Films That Aren’t The Sort Of Films You Thought They Were

It’s been a while since I had this argument, but Star Wars isn’t a science fiction film.

Wait, come back. Just because it’s set in another galaxy, with aliens and spaceships, doesn’t mean it’s science fiction. Sci-fi tends to be about hypothesising future technological advances or discoveries and the effect they have on humanity (directly or metaphorically). Star Wars isn’t about that – it’s effectively a fairy tale in space.

Yes it is – innocent farmboy becomes a hero, guided by a kindly wizard. He saves a princess. The bad guy is a big dude dressed in black armed with mystical powers. The Force is magic, the Death Star is the Dark Lord’s castle. It’s obvious.

Now, I’m far from the first person to point this out – heck, George Lucas based it all on the Hero’s Journey – but it’s worth noting. Despite Jar-Jar, despite wooden acting and horrifying wibbling about sand, my biggest problem with the prequels is that they came up with a sci-fi explanation for the Force. Suddenly it became mundane and reductionist, rather than the magic substitute it was originally. There was no need for it.

Then you’ve got the Terminator and Alien franchises – not science fiction. The first films in both series are horror – an implacable enemy from beyond that you can’t stop or reason with or understand and that you don’t stand much chance against – they’re in the same genre as Halloween or Jaws. Then their follow-ups are action movies – the bad guys could just as just as easily be terrorists. Interestingly they both have a theme of parenthood running through them…

And is Firefly/Serenity science fiction or a western? Is Hot Fuzz a western? They made Highlander sci-fi in its sequel, but that was just stupid. Transformers: The Movie is a road movie in space (so’s Star Wars according to a friend from university).

And that’s before we go really crazy. Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek film, which isn’t that original or controversial a claim, but I’d argue that The Iron Giant is the best Superman movie. And yes, I’m including Superman: The Movie and Superman II in that.

Anyway, all this is to say that genre is a slippery thing. The trappings of a story, be they spaceships or sharks, aren’t as important as what the story is about, its themes and tropes. You can’t figure out Star Wars using the rules of science fiction, otherwise you get The Phantom Menace (you could possibly say that lots of talk about politics, punctuated by action sequences and space battles is actually more a Star Trek thing…). Terminator 2 gains something if you see it not as sci-fi, and not just as peddle-to-the-metal action, but as a screwed up ‘man’ and woman learning how to be parents.

So what are your favourite films that aren’t the sort of films you thought they were?

The Stories We Tell

Okay, I admit it – my last post was grim, grimmer than I like to be. I know I’m a born pessimist but I try to fight against it, but I guess I couldn’t help it – a bunch of political maniacs are threatening the world economy, people are getting murdered in the streets in Syria while, parallel to this, people in London are riotting so they can nick DVDs, and someone near where I live has been messing with roadsigns so that diverted traffic is getting lost. Frankly, some days it’s not worth getting out of bed.

But then I read a couple of articles, one by my friend Sudge about living life between the bookends, the other a devastating New York Times critique of Obama’s inability to promote a narrative. All this got me thinking.

We’re a storytelling people, all of us; we tell ghost stories around campfires, we watch soap operas, we testify in church and pull together 140 character storylines on Twitter. Narrative is hardwired into us, and we always find a way to paint animals on cave walls.

And so what we may have here is a complete failure to tell a story that matters a damn.

Think about it – the rioters in Tottenham and Brixton rioted for… what? Despite there being two potential narratives that coild resonate (“Community rebels against police brutality”, “Poverty-stricken youths rebel against an uncaring society”), you can’t help but think there’s no greater message than “Smash stuff up and steal things”. In the absence of a grassroots story we often turn to leaders – let’s face it, Hitler and Churchill were experts at this, even if they were at opposite ends of the World War II spectrum. We don’t have anyone with that storytelling ability – Obama’s fairly bad at it, but at least he’s present, unlike UK leaders – it’s all very well trying to weave a tale of the Big Society, but before you can do that, you need to pay your dues working with smaller societies.

Meanwhile, London is rioting, and some people are trying to figure out if Twitter or Blackberrys are the story, as opposed to the medium through which those stories are told. No-one has much of an idea of what’s going on, or why people seem to want to destroy their own communities.

No-one knows what the story is.

Maybe the reason for this is that we’ve become accustomed to people telling our stories for us, rather than us grasping the nettle and creating our own narratives. We’re told that our jobs are vulnerable, that our old age will be spent in poverty, that things like healthcare and libraries and security or optional extras rather than fundamental human rights. And we’ve either gone along with this or reacted against it in ways that undercut the good within any alternative narratives.

