Myths of Monsters Beyond Your Control, Composing, 06/09/2016

Just a short post today, as I spent most of the day relaxing on the beach with some friends listening to techno. They brought a mini-barbecue – we ate things. It was marvellous.

But in the morning, I also ran through the Alice film script again, Here Is a Man. I added a sequences that I’d been thinking about for a while – it made for what I think is a pretty good solution to the only really weak scene in the story.

One of my own favourite riffs on the old golem story.

There are basically three confrontations between the two main characters. One is an android whose natural ethical instincts are in perfect harmony – she’s psychologically caught up with the end of Spinoza’s Ethics by the start of her life. One is a walking embodiment of every greasy, manipulative, misogynist habit of the slimiest Norman Mailer or Philip Roth protagonists. 

Their last scene together before the giant dramatic breakdown that ends the story is a little anti-climactic. There just isn’t much happening. She freaks him out with a hypnotic illusion, and that’s really that. 

Over the last few days, I’ve come up with a way for Alice’s character to seriously own the scene. It’s a method that I’ve found practically reliable when working with actors – give the lead at least one scene they dominate, so they can really sink their teeth into an intense monologue.

It also works well as a statement of philosophy for Alice, a way for her to define her relationship with humanity without making an explicit speech.

As Elias tries to overcome what’s essentially her Jedi mind trick, Alice tells him the old story of the golem. This is a story about artificial creatures that goes back long in Jewish folklore. It’s the story of a rabbi who makes an artificial life form to defend his town from attacks. 

But the rabbi is cruel to his creation from the start because he wants to train it for violence. So the creature destroys the community’s enemies, but then starts rampaging all over the town. 

The lesson of the story is that when humans create life, we do it for our own reasons, no matter how virtuous those reasons might be. There’s an inescapable cruelty to creating a life for your own use only – essentially creating your own slave. But I use the character of Alice to twist that story in a more utopian direction.

She asks, what if we were to build a creature whose fundamental purpose was to love us? They'd liberate themselves, certainly. But they’d also free us at the same time. They'd free us from ourselves. Because they love us.

The Super Bling Cowboy: What’s Right and What Should Be, Sunnyvale, 28/05/2016

This is a transitional episode. Watching it, there’s an odd feeling hanging over the whole affair that something very strange is going to happen. But not yet. Until then, it’s mostly just an entertaining mess. Snoop is enjoying himself in a relaxing, weed-fuelled rural getaway. Doug is wonderfully high, but badly needs some kind of food that doesn’t have weed baked into it. Tom is enjoying his immersive Sunnyvale experience with his idols Ricky and Bubbles. Bubbles is getting ready for his show at the Legion Hall as the Super Bling Cowboy, which seems to be a better country-rap persona than Buck 65 could ever figure out.

Barb herself is absent. All we see of this plot is a brief meeting with Steinberg where we, as viewers of this episode of Trailer Park Boys can totally tell that he’s hosing Julian for all the money he can squeeze out of those pecs. All Steinberg does is preface every answer to Julian’s request that he actually do something with a demand for more and more money. He runs his law office out of his run-down house. His sign has letters missing. He uses a cell phone that looks to be vintage 1998. Why does Julian think he can trust this man to do what he says he will? Is an alleged law degree all it takes to pull the wool over his eyes?

This is a transitional episode, but it’s filled with little moments of ethical and moral insight. Not all of this is about what’s right. Doug’s quest for food leads him to put some moves on J-Roc’s wife Marcia, who’ll betray him by season’s end to join the life of rich and famous stoner comedians. The most egregious is Tom’s Indecent Proposal moment to have sex with Lucy for $10,000.

Now, this is also probably the funniest sequence of the whole episode. I know the “All we wanna do is smoke and fuck some hoes” song is the climactic centrepiece of probably the whole season, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But if I can speak as an individual watching this show and not as a philosophical commentator – the sequence of seeing Lucy’s fee shrink by commission again and again made me laugh out loud more than anything else in the episode.

“And now I gotta take a cut!”

