Emerson

I am currently revisiting Raymond Carney's American vision: The films of Frank Capra, and in the chapter 'Frank Capra and American Romanticism', Carney offers a quotation from Emerson's 'The Divinity School Address' which I also feel compelled to reproduce:

All attempts to contrive a new system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason - today pasteboard and filigree and ending tomorrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they become plastic and new. The remedy of their deformity is first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify.

The Social Network

I got to see The Social Network on Saturday night, a film I had wanted to see for some time. It begins with a character returning home (well, home on campus) after a night out and venting his frustration via the internet. After the movie, I wanted to do the same. A couple of days later, the impulse to get out what I want to say and the opposing one not to spend time and space simply being negative about something are still battling, and are in fact proving a distraction, so I am just going to make a few observations, which make no claim to completeness or balance, so that I can get them out of my system! My points are reactions partly to the movie, and partly to positive things that have been asserted or suggested concerning the movie in its reviews (see David Denby's piece in The New Yorker for the piece where praise multiplied by prestige of outlet is highest).

Complexity

In the case of The Social Network, jumping back and forth in time does not add to the movie's complexity, but consistently and intentionally works against it. Having characters discuss what happened in a legal setting just before/after we cut to the events in question removes any ambiguity concerning i) what is going on as the original story unfolds and ii) how we ought to evaluate the truthfulness of the subsequent testimony that we hear. The two strands are mutually reinforcing and defining, and leave little room for speculation concerning character psychology or factual veracity (I am talking here about the 'truth' offered by the movie, not its adequacy or otherwise as a record of 'what actually happened', something which could not be determined by examination of the work alone, and which I am not interested in here). The Social Network seems to me to be a film devoid of mysteries.

The screwball connection

The most galling thing about the movie's reception is to read repeated comparisons with the dialogue of screwball comedy. Roger Ebert writes that 'in an age when movie dialogue is dumbed and slowed down to suit slow-wits in the audience, the dialogue here has the velocity and snap of a screwball comedy' (see also Denby). Again: I cannot think of a single plot point, inconsequential or otherwise, that is not relayed redundantly to the audience in this movie. (As well as the back-and-forth timeframe, think of the voiceover, motivated by blog writing, that accompanies the protagonist's first frenzied night of creation, in which he repeatedly tells us that he is hacking into campus networks to access photos; in the unlikely event that we have failed to grasp this, we get an on-campus trial afterwards where it is explained to us again. Think also of the scene with Bill Gates, after which we are told 'that was Bill Gates'.) The dialogue does indeed have 'velocity', and also has 'snap' - in the sense that it is brittle, which the best screwball dialogue never was. Listening to the dialogue in the famously fast-tongued opening sequence, I may as well have been reading it on the page - which, again, is something that one would never say of screwball dialogue. The characters speak in strict alternation. They interrogate one another's language, but at the level of vocabulary. It does not really matter how what is said is said (apart from it being fast and descending into acrimony): there is no play with tone, or really (in this peculiarly joyless movie) with anything else. This might be seen to speak to what has been termed as the slight 'autism' of the Zuckerberg character when it comes to social interaction, and to the fraughtness of contemporary communication more generally. These may be achievements of the movie (at whatever cost such achievements are bought), but they are far from the achievements of screwball comedy. And instead of the whole-body performances of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn et al, who keep us interested and make us laugh with their actions, which support and counterpoint their lines, in The Social Network our two characters are rooted to their chairs and framed in medium close-up.

Screwball comedy interrogated and worked to redefine gender roles and break down bourgeois heterosexual gender roles. What about The Social Network?

