In Which We Hold Ourselves Down

Unbelievably Sick

by BRIAN DELEEUW

Chris Morris is the kind of artist whose work tends to piss off people who haven't even seen it. The best example of this occurred in 2001, after the "Paedogeddon!" special episode of his Brass Eye series aired on UK's Channel 4. Like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, Brass Eye is a satire of the news media's pomposity and hypocrisy, and in 2000 the British press — especially tabloids like News of the World, The Daily Star, and The Daily Mail — had whipped itself into a self-aggrandizing and grotesque froth over a few highly-publicized cases of pedophilia, exploiting the victims and their families and emotionally manipulating the public. (News of the World — which later "broke" the Michael Phelps bong photos, as well as the infinitely more entertaining Max Mosley S&M scandal — was especially excitable, pursuing a name-and-shame campaign to "out" alleged pedophiles, which led to mistaken-identity mob pursuit of entirely innocent people as well as the vandalizing of a pediatrician's home.)

Brass Eye responded with this:

Perhaps jealous that she wasn't asked to make an ass of herself on the show like her Labour colleague Syd Rapson, MP Beverley Hughes quickly responded by repeatedly criticizing the episode, calling it "unbelievably sick," as did Education Secretary David Blunkett and Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, despite the fact that none of them had ever actually seen the episode.

The Daily Star excoriated Morris directly opposite a leering item about the singer Charlotte Church's breasts (Church was fifteen at the time).  

The Daily Mail did one better by running an outraged anti-Morris piece in the same issue as close-up photos of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie in their bikinis (the Princesses were thirteen and eleven). All of these reactions played out as though the show had continued on in real life, which is one of the best ways to measure the success of a satire. (Here's the Guardian's definitive wrap-up of the whole affair.)

Before "Paedogeddon!" Brass Eye's original six 1997 episodes had already taken on "Animals," "Drugs," "Science," "Sex," "Crime," and "Decline." The target is the "in-depth" topical news special; the tone is alternately (or sometimes simultaneously) sensationalistic and moralizing; the aesthetic is frantic, bombastic, over-produced. Aside from Morris's presenter alter-ego, recurring "reporters" like Ted Maul and Austin Tasseltine, and pointlessly over-the-top graphics, a common feature of the show is enlisting politicians and C-list celebrities to speak on behalf of absurd causes, like "F.U.K.D. and B.O.M.B.D." ("Free the United Kingdom from Drugs and British Opposition to Metabolically Bisturbile Drugs," natch) and "W.O.F.D.C.A.P, incorporating A.A.A.A.A.A.A.Z." ("World Organization for Decreasing Captive Animal Problems, incorporating Against Animal Anger and Autocausal Abuse Atrocities in Zoos").

My favorite example is when a procession of M.P.'s and entertainment personalities are trotted out to issue a grave warning against the dangers of "cake," a "made-up drug" (meaning made out of chemicals rather than plants, of course) on its way to Britain from the "boom raves" of Prague.

As each episode careens at high speed through interviews, panels, investigative "reports," and pure nonsense, mostly the target is the English language itself, which Morris contorts into bizarre and fantastical shapes. (A broke man is "out of wampum" because he "spazzed it all on a horse"; Jas Mann is "the biff-boff and the puff pastry hangman"; a cow, fired out of a canon, "lands in a crunched-up bone-heap.")

The density of the linguistic barrage is disorienting, but it makes sense because Morris got his start on radio -- where language is all you've got — with On the Hour, a spoof of BBC-style radio news gravitas, and Blue Jam, a collection of head-fuck sketches and ambient music. On the Hour's twelve episodes aired on BBC 4 in 1991-1992 and, among other things, introduced Steve Coogan's character Alan Partridge alongside Morris's all-knowing buffoon of a presenter.

The Day Today pushed On the Hour's style and delivery onto the TV screen, reminding us all that Fact x Importance = News.

