Wednesday 27 November 2013

The Aliens Came to Earth, Just Once


It’s not widely known, but in 2011 an alien ambassador visited Earth to meet with 20 of our world leaders.

After introductions were made, the ambassador’s first question was to ask how many of those present were psychologists. The answer came as a surprise.

“Really?” said the ambassador. “None of you? Let me check if I’ve translated the word correctly. Is psychology not the study of human behaviour, of how humans function; how to identify and understand their needs, their shortcomings, what inspires them or demoralises them, what they dream of?”

“Ah,” said the leaders. “We see the mistake here. We have indeed studied those things, but we have different names for them.”

“Forgive me,” said the ambassador. “My translator has now updated me. So then, which of you are artists, poets, sociologists, educators, writers?”

“No, no,” said the leaders. “Those aren’t the right names either. Here, let us explain.”

Each then proudly told of his or her academic qualifications while the small translating device whispered in the ambassador’s ear. The meeting continued a little while longer, then the ambassador thanked the leaders for their hospitality and returned home.

There has been no further contact from the aliens since that day.



Academic Qualifications of World Leaders in 2011:

SARKOZY (France) - Masters degree in Private Law
OBAMA (USA) - Degree in Political Science, degree in Law
MERKEL (GERMANY) - Masters degree in Physics
CAMERON (UK) - Degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics & Economics)
HARPER (Canada) - Masters degree in Economics
ZUMA (South Africa) - No formal qualifications
FELIPE CALDERON (Mexico) - Masters degree in Economics
FERNANDEZ DE KIRCHNER (Argentina) - Degree in Law
ROUSEFF (Brazil) - Degree in Law
HU JINTAO (China) - Degree in Engineering
NAOTO KAN (Japan) - Degree in Law
MANMOHAN SINGH (India) - Masters degree in Economics
SUSILO BAMBANG YUDHOYONO (Indonesia) - Military qualifications
MEDVEDEV (Russia) - Degree in law
RECEPP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (Turkey) - Degree in Business Administration
VAN ROMPUY (EU President) - Degree in Philosophy, Masters degree in Economics
BERLOSCONI (Italy) - Degree in Law
GILLARD (Australia) - Degree in Law
KING ADBULLAH (Saudi Arabia) - No formal qualifications
LEE MYUNG-BAK (S Korea) - No formal qualifications


A Disagreement with Oliver James


On October 12th 2010, Guardian regular Oliver James posted thisComment is Free web-article on the role of genes in psychology.

This was around the same time I became aware of the many criticisms online of Oliver James. He appears to be to psychology what Patrick Holford is to nutrition – a vocal and popular individual whose every utterance has scientists up in arms.

I read many of the comments underneath the article and found the arguments fascinating. I was surprised at just how many people were scathingly critical of James, not realising then as I now do that mistrust of his claims is rather widespread. In my opinion this is deservedly so and I was pleased to see that many others share my criticisms yet frustrated to read several comments supporting or going even further than James. So on October 14th 2010 I posted the following under the username Pumellhorne:

Is anyone still taking Oliver James seriously? His work is dubious at best and his research is flawed.
If anyone can show me an example of genetics which doesn't occur in an environment, or environmental factors which affect a person without genes I'll start listening to these arguments of convenience.

Later that day someone calling themselves Badmonkey posted this:

@Pumelhome
ill informed, not what has been stated and most of all boring

To which I replied:
@Badmonkey
Incorrect, aggressive and most of all laughable.

Badmonkey then perhaps decided to attempt a more reasonable post:

@Pumellhorne
It seems pretty clear that you have a lot of hate for OJ, but on a basis that he says it is all environment, that is not what he is saying....?
I am puzzled by your vitriol for someone who has not stated what you claim.
May i suggest some "love bombing".
Infact i think OJ is trying to keep it balanced between the two as you (and i for that matter want) but the way that it is balanced by the evidence is 70% - 30% in the environments favour thats all not 100% either way and you can't expect to get always nice 50-50 splits i'm afraid it is not the way the world works.

All this was, of course, interspersed with many other posts by people both for and against James’ view. I decided to spend some lunch hours responding to this person (see below) who felt in a position to comment on my feelings based on so little information.  Badmonkey did not reply. The whole thing was then made rather interesting when Oliver James himself popped up and commented on the many negative posts about him and taking the opportunity to tell us he thought he’d “nailed” Stephen Pinker in a live debate. Not what Stephen Pinker said incidentally and I’ve quoted Pinker’s comment below. I took the opportunity to question Mr. James, but much like Badmonkey, he seemed intent only on firing off a noisy salvo before retreating to safety. Here is my lengthy response to Badmonkey:

@Badmonkey
Quote:
1) It seems pretty clear that you have a lot of hate for OJ,
2)…but on a basis that he says it is all environment, that is not what he is saying....?
3) May i suggest some "love bombing".
4) I am puzzled by your vitriol for someone who has not stated what you claim.
5) In fact i think OJ is trying to keep it balanced between the two as you (and i for that matter want) but the way that it is balanced by the evidence is 70% - 30% in the environments favour thats all not 100% either way and you can't expect to get always nice 50-50 splits i'm afraid it is not the way the world works.

1) How on Earth do you interpret this: “Is anyone still taking Oliver James seriously? His work is dubious at best and his research is flawed” as “a lot of hate”? Perhaps it says something of your own belligerence that you took it that way.

2) No, on the basis that he is unscientific and that he makes claims without doing enough research. He sells books on highly emotive subjects that play on and exacerbate a particular set of stereotypically left-wing, middle-class fears and I have quite recently become aware of how often he is wrong. Yet still he somehow manages to retain people’s respect.  Also because, as Stephen Pinker put it:
He is in at the end of a declining field and he is desperately trying to prop it up. He is rather a boorish individual. He had a tantrum on air.'”

Whether Pinker is right about the declining field or not I don’t presume to say, but he’s not the first person to talk about James losing it in a live debate.

3) May I first remind you that you entered into debate with me with an aggressive post that attempted to comment, inaccurately, on the level of my knowledge. Any effort by you to sound reasonable now will inevitably be tempered by that start.

With wikipedia defining “love bombing” as: “the deliberate show of affection or friendship by an individual or a group of people toward another individual” it would seem inappropriate advice for this situation. I can only assume it’s an attempt at humour by referencing terms previously used. How drole. If you’re attempting to suggest I’ve been detrimentally affected by a loveless environment in my childhood and that I’m taking it out on James I hope you can see how ironic that would be. Perhaps you might also want to consider how vicious and out of place it is to make allegations about my parents, especially as your comments are based only on the two very short comments I made and that you and I are complete strangers.

4) Can something be vitriolic and boring? And I managed it in just 3 sentences? Amazing!

What is it that you think I’m claiming? Perhaps I was too minimal. My ‘claim’ would be that the variables psychologists are trying to remove for empirical study of their theories (genes from one side of the argument, environment from the other) cannot be removed and that serious confounding variables will always remain. They are, by necessity, in vivo studies and due to the factors I’ve mentioned I don’t believe they can properly be called empirical scientific experiments.

5) Who said it was supposed to be a 50-50 split? Where are you conjuring that figure from? The only people I’m hearing saying it’s 100-0 splits are some of the people posting on this thread and my comment was as much aimed at them as at fans of James. Your continuous extruding of my short sentences into more sinister, bold and inaccurate claims shows a deep misunderstanding and failure to engage with what’s been presented to you in small chunks.

Thanks for telling me "how the world works" though. Very kind of you. And your qualification for this is what exactly? That you live in it? How unbelievably arrogant and boorish of you.

Although I fail to see how you’ve reached the erroneous conclusions you’ve based your rebuttal on, I suppose my original comment could have been a little misleading due to the sparsity of detail I presented about my opinions, level of education, upbringing (all of which you seem to have a desire to comment on) so I could forgive your mistakes, if not your unpleasant attitude. Instead I’ll offer you some assistance in understanding what I’m saying.

Throwing stats out into the argument like 70% of this and 30% of that is a nonsense. First let’s consider what you’re trying to measure. How do you define 70% of a person’s development? As 70% of their age? Of their brain cells? Of the number of factors which affected them in childhood? Can you not see how ludicrous that is? How can someone possibly make a claim that ‘x = y% of z’ when z is as undefined, unique and stubbornly unfathomable as personality? Do you think Pinker or James fully understand how the mind is formed? What cognition amounts to? What consciousness is? What goes into the making up of you or me in childhood? They don’t. No one does.


Discrete numbers are lovely though, aren’t they? They fit into nice neat rows and you can use them to justify any argument you want with just a bit of framing and being economic with your input and output. Unfortunately real people aren’t divided into percentages of development and can’t be split like that.

