2022 Year in Review - part 2

 Lists like this are highly subjective, and I cannot pretend to have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist (to mix a metaphor or two). Even more so when it comes to a list of the best of TV and film because, frankly, I have seen too little of both to claim to have a broad perspective.

So, here goes, first of all, with TV.

First, the honourable mentions. BBC's This is Going to Hurt was an almost too painfully honest comedy-drama about the life of a junior doctor. This is mainly because it is based on the diaries of a former doctor, Adam Kay. Having spoken to others I know in the profession, the grim honesty is not a great exaggeration of the lived experiences of many working in the NHS today - if anything, it downplays the horrors and sanitises the dark humour. Not an easy watch, but brilliantly done.

I should also give a shout-out to the hilarious Derry Girls, arguably the funniest sitcom in decades, and yet one set against the background of the troubles in Northern Ireland in the nineties. Teen angst, sectarian politics and Ulster humour. The final season, which came out in 2022, is arguably its best - which is set against an already very high bar.

An unexpected delight was Wednesday, Netflix's updating of the Addams Family, focusing on the family's darkly deadpan daughter, Wednesday Addams, and her complex educational problems. It has an opening scene with a school locker, Pugsley Addams, a water polo team, a swimming pool, and some piranha fish that will either put you off or have you signing up to see the rest of the season on the spot. There are some great one-liners delivered with deadpan comedy timing by Jenna Ortega, but the plot is flimsy and forgettable. Nevertheless, there are some fun digressions and cameos that make this an instant classic. Watch out for the school disco in episode four in particular. And how they manage to give so much character to Thing, who is literally just a disembodied hand, is beyond me. Great fun, but don't look for anything profound.

Finally (but not least) is The Expanse season 6. To say it was the perfect finale for what has been the best space opera ever on TV (I am looking at you, Star Trek and Babylon 5) would not be hype. It was a slow burner of a season that gave all the characters room to breathe, so when the action came, it came with a gut punch. Sad to think the actual finale won't get made, as there are still three more novels and a whole new set of issues to confront. But having dealt with colonialism, racism, terrorism, environmental catastrophe and post-truth gaslighting, maybe the final three books' focus on imperialism and its resistance were too much for the producers.

But the three that really grabbed me this year were those that stepped out of the everyday horrors of life and into the darker worlds surrounding our everyday experiences.

I have to group the first two because they are cut from very similar cloth.

Midnight Mass

Set on a small fishing island off the US Atlantic Coast, this is a story about faith and its abuses. Starting with a fatal car crash caused by the drunk driving of one of the island's prodigal sons, the story picks up three years later on his release from gaol and his reluctant return to the bosom of his deeply Catholic family on the island. The Catholic Church is the fading hub of the fading island community. A handful of the faithful attend daily mass, but with the island's priest away on pilgrimage, it is in a hiatus. Then a younger priest arrives, with news that the priest has been taken ill and won't return for a while. He will stand in for now.

We see the tensions and relationships between the different individuals on the island, not least between the Muslim sheriff and Bev Keane, who I can only describe as the church warden from hell (almost literally!).

Then miracles start to happen, and a religious revival begins. The charismatic Father Hill seems to be leading the small community towards some massive religious renewal movement, and God appears to be at work. But is all as it seems?

I won't say more, but stick with it - episodes one and two are slow builds, it takes till episode three for the story to really get going, and then it goes bonkers! 

The standout scenes are those between Father Hill and the returned prodigal, Riley Flynn, as they hold the mandatory AA meetings that Flynn must attend as a condition of his parole. Hill challenges Flynn to look beyond his disillusionment with the world and his loss of faith to see that God is doing something amazing. Flynn challenges the easy assumption that God does good things through bad situations. These are authentic, faithful explorations of faith, doubt, grace, and despair. 

