So Post Empire

Skyfall is bitter sweet. There's an appropriate hang-dog nostalgia in the air for the 50th anniversary of James Bond. Of course, on the one hand, it's an auspicious occasion and we are all celebrating. But, like the much trumpeted criticism of what consumerism has done to Jesus' birthday, we now celebrate Bond without really giving a shit about his 'true meaning'. Bond is bigger than Britain and he is understandably a little bit apologetic.

That is not to suggest that the film is all wringing-hands and waving linen hankies, on the contrary it opens with the most impressive action sequence I have ever seen - one that references every cheap thrill and daredevil raise ever made in film.

Swooping off a motorcycle over the edge of a bridge in pursuit of a bad guy, Bond is suddenly atop a train, wrestling with the enemy, hurtling toward a low tunnel. Another agent is covering them with firepower. If she takes the shot she might hit Bond, if she doesn't both he and his opponent will disappear into the tunnel and be off the radar and out of the sight-line of the watching commanders back home.

'What should I do?' she asks M, the ruler of the mi6 British intelligence super-squad. Heartless Mummy to a legion of orphans. Matriarch symbol for the whole darn British empire. Lover of shortbreads and baths and bulldogs and all that is good and right.

'Take the shot', says M.

A second later James Bond is falling from the speeding train and into the opening credits. Agent down.

It's an odd start to a movie, a fake kill, a shot of adrenaline delivered to an audience who know darn well it's just for fun. Bond isn't dead. He just turned 50. And we only just opened our Jaffas ferchristsake.

Perhaps what this opening foreshadows is the eschewing of the double blind, of the script trickery that rises and plunges, sacrificing emotional complexity for the sake of rouse and surprise.

In Skyfall the audience can relax. It's assumed that we already know what going to happen. Bond will defeat his opponent, fuck a few broads, drink a martini and drive a flash car. This is what we are here for. The real surprise is that while we are letting all this glamour and formula wash over us, we will also be prompted to do some actual thinking, not about what is about to happen on screen but about what is going on right now, in the world, and what happened to bring us to this point.

Birthdays, when the party has calmed to a lull and the gin is tapped out, are a great time for reflection.

In the aftermath of the fake death of Bond, while our hero does tequila shots while balancing a scorpion on his wrist in some bar in Thailand, the British secret service is experiencing a leadership crisis.

Bureaucrats want answers. What makes M think she can go around giving orders that get agents shot? And who was it that leaked the document containing the list of names of all British undercover operatives in the global terrorist network?

The empire has become a joke. They keep talking about 'firewalls' like computer security were a new issue. They are operating out of 2001. They need to update their IOS and get with the future.

Especially since there is a traumatised cyber terrorist on the loose hacking into their shit and blowing up their headquarters.

The villain in SkyfallI is unforgettable. Javier Bardem plays Raoul Silva. An ex MI6 operative who fell victim to the Chinese in Hong Kong. He lost half his face when his cyanide capsule proved dodgy. He blames his Mummy of course. His Maam. M. And now, what with the aforementioned firewalls and internet smarts he is ready to reap his revenge. M, the cold bitch, must pay.

Silva then, with his stop-at-nothing deranged revenge drive, becomes the symbolic brother of Bond, who was also betrayed by M, who also acknowledges that she is a bitch. They are a Cain and Abel of the empire. The true sons of patriotism and colonialism.

Silva is what Bond could become if it wasn't for loyalty, steadfastness, 'a little thing called love of country'.

When Bond sees the smoking ruins of the MI6 office on the news he puts down the brunette and the scorpion. Time to get back to business.

The question of why Bond would go back to work after yet another near-miss death at the hands of the crown is of course the same thing that distinguishes him from brother Raoul. Unflinching, unapologetic patriotism.

Silva loves the wrong way, with embarrassing, feminine, distinctly Latin sentiment. He blames M for his disfiguration instead of seeing his fate as noble service of country. He's bisexual. Oedipally inconsolable. Aching for a Mummy who only spreads her legs for England.

Bond gets it. He'll let bygones be bloody bygones. But then, Bond is British and British is not something you become. You are born into it.

Silva's opening speech, a gloriously delivered deranged creep monologue is also a testimony about colonial violence. He tells us how, in order to stem a plague of coconut eating rats, his (native) grandmother trapped and starved them (of coconut, of love) until they cannibalistically devoured each other. Then, when only two rats remained - the survivors - she let them go. Though now, they've lost their taste for coconut. Now they only eat rat.

It's a chilling allegory, a nice parody on the philosophically profound tale-of-the-primitive so often evoked in colonial rhetoric, academia and literature. This tale unmistakably points to the civil unrest that accompanies colonial rule while also biting sharply at the husk of capitalism, that global neo-colonialism predicated on a cannibalism of resources. The starving many feed the fattening few.

Now, after a lifetime of colonial oppression, Silva is the ultimate anarchist. He knows that digital technology means the tools of oppression are accessible to the masses. Destruction is as beautiful as construction. Webs more malleable than borders.

'England!' he laughs at Bond, 'The Empire! You are living in ruins there too.'

We have all heard the argument that, as far as colonisers go, the Brits were a pretty fair bunch. Indigenous Australians, for example, should not whinge so much. Rather, they should count themselves lucky that in the inevitable process of colonisation they did not happen instead upon the blood thirsty Spaniards. And besides, a modern nation can't be taken to task for the sins of history.

Or at least, that used to be the line. But the line is becoming as hard to walk as it always was to swallow.

Raoul Silva's Mexican sugar skull insignia clings to the hacked screen of the British security system above the banner: think on your sins.

It's significant that Silva is from South America, a continent with an extensive and bloody colonial history with the British Empire. In a related aside, Ian Fleming, the creator of Bond wrote much of his bestselling prose from his expatriate estate in British Jamaica, right on the cusp of the countries successful bid for independence.

The Bond franchise has a fraught history with colonialism and empire thinking. When the USA prevented Britain from intervening in the Egyptian nationalising of the Suez Canal in 1956, the empire had a rude awakening to the dawning of what would become post-colonial consciousness. Suddenly it was not simply okay to annex territories for the good of the empire. The empire, in fact, was somewhat of a joke label as the world turned attentions to the superpowers of the USSR and USA engaging in a race to colonise the wider solar system. It's probably no surprise then that Ian Fleming's Bond books and the movies that they inspired gained massive popularity throughout the 50s and 60s. Here was a narrative of British relevancy at a time when such a thing was strictly past tense. A palliative bedtime story for Brits coming to terms with their status as second-class empire.

In 2012, Britain is in as much need of a quantum of solace as ever before. Only a few months ago, in October, the first court case for colonial violence was brought against the British Sovereign. Three Kenyans sought restitution for torture and detention at the hands of the Brits during the eight year so-called 'Kenyan Emergency' in which colonial powers sought to quash the rebel uprising of the Mao Mao, a secret society opposed to British rule.

The Mao Mao were a picture perfect bunch of 'villains'. They ritualistically drank blood and swore farmers to oaths of dissidence. Unafraid of breaking eggs to make omelettes, the British plan for beating the Mao Mao entailed the imprisonment of over 150,000 Kenyans. Torture, starvation and tens of thousands of deaths resulted from this measure. This was all going on right through the 50s and into the 60s. You know, the Bond years.

Fifty years later, colonial history went on trial and the Kenyans won. For once the losers got their hands on the history books. The ruling opens the British to an unimaginable number of potential future lawsuits regarding past colonial atrocities. Think on your sins has become a legal imperative. 

