Review of "Them: Adventures with Extremists" by Jon Ronson

I didn't much like this. Jon Ronson is not a person to engage seriously with the issues that he raises. He's trying to get laughs by reminding us that self-important conspiracy theorists still need to get the shopping in and so on, but it ends up humanising them rather than diminishing them. He mainly doesn't do any debunking, so it's hard to know what aspects of their narrative he accepts - and it sometimes seems like quite a lot, especially when he writes about the Bilderberg Group. 

There's a lot to be said about organisations like that - how they attempt to impose some sort of coordination on the chaos that is international capitalism, and how useless they mainly are at it, for example. There's a lot to be said about conspiracy theories, and why they are becoming so widespread and what role they play politically, but you won't find it here.

Review of "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch

It's not often I give up on a book, but this just isn't worth finishing. It's a bit like Harry Potter for...for grown-ups? Except that it's not all that grown up. There's a secret department of the Metropolitan Police that deals with magical matters, and our first-person narrator stumbles into when, as a beat policeman, he witnesses a horrible murder and then gets a tip-off from a ghost. It's not interesting, it's not well-written, I don't care about the characters...so enough. I notice that it's one of a series, which is depressing.

Review of Bacurau

This won lots of awards and has very good ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, but it felt like a pointless splatterfest to me. A small isolated town in North Eastern Brazil is threatened by its corrupt mayor who cuts off the water, and then brings in a bunch of racist psycho murderers from the US and Europe to kill all the residents in some horrendous paid-for game. 

It's tense, and for a while there's an air of mystery as we try to work out what's going on, but ultimately it's horrible and pointless. It's resolved with all the murderers getting blown away by the townsfolk who arm themselves with ancient firearms from the town's museum. Yeah, it's a metaphor for colonialism and stuff, but it's also two hours I won't get back.

Review of "The Descent of Man" by Grayson Perry

I love Grayson Perry, so I was sorry when this book got off to a bad start - too much unfocused whining about "Middle Class" White Males. I think "Middle Class" is a dangerous and obfuscating term that hides much more than it reveals...we've been royally fucked over by bankers, and some kinds of professionals do have more privileges and a better quality of life than some people who work with their hands and their bodies. But surely teachers and social workers are "middle class", in the cultural sense, even though they sell their labour power to survive. Really, so do engineers and scientists...and for the most part they don't run the world or the country, and they aren't responsible for how fucked everything is.

But after the first whiny chapter the book looked up a lot, and he's really astute and clever about gender and masculinity. It's definitely worth reading, and I'm going to watch the associated TV series. I was particularly taken with the way he talks about how men perform their gender, and also about his references to Lori Gottleib's work on gender equality in housework and sex - the research appears to suggest that men who do more of the housework get less sex, and less enjoyable sex, from their female partners. This deserves further consideration, and for once by women as much as by men.

I would really like see what he's got to say about the trans wars. Uncomfortably I have friends...mainly women...on both sides of an argument that I don't entirely understand.

Review of "The Ghetto Fights" by Marek Edelman

A short, gripping, but painful to read book about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and the prelude to it. Especially painful is the account of how so many Jews desperately wanted to believe that the stories of extermination camps were not true, and that they really would be relocated to find work in the East...and the way in which traditional Jewish strategies of accomodating to even the most oppressive authority, which had been "successful" in the past, turned out to be so terribly wrong in the case of the Nazis.

The book was published in English in the immediate post war period by the Bund, in the US, but it was only published relatively recently in the UK, and by Bookmarks, the SWP's publishing house. So there is a foreword by John Rose, an SWP member who has also written some decent history books. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Rose goes over the story of how the author, Marek Edelman, has been largely ignored by mainstream Jewish and Israeli audiences, because he remained true to his Bundist principles and continued to oppose Zionism. But I'd say he does this in a surprisingly generous way. He doesn't at all play down the contribution of Zionist fighters from the various Socialist-Zionist groups, or repeat any of the allegations about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. And he includes in afterwords the bad responses he's received from Zionist commentators, as well as his responses (which seem to me to be be scrupulously fair) to those when they were published.

It might have been interesting to have seen some discussion as to what the history means for the argument between Socialist-Zionists and Bundists. Zionists have generally acted as if the Holocaust proved that they were right all along. Bundists have often suggested that the way Israel has turned out proved that they were right all along. Still, this book probably isn't the place for that.

Review of "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: A Graphic Novel by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard"

I tried to read the actual book by Robert Tressell a few times, but never got very far. It seemed dauntingly long (though I usually don't mind long books) and a bit dull. So Scarlett and Sophie Rickard have done me a great service. The book is beautiful, and they've brought it to life in a way that (I think) keeps the feel of the original but makes it much more digestible.

