Film

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

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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

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Warning: Spoilers for ‘Saltburn’ ahead

On the 19th 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 24th 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 4th 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, 2nd 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, 16th 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, 16th March 2024].

[6] https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/Oxford%20University%20Financial%20Statements%202022-23.pdf [accessed 08:29, 16th March 2024]; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-58885181 [accessed 08:29, 16th 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 17th 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 28th April 2024, 12:42].

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_xZrdoP5rQ&ab_channel=PoliticsJOE [accessed 31st 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 1st 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 1st 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].

Why I won’t be watching ‘Blonde’

/ eharpingon / 2 Comments

For my GCSE English Speaking and Listening assessment in 2007, the topic I landed upon was Marilyn Monroe. I vaguely remember how it began: ‘What do 20th Century Fox, red lipstick and *something else unremembered* have in common? Marilyn Monroe!’ I then proceeded to give what I’m sure was a very dull chronology of her life that I had lifted from ‘The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe’ by Donald H. Wolfe, which I had borrowed from a public library as part of my research. The choice to commit myself to this topic for an assessment was, with hindsight, a bemusing one: I had never seen a film of hers by that point and the first primitive reference to her I can recall was Geri Halliwell replicating the subway grating moment from The Seven Year Itch in the Spice Girls film ‘Spice World’ in 1997. Comically, during the Speaking and Listening, I even unknowingly mispronounced the name of Monroe’s film-noir Niagara, opting for ‘nia-garra’ over the generally agreed upon phonetic pronunciation ‘nahy-ag-ruh’. Very Alicia Silverston playing Cher Horowitz from Clueless, if I say so myself.

My interest in Marilyn Monroe didn’t end there: I had a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes poster on my bedroom wall; received books about her life and wardrobe for birthdays and Christmas; and I kept a black and white photograph of a still from Some Like It Hot on a wall in many lounges in various rented flats I’ve lived in over the years. A friend asked me once: ‘Why do you like her so much?’ I recall that my answer was somewhat vague: that she’d had a hard life and that ‘people’ had been unkind to her so remembering her was important. I still follow an account on Instagram called @perfectlymarilynmonroe that posts on a daily to weekly basis with lesser-known photographs and stories from Monroe’s life.

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to wrack my brains as to why I felt passionately enough about Monroe to give a speech about her life at great length in front of a class of my peers. My deep fascination with her has, indeed, waned over the past few years largely without my noticing: emblematic of this is that the said photograph from Some Like It Hot is currently lying in a bag of other old posters, artworks and fragments from my early twenties, gathering dust. What is becoming clearer for me is that Monroe was a representation, as perhaps she was for many people, of some kind of angelic aspirational figure. Whilst being blonde has something of a cultural reputation for being ‘dumb’, I can only recall almost learning to revere blondness, in particular white blondness, both in my peers and in cultural figures. This started both with my first Barbie and my first intrusive worry about my physical appearance when I noticed, aged five, that all of my school friends were blonde and were, I felt intuitively, valued in a slightly different way than I was by parents and teachers. When I decided, slightly questionably, to ‘go blonde’ after a break-up when I was nineteen, I was immediately asked whether people had started responding to me in a ‘different’ way: a slightly coded enquiry, that left me feeling that my physical and sexual currency had somehow been elevated now that my hair colour was no longer its natural tawny (and, yes, I think gorgeous) brown. 

Monroe must be our culture’s ultimate archetype of this Aphroditic blonde. In the words of Anthony Burgess, she was an embodiment of ‘divine glamour’: physically unattainably beautiful, precious, witty and fun, whilst also seeming to transcend those humanly qualities into something celestial. Yet, her humanness meant that she never crossed into the realm of the purely and deathly symbolic: she seemed like an irreverent bodily, earthy being, vulnerable but also famously and gloriously comfortable in her own skin, like a cat. I am certain I projected a huge amount of my own adolescent gold onto her, seeing in her the goodness, radiance, beauty and joy that I couldn’t see consciously or couldn’t allow myself to accept in myself. As such, I began to uphold her as a role model I profoundly admired, believing I knew and understood her intimately, bittersweetly displacingknowing and understanding myself, and finding in my adoration a sense of meaning and belonging. I wonder if these feelings rooted for me are/were shared by others who upheld Monroe as a sacred role model. It is perhaps then no surprise or coincidence that my attachment to her has lessened, now, as a result of, amongst other things, therapy and by dedicating myself to practices that cultivate love, compassion and acceptance for myself. I don’t need to idolise someone externally when I have the qualities that I revere in abundance within myself.

As such, we arrive at why I have even been considering this at all. It is undeniable that Monroe has remerged in our public consciousness, famously through Kim Kardashian’s problematic wearing of the ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ dress at the 2022 Met Gala, the publicity preceding the film Blonde, and the subsequent furore surrounding its release. Towards the end of a term, a pupil at school said to me of Blonde: ‘I read that that film did her dirty’. Nothing screams cultural permeation and significance more than a thirteen-year-old remembering and recounting something they’ve discovered on one of their voyages across the internet. Yes: Monroe is back, and it feels more complicated than ever.

I decided to start reading ‘Blonde’ by Joyce Carol Oates a month or two before the film was released. Even before its Netflix release on 28th September 2022, the film had already drawn a lot of internet attention thanks to both the intriguing promotional stills that featured uncanny representations of Monroe, played by Ana de Armas, and clips of the 14-minute standing ovation the film received at the Venice Film Festival. Once the film was released, however, everyone from the New York Times to the Independent and social media netizens decried it for being exploitative ‘trauma porn’, that capitalised upon speculation and conjecture about Monroe’s life. I particularly respected Mark Kermode’s shrewd framing of the film as a ‘horror film’ and ‘gothic melodrama’, which, in my mind, served to complicate the fact that it was essentially marketed as a biopic, in spite of references to Oates’ novel in the trailers.[1] I noticed that many of the comments and reviews that read as supportive of the film when the backlash kicked off harked back to the novel, almost claiming that because the film was an adaptation from a book, people needed to calm down about how Monroe was represented; that being an adaptation lent the film some kind of legitimacy. This was problematic on a number of different levels that could be the subject of an essay in and of itself. However, what concerned me the most was that people were appealing to the book as a zenith of some kind of authority, when the whole premise of the book in the first place is startlingly thorny.

