Tag: Donald Trump

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Liar wolves, not dire wolves

 

From unsplash.com / © Reyk Odinson

 

Donald Trump has recently rampaged through the world’s global trade system with the delicacy of Godzilla taking a stomp around downtown Tokyo.  That would be Godzilla after he’d been on a week-long cocaine binge.  So, in the current climate of gloom, dread and despondency, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the world’s news outlets have latched desperately and uncritically onto a story that looks like good, even uplifting, news.  Those news outlets have made much of the claim by an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company called Colossal Biosciences that it’s created the first dire wolves to have graced Planet Earth in about ten millennia.

 

The dire wolf, according to Wikipedia, is “an extinct species of canine which was native to the Americas during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs (125,000-10,000 years ago).”  It was generally bigger than most modern wolves.  Research suggests “the average dire wolf to be similar in size to the largest modern grey wolf.”  Dire wolves also pop up in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1991-2011), but more about that in a minute.

 

The headlines have come fast and furious: DIRE WOLF REPORTEDLY BROUGHT BACK FROM EXTINCTION; NO LONGER EXTINCT: DIRE WOLVES HOWL AGAIN AFTER 12,000 YEARS; LONG EXTINCT, DIRE WOLVES ARE BACK, AND NOT JUST IN GAME OF THRONES; SCIENTISTS PERFORM WORLD’S FIRST DE-EXTINCTION TO REVIVE THE DIRE WOLF THAT VANISHED 12,000 YEARS AGO.  Time Magazine stuck a picture of one of three dire wolves supposedly created by Colossal Biosciences on a recent cover, below the word ‘extinct’ with a line scored through it and the inspiring message: “This is Remus.  He’s a dire wolf.  The first to exist in over 10,000 years.  Endangered species could be changed forever.”

 

So hey, this is great news, yeah?  Extinction is bad, so ‘de-extinction’ must be good, right?  And since much extinction in the last couple of millennia had been caused by humanity, isn’t it gratifying to see good old human know-how being put to work reversing the process and bringing one – hopefully the first of many – extinct species back?

 

Except, of course, that it’s a load of bollocks.  The New Scientist has responded to the company’s claims with an article whose lead-in puts it succinctly: “Colossal Biosciences claims three pups born recently are dire wolves, but they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species.”  Although some genuine dire-wolf DNA was used in the project, the genome was merely analysed to determine what a dire wolf’s key traits would be.  The DNA itself was way too aged and decayed to be spliced into anything, Jurassic Park-style.  The Colossal Biosciences team then made edits to modern-day grey-wolf DNA to replicate those dire-wolf traits.  Finally, three modified wolf-pups were produced using domestic-dog surrogate mothers and caesarean sections.  So what you’ve got aren’t dire wolves.  You’ve got three grey-wolf pups that’ve been tinkered with genetically to give them characteristics the team think dire wolves might have had.

 

The analogy here isn’t the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park (1993).  No, it’s Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, David Hedison and Jill St John.  In that film, the dinosaur special effects were achieved by taking modern reptiles like iguanas, monitor lizards and crocodiles and glueing horns, frills and fins onto them to make look ‘dinosaur-ish’.   Which is what’s been done with these young grey wolves in a fancy, high-tech way.

 

The Irish-American palaeontologist and writer Caitlin R. Kiernan summed it up bluntly in her online journal the other day: “…there’s this bullshit about a company named Colossal Biosciences claiming to have resurrected dire wolves.  They haven’t.  Not even close.  It’s a hoax that would make P.T. Barnum proud.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © American Museum of Natural History

 

Also, it’s not merely nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.  It makes extinction sound like something that’s solvable through scientific jiggery-pokery, an error that can be fixed without the arduous, inconvenient lengths that human beings need to go to to prevent extinctions happening, which is to stop killing life-forms through hunting, habitat-destruction, economic consumption and general greed, cruelty and ignorance.

 

In the last few days alone, I’ve seen stories on the Guardian’s environment page about a report on New Zealand’s environment, which warns that “76% of freshwater fish, 68% of freshwater birds, 78% of terrestrial birds, 93% of frogs, and 94% of reptiles” are “threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened”; and a warning by 32 charity organisations that proposals under the British government’s new planning bill “could push species towards extinction and lead to irreversible loss”; and the grim likelihood that Donald Trump’s decimation of USAID will wreck conservation projects leading to increased poaching and habitat encroachment and serious threats to such animals as lemurs, white rhinos, gorillas, orangutans and elephants.

 

The uncritical coverage given to the dire-wolf story is harmful because it encourages the idea that animal extinction is not so serious now because science can resurrect those animals later.  Which would be bad enough if the idea was based on proper science.  But it’s not – it’s based on the spin coming out of Colossal Biosciences.

 

As I said, direwolves (spelt not as two but as one word) turn up in the Game of Thrones books: “Direwolves once roamed the north in large packs…   According to Theon Greyjoy, direwolves have not been sighted south of the Wall for two hundred years.  Rangers of the Night’s Watch hear direwolves beyond the Wall.”  I’m quoting a Game of Thrones wiki here, as I’ve never read the books.  I haven’t watched the 2011-2019 TV show based on them either, having always intended to read the books first.

 

I find it a bit disappointing that Games of Thrones author George R.R. Martin seems to have swallowed the Colossal Biosciences hype hook, line and sinker.  In a recent blogpost, he said in February he’d been to visit the secret installation where the three supposed direwolves are being kept.  Obviously in a state of giddy excitement, he declared: “I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon…  And Colossal is just beginning.   Still to come, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and… yes… the dodo…  I can’t wait.” The post also has an undeniably cute picture of him holding one of the genetically-edited beasties.

 

To be fair to Martin, I suppose it must be flattering to have a biotech company pay you the compliment of (allegedly) creating some animals that nowadays most people only know as fantasy-creatures in your novels.  So flattering that it’s befuddled his critical faculties.  Of course, it’s likely that Colossal Biosciences chose to work on dire wolves because the creatures are currently famous due to the Game of Thrones phenomenon – making it an excellent PR stunt that’s earned them lots of headlines.

 

And I suppose, as someone who writes fantasy fiction under the penname Rab Foster, I’d be flattered too if a biotech company offered to create some fabulous animals or monsters that’d appeared in my stories.  Not that there’s much chance of that happening – last year, as Rab Foster, I earned about 75 pounds, which I suspect is a wee bit less that George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones royalties for 2024.  If any biotech outfit was up for it, though, I’d like them to have a go at creating the sinister miniature-harpy things in my 2022 short story Crows of the Mynchmoor, which were basically crows’ bodies with shrunken copies of a witch’s head grafted onto then.  I’d like a flock of those to keep in my garden.  I bet they’d really creep out folk passing by on the street.

 

© 20th Century Fox

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Eco chamber

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rob Bogaerts

 

A follow-on from my previous post…

 

Elon Musk’s stiff-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 24th – at least, unlike Dr Strangelove, he didn’t address Trump as “Mein Führer!” – inspired me to read again Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

 

This begins with Eco reminiscing: “In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian).  I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject ‘Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?’  My answer was positive.  I was a smart boy.”  It goes on to describe Eco’s hometown being taken over in 1945 first by the partisans and then by American soldiers (all of whom were African-Americans) and then muses on the nature of Italian fascism, as helmed by Mussolini, and of fascism generally.  It ends with Eco identifying 14 key traits that he believes appear in fascist movements and quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

 

Well, Roosevelt’s words seem sadly ironic now.  Under Trump, American democracy appears to be moving backwards as a dying force, and the only citizens whose lot he’s seeking day and night to better are rich, white, straight, male ones.  But what about those 14 traits of fascism?  How many of them are detectible in Trump’s America at the moment?

 

Spoilers…  A lot.

