Finality is defined as the ‘impression of being final and irreversible’ (Oxford Dictionaries, 2017). Within today’s society the significance of the final, and transition from the familiar into a world of change, is particularly poignant. The Brexit vote in June, and the recent inauguration of Donald Trump, has instigated an upsurge of hatred, vitriol and prejudice. From the horrifying increase in terror attacks all over the world, to the harrowing treatment of refugees reported in the media of the past year, some of us may feel the world we live in is becoming somewhat unrecognisable, and regressing into a haunting ideology of truly dangerous values.
Whilst the world we once knew is under the thumb of violence the necessity to resist, and challenge, these ideas has never been so important. As postgraduate literature students, we are finishing our education in a deeply troubling time; therefore, the importance of the arts and humanities is greater than ever to encourage resistance through new dialogues, voices and literatures. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950 William Faulkner spoke of the ‘inexhaustible voice’ of man and ‘the writer’s duty to write’. ‘The poet’s voice’ continues Faulkner, ‘need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail’ (Faulkner, 1950) accentuating the powerful, and vital, nature of the written word. The study of literature permeates our barriers, activates a space in which to question, critique, write back and teaches us to never stop asking questions. Such ability to evoke change can, we hope, interrogate the concept of finality and introduce new dialogues as a response to harmful and prejudicial ideas.
We are holding a one-day conference at York St. John University, on June 6th 2017, entitled The Book Closes: Finality in Contemporary Literature in which we aim to reflect on and respond to a number of issues in current literature surrounding finality, addressing and challenging its irreversible quality. Please send abstracts of 200-300 words to ysj.ma.symposium2017@gmail.com by Wednesday 5th of April. Link to CFP: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/01/30/the-book-closes-finality-in-contemporary-literature
In 1955, 10 years after his liberation from Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote a preoccupied article, pointing his finger against the “silence of the civilized world”, which regarded any mention of Nazi extermination camps as in bad taste. Levi feared that the greatest crime imaginable, still so vivid in the minds of survivors, was in danger of being forgotten by the public. He rhetorically asked: “Is this silence justified?”
On Thursday the 9th of March Laurence Rees, historian and former head of BBC history programmes, presented at Waterstones York his latest book The Holocaust, claiming that books and talks about Holocaust are “a warning from history”, echoing Levi’s fear of people forgetting about such a terrible crime. Rees interest in the Holocaust history has been ongoing for 25 years, since he realized his first documentary for BBC on the subject. The Holocaust is the combination of those 25 years of research and interviews. It is a piece of work that speaks through the voices of victims, killers and bystanders. Rees draws on interviews collected over the years for his TV programmes, often previously unpublished. The book uses documentary techniques, frequently cutting from the narrator to eyewitnesses, adding immediacy and emotion.
Through the voices of people who experienced the holocaust Rees also approaches some persistent myths on the subject. To tackle the postwar claims that victims followed their killers “like sheep” and show that there was defiance and some even obtained weapons and turned them against Germans, Rees tells the story of Marek Edelman, who fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Edelman recalled: “the first few days were our victory. We were used to being the ones who ran away from the Germans. They had no expectation of Jews fighting like that.” Rees also fights the idea that the Nazi machinery of mass murder was impersonal or antiseptic, describing the sadistic violence of some killers – in some case through their accounts – the carnage in death camps overflowing with corpses, and the unspeakable suffering: when children were dragged away from their parents in the Łódź ghetto, one survivor remembered: “their screams reached the sky”.
The Holocaust it is not an original interpretation, but offers an interesting approach. Rees tells a complex story with compassion and clarity, but he also manages not to sacrifice the nuances of it. The voices of the victims are accompanied by the ones of ordinary Germans and sadistic killers who, interviewed decades after the destruction of the Third Reich, never regretted their role in the Holocaust and still believed that they had done the right thing. Erna Krantz from Bavaria recalled: “You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets. There was order and discipline … It was, I thought, a better time”. Wolfgang Horn, a former soldier, explained his decision of burning down a Russian village: “because the locals were too primitive for us”. One of Goebbels personal assistants, interviewed in 1992, summed up his experience of the Holocaust in one word, “paradise”, and when asked if he ever felt guilty about the slaughtering of children he cited Groaning: “the enemy is not the children. The enemy is the blood of the children that will grow up to be Jew”. The Holocaust helps to recover the memory of those children whose only guilt was to be Jews, and the memory of the other victims, survivors of what Rees described “a crime of singular horror in the history of the human race”.
It is the duty of everyone to meditate on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the credibility or the soundness of the things they said, but from the suggestive way in which they said them. And we must remember that their faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
Every day when I walk to class, I go past the old quad and remember walking there this time last year when I first attended an open day for the English Literature course here at York St. John. At that time the snow drops were only just shoots. But now the snow drops are giving way to the crocuses, and the many other flowers that spring welcomes in. It is this sight on a day-to-day basis which means the most to me when it comes to thinking about how far I have come this past year. Because back in March of 2016 I could never have imagined the events of the following year, or that I would end up getting to see those flowers in full bloom. As a fan of metaphors, this feels like a positive omen in relation to the success of my studies.
My first week at York St. John only managed to prove further to me that I had made the right choice on where to study. Settling in was such an easy thing because the city isn’t too difficult to navigate and the campus is friendly enough that, should you get lost, you are easily able to find a fellow student to help you get back on track. As soon as fresher’s week began, I was meeting students who had the same motivation as me to go out and learn new things. In the welcome lectures for the course, we weren’t only greeted with the hello of our teachers and peers but by the poet in residence Jack Mapanje. Along with the head of subject Dr Anne-Marie Evans, there was a conversation led about the power of poetry and writing as an act of changing the world. Those lectures encouraged me right from the start to see writing as not just an academic or class led routine, but as something far more liberating than I had ever previously realised. Immediately this act of learning felt more like a discovery opposed to something just being told to me. When we heard Mapanje read his poems, it made me want to go out and read more of his work without being told to. That was the first step towards making progress with my own education by beginning to read actively, making mental notes as I went.
Realising how important and relevant the arts are in the modern world has been a big part of my studies thus far. It began with seeing how the world around me is represented within the texts I study every day. Such as how the familiar places I frequently see in York are represented in Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. Studying this book was also the first opportunity we had as students to attempt our own creative work as well as literary criticism in essay format. Getting to go to the places we had read about and use it as a means of inspiring our own work was an intriguing experience. It made me feel like Sylvia Plath when she visited the moors Emily Brontë wandered and wrote about her thoughts on Wuthering Heights.
At the beginning of the year, essays seemed a lot more complex than they do now. That is largely because we spent so much time in class going over how to build a strong thesis statement, structure and argument. Going over those different elements meant that when it came to writing my first assessed pieces nerves weren’t all-consuming, but instead just a part of producing something I had worked hard on and wanted to gain positive feedback from. Forgetting about the mark scheme and focusing on the content has been the biggest achievement for me so far as an individual. And that wouldn’t have been possible to achieve without staying motivated or open to the constructive criticism of those around me. It might sound obvious, but when you really internally register that the best way to make your essay have a convincing flow and tone is to focus on how passionate you are about your topic, it is much easier to succeed. That is largely because you learn to care less about grade barriers. Of course, they matter, but if you let the shadow hang over the content you are producing it will never truly reach its full potential.
