bounders in oiks’ clothing – the reign of the ordinary bloke

 

“His manner was so friendly that I forgot to put on my cockney accent, and he looked closely at me, and said how painful it must be for a man of my stamp, etc. Then he said, ‘I say, you won’t be offended, will you? Do you mind taking this?’ ‘This’ was a shilling, with which we bought some tobacco and had our first smoke that day. This was the only time in the whole journey when we managed to tap money.”

George Orwell, ‘Hop-Picking’, October 1931. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940. Penguin, 1968, p. 83

Clearly, the old school tie works, even when it isn’t worn. Incidents like this pop up several times in George Orwell’s writings of the 30s, in articles like “The Spike” and in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) etc., and they always make him uncomfortable. The reminder of the deference that he was, in his original identity as old Etonian Eric Blair, accustomed to and had been trained for in his daily life was both welcome and unwelcome. Unwelcome, because firstly, it was embarrassing to be ‘unmasked’ in front of people with whom he had become friends precisely because at the level of society at which they existed – and in these writings it is the poorest of the working class or the unemployed and destitute – there were no class distinctions anymore; as he says in Down and Out in Paris and London, regarding a typical London lodging house:

All races, even black and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were Indians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu he addressed me as ‘tum’ – a thing to make one shudder, if t had been India. We had got below the range of colour prejudice.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Gollancz 1933, p. 150

Though Orwell was sometimes taken aback by the levelling effect that poverty had, he welcomes it too – his occasional unmasking as a “gentleman” was an unpleasant reminder of his abandoned life as a police officer and tool of colonial oppression in Burma. But it was also useful in a way – not just because money and gentle treatment was welcome after weeks or months of hardship, but because it was a stark and simple illustration of exactly the kind of injustice, inequality and disparity he sought to draw attention to with his writing. Orwell is happy to write openly about his deception, partly because it was essentially harmless and necessary, in order to truly experience the kind of life he wanted to write about. But perhaps he was also comfortable doing so because, much as he would have liked to have ‘proletarian’ readers, – and probably did have a few – he was mainly writing for an audience of his peers; the political class who could, if they really wanted to, improve the lives of the vast, faceless mass of unemployed and homeless that they were no doubt aware of, but preferred to think about, if at all, as feckless layabouts who probably deserved their lowly status.

There were of course many working-class readers in the 1930s, possibly even more than there are now, given the enormous output of publishers of what Orwell calls “cheap novels” in that era, not to mention the libraries, newspapers and periodicals designed to cater for every possible niche hobby, that he lists in his 1940 essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies‘. In fact, he notes in Down and Out in Paris and London, that even the unemployed, homeless underclass of itinerant tramps were voracious readers of Buffalo Bill novels and the like, whenever they could get hold of them. Of course, even the most ‘proletarian’ newspapers and publishing houses were owned in the 1930s by people with backgrounds similar to Orwell’s – and by and large they still are. Likewise, at that point it would probably have seemed natural that it was this same class who were to be found running the more recently established broadcasters, notably the BBC. Natural, because before WW2, the role of the upper class was still very much seen as ‘the management’ of the British Empire with the middle class as administrators, but both far outnumbered by the working class who did the work (well, management and administration are work too, but you know what I mean).

What might – or on reflection, might not – have surprised Orwell is that 70+ years after his death, when class differences have been (or appear to have been) diminished, the leaders, for a while, of the relatively extreme left and right-wings of British politics and who appealed openly to the working classes should have been ex-public schoolboys called Nigel and Jeremy. It might surprise him too, to find that members of the openly-elitist public-school educated minority to which he belonged would still be going around pretending to be ‘ordinary blokes,’* almost like he did, in newspapers and especially on television. There are differences in the 21st century; the working class, although now interchangeable to a far greater extent with the middle class, are by virtue of numbers, the main demographic catered to by TV and so whereas Orwell was trying to blend with his social inferiors to prove a point to his peers, undercover toffs today are mostly trying to blend with them in order to appeal directly to, and ultimately financially benefit from, those working class people.

* even as a working class person I inwardly cringe writing “ordinary bloke,” but I think it’s the correct phrase in this instance for what these people think they represent. But bloody hell, “ordinary bloke” – from here on in I’ll just write “OB”

Some observations; the incognito upper class type seems mostly to be a male thing. The female counterparts of these kinds of commentators and presenters are there – Kirstie Allsop or Mary Berry spring to mind, but unlike the men they seem content to be unselfconsciously posh, which is fair enough.

There are various different versions of the type. Some are benign and essentially innocent; people who, one assumes, would have been dropouts whether or not opportunities in TV beckoned and whose scruffy clothes and sloppy speech were probably originally adopted to annoy their parents or just as a way of opting out of the expectations that come along with class privilege (but you get to keep the privilege anyway, so… )

Since at least the 1960s, the pop and rock music business has always been full of these kind of people – and since the 60s too, their opposite has existed; the vastly wealthy who weren’t born into an upper class background. It’s possible that these people, rock stars and entrepreneurs act in some ways as role models to the posh OBs

.

on the left, the standard uniform of the privately-educated “ordinary bloke” On the right, the more raffish, bohemian version of the same. Big posh expensive scarf optional but works with either.

The kind of TV shows made by the benign-dropout demographic tend to reflect a somewhat genteel outsider status* and are often geared towards niche hobbies and interests, so that the whole thing has the aura of the upper class dilletante of the 20s, dabbling in publishing modernist poetry or abstract art. This is a public role in a way, but although it allows the presenter to share his views on the world and life in general, it feels essentially more like a sharing of enthusiasms than anything overtly or covertly patronising or manipulative.

*I do realise that every word of this is probably wildly unfair and doesn’t take into account any of the genuine struggles that come with class expectations etc: oh well.

Where it feels less benign and perhaps more deceptive is when the “OB”-ness of the presenter is an embodiment of what he thinks an actual “ordinary bloke” is like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the evidence suggests that the posh public schoolboy assumes that the OB is what the tabloid press – also, it should be noted, owned by posh ex-public schoolboys – tries to condition them to be. No doubt there are working class people who are old fashioned, conservative, unreconstructedly misogynistic, knee-jerk racist xenophobes, impatient with anything that might seem effete – but it’s also clear that the tabloid press wants them to be that way and does what it can to continue and spread these attitudes. Which is logical enough; the whole point of the class system is to preserve itself and ensure the survival of privilege, blood lines and all that crap. An interesting question – which I don’t know the answer to – is whether it is it self-awareness or self-deception that makes the ersatz OB hide his upper-class accent for TV purposes. Either way it’s probably a wise move, because if there’s one thing that seems risibly effete to the kind of proletarian the tabloid press imagines, it’s the particular kind of upper class speech nurtured in the most expensive and exclusive public schools.

It seems that on the whole, the public is pretty much okay with the fake OB as entertainer and cultural commentator; except for those regular instances when he goes “too far.” But the whole raison d’etre of this kind of public figure is to test the boundaries of what is acceptable, always with the safety net that the whole persona is so obviously contrived that nothing they say can ever be taken seriously, surely? But it’s notable that the self-consciously “outrageous” incidents that pop up from time to time, that seem to simultaneously mark out where those boundaries are and make reactionary attitudes just a little bit more acceptable, always come from the same place. It’s that sweet spot where the tabloid-owner’s classist projection of the “ordinary bloke” – impatient with having to respect people, constantly at war with ‘political-correctness-gone-mad’ – happens to coincide and blend with the underlying upper class snobbery and prejudice that we aren’t supposed to notice, because of that bluff OB exterior. Class prerogatives, racism, classism, the fear of privilege being eroded, the snooty, outraged ‘don’t-you-know-who-I-am?’ loathing of having to deal with or, god forbid, defer to social or racial inferiors; the fear of change. But never mind, it’s all just a joke, innit, and if you take it seriously then you are a puritanical killjoy and who would ever want to be that? No self-respecting ordinary bloke, anyway.

 

gateways to horror: the watch house by robert westall

 

What was the first thing that scared you? The answer to that question is no doubt buried deep in your subconscious and could be almost anything. What was the first thing you sought out because you wanted to be scared? That should be easier to answer but for me at least, it isn’t really.

Well, there was Halloween, and Guy Fawkes Night still used to have a certain frisson in the days when effigies were burned on communal bonfires; an archaic-sounding memory now that November 5th is marked, if at all, by a few fireworks and now that Guy Fawkes has a new life as the face of anonymous protest, thanks to the weak movie adaptation of David Lloyd and Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel V for Vendetta. Whether many of the people using the likeness of “V” know that the real Fawkes’s aim was to restore an absolutist Catholic monarchy, rather than to restore power to the people, or whether most of them even know who Guy Fawkes was, I can’t say.

the terrifying Groovie Ghoulies, which dates from 1971 but was still being aired a decade later

At some point in early childhood I became aware – as we all do – of the classic horror villains; Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, the mummy. Those same creatures in fact that, as horror film-loving adults, are famous as ‘the Universal monsters’ – an appropriate/fortuitous name as they are or at least were a kind of lingua franca for kids in the western world. But at the same time, it’s hard to say when exactly one became aware of them. I was bought (and still own), Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual (more about that here) for Christmas when I was eight – but that was hardly my introduction to Dracula. So what was? The earliest memories of these icons that I can pinpoint are parodies, things like The Munsters which, though already a couple of decades old were still regularly aired when I was a child. Then there was Carry On Screaming and of course specifically made-for-children cartoons like the Groovie Ghoulies – also of a certain vintage by then and the more up-to-date The Drac Pack. But although these were all light and funny, even when watching them as a young child, Dracula/Frankenstein/The Mummy etc remained first and foremost horror characters and the enjoyment of those comical versions depended on knowing about the ‘real’ ones. I remember thinking that The Drac Pack wasn’t scary enough. But compared to what?

the somehow very 80s Drac Pack (1980)

In Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual – surely aimed squarely at the hardback annual audience (was this only a UK thing?), the same kids who bought, or were given, the Grange Hill Annual, the Beano or Dandy or Jackie or the annual Blue Peter book. And yet, in the Dracula annual there are beautifully drawn comic strip adaptations – as faithful as they can be for their brief length – of a couple of classic Hammer horror movies. Dracula (1958) and Twins of Evil (1971) were “x-rated” at the time of their release, but by the 80s would probably have been rated 15 – but even so, the comic adaptations come complete with titillating glimpses of nudity and splashes of blood that weren’t typical for kids annuals, to say the least. I hadn’t seen the movies at the time but I remember that even then I was aware of Hammer films, and thought of them as something old and harmless, rather than actually scary. I’d seen bits of them late at night on TV, mainly sequels; I saw Dracula, Prince of Darkness and The Scars of Dracula years before I ever saw the original, superior 1958 Dracula, but nothing from them sticks out much in my mind so, I can’t imagine I was particularly scared by them.

the edition of Shaun Hutson’s Spawn that nearly made me vomit the first time I read it

But at some point, as an older but still pre-teen child, I became a horror fan. While the theory of gateway drugs has been discredited regarding actual drugs, there’s a lot to be said for the idea in different contexts – as a teenage heavy metal fan you (it seemed inevitably) wanted to find music that was heavier, faster, more harsh. As a young reader of what passed for children’s horror fiction (I have the vaguest memories of enjoying Terrance Dicks’s Wereboy! and Cry Vampire! as mentioned here) you equally wanted to find ‘harder stuff’ – if not more scary, then at least more nasty and graphic. Which is not to say that (in either literature or music) you inevitably stick with the hard stuff; my liking for Stephen King long outlasted my liking for Shaun Hutson. In Hutson’s defence, his books were, as a teenager, ‘cool’ in a way that Stephen King’s only sporadically were, and although I don’t remember ever being actually scared by a Shaun Hutson book, he had other virtues; the pace, the energy, the humour – and to this day the opening of his 1983 classic Spawn (mentioned in various places, notably here) – my first encounter with his work – is the only time that reading a horror novel has made me feel physically sick. No wonder he became a favourite of my teenage years.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; if Shaun Hutson marked the zenith of my teenage horror addiction, the initial drug that set me on that road to excess happened a good few years earlier. There were children’s books borrowed from the library which for the most part didn’t really stay with me, although I remember the cover of a book of ghost stories I read then (surely edited by Peter Haining) vividly. As far as being scared goes, the things I remember most from childhood fall into the category of genuine not-fun fear (fear of older kids, skinheads, stuff like that) but also fun real-life fear; walking by a house where a ‘bad man’ lived, being on the streets at Halloween or (to some extent) Guy Fawkes night. The decline of November 5th is often attributed to the tightening of safety rules around fireworks, but I’d say its unique atmosphere actually died out just before that, when the making and burning of effigies (I still knew what “Penny for the Guy” was but I don’t remember kids of my generation doing that) was replaced by the bigger and more exciting (but less intimate and far less peculiar) spectacle of bigger and better communal firework displays.

the first horror movie that really made an impression on me – The Omen (1976)

I was still at Primary school when I saw the first horror film that seemed genuinely creepy to me, The Omen. But it was essentially a dead end for a few years as primary school kids then had no way of accessing real horror movies, at least not without the collusion of adults and a budget beyond what I think was normal in my peer group. So my main route to being what could be termed a horror fan (though I don’t think it would occur to me at that point that it was a specific genre I was drawn towards) was through reading. There’s another story to be told that begins with the hugely popular Fighting Fantasy series of game books, which leads (with some help from Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie; an important horror icon in his own way) towards HP Lovecraft, but for me, I think the real gateway drug that led me directly to Stephen King and James Herbert was Robert Westall.

the TV tie-in paperback edition of The Machine Gunners

Westall is best remembered now as a children’s author who wrote about WW2, and especially the Blitz. His most important book will probably always be his first, the iconic 1975 novel The Machine Gunners, winner of the Carnegie medal, which was made into an equally iconic TV show. And it deserves its fame – its story of a gang of Tyneside (actually, Garside; like most of his books The Machine Gunners is set in the fictional town of Garmouth, standing in for his own home town of Tynemouth) teenagers who ‘liberate’ a machine gun from a crashed German bomber plane and set up their own fortress to defend themselves and their town against the predicted Nazi invasion, in the face of what they see as the inadequate response of adult society to the situation. It remains both gripping and moving and is expertly told by a writer who had been a child during the war and was able to give a vivid account of the child’s eye view of ‘the home front,’ but who had also been a teacher with a teacher’s insight into children and their behaviour. Like most of the best children’s fiction it never talks down to its audience, and even allows its protagonists to swear when the realism of the story demands it, which was, quaintly, hugely impressive to children of the ‘80s.

