Give it to me, Lucille

Warning. This post is about the first episode of season seven of The Walking Dead and thus may be considered spoilery. I'm not going to reveal any character deaths or major moments. But I will discuss the themes and tone of the episode.

One of the new, fun things about watching TV these days is that you don't have to watch it at all. You can just go on Twitter and observe the reactions of other people who are watching it. This is excellent for things like Question Time, where the actual act of viewing the thing is a tedious and frustrating experience. How much better to read the swift and angry responses of the online community, than to look at some UKIP berk spouting off again about how he's definitely not racist but he does, co-incidentally, hate a lot of brown people.

It's an interesting shift in viewing patterns which has changed the nature of television itself. Live entertainment shows, of course, rejoice in the knowledge that they are part of a live, online conversation. But it's changing drama, too.

Last night was the premiere of season seven of The Walking Dead - a show I much enjoy. Now, season six ended in quite the cliff-hanger. If you are woefully behind on the show, you should probably look away now. If you don't watch it at all, the programme can be summarised thus - a guy called Rick leads a bunch of survivors through the remains of civilisation, after zombies happen.

At the end of season six, Rick's group are captured by the show's new Big Bad - a baseball bat wielding warlord called Negan. Our heroes have encountered Negan's followers a number of times throughout the season and, indeed, killed a lot of them. And now they are face to face with the man himself. And he intends to pay them back for the wounds they have inflicted.



"Eenie, meenie, miny, mo..."

Fans of the comics, like myself, know what is coming next, and sure enough it does. Negan and his small army of post apocalyptic warriors surround our heroes and make them kneel before him. Negan strides up and down in front of his captives, deciding who he is going to kill, swinging his bat suggestively. His bat is called Lucille. It is made of barbed wire and spikes. Negan is clearly not kidding.

The season ends with a POV shot, putting us in the position of Negan's victim, watching as the bat comes down on our head. Blood flows down the screen as the camera lurches to the side.  We do not know which of our beloved cast members is on the receiving end. All we know is, someone is definitely for the chop.

And it was all over Twitter. Just as the blood had filled the screen, so Twitter was covered in a thousand, 140 character responses. Who was dead? Why hadn't they shown us? What if it was Darryl? Oh, there would be trouble if it was Darryl!

The makers of this show know exactly what they are doing.

Clever stuff. Not, perhaps, a narrative driven by the true principles of drama. Rather, a story shaped and formed by the state of the medium. A programme that is not just a programme anymore, but part of a larger world - an online, interactive world where everyone gets to shout and cry and speculate.

So. Last night was the long awaited continuation of this cliff-hanger. Who was on the receiving end of Lucille's spiky wrath?

I won't spoil it here. But I will say, there is no reprieve and no cheat. No-one charges out of the woods to save them. No-one has a cunning plan. Negan most certainly does not change his mind. The episode is a bleak, brutal affair, full of pain and horror. I'd say it's pretty good drama and it certainly had me engaged. I say 'engaged' to dignify myself. I was clutching a cushion with one hand, while the other hand was waving frantically about in the air in panic.

Anyway. After the programme I spent a happy hour or so reading the online responses. People were all over the place. Shock, from those Tweeting in real time. Sadness for the characters. Anger at Negan. Anger at the makers of the show. It was brilliant - like being in a crowd at a gig, or a stand up show. Only rather than thousands of people singing a chorus , or laughing together, here they were shrieking in horror as a large man hit someone in the head with a baseball bat.

There were a few comments that surprised me, though. A number of people were vowing that they were done with the show, because it was too bleak. I mean, they were genuinely going to abandon a TV programme because of some fictional thing that happened. Popular science writer Doctor Ben Goldacre called it "Empty unpleasantness".


Empty Unpleasantness?


I find this attitude really weird. OK, I admit, this was not a 'fun' hour of television. I did laugh once - at an enjoyable bit of zombie grossness - but on the whole I felt a variety of unpleasant emotions. There was at least one moment where I had genuine, sick-feeling dread at what might happen next.

