Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures Part 6

Ford's Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011).

June 2011.

'I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting,' Laura Oldfield Ford has said. 'The need to doc.u.ment the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace.' The city in question is of course London, and Ford's Savage Messiah offers a samizdat counter-history of the capital during the period of neoliberal domination. If Savage Messiah is 'diaristic', it is also much more than a memoir. The stories of Ford's own life necessarily bleed into the stories of others, and it is impossible to see the joins. 'This decaying fabric, this unknowable terrain has become my biography, the euphoria then the anguish, layers of memories colliding, splintering and reconfiguring.' The perspective Ford adopts, the voices she speaks in and which speak through her are those of the officially defeated: the punks, squatters, ravers, football hooligans and militants left behind by a history which has ruthlessly photoshopped them out of its finance-friendly SimCity. Savage Messiah uncovers another city, a city in the process of being buried, and takes us on a tour of its landmarks: The Isle of Dogs...The Elephant...Westway...Lea Bridge...North Acton...Canary Wharf...Dalston...Kings Cross...Hackney Wick...

In one of many echoes of punk culture, Ford calls Savage Messiah a 'zine'. She began producing it in 2005, eight years into a New Labour government that had consolidated rather than overturned Thatcherism. The context is bleak. London is a conquered city; it belongs to the enemy. 'The translucent edifices of Starbucks and Costa Coffee line these s.h.i.+mmering promenades, 'young professionals' sit outside gently conversing in sympathetic tones.' The dominant mood is one of restoration and reaction, but it calls itself modernisation, and it calls its divisive and exclusionary work making London safe for the super-rich regeneration. The struggle over s.p.a.ce is also a struggle over time and who controls it. Resist neoliberal modernisation and (so we are told) you consign yourself to the past. Savage Messiah's London is overshadowed by the looming megalith of 'London 2012', which over the course of the last decade has subsumed more and more of the city into its ba.n.a.l science fiction telos, as the Olympic Delivery Authority transformed whole areas of East London into a temporary photo opportunity for global capitalism. Where once there were 'fridge mountains and abandoned factories' out of Tarkovsky and Ballard, a semi-wilderness in the heart of the city, now a much blander desert grows: s.p.a.ces for wandering are eliminated, making way for shopping malls and soon-to-be-abandoned Olympic stadia. 'When I was writing the zines,' Ford remembers, 'I was drifting through a London haunted by traces and remnants of rave, anarcho-punk scenes and hybrid subcultures at a time when all these incongruous urban regeneration schemes were happening. The idea that I was moving through a spectral city was really strong, it was as if everything prosaic and dull about the New Labour version of the city was being resisted by these ghosts of brutalist architecture, of '90s convoy culture, rave scenes, '80s political movements and a virulent black economy of scavengers, peddlers and shoplifters. I think the book could be seen in the context of the aftermath of an era, where residues and traces of euphoric moments haunt a melancholy landscape.'

All of these traces are to be eliminated from the Restoration London that will be celebrated at London 2012. With their lovingly reproduced junk-strata, overgrowing vegetation and derelict s.p.a.ces, Savage Messiah's images offer a direct riposte to the slick digital images which the Olympic Delivery Authority has pasted up in the now heavily policed, restricted and surveilled Lee valley. Blair's Cool Britannia provides the template for an anodyne vision of London designed by the 'creative industries'. Everything comes back as an advertising campaign. It isn't just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as their own simulacra. A familiar story. Take the Westway, West London's formerly deplored dual carriageway, once a cursed s.p.a.ce to be mythologised by Ballard, punks and Chris Pet.i.t, now just another edgy film set: This liminal territory, cast in a negative light in the 70s was recuperated by MTV and boring media types in the 90s. The Westway became the backdrop for Gorillaz imbecility, bland drum & ba.s.s record sleeves and photo shoots in corporate skate parks.

Cool Britannia. Old joke.

's.p.a.ce' becomes the over arching commodity. Notting Hill. New Age cranks peddling expensive junk. Homeopathy and boutiques, angel cards and crystal healing.

Media and high finance on the one hand, faux-mysticism and superst.i.tion on the other: all the strategies of the hopeless and those who exploit them in Restoration London...s.p.a.ce is indeed the commodity here. A trend that started 30 years ago, and intensified as council housing was sold off and not replaced, culminated in the insane super-inflation of property prices in the first years of the 21st century. If you want a simple explanation for the growth in cultural conservatism, for London's seizure by the forces of Restoration, you need look no further than this. As Jon Savage points out in England's Dreaming, the London of punk was still a bombed-out city, full of chasms, caverns, s.p.a.ces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted. Once those s.p.a.ces are enclosed, practically all of the city's energy is put into paying the mortgage or the rent. There's no time to experiment, to journey without already knowing where you will end up. Your aims and objectives have to be stated up front. 'Free time' becomes convalescence. You turn to what rea.s.sures you, what will most refresh you for the working day: the old familiar tunes (or what sound like them). London becomes a city of pinched-face drones plugged into iPods.

Savage Messiah rediscovers the city as a site for drift and daydreams, a labyrinth of side streets and s.p.a.ces resistant to the process of gentrification and 'development' set to culminate in the miserable hyper-spectacle of 2012. The struggle here is not only over the (historical) direction of time but over different uses of time. Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and ha.s.sling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium. Savage Messiah is about another kind of delirium: the releasing of the pressure to be yourself, the slow unravelling of biopolitical ident.i.ty, a depersonalised journey out to the erotic city that exists alongside the business city. The eroticism here is not primarily to do with s.e.xuality, although it sometimes includes it: it is an art of collective enjoyment, in which a world beyond work can however briefly be glimpsed and grasped. Fugitive time, lost afternoons, conversations that dilate and drift like smoke, walks that have no particular direction and go on for hours, free parties in old industrial s.p.a.ces, still reverberating days later. The movement between anonymity and encounter can be very quick in the city. Suddenly, you are off the street and into someone's life-s.p.a.ce. Sometimes, it's easier to talk to people you don't know. There are fleeting intimacies before we melt back into the crowd, but the city has its own systems of recall: a block of flats or a street you haven't focused on for a long time will remind you of people you met only once, years ago. Will you ever see them again?

I got invited up for a cup of tea in one of those Tecton flats on the Harrow road, one of the old men from the day centre I work in. I took him up Kilburn High Road shopping and watered the fuchsias on his balcony. We talked about the Blitz and hospitals mostly. He used to be a scientist and wrote shopping lists on brown envelopes dated and filed in a stack of biscuit tins.

I miss him.

I miss them all.

