A case for Lockwood and Dean in Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’

May 10, 2025May 14, 2025 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

As it does for many students, the third year of my university degree course entailed an extended independent project: a culmination of two and a half years building academic expertise in research, negotiating criticism and secondary material, deep and thoughtful analysis of language all framed within the construction of an elegant yet convincing argument. Whilst my department opted for a 7000-word long essay over a dissertation of 12,000-15,000 words (with one staff member morbidly commenting that they didn’t want to give students ‘too much rope with which to hang themselves’) it was still a rigorous task that began with a scintillating and frightening proposition: what on earth to write about?

Making any kind of decision for me initiates a period of profound reflection and soul-searching: I spent my early twenties distracting myself and others no-end with ‘Which Disney princess are you?’ Buzzfeed quizzes (answer: Pocahontas), and making a collage ‘All About Me’ at work a few years ago triggered something of an existential crisis. Before eventually deciding to write my long essay on the concept of ‘nothing’ in the elegiac and ekphrastic poem ‘Phantom’ by Don Paterson, a topic I picked the day before the deadline for submitting the topic, I was in torment trying to work out what I wanted to write about. I landed on a number of different options which, compounding my own purgatorial sense of ‘who am I and what shall I write about?’, were batted away by various academics.

These included one idea I had about the number three appearing in folklore (I still don’t understand the reservation about that one; Freud’s ‘Theme of the Three Caskets’ was going to anchor the thing, and my subsequent interest in Jungian analysis would open up my ideas in numerous different ways). Similarly, and most relevant for this essay, was an idea I had about cinematic adaptations of ‘Wuthering Heights’, and why, in my opinion, they never seemed to work. Another tutor dissuaded me from this task, citing either Queenie Leavis or Virginia Woolf in an attempt to communicate his perception that this topic was somewhat juvenile and I should do something more mature.

With the news that Emerald Fennell is writing, producing and directing a new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which started production in 2025, I have decided to return to my juvenile project. Instead, however, of performing a deep-dive into the adaptations that have come before, I will consider what I hope will emerge in this new adaptation. There has already been plenty of comment and controversy surrounding the casting of her adaptation – Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi would certainly not have been my choices for Cathy and Heathcliff, and I think many others agree – but I want to focus more on what I hope to see: which characters will be given prominence, will all of the idiosyncrasies, physical violences and clipped unhinged moments of the novel – biting, blows, ravings, hair-pullings – be woven in?

The first place to start was with re-reading the novel, which I did in the summer of 2024 in the waning months of pregnancy. The last time I read Wuthering Heights was when I was eighteen and studying it alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost and Webster’s The White Devil for A-Level. Back then, Gothic themes were prevalent not just in my studies but in noughties teenage culture at large, with the figure of the vampire in particular famously resurging in the Twilight novels and subsequent films, weekly doses of The Vampire Diaries on ITV2 and its spin-off The Originals, and True Blood for a more risqué proponent of the genre. The Noughties vampire craze is certainly something worth exploring in and of itself, and whilst I wasn’t the most adamant Twi-hard, I was certainly enamoured with the Gothic’s propensity for danger and romance. Wuthering Heights was no exception, with the emotional melodrama from all and sundry, the family saga and the theatricality of the various settings, from the Yorkshire moors to the two homesteads of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. These are all, undoubtedly, kindling for the teenage imagination, which became ever so apparent upon returning to the text as a heavily pregnant 32 year-old woman. I am curious to see if Fennell’s new adaptation will ring in a new wave of Gothic story-telling, perhaps already begun with the re-make of Nosferatu and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, and what that will tell us about the cultural moment in which we find ourselves.

Wuthering Heights remains a vivid and dramatic novel, with every character demonstrating a degree of emotional dysregulation, impetuousness and violence; characters I raged alongside as a teenager but now seem astonishingly unhinged in that unnerving, hopeless, hilarious and deeply endearing way that adolescents often are. This is because much of the action is being played out by just them: teenagers. As adaptations of The Great Gatsby are in danger of following Nick’s cue and romanticising its protagonist and anti-hero Jay Gatsby, adaptors of Wuthering Heights are in danger of imbuing this novel, and its key protagonists Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, with a sage maturity that is not adolescent when it really should be.

After all, this novel does not start with the mad entanglements and upheavals of the Earnshaws, Lintons and Heathcliffs, with the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in particular eclipsing most of the rest of the novel’s drama in our collective imagination. The novel, in my mind, starts at ‘the sea-coast’ with a pompous, avoidantly attached man who shrinks ‘icily into [himself] like a snail’ when the girl onto whom he has heaped attention starts to return his affection, causing her to ‘doubt her own senses’ and leave with her mother.[1] In the aftermath, and fancying himself a misanthrope who wants to remove himself from society, he decamps to Yorkshire and arrogantly plunges himself into the company of Mr Heathcliff, his new landlord. It is through him, Mr Lockwood, that Nelly Dean’s history of the families of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange emerges.

Adaptation, like translation, is an art form in and of itself, and it is inevitable that changes and modifications to a literary text are made when it is fashioned from, in the case of Wuthering Heights, a novel into a film or television screenplay. The end goal cannot be to lean into translating the novel too literally for the screen; however, the success of the novel, I argue, relies as much upon its structure as it does on its characterisation, and to do away with any sense of framed narrative, the sense of a story-within-a-story that is created through the use of Lockwood and Dean, erroneously indulges and intensifies the most melodramatic parts of the work. I want to see an adaptation of Wuthering Heights that makes much of these two and the containment they provide. For, in my mind, Wuthering Heights is not a psychological novel, even though the psychology of the characters is absolutely central to the development of the plot, with trauma, addiction, grief, abuse and emotional breakdown all exhibited. Without minimising the severity of any of these, I still see Wuthering Heights as Gothic adolescent drama; what elevates it to greatness as a novel is through its considered structure, the theatrical blocking of various scenes – the various entrances and exits of characters between rooms and locations reads almost like a play – and the way in which Bronte skilfully maps pathos onto a most singular and evocative environment: the Yorkshire moors. Personally, I am thrilled that we are not in the heads of Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Hindley, Catherine Linton and Linton Heathcliff and whoever else. These characters are so erratic, dogmatic, cruel and selfish that we absolutely need distance from them. Bronte’s genius is that she gives us two characters, Lockwood and Dean, who are two imperfect filters for the chaos and sheer ridiculousness of the rest of the characters: they make Catherine, Heathcliff and Hindley et al. bearable, but they do not hold a sense of moral superiority over them.

Primarily, far from being a vacant empty vessel of character into whom the story is poured, as one might argue Captain Walton is in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lockwood is consistently presented as creepy, malevolent, egotistical and, yes, ridiculous. He presumes to visit Heathcliff at the start of the novel and before much happens gets into a scrap with some dogs after ‘winking and making faces at them’, driving the bitch, and seeming matriarch of the pack, to break into ‘a fury’, leaping onto him and inciting the others to ‘assault’ his ‘heels and coat-laps’, thus requiring him to fend them off with a poker before calling for help.[2] Here, Bronte presents a scene of buffoonery that is also laced with something sinister, as buffoonery often is: Lockwood offers no culpability, explaining his decision to make faces, which caused the ruckus, with an entitled degree of passivity – ‘I unfortunately indulged’ – as though it wasn’t completely his fault for winding them up. As such, within the first couple of pages, our narrator is presented as a ghosting fuckboy who wantonly upsets women, and I like to think of the bitch as some retributive symbol for the girl he messed about at the seaside.[3] Bronte continues her characterisation of Lockwood as a man who is conceited towards the workers at Thrushcross Grange, affronted as he is by prescribed mealtimes (‘a matronly lady taken as a fixture along with the house, could not, or would not comprehend my request that I might be served at five’) and a ‘servant-girl’ cleaning a fireplace and ‘raising an infernal dusk’; and who takes a predatory interest in young Catherine who he describes as ‘scarcely past girlhood’ but who is physically ‘irresistible’ and ‘exquisite’.[4] Indeed, later on in the novel he pursues his interest in young Catherine indirectly, revealing to us that he ‘should like to know [the] history’ of ‘that pretty girl-widow’ and remonstrances himself with regards to her personality: that he should ‘beware of the fascination that lurks in Catherine Heathcliff’s brilliant eyes. I should be in a curious taking if I surrendered my heart to that young person, and the daughter turned out a second edition of the mother!’[5] Here, we see one of the many instances that Bronte provides of his predatory and wolfish behaviour, with repeated reflections that dwell on her physical appearance and his consistent overestimation of his own desirability.

As such, we can see that Lockwood is as dogmatic and deluded as many of the other characters. I would argue that his name also reflects this, with the image of ‘lock’ hinting that there is something extremely limited and limiting in his social ineptitude, that his perspective is unmoving and even, perhaps, that there is something in his nature that is controlling and desires to dominate, something that Heathcliff appears to be drawn to in the first chapter, loosening up and relaxing into ‘a grin’ as he does when Lockwood threaten to enact violence on the dogs: ‘If I had been [bitten], I would have set my signet on the biter’.[6] It is this fixedness that ultimately makes him the perfect character to dream Cathy’s visitation in Chapter 3: he is outsider enough to be unfamiliar with the family history and, thereby, experiences the full terror of the ghostly child at the window, and his cynicism and pragmatism about the presence of a ghost or a spirit, even in the dream realm, makes it all the more believable that the past has an almost supernatural presence in the lives of the living at Wuthering Heights. Lockwood is perplexed and perturbed at Heathcliff’s sobbing and crying out for Cathy, remarking that ‘there was such anguish in the gush of grief that accompanied this raving, that my compassion made me overlook its folly, and I drew off, half angry to have listened at all, and vexed at having related my ridiculous nightmare, since it produced that agony’.[7] He is convinced that nothing actually happened, with his reference to Heathcliff’s ‘folly’ and ‘raving’, clearly showing his belief that Heathcliff is acting irrationally and is annoyed at himself for having stoked it by relaying his dream. He doesn’t want to feed the psychodrama that is playing out in front of him and promptly leaves, taking us with him, and is drawn into it only in so much as he feels embarrassed and guilty by, what he perceives to be, Heathcliff’s extreme emotional response and the part he played in exacerbating it. In a novel teeming with emotional outbursts, we need Lockwood as this container of the chaos, and I think an adaptation’s success relies on it too.

Of course, Lockwood is not alone in his containment of the drama: Bronte teams him up with Nelly Dean in the relay of the tale, thus ensuring the essential distance we feel from the emotional tumult. These two characters become ‘companionable’, not only in the way in which they spend time almost cosied up storytelling together in the novel, but through Bronte’s use of them to construct and elevate the drama of the novel itself.[8] They are essential. Like Lockwood, Bronte presents Nelly as removed enough from the action and entanglements of the main characters by tracking her movements beyond the others, but she is inherently bound up with them too and is, thereby, able to deliver and weigh in on the emotional upheaval, because it is partly hers too. This is most evident in the scene in Chapter 17 where Doctor Kenneth relays Hindley’s death to her and knows that she’ll need to ‘nip up the corner of [her] apron’ for the tears that will come, which they do. He reflects that Hindley died ‘barely twenty-seven […] that’s your own age; who would have thought you were born in one year?’ To which Nelly responds that ‘ancient associations lingered’ around her ‘heart’ and she ‘sat down in the porch, and wept as for a blood relation’.[9] This scene reminds us that Nelly is relatively young and not the matronly or even crone-like figure that she has embodied in the cinematic imagination. Whilst she tends to Cathy, Heathcliff and Hindley as almost a nurse when they are young, for example when they all fall ill with measles, we are reminded of the fact that she is practically one of them by Bronte not only having her describe how she played with them before Heathcliff’s arrival, but in the way in which she describes joining in with Hindley’s campaign of physical violence towards Heathcliff when he has been admitted to the household, revealing that she ‘plagued and went on with him shamefully’ along with Hindley, and subjected him to ‘pinches’. [10] This has led to some critics, for example the academics on the ‘In Our Time’ episode on the novel to somewhat simplistically label her narration as ‘unreliable’, which is, in my mind, a moot point.[11] Reliability, I would argue, is not something that we should be aiming for or looking for, especially from a first-person narrator, as though there is some ultimate truth to be found. Furthermore, what is so mysterious and evocative about this novel is that we don’t really ever see the full drama play out: we mostly hear about it through recounts of events from dishevelled and upset characters. The energy, however, is conducted through Nelly, who Bronte brings close enough to the core of the drama for them to be somewhat enveloped by the emotion, and at times becomes an active participant and instigator, but who is still able to contain the drama as a whole.

In all likelihood, Fennell’s adaptation will centre on Cathy and Heathcliff, indeed most of the press attention has already fixated on them. As a culture, we are strangely obsessed with their story, fascinated as we are with their wildness, their desire for the disintegration of their physical boundaries to become one ego (‘I am Heathcliff’) which, I reiterate, is a movingly adolescent perception of love and relationships.[12] This, in spite of the fact that Cathy dies around half way through the novel, and we spend as much time, if not more, with her daughter. As a side note, the opportunity to explore doubling and doppelgangers is ripe here, and I think that David Lynch could have made a very curious and provocative adaption of Bronte’s work. I really hope that Fennell uses the gifts of Lockwood and Nelly Dean to contain and conduct the narrative. Looking at the cast list, I am heartened and excited to see Hong Chau playing Nelly Dean, with a younger version of the character being played by Vy Nguyen. This is a casting choice that suggests that Fennell is offering a truly reimagined Nelly, taking us away from the staid matrons of old to give us a more dynamic character who more accurately reflects Nelly in the novel: a peer of the main protagonists alongside whom she effectively grows up.