Women in The Social Network

The movie begins with an exchange between Zuckerberg and Erica that leads to the former taking revenge and in the process sowing the seeds for Facebook. It ends with Zuckerberg, at the end of a long day of legal wrangling, staying behind in the office and compulsively refreshing Erica's Facebook page just after he has sent her a friend request, to see if she accepts. (A comparison with Citizen Kane has repeatedly been drawn in reviews, one which I can see the structural logic of, but which is still irritating because it mainly stops at the level of namechecking and so serves as an indicator of mutual esteem between reviewer and suitably informed reader, rather than as a means of saying much of interest about The Social Network itself.) So a woman can be a muse to the male creator figure in the movie. An interning lawyer can also deliver a verdict on Mark which echoes Erica's and is given the further structural significance of providing (I'm pretty sure) the movie's final line. So a woman can have insight into male creator figures. What else can women do in the movie? They can strip to their underwear and dance on tables, as happens in the opening passage - whilst our creator figure furiously works away at his computer elsewhere. They can obligingly walk around in pants with 'Stanford' written on the back, with their rear to the camera, as a means of enlivening the introduction of the movie's second male creator figure, Sean Parker. They can (in another joyless scene) be 'groupies', and take Mark and his then-business partner Saverin to the bathroom and perform fellatio. But look out, because one of them might be a possessive psychopath who puts a burning bin on your bed whilst you try and conduct manly business on the phone. They can attract the attention and praise of Mark for their good work, but then be 'shamed' and evacuated from the narrative in the next scene because of their drug use, which might compromise the cleanliness of the male's pristine creation.

After watching The Social Network, I find myself wanting to say similar things about it to what I said after seeing Zodiac. In Se7en, Fincher's noirish lighting and brooding Reznor soundtrack were a good fit with the movie's plot, setting, and themes. Seeing the same features in The Social Network, it seems that style has been unmoored from meaning. Am I missing something?

Small, Striking Moments: The Corner and The Wire

The HBO ‘miniseries’ The Corner (2000) is now predominantly viewed and marketed as a warm-up or sketch for The Wire (HBO, 2002-8). When we enter for the first time the fictional world of the prior series (in its first episode, ‘Gary’s Blues’), the presentation of that world employs aspects of the rhetoric of a documentary. A handheld camera travels backwards to keep in frame its subject - a black man in early middle age (Gary, played by T K Carter) - as he hurries along an alleyway and then across a street. Offscreen, a voice asks him questions.

Gary enters a corner grocery store. The camera remains outside, and executes a three hundred and sixty degree survey of its environment. What is dramatised, however, is not the camera’s capacity for revelation, but the fact that its presence alters that which it would observe. It pauses first on three stationary youths, all of whom in their own ways exhibit a desire to give nothing away. Next, it stops on a man in a tracksuit crossing the street towards us, who meets the camera’s gaze, turns on his heel halfway across the street and crosses back. Finally, it catches a man walking past close by. The offscreen voice offers him an open opening gambit (‘Hey how’s it going?’), but he returns the greeting before it has even finished in a tone that ends the conversation, and moves past the frame without breaking his stride. Thus do we see figures variously frustrate the curiosity of the camera by doing nothing, turning around, and ploughing onwards.

Gary exits the store holding a cigarette. They are sold individually, he explains, for 25 cents. ‘Be a lot cheaper to buy a pack wouldn’t it?’ the offscreen voice ventures. ‘Yeah well, you know,’ Gary responds. ‘Why buy a whole pack ’cause you gonna wind up giving half of ’em away.’

The device of having the character who will turn out to be the episode’s protagonist speak to an embodied observer and enquirer is used in the introductory sequences of all six episodes of The Corner. The title card then acts as a watershed: afterwards, the camera is no longer tied to a following figure. Douglas Pye has argued that often in narrative fiction (he is specifically discussing Hollywood movies) ‘the initial overt marks of the presence of narration cue us to a relationship between narration and fictional world which we are expected to carry forward without the overt marks being retained’ ('Bordwell and Hollywood, p48). The Corner is based upon a six hundred-plus page book of investigative journalism of the same name (co-written by David Simon and Ed Burns). The opening sequences of the television episodes embed this provenance and method within the adaptive medium. Even after the initial mode of narration drops away, our viewing should continue to be informed by a way of seeing that places at the centre of its quest to understand the world the observation of human lives and the asking of questions about them.

'You want to know if a dope fiend's for real, check the bottom of his shoes.'

We are in an office basement which serves as the headquarters of a newly-formed special unit of the Baltimore Police Department, a unit whose purpose is to investigate the Barksdale drug organization. Detective Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson) enters, dressed as a drug addict for an undercover operation. He plays to the other detectives, first adopting the language and gestures of the fashion world (‘Detective Sydnor’s ensemble is the latest in Westside project-wear [...] torn cammies by Versace, stained sweatshirt by Ralph Lauren…’), before declaring: ‘I ain’t showered in two days, I ain’t shaved in four. Right now I am one ripe, nasty son-of-a-bitch’. The most appreciative audience member is Carver (Seth Gilliam), who immediately joins in with Sydnor’s strutting, ribbing his fellow detective but also joining him in a loudly-voiced holding at a distance of the category of person Sydnor is imitating (‘Look at this piece of shit!’).

Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), another detective, looks on more sceptically. After Sydnor has finished regaling the group with a rundown of his costume, she turns to her confidential informant, Bubbles (Andre Royo), a drug addict who will be accompanying Sydnor on his round of ‘buys’ from Barksdale dealers, to seek his opinion. ‘Clothes is torn down enough,’ Bubbles concedes, ‘but he could use a little bit more stains, more dirt.’ His first major criticism is of the wedding ring on Sydnor’s finger. ‘Shit, you married to the needle boy’ Bubbles chuckles. ‘That shit been pawned off if you for real. It’s a dead giveaway.’ After more criticisms, Sydnor protests that Bubbles surely cannot have a problem with his footwear. Bubbles, sitting down, places Sydnor’s heel on his knee, showing the sole of Sydnor’s shoe. ‘See? You walking down them alleys in the projects man, you stepping on the dead soldiers.’ ‘Dead soldiers?’ an uncomprehending Kima repeats. ‘Yeah, empty vials. You can’t walk down a Baltimore street without that shit cracking underneath your feet. You want to know if a fiend’s for real, check the bottom of his shoes. OK? Have him dance on some empties before we go out there.’

The limits of Sydnor’s costume are an index of the limits of his empathy and understanding. The attitude towards ‘dope fiends’ exhibited by Sydnor and Carver in this scene is one of contempt. If one views a category of person through such a distancing lens, it is not surprising that an attempt to emulate their appearance will tend towards caricature - a generalised set of undesirable attributes. In this case, Sydnor’s dope fiend is ‘tore down’, unshaven and malodorous. But, as Bubbles points out, because he has not walked a mile in such a person’s shoes, his masquerade will not withstand the scrutiny of true players of the game.

What is at stake here is more than ‘surface realism’ - although the series and the discourse that has bloomed around it clearly have a strong investment in this too. The point is not, or not only, to reproduce the way things look. The Wire constantly invites us to extrapolate meanings, and modes of existence, from small details of appearance and behaviour. When Bubbles points out the limits of Sydnor’s ‘inhabitation’ of his dope fiend character, he points out the stories told by the presence or absence of a wedding ring on one’s finger or of broken glass on one’s shoes, for those who are able to read them (‘See?’). Similarly, the availability for purchase of individual cigarettes in corner stores is at once a neat little detail and a neat little story - a small window onto a mode of existence where even the most temporary accumulation of the most minimal ‘property’ renders one a target, leading to the formalisation of novel methods of buying and selling basic commodities that answer to such an economy.

-- -- --

The moments described above, and my description of them here, were a starting point for an article I wrote about The Wire. However, I couldn't find a place for them in the flow of the article in its final form, even though the ideas contained within them remained relevant to it throughout its development.

'The Rhetoric of The Wire' has now been published in the first issue of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. I am deeply honoured to appear alongside the likes of writers such as Ian Cameron, John Gibbs, V F Perkins, Douglas Pye, Deborah Thomas, George Toles and Michael Walker, whom I have long-admired, as well as my friends and peers James MacDowell and Lucy Fife Donaldson.

(NB This would have been my first post with images, but my DVD capture technology pixellated them [I think Bubbles's magnetism was too much for my PC] and I couldn't get Blogger to lay them out like I wanted - it's worse that Word!)

Holiday reading: The Road

This blog contains spoilers.

Most of last week I was camping in the Lake District, and I managed to read a novel that I've been wanting to get around to for a long time.

I spend more time than might be healthy worrying about fuel and food shortages, resource conflict, and social collapse - thinking about all the things that need to keep happening to keep society going, and about how I'd cope if I found myself in the position of Robinson Crusoe, or the 'castaways' on Desert Island Discs. Should I be spending time learning how to grow my own food? Build drystone walls? Fashion spectacles for if my eyesight continues to deteriorate?! For this reason, and because I was so gripped by No Country for Old Men, I felt primed for The Road.

The novel follows a man (who remains unnamed throughout) and his son as they traverse an America in which society has collapsed, nothing grows, and the sun barely shines - effectively, a nuclear winter, although the specifics of whatever precipitated this ecological state are never gone into.