Up until Judith Dunn kicked off the research into sibling psychology in the 1970s the established view was that all children from the same family were pretty much psychologically identical due to shared socio-economic conditions. Prof Dunn’s own children didn’t fit this view and she wondered why. When she found no prior research on the differences of siblings she started her own. 40 years later there are well-respected people making a living out of attempts to slice up how much siblings respond to an environment, sometimes as if they were the same person in separate situations. I’m saying this is wrong-thinking by James, Pinker and those people on here arguing about nature vs. nurture as if it could be ‘proved’ either way.

Pinker is wrong because, despite using a scientific approach, he isn’t allowing for the fact that any studies will inevitably still occur in a family environment and that the number of confounding variables in the study will skew any results no matter how much twins look and dress alike or whether they both married a travel agent named Janet. James is wrong because no matter how hard he looks at the family environment, which he has made a living from for a long time now and has a huge vested interest in, there will always be genetic factors that can’t be isolated. If he was proved wrong he’d be utterly discredited.

I would say, if pushed, that the whole argument is flawed and that money is being made on both sides because it’s such an emotive and marketable issue and that it’s best to treat the whole thing with suspicion. Time would be better spent on research into how genes and environment interact and what factors are present in situations of interest to society. For an example of how environment and physiology (although not necessarily genes in this case) interact, you might want to look at this TED video of Jim Fallon.

I’m passionate about psychology and I’m frequently reminded of the barriers that remain between a fundamental issue of psychology (i.e. that it is a factor in everything we do) and those it could help (i.e. everybody). Too many people are held up as experts but are no more than quacks. I don’t hate quacks, I simply have no respect for them and I dislike the way they subvert progress to line their own pockets.

I think I’ve been more civil with you than you have a right to expect, Badmonkey, because it’s not my intention to cause rifts for my own pleasure. I hope to see an end one day to quackery and I hope this clears up some of your misconceptions.

[end]


Here is Oliver James’ post in the comments:

OWJames
·         Those who mention The Blank Slate and my Radio 3 argument with Steven Pinker should listen to it again on www.selfishcapitalist.com.
I believe that on that occasion I nailed him as unable to produce any evidence from twin or adoption studies that criminal violence has a genetic component. Yet in his book, he stated that it does.
Nailing him did take quite a bit of work because he refused to address my question.
For those who maintain that I am saying everything is nurture, I would point out that I accepted that the Thaper study found genes played a role in 16% of cases (though that needs to be replicated).
Those saying I ignore epigenetics are ignoring the point I make about the depression variant in my article - the purest epigenetic finding so far in this field, and looking increasingly as if it does not hold up.

Oliver James


My question to him was this:

But isn't this a case of oversimplification for the sake of taking a stance?
What is inescapable is that 100% of those with ADHD in Thapar's study possess genes and are also constantly immersed in environmental factors. It's a false dichotomy.
I'm not being facetious, I genuinely fail to see how you, Stephen Pinker or anyone else can realistically claim to be isolating your chosen variables sufficiently to say how much they influence development.

Unsurprisingly, there was no reply from him. Another contributor to the thread, Daen, posted the following, which very nicely (very technically) addresses some of the issues with Oliver James’ alleged expertise:

            OWJames: I presume that the depression paper you refer to is Risch et al, "Interaction between the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), stressful life events, and risk of depression: a meta-analysis" (JAMA. 2009 Jun 17;301(23):2462-71). That paper simply considers allelic variation of the serotonin transporter gene (the SS, SL, or LL genotypes), and not epigenetic modification at all! It demonstrates considerable confusion on your behalf that you believe that these things are equivalent.
A search of PubMed for "epigenetic depression" gives the recently-published paper from Olivier et al "The age-dependent effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in humans and rodents: A review" (Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 2010 Sep 25), which considers the huge gap in therapeutic indices between adults and children for the SSRI drug fluoxetine.
From the same search: yet another relevant and recent paper on epigenetic effects in stress-induced psychiatric disorders comes from Uddin et al, "Epigenetic and inflammatory marker profiles associated with depression in a community-based epidemiologic sample" (Psychol Med. 2010 Sep 14:1-11).
And another from Xu and Andreassi, "Reversible histone methylation regulates brain gene expression and behavior" (Horm Behav. 2010 Sep 15).
And so on, and so on.
Please, Dr James: you are evidently deeply unclear about some important aspects of genetics and should absolutely steer clear of commenting so definitively upon such an important and potentially controversial area, especially with a political agenda, until you have gained sufficient knowledge of the subject to comment precisely and accurately upon it.
And one more which does a very good job of demolishing your argument, from Plazas-Mayorca and Vrana, "Proteomic Investigation of Epigenetics in Neuropsychiatric Disorders: A Missing Link between Genetics and Behavior?" (J Proteome Res. 2010 Sep 9). I felt this was relevant enough to include the abstract.
Neuropsychiatric disorders affect a large segment of the human population and result in large costs to society. The majority of such disorders have unknown underlying causes. Recent evidence suggests an important role for epigenetic regulation in the emergence of neuropsychiatric disease. Epigenetics may provide a link between genetic and environmental factors and behavior. Epigenetic signaling involves changes on the structure of chromatin; such changes are often triggered and maintained by the post-translational modification of chromatin proteins and/or DNA. Recent proteomic technologies have enabled the study of epigenetic mechanisms in a high-throughput manner. This review will provide an overview of the major epigenetic pathways and modern techniques for their study, before focusing on experimental evidence supporting a strong role for epigenetics in selected psychiatric disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and drug addiction. These results highlight a great need for the inclusion of the proteomic characterization of epigenetic mechanisms in the study of gene/disease associations in psychiatric disorders.

The next day I spotted this article by Bob O’Hara (in the Grrl Scientist blog) in which O’Hara cuts James’ argument to pieces and where James himself wades in again on the comments thread, but once again declines to enter into debate after (perhaps a bit aggressively) saying his piece.

The thread of comments under it is fascinating too. If you’re interested in how and why inexpert people appear in the press as scientific experts  I urge you to read the thread and follow the links.
Oliver James has repeatedly been criticised for constructing and demolishing straw men and for failing to research his topics properly. Yet still he sells books, writes popular articles for national newspapers and is invited to take part in important and influential debates.
I’m not going to question how he’s managing to do this, that issue is dealt with very well elsewhere. Instead I’ll use this space to make a point.
It’s time we started taking responsibility for the experts that fill our book shelves and our airwaves. We choose them by buying the newspapers they work for, by buying the books they write on subjects of which we care deeply about but know little, by watching the TV shows offering them opportunities to tell us how they think things are, and also by failing to register our dissatisfaction with what they tell us. The internet has given us the power and the responsibility to check the facts before signing up for them. We should call out any person who’s argument isn’t backed up by the research in that field, write to the people employing them or comment on their websites to make our dissatisfaction known,  and always, always question what they tell us. Don’t passively accept everything, even from a trusted channel or paper. And perhaps above all question what the day-job is of the person being paid to tell you these ‘facts’. 

Earning the Respect of Our Children


We often hear it said that young people have no respect anymore. Why should they? What have we, the adults, done to earn it? Half the adults in this 2011 survey said we should beat children with sticks if they don’t do what we tell them or should they dare emulate us before the time we say they are allowed to. The truth is we should be asking how our children see us.

The majority of the looters in the craze of ‘shopping with violence’ that swept the UK in 2011 weren’t young people, they were adults with previous convictions for stealing. Rarely does a month go by without news of corruption in the adult world, including police, media and government. Tax evasion and benefit fraud are commonplace. Schools are regularly sued by parents for compensation, often over something that would’ve been shrugged off a generation ago. Everyone has their hand in the sweetie jar. Meanwhile children are denied access to the natural world that’s being destroyed by adult greed and incompetence and are kept indoors by parents paralysed by fear, exposed to a sensational media obsessively telling everyone what a mess the world run by adults is.

My generation will be remembered as the one that always looked to others for excuses rather than to themselves. We venerate our grandparents as heroes of a just war despite the all too human failings of that era. We vilify our children as barbarians at the walls of our magnificent, indignant moral empire. We blame our parents for locking up all the middle-class money in their property investments, leaving us to earn our own fortunes in a madly spiralling economy. We plough through all that has gone before to find comfort in meaning and entertainment already familiar to us, not daring to try anything new in case it fails to live up to standards skewed by nostalgia. Films are remade again and again yet usually fail to achieve the status of the originals, unable to evoke the same fond, inaccurate memories. We re-hash the same fashions we or our parents grew up with, at best being inspired by the finest motifs of the period and at worst blindly assimilating those elements of a style that makes it to the high street.

