{"id":1003,"date":"2012-04-11T10:20:09","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T15:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2020-09-14T09:52:47","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T14:52:47","slug":"illegal-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/movies\/illegal-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Illegals, Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

PART ONE IS HERE.<\/a><\/p>\n

PART TWO IS HERE.<\/a><\/p>\n

PART THREE IS HERE.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ALLEGORICAL COMPLEXITY #2 \u2014 Attack the Block<\/em><\/p>\n

A new problem: What are we to say about stories that feature both allegorical and literal versions of the same thing, of the same class of object or type of person\u2014about True Blood<\/em>, for instance, whose vampires code comprehensively as queer even though the show also includes among its characters several mortal, day-walking gays and lesbians? This is a real problem, because the show seems<\/em> to be drawing a distinction, prompting a rigorous reader, one perhaps suspicious of allegory, to insist that the vampires can\u2019t possibly be in some general way stand-ins for queer folk because the show already possesses these latter<\/em>, and they are not coterminous with the vampires. Placing an allegorical construct in the same room as its literal equivalent doesn\u2019t, as one might suspect, make the allegory stronger or easier to explicate. Quite the contrary: The allegory and the literal referent are going to be locked in a struggle for the relevant name or meaning, and it\u2019s not entirely clear which is going to have the upper hand in that fight. You might think that the literal term has home turf advantage. If a gay person and a vampire are standing next to each other, and I only get to call one of them \u201cgay person,\u201d I\u2019m going to choose the gay person. That\u2019s what it means to say that the presence of the literal term can prevent the allegory from coalescing, like the trace amounts of yolk that ruin your every attempt at meringue. But then hyperbole is at the heart of allegory\u2014you create an allegorical version of x <\/em>by exaggerating certain features of x<\/em>\u2014and in that case, the non-literal construct can easily seem like the better version of the thing, more fully and vividly itself, purer, pushed further away from the imaginary average against which all specific difference is gauged. If Dracula and Oscar Wilde double each other, I might decide that it is the vampire who is really <\/em>queer, whereupon gay and lesbian people will find themselves outflanked, normal by comparison, conceptually maneuvered bank into the ranks of dull humanity. The allegory can poach from the literal term its very name.<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re going to make sense of this particular deviant variety of allegory, it will help to have the terms provided by an unreformed structuralism, whose core insight was that all stories begin by generating some opposition or another: A and B, cowboy and Indian. The idea, then, is that since most of us experience oppositions as cockeyed and agitating, the business of nearly any story will be to stabilize its antithesis, though there are different ways a movie or novel or folktale might do this: by subordinating one term to another and perhaps by eliminating it altogether (cowboy defeats, expels, or guns down Indian); or, alternately, by fusing the two together into some unforeseen third (cowboy marries Indian). Storytelling can become more complicated, of course, as it begins shading in intermediate steps that already contravene the central opposition (the half-breed, say, or the white Indian) or as it appends secondary oppositions to its core one: (cowboy and East Coast railroad interest). But nearly all storytelling is at heart a play with oppositions, and the trick when considering a complicated story is to discern the master antithesis (or small set of antitheses) that underpins its many more local conflicts. The remarkable thing, then, about stories that contain allegorical and literal versions of the same thing is that they sabotage this most basic feature of narrative; they monkeywrench the binary by plugging the same term into each of the opposition\u2019s slots\u2014once nakedly and then again in disguise\u2014and thereby create reflexive stories that are not, however, immediately recognizable as such: cowboy and cowboy, teasingly and with the air of paradox.<\/p>\n

