Owp! (or “The Mother Who Came to A Crisis Point”)

I have read Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came to Tea aloud many times. I have had read it aloud, perhaps, 6322 times. That's no exaggeration. Or if it is, it's only slight. I've read it in day-lit rooms. I've read it, squinting, in gloomy rooms. I've "read" it in pitch-dark rooms, where I've realised that the physical book has now become just a prop for the benefit of a toddler who likes things just so. I know it off by heart. Every line.

So I feel I'm speaking with some expertise when I say that the Tiger is not just a trickster and a sprite, but a sort of Macguffin. He enters the world of Sophie and her mother, eats the edibles, drinks the drinkables, and departs. Leaving Sophie's mother unable to give her child a bath (the Tiger having consumed all the water in the pipes) and, crucially, unable to prepare tea for the father/husband who's due home imminently.

The image of her alone in the desolation of her kitchen, pondering this dilemma, sadly, always makes me cry. Even when it's dark. And I can't see her (but can still imagine her).

Enter the father/husband.

We then have the book's most haunting, and telling, image.

Sophie's mother animatedly explains the outrageous reasons for the absence of food on the table. The father/husband sits, listening, with the weary/resigned (?) look of someone who's been down this road before. Domestic chaos. No tea. Bare cupboards. An unwashed child. A "Tiger" blamed.

If this were a gritty, kitchen-sink, 60s play the drunken ogre of a husband might now explode into "Where's me dinner?!" violence. But there's no judgement. No fury. Just the tender suggestion that they all head out into the night to the local café for sausages and chips and ice-cream. The crippling loneliness, boredom and frustration of Sophie's mum's socially-enforced domestic servitude (echoing Betty Friedan's "the problem that has no name") may have conjured the Tiger – as a friend and a companion, an excuse and a justification – but he has perhaps, served his purpose. As an agent of change. An animal spirit guide. And Sophie loves him.

And so, in the morning, they go shopping and buy lots more things to eat. And a very big tin of Tiger food in case the Tiger should ever come to tea again.

But he never does.1

Footnotes
  1. How to read this. Is the husband's "resignation" actually of the "poor hysterical/addled woman, I must humour her" variety? Is the trip to the café, instead, an act of love? Does the Tiger's failure to return really signal change (and a new harmony), or is this the death of a cherished sustaining fantasy? I may have to squint at it in the gloom some more. [back]

December 20, 2011  8 Comments

Woah! Woah! Woah!

So there I was, on Saturday afternoon, chatting with Dave Fanning about Hergé, his (great) works, and the (not-so-great) Spielberg/Jackson adaptation of said works, when we got to the sticky issue of "faithfulness". I may have (accidentally) ended up sounding like the kind of saddo nerd to whom slavish faithfulness is intoxicating fan-boy catnip. But, like, y'know, I didn't mean to…

Take Zak Snyder's (snore) Watchmen, or Robert Rodriguez' (zzzz) Sin City. Both cravenly respectful adaptations of the source materials. Both technical experiments in trans-medium faithfulness that treat comics as mere storyboards. With intensely dull and unimaginative results.

The problem here is a formal one. Comics are (of course) not storyboards. Comic book panels are not the direct equivalent of cinematic "shots". They have their own visual language. Their own narrative logic and flow. And few people have ever spoken this language more eloquently and gracefully than Hergé. Sure, the Tintin stories are fun-filled and stuffed with the thrilling-est of derring-do. Sure, the characters (Tintin aside) are outrageous, lovable and hilarious. But it's not those elements that raise Tintin from pleasantly good to unforgettably great.

The things that make Tintin arguably1 the greatest creation in the history of comics are all specific to the medium. Hergé's visual genius (disciplined, obsessive and hard-won) didn't lead to the creation of some sort of proto-cinema in book form. It wasn't a stiff skeleton waiting for animation to make it dance.

It celebrated the thing just about to happen. The pause between the stumble and the head-long plunge into a ravine. The thrill of the frozen moment just before a wielded cosh connects with an unsuspecting head. You could stare (breathlessly) at those moments for minutes at a time, terrified to turn the page.2 Afraid to see the results of this thrillingly tense pause being released.

There are so many other examples. The long vertical thrust of panels where Tintin stands perilously on the edge of a cliff/building (as he does in The Black Island). The long horizontal thrust of panels where the long road stretches ever on (as it does in Tintin in Tibet). The sumptuous detail of the backgrounds (inviting the reader to pause and linger and return). The way every single extra, every single backgrounded or foregrounded unspeaking figure is invested with character. Each face telling their own untold stories.

