This is England: three years on

This Is England ’86, the televised mini-series and sequel to Shane Meadow’s film This is England (2006) has just screened in the UK. It's set three years after the film took place and stars all the same actors, who are just a bit taller and have different sections of their heads shaved, and more scars (thanks to all the beatings they took in the film’s world of 1983). In Episode 3, the focus was not on skinheads and racial tension, but sexual tension, and how to negotiate sex in a world where most people get they want through violence, and anyone who tries otherwise just ends up hurting their friends anyway.

      Shaun, for example, leaves home when he catches him mum in the act with her new boyfriend: something he can’t quite forgive in memory of his dead father. He spends the episode working through how he feels with Smell, who eventually convinces him that all women have needs and he should give his mum a break. Lol sleeps with, Milky, who is the best friend of Woody, her ex, and Milky spends the ep working out whether he values his new relationship with Lol over his friendship with the lonely and dejected Woody.

      Three-quarters of the way through the episode, I was enjoying it, but felt a bit let down because it didn’t seem to have the same devastating tone that the film did. Shaun admitting his mum can have a boyfriend doesn’t seem to compare to skinhead Combo bashing the shizola out of black Milky on the big screen, especially when all the ads leading to the sequel’s screening were full of seemingly heartbreaking scenes to a backdrop of moving piano music.

      Until: the rape scene. An absolutely shattering rape scene, perhaps the most powerful I’ve ever seen. Mick (Lol’s dad) rapes the teenage girl Trev in his lounge room, and it’s violent, and graphic, and she is utterly helpless against the strong, grown man who almost strangles her in the attempt to hold her down. But it's also clumsy and slow, and on an old couch while the TV's on. An awful act in the middle of suburban normality.

      Although still reeling from it, I appreciated this rape scene because it was real, ie. it did not come across as a plot device to explore power structures and dynamics; it was not a metaphor (for example, for patriarchal racist England colonising and policing against the racial/gendered other) it simply said: look. This is real. And it happens while all her friends are at the pub watching the footy, it happens while her friends are negotiating sleeping with their ex’s best friend, and it happens with a man that she knows. It happens in real life while the rest of us are distracted with our normal lives.

      Viewers were initially outraged, but shortly changed their tune. To quote some tweeters, “‘The last ten minutes of This Is England '86 was horrific. But I'm glad they had the b*lls not to gloss over the horror of the situation,' was how one tweet encompassed the sentiment, backed up by another: 'Tough stuff to end with but had to be done. This sort of thing goes on right now somewhere.'” (1)

      I agree. And in all honesty I appreciated the innocuous conversations  between Shaun and his mum by the end of the episode – I think it was just the producers being gentle with their audience.

1. http://www.metro.co.uk/tv/841703-this-is-england-86-viewers-left-stunned-by-sick-rape-scene

           

some fun things

At first I was like, "it's time for a fun post not about dead bodies for once in my life, maybe I should write about Jane Austen" until I saw this-

- and got over it. Plus it would go really well with my other favourite two actions figures!

Faith from Buffy

Self-explanatory - and with 'glide action'.

                                                            

No pun intended with Faith's name, PS. Anyway then I realised that the last two books I read were Rupert Thomson's Book of Revelation (story of a man who gets kidnapped, raped and tortured by a group of women and then attempts to piece his life back together) and Corman McCarthy's Blood Meridian (yep, you guessed it, a story of brutal cowboys who gauge each others' eyes and brains out with broken whiskey bottles or their bare hands). Moral is, I don't have much to talk about except dead bodies these days.

The other reasonably exciting thing I remembered this morning watching Dexter was that I took this photo at my friend's beach house kitchen:

real knives.

Totes looks exactly like Dexter's knife case! Now that I feel kinda disturbed that I got excited about finding knives that resembled a serial killers, I'm over and out. I just found a musty and leatherbound copy of Agatha Christie's Nemesis and hope to Miss Marple it up later this afternoon. Hopefully this will soon give more of a female flavour to the masculine/blood/corpse-infused haze that seems to have settled over this blog. Bye!

Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God"

Cormac McCarthy's Child of God (1973) turned out to less far less terrifying and far sadder than I expected. Having heard it was about murderous necrophiliac, I put off reading it for some time as I know how effective McCarthy's grasp of the literary horrific is (after reading The Road I was so traumatised I couldn't read or watch anything for about three weeks, a process repeated after I saw the film adaptation. And The Road isn't even bad in terms of horror. Ok the cannibalism is pretty revoltorama. Needless to say it's still the best book I've ever read). So I read Child of God and came out unscathed, as it seems more a comment on the state of the American Southern man than an excuse for a horror novel.

Set in 1920s-ish Tennessee, Child of God follows Lester Ballard, a young man with no family or land who wanders the town and mountains muttering to himself and carrying his most precious possession, his rifle, which he can fire more accurately than anyone else around. Ballard is also a road-side peeping-tom who hunts down couples in cars in the woods just to watch them, and soon becomes a road-side killer who hunts down couples in cars, shoots them, hides the bodies in a cave and keeps the female corpses for his own devices.

 It sounds repulsive, and it is. Yet McCarthy is not writing for shock-value and implies, rather than overtly describes, Lester's more hideous actions. What comes through initially is a complex picture of masculine loneliness and inability to connect. Lester's first corpse-bride is one he finds already dead and after dragging her home and buying her a red negligee, he is nervous and at a loss as to what to do, like a boy on a first date. He actually spends quite some time just watching her through the window. Though not sympathetic to the gruesome scenario, I did feel a pang for the wretchedness of this man, so unable to connect with the living that he can only do so sexually with a dead person. Any sympathy elicited was thoroughly quashed a page later when he hoisted the woman unceremoniously via a rope and pulley into his attic, her violated body flopping about and void of dignity, and I was reminded of exactly what happening. McCarthy is clever like this, unveiling the hopelessness of humanity and damning it at the same time.

Lester becomes madder and madder, talking to himself frequently and wearing the clothes of his female victims, including a "fright wig"(pg 163) which the audience is later told is a human scalp. At first, I read this as a parody of the original, pioneering American Southern man, lone ranger of the mountains with nothing but a gun and his skills therewith. By the end of the novel, however, I realised that Lester was no parody, but represented the true nature of the Southern man. McCarthy is critiquing the heroic tradition of the South/Western male: this man is alone, is a destroyer, cannot reproduce sexually for he is attracted only to the dead, with no desire to relate to the living except through violence. This man is also no “man” at all, but becomes a hodge-podge of gender stereotypes, a haphazardly destructive combination of cultural ideas of man and woman. This is summed up when Lester is described as "some demented hero or bedraggled parody of patriotic poster come aswamp and his mouth wide open for the howling of oaths until the log swept into a deeper pool and rolled and the waters closed over him" (pg 147). Lester is here sucked underwater by imagery of male and female anatomy, that is, the log and waters closing over him.

When Lester finally dies, it is in hospital. His body is donated to a med school and then "scraped from the table into a plastic bag" and interred (pg 184). While this abrupt and unpleasant end is perhaps deserved, it curiously sheds a similar dark light on the male medical students that has already been shed on Lester. Are they really that different from him, ripping open a dead body and discarding it once its used up? Though I hate reading rape as a metaphor, it's possible to interpret the text as suggesting that just because people aren’t killers or rapists doesn’t mean they aren’t representative of the same ideology. Scary. And the cost, I think, is the loss of individual lives – male or female, whatever the terms may mean – as seen through the deaths of Lester’s victims and his own human loneliness.

If you weren't desperate to read this book when you read the words "murderous necrophiliac" you should be after hearing about its depressing ending. Seriously, though, I do recommend it. It's such an interesting piece to read beside other texts from the region. But do it on a day you're up for thinking about things indoors with all your housemates home - not before you go on a mountain hike with you bf/gf.

My love/hate relationship with Dexter Morgan

So I’m getting really confused about my feelings towards Dexter – the TV series, that is. The show is pretty much made for me – blood, guns, dead bodies, cool chicks and conflicted masculinity with a hearty dose of violent stabbings and death-by-strangulation. What could be more appropriate? (For a gender/violence Masters project, that is). Behind the show’s colourful array of forensic labs, bloated corpses, Miami palm trees and ridiculously good-looking actors lies a set of deep contradictions which establishes Dexter as a show committed to exploring the grey areas of justice and responsibility…whilst also encouraging us to be, if not empathetic, at least sympathetic to the actions of a serial murderer. It’s this second message which makes me uncomfortable, because it’s unavoidable due to the plot’s very construction and the nature of prime time TV.