As a society we relentlessly pursue commerce for its own sake with no thought of the long-term consequences, concerned only with our own personal conveniences. We fill our children’s lives with substitutes for love, nurture and attention while we remain absent from their sides spending our days with our noses hard against the grindstone so we can earn more money to throw at the problems our work-centric lives create. And we wonder how anyone dare not show us respect for all the hard work we do. We wonder how young people, genetically programmed to challenge establishments, have the gall to disobey us. We forget the indolence we grew up with ourselves and the rebellious heroes who shaped and inspired us. Marlon Brando in The Wild One, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust days, Marc Bolan, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Morrisey… Rebels who challenged everything society stood for and who caused outrage whenever they raised their sneering, disrespectful heads. It’s always been this way.

The one thing my generation has done that I am most proud of is to begin to recognise and address the problems caused by the ugliness and extremities of previous generations’ attitudes. One such issue was the use of violence against children to gain their obedience. Now it seems many of us learnt nothing and will happily teach our children that brutality is a valid argument and that power justifies cruelty. We’ve already convinced our children they have no future on a poisoned planet with corrupt institutions and dwindling resources, and soon perhaps we will show them that we are willing to sacrifice anything if we think it might make our meaningless and miserable lives pass a little easier.

Or perhaps we can inspire generations to come while honouring the memory of our ancestors by taking the opportunity to change how we live, re-imagine the way we obtain and distribute energy, stop the culture of entitlement that has turned luxuries into perceived necessities, and take responsibility for our own lives and the world we live in by each and every one of us striving to become an adult. We shall see.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

"No, I Am Your Father! That's what I should've said!"

Click on image for full size
Thank you to Ian Smith for the conversation that inspired this silly idea and for suggesting a meme of famous quotes going wrong.

Here's the text in full:


“Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father. Look… When Obi Wan chopped off my legs… You see, this… all this… the heavy breathing and the robot limbs… I suppose I’m more machine than man now. When we were at the first Death Star… Oops! Shouldn’t have said that! I mean THE Death Star… Anyway, when I was trying to shoot down your fighter and kill you I swear I had NO IDEA who you were. I thought: “well the force is definitely strong with this one!”, but how was I supposed to know who you were? No one told me about you! Obi Wan never said a thing. I mean, we hadn’t talked in twenty years, but he knew where I was. Maybe he was worried about that whole “circle is now complete” thing and the striking down… Do you know what happened to the body, by the way? He was standing right there and then after I killed him he just disappeared! Nothing! You were watching, right? Where did the body go? Anyway, I had absolutely no idea who you were until my master told me. He was going to have you killed! But I talked him out of it, because, I know it’s hard to believe right now, but I do care about you. It’s not easy for me to show it. I have a lot going on right now. I have… anger issues. But I meditate now and I’m getting better. Well, I did Force Choke Ozzel to death from my meditation chamber earlier, so I still have some way to go, but I accept that and I am making progress. I’m trying, and that’s the main thing. And the Dark Side, it’s just SO powerful! And the whole anger thing with the Dark Side is quite a combination, but sometimes things get a bit out of hand. We don’t actually do that much with the Dark Side though to be honest, except lightning and the chokes. Lots of chokes actually. I’ll teach you that one, *heh heh*. What I’m trying to say here is, this isn’t how I wanted it to be. I never meant for all this to… My master promised me he’d teach me how to save the ones I loved. As long as I, you know… He wanted me to betray my friends and my pregnant wife, and there were these younglings... But by then all Jedi were declared enemies of the Republic so it wasn’t that bad. And it was for the best because I was trying to protect everyone! You can see that, right? That was just before we dismantled the Republic and I helped the Emperor take control of the galaxy. I know this is hard to understand, you weren’t there, but the biggest enemy of the Republic then WAS the Republic. Sounds insane, I know, but I swear that’s how it was and we had to DO something. But I didn’t do any of it for me! Can you understand what I mean? I took a new master and tried to kill my best friend, but it was the only option I had. Everything in the galaxy was a mess and I don’t think I’d been thinking completely straight since the thing with the Sand People and your grandma. That was absolutely my own decision, though. And they asked for it! Have you ever been to Tatooine? It’s a hole. I was born there and I met your mother there. Wait, do you even know about your mother? Did Obi Wan tell you anything about her? The whole THING was about her! She was so beautiful. I thought she was an angel when I first saw her. Ha! I was just a kid and she was a teenager. She’d come to my town with Obi Wan because they had trouble with their ship. Actually there was this whole thing about taxes and people trying to secede from the Republic. Eventually we annihilated their army, which is kind of ironic when you think about what we did as soon as the war was over. But anyway, there was this trade embargo on her planet… Look, do you want to go and get a coffee or something? This isn’t the best place to have this conversation and I can tell I’m making a complete mess of it. Your arm must be killing you! We should get that looked at. I’m sorry I chopped your hand off, and trying to freeze you just now and everything… It’s totally safe by the way! I know because we tested it on your friend! Ok, that came out wrong. Look, let me start again from the top…”

Thursday 14 November 2013

The Map Is Not The Territory - confusion over '-isms'.


Let’s talk for a moment about ‘-isms’.

Recently Joss Whedon claimed that an ‘ist’ can only be learned, can’t be present at birth, and is therefore “not natural”. (I’m focussing here on that dismissal of ‘-ist’ and not the rest of what he said. The link above does that if you want to engage with that issue. If you’re here about the use of the suffix, please read on.)

I’ve seen people leave comments in discussions claiming they personally aren’t an ‘-ist’ of any kind and dismissing all ‘-isms’ as indoctrinated nonsense.

First, a definition of ‘-ism’ by way of etymology:
Ultimately from either Ancient Greek -ισμός (-ismos), a suffix that forms abstract nouns of action, state, condition, doctrine; from stem of verbs in -ίζειν (-izein) (whence English -ize), or from the related suffix Ancient Greek -ισμα (-isma), which more specifically expressed a finished act or thing done.

So an ‘-ism’ relates to something you do, are, believe, have, or go along with.

Try dismissing magnetism as indoctrinated nonsense sometime and let me know how you get on.


Now a definition of ‘-ist’ from the OED:Forming personal nouns and some related adjectives.
1 denoting an adherent of a system of beliefs, principles, etc. expressed by nouns ending in -ism:
hedonistCalvinist See -ism (sense 2).
- denoting a person who subscribes to a prejudice or practises discrimination: sexist
2 denoting a member of a profession or business activity: dentist, dramatist, florist
- denoting a person who uses a thing: flautist, motorist
- denoting a person who does something expressed by a verb ending in -ize: plagiarist

So an ‘-ist’ is someone who does something, is something, believes something or goes along with something.
The exclusion there is whether something you have, a property of who or what you are, can make you an ‘-ist’.


Is racism learnt or natural? Well this is just the defunct old ‘nature vs. nurture’ question and a false dichotomy. Prejudice is hardwired into our psychology,(as described by Tajfel’s work on Social Identity Theory ), but many of the specifics of in-group/out-group criteria are cultural and all of them are subject to change through familiarity. It wasn’t possible to be racist at a time when no one had the ability to travel far enough to meet people of different races, so that suggests perhaps it’s a modern phenomenon. In fact, all that means is we invented a word for the naturally occurring prejudice that emerged when we did meet other races and saw them as out-group. The source of the prejudice is the same. The natural tendency is nurtured by experience. As ever.

Henri Tajfel

Now, don’t go deriving an ought from an is. Observing prejudice occurring due to psychological traits is not an approval of it. That’s the ‘appeal to nature’ fallacy. Just because something is natural doesn’t make it good, bad or even neutral. It simply is. I could make the same argument replacing the word ‘racism’ with the word ‘altruism’. An altruist is just as likely to be acting on motives lurking in their evolved cognitive functions as a racist.

What I’m getting at here is the wholesale dismissal of everything with an ‘-ist’ or ‘-ism’ suffix and justifying the rejection of a complex label, comes from ignorance and misunderstanding. It’s possible that ignorance stretches as far as the dictionaries we use to define our labels.

As Korzybski said: ‘the map is not the territory’.

Alfred Korzybski

If you dismiss a label based on your own personal interpretation, or the general consensus of what it means, shutting your eyes to the clues to a wider meaning, you conflate that label with what it represents.

If you confuse the definition of a label for the naturally occurring phenomena that we as a scientific species are constantly learning about and redefining, you close doors to your understanding.

If you are a wordsmith with a huge global following you might yet lack the qualifications to discuss the matter of whether a specific trait found in humanity, one that continues to affect so many lives, is “natural” or otherwise.

