film - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

the law won – police academy and 80s pop culture

The police in 2020 may feel beleaguered by the pressure to account for their actions and act within the boundaries of the laws that they are supposed to be upholding, but despite the usual complaining from conservative nostalgists about declining standards of respect, the question of ‘who watches the watchmen’ (or, ‘who will guard the guards’ or however Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? is best translated) is hardly new, and probably wasn’t new even when that line appeared in Juvenal’s Satires in the 2nd century AD. In fact, in the UK (since I’m here), from their foundations in the 18th century, modern police forces (or quasi-police forces like the Bow Street Runners) were almost always controversial – and not surprisingly so.

It’s probably true that the majority of people have always wanted to live their lives in peace, but ‘law and order’ is not the same thing as peace. The order comes from the enforcement of the law, and ‘the law’ has never been a democratically agreed set of rules. So law and order is always somebody’s law and order; as is often pointed out, most of the things we regard as barbaric in the 21st century, from slavery and torture to child labour and lack of universal suffrage were all technically legal. ‘Respect for the law’ may not just be a different thing from respect for your fellow human beings, it might be (and often has been) the opposite of it; so it’s no wonder that the position of the gatekeepers of the law should often be ambiguous at best.

And, as it tends to do – whether consciously or not – popular culture reflects this situation. Since the advent of film and television, themes of law enforcement and policing have been at the centre of the some of mediums’s key genres, but Dixon of Dock Green notwithstanding, the focus is only very rarely on orthodox police officers following the rules faithfully. Drama almost invariably favours the maverick individualist who ‘gets the job done’* over the methodical, ‘by the book’ police officer, who usually becomes a comic foil or worse, while from the Keystone Cops (or sometimes Keystone Kops) in 1912 to the present day, the police in comedies are either inept or crooked (or both; but more of that later).

*typically, the writers of Alan Partridge manage to encapsulate this kind of stereotype while also acknowledging the ambiguity of its appeal to a conservatively-minded public, when Partridge pitches ‘A detective series based in Norwich called “Swallow“. Swallow is a detective who tackles vandalism. Bit of a maverick, not afraid to break the law if he thinks it’s necessary. He’s not a criminal, you know, but he will, perhaps, travel 80mph on the motorway if, for example, he wants to get somewhere quickly.’ i.e. he is in fact a criminal, but one that fits in with the Partridgean world view

But perhaps the police of 2020 should think themselves lucky; they may be enduring one of their periodic crisis points with public opinion, but they aren’t yet (again) a general laughing stock; perhaps because it’s too dangerous for their opponents to laugh at them for now. But almost everyone used to do it. For the generations growing up in the 70s and 80s, whatever their private views, the actual police force as depicted by mainstream (ie American, mostly) popular culture was almost exclusively either comical or the bad guys, or both.

redneck police: Clifton James as JW Pepper (Live and Let Die), Jackie Gleason as Buford T Justice (Smokey and the Bandit), Ernest Borgnine as ‘Dirty Lyle’ Wallace (Convoy), James Best as Rosco P Coltrane (Dukes of Hazzard)

the same but different; Brian Dennehy as Teasle in First Blood

The idiot/yokel/corrupt/redneck cop has an interesting cinematic bloodline, coming into their own in the 60s with ambivalent exploitation films like The Wild Angels (1966) and genuine Vietnam-war-era countercultural artefacts like Easy Rider, but modulating into the mainstream – and the mainstream of kids’ entertainment at that – with the emergence of Roger Moore’s more comedic James Bond in Live and Let Die in 1973. This seems to have influenced tonally similar movies like The Moonrunners (1975; which itself gave birth to the iconic TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, 1979-85), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Any Which Way You Can (1980) and The Cannonball Run (1981). Variations of these characters, police officers usually concerned more with the relentless pursuit of personal vendettas than actual law enforcement, appeared (sometimes sans the redneck accoutrements) in both dramas (Convoy, 1978) and comedies (The Blues Brothers, 1980), while the more sinister, corrupt but not necessarily inept police that pushed John Rambo to breaking point in First Blood (1982) could also be spotted harassing (equally, if differently, dysfunctional Vietnam vets) The A-Team from 1983 to ’85.

In fact, the whole culture of the police force was so obviously beyond redemption as far as the makers of kids and teens entertainment were concerned, that the only cops who could be the good guys were the aforementioned ‘mavericks’; borderline vigilantes who bent or broke or ignored the rules as they saw fit, but who were inevitably guided by a rigid sense of justice and fairness generally unappreciated by their superiors; reaching some kind of peak in Paul Verhoeven’s masterly Robocop (1987). Here, beneath the surface of straightforward fun scifi/action movie violent entertainment, the director examines serious questions of ‘law’ vs ‘justice’ and the role of human judgement and morality in negotiating between those two hopefully-related things. Robocop himself is, as the tagline says ‘part man, part machine; all cop’ but the movie also gives us pure machine-cop in the comical/horrific ED-209, which removes the pesky human element which makes everything so complicated and gives us an amoral killing machine. It also gives us good and bad human-cop, in the persons of the always-great Nancy Allen; whose sense of justice is no less than her robot counterpart, but whose power is limited by the machinations of the corrupt hierarchy of the organisation she works for, and who is vulnerable to physical injury, and the brilliant Ronny Cox; very aware of the (practical and moral) problems with law enforcement and more than happy to benefit personally from them.