There is no sign of a Lockwood yet; we can but hope.

[1] Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (London: Penguin 1985), p. 48.

[2] Ibid, p. 49.

[3] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck%20boy accessed 15:03, 10/05/2025.

[4] Ibid, p.51; 53.

[5] Ibid, p. 74; p.191.

[6] Ibid, p. 49.

[7] Ibid, pp.71-71.

[8] Ibid, p.76.

[9] Ibid, p.220.

[10] Ibid, pp.78-79.

[11] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b095ptt5, 20:10 [accessed 14:50, 10/05/2025].

[12] Ibid, p.122.

‘Saltburn’: A delicious and disturbing British classic

June 1, 2024June 1, 2024 / eharpingon / 1 Comment

Warning: Spoilers for ‘Saltburn’ ahead

On the 19^th October 2022, a vote on fracking in the Houses of Parliament descended into chaos. The Conservatives’ Liz Truss, who would go on to become Britain’s shortest-lived Prime Minister, had intended to use the vote as a ‘confidence measure’ and had ordered a three-line whip for her own party to reject the Labour motion, at the risk of her own government collapsing.[1] Long-accustomed the British have become to an overarching sense of political chaos and turmoil post-2016[2]; yet, the scenes that unfolded that night stand out as particularly tumultuous and, indeed, farcical, which was evidenced by the anger of Conservative MPs regarding the handling of the vote. Backbencher Charles Walker gave an extraordinary interview with the BBC in its wake, demonstrating his anger and derision with the parliamentary Conservative Party not only in the handling of the vote, but in their orchestration of Truss’ ascension to the leadership, and thereby Prime Ministership, as a whole:

‘This whole affair is inexcusable [sic.] it is just a pitiful reflection on the Conservative parliamentary party at every level […] this is an absolute disgrace. As a Tory MP of seventeen years who has never been a minister, who has got on with it loyally most of the time, I think it is a shambles and a disgrace. I think it is utterly appalling. I am livid and, you know, I really shouldn’t say this, but I hope all those people who put Liz Truss in Number 10, I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it for the ministerial red box, I hope it was worth it to sit around the Cabinet table because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary […] I have had enough of talentless people putting their tick in the right box not because it’s in the national interest but because it is in their own personal interest to achieve ministerial position’.[3]

Since its modern inception after the 1832 Reform Act that extended voting rights in Britain, the Conservative Party, also known as the Tory Party, has championed the interests of law and order, landed interests, trade and national identity. It has also had a concerted paternalism about it; a sense that the people of the party were in some way born to rule as ‘the political arm of the rich and powerful’ with so many Tory MPs and Prime Minsters hailing from extremely wealthy backgrounds, predominantly attending private schools and Oxbridge.[4] I visited Oxford in January 2024 and found the place oozing with this bizarre sense of tradition and self-congratulatory prestige, not least when our tour guide described the seemingly endless stand-offs between the students of the university and the townsfolk, who, for a few hundred years, seemed perpetually embroiled in a class-turf war. I came away thinking that the University of Oxford was a natural Tory breeding ground; with the arcane rules, rituals and traditions, its exploding coffers and pervasive sense of superiority, it’s hard to imagine anyone coming up with any new ideas there.[5] It may be first in the Time Higher Education World University Rankings, it may have a ‘Gold’ rating in ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’, whatever these arbitrary ratings actually mean, but in a place where the statue of Cecil Rhodes continues to cast a violent colonial gaze over all who pass in the vicinity of Oriel College, with nothing more than an explanatory plaque to problematise his presence, it would appear that conservatism, tradition and entitlement still hold sway here.[6]

Charles Walker MP did not go to the University of Oxford. He was educated privately, like many Tory MPs, but then unlike many of his colleagues, he chose to study at the University of Oregon instead of pursuing the proverbial Oxbridge route. However, his analysis of his own political party, seething and scathing in equal measure, is also illuminating, with his admonition that he has ‘had enough of talentless people’ standing out as particularly pertinent. He seems entirely fed up with members of his party who have made self-motivated political decisions to increase their own reach and power, choosing to court favour with the weathercock of the day over a greater sense of collective good; people who prioritise themselves but ultimately have no real vision, plan or, seemingly, basic ideology that serves as their driving force, flip-flopping their way through their political careers and the UK’s subsequent political hellscape.

And, thus, we come to Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, the director herself an alumnus of the University of Oxford. Saltburn is film that people have, seemingly, come to love to hate and that, I argue, has suffered some misunderstanding. There have been many accusations levelled at it, the most pervasive being that ‘it doesn’t mean anything’, or that it was trying to be another film but didn’t quite get there (‘the implied film is better than the actual one’), or that it’s symptomatic of film’s dance with death via social media. As someone who has, despite my Derridean critical education, often sought out the ‘meaning’ of texts, even if it’s just being secure in what I think a text means, I was pleasantly surprised to realise that I was not one of this group challenging Saltburn for not meaning enough, or anything at all. I observed that the film nodded to eat-the-rich films like Parasite, with references to moths and images of critters that bejewelled the end credits; yet, despite these nods, it did not feel like this was the overarching idea of the film. However, this is clearly what many people wanted and have since imposed on it. One of my favourite video essayists, Broey Deschanel, analysed Saltburn in direct comparison with The Talented Mr Ripley, arguing very astutely that Ripley’s interrogation of class is far superior to Saltburn’s, and that Matt Damon’s portrayal of Tom Ripley as both maniacal and wounded juxtaposed with the grotesque entitlement of Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf forms one of the key dramatic tensions of the film that cements this class analysis. I think, however, that she actually hit the nail on the head with the title of her video to describe Saltburn as a wholeand, perhaps, its main character Oliver Quick played by Barry Keoghan: ‘The Untalented Mr Ripley’. Untalented indeed. That may just be exactly the point that people are looking for: this film is about Charles Walker’s ‘talentless people’.

For me, Saltburn is a quintessentially British film about the state of Britain, walking in the footsteps of Trainspotting, Billy Elliott, I, Daniel Blake and others. One of the film’s promotional posters reads: ‘We’re all about to lose our minds’. Anyone recovering from what we have observed and experienced as an electorate in Britain, particularly in the wake of 2016, could be forgiven for thinking: ‘Yes, quite’. Former BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, in my mind not an entirely unproblematic journalist, made a comprehensive documentary charting the tumultuous succession of crisis-ridden Tory governments in the years following the referendum to leave the EU and it makes for ‘gruesome’ watching in the words of journalist Rebecca Nicholson.[7] Called ‘Laura Kuenssberg: State of Chaos’, the series walks us through the fallout of Britain’s vote to leave the EU.[8] Despite living through it and witnessing all the twists and turns, there is something mind-blowing about seeing the true scale of upheaval mapped out for us, with commentary from civil servants, politicians and journalists who navigated it and orchestrated it. We see five Prime Ministers change hands (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak); back-stabbing and in-fighting within the government in the midst of Brexit negotiations; Boris Johnson’s illegal proroguing of Parliament, which I referenced in this essay; the shambolic handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, including the Partygate scandal that undermined social distancing measures and the extortionate contracts given to Tory grandees and connections who offered dysfunctional track and trace systems and PPE in exchange for millions of pounds; the sinister rise and fall of unelected officials like Dominic Cummings who was given so much power by Boris Johnson that he was able to stage his own press conference in the rose garden of Downing Street to defend his behaviour in the Barnard Castle debacle; the collapse of the Liz Truss government after 45 days against the backdrop of the country’s longest-reigning monarch passing away; the ascension of Rishi Sunak, seen as a ‘safer pair of hands’ than the volatile Boris Johnson but who was the architect of one of the most ridiculous pandemic schemes ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ which helped to drive up new Covid-19 infections.[9] In short, it is has been an unbelievable, disorientating time in British political history.

Whilst many people have wanted Saltburn to be a searing critique of class inequality that skewers the rich, I think this film, whether it meant to or not, exposes two big political archetypes that have been and continue to be extremely prevalent in British politics and culture more generally, as outlined above: primarily, the rotting, ineffective ideologically conservative ruling class who for so long have extracted wealth and wallowed around in it, whilst believing in their God-given right to lord themselves over others but ultimately do nothing and have nothing to offer society; secondly, the middle class aspirers we can’t help but look to to dismantle class inequality who seemingly just want to, and eventually become, what we thought they wanted to rip down. This is a film about talentless, self-interested people who want to maintain their power; in many ways, it is a satire of the maddening and chaotic state of British party politics.

Much of the discourse online around this film conveys the sense that people wanted this to be a film about class war. What we got instead was a somewhat trashy film that enjoyed rollicking around in its own sense of scandal. The film seemed to achieve this, partially, through its apparent enjoyment of irreverently wallowing in the mess, sensuality and abjectness of the human body: we have the iconic ‘bathwater’ scene, where Keoghan’s Oliver Quick slurps up Felix’s used bathwater into which he has just ejaculated; the cunnilingus scene where Oliver goes down on Ventia whilst she’s mid-way through her period, the grave scene, Oliver Quick’s antler outfit to name just a few. There seemed to be little political messaging lurking in the background beyond the fact that these scenes were meant to be provocative and shocking, which left some reviewers like they had been ‘shoehorned’ in to redeem the plot.[10] However, for me at least, there is something delightfully trashy about them; and I don’t mean that in a way to disparage the film. I mean ‘trashy’ with the same sort of respect and affection I hold for shows like ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘The Real Housewives’ franchises. Throughout the film, the characters thrive in their relentless gossiping about other characters and these shadowy, shocking scenes have managed to cultivate the same kind of discourse around the film itself; a discourse tinged with delicious salaciousness. Additionally, it is reminiscent of the British’s suspicions, long held, that some members of the privileged upper classes have involved themselves with these kinds of shenanigans, despite their crisp and staid appearances. Are the actions depicted in Saltburn anymore scandalous than 2015’s ‘Piggate’ allegations? A scandal fuelled and propagated by Lord Michael Ashcroft in what appeared to be a stab of revenge at then-Prime Minister and current Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron, who he claimed got up to all sorts of licentious porcine activities as a member of the mysterious Piers Gaveston Society at the University of, you guessed it, Oxford.[11]

As such, Saltburn’s trashiness (again, I want to emphasise that I do not use this term in a way to undermine or disparage the film!) gives way to the first political archetype; many of these characters are facsimiles of upper class people who are relatively two-dimensional but who relish in the power and prestige of their ancestry, their landed wealth and their proximity to those they hold close and delight in savaging. This is famously evident in Rosamund Pike’s character Elspeth who delights as much in gossiping about other people as she does in covering up the fact that she has been gossiping about other people. She casually reprimands Farleigh for telling Oliver that ‘we were just talking about you’, which, indeed, they had, by telling him without missing a beat that he makes up ‘the most awful things’ and that ‘of course we weren’t’. They are a group of people who don’t actually want to immerse themselves in critical, intellectual inquiry but would rather stew in their fantasies and speculations about other people’s lives, which Elspeth, again, cements when she quips later on in the film that Pulp’s song ‘Common People’ could not have been about her because the young woman depicted in the song ‘came with a thirst for knowledge’ but she ‘never wanted to know anything’. The limited knowledge of Liverpool they display in their first dialogue about Oliver is a good demonstration of this: Liverpool has long been a city that has attracted snobbery and condescension throughout the UK, with everything from the Scouse accent, fashion and beauty trends and implied poverty of its inhabitants offered up to ridicule and dismissal in equal measure. Elspeth and her friend Poor Dear Pamela draw on typically classist stereotypes about the city in their speculation about Oliver’s upbringing, for example imagining Oliver’s hometown Prescot on Merseyside as ‘some awful slum’, and with Pamela asserting that ‘I think that’s actually rather normal when you’re poor; when you’re poor that sort of thing happens a little more’ when Elspeth ravenously chews over the image of Oliver putting his fingers down his alcoholic mother’s throat to make her sick. The family delightfully indulges in both pity and scorn for Oliver that fuels their own sense of civilised superiority, choosing to lean into macabre fantasises about his poverty to cushion and closet themselves quite happily within their privilege.