Language and imagery are the novel's main strengths. Alan Warner puts it well in his Guardian review when he suggests that

what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy's late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description.

Around halfway through the novel, when we have become accustomed to the extreme precariousness of the lives of the man and boy, as they wheel a cart along asphalt, picking up what food they can and preciously guarding what they have, the man discovers a family's long-abandoned bunker, hidden under grass in their garden. It contains cans and cans of food: 'chile, corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. The richness of a vanished world'. The moment of discovery is a truly affecting one by virtue of its context.

The 'vanished world' of the novel is precisely a world where there's enough to eat, and a world in which food can still be produced. The loss of art, architecture, science, knowledge... these things are not considered directly. This is a consequence of the restrictions the novel observes. It mainly limits itself to describing the two main characters and their actions, and does not create within these restrictions occasions for reflection upon the lost civilization in broader terms.

As well as no longer having any meaningful past, wiped out as it has been, the characters are also robbed of any future. The underground bunker full of food represents not just the richness of the past, but the ability within that past to have a future; to have the wherewithal to save, make plans and think beyond one's immediate needs, and the faith that it is worth one's while to do so.

This is stark and effective, but it does present structural challenges that I did not feel that the novel entirely overcame, or at least did not sufficiently compensate for. When your characters live in an eternal and precarious present, how does one develop a story? Can one create a narrative that feels other than episodic and arbitrary?

My other main reservation is partly to do with the book, and partly to do with its critical reception. I confess that I love the critical fawnings that are used as pull quotes on book covers and inside them. I always read them in order to whet my appetite for the main course that is the novel itself. I am promised various kinds of brilliance in various authoritative, taut phrases; by reading this book I will experience this promised brilliance; the time I spend reading will be fuller and better living than if I was doing the washing up or sitting on the sofa eating biscuits; and afterwards perhaps I will have some taut phrases of my own, or at least I'll be able to inhabit rather than just observe and assume the fittingness of the judgements of the quotes on the cover.

There are the usual cliches. Kirsty Wark is quoted describing The Road as 'shocking and harrowing but' - of course - 'ultimately redemptive'. Reading the quotes back after having read the novel, I found myself temporarily transformed into Bertolt Brecht, feeling contempt for 'the scum of the earth who want the cockles of their heart warming'. However, I was also slightly troubled by something more specific to this novel's reception. In describing it as 'a warning', I think there is a danger of a self-congratulatory display of concern and social consciousness which amounts to very little and serves no useful purpose.

The Road ends with a one-paragraph coda, after the business of the plot is concluded. (In its muscular simplicity and subject matter, it reminds me of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.) Here it is in its entirety:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

We should not reduce The Road to the message or warning that this paragraph contains. Nevertheless, this is a rhetorically privileged moment. It is the first time we break away completely from the man and boy, and the last thing in the novel. We are no longer being presented with narrative, but with poetic and pointed description standing alone.

It probably seems churlish and uncharitable to begrudge McCarthy a one-paragraph coda after a 300 page novel characterised above all by economy and restraint, especially a paragraph so beautifully written, the sentiment of which one surely could not disagree with. However, it seems to me to provide the invitation to the kinds of interpretations referred to above.

The Road is, throughout, all about effects and not causes. How did this nuclear winter come to pass? We do not know. McCarthy's tone throughout is elegiac, regretful and humane, and this tempers and makes more palatable but does not eliminate the fact that he is also fatalistic and despairing, perhaps even nihilistic? When faced with the terrifying spectacle of an unexplained and total destruction of society, ecology and food production and supply, I would not say I had been 'warned', because a warning suggests that if I fix my ways there's still time to make everything alright, and I do not think that is what the novel suggests - and it certainly does not suggest how one might go about doing the fixing. If McCarthy is a climate change thinker, he is a James Lovelock. Again, the lost world evoked by The Road is not a world of excess, despoilation or rapaciousness: it is primarily a world where people simply had enough to eat. The novel does not present us with any past figures or actions who contextualise its calamitous present and would therefore serve as objects of blame. And a bit of tinkering at the margins by the reading public will not save us.

Discourse vs rhetoric

Over the past few months, I've attended a small handful of academic events at the University of Warwick: a workshop on gender, social reproduction and depletion; a graduate Security Studies conference; and the third annual Film-Philosophy conference. And now that FPIII, which I helped to organise, has been and gone, I have a little more time to write about some thoughts that these events have provoked. It was the Security Studies conference that got me thinking about the topic that gives this blog its title, but that topic is an important one for academia (particularly, I think, the humanities and social sciences) in general. It is also a topic that overlaps with the cover feature of this week's THE: 'scholarly writing'.

