Refracted Input

Clare O’Farrell’s blog on books, TV, films, Michel Foucault, universities etc. etc.

Code 46 (2003)

Clare O'Farrell

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November 29, 2008

code46My rating: **
Imdb link

The characters and story in this science fiction film directed by Michael Winterbottom are of no real interest and the film doesn’t offer much that is inspiring either on what appears to be its main themes of memory and identity and otherness. But what is interesting about this film are its incidental depictions of forms of biopower and notions of territory.

It is set in a society which regulates the geographical movements of its population via a computer system called ‘The Sphynx’. This system offers no explanations to individuals as to why it restricts their travel to places they wish to go. But we see one individual who obtains an illegal visa to visit Delhi die when he contracts a disease to which he is susceptible. The Sphynx had not granted him a visa due to this biological vulnerability in that geographical region but he is never told the reason.

But the Sphynx doesn’t govern all the territories – there is a large outside zone which is inhabited by the poor, the marginal and those designated as criminal. This territory is a harsh desert outside the urbanised centres. In this society the criminal is banished to the exterior rather than incarcerated. But mind control is used on more valuable members of the society if they transgress so that they can remain integrated and functional.

There are also interesting viruses available for public consumption, one that allows you to speak Mandarin for example – but if the speaker is understood by others they can’t understand their own speech. The main character has taken a virus for empathy which allows him to perform a job of unmasking criminals via psychic insight.

The notion of Code 46 is also interesting. In a society where the human population is reproduced via cloning, IVF and other forms of genetic manipulation as well as by more conventional means, there are strict rules to preserve the gene pool and couples have to have their DNA checked so as to determine whether or not they are ‘related’ by too much common DNA. There are severe penalties for transgression of this code.

Also of interest is the language the characters speak: an English base with lots of French and Spanish words and phrases thrown in. Science fiction films rarely speculate on how language evolves over time and this is an original feature of the film.

Great ideas, but the central story – an illicit love affair which is dealt with by an all-pervasive and disciplinary Panoptic system – is probably the least interesting thing about the film.

Definitions from my Foucault site

biopower

Foucault argues that biopower is a technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for managing populations. It incorporates certain aspects of disciplinary power. If disciplinary power is about training the actions of bodies, biopower is about managing the births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population.

Panopticon, panopticism and surveillance
The Panopticon, was a design for a prison produced by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century which grouped cells around a central viewing tower. Although the prison was never actually built the idea was used as a model for numerous institutions including some prisons. Foucault uses this as a metaphor for the operation of power and surveillance in contemporary society.

The Ancaster Demons

Clare O'Farrell

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November 27, 2008

My rating: *

I have put up a review of this rather dire book simply as an excuse to introduce the only social networking site I have found to be of any use – Goodreads. This site allows you to keep a record of the books you read and to share your ratings and reviews of these books with friends. It also provides a handy html version of your posts for inclusion in your blog. In fact, I can credit Goodreads with giving me the idea for setting up this blog in the first place. Once I started keeping records of the books I read, I then wanted to record the films and television I watched as well. Unfortunately the film site corresponding to Goodreads, Flickstr, has a really horrible interface. In any case, it begins to get messy once you start proliferating sites. Keeping everything together in one place is much more manageable.

The other excuse for this post is that it allows me to include another lolcat.

The Ancaster Demons The Ancaster Demons by Norman Russell


My review

The first page and a half is a riff on ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ – but the novel does not live up to its gothic promise. It reads curiously like notes for a novel. It is devoid of heart and conviction as though the author were writing its cliché characters and situations almost absent-mindedly to formula. I didn’t bother finishing but skipped through to see what happened at the end – which was of course predictable.

A story about the cat below would possibly have been more interesting.

My rating: ****

funny pictures

Cube (1997)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

November 26, 2008

Spoiler alert cube1
My rating: ***
Imdb link

This film about a group of strangers, inexplicably trapped in an interlocking network of connected cubes and their efforts to escape, is gripping from beginning to finish. It also raises some interesting questions.

What if we were trapped in a disciplinary mechanism which has gone way beyond any necessity for Panoptic surveillance and simply relies on the complexity of its own mechanism to keep people in place? Worse, there is no reason for the mechanism, it has simply arisen as the anonymous result of collective labour, each worker producing part of the machine in ignorance of others, until its original purpose – if there ever was one – is lost. The people trapped in the cube are there for no ostensible reason we can see. Perhaps there is still a residual bleak comfort in the notion of the Panoptic society. At least somebody cares enough to want to watch what we are doing, even if only to exercise punitive measures. Nobody (as far as we know from the film) cares what happens to the people who are seemingly placed at random in the cube. It would appear the only reason they are there is simply because the cube exists and something needed to be done with it.

The only person who escapes is the idiot savant who has no purpose, no capacity to wonder why, and whose contribution to his own escape is not willed but simply the result of instinctive action which others have been able to harness even if they themselves do not survive. And to make this grim scenario even darker, as the director’s commentary points out, the people are in far more danger from each other than they are from the deadly but logical workings of the cube.

The film’s intellectual and somewhat abstract approach, gives the viewer enough distance not to be dragged down into a gloomy morass and it works extremely well.

The famous soliloquy from Macbeth is clearly more than a little apposite here.

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Peer review

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

November 25, 2008

My rating: ***

Continuing on with the same theme…

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For those of you came in late, ‘lolcats’ is a phenomenon that really took off on the net early in 2007 – although it dates back to around 2005. It involves photos – usually of cats – with funny captions in broken misspelt ‘Engrish’ in a sans serif font. See dicey font of wisdom Wikipedia for further info.

The two main lolcat sites are I can has cheezburger? and lol cats

I have decided to categorise lolcats as an ‘internet meme’ (which others have done before me in any case). I am a bit ambivalent about this whole notion of ‘meme’ but will go with it for the time being. I am using the word in the sense of an idea or other cultural unit that captures people’s imagination and spreads like wildfire. Here are a couple of references: Wikipedia (aaaargh not again!), Meme central. Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of the ‘tipping point‘ covers similar ground to this particular definition of meme. He is similarly ambivalent about the notion of memes.

‘Boffins blogging’

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

November 23, 2008

Andrew Walker and Nicholas Farrelly, ‘Boffins blogging: unlimited review’, ANU Reporter, Summer 2008, p. 34

My rating: ****

Here are some extracts from an excellent short analysis of the benefits of the blogosphere for academics. The two writers have been running a blog titled New Mandala since June 2006.

I absolutely agree with what the two writers have to say here. I find writing for an online audience really works for me. If I could just redirect that enthusiasm into more formal publication!

‘Academic blogs … dramatically extend the boundaries of conventional peer review and academic readership… With engaging content, regular updates and savvy marketing, academic bloggers can build a community of peers that would fill seminar rooms, lecture theatres and conference venues many times a day. Statistics we have seen indicated that a blog run by a couple of academics can generate as much internet traffic as the conventional websites of an entire Faculty…

And perhaps most important of all, blogging maintains the daily discipline of writing. At a time when administrative loads distract many academics from their interpretive vocation, writing online is one way to keep the tools of argument and analysis as sharp as possible. Blog posts provide valuable building blocks for more formal academic articles. And they also open up discussions to a much broader and varied audience than the academic world, which in some ways exceeds feedback from peers. Blogging promises unlimited review.’

As another example, Henry Jenkins uses his own blog, ‘Confessions of an aca-fan’ in precisely this way.

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