The Machine Gunners TV series was broadcast when I was 9 and I first read the book around that time. It’s not a horror novel in any sense, but there are horrific elements within it. Aside from the general dread and tension of wartime, one scene in particular made a big impression on me, not only because of the gore, but also the subtly ominous build-up to the moment of horror, something which Westall would employ even more effectively in his horror-oriented novels. Near the start of the book, its hero Chas McGill has ventured into “The Wood” which

“was bleak and ugly[…] Some said it was haunted, but Chas had never found anything there but a feeling of cold misery, which wasn’t exciting like headless horsemen. Still, it was an oddly discouraging sort of place” (Machine Gunners, 1975, p.13)

This time though, Chas does find something; the remains of the tail end of a German bomber plane which has been shot down, but which still has its machine gun attached. He climbs the wreckage to get the gun, and the description of what happens next stayed with me for years:

“He peered over the edge of the cockpit.
The gunner was sitting there, watching him. One hand, in a soft fur mitt, was stretched up as if to retrieve the gun; the other lay in his overalled lap. … His right eye, pale grey, watched through the goggle-glass tolerantly and a little sadly. He looked a nice man, young.
The glass of the other goggle was gone. Its rim was thick with sticky red, and inside was a seething mass of flies, which rose and buzzed angrily at Chas’s arrival, then sank back into the goggle again.
For a terrible moment, Chas thought the Nazi was alive, that the mitted hand would reach out and grab him. Then, even worse, he knew he was dead.” (Machine Gunners 1975 p15)


After The Machine Gunners, the next Westall book I read was his excellent ‘Brave New 1984’-style dystopia Futuretrack 5 – again, not horror, but often horrifying, especially the scene near the beginning where the narrator Henry Kitson, head boy at an expensive public school, first becomes aware of the very different lives lived beyond the boundaries of his own privileged existence, and which for me entirely overshadowed the whole book when I first read it:

“… Peering through my jungle, I saw a man with no nose.
He’d had a nose; I could see where it had been. Now he just had two holes to breathe through. He’d no eyebrows either. Just purple rings around his eyes, making them look tiny and staring.”
(Futuretrack 5, 1985, p. 18)

This is Kitson’s first sight of an “Unem”, one of the army of unemployed who is killed shortly afterwards by the authorities. When Kitson asks his father what an Unem is (children asking adults awkward and difficult questions is a recurring theme throughout Westall’s books for children), the reply is chilling;

‘Shut up’, shouted my gentle father. ‘All you need to know is this – if you ever tell anybody what happened, you won’t have a home or a father or a mother.’ (Futuretrack 5, 1985, p.19-20)

After Futuretrack 5 I read as many Robert Westall books as I could get my hands on, and four in particular, all of which fit more or less within the horror genre, have stayed with me and at times unnerved me probably as much any book I’ve ever read has. In fact, they remain creepy now, if read in the right frame of mind, and are for me the most enjoyable of Westall’s many good books. Those four are The Wind Eye (1976), The Watch House (1977, now scandalously out of print), The Devil on the Road (1978; ditto) and The Scarecrows (1981), which, like The Machine Gunners, won the Carnegie medal. The Wind Eye is probably the least good of the four, but it has some powerful scenes. The action, which involves the bleak Northumbrian coastline, time travel, satanic goats and St Cuthbert, takes place when a troubled family (the central characters are three children from two broken marriages, whose incompatible parents have recently married) go to stay in the house of a distant and eccentric relative who has disappeared and been declared dead. But one of the book’s most effective moments comes right at the beginning, before the family even reaches the predictably ramshackle and spooky house:

“Oh, I’m shocking our little Christian here. So unlike her beloved Father. Don’t be such a prig, Beth. It doesn’t mean a thing.” And she placed her blue shoe on the black marble slab.
Nothing moved; nothing fell. But in that instant Beth knew that someone had become aware of them.” (The Wind Eye, 1976, p.12)

This anticipates some of Westall’s most creepy moments, especially a key scene in The Scarecrows, but although The Wind Eye builds to an appropriately stormy and tempestuous climax, The Watch House is far more effectively chilling throughout, probably because, like Westall’s later horror-oriented novels, the action revolves around a single, complex and isolated character rather than a group.

the sadly weak 1988 TV adaptation of The Watch House is still worth a look for lovers of eerie kids TV

The Watch House, which, like The Machine Gunners, was the subject of a TV series – though a sadly inferior and often laughable one – is the most traditional of Westall’s horror novels. The book is a kind of haunted house story, where a troubled teenage girl, away from home while her parents go through a difficult separation, becomes the focus of ghostly activity. The haunting initially centres around the Watch House, the somewhat dilapidated home of the Garmouth Volunteer Life Brigade, a kind of down-at-heel, local RNLI founded when the town was still a busy fishing port.

The atmosphere, landscape and ingredients of the story are established with skillful economy within the first few pages as the heroine Anne, driven by her spoiled and unsympathetic mother, arrives in Garmouth, where she is to be dumped on her mother’s old nanny for the holidays while the separation is hammered out at home. Garmouth, already depicted in The Machine Gunners as a town whose best years perhaps lay behind it, even in the 40s, is seen in more detail here. It’s a typical fishing town, still busy but slightly dowdy in the recession years of 1970s Britain. Decay is everywhere; Anne is introduced early on to the Black Middens, great rocks in the estuary of the Gar, historically the source of the shipwrecks which are at the book’s heart, but now tamed by great concrete piers. A sea wall, begun but discontinued when funding ran out, snakes along the foot of the cliffs on which the Watch House stands. The cliffs are crumbling, as are the ruins of a medieval priory with its slightly dilapidated coastal graveyard; “The sea must eat away the cliff, thought Anne. Some wild nights, bones long buried in earth must receive final burial in sea.” (The Watch House, 1977, p.10)

And then of course there’s the Watch House itself, established almost immediately as a sinister, but fascinating and alluring presence:

“The road ended at the Watch House, which loomed over them as they got out of the car. Built of long white planks, sagging with the years, it had a maritime look. Like a mastless, roofed-in schooner becalmed in a sea of dead grass. Through its windows showed a dark clutter of things that couldn’t be recognised. This clutter and a lack of curtains made the windows look like eyes in a white planked face.” … “The Watch House was well-named. It did seem to watch you. But it was only the effect of dark windows in white walls.” (The Watch House, 1977, p.10-11)

For the first two parts of the novel, the Watch House is at the centre of the supernatural action. A working base for the now-rarely-needed Life Brigade, by this time a group of old, retired men, it also houses their memorabilia. Like the house in The Wind Eye it’s full of fascinating curios. But whereas the house had belonged to one man with a fascination for the past, the Watch House is a repository for generations’ worth of knick-knacks; old photographs, items rescued from shipwrecks, ship’s figureheads, even the bones of the dead found among the Black Middens but never identified. Initially a project for Anne to pass the time, the cleaning, organising and documenting of the Watch House’s contents becomes an obsession and initiates the connection between Anne and a ghostly presence, known affectionately to the members of the Brigade, as ‘the Old Feller.’ Hitherto known and only half believed-in as a somewhat playful spirit who knocks things over and leaves messages in the dust, when Anne arrives his messages become frequent and unambiguously urgent and personal; they are a cry for help.

the Puffin Plus edition of the Watch House that I first read at Primary School

Anne’s status as a sympathetic outsider, as well as the somewhat lonely figure at is reinforced throughout the novel, where the other characters are almost all arranged around her in paired opposites. There are Purdie and Arthur, the elderly couple she is staying with, she old fashioned and disapproving, he mischievous and childlike; the friends Anne makes, Pat and Timmo, Pat cosy and docile, the simian Timmo energetic, cerebral and inquisitive; the two clergymen, Father Fletcher – the local Church of England vicar, cheerful, straightforward and relaxed, and Father da Souza, an American Catholic priest, fiery, dynamic and antagonistic. Even Anne’s parents, peripheral but essential elements in the story, fit in with this pattern, Anne’s mother is fashionable, demanding, cold and impatient while her father – who barely appears – is warm, caring, disorganised and ultimately, perhaps a less sympathetic figure than the author intends. Finally, there are the ghosts themselves; the Old Feller, harmless, terrified and childlike, and the real villain, the ghost of a murderous army officer named Hague, who is bullying, menacing and violent. In each of these cases Anne comes between the other characters, at times more-or-less harmoniously (keeping the peace between Purdie and Arthur and Pat and Timmo) and at others inadvertently stoking tension.
Anne’s own personality, less flamboyant than most of the cast, is mainly brought out in contrast with the others and essentially we see her as an ordinary, lonely teenager. She’s clever and industrious, mild-mannered, but also easily bored. There’s a sharper side to her nature too, mainly expressed when her mother is around, which can be surprising and no doubt  helped to earned the book its Puffin Plus (older children and teens) status. We meet this side of Anne right at the beginning of the novel, when, approaching Garmouth, her mother warns her about Arthur;

“Never made anything of himself, even by their standards. He takes advantage, given half a chance. You’ll need to watch him.”
“What is he – a rapist?”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that” (The Watch House p.9)

Anne, already not thrilled at this enforced holiday with near-strangers, is clearly trying to antagonise her mother, but as we discover, her cynicism is well-founded, not because of Arthur himself (who is a harmless, if irritatingly childish old man), but because she is used to the unwanted attentions of her mother’s boyfriend, the loathsome “Uncle Monty”. Late in the novel, when her mother threatens to take her home to London:

“’I don’t want to live with you. I can’t stand having that man around the place the whole time.”
[…] “You mean Uncle Monty? He’s just a friend, you silly goose. He’s just helping me settle in, that’s all.’
‘By spending all night in your bedroom while Daddy’s away? […] He can’t keep his hands off me either. He’s always trying to touch me, when you’re not watching. And give me wet open-mouth kisses.’ It was true. So why was it so terrible to say it?” (The Watch House, p.158)

We are reminded throughout the book that Anne is a teenager and not a child; she is at her most teenager-ish when she goes to the local Youth Club disco in the hope of meeting people her own age:

“She’d thought hard what to wear at the Youth Club, and finally decided on plain Wranglers with a Wrangler top. […] Nothing for little cats to get their tongues around; nothing for them to pick holes in. Course, they’d pick holes anyway. But not such painful ones.” [The Watch House, p.65]

Initially, all of the ghostly activity happens within the Watch House itself and takes the form of writing in the dust on the display cases and flickering lights, but when, a few years after reading The Watch House, I first read Stephen King’s IT, the scenes where that novel’s young protagonists first encounter Pennywise irresistibly reminded me of Anne’s first unambiguous encounter with ghosts after the Garmouth carnival, a beautifully effective and atmospheric piece of writing:

“As she got further along the pier, and the sky darkened, the family groups thinned out. She passed through the last, and was alone. Except for one small person in Victorian top-hat and frock-coat, hurrying ahead of her towards the lighthouse. Head down and hands behind his back. Alone among the crowds he looked anxious. He kept peering over his shoulder at her, his face a white blur in the dusk.
[…]
Didn’t she know him?
Of course not. It was just that he looked like that picture of Isembard Kingdom Brunel, who built the Great Western. Except Brunel had looked so much cockier with that big cigar. Not so scared…
And then she knew, quite certainly, that she was looking at a ghost. Because the light on the South Pier came on, and shone right through his face.
[…]
‘It’s me, Anne,’ she took a step forward.
The ghost writhed away.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Her voice rose to a scared shriek.
This had happened before to her. Where? Where? In the orchard with Cousin Jane. She had walked towards Cousin Jane, and Jane had shrieked with terror. Because Anne, all unknowing, had a spider in her hair, and Jane was terrified of spiders.
[…]
Anne whirled round. Something faded round the curve of the lighthouse. Something red. There was a strong gust of seaweed; the smell of the bottom of a river.
[…]
She tried doubling back. Nothing. The Old Feller was gone. She was alone with something red that stank of the river and had terrified a ghost.” (The Watch House p.116-7)

During the first two acts of the novel, Westall expertly raises the tension and confounds expectations, the simple haunting becoming something more complex and less predictable as Anne’s not-always-harmonious relationship with her newfound friends complicates things further. Then, as we enter the novel’s final phase, The Watch House has a feature that I’ve always loved in horror novels and one which I associate with (again) IT in particular – the period of research, usually during a lull in horrific activity after the threat has been established. In The Watch House, Anne initially assumes that the ghost – The Old Feller – is trying to engage her help to save the Watch House – which he, as founder of the Garmouth Volunteer Life Brigade had built – from financial and physical ruin and by extension save the Life Brigade itself. But once Anne has helped to secure the future of the Watch House as a museum and the hauntings don’t stop, it becomes clear that more than one spirit is involved.