These things (and many more) mark Tintin as, ultimately, a glorious celebration of the possibilities and pleasures of the comic book form. Specifically. You can faithfully reproduce narrative elements, dialogue, character, in live action or animation, but this X-factor,3 this thing that makes Tintin – Tintin, is, quite possibly, impossible to translate to another medium (particularly a comfortably mainstream piece of cinema).

And so, whatever about the cold/dead failings of motion-capture, whatever about the allegedly formulaic Hollywood-isation of this most European of icons, the most glaring flaw of all is that the soul of Tintin (our Tintin) just isn't there. And this absence really has nothing much to do with faithfulness (or otherwise). It's simply this.

Tintin = comics.

Producing a film/TV version is like dancing a poem. Or singing a painting. It may be a pleasurable thing, in and of itself, but it's not the thing (and, perhaps, it can never be). Particularly in this case. We're left with Tintin minus Tintin. Which is what, exactly? An above average action/adventure flick? A poor-man's Indiana Jones?

Footnotes
  1. I emphasise arguably. [back]
  2. Many of Tintin's most deliciously tense moments occupied a page's final panel. A classic example being those panels where a loud BANG! causes our hero to leap into the air and glance anxiously over his left shoulder (in the direction, of course, of the next page) toward the sound's source. Source not revealed till the page was excitedly turned. [back]
  3. A compromised term these days, I know. [back]

November 4, 2011  3 Comments

The Campaign Poster Debaffler: 8 – Gay Mitchell’s Quantum Head-Fuck

The presidential election. 15 days away. It will happen in a place/time called "the future". A contested place/time that does not yet exist, or maybe does.

We live, after all, in a time of uncertainty. I don't mean a "Will I be able to find a matching pair of socks in the morning?" uncertainty, though that exists too. And may yet have (in some ill-defined way) a quasi-mystical effect upon the outcome of the forthcoming election. It certainly can't be discounted. At this point in time.

I refer, instead, to quantum uncertainty. The uncertainty that pours out (in a steady head-fucking data stream) from the cool instrumentation of CERN. The uncertainty that makes Einstein look like a fucking eejit. Hyperactive neutrinos that flip two sub-atomic fingers in the direction of common-sense and conventional wisdom. We don't know whether we're coming or going anymore. For all I know you're reading this in the past – on a steam-punked, coal-fueled 19th Century iPad (and wondering who Gay Mitchell is…lucky you).

Speaking of Gay Mitchell…

Right. So he "understands our past". Fair enough. Just another way of saying he thinks our past is fucking awesome and tosses off to Cúchulainn poet-warrior porn like all the other Your-Country-Your-Call (bring back the Tailteann Games) reactionary fuckwads. That's what we need (in the present). More past. We have a clear past deficit. A healthy dose of the past would set us right.

But what's all this about believing in our future? I didn't know the future was dependent on (or receptive) to belief. I thought it was, well, just sort of there. Ready to unfurl itself like a magic carpet, or the yellow brick road. I never suspected it was contingent upon our belief (like Fianna Fáil). But this is a post-CERN world. A world where Gay Mitchell strokes Schrodinger's Cat (like a quantum-mechanical Blofeld) and keeps the future (our future) alive, through the sheer furious insistence of his belief.

Without him we're lost. We literally have no future. Not only must we elect him president (lest he gets depressed and stops believing, even for an instant), but we urgently need to discover a way to keep his brain alive post-mortem. Make him president for life, and beyond. Store his consciousness in a mega-computer in Áras an Uachtaráin and blast it endlessly with impossibly-accelerated neutrinos. Do whatever it takes to keep his essential belief in the future alive.

Otherwise we're left with the past and the endless present. And, let's face it, both suck (quantum) balls.

October 12, 2011  3 Comments

Send…More…Paramedics…

Had a blast and a half, with the Outbreak Festival crew, in the old Daghda space (St. John's Sq, Limerick) last night. A healthy (or suitably unhealthy) crowd shuffled horrifically down to enjoy local film-maker Dermott Petty's Gothic Country 'n' Irish short Zombie Waltzing, and the "splatstick" classic I'd chosen as our main attraction, Return of the Living Dead.

On the off chance any gorehound wishes to check out the folk and films mentioned in my introduction to the screening, here it be.

