s deployment of cultural theorists comes close to building its own wall of sound. By the time he has blasted Lacanian neologisms, structuralist equations and Guattarian graphs, I realised this was partly a laudable attempt to get beyond the daily turn of events, and partly an exercise in negativity about theory and its role in cognition. Although incognito, (not meant to be recognised as such), cultural theory was surely being applied as a defensive measure against the accusation that theory is inextricably linked to Enlightenment.

Against this accusation, Wilson’s theoretical strings were wound up to a level that matches the histrionic intensity of rap and metal. Each in accordance with the particular form by which it is defined, this sort of music and kind of theory both seek to transcend their immediate circumstances, while together they take an equally negative attitude to their original, defining roles. Here in negativland, theory mocks logical appropriation by verging on the inexplicable; music scorns pleasure by making itself excruciating. The show both of them are staging is the rejection of human perfectibility, though in rejecting this because it does not apply, they themselves confirm the belief that it should.

On the jacket, Wilson is described as ‘Reader in Cultural Theory’. On this showing, the problem with cultural theory is that it is neither cultural enough – it does not discuss music in terms of the forms which make it specifically musical; nor is it sufficiently theoretical. If Wilson had identified one or two theoretical categories and worked them through by reference to a handful of songs, at the same time working through them to a better understanding of social contexts and the terms used to encapsulate them, his account might have been both more comprehensible and more comprehensive. In its current mix, his track is ‘dilettante’ rather than ‘definitive’.

At once admirably and hopelessly idealistic, Carl Miller’s Red Fortress pits three children of different faiths against the tyranny of the Spanish Inquisition. In dreaming of “a city where children learn no hate, a land where no one is an infidel”, Miller might as well take to the stage himself and announce that he has a dream. Nonetheless, his original children’s play tells a captivating story with wit, charm and emotion.

In 1491, Granada is the last Islamic city holding out against Queen Isabella’s pillaging Christian armies. Among its poverty-stricken residents are the raspily playful Rabia (Géhrane Strehler) and Luis (Jack Blumenau), a Jewish boy with a flair for engineering. The pair, in conjunction with bravado-filled Christian Iago (John Cockerill) and the naive bravery of children, set on an amorphous quest to save their city.

Tony Graham’s lushly atmospheric production treats its young audience without patronising them, conjuring up a delicate exoticism through suspended rugs and the sway of Tunde Jegede’s music. However, while the core plot is gripping and original, too much is crammed in around it. Ideas surrounding science and faith, religious extremism and artistic rebellion – not to mention a tightly squeezed love triangle and a stand-up set from Christopher Columbus – jostle together to overwhelm the narrative.

It’s a shame because Strehler, Blumenau and Cockerill make a marvellous trio at its heart: bickering, joking and dreaming. They play with finesse, balancing the communicative largeness needed in children’s theatre with emotional subtlety superbly.

At times, Graham’s direction is too reliant on the mystery of flying props in, and design, slowing the pace and swamping the action. With refining, defining and clarifying Red Fortress could be lively, intelligent children’s theatre. As it is, Miller’s script emerges from the meandering chaos as a wonderful novel too large for the stage.

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Til 8 November 2008

Clashing worldviews rarely sit alongside one another in quietly grumbling contrast. Rather, they collide in messy, active and often violent opposition. In To Be Straight With You, contemporary dance-theatre company DV8 turn focus on the deep-set homophobia of strictly religious societies, with an equally polemical stance that happens to be more comfortable for its liberal-minded audience. Intolerance, it shouts loudly, is utterly unacceptable. And we, the converted, must nod along unquestioningly.

Using verbatim texts and confessional recordings in conjunction with DV8’s seductive and stylish brand of movement and dance, director Lloyd Newson offers a scattergun argument constructed of individual examples. At times, when the authentic and the artistic sync up, it hits with emotive power, but too often movement and text feel disjointed – like watching a muted television with the radio playing.

With same-sex relationships illegal in 85 countries, seven of which employ the death penalty as punishment, DV8 have plenty of evidence at their disposal. However, they fail to shape it into a case or present a sympathetic alternative. Instead we get a stream of solos and duets, victims and perpetrators through which phrases of fire, brimstone and bloody murder recur and recur, clubbing us into flat submission. Moral indignation is the only response available.

When the individual segments break free of the diatribe, however, they become succinct and poignant. A fragile Muslim youth, caught in the blurry bubble of a skipping rope, describes coming out to his family, being cornered in an alley and stabbed by his father. A respectable Indian husband performs a joyous banghra duet with his male lover, also married. Best of all is the seated line-dance – swaying, casual and seemingly harmless – underneath an absurd Christian argument against homosexuality, based on cannibalism and conformity. Gradually, the dance swells in numbers as people subscribe to the logic.

It is no coincidence that these moments are in the hands of Ankhur Bahl and Dan Canham, both of whom are possessed of remarkable fluidity, in storytelling as in dance. Simplicity is the key to the argument and the emotions. Where To Be Straight With You gets carried away with possibilities, particular those of visual projections, it sacrifices impact for technical wizardry. Where the message is left to the words and movements of a talented performer, DV8 create something special and, more importantly, human.

As it is, To Be Straight With You is an important piece of theatre: it’s message needs saying as much as it needs heeding, but it hasn’t the simple vitality to need watching.

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Till 15 November 2008