Aided by Partridge, android-like (but strangely sexy?) financial expert Collaterlie Sisters, and screw-up economic reporter Peter O'Hanra-hanrahan, among others, Morris bullies his guests, humiliates his reporters, and, in one case, incites a war between Hong Kong and Australia. Here he is covering the IRA's bomb-dog campaign:

Collaterlie Sisters:

Peter O'Hanra-hanrahan:

The Day Today preceded even the Craig Kilborn-helmed version of The Daily Show by over two years, but, while his goal of puncturing the balloon of media self-importance was similar to Lizz Winstead's, Morris had little interest in continuing to comment on daily events after the show's initial six-episode run. Instead, he moved on to attack the sketch comedy form, producing the psych-out extravaganza Jam, which aims to repulse and confuse its audience as much as to entertain it. I think the show is hilarious, but I sometimes have trouble convincing people this is comedy at all.

The format is brief sketches, heavily tricked out with audio and visual effects and set (mostly) over ambient or downtempo music. The subjects include suicide:

stupid people:

and murdered children:

The stuff of comedy! But somehow here it is. It's difficult to reason how, exactly, but I think it has something to do with the precision of the language and the deadpan, almost morbid, delivery. (There's also the insane intros to each episode, which feature Jabberwocky-esque monologues running over some of Morris's most disturbing imagery.) But rather than running the risk of over-explaining, it's best to just watch and decide for yourself. Here's a few featuring one of my favorite recurring characters, a terminally bored doctor:

Jam was produced between the original six episodes of Brass Eye and the 2001 "Paedegeddon!" special. Since then, Morris directed the short film "My Wrongs #8245-8249 & 117," which is in the style of the less-fucked-up Jam sketches and which won a BAFTA for Best Short Film in 2003. He also starred on the terrible Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd and co-wrote the far-better — if a bit obvious — comedy Nathan Barley, also for Channel 4.

More intriguing is the news that he's finally found funding for his feature-length film project, Four Lions, a (fictional) comedy about homegrown British jihadis. Morris seems to be at his best when he's most "offensive," which bodes well for this movie, apparently the result of three years of research and extensive interviews within the British Muslim community. Will it be any good? I don't know, but I can't think of anybody else who would even try such a thing. The movie is scheduled for release in early 2010, which gives you about six months to catch up on all the rest of his work.

Brian DeLeeuw is the author of the novel In This Way I Was Saved, out now from Simon & Schuster. He is an editor at Tin House magazine, and he has written for This Recording about Judas Priest, the Tsukiji Fish Market, and dubstep.

Buy the book here.

"I'm Not Asleep" — Vivian Girls (mp3)

"Double Vision" — Vivian Girls (mp3)

"Out for the Sun" — Vivian Girls (mp3)

In Which We Try To Explain The Rise of This Cobra

Joe's Lemma

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Following in the distinguished footsteps of Hollis Frampton and Stan Brakhage, Stephen Sommers — the director of G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra — has constructed the most unlikely film ever to occur.

It is enough to simply describe what happens in this marvelous ode to the nonsensical. One of my favorite moments is when the mixed-race protagonists (Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans) accidentally fall-in with the Joes' tactical unit. Standing in an underwater base that is more biosphere than military installation, commander Dennis Quaid, fresh off a montage training sequence that features Brendan Fraser as an officer (amazing) looks over his two new recruits. "You've scored in the 99th percentile," he informs them.

After your brain stops exploding, you realize Sommers' canny joke. No military outfit like G.I. Joe would ever exist, could ever exist. With those restrictions loosed, he creates an informed commentary on the American military that is destined to become the biggest grossing experimental film since Sherman's March.

Channing Tatum plays the hero of this revue of randomness. It's fortune that he fell into the same fighting unit that's trying to stop his fiancee from stealing nuclear warheads. (He keeps this a secret until the appropriate time, just like in the actual military.) This premise is occluded still further by the fact that the ostensible villains also owns the manufacturing process that develops these warheads. Why they needed to steal them, we never find out.

This is closer to the actuality of war than Black Hawk Down or Bridge Over the River Kwai. From its finite details, war and military expedience makes sense. But with a broader view it makes as much sense as this movie. I have to pour one out for Max Allan Collins, who had to novelize this epic journey into the insane. I am simply amazed that he found the courage not to write the line, "Channing Tatum took his dick out."

only max allan collins could handle this giant

After they join up with the team, the Joes are told by a black man with a british accent and the Latino guy from Lost that it's their combat fighting suits that make G.I. Joe real special. "If you think it, they do it," the makers say. Another revelation comes to us, swifter and more ironic than the path that brought Zorn's Lemma to its singular hole.

zorn's lemma There is no technology that turns thought into action, and I can assure you that despite the vaunted persuasions of fabulists like John Scalzi (with his BrainPal, that great weapon) and Tony Daniel, we will never bring our thoughts into action through a mechanism. We might develop an AI that was that sophisticated, but physics prevents us from ordering metal around with our mind like Ian McKellen.

