Príncipes Salvajes / Untamed Royals (2024)

 

There are essentially two kinds of Mexican movie. The first kind features a hapless protagonist, usually a lucky loser from the lower middle classes, catapulted into some sort of 'comedic' caper.

Príncipes Salvajes (Untamed Royals on Netflix) is the other kind: a relentless portrayal of the irredeemably morally bankrupt upper class elites and the officialdom which reports to them.

In this instance director Hinojosa Ozcariz places viewers amidst a group like the sociopathic teens of Hollywood films such as Cruel Intentions (1999), yet without the dramatic resolution.

The set up here has a certain promise and there are some fetching performances, but even 'empty' young people need to be written a little better than this. Shades of dark, so to speak.

Specifically there appears to be a sort of missing link dramatically here between the second and third acts, which left me feeling let down. I didn't need 'consequences' as such, but I did need something which ultimately made more sense as a story.

 

Detached Immoderates

When radicals become detached from moderation, moderates become radicalised.

This is not always a good thing.

Those who are unprepared to budge an inch get so wrapped up in their own cult that they end up staring at their own reflection, convinced that their antagonists are themselves fully committed non-budgers. And in so much as the latter might become so, it’s nearly always the fault of the extremists.

For instance, in England a decade or so before the Civil War, public opinion was almost uniformly opposed to royal policy. But then the radicals started to say (and do) the quiet stuff out loud, thus driving a significant group in English society to coalesce behind a new anti-radical sentiment, which sought to preserve the essentials of the existing order.

This is actually the commoner form of civil strife. One does not need two diametrically-opposed, ludicrous propositions.

 

Top Ten Bars in Central America

 

La Rana Dorada 🐸 in Panama City’s casco viejo — one of my current top ten in the region, perhaps even my favourite, mood depending.

The others, south to north, roughly… 

 

Wet Deck Bar, W, Panama City 

Stiefel Pub Otoya, San José 

Cafe Bar Revolución, SCDLC 

Tipsy Tuna, Placencia 

Barefoot Beach Bar, Placencia 

Caiman Tugurio, Playa del Carmen 

Roof 28, Playa del Camen 

La Negrita Cantina, Mérida 

Catrín, Mérida

 

 

The Sympathizer (1)

I'm yet to watch a single minute of the telly version of Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer.

I'm tempted though — Robert Downey Jr and all that —u but there's a lingering mystery for me surrounding how this novel was deemed suitable for adaptation, as the story is really the least interesting thing about it.

Almost all the excitement comes from the constant stream of set-piece observations by its narrator, resulting in something that could handily stand in for a dictionary of quotations or aphorisms. 

 

I suppose the screenwriters can put some of these into the character's mouth, but unless one is Oscar Wilde it's relatively hard to set up dialogue as an exchange of epithets and the trouble here is that only 'The Captain' seems to be doing it, so how much voiceover is there? 

 

I shall I have to find out, I guess, but meanwhile I am going to dump a few of my favourites here, in several batches. Herewith, the first...

 

No one could make a guilty pleasure like the French.

 

If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth? 

 

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep. 

 

I had forgotten something, but what that something was, I did not know. Of the three types of forgetting, this was the worst. 

 

Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment.

 

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise.

 

In negotiations, as in interrogations, a lie was not only acceptable but also expected. All sorts of situations exist where one tells lies in order to reach an acceptable truth.

 

Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued? 

 

One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both.

 

I naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences.

 

Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it. 

 

I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. 

 

The proper way to approach a prostitute is to adapt the attitude of a theatergoer, sitting back and suspending disbelief for the duration of the show.

 

Every man should have a false bottom in his luggage.

 

A talent is something you use, not something that uses you.

 

Amnesia was as American as apple pie, and it was much preferred by Americans over both humble pie and the fraught foods of foreign intruders.

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends. 

 

The mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. 

 

Like rolling one’s own cigarettes, or rolling one’s R’s, lying was a skill and a habit not easily forgotten.

 

Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.

 

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.

 

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence. 

 

And, a slightly longer one...

 

Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.

 

More to come...

 

Longlegs (2024)

 

We camehere for Nicholas Cage, of course we did, and he does not disappoint.

It's a fine looking and atmospheric movie, but the story and the characters are not quite so well construed, and overall there's a tendency towards predictability.

Perhaps some of the issues emerge from blending the FBI procedural with the supernatural horror genre, not really to the full benefit of either, and there were times when I found myself asking 'what exactly is at stake here?'

When we were watching Twisters recently, we did get snagged on one small kink in what was otherwise an smooth experience: "Did they eat the pizza?" In contrast Longlegs is kind of packed with such "Did they eat the pizza?" moments.

 

Unlearnable Lessons from the Bronze Age

Homer's Iliad was our civilisation's first proper set of pointers towards the abiding dilemmas of human conflict. e.g.

1) Communities which embark on a war hoping to recover something they believe they have lost, will inevitably propagate a whole new chain of losses, with restitution becoming ever more partial the longer the fighting lasts.

