Why Does Anyone Do Anything For Anybody? Research Time, 31/07/2018

Here’s the thing about revolutionizing your entire culture’s values. It’s much easy to think about than to achieve. That gap is even more frustrating because so many of those values already exist in society – it’s just that they don’t predominate.

You see, this appears to be a pretty common theme in all my philosophical writing. At least the big projects. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity started with problems of environmental ethics, moral philosophy, and ontology. It ended with an imperative to develop better methods of changing people’s moralities and self-conceptions.

Knockoffs do have some merits on their own terms.

Utopias is a sequel of sorts, in that it revolves around the methods, tendencies, and directions for revolutions in moralities and self-conceptions throughout a culture. And I think I’m just about ready to start diving into the manuscript now that I know how that book is going to end.

Once you’ve worked out the mechanics of how to revolutionize moralities and ethics, you have to ask what your endpoint is. For me, that endpoint is an anarchist-flavoured communitarianism.

It makes Raphael Sassower something of a fellow traveller, since he's also exploring the potentials of communitarian political economy and morality. His work will probably be quite influential in how I come to think about how communitarian values work in a civilization like ours – industrial, high-technological, in a state of global ecological reorientation (if not outright collapse).

Here's one example of how communitarian values end up creating quite a lot of prosperity. Sassower discusses the knockoff economy, particularly China’s dominance of trade in knockoff goods. He argues that the knockoff business sector offers an empirical rebuke to one of the unquestioned presumptions justifying intellectual property rights.

Not all forms of intellectual property need be respected to encourage innovation. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about art – I’m a writer and I like to be paid for my work. At the same time, I don’t exactly need every payday to be $5-million. It wouldn’t even be all that nice – it’d be too much.

Not this Gucci, no. Although he is my favourite Gucci.

But I’m talking about product designs – fashion products like clothing and handbags, personal appliances like dvd players and watches. Knockoffs don’t detract from the sales of the top label products because of the social status of actually having the proper product.* Knockoff economy businesses, meanwhile, are creating fashionable goods and appliances that working class people can afford.

* It’s a doubly elite status. Not only do you have the status of owning the proper product, but in a knockoff-dominated economy, the only ones who can tell on sight that you have the genuine article are connoisseurs of the product. Cash and hipster cred.

Preventing knockoffs actually harms the prestige of the brand, especially in the fashion retail sector, where the prevalence of knockoffs is a sign of the brand’s prestige. In all these ways, the knockoff and elite markets support each other.

This is a context where a supposedly universal principle – that innovation can only occur when patents and intellectual property amount to a practical monopoly. At least temporarily, to incentivize them with exclusive profit from that property.

Knockoff symbiosis shows how the prestige economy can thrive and fuel popular trends in fashion. It also shows that thirst for the maximum profits is not the only driver of economic activity. A demonstration for communitarian values.

Becoming Memorable by Becoming a Landmark, Research Time, 09/03/2018

There are moments, when you’re researching a big project, when a few key ideas all come together. I’m having a moment like that now, looking back at some notes on an essay about Félix Guattari.

Stephen Zepke wrote it – he’s a scholar of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work, who focusses a lot on their aesthetic theories. It has a mouthful of a title – “From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari.” Despite that in-your-face blast of technical vocab, it’s actually quite an interesting study.

Arinze Stanley with my favourite of his drawings.

Zepke talks about how Guattari explored art as a revolutionary process. Start from one key fact – if you want to start a successful art movement, you have to run against the mainstream.

You could bring up lots of examples from history. But most of the historical examples I know are Western, and in the spirit of my iconoclastic colleagues, I want to talk about a more global example.

Contemporary installation art, over the last few decades, has been dominated by the overtly shocking – blasphemous, stomach-churning, deranged. Photographs like Andres Serrano’s Piss-Christ, or installations like Damien Hirst’s famous The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Back in the 20th century, this kind of provocative sublime surreality was a sufficient shock to mainstream European visual and installation art that it ushered in a whole new way of thinking about what art was acceptable. It reminded popular culture that art is supposed to push boundaries.

As Zepke follows Guattari – art is a deterritorializing medium. The most remarkable art movements are the ones that forcefully reject the norms of an ossified mainstream. They create a whole new set of common principles for thinking about what art is.

Yes, it's a zebra in formaldehyde. But is it art?

The conceptual and social territory of – in the most extreme cases like Hirst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Kenneth Anger, or Henri Matisse – what counts as art at all. In most cases of historically remarkable art, you’ve at least helped create an exciting new movement that sweeps away a redundant mainstream. Or at least gives people the impetus to see how redundant and stale the mainstream had become under their noses.

Here’s the wider lesson for any social revolution. Every deterritorializalization ends up reterritorializing. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. Every departure has to set itself down somewhere, unless it just wants to fly to pieces. Maybe you want to fly to pieces. But you don’t have to.

What was once a provocative new artistic movement becomes a staid, drab mainstream. In the example I’ve been talking about, the once-shocking sculptures and installations of the Young British Artists are now old hat. Damien Hirst was becoming a punchline before the last century was even finished. Now, his new work is dismissed as “a showroom for oligarchs.”

What do I contrast to the bizarre shock of surreal that’s Hirst limping aesthetic? Hyperrealism. Massive canvases of charcoal and pencil still-life drawings with more detail than a photograph.

Chiamonwu Joy and her remarkable images.

Hyperrealism is a global scene as well. Notable figures are Nigeria’s Arinze Stanley and Chiamonwu Joy, Germany’s Dirk Dzimirski, Canada’s Jeannette Sirois, and plenty of others. Hyperrealist images are more emotionally powerful than Hirst-ian provocations could ever be.

The best of them, of which I count Stanley, creates images of faces that tear you from your complacency – human drama rooted in the individuality of real people. An image of reality hand-crafted in such detail that the devotion to completed, perfected art impresses you almost as much as the faces that root you from your self-interested museum-goer’s detachment.

Don’t think hyperrealism developed purely in reaction to the decadent excess and greed of Hirst-ian installation art. I chose those two art movements because I’ve been looking into hyperrealism over the last six months or so. I’m late to the party, but that was only when I discovered Arinze’s work.

Hyperrealism is a global movement, and the artists who are part of it each have their own motivations and techniques. Deterritorialization – ripping a mainstream out of its prominence to pursue utterly different directions in creativity – isn’t about taking the “opposite” of that mainstream.