The tech provided to the Joes (who writing the checks for this endeavour is verboten) is on the whole worth far more than any warhead.

Even if someone wanted to say, knock down the Eiffel Tower (only God knows why they'd knock over that silly toy instead of you know, a military target), they'd do it easier with that suit than a warhead.

No one dies in G.I. Joe. That's Sommers' next important point: we never hear of casualties, Bush blocked our even seeing them. We must see them, it is our greatest moral duty. But here, we don't. Sommers isn't just softening war for the kiddies. He's passing along a pillow and a bed.

This is a movie so unlikely that Jonathan Pryce plays the president! Seeing him so embarrassed in front of a meager world is even more enjoyable than watching the role Christopher Eccleston dumped Doctor Who for. It's like Sommers' subplot mission is to prove that actors you might have though had talent never had it really.

Sienna Miller, plays the Baroness, a furious war widow. She lost her dead brother with Channing Tatum in some military altercation, and somehow, fulfilling our wildest fantasies for such casting, they got Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play him. The only thing that could improve G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra is if Katherine Heigl suddenly cameo'd as a ten ton nuclear weapon that could think.

If you didn't know G.I. Joe was tongue-in-cheek by now, Sommers is shoving it in your face.

The Joes' team is composed of representatives from a bunch of countries. For example, Rachel Nichols comes to the team from the casting office that brought you Megan Fox. She's attractive if you don't think about the fact that she's a soldier and she wears full makeup in every scene. There doesn't seem to be much need for a global peacekeeping force, seeing as they spend most of their time flirting on treadmills.

For a military unit, the Joes are lacking in every possible way. They don't even have line of command. They don't answer to anyone, or even have mission briefings. Not even vague preteens can believe after the realism of video games like Call of Duty and Gears of War than any battle could actually be fought in this fashion.

In other words, if it weren't for combat simulators, we wouldn't know what actual war was like. We would have forgotten it, and the men and women who serve this country overseas.

This is the more pertinent fact, one that goes beyond all need for 'our protection.' Less lives than ever are being wasted on such enterprises, but still too many for thinking people. Let there be doubt that some military force is required. Yet despite any enemy who could be our equal in a fight existing in the world, we continue to rearm at unpredecented rates.

Military expenditure as percent of GDP, data taken from the CIA factbookWe cripple a once wealthy society by feeding the beast. We can kill anything, but nothing wants to kill us, or couldn't if they tried. Our military spending has become the feeble habit of elected officials who feed a patriotic need to repel an imagined enemy. Sommers' movie says as much. As Ben Friedman put it recently:

There are no enemies to justify such spending. Invasion and civil war are unthinkable here. North Korea, Syria, and Iran trouble their citizens and neighbors, but with small economies, shoddy militaries, and a desire to survive, they pose little threat to us. Their combined military spending is one-sixtieth of ours.

Russia and China are incapable of territorial expansion that should pose any worry, unless we put our troops on their borders. China's defense spending is less than one-fifth of ours. We spend more researching and developing new weapons than Russia spends on its military. And with an economy larger than ours, the European Union can protect itself. Our biggest security problem, terrorism, is chiefly an intelligence problem arising from a Muslim civil war. Our military has little to do with it.

We should embrace this geopolitical fortune, not look for trouble. If we decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations and fight only to defend ourselves or important allies, we could cut our ground forces in half.

If we admitted that we are not going to fight a war with China anytime soon, we could retire chunks of the Air Force and Navy that are justified by that mission. Even with a far smaller defense budget, ours will remain the world's most powerful military by a large margin. The recently enacted GI Bill, which gives veterans a subsidized or free college education, offers a vehicle for transitioning military personnel into the civilian economy.

