Hilltop Hoods have matured something shocking. It began in 2006 with The Hard Road, an album that underscored the standard Hilltop hedonism with genuine ideological passions, and this was stylistically emphasised the following year, when the group rereleased the album with remixed symphonic orchestral backing. Their ambition, however, is only crystallized with 2009’s State of the Art, which is a record altogether more comfortable with its own seriousness than The Hard Road is, and yet a good deal more serious than A Matter of Time or The Calling. State of the Art feels like the real deal, where the prior four releases were varyingly insufficient drafts (no pun intended, although it’s worth noting that the album, particularly “Last Confession”, is very Drapht-esque).

In fact, Hilltop Hoods have achieved an artistic status that puts them squarely between Drapht and Bliss n Eso – they share the former’s personalized, vaguely spiritual, maudlin contemplation and the latter’s larger-than-life, self-aggrandizing, double-MC theatricality. What nonetheless makes them a unique Australian hip-hop experience is the integrity and cohesion they lend to these two elements. State of the Art represents a mastering of duplicitous tone – celebratory and furious, silly and serious, introspective and anthemic. And if I tend to focus on nuances like this rather than lyrical intricacy, exciting musicality and lavish production, it’s only because Hilltop have always been technically infallible. The subtle character changes and tonal sophistication on State of the Art, however, are new, and they’re very interesting.

For starters, MC Pressure has calmed down. We’ve already seen some of the potential benefits of this on The Hard Road, where he humbly sat out of ”An Audience with the Devil” and let MC Suffa tell the epic tale of conversing with the Prince of Darkness. The song is a moving high point of the album. This is not to say that Pressure’s performative presence is wholly bad… but prior to State of the Art, there is an aggressive neediness to his serious efforts and an unnerving meanness to his comic that simply seems to have mellowed and balanced with this release. He has achieved humility and a perspective on things.

Perhaps this is most greatly reflected by “Parade of the Dead”. The song, for reasons that will become clear, is very dear to those of us at Wonderbread. It is an acerbic electronic whirlwind that facilitates the story of two characters trapped in an Adelaide Zombie apocalypse. Naturally, the premise begs to be played for comedy, but today Hilltop Hoods are smarter than that. Pressure’s verse in this song is the delightful highlight, waxing lyrical with a number of classic zombie conventions and breathing poetry into them. His gunshot bow lays the perfect stage for the socially conscientious chorus lament, “They built my city on top of a grave/and now the dead run the street like a rotting parade.” Here, Pressure’s integration of serious ambition and silly comedy is infectious; it brings the best out of DJ Debris and Suffa in the interest of a single stylistic vision. “Parade of the Dead” is probably the most cinematic Australian hip-hop song I’ve ever heard.

Still, it must be conceded that the album’s centrepiece is its final track, “Fifty in Five”, which dazzles purely on the merits of its beautiful construction, both lyrical and musical. For specifics, you need consult the album itself, because I can’t bring myself to dissect it, but the song is an exemplary text for the universal anger of our age, and it has more conviction, persuasion and relevance than anything else the group have ever done.

Meanwhile, of course, the Hilltop hedonism I mentioned is still alive and well. It finds the occasional bit of substance to adhere to, such as the pride of “Still Standing” or the sheer punchiness of “Chris Farley”, but we can catch it exposed and adolescent in “Super Official”, “The Light You Burned” and the staggeringly misogynistic “She’s So Ugly”. For many, I’m sure it’s this very uncouth sensibility that keeps Hilltop at an arm’s length: for fans, it’s an unnegotiable part of the package. And, it must be said that with all its distaste, “She’s So Ugly” is a gorgeous piece of hip-hop. Like Birth of a Nation (1915), it’s to be admired… even though it’s going to Hell.

But gosh darn it, isn’t that almost a summation of all good hip-hop – to be admired, even though it’s going to Hell? The good thing about State of the Art is that it reveals minds that know this – Suffa and Pressure are men who consistently categorize themselves as Damned. They, like the great pioneers of rap, recognize that there is almost no greater artistic commodity than the view of a soul who is only going down. Simultaneously, they recognize that there is a wide and diverse world of entertainment at the fingertips of such souls. State of the Art is a great start. I don’t think they’re the least bit done. You can pick up State of the Art from Amazon.com, or wherever good music resides.

The work of Woody Allen reveals perhaps some of the most instinctively recognized preoccupations and consistent attitudes of contemporary screenwriting. In all of his most celebrated and well-known films (Annie Hall {1977}, Manhattan {1979}, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask {1972}, Match Point {2005}) there exists innate cursors of the screenwriter’s opinions and attitude towards his craft that will, in this essay, be evidenced not just by the films themselves but by Allen’s own remarks, as made in Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking. Not only this, but through discussion of the three of the four films mentioned, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), common story patterns, character types and treatment of themes will be explored, as they pertain to Allen’s writing and the aforementioned opinions he holds.

The primary fact of Allen’s process and career as a screenwriter must be his origins as a comedian. It’s apparent from his earliest screenplays (Take the Money and Run) {1969}, Bananas{1971}) and from some of the later, more successful ones that integrated elements of them greatly that Allen began his film-making career seeing movies as a means of channeling his comedy. This is perhaps exemplified by Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex…, which literally has no plot; only a series of comedic skits, shown one after the other. Understanding that, for Allen, screenwriting and filmmaking grew out of a creative wellspring of stand-up comic methodology is vital in understanding how he approaches the writing of a film.

Aside from the circumstances of its outset, by the mid nineteen seventies, Allen’s grasp of the craft of screenwriting and his attitudes toward it had changed significantly and, quite arguably, deepened. He is by this stage telling Lax that “plot is dynamite in comedy”, and is operating on a screenwriting level out of an internalized understanding of movie-viewing’s historical progression:

You see [the old movies] as old movies, so they’re delightful. But they’re plotty, based on mechanics the public’s outgrown. In this new script [which will become Annie Hall] I’m trying to work from within, from the neurosis out, so it will not seem dated a hundred years from now. (Lax 10)

Allen also now ascertains that “there’s something less satisfying about comedy, even though it’s harder to do” (Lax 67). His opinion of his ‘craft’, which refers very specifically to the writing of comedies, is that it will “never have the impact” of the more “serious stuff” (Lax 66). Through this minor dissatisfaction with the inferior impact of comedic films and screenplays will come the more philosophical and emotionally potent narratives of Annie Hall and Manhattan. Judging by these professional developments, it’s fair to assume that Allen’s attitude towards his craft is that it must very much reflect himself in all honesty, while still retaining ‘impact’ and respecting the art form of films as they are appreciated by the public.

This more-or-less covers the issue of how Allen relates to the craft of screenwriting in general, but the more forceful issue when discussing this particular writer is the entirely specific niche that he occupies in contemporary cinema. I am of course referring to the thoroughly self-referential and self-aware nature of his writing, and the revolving of his seminal films around the constant of what can only be described as ‘the Woody Allen character’ – a neurotic, urban, intellectual type with a frank sexuality but a problem with women. Though this can and will be classified as a recurring theme or pattern, it also needs a significant portion of attention devoted to it as a matter of screenwriting, because it is a such a specific element that influences so greatly the construction of so many of his screenplays.