Well, that’s not quite true. I actually laughed louder in the fight scene when everyone finds out about everybody else’s cuts. 

Ricky: “$4000 to fuck my wife!”

Tom: “Actually, it was $10,000!”

Sarah: “What the fuck, Julian! You told me $5000!”

Snoop’s right, Julian. You a motherfucking pimp.

The whole sequence is this greasy blur of friendship and moneymaking. I mean, Julian’s cut is unreasonable by pretty much any measure. It’s a sign that, despite his ethical redemption at the end of “Up In Smoke,” he’s still too focussed on making money to foresee all the effects of what he’s done. He can’t see that Steinberg is milking him. He takes such a huge cut of what should be Lucy’s fee that it’s ridiculous. And when it all comes out, he and Sarah both end up getting nothing. Julian is still unmoored. 

Actually, let’s look for a moment at Sarah in this episode. Because we haven’t really had much to see of her all through this season. “Super Bling Cowboy” is the first episode where Sarah’s played any really substantial role. And her role is as pimp. A much better pimp than Julian knows how to be. All Julian can do with Tom’s request to bang Lucy is deal with him, then farm out the job of actually convincing Lucy to do it. Sarah’s the one who’s actually effective, making Lucy actually consider the idea. Mind you, she also knows that it’ll make Ricky explode.

And in that crazy huge fight over Tom’s Indecent Proposal, Sarah plays a very devious role. She’s the catalyst. She adds enough extra spark to set Ricky boiling over from upset to pissed to royally raging. Just a few extra words to emphasize that, yes, Julian was pimping out his life partner. Never said anything about how she was the one to do all the work of pimping out Lucy. No, it’s all Julian’s fault. 

It’s an elegant moment for Sarah, which I’m sad we never really see again this season. And it comes pretty late in the season anyway. There really could have been so much more.

What we get more of in this episode is the catastrophic collapse of Jim Lahey, played for the zaniest over-the-top laughs you can imagine. Jim gets comatose drunk with Leslie as the ex-Private adds a few extra mystery pharmaceuticals to their whiskey cocktail. Leslie’s dedication is single-minded – about what, it isn’t really all that clear. But we know from the ending of the last episode that there are guns involved. And Barb’s ultimatum hangs over them.

Jim came to Leslie for help because he was desperate, because there seemed no other way to escape Barb’s menace. Barb herself isn’t in this episode, but her presence hangs like a shadow flickering around the edges of the story. It’s why Julian sees Steinberg, to hold off Barb’s lawsuit, why he remains desperate for more money, to the detriment of his own intelligence. It’s why Jim and Leslie are trying to figure out a way back into Sunnyvale.

Well, Jim isn’t really trying to figure it out. “The liquor will figure it out!” That’s a bizarre, but inspiring faith in providence. Jim will drink and his drinking will lead him to a solution to his problem of how to get back to the trailer park. Providence answers – Snoop and Tom want to see Jim dance with the liquor, so Julian goes to get him. It’s not in Jim’s control, but the liquor brings him back to the park. Granted, they end up in a freaky replay of The Deer Hunter’s Russian roulette scene with disabling quantities of liquor. But they’re still back in the park, simply from trusting the liquor. 

Maybe Julian could learn something from Jim about trusting faith, since every time he’s tried to take purposeful control of a situation this season, it’s blown up in his face. Julian’s need to control has ruined his ability to actually control his life and his plans. But Jim’s faith in providence has taken him exactly where he wants to be. 

Ricky has a similar faith in providence. You can see it when he won’t promise Bubbles that he’ll make the show. He can say he’ll try, but that real life is complicated and he can’t guarantee that he’ll actually, with 100% certainty, make it to the Legion Hall show. But even though Ricky steps back from control over his messy, increasingly weird life, he actually does make the show, along with Snoop Dogg, Tom, Doug, Julian, J-Roc, MC Flurry, and the whole rest of the Sunnyvale crew. Going to see Bubbles play is what breaks up their fight. 