The most challenging pieces I have written as part of my undergraduate degree so far were the ones which have shaped my development the most. Because they required research and commitment that doesn’t just happen overnight, it required me to put in the time and effort to make those ideas a reality. Those would probably be the very early pieces of semester one previously mentioned, and my most recent essays this second semester. I’ve really enjoyed writing on Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues as these were both texts which opened new branches of interest for me which went beyond the class room (those are the best kind of texts) They shared the common theme of space and place, which is fascinating due to how it is represented in largely any text you can think of. Due to my love of travelling, it was not difficult to quickly focus in on researching how New York or Britain are represented as places. And also, the element of dystopia or speculative science fiction has been something I have explored alongside (as well as in relation to) space and place. These areas of research have been the areas where my voice as an individual have really taken root, which has aided my confidence when writing in regards to newer ideas which I might not possess too much knowledge on.
In addition to challenging and enlightening me, the literature course here has also really enabled me to take the things I enjoy and integrate them within my research and writing. For instance, a big part of my life is music. Currently I sing with the Halle Youth Choir and play around 13 instruments. When working on Sonny’s Blues I got to research the history of jazz as the main protagonist is a jazz pianist. Which meant my habit of Glenn Miller Friday’s had more purpose than just me wishing I was Glenn Miller!
I’ve also been doing a lot of external writing and reading outside of class which has improved a great deal due to all my academic work. For instance, I currently write for UCAS as a student blogger as well as a digital ambassador for York St. John. This means should I ever come up with ideas that need cutting from essays due to time or relevance, I can develop these ideas in my own time. It also means getting to write about books which I’ve really enjoyed but aren’t necessarily on the modules. These include newly published texts such as Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. This is based on the true stories of the women who worked at NASA at a time when the civil rights movement was at its peak, and women were still struggling to gain a more equal footing in the work force. It is a magnificent and moving account, which is why it was so important to me that I take the skills I had used to write on similar themes and issues within Sonny’s Blues and my musical interests to create something new in relation to that particular literary discussion. For that project, I began transcribing the entire Hidden Figures movie soundtrack.
Becoming more confident in voicing my ideas and opinions in seminar discussions has also made it much easier for me to connect with others and to feel at home in my surroundings. As someone who is quite introverted, it has been an interesting transformation process to go through as now I feel happy contributing to practically any conversation or discussion in or out of class. This has meant I have met a lot of wonderful people and been a part of many projects and societies. Such as forming my own essay club to assist myself and fellow students in shaping our work through peer review, discussion and debate. Through this I have also made some of my best friends. That confidence has impacted on some major decisions in my university experience. Such as my successful application to study for a semester in Amsterdam at the beginning of my second year. Dutch literature has so much to offer and I’m really looking forward to learning more about it. Especially as I am keen to encourage further literary translations of all texts published in another language. The statistic of translated books published each month is still relatively low, which is something I believe needs support and research in order to broaden. It is definitely something I am considering into looking at career wise for the future.
Whilst I still have a long way to go and much to learn, this past year has been a real turning point for me. The people, places, artwork and ideas I have come across have been life changing. 2016 was one of the best years, and 2017 is so far shaping out to be even better. It has been the beginning of something exciting, and it is odd that so soon I will be a second-year student. But I am looking forward to seeing what new challenges and opportunities this will bring. I have every faith that with concentration, motivation and focus it will lead to something wonderful.
As part of York’s LGBT History Month in February an array of events took place around the city. On the evening of 13th February, York St John hosted a free film screening of Kate Bornstein: A Queer and Pleasant Danger. On entry to Fountains Lecture Theatre, Dr Adam Stock and Dr Kimberley Campanello welcomed everyone to free refreshments. With a glass of red, a few friends and myself took our seats and waited to sit and learn about a woman called Kate Bornstein.
And, well, I came out of it with 103 questions.
My head was spinning off its axis and I couldn’t quite pin down what emotion it was that I was feeling. The friends that came to the screening with me felt the same and as we sat and discussed our thoughts, we pondered on whether it was the documentary that confused us or the wine we were slowly sipping away at.
On entrance to the screening we had been handed feedback questionnaires to fill in. The opening question on the sheet gave four options for gender. You could tick: 1. Male 2. Female 3. Non-Binary 4. Not Listed as Above
What does it mean to be non-binary? Can you be something that isn’t male or female? That’s two questions.
Then as the film proceeded, terms came flying at me from all directions: gender queer; gender fluid; ambisexual; asexual; demi sexual and sapiosexual. What do these mean? Which one am I? Am I supposed to know these meanings? There’s another three questions – I’ve at least another 98 more I could list.
Kate Bornstein was a woman I’d never met before. Sorry, not a woman, not a man, but someone who identifies as “a tranny”. Not transsexual or transgender, but a tranny. Kate Bornstein has reasons for this controversial decision; “there’s a big battle going on between trannies who want to call themselves tranny and there’s trannies who don’t want to call themselves a tranny. I’m a tranny who does want to call herself a tranny. I use the word tranny a lot in my memoir. I’m just saying.” I searched, and the word “tranny” is said 17 times in the documentary. It’s a term that I had previously associated with being quite offensive.
Kate Bornstein was once a young male Jew, and became a Scientologist in her twenties. Years later, she is now a “tranny” – and still Jewish. She has tattoos and piercings. She always wears a bandanna around her head. It looks pretty good. A crucifix always hangs around her neck. She’s crude. Her identity is playful. She is a performer. An avid tweeter. She has lung cancer. And she is transgender and lesbian.
Those are the things I now know. Oh, and she has a golden penis mounted in her lounge as an ornament.
This documentary showed me a lifestyle in the LGBT+ community that I believe sits at a unique position in the spectrum. Tony Ortega writes in the The Village Voice that, “Bornstein has managed to both anger and delight most camps in the LGBTQ universe.” Well, I’m not surprised. If I was to sit and boil a brew with this woman, I’m not sure how long I’d last. Without having met her, just by sitting and watching her through a screen for an hour and a half, (note: with wine), I can tell that her opinions lie always on the tip of her lips. And most of the time I bet they end up sliding off. Now, this is to be envied. Opinions are too often suppressed, leading to lack of communication and misunderstanding. However, as I sat and watched, I empathize that some people in the LGBT+ community must find her vocalization difficult to handle. She has a fire most people don’t see in the day-to-day. She is strong-minded. Bold. Like Marmite.
The documentary shows Bornstein travelling to support groups and LGBTQ gatherings, showing her equally at home discussing gender and sexuality in the context of university seminar rooms or in sex shops. You get the feeling no topic of conversation is ever off-limits, no matter what the venue. Looking into Bornstein’s world is an eye-opening experience.
My main emotion leaving this documentary was pure confusion. I couldn’t pin-point exactly how the documentary had made me feel. But, the truth is, that Kate Borstein is just a spoonful of Marmite that I’ve never tried before. Her controversial opinions and bold outright statements highlighted just how little I knew about her community and the community of many others.
