Ben Peek's Blog, page 18

Skyfall

Your ability to enjoy Skyfall will be based on how much you enjoy the misogyny that is integral to the Bond franchise.

Marking fifty years of the franchise, Skyfall is a celebration of the franchise, a cynical and unpleasant film that aptly demonstrates not only Bond's age, but also how difficult it is to justify the continual existence of a character who has failed to update in any meaningful way. That the film has received what appears to be an endless amount of rave reviews is not representative of the quality of the film--Sam Mendes has, at best, directed a dull thriller--but rather of the failure of society to reach a level of equality where extreme portrayals of heterosexuality are condemned for the subtext they convey in relation to homosexuality, women, and anyone who is not white.

Yes, I did not like Skyfall.

I am sure you're shocked.

At the heart of Bond the franchise is the idea that no one woman can be better than Bond. On a certain level, this is true of everyone who is supportive or goes against Bond: he is the hero, after all, and he will prevail. And to a degree, this is true of the majority of mainstream films where a good guy and a bad guy fight it out. But very few films celebrate the masculinity in the way that the Bond franchise does, destroying any chance of meaningful relationships or character development within its narrative. Indeed, very few films, much less franchises, have had such a directed and purposeful disregard for the women that appear in the films. It is this fact that primarily reveals the beating heart of the misogyny exists within the Bond films, because Bond must dominate women not just sexually, but intellectually and physically.

Since the mid nineties, after the role of M was taken by Judi Dench, that misogyny has been held back, to a degree. It has still existed, but with the franchise restart in Casino Royale, where Bond was stripped of the gadgets and brought closer to the character of the original novels, where Bond is more an anti-hero than a hero, the misogyny has become less a part of the franchise, but rather a part of the character that a good film maker could twist and turn to his purpose to characterise Bond. That is he, by the way: there has never been a female director in any of the twenty-three franchised films or three non-franchised. But, regardless of that small aside, what Skyfall does in a truly tragic sense, is take the misogyny out of Bond as a character and return it to the franchise, making it not so much a character trait, but rather a filmic one, where all women must be beneath Bond, sexually, intellectually, and physically. Believe it or not, Skyfall achieves this by turning M into a Bond girl.

It is awful to watch. From the opening scenes, Judi Dench's M is reduced to a character of failure, of someone who makes the wrong decisions, again and again, who is haunted by her past and relies upon Bond to save her. The characterisation is made even more pointed when she is contrasted against Ralph Fiennes' Mallory. That's not a spoiler, by the way. If you can't figure out that a character called Mallory played by Ralph Fiennes is going to be the next M the moment he appears on screen, then you probably think the world is flat. But Fiennes Mallory is everything that Dench's M is not: a man of action, confident, secure, and willing to interrupt a woman and make her know that she's talking too much and needs to get to the fucking point, woman. Either that or that kitchen. Mallory, a man who'd like a good steak and a good brandy, can also shoot, take a hit, and wear a vest beneath his suit jacket. Judi Dench's M cannot, because, lets face it, M needs strong men around her to save her not just from the mistakes she has made, but the failure of her own gender as well.

As I said, your enjoyment of Skyfall is based entirely on how well you accept the misogynistic heart that Sam Mendes has restarted in the Bond franchise. For a lot of people, I suspect it is a return to what has made Bond great, a return to excellent Bond films, but to me, it is an ethically unpalatable film for the 21st Century.

Finally

The blog has been a bit quiet over the last few weeks (and months, indeed) but I have finally finished the novel I was writing, so it should return to having regular content, soon.

It's a book that has had many titles, but mostly, it was the Godless. After about half a dozen changes, I am now (currently) calling it Immolation. I reserve the right to change my mind, after I have had a few people read it.

Then, once I make sure the world building is seamless, the plot doesn't skip a beat here or there, it'll be time to hit the road with it, again. Hopefully, the outcome will be good, and there will be a few changes, but time will tell. Either way, today: book is finished.

The Love of Russians

Yeah, the livejournal account got bombed by Russian spam over the weekend. To stop it, I had to set the comment filter to friends only. I'll flip it back soon enough.

You know, I really need to get a new website worked up.

Killing Them Softly

The girl and I went and saw Killing Them Softly last night and we both quite liked it.

It is Andrew Dominik's third film, following the excellent Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, both excellent films. Reuniting him with Brad Pitt, Dominik's Killing Them Softly tells the story of a small crime world set against the 2008 presidential election. In it, enforcer Jackie Coogan (Pitt) is brought in by a crime organisation to find two men after they hold up a card came and make away with forty thousand dollars. Besieged by bureaucracy and the inadequateness of himself and those around him, Coogan slowly and eventually finds the men responsible, and enacts revenge.