What would be the opposite of a cow suspended in formaldehyde? Does it even make sense to talk about opposites of artworks? No, only different artworks. If a cultural movement is influential enough to spawn a ton of mediocre imitators, then eventually some other movement will gather enough energy to blast the old corpse out of social prominence.

Canada's Everyday Horror, Jamming, 20/12/2017

I’ll say this. I’ll get it out of the way. I never realized how good Alice Munro was until after she won the Nobel Prize.

But my response wasn’t all that much awe or respect. It was, “You know what? Fuck it. Dear Life is on sale for only $12 and I’ll get myself a proper physical copy.”

Because I could never get past the hype of Alice Munro – The Great Canadian Short Story Writer. Weirdly, I missed her work when I was in secondary school. Probably just by chance. When you grow up in Newfoundland, the curriculum has a schizophrenic relationship with Canadian literature.

A lot of Newfoundlanders don’t even consider themselves Canadian. Since each province’s government feels something of an obligation to include literature from its own territory, we chop a lot of the mainstream Canadian authors in favour of local material.

There are few authors in Canada better suited to a whimsical, yet
ever so slightly deranged, postage stamp. I wonder how many
people in the last year or so thought she wrote The Handmaid's
Tale.

So instead of the middle-years collections of Alice Munro, I got The Lure of the Labrador Wild. A book written so badly that it made desolation and death seem boring.

You know what you can do instead of reading that, Newfoundland secondary education curriculum designers? Cut it in favour of some Inuit poets and Voss by Patrick White. I know he’s Australian, but you’ll never read a trippier, freakier, more existentially terrifying book about dying lost in an unforgiving wilderness.

Where was I? Alice Munro. No, I think I was exposed to so much Canadian literature that felt like artistic dead ends to me. Austere tomes about petty, small lives on the Canadian Prairies. That damn Hockey Sweater.

I think I only hated it at the time – elementary school – because the teachers expected us all to know about hockey, and none of them explained that the kid got the Leafs sweater because the head of the retail company was a racist Anglo. It was all, “Oh! Wasn’t he so embarrassed! The Toronto Maple Leafs!”

I’m kind of glad I avoided Alice Munro until I was almost 30. I think I can appreciate the unpretentious craftsmanship. A couple of months ago, I found The Love of a Good Woman at a garage sale when I was walking around The Esplanade with my 10 year old niece.

Stories of ordinary lives with violent, creepy secrets. People, just interesting enough on their own to follow for 30-70 pages. Then you discover some terrible incident in their pasts that flip all that ordinariness into haunted space.

A fat old man drowns in a small town’s river. A young-ish husband leaves his wife and dies mysteriously in Indonesia. A garish old woman’s first husband is conveniently killed in a house fire. Courtenay, British Columbia turns from a quaint hub of hippies, Whole Food shoppers, and wrinkled old white people into a screaming graveyard.

You never learn about Canadian literature as everyday terror. Maybe you should.

The Terror of Men, Composing, 30/10/2017

So I haven't written a post about my artistic work in a while, and I really should. I’m getting to the point where my Patreon’s getting hungry for more content. And if you’ll allow me to get a little crassly commercial here, I’m getting close to a point where the activities of Adam Writes Everything are going to get a bit more commercial.

Let me start at the current moment. I’m working on a new film project with a collaborator who I met as a colleague at my current teaching job. Right now, we’re putting the script together in tandem.

No, I'm not actually working with Ghostface Killah. But the privacy-
screen name for the blog works well for his personality.

We’ve opened up a Google Doc where Ghost throws up ideas, key lines, descriptions of scenes; then I refine all that into a shooting script. When we have the script together, Ghost gets a small crew together from the folks he’s made weird-ass short films before, and we get to work.

Did I mention I’ve ended up cast in this? I play a slightly deranged criminal psychiatrist. It’s been more than a decade since I’ve written anything to perform myself. It’s been bracing to get back into that – you approach the writing differently when you know you’ll be saying the lines yourself.

Mainly, you know your own acting talent, and definitely its limits.

I can’t tell you too much about the story, because it’s actually a little complex and I want to keep it secret. But it’s a horror film. A horror film that revolves around identity-cracking psychosis and violence against women.

An obsession-turned-tragedy sublimated into a split personality that’s carried out a serial killer’s campaign. Satanic-cum-Freudian rituals executed on IKEA furniture in a disused suburban basement.

I’m going all in here. I’m just going to throw every image of self-deluding misogyny on screen in the most intensely horrific, terrifying, icky, pathetic way possible. An exorcism.

An impossible exorcism, of course. A reasonably self-conscious man knows that possibility to intimidate just by being in the room is present in his whole life. We’re never getting rid of the desires.

Tamping it down because we’re realized that a just society is one where – at minimum – men fear the repercussions of offending any woman as much as a woman now fears the repercussions of offending a powerful man.

So that’s the kind of film I want to make here. I’d also like to do it with virtually no money, which I think we can manage. It’s the perfect kind of film to make a killing on the horror festival circuit.
• • •
I’ll be sharing this post on my Patreon page this week, since I haven’t posted there in a while. But after Ghost gets over his flu, we’re going to record our first YouTube channel video. Mostly talking about the ideas behind the film.

Later this year, I’ll finally transition Adam Writes Everything into a proper website. Much of the same will be going on, but I’ll just create more of a brand around it.

I said a week or so ago that I started this blog as therapy. That was true, back in 2013. Since then, I’ve grown more into my ambitions, and I’m in a position where their possibility is actually in sight. Not just a dream.

Being in Toronto is part of that, thanks to the extra connections you can make in this city. Reestablishing a foundation for teaching work, with a decent salary that can easily become more decent over time. Building the artistic side of my philosophical work is my own ideal for the rest of my life.

It’s been years, but I’m ready at last to begin that work. Took me long enough. Fucking economy.

I Guess Stronger Together Was It, Jamming, 23/10/2017

A story first, then some philosophy.
• • •
Sometimes, a politician hits on the right idea at a time when she can never do anything about it. Hillary Clinton had led a political life of equal parts naiveté and the most awful ethical compromises for state power.

I think there's a good heart and an ethical soul in Hillary Clinton. I
firmly believe this. But I'm also sure that she no longer knows how
to express that soul. She had to hide her values as First Lady of
Arkansas and the USA under vicious attacks that made her out to
be some feminazi monster. Now, her quite reasonable
feminism is actually mainstream.
But she spent so long and in such intense circumstances training
herself to speak in euphemism to placate millions of sexists and
racists, she can't sound believable about what she truly and
deeply believes.

