on Oppenheimer, again

From all the hype it seemed inevitable and indeed came to pass: Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer won various Best categories at the Oscars on Sunday night. I just want to reiterate why I think it’s a really bad movie (I blogged about it just after I saw it too). Specifically, I do not understand why Nolan gets a pass on the gender politics of Oppenheimer while inches and hours are spent dissecting Barbie.

I haven’t seen anything written about the masculinity that’s embedded in and celebrated by Oppenheimer. But the Oppenheimer character in the movie deserves some attention in those terms, I think, because he seems to me to be doing quite a lot of advocacy not just for Oppenheimer as a historical figure, but also on behalf of contemporary digital tech innovators. For all Cillian Murphy’s excellence as an actor, the character he is given is a cipher for the genius-inventor that seems very common right now in digital dude world: the scientific genius who invents something incredible (“moves fast and break things”), then gets to perform being really worried about that invention (“oops”), and then gets to decide to be the saviour who will prevent the rest of us from being harmed by his invention (“here is the oversight board I’ve convened”). It’s all about him. Genius, Tortured Genius, Genius-with-a-Conscience. This is exactly the position occupied by the contemporary techbro elite running corporations from Meta to OpenAI, who invent whatever and then want to work out how to manage its downsides themselves, while sacking the people (often women of colour) who have done the actual work of pointing out the problems with their creation.

This Genius-multiple position is one that only certain kinds of men can occupy. Indeed, Oppenheimer clearly demonstrates that being any variety of genius also makes you incredibly attractive to the ladies: the very few women in the film are all loyal to Oppenheimer regardless of what he does – abandon them, betray them – they even die for him! Yay!!! As for that ENTIRELY gratuitous scene of a lover writhing in Oppenheimer’s lap during a legal hearing while his wife looks on… unbelievable. It basically suggests that we live in a world in which a key scene in a major movie that shows a Genius being taken down a peg or two (mistakenly, of course) nevertheless has to reassure us that his masculinity is unscathed because he has not one but two women desperate for him, one of which actually is. In the room. No, sorry, in his fantasy. Except, since we can all see her, also in the room. Seriously???

Several reviewers have pointed out that Oppenheimer was a rather different character from the man in the film. And of course it’s a movie, not a historical document. But that makes its fictionality all the more important. Why is Oppenheimer the best movie now? What is it showing us, exactly? I think it’s so successful precisely because it’s a fantasy – a beautifully-made, visually striking fantasy – of a form of white masculinity that remains very powerful, and its enthusiastic endorsement at the Oscars speaks to that power.

Nolan has never been good at making the women in his films actual characters of course. But perhaps this new low actually speaks to something that Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins discuss in their recent book Believability. In that book, they argue that the current moment is definitely one in which a certain kind of hero masculinity is asserting itself, but in their analysis this is because it is also a moment in which, sometimes problematically, criticisms of straight white patriarchy are increasingly making themselves heard. So perhaps Oppenheimer should be seen as not only as a celebration of the tech bros, but also as a symptom of their anxiety that their control of the world might be slipping… perhaps. We can but hope.

The End We Start From and things not really ending

Another film reviewed in this post: The End We Start From, directed by Mahalia Belo and starring Jodie Comer, Joel Fry and fifteen babies, apparently, among other actors. It’s adapted from the book of the same name by Megan Hunter, which I haven’t read. I enjoyed the movie a lot, and I’ve thought a bit about not endings but survivings since.

There are lots of good things about The End We Start From (or at least, things I enjoyed). I liked the early extended attention to a pregnant body. A massive flood is very effectively filmed from within the water rather than from the aerial view that would be favoured by big budget VFX. There are some narrative gaps and jumps which I thought were quite powerful in suggesting Comer’s character’s traumatised memory. There are some beautiful bleak landscape scenes, and lots of rain. In general I felt the film was strongest in these more evocative moments, helped by Anna Meredith’s fab soundtrack. And all the performances are great.

