Machine | Fiction | The Implausibility of Goodness

I quite enjoy being lax about my sense of the word 'fiction' in these articles (as you, er, may have noticed). Because fiction is not, of course, restricted to prose novels and short stories. Fiction is the unreal; the unreal that - as I like to think, in the case of literature - informs and casts light on the real, but that can also be used to manipulate it and, in some cases, to engulf the real entirely.



One of my odd little obsessions, whenever something is happening in the wider world that excites or distresses me, is to go over in my head, again and again, a speech I'd quite like a public figure to make. It could be any public figure, really. Someone with a voice; someone who will be heard. In this case, as you can probably guess, I wanted someone to talk about Egypt. Not a journalist, or a blogger, or any one of us people who don't really matter - but I wanted them at least to admit the great gulf between ideals and practicalities; admit that our countries have been complicit in several cases in doing the unethical thing for the purposes of realpolitik, admit that the West is paralysed by a patronising fear that instability will instantly lead to dangerous fundamentalism and that this is considered a valid reason not to stand up for democracy - and admit that it is no longer ethical or practical to do anything other than demand that Mubarak be removed from office. I wanted the fiction of diplomatic language, with all of its fucking ambiguities and hedge-bets and pathetic insinuations, the use of ambivalence to obfuscate, to disappear just for once, because it's not helping at all. Why are the only people giving direct answers the ones who are lying directly, like Khamenei, hatefully and very deliberately, misappraising the situation as an Islamic revolution in Egypt? (And, of course, there's no point getting started on Berlusconi, who has to be trolling. He just has to be.)


I got what I wanted, sort-of, when Nick Clegg came onto Daybreak and said that he found the Egyptian protests "incredibly exciting" - which reminded me firstly of the trouble he got into when he referred to the illegal war in Iraq as an illegal war in Iraq in Parliament, and secondly of the belief that I do still hold; that he isn't a bad man so much as he is a weak man. Naive, perhaps, but I'm not sure I believe that anyone who's been touched by Beckett can be bad. Complicated, definitely, but not bad. (That does sound naive - even elitist and stupid - but I think I'm going to leave it in). But it troubles me that he was able to show instinctive sympathy and joy for a protest that he was dealing with in a detached, almost abstract sense - but that the same sympathy failed to break through in his spiels about tuition fees. When faced with the pressures of local reality, where was that sympathy for another sort of protest of the economically disillusioned youth against the government?


The saddening thought is the flipside of the Romantic dream; it's all too easy to be good when you're alone - when your actions are detached from personal costs that society will always bring. And goodness within society can never be truly good, because it's too complex; it's measured by one's possibly unconscious motives. It's easy to be good instinctively, like stamping out fires spread by a molotov cocktail as more missiles rain down upon you, or by blurting out how you really feel about a situation you're supposed to be toeing the company line upon. It's near-impossible to be good in a considered way. A hermit who steps away from the world is good in the meannest of ways, because he removes all opportunities to be bad.


A position I've always tried to take is to be good, while wearing life lightly - which I'm aware I'm falling away from with all of this hand-wringing about morality. Irritating earnestness is really uncomfortably close to attempts at sincerity. But, as they're saying Mubarak may go today - as they have, admittedly, said before - I find myself considering that uncomfortable fact that I don't want to be in a country where David Cameron's in charge. But I don't care for Ed Miliband either. All of the smaller parties are, in their own, often horrible way, hopelessly naive. And, more than any of these people, I'm concerned - ethically speaking - with the political system in place and - practically speaking - with any of the alternative possibilities. So, kids...where do we go from here?


Glenn Beck, who's nothing if not direct in his explanations of a given political situation, seeks to connect the economic protests in Greece and the tuition fee protests in London with the situations in Tunisia and Egypt by simply not bothering to give any details, shouting instead that "the fires are spreading". In one sense, he's an imbecile. In another, perhaps he has a point. The Internet is showing signs of a...universality beyond the machinery of politics. The possibility - if I may again be naive - of the goodness of individuals.


P.S. Fans of either actual fiction or sincerity gone wrong should check out Michael Rosen's caustic and slightly pointless comments on the Guardian live feed. He begins very well, with a sarcastic assertion that the women in hijabs protesting clearly can't stand up for themselves, and then goes downhill fast until he ends up making Hitler comparisons for comic effect.

Can the U.S. Government Hit the Kill Switch for Our Internet? (Stop saying kill!)

The U.S. Government already can? HERE committee-passes-plan-for-internet-kill-switch in U.S.
is the story.