The film you're about to see, Dan O'Bannon's 1985 Return of the Living Dead, was released almost simultaneously with Day of the Dead, the third film in George Romero's seminal zombie series. Though the two films share a common birthday, tonally they could hardly be more different. While Day was bleak and grim, Return was (and is) in the words of zombie-scholar Jamie Russell “a breathless horror cartoon that aspires to make jaws drop to the floor through its sheer exuberant excess”.

It had originally been conceived by John Russo – Romero's co-screenwriter on 1968′s Night of the Living Dead – as a straightforward horror film in the Romero mould, with Tobe Hooper (of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame) directing. When Hooper departed to direct the schlocky alien vampire-fest Lifeforce, Dan O'Bannon (who had written the screenplay for the original Alien and worked with John Carpenter on Dark Star) was brought on board.

In O'Bannon's hands the tone quickly shifted from earnest to overtly and outrageously comedic. Though horror and comedy might, on a superficial level, seem odd bedfellows, they've been combining happily and hilariously on-screen for many decades, dating back at least as far as James Whale's Old Dark House in 1932. In terms of breaking taboos, saying the unsayable, graphically depicting things that society normally hides away, the comedic and the horrific are, in reality, close cousins. Allowing audiences to laugh and scream in the face of their fears.

What films like Return of the Living Dead specifically helped popularise was the horror sub-genre/form generally referred to as “splatstick”. A key influence on O'Bannon's film – and other “splatstick” classics like Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, Peter Jackson's Braindead and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2 – were the outrageous horror comics of the 1950s, particularly those produced by the legendary EC. In those publications – which were victims of a sustained campaign of moral outrage – death, dismemberment and evisceration became gleefully delivered punchlines. The tension-releasing laughter they inevitably invited being one of the things that infuriated the guardians of public morality the most.

So what exactly makes Return of the Living Dead one of the finest examples of “splatstick”? Well first (and possibly foremost) are the three pitch perfect performances from the senior male leads: the wonderful James Karen (as the folksy and avuncular 'Frank'), Clu Gulager (as his put-upon, pragmatic boss 'Burt'), and Don Calfa (as the Nazi-loving embalmer 'Ernie Kaltenbrunner' – named, incidentally , after a real-life Nazi war-criminal). The gusto and glee with they embrace their roles, not only offered a refreshing counterpoint to the often irritating woodenness of the film's teen stars, but showed how instinctively they understood the kind of acting “splatstick” demands: full-on, no-holds-barred commitment, no matter how ludicrous the situations might be. [Bruce Campbell, of the Evil Dead fame, is probably one of the finest practitioners of this kind of OTT style]

Then, of course, there are the zombies themselves. In keeping with a film that cracks along at a frenetic pace, and bounces along to an ass-kicking punk soundtrack (featuring the likes of The Cramps, 45 Grave and The Damned) – the film's zombies don't shuffle and stagger about a la Romero. They sprint full tilt toward their prey – anticipating the hyperactive undead of 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake.

Most memorable of all was the film's so-called “Tarman” zombie – a dripping oozing mass of putrid flesh whose obsession with devouring big juicy “braaaainnns!” almost single-handedly popularised the notion that the undead are fixated with the contents of our skulls.

Oh…and then there's Linnea Quigley's…em….naked gyrations on a crypt. Which proved catnip to teen fanboys, and helped turn her, overnight, into a successful and prolific “scream queen”.

As gloriously goofy as the film undoubtedly is, there are moments where unsettling horror, unexpectedly and delightfully, creeps to the surface. While previous zombie movies had portrayed the undead as abjectly wretched – denied the dignity of eternal rest – Return of the Dead was one of the first films to suggest that being dead was actually painful. They're not just eating our brains because they're hungry, they're eating them because doing so offers temporary respite from the agony of being dead! Death, then, is not a release from bodily pain, but a descent into even more terrible suffering!

Another of the film's innovations was to actually show you the process of someone slowly turning into a fully-fledged zombie. As they lose control of their will, develop rigor mortis, and feel the urge to eat brains grow, Frank and Freddy describe what all this feels like. And force us to imagine and feel it too.

But, enough of all that. It's the laughs that brings people to the film, and it's the laughs we remember. There may be one or two more important zombie films, and certainly one or two more sophisticated zombie films, but none are anything like this much fun. Enjoy.