After a session of hypnosis with her new friends Pat and Timmo proves both disturbing and revealing it becomes clear that understanding the problem requires more detailed local knowledge than Anne has. She talks to the oldest member of the life Brigade, the 95-year-old Bosun, who gives her an eye witness account of events she has previously seen under hypnosis, through the Old Feller’s eyes. She again enlists the help of Timmo. Introduced in the guise of ‘Doctor Death’, an eccentric DJ running the youth club disco, Timmo is an older teenager, a medical student with a huge variety of interests and expertise, but no real attention span. Timmo is knowledgable and freakishly intelligent, but his interest in the paranormal is as playful and skeptical rather as it is genuine and after the dramatic first hypnosis session, Anne only reluctantly agrees to do it again. Before that happens, Anne insists on some more concrete research, but as is common during these kinds of interludes in horror fiction, she suffers from a sense of dislocation that makes rational thought difficult:

“Next morning, Timmo had to bully her all the way up the hill to Front Street. If he hadn’t called for her, she would never have got out of bed. Her legs felt like lead; she had hardly slept.
Front Street, full of shoppers and red double-decker buses, was insubstantial, like a dream. It was the real world that was ghostly now.” (The Watch House, p.131)

The novel’s final act brings the story to a feverish pitch as the supernatural events become more deadly and Anne’s mother arrives in Garmouth, threatening to take her back to London. The climax, involving the two priests in an extended exorcism – surely influenced by the final scenes in the movie version of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist – is powerful but, like the ending of this article, a little bathetic. Although narratively satisfying, it’s loud and apocalyptic where the novel’s most effectively eerie moments are quiet and understated. The scenes that lingered in my mind – and which remain the most vivid to me decades later – are those when Anne, alone in the Watch House, is menaced by Hague, or when she is stalked by a mangy, grave-digging dog in the old Priory churchyard. As horror fiction, these are among the finest scenes that Westall ever wrote. Anne too, is a surprisingly vivid and sympathetic character; Westall’s female characters are often on the verge of caricature and his usual (youthful, male) protagonists tend to have a manly impatience with the women in his books. I would hesitate to call Westall’s books misogynistic, but there is sometimes a strain of male chauvinism to them which seems to belong to the author as much as it does to the characters. It’s also an oddity perhaps worth mentioning that of all the books I read as a child – and there were quite lot of them – Westall’s are the only ones I recall which almost invariably have a flippant reference to rape in them, which definitely feels bizarre in the 21st century. The Watch House itself is very much a product of the 1970s – with much that that entails; chauvinism, mild homophobia, flared trousers – in a way that The Machine Gunners wasn’t, which possibly accounts for its currently out-of-print status. But it’s a shame, with some kind of preface/disclaimer about its dated attitudes and language, it could easily go on to scare new generations of children, and get them hooked on the mysterious delights of the horror genre.

church, going*

But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure.

Philip Larkin, Church Going (1954)

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky

Given that Christianity seemed to be – in the sense of being a kind of shared societal glue – on its way out in the 1950s, and was undermined further by the social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, it’s surprising in a way that churches are still standing at all. But what Larkin, for all of his humanist cynicism didn’t foresee, is what seems the obvious fate of churches in the 21st century: they won’t be allowed to peacefully moulder into dust and neglect like the menhirs and cairns of previous eras – they get sold instead.

At the time of writing, the Church of Scotland has seventeen churches for sale, among other kinds of properties and plots of land. The same thing isn’t happening with Catholic churches, Mosques, Synagogues or Mormon temples or whatever it is that Scientologists have – not because of anything inherently superior about those religions or the quality of their followers’ faith, but because, at the time when these churches were built – mostly in the 19th century, but some even earlier – the Church of Scotland was something you had to opt out of, not something you had to join. And therefore, in a way – although not of course a legally binding way – the Church of Scotland is selling off something which belongs to the people of Scotland.

 

 

The idea that money is more important to the Church of Scotland than the buildings that were at the centre of the spiritual and social lives of generations of people (and also, the place that God lived, I guess) seems grotesque, but there it is. It’s just bricks (or stone) and mortar, after all; or that, presumably is the logic, because God doesn’t actually live in a stone building but in either heaven or the hearts of believers etc, etc. And yet, if it’s just a building, how come people can only vandalise houses or schools or barns, but they can “desecrate” churches? “De-consecration” – what the church does in order to render its buildings saleable – is just a non-inflammatory way of saying desecration. De-consecrating the church doesn’t affect the material of the building, but it does remove its purpose – but what it can’t do is remove its history. So if you buy a church, what is it that are you actually buying? In a book I liked as a teenager, Terry Brooks’s Magic Kingdom For Sale – Sold! (1986), a depressed lawyer called Ben Holiday buys what turns out to be something like Narnia or Middle Earth, from a catalogue (nowadays it would be from a website). If Mr Holiday bought a church, he wouldn’t be mystically transported to an otherworldly realm, but he would – and the buyers of these buildings do – become the owner of a place where thousands of people were, in a meaningful way, transported to a place where, whatever the privations and terrors of their daily lives might be, things made some sort of black-and-white sense. Somewhere that virtue was rewarded with eternal paradise, vice  was punished with eternal damnation and the person in the pulpit had the correct answers to whatever questions life was throwing at you. You don’t have to believe in any of that to realise that it was (and to some extent I suppose still is) important.

Like, I’m sure, many convinced lifelong atheists (and I’m a very un-spiritual one at that), I love churches. The architecture, the fixtures and fittings, the solemn atmosphere. The idea of building on top of (Native American) Indian burial grounds was enough to fuel horror fiction and urban legend for a century; will turning churches into houses, flats and offices do something similar? Probably not; although some of the churches for sale do indeed still have graveyards attached, the churches themselves, whether used or not, are utterly familiar to the local people. Like the Indian burial grounds, they have, for these people, always been there, but unlike them, they have always been visible, and have far more mundane connotations. They aren’t, or weren’t just the places people got married or had funeral services, they are places where, very recently, a few times a year you trooped along with your primary school classmates to hear about the less commercial, less fun aspects of Easter or Christmas and to sing a few hymns. In short, even now churches aren’t, or are rarely “other” in the way that (to non-indigenous settlers and their descendants) Indian burial grounds are. But, after generations will they still be familiar in that way, or will they become just funny-shaped houses? Who knows, but it’s sad to think so.

However much one does or doesn’t believe in the mythology that put them there, churches, just as local landmarks, bear the weight of memory, just as schools, war memorials, statues and monuments do. Although a valuable and significant thing, it’s a personal, private and unknowable kind of value; nostalgia, in its original, Greek meaning of ‘homecoming pain’ can be evoked in all of its intense complexity by almost anything, and in your own private iconography a road sign or piece of weed-strewn wasteland is likely to be as potent as, or even more potent than the more obvious celestial symbolism of the heaven-pointed steeple and arched windows. But the fact remains that the hopes, beliefs, dreams, grief and pain of generations was directed towards the church like lightning towards the weather vane that surmounts it; there is a kind of power just in that.

So what should be done with churches? You can’t keep everything forever, after all, and the Church of Scotland is, strange though it is to say it, a business. The people used to belong to it; it never belonged to the people and its churches are not public property in anything but the spiritual sense. But perhaps they should be: granted, they only reflect one strand of what is now a multicultural (and what was always a multi-faith) nation, but it’s a strand that informs attitudes and ways of life that contribute, both negatively and positively to the character of the country and its culture to this day. And although I don’t personally believe in the idea that buildings and land absorb a kind of psychic residue that manifests itself in the ghosts, hauntings and folklore beloved of digital TV channels, I feel like they should.

Those fundamental life events; christenings, marriages, funerals, wars, disasters – all of those lost people and all of that vanished emotion, should have some kind of monument or repository – and what better place than a church? Still; maintaining empty buildings purely for the sake of their history is an expensive, ethically dubious business and hardly an indicator of cultural good health. Finding new uses for these kinds of buildings that somehow respects their history is no easy task either. Personally, I’d like the government to buy them and use them to display the large percentage of publicly owned art that is currently languishing in the storerooms of galleries and museums, fulfilling in some ways at least, the National Galleries of Scotland’s strategic plan: “we will make the national collection accessible to all and inspire curiosity across the world. We want to connect with our audiences and with each other in new, collaborative and involving ways.” It would be appropriate in a way; human beings create art as god is supposed to have created people after all, and people with or without gods make art; it expresses many of the same fundamental impulses and emotions as religion. But it’s hardly an idea that’s likely to capture the public imagination, except in the negative sense that ambitious government spending on the arts – not that there has been much of that – always invites manufactured outrage. Ah well, it’s probably best to just make them into flats.

* I realise the double meaning was already implied in the title of Larkin’s poem, but why not render it completely unsubtle with a comma?

 

chocolate eggs & bunnies & blood: happy Easter!

ceramic sculpture of a Moon Goddess and her rabbit partner, Mexico, c.700 AD

Imagine a culture so centred on wealth, property and power that it becomes scared of sex and  frets endlessly about what it sees as the misuses of sex. A culture that identifies breeding so closely with with money, wealth and status, and women so closely with breeding and therefore with sex that, when looking to replace traditional symbols of birth and regeneration it rejects sex and even nature and, in the end makes the embodiment of motherhood a virgin and the embodiment of rebirth a dead man. Unhealthy, you might think; misanthropic even – and yet here we are.

But when that culture loses its religious imperative, what should be waiting? Those old symbols of fertility; rabbits and eggs. But whereas Christianity in its pure form found it hard to assimilate these symbols, preferring instead to just impose its own festival of rebirth on top of the pagan one,  capitalism, despite  being in so many ways compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition, is essentially uninterested in spiritual matters. So even though it’s mostly pretty okay with Christianity, which creates its own consumer-friendly occasions, it proves to be equally okay with paganism too, as long as it can sell us the pagan symbols back in a lucrative way.

Easter is, after all, a mess to begin with; its name is pagan (Ēostre or Ôstara, Goddess of the spring) and its Christian traditions, even when embodied in the tragic idea of a man being killed by being nailed to a cross was never entrenched enough to suppress the essentially celebratory, even frivolous feeling that spring traditionally brings. Okay, so Christ ascending to heaven is pretty celebratory without being frivolous; but as, in the UK at least, represented by a hot cross bun, with its cross on the top to represent the crucifix and even – to play up the morbid factor that is so central to Christianity – its spices that are supposed allude to the embalming of Christ’s dead body, it’s hardly solemn: it’s a bun.

On the other hand, birth, since the dawn of time and to the present day, is not just a simple cause for rejoicing and in that the Christian tradition, though it tries to remove the aspects that seem most central to birth to us: women, labour (the word presumably wasn’t chosen accidentally) and procreation, probably tells us more about the seriousness and jeopardy of childbirth than the Easter bunny does.

The patron (matron?) saint of childbirth is no help; St Margaret in herself has nothing to do with birth (although she was presumably born), but becomes its saint through the symbolic act of bursting out of the dragon who ate her – a strange analogy but one that reflects the hazardous nature of childbirth in medieval times, when mortality rates were high, not just for babies but for their mothers. Rabbits may represent – in ancient cultures across the world, from Europe to Mexico and beyond – fecundity, but it’s an animal idea of fertility for its own sake that has nothing to do with the practical or emotional aspects of producing new human beings.

St Margaret, “reborn” after being eaten by a dragon
Jan Van Eyck’s Eve (c.1432) from the Ghent Altarpiece

Pregnancy in Western art was a rarity until fairly recently; and even now, the puritanical ideas inherited from Victorian Christianity mean that the apparently pregnant Eve of Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (completed in 1432) is a subject of debate: Eve pregnant with humankind makes sense, and the 15th century was certainly more in touch with the realities of human life than the 19th and early 20th century men who codified the canon of Western art history – but maybe she is simply the medieval/gothic ideal of femininity as seen in illuminated manuscripts and carvings; small shoulders, small breasts, big hips and stomach – given an unusually realistic treatment.