So how do we tell a better story? Collectively, I don’t know. I’d say it begins with treating each other with love and respect and decency, by building our communities together, by living to create and build up rather than destroy and tear down. But that only goes so far when, as we’ve seen in London, people are willing to burn down their own communities.

Yesterday saw the start of the Jewish festival of Tisha B’Av, a day on which the Jewish community remembers and reflects upon the disasters that have befallen it over the years. That seems instructive somehow, because for all we can lament everything that’s happened in the UK, we need a time to reflect on the crises we’ve seen but, more importantly, we need to uncover how we got to this point in the first place. People don’t hack mobiles or burn restaurants on a whim. And we won’t get to that point by passing laws that promote greater levels of random stop-and-search or that penalise Twitter – there’s a quote in this article from the Telegraph that goes “memory is far better than the law”.

We need our Tisha B’Av moment, to express a lament for the disasters befalling the UK at the moment – the poison of the phone hacking scandal, the explosion of rioting, the panic of the Stock Markets – and then, most importantly, construct a new narrative. And maybe that’s got to be based in loving our neighbour, because the problems that face us aren’t failures of law or economics so much as failures of a common humanity – if we marginalise people, if we see loyal workers or phone-hacked celebrities or disenfranchised young people as collatoral damage resulting from unstoppable cultural forces then we’re dead in the water.

We need a new story; one that we’re proud to tell, one that makes us not only proud to be British but that makes us capable of being in community once more.

Pick Up Your Pen

There’s a concept in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics that, somewhere in the halls within which the anthropomorphic personification of dreams resides, there is a library that contains all the books that were never written, including Road Trips to the Emerald City by L. Frank Baum and The Bestselling Romantic Spy Thriller I Used To Think About On The Bus That Would Sell A Billion Copies And Mean I’d Never Have to Work Again by…well, most of us actually.

I love that concept, that somewhere out there is a copy of the book I never wrote. I mean, it was something I always wanted to do, but it got pushed aside once bills had to be paid, and yes, now I’m a blogger and a writer for work, but it’s not the same is it? It’s not the same as seeing something you wrote on someone else’s shelf.

Because books have power, don’t they? We still remember the books we read as children. I recall being a voracious reader as a child, always with my nose in a book, reading as I walked along. My reading has slowed down since then; I blame it on being busy and getting old, but really it’s because I don’t make enough time for it. That’s sad and a shame.

So I guess that’s my plea to anyone out there who wants to do something creative but never gets round to it: just get on with it. Get on with it because you’ll never get any more time and because inspiration won’t strike if you never bother to pick up a pen or a paintbrush. Go ahead and do it – carve that sculpture, compose that symphony, paint that painting, write that book. Use it, don’t lose it.

(I stole “Use it, don’t lose it” from an obscure favourite book of mine, Mid-life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders tour with three chords and an attitude, in which a group of middle-aged writers, including Stephen King, form a rock band and tour America… Which, I guess, is also about seizing opportunities while you’ve got the chance.)

So pick up that pen and write for your life. The readers of the future await you.

We read to know we are not alone

he Evening Standard has today launched a series of articles exploring “a literacy crisis” throughout London. The article states that a million people in the city can’t read and 1 in 4 children are almost illiterate when they leave primary school.

Without going into the figures in any detail (although my job means I come across similar stories, like the CBI’s findings that employers are funding remedial English and Maths classes for new workers who do not have adequate literacy and numeracy skills), it’s a shocking story. Sure, the report uses emotive examples (like the boy who brought an Argos catalogue to school because it was the only book his parents owned), but even so it’s a state of affairs I have difficulty comprehending.

My parents never had a problem with me being a bookworm. They probably thought I was too easily distracted, and had problems with me readwalking, but on the whole I was encouraged to enjoy books, comics and magazines. Vists to our local library were a Friday ritual, and I can thank that ritual for giving me a lifelong interest in reading and for fostering my inner information junkie. My childhood bedroom was filled with Doctor Who novelisations, Transformers comics and notebooks in which I wrote stories and poems and fragments of conversations. Nowadays I’ve got my own house, but not much has changed except it’s a bit tidier than my old bedroom. Only a bit though.

