Das Tagebuch Murnaus

... ohhh pleasedontsuck pleasedontsuck....

From this morning's CBC:

Filmmaker Ben Wheatley is 'a cup of tea away from anarchy'
British director's new film, High-Rise, explores the intersection of condo life and class warfare
By Matt Meuse, CBC News Posted: Apr 16, 2016 8:00 AM PT Last Updated: Apr 16, 2016 8:00 AM PT

"They say you're only two meals away from anarchy," British director Ben Wheatley tells On the Coast host Gloria Mackarenko.

"You know, I like to eat. I'm probably about a cup of tea away from anarchy, usually."

Wheatley's new film, High-Rise, tells the twisted story of a utopian condo complex on the outskirts of a gentrifying city, and its rapid descent into chaos.

The transformation takes three months in the film. But in real life, Wheatley reckons it would be much quicker. In the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis, he realized he only had a day's worth of food in his house, and no real cash or valuables.

"I started looking around at the people in the street going, oh, I'd have to fight them, wouldn't I, for food," he said, laughing. "It would collapse really fast."

The film is based on a novel written by English author J. G. Ballard in the 1970s. Tom Hiddleston stars as Dr. Robert Laing, a resident of the titular High-Rise.

The book was speculative fiction at the time, but Wheatley finds it to be remarkably prescient.

"When I reread the book in my mid-40s, I realized that it wasn't predictive science fiction anymore, it was much more like I was reading pages out of a newspaper," he said. "It was a bit depressing."

To capture the feel of the novel, the film is set in a sort of alternate-history "super 70s," as Wheatley describes it — an ambiguous, highly-stylized representation of the era.

As if to highlight this, the film ends with an archival monologue from former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whose right-wing economic policies dominated British politics in the 80s.

"Hearing Thatcher in the air [at the end of the film] is like the ending of John Carpenter's The Thing," he said, referencing a classic 80s horror film with a similarly bleak ending. "When I hear that voice, I get a slight twinge of fear. I find her disconcerting and terrifying."

"It's saying that the whole thing is cyclical and it will start again. And we have the hindsight of knowing what's going to happen next."

Parallels with modern Vancouver

The city in the film is implied as London, which is currently facing housing affordability problems not unlike Vancouver's. Prices are surging in both cities, and many blame investors who use real estate as a way of making and storing money.

Wheatley said the practice of treating real estate primarily as an investment has a devastating impact on cities.

"I always think of it as a bit like when these investors buy Van Goghs and stick them in a vault somewhere," he said. "The art gets turned into money, becomes abstracted and then put away, and it no longer serves the point it had in the first place. So, you know, if you do that to a city, you basically kill it."

"And what happens when no one can afford to live in the city? Do we all have to live on the outskirts and just look to it like Oz or something in the distance? I don't know, it's terrifying."

High-Rise was screened Friday night as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival, with a wider Canadian release on May 20. He'll be giving a master class as part of the festival Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at Vancity Theatre.

Well, the end of the week and time for some undeserved vitriol, but I've been meaning to do this for some time and have eaten enough aniseed balls to get in the mood for it.

A few weeks ago I found a copy of an older science fiction book called Japan Sinks, written 1964-73 and published in the latter year by Sakyo Komatsu, an author who is apparently still one of Japan's leading sf writers.

The story is fairly simple: it is discovered that the tectonic plates are shifting in such a way that the Japanese archipelago will, in a matter of a couple of years, vanish beneath the waves. Much exposition on geophysics, scenes of destruction via earthquakes and volcanic eruptions abound, there is no magic bullet or happy ending, and in the end Japan does sink.

What infuriated me on reading it was something that had angered me before on reading the works of Japanese authors: the notion of "wareware Nihonjin", which shades off into Nihonjinron - namely, the pseudoscience of "we Japanese are different, unique on the planet." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron)

A few examples:

More than halfway through the book, the character of an unnamed but apparently extremely rich and influential old man emerges. A scene at his country home, where they discuss whether the population of Japan should emigrate to other countries, become naturalized, or stay where they are and die, is illuminating:

"...In effect it proposes that the best thing to do would be nothing whatsoever. The best thing would be not to lift a finger."
...
"So that opinion has come forth, has it?"
"That it should has its source, perhaps in the Japanese people's differing decisively from other peoples."
...
"Even if our race lives on, then, our descendants, it seems will have bitter times ahead of them. From now on whether it's a matter of going on being Japanese or ceasing to be Japanese, whatever the case, - we have to leave Japan out of our consideration. The problems to come will be those dictated by outside elements. Once this Japan of ours is gone forever, once it is taken from the Japanese, then our identity is simply that of human beings, it would seem, but in truth the problem cannot be reduced to terms so simple. For we have our karma - in our culture, our language, our history. And that karma will be resolved when this nation called Japan and its culture and its history - when all alike are swept away with the land itself. But the people of Japan will still be a young people, a people uniquely gifted...."

Later on the Japanese people are finally told what's going on:

They still had faith in Japan, however, still had faith in their government. Moreover, they made every effort to strengthen this faith. The government would do something. The government would not abandon them. For politicians and officials were, after all, Japanese just like themselves - a historically rooted sense of identity that everyone shared. In the present crisis the nation was waiting in submission for whatever the government had to say, givieing it due benefit of every doubt. This was the fundamental spirit of the Japanese, however critical, enraged or vituperative th4ey xcould be toward their nation on occasion."

By the end of the book, all but about 20 million of the (then) 110 milion Japanese are evacuated to countries all over the world, but the influential Rich Old Man stays put, as does his childlike maidservant Hanae:

"Hanae..."
The girl raised her tearful face.
"Would you let me see...?"
She drew in her breath with a quick movement of her white throat. Then the girl stood up and loosened her obi. There was a faint rustle of fabric as the kimono slipped from her shoulders. With this single graceful gesture, her naked body stood revealed in the desolate room. Its firm and rounded flesh shone in the gloom like a secret cache of snow. The old man looked at her but for a moment before closing his eyes.
"A daughter of Japan," he whispered to himself.
"Hanae...have children..."
"What, sir?"
"You must have children. You could have good, strong babies. Find a good man... he doesn't have to be Japanese. Have many children."

After this injunction, she leaves, he dies, Japan finally sinks.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that a critic attacking a book that angered him was like someone donning full armour in order to exact revenge on a hot fudge sundae. Well, maybe so, but this book was an expression of this strange smugness mixed up with humility confounded with blandly benign racism - something that, since I'm so inarticulate at explaining it, really has to be witnessed.

Have a good long weekend!

Sitting here eating my sandwich early and I want to tell you what I did before I came here to sit and eat my sandwich.
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