Friday 1 November 2013

Man of Steel review with spoilers


Man of Steel has split people into two camps – love it or hate it. Okay, there are also some who just weren’t impressed, but in today’s social media sniping culture, those who don’t think much of something will often go to great lengths to tell you why, so I’m including them in the ‘hate it’ camp.




Browsing Rotten Tomatoes and a few other websites, there are several themes that emerge:

In the negative camp – lack of humour, not enough mention of the name ‘Superman’, too much/re-visiting backstory, too dark, too edgy, too emotionally strained, too much destruction in the final act.

In the positive camp – realism and edginess, a good re-telling of the backstory, a Superman for the modern day, realistic levels of destruction given the power of those who were fighting.

As you can see, they’re all seeing the same things in the film and disagreeing on whether they’re right for a Superman story. It comes down to what people expect. It comes down to what Superman means to you.

In his review in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw mourns the absence of light-hearted cliché – no bullets pinging off a primary-coloured chest in bright sunlight, no cars lifted in one hand and jewel thieves shaken out at the feet of incredulous policemen. He’s saying Man of Steel ought to be more like the 1978 Christopher Reeves Superman The Movie, directed by Richard Donner. Bryan Singer’s 2006 film Superman Returns used that approach and Warner Bros. decided to cancel the sequel, despite mostly good reviews and making $400m worldwide. In 2008 Warner’s President of Production Jeff Robinov said: "Superman Returns didn't quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to. It didn't position the character the way he needed to be positioned.”

In September 2012, WhatCulture.com said: “Everything about Superman Returns felt somewhat out of place in the modern world. The only way forward is for the franchise to completely hit the reset button. That doesn’t mean that Zack Snyder has to reinvent Superman, but he must find a way to stay faithful to the character without becoming a slave to its traditional depictions.”
Read the whole article "Man of Steel: 10 Mistakes From Superman Returns Reboot Must Avoid" here.

People are notoriously bad at predicting what they want. It’s my opinion that is what’s happening here. Many felt they wanted Man of Steel to be a classic-yet-modern Superman film with roots in the camp levity of the Seventies. If that’s the film you want you have Superman Returns. Peter Bradshaw gave it a positive review in The Guardian at the time, his only real criticism that Singer should have used the opportunity to retell the story from the beginning. Seven years later some have criticised Zack Snyder for slogging back through an origin in Man of Steel that most of us have known our whole lives. But in fact Man of Steel doesn’t just retell the same familiar origin story. If that’s what you saw you weren’t paying attention.

As Man of Steel opens, Krypton is a culturally stagnant world. The genetically pre-determined, mass-produced population are without hope and doomed to destruction by the methods they use to generate power for their technologically sustained lives. Even if the planet hadn’t blown up they had no future. This is a vital point for Kal-El’s decision in the film’s climax. As a baby, Kal-El isn’t just saved by loving parents this time. His mother and father are dutiful citizens and he is the last remaining hope of their species, raised from the ashes of a dead world to embody salvation for both the Kryptonians and humanity. These are modern themes. There are parallels with our own self-destructive reliance on technology and unsustainable energy sources and the implication that we will one day need saving from ourselves. And that’s the real point. Bright sunlight, primary colours Superman doesn’t fit in with our world, any more than the red overpants do.

The theme of the ‘Space Jesus’ is handled nicely in Man of Steel. It was always bubbling under the surface, alluded to subtly here and there over the many years, but Snyder throws a couple of scenes at the audience to show us he knows about the concept and isn’t hiding from it. In one scene Clark Kent visits a church to seek guidance, yet seems confident in the decision he has already made to sacrifice himself and save humanity. The priest is the one in awe when he realises who he’s talking to. Then, in case this is too subtle, there’s a shot of Clark with a stained glass window behind him and sunlight streaming in through an image of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsamane.

 And wearing a red cape

Later, in orbit above the Earth, Kal-El and Jor-El gaze down at the planet and discuss the salvation of the human and Kryptonian races. The ghostly father reveals to his son what his mission is and waves him off as he flies down to the surface. In case we didn’t spot the reference, Superman then flies backwards for a moment in a cruciform pose framed by the planet he was sent by his father to save. 

Did I mention he's 33 at this point in the film?

A whole other blog could be written on the Superman-as-Jesus thing (and has been. Google it and ye shall find) and I haven't even mentioned the somewhat subtler scene where he's floating with arms outstretched apparently drowned, then rises again. Let me simply say Snyder knows what he's doing and is playing with it for our entertainment rather than sneaking it in by only indirectly referencing it, as I believe Singer did in Superman Returns. It's spelt out to us because it's there in the mythology whether we like it or not, whether we notice it or not. Snyder gives us the credit to put it in plain sight and let us deal with it.

Superman Returns had some good reviews in 2006, but remember, Singer wasn’t re-booting the franchise, he was making a sequel. Brandon Routh did a very good impression of Christopher Reeves and the film shared a lot with the Donner films, right down to the John Williams score. It was as much an homage as an attempt to breathe new life into it. 

Routh's hair is a mirror image of Reeves'. What's that all about?

As I already mentioned though, as far as Warner are concerned it didn’t work. Man of Steel is the reboot to bring Superman into an age where Batman has been sitting comfortably for a long time. The sequel to Man of Steel will surely be the clincher, with the ‘World’s Finest’ pairing firmly establishing themselves either as partners or at least co-habitants in the DC movie universe. In the post-Avengers movie world, DC are surely looking to make all their Justice League heroes viable products capable of sharing a screen. The Superman of Man of Steel has to be as believable to today’s audience as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight. No overpants.

Here The Daily Mirror discusses Man of Steel in the wider context of a JLA movie.

Some of the people who dislike Man of Steel are comic fans, some aren’t. Some are only familiar with the Donner films, some know the character’s long history in detail. It’s important to remember that DC have reinvented Superman many times over the last 75 years so whatever your take on him is, it probably comes from a single period, like your favourite incarnation of The Doctor. Or possibly it’s created from an amalgamation of many stories, in which case that version is your own subjective invention. John Byrne rewrote the official Superman story from top to bottom in the 1980s and as far as I know he began the concept that maybe people would be uncomfortable around a god-alien. Superman has been rebooted several times by DC in the last ten years – Infinite Crisis, New 52, etc. – and come a very long way since Action Comics #1. The first hurdle any Superman story has to get over is whether the audience is going to hold tight to their preconceptions or be open to a new version. Several attempts have failed miserably.

If you thought there was only one Superman, think again. Here are a few of the alternate versions over the years.

Here's a picture. Notice in one he's actually Santa Claus.


The second hurdle is the same as for any story – is it any good? There’ll never be a story of any kind that is universally loved. No film will ever please everyone. Unless the Muppets are in it.

Bradshaw criticises the Man of Steel for showing Clark Kent walking into a job on the Daily Planet without previous experience in journalism, but neglects the fact Kent is 33, super-intelligent, has travelled the world for years and that the film makes the point again and again there is far more to him than meets the eye. This nitpick is a good summation of the issues with fantasy criticism in general - that a journalist won’t believe a man can get hired by a newspaper without solid evidence for it in the story, but will happily accept the man can fly due to lower Earth gravity, then complain the film is too long. Any of us can pick a detail we dislike and hold it against the film, but if the film is good, on closer inspection that detail may turn out to be something we’ve misunderstood. Perhaps it’s something the internal logic holds up but unworthy of screen time. I know Clark Kent is going to work for the Daily Planet, I don’t care if he went to journalism school and I don’t want to watch a film about it. I know Superman can fly, I choose to accept there’s no good explanation for it and don’t need five minutes of made-up Hollywood science to make the problem disappear. I see no reason to keep going on about the glasses disguise, but Man of Steel deals with it well enough. Lois Lane already knows Clark’s secret before there is a Superman. She’s in on it from the beginning. At this point in the story there are no photos of Superman to compare to Clark in hushed discussions at the Planet’s water cooler. Maybe later it’s going to come up, but you either accept that as part of the Superman story or you don’t like Superman. It’s that simple. I don’t watch Something Special on Cbeebies while repeatedly pointing out to my kids that Mr Tumble and Justin look the same and are never onscreen at the same time. And if you want to go down that path go the whole way and dismiss every mask-wearing hero there is. As hilariously pointed out in 2010’s dark comedy Super, Rainn Wilson is easily recognised in or out of his costume throughout the film.



Many films don’t bear up under the slightest scrutiny and with huge special effects budgets and hack writers plot holes are routinely plugged by explosions and random peril. Some films do stand up to a bit of digging and Man of Steel, in my opinion, can take a lot. The plot had consistent logic, nothing glared out as wrong to me. It was a story well told and well acted. The characters were believable, the peril was pertinent.