In 2008, there occurred in UK higher education the Research Assessment Exercise, in which academic departments of UK universities and their research 'outputs' were evaluated, with the results influencing the distribution of funding. The RAE has been replaced by the REF (Research Excellence Framework). The new UK government has postponed the REF until some kind of agreement can be reached about a controversial element which, it is proposed, ought to influence how departments are evaluated - and, therefore, funded. That element is 'impact': the reach of university research beyond the academy.

I have written about this in passing on this blog before, and linked to Stefan Collini's excellent article on the subject. For the purposes of this particular entry, the initial point that this prologue leads me to is that consideration of, and worries about, the extent to which what academics write is or should be accessible to non-specialists is nothing new.

When non-specialists are confronted with the technical language of an academic discipline, it is often dismissed as jargon. As Terry Eagleton has noted, the use of such language is often felt to be particularly scandalous when the object of study is something that it is assumed can be understood without the need for study: films, novels, music, newspapers. (As a Film Studies person, I was interested to stumble across this piece recently.)

I think any academic discipline, whatever its object of study, is entitled to and probably requires its own specialist language. However, I do think distinctions can be made concerning the ways in which such language is used.

The danger of a specialist vocabulary is that it can become a substitute for thought. It can become, as David Bordwell has put it, the one hammer that makes every problem look like a nail. The speaker/writer's language becomes a reified, dead 'thing'.

In the 1988 introduction to Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Robin Wood writes of returning to academic Film Studies in the UK after a few years away to find a significantly changed intellectual landscape, in which a supposedly scientific language had displaced and discredited, and left no room for, the individual critical voice:

If criticism is scientific, then it has fixed rules, which anyone with a sufficient IQ (something very different from Leavis' 'intelligence') can master; having mastered them, you can write criticism. The notion of an individual voice becomes not only irrelevant, it becomes anathema. [...] Unlike Leavis, semiologists are not elitist. If there is the small problem that only a tiny group of intitiates can understand them, that is because everyone else is too lazy to learn the rules (or master the jargon). If we bothered to write the rules we could all write like that, indistinguishably. So democratic.

Wood identifies Stephen Heath as a person with the methodological commitments of the group he is critiquing, but whom Wood nevertheless admires, because Heath distinguishes himself through his personal style and intelligence, which demonstrate commitment and understanding.

In my terms, Wood is praising writers who employ rhetoric rather than simply using an available discourse. For such writers, writing is an act of discovery and communication - and, we should add, joy and love. It is not a more elaborate form of painting by numbers.

At the Film-Philosophy conference, I had several conversations with people at various career stages about where we find ourselves now. A discussion with an older academic about how things were when his career started (I asked whether there was the same imperative for him to slog across the conference circuit, presenting 20 minute papers on small topics to small audiences; the answer was no) reminded me of something Charles Barr said in his Guardian obituary for Robin Wood:

While film studies, the discipline he had helped to establish, inexorably followed a familiar academic trajectory, becoming staidly respectable, a field for careers based on narrow specialisms, he remained the best kind of generalist, continuing, as he had from the start, to engage equally with classical and contemporary cinema, and with films from many countries, and to place them in a wider cultural context, informed by his expertise in literature and music.

For those of us who want a career and an intellectual life similar to our old Film Studies idols, the big names who established the discipline, it is sad to ponder that the nature of academic Film Studies today makes such a thing much more difficult.

And 'specialist language' might appear to be the natural companion of 'narrow specialisms', but I would still want to insist that any piece of academic writing, however 'large' or 'small' its topic, need not dispense with such language, but must simply not use it mechanically, or unthinkingly. To repeat, language should communicate and clarify thought, not substitute for it.

(I apologise if this entry has not gone very far. It is not quite the entry I thought it would be when I set about composing it an hour or so ago, but it has gotten across some of what I have been thinking about whilst engaged in the events mentioned above, and on the eve of the publication of a newly relaunched journal in which some of my writing appears - a journal which has always valued the individual critical voice, and exhibited a healthy suspicion of, to use the terms of the above, mere discourse.)

Crisps on amazon: end times?