But then she put a fundamental truth about human nature on her campaign signs – that we are stronger together. It’s as if she knew she’d go down in flames – never consciously, only as a last moment of ethical instinct from the most ancient parts of her brain.

Everything about her political career was rooted in noble, true instincts, but she and her husband both were the worst judges of which compromises were worth making. Believe deeply all your life in the power to heal racism in America, then pass the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform packages in the name of compromise across the aisle.

Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party was just as revanchist as Donald Trump’s. Gingrich just had some tact, so he could trick naive kind people into thinking that he didn’t wish we could just have Jim Crow back.

It’s the same about this mess with Uranium One blowing up on right-wing media. FOX began talking about this complex web of business deals, as if it shows the fundamental corruption of the Clintons. But to me, the centre of the story lies here.

Bill Clinton walked into a meeting with Nursultan Nasarbaev – President For Life of that bastion of liberal freedoms and government transparency Kazakhstan – while Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State. Bill sincerely believed that he was arranging nothing more than a contribution to a public health project somewhere impoverished.

Bill and Hillary Clinton would never have imagined such a meeting as a pay-for-play. Corruption was the worst thing a powerful person connected with government could do – it would break the people’s trust in you to do the right thing by them. Surely, no leader of a country would take on such a burden solely to enrich themselves.

Nasarbaev lives in a world where every meeting is a pay-for-play, a corrupt deal to enrich yourself. Enriching yourself was the reason you joined the government.

Some people are raised believing that joining government means becoming a public servant – that you have a duty to your constituents. If you take that so much for granted that you can't conceive of people who join government for very different reasons, you should stay home. You won't be able to deal with these people.

• • •
Hannah Arendt wrote about a particular concept of freedom – freedom from interference, self reliance, autarky. Freedom as the ability to turn away from our obligations.

This is a freedom we all have. But it isn’t a freedom we should want. It’s the freedom to turn away from your friends and neighbours. We’re all free to decide that we should live only to enrich ourselves.

But living that way leaves us bankrupt. Humans are fundamentally social creatures – our personalities are inherently inadequate and broken if we don’t get enough contact with other humans as infants and small children. We’re each deeply interdependent on everyone else in society for our mental and cultural health.

To have a morality that turns away from everyone else – when freedom is freedom from obligation – embraces the withering of a human organ as a great ethical good.

It sounds absolutely mad. Of course we’re stronger together than we are acting only on our own. Someone who’d gladly turn his back on everyone around him would be a monster of a person.

Don’t forget that another way of life as possible – never forget that humans are very good at making ourselves monsters.

Facing Reality to Save Your Idealism, Composing, 15/09/2016

A few days ago when I was catching up on some of the recent news in radical nationalism around the West, I discovered a very enlightening Twitter thread by New Yorker reporter James Surowiecki.

There's a synergy to my own work with contemporary
issues, but I've also thought for years that I want my
non-fiction (and my fictional work) to engage with
the problems that drive my society and my world.

He argued that, even though the word ‘racist’ is usually (and rightly) used as a pejorative, we must also be open to using it as an objective description of an actual political ideology. Right now, the Trump campaign is leading a mainstream movement of openly racist politics in America.

His most dedicated supporters and activists – especially those in the alt-right who’ve been raised in the brutal message boards of Reddit and 4Chan* – openly identify as white supremacists. Or at least they sincerely believe that listening to the concerns of minorities and women expresses hatred of white men.

* And I’m sure quite a lot of them know their Moldbug. 

I've been thinking a lot this week about the conflicts of our hopes and ideals with our often cynical need to be realist in our lives. So I want to think about this very insightful series of ideas from Surowiecki through that lens. 

That the term ‘racism’ is today a straightforward insult is a sign of progress – It’s an ideal that’s become reality. Even the most enthusiastic evangelicals of race’s reality and racism’s rightness have to soak their expressions in irony to permit a sympathetic reading. 

That means writing philosophical texts that engage just as much with
ideas in daily media as in traditional academic sources.
Maybe more so.

You can't just openly say, “This is why racism is correct!” the way you could decades ago. That’s even too pleasant a sheen on how Western society was back then – only a few decades (and definitely a century) ago, you didn’t even need to try to prove it. You started an argument from racism’s truth as a basic fact. You could take for granted that everyone was a racist, and that this was an ordinary and true worldview.

In that sense, an ideal has overcome a concession to realism. And political realism is very much a concession. You take as a given that the world can’t fundamentally change, that we must accept its nature, and that all attempts to change the world for the better are fool’s errands.

Being realistic doesn’t necessarily mean you capitulate your dreams to a shitty universe. When you’re talking international relations theory, the attitude of ‘realism’ typically implies a kind of cynical quietism – there will always be war, conflict, power games, imperialism in different forms, and so on.

Here is a journalist thinking very radically, saying what needs to be
said in our current political environment: We have to take racism
seriously as politics, and he walks through its profound implications.

That attitude of blunt acceptance is a backbone of Surowiecki’s argument. There’s always been a significant stream of American culture that defines itself in racist terms. And racism is more than just an insult – it’s still, and inherently is, a fundamental political stance. We can’t just cast racism out of the realm of politics as such because it’s horrible. 

Political thinking is about the principles and concepts that form the framework of how we understand our societal and institutional relations and structures, and how we think of new relations and structures. 

You can build moral norms and principles around racism. There are plenty of examples to demonstrate it – Jim Crow and American plantation slavery, the race theories and political movements popular in Europe from the late 19th century to the Second World War, and the racial business and citizenship hierarchies of contemporary Persian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

Few things have thicker political significance than the structure and
makeup of your community. Your community is the field of politics
itself. So if you don't want blacks in your community, it means
that you don't want to share your fields of political activity – let
alone your highest political institutions – with black people.

Now, all of these moralities are pretty horrible. But they’re still moral and institutional systems. 

If you don't engage with that viewpoint – that someone can consider racist norms and principles legitimate moral and political frameworks – as a real political principle, you aren’t going to grapple with racist ideologies and all they can do. You’ll think of them as cartoon Nazis from some old Biggles book.

To achieve your ideal of a world free of racism, you have to deal with racism as it really is – the sincere ideology and moral/political beliefs of real people. That’s the uncomfortable tension between realism and idealism.

