The Writing in the Mirror – a review of 'Tenet'

“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.“

Walter Benjamin on ‘The Angel of History’

There's something which happens in the opening minutes of Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet (2020) that in retrospect, now seems utterly extraordinary: We see an audience taking their seats in a packed European opera house, as an orchestra is tuning up for a live performance.

Real stories for fake times

GK Chesterton is said to have famously observed that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. It's often quoted in order to dismiss whatever conspiracy theories happen to be in popular circulation at any given time and, while it is undeniably a good line, it doesn't honour the sense of betrayal or hunger for 'the truth' that often underpins the appeal of such stories. This month's column looks at three recent* films which prompted me to think again about the relationship between private beliefs and public events.

'Blinded by the Light' review

“Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.”

Extract from Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon

I must confess to feeling a tiny bit anxious whenever I see a musical advertised at the cinema, and not for the reasons you might imagine. While the uncanny appearance of Radius patron, Dame Judi Dench, in a computerised fur suit for the trailer of the forthcoming Cats movie is a sight that is undeniably difficult to put out of anyone’s mind, for me there are often much deeper disturbances at work.

"A Monster Calls" Review

There's a scene midway through J A Bayona's new film A Monster Calls where a boy and his mum are curled up on the sofa watching a scratchy print of King Kong (1933) on his granddad's rediscovered 35mm projector. The mother falls asleep before the end and the little boy watches wide-eyed as the mighty Kong, swatting bi-planes on the Empire State Building and harassed to the point of exhaustion by the modern world, lets go and falls to his death. 

'This is your imaginative inheritance', the filmmaker seems to say to him, 'and you're going to have to cope with it on your own, because the adults in your life are not awake to it'.

Putting Life into Perspective – a review of "Downsizing"

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.

Jonathan Swift, extract from On Poetry: A Rhapsody (1733)

The popular notion that stories about people changing size are aimed at children is an odd one when you look at it with an adult eye. I find it impossible, for example, to think of the hero of Gulliver’s Travels, pinned to the ground by a thousand tiny arrows, without also recalling that the author Jonathan Swift is said to have had Meniere’s Disease – a kind of vertigo which can lead to collapses, as if suddenly defeated by the smallest of everyday things. In this way, a rapid change of scale can be seen as a metaphor for something that brings us ‘down to size’, such as an embarrassing heath condition, a change in social status, or a shift in perspective.

A Cold and Perilous Journey

In Glenn Gould’s experimental radio documentary The Idea of North (PBS, 1967), regular commuters on a long distance train journey to the far north of Canada talk about their relationship to the remote landscape. Conversations and voices overlap, fading in and out with the clattering of the train wheels and the sympathetic rattle of the catering trolley creating a dreamlike, almost hypnotic effect...