Colonially speaking, Britain has been 'a very bad Mummy'.

In Skyfall, M is under fire not only by super-villain Silva but by the British parliament. A minister who so doesn't get it is asking her to assume accountability for the shemozzle that the secret service has become.

'It's like you are still living in a golden age of espionage', says the minister, 'where intelligence is out only resource'.

 The tone here is strictly sentimental. 'If only', the unspoken answer.

Postmodernity, postcolonialism, all those prefixes just muddy the mustard. It's so hard to protect the empire in a broadbanded, post-empire world.

Although M makes a pretty noble speech about country etc. it's clear her time is drawing to a close. The whole of her operation has in fact been driven underground, in to 'Winston Churchill's tunnels', a wry, metaphoric office.

Knowing that although parliamentary accusations hurt at least a little, vengeful machine guns break skulls for real, Bond drives M to refuge, somewhere on the set of Heartbeat, the manor where he grew up.

Here, they get down to a lot of talk about doing things the old fashioned way. Knives when guns won't suffice. British nous and bravery and somewhere, on the edge of this, a distinctly colonial nostalgia.

It's a harking back to, if not feudalism, at least the working manor system, a place of distinct hierarchies uninterrupted by the confusion and drifting power lines of digital networks.

Say what you will about the British Empire, they got the job done. Anyone for omelette?

The final show down is bitter sweet. Silva turns out to have a real eye for symbolism but ultimately, he too is guilty of looking back at the past. Only Bond remains unsentimental. He reveals his true feeling for the family manor as he blows it to smithereens.

Burn the ruins. The future is Bond. The new Bond. Daniel Craig’s Bond.

While we could say that this ending points to the endurance of patriotism against all odds, I think rather, Bond's survival proves that while empires rise and fall on their ideologies, corporate entertainment franchises will prevail.

While British films often struggle to make a dent in the corporate sector, Skyfall a truly international entity, is set to be the highest grossing film ever.

For the Bond franchise, even if it has to eat itself - it's worth it for all those sweet, sweet coconuts.

The Nymphomaniacs

This is erotic fan fiction what I wrote for an event at The Wheeler Centre. It's about Lar Von Trier's forthcumming. Enjoy yourselves pistoleers. xxxDoyle

Somewhere on the outskirts of Cologne, Germany, in an old warehouse, Shia Labeouf is jerking at his medium sized, flaccid penis, trying to give it some girth and heft for his upcoming close-up. Everything depends on this moment but clearly his penis didn't get the memo. Penises don't understand the highly oppressive political hierarchies of the film industry, penises don't realise how hard it is for an actor who made a name for himself on a TV show that rhymes and a movie about giant toys to be taken seriously. Penises don't give a toss about nothin' but a toss and a warm moist hole.

A fluffer from a local brothel hangs nervously around the young star but he shoos her away 'I can handle it,' he says. If Stellan Skarsgard doesn't need a fluffer, neither does Shier Lebeouf. 

Shia Labeouf is a serious actor in serious films about real people. Real people don't have some underage German prostitute show up to jerk their cock when it needs to be hard in order to fuck a model who looks allot like Jane Birkin so neither should an actor playing a real person in a real, serious film.

While most of the actors on the set of controversial Danish director Lars Von Trier's latest project, The Nymphomaniac, politely look away, Shia can feel the eyes of the creepy little auteur peeping down on him from ceiling mounted cameras.

Confirming his suspicions, a speaker to his left crackles and Von Trier's voice, always both amused and vicious fills the space

"Are we ready yet? It is taking you longer to arouse your penis than it took Hitler to arouse Germany," the tiny genius pumps his fist in the air, repeating it's tattooed mantra "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

Though filming began two months ago, Von Trier has been unable to attend production since he developed an irrational fear of Willem Defoe's grin. How could he have never noticed the teeth before? He always knew there was something perfectly evil about Defoe, but one morning, on watching him orally dissect a Danish pastry with startling precision, a great, primal, nationalistic panic awakened in Von Trier.

This fear, and his latent alcoholism, necessitated directing the film via remote from a raft in the middle of a placid Danish lake.

Now, bored by Shia's little problem, he shifts around restlessly, causing the raft to rock and almost knocking a box of Xanax into the drink.    

"Nicole, help him out won't you?" he calls out to his biggest star.

From the monitor in Von Trier's lap, Nicole Kidman shakes her head solemnly, waving a tome-like contract and tapping at the metallic edge of a Gautier designed chastity belt, stylishly paired with an age-appropriate Prada wiggle skirt and matching sandals. She has him by the short and curlies.

In Cologne, Willem Defoe sidles up to Shia and offers him some pointers -

'Look at it,' he says 'a man can should be turned on by looking at his cock' Defoe unzips. Without so much as a caress, his penis grows to the size of a large salami and his teeth glint in the studio lights like a gator approaching a Miami sunbather.

Labeouf tries not to block. He doesn't want to look ungrateful. Defoe has a background in experimental theatre. Theatre is as far from Transformers as you can get. A dead medium but then, you gotta pay respect where it's due. The last thing Shia wants is to get chewed up and spat out by the studios. Become nothing more than yesterday's pretty boy.

Over by the corner, Christian Slater takes another blowjob even though his scene won't be shooting for hours.

'Tonight, I’m as horny as a ten peckered owl,' Slater quotes himself ad nauseam. "Wanna hear the sound of Hard Harry coming on his own face?"

Shia shudders, there but for the grace of god go I, he prays silently, ripping at his glans.

The problem is this: while Shier likes indie films, he doesn't really like indie girls. If Megan Gale was here he'd be hard in seconds but these bony European film girls just don't do it for him. He's too ashamed to admit it but girls with crooked teeth make his dick soft. It's not his fault. He grew up on the Disney channel. Even his sexual desire and his genitals have been colonised by studio fat cats. He's a victim. Shia Labeouf grits his teeth and continues correcting himself, rhythmically.

'Do you want to hold hands and look through the Banana Republic catalogue?' asks Nicole Kidman, maternally. 'That always helped Tom."

Von Trier interjects omnisciently,

"Charlotte, is there anything you can do to help this situation?"

Charlotte Gainsbourg looks up from her magazine toward the camera and straight into Von Trier's diseased genius soul. 

She shakes her head.

It's not that Gainsbourg resents him asking. She sees. He needs all the help he can get surrounded by repressed Americans. Earlier she'd helped Slater, who was playing her father in the film, attain a state of climactic glee amidst not particularly clever incest jokes from the crew.

It was nothing she hadn't heard before. Here was a culture which brought the world Keeping up with The Kardashians. They were completely unequipped to appreciate the deep significance of a parody like her late father's collaboration with her on Lemon Incest.

Turning the page of her magazine she discovers a 6-page spread of Meghan Gale wearing Von Dutch.

'Buerk!’ she curls her lips in disgust, tossing the magazine at the kid, who looks away, proud and ashamed. Charlotte bursts into a fit of unkind laugher.  

'I can handle it', Labeouf screams, the anger and humiliation suddenly making him hard as a rock.

The sound of Von Trier's snuffling laughter echoes through the room. Labeouf, growls, tearing open his denim shirt and beating his chest.

On the bearskin, Stacey Martin puts down her iPhone and spits out her gum.

"I'm ready dude!" says Shia, triumphant.

Someone yells speed and Shia starts thrusting convincingly. This is it, he muses. An actor shouldn't work unless he is terrified. That's where the gold comes from. In an art film, they give you the money, and then they trust you to get the job done. They understand that it's a process. Not just something you can switch on. The studios want to turn you into a machine. There's no room for visionaries. They give you the money, sure. But then they stick their finger up your ass for 5 months.