Gustav Klimt – Hope I (1903)

As the nineteenth century gave way to the 20th, Gustav Klimt was able to bring the beauty and wonder of pregnancy and birth to art with Hope I, his beautiful female figure of hope and renewal glowing against a background of death and peril, but it’s only really when women begin painting that that the symbolic and magical aspects of motherhood are reconciled with the more sombre, earthly spirituality that Christianity preferred to represent in a dying man and with the fundamental animal nature of humankind, without that being a negative thing. A painting like Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Reclining Mother and Child II (1907) shows all of the human aspects that were embodied in the contorted Christian images of the Virgin Mary, crucifixion and Christ’s rebirth: human beings that are fragile, loving, vulnerable and dependent on each other, but also the things that were missing; biology and the bonds it creates. The magic of Klimt, but not represented in a titillating way, and depicted in concrete rather than symbolic terms.

Paula Modersohn-Becker – Reclining Mother & Child II (1906)

For the generation after Paula Modersohn-Becker, everything was seen through the fragmenting prism of World War One, and so Otto Dix, more cynical, less intimately involved, shows us the physical discomfort of pregnancy minus its magic. Dix, despite his famous claim, “I’m not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I’ve seen is beautiful.” took a definite pride in shocking viewers with his art; as he also said; “All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.” By the time Dix painted these pictures he was a father himself, but although his paintings of his family reveal a more tender, if just as incisive, aspect to his art, here he paints as a pitiless observer, knowing that his work was challenging and confrontational to the generally conservative audience of his time; a time when, like ours, forces of intolerance and conservatism were closing in on the freedom embodied in art this truthful.

Otto Dix – Pregnant Woman (1931) & Gussy Hippold-Ahnert – Pregnant Woman (1932)

 

But despite his clinical eye and devotion to the ‘new objectivity’ (“The Neue Sachlichkeit – I invented it“) Dix’s truth is a dramatic, heightened kind, designed to penetrate the complacency of his era. Meanwhile, his pupil, Gussy Hippold-Ahnert tackled the same subject and almost certainly even the same model with a realism that is at first less striking but also far less dramatizing.  Gussy was of course a woman and is not showing us, as Dix seems to be, a faceless being representing the eternal, but rarely remarked on hardship involved in the joyous business of continuing the species. Instead, Hippold-Ahnert shows us a woman who happens to be pregnant; both paintings are realistic, both are objective and, as with the symbolic sacrifice of Christ and the eternally recurring bunny, both display different aspects of the truth.

My favourite bunny in art: detail from Piero di Cosimo’s Venus, Mars & Cupid (1505)

But anyway; enjoy your chocolate.

 

forget my fate: saints and sex workers; the art of violence & martyrdom

In a way, this article concerns religious art, though the person who wrote it has no religious beliefs whatsoever. But when people really, passionately, even if unconsciously, believe – in a religion, a philosophy, an idea – that belief imbues the works they create with the power of human feeling. Art, music, architecture, literature, objects; that power that is retained whether or not the observer accepts or understands the ideas that are living within those things. That’s my opinion anyway; I may not believe in the supernatural, but I do believe the ‘natural’ contains magic of its own.

Adam Elsheimer – The Stoning of St Stephen, 1603 (detail)

So anyway; when, in Purcell’s 1688 opera Dido and Aeneas, the dying Queen of Carthage sings Nahum Tate’s beautiful words, “Remember me, but forget my fate”, she is articulating something that was then becoming, and to some extent remains a kind of ideal as humanity tried, perhaps pointlessly, to distance itself from death. Caught in a pincer movement between the Reformation, which had eliminated much of the rich mythology of religion in its determination to reduce the clutter and distance between human beings and their God, and the dawning of what would become the age of reason, which sought to cast off the shadow of crude medieval brutality and superstition, death, once an unavoidable and largely accepted part of daily life, had become something akin to what it is today. That is, entirely acceptable – even celebrated, in fiction and entertainment, in real life it’s preferably kept out of sight and out of mind as far as is possible. But although the impulse to distance oneself from the more viscerally negative aspects of life is understandable, it’s almost the opposite of the way that people, for a couple of centuries at least, related to saints.

Saints have remained celebrated through the years to some extent, but still, since their medieval heyday they have found themselves playing a gradually diminishing role in Western European society. Interestingly though, while Christianity lost much of its cast of characters and stories through the ages, what it never lost in the Reformation – quite the opposite in fact – is that key idea which saints’ lives so often embodied: misery now, rewards later. And it was this, despite the apparent opposition of the two ideologies, which made Christianity and all of the Abrahamic religions such successful facilitators, or carriers (in the pharmaceutical sense) of capitalism. But, while saints faded from the vital figures of the middle ages into their current, more modest position, they remained venerated, if not worshipped, even in the Protestant faith, and still played a vital role in Catholic countries. That being so, plenty of the somewhat harrowing and graphic art generated in their names in earlier years survives; and rightly so.

Take for example Adam Elseheimer’s 1603 Stoning of St Stephen. As a German artist working in Catholic Rome, Elseheimer’s position may have been anomalous, but no faith of any kind is required to understand and empathise with the young saint’s fate. We may not (or we may) share his implied, rather than shown, exultation at the parting of the clouds and the glimpse of heaven beyond, but we can recognise his pain, fear and loneliness. We’ve seen it many times, not only in cinema and in literature, but even more in news reports and photographs or, if we are unlucky, as eyewitnesses to (or victims of) real events. This painting make me think of the harrowing footage, a few years back, of prisoners being beheaded by Islamic State fighters, but they have echoes too, in those everyday acts of violence in which there are, thankfully, usually no deaths – but rarely any obvious sign of divine intervention either.

detail of St Sebastian being clubbed to death by Master WB (probably Wolfgang Beurer, c.1500)

One of the most strikingly contemporary-feeling examples of the art of martyrdom is the series of Scenes from the life of St Sebastian in the Cathedral Museum, Mainz, painted by Master WB (probably the Middle Rhenish painter and engraver Wolfgang Beurer). St Sebastian is one of the most often-painted of saints, usually shown as a kind of surrogate Jesus, young and beautiful, but pierced by (sometimes a lot of) arrows. But the whole point of that part of his legend, is that the arrows didn’t kill him. Tended by St Irene of Rome (in the baroque era the healing of St Sebastian was painted quite often; there are some very beautiful and moving pictures, like the famous Georges de la Tour painting from 1650, and my favourite, by Hendrick Ter Brugghen, from a little earlier) he recovered, and went about his saintly business.

Unusually though, Beurer’s cycle of paintings takes the story past the Christ-like recovery of Sebastian and through to his eventual death, after he journeyed to see the Emperor Diocletian and scold him about his sinful life. This time, the young saint was clubbed to death and didn’t recover. This is a very different death from the ceremonial, iconic execution by arrows. There’s a sense of solemnity, of procedural, if dubious, legality that affords the victim of a firing squad a kind of Christ-like dignity – in paintings at least. There’s no way to make a clubbing to death look dignified though, and Beurer/Master WB doesn’t try. Instead he shows the by now pitifully uncomposed figure of the saint being beset by three cheerfully brutish soldiers with beautifully painted lead clubs.

Hendrik Ter Brugghen -St Sebastian tended by St Irene, 1625
Sebastiano del Piombo’s Martyrdom of St Agatha 1520 (technically doesn’t feature her martyrdom)

St Agatha, like Sebastian, is unusual in that her actual martyrdom – technically, she died in prison at some unspecified time later, after being healed by St Peter – is never pictured. Instead what is shown, essentially for titillating reasons, as horrendous as that is, is not even her torture, where her body was torn with hooks, but only the specific detail of her breasts being cut or torn off.
But although her death seems rarely to have been depicted, there are paintings of the healing of St Agatha in prison by St Peter. Partly this might be because of the two-saints-for-the-price-of-one nature of the image, but perhaps more importantly it afforded the artist another opportunity to show female nudity without fearing religious censure.

detail of St Agatha healed by St Peter in prison by an unknown Neapolitan painter of the early 17th century

Although these paintings – Heinrich Vogtherr’s Martyrdom of St Erasmus (1516) is another great example – are full of religious feeling, it’s far easier as a secular person (or as this secular person) to respond emotionally to a painting of a martyrdom than it is to the ultimate martyrdom of the crucifixion of Christ. Jesus is of course something more than a human being, and though we are supposed to respond to his suffering in a human way, he’s still god after all; he presumably planned it and he can take it. Saints though, are different. The point may be the same – suffering holy people, relating to Christ as their father, in the same way that Christ related to god/himself as his – but these are just human beings. They may be idealised by artists, as they were in their official hagiographies, but they are supposed to be relatable for ordinary, unsaintly people.

Heinrich Vogtherr – the Martyrdom of St Erasmus, 1516 (detail)

Many artists captured the loneliness of Christ on the cross, but the loneliness of Christ, even alone in the dark, is qualitatively different from that of the martyr saints. In their last moments, the saints are usually closely surrounded by their enemies, who are of course also their fellow, imperfect human beings. The pain of Christ, too, tends, for the most part, to be a remote and rarefied thing; it’s familiar to everyone, in an almost neutralised way, from living the cultural landscape of western society. But the pain of the saints is something we recognise in a more direct way. It’s unlikely, I hope, that many people reading this, have first-hand experience of fatal stonings, mutilations, disembowelings or bludgeonings, but these saints, with their looks of glazed shock and their vividly painted blood, are a figures we have become used to in other, secular contexts.

Francisco de Zurbarán St Agatha, c.1630-33 (detail)

It’s fair to assume that these saints wanted to be remembered. But would they – and there are many, many more of them in addition to the few I’ve shown; from the big names like St Matthew and St John the Baptist (beheaded), to St Peter and St Andrew (crucified) to the more obscure, like Saints Cosmas and Damian (beheaded by pagans) and St Ursula (shot with an arrow by the Huns) to the theatrically horrific, like St Bartholomew (flayed and beheaded) and St Erasmus (intestines pulled out with a spindle) –  have wanted to be remembered for the nature of their deaths? Even divorced from these kind of narrative paintings, the saints were rarely depicted without their sometimes bizarre attributes, the strangest ones that spring to mind being the aforementioned Agatha, in a more serene setting, bearing her severed breasts on a plate, or Saint Peter of Verona, normally depicted with the cleaver still embedded in his skull.

After the Age of Enlightenment, these explicit, visceral images more or less disappeared from western art for a couple of centuries, despite the occasional politically-motivated flashback like Jaques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793). Unexpectedly, they returned in a slightly altered and ideologically almost opposite, and certainly far more secular form in interwar Germany, made vivid by the horrors of World War One. But although a comparison with the Lustmord (sex murder) paintings of the Weimar Republic seems like, and possibly is, a flippant and/or blasphemous one, it feels valid, especially in relation to the paintings of St Agatha with their uncomfortably conflicting motives and coolly horrific imagery.

Paintings like George Grosz’s John the Sex Murderer (1918) and Otto Dix’s horrific Lustmord (especially the lost 1922 painting that exists only in black and white photos) have parallels with St Agatha, the painting I want to briefly talk about is less blatantly sensationalist and to my eyes at least has something of the heartbreaking empathy of Wolfgang Beurer’s St Stephen. Like Dix’s but less confrontational, Lustmord (1930) by the great Neue Sachlichkeit painter and photographer Karl Hubbuch, shows only the aftermath of the murder, rather than the act itself. But rather than losing force because of its relative restraint, Hubbuch’s image is imbued with all of the loneliness, fear, isolation and fragility seen in the face of Elseheimer’s St Stephen and the pitiful battered corpse of Beurer’s.

Karl Hubbuch – The Sex Murder (1930)

In the end, whatever the means or motivation for these pictures, what we are left with is the pictures themselves; and if they should survive beyond their meanings and attributions, people will, perhaps sadly, always be able to see what they represent. This is the opposite of art for art’s sake; but then, to appreciate the form of – for example – Wilfred Owen’s war poetry and study that form and its mechanics without taking into account what that apparatus is for is to miss the point. Likewise, the skill of a painter like Beurer, whose intention was to make the holy real and relatable, or of Elseheimer, or Sebastiano del Piombo, or even Karl Hubbuch, wasn’t there solely in an effort to amaze the viewer with the painter’s skill or advertise their technical ability.

Lorenzo Lotto – St Peter of Verona (1549)

It may be that these sex workers and saints would have preferred, like Purcell and Tate’s Dido of Carthage, to be remembered, but to have their fates forgotten – but instead forget that you know the titles and subjects of these pictures. These people were, as many people still are, tortured, killed and disposed of without sympathy or ceremony. It would be nice if they were all remembered.

