The Oscars
Everything Everywhere All at Once received the yearly Cultural Validation Award awarded to films which successfully blend the current totems of empire. Approved totems recognised in this year’s winner were: lesbianism and the acceptance of arbitrary sexual identity, transvaluation of cultural identity combined with symbolic appeals to Chinese capital, the transcendent value of mother-daughter relations, the importance of working hard and paying your taxes and, most importantly of all, the reality of a ‘multiverse’ in which intrinsic meaning cannot exist. The film carefully explained all these values to the audience, and successfully reminded them of the cultural symbols of the dead culture which produced it. All agreed it was, even more than the rest of the Marvel franchise it is part of, the most ‘relatable’ movie of the past decade.
Everything Everywhere All At Once went up against The Banshees of Inisherin, a film in which characters, ordinary, recognisable, yet whose concerns are raised to the intensity of greatness, confront the universal pain of life, with actors equal to it. In my view Inisherin is not quite a masterpiece — for me the actions of the characters are little too heavy-handedly, and implausibly, ‘pawned’ in service to the plot — but it raises and faces a genuine moral question, again universal — the conflict between being good and being nice, while being entertaining, full of the black humour the Irish do so well (‘he could at least keep [his depression] to himself, like. You know, push it down, like the rest of us.’) Gorgeous to look at too, and with good music — and not that twee overproduced folk shite either. I just can’t think why this film, nominated in nine categories, won none of them, and lost to Everything Everywhere All At Once. What on earth could The Banshees of Inisherin have lacked?
Half Term
Half term has just finished. A week in which all the teenagers of Reading drift around town. Individuality has long been rare amongst 13-18 year olds, but as far as I can tell there’s very little left of it. All the faces of the young are coalescing into a single artificial omni-face. It seems to be rare for anyone under 30 to look unique, to have their own character, carrying something inside themselves like nothing else. I’ve watched a few documentaries set in the seventies recently; people wore the uniform of the time, but they looked more like distinctive individuals.
Not Even a Mosquito
I asked my [adult] students to tell me a story involving an animal. ‘Doesn’t matter what’ I said. One fellow’s story was about being bit by a mosquito. ‘It landed on me, filled with blood, and so I killed it.’ Okay, alright, well done, a mosquito is an animal. Then we got to a nervy-looking Saudi woman who said ‘I don’t know animal’. I said ‘but you must have encountered one?’ No, ‘I run away’, she said. Turns out she, a thirty-year-old woman, had, to her knowledge, never come close to any animal. ‘Not even a mosquito?’ Not even a mosquito.
The Bins
The bin collectors have stopped emptying the bins a few doors down at number 37 because they are overflowing. The inhabitants don’t care though, they just dump their bin bags out onto the pavement, which split and then the rubbish blows up and down the street. Rats are now common, even during the day. One climbed into our wheelie and couldn’t get out, smashing its brains out against the side of the bin. This was in the middle of the night, about three in the morning. I went out and lowered the big bin down to the pavement and the rat rocketed away, bouncing off garden walls. A mad old moment. Not enough of those.