But the film does suffer from what I’m really beginning to think is a fundamental issue with environmental disaster films (and novels, maybe): they are pulled towards the visual realism, emotional heft and narrative resolution which dominate mainstream filmmaking, but these are simply incompatible with picturing actual disaster. I’m no expert on actual hazards and disasters, but it always strikes me that apocalyptic kinds of films are pretty selective in the kinds of disasters they picture. Power failures, TV broadcasts surrendering to static (though only after they’ve conveyed the gravity of the unfolding situation to the characters and to us the audience), phone networks going down: all signal disaster apart from the disaster itself, whether that’s a flood as in The End or a meteor strike or alien invasion. But other things often keep going, oddly and illogically. In The End We Start From, cars are still on the roads and thus presumably petrol supplies remain; water continues to be safe to drink; our heroine and her baby survive long treks in good shape (do the filmmakers understand just how heavy a four month baby is?); there is nary a rat or a cockroach to be seen (though I did notice an ‘insect wrangler’ in the credits so maybe I missed one of the latter); and I am pretty sure that our heroine’s eyebrows would start to look a little more unkempt and her skin a little less dewy than Comer’s after months of privation. There is also the same character that appears in the novel The Survivors: Pandemic, by Alex Hern, which I blogged about: an older woman who against all the sceptical teasing has been hoarding food in case of just such an emergency. As in The Survivors, this is very handy in The End for a few scenes of marital and parental bliss before disaster recurs. And I won’t give away the ending but safe to say it’s not an actual ending.

Of course all disaster movies make these sorts of illogical moves – and that is my point. I seem to recall a tweet from a military historian (when Twitter was useful for this sort of fairly reliable random info) saying that in the face of the kind of disaster picture in The End, cholera and infected teeth would be the biggest and swiftest killers. But movies seem not to be able to envision such slow, messy and painful things. Even The Road, an environmental disaster movie that perhaps comes closest to a grimly real vision of an apocalypse, ends up with the dying father watching his son meet another mom-pop-and-dog family who take him in. I mean, a DOG survives in a situation in which people are turning cannibal?! And don’t get me started on the mother-son reunion at the end of the otherwise-excellent TV adaption of Station Eleven…

Using The End as a prompt, geographer Oli Mould wrote about films and the climate crisis for The Conversation earlier this year. He says films are good at communicating the consequences of climate change because they can visualise its consequences effectively, especially by embedding them into everyday scenarios and engaging audiences emotionally. Maybe. But if my hypothesis above is correct, maybe not. A movie can’t visualise the full awful consequences of environmental disaster effectively precisely because it has to do the emotional work too. As a movie, it has to give us characters to feel for and with, characters with some kind of agency, who survive, and they have to give us hope for happy endings too, apparently. So the end of this movie – like that of so many other films and novels – is precisely not the end of the world, it’s the start, the start of another human story, the nuclear family re-united and human life continuing.

In a world whose screens are currently showing so much terrible terrible actual violence and death, I guess some might feel that such fantasies are permissible. But right now, they do indeed feel like fantasies, the illogical fantasies of those who can afford to indulge in a frisson of risk which is survived and, at its end, generates a new start.

The Kitchen: a review

The Kitchen is a new Netflix movie, directed by Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares. It’s an excellent addition to the genre of film in which a working-class London neighbourhood is invaded by hostile outsiders (see also Attack the Block (“INNER CITY VERSUS OUTER SPACE”) and Cockneys versus Zombies (“This city ain’t big enough for the both of them!”), both made around a decade ago).

The Kitchen in the movie is a housing estate in near-future London. Netflix bills The Kitchen as sci-fi, but the Kitchen’s invaders aren’t aliens, as in Attack the Block, or zombies: they’re the police enforcing the evictions that’ll allow the Kitchen to be redeveloped. Zombie and alien invasion films are often taken as metaphors for contemporary concerns: nuclear war, capitalist alienation. In the case of The Kitchen, though, the invasion and destruction of poor neighbourhoods by property capitalism is not allegorised in any way: it is made viscerally real.