 

cycle; woods and fields and little rivers

 

With apologies to Paul Gorman, whose beautifully written accounts of bike rides partly influenced this article, although Paul actually knows about cycling and I don’t; this is essentially a surrogate fast walk.

setting off

I thought I’d take to the roads early (just before 7.30 am) because it was a beautiful morning that was forecast not to become a beautiful day, and because, even in 2021 there’s not much traffic on the road early on a Sunday morning. A recent bout of not atypical heavy rain and not unprecedented (one of the overused words of the last 18 months of so) but still definitely unusual-in-May extreme hailstorms left the roads shining in the morning sun and the fences strung with light-catching water droplets; it was very pretty.
Once out of the village, the landscape here is so flat as to look almost Dutch, aside from the Lomond Hills; still half buried in morning mist. In fact, despite living here most of my life, this was really the first time I had considered that this must be what is meant by the ‘Howe of Fife’ and indeed a quick googling confirmed it; “The term ‘howe’ is derived from an old Scots word meaning a hollow, valley or flat tract of land.” The Lomonds themselves, and Bishop Hill on the far end (not visible from my viewpoint) are really not particularly big, but almost give the impression of mountains from the vantage point of the plain below.

the Howe of Fife looking towards East Lomond

The nice thing about rural cycling is that, although much faster than walking, it doesn’t disturb anything much around you, and on a quiet morning (on my 8-10 mile cycle I was passed by one car, one proper cyclist and rode past one dog walker and a jogger) like this, nature seems not to pay much attention to you. It turns out that this area is infested (not the right connotations, but there were so many of them) with Yellowhammers, looking almost canary-like in the spring sunshine, plus innumerable sparrows, blackbirds and the odd village idiot-like pheasant shouting in the middle of a field.
The natural landscape is pretty enough on its own, but because, presumably, of the sort of person I am, I love the unexpected moments of geometry caused by human interference (ploughed furrows deep in shadow in one field, strips of plastic sheeting over rows of berries* in another) and of course the semi-wildlife, like a paddock with three huge, but mellow looking bulls that made me think of the work of Rosa Bonheur.

local bull

Although her work – and her life – is 19th century in almost every respect, Bonheur is a potent figure for the 21st century. Brought up in an egalitarian Christian-Socialist sect by Jewish parents, Bonheur was a troublesome child who developed a love for animals and for painting and as a young woman studied animal anatomy (in abattoirs) and dissected animals at a veterinary school as well as studying live animals. She was openly lesbian at a time when it was, if not illegal, certainly frowned upon by the French government; so much so that she had to request permission from the police to wear trousers, as cross-dressing for women was forbidden by law (until 2013!) Her official reason was that it was better clothing for attending sheep and cattle markets, where she made studies, but although that was certainly true, she was generally known among her friends for her masculine clothing and short hair; both very much against the conventions of the time. Nevertheless, she went on to become a mainstream success and in her own way an establishment figure, both in France and (especially) in the UK, where she met Queen Victoria and painted some anachronistic Highland scenes; she may have been revolutionary by nature and personality, but she seems to have been quite conservative by taste and inclination; never underestimate the complexity of people.

*I mean, maybe berries? Despite growing up in the countryside and actually on farms for a fair bit of childhood, I’m none the wiser about that

Rosa Bonheur – Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849)
geometry imposed on nature
and again; with plastic

Looking at the scenery, the wildlife, the roads, you have to wonder; why would anyone not care about this? I don’t mean the Howe of Fife, or Fife, or Scotland, or Britain, or Europe, or the world (although those too); just wherever you happen to be; place. Landscapes should and must change, as we change; not just the geometries and geographies we impose on them, like the furrows and plastic (though it would be nice to do away with the plastic itself), but everything. 500 years ago the Howe of Fife was covered in forest and the monarchs of Scotland hunted wild boar here. A thousand years ago, a Scotland that was different in shape, size and culture was being ruled by Alexander I, then near the end of his life, having recently lost his wife Sybilla of Normandy, the French child of Henry I of England; Alexander would be succeeded by his brother David, then Prince of the Cumbrians; by James’s time all of these details would seem strange. Two thousand years ago, the Howe of Fife was part of southern Caledonia, that is the land to the north of the river Forth; at least the Romans, still fifty years from their attempted conquest, called it Caledonia, whether the inhabitants of Caledonia had any name for the landmass in general, as opposed to their own local chiefdoms, isn’t recorded.

These back roads are quiet, but although nature is everywhere, it’s deceptive, hardly a natural landscape at all. It has been shaped by generations of human beings, by agriculture and the politics of land ownership, no less in King James’s day, when forests belonged to the King and had their own laws, than now. It reminds me both of my childhood love of Tolkien and of a line from The Fellowship of the Ring; where Bilbo says “I want to see the wild country again before I die, and the Mountains; but he [Frodo] is still in love with the Shire, with woods and fields and little rivers.” Tolkien loved both the wilderness and the smaller, more familiar (Oxfordshire-like) scenery of the Shire, but in his landscapes change is almost always bad; both on the larger scale of the desolation that evil brings to Mordor and the fiery chasms opened in the earth when the Dwarves delve ‘too deep’, and on the local level where the Shire is ruined by the arrival of industry. Michael Moorcock writes perceptively in his I think overly scathing (“The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle-class“ ‘Epic Pooh’, in Wizardry and Wild Romance, Gollancz, 1987, p.125), but often right and always funny essay about Tolkien, Epic Pooh (1987) about the essential conservatism of much of heroic fantasy fiction, and the points he makes are even more relevant today. The climate emergency will – regardless of the political will to do so – at some point need to be dealt with, as the pace of change outstrips the ways in which our society functions, and it’s important that the necessity to move forward doesn’t become an attempt to turn the clock back; always attractive in ever-nostalgic Britain. What Tolkien only reluctantly accepts – or accepts in a tragic way that fits with the more fatalistic (and Christian) aspects of his vision – is that change is inevitable. In Moorcock’s own heroic fantasy fiction, he not only takes change for granted, it becomes the backdrop against which his series of heroes who make up ‘the Eternal Champion’ fight their never-ending battle for equilibrium in a multiverse where change – in itself neutral – is the only constant:

“Then the earth grew old, its landscapes mellowing and showing signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner of a man in his last years – The High History of the Runestaff”

(quoted from Count Brass, 1973, but appears lots of other places too)

the Lomond Hills after the mist burned off

The landscape of the Howe of Fife is not yet – the odd wind turbine aside – whimsical and strange, but there was a certain surreal quality in the way the beautiful spring morning (which felt more like early spring than early May) followed days of hailstorms and thunder. Surreal anyway to someone old enough to remember when seasons seemed to have a set pattern. In another twenty or thirty years will British Christmas cards still have snow scenes on them, even though most of the heavy snowfall seems to happen now in March or even April? Human culture is perhaps slow to catch up with the changes it creates; bearing in mind that the traffic on the roads today is light because even after decades of change there’s a convention that people don’t work on a Sunday, for the most archaic of reasons – but I’m still glad of it. These kinds of thoughts, and Rosa Bonheur too, were partly on my mind because this week there were elections which, although not regime-changing, were important. The results were locally, fairly positive, nationally (Scotland) pretty much as expected and extra-nationally (UK: not quite international, yet at least) a bit disappointing. The collapse of any real kind of left-wing movement has been happening over a long period of time and I suppose at this point all you can say is that people in general don’t want one; or not enough of them to make it happen. On the other hand a general liberalisation has taken place that possibly just makes it seem unnecessary to large numbers of people. And of course, the left eats itself, as always; yesterday I saw online a list of “people that socialism needs more of” (working class people essentially) and “people it needs less of” (non-working class people, basically), whereas surely the whole point is, it needs all people, if it’s going to work. But whatever.

the remains of yesterday’s rain

A nice thing about cycling is that, aside from looking around, you can’t really do very much. It clears the mind in a way that car travel, with its technical aspects and its music or radio, doesn’t usually do. It would be possible to listen to the radio while cycling, but probably not very sensible; and in an election week the lack of human noise is very welcome. After watching/listening to/reading political propaganda and analysis before and after an election it becomes clear just how versatile “the media” seems to be. This week I’ve seen people criticise it essentially to suit their own viewpoint; it’s too right/left wing, too politically correct, too reactionary, too critical, not critical enough. Which makes it seem as though the UK media is pretty good at covering all bases. But TV, radio and the newspapers are a distorting mirror at best. Witness the way that the ‘working class’ – whether positively or negatively – is treated as a monolith. The viewpoint of the media (understandably, given most of its staff and ownership) is middle class; and therefore on TV, on the radio and in newspapers the middle class becomes the norm from which everything and everyone else (both working class and upper class) are observed and commented upon. “Reality TV” features the rich or the poor as something other, something to be looked at and entertained by. But it’s a norm that ignores the facts. The working class, insofar as there is still such a thing (I am of it and I’m not even really sure) is technically the norm, in the sense that it’s the majority, just as it always has been. The UK is (albeit in a less precise way than a century ago) a pyramidal structure, with monarchy and government at the top, the middle class – bigger and both richer and poorer than before, but still identifiable – in (yep) the middle, and the working class as the wide base, incorporating a layer of underclass which fluctuates depending on which government is at the top (it’s bigger now than it was a decade ago). How do you change that false picture the media presents? You don’t really; not without changing the society. Marx and Engels wanted the means of production to belong to the workers; in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that stood for something real and meaningful, but while its egalitarian spirit is eternally relevant, in the 21st century the statement itself needs so many qualifications as to be almost meaningless. What are the means of production? Producing what? Who are the workers? The working class of Marx’s day would barely recognise the working class of today – and they might well look at our lifestyle and be encouraged that the struggle wasn’t in vain. And of course it wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that the post-industrial 21st century is really much more fair than in the industrial age, certainly capitalism is even more rapacious and entrenched than ever before, and as callous too. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the tedious saying goes.

the flatness of the Howe

People of course do want change; the right kind of change anyway. And elections are one way of securing it. But this week people who were asked on TV for their reasons for voting gave ‘change’ as a reason for voting for parties who have been in power for 14 years (Scotland) and 9 years (UK) – which seems at best like wishful thinking or at least suggests a lack of exciting or convincing alternatives, to say the least. Arguably of course, a vote for the SNP in Scotland is a vote for a bigger change than just who currently sits in parliament, but familiarity breeds indifference and at this point it’s probably good for their cause that they are no longer the only party in favour of an independent Scotland. And in a depressing kind of way, circumstances have aided them too. In 2014 it was easy, personally speaking, to vote against independence on several grounds; a disliking of Nationalism as a principle, so closely related as it is to xenophobia and intolerance. As someone who was very happy to belong to the EU too, independence seemed (laughably in retrospect, though still not wrongly) to endanger Scotland’s membership, since the UK and not Scotland was the member. And there were niggles about the economy, not because Scotland couldn’t function outside of the UK – one of the most irritating arguments for the status quo; I think it’s pretty obvious that it could and can – but because the Salmond leadership seemed to be saying (ie he was saying) that he wanted nothing to change regarding the currency etc. Which would seem to put Scotland in the surreal position of being a supposedly independent nation which has its economy regulated by the Bank of England. Why the Bank of England would accept that, or anyone on either side of the border would want it is mysterious, to say the least. But anyway, here we are in 2021; nationalism and xenophobia look like being worse and more virulent in the UK than outside of it. We are already out of the EU and, while an independent Scotland being a member state is far from a foregone conclusion, the UK rejoining is definitely not about to happen anytime soon. And Covid-19 has given the economy a beating that will take a lot of recovering from, whatever we do. So why not independence? I would of course prefer to have a democratic socialist party in charge of it, but not having a rabidly inept right-wing one would be a step in the right direction.

apparent rural idyll

Without wishing to get bogged down even more in the minutiae of British politics, the story of the Labour Party (it’s probably not quite dead yet; it always has a far more cyclical life than the Conservative Party) is an instructive one. There’s always been a tug of war between the left and centre elements of the party, but since the 90s there’s always been the dubious argument that veering to the right is the way to win votes and power. But although New Labour was definitely uncomfortably right-wing for a supposedly socialist party, that wasn’t what brought it success. It was the ‘new’ part; drawing a line under history and saying ‘the past ends here and this is what we stand for’ was a big, optimistic step at a time when British politics – as now- had become stagnant and unappealing. The Corbyn left managed something similar, with a younger demographic, but for all its radical ideas, it was immediately familiar to anyone over a certain age. Much as Blair and co’s propaganda looks vapid and empty in retrospect (because it essentially was), not invoking Marx or even socialism was a key to their success, not because of where they or their supporters sat on the political spectrum (I think it’s true that the majority of the British public probably don’t think of themselves being especially political), but simply because people will, every now and then, give new ideas a chance, if they look exciting enough and if they’re bored or disgusted enough with the status quo; It’s worth bearing in mind. None of which has nothing obvious to do with this road on this morning, with the patches of bluebells under the trees, which might be left over from the great forest of King James’s time; where wild boar hid, evading the men and the dogs, before they were hunted to extinction.

 

 

the cult of maimed perfection

*firstly, may change this title as it possibly sounds like I’m saying the opposite of what I’m saying*

That western culture¹ has issues with womens’ bodies² is not a new observation. But it feels like the issues are getting stranger. Recently there have been, both on TV (where the time of showing is important) and online (where it isn’t), cancer awareness campaigns where women who have had mastectomies are shown topless (in the daytime). This is definitely progress – but it also seems to simultaneously say two different things with very different implications.
On the one hand it’s – I would say obviously – very positive; it is of course normal to have a life-changing (or life saving) operation and the scars that come with it, and it can only be helpful to minimise the fear surrounding what is a daunting and scary prospect for millions of people. Normalising in the media things that are already within the normal experience of people – especially when those things have tended to be burdened with taboos – is generally the right thing to do. These scars, after all are nothing to be ashamed of or that should be glossed over or hidden from view. I hope not many people would argue with that. But at the same time isn’t it also saying, ‘yes it’s completely normal and fine for a woman to be seen topless on daytime TV, or on popular social media sites, as long as she’s had her breasts³ cut off?’ That seems less positive.