I’ve seen criticisms of Michael Shannon’s portrayal of General Zod describe him as a one-dimensional villain in a constant fury. I disagree. Zod is a man bred to protect his planet and his species facing what he believes are their biggest threats. Kal-El is a physical and ideological threat, he holds the key to the rebirth of Krypton yet refuses to hand it over. Zod’s plan is anathema to everything Superman has come to value and his motives are a product of the stagnant Kryptonian gene-pool that is more alien to naturally born Kal-El than Earth is. Zod has no choice because Krypton failed to place a value on free will. Jor-El and Zod represent Krypton, both attempting to revolutionise their people’s ways and both failing. They have opposite views and each is outraged by the other’s apparently reckless and destructive methods. Shannon plays his part with subtlety yet still seems larger than life. Russell Crowe plays his part with exactly the right amount of detached and cool intelligence you’d expect in a man who shot his baby son into space. Jor-El is the premier scientist, embodying the alien technology, capable of envisioning hope for a distant future through his determination to hold on to a specific set of values. Values that, not by coincidence, are reflected by ‘the American way’. In the classic mythological mode, all the father’s and uncles die and get out of the way so the boy can become a man. Zod and Jor-El represent the warring ideas and dilemmas Kal-El faces, but in the end he makes his own choice when he accepts what he is.

Talking of the stellar cast, I don’t have the space here to do justice to the brilliant casting. Russell Crowe as Jor-El, Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Diane Lane and Kevin Costner as Martha and Jonathan Kent. Supporting roles requiring big punch. These are characters that shape the lives of the people around them, that set out the paths of the two most important characters in the Superman story – Kal-El and Lois Lane. Amy Adams is a brave but faultless choice. She’s so often cast as a perky, bright-eyed and lovable child-woman and now she shows us she can carry the weight of an adult role. Lane is a driving force in the story and Adams’ onscreen energy fits perfectly.

The apocalyptic levels of destruction in the latter parts of the film are said by some to be too extreme, but surely those are the people who prefer their Superman shaking thieves from cars and jumping into phoneboxes to change clothes. In normal day to day life around humans he must always control himself because he lives in a “world of cardboard”.



In Man of Steel he fights other superbeings and many buildings suffer. Are they filled with people? I doubt it. A gravity weapon has been smashing up the city over an increasingly widening radius for some time. Perhaps only the staff of the Daily Planet are professionally invested enough to stand at their windows and watch the world end. Undoubtedly people did die in the carnage, but the whole human race was facing extinction. Zod chose the battlefield, Superman had to defeat him no matter what. Special effects-wise, there’s never been a better time to show us what happens when the super-strong let loose. I’ve seen bullets bounce off chests a million times. I’ve seen enough kittens rescued from trees now. Smart comments to hapless goons and sartorial praise from pimps had it’s day and we saw what that eventually led to in Superman III & IV. I’ve never seen Superman level a city before, although I knew he was capable of it. It seemed right for a story tackling issues of genocide and the survival of whole species. By the end of the film only those military commanders who had direct contact with Superman in the field trust him, while the government and the top brass and no doubt the population of the world still had many worries. He’s a figure of mystery and suspicion, an excellent storytelling position and a good set up for a sequel involving Batman.

I grew up reading Silver Age Superman, the ‘daylight hero’, and watching some of the Donner/Reeves films. Perhaps people forget that Superman suffers from narrative breakdowns an awful lot; the villains so often becoming mischievous pranksters, ridiculously contrived methods to find suitable foils for an unstoppable man inevitably resorting to the use of ever more Kryptonite. The creep towards pantomime happens swiftly and without warning when the protagonist wears a cape or mask, until the plot is no more than a string of implausible scenes held together by a paper-thin character, resulting in dreadful comedies like Superman III or whatever the hell Superman IV was. In the 1970s Superman comic covers frequently promised incredible drama, the story itself being a huge let-down only vaguely similar to the picture on the front. Superman has for a long time been something of a joke, and even the name sounds silly and dated. Snyder side-stepped these problems and in my opinion he did it well. Of the 75 years Superman has been around I was a fan for ten of them and on the outskirts looking in for another 25. The character’s biggest problem has always been the inability to transcend his 1930s pulp roots. At last he’s done it. I feel like they’ve finally got him right. This is a Superman that could really exist, the Superman I’ve been waiting for.

EDIT: Links, pictures and video embedded. Some text amended. New links and pictures added. Font change. 04.11.13

Tuesday 1 October 2013

...And it was all just a dream. Or Purgatory.


Today, when a story reveals it was all in the character’s head or they were dead all along, it could be accused of being unoriginal and lazy. However, a few writers still manage to do it well, but these are the exceptions. In my opinion the trope is becoming very tired, but some writers seem to disagree. If the writer is still at school and already used ‘then a helicopter came and saved them’ too often then it’s excusable. But don’t forget the obligatory ‘and my mum was calling me to come down and eat breakfast’ ending. If the writer isn’t a child they might want to consider how often the trope has been used before, and maybe not go with the first idea they have.

To paraphrase Dr Seuss, some are good, some are bad, some are very, very sad.



Obviously this is all spoilers so don’t read it.



This post comes after several Facebook discussions about series finales, cop outs, poorly thought-out narratives and bad finales. Curious to know how overused this trope has become, I did some research. The following list includes early uses (e.g. The Wizard of Oz), clever uses that inform the audience about a deeper narrative (e.g. The Matrix), surprise endings that pull the film together (e.g. Fight Club), deliberately vague endings you may love or hate (e.g. Inception), possible interpretations (e.g. Pan’s Labyrinth), and cop out endings that stick two fingers up at the audience and laugh at them for investing time in a story that never actually happened (e.g. …well, you decide which ones fit that description).

To limit the spoil and cut down the word count I offer no details here and I mostly avoid saying which is dream and which is the afterlife. You may disagree with some and I’m sure you will have some to add to the list. Feel free to do so in the comments.

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen or read all of the below titles so in some cases I’m relying on other people’s interpretations.

I make it 65 films, 13 TV series and 19 books. Some of these are wide open to interpretation, but you can be sure there are many more I’ve missed.



Below this point it’s nothing but spoilers.



You have been warned.



Films:

1. The Wizard of Oz

2. Return to Oz

3. American Psycho

4. Secret Window

5. The Number 23

6. Boxing Helena

7. Swimming Pool

8. Source Code

9. Total Recall (sort of)

10. Pan’s Labyrinth (maybe)

11. The Descent (kind of)

12. Atonement

13. Vanilla Sky

14. Time Bandits (implied throughout, then inverted)

15. Brazil (ending only)

16. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (blurring the boundaries)

17. Give My Regards to Broadstreet

18. Phantasm (maybe)

19. MirrorMask

20. Mulholland Drive

21. The Matrix

22. Click (maybe)

23. Inception (maybe)

24. The Slayer

25. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

26. Shutter Island

27. Waking Life

28. Dead Man’s Shoes

29. The I Inside

30. Dead End

31. Reeker

32. Jacob’s Ladder

33. Pale Rider (unfinished business rather than purgatory)

34. Dead End

35. Menace II Society

36. The Life Before Her Eyes

37. Hellraiser Inferno

38. Hellraiser Hellseeker

39. Point Blank

40. An Occurrence at Owl Creek

41. Fight Club

42. Sixth Sense

43. The Others

44. A Beautiful Mind

45. Being There (implied – “Life is a state of mind”.)

46. Sucker Punch

47. Contact (or is it?)

48. Dreamscape (deliberately confused by the train conductor)

49. The Science of Sleep

50. Stay

51. The Thirteenth Floor

52. Living In Oblivion (repeatedly)

53. The Forbidden Kingdom (then averted by vagueness)

54. The Shining (read Roger Ebert’s discussion)

55. Invaders From Mars

56. The Woman in the Window

57. The Wizard of Gore

58. The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (or was it?)

59. I Married An Angel

60. Nightmare City/City of the Walking Dead

61. Shadow

62. Repo Men (partial)

63. Robot Monster

64. The Pirate Movie

65. The Smurfs 2 (I know, right!?)



TV:

1. Dallas (honourable mention)

2. Life on Mars

3. The Prisoner (maybe, but who knows?)

4. St Elsewhere

5. Newhart

6. The Brittas Empire

7. Season 23 of Doctor Who

8. Battlestar Galactica (it’s complicated)

9. Lost

10. Quantum Leap

11. Ashes to Ashes

12. Promoted to Glory

13. Running Late (one-off Peter Bowles TV drama)



Books:

1. Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle

2. Alice in Wonderland

3. Through the Looking Glass

4. Mars Is Heaven

5. The Dark Tower (might as well be)

6. Sophie’s World (in a way)

7. The Futurological Congress

8. The Queen and I

9. The Roads We Take

10. Son of Rosemary

11. The Chimes

12. The Man Who Was Thursday

13. Just A Dream (obviously)

14. The Great Divorce

15. The Pilgrim’s Progress

16. The Hated

17. 1990 Degrees F

18. An Elegy for the Still Living (possibly)

19. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court



Friday 27 September 2013

Superman vs. Batman


It won’t, I can promise you, be based on Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight Returns’.