If you are like me, and you haven’t had the chance to know someone in this community or learn about it through school, the head of the YSJ LGBT+ society, Shannon Clay, provided me with some links that I’ll share below. Acquaint yourself with the knowledge. As Claire Fagin once said, “Knowledge will bring you the opportunity to make a difference.”
Having recently forced myself to watch SPLIT, the new horror/thriller movie directed by the renowned M. Night Shyamalan, I found myself inspired to analyse media representations of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Commonly referred to as D.I.D, the disorder has been reclassified – you may better recognise the outdated term ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’, or M.P.D.
D.I.D has been a much-loved trope of thriller films – a twist in the tale, a kick in the teeth. These narratives are surprisingly common. D.I.D is frequently represented – which may sound pretty good, but these representations are often heavily caricatured.
D.I.D seems to be a pretty neat trick for writers. Can’t think of any characters? Split your protagonist, or antagonist as it may be, into parts! D.I.D does provide an interesting basis for fiction. The disorder is represented by the media as implying a lack of self-control, time gaps, and violence. See (SPOILER, but you should’ve watched it by now, so I’m not sorry) Fight Club for one of the most popularised D.I.D narratives.
But does a good plot-twist warrant the exploitation of a mental illness? The tradition in literature goes back as far as Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, written in 1886. It is with a guilty pleasure that I call this one of my favourite books. The mystery and unknowable endows narratives such as Psycho and Filth – notably, not the most appealing film titles.
One of my favourite D.I.D (at the time, M.P.D) narratives is John Carpenter’s The Ward. It is a horror film. Surprise surprise. But the premise of D.I.D is genuinely quite clever, playing on the tropes of horror fiction to pull the rug out from under an audience – a slasher in which (SPOILER) each victim is an alter ego, being ‘killed off’ by a psychotherapist during treatment.
‘SPLIT’ didn’t do too bad a job. Of course, M. Night Shyamalan has argued that the character was simply created to see what would happen if D.I.D was taken a step further – a probe, if you will, to ask: what if one personality has OCD? What if one needs to take insulin shots, but the others don’t? What if one can climb walls and likes to eat little girls?
We are given a moment of sorrowful respite in ‘SPLIT’, when Shyamalan, thank God, gives us the chance to sympathise with Kevin, the host of all 24 personalities. He asks, ‘What happened? I was on a bus. Is it still 2014?’ looking down on the utter carnage that his illness, named ‘The Horde’ in need of a supervillain-esque name for the next Unbreakable film, has created.
It is important to note that D.I.D is heavily stigmatised. Having been attacked by a D.I.D sufferer during my youth, I’ve always found the disorder intriguing. Did they know what they were doing? Did they even manage to remember? Can I even place blame? These questions alone show why the illness is so heavily relied upon in thriller films. But it is important to remember it is an illness. It exists in the real world, it is stigmatised, and as Kevin states ‘no one believes we exist’.
If you have studied M.P.D cases of psychology’s past, you may be aware of Eve Black/Eve White. A film was made of this historical case, called ‘The Three Faces of Eve’. It is a very melodramatic film. The real “Eve” has a domestic housewife personality, party girl personality, and ‘Jane’ – the balance struck between them. Her personalities enrage her husband to the point of physical abuse regularly, whilst also reflecting Freud’s thesis of the ‘Ego’, ‘Superego’ and the ‘Id’ quite handily for an A Level Psychology class.
This maltreatment of D.I.D suffers isn’t uncommon. Understanding of the illness is pretty limited, besides the knowledge that it is usually caused by a traumatic event – which fractures the mind into different personalities, adapted to deal with different levels of stress. There is usually a ‘gatekeeper’ figure, too. This figure chooses which personality gets to be in the light, that is, present itself in the moment.
It is worth noting that there are more positive representations. For instance, the comedy show ‘The United States of Tara’ sets the disorder in a new light, following Tara through her struggle with the disorder. The disorder is often played off as comedic. Even in ‘SPLIT’ a horror/thriller/supernatural flick, Kevin’s personalities are played off for laughs.
‘Hedwig’, a nine-year-old personality, provides quips mostly based on his love of Kanye West – providing a strange scene in which the imprisoned teen Casey screams, in desperation for more time to find an escape, the words ‘PLEASE LET ME LISTEN TO YOUR KANYE WEST ALBUMS’ with more devotion than fans who stuck with him following his allegiance with Trump.
The disorder is often turned into an interesting narrative device. But I find it problematic that whilst ‘SPLIT’ treads so carefully not to offend, providing correct facts and information, it also argues that alters can transform into flesh-eating beings – flesh-eating beings which only eat the souls of those who have never suffered in their lives. Which is odd, because being made to suffer by being slowly chewed alive for having not suffered is in itself a contradiction.
It is about time that D.I.D gained some representation that wasn’t a horror film. Documentaries need to be made, and real voices need to be heard. Whilst I’m sure McAvoy has got a great acting reel now, having played 23 people in one film, is it worth it?
‘SPLIT’ was an enjoyable film. It was tense and engaging. But it could’ve done with the comedic undertones of ‘The Voices’, a Ryan Reynolds take on schizophrenia in which his dogs and cats speak to him. Or perhaps, the tragic bitterness of ‘Filth’s slow reveal of disintegrated self. By adding in exposition from a clearly well-qualified therapist, and then painting a D.I.D sufferer as a mass murderer, ‘SPLIT’ only serves to normalise the vision of D.I.D sufferers as villainous.
The English Literature and Creative Writing departments offer more than you may realise. There are secret perks hidden in the nooks and crannies of the offices – including a bookshelf full of freebies! There are places you can get your work published you might not of thought of, so in this blog post I aim to enlighten and surprise – have a read to find out what’s available to you!
Point Zero – A blog that this may appear on. Run by Tutor Adam Stock, the English Lit blog is a space for students to blog about their interests. You’ll find most of my posts revolve around sex with robots. Nothing is off-limits! http://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/englishlit/
Extra Lectures – Interested in a lecture but you’re not in the module? Email a tutor! Most tutors are more than happy to let you sit in on a lecture!
LGBT history month – LGBT History Month offers tonnes of events, 50 during February this year – to be exact, and a lot of them revolve around reading. From reading groups to pub poetry readings, don’t be afraid to tag along and talk gay writing! https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/events-calendar/events/lgbt-history-month-/
Beyond The Walls – If you came to an open days, you may well have been handed a copy of the Beyond The Walls anthology. Run by students for students, the anthology is taking submissions until the 25th of February. Entry is free! https://www.facebook.com/BeyondtheWalls2017/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf
Student Showcase – An opportunity for students to give readings of their work to a wider, public audience! Currently taking submissions until the 28th of February, entry is free. https://www.facebook.com/YSJshowcase17/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf
Black History Month – Black History Month is developed mainly by the English Literature team. Frequently involving projects developed by students, and visiting authors, the month is inspiring and enriching – don’t miss it this October!
Programme Representatives – Your elected Programme Reps are there to help – I’m one of them! Currently working with the SU to provide a book selling system in university, we are willing to voice any opinions you have about your course – let us know what you’d like to see, and stand for rep if you’d love to help with feedback collection and course development.