The following year, Peter Weller (Robocop himself) returned in the vastly inferior Shakedown, worthy of mention because it too features unorthodox/mismatched law enforcers (a classic 80s trope, here it’s Weller’s clean-cut lawyer and Sam Elliott’s scruffy, long haired cop) teaming up to combat a corrupt police force; indeed the movie’s original tagline was Whatever you do… don’t call the cops. And it’s also worthy of mention because its UK (and other territories) title was Blue Jean Cop, though sadly lacking the ‘part man, part blue jean; all cop’ tagline one would hope for). Into the 90s, this kind of thing seemed hopelessly unsophisticated, but even a ‘crooked cops’ masterpiece like James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997) relies, like Robocop, on the police – this time in the only mildly unconventional form of a good, simple-minded cop (Sylvester Stallone), to police the bad, corrupt, too-clever police, enforcing the rules that they have broken so cavalierly. The film even ends with the explicit statement (via a voiceover) that crime doesn’t pay; despite just showing the viewer that if you are the police, it mostly seems to, for years, unless someone on the inside doesn’t like it.

With this focus on ‘the rules’, whether bending them a-la Starsky and Hutch (and the rest), hand-wringing over said rule-bending, like the strait-laced half of many a mismatched partnership (classic examples; Judge Reinhold in 1984’s Beverley Hills Cop or Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, another famous ‘unorthodox cop’ movie from the same year as Robocop) or disregarding them altogether like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, it’s no surprise that the training of the police should become the focus of at least one story. Which brings us to Police Academy.

the spiritual children of the Keystone Cops

Obviously any serious claim one makes for Police Academy is a claim too far – it’s not, nor was it supposed to be – a serious film, or even possibly a good one, and certainly not one with much of a serious message. But its theme is a time-honoured one; going back to the medieval Feast of Fools and even further to the Roman festival of Saturnalia; the world upside down, lords of Misrule… And in honouring this tradition, it tells us a lot about the age that spawned it. Police Academy purports to represent the opposite of what was the approved behaviour of the police in 1984 and yet, despite its (not entirely unfounded) reputation for sexism and crass stereotypes it remains largely watchable where many similar films do not, while also feeling significantly less reactionary than, say the previous year’s Dirty Harry opus, Sudden Impact.

While a trivial piece of fluff, Police Academy is notable for – unlike many more enlightened films before and since – passing the Bechdel test (but don’t expect anything too deep though; and not just from the female characters) as well as having noticeably more diversity among its ensemble cast than the Caddyshack/National Lampoon type of films that it owed its comedy DNA to. Three prominent African-American characters with more than cameo roles in a mainstream Hollywood movie may not seem like much – and indeed it definitely isn’t – but in an era when the idea for a film where a rich white kid finds the easiest way to get into college is by disguising as a black kid not only got picked up by a studio, but actually made it to the screen, it feels almost radical. Those three actors – Marion Ramsey, Michael Winslow and the late Bubba Smith could look back on a series of movies which may not have been* cinematic masterpieces, but which allowed them to use their formidable comedic talents in a non-token way, without their race being either overlooked (they are definitely Black characters rather than just Black actors playing indeterminate characters) or portrayed in a negative sense. It’s not an enlightened franchise by any means; the whole series essentially runs on stereotypes and bad taste and therefore has the capacity to offend, and although there are almost certainly racial slurs to be found there, alongside gross sexism, homophobia etc, the series is so determined to make fun of every possible point of view that it ends up leaving a far less bad smell behind it than many of its peers; definitely including the aforementioned (or at least alluded to) Soul Man (1986).
*ie they definitely aren’t

Despite its good nature though, there is a mild kind of subversion to be found in the Police Academy films. With the Dickensian, broadly-drawn characters comes a mildly rebellious agenda (laughing at authority), but it also subverts in a more subtle (and therefore unintentional? who knows) way, the established pattern of how the police were depicted. Yes, they are a gang, and as such stupid and corrupt and vicious and inept, just like the police of Easy Rider, Smokey and the Bandit, The Dukes of Hazzard, et al – but unlike all of those things, Police Academy offers a solution in line with its dorky, good natured approach; if you don’t want the police to suck, it implies, what you need to do is to recruit people who in the 80s were not considered traditional ‘police material’ – ethnic minorities, women, smartasses, nerds (and at least one dangerous gun-worshipper, albeit one with a sense of right and wrong). So ultiimately, like its spiritual ancestors, Saturnalia and the Feast of Fools, Police Academy is more like the safety valve that ensures the survival of the status quo rather than the wrecking ball that ushers in a new society. Indeed, as with Dickens and his poorhouses and brutal mill owners, the message is not – as you might justifiably expect – ‘we need urgent reform’, but ‘people should be nicer’. Hard to argue with, as far as it goes, but as always seems to be the case*, the police get off lightly in the end.

*there is one brutal exception to this rule, the 1982 Cannon & Ball vehicle The Boys In Blue; after sitting through an impossibly long hour and a half of Tommy and Bobby, the average viewer will want not only to dismantle the police force, but the entire western culture that produced it.

old books, old eyes, new readings

In Richard Linklater’s reputedly anti-nostalgic, but actually still quite nostalgic 1993 film Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey’s Fonz-like character Wooderson articulates his Fonzhood in a way that – as far as I remember – the actual Fonz never does*: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That quote popped into my head, in a sardonic kind of way, when I recently re-read the book that was the subject of this previous article, Richard Laymon’s Tread Softly. When reading books you first loved at an impressionable age, time makes Woodersons of us all; it’s the slightly eerie feeling of meeting old friends, only you have aged and they have stayed the same; except of course that in staying the same, they have changed too, because your perspective has changed. What once seemed profound may seem trite, what “you” once related to, you may not; re-encountering your youth – or even more so, your childhood – through books is as complex a feeling as looking at old photographs of yourself can be.