 

The American far-right’s modus operandi of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was a concept originally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new Trump-grovellers-in-chief, and is something Trump’s been doing ever since his inauguration three weeks ago: ‘Tariffs!’ / ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ / ‘Invade Greenland!’ / ‘Invade Panama!’ / ‘Make Canada the 51st state!’ / ‘Leave the WHO!’ / ‘Leave the Paris agreement!’ / ‘More tariffs!’ / ‘Abolish DEI!’ / ‘Abolish USAID!’ / ‘Abolish trans-people!’ / ‘Abolish Gaza and turn it into the new Riviera!’ / etc.  This obviously corresponds to Eco’s fascist trait number three: “the cult of action for action for action’s sake… Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection.”

 

Also Trump down to a ‘T’ is trait number four: ‘disagreement is treason’.  So too is number five: ‘fear of difference’.  I can’t see life in America over the next four years being much fun if you’re different from one of those aforementioned rich, white, straight males.  And absolutely so too is number six: “appeal to a frustrated middle class… a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

 

Number seven is: ‘obsession with a plot’.  Yup, Trump has never shut up about the ‘deep state’, whatever that is, being out to get him and he’s happily courted all those delusional QAnon believers and other conspiracy fantasists.  Number eight is the belief that one’s ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’?  Well, listen to Trump’s speeches and you’ll hear him ranting simultaneously about how shit the US has become in the face of international competition and how it’s still somehow the greatest country on earth.

 

© Lumen Press

 

Number nine, the notion that ‘pacifism is trafficking with the enemy… life is permanent warfare’?  Well, see what I wrote in my previous post, about how “when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like there’s a crisis, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.”

 

Numbers ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen, which are respectively, ‘contempt for the weak,’ ‘everyone is educated to become a hero’ (heroism is especially easy when your population has ready access to AR-15s), ‘machismo’ (note Trump’s conviction in a civil court in 2023 for sexual abuse) and ‘selective populism’?  Tick, tick, tick and tick.

 

I don’t think Trump’s smart enough to have entertained thoughts about number fourteen, ‘newspeak’, wherein, for example, “Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning”.  In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this was the project that Winston Smith’s colleague Syme was working on at the Ministry of Truth, whittling down the size of dictionaries so that people has less vocabulary to articulate such abstract concepts as free will and self-expression.  Mind you, the many social-media platforms now doing Trump’s bidding are infested with so much short, simplistic, soundbite messaging – ranting, basically – that’s there’s little room for critical reasoning in them.

 

I haven’t mentioned numbers one and two yet, which are the ‘cult of tradition’ and ‘rejection of modernism’, wherein fascists deny the “advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message” and the “Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”  But obviously, that’s written large across Trump and his operation, from his rejection of what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are warning us about, to his efforts to put the anti-vaxxer grifter Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health, to his lackey Musk getting rid of fact-checking on X and lackey Zuckerberg doing the same on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to the idea that you can turn any untruth into a truth by repeating it often and loudly and brazenly enough: Haitian immigrants are eating pets, vaccines cause autism, DEI policies caused a mid-air collision, USAID supplied condoms to Hamas and so on, and so forth.

 

And that brings me to another piece of writing I’ve encountered recently.  It’s a passage from the book The Demon-Haunted World (1995) by the late, great American astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan, which I’ve seen quoted on several people’s social-media pages.  Sagan’s mid-1990s fears about a near-future America were, shall we say, troublingly prescient.

 

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

 

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second soundbites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

 

Awesome technological powers in the hands of a very few…  Public representatives unable to grasp the issues…  Critical faculties in decline…  Dumbing down…  Soundbites…  Pseudoscience…  Superstition…  Yes, Carl, you nailed it.  I’m glad, though, that you (and Umberto Eco) aren’t around to witness the ultimate, apocalyptic celebration of ignorance that’s erupted with the advent of Trump Mark II.

 

© Random House

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You won’t ever be happy

 

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

 

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47th president of the United States.  For the 49.8 percent of Americans who voted in November 2024’s presidential election and voted for him, his previous four-year stint as 45th president obviously wasn’t enough.

 

Already those two weeks feel like two decades.  I live in Singapore, a long way away from Trump’s USA, and yet his orange visage assails me non-stop, smirking and scowling out of photos in the news websites and social media accounts I peruse.  I feel sorry for the poor folk who can’t stand the sight of him but have to live within the same country-borders as him.

 

It’s been relentless.  One moment he’s pardoning the 1600-odd dingbats who attacked the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, including 600 who were charged with attacking or impeding law-enforcement officers, and including the lunatic shaman-guy in the buffalo horns who reacted to his pardon by posting on Twitter, “Now I am gonna by some motha f**kin guns!”  The next moment he’s pulling the USA out of the Paris climate agreement (again) and halting Joe Biden’s Green New Deal – much to the delight, I’m sure, of the Chinese government, whom he blames for pushing the ‘hoax’ of man-made climate change.  They’ll now seize the opportunity to establish their country as the world’s renewable-energy superpower.

 

And the next moment again he’s halting all American foreign aid, giving Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Governmental Efficiency’ (DOGE) free rein to destroy the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or as Musk calls it, ‘a viper’s nest of radical left-Marxists who hate America’.  Again, I’m sure the Chinese government is cheering.  As the US’s disease-prevention, food security, water security, education, etc., programmes in the Global South and elsewhere grind to a halt, they’ll swoop in and replace them, thus greatly extending China’s global soft power and influence.

 

What else?  Trump’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – obviously, when there’s a deadly global pandemic, he doesn’t want medical experts interfering in how he runs his country and warning him that his proposed ‘inject yourself with bleach’ cure isn’t a good idea.  He’s banned all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in the belief that important jobs must be left to straight, fully-abled white men, who are inherently smarter than everyone else.  Why, even before the bodies of those killed in January 29th’s mid-air collision at Washington DC were cold, Trump raged that DEI policies were responsible for the tragedy.

 

He’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’.  (What next?  One wag speculated on social media that he might rename the Oxford comma ‘the Comma of America’.)  He’s tried to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland to him, as part of his expand-the-American-Empire project (no doubt inspired by his buddy Putin’s expand-the-Russian-Empire project).  And he’s also tried to bully Mexico and Canada, by threatening to slap tariffs on their goods.  I’m not a big fan of Pierre Trudeau, but his riposte to Trump’s blustering bollocks showed he has more class and statesmanship in the tip of his little finger than Trump has in his whole, gross body.

 

From pixabay.com / © StockSnap

 

However, I’m sure that for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, this is music to their ears.  They must feel like they’re in heaven.  Thanks to the antics of their orange hero, they’re now owning the libtards.  They’re bathing in libtard tears.  They’re loving the smell of napalmed libtards in the morning.  They’re achieving their number-one objective, which is to cause maximum distress to those libtard snowflakes who want to deny them their constitutional right to stockpile huge quantities of military assault rifles, and their right to go ‘rolling coal’ in their modified diesel-engine trucks, and their right to grab women by the pussy without suffering consequences, and their right to live in neighbourhoods with zero numbers of people of colour, and so on.  They’re all on Twitter, or ‘X’ as Musk insists on calling it, yeehawing their joy in their echo-chambers of MAGA-ites, incels, neo-Nazis and Russian bots at how President Trump is blasting those libtard wusses with both barrels.

 

Well, to the vast majority of Trump’s supporters – i.e., those not rich enough to qualify as being in the top 10 percent who own half the nation’s wealth – I have some bad news.  You won’t ever be happy.

 

Firstly, your lives aren’t going to improve materially.  The involvement in Trump’s project of Elon Musk, who’s the world’s richest human being and whose right arm had a Dr Strangelove-style tendency to slip into troubling, sloping salutes at the inauguration, should be a warning of that.  So too should the prominent places given at that inauguration to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.  Big tax-cuts are coming for Trump’s wealthy and super-wealthy friends.  A large part of the bill for those will be shifted onto the working and middle-classes, for example, through the extra they’ll have to pay for goods when Trump starts imposing his beloved tariffs.

