Kingsman: The Secret Service

Michael Vaughn’s Kingsman:The Secret Service is like The Shining meets Pygmalion. The movie which lies firmly in the tradition of Tarantino’s meta cinema features a millenarian mogul, Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson). who frequently threatens that the outcome of what we’re watching is “not going to be that kind of movie.” Jackson’s persona references Pulp Fiction in that the character he played in both films has an inclination for Big Macs. Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is the movie’s Galethea who will be transformed from a tough growing up in council housing into a slick and impregnable secret agent by a Bond rip off (Colin Firth). In terms of the theme of transformation, La Femme Nikita, Pretty Woman and Trading Places are all referenced in the movie, which could also be subtitled Film History 101. The crazed Jack Nicholson character of The Shining hatcheting through a door is played by a mother trying to murder her 4 year old. All the agents in the super secret society of the film’s title whose offices occupy the backrooms of a Saville Road tailor shop are named after the Knights of the Round Table, Galahad (Firth), Arthur (Michael Caine), Merlin  (Mark Strong) and Launcelot (Jack Davenport). Eggsy is given a shoe with a spike like the one Colonel Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) sported in From Russia With Love, though that’s nothing compared to the murderous Oscar Pistorius blades sported by Valentino’s side kick Gazelle, (Sofia Boutella). Without giving away the plot we can reveal that the Queen of Sweden will allow Eggy to fuck her in the ass if he saves the world. To take offense at either the film’s violence or silliness simply misses the wonderful pointlessness of it all.

Pygmalionization

Pygmalion and Galatea by Falconet (1763), photo by Alex Bakharev

In “The Secret Auden,” (The New York Review of Books, 3/20/140 Ed Mendelson quotes the following passage from a lecture Auden gave on Shakespeare’s sonnets, “Art may spill over from creating a world of language into the dangerous and forbidden task of trying to create a human being.” The essay is a brilliant meditation of Auden’s character in which seemingly erratic and selfishly indulgent behavior belied a deeper generosity. But the subject here is love which as we know doesn’t abide the reality principle, depending as it does on idealization. How else can instinct navigate the shoals of consciousness? Mendelson writes about Auden and his lover Chester Kallman, “He had begun to sense that he had caused the break between them by trying to reshape Kallman into an ideal figure, an imaginary lover who he valued more than the real one. What Auden had thought of as love for the younger man had been infected by libido domanandi, a lust for the power to transform him into someone else.” Personality is a subject that can drown the words of a brilliant poet in jargonese. But Eliot’s famous remarks about the impesonaity of the artist in "Tradition and the Individual Talent” not withstanding Mendelson’s quirky view of Auden turns out to be an exception in the often turgid world of literary biography. It’s a form of poetry in and of itself. And his observation about Auden’s relationship with Kallman makes one think in general about the nature of love. Eliza Doolittle finally rejects Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. All his work has gone for nought, but in actuality doesn't this transformative process goes on in most relationships in which the self is often shaped by its interaction with either the expressed or subliminal wishes of others?

Look Back in Perpexity

Photo of Hanif Kureishi: Brett Weinstein

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was one of the greatest plays ever written about class and it developed directly out of the particularities of language that defined British society in a way that was notorious and sometimes clichéd. The genius of the play is not only to create a character like the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle but to embellish the contrast by making her Pygmalion not only upper crust, but a student of language itself. Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady set it all to music. Language is of course what plays are made of, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were inhabitants of London who found a deeper explanation for class division. Das Kapital was Marx’s analysis of the workings of the capitalist economy. Later on Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist who was a member of both the German parliament and the House of Lords, would offer an post-Marxist understanding of society in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. And the legacy of colonialism evidenced in a movie like Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, might better speak to class division than the facile linguistic dichotomies put forth by Shaw at the turn of the last century. But here comes Fiona Devine, a sociologist from Manchester University hired by the BBC to create The Great British Class Survey. According to the Times (“Multiplying the Old Divisions of Class in Britain,” NYT 4/3/13), the results of the survey responded to by 161,000 people were that “in today’s complicated world, there are now seven different social classes…These range from the ‘elite’ at the top, distinguished by money, connections and rarefied cultural interests, to the ‘precariat’ at the bottom, characterized by lack of money, lack of connections and unrarefied cultural interests.” The in- between categories that the study describes as quoted by the Times include “the ‘technical middle class,’ a group that has a lot of money but few superior social connections,” “’the emergent service workers,’ a young urban group that has li little money but a high amount of social and cultural capital” and “the ‘new affluent workers,’ who score high on social and cultural activity, but have only a middling amount of money.” Sounds like it’s no longer the mythological character of Pygmalion, but Pandora or Proteus, that the up and coming generation of British playwrights will turn to when they try to deal with the changing complexion of English Society at the Royal Court.

The Skin I Live In

The notion of the mad doctor or scientist, who kidnaps and imprisons subjects for his experiments, is a staple of horror films. It is a also unfortunately a recurrent staple of reality, where newspaper headlines routinely report cases of imprisonment. In one an Austrian psychopath, Josef Fritzl, actually fathered children with the imprisoned daughter he’d incested. If nothing else Pedro Almodovar ‘s The Skin I Live In exemplifies the director’s obsession with plot. Horror film plots, romantic plots crimes of passion are all gris for this plotmeister.  He is the most plotty of modernists. No Bergman or especially Antonioni film was ever so heavy on plots as Almodovar's are and The Skin I live In takes the cake. The enormous reticulations of the plot in question lead to the simple conclusion that however much we change the surface, the inside of the human being is stubbornly unmalleable . The skin we live in is still an intransigent ego, no matter how much it’s tattooed or it the case of  the term the film coins, transgenesized. It’s an anti-Pygmalion if you like or another version of Vertigo in which the protagonist falls in love with someone who doesn’t exist. What’s really interesting is the brute grief that lies at the heart of all the desire to remake and reshape reality--another curiously simple, but essential element that is like the sun around which the other planets of the complex story turn. Louise Bourgeois makes a cameo appearance in the form of a book of her work. Bourgeois’ sculptures are psychohistories and testaments to trauma. The appearance of the Bourgeois book also makes a cool art critical point in comparing plastic surgery with her preoccupations. Robert Ledgard (Antonion Banderas) the villainous plastic surgeon who drives the action has lost his wife (a burn victim who jumped out of the window on seeing her reflection) and a daughter (who has never recovered from the trauma of seeing her human cinder of a mother fall to the ground). There is yet another level of the movie having to do with other mothers, the mother of the plastic surgeon  and the mother of the kidnapped victim, a young man who undergoes a vaginoplasty. To return back to Vertigo, the movie is vertiginous, highly flawed and much more powerful than some critics are crediting.