However, it is this that makes them vulnerable. Whilst the film tracks each individual Catton being picked off by Oliver, the Cattons clearly play the same game, with the weakest link in their midst subjected to the same scorn, ridicule and exclusion. Primarily, when Poor Dear Pamela, who morosely tells Oliver at dinner that ‘Daddy always said I’d end up at the bottom of the Thames’ does go on to die, Elspeth’s wickedly dark response is that ‘[Pamela]’d do anything for attention’. Then, once he too has outstayed his welcome, Farleigh is ejected from Saltburn without ceremony. There is no loyalty among the upper echelons at Saltburn, and this is something we have seen played out politically in the current government, with the endless leaks, scheming and backstabbing that have entailed Tory party politics, particularly post-2016. This has been born out of a political culture of self-aggrandizing, which Charles Walker highlighted with such vehemence in 2022, but was also raised by the outgoing MP for Maidenhead and former Prime Minister Theresa May herself in her final speech to Parliament on the 24^th May 2024 before its dissolution in the wake of the up-coming General Election. Whilst almost endearingly referring to her ‘place in history’ as the only MP for Maidenhead as a result of her holding of the post of MP there for 27 years, which charts the establishment of the constituency to its boundary changes in 2024, more than, perhaps, her more historical tenure as a Brexit Prime Minister, May was also critical of self-serving politicians. Not only did she make light of being in government and members of her own side not voting with her on three separate occasions, but she emphasised the role and responsibility of MPs to represent constituents, with her worry that ‘there are too many people in politics who think it is about them, their ambitions, their careers and not the people they serve […] their job here is not to advance themselves but to serve the people who elected them’.[12] Here, she is speaking of the same genre of ‘talentless’ people who prioritise their own politicking over a sense of humility in their service on behalf of their constituency. We know that in Saltburn the natural conclusion of so much selfishness and self-investment is implosion and a group of people rotting from within, with, of course, a little help from Oliver Quick. Yet, the delight with which they rip into their social inferiors and one another to maintain their own position points to a self-inflicted form of violence that marks their own undoing. We will have to see if such a political culture the Tories have exhibited over the past few years will ring in their own death knells of being in government, which only Thursday 4^th July 2024 will reveal.

This leads to my second British political archetype that Saltburn demonstrates: the pretender. In this, we have the character Oliver Quick, who delivers the twist that isn’t a twist: whilst peddling the story of being a disadvantaged, impoverished student from Merseyside to ingratiate himself with Felix Catton, he actually hails from a comfortable middle-class home. Like many people who have benefitted from privilege and wealth, Oliver leans on a narrative of working-class hardship and meritocratic achievement to make himself an object of sympathy, with his Merseyside upbringing a particularly astute geographical choice on the part of Fennell thanks to its working class heritage.[13] Many people watching the film felt that this ‘twist’ lacked punch, but, if you have been paying attention to British politics, there is something purposefully unsurprising about it. He used this tactic because it works, has worked and is commonplace in modern British politics. In Britain, many politicians have used working class allusions in their self-fashioning to make themselves more appealing and sympathetic in the eyes of the electorate. We have seen this even in the names that politicians opt to use for themselves, with former Prime Minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair opting for ‘Tony’; former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gideon Oliver Osborne opting for ‘George’ and former Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson opting for ‘Boris’ as three standout examples. All attended private school and all, you guessed it again, attended the University of Oxford. What these examples also convey is that this happens across the British political spectrum; whilst many would question Tony Blair’s left-wing credentials, particularly in light of Margaret Thatcher referring to him as one of her biggest achievements, the fact that he used the optics of a working-class name to mask his privilege to leverage support is significant.[14] Crucially, especially when this tactic is used by politicians on the Left, there is the real threat of upper middle class politicians using the power they have garnered from appealing to working class voters to then ‘ape the aristocracy in their modes of life’, becoming what they have sought to resist and neglecting those who put them there, something Marx and Engels keenly observed particularly in the English middle classes: ‘By this means the middle class roused the working classes to help them in 1832 when they wanted the Reform Bill, and, having got a Reform Bill for themselves, have ever since refused one to the classes—nay, in 1848, actually stood arrayed against them armed with special constable staves’.[15]

And is Oliver Quick anything other than an ‘ape’ of the aristocracy? Throughout the film, we see him aping the role of a working class student at Oxford, aping Felix Catton as their friendship grows, symbolised through the strategic use of a Jack Wills hoody (a signifier of an attempted to nod to the British gentry, if there ever was one), aping the ‘Brideshead Revisited’ chic of black tie whilst at Saltburn, aping a Ripley-esque psychopathic figure when really he is just as talentless, selfish and whiney as the rest of them. It is in this that critics’ comparison to Ripley doesn’t quite hold water for me; the psychological manipulative mastery of Ripley comes up against the cynical apery of Oliver Quick, making these two characters very unalike and doing very different things. Time will tell if Labour’s latest pretender, in the form of Kier Starmer, will emerge victorious in the up-coming General Election. His name evokes the founder of the Labour party Kier Hardie and he has already harked back to his father’s humble working-class occupation as a toolmaker on the campaign trail. This, despite his own selective grammar school education before his attendance at the University of Leeds and postgraduate study at, here it comes again, the University of Oxford. Starmer has a history of socialist activism, and yet has clearly manoeuvred the Labour party away from the Left and into a more Centre position, verging on centre-right, as the party of Tory voters who are sick of Rishi Sunak but not as extreme as to vote for Reform UK. With a huge focus on defence and immigration, and watering down environmental policy, the Labour party is clearly aping the traditional policy areas of the Tories, which is evident in their increasing popularity outside progressive urban strongholds, where their vote share in recent local elections decreased.[16] Labour’s apery is also evident in Laura Kuenssberg’s observation that the unfolding so-called ‘purge’ of left-wing influence in the Labour party, in particular in regards to the treatment of veteran MP Diane Abbott, ‘stands in awkward contrast to the way a string of Tories, including Natalie Elphicke, Dan Poulter and Mark Logan, have been welcomed into Labour with open arms in recent weeks’.[17] So far, so Oliver Quick: the backstabbing akin to the Tories, as previously discussed, and the cynical embrace of right-wing idealogues in an attempt to woo voters appears as a bid to obtain power at any price, thus leaving a particularly sour taste in the mouth. How can a party that has its roots in the socialist tradition now find itself as an attractive prospect for disaffected Tories? Precisely because under Kier Starmer, the party has become so adept at aping the Tories. At this point, it feels like a Labour victory in July, a victory so many on the Left have yearned for over the past 14 years, will be as thrilling and as sickening as Oliver Quick’s naked dance through the cavernous, empty halls of Saltburn: Starmer’s own dance down the corridors of Downing Street may feel equally as fabulous after 14 years of opposition, but also equally as hollow.

Saltburn is not what many people clearly wanted it to be: it is a trashy, scandalous, cynical piece of film-making that more than offering a critique of Britain’s class system serves to satirise it. Those who wanted something akin to Parasite or The Talented Mr Ripley are, I am sure, disappointed. But for me, Saltburn reflected the confounded state of British politics; the unbelievable, disturbing, riveting hilarious horror of the state of our democracy. It is rare for me to adopt the lens of ‘Britishness’ when writing a critical essay (I worry that it veers me towards some sense of nationalism of which I am very wary). Yet, for me, this is exactly what this film is about. ‘I don’t know what’s OK anymore’, a friend said as we left the cinema hooting and quaking in equal measure after a group trip to see the film. If this doesn’t perfectly capture the impact of a political system presided over by ever so many talentless people, then I don’t know what does.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/19/crunch-commons-vote-on-fracking-descends-into-farce [accessed 08:23, 2^nd March 2024].

[2] ‘Laura Kuenssberg: State of Chaos’ BBC iPlayer https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001qgww/laura-kuenssberg-state-of-chaos

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-63320605 [accessed 08:36, 16^th March 2024].

[4] Chavs, Owen Jones (London: Verso, 2012), p.40.

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/may/28/oxford-and-cambridge-university-colleges-hold-21bn-in-riches [accessed 08:22, 16^th March 2024].

[6] https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/Oxford%20University%20Financial%20Statements%202022-23.pdf [accessed 08:29, 16^th March 2024]; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-58885181 [accessed 08:29, 16^th March 2024].

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/11/laura-kuenssberg-state-of-chaos-review-full-of-extraordinary-revelations-if-you-can-bear-to-watch [accessed 17th March 2024, 09:03].

[8] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001qgww/laura-kuenssberg-state-of-chaos [accessed 17th March 2024, 09:10].

[9] https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/30-10-20-eat_out_to_help_out_scheme_drove_new_covid_19_infections_up_by_between_8_and_17_new_research_finds/ [accessed 17^th March 2024, 09:32].

[10] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/saltburn-ostentatious-black-comedy-designed-shock [accessed 28th April 2024, 11:29].

[11] https://time.com/4043311/david-cameron-pig-gate-scandal/ [accessed 28^th April 2024, 12:42].

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_xZrdoP5rQ&ab_channel=PoliticsJOE [accessed 31^st May 2024, 15:04).

[13] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2022/04/a-quarter-of-britons-paid-100000-or-more-identify-as-working-class [accessed 1st June 2024, 13:14].

[14] In 2002, twelve years after Margaret Thatcher left office, she was asked at a dinner what was her greatest achievement. Thatcher replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” (Conor Burns, April 11, 2008) https://economicsociology.org/2018/03/19/thatcherisms-greatest-achievement/ [accessed 1^st June 2024, 15:55].

[15] Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 13 (pp.663-665), Progress Publishers, Moscow 1980 https://marxengels.public-archive.net/en/ME1912en.html#N464 [accessed 1^st June 2024, 13:42].

[16] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/03/labour-celebrates-victories-but-loses-ground-in-urban-and-heavily-muslim-areas [accessed 1st June 2024, 15:07].

[17] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7220exjzvno [accessed 1st June 2024, 15:12].

An Unexpected Journey: Re-watching ‘The Hobbit’ trilogy

April 15, 2022 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

“I don’t think I know your name.’

‘Yes, yes my dear sir and I do know your name Mr. Bilbo Baggins. And you do know my name, though you don’t remember that I belong to it. I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me.”

Whilst J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit was famously written, in the first instance, for said writer’s children, it has been famously described as being ‘a children’s book’, a coded criticism in many respects, meaning that because it has been marketed for primarily children, it is devoid of substance, nuance and meaning that more intelligent and world-wise adults are able to discern.[1] It is for that reason that my first opinion of Peter Jackson’s three films of the same name, released in 2012, 2013 and 2014, was low and, as I discovered recently, severely limited. I remember vividly, going to the cinema to see ‘An Unexpected Journey’ at the ripe age of 20, immediately welling up at the ‘Concerning Hobbits’ refrain that accompanied the film’s opening titles, before launching into an internal criticism of everything I perceived to by divergent from the original text. ‘How could a short book, for children, be strung out into three long films’, was my main point of contention. Oh the irony, when I had spent the past couple of years challenging the sanctity of texts so voraciously, unable to witness the way in which I was clinging so unconsciously to this one! This essay is in part a mea culpa but also a celebration of what I now regard to be a film that bridged The Hobbit to the rest of Tolkein’s legendarium with, perhaps, more consciousness and success than by Tolkien himself.

This is not to say that The Hobbit films were and are perfect. Even after my most recent re-watch, there are still some significant issues that have persisted over time: the films have the visual aspect of a video game, thanks to the choice to film using 3D Red Epic Cameras at 48 frames per second. Where so much of the deeply immersive storytelling in The Lord of The Rings films was borne from the physical prosthetic, make-up, costuming and set-design work, so successful in that they enabled audiences to feel as though the characters, races and cultures of Middle Earth were in some way real, the reliance on technology and digital design in The Hobbit creates more of a visual and, hence, emotional distance from the characters and the world they inhabit. This is not to say that video games are not deeply immersive, they evidently are and this is because we are able to take action and actively inhabit those worlds.[2] In the medium of film, however, where we are able to become engrossed in the worlds of films, we are, whilst observers and critics too, experientially more passive and in a position of surrender to the camera. No amount of good acting or writing in The Hobbit films allows them to land with as much impact as Jackson’s predecessors as a result of this overemphasis of a frame ratio and visual effects that take from the story more than they give. This was and still is, with all the merit I would give Jackson for experimenting with this cinematic technology, disappointing.

Equally disappointing are the ‘wink-wink-nudge-nudge’ moments of shoehorned nostalgia, for example when the One Ring falls onto Bilbo’s finger in the exact same way it falls on Frodo’s in The Fellowship of the Ring. Furthermore, I think the relationship between Tauriel and Kili is hopelessly contrived and whilst I am appreciative of the filmmakers’ efforts to include a female character, where there are a grand total of zero in the book, it is somewhat frustrating that her only narrative significance revolves around an ill-fated and yet remarkably lacklustre romance plot.

Yet, from this re-watch, I was able to discern that Jackson put in more work than I previously was even aware of to expand The Hobbit story into its rightful context within Tolkien’s mythology, in particular in its temporal position as a precursor to The Lord of The Rings. It is in this where I think The Hobbit films showcase some narrative brilliance on the part of its director. My opinion of this was enabled by my reading of The Silmarillion last year, a dense and remarkably realised mythology of the First Age of Middle Earth that Tolkien wrote prior to and, perhaps according to Christopher Tolkien, concurrently with The Hobbit in the 1930s. In a letter, Tolkien wrote that ‘The Hobbit was not intended to have anything to do with [The Silmarillion] […] It has no necessary connexion with the ‘mythology’, but naturally became attracted towards this dominant construction in my mind, causing the tale to become larger and more heroic as it proceeded’.[3]He suggests here that the progressive adventurous sensibility of The Hobbit came about in its tangential relationship with The Silmarillion: almost that The Hobbit couldn’t help but become more epic as a result of its exposure, in his imagination and writing, to the truly sweeping and awesome aspect of The Silmarillion. However, he is clear that there was no over-lap between the two: however much The Hobbit was influenced by The Silmarillion in terms of narrative grandiosity, the narratives themselves were quite separate. Only in Tolkien’s own retrospect and re-jigging post-Hobbit and aided by The Lord of The Rings do we see an intersection begin to merge between what were previously disparate texts.[4] It is here where I argue Jackson, with the benefit of Tolkien’s retrospect and the extensive appendices that accompany the legendarium, was able to successfully bridge some of the gaps left behind by Tolkien’s source texts. In short, Jackson and his team did their research, it shows, and The Hobbit films deserve much more credit than I believe they have received for this.