 

Some of these tax-cuts will also be financed through the axing of government services, which Musk is doing in his new, DOGE-eat-dog world right now.  There’s always much whinging about how much is removed from your pay-packet and sent off to fund distant government departments.  But when departments overseeing such things as social security, medical care, education, tax refunds, disease control, environmental protection, disaster relief and so on receive the chop, and the effects of their loss are felt, I suspect people’s tunes will change.

 

Incidentally, it’s ironic that far-right-wing commentators, influencers and social-media grifters have for years belched out claims that the world’s governments are secretly controlled by liberal-minded billionaires like Bill Gates or George Soros.  They’ve also indulged in antisemitic dog-whistling by suggesting that billionaire banking family the Rothschilds are pulling the levers.  (See, for instance, a 2023 complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to GB News about their presenter and conspiracy fantasist Neil Oliver referencing the antisemitic, Rothschild-accusing document Silent Weapons for Silent Wars during one of his diatribes about impending ‘one-world government’.)  Yet here we have a billionaire who, unelected and in plain sight, is heavily financing, influencing and manipulating an elected government for his own benefit.  And there’s not a peep out of them.

 

From unsplash.com / © Larissa Avononmadegbe

 

Musk has even got access to classified US treasury files, which are full of confidential data about citizens’ social security and Medicare payment systems.  You’d think this violation of people’s private information would give right-wing conspiracy nuts the heebie-geebies.  But no, they’ve been strangely quiet.  Maybe Musk’s salute at the inauguration did it.  He showed these guys that they didn’t have to worry – he’s the type of billionaire they’d want to have controlling their government.

 

But returning to Trump, I don’t see how his antics are going to improve life for the average citizen who voted for him.  If he carries out his witless threats to impose tariffs, he’ll drive up prices.  Meanwhile, his belief that, conveniently, climate change is just a sham will no doubt see the American economy take a severe battering in the years ahead as the country itself takes a battering from increasingly inclement weather.  Imagine what home-insurance bills will be like after a good chunk of Florida tips into the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Not that I think his supporters will be loudly belly-aching about their lives continuing to be shit, or being even shitter than they were previously.  A lot of them will be conditioned by sunk-cost fallacy and keep quiet – having invested so much time and energy in backing Trump and his MAGA movement, they’ll be reluctant to admit they were wrong.  Also, Trump now has X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok singing his praises.  He also has newspapers like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times kowtowing and kissing his ring.  The bulk of the American media will spend the next four years assuring the public they’ve never had it so good, when in all probability they’ve never had it so bad.

 

And that’s not all, Trump supporters.  Even in the unlikely case of your circumstances getting better, you still won’t ever be happy.  Trump and his lackeys won’t allow you to be happy.  To illustrate what I mean, you only have to look at Britain and the nearest institution Britain has to Trumpism – that toxic far-right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail.  Paul Dacre, its former editor and now the editor-in-chief of its publisher DMG Media, once remarked that the perfect Daily Mail story was one that (1) confirmed its readers’ worst fears and (2) gave them someone to blame for it.  You can expect something similar in the US over the next few years.  (Maybe forever, if Trump can change the constitution so that it resembles that of Putin’s Russia, and politicians who might oppose him in future elections start falling to their deaths out of windows.)

 

Everything that goes wrong will be the fault of immigrants eating people’s pets, or environmentalists not pumping enough water to put out wildfires, or Democrats controlling the weather, or Jewish space-lasers, or deadly aircraft-destroying DEI programmes.  Even when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like crises are happening, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.  They’re to be riled up, permanently.

 

So, Trump people, I’m sorry, but you won’t ever be happy.  As someone once put it: “Hell is getting what you think it is you want.”

 

From pixabay.com / © heblo

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Haw Par Villa: a special place in hell

 

 

Donald Trump has been inaugurated as 47th President of the United States of America. With social-media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and now TikTok acting as his cheerleaders and fascists like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and those deranged January 6th rioters he’s just pardoned acting as his law enforcers, he looks set to transform the USA into a combination of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Benito Mussolini’s Italy.  That’s while his administration abandons science and embraces paranoid conspiracy fantasies, superstition and stupidity, pumps umpteen more billions of tons of carbon into our already-poisoned biosphere, and conspires to destroy what democracies remain in the modern world.  Therefore, it can be said we are now living in hell. 

 

With these hellish things happening, I thought it would be appropriate to devote a blogpost to the most vivid representation of hell I have ever seen: that at Haw Par Villa, Singapore’s most remarkable museum.

 

Haw Par Villa was originally built by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, who developed and marketed the famous analgesic remedy Tiger Balm.  They relocated from Burma to Singapore in 1926 and purchased the site – today on the West Coast Highway, just along from the Haw Par Villa MRT Station – in 1935.  The villa was designed in an Art Deco style and completed in 1937, but its original incarnation didn’t last long, being bombed and occupied by the Japanese during World War II and demolished after the war ended.  Its gardens survived, though.  Up to his death in 1954, Aw Boon Haw installed statues and dioramas there that he hoped would help instil ‘traditional Chinese values’ in those who viewed them.  Subsequently, the gardens became a public park popular among Singaporean families.

 

By the 1980s, the place was losing its lustre and efforts to repackage it meant it underwent several name changes – from ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ to ‘Haw Par Villa Dragon World’, back to ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ and finally to ‘Haw Par Villa’ as it is today.  No doubt the Singaporean Tourist Board understood it was special, thanks to those installations Aw Boon Haw had made to promote his vision.  Yet it surely seemed too traditional, and too eccentric, to compete with the city-state’s more modern visitor attractions.  A study in 2014 reported ‘low tourist interest’ in it and made the melancholy observation that it was ‘rather rundown and not very well maintained’.  However, Journeys Pte Ltd acquired it in 2015 and closed it for a period at the start of the 2020s to make renovations.  Since reopening, the latest version of Har Par Villa has won acclaim.  In 2023, for instance, it was a finalist in the Singaporean Tourism Awards for Outstanding Attraction.  Let’s hope its future is now secure.

 

 

A while back, accompanied by my partner and a couple of friends, I visited Har Par Villa.  Approaching its entrance, we went past the place’s name in blood-red English letters and Chinese characters raised against a tableau of artificial rocks.  Then we went through a traditional Chinese paifang with a prominently-displayed picture of a tiger – appropriately for the home of Tiger Balm – and then found ourselves passing a gamut of strange statues.  These included big, spooky white rabbits with red mouths and eyes, mad-looking sheep with black horns and black-rimmed eyes, and a freaky humanoid pig in britches, cap and shirt, the shirt peeled back to reveal a fat belly and sagging man-boobs.  A couple with human bodies and tiger heads, wearing dungarees and a pink dress, held forward tins, boxes and packets of Tiger Balm.  And a pot-bellied Buddha with a wide cackling mouth resembled one of the Blue Meanies in the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine (1968).  It was all wonderfully, charmingly weird.

 

 

Our intention today was to visit just one part of Haw Par Villa, its most famous part – the attraction announced by a banner at the entrance, which said: ‘Hell’s Museum: Visions of Death and the Afterlife’.  From all accounts, there’s much more to see there, but that would have to wait until another visit.

 

After buying tickets at the ticket desk / gift shop – whose door had a sign saying ‘No food, no drinks, no pets (pets go to heaven)’ – we ventured into the first section of Hell’s Museum.  We discovered a corner where we could stand by a backdrop of red-hot lava, orange flames and grey smoke and have photos taken so that it looked like we were in hell; and a room where a short documentary film about religious concepts of death and hell played on a loop. Thereafter, we entered a modern and reasonably sober museum.  Haw Par Villa is famous for some over-the-top, properly hellish depictions of hell, but those would come later.