Savage Messiah deploys anachronism as a weapon. At first sight, at first touch and tactility is crucial to the experience: the zine doesn't feel the same when it's JPEGed on screen Savage Messiah seems like something familiar. The form itself, the mix of photographs, typeface-text and drawings, the use of scissors and glue rather than digital cut and paste; all of this make Savage Messiah seem out of time, which is not to say out of date. There were deliberate echoes of the para-art found on punk and postpunk record sleeves and fanzines from the 1970s and 1980s. Most insistently, I'm reminded of Gee Vaucher, who produced the paradoxically photorealistically delirious record covers and posters for anarcho-punk collective Cra.s.s. 'I think with the look of the zine I was trying to restore radical politics to an aesthetic that had been rendered anodyne by advertising campaigns, Sh.o.r.editch club nights etc.,' Ford says. 'That anarcho-punk look was everywhere but totally emptied of its radical critique. It seemed important to go back to that moment of the late '70s and early '80s to a point where there was social upheaval, where there were riots and strikes, exciting cultural scenes and ruptures in the fabric of everyday life.' The 'return' to the postpunk moment is the route to an alternative present. Yet this is a return only to a certain ensemble of styles and methods nothing quite like Savage Messiah actually existed back then.

Savage Messiah is a gigantic, unfinished collage, which like the city is constantly reconfiguring itself. Macro-and micro-narratives proliferate tuberously; spidery slogans recur; figures migrate through various versions of London, sometimes trapped inside the drearily glossy s.p.a.ces imagined by advertising and regeneration propaganda, sometimes free to drift. She deploys collage in much the same way William Burroughs used it: as a weapon in time-war. The cut-up can dislocate established narratives, break habits, allow new a.s.sociations to coalesce. In Savage Messiah, the seamless, already-established capitalist reality of London dissolves into a riot of potentials.

Savage Messiah is written for those who could not be regenerated, even if they wanted to be. They are the unregenerated, a lost generation, 'always yearning for the time that just eluded us': those who were born too late for punk but whose expectations were raised by its incendiary afterglow; those who watched the Miners' Strike with partisan adolescent eyes but who were too young to really partic.i.p.ate in the militancy; those who experienced the future-rush euphoria of rave as their birthright, never dreaming that it could burn out like fried synapses; those, in short, who simply did not find the 'reality' imposed by the conquering forces of neoliberalism liveable. It's adapt or die, and there are many different forms of death available to those who can't pick up the business buzz or muster the requisite enthusiasm for the creative industries. Six million ways to die, choose one: drugs, depression, dest.i.tution. So many forms of catatonic collapse. In earlier times, 'deviants, psychotics and the mentally collapsed' inspired militant-poets, situationists, Rave-dreamers. Now they are incarcerated in hospitals, or languis.h.i.+ng in the gutter.

No Pedestrian Access To Shopping Centre Still, the mood of Savage Messiah is far from hopeless. It's not about caving in, it's about different strategies for surviving the deep midwinter of Restoration London. People living on next to nothing, no longer living the dream, but not giving up either: 'Five years since the last party but he held his plot, scavenging for food like a Ballardian crash victim.' You can go into suspended animation, knowing that the time is not yet right, but waiting with cold reptile patience until it is. Or you can flee Dystopian London without ever leaving the city, avoiding the central business district, finding friendly pa.s.sages through the occupied territory, picking your way through the city via cafes, comrade's flats, public parks. Savage Messiah is an inventory of such routes, such pa.s.sages through 'territories of commerce and control'.

The zines are saturated in music culture. First of all, there are the names of groups: Infa Riot and Blitz. Fragments of Abba, Heaven 17 on the radio. j.a.pan, Rudimentary Peni, Einstrzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Spiral Tribe. Whether the groups are sublime or sub-charity shop undesirable, these litanies have an evocative power that is quietly lacerating. Gig posters from 30 years ago Mob, Poison Girls, Conflict call up older versions of you, half-forgotten haircuts, long-lost longings, stirring again. But the role of music culture goes much deeper in Savage Messiah. The way the zine is put together owes as much to the rogue dance and drug cultures that mutated from Rave as to punk fanzines; its montage methodology has as much in common with the DJ mix as with any precursor in visual culture. Savage Messiah is also about the relations.h.i.+p between music and place: the zine is also a testament to the way in which the sensitive membranes of the city are reshaped by music.

This sombre place is haunted by the sounds of lost acid house parties and the distant reverberations of 1986. Test Department. 303. 808. Traces of industrial noise.

The roundhouse was easy to get into, and the depot itself, disused for years is lit up with tags and dubs.

You can hear these deserted places, feel the tendrils creeping across the abandoned caverns, the derelict bunkers and broken terraces. Mid summer, blistering heat under the concrete, Armagideon Time(s), a hidden garden, to be found, and lost again.

Superficially, the obvious tag for Savage Messiah would be psychogeography, but the label makes Ford chafe. 'I think a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-cla.s.s men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot. I have spent the last twenty years walking around London and living here in a precarious fas.h.i.+on, I've had about fifty addresses. I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different to theirs.' Rather than subsuming Savage Messiah under the increasingly played-out discourses of psychogeography, I believe it is better understood as an example of a cultural coalescence that started to become visible (and audible) at the moment when Ford began to produce the zine: hauntology. 'The London I conjure up...is imbued with a sense of mourning,' Ford says. 'These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates.' So many dreams of collectivity have died in neoliberal London. A new kind of human being was supposed to live here, but that all had to be cleared away so that the restoration could begin.

Haunting is about a staining of place with particularly intense moments of time, and, like David Peace, with whom her work shares a number of affinities, Ford is alive to the poetry of dates. 1979, 1981, 2013: these years recur throughout Savage Messiah, moments of transition and threshold, moments when a whole alternative time-track opens. 2013 has a post-apocalyptic quality (in addition to being the year of the London Olympics, 2012 is also, according to some, the year that the Mayans predicted for the end of the world). But 2013 could also be Year Zero: the reversal of 1979, the time when all the cheated hopes and missed chances are finally realised. Savage Messiah invites us to see the contours of another world in the gaps and cracks of an occupied London: Perhaps it is here that the s.p.a.ce can be opened up to forge a collective resistance to this neo liberal expansion, to the endless proliferation of ba.n.a.lities and the h.o.m.ogenising effects of globalisation. Here in the burnt out shopping arcades, the boarded up precincts, the lost citadels of consumerism one might find the truth, new territories might be opened, there might be a rupturing of this collective amnesia.

Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys' So This is Goodbye.

k-punk post, March 4, 2006.

s.p.a.ce comes as standard with the Junior Boys. The synthpop that inspired them remained attached, for the most part, to the three-minute format; 'extended' remixes were a concession to the imperatives of dance. Only one of So This is Goodbye's 10 tracks is under four minutes. s.p.a.ce is integral, not only to their sound, but to their songs. s.p.a.ce is a compositional component, a presupposition of the songs, not something retrospectively inserted at a producer's whim. The pauses, the imagist-allusiveness of the lyrics, the breathy phrasing would not work, or make much sense, outside a plateau-architecture imported from dance; crushed into three minutes Junior Boys' songs would lose more than length.

House references are everywhere: the t.i.tle track is gorgeously, oneirically poised on a honeyed Mr Fingers' plateau, and it is not only the arpeggiated synth which drives many of the tracks that is reminiscent of Jamie Principle. Yet the LP does not sound either like House or like most previous attempts to synthesize pop with House. So This is Goodbye is like House if it had started in the wilds of Canada rather the clubs of Chicago. Too many House-pop hybrids fill up House's s.p.a.ce with business, hectic activity. On Vocalcity and, to some extent The Present Lover, Luomo did the opposite: dilating the Song into an unfolding driftwork. But the Luomo LPs were more pop House than pop per se. So This is Goodbye is, however, very definitely a pop record; if anything, it's even more seductively catchy than Last Exit.

The obvious difference between So This is Goodbye and its predecessor is the absence of the tricksy stop-start stutter beats on the new record. If Junior Boys' inventiveness is no longer concentrated on beats, that is a reflection as much of a decline of the surrounding pop context as it a sign of the JB's newfound taste for rhythmic cla.s.sicism. Last Exit's reworkings of Timbaland/Dem 2 tic-beats meant that it had a relations.h.i.+p with a rhythmic psychedelia that was, then, still mutating pop into new shapes. In the intervening period, of course, both hip hop and British garage have taken a turn for the brutalist, and pop has consequently been deprived of any modernising force. Timbaland's beat surrealism became water-treading repet.i.tion years ago, displaced by the ultra-realist thuggish plod of corporate hip hop and the ugly carnality of crunk; and 2 Step's 'feminine pressure' has long since been crushed by the testos-terone-saturated bluntness of Grime and Dubstep. That skunk-fugged heaviness remains the antipodes of the Junior Boys' cyberian, etherealised, plaintive physicality; listening to the Junior Boys after Grime or Dubstep is like walking out of a locker room thick with dope smoke out onto a Caspar David Friedrich mountain. A lung-cleansing experience. (Significant also that those other ultra-heteros.e.xual post-Garage musics should have bred out the influence of House, while the Junior Boys return to it so emphatically.) But the removal of rhythmic tricksiness perhaps also indicates something of the scale of the Junior Boys' pop ambitions, which are best seen as the pioneering of a New MOR rather than another attempt at New Pop. If there is no cutting edge, then it makes more sense to abandon the former margins and refurbish the middle of the road. The Junior Boys' songs have always had more in common with a certain type of modernist MOR Hall and Oates, Prefab Sprout, Blue Nile, Lindsay Buckingham than with any rock. Modernist MOR is the opposite of the discredited strategy of entryism: it doesn't 'conform to deform', it locates the alien right in the heart of the familiar. The problem with current Pop is not the predominance of MOR, but the fact that MOR has been corrupted by the wheedling whine of Indie authenticity. In any just world, the Junior Boys, not the drippy moroseness of James Blunt nor the earthy earnestness of KT Tunstall, would be the globally dominant MOR brand in 2006.

Ultimately, though, So This is Goodbye sounds more middle of the tundra than middle of the road. It's as if the Junior Boys' journey into North America Endless has continued beyond the late-night freeways of Last Exit. It's like the first LP's city lights and Edward Hopper coffee bars have receded, and we're taken out, beyond even the small towns, into the depopulated wildernesses of Canada's Northern Territories. Or rather, it's as if those wildernesses have crept into the very marrow of the record. In The Idea of North, Glenn Gould suggests that the North's icy desolation has a special pull on the Canadian imagination. You hear this on So This is Goodbye not in any positive content so much as in the songs' gaps and absences; the gaps and absences that make the song what they are.

Those crevices and grottoes seem to multiply as the alb.u.m progresses. The second half of the alb.u.m (what I hear as the 'second side'; one of the most gratifying things about So This is Goodbye is that it is structured like a cla.s.sic pop alb.u.m, not an extras-clogged CD) diffuses forward motion into trails of electro-c.u.mulae. The t.i.tle track sets stately synths against the anticlimactic urgency of Acid House's Forever Now: the effect like running up a down escalator, frozen in an aching moment of transition. 'Like a child' and 'Caught in a Wave' immerse the agitated drive of the LP's signature arpeggiated synth in a vapour trail of opiated atmospherics.

The reading of Sinatra's 'When No-one Cares' is the knot which holds together all of So This is Goodbye, a clue to its modernist MOR intentions (lines from the song 'count souvenirs', 'like a child' provide the t.i.tles for other tracks, almost as if the song is a puzzle the whole alb.u.m is trying to solve). So This is Goodbye's songs bear much the same relation to high-energy as the late Sinatra's bore to big band jazz: what was once a communal, dance-oriented music has been hollowed out into a cavernous, contemplative s.p.a.ce for the most solitary of musings. On the Junior Boys' 'When No-one Cares' beats are abandoned altogether, the track's 'endless night' lit only by the dying-star flares and stalact.i.te-by-flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics.

The Junior Boys have transformed the song from the lonely-crowd melancholy of the original Frank at the bar staring into his whisky sour, happy couples partying obliviously behind him (or in his imagination) into a lament whispered in the wilderness, icy-breathed into the black mirror indifference of a Great Lake at midnight. It is as cosmically desolated as the Young G.o.ds' version of 'September Song', as arctic-white as Miles Davis' Aura. 'When No-one Cares' is one of my favourite Sinatra songs, and I must have first heard it 20 years ago, but with the Junior Boys' version which makes the catatonic stasis of the original's grief seem positively busy it is as if I am hearing the words for the first time.

Sinatra's No-One Cares (which could have been subt.i.tled: From Penthouse to Satis House) was like pop's take on literary modernism, an affect (rather than a concept) alb.u.m, a series of takes on a particular theme disconnection from a hyper-connected world with Frank the ageing sophisticate adrift in the McLuhan wasteland of the late 50s, Elvis already here, the Beatles on the way (who is the 'no-one' who doesn't care if not the teen audience who have found new objects of adoration?), the telephone and the television offering only new ways to be lonely. So This is Goodbye is like a globalised update of No-One Cares, its images of 'hotel lobbies', 'shopping malls we'll never see again' and 'homes for sale' sketching a world in a state of permanent impermance (should we say precarity?). The songs are overwhelmingly preoccupied with leave-taking and change, fixated on doing things for the first or the last time. 'So This is Goodbye' is not the t.i.tle track for nothing.