That such stories pose special challenges should be clear from Spielberg\u2019s War of the Worlds<\/em>, released in 2005. Nearly every newspaper and magazine reviewer\u2014and, I suspect, most ordinary fans\u2014thought that the movie was about terrorism or that it was 9\/11\u2019s conversion into science fiction: It was \u201cthe first serious post-9\/11 sci-fi movie,\u201d \u201ca 9\/11 allegory,\u201d a reminder that \u201cterrorists can take out a big chunk of the Manhattan skyline,\u201d a surprisingly solemn tour of the nation\u2019s \u201cworst terrorism nightmares.\u201d The New York press took to warning its readers off the movie: \u201cmerciless,\u201d they called it, and \u201cshocking\u201d\u201435mm PTSD. And it is certainly true, as the reviewers all mentioned, that the film is crammed with \u201callusions\u201d and \u201cparallels\u201d and \u201creferences\u201d to 9\/11: civil emergency in greater New York, panicked urbanites sprinting down city blocks, overwhelmed beat cops, airplane wreckage, a wall of the missing, and\u2014least generically, most jarringly\u2014a rain of ash.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That War of the Worlds<\/em> is not about terrorism one knows all the same, because it tells you as much, and in so many words\u2014except, of course, one doesn\u2019t know it; everybody missed it. The movie\u2019s hero has two children, and as they escape from the attack, the younger one screams: \u201cIs it the terrorists?\u201d\u2014and gets no answer. Then a minute or two later the older one repeats the question, more calmly this time: \u201cWhat is it? The terrorists?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d the father says, \u201cthis came from someplace else.\u201d All the more remarkably, the film has already by this point identified that Someplace Else or Other Thing, the thing that isn\u2019t terrorism. Some four minutes into the movie, Tom Cruise\u2019s ex-wife instructs him to stay on top of their teenaged son over the weekend, because he has a research report due \u201con the French occupation of Algeria.\u201d And there it is: The malicious gag underlying the movie is that the invading Martians give a high-school student all the material he needs to write a really bang-up paper about occupation or that they turn his assignment into a family project: This is the weekend everyone learns about empire.<\/p>\n

War of the Worlds<\/em> was thus a thought experiment or indeed a political education\u2014one specific to the middle years of the Bush era: Can you imagine a force powerful enough to do to the US what the US has done to Iraq? Can you imagine, via analogy and extrapolation, a military wielding technological superiority over the US of a kind that the US currently wields over the world\u2019s other nations? Or as one character says of the invaders: \u201cThey defeated the greatest power in the world in a matter of a couple of days. \u2026 This isn\u2019t a war any more than there is a war between men and maggots.\u201d What the reviewers inexplicably overlooked was that terrorists do not occupy entire countries. And that\u2019s all you need to bear in mind to realize that Spielberg\u2019s movie was is no sense an homage to 9\/11\u2014just the reverse\u2014it was a deliberate and principled insult to the instant sanctity of that day, a way of putting 9\/11 back into perspective by staging on the same terrain an event of incomparably greater magnitude, a way, that is, of showing the New Yorkers who were told to skip the movie just how much worse it could have been: Baghdad.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the sort of thing that becomes possible when allegory doubles its referent; such doubling is, indeed, one of the only ways that narrative can place the same term on both sides of an opposition; X fights X; the US invades the US; Americans as colonizers, Americans as colonized. This is the structure we\u2019ll need to carry forward with us if we want to make sense now of Attack the Block<\/em>, which is Super 8<\/em>\u2019s English twin, the other alien-invasion movie from 2011 that pulls in equal measure from ET <\/em>and the Goonies<\/em>: more adventuring tweens, more BMXs, more aliens that seem visible only to the pubescent. But then Attack the Block <\/em>is also the first movie I\u2019ve named that is openly about race in some entirely literal and earthbound sense. This is first of all a simple matter of casting: Almost none of the movie\u2019s heroes are conventionally, ethnically English; all but one come from African or Caribbean immigrant families. If you haven\u2019t seen the movie, it\u2019s not enough to imagine The Goonies <\/em>with English accents. You have rather to imagine The Goonies <\/em>as new-model Cockneys, black and mixed-race and speaking grime patois. But then it\u2019s not just the characters: Attack the Block <\/em>is also telling a story about<\/em> race; indeed, it is telling perhaps the most familiar racial story of the last few generations, the one about integration and enfranchisement. All you need to know is the bare outlines of the plot: Once they start fighting the movie\u2019s aliens\u2014and fight they do, to the death; the movie\u2019s resemblance to ET <\/em>and Super 8 <\/em>ends there\u2014the boys are transformed from the piece\u2019s villains to its heroes. They begin the movie by mugging a young white nurse, but they end it by saving the day. In other words, it\u2019s not just that Attack the Block <\/em>is one of the most extensive pieces of black British pop culture yet produced, and in that sense some kind of landmark. The movie is actually walking you through a reassessment of black Britain and can, to this extent, easily seem like an advance on that recent crop of movies that make the English poor seem like the worst people on earth, though it has to be said that those films\u2019 chosen technique for communicating their sour insight is simply to remake Hollywood movies on English soil: Harry Brown<\/em>, for instance, which casts Michael Caine as an East End vigilante and aitchless Eastwood\u2014it\u2019s there in the title, if you squint: \u201cbrown\u201d = \u201csmudged\u201d or \u201cunclean\u201d = Harry Dirty<\/em>; and especially the remarkable Eden Lake<\/em>, which is Deliverance <\/em>transplanted to a not-so-rural Buckinghamshire, with hoodie-wearing poor kids in the place of Georgia hillbillies: 13-year-old proletarians carving up their betters. These movies and others like them leave the impression that the British working class has simply gone feral\u2014the impression, that is, that class relations in the UK have by this point simply snapped or that basic modes of sociability or decency or respect have disappeared, with dehumanized workers and lumpens stuck living in perpetuity on the far side of their old traditions. To a considerable extent, then, Attack the Block <\/em>asks to be read as a polemical response to this cinema of broken Britain. The movie begins in the mode of Harry Brown <\/em>and then simply demands that viewers revise their judgments. The respectable white audience\u2019s designated proxy obtrusively changes her mind. At the beginning of the movie she and an older white neighbor commiserate: \u201cThey\u2019re fucking monsters.\u201d But by the end of the movie, she is telling the cops to back off from the bruvs: \u201cI know them. They\u2019re my neighbors.\u201d<\/p>\n