Fittingly, it would seem that the main mechanisms that Jackson uses to help bridge these narrative gaps are the wizards Gandalf the Grey and Radagast. In saying this, I do not aim to reduce their roles to mere plot devices: on the contrary, in some way I see it as nigh on poetic that these characters, who are so well-loved and revered by both characters in the stories and by readers and audiences too, who have so much power, wisdom and benevolence, should be the ones to ensure the successful metaphysical narrative weaving across the media of novel and film between The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. Whilst Radagast is elusive throughout Tolkien’s texts, Gandalf is presented as a character whose wizardry extends beyond telekinesis and otherworldly intuition to his ability to construct and affirm meaning for the characters around him. Indeed, when we first meet him in the very first chapter of The Hobbit, he engages an unwitting Bilbo into something of a verbal sparring match, after the latter has wished him a ‘Good morning!’. Looking at Bilbo ‘from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat’, Gandalf asks him:

‘“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”’[5]

In his interrogation of the exclamation ‘Good morning!’ is a playfulness with which Gandalf employs and perceives language, pointing to the number of different ways in which Bilbo’s deceptively simplistic phrase could be used and interpreted. Gandalf’s questions expose the realms of meaning that underlie even the most apparently obvious of statements and, as such, successfully and wittily deconstructs both the phrase Bilbo has used and, importantly, the complacency with which he used it. As a result, along with the play, is an assertion of dominance, expressed through the performed uncertainty around what Bilbo means: in his questioning he demonstrates his own command of and ability to wield language, and therefore his ability to construct meaning. By questioning Bilbo in this way and subtly asserting his own dominance over language and its multiplicity of meanings, Gandalf’s introduction is none too reminiscent of ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, yet perhaps with more of a knowing wink and a glint in the eye from underneath those bushy eyebrows. Although Saruman is described as ‘subtle in speech’, I would argue that it is Gandalf’s playfulness with language that marks him out as more flexible in his thinking and the more compelling to those around him.[6] This linguistic dominance is developed later on in the novel where Gandalf uses narrative to convince the shape-shifter Beorn to allow Thorin’s Company of dwarves and Bilbo to stay in his hall having been pursued by goblins through and from the Misty Mountains. Aware of Beorn’s reticence for opening his home to strangers, and with a particular dislike for dwarves, Gandalf weaves the tale of the Company’s adventures with hints at their number and regular interruptions by the arriving dwarves at such a pace as to not offend Beorn.[7] We are told towards the episode’s end that,

‘Bilbo saw then how clever Gandalf had been. The interruptions had really made Beorn more interested in the story, and the story had kept his from sending the dwarves off at once like suspicious beggars […] “A very good tale!” said [Beorn]. “The best I have heard for a long while. If all beggars could tell such a good one, they might find me kinder.”’[8]

Gandalf successfully uses language and, slightly differently to his first encounter with Bilbo, the delay and deferral of meaning to ensure he is able to get what he wants and needs. Even though he and the Company are in a vulnerable enough position so as to rely on Beorn’s hospitality, Gandalf is able to use his, again, playful and ‘clever’ control of language and meaning to endear himself and the others. In particular, Tolkien emphasises that it is ‘the story’ and the means by which it is told that secures safety and, therefore, it is clear that the ability to use language in this way is as powerful a weapon for Gandalf as any of the other magic he may be able to perform. This is confirmed through the echo of the description of the dwarves as ‘beggars’: the story does not prevent Beorn from seeing the dwarves as ‘beggars’, yet the power of the narrative seems to enable Beorn to move past his preconceived distrust and disdain for the dwarves, even conceding that he might be more open in general if each story he met was ‘good’ enough. By ‘good’ we don’t necessarily mean that plot points of the narrative, although they help, but the way in which Gandalf has adeptly guided Beorn through what is essentially a carefully constructed unfolding of the truth. The irony of which is that perhaps Beorn’s distrust is not entirely misplaced, given Gandalf’s masterful yet creatively tentative handling of what actually happened and how many they are. Nevertheless, what is clear is that Gandalf the Grey occupies an important role in Tolkien’s work as a conduit and creator of meaning, which makes it all the more appropriate that his character is one of two wizards used by Jackson, in this same vein, to bridge the narrative gaps between The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. These narrative bridges revolve around the shadowy figure of The Necromancer.

The Necromancer is only named four times in The Hobbit text, and the gift that Jackson gives a film audience is a cinematic expansion of these short hints given, of course, by Gandalf both about him and his fortress at Dol Guldur, thereby building something of a narrative bridge from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. One hint appears in the very first chapter of the novel, where Gandalf describes his adventure to retrieve Thror’s map: ‘I was finding things out, as usual; and a nasty business it was. Even I, Gandalf, only just escaped’; and one, satisfyingly cyclical, in the final chapter, ‘Gandalf had been to a great council of white wizards […] they had at last driven the Necromancer from his dark hold in the south of Mirkwood.[9] Furthermore, the episode is given reference to, again with little expansion in The Silmarillion: ‘Mithrandir [the Elvish name for Gandalf] at great peril went again to Dol Guldur and the pits of the Sorcerer, and he discovered the truth of his fears [that the Necromancer was ‘the first shadow of Sauron returning’], and escaped’.[10] Moreover, Jackson, I would argue, successfully interleaves the council meeting and Gandalf’s investigation of Dol Guldur mentioned here into The Hobbit narrative, with the council, attended by Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond and Saruman the White, taking place during the Company’s sojourn at Rivendell early on in the first film of the trilogy, and then the investigation of Dol Guldur after the Company enter Mirkwood in the second film. This latter interleaving is particularly poignant narratively because as the Company encounters the corruption of the old Greenwood forest, we see Gandalf explore the root of that corruption, which I think works seamlessly. The expansion of these moments in the films serve to build important narrative connections that Tolkien either hints at or simply misses. The revelation that The Necromancer is the spirit of Sauron beginning to re-take form in the final film in The Hobbit trilogy is an important set-up for what happens sixty years later in The Lord of the Rings, plus is an excellent opportunity to see Galadriel in all her power. What was, perhaps, a missed opportunity was Jackson’s lack of emphasis as to why the council does nothing to organise against Sauron once it is revealed that he has returned. Saruman clearly underestimates Sauron’s ability to fully amass power, as described very late on in the appendices of The Silmarillion, but I think, what should be, an extremely pertinent moment becomes slightly lost within the narrative of the Company.[11] In truth, there is a lot of action in this film: it begins with Smaug’s destruction of Lake Town and his killing at the hands of Bard, then the confrontation at Dol Guldur, Thorin’s antagonism and obsession with the Arkenstone, followed by the Battle of the Five Armies. There is a lot of action and huge visuals to be swept along with. The decision to not challenge Sauron comes thirty minutes into the film and, most unfortunately, is not particularly circled back to. Gandalf’s last lines in the film seem like a particular waste, even though they replicate those in the novel: ‘You’re a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I’m very fond of you; but you’re only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all’. In the novel, these words are delivered as Balin, Bilbo and Gandalf discuss the prosperity of the Men of the Lake after the Battle of the Five Armies and Bilbo’s hand in helping to ensure that peace. [12] Jackson’s use of them almost sentimentally, however, as almost a parting caution to Bilbo about the power of his magic ring is slightly too cryptic to ensure the sort of foreshadowing that could have been used to more explicitly weave the end of The Hobbit films to the larger narrative of The Lord of the Rings. However, as I said at the beginning of this essay, whilst true merits of these films have emerged with time and further investigation, they are by no means perfect.

Something that cements Jackson’s attempt at narrative restructuring with, I argue, some great degree of success comes courtesy of the elusive and reclusive wizard Radagast. Whilst having scant mention anywhere in Tolkien’s books, his inclusion in these films was a brilliant, heartful choice which I think shows true warmth for the text on the part of the filmmakers. Not only does Jackson use Radagast to root The Hobbit films more securely into Tolkien’s context of Middle Earth, but he uses the wizard to bridge The Hobbit to some of the earliest events in the Elder days of the High Elves in The Silmarillion. In the first Hobbit film, when describing the corruption of Greenwood, Radagast describes the giant spiders in the forest as ‘some kind of spawn of Ungoliant’. In doing so, the filmmakers reference one of the most destructive and shocking moments in the early history of the Elves, where the first Dark Lord Morgoth, Sauron’s original master, uses a great, ravenous, corrupted spider called Ungoliant to destroy the sacred trees of light in Valinor, where she ‘belched forth black vapours as she drank, and swelled to a shape so vast and hideous that Melkor [precursor to the nomenclature Morgoth] was afraid’.[13] Whilst the film only makes a small reference to this early and haunting moment of the mythology, so grotesque that even a character as epically vengeful and envious in the history of literature as Morgoth is rendered frightened, this connection built by Jackson through Radagast between the current condition of the Greenwood and the originators of decay and destruction at the very beginning of Tolkien’s world, shows how much thought has gone into what these Hobbit films could serve. They are not mere adaptations of one novel, but offer an explicit narrative bridge across the legendarium. These films are then, perhaps, more faithful adaptations of the legendarium than audiences claiming The Hobbit to be a children’s book are even aware of. We can see that the two wizards help to create this greater sense of meaning across the texts: Gandalf is used to enable The Hobbit to look forward to the later The Lord of the Rings, whilst Radagast is used to root The Hobbit in the legendarium, looking back to the past as he does to The Silmarillion, where previously The Hobbit was almost adrift between the bigger epic narratives.

All this to say: perhaps making The Hobbit into a film was never going to be as simple as the reductive mindset of ‘it’s a children’s book’ would allow. I may have been dismissive of these films when they first came out, arguing that so short a book could hardly require a three-film adaptation; but I am convinced as a result of this recent re-watch that, in making these films, Jackson undertook a bigger project, enfolding The Hobbit into the rest of the legendarium, enlarging its prospects rather than keeping it a stand-alone novel, whilst simultaneously paying homage to the warmth and good humour that has made it such a beloved narrative since 1937. With all of the richness embedded in the text, even and especially unconsciously done, The Hobbit appears, like its namesake protagonist, to have more to it than what meets the eye. There are faults with the films, it cannot be denied; but I do not think that this cinematic trilogy should be so easily discarded either. It makes sense that the novel, surprisingly dense as it is with the range and length of adventures contained within it and, as we have seen, extending beyond it, could not fit an average feature-length running time. My lasting thought upon writing this is that perhaps it would have been more suited to a television series format so that the barrage of episodic action could have been more evenly placed alongside the intricate narrative weaving that, it has become evident, is also required.

[1] The Hobbit, J.R.R Tolkien (London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2011), p.vii.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2010/aug/10/games-science-of-immersion

[3] Ibid, p.vii.

[4] Ibid, p.xiii.

[5] Ibid, p.6.

[6] The Silmarillion, J.R.R Tolkien (London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2013), p.360.

[7] Ibid, pp.114-119.

[8] Ibid, pp. 119-120.

[9] Ibid, p.26; p.277.

[10] Ibid, p.360-1.

[11] Ibid, p.361.

[12] Ibid, p.282.

[13] Ibid, p.80.

So help me

April 3, 2022April 5, 2022 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

TRIGGER WARNING: rape, sexual assault, femicide.

I wrote this poem in a passion of clear, hot anger upon reading about the atrocities committed against Ukrainian women and girls by Russian soldiers. It is becoming clear that like virtually all conflicts that precede this one, rape and sexual violence are being used as weapons of war and that horrific war crimes are being committed.[1] News that leaves me cold, sickened, frightened and horrified, as it always does.

When writing this, I had Ukrainian women and girls in mind. I also had in mind the Yazidi women of northern Iraq and Kurdistan who were systematically raped by Daesh militants; I had in mind the unknown thousands of black enslaved women in Britain, the Caribbean and the USA who were raped by their enslavers; I had in mind the unknown thousands of indigenous women who were raped by colonial oppressors[2]; I had in mind the 61,158 sexual assault offences recorded in England and Wales at year end June 2021[3]; I had in mind the students raped whilst I was at university in Manchester between 2010 and 2014; I had in mind Jyoti Singh, the woman a group of men gang-raped and killed in Delhi in 2012; I had in mind Grace Millane killed in New Zealand; I had in mind Sarah Everard, abducted, raped and killed by Wayne Couzens in 2021; I had in mind Sabina Nessa, Ashling Murphy, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman; I had in mind the unknown numbers of transwomen raped and murdered across the world. All acts of terror and violence committed by men.[4]

I am heartened by news that, as of 2021, the UN has begun to impose sanctions for rape as a human rights abuse.[5] But the anger, sorrow and fear I feel is still so profound. I was unsure as to whether to even publish this poem for fear of it being ‘too much’. But having typed out all of the suffering above, my worry dissolved by my wrath.

I want to live in a world where perpetrators of sexual violence are held accountable. Where I don’t have to worry that a walk to the park on my own could be my last; where my husband and I don’t feel the need to escort teenage girls home at night because they are scared of the men who touched them on the bus; where I don’t live in perpetual fear that such an act of violence could be committed against me and my body, and those of the women in my life.