2) A key consequence of the mortal human condition is that while some losses are finite i.e. recoverable, many others are infinite, unrecoverable.

The dynamic of conflict and the related pool of emotions are very much driven by the interplay of these two kinds of loss, and by the participants' perceptions of the balance between them, usually mistaken.

3) Even those who have read their Homer and understand points 1) and 2) above, will often still feel compelled to go to war, reluctant at any stage to take a step 'back' and reassess the situation.

Sometimes the imperatives are cultural, a sense of honour for example. But warfare often occurs as a kind of narrative process with the instigating incidents having already created a loss of stasis before anyone takes up arms.

Thus there is no way to recover that dissipating 'peace' simply by pretending it is still there, intact.

Indeed, the conflict typically has to play out in order to restore an equivalent or novel situation, no matter how many additional losses, finite and infinite, occur along the way.

Perdida (2019)

New on Netflix this week, this is a Mexican movie that seems unsure exactly what it wants to be other than some combination of dark, sexy and perhaps a little nasty, yet made me imagine of a superior combination of these moods which might have been achieved if plot and character had been organised and presented better. 

Having discovered after the event that it is a remake of a Colombian movie from 2011, The Hidden Face, I now rather urgently need to know if the mis-steps made here were additions or reproductions.*

 

I think I already know how I would choose to re-make it. I'd actually like to see a French version. It would probably never get an English-language treatment, as it contains elements which some people within that culture might take as misogynistic, mistakenly I think, and it is these very which would actually need to be accentuated a bit to get the most out of the basic scenario.

 

* I have now downloaded the earlier version and checked and Perdida is an almost bizarrely perfect facsimile, right up to the very end where the Colombian movie handles one small detail a little better. 

 

 

National Greats

Between the Romans and the Renaissance England (geographical area) possesses a key quartet of available national heroes: Arthur, Alfred, Robin and Henry, all of whom have been served rather indifferently by Hollywood, when at all.

This is in part because each of them embodies aspects of our history which outsiders (and Americans in particular, either don't get or want to get), but also because their roles are even a little problematic in terms of our own collective narratives.

Take Arthur, for example. Much of his story as a 'native' British hero was invented by our French overlords specifically as a means of suppressing English alternatives. Yet these adopted myths contain a deeper and sometimes darker payload, Christianised pagan symbolism (or vice versa), which transcends the propaganda usage, and these have continued to fascinate poets, artists, composers and so on throughout history.

John Boorman's Excalibur has undoubtedly been the superior silver screen treatment which these have been treated to so far. Elsewhere Hollywood has occasionally confused this Arthur with his demi-historical progenitor, an essentially post-apocalyptic figurehead, representing a final burst of Romano-British resistance before the darkness descended.

If Arthur is a placeholder for not quite the end, Alfred the Great does the same for not quite the (new) beginning. He’s the man who didn’t lose, rather than the great victor, and his finest achievements were perhaps intellectual, which don’t translate well to American action movies. And it’s his enemies that everyone is really fascinated with.

Robin of Loxley, aka Robin Hood, is the English man of the hour that Hollywood has seemingly found most universal, specifically as a not too doctrinal redistributor of wealth — even if neither the rich he took from nor the poor he gave to are exactly the people we think of when these terms are mentioned today. (For Robin was not really the saviour of the actual, very poor, the illiterate peasant masses, who by definition were unable to read about him.)

In as much as he took up arms against the Norman state, he’s a kind of noble resistor and anti-colonialist, but his story awkwardly dovetails with that of the Crusades, material which cannot be handled today without some sort of lip service to Arab-Muslim, anti-western prejudice.

And then there’s Henry V, whose tale has been told, almost too well, through the course of three plays by Shakespeare, a state of affairs which makes it hard to re-tread any other way. In the last of these he is triumph personified, but the Bard had one eye on the bigger picture too, and Henry’s story is one of the reasons George R.R. Martin plotted GOT so that there were no definitive winners or losers in the end.

Our best medieval King, Henry sired our worst, sixth of that name. This might not have mattered all that much had he not died, rather randomly and prematurely, before his project was completed, and as a result his no-fault condition as the son of a usurper came back to haunt House Lancaster.

The Anti-Zionism Fallacy

First of all, because it apparently needs to be said, non-Jews have no established authority when it comes to policing the boundaries of antisemitism. 

And when they do start up with this, they only end up sounding like Elon Musk lecturing black people on the permissible uses of the term 'racism'. (Or indeed, worse, Musk appropriating minority black voices in order to do this.)

Secondly, I shall resort to a simple analogy to make the key point here...

As a non-Scottish Brit I am aware that there are aspects of the Scottish Nationalist programme which I do not favour (specifically the call for full independence), but I am also aware that I have an obligation to express these opinions in a manner which doesn't make me appear to be a total prick. 

The same is clearly also true of any bona fide Scot who might feel the same way. 

Stating that I am engaged in a fanatical fight against all forms of Scottish national aspiration, demeaning Scots, or perhaps stating that they all originated in Ireland, or similar, would certainly be a fast track to prickishness.