To begin with, the protagonist is a psycho-killer. He hides his addiction to killing by only slashing the baddest of the bad – serial rapists, child murderers, abusive pornographers, etc. After Dexter has sliced and diced his victims he dumps their bodies in the bay and preserves a drop of their blood on a glass slide for his collection that he keeps in the air-con vent in his apartment (weird). Cool thing is, all this weirdness is explained away when you find out Dexter, at a very young age, saw his mother hacked to bits with a chainsaw inside a shipping container and was then trapped in there amidst bloody family limbs for several days. He grew up, consequently, an emotionless sociopath with a desire to kill. Interestingly, Dexter does not stick to killing those who “deserve” death in some attempt to exact justice (which would make him like Batman) rather, he does so avoid getting caught and to “fit in”, because he can’t actually stop killing (more like Dracula).

But we still like Dexter despite his inability to care about morals. We don’t want him to get caught, because he’s learned to fit in so well that we, the audience, get duped by his sweet smile, his great wit, his fantastic forensic skills, the way he protects his sister, and most of all (for me) his beeeautiful relationship with his girlfriend Rita and her children. It’s this relationship where we see Dexter’s own fear and confusion as he starts experiencing true emotions for the first time in his life. Dexter himself becomes conflicted – he wants to be honest with Rita about his true self, but of course he can’t be, because then she’d be terrified of him and leave him. This results in an elaborate set of lies which ends up with Rita believing Dexter is a heroine addict and Dexter having to go to rehab to keep the façade going. I started getting uncomfortable here because I wanted Dexter to successfully deceive Rita so they could stay together…whilst also being disgusted that their whole relationship is based on a lie.

By the end of Season 2 though I was feeling even more uncomfortable. Two divers find garbage bags containing the fruit of Dexter’s dismembering adventures at the bottom of the bay and the public begin mythologising about the “Bay Harbour Butcher” and who this may be. The audience spends the whole season watching all the near-misses Dexter has with getting caught, till he finally frames his fellow colleague and policeman Sergeant Doakes – one of the shows main characters. Incidentally, Doakes dies at the hands of Lilah, an addict Dexter meets in rehab. But the evidence has been set up so well that Doakes is posthumously convicted, much to the dismay of the Miami PD. I felt sick that Doakes died so suddenly and that he became known as this killer: I felt sick about Dexter’s smugness and how happy he was not only for his freedom but also for Doakes’ death (the two never got along). And yet I was so so SO happy he wasn’t caught, because it meant he could get back together with Rita (my favourite female character in crime television, even more than Olivia in SVU) and it meant he could kill that psycho-hose-beast Lilah (my least favourite female character in crime television, no thanks to her annoying nasal voice).

This is the crux of it all. I don’t like killing and it makes me feel gross. But I still love Dexter. I don’t think the series endorses killing, because someone always has to take the punishment for the crime. It’s just who receives punishment and who should receive punishment which is played around with. The show even acknowledges the horror of its protagonist’s actions - Dexter’s foster dad Harry actually commits suicide once he realises who his son has become. But while the show engages with the subtleties of justice, guilt, responsibility and flaws of the legal system and encourages audiences to do the same, I wonder how much any prime time American TV show can engage with this truly. For the sake of ratings and the audience’s contentment, Dexter always has to win and hence always has to lie. I can’t fathom he’ll ever get caught and go to prison for life for what he’s done; nor can I imagine him coming clean and the citizens of Miami accepting him as their very own vigilante protector (like I said, he’s not Batman). However I’ve only just finished Season 2 so who knows how mental things get. I’m still going to keep watching – I’m addicted, and Dexter and Rita together make me feel a warmth inside I haven’t felt since Buffy and Angel first made out in ’96 (wow). While conflicted and conflicting, Dexter is nevertheless engaging audiences well if it makes me react so strongly. And despite its promotion of a killer, it’s forced me to think about and articulate my views on morality more than any other Miami-based murder series – take that, Horatio. Dexter’s sandy hair is way more natural than yours anyway.

NB – let’s not forget that Julie Benz (the actress who plays Rita) became famous through her stellar performance as the vampire Darla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. She's still hooking up with dudes who dig blood and all about putting her life on the line to protect her kids. Amazing!