This literalism reminded me of something NK Jemisin wrote about her two Great Cities novels. Those books are also about a city being invaded (New York), this time by an actual alien (you know what I mean), and the alien is both convincingly real in terms of the story and clearly metaphorical: white, tentacular, extractive, plugging into bodies and minds to render resistance useless. There are certainly many analogies at work in these two books: the first especially is a great, challenging read. At the end of the second book, The World We Make, Jemisin explains that she intended to write a third but by the time the first was finished, what was actually happening in New York had outstripped satire. “I had to change one of my initial planned plots for this book—a monstrous president waging war on his own hometown—because Trump got there first,” she says. “The Great Cities trilogy that I’d initially planned became a duology because I realized my creative energy was fading under the onslaught of reality”

While it certainly can’t be accused of lacking creative energy, I got the feeling that as a creative intervention, The Kitchen occupies a similar relation to urban change in cities like London and New York, and many more, as do the Great Cities novels. The movie clearly didn’t lack the budget to show aliens or zombies, because the digital visual effects are impressive, but it chose not to: economic, social and political relations and dynamics clearly understandable from our contemporary moment are frightening enough.

I can’t close without saying more about those visual effects, because they are both part of the film as it’s meant to be seen by us spectators – they visualise the near-future city of which the Kitchen is part – and also because onscreen digital images play a role in the film’s narrative. Lots of critics have remarked on the film’s VFX and they are very good. London’s existing built environment seems to have been intensified: the London Eye has been upgraded; the skyline has even more striking tall buildings; the Kitchen is a huge building over which drones hover and sweep. Watching on a tv screen I could see how that urban landscape would scale up impressively in a cinema. There are smaller pleasures too: the vibrant market of the Kitchen has lots of floating glowing signs which look rather lovely; bits of what I looks very much like the actual Barbican complex in London have been modified to become a crematorium (maybe that’s metaphorical).

Digitally-produced images of cities also feature in a key scene in the movie where one of the main characters finally accesses a new apartment provided by the company wanting to redevelop the Kitchen. There’s no actual window in the one-room apartment (the decor of which looks very much like what’s pictured in endless CGIs of new apartments now). Rather, there is a wall-size screen with a selection of aerial urban views of exactly the same kind that property developers now frequently use to sell their apartments: a view from on high of a city at dusk, lit buildings twinkling like urban fairy lights. And the streets of the London we see in the movie are full of billboards picturing new developments in just that style. So it’s not just the physical landscape of this London that’s being reshaped by big developers, but also its visual culture.

I’m probably a bit over-focussed on such things, but it did seem to me that there was a strong and interesting convergence between these computer-generated marketing images and how the city as a whole was pictured in The Kitchen. The VFX are good but they’re not quite at the level of Dune, say, or The Creator, or San Andreas. There was a slightly sketchy quality to them, a slightly washed-out, pale colour palette. While this did make me wonder that perhaps future London has at least benefited from being a low emission zone, I was also strongly reminded precisely of the computer-generated images frequently used by property developers, pitching their apartment blocks in the ever-sunny uplands of property-owning capitalism. Just like the characters are only offered CGI views when they leave the Kitchen, then, so too it felt that as viewers of the film, our vision of the city also has been infected by real-estate-VFX.

There’s a lot more to say about the film, of course. Fantastic acting, rather slow pacing but with some great set pieces, fails the Bechdel test. It’s a fascinating watch, and has certainly given me a lot of food for thought as I ponder the implications of various digitally-created images of urban life.

