Freedom is a myth

Troyer: This is a kind of banal question I guess, but if you could leave one sentence or phrase or paragraph in the head of everyone who watched The Prisoner series - the whole series - one thing for them to carry around for a while when it was over, what would it be?

McGoohan: [immediately] Be seeing you.

In 1977 Patrick McGoohan gave one of only a few interviews during his career on the subject of The Prisoner, a 1960s ITV series that already had a dedicated cult following. The interview, conducted for Canada’s TVOntario by Warner Troyer, is respectful and contemplative, with audience and host both perfectly comfortable dealing with the ideas behind the series. McGoohan as usual manages to seem like he is either about to drift into an intellectual reverie or explode with righteous anger at any moment. He is always part prophet, part priest; part curmudgeon, part playboy.

While keen to emphasize the collaborative and improvisatory nature of television production, he is utterly certain of the meaning behind the programme. Passive aggressive language, mechanical bureaucracy without a single, controlling administrator, and the impossibility of escape: these are constant, he is sure of that. While The Prisoner is about the struggles of an heroic individual against the system, McGoohan’s outlook is far from romantic. "Freedom is a myth", he spits.

What is interesting about this show, apart from the old fashioned assumption that the audience aren’t morons, is how it contrasts to the reified status of Cult TV today. The Prisoner is talked about in the past tense, but there is no need to insist that it is still relevant. McGoohan mentions that he had to sign-in to be allowed access to the studio as if it was a terrible imposition. That everyone reading this now gave their details for access in some form is probably not worth remarking upon today.

Sadly, the retro process was already underway in the 70s. After The Prisoner, McGoohan worked on episodes of Columbo, very much aware that he would never be given the chance to shake off his albatross. In the 90s he said of his Braveheart co-star and director that “Mel Gibson will always be Mad Max, and me, I will always be a number”. His character in one Columbo episode from 1975 constantly uses the “Be seeing you” catchphrase seemingly well beyond the point of self-parody. McGoohan’s is a CIA operative who murders his colleague – played by a pre-PoMo Leslie Nielson – after he discovers that McGoohan is a double agent. McGoohan’s character bugs Columbo’s home and has him followed, as well as other Mission: Impossible shenanigans, but Columbo is able to make McGoohan crumble with the flimsiest of evidence. It’s striking how weak this episode is and how hackneyed the stock spy tropes and in-jokes are – it’s bad precisely because of the “Be seeing you” retro call backs. The little flourish to please trainspotting fans only highlights the flimsy and unambitious pastiche of this episode.

"blah blah be seeing you blahblahblah"

Don’t get me wrong, Columbo was one of the finest police procedurals ever made, but this episode – before VHS and PoMo – illustrates one of the points McGoohan made in the interview. The costumes and catchphrases of The Prisoner may be very important, but they are also disposable and interchangable. Authoritarianism is not neceesarily the bleak, grey, “totalitarian” harshness of a boot stamping on a human face forever. It can be colourful and polite, full of whimsy and charm – but stray outside the accepted boundaries or ask the wrong questions and you’ll see the mask slip. McGoohan knew that not only is there is no puppetmaster controlling everything in the shadows, but that social control is most effective when internalised, that even if you managed to get to the centre of the conspiracy you would only be faced with yourself – The Self.

Every episode of The Prisoner began with Number Two obliquely replying to Number Six’s question “Who is Number One?” with the statement “You are Number Six”. Is he/she avoiding the question? Or answering it: “You are, Number Six”. McGoohan himself also knew something that Number Six never found out. In response to Number Two’s deflection/answer, Six defiantly insisted “I am not a number, I am a free man!” The opposite was true. Freedom is a myth.

Suburban Salvation

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."

Friederich Nieztsche 

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

An Endless Almanac Of Terrifying Wounds

I grew up along a main road, among concrete monstrosities that once appeared pregnant with mystery and possibility (but in retrospect were bloody tragedies). Like many others living near a city centre, I witnessed my fair share of motor accidents, both minor and horrific. Even now, cars bring to mind the stench of eye-watering emissions, small animal carcasses and ominous smears of blood along the kerb: brands of unearned power over nature and the fragile pedestrian (another vulnerable constituency neglected by neoliberalism). Every triumphant roar replaced by a new one, as traffic proceeded on its predatory journey, oblivious to it's own final destination. As a virginal teenager, it was perhaps unsurprising that J.G. Ballard's Crash would strike such a nerve. A pornographic, but highly unerotic, novel centered around the allures and traumas of motoring held a perverse glamour. To this confused adolescent, the popular obsession with the motorcar was as mysterious and ominous as sex itself. The destructive - or of course liberating - potential of both leads western societies to mystify them with layers of distorted exchange value; not least with their taunting promises of plentitude. Our lonely, Faustian trade between alienated desire, the consumer spectacle and the infernal machines of capitalism are even more starkly apparent in this century of fractured communities, economic pillage, and wars of peak oil denial.

