Day 132: BlacKkKlansman

I went to see Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman with my dad today. It's the angriest, the freshest, the most vibrant and vigorous and exciting of Lee's films in a long time. It's brilliant, and it's very much needed right now.

Released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the fascist rally in Charlottesville - during which a white supremacist rammed his car into counter-protesters, murdering one, and then Donald Trump made snivelling, sycophantic excuses for the neo-Nazis - the film, detailing the true story of a black cop infiltrating the KKK, leaves no question as to the parallels it draws between then and now, nor of whom it blames.

A number of Klan members make reference to the need to "make America great" again. During a scene where the protagonist derides as implausible the thought of a lying racist buffoon becoming president, Lee could only be more on the nose if he walked out from behind the camera and winked at the audience. And the ending of the film dissolves into real footage from Charlottesville, and Trump's cowardly response, with such force that it left me gasping back tears. BlacKkKlansman is not playing. It sees the problem, and it's making damn sure that you see it, too.

But it's an odd film. The subject matter is shocking, yet the storytelling itself is safe, even formulaic. John David Washington (son of Denzel) plays Ron Stallworth, an undercover cop who bags an invitation to the Colorado Springs chapter of the KKK, using fellow officer Adam Driver as his white stand-in during face-to-face meetings.

What follows are the plot beats of every cop movie you've ever seen. The outsider rookie having to earn his place in the department. The disapproving commanding officer. The tense first undercover meeting. The moment it seems like the subterfuge is blown. The distraction at the last moment. The one member of the gang who has his suspicions... And so on, right up to the neat yet expected climax.

There's a love interest, played with nerve and verve and strength and cool by Laura Harrier, but it's a depressingly traditional role, and she ends up with little to do. In a film so concerned with equality, it's a shame that there's not more parity between the male and female characters. Passing the Bechdel test would have been a good start. 

So the main thrust of the script is familiar, deploying a successful but well-worn version of the Hollywood structure, even if Lee's energetic, playful direction, and the excellent performances, elevate the material.

Yet in a way it feels like this is the point. The comfortable plot is really only a delivery method for the film's message. Lee is raging, and he wants you to rage, too. The bright, cartoony world of BlacKkKlansman, where good guys are heroic and bad guys get their comeuppance, makes a number of stand-out, tonally different scenes all the more shocking for their incongruity. You enjoy the story, you settle in, and then Lee reminds you that, hey, black people have been being shot and burned and hanged and raped and mutilated and run the fuck over by obscene, white-man-driven muscle cars for as long as we all can remember, and the recent surge in popularity of the far-right is only the intrusion into quiet middle-class life of an ugliness that has never once disappeared for people of colour.

The film is an appeal to emotion, a piece of rhetoric, and it is unapologetic about that. It uses storytelling and filmmaking techniques to make you empathise with its characters, to care about them and hope they win out, and even as the fictional narrative sees them succeed, the real world, messy and complicated and terrifying, comes rushing in, mocking you for enjoying such an easy ride.

There's a black power speech that Stallworth attends early on where Lee films rapt black faces singled out in the spotlight, staring up contemplating the struggles each of them has faced for no reason other than that they were born black in a white America, and it's like a stinging slap to the audience, with the accompanying shock of tears.

Later on Harry Belafonte has a cameo as an ageing civil rights activist who relates the true life story of the lynching of Jesse Washington, horrifying, repugnant, and he's as good as talking directly to us. He discusses social feelings of the time, the release of The Birth of a Nation, holds up real photographs of the crime. Once again we're skewered in our seats, given zero room to wiggle free. We were in the safety of a predictable story, but suddenly this is all too real.

And then there is the ending, and the final documentary footage, and all the neatness of what has come before is upended, and we are left paralysed, shocked, and broken.

In BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee uses the main weave of the film - solid and structurally sound and, yes, hilarious - to lay a comforting blanket for us to rest upon, and then he yanks it out from under us. "Liked these people, did you?" he asks. "Well this is what America has in store for them."

And the credits play, and you walk out of the cinema blinking in the late afternoon sun, and you feel sick, you feel dizzy. But most of all, you feel angry.

Day 131: Untangled

Woke up hating myself this morning. All the usual reasons. I'd overslept; rather than seizing the day I'd rolled over and spent the last two hours feeling pinned to the bed, thinking how the healthy decision would have been to get up, but feeling unable to do so. And I was thinking about my writing, how I'm not pushing myself enough, how disappointing it all is, how simple and safe and boring. How I'm not making any progress. I'm trapped in stasis. How I've been eating ready meals and oven pizzas most nights again, and averaging one piece of fruit every other day. How I haven't been shopping at Unwrapped. How I never follow through on plans. The moment things get difficult I give up. How I'm a worthless waste of space, a pathetic ugly moronic loser.