The speaker crackles.

"Christian Slater," says Lars Von Trier "Could you stick your finger up Shia Labeouf's ass?"

Faster than you can say 'washed up' Slater bounds across the warehouse, he spits on his two longest fingers and inserts them into Shias rectum with a little whoop of glee. "Do your homework in the dark, kid"

'No!!!!' yells Shia but it's too late, Slater's index finger finds its mark, pressing sensuously against the microchip on Shia's augmented prostate. There is a low rumble above his scrotum. 'What have you done?' Shier looks at Slater, helpless and resigned.

Shia's foreskin peels back over his entire penis like a banana or the petals of an over ripe penis flower. A gunmetal grey, mechanical proboscis emerges from its fleshy enclave.

(Insert sounds of transformation from Transformers films)

In just seconds Shia's penis has completely transformed into what looks like an upside down merry-go round with dozens of bobbing mechanical lions mounted at it's circumference. The lions jog mid air, wildly licking their furry lips, exposing rows of flexible rubber teeth, their red eyes vibrating and pulsing with soft infra red heat, their snouts ribbed for her pleasure.

Shia's transformercock drags him, weeping, onto the body of Stacey who is frozen in aroused shock. "Please' Shia entreats his own cock, to no avail 'my performance shouldn't be dependant on special effects'.

The lions go to work. Stacey begins to squeal and froth, convulsing with pleasure. Her eyes role back in her head and her slight body judders as the lions raw and purr and lick and growl her into a state of unimaginable ecstasy. 

When the young up and coming model has well and truly up and cummed, the lions turn their pulsing lascivious gaze to Australia's first lady of the silver screen, Nicole Kidman.

Shier notes his penile intention and shrieks. He turns to Nicole; eyes wide like a Cow apologizing before the stampede

'Nicole, he blubbers, I would never, ever do anything to jeopardise your integrity as an accomplished actress or as a woman.'

Shia knows he's powerless to intervene though. His genital modifications had been performed in 2009 by Dreamworks as part of their now abandoned collaboration with Hasbro on a range of adult toys inspired by movies inspired by children's toys.

Transformercock was a hidden clause in Shia's contract; one which his agent assured him was fairly innocuous, failing to mention its repercussions on any future anal play.

Now, the transformercock is completely out of control and Shia, nothing more than a short, overrated, hubris filled rag doll supporting its surging dreamworkings.

'It's okay Shia,' Nicole says calmly. 'It's going to be okay.' The darling of Australian film removes her chastity belt and panties and spreads her legs with the knowing calm of a virgin saint when meeting Jesus at the pearly gates.

A great shining light floods from Kidman's sublime sex and the smell of artificial apples fills the room. In a poof of candy-pink smoke, hundreds of tiny My Little Ponies gallop out of Nicole Kidman's vagina and over to her assailant -

The ponies sink their teeth into Shia Labeouf's ankles, stopping him and his powerful transformer cock mid thrust. The ponies spit glitter in Shia's eyes, blinding him, sparing him the sight of his own humiliation.

Then, they each go one on one with a cock-lion, fighting with sharpened  ice-cream cones and party planning magic. 

One of the ponies, perhaps Twinkle Wish or Fizzie-Pop, though in the chaos of the moment no one can be sure, breaks from the fray and gallops up Shia Le Buff's stretched rectum, snouting the Hasbro installed sensor, causing his tranformercock to fold back into its flaccid sheath, all buckled steel and moaning savannah feline.

The ponies clap their pastel hoofs and sing a quick pony song before cantering back into Nicole Kidman's sweetly welcoming snatch.

Still calm, though with small beads of baby-blue sweat now dotting the edges of her reddish mons pubis, Nicole Kidman refastens her chastity belt, as per her contract with notoriously manipulative auteur director Lars Von Trier.

Willem Defoe helps her stand and smooth her Prada skirt.

"That's a fascinating vagina you have," he says.

"Thankyou," she says, courteously before turning to Shia, who is now rocking back and forth on the floor, his crotch bloody and speckled with glitter.

Nicole speaks to him, gently 'you see kid, I was cast in the never released 1987 production of The Real My Little Pony Movie. When we're young, we all make questionable calls on scripts. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You are on the right track here. Auteur’s can help you. Believe me, Kubrick and Luhrmann changed my life.'

Nicole strokes the young star's disgusting ducktail soothingly while he weeps.

Meanwhile, on the raft, Lars licks his lips in erotic glee. He had been planning on doing a hard-core and a soft-core version of The Nymphomaniac but now he sees the opportunity to release a version for children. He wipes the semen off his thighs, opens another chardonnay and hastily drafts a telegram to Zentropa. Plan has changed. Stop. Make porn for children. Stop. Pony cunt nightmare. Stop

"Nooooooo," shrieks Shia Labeouf, his anus leaking pony power his future block busting at the seams.

Vim Vendors

Dear Pistoleers,

Obviously, this blog has been pretty quiet for a little while now. That’s because I have been penning PPP style essays on pop culture for places like Next Wave and Going Down Swinging for cold, hard cash. Because the pistol format is big-long essays, I am totally unwilling to clutter up the page with short, insubstantial posts in order to keep the site fresh. But what with thesis work and general lifely duties, I only have time to do one pistol-style essay a month, and if someone gives me money for said essay, they can have it for their own publication.

So, here’s my new notion. I have started another blog www.girlandgun.com on which I will write a short post, every single day, about a movie I watched the previous day. I'm pretty excited about this as it's a lower pressure, higher yield format that will keep me writing, watching and engaging. If I run into a topic that deserves a longer essay, it will appear here, though I’m not gonna worry about doing this monthly. You can’t force vim. No siree.

So, if you are keen to follow me into a different format, at least for a while, then please check out Girl and Gun daily. I’ll also post links to other places I am publishing essays and fiction. I have a sci-fi novel coming out some time soon, though I’m not sure exactly when. Otherwise, I’ll see you back here when something really gets under my skin.

Yours stickily,

Doyle

You are you speaking for when you speak not-man?

I came to Lena Dunham, Judd Apatow and HBO’s new sitcom Girls through the controversy that surrounded it and not vice versa. I read an article on Overland’s website, then followed the various critiques around the internet for hours. Then I downloaded the show.

If you haven’t watched Girls it’s premise is basically this – four Generation Y 20-something white girls living in NYC, trying to make it in ‘creative industries’ such as publishing and the fine art market and having cringy, 20 something sexual encounters and relationships. If you haven’t read the backlash, it has variation but hangs on this premise – why, in Girls is everyone white?

Because I consumed the critique before I watched the show, I had a pre-politicized view. I was already scrutinizing the show for racism before the title screen. Having discovered that, despite the show’s great writing and comedy, the criticism levelled at it is mostly founded; I now have to wonder if I would have noticed if I’d simply stumbled on it on a late night TV binge. While I often read texts with my feminist glasses on, I hardly ever scrutinise representations in pop texts for white-wash. This is a shit thing to admit. I’m a white girl and I only notice racism if it’s obtuse, not if race is simply omitted.

As a writer, this is a pretty large problem and a good example of how uncritical enagagement can lead you to perpetuate the conditions of your own oppressive positioning. For example: I have a science fiction novel due out later this year. If there were such a thing as the bechdel test for novels, mine would fail. The book is written predominantly from the perspective of a middle-aged white man. The only female characters are his wife, his secretary, his daughter and his doctor. You would hope the doctor would redeem this subordinate, service role for women, if not for my protagonist then at least for the reader, but there is a tension as to whether she actually exists or is merely, wait for it, his fantasy. Does it go without saying that all the characters are white?