My wife just mentioned Fearne Cotton, and I always get her mixed up with Fern Britton. Anyway, this led to a brief conversation about This Morning, during which I learned it is now presented by Peter Andre and Holly Willoughby. For some reason, this reminded me of a couple of Tweets that I saw a few days ago about the fact that one can now buy crisps and other snacks on amazon.co.uk, whose authors suggested that this portended apocalypse.

I was having lunch the other day with a newly appointed (lucky fellow) lecturer in International Political Economy whose research specialism is the political economy of food, and we got talking about supermarkets (principally Tesco) and their economic vacuum effect, as outlined in the excellent book Tescopoly: the way they suck money out of a local community rather than allowing it to circulate within that economy, and at the same time de-skill the labour force, narrowing and reducing the quality of the types of job available. Someone else chipped in to talk about a man who used to go door to door offering video rental! - sadly too a thing of the past.

Amazon extending their repertoire is clearly more economic consolidation and vacuuming, but there's also something peculiar about using an interface geared towards selling music, DVDs, books and consumer electronics to buy Snaps Spicy Tomato (21g). There are only 3 left in stock - amazon urges me to order soon! These particular crisps aren't available from sellers other than amazon, but I believe others are - though not second hand, I would hope ('used, like new?'). I can read some product details to do with the crisps: how big the box they come in is, how quickly I should eat them. I can write a review to say how much I like or dislike the crisps, and give them a star rating. Not only can I buy them, I can add them to my 'wish list' - make them something I aspire to one day own. (Going back to the apocalypse theme: this kind of reminded me of the quiz show sketch on Mitchell and Webb which takes place after what is always only referred to as 'the event' and which repeatedly and to great comic effect exhorts its audience to 'please, remain indoors', where a pile of fuel is a similarly coveted item: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_rCnueID8.)

Scrolling down, I am disappointed to report that this is actually, apparently, not a new thing at all: Snaps Spicy Tomato were first available on amazon in December 2007. Or perhaps, 1984-style, amazon are re-writing their history. I sense I am probably now going too far...

Shrek Forever After

This blog contains spoilers.

When I got back from a nowadays all-too-rare trip to the cinema and its wonderful absorption last night, I had a telephone conversation with my good friend James MacDowell about the movie I had just been to see, Shrek Forever After. Unsurprisingly, given James's abiding concern with the topic, happy endings were one thing we discussed (a topic I shall return to below). He also mentioned that he had seen advertising for the movie around London featuring Shrek in an England strip, accompanied by the punning caption 'They think it's all Ogre. It is now!'

The Shrek franchise has always riffed on surrounding culture to humorous effect. And like most contemporary franchises, it surrounds itself with merchandise: action figures, duvet covers, video games, clothes. This sort of activity has been around for a long time. However, I discovered this evening another form of diffusion/repurposing that is at least a little newer. There is a particularly memorable 'turn' early in the movie, and at what turns out to be a crucial narrative juncture, which involves a young boy, reminiscent of Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, repeatedly demanding that Shrek 'do the roar'. The repetition, editing pattern and timing of this in the movie make it very funny. And 'do the roar', a web search reveals, has, to use an ostensibly vague trio of words which in fact precisely captures the nature of the phenomenon we are faced with, 'become a thing'. When I google 'shrek do the roar' this is what I get: http://tinyurl.com/shrdtr. There is a YouTube video that re-edits the movie to MC Hammer's 'U Can't Touch This', to great effect. There is a link to a Facebook group page which bears the following description: 'Welcome to a Facebook Page about The kid from shrek who says "Do the Roar!" Join Facebook to start connecting with The kid from shrek who says Do the Roar!"'. And, perhaps inevitably, there is an iTunes App: 'Do The Roar, will allow anyone to annoy Shrek, and cause him to bellow out his enormous Ogre roar. Use Butterpants to help you annoy Shrek, ...' And those are just the first three hits!

