ARCADIA
Dionysus. While Pentheus attempts to drive Dionysus away and stamp out his influence on his people, he is made ridiculous, climbing a tree to spy on the orgies he despises, before being torn apart by his own mother, who, bewitched by the god, mistakes him for a lion. Pentheus and Dionysus represent two sides of the human psyche. The first is governed by rules and propriety; the second by a thirst for hedonism and release. All is well until one tries to repress the other. That’s when the equilibrium so admired by the later stoics is most at risk of being overturned. As the moral of this story goes, a bit of self-discipline and abstemiousness is never a bad thing, but too much is potentially self-de- feating, besides being rather joyless. In the modern spirit of doing things together (it is undoubtedly easier to give something up if others are doing the same), we should put up with Seneca standing on one shoulder, Diony- sus on the other, and do our best not to lose our balance as we go. S
LITERARY NOTES
FURROWED BROWS Sam Leith
THIS SPRING, Modern Review – the maga- zine described on its debut a whisper over 30 years ago as ‘Low Culture for Highbrows’ – is to relaunch. It’s just the time for it, if you ask me. The culture has caught up with its manifesto. By way of evidence, look at the latest James Bond movie No Time to Die: it has everything you expect from a James Bond movie. Under- ground bunkers on mysterious islands; vintage cars with machine guns; disposable henchmen catching 50 shades of bullet-in-the-face; a gorgeous Cuban girl in a barely there frock who comes over all ditzy but turns out to be a dab hand with a machine gun; a baddie with a bi- onic eye; a supervillain with a world-threat- ening plot that makes not a lick of sense; and (checks notes)… a reference to Proust?
Of all the silly things in this enormously en- joyable movie, probably the silliest is the name of the heroine, Madeleine Swann. The latest love of Bond’s life, our Maddy (who re- turns after surviving her debut appearance in 2015’s Spectre) constitutes probably the most improbable and clunkingly named Bond girl since Pussy Galore. Because in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Proust’s much referred-to and little-read masterpiece, the first volume is called Du Côté de Chez Swann, and there’s a famous bit where yer man dips a madeleine in some lime tea and remembers his childhood. And this Bond movie is all about the past, yeah? (Also: killer nanobots, which don’t fea- ture in even the later volumes of A la Recherche, though they’d have livened it up no end.) Here is, you could say, an absolute corker of an instance of the old lowbrow/highbrow crossover. But it’s interesting to see how the balance has shifted. It used to be the case, mostly, that it was highbrows who swept down from their eyries like ravening raptors to pluck away a sheep from the cultural low ground in order to incorporate its bones in their nests. Think TS Eliot plundering the music hall, say; or, as ‘cultural studies’ got into its stride in the second half of the centu- ry, highbrow critics earnestly pondering the semiotics of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Which is, you could say, the territory mapped out by Modern Review in its first incarnation. Yet here’s the opposite. Here is a franchise
film of surpassing mindlessness – I mean this as the highest compliment, by the way – giv- ing itself a gloss of intellectual credibility by referencing some monument of high culture. When did it begin?
Some will, I suppose, point to the allusion
to Juvenal (‘quis custodiet Ipsos custodes’) in the title of Alan Moore’s unquestionably brainy comic Watchmen; or to the matchless Calvin & Hobbes, though the young protago-
nist and his pet tiger in no way resemble their austere namesakes. Others will mention the influence of the French theorist Jean Baudril- lard on the action movie The Matrix. Me, I prefer to think that the learned jokes about the philosophy of Socrates and the cinematic oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey represent the decisive moment when it comes to cinema. Pop songs have been doing this for a bit, mind, and they tend to get it a bit wrong. I think with a wince, for instance, of mournful Irish pop indie-alikes the Cranberries, with their terrible song ‘Yeat’s [sic] Grave’, whose botched spelling suggested nobody in the band or their record company really spent all that much time trying to make sense of A Vision or The Wanderings of Oisin. Also, of Sting mis- pronouncing Nabokov’s name in ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’: ‘He starts to shake and cough/Just like the old man in/That book by Nabokov.’ (Never mind that Humbert Hum- bert is in his late thirties in Lolita.) That said, I reckon we can just about for- give Scritti Politti (art-school punks as they were) for naming themselves after the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci; and a positive high five to Steely Dan for referenc- ing a particularly challenging dildo in Wil- liam S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. But films? Not, until recently, quite so much. Still, I think it is to be encouraged. We’re living in an age when (at least to hear certain culture warriors tell it) the defining political influences of the moment are Fou- cault, Derrida and the almost unreadably ab- struse theorists of the Frankfurt School. The old divide between high culture and low cul- ture has broken down irreparably, so why shouldn’t the low have fun with the high as well as the other way round? Roll on Fast & Furious XI: Briggflatts Burnout. S
No Time to Die combines familar lowbrow tropes with more esoteric references
UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