Allen talks at great length about this in his conversations with Lax, but perhaps his most succinct discussion of it is thus: “It’s hard to write good films and accommodate my character.” Allen professes that ‘his character’, which is prolific in spawning most any of his most recognized and accomplished films, can be a problem in the writing stages if only because it limits the film to a specific, personal and intimate space. He goes on to say:

I’ve got to get an idea that’s believable, yet funny, and within my miniscule acting range…[t]herefore plot possibilities get reduced to human relationships, and because they get reduced to human relationships…the conflicts become internal and not as visually active and cinematic as they were years ago. (Lax 9)

Here is a fine example of how Allen’s attitude towards the generic craft of screenwriting is intensified when furthered in relation to his specific and personalized craft of writing ‘Woody Allen’ films, meaning those in which he is a character and with which he is most closely associated. The writing of a ‘Woody Allen’ character-based film is almost a craft unto itself, one which Allen has explored in as many different genres as he can, and of which his opinions are just as steadfast as those he holds in regard to all screenwriting.

This quickly honed sense of his own specific films and subsequent writing style lead to 1977’s Annie Hall, the most acclaimed (four Academy Awards) and celebrated of all his films and here the first of discussion. In the context of Allen’s career, Annie Hall establishes almost all of the story patterns, character types and themes that would later come to define him as a writer and performer. Although it had been present as far back as Take the Money, the Woody Allen character is here for the first time really strongly realized and contextualized, given a background that is not outlandish and a lifestyle situation that does not ring false. It also follows quite closely a story pattern that Allen will use a number of times later: the Woody Allen character (in this case Alvy Singer) meets a woman, falls steadily in love and goes through a series of dynamics with her over a number of years. (Incidentally, this pervasive plot indicates an adaptive element of Allen’s writing: apparently in the original screenplay “[t]here were a million other digressions…Then we found the story was so strong that nobody cared about anything else. They wanted to get back to the parts about ‘you and Annie’ so I let it grow that way” {Lax 19}).

Another immeasurably key element that Annie Hall introduces with the full fervor that the topic really warrants in the context of Allen’s films is the location of New York. Late in their ill-fated relationship, Diane Keaton’s titular character exasperates to the film’s surrogate Allen: “You’re like New York city…you’re just this island, all by yourself.” This reference and comparison is vital, as the city is in so many of Allen’s films not just as an atmosphere but as an emblem, and her labeling of him as an ‘island’ helps place the city’s significance to Allen firmly in the metaphysical realm. Both Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters also make direct reference to New York as being fundamentally and inseparably “his”: in the first it is through opening narration that the Allen character (while tellingly writing a work of fiction about himself) firmly labels New York “his town; it would always be his town”. In Hannah, the Allen character uses this trope as a comfort, assuring himself that no illness, no harm at all could befall him in New York City, for which he feels such a strong affinity.

The last point is one that relates most strongly to the writing of the film and the writing of Allen to follow, and that is the motif of characters writing texts that are strictly based on their experiences. This is particularly important when it is found in Allen’s own characters as it is here (one of the final scenes is of the enactment of a play that Alvy has written specifically detailing his relationship with Annie), because it helps the audience feel they can read Allen through the film, and it reflects nicely the sentiment that “[a]lmost all my work is autobiographical and yet so exaggerated and distorted it reads to me like fiction” (Lax 7).

His next film, Manhattan, made two years later, will also be the next film of discussion, and one that perhaps solidified the public image of Allen as a character and hence as a writer. Described by Angela Errigo as “the rapturous high point of Woody Allen’s on-screen love affair with New York City”, Manhattan did indeed expand strongly the romanticism of the town that Annie Hall hinted at, going so far as to open with voice over narration (another beloved Allen device) that riffs on the Allen character (Isaac Davis)’s love for New York. Admittedly, this narration is spoken in the voice of an internally fictional character that Isaac is writing for, but as fictional writing has already been suggested by Annie Hall to be a theme that represents the character doing the writing (and since Isaac will later give direct evidence that he himself does love the city he inhabits) we can safely assume it is really his own voice he’s speaking in during this opening montage.

Aside from this, New York City is given much more significance and credence in the writing of Manhattan that the simple presence and mention of it in Annie Hall could achieve. Although Allen’s role as director is not the issue of focus here, it’s necessary to note that as a writer, at least in the case of this film, he was thinking even during the conceptual stages in a directorial capacity:

I had brought Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings of Gershwin overtures and I kept hearing them in the shower everyday and thinking, God, a scene would be great set to this, or a scene would be great set to that. And I started working out the story with Marshall Brickman (Lax 32).

The spark of an exclusively George Gershwin soundtrack here was the origins of the whole screenplay, and found its way into the script very easily and early. This happens during the opening monologue, wherein Isaac states his ‘fictional character’ “romanticized [New York] all out of proportion”, imagining it as a place where George Gershwin was always playing and everything was black and white (this seed of imagery sown in the screenplay of course influenced Allen’s own decision to shoot the whole film in black and white).

Also, the city’s symbolic nature is all but announced in the beginning when Isaac writes “he adored New York, although to him it was a metaphor.” He goes on to say that the metaphorical implications of the city pertain directly to the “decay of contemporary culture”, which Mary (Diane Keaton) underlies with her hostility towards what Isaac considers the great figures of contemporary culture (Bergman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jung, Van Gough). In one of the final scenes, Isaac suggests to his Dictaphone that “his town” breeds emotional neurosis of petty issues to shelter its inhabitants from the “unsolvable, terrifying” issues. So Manhattan features quite pivotally and extensively the city of New York in its narrative.

The other element of Allen’s work that is deepened in the screenplay for Manhattan is the intertwining of human relationships; the focus of desire shifts for all four of the main characters of the film, to each other, off each other, onto someone else. This film, like the one before it, studies romantic relationships in a tight social circle over a long period of time and pointedly observes any changes. In Annie Hall, it was only a brief encounter with a rock journalist (Shelley Duvall) that served to be Alvy’s distraction away from Annie, but in Manhattan Isaac finds himself equally in love with two separate women, and suffering at the hands of fate and irony in both cases. There is also a serious narrative focus on infidelity, which will become an issue even more tightly connected between Hannah and Her Sisters and Match Point.

In fact, the two films just mentioned, for the reasons just mentioned, are probably best discussed together. Hannah, despite an increasing interest in other characters besides the Woody Allen character, is still set in his beloved town and features him quite strongly (and almost entirely apart from everyone else, as though narratively sheltered and alien). Nonetheless, there is much more emphasis put on the women of the film, and their various relationships. The most important theme that this attention reveals is one of infidelity, more particularly infidelity amongst familiar people. In this case, Elliot (Michael Caine) cheats on his wife Hannah (Mia Farrow) with her sister Lee (actress). It’s interesting to note that even in comedic environments such as this film, the theme of infidelity is always treated by Allen with seriousness.

The much later Match Point deviates from the Woody Allen model in some crucial ways, but using Hannah as a mediator, it’s clear to see it also abides by a lot of the writer’s established rules. It is far removed from New York, set instead in London and harbouring only one American character, Nola Rice (Scarlet Johanssen). Ergo, there is also no Woody Allen character, not even one that isn’t played by Allen himself, as has been the case in a quite a few other films (Celebrity {1998}, for example, which featured a distinctly written Woody Allen character played by Kenneth Brannaugh). Match Point is also not, in any sense, a comedy, which makes for some interesting comparisons between treatment of themes: it has in common with Allen’s very first screenplay (Take the Money and Run) strong elements of crime and punishment, yet doesn’t at all treat them in a jokey manner, rather with a disturbing practical and emotional realism.