That said, I still didn't really enjoy it. Much of the detail about grinding poverty in the Edwardian era seems all too contemporary, with working poor having to decide how to pay their rent to private landlords, while keeping enough back to both heat and eat. I'm sure there must have been times when the book just felt like a period piece, but it doesn't now.

I didn't enjoy the politics all that much. I don't Tresell was ever a Marxist really, and his cod version of the Labour Theory of Value doesn't feel very convincing. It's even less so given that the workers in the book are all painters and decorators, so they really don't fit with the narrative of surplus value that it tries to illustrate. When the book's socialist intellectual tells the workers that they ought to stop voting for Liberals or Tories, and instead "elect revolutionary socialists to the House of Commons" I couldn't help wishing that he'd actually spent a bit more time learning socialist theory.

The old socialist who tells the hero that he's given up, and the toiling masses deserve what's coming to them because they are so stupid...? Hard not to give in to that, particularly in the week of King Charles III's coronation.

And the fairy-tale ending in which one of the painters, George Barrington, turns out to be a socialist rich man temporarily playing at poverty so that he can develop his socialist understanding, and then gives out some big presents for Xmas before he leaves? Well, finger heading for throat.

I read the Wikipedia article about Tressell afterwards, and he's quite a nuanced character, with a bit of a background in the SDF who apparently never joined a union, and may have supported segregated labour markets in South Africa (like much of the rest of the white labour movement there).

Review of La Belle Epoque

If Guy Debord made a romcom this is what it would be like. This is a really unusual film, but no less enjoyable. In some ways it reminded me of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", because it has themes of identity and memory, but there's arguably nothing fantastic to make the plot line work - no magic, no implausible technology. The protagonist's son, a producer, makes content for streaming platforms, and as a sideline offers people direct personal experiences using the sets and actors - so that they can go back in time to an earlier era and just be there. And the protagonist, whose marriage is on the rocks, wants to go back to 1970s Lyon where he met and fell in love with his wife.

And it's brilliantly done - the bar they met in (the eponymous Belle Epoque) is lovingly recreated and populated, a woman plays the younger version of his wife-to-be, and he falls in love with her. And then this plays out, with all of its contradictions and difficulties.

That's not a plot summary - it's actually much more sophisticated and more interesting. It probably bears watching twice, which I almost never say.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of Rango

A real disappointment, and an illustration of how a film can be less than the sum of its parts. Great art and animation, some good visual and verbal jokes, a great cast (though what was the point of having Bill Nighy in it as a voice and then having him put on an American accent?)...but let down by the plot and the pacing. Too many big scenes crammed in, too many set pieces...I can't exactly put my finger on it, but this just dragged, even though it's no longer than a regular Disney animated film. Curiously the bits that dragged the most were the action scenes.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill from a USB drive, new DVD player and informal distribution.

Review of "Now we shall be entirely free" by Andrew Miller

I've only read one Andrew Miller book before - "Pure". That was great, and so was this...set for the most part in Regency-period England and Scotland during the Peninsular War, which looms large in the story though isn't really depicted except through the recollections of the characters. It's beautiful, clever, with a strong plot, lots of brilliant period detail and insight, and superb characters. A page-turner and a literary work at the same time.

Review of Behind The Curve

A film about flat earthers, which tries to be sympathetic but not uncritical. It doesn't really debunk or answer their "proofs" that the earth is flat and covered by a dome. Some of them look a bit ridiculous, but others seem nice and concerned with evidence and argument...it's not inconceivable that a naive person could watch the film and be led into becoming a flat earther. In fact, the podcasters and YouTubers featured in the film have said that it has increased their fan base.

There are interviews with the flat earthers, some of whom are bitter foes with each other...one of them argues on his YouTube channel that his rival is a Hollywood actor, hired by Warner Brothers but working for the CIA. And this hints at the main weakness in the film; although it does show that flat-earthism is more of a socio-political belief than a cosmological one, and it does show that the devotees are conspiracy theorists, it plays that down and makes them look mostly harmless. There's a hint that some of them blame the Jews (along with the Freemasons or the Vatican) for the 400-year hoax, but the nasty side is not emphasised.