 

The museum contained displays and charts giving information on such things as different cultures’ and religions’ beliefs in the afterlife, the history of ‘handling death’ in Singapore, ‘Singapore’s industry of cremation’ and, courtesy of a large map, the locations of all the cemeteries in the city-state – Chinese, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Baha’i, Parsi, Burmese, Japanese and ‘War’.  Among many other things, there were verses on the subject of death and hell from various sacred texts, such as the Buddhist Dhammapada.  (Chapter 9, Verses 126-128: “Some are born in the womb; the wicked are born in hell…”)

 

 

I particularly liked a replica of a Mexican Day of the Dead altar with all the traditional paraphernalia: photographs of the deceased, butterflies, flowers, bunting, candles, water, food, alcohol, cigars, salt, incense, mirrors, crosses and little skulls made of glass, ceramics, plaster and sugar.  There was also one of ‘a traditional Chinese void deck funeral’.  Void decks are the ground floors of the Singaporean Housing Development Board (HDB) apartment blocks that rise all over the city-state.  These floors are normally untenanted and have communal spaces and, according to the museum, create ‘opportunities for residents to interact and bond over activities…’ and let them ‘…stage social functions, weddings, and of course funerals.’  Coincidentally, I’d lately read a short story entitled The Moral Support of Presence by the Singaporean writer Karen Kwek, about a woman having to organise and sit through a void-deck funeral for her mother whilst coping with grief.

 

 

Immediately past the modern museum was another area of Haw Par Villa eccentricity.  The dioramas here included a mass of rock whose multiple folds and clefts were adorned with severed heads, their faces ghostly pale, tongues protruding, mouths and eyes leaking blood.  An even more bizarre display was a rocky landscape where rats and rabbits were depicted at war with each other.  I don’t know what story or legend inspired this, but to my Western eyes it resembled the title creatures of James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) taking on the rabbits in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) – after those rabbits were infected with rabies. One rabbit chomping bloodily on a rat’s neck was an especially nasty detail.  Meanwhile, I felt sorry for a pair of rats wearing medic armbands who were trying to carry away an injured comrade on a stretcher.

 

 

Finally we came to a structure housing Haw Par Villa’s most celebrated attraction – a series of dioramas representing the Ten Courts of Hell of Chinese mythology and Buddhism.  Guarding its entrance were the demons Ox Head (a minotaur holding a trident) and Horse Face (an equine-headed being clutching a spiked club).  These guardians, an information panel explained, were “…part of the netherworld’s bureaucracy.  They form a network of attendants and jailers responsible for escorting souls through the ten courts…”

 

 

Inside, things started fairly innocuously with Court 1, where ‘King Qinguang conducts a preliminary trial for the deceased.’  The diorama here showed a recently-deceased soul cowering in front of King Qinguang while demon guards with superlong tongues and bird’s claws, or heads shaped like malformed gourds, looked on.  Having been assessed according to the deeds they did alive, with the help of such judging tools as ‘the Book of Good and Evil’, ‘the Scale of Good and Evil’ and ‘the Mirror of Souls’, the souls are divided up: “Virtuous souls… may cross the Golden or Silver Bridges to either attain the Tao, become immortals or deities, or be reborn as humans blessed with good lives…”, whereas “…sinners will have to go through further judgement and punishment in the rest of the 10 courts.”  Needless to say, it’s the ordeals of that latter group that gives this attraction its ghoulish zest.

 

 

Thereafter, we learnt what types of miscreants are dealt with in Courts 2-9 and what punishments are meted out to them.  In Court 2, for instance, people who’ve caused hurt, cheated or robbed get ‘thrown into a volcanic pit’, those who’ve indulged in corruption, stealing or robbery (again) get ‘thrown into blocks of ice’, and those sullied by prostitution get ‘thrown into a pool of blood’.  By Court 9, robbers, murderers, rapists and those responsible for ‘any other unlawful conduct’ have their ‘head and arms chopped off’ while anyone guilty of ‘neglecting the old and the young’ gets ‘crushed under boulders’.

 

And the dioramas showed the courts’ demonic bureaucrats carrying out those punishments in bloody, gory detail.  We saw hearts being extracted (as punishment for ungratefulness, being disrespectful towards one’s elders or ‘escaping from prison’); writhing bodies disappearing under giant grindstones (that’s what you get if you’re disobedient to your siblings or don’t show enough ‘filial piety’); folk being graphically impaled on the branches of ‘a tree of knives’ (your comeuppance for cheating, kidnapping or using bad language); and tongues being removed (the price you pay if you spread rumours or cause discord among your family members).

 

 

Fabulously, the chopping, severing, gouging, crushing, impaling, disembowelling, dismembering and decapitating going on in Haw Par Villa’s 10 Courts of Hell have encouraged generations of parents to bring their children here in order to instil moral values in them – or, putting it more bluntly, to terrify them into being good.  They’ve forced their offspring to look on these horrors while warning them, “See what happens if you’re naughty!”  Indeed, one of my Singaporean colleagues told me she was brought here when she was eight years old and suffered nightmares for the next fortnight.

 

I found myself wondering, meanwhile, what chastisements the 47th President of the USA would face when he passed away and entered the netherworld.  From what I knew of his misdeeds, I calculated he’d be thrown into a volcanic pit, into blocks of ice, into a tree of knives and into a wok of boiling oil; have his heart and tongue cut out and his head and arms chopped off; and be grilled alive on a red-hot copper pillar, sawn in half and pounded by a stone mallet.  Oh, and dismembered.

 

 

Lastly, in Court 10, we saw King Zhuanlun making a final judgement on the souls who’ve been through hell’s punishments, deciding “what forms they will take upon their rebirth.  This will depend on their karma – the good and bad deeds committed in life.”  In this diorama, there were two sinners on their hands and knees before the king, and already the animals they’d become in their next lives were taking form on their backs.  One was metamorphosising into a black goat, the other into a white rabbit.  Before being reincarnated as those creatures, they had one more port of call – ‘Meng Po’s Pavillion’, where their  memories of previous lives, and presumably of hell, are erased.

 

With all this glorious, phantasmagorical barminess on display, it doesn’t surprise me that the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, who worked in Singapore at various times between 2014 and 2020 and whose Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) is about ghosts, demons and the afterlife in late-1980s Colombo, cites Har Par Villa as one of Seven Moons’ major inspirations.

 

As I’ve said, there was a great deal more at Haw Par Villa we didn’t have time to see that day.  I can’t wait for our next visit to this splendidly baroque place.

 

Posted on

The controls are set for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

In my previous blog-post, I cited the ending of the apocalyptic 1961 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, where we’re inside a newspaper office and see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One page’s headline announces WORLD SAVED.  The other announces WORLD DOOMED.  Which headline, I wondered, would be appropriate after the US presidential election on November 5th?

 

Well, the results are in.  And it’s…

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

I think I’ll stay away from the news for the next week or so, as it’s going to be full of the sights and sounds of the very worst people on the planet popping open the champagne and jeering and crowing about Trump’s win – from despots and corrupt authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un, Victor Orban and Aleksandr Lukashenko to billionaires who believe (probably rightly, given the evidence now) that democracy is something that can be bought and sold in the quest for profits, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Marshall and all the other media tycoons, hedge-fund moguls, oligarchs, oil barons and would-be tech overlords.