¹I’m sure western culture isn’t alone in this, but ‘write about what you know’ (not always good advice, but still). I’m also aware that this whole article could be seen as a plea for more nudity. I’m not sure that’s what I mean

² might as well say it, this article deals mainly with old fashioned binary distinctions, but misogyny applies equally to trans women and I think what I say about men probably applies equally to trans men. 

³ or her nipples, on social media

Raphael – The Three Graces (1505) nudity acceptable due to classical context

Looked at this way, this positive and enlightened development seems to be (inadvertently?) reaffirming ancient and (surely!) redundant arguments, but in a completely confused way. Non-sexual nudity, whatever that means, has always been okay with the establishment(s) in some circumstances. Now, one could argue from the context (cancer awareness campaign) that the nudity is desexualised, and I think that’s why it is allowed to be aired at any time of day. (In fact, the Ofcom (UK TV regulating authority)’s rules on nudity – which are aimed at ‘protecting the under 18s’ from nudity, as strange a concept as it’s always been*, are pretty simple:

Nudity

1.21: Nudity before the watershed [9 pm in the UK], or when content is likely to be accessed by children (in the case of BBC ODPS), must be justified by the context.

*Interestingly, Ofcom’s rules about nudity are listed between their rules about Sexual behaviour and their rules about Exorcism, the occult and the paranormal

So presumably, Ofcom (rightly) considers this context to be justified, because the naked body is not being presented in a sexual context. But, at the same time, one thing the cancer awareness film demonstrates – and which it seems it’s at least in part supposed to demonstrate – is that there’s nothing undesirable about the female body post-mastectomy. (admittedly it’s entirely possible that this is just me, projecting the notorious male gaze onto the subject, as if that’s the determining factor in what attractiveness is or isn’t*) . But then, the people that devised and created the film are not the same people that determine what can be shown on TV or online and when.

But even accepting that it’s permitted to show a topless woman on TV during the daytime because it’s de-sexualised nudity, why is that better? Two opposing arguments, a puritanical/right-wing one and a feminist one might both be skeptical (*rightly? see above) of me, as a heterosexual male writing about this. But if the price of women being regarded equally, or taken seriously, or not being somehow reduced by the male gaze (but also the child’s gaze, since on TV at least, nudity tends to be fine after children’s standard bedtimes and on the internet is theoretically policed by child locks) is to de-sexualise them, then that is no less problematic – and in a way really not that different – from the traditional, paternalistic Western view which sees the Virgin Mary as the ultimate exemplar of female-kind. And if sex or desire is itself the problem then not allowing female nudity is also, typically, reducing the visibility of women for what is in essence a problem of male behaviour.

Sebastiano del Piombo – The Martyrdom of St Agatha (1520)

It’s worth looking at the fact that nudity is even an issue in the first place, considering that we all privately live with it, or in it, every day of our lives. In many world cultures of course, it isn’t and never has been a problem, unless/until Westerners have interfered with and poisoned those cultures, but it’s widespread enough elsewhere too, to be a human, rather than purely western quirk. It possibly has a little to do with climate, but it definitely has a lot to do with religion.

But the fact is that, in Western culture, even before the era of the Impressionists and their selectively nude women or the (as it now looks, very selectively) permissive society of the 1960s, female nudity has been perfectly acceptable to depict for hundreds of years; as long as the nude female is either mutilated (say, a virtuous martyr like the Roman suicide Lucretia), the victim of alien (non-Christian) assailants (various saints*) or, turning the tables, if she is a heathen herself (various classical figures, plus Biblical villains like Salome; a favourite subject with the same kind of sex & violence frisson as Lucretia)

*I didn’t realise when I posted this article that today (5th February) is the Feast day of St Agatha, the patron saint of – among other things – breast cancer. I’m not a believer in supernatural or supreme beings, but that’s nice.

Even in Reformation Germany – surely one of the least frisky periods in all of western civilisation – in the private chambers of the privileged male viewer, nudity – especially female nudity – was there in abundance, providing it came with various kinds of extenuating nonsense; dressed up (or rather, not dressed up) in the trappings of classical antiquity. Okay, so maybe a woman can’t be flawless like Christ, but she can be nude and beautiful too, as long as she is being murdered, or stabbing herself to preserve her virtue, or is sentenced to everlasting damnation.

Lucas Cranach the Elder – Lucretia (1528)

Men, of course could, in art, and can on TV or anywhere else, be more or less naked (admittedly with a fig-leaf or something similar) at any time because – I assume – of Jesus. Otherwise how to explain it? The male chest is arguably less aesthetically pleasing than the female one, and certainly less utilitarian in the raising of infants, but in deciding that it is less sexual, our culture makes lots of assumptions or directives that come from religious, patriarchal roots.

The dissonance between the ways that female and male nudity are treated in our culture has its roots in Christianity and its iconography and although in the UK we’re technically the children of the Reformation, what’s striking is how little difference there really was between the way nudity was treated in the Catholic renaissance and the Protestant one.

In both Catholic and Protestant cultures, the art that was not solely designed for the private, (adult) ‘male gaze’ was almost entirely religious. Popes and Puritans both found themselves in the same odd position; Jesus must be perfect and preferably therefore beautiful, whatever that meant at the time – but more than that, it would be blasphemous – literally criminal – not to portray Christ as beautiful.4  But in addition to being perfect, he must, crucially, be human. Understandably, but ironically, it seemed the obvious way to depict human beauty and perfection was without the burden of clothes. The human aspect is after all how the people of the Renaissance could (and I presume people still can) identify with Christ, in a way that they never do with God in other contexts, where that identification would be as blasphemous as a deliberately ugly Christ.

But how was one supposed to regard the nearly nude, technically beautiful body of Christ? With reverence, of course. But revering and worshipping the naked beautiful body of a perfect human being is not something that a misanthropic (or if that’s too strong, homo-skeptic5) religion can do lightly. Helpfully, the part of Christianity that puts the (nearly) naked figure at the centre of our attention is the human sacrifice ritual of the crucifixion and its aftermath.  That bloody, pain-filled ritual allows the viewer to look at Jesus with pity and empathy and tempers (one would hope; but who knows?) the quality of desire that the naked beautiful body of a perfect human being might be expected to engender. And to that Renaissance audience, the reason for that desire was another, but far more ambiguous subject for artists; Adam and Eve.

4 There are special cases though, see below re Grunewald

5 Doesn’t Alan Partridge call himself homoskeptic at some point? But what I mean is – and I’m sure many Christians would take serious issue with this – that Christianity/the Christian God is in theory all-accepting of humans and their frailties, but somehow humans as they are are never quite good enough to escape negative judgement. Not just for things like murder or adultery that are within their power to not do, but things that are in their nature. And then, making a human being who must be killed for the things that other human beings have done or will by their nature do seems on the one hand not very different from an imaginary pagan blood sacrifice cult in a horror movie and on the other, kind of misanthropic

Hans Baldung Grien’s slightly diabolical looking Adam & Eve (1531)

Adam and Eve were a gift to the Renaissance man seeking pervy thrills from his art collection because they are supposed to be sexy. Here are the first humans, made, like Christ, in God’s image and therefore outwardly perfect; and, to begin with, happily nude. But in almost immediately sullying the human body, Adam and Eve are fallible where Christ is not. But how to depict the people that brought us the concept of desire except as desirable? Because they are not only not our saviours, but the opposite, their nudity can afford to be alluring, as long as the lurking threat of that attraction is acknowledged.

Alongside the problems of the iconography in art came the practical problems of making it; and I think that one of the reasons that, of the main ‘Turtles’ of the Italian Renaissance,6 Raphael was elevated to the status he enjoyed for centuries, is that his nude women suggested that he might actually have seen some nude women. For all their athletic/aesthetic beauty, figures like Michelangelo’s Night (see below) and his Sistine Chapel Sibyls are the product of someone who found that the church’s strictures on female nudity (no nude models) happened to strike a chord with his own ideas of aesthetic perfection. Likewise,  Leonardo’s odd hybrid woman, the so-called Monna Vanna (possibly posed for by one of his male assistants) seems to demonstrate an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity on the artist’s part.

6 childish 

Michelangelo – Night, Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence (1526-31) and Leonardo(?) Monna Vanna (c.1500)

One way around the problem of naked human beauty was – as it seems still to be – to mutilate the body. Paintings like Mattias Grünewald’s agonised, diseased-looking Jesus (perhaps the most moving depiction of Christ, designed to give comfort and empathy to sufferers of skin diseases) and, on (mostly) a slightly shallower level, the myriad Italian paintings of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, do much the same as those Lucretias and St Agathas; they show the ideal of the body as god intended it, while punishing its perfection so we can look at it without guilt.

This feels, for all its beauty, like the art of sickness. What kind of response these St Sebastians are supposed to evoke can only be guessed at; and the guesses are rarely ones the original owners of the paintings would have liked. Empathy with and reverence for the martyred saint, obviously; but while Grunewald’s Christ reflects and gives back this sense of shared humanity with the weight of his tortured body and his human suffering, St Sebastian gives us, what? Hope? Various kinds of spiritual (it’s in the eyes) and earthly (relaxed pose and suggestive loincloth) desire?

Grunewald’s agonised Christ from the Isenheim Altarpiece (1515) and one of Pietro Perugino’s fairly comfortable-with-his-situation St Sebstians (1495)

There are lots of fascinating themes and sub-themes her, but for now, there you have it; Christ may have, spiritually, redeemed all of humankind, but aesthetically speaking, women remain (as Narnians would say) ‘daughters of Eve’.

Nowadays, tired presumably of the restrictions on their lives, men have liberated themselves enough that we don’t even need St Sebastian’s spiritual gaze, or a hint of damnation, to justify our nudity. In what remains an essentially patriarchal society, just advertising a razor, or underwear, or perfume, or chocolate, or taking part in a swimming event, or even just being outside on a warm day is enough to justify our bodies, as long as they don’t veer too far from that Christlike ideal, and as long as they aren’t visibly excited. But even now, women – who can look like our mother Eve, but not our reborn father Christ – can be more or less naked too, at any time of day they like (on TV or online at least); just as long as they are mutilated.

ghost cities of cyberspace

 

Tell me now, I beg you, where
Flora is, that fair Roman;
Archippa, and Thaïs rare,
Who the fairer of the twain?
Echo too, whose voice each plain,
River, lake and valley bore;
Lovely these as springtime lane,
But where are they, the snows of yore?¹

François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis(1461)¹

My uncle died two years ago now, but his Instagram account is still there. How many dead people live on in their abandoned social media accounts? The future never seems to arrive, never really exists, but history never ends. For over a quarter of a century, social media has mirrored and shaped lives, always evolving, but leaving behind its detritus just like every other phase of civilisation. Where are the people we were sociable with on the forgotten single-community (bands, hobbies, comedy, whatever) forums and message boards of the 90s and 2000s², or the friends we made on MySpace in 2005? Some live on, ageing at an only slightly faster rate than their profile pictures (Dorian Gray would now age privately at home, his picture migrating untouched from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok etc), others lost, vanished, dead? But still partially living on, like those sunlit American families in the home movies of the 50s and 60s.

Club Kids 1992 – Keda, Kabuki Starshine, and Sacred Boy, Copyright Michael Fazakerley

Twenty-five years is a long, generation-spanning time, but, just as abstract expressionism essentially still lives on, in almost unaltered forms but no longer radical, long past the lifetimes of Rothko, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, so the (just) pre-internet countercultural modernity of the late 80s and early 90s, the shock-monster-gender-fluid-glam of Michael Alig and the Club Kids, still prevalent back in the Myspace era³, (captured brilliantly in the 1998 ‘shockumentary’ Party Monster and less brilliantly in the somewhat unsatisfactory 2003 movie Party Monster) lives on and still feels current on Instagram and Tiktok and reality TV and in whatever is left of the top 40. Bulimic pop culture eats reconstituted chunks of itself and just as the 60s haunted the early 90s, bringing genuine creativity (Andrew Weatherall, to pick a name at random) and feeble dayglo pastiche (Candy Flip, to deliberately target a heinous offender), a weird (if you were there) amalgam of the 1980s and 90s haunts the 2020s, informing both the shallow dreck that proliferates everywhere and some of the genuine creativity of today.

‘I’m ready now,’ Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. ‘Touch the spread with your left hand.’ Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper’s ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

entering cyberspace in William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) Grafton Books, p.105.

