New Contemporaries 2018

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018, 

Liverpool School of Art & Design, Liverpool John Moores University

14 July 2018 - 9 September 2018

Radiohead and Waiting

Just lying in a bar with my drip feed on Talking to my girlfriend, waiting for something to happen And I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen 

(the bends, 1995) 

I cannot think of any lyric that better sums up my experience of growing up in the 1990s than the one above, from Radiohead’s the Bends. I had a niggling feeling that nothing was happening. My parents had seen men land on the moon, but the Apollo programme has ended before I was even born. My parents had also see the invention of Concorde, whereas I only saw supersonic passenger flight decommissioned, as it was too expensive. You might argue that I have lived through a communications revolution, witnessing the birth of the internet and mobile phone technology, but this seems a somehow inferior experience to me. My parents could catch a flight out of Heathrow and land in New York before they had even taken off, while I can access Facebook on my phone. Indeed, these technologies, although they were born in the 1990s, didn’t really come into their own until the new millennium.  

I am not really interested in a debate about whether advancements in travel or communications is more exciting. This is only a metaphor for a lingering feeling of disquiet – that nothing was happening in the 1990s. It was not long after the ‘90s ended that things did start to happen though. It started when a man living in a cave orchestrated the largest ever coordinated attack against the USA on its own soil. Using World War Two Kamikaze-style tactics he destroyed icons of American imperial capitalism, military might, but failed to reach his last target in Washington. That a man in a cave in Afghanistan (or a house in Pakistan) could do this seemed unbelievable. What’s more unbelievable is that the most powerful country in the world, with the largest military budget was unable to catch him (or execute and dump him in the sea) for a decade. It was as it we had entered a Bond film.  

The Bond film continued when a computer programmer with white hair founded a global organisation to gather and release the world’s secrets. He even defied the world’s most powerful country at a time when it was run by a cowboy out to avenge the attacks by the man in the cave (house in Pakistan). Kim Jong Un is the most recent Bond baddie threatening to turn the world order upside down.  

Scotland’s near secession from the United Kingdom, Brexit, the election of Donald J. Trump, Catalonia’s vote for independence... things have started to happen and maybe there’s a bit too much happening, as if making up for the lack of activity in the 1990s. 

Skyfall and Brexit Britain

I watched Skyfall on TV this Christmas (December 2017). I first watched it at the cinema, when it came out in 2012. I was abroad and watched it on my own. I got the last seat in a packed cinema in Amsterdam, suggesting that James Bond still has appeal outside the anglophone world. I was struck by the film's sexism, nostalgia and jingoism then, as I was in 2017, and much more so than in other, recent, James Bond movies. I confess that at times I found the patriotism exhilarating, but in a dirty secret pleasure kind of way. There are constant references to how things were better in the past, or how "the old ways are the best ways". The key motif is the return of the Aston Martin DB5 - symbol of British engineering and design icon, but one might also recall how Bond is issued with a gun and a radio - no fancy new gadgets necessary. Skyfall appears to be a call to return to traditional British values and, writing in 2018, the film seems like an uncanny poster-boy for Brexit. I will elaborate with a few examples.

When the new Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), sticks his nose into MI6 business his understanding of life "in the field" is brought into question. It is then revealed that he has seen active service in Northern Ireland. Since the Bond films are always set in the present, and given Mallory's age, we might guess that this active service was in the 1970s or 1980s. It is unlikely that M (Judi Dench), who is of a similar age to Mallory would have seen such front-line action. The implication is that she, as a female, could not have the same understanding and experience as either Mallory, or Bond. Indeed, this is confirmed as the film comes to its climax. Bond (Daniel Craig) takes M to Skyfall, not to hide from villain and ex-agent Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), but to fight him on their own terms. There, she does see active service, and she is killed, because she is a stupid girl. Note that, against all odds, Bond and his elderly game keeper (male) both survive. What was Dench thinking when she accepted this role? The look in Bond's eye when he acknowledges Mallory as the new M is one of relief - now we can go back to normal and do things properly. The female M was tolerated for a while, but in her final film she is shown to be weak. When there is an existential threat (MI6 is blown up), the atavistic need for a public school-educated male to fill the role is apparent. The retreat to Skyfall is a reminder that Bond's blood is aristocratic and that he has ties to the landscape: no foreigner would know where it is, or understand about its priest holes and secret tunnels.

Near the beginning of the film, a female agent, Eve, watches Bond fight a villain on the top of a train. She has a partial shot and is ordered to take it by M: she does, but shoots Bond. Dench's M does not lack the metal to make such calls, she just gets it wrong, as she did when sacrificing Silva. The consequences catch her up in this film. When Bond and the female agent later meet in London, Bond ribs her for the miss: "you gave it your best shot". He quips that field work is not for everybody. At the end of the film Bond asks if she is not returning to the field. Eve replies that she is not. She has realised that fieldwork is not for everybody. She then introduces herself as Eve Moneypenny, before taking up the role of secretary (or PA) to M. That's right, she had a go at being the hero, but mucked it up because she is a stupid girl. Realising that she could not cut it, she took up a desk job. Not as an analyst or similar, but as a secretary: she now knows her place. Previously, when in Macau, Moneypenny assumed a submissive role when she shaves Bond. She knows her place.

Mallory is one example of a renewal of the old system. Bond is another. He fails his medical when returning to active service (after having been shot by Moneypenny), but he is reinstated nonetheless. Why? Because M instinctively knows that he is the best. The fact that others might score more highly in tests is irrelevant - Bond must get the job. Dench's M must make way for new male "talent", all that remains of her is her porcelain bulldog with a union flag on its back. Moneypenny must get back behind a desk. From now on, jobs in MI6, we can presume, will be reserved for the old school tie. Public school boys have always comprised the British secret service, as represented in Bond and in real life. The implication is that the only people truly allowed to do the tops jobs are old, public school educated, men. This is made abundantly clear when Bond first encounters the new Q: "you have to be joking... you still have spots". Q fulfills his role with distinction, however. Apparently being a young male need not hold you back after all, but you will still have to put up with prejudiced remarks and no one will take you seriously.Is this the Brexit Britain that we can look forward to?