While the film itself is universally excellent--Ben Mendelsohn's junkie Russell is superb--the strength and the weakness of the film draws itself from the same element, that of the backdrop of the 2008 election, and the use of statements by the then President Bush and the later President Obama. The goal--at least as far as I was concerned--of this was to turn the film into a metaphor for the state of democracy and capitalism in the United States of America, thus reducing all the characters in the film not to characters in their own right, but to parts of an argument that is strung out and brought to conclusion by Coogan's final lines in the film. Unfortunately, Dominik's statement within the film is not a measured one, not one in which his metaphors meet juxtapositions, or find themselves in a moral or intellectual crisis. It is what it is and while that is fine and good, it does leave you wanting a little more.

Dominik's statement in Killing Them Softly is that the capitalism decline of the country is linked to the weakness of the men--and they are all men--in charge, their unwillingness to be bloody, to view the opinion of the public and take it to its logical conclusion. As with a Wall Street bailout, when Markie Trattman's game is held up years after he held it up himself, the logical conclusion is that he did it himself. Despite the fact that he didn't, Pitt's Coogan rightly points out that Trattman--Ray Liotta--needs to die, because if he doesn't, it sends a message out to everyone that they can rob his game and blame others. It mirrors the lack of punishment dealt out to Wall Street and the big banks in the wake of the financial collapse and meant that those responsible for the financial crisis could continue as they pleased and that, indeed, the lack of repercussions would encourage only others to do as they had done before.

It's an interesting statement, not one I disagree with, but as I said, it's not measured. Dominik is not intent on creating a conversation or debate about that, but rather instead about crafting an argument that goes one way. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does result in some missed opportunities in the narrative. James Gandolfini's drunken, nihilistic Mickey who is bought in to kill the man Coogan knows, is unable to do it because of his own fatalism with the state of the world, and while it is a fine performance and the scenes with him and Pitt are great, there's a moment when, basically, you realise nothing will be done with Mickey, that he won't leave his hotel room, that he won't take the revenge that is required because he represents those in power, the old generation of jaded men who see no point in changing the status quo, and would rather drink and fuck young women. Amusing as the statement and the characterisation is, it doesn't really go anywhere.

Still, when Coogan actually takes things into his own hands, the argument does shift a little, and Dominik begins to tell the audience what was required at the time. Pitt's final lines at the end of the film are both the solution to the problem, and the outcome of the unsolved problem, and close the film excellently:

"I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's a business. Now fuckin' pay me."

Five Dollars in My G-String

Yesterday, Barack Obama was re-elected as the American President and I won five dollars, shoved into a g-string I didn't own because I said it would be a quick and decisive victory.

From afar, it was never going to go differently. Mitt Romney was never a number one choice of a candidate for the Republican Party. A Mormon and a moderate, he was simply unable to speak to the base of the party, many of whom you heard during the election, arguing legitimate rape, anti-abortion stances after wanting to kill health care. The choice of Paul Ryan, an untried and radical part of that base, was a gesture to that conservative element, but it also meant that Romney was even more isolated in his campaign: Ryan had to be careful monitored, his mouth taped shut, a constant, silent reminder to women around the country that their uterus was not their own. Add to that that Romney himself could never shake the image of being a billionaire who made money closing down companies, that he never could offer people a record of a companies built from the ground, and that he was, as Julia Baird said, "The kind of man who walked into a company and sacked your Dad," then there was no reason to vote for him, unless you simply hated the current American Government.

And that, lets be honest, there was that.

Inheriting debt in the middle of a global financial crisis, Obama and the Democrats went into the election with high unemployment, uninspiring economic growth, and a certain malaise in relation to Obama himself, who never lived up to the promises of his 2008 campaign of hope and change (something he was never going to do). If the Republican Party had managed to put up a moderate candidate who ran on self made business, the narrative that Romney himself tried to create, then it would have been the close race that a number of people thought that it was going to be. The election was there to be lost for Obama, which is perhaps the thing that it going to stick in the Republican mouth for some time, but they buried themselves so easily and throughly that it was always a question of not if Obama won, but by how much.