* to be fair to the Fonz, it would be hard for him to have this kind of perspective on the creepier aspects of his Fonzhood since, by the time he was in his 40s, the Happy Days “high school students” he lurked around were themselves in their 30s

What Wooderson specifically draws attention to, and what we are forced to do, is to relate to the things we once liked from the perspective of an older person. And this is where the “genre fiction” comes in. As a teenager, especially from the ages of I think 13 to 17, my preferred reading was, in order of importance, horror, heroic fantasy and science fiction. Recently, in addition to Tread Softly, I have re-read a few books that were among my favourites in my mid-teens (The Rats, Lair, Shrine, The Dark and The Fog by James Herbert, It and Carrie by Stephen King and Weaveworld by Clive Barker) and, for the first time, what struck me about all of them (ego alert) was that I am now older than all of the main protagonists, including the ‘grownups’ in It and the parents in Tread Softly. Which of course is partly because I am now older than the authors of those books were when they wrote them; a strange thought – it’s possibly just me, but I don’t think one ever feels older than an author whose books you read when young, even when their youth is obvious. Not that the age of an author necessarily correlates to the age of their characters, but there seems to be something about the horror genre in particular that makes writers simplify and sketch the main – non-villainous – characters, rather than draw them in vivid detail. Perhaps it’s because some degree of identification with the main character makes the horror more effective, and a certain amount of vague/generic-ness is necessary to make as many readers as possible identify with those characters. I think this is pretty much explicitly what James Herbert did with his ‘everyman’ heroes.

For a variety of reasons, it’s a strange thing to try to engage with your teenage taste in books, far more difficult than it is with music, or with the books one loved as a child. For a start, and with no disrespect intended to the authors, what has to be borne in mind with some of these books is that they weren’t necessarily (or definitely weren’t) aimed at the 14-15 year old who was reading them. When reading childrens’ books, adult me can be – CS Lewis’ Narnia books are perhaps the classic example – uncomfortably aware of the feelings and attitudes – the ‘adultness’ in fact – of the author behind the book. Sometimes – as with Jan Mark’s Thunder & Lightnings (there’s an insightful article about this excellent book here), or the best of Robert Westall’s novels – it gives me a new respect for a writer who until now I was mainly nostalgic about. Other times less so; for all the informative qualities, animal welfare concerns and anthropological information in Willard Price’s Adventure series (which I loved), the core idea of the two wholesome young American boys travelling the world, encountering its cultures with genuine (if occasionally paternalistic) respect and then catching its animals & shipping them off to zoos and safari parks, feels pretty uncomfortable. Far more so in fact than Biggles or Bulldog Drummond, where even child-me was aware of the dated imperialist attitudes and (in Bulldog Drummond especially) almost (or I’m tempted to think actually) parodic levels of jingoistic racism. But Willard Price wasn’t dealing in knowingly crass, simplistic thrills as “Sapper” was.

He was a genuinely philanthropic, genuinely respectful, extremely knowledgeable naturalist and social worker and I did in fact learn a lot from his books. But one of the things I learned – and I don’t think it was a bad thing to learn – was that the enlightened attitudes of yesterday, although certainly preferable to the unenlightened ones – are not necessarily the enlightened attitudes of today.

the beginnings of horror fandom? Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual

Julio Vivas’ artwork for The Drowning Pond

My interest in horror was probably first awakened when I was still very much a reader of Biggles & co. I loved the Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual I had got for Christmas when I was (I think) 8 or thereabouts. Around that age I also loved the (vastly inferior 80s) Eagle comic horror spin-off Scream! (which only seemed in my world to exist as ‘specials’ and never as a regular comic) Nevertheless, various things from Scream!, most notably a somewhat folk horror-ish story called The Drowning Pond with its illustrations of a skeleton with flowers in its long hair is still very vivid in my mind. And here it is!

Non-comics-wise, I remember borrowing (Doctor Who author) Terrance Dicks’ Cry Vampire! And Wereboy! from the Mobile Library (itself a very 80s detail although I’m sure they still exist) and loving them, and, later in Primary School Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, The Watch House, The Wind Eye and The Devil on the Road made a big impression on me (and still stand up well when read as an adult). As a devotee of the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, I recall being particularly impressed by the horror-themed House Of Hell, which was very different from the swords & sorcery (or sci fi) leanings of the rest of the series.

Interestingly (I use that word advisedly, with the caveat; ‘to me’) my interest in gore was parallel to, but not at all dependent on horror. I remember in my English class, at the age of (I think) 12, having to write a story based on Robert O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, and writing, under the influence of Robert Shea’s supremely dodgy Shike: Last of the Zinja books, about ninja rats attacking their enemies and slicing their intestines into ‘spaghetti’. So I was quite ready for James Herbert already.

Herbert wasn’t the first ‘adult’ horror author I read though. I think that was HP Lovecraft, who I came to through two sources he would probably have found incomprehensible. Firstly, heavy metal (he is quoted on Eddie’s gravestone on arguably Derek Riggs’ finest – and certainly my favourite as a child – Iron Maiden album cover, Live After Death (1985)) and I came across him again a little later, through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. Not that I played it (though I would have liked to) but as a subscriber to Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine (essentially, I now realise, for the pictures) I became aware of it and my interest in Lovecraft grew.

Derek Riggs’ finest (Iron Maiden) painting? Live After Death (1985) Lots of blue, lots of yellow & a bit of white; genius

Games Workshop’s 80s edition of Call of Cthulhu

Before reading any actual Lovecraft, I’m pretty sure that I borrowed the game itself in its hardback book edition from the local library (this would either be the Rats of NIMH year or the year after). Shortly thereafter I then borrowed (from the same library – Cupar) a hardback edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out Of Time and other stories and since then, Lovecraft has been one of the few writers I’ve never ‘grown out’ of, or lost interest in. As such, he fades from this article now except for two more observations; firstly, Lovecraft’s protagonists – sensitive, articulate, terrified – are clearly Lovecraft himself. The author died when only a few years older than I am now, but both Lovecraft and his characters will I think always feel older to me than I do. People – like Michael Moorcock (another teenage favourite) – who don’t like Lovecraft’s writing, usually don’t like the florid style and neurotic tone of his stories – the elements which to me are his real strengths as a writer and make his writing – although widely imitated – genuinely inimitable; no-one else captures that tone. Secondly, that first Lovecraft book I read had no illustration on the cover (on the whole I think Lovecraft has been badly served by artists and illustrators, though I love many of their efforts – and anyway it’s his own fault the illustrators so often fail). but two pictures were instrumental in making me want to read his work; there was the art for a Call of Cthulhu module called Green And Pleasant Land that was advertised prominently in White Dwarf, and a Les Edwards painting (possibly unrelated to Lovecraft in origin) used in the Call of Cthulhu book. (Edwards’ Croglin Vampire*, also used in the book was a superb picture too, though less Lovecraftian*)