Aside from the legal abstract that opens the book with the prerequisite publishing and copyright details, and the declaration of this novel as a work of fiction, Oates provides us with a lengthy ‘Author’s Note’ that forms a singularly disorientating read. Here is where the novel begins, before the introduction of any characters, settings or narration. It interweaves a number of bibliographic references to Monroe’s poetry, Monroe biographies, and secondary material reproduced and referenced throughout the novel, which are held in the same breath as assertions of ‘invention’:

‘Blonde is a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction, and, for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation […] The historic Marilyn Monroe did keep a journal of sorts and she did write poems, or poem-fragments. Of these, only two lines are included in the final chapter (“Help help!”-); the other poems are invented. Certain of the remarks in the chapter “The Collected Works of Marilyn Monroe” are taken from interviews, other are fictitious […] Biographical facts regarding Marilyn Monroe should be sought not in Blonde, which is not as intended as a historic document, but in biographies of the subject […] Of the books on acting cited and alluded to, The Thinking Body by Mabel Todd, To the Actor by Michael Chekov, and An Actor Prepare and My Life in Art  by Constantin Stanislavski are genuine books, while The Actor’s Handbook and the Actor’s Life and The Paradox of Acting are invented’.[2]

From the beginning, Oates immediately seems to perform the bewildering intertwining of fiction and reality: the ‘Author’s Note’ reads as a pre-emptive bombardment, constructing the overarching authorities of fact and fiction that are cast over the novel with the force and momentum of a high-speed train, throwing up questions and complications from the start: what exactly does ‘‘life’ in the form of fiction’ constitute? Is that not what fiction does and has done since its inception? Furthermore, the ‘nothing-to-see-here-officer’ intonation of Oates’ equivocation that the novel is ‘not intended as a historic document’ seems particularly slippery. Thanks to Roland Barthes and others, I have come to understand authorial intention as a concept that forms a contentious and, to put it bluntly, irrelevant focus of enquiry.[3] Whether done performatively or not, statements of intent, and their denial thereof, always raise my hackles: despite its seeming nonchalance, Oates here seems to be attempting to, or performing, the attempt to control the reception of her novel. This is doubly ironic as she follows this assertion with a complicated tangle of references that are both real and entirely made up, yet through the use of formal bibliographic conventions, such as italicisation, do not appear as such. Not to mention the ambiguity of the statement itself: ‘not intended as a historic document’. Not ‘not intended as an accurate history’ but ‘not intended as a historic document’. Which means that a claim is being made here that Blonde, in some way, exists outside of history. I would argue that any document published with an ISBN and with a catalogue record in the British Library constitutes an ‘historic document’: it is of a time and of a place. Whether Oates or Oates-performing-the-author believes it or not, her novel has entered discourse, it has entered consciousness with all of the contextual influences that informed its production and its reception, thus granting it a certain ‘historic’ position, regardless of whether its subject matter actually deals with history. Which the note tells us it does… and doesn’t.

I don’t mind that the novel starts with the ‘author’ running rings around us. I love being thrown into a conundrum which challenges my position as a reader, demanding interrogation and criticality over complacency. The is undeniably the air of the Trickster to the whole thing. However, it wouldn’t be a problem if the book wasn’t about someone who was real and is unable to do what she wants with the narrative: whether to disregard it, ignore it, challenge it or lean into it. And what a narrative it is: Blonde is one of a few books that I have found really excruciating to read: page after page, chapter after chapter of objectification, exploitation and violence. I actually didn’t mind the start of the novel and the mapping out of Norma Jeane’s relationship with her mother; I think it would make a great exercise to draw it into comparison with the start of David Copperfield, which I found equally compelling in the ways in which Dickens too leans into the psychological darkness and torment of an unhappy childhood. However, the rest becomes something of a relentless barrage of pure misery. Why did Marilyn Monroe have to be presented in this way? If this story had to be told, surely a fictional starlet could have been constructed upon which to map Monroe’s story, thereby removing the stickiness of projecting a load of cultural baggage onto someone, without their consent, who really existed.

Blonde’s iterations as a novel and a film are all a matter of projection. In choosing to render Monroe a total victim under the guise of critiquing the twin forces of patriarchy and capitalism, the book, in my view, ends up becoming an oppressor; it becomes the toxic water that oppresses, stunts, and drowns out the reality of a person who once existed, denying her control over her own narrative and story. This is all the more important, and all the more baffling, because we live in a post-#MeToo world where agency and the reclamation of power and truth are a core part of women pushing back against sexual harassment and violence, as argued by the movement’s founder, Tarana Burke: ‘There is inherent strength in agency. And #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency, it’s about claiming it’.[4] Blonde was first published in 2000, six years before Burke first used the phrase #MeToo on My Space and a further eleven years before it gained significant global traction after the New York Times broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women in Hollywood. Therefore, the book clearly comes from an earlier time when ‘feminism’ was still a dirty word and stories of sexual violence and harassment were still marginalised. In 2000, perhaps society needed an Homeric story of trauma to act as a sledgehammer for us to wake up culturally and resist the violence of patriarchy, even though stories of sexual violence have long been shared and published. Yet, we are no longer in 2000; from a 2022 perspective, Blonde’s framing of Monroe’s torturous suffering in its obscenity and relentlessness verges on the gratuitously perverse. More than ever, we need testimony and we need story sharing: but a text claiming fictitiousness about a real person who is subjected to an indulgence of abuse and trauma is not the same thing. The biographical film She Said, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, the New York Times journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein revelations, was also released in 2022 and is something of a counterpoint to the release of Blonde. The film doesn’t shy from giving voice to traumatic experiences, including Ashley Judd’s who, notably, plays herself; however, instead of presenting horrific detailed scenes of abuse, the film centres women’s experiences, storytelling and solidarity in challenging gargantuan male power. I would argue that it is a much more important film for exploring the real lives and stories of real people who experienced sexual violence, rather than projecting conjecture and contributing to the oppression of someone who will never have the right to reply.

Am I surprised that Monroe and her story continues to be plagued and harassed by patriarchy (and, yes, I consider Blonde to be a patriarchal novel)? No. I see Blonde and its cinematic iteration in the same vein as the documentary Amy, released in 2015. Neither Marilyn Monroe nor Amy Winehouse are allowed a say on their own story, let alone offered catharsis, redemption or transcendence. Two woman are placed onto a pedestal and then torturously and repeatedly torn down. They are brutalised within and by these texts in a way that I hope audiences find increasingly unacceptable, especially when compared with the adulation and adoration that men like Ayrton Senna in Senna and Kurt Cobain in Montage of Heck have received. It really is a tale as old as patriarchal time.