Like I said, all the usual reasons.

And then I got up and stood in the shower. I got out of the shower and dried myself with my towel. I did my teeth, did my beard. Put on clothes. I took a bag for life and an empty Kilner jar and walked to Unwrapped, and then to the greengrocer's on the corner. I ate breakfast - cornflakes with milk, satsumas, an apple, a banana, a croissant - washed up, made a large pot of coffee.

I paid my rent, checked some dates on the calendar, did some other sorting work. I briefly felt awful that I still don't really get the next part of the story-structure stuff I've been putting off for weeks - but then I watched an episode of Community and made notes about the hero's journey, made notes about Bourne Identity, read up on story circles online... And by the time I had to get ready for work I felt like I had a better grasp on the subject than ever before.

And, OK, I know all that is not very impressive. It's pretty much the bare minimum that an adult should be achieving. But for me it was a big deal. This self-loathing I feel every day is such a weight on me. It is self-sustaining. It perpetuates itself. You feel worthless and that saps you of all energy, which makes it impossible to do the things you know you should be doing, which makes you feel all the more worthless.

I have had so many mornings waking up like this morning and letting that weight of negative thoughts crush me. Churning over in my head all the reasons I'm a failure, each reason leading to ten more reasons, which each lead to ten more, spreading outwards, forming strands between what were disparate incidents - the social failure last Thursday, the sense of loneliness in the corner of the party last month, not buying enough fruit yesterday, classmates laughing at me decades ago - the strands solidifying into a thick web that encompasses my entire consciousness, with me enmeshed in the centre, trapped and tiny and helpless, unable even to struggle, unable to move even a finger.

And once that process starts spinning up it's so difficult to halt, it carries its own energy and the energy builds as it goes, and often I'm not conscious it's begun, and then suddenly it is everywhere. And struggling only tangles me worse, the energy to fight back can so easily just go into energising the self-loathing, and then I get frustrated, and then feel helpless, and then suffer more.

So to feel the beginnings of that happening this morning, but then to gently, lightly climb over the first of the webs, to walk away and get on with the mundane work of my day, well for me that is huge. I'm going to recognise that that is huge. I'm going to feel good about it.

I'm going to give myself that.

Day 130: Junk food

Ohhhh buddy. I have been wiped out today. I don’t even know why. I’ve just got so little energy of late. I had a good day yesterday and used up my energy, and today I had none left. I played Zelda in bed. I roamed through quiet snowfields and over desolate mountains, I found ruins of temples, I cooked potions, I crept around monster camps and battled the monsters and picked up the doo-dads they dropped.

I watched a few episodes of Orange is the New Black, which show I’ve never got round to watching before. I thought it was good. I liked the world building of the prison as an environment, I liked the characters. The balance of cynicism and positivity, of feel-good comedy and sense of peril, is not easy to get right, and it looks like they have done here, mostly.

Umm. I read some Naomi Klein. I watched a video on game design by a guy I like on YouTube. The algorithms on YouTube incentivise video makers to put out continuous low quality content, to splurge out list features and clickbait nonsense about why x franchise has failed and y piece of media will not live up to the hype, and it’s just so much white noise, so much shite, clogging our ears and eyes and brains, everyone yelling louder to make themselves heard over the din, which increases the din, so everyone yells even louder…

And so when you find people putting out difficult, complex, reasoned stuff on YouTube, and you know they’re not making much money but they’re doing it anyway, it’s such a breath of fresh air. Videos that takes months to create, say something worth saying, and yet get a fraction of the views of the crap that everyone else is tossing off twice a day. That stuff is precious. It’s worth celebrating, worth being grateful for, because there are so many factors encouraging the creators to not do it that way. 

It’s like everyone within that sphere is saying how you can get rich by selling ultra-processed junk food, how that's the only viable way to make money, yet a few people would still rather stay poor yet cook meals that are worth eating. And that is good. People like that are good.

OK, I'm done, I'm gonna go pass out. Noight noight.

Day 129: Test Card F

If my girlfriend has a flaw, and she does, it’s that she doesn’t remember the girl and clown playing noughts and crosses on the tester card on early morning TV.

You know what I mean, right? You’re not insane. You’ve been alive longer than one singular moment. You’re seen a television at least once before. You’re aware of the concept of television.

Back when the channel would go off at night the BBC would show a colour-tester card with a picture of a girl playing noughts and crosses with a clown, and it would be-

-In fact, no. I’m not explaining this. You should know this. You should know.

The thing is, I’ve got such nostalgic memories of that tester card. As a five-year-old kid there’s not much time that is your own. You’re taken places, supervised, taught, watched, talked to, trussed up.

But first thing in the morning there’s a space of time that belongs only to you, and that time yawns and stretches outwards for an eternity. You wake up naturally, fresh, excited, and you creep down the rungs of your bunk bed, careful not to wake your baby sister below, keeping your weight on the mattress until you’re past the second rung, which squeaks, and then you cross the thick carpet and reach up for the handle, turning it gently, not breathing, and then you’re out on the landing, closing the door behind you, and you avoid the creaking floorboards, ease down one step, then the other, then the next, creeping until you’re in the living room, and the door is shut, and you have the television remote, and the whole universe is in your hand.

And soon there will be Transformers, and Thundercats, and Bucky O’Hare; Ghostbusters, Alvin and the Chipmunks, BraveStarr, Duck Tales, Turtles. A million other shows about space battles and magic and lasers and adventure, and each one will be so real, and you’ll go into them all, fall into them, live out the daring, the danger, pump your fists at the theme tunes, dream of getting the toys, and for a few hours, a lifetime to your tiny inchoate self, you will own the world.

But first there are the edutainment programmes, the pre-school programmes, with the counting and the puppets and the unmistakable stench of boredom. No robots here. No glinting steel. But it’s better than nothing, and it’s part of the routine, the pre-match warm-up, the carrot sticks that you know you have to eat that will make the fish fingers and alphabetti spaghetti taste all the sweeter.

But before even that, right now, there is the tester card, immutable and unmoving, its utilitarian greys and adult grids giving way at the corners to blossoming explosions of colour, the central smiling girl and the whimsy of the clown and the game they are playing embodying to your childhood self concepts that you can’t quite name, the virtue of patience, the zen of the present, and a restful excited poise that spreads from inside you until it blankets all things, and all things hum internally with something that is you.

And then the tester card disappears, and the cartoons begin.

And that is why, ladies and gentlemen and others of the jury, my girlfriend is a moron. Thank you. Good night.

Day 128: I love dogs

Another slow, fatiguing day at work, and a short evening, as I have to be in bed soon to be back at work for 7am tomorrow for delivery again. Ah well, once I’m up it’s fine, I like riding the bus down first thing when it’s quiet and the air is clear and the low morning light is piercing in through the windows. And the delivery shouldn’t be too large and there’ll be plenty of time to potter about and eat French pastries and drink coffee before it’s time to set the bar up.

Watched Isle of Dogs with the housemates this evening. I loved it. I mean, Wes Anderson hasn’t made a film yet I’ve not enjoyed. This one doesn’t quite reach the heights of Grand Budapest Hotel; it’s a smaller, more conventional story (although breathtakingly told), but it looks sublime and it’s so funny and the filmmaking is about as confident as you can get. And there are dogs in it, and the dogs are da cutest wess dey are.

It has all the hallmarks of a Wes Anderson film. There’s the deadpan comedy. The mournful 60s vibe to the soundtrack and the beating drums to push forward the narrative. The moments of surreal, incongruous violence, expressed so matter-of-factly. The purposefully cheap looking model shots. The truck shots following along the sideways motion. A poignancy that is all the more affecting for the aloofness of the surrounding tone. Tragedy and comedy held in balance so that each deepens the other. Bit parts for Bill Murray and Ed Norton and Jeff Goldblum and Harvey Keitel.

So Isle of Dogs was classic Wes Anderson, is what I’m saying. It was funny and touching and bizarre, though also utterly conventional, as a Wes Anderson film. The supporting characters could have had more development, and the ending wrapped up a little too easily, but, look, Wes Anderson is a filmmaker who has perfected his approach by now - you know what you’re getting, but you know you will like what you’re getting. He explores similar feelings again and again, through similar cues, but each time the experience is fresh, each time you’re happy returning to his brain for another go round.

Other things I liked: the conceit that the humans spoke Japanese but the dogs spoke English, and how the Japanese was sometimes translated intrinsically, within the world of the film, by an exchange student or whatever, while other times it was left for the audience, and the dogs, to be baffled. I liked the aesthetic, it reminded me of Akira and other 80s anime. I liked how it played with mythical storytelling tropes. I liked how one of the symptoms of the dog flu that had ravaged the canine population of Japan was sneezing, which they used to pull the rug from under serious situations at regular intervals. Right at the apex of an important speech, or in the silence after a pivotal reveal, one of the dogs would let out a cute little sneeze, and then the film would move on, as if it hadn’t happened. I laughed every time.

That’s all I got off the top of my head. Gotta go sleeps now to be bright functional technically alive for the open tomorrow.

Toodles x

Day 127: All Cronenberged up

Oi oi! I’ve got bugger all to offer today. I was at work and it was a horrible Saturday with the pub filled with horrible weekend dad lads and screeching hen parties and ageing rockers for a festival down the road, and I got home at six and slumped in my chair and my feet were throbbing and my head caning and all I could do was sit in front of Zelda and poke about in little glowing tree-lined grottos and collect shiny doo-dads and climb outcrops and paraglide down through the air watching the world tiny and indistinct below me grow larger until it engulfed me, and then I turned the Switch off and went to buy and cook tea and while I was eating I watched an episode of Rick and Morty, the one where they Cronenberg up the world, make a real Cronenberg of it, and I made notes on the episode's story structure, the hero’s journey for each character, how the writers toyed with the format of serial television, some neat metatextual stuff where they both adhere to the rules of the paradigm while satirising and even transcending them.

Rick and Morty can be cloyingly cynical, that cynicism where everything is sneer-worthy and it becomes posture, watching it can be tiring, depressing, even, how it always has to stay one step ahead of the curve, has to prove its superiority with every syllable (maybe I’m just identifying it with some dark parts of myself, there) - but at the same time the show is wicked-funny, bracingly unsentimental, and so au fait with story structure that it regularly provides complete hero journeys for each of its cast members that are as solid as anything else you’ll see on Netflix, while simultaneously mocking the whole process.

I don’t worship the programme - I think unguarded sentiment, simple sincerity, is as important as the obsessive misanthropic intellectualising that Rick and Morty embodies, sometimes more so in these dark times, but I respect the hell out of it. Comedians and storytellers at the top of their game, those guys. Well done.

Blarg, and those are all the words I can squeeze out of my tired old brain tonight. Everything is gooey mush now. A right old Cronenberg. 

Niiiight! x

Day 126: Coaxial cables

Well, I never showered. Mike messaged me as I was necking coffee in my boxers to ask whether I wanted to "do something" before he went to work, so I threw on clothes and walked round, and we drank more coffee, chatted about literature and politics and videogames, mostly videogames, and then we went geocaching, as is Mike's wont, and explored city centre backstreets and parks full of unconscious homeless people and cathedral grounds pocked with bird shit, and we ate sandwiches and made jokes about being depressed, and then Mike went to be a twilight file clerk and I went home, and I took photos on the walk back, got in and edited the photos, sat down to write.

And after putting down some thoughts about Zelda on the Switch I forced myself to engage with the story structure notes, and I remembered that I was stuck on the next bit, it wasn't clear in my head how it flowed, and I didn't know how to explain it in my own post.

Even yesterday this was a sign that I was a moron and a failure, but today I just went away and read up on the stuff that confused me, made notes, thought about the plots of films that overtly follow the hero's journey and how they dealt with the areas that I didn't have straight.

And it's weird. When creativity is stuck just go and work anyway. When the well is dry just do what is necessary to fill it back up. I've learnt that lesson so many times before, and forgotten every time.

And yesterday I would have seen that as a sign that I'm a moron and a failure, but from today's perspective it's fine. Every time I forget, the lesson is easier to pick up again the time after. Every time I fall it becomes easier to rise.

Negative thoughts are strengthened pathways in the brain. Neurons that fire together, synapses that have thickened their coaxial cables though use. Except they're not called coaxial cables, because those are the things that connected your TV to your antenna before Netflix, but it's a word like that, and it's late, so let's just go with it. The thickened synapses are like deep grooves worn into the ground. And when the rain of thought falls that water will run down the grooves easier than it will run across open land. So changing your mind, learning new patterns of thought, is about going down again and again and chiselling out new channels. And at first these new channels are very shallow, and the water quickly starts running back into the old riverbeds. But then you go back and dig the new channels out, and it's less effort than the first time, and you dig them a bit deeper. And then the water goes back into the riverbeds. And then you go down again and dig out the new channels...

I'll forget everything I'm saying here, and I'll feel blue again. I'll lose hope. But I'll keep remembering, and it will get easier. And one day I'll look back and find that I can barely make out those old ossified riverbeds, while the roaring rapids of healthy thought will be connected to a hydroelectric dam powering machines that change the world, and I'll dip the coaxial cables into the water and short-circuit my house and the power will go off and then I'll never be able to have a shower.

See how by referencing my mixing of metaphors and the lack of symmetry in the post I get to both show that I'm aware of those problems and provide a sort of solution to them? Writing is great.