Lovecraftian inspirations: the cover of a sourcebook for UK based Cthulhoid adventures (left; still love tentacle-meets-cricket) and a Les Edwards painting used in Call of Cthulhu

*Still very interesting however; read about the ‘real’ Croglin vampire here

So anyway; although I have very shadowy memories of reading the opening of Cujo (I think my mum had it) and seeing the film versions of Cujo and Christine, the first horror novels I remember reading in their entirety are James Herbert’s The Rats and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and It. I remember an interview in FEAR magazine issue two, James Herbert said that the characters in his novels were ‘everyman’ – and in his early novels in particular, it’s a very specific kind of everyman; In The Rats (1974), we meet Harris, “teaching art to little bastards whose best work is on lavatory walls. Jesus Christ!” and “At thirty two he was back [in the East End], teaching little facsimiles of his former self…” while in The Fog (1975) we find that “At thirty-two, [environmental investigator] Holman was still young enough to be angered by the seeming lack of resolution shown by his superiors when he himself had taken great risks to ferret out the proof they asked him to provide.”
Variations on these characters – tough, working or lower-middle class, cynical about the motives of those in charge; thirty two – are essentially versions of the young(ish) James Herbert himself, which is understandable, and they were to appear in the majority of his books until the mid-to-late 80s, when he seems to have become interested in characters with a little more individuality. Those ‘everymen’ – Harris, Holman, Pender, Culver, Bishop – are little more than ciphers, characters made of a few (mostly) well-selected details but overall as relatively simple as the dangers they face – that is, rats, fog, more rats, a fog-like darkness etc.

When the stories get more complex, as with The Spear, The Jonah and the aforementioned Shrine, it’s noticeable that the characters do too. In Shrine, the hero, Gerry Fenn is actually younger than usual (29) but even more jaded; a wannabe tabloid journalist(!) who we first meet “tired, angry and a little drunk” and ranting about “rent-a-left” loonies. As a teenager I took James Herbert’s statements about politics at face value (this isn’t quite a quote but I’ll keep the inverted commas as what he said in that issue of FEAR was definitely something like “I’m not anti-right, I’m not anti-left, but those in power always look after themselves”). Now – especially after reading his final novel Ash (2012) perhaps the most unintentionally funny book I’ve ever read – Herbert’s apparently apolitical stance seems – like his everyman character and his ‘have your cake and eat it’ attitude to sex (describe it in titillating detail but punish the characters who indulge in it illicitly) – pretty reactionary, although his point about the powers that be is of course a valid one. But still; maybe the strangest thing about reading James Herbert as an adult is not the paranoia about what governments get up to, or the preoccupation with violent death; it’s that supposed everyman. I guess as a young teenager I saw him/them as simply ‘an adult’, but as an adult – and an older one than most of those characters are – I see him/them as… a bit of an asshole really, which mars the enjoyment of the books a little for me. But maybe just for me; possibly ‘everyman’ really is a centre-right-to-borderline-fascist asshole. Complicating things further, sometimes – as in Shrine and especially some of Herbert’s later books like Creed – it seems like we are definitely supposed to view the character as unsympathetic/unpleasant, which is odd in that it diminishes the effect of the horrors they experience to some extent; the effect is a little like those ‘ghost hunters’ type of TV shows, where noisy, aggressive people blunder around in the dark taunting spirits for not showing themselves and then scream like hysterical children at the least noise or drop in temperature; good.

By contrast, Stephen King is interesting, in that the book that made his name – Carrie – has no hero at all to speak of, just Carrie herself, and the impersonal voices of the various documents that tell her story. As a teenager I wasn’t very keen on the book and found it, despite its brevity, far harder to read than It. I don’t think I really understood its popularity either. Reading it now, I find it far more impressive and effective, maybe because as a teenager, King’s insight into teenagers and their lives seemed unremarkable (ie I literally didn’t give it any thought) whereas now I think it’s one of the key features of almost all of his work that I like the most. In Carrie, as in It, the vividness of the horror is increased by the framing of the story. In It the story is being told “now” (although now is obviously the 80s) and segues into the 1950s sections in a self-consciously cinematic (or televisual) ‘flashback’ kind of way, whereas in Carrie, we know right from the beginning that Carrie’s story has already ended and become history. Although that sounds like it should have a distancing effect, what it actually does is give a feeling of reality. We don’t so much empathise with the characters as look on at their plight – but King is a good enough storyteller to engage the reader’s empathy without having to put them directly into the characters’ shoes.

Stephen King and James Herbert both brought a sense of modern-ness to the horror genre in the 1970s (not that they were the only ones, but for me they were the most important for the 80s horror fiction explosion, Herbert possibly less so in the USA), but they did so through almost opposite means. Both abandoned the gothic/melodramatic/romantic element of horror that had been at the genre’s heart, but after that, they part ways. Herbert is modern via the immediacy of his bluntly explicit descriptiveness; a very 1970s matter-of-factness; cold, harsh and almost industrial (the Throbbing Gristle of horror literature maybe?); horror with no politeness. Carrie, has a cold, clinical, matter-of-fact quality, but it’s entirely unlike Herbert’s – it isn’t about the viscera. With The Rats, James Herbert was telling a nasty story, as vividly and convincingly as he could, to make it feel real. With Carrie, Stephen King heightens the reality by saying this isn’t a ‘story’ at all; this is what happened. As a teenager I mostly preferred James Herbert, but as an adult I find that Stephen King is far easier to enjoy. From the adult perspective, King’s teenagers are still teenagers; in fact even more so than they seemed at the time; whereas Herbert’s adults are ciphers, or in his more developed characters, people who on the whole I just don’t like.

