Boys 'n' Beasts

I don't see that many films in cinemas these days but somehow in 2008 I managed to catch both Mama Mia and Indiana Jones IV. Each was compellingly bad in its own special way, but they also had a dynamic in common agewise, pitching infantile, dull, irremediably pussified 20somethings against age 50/60ish actors who got to be wryly sage and exude dog-eared but 100% authentic charisma and moxy and get finally wed at the end. I guess it's a smart move to target a generation of moviegoers who for reasons of disposable income and net-illiteracy and misc. other demographic factors are much more likely to pick up (or be bought) the DVD/soundtrack CD/tied-in products.

So last nite I saw Looking For Eric, which also has a hero of a certain age - a postal worker who, under the tutelage of le King, finds within himself reserves of hitherto-untapped courage and facility etc.

I was struck by how far it followed the Totoro/Beethoven/Free Willy/E.T. 'kid meets creature which over the course of their necessarily and tear-jerkingly brief association teaches them key life lessons' paradigm. It's an evergreen model Fumito Ueda's upcoming PS3 game looks to be following, but having a grandparent in the role of the boy and a Gallic centre-forward (albeit a very creaturely, hirsute and kind of Totoro-esque one) as his figmental buddy put a different spin on it. While the movie kinda falls into the trap of painting women as saintly & innately forgiving if not especially au fait with life's grizzlier realities, what's more interesting is the way it transvalues the corresponding model of manhood - i.e. that men are outsize, incurably solipsistic kids.

It's pretty positive about a number of 'male' traits and behaviours - cultivating specialist knowledge, gadgetary aptitude, hero-worship, pack-style communality, mischief - that are normally seen as sad and suggestive of arrested development. Loach both allows Cantona to come across as all-but ad absurdum masculine and as an embodiment of humility, generosity, team spirit, improvisatory flair and acceptance of flux. As in one Corinthians thirteen, understanding as a man instead of a child = acknowledging you only ever see as through a glass, darkly, and should as such cultivate Loachly, bro'ly agape. I totally got choked up in a slightly socialistically-inflected version of the proper response to impossible kid/creature love story movies.

(Totoro from here, Trumpetting Eric from here, Ueda boy & griffin from here)

Vermoulu

Just read, via Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, about Helen Mayer Harrison and John Harrison's project Casting a Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing a Dragon? which saw the two artists delimiting an area of the Pennines bounded by the Humber, the Mersey and misc. Roman roads in order to consider cultural and ecological interlinkages within it. Only when they'd set these bounds did they find they'd outlined a dragon. Wilfuly hallucinated out of OS maps, the Harrisons' dragon - with its two marigold wings and beaked profile - is illustrated above, as are a couple  of AGF's even more Rorschach-y blot-dragons. It's kind of like the woman-shaped map in Rider Haggard's She (with regard to which, transposed into a chic Gallic electro register, this too).

Dragons, as the mapping of one onto (or maybs the discovery of one within) the Pennines suggests, are instruments of territorialization and deterritorialization. Always occupying as-yet unmapped frontiers  (hence 'here be dragons' plus also 'It Came from Outer Space') they embody the negotiation of borders - between places, between species, between the real and imaginary. AGF's Dancefloor Drachen - the LP which the inkblot dragons were produced to illustrate - is about digital property, about modes of acquiring and altering others' music in an age when bricks&mortar pressing plants & record shops are increasingly superfluous, and is as such preoccupied with shifting boundaries. 

As with giants and Krakens, dragons speak to a kind of animistic need to imagine animals on the same scale as the landscape, who are or at least are able to shape that landscape, animals the forms of which are suggested in rockfaces and bunched clouds - hence the Rorschachiness of AGF's and the Harrisons' dragons.  Also pictured above is a plastic dragon-islet playset which I owned as a kid that opened up and had a smaller dragon in it. Pictured too is Shadow of the Colossus, a recent, deeply melancholy videogame where you kill 16 behemoths that turn, dead, to piles of mossy rubble which look from the right angle like like the monsters they used to be pre-ossification. The game takes some design cues* from the earlier Panzer Dragoon Saga, wherein you rode a dragon over ruins and deserts. One of the interesting things in Panzer was the dragon's malleability; there's three images above of the screen where you moved a cursor between 4 points in order to genetically reconfigure your mount in real-time. Aspects of the dragon would evoke a rhino, a narwhal, a cricket, a gecko, an egrit without its ever looking entirely like any of them, or even like a straightforward chimera-like composite. 

Reading Baker grapple with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming-animal'  - which has to do with creating new, contingent combinations of attributes, with multiplicity and metamorphosis, 'deterritorialization' and the liquidation of known boundaries -  reminded me of this facet of the game. Becoming, in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, is not a matter of A turning into B or A + B turning into C but of perpetual, indefinable flux (nothing is and nothing becomes; everything is becoming) and  'becoming-dragon' is no more or less viable than 'becoming-antelope.'  As often w/ Deleuze, its an attractive idea insofar as it gets close to something of the way I find I think or intake stuff. I spent the lengthy tail-end of a recent party propped up frazzledly watching maybe 4 hours worth of Planet Earth, hours which are only now imperfectly recoverable - so that while there's odd gestures or textures or images that've stayed with me I can't, for example, say just what species the animal that tore out a long, red shoehorn of inner neck from another animal on a pebbled, spumy shore was - I've just a sense of scattering, slickness and blubber, mingled somehow w/ tactile data from the bubblewrap on the fancy-dress costume of the girl sat next me. The emotional residue smacks a bit of being a kid, back when it was okay to imagine or credulously read about or draw up dragons.

 

 

*not to mention its mood (which is that sort of bereft, coastally-salty bleakness you get in Old English poetry) plus a taste for portentous Engrish titles

(AGF's dragons from her website, poemproducer, worth-seeing-in-motion dragon morphing from this vid, Dune-y colossus from here, OS map dragon from Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, dragon islet from here)