Bull’s-eye View

'An empty theatre is a promise unfulfilled'

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Living for the city

By a stroke of luck I caught the second episode of BBC2’s ‘Welcome to Lagos’ last night, and it was just as fascinating as the first. Last week the focus was on born-and-bred city people, but this time the thousands who migrate from Nigeria’s countryside to live in the city’s slums were in the spotlight. In the same way that the first episode looked at life on the rubbish dump, the lives of various people living in the slum of Makoko, built on stilts over the massive Lagos Lagoon, were examined. Chief among the many characters was Chubey – fisherman, entrepeneur, father of 18 children and master of the weekly Lotto, who served a linchpin for the other stories to revolve around. Highly intelligent, with plenty of what we Irish call ‘cop-on’, Chubey nevertheless was a firm believer in traditional sorcery and remedies, wearing what appeared to be a bird’s head around his neck and arranging for his son to receive an elaborate cleansing ceremony when he started running with a bad crowd. It’s not just rural ignorance that causes people to cling to such remedies – as Chubey revealed when he stated ‘We don’t have gates and guards like the rich men in the city, so we use our own protection’ – it’s also about asserting identity in a city where the haves and have-nots look at each other across such a vast chasm. Racial identity is also maintained through these practices – many people spoke of how traditional medicine was a uniquely black way of doing things, distinct and separate from the ways of white people. Makoko is like a slum Venice, made up out of thousands of small wooden huts supported on stilts sunk into the thick black sand of the lagoon bed. Inhabitants get around on small rowboats, often perilously overloaded with people, logs, sand, bricks and other bits and pieces. The presenter (refreshingly always behind the camera) astutely noted how ancient and modern coexist almost seamlessly in this place – the few medical centres provide antibiotics and tree-bark potion, everybody has a mobile phone but the primary method of disseminating information is still word-of-mouth. The patchy-to-nonexistent levels of service provided to the inhabitants was revealed by two deaths by electrocution of saw operators in the slum’s largest business, the Ebute Metta timber yard. Worn cables and a lack of protective gloves meant that even touching the wrong part of the wire connecting the huge electric saws to the power source led to instant death for two unlucky employees. The workers formed a makeshift union and demanded rubber shoes and gloves for safety, which appear to have eventually been provided. Also working at the mill were two boys of about eleven, who had left their rural villages behind and were saving to return home and build a house. How realistic their ambitions were remains to be seen. But as Chubey pointed out ‘If you come to Lagos and don’t have sense, you will get sense very quickly. You will never leave Lagos without getting sense.’ One person who seemed to be lacking in sense was Chubey’s teenage son Payo, who, as Chubey put it ‘is only good at going out’. Despite the traditional ceremony, he continued on his no-good-nik ways until eventually he was thrown out of the family home, along with his mattress and few belongings. Teenagers everywhere fall out with their parents and run away from home, but I don’t envy Payo trying to negotiate a life alone in Lagos’ slums. He maintained ‘I refuse to beg him [Chubey]’ but a few weeks out in the world might make him rethink his stubbornness. Female voices have been fairly absent from the series so far, probably due to to the fact that the central characters tend to be family patriarchs who would be unlikely to allow their wives (seemingly plural in Chubey’s case at least) and daughters to speak alone to the camera team. However the women of the slum were noisily present in most scenes last night, even if we didn’t get to find out much about their thoughts on life. One charged into the sawmill when she heard of the second electrocution, clutching an empty bottle of schnapps and roaring about how God had forsaken them. Meanwhile a couple of concerned sisterly types tried to persuade Payo to apologise to his father, but to no avail. Chubey – who despite his rather aggressively irascible manner, seemd fundamentally decent – eventually won the equivalent of £54 on the state Lotto, and the programme ended with his entire (and extensive) family celebrating. Another man, Paul, saved up enough money from his work at the timber yard to buy his own tiny home. Their ebullience and repeated assertions that money was making them extremely happy shows yet again that the bizarre mental trickery involved in separating money from a certain level of contentment is an invention of the affluent West. Again this super series provides a humanist, unpatronising view into the lives of people inhabiting a confusing, dreadful, fascinating and thoroughly modern city. I look forward to the next episode!