But for me that's part of the point of this kind of show. It takes us, safely, into places we don't normally go. And as for 'empty'... well, that's just silly. Ben Goldacre is about a million times more intelligent than me, but on this one thing I think I'm justified in saying, Doctor Goldacre - it's a little more complicated than that.

Off the top of my head, these are some of the things that stop last night's Walking Dead being 'empty'...

It's a story about hubris. A supremely cocky group who think they can control all situations and are always in the right are suddenly faced with something far more powerful, much nastier and - crucially - morally just about the same. Sound relevant for 21st Century America?

It's about leadership. What kind of a man does it take to really keep control, and do we really want that kind of man in charge?

It's about empathy. These are characters we've known for years. Here they are, terrified and helpless and in pain. In a world where we are increasingly insular and comfortable, maybe it's a good idea to see a little bit of bleakness.

It's about death. One of the characters has their head reduced, by Lucille, to a bloody pulp. I mean, like totally formless. Just a mess of meat, with eyeballs still wandering about in there. It's a moment of existential horror. Is that all we are? Some meat? That face, which I look at in a mirror, and call 'me', is just some stuff. My brain, in which all my thoughts and emotions and experiences seem to happen, is just some stuff. It could be destroyed, and there'd by no 'me' in there. I'd be gone. Brrrrr.

It's about what to do next. The episode doesn't end with the horror. It ends after the horror has stopped, and the survivors are wondering what to do next. What are you left with? Who are you, now? Who might you have been, without this?

And it's about the performances, and writing and technical skill and direction that makes this look and feel real. The craft that stops this looking like people standing about wearing makeup and pretending to be sad, and makes it compelling and powerful and horrible.

It's not empty, though.

Bad Loser

I don't know about you, but I'm going to miss Donald Trump.


I don't know whether I'm going to miss him because he'll lose, and stop being a constant source of surreal entertainment, or because he'll win, and we'll all be dead soon. But one thing is for sure - we're in a golden period of time, soon to end, where every day is filled with bonkers proclamations from the world's most powerful idiot.


It's kind of fun, isn't it? Going on Twitter to see what panicked garbage he's hurling at the world today. Who will he hate next? What supremely illogical sentences will escape from his sparking, fizzing brain? What lie will he confidently chisel into the side of a mountain and declare the word of God almighty?


Although, of course, there's the strong possibility that he won't go away even if he does lose. He is very committed to the idea of not losing, and this commitment may well be undiminished by the fact of not winning.


Because the election is rigged, you see. That's why he'll lose. Unless he wins. In which case, presumably, it suddenly isn't rigged, and the election process is very trustworthy. His faith in the system seems to comprehensively rely upon the system working the way he wants it to.


It's hard to frame this kind of person, isn't it? Intelligent people are struggling to categorise this orange buffoon, whose behaviour defines all rational explanation. What kind of person devotes massive energy to winning a game, only to denounce the validity of winning that game in the first place?


He reminds us of something, that's for sure. A child, maybe. Trump is very keen on that petulant, backwards logic that children employ to reverse engineer justifications for their behaviour. Start with the conclusion you want, then work backwards to find a reason why that conclusion must be right.


But he's not a child. Is he? He looks too big. They let him run companies, and own houses, and touch women. Well, maybe not all the time, that last one. But for the most part he seems like an adult.


Maybe he's two or three children in a big, weird, oddly fitting grown-up suit. That would explain a lot. In fact, it's less implausible that the probable truth: here is a grown, intelligent man who has invested himself, publicly, in a massive global tantrum that makes literally no fucking sense whatsoever.

I'll tell you what he reminds me of, and it's very specific. He reminds me of the mother of my first ever proper girlfriend, an equally unreasonable woman called... well, let's call her April Fenchurch.


The parents of your first girlfriend are a worrying prospect. You've never done this romance thing before, and it's hard enough to make it work with the object of your affection. Especially if you are 16 year old me, and composed entirely of stupidity and hormones.


And then you're confronted with her parents. And they are, rightly, suspicious that you are a horrible pillock, hell bent on ruining the life of their lovely daughter. And then one of them is April Bloody Fenchurch.


April was my first encounter with backwards logic. She refused to be wrong. She refused to lose. And it wasn't cool, like when I do it. It was irritating and frustrating.