Oppenheimer: Man, man and oh man…

Yes, I’ve been to see Barbie and Oppenheimer. Here are some thoughts on the latter. Well, one thought really: Oppenheimer the movie is so deeply wedded to the idea of the white straight male scientist hero that it gives its lead actor no room to manoeuvre. We get Oppenheimer the Tortured Youth, plagued by visions of Physics and Molecules and Atoms and Energy (beautiful and a bit overwhelming, admittedly); then we get Oppenheimer the underestimated Scientific Genius at Berkeley; then the inspirational Leader, motivating crowds of young men, mostly, at Los Alamos; we also get Oppenheimer the manly Man, having sex with pretty much all the female characters who actually get to talk in the movie (all three of them); then we get Oppenheimer the Tortured Genius, having Moral Crises while not, in the end, becoming the victim of a petty bully hoorah.

This is all done with the utmost seriousness: there is no suggestion that lives can be shaped through such discursive figures but not reduced to them. There is no irony or self-awareness. It’s actually a really grim vision. Given all the discussion about feminism and gender swirling around Barbie, the lack of discussion about Oppenheimer‘s view of masculinity is disappointing, to put it mildly, especially given that several of the masculine figures the film works through have have appeared recently in various discussions of AI. I despair. (And I imagine so too do many actual scientists.)

maximal and minimal VFX

I’ve recently watched Andor and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and on the (flimsy) basis of that and my viewing of other movies and streaming series and trailers, I would like to propose that digital visual effects – VFX – the ones that strive for some kind of photorealism – can more and more often be divided into two kinds: maximal and minimal.

Maximal are those movies and series which go all-out for mega-detail at every scale, like Wakanda Forever. Everything seems to be designed to be looked at close up – except that viewers are also continually offered spectacular views of extremely detailed huge landscapes too. Every surface displays some kind of elaborate patterning. Characters’ bodies have incredibly crafted hairdos, jewellry, armour, clothing, weapons, skin. Imagined architecture is florid, covered with neo-neo-gothic-mayan-deco-whatever. Forests and oceans are full of weird vegetation created leaf by leaf, and elaborate fantasy creatures. Streets are packed with crowds of individuals all doing things. Landscapes are full of houses, valleys, peaks, lakes, bridges, flying things, flowing things, cities, weather. I am thinking here of all of the Marvel movies I’ve watched, as well as the Rings of Power (indeed, maybe this was all started by the Lord of The Rings films). Wheel of Time, not quite so much – but the VFX there are still things you have to look at, monsters and magic and such. The Avatar movies definitely. It’s as if the entire screen has to be full of lots of visual-attention-grabbing things all the time.

Whereas one of the reasons I so much enjoyed Andor, and Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune, is that their VFX are somehow much more minimal. They can be spectacular and detailed, of course. But one reason to see Dune on the big screen is to relish the scale of just a few big things in a frame rather than every scene jostling with endless detail (see also Nope). Huge spaceships, huge deserts, huge cities with lots of enormous blank walls. Just a few people. As for Andor, one of the early episodes – maybe the first – had Andor walking through street at night and passing bubble-type enclosures, inside of which some sort of figures were moving. What sort of figures? No idea. Because the camera didn’t linger on them, I was given no detail, no ‘look it’s an alien doing something weird’ moment. They were just casually there in the background, the viewer hurried past them much in the way that Andor was hurrying. Much of the rest of the series was similar: VFX as background. World-building, necessary, but not flashy, not demanding attention. So minimal VFX seem less fixated on visual details, less interested in making everything totally visible, less concerned to add elaborate detail to every surface. They show less of themselves.

It might also be no coincidence that Dune and Andor are strongly focussed on character and story and are, relatively, really well-written and involving. I have to admit I found The Rings of Power incredibly boring partly because it was so poorly written. But that was maybe also because I was watching it on a laptop rather than an 80 inch tv. To build enticing worlds based on detail, the detail really needs to be visible, I guess, as well as inhabited by characters you care about.