Of course, powerful interests benefit from heavy defense spending, and cutting the military budget would be a tough sell. Both political parties believe that American primacy is the route to safety. But they're wrong.

We must commend Mr. Sommers for making his films this execrable that we must divine such horrible, prolific meanings from them.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Silver Moon" — Blitzen Trapper (mp3)

"Black River Killer" — Blitzen Trapper (mp3)

"Preacher's Sister Boy" — Blitzen Trapper (mp3)

In Which We Wish To Wipe Your Tears

Nana's Twelve Steps

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Vivre Sa Vie

dir. Jean-Luc Godard

85 min.

Quick! Follow the guy with the Moscot glasses and beige trench! He’s jumping over puddles securing his fedora with one hand and umbrella with the other. Scott Schuman is close, I can feel it. On this rainy New York Sunday, we’re both going to the same place: a showing of Godard’s 1962 Vivre Sa Vie, at the Museum of Art and Design.

Seeing French New Wave at a museum is not the same as ‘going to the movies.’ After buying my ticket, I hurried to Whole Foods to grab some snacks only to be told by the usher, this eerie wiry man—think Twilight Zone elevator operator—of the strict no food or beverage policy. I also had to check my umbrella, and promise him my first born. Inside the theatre everyone was quietly seated as though following an oath of stoic Sunday cinema seriousness. Of course I thought this was funny, but played along.

There were lots of nods of recognition between acquaintances: most people had come alone and were busying themselves with their iPhones, or whispering to themselves the Sontag quote on the program that was given to us: "One of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." In my head, that collective, feverish feeling of anticipation seemed to swallow the room. Something special was about to happen.

And it did. Vivre Sa Vie starts with a dedication to B movies; a shout out that immediately endears the audience. And then, Nana (Anna Karina, Godard’s then wife) appears—her helmet hair profile changing angles as the opening credits roll. Nana’s silhouette paired with the movie’s haunting music — a Michel Legrand piece that repeats without ever reaching a climax — establish the film’s twelve-part intrigue, endlessly and heartbreakingly evading satisfaction. Nothing completes itself and nobody finds peace. And yet, Karina’s performance finds a way to couple the urge to take flight with the impulse to preserve, recognize, stop, sit, and share a conversation, or write a letter, slowly, carefully, and eloquently.

In one scene Nana fights off a kiss on the lips from one of her clients, in another, she ditches one man who bought her a movie ticket for another man sitting at a café. She skips out on her rent, and her husband and child to pursue acting, and yet, she’ll still choose to dance the entire length of a song on the jukebox, playfully and wholeheartedly. She orders a glass of wine, but leaves before having one sip. She embraces a man, only to take a puff of her cigarette over his shoulder, staring off longingly, mildly melodramatically, at some far away horizon. You’ll covet her whole face, but when you see it all, that regretful pang of knowing too much will start to pulse. She’ll get you like that.

Because we follow Nana’s path towards prostitution in twelve parts, Vivre Sa Vie is set up like a countdown to the end. Fin! The audience is ushered through a veritable ‘How to’ of prostitution made intimate by varied forms: a voice-over interview of the ‘lay of the land,’ a conversation shot from behind, scenes of silence followed by philosophical conversations.

At times, the film’s endless collection of quotations or allusions to literature, philosophy and film, teeter dangerously near affectation. For non-believers and those critical or hesitant of film’s snobbish stigmas, the tendency in this, Godard’s fourth major film, to reference and draw comparisons can be disorientating and alienating: audience self doubt abound.

But Karina’s presence and her manner, her step, both weightless and grave, her ennui, “the life,” does not impose, and instead seduces the way familiarity in strangers might seduce. Yes, I will follow you down the street as you nervously accept your first client. Of course I don’t mind looking over your shoulder as you write a letter. All of it? Sure why not? Watch you watching The Passion of Joan of Arc? Yes, please. Can I wipe your tears?

In talking about female leads, we often rate their undeniability, their charm and contrary whimsy, their command. But with Karina, it’s not an easy attraction, and not one that accepts your refusal. Nana’s allure haunts and evokes that part of us that is compelled by our own discomfort.

Durga Chew-Bose is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"Trouble" — Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions (mp3)

"Blanchard" — Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions (mp3)

"Sets the Blaze" — Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions (mp3)