The conclusion suggests that all religion is prone to evil and corruption, with Bev Keane leading the evil and Father Hill realising too late that he has unleashed something that is very definitely not of God. It suggests that a rather pantheistic, monistic understanding of our place in the universe is better than a theistic (or stark atheistic) one. I find it hard to argue with the first point - religion can very easily be exploited for evil ends, and the faithful can be turned to evil by charismatic leaders all too often. The second conclusion is more problematic to my mind,

Midnight Mass is a fascinating exploration of deep themes with complex characters. The first three episodes have a growing sense of unease, which is helped by some excellent, eerie scoring. As things become more and more full-throated horror, the tension never lets up. Not one for the faint-hearted, though.

His Dark Materials Season 3

Picking up where season 2 ended, Will is hunting Lyra across multiple universes while her wicked mother, Marissa Coulter, hides her in a drugged sleep. Lyra dreams of her dead friend Roger and believes he is calling her from the land of the dead.

If you have never entered Philip Pullman's universe of steampunk fantasy, worlds where the human soul exists as a physical animal companion called a daemon and where a knife can cut between different universes, including our own, then here is a quick primer. It's wide, wonderful, profoundly anti-organised religion, and pro a pantheistic, monistic idea of our place in the universe. 

Hang on that sounds familiar!?

All the baddies are priests or agents of the Magisterium (in other words, the Roman Catholic Church) who serve The Authority (God, only not actually God, but the first Angel who conned the others into believing he was the Creator). Witches, armoured bears, and scientists like Lyra's father, Lord Asriel, who have no truck with religious nonsense, all fight on the side of the good. 

In season three, Lyra visits the land of the dead (a kind of concentration camp for ghosts) and sets the ghosts free to become one with the universe. The priests create a bomb to kill her because she is the New Eve, destined to cause a second fall. However, this fall is no more than her kissing her bestie, Will and falling in love. Apparently, that saves all of Creation.

Yes, crazy, but emotionally engaging, rip-roaring action, and some fantastic design and characterisation, not least from Dafne Keene, who totally holds the screen as Lyra in every scene she's in. Also excellent is Ruth Wilson as Lyra's evil mother, Marissa Coulter - former agent of the Magisterium but now fighting on the side of the angels (well, the good ones) for reasons she does not entirely understand. I could have watched scenes between these two actors and done away with 90% of the rest of the plot and been happy! 

But at its heart, the enemy Pullman is trying to tear down a straw man. Religion is seen as life-denying, joy-sapping, and ultimately constrictive while losing faith means we can fall in love and live happy, creative lives. Hmmm. 

While faith may often be all of these things, they are not intrinsic to religion. Many sects of the Protestant and Catholic faith are precisely the sort of thing that Pullman takes a swing at, but the opposite is also true. Some of the most significant social engagement, joy, creativity, community life, and striving for justice and freedom are to be found in faith communities. Meanwhile, this sort of amorphous spirituality that both HDM and Midnight Mass seem to promote sounds attractive but ultimately lacks depth and demands on the believer.

Dramas like these two certainly initiate a conversation about faith, but neither has the final word to say.

The Sandman

The long-awaited screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman's ground-breaking graphic novel series of the nineties finally dropped in August. And it was worth the wait. Beautifully filmed, well acted, and adapted faithfully (but not slavishly) from the graphic novels, much of it by Gaiman himself. It was a thing of beauty throughout.

Dealing with the big ideas - the nature of story, morality, death, and so forth - it also manages to be a lot of fun and occasionally even funny. Hang on for episode 6 - The Sound of Her Wings - it is a simple, beautiful, and thoughtful pause between the horrors of the first set of stories and the epic finale of the last four-parter. It is possibly my favourite single episode of TV this year.

I may not share all of Gaiman's ideas about life and death, but one thing he understands, and one thing of which he is a consummate master, is storytelling. The power of stories to change people, to shape our choices and values is very clear throughout his work. The Sandman, who is himself the master of dreams and stories, personifies this throughout this widely rich and imaginative series.

This is fantasy TV of the highest order.