Forget the rumours and ignore the direct quote from the comic that was used to announce the film.

“I want you to remember Clark, in all the years to come. In all your private moments. In all the years to come, my hand at your throat. I want you to remember, the one man who beat you.”

Or rather, see the quote for what it is – a sensational bit of flavouring lifted from the very hearts and souls of the fans.

A mission statement, a tantalising glimpse of the film’s objective, not a sign-post to the narrative that will appear on screen.

In TDKR the two heroes have a long-standing relationship and deep familiarity with each other that in the final battle leads to Superman’s trademark overconfidence and Batman’s trademark resourcefulness, and that’s why Batman wins. Not because he can breath in space.



Because he plans things waaaay in advance and is superhumanly thorough. He blows a fortune, years of research, has to tap into a whole city’s power grid, and even then he ‘dies’ doing it. His plan works because it hinges on Superman’s weaknesses, including his expectations, and he uses them against him the way an intelligent martial artist like Bruce Wayne would take on someone of superior strength.

The word (not quite officially) is that this will effectively be a sequel to Man of Steel, which means Superman is the new kid on the block and as yet unfamiliar with the Dark Knight’s MO.

Man of Steel ends with widespread destruction, so Supes will be in a similar position in the popularity stakes to Spiderman after J. Jonah Jameson has given him a good going over in The Bugle. He’ll be in for a ton of flack from politicians and public figures looking for a platform to make names for themselves. This is the perfect springboard for Lex Luthor to start his campaign to rid the planet of what he sees as a dangerous alien and a living WMD.

Luthor is a billionaire industrialist, as is Bruce Wayne, so the two undoubtedly know each other. Bruce/Batman is no fool and I can’t see him teaming up with Luthor as some have suggested. He’ll know that behind the respectable front Luthor is a villain, a corrupt reflection of his own arrangements. Both men are hiding in plain sight.

This doesn’t mean the film script won’t pair them up of course. It just means they ought not to, unless they can find a good reason for Luthor not to be on Batman’s grudge list already. Hard to imagine.

John Byrne’s 1986 run of Superman comics, called The Man of Steel, is a closer match to the rebooted movie franchise. It recast Lex Luthor from mad scientist to businessman and changed the dynamic of the relationship between the invulnerable man and the ordinary mortals around him, shrewdly evoking a sense of unease akin to the threat of nuclear war that was still very much on people’s minds at that time (as seen in Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ and ‘V For Vendetta’ of the same period). Superman earned the trust of the people by saving them and catching criminals, he didn’t start out at the top of the popularity list. The series also re-imagined his first meeting with Batman, pitting them against each other in a way never seen before. DC had perpetuated a BFF relationship since the 1940s, set in stone by ‘World’s Finest’ and repeated throughout the Silver Age, despite the many differences between them.

Best buds


and fun times


(OK, that second one’s not genuine)

Byrne put their differences in the spotlight and redefined the relationship; Superman seeing a masked vigilante as just another criminal, Batman outwitting an immensely strong threat by exploiting Superman’s good nature. Batman threatens to kill an innocent citizen with a signal that will set off a bomb if Superman comes too close to him. He’s not bluffing. Only later does he reveal the citizen is himself.

Byrne’s series is less iconic than Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, but it had a far greater impact on DC Universe mythology, becoming accepted canon post ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ until as recently as 2009’s ‘Superman: Secret Origin’. TDKR, meanwhile, is set in an alternate ‘future’ where superheroes are banned, imprisoned or working undercover for the corrupt government, with Bruce Wayne at an advanced age and grey-haired. If they make TDKR one day it will stand alone from the rest of the DC movie franchise. That is absolutely the opposite of what appears to be their current goal of following Marvel’s lead and galvanising the mythology into a single movie continuity. The aim is surely now to breed a cash cow in the shape of a big screen Justice League series, and that will require a reconciliation between Batman and Superman at some point, presumably by the end of the film.

Although…

It would make a good Justice League lead-in to have the two biggest names in DC at odds while the world is in danger; perhaps requiring Wonder Woman, the third hero in the mighty triumvirate, to get them to work together.



That would be, though I do say so myself, a very good story and a nice way to introduce Wonder Woman. She already walks the middle ground between the two, possesses better diplomatic skills and despite being as brawny as Superman often uses other skills to solve problems yet isn’t shy when it’s time to wade in and kick backsides.

But somehow I doubt they’ll leave the antagonism unresolved for a whole film. They’ll most likely want the classic ‘mismatched buddy’ film, another reason why this won’t be based on TDKR. At the end of that story the two are anything but friends.

What I predict we’ll see is a version of Byrne’s story and a reconciliation by the end of the film, a strong focus on the different approaches to crime-fighting and a very large amount of fisticuffs. Luthor is the obvious choice for villain, working on many levels and being a person of interest for both heroes and a good way to make their paths cross.

Will it work? Impossible to say. Zack Snyder loves the subject matter and that makes a big difference. I’m quietly confident.

The biggest question for many is will Ben Affleck be any good as Batman? I prefer to stay out of that argument. Argo may be a highpoint in his acting career. He may have matured into the kind of actor that can wear the cowl convincingly. We can only wait and see. With Star Wars VII in the same year, 2015 is going to be exciting.

Monday 23 September 2013

Conan the Barbarian (2011): sexual symbolism in a film of two halves


I watched the 2011 Conan the Barbarian on Channel 5 last night (23.09.13). It’s a film of two halves – the good half and the hackneyed slide towards an underwhelming conclusion that chucked in unnecessary drama until enough time had passed to prevent the film ending too soon.




SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY.



The beginning sets things up nicely. The info dump prefacing the film is short, to the point and narrated by Morgan Freeman. Job well done.

Conan’s ‘birth’ is suitably violent and fits the quasi-mythological hero cycle of the story. He’s literally ‘born of war’. His mum isn’t a weak victim, she’s in heavy armour and wielding a sword while almost at full term of her pregnancy. Battle is clearly a constant feature of Cimmerian life (although not for everyone, but more of this later). When fatally wounded she refuses to die as a victim, takes control and dies on her own terms once she’s performed her motherly functions within a classic hero myth – i.e. confirming her love for him, naming him, sacrificing herself, then getting out of his way.




In the medieval Arthurian myth-legend of Percival/Parsifal, the hero’s mother shelters the boy until he comes of age, protecting him from the violent world of knightly combat out of motherly concern for his life. His father and brothers having all been knights that died in combat, she tries to prevent him from ever finding out about knighthood (i.e. manhood) and treats him as the niaive boy he will remain until he escapes. When at last he leaves ‘the realm of mothers’ she collapses in grief and in effect dies as she never appears in the story again. This is a mythological trope that allows the hero to become a man as he leaves the world where his mother dominates. She is no longer able to influence him except where he draws upon the wisdom she imparted to him as he grew up. In Star Wars Luke loses his mother twice; once when he is born, then again when Aunt Beru is killed; enabling him to follow Ben on his “damn fool idealistic crusade”.




Conan’s mother dies a warrior’s death as he is cut from her. This tells us without doubt Conan is a man from the moment of his birth. More than that, he is born of a very manly man and a very manly woman and plunged into a man’s world with no maternal influence. He is manliness-cubed. We see this confirmed in the next scene.

The intro to Cimmerian culture is nicely done. Ron Perlman is great as Conan’s chieftain father and the initiation of the new warriors is a good way to show the audience the barbarians’ way of life without resorting to another info-dump. Conan is far younger than the other boys. He’s finished the chores his father gave him, meant to delay him and prevent him from competing, and stands quietly accepting his father’s reluctance to let him join in. It’s this quiet performance of his duties that tells the chief Conan is ready. He’s earnt his egg so off he goes. A few minutes later we see just how much of a hero young Conan already is. All the other boys run from the fight, many have lost and broken their eggs. Conan runs TO the fight, takes on many enemies at once single-handed and wins. 




The enemies roar like animals, they’re not men. This is another myth trope. The hero must defeat the bestial to become a man. So far so good. We’re on track. The hero cycle is underway. Conan returns to his village carrying the severed heads of his enemies and has kept the egg unbroken in his mouth. We are in no doubt he is a man despite being perhaps twelve years old. But he’s far more than that as well, all the signs are there. He’s an honest to goodness mythological god-hero.

His father teaches him the mysteries of steel (a nice nod to the Schwarzenegger film) and instructs him how to become like steel by harnessing fire and ice together. A lesson Conan utterly fails to learn. The boy fails to beat his dad in combat because he’s “all fire” and this is underlined by his dad chopping up the frozen river they’re fighting on and dumping his son in the freezing water, exactly like the sword was quenched in ice a few minutes before. His dad tells him he’s not yet worthy to wield that sword. We the audience are now shown the quest. Conan’s McGuffin is the sword, or rather the worthiness to wield it.

Parsifal has to become worthy of the Grail before he can approach it. His journey, once he becomes a knight, is to transcend mere knighthood. Marvel’s The Mighty Thor loses the right to wield his mystic hammer and it’s given to another to teach him humility. 




Conan, already a man, must become something more. He must learn to calm his temper, to become the ultimate warrior using guile and strength, because strength alone is insufficient. The army of darkness turns up soon after. Cimmerian villagers are standing about in a way that jars with their warrior philosophy. They seem too ordinary, too domestic. They look like farmers, and they scream when the enemy attacks. I don’t get it. This shouldn’t happen. We know Cimmerians don’t fear death and are tough as old boots.

We see a woman with a helm that covers one eye shoot an arrow into Conan’s dad and take him down. In myth-speak the missing eye alludes to deeper vision, an archer that sees beyond our world, her knowledge allows her to defeat a great opponent even if it is by deception and lacking the honour of melee combat. She seems significant, but isn’t. She dies pathetically in the second half of the film and has only one or two brief appearances in-between. Her armour has been styled to make her stand out yet her character is non-existent.


An archer with no depth perception is a statement. But of what?

Conan’s dad dies by killing himself to thwart the villain’s evil plan while saving Conan’s life. Both parents die proving their love in the most violent ways possible. For Conan love and suffering, life and battle, are the same thing. He can’t see it any other way. The next we see of him he’s a giant of a man, heavily muscled and half-naked. He’s also Drogo from Game of Thrones, without the beard and makeup.




A few scenes follow telling us the current state of play that will eventually lead to the film’s climax. We see Conan is confident and more than capable. He gets himself imprisoned so he can capture the prison boss who knows where the Big Baddy is. Things get a bit daft now. They chain him up, but the chains are so long he can easily fight the multiple guards who line up to attack him one at a time. He meets the obligatory thief character that in Conan stories represents fear, caution, guile, sneakiness and success by indirect methods – all things Conan is incapable of. As Conan rides off the thief shouts to him his name and where to find him, pretty much saying “See ya later ‘cos I’m the plot device you’ll need in the third act!”.

There are three McGuffins in this film by my count: the sword/worthiness, the magical mask that will make the wearer a god, and the young woman whose pure blood is required to activate the mask. Conan finds the young woman before the villain does, setting up a clash where the villain’s power is revealed – his daughter is a sorceress and he himself is a highly skilled swordsman who easily defeats Conan. Conan and the pureblood escape more by luck than ability. Nice ‘sand elementals’ in this scene, but unfortunately it’s the only decent bit of magic we see in the whole film.

From here the film goes dramatically downhill. It's like the director left and they had to finish the film as best they could with no clear vision. Conan and the woman escape to a ship commanded by Conan’s best mate. There’s a scene where Conan describes his failure and swears to try again, his warrior friend swearing to assist. At this point my wife turned to me and said “Ham AND cheese in that scene.” The narrative seemed to dry up completely, nothing on screen advanced the plot and we found ourselves chatting about the weekly domestic chores. I don’t know about you, but if I find myself discussing unloading the washing machine during an action film it’s a bad sign.




The ship is pointlessly attacked, seemingly to give the woman a reason to fall in love both with killing people and with Conan (the former surely a requirement for the latter). Despite being a peaceful monk up until this moment, her whole life spent in a monastery dedicated to the sacredness of life, she picks up a sword – a big one – and starts killing fully armoured professional warriors.

During this scene the one-eyed woman is nonchalantly killed by Conan as if she were one of the faceless minions.

Afterwards, the pureblood has sex with Conan in a cave, and in the morning inexplicably (although I may have missed the reason) sneaks off early. Immediately outside the cave (i.e. outside the manly protection of her violent lover) she’s caught by baddies who were somehow waiting for her. Her character has developed from spirited monk to joyful warrior to sexual being, then after three seconds of independence she becomes a peril-monkey. Now she is Conan’s new McGuffin, his stated reason to track down the villain that he’s already been tracking since boyhood. Later when the thief asks him why he must enter the city of bad guys Conan replies “There is a woman in there,” and this is sufficient explanation. Nothing is said about the king who killed his tribe and who has a mask that will give him godlike powers so he can lay waste to the world with forbidden magic and resurrect his dead wife so she can tell him the secrets from beyond the grave. All of the stuff we the audience have been fed constantly since Morgan Freeman’s intro speech.

From the moment Conan is on the ship until the end of the film, the scenes feel disconnected and the narrative is almost entirely missing. Drama, sex and sword fights plug the gaps for those people disinclined to look for a story (and there are many). It’s like a different director took over, or the writers gave up after running out of ideas. This is the time when the hero has failed and lost everything and we the audience should feel the tension, wondering how the inevitable victory will be achieved from this low point. But it’s come too early. We should be three quarters of the way through, yet we’re only halfway. I was expecting Conan to be captured so the film’s pacing would stay interesting for another hour and give him a chance to soak up some post-hubris humility.

The film’s first half set up the journey, using ice as a metaphor for some vague quality and showing the sword (now in the possession of the villain and his witchy daughter) as a marker for when he attains that quality. What does the ice represent? Intelligence? Humility? Patience? Some missing ingredient, perhaps, that empowers a warrior beyond being merely strong and formidable. What we should be seeing here, after the grand failure, is the hero’s realisation of how far he still has to travel. It should be the beginning of the journey of transcendence to achieve worthiness. It doesn't have to be intellectual, just meaningful and resonant. Instead we see more of the same. Hot-headed brawn winning inconsequential victories, ticking off the last of the characters we saw standing about at his father’s defeat. Very basic revenge. They are monsters and demons, one has his own pet tentacle-monster appearing in a scene so pointless it becomes ridiculous when it should be awesome. The monster is unleashed and the guards are sent in, only the monster can’t tell the difference between friend and foe so eats the guards then kills its master. It illustrates how meaningless the scene is. Pure filler. It doesn’t matter who kills whom as long as lots of people are being violently killed. Peril, drama, violence, spectacle. Ten more minutes ticked off.




This whole section is beyond cliché. The bad guys have hunted the pureblood for twenty years and now taken her to the city of darkness for the sacrifice. Conan meanwhile rides off to find the thief who will help him get into the city. The time it takes him to find his ally and get to his destination happens to be exactly the same amount of time it takes the villain to get round to sacrificing the pureblood, enabling Conan to arrive as the cavalry. The thief disappeared at some point. I have no idea what happened to him. His function performed, he just seemed to fall out of the story.

And on to the climax. Conan faces the villain, the peril-monkey is chained to a sacrificial device, spread-eagled and incapable of moving. The villain gets the blood in a disappointingly undramatic scene as they only seem to need about half a cupful. He dons the mask – the terrifying magical mask we’ve been told to fear since the very beginning – declares his intent to summon the spirit of his long-dead wife in the pureblood’s body and then ... has a shoddy swordfight with Conan. No magic, nothing godlike. The villain uses Conan’s dad’s sword to fight him, the sword Conan wasn’t worthy to wield, and he seems unable to do much with it. Conan has done nothing to transcend his warrior-boy beginnings up to this point and has no reason to be able to fight any better than when he was beaten so soundly before. He’s a hero-god of battle and his enemy is the dark shadow of himself and his family – a warrior/father/god driven by the loss of a loved one and by revenge, willing to use magic (usually a stand-in for womanly whiles, dishonesty and the dark side; those resorting to sorcery often losing their manhood in some way and becoming corrupt, demanding to be destroyed by the hero so that the balance can be restored, sorcery can be banished back to the dark world of womanly mysteries and the men can get back to man-business as usual) – yet this time Conan is fighting better than the villain.

The villain, Zym, is an interesting character. He’s a man who’s lost his way and fallen into darkness. The implication is that marrying a witch is a bad idea. But what does the witch stand for? We see her die, burnt by pious monks as her husband and daughter look on. At this point Zym is a loving father staring in horror at the act of atrocity being performed and ripping apart his life. We have a moment, just that, of sympathy for Zym. But it’s stripped away when we remember the fairly clear evidence he has an incestuous relationship with his daughter. She too is a witch and now looks just like her mother did at the point of her death. Witchy women are interchangeable in this story, and when a man walks into the dark forest their power surrounds him and he can either leave, fight or embrace them. Heroes tend to leave (Sir Gawain is an exception, but that’s another story), villains tend to embrace, compromising their masculinity and becoming in effect a force for the 'feminine'.