One New Year's Eve, we played a game of Bible Trivial Pursuits. That's right. New Years Eve. Two years previously, I'd been standing alone in a back street, staring at the spinning stars above, out of my mind on gin. Now I was already wondering if my life was over and all the happiness was behind me. This was their idea of fun. Bible Trivial Pursuit.


Because April was a Christian. And so was I, but only very recently. I'd gone to church in pursuit of her lovely daughter and got kind of roped into everything else along the way. And, of course, I was trying hard to seem presentable and mature, and not a stupid twitchy deviant who would have much preferred to be out drinking snakebite and black.

Yum.

Trouble kicked in before the game had started. April made some reference to the Three Kings, who pop up in the nativity, bringing Jesus gifts and such. I can't remember what she said about them. But I know that I'd just learned a Christian thing at church, and I wanted to share my new understanding.


"They weren't Kings," I said, unwisely. The room went quiet. April's friends and relatives looked in horror, at me, and then in excited anticipation, at her.


"They were," she replied. Straight in, no messing.


"No, I just found out. They were wise men. People often call them kings, but that's not what the Bible says."


April did not like this. She'd said a Fact, and now I was challenging the Fact. So she employed the kind of nonsense technique that I now recognise as false syllogism, but which, at the time, just confused me.


"Solomon was a king, wasn't he?" she said.


"Um, yes."


"And he was wise?"


"He was..."


"So in the Bible a king is a wise man and so when they said they were wise men it's the same as them being Kings."


Ta daa! April went back to shuffling the question cards. The friends and family relaxed, glad to have a way out of this - which I'm assuming was not the first terrible situation of its kind. I sat there, trying to work out how I had been given an answer that was somehow both very logical but also definitely bullshit.

"Aaaaaaaaagggggghhh!"

We played the game. April was really bad at the game. It wasn't just Kings she knew nothing about. It was almost everything the game asked. To be honest, none of us were very good at it. I think you'd have to be a very special kind of person to be good at Bible Trivial Pursuits. Very special indeed.


But the way most of us reacted to our failure to guess the 8th wife of Nehrat the Ethiopian, was to accept our ignorance and be quite relieved. Not April. As has been noted, she was not a fan of being wrong.


So it transpired that she wasn't wrong. No. The game was wrong. The whole thing. This poor collection of cardboard and coloured dice went from being an excellent, spiritual way of spending New Years Eve, to being a stupid, lying whore of a thing that was made by idiots, for idiots and knew nothing about anything.


April's husband, Paul - a fragile mouse of a man - was forced, by April, to read through much of the New Testament in an effort to prove the stupid game wrong. We had to pause the game every time April's answers didn't tally with reality, while Paul flicked sadly through a massive Bible. Every now and then he'd find the relevant bit. He'd read, silently, patiently, for a few moments. Then I'd see panic in his eyes. Oh dear. It was clear that whatever he'd found wasn't going to be the answer April was looking for.


"Well, there's lots of ways to look at it..." he'd say, hesitantly.


So passed the most depressing New Year of all time. No, second most depressing. But still. Bloody awful.

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in such massive fear of being wrong? To exert such tremendous effort against reality itself, to avoid the fact of failure? Terrifying, I imagine. You have to dismantle the very language upon which all meaning relies. You have to construct a new version of logic, a bizarre distorting mirror of cause and effect, action and consequence.


As I get older I feel less annoyance with April, and more pity. And then I see Trump, and all the old feelings come flooding back. A man who will not lose. Who reverse engineers reality to suit his tiny minded, timid, feeble grasp on the world.

He's an idiot, but it's no wonder he's popular. There's a world of Aprils out there, not wanting to have to think, unequipped to deal with being told they're wrong. People who'd prefer the message that listening isn't important - you are the all conquering kings of existence. Carry on with your prejudice and your greed. Ignore your weaknesses - they don't exist. Do whatever is easiest. Don't let anyone tell you what to do.

It sounds awesome.

Thanks, April, for showing me - a long time ago - that it's not.