October 1, 2011  Leave a comment

Brainstorm: Dawn of the Damp

Achill Island. 1999. A different decade. A different millennium. Driving, interminable rain sweeps in over Keel strand and down from lofty Slievemore. Dark thunderous clouds roll and boil in the grim skies overhead. And there, huddled and damp, in a weather-lashed holiday home, are we. Me and the family. Gazing out mournfully as nature kicks our holiday in the balls.

But, wait. All is not lost. We have in our possessions a technological miracle. A camcorder. You press a button and it imprints moving images on tape. Crazy! And check out the settings. Pixellate! Solarise! Sepia! The future was here (or there, and then). What a world.

And so, we grabbed the camera, and pointed it at things (mainly ourselves). Two hours later and the greatest fucking zombie film ever made by anyone anywhere was in the can (if, y'now, "the can" had been an 8mm TDK tape). My friends, behold BRAINSTORM (or Dawn of the Damp). The newly-digitised "Director's Cut", with delicious layers of funky muzak lashed on.

Forget wordy old Ulysses. This is the the most important cultural artefact ever hewn by Irish hands. Even if you ignore its aesthetic wonders (not that you should), it functions as a poignant and moving document of the world that was. A few short months later Y2K rode in on a pale horse. And the computers, as predicted, went nuts. And the robots rose from the wreckage of global apocalypse to force us all into sex slavery. The bastards.1

Footnotes
  1. I think I'm accurately representing Adam Curtis' thesis here. [back]

June 18, 2011  7 Comments

Family Album: The Terrible Agony of the White Phone When it Doesn’t Ring (Or Maybe When it Does)

There really wasn't that much to do. Back in damp-priest-riddled, early-80s Ireland. Especially if you were a wife and mother.

Choices were stark and choices and simple. And really limited. You could sit munching a communion wafer (or sucking an Oatfield sweetie) from mid-afternoon on a Friday, waiting, desperately, for the misanthropic Uncle Gaybo's Late Late to start, or you could curl up on a gold couch and sob. Beside a white telephone. Like Isabella Rossellini.

My mother always chose the latter option. Always. I played Subbuteo.

June 14, 2011  6 Comments

The Museum of Cultural Waste: Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories

When I was a child I had a fairly good nose for moralising that masqueraded as entertainment. I'd see it coming. I'd spot the signs. A tingly sensation warning me that the adult world was trying to insidiously slip one past me. Disguising their nasty medicines with a spoonful of sugar (see "Educational Board Games" for more of same).

Occasionally, however, I'd lower the guard and gobble up the goods without really checking what I was consuming. Only later, when I saw, say, Christians sniggering behind their hands and elbowing each other would I realise I'd been had. Such was the case with the Narnia books. It was a grim day when I discovered that Aslan was really just Jesus hiding inside a fancy-dress lion suit. Still, at least those swarthy, scimitar-wielding baddies were creatures of pure fantasy, and in no way, shape or form a baleful example of Orientalist demonising…

But, by and large, my instincts and suspicions were sound. My daughter, sadly, has yet to develop these deductive skills. In her defence, she is only two, and thus not to be judged too harshly for recently finding this in a second-hand book shop and insisting (in a way only toddlers can) that I buy it. Immediately.

After flicking past the yummy Battenberg-ian cover – and a title page telling us that this is Volume 43 (!) in series that has, apparently, sold 30 million copies – we arrive at "Uncle Arthur's Letter". A 2-page missive from the bespectacled and avuncular man himself. There, in the final paragraph, are words that would, and should, chill any lively and imaginative child's heart.

"Readers may rest assured that every story is true to life, and that every one contains some uplifting, character-building lesson."

True to life? Character-building? Noooooo! This fucking sucks!

Happily, the contents page lightens the mood slightly with a list of titles that are so transcendently banal they become the stuff of high hilarity. Who, for example, can resist the exotic lure of "The Boy with a Bag"? Who can fail to be seduced by "Peter's Pyjamas"? Or the Hitchcock-ian thrills and intrigue of "The Unclipped Ticket"? Or "Daddy's New Watch"? Or (gasp!) "How Barbara Went to Sleep"?

Though the text may be tedious (and stuffed with "Jesus is amazeballs!" platitudes), the images, throughout, are glorious. Especially if (like me) you don't bother reading the associated tales and just view them as decontextualised things of creepy beauty. Enjoy.

June 9, 2011  22 Comments

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