A recurrent line of argument in film studies is that the contemporary commercial and media environment in which popular cinema exists mean that movies must appear across several different platforms, and that the pressure of such a commercial imperative causes their narratives to become incoherent. (A related line of argument is that the era of the blockbuster shepherded in the 'movie as rollercoaster', a thrill-ride of sensations, a mechanical series of ups and downs, rather than a carefully worked out story. 3D aesthetics, and the resurgence of 3D, invite us to revisit this analogy, and we will touch upon 3D aesthetics below.) Such arguments are not entirely negligible. In the Matrix Trilogy - the cinematic component of the Matrix franchise (and the dominant part of that supertext, to which all other parts ought to be subordinate??) - to take a good example, it is true, I would say, that the power station sequence in Reloaded seems at least a little thin and undermotivated - and when one learns that the Matrix videogame involves a much more elaborate treatment of the same location, things start to make more sense. It is true that the thinness of the power station sequence in Reloaded or what one might tentatively call the 'excess' of the sequence with the young boy in the latest Shrek do pull us out of the narrative flow somewhat, and make the moviegoing experience less smooth, but then, i) it is not only intertextuality that does this; ii) complete 'smoothness' is neither a desirable nor even a possible state for narrative fiction, predicated as it is on development and conflict; iii) neither moment radically endangers the narrative coherence of the movie (or supertext) of which it is part.

Indeed, Shrek Forever After possesses a very carefully worked out plot, one which, as we shall see, owes certain debts to 'classical' movies and genres of the Hollywood cinema, and some of its most interesting elements of 'un-smoothness', tension and excess have nothing to do with the fact that the studio that made it also wants to sell toys and the people who see it want to make YouTube videos or set up Facebook groups. Rather, they emerge, in a much more old-fashioned way, from aspects of narrative, character and genre (all of which, of course, rely upon intertextuality, albeit of a different form).

We can see Shrek Forever After partly as a form of what Kristine Brunovska Karnick calls 'reaffirmation comedy' and what Stanley Cavell calls the 'comedy of remarriage', where 'the drive of its plot is not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again' (Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness). The reader who has seen Shrek Forever After will know that I am cheating here slightly, because, oweing to its alternate-world narrative, only Shrek knows that he and Fiona are already married, and Fiona is a completely different person who does not know Shrek at all. But I'll get to that.

The moment that made me think most strongly of the comedy of remarriage was a sequence where Shrek and Fiona have been chained by the villainous Rumplestiltskin in such a fashion that when one moves towards the other, it causes the other to be pulled away. There soon follows an action sequence where 'the camera' swoops around through the space, joining Shrek and Fiona in a dance of movement as they work together and use their chains to turn the tables on their antagonists. As Dr Martin Pumphrey, a truly superb teacher at the University of Warwick, taught me in a final year undergraduate module on film comedy, the heyday of the reaffirmation comedy/comedy of remarriage/screwball comedy cycle occurred at roughly the same time as the rise of censorship, and we can see both the sparky dialogue and the pratfalls and physical comedy of the central duo in those movies as a sublimation of sexual impulses and desires. To see a plot work itself out bodily is one of the great pleasures of comedy, along with other even more disreputable genres.

And during this sequence, I felt that the movie's 3D presentation added something to its achievement and its expressivity. I am generally skeptical of 3D, mainly because movies are not computer games, and are the better for it, and as such the worlds of the movie and the audience should remain separate, and will remain separate even if something jumps out at us to give us a scare. We are not in a straightforward sense participants in movie narratives: we do not affect their outcomes. (We are, however, 'participant observers', to borrow a term used by V F Perkins in relation to film, and movies rely upon our consent and our mental acitivity for their fictions and stories to work). But perhaps this is an argument against the misguided rhetoric of those selling 3D rather than 3D itself, promising to put us 'right there in the picture'. And this is not exclusive to 3D: the same empty promise accompanies every new technological innovation. As a compositional tool or mode, 3D can definitely enhance the eloquence of certain framings, and the effectiveness of the physical and bodily working out of narrative, and as such is not 'mere spectacle'. To evoke V F Perkins (again), so long as 3D creates possibilities rather than imposing spurious demands, then it is to be welcomed.

The main reference point for me as I watched Shrek Forever After though, perhaps predictably, given that it is one of my absolute favourites, was It's a Wonderful Life. Shrek, like George Bailey, ruins a gathering for a special occasion by venting his suppressed rage at a life of domesticity and self-abnegation. And also like George Bailey, Shrek, via a bit of magic (although Shrek's magician is malevolent, and decidely not an angel like Clarence), gets to see what the world would be like if he had never been born.