I am not ashamed to admit that when I finished reading Blonde I threw it to the ground, which has only happened one other time in my life (after reading Crime and Punishment, but that’s another story). I will not watch Blonde. Just as I don’t care if there really was a ‘real’ Shakespeare, I don’t care to speculate on ‘who’ the ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe is or was, especially when posited by a film that is problematic for all the reasons stated above and was applauded by the likes of Casey Affleck. Instead, I will re-watch Gentleman Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot for the thousandth times; I will recall how when Jane Russell tried to encourage Monroe to join a Bible group, she, fabulously, in turn decided to introduce Russell to Freud; I will enjoy the photographs of Monroe reading Leaves of Grass and Ulysses and leaning over a balcony in New York; I will enjoy the Warhol paintings depicting her; I will thrill at Lana Del Rey’s play with her image in the videos to National Anthem, Paradiso and Candy Necklaces; I will reminisce about the homage to Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend in Noughties teen staple ‘Gossip Girl’ where Monroe was played by Serena Van Der Woodsen AKA Blake Lively. What real joy this woman has brought and the bright, bright shadow she continues to cast. I dedicate the end of this essay to Marilyn, in her own words:

‘When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want. If they care enough to bother with what I do, then I’m already better than them’.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/25/blonde-review-marilyn-monroe-netflix-film-ana-de-armas-andrew-dominik-joyce-carol-oates [accessed 31/05/2023, 15:15]

[2] Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates (London: 4th Estate, 2018), p. i.

[3] https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf [accessed 31/05/2023, 15:18]

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/15/me-too-founder-tarana-burke-women-sexual-assault [accessed 31/05/2023, 15:23]

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

/ 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.

Love Note – Marvel Films

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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 21st 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 21st 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:

  1. 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.

    

Love Note Year in Review: 2019

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Like 2016, 2019 has, in many ways, been a stellar year for me, but has been societally shambolic and difficult to digest. Here, I have written about some of the films, music, TV shows and podcasts that have been my companions along the way. These have all inspired me, taught me new things, expanded my thoughts and given me a richer understanding of the world and the people in it. Enjoy and do let me know what you think.

Book: Crudo by Olivia Laing

Crudo 2

I have read a few books this year that have completely blown me away, including Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  and Circe by Madeline Miller. Here, however, I want to discuss dearest Crudo. I bought this book from Shakespeare and Company whilst in Paris on the recommendation of a great friend with great taste. Crudo is a very short book but it is an absolute gut punch of hilarity, darkness and tenderness. Indeed, it’s hard to really pin down exactly what happens in it because it is such a heady mixture of consciousness, recollection, projection and commentary. For me, this spells perfection: I have always loved character studies and don’t think an exacting plot is always necessary all the time. What I can get to with Crudo is that it centres on Kathy, who is getting married but has all sorts of qualms and skeletons to negotiate with first. Almost every page I declared ‘I LOVE THIS BOOK’ as it twisted and turned unpredictably through the mental chaos of anxiety, exhaustion, eating, friendship, loss, Twitter and drunken chaos in beautiful Italian locations. It is a love letter to anyone who is in despair at recent political turns of events, sardonically laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation whilst also grieving and mourning the rise of hatred, fear and intolerance in the West. I think this book will benefit from many readings, and I cannot wait to sink my teeth into it again.

Film: Apocalypse Now

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I was horrendously late in joining this film’s bandwagon, but was so glad when I did earlier this year. From that first shot of palm trees and the withering notes of The End by The Doors floating in like a breeze before the chaos, I was completely enthralled. This film is one of the greatest examples of a disorientating, arthouse viewing experience blended with the hallmarks of an epic: dramatic helicopter sequences and iconic lines offset with simmering delusion and madness all the way throughout. One such line, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, is a case in point: the line is delivered so much more softly than I thought it would be. I imagined that line to be a yelled declaration in the heat of conflict, but it is almost a tender revelation: an insight into how war and nationalism has warped and disfigured these men’s emotional engagement with the world around them. Amongst a host of spectacular performances, and there really isn’t a bad one in the whole film, Dennis Hopper stood out for me. With cameras draped around his neck like beads, Hopper plays a sycophantic, voyeuristic photojournalist, an unnamed self-declared ‘little man’ who has been brainwashed by Colonel Kurtz and is always ready to get a picture. An embodiment of a culture and a media that will transmit horror without reflection, Hopper’s photojournalist is the keenest harbinger of the shit state that is our current retinue of communication and media affairs.

Music: Beware of the Dogs, Stella Donnelly

StellaDonnelly_BewareOfTheDogs

Music-wise, this year has been a stunner. With the returns of Lana Del Rey (who I wrote about here), Michael Kiwanuka, fka Twigs and Nick Cave amongst many others, and Billie Eilish’s brilliant debut, this year has felt particularly golden. I want to give my attention here to singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly, whose album Beware of the Dogs is undoubtedly one of my favourites from the brace of brilliance that was 2019. If there were to be any soundtrack to the #MeToo movement, it would be this album. From a sassy , beachy opener that holds a ‘grabbing’ middle-aged man to account, in what I would argue is a direct middle finger up to the likes of Donald Trump, to the searing and devastating ‘Boys Will Be Boys’, Donnelly keenly and devastatingly  confronts rampant toxic masculinity and a patriarchal culture that is riddled with sexual assault and violence. And yet, even with these serious concerns, the album is undeniably fun. With a contents list that features the maddening performativity of relationships, the deconstruction of awkward family dynamics and cake allergies in a register that nods to Noughties Lily Allen and Kate Nash (but with plinky plonky music exchanged for a wilting easy-breezy Australian nonchalance), this album feels assured, mature and endlessly witty. I can’t recommend it enough.

TV: The Politician, Netflix

The Politician

As the Golden Age of Television enters its late period of peak saturation, this year has once again been brilliant, if not slightly exhausting. Shows I loved included Stranger Things, Big Little Lies, The Real Housewives of New York City which, quite frankly, deserves an Emmy (that trip to Miami, in particular the first night, was the trip to end all Bravo trips), The Last Czars, which expertly wove dramatic reconstruction with historical analysis, and His Dark Materials. The Politician, made by the producers behind Glee (which I never much cared for) is an absolutely hilarious, obscene, outrageous drama which follows a group of Californian uber-rich teenagers taking part in a high school election campaign. Whilst this may ring with all the hallmarks of another glossy, predictable teen drama, The Politician is hilarious, piercingly dark and shocking, with some of the biggest knots of twists and turns I have seen on a TV show. We had to take a break after watching the first couple of episodes because it was so intense. Yet, the show’s astute political and social commentary feels absolutely essential in a ravaged post-truth Western world, in particular the stand alone episode ‘The Voter’, which serves as a microcosm of the lives of undecided and politically disaffected members of the electorate. With a soundtrack reminiscent of Western revenge tragedies and dramas, and a wardrobe department to rival seminal teen show Gossip Girl, The Politician is a sensory riot, and one of the most groundless viewing experiences I have had: I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next or which bizarre direction the drama was going to take. This all serves to make it utterly compelling and brilliant television.