EEP. And I AM a feminist.

When I undertook to solve structural problems in the novel by rewriting two sections from different perspectives, I saw it as a great opportunity to attend to the erasure of women. It was a challenging and rewarding experience and one that has made my narrative far richer than in the previous version. I did not, however, change any of the character’s ethnicity. That would be unacceptable tokenism. Right?

Girls creator Lena Dunhan, says she didn’t realise that all the characters in her show were white until it was too late. She says she wrote from what she knew and what she knows it white. This, I think, is an important point. Dunham (who like me studied arts and creative writing, in a pretty racist curriculum) avoided writing say, a black female character because she did not want to be held responsible for the tokenism of that character. Third wave feminism has taught us not to speak for each other, or assume each other into our own experiences, but does this mean we are no longer attempting to understand each other’s position? Is this racial sensitivity or just laziness, in craft and world-view?

I know that the reason I choose to write much of my fiction from a white-male point of view is because I don’t have to feel politically responsible for the character. The assumption is that in fiction, as in life, a male character is free to explore the world without having to explain what he is doing there. Also, in male dominated spaces, his occupation doesn’t mean anything about his character. Also, if I write a male character who is neurotic and shallow, I don’t feel responsible for perpetuating a negative stereotype about men. If he is sexually repressed, I don’t feel like I’m making a comment on the sexual experiences of all men. Not having to deal with my male character with sensitivity allows me to exploit him to explore different ideas more aggressively.

I can only imagine that, for Dunham, not having to be sensitive to her characters allows her to exploit them for comedy. Four episodes into the first season of Girls the only sustained interaction between a white girl and a women of colour is a scene in which a group of women child-carers sit together in the park, watching their children. In her newly acquired status as a babysitter the white girl patronisingly states that no, she isn’t a model or an actress but “just like all of you,” her claim is, understandably met with eye roles from the other babysitters and a deep cringy feeling for the viewer. When we next return to the scene, the white girl is sitting on top of the table, lecturing the other women about unionising, saying she will ‘take a pay cut for the good of the group’. I read this as a knowingly fucked moment in which a white woman assumes experience with other women of different backgrounds and then immediately starts lecturing and patronising them. It’s a good scene, the problem of course is that, in terms of the overall arc of the show, the other babysitters don’t really exist character wise, they are just props to support the parody of the white woman’s hypocrisy.

At a recent Next Wave Festival event on feminism, a white dude, Dr Ianto Ware, got up and discussed his experience of ‘attaining’ (his words), or perhaps growing into privilege. Ware, because he ‘used to be a punk’ i.e. dressed scrappy, had ideals and made a point of being poor, didn’t feel he had access to what we would regard as mainstream privilege. Then he grew-up, straightened up, ditched the working class accent, got letters after his name and became CEO of an arts festival (of course, he could easily have called himself CEO of his zine or punk band previously). Suddenly doors opened. He learned to inhabit his privilege. Speak like a private school boy. In his talk he gave a refreshingly succinct list of things he had noticed about privilege as he obtained it. People with privilege tend not to barter or apologise. Privilege is a system of rituals. Privilege is all about having things in common with other people of privilege.

This is relevant to the Girls argument because not noticing the imbalance of representation in the TV you watch is all about cementing your privilege uncritically by appearing to ‘have something in common’ with everyone. This creates a world where there is only privilege and, therefor, no pesky injustice that you might have to take responsibility for. You can even, with a little (non)creative casting, appear to have something in common with, say, everyone in Brooklyn. Even if you have never even been to Brooklyn the commonality of privilege, simulated by the TV show, will open up the space and make it appear known to you, while being simultaneously unrecognizable to people who actually live in Brooklyn.

The final point on Ware’s list was that, as a white man, you can speak for yourself, and aren’t expected to be speaking for ‘your people’. Is this why Seinfeld or, like, pretty much every other sit-com ever written by a man, is not accused of being racist? Because we don’t expect white, male writers to see beyond themselves? If Larry David isn’t taken to task for racism why should Lena Dunham be? 

Admittedly, it's likely a large part of why Seinfeld wasn’t immediately vilified in the media for racism has to do with the changing nature of the media. Girls too was largely embraced by print news but blogs and twitter mean that marginalised voices have the space to articulate frustrations that the (predominantly white, male) mainstream press may not see, feel or have the freedom to write about. It also means that misguided writer’s can put their foot in it even more by responding to their detractors.

But beyond this Girls is so promising. It is somehow more saddening that a smart, savvy 21st century show like Girls erases race than that Seinfeld does. For me, relating heavily to the characters on girls is both an uncomfortable and refreshing experience. It is fun to see parodies of the worst of yourself. However when you are watching parodies of the worst of someone else, the affect is often alienating or even offensive. As a teenager (I was punk too) watching the shallow yuppies of Seinfeld trivialise everything made me sick to my stomach. Sex in the City too was totally appalling. I remember watching these yuppy freaks obsessing over whether they should do a shit in their boyfriend’s toilets and thinking, there but for the grace of god go I.

Like all things though, as you learn, through repetition, the language, the tropes, patterns and systems of a text you can become less repulsed and more ambivalent or even amused. Historically, this works for TV shows and racism.

 Girls is often compared to Sex and the City and the comparison is not unwarranted. Both shows are about white women living in New York City. Though in SATC these women, financially secure, successful and validated in every way have less to loose in character assassination than the characters in Girls. That the SATC women think and talk almost exclusively about men and sex is somehow made okay by the fact that they are already independent women, at the top of their fields in male-dominated creative industries (PR, media, law, fine art sales). Criticisms of the kind of privilege represented in Girls focus on the fact that Hannah and her friends (like Lena Dunham) receive support from their parents and feel that this is something to which they are entitled. There is a 'poor me' element in Girls that is funny and distasteful (or funny because its distasteful). Dunham makes fun of this in interviews, she told NPR’s All Things Considered that she feels she is always asking her parents to both ‘stay out of her life’ and ‘bring her soup’.

You don’t get the sense from the interview though, that she has resolved this conflict. Neither has Girls. But this youthful precociousness is balanced out by the fact that the 'girls' like Dunham, are engrossed in a big adventure. They are young and stupid and maybe, slowly getting less so. They are living in NYC and think they are at the centre of the world. They have a lot to learn and don't let all the mistakes they are making destroy their confidence. I think though that it is easier to write a script that begins with ‘successful female protagonist gets feet splashed by bus with her picture on the side’ than realistically explaining how the fantasy scenario of being a freelance writer who supports herself in NYC from one column a week came to pass. For me, depictions of women struggling through at least partially realistic lives is more empowering than a world in which ‘all the women are just really rich and beautiful and powerful, ok?’


Another point of comparison is that Sex and The City is also racist. Though for Dunham, it’s trajectory toward ‘race inclusion’ can only stand as an illustration of what-not-to-do. Can anyone remember how Louise-from-St-Louis, Carrie’s new assistant in Sex and The City The Movie progressed the plot other than by being black and making Carrie (and by extension her writer’s) look a tincy bit less (or maybe more) racist? In a kind of double wammy, Louise not only supplied the black furniture for Carrie’s apartment, but also for some uber-fucked-up product placement when, in her climactic scene, she is ‘empowered’ with a Louis Vuitton handbag.