 

Despite a majority of British people hating Trump’s guts, Britain’s press and social media will be particularly infested with sycophants drooling and slobbering over the orange turd’s victory.  These range from online grifters who make their money whipping gullible people into frenzies of paranoia and hatred, such as Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Neil Oliver, Tommy Robinson and failed nepo-baby thespian Laurence Fox; to the preening hacks who pen vitriol for the country’s right and far-right-wing publications, like Brendan O’Neill, Alison Pearson, Douglas Murray, Piers Morgan and Isabel Oakeshott; and to its most discredited, unsavoury and opportunistic politicians, such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.  So, I’ll avoid that lot too for a while.  I don’t want to be put off my food.

 

Many hideous people are no doubt licking their lips at the prospect of the dystopian years ahead, thinking about what they can do as part of the Trump bandwagon and how they can line their pockets from it.  I’m sure that includes all those I’ve mentioned above.

 

Finally, I now find myself thinking of the ending of another 1960s sci-fi film, that of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968).

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Not only does this conclude with Charlton Heston discovering the Statue of Liberty buried up to her chest in sand – indicating that the USA, plus the rest of human civilisation, are now extinct and lie hidden under millions of tons of sediment – but it shows Heston having a meltdown in front of this haunting and pitiful spectacle.  “You maniacs!” he rages.  “You blew it up!  Damn you!  Goddamn you all to hell!”

 

He could have been referring to those millions of Americans who thought it was a good idea to vote Donald Trump back into office the other day.

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

Posted on

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

One my favourite British science-fiction movies is The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), starring Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern, directed by Val Guest and scripted by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz.  (The underrated Guest made three other movies, 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment, 1957’s Quatermass II and 1960’s Hell is a City, that I also like a lot.)

 

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is an apocalyptic tale wherein the USA and the Soviet Union carry out simultaneous nuclear-bomb tests at the earth’s poles and, subsequently, the planet experiences weird meteorological events.  Rivers dry up in some places and rain falls in unexpected torrents in others.  The general trend, though, is that temperatures rise.  The film’s heroes – a pair of London-based journalists – discover that those nuclear tests have disrupted the earth’s nutation, its axis of rotation.  Our planet is now spiralling closer and closer to the sun and in a few months’ time will plunge into it.

 

Yes, the film’s science is wonky.  A full-force hurricane has a heat-release every 20 minutes that’s similar to one 10-megaton nuclear bomb going off, so a few such nuclear explosions are nowhere near enough to knock the earth out of its orbit.  Also, what’s amusing about the film from a 2024 viewpoint is that its journalist heroes work for the Daily Express – a newspaper now so moon-howlingly rubbish it makes the Daily Mail look comparatively sane and reasonable.  Today, while the Thames evaporated, the Express would be denouncing the earth-knocked-out-of-orbit / crashing-into-the-sun scenario as a woke hoax and politically-correct fearmongering.

 

However, as a dystopian sci-fi movie showing a gradually-unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of some ordinary people who are powerless to do anything about it, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is both affecting and chilling.

 

The film ends ambiguously.  The world’s governments make a last-ditch attempt to reverse the damage, exploding more nuclear bombs in the desperate hope they’ll nudge the earth back into its proper orbit.  Meanwhile, in the Daily Express’s offices in now-utterly-sweltering London, we see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One bears the headline WORLD SAVED, the other the headline WORLD DOOMED.  And we leave the film’s characters there, not knowing their fate.

 

I’ve been thinking about the ending of The Day the Earth Caught Fire a lot today.  November 5th, 2024, is when Americans go to the polls to elect a new president.  That will either be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.  The latter was once memorably and accurately described by the New Yorker writer Mark Singer as someone whose existence is ‘unmolested by the rumbling of a soul’.  A few years ago, less eloquently, I called him ‘that rancid man-slug of evil.’

 

Trump has been open about what he’ll do to the USA if he’s re-elected president.  He’ll transform the world’s most powerful country from a democracy into an authoritarian state, with him as despot-in-chief.  Even if the American public are stricken with buyers’ remorse after voting him in, he’ll change the election laws and fiddle the constitution so that they can’t ever get rid of him and his far-right Republican successors (who’ll no doubt be led by the repulsive J.D. Vance).  The Trump Reich will be here to stay.

 

Along the way, he’ll also embolden other fascists in other countries around the world, hand over Ukraine to his buddy, hero and idol Vladimir Putin and allow Putin’s malignant influence to extend right into Europe, make American women second-class citizens with zero control over their bodies, persecute LGBT people and probably erase trans ones, put the lunatic anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of American health policy and appoint Elon Musk as his Joseph Goebbels-style head of propaganda who’ll pump out misinformation and hate on Twitter (or ‘X’ as Musk calls his debased platform these days).  Science will be derided, suppressed and defunded.  Pig-ignorance will be lauded, promoted and revelled in.

 

Worst of all, Trump, a climate-change denialist, will add billions of tonnes of US carbon emissions to the earth’s atmosphere, probably thwarting any last chances of humanity doing anything to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe.  Yes, the earth really will be catching fire, if slightly more slowly than it did in Guest’s movie.

 

So, world saved or world doomed?  We’ll find out a little later this week.

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

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Jiggery-wokery

 

From abc.net.au / © BBC

 

‘Woke’…  What does that word even mean?

 

Here’s failed US presidential candidate and failed insurrectionist Donald Trump using it to denigrate the American women’s soccer team, who do un-Trumpian things like ‘taking the knee’ during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.  “Woke equals failure!” he barked on TruthSocial, his minor social-media platform, when the team was knocked out of this year’s Women’s Football World Cup.

 

And here’s John Cleese grumping about the BBC being woke because it banned that episode of Fawlty Towers (1975-79) where the Major uses some unfashionable language to describe the West Indies cricket team.  (In fact, the episode was temporarily pulled from the BBC-owned streaming service UKTV, and reviewed, and reinstated with a content warning.)  Cleese is so incensed by wokeness that he’s started hosting a TV chat-show in which he fulminates against it.  His show is called The Dinosaur Hour (2023) and it’s broadcast on the right-wing, alleged ‘news’ channel GB News.  Amusingly, Cleese was peeved to discover that his new employers at GB News had just signed Boris Johnson, whom he considers a ‘serial liar’, to host a show too.  Well, John, when you lie down with dogs, expect to get up with fleas.  In this case, big, blonde, bloviating, bonking Boris-fleas.

 

Another household name much concerned about woke behaviour is Elon Musk, who last year purchased Twitter (or X, as he calls it now) and set about purging it of wokeness.  He’s certainly done that.  He’s also purged the platform of half of its advertising revenue and half of the value of its acquisition price.  Musk has described wokeness as a ‘mind-virus’ and ‘communism rebranded’ – and communism, he’ll tell you, is a very bad thing.  Though that hasn’t stopped him opening a big Tesla plant in communist China, in Shanghai, and being warmly welcomed every time he visits the country, and declaring that democratic, capitalist Taiwan is actually Chinese property.  Musk is also introducing to Twitter a ‘snarky, anti-woke AI chatbot’ called ‘Grok’, which sounds like a character from the sci-fi comic 2000 AD (1977-present).

 

From britishcomic.fandom.com / © Rebellion Developments

 

I don’t agree with Musk on much but he’s right to liken wokeness to a virus.  Because the moment that people with his right-wing politics come into contact with it, they seem to turn red-eyed, froth at the mouth and gibber insanely, like the infected did in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2003).

 

© DNA Films / UK Film Council / Fox Searchlight Pictures

 

But if you need refuge from wokeness, just move to Florida.  There, Governor Ron DeSantis has been pushing a ‘Stop-Woke Act’ in the hope that the state will be ‘the place where woke goes to die’.  In fact, DeSantis’s Florida is now so anti-woke, and so determinedly opposed to the teaching of wokey things like Critical Race Theory, that its State Board of Education has kids learning in school that slavery was a good thing because it helped the black slaves to develop ‘skills which, in some cases, could be applied for their personal benefit‘.  Wow.  Who knew?