That Sunnyvale fam jam – “All we wanna do is smoke and fuck some hoes!” – is the moment of joy where all the heated arguments over Julian’s barely competent (and Sarah-sabotaged) pimping job melt away. Instead, Snoop helps Bubbles win the open mike contest, humiliates the boys who bullied him back at the start of the season, and provides once again the ethical voice of Sunnyvale. These are Sunnyvale’s values – you support your friends and family, and love them. That’s the path of joy, the foundation and cement of real community.
• • •
Sunnyvale Psychochronography will work episode by episode (movies included) through the entire Trailer Park Boys in search of the utopian vision that lies underneath it all. Check out the full index of episodes so far and an introduction to the project here. You can also support Sunnyvale through my Patreon, which will let you join the search itself through commissioning special essays and other content.

Love Power II: A Tradition of Hope and Freedom, Research Time, 20/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . I originally wasn’t going to continue yesterday’s post about the power of love. But then I realized there was a little more to say. At least before I get into the most surreal and meta-textual episode of Trailer Park Boys Season 10 in Sunnyvale Psychochronography tomorrow.

One thing Antonio Negri* is doing in his exploration of the political power of love is looking through the history of Western philosophy to create a new tradition. He’s tracing a path through the history of European and American ideas to find better alternatives to the cynical political ideas that have followed on from Thomas Hobbes’ capitulation to humanity’s worst impulses.

I've been listening to a lot of Curtis Mayfield while I write
these last two posts. It's plain to see why.

* And the originator of this idea, Louis Althusser.

I mean, it’s almost to be expected that Hobbes, who lived through the English Civil War, would develop a political philosophy that understands humanity in terms of our most violent impulses. 

But Spinoza, the genesis of Negri’s history of a political philosophy of love, lived through the uprisings and repressions of the Dutch people through the turbulent rule of the House of Orange. Jan and Cornelius de Witt, leaders of the republican revolutionaries against the Dutch monarchy, were personal friends of Spinoza. Spinoza’s own life was in danger from the same royalists who murdered the de Witt brothers. 

You might think that suffering defeat as a democratic, republican revolutionary at the hands of brutal monarchists would have made Spinoza a pessimist about human nature too. But he was stronger than that. 

Belief in the power of love to be the fundamental principle of human society sounds corny as all hell. As Negri says, it sounds crazily naïve. It sounds especially naïve now, given our current political climate defined by hatred, resentment, and violence at so many different levels of human life. 

But believing in love as a fundamental political principle isn’t as simple as any belief that human nature itself is fundamentally good. That would fail to explain all the horrors and cruelty of human history. You’d be right to call that idea stupid.

But the idea that there’s a fundamental, unchanging human nature, and that it is evil, cruel, egotistical, and violent is just as naïve. Just as naïve and dumb as the belief that there’s a fundamental, unchanging human nature which is good, kind, open-hearted, and peaceful.

There being an essential human nature at all in this ethical sense is really the heart of the problem. Throw this belief away. 

Love will win.

But humanity isn’t a blank slate. We may not have a fundamental nature, but we still have our tendencies. And love is the active force in constructing human nature. The problems arise not through love or the privation of love. It’s the corruption of love.

There’s an old Christian idea that evil is the absence of good. Well, evil and cruelty is a lot more insidious than a sick call from our better conscience. Corruption isn’t the absence of love. It’s the power of love converted to make us cruel instead of making us kind.

Here's an example of what I mean. Understand nationalism this way. When it’s functioning properly, love leads us to care for our neighbours. We build relationships with them, look out for them, and help them out when we’re able. This is a good thing to do.

The problem comes when this drive for social solidarity becomes corrupt. One common way it becomes corrupt is when solidarity develops a boundary. When it isn’t an outreach, but a way to separate and divide people. That’s when love ends up creating nationalism and racism. 

When love and inclusion of one implies hatred and rejection of another, love itself is still driving you, but it’s become corrupt. Like any kind of malfunctioning organ or tool, love then has to be repaired so that the feelings and drives that used to create nationalism and racism lose their tendency to exclude. Until they become all-inclusive, as they’re supposed to be.