If you don’t engage with racists and racism as authentic political actors and ideology, they’ll run circles around you. You’ll engage only with phantoms, and your enemies will still be real people.

Real flesh hurts when it hits you.

The First Step of Justice Is Reaching Out, A History Boy, 21/12/2015

I thought I'd write a short follow-up of this weekend’s post about how abstract, theoretical thinking can blind you to real suffering. Because it isn't just complex theories of literature that make you think others’ suffering either doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

I’ve started working on a script for a film version of You Were My Friend, the play I wrote and helped produce in Hamilton last Fall. The story applies to this problem of indifference, in a lot of ways. It’ll take a few tangents through my memory to explain fully.

All the terror of our current century has followed from
the effects of this day. We should never take its
power for granted, or think of it as ordinary.

Don't worry – I won't spoil the story.

Let's start with yesterday's main topic. Lisa Ruddick ends her article about the moral coldness of modern literary theory with an appeal to heart, which is a little vague when you think about it. Aside from getting back into a more generally sympathetic frame of mind, how would you analyze or understand an artwork this way?

It reminds me of a conversation I had with my old friend D shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about irony in art. So much of the most popular art in the 1990s had a thick veneer of irony and misanthropy, which were sources of humour. 

We sat and wondered what would happen to art, whether irony would be dumped, inadequate to the trauma that had just been inflicted on our culture. We imagined a new era of art whose primary tone was a heart-rending sincerity.

Because 18-year-old students can be really pretentious sometimes. 

But I sometimes think we were onto something. At least in terms of tendency. Intelligent art isn’t always drenched in disdain or contempt. Being a dedicated Seinfeld fan was appropriate to my self-absorbed teens, and it's not like that show stopped being funny. 

Throughout my 20s, I've been more drawn to works of art that explore real struggles, and either find humour in them or depict them in all their gut-wrenching intensity. The most remarkable TV comedies of the early 2010s, Community and Parks and Recreation, mined cartoonishly absurd humour from narratives of love, friendship, and dedication. 

Community was probably the perfect example of how
to combine thickly referenced media literacy, hip
sensibility, healthy irony, and genuine ethical
sympathy with its characters.

These are examples that impacted me the most anyway. Being able to take part in the online communities that grew around these and other shows also contribute to a powerful sense of belonging. These were our communities.

Able to reach out and form fandom communities with people all over the world. Where more and more of the best cultural entertainment properties combined humour, satire, and love. These intensely social environments and sympathetic ideas have shaped how I engage with art. 

So I’m trying to bring that same attitude to You Were My Friend. The warmth of watching a friendship come together, but in a world constantly haunted by the worst economic and family traumas that Mike Leigh or Lars Von Trier could come up with.

I’ve told Samantha before that her big moment in the storyline is when I go “the full Von Trier" on her. One of the most powerful moments in cinema that I think I've ever experienced is the end of Dancer in the Dark. I saw it in a theatre, and it left me frozen in my seat for at least 10 minutes. 

The ambition of You Were My Friend is to combine that kind of emotional power with moments of ridiculous levity and warmth in one movie. It tries to depict how real friendship can develop and fall apart in the pressures of the real economy and urban life.

So if I can venture an answer to Ruddick’s question. What would a literary theory with heart be? It would move away from finding significations that conform to a theory that sees liberation in the total explosion of personality and history. That’s what it's not.

It would understand an artwork in terms of its affects and its mission. What an artwork makes an audience feel, and what they learn from it. In my own case, they feel the real pain of people cast adrift in an economy and a business world more obsessed with empty buzzwords and quick cash than real struggles. They feel the real joy of the friendships that are our life rafts in these harsh times. 

And they understand the world where all this happens. It’s ours.

The Real and the Most Real, You Were My Friend, 31/10/2014

A brief post today, a further elaboration on some of the ideas in You Were My Friend (for which tickets are available). It’s relatively spoiler-free, but even these spoilers won’t really be such, because all I’m going to describe of them is that they exist, not precisely how or why the scenes shift as they do. 

Throughout, You Were My Friend is what I’d call a social realist piece of theatre. I mean it’s social realist in the sense that I learned about it from Phil Sandifer, after whose lesson on the landmark BBC tv-movie Cathy Come Home, I realized applied to a lot of my favourite old movies: Five Easy Pieces, MASH, The Passenger. My own production is deeply political, and finds its profundity in the small scales. It’s about two women living in an apartment overlooking Kensington. All scenes but one take place in that single apartment. 

The pressures that drive them throughout the narrative are utterly ordinary, and exactly what drives most of us to distraction. They have hostile or passive-aggressive relationships with their families. They experience crises of confidence as their careers face roadblocks or stall out completely. They undergo the pressure of having to pay the same or rising bills at a time when they have less and less money. 

That’s what social realism is about. In Phil’s words from his Cathy Come Home post in 2011, “The point of social realism is simple. It’s out and out politicized art. You do social realism because you want to get people to change something about the way they live their lives.” Social realist storytelling conventions let us experience a person’s life in such a more intense way than we usually do, because it’s packed into, in the case of You Were My Friend, only about 80 minutes.

That intensity of a sympathetic example of someone whose life circumstances are very different from yours can achieve the political purpose of helping you understand such a person better than you otherwise could. Some reactions to learning that a person is stuck in a crap job is, “Well, they should get a better job!” But that idea doesn’t take seriously the idea that you can’t.

As well, when a person is lulled into an attitude of accepting a realistic portrayal of life on stage, seeing that shift into a hyper-real mode is especially jarring, unsettling. This is what we spent a lot of time on during the technical rehearsal tonight: getting the transition from the social realist mode of lighting and on-stage movement to a more meta-fictional dreamscape that directly involves the audience in the characters’ existences. It’s a step beyond the social realism that encourages sympathy, and into a mode of theatrical storytelling that actually takes the audience directly into the experience of the characters. 

Meticulously Understanding Intuitive Theatre, Composing, 09/10/2014

The American cinema of the 1970s is a major influence on
my approach to drama and narrative. I originally planned
You Were My Friend as a pure social realist narrative, like
Hal Ashby's The Last Detail.

Last night was the first time I’ve been able to make it to a rehearsal of You Were My Friend in a couple of weeks. We’ve made great progress on the production. All but the last two sequences have been completely blocked already. Today, I thought I’d talk about an idea that I’ve had about our process of composition and production.