Nobody, no matter which identity or group with which they habitually align, has a fundamental right to oppose another human group's aspirations to nationhood. One can take issue with policy, with attitude even, but not the basic impulse. For that is bigotry.

Most of the above applies to non-Arab 'anti-zionism'. The Arab form is instead more often a kind of negative image of the typical aspiration to nationhood: a dogmatic anti-nationalism targeting Jews rather than any serious attempt to build a coherent and viable vision for Arab Palestinians. 

I have certain hard red lines when it comes to antisemtism, so when self-professed 'anti-zionists' cross them without shame, I am not interested in any subsequent bleatings about how their chosen cover story gives them a free pass. 

Whatever anti-zionism might be in the abstract, their version of it is Jew hate. This includes demonising Jewish nationalism, or juxtaposing it with Nazi iconography, to state the rather obvious.

 

 

The Migratory Trinity

Britain is the name of a place which has become synonymous with colonialism, yet it is also an island which has been invaded and colonised more than most geographical spaces on planet Earth. 

Throughout most of the Middle Ages it would be hard to say if England was a French colony or vice versa, and it took a war which famously lasted a hundred years to finally resolve this. (Kind of.)

The Conquest of Mexico could not have taken place if it had not been simultaneously an act of de-colonisation, for the Mexica civilisation had migrated down from the north and imposed itself on the peoples and cultures which had previously established themselves in the central highlands, and their desire to be free of a very brutal imperial system was very much part of the dynamic unleashed by the arrival of Europeans. 

502 years ago today

Those are three tiny snapshots of the nuances of History, of the kind which tend to get lost every time History is ransacked for the purposes of contemporary political invective. 

The first thing I would have taught about the past in British schools is that every single citizen is descended from people and things which migrated. For after the Ice Age the island was a blank slate. Empty. And then the boats started coming. 

I mention 'people and things' because the second lesson which needs to be conveyed in those classes is that migration always takes the form of a trinity: peoples, languages and cultures and these typically become detached and independent in their historical actions as the migrations occur. 

Our contemporary habit of focusing on only one element of this trinity, usually either ethnicity or culture is a modern misconception largely driven by our prevailing political grudges*. Indeed, we cannot hope to resolve many of our own world's migratory challenges unless we properly (and dispassionately) understand how the trinity operates.

The notion that all we need to do with migration is welcome it has an obvious appeal to anyone experiencing an urgent desire to be recognised as 'good' by their peers, but it is clearly not very sophisticated.**

Each of us has our biological heredity, often not as clear-cut as we would like to imagine, but we are also made up of the way our minds work and express themselves, and this has its own history of geographical movement from the dawn of homo sapiens in Africa.

The Mexico story mentioned above leads one to add one more element to the story of human migration, a kind of fourth horseman if you like: the non-human biological component that piggy-backs on the other movements. Stuff like germs, plus both wild and domesticated plants and animals. 

* One of the ways that we collectively ensure that our arguments relating to these matters are intractable, is by pointedly referencing one element, ethnicity, say, when it suits us, which often means when the other side is talking about culture, and contrariwise. 

** Just consider the so-called 'ex-pat' phenomenon here in Antigua, where some could be said to add the whole and others detract from it. See also the current spate of resistance movements in major cities like Barcelona to tourism, perceived as a more short-term and temporary form of migration. All hard to legislate for or even regulate, but surely worth a try.

 

Communication and Feedback

Much of the prevailing discourse about free speech has been implicitly solipsistic. There is an assumption that the most important thing is the ‘right’ of the talker, as if communications were always somehow one way and disconnected from listeners. 

Social media encourages this of course, because of the sheer ease of public speech and because within that environment we all speak to an auditorium that is at least partially swathed in shadow.

One way I approach this issue today is to recall how I learned to write my essays at Girton. From the moment I put pen to paper I had a mental image of my reader, singular, not an amorphous group of individuals with different biases, but one person with whom I had had regular face to face interactions, an individual who was by definition a lot more informed on the basic material than I was, and a lot more intelligent to boot. Writing for such a person is a genuine discipline.

For me the scariest thing about platforms like Twitter is to see this discipline turned completely on its head. Elite academic minds, well-informed and skillful with words, using the medium to communicate with the relatively ignorant, deliberately and with considerable guile. This version of ‘free’ speech involves carving up issues so that there is a notable slant, sometimes well camouflaged, but the overall effect is warped, propagandistic.

One of the most critical comments ever delivered by one of the readers of my essays was that I possessed a style which might convince anyone I knew more than I really did. But I took this as a sort of semi-compliment, as this was one of those skills one was driven to cultivate on the side, given the basic circumstances of the weekly supervision.

But if I had constructed my essays the way supposedly acute, reasonable and knowledgeable people now communicate into their chosen echo chambers, I’d surely have been on the end of some serious ear-bashings.

So, rather than concerning ourselves uniquely with the freedom of expression, we should surely also be simultaneously considering the proportion of public speech which is ‘talking down’ (or indeed screeching all around), the sophisticated getting off on positive feedback from the unsophisticated, and whether there are any trends therein worthy of our anxiety.