Alta Vista, 1999

Cyberspace, like any landscape which people have inhabited, has its lost cultures and ruins, becoming ever more remote and unknowable with the passing of years, but, like Macchu Picchu or the Broch of Gurness, retaining a sense that it all meant something significant once. The not-quite barren wastelands of Geocities and Xanga, the ruined palace of MySpace, a Rosetta stone partly effaced with dead links and half forgotten languages; photobucket, imageshack, tripod, what do these mean if you’re 15? Would the old, useable interface of MySpace seem as charmingly quaint and remote now as the penpal columns in the pages of ’80s music magazines do?

Looking for friends all over the world, Metal Forces magazine, 1987

But there was a time when Lycos, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves were peers of Google, and Bebo rivalled Facebook and Twitter, both now seemingly in senile phases of their development. Until very recently Facebook (Meta) and Twitter were brands that were seemingly unassailable, but empires do fall, albeit more slowly than bubbles burst.4  And meanwhile, the users of social networks age and die and give way to generations who remember them, just as the Incas and the Iron Age Orcadians are remembered by their monuments, if nothing else. Depressing, when you think about it; probably won’t write about history next time.

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.  JD Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye, Penguin, 1958, p.220

 

 

Geocities; this is what the future used to look like

¹ translated by Lewis Wharton in The Poems of François Villon, JM Dent & Sons, 1935, p54. Not reading French – I seem to go on about that a lot – this is my favourite translation I’ve come across, although apparently it’s a pretty free one, judging by the literal – but still quite nice – one here

² the continuing success of Reddit suggests that people never really grew discontented with the interface of the Kiss online fanclub c. 2005 (etc etc)

³It’s weird to note that the Club Kids would be considered – even without the murder etc – just as outrageous today as in the late 80s, even though their aesthetic was itself put together from a mix of Bowie, gore movies, Japanese pop culture etc etc. But then as I think I recently noted, there are people who still find the word fuck outrageous, after something like a millennium.

4Online and mainstream culture, even after this quarter century, remain mysteriously separate. Online news unfolds as it happens, but meanwhile in the daytime world, mainstream culture hangs on to husks even older than Geocities; publicly owned TV news shows don’t look to what’s happening now, but pore over the front pages of newspapers – yesterday’s news… today! – simultaneously being redundant and ensuring that newspaper owners’ views get publicity beyond their dwindling readership and therefore giving them an artificial sense of relevance. Which is really just about money, just as Google and Facebook are; the crumbling aristocracy of print media, its tendrils still entwined with the establishment, versus the new money, steadily buying its way in.

 

 

shooting the messenger; moral panics, the 1980s, American Psycho turns 30

 

Marshall Arisman’s superb artwork used on the Picador first edition of American Psycho

Happy New Year! I’ve written before about the way that new decades seem to bring their own distinct identities with them (probably too often; here was I think the most recent time) and as we ascend/descend/just go into 2021 an auspicious anniversary approaches; 30 years since the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s classic novel American Psycho, a book which seemed to set the seal on certain aspects of the 1980s, preserving them in a concentrated form for future… hmm, enjoyment seems the wrong word (but it’s not).

Moral panics (“an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society” is how the internet defines the term) don’t occur very often, though something tells me that in the next few years they may be one of the few areas of growth in the UK, and moral panics about books are even more rare. But American Psycho caused one, and until it was to some extent defused by Mary Harron’s excellent (though necessarily less graphic) 2000 film adaptation* the novel remained (appropriately I guess) a kind of bogeyman, in some countries (still?) only being displayed in shrinkwrap lest an unwary child catch a glimpse of the dangerous words it contains.

*the film managed to avoid great controversy partly I think because it confirmed what many of the book’s defenders had always maintained; that it was (among other things) a satirical black comedy

At the heart of any moral panic there is generally one catalyst, but it usually overlays a more or less complex set of issues. These tend to be fundamental things like; should there be limits to free speech? Should human beings have control over their own bodies whatever the consequences to their health? How much control should parents exercise over their children? Is it important to be able to clearly define individuals within specific traditional pigeonholes and if so, why? Interestingly though, the point of the panic (generally sparked by a newspaper, politician or an interested pressure group) is usually, perhaps always to avoid the discussion of these issues, and instead to simply wish whatever it is – ‘video nasties’, drugs, loud music, raves, books, certain kinds of people – out of existence entirely. The unstated aim is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy; films that aren’t explicit, children that are ‘seen and not heard’, Christian ideas of morality). And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.

one of the UK’s classic moral panics; punk

Literature and cinema have a special place in the moral panic spectrum, because, unlike, say drugs, prostitution, hoodies or (more ridiculously) ‘happy slapping,’ those defending them (to be fair I don’t think anyone really defended happy slapping) almost always have to use, or at least generally do use, arguments that are unrelated to the charges the accusers make. DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is probably the most famously banned book in Britain, but when it was finally un-banned it was because of arguments about the quality of the book. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is indeed an important book, written by an important writer, it is ‘literature’. But, typically, the people who wanted it banned didn’t care about that, didn’t even necessarily dispute it, or disapprove of the acts that were considered so outrageous when described in print. After all, even most Festival of Light type people don’t believe that no-one should ever have sex. Mostly, what they cared about was the actual words used in the book; and, strangely, the words that were considered most offensive in the 1920s (when it was written) and the 1960s (when it was printed legally) are mostly still the same ones that are considered offensive – which is handy for the arbiters of public morality. If your tactic is simply to be outraged, you can count the number of bad words in Lady Chatterley, just as, 30-odd years after that was printed in an unexpurgated edition, critics could count the swearwords in a novel by James Kelman or Irvine Welsh, preventing them from having to address whatever uncomfortable things the books might actually be saying.*

* although swearwords are routinely still censored in print in newspapers (f**k and whatnot), the irony is that this kind of censoring only works for people who already know the words. If you know a word and are offended or horrified by it, but read it with some letters missing, does it become less offensive? Recently I’ve noticed people self-censoring non-swearwords that (I presume) might cause discomfort, such as writing ‘r*pe’, rather than ‘rape’. But a) does the use of the word ‘rape’ itself cause trauma? and b) if it does, does reading it in context as ‘r*pe’ cause less trauma? Because although it’s possible that the word I am assuming is ‘rape’ might be be warning me about ‘rope’ or ‘ripe’ – but rape is the only word that makes logical sense. And seeing that the sentence will only make sense if you understand that “r*pe” is “rape,” is the letter ‘a’ really the problem there? Are the letters “uc” the problem with the word “f**k”? This seems different to me from something like self-censoring a word associated with, say, racial abuse, where the censoree is avoiding an offensive term while also showing that they recognise its offensiveness and are distancing themselves from its casual use. But I am no authority!

the much maligned 1987 film of Less Than Zero is surprisingly faithful, perhaps because it was a product of the milieu that it depicts.

What was often lost in the furore surrounding American Psycho is that Ellis’s first two novels, Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) had also been controversial; it’s just that they were controversial in a way that was more comfortable for literary critics and especially for publishers. After all, you don’t get to be an enfant terrible without being young (Ellis was 20 years old when Less Than Zero was published), or in some way terrible. With Less Than Zero, it was as much the described world itself – decadent, affluent, mid-80s consumerist LA with its drugs and excess and callousness – as the behaviour of the protagonists which shocked reviewers. And (which is also true of his second novel The Rules Of Attraction but definitely not American Psycho) the positive reviews selected for quotation for the book’s cover were largely admiring of that excess, in the classic, coolly jaded ‘yes-it’s-all-very-shocking-if-you’re-old-and-shockable’ vein:

This is the novel your mother warned you about. Jim Morrison would be proud (Eve Babitz)

Bret Easton Ellis is undoubtedly the new master of youthful alienation … makes Jack Kerouac and his Beat Generation seem like pussies (Emily Prager).

the Picador Rules of Attraction paperback is a definitively 80s artefact

For whatever reason, nobody said that American Psycho made Charles Bukowski or Norman Mailer or even Stephen King seem like “pussies,” even though, in the sense that Prager means it, it certainly does. With The Rules Of Attraction, set in more or less the same social milieu as Less Than Zero, only on a New England College campus, the controversy was again more moral than literary; promiscuous sex! Drugs! These young people are amoral, unpleasant and cynical, why would anybody want to read, let alone write about them? But again, this is the kind of controversy that critics and especially publishers are comfortable with; low level outrage that is shocking enough to attract new readers but not shocking enough to require justification for publishing. This time, the approving review used by the publisher (at least of the UK Picador edition I have) is less gloating and perhaps slightly more defensive – yes he’s young and outrageous but please note that he’s a good writer too – appealing frankly (and I think accurately) to the literary precedent for books like Ellis’s:

Compelling … and sympathetic to his “lost generation” the way only Fitzgerald was about his (nameless Vanity Fair reviewer).

Interestingly, although Simon & Schuster in the USA sparked and fuelled the controversy of American Psycho by declining to publish it, Ellis’s UK publisher Picador didn’t follow suit, and the blurb and reviews chosen for the first UK paperback edition are instructional; they knew exactly what they had on their hands tabloid-wise, and it’s interesting to look at what the publisher says they are selling:

a bleak, bitter and aversive novel about a world we all recognise but do not wish to face, but also an explosive novel which brilliantly exposes American culture today and finally a black comedy, a disturbing portrait of a madman [strangely archaic phrase that], a subtle send-up of the blatant behaviour of the ‘80s – and a grotesque nightmare of murder and insanity.

It may be all of these things, but the word that, having just re-read the novel, feels at first oddly out of place there is ‘subtle’. American Psycho does not feel subtle. It’s a maximalist (is that a thing?) novel, roughly twice the length of the author’s first two, and perhaps half of that length is made up, in effect, of lists; what – in detail – every major and minor character is wearing when Patrick Bateman (the psycho of the title) encounters them, what kind of hygiene or beauty products characters are using, what food is being eaten and where, detailed analyses of the careers of the narrator’s favourite musical artists.* As mentioned before, until the film adaptation of American Psycho was released, the blackly comic aspect of the book – although explicitly mentioned in the blurb – was mostly overlooked (or outright denied), but one of the things that makes the nasty parts of the book so effective (and they are still bracingly explicit and intense 30 years on) is that they don’t happen until half way through the novel, at which point – if not for the title – the book is to all intents and purposes an immersive dip into the more absurd aspects of New York/Wall Street consumer yuppie culture.

* interestingly and humorously, outside of those few psycho-approved artists (Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins) and current 80s hits (Madonna, INXS), every musical reference Bateman makes – to what is playing on the radio, or in a cab – he gets the artist wrong; when asked towards the end of the novel for the saddest song he knows he names You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Beatles (sic)

Christian Bale, iconic as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of American Psycho

What Ellis does – and significantly, it’s what made Less Than Zero such a formidable debut – is to adopt a strangely blank and hypnotic voice (a bit like the famously ‘glazed’ tone used by JG Ballard – about whom more later – in his classic Atrocity Exhibition/High Rise/Crash period), which somehow (I guess this is the subtle part) ends up being the opposite of cold or uninvolving. In The Rules Of Attraction, one of the novel’s protagonists, Sean Bateman (as it turns out, the brother of American Psycho’s  Patrick), is a generally unpleasant, amoral, cynical opportunistic drug dealer, but the reader realises (though Sean himself seems not to) that this attitude is at least in part a defence mechanism to protect the more sensitive and romantic aspects of his nature that he would rather not acknowledge. In American Psycho, the reader has direct access to Patrick Bateman’s thoughts and feelings; not just what he really thinks and feels, but also, in some of the book’s stranger moments, what he seems to think he should think and feel. There’s a very odd page-and-a-half long monologue where Bateman lectures a group of friends and acquaintances on a kind of socially responsible, enlightened conservatism that is comically at odds with the reactionary nihilism we usually read in his thoughts:

Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger… Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education… (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.15)

It’s never entirely clear if this is Bateman being funny – he does have a sense of humour, but usually he tells us if he’s making a joke (his jokes are however – importantly – not the funny parts of the novel). Or if it’s his way of making his friends uncomfortable while trying to impress people who aren’t from his social circle, in this case a bohemian couple, which seems quite likely. Or if it’s just anomalous parts of his submerged and fragmenting personality coming through; throughout the book there are moments when we realise that this is, more or less, how he’s perceived by the other characters; the ‘boy next door’, an unusually sensitive and perhaps even shy member of their set, which reaches a comic climax when he leaves a confession of his hideous crimes on the voicemail of another of his interchangeable set of yuppie acquaintances. It’s treated as a not-very-successful joke by the recipient, who like everyone in the book, has trouble differentiating between the people he knows and thinks that Patrick is someone else:

‘come on man, you had one fatal flaw: Bateman’s such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody, that I couldn’t fully appreciate it…. He could barely pick up an escort girl, let alone…  Oh yes, ‘chop her up’’ (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.387)

the still-pretty-cool US first edition

The fact that Bateman is on the surface a normal member of his peer group, and by their standards even a fairly laudable example of the 80s yuppie is of course one of the things that made the book uncomfortable in 1991. A couple of years before American Psycho was published I had read and enjoyed Slob (1987) by Rex Miller. It’s a novel about a grotesque (and unlike Patrick Bateman) grotesque-looking, remorseless, obese sadistic outsider maniac who, having previously been utilised, hopefully improbably, by the government as an assassin in the Vietnam war, returns home and continues his ‘work’. It’s more or less relentless graphic violence and sex (in that order), not really a searing indictment of anything, (although obviously not pro-serial killer either) but as far as I know the publisher had no qualms about publishing it and, far from feeling the need to defend it in the blurb or quotes, took pride in its extremeness; Slob is almost too crudely terrifying to be read… (said Stephen King, quoted on the front cover) But it is too compelling to be put down. 

a powerful indictment of overweight people wielding chains

Well yes; Slob is genre fiction after all, and therefore weirdly immune – on an individual level at least* – to the vagaries of the moral panic. It’s a fact that questions like ‘would American Psycho be published today?’ still pop up in newspapers from time to time, while the excesses of gory 80s horror are, if they are still in print, (rightly) still there in bookshops to be read by anyone who wants to do so. And some of those books really are mindlessly violent or repellently misogynistic, without the publisher feeling any particular need to defend them. No shrinkwrap is required, no literary reviewer was disappointed to find that their faith in a promising young writer had been repaid by Slob and nobody (or at least nobody powerful or influential) made to feel uncomfortable by the things it was saying about the country. If it had been written by, say, Jay McInerney and called American Slob perhaps there would have been some concern about teenagers buying it and circulating it among their friends; possibly it would also have sold more copies (though I think it did pretty well); because of course the ultimate irony of any moral panic is that it creates an interest in and appetite for what it condemns. Notoriety is good publicity.