As I write a text like this, a script that’s performed entirely live in front of an audience who’s right in the room with us, I’m intimately concerned with transition and flow. Each moment of emotionally intense drama has to be followed up with a moment of humour. Levity must follow gravity so the audience isn’t dragged down too deeply. As well, each line progresses the narrative just a little bit. Even the most apparently superfluous element like a reactive, “Well, yeah,” contributes to the development of the characters, the story, and their ideas. I conceive of the play, as well as my film script for the Alice project, as one continuous movement.

Getting into the first rehearsals with Mel the director and Samantha and Hannah the cast, a very different process began. Mel breaks down that continuous movement into individual moments, according to the predominant emotional tone. Every tonal shift is a little break in the narrative, as my continuous movement is analyzed into component parts. 

Then once we get to physical rehearsal and the blocking out of scenes, the continuous movement of the play is restored in the performance. Small changes are made to the script, we introduce performance details as we refine and perfect the expression of the narrative on the stage. Most importantly, all the knowledge of that analysis is articulated in the physical movement of the play.

Yet once the script was finished, You Were My Friend had
several fourth-wall breaking and montage elements as well,
shattering its social realist style of expression (though not
its content) as it came to an end. Robert Altman's MASH
was a touchstone here.

This is the closest I’ve come to actually seeing Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition in front of me in my experience. The concept is a strange one, appearing as it does in his books Creative Evolution and Two Sources of Morality and Religion at work in more specific arguments about particular disciplinary areas (biology and evolutionary theory in one, and social/political philosophy in the other). He explains the concept in the abstract in some of his essays in the Creative Mind collection, but precisely what it is remains an object of endless debate* in academic Bergson studies.

* As all debates are endless in academic contexts. The endlessness is a function of the desperation of university academics to keep a debate going past a sensible point, finding more and more distinctions to create research niches in the sub-disciplines of X studies. For an example, see my earlier posts on Daniel Smith's work about Deleuze. Rant over.

After my experience working on You Were My Friend with a director who has such a different method that gels so well with my own, I think I can say, following up on my own suspicions about the concept in Bergson’s work, that this intuition unites the smooth articulation of expert physical movement with the depth of contemplative knowledge that you gain from analysis. It is knowing movement.

I Hear Voices Across My Desk, Composing, 18/09/2014

Wednesday was so ridiculously busy that I couldn’t really sit down and blog an entry for today, but I got some things done on the way home from my campus in Oakville. So I was able to load this up to post this evening. The schedule goes, I’ll probably promote this as Friday’s post as well, write a conclusion to my thoughts on my coming battle with Robert Nozick for Saturday, then post my review of Doctor Who: Time Heist for either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.

It’s not so much that Adam Writes Everything is scattershot. Posts are regular, with few unscheduled skips. But there are always variations to the plan that pop up at the last minute. 

One quite pleasant such variation was the first read-through of You Were My Friend, as the cast and crew sat around a desk at the Pearl Company in Hamilton. It was the first time that anything I wrote was performed by professional actors in a professional context. The play’s director Mel told me beforehand how wonderful it felt to hear your words being spoken, and it really is a beautiful feeling. It helps that my dialogue wasn’t terrible. In fact, it was generally pretty good.

I designed You Were My Friend as a social realist play, a simple story about people under pressure from the current economy. Hearing Samantha and Hannah, our actors, read through the script in real time also gave me a good sense of how the narrative unfolds over time. Samantha’s character comes from a working class background and a hostile home environment, but begins with an optimistic, hopeful attitude about her fellow humans and her new life in the rough neighbourhoods of Toronto. But as the grind of the everlasting recession goes on, that hope gets pushed under her anger and frustration at continuing exploitation by customers, bosses, and co-workers.

Hannah’s character is already jaded from working in mediocre office jobs for a few years, and funnels that bitterness into rage at the idiocy of the human race. She hates people to distract her from hating herself. Samantha is the centre of gravity around which Hannah flies fuelled by rage until she crashes. Substance use (but not really abuse, as that would be too cheesy in my context) is how they deal with their frustrations.

Another pleasant aspect of the play’s production is that I now have a promotional team working for me. Well, I shouldn’t be quite so hierarchical about it. I’m retraining right now in the Corporate Communications program at Sheridan College, and our working teams each have to promote a not-for-profit event this Fall as a credit for one of our courses. 

Our professor for this course was cool with our promoting You Were My Friend, which plays over this November. So we have a publicity team working at the training program for the best public relations practitioners in Canada. And they’re cool with my paying them in complementary tickets. 

The Reality of Stories, Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood, Reviews, 07/09/2014

“We’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?” — The Doctor, The Big Bang.

In Robots of Sherwood, a sci-fi alien manipulates a local
warlord to repair his ship when it crashes in medieval
England. Wait, this isn't right, is it?

Phil Sandifer, my inspiration on this philosophical review project, started the TARDIS Eruditorum with the notion that Doctor Who is a figure about which we can always tell new stories. We don’t have to be concerned with whether each story is consistent in every detail with what has gone before. All we need to know is that the Doctor is a hero, both for our time and for however long the human future lasts. 

In just the same way, Robin Hood became a hero in British culture, and all the cultures around the world that the British influenced. Through their military empire, and then their creative media, that was the entire world. Mark Gatiss made the point clearly and explicitly, because he isn’t really a writer deft enough to make a philosophical point without stating it didactically. 

“That a man born of wealth and privilege could find the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear . . . until one night, he is moved to steal a TARDIS and fly among the stars.”

I cut the last phrase in that quotation because it’s such a cliché. The point is that the Doctor is the latest in a long tradition of British heroes who turn against a society where class hierarchy and the accumulation of unfair wealth and power cause terrible suffering. Like the Doctor, Robin Hood is such a mythical figure in British mythology. Unlike the Doctor, it is generally believed that he was also a real person. This is the conceit around which Gatiss structures his episode.

The story does play to Mark Gatiss' natural strengths as a
writer of comedic banter, however.

The peculiar nature of Robot of Sherwood as a story creates problems for the episode,* which suffers from the tension of its pretensions to realism and both its science-fictional and mythical settings. I’m not going to post my SPOILERS heading yet, because what I’m about to discuss can be gleaned from such ordinary parts of public discourse as the trailers and press photos. 

