UNARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

Despite its awards, its cult following and its widely acknowledged place in comedy history, Arrested Development is sorely underrated. 

Cancelled after two and a half seasons in the US due to low ratings, it was never, while on air at least, adored by the masses in the way that many critics believed it should’ve been. Admittedly, and to the frustration of my fanboy side still protective over the show, Arrested Development has since become rather more popular through word of mouth. Nobody has ever expressed anything other than confusion when I’ve mentioned it on this side of the Atlantic though, and I’ll continue to greedily cling on to that small consolation. (Arrested Development is not mainstream, mmkay?)

The show is a sitcom/mockumentary about, as the narrator puts it in the opening credits, “a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together”. The acting is formidable, the on-set chemistry vibrant; you desperately want to believe that the sadly-fictional Bluth family exist in the real world. Seeing the mild-mannered and awkward George-Michael Bluth (Michael Cera of Superbad and Juno) mature into a young man with stronger convictions and self-assurance is not only brilliantly funny but also – am I allowed to say this? – life-affirming. There’s so much likeability ingrained in each and every character that you find yourself caring a little too much about what happens to them, whilst simultaneously trusting them to get through their respective ordeals with sufficient hilarity. 

The biggest draw of all is how grippingly intelligent the humour is. There’s no canned laughter; there’s intertextuality; there’s self-referencing; there’s topical jokes; and there’s an abundance of witty remarks and comebacks to die for. In other words, Arrested Development is the real deal. Debatable, yes, but I’m convinced that the only modern comedy that comes anywhere near to competing on the same level is the far-more-successful British sitcom, The Office.

The cast announced in an Arrested Development reunion that the shooting of a film is planned to start next summer so that means it’ll be… at least more than one year until the film hits the screens. Until then, buy the box set and marvel at the sheer genius of it - the development throughout the three series is anything but arrested.

DRUGS HIGH ON FOOTBALL AGENDA

Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary The Truth About Drugs in Football, aired on Sept 12 2011, has sparked much controversy over the influence of drugs in English football.

The Dispatches documentary named and shamed, as promised, a multimillion pound footballer whose drug habits had been hidden from new employers. The footballer in question was Scottish international Garry O’Connor, who’s now playing his football for Hibernian in the Scottish Premier League. O’Connor had tested positive for cocaine while playing for Birmingham City in the 2009-10 season, and the documentary questioned the validity of the club’s claims that an injury sustained at the time had coincided with his ban. They instead proposed that it’d been a cover-up.

The very nature of the problem means that it can be difficult to find any definitive evidence of drug use in professional football, but there have been a number of high-profile incidences in recent years. Romanian international Adrian Mutu’s promising start to a career at Chelsea was cut short when he failed a test for cocaine in September 2004 and was banned from playing professionally for seven months. Chelsea decided to sack him a month later, just 14 months after paying nearly £16 million to sign him. The striker, who in 2010 served another ban for using an appetite suppressant containing illegal substances, has since been ordered by FIFA to pay millions of Euros in compensation to Chelsea for the unjustified breach of contract, despite several court appeals.

While Chelsea’s stance on drugs was backed by most people within sport at the time, their haste in punishing Mutu was not met with support by all corners of the sporting world. For some, there’s a feeling that the dealing of footballers who’ve failed drug tests is inconsistent; it sometimes seems as though transgressors’ identities are exposed to the public when it suits a club, and are kept secret when it doesn’t. For example, the exposure of Mutu’s misconduct wouldn’t have posed a problem for Chelsea because they were keen to get this high-earning player, unavailable for selection until the next season, off their books. In addition to costing clubs money through wages, a drug user damages a club’s reputation and is hard to sell for a substantial fee. Besides, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had bought the West London club a year before and was at that point willing to pay for any player the manager wanted to recruit, so finding a replacement wouldn’t have been a problem.