Although often regarded as a cold, clinical author, I'd argue that Ballard is anything but. The supposed 'blankness 'of his prose opens up caverns of unspoken yearning and a need for human connection. A widower for most of his adult life, there's a recurring sense of loss to his stories. His extended autopsies on "the death of affect" are thinly-veiled acts of mourning, made explicit in later autobiographical works. Crash is a typical example of his characters compensating with flights of creative hubris, according to technology and its audiovisual sermons (or 'the media landscape'). His innerspace visionaries and 'hoodlum priests' invariably fall to earth with burnt wings, his survivors remaining as seduced observers. Not so much scarred by their (sexually ambiguous) love triangles, as by the environments within which this desire operates. Ending on notes of muted sadness and resignation, the Spectacle remains as impregnable and distant as the intimate, but alien, landscapes that negotiate the desires of his characters. For all of Vaughn's grand claims, he climaxes as an anonymous victim to the Elizabeth Taylor of his fantasies. The pornographic imaginary ultimately answers to the faceless technology that generated it (a motif of Ballard's beloved surrealists). For stories set in the present, this entropy is largely private, internal. If technology dictates the inner world, then humanity as whole is dwarfed by unpredictable nature. Explicitly so in his 'disaster cycle', and other futuristic stories where it overwhelms the grandest of human designs. For Ballard, the future is haunted by the imaginative consolations to be found within departures. Emotion is replaced by theory, a coping strategy in denial of the remorseful, vulnerable mechanics of being human. A resource with which to steer around trauma:

The above film was directed by Harley Cokliss, a name suggestive of some pornographic car part. Older readers may also recognise Gabrielle Drake, Crossroads heroine and sister of Nick. This was actually broadcast before publication of Crash the 1973 novel, inspired by the Atrocity Exhibition passage that preceeded it. Unlike many 'name' novelists, Ballard actually talks like he writes. Always a comfortable and engaging television presence, he aquits himself well in this 'adaptation'. It's also a relic of the days when pulp, public television and the avant-garde would cross paths for a general audience. It has an atmosphere of reverence and horror for the urban environment, an approach common to early 70s British culture. Later, and in tune with the rise of Thatcherism, this became supplanted by revulsion at the population as well as the design of urban Britain. The New Right ethos paradoxically promoted the car as a means to belong in a society that was "no such thing"; with Thatcher famously dismissing public transport passengers as 'losers'. In line with this paradox, 80s advertising tended to promote the car as protective rather than free; concealing its sexual appeal within promises to prevent against mingling. Somewhere along this intersection lay Crash's status as the cult novel for post-punk subcultures, appropriate to their consumerist ambivalence and morbid sexual mores. 

                     

For a writer of supposedly 'narrow' concerns, Ballard is someone I return to far more than other teenage favourites (you can guess the usual suspects - I am a cliche). Despite reoccuring obsessions, his passive dialogue opens more room for speculation on the part of the reader than, say, Burroughs (infected as he is with a distinctly macho insistence on writerly authority). Indeed, Ballard's obsessions are feasible basis for an always interesting blog. Perhaps time will embed his more trans-literary qualities. As with Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Peter Pan, Frankenstein, The Trial, 1984, Waiting For Godot etc. his stories could acquire the texture of fable, where the strength of concept can outweigh literary merit. It's somewhat surprising how rare film adaptations of Ballard's work have been. Compared to his Burroughs misfire (or anything starring Jeremy Irons), David Cronenberg's Crash has aged surprisingly well. It captures that removed sense of emotional desperation so common to Ballard. However, its location neglects a central underlying theme: how the British middle-class are, well... fucking weird. Perhaps compelled by the post-war welfare consensus (and experience of total war), enough of its cultural producers were once aware of this; unafraid to document it from a variety of angles. Nowadays, they appear too preoccupied with celebrity evisceration, narcissistic self-surveilance and fetishised motorist entitlements to notice anymore.

