Macleod and '300' - Two Responses to the Darkness

I try to see at least one film and read one book in a week. Time and ease of access usually means that the film comes from California and that the book is as likely to be the contemporary equivalent of pulp fiction as something more 'worthy'.

Not that dedication to popular culture should be confused with understanding community culture.  The vast bulk of the material provided to us is produced by creatives and accountants with one main aim - to get us to buy the product.  There are two corollaries of this.  The first is that producers have to meet us more than half way and match our prejudices, fears, moods and desires.  The second is that producers and creatives can slip in their own ideological prejudices - usually but not always to sustain the system that enables production. 

Occasionally, a truly subversive creative can slip in a message against the system if the accountants think enough profits can be made by meeting the mood of the time.  The remarkable and anarchic V for Vendetta is proof both of the freedom of Western culture and of the essential uselessness of that freedom in bridging the gap betwen thought and action to effect change.  The graffiti of Banksy is another subversive act being appropriated by the mainstream.  Thus must it be.

Real community culture is usually folkish, repetitive, traditional and often second rate in execution.  Occasionally, a substantial creative talent emerges from below - like the vigorous youth cultures of urban environments - and then gets appropriated into the market system quite quickly.  So, when a film or a book strikes a chord, it is striking that chord at the boundary between many individuals' emotional response to events and the management of that response by those cultural high priests who can get enough offerings from the money men.

This week I saw the film 300 and read the book The Execution Channel by the Scottish writer Ken Macleod.  Both were responses to the war on terror. They represented distillations of two opposite ideological positions that are emerging to replace the left/right split of the Cold War.  These two responses are expressing the break-up of traditional allegiances.  At the risk of oversimplification, it may be worth unpicking the unspoken politics to be found in these two units of creative production that have been offered to attract our bank notes.

300 is the easiest because you can see it readily enough and it is only two hours long.  Its iconography is comic book but also both fascistic and gay - not as incompatible a connection in some extreme circles - and certainly morally and sexually ambiguous.  It tells the story, known to all British schoolboys until classical education was eliminated as part of the national curriculum, of the self-sacrificing stand of 300 highly trained Spartan warriors at the pass of Thermopylae.  It was always a symbol of what well trained dedicated soldiers might do to protect their own and is poignant in the week that a senior RAF Officer is said to have asked whether his men would consider suicide defence against an incoming terror attack and British naval captives seemed to collude in an Iranian propaganda victory.

But, putting aside how our culture actually handles conflict, 300 is about how conflict should be viewed.  Liberty is made abstract as homeland (women are second class and the economy is based on slavery), war is seen as a testosterone-fuelled glorious enterprise in which fame in the future is superior to a grey life in the present and the enemy is seen as imperial, decadent, compromising, ill-trained for service and polyglot.  Ironically, the mise-en-scene could easily be reversed and the 'resistance' to Imperial America be cast in these terms but this film at this time from this place introduces a language of the West versus the Rest that makes it clear that no such interpretation is possible.

Meanwhile, Ken Macleod, hitherto known for imaginative and wry sci fi space operas that are certainly fun but cannot be called works of Dante-like status, has turned his hand to a hybrid political and espionage thriller (with sci fi characteristics and a homage to James Blish) that is on the very edge of genius.  The Execution Channel (Orbit, 2007) is a natural outgrowth of his earlier work - his readers will recognise strong female protagonists, the centrality of Scotland and a fascination with the rhetoric of hard-line Communism.  There is a new fact around page 100 that shifts it sharply back from the world of John Le Carre to the world of Philip K. Dick.  But the distancing of the reader, similar to the distancing through graphics and formal rhetoric in 300, brings into focus the core ideology that Macleod, wittingly or unwittingly, is drawing out of the early years of the war on terror.

Place these two bits of popular culture alongside each other and patterns begin to emerge.  The core of 300, if you strip away the stylistic accretions and pretend you know no history, is brutally simple - that the West exists and is under threat, that few realise the extent of the threat, that we need to be awakened and that the necessary response is to move forward, engage with the enemy and turn back the tide.  Moreover, there are enemies within.  The tone is one of heroes with a weak mass that needs leading.

The Execution Channel is very different.  More muddied, like real life.  There are no simple bad guys. If there is a villain, then it lies within that generic class of Great Powers whose less-than-competent and paranoid leaders bring us to the brink of disaster through secrecy and manipulation.  The book can be compared to that great dystopian British science fiction masterpiece of the 1970s Fugue for a Darkening Island.  It represents that sense of things being out of control because of forces we will not control.  An oddly sympathetic if fundamentally cynical attitude to Chinese communism will puzzle American readers but it represents a preference, found lurking in many places outside the US, for community order over the murderous anarchy created by competing amoral elites.

In fact, Macleod is far from anti-American.  All Westerners are much of a muchness - confused and blundering and a bit dim about the big picture.  The Europeans and British officials are not much better and no-one seems to be particularly sadistic though sadistic things happen.  The clue to the anger not only in the book, but also outside America about America, lies in an almost throwaway comment from Roisin, the woman it will be hard not to identify as the voice we are supposed to identify with.  One of the contemporary themes in the book is the world of extraordinary rendition and of Guantanamo Bay that disturb Europeans far more than most Americans may understand:-

"Tears sprang to her eyes, as they always did when the thought struck her that particular prerogative was back: the right of the sovereign to condemn, to put to the question, without due process and for reasons of state; that on that sore point all the Revolutions in Britain and America had been for nothing,  That America had been for nothing: that dismayed her."

Dismay - what a British understatement!  So this film and this book, appearing at the same time, express, in popular cultural terms, the great split that is taking place within the Western Enlightenment.  On the one side there is a new defensive aggression, the fear that the Enlightenment is under siege from dark forces and that the forces of Light must learn to be hard and do what is necessary against the forces of Darkness.  On the other side is a deep sadness and 'ressentiment' that the Enlightenment is going into reverse and that the little people are becoming pawns once again in the battles between self-seeking and self-interested elites.

It might be interesting to speculate on how these two attitudes will develop as political movements within the West in the coming decades - we have our theories and our suspicions - but Zaadz is not a place for politics.  My interest here was only in the place where cinema and popular literature are expressing deeper shifts in culture.  These two trends - of defensive aggression ['Festung West'] and of individual and community resistance ['neo-socialism', if you like] - are becoming established across Europe, and even within US domestic politics, as alternative reactions to the stresses of the post-Soviet era.  It is well worth keeping an eye on the balance of power within the networks that will decide what we watch and what we read.

*****

300 is on general release and is strongly recommended.  The trailer gives a flavour of the film and can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDiUG52ZyHQ but the film is only for those with a strong stomach.

Ken Macleod has a blogspot at http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ that contains items that make the content of his books clearer.  His understanding of international affairs is remarkable in someone who is primarily a creative writer.  Although fantasy, The Execution Channel contains elements that are only too real and whose significance is clearly passing by many of those 'literary giants' who lurch from party to party down in London and who are still trying to reproduce the taste and smell of a Proustian teacake.