Although I mentioned James Herbert, Stephen King and Clive Barker as a kind of trinity of 80s horror in my Richard Laymon article, Barker is and always was the obvious odd man out of the trio. Firstly because – with a few exceptions – the standard idea of ordinary people encountering horrible things isn’t his primary kind of story. In fact the idea of ‘ordinary people’ isn’t one that I associate with Barker at all; not because (as far as I can tell) he is dismissive of everyday kind of characters, it feels more like he just doesn’t really believe in them. In Weaveworld (1987), the hero is to all intents & purposes ‘ordinary’ – “His name is Calhoun Mooney, but he’s universally known as Cal. He is twenty-six, and has worked for five years at an insurance firm in the city centre.” We first meet Cal trying to catch an escaped racing pigeon. A working class Liverpudlian in the 80s seems the very epitome of ordinariness, but as his name indicates, there’s always something a little otherworldly about Cal (even compared to for instance, the villainous, magic-using Shadwell, who fits in in Cal’s prosaic world far more easily than Cal himself seems to). I can’t remember if I felt this way about Cal, or the book itself when I first read it (another library acquisition I think, I certainly read it at the time of its first paperback edition if not before). He seems a younger, stranger character than I remembered; but then the whole book feels stranger. Not so much the overtly fantastical parts, but the Liverpool-set opening chapters.

Without thinking much about it, I had always assumed that Weaveworld was set “nowadays”, i.e. in the late-80s, when it was published, but there are odd mentions, such as the police arriving in a ‘Black Maria’ – I don’t know when the UK police stopped using black vans, but I know that even in my earliest recollections (late 70s/early 80s) they were white – that make the Liverpool Barker describes feel both specific and vaguely unreal. Is this intentional? Clive Barker grew up in working class Liverpool himself, in the 60s and 70s, but was not much older than Cal Mooney when writing Weaveworld (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he started writing it when he was 29 in fact). And yet; I remember seeing him on TV around the time the book was published and being surprised at his relative lack of a Liverpool accent; perhaps because of his background in theatre and experimental filmmaking he seemed at ease on television, but always has a hint of the otherworldly quality I associate with his work. Weaveworld has been ‘in development’ in Hollywood for years, but I’d say that unless they can somehow go back in time and get the young Clive Barker, the production will never have the right Cal Mooney. In fact this 1988 interview with both Clive Barker and James Herbert could almost be with “Mooney” and “Harris” and probably tells you everything you need to know about the differences between the two authors’ work; If Harris, Holman et al are James Herbert and the gritty urban settings of London and its environs are their natural habitat, then Cal Mooney equally is Clive Barker, and ghost-Liverpool and the magical world of The Fugue is his. And I’m not sure either author had it in them – at that time at least – to write convincingly about the world of the other, even if they had wanted to.

So what of it all? I don’t know; are there conclusions here? Reading favourite teenage books is like visiting your school long after you left it – everything is familiar, but smaller than you remembered. Genre fiction is by its nature somewhat generic, and is largely plot, rather than character-driven. Lovecraft again is an exception, because somehow his stories manage to be neither plot, nor character driven, so much as they are perspective-driven; sometimes the horror, omnipresent in his best work, has very little narrative to fuel it, just a tone of voice. The heroines and heroes of most of the horror, fantasy and sci-fi I used to devour as a teenager were mostly there as stand-ins for the reader, or for the writer. Most horror authors whose careers last any length of time start to write novels about writers, just as successful musicians start writing songs about being on tour. Going all the way back to Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, the villains in horror have always been more memorable than the heroes (actually, Frankenstein is more complex than just hero/villain, but I’ll stand by it), in the 80s with horror cinema this becomes even more noticeable…

At some point a real conclusion will come to me and I’ll add it here; until then, the thing I love about these stories? I get older, they stay the same age.

Review of the Year – the paradox of realism

2017, like most years but somehow more so, was filled with unpleasant things, events and people. For me though, one of the more pleasant features of the year was that I made the effort to visit art galleries more often than previously, in particular to see the superb exhibitions held by the National Galleries of Scotland; after missing Modern Scottish Women in 2016, I was determined to see Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery and especially True to Life – British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Both of these exhibitions were excellent, but I am writing mainly about the latter. As curator Patrick Elliott was clearly aware (see also the essay What Sort Of Truth? British Painting Between The Wars by Sacha Llewellyn in the excellent exhibition catalogue), ‘realism’ is not a simple thing to define, and indeed it seems strange that (for example) the peculiar and highly artificial painting of Maxwell Armfield and the shockingly immediate work of David Jagger should be considered the same kind of art.

‘Pacific Portrait’ (1929) by Maxwell Armfield (left) and ‘The Conscientious Objector’ (1917) by David Jagger (right)

If ‘Realist’ at first seems a pretty simple and unambiguous description, the fact that many of the artists (Dod Procter, Meredith Frampton, Gluck, Glyn Philpott) and paintings discussed in the exhibition catalogue also appear, equally convincingly, in Edward Lucie-Smith’s book Art Deco Painting (Phaidon, 1990) demonstrates just what a subjective term it really is. What the word seems to denote in the context of this exhibition is something like ‘representational rather than abstract’, which admittedly is an extremely unwieldy and far too wide term.