This poem was inspired by all of the stories above, by my love for my sister, family, friends and beyond. It was also written in response to the tale of ‘The Loss of the Voices of the Wells’, written down by Sharon Blackie in her book If Women Rose Rooted.[6] I am forever inspired by Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.[7] I found writing this poem extremely comforting, connecting and powerful: I hope it speaks to you too.

So help me,

Great Mother,

I would I were

a wolf.

I would rip him,

each and every him

who has done this,

limb from limb

worse than any

frothing Bacchant.

I would have the wind

whisper a reminder

to him discretely

each and every morning

upon waking

with cold, sinister severity:

‘You committed an atrocity’.

And the darkness of night

would swallow you

yes, you

consume you

for one hundred and one years;

the dawn would hold

no hope,

just a pale shadow

of what you have lost

by your own actions,

your own violence.

I know you are not

beyond redemption and restoration

I believe that with all my heart, but

first, I would have you

raked over the coals

of despair;

I would have you

contemplate the horror

of yourself

day in, day out,

crying in pain

over and over again

wondering how

you

a gift to the world

could become the profane.

No joy from bird’s flight.

No warmth from embrace.

No tenderness from the sea.

I would have you cast adrift

prostrate in the desert

of your being,

to consider the bones of your kind,

the yellow moon

casting you in

sourness

as all of Earth’s women

who have been, who are, who ever will be

along all the webs of the matrilineal lines,

the witches, the maidens, the crones, the hags,

all of us queens,

every single one

in our billions,

howl and claw and roar,

rendering you deaf and dumb

at the ancient, timeless horror

that is

you.

And you will know yourself.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/03/all-wars-are-like-this-used-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-ukraine

[2] ‘EmpireLand: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain’, Sathnam Sanghera, Viking Press, 2021.

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/04/highest-ever-number-of-rapes-recorded-in-england-and-wales; https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/natureofsexualassaultbyrapeorpenetrationenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020

[4] I want to show an awareness here that the rape of black enslaved women by their enslavers created the conditions for violence to be perpetrated against them by white women. Dr Yaba Blay explains in great detail here: https://momastery.com/blog/we-can-do-hard-things-ep-79/

[5] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/angelina-jolie-campaign-rape-war-landmark-un-sanctions-b921377.html

[6] https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Sharon-Blackie/If-Women-Rose-Rooted–A-Life-changing-journey-to-authenticity-and-belonging/23812711

[7] https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Clarissa-Pinkola-Estes/Women-Who-Run-With-The-Wolves–Contacting-the-Power-of-the-Wild-Woman/7000774

What is the future of fame?

December 21, 2021December 21, 2021 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

My 2021 began hideously hungover. I wept at a BBC Four documentary about the cultural history of the poem ‘Auld Lang Syne’, wolfed down serving after serving of tomato pasta (the only thing I can stomach in such a condition) and winced at empty bottles of Corona lying around all over the place, the playful irony of twelve hours previous now seeming exceedingly gauche. In between the dollops of pesto and wailing, I stumbled upon a four-part documentary series on BBC iPlayer called ‘Celebrity: A 21^st Century Story’. I watched the series compulsively and found that it immediately forced me to re-assess and reflect upon my own relationship with celebrity culture, particularly as a member of the ‘tween’ market targeted during those unchartered rampant days of celebrity consumerism in the Noughties.

What began as a New Year’s essay in response to that single series has turned into a year-long retrospective project: in the past twelve months I have found myself constantly musing upon and internally pickling the issues of fame, celebrity and the power structures and dynamics that shaped the beginning of this millennium, as well as my relationship with them. My grappling with personal feelings and thoughts about this aspect of popular culture has been both mirrored in and fuelled by what became a wider societal re-appraisal of the Noughties that only gathered momentum throughout the year. From the New York Times’ ‘Framing Britney Spears’ in February and her unprecedented address of the court in June regarding her experience living under a conservatorship; to Mischa Barton’s compelling interview with the Guardian also in June; to the article in British Vogue’s July 2021 issue about the resurgence in ‘vintage’ Noughties trends like Blink 182 T-shirts, Fendi ‘bag-ettes’ and low-rise jeans and more; to Beyoncé and Adele speaking to their experiences with fame in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue respectively; and the climactic ending of Spears’ conservatorship in November, the stories of the women harassed and demonised during the Noughties are, rightly, coming centre stage. What was confined and repressed is finally being given air to breathe.

Absorbing and horrifying in equal measure, ‘Celebrity: A 21^st Century Story’ charted the Western obsession with fame and celebrity culture from Channel 4’s ‘Big Brother’ to Instagram, through the cultural intersections of gender, class and politics. The documentary is nigh-on academic in its scope, covering reality television, print media, the treatment of young women like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse, the ‘WAGs’, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, the Kardashians, Perez Hilton, TOWIE, the casts of Love Island and, of course, Britney Spears (in, I would argue, an even more gut-wrenching way than the New York Times’ ‘Framing Britney’ documentary, simply because her story is told within a four-hour wider context of misogyny and exploitation), and more.

Kerry Katona interviewed for Celebrity: A 21st Century Story

Amidst the laying bare of the gross misogyny that many, particularly young women of my generation, consumed on a weekly basis in magazines like ‘Heat’, the documentary gave a platform for the likes of Kerry Katona, Charlotte Church and many others to speak about the hell that their lives were, so preyed upon they became by paparazzi and photographers. Who, however, to blame for this nauseating mess is ambiguous. Figures in the media industry pointed to an insatiable public appetite for such coverage, whilst the case is also made that the public’s desire for more was (and is) constructed and manufactured by those who claim they are just giving people ‘what they want’. Do we level the blame for aggressive, intrusive celebrity-baiting at the armies of paparazzi trying to earn a living, or the people who employed them? The magazine editors, the media conglomerates who published the images? The celebrities for making a choice to live a life that in the glare of public judgment? It is very unclear and maybe there doesn’t need to be a definitive answer: the point is, and well-articulated by YouTuber Broey Deschanel in her video essay ‘The Systemic Abuse of Celebrities’, is that a life lived in the spotlight as a ‘celebrity’, whether as an A-List actress or as a YouTube vlogger and influencer, becomes, perhaps inevitably, a form of abuse.

The opening notes of the 21^st century are undoubtedly sour and sobering. In light of how amazing human beings can be, I couldn’t help asking: what the hell were we thinking? The opening of a new century, a new millennium, has been completely marred and defined by cruelty, excess, mass produced objectification and vilification as sport. The Faustian exchange that celebrity life encapsulates undoubtedly causes a huge amount of suffering for the human beings at the centre, which we may have always known deep-down but has all too frequently, perhaps, been forgotten in the mass-produced heady dopamine rush of alighting upon the latest mishap or scandal. These human beings, in their nuance and multiplicities, have been dehumanised and objectified, rendered symbols and screens for the shadow of the collective unconscious- everything we cannot accept and embrace within ourselves- and held to impossible standards of perfection in a game they can never win. For me personally, one of the most sobering moments was listening to footage of Keira Knightley on the BBC Radio 4 podcast series ‘Pieces of Britney’, another longform exploration of the treatment of young female celebrities during the Noughties. The clip, taken from an interview with Jonathon Ross in 2007, shows Knightley at the tender age of 22 beginning to shake as she describes relentless paparazzi intrusion into her life. It’s hard to believe that such a candid admission on national television was never taken seriously enough beyond Ross’ platitudes, and that no cultural conversation emerged around the terror facing young women on a regular basis. I cannot believe we were all, myself included, blind to it.

And, of course, it goes even deeper than this. What I think is important to analyse, along with the gender and class undertones of the abuse suffered by Spears, Lohan, Barton, Winehouse and Knightley etc., are the very obvious racial dynamics at play: there is a lot to learn about the inner psychology of white supremacy from looking at the ways in which these women were treated. Primarily, as brilliantly critiqued by Simran Hans in ‘Pieces of Britney’, the ‘white trash’ criticism levelled at Spears in particular was a deeply racially coded term, employed to shame her for her behaviour’s perceived proximity to blackness. Young white women were effectively punished by media outlets, acting as bastions for white supremacy, for acting in a way that was indicative of a betrayal of their race. As a result, this systemic punishing of white young women, bears all the classic hallmarks of breathtaking misogyny, with their bodies and whiteness being fetishized and objectified to the extent that their humanity is purposefully forgotten. It also demonstrates the sicknesses of self-loathing and self-hatred embedded within white supremacy. Ibram X Kendi describes white supremacy as a rain that we are all drenched in: white people believe they are safe from it because they are holding an umbrella, but that umbrella too is a structure of white supremacy. There is no escaping it. Similarly, writer and activist Rachel Cargle argues that white supremacy and racism are sicknesses that poison each generation: not just black people who are brutalised with it, but for white people who enact and espouse this violence, consciously and unconsciously. Perhaps the predatory behaviour of a culture that created a trap for preying on this group of white women is an example of this self-inflicted sickness. The seeming pleasure taken at torturing and brutalising these women, through paparazzi-hounding and endless abuse in print and internet media, is an offshoot of white supremacy, symptomatic of its paranoia in maintaining and perpetuating itself, punishing those who did not conform to its standards.

Of course, this coded abuse of white women walks in tandem with both the coded and overt abuse of BIPOC stars by the media. Whilst there was a predatory paparazzi focus on Spears, Hilton and Lohan in the Noughties, black artists and celebrities, then and now, have seen their lives, bodies and work unduly criticised, eradicated, appropriated and underappreciated by a white supremacist media culture. BIPOC stars face systemic racism that prevents them from being in the spotlight in the first place and then, once there, targeted with gaslighting, abuse and criticism from mainstream media as well as armies of social media trolls. As such, what I have observed is how boundaried some black muscians have been and become over this period of time, both preventatively and as a result of white supremacy’s toxic double standards and hypocrisies. Whilst none of these people have been strangers to racially coded criticism, it is clear that the likes of Beyoncé, Rihanna, Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, Tyler The Creator and others have combined vigilance and artistic ambiguity to stave off unhealthy media attention, working hard to keep themselves at arm’s length from the media woodchipper. Perhaps this is a self-protective proactive response in light of the ways in which black women like Nina Simone and Billie Holliday were torturously celebrated and reviled with equal measure. Be it through surprise album drops, hints and easter eggs on social media posts or downright disorientation- Frank Ocean’s green baby at the Met Gala in 2021 was genius- these black stars have refused to play the media game and, in so doing, have carved out truly experimental and industry redefining modes of work, art and being. Of course, the secrecy and vigilance is an additional, expensive layer of work and comes at many costs. Beyoncé talked about this explicitly in her rare interview with Harper’s Bazaar:

‘I’ve been intentional about setting boundaries between my stage persona and my personal life […] I’ve fought to protect my sanity and my privacy because the quality of my life depended on it’.

In a world of media gaslighting and wars over whose narrative succeeds, Beyoncé has painstakingly prioritised her cognitive and emotional clarity, setting down multiple lines that cannot be crossed in order to keep her and her family safe. She is emphatic about the importance for her boundaries, stating that:

‘those who don’t know me and have never met me might interpret that as being closed off. Trust – the reason those folks don’t see certain things about me is because my Virgo ass does not want them to see it… it’s not because it doesn’t exist!’

Beyoncé’s attention to detail in her art is legendary; the fact that this is also required to an astronomical extent to maintain her privacy and safety is an additional layer of work and effort that, whilst seemingly non-negotiable, requires a huge amount of energy and resources. But that emphatic, imperative ‘trust-’ is unequivocal: white supremacy may condemn her actions as ‘closed off’ but, ultimately, she is protecting herself. It’s a power move.

Frank Ocean building a staircase on a live stream

Whilst these high-profile black artists have been able to establish and assert boundaries through a consciously constructed ambiguity artistically and through heavily controlled and managed PR, white supremacy, of course, still manages to openly violate famous black people in the media. Whilst it may have become more difficult to smear the likes of Beyonce et al., who have become increasingly adept at wielding their own narrativizing power, there are groups of famous black people who are still incredibly vulnerable to targeted attacks. In recent years, racists and trolls have openly abused Leslie Jones and Lizzo: both powerful women in the own rights but, upon entering mainstream awareness, perhaps did not yet have enough cultural ubiquity or capital to secure their boundaries and safety. Concurrently, black successful sportswomen are hideously exposed to the forces of white supremacy to police and abuse them: Serena Williams, Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka have all faced systemic and spectatorial abuse online. Unlike the musicians, who are, perhaps, more able to obscure themselves behind veils of artistic expression, sport is, by its very nature, unfiltered and exposing. White supremacy is almost granted more access to these women, and, therefore, they are perhaps more vulnerable to its violence. The derision that white supremacy levels at these women, with a whole host of stereotypes, criticism and condescension thrown in, is particularly potent and widespread. Visibility seems to walk hand-in-hand with media abuse, so it would be impossible to critique the targeting of BIPOC women without mentioning Meghan Markle in the same breath. As a royal, one of her jobs was to be professionally watched and looked it, open to constant judgment, evaluation and criticism, much like the sportswomen. This made her vulnerable to intrusive levels of scrutiny and abuse, perhaps most pervasively when she was pregnant and undergoing a hugely significant physical transformation. This is not a coincidence.