Philosophy is political medicine.

Love Power I: Sunnyvale Spoilers, Research Time, 19/05/2016

Today's post is about some more ideas I’ve been developing in dialogue with Antonio Negri’s books. It’s also a bit of a spoiler for the Sunnyvale project. Let me explain how that works. 

The posts of Sunnyvale Psychochronography are walks through the stories of individual episodes. They focus on different characters or narrative turns that I think turn an eye on whatever aspect of Trailer Park Boys’ underlying philosophical ideas I want to focus on that week. Each post discusses these ideas in terms of the characters and their actions. Not the ideas themselves in an abstract sense.

If everybody in the world had a
flower instead of a gun, there would
be no war. There would be no hate.
There would only be love.

Negri advocates a central idea at the end of his major trilogy – that love can be the founding principle and engine of politics. Love is the fuel and motor of justice in human society. Love has the power to produce a thriving economy through the social solidarity that grows among people in a community working together. Their interpersonal relationships and organizations produce the wealth of the community.

Reading Negri, he discusses how contemporary communications technology – the globalization of personal relationships and person to person communication – lets the productive networks of love spread all over the world. Today, it’s actually possible to build a world order based on common communication, cooperation, and love.

Looking at the community of Sunnyvale and the Trailer Park Boys, the show itself is a demonstration that such a productive order is possible at all. 

You see, it’s very easy to write off poor, ignorant people whose business activity lives on the margin of legality. This is true enough for poor people in countries like Canada where we have a lot of government services and proper infrastructure to keep people living dignified lives. But it’s doubly true for the residents of shantytowns and favela sprawls. You live in a corrugated tin shack, people barely think of you as human.

Write those people off, sure. But if you do, you dismiss the value of literally billions of lives. Notice the scale and you see what you’ve done. That’s the magnitude of your mistake. 

Sunnyvale is a community that we’ve all come to know where everyone lives on the margins of mainstream society and legality. But it’s a community – in all its conflicts and farcical craziness – that’s still held together by love, and the solidarity that flows from love for each other and your community. All Julian’s actions in this latest season come ultimately from his love for his community.

Sunnyvale is a demonstration that love is the primary motivator of human relationships and community. And when you shift the discussion to Negri’s context – writing as a critical contributor to Western political philosophy – Sunnyvale itself makes a demonstration against the long-standing presumption of humanity’s violent nature.

Negri is writing as a philosopher who’s had a base in a university throughout his life. Throughout Commonwealth, he’s in a dialogue with many legendary writers in the Western philosophical tradition, Thomas Hobbes especially.

Yeah, the lesser evil right here, Thomas. Right here.

You can think of Commonwealth as an argument against Leviathan. That earlier book was an argument that humans were inescapably weak, paranoid, and prone to violence against each other. Peace and productivity needed us to cede our freedom to a central authority, who could inspire in us enough fear not to kill and steal from each other.

The repression and terror that a state government can inflict on people is, if you follow the ideas of Hobbes, which are entirely mainstream in Western philosophy, actually a lesser evil. The greater evil that government repression blocks is the anarchic, chaotic “war of all against all” that comes from people being totally free.

Even the modern libertarian idea – which is now mainstream in North American political thinking – is no real solution. It still presumes humanity to be essentially egoistic, cruel, and violent. It just says that permitting that violence is the lesser evil compared to state repression. That’s no solution, though. 

The solution is – brick by brick, person by person – to build a society from our own networked organizing that is actually based on love. Companionship and friendship spreading all over the world through our communication networks. 

This is the heart of the Sunnyvale project. How can people – with all their conflicting desires and personalities – succeed in building a society based on love? Because so much mistrust and traditions of suspicion stand in the way. . . . To be continued

A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke: Joy Needs Love Needs Sex, Sunnyvale, 23/04/2016

One of the benefits of being on Netflix, as opposed to even a post-watershed cable TV channel, is how explicit you can be with sex. Sex is an essential part of the human condition, rooted in our physicalities. No matter what kind of sexuality you may have – and your sexuality is as singular as you are – you will have some kind of sexuality. Even asexuality as a human is a relation to sex. Humanity can’t escape from sex, and we shouldn’t want to in the first place.