For Birmingham, however, drug offender Garry O’Connor was a player who had performed well enough in his debut season, when not struggling with fitness, to suggest that he could establish himself as a valuable member of their team, or at least command a decent transfer fee from a club interested in signing him. They could forget about the latter situation coming to surface if O’Connor’s failed drug test was out in the open – not many managers are looking for an injury-prone cocaine-user. Thus, it will have suited the club to claim that the player was out with an injury, rather than a serving a ban. They shipped the player to Barnsley on loan the following year, with his drug history unbeknownst to the Championship side. It would be unjust to heap criticism on Birmingham though, as they’re not alone in carrying out such actions: there have been 21 cases of cocaine use in the Football League since 2003, all but two of which were covered up. The FA maintains that footballers’ identities should be hidden to protect the reputations of clubs and players, particularly as many of the players found to have taken drugs are young ones who are trying to establish themselves, and whose careers would potentially be ruined by a drug scandal.

Some established voices in the anti-doping community believe that the use of cocaine, or other recreational drugs, isn’t the main issue at hand anyway; they argue that going after those who may have taken drugs socially should surely play second fiddle to the war on systematic cheating through doping. The advantage of tackling the use of drugs like cocaine and cannabis is that it’s more clear-cut – the ingredients are known and can be traced readily – but do drugs taken socially jeopardise the integrity of football to the same degree that performance-enhancers do?

A BBC One Real Story documentary aired in 2003 showed the results of a survey carried out with professional footballers. One of the key findings was that 5.6% of players knew of a colleague who used performance-enhancers; another notable finding was that 4% of the players admitted to having had an injection of an unknown substance. Many of the injections given to the 4% bracket probably contain only legal substances, but it is alarming that players are unaware of the ingredients surging into their bloodstreams, and it would be naïve to have no reservations.

With so much pressure to succeed, clubs naturally try to ensure that their players are in peak condition, and as such will try any methods, within reason, that are going to give their squad an edge over opponents. There is, though, a thin line between using unconventional, but legal, methods to enhance players’ fitness, and breaching the doping law enforced by the UK Anti-doping Agency, whose budget the coalition government has cut by 3%. During his spell as Chelsea manager, Claudio Ranieri instructed club doctors to give players sessions attached to an iron drip, presumably to feed players’ bodies the iron lost during exercise. Chelsea’s medical team were uneasy with adopting these methods and refused to comply, so the Italian manager got his own team of coaches, countrymen who’d performed the procedure for him at previous clubs, to carry out the sessions. This routine is clearly dubious, yet his medical team have maintained that the practice is entirely within regulations. It’s a case that highlights the ambiguity surrounding what can and cannot be done by clubs.

It’s obvious that the iron drip is intended to improve performances, but it seems that the covert, seemingly harmless, practices are more punishable. Manchester City’s Ivorian defender Kolo Toure was earlier this year given a six-month ban for taking a diet pill containing an illegal ingredient, apparently because of body image issues. Some football fans believed the ban to be too severe for such a small offence, but there may have been a subtext to his swallowing of the pill. Drug authorities have claimed that some diet pills can be used to cover up other substances so, although perhaps a little sensationalistic, it’s not completely unreasonable to wonder if his claims of being insecure about his body were a pretense. Goalkeeper Paddy Kenny, now at QPR, was given a nine-month ban in a similar case two years ago. The suspension came after he tested positive for the stimulant ephedrine after a play off semi-final against Preston; he would have been banned for two years in normal circumstances but the FA believed his claim that he had taken the tablet for a chest infection. His then-manager, Kevin Blackwell, suggested that Kenny had been made a martyr by the FA and warned that the rules would only become more stringent as the 2012 Olympics approaches.

