Photo: Shimelle (cc)

The epithets attached to the Olympic opening ceremony piled up: eclectic, spectacular, monumental, shambolic, parochial, world-beating, hideous, embarrassing, filmic, and even inspiring. In its parts, the spectacle was all of these things because of the whole, which formed a gush of free-floating anxiety, a confession on a therapist’s couch.

Many commented on the ceremony’s focus on times past, in what viewers outside of Britain took as a flamboyant history lesson or, less charitably, as a statement of a country with no future. This was, however, no simple portrayal of past events, but a raid conducted to shore up a particular view that exists at this time; a malaise suffered here and now.

In this respect, it was significant that director Danny Boyle posed Britons as stoic victims of two world wars and not victors, inventors of an environmentally destructive Pandemonium (Milton’s capital of Hell) not liberators of humanity through the scientific revolution (where was Newton?). British school children are, indeed, more likely to be aware of the pollution created by industry than its role in making sure they can read history at all.

Many on the right in Britain balk at the ceremony's sugared presentation of our National Health Service, which has not been ‘free’ since soon after its inception and which now relies heavily on private finance to keep going. However, the mythology of our history here was not straight-forwardly ‘left’ or ‘right’ wing at all.

Caribbean immigrants to the U.K., arriving on the Empire Windrush, were welcomed with open arms this weekend–not immigration police and hostile locals. None of the suffragettes in the stadium threw themselves under the monarch's horses. Recent bombings were deemed worth mentioning (if not by America's NBC, which cut them from its broadcast) but not the more significant loss of life in the struggle over British rule in Ireland.

Even the punk rockers were robbed of their more ‘unsavory’ associations with drugs and rebellion. This was a thoroughly contemporary vision, deracinated and empty of traditional ‘politics’ or even ‘reality’. In Boyle and writer Frank Cotterel Boyce’s sensitive vision, we ordinary Brits became sick children, mourning soldiers, love-struck teenagers and harmless old rockers and anything else you can't argue with.

This is a British society in which the presentation of an idea always has an easier passage if it is attached to a victim or an innocent, rather than to a vision of the future. It is a Britain where schools are fortresses because children are very rarely attacked by madmen, and where families of the victims of appalling crimes, such as the parents of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, are expected to become policymakers.

This self-consciousness was summed up (and subverted) in the genius touch of turning Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, into a self-deprecating joke. It was beautifully done and, yes, ‘very British, Mr. Bond’. But as one of those teens, unable to finish a dance routine without stopping to text each other, might have said: WTF?

Everything seemed double-edged. Even an ideal like the celebration of heroism was presented more as an opiate’s dream than a hope, with ‘Heroes’, David Bowie’s theme from the heroin flick Christiana F, serving as soundtrack.

Britain’s lack of a future orientation has much to do with an arbitrary and defensive relationship to its history, as displayed this last week. The past haunts us like a Warner Bros.-licensed specter, but even these ghosts are more substantial than our tenuous grip on where we come from. The opening ceremony showed us a Britain where the past is not so much another country, but a Neverland where visions of tomorrow slip further out of reach.

As Bowie wrote: “I could be King, and you could be Queen”. Putting aside the literal constitutional impossibility of such an outrage, we forget now how any of us ever achieved such Olympian heights.

Let's hope the herculean efforts of the sportsmen and women—here to demonstrate human excellence—remind us.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/01/the-unbearable-lightness-of-be.html/feed 117 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/the-luvilee-jubilee-underwhel.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/the-luvilee-jubilee-underwhel.html#comments Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:49:45 +0000 Wystan Mayes http://boingboing.net/?p=165014

There was little surprise at Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, but that's probably the point. Dutifully present were the Queen, the rain, the warm beer and the National Health Service glasses and teeth (I can say this, I’m British) and, …

There was little surprise at Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, but that's probably the point. Dutifully present were the Queen, the rain, the warm beer and the National Health Service glasses and teeth (I can say this, I’m British) and, surreally, hundreds of photographic Queen masks handed out for free. Parts of the crowd looked like a monarchist V for Vendetta; R for Regina?

There were some other traditions wheeled out for the occasion. The campaign group Republic, with some disdain for the 1.2 million lining the Thames to cheer the Queen (or ‘sausage’, as her husband calls her), had a spirited and—for them—historic turn out of about 1200. There were chants and moderate, reasonable speeches. This precluded any Greenpeace-style stunt: a lost opportunity, some might say, as in a nod to another British tradition, they were undermined by a bored Metropolitan Police force. The Met divided the protest into two, with most protestors corralled some way from the riverside. Those allowed to gather next to City Hall, the seat of London’s Mayor, had no chance of getting near enough to the river bank to be featured in photography of the main event.

So the case against the monarchy was laid out a few yards back from the crowds, with no PA, to huddled protestors. The wealth (nineteen royal ‘residences’, the royal Duchies, the newly-sanctioned share of profits from the Crown Estates, the hundreds of millions in personal wealth, the seven hundred servants for the family), such power as she has, the power wielded in her name (through the ‘royal prerogative’ to declare war without recourse to parliament, for example, as fomer Prime Minister Tony Blair most recently did), the secrecy (a recent amendment to Britain's Freedom of Information Act made the royal family’s correspondence uniquely protected from disclosure) and above all the unprincipled outrage that is, for republicans, the hereditary title, were all roundly declaimed.

1977 was the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee, a far more enthusiastic affair with bunting and union jack posters seemingly ubiquitous on the one hand, and Irish republicans branding her ‘Queen of Death’ on the other. The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queeninfamously reached number 2 in the UK singles chart, largely because of hysterical outrage directed at it. There were no histrionics this time around, though a few demonstrators shouted the Pistols' lyrics at the drunken, lairy, plastic-Union-Jack-hatted mass, which did its best to enjoy a very wet day.

“They made you a moron!”, shouted one protestor. Private security moved in.

“Glad to be a peasant!” one shouted back.

“End the reign! Democracy Now!”, chanted demonstrators. Geddit? It was raining.

“They’re not bad people, they just don’t want a Queen”, another explained carefully to his son. Then the security guard stepped in, to prevent the reconciliatory handshake offered by the protestor to the man he’d called a moron.

‘Votes not boats’, sang the crowd.

One among the throng, who wouldn’t let it lie, tried to explain to the demonstrators that The Great Rock n Roll Swindle“was taking the piss out of you lot as well”. He too was moved back, perhaps for being too esoteric.

More merry royalists sang ‘we love our history’ to the tune of Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ayat the republicans as Peter Tatchell spoke. A radical activist in an appeasing mood, Tatchell offered his own version of a tolerant, Nationally Healthy, multi-cultural, anti-racist, Hitler-vanquishing Britannia—with an elected head of state. Evoking the Nazis, it must be said, is a bizarre strategy, because the Queen and her family are closely associated with victory over them. The Windsors' role—selling an otherwise unpalatable reality in ways politicians couldn’t—came into its own in World War II. And it's not just the proverbial King's Speech. The Queen's mother, stepping in to placate the pulverized East End when Churchill had been met with anger and resentment, cemented a basic reality which is their main pull now: that they are not politicians.

60 years on, current Prime Minister David Cameron confidently proclaims “She hasn’t put a foot wrong.” He wouldn’t make the same claim for his own last 6 months. The Queen is an adaptable monarch, noted for stoicisim and yet willing to be led by public sentiment when it matters (such after the death of Diana, when she unstiffened her British upper lip in favour of the confessional TV broadcast).

She is now led, however, by the requirements of a highly sophisticated PR machine, which is determined to exploit her non-political status in a time when for many, all politics in Britain is tainted with cynicism and empty of content. In misty, myth-making mood, Cameron referred to the Queen as a guiding light “who has never shut the door on the future; instead, she has lead the way through it.”

If only this were so. The celebrity status of the Windsors is what keeps them aloft, apart from their people. There is nothing pageant and ‘tradition’ can do about this, but by the same token, there is nothing an alternative ‘tradition’ can do to shake it.

“What do we want? Democracy!”, chanted the demonstrators.

“When do we want it?”

“You’ve already got it,” shouted one informed member of the rain-soaked crowd.

An argument about representative parliamentary democracy with an unelected but ‘constitutional’ head of state began over the head of a steward. It is still going on.

The Queen, who eats out of Tupperware and has only been seen running once, sailed past. She was majestically oblivious in the drizzling rain, the day’s uncontested excuse for a good piss-up.

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Unless you've recently had a bag on your head to be specially renditioned, are related to murdered Israeli athletes, don't like lesbian kisses, cock, dildo or pussy jokes, and unless you think that cancer, torture, dwarves, Jews, Arabs, infanticide, paedophilia, prostitution, incest, rape, anti-Semitism, casual racism or misogyny are inappropriate subjects for jokes, then it really is hard to find that much to be offended by in The Dictator.

Except, maybe, the pinko-commie rant towards the end implying that the USA is as 'good' as a dictatorship. Shocking.

One critic branded the film a contemporary Black and White Minstrel Show. This is not true, because the songs are better. But while the star of the show, General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen), is by no means an 'every-Arab' type, much of the humor is lazy. In that way, it is a little like the Minstrel Show: a bit lightweight. The Dictatorfeels scrappy, thrown together, meandering sometimes like an overextended sketch and sometimes like cheap Saturday night Italian TV—despite lavish sets, high production values, and Ben Kingsley. It's asinine, crass, pointlessly shocking and bloody cruel; and deliciously funny because of it, for most of the way through. If you 'take a chill pill' (a phrase the General, in a TV interview, claimed to have coined) you will enjoy.

Interviewed on Australian TV, General Aladeen claimed to be working on a 2 trillion dollar project to make the coastline of his country, Wadiya, resemble his face. All that remained to do was find 'an ear-shaped piece of Sudan to invade', to complete the picture. A great line, but unfortunately not in the movie.

Here's another one: "I am going to meet Kim Jong Un, After Kim Jong Il became Kim Jong Dead…", also not in the film. And I suspect the spilling of the recently deceased Korean leader's "ashes" on Ryan Seacrest will be remembered long after the movie itself. A lot of the General's best work, in fact, was in the publicity interviews rather than the movie itself.

In The Dictator itself, his characters are actors in a film populated only by more actors, and the magic is occasionally missing. Cohen told stories of 200 lawsuits brought by the real people featured in Bruno, which might be an explanation (or more spin) but his decision to take General Aladeen into his own make-believe world gives the character a stronger back-story. This is what The Dictator was made for; to spew, into the world of the living, the fully-formed obscenity that is Aladeen.

Sacha Baron Cohen's characters come into their own when they are put into contact with real people—and even chat show hosts are people—because, as Ali G taught us, the embarassing reaction and our own cringing is at least half of the humour, innit.

When it works, it's as good as situationist comedy gets. It is Andy Kaufman with actual jokes. It also stands out from Ricky Gervais and others because his targets are far more weird and innately funny than the ordinary people that British comedy tends to send up. But when it doesn't work, it not only fails to expose prejudice or political correctness, but simply takes advantage of his victims' desire to be polite to the idiot they just met.

Given the safer environment of a fictional film, the 'satire' should have gone further than Aladeen's predictable rant. Still, I will follow the General's career in the real world with interest and savour the irony that will probably get real spooks shadowing him— to protect us from his weapons-grade rudeness.