In the period in which the art of the exhibition was produced (the title says the 1920s and 1930s, but a few earlier and later works were included, so roughly from the years of World War One up to the first half of World War Two), the word realism tended to have mainly negative connotations; for which see Billy Bunter author Frank Richards’ famous 1940 reply to George Orwell’s article Boys’ Weeklies; “They go grubbing in the sewers for their realism, and refuse to believe in the grass and flowers above ground – which nevertheless, are equally real!” This was and still is an aspect of a wider conception of realism that Orwell himself attacked occasionally in its more extreme political forms. Today, ‘realpolitik’ is used as a term of criticism, but in fact almost all political or social ‘realism’, even when respectable, is basically an excuse for people or governments not to act compassionately when it becomes unprofitable to do so. People who term themselves realists rather than optimists or pessimists tend (in my experience) to lean more towards the latter, but with an added smug quality as befits someone who is never surprised when bad things happen. While the artists of True To Life presumably held beliefs and opinions on a wide range of issues, these are by and large absent from their work as collected here. This is not the 1920s of the General Strike or the 30s of the Depression and The Road To Wigan Pier, let alone the 20s and 30s of Lenin, Mussolini and HItler, or perhaps more to the point, of Picasso, Matisse, or Dadaists and Surrealists.

Edward McKnight Kauffer – poster for the London Underground (1930)

Nevertheless, from the delicate figure studies of Dod Procter to James Cowie’s pastoral portraits, it is a window onto certain aspects of British art and life between the wars. Also, the painters’ rejection of the vocabulary of avant garde modernism should be seen in the context of the time; while abstract or semi-abstract art had been at the cutting edge of modernism in the years just prior to and during World War One, not only had the innovators of that era moved on (why not look at my article about Wyndham Lewis in the 20s here?), but the angular, dynamic language of modernism had infiltrated mainstream culture to the point that institutions as staid as the Royal Mail were using designers like John Armstrong and Pat Keely to give the Post Office a modern identity, while Edward McKnight Kauffer and others did similar work for the London Underground and, outside of the UK, fascist Italy, Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union all utilised versions of modernist design to establish new national identities. In that sense, the idiosyncratic, apparently old-fashioned and above all individualistic styles adopted by British artists outside of the more radical movements can be seen as, if not revolutionary, then at least stubbornly dedicated to their own visions.

Although it may seem paradoxical or incompatible, the ‘realism’ of these artists is founded to some extent on escapism and idealism; but maybe that is truer of realism in a wider sense than at first seems to be the case. The definitive artistic form of realism (if we think of everyday life as ‘real’ – but I don’t really want to get into philosophical questions here as I’d like to finish this article at some point) nowadays is probably something like instagram, or on a slightly grander level, the documentary film, but the very nature of documenting reality – whether in film, photographs, painting or in writing – is necessarily selective, and in being so, tends towards some kind of commentary (and/or judgement) on its subject. One of the nice things about the True To Life exhibition was that both the grime-and-hardship/warts-and-all and the grass-and-flowers aspects of realism were represented – albeit mostly in a perhaps fairly superficial way. There was very little evidence of the documentary as protest – perhaps because, by the end of WW1, photography had become the obvious tool for this kind of work. That said, social commentary of a sort was present in Thomas Nash & Stanley Spencer’s idiosyncratic recasting of some of the Renaissance’s favourite religious scenes such as the Crucifixion & the Last Judgement in ‘modern dress’ and modern settings (and slightly generic ‘modernist’ styles). This use of realism was not uninventive, but was in essence just another way of looking back at the ‘old masters’; revisiting the groundbreaking realism pioneered in the 14th century. More interesting, (to me) was John Luke’s strange 1929 modern-dress version of one of the baroque era’s favourite Old Testament scenes, Judith and Holofernes, in which the story of the beheading of an Assyrian general is made even more unsettling by having a strangely surreal Agatha Christie/Enid Blyton aura.

Much as in Edward Lucie-Smith’s Art Deco Painting, the unifying factor in the exhibition’s disparate works was less a matter of style/school or subject than it was atmosphere; the paintings, as different as they are, belong definitively to the period between the wars, in much the same way as the very different works of Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood did (according to me, here).

If the term ‘realist’ in painting suggests the artist as eye (kind of an analog to (again) Christopher Isherwood’s fictionalised realism; “I am a camera”), the eye of the artist/writer is necessarily as individual as the brain it is connected to. For example, one might assume that realism and idealism were opposites, but there is a strong classicising element among some of the artists in the exhibition – but even then, individual artists seem to have reached a kind of classical serenity and monumentality via different routes.

Meredith Frampton – Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941)

One of the stars of the exhibition for me was the portrait painter (George Vernon) Meredith Frampton (1894-1984). Frampton’s art was in some ways the most ‘realistic’ art in the exhibition, in the sense of being (by far) the most illusionistic and quasi-photographic. In a way, portraits like the stunning Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941) are less ‘realist’ than than they are ‘corporealist’ – their accumulation of painstakingly rendered detail being in some ways closer to taxidermy than to the realism of a snapshot. In their almost eerie stillness, his portrayals of professional men surrounded by the accoutrements of their work, (another excellent example is Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938, below) seem – despite the maximalist inclusiveness of the painting – closer to the carefully composed minimalism of a photographer like Lilo Raymond than to a more or less contemporary realist (or ‘objectivist’) painting like Otto Dix’s theoretically similar portrait of urologist Dr Hans Koch (1921). And yet, for all of their modern realism, both artists looked to the past; for Dix – who had experimented with Expressionist styles earlier in his career, the aim of the modern realist painter was to tackle the breadth and the often-unrecorded detail of modern life with the – to him – unimprovable techniques of the old masters. For Frampton, the source of his style is less the realistic tradition of the Northern Renaissance than it is the monumental, but still ‘realistic’ neoclassicism of Ingres.