Podcasts

I have found it impossible to pick one podcast that has stood out as my favourite this year. Different podcasts serve very different moods and purposes, and there is no singular podcast to be drawn from my list of regulars and favourites.

Reasons

Reasons to Be Cheerful – Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd’s podcast forms the audio backdrop to my Monday mornings. This podcast has introduced me to many exciting concepts and policy ideas that I hope will become a part of the fabric of our politics in the future. Favourite episodes included topics like social care for the elderly, tax on frequent fliers, music and history education, the power of protest, community organisation, architecture and town planning and sustainable fashion. I am also exceedingly proud that my email on green fashion alternatives and tips was read out by Ed himself. #goals

Dressed.jpg

Dressed: The History of Fashion – This podcast fills the gap that glossy magazines have left in my life (I still buy the September issue of Vogue and the December issue of Harper’s Bazaar but that’s just about it). Instead, I have a podcast full of incredible interviews and explorations into the personal and cultural stories of my favourite designers and some of the clothes I wear on a day-to-day basis. I have enjoyed listening to episodes on The Met Gala, fashion and physique (mapping the female body), the history of the penny loafer, the biography of Cristóbal Balenciaga, the history of the French haute couture industry (Worth, Vionnet and Louis Vuitton being some of the most interesting stories) and a compelling conversation with Dr Monica Germanà about Bond girl style, looking at sexual, racial and colonial implications of women’s bodies and women’s dress in the franchise. I have shunned James Bond for many years but this conversation, with its focus on masculine and imperial anxiety, has shifted my perspective entirely.

DIDs

The Desert Island Discs Archive – This year, I discovered the delights of conversations and the musical favourites of some of Western culture’s greats. Tucked away in the archive, I found Powell and Pressburger, Leonide Massine, Tennessee Williams and Lauren Bacall amongst others. Gregory Peck was as dreamy as I hoped he would be and had a great story about the filming of Moby Dick, which coincidentally was shot down the road from where my grandparents lived in Wales; Jessica Mitford was hilarious and sassy; Roald Dahl was a bit of a snob; and P L Travers wasn’t as scary as I thought she’d be and picked a list formed exclusively of recordings of poetry being read aloud. One such recording was of Alec Guinness’s reading ‘Little Gidding’ from T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets, which was a balm I never knew I needed. Utterly transporting listening.

One last thing…

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, Netflix

Joseph Campbell

Originally broadcast in 1988, and which I watched on Netflix this year but has now been removed, this series of six conversations in six episodes between comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers is one of the most fascinating TV shows I have ever seen. Combining conversation, story-telling, animation, archive footage and film clips, this series takes a deep look into the psyche and collective unconscious of human beings. Campbell takes us on a bewildering but utterly brilliant journey through indigenous ritual, Jungian archetypes, the world religions, Western capitalism, the sacred feminine, the interplay of symbols and allegory, the sublime, the liminal passage and many other areas to present a multi-faceted, deep and intriguing portrait of human behaviour, interconnectedness and culture. Every single episode had something profound to learn from it, but the episode that stood out to me the most centred on animal-human relations, including the role of sacrifice, the transcendence of Death and the horror of a world where human beings are divorced from where they get their food, their clothing, almost everything. Additionally, I loved Campbell’s ideas that stemmed from the Buddhist teachings: that the present is all there is, and in the present, when you sit wholly aware, unblinkered and unfettered from trappings of ego (fear, envy, jealousy, anger, boredom etc.) we are witness to and subjects of, what could be called, the divine. I have never thought of myself as a religious person, and I still don’t think I am, but I found immense power in what Campbell had to share. There are iterations of ancient behaviours and beliefs all around us, and Campbell’s myth work is a great source of inspiration and an anchor when the ocean of chaos, anxiety and societal disruption feels too overwhelming. His work prioritises the power of metaphor beyond what is material, and it has enriched my life immensely.

 

First Response: ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ 2/2

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Part Two: Tarantino’s representation of women

To continue my exploration of expectation in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, (my critique of the ranch scene can be found here) I would like to discuss an aspect of the film that received a lot of traction in the run-up to its release and occupied commentators afterwards.

During the film’s promotional tour at Cannes Film Festival, a clip from Once Upon a Time’s press conference went semi-viral. It featured a journalist asking Quentin Tarantino about Margot Robbie, having been in films such as The Wolf of Wall Street and I, Tonya being given few lines as Sharon Tate in this film. The clip can be seen here. Tarantino unequivocally ‘rejects [the] hypothesis’ and Robbie answered that she ‘appreciated the exercise’ of using alone-time on screen to construct a character as opposed to being presented always in relation to or through interaction with others. This did little to convince some commentators upon the film’s release, including Clémence Michallon at the Independent, who concluded that Tarantino’s lack of dialogue for Robbie was indicative of Tarantino’s male gaze subsuming everything, which was both ‘insulting’ and ‘boring’.[1]

This has been a sticky issue in my thinking about the film. I am, as many of you aware, a big advocate for women being given nuanced, interesting characters in film. Having said that, I am not a strict disciple of the Bechdel Test, whilst I appreciate its importance as a basic bar for storytelling and representation on-screen.[2] (For the record: this film does pass the test). I really enjoyed Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, but it’s true that Robbie does not say much and this is slightly uncomfortable: Sharon Tate does little more than put music on, drive around in a delightful Porsche and dance about. I can absolutely appreciate the criticism; however, I think this is, ultimately, a simplistic argument, given the self-reflection at work in the film and because of the way in which Tarantino uses the film and its setting to play with history and expectation.

Similarly, I think it is important to highlight that having dialogue in a film does not necessarily save women from poor representation (see my footnote on the Bechdel test). The journalist at Cannes suggested The Wolf of Wall Street as a film where Robbie was given plenty of dialogue to work with, and yet Martin Scorsese’s representation of her was sexualised beyond belief. Robbie was front and centre of Suicide Squad as Harley Quinn, and yet here too she was hyper-sexualised and Zac Snyder gave her little to work with beyond that. Michallon at the Independent makes the case that in Once Upon a Time, Tarantino uses Robbie as Sharon Tate to convey a deified form of femininity: ‘a luminous, kind, generous angel of a woman whose heart seems wide open to the world. It’s a flattering depiction, for sure, but it’s also terribly reductive […] a lifeless, perpetually cheerful doll’. I would argue, in the first instance, that the fact that we see these former attributes as reductions is a damning indictment both of the nastiness we tolerate in society and the way in which we accept being open-hearted and kind as completely unrealistic. Sharon Tate was described with reverence by the likes of Mia Farrow and was famed for her generosity and kindness, there is no reason why this should not be significant in Tarantino’s representation of her here. Secondly, I would like to argue that through the film’s use of history as a fluid play-thing, Margot Robbie and Sharon Tate were not reduced within the narrative of the film, and that in more ways than focusing on one female character, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood waves in an empowered cohort of women and womanhood.