One way to summarize Attack the Block<\/em>, then, would be to say that it is a story of uplift and interracial friendship, in which Britain redefines itself in order to make room for its newest members. Nor is it overreaching to mention Britain in this context; the film has the nation unmistakably on its mind. It is set on Guy Fawkes Day, for one, and so asks to be read as a redo of 1605\u2014England\u2019s second saving!\u2014with West Indian yardies performing the patriotic gallantries once reserved for Protestant knights. More to the point, the movie\u2019s 15-year-old hero, propelled in one scene from out a high window, saves himself by un-metaphorically clinging to the Her Majesty\u2019s flag.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The movie, in sum, revises British nationalism by pushing it in a liberal and multiethnic direction, though we will want to note that this observation is dogged by two persistent instabilities.<\/p>\n

First: The film\u2019s visuals might be plenty nationalist\u2014all fireworks and Union Jacks\u2014but its dialogue is not. Anything but: The film\u2019s teenagers routinely say that they are fighting only to defend their housing project, their block. Where the movie is John-Bullish, the characters are instead intensely localist: \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have mugged you if we\u2019d known you lived here.\u201d That\u2019s a sentiment available only to someone whose sense of the imagined community stops cold at the corner shop. And to this jingoism of the neighborhood the characters add a working-class or black ethos of self-policing\u2014the code, in the US context, of Stop snitching<\/em> and jury negation and Walter Moseley novels: \u201cThis is the block. We take care of things our own way.\u201d It might be possible, when trying to make sense of the movie, to simply superimpose these two terms\u2014the nation and the locality\u2014in which case we would conclude that Attack the Block <\/em>is proposing a council-estate nationalism, a black-white alliance of the distrustful and cop-hating poor. There\u2019s something to this idea, and yet the individual components remain visible and not fully resolved into one another.<\/p>\n

Second: The movie does almost nothing to revise one\u2019s perception that its heroes are sadistic predators. It merely concludes that sadistic predators are sometimes useful to have around. The film\u2019s few white men are by contrast all emasculated. \u201cI am registered disabled\u201d one of them says; \u201cI\u2019m a member of fucking Amnesty!\u201d shouts another; and the movie\u2019s gibe is that these amount to the same thing, just two different routes to castration, physical and ideological\u2014twin softnesses. This will obviously complicate our sense of the movie as liberal, since even as the movie is promoting a kind of racial liberalization, it is deciding that liberal men aren\u2019t good for much, and the burden of British masculinity will thereby pass over to the nation\u2019s young Trinidadians and Congolese, fourteen-year olds with knives and swords and bats and explosives, a nine-year old with a handgun, announcing that his new warrior name is \u201cMayhem.\u201d Attack the Block <\/em>sometimes gives the impression that it is recruiting the child soldiers of South London.<\/p>\n

