The hideous gnostic has a blog.

extract from work in progress.

THE HILL ITSELF

Jacko King: “Somebody got to have the guts to cancel some of them wrong orders.”
Roberts: “There’d be no bloody army left if we didn’t obey orders!”






The Hill opens with an elaborately extended tracking shot floating away from a soldier collapsing on the summit of the hill and being carried off to the infirmary. The shot takes in the entirety of the fort and the surrounding area, a vast, flat plane of which the hill is the centre.

The most immediate precursor to the image of the prisoner watching the sand drain out of his bag and then collapse is Camus’ use of the Myth of Sisyphus.

As a punishment for having imprisoned Death Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again and come to rest exactly where it started. For Camus this is the central absurdity of existence: endless, fruitless labour.

The hill is the means by which Connery’s “broken” Sgt. Major Roberts is to be reshaped. In his refusal to send his men to certain death and his deeper inability to make sense of the current situation, the rules of war and the overhang of Victorian institutions and ideologies into the mid twentieth century Roberts is an Absurdist hero of a sort, the man who follows one of Camus injunctions, to revolt. Roberts certainly complies with the archetype of the rebel, terse, ironic, intransigent, individualistic.

But The Hill, which on one level appears to be a critique of militarism and British institutions such as the Army and the Empire, is less indebted to Camus and The Absurd than first appears. The Hill’s messages is deeply ambiguous, and the ambiguity surrounds the contestation among the characters with regard to the hill itself. What’s certain is that the hill is central to everything that occurs in the film and is at the forefront of all the character’s minds, as a threat, a tool or a promise. In a sense the central character of The Hill is the hill itself, and in a film replete with point of view shots the hill also has one, watching silently as the latest set of prisoners are drilled around its base by Staff Sgt Williams.

This is, if you like, a hill with two sides, representing discipline and punishment, but also organisation and collaboration: death but also transformation. Imperious and immutable, the hill is man himself in his purest expression, the symbol of the basic rejection necessary for any kind of conscious or collective existence to come into being. This is the real conceived not as a void at the core of things, or as a cut, but as an expression of the will. In The Hill, man, both individually and collectively evolves through the rigour of reshaping himself. Existence is predicated on labour, the question is how and why the labour is performed.

The British psychoanalyst Darian Leader has identified the message that the child receives from the parent as it begins to falteringly achieve motor skills, reaching out its hand to grasp at an object, trying to take its first steps. The message, he claims is : “live!” Live could be usefully replaced by a host of other commands, to varying degrees: “Strive” “Grow” “Develop” “Overcome”. But living is unthinkinable, unattainable without this basic call. Whether this call is/should be more in the nature of a command or an appeal may be the basic modality of the passage through from the explicit paternalism of pre-war society to the increasingly liberal post war world. And this modality is the core of the argument in The Hill, the ways the different interest groups and power relations compete around and are shaped by their relationship to the hill.

It’s easy to imagine a contempory Hollywood remake in which Sgt Major Roberts blows the hill up in a liberal, feelgood spectacle, to whoops from the liberated prisoners, bonded together now, having overcome their mutual suspicion and animosity, enriched by each others’ difference. Ding-dong, the hill is dead. But the hill cannot die .

The tagline for the film is “They went up it as men! They came down it as animals!” Yet the reverse is true. Primal, implacable, indestructible, the Hill is the thing without which man would still be wallowing in the slime. A hill is what each man must construct in order to free himself from his animality, the corollary of the voice of the other calling out “live!”

Between the parent crouched in expectation and the child struggling to reach them stands the hill.

Inception takes a long time get going and even longer to end. The core idea, that a group of mercenaries are invading peoples’ dreams in order to steal their secrets is solid and intriguing enough and for the first 45 minutes or so as the technique is explained and a new team member initiated into the process of building a dreamspace for the victim to inhabit the film looks immensely promising, but it squanders the promise by becoming that most tedious of all things, an action movie.

Contemporary action movies are not exciting for several reasons, the most significant of which is of course overkill, and Nolan is a master of overkill. I can’t be the only person who squirmed in exasperated boredom through the unbearably long finale to The Dark Knight and dozed off during various Spiderman, Bond and Bournes. There’s been a recent debate about the merits of Fast and Slow cinema (fast being the Hollywood model, slow the longueurs of Indy and Arthouse) which partially elides the degree to which they resemble each other, there may be more edits in 30 seconds of Nolan than there is in 30 minutes of Kore-eda but the effect is the same: impatience. Get on with it! Fast or slow the overwhelming problem is vacuity. Couldn’t this all have been done much more effectively shorn of about 50 minutes worth of uninvolving, high octane action? Aren’t these incredibly long takes here to avoid the director having to reveal that his story is paper thin? I’m no more prepared to give myself over to thirty minutes of a Turkish guy smoking pensively in his flat than I am a superhero battling his nemesis. There’s a similar feeling of lethargy and inertia to both models, an equivalent desperation. What do we do now? Let’s have another car chase! Let’s have a very long sequence of the taciturn central character walking across a tundra. Rapt fascination or rapturous reverie may be the goals but the actual state they induce is one of fidgety irritation and scepticism. Either neurotically busy or distractedly mystical the failure of almost all contemporary film, no matter how high-concept or “philosophical” is to have any really interesting ideas, any kind of argument. Dare we say any kind of politics?