The Truth About Drugs in Football raised issue with how infrequently players are tested for drugs in England – apparently only once every three years, while other sports test professionals several times a year – and proposed that a player from each team should be tested after every game, as is standard practice in Italy. They also lamented how many tests are abandoned, arguing that it’s too easy to steer clear of a test. Perhaps the FA is displaying wilful ignorance towards to the problem at hand; the point is backed up by another stat published in the 2003 BBC Real Story documentary about drugs: 5.8% of the footballers questioned testified to have been given prior warning of an upcoming drug test. The implied menace was rejected by the Secret Footballer columnist writing for the Guardian, though, who dismissed the claims as “laughable”. He explained that “anyone who knows anything about the daily life of a football player will tell you that training can be moved at the drop of a hat, depending on anything from a good or bad result to the weather”. While a certain degree of doubt surrounds how prominent the involvement of drugs in the English game is, there is no doubt that the issue will linger. 

http://brightonlite.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/channel-4-searches-for-the-truth-about-drugs-in-football-part-1/  

http://brightonlite.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/the-truth-about-drugs-in-football-part-two

NARRATIVE TEKKERS: USE OF NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN PULP FICTION AND MEMENTO

Films that come along with carefully constructed and innovatory narrative techniques are eagerly anticipated by audiences, largely due to the lack of originality in so many films. Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) is a contemporary example of this; its challenging and surreal nature has seen audiences go back to the cinema and see it again just to gain some sort of understanding of what they’ve just witnessed. By paying close attention to innovatory narrative styles, filmmakers ensure that their films will have an edge to them that will captivate audiences. The reason I’ve chosen to analyse the use of these techniques is the fact that - pretentious, I know - so many of my favourite films are avant-garde in their use of narrative. Memento (2000), written and directed by Inception’s Chris Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) are the two texts I’ve selected to focus on because they offer thoughtful techniques in their standout manipulation of narrative. I will analyse these films by comparing and contrasting their respective approaches to narrative with several narrative hypotheses proposed by theorists.

Bordwell[i] wrote that ‘While watching a film, the spectator takes as one goal the arranging of events in temporal sequence. Our prior commerce with narrative and the everyday world allows us to expect that events will occur in some determinate order, and in most films specific cues encourage us to treat each distinct action as following previously presented ones.’ The knowledge that most films conform to this means that audiences are reassured and take comfort in the predictability of plots, but it also means that the narrative in films can become painfully repetitive. The unvaried nature of populist film narratives, which have been extensively analysed by narrative theorists such as Todorov and Propp, make the experience of watching a film with an unconventional narrative especially rewarding.

One of most noticeable things about Pulp Fiction and Memento’s narrative structures is that they both subvert Todorov’s classical narrative structure[ii] by making a point of not moving coherently forward and challenging the audience expectations that Bordwell discussed. Pulp Fiction’s multistrand plot is incoherent throughout: it starts off in a diner, shows three separate storylines that are interrelated, and then returns to the diner in the final scene at the same point in time at which it started. Memento’s plot is meticulously linear but in reverse. It consists of 22 colour scenes that are in reverse order, with a Memento at the start of each scene connecting it to the start of the next scene, and 22 black and white scenes which move forward. As Bordwell stated, audiences are commonly encouraged to ‘treat each distinct action as following previously presented ones’, so Pulp Fiction and Memento’s narratives challenge the audience to break out of their normal routine and work at constructing the narrative themselves. Todorov’s classical narrative structure is broken as neither film’s narratives start with equilibrium, instead using a catalyst to introduce conflict (Pulp Fiction starts with the proposal of an armed robbery while Memento starts with Leonard killing a man) and throw the films straight into disequilibrium, setting the tone for the rest of the plot.

Roland Barthes’s narrative codes are relevant in both films. Pulp Fiction toys with Barthes’s delay code by exaggerating its use: the audience has to wait until the last scene to discover the outcome of the bank robbery proposed in the first scene. Memento has enigmas continually planted into its plot - the questions of whether Leonard’s memories are accurate and whether his ‘friends’ are manipulating him are a couple of the mysteries that engage the audience in the text.