Knowing your scriptures better than the devil: lessons from the Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood seminal narrative of a nameless woman’s struggle to survive in a repressive theocratic dictatorship has gone beyond being a widely lauded literary classic. With its latest incarnation as a television series (it has previously been an opera and a Hollywood film), it has moved into that iconic territory that is inhabited by Nineteen Eighty-Four, We and Brave New World.  It has become a prophetic warning of the danger of totalitarianism.

Unlike those three, male penned titles, Handmaid is focussed on the particular evils of religious dictatorships and the oppression of the female body as a tool of the state. As such, the red dresses and white bonnets of the Handmaids, in particular, have become items of political protest and even fashion statements. They have certainly become almost instantly recognisable, even before the cinematic and televisual adaptations, and have themselves become iconic – symbols of the oppression of women who have been reduced to the status of a womb on legs.

The gender politics of The Handmaid’s Tale is also being seen as very topical, with the arrival of another Republican, abortion de-funding regime in White House. Here in the UK, the current cosying up of the Tory minority government to the Democratic Unionist Party is raising similar liberal hysteria about a threat to abortion rights and same-sex marriage in Britain. While the latter is frankly silly (not only are both issues matters for devolved governments and therefore strictly off the table in any Westminster level negotiations but all the main parties in Ulster at the moment are pro-Life and anti-same-sex marriage - the DUP is not outside of the norm in Northern Ireland in this respect).
Nevertheless, the former has some traction.

The TV series has certainly hit a raw nerve in the States, with its depiction of the rise of the Sons of Jacob (the religious fanatics who take over at least part of the USA to form their Republic of Gilead). We see what Atwood only alludes to – the closing of women’s bank accounts, loss of their rights to employment and rights to property. We hear about a murderous attack on US Congress, blamed on terrorists but actually organised by the Sons of Jacob as a pretext for the imposition of martial law and the suspension of the constitution. One presumes this is after many years of building up a network of supporters and wider cultural acceptance of their particular flavour of ultra-conservative, Reformed Christianity.

It is chillingly not far from reality – similar scenarios have allowed other religious and nationalist fanatics take power in many parts of the world over the centuries. Likewise, the TV show gives us summary executions of homosexuals, abortion providers, ministers and priests of other faiths and denominations, etc. such as may be seen in modern-day Iran and Chechnya. ‘Salvaging’ – the group execution of certain political prisoners is taken from an Iranian model that makes the mob complicit in the death. The segregation of the women into different castes based around dress can be found in Nazi concentration camps and many other regimes. And other forms of violence against women, including female genital mutilation (one character is given a clitorectomy to stop her from seeking forbidden sexual liaisons), also have a strong basis in reality.

But for me, the most challenging element deep down in the structure of this shocking novel is the religious roots of this brutal regime. The Sons of Jacob adhere to biblical literalism. However, as anyone who knows the Bible well can tell you, there are many ways to take the Bible literally, many mutually contradictory, and all reliant on a selective use of proof texts.

When Aunt Lydia, who is the main teacher and moral overseer of the Handmaids, quotes Matthew 5:5 ‘blessed are the meek’ to Offred, our protagonist, to encourage her to comply with her interrogation, Offred quotes back at Matthew 5:10 ‘blessed are those who suffer for the cause of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’, and gets beaten and cattle prodded for her audacity.  Satan knows the scriptures well, so be sure you know them better.

That, at the end of the day, is how the US sleepwalks into Gilead. As Offred says, we were asleep even when they slaughtered Congress, suspended the Constitution and imposed martial law. The secular majority could not believe it could happen and did not engage with the scriptures that the Sons of Jacob used in what they believed was their struggle to restore the US to a pristine, New England Puritan righteousness. The religious did not know their scripture well enough to challenge the Sons of Jacob, and so many of them fell under their spell.

Christians need to come terms with our history. We did set up brutal theocracies – whether it was the Salem witch trials in Puritan New England, the Spanish Inquisition, Calvin’s Geneva, etc. The church has form. We also did these things because we took our scriptures and used them selectively to justify what we already wanted to do. The Bible is a living book. It teaches us and shows us the way when we interrogate it, but we need wisdom about the questions and to interrogate the whole of scripture, not just the bits we know or feel comfortable with.