Moral Minority: Philip K. Dick

Click to enlarge each page, left to right.

Everything Falls Apart, Pt. 1

Certainly the End of Something or Other, It Seemed

"Do you think a city can control the way people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"
"Of course it does," she said. […]
"Yeah...But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"
"Yes," she said, "that's crazy--in a word."

- Samuel R. Delaney, Dhalgren

“Architects tend to be idealists and not dialecticians.”

- Robert Smithson

In 1975, science fiction author Samuel R. Delaney published his eleventh novel, Dhalgren. Weighing in at 800-plus pages, knottily metafictional, equally praised and reviled by readers and critics alike, Dhalgren would prompt comparison to another similar novel that had appeared only two years previously -- Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Commenting in an interview years later, Delaney countered, "Gravity's Rainbow is a fantasy about a war that most of its readers don't really remember, whereas Dhalgren is a fairly pointed dialogue with all the depressed and burned-out areas of America's great cities. ...To decide if Gravity's Rainbow is relevant, you have to spend time in a library. ...To see what Dhalgren is about, you only have to walk along a mile of your own town's inner city."¹

In many respects, Dhalgren was very much a product of its time. The setting of Dhalgren involves a city -- a fictional city called Bellona that lay somewhere in the American Midwest, a city that has been cut off from the rest of the country by some mysterious and unexplained rupture in the space-time continuum. Post-apocalyptic, ethnically diverse, gang-infested, and pornographically rife with all nature of pan-sexual couplings, Bellona embodied the cultural phobias that many Americans held about the nation's metropolitan centers at the time -- represented many of the reasons that the white middle classes had fled in ever-increasing numbers to outlying suburbs over the two preceding decades. It was the sort of setting that would appear again and again in the years that followed, often in films of the "urban exploitation" nature; films like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York, The Warriors, Fort Apache: The Bronx.² If this setting would had become a predictable cliché by decade’s end, it was a cliché that hinged on an underlying Hobbesian-Darwinistic dread that much of America had about the fate of its urban centers. As Richard Nixon had reputedly mused to his aides at some point in 1972, "Maybe New York shouldn’t survive. Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction."





Another artifact of the era was the 1979 documentary 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s. Focusing on life among black and Puerto Rican gangs of the South Bronx, the film graphically illustrated the advanced urban decay and socio-economic breakdown that afflicted the South Bronx in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The film's very title is curiously awash in ironic implications. Firstly, in its highlighting of distance and economic disparities, but second in the way these disparities invoked a specter that haunted the history of modern urbanization from its very origins -- pointed to a social legacy that could be traced back to the "Haussmannization" of Paris in the previous century.

Eighteen years in the offing, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's redevelopment of Paris was the most ambitious and expensive undertaking of its sort in modern history, requiring inconceivable amounts of leveraged financial backing and a labor force that employed upwards to one-fifth of the city’s working population. It amounted to an infrastructural overhaul that completely transformed the city. The project required the dislocation of thousands of the city’s citizens, the course of which resulted in the destruction of numerous poor and lower-income neighborhoods (those potential pockets of political unrest in the Second Empire); in the end pushing much of that population into slums on the city’s margins. In the place of some of these demolished neighborhoods arose housing for the city's more affluent and middle-class residents, districts in which the broad avenues converged on a series of arrondissements and commercial hubs that included such newly-built department stores as Le Samaritaine and Le Bon Marché.




Robert Moses: 'Look upon my works, ye haterz...'

Haussmann’s Paris would become a modern model city for urban planners the world over, and an inspiration to American twentieth-century men of vision such as Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Robert Moses. Hailed as a "master builder," it was Moses who presided over the extensive projects of city planning and urban renewal in New York City from the late 1920s through the 1970s. It was also his Cross-Bronx Expressway -- begun in the late 1940s and completed in 1972 -- that many critics blamed as the primary factor in the demise of the South Bronx. Between the Expressway and the compounding factors of "white flight," strained social services and budget cuts, and the city's policies of municipal redlining and "planned shrinkage," the neighborhood entered a steep downward economic spiral. Within the span of a few years, the blighted South Bronx would become -- as a sort of idée fixe in the public imagination -- the epitome of an "urban wasteland," a testament to the dysfunctionality, failure, and obsolescence of the modern city.³

By some accounts, the mid-1970s may well have marked the official end of the Modernist social vision. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project by the city of St. Louis in 1972 was framed by many as de facto evidence of the failure of modern urban renewal and social engineering. That same year, architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published the first edition of their anti-Modernist decree Learning from Las Vegas. The following year brought Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. And in 1975, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker appeared -- a comprehensive and deeply critical account of the life and career of Robert Moses that met with a broad readership and would eventually land a Pulitzer.⁴ The ground was shifting, all that was solid was melting into air.