*while it’s rare – though not unheard of – for a single genre book or film to be targeted by a moral panic there is always the chance that the ‘powers that want to be’ will try to remove a whole genre or sub-genre at once as with the UK’s notorious ‘video nasties’ furore. In a way the horror genre is always stuck in a kind of self-perpetuating, positive/negative loop – horror can ‘get away with’ pretty much any kind of extreme and transgressive material it wants to, because that is part of its raison d’etre. On the other hand, it’s very hard for that transgression to have much of a wider impact beyond the horror genre because it’s ‘just’ horror.

The reviews used by Picador on the back cover of American Psycho are as interesting at its blurb. Retraité terrible* Norman Mailer is quoted;

He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that much anymore.

Clearly, Mailer had not been ‘forced to look at’ Slob. Or anything by Skipp and Spector, or Clive Barker, or Shaun Hutson (whose Spawn made me feel physically sick on first reading, which American Psycho, presumably because of the influence of Spawn, and lots of other books like Spawn, did not. More about that kind of thing here). That ‘forced’ is fun too; forced how? Because he was paid to review it?

* Vieil homme terrible? if I could speak any French at all I could have made this joke more confidently; in English I’d say something like ‘OAP terrible Norman Mailer’. Which is as good a point as any to mention a particular paternalistic and I think class-based kind of censorship that used to exist in the UK. Several times I’ve come across older books (most recently a book about the historical figure Erzsébet Báthory (the real Hungarian ‘Countess Dracula’) by Valentine Penrose, the wife of surrealist Roland Penrose, that was written in French and translated into English by the wayward Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. Translated apart, that is, from any especially salacious parts, which were left in French, presumably so that only well educated British people could be traumatised by them. 

(American Psycho is) a very disturbing book, quoth Joe McGinnis, but the author is writing from the deepest, purest motives. Which may be true, but is it relevant? Pan books did not feel the need to reassure readers about Rex Miller’s motives. In fact, Picador, when selling Less Than Zero, chose quotes which actively encouraged the idea that Ellis’s motive with that book was to shock people. But surely if shocking readers is a valid motive (it is) then American Psycho was far more successful even than Less Than Zero? If Bret Easton Ellis’s motives had been to provide the reader with some kind of complicated entertainment, to amuse and entertain and make them think, or if he wanted  to lecture them on morality or to disgust and repel them, or even if, as his detractors said, he just got off on writing about violence, sex and Phil Collins, does that change the book itself? These are questions, I’m not sure about the answers.

Although the book contains horrifying scenes, said Nora Rawlinson, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering.

This seems fair enough, but it also contains some odd statements; that ‘but neither’ is strange, isn’t it? Being neither ‘pleasure reading’ (whatever that means) nor pornography suggests firstly, that pornography isn’t pleasure reading; maybe not, but what is it then? People seemed to be reading the Fifty Shades… books for some kind of pleasure, which is, believe it or not, not a judgement of the books. And secondly, it suggests that a novel can be read for something other than pleasure – which it obviously can, but a novel, even a polemical novel (and American Psycho isn’t that) still isn’t a lecture. JG Ballard – him again – was less squeamish about what his books were or weren’t, and wrote, for a 1995 edition of his most controversial novel Crash;

I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. (Crash, Vintage books, 1995, p.6).

This – although he later slightly recanted and said that Crash was purely a ‘psychopathic hymn with a point’ – seems to me a more valuable observation than any of those printed on the back cover of my edition of American Psycho. (Interesting but value-free information; Vintage, the publisher of that edition of Crash, was also the publisher that picked up American Psycho in the US after Simon & Schuster refused to print it. And James Spader, who plays a slimy drug dealer in the movie version of Less Than Zero is also in David Cronenberg’s Crash. Connections! But what of them?)

transgressive 80s classic

There is more than one way of dealing with a controversial novel; and the fact that Picador was squeamish or at least cautious about the book they were publishing comes through clearly in that careful choice of quotes from positive, but very sober reviews. That several of those quotes are from women is also probably no coincidence; the book was attacked (most visibly by Gloria Steinem) as being misogynistic. And indeed it is, insofar as the narrator and his milieu, and the 1980s, and consumerist capitalist culture are and were. But the book is called American Psycho; not What Bret Easton Ellis Thinks About Women and it seems surprising that, coming just as Gordon Gekko and his ilk seemed like historical figures and the 90s had established its own distinct identity, a very personal satire of the 1980s, written by an author whose earlier work was both a thoughtful product of and also an embodiment of that era (and also not misogynistic), should be taken at something less than face value. Too soon, and too extreme perhaps? But if it had come later it would suggest an absolving clarity that can only come with hindsight, and if it had been less extreme an absolving kind of a shrug; but it is what it is because the 80s were what they were; a kind of wild, extravagant, decadent but above all exclusive party; exhilarating, on the surface, for a while; if you were invited and could afford to attend. In a way, Picador missed a trick; given the book’s pre-publication notoriety, they might have been better to quote from both positive and negative reviews, as Abacus did with Iain Banks’s 1984 debut The Wasp Factory. In both editions that I have owned (a mid 80s paperback and a 2005 reprint), the book has several pages dedicated to reviews which say things like Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish (The Times). Of course, these kinds of reviews are really a selling point, just as, in the 90s, an author being sneered at by Tom Paulin and Allison Pearson on The Late Show was usually a promising sign.

Funny Games; it’s not very nice though this poster reminds me of the one for Howard the Duck somehow

But if, as the positive reviews said, American Psycho isn’t to be read for pleasure then what is it to be read for? Education? Certainly it has – especially over time – gained a kind of educational value as a time capsule or artefact of some aspects of – and the texture of – 80s American culture. But is that what it is for? Or should it be seen as – which Rawlinson’s quote seems to be suggesting – a kind of literary analogue to a something like Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, where the director is saying ‘so you like to watch horror films? You like violence and torture do you? Well here you go. Not very nice is it?’ But that isn’t how American Psycho feels exactly, despite being published at the height of the early 90s serial killer boom (there’s a phrase), a time when Jonathan Demme’s straightforward and well made horror thriller The Silence of the Lambs was somehow elevated to Oscar-worthy, cultural event status; clearly something, like the stench emanating from Dennis Nilsen’s drains, was in the air.

If JG Ballard’s aforementioned 1973 novel Crash was, as Ballard sometimes stated, cautionary as well as pornographic; a novel to be read for (peculiar sexual) pleasure, but also a vision of the future concerning how humanity might be shaped by the very environment it had built to suit its needs and whims; a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape is how he put it in that introduction (Crash, Vintage Books, 1995, p.6), then in American Psycho, it was already too late for caution. This is a historical novel; this, says Ellis, or at least says Patrick Bateman, is what we became in the 80s. In the chapter End of the 1980s, Patrick himself gives us an extremely Ballardian kind of collage:

The dreams are an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns(…) A month ago was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death… Football games flash by, the sound turned off… All summer long Madonna cries out to us “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone…” (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.371)

This is still recognisably the author of Less Than Zero, but where Ellis seemed before to coolly comment on the state of the society he was talking about, here he is immersed in it. As before, the author shows us a group of people who are numb, alienated from the world and from each other, possibly looking for some kind of connection with humanity while also (inadvertently? deliberately?) distancing themselves from the possibility of it. But while outwardly, Bateman prides himself on just this kind of cool detachment, from our position inside his head we can see that however unreliable he is as a narrator (it’s never clear what really does or doesn’t happen, partly because, like everyone else in the book, he can’t really tell one person from another, outside of his closest friends), he is anything but emotionless, but instead a mass of obsessive, raw neuroses, circling endlessly around status, wealth, sex and (increasingly) age; turning 30 is something that would probably fill him with nameless dread, as many things do. Whether or not he really murders anyone (a source of frequent debate, though the publisher’s blurb takes for granted that he does), the title still stands. And it’s an important title too; after all, Robert Bloch’s Psycho was also American, but only because Robert Bloch was. American Psycho is deliberately specific.

I’ve mentioned JG Ballard’s Crash a few times, because for all its differences, it met with a similar response to American Psycho (not least from Ballard’s publisher – had Ballard been a mainstream and not genre author, it would have been an ideal contender for moral panic status. Something similar happened with the movie, where the fact that it was made by director David Cronenberg, maker of legendarily peculiar horror films, to some extent defused the more controversial aspects of the film although the Daily Mail etc tried, bless them). Like American Psycho, Crash‘s mixture of extreme violence and sex remains potent and shocking decades after its original publication. Like American Psycho too, it’s often a funny book, although the humour was not really translated to Cronenberg’s good but oddly restrained film version. Partly the film is less comical because toning down the mayhem (a film that really looked like the book reads would have been banned everywhere in the world) makes it less funny*, but also because robbing the story of its very specific object of obsessive desire, Elizabeth Taylor (presumably because she was still alive at the time; the stuff about Jayne Mansfield is still in the film) makes it less absurdly funny. The film version of American Psycho is still humorous (especially regarding the swapping of business cards), but the novel’s funniest scene, which is also one of its most strangely moving, is not included for – I presume – similarly practical reasons.

*see also Paul Verhoeven’s classic RoboCop, where the cuts administered by the BBFC to some of the more ludicrously violent scenes made what was brutal and blackly funny into something that was just brutal; do these people not want extreme violence to be funny??

Throughout American Psycho, we see Bateman revelling in, and/or boasting about his alienation from the human race, his merciless coldness and basic inhumanity etc etc, but there are several scenes where, against his will, he is forced into some kind of intimacy with another character. Usually it’s Luis Carruthers, a friendly acquaintance who mistakenly believes that Bateman is in love with him and unfortunately reciprocates, or Jean, his secretary who Bateman assumes is in love with him, but whose feelings, we learn, are more complex than Patrick realises. But strangely we see Patrick at his most naked and human and afraid at a U2 concert where, to his alarm, he shares a rare and intense moment of connection with Bono, of all people; the horror. This is not the kind of relationship that Bateman has with the artists he really likes. There is though, an almost equally funny moment in the late chapter Huey Lewis and the News (the last of Patrick’s disarmingly straightforward, cheerful and perceptive rundowns of his favourite artists’ careers) when his veneer of normality starts to crack – as well it might – and he says The album [Small World, 1988] ends with “Slammin’,” which has no words and it’s just a lot of horns that quite frankly, if you turn it up really loud, can give you a fucking big headache and maybe even make you feel a little sick.

What I have perhaps not stressed enough here is the general sincerity of the book. Some critics felt that Ellis was being sneeringly cold and cynical about the people and lifestyle he portrays, but (to me at least) it doesn’t feel that way, especially compared to his first two novels. Obviously American Psycho isn’t, thankfully, autobiographical in a narrow sense, but Bret Easton Ellis was still – more than ever – concerned with the fate of his ‘lost generation.’  These were successful young American people for whom a whole culture had been built to fulfil their every whim and enrich – albeit at a price – every element of their lives, but which instead seemed only to emphasise its own emptiness. You might think that it’s hard to feel sorry for people who have (in material terms) everything, and you might be right; but these are his people. That the worship of visible success makes anything that isn’t visible success look like abject failure seems like a glib kind of lesson, but it’s only one element of a richly textured, (sometimes literally) tortured and yet funny and readable book. Thirty years on, what’s funnier (in more than one sense) now than it was in 1991 is Patrick Bateman’s Donald Trump obsession – also less of a feature in the film – which, from the perspective of 2021 seems quite surreal but also strangely fitting. American Psycho is, after all, largely Patrick Bateman telling us, based on his experience, how the world works, and sometimes he’s right.

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.

the Keystone Cops

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.

iconic movie; iconic poster

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.

Part Man, Part Blue Jeans; All Cop

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.

christ

*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.