 

I’m sure DeSantis’s achievements in Florida are admired by Suella Braverman, the belligerent and self-serving British Conservative politician who was very recently sacked from her position as the UK’s Home Secretary.  During her time in office, she slammed the British police force for being too woke.  One example was when she claimed to have reprimanded officers in Essex for the woke act of raiding a pub and removing a display of racist golliwogs.  (Except that she didn’t – it turned out that Suella had been disingenuous, or stupid, or both, which is perfectly possible in her case.)  Suella, or ‘Sewer-ella’ as I like to think of her, also famously condemned a faction she called the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’.  Supposedly, these have formed a ‘coalition of chaos’ with the opposition parties and are responsible for all of Britain’s ills.  She said this whilst serving in the brief but tumultuous government of Liz Truss.  Accusing someone else of being part of a coalition of chaos?  That’s a bit rich, given the context.

 

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has complained that woke builders are daring to ‘enjoy yoga, muesli, listening to Radio 4 and sharing their feelings’ rather than ‘devouring greasy-spoon breakfasts and discussing sport.’  Xbox games consoles have been accused of being woke for getting updated with an ‘energy saver’ mode to lessen their power consumption – because, as you know, attempting to be more environmentally-friendly just drips with contemptible wokeness.  The makers of The Simpsons (1989-present) have been lambasted for being woke, coincidentally by Cleese’s associates at GB News, for no longer having scenes where Homer loses his rag at Bart, picks him up by the throat and strangles him until his eyes bulge and tongue protrudes.  Not wanting to strangle children?  How hideously woke.

 

So, what does ‘woke’ actually mean?  Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s “an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’.  Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism and LGBT rights.”  Fascinatingly, the phrase ‘stay woke’ goes all the way back to 1938, when it was first heard on a recording of a song called Scottsboro Boys by the legendary blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, aka, Lead Belly.

 

From wikipedia.org / © William P. Gottlieb Collection

 

Though how the term ‘woke’ became elastic enough to encompass eating tofu, and builders talking about their feelings, and Xboxes having energy-saving modes, and Homer Simpson not throttling his offspring, is anyone’s guess.  Perhaps a simpler definition of the term – certainly when you look at the people mentioned above who’ve railed against it, like Trump, Musk, DeSantis, Braverman, the Daily Mail and GB News – might be: ‘Anything that right-wing tossers don’t like.’

 

Indeed, as somebody who considers himself partly Scottish, I felt a surge of pride a while ago when Gavin McInnes, founder of the neo-fascist American militia the Proud Boys, denounced Scotland as ‘the most woke country in the world.”  No wonder Scottish novelist Christopher Brookmyre responded to McInnes’s ravings by saying: “That delighted me…”

 

Unfortunately, nobody ever lost money by underestimating human beings’ intelligence.  There’s clearly political mileage in ranting endlessly about wokeness. Gradually, you brainwash millions of people, mainly older ones who don’t get out much, and sit and watch Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News all day, into believing that dark, malevolent woke forces do indeed lurk in the world, planning to deprive them of their Bibles, guns, gas-guzzling automobiles, Big Macs, racist jokes, un-politically-correct 1970s TV shows, etc.  It’s also convenient for the likes of Trump (currently facing 91 felony counts) and Britain’s Conservative government (trying to justify why the country is such a horrible, unhappy mess when they’ve been in charge of it for the past 13 years) to peddle the narrative that the establishment is riddled with hostile woke agents.  The civil service, the courts, the police…  A giant woke conspiracy is being implemented from society’s corridors of power and it’s trying to discredit them and stymie their every move.

 

I’m not claiming, by the way, that stupidity is confined to right-wingers.  The left is also capable of it.  In recent years the American right has infiltrated school-boards and removed books they disapprove of from syllabuses and libraries, books deemed too woke, often written by people of colour or members of the LGBT community, and often featuring characters of colour or LGBT characters.  There was even a book suspended in Alabama because officials didn’t like the sound of the author’s name, Marie-Louise Gay.  But left-wing educators have done themselves no favours by trying to ban books that offend their sensibilities too.

 

For example, I lately came across the case of a school board in Washington State pulling Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) off its required reading list for ninth-graders because a group of ‘progressive’ teachers objected to it.  Sure, you can argue that To Kill a Mockingbird portrays its black characters with less depth than its white characters and has a ‘white saviour’ narrative that’s offensive to many.  But shouldn’t teachers focus on developing their students’ powers of critical thinking, argument and self-expression so that they can articulate why they object to the book?  Engaging with – certainly, studying – literature shouldn’t be limited to books you’re personally comfortable with.  You should have to experience ones you find discomforting too, whilst developing the ability to formulate logical and coherent responses to them.

 

I don’t deny there are works that some people will find upsetting because of their beliefs or backgrounds or difficult experiences they’ve had in their lives.  And I don’t see anything wrong with books and stories having trigger warnings, which inform readers the content they’re about to immerse themselves in may be uncomfortable or even traumatising.  I say that as a writer who’s had trigger warnings attached to his fiction in the past.  But banning books altogether?  I don’t agree with censorship, unless it’s of something that’s completely off-the-scale in promulgating odious stereotypes and stirring up hatred.

 

Otherwise, I don’t have much of a problem with wokeness.  Especially as it seems to annoy all the right – and I mean ‘right’ – people.  So, now, it’s time to sign off and grab some lunch.  What will I have…?  Why, tofu of course.  Up yours, Sewer-ella.

 

From wikipedia.org / © UK Government Web Archive

Posted on

Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

 

© Duckworth Books

 

Another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema.  Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living.  But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc.  This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

 

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War.  His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric.  Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular.  Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq.  And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

 

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes.  Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games.  With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

 

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon.  (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.)  Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

 

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984).  It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report.  He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate…  Too many opinions, too many feelings.  That’s not what this report is about.  We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.”  So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

 

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework.  The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc.  It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their  experiences of the conflict with the undead.  The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched.  Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

 

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense.  For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A.  I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics…  We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.”  But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work.  And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

 

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

 

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though.  An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly.  To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

 

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too.  It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro.  Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener.  He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him.  Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction.  But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism.  Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long.  I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

 

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).  An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes.  Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London.  There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II.  She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland.  Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’  Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.”  That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

 

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones.  Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis.  Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada.  They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake.  Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food.  Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours.  “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore.  A couple of times I stepped in human shit.  Nobody was even bothering to bury it.”  By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty.  It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency.  And the zombies aren’t even around.  They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

 

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere.  The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons.  Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients.  Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

 

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013.  No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

 

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II.  This gives it an oddly historical feel now.  Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s.  And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

 

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023.  For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump.  Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic.  If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

 

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’.  Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all.  Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it.  If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

 

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it.  A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

 

From invaluable.com / © Motik One

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Now expose it to garlic, holy water and sunlight

 

From wikipedia.org / © Eva Rinaldi

 

A while ago on this blog, I conducted the following thought-experiment.  Imagine that current trends result in the world becoming a globally-warmed, war-ravaged hellhole inhabited by only a few surviving remnants of humanity.  But those remnants somehow manage to lay their hands on a time machine and realise they can send an assassin back in time, in the manner of the James Cameron / Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Terminator (1984).  Who would they have their assassin target in, say, the late 20th century to change the course of history and prevent the world from turning into crap?

 

As I mused at the time, “The young Donald Trump?  The young Vladimir Putin…?  Neither.  I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the one the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after…  Rupert Murdoch.”

 

Wizened 92-year-old media mogul Murdoch was recently in the news because he announced his decision to step down as head of News Corp and the Fox Corporation in favour of his son Lachlan.  Murdoch certainly looks his age, but it sometimes felt like he was going to live forever and keep running his media empire forever.  Regular nocturnal blood-meals sucked from the throats of helpless victims are evidently good for the constitution.  That said, lately, the old monster had begun to look a little vulnerable, both in his business dealings and in his personal life.