Sinatra's melancholy was the melancholy of ma.s.s (old) media technology the 'extimacy' of the records facilitated by the phonograph and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and urban sadness. 'I've flown around the world in plane/ designed the latest IBM brain/ but lately I'm so downhearted', Sinatra song on No-One Cares' 'I Can't Get Started'. Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce. Every town has become the 'tourist town' alluded to in So This is Goodbye's final track, 'FM', because now at home everyone is a tourist, both in the sense of permanently on the move but also in the sense of having the world at their fingertips, via the net. If Sinatra's best records, like Hopper's paintings, were about the way in which the urban experience produces new forms of isolation (and also: that such ma.s.s mediated private moments are the only mode of affective connection in a fragmented world), then So this is Goodbye is a response to the cyberspatial commonplace that, with the net, even the most remote spot can be connected up (and also: that such connection often amounts to a communion of lonely souls). Hence the impression that, if Sinatra's 'When No-one Cars' was an unanswered call from the heartless heart of the Big Apple, then the Junior Boys' version has been phoned-in down a digital line from the edge of Lake Ontario. (Is it accidental that the term 'cybers.p.a.ce' was invented by a Canadian?) So this is Goodbye is a very travel sick record. It expresses what we might call nomadalgia. Nomadalgia, the sickness of travel, would be a complement to, not the opposite of, the sickness for home, nostalgia. (And what of the relation between nomadalgia and hauntology?) It's entirely fitting that the final track, 'FM', should invoke both 'a return home' and radio (not the only reference to that ghost-medium on the alb.u.m), since internet radio with local stations available from any hotel in the world is perhaps more than anything else the objective correlative of our current condition. A condition in which, as iek so aptly puts it, 'global harmony and solipsism strangely coincide. That is to say, does not our immersion in cybers.p.a.ce go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizian monad which, although "without windows" that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more monads, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe?' ('No s.e.x Please, We Are Post-humans', http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/no-s.e.x-please-we-are-post-humans/)

Grey Area: Chris Pet.i.t's Content.

BFI/ Sight & Sound Website, March 2010.

At one point in Chris Pet.i.t's haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I now live what Pet.i.t filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more uncanny was the fact that Pet.i.t never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this might not be a doppelgnger container port somewhere else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Pet.i.t's text describes these 'blind buildings' while his camera tracks along them: 'non-places', 'prosaic sheds', 'the first buildings of a new age' which render 'architecture redundant'.

Content could be cla.s.sified as an essay film, but it's less essayistic than aphoristic. This isn't to say that it's disconnected or incoherent: Pet.i.t himself has called Content a '21st-century road movie, ambient', and its reflections on ageing and parenthood, terrorism and new media are woven into a consistency that's non-linear, but certainly not fragmentary.

Content is about 'correspondence', in different senses of the word. It was in part generated by electronic correspondence between Pet.i.t and his two major collaborators: Ian Penman (whose text is voiced by the German actor Hanns Zischler) and the German musician Antye Greie. Penman's text is a series of reflections on the subject of email, that 'anonymous yet intimate' ethereal communication. Some of Penman's disquisitions on email are accompanied by images of postcards the poignant tactility of this obsolete form of correspondence all the more affecting because the senders and addressees are now forgotten. Greie, meanwhile, produces skeins of electronica that provide Content with a kind of sonic unconscious in which terms and concepts referred to in the images and the voice track are refracted, extrapolated and supplemented.

One of the first phrases cited in Greie's soundwork which resembles sketches for unrealised songs is a quotation from Roy Batty's famous speech in Blade Runner: 'If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.' This is a phrase Penman has made much of in his own writings on recording, technology and haunting and it brings us to the other meaning of 'correspondence' Content plays with: correspondences in the sense of connections and a.s.sociations. Some of these are underscored by Pet.i.t in his dryly-poetic text; others he leaves the viewers to make for themselves.

One of the most gratifying aspects of Content, in fact, is that by contrast with so many contemporary television doc.u.mentaries, which neurotically hector the audience by incessantly reiterating their core thesis, Pet.i.t trusts in the intelligence and speculative power of the viewer. Where so much television now involves a mutual redundancy of image and voice the image is slaved into ill.u.s.trating the text; the voice merely glosses the image Content is in large part about the s.p.a.ces between image and text, what is unsaid in (and about) the images.

The use of a German actor and musician and the many references to Europe in Content reflect Pet.i.t's childhood which, as he describes in the film, was partly spent as a forces child in Germany. But it also reflects Pet.i.t's long-standing desire for some kind of reconciliation between British culture and European modernism. Pet.i.t has described Content as an 'informal coda' to his 1979 film Radio On (recently reissued on BFI DVD). With its strong debt to European art cinema, Radio On projected a rapprochement between British and European film that never happened a rapprochement antic.i.p.ated in the 1970s art pop (Kraftwerk, Bowie) used so prominently in that film. Pet.i.t imagined a British cinema that, like that music, could a.s.sert its Europeanness not by rejecting America, but by confidently absorbing American influences. Yet this future never arrived.

'Radio On,' Pet.i.t said in a recent interview, 'ended with a car 'stalled on the edge of the future', which we didn't know then would be Thatcherism.' Ahead lay a bizarre yet ba.n.a.l mix of the unprecedented and the archaic. Instead of accelerating down Kraftwerk's autobahn, we found ourselves, as Pet.i.t puts it in Content, 'reversing into a tomorrow based on a non-existent past', as the popular modernism Radio On was part of found itself eclipsed by a toxic-addictive confection of consumer-driven populism, heritage kitsch, xenophobia and US corporate culture. In this light, Content stands as a quiet but emphatic reproach to the British cinema of the last 30 years, which in its dominant variants drab social realism, faux gangster, picture-book costume drama or mid-Atlantic middle-cla.s.s fantasia has retreated from modernity. It isn't only the poor and the nonwhite who are edited out of Notting Hill, for example it's also the Westway, west London's Ballardian flyover, which now stands as a relic of 'the modern city that London never became'.

Yet Content isn't just a requiem for the lost possibilities of the last 30 years. In its use of stunning but underused locations the ready-made post-Fordist science-fiction landscapes of Felixstowe container port, the eerie Cold War terrain of nearby Orford Ness Content demonstrates not only what British cinema overlooks, but what it could still be.

Postmodern Antiques: Patience (After Sebald).

Sight & Sound, April 2011.

