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: Knock Knock” vs. the British Housing Industry

Written by Tom

[Previously: “Doctor Who: Thin Ice” vs. the Jeremy Vine Show & Fascism]

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2017 was the right time to have an episode about the British Housing Industry, much the same way that 2018 was the right time to have an episode about Amazon. Critiques of the housing industry were becoming more and more plentiful. It was too expensive, locking many young, working class people out of owning their own home. The rented housing industry was too skewed towards the landlords and against the tenants. It wasn’t even a legal requirement for rented houses to be fit for habitation yet. People were getting angry. And then the Grenfell disaster happened, bringing everything to a head.

On 14th June 2017, the Grenfell Towers (a 24-storey tower block of public housing flats located in West London) caught on fire, killing over 70 people. The disaster was a neoliberal tragedy in which working class people died due to their landlords actively prioritising rich people over them. Residents had been trying to get their landlord company (KCTMO, a government outsourced ‘tenant management organisation‘) to improve the fire safety conditions of the flats for years and received little more than legal demands that they stop. Instead KCTMO spent a lot of money covering the tower block in cladding, placating the demands of the richer people in the local area who wanted it to be turned into less of eye-sore while also making the property a more attractive proposition for new residents. This cladding was a non-fireproofed version bought and used because it was relatively cheap, despite the fact that it failed all safety tests and probably should’ve been illegal to buy in the UK. Then, when a fridge-freezer on the fourth floor caught fire, this cladding was what allowed it to spread so quickly up the entire block. Meanwhile, all the recent refurbishments to the tower block that KCTMO had done only worked to restrict fire exits and make it more difficult for a) people to get out of the block and b) the emergency services to get in.

Everything about the disaster shows exactly where KCTMO’s (and the entire housing industries’) priorities lay. Every improvement to the tower block done by KCTMO wasn’t done to improve the lives of the people living in it but was done either to placate the wealthier (and thus more influential) people who lived around the flats or to bring more people into them, increasing the worth of the company’s assets and thus the company’s incomes. Anyone who was actually living in the blocks weren’t cared about: they were already paying KCTMO their monthly amount of money and so there wasn’t anything to be gained out of improving their experience. Their lives were only deemed worth helping if it would simultaneously open up new income streams. In the landlord’s eyes, their clients were nothing more than capital, only worth investing in if they were to receive a sizeable return.