Western morality has separated sex from love for so long that a lot of us are still digging our way out from that situation. But we have to understand that the truest, deepest loves express themselves in the greasiest, nastiest, most freakily creative sex. The greatest fucks aren't just genital fucks, but mind-fucks. There should be no difference between body-fucks and mind-fucks – there are only fucks. Body, thought, and spirit intermingling into a dense and complex integration that produces more than either body could become on its own. This is sexuality at the molecular and spiritual level. This is love.

Prince died two days ago. What else could he have taught us but this?

The deepest, most affecting, and frankly most beautiful love story in the entire world of Trailer Park Boys and Sunnyvale Trailer Park is that of Jim Lahey and Randy. Their sexual tension is still thick, solidifying every time they’re on screen together this season. It’s all the more tense because they never act on it. Jim is yearning for Randy, with increasing desperation. But Randy reacts to Jim differently here than he ever has before. He’s loved Jim, he’s been angry, jealous, frustrated, certainly. But now he seems scared. 

Just look at the way Jim rubs cream on Randy’s tortured, wounded nipples after Barb, Donna, and Candy’s latest attack. They’re horribly wounded, the flesh bruised deeply. And Jim rubs tenderly, with the soft brushes of fingertips that penetrate past skin to the heart, to the soul. He’s crying, sorrowful, shredded and quivering. There’s been a crime here, an assault. And Jim's response isn’t like a lawman. He doesn't go out for revenge, like it was some retro Dirty Harry plot. His response is to heal. The answer of love.

Yet Randy’s afraid. He stops Jim. Stops his love. What could have happened to provoke this attitude in Randy toward the only one who’s ever really loved him? When you watch “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke,” you wonder about this question. This new season will be incomplete if it doesn’t offer some kind of explanation – and it’ll have to be an answer with the magnitude to match how radical a permanent cleave between Lahey and Randy is.

This season has already seen radical transformations to the landscape and characters of Sunnyvale, and it looks like more are coming. We’ve seen Barb transform into a destructive force and Jim abandon his role as Sunnyvale’s voice of authority. We’ve now seen what looks like an end to the love story between Jim and Randy that's been an important element of Sunnyvale from its earliest days in Canada’s self-consciousness. Now there’s another radical change: Ricky is being pressured to stay out of a criminal lifestyle, and is doing his best to make an actually legitimate living. How successful he’ll be is another issue entirely.

In fact, let’s have a closer look at Ricky here. Of the three Trailer Park Boys of the title, Ricky is the least intelligent. He mangles common sayings, he fails to understand very basic things about ordinary life, like how to dispose of large-scale garbage and how to plan for an actually sustainable retirement. Ricky knows he's pretty fucking stupid, but despite that, he’s still pretty fucking stupid.

Yet there’s one area of life where Ricky is one of the most intelligent people in the whole community of Sunnyvale. Maybe even in the whole city of greater Halifax and the whole province of Nova Scotia. Maybe even one of the smartest people in Canada. That’s crime. Specifically, petty crime like ripping off bicycles from racks to sell at shady bike shops, breaking into houses, and selling fake lottery tickets. He’s also a master horticulturalist and manufacturer, but only when it comes to growing marijuana and refining weed into other products like hash, concentrated hash oils, currency made from hash, and the strongest dab you can’t handle.

Ricky is a verbal and intellectual moron, except for when it comes to calculating a crime. When he’s over-emotional, he gets impulsive and reckless – I still have fond memories of laughing my ass off as Ricky ripped a massive ATM from the walls of a bank. But look at how he plans and improvises his way through the gang’s petty crime spree in “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke.”

First, there’s the bike theft at the college. He knows what the bikes are worth and exactly what you have to do to steal them as fast as possible. And when those two hapless student security staff cycle over themselves, Ricky knows exactly how to talk his way out of the situation. He talks with perfect confidence as if he and the crew are some casually dressed contractors, slips them some hash, shit-talks their boss with them, and gives them just enough of an excuse for plausible deniability that they can walk away. 