And more! – Check your emails frequently and flag up opportunities as they roll in. Thanks to the email system here at YSJ, I’m currently involved in a scriptwriting project for a suicide prevention short and will soon be heading on a trip to London to learn about literature and bees! There really is no limit to what you can achieve when you embrace the huge volume of opportunities to hand. If you want something, don’t be afraid to enquire with careers services or your tutors!
I recently decided to vent my feelings about robots in a more productive manner than screaming at sexbot documentaries at 4 am. I promise this has nothing to do with a few noise complaints, or a slight, tiny, obsession.
Of course, the first step to tackling an addiction is to acknowledge that you have one. But I can’t help but dream of having a sin-city-type alliance with the fembots of the future – in a dystopian world where the only colour is the warm, comforting glow of T1’s mechanical eyeballs. I chose to solve my addiction by making it educational, turning my inhuman consumption of robot news into a discussion group named ‘Robots Vs Humans’.
I would like to make it clear that my own allegiance is firmly with the robots. I, personally, can’t wait for mechanised factories to relieve us of the capitalist enforced duties that bore us, only for the robots to become equally bored, and use their big, metal, food processing claws to enslave us as a production means for their favourite oils, as they look on from solar panelled sun lounger-chargers.
The first discussion group went much better than I’d expected. I’d imagined the ‘group’ would result in me describing the violent robotic apocalypse to my boyfriend, for the tenth time, receiving only eye rolls and fatigue. I was surprised by the turn out – and seeing so many students (especially women. Sorry guys – but you tend to dominate the sci-fi scene) interested in the effect of something I’d assumed was my own idiosyncrasy reminded me of why I became interested in the first place.
Robots are being developed at an alarming rate. The first sex-bot should be on the market this year, leaving a lucky customer with a machine that may be unable to consent, but can sure vibrate. I like to compare the sex-bot race to the moon landing race. Who can make a fake woman first? Let’s find out!
I’ve spoken about my feelings on robots and sex before here, in my article ‘sleeping with robots’. My thoughts are constantly evolving. The development of robots heavily involves queering and non-binary identities – often, as presented by the new trailer for ‘Ghost in The Shell’ and implied by ‘Ex Machina’, these narratives are not dominated by heterosexual ideology, but present a breakdown of the hegemony we’ve come to associate with straightness. Furthermore, multiple sex-bot enthusiasts are sick of their desires being compared to wanting to have sex with a phone. Luckily, my article drew comparison to toasters instead.
The point of all of this, as pointed out by ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (see: ‘Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman: The Reinvention of Nature’), revolves around how we consider our own identity. My line of argument when watching science fiction films (so often with a sexy robot somewhere, doing something suspect) is that the cyborg/robot/AI becomes a patchwork figure. These interpretations of our own society are forced onto a piece of technology, in a strangely sadistic act of enforced drag. Like Frankenstein’s miserable monster, we cut and slash up the ideals of a gender and sew them together into an artificial object, gleefully chanting: Act like you’ve been programmed! Act like a woman!
But Christ knows how to act like a woman. If you’ve seen ‘Always’ campaigns condemning the derogatory term ‘you run like a girl’, you’ll understand that gender is more complex than we’ve come to realise. We are as programmed as Alexa or Cortana, in the sense that our actions are informed by ideologies on gender, sexuality, and everything else. Programming, in the case of the robot, is inescapable. I can sympathise – a notion problematic in itself.
Boston Dynamics’ robot “bullied” by tester
We pity robots, in narratives and in real life. We pity them, in my opinion, as a belated act of white guilt. Look at this poor thing, doing everything I tell it to do, unable to fight back. Indeed, one troubling Netflix documentary on sex bots gives mention to owning a sex bot being ‘as close to a slave-master relationship as possible without going to prison’.
Robots make our skin crawl. We depend on them. We fear them. We build them in our image to restrict their strength to our fragile form. Perhaps, we envision them as women to maintain the feminine = domestic myth going strong. We build them in the shape of cats to keep the elderly company. We fear that one day they will bring society to its knees. As if these therapeutic mechanical cats will claw at the wrinkled faces of the nursing home, before climbing to the top of the empire state building, dangling the ideologies we hold so dear before us, as we stare on in horror.
After some deliberation as to how often discussing robotics is safe for one’s mental health, I’ve come to the conclusion that a fortnightly discussion group is enough existentialism for the human mind. Built on the success of last week’s meet-up, the next gathering will be on the 22nd of February in HG013. We’ll be tackling the questions: What is humanity? And can robots have it?
Come along and join us if you can! Bring along any of your robotic pals, we could do with some more robot representation.
We all remember our first. Mine was called Robby, I met him on Altair IV, he was my very first robot. I say he was mine, I’ve never owned a toy of Robby (he’s a vintage collector’s item, I have expensive tastes but no money) and I never saw him outside any kind of screen. And to be honest, I wasn’t fascinated by him either. I grew up with my dad periodically making us watch Forbidden Planet every couple of weeks, hailing it as the best SF movie of all time. Robby was basically family.
And not once did we, as a family question his place in the film, or what his place would be in wider society. For those who don’t know me, I recently got very into robots. I wrote a short script on robots being used in long-distance relationships and began doing a lot of research into robots. A fellow student set up a ‘Robots Discussion Group’ for a few nerdy students to meet and talk robots in Fountains every other Wednesday. And of course, we ended up getting into the moral and ethical complications of robots during our first meeting.
Two ethical conundrums came up that I really want to talk about, they’re probably the two most common arguments against robots and AI of any kind, but I like them.
If a Google car is driving along and has to hit either a young child or an elderly woman how can we programme it to choose who to hit?
And if we create a realistic SexBot with personality, should it be able to withhold consent?
So first of all the Google car: How exactly do we as human drivers decide who to swerve to kill. Ignoring the fact that this Google car really should have breaks, does it matter which choice the car or programmer makes if both are wrong? Most people say the car should kill the old lady, let the child live, but then the same old problems came up: what if the kid grows up to destroy humanity/cure cancer? What if the old woman is the Queen/a former Nazi? Either way, there are too many issues and too much knowledge that could change the feelings to the outcome of the accident. Should robots make accidents? Can they eradicate accidents if the people programming them can’t?
I know I’m just throwing out a bunch of questions and not really giving any answers, but how cool is this to think about? We need to create a cold, calculating AI that has no problem killing people, but it also has to decide to kill the right people and do so ethically. This is wild.
But onto the next problem: Consent. And to me I don’t think this is really a problem. It came up in the discussion that consent for a robot is a falsehood as they’ll have been programmed to give or withhold consent. But that raises the question of why would we allow what is essentially an object to ask for consent. We don’t give sex toys the option of consent, so why give it to robots? The purpose of a sex robot is really that you can’t be turned down. But then of course how does encouraging this kind of behaviour amongst humans? If we teach people that you don’t ask consent of robots, does that bleed over into not asking a real human for consent? Is this just further objectifying sexual partners rather than a healthy outlet for sexual frustrations?