Of course, it’s not impossible to write a convincing, vital portrayal of a person different to yourself. It just involves mores research and sensitivity than making cracks about your friends does. For Dunham, perhaps the easiest way to get around this cringe and avoid having to do too much empathy training and mind-broadening (she has a middle-class comedy of manners to write after all, closed mindedness is a writerly asset) would have been to employ a diverse team of staff writers rather than white gals whose resume includes writing for rape-joke and white-power fashion rag Vice Magazine (does anyone remember when the Vice founder told the New York times that he ‘loved being white’ and would hate to see his culture eroded or some such rubbish? NO? How about the DO where a some fucker wrote that Hispanic girls in shorts and pumps are so hot, not even a good raping would cool the fire?).

But then, would Dunham’s ‘non-white’ writers be tokens? And isn’t Dunham herself a token too. She is the token under-30 (white)'girl' writer/director at HBO. She is charged with speaking for ‘her people’. The problem is that ‘her people’ is not ‘women’.

The Guerrilla Girls, in a recent talk at VCA addressed tokenism in the art world, asking the question “is tokenism a solution or a continuation of exclusion?”

With their art projects Guerrilla Girls seek to challenge the racist, sexist institutions that continue to underrepresent woman and people of colour and then seek to rectify their mistakes with blatant tokenism. A question from the audience asked how, as a practitioner you can make ethical and political decisions in this kind of climate? Should artists hang their paintings in institutions where they will be tokenised, for instance? Or should you take the extra work that is offered to you just because it’s International Women’s Day, or NAIDOC Week? Or, should female writers seek to penetrate the male dominated world of TV scriptwriting and if you choose to do so do you have more responsibility than your new cronies?

“It’s really personal,” said the Guerrilla. Some of the group’s members take work were they can get it. Some refuse to exhibit in places where female artists and artists of colour are underrepresented. Sometimes this leads to change. Sometimes it leads to the institution passing the token. Sometimes it leads to no token at all.

“But, I mean, you’ve gotta work, right?” said the white, female audience member.

“Yes you do…” said the Guerrilla Girl elliptically. And even with her face concealed in hairy gorilla mask and hands gloved in black leather she spoke, inevitably, for ‘her people’.

Post-Apocalyptic Dwellers Unite or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wasteland.

(I wrote this apocalypse themed polemic for the Next Wave emerging artist's festival magazine. It's a good festival so have a look)

This decade, which is only two years old, I have witnessed the end of the world dozens of times. I have watched it end by inter-planetary collision, alien invasion, contagious super virus, mass infertility, nuclear attack, weird unexplainable mist, the proliferation of zombies and occultists, the re-figuration of the climate and the sudden occurrence of ice storms, tidal waves, flash fire and drought. In the cinema and in my lounge room I have seen good men saving us all with science, with religion, with extreme physical fitness and with good old fashioned patriotism.

I have seen the survivors (because there are almost always survivors), emerge from the arms of salvation much humbled, more sensitive to the warnings of environmentalists, less cavalier and greedy, more open to the possibilities of tolerance, human connection and love. It's a heart-warming idea. All we need is a wake-up call. When that happens, we'll straighten up and fly right.

In the newspaper and on the radio, foreshadow for similar plots glimmers like mirages in the ceaseless desert of progress. Economies collapse. People in some places starve needlessly and in other places needlessly starve themselves. Bullets filled with depleted uranium find targets, and then just hang around setting off the Geiger counters and making us all extremely nervous. Rich white baby boomers publish practical guides to living forever while their disease afflicted parents are forcibly kept alive.

I'm not trying to get you down, man. Mostly I just get along. I work. I study. I make things and talk to people. We all do.

But it's hard to ignore these immanent endings. There's an urgency, a sense that whatever we are getting on with, we have to make it count. Is this novel to our times? Almost certainly not. Each time the Nile overflowed the ancient Egyptians had a glimpse of the end. The black plague knocked out half of Europe and the crusades mopped up with the remnants. What we face is less tangible and a little further away.

On approaching uncertain futures, we tend to want certainties. We long for the perceived simplicity of bygone eras or cling to the tangible achievements of our moment. For some people the desire to pin down a purpose manifests in a return to the ‘simple things’, to face-to-face interaction, to loving, knitting, having kids, keeping animals and forming communities. For some it means working hard, forever. For some it prompts a kind of technological fervour – a faith in the radical possibilities for connection represented by social media and communications gadgets and by the life-enhancing potential of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. And then there are those of us who just feel uneasy, certain only that we are travelling in unmapped territory.

It's okay. We aren't alone in our anxiety or our uncertainty. Everyone looks at a sunset and sees nuclear fall-out from time to time.
In the 1980s the philosopher Jean Françoise Lyotard evoked the fable of the explosion of the sun in 4.5 billion years in order to consider the problem of ‘what the Brain and its Human would resemble at the moment they leave the planet forever, before its destruction.’(Lyotard, Postmodern Fable) This, he told us, is the question all progress – logic, astrophysics, astronautics, genetic biology, chaos theory, military strategy, etc. – seeks to answer: In what form will the human survive the inevitable annihilation?

The figure of a human, or even 'a brain and its human', who survives while the rest perish, involves pinning down what it is about the human brain that should survive. Is it our resilience, our neuro-plasticity, our emotional sophistication? Will difference survive? Or is the content of thought itself most important, making the brain an archive for our precious history? This is a philosophical, scientific and artistic question.

On screens we have been modelling prototypes. I'm thinking of the child/robots – David in Spielberg's A.I., Shinji Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion. That they are part-robot means they can survive beyond the blazing earth. That they are children means there must still be a future. Or, is their existence only functional, to trick us into believing that we have a future? If this is the case and they are the human who survives annihilation, they are not children but evidence of our irrational demand for unmodified continuity in a world where:

"The icecaps melted due to the greenhouse gases and the oceans had risen and drowned so many cities along all the shorelines of the world... Millions of people were displaced. Climate became chaotic. Hundreds of millions of people starved in poorer countries." (A.I)

Think also of the great cyborg women, all with one foot in Donna Haraway's manifesto. Motoko Kusanagi, the existentially taxed major from Ghost in the Shell. Rachael, Pris and Zhora, Bladerunner's femme fatales with borrowed memories. Or the cylons from Battlestar Gallactica, whose task is redefining love from the front-line of a galactic workers’ rebellion. These women show us how recognize colonised memory. They refuse to allow their cyborg bodies to be subordinated. If they are the survivors then what is essentially human is the struggle to be acknowledged as such.
The truth which cyborgs know, and which Lyotard knew, is that ‘the pursuit of greater complexity asks not for the perfecting of the human, but its mutation or its defeat for the benefit of a better performing system’. This isn't something we want to hear. It's not something we are united in working towards. We are like the Rutger Hauer replicant angrily addressing our own design flaws. Would we like to be upgraded? No! We want more life, fucker! But our demand is not just for a longer life but more in type and kind.

With our telescopic sites aimed at a flaming far-off and the means to survive it, we run the risk of living lives characterised by anticipation, ‘that is, the presentifying of an absence’ .

On the other hand, we can think of no other force powerful enough to halt the unsustainable momentum of progress.

How can we work in these conditions?

We would block our ears but dying stars have filled our minds with white light. We can hear the sirens, smell the smoke. We find it harder not to imagine the apocalypse. We have watched so many survivalist TV shows we feel we might have a chance. Not if the sun exploded but one of the other ones. Though how can we know which to prepare for?

Perhaps the end of everything is located everywhere, not in a single catastrophe but in a multiplicity of actions and reactions. Leave the singular ending for the universal man, we are many in type and kind and so require infinite possible endings!

