Notes on ITV's Lucan

Caught the first episode of this last night. So far it's fine social-realist TV drama in the tradition of Our Friends in the North, Tinker Tailor, Red Riding, etc, and certainly better than anything the Beeb have done this year I reckon. (Definitely better than last year's shambolic effort in this regard.)

 

There's quite an interesting political thread running through it, too. Christopher Eccleston is deliciously demonic as gambling club owner John Aspinall. An unusual amount of script space is given over to Aspinall's Randian dialogues full of references to Alpha Males, biological determinism, the survival of the fittest, the importance of accepting the growth of an inferior underclass, and all that shite. He's basically a walking Adam Curtis theory, a right-wing crank grumbling about the power of "the Miners" in social-democratic post-war Britain, a sinister Blimp full of embittered determination to reassert what he calls the "natural order". Of course, the character is all the more shady because his views will become depressingly mainstream some ten years after the early-seventies moment that provides the backdrop to Lucan's narrative.

Another interesting thing is the way this class narrative is synthesised with a powerful feminist argument. Egged on by Aspinall's reactionary Alpha Male spiel, Lord Lucan starts to intimidate his wife Veronica - mentally and physically - in an attempt to get her committed so he can win custody of his children. Fortunately, this is the progressive early seventies rather than the Downtonite 1920s, so the courts decide in favour of the independent, sound-of-mind woman against the imperious, bullying aristo. The tragedy is that the working-class nanny who has supported Veronica in the run-up to the trial is bludgeoned to death by a crazed Lucan at the end of the first episode.

The symbolism here - of a brutal, quasi-Darwinian patriarchy reasserting its authority after a period of "effeminate" egalitarianism - is not difficult to grasp. The unheimlich contemporary relevance - bearing in mind certain recent uber-Darwinian pronouncements of the British Conservative Party - is also striking.

And then you realise who Aspinall's step-nephew is:

There can be no more denying it.

The conspiracy theory is the true realist art form of the twenty-first century.


[Cross-posted from http://thefantastichope.blogspot.co.uk/]

"Not even a bagpipe band?"

This is a fascinating lecture in all sorts of unexpected ways, but the biggest revelation is Lyndon Johnson's surprisingly pathetic and increasingly desperate pleading to Harold Wilson to provide British troops to help the Americans in Vietnam. You even start to wonder if the USA was ever really a superpower at all, but rather a much smaller country that found itself in the invidious historical position of having to imitate one.

We merely suggest that it could have existed

EXECUTIVE ACTION (1973)

It was all ice out there tonight

Sorry to post on top of Paul, but remembered Trevor Griffith's Comedians and thought: wonder if Russell Brand had watched it recently?

The Wolf in Man

Here's a belated Halloween entry, about the not outstanding but quite good for what it is Amicus horror film The Beast Must Die (1974), which despite some ropey plotting and unconvincing special effects has a few interesting edges to it.Since werewolves are already covered here it seemed worth a go.

The Beast Must Die is built around the central gimmick that the audience is asked to guess who the werewolf is amongst those gathered at a millionaire's country mansion. The film breaks a quarter of the way through and offers the audience a few moments to weigh up the evidence in each suspect werewolf favour. As such the film can basically be boiled down to an Agatha Christie plot plus werewolf, although the audience participation gimmick is actually pointless thinking it through: the film-makers are asking the audience to do nothing more than they will already be doing anyway.

Calvin Lockhart plays the lead role, a sportsman who has transformed his country mansion into a panopticon, in which himself and his security team can sit at the centre and monitor the activities of his house guests through a bank of CCTV screens. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, The Conversation came out in the same year, suggesting this was the right time for paranoiac surveillance culture to really get going in the public imagination leading on from Watergate. Unusually for a British horror film (or any film of this era and probably since) the hero is black, depicted as arrogant and ruthless but not stupid or malicious, and shown as far more successful (financially, socially, physically) than his white house guests. Newcliffe's wife Caroline (Marlene Clark) is also black and not depicted stereotypically. Influential here perhaps are the possibilities of casting American lead actors for distribution in the USA, and the influence of blaxploitation that partially encouraged the casting of black actors in well-rounded and non-stereotyped roles (again concerns here were more likely financial than egalitarian, the marketing of films based on the breakdown of 'the audience' into analysable demographics). In much of the promotional material however Peter Cushing is emphasised over Lockhart, again possibly not dubious as placing Cushing on a horror movie poster is smart money, but still. Although the tension between Newcliffe and his houseguests is never expressed verbally as racial in nature, the possibility is there, a sense of resentment at Newcliffe's success compounded with racism.

From a different angle however, The Beast Must Die is maybe perceptive in that in order to accommodate to the ruling capitalist class traits such as race can be de-emphasised when presenting the right attitude and accoutrements. To do the things you must do you don't need to be anybody in particular. Here the image of Newcliffe, sitting behind his screens monitoring life in the enclosed world of the mansion, drifts towards the horror-film reality of shoot-to-kill lists and air-conditioned huts in the Arabia Peninsula. Newcliffe is prepared to kill anyone of the depersonalised figures who walk across the camera's field of vision, to track and kill them in the most productive sense possible; the image marries up well with Harry Lime's declaration about the ease of bumping off the black dots far below, although as the army can tell you the dots can be even closer than that and still be easy to take out with a button push of the controller. Newcliffe does not even spend most of his time watching the screens, subcontracting to a team of hired surveillance experts who keep watch from their hidden room at the top of the house while below Newcliffe entertains his guests.

The plot of the film is essentially fluff. The guests wander around the house, there are a few interesting character details, some appearances from a deeply unconvincing werewolf (in some scenes it is literally a big dog wandering onto set), and there are some words of wisdom from Cushing about the rule of werewolves and silver that doesn't stay quite consistent through the film. Not to spoil the reveal, the film ends with Newcliffe deciding to commit suicide after being infected from a werewolf bite. Here some of the racialised resentment perhaps becomes more apparent as Newcliffe is made to die for the folly of his success. In order to win, Newcliffe has had to destroy his entire life, not just himself but what he has worked for and what he has held dear.