As a final note, while The Handmaid’s Tale can seem like an anti-Christian polemic, that would be to do it a disservice. Atwood is far too nuanced a writer for simplistic polemics. The Republic of Gilead is at war with Baptists, Catholics and Quakers, who smuggle fertile women and other political refugees across the border into Canada. Some Christians (at least those from non-pacifist denominations) are spearheading the armed resistance inside and outside of Gilead. Just as not all Muslims (and not even all Shia) subscribe to the Iranian strain that has ruled for decades, let alone do all Sunni subscribe to the ultra-extreme Wahhabism of the Islamic State, so not all Christians subscribe to the doctrines and practices of the Sons of Jacob. Some of them knew their scriptures and their humanity much better.

Generation to generation

Intergenerational wars seem de rigour at the moment, although to me they seem rather hackneyed. The current manifestation is the slanging match between Millennials and Baby Boomers. The latter being accused by the former as wreckers who have destroyed the planet and the economy, leaving them with unaffordable housing, healthcare, insurance and taxes and only McJobs to pay for it all. The former accuse the latter of being snowflakes who need 'safe spaces', cannot decide what gender they are, are unwilling to work or study and have no intellectual consistency.

Cicero famously said 'Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.' Or maybe a blog or a Tweet…. Horace, noted that

'Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more

worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more

corrupt.'

As the philosopher said, there is nothing new under the sun.

The usual moans that one generation has about the other are, to be fair, and as the above quotes show, neither anything new, nor totally without foundation. However, we always relied on one central contract - that the wealth, learning and opportunities afforded to our elders would come down to us, in turn to passed on to those coming behind us. In the last century it became so that we would accrue yet greater wealth and learning than our parents to pass on to our children who in turn would enjoy yet greater opportunity. That now seems to have broken down, with a generation retiring now that will be the last to do so early or to enjoy wealth and the fruit of their labours for so long.

We now see succeeding generations earning less than preceding ones, looking at working longer and enjoying shorter and poorer retirements. We will be caring for our elders into our old age, as they live into their ninth or tenth decade, while our kids will have to live with us because they cannot afford to set up their own homes. Multigenerational households will be inevitable once again. Social mobility will slow down. Inherited wealth is being passed on (often skipping generations) but will benefit only those with affluent grandparents.

Our care system, designed to ensure that no-one would go into their final years uncared for, is now breaking down because we are seeing both an increasing ageing population who live longer but with poor health and increased dependency. Hidden within this are the millions who care for parents, spouses and siblings, many of whom are also older and in deteriorating health. Successive governments have refused to grasp the public policy nettle of finding a wider social solution, including insurance schemes as part of retirement planning.  Many solutions have been put forward, but it requires a government prepared to put in the time, money and political capital to make it happen.

If the generational contract is breaking down, snowflake Millennials resenting feckless and selfish Baby Boomers and vice versa, then how do we expect the young to care for the old, to fund their care or be their carers? Maybe we need some intergenerational reconciliation, because the grim reality is, we will need each other in the decades to come. If the Millennials ? and Baby Boomers hate each other now, how will it be for Generations X and Z when it's our turn? We Genexers will be caring for the Boomers and the Millennials and the Genzeds as we begin to move towards our retirements. Our households will soon include parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren. We'll need to find a new way of relating to one another, because the option to move out will be less and less available for the youngsters, and the option of care homes, let alone domiciliary care won't be there for our elders. We'll need to reinvent family again.

The Jewish households of the Old Testament were known as beth'avoth, or households, and were not only intergenerational (parents, grandparents, children and their spouses and the grandchildren) but also slaves (or bond servants) and foreigners or sojourners. The nuclear family did not exist. Go around the world, you'll find the nuclear family still a recent aberration, to be found in the emerging middle classes of developed and developing countries, but nowhere else. Here in the West where we invented this aberration, we are soon going to have to abandon it again, along with the lone parent household, the singleton living alone or the childless couple in a large, empty house. We'll be sharing rooms, sharing lives, sharing meals, sharing hopes, fears, opportunities and troubles. It may not be as horrible as we fear - in fact, maybe, just maybe we'll find again something we lost a long time ago.

