The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World – Joker

Written by Tom

Even though the DCEU mainline films were becoming more optimistic and joyous, they had still made DC and Warner Bros. hesitant about keeping their eggs in one basket. As such, they started to diversify, greenlighting a range of movies which would foreground idiosyncratic takes on the superhero genre while limiting those takes to one film each. The first film of this type (beyond TV spin-offs like Teen Titans GO! to the Movies) was Todd Philips’ Joker – a more grounded take on the genre providing a downbeat origin story for its eponymous character.

Ironically, the concept of Joker fits in well with the Snyder era of the DCEU. The early DCEU was very interested in blurring the lines between heroes and villains as a (perhaps overly literal) way of defining itself as the anti-Marvel cinematic universe. This was the era which treated Superman and Batman as deranged anti-heroes and had previously used the “villains as main characters” set-up in the first Suicide Squad movie. Given this, the obvious thing to do with “A DCEU Joker movie” would’ve been to make a film which had him be villainous while unambiguously siding with him. Of course, you’d then have the issue that the Joker is canonically one of the worst people in the entire DC canon – making a movie that sided with him would be making a movie justifying a complete monster. As such, Joker went with the least morally repugnant spin open for it: it presented itself as a social satire, telling a story about how the stresses of modern capitalism slowly push a basically sympathetic man into becoming an utter psychopath.

This aspect immediately made Joker one of the more controversial films of the DCEU, an impressive feat given that this is a series containing Batman vs. Superman. It’s a story about a white man who goes on a killing spree because he feels that modern society has failed him. It was released at the same time that white men who disliked modern society were shooting up schools, driving cars into protestors, sending death threats to women on the internet, invading the capitol, and all sorts of stupid shit. The critical line against the film formed almost immediately: this was a film about and for the alt-right. Then Todd Philips started spending his promotional interviews complaining about cancel culture and how political correctness has ruined comedy, worsening the film’s reputation. You can see how the “it’s slightly fascist” readings took root: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might be a duck. I know several people who straight up refuse to watch this movie, having completely rejected the idea that it could possibly have social worth. This is a film that people won’t watch on principal.

In Defence of: Lost River (2014)

Written by Tom

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Something I like to do on this blog is provide the case for texts which have been largely dismissed, particularly when they’re quite interesting pieces derided by an audience who are uninterested in reading them on their own terms. This is what I did for Weiner-Dog and Mute, and is the basic concept behind my Love Island Diaries, my essays on Doctor Who Series 10 and my ongoing DC Extended Universe vs. the World series. And boy do we have a doosy today: Lost River – 31% on Rotten Tomatoes, 5.8/10 on IMDb, critically panned, commercially unsuccessful, and absolutely brilliant.

What an odd object it is too. Written/directed by Ryan Gosling (yes, that Ryan Gosling) and starring both Saoirse Ronan and Matt Smith (who knew they were in a film together), I knew I had to watch it based on those names alone. Once I found that it was a visually intense piece of nightmarish surrealism about a forgotten underclass trying to survive American capitalism, it went straight to the top of my “Watch it now” list. And after finding that it’s really quite good… well here we are.

But liking this film seems to put me in the minority. The reviews on Google are pretty much unanimous that Lost River is a confusing mess that has no plot. Robbie Collins straight up refuses to accept it as cinema, claiming that “Gosling hasn’t really made a film [as much as] he’s pointed a camera at some things that he seems to think belong in one”, producing a morally vacant “Instagrammed poverty safari” that “has nothing to tell us about poverty other than that it looks, like, really cool”. The Guardian agreed, calling it “colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited”. So it’s a plotless vanity project in which a rich man treats the poor like zoo exhibits. At least with the argument against the film so staunchly defined, it’s easy to come up with the defence: we just have to explain what the film’s narrative structure is actually doing, tie this into working class existence from the perspective of someone who’s actually lived through the bastard, and then conclude things by calling it a working class magick trick in which the evils of capital can be resisted by a mythical take on collectivism. By Fnord standards, it’s almost simple.

“Doctor Who: Oxygen” vs. Capitalist Realism

Written by Tom

[Previously: “Doctor Who: Knock Knock” vs. the British Housing Industry]

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If you want to argue that Doctor Who Series 10 is a politically active show (and we do), then “Oxygen” is exhibit A. The villain is literally capitalism. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor spends half the episode making speeches about how society boils down to the workers vs. the suits. It ends with the event that will canonically end capitalism as a political system and bring on its replacement. It’s the single most blatantly anti-capitalist episode that Doctor Who has ever done.

