Theatre | Critical Dahl-ings

Last week I found myself in The Cambridge Theatre in London, watching Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of Matilda, by Roald Dahl. On one hand, this confession should make it obvious that here at Silkworms Ink, a cutting-edge literary e-press, we lack the nous to track down any cultural events more significant or trailblazing than a children’s musical. On the other hand, I don't think there were actually any children present, other than onstage; the audience was rammed full of childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old adults, all of whom presumably went home afterwards and told their childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old friends that it was a show grown-ups and kids could enjoy alike.

            Anyway, I did enjoy it; it was a Tim Minchin musical, with the characters singing spoofy Tim Minchin songs in Tim Minchin’s favourite registers, making sly Tim Minchin polemic digs and being, in general, about as memorable as any of Tim Minchin's tunes. But it did remind me of the rather serious structural problem with Dahl’s novel; it’s two very different stories, tenuously connected, one of which sprouts out of the other and swallows it whole just as it's running out of steam. The second, eventually dominant story is a rousing, dark schoolyard tale, in which Carrie and Sheba Hart team up to defeat a villainous 1920s portrayal of a lesbian. The first story is the heartrending tragedy of a middle-class girl born into a working-class family, until eventually their inept criminality results in their fleeing to join their innumerable comrades in southern Spain, allowing her to return (hurrah!) to her own kind.

            Facile, yes, but both of the interlinked stories in the novel articulate two distinct sides to Dahl’s personality and his writings; the revolt of Matilda and her classmates against Miss Trunchbull is a characteristically dark and funny, rather wonderfully skewed fairytale in which the righteous young heroine actually gets to defeat the monster after the rescuer/woodsman figure (Miss Honey’s father, heroically named ‘Magnus’) has already been tragically swallowed up by it. Matilda’s psychic powers come out of nowhere halfway through the novel and never seem to relate thematically to her intelligence or her love of books; rather, they rise from her impotent fury at adult injustice, her innate sense of fairness and strength evolving into the power required to overcome the villain. And Trunchbull is, indeed, a fine villain, perhaps Dahl’s best; he could create a grotesque character without blinking, but like so many great monsters, the hulking headmistress is as pitiable as she is terrifying, an insecure obsessive who, similar to his Twits and Witches, regards children as an undefined species of louse - memorably visualised, too, by Quentin Blake as a buttoned-up mass of brawn just barely keeping its balance on two pin-slender legs.

            Matilda’s parents, however, have no such complexity; they’re bingo-playing, used-car-selling scumbag stereotypes who loathe their own daughter and her love of books mainly in order to give Dahl an excuse to bitch about television, a subject he thoroughly enjoys. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, I seem to remember, contains a room devoted to television for no other reason than to horribly punish Mike Teavee, a small boy who, as you may have guessed, watches too much TV. Afterwards, the Oompa Loompas, serving as Greek chorus, caution parents to throw away their own sets. A brief reminder:

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!

There’s a triple irony in there; one, in advocating that an escape from reality via literature is somehow intrinsically of higher merit than an escape from reality via television, two, that it was written around the time of Nigel Kneale’s first glorious genre pieces and Dahl’s own Twilight-Zone-esque anthology series ‘Way Out’ (now available online; it's really rather good), and three, that a spiel about the medium of film rotting the brain was written by the man who inflicted You Only Live Twice upon the brains of adults and children everywhere. 

You can really tell this was written by someone passionate about creating intellectually challenging artforms.

I can’t bring myself to like this posturing, sneering Dahl any more than I like Boris Johnson for his godawful poetry collection The Perils Of The Pushy Parents, which steals openly from him;

Loving parents, learn from me.

If your children crave TV

Tell them, OK, what the hell

You can watch it for a spell ...

IF YOU READ A BOOK AS WELL.

SON, I'M TALKING IN CAPITALS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU MUST COME TO ACCEPT THE INNATE SUPERIORITY OF ONE ARTISTIC MEDIUM OVER ANOTHER INSTEAD OF ANALYSING QUALITY ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS. IT MUST BE TRUE. I READ IT IN A BOOK.

There will always be an argument, which is to me at least part-convincing, that Dahl was a nasty man. It is, in fact, almost obtuse to point out that a highly-refined nastiness of spirit is what is so often utterly glorious and appealing to children and adults in his work, from the giants that reach into kids’ bedroom windows and gobble them up to the macabre turns of his Switch-Bitch stories. 