What I did find interesting, throughout the whole of yesterday, was how many people said that only white men, and angry white men, vote for the Republican Party. It was part of a larger racial comment in the election in general, where people felt comfortable saying that only Black men and women, and only Hispanic men and women would vote for Obama. Also, women would vote for him, because he was for womans issues (and the economy, dontcha know, isn't a womens issue). I don't know who Asians were voting for, because no one ever considered them. But having heard it said so often and so repeatedly, even I--a white Australian on the other side of the world--started to feel insulted by the claims made either way. Racial motivation is an easy and simple minded thing to do, and while base voting blocks do have a racial element, there's also a strong socio-economic and cultural play into it as well. But also, mostly, it's lazy--it's lazy to say only one kind of person will vote for this person based on their skin colour. And given that over a hundred million people voted, it's lazy and disingenuous to say it.

It also has the additional negative impact of giving a sense of validation to the claims of various right wing nuts who say that the white man's time is over. We can only hope that it is, but not for any of the fear mongering that they are pushing. We hope it is because the dominance of any race or gender by one other is an untenable thing and flies in the face of equality, a goal that we all ought to strive for. Terrible things are done when all people are not treated with the respect and dignity that people everywhere deserve. Terrible things are being done because of this right now. So there should not be any attempt to give the radical voices that loom close to KKK territory any validity, and the lazy division of such a large amount of voters into simplistic racial blocks that ignores all individuality does this. Rather, what should be celebrated is the diversity, the range of people, who vote to support either candidate.

After all, African Americans do vote Republican. So do Hispanics. And so do women. And white men--white angry men, even--do vote Democrat.

Except for, perhaps, white men who live in Australia with their American girlfriend. They don't vote Republican or Democrat. In fact, they don't vote at all. Something to do with them not being American citizens, and all.

Steampunk Revolution

My copy of Steampunk Revolution arrived today. Edited by Ann Vandermeer, and containing my story 'Possession', it is available now.



It is, as with all the VanderMeer books (or VanderMeers, when Ann edits with Jeff, such as the recent World Fantasy Award winning the Weird), Steampunk Revolution is a well designed and lovely thing. I even pick up a mention in the Publishers Weekly review:

VanderMeer’s follow-up to previous similarly themed anthologies targets established fans of the retro-infatuated steampunk movement. In addition to four nonfiction pieces by gnere luminaries such as Jaymee Goh of “Silver Goggles” fame, including Margaret Killjoy’s “Steampunk Shapes Our Future,” the collection offers 28 stories, several of them standouts. In Ben Peek’s ”Possession,” a botanist trying to regenerate soil in the Earth’s crust discovers a dying female android, while Karin Tidbeck’s sad, whimsical “Beatrice” relates a tale of love between man and airship. Vandana Singh’s “A Handful of Rice” entertains with its alternate history of India. Technology runs amok in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Fixing Hanover,” in which inventors suffer unintended consequences from their creations, and in Christopher Barzak’s surreal “Smoke City,” about an urban industrial hell. Readers who enjoy steampunk largely for its visual aesthetic or use in other genres like YA and mystery may find less appeal in a collection geared mostly toward hardcore devotees.

Now, back to finishing novel. Not long, now.

Hit Squad!

Lately, I have begun to feel a vague sense of living in the 1940s.

There are a few reasons for it, and a few blog posts worth, so today, I'll focus on the current debate of equality for women. It is in part motivated by this article from the Age, where Nicolle Flint decided that anecdotal evidence was enough to claim that there's no problem with women, especially in the arts: "There is a growing body of evidence, anecdotal though some of it may be, from the literary sphere and closely related theatrical sphere that suggests women bear a large degree of responsibility for their alleged, and statistically questionable, under-representation in both fields."

I mean, hang your head in shame, right? Anecdotally, I heard that Nicolle Flint was actually a man, and paid by a Coalition supporting editor in the Age to write this article under a pseudonym. It would explain his repeated use of 'Handbag Hit Squad' to refer to female Labor politicians, after all, and besides, the good thing about anecdotal evidence is you don't need to prove it. It's probably a slippery slope to go down in public discussion, after all, I've heard anecdotal evidence the world is flat, Jesus was white, and Barak Obama and Donald Trump were both born in Kenya. You'd think that if you were a PhD student you'd know better than to go on that, but then anyone can get a doctorate these days, really. After all, I have one--once that happened all the respect and dignity about being able to call yourself doctor went out the window. Probably why more and more of my friends keep getting it.

But Flint's article is part of a larger problem that exists in Australia, especially in the media, and that is the denial of the female voice.