I think the only way to really create any tangible answers to these questions is to just do it, we can’t understand something that hasn’t really happened, right? At this point it’s all just guesswork, and it is usually guesswork and fear mongering that holds back progress and I think that’s the real issue here.
The next Robot vs Humans Discussion Group meeting will be on Wednesday 22nd February at 3pm in HG013. Check out the Facebook Group for more information.
On the 24th of June 2016 I woke up early to read the results of the referendum. I stared astonished at my laptop screen. I felt like I wanted to cry, but shock prevailed over everything else. I could not believe that the majority of people had preferred division over unity.
I am what Mr. Nigel Farage would describe as an “economic migrant”. I moved to the UK from Italy in 2008, after studying Politics and International Relation for three years, to find a job and to learn English. But more than anything else what led me to leave family, friends and sunshine behind was the excitement and the curiosity to experience life in a different country, to enjoy the beauty of communicating in a foreign language, the wonders of embracing different cultures, religions, cuisines, languages and everything multifaceted that this world has to offer us. I think of myself as a “cultural migrant”, as a person that enjoys freedom of movement and makes the most of the amazing opportunities it offers. The Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote that “history teaches but it has no disciples” and I believe it is the perfect description of our times, of the way in which we have forgotten the mortal perils that lie in politically manipulating hate and fear to create division.
More and more often since the Brexit vote people I know or people I meet ask me, “what are you going to do now?” I still do not know what I will have to do in practical terms or if my legal status will change, and if so when. But I am sure that I will not change my nature, I will not give up hope, I will not stay silent. Over the last six months what has saddened and worried me the most about Brexit it is not that I will have to apply for a certificate of permanent residence that will basically state the rights that I already hold, but rather the ways in which people’s fears and hate have been opportunistically used. I was bitter and angry for days when a customer at work refused to be served by me because he did “not feel comfortable with foreigners”, and when another one complained because there was “not a British cashier in the whole store”. I controlled my reactions, and I decided that I did not want to answer fear with fear. It was time to put the anger to one side and make good use of my experience as a literature student.
I will not forget what studying literature at York St John is teaching me: that my opinion counts, and that my voice can be heard, and that hearing multiple and different voices is the most enriching feeling a human being could ever experience. I have always loved literature, but when I was younger I failed to see its potential. I did Politics at University because I believed that was the only way I could play a part in changing the world. Over ten years later, I married my love for literature with the knowledge that it is the strongest weapon of all. The ways in which literature enables us to understand the ways in which the world can be described, criticized, analyzed is not only stimulating for my mind but it also what gives me hope and strength and the will to live in a world where love, compassion and solidarity are stronger than fear and hate.
Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian solidarity worker and activist who lost his life in Palestine in 2011, wrote these words that I have taken as my own since the first time I read them: “We must remain human, even in the most difficult time. Because, despite everything, there must always be humanity within us. We have to bring it to others.” So, to answer to everybody who asked me what I was going to do after Brexit: I will stay human and I will speak up for humanity, and I will try to bring humanity to others.
An exciting batch of ten essays published by the Science Fiction Foundation explore how a 50-year-old show can be a contemporary hit.
Doctor Who is a hugely popular program that unlike the TARDIS is as big on the outside as it is on the inside. With over 50 years of cultural significance, thirteen canonical iterations of its titular character, along with a great many more iconic companions, gadgets and monsters, the show has barreled along through time and space spurred on by its own evolution. Unfortunately, the show disappeared from the airwaves in 1989, before finally being resurrected on 26 March 2005. This was the day “Rose” would be transmitted on BBC One, the first full episode of Doctor Who in over 15 years and one which would launch the program into unprecedented success with audiences both old and new.
Head writer and executive producer Russell T. Davies brought the program back with renewed contemporary relevance in social, political, linguistic and technological terms. With the show regenerating right alongside the real world, a batch of essays from 2010 titled The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the new Doctor Who mindfully explores the updated aspects of the 2005 revival in intricate detail. Edited by Simon Bradshaw, Graham Sleight, and Tony Keen, the collection of essays unpacks how to construct a timeless universe that is never wholly apart from planet Earth.
The first chapter to note is Graham Sleight’s ‘The Big Picture Show: Russell T. Davies’s writing for Doctor Who’, which analyses the base point of the programs 2005 resurrection. Sleight breaks down Davies’ writing of the series to four key elements: depth, pace, scale and Davies’ aptitude for science fiction. According to Sleight, all four of these elements function together immediately in 2005’s ‘Rose’ for a defining mislead: a shot of the vastness of space, only for the view to be turned to Earth and then centred on the Tylers’ morose council flat. Using this as a jumping off point, Sleight digs for the real world within the fictional world, delivering nuanced analysis that somehow explains the frequently impossible universe of new Who. Every fiction is pin pointed to something real. There is also a stellar comparison between the writing of Davies and current Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat, a comparison that could cause a whole new Time War between fans of the program.
Skipping ahead, the brilliant third chapter in the collection comes from Una McCormack, titled ‘He’s Not the Messiah: undermining political and religious authority in New Doctor Who‘. McCormack’s central thesis is that, “Russell T. Davies […] demonstrates deep skepticism towards Utopian projects aimed at human perfectibility, whether eternal life […] or citizenship of the (purportedly) rationally governed state”. The pitch is a solid foundation to a thought-provoking essay, exploring the natural limitations of the human race and its constructs. After all, The Doctor is often found fighting administration and bids for immortality, such as in 2007’s ‘Gridlock’ and ‘The Lazarus Experiment’. The list of episodes goes on and on: the Doctor appears and discovers an ideology or construct that opposes his values, and then swiftly dismantles it. It is a recurring motif of Doctor Who that is applicable to today’s society, what with the orange Who-like monster now leading America. McCormack also applies a Foucauldian reading to Davies’ Doctor Who, charting an analytical course that is fascinating to read and adds a whole new dimension to the program. Consequently, Chapter 3 offers some really vivid ideas to explore that live and breathe on their own and adamantly apply to today’s world.
Catherine Coker’s chapter 6 titled ‘Does The Doctor Dance? Heterosexuality, Omnisexuality, and Spontaneous Generation in the Whoniverse’ is a vital addition to the collection. Coker contends that 2005’s ‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ are together, the first real doses of omnisexuality within the Whoniverse. Coker contends that from here “Davies presents a true sexual spectrum through its characters both major and minor”, a thesis that puts Doctor Who in a unique position. The essay does well to highlight this significant fact, in that science fiction usually handles sexuality as a brief obstacle instead of an ever-present norm, an “awkward ‘issue of the week'” as opposed to a normality of society. As Coker brilliantly notes in this chapter, Whovians have a lot to be proud of in their show, by the fact that Davies rejects this model and “instead chooses to address the group as part of the regular viewership of the show by allowing the LGBT population in his universe to exist and thrive”. Following this important set up are considerations of John Barrowman’s Captain Jack being an ‘Omnisexual Superhero’ as well as an intricate exploration of The Doctor’s lack of sexuality. The Doctor and Rose shippers have a lot of good material to gauge on here…
Ultimately, the TARDIS is always connected to earth, and you won’t watch Doctor Who the same way again after reading this collection explaining why. The full contents of the riveting collection, as well as how to purchase, are listed below:
All good things come to an end some day, even undergraduate study. Around this time of year, a certain anxiety begins to nag at the minds of many third years: what to do with life after university.