One exception to my minimal-maximal categorisation might be Game of Thrones, which managed both character and cities and dragons pretty convincingly, at least for a long stretch. But hey, you know what they say about exceptions…

Bigger Than Life beyond perspective

I’ve been reading Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema by Mary Ann Doane, published in 2021 by Duke University Press. It’s a fascinating discussion of the spatial organisation of cinematic film – both classic and avant-garde – and the spaces offered to the spectators of those films. Her discussions of those films are always interesting, and make a distinctive contribution to the current discussions about three-dimensionality, scale and zoom in film and other media.

However, the book feels on much less certain ground when it touches on more recent digital media. These are mentioned quite often but they aren’t really theorised in the way that Hollywood movies or Shanghai cinema or New York experimental films are. I think this is partly a consequence of Doane’s continuing commitment to psychoanalysis as a valuable toolkit for understanding the subjectivation of the movie spectator – and psychoanalysis doesn’t seem to work in quite the same way for digital media, which, as Doane often says, are often viewed on small screens, on the move rather than in a cinema seat, with different kinds of attention from movies seen in a cinema.

Also though, I think the book struggles with digital media because of its focus on the perspectival organisation of filmic space. Doane elaborates this at length and very helpfully. She describes the alignment of the movie camera with the eye as imagined in Renaissance theories of perspective as a technique to represent three-dimensional space on two-dimensional surfaces at some length. This is really helpful, and generates some great insights into different understandings of visual media as ‘immersive’, for example, and different kinds of vanishing points and horizons, and bodies ‘turning’ in 2D space.

As the book progresses, though, an account seems to emerge of digital media (whether on a phone screen or on an IMAX screen) as purely abstract forms of space, as erasing real bodies and geographies (Doane doesn’t use the word ‘real’ of course, but that is the implication). She argues that engaging with digital media means that the spectator becomes delocalised, disoriented, and sucked into the apparently entirely commodified world of social media. Putting to one side the assumptions that social media do nothing but commodify, and that phone screens and IMAX screens do similar things because both are digital: I think this argument only holds because Doane theorises just one form of spatial organisation in relation to filmic images and their viewers, that of perspective. It’s as if the psychoanalytically-grounded alignment of subjectivity with the perspectival organisation of space becomes the only way in which subjectivities might emerge in relation to film. Take away that space, and according to Doane, the subject floats untethered too, defined only by their online data.

But what if perspective is not the only technique for organising the space of an image, filmic or otherwise? It certainly isn’t the only way that films screened on phones, say, are spatialised; those phones are constantly producing geolocated data which do locate their users, by latitude and longitude – they are very much not delocalised, quite the opposite in fact. Indeed, given Doane’s own discussion about the emergence of perspective (and latitude and longitude) alongside capitalist property ownership and colonialism, more attention to other forms of spatial organisation is definitely in order. For example, while I largely share her critique of affect theory and phenomenology in visual studies, I wouldn’t dismiss space as atmosphere quite so quickly. And what about space as network? Or topological spaces.

In short, what other sorts of spaces might be seen in films, beyond perspective? And what might their seeing do to who is doing the seeing? As film-like imagery proliferates digitally, its specific and various forms spatial organisation need more attention.

film and phones in The World’s a Little Blurry

I watched the film Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry at the weekend, which follows her music-making processes up to her Grammy award wins in 2020. Of course there’s lots to say about the film, but one of the things that struck me about it was how smartphones were both ubiquitous yet given no attention by the film.

On the one hand, there are many shots of Eilish’s ‘fans’ (not a term she likes), rather coolly observed in the film, at a little distance – the camera rarely joins Eilish as she enters any crowds for example. Indeed the entire film has rather a casual style – there isn’t a particular narrative arc, things just unfold kind of like they did for Eilish over the year or so that footage for the film was being shot. But the fans are pictured really Intensely experiencing her music, with her, at her gigs; singing every word, tears streaming; jumping in sync with her; and very often holding a phone to record the moment. In some shots of crowds gathered to see her, to witness her just sitting in a bus or getting off a plane, to scream and shout, and cry again, the faces are almost entirely obscured by phones being held up to film the moment, the encounter. The phone, the kinetic body, the software, tears, sweat, the voices and words: while that intense identification with a pop star isn’t new, the intimate incorporation of the smartphone and its camera is (fairly new, anyway).

So the film acknowledges the fans’ phones. It also shows the phone as central to Eilish and her work. She is very often filmed on her phone, writing and reading lyrics, recording songs, phoning, posting. We hear about her rocketing numbers of Instagram followers, and she jokes about The Internet not liking her Bond movie song because it might have a big crescendo; she’s also provoked at one point by the constant demand that she be nice and be seen to be nice online. But the film does not explore the phone as a portal into the immense social media world. We see only see it tethered to bodies, to bodies doing things with it – singing, dancing, talking, crying, filming, using it as a glowing light – but we don’t see what happens when its various harvesting is re-engaged with in different kinds of audiencing in other situations on- and offline. All we see is some bodies using film to record other bodies, particularly the body of Eilish (fantastically styled) but also the bodies of her fans (and family and friends and team). The phone as a recording device entangled in a massively distributed, partly inhuman, not-entirely-visual social media constellation is not allowed to disrupt the intimacy of that kind of filmed embodiment. In that sense, being so uninterested in its ubiquitous rival the smartphone camera, this is very much a film film.

Nope and seeing extraction

Nope is a movie with a lot to show about seeing. It’s packed full of ideas and references. It is also a great cinematic spectacle with a soundtrack to match. I watched it a few days after taking a train through landscape very similar to the Californian scrub that situates the film, and maybe that helped to underline the sense of hugeness in the film’s landscape and its alien. Definitely one to watch in a cinema.

The alien turns out not to be a spaceship, despite its definite flying-saucer vibe, but rather a living thing. And one of the themes of the movie that I haven’t seen a lot of reviews discuss is its focus on animals. The alien itself is a sort of animal (it eats flesh and eventually develops wings) but the film also focusses on horses, a chimpanzee, and of course humans.

I think the film is divided into sections each of which is named after an animal. And there’s something going on about how different animals see, what they see and what then happens. Key moments in the film include a horse seeing its own reflection. And, in a truly terrifying scene (I thought so anyway), the camera is occupying the point of a view of a character hiding from a chimpanzee that has just savagely attacked several humans. The chimp turns its own intense gaze, noticing and focussing on that character but also directly at you in your cinema seat… the camera cuts. Wow.

While animals like horses and chimpanzees and the alien are shown as looking very directly (the alien can detect what looks at it), the film spends considerable time reflecting on all the technologies that humans use to mediate their looking: mirrors, veils, surveillance cameras, still cameras, hand-cranked film cameras, green screens, smartphones, sunglasses… and demonstrating all the ways that these falter and fail. There’s an acknowledgement of what commodification does to the images produced by those technologies; and also a deathly penalty attached to making direct eye contact with the alien. That bleak paradox is one of the film’s horrors. However you look, it seems, there are risks…

Another horror is the white alien monster extracting flesh from this landscape: horse and human. This extraction is what Daniel Kaluuya simply refuses in another of the film’s standout moments: nope, he says. One of the things I’ve learnt from reading Gray Brechin’s book Imperial San Francisco is the full extent of the massive environmental despoilation that accompanied white settler colonialism in California, and the latter’s profound racisms. The way the movie pictures the whiteness of the monster sucking up bodies and then expelling them as waste matter feels deeply metaphorical of that extractivist racism.

I know some critics dislike Jordan Peele’s films because they invite this kind of multiple interpretive reading – and certainly the readings don’t neatly line up. But – in perhaps the final paradox of this movie’s account of human visuality – the for me at least there is something so compelling about how this film looks, that the readings and interpretations do indeed stumble a little. I’m too busy looking to do too much analysis. (Are the film’s sections really named after animals?) The movie itself disrupts human looking while enticing us to look.

the horror, the horror: ‘Annihilation’, or not mixing it up

I was one of those fans of Jeff VanderMeer’s amazing Southern Reach trilogy eagerly anticipating the film of the first book. It’s called Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland. The books are about a piece of land – Area X in the books, the ‘shimmer’ in the film – which has  gone very different in the books and in the film is occupied by something alien. Various military/scientific teams are sent in to investigate and only one man ever reappears.  After doing poorly at the box office in the US – apparently because it was too ‘high concept’ – it’s only available via Netflix in the UK.

So I watched it and boy was I disappointed. And not just disappointed: actually quite angry. Here’s why.

1 as I recall the Southern Reach books, one of their major themes was perception and its difficulties. In Area X it’s not clear what’s happening: objects shape shift, sounds are inexplicable, time and space warp and fold. You would have thought that film is a great medium to explore awry perception, visual and otherwise. But no. What’s happening in the shimmer is spectacularised in the film so that it’s all about objects that are shown to have changed form. That is, everything is rendered visible, whereas in the books a lot of the fascination is that the visible is no longer a reliable guide to what exists.

2 the main character in the film is given an elaborate back story about her husband. We get happy scenes, we get sad scenes, we get her having an affair (wot? oh yes, we get to see Natalie Portman having sex)… all entirely irrelevant to the central problematic of the books but hey, core to maintaining patriarchal heteronormativity in wannabe Hollywood blockbusters with female leads.

3 the film explains what’s going on in the shimmer. Whereas the whole point of the books (as I read them) is that what’s going on is incomprehensible. Nobody knows, nobody understands, nobody has an explanation, or at least not one that works. But in the film, we get an Explanation. Again, while the books contemplate what an encounter with something radically alien might feel like, the film reduces it to a puzzle that can be solved by science.

4 the Explanation of the shimmer’s effect is genetic mixing. This is the horror, the film tells us. Genetic mixing is what gives animals human voices and bodies writhing intestines and plants more than one kind of flower and trees coloured fungus.

5 and can the film accept this mixing? (The final book of the trilogy is called ACCEPTANCE). Nope. What does the main character do to its source? She firebombs it. Literally, she sets off an incendiary grenade which burns all the effects of the mixing. ANNIHILATION, geddit?

Now I understand that films can’t be the same as novels. That’s why they’re called adaptations, I get that. And yes, I enjoyed seeing a film full of strong, intelligent, diverse women. But what this adaptation has done, I think, is to systematically strip out the really very radical weirdness of the novels. It’s removed every vestige of unknowability, incomprehension and bafflement, and replaced it with convention, science and control.

And that it represents mixing as a horror that must be violently undone is just apalling. I perhaps feel this especially strongly as I spent today reading Simone Browne’s book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, which is a very powerful account of how surveillance technologies of many kinds have both observed and invisibilised black bodies over centuries, and legitimated terrible racist brutality. At one point she discusses how Hollywood versions of biometrics are imagined as tethering people to a fixed identity (and thus also to gendered and racialised hierarchies of power). What Annihilation does, it seems to me, is to visualise the flipside of that desire for biological tethering: the apparently grotesque horror of fluid identity, of mixing it up.

Barbara Creed wrote a book a long while ago about how so much Hollywood horror depends on monstrous, out-of-control female bodies. I can’t help thinking that Annihilation also takes something excessive to dominant norms and makes it horrible. However, as Browne’s book makes very clear, that horror of mixing has generated, and continues to generate, a far more powerful and violent terror than anything Annihilation appears able to imagine.

looking for culture in the unlikeliest of places: MK and smart

Milton Keynes, smart cities – and culture?! I’ve caught up with a fascinating video which made me pull these things together: it’s called Looking for Culture Through Economy, Through Capitalisation, Through Milton Keynes (LCTETCTMK for short. Well, kind of short). It’s directed by Sapphire Goss and was made as part of the Journal of Cultural Economy’s tenth birthday celebrations.

A whole bunch of people were involved in its production, including Liz McFall, Darren Umney, Dave Moats and Fabian Muniesa. It starts tongue firmly in cheek, saying that it’s exploring the notion of ‘culture’ in a place often thought not to have any: Milton Keynes. The film then discusses what culture is, how to spot it, how it was planned and designed in MK, and its relation to capital. All of this is animated by the presence of someone who kind of becomes another team member: Stuart Hall. The cultural theorist appears in a range of archive footage, and one of the film’s many pleasures is to see him animated, poised and as relevant as ever.

Another pleasure of the film is its rigour. This is a film about theory as much as it is about MK. Hence that clunky title. The arguments at the heart of the film are that culture remains a vitally important analytical category and that culture isn’t a thing. Culture can be The Arts, but the film is much more interested in culture as Hall understood it, as the ordinary, taken-for-granted meanings and values that animate everyday life. In that sense, culture is everywhere, mediating how we understand and what we see.

The film enacts that everywhereness, filtering its views of the city through odd edits, collaging and splicing, using fuzzy archive film and repeating images. There aren’t that many clear views of the city, and the ones that are offered – the planners’ models, architects’ drawings, drone footage of layouts and geometric patterns below – tend to be shown as existing only in those forms. Once they become realised as part of the city, or the camera gets down to ground level, the clarity of their design and its intentions goes awry. They go fuzzy, multiple, the idealistic plans never quite work out, buildings fail and social markets are abandoned. It’s noted that capital should be seen culturally, as an approach to making value. And then there are a few closing remarks about how culture is now increasingly also capitalised as things are seen more and more in terms of the value they might realise in the future.

All this is great on its own terms, and it’s wonderful to see the city provoking such careful and complicated thoughts.

It also got me thinking about how another of the city’s current manifestations – MK as a smart city – also needs to be thought of in terms of this understanding of culture. ‘Culture’ and ‘smart’ are in one way quite often brought together now, in discussions about various discourses about what smart city should be; there are now several discussions of how talk about and pictures of smart cities are riven through and through with values, visions, interpretations, truth claims and situated evidencing. The smart city as something that can create capital by innovating new products and making efficiencies is a strong theme too.

The more pervasive sense of culture, though, culture as everyday (rather than as something only marketeers and artists do) is less often explored. I was chairing a conference organised by Inside Government last week which was discussing how smart cities might transform service provision, and the day was full of the need to be brave, to take risks, to have vision, to make leaps of faith (as well as much more pragmatic discussions about mechanisms for collaboration between key stakeholders). (You can read my report on the day here.) Organisational culture, then, was actually at the centre of the discussion, that is, the everyday assumptions embedded into workplace practices.

But LCTETCTMK also suggests a more deep-seated relation between smart and culture. The film ends with Stuart Hall suggesting that, after the 1970s, the sphere of culture is in “permanent revolution”. There are no set or stable frameworks of meaning now that can endure without challenge or renewal. Here then is a final thought provoked by LCTETCTMK: how are smart cities part of current cultural transformations? They’re about capitalisation for sure and about changing organisational culture. Perhaps their particular transformation, though, is more about the sort of everyday life that a smart city enacts. Mobile (so much of it is about movement), individualised (the phone screen, the data dot), agglomerated (databases), fast (nobody lingers in smart cities), colourful (all those glowing screens), customisable (what are your preferences?), distributed (hello, platforms)… this is a more pervasive sense of cultural shift, enacted with and through smart things.

Any other thoughts on what it would mean to think of smart MK, or indeed any smart city, through the lens of LCTETCTMK’s sense of culture? Do watch the film and ponder. And you can find more about MK, culture and smart on OpenLearn, here.