Try to imagine every ending you have seen – all at once. Light those circuits and sizzle. Now we are the survivors.
So, in the aftermath, how do we go about constructing our own unique visions of post-apocalyptic existence? We have seen these scenarios too of course. We know all the signs – the torn up clothes, the motorcycle gangs, the strange cults, the long journeys to the coast past overturned road-trains. What else?

For starters, we will have to reconsider the way we relate to our environment. After all, a post-apocalyptic world can no longer be considered a material resource. Rather, it's a challenge. Its air is polluted. Its minerals are volatile. Its seasons are consistent only in calamity. The postapocalyptic earth can't be managed or cultivated. It requires of us a new kind of ingenuity and spontaneity. We can't rely on evolution or engineering to adapt us to its rigors because environmental conditions change and change again faster than research or adaptation can keep pace. We need to learn to live beside this volatile environment, respectfully and cautiously.

The post-apocalyptic world is host to mutations, amalgamations and strange appropriations of forms and ideas left in the wreckage beyond the end. We need to get down to the work of imagining what possibilities these mutations might bare politically, socially and personally.

We might find we are drawn to the site of the ruin, architecture which is both inhabited and abandoned by progress and history. We can't ignore the traces present in the ruin, nor can we afford to leave them to stand as a deified relic. This is not a call to restoration. We have neither the resources nor the inclination. We are better off finding new ways of understanding and inhabiting them. We need shelter. It is cold outside. Then suddenly, too hot to bear.
In the post-apocalyptic economy production is limited and so materials for building are likewise limited to scraps. We learn to think carefully when tempted to throw away something that still works. Obsolescence is predicated upon progress toward the technological development of 'a brain and its human' to fly off into space – we are beyond that now. We are what survived, we are plural and we aren't flying anywhere.

Post-apocalyptic thought is not about forgetting what came before in favour of the all-new. The importance of remembering is evidenced by the fractured reflection on a shattered surface. But our memories don't need to compete with these shards and patterns. Post-apocalyptic survivors know that there are many different ways a thing can be viewed. We know the whole image doesn't automatically disclose the meaning.

There is no revelation. Because we are post-apocalyptic we are free of the Old and New Testaments. We can make no real judgement on their teachings but can easily agree that their jurisdiction ended with the prophesied apocalypse, and they have no further bearing on our future.

To access the radical possibilities of the post-apocalyptic we need to consider now as the destiny, the telos toward which all history pointed. We will then be well positioned to recognise that this ending does not suffice. Because we are post apocalyptic we are unsatisfied and unsaved. There is no restoration of original wholeness. Meaning must lie elsewhere. It is up to us to untangle it from the detritus. We have to rip up the floorboards and grope around in the dirt. Let's head out into the streets and sniff about. There is nothing left but to engage in the activities of post-apocalyptic peoples – scavenging, translating, repairing, replying, reassembling, journeying. We take inspiration from the drifter, choose an impossible quest and live for the encounters along the way.

Against the urgent and cut-throat activity of survival in the service of redemption, which has always been our existence, post-apocalyptic survival is in the service of the urgent and thoughtful activity of witness. To bare witness after the end is such a great privilege that we will be extra attentive and eager to share the benefit of our experience with others. There is no way to profit from hoarding - value is anyone's guess these days. While everything we see on our various treks and travels has meaning, every meaning is contestable, up for debate and slander. We are all qualified to speak just by virtue of our continued existence. Though now, with the benefit of hindsight, we are all just as interested in listening.

Likewise, post-apocalyptic art is the practical and imaginative act of witness. It articulates the ruins and seeks to engender new possibilities rather than to enter a canon. Canons are a total joke in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

If movies have taught us anything useful to our situation, it's not that good Christian values and familial duty will save you from the storm, it's that the primary skill of the post-apocalyptic person is in sorting through the rubble and finding ways to make things work – whether the things are objects like radios and engines or constructs like families and communities. In the post-apocalyptic space the new is literally exploded out of the old. We work with the remnants of what came before. Everything is already strewn and scattered and fallen apart. Picking up the pieces might mean putting together configurations that have never occurred before.

Here, in these ruined times, instead of suffering in anxiety generated by the threat of something to come, or something left unfinished and unresolved, we can attempt to accept that, in the end, to be human is to be unfinished and unresolved. This is what survives.

We are artists and thinkers. We are imaginers. We live off scraps. We inhabit these ruins. The end is now.

Monstrous Skin

Simone de Beauvoir famously turned our conception of gender on its head when she declared that "one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman."

Perhaps this is even more true, though a little less socially revealing, if one was born with male genitalia, which at maturity, one chose to use to dominate and control a female by raping her, resulting in one being kidnapped by one's victim's deranged and vengeful plastic surgeon father who forcibly performs a sex change operation and keeps one locked in the cellar, undergoing complex and groundbreaking surgical procedures, reading Alice Walker and meditating on particular works of art until one is, or at least understands what it is to be a woman.

This is the plot of Pedro Almaldovar's latest film, The Skin I Live In. The villain/'male' protagonist of the film is Dr Ledgard, played by Antonio Banderas, a surgeon working controversially in transgenesis to develop a hardy, synthetic skin for use on burns victims. Amongst his peers he holds a dual reputation as both a genius and a mad-scientist. At a conference on surgical technology he voices the views of every post-humanist meddler since Dr Frankenstein with the question, why shouldn't we use science to improve the human body?


Because it is unethical, say his colleagues, because it is illegal.

But the doctor has long since fallen out with the law. At his country estate, he keeps the beautiful woman named Vera locked in his cellar. Each night he supplies her with morphine, each morning the servants send up breakfast, art supplies, yoga manuals and feminist literature. Vera fills her days perfecting poses, writing on the walls and making little sculptures in the style of Louise Bourgeois. There is, of course, the odd suicide attempt or seizure of slicing self-harm but all in all Vera's life doesn't appear to be any different from the lives of countless damaged folks in our prescriptive rehab culture.

Even before we find out about Vera's origins, we are alerted to her status as inhuman the by the locked doors and cctv cameras, by the sudden retrenchment of all the other domestic help and by the hissing of the housekeeper.

"Kill her," she says. "Kill her or she will kill herself."


Why this beautiful, enigmatic woman is a monster who should be put to death is the driving mystery for the plot. While at the outset our sympathies lie with Vera, who appears to be the victim of the meglomaniac, paranoiac doctor's deranged fantasies. When we learn that Vera is in fact a male rapist, Vincente, our sympathies are interrupted. Suddenly we are unable to trust our eyes - the familiar woman-as-victim position is transferred to some other hapless she. The beautiful Vera is a corrupt object concealing a terrible crime. There is a play with masculinity here too. A man has a right to seek revenge against another if this other has grossly wronged a woman belonging to the revenge seeker. Vera/Vincente's brutal treatment at the hands of their victim's father further problematises the ugly, vengeful nature of those often heard cries that rapists should have their dicks cut off. Does Vera's status as a rapist justify her own rape? Or perhaps, if you are a man, and a rapist, is experiencing your body as the always inevitable site of rape the only way to empathise with sexual assault victims, and further, with women? Do you need to become a monster - a spliced creature with no 'true' nature in order to stop behaving monstrously? Rape can be said to destroy the victim's sense of identity. As Vera/Vincente's body slowly heals the audience is given a concrete analogy to the healing process of a victim of rape who might suddenly find the skin they live in to be a concealing and inadequate thing, which neither protects nor represents them. Vera/Vincente has to learn to recognize themselves again.