 

April this year saw his Fox News network fork out nearly 790 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against it by the voting-equipment company Dominion.  This was after the network told outrageous porkies about the company switching votes in the 2020 US presidential election so that Donald Trump wouldn’t win it.  Among the guff peddled by Fox was the claim that the company was owned by Venezuelans and had experience of swinging elections for the late Hugo Chavez.

 

Meanwhile, though old Rupe had once wooed the ladies with confident charm, like an extremely shrivelled George Clooney, he’s also looked less sure-footed on the romantic front recently.  In 2022, he ended his fourth marriage, to Jerry Hall, by unchivalrously sending her an email to inform her that she’d been dumped.  Hall was unsurprisingly miffed, as during the Covid-19 pandemic she’d gone out of her way to ensure her aged husband stayed isolated and avoided getting the virus, which for someone of his years would probably have been a death sentence.  Earlier this year, he announced his engagement to former radio host Ann Lesley Smith, but this lasted just two weeks.  That’s even shorter than a Liz Truss premiership.  Apparently, Murdoch started to panic at Smith’s loopy evangelical-Christian pronouncements, which included the assertion that Tucker Carlson was ‘a messenger from God.’

 

But you can’t keep an old horn-dog down.  Rupe is currently engaged again, this time to Elena Zhukova, who was once married to the Russian billionaire – don’t mention the ‘O’ word – Alexander Zhukova.  At this rate, Murdoch will have got himself betrothed 16 more times before he reaches treble-figures.

 

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

 

Now that Murdoch has stepped back from the media-controlling activities that have kept him busy for the past 71 years, ever since the age of 21 when he inherited an Adelaide newspaper, the News, from his dad, what legacy does he leave?  If he had a shred of conscience, morality and decency – which of course he doesn’t have, which makes this an academic statement – he’d surely howl in despair and incarcerate himself in a Trappist monastery for the rest of his days to do penance for his multiple sins.  Or just top himself.  Murdoch’s media operations have, over decades, caused massive harm to the well-being of humanity.

 

He pushed the rapacious neoliberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with its credo that greed is good, the market should be worshipped and the financial safety nets and infrastructure that held societies together, and looked after their most vulnerable members, weren’t worth bothering about.  Thatcher said it all when she declared in 1987, “There is no such thing as society.”  His outlets have gone to great lengths to ignore and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence that manmade climate change is happening and poses a terrifying threat to our civilisation’s future.  In Australia, a country that’s already baking and burning as the climate catastrophe unfolds, Murdoch newspapers like the Australian and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph cheer-led right-wing moon-howler Tony Abbott into power in 2013 – Abbott once dismissed climate change as ‘absolute crap’.  And in the USA, Murdoch has used Fox News to build up a vast, paranoid, delusional, far-right-wing ecosystem whereby millions of gullible people now accept the lies of Donald Trump as gospel truth.  Fox could very well see to it that Trump wins the presidency again in 2024.  At which point, the world’s biggest superpower will make the transition into authoritarianism.

 

Murdoch is truly the man with the reverse-Midas touch.  Everything he sticks his finger in turns into manure.  Yet this never seems to stop him generating huge amounts of money, so he’s happy.  No wonder his son James, that rare thing indeed, a Murdoch with a conscience, quit the board of News Corp in 2020, sickened by the horrors his old man had empowered.

 

In the UK, Murdoch has long exerted his toxic influence through the swathe of national newspapers he owns: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday.  His reign of terror began when he acquired the Sun in 1969.  The history of that particular tabloid since then, when it hasn’t devoted itself to gleeful, lowest-common-denominator stupidity with headlines like ‘WEREWOLF SEIZED IN SOUTHEND’ and ‘FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER’, has been an unrelenting saga of horribleness.

 

In the 1980s, when the Sun was under the stewardship of the repugnant Kelvin MacKenzie, it revelled in homophobia and gloated over the AIDS epidemic, which it dubbed the ‘gay plague’ and insinuated straight people had nothing to worry about.  It catered for the ‘dirty mac’ brigade with its ‘page three’ girls, at least one of whom, Samantha Fox, was only 16 when it displayed her topless.  And it lied through its teeth about the behaviour of Liverpool football fans at the 1988 Hillsborough Disaster, to cover up the failings of the police that day.  That led an embargo of the Sun in Merseyside, which is still in force now.  If only the British population generally treated the rag with the same contempt that the Scousers do.  (I also admired the attitude of the late playwright Dennis Potter, whom the Sun dubbed ‘Old Flaky’ on account of his crippling psoriasis.  When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he named his cancer ‘Rupert’.)

 

More recently, the Sun provided a platform for Katie Hopkins, someone even more repellent than MacKenzie, who likened migrants to ‘cockroaches’ and advocated the use of gunboats to stop them.  And its incessant abuse of the European Union, European countries and European people (‘frogs’ and ‘krauts’ to a man and woman) climaxed with the newspaper’s enthusiastic support for Brexit – ‘BELEAVE IN BRITAIN’, its front page declared on the day of the referendum in 2016.  It was no surprise that Murdoch welcomed Brexit, regardless of the economic, diplomatic and reputational damage it inflicted on the UK.  He famously commented that while he could impose his will on one country’s leader, at No 10 Downing Street, he wasn’t powerful enough to do that with the combined force of 28 countries’ leaders, in Brussels.

 

From dailysabah.com / © Sun

 

Meanwhile, during the noughties, the Sun’s sister paper, the News of the World, under the editorship of flame-haired gorgon Rebakah Brooks, was so determinedly on the sniff for a good story that it hacked into the phones of, among others, murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, dead British soldiers and victims of the 2005 London bombings.  This proved too much for even its ghoulish proprietor and he axed the News of the World in 2011.  Mind you, he soon replaced it with the Sun on Sunday, so not much changed.

 

With the Sun leading the way, Britain’s other, supposedly more ‘respectable’ right-wing newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express – happily dived into the same midden of lies, slander and xenophobia, with the result that over the past half-century the popular press in Britain has done much to cheapen public discourse, making it shrill, prurient, mean-spirited and pig-ignorant.  Murdoch can also take credit for inspiring the birth, or spawning, of alleged news channel GB News in 2021, which clearly wanted to become the British equivalent of his ghastly Fox News.  The conspiracy theories it peddled about the Covid-19 pandemic and Covid-19 vaccines, often voiced by that havering bawbag Neil Oliver, mirror the work Fox News did in the USA to make people resistant to vaccinating themselves against the virus.  The fact that Murdoch was one of the first people on the planet to get the vaccine, yet he happily let his media outlets promote scepticism of it among their audience – who tended to be older and more at risk from Covid-19 – shows his ethics are non-existent.

 

Sadly, in Britain, non-Conservative politicians are so frightened of Murdoch’s newspapers that they feel obliged to cosy up to him.  In the late 1990s, Labour Party leader Tony Blair got so thick with Murdoch that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids.  In return, the Sun displayed the front-page headline ‘THE SUN BACKS BLAIR’ prior to the 1997 general election that saw him win power.  Murdoch’s newspapers subsequently supported Blair during his participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an operation founded on lies and resulting in disaster.  I have no doubt that Keir Starmer, the current Labour Party leader, and basically Tony-Blair-lite, will prostate himself before Murdoch in a similar, craven manner.

 

Though the Nosferatu-esque Murdoch is no longer at the helm of the media empire he’s built, he’s made it clear that he still intends to exert influence from the sidelines.  And his son Lachlan is such a piece of work it sounds like that empire will conduct its business with even more malevolence in the future.  The fact that Lachlan has just appointed Tony ‘climate-change-is-crap’ Abbott to the Fox board doesn’t bode well.