Inception is a kind of amalgam of two other recent films, Scorceses’ wretchedly derivative and desperately overlong “Shutter Island” (a rip off of William Peter Blatty’s “The Ninth Configuration” one of the boldest and strangest films of the Eighties, though not as good as his criminally overlooked “Exorcist 3” possibly the only film I’ve seen as many times as “Withnal and I”) and Charlie Kaufman’s bewildering “Synecdoche New York” along with “intelligent” globalization movies like “Babel” and “The International”. Both Inception and Synecdoche (and judging by the trailers the upcoming “The Adjustment Bureau”) are in hock to Borges, most notably the frankly awesome “The Lottery in Babylon”. Borges is instructive here in that he was sure enough in his ideas and, more importantly, in what was thrilling in ideas themselves not to have to pad his stuff out with back story, drama, character and journey. Inception’s problem is that it wants to have it all. What could have been a fascinatingly vertiginous trip into successively fantastic, impossible worlds, not to mention the limbo of the raw unconscious into which a couple of the central characters plunge ends up looking wholly like a series of action movies, one within the other, “reality” looks and feels like a “globalization” movie, jumping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa to Sydney with a team of basically decent technical geniuses who are forced to live outside the law, making sure there are lots of helicopter shots of cityscapes and exotic local colour. Level one dream is basically The Bourne Identity (by far the best of the Bourne films) rainy, grey, urban. Level two is the Matrix, zero gravity fistfights in a modernist hotel, level three, depressingly, turns out to be a Seventies Bond film while the raw Id is basically just a collapsing cityscape. After the first hour it’s quickly evident that, apart from having a conceptual structure so rapidly articulated that you just have to take the films’ switching between levels of reality on trust, they have no idea what to do with these interconnected levels, so effectively you have three uninvolving action movies playing out simultaneously. Three times the entertainment, right?

Above and beyond conceptually unconvincing devices used to thread together gimmicky action sequences (i.e., the fact that a dreamer in a falling car experiences zero gravity in his dreamworld) something that also drags the film down is Di Caprios “journey”. Similarly to Shutter Island, it’s all about Leo’s grief. He can’t let go of the memory of his dead wife, his feelings of guilt for having planted an idea in her mind. His wife has gone to comically ludicrous and convoluted ends to ensure that Leo will be implicated in her death and thus cannot return to America to see his angelic blond children. Hence lots of repetitive, banal emoting between the couple in Leo’s subconscious. “Stay with me”, I can’t this isn’t real”, “You promised”, “I’m sorry” and so on. Kaufman’s stuff works because its “humanist Po-mo” is laced with real despair and horror, the awfulness of existing at all is writ large, it’s also the case that Nolan’s vastly superior “Memento” was moving almost precisely because it had no redemption or escape for the central character. Both Synecdoche and Inception have moved on from these early works to suggest that somehow late capitalist culture with it’s shifting levels of mediation and hyper self-consciousness, breakdown of official history and meta–narratives, is in fact cognitively mappable and navigable: the polestar is love (this looks to be true of the upcoming The Adjustment Bureau to a nauseating degree) which takes on a quasi-religious character, here “a leap of faith”. In Inception Di Caprio’s motive for ensuring that the business empire of his target is eventually broken up and his monopoly on the world energy market is undermined is not political, it’s so he’ll be allowed to see his children again. We’re not invited to celebrate the blow struck against the Oligarchs, our feelgood is that Leo has resolved his “issues” and can hug his cute kids in his roomy house.

There is always the possibility of salvation, and salvation is always a personal matter. But one look outside the window will tell you salvation is collective, or it isn’t salvation at all.

read em and weep! *

Festival director Sean Mclusky commented “I heard a rumor that Peter Hook had performed his seminal Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures in its entirety in Manchester a few weeks ago, he was playing with his band The Light at the New Factory Club on the anniversary of Ian Curtis’ death. I had to have this for the1234 as an exclusive London show. And we have! I mean I know people in Shoreditch that have the cover of Unknown Pleasures tattooed on their bodies!”