Perhaps it is unsurprising then that, now, so many famous people are not only asserting their boundaries but also reclaiming their lives and narratives. Noticeably, over the past couple of years, there has been something of an uptick in the number of celebrity-produced documentaries that aim to offer a form of insight into the personal, private lives of celebrities. It may be easy to be dismissive when embarking upon a viewing of these documentaries about how constructed and constrained these forms of storytelling are, but there is no denying the chillingly dead looks in the eyes of young people, in particular, who are exhausted and have been nigh-on tortured by the circumstances their fame has brought them. To date, I have watched self-produced documentaries of and by Taylor Swift (Miss Americana, Netflix, 2020); Paris Hilton (This Is Paris, YouTube,2020); Billie Eilish (The World’s A Little Blurry, Apple TV,2021); Demi Lovato (Dancing With The Devil, YouTube,2021); and Justin Bieber (Seasons, YouTube, 2020). With Mischa Barton also stating this year in The Guardian that she wanted to produce a documentary about her life and experiences during the Noughties, perhaps we cannot blame these people from wanting to reclaim some of the agency, self-worth and power that seems to have be routinely and, often, catastrophically denied them. A lengthy comparison could be made of the aforementioned docs: some opt for a fly-on-the-wall format; some give lengthy insight into the artistic process of song writing and music production; some form a personal and musical retrospective. Even if the claims to candidness, authenticity and ‘truth’ telling are awkwardly performative, and require a healthy pinch of salt for the cynical, there is no doubting the catharsis on show when these figures are in control of their own narrative and it is oddly relieving and emotional to watch. Of course, however, they are not all unproblematic.

Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato, in particular, have centred Scooter Braun in their recovery narratives, as much a friend and a mentor as he is their manager. Yet, this nurturing sage-like presence on their documentaries simultaneously functions as a redemption platform for Braun who has, seemingly and allegedly, gone out of his way to undermine the authority and self-determination of Taylor Swift. Famously, Braun sold the rights and master recordings of her first six albums to an investment fund for $300 million, without her consent, playing the game of music’s industrial capitalism to reap huge financial rewards for himself and leaving an artist with little sense of control or ownership over her own songs. His presence on Lovato’s documentary in particular, whilst important to Lovato’s recovery from addiction, feels uncomfortable when he is an active part in a system that has undermined the personal and professional wellbeing of another talented young woman.

It would be grossly naïve to think that as a result of this cultural moment of reflection that there will be an overnight rejection of celebrity culture. Fame may still be an enticing prospect for many, but I think it is increasingly clear that it is a double-edged sword. As with many areas of our lives, for example with regards to our relationship with the climate crisis, there is, I would argue, an increasing onus on personal responsibility and accountability to ensure the safety of the collective. We need to be conscious and honest with ourselves when we get dragged into having startlingly impassioned opinions and conversations about people we do not know anything about. Why do I care about looking at Jennifer Lawrence with a baby bump? What am I being distracted from? Where does our desire to stew in negativity and delight in other people’s pain come from? How is the language we use causing harm? Even if we never take the steps to actually target celebrities with viciousness, the dehumanising and objectifying language we use to talk about them infects the way we see and speak to ourselves, as well as everyone around us. As a public, we have to acknowledge how infantile it is to obsess over other people and their lives when we could so better serve ourselves by training that spotlight back onto our own shit.

What I think is different, however, now compared to twenty years ago is that a culture of activism has flourished through social media. Whilst the abuse of celebrities will shapeshift and morph into a new means of expression, there are legions of people online ready to resist. We are all better off in a world with Jameela Jamil in it, for example, whose modelling of honesty and criticality on social media is exemplary. She cuts through bullshit like no one else, and is able to use her influence to affect change and empower others to do so, whether its advocating for Britney Spears and vulnerable demographics like trans and disabled people, or taking the fight for eating disorder prevention right to politicians and lawmakers in the US. The key is to remind people of the power they do have: it may not be overt embodied power that they feel on a daily basis, thanks to capitalism, but we all have the power to observe and challenge our own patterns and behaviours in this. Ironically, for many people this may mean abandoning social media all together: whilst there is much to gain from social media’s potential for connecting people and causes, it is also an aggressive, manipulative place that actively causes harm.

And for the already famous? I think we are going to see increasingly controlled and boundaried behaviour. Stars have always reflected on whether the bargains made for fame have been worth it and I think we will see more and more reflections on this in the years to come, including retreats from visibility: symbolic of this, for example, is that Pamela Anderson left social media behind in January 2021, before this year’s reappraisal of celebrity culture even began. Whilst I don’t think we’ll see a mass exodus in her wake, because personal photos posted to social media will always be more valuable than paparazzi shots and the power this enables celebrities to retain is significant, celebrities will undoubtedly assert new means and methods of control to undermine and undercut the role of traditional media in abusing them. They have every right to do so and I believe we will all benefit as a result.

We keep changing all the time

The best ones lost their minds

So I’m not gonna change

I’ll stay the same

No rose left on the vines

Don’t even want what’s mine

Much less the fame

It’s dark, but just a game

‘Dark But Just A Game’, Chemtrails Over The Country Club, Lana Del Rey

‘Élite’: The ‘Gossip Girl’ alternative

February 17, 2021February 17, 2021 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

This article is dedicated to Charlotte Bender, Francesca Bender and Hanan Isse: my fellow obsessees

Video essayist Broey Deschanel recently posed the question: ‘Have We Grown Out of Gossip Girl?’ By looking at the class, gender and racial politics of the show, and the wider politics and issues with re-makes, her answer is an unequivocal and undeniable: yes. Whilst aesthetic nostalgia for Gossip Girl is high (because who wouldn’t want to eat lunch on the steps of the Met or venture an embellished headband?) it is a show that does not need resurrecting or an attempt at correction. Her analysis that Gossip Girl sided with elites, demonising working class characters, catching principled characters into a tangled web of deceit and selfishness whilst glorifying toxic chauvinism (Chuck sells Blair for a hotel), demonstrates that Gossip Girl is a show too riddled with the white supremacist hyper-wealth orthodoxy of its time to be worth redeeming.

The show is almost a historical artefact of capitalism’s anaemic attempt at self-criticism, eventually reinforcing itself and seducing everyone in its wake, characters and viewers alike, when arguments for capitalism were becoming increasingly tenuous in the context of recession, economic suffering and burgeoning inequality. This would go on to lay the groundwork for a subsequent decade, and counting, of austerity in the West. No amounts of references to F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, Serena Van Der Woodsen’s favourite novel, could distract us from class-bashing snobbery, rampant aspirationalism and full-bodied immersion and defence of white privilege and supremacy.

Ironically, we are living in a time of studios hyperactively re-making, sequelling and prequelling everything: capitalism is so desperate to reinforce itself to itself and ensure a buck, that it cannot stomach the risk of making something new. I wrote about this in 2014 and there are signs that things are beginning to change. With the emergences of more experimental forms of television storytelling such as Master of None, Fleabag, I May Destroy You, Pose, The Politician and The Good Place against the backdrop of a larger appetite for non-white heteronormative stories centring around race, sexualities, genders and philosophies that have been previously untold in a popular way, we are seeing progressive shifts that render the prospect of shows like Gossip Girl more and more redundant. It has been particularly promising this year to see the number of films and TV shows exploring stories of race and class being feted and nominated for awards, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Malcolm and Marie forming two of my favourite films so far, even if the jangling of white supremacy still echoes and reverberates throughout the creative industries (no Golden Globe nomination for I May Destroy You?)

So, where can we go for an aesthetically-fuelled glossy teen melodrama? Is there place for such a thing in the twenty first century?

My answer: yes. Do I want to see well-dressed people getting into romantic dilemmas, going on coming-of-age adventures, disappointing people around them, ripping up expectations, finding their voices, breaking up and making up and all set to a fabulous soundtrack? Yes. Whole-heartedly. But it goes deeper than that. This need for stories about teenagehood reminds me of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, a late nineteenth century German play that sought to express and plug the gap in stories for and about teenagers to navigate the upheaval of adolescence. The play, scandalous at its first performance, covers sexual repression and expression, abuse, suicidal depression, homosexuality and the relentless pressure of morality and achievement in arbitrary school exams: issues that still feel relevant and familiar to teenagers now, with a quintessentially new iteration of perfectionism that entails a life lived through the filters of social media. This rite of passage has been maligned throughout much of Western history, with teenagers demonised and ridiculed for the seismic shifts they experience in their bodies and identities, without any kind of holistic guideposts to nurture and respect them through it. Our experiences as teenagers lay the groundwork for our future relationships with ourselves (and our therapists) and, as explored so well in the documentary Beyond Clueless, secondary school is a charged space to explore a heady mixture of emergent and predominant ideas, with the teenage body a soil, in its perpetual state of flux, expansion and contraction, to do this. I don’t spend my time watching back-to-back teen shows or teen films because the chaos of melodrama and angst no longer feels like an outward projection of my own internal tumult. But I continue to hold the genre in high regard, in much the same vein as Mark Kermode in his advocacy for the Twilight franchise. If we are to live in a society where teenagers are not honoured, then why should we damn genres that appeal and speak to this dramatic, archetypal experience that they are going through? Whether we have anonymous whistleblowers and gossip mongers, vampires or quixotic righteous dudes, teen films and shows are crucibles and allegories for bigger shifts, both personally and societally that are, whether they mean to be or not, both vitally hyperbolic and fascinating. In the case of Gossip Girl, it turns out, we should have been paying more attention.

As such, we don’t need a new Gossip Girl or, god-forbid, the re-make of Clueless that we keep getting threatened with (the original should remain an untouched gem and deserves respect and adulation not an irrelevant, fatigued re-make). We already have a show that is compelling, compulsive, aesthetically pleasing and playing whack-a-mole with big teenage issues in a critical and entertaining way. Crucially, it also grapples with many of the issues that a new Gossip Girl may want to rectify and reconcile with to itself, which Broey Deschanel predicts will be watered down and disastrous. Issues like race, religion, sexualities and deconstructions of class power structures. My friends, I give you, Netflix original series, Élite.

Élite’s premise seems standard fare: told in flashback, three working class students are given scholarships to shiny, international, private school, Las Encinas, located in an ambiguous area of Spain, but most likely near Madrid. The scholarships are a form of compensation from the rich owner of a building company, who built a structurally inadequate state school that collapsed. The son of the owner of the building company also goes to Las Encinas with his extremely wealthy and aristocratic friends: immediately, as a result, there is discord, resentment and rivalry between the two groups. The backdrop of all of this is a murder investigation, as one of the students is found dead next to the swimming pool at Las Encinas. A heady mixture of Big Little Lies, Skins, Cruel Intentions and, yes, Gossip Girl, it is immediately aesthetically pleasing and riveting. At the very least, along with the rollercoaster ride of dramas and chaos, viewers have the additional pleasure of having learned a variety of Spanish swearwords. And the background reggaetón is always on point.

Without spoiling anything, the show deals with a plethora of teen issues: the standard first sexual experiences, family fall outs, teen pregnancy, ambition and inter-class/clique warfare. Additionally, there are higher stakes of HIV diagnoses, cancer diagnoses, threesomes, throuples, incest, blackmail, revenge porn and drugs thrown into the mix. In short: a whole lot of loco. Across the seasons, however, Élite goes on to explore the intersections of many of these issues in greater depth, most powerfully, the immigrant-working class experience and, in particular, the cultural tensions of growing up Muslim in the West. This includes relationships between faiths, homosexual relationships (the cutest gay couple ever has to be Ander and Omar), the politics of feminism and the hijab, and both subtle and overt forms of anti-Muslim hatred. We have rarely seen a character like Nadia presented on television and it is joyful to watch her unfolding across the seasons.

Even the intersections and illusions of wealth are explored: the differences between no money, new money and old money, with most of the judgment and consternation reserved for the aristocrats. Unlike Gossip Girl, the most despicable characters in Élite are the privileged who lie, cheat and betray others to maintain their social position, closing ranks and perverting justice through their family names and wealth. Self-preservation is constantly at work in Élite: this manifests as working class characters attempting to reject and resist the trappings of wealth and privilege to preserve their sense of dignity and self-respect; whereas, the wealthy pull up their drawbridges and manipulate the power structures to get their own way. They become unredeemable in the process. Yet there are some who do change, and there are some divine redemption arcs at work, the best I’ve seen since Steve Harrington in Stranger Things.

As such, where Broey Deschanel’s criticism of Gossip Girl focuses on the fact that everything, including the viewers, is subsumed by the inordinate toxic influence of power and privilege, in Élite, a form of equilibrium and, dare I say, comradeship between the classes eventually emerges. Of course, we are still based in a powerful, private school only accessible to the privileged few; but it feels like the upper classes are the ones who have had to adapt and give up something, in the form of their power and privilege, in order to survive and not the other way round. The only question that remains, as Season 4 approaches, is whether this will be maintained. My main criticism is that even with the introductions of Yeray and Malik in Season 3, there is plenty more space for black characters in the show, and I think the show has great potential in posing more questions on race. Needless to say: we don’t need a re-make of Gossip Girl. Élite is the show Gossip Girl should have been ten years ago, and I for one think we all need more of it.

Full disclaimer: I watched all three seasons of Élite during Lockdown 1.0 and it definitely became an emotional crutch when many of us, myself included, seemed to regress into a state of teenagehood, confined as we were to our rooms for months on end (explored so well in this article). If there is anything I need to add or qualify, let me know.