One of the most important parts of Michallon’s argument is that Tate does not experience any kind of personal growth and that ‘watching people just live is boring’. Of course, this is an extremely personal assessment: I happen to be an enormous fan of films where not a lot happens and what we are offered is an in-depth character study. What is so ironic about this claim, however, is that in real life, we cannot watch Sharon Tate live and we haven’t been able to since 1969. This is singularly important in the film. We might complain that not a lot happens because she spends a day on her own and she doesn’t talk to anyone, but there is some joy in watching a woman on a solo trip to the cinema (an exercise I would recommend all women indulge in/challenge themselves to at one point or another), enjoying time with her friends, dancing and having fun and preparing for motherhood when we know in real life that Tate was robbed of the chance of being able to do this. Furthermore, we are offered nuance in the dialogue-less-ness: in her interaction with a female hitchhiker, Tate drops off the woman, wishes her all the best on her ‘adventure’, thus suggesting that she spent the majority of the journey listening to someone else’s story; we are offered actual footage of Sharon Tate in the cinema that Robbie’s Tate watches, forming homage, an opportunity for self-reflection and, for us, a melancholy funhouse mirror of reality. It is an echo of the fact that this film plays with history, something that will be completely apparent by the end of the film.  Alternatively, although Tate is depicted as loving and loveable, the interpretation can be made that she displays smugness, vanity and happy-go-lucky privilege in her life as a white, blonde, beautiful woman; a kind of flip-side to the open-heartedness and generosity that some find so problematic. One way in which I think the film could have been improved is if Tate had had some kind of hand in killing the hippies in a badass, heavily pregnant way. And yet, just maybe, the best thing to do for a character who in life was a victim to such appalling violence, was to keep her removed from it.

pregnant

This is where bittersweetness seeps into the film: we know that in real life, she does not survive that night in 1969, and neither do her friends. When she offers Rick Dalton the opportunity to come into her house after the pool party of hippy carnage and the end titles begin to materialise on-screen, we know that we have reached the fairytale territory that only Hollywood can give us.[3] Primarily, it is Tate in the position of power: she is the one who could be a useful contact for Dalton, who spends most of the film choked up and flailing about, and not the other way round. She is the valuable, influential and powerful contact to have in the industry, not the male television star.  Additionally,  and similarly to seminal Tarantino revenge film Inglourious Basterds, which re-writes the history of the Second World War with Hitler and his cronies getting an epically fiery bloody death at the hands of escaped Jew Shosanna, in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood we are offered an alternative reality where Charles Manson’s blood-thirsty hippies don’t butcher Sharon Tate,  but get their comeuppance at the hands of Brad Pitt and a cute dog, and Sharon Tate herself is in a position to offer help and support to Rick Dalton in the loving and kind way that we have come to expect from her. Tarantino offers us a moment where history was very different: where bad guys are punished, the good survive and everything should have been OK.

And yet, despite the satisfying end that is put to the hippies, the heroics of Cliff Booth and his dog and the hilarity of the flame-thrower in the garden shed, the ending here is poignant and sad, as opposed to the jubilation and bad-assery of Inglourious Basterds . The camera lingers on Tate, Dalton and Tate’s friends from afar, as they introduce themselves and discuss the attack. Their conversation is barely audible, and the camera stays put, almost from a high CCTV angle, as they slowly follow one another into Tate’s house. A lot of space is created between the actors and the camera and, ergo, the audience watching. It enables us to sit within this strange liminal space where we can enjoy and revel in what we have just witnessed; but the distance cultivates a sense of knowing; a knowing that this did not happen. Tarantino wrote that Sharon Tate stayed alive and continued to live her beautiful life, but we know that she didn’t, murdered as she was in the most horrifying and violent way. Pertinently, the camera then stays on Tate’s Porsche and the other cars they have in the driveway, using the visual metaphors to reflect the power of the Hollywood machine to re-write and re-create things as we want them to be. Hollywood is itself a vehicle for change, for creativity and for embracing life over destruction; or, at the very least, offering the façade of that. It has a twofold power to reflect change and to exact change; to re-write history but also to ensure that the future is safeguarded. Ultimately, in this case, Sharon Tate can only stay alive in the movies.

Hollywood’s role in the film is developed and explored in numerous parts of the film, in particular with regard to the representation and role of women. Importantly, and as mentioned in my critique of the ranch scene, Cliff Booth does not have sex with Pussycat, the underage hitchhiking hippy with impressive underarm hair, in his car. This is not what she expects or, perhaps, what the audience may expect, particularly as this is a dynamic that has pervaded the film industry for as long as Hollywood has been functioning. Harvey Weinstein was a producer and collaborator with Tarantino for every single film he has written and directed, so the significance of this scene cannot be overstated.

Trudi

Similarly, one of the shining stars of the film comes in the form of Trudi, played by the delightful Julia Butters. At only 8 years old, Trudi almost steals the film and her character is one of the standouts amongst a cast of standout performances. Her endearing and academic approach to the craft of acting is refreshing, powerful and leaves Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton’s a gibbering, insecure wreck. Indeed, his entire self-worth on the set of the Western they are shooting together boils down to what Trudi thinks of his performance and his ability to achieve the performance, in particular through knowing his lines. In the scene where he gives himself a rollicking in his trailer, he mentions Trudi, berating himself to not show himself up in front of her. She, because of her commitment to her work, her ability to interpret and understand story, her thorough approach to research and her interest in the wider industry, is made out to be a force to be reckoned with. As with the subversive ranch scene, where Tarantino constructs the difference between psycho-killer hippies and the misunderstood, kooky youth, and thereby critiquing snowflakism, in Trudi we see the highest hope for future generations in film and beyond: doing their research, speaking their minds and not limiting themselves to who they think they should be. At the end of a long scene they shoot together, Trudi, who we know at this point Dalton completely respects and admires, tells him that he just put in the best acting performance she has ever seen, and Dalton immediately chokes up. His belief in himself completely stems from the way in which he is perceived by this precocious, wise and talented young girl and he can barely contain his emotion at having shone in her eyes.