Propp’s character function theory[iii] is subverted in both of the films, with the characters far more complex than those in many populist films. This is particularly apparent in Memento, in which Leonard is seen to be seeking revenge for the murder of his wife and the loss of his short-term memory after an assault. The audience progressively discovers that his memories aren’t accurate and in actual fact it was he who killed his wife, though through no fault of his own in extraordinary circumstances. Propp’s black and white ‘hero’ or ‘villain’ characterisation can’t be applied to such a complicated character, enabling the audience to instead adopt a negotiated reading of the protagonist based on their own ideologies.

Both films enhance their narratives by employing a femme fatale (associated with film noir and therefore making the two films a hybrid of genres) to expose the vulnerability of characters. Marsellus Wallace’s wife, Mia Wallace, fulfils this role in Pulp Fiction. Vincent goes to a 50s bar with her, as a favour for Marsellus who’s out of town, and her seductive nature persuades him to compete in a dance competition with her before returning to her house, where he ends up having to revive here after she mistakenly sniffs heroin. In Memento the femme fatale, Natalie, reminds the audience of Leonard’s vulnerability by asking him and other men at a bar to spit in a pint of beer before offering it to Leonard only seconds later, and he of course accepts because he doesn’t remember spitting into it. She also manipulates him into driving a dangerous man called Dodd out of town. By exposing characters’ weaknesses, these events evoke sympathy from the audience. The narrative theory of the Seven Universal Myths[iv] is relevant here. One of the myths is the Achilles Heel, by which a character’s weakness, in this case a weakness for women, brings them down and puts them in danger. This is evident in Vince’s susceptibility to seduction and Leonard’s gullibility due to his severely damaged memory.  The Noir film convention of crisis in masculinity is also apparent. Noir films’ plots often centre on a male protagonist who’s lost his way, usually after experiencing a tragedy of some sort, and a result has a crisis of masculinity. Leonard fits perfectly into this role; due to the damage to his memory he has no job, no partner, and no direction in life; he just sets off on revenge-seeking quests in order to install some sort of purpose into his life.

Shots of characters in private are used as techniques of identification and alienation in both films. There are two scenes in Pulp Fiction, with alternating shots between Vincent in the toilet and the significant events occurring outside the toilet, that enable the audience an intrusion into his world to understand his obliviousness to the potential danger while also placing them in a frustrating privileged position. There are numerous shots set up to see the world as Leonard would in Memento, such as the slow camera movement used when Leonard discovers his tattoos throughout the film which suggest he hasn’t seen his tattoos before, even though we know he has.  Over the shoulder shots are also used to make the audience feel as if they’re pushing him on and insert shots of isolated details are used to keep the audience seeing through his eyes. The black-and-white scenes of Leonard in the motel are shot much like CCTV footage with a high angle used. The monologue in the black-and-white scenes is in second person, which makes the scenes seem like parts of a documentary. This alienates him and allows the audience a chance to see him objectively, in contrast to the subjective colour scenes shot from his point-of-view.

The subtle manipulation of visual and audio codes in Memento strongly contributes to the narrative. The audience is immersed in Leonard’s worlds through the repetition of certain images and scenes which create a sense of déjà-vu and encourage the audience to question what it must be like for Leonard to repeatedly see the same things without remembering them[v]. A specific pallet is used which has enough variety to resemble the world we live in but is cinematically limited in order to portray Leonard’s challenged view of the world. The environments in the film such as the motel are anonymous to emphasise the difficulty of orientating yourself after losing memory. The importance of repetition in Memento cannot be overstated as it is crucial in understanding the plot structure and story on a personal level. The abandoned warehouse is shot identically at the beginning and end of the film, with Leonard’s car parking in the same spot, the camera in the same position and the same music playing. An ingenious way of disorientating the audience is used during Teddy’s death; the camera footage is shown in reverse motion, whilst the sounds of the gun shot and the glasses falling on the ground are deceptively forward-moving. Distinctive sounds are inserted to distinguish between black-and-white scenes and colour scenes. The sounds in the black-and-white scenes are cold and subliminal whereas the sounds in the colour scenes are more overtly haunting. This draws attention to the sadness felt by Leonard and to his fragile emotional state. The audience is positioned alongside Leonard and therefore feel at one with him in his attempt to piece together the mystery that is his life.