The writing on the wall says: I breathe, I breathe, I know I breathe.
The writing on the wall says: Art sets you free.

Dr Ledgard has mounted CCTV cameras in Vera's room, and in the evenings he likes to pour a whiskey and reflect on her from a distance, as though she were art herself - a master painting. The keeping of a woman as a beautiful possession is a familiar plot from life and literature but the monstrous Vera/Vincente turns this trope on its head. When s/he looks up from their draped odalisque's pose and makes eye contact with the viewer, we are reminded of the constructing nature of the gaze. It is the gaze, as much as the knife, or the paintbrush which constructs the woman.

"I know you watch me," Vera tells the doctor, mounting a seduction through playing to the gaze, playing to the doctor's sense of shame. Even though Dr Ledgard objectively knows Vera's origin and what he has inflicted on their bodies, he still trusts that Vera, like any good woman, has become supplicant and obedient with love. He can only believe his eyes - Vera has become a 'woman', with all the confabulations that this category assumes. In The Skin I Live In the seductive potency of woman-as-construct is such that it obliterates the other, lesser aspects of the self, like, say - that she is really a male rapist.


The idea of gender as a monstrous and incoherent invention is not new. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway evokes the image of the monstrous, cyborg body as a site of 'potent fusions and dangerous possibilities'. Monsters, she tells us, who share their linguistic root with demonstrate, are tasked always with signifying. They define the limits of our communities and the failures of our categories. They are the transgressive mutations and evidence of culture and nature gone awry. They are also the place where we can construct feminist myth making beyond the limits imposed by the necessities of agreeing upon what 'makes' a woman. "Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of man and woman."

In The Skin I Live In, the Vincente/Vera monster's super power is the slowly developed power of empathy. For me, this is at the core of the feminist mission - the attempt to empathise with one another in terms of what it is like to 'be' in each of our specific skins. Broadly, this means not just men considering and working to understand the particular situations of women, but women working to consider and empathise with other women who are different from themselves in terms of race, class, geography, sexuality etc. Feminism means trying our best to inhabit the skin of one another and understand its implications. This empathetic activity is totally incompatible with raping.

In the end, the relationship that develops between Vera and Ledgard is emblematic of the complicity between men/women/culture in the construction of woman as object. That Vera is not sacrificed to some order of the natural is the most powerful aspect of the film. Because it is the monster who survives, and the authentic, excused self who dies, the monster must now learn to articulate his experience with all the tools that it has furnished him/her with. Like a woman, Vera testifies, confesses, seeks shelter. Like a man, Vincente gets revenge.

By allowing the monster to survive and attest, not only to their own mistreatment and abuse but that of others, The Skin I Live In holds up survival as the alternative to redemption.

Vera/ Vincente is not born a cyborg monster in a feminist science fiction, but rather becomes one.

Auteur at The End of the Earth

Lars Von Trier's Melancholia begins with a close up of Kirsten Dunst's face, features collapsed into a dark grimace, as a rain of dead birds falls from the sky behind her. Set to Wagner's Tristan and Isolade, the film's overture continues by way of surreal montage. A bride wades through a jungle of grey yarn. A charge of electricity emanates from Dundst's fingertips. Charlotte Gainsbourg sinks into the disintegrating green by the 19th hole of a fantastic golf course. On the horizon, a magnificent planet - the errant Melancholia - rises to eclipse the sky. A wide shot shows its collision with Earth, which explodes upon impact leaving an imprint no more significant than chalk dust.

Von Trier's apocalypse is hyper real. The Earth is eulogized with images that seem torn from high class fashion advertising. It fits nicely then that Dundst's character, protagonist Justine, is a depressive fatalist who works in advertising. When Wagner fades out the film follows Justine on her wedding day at an opulent manor house in an undisclosed location. Despite the elegant attendants and sumptuous surrounds, Justine is unable to engage in the ceremony or find an appropriate emotion for the occasion. Instead she behaves badly. She avoids her groom, skives off to take baths and fuck an interloper. She insults her boss and generally gets down to the serious business of destroying her life.

In showing all the painful details of Justine's wedding, Von Trier portrays life in the shadow of the death planet, Melancholia as nothing more than a series of empty rituals and beautiful images. For the audience, it's easy to move past the well lit chaos of the overture and be lulled into a familiar mode of reception for 'family drama', quietly moralising and sympathising with Justine and her guests. But when we glance at the night sky and see the faint red star of Melancholia approaching, our engagement is disrupted. At the point of imminent collision with Melancholia, how can we put stock in the importance of this messy family affair? Further to this, how can the melancholiac, whose past is lost and whose future always appears catastrophic, create meaning?

The thinning of excess meaning is a narrative function of apocalypse. Apocalypse is a definitive ending in light of which all preceding events are interpreted. In the bible, apocalypse reveals the truth of history according to God's judgement, before a completely new world descends, 'prepared as a bride adorned for her husband'. However with Melancholia, Von Trier withholds revelation, the bride does not behave as expected and apocalypse is presented as pure spectacle without revelation.

The second part of the film follows Justine's sister Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Unlike Justine, Claire won't embrace the nihilism of end times and wants things to be 'nice' until the last possible second. While her husband (Kieffer Sutherland) urges her not to worry, and to 'trust the scientists', there is no doubt that the sisters' emotional connection with the apocalyptic exceeds any rational, scientific description of Melancholia. While Justine claims to have always known it would end this way, Claire anxiously measures the planet's distance with a bent coat hanger loop, which when shaped around the perimeter of its silhouette and pointed out from the chest, shows the planet decreasing or increasing in size. This device is a perfect illustration of the way we all measure the significance of the universe in relation to our own bodies. We construct events, our lives and rituals with an apocalyptic significance - revealing new ages, truths and worlds.

The apocalypse is a representational event, that is to say, it hasn't happened yet. When, in 1994 Jean Baudrillard joined with Francis Fukayama in declaring that the world had already ended, he was appealing to the post modern perception that order, both temporal and spatial has become impossible due to the proliferation of real-time media, surveillance and simulation. The collapsing of symbolic space makes us anxious about our endings, which are described as both impossible and paradoxically having already occurred when linear, universally narrated history lost plausibility and signs detached from their referents in the service of consumer capitalism. The psychological implications of living in this endless, post history waste land is, according to Baudrillard in his book The Illusion of The End, characterised by melancholia

"We are, then, unable to dream of a past or future state of things. Things are in a state which is literally definitive - neither finished, nor infinite, nor definite, but de-finitive that is, deprived of its end. Now, the feeling which goes with a definitive state, even a paradisiac one - is melancholic. Whereas with mourning, things come to an end and therefore enjoy a possibility of returning, with melancholia we are not even left with the presentiment of an end or of a return, but only with ressentiment at their disappearance".

Lars would agree with Jean. Melancholia is natural, an appropriate psychological stance given our extraneous position in relation to history and nature. The pace of modern life is accelerating toward a horizon of smoke and rubble. How can we ignore the sense of heading at breakneck speed into catastrophes which we can neither prevent nor understand? Planetary collisions, nuclear annihilation, terrorism, starvation, climate change: it takes more will to ignore apocalyptic threat than to be devoured by its melancholic shadow, or indeed to follow Baudrillard in concluding that we reached crisis point long ago and are now continuing in ruins like victims of trauma.

Von Trier has admitted that the world would benefit from an ending (if no-one had to suffer) and that his inspiration for creating Justine was his own 'experience with depression and doomsday prophecy.'

