Mindless Ones

aka the obvious one…

Like Elephant, I didn’t see Threads at the time. It was deliberate this time, another video, borrowed years later on the strength of fearsome reputation. I think – but these memories could well  be half invented, half-recounted – I think I can remember the day after Threads was first shown.  Shocked and ashen elder sisters, parents bravely pretending everything was just the same as before.

We all knew we had a neighbour not 20 miles distant, forever an unwelcome megatechnological interloper into our innocently bucolic existence, who even if not an obvious first-strike target, still had that doorstep Chernobyl possibilty about it. Parents had explained roughly what it would mean if it went tits up, and I was shocked that there wasn’t something they could do about it. There was an apocalyptic timebomb just down the road. How did they go on without panicking? Why weren’t they screaming, shaking their neighbours and duly elected representatives by the shoulders, awakening them to the threat, begging for something to be done? How could normal life as I had always known it be so permanently close to the precipice of extinction?

Watching Threads again now, as the hardy among you will, that’s still the frightening thing – the destruction of the parental superego, manifested as the pathetically heroic, hopeless efforts of the municipal employees, those clerks and accountants, supervisors and secretaries holding onto the world, to save us all through continuation of a neat and orderly bureaucracy. The accumulated ballast of human society, those cultural codes and social securities, worthy words and high hopes, and all their inevitable extinction in the awful new reality beyond the opening of the atomic portal.

The sickest joke is the collapse of all those habits and symbols would not be instant and total. They’d persist in their broken, poisoned, ineffectual form for a short time after the  initial massive surge of human casualties. The words and numbers we use to organise our newly nonexistent world would be walking around undead in the fallout, scorched and sick but stumbling shortly on, for some time after we were sick and starved and gone, prior to the eventual (and as it turns out, unlikely) dominion of the cockroach.

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Other posts in the Notes From the Borderland series:

The Overlook Hotel – Kubrick’s The Shining

Telly Terror: Elephant

Watch this clip. Do so unaware and unshielded, and come back and read the rest of the post after the clip has made you a different person. For the full authentic experience, or as close as you’ll get without being me twenty odd years ago, watch the final execution only, from about 4.12.

http://youtu.be/iJK_2xg_s6k

It’s doubtful any reading this is too young to remember VHS video. You would record a show onto a thick black fat analogue tape, and watch it later, again and again. When you had seen a show enough times you would tape over it with another show. The contents of each cassette gradually became a patchwork palimpsest of overlapping programmes, the end of each show running into the start of the next, or cutting into a film half-way, a rolling scrapbook of missing beginnings and abrupt endings.

Between the joins of one show and the next was the all pervasive void of snow, empty space on the tape, blank matter, the nonsense noise of the TV and VCR saying nothing to each other. The snowstorms were phase-shifts in your viewing experience, synaptic pauses triggering unstable responses to unpredictable stimuli. Evil faces looming evanescent from the abyssal squalls.

I don’t remember what I was watching beforehand, but I remember the snow, and I remember the last final minutes of Elephant. I haven’t watched it again since, so if the details her are wrong in fact, that’s unavoidable but hardly important. The endlessly brief expanse of ghost-space coalesced int two men, a brutalist building of British municipal anonymity, a landscape instantly familiar and obscure. They walk in eerie silence, with ominous purpose. They come to a third man who awaits them in an enormous, evacuated warehouse space. Walking in wordless footsteps, the pair reach the third man, who shoots one of them at point blank range in the head. The target falls away, cold and gone, while the camera peers, not flinching, or explaining or remarking, just showing, the oddly perfect star of blood and body on the curdled shining wall.

I sat agape, helpless, pulse and mind racing to come up with the appropriate physiological response, establish the right questions to make the right frame to understand this incredible eruption of quiet chaos into my pleasant little life. It was impossible to explain. I never mentioned this to a soul – what one thing was clear was that this was something I should not have seen, and could not be spoken of, even if I had wanted to brave the threat of explaining it to someone else, of fitting it into words. I rewound it of course, not too shocked for that, to convince myself it was real.