Electronic Performers

Afternoon. My, that's a fine hat. What? That's your hair? Oops. Sorry. Erm, let's change the subject. I know - friendship.


Every now and then I'm playing about on Facebook, trying to avoid work,  and I notice that I'm not 'friends' with someone. And by that I mean, someone who I thought I was friends with, not just one of the millions of people who are lucky enough never to have met me in the first place.


And it's a weird moment. Not least because I generally have to try to remember: have they deleted me? Or did I delete them? Should I be very angry with them, or terrified in case they are very angry with me?


It's all become very complicated, this friendship thing. And I've been thinking about it a lot, for one reason or another - you may have noticed the theme recurring if you've been following this blog. And today being National Poetry Day, I thought I'd try to express my ideas here, poetically. I hope you enjoy it and doesn't lead you to instantly cast me into the wilderness.






We were friends, you and me, for nine good years
A quantifiable measurement of Summers and Winters, verified by Facebook
Celebrated with notifications and a photo montage on an arbitrary date
Harder to see, in real life


More and more difficult, as the years slipped by
To remember the last time I saw your real face
Memories bleached out by a thousand digital lips and eyes and teeth


Posing for your self-held camera
Trying to look ironic, but definitely really meaning it


Or side by side with this year's lover
Romantic memories, swiftly deleted as one by one they fell out of favour


Or laughing too loud, even through the silence of the frame
At parties I stopped attending years ago


Like all friendships, ours was subject to decay
But social media, like a virus in the zombie films we loved,
Kept it moving
Animated it beyond the point of death
Made it harder to let die


Until one day you removed the head and you destroyed the brain
And without warning, our friendship was gone
A mercy killing of sorts.
What passes, these days, for goodbye.
Your final words spoken, not by you, but by your electronic ghost


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Signifying Nothing

For some reason I cannot stop going to HMV, even though it always makes me sad.


I used to love it. It was my holy place. A cathedral of undiscovered movies and albums. Racks and racks of LPs, and then CDs, that could offer up unexpected and magical things. Albums you'd never heard of, by bands you loved. Films you'd only read about, and desperately wanted to see, and suddenly here they were, stickered, 2 for £20.


I don't want any of their things anymore. But I still want to be in their shop, drifting around like those zombies in Dawn of the Dead. The 1978 version. Not the 2004 one by Zack Snyder. I like the Snyder one, but those zombies don't really 'drift'. They're more 'scampery'. If they were in HMV, they'd just knock everything over and run off without clearing it up.

"Hello. Do you have Jungle Book? No, the new one."

Like the undead inhabitants of the shopping mall in Romero's film, I shuffle about the shop, staring at things that used to mean something, clutching at a life I used to live. I think that's who we all are, in that shop, these days. People who used to live a different life.

We like to look at the DVDs and BluRays, even though we don't need them because we've got Netflix and Amazon and Tivos and torrents. We look wistfully at the games and the CDs in their shiny cases, but we don't pick them up because we download everything now. And we look at the increasing amount of figurines and T-shirts and mugs. And while we might idly toy with them, we know that, ultimately, they are useless tat.

What is it with these big headed plastic toy things?

Why does everyone love them?

The tat is there, of course, because you can't download it. Yet. Like the resurgence of vinyl, it signifies a desperation on the part of brick and mortar retailers to provide something unique. Something you can touch. A lifeline to a time when things were things, and not just the idea of things.


And it's fine, of course, living here in the future, with all the digital stuff. It's great to be able to download media - to have such incredible access to films and television and music and games. Wonderful. But there's something sad, and slightly desperate, in the way that the analogue world is trying to integrate itself with this shift in consumer habits. And something more than sad. Something worse.


There's a rack of CDs, for example, in HMV, that groups music under the banner "Trending Now!" I stood there, this morning, and looked at this rack for a little while, confused. Trending? What on earth are you talking about? Trending? Trending where?


Who's in charge of this stuff? My great aunt? "Trending is what the kids like. Things that are trending. On the Twitter. Things trend on the Twitter. So let's say our stuff is trending. Then people will be interested. Like on the Twitter."