 

When Murdoch informed his employees of his decision to step down, he told them to “make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in.”  Really, Rupe?  Improve?  You did nothing to improve the world.  Rather, your shitty news outlets helped turn it into a sewer.

 

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

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The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 1)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Guillem Medina

 

I was very young when a film made by William Friedkin, the great American director who died earlier this month, first unsettled me.  I was about eight or nine years old when I learnt that the BBC was going to show his 1968 movie The Night They Raided Minsky’s one evening.  The TV listings in the newspaper assured me this was a comedy film, starring the zany performer Norman Wisdom, who could best be described as Britain’s answer to the USA’s Jerry Lewis.  When I was eight or nine, I absolutely loved Norman Wisdom.  I adored the knockabout slapstick he specialised in and the gormless man-child persona he affected for his roles.  You couldn’t dissuade me from my belief that such efforts as The Bulldog Breed (1960), in which Norman joins the Royal Navy and ends up being launched into outer space in an experimental rocket, or The Early Bird (1965), in which Norman plays a humble milkman who takes on and outwits a ruthless dairy corporation that’s trying to muscle in on his milk-delivery patch, were the best movies ever.

 

Thus, I was rather perturbed when I sat down to watch The Night They Raided Minsky’s and discovered it wasn’t a typical Norman Wisdom vehicle.  Rather than a knockabout comedy, it was a nostalgic, bitter-sweet film about knockabout comedy, as it was enacted in American burlesque theatres in the 1920s.  It was also, I realised to my horror, a bit risqué.  It told the story of a naïve Amish girl (Britt Ekland) who runs away to the big city, tries to fulfil her dream of making a career onstage, and ultimately but accidentally invents the striptease routine. Every time the film featured a boob gag, I’d nervously look over my shoulder in case my parents had entered the room.

 

Needless to say, since then, my opinion of Norman Wisdom’s oeuvre has been revised, downwards.  I’ve also managed to see The Night They Raided Minsky’s again, at an age when I no longer found it baffling and was able to appreciate its tone and subject matter.  It’s not great, but it’s likeable and benefits from a marvellous cast: Ekland, Elliott Gould, Jason Robards, Forest Tucker, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Joseph Wiseman and Bert Lahr, who’d played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939).  In the film’s final images, Lahr is shown ruefully treading the boards of the now-deserted theatre, after the titular police raid, with the implication that as far as burlesque is concerned, this is the end of an era.  (It was also the end, alas, for Lahr, who died of cancer during production.)  And, credit where it’s due, Wisdom is pretty good in the movie too.

 

© Tandem Productions / United Artists

 

The Night They Raided Minsky’s was film number three on William Friedkin’s CV and was a credible third film for a director in his early thirties.  Mind you, based on it, you’d hardly predict the stunning commercial and critical success that awaited him in the next decade.

 

Half-a-dozen years later, I was also unsettled by the second Friedkin movie I saw, 1977’s Sorcerer, shown on TV while I was a typical teenager, i.e., I saw myself as hardened, cynical and incapable of being fazed by anything.  Sorcerer made an impression because it did faze me.

 

A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), it tells the story of four dregs of humanity – a Mexican hitman (Francisco Rabal), a Palestinian terrorist (Hamidou Benmessaoud), a French businessman fleeing fraud charges (Bruno Cremer) and an Irish-American crook who has the Mafia after him (Roy Scheider) – hired to drive two ramshackle trucks carrying two loads of volatile explosives across a natural assault course of overgrown jungle paths, rocky mountain-trails and decrepit rope bridges.  The explosives, ancient sticks of dynamite so decayed they’ve started to leak their prime ingredient, nitroglycerin, are needed to extinguish a fire that’s consuming an oil well in a remote part of South America.

 

I was rattled by Sorcerer because I wasn’t prepared for how brutal, cynical and hard-as-nails it was.  From its unflinching images of accident victims – bloodied ones after the getaway car Schneider and his gang are using crashes in New Jersey, charred ones after the initial explosion at the oil well – to the squalor of the village from which the four men set out on their ultra-dangerous mission – mud, shacks, chickens, feral dogs, feral policemen, Big-Brother-type political posters bearing the features of the local military dictator, barefoot kids whose only function is to mindlessly chase after the jeeps that occasionally rumble through the place, sordid bars where the only thing missing is the author Malcolm Lowry sitting on a barstool, getting sozzled on tequila – to everything that nature flings against them during their nightmarish odyssey – torrential rain, sweltering heat, choking vegetation, raging torrents, treacherous quicksand and toppled trees – Sorcerer knocked me for six.  And ladled over that is the film’s relentless nihilism, which makes it plain there’s going to be no happy endings for anyone.  Teenaged kid, Sorcerer seemed to tell me, you still have some growing up to do!

 

© Universal Pictures / Paramount Pictures

 

The film’s master set-piece, of course, is the sequence where the quartet have to get their trucks across a falling-apart rope bridge, above a swollen river, during a mini-hurricane – which at one point sends a fallen tree scudding along the water and crashing into them.  Appropriately, this provides the vertiginous image that appears on Sorcerer’s poster.  The film’s stunt coordinator was the Bud Ekins, who’d doubled for Steve McQueen during the climactic motorbike chase in The Great Escape (1963), though I’ve read that the cast did many of the stunts themselves.  There’s also a pulsing, needling soundtrack by German prog-rock band Tangerine Dream, which Friedkin wisely refrains from overusing.

 

On its release, Sorcerer was a financial disaster – coming out at the same time as a wee film called Star Wars (1977) probably didn’t help – and received a critical drubbing.  Leading the charge was Britain’s notoriously prissy, reactionary whinging-film-critic-in-chief Leslie Halliwell, who lamented, “Why anyone should have wanted to spend twenty million dollars on a remake of The Wages of Fear, do it badly and give it a misleading title is anybody’s guess.  The result is dire.”  Happily, Sorcerer had now been re-evaluated and is recognised as one of the very best American action-thrillers of the 1970s.

 

Roy Scheider turned up again in the next William Friedkin movie I encountered, 1971’s The French Connection, the one that put him on the map and won him a Best Director Oscar.  Lauded for its grittiness, as exemplified by Gene Hackman (who bagged an Oscar too) in the lead role of rumpled and rowdy detective Eddie ‘Popeye’ Doyle, The French Connection manages to have its cake and eat it – for while it oozes with authentic, documentary-style 1970s New York grime and sleaze, it also serves up some classic, if hardly realistic, action set-pieces.  Most notable of these is the legendary chase between a car and an elevated train, which Friedkin filmed without proper permission.  The sequence also necessitated the head of the New York Transit Authority being bribed so that one of their trains could be ‘borrowed’.  Indeed, it sounds like Friedkin indulged in the same sort of ‘guerilla filmmaking’ that nine years later Lucio Fulci did when he shot the New York parts of his horror opus Zombie Flesh Eaters (1980) – he’d have his crew turn up in city locations, start filming and then run like hell when the police appeared.  (There. I’ve just mentioned William Friedkin in the same sentence as Lucio Fulci.  The famously cantankerous Friedkin would hate me for that.)

 

Incidentally, classic though The French Connection is, I think its sequel, John Frankenheimer’s imaginatively titled French Connection II (1975), is equally good.  This sees Doyle pursue Alain Charnier, the smooth French drug-mastermind of the original film (who was played by Fernando Rey, actually a Spaniard), back to Marseille.  This leads to culture clashes galore.  Predictably and hilariously, Doyle shows zero diplomacy while dealing with the locals, including the exasperated Marseille police force.  He’s surely the most boorish American to ever descend upon France – well, until 2018, when Donald Trump rocked up there for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of World War One.

 

© Philip D’Antoni Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Stay tuned for the second instalment of this entry, when I talk about my experiences of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Cruising (1980) and Killer Joe (2011)! 

 

Cue Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells…