How I Won The War

How I Won The War is a curious movie. Any lasting notoriety it has most likely stems from John Lennon's presence in the cast. It was his only non-Beatles film role, and the story goes that he composed "Strawberry Fields Forever" on set in Spain, in between takes. Roger Ebert gave it a fairly vicious negative review upon its release in 1968 and apparently never felt it was worth revisiting at any time since.

Ebert's review is typically attentive and well-reasoned, and some parts I find hard to disagree with, but I think the film is worth much more than he gives it credit for.

Two immediate touchstones came to mind upon first viewing - Catch-22 and Gravity's Rainbow. Mike Nichols' 1971 film version of Catch-22 can't quite nail the nifty, daring leaps between comedy and tragedy that epitomize Joseph Heller's novel. Nichols' plays his film as slapstick which suddenly gives way to nightmarish horror in its final third, and while that structure offers its own rewards (and that final third is truly brutal), How I Won The War is far more nimble in it's melding of absurdity and carnage, and thus in a strange way watching it evokes the same feeling of displacement one gets from reading the Heller novel.

Catch-22 the novel was long-published when How I Won The War was made, but Gravity's Rainbow was pretty far in the future. I'm not one to blithely assign influence where it's not readily apparent, but it did occur to me watching How I Won The War that director Richard Lester might be Thomas Pynchon's closest corollary in the film world. The relentlessly tangential structure of the film's narrative, and the near-constant diversions into the back stories of its minor characters are devices Pynchon utilizes frequently, and nowhere more luminously than in Gravity's Rainbow. Aside from a World War II setting, the two works also share certain meta-textual preoccupations, and both can sometimes come off as a barrage of meta-narrative techniques, something with which Ebert certainly takes umbrage in his review. His main gripe is that How I Won The War is too flashy with it's storytelling devices and in his view this focus on fractured narrative makes the film's dips into pathos ring hollow. I tend to disagree, as I do think the meta-structures align for a singular meta-purpose - the framing device of the film is a bunch of English blokes reminiscing about their wartime days over a pint, and this idea of a story being told by people all too aware of their own (often inconsequential) place within the story is what lends the film it's deeper sense of tragedy. The players know their parts, and they know how it ends, and they follow through on their destinies, some with resignation, some with lunacy, some with bitterness and rage. But there's a helplessness, an inability, in the end, to change anything at all, that ultimately evokes a remarkable feeling of desolation.

Ebert makes on point that is irrefutable. How I Won The War is a resolutely British film, and I too had trouble at times even understanding what was being said, and the British cultural references and lapses into vaudeville were way over my head. Ebert's reaction to this is so violent as to almost come off as bigoted. I, for one, think that despite the insularity of the film's cultural landscape, the meaning of these references and vaudevillian asides is quite clear - it's all about what they mean to the characters, and in that regard they serve to reinforce the theme of stories told by self-aware storytellers, who despite their awareness are powerless before the arc of the story, and end up crushed by the march of history.

From These Flames No Light

From These Flames No Light

Against the U.S. Election Spectacle

Consumption of industrially produced commodities is no necessary adjunct to or true ornament of life, in advanced capitalist societies especially, but rather the invention of a barbarous age, used to obscure wretched matters.  Neutered antagonisms – of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola or Romney vs. Obama – likewise are manufactured consumer commodities, blessed as they are by the powerful, the famous, the holy.

That few people, in the United States or elsewhere, believe that these antagonisms actually accomplish much less change anything more substantial than the window dressing of power is a banality as obvious as it is wearying.

Nonetheless the people’s consumption continues, carried out as if some ancient custom, a vain, futile holocaust the flames of which produce no light.  The practitioners of this rite are granted nothing but vexation, hindrance, and constraint for their efforts. 

Not without cause then, do Republicans and Democrats alike urge the populace to vote.  Participation in the ritual, even if only by blind habit, grants legitimacy to the system of modern bondage that both parties preside over in tandem.

Though expressing this obvious fact is deemed vulgar and troublesome, a few judicious ears have long since rejected the trivial pleasures of eloquent oratory and the jingling sound of false victories.  We recognize there is no true musical delight here, just the hollow thunder of order applauding itself.

Zero Sum

October 2012

In all am I scattered

I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself.

—From the Gospel of Eve, quoted by Epiphanius, Hæres., xxvi. 3