The first time I saw Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker when it was broadcast by Channel 4 in the early 1980s I was immediately reminded of the Suffolk landscapes where I had holidayed as a child. The overgrown pill boxes, the squat Martello towers, the rusting groynes which resembled gravestones: this all added up to a readymade science fiction scene. At one point in Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) (2011) an essay film inspired by W G Sebald's novel The Rings of Saturn theatre director Katie Williams makes the same connection, drawing a comparison between the demilitarised expanses of the Suffolk coast and Tarkovsky's Zone.

When I read Rings of Saturn, I was hoping that it would be an exploration of these eerily numinous s.p.a.ces. Yet what I found was something rather different: a book that, it seemed to me at least, morosely trudged through the Suffolk s.p.a.ces without really looking at them; that offered a Mittelbrow miserabilism, a stock disdain, in which the human settlements are routinely dismissed as shabby and the inhuman s.p.a.ces are oppressive. The landscape in The Rings of Saturn functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian's listless daydream. Instead of engaging with previous literary encounters with the Suffolk Henry James went on a walking tour of the county; his namesake MR James set two of his most atmospheric ghost stories there Sebald tends to reach for the likes of Borges. My scepticism was fed by the solemn cult that settled around Sebald suspiciously quickly, and which seemed all-too-ready to admire those well-wrought sentences. Sebald offered a rather easy difficulty, an anachronistic, antiqued model of 'good literature' which acted as if many of the developments in 20th century experimental fiction and popular culture had never happened. It is not hard to see why a German writer would want to blank out the middle part of the 20th century; and many of the formal anachronisms of Sebald's writing its strange sense that this is the 21st century seen through the restrained yet ornate prose of an early 20th century essayist perhaps arise from this desire, just as the novels themselves are about the various, ultimately failed, ruses conscious and unconscious that damaged psyches deploy to erase traumas and construct new ident.i.ties. The writer Robert Macfarlane has called Sebald a 'postmodern antiquarian', and the indeterminate status of The Rings of Saturn is it autobiography, a novel or a travelogue? points to a certain playfulness, but this never emerges at the level of the book's content. It was necessary for Sebald to remain po-faced in order for the 'antiquing' to be successful. Some of Gee's images of Suffolk take their cue from the black and white photographs which ill.u.s.trate The Rings Of Saturn. But the photographs were a contrivance: Sebald would photocopy them many times until they achieved the required graininess.

Gee's film was premiered as part of a weekend of events superbly curated by Gareth Evans of Artevents under the rubric After Sebald: Place and Re-Enchantment at Snape Maltings, near Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. In the end, however, Sebald's novels fits into any discussion of place and enchantment only very awkwardly: his work is more about displacement and disenchantment than their opposites. In Patience (After Sebald), the artist Tacita Dean observes that only children have a real sense of home. Adults are always aware of the precariousness and transitoriness of their dwelling place: none more so than Sebald, a German writer who spent most of his life in Norfolk.

Patience (After Sebald) follows Gee's doc.u.mentaries about Radiohead and Joy Division. The s.h.i.+ft from rock to literature, Gee told Macfarlane, was one that came naturally to someone whose sensibilities were formed by the UK music culture of the 1970s. If Sebald had been writing in the 1970s, Gee claimed, he would surely have been mentioned in the NME alongside other luminaries of avant-garde literature. Gee started reading Sebald in 2004, after a recommendation from his friend, the novelist Jeff Noon. The film's somewhat gnomic t.i.tle was a relic of an earlier version of what the film would be. It now suggests the slowing of time that the Suffolk landscape imposes, a release from urban urgencies, but it is actually a reference to a pa.s.sage in Sebald's novel Austerlitz: 'Austerlitz told me that he sometimes sat here for hours, laying out these photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if playing a game of patience, and that then one by one, he turned them over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pus.h.i.+ng the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left but the grey tabletop, or he felt exhausted from the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had to rest on the ottoman.'

Gee had originally intended to make a film about the non-places in Sebald's work: the hotel rooms or railway station waiting rooms in which characters ruminate, converse or break down (Austerlitz himself comes to a shattering revelation about his own ident.i.ty in the waiting room at Liverpool Street station). In the end, however, Gee was drawn to the book which osten-sibly at least is most focused on a single landscape.

Gee filmed practically everything himself, using a converted 16 mm Bolex camera. He wanted something that would produce frames that were 'tighter than normal', he said, 'as if a single character is looking'. Gee sees Patience (After Sebald) as an essay film, in the tradition of Chris Pet.i.t's work and Patrick Keiller's Robinson trilogy. But when I put it to him that Patience lacks the single voice that defines Pet.i.t or Keiller's essay films, Gee responded self-deprecatingly. He had tried to insert himself into his own films, but he had always been dissatisfied with the results: his voice didn't sound right; his acting didn't convince; his writing wasn't strong enough. In Patience, as in the Joy Division doc.u.mentary, the story is therefore told by others: Macfarlane, Dean, Iain Sinclair, Pet.i.t, the literary critic Marina Warner and the artist Jeremy Millar. Millar provided one of the most uncanny images in Patience. When he lit a firework in tribute to Sebald, the smoke unexpectedly formed a shape which resembled Sebald's face, something which Gee underlines in the film by animating a transition between Millar's photograph and an image of the novelist.

More than one of the speakers at the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium acknowledged that they misremembered The Rings of Saturn. There's something fitting about this, of course, given that the duplicity of memory might have been Sebald's major theme; but my suspicion is that misremembering of a different kind contributes to the Rings of Saturn cult; that the book induces its readers to hallucinate a text that is not there, but which meets their desires for a kind of modernist travelogue, a novel that would do justice to the Suffolk landscape better than Sebald's actually novel does. Patience (After Sebald) is itself a misremembering of The Rings of Saturn which could not help but reverse many of the novel's priorities and emphases. In The Rings of Saturn, Suffolk frequently (and frustratingly) recedes from attention, as Sebald follows his own lines of a.s.sociation. By contrast, the main substance of the film consists of images of the Suffolk landscape the heathland over which you can walk for miles without seeing a soul, the crumbling cliffs of the lost city of Dunwich, the enigma of Orford Ness, its inscrutable paG.o.das silently presiding over Cold War military experiments which remain secret. Sebald's reflections, voiced in Patience by Jonathan Pryce, anchor these images far less securely than they do in the novel. At Snape, some of those who had re-created Sebald's walk including Gee himself confessed that they had failed to attain the author's lugubrious mood: the landscape turned out to be too energising, its sublime desolation proving to be fallow ground for gloomy psychological interiority. In a conversation with Robert Macfarlane after the screening of the film, Gee said that it was not really necessary that Sebald had taken the walk. He meant that it was not important whether or not Sebald actually did the walk exactly as The Rings of Saturn's narrator described it, in one go: that the novel could have been based on a number of different walks which took place over a longer period of time. But I couldn't help but hear Gee's remark in a different way: that it was not necessary for Sebald to have taken the walk at all: that, far from being a close engagement with the Suffolk terrain, The Rings of Saturn could have been written had Sebald never set foot in Suffolk.