Yet the central theme of infidelity is kept from Hannah, and even too are the premises and emotional consequences of the infidelity kept the same. In both films, a man (Elliot in Hannah, Chris in Match Point) marries a beautiful woman, yet instigates an affair with a close member of her family (sister in Hannah, sister-in-law in Match Point). They then fail to follow the affair through and leave their wives, which although having quite different outcomes in the two films (in Hannah the mistress simply moves on and finds another man, leaving Elliot still somewhat pining after her; in Match Point the mistress threatens to break up Chris’s marriage and he murders her to prevent this), nonetheless does not result in anybody ever discovering the infidelity.

Judging by these two separate and stylistically opposed films, its fair to suppose that the “plot possibilities [that were] reduced to human relationships” (Lax 9) by Allen’s initial restriction of writing his own character have become, over the course of his career, actively preferred. In other words, even when the Woody Allen character is no longer present, the focus on intimate human relationships that the character once dictated remain a pivotal part of Allen’s writing.

The last recurring motif of Allen’s writing that I would like to discuss is his dramatic use of apartments. Throughout all of the films examined here, it has not yet been noted how prominently the apartments, the intimate living spaces of the characters are presented. Perhaps as a by-product of his urban New York sensibilities, the apartments of Allen’s characters, particularly his own character, are always brought closely to the attention of the audience and almost reach and equal symbolic status as New York City itself.

Consider Annie Hall, where it is the argument over whether Annie should give up her own apartment to live permanently in Alvy’s that trigger’s the couple’s and the film’s first serious emotional altercation, and lays the groundwork for their first break up. Or Manhattan, where Isaac’s artistic integrity costs him his beloved apartment and ends him up in a living space and living arrangement that he is uncomfortable with, one that makes strange noises and produces suspect water. Yet despite being totally uncomfortable of and in his intimate apartment, Isaac is still extremely reluctant to let Tracy spend the night there, to let her be too familiar with this architectural extension of himself.

Even Match Point, the most removed of the films, anchors its typically Allen human relationships in the emotional logistics of the character’s apartments. Chris begans London life with an expensive yet inferior apartment, physically present in the English city of dreams (or the English New York City) but without a yet-suitable intimate environment. In the structure of the screenplay, we notice that after he has married into wealth and class, he is given the most luxurious and spacious apartment imaginable… with an amazing city view. Compare this to Nola’s apartment, which is small, clustered and cheap but warm and personal, and where every single passionate moment of their official affair takes place.

Woody Allen’s screenplays seem then to relate very strongly to his views and opinions about the process of writing them – they tell of honest, human relationships, they interchange comedic and dramatic takes on subjects close to his heart, and they reflect him, even when they do not contain ‘the Woody Allen character’ that so uniquely defines him. At his most honest, Woody Allen appears to be a writer who is completely unafraid to write films about nothing but his own simple concerns and pleasures, and at his most daring, he appears totally unafraid to explore them in “relation to what other people feel” (Lax 20). In either case, his devotion to human relationships is real, complex and complete, and his films, no matter their specifics, consistently demonstrate this.

Further Reading

Lax, Eric. Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies and moviemaking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

The cinematic phenomenon that would retroactively be known as film noir began in a world without television. This fact has several bearings on the issue of discussion, but the main focus of this essay will be to show how this film cycle, its traditions and its sentiments, has integrated itself not only into a world with television, but into television itself. As television programming has moved steadily toward an easier, cheaper and more accessible form of entertainment than the movies, many televisual genres have been born, from the classic soap opera (The Bold and the Beautiful, Dallas) to quirky drama-comedy (M*A*S*H, Northern Exposure) to simple horror shows (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits). The questions before us are, what of television noir, how has it happened, and does it succeed?

Firstly, I must indulge in a brief validation. It should be acknowledged that the presence of television in society, in relation to film noir, is not as culturally extraneous as it may appear: not only does it have a significant bearing on the national understanding of motion picture and entertainment, but the advent of television was one of the key factors in marking the delineation between effects had on America by World War II and effects had on America by the Vietnam War. Where American post-war disillusionment of the forties was reflected most strongly by the onset of film noir, it was perhaps more evidently reflected during the seventies by a glut of graphic and violent horror films, films that are persuasively argued in Robin Wood’s The American Nightmare to be products of a nation confronted by televisual images of the war effort, its destructiveness and its horrors. In this respect, television bore witness to the war during the sixties and seventies, and thus drastically altered the nation’s conceptions of itself.

Given that television, then, has been a strong influence on the course of America’s progressive and continuing return to ‘the dark past’, how has the cinematic reflection of that dark past been conveyed through television? The aforementioned Twilight Zone, Rod Sterling’s fantasy compound of Cold War paranoia, is a good place to begin.

Because film noir entails so many specific ingredients and characteristics, it is quite fruitless to expect to find all of them in any contemporary noir effort, especially television. To appreciate how noir has survived into new forms and works, it’s crucial that one try not to be overly purist – to accept as valid ‘bits and pieces’ of that amalgamative noir ethos. The aspect of noir that is most greatly adopted by The Twilight Zone is the existential and nihilistic philosophy that one might argue is at the very heart of the noir film cycle. Each episode is a new and frightening landscape of alienation and confusion, culminating in a revelation that damns the characters and leaves the audience without closure.

In terms of philosophy and intent, The Twilight Zone probably has the most brazenly noir sensibility to it of all American television. Its many revivals over the decades go to show that the series’ appeal has not dwindled along with the social climate that facilitated it, and no series of the same ilk (The Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt) has been quite as successful. What needs to be understood about the show and its compatibility with noir, however, is that it was not a serial narrative at all – it was a string of weekly, stand alone stories. On this basis, a divide becomes clear between The Twilight Zone and the kind of commercial, ongoing narrative of which television became the champion. The Twilight Zone was produced and consumed on the tacit understanding that its audiences were after the kind of depressive and fatalistic ‘fix’ that noir has perhaps once provided – it was a television series that filled a niche of human desire. The really interesting attempts at television noir came much later, in the early twenty-first century, when commercial television shows that comprised serial narratives began trying to integrate noir into their formula.

The three television series’ that will be discussed here in relation to noir are Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars, Joss Whedon’s Angel and James Manos Jr.’s Dexter.

Veronica Mars is a production that shares strong and deliberately superficial similarities with film noir, so we’ll begin with it. The series is noir in premise: the eponymous character is a Californian high school girl who works with her father as a private investigator. Through her investigations she uncovers, far more often than not, the dark and dirty sides of humanity, making her cynical and emotionally detached. Her Ordinary World, to borrow a phrase from Chris Vogler, is one of disillusionment, discontent and alienation: in the fairly recent past, her best friend was murdered, and in the wake of the crime she has become a social pariah.

One will note that such a premise could well be fitted to The Maltese Falcon or Chinatown: the disturbing journey of a private investigator, living in the consequences of a past gone wrong. Or we could take, for instance, the opening monologue to the third episode, which sounds as though it might have come direct from a nineteen thirties crime novel:

I look back over the past week and wonder if things could have turned out differently. If I hadn’t met the girl; if I hadn’t initiated the case; if I hadn’t interfered, would tonight be just another dull, quiet night in our apartment complex? Is it my fault a horrible crime played out its final chapter here? Or was what happened inevitable?

There are a number of noir elements that develop as the series progresses, as well. We become aware that no character can be trusted (every one Veronica knows becomes a suspect in her friend’s murder case) and that every revelation will make matters direr. However, these elements are really no different to those of any serial drama, because the mystery and urgency they evoke is crucial to the appeal of episodic storytelling. In this respect, Veronica Mars falls victim to its commercial nature and betrays the fundamental conflict between noir and commercial television: the nihilistic philosophy of noir cannot be sustained in commercial television because it is detrimental to the marketing appeal of television in general. In short, audiences won’t return each week simply to be depressed.