Perhaps strangely, until a few months ago, I wouldn't have said that Australia had a huge issue with female equality. If pressed, I would have said it wasn't perfect, but we've made good good headway, and that it still required work, for the battle for equality is a constant one. I probably would have pointed to race and sexuality and said to you that these were the current important battlefields of equality, and they could only hope to look like the gender battle in a decade. But after the last few months, with more and more articles like Flint's emerging, I have come to despair, truly, and come to consider that I have been wrong, that the battle for equality in gender is in dire need, that it requires constant supervision, that as an important social and cultural issue, the last six months have set back women's rights for at least a decade.

And how do I rationalise this, you ask?

Well, mostly, it's because I have heard, time and time again, in interviews, in articles, on TV, on the radio, on the net and in person, women say, "The treatment of Julia Gillard is sexist, and it mirrors my own lived experience of the world."

And time and time again, I have seen people in positions of authority--most of them men, but a few 'women' like Flint--say, "No, you're wrong. It doesn't. Be quiet."

It's as if the very act of denying the lived experience of thousands of women does not strike one moment of concern in people, that the constant and endless parade of people who easily and without pause tell women they are wrong isn't of any concern, doesn't support the argument of sexism and doesn't underscore the very real problem that this whole situation with Gillard has highlighted.

Someone, no doubt, is probably thinking, "Well, isn't that just anecdotal evidence as well?" to which I kindly and properly say, "No." The evidence is out there, easily obtainable to anyone who wishes to do it. It's in the blog posts, in the interviews, in the articles and sorry excuses for TV journalism that are currently doing the rounds in Australia. It's in the viral nature of Julia Gillard's statement. It's in the very fact that I took time to write this post to tell you that the lived experience of millions of women in this country, much less the world, should be listened to. After all, it is their life, their statements of being treated without equality.

And, like all questions of equality, it impacts on us all.

It's a Genre Debate, Insert Seinfeld Reference.

Genre, served straight up, has its limitations, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. Indeed, it’s these very limitations that attract us. When we open a mystery, we expect certain themes to be addressed and we enjoy intelligent variations on these themes. But one of the things we don’t expect is excellence in writing, although if you believe, as Grossman does, that the opening of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” is an example of “masterly” writing, then you and I are not splashing in the same shoals of language.

At the New Yorker, Arthur Krystal is trying on the old hat that is Literary Fiction vs Genre Fiction and it reads fairly much as you imagine it would.

An old, old debate, it mostly falls to a series of comparisons between the big releases of genres and literary fiction (because, you know, literary fiction isn't a genre as well, and we shouldn't suggest that it struggles with its own limitations, no). Ursula Le Guin gets name checked, though none of her books are mentioned; talking about the Left Hand of Darkness is probably not that wise in this context anyhow. But Krystal name drops Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan, Michael Chabon, Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem, as if he just strolled into a bookstore and found whatever it was that was selling well, and compares them to Agatha Christie, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler and more. There's not actual time spent comparing the literary value of any of the authors I just mentioned--well, okay, a little time on Christie--so you're free to move them around to the various groups that you want and to imagine which genre they belong in.

The problem with Kyrstal's argument is that it's fairly shallow because he writes about it without any depth, any attention to craft or technique, or style or theme. Neither is he able to quantify his choices, either. He cannot explain to the reader why the opening of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express isn't a masterpiece when Grossman claims that it is. Granted, I don't think it is, either, but I think that because it's a matter-of-fact, stylistically empty, flat paragraph of prose. However, having not read the rest of the book (I know very little of Christie's work), I can't say if it becomes a great start, or not. The opening of To Kill a Mockingbird isn't anything special until you have read the entirety of the book and you realise how Jem broke his arm. But, you know, this is me, discussing actual works, not just comparing them to whatever I feel like. If I was to further compare, I might point out that Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road is awful, a pale imitation of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Mouser stories, but without the fine writing, nor the detailed, excellent character study, or even the humour. And lets not talk about his Sherlock Holmes piece, the Final Solution. That was just embarrassing--to Arthur Conan Doyle and Holocaust survivors. But I otherwise love Chabon: the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys are great novels, Werewolves in Their Youth a strong collection, and The Yiddish Policeman's Union has some of his best prose. My girlfriend bought me a signed first edition of his latest novel for my birthday.

But there I go again, actually discussing the content of books, the way things are written. You'd almost accuse me of having knowledge of multiple genres. A knowledge that might suggest that there is no inherent value in one 'type' of book over another.