Love Note Year in Review: 2020

December 29, 2020December 29, 2020 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

Arundhati Roy, in her signature wisdom, wrote in April that ‘the pandemic is a portal’: this year, it is impossible to deny, Covid-19 drew us across a collective threshold, and there is no going back. In a year that the veils were lifted, where our stories and systems, both personal and cultural, were laid bare under a bright, unforgiving light, we were given the gift of 20:20 vision: society cannot function without people who are normally paid the least and are given the least amount of respect; underfunding public services, including healthcare, is a short-sighted, political decision that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands; we continue to fester in the sickness of white supremacy and racism that brutally terrorises and kills; we are approaching a number of one-way doors that will result in climate catastrophe. This pandemic was an apocalypse: a word that comes from the Ancient Greek, meaning ‘an uncovering’, a revelation. In spite of the death, chaos and suffering it has unleashed, I am convinced that we needed it. Death, chaos and suffering were mightily at work beforehand, we just didn’t realise it.

Almost as soon as the pandemic put a stop to our hectic, exhausted lives, it became clear, like all moments of change, great and small, that we have a choice: to bury our heads in the sand and avoid the pandemic; to desperately cling to the familiar shores of neoliberalism, white supremacy and exploitation; or to take the plunge into these unknown waters and to live more consciously, meaningfully and compassionately. Joseph Campbell wrote that ‘the neurotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight’ and whilst at times I caved to cynicism and despair, particularly later on in the year, I have tried to choose acceptance, curiosity and joy over and over again. As Roy attests, this pandemic is an opportunity to shift, reset and revive, and we would be fools to not pay attention to that.

As such, here are some of the things that have expanded my world this year: that gave me hope, helped me to re-frame my biases and reflect upon my own experiences and contributions to the world, and that gave me joy.

‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ with the assistance of Alex Haley

This was by far the most powerful book I read all year, and came courtesy of the amazing ‘Let’s Talk Racism’ book chain on Instagram. X was nothing short of a lightning bolt of a man. His autobiography is incredibly immersive, giving a huge insight into his many turbulent and shifting lives and iterations. There is no doubt that X was one of the most quick-witted, sharpest and, often, humorous critics of white supremacy, re-framing and wiping the floor with his accusers at every turn. He was unfiltered, incendiary and uncompromising, an unrelenting champion of and for Black people. I found the chapter of X describing his days in prison re-teaching himself to read and write particularly moving, as were his trip to perform Hajj in Mecca and subsequent travels across the Middle East and Africa. He was ever-evolving, ever-driven for justice and whilst scathing of many of his contemporaries, he showed capacity for compassion and his own personal evolution. A truly extraordinary man.

Through ‘Let’s Talk Racism’, I also borrowed copies of ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’ by Emma Dabiri and ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ by Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, both of which massively expanded my awareness of the insidious workings of white supremacy around women, beauty, the university and pedagogy. I am so grateful for the chain: it has been a key part of the work I have pursued this year to reckon with my own white privilege and racism, whilst introducing me for the first time to Pan-African productions and modes of knowledge, expression, spirituality and culture. In spite of the hard work, I have encountered so much that is truly joyful.

My subscription to British Vogue

The fashion industry is one of the world’s biggest polluters and has been notoriously crap at dealing with the problem. The industry has been so caught up in producing, over-producing, tens of collections every year and conducting the flying circus of fashion weeks around the world, that it has become caught up on its own proverbial hamster wheel. There is, naturally, a human cost to this overproduction and consumption: people in Bangladesh, India and other countries continue to work in horrendous conditions for next to nothing, whilst their rivers and forests are polluted and destroyed (if you haven’t seen documentary ‘The True Cost’, I cannot recommend it enough). Furthermore, designers and creatives have experienced sustained burnout under the unrelenting pressure of an industry and culture that demands more, instantly, and all the time, as memorably recorded by Suzy Menkes in 2015. However, things are beginning to change: Edward Enninful, the Editor-in-Chief at British Vogue has written so beautifully and powerfully this year about the need for reset and change in the industry:

‘But a truth has been exposed by the tumultuous events of 2020: there is no normal to return to. Like many of you who I’ve spoken to or corresponded with over these past months, I share a sense that, actually, ‘normal’ is what got us here in the first place. If we are going to evolve, to a place of greater fairness and safety for our planet and its people, our future cannot look exactly like our past. We are going to need a genuine rethink about our lives. Our attitudes, our priorities, our compassion. What and how we consume. What we stand for and how we voice it […] let’s be honest: normal wasn’t working’. (British Vogue, August 2020).

Along with his excellent advocacy for decolonising fashion and art, Enninful demonstrates keen awareness of the change being demanded of fashion environmentally. Indeed, all of these issues and contexts constantly intersect. It is so incredibly refreshing to hear a fashion editor speak honestly and in no uncertain terms about the hard work and change that is required to live in a more just and less exploitative way. Of course, we want the pandemic to end as quickly as possible, but we cannot return to life before the pandemic. Enninful is aware that this moment is our opportunity to make big decisions about the direction we want to go in, what kind of people want to be, how we want to leave the world for future generations. For an industry that constantly chases the ephemeral newness of capitalist modernity, this is nothing short of revolutionary. It is so incredibly exciting, and comforting, to have such a man in in such a position of influence and authority. With his recent promotion within Condé Nast, he is set to have increasing influence over the role of fashion in the world. Accompanied with his invigorated focus on sustainability, this is extremely hopeful and promising. I have loved getting to know him and his vision of fashion over the year and, given fashion’s huge economic and cultural reach and influence, I am looking forward to him exacting some truly impactful change.

Hay Festival Digital

This was a completely divine couple of weeks of talks, readings and lectures all brought to us online. I am still quite stunned by how smooth-running the festival was considering they had next to no time to get online; equally, I am stunned that I haven’t been to the festival before now. Books? Wales? How had I managed to miss it? Regardless, the Hay Festival brought me so much happiness. I curled up in bed listening to Stephen Fry tell stories of Troy; attended talks on the Welsh language (which I began learning during Lockdown); had my questions answered by Simon Schama and James Shapiro; attended the Schools Programme featuring Onjali Q Rauf and Laura Bates; and immensely enjoyed Rutger Bergman and Michael Wood’s respective talks. One of the best moments of the festival was virtually attending Gloria Steinem’s talk with friends and family, all texting one another in excitement as this feminist queen imparted wisdom about activism and the fuel of being pissed off. I really hope that they continue running the festival online in some capacity going forward: there was such a magic to enjoying talks about books whilst knowing that people were logging in from all over the world. A true gift and moment of solidarity this year.

Online theatre

As a child, going to the theatre was pretty much the highlight of my year. I still think going to see ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ in Stratford-upon-Avon when I was seven years old was one of the best days of my entire life. However, since becoming a worker bee, I have found opportunities for going to the theatre, and requisite non-subsidised ticket prices, become quite a barrier to going. In 2020, I more than made up for years of missed theatre. At one point, myself and a couple of dear friends were virtually going to the theatre together every week, courtesy of the National Theatre. We watched ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘Small Island’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ and ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, sometimes dressing up to suit the occasion, building in our own ice cream breaks and having post-show chats. It was such a rich experience: I still can’t quite believe the access we were all given. I donated to the fund as and when I could and it was a genuine pleasure to do so.

Similarly, I watched more ballet than I ever could afford to see in one year: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ featuring Matthew Ball as, perhaps, the best incarnation of Romeo ever (sorry Leo); ‘The Winter’s Tale’ featuring Edward Watson as a truly devastating King Leontes and Lauren Cuthbertson who makes me weep; ‘The Cellist’ featuring the divine Marcelino Sambé; ‘Anastasia’ with Natalia Osipova, someone who embodies negative capability; ‘Sleeping Beauty’ featuring Fumi Kaneko who has the most graceful arms ever and, my personal favourite, ‘Woolf Works’, a ballet triptych inspired by the life and works of Virginia Woolf. The ‘Orlando’ section in particular was truly astonishing, especially the partnership of the aforementioned Edward Watson and Francesca Hayward. The music, choreography, costuming and staging here created a piece of art that was electric. I quite forgot that they were performing in a grandiose old building, so futuristic and transporting was this section. It was everything that is truly brilliant and exciting about contemporary ballet. I remember watching ‘Danse à Grande Vitesse’ years ago and being enthralled by the limits of ballet and dance that were being pushed here: the same can equally be said for ‘Woolf Works’. Yes, tutus and Tchaikovsky are fun, but these new frontiers of dance and expression are so important and so invigorating. I cannot wait for more.

Love Note – Marvel Films

November 28, 2020 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

Spoilers – please tread carefully!

For many years I shunned the superhero genre. I was, and still am, a huge fan of the Christopher Nolan Batman films but, after the astonishing disappointment that was Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in 2013, I ignored the glut of superhero films that followed. I still haven’t really forgiven DC for wasting so appallingly the talent and excellence of Amy Adams as Lois Lane. Dry, vacuous, thin writing. Atrocious. Superhero films subsequently defined blockbuster filmmaking in these early decades of the 21^st century, and I wanted nothing to do with them.

Enter: Lockdown 2020.

Amongst the numerous personal epiphanies, rediscoveries, explorations and denunciations that this period elicited, one of the most joyful things we did was watch every Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film in order, from Iron Man to Spiderman: Far From Home (disclaimer: The Hulk films aren’t on Disney Plus; we will watch them at some point but I have a hunch that we haven’t missed anything too drastic).

In many ways, I conflated Marvel’s films with the shoddiness of the DC output, and, pre-emptively diagnosed Marvel’s films alongside Nerdwriter’s analysis of the ‘Epidemic of Passable Movies’. Big-budget films that rely so heavily on tropes and cliché that they are tonally unconvincing and annoyingly poor. This isn’t to say that some of Marvel’s films aren’t ‘passable’: Iron Man 2 is crap, Avengers: Age of Ultron is weak and Dr Strange is bland and famously appropriated Eastern traditions and spiritualities for yet another egotistical white man to ‘find himself’. Marvel is also hugely reliant on mythologies of nationhood and capitalism, which underscore every single film. However, there is much to love in this epic serial of films that provided relief from pandemic anxiety. With a plot template that is consistent and hardly deviates from a standard exposition – conflict – climax – resolution structure, these twenty two films and their stories were comforting, relatively thrilling, slightly mindless, and everything that were needed to survive months of quarantine. Like a 21^st century reincarnation of Borachio’s Decameron, which, coincidentally, I attempted in Lockdown. I got to the end of the Second Day then promptly gave up: there was only so much wife-stealing, ambiguity around sexual consent and general frustrating buffoonery I could take for one pandemic. I think I’ll just stick to the Pasolini film.

I digress.

Below are some of my thoughts, opinions, loves and obsessions about the twenty-two films we watched:

My favourite Avenger is Black Panther and I am devastated about the loss of Chadwick Boseman

It goes without saying that the tragedy of Boseman’s untimely death far eclipses the sadness we might feel as fans of Black Panther who will not see him in the role again. However, we can also acknowledge that Boseman’s performance is nigh-on legendary as T’Challa, and is a gift to cinema. As a character, Black Panther is one of the most powerful, endearing and incandescent Avengers to watch. Thanks to his vibranium suit and his ability to metaphysically connect with his ancestors and forebears, he is formidable and riveting, whilst also demonstrating deep dedication to his family, ancestral traditions in his advocacy and loyalty for Wakanda. Of course, as Emma Dabiri argues in Don’t Touch My Hair, the Marvel vision of African affluence and abundance is problematically neoliberal; however, the significance of seeing an African country and its peoples thriving technologically and financially is a rebuttal to white supremacist stereotypes and depictions of that continent. Boseman helped to forge a path in the representation and celebration of black life, the importance of which cannot be downplayed. The huge emotional and spiritual void his death leaves in this franchise undoubtedly echoes as a modicum of the one he has left in the lives of his loved ones.

2. My other favourite Avenger is Captain America

I was once unceremoniously dubbed ‘vanilla’ for holding this opinion. I truly don’t care. Whilst Thor and Tony Stark embarked on their redemption arcs, Steve Rodgers was earnest, honest and dignified from Day One. I love to see this in my lead male protagonists once in a while (see my Love Note on Alyosha Karamazov for more). The scene in the lift in Winter Soldier is dramatically excellent and I don’t think any moment in a film has made me so disproportionately excited than when he was able to pick up Thor’s hammer in Endgame. Be in no doubt that I was shrieking ‘I knew it!’ along with Thor. What I love about Captain America is that he is always the first one into a fight and the last to give up on a fight: standing alone, battered and bruised, in front of Thanos in Endgame as the last line of defence for life itself, unwilling to give up, is the perfect encapsulation of who this man is. He never moves from a place of rage, anger or lack: there is no hubris here. Instead, he’s slightly melancholic all the way through, thanks to the loss of love-of-his-life Peggy and his existence as a living anachronism. As a result, he has Frank Ocean sad boy vibes in bucketloads, which I love. Of course, he is by no means perfect: the character’s relationship with American nationalism and militarism is, at times, nauseating. But he is a character who, in spite of this, is endlessly optimistic, never gives in and always tries to do the right thing for as many people as possible. There’s a lot to like there.