The result, in Shrek Forever After, is that the kingdom of Far Far Away is ruled by Rumplestiltskin. Like the Pottersville of the alternate world of It's a Wonderful Life, it is a fallen world of unproductive labour, cruelty and vice, and in both worlds this is fundamentally because the person in control of the circulation of money is not a benevolent figure. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life is an acquisitive capitalist. 'Rumple' in Shrek Forever After is more like an absolute dictator. As well as living in an opulent palace surrounded by his witches while the rest of the kingdom falls into ruin, he has control of the airwaves, issuing edicts via his magic mirror, and a pied piper whom he pays to make his subjects dance like automatons to his tune. Another of his strategies to keep his subjects supine and divided is to dangle in front of them the promise of riches beyond their wildest dreams - the equivalent of a lottery win - if they will buy into his system and do his bidding.

In It's a Wonderful Life, George's wife Mary is in the nightmare world of Pottersville a spinster-librarian, and clearly the worse for having missed out on marriage and motherhood. In Shrek Forever After, by contrast, Fiona is the potent leader of an underground resistance movement of trained warrior ogres committing to overthrowing Rumplestiltskin - that is, to enacting a revolution. She was not rescued from the tower by Shrek: she rescued herself.

Andrew Britton has written that 'A peculiar interest accrues to works which have radically contradictory invitations - works which, in seeking to accommodate ideological disturbances, are compelled to allow them a space in which they become available to readers for purposes which the work as a whole cannot endorse.' In the case of Shrek Forever After, the movie makes the alternative Fiona such a compelling and positive figure that we might well prefer to see her remain a radical, living as part of an alternative community and seeking to overthrow the unjust status quo, rather than revert to being Shrek's wife and the mother of his children.

We must be careful not to exaggerate. The movie does represent the alternative Fiona as unfulfilled, and still yearning for true love and its kiss which, like all fairytale princesses, she has been taught to wait for in order to give completeness and meaning to her life. And eventually, Shrek, by being able to point out Fiona's personal and intimate idiosyncracies (unchanged across worlds) such as the way she doesn't like her feet to be constricted by bedsheets, is able to lay claim to what is often taken to be the truest and deepest knowledge one person can have about another, even though we might question why details such as this might define a person more than their public life does. The process is completed when, just before he expires (for the magic contract means he is living on borrowed time - the movie's narrative deadline and part of its ideological 'emergency exit'), Shrek opens his hand to reveal the squeaky toy of the ogre baby (like It's a Wonderful Life, Shrek makes good use of objects and other motifs). There are tears and a true love kiss, and Shrek's quest is complete. He gets his old life back (but gains a renewed appreciation for it).

But whilst we can take great pleasure in seeing Rumplestiltskin's empire crumble before his eyes (another boon for animation and 3D), and can feel the rightness of the way the plot has worked itself out, I suggest that we feel an unresolved and uncompensated-for sense of loss in seeing this alternative set of possibilities for Fiona evaporate, and being left with the original Fiona, who remains none the wiser. The movie's narrative logic and emotional dynamics reaffirm marriage, motherhood and domesticity, but they are unable to completely eliminate the contradictory invitation to acknowledge and experience the fact that there is fulfilment and value to be found in roles for women other than - or at the very least, in addition to (we must be on our guard against 'either/or' thinking!) - marriage or motherhood.

Afterword

Another 'excessive' turn in Shrek Forever After is Rumplestiltskin's sidekick, a giant goose, who only honks throughout the movie, but had me in stitches with his blank malevolence. I was even going to break my 'no-images' policy and grace my blog with an image of this creature, but amazingly, I was unable to find one. During my search, however, I did find this page. Someone has ventured that the goose might 'represent somethign deeper , like perhaps the global economy meltdown in 2008, with Rumple being all administrations, until finaly the goose destructs after becoming grossly inflated.' As you might imagine, I got a big kick out of this, as well as the admirably balanced first response:

Claiming that the demented goose is nothing more than a funny side character is a little dissatisfying, though I do think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that it represents an inflated economy. Your guess is as good as mine, though. I'm a big proponent of reading into movies when you find something interesting or provocative (even when it's an animated kid's movie). When I first saw the creature, it did bring to mind a demented Mother Goose figure. That reading makes sense--the film is so entertaining because it puts a comical spin on all kinds of familiar fairy tales. It is a little disturbing to portray Mother Goose in that way, though...it's a very grotesque-looking goose with its pointy fangs and beady eyes. Very funny, though. I laughed every time it honked.

So did I, Answerer 1, so did I.