Except it's not trending, is it, imaginary Great Aunt Marketing Manager? Trending is the opposite of what this is. Trending is a spontaneous, emergent response to things. It's a chaotic, crowd led surge of genuine interest. It can be manipulated, of course. But not controlled. It's an expression of the human psyche, like the mad, magnificent patterns formed when a flock of birds swirls beautifully into the sky.

Some birds, flocking. Or possibly photoshopped. I don't know.

As I write, things that are trending on Twitter include Kezia Dugdale, Malta and Meat Free Monday. I'm pretty sure HMV don't sell any of those things. Well, I suppose the stock is, technically, meat free. But that's just a coincidence.


Telling us that the music you want to sell is "trending" is meaningless. It's a weird, unintuitive attempt to reverse engineer the concept of what matters. A tone deaf attempt to appropriate new ideas, even though those ideas are the very antithesis of what you're all about. The culture which leads to things 'trending' is the very reason HMV, and places like it, are dying out.


As I left the store, empty handed, I saw another example of this sad, weird desperation. A poster on a wall, in a near empty food-court. It said 'Selfie Corner!" There was a little cartoon image of a smiling face, camera in hand, delighted that finally, against all odds, it had found somewhere to take a selfie.


As I looked I both understood and completely failed to understand. You want people to come into your food court. And no-one does, because they're all at home streaming Stranger Things and downloading No Man's Sky. So you grasp at language and you try to commodify it. Here. Here is where you can take your selfie. Here in this corner. Please. Here. You like taking selfies. You fill the world with them. So do it here. Here. Here. Please, God, Here.


It's like that zombie, from 1978, shuffling around, folorn and lost. Hungry, without knowing why. Biting at the living, consuming the new, hoping that, maybe, young flesh contains the cure to this rotting, fading existence. Maybe if it eats enough living tissue it will somehow catch that spark of life again.


But it won't. What was alive will just die in its mouth. It will make things worse, and it will never be satisfied. Words and phrases will lose their context. Nothing will mean anything any more. Every word anyone ever says will be caught up in the wind and snatched away, untethered from it's purpose. Lost.


Of course, I may just be over-reacting. Like I say, I did really used to like going to HMV.


This got darker than I expected.


Um...


Sorry.


Look, here's a Pop Vinyl adipose. Enjoy that.

Ruminations

My mind is full of fascinating thoughts. Because I am full of love, I share the following ones with you. Warning - none of it is in the slightest bit useful or relevant to actually achieving anything.


My thoughts...


1.

If I spent as much time watching things on my Netflix List as I do browsing Netflix for things to put on my Netflix List I would have fewer things on my Netflix List and thus it wouldn't be so intimidating that I can't face watching anything on it and so spend all my time browsing instead.

 

Too. Many. Things.



2.

There should be a sequel to the film 'Once' and it should be called 'Twice'.

Then there should be another sequel to that, but probably starring different actors, called 'Thrice'.

Then they should make a fourth one, set on a plane,  and call it... um... 'Frice'?

Then there should be a reboot of the whole thing called 'The Once'.

This is a good film and you should watch it. 

3.

The most annoyed I ever get is when I am browsing the internet and, as I go to click on a link, the page reorganises itself so I have clicked on something else. I mean, it waits until the exact microsecond I click, and then changes where everything is. The thing I was going to click on is now way down the page, and in its place is a link to something else. Something I don't give a toss about. It makes me howl with rage. I'm convinced it does it deliberately.

 

The Internet, seen here annoying someone.

4.


There should be a sequel to the film It Follows called They Follow.

Then there should be a sequel to that called We Follow.

And then He/She Follows.

And then I Follow.

It Follows is great, and quite spookington.

That's a word. It means spooky, only better.

5.

It pleases me greatly that Bates Motel - a programme about the young Norman Bates from Psycho - is an anagram of O Let Me Stab.

See?

6.

There should be a sequel to Suicide Squad, called 'We're Very Sorry'. In it, the producers of 'Suicide Squad' should apologise, for ages, to camera, for the terrible script they inflicted upon us. It wouldn't be very entertaining, but it would be better than the nonsense they made in the first place.

Lovely imagery. Awful waste of time film.

That's all. About your business now.