The epileptic soundtrack to Pulp Fiction complements the unorthodox narrative progression, with the songs juxtaposed into an incoherent musical sequence that mirrors the narrative sequence of the film. The stylish collection of music played, such as Jungle Boogie by Kool and the Gang, is crucial to the character development and emphasises how cool the characters are. It also provides inter-textuality; John Travolta’s character dances to You Never Can Tell by Chuck Berry when he competes in the dance competition with Mia, referring to Saturday Night Fever (1977), which Travolta starred in, and adding an inter-textual layer to the narrative.

Pulp Fiction and Memento could both be categorised as postmodern cinema, but Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction especially, with its subversion of mainstream narrative structure and flood of inter-textual references. Baudrillard claimed that we live in a world of “hyperreality” in which the perceived ‘truth’ regarding events and experiences is constructed by media images. He believed that a copy world has replaced reality, in which we feed off old stimuli without procreating[vi]. Tarantino pointedly conforms to this postmodernist theory by injecting a wealth of references into Pulp Fiction. For example:  Zorro (1957) is the name of a character; Psycho (1960) in referred to when Marsellus walks in front of Butch’s car before turning to him; The Flintstones (1960) is paid homage to via a Freddy Flintstone t-shirt; and the influence of the aforementioned Saturday Night Fever (1977) is evident in the dancing scene[vii]. Tarantino’s known to have been influenced by the French New Wave (he dedicated Reservoir Dogs to New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard) and he alludes to this through pieces of dialogue such as “Don’t Jimmy me, Jules,” a line borrowed from Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim.  Tarantino has established himself as a prominent master of postmodern cinema through his imitation; by creating pastiches such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill (2003) he maximises the entertainment of his films, enabling the audience to take gratification in recognising the references and rewarding their cultural competence.

Pulp Fiction and Memento are grand examples of how to enhance films through the manipulation of narrative. By going against the traditional ordering of events which audiences are accustomed to, as discussed by Bordwell, they challenge the audience’s expectations of film structure. They both subvert Todorov’s theory by adopting incoherent (Pulp Fiction) and reversely ordered (Memento) narrative structures which catapult their plots straight into disequilibrium. Barthes’ narrative codes are used exaggeratedly: Pulp Fiction introducing a delay code in the opening scene which is only returned to in the final scene; and Memento engrossing the audience in its plot with a bombardment of enigma codes. Both films ignore Propp’s black-and-white character functions, instead applying more subjective, complex characters. A femme fatale is injected into both narratives to expose vulnerability in characters, forming a hybrid with film noir whilst utilizing one of the Seven Universal Myths, the Achilles Heel. There is a polysemic layering of the narrative in Pulp Fiction and ingenious editing in Memento: reversed camera footage and forward-moving sounds simultaneously used to disorientate the audience.

Considering the diverse range of innovatory narrative techniques employed in Pulp Fiction and Memento, it’s not hard to understand why both films have drawn such tremendous critical acclaim, but it is hard to understand why so many filmmakers refuse to take a similarly avant-garde approach to narrative, which enriches the film-watching experience so profoundly.

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[i] BORDWELL, D 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film University of Wisconsin Press

[ii] BRANSON, G 2010 The Media Student’s Book Routledge

[iii] CONNEL, B H 2008 Exploring the Media: Text, Industry, Audience Auteur Publishing

[iv] BOOKER, C 2005 The Seven Basic Plots, Why We Tell Stories Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

[v] NOLAN, C 2000 Memento Special Edition Pathe Distribution

[vi] BAUDRILLARD, J 1995 The Precession of Simulacra Jade Tree

[vii] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/movieconnections

LOST IN TRANSLATION: CHANGES MADE IN FILM ADAPTION OF A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Controversial changes are inevitable when novels are adapted into films. The changes that are picked up on are usually ones regarding a misrepresentation of a novel’s character, or a change in the plot that grossly distorts the novel’s essence. Something that’s not usually analysed, though, is the linguistic changes that occur. A Clockwork Orange is a prime example of how the language used in novels is modified in film adaptions to cater for different audiences and to help squeeze a novel’s worth of reading into one and a half hours’ worth of screen viewing. 