President Jimmy Carter visits the South Bronx, October, 1977.



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1. No doubt Delaney’s dismissive remarks will rankle some readers. So perhaps it should be pointed out that numerous critics have argued that Gravity’s Rainbow couldn't have been more crucial and timely. Publishing in the midst of the Watergate disclosures in 1973, the book's unstable narrative unfolds in a densely intertwining sprawl of conspiracy theories, shadowy global alliances, conflations of actual and speculative histories, the irresolution of its narrative and structural slippage embodying the paranoia of its milieu. As author and historian Andreas Killen summed it up, Gravity’s Rainbow is ultimately about how "the loss of historical consciousness becomes a function of image culture...and its rewriting of the past" in contemporary/postmodern America.

2. To name just a few notable examples, admittedly.

3. Sociologically, this all shaped up in a very tautological fashion. Advocates and apologists for increased suburbanization routinely pointed to the decline of inner-city conditions to argue for the increased relocation of jobs and families to the suburbs, conveniently ignoring the very same relocations were in part responsible for the conditions in question.

4. Adding another pivotal book to this stack, Gayatri Spivak’s English translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology appeared in 1976.

Disorganised Sport #4

Quatermass Vs. The Me Generation

 

The last - and least celebrated - of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass serials gains resonance in terms of the surrounding decades. Already heralding the tyranny of reality TV with 1968's Year of The Sex Olympics, in 1979 Kneale concluded Quatermass (A.K.A. Quatermass Conclusion) to low viewing figures and a tepid critical response. Even after Kubrick, Spielberg and Star Wars, it refused to pander to sci-fi's young audience. It was received as the dour grumble of an angry old man, perplexed by the aftermath of the 60s, with a foreboding glance at the ascending Thatcher revolution. Not only was Kneale unhappy with the state of British society, he also publicly expressed disappointment with the production itself, not least its casting.  Highly personal but deeply flawed, this dimly remembered serial is difficult to find on DVD even now.

As with every Quatermass serial, a mysterious alien menace threatens human life. Yet here the herd-like cult of the Planet People welcomes its mind-altering influence, congregating at various neolithic sites in anticipation of transportation to another world. They are actually 'harvested' (vapourised) in such numbers that their gaseous remains turn the sky green. Terroristic street gangs and accelerating social decay conspire to frustrate Quatermass' search for his granddaughter, whose membership of the cult contributes to his heart attack. Only the skepticism, values and expertise of older characters provides a frail path to sanity. The young remain in thrall to trend-following, malign influence, and the nihilism of easy answers. Their natural vitality (protein) is the substance valued by the aliens; whose targeting of youth with visual spectacle and mass persuasion is redolent of the aggressive but 'concealed' methods of advertising; not least in reshaping social relations.

Quatermass is also prescient on the darker urges that would spring from the Age of Aquarius. The Planet People, hippies in the final production, were at one point intended to be punks. To an an ageing iconoclast like Kneale, the youthful rush towards the 'new' was but another aspect of a declining west; in thrall to consumerism, individualist lifestyle politics and social breakdown. The uglier aspects of youth were an ongoing concern for Kneale. In 1965 he wrote the censored, unproduced screenplay The Big, Big Giggle, about a teenage suicide cult; and Biff! Pow! Zap! (1969), which dealt with that most ancient of grumbles: juvenile deliquency. In the 70s, apocalypse tended towards the youthful, or at least fetishised the virility of its struggles. Quatermass views collapse from a rare elderly perspective. 

Like an inconvenient grandparent, this once-popular character was relocated, operated on (re-edited or shortened for foreign markets and repeats), and subject to disputes beyond his control. Ahead of imminent privatisations, the BBC (who found it too gloomy) passed its ailing Cold War icon to Thames TV, who boosted the budget and promoted it as a flagship summer 'event'. However continuity was broken by a three month ITV blackout due to industrial action. Ironic in that Kneale was partly inspired by the winter of discontent. Interrupted broadcast and audience indifference were perversely appropriate to its autumnal despair. Belated conclusion in a colder season only emphasised its most glaring theme: the fragile terrors of ageing, and how the culture of youth grows ever more alien with the passage of time. In Quatermass the elderly are immune to alien manipulation, yet besieged by alienation. 

The Apocalyptic Underclass

A Boy and His Dog (1975), although never a hit, was somewhat influential in its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world. Directed by L.Q. Jones (a character actor mainly known for his Peckinpah lowlifes), it has obvious echoes in Mad Max, not least in its post- technological inversion of the western (although some 70s westerns share motifs). Featuring a young Don Johnson as Vic, who 'scouts' a post-nuclear wasteland with the help of his telepathic dog Blood, it depicts a world where young men and boys (no-one lives long here) fight a war of all against all for food and women. Guns are the only guarantor of trade, and dogs are the smartest guys in the room. 

The 70s was the decade when various apocalyptic scenarios went mainstream. The disaster movie cycle (Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, various Airports, and any number of films where nature strikes back) modified the premise of the previous decade's On The Beach, with superstars as elites facing overwhelming disaster, attempting to survive it assisted by professional expertise. Along with the nightmare scenarios, the basic pleasure was waiting to see who made it to the end ("Ooh Robert Vaughn's dead! Will Fred Astaire survive?"). There was also novelty in the Grim Reaper not selecting victims according to status.

However, with their use of spectacular effects and all-star casts, the 'event' disaster movie had its low budget mirror image (often the case with 70s genres). The lewder, cruder apocalyptic scenarios of George A. Romero, Roger Corman or other 'exploitation' productions rarely featured elite characters or superstar experts who could eventually save the day. This time, the stories were largely told on the level of worn-down working stiffs, or indeed a dangerous 'underclass' excluded from labour value. Mirrored in their budgetary differences, these conflicting perspectives were a matter of class. The economic relations and emotional connections of bigger budget disasters were put aside to favour raw survival. With victims played by c-list actors, individual deaths were granted less dramatic significance. With stagflation, mass lay-offs and energy crises moving many urban areas towards 'post-apocalyptic' conditions, faith in technical expertise and organisation wasn't an option at the grindhouse (like the one still open for business in A Boy and His Dog, showing porn loops and old westerns). Nor did these films affirm family bonds in their traditional sense.

A Boy and His Dog generated fierce feminist criticism for its sexual politics. 70s cinema's obsession with rape has been discussed here, and this film is no exception in its disturbing attitude to women (also present in Harlan Ellison's original stories*). The figure of 'woman' - teenage Quilla June - is posited between a suffocating, (literally) sterile social conservatism and the most brutal form of post-capitalism, with women  the ultimate commodity - producer or product. Underground, women are reproduction machines in a grotesque version of Republican ideals (anticipating The Handmaid's Tale). Outside, women hide away for their own safety - hence the need for 'his dog' to sniff them out in exchange for food. Both 'societies' being caricatures of what each fears in the other; Quilla June's 'choice' is between a patriarchal prison of automated duty, or a feral 'me' generation of violent sexual predators. Much criticism focussed on her character willingly trading on these misogynist negations. Without giving away spoilers, family and 'love' are revealed as meaningless when pit against crude, ugly necessity.

Like so much of 70s cinema, it opens up stark polarisations without easy resolution. The idea of the repressive, family-driven small town vs. the lawless post-industrial wasteland still informs American political discourse (and has increasing traction in Europe too). In their youth, both Vic and Quilla June are little more than bewildered adjuncts of their respective worlds, fuelled by illusions of power and escape. The film was released in the dying days of Fordism, and more than its explanatory nuclear war, the film's anxieties fixate on masculinity as an unruly surplus, with women as its economic and/or biological battleground. This theme is now common to 'apocalyptic' scenarios, and not just in film. Although the big budget 'event' disaster has since returned to re-affirm family values, the supposed 'underclass' despair of A Boy and His Dog  - and similar low-budget 70s catastrophes - has disseminated into popular culture more pervasively than the gentrified, containable nightmares of Irwin Allen.

*Later - unfilmed - stories of Vic and Blood feature radioactive zombies, and a lot more 'survivor guilt'. Ellison's stories, like Romero's films, were deeply influenced by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - the urtext for innumerable novels, comics, films, TV shows and games since the 70s.