This was the view of Richard Mabey, cast in the role of doubting Thomas at the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium. Mabey who has written and broadcast about nature for 40 years, and whose latest book Weeds has the glorious subt.i.tle How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature argued that Sebald was guilty of the pathetic fallacy. When he read The Rings Of Saturn, Mabey said, he felt as if a very close friend had been belittled; although he had walked the Suffolk coastland countless times, he couldn't recognise it from Sebald's descriptions. But perhaps the issue with Sebald is that he wasn't guilty enough of the pathetic fallacy, that instead of staining the landscape with his pa.s.sions, as Thomas Hardy did with Wess.e.x, or the Brontes did with Yorks.h.i.+re, or, more recently, as the musician Richard Skelton has done with the Lancas.h.i.+re moorland Sebald used Suffolk as a kind of Rorschach blot, a trigger for a.s.sociative processes that take flight from the landscape rather than take root in it. In any case, Mabey wanted a confrontation with nature in all its inhuman exteriority. He sounded like a Deleuzean philosopher when he expostulated about the 'nested heterogeneity' and 'autonomous poetry' of micro-ecosytems to be found in a cow's hoof print; of how it was necessary to 'think like a mountain', and quoted approvingly Virginia Woolf's evocation of a 'philosophising and dreaming land'. I was struck by the parallels between Mabey's account of nature and Patrick Keiller's invocation of lichen as 'a non-human intelligence' in Robinson in Ruins. With its examination of the 'undiscovered country of nearby', Robert Macfarlane's film for the BBC, The Wild Places of Ess.e.x, shown as part of the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium, was also close to Mabey's vision of a nature thriving in the s.p.a.ces abandoned by, or inhospitable to, humans. (Macfarlane's film now seems like a counterpart to Julien Temple's wonderful Oil City Confidential, which rooted Dr Feelgood's febrile rhythm and blues in the lunar landscape of Ess.e.x's Canvey Island.) Patience (After Sebald) could appeal to a Sebald sceptic like me because in spite of Sebald it reaches the wilds of Suffolk. At the same time, Gee's quietly powerful film caused me to doubt my own scepticism, sending me back to Sebald's novels, in search of what others had seen, but which had so far eluded me.

The Lost Unconscious: Christopher Nolan's.

Inception.

Film Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3, 2011.

In Christopher Nolan's breakthrough memory-loss thriller Memento from 2000, the traumatised and heavily tattooed protagonist Lenny has a suggestive conversation with a detective: TEDDY: Look at your police file. It was complete when I gave it to you. Who took the twelve pages out?

LEONARD: You, probably.

TEDDY: No, you took them out.

LEONARD: Why would I do that?.

TEDDY: To set yourself a puzzle you won't ever solve.

Like Lenny, Christopher Nolan has specialised in setting puzzles that can't be solved. Duplicity in the sense of both deception and doubling runs right through his work. It's not only the case that Nolan's work is about duplicity; it is itself duplicitous, drawing audiences into labyrinths of indeterminacy.

Nolan's films have a coolly obsessive quality, in which a number of repeating elements a traumatised hero and his antagonist; a dead woman; a plot involving manipulation and dissimulation are reshuffled. These film noir tropes are then further scrambled in the manner of a certain kind of neo-noir. Nolan acknowledges Angel Heart (1987) and The Usual Suspects (1995) as touchstones (he mentions both in an interview which is included on the Memento DVD, singling out Parker's film as a particular inspiration), but one can also see parallels with the meta-detective fictions of Robbe-Grillet and Paul Auster. There's a s.h.i.+ft from the epistemological problems posed by unreliable narrators to a more general ontological indeterminacy, in which the nature of the whole fictional world is put into doubt.

Memento remains emblematic in this respect. At first glance, the film's enigma resolves relatively simply. Lenny, who suffers from anterograde amnesiac condition which means that he can't make new memories, is 'setting puzzles for himself that can't be solved' so that he can always be pursuing his wife's murderer, long after Lenny has killed him. But after repeated viewings, the critic Andy Klein in a piece for Salon.com pointedly ent.i.tled 'Everything You Wanted To Know About Memento' conceded that he wasn't 'able to come up with the 'truth' about what transpired prior to the film's action. Every explanation seems to involve some breach of the apparent 'rules' of Leonard's disability not merely the rules as he explains them, but the rules as we witness them operating throughout most of the film.) The rules are crucial to Nolan's method. If Memento is a kind of impossible object, then its impossibility is generated not via an anything-goes ontological anarchy but by the setting up of rules which it violates in particular ways just as the effect of Escher's paintings depend upon unsettling rather than ignoring the rules of perspective.

Nolan nevertheless maintains that, however intractable his films might appear, they are always based on a definitive truth which he knows but will not reveal. As he said of Inception in the interview with Wired, 'I've always believed that if you make a film with ambiguity, it needs to be based on a true interpretation. If it's not, then it will contradict itself, or it will be somehow insubstantial and end up making the audience feel cheated. Ambiguity has to come from the inability of the character to know and the alignment of the audience with that character'. When the interviewer Robert Capps puts it to Nolan that there might be several explanations of the film's ending, that the 'right answer' is impossible to find, the director flatly contradicts him: 'Oh no, I've got an answer.' But Nolan's remarks may only be another act of misdirection; and, if a century of cultural theory has taught us anything, it is that an author's supposed intentions can only ever const.i.tute a supplementary (para)text, never a final word. What are Nolan's films about, after all, but the instability of any master position? They are full of moments in which the manipulator the one who looks, writes or narrates becomes the manipulated the object of the gaze, the character in a story written or told by someone else.