If you want to compare books from different genres, that's fine. It's an enjoyable exercise to discuss work--well, I reckon it is, anyhow--but if you're going to do it, at least begin from a point of view that all fiction belongs to a genre, that all genres, outside being a marketing tool, have a history, a set of definitions, expectations, and rules. This includes literary fiction as much as it does crime, romance, and science fiction. No work of fiction is genre free, ever. Then, secondly, don't use commercial success as a mark of a truly excellent book, regardless of its genre. What you find on the shelf put out by mainstream publishers is not the pinnacle of literary achievement, though by no means is it the dregs--but to fully understand a genre, any genre, you have to go beyond what is put out there for you by, say, the New York Times bestseller list and awards like the Pulitzer and Booker, and you need to look at the depth and dearth of work that exists in all genres. Then you can then start making judgments and opinions, and begin saying which is worth more time and less.

Or, you might not, having become well read at this point.

The Life of...

I thought today, "It's best to respect everyone, while maintaining a healthy disrespect for all their opinions."

Perhaps it only works in relation to art, however.

At any rate, the final twenty thousand words of this book is taking longer than I thought, which is why the blog has been a bit quiet. The priority running into the end of the year is to finish it, then begin hunting around for a new agent and so forth. Once that is happening, new things can be written.

The girl and I have shifted markets, moving from Glebe to the Rocks, where tourists are bussed in, and I have made friends with a woman who sells cheese boards. The process to get into the Rocks Market was a little more intense, involving submissions, interviews, and the like. There are a few markets like that and it's nice to get into them, but in the same way, they have to prove themselves. So far, we've been a bit underwhelmed by the Rocks, a sentiment shared by everyone that we talk to. However, I did see a guy who made 'steampunk' jewelry out of old watches, pulling them apart for the gears, cleaning them up and then mounting them, or setting jewels in them. It's a pretty simple idea, but really quite impressive, and worth the look if you're into that kind of stuff. Still, for us, it has been a bit underwhelming, but hopefully it'll pick up. We're at Kirribilli Market in a couple of weeks, and then at the Glebe Street Fair, so hopefully all these things will work out well. Still, it's an up and down life, this marketeer, thing.

If I owned a press, I reckon I'd be at these markets, though, I have to say. You can sell books at these things and if you had enough diversity in your line, you would stand a decent chance to make a profit, and to reach an audience that you don't usually come into contact with. One of the things about selling Above/Below among all the photography is the diversity of people who buy it. It's been enough, actually, to make me consider reprinting 26lies, and perhaps doing some small, one off projects, just for my own amusement. Not that I have the time or money for it at the moment, mind you.

But isn't that always the case?

Klausner and DeWitt

Harriet Klausner claims to be a speed-reader. In the last decade, this former librarian has reviewed over 28,000 books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other sites. She's a notorious figure in the book-reviewing world. For many authors, getting "Klausnered" is a rite of passage, and as her "reviews" are nearly always very positive they are in a small way helpful, as she raises the average rank of your book.

Despite the impossibility of reading so many books and liking them all, few authors or publishers have condemned her as an obvious fake. But last week, a blogger who has spent years obsessively documenting Klausner's reviewing habits finally found a smoking gun. Using information given by Klausner herself in interviews, the blogger showed that many of the free books she receives from publishers and then reviews are promptly sold online from an account under her son's name. Suddenly, it all makes sense. Some have estimated that Klausner has made around $20,000 a year from her review mill.

But it has made no difference. On Tuesday, Klausner posted 30 new reviews to Amazon, all of them positive. The fact that Amazon and others have tolerated such an obvious fake for so long, and will apparently continue to do so despite overwhelming evidence she is profiting from it, shows how little they care about the integrity of their review systems.

As the post says, Klausner has been around for years, but I found the income she was making from it fairly amusing. That's more than some writers make!

In news that's perhaps vaguely connected to this, I read an interview with Helen DeWitt, which talked about publishing and other things and her lastest novel, Lightning Rods. At one point during it, she said, "I was very traumatized when I wrote it. Lightning Rods was a response to the very bad experience of having Samurai sent out and having all these unsolicited opinions from people whom I knew nothing about, so I couldn't place the context. Which certainly to me, as an academic--it was offensive. I don't think books come programmatically, they come from the subconscious. So my experience of that was like being fucked from behind through a hole in the wall. See, sexual abuse is taken very seriously, but intellectual abuse is not seen as a problem. That's just our society."

In Lightning Rods, a man creates a device that allows high powered corporate men to fuck women from behind in the toilet anonymously. I reckon I'll check it out.