MIA - Born Free

To a lot of British viewers, the controversial video to MIA's Born Free may resemble a Catherine Tate sketch gone wrong. It's not a tasteless joke at gingers' expense, though.

Ginger is being used to show how arbitrary hatred and violence is applied in violent regimes across the world. The clip is shocking not only because the gingers are obviously different to the white consensus of 'us', but so closely follow its definition. In the Venn diagram where one circle is labelled 'white' and the other....'other', gingers are placed in the overlap. This accessibility improves the video, because the west is saturated with images of suffering people. Suffering people with different skin colours in faraway lands. Would we have taken as much notice to this video had the gingers been replaced with, say, men with darker skin, hair and eyes and dishcloths on their heads? No, we would've thought it was ITV News.

In light of the obvious analogy, brusque US commentators have suggested that it's concerning recently-introduced laws in Arizona allowing the police to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely. This just shows how parochial some Americans can be. It only takes a little read through MIA's Twitter to realise that this video was definitely intended to represent the treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka. I wouldn't have a clue of what's going on over there, as so much news of its Civil War is being censored. So, enjoy the song.

I think it's a banger. Masterminded by a whole bunch of Mad Decent, and banned by YouTube, it's getting more attention than Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber put together...

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Dystopia

I decided to read the four most influential dystopia books of the 20th century all at once:

1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale. All have their merits. All are depressing, but the tragedies of each of them: government-sanctioned oppression, rape and murder, the loss of intellectual debate and discourse, are all the more convincing when the dystopia created is coherent and structured.

The harsh regimes are scariest when the author describes them as meticulously crafted, or created from (misunderstood) logic or misinterpreted verses. Most of the order in each story is about keeping people within certain social tiers and also ensuring reproduction is done accordingly. Eugenics is a common theme of the novels, even if only faintly so in the case of Fahrenheit 451. With the exception of Brave New World, which eerily foresees Nazi ideals, all of the books were written after the Holocaust. To me, the scariest part of the Holocaust was that, in the early 1930's, Germany was technologically advanced. To Hitler and his followers, who democratically elected him, the final solution wasn't a last resort, it was a culmination of the industrial revolution. Hundreds of years of scientific enterprise and human achievement were being used to systematically destroy millions of people. We can create gadgets, machines and all sorts of electrical devices, but we're still violent savages.

Echoes of this sentiment are present throughout all of the books, but each focus on more specific elements: The Handmaid's Tale is concerned with sexism whereas 1984 is occupied with restrictions upon privacy and freedom of surveillance. But this factor should not demarcate which book is more relevant. If I've learned anything from these books, it's that when a specific demographic is oppressed, the whole community, even those outside of those being directly oppressed, is oppressed.

let's get this straight

In the wake of Jan Moir's badly-researched, popularly (and at times, inadequately) lambasted article about Stephen Gately's death, Tweeters went apeshit. There was a flurry of personal attacks. The PCC was contacted. Celebrity Tweeters waded in to the argument, even, somewhat controversially, Jonathan Ross. Also, tags were created. One, which I found as irrevocably offensive as the article in question, was '#thedailymailisgay'. This grated me. Jan Moir's homophobia, as detailed by an article that has now received almost 22,000 complaints, was, at the very least, articulate. And it was brought into question by every single publication going. People are now talking about gay hatred, and how horrible it is. And how....and how...'gay' it is. Confused much?

The BBC gave Chris Moyles a little ticking off for describing a ring-tone as 'gay' a while back. But, of course, 'gay' is still used by many as a pejorative. I have friends who regularly use it this way, and they are otherwise not homophobic, as far as I know. 'My phone's not working. Gay.'

As much as some of my closest friends use it as such, 'gay' is only chosen as a pejorative by someone who is too lazy to use their vocabulary to its deserved capacity. By teaming 'gay' with the meaning 'shit', there is inevitable crossover that 'gay' to mean 'homosexual' means 'shit' as well. Confused? Again? Here's the etymology of this poor slang: 'Shit' is the stuff that comes out of our pooper, stuff that no-one wants, stuff that is immeasurably useless to us (eco-warriors, fuck off. Shit is shit). By transposing this, 'gay' to mean 'shit' gives us: people who come out of our pooper [LOL], people who no-one wants, people who are immeasurably useless to us.

But surely no-one thinks any of that?! My cousin's friend is gay, and we get on really well! And I think Danyl Johnson is so brilliant! And I got so pissed off at that fat bitch Jan Moir for that horrible article about Stephen Gately!

Well, the sad case is that some people do think gay people are shit. Homophobes exist in Britain, and I'm not just talking about yobs tackling a civil servant and kicking him to death for being 'gay'. I'm not just talking about the cretin who stabbed a man on his doorstop for being 'gay'. I'm not just talking about the hundreds of people across this country who, year upon year, verbally abuse, beat, rape or murder people for being 'gay'. I'm talking about intelligent, non-violent people who do nothing to tarnish the misconceptions, stereotypes and insults directed at gays, because they can't be bothered to use an appropriate word when pissed off, disappointed or let down. Jan Moir did not say anything that a lot of people weren't thinking, but she validated many narrow-minded opinions. In the same way, 'gay' to mean 'shit' validates many opinions that 'homosexual' means 'shit'

As long as there is under-representation, hatred and persecution of people who identify as 'gay', using 'gay' as a pejorative is not going to fly with me. Accept this as a friendly warning. I'm not out to whip the backs of your legs, Tatchell style, or to start fundraisers for Stonewall. Alas, I'm too busy looking after my own selfish needs to do that. But next time you say 'Oh, that club is so gay', please do expect me to ask how much Kylie they'll be playing.

Subtitles. For and Against. (with tangents on Nazis)

FOR: Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino's long-awaited Nazi film-meets-spaghetti western-meets macaroni-combat film, was criticised by some for being told in three different languages; French, German and English. Actually, there was some Italian in there along the line as well, put to use by the evil Col. Landa in a hilarious, yet teeth-bendingly tense scene towards the end of the 3-hour epic.

As much as the use of three main languages ruffled a few critics' feathers, the disparities of language is integral to all of the hierarchies of knowledge of the film. Each language is needed to create different sets of knowledge in each character. For the audience to get used to the subtitles, scenes are long and tedious; they are necessary to create a verisimilitude, a semblance of real-time. So that, when the action happens, it shocks the audience as much as the victim of the testicly-recieved bullet.

Hitchcock famously said that if you show an audience two people having a conversation at a table, speaking for ten minutes before a bomb goes off from under the table, the audience only gets 10 seconds of surprise. However, if you show the audience the bomb is under the table before the ten minutes' conversation, you get 11 minutes of suspense.

It could be argued that Tarantino refuses to strive for suspense, instead creating long, meandering, seemingly irrelevant conversations. But Tarantino is being wonderfully self-reflexive by not telling the audience where the gun is. He knows what his fans (and critics) expect of him, especially after Kill Bill. They expect violence, gore, blood and, if Aldo Raine's preface is to be trusted, a whole lotta Nazi scalps. The self-reflexivity even flows into the end of the film, when you, as a cinemagoer are brought into the Nazi cinema, and, well, I won't give too much away, but it gets fucked up and you start to question your own bloodthirsty drive to rush out and see films with one-word reviews ranging from 'gory' to 'bloody'.

When you watch the 15-year-old Pulp Fiction, you don’t strive too hard to fit all the pieces together, the colours aren't in strict blocks on the rubik's cube. But the film still proves appealing because it is fucking cool, and all the action is held firmly apart by a fair bit of suspense.

Inglourious Basterds is no different. The range of different languages mean that, whilst watching, you know who knows more than the person next to them, and who’s fooling who, but if you were given a piece of paper after each chapter and had to establish who knew what and who didn’t know what, you’d probably put the pen down and just carry on watching because it’s a stupid thing to try, especially when the lights are dimmed in a cinema and you're watching a great film.

Inglourious Basterds *****

AGAINST: Coco Avant Chanel

About two and a half hours into this, I thought: 'Wow. I really like this. The pearls, the dinner suits, the monochrome, the clean edges. I really like Chanel couture. I like dresses.' Then the film ended.

Coco Avant Chanel bore all of the signs of sloppy filmmaking. The memoirs of the life of an iconic fashion designer who became hated by her homeland after a bit too much pleasure taken at the Nazi occupation (wink) BEFORE any of the fun stuff like MAKING PRETTY CLOTHES or SHAGGING NAZIS happened…was, quite frankly…terrible. Not only did the whole story belittle the life of a very complicated woman, merely showing the two men she shagged in an awkward downsizing of the Edith Piaf biopic (La Vie En Rose, 5 stars) * the subtitling was atrocious. It was clearly subtitled by an intern found through an episode of The Hills. I was trying to take the film seriously, but then a character said ‘I’ll drop you a line’. In 1930’s France, was that really ‘par de course’? The colloquial contemporaneous Americanisms were innumerable, and I tried to mentally exorcise them like you would the image of the last person you slept with fellating a poo you did yesterday, but, mustering some strength to remember, I swear I read ‘hook up’ amongst that ill-commissioned text.

Also, Audrey Tatou looked like a massive hag. It was bad enough that the story was misogynistic in its latent dismissal of Chanel's career-related achievements, but its lighting was the filmic equivalent of a weekly glossy magazine's photoshopped red-ring around an exercising celebrity's left armpit - gasp - sweating!

*I understand that Coco Chanel and Edith Piaf did have some similarities in their lives – both singing in gaudy bars as young women, being mistaken for prostitutes, finding their way up in the world and shagging a man who, betrothed to someone else, dies in a crash. However, Edith Piaf’s life story did not cut out the heroin and the bingeing and the aides and the cancer. Why should Coco Chanel’s story cut out the Nazis and the emigration to Switzerland, the working with Audrey Hepburn?

Coco Avant Chanel **