On this note, we will move on to Angel, another series whose commerciality prevents it from truly reflecting noir philosophy, but which nonetheless has value and raises points worth discussing. Angel’s premise is another inherently noir one: a lonely and broken-hearted man moves to L.A., where he sets up a small detective agency that operates only at night, while he battles the demons, figurative and otherwise, of his past. Angel has more noir elements in it that Veronica Mars, most specifically in character. The hero of Joss Whedon’s series is a fickle one: he is very literally a monster, and is responsible for countless reprehensible and unconscionable acts, but he is now seeking amends and forgiveness. Although his dark side is almost constantly hidden, and he is driven by goodness and nobility, there is nonetheless an evident dark side there, and this makes him, at the very least, an anti-hero of sorts (Veronica Mars has no real anti-hero).

Angel is also a prime example of how television can secret noir sensibility into its structure, without upsetting its commerciality. The way to uncover this is to examine singular episodes, without thought of their place in the greater canon. Because there will be time later on to rebuild a sense of hope and decency, television is sometimes able to allow stand alone episodes that have no overwhelming hope or decency, episodes that, when viewed in isolation, are about as noir as they come. Or, in short, audiences may not return each week to be depressed, but they’ll forgive being depressed for one week and return to find closure.

Take Angel’s third-season episode “Forgiving” (3.17), which deals with the jeopardy of a central character’s life and the attempt to understand an act of betrayal that he has perpetrated. Once he is found and safe, and when the reasonable motives for his betrayal have been revealed, all of the series’ regulars, sans Angel, have amassed at the hospital, where they wait for their fallen comrade out of love and loyalty. When Angel too arrives, he seems in a receptive and forgiving state. However, he quickly turns murderous, and the episode ends very abruptly with him attempting to smother his friend to death with a pillow, professing that he will “never” (his emphasis) forgive the betrayal. He is forcibly dragged off his hospitalized colleague: “You’re a dead man, Pryce! You’re dead! Dead! Dead!”

Because Angel, both as a series and as a character, deals heavily in the darkness of the human soul, this scene and its place at the very end of the episode is one that harbours disturbing philosophical implications. The darkness of this anti-hero has, even if only for a little while, won. He has not risen above his hate, or listened to his better angels, and something pure has been poisoned. It is not a happy ending at all – it is a noir ending (an even more potent example of this can be found in season four’s devastating episode “Awakening” (4.10), but we don’t have time).

On the subject of dark anti-heroes, we will progress to Dexter, the last and perhaps most noir-esque of the series in discussion. Dexter Morgan is almost an exemplary anti-hero: were he not the subject of our exclusive attention, we might even call him a villain. He succeeds in bringing, at the very least, the quietly unsettling effects of noir anti-heroism by embodying darkness. For the first time, television has a hero in Dexter who is unable to contain his darkness, and who we are supposed to learn to accept in all his dark horror.

Dexter’s philosophy is a confused and confusing one, and it plays with our moral sensibility as many great noir works have done. There is simply no facet or angle of the series that we can appreciate without being first forced to confront the essential ‘badness’ of Dexter Morgan. He is a murderer and he makes no apologies for it. Because he is the first fact of the series’ existence, and this moral conflict is the first fact of him, we are unable to escape from it. It’s almost a prerequisite for watching the series that we accept Dexter and his immoral, evil actions. Very in keeping with the style of noir, Dexter is able, though remaining brightly lit with Miami sun throughout, to question morality at a base line.

Is it then possible that one day television noir may bear the same character, location, plot and philosophy traits as film noir once did? Perhaps that question is not the proper one. James Naremore talks of “the theatrical motion picture… evolv[ing] into some other medium”. It is not out of the question to suggest that the likes of Veronica Mars, Angel and Dexter signify a shift toward a new age of noir production, to be valued separate to the forties films. Perhaps television noir is not the right term for it, but it certainly displays a significant return to ‘the dark past’, and a fascination with human darkness, that prompted film noir to begin with.

You can pick up the first, second and third seasons of Dexter from Amazon.com, as well as the complete run of Angel and the complete run of Veronica Mars.

I was having a bed-time gander through Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson the other night, and I came across his chapter on Bart as Punk Icon. Turner’s observations are astute, and more than valid (his basic contention is that Bart Simpson rekindled for the West a sense of jubuliant individualism and anarchy that had most notably been achieved in the past by the likes of Joey Ramone and Johnny Rotten), but reading his argument, I came across the quote that both spawned the conception of this jotting and gave it its title. I found the idea interesting, so I thought I’d write it down real quick, float it, see what people make of it.

The gist: no one will disagree that Bart Simpson does indeed embody individualism and anarchy. This little hypothesis assumes that it’s agreed he therefor pretty well rejects any kind of institutionalized philosophy or religion, anything that can be affiliated with authority. Key point. More later. Firstly, a few words on Punk.

Punk is singularly and extraordinarily revolutionary because it is so fucking postmodern – its a philosophy that was begotten not from an understanding about life or a dissent/extrapolation of pre-existing philosophies, but from the institutionalization of philosophy itself. Even nihilism faced the void – Punk knows nothing of the void, because it’s never looked that far. All it sees is a society that won’t let individuals “do what [they] feel like”, and that’s what it’s against. The philosophy of Punk, it’s grand comment on the human condition, is ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” And that is also, essentially, the philosophy of Bart.

That’s the first half of my thought.

The second half is about trying to diffuse the cynicism of this conclusion. I don’t believe it cynical, nihilistic, misanthropic or apathetic. I believe that, despite himself, Bart’s character says something quite grand about the human condition, and all schools of philosophical thought. It is of my own personal assertion that all Philosophy is born out of a need to try to understand oneself, and the all-encompassing nature of the result is simply the reasoning that all personal crises are inherently (being, as we all are, human) of the human condition. I believe Philosophy is the long-winded answer to human uncertainty, the posited Because to the posed Why. Descartes’ famous consensus “I think, therefor I am,” is fine, but it leaves open another query: “While I’m at it, I might as well think about this, too: what am I? Who am I?”

Bart Simpson, as the quote that started all this so brazenly demonstrates, knows exactly who he is. He’s Bart Simpson. He has no need for any kind of traditional philosophy, because they are answers to a question he never asked. Unnessecary to wonder the nature of man; he knows his own nature. So in lieu of philosophy, he adopts Punk, the cultural insitution of rebellion against a society that would not allow these pioneering men and women, knowing who they were, to be themselves. In doing so, he embodies also the real threat that Punk and Punk rebellion represents to the West at large – “Who the Hell are you?” The rude question, asked simply because Bart doesn’t care for respect or manners, has more meaningful implications. Don’t you know who you are? Why aren’t you as comfortable with your own place, and your own identity, as I am?

Now, I realize, in closing, that I’ve presented a pretty rosy and idealistic visage of Punk and anti-establisment sentiments. A lot of Punk philosophy is, I admit, simply a manifestation of selfishness and irresponsibility. But Bart is not these things. He has a fundamental, almost innate sense of morality, of social responsibility, of kindness. It is submerged heavily and readily below his irrepressible anarchy, but when Bart Simpson has to do the right thing, Bart Simpson does the right thing, with ferocity and aplomb, and not because he’s told to. Because he knows what’s right, he knows who he is, and he knows what do about both.

Food for Simpsonian thought.

(For further and much better studies of this ilk, I do recommend Planet Simpson. It’s a good read, if far from legitimately academic. I also pass on Martin Kingsley’s recommendation of The Simpsons and Philosophy.)