Meredith Frampton – Sr Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938) and Otto Dix – Dr Hans Koch (1921)

The more usual classical influence on British art of the period was the modernist route via Picasso and cubism; in the case of painters like the ex-Vorticists William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth (also Edward Burra, whose expressionistic 1930 painting The Snack Bar was included in the exhibition), the angularity of Vorticism became a kind of stylistic shorthand that marked out their otherwise fairly conventional/traditional art as ‘modern’. Several other artists in the exhibition, such as Gladys Hynes and James Walker Tucker seem to have used modernist stylistic traits in the same way; to heighten the clarity and monumental qualities of their work; a kind of ‘realism’ as simplified solidity and a classicism that couldn’t be easily written off as old fashioned.

Gerald Leslie Brockhurst – By the Hills (1939)

For society portrait painters like Gerald Leslie Brockhurst and Sir Herbert James Gunn, realism – if explicitly not ‘gritty’ realism – was a necessary part of their trade. The glamour and drama of portraits like Brockhurst’s By the Hills (1939) is what made the artist in demand for fashionable sitters, but their effect – despite relying on a similar sense of heightened photo-realism for their success – is almost the opposite of Frampton’s still life approach. This kind of art was, despite its use of traditional techniques (and even, in the case of By The Hills, a Renaissance-influenced landscape in the background) resolutely of its ‘modern’ age, referencing Hollywood and the world of contemporary fashion, but not really any of the ideas that had affected the visual arts since the mid 1800s.

The same is true of the slightly creepy empty street scenes of Algernon Newton; despite their passing resemblance to the post-impressionist work of Maurice Utrillo, these brilliantly realised townscapes are depictions of the modern world, but not interpretations of it. While the artist captures the melancholy charm of the slightly shabby suburbs he painted, their spirit is more like restrained romanticism, rather than being invested with the revolutionary sense of psychogeography that the proto-surrealist works of Giorgio de Chirico had pioneered two decades earlier. That said, because of the role of artist – not just as a ‘camera’, but also as processor and interpreter of experience – his paintings are something more than a documentary photograph of an empty street.

Algernon Newton – The Outskirts of Cheltenham (1932)

Pietro Novelli – ‘Cain Killing Abel’ (1625)

In fact, what True To Life highlights, is the extent to which the vast majority of art, until fairly recently, had as its aim something that could be called realism; the National Gallery’s Beyond Caravaggio exhibition likewise showed Caravaggio and the artists of the late 16th/early 17th century trying to make their art – both in religious/mythical and modern genre paintings – more immediate & vivid through a kind of dramatic heightened realism. Impressionism broke away from the staid, schematised world of academic painting to capture something closer to the experience of both the artist and viewer, Expressionists tried to infuse their works with the feeling of events as experienced, Futurists tried to capture the violence of the 20th century where traditional techniques tended to distance it… And in that sense, much of the work labelled ‘realist’ in this exhibition works for us now in a way that it possibly didn’t at the time; to a modern audience the work in True to Life is almost all imbued with a between-the-wars ‘period’ quality that seems to capture the zeitgeist of that troubled era, even while sidestepping most of the troubles themselves.

It is with that last point that the artists – without doubting the depth of feeling they put into their work – mainly succeeded in recording (limited aspects of the) reality of their era in a relatively superficial way. As an example, Clifford Rowe’s The Fried Fish Shop (1936) depicts what the interior and clientele of a fried fish shop of the 30s presumably looked like; as such it has sociological and historical value, as well as being a fine, faintly modernist painting. On the other hand, a slightly earlier and in some ways comparable painting like the Vorticist-inspired Rain On Princes Street (1913) by Stanley Cursiter (it’s quite surprising that none of Cursiter’s fashionable work of the 20s & 30s was included in the exhibition), despite its fractured, faceted and in that sense ‘unrealistic’ modernist appearance, not only captures in its stylised way a glimpse of late Edwardian metropolitan life, but also the feeling – still the same over a hundred years later – of being on Edinburgh’s Princes Street on a busy, rainy day. So in the end I suppose which painting deserves to be called ‘realist’ is as subjective as reality itself.

Clifford Rowe – The Fried Fish Shop (1934)

Stanley Cursiter – Rain on Princes Street (1913)

“Turmoil, Ecstasy, Violence and Isolation” – a conversation with Wreche

the stunning artwork for Wreche’s album, by Max Moriyama and Athena Wisotsky

The self-titled debut album by Wreche, a duo consisting of John Steven Morgan (piano/vocals), and Barret Baumgart (drums), released by Fragile Branch Recordings back in May, is undoubtedly one of the most eccentric and striking releases of the year. Almost certainly a love/hate kind of record, this is essentially a black metal album, albeit without most of the musical elements that make up traditional heavy metal (guitars, basically). The band’s name is an Old English word meaning affliction or calamity, deep distress or misery and it’s an appropriately extreme, unsettling and deeply affecting album. In fact, it’s quite unlike anything else I’ve heard and so it seemed like a good idea to ask John, (who, incidentally, also has an excellent non-Wreche album, Solo Piano Works coming out soon) about it – and so…

The most obvious, because most unusual, element in Wreche’s music is your use of the piano. In ‘standard heavy metal’ terms this is a strange and some would say incompatible choice, but somehow it feels absolutely right for the black metal aesthetic, why do you think that is?

“Thank you. We found our skill set and taste fit naturally with black metal. There is so much flexibility compositionally—from long, almost shoe-gaze atmospheric arrangements where the focus is less on individual notes and more on swathes of colour, to abrasive crushing passages and agonised vocals. For us, it was an ideal platform. As for the use of piano, there wasn’t much to decide —it is the instrument that I play and I’ve always played aggressively and texturally. For me, there’s an emotional continuity between metal, jazz, and romantic/modern classical music. I found metal to be the logical extension of the narrative of the piano. Rather than adding classical to metal or playing jazz that quotes metal, we wanted the piano itself to drive the music—it is a heavy instrument on its own (no pun intended) and spans a vast sonic range. It is both string and percussion.”

Perhaps a question I should have asked before the last one; do you consider Wreche to be a black metal band?

“Everything has to be called something—it gives a clear reference point for potential listeners. Apart from loving all the great music coming out in the genre (which has definitely inspired us), we felt that metal enthusiasts, specifically “black metal” enthusiasts would be the most receptive to our style and composition. So we call it black metal, but I think there is more to it and it can resonate with those who don’t know anything about black metal. Some of the textural/formal elements conform to the genre, but I see the project as music with some classical, some jazz, and some metal—it is its own thing. The tough part about picking a genre is that we now deal with the “novelty” aspect which can be good if the music transcends it, but bad if nobody considers it apart from the black metal foundation.”

Obviously, as the composers of your music you are in control of it, but would you say it’s a tool for expressing what you want to express, or do you find that the act of making music itself takes you in directions you hadn’t necessarily considered?

“A little bit of both. With the first, I think expressing an emotion through your instrument is a gradual process. I can feel a certain way, but it won’t necessarily translate into piano music that day. The compositions took months so there were spurts of turmoil, ecstasy, violence and isolation where I could write passages same-day for days at a time locked in the studio. On the other hand, some emotions had to settle in and eventually work their way out. As for the latter case, the act of making music influencing the compositions themselves, that also played a part. I write from the keyboard, so errors or occasional stand-out phrases in practicing one thing led to new parts. I am always open to the focal point of a passage changing emphasis if it leads to more effective, evocative music.”

Compared to other forms of metal, black metal has often been involved with spiritual, metaphysical or philosophical concerns, rather than purely earthly ones, with the forms of the music acting almost as a catalyst/lightning rod for the energies that bands are channelling; is the music a tool in this way for Wreche?

“In a way it is, however I don’t live in the forest, outer space, or subscribe to religion. I do look at the stars and feel awe, weightless existential ecstasy, and sadness. But, I think the music comes from earth. I grew up in the desert, but for the last 13 years I’ve been traversing and staring at city blocks. I play music in the street for a living and have always only been able to afford housing in blighted neighbourhoods. The spiritual or philosophical drive, if you can call it that, comes from my observations of the human condition and metaphorical “desert” in the cities we exist – especially in Los Angeles. There are so many broken people, crammed to capacity on freeways, office buildings, sidewalks, who are barely staying afloat or are lost altogether. They are in a chokehold – always needing money, never having enough of it, and never able to catch a breath. All the while we have a steadily rising wealth inequality, a dying earth, and booming technology designed to express our individuality and our successes. The misery, anxiety, irony and sadness of it all is overwhelming. In this way, I think the music confronts and reflects.”

The album has a very intense, pervasive haunted quality, is that something that you felt while making it?

“Definitely. Besides the actual tone I managed to get out of the piano, this album partially reflects on my own life, personal growth and the repurposing of my playing style. Whether through piano lines, lyrics, song titles or samples, the music is peppered with snapshots and memories from the past. Another factor was probably that I spent almost a straight year living out of the rehearsal studio during this time. It was extremely isolating, money was tight, and I was in a new environment having just left my previous band in Oakland to work on this album. Some nights were real bad, and the city has that effect on people—high anxiety, sleepless nights, anonymity. I felt invisible roaming the streets or looking out the window, always in my head, like I was dead already. A real ghoul.

Barret also had recently completed a book basically about climate change, geoengineering, and human extinction—I know he brought that cheerful perspective to some of the writing as well.”

Do you find the surroundings of a recording studio a conducive environment for making this kind of music? Does the environment affect the feeling you capture when recording?

“I really do. Some people can write anywhere, but I like feng-shui. Our studio, by pure chance, has a wall of windows that overlook the Los Angeles river and a view of the complete LA skyline. It was beautiful at times and oppressive or sinister at others. We opted to record the album ourselves so that there would be no time limit or stress about how much money a formal studio costs per hour. In this way, I was able to make decisions at a pace that allowed the music to develop over several drafts.”

Your album feels like a strangely intimate kind of black metal chamber music, which could translate very well to extremely atmospheric live shows, is playing live something that interests you?

“I think the music, while abrasive, is really something that works well played loud and alone—maybe in the dark. We would love to play live shows, but so far, our focus was to make the best music we could with our respective instruments. Now that we have finished the first album, I’m anxious and excited about getting back to writing and trying new things. However, if the opportunity arises to travel and play, I’ve been working on several ideas for that. I would like to involve Max [Moriyama] and Athena [Witosky]’s artwork in an impactful way, and if possible, some of the Wreche film Zack Kasten is creating for the project.”

Unlike the majority of new black metal releases, where the listener can easily pinpoint key influences, Wreche have a sound that is completely unfamiliar in the metal genre, are your musical influences mainly from the black metal world or beyond?

“I love black metal and the greater genre of metal, but my background and taste started with Pink Floyd as a teen. I delved heavily into classical and jazz too—which I think set me up nicely for metal. I would say apart from Pink Floyd, huge influences on me musically are Hella, Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus, Jackie Mclean, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, Chopin, Shostokovich, Beethoven, Scriabin, and Rachmaninov. Recently in metal, we both look to Ulcerate and Krallice. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying Ultha’s Pain Cleanses Every Doubt and this CD I have in my van of Sviatoslav Richter playing Scriabin Etudes and Poemes. Richter is the master.”

Do you see Wreche as a band with a specific overarching concept/philosophy, or can it tackle any direction/theme you have in mind at any given time?

“I think Wreche is, by design, an open platform. It isn’t based on a particular philosophy, just a reflection of the human condition filtered through our perception. Black metal is a great starting platform, as I’ve said, but I can see a lot of potential with these two instruments, the potential even for evolution outside of the genre. The focus will always be on writing the best possible music—to push our limitations, with all other styles and textures as tools.”

Many thanks to John for the interview! Check out Wreche on Facebook