From our perspective though, this leaves us with surprisingly little to talk about. You can pretty easily spin a few thousand words arguing that “Smile” is anti-neoliberal and you’re going to get something at least interestingly counter-intuitive out of it. You’re not getting any brownie points for noting that “Oxygen” is political though. My first plan for this entry was to just post a link to the script and leave it at that. There’s not a lot to do here.

This gets compounded by the fact that “Oxygen” isn’t actually doing anything much differently from the other episodes leading up to it. We noted the series’ anti-capitalist leanings when looking at “Smile”. It’s anti-exploitation angle and general alignment with anti-capitalist youth cultures is shared with “Thin Ice”. ‘People are being killed by the economic contexts around them’ is also the plot of “Knock Knock”. Sure, “Oxygen” might be the most blatant engagement with these themes – and its existence oddly helps things like the “Smile is anti-neoliberal” argument in that it proves that anti-capitalism was on the production teams’ minds at the time – but it’s not anything all too unique in itself.

What mostly separates it from the pack is how vicious it is: while “Smile” hides its messages behind sleek imagery and emoji jokes, “Oxygen” is a grim survival horror that temporarily kills a companion and ends by blinding the Doctor. This is mostly part and parcel of the episode being particularly blatant about its themes though: something that’s so willing to be a series of angry rants about the evils of capitalism needs things as heightened as spacesuit zombies, companion deaths and people getting blinded to justify the anger. Despite being the most openly anti-capitalist Doctor Who episode so far, it’s really just a particularly strong flavour of Series 10’s political angles in general.

Instead of looking at it from inside the context of Doctor Who then, “Oxygen” is best served by being taken as a cultural object, because the important thing to remember about this episode isn’t just that it’s a grimdark anti-capitalist rant, it’s that it’s a grimdark anti-capitalist rant first broadcast on a Saturday afternoon on BBC1 just before the Eurovision Song Contest.

The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: Teen Titans GO! To The Movies

Written by Tom

The DCEU was beginning to splinter before our eyes. Batman vs Superman and Suicide Squad had been critical punching bags. Justice League got released to complete indifference. Wonder Woman became a hit by rejecting everything that had defined the DCEU up to that point. Things weren’t good. Cinematic Universes were turning out to be damp squibs anyway. Despite the large number of them which popped up in the wake of Marvel’s, few had managed any real traction. Audiences didn’t like cinematic universes, they liked Marvel films, interlinked or not. At this point, it must’ve been tempting to give up on the whole thing. So they did. Sorta.

They didn’t give up on it completely. They were still to release Aquaman. Birds of Prey was to feature Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad. Wonder Woman had a direct sequel in production. James Gunn was nabbed for the universe as soon as he got fired from Marvel’s. But it was nowhere near as structured as it once was. Instead of trying to dictate what the audience wanted before giving it to them, DC’s new strategy was to throw things on screen and develop whatever proved popular. It’s notable that Harley Quinn’s getting her own film while the Flash and Cyborg have found themselves largely forgotten.

More than this, DC started commissioning movies that had nothing to do with the DCEU. Todd Phillip’s upcoming film Joker has nothing to do Jared Leto, for instance. And then, between the release of Justice League and Aquaman, we got this: a cinema outing for the TV show Team Titans GO!

Incredibles 2: a much anticipated blog post

Written by Daniel – It’s the most anticipated blog post of the year. My thoughts on one of the most anticipated sequel, it is 2018’s Disney-Pixar Incredibles 2. Written and directed by Brad Bird the events of Incredibles 2 follow directly on from The Incredibles (Bird, 2004), opening where we left off: with Underminer and our incredible family donning their masks ready for action. I’ll try and give a spoiler free review to open, then I’ll give you a heads up when it’ll be spoilers galore and rambling-analysis as per my usual approach. Here goes.

The film is a lot of fun, I don’t think I’ve had such a pleasant and enjoyable viewing experience watching a film (perhaps since seeing Paddington 2?). The film opens with the Parr family donning their masks to save the city from the claws of the Underminer, who is causing mass destruction to the city, continuing on exactly from where we left off in the first film from back in 2004. Our Incredible family battle it out, but Underminer escapes. As a result the Parr family is arrested (as superheros, continuing form the last film, are still illegal), until, business man Winston Deavor comes to their help. Winston wants to see Superhero’s return, and with the assistance of his sister Evelyn, they enrol Helen Parr to return as Elastigirl and begin their campaign for the legalisation of superheros. Whilst Helen is off saving the city as Elastigirl, Bob is at home with the kids, trying his hardest to connect with his kids, and keep Jac-Jac’s new found powers under control.