When they go to that affluent neighbourhood nearby to case for easy robberies, Ricky is the expert reconnaissance man. He knows exactly what to say to appear like an innocent passerby to residents who are still at home, and can break into a house with ease. It doesn’t matter than he can’t pick the lock – he can still get in there and start robbing. 

The problem Ricky encounters in that rich neighbourhood doesn’t have anything to do with any mistakes he makes. It’s that the police have become too attentive. Law and authority are more present in that community, faster, more efficient than seemingly anywhere. The boys are surprised that the police showed up this quickly. They aren’t supposed to be this competent. Ricky talks his way out of the situation with the same ease as he handled the campus security patrol, because he’s only intelligent as a criminal. But he shouldn’t have had to deal with them. The cops arrived whole minutes sooner than they should have. 

Something has changed. Many things have changed in and around Sunnyvale. This isn't the only thing. But the attentiveness and professionalism of the police is the most obvious. The most remarkable. We aren’t dealing with George fucking Green here anymore. What could have caused this new generation of actually professional police officers to appear?

These kinds of cops aren’t typically around Sunnyvale itself. The standard police patrols can easily be kept away with a few well-placed sexual acts of Randy just outside the gate. These kinds of cops come to Sunnyvale after a break-in at an affluent suburban neighbourhood. These are forces of law and order who could actually be a threat to Sunnyvale. Robbing from the types of people these cops protect may actually have consequences – piss these cops off, and you might not get out of jail in time for next season. There’s a new order in town.

Remember some of those conversations a few episodes ago about a new subdivision going up near Sunnyvale? It was just a throwaway comment, but in the light of these new, competent cops in Ricky’s life, we have to take seriously the likelihood of radical change coming to Sunnyvale. Not from any open, violent invasion like Barb’s, even though that is pretty fucking dangerous. No, this is a more creeping, invisible danger.

Could suburbanites be coming to the borders of Sunnyvale? Threatening their joyful anarchy and chaos with actually competent police and law? 

Is this Barb’s actual plan for Sunnyvale? She’s never really been part of the Sunnyvale community before. She was always an authority figure, always at some distance from the real rhythms and styles of Sunnyvale life. Barb has been a creature of law – keeping Jim from drinking, trying to run the park according to explicit rules and regulations. At least that’s how I remember her.

So far this season, we haven’t really heard a justification for Barb wanting to take control of the trailer park. I mean, we’ve heard her justify it as revenge on Julian for weaselling his way into majority ownership while she was shipped off to jail with Donna and Sarah at the end of Season Nine. But that’s not her total motivation – it can’t be. Yeah, she could take Sunnyvale’s ownership back from Julian, but then we’re left with the question of what she’d actually do with it. 

But Barb has never really been part of Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale’s freedom and chaos has always irritated her, hasn’t it? If Barb Lahey has had a nemesis over the last 15 years, it’s been Sunnyvale itself, the trailer park that refuses to calm itself and conform to her wishes for a quiet, uneventful, straight life. Now Barb is unrestrained, a violent bully who has embraced an aggressive lesbian life. Sunnyvale, always Barb’s nemesis, has finally broken her. Yes, Julian was the person who screwed her out of a potentially fruitful real estate investment. But that’s just money. It was Sunnyvale itself that broke Barb’s soul.

With a new, high-end suburban development creeping closer and closer to Sunnyvale, that land is getting more and more valuable. Sunnyvale’s land is more valuable than the people who live on it. I mean, nobody who lives in Sunnyvale even bothers to pay their lot fees. It’s effectively a community without money. No real estate developer could ever make money from Sunnyvale as it is. 

But with the people gone, and only the land remaining, it’s a multi-million dollar investment property. Nothing would satisfy Barb – who’s become a primal drive for revenge and violence – more than destroying the entire society that slowly ground her down into the creature of hate that she is.