As such, I believe that the argument that women are reduced in this film is not a very convincing one. Sharon Tate does not speak much in the film, it is true; but her role in the film, sensitively portrayed with the respect of Tate’s family in mind as much as for Tate herself, is to celebrate life and the power we have to construct our own narratives. If she had been killed at the end, then she would truly have served as a lifeless doll; but she lives, and she is glorious. She is not part of the overall plot because the plot is about two menopausal men trying to stay relevant. Robbie’s Tate does not have that concern and has ample time to while away the time, with added luxury of being on her own, both during the film and, thanks to the film’s revision of history, we can assume after the credits have rolled. To compound this, we have Trudi, a bright spark for the future who has plenty to teach the struggling Rick Dalton; and a man in Cliff Booth who respects the boundaries of power, age and experience by not taking advantage of a young girl. Tarantino has never shied away from giving audiences strong female characters, but in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood he provides a much more subtle offering, playing with our expectations and using a variety of characters and dynamics to do a great justice to the women of the film and the actors who play them.

 

[1] ‘Quentin Tarantino’s male gaze in ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ isn’t just insulting – it’s profoundly boring’, The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-quentin-tarantino-sharon-tate-margot-robbie-lines-a9061446.html [accessed 12:05, 19th August 2019].

[2] The Bechdel Test, created by Alison Bechdel, suggests that to pass a basic representational threshold, films must have more than one female character, the female characters must speak to one another and the female characters must speak to each other about something that does not involve a man. Of course, many culturally celebrated films do not pass this test, but then neither do films like Gravity, A Star is Born and Arrival, in spite of the lengthy screen-time afforded to women and where the quality of the female characters is exceptional. Equally, there are many female-centric films where women have plenty of dialogue and on-screen time, but their lives and conversations revolve around men.

[3] I want to add here that the irony of Dalton proclaiming earlier on in the film that he is ‘one pool party’ away from Roman Polanski and then fighting a hippy with a flame thrower in his pool becoming his ticket to friendship with Tate, is just hilarious.

First response: ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ 1/2

/ eharpingon / 1 Comment

Part One: The Spahn Ranch scene

I went to see ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, on the 14th August 2019. As soon as the credits began to roll, opinions began to surface from cinema-goers around us:

‘It wasn’t very ‘Tarantino’ until the end’.

‘I wanted more of Margot and Leo together’.

‘Nothing happened’.

In many ways, this confirmed what I thought the whole film was reaching towards: expectation. Or rather, the dismantling and reflection upon what we want and what baggage we bring with us to a cinematic experience. The film focused on a number of things: the film itself, Tarantino as writer and director and Hollywood as a mechanism for hopes, dreams and ideology. In many ways, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was a perfect fit within Tarantino’s oeuvre, offering many moments of self-reflection, humour and a fluid sense of history. In two parts, I would like to discuss some important aspects of the film that stood out upon my first watch of the film: in the first, I offer a close reading of the ranch scene half way through the film and in the second, I challenge some of the commentary regarding the representation of women in the film, in particular Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate.

Primarily, I think it is important to acknowledge what I thought was problematic about the film and made for uncomfortable viewing. I was not a fan of the exchange between Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth and Mike Moh’s Bruce Lee. I found Pitt having to take his fake hair off before their fight absolutely hilarious, but I did not think the representation of Lee’s karate fighting, including all of his sound effects, were the homage that Tarantino claimed they were.[1] It fell into the realm of mockery, in the same way that Kill Bill Volume Two descends into a kung-fu farce for a while. Any subtlety around these moments in both films is lost, and Lee is reduced to a laughable caricature. Similarly, I found the storyline of Booth killing his wife and getting away with it in slightly poor taste. Arguably, there is almost a Gatsby-esque ambiguity to this story: even with the flashback of Booth and his annoying wife on a boat, it could be argued that this is an event fabricated through rumour and speculation of extras and film crew, neither confirmed nor denied. Yet, with the number of women who are killed every week by a partner or former partner still not being treated as seriously as the social issue that it is, including the fact that funding for domestic abuse charities in the UK comes from the luxury tampon tax that menstruating women are subject to, I am not sure that ambiguity on such a subject should be pissed around with.[2]

There are many aspects of the film where Tarantino is playful with expectation, in a script that is often light-hearted, funny and self-deprecating in a way that we have not seen Tarantino play with before. Primarily, there are the references to feet all over the place: Pussycat’s feet squished against Booth’s windscreen; Sharon Tate’s bare feet in the cinema; Squeakie Froome using her foot to point Booth to George Spahn’s room etc. Tarantino’s foot fetish is something of Hollywood legend and the fact that there were so many shots of feet in this film suggests that he wanted to take the piss out of himself and the rumours for as long as he is able to. Similarly, there was the mention of Spaghetti Westerns not being worth Rick Dalton’s time: Django Unchained is famously an homage to the Spaghetti Western genre also starring Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated for an Oscar in that role, who here plays Rick Dalton. Additionally, the long, weighty scenes spent filming Dalton’s Westerns, and Dalton’s typecasting in Westerns in general, perhaps pokes fun at the fact that Tarantino’s last film, and the film that succeeded Django Unchained, was The Hateful Eight, another Western that had a Roadshow running time of over three hours and was described as sluggish, slow and boring by many critics.[3] Tarantino doesn’t let himself off the hook in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, and the film feels, in many ways, humorous and self-aware as a result. It doesn’t perhaps command the edginess of Pulp Fiction or the epic odyssey-feel of Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs or Django Unchained, but the humour is still on-point and the effect is a lightness that has rarely shown up in Tarantino’s films before, where crime and violence is purposefully more prolific and commonplace.

The part of the film that most demonstrates Tarantino’s toying with expectation comes when Cliff Booth is taken to the Spahn hippy ranch on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The scene is already set for expectations and stereotypes being toyed with as Booth rejects the sexual advances of the hitch hiking hippy Pussycat on account of her age. She reveals that she has performed all sorts of sexual favours for men who have picked her up in the past. The couple have chemistry and Booth has signalled his interest in the number of times he spots Pussycat around Hollywood prior to their actual meeting; however, this white middle aged man decides to go no further with her when the sexual opportunity is presented to him on a plate. For a cinematic white alpha male to turn down a spontaneous encounter feels pretty progressive: James Bond certainly wouldn’t have done. It seems here that Tarantino is playing with what we expect from white leading men in Hollywood and, in turn, the representation of women, which I explore more deeply in my next essay. In a film that has ‘Treat Her Right’ by Roy Head and the Traits as its first soundtrack listing (with lyrics like ‘If you want a little lovin’ / You gotta start real slow / She’s gonna love you tonight now / If you just treat her right now’) Tarantino is offering something more progressive in the realm of relationships between men and women. It is appropriate that the stereotype of the older man involved with a younger girl is subverted, especially in light of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein, and Hollywood itself becoming the epicentre of the worldwide #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

margaret-qualley-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-700x321

Once at the ranch, Tarnatino sets a ghoulish and eerie scene, with waifish young women and long-haired men looming about evidently having drunk the Manson Kool-Aid. Tension builds as Booth pushes to see his old colleague George Spahn, whom he suspects has been overruled and overrun by the hippy family. We are told, however, that he is ‘napping’.  A woman called ‘Gypsy’, played by the infamously controversial Lena Dunham, seems to be in charge of the place; George’s house is a dirty hovel; and Dakota Fanning, playing Squeakie Froome, is formidable with her piercing eyes, her commands and her commitment to watching television. Booth doesn’t take no for an answer and enters George’s room where… George is napping. George wakes up, becomes pissed off that he has been woken up, seems to be absolutely fine and wants to go back to sleep so he can watch television later. Tarantino builds up a big expectation that there is something rotten at the ranch, that George is probably out of his mind and that a big bust-up or reckoning is on the cards. However, everything is fine. Weird but fine. Squeakie is freaky, but she’s fine. She doesn’t lie to Booth about George being asleep and she is as ruthless about what she wants as Booth is himself. With Lena Dunham hanging about, in her first major on-screen role after the divisive and complicated Girls, we assume that there must be something questionable going on. Her casting in this part of the film feels almost deliberate precisely because she irks people and makes people uncomfortable. And yet, she is relatively harmless.

Similarly, and moments later, we begin to expect a big bust-up between Booth and Tex, a male hippy on a horse who is summoned back to the ranch after Booth beats up a guy who burst his tyre. Tex epically races back to the ranch, Tarantino giving him lengthy screen time as he rides through the canyon, providing beautiful wide panning shots of him galloping in the sunshine, as per the Westerns parodied at the beginning of the film. Unfortunately, he arrives too late because Booth has already driven off, happily listening to the radio. Over the course of his writing career, Tarantino has never shied away from surprising us with violence or building up action to a violent crescendo; yet, in the instance of Tex in particular, the time for violence to erupt is slightly out of joint. This is an opportunity for violence to bubble up into a lengthy fist-fight or shoot-out but he arrives too late. As such, I would argue, the opportunity for violence to be delivered to us on a plate is purposefully missed. Tarantino attempts to frustrate what we come to expect from a Tarantino film by holding our lust for quintessential Tarantino violence at bay. Booth beats up a hippy for puncturing his tyre and he kind of deserves it. Beyond that, there is nothing superfluous.

Furthermore, I would argue that casting the likes of Lena Dunham and Dakota Fanning to lead an anonymous cast of slightly weird but, in the moment, harmless characters, is a nod to cultural anxiety held around youth. Lena Dunham is interesting casting because she is held simultaneously in high regard and disdain by the viewing public; Fanning, on the other hand, has successfully navigated child stardom, has a brilliant reputation in the industry and has many impressive performances to recommend her.  In a time where Millennials and Gen-Zers are treated with disdain for their focus on the climate crisis, identity politics and everything a conservative older generation decries as snowflakism, Tarantino delivers a bunch of layabout hippies who, in this moment, are weird but ultimately fine. The familiarity and renown of these actors in particular helps to convey and play with this. Of course, there is the spectre of Charles Manson looming over the hippies, but Tarantino makes the point to distinguish between a misunderstood misfit youth and actual psycho killers. To cement this, he uses another surprisingly familiar face: Maya Hawke, daughter of famous Tarantino regular Uma Thurman. [4] Hawke plays Flower Child, a member of the hippy group who abandons the three murderous ‘pig-killing’ hippies (whose exchange reminded me of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in Pulp Fiction), steals their car and leaves them in the lurch. Using such a recognisable face to play a weirdo but who wants no part in violence and carnage helps Tarantino to establish this spectrum of youth and to play with our assumptions and expectations. There are always going to be weirdos and arseholes, but not all of them are going to go on a killing spree; we may expect certain behaviours and outcomes from a group of people, or violence in a Tarantino film, but that is because we bring our own baggage of what we want and what we think with us wherever we go.

Tarantino is at an interesting point in his career where he can toy with being self-referential and also with the expectation of what we think we are going to get with a Tarantino film. He has a backlog of material with which people are extremely familiar and, as such, he can and does frustrate and toy with what he has constructed for us to want over the thirty years he has been writing. The ranch scene isn’t explosive and I can see how people might interpret that it all falls slightly flat and underwhelming, because nothing actually happens. However, with beautiful irony and in a way that builds up to the later chaos, this scene is rich with posturing, preconceptions and imagery, and I think that is perfect story-telling within the world of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. In some ways, this is a sunny, light and hopeful film and Tarantino leaves out violence until it is truly necessary at the end of the film (and he really goes to town with it in the best possible way). But that does not mean that the rest of the film is passive and blank: it seethes with tension, with frustration, weirdness and curiosities. As I will explore in my next essay, it is also tinged with undeniable melancholy and bittersweetness. Whatever expectations we have of a Tarantino film are healthily disrupted by the ranch scene in particular and I think it is a brilliant move on Tarantino’s part.

[1] ‘Quentin Tarantino Defends ‘Arrogant’ Portrayal of Bruce Lee in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’’, https://variety.com/2019/film/news/quentin-tarantino-bruce-lee-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-1203299921/ [accessed 17:07 19th August 2019].

[2] ‘The women killed on one day around the world’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-46292919 [accessed 21:24, 20th August 2019].

[3] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_hateful_eight/reviews?type=top_critics [accessed 21:22, 20th August 2019].

[4] I want to show an awareness here that Maya Hawke’s presence in the film is an interesting one, considering her mother’s estranged relationship with Tarantino, who forced her to drive an unsafe car during the filming of Kill Bill. Click here for Thurman’s interview with the New York Times detailing the incident as well as the harassment and violence she was subjected to at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, Tarantino’s financier and creative partner: ‘This is why Uma Thurman is angry’, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/this-is-why-uma-thurman-is-angry.html [accessed 21:46, 20th August 2019].    

Love Note series – Bonus Disney Women

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This little Disney series has been so much fun that I felt that I needed a bonus post. Today, I’ve decided to give some honourable mentions to Disney women who have enriched the stories they are in, have given fantastic comic relief and whose characters have become even more indispensable with every new viewing.

Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, Sleeping Beauty, 1959

It pained me that in Maleficent, one of Disney’s best re-makes/re-tellings out of the thousands they’ve done, these women are reduced to squabbling, dim, clueless fairies. Of course, in the 1959 version, they also squabble and are crap at not using magic, see exhibits one and two:

Flora and Merryweather.gif

Fauna eggs

Yet, the three of them also end up holding the entire world together. They offset Maleficent’s curse on Aurora by ensuring she falls into sleep instead of death, they put everyone else to sleep, they fly to Maleficent’s castle to release Prince Philip even though it terrifies them and then help him to bring about Maleficent’s downfall. They are constantly busy saving the world and everyone in it and are integral to the film’s action. As such, Fauna, Flora and Merryweather ensure that in spite of some of the other problematic tropes in Sleeping Beauty, this animated film actually has the highest amount of female dialogue in the whole of the Disney oeuvre.[1] That is something pretty special.