Neo-noir, its pitfalls and its triumphs in Rian Johnson's "Brick"

American cinema has been going to darker and darker places with the high school institution since the nineteen eighties tried to pass it off as a funland of pretty people and carefree antics. John Duigan’s Flirting (1991) wanted to give the trope of high school romance the proper tragic angle of which Shakespeare found it so deserving. Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) introduced a genuine savagery to the picture that had not really been seen outside of horror films (Brian De Palma’s Carrie trumps all cards in this regard). The Virgin Suicides (2000) upped the ante considerably by portraying High School and the years of adolescence as an oppressive Hell. However, it took until 2005 and an under-experienced independent filmmaker named Rian Johnson for high school to finally undergo marriage to that cinematic pinnacle of bleakness and despair that exploded onto Hollywood in the forties. Brick, the film in question, is exactly what people say it is: a teen film noir.

The film tells the dirty story of Californian teenagers who seem to exist adrift in a sea of guideless tension, completely void of adult involvement or assistance, hardened and wise to even the most vile acts of human nature. Johnson is not pulling any punches with this premise – his kids are all very real, damaged and dangerous people, some of them capable of murder, and one of them (loner anti-hero Joseph Gordon Levitt) capable of intense psychological warfare, the stakes of which are simply deadly.

The tricky thing about contemporary noir is that it can never help but be played for gimmicks. Brick is hardly spare on stylistic clichés – take this piece of expositional dialogue from the high school informant, ‘Brain’, which I assure you is no more or less stylized than any piece of dialogue in the film:

The Pin pipes it from the lowest scraper to Brad Bramish himself, maybe. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they’ll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said “Show your hands” if any of them’ve actually seen The Pin, you’d get a crowd of full pockets.

You see what I mean, I’m sure. In fact, the only dialogue in the entire film that even sounds remotely like high school is the recurring motif of lunch-eating locations. Even this is very knowingly used as a monumental piece of irony. Despite this, the film retains a certain integrity. There are other contemporary noirs that are far worse offenders.

Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City (also released in 2005) is the richest example – it is a piece so saturated in noir style, noir sensibility, noir characters and noir plots that it surpasses even the classic noir films themselves, becoming a heightened postmodern orgasm of homage and cinematic recognition. Its main problem, however, is easily identifiable. It exists in a vacuum, allowing for only the most convoluted and (I say again) postmodern of cultural readings. Sin City was made because noir is cool; it looks cool, it sounds cool, it feels cool and that coolness is the film’s sole driver.

Brick doesn’t crack the code of neo-noir greatness, but it comes pretty close, in much the same way that Chinatown (1974) and Croupier (1998) did. It justifies itself purely on the strength of its conviction that noir remains relevant; that it has something new to say about the sentiments that the noir phenomenon was built on; that something about combining early 21^st century high school life with America’s darkest cinematic hour is fundamentally right and fruitful.

And it’s hard to argue against that, because Brick’s visceral impact is somehow untouched by its gimmick and its postmodernity, somehow unfazed by the stylistic collision to which we have born witness. There is something very coherent and very powerful about the gut reaction that I had to the film. The world Johnson shows us is outrageous and implausible, but it’s mesmerizing, and while we realize he is going over the top in his depiction of modern teen life, we also realize he is not really going that far over the top. Today’s kids don’t act, talk or even think like the kids in Brick, but I believe cinema has always been the process of society dreaming, and as many a Freudian will tell you, dreams are full of metaphors and other such associations. To appreciate why this film works, you have to look at what this heavy stylization is getting at. Do the teenagers of post 9/11 America feel a deep, noir-esque sense of disillusionment and shocking worldliness? Do they feel unsafe in their schools, as though they are capable at any second of becoming either a victim or perpetrator of violence? Do they feel as though parents, teachers and police are irrelevant? Yeah, I think they probably do.

Something's after something in the children

Note: All quotes from A Nightmare on Elm Street or its DVD commentary refer to New Line Entertainment’s 2007 2-disc release of the film.

Of every social and sexual terror that has ever gotten under the skin of Western civilization, the ones that disturb most deeply are indisputably those that involve children. There is something about children that society deems untouchable, in a range of ways. We firmly believe that they live in another world, an alien but safe world, and that all matters adult are forbidden there. When these lines are blurred, base fears are released inside of us. Violence and sexuality become fundamentally worse when children are involved, fundamentally reprehensible.

Although these are protective tendencies, there’s no denying that this separation has resulted in a mild fear of children as well. They are the final and most extreme of all Robin Wood’s examples of The Other, a completely alien creature whose psyche we are vaguely amazed that we ever shared. Because of this, Horror films had begun to integrate children into their canon of Others as early, I suppose, as Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968 ), although The Omen (Donner, 1976) and Halloween (Carpenter, 1978 ) are better examples. It wasn’t until a certain Wes Craven made his mark on the cycle in the mid eighties that the concept of children in Horror was quite masterfully inversed. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984) the children are not the monster; they are the victims, and the monster is ours.

The film follows through in a very visceral way on the childish nature of Horror’s appeal, the regression to child-like states that these films evoke in us. The horrors of Elm Street are not just able to turn us into children, they are children’s horrors, and remind us with frightening power just how incapacitating these can be. Note for instance that the presence of parents in the film, and the narrative function of parents, does not (like many horror films following it) just get used as establishment for the teenage hero’s disconnection and alienation. It is held onto, made stronger throughout the film. This unbreakable bond between parent and child is never unacknowledged by Craven, but this is only to an effect that is more evil still. To our inner child, the great, world-shaking phobia of A Nightmare on Elm Street is that our parents are trying to kill us, both  through their actions (killing Freddy to begin with) and inactions (standing idly by as the horros ensue, insisting that Nancy get some sleep). This elemental terror at the heart of the film is as close as the child psyche can conceive of to the real, true and unimaginable trauma of discovering that there is no God.

Godlessness is actually a pretty key factor in what makes A Nightmare on Elm Street such an effective Horror film. Even aside from its return to the Supernatural, a film device that David Del Valle notes had come to be considered a touch old-fashioned by 1984 (Del Valle, DVD commentary), the film separates itself from the safety of normal film logic by design of its premise: the monster is a figure of dreams. He operates in an ungoverned world, and so there are no rules from which safety can be derived. All the realms that God should preside over – the finality of Freddy’s death; the physics of a space within nightmares; the protection and love of parents – are left unattended, and open to corruption. Everything that Nancy, Tina, Glen and Rod depend upon as children simply caves in, leaving them to flounder helplessly in the ocean of life until they drown. This is rather beautifully symbolized in one of Nancy’s nightmares, where she attempts to escape up the stairs of her house, only to find the staircase turns to sludge under her feet, bogging her down. The film is, for all its gory silliness, a carefully constructed tale of youths who can’t even trust the ground on which they stand to stay solid.

In this regard, Elm Street manages, I believe, to tread quite well the line between social satire and social horror. There is an undeniable element of fun being had: the exaggerated metaphor of life-and-death circumstances being dismissed by adults as kid-stuff (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer) must be acknowledged. At the same time, that metaphor extends itself to a more serious agenda – the implication that kids really do need help that they’re not getting, that as adults we are dismally failing them. It can be argued with next to no protest that the real nightmare of Elm Street is that American society no longer values or protects its children.