There was a possible sub-plot here that would’ve made this a better film. The daughter aided her father in his plans to gain power over life and death and resurrect his wife, her mother. To do so the daughter effectively became her mother, taking her place by Zym’s side as sorceress and lover. What would happen if the mother had returned? The darkness would have to oppose itself, two equal powers ostensibly on the same side, but competing for the same space and cancelling each other out. A hero cycle in its own right, but a dark reflection of the classic male cycle. Possibly misogynistic, but the overt anti-feminism could easily be avoided and the result would’ve been less offensive than what did occur.

Zym fights Conan while standing over the chained peril-monkey. If you want to get deep over this bit of symbolism, we have the two warring sides of manhood slapping big swords together above a bleeding (i.e. fertile) woman whose legs are spread open and held there with chains at the bottom of a dark, hot cylindrical pit, and whom Zym plans to force into becoming his wife. 




The woman is reduced to her reproductive functions and the two men, in THE most basic struggle, compete for breeding access. There is no plot here, the narrative has left the building. Zym fights badly, Conan fights as well as usual, Zym is losing. Perhaps there’s one shred of plot hidden in this otherwise inexplicable scene – Zym is using Conan’s father’s sword. If the swords are the male principle here they are masculine violence as well as male reproduction and a phallic method of penetrating enemies and lovers alike.

Not buying this idea? Well, remember Conan’s dad sticks a knife in his wife early on in this film and a baby pops out. The dad educates the boy on becoming a man by telling him how to use his sword not in rage but with a cool head. The sword is a symbol of manhood and fatherhood throughout the film. And don’t forget many male social animals, including humans, bugger subordinate males to make sure their position of dominance is understood. Penetration has a spectrum that goes from love all the way round to hate. In it’s most basic, thoughtless form it’s reduced to an amoral function of the male anatomy. As if men are merely penetration facilitators and penis conveying devices. This is in direct opposition to the lessons Conan’s father tries to teach him and which the unworthy boy has constantly failed to understand. Only now the film sides not with the wise father, but with the hot-headed boy not fit to wield a man’s sword.

Conan’s father’s name is Corin, from the Latin Quirinus, meaning ‘spear’. A weapon even more phallic than a sword.




Oh, and the peril-monkey’s name? Tamara. It means ‘date tree’ and is used in the East to mean ‘fruitful’. When I started writing this I couldn't remember her name, but when I found out what it was I decided not to go back and add it as the actual name is just a label of her purpose and 'peril-monkey' is more accurate.



Zym is much older than Conan. Possibly there’s a sub-text of youthful virility versus old wiliness. A no-nonsense young man in his prime against an old man whose power is not only waning but located in his feminine accomplices. The second Conan/Zym fight scene has several differences: Tamara is incapacitated. Zym fights with Conan’s father’s sword. Zym’s daughter, the sorceress, isn’t there. Zym has gained the blood-filled mask. Zym is in the process of bringing his wife back from the dead.




You’ll perhaps notice all the differences are to do with Zym. He has committed to the womanly world and is unable to effectively wield the sword of transcendent manhood. Conan hasn’t changed one bit. He does what he does and this time gets the advantage. He cuts Tamara’s chains (how is it steel swords are so good at cutting steel chains?) and somehow she falls sideways about twenty feet onto a ledge. From there she gets into a fight with Zym’s daughter.

Zym’s daughter is called Marique (ma-REE-kay). Loosely translated it means “and by sea” (as in ‘terra marique’ meaning ‘by land and sea’). I’ve also seen it translated as ‘wished for’, ‘star of the sea’ and ‘bitterness’. I’m going to go ahead and say this character is a dark wish fulfilled at a terrible cost. Zym wants his wife back from the dead and never gets her, except in the near identical form of his daughter. The mother is called ‘Maliva’. ‘Mal’ means ‘bad’ in Latin. Marique is powerful, dangerous, without mercy and mysterious, like the sea and like many powerful women in classic misogynistic patriarchal myths. She is the independent female principal in this film and she is the enemy. She and her dead mother have unmanned Zym and made him a puppet, but still they aren’t dominant. The women rely on Zym for everything and are nothing without him.




Marique’s claws are prominent. She wields them frequently. Perhaps symbols of her inhumanity and lack of civilised weaponry such as the phallic sword Tamara learns to use. The claws are violent and threatening, but ultimately do nothing but scratch, which is how female power is shown throughout the film – scary and unpredicatable, but nothing to worry about in the end.

Marique, separated from Zym, gets into the inevitable woman versus woman fight and resorts to using her fists, claws and any heavy nearby object in an attempt to bludgeon Tamara. This, remember, is the powerful sorceress with a knowledge of forbidden lore. She can conjure allies from the ground, yet doesn’t. But even now, Tamara doesn’t beat her without help. Conan shows up and chops off the animalistic clawed hand, weakening her, then Tamara kicks her off a ledge where she falls to her death by landing on a big wooden shaft that penetrates her whole body, killing her instantly. Death by penetration for the dark, badly behaved woman.

Zym’s death is pathetic. Standing on a rickety old bridge he boasts of how he now has the power of a god, dangles Tamara the peril-monkey on a chain gripped in Conan’s eversostrong hands and forces him to make the comparison with his father’s death. Zym seems to think he’s put Conan in a position where he can only dramatically and devastatingly fail, but in fact he’s given Conan all the motivation he needs to succeed. Bewilderingly, Zym chooses this moment to summon the spirit of his dead wife into Tamara’s body. Zym knows his daughter is dead so now his only chance of filling the gap left when his wife died is to steal Conan’s woman and replace her soul with Maliva’s. And he does this at the moment Tamara is in the most danger and when her only chance of survival is if Conan taps into his hero powers and goes all badass. Which he of course does. Zym falls to his death when Conan uses his sword to chop away the wood of the bridge they’re standing on. This is a parallel of Corin’s lesson to Conan as a boy while admonishing him for not being ice as well as fire. Perhaps we’re meant to see this as Conan accepting his father’s wisdom, but that isn’t quite what’s happened. Corin chopped the ice from under Conan as a punishment for his foolhardiness. Conan chops the wood from under Zym, copying his father but not in any way adopting warriors’ cunning as a skill of his own. And he does it in anger and revenge, calling on his father’s prediction that Zym would fall. Both men used swords to dish out punishment by the backdoor and make the lesser men fall. Conan didn’t use any new tactics until this moment. This isn’t a boy in a man’s body finally becoming a man in spirit, it’s a male of the light punishing a male of darkness who dared to put womanly ways before the ways of men. Corin is still alpha male, but Conan has shown Zym he’s on the bottom rung. Zym plunges screaming into the dark, and we are left wondering what happened to the god-like powers of the mask Morgan Freeman told us about a couple of hours back.

Conan drops Tamara off at home, then visits the ruins of his village. The remains are still lying about after ten or twenty years as if the attack had only just happened. He finds the mould Corin used to make the sword and he speaks to it as if it was, or was possessed by, his father. We are, I’m sure, meant to assume Conan is now worthy to wield the sword because he avenged his father’s death. Despite the fact he did so hot-headedly and almost entirely without cunning. This should’ve been the moment of reconciliation, the hero-moment when it all pulls together. His goals achieved by becoming ice and fire at the same time, he should’ve transcended the merely masculine and become the true hero that is beyond such limitations. But he didn’t, so instead we have a manly man very much in the ordinary mould. He plunges his father’s sword aggressively into the ground where Corin’s burnt body must be. Is this final penetration the son dominating the father to prove his superior manhood? I can’t see it any other way. Conan leaves the sword there and we cut to the credits. The sword now penetrates his own name on screen. He has, with the final thrust, become the weapon, the phallus. 




Instead of following his father’s path he has destroyed it with his own. The film ends with the journey ongoing, which was surely always part of the plan. The final message is that there will be no character development for Conan. He is a manly man and all who attempt to obscure his path with feminine nonsense will suffer the same fate.

Instead of a hero cycle in the classic form we have a hero loop, the protagonist endlessly travelling the same route to nowhere, enabling film studios to churn out more of the same if they see a profit in it. But of course such tales hold little interest and people don’t clamour for more of them. The initial spectacle wears off and a planned sequel is shelved. In this case the ‘sequel’ due to be released in 2014 ignores the whole film and instead uses the 1982 far superior Schwarzenegger film as it’s backstory.



And that says it all.