 

Magnificent Marvellous Mad Madam Mim, The Sword in the Stone, 1963

This small dumpy woman, with her bright pink dress and purple hair, may not look like trouble but she is as feisty and frightening powerful as they come. I think of her as a pre-cursor to Winifred Sanderson from Hocus Pocus in many ways.

Mim sick

Winnie

Mim is ridiculous, darkly hilarious and appeals to all that is gnarly in ourselves. Obviously I don’t make it a habit to ‘destroy’ cute little sparrows for fun; but I find it funny just how funny she finds herself. She takes absolute delight in being grisly and her cackle cracks me up every single time. She is magic’s counter-balance to Merlin’s honourable, good-natured and learning-outcome wizardry, displaying considerable power and resolve. She doesn’t win the wizard’s duel, and rightly so, but she sticks two fingers up to Merlin’s borderline self-righteousness and I find her very enjoyable viewing.

Mim sunshine

 

Lady Kluck, Robin Hood, 1973

Klucky

Lady Kluck, or Klucky, is the real star of this film. She is Maid Marian’s lady-in-waiting and her contributions to the friendship and film include terrible badminton technique, Prince John impersonations, dancing and of course, her willingness to get stuck into a barney. She is loud, rambunctious, has a fantastic Scottish accent and her fearlessness in a punch-up is inspirational. Her best line comes during the carnage of the archery competition where she tells Maid Marian to ‘Run lassie, this is no place for a lady’, before rolling up her sleeves and slamming the Sheriff of Nottingham and a bunch of rhinos. This chicken is no wet hen and has excellent gif game.

Klucky funny

 

Kala, Tarzan, 1999

Kala

Disney as a creative institution is famous for severely lacking in representations of secure, loving mother figures. When Tarzan was released in 1999, Kala was brought to us by the divine Glenn Close, and became the overdue motherly role model that we had all been waiting for. At the beginning of the film, Kala goes through the unspeakable trauma of her baby being killed by a ferocious leopard called Sabor. When she hears Tarzan’s cries across the jungle, she discovers him alone, his parents also having been killed by the leopard. She rescues him and resolves to protect him from the dangerous world around him, whether that’s from leopards and other predators, but also the hatred of Kerchak, Kala’s partner who refuses to acknowledge Tarzan as his son. Kala’s love is boundless; she brings Tarzan into the safety of the gorilla family, teaches him that he isn’t as different to her as other gorillas make him out to be, and also embraces the grief-stricken realisation that she will have to let her son go. For me, this scene is up there emotionally with ‘Baby of Mine’ in Dumbo. Kala is warm, kind, brave and nurturing and definitely deserves some recognition.

Kala and Tarzan

 

Mama Odie, The Princess and the Frog, 2010

Gumbo

Mama Odie is a blind witch lady living in the bayou outside New Orleans, who Tiana and Prince Naveen visit to solve their frog problems. Mama Odie is friends with Ray and his firefly family and relies on the help of a snake called Juju to get around the place. The two form an excellent double act as Juju doubles up as a walking stick, plank and sous chef as Mama Odie makes her magical, clairvoyant gumbo. I think she’s brilliant because she introduces us all to the idea that what we want and what we need are very different things. I believe that what we think we want lies firmly in the realm of ego; it is often short-sighted, ruled by fear, lack and longing. What we need is something more deeply personal and actually evades us a lot of the time: the need for connection, boundaries, and the key self-awareness to know what makes us feel safe, comforted and loved. Mama Odie, with wit, an excellent gospel song and tons of energy makes that abundantly clear, paving the way for Tiana to reject Dr Facilier’s soul-selling proposition at the end of the film.

Mama Odie and Juju

 

[1] Female Dialogue

Love Note series – Meg

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Meg, Hercules, 1997

Hercules Meg

Hercules really is the unsung hero of the Disney oeuvre (if you excuse the pun). This film is a fun anachronistic re-telling of the Greek myth, which introduces Ancient Greece and its mythology to gospel music, American consumerism (Thebes is the Big Olive and Hercules fronts an Air-Herc mosaic advertising campaign) and Danny DeVito as Philoctetes. It also introduces us to Megara, whose friends call her Meg, or at least they would do if she had any friends.

Have nice day

Now, if you are familiar with the original Greek myth, you will be aware that Hercules actually kills Megara and all of their children when he is driven mad by Hera, thus initiating himself into completing the twelve arduous labours to redeem himself. Disney devolved significantly from the ancient myth, for obvious reasons, and instead of killing Meg off, the animators created a super sassy, fabulous woman who also has her fair share of emotional wounds to negotiate and free herself from. Meg combines witticism and fiery comebacks with deep-rooted pain and vulnerability. Prior to the main action of the film, we learn that she sold her soul to Hades, the god of Death no less, to save the man she loved, who then dumped her for someone else. Ouch. I mean, we’ve all had bad experiences in our love lives, but that is as about as shit as it gets.

Meg Wounded

Meg’s journey, in many ways, sees her learning to open up her heart and allow herself to be emotionally healed enough to accept the love being offered to her by a kind, emotionally available man who really bloody likes her. This may sound a bit patronising, melodramatic or wishy-washy, but is there any arena in human experience that feels as vulnerable and, sometimes, scary as being in a safe, loving relationship, especially when situations you have found yourself in previously left you hurt, distrustful and determined to close yourself off? I’m not sure. Meg is determined to keep up her walls up and her heart closed to Hercules, whose honesty and desire to help other people makes him one of Disney’s most endearing men. Ultimately, Meg proves that she is one of the most fearless Disney women when it comes to love. She throws herself under a column to protect Hercules when he is at his most vulnerable, putting her own life on the line for him; who then puts his life on the line to save her soul from the Underworld.

Now, I’m obviously not suggesting that we all start throwing ourselves under collapsing buildings or finding our way to Hell for the people we love, but if we look through a metaphoric lens here, I think there is very little difference. Healthy, loving relationships, no matter if they’re with a romantic partner, family or friendships, are absolutely worth protecting, require commitment to your own inner work and wellbeing, even if that means dragging yourself through the depth of your own personal hell to deal with issues like trust and intimacy, and embracing your loved ones with an open, accepting and trusting heart. If Meg taught me anything, it was about freeing yourself from the chains of low self-esteem; that the idea of a femme fatale can be a veneer for a huge amount of insecurity and emotional damage; and that allowing yourself to be loved fully by good, kind people around you, is the scariest but life-affirming thing in the world.