Biblical narrative has provided a blueprint for Von Trier's film making before and he has continually explored themes such as the essence of evil and man's alienation from nature. His two most recent films (Melancholia and Antichrist) are linked aesthetically, through their visual style, the deployment of overture and art images, and thematically in their reworking of bible stories. If 2010's Melancholia is Lars' version of Revelations, (though he fears it is an exploitative romance, 'a woman's film') then 2009's Antichrist is his take on Genesis (he claims that it is simply, 'his version of a classic pork roast'.).

Von Trier is known for toying with audience expectation. In Dogville and Mandalay he used theatrical staging to interrupt audience immersion and create critical distance. In 1987's Epidemic, the story of the film's composition collides with the dark SF narrative which is its subject. In Europa, he uses the conceit of a hypnotist to imply the complicity of audience and protagonist in a depiction of historical genocide (Nazis, of course!). In his Golden Heart Trilogy, he explores the ideal of 'female goodness' based on the notion that enduring wickedness is high virtue and in 2009's Antichrist, he exploits the horror genre to explore conceptions of the abject, the inerrant 'evil' in nature and the basis of misogyny. In all Von Trier's films the audience experience is destabilised. Strange allusions interrupt the completion of meaning. Philosophical rouses are staged in which the viewer's morality becomes the object of deconstruction.

In 1995 in Copenhagen, Von Trier, along with Thomas Vinterberg founded The Dogme Collective. Their manifesto called for discipline as an antidote to the decadence of cinema. In the market boom of affordable cameras and film stock the dogme movement saw potential for the democratization of cinema. The dogme manifesto called on directors to take a 'vow of chastity' and practice a bear bones, restricted method of film making. The rules of dogme film preclude the use of props, soundtracks, fancy camera tricks, lighting, temporal dislocation, video cameras or arty film stock. Genre films are strictly forbidden. Lars attributes part of the appeal of this obstructive discipline in his work to the psychological effects of an over liberal childhood where everything was permitted.

Melancholia's plasticized, luminous aesthetic is a far cry from Lars' dogme days when he railed against a culture of film making which was "cosmeticized to death". Considering his new film Von Trier wonders if it turned out "too nice" and reflects, ruefully that, "it's hard to inject a little bit of ugliness". But he still managed to do so, if not straight into the main vein of the film, then certainly the fatty excess of it's publicity.

Responding to a question about the film's use of Wagner at a press conference in Cannes, Von Trier muses, "I always wanted to be a Jew, but it turns out I am a Nazi."

In the Youtube footage, Dundst looks on, blank faced as Von Trier continues over the stark soundtrack of digital shutters and journalists licking their lips.

"What can I say? I understand Hitler... I think he did some wrong things yes absolutely..." Dunst's facade cracks, she whispers something like, "Oh my god, this is terrible," over her shoulder. Von Trier breaks pace to justify himself to her, "No but there will come a point at the end this when..."

Unfortunately for Lars, The End and the revelation it affords is not in sight. While his 'nazi gaff' rendered him officially persona non grata from Cannes in 2011, it's likely he'll be back soon with The Nymphomaniac and it's equally likely that there will be controversy surrounding that film too. There is controversy surrounding all of Von Trier's films. Exploitative treatment at the hands of the Danish director is rumoured to be the reason Bjork will never act again. Nicole Kidman firmly stated that she wouldn't do a sequel to Dogville. Von Trier holds a longstanding reputation as a deranged agitator, a sadist and perhaps most famously, a misogynist.

"I think he hates women and he wants to punish them," a friend recently told me at a BBQ.

But I always thought that the men came off much worse in his films. The men in his films are exploiters, rapists, control freaks, sycophants, saps and hypocrites. That the women, generally smarter and more interesting characters, tend to bare the brunt of these men's tactless cruelty seems like a fairly accurate, if over dramatised, version of what happens in real life. In breaking the waves, Emily Watson plays a 'good' woman who finds herself manipulated into prostituting herself for her paraplegic husband's vicarious thrill. In Dancer in the Dark, Bjork plays an immigrant who retreats from the injustice of her life into a hysterical passion for musicals, but is still driven to despair by the monotony of factory work and the racism of the community she has moved to. In Antichrist, Charllotte Gainsborg is a grieving mother and PhD student who becomes convinced by her own academic research into the routes of misogyny that women are in fact evil. Her husband meanwhile, holds the historically misogynist rhetoric of psychological therapeutics against her and tries to 'cure' her of her melancholy.

Lars von Trier, in his work and his life, appears to remain skeptical that melancholia is something that can be cured. In his famous essay Mourning and Melancholia, Freud differentiated one process from the other as a dichotomy of the 'natural' and the 'pathological'. Some time after the loss of the object, Freud claims, the mourner will 'return to reality' where as the melancholic remains caught in the experience of loss eventually turning the sorrow against themselves. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”

For a melancholiac then, the end of the world might seem like a relief; a vindication of the emotional certainty that folks like Justine (and I'd guess Von Trier too) experience.

Von Trier's pathological fear is a part of his film making. He is unable to get on planes and so filmed the two first parts of his America Trilogy in Europe. His phobias sometimes necessitate directing remotely, via monitor, to avoid entering anxiety inducing locations like aircraft or oilrigs. Documentaries and interviews suggest that Von Trier operates from a creative but insulated space. His ideas develop there, sheltered from reality - an opposing place where sensitivity is often more important than provocation. When he is forced to 'return to reality', he flails around in the schism. "I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I'm sure that later on I'll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive," he babbles, stepping backwards into a pre-dug hole, "I found out I'm a Nazi!" he calls out on the way down.

At the risk becoming a Von Trier apologist, I am sure he's not really a Nazi. By declaring that he 'understands Hitler', Von Trier is making the mistake of reducing history to mise scene, ignoring the reality of history and its legacy and rendering the Second World War as an allegory in which one finds oneself, suddenly under lights, in a Europa style narrative game: Close your eyes, when you wake up you find yourself in Europa, are you a Nazi or a Jew? Only your creator knows.

"I'm the best director in the world!" says Lars, over and over, to anyone who'll listen.

Experimenting with ideas and images is how Von Trier untangles his chaotic and frightening world. His respect for art as a system of interpretation is everywhere in his film making. Melancholia is full of quotation marks. Several shots of Bruegel's The Hunter align the film with a tradition of 'art of ages' as well as with the aesthetic mysteries of Tarkovsky's Solaris. At one point Justine, in a fit of rage, goes into the library and replaces all the displayed prints of abstract art with allegorical paintings. Justine, like Lars, rejects studied, rational abstraction in favour of a melodramatic excess of story where genre and metaphor collide and obliterate each other.

But is art enough? For the barren ego, can art fill the void? For want of a definitive answer, Von Trier the melancholiac continues to make movies. For Justine though, art is just another corrupted commodity. Though as a shelter from the final, definitive loss, it turns out a representation is as good as anything 'real'. In her final moments Justine cobbles together a 'magic cave', constructed from kindling to comfort a fearful child. It is here, in their own feeble representation that Justine, Claire and Claire's son seek shelter. At the end of the film, which is also the terminus of the world, they sit together in this primitive structure, powerlessly awaiting doom.

Meanwhile, back in the cinema, we too sit out another apocalypse in a magic cave. We are all swamped by meaning, all living lives that are both apocalyptic and hollow. We gaze upon a flaming horizon, waiting to be obliterated by Melancholia, unwilling to return to any 'reality', without the will to see how fragile, how un-cave like our accomplishment, this fragile lean-to of sticks.