* I should say, though, that this was actually a wonderfully entertaining episode to watch. As a straight adventure story, it’s one of Gatiss’ best, and he’s really quite good when he’s good, as he is here. Both my girlfriend and I got a huge kick out of Robots of Sherwood.

There are basically three layers to Robot of Sherwood’s story:

1) Sci-fi. The Sheriff of Nottingham has an army of robots, after all.

2) Heroic Myths. The legacy of Robin Hood as a cultural myth plays a significant role in the plot.

3) Realism. The narrative explicitly positions its Robin Hood as the real historical person.

The TARDIS lands at semi-random in Sherwood Forest after Clara requests that she meet Robin Hood, even though the Doctor doesn’t believe he exists. He’s a myth, just a bunch of stories. I like to imagine that the TARDIS likes Clara after she saved the Doctor’s timeline in The Name of the Doctor (she was able to snap her fingers to shut the door in the Anniversary Special), so materialized literally in front of Robin Hood. The Doctor spends the next few set pieces trying to figure out a science-fictional explanation for why a mythical figure that doesn’t exist is standing in front of him swashbuckling in archery contests and swordfighting on bridges across small streams. But eventually, he has to admit that Robin, Earl of Locksley, was a real person.

Despite their protests, these Merry Men are too Hollywood.

But the Robin that Gatiss presents us with has nothing to do with, historically speaking, who the real Robin Hood could have been in the actual 1100s. Gatiss has clearly done no historical research whatsoever to work out how actual 12th century English lived, aside from the usual two-story thatch-roof houses and castles. The Merry Men (though Clara baptizes them as such here, because you can’t not make that joke) are just as they’d appear in any contemporary Robin Hood adventure show. Tom Riley’s Robin is an Errol Flynn pastische, complete with banter and theatrical laughter. The Doctor even makes a reference to Errol Flynn during his ‘swordfight’ with Robin, lampshading the artificiality of the character.

The problem is, because you know the story is science-fictional, you know that someone is going to turn out to be the Robot of Sherwood. So, engaging with the episode, the Doctor’s doubts about Robin Hood’s authenticity are immediately going to ring true. The Robin Hood we see is the product of a century of cinematic and televisual storytelling. He’s Errol Flynn’s personality put through a filter of Jonas Armstrong's messier aesthetic. 

Yet the ultimate denouement of this theme is that the Robin we see is real, despite his obvious nature as the Robin of our popular culture, not one who could ever have lived in medieval England. And this Robin who fails to capture the character of medieval life has his allegedly real medieval world invaded by robots and spaceships. Most importantly, Robin’s world has been invaded by the Doctor, the TARDIS, and Clara Oswald. 

The Doctor has encountered British foundational myths
tempered with sci-fi concepts before. I strongly recommend
Battlefield, in which Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and Brigadier
Lethbridge-Stewart must stop Morgaine from hijacking a
nuclear weapon for her trans-dimensional spaceship to fight
King Arthur.

A Robin whose reality is schizzed with his Hollywood image maintains his reality. Yet he does so in a world where the Doctor is real. Their final conversation calls special attention to their reality. When the Doctor asserts that he’s no hero, Robin responds that he isn’t either, but that their stories can make them heroes, and encourage others to do heroic deeds in the conflicts of their own times. 

They are talking as real men, but we are watching them talk as real men in an episode of science-fiction television, an episode that is consciously about the collision of a modern myth of a hero who gives up a life of privilege to fight injustice with an ancient myth having the same ethical structure. The story intends to parallel Robin Hood and Doctor Who as myths, placing Doctor Who as the latest in a long line of such myths of just rebellion. The myths claim they’re real, but only myth appears.

• • •

SPOILERS

Quick review-like notes. I don’t think Gatiss is very good at compressed storytelling when it comes to introducing new characters to the main world of the show. The Crimson Horror was brilliant, but the only characters with any substantial screen time aside from the campy villain and her daughter (herself defined largely in terms of her torture and disability) were the regulars or already-established recurring characters, the Paternoster Gang. Cold War was similarly a story of stereotypes from other film traditions (Klingons and a comedy take on Das Boot, specifically). 

The episode also included an image of the first actor to play
Robin Hood on television, Patrick Troughton, whose
performance was unfortunately lost to the BBC's short-
sighted tape-wiping policy. A decade later, Troughton
would become Doctor Who's first engagement with the
Robin Hood mythos, albeit para-textually and
retro-actively.

I say this because his Marian was atrocious. She plays a key role in the margins of the story, first illustrating the oppressive apparatus of the Sheriff’s robot army, then helping the Doctor destroy most of that army in the slave quarters. But she is always marginal, barely present. Her final reveal as Marian isn’t even as a character, but blatantly (even in the Doctor’s own words) as a “present” to Robin. If I can put on my Anita Sarkeesian hat, this is atrocious, and Gatiss should either learn his lesson or retire his writing duties to Neil Cross.

And the beheading scene that was not. Originally, Robin was to have beheaded the Sheriff, much to Clara’s delight, only for the apparent corpse to begin talking, revealing that the robots’ spaceship originally landed on him, and they restored him with a cybernetic body. This would tie in more clearly with the theme of cyborgs taking shape this season, and better explain how he could have swum through molten gold before finally succumbing to his injuries as it hardened around him at the lip of the tank. Now that I know what the original story included, I think it suffered for the cut.

However, given the terrible timing of how many beheadings have been in the news lately, I can understand why Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin decided on the cut in the production office. Not only have American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley recently been beheaded by ISIS militants in Iraq, but there has been a rash of beheading murders among the civilian population of Britain recently, the most recent being the death of an 82 year old woman. 

There are no direct connections between the ISIS and British crimes, but it makes sense to avoid needless controversy, given the understandable public sensitivity about decapitation at the moment. Over-sensitive social conservatives among the British public have a special hatred for Doctor Who and a history of getting their way. The episode order for this and the following season was already cut from 14 to 13 for austerity’s sake. So any move to keep the show from coming under further fire is a good one.

Still, I hope we get an option to watch Robot of Sherwood with the beheading sequence on the DVD release. Then, we can at least see for certain who the robot of Sherwood is.

A Character’s Conceptual Reality, Composing, 29/08/2014

A break from the anarchism, which has been simply depressing, as you could probably tell from my last post, which indicated how little we’ve progressed (and how much we’ve probably backslid, given the bleak, Thatcherian individualism that has permeated our society) in the last hundred years.