But then those two instabilities are nothing, mere tremors, compared to the movie\u2019s central and defining instability, the oscillation around which it is constructed. I\u2019ve been describing the role of race in the movie at the literal level, but then there is also an allegorical level, in which everything I\u2019ve just described is taken back. This makes for a vast and, I think, unsolvable puzzle, though in many ways Attack the Block<\/em>\u2019s racial allegory is unusually bald and not in the least puzzling and amounts to this: The aliens are also black\u2014hairy, subhuman, grinning, and black. I don\u2019t actually want to put too much emphasis on the color in isolation. Racial allegory, after all, is not automatic. Lots of black things are not black. Darth Vader is not black. If all we had to go on is that the creatures are inky-dark, I\u2019d say we could let it slide. But that\u2019s not it: The movie is entirely upfront about how it wants us to understand the aliens\u2019 ebony. The kids stand over the first adult monster they kill, and two of them speak out loud what they see: \u201cWow, that\u2019s black, that\u2019s too black to see. \u2026 That\u2019s the blackest black ever, fam. \u2026 That\u2019s blacker than my cousin Femi\u201d\u2014which moniker is Nigerian and usually followed by names like Ogumbanjo and Kuti.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The movie, in other words, openly places the creatures on a spectrum of African-ness. What\u2019s more, it has various ways of expanding on this tactic. Only once does Attack the Block<\/em>\u2019s dialogue turn openly nationalist, when a gang member sticks up for the home country at the expense of Africa, pouring contempt on a white philanthropist off doing aid work in Ghana: \u201cWhy can\u2019t he help the children of Britain? Not exotic enough, is it?\u201d Or there\u2019s this: One teenager warns another than an alien is about to attack by shouting \u201cGorilla!\u201d\u2014and then that\u2019s another clue. Attack the Block <\/em>is, at the level of its allegory, an inversion of Rise of the Planet of the Apes<\/em>, a second film about berserking primates, and with the meanings from that other movie largely intact\u2014the meanings, not the judgments. If Rise <\/em>stages a latter-day slave rebellion\u2014an insurgency against the mass incarceration of black men, an uprising that is at once prison break and revolution\u2014then Attack the Block <\/em>stages a related event, a bit of colonial turnabout, but asks us instead to cheer its suppression. Anyone who goes into this movie hoping that the Jamaican newcomers are going to battle the white dragon of the West Saxons or cut down the English aristocracy\u2019s heraldic wyverns is going to have to swallow hard. For Attack the Block <\/em>offers to enfranchise black Britons only by giving them creatures to kill who are blacker than themselves. A group of mostly black teenagers earns its citizenship by systematically cutting down the new crop of even darker arrivals. Conceptually, this is rather astounding: The film is telling two antithetical stories at once\u2014and not via a multiplot\u2014there is no main plot and contrapuntal subplot; it is telling two contradictory stories, but it only has one plot; the same story, then, but susceptible to two radically opposed constructions: a parable about learning to like black immigrants that is at the same time a fantasy about wiping them out\u2014\u201cKill \u2018em! Kill all them things!\u201d The creatures in Attack the Block<\/em> are so very jet that they often blur into the shadows, but the filmmakers, in what must have seem like an inspired touch, have given them glow-in-the-dark fangs, which means you can only see them when they bare their teeth. There\u2019s an ugly old joke in the American South — something about hunting at night — to which this image is the reinvented punchline.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PART ONE IS HERE. PART TWO IS HERE. PART THREE IS HERE.   ALLEGORICAL COMPLEXITY #2 \u2014 Attack the Block A new problem: What are we to say about stories that feature both allegorical and literal versions of the same … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[23060,23058,23052,4050,23051,23061,4027,23059],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-attack-the-block","tag-britain-england","tag-race","tag-science-fiction","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-true-blood","tag-vampires","tag-war-of-the-worlds"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1559,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions\/1559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}