Here is the scary Close Call story of the day. Yikes!! man-arrested-with-explosives-at-michigan-mosque



Full Speed aHEAD



Generation | Film | For No Reason, Let's Compile Some Lists

What an interesting article from Totalfilm. ‘Horror Icons on their Favourite Horror Movies!’ Admittedly towards the final third, the top ten lists are no longer by horror icons so much as by journalists who make a living out of things like compiling lists of their top ten horror movies. But still.


The list delighted me specifically because the icons’ stated preferences confirmed ingrained snobberies I already hold. Smart and ironic filmmakers like Joe Dante and Edgar Wright enjoy smart and ironic films like Don’t Look Now and Night of the Demon. Eli Roth plumps for dim-witted gorefests that are cool because nobody’s heard of them except him, Quentin Tarantino, and losers who actually ask themselves, “Hey, I wonder what’s on the Horror Channel tonight,” like me. Kane Hodder picks an upcoming movie of his as his second favourite, and consequently comes across as a self-publicising boor, whereas Robert Englund speaks passionately about the sound and cinematography of Turn of the Screw adaptation The Innocents. In terms of overall votes, John Carpenter goes all-out with a two-by-four on the craven Wes Craven. Nobody voted for Saw. (Oh, hang on – oh, no. They did. And for Hostel. Damn you, Kane Hodder!)

I probably couldn’t have predicted that the writer of Slumber Party Massacre 2 would admire the cinema veritie style of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In fact, in spite of their names, I might not have considered that the two films had a great deal in common. But still.

                                                               Pictured: horror.

What was more interesting was the preponderance of films from the late Seventies up to 1980 – I guessed the final punch-up must have been between Turner Classic Movies Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien and The Exorcist. A golden age for the genre, certainly, but so very dominant? Note the lack of love for films that were only, relatively speaking, very slightly earlier – 1963’s The Haunting is only mentioned once or twice. And films that came later – Blair Witch Project, for example. And, thinking about it, I don’t think this is simply a question of the era these film-makers and film-stars were informed by. It’s also an issue of generational cool in a genre that prides itself on being outsider-ish. Blair Witch/The Descent/Let The Right One In are too new to be considered classics, and certainly too new and too mainstream to be considered cool for real horror connoisseurs. The Exorcist, in its own way, was an exceptionally mainstream movie, but it gets far, far more votes than Poltergeist, which is still tainted with the mark of the mainstream period of Steven Spielberg. Jaws gets a pass because it was his breakthrough film. Freaks is old enough and cultish enough to be cool. Carnival of Souls is maybe too cultish for its own good. The Thing, to my surprise, gets more votes than Halloween – because it’s still an outsider’s movie, perhaps? Because it remains under-acknowledged by that mainstream, passed aside, un-remade? At least until that prequel comes out, that is. But still.

So I decided to generate an enormous, utterly meaningless flow-chart, to document the various peaks-and-troughs of horror opinion, making use of this vast new repository of information.

As with all statistics, I made some fairly arbitrary distinctions; I would only include the lists that were being made by someone chosen for actually working in the business, rather than commenting on it, no matter how knowledgeable they may be. So the guy who did make-up on Scream is in. Nigel Floyd is out. If someone didn’t bother to put their votes in order, only their first vote counts (sorry, John Landis. But for God’s sake, play the game! I don’t care how restricting and pointless it is!). And, to make the generated chart even more meaningless, all of Rob Zombie’s votes count as minuses. Not really. But to add a further note of randomness to the equation, I’m not particularly good at maths.
Each film gets a score out of ten depending on where it stood in the top ten list. First place gets ten points, tenth place gets one point. Bon? Bon.


Most Popular Horror Movie

1) The Exorcist; 182. The run-away victor. 22 appearances on the lists, almost always in the uppermost regions.

2) Alien; 119. Less-often picked than TCM – fifteen times - but more highly-rated.

3) Texas Chainsaw Massacre; 110. Sixteen votes.

4) A tricky tie at 101 between Jaws and The Thing. Thing gets more votes (eighteen), but Jaws is more highly rated amongst those who’ve picked it.

Lone Defender: Highest Rated Horror Movie picked by only one participant who wasn’t being hipsterish and ironic, or trying to promote his forthcoming sequel Hatchet 2

With a 10 from George Romero, the original Thing From Another World clinches it, beating Wes Craven’s lone 10 for Nosferatu because I don’t care for the films of Wes Craven. Soon after come the Twin Peaks movie, with a 9, and Inferno, also with a 9 (curiously, Steven Shiel, who voted for it, didn’t include Suspiria on his list; I’d like to hear his argument.)


Best Overall Average

Peeping Tom; two nines.