In Inception, Cobb is an 'extractor', an expert at a special kind of industrial espionage, which involves entering into people's dreams and stealing their secrets. He and his team have been hired by hyper-wealthy businessman Saito to infiltrate the dreams of Robert Fischer, the heir to a ma.s.sive energy conglomerate. But this time Cobb's team is not required to extract information, but to do something which the film tells is much more difficult: they are tasked with implanting an idea into Fischer's mind. Cobb's effectiveness as a dream thief is compromised by the projection of his dead wife, Mal, the pathological stain he now brings with him into any dream caper. Mal died after she suffered an apparent psychotic break. She and Cobb set up a lover's retreat in the 'unconstructed dreams.p.a.ce' that the dream thieves call Limbo. But after she became too attached to this virtual love nest, Cobb 'incepted' in her the idea that the world in which they were living was not real. As Cobb mordantly observes, there is nothing more resilient than an idea. Even when she is restored to what Cobb takes to be reality, Mal remains obsessed with the idea that she the world around her is not real, so she throws herself from a hotel window in order to return to what she believes is the real world. The film turns on how Cobb deals with this traumatic event in order to incept Fischer, Cobb has first of all to descend into Limbo and defeat Mal. He achieves this by simultaneously accepting his part in Mal's death and by repudiating the Mal projection as an inadequate copy of his dead wife. With the Mal projection vanquished and the dream-heist successfully completed, Cobb is finally able to return to the children from whom he has been separated. Yet this ending has more than a suggestion of wish fulfilment fantasy about it, and the suspicion that Cobb might be marooned somewhere in a multi-layered oneirc labyrinth, a psychotic who has mistaken dreams for reality, makes Inception deeply ambiguous. Nolan's own remarks have carefully maintained the ambiguity.' I choose to believe that Cobb gets back to his kids,' Nolan told Robert Capps.

Nolan's films are preoccupied with, to paraphrase Memento's Teddy, 'the lies that we tell ourselves to stay happy'. Yet the situation is worse even than that. It's one thing to lie to oneself; it's another to not even know whether one is lying to oneself or not. This might be the case with Cobb in Inception, and it's notable that, in the Wired interview, Nolan says that 'The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn't care.' Not caring whether we are lying to ourselves may be the price for happiness or at least the price one pays for release from excruciating mental anguish. In this respect, Dormer in Insomnia (2002) could be the anti-Cobb. His inability to sleep which naturally also means an inability to dream correlates with the breakdown of his capacity to tell himself a comforting story about who he is. After the shooting of his partner, Dormer's ident.i.ty collapses into a terrifying epistemological void, a black box that cannot be opened. He simply doesn't know whether or not he intended to kill his partner (just as Borden in The Prestige cannot remember which knot he tied on the night that Angier's wife died in a bungled escapology act.) But in Nolan's worlds, it is not only that we deceive ourselves; it is also that we are deceived about having a self. There is no separating ident.i.ty from fiction. In Memento, Lenny literally writes (on) himself, but the very fact that he can write a script for future versions of himself is a horrifying demonstration of his lack of any coherent ident.i.ty a revelation that his Sisyphian quest both exemplifies and is in flight from. Inception leaves us with the possibility that Cobb's quest and apparent rediscovery of his children could be a version of the same kind of loop: a Purgatorio to Memento's Inferno.

'The urge to rewrite ourselves as real-seeming fictions is present in us all,' writes Christopher Priest in his novel The Glamour. It's not at all surprising that Nolan has adapted a novel by Priest, since there are striking parallels between the two men's methods and interests. Priest's novels are also 'puzzles that can't be solved', in which writing, biography and psychosis slide into one another, posing troubling ontological questions about memory, ident.i.ty and fiction. The idea of minds as datascapes which can be infiltrated inevitably puts one in mind of the 'consensual hallucination' of Gibson's cybers.p.a.ce, but the dreamsharing concept can be traced back to Priest and his extraordinary 1977 novel, A Dream of Wess.e.x. In Priest's novel, a group of researcher-volunteers use a 'dream projector' to enter into a shared dream of a (then) future England. Like the dreamsharing addicts we briefly glimpse in one of Inception's most suggestive scenes, some of the characters in A Dream of Wess.e.x inevitably prefer the simulated environment to the real world, and, unlike Cobb, they choose to stay there. The differences in the way that the concept of shared dreaming is handled in 1977 and 2010 tell us a great deal about the contrasts between social democracy and neoliberalism. While Inception's dreamsharing technology is like the internet a military invention turned into a commercial application, Priest's shared dream project is government-run. The Wess.e.x dream world is lyrical and languid, still part of the hazy afterglow of 60s psychedelia. It's all a far cry from Inception's noise and fury, the mind as a militarised zone.

Inception (not entirely satisfactorily) synthesizes the intellectual and metaphysical puzzles of Memento and The Prestige (2006) with the big budget ballistics of Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). The problem is the prolonged action sequences, which come off as perfunctory at best. At points, it as if Inception's achievement is to have provided a baroquely sophisticated motivation for some very dumb action sequences. An unkind viewer might think that the entirety of Inception's complex ontological structure had been constructed to justify cliches of action cinema such as the ludicrous amount of things that characters can do in the time that it takes for a van to fall from a bridge into a river. Blogger Carl Neville complains that Inception amounts to 'three uninvolving action movies playing out simultaneously' 'What could have been a fascinatingly vertiginous trip into successively fantastic, impossible worlds, not to mention the limbo of the raw unconscious into which a couple of the central characters plunge,' Neville argues, ends up looking wholly like a series of action movies, one within the other: "reality" looks and feels like a "globalisation" movie, jumping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa to Sydney with a team of basically decent technical geniuses who are forced to live outside the law, making sure there are lots of helicopter shots of cityscapes and exotic local colour. Level one dream is basically The Bourne Ident.i.ty...rainy, grey, urban. Level two is the Matrix, zero gravity fistfights in a modernist hotel, level three, depressingly, turns out to be a 70s Bond film while the raw Id is basically just a collapsing cityscape.

The 'level three' snow scenes at least resemble one of the most visually striking Bond films 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service but it's hard not to share Neville's sense of anti-climax. Rather than picking up pace and ramping up the metaphysical complexity, the film rushes towards its disappointing denouement. The elaborate set-up involving the 'dream architect' Ariadne is summarily abandoned, as she is told to forget the labyrinth and 'find the most direct route through.' When Ariadne and the film accede to these demands, it as if the imperatives of the action thriller have crashed through the intricacies of Nolan's puzzle narrative with all the subtlety of the freight train that erupts into the cityscape in an earlier scene.