Which leads rather nicely into my second criticism - the suggestion that the best thing to do it to treat them as genuinely intellectually engaged and to try to draw them towards an evidence-based approach to the rotundity of the earth, without ever shaming them. Lots of talking heads of scientists saying this, but they are for the most part natural scientists - physicists and astronomers. They are interviewed as experts, but they are talking about a subject in which they have no expertise. It might very well be that shaming is exactly the best way to deal with them - not enjoyable for them, or even for the people doing it, but it might be more effective than treating them as folk-scientists. That's a question for social science. 

The film makes it clear that however they became flat earthers, they now have emotional, and social, and even financial reasons for not abandoning their "theory" (as they point out credentialed scientists also do). So maybe emotion-based and social-based approaches will work better - if not at rescuing these heavily committed individuals, then at least in helping to prevent others from coming under their influence. If this was only a cosmological belief there might be an argument for letting them continue to think whatever they wanted (as long as they weren't involved in say aviation planning) but it's not. They need to believe that there is a hoax, and that there are dark powers behind it, and that's a political theory with bad consequences. 

I note in passing that the scientists in the film know a lot about their subject matter, but they have a very unsophisticated understanding of Science as a social phenomenon. They spout a lot of warmed-over Popperian falsificationism, as if that's how Science really worked; fifty years of social studies of science, and empirical research on the functioning of scientific institutions and communities, might as well never have happened. No-one seems to have an understanding of science that's more nuanced than "Science is True" or "Science is all made up". This is a pity, especially in the face of the present conversations about the pandemic and climate change.

Review of "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann

Oh my, what a snoozefest! This reliably put me to sleep in about three minutes. The first story, Death in Venice itself, was kind of atmospheric, and it was possible to appreciate the central character's wrestling with his almost unacknowledged homoerotic attraction...though Mann rarely used one word where a couple of pages will do. It's a short book, but it felt much longer, perhaps because almost nothing happens, very slowly. That sort of fits with the scenario of hot, cholera-infused Venice - and I rather liked the rather contemporary threads about misinformation regarding the course of the epidemic. So I guess I'd give that story three stars. The second, Tristan, about not-very-ill patients in a sanatorium maybe two stars, and Tonio Kroger perhaps one star, if no lower ratings are permitted.

Review of That's Amor

Terrible, barely watchable rom-com about a young woman moving back to live with her mother in her small-town home town after a career and romance failure in San Fransico, who is then set up for a relationship with a visiting young Spanish aspiring chef. It's just awful, with stupid characters, rotten acting, terrible dialogue...everything really. Do avoid.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "In My Grandfather's Shadow: A Story of War, Trauma and the Legacy of Silence" by Angela Findlay

I've got very mixed feelings about this book. Part of it is to do with my own feelings about Germans and German-ness. I have a lovely German brother-in-law and some very nice German friends. I don't hate Germans at all; my personal relations with many Germans have been very enjoyable, and I really enjoyed working with German people during my professional life - the honesty, the orderliness, the courtesy - it was all great.

And I have strong memories of how my first ever argument with my Dad was about Germans - how he'd raised me to be against racism but was telling me that he hated all Germans, because of what they'd done. I was about ten, and suddenly I was realising that he wasn't always right, and that he didn't live up to his own standards. Of course he didn't actually hate all Germans - his Jewish Judo club included a young German lesbian woman who was sort of an honorary Jew, and who he really liked.

But still, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the suffering of Germans - civilians and soldiers - that resulted from their defeat in WW2. Intellectually I can accept that the Allied bombing of German cities was wrong and bad, and that if there was an objective standard would be ruled to be a war crime. Only, I can't find it in my self to feel really sorry for the victims, or for the Germans who lost their homes in territories awarded to other countries after the war. Because of what they'd done, and what they had shut their eyes to.

Angela Findlay's book addresses all this, but not with the same structure of feelings that I'd bring to it. Not surprising, really, since she's a descendant of one of the perpetrators rather than one of the victims. Her grandfather wasn't in the SS, but he was a German general, and was doing his utmost to make sure that Germany won the war. So it's hard to work up much sympathy for his two years in captivity at the end of the war.

For the most part I liked the parts of the book where she details the personal histories, and I wasn't so keen on the parts where she describes her own personal history of psychological suffering. Nevertheless there's a good survey of all the current thinking about PTSD and trauma, including epigenetics, and it's worth reading for that. And I think she's been brave to have confronted her family story, and to have attempted to disentangle the ways in which it has reached from the past into the present. But I can't help thinking that she tried too hard, and too fast, to find a good thing that her grandfather had done (allowing some fleeing Italian civilians to hide in some tunnels that he'd been ordered to destroy), and to feel at peace from that. I can't blame her for that, but I can't feel the same, and that's partly what the book is about - how to feel about these legacies.