I spent a good chunk of today taking care of the bureaucracy for my new retraining plan in Sheridan College’s Corporate Communications program, an opportunity to land a solid, well-paying job with an environmentalist group, or a publisher, or a film company, or a lobby group on behalf of affordable housing in Ontario. I want to use a career that’s typically called public relations to help people and make the world a better place. I think that’s a reasonable request of the universe.

Of course, that career path won’t stop my creative pursuits in philosophy, fiction, and scriptwriting. Basically, it will allow me a virtuous way out of the relative poverty I’ve been stuck in for the past two years while my creative work can continue. I spent this afternoon in a meeting with my director, Mel, about our upcoming play, You Were My Friend.

As I polish the script over the next few days, we’re preparing for the auditions for the two parts, which will take place in a couple of Sundays. I designed the parts so that the actresses will not only have fun doing them, but be challenged and impress their audience. I wanted the characters to be crafted such that they follow an idea which I think is essential to most quality literature and drama.

One of my favourite eras of cinema is the social realist era of
the 1970s, and Five Easy Pieces was one of the best of those
films, easily the most influential on my own work.

First, they have to be neither particularly heroic nor villainous. Both of these women have virtues and flaws. One has a powerful sense of optimism and hope, a basic faith in people to be decent, despite having been kicked around by several people who were very close to her. Yet this is also her flaw, as it leaves her still vulnerable to being manipulated by others, and vulnerable to the harms that the world has in store for us all generally. One is an insightful pragmatist, able to see reality for what it truly is. But she doesn’t have the sense of hope to fight against the foregone conclusion of defeat. If they can combine their virtues properly, they’d be practically unstoppable, friends for life fighting together against a world full of petty micro-injustices. Because I’m a terrible person and I like to make people feel depressed, it doesn’t quite work out that way. They’re both the protagonists, each of their stories illuminating and colliding with the other. In that sense, they’re people.

That’s the essence of what I think of as social realism, art that articulates the singularity of human personalities and the essences of how we live today. The play itself isn’t purely realist in that I never strive for verisimilitude. There are scenes where telephone conversations that happen across town merge into the same apartment, where characters make revealing remarks in Shakespearean (or Underwoodian) asides to the audience. But the people and the world they live in are real, because they’re ours.

The characters also embody so much of the experience of my own generation in the modern world. We work hard and intelligently in difficult circumstances, but too often remain trapped in the bad situations we were in before. And all too often, we don’t really understand how it could be anything but our own fault, unable to perceive the aggregate association of individuals interacting so that so much is ruined, but it’s impossible to apportion intentional blame to anyone, even sometimes when someone actually does commit a terrible act.

But that would be spoilers. You’ll just have to see the play in November. Or audition for it – write me at the Twitter account along the side here, and you’ll get a pm back with the address to apply. I promise you’ll love it.

Yellow Wallpaper: The Undeniable Power of Theatrical Experience, 14/07/2014

Theatre is supposed to be strange. We usually gripe about how a special effect in a movie doesn’t look real enough, but we always know that it isn’t real because it’s an image on a screen. When we experience the strangest images theatre can create, the effect is especially powerful because we are physically in the same room as these phantasms. 

See it at the Player's Guild theatre at
80 Queen Street South in Hamilton,
June 17 – 27.

I met Kristi Boulton a couple of years ago when she was a theatre and media student and I was doing my doctorate at McMaster University. Today, she’s written a play based on “Yellow Wallpaper,” a chilling short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is written in the first person, and the play presents a fictionalized version of Charlotte herself playing the protagonist, a woman confined in an attic for medical observation after an embarrassing mental health episode spoken of only in hushed terms. 

Locked away, she begins to experience visions, hauntings. A featureless female figure in bright yellow emerges from the titular modular wall, stalking her around the room with the voices of the women who have been confined there before. Not only these, but the cries of all the women who have been broken by the violence of men. Not only these, but echoes of Charlotte’s own torture and suffering, as her husband has happily betrayed her to a medical institution that has stripped her of freedom, personhood, agency. 

Boulton told me that her script and production has left it up to the audience to decide whether Charlotte’s experiences are real supernatural events, or if she really has had a mental breakdown and has become delusional. But the weirdness of theatre both complicates and simplifies this impression. It’s a fairly simple form of narrative literacy to think of a performance like this as presenting the audience with a choice between whether Charlotte’s haunting experiences are real or imaginary.

Because a contemporary theatrical (and televisual, and cinematic) literacy is more sophisticated than this. A reasonable viewer of this play knows that they’re watching an artificial experience: actors on stage in an adaptation of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story. The ambiguity of whether her haunting is diegetically real or illusory is part of the play’s own structure. Posing and thinking about the question is itself part of how the audience engages with the play, and a discerning audience will understand that the ambiguous nature of the events on stage is part of the theatrical event. 

Audiences today don’t need to postulate the reality of what they see on screen or on stage to engage with an artwork, as if they were watching a documentary about imaginary people. Theatre is the presentation of a narrative through self-consciously artificial means. The sets are wooden blocks, often intentionally bare or sparsely decorated. Theatre creates an intentionally unsettling space, bringing its audience to an experience where they will see a purposely artificial story, a live barrage of affects whose purpose is to express ideas and emotions, and enfold an audience into that expression.

• • •

Theatre wasn’t always supposed to be strange. Before the invention of cinema, an artistic movement began in the 19th century for theatre to depict social situations realistically. Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen are the most famous voices from this movement today, though Leo Tolstoy and other Russian playwrights affiliated with the Moscow Art Theatre were remarkable figures as well. 

If you watch Brando's The Wild One, you understand just
how strange he makes that movie. The Wild One is an
extremely stupid movie. Its tone is essentially Reefer
Madness, only about motorcycle riders. But Marlon Brando
shows up in this world of cornballs giving a totally realistic
performance as a swaggering young man driven to criminal
life by a lack of opportunity who acts out to cover the deep
wounds of his soul. It's totally incongruous and brilliant.

Probably the most influential inheritance from theatrical realism today comes from Constantin Stanislavski, the progenitor of modern psychological realist acting. The Method, when Marlon Brando brought it so forcefully to the American stage and screen, ushered in an era of realist filmmaking in cinema that lasted for decades. The theatrical flourishes and purposeful artificiality of the silent and studio system generations disappeared from American cinema for decades, only resurfacing in the genre play comedies and action films that developed in the 1990s and 2000s.