Neville is right that Inception is very far from being a 'fascinatingly vertiginous trip into successively fantastic, impossible worlds', but it is worth thinking about why Nolan showed such restraint. (His parsimony couldn't contrast more starkly with the stylistic extravagances of something like Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones (2009), which aims at the fantastic and the impossible, but ends up CGI-onanistic rather than lyrically oneiric.) One initially strange thing about Inception is how un-dreamlike the dreams in the film are. It's tempting to see the Nolan of Inception as a reverse Hitchc.o.c.k where Hitchc.o.c.k took De Chirico-like dream topographies and remotivated them as thriller s.p.a.ces, Nolan takes standard action flick sequences and repackages them as dreams. Except in a scene where the walls seem to close in around Cobb when he is being pursued which, interestingly, takes place in the film's apparent 'reality' the spatial distortions at work in Inception do not resemble the ways in which dreams distend or collapse s.p.a.ce. There are none of the bizarre adjacencies or distances that do not diminish that we see in Welles's The Trial (1962), a film which, perhaps better than any other, captures the uncanny topographies of the anxiety dream. When, in one of Inception's most remarked upon scenes, Ariadne causes the Paris citys.p.a.ce to fold up around herself and Cobb, she is behaving more like the CGI engineer who is creating the scene than any dreamer. This is a display of technical prowess, devoid of any charge of the uncanny. The Limbo scenes, meanwhile, are like an inverted version of Fredric Jameson's 'surrealism without the unconscious': this is an unconscious without surrealism. The world that Cobb and Mal 'create' out of their memories is like a Powerpoint presentation of a love affair rendered as some walk-through simulation: faintly haunting in its very lack of allure, quietly horrifying in its solipsistic emptiness. Where the unconscious was, there CGI shall be.

In an influential blog post, Devin Faraci argues that the whole film is a metaphor for cinematic production itself: Cobb is the director, Arthur the producer, Ariadne the screenwriter, Saito 'the big corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game', Fischer the audience. 'Cobb, as a director, takes Fischer through an engaging, stimulating and exciting journey,' Faraci argues, 'one that leads him to an understanding about himself. Cobb is the big time movie director...who brings the action, who brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the humanity and the emotion.' In fact, as a director Cobb is something of a mediocrity (who we must conclude is far less accomplished than Nolan) as Neville argues, Fischer's 'journey' takes him through a series of standard-issue action set pieces, which are 'engaging, stimulating and exciting' only in some weakly generic way. Significantly and symptomatically, Faraci's hyperbole here sounds as if it might belong in a marketing pitch for Cobb and his team; just as when Cobb and the others eulogise the 'creativity' of the dream architecture process you can create worlds that never existed! they sound like they are reciting advertising copy or the script from a corporate video. The scenes in which the team prepare for Fischer's inception might have been designed to bring out the depressing vacuousness of the concept of the 'creative industries'. They play like a marketing team's own fantasies about what they themselves are doing: the view from inside an Apprentice contestant's head, perhaps. In any case, Inception seems to be less a meta-meditation on the power of cinema than a reflection of the way in which cinematic techniques have become imbricated into a ba.n.a.l spectacle which fusing business machismo, entertainment protocols and breathless hype enjoys an unprecedented dominion over our working lives and our dreaming minds.

It is no doubt this sense of pervasive mediation, of generalised simulation, that tempts Faraci into claiming that 'Inception is a dream to the point where even the dreamsharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn't an extractor. He can't go into other people's dreams. He isn't on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he's being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.' The moment when Mal confronts Cobb with all this is reminiscent of the scene in Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990) when a psychiatrist attempts to persuade Arnold Schwarzenegger's Quaid that he is having a psychotic breakdown. But while Total Recall presents us with a strong distinction between Quaid's quotidian ident.i.ty as a construction worker and his life as a secret agent at the centre of an interplanetary struggle a distinction that the film very quickly unsettles Inception gives us only Cobb the generic hero: handsome, dapper, yet troubled. If, as Faraci claims, Cobb isn't an extractor and he isn't on the run from faceless corporate goons, then who is he? The 'real' Cobb would then be an unrepresented X, outside the film's reality labyrinth the empty figure who identifies with (and as) Cobb the commercially-constructed fiction; ourselves, in other words, insofar as we are successfully interpellated by the film.

This leads to another difference between Inception and its Philip K d.i.c.k-inspired 80s and 90s precursors such as Total Recall, Videodrome (1983) and Existenz (1999). There is very little of the 'reality bleed', the confusion of ontological hierarchy, that defined those films: throughout Inception, it is surprisingly easy for both the audience and the characters to remember where they are in the film's ontological architecture. When Ariadne is being trained by Cobb's partner, Arthur, she is taken round a virtual model of the impossible Penrose Steps. On the face of it, however, Inception is remarkable for its seeming failure to explore any paradoxical Escheresque topologies. The four different reality levels remain distinct, just as the causality between them remains well-formed. But this apparently stable hierarchy might be violated by the object upon which much of the discussion of the film's ending has centred: the thimble, the 'totem' that Cobb ostensibly uses to determine whether he is in waking reality or not. If it spins without falling, then he is in a dream. If it falls, then he is not. Many have noted the inadequacy of this supposed proof. At best, it can only establish that Cobb is not in his 'own' dream, for what is there to stop his dreaming mind simulating the properties of the real thimble? Besides, in the film's chronology, the thimble that ostensible token of the empirical actual first of all appears as a virtual object, secreted by Mal inside a doll's house in Limbo. And a totem, it should be remembered, is an object of faith (it's worth noting in pa.s.sing that there are many references to faith throughout the film).

The a.s.sociation of the thimble with Mal there are online debates as to whether the thimble was first of all Cobb's or Mal's is suggestive. Both Mal and the thimble represent competing versions of the Real. For Cobb, the thimble stands in for the Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition's account of what reality is something sensible, tangible. Mal, by contrast, represents a psychoa.n.a.lytic Real a trauma that disrupts any attempt to maintain a stable sense of reality; that which the subject cannot help bringing with him no matter where he goes. (Mal's malevolent, indestructible persistence recalls the sad resilience of the projections which haunt the occupants of the s.p.a.ce station in Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).) No matter what 'reality level' Cobb is on, Mal and the thimble are always there. But where the thimble supposedly 'belongs' to the 'highest' reality level, Mal 'belongs' to the 'lowest' level, the lover's limbo which Cobb repudiated.

Mal conflates two roles that had been kept separate in Nolan's films the antagonist-double and the grief object. In Nolan's debut, Following (1998), the antagonist-double of the unnamed protagonist is the thief who shares his name with Inception's hero. The theme of the antagonist-double is nowhere more apparent than in Nolan's remake of Insomnia and The Dark Knight, films which are in many ways about the proximity between the ostensible hero and his beyond-good-and-evil rival. Nolan's adaptation of Christopher Priest's novel, The Prestige, meanwhile, is in effect a film in which there is a defining antagonism but no single protagonist: by the end of the film, the illusionists Angier and Borden are doubled in multiple ways, just as they are defined and destroyed by their struggle with one another. More often than not, grief is the source of these antagonistic doublings. Grief itself is a puzzle that cannot be solved, and there's a certain (psychic) economy in collapsing the antagonist into the grief object, since the work of grief is not o