3. One of my future dogs will be called Groot

My favourite tree-esque character since Treebeard (not a tree of course, but an Ent) Groot is everything. I wept bittersweet tears at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, when he protectively encased his friends in his branches to protect them, whilst suffering fatal damage to himself. Thankfully, his Jesus moment encompasses full resurrection, and we see Groot re-born as a precious and hilarious sapling and an uncannily familiar angsty teen. Always helpful, loving, resolute, and with a particular penchant for aggression when necessary, Groot is a shining star of the supporting cast and I love him, and will name a future puppy dog in his honour. The self-sacrifice ‘We are Groot’ scene at the end of the first Guardians film crystallised for me that this group of characters in this corner of the MCU are in one of my favourite films of the franchise. From the opening strains of Redbone’s ‘Come And Get Your Love’, to when the future Guardians are described as ‘bunch of assholes’, it was obvious that this superhero film was the scrappy, fun, genre-dying franchise sibling that would pave the way for the more experimental likes of Thor: Ragnorok and Tom Holland’s Spiderman.

4. I am conflicted by the up-coming release of Black Widow

It’s taken Marvel far too long to commission films based around the women of the MCU. Captain Marvel is excellent and was a real breath of fresh air after so much machismo and seemingly endless male soul searching throughout these films. There is the indefinitely postponed Black Widow film to watch in some post-pandemic future, but I feel more begrudged by it than completely psyched. Throughout the franchise, Black Widow seems to serve more as a distraction to movie fanboys than to exist as a fully realised character. This isn’t to discredit Black Widow as an idea or Scarlett Johansson’s representation of her: I think she is a poorly written throughout and has not been taken care of properly by the makers of the films. I am frustrated that we will only now get an origins story when we’ve had to witness her endlessly supporting others, her lukewarm love affair with Bruce Banner and the mediocre handling of her death.

5. We need more Nebula and Gamora

Oh, the joy of seeing sisters on screen. These two characters present the highs and lows of sisterhood unlike few I have seen before. Fighting one another to the death when necessary? Relatable. Becoming the ultimate force to be reckoned with when united for the same cause? Absolutely. These two convey the ridiculous, hilarious and fierce love that can exist between sisters, and we need more of it in film. I hope that the producers and financiers at Marvel will give us more of Nebula and Gamora, who are, in my opinion, two of the most important and essential characters of the whole franchise.

Paris Hilton and us

October 10, 2020 / eharpingon / 1 Comment

My tolerance and, indeed, indulgence of, what I deem to be, divine trash has its roots in the halcyon days of 2009. Drunk on a popular culture concoction of Gossip Girl and Look Magazine, and living with the unshakable desire to replicate Sienna Miller’s boho aesthetic (it never went well), I was taken in by perhaps the worst possible trash television. In January of that year, I promptly started watching and became hooked onto a show called Paris Hilton’s British Best Friend.

The premise was simple and utterly laughable: contestants lived in a fancy house and all competed to become socialite and heiress Paris Hilton’s British Best Friend. The show was a hot mess. The contestants all wore necklaces bearing Paris’s name, one contestant’s eligibility came into question because he was too young to get wasted in Las Vegas, and challenges included buying Paris presents, designing her a dress and enduring a twenty four hour clubbing crawl through Chelsea.

Paris Hilton was everywhere at the time. As one of the original reality TV stars, thanks to her show ‘The Simple Life’ which first aired in 2003, she was constantly photographed and gossiped about, and effectively paved the way for a new generation of people who became famous for being famous. I had five channels until about 2008, and so was unable to watch any American shows that were prevalent at the time. I read about all of Paris’s antics in trashy magazines and, even though I didn’t particularly care about her or her life, I felt like for some reason it was imperative that I had an opinion about it. I remember having in-depth knowledge, as did many people at the time, of extraordinarily specific details about her life: from her catchphrases, the names of her dogs and what her house looked like, to how much she weighed. I also remember absorbing hideously toxic stories of her relationships, break-ups, the sex tape her ex-boyfriend released without her consent and her friendship issues. Looking back, it is mad to think how much of her life was served up on a platter for public consumption, partially as part of her own doing, but also because the tabloid press were obsessed with her. Some of the specifics may have been fabricated or completely blown out of proportion; regardless, I had huge opinions about who she was and what she was like, even though I had never seen her in a television show until 2009.

In spite of all the candy-soaked ridiculousness and extravagance of the silly TV show Paris Hilton’s British Best Friend, something started to stand out to me about Paris herself. When on her own or with a small number of other people, her voice completely changed. Instead of the high-pitched baby voice for which she was famous, used to deliver her litany of catchphrases and vacant platitudes, her voice would become low, becoming a quintessentially deep Californian drawl. I recognised, even back then when I was still trying to navigate my own personae of public and private selves, that Paris Hilton had created an enormous Barbie façade. She knew the effect she had on people, she knew how to play a character and that underneath it all, possibly, was something else.

Since 2009 until today, I hadn’t given much thought or attention to Paris Hilton. Whilst still working successfully as a businesswoman and building her brand, her light was somewhat dimmed during the ascension of the Kardashians who went on to embrace the reality television medium and almost completely redefined it in their own image. Instagram came into my life in 2013 and, like many others, I began to walk in the footsteps of Paris et al. as I built and shared my own public narrative of my life. With the release of Sofia Coppola’s film The Bling Ring in 2013, I reflected on the role of figures like Paris Hilton, the obsession they inspire and, ultimately, suffer from. The film is such a captivating sojourn through the pitfalls and pandemonium of celebrity culture, at once capturing the perverse sublimity of materialism whilst also observing, with withering distance, the ugliness of ruthless greed. Hilton famously appeared in the film and allowed Coppola to film in her house, which had been burgled by the real ‘Bling Ring’ gang between 2008 and 2009.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the YouTube documentary ‘This Is Paris’. Fatigued by my job, by Covid-19, by 2020 in general, I geared myself up to watch some divine trash. It turned out to be anything but. Everything I had recognised about Hilton in 2009 came rushing back: the voice, the façade, the platitudes. What was interesting about the documentary, however, was that it became the means through which Paris reckoned with this construction of herself. She has evidently been aware of this character her entire life, but this seemed to be the first time she was confronting this part, this projection of herself, that we have all become so familiar with.

Significantly, the modulations of her tone of voice became increasingly stark. We see her squealing and cooing her way through the first half an hour of the documentary, posing for cameras, taking selfies and slinking around her house. This changes during a business trip to South Korea, where she divulges her long-term suffering with acute insomnia and nightmares. Immediately, this brings around her deeper, richer vocality that lasts for most of the rest of the film. Her mother, Kathy Hilton, pinpoints the adoption of ‘the voice’ forty five minutes in, as she describes her daughter as a ‘Disney child’, constantly decked out in rhinestones, faux-fur, glitter and pink and adopting a high-pitched voice to match. Kathy’s implication here is that Paris is dawdling through her adult life, very rich and successful of course, but clinging to childish totems and self-presentation whilst nearing forty years old. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, but an observable and critical fact.

What unfolds next is a deeply existential and moving piece of self-inquiry. This is a woman who appears to be trapped within a prolonged state of adolescence, who is afraid of taking steps into womanhood. Paris admits herself at around an hour in that ‘when you get married, you have to grow up’, before reflecting on her relationships and how they have never culminated in a marriage or children. Of course, the key to a happy, healthy life is not necessarily getting married or having children: this seems like an antique and regressive expectation for women, and it is perfectly fine if she doesn’t want those things. Indeed, an interesting part of the film comes when she discusses family and relationships with sister Nicky Hilton-Rothschild, who dissects whether or not Paris is living under a societal expectation or under her own volition when she ventures that she would like a family. This had echoes of Tinsley Mortimer, another famous blonde, curiously childish socialite, who had the exact same inner tussle whilst starring in the Real Housewives of New York City. Both Hilton and Mortimer have had their eggs frozen, and both are unsure as to whether their dreams of getting married and having children are ones that they inherently feel or are compulsions of patriarchy. Mortimer summed it up well when she drunkenly quipped, ‘maybe I’m just happy with chihuahuas?’ Confusion abounds for them both, especially as both have built brands and images that revolve around their own archetypal adolescence.

This adolescence is expressed, and in none more clearly than in Paris Hilton, through the voice. Jungian analytic psychologist Marion Woodman writes that the voice is deeply connected to the depths of womanhood, conveying a radical acceptance of the Feminine, the yin, that exists in all humans and not related to societal constructions of gender. The voice of the adolescent is girlish and high-pitched, whereas the woman’s voice is deep, slow and resonant. The voice of archetypal womanhood reflects an earthly connection to the body, that physical bridge between the material and the divine, honouring and loving its rhythms, needs and functions. The voice is the harbinger of someone who is present, receptive, in love with life, who embraces process over product and glories in connection, be it with friends, family, the glory of the dawn, poetry or just really, really good food. The body, in particular the female body, has been repeatedly controlled, judged, denied and shamed throughout history, and is the main battleground of patriarchy; has been viewed and gazed upon through the eyes of denigration, sin and doom, when it should be hailed and revered in awe.

In the adoption of a high-pitched voice, therefore, Paris shows that she clings to the familiar simplicity and rootlessness of the adolescent. She travels constantly, never allows herself to take a break and longs for the day when she has finally made a billion dollars. And yet, something tells her she cannot go on like this. She is perennially exhausted, cannot sleep and feels increasingly dissociated and detached from her life and her sense of self. She admits that, yes, the high-pitched happy vision of ‘perfection’ is a character, that she knows few people who aren’t disingenuous, has huge trust issues and repeatedly finds herself in relationships were her boyfriends attempt to control her. The adolescent has run its course: it’s clear in this documentary that the part of her that wants to transition into womanhood and an authentic, connected life, leaving behind the dregs and frivolities of the adolescent, is trying to come to life.

However, transformation is rarely free from pain. Crucially, Woodman suggests, the body holds and records trauma, and needs to be consciously met with compassion and healing. We see this unfold in the last part of the documentary, where Paris reveals that as a teenager, she attended Provo Canyon School, a pseudo-correctional facility for wayward children masking as a school in Utah. She was forcibly taken there, mentally and physically abused, kept in solitary confinement and repeatedly threatened and shamed. Her insomnia and nightmares are rooted in her experience at the school, and her whole career is built upon her desire to escape from and not process her trauma. As a result, her trauma has lived on in her symptoms which now, through this documentary, have been brought out into the daylight. The teenager who suffered so much erected walls, hid behind a façade, pursued material wealth and notoriety and became the Paris Hilton character that we know today. It’s almost as though the hurt and pained teenager is still trapped in the body, revealing itself through a makeshift high-pitched voice, unable to transition to adulthood. Until, perhaps, now.

After speaking with a group of fellow survivors from the school, Paris is captured in her enormous walk-in wardrobe, surrounded by lines and legions of handbags, shoes and jewellery. She looks uncomfortable and openly questions why she has so much stuff that she never wears and never uses. It is a classic moment of a crystal castle shattering around the heroine, the one she built to protect herself from her pain and her trauma. It is eerie how these markers of success, affluence and perfection almost visibly turn into empty voids around her. It’s a tale as old as time: capitalism sells us a story that accumulating wealth and lots of expensive things is the key to our salvation and the happiness we yearn for in our lives, when in fact our endless ‘stuff’ serves to barricade us within ourselves, preventing us from any semblance of connection.

Paris Hilton was one of a number of architects that used capitalism, materialism and white privilege as a bedrock to elevate themselves financially and socially and literally influence the way in which Western society conceives of itself and presents itself. Even if we don’t care about Paris Hilton, we have to acknowledge that the way in which entertainment and social media work has everything to do with the impact she has had. It’s like when people say they don’t care about fashion and I almost instinctively now rattle off Miranda Priestly’s monologue about the blue belts in The Devil Wears Prada, a scene that remarkably and deftly captures the entwining of capitalism, fashion and supposed ‘free choice’. It is because of this that I think Hilton’s documentary is important: yes, she represents and models a dysfunctional relationship with work, materialism and privacy; however, she is also a blueprint for how as a society we all live with traumas, and that our traumas manifest in how we present ourselves, what we buy and how we live our lives. No one is free from their own personal reckoning, that day where we wake up, or are forced to wake up, and realise that we cannot carry on the way we have been living. Of course, the extent to which Paris Hilton barricaded herself from her own trauma is truly epic, but we all have our symptoms, we all have our addictions that make us crave more and more, preventing us from meeting ourselves exactly where we are meant to be (more often than not with our pain). If a more embodied, grounded and authentic version of Paris Hilton is left in its wake, which I am sure she will be, then this documentary and its subject, are wonderful teachers.

Moon baby

September 18, 2020 / eharpingon / Leave a comment

The channels run silver,

Moon baby.

New moon

I bloom

in the black,

ready to receive;

listening

to the whispers

of the stars,

now that

our glowing orb,

pale,

is in darkness

transfixed.

We kiss.

Enveloped in

softness

I turn

my hopeful face

to the vault

as I dance

on the threshold

of the twenty eight.

My dreams

run like trains;

planes hit by

waves;

caught in a

building

burning

and fashions

march by.

Saint Campbell,

Mother’s son,

what initiation

is this?

Of the body,

my body,

that rings

when we kiss?

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Harping On

by Elizabeth Harper-Williams

Culture