But the growth of cinema forced theatre to give up its pretensions to realism. This was not an immediate process, of course. Brando’s own theatrical work, along with the plays of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller were developing viscerally realist theatre while Eugene Ionesco, Dario Fo, Peter Shaffer, and Samuel Beckett were bringing a new weirdness and surreality to the stage. Harold Pinter's works were deliciously vital combinations of realism and artifice. These experimental works created new forms of dramatic, conceptual, and emotional expression by dropping all pretence that the events on stage were real, or even aimed for verisimilitude to the real.

But the strangeness of theatre’s obvious artificiality belies its ability to express vitally important realistic ideas. Consider Boulton’s Yellow Wallpaper. A woman is trapped in a confined space and stalked by the psychic echoes of all other women who have been abused and tortured through a medical system that treated them as living laboratories and a wider patriarchal society that robbed them of physical agency and self-control. 

It’s a perennial struggle, one of the defining struggles of human culture for well over a century. The theatre is a space where an essential dynamism of the forces that constitute the globalized culture of our world can be displayed before us. The performance itself expresses those forces and we participate in them in real time as we experience and engage with the narrative. 

Charlotte is locked in an enclosed space where the narratives of millions of tortured and oppressed women are brought before her through an experience that, in its artificiality is more than real precisely because its nature as a performance allows the direct expression of forces that are normally diffuse and barely noticeable throughout our planet’s societies. She, and we, are the audience to the history and narratives essential to the entire human experience.

This is the power of theatre.

Long Lives and Long Memories, Jamming, 27/04/2014

We watched Jim Jarmusch’s new film, Only Lovers Left Alive, a little while ago, and like most of Jarmusch’s films, it didn’t disappoint me. Jim Jarmusch makes films with a kind of loping pace, lingering over images and ideas in a way that most North American films haven’t really been comfortable with since the 1970s, a period of social realist cinema that I dearly love. And in many ways, it’s the closest a vampire film can come to genuine social realism. I’ll explain.

This is the story of an immensely old vampire couple who at first seem notoriously pretentious with the way they name-drop countless references to the famous artists and scientists they hung out with and inspired. One of their vampiric friends, played by John Hurt, is actually Christopher Marlowe, yet another science-fictional take on the mysterious fate of William Shakespeare’s rival. And of course, the dialogue implies that he actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Tom Hiddleston plays the male vampiric lead, a reclusive musician who records brilliant art on analog equipment which he smuggles out to the world through his intermediary, Anton Yelchin, under the presumption that the records are sent to artists to be inspired by the sounds. This is my least favourite aspect of the film, because of its implication that all the great artistic and scientific breakthroughs and innovations of humanity are actually the work of a physically superior species, vampires, who prey on us. In comparison, humans are mere zombies, as Hiddleston contemptuously calls us.

But even the vampires are all too human. When they drink blood, they do so from a small aperitif glass, and it knocks them back in their chairs with the vacant bliss of a heroin high. It’s implied in a later that drinking an entire human worth of blood at once would send them into a frenzy. Yet they have to contend with the fact that it’s impossible to cover up a murder anymore. Police actually have the wherewithal today to perform detailed scientific autopsies on murder victims, and a vampire can’t just get away with throwing a victim in the local river to mingle with the other anonymous floaters. As well, because almost everyone today has a video camera in their pocket, it’s incredibly difficult to do anything vampiric in public without someone capturing enough evidence to lead police straight to you.

As well, contemporary levels of pollution and disease in the human population constitutes a genuine health hazard to vampires. This is part of the core drama of the film — hunting has become riskier than any reward. So the vampires employ a series of corrupt doctors to skim a little of the blood supplies off the top for them. It actually makes them remarkably vulnerable, as the creatures that they hunt can now effectively hunt and control them.

Few loves grow as deeply as the (practically) immortal.

This is the setting, but the story and the characters (aside from their supernatural elements) could have come from a Mike Leigh or Hal Ashby film. The cinematography and storyline is clear about the nature of vampires: they’re addicts to human blood. Hiddleston and his eternal life partner Tilda Swinton are essentially bourgeois, respectable drug addicts. They get their stuff from clean, respectable sources, pay well for it, use it in moderation, and live in idyllic, reclusive bliss together. But Swinton, Hiddleston, and Hurt have all been having eerily prophetic dreams about her sister, Mia Wasikowska, and they speak of her with the hushed tones that a lesser vampire film would use to introduce an epic villain filled with plans of world conquest and human enslavement. Think Queen of the Damned, only worse.

Then Wasikowska shows up, and she’s basically an immature party girl. She loves to go out and hunt people, no matter the risk of potentially fatal contaminated blood. She has no sense of moderation, drinks their supplies dry within days, and still has that sisterly influence on Swinton to get dangerous again. Basically, this is the story of an upper-class drug addicted couple having to deal with an uncontrollable relative. Of course, Wasikowska ruins everything, because her type of impulsive character always messes everything up in these movies.

So there’s a beautiful social realist heart to this arty vampire film. Wonderful. But there’s even more to it. Hiddleston has, over the last few centuries, become remarkably depressed about humanity. They seem to have lost a skill that only he remembers, and the science they developed after forgetting it seems effective, but is only the self-destructive stumbling of people who can’t understand the universe’s more fundamental laws. It all becomes clear in a scene where Hiddleston reveals the actual means by which he powers his apartment without being connected to an electrical grid.

He’s built a working Tesla generator out of spare parts. But he explains the principle by which it works very curiously. The generator has a pair of antenna that download electrical information from the Earth’s electromagnetic field, and this information is itself the replication of that energy. From manipulating information, the symbol, of electricity, he can manipulate electricity, the thing itself. In other words, he’s the last remaining alchemist. And in the world of this film, alchemy is real.

This knowledge of how to manipulate the world by manipulating its information used to be common among humanity, but it had been forgotten through generational change. Hiddleston is the only one who remembers this true highest science because he’s the only person from the alchemical era who hasn’t died. This is why he’s so particularly depressed about humanity; they were always his prey, but they also had this incredible potential. But it’s all been squandered as they forgot the true principles of reality. Our environmental and health problems today are a by-product of this profound lack of memory. 

In a narrative whose structure is socially realist, this literal resurrection of magic provides its emotional core, the one drive other than pure hedonism (whether in the responsible mode of Swinton or Wasikowska’s self-centred wildness) that keeps an immortal going through this terrible, shuddering world we’ve made. Well, that and love.