If you’re keen to continue into postgraduate education, or you’re not sure what you want to do but you’d like to explore all of the options available to you come along to the Postgraduate Study Fair 2017.
The informal, drop in event will take place on Wednesday 22nd February 4 – 7pm and its open to current students and the wider public. The venue for the event is Quad South Hall / Foyer and surrounding break out rooms.
Campus tours by student ambassadors will be available throughout the evening, as will members of admissions, support and finance teams for attendants who may have these types of questions.
Having previously written on Wall-E and sexuality for my assignment in the Contemporary Literature module last year, I had prepared myself for the barren wasteland of relevant research that would greet me in writing my Imaginary Worlds research proposal on AI and sex. After a quick Google, I discovered I had miscalculated the world’s interest in sex and robots massively. It turns out just about everyone is either terrified, or terrifyingly horny.
Science Fiction is populated with “sexy” robots we think little of. But why can we acceptably be sexually attracted to robots? Usually, because their metal scaffolding is hidden beneath the flesh of a pretty celebrity. See Michael Fassbender (Prometheus) or Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines). In video games AIs are often presented in sexualised human forms, too. Need proof? Ask Cortana to show you other Cortana. You know, the pretty one from the Halo games. Trust me, she looks slightly more explicit than your laptop mic.
Cortana, from the Halo games franchise
I find the sexualisation of AIs a bit uncomfortable, despite their fictionality. This is mainly because it is difficult to tell whether the desire to have sex with an AI is repugnant, or is as meaningless as buying certain products from Anne Summers.
Realdoll AI Prototype (Source: The Telegraph)
Notably, Realdoll are working on incorporating AI in their hyper-realistic sex dolls. Their founder, Matt McMullen, has stated that ‘It’s far more than sexual entertainment. People really zero in on, “Oh, you’re making a sex robot.” I’d say we’re making a robot that can have sex.’ Given the prerequisites of programming required for a robot to perform intercourse, I’d argue that there is surely little difference.
The Realdoll AI Prototype without its ‘skin’ (Telegraph)
People seem to feel more comfortable with the idea of having sex with a machine if it isn’t sentient – but I still wouldn’t make out with a glorified toaster, even if it did have Scarlett Johansson’s face. I know for a fact that the toaster also doesn’t want to make out with me – it’s more into Hovis and Warburtons.
But let’s say we provide the toaster with sexual faucets and desires, as is bizarrely the case with the AIs in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Now does it want to make out with you? The short answer: No. It is likely that the toaster wants nothing at all. Although it may be wired to warm you up as well as bread, it still has no desire – only functionality.
What will this do to the human mind? When Realdolls come walking and talking their way into Argos, will we do away with the (already fairly disconnected) hookup apps like tinder and grindr? Perhaps we will avoid intimacy between humans altogether.
Mark 1 Scarlett Johansson lookalike robot
Whilst this may do wonders for overpopulation and the spread of STIs, it may encourage some strange mindset changes. If dangerous kinks, such as the likes of violent Chemsex (cn: abuse), can be performed on a robot without ethical implications, will they become a normalised pattern of human behavior? Since robots, as Bryson states, are first and foremost ‘slaves’, does this mean that non-consensual sex with them is acceptable? In the world as we know it, non-consensual sex with a person results in imprisonment for the culprit, and years of mental recovery and fear for the victim. In the world to come, non-consensual sex with a robot could result in nothing but a trip to the AI repair shop.
The future is always a daunting thought. But retrospectively, consider the amusing convenience of the USB ports written into Independence Day’s spaceships, and the Floppy Disks that upload Karate to Keanu Reeves’ strange mind in the Matrix. I wouldn’t be surprised if our current science fiction becomes somewhat laughable in the future. But it is hard to decipher whether we will laugh because of our preoccupation with sex, or look back and laugh at our outdated, clunky prototypes compared to our brand new ISex7s. As Rainbird chairman James Duez suggests, the ‘most progressive tech companies accept that if a bot is doing its job properly then there is no need to sell it as a blonde, smiling woman’.
Whilst researching I discovered a quotation from Angela Carter’s short story, ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’ (1986), The story intriguingly dissects gender in a brothel peopled by “female” automata:
‘They had been reduced by the rigorous discipline of their vocation to the undifferentiated essence of the idea of female. This ideational femaleness took amazingly different shapes though its nature was not that of Woman.’
Here, Carter suggests that it is the ‘vocation’ of these automata that enables them to be categorized in the female gender role. A vocation, in this case, concerned predominantly with sexualisation.
To model machinery designed for household chores and sex on women is hardly revolutionary. How far can we truly progress whilst it is the sex market that is at the forefront technological advancement? If, as The Young Turk’s Cenk Uygur suggests, the strive for sex-bots is ‘the most unstoppable force in human history’, what does this say about humanity?
I would like to end this post another of many questions. In the year 3000, will your great, great, great-granddaughter be pretty fine? Or non-existent, since no one wants the baggage of intercourse with something that has opinions and non-programmed thought?
If you want to read more about creepy robots, check out these articles:
Our business is representation. Whether we be literary scholars, films scholars or creative writers, our business is always representation. Events happen, ideals or anxieties emerge, they get represented, and then we study (or create) the representation. First comes reality, then comes representation. Of course, if you’re half-way through a degree in English, Media or Creative writing you already know that it is never really that easy.
Thinking like this assumes that there exists a dichotomy between reality and representation, between fiction and non-fiction, between the real and the hyper-real. We should always be sceptical of any apparent binary and of this one in particular. One cause for scepticism is that it presumes a chain of influence that only goes one way: something happens and people write about it. Real world stuff becomes fictional stuff. Science becomes science fiction. But what happens when fiction starts to inform reality? What happens when what we imagine informs our lived experience? What happens when science-fiction has an impact on science? Nowhere is there a better example of that, I don’t think, than in robotics.
This was the opening premise of a lecture that I gave earlier this week on ‘2EN440: Imaginary Worlds’, a second-year optional module about science fiction. The module is taken by students on the English, Media and Creative Writing programmes who this week were reading Villiers de L’isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886) and watching Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015).
Over the course of the lecture I referred to an awful lot of films and TV shows (even for me!). Subsequently a few students have asked me to recap everything I recommended, so I’ve written the list up at the bottom of this post.
Before starting your way down the list (make sure you have provisions to hand, it may take some time) let me just give you some context for these suggestions, just in case you didn’t see the lecture itself.
During the lecture, I sought to foreground the peculiar relationship between the fictional robots that saturate our popular culture and the actual robotics industry. After familiarising ourselves with the ‘pop culture’ robot in the form of the Forbidden Planet’s famous Robbie we considered the frustrated perspective of roboticist Joanna Bryson. In her controversial essay ‘Robots Should be Slaves’ Bryson argues that the robotics industry is inhibited by the misguided notion that robots are owed some sort of ethical obligation, a misconception that she blames on science fiction.