The A Clockwork Orange film’s exclusion of the final chapter from Anthony Burgess’ novel of the same title caused a stir at the time of the film’s release, with Burgess condemning the change and voicing concerns over the meaning of the novel becoming misconstrued. 

There are, however, other adjustments to the novel that Stanley Kubrick made in his stylistic film adaption of A Clockwork Orange, in addition to the elimination of the novel’s final chapter. In terms of language, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange’s scarce use of the distinguished language which is so prominent in the novel is something that stands out. This change in Stanley Kubrick’s stylistic adaption of A Clockwork Orange had Burgess farther aggrieved. Nadsat, the iconic language Burgess created for his novel’s central character, Alex, was the staple that held together his novel. It was Alex’s most lethal weapon, used forcefully to gain power over his peers; used mischievously on his villainous outings; and used manipulatively to pull free from any sticky situations he found himself in. Speaking in Nadsat reassures the audience that Alex has intelligence, has potential; without it, there wouldn’t be much to differentiate Alex from other offending adolescents and it’s hard to imagine the audience being anywhere near as quick to forgive him for his actions. 

An example of the diminished use of Nadsat in the film comes in one of the first scenes, in which Alex and his friends taunt and attack a homeless man. Alex’s narration in the novel goes like this: “All we did then was to pull his outer platties off, stripping him down to his vest and long underpants (very starry; Dim smecked his head off near), and then Pete kicks him lovely in the pot, and we let him go.” Now, there is a case to be heard for this acting only to amplify the violence, the unfamiliar words and style of speech making it hard for the audience to understand what exactly is going through his head and therefore making it a challenge to relate to him. However, the feeling I get from his surreal narration is a feeling of detachment from the violence. The language he uses has my attention rather than his actions; trying to decipher his words preoccupies me to such an extent that I don’t think to dwell on the pain he’s causing to the defenceless man. This isn’t the case in the film, in which the violence very much dominates the proceedings. We’re introduced to the seen by Alex remarking that the one thing he could never stand was “to see a filthy, dirty old drunkie”. After that, we see Alex torment the homeless man before, together with his friends, beating the man up. Burgess wrote “language ceases to be an opaque protection against being appalled and takes a very secondary place” of this. It is true that there’s a distinct lack of protection from the violence in the film, and the blast of classical music over many of the violent scenes suggests that Kubrick was aware of this and tried to amend this, but you can’t help thinking that he missed the point. Acting as a linguistic veil over the violence was not the only thing Nadsat gave the novel, so blasting Beethoven over violent scenes won’t give the film what it’s lost by neglecting to recognise language’s importance to A Clockwork Orange. 

It is worth noting, though, that it would’ve been incredibly hard for Kubrick to employ Nadsat to the same extent as Burgess did in his novel. When A Clockwork Orange was first published, a glossary was included in many of the copies, so meant that readers would be able to look up any words that they were unsure about. For those who were not afforded this luxury, it would still be able to pick up Nadsat through techniques such as re-reading passages. Audiences watching the film, however, would have no means by which to aid their understanding, so Kubrick may have been worried that audiences wouldn’t be able to adapt to the complex language over a two-hour period. A study by Saragi, Nation & Meister (1978) found that subjects who’d read the novel scored 67% on a test of its vocabulary. An understanding of 67% is impressive, but it does mean that a third of the vocabulary wasn’t understood by readers of the novel, and it’s likely that the level of understanding would be far lower for film audiences exposed to Nadsat in its entirety over two hours.  Two hours is insufficient time for audiences to develop an understanding of a language, especially when the audience is likely to be more mainstream than the novel’s audience and therefore perhaps less likely to be open to such a challenge.