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: World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls” vs. The World

Written by Tom

[Previously: “Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light” vs. The Concept of Borders]

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If there is a single political message underpinning the entire Capaldi era, it’s “Be Better”. The Twelfth Doctor was born an old man uncertain of his worth: was he a good man; did he deserve to be the Doctor? And over the course of his three seasons, he learnt, grew and tried to improve himself. Pointedly, he did so by listening to the women around him, particularly Clara. Clara became his moral compass and taught him about the need to give the people around him autonomy. Given this freedom, she was able to ascend to the Doctor’s level, while his attempts to reverse her death, refusing to let go of her life, got presented to us as the one time Capaldi’s Doctor became truly monstrous. Through this, the Doctor relearned the importance of taking a supportive role in people’s lives: in listening to people, empathising with them and standing up for them. In short, the Doctor went from a grumpy insular white man unsure of his place in an intersectional age to an effective ally. He then took his position of authority and privilege and used it to help a queer woman of colour, giving her an education she couldn’t afford while showing her the stars. He got out of his own ass and started helping people. He got better.

This in turn brings us to the big aspect of Series 10 that we haven’t talked about yet: Missy, the woman in the vault. Over the course of the series, Missy has been imprisoned in a vault that it’s the Doctor’s duty to guard. While there, the Doctor has been trying to teach Missy how to not be evil because he misses when they were friends. Having gone through a profound period of change from asshole to good person himself, he’s now trying to help someone he loves to make the change too. In turn, Missy takes the role of a cracked mirror to Capaldi’s Doctor: the brisque and unpredictable Time Lord who, over the course of a season, becomes increasingly worried that their actions aren’t up to snuff before slowly trying to better themselves, begrudgingly forcing themselves to accept the help of others in the process. Both plot lines embody in micro what the Capaldi era’s been about on a macro level, ending his era with the character that Capaldi’s Doctor has grown into alongside a reminder of how his character began.

This said, the attempt to improve Missy is always presented as a double-edged sword. After several decades of the Master, we know now them as evil incarnate, “evil” being pretty much their entire character description. As such, we’re set against the Doctor helping Missy in a way that we’ve never been with the Doctor helping Bill, and are set against Missy in a way that we’ve never been with the Doctor. Given that she’s the morally grey slaughterer of worlds who’s gleefully killed hundreds in front of us, who’s to say that this will end well? Well, to cut a long story short, it doesn’t. The Doctor takes Missy, Bill and Nardole to a space station in order to give Missy a chance at being the hero. Within 10 minutes, the situation is entirely out of control and Bill’s been shot in the chest before getting kidnapped by medical patients. A few hours later, Capaldi’s been blown up by the Cybermen and his regeneration begins.

“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.

“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.

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 Love Island Diaries: Week One

Written by Tom
Continuing from my previous look of the first two episode of this year’s series of Love Island, here’s a few observations based on episodes three to five.

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The Problem with Love Island‘s Contestants
written in relation to Episode Three

Several episodes in, the big issue with the programme has become the fact that there is still almost nothing to actually differentiate the vast majority of the contestants. The very nature of the way that the show gets made means that the contestants are limited to a very specific type of person. Firstly, only a very specific type of person would agree to take part in the show in the first place. Secondly, ITV2 only feature a very select type of person in these types of programmes as these are the types of people they’ve had financial success with in the past and they don’t want to start losing money. Finally, there’s the fact that ITV2 would have to pick people who are vaguely similar to each other, else no-one actually fall in love with anyone else and you end up with a dating game set on an island where nobody much talks to each other. It’s all fair enough from a production viewpoint, but the end result this series has been a show in which eleven variations of the same person tie themselves into minor knots over relationships which have been rather arbitrarily thrown together over the past three days. It isn’t exactly a pinnacle of drama.