But I bet we'll still moan about the youngsters of today - it's an institutional sport!

Loving the Robot?

The live-action version of Ghost in the Shell is (for the time being at least) out in cinemas. It has become infamous because of an alleged 'whitewashing' by casting the Caucasian Scarlett Johansson in the role of  Major Motoko Kusanagi, a supposedly Japanese character. In the original anime, the character is of indeterminate race, not least because she is, in fact, a cyborg. Not a woman but a sophisticated, human-seeming, armoured chassis holding a human brain. The gender and race of Major is anything but what it seems. The English title taking its cue from  Arthur Koestler's 'Ghost in the Machine', exploring the idea of identity and self outside of our physical body. Major is not really a woman, even if her brain is (or was) - she only appears to have humanity because her body has been created that way. She could have any form.

Why does she have a female form (especially one that is regularly on show in a skin-tight latex combat suit)? Let's be honest, given that the prime audience for anime and most Hollywood action sci-fi is fifteen-year-old males, the answer is not too hard to figure out. Major may be tough, and not have any overt sexuality beyond her appearance. Some may even argue that she is subverting the stereotyping of women, but actually, the film is still pandering to it, just creating the new stereotype of the sexy but tough female warrior that has become fashionable ever since Sigourney Weaver took down the Mother Alien in Cameron's Aliens.

It is interesting that so many depictions of artificial intelligence are female. Eva in Alex Garland's superb Ex Machina is deliberately female, to appeal to the sexual proclivities of Domal Glesson's hapless Caleb, but despite being referred to as 'she' throughout, it is quite clear that Eva is an 'it' - a self-aware machine with the physical appearance of a young woman. Here, the reason for the female form is explicit - she has been created by an alpha male who equates his sexual potency with his creativity and power over his creation and other people.

In Westworld, the Hosts are both male and female, but it is the two female Hosts, Maeve (played by the badly awards-overlooked Thandi Newton) and Dolores Abernathy who achieve self-awareness first, through the violence done to them by men.

In the film Her, the AI is again female and possessing the disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson (again!), with whom the protagonist falls in love. Like Eva, she is really an 'it' and using her apparent femininity as a ruse to control the men around her. She does not share their feelings or motivations.

As I delve into current science fiction narratives about Artificial Intelligence, it seems to me that really they are more about how men perceive women - tough and sexy, manipulative and other abused, yet triumphant, but all ultimately the creation of men, not people in and of themselves. True AI is not really being explored. Maybe we need to hear from some more female authors to explore the subject in another direction.

I also think this is about male creativity and power over nature - which as CS Lewis pointed out is really about some men's power over other men (and in particular, women) and nature. It is a perversion of the divine cultural mandate of stewardship over Creation. The steward has become the dominator. It also reflects the way men disempower, control and dominate women.

Science Fiction has explored this deeply theological theme ever since Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. There, the creative male discovers he cannot be a true father to his creation, to which he brings life (a female act) and it is a disaster.  It is far from a coincidence that this exploration of the theme of male power and creativity is explored most explicitly by a female author!

It is also true that science fiction has a habit of becoming reality.  This is almost certainly at least in part true because the engineers and thinkers behind so much of the technology coming out at the moment were fans of science fiction and are trying to bring these childhood dreams into reality. So don't be too surprised if when strong AI does appear, it will be feminised. After all, the virtual, digital assistants around at the moment, from Siri to Cortana and Alexa are given female personas in both name and voice. 

Deep AI - self-aware machines like Ex-Machina's Eva - is a long way off and may never arrive. But in the meantime, how we interact with increasingly intelligent technology, with the creation and with other human beings is being shaped by this dominating, will-to-power mentality here and now. Will that technology in time replace the human creativity and intelligence that gave rise to it and in turn become another means to control and dominate humanity and creation?