I was not the same person after that point that I had been before. I was the lone custodian of a precious terror that over the years  I largely suppressed.  It wasn’t until last year, and youtube of course, that the memory itself was unburied, that I learnt about Alan Clarke, and discovered what the elephant in the room really was.

Today, as then, the tellybox is a maligned feature of the household. It blasts idiocy daily  into our domestic lives, provides an environmental niche where appalling things like X-Factor, adverts, and the 24hr news cycle may thrive. To admit to watching it is a shame, an admission of defeat. It breeds all kind of awful things.

But that glimpse of Elephant, that giant secret mystery of mine, those silent screaming strange minutes that still frighten me and are so precious and treasured, that was a product of the telly too. For me that moment has become an emblem of the cathode ray’s possibilities, its capacity to disturb instead of pacify, to entrance and enhance the viewer’s perception of the world, and to provoke instead of mollycoddle. The telly isn’t, or needn’t be, a mere transmission conduit for the flat consumerist imperatives of our teetering society. It can be something weird, and frightening, and magical, and uncanny – a really existing portal into impossible new territories. It can open up realms of fascinating and essential new potentialities.

As part of our Notes from the Borderland series (love that logo), we will be posting clips of telly that disturbed and detourned our minds. That shit us right up. The scariest, most toxic and wonderful moments of fear and strangeness we could find. You will not enjoy them, but they will make this most deliciously creepy time of the year yet more terrible and brilliant,  sharp like a dead shark’s tooth. And teach you new respect for the baleful gaze of that odinic eye, that sits there, among you every day, flashing moments of bleakest wisdom from the corner to the heart of your living room.

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Other posts in the Notes From the Borderland series:

The Overlook Hotel – Kubrick’s The Shining

Wotcha reckon?

I come to you, a lapsed Squaxx.

I stopped reading the Galaxy’s Greatest in any sort of regularity a long time ago. More than 15 years ago I reckon. That wasn’t always the way though. For a long time 2000AD was the most important comic in my life. I don’t really need to list the reasons – you’ve heard it all before no doubt. English comics fans proudly informing their bored US counterparts that they don’t know shit son, cos they weren’t there. But fucking hell man sometimes it was hard not to gloat – Millligan & Ewins on on the scorching psychedlic war strip Bad Company; Morrison & Yeowell on Zenith;  Mills & O’Neill on the utterly original and frankly just plain crazy Nemesis; Mills & Bisley on the heavy metal nihilism of ABC Warriors; the incredible John Wagner (whose contribution alone to absolute fucking rock solid thrill power for the last 35 years means that, really, we should have a National holiday celebrating the man…); Brendan McCarthy; Mike Fucking McMahon; Bolland, Gibbons; Cam Kennedy’s incredible shattered war torn planetscapes that still absolutely kill it; Brendan McCarthy again; Halo Jones (Alan Moore’s best work, and it is so fuck off and it’s a proper tragedy but also kind of beautiful that it’ll never be finished); John Hicklenton (RIP); DR & Quinch; Big Dave;Dredd’s boots….JOHN MOTHERFUCKING SMITH….

Fuck, I did it anyway. Sorry…

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 9:

Read parts 1- 8 here.

Who are Cindy & Biscuit? Why don’t you find out for yourself?

And don’t just take my word for it. Look here, here, and here! for further proof!

And look, even Tom Spurgeon told youto read it, and he’s like royalty.

A reminder that Comics & Conflicts is going ahead at the Imperial War Museum, London, Friday August 19th and Saturday August 20th, and it’s jam packed with interesting stuff.

Guests include Garth Ennis, Pat Mills, David Collier, Mikkel Sommer, Sean Duffield, Dave Turbitt & Adrian Searle, Eileen and Francesca Cassavetti. Last-minute extras David Blandy and Inko, creators of the anime-collage autobio-documentary and manga-inspired comic CHILD OF THE ATOM

The event also features a full-day academic conference, talks and panels, a comics workshop, free film screenings from 4.30pm on the Saturday of the documentary Comics Go To War

Plus art exhibits of Joe Colquhoun’s originals from Charley’s War and more.

Alex Fitch is hosting a special Comics & Conflicts preview broadcast from 8-9pm Tuesday 16th on Resonance FM.

Full details and links to book are here

A feature article on the main guest creators is here

• Welcome to England

Perhaps the most terrifying words ever read in a comic?

The Martian invaders, who Wells presents as being foul on a level deep enough to be both visceral and ontological, are upon facing a grinning English gentlemen made instantly sympathetic, as we realise we’ve been cheering for the wrong side all along.

This isn’t what the Martians are supposed to be. It’s one of Wells’ great tricks – they’re the bad guys that the reader is permitted on a planetary scale to Other and despise. It’s okay to revel in the violence of the conflict and the cruel irony of their demise. They’re not like us. They wouldn’t show you any mercy. They don’t belong here. It’s OK, you can hate them and enjoy their pain. It’s OK.

It’s not OK. From chapter 1 we’ve been presented with the Martians’ badness (they’re not even Martians! They’re not even from there! Not originally, not like the good Martians) as a simple, natural fact. So we cheer when they are chased off that planet. When these disgusting things arrive on ours, and treat those nice Wokingians exactly as generations of Englishmen have treated those they met as they set foot on shore, we are shocked and appalled and call righteously for vengeance upon them.

What if they just want somewhere safe to live?

It’s the final kick of the second book, hidden away in one small panel in the middle of the sequence that’s supposed to be giving us our final emotional catharsis. The scale of what Moore and O’Neill do in these panel isn’t to be underestimated – it’s something of a watershed moment in English literature – trumping Wells’ Woking, Larkin’s Slough and Morrissey’s seaside town they forgot to close down.  The repellent subject here withering under the poet’s red-hot glare is nothing less than England itself. The raw, fearful symbolism encoded in the imagery is unforgettable: the unleashed upper-crust, standing above England’s fetid carotid artery, physically devouring, digesting and delighting in the pain of this insect that thinks it knows about war and extinction, the gentleman so happy in their mutual immolation, their mingled ashes spread on the filthy red weed-choked water.

Come not to England ye monsters, ye Martians – there are plenty here already.

• I Can See You!

Bobsy and I were worried that we’d make this ‘Best Of’ a bit too Hyde-heavy, but it seems somewhat inevitable that this would the case, given the crowd pleasing nature of the big ugly bastard. If we can’t all love our Id what can we love…?

Way back in the first volume of the League there was a moment that you just knew was going to have some repercussions later on down the track. Caught midway through some brutal black ops with Edward Hyde, the Invisible Man gets a brief glimpse at his bleak, black future. In the sequence, we cut to an infra-red heat image of Griffin, seen through Hyde’s animal eyes. With the simple words “What? What are you looking at?” right there and then you just knew that Griffin’s invisible chips were cooked. By Christ, we didn’t know how horrible his comeuppance would be in Book 2, but with the look of feral glint in Hyde’s eyes in the next panel we at least get a hint. It’s the look of a cat about to commence the hunt with it’s mouse prey.

The simple but effective juxtaposition of Hyde’s ‘I’m not blind you know‘ with the realisation of quite how far from blind he actually is, is classic Moore. No-one does horror in comics quite as well Uncle Alan, and when pared with an artist as subtle and talented as O’Neill the effects are devastating.

More classic classics after the jump

Comics & Conflicts is a two day event that will explore stories of war in comics, graphic novels and manga.

The conference will explore the ways in which comics around the world represent and articulate the experience and impact of war and conflict. Topics to be covered include the impact of 9/11, the relationship between the image and reality of war. Established and up and coming comics artists are also participating.

Speakers include Pat Mills, legendary creator of Charley’s War; multiple Eisner winner Garth Ennis discussing his Battlefields series; and Martin Barker and Roger Sabin who’ll be talking about the depiction of war in the Guardian’s comic strip Doonesbury.

To read more about the event visit the Comica website