There is, I believe, a distinct turning point in the film away from the scary yet satirically twee twinge of Parents Disbelieving Their Kids. Through most the film it is upsetting to watch these confrontations simply because we know that Nancy, Rod and Glen are telling the truth, we’ve seen proof. But the adults of the film haven’t, and so we can forgive them their mistakes and the satire can still live. By the time of Glen (poor Johnny Depp)’s grisly death, however, the  situation (continual failure of the parent) has escalated to a point where we can no longer simply laugh at it. Nancy is, in this scene, fighting desperately to save Glen’s life and is literally being held hostage by her mother. Nancy knows that Glen is in very real and mortal danger, and the parents of the film still don’t realize she’s telling the truth yet, but what they surely can’t have missed is that this young girl is evidently suffering. Nancy is reduced to simply screeching, in tears, at the top of her lungs from within her own locked house for Glen to wake up, vainly hoping he will hear her, that she can save him. The mother remains reclined on the sofa, sipping her spirits.

This is intercut with Glen being swallowed, TV, stereo and all, by his bed. Once he has vanished into the dark, claustrophobic abyss opened up in his bed, his safe refuge, he comes tumbling back out from the hole, toward the ceiling, in liquid form. A gore-red Johnny Depp smoothie is regurgitated into his bedroom. We are confronted by this image after repetitive establishment of the fact that Nancy knew he was in danger, struggled with all her might to save him, and was stopped by their parents at every turn. It is a perfect portrait of horrific powerlessness that every child can relate to instinctively, and that every adult finds themselves remembering all too well.

This, over-arched by the fact that the film is itself “so much like a nightmare” (Del Valle, DVD commentary) in construction, production and execution, lends it an emotional integrity that was lost entirely in the largely redundant sequels (New Nightmare, while not redundant, is still a radically different film and horror experience). The first instalment blends masterfully the real and mundane tribulations of being too young to be a part of the world with the fantastic terrors you imagine may be hiding in this strange exile with you.

But these are all horrors that focus on things we already know about kids. These are horrors of helplessness, or children’s horrors. There are adult horrors at work with the children here too: horrors of disturbing worldliness, or premature maturity – horrors that do, despite Craven’s inversion of their function in such films, remind us strongly of the Otherness of children. The greatest of these must be the bathtub scene, which begins most sinisterly with Nancy falling asleep in the bath, and Freddy’s razor-fingered glove surfacing from the cloudy water between her open legs. This is an image of such sheer perversity that it sends one’s analytical mind into seizures. Firstly, it is a clear rape sublimation, and a pedophilic rape at that. Secondly, the girl is unconscious, so further unease is laid by the social implications of date-rape. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, this ‘rape’ is also oddly inverted, because Freddy’s razor fingers are not going in but coming out. The girl is not being penetrated, but extended from. It’s as though this demented and monstrous act of sexuality is coming directly from her, the child. It’s such a monumental and, in the context of the film, hermetically sealed violation of the innocence we’ve seen that its hard to integrate into our experience and perspective right away.

Furthermore, we simply can’t ignore Nancy’s being a child of divorce. While Craven suggests that it was, to his mind, the lynching of Fred Krueger that caused this marital breakdown (Craven, DVD commentary), this notion does not make itself clear in the film, and, more importantly, it isn’t needed for the divorce to nonetheless be significant. Nancy’s survivalism can be attributed to her pre-existing exposure to the falsity of adolescent innocence: she has already seen her family torn apart, witnessed the American icon disillusioned. Her parents are not a united force for her good, but a warring faction who are twice as clueless for it. The purity of these kids is already being threatened before Freddy ever makes an appearance, by the collapse of their familial sanction.

It is through this continued and thorough establishment of the Child’s world that the film makes its most powerful mark. It wasn’t long at all before a plague of teen-slasher films erupted into American cinema (the Friday the 13th sequels, Final Destination, I Know What You Did Last Summer) without for a second recognizing the importance of their teen characters, the reality their substance has to a child, the kind of innately terrifying notion of growing up and being expected to handle these horrors on your own. A handful of films have successfully plumbed the depths of Children for the purposes of the genre since then (The Sixth Sense and El Orfanato spring to mind), but mostly an obligational stance on youth has been taken. They are the audience for Horror, so they should be the characters too, and if a bit of youthful nudity happens, well, that can’t hurt either.

What A Nightmare on Elm Street understands so well, and what so many other films do not, is that horror belongs to children. Adults only think they understand it: it is not until we’re forced back into these childlike states that we remember the terrible conviction of youth and innocence, that the bogeyman is going to get us. American society may have produced enough very real horrors for its incoming generation – divorce, alienation, alcoholism, pedophilia – but kids live in their own world, one we know is alien while assuming it’s safe, and we don’t understand what affects them, how, or why. For us as children, the nightmare is that our parents damned us. For us as adults, the nightmare is that yes, we damned our children.

Steven Weber looking ready to steal Christmas

The Shining is, at its core, a story about “human monsters”. The phrase is used more than once in King’s novel and deserves its place as a pivotal concept to his story because it is not a horror fable with social subtext, but one about social horrors with a supernatural backdrop. To those who are only familiar with Kubrick’s version, a brilliant film but poor adaptation, one very fundamental difference between the two should be addressed. In King’s vision, Jack Torrance is not The Madman in a Horror Film. He is a damaged, alcoholic, unfulfilled writer with a history of anger management, one who tries with all his might to be a good man and fails. The Shining is his story, and it’s a tragedy.

That’s why, after pretty staggering success with his televisual adaptation of The Stand, King jumped at network TV’s offer of another project and immediately set about telling Jack Torrance’s story his way. The result is a mixed bag of pros and cons that any real King fan can’t walk away completely ashamed of… it does, after all, bulge with all that Kubrick omitted. The lengthy characterization, the fits and starts of insanity by its lead (I love Nicholson’s performance to pieces, but I think we all agree he looked ready to kill his kid from the very first scene in the car and to hell with the hotel) and those creepy hedges that follow you around. Steven Weber, of Wings fame, does admirably with his twisted role; whether he managed Nicholson’s menace I think is beside the point. He certainly winds up healthy, convincing levels of drunk and crazy, which is all I’m after in a mini-series that won’t let anybody cuss or be disfigured.

If you have any strong objections to the production, in fact, my research suggests it will be thus: “it wasn’t fucking scary”. Well, I’m certainly not going to get into fisticuffs with anybody over that. The furthest I’d go is ‘occasionally creepy’, although I have to confess that if we’re going to be pedantic the only film that’s ever physically scared me was Alien. Even so, I think most people can save their moods if they approach the way I approach all King: I don’t come to the party to be scared. He’ll freak me out a little when he’s really in the zone, but what I love and pay for is the stark emotional realism that he’s so in tune with. In Pet Sematary, a father loses his infant son to a roaring highway truck and is tormented with the knowledge that he could, if he chose to, bring him back to life. The most horrific thing about that novel is the slow, agonized and terrifyingly inevitable actions of the father and the sick sense that they make – King is the kind of man who sees the infinitely horrific potential behind the infinitely human paradigm: there’s nothing a parent won’t do.

The Shining’s emotional realism is its foundation for all that is unreal and supernatural about it, and what’s emotionally real about the text is already pretty terrifying: alcoholism, misogyny and child abuse. On the screen we lose some of the internal deliberation by the characters which lend these themes credence, which is a shame because if there’s one thing King can do, it’s makes you forget how stupid a character is for staying in the creepy old haunted hotel when they could leave at any time by telling you exactly why they don’t. He can’t do that through images, but he tries.

When all is said and done, this production is one created from the mind of a novelist, not a screenwriter, and that shows. But it’s also one created by Stephen King and a director-actor team that respected what he was going for, and did it reasonable justice. The result is something of a guiltily pleasurable in-joke that only established fans of the novel will really appreciate, but I’m certainly not disappointed that it’s out there.

There’s something endlessly captivating about Anthony Perkins’ performance as Norman Bates, cinema’s seminal psychopath. His boyish goofiness is part of it. His tragic schism from the reality of his mother’s death is another. But I don’t think it’s completely out of left field (nor, I imagine, was it completely out of Robert Bloch’s mind when he created the character) to purport that the most darkly fascinating thing about Norman Bates is his ostensible normalcy. When detective Arbogast firsts encounters Norman, in the scene on which I’d like to focus, he is relaxedly reading on a porch chair, munching from a bag of candy. He is soft-spoken but friendly, conversational but uncontroversial, open-faced but un-foolish. Even his name, one letter away from being the word itself, is blandly normal.

And yet, something is off about him. I’ve always thought that Psycho has another film inside it, a more haunting and enigmatic one. In my own imaginary cut, we never get to see inside the Bates house. We never get the closure of discovering the full monstrosity and insanity of Norman’s life. All we get is the hints. This is because I have always believed that even forgetting the twist in the tail for a moment, Psycho paints a pretty grisly picture indeed. We suppose the dreadfulness that we are eventually allowed to see long before we see it. It is written all over Norman’s face.

Perkins’ characterization of Norman Bates, and indeed Hitchcock’s own treatment of him, bears the profound uneasiness of a picture hung slightly askew; the distinct mark of Freud’s definition of The Uncanny. He is not the outright ‘Other’ of Robin Wood’s horror theology… in fact he strives to be quite the opposite, one of us. But there’s a vague trace of ‘the Other’ in him, throughout all the film. Even if it is something as inconsequential as a stutter, we agree with Arbogast when he says, “this isn’t gelling.”

Hitchcock notices the uncanniness of Norman in this scene too: as Arbogast checks the registration book for Marion’s alias, the camera stays squarely on Norman, while he chews nervously. When the detective claims to have found it, Norman leans over to stage left, as if with curious interest, his neck craning at an odd angle to read the off-screen registration log. The camera faces him on more-or-less eye-level, but he is looking to the side and has tipped his head so far away from us that we are looking at the underside of his chin, as though from the ground. The angle of the camera in relation to Perkins’ face in this shot (2:33 in the video above) is quietly unsettling, and not one I’ve ever seen in any other film. There’s something, quite simply, wrong about it. The audience feels that.

Not that we need such big visual hints to feel it; there is so much infinitesimally uncanny about Norman Bates that we never really escape from it. His psychological trepidations, precursors to a disturbed mind, have already been established in his talk with Marion. In that scene, we are shown his stumbling over the word ‘falsity’, his downright inability to say the word ‘bathroom’ and his sinister, bitter reaction to Marion’s suggestions regarding his mother. Here, in his talk with the detective, we see yet another to add to the list, the fixation on changing the motel’s linen, fuelled by his hatred of the smell of dampness; “It’s such a… I don’t know, creepy smell.”

Possibly, Norman’s aversion to dampness belongs to the same sick school of pathology that has him unable to leave his mother: “She’d be all alone,” he has told Marion by this point. “The fire would go out. It would be damp and cold, like a grave.” So perhaps it comes down simply to his refusal to acknowledge his mother’s death, and the threat to that refusal brought on by things which remind him of death, like dampness, or bathrooms (the bathroom being not only the scene of Marion’s murder, but of his mother’s own).

But if this is the case, it is certainly of equal note and curiosity that Norman integrates all these complex and disturbed factors into his day-to-day life. He is able, despite all of it, to casually mention to Arbogast (a complete stranger) his dislike of dampness, and treat it with his routine of changing the linen; he lets his pyschopathy become a part of his normalcy. Serendipitously, I was considering how best to convey the sense of perverted normality shown in Psycho when I inadvertently stumbled upon it, perfectly articulated, in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Through the myth of the Werewolf, or the Beast Within the Man, King has this to say about Norman Bates:

To the observing world (or the small part of it that would care to observe the proprietor of a gone-to-seed backwater motel), Norman is as normal as they come… [c]ertainly Janet Leigh sees no reason to fear him in the closing moments of her life.

But Norman is the Werewolf…Psycho is effective because it brings the Werewolf myth home. It is not outside evil, predestination; the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We know that Norman is only outwardly the Werewolf when he’s wearing Mom’s duds and speaking in Mom’s voice; but we have the uneasy suspicion that inside he’s the Werewolf all the time. (King 96)

I think it is this that captivates me the most about Norman Bates, Robert Bloch’s conception of him, Anthony Perkins’ portrayal of him and Alfred Hitchcock’s observations of him. He is the ultimate subversion of cultural ‘normality’, the sad madman who brought the whole ship of clean-shaven, well-spoken, nineteen-fifties-made American decency down. Is it wrong to suspect Norman of being, as King puts it, ‘the Werewolf’ when he offers Arbogast some candy on arrival? When he prepares dinner and shelter for Marion? When he abruptly supposes to Arbogast that he has “one of those faces you can’t help believing”, a foppish grin overrunning said face, pathetic in its lack of guile? Not at all – Norman Bates is never so scary as when you just can’t articulate what it is about him that’s so wrong.

Works Cited

• King, Stephen . “Tales of the Tarot.” Danse Macabre. Warner Books: London. 1993. 65-100.

• Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. Shamley Productions, 1960. Universal Studios, 2003.

• Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Columbia University Press: New York. 1986. 70-94.

“And wherever you’ve gone

and wherever we might go,

it don’t seem fair… today just disappeared.

Your light’s reflected now, reflected from afar.

We were but stones: your light made us stars.”

- Pearl Jam, Light Years

No, that quote is not from Ten. It came a number of years later, after Pearl Jam had miraculously survived the pathetic and traumatic death of Grunge, which floundered and crashed to the dirt in the wake of Cobain’s suicide like a monster severed from its head. It’s a nice stanza, though; nice because it shows a thoughtfulness and appreciation outside of self effacement; because it suggests that the group never intented to drive Grunge into the ground and then give up and go home; because it stands testament to the virtuosity and integrity Pearl Jam brought to the game in the early nineties, exploding with Ten as a launch pad for whatever organic path was waiting for them beyond it. Unlike almost any other seminal album of the Grunge era (even Soundgarden’s phenomenal portrait of pain, Superunknown) Ten wasn’t a dead end. It was a beginning.

The album opens with a contemplative quagmire of bass, percussion and electronic sounds. This instrumental forms a primordial motif that bookends the album (and returns at the album’s midpoint, Jeremy) and gives the album a primal, ethereal quality. In his 1991 Rolling Stone review, David Fricke comments that the album “hurtles into the mystic at warp speed” and when we listen to the qualities of the album’s opening track, Once, we can see why.

Pearl Jam: Once

It’s like a burgeoning consciousness awakening at the bottom of a swamp. It slowly begins to rise to the surface, gradually gaining momentum before exploding to the surface and causing the surrounding swamp gas to ignite with its meteoric fury. In a 1993 interview lead singer, Eddie Vedder, revealed that Once formed the middle piece in a musical triptych, composed of Alive, Once and, the B-Side to Jeremy, Footsteps. Together they tell the story of a young man whose father dies. The boy is physically identical to his father and his mother, presumably mad with grief, begins to make sexual advances on the boy. The boy, with his dead father and oedipal relationship with his mother, grows up into a disturbed young serial killer. Finally he is caught, executed and goes out with a litany of curses against the world that wronged him. If you think this is grim subject matter, then you’re on to something, but this is all par for the course for Vedder.

Vedder’s truest talent, besides his animalistic vocality, is his ability to translate the strange and depraved stories (mostly fictional at that) that he tells with his lyrics into solid and infallible chunks of trans personal human truth. Why Go is about a teenage girl sent by her own mother to be locked up in a mental institution, presumably for being “too real”. Maybe Vedder needs these specific social gripes to get him to his magic place, but the bottom line is that when I listen to Why Go, all I hear are the base emotions behind it: anger, pain, displacement, loss. I can’t relate to no crazy girl – but I can relate to these things. Although maybe I’m giving the guy with the mic too much credit: if music is the language of the soul, isn’t it more likely that it’s Gossard, McCready, Ament and Krusen who are speaking these themes to me? Pounding out pain in the beat of the bass, shredding my senses like so many fretboards? Food for thought.

In an SBS special on albums that changed the world, a lackey for Madonna or some such declared that Grunge “didn’t do much for music”. What he was referring to is one of those delightful reversible arguments that can be used powerfully by both the yea and naysayers – it’s incredibly sad and dark. The negative take on this, the one that techno boy here was probably on board with, is that it depresses you. What they won’t tell you in the Spice Girl Appreciation Society is that depressing music, if done right, can positively inspire. It can make you feel less alone. It can sweep you up in its arms of doom and get you singing the gospel of the damned. Black people have every right in the world to feel furious and depressed; blues and hip hop can’t speak to us pasties like it can to them. Grunge was the anthem of the unrighteous disillusioned; Ten was our rainbow flag.

Pearl Jam: Jeremy

Jeremy is a perfect example of what it is that makes Ten special as well as Vedder’s ability to cut through the abstract of our societal traumas. It is an intersection of Vedder’s casually powerful lyrics, grim subject matter, sprawling sing-a-long melodies and the band’s intense, layered musicality. This is not only a quintessentially 1990’s or Grunge song, it is a quintessentially American song and an American song perfect for the time of its release. While the Columbine shootings at the end of the decade have become the iconic American School shooting event of the 1990’s, there was a particular climate in middle America during the 1990’s which resulted in a range of school shootings. Vedder touches on many of the things that were cited as contributing factors to the occurrences of the Columbine and other school shootings, years later. Apathetic parents, bullies and a disturbed mind left unattended are Vedder’s checklist for how such a tragedy could occur.

We are introduced to Jeremy as he is drawing a picture of himself atop a mountain, with all the trappings of an adorable children’s painting: a “lemon yellow sun” and Jeremy with his “arms raised in a V”. It is only revealed in the last line of the verse that beneath Jeremy (standing in a victory stance), at the bottom of the mountain, “Dead lay in pools of maroon”. So, in effect, we’re introduced to Jeremy as he’s drawing a picture of himself, towering above the mutilated corpses of his enemies. This would surely be of concern to most parents but, as Vedder points out in the bridge, “Daddy didn’t give attention/To the fact that mommy didn’t care”. This is promptly followed by the surprisingly reflective perception of one of Jeremy’s bullies:

Clearly I remember
Picking on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth
And bit the recess lady’s breast

This articulates perfectly the capability of bullies to never understand just how bad bullying is. The bully generally ignores Jeremy, except when he sees an opportunity to exploit him for entertainment. He is, at best, a fond memory of an entertaining moment when “that weird kid went crazy”. The flippant tone suggests little more than bemusement at the “harmless little fuck” who “bit the recess lady’s breast”. Conspicuously absent are the adults in this situation. We only hear about Jeremy’s parents as a distant, uncaring presence and there are no teachers or school staff, aside from the afore mentioned recess lady. This is a picture of a kid who, despite giving the world plenty of warnings, isn’t heard. This absence of adults and societal apathy is rammed home in the video clip for the song, in which everyone but jeremy is completely static and unmoving. It is this that makes the choice of singing “Jeremy spoke in class today” in the chorus (as opposed to “Jeremy blew his head off in class”) all the more powerful. Jeremy has been ignored all his life and the only statement he can make that people will listen to is one that he makes with a gun. This lyrical style, steeped in sublimation and symbolism, is a defining characteristic the album. Vedder has an ability to convey a sense of powerless pain and desperation which, when it combines with Gossard’s compositions, perfectly reflects the feeling of impotent rage which plagues everyone at some point in their life. The feeling that something is desperately wrong , there is nothing you can do about it and nobody seems to care. Which brings us squarely to Black, the emotional and, arguably, musical centrepiece of the album.

Pearl Jam: Black

This is the miserable break-up song. While many have written about the anguish of loosing a lover none have articulated the pain and wretchedness of the experience like Vedder has in this song. For this man, the woman he lost was central to his existence. She presented a cosmic gravity which provided him with a stability which he could find nowhere else. This is first illustrated when he says “All five horizons revolved around her soul/As the earth to the sun”, placing her at the centre of his universe, with him as a mere planetary body revolving around her. The metaphor of her as his “sun” is a persistent contrast to the world of black void that he now inhabits. This is very much a song about standing bitterly bewildered as you begin to pick up the pieces of your broken life. Vedder manages to convey the the cornucopia of negative emotion that one experiences when someone you love leaves you. He oscillates between bitter and defensive when he says “all I taught her was everything” but almost immediately begins to despair at “how quick the sun can drop away”. There is a genuine, heartfelt anguish that cannot be ignored in this song. The haunting motif in the chorus of a disintegrating life turning black is one which is hard to be unaffected by. Of special note is the second chorus in which his “bitter hands cradle broken glass/of what was everything”. The memories of his life with this woman have shattered in such a way that any contact with them is excruciating, as if he were holding a shattered glass. The tragedy is, no matter how much it hurts, he can’t let go. Ultimately, the song reaches a crescendo in which he pleads:

I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life,
I know you’ll be a sun in somebody else’s sky, but why
Why, why can’t it be, why can’t it be mine?

This is the distilled desperation of the dumped. She broke his heart, his world is destroyed and all he wants to know is why? Despite everything that happened, his love for her is so monumental that the only thing that can undo the hurt is the impossibility of getting her back (which no doubt compounds the hurt considerably). Beyond this incredibly sad and beautiful plea there is nothing else to say. The final minute and a half of the song’s vocals are a keening melody of nothing words, a cathartic expulsion of pain and regret.

Ten’s parting words are, very wisely, gentle and wistful. That’s not too say they’re not powerful: I’m sure the argument could be made that they’re some of the most powerful on the record. They comprise a lyrical letter to Vedder’s father, or the father of a character Vedder has created, and they are given to us in the aptly titled last track Release. The song is the most understated of them all (a trend that would be continued on the group’s follow up album Vs and its last track Indifference) and the beauty part is that the lack of bells and whistles lets you see just how fucking perfect these musicians are for each other. They mill and swirl around Vedder’s exposed and broken heart, threatening at several points to explode but always pulling back at the last moment (most of this is achieved through feedback control, but to put it into technical terms sullies it). The lyrical content is unusually introspective, even for Vedder, in that there’s no external force at work at all, no hitchhiker about to get fucked up, no mothers trying to seduce their sons, no bullying or rape or breakups. There’s just sadness… and at long and longing last, an expressed want for that sadness to end. “I’ll hold the pain,” enunciates Vedder, making very sure we hear him because this is the important part. “Release me.” Grunge was a good ride while it lasted, but here in its microcosmic record, we see the ending before Kurt Cobain ever did: no one can hold onto hurt this huge forever. Sooner or later, everyone needs release.

Now, go and listen to the album.

If you don’t have it, you can obtain a copy here.

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