As Elastigirl patrols the city, restoring the citizens faith in superhero’s once again, she uncovers a super villain who goes under the name Screenslaver, who has the ability to hijack technology and hypnotise its users. Screenslaver hatches a plan to kidnap and hypnotise the growing community of superheros and see that superheros stay illegal forever!

“The Endpoint of Capitalism. We’re Fighting an Algorithm. A Spreadsheet.” (Kerblam! Review)

Written by Tom

You know how a lot of nostalgia-obsessed male Star Wars fans took against The Last Jedi because it kept treating them as the villains and thus disrupted their ability to receive the hero wish fulfillment that they got from the series while growing up? Well keep that in mind because, starting from paragraph three, I’m going to be fucking livid at this episode due to the way that I felt targeted by it’s ending. This is an episode which deliberately states that people like me are everything that’s wrong with society right now. I’m obviously not happy with that.

Let’s take the egos out of this for a paragraph though and admit that this is a well done episode. Doctor Who takes on Amazon is a great idea and exactly the type of thing Doctor Who should be doing right now. The character work is superlative: with very little screen time, all of the guest cast become the most rounded and likable characters of the series so far. The design work is great too, particularly the robots who are fantastically creepy. Giving the first Kerblam! drone a Talking-Toaster-esque human personality was a nice touch. The escalator scene was really fun. The idea of killer bubble wrap is Doctor Who-y in the extreme. Having the break area be an externally-filmed garden was an inspired bit of weirdness. I really did love the first 45 minutes of this episode; so much of it was great.

But that ending. How fucking dare it.

“Doctor Who: Smile” vs. Neoliberalism

Written by Tom
Utopias, Captialist Realism, Colonialism and more in the Doctor Who episode ‘Smile’.

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[Previously: “Doctor Who: The Pilot” vs. Heteronormativity]

One of the great joys of Doctor Who to me is how it’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to storytelling allows the myriad of images it crams into every episode to spark off each other in fascinating and deliciously over-signified ways. That’s what I love about ‘Smile’: the way that it’s bricollage of images and concepts come together to create a mad-house which practically bristles with half-formed radical ideas. Sure, the end result is one of the most staggeringly incoherent episodes that NuWho has ever done. It’s narrative structure, built on constantly reversing what we think the plotline is, only serves to fracture the thorough-threads from one idea to the next, making it hard to figure out what they’re actually supposed to be; this means that it never gets the chance to properly merge its ideas and images into any one central point, leaving the episode filled with gaps which serve to nullify and weaken many of episode’s overall implications. Then again, the presence of these gaps and the lack of path through them only gives us the space to travel through the episode ourselves and come up with our own counter-narratives to the show itself, whether what we see is intended by the show or not. So let’s do that: a stroll through one of Doctor Who‘s most over-signified episodes in years, pulling at its ideas until they eventually break apart.

Let’s start with the theme that Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the episode’s writer, definitely meant to put in here: Utopia. According to interviews, the inspiration behind ‘Smile’ came when Cottrell-Boyce was thinking about Utopias and, more accurately, noticed that utopias didn’t really pop up in sci-fi anymore while dystopias were all the range. As such, he decided to write an episode about an utopia, coming up with this episode’s hyper-modern colony base designed to be the perfect place for future humans to live.

Anyone who’s read Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism will be aware of the reasons why Utopias are currently out of vogue.

The Doctor Who Book Club – The Christmas Invasion

Written by Tom
Continuing our look at the new Doctor Who novelisations, we ask why The Christmas Invasion book exists and how it changes its original story for more cynical times.

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A fair question you could ask is why I left The Christmas Invasion to be the last of the NuWho Target novels that I covered, given how I reviewed all the other books in series order. The honest answer is that The Christmas Invasion was the book that I felt I’d have the least to write about. All the other books were big event episodes written by massive names who hadn’t written Doctor Who novels in decades, while The Christmas Invasion was an relatively odd choice of episode to be novelised and was done by a relatively less known writer who’s already contributed quite a few books to various NuWho novel ranges. It seemed like it’d be a trickier, less inspiring thing to grapple with. With this in mind, and given that I’d given myself a fortnight to read each novel and write 2,000 words on them, I put The Christmas Invasion in the last slot purely to give me more time to figure out what to say about it.

Pretty much all of the oddities of the book came from the choice of The Christmas Invasion to novelise. The NuTarget range of books picked one episode from each Doctor’s era in order to represent the entirety of NuWho up until the point of publication. To ensure that there was some buzz around the series and to justify the series’ space on bookshelves, they picked big episodes from each era which had some form of mythic tagline – “The first episode ever broadcast”, “The 50th Anniversary Special”, “Peter Capaldi’s last episode and the one that most recently aired”. To provide extra buzz and give the mini-range some thematic unity, they also went for episodes which primarily revolved around regenerations – Rose is the first time we see the Ninth Doctor, The Day of the Doctor is a multi-Doctor epic with several regenerations in it, and Twice Upon a Time is Capaldi’s last episode/Jodie Whittaker’s first.

The thing is, given all this, what episode would you choose to represent David Tennant’s era? Firstly, what big episodes of Tennant’s era could you novelise? Episodes like Midnight or Gridlock are well respected, but lack any big iconography or selling point that would put them on the same level as the other episodes in the range (I don’t think “The return of the Macra!” would quite cut it). Human Nature/The Family of Blood is a big episode, but the novel version of it already exists. Blink is massively important, but you’d want Moffat to write that one and he’s already working on The Day of the Doctors. Plus, none of these episodes feature regenerations.

So, What the Hell is ‘Love Island’ Actually About?

Written by Tom

Right, this will be our last Love Island post ever. I promise. To those who’ve come to this post through an archive or just came across it through Google, over the past two months, I’ve spent too much of my time watching the fourth series of Love Island, the infamous UK reality show broadcast by ITV2. While watching it, I also maintained a “Love Island Diary” through needlessly long statuses that I posted every other day on my Facebook page (and subsequently archived on this blog). My aim was to provide a running commentary on how Love Island worked as a TV show and what it was doing as a text, asking what types of arguments you could make about Love Island if you treated it like a Lynch film or an actual work of art. The series is finished now and so – 2 months, 49 episodes and 28 posts later – it’s time to finally answer the ultimate question: after all’s been said and done, what the fuck is Love Island?

Let’s go over the obvious: it’s a reality show/game show in which a bunch of singletons are grouped together in a villa and forced to pair off. Eventually one pair will remain, of which one person will be given £50,000 and asked if they want to keep the money or share it with their ‘beloved’.

You’d think that such a show would be about love or romance in some way. It sorta is, sorta isn’t.

The Story Makers & Public Services

Written by Tom
A reading of the Cbeebies series The Story Makers in relation to Monday’s post on Fun Song Factory, discussing its representation of reading and social services.

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Last post, I talked about the theme of capitalism in the direct-to-video pre-school series Fun Song Factory. While I was writing about how the Fun Song Factory works by putting base materials into a funnel and having songs come out the other end, I found myself immediately reminded of another pre-school show in which base materials were put into a funnel and transformed into a piece of media. And look, if I ever get the chance to talk about The Story Makers, I’m taking it. I love this show with all of my heart.

The Story Makers is a Cbeebies pre-school show produced during the early 2000s (when my sisters were born, in case anyone was wondering why I was watching it). The series is set in a library. Every night, the library shuts and three figures come out to play – two puppets called Jelly and Jackson and Milton Wordsworth (played by Danny John-Jules, best known as Cat from Red Dwarf). Together, they take things left by library residents, feed them into the library computer and produce new storybooks out of them. Each book would be one of a series – either a Blue Cow book, a Kevin the Spaceman book, a Sniff and Wag book, etc. – and they’d always be read out once produced (by which I mean the actors would start reading the book, at which point the show would fade to a narrated short film which represented the book’s contents).

The series is frankly magical. The dark library setting, the fact that Milton Wordsworth is a literal wizard, and the poetic tone to the whole thing just carries with it a sense of mystery and majesty. It made writing and reading seem genuinely wondrous; I have to imagine that a lot of currently budding artists and writers watched this as children.

But because we’re here and I’ve got a blog to write, let’s have a look at some of the show’s political subtexts! And because this is pretending to be some form of series, let’s define those subtexts in relation to Fun Song Factory. Because honestly, if I ever get the chance to write something comparing the political subtexts of Fun Song Factory and The Story Makers and I decide not to do it, I have officially grown up and thus lost all sense of myself.