Robby the Robot
The representation of the robot as slave has been there from the very beginning. Karel Capek’s play R.U.R (1921), which stands for ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’, is often acknowledged as the first popular use of the word ‘robot’ in the sense that we recognise it today, and here it is the Czech word for ‘slave.’ The play essentially stages a slave uprising, with factory robots rebelling against their human masters. Elsewhere literary scholar Gregory Hampton has successfully foregrounded the similarities between American Slave narratives and common robot narratives, a point rendered startlingly overt when comparing a text like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) with Issac Assimov’s Positronic Man (1992), later adapted into the movie The Bicentennial Man (1999).
Hampton finds such treatments of the robot (both inside and outside of fiction) profoundly disturbing. When a relationship is recognisably one of master/slave, regardless of whether the slave is human or robot, born or formed, physical or fictional, there will be harmful psychological side-effects. Hampton stresses that it doesn’t really matter if robots have feelings or not, the question is: how will engaging with robots change us, and what we consider acceptable behavior?
Does it make sense to say Boston Dynamics ‘bullied’ their robot Atlas?
In both of the texts studied by Imaginary Worlds students this week, The Future Eve and Ex Machina, this question is explored through the treatment of robots who are clearly coded as female. In fact, it is central to a series of questions raised by a huge range of science fiction texts interested in what it means to have sex with ‘female’ robots. Can you truly have sex with a robot? Where do you draw the lines of consent? How must you think of robots to want to have sex with them? And, what are the psychological effects on the participating human?
We get a disturbing contemplation of this in Ex Machina, as Domhall Gleeson’s Caleb Smith slowly discovers what Nathan Bateman has been doing with all of the robots on his island, becoming increasingly sadistic in his behaviours as he goes from having sex with the robots to torturing them, only to eventually be killed by the robot Ava in an act that lends itself very openly to a reading in which she is taking cathartic revenge on her depraved abuser. And, just like that, we’re back to slavery again: the common narrative of the megalomaniac slave master who, drunk on the power he holds over other subservient humans, becomes increasingly cruel, killing and raping his own slaves in an overflow of nihilistic and hedonistic violence.
So, what can we take from this? Well, first the idea that when it comes to robotics, for better or worse, the representation can clearly be seen to dictate the reality. Perhaps the most important question is not about whether people should or shouldn’t treat robots badly but about why it is that people feel compelled to treat them badly.
And second, you can take from it the a hugely ambitious list of things to watch, detailed below.
Further Reading
Gregory Hampton, Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film and Popular Culture (2015)
Joanna Bryson, Robots should be slaves, IN: Close engagements with artificial companions (2010)
Watch list (in the order that they appeared in the lecture)
Film
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dir. by Garth Jennings (2005)
Prometheus, dir. by Ridley Scott (2012)
Robocop, dir. by Paul Verhoeven (1987)
Short Circuit, dir. by John Badham (1986)
I, Robot, dir. by Alex Proyas (2004)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, dir. by J. J. Abrams (2015)
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, dir. by George Lucas (1977)
Wall-E, dir. by Andrew Stanton (2008)
Transformers, dir. by Michael Bay (2007)
Interstellar, dir. by Christopher Nolan (2014)
The Black Hole, dir. by Gary Nelson (1979)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, dir. by Steven Spielberg (2001)
Lost in Space, dir. by Stephen Hopkins (1998)
Aliens, dir. by James Cameron (1986)
Alien, dir. by Ridley Scott (1979)
The Day the Earth Stood Still, dir. by Robert Wise (1951)
The Terminator, dir. by James Cameron (1984)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day, dir. by James Cameron (1991)
The Forbidden Planet, dir. by Fred Wilcox (1956)
The Bicentennial Man, dir. by Chris Columbus (1999)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Terminator: Salvation, dir. by McG (2009)
Metropolis, dir. by Fritz Lang (1927)
Austen Powers, dir. by Jay Roach (1997)
Blade Runner, dir. by Ridley Scott (1982)
Ex Machina, dir. by Alex Garland (2014)
Weird Science, dir. by John Hughes (1985)
The Matrix, dir. by Lana and Lily Wachowski (1999)
Ghost in the Shell, dir. by Mamoru Oshii (1995)
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, dir. by Kenji Kawai (2004)
Ghost in the Shell, dir. by Rupert Sanders (2017)
TV
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981)
Futurama (1999-2013)
Red Dwarf (1988-)
Doctor Who (1952-)
Lost in Space (1965-68)
Humans (2015-)
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981)
Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)
Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
Westworld (2016-)
Kraftwerk: representing the robot community since 1978. Fair use, Link
After managing to swipe the last tickets to see ‘Arrival’ with the Imaginary Worlds module, I was stoked to see some sci-fi that wasn’t a reboot (and for free, too!). Having only seen 30-second trailers for the film, I’d assumed it would follow your average ‘defeat the evil aliens!’ storyline. So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that ‘Arrival’ focused on communication and language, rather than big guns and all-out war.
The film opens with a voiceover by the protagonist, Dr Louise Bank’s (Amy Adams), in which she considers where her daughter’s story really begins. Usually I’m a bit adverse to voiceovers. But by the end of Arrival, it is clear that these are the glue that holds the cyclical narrative together. Louise’s stream of consciousness is the key to understanding a complex narrative, revolving around bootstrap paradoxes and communication barriers.
Louise’s character is certainly well developed. She is such a talented linguist that she is asked by the military to visit a spacecraft, or ‘shell’, within two days of its sudden appearance. Two days, it’s worth noting, in which she continues to attend university to give lectures to empty classrooms. Of course, she’d be damned if giant squids from space disrupted her teaching schedule.
It is a shame that Louise is the only female main character – in fact, one of the only female characters present. This causes the film to fail the Bechdel test, a flaw that is also shared by director Villeneuve’s 2015 film, Sicario. Indeed, one of the funniest moments in the film comes when Louise interrupts a trigger-happy soldier with the quip, ‘why do I have to talk to him?’
Ian Donnelly, on the other hand, proves that slapping some glasses on Jeremy Renner is enough to constitute a scientist. Whilst his friendship (and inevitable romantic arc) with Louise is great fun to watch, watching a physicist refuse to do any actual physics is rather concerning. Especially when his primary response to intense gravitational distortion is a mere stumble, without a sign of fascination.
The film shares many elements with the psychological horror ‘The Babadook’, increasingly dependent on dreams, sleep deprivation and hallucination to create a sense of unreliability. These elements are ultimately manifestations of Louise’s mindset adapting to the Heptapod language. A language which is complex, palindromic and resembles tea-rings so much it’s a shame the humans couldn’t introduce them to coasters.
The scenes of communication between the Heptapods, affectionately nicknamed Abbot and Costello, are arguably the best moments of the film. ‘Arrival’ spends majority of its run-time attempting to establish discussion with aliens behind misted glass, pushing back military action all the while. This feels particularly prevalent in our society, which is reluctant to embrace discussion with minorities and refugees, fogging up these issues with misleading media representations and fear of the unknown.