Dark times in the city

Below is a review of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, showing in the IFI in Dublin till Thursday. This review has also been published in Politico magazine.

For decades the only version available of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece ‘Metropolis’ was a cadavre exquis made up of what footage survived after American distributors cut nearly an hour from the original edit and the lost scenes were left to rot in various warehouses. Bits of film have been rediscovered over the years, leading to various ‘definitive’ versions, including the 1986 cut accompanied by Giorgio Moroder’s infamous synth-heavy soundtrack, but it’s only this year that the fullest, most logical version of the film can be seen. This was faciliated by the discovery in 2008 of over 30 minutes of original footage in an archive in Buenos Aires, and it is the existing footage plus these additions that is on view in the IFI until Thursday 23 September.

‘Metropolis’, set in a dystopian future where countless workers toil underground to facilitate the luxurious lifestyles of the inhabitants of the eponymous city, is a truly unique film, combining high art with blockbuster melodrama with complete unselfconsciousness. Its technical and imaginative achievements remain unparalleled – the prototype for all TV robots, the ‘mad scientist’ and his lab and the dystopian city of the future are found in this extraordinary feat of technical and creative imagination. The plot apparently makes far more sense in this complete version than in previous edits, and centres around the discovery of the subterranean hell of the workers by Freder, the somewhat hysterical son of Metropolis’ founder, Joh Frederson, and his attempts with the saintly Maria to help the workers using non-violent means. Rotwang, the mad scientist employed by Joh Frederson, creates a robot version of Maria to incite the workers to open rebellion and thus justify Joh Frederson’s intentions to crack down violently on them. Modern-day parallels are hard to ignore, when the third world labours on subsistence pay to accommodate the lifestyle of the West, but the film had more immediate, and questionable, appeal at its time – its message of a ‘Mediator’ being needed to reach concord between the workers and the bureaucrats struck a chord with Goebbels and Hitler. This appeal can perhaps be attributed to the movie’s scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife at the time and later an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party (she and Lang had divorced by that time). The ‘good’ Maria’s peasant-girl costume and rather wimpy appeals to the workers to wait for the mythical ‘Mediator’ are easily identified with the contemporary growth in nationalistic sentimentality that the Nazis piggybacked so effectively on, while the ‘evil’ Maria’s exhortations to violently rebel are clearly meant to echo (and criticise) Bolshevism (her gestures while speech-making are even reminiscent of Lenin).

But ‘Metropolis’ is by no means a ‘Nazi’ movie, and should not be judged by its political sympathies of its writer and fans. Frankly, the script comes a poor second to the magnificent cinematography and montages that Lang showcases, from the iconic opening sequence of the cogs and pistons of the ‘Heart-Machine’ to the jaw-dropping sequence where the ‘evil’ Maria performs an atavistic erotic dance, spinning off into wild apocalyptic fantasy with the Grim Reaper and the personified Seven Deadly Sins turning up for good measure. Sequences such as these will more than make up for the tediously melodramatic acting beloved of silent cinema at the time. The addition of the original score by Gottfried von Huppertz also carries things along at a fine pace. Not to be missed.

Hell Fire Club. where the ghost of Buck Whaley roams.

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A couple of fics I wrote

I got an ao3 account this year and have 2 3 fics in the Beatles fandom that I'm a little proud of. Both character studies focused on late 1970s John in NYC. Have a read if you're so inclined. Username bodhbdearg.

Where I would be: Househusband era John is very depressed and disengaged from music, but is nudged out of it by folksinging lesbians & NYC queer culture.

Singing a song of ruin: Writing DF-era John is no longer depressed, and spends a night trying to talk someone out of jumping off a bridge.

Update, new WIP:

3. Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs of her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990.

hi pope leo can u drop the skincare routine pls

Builders of the future

‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime’. The old saying, traditionally attributed to Balzac, is as striking today as ever. In fact, in today’s atmosphere, it rings even more true. We may admire the wealthy, the powerful, the self-made, but deep down we can’t help but believe that a millionaire must be, if not quite a criminal, than at least criminally exploitative. It’s this assumption that fires the script of The Social Network, a movie about the events that led to the founding of Facebook and the gazillion-dollar lawsuits that followed. Mark Zuckerberg, the driving force behind the site, is the world’s youngest billionaire, and it is The Social Network‘s aim to uncover the crime(s) that led to those billions.

Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires, the movie portrays Zuckerberg as a Harvard-attending socially inept weirdo whose immense sense of entitlement causes him to react furiously to a girl’s rejection. After calling her a ‘bitch’ on his blog, he creates (with the help of his geeky roommates) a site called FaceMash that calls up random pairs of photos of female Harvard students with a ‘hot or not?’ button underneath. The site is an instant hit, and Zuckerberg is courted by uber-WASP twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to help them build a Harvard dating site. Zuckerberg agrees, but after stringing them along for a few weeks, creates a more sophisticated version of the idea – the Harvard-based prototype for Facebook. The twins are furious and make the (frankly rather dubious) claim that he ‘stole their idea’. Meanwhile The Facebook (as it’s originally called) takes off like wildfire. Zuckerberg refuses to let co-founder Eduardo Saverin bring in advertising for the site, and on the encouragement of Napster founder Sean Parker, moves the operation to California. He freezes Eduardo out of the business altogether, leading to the second lawsuit that frames the story.

The plot is pacily executed, with the Winklevoss and Saverin trials against Zuckerberg used as a framing device. As the characters remember events the action jumps back in time and the story unfolds. There’s a lot of the kind of ‘lightbulb’ moments so beloved of film-makers trying to evoke a creative process, complete with shots of Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg dashing across Harvard towards the nearest computer to encode his latest revelation. Some of these revelations seem simplistic, but Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is a viable idea because ‘anyone can look at pictures of hot girls on the internet – what they want is to look at pictures of people they know’ is bang on the money and exactly the reason Facebook took off in the way it did. What doesn’t ring true is the script’s constant assertions that Zuckerberg’s primary motivation in setting up the site was to impress girls and increase his social standing in Harvard, with its rigid hierarchies and elite clubs.  The real Zuckerberg hasn’t said much about the film, but he did comment recently that he particularly disagreed with the script’s interpretation of his motives. As he put it: “They [the film's creators] just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things”.

I believe that that is the film’s key weakness. Plenty of people are motivated by emotional damage, but the current idea seems to be that any great acheivement must be underpinned by some terrible lack within the achiever. It’s almost as though the modern world is suspicious of anyone who achieves ‘too’ much, who uses their gifts to their absolute limit and attempts to be the best they can be. Single-mindedness is seen to be the same as destructive obsession, pride in doing well at something is seen as being interchangeable with grasping ambition. After efforts are made to understand those who do things for the wrong reasons, a dangerous assumption seems to be rising in storytelling that implies that no-one ever does anything just for the sake of it. This ties in well with an era in which university courses are rated only on their ‘practicality’, and hobbies are something to enhance a CV with. If you’re not emotionally damaged, you’re nakedly seeking profit; either way, high achievement is suspect.

I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg is a nice person or not; certainly you don’t get to his position without a tough hide and a willingness to make enemies. What he undoubtedly is is a programming genius and a hard worker. Is he emotionally damaged? He could be, who knows? Whether he is or not, it’s not the reason he invented (or co-invented, depending on who you talk to) Facebook. His statement that he built it because he ‘likes building things’ is the simplest, and therefore most plausible explanation. All over the world, people are creating, inventing, building, designing and investigating all manner of things simply because they are interested in them. People are working day and night, going without food and sleep, not because they are damaged, but because they passionately care about what they do and want to do to the best of their ability.

Most of us are average in our skills and our abilities, and undoubtedly that leads to an easier, more balanced life. But we shouldn’t pathologise geniuses and grafters; they are the ones who take the ‘giant leaps’ that help us all walk faster. Facebook has its good and bad sides, but it can’t be denied that it has changed the world. Even if Zuckerberg is as unpleasant and odd as The Social Network suggests, that’s not relevant to his role as one of its creators.

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.