What’s a little sad, though, is that when we’re young we read his books as a sensational dive into a land of horrors and marvellous weirdness; we don’t pay attention to the crude attempts at messages (I’m not sure Charlie And The Chocolate Factory scared me off watching television as much as my quaking fear of changing the channel and accidentally encountering Gene Wilder in the film version), we don’t really take in the uncomfortable fact that the Oompa Loompas were originally gurning, simpleton African pygmies, and we probably don’t find ourselves sitting through a children’s musical about an extraordinary genius being held back by a society that encourages mediocrity, thinking, ‘Hang on, this is the exact plot of The Fountainhead’. Maybe, despite the popular cliché, Roald Dahl’s books demand to be read and loved while you're young and before you start to panic about his politics.

Sitcom | Television | Roseanne: No Holds Barred

Roseanne is America's greatest sitcom. There, I've said it.

At least in its early years, the show was a perfectly formed, and perfectly performed, slice of working-class America. It was consistently intelligent and emotionally mature. And (as if this matters) it gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs.

I didn't even watch the show when it aired in the '90s but discovering it on DVD has been a revelation. I was reminded of its subtleties this week when I read Roseanne's fascinating account of the behind-the-scenes ructions, posted on New York Magazine's site. Take a few minutes to go and read it too.

And if you need any convincing, here are a few choice extracts:

'The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognize that only by God’s grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.'

'I walked into this woman’s office, held the scissors up to show her I meant business, and said, “Bitch, do you want me to cut you?” We stood there for a second or two, just so I could make sure she was receptive to my POV.'

'Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.'

'Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.'

All done? Good, wasn't it! Now, for balance, I recommend this rather po-faced response from The Guardian.

Although the network's worries over Roseanne are legendary, what's amazing is that very little of this tension shows up onscreen. In fact, watching seasons back to back on DVD, it's striking that the show has a coherence that's very rare for this era of TV. (Again, I am choosing not to address the last few seasons, when the show was chasing ratings and its star was struggling with mental illness.)

Look at the way each episode begins. I think we learn a lot about television's preoccupations from studying title sequences (that's how I justify the time I spend on Youtube, anyway). Roseanne's one-shot opening is exemplary in the way that it prepares us not just for the show's thematic concerns, but also for its political challenge.



Sorry about the quality of the video, but hopefully you'll have grasped the boisterous to-and-fro of the family unit, the deft sketching of interpersonal relationships and, most importantly, the way the kitchen table is a locus around which discourse occurs. It's a conversation to which we do not have access, true, but the rasping bluesy harmonica conveys its earthiness and its wit. Offsetting the liveliness of the group, the smooth 360° camera movement speaks to their emotional connection.

It is a camera movement that begins and ends with Roseanne, capped off (wonderfully) with her laughter: raucous, unself-conscious, enjoying her family and herself. And this is the nature of that political statement - the show dares to suggest that matriarchy, working-class life, irritation and happiness are all compatible. It's simple enough but I'm struggling to think of anything quite so progressive on our screens today.

Nicolas Pillai
Film Editor

Leap | Film+Television+Comics | Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

He that is everywhere is nowhere. (Thomas Fuller M.D., Gnomologia, 1732)

The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939)

Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound... (Adventures of Superman, ABC, 1952)

Superman hasn't always been able to fly. Once upon a time, back in Joel Siegel and Jerry Schuster's original stories, he was only capable of super-leaps. He was also a fairly ruthless bastard in those early days. In a strip from 1939, he terrorizes a stool pigeon by dangling him over the city. "Hm-mm! I wonder if we could jump all the way to that building?" Superman asks the poor fellow, adding, "Did you ever wonder how it would feel to fall a great distance and be CRUSHED TO A PULP?"

Needless to say, Superman gets the information he's looking for.

With hindsight, it's disconcerting to see such a well-loved character starting out life as a bullying Übermensch. The clue's in the name of course, but it's difficult not to be a little shocked by lines like, "Cracking your head like an eggshell will be a messy job, but if you insist on being stubborn..." In these first comic-strip outings, the Man of Steel was Spring-Heeled Jack bestriding the earth, a colossus in red underpants.

Over time, the rule-book was rewritten. Now Supes could fly, continuously and without rest. He could even leave the Earth's atmosphere, venturing out into the depths of space in search of his lost homeworld. And with this upgrade came a new source of imagery. He wasn't just a Nietschean avenger anymore; he was an angel. He could look down upon the world from a God's eye view.

It's fair to say that these grandiose ideas were sublimated for most of the strip's early life. But when the character came to be adapted for the motion pictures, the imagery of flight fed upon this crucial metaphor. So too did the achievement of flight, with the technical challenge of its representation becoming a crucial selling point. It's no surprise that the blockbuster hit of 1978 (in which Christopher Reeve filled out the lycra) used the language of faith in its tagline: "You'll believe a man can fly."

Even the earliest screen incarnations emphasized the character's dominion over the skies. In The Mechanical Monsters (1941) and The Bulleteers (1942), two of the Fleischer Studios' brilliant Superman cartoons, striking sequences show our hero soaring above the city, then zipping down into action. Very soon, the Fleischer cartoons recruited Superman into the war, reigning down death on stereotyped Japanese troops.

It was the Fleischer cartoons that first gave Superman flight. The animators, quite understandably, decided that super-bunny-hops looked clumsy onscreen and so adjusted his super-powers accordingly. The majority of the cartoons were rotoscoped, a process that traced the movement of live-action footage onto the hand-drawn cells. Rotoscoping flight, however, was too complex, meaning that the animated flying sequences took on a looser, malleable aspect. With form came plasticity.

For many years, animation remained the only method of picturing flight. Superman's first live-action outing, Columbia's 1948 15-part serial starring Kirk Alyn, switched to animation footage whenever take-off was required. In the more accomplished Adventures of Superman TV series (1952-1958), George Reeves flew on wires, usually against matte shots or back projection.

Budgetary restraints meant that the same shots of Reeves flying were used in each episode, but this creates an interesting sub-textual resonance. The repetition of the same special effects sequences heightens our awareness of their mechanical reproduction. Flight becomes routine and ritualized, making Superman's intervention into each episode a true deus ex machina. On the backlots of Metropolis, the focus is always upon the characters of the Daily Planet newsroom, and the way that they enact B-movie tropes. Episodes frequently end with Clark Kent winking at the camera, as though acknowledging a tacit contract - Superman as shared joke.

The first hour of the Christopher Reeve Superman stands up pretty well today as an attempt to place the character in a pulp-screwball tradition of Americana. It also presented the most sustained religious allegory the franchise had seen so far, with Marlon Brando incarnating a dubious Heavenly Father. The knowingness of the script often worked against it, however. In what must be one of the most cringe-worthy sequences in American film, Superman's first flight with Lois Lane became a soupy Freudian ballet. The movie's tagline cuts both ways - this really has to be seen to be believed.

In the final scene of the movie, Reeve circles the Earth and passing the camera, smiles at us. It's a reassuring moment, a promise that flight is no longer a joke and that omnipotence is benign.

In a post-9/11 world, this omnipotence becomes problematic. Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006) attempted to negotiate the character's inefficacy through a period of absence, with his return marking a reinvigoration of the American spirit. But the film ended up seeming glum and sour. Brendan Routh's Superman is castrated, a father without access to his son, doomed to watch over a world that needs him but cannot accommodate him. The final shot repeats Reeve's circuit around the Earth, but omits the smile to camera.

Flying as a metaphor for loneliness? Tiresome stuff - I think I prefer Nasty Superman. Now, where was I? (reaches for Siegel and Schuster) Ah yes, Superman is clawing at a villain's face: "This nose would look perfect, mounted above my mantle piece!"

Marvellous.

Nicolas Pillai

Film Editor

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns by Nicolas Pillai | Part 4: The Bedroom

 

The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and decency.
The Motion Production Code of 1930.

Bedrooms are always significant in film. Whether characters are dreaming, making love, going to sleep or waking up, bedrooms are always significant.

Maybe it’s because they are such private places, and the things that occur within them are often hidden from us in life. And so scenes in bedrooms hold a special kind of thrill, permitting us access to intimate moments of the characters. Once Hollywood studios began to implement the Hays’ Office’s Production Code in the 1930s, it became common to show married couples occupying separate beds. It was as though America was becoming ashamed of itself.

I was uncomfortable with all of the handwringing, tutting and sneering over conspicuous consumerism and cultural imperialism in this summer’s reviews of Sex and the City 2. It is, I think, noteworthy that the same critics failed to muster the same level of outrage for The Expendables. There are two snobberies at work there, one concerning (excuse the revolting term) 'chick flicks' and one about TV shows that get above themselves. While I’m not interested in defending Carrie & co. here, I do think the film had some very interesting bedroom scenes. And none of them had anything to do with sex.

In the New York sequences of the movie, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) begins to feel that conjugal life in her new apartment is growing stale. The final straw comes when her husband John James Preston (one-time Mr. Big, Chris Noth) buys her a big screen TV for the bedroom. To Carrie, this is the end of romance. He only wants to watch black and white movies, whereas she wants to live in them.

Watching the hitch-hiking scene from It Happened One Night (a film in which attraction begins with lines drawn across a motel bedroom), Carrie worries over her ability to lead an exciting married life. At the end of the film, in the living room again, the couple watch the conclusion to The Talk of the Town, as Cary Grant runs back to kiss Jean Arthur. Carrie has reordered domestic space to her satisfaction.

What’s so wrong with watching TV in bed anyway? In Sex and the City 2, the bedroom becomes less the arena of sexual satisfaction and more the assurance of mutual content. The way this is measured is through the absence of a TV. The bedroom becomes the last refuge from the moving image.

Keep dreaming. Keep watching.