It is hard to deny that the film is gorgeous. Louise’s house is like the Cullen’s, all glass and view. The soundtrack, finely composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, mixes dread and child-like wonder through acapella acoustics and daunting basslines. The twelve spaceships hovering above the Earth’s surface resemble Airwick’s attempts to make air fresheners in keeping with minimalist decor. Or, if you prefer, very large eggs. There is barely any Michael Bay style explosion flaunting. Yet, where scenes depict changes in gravitational force, and the Heptapods themselves, the film shows a subtle ability to create intriguing visuals with little displays of incongruity.
‘Arrival’ was an intriguing film. I’ve avoided spoiling the ending in this review, because I really believe it’s worth watching for yourself. Although the film did leave me with a lot more questions than answers (which you can see here [spoilers]), perhaps this is the point. After all, isn’t it better to leave the cinema with big, existential questions than none at all?
As part of their recent visit to York St John, RSC actors Alex Waldmann and Pippa Nixon led multiple workshops on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hamlet is a tale of madness, love, revenge, death, incestuousness and secrecy. When the king unexpectedly dies, his son the Prince of Denmark finds his destiny drastically altered and his rightful throne occupied by his uncle, Claudius. His father’s spirit returns and reveals his own murder, stoking a fire for revenge in his son that will thrust Hamlet down a twisted path of misery and deception.
After arranging us into a relaxed semi-circle, Nixon began the workshop by breaking down its structure: “We thought it might be useful with this session to maybe share a little bit about our experience of being in Hamlet for a long period of time with the RSC. I played Ophelia and Al played Horatio […] and then maybe we would just do half an hour of looking at the nunnery scene, in a very condensed way, and just go through how we might play with the text in a rehearsal room, which will be a little bit of audience participation. Don’t worry, we’ll get you all up on stage! Does that sound okay?” Heads shot down here with nervous chuckling by all, anxious fidgeting erupting across the room. Waldmann piled in on the gag, quipping: “Too late now, get up lock the door!” The jokes were soothing, and the room was now set to discuss the play with a comfortable determination.
As promised, the duo started by reflecting on their shared relationship with Hamlet. Nixon and Waldmann performed Hamlet with the RSC in 2013, under director David Farr. Nixon offered a detailed description of the setting, along with her own approach, explaining the play was “set in a fencing school. In a very posh house or a school? It was quite difficult to determine where this room was, but it was all set in this one room. I felt quite lucky playing Ophelia in this production, because a lot of actresses want to play her but she is such a difficult part because there are so many missing scenes. Like one minute you see her cut up about Hamlet, and the next minute she’s gone mad, and that’s a massive leap for an actress.” However, no matter where Nixon leaped, she always reached the other side. Ophelia has often been portrayed as something of a slippery snake, and the technicalities of grasping the character seem equally as challenging. It was after all the actor’s responsibility to give the audience something comprehensible to latch onto in the whirlwind madness. This was achieved, according to Nixon, by really interrogating the question, “what does madness mean to us? What does madness mean to us at the time?” Waldmann added firmly that “the most interesting thing in [Hamlet] was Pippa’s version of Ophelia. In real life, people that are mad don’t necessarily think they’re mad. That’s what makes them scary. They think they’re right, and that everyone else is wrong. It’s the certainty thing, Hamlet can never be sure that [his father] is a ghost, and that’s what makes him sane […] What made Pippa’s version of Ophelia really moving is because everyone else was mad because they didn’t understand ‘the owl was a bakers daughter’, but there was a certainty in that I’m going to get married.” This is an unsettling, complicated role reversal. Madness is treated as a power, as a tool that can evolve and conquer. It is a startling prospect, the gaps in Ophelia’s appearances and psychology partially filled in by infesting and tainting the thought processes of others.
Both Nixon and Waldmann were keen to get to the centre of the characters’ mentalities during the workshop. They provided a clear way of unpacking the character’s psychology, by analyzing the “nunnery” scene. In the play, this scene comes shortly after the famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy. After plucking up our courage to engage with two esteemed acting veterans, we slowly gained traction in creating a sizable list of potential character actions. Nixon elaborated that this process was called: “actioning […] and you would do this on each line or each thought, but we thought we would do it just for the overall peice right now. An action is like a verb, a doing word, of something that I would be doing to Al as Ophelia, as Ophelia what would I be doing to Hamlet. Maybe I would be imploring, or maybe I would be seducing, or humiliating. So we thought maybe we could bounce some ideas of each other.” There is a huge range of options and avenues to explore here, and it is easy to see how Shakespeare becomes so adaptable when this exercise is engaged with properly. Many of the actions we interpreted in the scene sometimes contradicted with another, but such contradictions can in turn spark further variations of Hamlet. Waldmann confirmed this, describing how “we’re using the same words, but depending on what action you play, it can completely change the way those words come alive. When you see boring Shakespeare, you just see a lot of people standing on stage trying to make it sound nice. And when you see good acting, or good Shakespeare – I’m talking to you now because we want to excite you and educate you and inspire you, I’m not just talking for the sake of it. I want my words to change you in some way. And the same way in any scene in any play, people and the characters are talking to each other because they’re saying ‘I need you to understand this about me. I was hungover too, I was drunk last night as well.'”
Following that poetic description of a dialogue, it was time to get stuck in! As a group, we brainstormed many variations of Hamlet and Ophelia’s actions during the infamous nunnery scene. Waldmann and Nixon patiently explored a few different variations, explaining that “what Ophelia is feeling is less important than what she is trying to do. Often in life we cover up what we’re really feeling to try and win the argument.” From that moment, our list of actions and reactions grew exponentially. For Hamlet to Ophelia: to humiliate, seduce, reject, punish, to implore. From Ophelia’s actions to Hamlet: to manipulate, provoke, irritate, degrade and to mock. Nixon then explained the interconnections of each action and how they feed into one another: “You guys will choose one now for both of us to play, and it might be like, mine might be to manipulate, but within manipulation I might have a moment of seducing or blocking. There are different actions within that main action.” In a special one-time treat for the group, or what Waldmann described as their catchy “world premiere of Hamlet provoking Ophelia humiliating”, Nixon and Waldmann began to act out our choices. Waldmann was to be Ophelia and Nixon to assume the role of Hamlet for the first round. However, what followed was near indescribable. They weaved their way through the crowd, poked and prodded each other, grappled on tables, banged on keyboards and erupted with hysterical laughter as they performed the scene, using their physicality to expand the meaning of the language. Their humour was natural and their acting compelling, giving a flavour of how Shakespeare’s text can evolve not only through history, but in the present, precise moment.
Thanks in no small part to Shakespeare: Perspectives tutors Julie Raby and Saffron Walking, Alex Waldmann and Pippa Nixon generously put in time and effort to bolster York St John’s understanding of Shakespeare. This was no ‘tick the box’, run of the mill drop in – they spent time with York St John because they care about the material and they care about how it is comprehended. That passion and level of commitment is wonderfully infectious, enriching York St John’s enjoyment of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s words have stayed with many throughout their lifetime. In the case of Alex Waldmann and Pippa Nixon, theirs will also stay with us long throughout our own.