Books – and yes, comics, magazines and the internet – can be a means of escape, a way of exploring a new world, a means of enchanting our reality and making it new and strange and wondrous again. Fiction gives us myths and adventure and romance, non-fiction provides us with knowledge and new horizons. If children in the UK are being denied this, because of poor parenting or inadequate teaching or government cuts then it’s not only unfortunate, it’s not only sad, it’s a national tragedy. It has profound implications for how we create, invent, compete and dream. And yet the country closes libraries while a quarter of kids in London can’t read.

This is why the Save Libraries campaign is so important, why encouraging children to read is vital, why Hurley’s Heroes distributing comic books to youngsters in shelters following the recent tornadoes in Missouri may not just be a fantastic act of charity but might be a spark that ignites the imagination of a kid who’d never gone near a book before. This isn’t just about the economy and having a skilled workforce, although that’s a big deal in itself, it’s about quality of life and creating the future. The report suggests that the potential of a huge number of children and young people is being squandered and that’s not only a shame, it’s a crime.

And so the challenge for each of us is to do something about this situation. Talk about the books you’re reading, donate your old books to libraries and charity shops and park benches, read stories to children (and make sure you do the funny voices), comment on blogs you’ve enjoyed, quote your favourite song lyrics at every opportunity. And may we help one another discover once again the joy of words and stories.

Like Tears in Rain

And so it came to pass that, in 2001, UNESCO established the Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, a project aimed at recognising and preserving ‘intangible cultural heritage. On this list are festivals, puppet theatres, folk music, human towers, cuisine and the whistled language of the island of La Gomera.

All of these are transitory – a performance, a meal, a dance, a prayer, a conversation, and while my area doesn’t have anything as evocative as the Mosque at the End of the World, we have Aynuk and Ali and faggots and peas (don’t laugh). All those quirky expressions of culture that don’t make it on to Britain’s Got Talent but that are somehow an intrinsic part of our humanity.

I’ve been thinking about things like this since I read MaggieCakes’s blog, specifically the articles on the evolution of storytelling in the digital age. The blog has featured pieces on microfiction and whether or not Twitter and Facebook will develop a native storytelling tradition, and I guess that’s what’s prompted my interest in the subject; that and a post I wrote a few days ago about the BBC’s Domesday Book project almost falling prey to the digital dark age.

There are examples of Twitter being used as a storytelling medium, and it will be interesting to see how they develop, but despite how they exist within an infrastructure of computers, smartphones and PDAs there’s still a sense that they lack permanence; this may be my prejudice coming out, but although I love the Kindle app on my iPhone, there’s something fragile about the books I read on it – one wrong sync or copyright screw-up and they disappear and yes, they can be retrieved but…

(There’s a great line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Giles, the technophobic fount of all knowledge, weighs in on the books vs computers debate: “Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is”, he says, “A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up memories long forgotten. Books smell, musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is…it has no texture, no context. It’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last then the getting of knowledge should be tangible, it should be smelly.”)

I’m not getting into whether or not I agree with Giles, but I know that the funniest things I’ve ever read on the internet have seemingly vanished without trace (a review of All Star Batman and Robin and the Hulk getting emotional in his reviews of DC Comics). Does this lack of permanence mean that stories born out of social media face an uphill struggle to take hold on the popular imagination? Internet memes are all very well, but I’m not convinced they’re particularly mainstream yet – my mom’s heard of Superman but not Dramatic Rodent, and that’s before we get onto how strongly a story can take hold in a world where the majority of internet users are concentrated in certain geographic areas. That said, Twitter’s use in mobilising Middle Eastern protests may be a precursor to net-based storytelling taking off globally.

And even if this new storytelling fails to become a global thing, who cares? The traditions listed by UNESCO are the products of specific communities, formed by culture, language, resources and geography. We in the West may have a tendancy to see our pop culture as mass media, but my experience of the internet is that it’s formed of thousands of interactive communities, defined by forum membership, blogrolls and friends lists. Even forums I read every day have their own acronyms and in-jokes I don’t get – I’m not part of the in-crowd, not there 24/7, a lurker on the edge of community listening to secret languages, not meant for outsiders.

And if all these emerging cultures are, by their nature, transitory and intangible, should we be thinking about preserving them? It feels like it’s early days for that question, but the internet moves quickly – heck, it hasn’t been that long since Myspace was bigger than Facebook. Do we look at archiving (asks the man with a back-up blog), or do we let the jokes and the flame wars fade away, moments in time that it would be pointless to capture; if the internet is formed by its users, democratisation and a little bit of anarchy, would trying to capture and preserve it end up with a zoo-dwelling tiger in too small a cage?