Least Favourite Most Favourite: Lowest Rated Horror Movie Overall

Cult of the Cobra (Romero again), Who Can Kill A Child?, The Other, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Seventh Victim, Duel, Braindead, Fright Night, Son of Frankenstein, Martyrs, 10 Rillington Place, Friday 13th Part VII (HODDER!), and Day of the Beast all manage a lowly one.

Most Questionably An Actual Member of the Genre

Scanners, at one vote of four. Exploding heads don’t make it a horror film. Points go to those who correctly identified Picnic at Hanging Rock as a horror film.


Most Likely to Get Bullied By The Other Participants

Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, score of two? Not Dracula, not Nosferatu?Get out of here, Larry Fessenden, director of Wendigo, you prissy Twilight lover.


Most Intriguingly Overlooked

Silence of the Lambs and Blair Witch scrape a couple of votes each, but Hellraiser and Les Diaboliques are the winners here, managing only four and three respectively, with a single vote. Hm. Intriguing.

Pictured: horror.

My point is, we’re obsessed with this sort of thing. On the Internet in particular. You could actually speculate about how the mechanical processes of the online world are turning us into obsessive-compulsive automatons, forever making lists and comparing statistics and telling ourselves that this stuff actually means something objective. I’d do it myself, but I’m far too busy. As an addendum to this article I’m planning to make a new flowchart that only compares the preferences of the people whose opinions I happen to personally agree with. Kane Hodder will be nowhere in sight.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor Strolling Briefly And Recklessly Out Of His Remit

p.s. The full 121-film flowchart is available to anyone who wishes to see it, providing they first put their signature to some documents I happen to have lying around.



Facebook | Fiction | Death To Facebook! Long Live the New Flesh!

“She knew several thousand people; in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”


My God, I love The Machine Stops. On-the-nose, some claim, but it’s deliciously so, I think. And besides, who can scoff at such straightforwardness when it hits the mark of the pitfalls of today’s modern society so often, and so much more accurately (I’d argue) than 1984 or Brave New World, its bigger, more famous cousins.

Like when Vashti turns off her “isolation switch”, and is assaulted on all sides by the voices of the people she “knows”, wanting to communicate with her,

“What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas?”

Hello, Facebook Chat.

If you don’t know E.M. Forster’s savagely anti-technological short story, it describes a world in which mankind has not so much been imprisoned by a totalitarian regime as imprisoned itself, through slovenliness, convenience and the desire to escape reality. All life is focused around the Machine, which is....just that, a great machine that stores information and enables communication between all members of society. In a quick burst of dark humour, the only book left in the world is an instruction manual for using the Machine, which is just beginning to become a sort of holy book in the minds of some.

Hello, Internet.
And if on-the-nose makes you cringe,

“We created the Machine to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”

If I’m being reduced to copying out passages verbatim instead of being rather more interesting in my discussion, well, it’s because I can’t fault Forster’s logic. The obvious link of carnality to pornography doesn’t intrigue me quite so much as the suggestion, elsewhere in the story, that physical contact with another human being has become abhorrent to us. I’ve met, myself, some young men of my age who have come to prefer the safety of pornography to the reality of sexual contact – to the risks of dealing outside the Machine. “Second-hand ideas” themselves become preferable to those experienced IRL. And that our sense of the spaces around us is lost – I couldn’t possibly disagree with that, having known, myself, the horrid, fuzzy feeling after breaking away from two many hours staring at the screen, as if reality itself has become unreal.
And, more worryingly, for our purposes, living outside the Machine becomes living outside society itself – becoming “homeless.” Damn straight. In order to preach this Luddite sermon about how the Internet is killing us, I, er, have to go onto the Internet and post it, and for people to agree or disagree they’ll have to do the same. And in order to write, I use my laptop, and in order to research, I use the Internet. I am becoming a slave, of sorts. I even feel a little guilty for typing this, because, hell, the damned thing is immensely useful, and it’s convenient. It seems inconsiderate to blame it because I’m too feeble to use it without it using me.
Or perhaps it’s wrong to call The Machine Stops Luddite. It doesn’t believe in the evil of technology so much as the frailty of humanity, when faced with great power. But it does have an enormous satisfaction to it when the Machine does finally come crumbling down. And I have to ask myself – if Facebook or the entire Internet itself collapsed today, for ever, I might be panicked, because I’d lose a great deal. I’ve stored a lot of photos there, a lot of memories. I’d be rendered pretty much blind, deaf and dumb. But I’m not sure I’d be saddened. I might even, in the end, be a little pleased.
That final exchange between Vashti and her son, as the Machine comes crashing down, all around them – perhaps one of my favourite dialogues in all of literature;

“Is there any hope, Kuno?”

“None for us.”

We are all children of the Machine now. We rely on it; we’re all tainted. But perhaps there is a way we can stop future generations from ever becoming addicted.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor